Serendipitous Happen-chance.

I’ve started at my sailing club. I went to help out on Sunday, just helping take boat times on the races and inputting the data into the computer. Today I did my first lesson.

I think I was wise to take lessons. I capsized it 5 times in the morning session. The rudder is so sensitive! You push it a little bit and the boat goes everywhere. Not a problem in a straight line, but you have to tack upwind so you are swiveling around, while ducking under the swinging boom, and changing sides of the boat, then trying to steer with the tiller extension behind your back until you can swap hands. As with learning to drive anything, it’s a lot of things to be concentrating on at once.

After the dinner break we went back out on a tougher course and I was fine. Once you’ve got the basics you can relax enough to see what is starting to go wrong and correct it. The good thing is I am now a master of the capsize drill for righting the boat. That bit holds no fear for me anymore.

Also, due to DVLA being swamped and taking forever, I’ve not sold motorbike, so have had chance to ride it back and forth to the club twice. If you’re not all dolled-up in complete race leathers, just wanting to get your knee down, you can really enjoy that bike. I was in awkward kit, to which I’m not accustomed, trying for a maneuver I’ve never done, straight out of the box on an unfamiliar bike. In retrospect, I was setting myself up for a kicking and huge disappointment. Riding in familiar, comfortable kit, with somewhere to go, and pushing my limits incrementally, is brilliant fun. I *heart* my Triumph again!

I’ve got over my shopping thing. Well, I’ve stopped doing it, which is not the same, really. I’ve bought some books, some seeds and we went to the garden centre yesterday so we got some flowers. That isn’t the problem. I actually use the obsessive searching, comparing, and hunting down the very best model for the very best price, as a fun hobby in itself. The purchase is where the fun ends, to a degree. I crave newness and change, shopping provides that, and kills many pointless hours. I can see that that is a problem now I’ve had my nose rubbed in it.

I’ve got to buy some specific kit for this yachting lark (a top, some wetsuit material shoes with a grippy sole, and a buoyancy aid- I bought a lifejacket, not the same thing-) but I’m going to be in an out. See. Buy.

In much the same vein, I’ve not looked at cars since the Damascus Google search on Obsessive Compulsive shopping. Or boats. Or anything. The bike is getting me to the club for now. Apparently the club rent boats out to noobs (£15 a day) when you’ve done the training. They encourage you to use them for a while to get your skills up, and try different boats, before you commit to buying one. I’ll do it like that. If I stick to it, then I’ll get a boat. Hopefully I’ll be able to rent one on holiday in Scotland.

I applied for a full time gig with the Royal Mail about 6 weeks ago. I was talking to a driver when I was shunting last week (well, he was talking to me) and he said he’d had an email off the them asking for the authorisation code DVLA need to issue, so RM could check his licence. I’d not had a “no”, but not heard anything.

I found that on my ‘phone after sailing! Brilliant! I’m still in the running.

Also, they do open water swimming at the boat club lake, so that will be something to keep my eye on in the future. Preferably when my swimming wetsuit doesn’t look like someone shoving a whole cow in a single sausage skin.

Work has been a karmic rebalancing of the lorry driver scales. In Lockdown 1, the motorways were empty apart from professional drivers. It was brilliant. That, and people not touching me, were the best parts of the plague for me. Now the UK is on the world’s leper list so hardly anyone can go abroad, and it’s school holidays, so literally millions of clueless, impatient, angry amateurs are all clogging up my office. Eughhhh.

Right, bit of Twitter and I’m out of here.

Forest Fr1ends were musing on the Great British Holiday: