2010-03-28»
en vacance, and a seafailing raceยปI’m halfway through my time between jobs. (“Oh,” said King, “so when you say you’re between jobs, you really mean you’re between jobs”). It turns out that my idea of a holiday is pretty much the same as my normal life, only with more naps, greater daughter indulgence, less guilt and more Doctor Who. The Doctor Who is driven by my indulgence in the publicly-funded brand-frenzy that is the build up to the new series (he’s going to be all right!), augmented by a recent dive through Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook’s brilliant Writers’ Tale, which makes you feel if only you stayed up and agonized all night, you too could write a cyberman episode or three. I never actually wrote any screenplays in the long nights reading this book, but it did make me rewatch some of the wobblier RTD episodes and feel a little more sympathetic to the man. He, too, had a lot of email to answer.
The rest of the time has been messed about with upon boats. Let me say this: I am very badly engineered for seafaring. My average interval between boat trips is about a decade. I am bad at knots. Even my proportions are unshipshapelike. My head is Irishman-large compared to my Puckoon-thin legs, giving me an unusually high center of gravity. I can capsize craft by nodding enthusiastically within them.
That said, my life has taken a watery bent recently and I greatly appreciate it. I spend a lot of my time living in a houseboat on the shores of Silicon Valley, where I stare out of a bedroom window filled with a water-level view of neighbourly riggings, sterns and curious ducks. I bought a cheap sixties dinghy hand-designed by a retiring Alameda sailmaker, Donald Goring, a man who, he said, kept his Nazi surname until the day he discovered his family was actually jewish, and then named his company after both halves.
In which the author does everything wrong.
Donald Goring-Bogart (or Bogart-Goring) designed Daisy to be a hard-chined 8 ft lifeboat that could survive a sinking in the Alaskan Pacific. She has handmade sails, custom-fitted oars and a 1983 2.5hp motor. The motor doesn’t run, I can’t sail her yet, and I row those oars like my arms are caught in a threshing machine, but she’s mine.
More practically than my Daisy-flails, Ada and I have been kayaking. My first kayak trip was sort of sales-pitch, I think, but unless they were selling me on the idea of paying protection money to keep me from future kayaks, it wasn’t successful. Somehow I agreed to be crammed into a sporting model about the width of my ankle and, while struggling to escape, kick-launched into a river. They did this to me at sundown, and within minutes it was pitch black. I swung around like a metronome in a moccasin until I could find a quay to clutch onto. Whoever the race of Kayaks are, they failed to either sell me on their device or drown me in their bloody rituals, but I had learned a lesson.
I finally unlearned it this weekend, when Ada and I merrily day-kayaked around the harbour. We bumped around together and gradually learned the subtleties together, such as which way the paddles don’t go, and how to get out of the thing without firing both feet from underneath you like a torpedo. Ada reassured me that in all her seven years, she had never seen a father sink beneath the waves yet. She also quietly sung “Ponyo, ponyo, fishy in the sea” as she paddled around the neighbours. A very good vacation.