I was asked in an online meet-the-author gig the other day “What’s the weirdest place you ever read a book”. I immediately thought of some beautiful places, but nowhere weird came to mind ... then I remembered!



“I can’t tell you the weirdest place I read a book but I can tell you the weirdest place I ever read a sentence. I was upside down, falling out of the second floor window of a Sydney apartment, milliseconds away from smashing headfirst into the pavement below.”

And reading saved my life.

It was a fantastic summer night. A friend’s party in her warehouse apartment on William Street in Kings Cross, Sydney. For those who don’t know it, the Kings Cross skyline was for a long time dominated by a huge Coca Cola sign up on a hill, about 100 feet wide, 50 high, flashing neon. It was warm, the music was pumping, everyone was dancing, I'd had a mohito or two.

It was the last time I ever drank mohitos above sea level.

One of the windows of the apartment was open and I was sitting with some friends on the window sill, two floors up, back to the cool air. The girl whose party it was came up to me and said,

“Hey, can you look through my bedroom window? Someone is in there and they locked the door and I want to know what they’re doing!”
“Your bedroom window?”
“Yeah, it’s the next one along, you can just lean out…”

Now, she probably thought I would hop down from the window sill, stand with both feet planted securely on the floor facing out and hold tightly to the window frame bobbing my head cautiously around the corner to sneak a peak. But I didn’t. I just said, “No worries!”, leaned backward out of the window as far as I could, still couldn’t see so leaned over to one side trying to hold onto the window frame and the next thing I knew I was falling toward the ground head down, testing both Newton’s theory of gravity and Darwin’s theory that it is good that the dumb die young before propagating their DNA.

And that was when reading saved my life. Because I can vouch for the fact it is totally true that when the adrenaline hits your system, you become hyperaware, and time slows. In the second or so it took me to travel two floors to the pavement below these were my (potentially last) thoughts.

S**t!
The Coke writing is upside down.
That is not good.
Turn around turn around turn around!

So I managed to twist in mid-air like a drunken cat and get my feet and hands under me just as I hit. Luckily I hit a shop awning on the way down and landed on a broken real estate sign on top of a pile of garbage, cans and broken glass. I broke both wrists, my nose, exploded my left ankle and split my left tibia in a spiral fracture up to the knee.

But I lived!

And after many months in plaster which gave me a lot of time, and incentive, to reconsider my life choices I quit my job and began travelling the world and I haven’t stopped.

All of which is thanks to the fact I read the writing on the Coke sign while free falling head first out of a dance party. I think that qualifies as a weird place to read something!

What's yours?