I Didn’t Soil Myself: A Triumph of the Human Spirit

With video proof

‘I hope I don’t shit myself.’

I’d forgotten to bring a spare pair of trousers.

I was far more concerned ab

out embarrassment on the bungee jump than I was about coming to harm. A small crowd had formed around the crane - including my wife, son and sister-in-law - craning their necks and taking photos. Paralysis or a brain injury, I could live with.

There, a hundred and sixty feet in the air, London swayed beneath me, every detail etched minutely below. There was nothing abstract about this. This wasn’t skydiving, up in the clouds - this was real life, concrete and hard and ready to kick me in the teeth. I teetered millimetres at a time towards the cage’s edge. There was no gate; nothing. The air drew colder as the unreal void pulled me closer. With every shuffle and tremble I felt the massive weight of my body screaming to be pulled back to earth. My toes reached the edge of the precipice, my body froze, my hands gripping the railing like iron.

Oh God, oh God, I can’t believe it. I wonder what happen now if I just said I didn’t want to? Oooooooh, oh God, I’m going to do it.

‘I can see you’re not going to do it,’ sighed the guy. ‘Right. I’m going to push you.’

‘Don’t resist,’ he said, as if he were an American patrolman from the deep south. With an expert application of pressure to the thoracic vertebrae (i.e., a shove), he dispatched me as dispassionately as a chain smoking meat packer performing his grim rota at the local abattoir.

The worst part was the fall.

Falling, twisting, spinning, bouncing. No up or down. No place. Where? No control. Absolute loss. Bending, struggling. Good core workout. Floating.

The second-worst part was the dangling.

Once the rush was over, I had to droop like a fish on a hook. I’d been controlling my breathing – I didn’t want to embarrass myself by screaming or being sick – and gripping my arms for safety, as if that would help. But my shirt had slipped, revealing my pallid, flabby belly for the onlookers, as I was gently winched onto a safety mat, like some kind of poorly walrus at the zoo. Passersby gawked and giggled. I still had my dignity.

You were hoping I’d shit myself, weren’t you? Well, I didn’t. I know they say you shouldn’t introduce a gun in the first act / talk about shitting yourself at the start of a story, unless you shoot it in the third act / have actually shit yourself by the end of said story, but I just didn’t do it, sorry, and nothing the many onlookers or St John’s Ambulance volunteers can say can convince me otherwise.

In conclusion, I jumped / was pushed from a ledge attached to a piece of elastic and that was exactly how you’d imagine it to be. I don’t have anything else to say about it and I resent you for making me write it up, if I’m honest.