"WILL you be going on the Mickleover water slide? There are people here who would pay to see you do it. And it would make a great cartoon."
That was the e-mail that pinged into my computer from Telegraph Towers last week.
Well, it's a thought.
But, first of all, I believe that one has to win a lottery – and when you measure the number of people already wanting to do this against the number that can be accommodated, then the odds against my name coming out of the hat are stacked pretty high.
I rarely have luck with raffles and suchlike. When I do draw a winner, the prize is usually duff.
Take when my ticket came out at a reunion lunch in London last year. At the time I was using a walking stick because I was suffering from gout – I may have mentioned this from time to time – and asked Mrs R if she would go up to choose my prize. I could see a table covered in bottles of various sizes and colours.
So I was less than delighted when she returned with a gardening calendar. My protest was met with a fairly predictable: "Well next time, go and get your own prize."
At a Derby County former players' function, I won a caravan holiday. At least I thought I had. It turned out that, first, I needed to already own a caravan.
Then, the other week, my number came out at another little do, but again I came up short. This time the scheme of things was that a prize was drawn and then a ticket was drawn.
The person before me won a DVD player, the person after me took away (with some help) a 55-inch LED television. In between I collected a set of chopsticks. "Never mind," said Mrs R. "It's all in a good cause." She really doesn't get it.
Anyway, apart from the chance being extraordinarily remote that I would come up trumps for a slide down Kipling Drive, I was suspicious of the motive behind the suggestion.
Not that I take myself at all seriously – I've tried that and it's always ended in disappointment – but I had already been told (with some glee) that there are people in Derby who recognise me from Dave Hitchcock's wonderful cartoons rather than from the photograph that accompanies this column. I have become a caricature of myself.
So I probably won't enter my name. Not that I'm scared. After all, it isn't a parachute jump, or an abseil down Mam Tor from the Grim Wall – I leave that sort of thing to my friend and intrepid mountaineer, Nigel Vardy.
It's just that, in the autumn of his years, a chap has to maintain some dignity.
I might, though, be found outside the Hippodrome this Sunday when, at 2.30pm, members of Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust, led by its president, Derby-born actress Gwen Taylor, will release 100 balloons to mark the centenary of the theatre's opening on the eve of the Great War.
It will also be a tribute to Chris Harris, a lovely man with a whimsical sense of humour, and a stalwart of the DHRT, who died earlier this month. He will be greatly missed.
