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don't try this at home

Thursday 23rd April 2009

... or indeed anywhere else

I forget whether it was during the 2006 or 2007 Edinburgh fringe, but one afternoon I was sitting in front of one of my favourite Edinburgh haunts from my uni days, Negociants Café, when I saw something remarkable.  The street Negs (as we used to call it) is on is a dual carriageway, and on the central reservation-bit there are a couple of those waist-high steel boxes which contain circuit breakers and the like for traffic lights.  As I drank my coffee (it will have been coffee; back when I was a student Negs was the first place I ever saw or used a cafétiere so I enjoy their coffee for nostalgic reasons, above and beyond the fact that it's good coffee) a young man on a mountain bike came hurtling directly toward these boxes.  Astonishingly, he neither smashed into nor jumped over the boxes, rather he and his bike, at the last second before impact, sprang into the air and landed deftly on TOP of the first box, balanced up there on one wheel for a few seconds, then hopped across onto the SECOND box, balanced, then hopped down to the ground and sped off on his way, to the sound of rapturous applause from the assembled gobsmacked onlookers.

Edinburgh's so replete with performers pulling off guerilla promotional stunts during the festival that I think most of those who saw this assumed that it was something along those lines, despite the fact that the man neither paused to hand out flyers nor did he appear to have any accomplices along to do so for him.  He just did his stunt and disappeared, and I've often wondered who he was.

Well thanks to bbc.co.uk I now know that he's called Danny Mackaskill, and that thanks to YouTube he's become a bit of a global phenomenon. This is him here:

[ Fixed link ]

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