So I'm down to the last month, the final 31. Tonight's been very strange, it's starting to sink that this really is it for me. I was talking to a friend on the walk home from the rock club where most of my teenage years got played out (refitted, no longer smelling of smoke, but still the same shitty dive), and it struck me why this is different. It's the finality of it. The ending of the first quarter-century of my life in a very definite and distinct way. Before, with London, part of me always knew it was temporary. Even in St Albans, when I was busy playing grown-up and being miserable at the prospect, a small part of me knew that it wasn't right, that it was only temporary. This isn't the same.
I guess the reasons for it are that I'm not leaving for someone, or because of someone. I'm not driven by the prospect of being with a person and a glittering future with them, nor am I running from something that i couldn't resolve up close, this time I'm moving because...well, just because really. I'm going to a place I've visited once, for a week, almost half a decade ago. I'm going to a place where I don't know anybody at all, where the closest friend I have out there is someone who's voice I haven't even heard, to a house I've only seen in pictures. I should be more scared, more nervous, more...something. But I'm not. It just IS, and that's the end of it.
It feels like I've already left, and all I'm doing now is tying up the loose ends.
Friday 5 December 2008
Wednesday 5 November 2008
So, just what the fuck is this all about then?
I've always though that my life has been pretty eventful. It's had a good number of near misses, horrendous failures and literal highs. I've always thought I can tell a good story, and my memory for detail and pointless bits seems pretty good. I want to get down some of the stuff I think is important and has made me the surprisingly well-rounded woman I am, before senility and years of eating cheap beefburgers turns my brain into pate and I ent up a drooling mess who thinks the Daily record is high literature. It's not all absolute fact of course, your life being a mixture of first-person recollection, other people's take on that event, time blurring the sharper corners and exaggeration filling in the inevitable blanks.
This is by no means a definitive account of anything, so if you're reading this and you were there and think I'm a liar, then you're probably right. If you weren't there, then either take my word for it and enjoy (remembering of course the point of NanoWriMo is quantity and this is a first draft/personal writing exercise in action, so don't expect much more than roughness and spelling mistakes), or bugger off and find someone else's blog to pore over.
This is by no means a definitive account of anything, so if you're reading this and you were there and think I'm a liar, then you're probably right. If you weren't there, then either take my word for it and enjoy (remembering of course the point of NanoWriMo is quantity and this is a first draft/personal writing exercise in action, so don't expect much more than roughness and spelling mistakes), or bugger off and find someone else's blog to pore over.
November 3rd- Two Wheels from a Static Standpoint
I've always loved motorbikes. Fascinated by them. There's a picture of me aged 2, grinning like crazy in my dad's Italian-flag-coloured bike helmet (I'm also on a potty, which should go a long way towards explaining why it does not appear here, you pervs). I had my first pillion ride on the back of a BMW tourer when I was seven, and got hooked on the adrenaline of riding the statistically most dangerous method of transportation before the engine started on that two-mile trip up the road and back.
As is the recurring theme through these half-baked memoirs, I blame my ancestors. Both grandads rode bikes, my dad had owned motorcycles almost all his adult life and my mum told some brilliant stories of her adventures on two wheels (the tale of the Honda, the classified nuclear submarine files and a terminal clutch failure is one that still makes me dislike the RAC to this day). I grew up round them, and they stirred me in a way cars never have and probably never will.
I was nine when my dad got into classic motorbike racing. For whatever reason he came home one day with a 1960's Ducati 350, red like lust should be and all curves and grunt. When he fired her up the noise could be heard a quarter of a mile away. I was in love.
Classic bikes are nothing like the cock-rockets of today. They have an organic quality about them that brings out the sixth-form poet in me. Modern bikes, even those made by the grandiose marques like Ducati, Moto Guzzi and Triumph, sound muted, muzzled by emission laws and the desire of 99.9% of the population not to have to suffer the incredible growl and roar of an uninhibited engine. Classic bikes have no such pretensions of civic responsibility. I used to stand in the paddock at race meets, just listening to the sound of fifty engines all roaring and grunting in unison as their owners tweaked, picked and tinkered with their geriatric pride and joys.
That noise! I went to the Isle of Man Grand Prix last summer, where classic and vintage motorbikes gather in numbers so large that after a day you cease to gawp as ten bikes that normally sit behind glass in a transport museum trundle sedately along the seafront, proud owners riding in long brown coats, bucket helmets and pipes clamped between tea-and nicotine-stained teeth. The holding pen for the classic bikes before that morning's race had a roar so primeval it sounded like something HP Lovecraft would have written endless short stories about. It's not a flat note but rises and falls like the breathing of something huge and terrible, something alive. I stood there, transfixed as these relics breathed smoke and speed and recklessness. It took me back to being a little kid in a neon-coloured fleece, watching in awe as my dad and his friends grunted monosyllabic approval as various Ducatis, Goldstars and Tritons sputtered into existence after an hour or so standing around offering advice on which grumnut had come loose.
These bikes required more maintenance than your average member of the Pussycat Dolls. Every other race meet an engine would blow up, fall off, blow out, or just plain fail. Parts, which the makers had stopped producing before the end of segregation, required either buying from dodgy guys in flat caps who owned eerie graveyards of bike carcasses and the odd mangy dog, or buying another bike and cannibalising it as a sacrifice to the ever-hungry engine. I was about 10 when our sacrifice arrived, a dark red Ducati 250. I helped unload it off the trailer and stood admiring it for ages. In my daydreams, dad would secretly rebuild it and give it to me, and I would race it and become the first Lady Champion of Scotland (I had developed quite the thing for being the first female to win or achieve things back then. I had also latched on to this word "Lady", a term I've barely used since I hit puberty. Too many years reading old Pony Club annuals from the 1970's I think).
It was a cruel day when I went down to see "my" bike one Saturday, to find it eviscerated, leaking stinking black blood on the floor of the garage, lifeless eye fixed on me as my dad cheerfully asked to pass him that wrench over there, and did I was to see him replace that clutch that had broken last race? I tentatively asked if he was going to fix up the other bike later.
I never did become Lady Champion of Scotland. Childhood optimism will only get you so far it seems.
So, racing. As a little pit-rat I got to know most of the guys who would turn up to race meets. I made myself useful, gofering for coffee, wrenches, screwdrivers and long, pointless trips which I now realise were clever attempts to make me bugger off and stop asking if I could sit on the back of their priceless Norton Commando or whatever. Some of them would buy me fudge from the ubiquitous home-made sweetie stall, or keep an eye on me when the pater familias was out on the track. As a result I had to deal with the realities of motorbikes and their inherent danger rather sooner than I'd have liked.
I never really knew the guy that died. He didn't race old bikes, at least not like the ones I knew. We were at Knockhill racing circuit in Fife, on a grey Autumn day. The race was on it's first lap when there was a pile-up on the corner we were watching from. It looked pretty nasty, but when the ambulance came out and there was a flurry of fluorescent yellow and green activity, we knew something had gone wrong. I never heard directly at the time, but I overheard that he had broken his neck. I'd never considered that this was really dangerous before, and to be honest it still didn't make much sense afterwards. The guy went in an ambulance and went away, and we all packed up and went home early, and there was no music in the car on the way home. I think if dad had a machine that ran more than one race out of ten then that would have been an end to it, but his chances of being close enough to the main pack to actually be in an accident like that seemed slim enough that it didn't cause him to do much than ride more conservatively when the Ducati did more than fart smoke and screws and cost another hundred quid.
Then Big Andy happened. he was an old friend of my dad's, always friendly and pleasant with me and my sister. I liked him, not least because he would finish races and even do really well in them from time to time (no kids, so more money to throw at the bike-graveyard owners).
It was a glorious summer's day, dry, and perfect for racing. My sister and mother were elsewhere, and dad and I had settled by the finish line to watch Big Andy race. The bikes lined up, ignitions started, and that primordial purring and howling drowned out everything but the sun. They went off round the track for a practice lap, then reigned in again on the start for the race itself. I had my fingers crossed like I always did when people I knew raced, and I knew Andy would do well. In a roar and a scream and a smell of burning petrol they were off and gone. Suddenly, we could see orange flags all along the circuit, being frantically waved by the marshals in their gravel traps. Waving flags meant an accident. I wasn't unduly fussed, and nobody else seemed to be either. Orange waving flags meant a restart, but that was OK. Probably some idiot with an exploding engine was now sitting in a gravel pit looking a bit bewildered. The bikes came back to the line, and waited. Waited. Waited. I got out the race programme and began matching up numbers to names.
Big Andy wasn't there. There were two bikes missing, and Big Andy wasn't there.
Intuition is a wonderful thing. We both knew that this went beyond sitting dazed in a gravel trap, and this was confirmed when the other riders started getting off their bikes and heading back to their paddocks. The announcers were being tactful, saying there had been an accident, and asking for patience. My dad did the decent thing, told me to stay where he was, and promptly ran off to the main office, just as his name was called over the tannoy. I was numb with shock. The memory of the other guy dead in an ambulance suddenly loomed large, and I was alone and frightened in what was suddenly a place where danger was extremely loud and incredibly close.
I wandered, looking for the medical centre, the office, dad, someone. I didn't cry, 'cause I was ten now and you just didn't. I went everywhere I could think of. Our car. His car. The cafe. The sweet stall. They were playing music over the tannoy to keep us entertained, and even now the Crash Test Dummies stir up feelings more powerful than a song with the worst chorus in the world has any right to. It can't have been more than ten or so minutes, but to me it was an eternity of heat, fear, noise, and that fucking grunge-esque classic.
I found the medics just as they were bringing out the ambulance. Feet first with a blanket over him, and I was sure he was dead. After all, that's how dead people look in films, right? And there, thankfully, was dad, looking more worried than I'd hoped he would. Again, he told me to stay put, and this time I did as I was told and sat outside the prefab medics hut while he followed the stretcher. I was sure he was dead.
I cried then. Big Andy was my friend and now he was dead and I'd seen him and it was my fault 'cause I must have crossed the wrong fingers and where was my dad and I wanted my muuuuuuuum......
Dad reappeared, and told me that Big Andy was alive but we now needed to go to hospital with him to make sure he was going to be alright. On the way he explained that there had been another accident over the brow of a small hill on the circuit. Big Andy had hit another bike at full speed, pitching him off the bike and causing his machine to land on him, shattering his shoulder. He was going to be OK but he was very sore, and we needed to go and fill out some forms and then we could go home.
At the hospital they were cutting off his leathers in preparation for surgery. He was conscious, but delirious and kept asking the same few questions over and over again. I was so pleased to hear his voice (confused as it was), that it was like the accident was nothing.
It plagued me though. I actually did have bad dreams about it, seeing him coming out the ambulance, of wandering the circuit looking for the living and running from the dead. I never went back to the racetrack to watch my dad race, in case I got left behind if anything happened to anybody else. A few months later and my dad came off, shattering his collarbone. It didn't register as high on the scale, but the bike came home in one piece but dead, and dad came home alive but with more bits than he left with. Eventually the bike was quietly sold to the flat-capped keepers of the spare parts, and I quietly shelved my plans for world superbike domination. It seemed that riding a motorcycle on a secure track, with the only other traffic doing the same thing at the same speed was too dangerous. Bikes in the real world was another matter entirely...
As is the recurring theme through these half-baked memoirs, I blame my ancestors. Both grandads rode bikes, my dad had owned motorcycles almost all his adult life and my mum told some brilliant stories of her adventures on two wheels (the tale of the Honda, the classified nuclear submarine files and a terminal clutch failure is one that still makes me dislike the RAC to this day). I grew up round them, and they stirred me in a way cars never have and probably never will.
I was nine when my dad got into classic motorbike racing. For whatever reason he came home one day with a 1960's Ducati 350, red like lust should be and all curves and grunt. When he fired her up the noise could be heard a quarter of a mile away. I was in love.
Classic bikes are nothing like the cock-rockets of today. They have an organic quality about them that brings out the sixth-form poet in me. Modern bikes, even those made by the grandiose marques like Ducati, Moto Guzzi and Triumph, sound muted, muzzled by emission laws and the desire of 99.9% of the population not to have to suffer the incredible growl and roar of an uninhibited engine. Classic bikes have no such pretensions of civic responsibility. I used to stand in the paddock at race meets, just listening to the sound of fifty engines all roaring and grunting in unison as their owners tweaked, picked and tinkered with their geriatric pride and joys.
That noise! I went to the Isle of Man Grand Prix last summer, where classic and vintage motorbikes gather in numbers so large that after a day you cease to gawp as ten bikes that normally sit behind glass in a transport museum trundle sedately along the seafront, proud owners riding in long brown coats, bucket helmets and pipes clamped between tea-and nicotine-stained teeth. The holding pen for the classic bikes before that morning's race had a roar so primeval it sounded like something HP Lovecraft would have written endless short stories about. It's not a flat note but rises and falls like the breathing of something huge and terrible, something alive. I stood there, transfixed as these relics breathed smoke and speed and recklessness. It took me back to being a little kid in a neon-coloured fleece, watching in awe as my dad and his friends grunted monosyllabic approval as various Ducatis, Goldstars and Tritons sputtered into existence after an hour or so standing around offering advice on which grumnut had come loose.
These bikes required more maintenance than your average member of the Pussycat Dolls. Every other race meet an engine would blow up, fall off, blow out, or just plain fail. Parts, which the makers had stopped producing before the end of segregation, required either buying from dodgy guys in flat caps who owned eerie graveyards of bike carcasses and the odd mangy dog, or buying another bike and cannibalising it as a sacrifice to the ever-hungry engine. I was about 10 when our sacrifice arrived, a dark red Ducati 250. I helped unload it off the trailer and stood admiring it for ages. In my daydreams, dad would secretly rebuild it and give it to me, and I would race it and become the first Lady Champion of Scotland (I had developed quite the thing for being the first female to win or achieve things back then. I had also latched on to this word "Lady", a term I've barely used since I hit puberty. Too many years reading old Pony Club annuals from the 1970's I think).
It was a cruel day when I went down to see "my" bike one Saturday, to find it eviscerated, leaking stinking black blood on the floor of the garage, lifeless eye fixed on me as my dad cheerfully asked to pass him that wrench over there, and did I was to see him replace that clutch that had broken last race? I tentatively asked if he was going to fix up the other bike later.
I never did become Lady Champion of Scotland. Childhood optimism will only get you so far it seems.
So, racing. As a little pit-rat I got to know most of the guys who would turn up to race meets. I made myself useful, gofering for coffee, wrenches, screwdrivers and long, pointless trips which I now realise were clever attempts to make me bugger off and stop asking if I could sit on the back of their priceless Norton Commando or whatever. Some of them would buy me fudge from the ubiquitous home-made sweetie stall, or keep an eye on me when the pater familias was out on the track. As a result I had to deal with the realities of motorbikes and their inherent danger rather sooner than I'd have liked.
I never really knew the guy that died. He didn't race old bikes, at least not like the ones I knew. We were at Knockhill racing circuit in Fife, on a grey Autumn day. The race was on it's first lap when there was a pile-up on the corner we were watching from. It looked pretty nasty, but when the ambulance came out and there was a flurry of fluorescent yellow and green activity, we knew something had gone wrong. I never heard directly at the time, but I overheard that he had broken his neck. I'd never considered that this was really dangerous before, and to be honest it still didn't make much sense afterwards. The guy went in an ambulance and went away, and we all packed up and went home early, and there was no music in the car on the way home. I think if dad had a machine that ran more than one race out of ten then that would have been an end to it, but his chances of being close enough to the main pack to actually be in an accident like that seemed slim enough that it didn't cause him to do much than ride more conservatively when the Ducati did more than fart smoke and screws and cost another hundred quid.
Then Big Andy happened. he was an old friend of my dad's, always friendly and pleasant with me and my sister. I liked him, not least because he would finish races and even do really well in them from time to time (no kids, so more money to throw at the bike-graveyard owners).
It was a glorious summer's day, dry, and perfect for racing. My sister and mother were elsewhere, and dad and I had settled by the finish line to watch Big Andy race. The bikes lined up, ignitions started, and that primordial purring and howling drowned out everything but the sun. They went off round the track for a practice lap, then reigned in again on the start for the race itself. I had my fingers crossed like I always did when people I knew raced, and I knew Andy would do well. In a roar and a scream and a smell of burning petrol they were off and gone. Suddenly, we could see orange flags all along the circuit, being frantically waved by the marshals in their gravel traps. Waving flags meant an accident. I wasn't unduly fussed, and nobody else seemed to be either. Orange waving flags meant a restart, but that was OK. Probably some idiot with an exploding engine was now sitting in a gravel pit looking a bit bewildered. The bikes came back to the line, and waited. Waited. Waited. I got out the race programme and began matching up numbers to names.
Big Andy wasn't there. There were two bikes missing, and Big Andy wasn't there.
Intuition is a wonderful thing. We both knew that this went beyond sitting dazed in a gravel trap, and this was confirmed when the other riders started getting off their bikes and heading back to their paddocks. The announcers were being tactful, saying there had been an accident, and asking for patience. My dad did the decent thing, told me to stay where he was, and promptly ran off to the main office, just as his name was called over the tannoy. I was numb with shock. The memory of the other guy dead in an ambulance suddenly loomed large, and I was alone and frightened in what was suddenly a place where danger was extremely loud and incredibly close.
I wandered, looking for the medical centre, the office, dad, someone. I didn't cry, 'cause I was ten now and you just didn't. I went everywhere I could think of. Our car. His car. The cafe. The sweet stall. They were playing music over the tannoy to keep us entertained, and even now the Crash Test Dummies stir up feelings more powerful than a song with the worst chorus in the world has any right to. It can't have been more than ten or so minutes, but to me it was an eternity of heat, fear, noise, and that fucking grunge-esque classic.
I found the medics just as they were bringing out the ambulance. Feet first with a blanket over him, and I was sure he was dead. After all, that's how dead people look in films, right? And there, thankfully, was dad, looking more worried than I'd hoped he would. Again, he told me to stay put, and this time I did as I was told and sat outside the prefab medics hut while he followed the stretcher. I was sure he was dead.
I cried then. Big Andy was my friend and now he was dead and I'd seen him and it was my fault 'cause I must have crossed the wrong fingers and where was my dad and I wanted my muuuuuuuum......
Dad reappeared, and told me that Big Andy was alive but we now needed to go to hospital with him to make sure he was going to be alright. On the way he explained that there had been another accident over the brow of a small hill on the circuit. Big Andy had hit another bike at full speed, pitching him off the bike and causing his machine to land on him, shattering his shoulder. He was going to be OK but he was very sore, and we needed to go and fill out some forms and then we could go home.
At the hospital they were cutting off his leathers in preparation for surgery. He was conscious, but delirious and kept asking the same few questions over and over again. I was so pleased to hear his voice (confused as it was), that it was like the accident was nothing.
It plagued me though. I actually did have bad dreams about it, seeing him coming out the ambulance, of wandering the circuit looking for the living and running from the dead. I never went back to the racetrack to watch my dad race, in case I got left behind if anything happened to anybody else. A few months later and my dad came off, shattering his collarbone. It didn't register as high on the scale, but the bike came home in one piece but dead, and dad came home alive but with more bits than he left with. Eventually the bike was quietly sold to the flat-capped keepers of the spare parts, and I quietly shelved my plans for world superbike domination. It seemed that riding a motorcycle on a secure track, with the only other traffic doing the same thing at the same speed was too dangerous. Bikes in the real world was another matter entirely...
Tuesday 4 November 2008
November 2nd - Falling Out Of Planes And Fucking Up.
A week after my triumphant first jump, and I'd been on a high the entire time. I relived it all every time I needed something to daydream about in Maths, I'd say I dreamt about it the way people dream about important things, but that would be a massive fucking lie, just as it is when anyone says they dreamt about anything remotely coherent that isn't to do with nakedness and squelching. At school, I was infuriating, trying to get the teachers to discuss terminal velocities and the science of falling out of planes, the best exercises to stop me from hurting my ankle on landings, how best to write it up (took me long enough on that one). There must have been at least a few teachers who wished I'd met that lake. I speak from experience, the irritation of dealing with the over-excited attention-seeking pupil is a unique phenomenon to be tolerated and bitched about after in the staffroom.
John and I agreed to keep it going, and booked ourselves another jump the following weekend, and the stars are looking to go in our favour. It's another gloriously sunny day and we're not even fazed by turning up in a wedding car this time. We casually breezed past week's trainees, acted like we owned the whole airfield. Youth really does make you stupid. I had somewhat optimistically bought my dad's old paragliding jumpsuit, thinking that as I'd jumped I was now cool enough to wander about in a fetching mint-and-black number than slum it with the orange-suited proles. In hindsight it's only fair that my instructor laughed me back to the changing rooms, but at the time miffed hardly begins to cover it. we were scheduled to jump later in the afternoon, so had a few hours of dossing about, eating nasty burgers and watching the real skydivers swan about in tight Lycra suits with contrasting grab-handles. Yeah, you heard that right. Technically, I can see why these outfits make sense. When you're doing the whole synchronised thing, it makes sense to have easily-identifiable grabrails, and tight clothing does make for less wind resistance, but on the ground? It was like a skinny 1970's reunion. I was surprised they weren't wearing platform boots with goldfish in the heel. The hilarity was increased by seeing them practice their synchronised falling on the ground. Ever wondered how they do it? Well, each person gets a tea-tray, attaches casters to it, and then lies belly down it, shifting in tiny circles while someone barks out unintelligible codes. It was like synchronised swimming without the make-up or creepy twin girls from Ukraine or wherever. It's funny, when I was helping with the paragliding it was the pros that I most wanted to be like, and here the idea of stuffing myself into some spandex and grabbing someones luminous-clad thigh at 10,000 feet seemed the most bonkers idea I'd ever come across. But then, that had never appealed to me. I'd discovered the existence of sky-surfing, and was convinced that one day I'd be throwing myself out of planes above mountains with a snowboard on my feet, doing incredible-looking stunts before hitting the slopes and being the kind of superheroine you don't really get outside of Freelander adverts.
So, back to training. There was a recommended five-jump training programme before you were let off the static line that opened your parachute and were allowed to go solo. We'd already done one, and now we were on to handle pulling. The site's main shed had a practice area, where you got in a harness, were hoisted up into the air and would practice your jump technique, what to do when it all went wrong et cetera. Last week, they had shown us picture after picture of how canopies look in various states of entanglement, and asked us what we would do in each situation. This time, we were practicing pulling our main chutes, and again we had the pics, just so we knew when to go with the fake and when to really throw our reserves (do this, and you have to buy a round in the pub apparently. Seems a little unfair to me, but that's macho bullshit for you). I was doing fine, hours of reading various manuals on paragliding and parachuting helping me identify the various tucks, snags and kill-you-in-the-face SNAFUs that we checked for after those magic four seconds after we left the plane.
So, once again the troop out to the little Cessna, the briefing on handle pulling, and I'm second out this time. In contrast to last week, I was positively buoyant on take-off. I was humming Song " by Blur (every person's action movie soundtrack of choice in 1999) and thinking about my textbook jump so much I barely noticed when I was asked to shut up by the long-suffering instructor. John was first out, and it looked good. Now me.
Again, I'm in the doorway. I'm positioned, I'm ready. Legs dangling into nothingness, the engines go quiet, the pilot "feathering" them to bring down our airspeed. Three. Two. One. Go.
They teach you how to scream in the sheds. You turn the screaming fear into something positive, something aggressive.
ARCH THOUSAND!- arch backwards, arms and legs splayed out on a rack of speeding air. Slow your descent by increasing your surface area. Pull the fake cord, and pull it good.
TWO THOUSAND!- Taste that adrenaline
THREE THOUSAND!- You're still in freefall, and time stops making sense
FOUR THOUSAND!- It must have opened by now?
CHECK CANOPY!- And now you're allowed to look, to try and match the sight behind you to those photocards that got flashed at you by the guys in the hangar. First time, it had looked more perfect than anything in creation, a blue and white unfurling that meant I was going to live, goddammit!
I'm screaming now. Real, terrified screaming. I can't see the canopy. I look over both shoulders, and the fucking thing just isn't there. Fuck. I'm going to die. This is how it ends, this is how it's over.
The guys on the ground tell me that the canopy came out low, in my blind spot. It took an extra second or so to open, but that second was enough. I've never screamed in genuine, utter, animal terror before or since, and never want to again. My life didn't flash before my eyes, there was no feeling of peace or Jesus or anything other than blind, screaming, utter terror.
After that second, the canopy opened, and I snapped alive again. I hung in my harness like a corpse, barely able to register my legs, my arms, nothing. Sobbing in fear and relief, it took the instructor asking if I was OK and shouldn't I be reaching for brakes by now that made me realise I wasn't on the ground yet. I did what I'm good at: shaking my head, gritting my teeth and just getting the hell on with it. And so I did. Still shaking, I raised my right hand, went looking for my brake. Gloved, trembling fingers came up blank until they found a small tag and pulled slightly. Pulled enough to release it from it's dock and into my peripheral vision, but not so far as to work. What I saw in my peripheral vision was a small, red tag. A small, red tag saying "DANGER: WATER LANDING ONLY".
Well, that was it as far as my nerves were concerned. Not only had I had my two seconds of certain death, I had also nearly killed myself through panic and fucking up. I spent the next few thousand feet in a state of shock, realising that my fear of something that wasn't a problem had nearly caused me to plummet out the sky like a stone, my canopies fluttering uselessly behind me.
Like I said, nobody really dreams about actual things, but there are times I remember that feeling of utter, utter....fail is I think the best word to use. Failure to think rationally, failure to take control. Failure to think it through. Fucking idiot.
So, back to the airfield. I was a shaking mass of fear, embarrassment and anger at myself. I muttered something about being freaked by the rear-sitting canopy, and agreed that the best thing to do was just get straight back up there, get past it. I heard them talking about someone nearly pulling the "DANGER" cord in the shed where 'chutes are repacked, as it was undocked and "They don't do that by themselves". I said nothing, my bravado from the morning gone.
Late afternoon and I was back in the plane, fourth out. I wasn't humming anything this time. I was terrified, worried that I was really going to fuck up this time, that I wasn't good enough to do this. First two got out, and then we got a report on the radio. Gusty conditions on the ground meant we were going to land, and there would be no more jumps. I went home, unsure if I'd had a lucky escape or if i should book in again.
Nearly a decade on and I'm thinking I should have booked in again. I've looked at going back, but a lack of willing accomplices and some (justifiable) fear is stopping me. I feel pretty damn proud of doing something like that for fun at an age where I should have been sitting at home listening to Nine Inch Nails and taking three hours over my hair (OK, there was a fair bit of that too) but still, could have done better....
John and I agreed to keep it going, and booked ourselves another jump the following weekend, and the stars are looking to go in our favour. It's another gloriously sunny day and we're not even fazed by turning up in a wedding car this time. We casually breezed past week's trainees, acted like we owned the whole airfield. Youth really does make you stupid. I had somewhat optimistically bought my dad's old paragliding jumpsuit, thinking that as I'd jumped I was now cool enough to wander about in a fetching mint-and-black number than slum it with the orange-suited proles. In hindsight it's only fair that my instructor laughed me back to the changing rooms, but at the time miffed hardly begins to cover it. we were scheduled to jump later in the afternoon, so had a few hours of dossing about, eating nasty burgers and watching the real skydivers swan about in tight Lycra suits with contrasting grab-handles. Yeah, you heard that right. Technically, I can see why these outfits make sense. When you're doing the whole synchronised thing, it makes sense to have easily-identifiable grabrails, and tight clothing does make for less wind resistance, but on the ground? It was like a skinny 1970's reunion. I was surprised they weren't wearing platform boots with goldfish in the heel. The hilarity was increased by seeing them practice their synchronised falling on the ground. Ever wondered how they do it? Well, each person gets a tea-tray, attaches casters to it, and then lies belly down it, shifting in tiny circles while someone barks out unintelligible codes. It was like synchronised swimming without the make-up or creepy twin girls from Ukraine or wherever. It's funny, when I was helping with the paragliding it was the pros that I most wanted to be like, and here the idea of stuffing myself into some spandex and grabbing someones luminous-clad thigh at 10,000 feet seemed the most bonkers idea I'd ever come across. But then, that had never appealed to me. I'd discovered the existence of sky-surfing, and was convinced that one day I'd be throwing myself out of planes above mountains with a snowboard on my feet, doing incredible-looking stunts before hitting the slopes and being the kind of superheroine you don't really get outside of Freelander adverts.
So, back to training. There was a recommended five-jump training programme before you were let off the static line that opened your parachute and were allowed to go solo. We'd already done one, and now we were on to handle pulling. The site's main shed had a practice area, where you got in a harness, were hoisted up into the air and would practice your jump technique, what to do when it all went wrong et cetera. Last week, they had shown us picture after picture of how canopies look in various states of entanglement, and asked us what we would do in each situation. This time, we were practicing pulling our main chutes, and again we had the pics, just so we knew when to go with the fake and when to really throw our reserves (do this, and you have to buy a round in the pub apparently. Seems a little unfair to me, but that's macho bullshit for you). I was doing fine, hours of reading various manuals on paragliding and parachuting helping me identify the various tucks, snags and kill-you-in-the-face SNAFUs that we checked for after those magic four seconds after we left the plane.
So, once again the troop out to the little Cessna, the briefing on handle pulling, and I'm second out this time. In contrast to last week, I was positively buoyant on take-off. I was humming Song " by Blur (every person's action movie soundtrack of choice in 1999) and thinking about my textbook jump so much I barely noticed when I was asked to shut up by the long-suffering instructor. John was first out, and it looked good. Now me.
Again, I'm in the doorway. I'm positioned, I'm ready. Legs dangling into nothingness, the engines go quiet, the pilot "feathering" them to bring down our airspeed. Three. Two. One. Go.
They teach you how to scream in the sheds. You turn the screaming fear into something positive, something aggressive.
ARCH THOUSAND!- arch backwards, arms and legs splayed out on a rack of speeding air. Slow your descent by increasing your surface area. Pull the fake cord, and pull it good.
TWO THOUSAND!- Taste that adrenaline
THREE THOUSAND!- You're still in freefall, and time stops making sense
FOUR THOUSAND!- It must have opened by now?
CHECK CANOPY!- And now you're allowed to look, to try and match the sight behind you to those photocards that got flashed at you by the guys in the hangar. First time, it had looked more perfect than anything in creation, a blue and white unfurling that meant I was going to live, goddammit!
I'm screaming now. Real, terrified screaming. I can't see the canopy. I look over both shoulders, and the fucking thing just isn't there. Fuck. I'm going to die. This is how it ends, this is how it's over.
The guys on the ground tell me that the canopy came out low, in my blind spot. It took an extra second or so to open, but that second was enough. I've never screamed in genuine, utter, animal terror before or since, and never want to again. My life didn't flash before my eyes, there was no feeling of peace or Jesus or anything other than blind, screaming, utter terror.
After that second, the canopy opened, and I snapped alive again. I hung in my harness like a corpse, barely able to register my legs, my arms, nothing. Sobbing in fear and relief, it took the instructor asking if I was OK and shouldn't I be reaching for brakes by now that made me realise I wasn't on the ground yet. I did what I'm good at: shaking my head, gritting my teeth and just getting the hell on with it. And so I did. Still shaking, I raised my right hand, went looking for my brake. Gloved, trembling fingers came up blank until they found a small tag and pulled slightly. Pulled enough to release it from it's dock and into my peripheral vision, but not so far as to work. What I saw in my peripheral vision was a small, red tag. A small, red tag saying "DANGER: WATER LANDING ONLY".
Well, that was it as far as my nerves were concerned. Not only had I had my two seconds of certain death, I had also nearly killed myself through panic and fucking up. I spent the next few thousand feet in a state of shock, realising that my fear of something that wasn't a problem had nearly caused me to plummet out the sky like a stone, my canopies fluttering uselessly behind me.
Like I said, nobody really dreams about actual things, but there are times I remember that feeling of utter, utter....fail is I think the best word to use. Failure to think rationally, failure to take control. Failure to think it through. Fucking idiot.
So, back to the airfield. I was a shaking mass of fear, embarrassment and anger at myself. I muttered something about being freaked by the rear-sitting canopy, and agreed that the best thing to do was just get straight back up there, get past it. I heard them talking about someone nearly pulling the "DANGER" cord in the shed where 'chutes are repacked, as it was undocked and "They don't do that by themselves". I said nothing, my bravado from the morning gone.
Late afternoon and I was back in the plane, fourth out. I wasn't humming anything this time. I was terrified, worried that I was really going to fuck up this time, that I wasn't good enough to do this. First two got out, and then we got a report on the radio. Gusty conditions on the ground meant we were going to land, and there would be no more jumps. I went home, unsure if I'd had a lucky escape or if i should book in again.
Nearly a decade on and I'm thinking I should have booked in again. I've looked at going back, but a lack of willing accomplices and some (justifiable) fear is stopping me. I feel pretty damn proud of doing something like that for fun at an age where I should have been sitting at home listening to Nine Inch Nails and taking three hours over my hair (OK, there was a fair bit of that too) but still, could have done better....
November 1st : Falling out of planes and not fucking up
I’ve always idolised my parents. I won’t deny it. When other kids hit their difficult teenage years and started deriding their elders and betters for poor sartorial and music choices, I was spending weekends in the hills with my parents, marvelling at golden eagles and listening to Deep Purple in the car home. It was really, really hard to rebel against people who seemed to lead the kind of life that really appealed to me, and who seemed pretty nice on the whole too. If anything, my real problem was discovering my niche separate from them and finding something I could do that they hadn’t done, become experts in and finally tired of and moved onto something equally cool. Whilst most parents were spending Saturdays going round furniture warehouses and watching TV, mine would be at the airport learning to fly light aircraft, up hills playing with paragliders, racing classic motorbikes….you get the idea. As someone who loved being outside and getting muddy and worn out doing something slightly dangerous, I had to really work on finding something I could do for myself, that would be mine and mine alone (eventually I discovered rebellion could be achieved by not doing anything at all, but that can wait).
My big foray into doing my own thing was born out of my parents’ respective hobbies at the time. My dad was heavily into paragliding, that fantastic French sport where you climb a hill, spread out your glider and run off the hill. If all went well and you were an eight-stone, tanned and well-dressed European who had perfect conditions every day and an appreciative female audience, you would glide into the air, soar upwards and off into the cloudless sky, to land a few miles away by a bar and another appreciative female audience.
If you’re a slightly rotund Scotsman, in a club of slightly rotund Scotspeople with one hour of good flying conditions a month and your audience consists of bored hill-walkers and even more bored sheep, you would struggle into the air, only to descend at speed towards a field full of sheep and the delightful leavings of sheep, which you would then make a valiant attempt to dance around in case you faceplanted into a steaming herbivore turd.
It lacked romance and a certain amount of style. We’d go on holiday and I’d be entranced by these airborne demi-gods, laughing in French and looking wonderful while team GB would be looking pale and ill-equipped, like the nerdy cousin who really wanted to play World of Warcraft but had been made to come to your raucous house party instead.
In Scotland, I would religiously go out paragliding with my dad, in the hope that someone would take pity on me and let me have a quick flight in the tandem glider. I’d spend entire days sitting on wet hills, pulling gliders out of ditches, finding radios and carrying the lunch up from the car. In a tragically teenage way I optimistically described myself as “ground crew”, when hindsight shows me to be a gofer, or similar hillside-dwelling rodent (a marmot perhaps?) I was obsessed but I knew that years of running around after my dad and his friends was not the way to become like those awesome continental pilotes.
I was a flying fanatic at the time, and for this I blame my mother. She was learning to fly light aircraft and when I wasn’t up some godforsaken hill with my dad I was at a small airport outside Glasgow, waiting for (you guessed it) someone to take pity on me and take me up for a flight while she was out learning to fly properly. I’d managed to rack up about three hours flight time in powered aircraft and about half that in paragliders when I decided that the sky was where I was going to be. I started looking into becoming a commercial airline pilot, and ways of gaining experience with anything to do with flying.
This brings us to skydiving. It came to me in a flash of inspiration one night. It had everything: adrenaline, aircraft, the chance to show off to my classmates and (more importantly in my 15-year-old opinion) teachers, and a sport that would show British Airways/Midland that I was really into this whole flying gig. It was perfect.
Of course, at 15 deciding you want to learn how to jump out of planes and actually jumping out of planes are two very different things. I had no money, and no means of making money. I needed a plan. Thankfully, school came to the rescue. It was the year I took my Standard Grades and, hearing about some of my friends brokering deals to get money out of their family in exchange for grades (in some cases, up to £50 for a grade 1, or A to the rest of the civilised world). Confident in my abilities to do really well in my exams, I asked my parents if they’d pay for me to learn to skydive if I did well.
They told me not to be so ridiculous, and after a swift reminder of the importance of doing well in school for it’s own sake, and then another reminder that it was my birthday soon and it could be my present instead. Makes sense, I thought, and before long I had a date for departure. All I had to do was be up at 5am to get into Glasgow to meet my friend who was going to be jumping with me, get the train to some tiny Perthshire town, and then find a way of getting from there to the airfield.As someone who at the time was uncomprehending of the link between bus number and the number on bus stops, this would present a challenge to say the least. However, I was determined, I was excited, I was as ready as I was ever going to be. bring on the parachutes!
It was a good day to jump, not that I'd have known if my parents hadn't woken me up. Sleeping through my alarm on a day like this? Being a teenager was awesome, and terrifying in the inherent ability to sleep through even the most important occasions.
After a flurry of activity in the house, racing to meet John (who was late of course), finding and getting ont he right train and getting off at the right place, we were on our way to the airfield. Our next hurdle was getting there from the train station. It was a fair few miles away and the train station consisted of a platform and a broken ticket machine, hardly the most promising start. So, off we wandered in search of the nearest village. Upon finding the only open shop, we were told that there just one taxi in the area, which the shopkeeper generously offered to phone for us (on the unspoken assumption we bought a few packets of crisps)
Finally our chariot arrived. It was beautiful. No, really. A white merc sedan with white leather seats, and the smartest taxi driver we'd ever seen. He explained to us that he doubled up for wedding car hire, and did a bit of taxi-driving on the side. And so we pulled up to an enormous prefab shed, at half eight in the morning, wearing our stout boots, old clothes and stepping out the sort of thing an England WAG would dismiss as being too flashy. Never let it be said I didn't like to make an entrance.
So, we were here, we were ready, we were put into bright orange jumpsuits. The purpose of these was to stop us getting our clothes filthy (and, as I found out later, to make our bodies easier to find if we went way off-piste). We went through the initial safety briefing, practiced jumping out of the balsa wood mock-up of a Cessna side door kept in another shed, and practiced how to get out the plane in the event of an emergency (quickly seemed to be the jist of it). There were four of us to a flight, and the instructor did the decent thing and kept us young'uns together (me being the youngest by a good four years). There was me, who spent the day being the kind of mouthy and brash that you can only really get away with when you're 16, John, who seemed slightly embarrassed to be there with me, Mike, who had dreams of joining the RAF as a pilot, but had a crippling fear of heights and hoped that jumping out a plane at 3,500 feet would be a good way of curing this, and Dave, who was there to be supportive of Mike. Poor Mike, I really hope he made it into the RAF. At the time however, I was terribly unsupportive, and making jokes about jam donuts and stories I'd heard about water landings was erring on the cruel side of polite conversation.
Speaking of water landings, a little note on mechanics. On your standard square parachute harness, you have two brakes. These brakes are stuck on with velcro, and once your 'chute has opened, you can release these brakes and use them to turn, hang in mid-air, and (most importantly). slow yourself down before landing so you don't break both ankles and mess up your orange jumpsuit. Simple.
Also on your right hand side is the 'chute-opening handle, which we weren't worrying about as we were on a line, the reserve 'chute pull, and way up, on our shoulders, was the water-landing handle. This we were told, was VERY DANGEROUS. It was very small, had a DANGER: WATER LANDING ONLY tag on it, and had the unique ability of making your main parachute detatch itself from your harness. And the reserve parachute. If a skydiver lands in water, the cells of the parachute fill with water, sinking and dragging the hapless victim down with them. From my time on the hill with the paragliding crew, I'd heard stories about poor bastards drowned this way, and it was very fresh in my mind. So, the water-landing handle. Very important. Very useful. But ferchrissakes, do not under any circumstances pull in an emergency (unless that emergency is waterborne).
So, four up and we're in the plane, a little, beaten-up Cessna held together with duct tape and the kind of frantic optimism possessed only by those in aviation (a kind of amphetamined-up Right Stuff). I'm jump three of four, and now it's real I am utterly, utterly terrified. I've stopped making jokes now, and can do very little but stare at my altimeter as it counts up. Three thousand feet is a terrible height to jump from. High enough to be very deadly indeed, low enough that I could make out little details on the ground. The sheep, the lake (lake!?! Fuck me, there's a LAKE over there!), my mum and dad getting out their silver Volvo.... this may have been an exercise in striking out on my own, but I was bloody happy to see them at that moment.We ascend, the dial on the altimeter rising in time with my sense of foreboding.
One out. He's fine, Mike is one step closer to flying jets for the RAF (and how is Afghanistan these days I wonder?). Two. John grabs my hand as he moves past me, and he's gone. Three.
We circled the airfield after John had gone and I could see him, a small dot in the air, his canopy blossoming above his head. I simultaneously wanted it to be over now and wanted there to be a problem with the plane, me, the chute, anything, so we would have to land and do it another day far, far in the future. Then our instructor put his hand on my shoulder, shouted "Ready?!" at me. It was time.
People always wank on about how everything becomes automatic at moments like this. Bollocks they do.I had to consciously do everything in my head before my body could be trusted, as I'd developed a fear of falling head-first out the plane by fucking up. Christ, don't fuck this up. I sit in the doorway of the Cessna, almost side-saddle. my right arm is braced against the back of the doorway, my left on the floor by my legs. It all feels very precarious. In common with almost every other human being who ever lived, I've never dangled out a plane before, it's very surreal. The land rushing beneath my feet, thousands of feet below. It looks like a whole world of nothing between me and safety, and the plane feels like it shouldn't be up here, let alone with me in it. It's all wrong!
Finally, the pilot shuts the engine, the plane slows, and I remember it becoming very, very quiet. Time didn't slow but I suddenly became aware of every breath. Every movement. Every. Single. Second.
And suddenly, there are no seconds left. I feel a hand on my back, I launch myself out, and I'm screaming. Really, really screaming. I believe my thought process in freefall went something like this.
Fuck.
FUUUUUUCK.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck I've just thrown myself out of a plane what the hell is wrong with me....
How many seconds was that?
FUCK!!
THREE THOUSAND
FOUR THOUSAND CHECK CANOPYYYYYY
...and the parachute opens up and in my head it opens with a crack like gunfire and I'm suddenly soaring, not falling. My screams transmute into tears of sheer, unbridled joy. After a few seconds of hyperventilating, snottering and kicking my legs like a toddler on a tyreswing, I remember my checks and get my brakes out. It's a beautiful view from here (though I'm watching that fucking lake like a goddamn hawk, oh yes. It's when you let your guard down, that's when they get you...), the late afternoon sun turning the airfield and nearby farmland into a glorious, golden, bucolic cliche. However, it wasn't long before I decided to show off a little. A few steep banks and turns on the chute using me (basic) knowledge of paragliding made me feel far better at this than I thought, a pretention that gravity quickly disabused me of when I misjudged the final ten feet and fell over arse over tit, spraining my ankle and starting a good fight between me and the canopy that made me look like a sweary extra in the soft porn they used to show on BBC2.
Still, I had done it. I had thrown myself out a beaten-up Cessna for reasons other than necessity. I was a fizzing ball of joy and incessant chat all the way home, and John and I promised we'd make this a regular thing, that this would be our sport from now on. Elation never felt this good.....
My big foray into doing my own thing was born out of my parents’ respective hobbies at the time. My dad was heavily into paragliding, that fantastic French sport where you climb a hill, spread out your glider and run off the hill. If all went well and you were an eight-stone, tanned and well-dressed European who had perfect conditions every day and an appreciative female audience, you would glide into the air, soar upwards and off into the cloudless sky, to land a few miles away by a bar and another appreciative female audience.
If you’re a slightly rotund Scotsman, in a club of slightly rotund Scotspeople with one hour of good flying conditions a month and your audience consists of bored hill-walkers and even more bored sheep, you would struggle into the air, only to descend at speed towards a field full of sheep and the delightful leavings of sheep, which you would then make a valiant attempt to dance around in case you faceplanted into a steaming herbivore turd.
It lacked romance and a certain amount of style. We’d go on holiday and I’d be entranced by these airborne demi-gods, laughing in French and looking wonderful while team GB would be looking pale and ill-equipped, like the nerdy cousin who really wanted to play World of Warcraft but had been made to come to your raucous house party instead.
In Scotland, I would religiously go out paragliding with my dad, in the hope that someone would take pity on me and let me have a quick flight in the tandem glider. I’d spend entire days sitting on wet hills, pulling gliders out of ditches, finding radios and carrying the lunch up from the car. In a tragically teenage way I optimistically described myself as “ground crew”, when hindsight shows me to be a gofer, or similar hillside-dwelling rodent (a marmot perhaps?) I was obsessed but I knew that years of running around after my dad and his friends was not the way to become like those awesome continental pilotes.
I was a flying fanatic at the time, and for this I blame my mother. She was learning to fly light aircraft and when I wasn’t up some godforsaken hill with my dad I was at a small airport outside Glasgow, waiting for (you guessed it) someone to take pity on me and take me up for a flight while she was out learning to fly properly. I’d managed to rack up about three hours flight time in powered aircraft and about half that in paragliders when I decided that the sky was where I was going to be. I started looking into becoming a commercial airline pilot, and ways of gaining experience with anything to do with flying.
This brings us to skydiving. It came to me in a flash of inspiration one night. It had everything: adrenaline, aircraft, the chance to show off to my classmates and (more importantly in my 15-year-old opinion) teachers, and a sport that would show British Airways/Midland that I was really into this whole flying gig. It was perfect.
Of course, at 15 deciding you want to learn how to jump out of planes and actually jumping out of planes are two very different things. I had no money, and no means of making money. I needed a plan. Thankfully, school came to the rescue. It was the year I took my Standard Grades and, hearing about some of my friends brokering deals to get money out of their family in exchange for grades (in some cases, up to £50 for a grade 1, or A to the rest of the civilised world). Confident in my abilities to do really well in my exams, I asked my parents if they’d pay for me to learn to skydive if I did well.
They told me not to be so ridiculous, and after a swift reminder of the importance of doing well in school for it’s own sake, and then another reminder that it was my birthday soon and it could be my present instead. Makes sense, I thought, and before long I had a date for departure. All I had to do was be up at 5am to get into Glasgow to meet my friend who was going to be jumping with me, get the train to some tiny Perthshire town, and then find a way of getting from there to the airfield.As someone who at the time was uncomprehending of the link between bus number and the number on bus stops, this would present a challenge to say the least. However, I was determined, I was excited, I was as ready as I was ever going to be. bring on the parachutes!
It was a good day to jump, not that I'd have known if my parents hadn't woken me up. Sleeping through my alarm on a day like this? Being a teenager was awesome, and terrifying in the inherent ability to sleep through even the most important occasions.
After a flurry of activity in the house, racing to meet John (who was late of course), finding and getting ont he right train and getting off at the right place, we were on our way to the airfield. Our next hurdle was getting there from the train station. It was a fair few miles away and the train station consisted of a platform and a broken ticket machine, hardly the most promising start. So, off we wandered in search of the nearest village. Upon finding the only open shop, we were told that there just one taxi in the area, which the shopkeeper generously offered to phone for us (on the unspoken assumption we bought a few packets of crisps)
Finally our chariot arrived. It was beautiful. No, really. A white merc sedan with white leather seats, and the smartest taxi driver we'd ever seen. He explained to us that he doubled up for wedding car hire, and did a bit of taxi-driving on the side. And so we pulled up to an enormous prefab shed, at half eight in the morning, wearing our stout boots, old clothes and stepping out the sort of thing an England WAG would dismiss as being too flashy. Never let it be said I didn't like to make an entrance.
So, we were here, we were ready, we were put into bright orange jumpsuits. The purpose of these was to stop us getting our clothes filthy (and, as I found out later, to make our bodies easier to find if we went way off-piste). We went through the initial safety briefing, practiced jumping out of the balsa wood mock-up of a Cessna side door kept in another shed, and practiced how to get out the plane in the event of an emergency (quickly seemed to be the jist of it). There were four of us to a flight, and the instructor did the decent thing and kept us young'uns together (me being the youngest by a good four years). There was me, who spent the day being the kind of mouthy and brash that you can only really get away with when you're 16, John, who seemed slightly embarrassed to be there with me, Mike, who had dreams of joining the RAF as a pilot, but had a crippling fear of heights and hoped that jumping out a plane at 3,500 feet would be a good way of curing this, and Dave, who was there to be supportive of Mike. Poor Mike, I really hope he made it into the RAF. At the time however, I was terribly unsupportive, and making jokes about jam donuts and stories I'd heard about water landings was erring on the cruel side of polite conversation.
Speaking of water landings, a little note on mechanics. On your standard square parachute harness, you have two brakes. These brakes are stuck on with velcro, and once your 'chute has opened, you can release these brakes and use them to turn, hang in mid-air, and (most importantly). slow yourself down before landing so you don't break both ankles and mess up your orange jumpsuit. Simple.
Also on your right hand side is the 'chute-opening handle, which we weren't worrying about as we were on a line, the reserve 'chute pull, and way up, on our shoulders, was the water-landing handle. This we were told, was VERY DANGEROUS. It was very small, had a DANGER: WATER LANDING ONLY tag on it, and had the unique ability of making your main parachute detatch itself from your harness. And the reserve parachute. If a skydiver lands in water, the cells of the parachute fill with water, sinking and dragging the hapless victim down with them. From my time on the hill with the paragliding crew, I'd heard stories about poor bastards drowned this way, and it was very fresh in my mind. So, the water-landing handle. Very important. Very useful. But ferchrissakes, do not under any circumstances pull in an emergency (unless that emergency is waterborne).
So, four up and we're in the plane, a little, beaten-up Cessna held together with duct tape and the kind of frantic optimism possessed only by those in aviation (a kind of amphetamined-up Right Stuff). I'm jump three of four, and now it's real I am utterly, utterly terrified. I've stopped making jokes now, and can do very little but stare at my altimeter as it counts up. Three thousand feet is a terrible height to jump from. High enough to be very deadly indeed, low enough that I could make out little details on the ground. The sheep, the lake (lake!?! Fuck me, there's a LAKE over there!), my mum and dad getting out their silver Volvo.... this may have been an exercise in striking out on my own, but I was bloody happy to see them at that moment.We ascend, the dial on the altimeter rising in time with my sense of foreboding.
One out. He's fine, Mike is one step closer to flying jets for the RAF (and how is Afghanistan these days I wonder?). Two. John grabs my hand as he moves past me, and he's gone. Three.
We circled the airfield after John had gone and I could see him, a small dot in the air, his canopy blossoming above his head. I simultaneously wanted it to be over now and wanted there to be a problem with the plane, me, the chute, anything, so we would have to land and do it another day far, far in the future. Then our instructor put his hand on my shoulder, shouted "Ready?!" at me. It was time.
People always wank on about how everything becomes automatic at moments like this. Bollocks they do.I had to consciously do everything in my head before my body could be trusted, as I'd developed a fear of falling head-first out the plane by fucking up. Christ, don't fuck this up. I sit in the doorway of the Cessna, almost side-saddle. my right arm is braced against the back of the doorway, my left on the floor by my legs. It all feels very precarious. In common with almost every other human being who ever lived, I've never dangled out a plane before, it's very surreal. The land rushing beneath my feet, thousands of feet below. It looks like a whole world of nothing between me and safety, and the plane feels like it shouldn't be up here, let alone with me in it. It's all wrong!
Finally, the pilot shuts the engine, the plane slows, and I remember it becoming very, very quiet. Time didn't slow but I suddenly became aware of every breath. Every movement. Every. Single. Second.
And suddenly, there are no seconds left. I feel a hand on my back, I launch myself out, and I'm screaming. Really, really screaming. I believe my thought process in freefall went something like this.
Fuck.
FUUUUUUCK.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck I've just thrown myself out of a plane what the hell is wrong with me....
How many seconds was that?
FUCK!!
THREE THOUSAND
FOUR THOUSAND CHECK CANOPYYYYYY
...and the parachute opens up and in my head it opens with a crack like gunfire and I'm suddenly soaring, not falling. My screams transmute into tears of sheer, unbridled joy. After a few seconds of hyperventilating, snottering and kicking my legs like a toddler on a tyreswing, I remember my checks and get my brakes out. It's a beautiful view from here (though I'm watching that fucking lake like a goddamn hawk, oh yes. It's when you let your guard down, that's when they get you...), the late afternoon sun turning the airfield and nearby farmland into a glorious, golden, bucolic cliche. However, it wasn't long before I decided to show off a little. A few steep banks and turns on the chute using me (basic) knowledge of paragliding made me feel far better at this than I thought, a pretention that gravity quickly disabused me of when I misjudged the final ten feet and fell over arse over tit, spraining my ankle and starting a good fight between me and the canopy that made me look like a sweary extra in the soft porn they used to show on BBC2.
Still, I had done it. I had thrown myself out a beaten-up Cessna for reasons other than necessity. I was a fizzing ball of joy and incessant chat all the way home, and John and I promised we'd make this a regular thing, that this would be our sport from now on. Elation never felt this good.....
A rethink
It was too depressing to write. It wasn't going anywhere.
It's not being scrapped, but it's one for another time. However, this year I've decided that, given my imminient move and changing pretty much everything means that it's time to look back on all the awesome stuff I've done.
I present...
The Thirty Most Amazing Things I Can Remember
Not all of the following is entirely accurate. I'm doing this for me, and as a thank you for all the people who gave me all these amazing experiences...
It's not being scrapped, but it's one for another time. However, this year I've decided that, given my imminient move and changing pretty much everything means that it's time to look back on all the awesome stuff I've done.
I present...
The Thirty Most Amazing Things I Can Remember
Not all of the following is entirely accurate. I'm doing this for me, and as a thank you for all the people who gave me all these amazing experiences...
Thursday 30 October 2008
It’s cold. Real cold. The kind of cold that seeps in through the pores and out through the fingers. I shiver in my blanket, turn the TV up to catch the rest of the news before the power outage starts.
“….President Biden has called for calm as a secessionist march through Flagstaff, Arizona, erupted into violence today. The crowd of 30,000 had assembled at the historic flagpole to hear influential leader James Buchan speak about employment, but his long delay in reaching the stage caused unrest among the protesters, who started rioting through the streets. The army have been called in to contain the situation, and it is believed that there have been shots fired….”
Fuck. Arizona now? I remember a family holiday to Sedona years ago, getting sunburned after I went for a long walk in the searing heat of the day and spending the rest of the afternoon in a cold bath cursing my stupidity. We’d had spicy ribs in the Red Planet café, and dad had spent the next day prodding my raw shoulders. It had seemed a lovely place, more hippyish and liberal than I’d expected the south to be, all aliens and wind chimes. Beautiful country, America like I’d really imagined it to look. And now it was going up too. Going the same way as Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas. Christ, Texas had been ugly. The lynchings, the burnings, the mob screaming and hollering as they chased that young guy down the street. The dead-eyed truth of rolling news- millions of people got to see the look of sheer terror in his eyes before he was engulfed by the furious tide.
Midnight, and all the lights go out. The TV, which had been cheerfully predicting more snow, dies with a static sound and crackles quietly to itself. I groan, lurch off the sofa and light a candle. Not much to really do now but sleep, anyway. Or at least try to. I pad through to the bedroom, trailing my blanket. Spread it out over the two duvets already there, my breath frosting in the bitter air. Cam is sound asleep, her gentle snoring and starfish position a testament to her incredible ability to sleep in such a way to guarantee me a really uncomfortable night. Fuck. She hits work early, if I wake her up and get her move across then we’ll have to talk, and she won’t sleep, and I’ll feel like a bitch. I stand by the bed, mind groggily working through ways I might manoeuvre her across without waking her up. The stupid things we do for love. Christ, it’s cold, I’m standing here freezing my ass off wondering how to get into fucking bed? Right, sleep it is then. Don’t be so fucking daft. I lift the covers slightly, moving like a pantomime villain as I try to contort myself under the covers. She shifts slightly, half-grunts, half-moans, shuffles, and I’m in. I blow out the candle, feel my extremities start to tingle with warmth in the sharp darkness. I lie awake, thinking about Arizona. If they go down too, what then? Nobody really thought secession was going to happen before Texas. Nobody. It was for history books and grade school, not the response a state gives after ’13.
I lie in the dark, and try not to think about ’13.
“….President Biden has called for calm as a secessionist march through Flagstaff, Arizona, erupted into violence today. The crowd of 30,000 had assembled at the historic flagpole to hear influential leader James Buchan speak about employment, but his long delay in reaching the stage caused unrest among the protesters, who started rioting through the streets. The army have been called in to contain the situation, and it is believed that there have been shots fired….”
Fuck. Arizona now? I remember a family holiday to Sedona years ago, getting sunburned after I went for a long walk in the searing heat of the day and spending the rest of the afternoon in a cold bath cursing my stupidity. We’d had spicy ribs in the Red Planet café, and dad had spent the next day prodding my raw shoulders. It had seemed a lovely place, more hippyish and liberal than I’d expected the south to be, all aliens and wind chimes. Beautiful country, America like I’d really imagined it to look. And now it was going up too. Going the same way as Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas. Christ, Texas had been ugly. The lynchings, the burnings, the mob screaming and hollering as they chased that young guy down the street. The dead-eyed truth of rolling news- millions of people got to see the look of sheer terror in his eyes before he was engulfed by the furious tide.
Midnight, and all the lights go out. The TV, which had been cheerfully predicting more snow, dies with a static sound and crackles quietly to itself. I groan, lurch off the sofa and light a candle. Not much to really do now but sleep, anyway. Or at least try to. I pad through to the bedroom, trailing my blanket. Spread it out over the two duvets already there, my breath frosting in the bitter air. Cam is sound asleep, her gentle snoring and starfish position a testament to her incredible ability to sleep in such a way to guarantee me a really uncomfortable night. Fuck. She hits work early, if I wake her up and get her move across then we’ll have to talk, and she won’t sleep, and I’ll feel like a bitch. I stand by the bed, mind groggily working through ways I might manoeuvre her across without waking her up. The stupid things we do for love. Christ, it’s cold, I’m standing here freezing my ass off wondering how to get into fucking bed? Right, sleep it is then. Don’t be so fucking daft. I lift the covers slightly, moving like a pantomime villain as I try to contort myself under the covers. She shifts slightly, half-grunts, half-moans, shuffles, and I’m in. I blow out the candle, feel my extremities start to tingle with warmth in the sharp darkness. I lie awake, thinking about Arizona. If they go down too, what then? Nobody really thought secession was going to happen before Texas. Nobody. It was for history books and grade school, not the response a state gives after ’13.
I lie in the dark, and try not to think about ’13.
Wednesday 29 October 2008
Novel setting (maybe)
2015. The global recession that gripped the world has ended, leaving a radically changed political landscape. The “Economic Nuclear Winter” upended governments, starved millions, and left the former Western political powerhouses in ruins. The USA, ripped apart by race riots and secession since the assassination of President Obama two years ago, is a country on the brink of bankruptcy, having been hit the hardest by the ’09 crash.
Against this “Second Depression”, Eugene Cernan, the last man ever to have set foot on the moon and the last of the Apollo astronauts, is found dead in his Houston nursing home. His death brings the final curtain down on America’s Space Age, and with him the end of an ideal.
Cernan’s death shocks America. It’s a country with few heroes left, where abortion is illegal, immigration laws are tighter than anywhere in the world, and food is rationed to cope with appalling drought and mismanagement. In these desperate times the moonwalkers had swung back into focus, a representation of the Golden Age of America, and now they are gone.
Against this “Second Depression”, Eugene Cernan, the last man ever to have set foot on the moon and the last of the Apollo astronauts, is found dead in his Houston nursing home. His death brings the final curtain down on America’s Space Age, and with him the end of an ideal.
Cernan’s death shocks America. It’s a country with few heroes left, where abortion is illegal, immigration laws are tighter than anywhere in the world, and food is rationed to cope with appalling drought and mismanagement. In these desperate times the moonwalkers had swung back into focus, a representation of the Golden Age of America, and now they are gone.
Thursday 23 October 2008
It's not November yet!
It will be a week Saturday though. Thirty days of writing absolute bollocks, in public, for the benefit of my ego and your desire to read whatever passes for entertainment that I can think up. If I was going to make this into anything, it' be called "Holding Patterns", as I used to think my life was constantly spent in one long holding pattern, waiting for the good stuff to start happening. Of course, I now realise that a life spent watching the calendar is no life worth living, but then I'm saying that with a ticker on my facebook and a printout of the remainder of 2008, the dates being crossed out as I count down to the 6th of January and a flight to the far side of the world, so hypocrisy may happen here.
Just warning you.
So, seeing as you're here, I may as well write a little something, as I'm waiting for my dryer to finish so I have a clean towel for a shower and some well-deserved kip. Enjoy, or whatever us Gen X types do instead of genuine emotion.
Strata
The church was never a place to show real weakness. It was a place to come with your mates, put on a little bravado, look like you knew what you were doing and generally be very positive and nice to everybody. Tuesdays and Thursdays were rammed to the ornate rafters, the mix of people as stratified as the rock we all pretended to climb.
At the apex, the hardcore. Gnarled, tattooed types communicating in grunts and impenetrable lingo, their dominant place in the climbing heirachy confirmed by their exclusive use of the "Scary Wall", often looked at and rarely attempted without muscles that resembled Grey's Anatomy as drawn by Tom of Finland.
Next down you got your sport climbers. A subgroup of the Apex Twinbreds, they tended to be young, wiry and rarely out of clothing that cost the sustainable rainforest and had the suffix "-tex" discreetly hand-sewn in one corner by fairtrade gorillas. They exist in a world of weekends climbing in Slovakia ('cause, y'know, Spain is ALL about the paragliding this time of year) and earnestly discussing which ski resort will best suit their snowboard bindings.
Middle of the heap, us. Good enough to speak their tongue, not confident enough to venture out in the summer months, we lorded over the place as little deities during the summer months, when the sport climbers were in Boulder and the Tom of Anatomys were in some remote pub up north, boasting of climbing the Inaccessible Pinnacle naked in a rainstorm. We knew the lingo, wore t-shirts with amusing slogans on to show we were here for fun, a lie revealed as soon as we got out the changing rooms and said "what climb first?".
We all want to be better. Better than our peers, better than whoever went first, and above all, better than we did when we climbed this last time. We'd start slow, climbing things just below the limit of what we could do. "Warming up". Then came business. Tie in, check knots, get started. Climb until our arms burn hot and legs wobble and you strain for the next hold. Climb something that looks half-finished, but can't be as that fucker just did it. Find ourselves trapped on a hold, the next one looking miles away with nothing between us and it but bare, gently inclining wall. Know in our hearts that it's bloody impossible, even if that fucker just did it. Just then! I saw him! Bastard. Fear to wuss out, ask to come down, cheat by grabbing that oh-so-inviting hold that is so conveniently placed but not the right colour. Stay trapped. Look at hold again. Chalk fingers to play for time. Look again. Hop from foot to foot, knowing that one of two things will happen.
1. We'll fall. And then have to do it again, plus the six or so feet we just fell.
2. We'll make it.
So, with that relatively simple choice to make, we go for it. With the shouted encouragement of the slightly bored belayer below, we gather muscles (less Tom of Finland, more Margrave of the Marshes) and half-leap, half grab for the elusive hold, hoping that option 2 is going to win this time.
That primeval fear of falling never really leaves us, but we manage to ignore it enough to pull these moves and draw the admiration of those further down the pile. We say well done and nice work and good effort, knowing that moment of utter terror when we let go of the closest thing we had to safety and put complete faith in bodies that used to be good for nothing but alcohol consumption and conversion.
Having never had real pride in what my body can do, it's a new feeling for me. I still look at the top of the heap with a mixture of admiration and slight fear at their goggle-eyed lunacy, but at least I'm not one of those dozy fuckers in rented helmets and sensible trousers.
Now that's something to be really proud of.
Just warning you.
So, seeing as you're here, I may as well write a little something, as I'm waiting for my dryer to finish so I have a clean towel for a shower and some well-deserved kip. Enjoy, or whatever us Gen X types do instead of genuine emotion.
Strata
The church was never a place to show real weakness. It was a place to come with your mates, put on a little bravado, look like you knew what you were doing and generally be very positive and nice to everybody. Tuesdays and Thursdays were rammed to the ornate rafters, the mix of people as stratified as the rock we all pretended to climb.
At the apex, the hardcore. Gnarled, tattooed types communicating in grunts and impenetrable lingo, their dominant place in the climbing heirachy confirmed by their exclusive use of the "Scary Wall", often looked at and rarely attempted without muscles that resembled Grey's Anatomy as drawn by Tom of Finland.
Next down you got your sport climbers. A subgroup of the Apex Twinbreds, they tended to be young, wiry and rarely out of clothing that cost the sustainable rainforest and had the suffix "-tex" discreetly hand-sewn in one corner by fairtrade gorillas. They exist in a world of weekends climbing in Slovakia ('cause, y'know, Spain is ALL about the paragliding this time of year) and earnestly discussing which ski resort will best suit their snowboard bindings.
Middle of the heap, us. Good enough to speak their tongue, not confident enough to venture out in the summer months, we lorded over the place as little deities during the summer months, when the sport climbers were in Boulder and the Tom of Anatomys were in some remote pub up north, boasting of climbing the Inaccessible Pinnacle naked in a rainstorm. We knew the lingo, wore t-shirts with amusing slogans on to show we were here for fun, a lie revealed as soon as we got out the changing rooms and said "what climb first?".
We all want to be better. Better than our peers, better than whoever went first, and above all, better than we did when we climbed this last time. We'd start slow, climbing things just below the limit of what we could do. "Warming up". Then came business. Tie in, check knots, get started. Climb until our arms burn hot and legs wobble and you strain for the next hold. Climb something that looks half-finished, but can't be as that fucker just did it. Find ourselves trapped on a hold, the next one looking miles away with nothing between us and it but bare, gently inclining wall. Know in our hearts that it's bloody impossible, even if that fucker just did it. Just then! I saw him! Bastard. Fear to wuss out, ask to come down, cheat by grabbing that oh-so-inviting hold that is so conveniently placed but not the right colour. Stay trapped. Look at hold again. Chalk fingers to play for time. Look again. Hop from foot to foot, knowing that one of two things will happen.
1. We'll fall. And then have to do it again, plus the six or so feet we just fell.
2. We'll make it.
So, with that relatively simple choice to make, we go for it. With the shouted encouragement of the slightly bored belayer below, we gather muscles (less Tom of Finland, more Margrave of the Marshes) and half-leap, half grab for the elusive hold, hoping that option 2 is going to win this time.
That primeval fear of falling never really leaves us, but we manage to ignore it enough to pull these moves and draw the admiration of those further down the pile. We say well done and nice work and good effort, knowing that moment of utter terror when we let go of the closest thing we had to safety and put complete faith in bodies that used to be good for nothing but alcohol consumption and conversion.
Having never had real pride in what my body can do, it's a new feeling for me. I still look at the top of the heap with a mixture of admiration and slight fear at their goggle-eyed lunacy, but at least I'm not one of those dozy fuckers in rented helmets and sensible trousers.
Now that's something to be really proud of.
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About Me
- Irn Bruja
- If my body is a temple it wasn't built to earthquake regulations.