WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

JUMP OUT OF AEROPLANES

IJUMPED from my first aeroplane around 10 years ago, but I didn’t take it up properly until a few years later. It looked like a real challenge. It also scared the living daylights out of me, so I felt it had to be conquered.

There are so many great things about the sport – you get to meet people from all walks of life, the camaraderie, the falling through the sky while pulling faces at your mates, the feeling you’re doing something special. You get to have amazing holidays too – one day you’re at work looking out the window at the sky, the next day you’re somewhere hot hurtling through that same sky. And the parties are legendary.

The best bit is when my parachute opens and I know I’m not going to die.

The worst thing you can do is to have long breaks in between jumping. Some of your initial fears can come rushing back – fears you were able to keep at bay when you were up there on a regular basis. When I haven’t been in the sky for a while, I often think on the plane ride to altitude, “Who packed this parachute for me?”, “Could this be my last jump?” and so on.

When you’re in the air nothing else matters. When you’ve been having a rubbish week at work or have other stresses going on – once you’re out of that door, everything else is completely insignificant.

I don’t practise any kind of ritual before skydiving, but I do have a necklace I won’t jump without. I was visiting a drop zone in Italy a few years back and it fell down the sink hole in the hotel – they had to ask the maintenance man to get it for me before I would go to the drop zone.

I’ve skydived in a lot of places around Europe – Spain, France, Portugal and Italy. I regularly visit a great drop zone in the Lake District called Skydive Northwest. And of course I’ve also jumped in Scotland.

I’ve had my fair share of mishaps. I had to cut away my parachute and open my reserve a couple of times due to a malfunction – not something you want, but good experience and it gets the adrenalin going. Parachutes occasionally don’t open correctly, but most of your training focuses on how to deal with a malfunction. It’s not as big a drama as it sounds.

The worst experience I ever had was when I was learning in the Algarve with friends. I messed up in the sky and ended up having to open my parachute far too high. The upper winds were howling and carried

me quite some distance from where I was supposed to be. I ended up above a housing estate with nowhere to land safely. All I could see were rooftops and power cables. I didn’t realise I knew so many swear words, or that I was religious up until that point. I managed to land in between two blocks of flats. I came screaming in in front of a load of teenagers who were having a few beers in the sun. They had a right good laugh at me, but I was laughing too – from the sheer joy that I wasn’t lying mangled on a rooftop or wrapped around a power line.