[jambutty]

Years ago as a kid, during my naval career and for many years afterwards I could climb the heights without a single bad thought in my head. 600 feet up a land based radio mast at HMS Inskip near Preston is my highest achievement. I’ve stood on the very edge of Table Mountain and looked down without any effects.

Today I get an awful feeling looking down from a high rise flat window but I can look out into the distance OK. The best that I can manage now is looking down from a bedroom window of a normal house.

I recently watched Paul Merton’s programme about silent films and when Harold Lloyd’s clock hanging was shown and a guy climbing up a skyscraper I got that awful feeling in my guts. The same happens when I watch a film that has people climbing mountains or hanging off skyscrapers etc.

But I would probably manage that skywalk just as long as I didn’t look down. But then that would defeat the object of the exercise, wouldn’t it?

If it gives the native Americans a better standard of living then I am all for it.

Just one other point - once you get above about 100 feet and fall onto somewthing hard, you are the same strawberry jam as if you had fallen from 4,000 feet. Hopefully from such a height you would be unconsious long before you splattered on the deck. It’s not the distance that you fall but the sudden stop at the end that does the damage.

The definition of an optimist - An optimist is some who, whilst falling thousands of feet, reassures himself with, “so far so good.”