Or the time I went paragliding above the plains of Nineveh, looking over Mosul just eight weeks before it fell to Abu Dick Splint and his band of murderous bell whiffs. Being the passenger on a tandem paragliding expedition isn’t challenging, right?
It is, if in one’s quest to do something ’mazin’ which one can boast about to some guy in the pub at Reading train station via the medium of The Ocelot, one forgets one has a debilitating fear of heights, and won’t back down once the chips are down because you want to impress the pretty girl one’s brought along for the ride.
Today I’m as close to suited and booted as I fear to dress, ready to take to the stage to join a three-handed panel discussion on social media’s effect on television news. It’s not something I know anything about, sincerely.
I’m on the panel because I’m perhaps the sole British journalist in Iraq working on a project that uses social media as its premium delivery method. That, and my boss put me forward without asking.
I’ve had to do some learning. I thought Google would be awash with results, but it seems the algorithms prefer to suggest pages about social media incidents that have made the news.
So at 5 this evening, I’ll be looking over the plains of bored conference attendees who will be watching me, this underprepared idiot, with a useless ream of notes, splutters and falters, eventually falling back on my trusted bullshit – it usually works.