Long life: How to fall off a moving bus backwards and land safely

My mother’s father, Sir Richard Paget Bt, was not just an old-fashioned Somerset landowner but also an amateur scientist, artist and musician of boundless energy and curiosity, whose achievements included the writing of a book on the origins of human speech, the invention of a sign language for the deaf, the hand-crafting of musical instruments, and the composing and publication of various long-forgotten songs. And he was always propounding bizarre theories that he liked to test by using his children as guinea pigs, however hazardous this might be for them.

At some point during the first world war, when my mother was a teenager, he was with her on a bus in St James’s Street — one of those buses that had an open platform at the back — and told her that when a bus was going at a certain speed, and provided you kept your body ramrod straight, you could fall horizontally backwards off the platform and then find yourself blown vertical and running gaily along the road.