Universal Studios Annoys Me

Dawn dawned and no-one got up.

Little wonder I was comatose after the hellish events of the past week that had piled inconvenience upon imposition almost beyond reason, but Mrs Stevie is normally up and kicking people out of bed as the first of the Sun's rays lick the horizon in order that no scrap of the day be "wasted". The roses, she reasons, will be there to be smelled tomorrow when "we" aren't in such a hurry to achieve enjoyment.

Of course, the usual course of events calls for the roses to be crushed under the smoking tyres of Mrs Stevie's vehicle du jour as they will undoubtedly be in the way, but it is pointless to try and remonstrate with the woman when her Florida Juices are in full boil. One can only hang on for grim death and hope it all works out for the best.

I cracked an eye open, or tried to. Over the course of the night it had become glued shut either because of the swelling or from the various bodily fluids that had been oozing from my integument thanks to my Safari of the day before.

I groped out for the tumbler of water I put on the bedside table before I retired and one of the paper towels doing duty as emergency tissue I customarily keep under my pillow in case of a sneezing fit or the need to staunch a nosebleed¹ and by fumbling around with only my sense of touch and my innate spacial awareness and sense of balance to call upon I managed to spill the water on the floor, side-table and mattress. And break the glass.

I was able to moisten the paper towel in the small lake pooling next to my chest and then bathe my eyes until they unstuck. It took only a matter of minutes. Perhaps twenty of them.

I rolled over and cooed seductively at Mrs Stevie. How beautiful she looked as she lay snarling in her sleep. I kissed her carefully, and she smiled, opened her eyes and let out a scream that fetched the paint off the ceiling.

I leapt back and span around looking for the intruder that had so frightened her, then let out a scream of my own as my feet collected all the broken glass so no-one could stand on it.

This was a trifle unexpected and Mrs Stevie responded with another vocal excursion of the extreme kind. The sound must have carried through the peaceful holiday villa as I distinctly heard the Stevieling join in the fun, and a fraction of a second later the next door neighbours.

I decided not to carry on with this nonsense and instead fell onto the floor clutching my ankles, moaning in the way I've found to be effective in deadening pain, or at least, doing something until it subsides to a bearable level.

"What the hell did you do to your face?" demanded Mrs Stevie.

"Nothing. Why?" I replied as I began the process of digging bits of tumbler out of the Feet Twins.

"It looks horrible! Blotchy, swollen and covered in scratches! Were you with a woman yesterday? Have you been beaten up again? Oh God, please tell me there isn't a court appearance in our future! Not again! My mother was right about you!"

"Silence! If I were to be with a woman she would certainly not beat me up! That business in Maryland was a misunderstanding and it was her sister who attacked me, not the woman herself, and I was holding my own until the police dog got involved, I might add. No, these wounds are the result of my having to walk back from breakfast. I was caught in a freak wolverine stampede. It's nothing. Do we have any Hydrogen Peroxide?"

"Why do you need Hydrogen Peroxide?"

"I'm thinking of building a moon rocket. "

"Your feet are bleeding all over the carpet!"

"You think I should swab them with rocket fuel? Worth a try. Good thinking."

Thus another day in paradise was set in motion.

Mrs Stevie was feeling conflicted. On the one hand we had overslept and now would have to jostle next to the hoi-poloi in our planned trip de merriment to Universal Studios (not the Harry Potter one, the original one). On the other I had cheered her up by sustaining major wounds and alerted her to the danger of broken glass before she had walked on it. She settled for a sort of contented grumbling.

After coffee and toast we set out for the park with about four billion other people. The Florida People's Highway Infrastructure Soviet decided to spice things up by closing large portions of the major arteries on our proposed route, triggering massive traffic jams and impressive bursts of commentary from Mrs Stevie. We eventually gritted our teeth and allowed the GPS out of its lead-lined box and it suggested a new route that went round the side of all the stationary cars. We let out a group bleat of hopelessness and committed ourselves to the horror of GPS-assisted travel.

It is always a voyage of discovery when the GPS system is engaged. The problem is that the typical voyage it comes up with is constructed of discoveries we do not care to make situated in places we would not, given our druthers, care to visit on a bet. I may already have mentioned the demented thing's insistence on routes that transit or failing that at least visit Manhattan, even if numerous waypoints are laboriously programmed in to avoid that nightmarish traffic snarl masquerading as a major city at all costs. It once tried to get us to make a U-Turn off Staten Island so we could make a loop into Manhattan, then come back the way we'd gone and resume our current route across Staten Island². The damned thing is insane. It's like we somehow got a piece of technology from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy³ or something.

This time the GPS faked us out by taking us where we wanted to go with no attempted side trips to Tampa or Jacksonville. I should have taken note of this deferred perfidy and would later regret not doing so because it left me open to a navigation ambush of the most virulent stripe, but that is a story for another day.

We pulled up to the parking lot entrance and Mrs Stevie wound down the window so we could pay and get a parking pass. There was a small delay when the young woman on duty peered in at us and fainted. Fortunately the security guard who was passing had smelling salts. I opined that she must have skipped breakfast, but the guard also looked pale so perhaps there was something going around. The guard said something about "cosplay" to the hysterical parking booth lady that seemed to calm her, and she returned to duty with many unearned dark looks in my direction. I determined to write a stern letter to the park operators. I have never been scowled at while attempting to pay for parking at Disney.

Once again I forked over for "Preferred Parking" and we parked less than a mile from the moving sidewalks Universal have provided to speed one to the fun of the security bag check and ticket registration.

The Universal Studio park dates from the days when Mrs Stevie had not discovered the mixed blessings of Starbux and the El Grande Maximo Clawhammer Double Espresso Latte⁵ and we were yet in a state of comparative bliss. Mrs Stevie was about six months pregnant with The Stevieling and the size of a small barrage balloon. Seriously, she would not have looked out of place if someone had written "Goodyear" on her while she was asleep⁷.

We visited the newly opened Universal Studios park that year. One look at Mrs Stevie over the closed circuit TV convinced the Park Personnel that she was several months further along in the baby-building process and thus a Lawsuit on Legs. This caused Panic in the Park Personnel and we were followed around the entire day by people with walkie talkies and steered to the non-moving seats in the exciting simulator-type rides (which was almost all of them). To this day I have only ever experienced The Jetsons ride, a ride that was in its day something people would exit slapping each other on the back and loudly extolling its awesomeness, as a rather boring movie seen from some very hard seats which if I didn't know better I'd suspect were just wooden boxes with carpet nailed on top. We were also forcéd to take the "static car" in the Back to the Future ride. It was so boring I seriously thought of dumping the buzzkill woman causing all the trouble until I saw her face, which by then wore an expression I've since come to know well but that day was just glad it was aimed at someone else.

The only thing they would let us ride was E.T., possibly the most dangerous precursor to diabetes in the world. If you think the movie is sickly sweet, the ride takes it and makes of it a soft drink even the FDA would not tollerate.

Mrs Stevie loved it and all was well with the World (most notably, the bits of the World occupied by my body).

Years later Mrs Stevie took the, what, four year old Stevieling on the ride. I stayed away from the park that day, but still experienced the ride in all its glory as it made An Impression on the child and she insisted on recapitulating it all week. Ah, the family memories.

Where was I?

The moving sidewalks propelled us past mini golf and lakes and various other diversions not inside the parks. The sidewalks were full of Brazilian merrymakers (and no-one can make merry like teenaged Brazilians let me tell you) but for some reason they gave us a wide berth so we weren't troubled by the usual close encounter issues. We joined a boisterous line of people waiting to enter the park, but as the bag check dragged on they became subdued and quiet, shooting looks back down the line and shuffling nervously. Some even shuffled out of line and joined one of the others. Clearly the bag-check guard was harshing everyone's mellow.

We finally got up to the turnstile and I presented my camera bag for examination. The guard, a short, wide man in his fifties seemed genial and not at all the grumpy anthrophobe the rather churlish behavior of the others in the queue had led me to expect. He finished rooting in my bag, looked up and let out a shriek that could have given me a heart attack if I hadn't been inured to such unexpected screams from a lifetime of making them.

I span round to see what had given the poor sod such a shock but whatever it was had gone. As my hearing began to return I heard Mrs Stevie engaged in a shouting competition with the gate security, who were gesturing toward me and saying something about only official staff being allowed in the park in makeup. Why they were pointing at me I have no idea. The only one in our family not wearing makeup was me, and as for that "staff only" law, well, I saw dozens of women wearing makeup and not one of them was wearing the matching staff ID badge.

One of the gate security came over to me and peered into my face, then asked if I needed the services of the first aid station. I thanked the man and told him my eardrums were already 80% scar tissue and could not be permanently damaged by the shrieking of the bag security guy who surely needed medical help more than I. He spoke briefly into a walkie-talkie, then looked at me and said in a hoarse voice "please enjoy your day at Universal Studios".

Heartened by this show of concern (however misplaced) we made our way into the park and headed to the one new attraction I was interested in: The Despicable Me 2 3D extravaganza and all-round good time for all the family. By all accounts it was not to be missed, and we would not have elected to miss it had the line not been already measured using line-length calculus⁸ as "three hours if nothing breaks down".

Mrs Stevie demanded we try the Shrek 3D thing so we did. It was a way of getting an air-conditioned seat at least, and the kids enjoyed it so much some of the joy leaked into the rest of us.

Thence to the Roller Coaster.

This edifice to conspicuous thrill-seeking was not only a twisted maze of vertical climbs to improbable heights followed by vertical drops into the former contents of your own stomach, corkscrew twists and loop-de-heart-attacks, it was the only roller coaster in this particular park, indeed, one of only two rides that went anywhere at a speed of more than walking pace. Mrs Stevie flatly refused to believe it was in this park until we were standing before the turnstile, reading the notice that it was out of commission for the foreseeable future.

I caught sight of the Transformers thing, which I had no wish to experience but which had a line even longer than that for Despicable Me, and began to discern a pattern. It seemed that if I hadn't seen the ride/attraction before it was either broken or full to bursting point with annoying people. SIghing I suggested we visit some old favorites from the days when the Stevieling had been knee high to, well, us.

First up was Twister, in which clever American Fungeneers⁹ bring the full majesty of a tornado to a captive audience with no danger of them being sucked into the vortex or impaled by wind-liberated bits of house. It is not bad, especially when you can get in without four hours of queuing. There is a set of bleachers on which the audience stands in a darkened theater looking out over a small town street. There is a roof over their heads, but only a sort of foreshortened porch-like affair. To one side a gas station sits, promising mayhem to come, on the other a farm house. On the horizon, the screen of a drive-in theater is showing a film. Clouds bedeck the night sky. A cow stands peacefully at the back of the stage. The audience leans on the rails provided for such lounging, and it starts to rain.

The wind picks up and things start rocking¹⁰. The drive-in theater screen disintegrates as thunder crashes and lightning rends the sky in twain. The vortex forms right before the audience's eyes! The unfortunate cow flies past, a truck skids. Gasoline squirts everywhere. The gas station sign falls over, hitting the electric cables and faWhoosh! goes the gasoline. Thunder peals. Houses disintegrate noisily. It is all very terrifying to small children and not unentertaining to those facing a day with small children. Just when everyone thinks the climax has arrived and nothing else could possibly happen, the floor that everyone is standing on drops about three inches or so, eliciting screams from the womenfolk.

The fun in coming back is to watch for the things you know are going to happen. My favorite is probably the flying cow which cracks me up. Possibly favorite for small children is watching the cow reset, proving that no cows were actually hurt in the production.

We emerged into the inevitable gift shop (all the rides and attractions at Universal Studios are simply complex foyers for themed gift shops and the sooner you understand this the happier your visit to Universal Studios will be) and headed out into the sun to do it all again so we could watch the bits we'd missed and I could get a second dose of the Flying Stuffed Cow of Hilarity.

After that we walked into the scenic part of the park. The back part of the park is carved into areas dressed as New York, San Francisco and other great American metropolises metropopli cities. I was told when the park was new that they actually used these places in films, but the back lot was shuttered years ago so I doubt that is true today.

New York used to have a wonderful recreation of the Roosevelt Island tramway station that housed the King Kong Encounter, but that had been replaced with a long queuing hut leading to a an indoor roller coaster themed for The Mummy. We committed our valuables into the questionable care of some fingerprint-secured lockers and raced through the miles of mostly empty queuing space and managed to secure a place in the front car by the cunning ploy of telling the attendant we wanted to do that and agreeing to wait while a few others took a turn.

It was a most agreeable experience with lots of zooming around in the dark augmented by back projected mayhem and animatronics in the Ancient Egypt-themed set dressing. The bit where the roof is engulfed in a sheet of flame is particularly effective, as is the scene where the car stops and one is confronted by the sight of a bajillion scarab beetles scuttling out of the wall in front of one. I made a note that next time we came on this ride to smuggle a bag of plasic bugs to toss over my shoulder at this point, to enable the other riders to properly immerse in the experience.

This was another twice around the block ride that had to be immediately had to be repeated, and I recommend it to all.

When we emerged from the gift shop I was surrounded by a number of young Brazilian women who for some reason wished to be photographed with me beside the entrance to the ride and the life-size mummy standing next to it. I would have obliged, but they were chased off by park officials and once again I was embroiled in a stupid misunderstanding with people accusing me of unlicensed activity on Studio property. A passing Brazilian lady spritzed herself with some sort of perfume and caught me in her sternwash as I protested my innocence, eliciting a scream from me as some of my wounds from the day before let me know they were still there and did not appreciate alcohol-based preparations thank you very much.

This brought an indignant Mrs Stevie into theater and there was a frank exchange of views that would have gone splendidly my way if one of the park staff had not mentioned the Brazilian ladies. I may have mentioned that Mrs Stevie strongly disapproves of Brazilian ladies, and things went rapidly downhill from that point as she visited the usual topics of debate in such strong and unequivocal terms that the park employees decided to retire from the scene while the getting was good.

I remonstrated with the demented woman pointing out that there were no Brazillian women anywhere near me, but she insisted that I must have been getting "up close and personal" wih at least one of them because she could still smell her perfume on me. I tried to explain this innocent misunderstanding but she was in no mood to listen to "any more fantastic lies" so I gave up.

We then went to the lockers where I put myself further up a certain apocryphal creek sans propulsion by paying the three dollar overage charge on our locker while Mrs Stevie was enjoying arguing the locker opener-upperer into waiving the "unreasonable" charge.

The way these lockers work is that the first however many minutes are free, where however many is the estimated time it will take for you to finish the ride from the time you asked for the locker. This time does not include goesy-roundies-for-another-turn or arguments-with-staff-over-bogus-license-and-copyright-issues time, for which a three dollar charge is levied. The Stevieling and I elected to pay so we could get on with our lives, for miserable as they are they are worth more than 3 bux per quarter hour during leisure time. Mrs Stevie believes arguing with people is leisure time, but won't use a separate locker which - it seems to me - would have addressed the problem of my "stupidly" paying up instead of standing around while Mrs Stevie made the locker opener-upperer earn his or her pitiful wage.

Mrs Stevie was just finishing her peroration. She span triumphantly to lead the poor, browbeaten locker opener-upperer to the scene of the financial outrage only to find me standing there with all her stuff, which I handed to her. The locker opener-upperer immediately assessed the situation and fled while Mrs Stevie selected exactly which terms of endearment to use on me, then - sensing the absence of the locker opener-upperer - span round enabling me to quickly absent myself from her rage by dodging behind a bank of lockers, where I was joined by the Stevieling.

Mrs Stevie span back around but I was gone. She span back but could not see me or the hapless locker opener-upperer. She might have simply gone off the boil in the target poor environment we had engineered had not the group of Brazilian ladies reappeared in theater after having experienced the ride and spotting me cowering behind the lockers loudly exclaimed and pointed while waving their cameras.

The Stevieling and I decided to move as quickly as possible on to the next attraction, and by the time Mrs Stevie had caught up with us tempers had cooled.

This attraction was the old Earthquake Disaster Ride which used to feature Charleton Heston, but has been retooled for some years with a "you are appearing in a cheap movie made by Christopher Walken" theme, which actually works very well and is quite clever. The show part of the attraction requires ten volunteers, and when the presenter asked for someone who could do an evil laugh Mrs Stevie tried to volunteer me, but was herself selected for her 15 minutes in the limelight.

Things got even better when the presenter asked for her very best evil laugh and then tagged her as "crazy lady". He played this up and I was agog to see how long he could get away with it before copping a size nine in the hurtybits, but Mrs Stevie had been bitten by the stardom bug and was, for once, pliable and cooperative even at the expense of her own image.

And I have to say she was quite good, cast as she was with two other women as "evil scientists". True, every time she lifted her face to the light her Evil Scientist hard hat fell off. Even so, I felt she was the best Evil Scientist ever and told her so, which cheered her up for most of the rest of the day.

Then it was on to the Men in Black ride, in which you ride in whirling cars while you shoot various targets of opportunity with a "laser" pistol. It transpires that winning an inordinate number of points on this idiotic ride is a personal strength, and so I was able to rack up 10,000 points and more to the womenfolk's aggregate score of 203. Mrs Stevie was driven to new heights of jealousy over this when I mentioned it a few times in passing, but I had to stop when we went to get our stuff back from the lockers.

There I found a French lady and her daughter in tears because they had locked up their valuables and the locker had refused to acknowledge them as them thirty minutes later. I became the hero of the hour by flagging down a locker opener-upperer for them, which was when I found out that Mrs Stevie does not approve of French ladies either.

We then moved on into the rather over-the-top Springfield area of the park and the Simpsons ride, which turned out to be the old Back To The Future ride with some plywood shapes screwed over the original fiberglass stuff and painted in Krusty the Klown colors. I was enchanted by the naffness of this half-arsed "renovation" and felt it stood a good chance of being the best ride in the park as a result. It was easy to see the provenance of the ride, and the old DeLorien cars were clearly visible behind the plywood sides.

The ride became even more brilliant when I realized that in all likelihood the hydraulic motion of the cars hadn't even been reprogrammed, and a new movie had simply been scripted to the existing motion scheme. This is a simulator-type ride with hydraulic cars suspended in front of a hemispherical screen on which is projected a wrap-around movie, producing a nauseatingly convincing illusion of chaotic movement - in the original a flight in the DeLorien time machine from Back to the Future but now a high speed ride in a derailed roller-coaster car in the Krusty theme park. There were and are certain key points in which recognizable and memorable things happen, and they happen the same way now as they did in the early 1990s.

For all that I have to say the new Simpsons movie uses the motion to better effect than the original ride did, and I almost threw up at several points. We had been forced to queue for about 30 minutes for this one but I think it was worth it.

We had lunch which was, wonder of wonders not the terrible, nasty and horrible experience it had been in the Islands of Adventure park at the start of the week where we despared of finding anything edible, and moved on at the womenfolks' insistence to the E.T. ride. I protested to no effect; the ride was closing at the end of the year, they said, and it was part of family history, they said, and shut up that moaning Mrs Stevie said so that was that.

Umpteen years ago Mrs Stevie and the four year old Stevieling had a girls only day at this park and The Stevieling rode the E.T. ride for the first time. She returned home wide-eyed and full of the backstory in which "E.T. must go home". In fact, she nearly drove me stark staring mad with this mantra over the next 24 hours, to the point I started to tease her by saying stuff like "E.T. must go to the store" or "E.T. must go to bed", which would drive her into a rage-filled correction. She was, and is, her mother's daughter in every way.

The ride itself is beyond lame from an adult perspective, and I was astounded at how many adults were on line sans children to experience it. It consists of an extremely sedate suspended coaster-like mechanism fashioned to look like ranks of bicycles (of course). Each "car" houses about 16 people in ranks of four and everyone "flies" over various scenes that tell whatever daft story has been going on until at the very end E.T. says goodbye to everyone by name as they coast past.

This miracle of technology is achieved by making everyone register their name and carry an ID card during the queue stage (which takes place in a giant "wood" somehow relevant to the backstory but which I've never understood despite having spent several hours in the bloody thing) and which gets taken just before boarding. The names get recorded in a computer and get played back as those seats pass the sensor at the end of the ride.

Actually, I've ridden this one a couple of times before, once when Mrs Stevie was pregnant when this was the only ride they'd let her on, and once a few years later with a young Stevieling, and on both occasions E.T. got our names wrong because the order everyone gives in their ID cards is not always the order in whch they are seated due to last second dithering in the line, and once E.T. is out of step, he stays out of step. It was the only redeeming feature of the ride in my opinion.

But this time he got everyone right, ruining the ride for me.

We wandered back to the roller coaster, which rumor had it had actually restarted, but it turned out that after running one train they had closed it down again.

We revisited Despicable Me 2 but the line was now a day and a half long.

So we rode The Mummy again a couple of times (I'm voting this as my new best ride in the park) and made our way toward the exit.

Mrs Stevie asked if we could perhaps take a look at the aging Terminator T2 show and I said okay, since it was a sit-down 3D and live action thing in air conditioned darkness and did not suck if memory was not playing me false. It also demanded no audience participation, so I was in no danger of being volunteered for public humiliation in the name of mass entertainment.

The show was quite good, not at all naff, and we nailed seats on the wide aisle about halfway down the theater so part of the live action took place a few feet from us, though I'd forgotten that happened (in my defense I hadn't seen the show in over a decade). Mrs Stevie swears that they used to ride a motorcycle down this aisle but I don't remember that myself.

We exited into the gift shop and I was confronted by a life-sized model of the skeletal robot from the original Terminator movie, the equivalent of a cigar store indian and made to serve much the same purpose. What caught my eye was the sign hung on it announcing that it was for sale (with no price on it). I speculated for a few minutes on where one would put such a thing - it stood over six feet high - and how one would transport it.

Then I took a long look at the collectible figures in the cabinet next to it, statuettes of Arnie as The Terminator. The sculpts were not spectacular (since the '90s a revolution in realism in facial sculpts has overtaken the collectible figures market and I've come to expect almost photographic realism in such items) but the poses and settings were nice. If I'd had anywhere to display one I'd have been tempted by one of the smaller ones.

As I walked toward the exit I saw that the floor was littered with souvenir leather jackets, so, not being a clod and wanting to look I picked them up and re-hung them on the hook. America can be such a land of clods, with people stepping around or even on merchandise dropped by other clods instead of replacing it where it came from. As I say, it was also an excuse to have a look.

Which is how I came to leave the park the proud owner of a souvenir Arnie motorcycle jacket branded for T2, something I'd never in the past have bought. It was real leather, decently made if a little heavy, at an attractive price. I have a leather jacket but it is far too nice to wear every day, and I'd been noodling with the idea of getting one I could screw up without worrying too much.

All I need now is a motorcycle and a lever-action shotgun.

1. Mrs Stevie has been known to have dreams in which the dream-me indulges in various acts of perfidy, and upon waking hold me responsible for the imaginary transgressions her twisted psyche conjured in what passes for her mind, often exacting swift justice in a brutal attack while I am still asleep and in the arms of the Dallas Cowboys' cheerleader A squad↑
2. While smugly announcing that we were to pay tolls twice for the privilege of doing so↑
3. By a curious coincidence I had purchased a copy of The Ultimate Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy⁴ to read on my Kindle, but hadn't found time to do so. That should be read in Simon Jones' voice of course↑
4. I have since found time. Would that I hadn't. Avoid this highly edited edition↑
5. I have alluded in the past to the fact that I attribute her foul temper to overindulgence in this and similar beverages, which she developed a taste for in the third year of our marriage around the time I inadvertently killed the front lawn by applying too much Lorn Fude™, shortly after the Tree Felling Misunderstanding and about a month before the Heirloom Dining Table Fire Incident⁶ ↑
6. This last the impetus behind the totally unreasonable "No More Steam Engines In The House" Snap Decision↑
7. Although her reaction to finding that someone had indeed done this in indelible laundry marker was a harbinger of her coffee-fueled rages and then some↑
8. δLine Length/δt↑
9. A Stevie-invented term I'm sure is just waiting in the wings before appearing in some piece of park literature↑
10. Moving laterally back and forth as opposed to becoming highly entertaining, though in this case both senses of the word apply if you enjoy such things↑

Alone At Last, Part 2

"...and that is how I came to have a picture of the Queen permanently stamped into my right buttock."

I came out of the wiggly space flashback effect to discover I was alone. My audience was fled and gone away, leaving me with the bill. I quizzed the waitress, but she wasn't helpful. Best I could make out he'd driven off while I was jumping off a fan tower.

This wasn't as unexpected as you might think. I find it rare that young people have the mental stamina to withstand the unalloyed terror of adventures I've had, on account of their moral fibre being eroded by the internet, Japanese cartoons and the racket that passes for music these days. It was inconvenient that he'd taken the car, but that was kids for you. No consideration.

I paid the bill, which was higher than expected on account of the kid adding a bottle of whisky to the total before departing. The waitress said he'd taken a hefty swig before he'd gotten to the door and by the time he was in the car had drained almost half the bottle. Clearly the lad had a drinking problem. Lesson learned: only breakfast in unlicenced diners from now on when The Boyfriend was in tow.

I wandered outside and used some half-hearted class two Word of Power on principle, and started walking back to Orange Lake Country Club some three miles as the turkey vulture flies up the road.

The first mile or so was along a strip of souvenir shops, mostly offering Disney-themed stuff. Then came a few fruit stands and Cap'n Stays'ls Privateers of the Carribean Mini Golf, where I was severely beaned by a bank shot off the lighthouse made by some sullen 12 year-old who wanted to be playing X-Box. I know because I could hear his whining about it right before my world exploded in a splash of psychedelic lights and I pitched forward into the drainage ditch that ran between me and the highway.

I came to some unknown time later. It couldn't have been long because the half-submerged yearling alligator I had landed on was still unconscious when I regained my senses and, about 1.5 seconds later, the use of my legs, lungs and vocabulary.

I stopped running and telling the world about my consternation and my feelings on the matter of other people's kids after about half a mile, when my legs started to remind me why I was staying home that day and refused to work for a bit until I had had a rest. I checked the ditch for alligators, but you know what they say in Orlando: if you can't see the alligators, they're hiding in plain sight. Working on the principle that they were basically timid animals that would avoid human contact by preference, I began warning them away by whimpering in a high pitch.

After ten minutes or so I felt fit to continue and walked for perhaps another half mile before being overcome by exhaustion. I slumped to the ground and passed out.

I came to some unknown time later with an unacustomed weight on my chest. Opening my eyes I found myself nose-to-nose with a hideous rat-like face and let out an involuntary shriek while my limbs went into The Florida Wildlife Avoidance Windmill.

I count it most fortunate that I am able to warn everyone here that should you find yourself being investigated by a curious Armadillo, it is absolutely essential not to frighten or panic the beast by sudden moves that could be interpreted as an agressive attack, nor should you startle it with sudden loud, high-pitched noises. Armadillos are known for their habit of curling into a ball when threatened, but before they do that they can inflict much damage to one's clothing and skin with their small but extremely sharp claws as they scrabble their own little Windmill of Avoidance.

They also have a large reserve of extremely pungent urine if mine was any indication, though I like to think I gave as good as I got in that department. Unfortunately I was the only one wearing trousers, so all in all I think the day went to the rodent.

The sun had risen quite high in the cloudless sky by now and proceeded to fry my brains and burn my typical whiter-than-white English skin to the color of a lobster and the tenderness of something very tender indeed. I took the opportunity to become a trifle delerious and spent some time walking in circles, crashing into bridge abutments and so forth. I began to hallucinate about the time I had accidentally shorted out Chateau Stevie's main breaker box by inadvertantly cutting a pipe with the water main turned on, then realized the deafening crashes of sound, blinding actinic flashes and sluicing water were, in fact, real and due to the daily Orlando Summer Downpour and Thunderstorm.

I spent some time executing Evasion Pattern Stevie Delta One as the lightning poked the landscape around me, which sufficed to wake me up and empty my bladder again in no time at all, and I also got some practice in the use of some of my vintage class four Words of Power which I had laid down for just such an occasion. Eventually I found an overpass and took refuge from the elements, intending to stay there until it was all over.

I had been under the overpass for perhaps ten minutes when the rotting body of what I think might have been a possum that had been blocking the drainage culvert just behind my shoulders rammed into my back and burst, followed by about five hundred gallons of backed-up drainage from the road overhead. I was sluiced from shoulders to shins in a sludge comprised of rainwater, rotting leaves (I recognised that element of the stench from the swimming pool cover chez Stevie), soggy cigarette ends, bits of presumed possum and a zoo of aquatic insects that had been living in the flooded culvert for some time but were happy to relocate into the various places available on me.

Such was the force of the column of filth hitting me in the back that I was propelled once more into the drainage ditch. This time I didn't wait to see if there were any alligators, and simply let my limbic system deal with the problem of getting the hell out of Dodge while the rest of my intellect bounced around my skull gibbering in fear.

By the time I had reached the other side of the overpass the rain had stopped (robbing me of the chance to avail myself of a timely shower), and the sun went into overdrive, boiling the water out of the ground and pushing it down hard in a blanket of intollerable humid heat Man was not intended to walk about in. However, I was still some distance from Orange Lake and so had no option but to stagger on, cursing fate, begging for death and crying out "Why me?" every so often in my usual stalwart fashion.

Raging thirst set in.

I began to search around for a place I could grab a bottle of water or soda, but there was nothing. I was out of the built-up section and deep in the Orlando Bush. I tried to get my bearings but the thirst and the wounds were taking their toll and I couldn't hear myself think for all the traffic zooming by an the highway some twenty feet to my left.

I wandered around for what might have been hours but was actually about twenty minutes or so according to my watch before stumbling into the car park of the supermarket just down the road from Orange Lake. Glass doors harnessed to Modern Technology whisked open at my approach and I staggered into the blessed cool of the salad and designer cheese section followed by the cloud of mosquitoes that had been lunching on me since the Armadillo Incident, and grabbed a soda from a refrigerator.

I was getting in line to pay when I became aware that everyone was evacuating the store in great hurry. I span round but couldn't see a fire or robbery in progress. By the time I was facing the cashier again there wasn't one - she had apparently joined the inexplicable mass exodus.

Now normally I am a reserved person who toes the line and does what's expected of one without complaining, which in this case would be to replace the unpaid-for soda in the refrigerator and evacuate the store with everyone else, but I was tired and had been dumped by an apparently alcoholic youth in the middle of nowhere, fallen on a sleeping alligator, been rolled by an armadillo, sluced in well-rotted possum, burned bright red by the unrelenting Florida sun and eaten alive by the mosquitoes the size of World War One biplanes. I was thirsty and tired and reeking of ditchwater and fermented possum and armadillo pee, covered in welts left by insect mouthparts the size of a garden hose, and not in the mood for the playful antics of Floridians.

I took a couple of dollars from my wallet and left them lying under a Kit Kat on the conveyor belt in front of the cash register, grabbed the soda and made for the door.

I could hear sirens approaching as I passed the trolley return rack. Clearly the police had been called in to deal with whatever the problem was, and I would only be in the way now, so I cut round the back of the supermarket and across the back of the Orange Lake property, emerging on the fairway of the golf course (dunno which one) and drank my soda while I crouched under some thorn bushes and kept out of the way of the police.

It is likely that had the police gotten close enough to spot me - a happenstance made somewhat more likely owing to the pungent state of my vestements, skin and hair - a serious misunderstanding of the sort so common in my life could have taken place, but as luck would have it the garden landscapers drove past on a modified golf cart towing a fertilizer broadcaster, and the officers decided that getting splashed with what smelled like pig manure was sub-optimal and voted to conduct their search somewhere else.

Once the officers had finished thrashing the bushes round about with night sticks and yelling to whoever it was that he should come out and surrender quietly, it was a fairly simple matter to orient myself and make my way back to the villa, where I stripped off my clothes and fed them to the washing machine, and went back to bed via the shower, and itched myself to sleep.

Later, I was awakened by the shrieking of Mrs Stevie who apparently had returned, opened the washer and found my clothes, but I wasn't in the mood for tedious explanations so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

The Parachute Jump Fiasco

As a child I'd always been entranced by TV footage of free-fall parachutists.
I mean, what child wouldn't be? People dress up in nifty clothes, strap an important-looking pack on their back with a complicated harness, get into an aeroplane with no door which flies up to a great height, at which point the parachutist waves a cheery goodbye to the unlucky pilot who only, only gets to fly the plane 'back to base', yells the magic word "Cut!" and jumps out into space. Then, then said parachutist displays just how awesome this all is by zooming hither and yon about the sky, tumbling and spinning at will. Sometimes they jump out with friends and do complicated dances, grinning like idiots the whole time from the sheer fun of it all.

In my childhood this would end with a rather boring canopy deployment and landing, but by the time I was fifteen or so the parachute of choice was an oblong parawing which enabled more aerobatic shenanigans and displays of awesomeness¹.

What kid wouldn't be entranced by it all?

There was even a TV show about parachutists who solved crimes and had adventures all which required someone jump out of an aeroplane and zip around the sky creatively for a few minutes each week. It was called Ripcord and after watching it we would all make parachute packs from satchels with string for a ripcord and emulate the zooming bit by skating down the hill on Rotherham Road into Chesholme Road with our arms outstretched.

It was all great fun unless the grown-ups decided to put more crushed granite on the roads, which would result in loose chippings being scattered all over the pavement ² which in turn would jam a wheel at some crucial moment of high-speed pretend freefalling, precipitating a moderate-speed real-world tumble onto razor-sharp gravel. It was all very tedious but that was adults for you. There was no understanding why they did the brainless stuff they did. All you could do was dig the stones out of the wounds and carry on as best as you could.
Fast forward a few years.

In 1984 I was working as a consultant on a contract with a firm in Aylesbury, which I've mentioned before as the boredom capital of the world at that point in time. I was working on a team led by a bloke who did free-fall parachuting for fun, and who was just about to qualify at the highest recognised level in the UK (there were ten such levels at the time). He talked about it a lot, sparking memories of lacerated knees and sturdy strap-on rollerskates weighing my feet down³.

One day we celebrated someone's birthday or resignation or engagement, can't remember which, with the standard I.T. lunchtime trip down the pub, during which the Parachuting Team Leader passed around photographs of his latest plummet to the great interest of all. That evening I retired to The Brewer's Elbow, my chosen local pub of choice for whiling away the hours until they opened Ayelsbury up again⁴ and someone asked who would be interested in doing a sponsored parachute jump for charity.

Let's recap: Childhood fantasy reinforced by recent photographic evidence of spiffiness, voluntary brain function depressed due to repeated application of large quantities of lethally strong beer, leading question. Anyone in any doubt whose hand shot up so fast it pulled a muscle?

It should be noted that in my youth I was not so robustly muscled⁵ as I am now, and was known at times to get involved in athletic pursuits that might seem far-fetched to those who only know me in my post "responsibility" years. Rock climbing had been a passion in my late teens, and I would be white water rafting inside a year of getting to the USA.
And so it came to pass that I signed up for two weeks of misery, by which I mean the process of asking colleagues if they would care to sponsor me.

I ran into unbelievable levels of hostility in this, directed at me by the gittish cadre of young men who worked around me, especially the gang who worked on the Olivetti equipment⁶ who, if there is any justice, went to early and lingering retirement at 40 because their chosen technology went the way of the buggy whip. They spread the false story around that the first however much I raised would be used to pay for the jump, which I had, in fact, paid for myself up front in cash the night I volunteered to take part in the mass plane evacuation at inconvenient altitude, and it took me days to quash the story, only doing so by calling the chief storyteller a fbleeping liar to his face in a voice loud enough to carry to the carpark.

I later opined that the next time I would simply donate the cost of the parachute course to the charity; it would be cheap at any price if it meant not having to try and access the better side of such people⁷.

I should add that this sort of thing was not at all unusual in that shop. A more sullen bunch of backbiting treacherous shirtheads I have never had the dubious pleasure of meeting. Even the hostility shown to me by real southerners two years before paled into insignificance beside this Faux Fbleepheadism. I wish them all well. A corpse-poisoned well. Gits.

Where was I?

The weekend of the training course and jump eventually rolled around and the hardcore Brewer's Elbow crowd departed for an airfield in Peterborough where we were shown to a rough baracks deemed unsuitable for purpose, airmen the billeting of sometime around 1942. We didn't care because we had thought to bring gallons of life-saving Red Stripe lager with us for emergencies.

It was perhaps unfortunate that an emergency⁸ had been declared two minutes after setting off leading to the consumption of the entire reserve on the road, causing us to be late due to getting lost, bathroom breaks and frank exchanges of views on the subject of route.

We arrived in the pitch darkness and woke everyone else who had turned up at the suggested five o'clock and bedded down at the suggested eight. They took it in good part, joining in the exchange of slanderous observations and vile epithets in which we were indulging ourselves. The next morning there was a great deal of loud greeting and backslapping. It was just a little sad that everyone else wasn't of a mood to join in, and we surmised by the dark looks people shot our way that they had yet to find their own reserves of derring-do (and perhaps some Red Stripe lager).

We breakfasted on whatever it was that parachutists thought appropriate, to be honest I've forgotten what that entailed, and began a day of learning how to count to four, which you have to do in thousands at the top of your voice for archaic parachutist reasons. After you get to four thousand you have to scream "check!" and look over your shoulder. Apparently "check" is the magic parachute-opening word.

As soon as the instructors were satisfied that we could get to four without getting lost along the way - perhaps they underestimated our tollerance for Red Stripe and feared after-effects would rob us of basic intellect⁹ - we were taken to the next stage of our training: the wooden mock-up aeroplane.

The aircraft in which we were to make our leap for idiocy was a Britten-Norman Islander, a short take-off shoulder-wing aeroplane originally designed for use in the Channel Islands where runway length is at a premium. In order to make the eight seater aircraft fit for six parachutists all the seats had been removed that didn't have a pilot sitting in them, the carpet had been replaced with plywood and the bit where the door and some of the wall of the port¹⁰ side once resided had been replaced with a sort of D-shaped hole. More a Delta really, with a long edge running down and a short edge running up to form the point around a foot above the deck line. This was represented by a wooden mock-up of half the aeroplane set up about four feet above the concrete of the hanger it was housed in.

The exit technique was simple. You sat on the floor. When the "Jump Master", the bloke nominally in charge of things yelled "Feet Out" you shuffled over, stuck your legs out of the plane turned forward, hung one buttock over empty space while holding the edge of the deck under your right thigh with your right hand and reached behind with your left for that point where the delta was made, just behind the small of your back. It sounds more dangerous than it would be if it were less dangerous. In point of fact there is no danger of falling out unless you fall out. When the Jump Master yelled "GO!" you would push hard with the right hand while stretching out with your left arm, trying to reach and touch the pylon of the landing gear. I was assured it couldn't be done, but the idea was to believe it could and to try and do it while simultaneously believing that you wouldn't end up stubbing the fingers of your left hand into the bloody thing.

I have to say I excelled at this and in only four hours or so was no longer whimpering aloud when I jumped out and landed on the concrete, there to stand spread-eagled in the manner encouraged by Mistress Alexa during her Executive Discipline sessions while screaming "ONE THOUSAND, TWO THOUSAND, THREE THOUSAND, FOUR THOUSAND, CHECK!"¹¹ then hurrying out of theater so the next person could have a go, though I was dubious when told that the observers would be listening for the count when we jumped for real. It was all great fun, and soon we were deemed fit to try the various Fan Towers

These were even more fun than the Wooden Aeroplane. You climbed up a small tower, grabbed a set of writs restraints¹² and jumped off the platform. The wrist harness was connected to two ropes wound round a drum, which was attached to a huge squirrel-cage fan by a massively overdriven gear train. This slowed your descent to parachute-like speeds and you crashed into the floor at only a mild plummet, collaspsing in an approved manner into a heap. If you did it wrong, a fat instructor yelled vile things at you.

Then, when we had mastered the vertical drop we got to do the really high vertical drop which was a bit of a challenge because of a teensy problem I hadn't bothered to mention to anyone: I was and am very slightly terrified of heights. However, I drew on the same reserves of sheer manliness I used while rock-climbing in my teens¹³ and managed to complete the training jump off the thirty foot tower with only a minor bladder leak and a falsetto shriek I passed off as a battle-cry.

Then there was only the travelling drop, a sort of inclined zip-line that crashed one into the ground at a forward speed of about ten miles an hour, and we were given the tour of the packing shed and roped into packing a parachute. We would also repack our own 'chute after we jumped later on the Sunday.

A word or two about parachutes and how they work is in order.

Parachutes came in two general flavours at that time: the round umbrella affair familiar to those who've seen The Longest Day or Band of Brothers, and the oblong sort you see the Red Devils and James Bond using. Oblong "parawing" parachutes are packed in haversack-sized packs. The canopy is bagged in something that looks like a spongebag. Really. The reserve 'chute is packed into a spring-loaded cylinder set in the middle of the haversack. The parachutist jumps out of the aeroplane and has fun, then, to deploy the parachute he or she pulls a small parachute from a sheath typically across the belly by means of a wooden toggle for all the world like a duffel coat "button", holds this outside their slipstream and lets go. The small 'chute zooms back and pulls the ripcord, and starts the parachute deployment by dragging it out of the pack. If there is a problem, the parachutist must pull on securing toggles at their shoulders, releasing a system of three overlapping rings that are the attachment points for the parachute shrouds, "cutting away" the main canopy so that the reserve parachute can be fired. The spring does the same job for the reserve 'chute as the small parachute does for the main; it gets the canopy of the reserve 'chute out of the slipstream of the plummeting skydiver (parachutes will tend to cling to the back of the skydiver because there is a partial vacuum there).

People who go on two-day parachute jump training courses get to use the first kind, with a spare one in a small pack strapped across the stomach. This is because round parachutes are simple and relatively failsafe after years of ironing out the bugs and because new parachutists count to four too fast sometimes and deploy the reserve parachute needlessly. The back-and-belly design means that you can do this without one parachute fouling the other, though you lose maneuverability if you use both 'chutes. I saw a couple of figure-eight shaped canopies the day I did my jump.

Parachute failure on these round 'chutes is extremely rare. The so-called Roman Candle failure that used to be a common killer of parachuting servicemen is no longer possible thanks to the use of static-free materials (the "Candle" is actually a lethal case of static cling that prevents the canopy opening because it sticks to itself like socks do in a tumble drier) and various other design elements. A Lineover failure, caused when the canopy opens, then momentarily collapses and allows the lines to flop over the canopy top before it inflates again, is made much more unlikely by another design element that looks like a mesh skirt running around the rim of the canopy. Modern parachutes can even lose a shroud or two without catastrophic failure. Which leaves the Hang-Up.

Parachutes can be deployed either by the parachutist pulling the so-called ripcord, or by the ripcord being replaced by a thick strap called a Static Line which is attached to the plane at one end and the parachute at the other, like paratroopers do in the movies. The act of jumping out of the aeroplane causes the static line to pull the parachute after a drop of a few feet.

A hang-up occurs when the parachute fails to unbag itself and the parachutist is towed along by the static line, bashing into the aeroplane and generally not having a good time of things and making it impossible to land the aeroplane. When this happens the jump master watches to see whether the parachutist puts his hands on his head, indicating he is conscious and aware. If the Jump Master sees this signal, he takes the enormous knife fastened to the rear bulkhead of the plane and cuts the Static Line so the parachutist falls away and can deploy his reserve 'chute by hand. If the Jump Master doesn't see this signal he is supposed to put the knife between his teeth and shin down the static line pirate-fashion, take hold of the unconscious parachutist, cut the Static Line, deploy the unconscious parachutist's reserve belly 'chute, push himself away and deploy his own parachute and effect a safe landing.

This rather flamboyant methodology was developed on the spur of the moment by the first (and as far as I know only) person confronted by the problem of an unconscious man hung up on the aircraft. They gave him the George Medal for it, which suggests it isn't quite as easy or safe to do as I may have made it seem. The Jump Master I eventually flew with said if it came to it he'd cut away the dangling person and swear he'd seen the signal. In his defense, he was a git.

I was about to see why a hang-up would be about as unlikely as a lottery win after not buying a ticket.

The pack of the parachute is a bit of a fake-out. Take an envelope and gently unstick the folds from each other. You'll have an oblong with triangular flaps on the top, bottom and sides that wrap around to overlap each other. This is exactly like a parachute pack. Along the length of the pack run twin tracks to which are attached rubber bands. The same sort as you use for in-office firepower. The shrouds, the lines that tether the canopy to the harness at the shoulders, are gathered in a loom on a long table and carefully folded into back-and-forth loops across the width of the pack, tethering each loop by slipping it through a rubber band. The canopy is carefully folded and inserted into the bag and the top secured to the ring the static line will attach to by string with a given beaking strain - I was told 100 pounds. The base of the bag is also secured by string with a lower breaking strain. I was told 50 pounds. The strings were colour-coded so you couldn't get them wrong, bright orange for the top of the bag, white for everywhere else. The bag then gets packed and secured with more rubber bands and the pack folded closed over the whole thing. The flaps were secured together around the Static Line ring with 50 pound string.

When the parachutist jumps out of the aeroplane the Static Line is pulled taut and the string holding the pack flaps together breaks as it is a sure bet the force of a grown person falling into the something-like 70 mph slipstream of the aeroplane will exert more than 50 pounds of force. The parachutist continues to fall and the bag, still fastened top and bottom by string unfolds from the pack, pulled by the retreating aeroplane. Once the bag is fully extended the shrouds pull free from the bands securing them in an orderly fashion so they don't tangle.

The 'plane is still pulling away with the Static Line attached and the top of the parachute, still packed in its bag, attached to the Static Line, the parachutist at the end of the fully deployed shrouds and still falling free when the bag suddenly takes the weight of the person in the harness. The 50 pound string gives first and the parachute, still attached to the 'plane begins deploying from the bag. It begins to open almost straight away.

When the canopy's length is fully extended the top string is pulled and breaks and the parachute, finally, is free of the aeroplane. The Static Line and the bag are still attached to the aeroplane and of no further interest to the parachutist. At no point is there anything stronger than rubber bands or string holding the parachutist to the aeroplane, thus a hang-up is just about impossible.

Should the parachute not open after all this, the parachutist simply grabs a fat red tab situated on top of the belly pack and pulls to deploy the reserve 'chute (we also practiced this with fake packs fitted with reusable Velcro ripcord tabs). The parachutist does not attempt to cut away from the main canopy because the belly 'chute is designed to deploy forward of the main canopy and is unlikely to tangle in it. Anyway, this sort of parachute does not have the three-ring release mechanism, but a sturdy pinch-and-pull-hard release on each shoulder called "Capewells" that we were warned time and again not to release in mid-fall because their primary use is for cutting away a canopy when it is dragging one along the ground after landing.
Modern equipment may differ from this 1984-era stuff I should add. My info is based on my own experience. You want research, you do it.

Parachutes in those days had twin vents in the rear panels that spilled air and conferred a 10 mph forward speed. This was considered an important factor for many reasons. Firstly it made the parachute maneuverable. By pulling on the steering toggles that would dangle over the parachutist's shoulders once the canopy was deployed the contraption could be steered and the Rottweiler Farm adjacent to the airfield could be avoided, as could the section of the National Electrical Grid that passed to the other side of the airfield. Secondly, positive airspeed would confer a small amount of lift to the canopy and reduce the downward velocity considerably¹⁴.

Unfortunately, after all the jumping and spreading and screaming and falling and packing, it transpired that the wind was blowing at a steady 20 mph on Sunday afternoon, and all jumps on round parachutes were cancelled. We would have to come back another day.
To cut a long story short, everyone else eventually did this on various weekdays, but I could only get to the airfield at weekends and for a few of these the weather was naff. Every Saturday morning I would dress in my jeans and a sweatshirt with no buttons or hooks, and a pair of Doc Martens I bought when I realised that the only boots I had had hooks for the laces which are a safety no-no in the world of parachuting. Foregoing breakfast in the interests of not suffering a catastrophic involuntary digestive tract evacuation should the sheer terror of jumping into pure height be too much for the old endocrinal system, I'd pile into the TR6 and drive to Peterborough only to be told "not today", and I would drive back getting into Coventry just in time for the lunchtime boozing session and throwdown Space Invader challenge down the Dog and Trumpet.
One Saturday I pulled into the airfield around eight thirty or so, to the vision of a thick blanket of fog. "So, no jumps today, then?" I asked a man wearing a Stetson, sunglasses and a parachute.

"Oh no, we're just waiting for the Sun to burn off the fog. I'll run you through the Wooden Aeroplane while we wait." His accent was South African.

I wandered back to my car past a group of people playing at free falling by running around with their arms spread so they could work out a four person routine and figure out how not to crash into each other before they did. Another team were doing the same but using mechanic's crawlers so they could be face down and see whether their close-order plummeting would end with someone getting a boot to the head. I'd always wondered how it was all choreographed.

Back at the car I carefully emptied my pockets of everything I could find and dumped the contents into my car boot. Nothing in pockets, nothing in bowels, no hooks. I was in good shape for the madness to come. I passed the time watching someone practice a juggling routine using the then-new "Klutz" bags. I had taught myself to juggle using the same book¹⁵ some weeks before¹⁶. He was good, too. Soon it was time for a parachute fitting.

"We've got ten-stone¹⁷ rated 'chutes and thirteen stone rated 'chutes. What'll you have?"

"I'm eleven stone¹⁸. What should I do?"

"It’s up to you."

I did a little thinking and reasoned that a parachute that was too small would drop me too fast and possibly injure me. An oversized parachute would, at worst, give me a longer ride for my money.

"Thirteen stone, please"

It weighed a ton. Then there was the belly 'chute that added another half ton to the whole sorry affair. Then I was hurried over to a group of five others. Two of them were sporting haversacks so they were going up to 15000 feet and would be last out, so first in.

Two were wearing elaborate parachutes with bulky automatic ripcord safety altimeters attached. They were at the point in their training that they were practicing a mimed cutting away of their main parachute¹⁹ demonstrating they could stay stable in free-fall while moving arms around. They would be going out at around 7000 feet and so were in second.
The last of my co-jumpers was also in training, and was destined to show she could pull a ripcord without becoming unstable in free fall²⁰. She would be leaving the aeroplane at 5000 feet. Since I was the only one on a Static Line and would be jumping at 3000 feet, I would be last in and first out, and would not be able to "change my mind".

I sat, back to the pilot, looking at the South African cowboy sitting under the machete in its sheath on the rear bulkhead, nothing but open air a little forward and to my right. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I'd only have to look out at 200 feet (in order to get a mental picture of the "get ready for landing" look of the ground). The Jump Master held up two fingers and I had a good, long, nauseating look. And fell back, propped up by my parachute. The engine noise was deafening.

The Jump Master leaned forward to shout in my face: "We're a bit crowded in here with all these parachutes" he yelled.

I thought: Well I'm not chucking mine out, mate, but elected to say nothing.

"I want you to come and sit opposite the door."

I nodded, maintaining a manly silence rather than scream "Are you out of your fbleeping mind?" and scooted around to face the "door", with a foot on either jamb since we had not completed the ascent to 3000 feet yet and the pilot was banking to port which had the "door" pointing down for long periods as we climbed in a lazy circle.

"3000 feet!" yelled the pilot.

"Feet out!" Screamed the Jump Master.

I scrambled into the doorway and dangled one buttock over empty space and looked up as I had been trained to do. If I looked down, I had been informed, I would get pulled out of the 'plane, spinning, which would temporarily tangle the shrouds when the parachute opened and make it unmaneuverable until I'd kicked myself around and untangled them.

"GO!"

And I pushed and stretched and by some miracle missed the undercarriage pylon and watched the static line paying out forever overhead as the plane zoomed away²¹.

"One thousand, two thousand, three thousand"

It was at this point it dawned on me that my feet were not on concrete, that I was falling belly-down rather than standing vertically and that I had just jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane at 3000 fbleeping feet.

"Four thousand"

The parachute opened with a "thwack", and, being underloaded by two stone came to a dead stop in the air. I, falling at about 70 mph by then was grabbed by the shoulders and swung onto my back for a good look at the canopy.

"ChMYWORDTHATCERTAINLYWASASUDDENANDUNEXPECTEDSTOP!"

Having given me time to check the canopy and judge it good, my body swung back down. My feet, however, clad in their Dr Marten's Patent Parachuting Boots hung around at face level so I could also check them²² before swinging down to dangle bonelessly under my arse while I tried to inventory my organs and the contents of my underwear.

All seemed to be in order. The shrouds were not twisted (the only way this could have happened is that it had opened while I was spinning, though parachutist etiquette is that those who experience twisted shrouds are allowed to claim their parachutes were "packed wrong" on their first couple of jumps without being openly mocked) so I had full control of the canopy spread majestically above me. I reached for the steering toggles and Assumed Command. Now to get my bearings so I could pilot my little aircraft to a landing on the circle of sand called the Drop Zone, or DZ (if I was going to be a parachutist, I supposed I had better master their banter and when better than now, in the peace and quiet of the air over England?).

It was very quiet up there. The instructors had all emphasised that any failure of the canopy on deployment would be immediately noticeable because of the noise it would make. Most of the people listening to that imagined the roar of the aeroplane and the rush of air past their heads and smiled, but having experienced the quiet of a working parachute in action I can say that yes indeed, the first thing one would note would be the flapping or tearing noises because that aeroplane noise is above you and for some reason much, much quieter than you'd think. It might even be quiet enough for the observers to have heard my count as I fell, though I reckon that was a tale to make everyone concentrate on counting loud rather than thinking about the distance to the ground. It was time to get my bearings so I could begin to pilot myself around the sky to land triumphantly in the DZ. Easy peasy.

The airfield had in it two features that were vitally important. First, there was a DC 3 parked on it with prominent black and white stripes on its wings. This aircraft had given of its best and was no longer airworthy, but now did sterling duty as a piloting aid. It was perhaps the biggest identifiable thing below me and would serve to help me find the airfield itself. Laugh all you want, but at 3000 feet the world looks small and the bits of it you think would be unmistakable are hard to find if in fact they are, when you get down to it, a bunch of flat grass among many hundreds of acres of flat grass. The DC 3 would also enable me to see which way the airfield was pointing relative to my boots because one of the things that had been hammered into the students was where the DC 3 was in the airfield and which way it was pointing. Every time we had occasion to be in eyeshot of the thing, someone would point it out and note its bearing in relation to this hangar or that control tower. This took a while because I was directly over the wretched thing and my belly 'chute removed large amounts of the ground from my field of view.

Now I needed to find the other vital feature of the airfield, the windsock.
This bright orange tubular streamer was not, as I had first thought, merely a way for the normally taciturn people working in and around the aerospace infrastructure to express a small amount of festivity in the workplace, but was in fact a sophisticated wind direction and strength indicator. If the sock dangles around the pole, for instance, it means there is no wind at all. If it flaps about in a half-hearted manner in some direction, it mans there is a low-speed wind of a few measly miles per hour blowing from the opposite direction. If the sock is standing out horizontally it means that the wind is perhaps too strong for parachuting, certainly too strong for the round parachutes of the students. If there is no sock on the pole it means that your car has probably been blown into the next field too. If you can't see the pole, it means it is foggy.

I looked and looked but could not locate it for the life of me. Had I been with some of the original crowd from The Brewer's Elbow I would have suspected high-jinks at my expense, but they had all jumped weeks before and had the broken limbs to prove it. I figured out later that during the time it took me to trundle across the sky enough to see the DC 3, I had trundled directly over the windsock and so my belly 'chute was hiding it. These days I sort of expect this kind of behaviour from the evil spirits that commonly infest everything I try and do, but then I was a callow youth who did not believe in evil spirits other than the one I found in a bottle of something vile that allegedly came out of Yugoslavia²³, and so I failed to pause and take stock.

It was then that Mr Brain made an overt move in our war of wits and suggested a plan. I licked my finger and held it up. Cold on the front, so I was heading into the wind and all was good. I would maintain this course and forget about the DZ, which I could hit the next time. Paramount was the need to face into the wind and gain the lift needed for a soft landing. The collection of busted arms and legs now propping up the bar in The Brewer's Elbow demonstrated that in unequivocal terms. Besides, I couldn't find the DZ either. Stupid airfield staff for not painting the sand bright orange. Didn't they know that everything looks like a big, flat bewildering plain of unidentifiable stuff from up there? You'd think they'd notice when they jumped themselves.

Have you figured out the flaw in my brilliant scheme? Don't worry, I didn't see it either, though I was still swamped in the euphoria of the Parachuting Experience so I at least have an excuse. Plus, of course, my brain was ambushing me, though I didn't recognise the signs at the time.

Recall that the parachute has a forward speed of 10 magnificent miles per hour or so. this would confer the illusion of an oncoming wind in just about any direction I cared to point myself. As it happened, I was carefully maintaining a course directly downwind, which upped my forward speed to about twice that I would be going in still air. It also meant I had lost the lift provided by the wind's movement over the canopy, and my downward speed was much higher than that recommended for a safe and comfortable landing.

None of this was conveyed by the view of the ground, which didn't change much as I descended and robbed me of any sense of approaching impact. I've been told the brain simply cannot properly interpret what it sees because of the illusion of flatness, but I suspect Mr Brain simply refused to interpret what I was seeing out of sheer bloody mindedness.

"I'm good" I thought as I zoomed across acres of flatflatflat. "That is nice soft grass." Tranquility was the order of the day.

Let us pause a moment to talk of the phenomenon of Ground Rush. Everyone who parachutes experiences it, and it is quite disconcerting, not to mention a hell of a shock the first time you see it firsthand. It is caused by the long period of long-distance viewing robbing the brain of its stereoscopic information as to the depth and distance of the ground features. A haystack can and does collapse into a flat disc under these conditions and the brain fails to note the gradual increase in size of that disc as you fall unless you specifically make note of it, and even then it can't make sense of the information because it isn't used to it coming in in that way. A field is just a mostly green Jackson Pollock canvass that stretches out to the peripheral vision on every side. Look up and you get no useful information because there is nothing to look at besides the horizon, and the angular change as you fall is so small that that doesn't provide useful "how fast am I falling?" info. Besides, look down again and you have no idea how high you are so even if you could estimate your downward speed it would be a useless statistic. This goes on until your eyes finally resolve the fine detail, at which point the brain updates the information and starts working normally on your visual intake.

As an experiment to demonstrate the effect, you'll need a camera with a manual zoom of around 70-210mm focal length. Find a wall containing texture but basically one colour - granite will work but you need detail in there that will become apparent quickly so pick some with light specks or veins in it. A Where's Waldo poster of sufficient size will work too.

Now, stand some distance from the wall and set the lens at the shorter focal length, 70 in my chosen example. Focus the camera and take a good look at your surroundings, making sure there are no pits, open manholes, children, bales of barbed-wire or sleeping humans for you to fall over. You need a clear field around you because you will be mobile for a bit and won't be looking where you are going.

Look at the wall through the camera and close your other eye. I know this is not how you were taught to use a viewfinder, but do it anyway. Now you have a two dimensional view of the patterned wall. Walk forward a couple of steps while looking through the viewfinder. Walk back. Notice how the wall is essentially unchanged and that you have no real idea of how far away it is. Now brace yourself and grip the zoom control. Concentrate on the wall and fool yourself that you are a long way from it. When you have yourself convinced, pull the zoom to maximum quickly (but no so quickly as to threaten damage to the lens elements). Watch the wall the entire time. Try not to fall over. You have just seen what Ground Rush looks like.

Back to me, dangling under the Zooming Parachute of Treachery.

So I'm busily correcting my line, which is carrying me further and further from the airfield buildings, the DZ and civilisation in general but who was keeping track of such mundane stuff? Not me. I was busy. I was looking down and internally chanting the mantra "That's nice soft grass. Grass, grass, grass. Soft green grass." and watching for the ground to come up at me as I'd been warned it would.

And it did, with a vengeance.

With no warning whatsoever the ground suddenly swooped up at me like a giant swooping thing. Simultaneously my eyes suddenly reported that the ground was not a carpet of grass but a rather barren field covered in sparse weeds and straw. Mr Brain gibbered "That's not grass, that's hard-packed dirt!" and shut down completely. I had just enough time to announce my consternation at this turn of events to the world when my trajectory intercepted the plane of the field and then some²⁴.

I smacked into the ground and was catapulted into the air a few feet so I could try my landing again, this time face-first. The parachute had not finished its headlong flight either and so my bounce was a sort of parabolic affair that covered a few tens of feet of field before I once more felt the tender caress of Mother Earth on my face, chest and sundry other bits too stupid or too slow to take shelter behind the rest. Once more I rebounded and was dragged somersaulting through space to land on my backside, it having so far escaped injury and obviously feeling left out of things. If I hadn't had the good fortune to collide at this point with a pile of haybales I would probably have ended up in the next county.

Naturally I had readied some appropriate class four Words of Power at the sudden onrush of landscape, but such was the force and frequency of the blows dealt to my body by the terrain that I was unable to deploy any of them in lucid fashion and was forced to content myself with some interpretive groaning after the fact as I lay across the scattered haybales and did another inventory of my limbs, vital organs and underwear. My boots were still not full of wee but since I had lost all feeling in everything but my feet I couldn't swear this wasn't because I was partly upside-down and they had simply drained themselves.

I reflected a bit on the new-found knowledge of haybales as ballistic cushioning. I had, like most people, seen footage of those lunatics at the Winter Olympics zooming along on the Luge only to take flight like a rocket through a pile of haybales at some corner. I had always assumed they used haybales because they were soft and would safely cushion the sledging loon to a safe stop so they could have another go free of bruising and without having to bus back in from wherever they ended up. Now that I knew that a haybale is approximately the same consistency as a block of concrete it became obvious that they were deployed to make the Luge pilots ricochet back away from the public and press, and to shield said public and press from any blood spatter caused by the disintegration of the body of the unfortunate sledger. Live and learn.

Fortunately the wind had dropped and so I was given a few minutes respite in which to lie groaning on the cubist nightmare the orderly pile of haybales had become. Then, galvanised by a gust of a breeze, I leaped to my feet over the course of a minute or two, and limped around gathering the shrouds over my arms just like you see the Airborne Regiments do on war movies. It is vitally important during this phase of parachuting to get on the downwind side of the deflated canopy and to collect the shrouds quickly so you can pull the "mouth" of the canopy to leeward²⁵ lest it get the bit between its teeth and re-inflate so it can drag you hither and yon across the ground in mutinous fashion to the detriment of your skin and the amusement of your fellow parachutists.

I collected the parachute over my arms and began the long trek back to the airfield and the packing shed. I had ended up on the extreme edge of the airfield, in one corner in fact, and so faced a journey of about a quarter mile or so with a ton of parachute in my arms. Those who had hit the DZ got bussed back to the shed. I had to walk the entire distance, which seems unfair to me even now. Oh well.

I repacked my parachute and went to see how I had been marked on my jump by the observers. These gentlemen watched through enormous German binoculars attached to massive steel pipe mounts as everyone jumped out of the aeroplane and noted the salient details on a card that would be important if I wanted to start a career as a parachutist, which I was not as keen to do as I had been earlier that morning, I will admit.

"Excellent exit²⁶. Ran downwind out of sight. Landing unobserved." Result! No-one had witnessed the landing fiasco.

Well, there was nothing for it but to sign up for another lift and do it over again²⁷. I signed up again before I could talk myself out of it and was soon riding up into the sky, this time with five other Static Line jumpers, all of whom knew each other.

This time I would be second out of the aircraft, and I got to see how the Jump Master dealt with Reluctant Parachutist Syndrome. The guy in front of me took up the proper position when the Jump Master yelled "Feet out!" and I watched with interest as the Jump Master quietly and unobtrusively placed his own left hand under the parachutist's pack. When he yelled "GO!" the young man sitting in the doorway hesitated and the Jump Master simply lifted his hand, not much, just enough to register on the parachutist's sense of balance. He naturally whipped his head round to see what was going on and the slipstream of the aeroplane pulled him spinning out of the door. Interesting.

I left the aircraft slightly less stably than the first time but still with a good line and not spinning or tumbling at all. The opening of the parachute went much as before, with a sudden dead stop from 70 mph interrupting my shout of "Check" so I could once more be spun about by my shoulders to look at the canopy and then my boots.

I spoke before of the quiet. They had kicked me and the first fellow out of the plane at the same altitude a few hundred feet apart, yet we could converse in conversational tones easily. Amazing, really. I can remember the sense of absolute stillness thirty years and more later.

My landing was this time a thing of more professional execution. I missed the DZ by quite a bit but was able to catch the bus with the other five, all of whom hit the sand effortlessly²⁸. I was amused to hear my jump-buddy and one of his friends who had jumped on the very next circuit of the 'plane complaining that their parachutes had been packed wrong.

"Did you let out a Rebel Yell?" one of his pals asked me. "We thought we heard one from the plane as we circled round."

"Yes. It's exhilarating, don't you think?" I responded, and allowed ghost of a jaded parachutist's smile to cross my face.

"Are you having a stroke?" He asked in a worried tone.

I was tired and happy. I grabbed lunch in the cafeteria and called my mother to tell her that no, I wasn't lying dead or crippled in a field from this idiotic stunt and drove back to Coventry and a hot bath as my muscles began to stiffen up. It was only at that point that I discovered that although I had gone through my pockets, somehow an old-style²⁹ Ten Pence piece had been left hiding in my right back pocket, and that the face depicting the head of state had been pointed inward. The coin was new and the sculpted relief was good, and the velocity at which it had been repeatedly driven into my buttock had been extremely high.

I would have bruises over 100 percent of my body the next day, leading some to speculate that I had lost a fight to a combine harvester, but all would fade over time except the one left by the coin.

1. Though for some reason it seemed that everyone who used one had their feet catch fire and would end up landing in a cloud of orange smoke↑
2. US: Sidewalk↑
3. And I'm not kidding when I say that. Jacoskates were a fine product that lasted for ever, but they were like unto wheeled deep-sea diving boots in terms of weight and inertia. Mine had red lace-up leather toecaps, others had brown. The skates had wheels that made them look like miniature formula one racing cars of the day, with fat black rubber tyres and double ball-bearing races. Mine were almost worn down to the metal when I stopped using them. I don't think I ever thanked my Grandparents adequately for the fun these things gave me. They were truly the spiffiest skates in the world↑
4. Seriously, they closed the bloody swimming pool at seven. It was like the town fathers were trying to engender discontent and dismay in the locals↑
5. Albeit with relaxed muscle↑
6. It is a small hope of mine that these gits recognise themselves one day from this brief but flattering description of their gittish miserable caricature Southern English Gittism that they strove so hard to cultivate↑
7. Because they don't have one↑
8. Namely the realisation that we would be facing two days without beer↑
9. A realistic fear in some cases as it turned out↑
10. Technical parachutist jargon for "Left as you face the sharp end while seated on the floor with a parachute pushed in your face"↑
11. Mistress Alexa was perplexed by my reflex screaming of this mantra on the occasion of my first visit to her House of Executive Correction over on Tenth Avenue and Greenwich, particularly as she had not in fact begun the planned course of instruction that would prompt such outbursts↑
12. Not unlike Mistress Alexa uses, but the ones in Peterborough didn't lock and were made of canvass, and there was less thrashing involved↑
13. Another mad thing Mr Brain talked me into that was extremely bad for me↑
14. Important point↑
15. Juggling for the Complete Klutz↑
16. I have remarked on the entertainment possibilities of Aylesbury before, and I couldn't drink all the time↑
17. Fourteen pounds to the stone. Figure it out↑
18. Them were indeed the days↑
19. Once they'd done that to the satisfaction of the Jump Master they would have to actually jump with three parachutes. They would open the first, cut it away, fall free on their backs and mime deploying the belly 'chute then turn over and actually deploy their second main 'chute↑
20. Where any movement of the limbs causes movement of the whole body in numerous ways↑
21. Which was how I knew my exit was good and I wasn't tumbling↑
22. Both on, laces fastened, not filled with wee↑
23. And is probably part of the reason there is no longer a place called "Yugoslavia"↑
24. I once saw an Action Man (G.I. Joe) tossed into the air tied to an improvised parachute which turned out to be inadequate to the task of soft-landing the 12-inch mannequin. In my minds eye I see my bounce as about the same as that experienced by the unfortunate doll when scale is accounted for↑
25. Downwind from the rest of the canopy↑
26. I remain inordinately proud of this to this day. I got out of the plane under my own steam when requested to do so, and was properly stable for the entire time the parachute was deploying. Job done↑
27. The lifts cost quite a bit, and you had to be insured for each jump which was another expense, but I was entitled to six lifts in a given time so I wouldn't be paying any more for a second jump, at least not as far as money was concerned↑
28. Show offs↑
29. The size of a Florin or Two-Shilling piece↑

Alone At Last, Part 1

Thursday happened.

I rose to the tintinnabulation of the Women de Famile Stevie making ready to cast off for the shores of the Magic Kingdom with the usual good grace, punctuated by vile epithets and threats on the one hand and strident claims of innocence/hurrying/whatever would shut down the vile epithets and threats quickest on the other.

Ah, the joys of family life. It only seems like yesterday that I was witness to that most wondrous of life's mysteries: the simultaneous onset of puberty and menopause, the lot of those who start families later in life and stick around to see how it all works out. Oh how I looked forward to coming home after a day of being screamed at by co-workers.

I tried to remain above it all by burrowing into the bed and stuffing pillows into my ears, but Mrs Stevie became aware that someone wasn't getting into the holiday spirit and demanded I rise and shine with the rest of the world (as typified by the contents of the timeshare villa).

I took a quick inventory. Two women, bright red from anaerobic shrieking: check. Boyfriend somewhere under the busby that passes for his hairstyle, nimbly managing to stay out of either of their zones of control: Check. Something was missing. A second brief inventory of personnel was no more help in dispelling the feeling that I was missing someone.

"Stop standing around like a great useless lummox and help!" yelled my darling.

There it was: the punchbag-cum-money-fountain formerly known as "You idiot". All present and correct then.

Now a newcomer to the business of marital bliss might have made a classic mistake at this point by saying something like "What would you like me to do?" or the even worse "How can I help?"

Of course everyone with more than two years service under their belts will recognize the first as the bait for the "Anything would be better than standing round doing nothing, I don't know why I bother sometimes you insensitive bastard, my mother was right about you" rant that never goes anywhere good. The second is a more subtle trap, one designed to play on any feelings of guilt the spouse may have left in them, and inevitably ends up leaving the baited one feeling angry and hostile for hours afterwards.

I have managed over the years to expunge all feelings of guilt from my body, even those left by the most egregious "transgressions¹" enacted against the interests of Mrs Stevie over the two hundred years or so that we've been married. Even the time I inadvertently dropped a forty year-old Norwegian Maple on her is now, in the light of passing years, remembered simply as the unavoidable and entirely accidental result of insect perfidy and unobservable wood rot rather than a deliberate attempt to jump directly to the "us do part" clause in our contract of bondage as she would have it at the time.

Besides, I had intended for the tree to fall the other way and by doing so remove a small flower bed that we were in dispute over. Had I been trying to drop the bloody thing into the driveway I would a) have arranged a better plan that didn't involve split second synchronization with her parking in the driveway² and 2) removed the new-ish chainlink fence from the path of mutinous arboreal destruction.

In any case, it missed both her and the car.

Where was I? Oh right.

Sadly for Mrs Stevie I have trained my ears to recognize the start of both phrases and was thus able to make myself unavailable by ducking into the bathroom until they had left and gone away. I adopted my usual garb when on my own by removing every stitch of clothing, there being no good reason to make more laundry for myself when all I planned was sleeping, lounging and sleeping, and walked out into the living room.

"Good morning sir!"

I had forgotten about The Boyfriend, who had waited until I had walked past and was therefore behind me when he spoke.

"Argh!" I agreed, leaping several feet into the air in a display of improvised British athleticism designed to confound and amaze the colonial eye, and returned to the bedroom to put back on my clothes.

"That is an interesting tattoo you have on your right buttock, sir" the lad opined through the door as I hopped about madly trying to get my trouser legs to match my actual legs.

"Not a tattoo" I replied. "More of an embossing, really"

"Really? Radical! Who is the woman?" he said in tones of wonder

"The Queen" I replied

"I didn't know they had any women in the band. I'm not really a fan of their stuff myself"

"Not Queen, The Queen. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Great Britain, defender of the faith, et cetera et cetera."

"Wow! You must be a really loyal fan! But isn't it treason of the most mutinous stripe to depict the sovereign on one's buttock? Where did you get it done? I've never heard of embossing human flesh before. How do they do it?" His excitement was palpable.

"Not really. Yes, it probably is. A field in Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire. You do it by ... look, I'll tell you over breakfast if you'll drive us to a diner and you promise not to talk about my buttocks to anyone. Ever."

"Deal!"

And so, once we had ensconced ourselves in a diner made quiet by everyone else having gone to Disney, and once breakfast had been served and I had coffee and eggs and bacon and sausage and hash browns and all the other things I like but have forgotten to mention in front of me, I told the tale of The Parachuting Fiasco.

continued in the next entry

1. Per Mrs Stevie↑
2. Why she believes this is beyond me. She knows from the two years we had a mountain of topsoil in the driveway that I can barely manage simple solid geometry. The calculus required to enact the ambush she believes I had arranged for her return from Starbux was, even then, beyond me without serious application of strong drink, and that would have precluded the use of the chain saw. Q.E.2.↑