Excitement

Nowadays, I live a rather dull life, but I’ve had my share of excitement.  Sometimes it seems rather as though I’ve had more than my fair share.  For example, many years ago I spent some time in East Africa.  It wasn’t a long time, but it was long enough to be chased by several highly irritable members of the rhinoceros family.  Not only that, there was the buffalo which decided that he didn’t care for a gun being waved in his direction, and encircled the hunting party to come up from behind.  An African buffalo in a bad temper, it has to be understood, makes your average elk look like a domestic pet.

It was about that time that I lived for two years in what is now known as South Yemen, in a town called Aden.  It was in that place that I climbed up the outer slopes of an ancient volcano.  There was an easier route on the inside, with steps laid down for the faint hearted, but with a sublime English disregard for authority, the party I was with took the harder way.  One of my companions developed severe heat exhaustion and had to be lifted off the top by a rescue helicopter.  The rest of us trudged wearily back, being attacked on the way by a group of local gunmen, who wanted to know why the British didn’t leave their country.  A very reasonable attitude, I always thought.  Given the opportunity, I would have been the first on the boat home.

Not long after this episode, after my return to England, I was driving by night in a second hand car bought only the day before.  Speed was something well in excess of 140 kilometres an hour when the engine stopped.  To be more exact, the engine burst wide open.  Still, to see little bits of metal glittering in the frosty moonlight for half a kilometre behind me was surely a thing of beauty.

Dare I mention the time when the British Airways flight I was in had to return to Heathrow on one engine, although it had had four perfectly good ones when we took off?  It’s really amazing how many fire engines you can sometimes see at an airport.

Then there was teaching, of which I did several years.  Now that doesn’t sound very dangerous, does it?  I mean, it’s not to be compared with Hemingway in the bull ring or skydiving.  Still, when you know that more of my ex-pupils than I care to think about ended their short criminal careers in prison, some under maximum security for offences which a family newspaper wouldn’t write about, it’s a job that certainly had its moments.

Nowadays, I take my children to places where they can practise their hobbies, and stand around in the cold for hours.  It’s dull, it’s boring, and I wouldn’t change it for a single day of my previous exciting life.