2002-04-29 - 5:20 p.m.

On the misguided advice of people who will remain nameless, I just spent a while going through my archives in the hope of being inspired to �do� �something� with the best bits. Remember when I used to be funny? Hahaha. Those were the days. Anyway, I�m not sure. The only option seems to be to present them as a set of fictional Bridget Jones� (ugh! Now I feel all soiled) style noodlings, but without the plot or audience or money-spinning international hit movie potential. Hmmm.

Anyway, I survived the nautical frippery of the weekend. I�ve never much been one for tossing around bodies of water (as PJ O�Rourke once said, �There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.�), but it was actually not that bad. Of course, it turned out I was the only person in the group with no prior sailing experience, and my reluctance was ridiculed by all, particularly the woman who�d just finished a yachting course where a semi-blind coffin-dodger recovering from a stroke had passed with flying (sailing?) colours, and was I a man or a pasty-faced land lubber with pink, earth-loving custard where my spine should be? To this, I answered, �Who�d like a drink? The PR firm are paying.�

Like anyone involved in a pursuit that requires a change of clothing, the sailing crowd are a pretty snobby bunch. A lot of them look at you like you�re some kind of mutant sub-species, just because you haven�t tooled around the Cape of Good Hope on a treacherously heaving vessel eating raw seagull and using your own arteries as thread to mend ripped sails. It�s one of the last bastions of a kind of overly-sunburned machismo, where you can boast about the size of your mast in tacky, overpriced resorts and spend half your life applying luminous zinc oxide to the upper parts of your nose.

We got into our craft and were assigned different tasks by our �skipper� (let�s call him Pete, because that was his name) so that we could try out some basic manoeuvres, like getting ropeburn from holding onto things we shouldn�t and ploughing into a group of schoolchildren on plastic rafts. Satisfied that we were bored with terrorising the harbour, Pete took us out to the open sea, where we could put our naval abilities to proper use. I was bafflingly allowed to control the main sail, which essentially controls the speed of the boat, though has a tendency to tip the boat up in a quite exciting fashion if you let it catch the wind. My particular sail control technique could best be described as �uninhibited�, at least I think that�s what Pete meant when he shouted at me to �let the fucking thing out� as we were crashing along at an unnatural angle. Anyway, we all got a bit cocky and just started arsing about � I got really excited when we hit a speed of 5 knots and the water was rushing by below us and I asked Pete what the equivalent speed would be on the land and he said �Five point five miles per hour�. Then the weather changed and we all started crying and had to be sailed to nearest pub.

So I now know my jib from my spinnaker and I didn�t ask any embarrassing questions about the poop deck. Maybe not a life on the open waves for me, but I feel my timbers were sufficiently shivered and I can look that yachting geriatric stroke victim in the eye (assuming she has at least one good one), should we ever meet.

Um. Yeah. So. Does anyone know anything about how publishing works?