I remember leaving Leamington Spa after finishing university. It was the day my best mate and I awoke face down on the blue-carpeted lounge floor of a girl I knew only vaguely, after the previous night's excessive drinking and generally talking bullshit came to an end at about 5am when I fell asleep mid-sentence - Grandpa Simpson style.
Two hours after that, and for reasons I won't go into, I was taking lunch with Trevor Brooking, The Lord Mayor of Coventry and the Minister for Sport, the Right Honourable Richard Cabon MP. My shaking hand made the spoons rattle as I passed the plate of tea and coffee accoutrements, and I made some nearby athletes laugh.
As the car sped out of the arse of Leamington, I knew I would miss that certain element of sheer randomness that came part and parcel of university life.
Imagine my life as a film...we will now cross/cut to Monday afternoon.
I am crouching in a ghostbuster-like boilersuit in a (dry) sewer pipe, underground, in the dark, somewhere near Brentwood.
That's okay, because the torch slung over my arm could be dropped out of a passenger airliner and still work after hitting the ground.
Apparently.
Maybe it's the kind Mulder and Scully used - the ones that never ran out of battery, never broke, never stopped being so very dramatically bright and piercing in all those dark places?
I feel glad to have it, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to see anything. This is obvious, you think...it is dark.
Not just because of that...the nice people who put me here said 'No contact lenses.'. I turn up wearing glasses. 'No glasses,' they say.
With the torch, I can see all I need to - the pipe I need to be moving along right now.
Also included in my strange array of kit is a little orange box that beeps every few seconds. It is searching my surroundings for the presence of deadly gases, and any lack of the not-so deadly ones I need to stay alive. The sound of it beeping regularly is calming. My hard hat scrapes along the top of the pipe again. It's fallen off three times already, severely impeding my progress. I'm bent double and walking in a squat. I could crawl, but I don't want to have to move too slowly, and besides...it's a very nice boilersuit.
Air, carrying sound waves bouncing off the circular walls of the pipe, delivers a message.
"GAS GAS GAS!"
My hard hat falls off again. I've knocked it off with my left hand, while with newly-acquired co-ordination my right hand has already ripped open the sling I am carrying over my left shoulder. This automatically twists the valve on my oxygen tank to 'open'. My right hand plunges into the sling and emerges awkwardly clutching my gas mask. All new-found co-ordination is now useless. I can't function properly. Nothing seems to be going right. The straps seem much smaller than during practise. I stare hard at my hands. Something is wrong. The four seconds I had to put my mask on passed aeons ago. Something is impeding me, affecting my dexterity...slowing me down. I'm scared. All that practise...for what?
Our instructor is standing in front of the class of the Confined Spaces Training earlier that day. He is talking about dangers of a particularly nasty disease, particular to confined spaces. It is called Weil's Disease. He recounts the horrors of this fast-striking affliction, that start with flu-like symptoms, progress through many months in hospital having large sections of your skin removed...to an end where life just isn't very pleasant for you...ever again.
Everyone is suitably shit-scared. You catch this disease through an infection, released in affected rats' urine, entering your body through a shaving cut, or any scrape or soft tissue. Everyone, rather understandably, chooses to wear gloves when it comes to the practical exam.
This is why I can't do anything - I'm wearing a stonking great pair of gardening gloves. I can just about hear the other two members of my team scurrying back the other way along the network of tunnels. I rip off the gloves and finally, after about fifteen seconds get the mask on and am able to breathe. I jam my hard hat back on but it doesn't want to stay there on top of the mask.
At the bottom of the winch shaft (yay for being winched about like a sack of flour), just about in daylight but still very much underground, one of my other team members stands up ...and takes off his mask in relief for having made it.
"Bang! You're dead."
Standing outside in my boilersuit and hardhat, sexy S&M harness, carrying a half-empty oxygen cylinder over one shoulder and pretending to everyone that I can see perfectly, honest, it hit me that life doesn't lose that quality of randomness all that easily.
I had just been paid good money to squat in a concrete-lined hole in the ground, after all.
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