If you live life in fear then you dont live life (Most Frightening Moments)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Most Frightening Moments
Date:	13/12/08 (187 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Im still here

Disadvantages: Three more to come

I was pretty good runner in the 1980s and determined to be Olympic middle-distance standard. But it was not to be and my one appearance on Grandstand in lane 8 was the start and finish of my TV athletics career. I was only ever going be county standard and so needed a new challenge to find the buzz I was losing with every mile in the winter training in the rain and snow.
Some serious traveling would be the answer. In the 1990s I went pretty much everywhere that my budget from dead end jobs would take me, which means one would get in a few scrapes at times and end up in places you really shouldn't, including a minefield in Botswana and some Italian twin sister's bedroom in Mexico, the boyfriend of one of them just returning from work and soon waving a knife at me, but neither of those scary enough to make my list below of bad memories when I used up most of my nine lives. Mums and Dads are right to be worried when Ben and Sophie have a year out from university. Traveling is all about trying new experiences, however daring. We don't half push it guys! These are six moments in my life where it could have been me in that innocuous small coffin shaped paragraph in the local paper...

-Miami-
(1999)

For some reason I tended to end up in South Beach, Miami on my various backpacking trips and not leave for quite a while, mainly because it's such a laid back and glamorous place, not full of leery Brits, just the beautiful people. When your there it feels like all of Americas models and actresses not working are there to top up their tans all winter, the beaches packed with unbelievably beautiful women. Miami is Americas Brighton and so full of gay people and so it means all the women are available. They are always making big movies down there and you can literally mix with those stars on the iconic and somewhat kitsch 'Ocean Drive', easily America's most star studied street. In one night alone I saw Al Pacino, Elton John and Rupert Everett. In fact 'Rupe' was my next door neighbor for a bit, his house three doors from the Clay Hotel, the big backpacker's hostel down there. I even lent him my International Telegraph one day to catch up with news from home. You should read his autobiography for Christmas; it's really very good.

My life threatening experience in this incredibly sexy place was rather pathetic, really, if you consider the threat zone it isn't, A.I.D.s probably the only thing that can take you in your prime there. After wading out in an unusually rough sea, the waves about three feet high (which isn't high), I got caught in a rip tide in the late evening. The beach is not known for rip currents and big surf but after the big Caribbean storms have passed the under current tends to rearrange the bottom of the sea and make sand backs, meaning that sea water comes in tends to run out between the sand banks below the frothy surf. If you're in the gaps when the waters gushing out then you are in trouble, especially if the waves break on your head, as was the case with me. I knew it was bad because I was an experienced athlete with strong thighs and even I was struggling to move towards the shore, the water racing around my legs and ankles with such force like I was trying to walk away from the edge of the Niagara Falls or something, all very odd and alarming. When you realize you can't go forward it dawns on you the only way now is backwards, into the waves, out to sea. By now your panicking and swallowing sea water to the point of dizziness, confused why the water is doing what its doing down there, to vain to shout for help. I mean how can it be possible for the sea water to go the other way so fast? After 15 minutes of this I decided to use my last ounces of energy to edge sideways and luckily found one of those sand banks to slowly edge up, but still battling the now swirling current, finally getting out of the pickle an exhausted wreck, staggering out of the water like the gullible tourist I was. I was pretty close to drowning that day and now rarely swim out in the big surf when I think the sand below is uneven.

-Houston International-
(1995)

On my first real trip to America, this time going coast-to-coast for 6 months, the return flight to London from L.A stopped off in Houston-Texas to pick up more passengers. Now anyone who has flown Continental Airlines will know that's never a straight forward experience. On our first approach to the runway you could see violent thunderstorms each side of the airport, the hot air between, silent, shimmering and deadly, the wings shaking in anticipation for what was to come. Once we hit the bad air the plane went up and down violently, followed by our stomachs and then lunch, the plane desperate to hold a straight line as the violent micro blasts tried hard to push the plane into the dust, the pilot applying maximum engine thrust to pull us up as we went around again for another crack. This time the wheels did touch the ground, a reasonable bump and reassuring, but hard enough to fray the last of the ice cool passenger nerves. Alas we were only on the ground for a few seconds, the engines again at full rev as we left the ground in a serious hurry, the Airbus A300 turning violently to the left, the wings tips knocking the bugs off the long grass, our faces pressed up to the only bit of the plane they hadn't been so far. As we found some safe altitude the pilot then announced that 'there was a plane on the end of the runway' and we had to take evasive action. Then this fat Texan stood up and shouted: 'Jeez, this happened last week...' Needles to say I didn't travel with Continental again. I later discovered it carried on to London with a burst tire!

-Littlewoods Northampton Store-
(1994)

So how can you nearly die in a department store in Northampton? (No I wasn't half-strangled by a bra strap sniffing the underwear). Well you can if the refit isn't quite finished yet and you are an employee working in an unsafe building site that's never going to be ready for the opening...
I was working for the store when it first opened in Northampton, employed as the goods-in guy, was building up some money to go traveling to end up on that Continental flight. The builders were under pressure to get it done and so were bypassing health & safety, as you do, including leaving a big hole in the floor on the loading bay where stock was arriving. Around that hole was rubble and on the floor below was rubble, meaning the whole could only be highlighted by some feeble yellow hazard tape, now the color of the dusty rubble, which muggings here stepped back into and then down into. Luckily I plunged at an angle, my rib cage and then my elbow stopping the fatal fall onto the debris below, which includes broken glass, those steel supports you get in concrete and all manner of crap - in a wheelchair for life at best if I landed back or head first some twenty feet below. The impact of the rim of the whole saved my ass, knocking the wind out of me and smashing two ribs. I feinted on the bus on the way home and my GP refused to send me to hospital for an X-Ray the next day at her surgery. I went on my own accord, feinted again, saw my X-Ray and had two weeks off work with those now diagnosed busted ribs. Today that would be a compensation claim and a nice pay out. But for me I was made to feel guilty on my return to work by the mangers and they tried to fire me through constructive dismissal. I learnt lesson that day that your life's more important than work. Three months later I was living with a sexy California girl in one of those Malibu beach houses with a hot tub and her hotter body, karma indeed...

-Hillsboro-
(1987)

I wasn't at Hillsboro but all footballs fans in the 70s and 80s who went to big matches in crumbling hooligan ridden grounds were only a fag end away from another Leppings Lane disaster. You were always at the peril of the crush and football fans had been in a few unreported near fatal ones in that decade, I can tall you. You move the way the crowd sways and that's the end of it, even if you got to the grounds early to avoid the chaos. I nearly got crushed at one game in particular at Leeds united and it was the last big game I went to after seeing those images ay Hillsboro. That could have been me. It could have been any football fan back then.

I couldn't get those images out of my mind of families crushed against the wire for a long time, the life draining out of them in front of our eyes. My work mate had been at the Bradford City fire and it seemed like the devil was at play with British football. Just as the people wanted to blame the social workers over Baby P`s death, the people of Liverpool were all too keen to blame the police and the authorities for Hillsborough. That moral self-indulgent stand by Scouscers made me angry at the time as the Liverpool fans at the back of that stand, fairly drunk and, as per usual, arriving late to push their way to the back of the stand after one too many beers, were the same thugs that wouldn't think twice about attacking the police in other grounds that were always undermanned and outnumbered at big games and now dragging them out of the crush to breathe again. The worst thing of all about Hillsboro was it was the good people who got crushed, people who had arrived early and sober and deliberately stood away from the thugs near the front. A chunk of that crowd that day that were drunk and pushing at the back have never apologized for their part in the slaughter, probably the same people who won't buy the Sun in Liverpool because of that festering guilt. Fortunately seating has saved another disaster from happening here and those images won't thankfully happen again. I think football changed forever in the west after that and the working man surrendered the game to the middle-class because we proved we couldn't be trusted with the beautiful game.

-Northampton-
(1983)

They tell you speed kills, but in most cases its driver error, 80% of all car accidents happening below 20mph, the towns and cities statistically where cars, trucks and vans come into contact with people and each other the most. In the summer of 1983 I came into contact with one such car, and nearly a van and a lorry for good measure, taking a trip up and over the bonnet and roof and landed on my head, inches away from an articulated lorries big fat wheel on the other side of the Ford Escort. I still recall the plates of all three vehicles involved it freaked me out that much. Rather ironically it was a district nurse who took me out that thump, but because she was in the right on a strange roundabout where you give way to the left, she felt that was excuse enough to carry on her journey to work after checking I was ok from her rolled down window. Apart from my badly cut nut and broken pinky, I managed to pull my twisted bike from beneath the lorry wheel and carry it home to my anguished mum. If you're going to have you one and only car crash then its best to have it young.

London
(1974)

My first school trip was to the Tower of London in my very smart blazer and short trousers, barely five years old. For some reason the only memories that are still vivid of that trip are the ones outside the tower, the giant black ravens that hop around alongside the proud and exotic Beefeater Guards, supposedly protecting the tower from intruders, still in my head. If you have never seen a Raven close up they are very big and extremely demonic looking for birds, as big as a six-year-old kid in short trousers, the devils guardians for sure on this planet. I can still remember the way they stared at me that day, as if they knew what was coming.

Our tour around the towers was fortunately booked for the morning. I don't remember much of the day accept that my mum was very worried when I got home. In the afternoon the IRA blew up the Tower of London gift shop and exhibition room, the bomb hidden behind the historic cannons, as if the cannon had been aimed at the Tower itself and fired, badly injuring 41 people, including one fatality, two small children amongst the seriously injured. I think I was very lucky that day and the Ravens wanted to tell me people from Ireland wanted me gone. I have never visited Ireland for my holidays or on my travels and have no intention to since. How could anyone target kids?

Summary: Six degreess of near seperation..