Why my father in law was glad he was married

Len was a cockney - and a sign installer from inner London with a thick colloquial accent and speaking the cockney rhyming slang that I needed a translater for most of his talking. It was the first Christmas I'd met him and the family get together was going well. He had had a few drinks and proceded to tell one of his many tales. . . . .

" When I'd married a few years, I's sent out to change tubes ( the burnt out neon 8' light bulbs ) on the lights of Piccadilly ( Circus ) . Were a hundred or so needed changing and course there's a couple right 'the very top of the fourth floor. Me mates and me got several ladders lined up on the pavement and had to use our belts to hold them together to make them long enough to reach top. With thousands of people milling about was not easy. We also had a bit of the old snow which we don't get often, but it was there, slushy and all from the people walking through it. Then we had to upright the ladders which being 60 foot tall was also not easy. So we get up the ladder and it bending and swaying like a banana, passed tubes up with our left hand, down with our right. As I get to top, the bottom of the ladder slips a bit and it wants to go down sideways and as me mates below try to scramble down, my wedding ring gets caught on a bit of steel at the top and with my feet hooked around the step, I am able to hold us all three from the ladder going down. Matey gets to the bottom and adjusts the leg and I am able to unhook my ring finger and finish the job. It was that ring what saved us. That was worth getting married for."