Rock climbing & Richard Worth

This weekend we took the girls rock climbing.  Madeleine (6) has been before and loves it, she scrambled up with great confidence until she could go no further, then merrily let go of the wall, letting the automatic belay gradually lower her to the floor. Lulu (3) did not have such success.  Her initial confidence crumbled once she saw the actual wall, she cried piteously and even when we helped her up a couple of steps, all she wanted to do was get down.  Unfortunately, however, her stubborn pride didn’t allow her to confess that her rock climbing dream was all over, for the day at least.  Again and again, she insisted that she wanted to go rock climbing, but as soon as she got any distance off the ground, her fear overcame her and she had to be pried off the wall like a limpet.  

I recognised the internal battle going on.  When I was eight or nice, I scaled a six foot fence in our front yard.  Once up there, I was frozen with fear, unable to find any way of getting back down again.  My brothers implored me to jump, my exasperated mother came out to order me to jump, but I just couldn’t.  And yet I refused any other offers of help to get me down – a ladder, or a helping hand from someone.  I just couldn’t admit that I needed help to get down, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  I know hindsight tends to exaggerate things, but seriously, I must have spent at least half an hour perched up there on the fence.

Eventually I jumped, but needless to say, my dignity and pride had been mortally wounded in the process.  I felt like an utter fool, and looked one as well, although luckily everyone immediately forgot about it (except, me, licking my wounds decades later…).

So now, Richard Worth has somehow scaled his own fence, and got himself well and truly stuck up there.  Its plain to all that he has made a fool of himself, that his pride and dignity are gone.  And like me, I expect he’s finding that the top of a fence isn’t a particularly comfortable place to be.  

Like me, his pride is not allowing him to face the fact that he needs to get down, however inelegant that climb down might look.  But he is not eight or nine.   He is a member of Parliament, not a truculent child.  Sadly for him, its quite hard to tell the difference.