The boulder was teetering on the lip of the plateau.
My bookcase groans with books about the Third Way, and beside my bed in teetering piles lie pamphlets and psephological studies and slim, but optimistic volumes with titles like Conservatism - the Future.
No one would imagine listening to this debate that we are teetering on the edge of a massive European financial crisis.
Our city skylines are brimming with teetering towers of phallic ambition, endlessly choked with competing monuments to the male member.
The eurozone is teetering on the brink of a possible third recession, with high unemployment, falling growth and the real risk of falling prices too.
But Alexander was also on message, defending a string of contentious economic decisions as well as demonstrably silly points of presentation, including the chancellor and prime minister's repeated claims that Britain had been teetering, Greek-style, on the edge of bankruptcy before the axemen saved the day.
However, an Opinium/Observer poll shows that with the economy teetering on the brink of a "triple-dip" recession, voters are going into the new year unconvinced that things will improve, expecting 2013 to deliver even more financial hardship.
Last year's triumphant winner of the Carbuncle Cup, awarded for the ugliest building of the year, was another staggeringly misjudged student housing scheme, where a 350-room complex was built behind the teetering frontage of a 19th-century warehouse on -London's Caledonian Road.
For many Zimbabweans, there is nothing to celebrate, and opposition parties have condemned such decadence in an economy that is teetering on the edge of disaster.
The Japanese economy, the second-biggest in the world, is once again teetering on the edge of recession.
Thousands of species are teetering on the edge of extinction.
