A climb up the ladder of years

‘Aman’s reach should exceed his grasp,’’ wrote the poet Browning, ‘‘or what’s a ladder for?’’

The ladder is a venerable thing. It’s helped build everything from the Pyramids of Egypt to the cathedrals of Europe. The aluminium version in your shed is a modern expression of an ancient ingenuity. And it has designs on your life.

Recently I watched a documentary called 24 Hours of Medical Entertainment. It was filmed in an Accident and Emergency Department. Ambulances kept the place fed. Half the victims they disgorged were young male motorcyclists. The other half were old male ladder-users. Without blokes A&E would starve.

Two weeks ago we had a hail storm. Within moments I discovered I had a blocked downpipe. The spouting was spouting and hail was backing up under the iron and dripping through the kitchen ceiling. Of course I would have gone out like Captain Oates to clear the blockage but my dog suffers from Postquake Stress Disorder. Given thunder, fireworks or hail on the roof his mind shoots back to 2011, his tail whips between his legs, his spine hunches and he trembles like that wobble board Rolf Harris used to favour before he got banged up for a lifetime of Jake-the-Peggery. Scared dogs matter more than wet ceilings. So only when the hail had stopped did I fetch the ladder, having first donned clean underpants in case I found myself in a documentary.

Aged 19 I got a holiday job in the maintenance department at my college. ‘‘What are you like with heights?’’ asked the foreman. ‘‘Brilliant,’’ I said. The extension ladder he brought out was the one Led Zeppelin wrote a song about. It would have made a fireman blanch. My job was to rub down, prime and paint the metal spouting on a three-storey accommodation block.

When I went up the ladder for the first time it flexed. I clung to it like a koala to a gum tree. To encourage me the foreman gave one leg of the ladder an amusing kick.

At 19 it is more important to save face than life. And at 19 you can adapt to anything. After a couple of days I took a perverse pleasure in alarming passers-by from 30 foot up. The only tedium was having to come down every so often to move the ladder. It was a fellow worker who taught me the trick of bouncing the ladder along the wall while still aloft. The thought of it now makes my stomach lurch.

Today my stepladder has a mere six steps. As I put it up I noticed a sticker. ‘‘Maximum loading 120kg,’’ it said. I’m 117kg. I was tempted to cram seven pats of butter in my pockets, just for the pleasure of making the thing crumple.

I could only see into the spouting if I stood on the fourth step, but at that height I felt vulnerable to wind gusts. So I contented myself with the third step, from which I was ideally placed to reach blindly into the spouting, while neatly slicing the back of my hand on the edge of the roofing iron. The blockage in the downpipe was soggy and dense. I grasped it firmly, sinking my fingers. It came away with a sucking noise and I lifted the dripping mass out over my head. There were leaves and twigs and pine needles but the core of the plug, the heart of the matter that the ladder had let me reach and grasp so very firmly, was a long-since-dead rat.

The poet Browning would have made something of it.