I bravely returned to Hippo Rock this afternoon, even though the sea was rougher and more swirling than ever, and with the help of a deep sea cameraman recreated my initial conquering of the domain. It was much harder to get on the rock today and you can see the exhaustion in the pictures as I finally pull myself to my feet. But there I am in all my glory, followed by a spectacular walrus like leap from my perch. Hope that gives you some context.
I have been mainly eating, reading and sleeping. It's been just marvelous to get in some proper kip and I managed almost 12 hours last night. This is what this holiday is all about, recuperation and I already feel more relaxed and more content. As I sat on a piece of driftwood on the shore, the sun on my face, the sea lapping and occasionally crashing into my feet reading the excellent
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Collings wouldn't like it, but now I am armed with ammo for podcasts 2009 - may write about it tomorrow if nothing else happens), I felt about as content as it's possible to be. All the hard work of the last few months has been worth it and this fortnight is most certainly my reward. It's a long time since I have earned a break, but in my mind I started to equate the less satisfying jobs I've done, with what they had now allowed me to purchase (ie a fortnight of freedom in the sun) and it all made a wonderful kind of sense and was worth it. I am lucky that most of the work I do I do because I like it, and sometimes they even pay me to do that stuff, but those hard days of writing links for eight solid hours are not as much fun and it's satisfying that they helped to get me on to a piece of driftwood, with wet feet, reading a brilliant and funny book.
It's strange having the internet in this hideaway bit of paradise. There are few other mod cons - no TV, no phones in the rooms, it's even pretty difficult to get to anywhere else on the island. So being kept up to date with the death of Harold Pinter and the results in the Conference, within seconds of these things happening is a little surreal.
I told my uninterested girlfriend - knowing that she wouldn't be interested - that York had lost their away game to league leaders Burton Albion, despite being a goal up. She took more interest than I had anticipated and wanted to know how good a division the Conference was. I explained that it wasn't very good, coming as it does beneath the Premiership, the Championship, League One and League Two.
A man at the next table though, heard me discussing football and when I was alone came to ask me about the football results. Now, I am not really interested in football either. I support a club who are 108th in the country and only follow them on the internet, never having seen them play. I have a tiny amount of knowledge about higher divisions and teams, enough to get me through a brief discussion with a taxi driver, but in no way enough to enter into a half hour conversation with a stranger.
This, I know, makes me an unusual man. Football is the social glue that binds most men together. Two strangers can meet, thousands of miles from home and immediately bond on a topic that they know all about. They can passionately talk about this one issue, when treating any other subject with such investment of emotion would be seen as weird and unmanly. It usually just makes me laugh when I hear two men embroiled in such a conversation, and the levels of importance that they will attach to some men kicking a ball around.
The man who talked to me seemed like a lovely man: down to earth, friendly and normal, but he wanted to talk about football and I knew that I would only get him so far. I had luckily remembered the scores of some of the important games, but he wanted to know how Arsenal had done. I didn't know and I could see in his face that he thought less of me. I said I could check the internet next time I was in my room.
Later, after my falsified documentation of my discovery of Chard Island II, I returned to the shore and the man was on a lounger. It was 2-2, I told him, having gleaned the information from the BBC sports page (the game hadn't actually been played when I had initially been talking to the guy, so I wasn't so stupid after all). As an Arsenal fan he was a bit disappointed, though he'd have been more upset if I had told him that Aston Villa had equalised in injury time (I only noticed this later). He knew I supported York (who beat Arsenal in the FA Cup a couple of decades ago as I was keen to remind him - I can be a bit blokey when it is called for) and told me that he believed that the lower divisions were the only true representation of British football, as the Premiership is so full of foreign players that sometimes hardly anyone actually from this country is on the pitch any more. I was getting out of my depth. Because of one jokey conversation with my girlfriend about my rubbish football team, that I don't even support properly, this man saw me as someone interested in sport and I realised that possibly for the rest of my holiday, every time I saw him I was going to have to have a discussion about something I know hardly anything about, which would involve him saying something complicated (about something actually rather trivial) and me nodding and saying, "Yeah, good point."
He thought that each side should have to field at least four British players, which would ensure that - he had to think about it, but I suspect only to give me the impression that he didn't know about maths, which would be unmanly (football was his only interest), yet I would much rather be doing some multiplication tables with him - there would be sixteen home grown players playing for the top four teams on any given Saturday. "Yes," I agreed. "It's a shame you're not in charge of the League."
There was little left for me to say, but with a sinking feeling I realised that I'd have to spend the rest of my holiday learning stuff about football off the internet, because this guy would now be talking to me about it at any given opportunity. And like I say, he was a lovely, genuine fella who clearly just wanted to make friends, and who was using a tactic that would have worked fine with 99% of men in the world. But he'd ended up with the one who would rather discuss the fact that homeopathy and the media coverage of science was fallacious and potentially dangerous.
I did my best to pretend though and one wonders how many other football talking men actually hate football and are just going through the motions. Perhaps this guy didn't like football either and was just doing what was expected of him. Perhaps he feels slightly sick at the prospect of talking about football and nothing else every time he sees me for the next two weeks.
But most likely I am just a gigantic and unmanly weirdo.
Still this is my only slight stress in an otherwise almost perfect environment. So things aren't too bad.
Unless the bloke gets internet access, finds out who I am and reads this before the holiday is over. Then my cover is blown.
