So I’m out of bed bright and breezy (ish) at 5am on Saturday morning, only mildly hung over.  We arrive at Langar Airfield in Nottingham just after 8, put our names down and then wait.  The early start wasn’t for nothing; we’re on the first lift! Get some breakfast (is this wise?) and wait a bit – the briefing starts at 9, goes on for about 20 minutes… and it all seems a bit abstract really, I haven’t really processed the thought of what I’m about to do properly, it’s all very interesting like but…

A tall bald guy with a pierced ear shouts out “Who’s S?”, that would be me, “You’re on the first lift with me, we’ll get you suited up straight after this.”

Well at least I know what he looks like now.  I try and gauge how trustworthy he is (with my life like) by looking at him, but it’s very difficult to judge that sort of thing at first glance.  Ah well.  The briefing finishes – it all sounds very simple, do what you’re told when you’re told it, bend your knees to land – and I have to go to the loo.  I go, I come back, my instructor’s shouting “S.  Can we get on with it please?”  Fab, I’ve already pissed off the guy I’m about to plummet to the earth strapped to.  He seems quite hard, makes jokes about how he finds it difficult to believe people place so much trust in complete strangers, I’m not sure this is a good sign.  I get into my jump suit thing (and of course I’ve left my ticket in the back pocket of my jeans, exactly as I was told not to do!) and then the harness.  It’s bright yellow, goes round your arms and your legs, and is reassuringly secure feeling.  The clips by which I will be connected to my instructor (his name is Dave, I think, or possibly Paul and he has been jumping since 1978, which is very very encouraging) don’t seem quite sturdy enough for the job in hand, but I decide not to bring it up.  So out we go.  Photos are taken outside on the airfield, chat chat laugh laugh, and still it all seems strangely remote.  I’m still in denial.  So everyone starts filing to the plane and I’ve lost my instructor, of course.  Find him, kiss my boyfriend (goodbye?), then off we go, walking across the airfield to the tiny plane.  My instructor seems to be warming up a bit and I am being sickeningly nice to him – what choice do I have?  He seems okay though.  We get to the plane, they start it up, and I climb up the tiny metal ladder into the plane (I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be ironic if I fell off the ladder and died… no probably not).  He climbs in behind me and I have to sit between his legs, then he clips my shoulders to him.  It is a very tight squeeze in the aeroplane, but it’s quite comfortable all the same, and as we take off I find myself quite calm.  The scenery is quite stunning, the banter in the plane is heartening, nobody seems overly concerned, and up we go. It takes around 20 minutes to get to 14,000 feet and as we’re going there’s a lot of laughing and joking, music is playing (the kind of music you’d expect to be playing on your way up to a sky dive funnily enough), my instructor discovers I’m ticklish and tickles me intermittently, everyone’s very friendly.  I can’t stop smiling – it seems insane what I’m doing and I’m loving it.  It’s as though we’re all on our way to war or something, and we’re all laughing and joking, because what else can you do?  I turn round to check my clips are firmly attached to my instructor, which he finds very funny indeed, he’s really very nice after all, keeps making jokes and rubbing my shoulders and showing me things out the window and reassuring me again that he has more experience than anyone else in the plane, and it’s really very entertaining and I am still so very very calm (if smiling just a little too much).  We must be getting nearer because he tells me to put my hat on we have to sit in our instructors laps while they clip our legs to them and tighten them off (some of the lads are looking quite uncomfortable – as if the situation isn’t bad enough without having to sit on a bloke’s lap).  And I’m still calm.  Then the engines die down and they open the door (it’s a Perspex roller shutter thing). I am no longer calm, I am terrified, what the fuck am I about to do?????  But there’s no going back, I’m here, I’m doing this.  Fuckity fuck fuck, this was a very bad idea.

There’s some solo jumpers at the front of the plane, then three cameramen, one for each person who wants to be filmed (and one of whom is very very tasty indeed, blonde surfer look, cute).  So the doors open and the solos… disappear out of it.  It’s the strangest thing watching someone jump out of a plane, they’re there, and then they just step off the edge and they’re gone.  One girl seems to kind’ve float away spread eagled – very fast like – it’s so strange.  And the thing about skydiving is this – it’s not right.  Everything about it is wrong.  You should always have something solid beneath your feet, always.  Jumping into the sky from a perfectly working plane… isn’t right.  Then the first tandem people go and that’s even weirder because, as they’re so much heavier, they just drop like a stone.  Out of the plane.  And your brain can’t compute that distance, you think they’ll splat on the ground in seconds – but of course at that height even if they were to freefall all the way to the ground it’d take two minutes.  Scary thought.  Every time a tandem goes the plane jolts because of the weight that’s just left. And that’s it.  Me next.  I’m terrified, there is no other way to describe the feeling.  Pure terror, but you force yourself to move forward…

You’re sitting on the edge of the open doorway of a plane, this isn’t right.  You bend your legs under the plane, cross your arms across your chest, this isn’t right.  You don’t look down.  You put your head back on your instructors shoulder and he tells you to arch, this is not right.  The next few seconds are the most terrifying of my life so far.  You fall off the plane, sink almost, and in a split second there’s a roaring in your ears and the world is somersaulting around you – you are falling out of a plane you are falling out of a plane you are falling out of a plane….  That first couple of seconds… you’re sat there, something solid beneath you, then you’re falling into nothing so fast you can’t breathe.  The terror is overwhelming, to just fall like that…. unbelievable.  Like all your falling dreams rolled into one, you’re falling you’re falling you’re falling and your brain just can’t compute the fact, you’re falling through the air.  My friend described it as weightlessness but it isn’t, you can feel gravity all too well.  Then you just have to snap out of it.  You can’t spend the next minute of your life in a state of screaming terror, so you have to tell your brain to relax and trust that everything that is supposed to work will and you will not die.  And it’s hard but you do it.  You’re facing the ground at this point, face down to the ground, you can see the world beneath you and somehow it doesn’t feel as if you’re falling.  You’re so far away from the earth you don’t seem to be getting any nearer to it and the terror, although it still isn’t far beneath the surface, subsides just a little bit.  I think the feeling of falling away from the plane makes it far worse, but when you have no frame of reference it is very bizarrely like you’re floating, albeit with the wind whipping past your head at 120mph.  My instructor points out some things, other people falling, his altimeter, and I try to remember to keep my arms out and legs up the way I was told.  He hold my arms to my side for a second and we fall even faster, it seems to go on for such a long time and still the ground doesn’t get any nearer.  It crosses my mind briefly how terrifying it must by when your chute doesn’t open, the only thing that’s keeping me together at this point is that any minute now the chute will open…

And then it does, and the world becomes an entirely different place.  As it opens we are jerked backwards quite violently, but not as violently as I thought, I see the orange of our canopy out of the corner of my eye and suddenly calm is restored.  It is the most beautiful thing I have ever done.  Everything is silent, or as near as, it is so beautifully different to the freefall.  You’re hanging there, still not moving it seems, and you feel like a bird.  I can hear my instructor now and he chats to me all the way down.  We’re above the cloud and he points out our shadow on it, points out other people, and it is so tranquil so peaceful.  He gives me control, show me how to put my arms up to make us go slower and down to make us go faster.  My stomach goes as we do that, I’m still panicky and I’ve read about parachutes collapsing in mid air.  I do not want that.  Beautiful as it is I am still fully aware how far off the ground we are.  We do this bizarre spirally thing to bring us down faster – this again I’m not keen on, but he laughs and tells me to calm down.  I keep grabbing my straps which he tells me not to do and he grabs my legs with his and I find that when I just relax the experience is so much more enjoyable than when I’m panic-ing and grabbing for things.  What’s to hold on to?  You’re suspended in mid air by your shoulders.  As I come in to land I can make people out on the ground – we fly straight over the airfield and it’s incredible, so exhilarating.  Yet I’m still nervy about the landing so I panic a bit again and fall onto my knees as we land.  I’m on top of the world, buzzing with adrenaline, wanting to hug everyone. I give my instructor a kiss on the cheek and we go back to the building – it’s amazing, my head feels kind’ve tight and I can’t believe what I’ve just done, but I feel incredible. Just before we left the aeroplane my instructor said to me “You’re about to have the best day of your life”, he wasn’t wrong.  It was the best day of my life.  The day I jumped out of a plane from 14,000 feet before 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning.