What do you do in your spare time?

Have you ever thought about skydiving?

That must be the most crazy thing that anyone would consider doing. Imagine being strapped to someone, who must be at least half crazy, and then jumping out of a fully functioning aircraft with a serviceable engine and a live pilot who is wide awake.

You then drop like a stone until this maniac, who you have decided to trust with your life, and who you have probably just met for the first time, decides to open his parachute. As a matter of interest, you may like to consider a couple of facts while you wait for the parachute to open.

If you are falling in a spread eagle attitude face down, and if plans A,B and C don’t work, your terminal velocity will be about 120 mph. Good luck!

But, as we all know, real maniacs are not daft enough to jump out of a moving aircraft and if in real life one did decide to give it a try, the chances of his parachute failing to open as well, are extremely remote.

The other day, I was watching an hour long commercial break on one of those obscure Sky channels. The content that filled in the time between adverts was about hang gliding in the Yosemite National Park in California.

I have reached the stage in life when to go upstairs in a double decker bus is enough to make me dizzy.

As for jumping off the edge of a cliff into nothing at all when you are hanging onto a couple of aluminium poles stuck to a few pieces of plastic sheet, well, for once, words fail me.

But the human race has always set itself against nature. The ’big two’, when I was a lad, were the conquest of Everest and the South Pole expedition.

I remember an afternoon school trip to the pictures to see ’Conquest of Everest’.

In those days, when a day trip to Liverpool was the most exciting thing that we could imagine doing, to watch Colonel Hunt, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay planting their flags in the snow, brought a lump to many a young throat.

The film, ’Scott of the Antarctic’ which told the tale of the expedition to be the first nation to reach the South Pole, was another must see for a young lad.

Sadly this film was not to have a happy ending. Captain Scott and the team that eventually reached the Pole were to find that they had come second in the race.

They had been pipped to the post by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen by about four weeks.

Tragically, Scott’s team perished on the return journey.

But looking at things from the point of view of an active coward, I have never had any urge to be a hero, And as far as I know everything worth exploring has already been explored.

All things change, and exploration is no exception. Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492.

It took another 500 or so years for the miracle of powered flight to arrive. You may remember that the first Channel crossing by air happened in 1909, a distance of 22 miles. The pilot was a Frenchman called Louis Bleriot. But can you believe that just sixty years later, in 1969, Neil Armstrong and his crew flew 250,000 miles through space and walked on the Moon. How’s that for progress?

In today’s world the exploring takes place in the laboratory. It seems that half of the on going research budget is used to find ways to improve our life and health, and the rest is used to find ways to kill us.

I don’t think that anyone could have missed the rescue of the boys who were trapped in that cave in Thailand.

I have to admit that I have always included rock climbing, caving and scuba diving in my list of hobbies to avoid, but thank heavens for the skill and bravery of those unassuming rescuers who in their spare time enjoy being crazy.