For me, it was as much about the cardboard boxes as anything else.
Imagine it – you've been in marketing for these things for years and deep down (or not so deep down in fact) you know that they are boring. Useful, but fundamentally boring. Then this happens. "You need HOW many? For WHAT?"
Gary Connery's record-breaking skydive this week – the video clip of which has been watched so many times by people at work that the CBI estimates it has added another minus percentage point to output – saw the 42-year-old fall from a helicopter and safely "fly" in a "wingsuit" and land on a mass of cardboard boxes (your company's boxes perhaps!) in a field in Oxfordshire. If ever there was a glorious combination of art and stunt then this was it.
Connery used 18,600 boxes to be precise, made up and empty (obviously – you don't want them full of china) to form a cardboard "mattress" 350-feet long and 45-feet high. Cool. If that doesn't say Turner Prize, what does? Get those boxes into the Tate right now.
My goodness, don't we all wish we had a "wingman" about when we need one?
Like when your presentation isn't going so well at work, how useful would it be if we could just gesture to the window and our own personal wingman would swish past, tipping his body so that the fundamental sales point you were trying to make could be read, emblazoned in luminescent stitch on the underside of his wings.
"And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why your company should adopt blah blah blah -"
Of course, Connery's achievement is really just the adult equivalent of the childhood game of leaping onto cushions in the garden.
Yet who would deny that he doesn't carry our dreams with him?
How many men dug out an old sleeping bag last night, unzipped it and draped it over one arm and sort of swished it around the bedroom, wondering if – "Just what do you think you're doing?" "Oh, hello love! Just, um, you know, just seeing if we might still be able to use this."
"Well, never mind about that. Some kids have put a load of boxes in the garden. Can you get rid of them?"
"On to it right now!"
But you don't go downstairs. You move to the window, a faraway look in your eye. Already, you're soaring.
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