Such strength in someone diminutive does happen. I took my sister-in-law, 18 years old, out for a driving lesson in the largest emptiest car park I could find locally at night, with my brother in the backseat. We weaved around for a while until she started to steer the car in a straight line, heading for a tree with a concrete kerb around it. I suggested she steer the car in a different direction to avoid the tree and its kerb. She didn’t, and we were getting closer and closer - too close - I grabbed the steering wheel frantically, but she had such a grip on the wheel there was no way I could move that wheel one inch! We hit the kerb and the three of us had minor scrapes and bumps.
She had panicked for some reason, became scared - such that she froze with a strength that I couldn’t overcome.
Thank you so much, Stella. How strange the memory is. What I remembered from 40 or so years ago of this film is nothing like the film I see now. Naughty misleading memory, embellishes, exaggerates, leaves out, adds in, forgets - but the essence of the film is exactly the same.
Adds grist to my mill, my hobby horse, but I leave it there.
I love this film (1984) which is on Youtube now in full. Bit crude at times.
The story of seven households that comprise a circular property chain, and various moving company employees who are tasked with assisting each household in their move. It follows the trials and tribulations, from trivial to profound, each household and mover (who are each guilty of one of the seven deadly sins) endures during the moving process. (Hackney to virtually Belgravia).
“Moving house is very upsetting”, philosophises Warren Mitchell, the chief furniture removal man, “and is the third worst shock to the nervous system”.
Great performance by Nigel Hawthorne (of Yes Minister) as a miserly house owner.
Another film I’ll watch again and again, whenever it comes around. An emotional film. A young boy living in a mining village, during a traumatising miners’ strike, wants to dance. In this clip, he finds out if he’s been accepted at ballet/dancing school. Very few words.
Fear, stress or rage can cause the release of Norepinephrine which is thought to be the compound responsible for humans being able to perform feats of strength far beyond their normal abilities.
The Bridge Over The River Kwai was recently on French TV. My favourite line is when the Japanese commandant says, “This is war. This is not a game of cricket!”
My FIL was captured in Singapore when the japs arrived, he was actually having his appendix removed and the japanese took over and finished the op and he recovered well. He then walked to Thailand/Burma and ended up working on the bridge and was there when the bombers came and blew it up. He never could watch that film as he said it was nothing like what really happened and was made solely to entertain. He never hated the japs, he said they were like children and you had to try and understand how their minds work and he even went to Japan after the war ended to help with the fallout of the bombs (he was in the RAMC). He suffered badly from bamboo poisoning for the rest of his life as the bridge was built out of bamboo and cut the prisoners to pieces.
Thank you, a lot of those prisoners did not get the recognition they deserved when they returned and years after for the suffering they endured. FIL was in the RAMC which meant they always had to stay behind and help the sick and injured and one aussie he helped recover from a bad bout of malaria and then dysentry kept in touch in with him for years after the war when he returned to Sydney. He became a barrister and offered FIL a job for life looking after an island and hotel he had bought off the barrier reef but family in UK blackmailed FIL by pretending to have heart attacks etc and he could not get MIL to go but that man never forgot him and sent presents every year from Harrods and became my husband’s godfather.
