Things I’ve done that you (probably) haven’t
I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.
Gavin and I got talking about things we’ve done that other people probably haven’t. Gavin joined the Parachute Regiment to fight in Afghanistan.
Here’s a stream-of-consciousness list of some stuff I’ve done that you probably haven’t.
I left school and left home at 16.
I have evacuated from a burning building.
I have fired an anti-aircraft gun.
I’ve emigrated multiple times. Four countries. Three states. 13 cities.
I slipped off the bridge of a ship and narrowly missed hitting my head on the ship’s side.
I was invited to a funeral by the Most Beautiful Girl in Moorea, French Polynesia.
I’ve been caned once, slippered twice and beaten around the head by a teacher half a dozen times.
I jumped off Bournemouth Pier onto the beach while my mum wasn’t looking.
I loaded and fired 300 shells from the 4.5in gun on my ship. The shells weighed 72lbs each.
I’ve met the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Bill Gates. I scratched Prince Andrew’s car
When I was 10, I rescued a little boy who was floating face-down in the swimming pool while his parents enjoyed the evening entertainment at Pontins. When I delivered their almost-drowned six-year-old to their table, they bought me a Coca-Cola and a packet of crisps.
I fired a torpedo from a Polaris submarine.
I have a titanium plate in my skull.
I was chased by a fur seal in South Georgia.
I drank 34 drinks at my leaving party when I left the Navy (rule: no two drinks the same colour).
I was CEO of a Silicon Valley startup.
I was at the Live Aid concert at Wembley.
I have ridden a horse bareback into the Pacific Ocean.
I flew out of the side of the half-pipe at Squaw Valley on a snowboard and landed on my arse. I’m still suffering.
I won a silver medal in the London Area Sea Cadet regatta.
I once learned to recite the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I saw a German girl get bitten on the bottom by a sunfish while swimming on the Great Barrier Reef. She thought it was me.
Five minutes later, I thought I was being bitten on the bottom by a sunfish, but it was that German girl getting her revenge.
I was arrested by the police as a teenager for scrumping.
I took my girlfriend to Saturday Morning Pictures on the bus every Saturday when we were eight. She was crowned Miss ABC Cinema by the Prime Minister, Ted Heath.
I’ve swum with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef.
When my parents divorced, my mother married the next-door neighbour. So did my father.
I paid tribute to Sir Earnest Shackleton at his grave in Grytviken, South Georgia.
I attended a meeting at the White House with Vice President Biden.
I watched The Rocky Horror Show on stage wearing French knickers, stockings, suspenders and a camisole.
I ran out of money in Tahiti and survived for three days on mangos & coconuts straight from the tree.
My team won a Duke’s Choice Award, a Jolt Award and InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award for best new Java software.
I brew mead, cider, wine and beer in my garage.
I was in the fire-fighting team on a nuclear submarine. Lots of fires!
The gendarmes on Raiatea violently objected to where I pitched my tent and took me to see the Mayor, who suggested somewhere more legal.
I walked 50 miles barefoot through the Burmese jungle because I lost a shoe getting off the bus.
I did A-level maths in 6 weeks.
I slept on Waterloo Station when I missed the last train home after lots of beer at The Goose and Firkin. I was woken by a policeman’s boot at 5 AM.
I was chased by a Komodo dragon in Komodo. He didn’t catch us.
I’ve been on the cover of a magazine.
I proposed over the phone and got married on the beach in Jamaica 10 weeks later. Still married 33 years later.
I made a bomb from magnesium dust and homemade gunpowder with a friend when we were 14. Our injuries were not too severe.
I was at the infamous Sozzlehurst and Hiccup party that made the front page of every newspaper in the land. I danced with Jo, who became my girlfriend for the next three years.
I ran out of money in Flores, Indonesia and persuaded the airline to let me fly to another island for free and pay at the other end.
I slept on the beach for a week on Bora Bora, French Polynesia.
I ate crushed beetles with chilli for dinner in the jungle in Thailand. We followed it with fresh honey straight from the nest.
I slid down the metal strip between the escalators at Waterloo Underground Station. It didn’t end well.
My ship was buzzed by a hostile Argentinian jet near the Falklands. We were ready to fire if it came too close.
I was mugged in Amsterdam. Big knife!
I almost tripped over an elephant seal on South Georgia.
I took off on a tiny plane from a short runway at the edge of a cliff. We used the fall to pick up enough speed to fly. Wheeeee!
I went to London on a Red Bus Rover for the day with my next-door neighbour when I was 10, and he was 8. We went to St James’ Park, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Street and Hamleys.
I snuck into Burma (twice) when the border was still closed.
I danced naked in a shopping centre with 40 of my closest friends.
I was responsible, as a 21-year-old petty officer, for most of the sonar systems on a Polaris nuclear submarine.
I climbed to the Top of the Rock in Gibraltar. A Barbary Ape stole my camera.
I rode an elephant through the Burmese jungle.
I was banned from all four pubs in Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands.
I rode a freshly made bamboo raft down a river in Thailand.
I got snowed in for a weekend in Lake Tahoe and for a week in Manhattan.
I was the only member of Greenpeace on my nuclear submarine.
I won a gold medal in a London area shooting competition.
I held the hand of my love as she died.
Details available on request.
Philosophical Unruliness
I listened to an interview on BloggingHeads.tv where philosopher Agnes Callard explained the concept of unruliness to Robert Wright.
I am more open and risk-taking than other people. I’m sort of seeing more possibilities of what to do.
Even just when I walk down the street, and if there’s a little ledge, I’ll tend to walk on the ledge because it’s more fun. And I notice other people don’t do that.
The fact that I walk on the ledges and other people just walk on the sidewalk. It’s fun. When I walk down the street, sometimes I skip, sometimes I dance. I’ve noticed other people don’t do that. So I get to have more fun than other people, because I’m seizing these possibilities that are there.
Callard decided to become a philosopher to rein in some of her wilder instincts. Maybe I should try that next.
I’m writing down some memories.
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It won’t make me rich but it’ll make me happy.
(I promise I won’t spend it on beer!)
Wow, that’s quite some list. I see there are many (many) stories yet to be told.
Hey, I walk on curbs. Would that be the same as ledges? Park service person trims tree, so the branches aren’t in my way.
It was amusing to read the reactions to this and the many ways that it could be misinterpreted by people who were determined to misinterpret it.
The most common misinterpretations were:
The funniest thing was to read the dismissals by the accomplished young men who comment on Marginal Revolution and have (no doubt) seen a few things themselves.
These same young men had a lot of advice to give to the young woman who had the misfortune to be featured at the top of Tyler’s list of interesting links after asking for dating advice on Reddit.
Not that I owe anyone an explanation but my list came as a stream-of-consciousness walk through my memories after a beer at the pub with a friend. I wasn’t trying to claim that my life was better than anyone else’s — just that it has been different.
My favourite response came in a blog called Applied Divinity Studies.
ADS contrasted my list of experiences with an article on The Art Of Manliness about how people don’t have experiences like mine anymore. Especially not Millennials.
The AoM article lists a bunch of celebrities from a generation or two before mine and notices that many of them had a start in life that is barely credible today.
ADS summarizes:
AoM compares this with the experiences of the Millenial generation:
ADS gets a bit defensive at this but I think AoM has a real point: up until about 30 years ago, smart people had options at the end of high school that didn’t involve spending 4 years at college followed by 30 years climbing the greasy pole. Some of those options could lead to interesting life experiences and they didn’t close any doors to future success. Millennials feel that they no longer have those options. My daughter even told me that, for someone of her generation, university is pretty much compulsory or your life is screwed. I don’t think she is right but this is about perceptions not right or wrong views.
Applied Divinity Studies compares my experiences to the ones that Millennials are missing out on. I thought his observations were thoughtful and they made me reflect.
That made me laugh out loud!
This comment made me smile, all crinkly in the corners of my mouth. It’s completely wrong, of course, but it made me imagine myself as the kind of person that ADS imagined I might be.
Sounds like an exceptional life. I have a tiny fraction of that on my own ledger:
Like you, I left home at 16.
I was briefly homeless at the age of 16, while working at an overnight job to keep off the streets while sleeping in a library during the day.
Spent a month living on a Georgia commune and helped build houses with Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity while there.
Volunteered for a month to live in a community Center in a poor urban community where we performed services for the community.
Wrote a computer program to help enforce a major civil rights consent decree that put 2000 new clean fuel buses on the streets of Los Angeles.
Patented an AI-based algorithm for interactive screen layout of a set of display elements.
Hi Lou! Thanks for stopping by!
I think most people would benefit from living a little before getting on the school-college-career treadmill. Check out The Art of Manliness in my reply to Janet.
Happening upon your blog is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in months. Re: this post, I think the spread of multinational corporations, the rise of international travel, and the movement of ideas from one part of the country or world to another via electronic media has made it easy to not have as many unique or remarkable experiences as you might have had before no matter where you go. I’m not saying there aren’t interesting things happening everywhere, just that the path of least resistance for most people I know often leads to a meal in a franchise restaurant instead of a local tavern, a room at a chain hotel instead of a little-known inn, an evening spent scrolling on the phone or watching TV series on Netflix or playing online games instead of going out and mingling with the locals. Precious little material for interesting stories there! When I was a child, my family moved a lot between several different countries, I went to 12 different schools in 12 years, and we had no means of communicating with family and friends in the US or in the other places we had lived but those blue “aerogramme” airmail letters. Globalization of the economy and the availability of (not only)US corporations’ products and media products around the world, then the internet and easy “keeping in touch with what’s going on back home and everywhere else” have led to enough homogenization of and indirect exposure to different cultures that many travel tales or stories about “when I was a kid” I hear from my friends and acquaintances under 50 are not that interesting. When your family’s big road trip means staying at Comfort Inn in every town and eating at McDonalds or Denny’s…well, you see what I mean. And those I tell about my life as an adult are not either…but the wild things that happened when I was a kid? People ask me to repeat those stories LOL. (BTW you’ve done many more interesting things in your life than I have–fascinating stuff, would love more details!)
Totally agree, Janet. I do think things have changed with the homogenization of the world. I spent a year backpacking around the world in my youth and I’m scared to go back to all those places now because I know that they all will just look like “Miami with a backdrop”. Back then, everywhere was an adventure. Order chicken and they give you pigeon because they are out of chicken. Now they’d get a bad review on Yelp.
Also agree on the lack of opportunity/desire for adventure among the younger set. I was in a pub a little while ago and met two dudes, one young and one older, who worked on a building site. The older dude and I took it in turn to tell stories of walking across Australia or riding on the outside of a bus for 150 miles in Thailand because the bus was full. The younger dude just refused to believe that those things were even possible.
I think a lot of it is down to openness to experience. Talk to random people in a pub or up a mountain or in a boat and adventures will happen. Young folks have never learned how to do that. Maybe it was all the lessons about Stranger Danger in the 80s?
Checkout what The Art of Manliness had to say about the difference between the generations:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/the-least-interesting-generation/
It amuses me that you’re one of the most intelligent people I know, so many wonderful stories and knowledge to share, yet you lost a shoe getting off a bus ?
I had been walking barefoot for a few months by then and I carried my espadrilles in my pocket for just-in-case but one fell out of my pocket on the bus. I tried making shoes out of banana leaves but it didn’t help much.
Improvised shoes!
Dinner Time!
Opium Time!
I added a new thing that you have (probably) not done. I danced naked in a shopping centre with 40 of my closest friends.
I hope to have a list as grandiose as yours someday. I have done well for myself, but you set a high bar.
Couldn’t figure out how to subscribe. (As you know, I’m not technically inclined). Hope this will do it. I’m a woman who’s been aboard a submarine. Okay, just once. My ex- was a submarine officer initially assigned to a diesel fast attack sub out of Groton, CT. Unlike the fleet ballistic missle subs, they were at sea ALL the time unless docked for repair, so there was no telling when they’d surface. Older officer’s wives (the Capt. was 32!) said to keep the wardrobe door closed and if you missed your husband to just open the door and sniff, as laundering did not remove the stench of deisel fuel on khaki uniforms). When in port, they died up next to the sub tender which, for one thing, did their laundry. Without ever having seen it for himself, my husband confidently told me that 3 pieces of equipment were used in this process. One snatched all the buttons off of shirts. One ate one of ea. pr. of socks. (I forget what the 3rd one did.)
Once while in port the wives of the 5 officers were invited aboard, one at a time, to see where it was our spouses spent the majority of their time. I was duly impressed to see that some of the enlisted men’s hammocks were slung under and around torpedos. Although the Capt. had his own cabin, the 4 other officers all slept on shelves in a single cabin, the shelves so close together that it was not possible to stretch out full length and with bend knees one could not turn over. Only one could be out of bed at a time. Since my husband was sonar officer he had to be awakened every time there was some noise detected, much of which apparently was made by shrimp) or some message recv’d. He said he never slept as long as 4 hr. And as luck would have it he didn’t get seasick as did the other 3 ossifers. They were in the No. Atlantic in winter and, as a deisel, riding on the surface most of the time.
They’d strap his binocs to him over his heavy duty sea gear, shove him out into the conning tower and close him in up there w/ the waves crashing down over him. He not infrequently got to enjoy multiple consecutive shifts of this since everyone else was down below barfing.
In my tour, I got to see the various compartment doors that would be consecutively closed in a fire or when the sub had been hit and was taking water or on the ocean floor, w/ the men told to lie down and breathe slowly (yeah, right…..), to apparently maximize the time until everyone in every compartment suffocated. It did not give me a warm fuzzy feeling but did make very real what we ossifers’ wives had been told in an initial briefing when we arrived at the base for our husbands to attend officers school (part of which involved an underwater ascent within a water-filled tower which everyone dreaded; they were to take in a lung full of air within a chamber at the bottom and then slowly ascend, rotating in a circle, slowly blowing out bubbles all the way; in chambers up the sides divers were stationed who would rush out and punch the trainee in the gut if he ever stopped blowing bubbles). This all seemed bad enough, given the ht. of the tower and how long that one inhalation had to support the slow bubble-blowing exhalation before they surfaced and passed that test. But in the same lecture we were told about the sinking of one of our subs in which everyone aboard did what they were told, closing off compartments and lying on the floor, where they all died, as the sub was below the depth where a rescue vessel, even if one were close by, could descend to dock w/ them and rescue the crew. That depth was well below what our husbands had had to prove they could ascend.
I was served coffee that had circulated many times through the percolator and all I could taste besides the extreme bitterness was all I could smell as well, deisel fuel. My husband raved that to keep morale high they ate like kings, steak and eggs, lobster, etc. (with large amounts of the leftovers being jettisoned before they came into port, having been dumped into the sanitary tank and blasted out w/ all the accumulated human waste and shower drainage from that deployment, at taxpayer expense). I imagined the only way they’d know they were eating steak or lobster was by visual confirmation, as it seemed likely that their senses would be saturated by deisel fuel as were mine).
One visit on my part was sufficient.
Welcome to the House of the Clowns, Norma Jean. Lovely to see you!
I also did the escape training for submariners. Ours was 100 feet deep… Everything else was exactly as you described it. One fun fact: if you have to do an escape for reals on an actual submarine, they flood the escape tower so quickly that your eardrums burst and you arrive at the surface happy to be alive, but deaf!
The shrimp that your husband heard are known as “snapping shrimp”, he probably heard carpenter fish (sound like someone sawing wood) and underwater pigs (dolphins) too. The occasional whale song is quite magical!
One of the blessings of being on a nuclear submarine is that it doesn’t stink of diesel. Another is the almost endless quantities of hot, fresh water for showers etc. I was told by my diesel boat colleagues that no one is allowed to wash except (occasionally) hands and face while on patrol. Also no water for washing plates so, after eating, you would wipe your plate clean with bread before giving it to the next person.
My step brother and sister, Matt & Ellie, visited yesterday. We established that Matt was implicated in no less than six of these crazy things and we thought of at least 5 more things that should have been on my list. Growing up on a council estate was fun!
Glad you three got together after so long. Probably good you didn’t continue getting together frequently over the decades, as it didn’t sound as though you and Matt were the best possible influences on ea. other, at least if you wanted to survive beyond adolescence.
Okay, for benefit of us colonists, what’s a council estate?
A housing project. Government-provided social housing.
Mrs Clown does a lot ‘tv extras’ work, appearing in movies and TV shows as ‘passerby #3’ or ‘2nd assistant nurse’.
She had one call to appear in a show that was set on an estate and she went all dressed in fancy clothes because she thought estates were where the rich people lived. Nope. Estates are where the poor people live.
I have just discovered this post and read the accompanying articles. When I graduated from university I went off back-packing in east Africa for eight weeks and simply left my mother a poste restate address in Namibia. I remember being on the back of a truck and kids waving and jumping up and down in their excitement at seeing someone foreign. I loved it and have been travelling as far and as often as I can ever since. But I miss those early days. Travel is too easy now. It’s lost that sense of adventure where you don’t know where you’re stopping for the night or what you’ll find to eat and negotiations are done with hand waving, pointing and a stick in the sand. I’m sure it’s still there at the edges, but maybe I’ve stopped looking?
Astounding list! I can relate to some things directly and other parts leave me struck with awe and wonder… The blog is an inspiration to keep writing. And to keep going.
thanks and best wishes
Dave F.