tin.fish

My paddleboarding journey started what seemed like years ago, because it was in fact years ago.  Seven in fact.  After a paddleboard rental in Torbay, on a forgivingly flat day, i was bitten by the bug.  By the following spring I had purchased my first paddleboard having done a frankly appalling level of research.  The board was an Aquamarina Vapor.  Whilst ideal for my Wife, I’d picked something entirely unsuitable for myself and it bent under my weight like a comedy banana.  The starter paddle was too short for me by about two feet too but I persisted that year to try and get a feel for SUP.  Oh how people must have laughed at the portly little pale man, flailing around in the shallows, fins almost clean out of the water like a seal waving at the crowd. I should probably rewind a few years to explain that, in spite of how ridiculous I might sound so far, watersports (not the urination kind) are not a new thing for me.  From an early age, I spen...

 I knew, I knew that gerbils were the thin end of the wedge.  Once you allow animals into your home, the Overton Window of acceptable things begins to shift and before you know it you've got yourself a dog.  A Christmas dog - the worst kind of dog. Bunny Fish is a miniature dachshund and she's really bloody tiny.  She seems to have a radar that tells her whenever a human (and especially me) is accessible to be sat or laid on.  If I sit and enjoy a coffee on the floor, as I often do, this happens.  Then you feel obliged to just sit there until your buttocks and legs become clinically dead. I was fully in my "tight ship" mindset, preparing to ensure that Bunny would understand her place in this house and that she was a dog (Han's previous dog thought she was people) and should behave as such.  Then, the first time she cried I ran from my desk to her bed and thought "Ohhhh crap, she's got me". So here we go then, don't we.

On the 17th December, the family and I visited a friend in Copenhagen.  This was booked before omicron broke and was a non-refundable flight otherwise we'd probably have cancelled.  We did have a nice time, though the city and country were closing up around us.  By the 19th the Christmas markets were closed and restaurants and bars were emptying.  We left on the evening of the 20th and hunkered down at home for the Christmas period.  Turkey.   Pork-pie.  Prosecco.   You know the deal. On Christmas Eve I woke up with a slight sore throat and reported as much on the Kings College London Zoe app that I have been using pretty much since the beginning.  I also took a lateral flow test at the same time, which came back negative.  The sore throat was gone by lunch and I thought nothing else of it.  On Christmas Day I received an e-mail from KCL that said, although my symptom was not a Covid key symptom, they invited me to take a PCR test f...

Well that back-fired.  Pop a range rover in front of Chris Packham's gaff and set it on fire .  Cracking high jinx, that'll show him.  Hahaha no one died, fortunately, hahahaha.  Haha criminal damage hahahahaha.  Nothing, and I do mean nothing , gets your point across better than this sort of thing. Chris' response to this was to remind people to vote on the National Trust trail hunting permission and indeed I was one of them.  So I did.   And now trail hunting is to be banned on National Trust sites . So that went well.  Probably not the outcome the chaps in their rangey were hoping for.  Hope they didn't leave their sunglasses in the glovebox. Maybe it's COP26 enthusiasm, but I'm feeling quite optimistic all of a sudden.

As an avid paddler of boards, I have been quite preoccupied with watery stuff for quite some time.  Whilst I live in the perpetual optimistic middle ground of eco-politics, I do think that the situation with english waterways and the water companies sewage release to be an absolute shit show - pun intended.  The fact that I use (and have done for a long time) the Surfers Against Sewage app, that informs of coastal pollution by proxy, alongside weather and tidal forecasts for planning my excursions is deeply depressing to me. I am not directly annoyed with my MP over votes over the environment bill last week, I understand how the whip works.  I do however think it was a gross miscalculation on the part of the Government of the temperature of the Nation on the topic.  Thankfully, amendments yet to be seen, it seems that a correction is on the way.  A real show of the power of calm and peaceful protest .  Well done  #EndSewagePollution  I have been...

I’ve spent a lot of time switching between various GTD approaches in my life.  As I’ve probably explained before, my brain rejects the various forms of organisation I try to put upon it after varying lengths of time like a transplanted nipple.  Too smart (or do I mean lazy) to be hoodwinked into keeping ordered lists of items to work through, the process is sabotaged by waning enthusiasm and resolve in my mind and I am left scratching around helplessly in the dark like those early days of sexual encounter.  And the rest of the encounters then on for that matter. The ones that I tend to gravitate too most frequently were either a very basic Bullet Journal (strictly no unicorns or artwork more complex or time consuming than the the task I was documenting) or some form of kanban.  I have tried various times to just use Apple Reminders and Calendar and I have even tried using Amazon Alexa.  But I would admit even during that, this was something I was ...

Well.  This is not the month I expected to be having, how about you?  Some chap in Hubei decides he fancies bat for tea, lets the bat sneeze in his mouth or something before he pops it in the microwave and boom - you got yourself a movie-quality pandemic on your hands. What happened next varies for everyone.  To use the popular wartime rhetorics, the war against coronavirus was also a million tiny battles.  The battle to keep the small business open, to keep the community safe, to get a supermarket delivery slot. Billions of people discovered who they really were overnight.  Stripped of the comfort of normality, the spirit laid bare, they did what came naturally.  Some got in contact with neighbours they had never spoken to before and threw up support networks immediately.  People dropped their political views and agendas and began conforming to instruction for the common good.  Social media (the megaphone for the worst) became the tendril th...