I quite like “aerial” things – looking down at the world from altitude. I spend a lot of time on planes and I like looking down from high buildings. For years, I wanted to fly in a hot air balloon<\/a> and, not so long ago, I did just that. The thing that I have never tried is parachuting. I know that lots of people have jumped out of aircraft, secure in the belief that their parachute will deploy correctly and bring them down to Earth with only a gentle bump. My sister did it a while ago. My soon-to-be step-son has done it lots of times. I just cannot imagine actually stepping out of the back of a plane myself. My current excuse is that it might jolt the previously prolapsed disk in my back and that would be very painful and debilitating.<\/p>\n I did seriously consider parachuting once, long ago. I had just started at university – Bath, England in 1975. I went to the “Freshers’ Fair”, where all the clubs and societies were trying to drum up new members and separate students from their money. I went to chat with the two people from the parachuting club. They told me how wonderful it was – an experience not to be missed. Their charge for a season, which included full training and the first jump, was quite a lot, but was more reasonable than it might have been out in the real world. So, I was interested. But I was still wondering about the safety. I asked the people about their own experiences. The girl admitted that she had not yet made her first jump, but was excited that it would take place in a couple of weeks. The guy was experienced – he had made his first jump the previous term. And he only broke the one ankle.<\/p>\n I moved on and joined the Real Ale Society and have never looked back …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a quote, accredited to a selection of people, including Thomas Beecham, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill: “Try everything…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[302],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-off-topic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10072,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127\/revisions\/10072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3127"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=3127"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=3127"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2012\/06\/nyc-520x520.jpg\")
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