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19 November, 2023

Kirke taking the plunge in 1979. Dafydd Jones

The eccentric daredevil who invented the bungee-jump

On April Fools’ Day in 1979, a young man wearing a morning suit and clutching a bottle of champagne flung himself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. And then, says The Economist, he “bounced back up”. David Kirke, founder of the Dangerous Sports Club (DSC) in Oxford, had completed the first modern bungee-jump. The stunt was inspired by a documentary about young men in Vanuatu leaping off bamboo platforms with only a vine tied around one ankle. Other DSC members did their homework before the 245-foot jump, calculating the “false extension curves” of the elastic ropes. But Kirke, who has died aged 78, was a purist – he felt that too much preparation would mean he wasn’t doing something truly dangerous. His only thought was “Whoopee!” 

Bungee jumping was just the start. In 1986, Kirke flew over the Channel in a giant inflatable kangaroo, only narrowly avoiding a jumbo jet. He found skiing “especially boring”, so encouraged DSC members to “swoosh down the slopes of St Moritz” on whatever they liked: an ironing board, a rowing boat, a grand piano, even a Louis XV dining suite complete with wine waiter. (Authorities finally drew the line at a double-decker bus.) His stunts tended to be “formal occasions” – he once held a cocktail party “on the rim of an active volcano in St Vincent”, with attendees in full black-tie and tails. The DSC, whose emblem was a “bloodied silver wheelchair”, gradually broke up. But Kirke never stopped, performing more than 80 bizarre stunts over his life. Many thought him mad, but for him, jumping off a bridge wasn’t as mad as living a “humdrum life”.

THE APARTMENT This two-bedroom flat in Crouch End has a large open-plan kitchen with windows overlooking nearby Elthorne Park. It has high ceilings throughout, marble-clad bathrooms, and a secluded garden with an outdoor studio. Hampstead Heath and Finsbury Park are within walking distance, as are plenty of coffee shops and restaurants. Crouch Hill Overground station is a 10-minute walk. £800,000.

Hadid (left) and Gadot: “primary sources of information” on Israel-Gaza. Getty

Battling for hearts and minds on Instagram

Gal Gadot and Bella Hadid are “two of the most famous and beautiful women on the planet”, says Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times. Gadot is Wonder Woman, the “corset-wearing, sword-wielding” DC Comics heroine; Hadid, along with her sister Gigi, is “the face of luxury fashion”. And in the past month they have become leading players in the “ferocious and toxic” online battles over what’s happening in the Middle East. Hadid, whose father is Palestinian, has swapped her usual glossy Instagram fare for posts highlighting the devastation in Gaza. Gadot, a former Miss Israel, has done the same for her home country, arranging a screening in LA to broadcast Israeli Defence Force footage of the October 7 massacre.  

Why should you care about what a movie star and a supermodel are saying on social media? Because for most people, particularly those under 40, these and other celebrities are one of the “primary sources of information about the conflict”. Hadid has 61 million Instagram followers; Gadot has 109 million. Israel is under no illusions about their influence – the country’s official Instagram account responded directly to one of Gigi Hadid’s posts, accusing her of “turning a blind eye to Jewish babies being butchered in their homes”. Both stars have received a “torrent of abuse” for speaking out. Of course, celebrity activism is nothing new – just think of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda’s 1972 visit to north Vietnam. “But conflict in the Holy Land has the ability to divide and outrage like little else.”

On the tracks in the Canadian Rockies. Rocky Mountaineer

Train enthusiasts with a “massive wad of cash to splash” are in luck, says Time Out. Travel company Railbookers has announced an 80-day, £90,000 luxury rail odyssey that goes through 13 countries across four continents. It includes a trip through the Canadian Rockies; a week in the Scottish Highlands on the Royal Scotsman; a journey from Paris to Venice on the Orient Express; and a tour of the “castles and hilltop hamlets of south-eastern Europe” on the Danube Express. The package launches next August; see the full itinerary here. 

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Helen McCrory in Peaky Blinders

The golden age of telly is over

For the past 20 years, says Zoe Strimpel in The Spectator, telly-watchers have been treated to one “absorbing and pleasantly addictive” drama after another. The moment House of Cards or Breaking Bad wrapped up, you could simply flick over to Fauda, Spiral or Peaky Blinders. For the first time ever, to consider yourself a cultured person you had to know what was on TV. But something’s gone wrong. Now, we spend the first half-hour of any telly session searching different streaming services – five of them, in my case – and the ingenious thrillers of yore have given way to a “never-ending parade of untempting trash”. What happened? 

The age-old balance between quality and quantity seems to have been forgotten. Netflix and other over-funded tech firms are engaged in a TV version of intensive farming, churning out “low-nutrient dramas” – The Diplomat, The Lincoln Lawyer – “by the ton”. Writers and commissioners alike “steer away from originality” because it’s considered too dangerous. “The pleasure and excitement have gone out of making TV – and it shows.” But maybe we shouldn’t mourn the death of good telly. With nothing decent to watch, we’ll be forced to look to other distractions. You never know, we may even return to an age of “voracious fireside novel-reading”. 

Kokura Castle: a lucky escape. Shutterstock

The Japanese have a phrase for when someone “unknowingly escapes from disaster”, says Brian Klaas on Substack: “Kokura’s luck”. In 1945, America’s second atomic bomb was meant to be dropped on the city of Kokura – but cloud cover forced the crew to fly to Nagasaki, itself a last-minute addition to the target list. Had the bomber taken off a few minutes earlier or later, “countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead”. Another city that benefited from Kokura’s luck was Kyoto. The former imperial capital was originally on the list for the first bomb, but Henry Stimson, America’s secretary of war, had been there with his wife years earlier and didn’t want to see it destroyed. It was “perhaps the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history”. 

Peter Thiel at a crypto conference last year. Marco Bello/Getty

The tech evangelist hoping to live forever

Peter Thiel, the “techiest of tech evangelists”, is best known for making the “most celebrated wager in the history of venture capital”, says Barton Gellman in The Atlantic. In 2004 he met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became the first outside investor in Facebook, buying 10% of the company for half a million dollars. He cashed out most of this eight years later for about $1bn. But as well as making canny bets – and co-founding other multi-billion-dollar companies such as PayPal and the private intelligence firm Palantir – Thiel has come to articulate the “purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos”.  

He longs for a world where “great men are free to work their will on society”, unconstrained by government or regulation. For a while he funded “seasteading” projects – efforts to build autonomous floating microstates in international waters. But after years of talk and no progress, Thiel withdrew his funding and bought a 477-acre former sheep ranch in New Zealand instead. As a boy, he had believed that by now there would be colonies on the moon, flying cars, and cities in the ocean. Instead, the tech boom brought us the iPhone, Uber and social media: “none of them a fundamental improvement to the human condition”. Most of all, Thiel, 56, “longs to live forever”. He has given millions to Aubrey de Grey, the English gerontologist who believes the first immortal human has already been born. As a back-up, Thiel has also signed up to be cryogenically frozen, to await the emergence of some future society with the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. “And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.”

“If I had to live my life all over again, I’d do it exactly the same – only I wouldn’t read Beowulf.”

Woody Allen

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