After writing off my parents’ Fiesta I had myself a midlife crisis (yes at eighteen). I was terrified I wasn’t doing enough with my life and that one day there was even a chance I would be dead. I had not seen the film The Bucket List, it hadn’t even been released at the time, but I decided there were a few things I simply had to experience before death and so made a list of those things (what I’m saying is, I came up with the idea for The Bucket List before it even came out). There were three things on the list that I managed to achieve. One was to try stand-up comedy, which I initially put off out of fear. Another was to do volunteer work which was much easier as I knew someone who worked at the Kettering Volunteer Bureau (obviously I always referred to this as ‘The Bureau’ so I could feel like a cool FBI guy whenever I went in there). They sent me to paint an elderly woman’s kitchen – something I actually had no experience of, and so I did what is commonly referred to as a hideous job. Her kitchen somehow looked worse than it did before I painted it, getting progressively worse the more work I did on it. Quite remarkable.
After making a sweet old lady’s kitchen look unbearably ugly I was asked by The Bureau if there was anything they could do for me in return. Because I felt guilty about the kitchen I tried to think of the one thing on my do-before-I-die list that they wouldn’t be able to help me with so I said I’d like to try stand-up comedy. To my relief they said they didn’t really do that sort of stuff and sent me on my way.
Then two days later they rang me saying that a guy had come into The Bureau asking for help setting up a stand-up comedy workshop in Kettering and so they had put my name down to attend since they already knew I was keen. There was one workshop a week for nine weeks and three of us attended. Our teacher would always be drinking a pack of beers and he never strictly taught us anything, but I think that was actually a good thing. Every week he’d just make us get up one by one and do ten minutes of new material to the other three people in the room and then he’d either say, ‘That was funny’ or ‘That was shit’. I honestly think that this is the best way to help someone get started in stand-up – no instruction, no tips, just make them start. Put them in a position where they’re forced to figure it out by themselves and at the end of it all put them on stage and make them do a gig.
The guy who ran the workshop was called Jim Watts and on the night of our first gig he told us we were setting ourselves apart from 99.9 per cent of the population just by getting on stage, so it didn’t matter how it went. I still remind myself of this fact every time I’ve just been unfunny on stage. That first gig was in a local pub in Kettering. It was fun and went better than I expected but I didn’t consider moving into it as a career because Three Line Whip was still going strong and I was going to be an extremely influential musician/genius. So for the next couple of years I would do a comedy gig once every four months just because I enjoyed it.
One of the other goals on the I’m-going-to-die list was to do a skydive.
I saw a poster advertising the chance to do a charity skydive and it felt perfect. I would get to fulfill a life goal while raising money for something, thus making myself feel like a good person in the process. The charity was Age Concern, quite fitting when you consider I was currently fretting over my own mortality. If anyone was concerned about ageing it was James Acaster, so in a way I was raising money for myself – win-win. Having said that, if I was truly concerned about the aged I’d probably have taken more care when painting their kitchens. It turns out it’s actually not easy to get people to donate to Age Concern because the name doesn’t sound urgent enough. Very few charities reel people in by playing on their concern. I would tell people I was collecting for Age Concern and they would look baffled and ask, ‘Well, what’s wrong with them? Why the concern?’ to which I would answer, ‘They’re old.’ If it was called Age Crisis I’d have raised some big bucks in next to no time. There is a world of difference between crisis and concern, that’s all I’m saying. Anyway it’s a great charity; please give what you can.
Once I had raised enough money I assumed doing the actual skydive would be fairly simple. However, I had a bunch of jumps cancelled for various reasons:
Jump One – too cloudy. We got all the way up to 12,000 feet in the plane and then just flew back down again and went home. You would think they’d be able to tell how cloudy it is from the ground; I still don’t know why we had to go all the way up there in the plane to figure out that there were clouds in the sky.
Rescheduled Jump – too cloudy. Couldn’t we just jump through the clouds though, really? It’s not like we’re going to hit any clouds on the way down, guys!! It was safe enough to fly up here so surely it’s safe enough to jump down again!!
Rescheduled Rescheduled Jump – another skydiver messed up his landing and slipped a disc in his back and so no one else could jump that day because he was lying in the landing zone waiting for the ambulance in agony. He messed up his landing because it was too cloudy and he couldn’t see where he was going (I’m guessing).
So when I arrived at the airfield to do the rescheduled rescheduled rescheduled jump I was extremely laid-back, because as far as I was concerned I would once again end up not jumping out of a plane that day. I skipped the safety course (I’d done it three times and knew it back to front), absolutely destroyed a child at big Jenga in the waiting room, watched an episode of Friends and then, two hours later, they called my name along with a bunch of other people and we got into the plane. I talked to everyone on the plane like I hadn’t a care in the world, knowing that something would once again get in the way and stop me from doing the jump. But on this particular day nothing got in the way at all and so I ended up jumping out of a plane without having prepared myself for jumping out of a plane. I wasn’t prepared mentally, emotionally or physically, and so it ended up feeling like I had been unexpectedly pushed out of a plane for real.
Just so I don’t put you off entirely I should mention that the free fall element of skydiving is incredible and I loved it. Before the parachute opened and after I had accepted the fact that I was about to die, it was an experience like no other and that alone made the whole thing worth it. To my surprise, my skydiving instructor loved the experience even more than I did, he was whooping and shrieking in a way that led me to believe this was his first time too and maybe they had accidentally attached two newbies together and pushed us out of the plane without realising, and meanwhile two professional instructors were attached to one another, free-falling in silence and each wondering why the other wasn’t more excited.
‘Woooooooo! Yeah! How do you like free fall, James?!?!?!,’ he screamed in my ear.
‘It’s good,’ I said. After we’d been free-falling for a while he pulled the chord and released the parachute, which meant we got pulled sharply from a horizontal position to a standing position and my stomach went haywire.
‘Check this out, James!’ he hollered, before steering the parachute left and right, zig-zagging across the sky, my stomach always trailing a few feet behind us, failing to catch up with the rest of my body. Without a shadow of a doubt I was going to chuck up if he carried on like this – if he’d said the word ‘Beckham’ then that would’ve sealed it and I would’ve erupted.
‘Sorry, mate, do you think we could not move around as much? I’m feeling queasy.’ I have never found out for sure but I think ‘queasy’ is the word that skydivers hate the most. This guy had been fairly quiet in the plane. He had just sat there, moodily staring out the window, no interest in conversation, but then sprang into life once we jumped. It was like he had transformed into a bird and was finally free. But now I was raining on his parade and had dropped the Q-word. He immediately started sulking.
‘Fine,’ he said and we stopped zagging. We just drifted silently and slowly in a general downwards direction. I couldn’t see his face because he was behind me but could sense his disappointment. Every time he exhaled he’d huff loudly in my ear like a stroppy teenager. We were still incredibly high up at this point and moving very slowly, which made me start to panic even more. I kept all the panic internal but I felt like I was going to be sick and didn’t want to start being sick while trapped in the sky, I wanted to do it in a lovely toilet on the ground. Then another problem arose and this one was definitely my fault.
If there’s one piece of advice I would give anyone doing a skydive it would be this – do not under any circumstance wear slip-ons. Wear shoes with shoelaces that will stay on your feet no matter what because you are about to fall through the sky and that’s where all the wind lives. As we floated around aimlessly and my skydiving instructor’s eyes burned into the top of my head, one of my slip-ons began to slip off (the exact opposite of what I’d bought the slip-on for). I couldn’t tell him because I was certain he would instantly unclip me and let me fall to my thoroughly deserved death. But I really, really didn’t want my slip-on to fall thousands of feet and embed itself in a cow’s brain because that was without question what I believed would happen if I didn’t keep it on my foot. In order to stop this from happening I had to curl my toes up towards my shins and hold them in that position all the way down, thus hooking the slip-on with my foot.
Skydiving
It took so long for us to reach the ground. We were drifting for what felt like an eternity, plus it was super uncomfortable and made me panic even more about being sick because if I was sick there was no way I’d be able to keep the slip-on on my foot in the process and so I would be dropping vomit and footwear at the same time and it would look like I had hurled up a slip-on and everyone would think I eat shoes whole and then have the nerve to complain about feeling ‘queasy’ when eating shoes doesn’t agree with me.
By the time we came in to land I felt terribly faint. ‘You won’t be able to do the landing we practised because you’re feeling so poorly, so we’re going to have to do an emergency landing,’ the instructor said to me. Oh great, I’m slipping a disc, that’s what’s happening now, I thought. Just like that man last time, I’ll slip a disc and then the ambulance will take an hour to arrive and no one else will be able to jump because I’m a big wimp with a slipped disc. Here we go, get ready to slip a disc, James, that’s what’s about to happen to you – disc-slipping time. First your slip-on slips off and now your disc is about to do the same. Congratulations. That’s you, slipping all over the shop, king of the slips, say goodbye to your disc you slippy embarrassment.
As we came in to land he started yelling to the people below, ‘We’ve got a sleeper! We’ve got a sleeper!’ Which sounds an awful lot like ‘We’ve got a slipper!’ I initially panicked thinking that he had just confirmed my biggest fear and that I was unavoidably about to slip a disc, or maybe my slip-on had slipped off without my knowledge and he was warning the crowd of the incoming missile, but fortunately he shouted, ‘We’ve got a sleeper’ about ten more times and so I quickly figured out that I wasn’t a Slipper I was a Sleeper.
Everyone always learns something about themselves when doing extreme things like skydiving and I had learned that I was a Sleeper, which isn’t an ideal thing to be when jumping out of a plane – asleep. He shouted it so loudly as well, which was irksome as I didn’t want everybody to know I was a Sleeper, I wanted it to be a secret. And so everyone watched as the Sleeper rolled into town, a single limp slip-on hanging off his foot, not doing the same landing as everyone else where the instructor and the pupil both lift their legs up at the same time and land safely on the ground, all smooth and cool. The Sleeper and his angry friend had to resort instead to skidding along the ground on their butts like a couple of twonks, a couple of twonks who hated each other and would never ever speak to each other again.
As I lay on my back, my instructor patiently laying underneath me because he was unable to get up until I got up, someone ran over and took our photograph. Later on, my mum bought that photograph for five pounds. I look like I’ve completely passed out in the photo and my instructor is looking off camera at some of his mates with a look on his face that says, ‘Why is it always me?’ The photo is still on display in my parents’ house and serves as a reminder that, while I will die one day, there are some things that are way worse than dying and it’s important to experience those things while we’re alive in order to put death into perspective; that way we won’t get too down about our own mortality.