I have nearly met my sticky end on a number of occasions, occasions often involving ineptitude. I have pondered the fleeting nature of mortality. I have made many a woeful choice of staircase to jump down on a skateboard... but the most memorable of my near death experiences came as no fault of my own and had nothing to do with staircases, other people, ineptitude, skateboards or any permeation thereof. I was working at a sweetie factory. I did this - firstly - to get some much needed back rent and - two - as a desperate attempt to shorten my 'Stuff To Do Before I Die' list.

(This list of pre-termination stuff has shown an alarming tendency to double in length bi-annually but rather than go into the details of this, and before you allow your imagination to run riot, I will describe the sweetie factory.)

The sweetie factory had a worrying resemblance to the set of Alien: steam and worrying goo were major by-products.
Things were in general either very hot, very sticky, or both. Seething, wizened, hot, sticky old ladies were in abundance. Pipes were in abundance. I got lost and found huge rolls of coloured tin foil and innumerable conveyor belts. I found hide nor hair of Oompa Loompas though, and I bloody know Oompa Loompas when I see them: they are very small and bright pinging orange with green hair and I looked everywhere for them. There was nothing to be found in the way of candyfloss trees or lakes of chocolate. There were machines. The machines were big, hot, sticky, dusty, grimly-complicated-looking things devoid of any pleasing colouration, psychedelic patterning or malicious livestock. I worked at the fruit pastel machine. This was where I faced my death.

The fruit pastel machine did look a tad fictional. It was the size of two bungalows, one on top of the other, and had something that looked like a cross between a giant cement mixer and an even more giant horizontal shuttle-cock connected to it. This shuttle-cock contraption oscillated at a terrifying speed and was filled with rotating proto-pastels and sugar. The proto-pastels were basically red hot pastel-shaped lumps of starch, flavourings and sugar and the whole process was engineered to coat them with further and presumably slightly different sugar. My job was to stand at the wide end and collect the pastels on trays. After this the pastels would cool before being soaked in syrup for a week. After wallowing leisurely in liquid sugar the pastels would be coated in further mysteriously different sugar and left to dry before being wheeled off to the shadowy, cabbalistic necropolis spoken of only in whispers as the packing department.

Anyway... The pastels entered the shuttle-cock-like contrivance at the thin end where there was a kind of hooped grate similar to what you see at the extremities of escalators. Unbeknownst to me, rouge pastels had been building up under this grate. These trapped pastels were under terrific friction from the rotating shuttle-cock apparatus and at one point while I was working the frictionated scalding pastels, which would fuse on contact, obviously gained the last pastel necessary to reach critical mass. This had the effect that the super-heated accrual of sugar sort of popped out of the grate and into the rotating drum doo-dad.

I was aghast. The 'object' was about the size of a small football and must have been two hundred or so degrees centigrade. It was glowing and circling the drum with mercurially iridescent arcs like a dense, molten jellyfish performing a horizontal wall of death, but only slowly coming towards me. I was a bit scared and then very scared and then struck dumb with botty-hole-palpitating horror as I realised that the sweetie was, ghoulishly, absorbing all the proto pastels in its path and gaining momentum with extreme rapidity. Then I had a dreamy moment, when everything went a bit slow and I had the fairly whimsical thought that the few surviving pastels in the creature's wake looked like people gone overboard from a shipwreck. I tried to summon help. I wasn't really thinking straight and only managed to shout 'Big ball!' in a very girly voice. This worked quite well actually. One of the managers/machine operatives rubbernecked a disgruntled head over the gantry to stare balefully down at me. I pointed tentatively into the drum, no doubt pulling a very foolish facial expression. The baleful chap must have got the drift and I suppose foresaw the havoc that can be caused by vampiric blobs of white-hot confection because he started running along the gantry, then turned and ran back in the direction he'd come, all in a very distracted kind of way. I think he was having the moment of shock I'd had previously. While he was doing this some ancient fruit-pastel-velocity-calculating node of my brain flared into life and told me in no uncertain terms that the abomination was going to exit the drum in a matter of seconds and would almost certainly chart a graceful path straight into my knackers. These next few seconds passed in a blur. The gantry man regained the use of his faculties and immediately used this new-found wherewithal to scream 'RESTRAIN IT!' very loudly at me. I seized a metal tray from the pile and as the slightly cooled but now child-sized globule leapt from the drum I dealt it a truly herculean blow with the back of the tray. The molten fiend flew into the conveyor belt and, mercifully, began to set. Any member of the England cricket team, alive or dead, would have recommended me for a Knighthood had they seen it.

I personally would recommend to the English cricket team that if you want to hit something really, really hard you must be convinced that a substance akin to boiling jam will be brought into immediate contact with your genitals should you fail.