23 Skidoo

A decade ago the old TV aerial on the roof fell off. The pole attached to the chimney remained but the horizontal part had detached and was dangling halfway down the roof tiles by the coaxial (luckily there was only the one coaxial [see: "Have you got the scrolls?"]).

This was a seemingly minor concern as it was the old aerial - the newer one that would have been in use had I not got rid of the TVs anyway was on a different chimney stack. However, you felt that eventually the coaxial would break, or the aerial blown about in high winds would crack tiles; plus it looked ugly and, the longer it was there, stupid.

So that's how I ascertained that I could still go up on a roof.

I used to galavant about on roofs like a teenager who thought he was indestructible. I nearly went through one; and I actually fell off a half-round barn roof on a farm (and landed feet first on the ladders stacked on the bed of our Bedford TK from the tailgate to the cab roof and that therefore acted like a trampoline. I bounced off of them and landed on my feet beside the lorry - and in front of the farmer who saw the whole thing and, by then, didn't look so much surprised as weary).

I ended my roofing career using actual safety equipment and the whole thing was like a gradually waking up to the risk of being blasé where heights are concerned.

Anyway I brought the otherwise never used metal double-extender around to the neighbour's garden and went up on the roof more than two decades since I'd last been on one, without a tether, and found it a cinch.

I think fear of heights is a hardwired response we mostly know from dreams. That is to say the biochemical code that drives it works unconsciously but is arbitrarily read in dreams, because that's what they are, random playback of unconscious data accessible during sleep because Evolution wasn't influenced by the phenomenon of dreaming, so never selected to inhibit it as a hindrance, or to ensure it as an asset. Because it's random, our reduced consciousness, that in most cases thinks it's a waking experience, interprets it as best it can, but without recourse to the higher, critical function that would reject the result as illogical. We still respond emotionally because emotion is about as primitive as sentience gets. In sleep, in which consciousness is largely disconnected while neural pathways are rearranged, like Windows installing system updates, we're left with the minimum required for tickover (as it were. Kind of like the BIOS, perhaps).

Dreams of falling make conscious a fear that's there already: so without dreaming of falling we'd still be deeply uneasy at the edge of a precipice and step back, but with dreams we graphically imagine scenarios whereby we can go over.

So I became increasingly uneasy about standing beside a drop that could easily kill me because, once the worst of the exuberance of youth had deserted me, I'd imagine, exactly as in dreams, a dizzy turn, a gust of wind, ground shifting beneath me, any of a dozen stupid ways to lose my balance at precisely the wrong moment and over I go. Which, I would surmise, is why most people are too afraid of heights to walk to the edge and look over, though if they did they might find it's not nearly as scary as they'd built it up to be.

Which isn't to imply that people like me are more courageous. I think we do these things, except when out of necessity, because we want to be considered fearless (in adolescence. Later, when we come to take the risk, it's to prove something to ourselves. Initially it's a path chosen as we look at the society we're growing up in and ask ourselves where we want to fit within it).

On Crete, when I hired the KLR650, when I rode across the centre of the island, I stopped more-or-less half way, in the mountain pass, for a cig. At one side of the road it drops almost straight down several hundred feet - no barrier, of course - and, peering over I saw, near the floor, the wreck of a car. I took my camera and took a photo of it, lifting one foot out, over - into empty space - to get it in shot, for the purpose of perspective. Standing on one leg, actually partly over the edge of this clearly lethal drop, I did, at least, do it very carefully; calmly and deliberately. Maybe I'll upload that sometime, when I get to a scanner.

But - and let me be absolutely clear about this: I would not have done it in high heels. Or done the Charleston. Or if merely posing the Charleston, stood on one leg in high heels.

It was, apparently, taken Dec. 11th, 1926, on Chicago’s Sherman Hotel.


I bet those chicks were fun.

Incidentally, when I said I dared to eat garlic then fart in public, I was being disingenuous. Curiously, I don't actually fart. And when I do, it doesn't smell; not even of roses. Though I had lots of garlic yesterday and after this mornings shit, giving it ten minutes would have been optimistic.

 

I had to look that one up. I thought it might have referred to grown up Adrian Mole.

My alibi is that the last time I was in Woking is getting on 20 years ago, on this:

 

Hyde Park. I must have been past it many times, but it blended in to the overwhelming architectural splendour of the area. Plus I was usually on a bike, looking at the traffic through stinging eyes.

In Luxor, New Year's Eve '94, I boarded a Presidential Nile Cruiser for the rep's do, down to, as I recall, Abu Simbel. Late that night I was getting merrily stewed on some cocktail they set on fire. This gay Thomsons rep came over to urge me to come to one of the cabins. I said words to the effect that I didn't swing that way, but he said that wasn't what he meant, so I went with him. Once there I was ushered into the shower cubicle where an Egyptian rep passed me a reefer. Bloody great, it was! I asked if he could get me some and he gave me a chunk. The rest of the holiday was a blast.

 

The only time we used a triple extender was on a water tower in a field at Banbury. That was a little unnerving at the top. That was a shitty job: we had to go inside, wire brush all the panel joints, replace all the bungs - hammer in hardwood dowels bound in hemp and bitumen, as I recall. Rust everywhere, in hair, eyes, presumably lungs*. Dark and damp. And as we passed Eddie Dow's I didn't see a single bike!

What I got from the job was a good sense of when a ladder is properly placed. When I went up to retrieve the aerial, that was very reassuring.

*The boss, a semi-literate cowboy, used to make his own blackjack, for spraying onto a mesh membrane. Essentially it was bitumen, thinners, and ground asbestos. He (i.e. 'we') ground it up in a hopper, there were clouds of it. I waited a long time for asbestosis to show up! I'm not even sure I can say it's been about 45 years so it looks like I got away with it.