Salocin

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation just benefited from a donation of $37bn from Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and arguably the world's most successful investor.

Aside from the fact that this donation dwarfs any other donation made by an individual ever heard of, the pragmatic, realistic and ego-free way in which Mr. Buffett has chosen to deploy his vast fortune echoes his down-to-earth investment style.

In all his years as an investor, Mr. Buffett has favoured established companies with strong management and good products. The dot-com bubble came and went, and as thousands of investors went from poor to rich and back to poor again, Mr. Buffett continues his inexorable accumulation of wealth, never touching the flash-in-the-pan investments that had so little chance of success, and whose share prices were driven more by panic buying and panic selling than by products sold or consumers satisfied.

You can detect the same coolness in his philanthropy. Why create a new charity when there are already far too many out there, and when there are already lots of people far higher on the philanthropy learning curve than he is? Far better to do one's research, figure out who is going to make the most difference with the money, and invest it there. He could hardly have chosen better.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is admirable in many respects. Leaving aside the vast generosity it embodies (even before this gift), it always targeted areas of real change. It is one of the rare charitable organisations that seek to remedy intractable underlying problems. These issues give rise to the symptoms that are grist for the mills of all the other charities - band aids of various sizes stemming the flow of blood and mitigating the damage caused by deep-set issues that they dare not try to tackle, for fear of failure. The foundation is admirable for its courage in tackling issues that will take decades to remedy.

Mr. Buffett could have sought to create a charity of his own, to rival the Gates Foundation. He has the cash. He could have become famous for his own brand of philanthropy, his own approach to solving global problems, or the effects his own interventions have had on the developing world. But he's a far more subtle operator than that, and his goals are much clearer. He's far more interested in the difference he can make, than in having that difference attributed to him.

By more than doubling the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Buffett has put his weight behind an already fast-moving train. He's given support to an organisation that mirrors his values, and he has, as always, kept his ego out of it.

This donation represents the majority of his fortune. It is a gift of such magnitude that most people will look at the number, talk about it in dinner parties, and yet never truly appreciate the extraordinary transfer of wealth that he has pledged to make. It is his greatest ever investment, and hopefully his wisest. The Gates Foundation already had more spending power than any charitable organisation you cared to name. It now has more than double what it had previously. Moreover, it is beholden to no-one, least of all the wittering, schitzophrenic, directionless whim of the idiot tabloid-reading general public - it is led, has its goals set and its strategies decided by a small team, with their judgement unclouded by the media screams of what they should be doing, and as such, it's in the most incredible position to make a real difference. Even had I not had the utmost respect for the foundation before, it's hard to argue with where Warren Buffett puts his money - that's a vote of confidence of the highest order.

The world won't thank Gates or Buffett - there's too much societal resentment of other people's success, and the world will think it was owed what these remarkable individuals have chosen to give. Luckily, they're big enough not to let that stop them.

The photo above is a view of the inside of the flight chamber at BodyFlight, a freefall simulator based north of London. The nutter in blue is me. The nutter in red is the instructor.

I spent 12.5 minutes in that room, and hardly touched the ground once. It's a fantastic experience that I highly recommend.

Don't do it on a full stomach.

Controlling your position when you're not touching any solid objects and you're hanging in a 140-mile-per-hour current of air is not an easy task. The professionals who practice in the tunnel and the instructors who work there make it look like it's not only easy, but the greatest thing in the world. As a newcomer to the sport, the best you can hope for is to not ridicule yourself.

I went for the "starter course", which is a collection of lessons in a day with an instructor to help you through them - this gives you first an experience of what it's like, followed by some feedback and some tuition, and then some more time to practice. The total time in the chamber is not that long (12m30s), but you do it in 1m15s intervals. I would have preferred 2 minute intervals, but no longer than that as there's a lot to take in at once, and the breaks help you assimilate what you've learned.

Bodyflying is completely counterintuitive. As soon as you lose your balance in the airflow, your body wants to do things which will only make the problem worse, so you have to subdue those unhelpful reflexes. Near the end, when I was getting tired, I was no longer able to do this, and would curl my legs up too far, thus flying quite violently backwards into the walls of the chamber, bruising my knees.

The staff and professionals show you how it's done - with complete control over their body, their flight and their position in the air, they turn the chamber into a skydiver's playground, zooming around the walls, doing backflips and corkscrews with massive smiles on their faces. It's certainly something to aspire to!

Despite the newness of the exercise, I wasn't too tired afterwards, although I think there's a muscle in my back that I very rarely use, which it quite crucial when skydiving, and which was tired at the end of the session, causing me to adopt a less-than-ideal flight position - I can just feel a little soreness there today - enough to let me know that the entire experience wasn't some strange and mysterious dream.

I went to a Dixie Chicks concert last night. It was a lot of fun - their new album rocks (for the most part) and the venue in Shepherd's Bush is a bit of a special place for them, since that's where Natalie Maines uttered the fateful phrase, "Just so you know, we're embarassed that George Bush is from Texas".

That comment resulted in the Chicks being banished from most radio stations in the southern states, and in particular, Clearchannel communications, the company that holds a stranglehold on much of the radio broadcasting industry in the US, blacklisted them, preventing any of Clearchannel's subsidiary stations from airing the DIxie Chick's music.

The effect on their sales, their profile and their exposure to listeners was devastating. That's what you get for airing a personal view in the company of those for whom free speech is less important than the right to hold a gun.

Given all of the above, one might have expected them to be a little more cautious this time. To perhaps make their point in a more oblique way, so that everyone could interpret their words in a way that didn't offend them. But that would have been ducking the bullet, kowtowing to the likes of ClearChannel and compromising themselves. In what was certainly a prepared moment, Natalie Maines brought up the subject early on in the concert, referring to the pain of the last two years and the comment made so long ago in exactly the same place on exactly the same stage. Then she made the exact same comment again. Clearly.

Then they played another song before the cheering had had time to die down.

I was impressed. It may sound imprudent, it may sound like they're asking for it, but in reality, it was the only option open to them. To say they regretted the words the first time they were spoken would not have removed their meaning, and would have made them no new friends. Some blinkered Republicans would have beaten their chests claiming they have given the Dixie Chicks what for, but the only reason to claim they regretted their prior statement would have been to avoid the financial pain being inflicted on them. It would have lacked integrity.

The Chicks aren't being pushed around, and good for them.

Politics aside, it was a great concert. This was in large part thanks to the crowd, who were all very much up for it. The Chicks have fantastic music, great voices and good material, but they don't fill up the stage. They don't generate the energy and power of some more charismatic stage personalities. Then again, they haven't been on stage for two years, so perhaps we should cut them some slack on that front.

What they do well is provide a mix of songs from all of their albums, with the best of the most recent material occuring a little past the half-way mark of the concert - "Not Ready to Make Nice", the first single to be released from the new album, was particularly well received. Where the audience was most enthusiastic, however, was the best of the older material, with everyone in the room singing along to every word. "Travelling Soldier" in particular was sung along to word for word by everyone in the section I was sitting in.

The Chicks perform the songs on stage almost exactly as they are on the albums, which is perhaps a pity, since a more personal touch usually leaves me with the feeling that I've experienced something a bit different by seeing them in person.

I had two regrets, the first of which was the absence of "There's Your Trouble" from the set, since it's the song that first caught my attention and caused me to buy Wide Open Spaces, their first album. My second regret is that they chose to open with "Lubbock or Leave It", which is one of the only two songs on their album which doesn't work for me - it would have been nice to launch into the concert with one of their greats, a sort of "we're back and as good as ever", rather than a song which sounds like a rant, both in terms of its lyrics and its melody.

As a whole, the evening was excellent, the audience was extremely happy to see them back, the Dixie Chicks as musically strong as ever and unbowed by the political savagery they've had to endure. Congratulations.

So the cyst is gone - the consultant orthopaedic surgeon (try saying that after a few beers) looked at it, shrugged and said, "I can aspirate it if you like". A few short minutes, a little anaesthetic and a needle big enough to prop up a strut of the eiffel tower, and my wrist no longer has an unsightly bulge in it.

More pleasant still, I can flex my fingers and wrist and not experience weird twinges of pain.

The cyst - it turns out - was really not very big. Certainly no match for the giant metal straw that it was jabbed with. Apparently, small "tight" cysts are often the most painful. I didn't really understand why, or what a "tight" cyst is (perhaps it's not very big but the liquid in it is under pressure?), but my experience bears the statement out.

I'm glad to be rid of it.

A while ago, I had a ganglion cyst in my right wrist, and a doctor in the US, at immense cost to my insurance, spent 5 minutes sticking a needle into my wrist and drawing out some jelly-like fluid - it was over faster than you would have thought, and when I took the bandage off the next day, my wrist was all better.

Unfortunately, aspiration isn't the most reliable method of getting rid of ganglions, as they have this annoying tendency to come back. By and large, they wax and wane and can safely be left alone, but the one I currently have in my left wrist is blocking the movement, getting in the way of my doing sport, or yoga.

And it hurts. All the damn time.

So tomorrow, after jumping through the countless hoops designed to dissuade you and which make it as complicated as bureaucratically possible, I will be going to see a consultant at a nearby clinic. I'm hoping he aspirates at the very least. The last time I saw a consultant, he told me to not do any sport for a month and wait for it to go away, which is a really sub-standard solution as far as I'm concerned. After all, a month is a long time to not be able to do yoga or go to the gym, and to be saying "ouch" every time I flex my wrist.

I will be going there armed with an insurance membership number, an insurance authorisation code and a GP referral letter. It's taken me a week and a couple of hours off work to get those three items - what a waste of time - but hopefully the road is now clear.

I recently booked myself into AFF Level 1. That's Advanced FreeFall. It's the first of 8 lessons after which you get a license to jump out of a plane all on your own.

AFF Level 1 involves a day's training on the ground followed by a jump out of a plane with a parachute and with a couple of experts holding on to your harness for dear life (yours, not theirs) to make sure you're not sideways on or something when you deploy your parachute.

Probably also to make sure you actually do deploy your parachute.

I'm raising lots of funds for charity too - since I'm paying for it myself, the charity's getting all of the cash. It's almost £600 now and I'm still more than a month away from jumping.

Some people I would not have expected to donate have been outstandingly generous, and others whom I would have thought would have been happy to make a gesture have suddenly adopted a low profile. I suppose that was to be expected. I find myself keener to get a long list of names sponsoring me than I am to get a large amount of cash - the messages of support I've received from friends - some of whom I haven't heard from for a while - have been the best part of this. Some people who I know are not necessarily flush with cash have also been surprisingly and spontaneously generous, both financially and in terms of the messages they've written, and the gesture is incredibly warming.

In case I decide to go for the full AFF course once level 1 is out of the way, I'm putting all the chances on my side and I'm going up this weekend for freefall "training" in Bedford at a place called Bodyflight. It's a big fan powered by a massive engine in a tower, and it creates an upward draft powerful enough to fly in unassisted. I'm going to be spending 12.5 minutes in freefall over a period of 3 hours, and will hopefully pick up enough experience in that time to be able to pass AFF without needing to repeat any levels - should I choose to take the whole course. 12.5 minutes is equivalent to between 17 skydives with 45 seconds of freefall in each. That's a lot of experience in 3 hours.

I think the bodyflight experience will be helpful, but more than that, I'm going to be flying in a column of air powered by a massive fan, driven by a giant engine, in a big tower in Bedford this Sunday evening. How cool is that?

One of the websites said that we should bring laceup shoes, because if someone loses a shoe, they have to stop the engine and go get all the pieces of shoe that end up scattered all over the place. Fantastic! That's one hell of a fan...