Late this morning I walked round to one of our local children’s playgrounds, accompanied by my number 2 granddaughter (useful for pushing the baby buggy when I got fed up of doing so) and the two youngest grandchildren. The youngest, two and a half and inclined to stop and examine every interesting stick and stone he comes across, rather like a small dog with smells, insisted that he wanted to walk. I decided to go with that, for a while at least, putting off the dread moment when I would need to wrestle a stiff, howling child into the buggy and strap him in with great difficulty. His older sister, by way of a contrast, insisted after maybe 500 yards, that she needed a lift on the buggy board, a device which did not exist when my children were small! The older child just had to walk alongside the buggy holding the younger child.
We finally got to the park, after a stop for a portion of sausage and chips for some of our party who declared themselves to be starving and then admitted to having had no breakfast this morning. Most of our time at the playground was uneventful. Small stick houses were built, the two and a half year old built “castles” - a stick stuck in the sand next to a pile of sand! Then the five year old, quarantined from her reception class because of a stomach upset the night before last, decided we were going to play at ”going to the theatre”.
There is a section of the playground with wooden seating arranged like a mini outdoor theatre. We sat on the top level, eating imaginary popcorn, and after a while the smaller child decided to climb up from the lower level to ours - climbing “steps” almost as big as he is tall. He must have tumbled three or four times, each time picking himself up with a cry of “my okay!”. Kamikaze genes, obviously.
I thought of this when I read this report in the newspaper online later in the day:
“A British Base jumper has died after his parachute failed to open in time during a cliff jump while on holiday with friends in the south of France.
The 34-year-old man succumbed to his injuries at Grenoble university hospital after Tuesday’s accident, according to the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper.”
Anything involving parachutes sounds a little hazardous. So then I had to find out exactly what base jumping is. This is what Wikipedia told me:
“BASE jumping is the recreational sport of jumping from fixed objects, using a parachute to descend safely to the ground. "BASE" is an acronym that stands for four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: buildings, antenna (referring to radio masts), spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs).
Participants exit from a fixed object such as a cliff, and after an optional freefall delay, deploy a parachute to slow their descent and land. A popular form of BASE jumping is wingsuit Base jumping.
In contrast to other forms of parachuting, such as skydiving from airplanes, BASE jumps are performed from fixed objects which are generally at much lower altitudes, and BASE jumpers only carry one parachute. BASE jumping is significantly more hazardous than other forms of parachuting, and is widely considered to be one of the most dangerous extreme sports.”
Why would you do that? I am constantly amazed at the human capacity for finding new and possibly interesting and spectacular ways to put themselves at risk. As if there weren’t enough dangerous things to do accidentally.
Incidentally I discovered that a certain Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have been the first person to build and test a parachute, by jumping from St Mark’s Campanile in Venice In 1617 when over sixty-five years old. However, these and other sporadic incidents were one-time experiments, not the actual systematic pursuit of a new form of parachuting. Rather better that Daedalus and his feather and wax wings for himself and his son the ill fated Icarus but only just!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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