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dorianjolivald
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Jumping out of a plane for fun must seem so strange to those people who were forced to do it in a real combat situation and would never ever do it again for all the money in the world. Why stop at modern warfare in your search for thrills? Why not try charging across a muddy field while hundreds of stout yeomen fire longbows at you? Often such acts of recklessness and stupidity are excused in the name of charity. But why should I sponsor someone simply because they are putting their life at risk, however noble the cause? "I'm going to head-butt a chainsaw for Motor Neurone Disease, can I put you down for fifty quid?"
Some people do one parachute jump for charity but then get seriously addicted to skydiving. One friend of mine was completely hooked until one day his chute didn't open properly - after about twenty seconds of plummeting, he blacked out and came to in a tree. You know those dreams you have when you are falling and wake up with a jolt just before you hit the ground? He has those every night, only they're not dreams, they're memory.
Seasoned skydivers, even my mate who has since, unbelievably, taken up jumping again, say the adrenaline rush when you jump out of the plane is worth all the training and the preparation time and the fear. No, no! How can it possibly be worth it? I don't think queuing for half an hour at a theme park for the Big Dipper or Thunder Mountain or Vomit Passage or whatever it's called is worth it, never mind leaping into space at 13,000 feet with only a square of silk keeping you airborne. There are about a million reasons not to skydive. I won't list them all here, but the main ones are: I don't want to pay 200 quid to be trained for three weeks in basic technique, having someone push me off a ten-foot wall to simulate landing; I don't want to feel my bowels turn to hot-and-sour soup in a rickety plane and then jump out of it. I don't want to smash into the ground at 14 miles an hour and have my leg bones driven up under my armpits or land face first and have my eyeballs pop out through the back of my skull, or, assuming the chute does open, float helplessly into the propeller blades of a plane on the ground and be turned into a human smoothie.