I HAVE a confession to make. My name is Max Channon, and I am a tombstoner.
Well, if I'm honest, I'm more of an ex-tombstoner these days. I don't like to admit it, or act it, but I'm middle-aged - and I've turned into a bit of a wuss. I find the sea just a tad too chilly. Even with a wetsuit.
I grew up a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away - the village of Mousehole, Cornwall, during the 1980s, to be precise. If was a pretty idyllic childhood, but there wasn't an awful lot for Cornish kids to do, apart from fling themselves, lemming-like, into the sea during the long, lazy, sunny summers of yore.
Back then we didn't call it "tombstoning". We called it "having fun". And Mousehole's harbour was my gateway to this deadly and dangerous activity, that would sink its claws into me like a drug.
Aged seven, I first tentatively stepped off a set of salty granite steps and plummeted at least 36 inches into the water below me.
Like nearly every other child in Mousehole, I was instantly hooked on this suicidal game of Russian roulette for daredevils. By the end of the summer of 1980 I was seeking bigger thrills. I had graduated to jumping from the top step. I savoured those milliseconds where I plunged around ten feet into a few metres of water.
Then winter came.
My time was spent indoors playing with Star Wars figures and coveting my mate's Millennium Falcon, or building dens in the countryside around the village and coming home freezing cold, soaking wet and covered in god know's what. I still had fun - but I yearned for summer, and to once again enjoy the idiotic thrill of throwing myself off a few steps into the harbour's enticingly icy waters.
As the years and summers passed I grew braver - or stupider - and needed a bigger buzz. I progressed to leaping into the gaping maw of the harbour's mouth. I could now 'bomb' with the very best of them, as long as I held my nose.
Eventually, I started mixing it with the really big boys, and began hurling myself off the high back of the harbour wall into the choppy open sea thirty feet below.
But even that buzz soon became pedestrian. My teenage kicks needed to be harder, faster and higher. I headed out to the cliffs and scouted for chasms, where the sea surged in like a swirling storm, and the rugged granite soared like the spires of a cathedral above me, as my head bobbed up from the inky depths, gasping for breath.
At this point, some of The Herald's ever-empathetic readers will find themselves consumed by an apoplectic fit of tutting, and say I deserve to be dead or, at the very least, to have ended up in a wheelchair pee-ing into a plastic bag.
I'm well aware this, tragically, is the fate awaiting some tombstoners.
But it didn't await me. And nor, as far as I am aware, did it await any of the generations of the Mousehole harbour brats that preceded or followed me, or the majority of tombstoners around the world.
I did, however, spend plenty of time in West Cornwall Hospital's casualty department being patched up for injuries sustained playing rugby, football, tennis and Subutteo (have you never had a inch tall plastic man flicked in your eye?). But not once, a few grazes and bruises aside, did I come to any real harm as a tombstone dicing with death on a daily basis.
And, as an impudent single finger salute to the keyboard warriors who claim those unfortunate few who are injured tombstoning are examples of Darwinism in action , I've even managed to sire a few children.
Yes, I survived tombstoning - and have produced precocious progeny with a proclivity for plunging from precarious precipices. Oh, the shame. It stings me, like a bellyflop from a great height into a cold, unforgiving, sea.
Only it doesn't. Not one little bit.
We complain when our kids hide away at home glued to their PlayStations.
We sneer if they leave the house and hang around outside the Tesco Express with that ne'r-do-well friend with a bad haircut and an even worse attitude.
We gasp in horror if they dare do the things we used to do as kids.
We complain they're soft, timid, incapable of standing on their own two feet and lack common sense - after cosseting them in sterilised cotton wool and micro-risk-managing their every activity.
And, as inevitably as the summer coming to a soggy end, we once again have an injured tombstoner on the front page of The Herald - and his mum calling for the activity to be banned.
I'm sure she means well, but kids will always be kids. Some adults - myself included - will also always be kids (as long as the water isn't too cold).
People will always do things that are dangerous. Even ones that have retired and should be sat at home watching repeats of Midsomer Murders and waiting to die, rather than gallivanting around living life to the full.
With a degree of delicious irony, the tombstoner's mum's heartfelt plea to ban her son's deadly hobby appeared next to a story about a hill walker who also injured their leg pursuing their treacherous pastime of going out for a stroll, and had to be airlifted off Dartmoor.
Those reckless pensioners, eh? Clambering up tors, with no regard for their safety - or the safety of those who'll have to come and rescue them if it all ends in tears.
Then there's the so-called role models these days.
That Tom Daley, he's just a glorified tombstoner - albeit one with flawless technique, teeth and abs. It's enough to make anyone want to take a long walk off a short pier.
Instead of "banning" kids from tombstoning, how about we try educating them? Tell them not to be complete morons and encourage them to avoid jumping into water that isn't deep enough to float a rubber duck in. If that doesn't work, we can always chain them up under the stairs and make them watch The X-Factor until their ears and eyes bleed.
Ultimately, stupidity is a killer - and it's one you can not easily legislate against. But there is something even more deadly and pernicious. That thing is called 'life'.
It's the biggest killer of them all. Especially if you actually get out there and live it.
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