Tag: abseiling

thing 21: ‘… not what ships are built for’: abseiling, part (i)

“10.30 Andy climbing wall.” Not an entry I ever expected to see in my diary.

I’ve never wanted to climb, don’t think of myself as physically courageous, and am self-conscious and unconfident about learning new bodily skills. I am, to say the least, physically quite other than the long-fingered, lean, limber types I imagined would find a natural habitat at the climbing wall. W—as the Young People would say—TF? But there it was in my diary; and I’d chosen to put it there. Desperate times, and all that.

When I heard the sponsored abseil was on, I went into a kind of ingrowing hysteria (if there can be (more…)

Things are getting out of hand…

You know that thing where you blithely promise something, knowing it is safely far enough in the future not to feel real, and may perhaps not even happen anyway? Well, here I am, having promised to help my goddaughter’s sister raise some money, and now finding myself with a definite date when I’m going to be doing so. Buying from her stall at the church fair? Yes, done that. Abseiling from the church tower… no. Not so much. And yet, it is happening. And it’s happening next month.

The fact that, in the event of something going catastrophically wrong, I’ll be handily placed for the funeral and committal of my remains is, it turns out, insufficiently comforting. (more…)