I’m slippin’, I’m fallin’, I can’t get up!

When you trip, don’t tense up, relax and take your fat, big L like Manchester United

Last week, I witnessed a woman at the Ramsgate Spar on the South Coast misjudge the edge of a pavement, lose balance and fall, at the same speed as video assistant referee footage in the Champions League.

It looked like a planned, frame-by-frame movie scene in the mould of Neo from The Matrix dodging bullets, except that it wasn’t as choreographed or elegant.

She put in a gallant effort to avoid surrendering her vertical disposition. In the end, she ended up flat on her tummy, arms outstretched, potatoes, tomatoes and naartjies rolling away.

A few people sniggered. I didn’t see “the funny”. I helped her pick up her stuff and, other than asking once if she’d hurt herself, I resisted the urge to fuss and allowed her to get into her car with as much dignity intact as possible for someone whose dress was over her head moments before.

Your suspicions are spot on; the primary reason I didn’t find her fall funny is because I’m an incorrigible klutz myself.

Throughout my life I’ve taken a grossly disproportionate number of tumbles. When I was younger and more athletic it didn’t help that I was born with above-average running speed. At my athletic peak, around age 16, I could run the 100m dash in about 13 seconds, which wasn’t shabby for a big-headed, scrawny teenager with zero training and the muscle structure of a chicken.

That meant that my tumbles on the football pitch were spectacular. Even on the tennis court I spent a lot of time picking myself up from the concrete. Back then, I’d fall, graze my forearms, elbows and knees, get up, dust myself off, continue playing and only apply Gentian Violet and Elastoplast afterwards. Fast forward 30-odd years and all that’s changed. These days, I’m acutely aware that one awkward fall could mean six weeks in hospital and a permanent limp.

In a previous column I wondered out loud what’s the point of “slippery when wet” signs. My silly punchline was, “As opposed to being slippery when dry?” Now in my 50s, I’m grateful for these signs.

When I walk into a building and there’s a lady with a mop, bucket and yellow board with “slippery surface”, I do some mighty vigilant stepping.

Folks in the occupational safety field reading this will nod sagely when I point out that, regardless of the industry, about 25% of workplace injuries are slip, trip and fall incidents.

Despite the data collection acumen of Stats SA, none of our successive administrations have been interested in sharing figures with the public, so I struggled to obtain a figure of how many billions of rands are spent on slip/trip/fall injuries each year.

But the average spend per fall is around the R60,000 mark. The UK government estimates they cost that in the region of £25bn. My estimate is that our figure is about R10bn, assuming about 600,000 workers are injured per annum.

This column is designed to impress some bureaucrat so that I get a tender teaching employees to avoid falling and what to do to minimise when unavoidable plummets inevitably occur. Don’t be ridiculous, of course the art of falling can be taught.

That science is at the core of the sports of judo, wrestling, gymnastics and Cristiano Ronaldo’s footballing career. That’s why Hollywood stuntwomen/men make millions.

My training manual will start out with some basic Statistics 101 and Physics 101. Firstly, the head-to-head record of humans vs gravity is roughly 999,999-trillion times infinity to one in favour of gravity.

That one victory came on Ascension Day, about 2,000 years ago. And that fellow only triumphed over gravity because of heavenly privilege — his Dad had the gravity remote in His hand and paused it.

There may also have been other “cheats” in the wind factor, clouds separating and whatnot. The bottom line is; you can’t win against gravity.

Prevention will always be better than cure unless you’re a comrade and spending R100m a year on maintenance is less lucrative than letting a highway rot and then announcing R30bn to rebuild it.

However, in the falling business, prevention is always king. I hate falling so much that I’ve become pretty adept at looking at a surface and instinctively deciding to take the longer way around to avoid it.

My last encounter with one of those travelator walkways at OR Tambo ended when my inadvertent forward dive was broken by the hairy back of a former loose prop from Delmas. As I went down, the soundtrack inside my head was rapper DMX’s song Slippin’, with the lyrics Ayo/I’m slippin’/I’m fallin’/I can’t get up.

Since that day, I’ve avoided those human conveyor belts like Covid. That’s an important lesson; choosing your surface battles carefully.

The second, and possibly more crucial advice, is this: at some point you will fall. It’s inevitable, we all fall. Now this is important; when you do stumble and trip, the worst thing you can do is try to stop the fall. That works maybe 3% of the time, and only for the small percentage of the population who are actually in shape.

For the rest, the weak muscle structure, poor posture, extra poundage on our bums, bellies and mammaries (of all genders) are collectively working against us to help that old nemesis, Sir Gravity. When you trip, don’t tense up, relax and take your fat, big L like Manchester United.

Trying to fight gravity is how you end up in Ward 4B eating tasteless mash-and-gravy and jelly. I hope the minister of employment, Thulas

Nxesi, reads this column so I can tell him: “Look, we already have a minister of employment and a minister of electricity, so you might as well hire me as your chief director of Fall Prevention.”

As you can tell, I’ve given this a lot of thought. I may or may not have an M.SC in Fall Prevention from the Trinity International Bible College.