Resisting the pull

If you want to feel sick, are a failed bulimic (who can’t make himself sick) or want to learn that you have chosen the wrong career, venture no further than Phil’s http://up2randomthoughts.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/afraid-of-heights

Watch it, preferably before you eat. Or in the middle of the night when your last meal has been digested and there is little further to bring up.

Normally Phil does Opera or dances the Tango. But at least both of those keep your feet on terra firma. What all three [opera, Tango and heights] have in common is the drama of it. Maybe that makes Phil the Drama King to my Drama Queen. On stage. With Mrs Phil in the audience, applauding.

I didn’t watch Phil’s clip. If I want to look down on anything I go and see my bank manager. He is a man of sorrow as, these days, a bank manager has no discretion any longer. No power to make a decision on his own instinct, impervious to any charm offensive.  He is slave to what the computer tells him to tell me. What that does do to his masculinity I have, so far, refused to contemplate. Anyway, that’s his wife’s affair.

So, yes, Phil set me thinking. Thinking being not so much a contact sport as a dangerous pastime.

You do know, don’t you, why most people, even those reluctant to go up the Eiffel Tour or a Pyramid outside Cairo, are perfectly happy to fly? It’s simple. You sit in a capsule. High above the clouds. Removed from reality. Obviously turmoil across the Atlantic will focus your mind as to the possibility of taking more than a nose dive  (though not when having been upgraded to business class and your stewardess keeps filling your glass with champagne till you don’t care about anything any longer).

So that’s all good. However, there is mystery about height when you face it head on without the shell of a Boeing between you and down there. Height has magic. Drawing us to the abyss. Will you jump? Won’t you jump? Height is the devil. If you allow yourself to look down. That’s why, when I go for a walk along the cliffs, I always look at the horizon. Even at the risk of becoming sea sick.

U

Short

Sweethearts, let me throw myself at your collective bosom to bring me comfort: Yesterday I was sinking, today I am SHRINKING.

Had bone density scan this morning as part of which they measure your height. Make that shrinkage. Last time I measured my height, circa 1975, I am sure I stood 166 cm tall (that’s 5 ft 6) or at least that’s what I told the passport office.

Today I am 5 ft 4.5 in (163 cm). I ask you: When did those 3 cm slink off, unnoticed? I can only comfort myself with fact that doctor taking measurement was shorther than me and probably didn’t do it right, or maybe she wasn’t wearing her glasses.  I wonder how soon I’ll be Gulliver in the land of giants. Not that height matters to me. Particularly as, for reasons I don’t hazard to guess, people always think me much taller than I am; particularly when I am sat down.

U

PS Don’t worry about the bones. Rays revealed that I am pretty dense.

PPS   And how SHORT are you? I can see the line up now. Dear god in heaven: Con will be towering above the rest of the herd with GM deliberately sagging at her knees to make herself shorter than U (that’s me). BHB will plead need for wheelchair to beat us all or, if in contrary mood, she might climb on a chair to trump Con. In which case Jean will climb up a ladder. Daphne will fly off to the nearest branch to get a better view. Looney cops out by offering to take group photograph. And Ramana will strike a pose.