Just returned from a rig-less two day business trip to Istanbul. Wish I'd done my research - big buildings going up everywhere. Does anyone know any jumpers there? I'll be going back in a few weeks time and keen to get on it ...
I dislike how much media get off on saying things like 1 in 6 DIE... Life threatening sport of andrenaline junkies! Secretive communities! (preferably in the voice of someone who'd narrate film adverts with a relatively low voice)...
I'm finally on my way up north from Wednesday next week, and will be spending some time around Edinburgh area if there are any locals that want to hook up for a jump? I spoke to someone a while back about a couple of objects but lost the pm's in the website makeover. Thanks for any and all info.
Cheers,
Olly
04:35 PM
Blackjack is celebrating his first solo flight today, yippee..........
Everyone dies, don't they – but not everyone lives," said Dan, the subject of Alastair Cook's film The Men Who Jump Off Buildings. If you had to devise a bumper sticker to promote suicidal recklessness that would do the trick, wouldn't it? It sounds plausible enough, relegating all those of us too sensible to launch ourselves off the Trellick Tower at four in the morning to mere zombiedom. It's the sort of slogan that you need to see flashing past you in the fast lane, though, because any kind of tailback would give you too much time to question its essential premise. You might, for one thing, want to ask exactly what kind of definition of "living" was proposed here. Dan – compulsively addicted to base jumping – seemed to acknowledge at one point that it was a slightly desperate, compensatory one. "Base jumping gives me enough excitement to carry on with this," he explained, smearing tar on to a roof while doing the job that pays for his parachute. Is that really a life though – in hock to boredom for the occasional 45 seconds of terrifying adrenalin?
The Men Who Jump Off Buildings would have been distinctly dull if it had only been about the falling. It is, I'm sure, a terrifyingly galvanising thing to do, but nonetheless a bit dull to watch from the outside, over in seconds and (barring the odd bone-crunching accident) somewhat repetitive in form. What you jump from might vary – Dan had done Nelson's Column, Wembley Stadium and most of the pointy bits on the London skyline – but the jumps themselves looked a little samey, and tended to be followed by an is-that-it anti-climax, which may be connected to the urgent need to repeat the experience as soon as possible. On good nights, Dan will toss the coin on his continued existence two or even three times. His girlfriend, Tia, who he met while skydiving but who doesn't share his appetite for jabbing death in the nose, understands that she isn't likely to get him to stop anytime soon. And that was what really compelled here – the sense of a man unable to break an addiction to gambling with his own life.
"I will give it up..." said Dan, "I wouldn't say when... hopefully at the right time... because sooner or later it's going to bite me back." Statistics would suggest that it's going to be sooner, since one-in-six base jumpers are forcibly retired from the activity by a fatal accident. Dan's best friend, Neil, died six years ago while climbing a cliff in Thailand for a base jump and his most recent jumping partner, Ian, was still recovering from a horrible accident in Spain when the filming began. Ian, who relishes the foreplay to a leap almost as much as the climactic plummet itself ("It's as close as you can get to being a master criminal without committing any major crimes") recovered his nerve sufficiently to accompany Dan on a base-jumping holiday in Switzerland, where he soon provided another grisly bit of helmet-camera footage of a snarled canopy and a crunching collision with the rocks. It would have been intriguing to know whether the jump Dan made immediately following this accident (he was staring down from the cliff edge above) was even more enlivening than the others he'd made, but the question never got asked. A few hours later, Dan was filming a visit to Ian in the nearby intensive care ward, still all chirpy denial. I reckon he'll make the decision to quit when it's about five seconds too late and he's only got five seconds left in which to regret it.
Good luck Adrian mate, guess your well into the ride by this time! Its amazing considering how you were that day on the hill three years ago. Will never forget it.