To talk of many things...

xX For my Katie Xx

Cake is so comforting. Everybody I know with 'time on their hands' is busy baking cakes... not me though, I scribble and write away trying to find some recipe in what I do - no luck yet, but I'll keep trying.

I often think about having an adventure, nothing grand, just a small one. Not a holiday you understand, holidays are planned and to my mind adventures can’t be planned, they just happen or at least it’s the unplanned bits that make for adventure.

Problem is if I don’t plan I tend to do nothing and I’m not that great at planning any more. Well, plans never seem to go to plan these days, haven’t for a while.

Let me set the scene: There I was sailing along in my well planned boat, route all planned out, knowing what my planned destination was going to be when… ‘LOOK OUT… ADVENTURE AHOY!’

Of course I use the word adventure in the loosest terms. It can be weasily be substituted for ‘disaster’, ‘fuck up’ even  and although weasily was originally a miss-key I decided to leave it on reflection - and there’s a rhyming couplet in there if you look hard enough.

Perhaps that is why I’ll never be a buccaneer, no not the rhyming couplet thing – pirates spoke in rhyming couplets all the time - I'm talking the unpredictability of adventure.... Yes, anything could happen you see.

WARNING! WARNING! Life is an adventure – ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!

I have to wonder what she's sitting
on to make her smile in quite that way.

As I said: I find adventure unpredictable and unpredictable means ScArY WArY.

I’d be the sort of buccaneer who’d want to agree a time and meeting place with the vessel I was going to board. I’d ask what they were carrying and how to best store it and what (if I didn’t like the goods) the terms of return were. I’d tell the captain of the other ship my name and what weapons I had about me and how I could hardly use a cutlass or a dirk, and how I was hopeless with a musket. I’d agree who to kill and who to maim, which bows to fire my canon shot into and I’d confirm it all by e-mail – sorry, semaphore.

No I’ll never climb a mountain, explore the jungle, shoot the rapids, cross the desert on foot, live in Greece in a cave – or even wink at someone who drives past me as a 'somebody I know' was advised by the magic of chocolate recently as a way of breaking out and away.

A Dove or Galaxy by any other name

Let’s put on a show. Where? Well how about here? Now let me see… do we have insurance, where are the fire doors, is the lighting up to it?

Oh well, the VW campervan and that year long trip around the UK (one town each day, interviewing the local loon celebrity) will have to continue to live in my mind along with that bamboo hut on the beach and the tree house.

Out and away… I wonder where that actually is? Sometimes I think that life has happened to me while my back was turned. Oh well, chin up old boy, keep calm and carry on, the best laid plans of mice and men... and all that shit.

Squeak, squeak.