Biting your bottom

It's been a long week for me, I've had this damned cold and that has proven to just be a drag. But the week hasn't been without it's moments of joy.

One of them was on Saturday, when I was lurking down at Mechanics Bay in the pre-dawn as part of the ACCC waterfront time trial. I looked out across the bay, and there was a pod of dolphins making their way up the harbour. As a consequence of my cold, my horrible runny nosed infection, I have stayed off the bike, so my tales of cycling for the week are limited.

Instead I reflected upon my life, I suspect having reached another anniversary of being thrust into the world made me a little circumspect also. I started to run through the years and the various adventures, mistakes, calamities and triumphs I have enjoyed and endured. I'm not going to share them with you all, the interior of that dark cupboard is best left unseen, but I will give you a glimpse of what's near the door.

Bailing twine and a chaff sack do not make effective parachutes. My cousin and I were very close, we lived about a kilometre apart in the area of small holdings, dairy farms and horse training tracks to the south of Christchurch. We tended to roam pretty freely, with haysheds, a creek, airguns, ponies, cattle, clod throwing and electric fences as sources of entertainment. One day, after we had tired of trying to make objects fly from the top of my uncle's hay barn, we decided that we would make our own parachute.

Only tools that we had were our omnipresent pocketknives, but resource wise we were rich. There, close at hand, was more bailing twine than we would ever need and a couple of chaff sacks. We set to, carefully knotting the twine into equal length loops off the corners of the chaff sack to form a parachute, measured carefully to allow maximum expansion of the sack as the lucky jumper descended gently to the ground with enough time to admire the view.

The parachute was tested using that venerable method, of running with the sack opening behind, it inflated and slowed the runner well. The important decision had to be made as to who had the honour of jumping and who had the lesser task of holding the parachute clear of the hay as the jumper jumped. Somehow, (and this wasn't usually the case my cousin being older, and although shorter, was stronger and tended to make my nose bleed) I was the lucky one.

We ascended to the top of the hay barn, there all was prepped, and I full of confidence, jumped holding two strands of bailing twine aloft. There was no floating sensation, and certainly no admiring the view. I jumped and the ground came up and hit me immediately, very hard.

After I'd regained normal breathing function and my head stopped pounding we discussed what went wrong, and I advocated a retry with a different victim. My cousin was distinctly unwilling, being quite certain, after seeing me plummet and hearing the thud, that our design was flawed.

I've never tried making a parachute again.