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Surfing the wind
I’m writing this in response to (yesterday’s) Daily Prompt:
“Apply yourself: Describe your last attempt to learn something that did not come easily to you.”
Once upon a long ago I decided to try my hand at a spot of wind surfing. I know the Daily Prompt mentions “your last attempt”, but I honestly can’t think of a more recent example. I haven’t really tried to learn anything recently apart from computer stuff for my job, and that isn’t so hard to pick up.
The thing about wind surfing is that it’s a physical activity, and the thing about me is that I’m more a watch TV, play video games and read books kind of a guy. That’s what made this so hard.
A chap from work (I was working in Cork, Ireland at the time) announced that there were a couple of places going on a beginners’ wind surfing course nearby. In a moment of madness, I signed up!
We started in a test board on dry land. I fell off.
We progressed to a proper board on the water. I fell off. A lot.
The water wasn’t particularly deep. In fact you could stand up and keep your head above the surface.
Here’s my modus operandi when I fall – whenever possible, when I feel myself falling off something, I jump. This is an attempt to keep some control over the fall. When I fall into water, I pull my legs up under myself so that they don’t hit the bottom (which I can’t see and therefore have no wish to land on). These are instinctual reactions.
Therefore, falling off the wind surfing board always involved getting completely wet, as I always ended up completely submerged. In one notable incident, the sail came down on top of me, resulting in a nasty lump to the head.
The highest point of the day was actually getting on the board and sailing off. I was so excited that it was finally happening that I didn’t want to stop and the people on shore watched as I got smaller and smaller, headed out into the bay. It’s easy to stay on once you’ve got going as you have the sail to hang on to. Turning around wasn’t something I could do as it involved a complicated shuffling around the sail.
Finally I jumped off in an attempt not to go out to sea. The water was very deep and very cold. Eventually I managed to get back on and I kept going until I crashed into the shore.
I’m not sure I’d do it again, but I’m glad I tried it. It was way outside my comfort zone (my comfort zone only includes “things I’ve done before”), but I gave it a go and I had my one successful sail. Something to add to my (small) list of life experiences!
The Sniffles
Rather annoyingly, I’ve spent the last week or so with a bit of a cold. A bit of a nasty cold, actually.
It followed the usual course. A tingling in the throat, followed by a full-on nasty throat, followed a couple of days later by the whole nose and sneezing thing. Then came the coughing and headache. The odd thing is that I never seem to get all the symptoms at once, almost as if the cold is evolving day by day. I’m not complaining particularly – everything at once would be even more miserable, though it would be cool if the whole thing happened all at once and therefore only lasted a couple of days rather than a whole week.
Lemsip. Yummy – but read the label!
Lemsip is the key here. Wonderful stuff. Unfortunately, rather delicious as well. The trouble is (and one of the reasons it works so well) is that it contains a gramme of Paracetamol, which means you can’t just drink it willy-nilly. I was very good and got through the entire episode with only a couple of sachets – mustn’t stress the kidneys!
I worked throughout, of course – most people at work already had it so there was no real point in staying home, regardless of how ill I was feeling. There’s another reason for not taking time off. In over nine years at this job, I’ve yet to take any sick time. The longer this lasts, the less likely I am to take a sick day – it’s become a matter of pride. I even (jokingly) remarked to a colleague – the one I blame for passing the cold on to me, in fact 🙂 – that sometimes I wish my appendix would just burst so that the pressure of sick days would be off me.
And, lo and behold, I woke up at 3am the next morning with a nasty pain in the appendix area, spreading right across the front. Psychosomatic? Maybe. Or maybe just gas. I spent the next half hour trying to convince my body I was “just joking” about the whole appendicitis thing. In any case, I was fine later on. Appendix still intact.
But be careful what you wish for!
Season of mists and mellow etc
It was a lovely day yesterday. A real Autumn becoming Winter kind of a day.
I got up nice and early to drive into Truro for a long-overdue haircut. It was still dark, but crisp and clear. It was also the coldest morning of the year so far – the temperature gauge in the car read 2 degrees and the little orange snowflake was showing on the dashboard. As I arrived in town the sun was just peeking over the horizon, big and orange and beautiful.
Towards evening we had a couple of short, hard rain showers. Not that persistent misty drizzle we’ve had all summer. Good, proper honest-to-goodness rain. Lovely! Well, the absence of rain might have been better, but at least it was proper rain.
This sort of weather always reminds me of when I was little and in primary school. We would always have to collect leaves which had fallen to the ground, bring them into school and stick them into our exercise book. Then there was the Harvest Festival, when everyone would bring in vegetables and things for a display in the main hall. This is the only time of year which reminds me of primary school stuff – not even Christmas compares.
We switched back from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time early this morning which means lighter mornings and darker evenings. I prefer darker evenings – getting home after work, the flat always seems cosier with a little light on and the curtains closed. A warm haven away from the cold outside. There’s no point in light evenings anyway – all it did all summer was rain.
I even decided to write a poem to mark the occasion of Autumn, but all I managed were two lines which would go in the middle somewhere:
The crunch of leaves upon the ground
A carpet lying all around
On the plus side, if I change “leaves” to “snow”, it works for winter as well, so maybe I’ll have another go in a month or so. While you’re waiting for my literary master piece – to be titled “Winter Days” (formerly titled “Autumn Days”) – read this one from an expert (Keats) instead.
Now I’ve just got to hope that winter is cold and crisp and it doesn’t snow – I like snow and all, but driving over frozen snow to get to work is no fun at all.
Birthday Time!
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday, dear dralimaaaaaaaaaan,
Happy birthday to me.
Yes, it’s that time of the year again. Time to take stock, ponder the last year and really think about the things that really matter. Or whatever.
Or is that what you’re supposed to do on New Year? I forget. Old age. More aches and pains. Becoming slightly forgetful. The other day I went to pay for petrol and the card’s PIN number went straight out of my head. I had to use my debit card instead. Aargh! Paying for petrol straight from my bank account? Everyone knows Visa fronts me my petrol money.
Yesterday I was “a certain age”. Less than 24 hours later I’m “a certain age plus one”. A whole year in a day. Hardly seems fair. Hey ho.
I got some lovely presents and spent a wonderful yesterday evening over with my friends where we had Chinese takeaway and watched Eddie Izzard – very funny! Now I’ve got a couple of days off work in celebration.
And I had some good news – I won the lottery in time for my birthday! Well, maybe “won” is too strong a word. Here’s the notification:
Woo-hoo! I’m rich I tell you, rich!
Yes, 25 big ones. Unless “big ones” is slang for “thousands”, in which case, 25 small ones. What shall I spend it on? More tickets I expect. It’ll pay for next month’s entries. But nice all the same – that’s 2.5 times more than I’ve ever won in one go before!
So I leave you with these immortal words from Pink Floyd’s “Time”, from their amazing album “Dark Side of the Moon”. Forgive me if I get the words slightly wrong, but I can’t be bothered to spend 10 seconds looking them up so I’m reproducing them from memory.
“And you run, you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking,
Racing around, to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.”
Ah, happy days!
The Classics
I’ve always wanted to be a sophisticated chap. Reading the classics – Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. Listening to all the classic music – Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. I’d love to be able to intersperse my witty and sophisticated conversion with quotes from Sartre and, well, all those other dudes people quote.
The thing is, I can’t be bothered. I’ve tried. I’ve really tried.
I like the occasional classical music, but by and large it makes me feel like I’m in a lift, desperate to get out at any floor and take the stairs instead. Or in one of those posh restaurants where such music is constantly piped in.
A beautifully-presented plate of almost no food.
(Not that I regularly/ever visit such restaurants – they’re largely incompatible with my bank balance. My credit card prefers the likes of pub grub, McDonald’s and Pizza Express. Plus I don’t fancy paying a week’s wages for beautifully-presented almost nothing food.)
I had a go at some classical literature – Emily Bronte’s only published novel Wuthering Heights. I made it about half way through before I got bored. It’s a good story, but it was hard going, I tell you. And very little in the way of zombies, decapitations, magic or mystical creatures. I’ll stick to Kate Bush’s version from now on.
As for quotes, I have a vast array at my disposal. Unfortunately 99% come from Red Dwarf and Black Adder. It’s amazing how often I get to use them in real life situations!
My lack of knowledge (and interest in) the classics bothered me for ages. However, I’ve recently decided that I don’t care! Life’s too short. I’ll spend the rest of mine reading, watching and listening to the stuff I enjoy, rather than the stuff I think I ought to enjoy. And let’s face it, in a couple of hundred years, the stuff I like now will probably be “classics”!
So bring on Marina and the Diamonds, the Kim Harrison “Hollows” books and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s what I like and I’m not going to feel bad about it any more.
Club 130
This has been quite a couple of months, money-wise. And weirdly, all my “extras” have come to around the same amount (£130) – hence “Club 130”. What are the odds of that? (Well, one in one, though calculating the odds of something after it’s happened could be counted as “cheating”.) I’ve even created a logo using my mad design skills. Though I suspect that “brokus” isn’t actually Latin for “broke”.
The new, professionally created, Club 130 logo.
First off I loaned, yes, you guessed it, £130 to a friend.
Then, out of the blue, my car tax reminder arrived. Technically speaking, it wasn’t really out of the blue. It’s been due at the end of June for years. There’s a disk in my windscreen with a big “6” for June on it. So I guess I should really have known ahead of time, but time seems to be fairly zipping along at the moment and it just crept up on me. How much for the year, I hear you ask? £130 (ish).
Now, the third member of Club 130 really was a surprise.
Thinking that the beginning of July would be OK weather-wise, I booked the first two weeks for my annual leave. I wasn’t planning on going away, but there are plenty of places in Cornwall to visit for day trips – everything from beaches to cliff walks to moorland.
Then the Jet Stream got lost. This particular Jet Stream is supposed to bring warm, dry weather to the UK. Instead, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and it rained. And rained. And rained.
Every day.
I think I left the house maybe 4 times during my holiday, and all were necessary trips (shopping and so on). Ultimately, I didn’t use my car from the second Tuesday until the following Monday when I went to work. After work I went shopping and parked on a hill, and returning to the car I saw the street lights glinting off something in the rear foot well. The last thing I expected it to be was a puddle!
So, look on the bright side. Surely everybody wants a swimming pool in their car? How cool is that! Well, it turns out that it makes the car smell damp and I’m sure water sloshing around didn’t do my fuel economy any favours. So off to the garage I went. They were great – ferried me to and from work two days in a row, fixed the door seal, dried out the car and helpfully pointed out that the air-con was no longer working.
Apparently if you don’t use the air-con for a few minutes every couple of weeks, the seals dry out and all the gas escapes! Who knew? Maybe if I’d read the owner’s manual when I bought the car. But I’m a bloke – I don’t read instructions.
I told them to fix the air-con as well, so they did that and chopped some money off the total, which spookily brought the total back to… £130!
So now I’m hoping that I don’t get any more eligible bills for Club 130 (not until my next pay cheque anyway), and I’m counting myself lucky that I’m not writing about “Club 250”, because that would have been no good all, money-wise.
So if anyone wants to join the club, just send me a receipt for around £130 and in return you’ll receive a laminated membership card* and exclusive secret decoder ring**.
*Membership cards not available
**No secret decoder ring will actually be sent
Ah, Shopping
The joys of food shopping. It has to be done. Otherwise, I’ll starve to death.
Okay, I could do my shopping online and get it delivered, but I really don’t fancy that at all. I want to choose my own bananas. I’m very particular about my bananas. I need them in various states of ripeness so I get a nice-to-eat banana every day for my lunch at work.
If a product is out of stock, I want to make the decision whether or not to “substitute it for a similar product”.
I don’t want to hang around at home as it gets later and later wondering if my food is going to arrive, getting more and more stressed (it doesn’t take much to get me stressed).
This all means that I need to go shopping.
With a few exceptions, I choose the shop and the timing with care. I choose half past nine in the evening – the roads are quiet and the shop is quiet.
I choose a supermarket which is neither too small (little choice) or too big (can’t find anything).
These choices reduce my stress level. Average time for my weekly shop – less than 15 minutes in and out.
So what does annoy me the most about shopping?
- The “What, pay?” crowd – these are the people who pack all their shopping away and then look surprised when the cashier says “That’ll be 21 pounds 30, please.” After rooting around for what seems a lifetime they finally find a card and shove it in the slot. This is a financial transaction, people. Please be prepared to pay.
- The “pay by cash” crowd – not the people who pay using actual money, but the people who extract all manner of small change from their wallet/purse/pockets, count it and start piling it up neatly on the counter. The cashier then has to count it again. To be honest, I feel a little guilty hating this, they’re just being careful/sensible, but Boy! it takes a while!
- Products which magically move shelves overnight – I hear this is done to (a) make people look around so they see other products to spend their hard-earned on, and (b) deter shoplifters who tend to know exactly where the product is they wish to steal and don’t want to spend time searching in case security get suspicious. I understand the reasons, but I need to be in and out in 15 minutes! I don’t have time to spend on a hunt for my favourite snacks.
- The “conveyor gap” crowd – these individuals start stacking their shopping at the far end of the conveyor belt, leaving a huge gap in the middle so that people behind them can’t start to unpack. Are they afraid their shopping’s going to get mixed up with he person’s in front? That’s what those plastic separators are for.
- The “roughly 10 items or less” crowd – when I’m in the “10 items or less” queue, it means I just popped in for a couple of things and I could even be in a hurry! I can’t help counting the items in the baskets of people ahead of me. And man, do I get (quietly and internally) mad when I spot more than 10. Bastards.
Ah, shopping.
Oh deer
“Oh deer” – no, not an embarrassing typo. We’re talking Bambi’s here (I understand that “Bambi” is a name and has no plural, and neither “Bambis” nor “Bambies” look right, so I hope you’ll excuse the use of the apostrophe in the plural).
From personal observation there has been a recent spate of attempted animal suicides in my area. Over the last couple of months every kind of furry mammal has flung itself at my car in an apparent attempt to end it all.
A Bambi, much like the suicide Bambi recently spotted on a main road in Cornwall.
Here’s a list of the most recent attempts:
2 cats (Truro and Redruth)
1 fox (A30 dual carriageway)
1 squirrel (Falmouth)
1 deer (A30 dual carriageway)
1 drunken youth (Truro)
All of these incidents took place after 10pm except for the squirrel – he only required a quick braking manoeuvre. The others elicited a last minute swerve.
Now, the fox and the squirrel I can understand – they’ve never traditionally balked at running into the road.
I always thought cats had more sense.
I’ve included “drunken youth” in the list because he was behaving like an animal. He jumped out into he road and stuck his finger up at me. Maybe he was trying to thumb a lift but mistakenly used “the finger” instead. As I passed him I saw him in the rear view mirror move further out into the road, finger still held high as I drove away. I was quite annoyed at such a random incident and briefly considered slamming the car into reverse and backing over him. Of course that would have been “wrong”, although, to be honest, prison food could only improve my diet.
That brings me to the Bambi. A deer in Cornwall? What? I saw it in the headlights at the last second as it calmly made its way down the verge and straight out into the slow lane. I performed a rather impressive 70mph swerve and saw it in the rear view mirror stare at me for a second before, again very calmly, it made its way back up the verge.
My Dad later told me that apparently there’s a “deer farm” in the vicinity (deer don’t generally roam free in Cornwall which is why I was so surprised to see one at all, let alone on the main road).
I’m not sure why one would “farm deer”, but I guess it must have been “deer harvest” time and one of them made a break for freedom.
Apparently hitting a deer at 70mph does serious damage to a car (and it probably doesn’t do the deer much good either) so it’s lucky I had an empty lane to swerve into.
Are these incidents all part of the rich tapestry of nature, or is there a multi-species suicide pact going on? Hopefully the former, otherwise it’s all just a bit depressing.
The Great Green Missile
Today my attention was brought to a story in the news about a Brazilian chappie who decided he wanted to spend the day looking like the Incredible Hulk.
Mr Paint Job.
Having decided on this course of action he covered himself in green paint. Did he use specialist body paint? No. He used specialist submarine and missile paint.
Apparently it took all his friends an entire day to scrape it off.
Now, while this is a vaguely amusing story, it brings to mind an obvious question.
“Specialist missile paint”?
Specialist submarine paint, well, maybe. After all, it gives all the little fishes something nice to look at. But why develop special paint for missiles? Is it considered bad form to blow people up with missiles with the paint peeling off? Do the intended victims care? Do they casually remark “Oh, will you look at that, they obviously used ordinary exterior wall paint on that missile, it’s all peeling off” in the micro second before their violent incineration? Is it a point of national pride to only use the most beautifully painted high explosives? Or is it so they look good when certain countries drive them through the streets during parades?
Hello people. They’re ugly inventions that do an ugly job. There ain’t no amount of paint gonna cover that up.
The taxman cometh
On arriving home from work the other evening I saw a dreaded brown envelope on the mat. Upon closer inspection all I needed to see was the return address – “HM Revenue and Customs” – to send butterflies swooping through my stomach.
I’ll just briefly explain the tax system in the UK. We use PAYE (Pay As You Earn) – HMRC takes tax from your pay every month and the rest (minus National Insurance) goes into your bank account. We trust HMRC to take the correct amount – we have to. You need to be a genius to be ale to work it out for yourself. If you get paid more one month (bonus, overtime and so on) the tax is recalculated for the next month (you might pay more), but it all evens out in the end.
A letter could easily mean that they haven’t taken enough money and they want more!
I settled myself on the sofa and opened the letter. The first page was very generic – “you may owe us money, or we may have taken too much and we owe you”. Pages went flying in all directions as I tried to find the final reckoning. I should mention that this is for the tax year 2005-2006, back in the distant mists of time.
Joy of joys – apparently they didn’t take into account an increase in my personal allowance (the amount you can earn before you pay any tax) and I paid too much (i.e. they took too much)!
Rich, I’m rich! They’re sending me a cheque! What should I buy?
I’ve always wanted a little Audi. That would be nice. Or I could move to a bigger place. One with a spare room to put all my junk in. Or maybe a cool 3D TV with a massive screen.
Audi, big house, 3D TV – all denied
Well, they owe me a grand total of £34.50. So I won’t be getting any of those things. But it’s nice that the government thought of me and are sending me some money.
I can’t help thinking that it would be nice if HMRC always took a little too much and then gave it back – it would be like a little savings scheme. But then I suppose we’d come to expect it and then the one year we didn’t get it we’d find we’d already spent it in anticipation.
Maybe next year I’ll owe them money instead. Perhaps I’ll just take my £34.50 and store it away against that eventuality.
No, screw it. Amazon.co.uk here I come!
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