Number One, The Larch

 

The location of the 'Ditch' episode

The date was 21 December 1989. Ray invited Adam and Mark to his home, as Mark wasn't due to arrive for a good few hours, Ray and Adam decided to take a ride down the track and onto Preston. Ray's brother, Graham (who was 13 at the time) pestered them into letting him go too. They had gotten most of the way to Preston, but decided it was too cold and turned back. At one point, Adam called out to Ray,

"Wouldn't it be funny if Graham were to accidentally end up in the ditch?" The ditch in question being the one that ran alongside the road, and contained over 3ft of freezing water.

Due to some bizarre freak of chance, or maybe just some bizarre freak, Adam lost control of his cycle and veered off the road and into the ditch. Although his cycle went cartwheeling down into the water, Adam was miraculously plucked from a similar fate by the branches of a tree.

A Hawthorn, not a Larch

He hung there in the branches of the tree, the crook of one bough wedged under his chin. As Ray and Graham hurried over to help, Adam's first words were, as he pointed to the branch that supported his neck,

"Number one, the Larch" as from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

It took best part of 45 minutes to rescue Adam from the tree and retrieve his cycle.

The bottom of the ditch, now empty is a good 8 ft below.

This incident is now a major date in the Owstwecian Calendar as Jump in a Ditch Day.

On Jump in a Ditch Day, on 21 December, Owstwecians celebrate by throwing bicycles into hedgerows and swinging from branches. Afterwards, they feast on lukewarm tea and corned beef sandwiches and quote the revered lines,

"Number one, the larch. Help me get down from here."

The moral of the story is, never trust bizarre freaks when cycling past freezing ditches.