The true and sometimes hilarious encounters from a lifetime of travel, flying, the military, fascination with nature, things that go bang and situations that just need a little encouragement to be tipped over the edge.
The birth of a new career and its instant demise on the first hour of the first day.
“You want to cut a good impression when it’s your first day on the job.
My ego armour was strong and I felt an air of impenetrability hanging around me. My inner critic allowed me a little slack so that pride and autonomy could float to the surface.
But not for too long; it turns out that my rope wasn’t that loose.
Oct 1981 hosted not only the first day on the job, but my first day to mark a brand new sixteen year career as one of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force Pilots.
It was never going to go well.” more…
When twelve tarantulas escaped from my bedroom in a military dormitory in the jungles of Belize, the result threatened more than my safety.
“Jim found it hard to sleep at nights knowing that a hungry family of the worst of the worst huddled together in a makeshift prison just a few metres away from his pillow, and were all very keen to get free in the dead of the night and scamper in all directions in the search for freedom and food. Possibly even tasty human fingers, ears and eyes to liquefy with toxic flesh-digesting venom and then suck and gorge on the resulting mush.
He quaked at the thought, but he had no choice but to be there in the thick of the jungle. Ships were more sterile places, but the naval postings officer saw fit to send Jim to three months detention in a living zoo of everything he hated.” more …
“Near Death in a Puma Helicopter”
Doing what we weren’t weren’t supposed to do in the RAF was one of my personal specialities.
Doing something that a helicopter couldn’t do was just crass stupidity.
There was nothing on the clock but the maker’s name.
It’s a euphemism for flying so low in an aircraft that the altimeter doesn’t register any height. The experience is pretty hairy if it’s planned, but if it isn’t planned then it’s the time that imminent destruction is calling.
There would have been nothing on the clock but the makers name if I had the wherewithal to look at it, but in this instance my world was a haze of brown and green as we hurtled past trees and bushes at root level, in a thrashing of noise, metal and vibration.
I was in temporarily in that a world where everything slows down. An internal scream of “NOOOOOOOOO” shouted silently through my head, strangled by the shock and disbelief of an impending death through my own crass stupidity and downright overzealousness.
I had certainly over-cooked this manoeuvre. more...
Image by asier_relampagoestudio on Freepik
How the innocence of youth became a horror of adulthood.
Another true story.
I was an innocent seven-year-old that knew nothing about women’s sanitary products. You wouldn’t expect me to, surely?
But as you would expect, my female teachers did. Privately and quietly, they knew what was what, and what what was for, if you follow me.
I suffered bad nose bleeds. Sometimes they would go on for an hour or more. It was just one of those things of growing up. I had nose bleeds. End of story.
Sort of end of story. Some might know the end already. more…
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