[lit-ideas] Re: FIP

  • From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 15:45:17 -0700


On Aug 16, 2015, at 12:45 PM, epostboxx@xxxxxxxx wrote:


On 16 Aug 2015, at 20:25, David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

At a party held beside a pool I learned that the mental quirk some people
(including me) experience on high balconies, the slight and absolutely
resistible urge to throw yourself off, can extend to throwing yourself into
a pool.

One reads of Rudyard Kipling that at his residence (Bateman's) in Burwash,
East Sussex, England he made a shallow pond for (among other things) his
children and their friends to bathe and boat in. The pond is immortalized in
the visitor's book, where certain guests have the letters 'FIP' appended to
their names.

'FIP' - for 'fell in pond'.

It is not recorded whether the 'fallers' stumbled (for any one of a number of
reasons), jumped (for the reason outlined above) or were pushed. (And I do
not know what percentage of visitors have their names are so graced.)


I remember the pond, but not the book. It occurs to me that I fell in a
boating pond at an early age. Perhaps the urge therefore is a the result of a
regressive (rather than recessive) gene?

David Ritchie,
done watching Arsenal's win in
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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