‘It’s good,’ I said. After we’d been free-falling for a while he pulled the chord and released the parachute, which meant we got pulled sharply from a horizontal position to a standing position and my stomach went haywire.
‘Check this out, James!’ he hollered, before steering the parachute left and right, zig-zagging across the sky, my stomach always trailing a few feet behind us, failing to catch up with the rest of my body. Without a shadow of a doubt I was going to chuck up if he carried on like this – if he’d said the word ‘Beckham’ then that would’ve sealed it and I would’ve erupted.
‘Sorry, mate, do you think we could not move around as much? I’m feeling queasy.’ I have never found out for sure but I think ‘queasy’ is the word that skydivers hate the most. This guy had been fairly quiet in the plane. He had just sat there, moodily staring out the window, no interest in conversation, but then sprang into life once we jumped. It was like he had transformed into a bird and was finally free. But now I was raining on his parade and had dropped the Q-word. He immediately started sulking.
‘Fine,’ he said and we stopped zagging. We just drifted silently and slowly in a general downwards direction. I couldn’t see his face because he was behind me but could sense his disappointment. Every time he exhaled he’d huff loudly in my ear like a stroppy teenager. We were still incredibly high up at this point and moving very slowly, which made me start to panic even more. I kept all the panic internal but I felt like I was going to be sick and didn’t want to start being sick while trapped in the sky, I wanted to do it in a lovely toilet on the ground. Then another problem arose and this one was definitely my fault.
If there’s one piece of advice I would give anyone doing a skydive it would be this – do not under any circumstance wear slip-ons. Wear shoes with shoelaces that will stay on your feet no matter what because you are about to fall through the sky and that’s where all the wind lives. As we floated around aimlessly and my skydiving instructor’s eyes burned into the top of my head, one of my slip-ons began to slip off (the exact opposite of what I’d bought the slip-on for). I couldn’t tell him because I was certain he would instantly unclip me and let me fall to my thoroughly deserved death. But I really, really didn’t want my slip-on to fall thousands of feet and embed itself in a cow’s brain because that was without question what I believed would happen if I didn’t keep it on my foot. In order to stop this from happening I had to curl my toes up towards my shins and hold them in that position all the way down, thus hooking the slip-on with my foot.
Skydiving
It took so long for us to reach the ground. We were drifting for what felt like an eternity, plus it was super uncomfortable and made me panic even more about being sick because if I was sick there was no way I’d be able to keep the slip-on on my foot in the process and so I would be dropping vomit and footwear at the same time and it would look like I had hurled up a slip-on and everyone would think I eat shoes whole and then have the nerve to complain about feeling ‘queasy’ when eating shoes doesn’t agree with me.
By the time we came in to land I felt terribly faint. ‘You won’t be able to do the landing we practised because you’re feeling so poorly, so we’re going to have to do an emergency landing,’ the instructor said to me. Oh great, I’m slipping a disc, that’s what’s happening now, I thought. Just like that man last time, I’ll slip a disc and then the ambulance will take an hour to arrive and no one else will be able to jump because I’m a big wimp with a slipped disc. Here we go, get ready to slip a disc, James, that’s what’s about to happen to you – disc-slipping time. First your slip-on slips off and now your disc is about to do the same. Congratulations. That’s you, slipping all over the shop, king of the slips, say goodbye to your disc you slippy embarrassment.
As we came in to land he started yelling to the people below, ‘We’ve got a sleeper! We’ve got a sleeper!’ Which sounds an awful lot like ‘We’ve got a slipper!’ I initially panicked thinking that he had just confirmed my biggest fear and that I was unavoidably about to slip a disc, or maybe my slip-on had slipped off without my knowledge and he was warning the crowd of the incoming missile, but fortunately he shouted, ‘We’ve got a sleeper’ about ten more times and so I quickly figured out that I wasn’t a Slipper I was a Sleeper.
Everyone always learns something about themselves when doing extreme things like skydiving and I had learned that I was a Sleeper, which isn’t an ideal thing to be when jumping out of a plane – asleep. He shouted it so loudly as well, which was irksome as I didn’t want everybody to know I was a Sleeper, I wanted it to be a secret. And so everyone watched as the Sleeper rolled into town, a single limp slip-on hanging off his foot, not doing the same landing as everyone else where the instructor and the pupil both lift their legs up at the same time and land safely on the ground, all smooth and cool. The Sleeper and his angry friend had to resort instead to skidding along the ground on their butts like a couple of twonks, a couple of twonks who hated each other and would never ever speak to each other again.
As I lay on my back, my instructor patiently laying underneath me because he was unable to get up until I got up, someone ran over and took our photograph. Later on, my mum bought that photograph for five pounds. I look like I’ve completely passed out in the photo and my instructor is looking off camera at some of his mates with a look on his face that says, ‘Why is it always me?’ The photo is still on display in my parents’ house and serves as a reminder that, while I will die one day, there are some things that are way worse than dying and it’s important to experience those things while we’re alive in order to put death into perspective; that way we won’t get too down about our own mortality.
Porcelain
The skydive was one of the few things I had achieved on the list and during the daytime, when Three Line Whip didn’t have band practice, I was so bored. No matter how hard I worked on the band I always found myself with a lot of spare time, and with my new found fear of dying I was now trying to fill that time up with anything I could. Any opportunity to feel like I wasn’t wasting what precious little time I had on this earth, sign me up.
The best example of this was the time my parents, who had never shown an interest in French porcelain, inexplicably received an invitation in the post to attend a French porcelain exhibition. I asked them if they were going to accept the invitation and they said no, because they didn’t like porcelain exhibitions, plus they had no idea why they’d been invited in the first place, and so I asked if I could go in their place and they said yes, because who cares. I think I imagined some grand exhibition, the finest French porcelain on display for only a select few to see, like the opening of a prestigious art gallery. But since it’s made it into this book you can probably guess it was nothing like that.
The exhibition was taking place at a nearby hotel. I arrived on time, handed my invitation in at reception and they took me into a waiting room with the other attendees. I was the youngest one there by about fifty years. Everyone else was real old, the kind of age that might even elicit some ‘concern’, maybe inspire people to raise some money for them in order to alleviate some of that concern, perhaps by means of a skydive, who’s to say? There were twenty of us in total and we waited patiently while drinking free cups of tea, in silence. There was a buffet but no one had touched it yet so I too resisted and waited patiently. The door to the main exhibition room opened (in my memory the door opened on its own) and a French man’s voice from inside boomed, ‘Enter!’
We filtered timidly into the room, which was was huge but virtually empty. At the far end was a long table, behind the table was a tall shelving unit full of porcelain, and behind that was a partition.
‘Please approach the table!’ boomed the voice. And so we all spread out along one side of the empty table, looking across at the porcelain with intrigue and suspicion.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in an expensive suit appeared from behind the partition, then walked around so he was standing in front o
f the shelves and behind the table. He spread his arms wide as he introduced himself.
‘My name is Michelle!’ he announced. Now obviously that’s not how his name is spelt but it’s how it’s pronounced and it caused one of the old men to let out a loud, high-pitched laugh, which ended abruptly when his wife jabbed him sharply in the ribs. Michel probably knew at this point that this was going to be a tough gig.
He then proceeded to tell us that he represented one of the most respected porcelain companies in the entire world and that we were the very lucky few that had been selected to attend this exclusive event. He also revealed that one of us would be walking away with over five thousand pounds’ worth of French porcelain for free. The old people looked at each other in disbelief; they were clearly thrilled. None of us knew what we had to do in order to win the porcelain yet, but being the youngest by some distance I was crossing my fingers for some sort of physical challenge, maybe a Royal Rumble, so I could walk my way to an easy victory. I may have been throwing myself out of a plane for these people a matter of weeks ago but I would trample every last one of them into the ground if it meant walking away with some free crockery from our friends across the Channel.
Michel then walked back behind the partition and stayed there for the rest of the presentation. He was taller than the partition so had to crouch the whole time with his hands on his knees. His job for the remainder of the afternoon appeared to be aggressively shushing the old people whenever they got too excited and started nattering, whilst a lady dressed in a similar suit appeared from the other side of the partition and stood in his place. I hoped her name was Michelle but alas, it was Juliette.
Michel crouching behind the partition
Juliette was also French and told us the full history of the company, as well as talking us through every single plate and dish on the shelves. She also explained in detail the reason why each piece of porcelain had a different plant painted on it. (Not that I remember the reason now. It was probably because plants look nice when painted on plates.) One dish had a thistle painted on it. Juliette found it difficult to say ‘thistle’ though and pronounced it ‘fiffle’. This resulted in one of the most bizarre yet beautiful moments I’ve ever been fortunate enough to witness.
Juliette said, ‘And this is a fiffle,’ and then all of the old people went, ‘No, no, it’s a thistle!’
So Juliette tried again.‘Fiffle?’
‘No, thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
‘Fiffle?’
‘Thistle!’
I’ll cut this short but it went on for longer than I ever dreamed it could have and neither side altered what they were saying. It was Parrot Soup all over again. After a while I began to prefer ‘fiffle’ and decided to start saying it like that all the time, even though I knew it was wrong, in the hope that people would always correct me so I could go through the fiffle/thistle rigmarole again and again.
Juliette soon regained the higher ground, however, when she passed a plate to one of the old ladies and asked her what would be the first thing she would do with the plate once she’d taken it down from the shelves in her home, and the old lady paused, panicked, and mimed licking the plate. Even as she mimed the single lick across the diameter of the plate, holding it in two hands like a squirrel holding a nut, you could see in her eyes that she knew she’d messed up (the correct answer apparently was to look at the back of the plate to check that it bears the official stamp of the company but surely if you owned the porcelain you’d already know the stamp was present and accounted for so why wouldn’t you skip the unnecessary inspection and dive straight in for a bit of a lick?). Anyway, that old lady never recovered and looked mortified for the rest of the lecture.
It was now time for Juliette to decide who would walk away with the free porcelain. All we had to do was answer three simple questions by raising our hands.
‘Question one! Did you like the porcelain I showed you today?’
We all raised our hands. Question one was such an easy question, I would’ve been shocked if the correct answer had turned out to be no. She revealed that the correct answer was in fact – yes. No one was eliminated in the first round.
‘Question two! Who would like to have some of this porcelain free of charge?’
We all raised our hands. I was confident with question two as well. I was pretty sure that if I wanted to win some free French porcelain and someone asked, ‘Who would like some porcelain for free?’ that the correct answer was ‘Me’. Juliette narrowed her eyes at me and walked over.
‘I’ll have you knew I am a psychologist and can tell if you are lying,’ she said very sternly. I kept my hand raised defiantly and nodded my head. I wasn’t lying; I did want the porcelain for free. She had no idea how wrong she was. Bring on the final question.
‘Question three! If we give you this porcelain for free would you be prepared to have your initials engraved on the back of every single bit of porcelain, which costs five hundred pounds per initial?’
All of the hands went down except for the plate-licker. I was fairly certain that the correct answer was ‘Yes’ but I was willing to risk it at this stage and hope that the answer she was looking for was in fact, ‘Never in a million years.’ I don’t know if the plate-licking lady hadn’t heard the third question or simply didn’t realise she hadn’t put her hand down but as we were all told to get out of the room because we were eliminated (Juliette pointed at us all one by one, saying ‘eliminated’ every time), the plate-licking lady looked very surprised indeed. Just as the door closed behind me, I saw her doing a little victory dance on the spot and I think to this day it’s one of the saddest sights I’ve seen, an old lady doing the twist because she’d just been completely swizzed by a French porcelain saleswoman. I felt sorry for her and I felt worried about what was about to happen to her. It was at this moment that I finally understood the concept of Age Concern. So once again I urge you, give what you can and together we can stop old, plate-licking ladies from falling into the hands of Continental Con-Men.
It was then that me and the rest of the eliminated old people descended upon the buffet. Now we all knew what kind of a racket they were running here, there was no way we weren’t going to take full advantage of the free eats (unless we had to pay to have our initials engraved into the back of each sandwich). As we were piling nibbles on to our paper plates (you would’ve thought they’d have at least provided us with porcelain plates – let us dream a little, we would’ve given them back after), one of the old ladies said to her husband, ‘Oh we should leave some for the lady who won, surely?’ and as he stacked up three eclairs against a mini scotch egg and a big pork pie he looked back at the main room and said in a husky voice, like an Everest mountain climber deciding not to go back for one of their party, ‘No, love . . . she knew the risk when she kept her hand up.’
Ice Skating
Even after attending a French porcelain exhibition I somehow still didn’t feel like I was living my life to the full, so I decided to get more organised. I came up with the idea of doing a ‘new thing’ every single night for a week. No one had set me this challenge, I just thought I needed to have some new experiences and broaden my horizons before I would be dead for ever (yes, I was still eighteen at the time.) Initially, this project wasn’t something I had planned; it actually started by accident.
It was Monday 13 February and I had a date. And no, the new thing I did that night was not ‘go on a date’ but hahaha well done. That being said, I was not well versed in dating and I think I’d watched way too many indie romance movies to know that people didn’t always enjoy going on dates with someone who’s deliberately acting
kooky. I picked up my date for the evening (against their better instincts, my parents allowed me to borrow the car for the night, presumably because they hoped I was meeting my future wife) and when she got in the car, I proudly announced that I had got absolutely nothing planned for us whatsoever. At the time I think I thought she’d be impressed by, and attracted to, this guy’s spontaneous attitude. Looking back, I can see how I may have come across like I didn’t care how the night went or what we got up to, and maybe saying I hadn’t bothered to plan anything was an instant turn-off.
So we drove around aimlessly, trying to find somewhere to go. She spotted a sign for an ice rink and so it was decided that we would go ice skating, and I finally understood why most people plan their dates in advance. Spoiler alert – I couldn’t ice skate. But I still agreed to go ice-skating because if I said no to her suggestion then that wouldn’t exactly fit with my new spontaneous persona. You can’t say, ‘We’ll do whatever we may chance upon this fine evening!’ then when someone suggests ice skating say, ‘Not that.’ I had ice skated once before for only five minutes when I was ten and had to stop because I had managed to stab myself in the back with my own ice skate while I was still wearing it.3
I wasn’t sure when would be a good time to bring up the fact I couldn’t ice skate. She was definitely going to figure it out because at some point I’d have to put ice skates on and go out on the ice and stab myself in the back in front of her. But a part of me hoped that maybe I’d be good at it, maybe I would suddenly be able to ice skate and she need not know that I’d never properly skated before.
On the bright side I’ve never seen someone laugh as much as she laughed that night. I did that thing when you just walk around the ice and don’t technically skate at all. I just walked like a normal person on normal ground and then occasionally would lose my confidence and ‘wobble all over the place like a baby giraffe that’s just been born’ (her words). She lapped me countless times and during the course of the date she mentioned that at the end of the week she would be leaving the UK for a year. I can only hope the trip was something she had planned before the date started.
James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes Page 8
