I've been away, briefly, and doing some idle pondering, and I asked myself this question.
It started me thinking when staring into a seemingly bottomless main sewer inspection chamber, trying to work out the path of a drain run. Because I was on my own, and a wary of the lid slamming on me and nobody knowing I was there, I resisted the temptation to climb down and rod upstream. That isn't the way I want to check out of this life.
I'd like to 'share' some thoughts, in the hope that they might mean something to someone - a quick distraction from rising damp, falling wet, penetrating soakings, professionals and unprofessionals, regulations, sanitation, titillation and provocation. A (hopefully) humble interlude.
Sometimes fear is a nuisance - it can be irrational, petty, misplaced, or just overwhelmingly wrong. Fear of failure, fear of looking a dork, fear of rejection - a very normal, but not always very constructive, emotion. Generally, being scared is A Good Thing. It prevents us from prematurely running headlong towards the edge of our human abilities and hurling ourselves off with what, innocently, used to be called gay abandon. It screams at the pratt we each have inside, that one that seeks a cheap thrill from going too high, too deep, or too fast, that would otherwise play fast and loose with our own and with other peoples lives. To ignore it is mortal, to completely shut it out is, quite frequently, fatal.
But many of us have pet fears - ones that have become a comfort, or provide a familiar place in which to hide when things get too much. I used to be petrified of heights. I was, in a word, phobic. And you know what they say about phobias? My way of facing it was abseiling. We came, we saw, we whimpered.
This wouldn't be scary to someone who can spend 2 hours, 22 floors up, waiting, staring, unblinking, on the clearest spring day imaginable (a day on which, by the way, you could convince yourself that you could see the waves being transmitted from Alexander Palace, and, in another unmentionable direction, count the cracks in the paving stones in New Oxford Street). Nor if you could gaze romantically across a metropolis littered with so many other buildings that relatively, and obstinately, WERE SO VERY SHORT INDEED - humble, unassuming structures that cry out for a quiet, graceful, sponsored and suspended fall from rooftops carefully adorned with safe looking, and LOW, parapets.
To successfully convince people that you consider it easy, and that you hadn't just dictated your last will and testament to your family solicitor on the mobile phone clutched to your chest with white knuckled terror before it was wrestled out of your blood-starved and exhausted fingers during the pre-descent briefing, you'd have to be someone who oozes the kind of self-confidence that is the sole preserve of the youthful, the drug-crazed and the Prime Minister.
More specifically, you'd have to be someone with a will so strong that it doesn't hear those misconceived and risible danger screams issued by, hello?, reality?, as a signal of the dangers stretching out literally 400 feet downwards. Vertically. Downwards. You'd need to have returned from The Forbidden Planet having beaten the Krells in the 2007 galactic final of the "Create An Invincible Monster Whilst Asleep" tournament. You'd need to possess the boisterous and assailable certainty that sheer stupidity can manifest an invisible anti-Newtonian force field with the restitution of a brand new space-hopper that your Dad just fully inflated at the local garage. You'd need to be the kind of character who believes that a pavement moving at around 50mph upwards can be kept at a safe distance without any real effort, much in the way that a large sixth-former would keep a threshing first-year out of punching range effortlessly and simply by virtue of relative arm length and some brief primary school arithmetic. In short, abseiling is something at which Wile E. Coyote would excel.
But I digress (which is a cliché that I've always wanted to use but never dared; and will never dare again). I think you've got the drift by now. After waiting what seemed like forever, the moment of truth arrived far too soon.
Oh - as a final pre-launch observation, and to harp back to my new-found understanding of the importance of parapets, I should mention, just in case you've never stood at the top of Centre Point, that there are no right-angles - no "safe" (I use the term relatively, obviously), abseiling platforms on which to stand before letting the rope take the strain. Instead, representing what must have been a career limiting choice for the architect of the time, there are very bizarre, and very rough, cast concrete pyramids that lend themselves to being stepped off easily in the way that the Queen Mary II cruise ship could be 'easily' driven onto a car ramp for a quick chassis inspection. The words "now just shuffle your bum off into mid air and follow me down" will haunt me at every cliff edge I ever see again. I mean, when you cut yourself with a razor blade it doesn't actually make it one atom less sharp, does it now?
Anyway, the rest wrote itself. The point is that having done it once, I could do it again. And again, and again, and still maintain a healthy respect for heights. That was it for me - the main one conquered. Or so I thought.
If you're still reading this, you're probably wondering: why this, and why now? Well it's only now that I've come to realise the thing I'm most scared of, which is not existing. Or, to be more precise, coming to the end of my existence. I'm not unique in this, obviously, and I'm sure everyone ponders it from time to time, but as the years roll by I'm guessing most people tend to do it with a little less levity and a sense of there not being enough time left, of having been a weeny bit careless with quite a few of those thousands of millions of seconds.
The Internet is all very well - it's a vast learning and information resource - but sometimes it can take the place of real life without giving very much back for the time invested. Getting over the fear of death has become my new ambition, instead of pretending it's not necessary, because, for most people, there's no safety talk, no expert guidance, no soft landing on a friendly pavement, and no chance to do it all over again.
If you made it this far, thanks for listening. Live long and prosper.
Oh, and if you skipped straight to the end out of sheer boredom, just be grateful that I didn't tell the story of how I couldn't find my car afterwards, having forgotten where I'd parked it.
It started me thinking when staring into a seemingly bottomless main sewer inspection chamber, trying to work out the path of a drain run. Because I was on my own, and a wary of the lid slamming on me and nobody knowing I was there, I resisted the temptation to climb down and rod upstream. That isn't the way I want to check out of this life.
I'd like to 'share' some thoughts, in the hope that they might mean something to someone - a quick distraction from rising damp, falling wet, penetrating soakings, professionals and unprofessionals, regulations, sanitation, titillation and provocation. A (hopefully) humble interlude.
Sometimes fear is a nuisance - it can be irrational, petty, misplaced, or just overwhelmingly wrong. Fear of failure, fear of looking a dork, fear of rejection - a very normal, but not always very constructive, emotion. Generally, being scared is A Good Thing. It prevents us from prematurely running headlong towards the edge of our human abilities and hurling ourselves off with what, innocently, used to be called gay abandon. It screams at the pratt we each have inside, that one that seeks a cheap thrill from going too high, too deep, or too fast, that would otherwise play fast and loose with our own and with other peoples lives. To ignore it is mortal, to completely shut it out is, quite frequently, fatal.
But many of us have pet fears - ones that have become a comfort, or provide a familiar place in which to hide when things get too much. I used to be petrified of heights. I was, in a word, phobic. And you know what they say about phobias? My way of facing it was abseiling. We came, we saw, we whimpered.
This wouldn't be scary to someone who can spend 2 hours, 22 floors up, waiting, staring, unblinking, on the clearest spring day imaginable (a day on which, by the way, you could convince yourself that you could see the waves being transmitted from Alexander Palace, and, in another unmentionable direction, count the cracks in the paving stones in New Oxford Street). Nor if you could gaze romantically across a metropolis littered with so many other buildings that relatively, and obstinately, WERE SO VERY SHORT INDEED - humble, unassuming structures that cry out for a quiet, graceful, sponsored and suspended fall from rooftops carefully adorned with safe looking, and LOW, parapets.
To successfully convince people that you consider it easy, and that you hadn't just dictated your last will and testament to your family solicitor on the mobile phone clutched to your chest with white knuckled terror before it was wrestled out of your blood-starved and exhausted fingers during the pre-descent briefing, you'd have to be someone who oozes the kind of self-confidence that is the sole preserve of the youthful, the drug-crazed and the Prime Minister.
More specifically, you'd have to be someone with a will so strong that it doesn't hear those misconceived and risible danger screams issued by, hello?, reality?, as a signal of the dangers stretching out literally 400 feet downwards. Vertically. Downwards. You'd need to have returned from The Forbidden Planet having beaten the Krells in the 2007 galactic final of the "Create An Invincible Monster Whilst Asleep" tournament. You'd need to possess the boisterous and assailable certainty that sheer stupidity can manifest an invisible anti-Newtonian force field with the restitution of a brand new space-hopper that your Dad just fully inflated at the local garage. You'd need to be the kind of character who believes that a pavement moving at around 50mph upwards can be kept at a safe distance without any real effort, much in the way that a large sixth-former would keep a threshing first-year out of punching range effortlessly and simply by virtue of relative arm length and some brief primary school arithmetic. In short, abseiling is something at which Wile E. Coyote would excel.
But I digress (which is a cliché that I've always wanted to use but never dared; and will never dare again). I think you've got the drift by now. After waiting what seemed like forever, the moment of truth arrived far too soon.
Oh - as a final pre-launch observation, and to harp back to my new-found understanding of the importance of parapets, I should mention, just in case you've never stood at the top of Centre Point, that there are no right-angles - no "safe" (I use the term relatively, obviously), abseiling platforms on which to stand before letting the rope take the strain. Instead, representing what must have been a career limiting choice for the architect of the time, there are very bizarre, and very rough, cast concrete pyramids that lend themselves to being stepped off easily in the way that the Queen Mary II cruise ship could be 'easily' driven onto a car ramp for a quick chassis inspection. The words "now just shuffle your bum off into mid air and follow me down" will haunt me at every cliff edge I ever see again. I mean, when you cut yourself with a razor blade it doesn't actually make it one atom less sharp, does it now?
Anyway, the rest wrote itself. The point is that having done it once, I could do it again. And again, and again, and still maintain a healthy respect for heights. That was it for me - the main one conquered. Or so I thought.
If you're still reading this, you're probably wondering: why this, and why now? Well it's only now that I've come to realise the thing I'm most scared of, which is not existing. Or, to be more precise, coming to the end of my existence. I'm not unique in this, obviously, and I'm sure everyone ponders it from time to time, but as the years roll by I'm guessing most people tend to do it with a little less levity and a sense of there not being enough time left, of having been a weeny bit careless with quite a few of those thousands of millions of seconds.
The Internet is all very well - it's a vast learning and information resource - but sometimes it can take the place of real life without giving very much back for the time invested. Getting over the fear of death has become my new ambition, instead of pretending it's not necessary, because, for most people, there's no safety talk, no expert guidance, no soft landing on a friendly pavement, and no chance to do it all over again.
If you made it this far, thanks for listening. Live long and prosper.
Oh, and if you skipped straight to the end out of sheer boredom, just be grateful that I didn't tell the story of how I couldn't find my car afterwards, having forgotten where I'd parked it.