'Heroes'..... A guest post

For reasons that I don't think I need to explain I seem unable to string together more than a few coherent sentences lately and it was thus that late last night I put a shout out on Twitter for anyone who fancied guesting here. 'Alex' (@redalexred), a fellow blogger and twitterer offered to help me out almost immediately. For those of you who don't know Alex, he is a serving RAF officer with more than a few exciting tales to tell on his own blog Balderdash and Piffle, so, I will duly instruct you to take a trip over there sometime and let him take over here for today!

Oh...and if anyone else would like to guest post here just drop me a mail or a comment, subject your choice!

Over to you Alex....

Heroes.

My first hero would have had to have been Trevor Francis. The first million pound footballer (well almost his transfer fee was £999,999 but it’s close enough!). He came from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest and became my hero when he scored the goal to win the European Cup in 1979. He dived into the box in front of the goal to head in a cross by John Robertson, landing on a concrete “shot put” circle by the goal. I was allowed to stay up late and watch the game (which was very dull) but the goal got me bouncing around the room. MY club had won the European Cup! And the player that did won it…well he became my first real hero. I was 10. But footballers retire. They disappear and new ones replace them…Stuart Pearce, Stan Collymore, but they weren’t the same. They weren’t real heroes to me. Just other players

Since then I have had a couple…in the 1980’s and early 90’s Bruce Springsteen was a bit of a hero to me. He just made this excellent music that spoke to me. Talked to me. Took me out of a crappy, cold council house bedroom in the Uttoxeter and off to a place in the sun with cars, and guitars, and girls, and beer and music, and soft, soft summer rain, with barefoot girls sitting on the hoods of cars. It was like a new world to me. I slowly built up a collection of everything he had put onto vinyl . I made tapes. I would have weekends where I would play his music song by song, album by album, in consecutive order from first to last. I had a wall with posters of him, books on him…looking back, it’s probably a bit obsessive compulsive to be honest. But HEY! I was 14-16. It’s the age to get obsessive.

But for some reason he stopped being my hero. He stopped speaking to me and his music went off in a direction I disliked. All this fake folk stuff, a devotion to Pete Seeger he suddenly found. When everything he had said before was about his devotion to Phil Spektor! It was like he had turned his back on me…and so I turned my back on him…I can’t listen to anything he has produced since The Ghost of Tom Joad. I still listen to the earlier stuff. When he was raw, and, to me, true.

But one day I was idly watching a bit of TV and found a real hero.

I had got into the outdoors and was interesting in watching anything with mountains and hills in, and there was a programme about South Georgia. And the name Ernest Shackleton was mentioned.

Now I’d heard of him, he was some explorer dude. Went to the South Pole? Yeah that was it.

But I watched and heard his story. And was captivated. This man, he failed at getting to the Pole. He’d fallen out with Scott…but he did this amazing thing.

He took a ship to the Antarctic with the aim of walking a team across the whole continent. But the ship he was on had gotten stuck in the ice. The ship was stuck fast and then it was crushed by the ice!

He led his crew through almost 2 years of privations and hardships and discomforts, living on the ice-floes, watching their ship be crushed and sink. Transferring to three life boats, they lived on the ice until the ice broke up enough to sail the boats to the nearby Elephant Island. From here he took 5 others across the South Atlantic sea, in an open boat for over 800miles…aiming for the island of South Georgia. This he did, but managed to land on the wrong side of it, and then be unable to relaunch the boat. So he and 2 others walked across the island. Over mountains 4000foot high. Over glaciers, and through deep deep snow. With just a carpenters adze as an ice ax.

Once over the mountains – something that has only been repeated once by modern mountaineers with modern kit, he organised a rescue party and returned to Elephant Island to rescue his crew. NOT ONE PERSON DIED.

And Shackleton led this party. He was the one who made sure that all his crew made it home from an ordeal that must have been completely unimaginable.

Why did he become a hero? Simply because it takes a real hero to do this stuff. He got the right people, and he organised them, led them, motivated them…inspired them.

And this is what a real hero should do. He (or she!) should inspire us. They should make us want to be something better than we are. Do more than we are doing. Reach further than we are reaching. Yes heroes have their faults – Shackleton was a bit of a ladies man – but that’s what makes them more inspirational to me.

If these real people can have faults like the rest of us, but still do so much – then there is hope for me. Maybe I can be a better person if I do a little bit like they do.

If I push myself diving into the box like Francis did, knowing that I might land badly but still score the goal. If I can take people’s minds away from the boredom and drudgery of life like Springsteen did and open their eyes to a whole new world. If I can motivate people like Shackleton to overcome terrible cold and fear…well I might just be a bit of a better person…if I can use a little bit from each person maybe I’ll grow and change. And maybe that’ll make me be a bit of a hero to the people in my life that I want to be a hero for. My children.

Alex.