SAS

I have made an interesting discovery. I really like SAS thrillers.

Once I had a thrusting Liverpudlian boss, who strode about saying, “Bravo Two Zero—best management textbook ever written.” But that was the limit of my knowledge of the genre, until my book collector procured one from the local library.

I am hooked. What’s so great about SAS thrillers is the amount of useful, practical, how-to information they contain, about all sorts of things. I have learnt, for example, that SAS members always keep one eye shut when looking at a map at night. It takes forty minutes for the human eye to adjust fully to darkness; keeping one shut ensures you don’t lose all your night vision when you turn on a torch. (I can well believe the forty minutes. Sometimes it’s only after I’ve sat for a while in my room that I start to notice a crack in the curtains or a line at the base of the door.)

I have learnt how to live in a bush for several days, keeping observation on a target. I have discovered that the necessary equipment includes secateurs, gardening gloves, camouflage netting, cling film, Imodium, a petrol can and food that doesn’t make a noise. I have learnt that breaking someone’s neck requires a screwing action, similar to getting the lid off a jar of jam. I have learnt how to cover my scent when being tracked by dogs, and how to strip off and make a raft to swim a river, so that I have dry clothes to wear on the other side.

It is all fascinating—and very pleasant and stimulating, especially as I am in a situation where acquiring new skills is pretty near impossible. So I enjoy my theoretical survival lessons; the fact that I am probably, out of the entire human race, the person least qualified to join the SAS, and the person least likely ever to have a use for these skills, doesn’t bother me.

There is a thought experiment favoured by philosophers who worry about the foundations of human knowledge: if you were a brain in a bucket, and all your sensory experiences were created in you by the sophisticated equipment of a mad scientist, would you be able to tell?

The technology that stimulates my brain is crude, utilising only one of my sensory channels (the auditory nerves), and strongly dependent on my store of memories and impressions from the life before. But it nonetheless has some effect, as I move stealthily towards my objective, crawling on my belly through earth and undergrowth, a pistol in my hand and a knife in my belt.

I can, in my darkness, live so many different lives.

Strangely, there is one thing we have in common, these SAS heroes and I: the degree of effort we direct to the management of risk. Before an operation, the SAS prepare meticulously, researching the objective to the best of their ability. They try to ascertain the timing of guard patrols around the perimeter fence, the position of the exits, the number and the firepower of the enemy. They think through different scenarios, and work out what they will do in each hypothetical situation. Finally, they check and check and recheck their equipment to make sure that it is working, that it can be brought out swiftly, that they know exactly in which pocket each item is stowed. All risks that can be minimised are minimised, before they enter a red sector.

In the life before, I walked up Scottish mountains without a first-aid kit, and, occasionally, on my own. Sometimes I waded small rivers, if I needed to get to the other side. Once, I visited a friend in Biggleswade, and, wanting to reach the continuation of a footpath, we ran hand in hand across the A1—a wild exhilarating dash over four lanes, with cars zooming at us at seventy miles per hour.

But these were calculated risks. I exercised my judgement on each set of circumstances, weighed the possible consequences, and decided that I was much more likely to be all right than not.

Now I have given up such grand gestures. I am in a permanent red sector, and am intensely aware, all the time, of the enormity of the downside risk, the abyss that awaits me, should anything go wrong. I select with great care the chair I will stand on to get down a plate from a high shelf in the kitchen, checking and rechecking the wobbliness of its seat. I clean my teeth twice a day, counting up to the recommended two minutes, and floss with dedication, hoping to forestall decay. For some reason I am always getting into difficulties with chicken, frequently phoning my mother to pose some variant of the following: “Mum, Pete cooked some chicken on Saturday lunchtime, and then left it out of the fridge until the evening to cool down, and then it was in the fridge for two days—should I eat it?”

“Yes, hello,” she says. “This is the Chicken Advisory Service speaking.” The Advisory Service always gives clear and definitive advice.

At his work, Pete was taught a mantra on a health and safety course: “Think ‘what if,’ not ‘if only,’ ” and I do. Caution infects all my movements now, and all my small decisions in the black and in the gloom.

And I must not get pregnant.

Now there is something that does not worry the SAS.