Sending something light up first

You need

• kitchen string
• one shoelace
• two chairs
• a tea towel
• a paper clip
• sticky tape

About half an hour. Everything on that list came out of a kitchen, which is the rule these pages are written to.

Steps

1. Stand two chairs back to back, six feet apart, backs facing each other. The gap between them is your flats.
2. Measure off about twelve feet of string and tape the paper clip to one end. That is your kite line, and the paper clip is your compy.
3. Walk the paper-clip end up over the back of one chair, across the gap, and down over the other. Do not throw it. Nothing gets thrown in this build.
4. Tie the shoelace to the paper-clip end with two ordinary knots. This join is the part that fails first, so make it neat.
5. Pull the far end of the string, slowly. The shoelace goes up, across and down. You have just moved a heavy line with a light one, and you never touched the middle of it.
6. Tape two corners of the tea towel to the shoelace, about a foot apart.
7. Pull the shoelace back the other way. The towel goes up and stands over the gap: a roof, built from the ground, without climbing anything.
8. Put something small on the floor underneath and look straight down at it. You cannot see it. Neither could anything else.
9. Now make it walk. Move one chair a foot further on and pull again, so the same towel covers new ground and uncovers the old. That is the whole of Chapter Seventeen, and it is why one bay of cloth is enough and a hundred and forty yards of it is not.
10. Then the rest of the string. Walk nine of your own paces heel to toe, tie a knot, nine more, another knot, all the way to the end. That cord measures your legs and nobody else's. Take it outside, shut your eyes, walk it out and walk it back, and see how close you get. Count in. Count out.