It's hard being a has been, but at least you were a once been! The public, I hesitate to call them people for humans should be kinder, seem to take cruel pleasure in a fallen sporting "hero" or celebrity caught drunk, fallen over, ass over breast, on the pavement, with their knickers visible. Occasionally this mean spirited, ungenerous trait floats to the surface inside my retina, and I have to blink really hard to get rid of it.
The great boxer Prince Nazeem, in slightly less svelte pose.
I remember, for I am old, many quick slips on the slippery slope towards ordinariness. But the above seems like an avalanche. Maybe it's better, or way better than the slurring speech of the great Mohamed Ali, once Cassius Clay. The disturbing German tendency to laugh at other peoples misfortunes Schadenfreude , seems to be spreading. So we can laugh at Nazeem gaining some buoyancy, but not some one hitting the ground, and going splat! After all we are English, perhaps it's Sharon froide we have caught not Schadenfreude!
But only those who have risen to great heights can fall a long way! Although you could perhaps argue that its only the heavy that can really splat from any height at all.
There must now, in our modulated, politically correct lives, be an ideal weight, perhaps an agreed level of sporting prowess that we must not exceed, and a regulated clean toothed smile that we must flash. Where are the UIAA regulations penned by this Uber Mensch in his Union of International Associated of Alpinists, because I truelly wish to conform. What after all is an Alpinist? The Americanoes do not have Alps, so can perhaps not have Alpinists. An Alpininst is not, as one of my intellectually impaired girlfriends said, a man who is "all penis"! She picked up the huge volume entitled how to become the Complete Alpinist with a wicked dirty grin. Alas she was disappointed with the bland, boring content!
And the moral of this little piece of gibberish is, hope you didn't over eat at Xlarge portion Xmass, for gravity is cruel my heavy friends. Welcome to Schadenfreude.
