Year after year, on holiday in Switzerland with her late husband, Margaret Thompson watched the paragliders and imagined joining them. When she did, it was heavenly
fter their three children grew up and left home, Margaret Thompson and her husband, Kenneth, stretched their legs together on walking holidays in Switzerland. In, year after year, they would head up the mountain and watch the paragliders launch themselves into the sky. Back in town, in a large park, they watched them return to earth. “Some day I’d love to do that,” Thompson told Kenneth.
Her instructor was seated behind her. “You’re on the side of a hill. And you have to run down the hill,” she says. “He’ll say: ‘Three … two … one …’ And then you run. He was that bit taller than me. He was running, but my feet weren’t touching the ground. I was running in midair.” Thompson did her second paraglide when she turned 85, and raised nearly £2,000 for a hospice in Belfast, where she lives, much of it with the aid of social clubs run by the Presbyterian church she regularly attends.
Thompson grew up in Belfast. Her parents ran a grocers on Cavehill Road; the family lived above the shop. “It was the time of the Troubles.” One night the bar opposite was set alight. “We had a glass door. I went downstairs and the glass was running down like a waterfall after the blast.”
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