I had plenty of practice climbing drainpipes as a teenager, when I'd regularly use one to access a girlfriend's bedroom. It wasn't a skill I expected to need again on a sunny bank holiday more than two decades later.
I'd arranged to meet my wife and a couple of friends in the beer garden of a local hotel. As I approached, I could hear raised voices. I thought maybe a group of people had drunk too much and things were about to turn nasty, but as I walked into the garden, I saw everyone looking up, including my wife and friends. Following their gaze, I saw a child in a red hat perched on top of a roof jutting out from the hotel. It made no sense – how had he got there?
I realised the people in the garden had arranged themselves underneath, in the hope that one of them would be able to catch him if he fell. From the other side of the roof, I heard a woman's voice imploring him to sit down and keep still. It was the boy's mother, who had tried to climb up to him and become stranded halfway along a flat roof.
The child ignored his mother's voice and his every movement brought a fresh gasp of anxiety from onlookers. The fire brigade had been called, but no one knew how long they'd take. I imagined the fire engine working its way across the city, slowed by holiday traffic. The thought of looking on helplessly as the boy lost his footing made me feel sick. The knot in the pit of my stomach was too much to bear – scanning the side of the building, I quickly worked out the quickest way up and made for the drainpipe.
It was old and looked as if it might break away from the wall, but I hauled myself up, grabbed on to a gutter that cracked ominously as it took my weight, then quickly heaved myself on to the tiles. Above me, the child paid me little attention and didn't appear to be frightened at all. He was younger than I'd thought – no older than two – and the roof was steeper than it had appeared from the ground. The situation suddenly seemed even more grave. I realised I'd be unable to predict a toddler's responses, and imagined diving across to grab him if he stumbled, knowing there would be nothing to arrest our fall if I did.
My only option now was to keep climbing. I launched myself upwards and tried to ignore the tiles fracturing beneath me, a couple slipping free underfoot and clattering down.
The roof narrowed as it rose and I planted myself as firmly as I could on the ridge, grabbed the boy and swung him on to my lap. In my precarious position, just holding on to him was a indoor Tracking – he wouldn't stop wriggling.
Below me, the hotel's customers remained rooted to the spot, staring up at us, occasionally shouting words of encouragement. My wife, unable to watch, was playing with our four-year-old daughter, attempting to keep her distracted. It occurred to me suddenly that the life of this stranger's child was literally in my hands. I had no doubt he was safer now I was holding on to him, but if we fell, would I be blamed for the consequences?
I also began to question what had led me to act so impulsively. I'm an artist, and over the years I've engaged in many public performance pieces, some of them quite risky – attempting to sell my identity, offering myself for 24 hours as the prize in a raffle, all sorts of projects with unknowable outcomes – but nothing compared with this.
It took only about 15 minutes for the fire brigade to arrive, but I was more than ready. A long ladder slid towards us, and a fireman clambered up, warning me not to move until he was directly below me. I felt a surge of relief as I passed the boy over, then waited to take my own turn climbing down, glad the situation was now in someone else's hands.
I learned later that the boy was called Charlie. His mum had been in the garden with a friend, waiting to be picked up by her husband. She took her eyes off Charlie for only a minute, and it seems he was able to climb so high because a small stepladder was leaning against a trellis, which in turn connected with the roof. No one could have foreseen his fearless ascent.
Whereas rumors once swirled that Microsoft’s Xbox One would require a true always-on connection — one that required the Xbox One to be online literally all the time — the policy turned out to be a simple check-in once every 24 hours. As long as a game is being played on your own Xbox One, rather than a friend’s — which requires an admittedly draconian hourly check-in — you can technically have an internet outage for the majority of the day and still be able to play your games. However, a common argument against an always-online Xbox is that some people just can’t afford an Xbox plus internet service, but no one ever seems to go out and survey to see the extent to which this is true.
This argument assumes that people can afford an Xbox One, games, and a display, but not an internet service. To see if this is true, you’d compare the prices of two groups of products and services. The first is everything you’d need to use an Xbox One without an always-on internet requirement — the Xbox One, a television or monitor with appropriate inputs, and at least one game purchasable from a brick-and-mortar store.
The second group would be an internet connection and a device to utilize the connection — a computer. You’d include the computer in the second group for the same reason you have to include a display and a game in the first group. An Xbox One without a display and a game cannot be used, and an internet connection without an internet-capable device cannot be used.
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