Extra bulb for shocked Myra as lamp collapses!

LUCKY ESCAPE . . . Myra Shiel with the fallen lamp standardExtra bulbs for shocked

A sprightly green-fingered pensioner was shocked when a concrete lamp standard collapsed in her garden.

For 81-year-old Myra Shiel had just finished replenishing food for the birds in her award-winning garden when the 15-foot long lamp crashed down.

And Myra, a mother of four, from Grove Street, Greenfield, revealed it’s the third time she has escaped injury in garden-related incidents.

Mrs Shiel, a widow, said: “I had just returned from my garden and looked out of my kitchen window and saw the lamp had collapsed right across where I had been standing.

“The whole concrete post had come down including the complete lighting head itself. I couldn’t believe it —but I had to see the funny side of things.

“Just think, if the lamp had hit me – I would have been like a bulb being planted in my own garden,” she quipped.

Mrs Shiel, a devoted gardener, has won prizes in the small or community garden categories in Saddleworth in Bloom contest for several years.

Before she moved to her present address, she was nearly washed away when her wellington boots filled with a mini-tidal wave of water while working in another riverside garden.

And previously she had to take refuge after being attacked by angry ducks while pruning plants.

Mrs Shiel, who won a national magazine’s Woman of the Nineties title for her gardening expertise, added with a smile : “I think I’ll put a tin hat on next time I venture out — just in case I tempt fate.”

It is believed that the lamp may have become unstable in the thick ice which had damaged paving areas.

Workmen have arrived at the scene to repair the damage.

Meantime, coping stones at Greenfield Methodist Church on Chew Valley Road which had which had been affected by the bad weather and caused the postponement of meetings are being replaced.