One mile from land

Wind and rain continue to lash against the flimsy canopy of my plastic garden gazebo (Homebase - £15) on the third day that my glamorous assistant is available for work now that his daughter is back to school; so it is the third day in a row that he will not be taking over where my other - not so glamorous - assistant left off, having been convicted of GBH, and now awaiting the outcome of an appeal.

I look out of the window and think, 'Nah. It's not going to happen', so wander aimlessly over to the computor to see if anyone owes me any money, only to find it's the other way round.

A friend of mine has just blithely agreed to help crew a small racing yacht for another friend of mine (who is a qualified captain) this coming October, and returning this boat to the Canary Isles from Portsmouth (after the owner has flown over by plane to meet it - that should have been a give-away) involves a two-day trip across the Bay of Biscay.

He has spent the last few evenings frightening himself by looking up sailing forums on the subject of 'Idiots who try to cross the Bay of Biscay in the Autumn' and is now scared shitless.

He tells me that there are some very exciting video clips of small boats attempting to survive the high seas of Biscay to be seen on You Tube, and I advise him to stop watching them now. Deal with the situation when it arises, I say, but he looks out of the window at the horizontal rain being driven by a steady (ish) 30 MPH wind, and knows that this is but nothing to what is going on out there in the oceans. I try to settle his mind by nonchalantly commenting that it will probably all blow over by October, but we both know I am inwardly enjoying winding him up with my misplaced optimism.

I also tell him that - in any event - the experience will be character forming for him, 'It will make a man of you', I say. I think he must sense the irony in my voice though, because - at the age of 62 - if his character isn't fully formed by now, it would take more than drowning to death to add any little nuance to his personality, or to sprout a couple of extra hairs on his chest.

It is amazing what some people will put themselves through, simply to enjoy themselves. I have always been of the Hobbit persuasion, preferring to stay in the Shire and sit around of an evening with slippers on my huge, hairy feet. The closest I ever get to deliberately trying to kill myself is smoking tobacco, as I sit around of an evening with slippers on my huge, hairy feet, and a glass of wine in my big, hairy hand. If some human-sized wizard turned up and told me that it was my duty to Save The World by embarking on a one-way trip into the depths of Mordor, I would tell him to fuck off.

Even as a child, I was blessed with an innate sense of self preservation which bordered on the edge of cissyness. My older brother would be continually going back and forth to hospital with some minor/major injury caused in an idiotic attempt to have fun, but I would - so my mother told me - be looking out for danger from the moment I woke up, and well before I learnt to walk on my own, two feet.

This didn't stop me from messing about with high-explosives, but I always felt that I knew what I was doing, and the explosions usually took the form of controlled experiments. I stopped short of mixing my own blend of nitro-glycerine (despite having all the ingredients to hand) at the age of 12, so this shows you how eminently sensible I was as a kid, despite evidence to the contrary.

A few years ago, the same captain as mentioned above, asked me if I would like to crew for him on a similar boat-delivery, and I told him that I could not even swim, let alone sail a boat. He just said, "A lot of sailors cannot swim. Just remember, no matter how far you are out to sea, you are never more than one mile away from land."

I asked him how this could be true, and he simply pointed his finger downward, toward an imaginary and distant ocean floor.