Now that I have had quite lot of guesses on Archery? Church? Goat? I figured it’s time to reveal which two things really happened, and which didn’t…
Firstly, I DID indeed do archery at high school! In Year 12 I was enrolled in the IB programme. As part of IB, we had to take part in something called CAS, (Creativity, Action, Service). The purpose of CAS was to make sure that we didn’t become so focussed on our academic work that we didn’t do anything else. Most people at my school interpreted the Action component as being a sport. As I am not particularly sporty, I (along with some like-minded friends) selected archery. Although I was not very good at it, I did once manage to score a bullseye!! In the center of the target next-door to the one I was aiming for. O.O This lack of ability, combined with the huge bruises I acquired (even THROUGH an arm guard!) explains why this “sport” was rather short-lived.
Secondly, I am NOT currently attending Alpha courses. The idea for this false statement came to me a couple of days ago, when I was riding the bus past a church with a large billboard outside it advertising these courses. Although I initially really did think one of these might be worth attending, on doing some further research on their website, I deduced that they are intended for people who KNOW they want to become a Christian, and are looking for a church-based support group to assist them in doing this. In short, not me.
Thirdly, many of you will be delighted to hear that yes, I WAS indeed butted down a hill by a goat as a small child! I live at the top of a quarry. Although this quarry was originally used for mining stone, this ceased to be the case in the early 1990s, and it was eventually developed into a snazzy reserve. Several years before the reserve was created, our neighbours got permission to graze a family of goats along behind all the houses at the top. Other than minimal fencing to prevent the goats from escaping either onto the road or into private gardens, these lovely creatures were pretty much free to roam wherever they liked.
The Unfortunate Incident occurred when I was three or four years old. One day my parents and I decided that instead of just feeding and petting the goats through the fence (as a smaller, chubbier version of me can be seen doing in the photo below), we would open our back gate and visit them on their side of the fence. Bad idea. I don’t remember the specifics of what I DID to annoy one particular goat so much that I ended up being bowled over and rolling several metres down the hill before coming to a stop thanks to the fence, but that was exactly what happened! :/
Thankfully I was not injured, am not fearful of goats as an adult and, as far as my parents are concerned, The Day Holly Was Butted By A Goat seems to be remembered as a humorous event as opposed to an occasion upon which their only daughter suffered grievous bodily harm!
I don’t know whether this was the goat that actually did the butting or not, but I took this photo-of-a-photo anyway, so you can see what they looked like and how large they were – well, at least compared to me!
