Archive for April, 2007

Ah yes indeedy, the outlaws have left the building. They’ve gone, departed, removed themselves from this island, fucked right off, the torture is at an end.

I didn’t think it was possible to hate every single facet of a person until I met my mother-in-law. I mean, even when you meet someone who you think is an utter arsehole, there’s normally some small part of them that offers an element of redemption. Not with the MIL though, she’s got these blank dead eyes like a crow, a face only beelzebub himself could enjoy, an expression that suggests someone has dabbed dog-shit on her top-lip and a demeanor that makes the child-snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang seem like Harry Secombe. I appreciate that she produced my lovely wife, but I can only assume that this act sucked all the good out of her and left only the mean-spirited heffer that we find today.

The MIL’s purpose in life is to constantly complain about her surroundings and those people unfortunate enough to be in her immediate sphere. She was forever criticising every tiny thing that Jack did, from the way he ate, to the way he sat in a chair. She picked on my wife. She picked on her husband. She’d pick on me but she knows I’d chuck her through an upstairs plate glass window. She also feels that what she has to say is so much more important than everyone else’s views, because she always (and I do mean *always*) talks over the top of people. She also spouts half-arsed bollocks at best and borderline facist ravings at worst (Oberleutnant Thatcher was some sort of demi-goddess). She even has this satanic sneeze – it’s hard to explain how horrible a noise it is, but it’s like listening to a Pterodactyl choking on a bone.

Anyway – we’ve stripped the beds down – I wanted to burn the sheets, but Liz insisted they were salvageable. We’ve fumigated the spare room to get rid of that strange mixture of old lady smell crossed with rat piss. And life slowly returns to normal – if they visit again, I’m fucking off to Cairns to see my kid brother for the duration.

I paid my first visit to Jack’s football practice after school on Thursday. He went for the first time last week with Liz and thoroughly enjoyed it, so we’ve signed him up for his little under 6′s team and he now officially plays for Broughton. I thoroughly enjoyed watching them practice, it was so funny. One kid spent the entire time doing that aeroplane thing where you hold your arms out and run around making engine noises. Another kid who has Aspergers (similar to Autism I believe), did a Forrest Gump – got the ball and took off across the pitch – in fact he made it straight through three other games before he was brought to a halt. The little girl in goal, whose mum was sitting next to me, shouted out, “Mum, my knickers have gone up my bum crack,” and proceed to drop her kecks and sort her underwear out at exactly the same time as the mass huddle of gurning five year olds descended on her goal mouth. The coach’s son Anthony got caught on the legs by a low pass that wouldn’t have hurt a butterfly, burst into tears and spend the rest of the kickabout standing behind his dad. Adrian (who Jack used to go to pre-school with, and is a little cunt) scored two goals by effectively running over the top of the other children, cheered on from the sidelines by his father, an eastern european cross between Andre the Giant and Ray Hasslehoff. Quality stuff though, I can’t wait for Jack’s first match which takes place this Saturday.

It has now stopped raining, after about four days of pretty insistent precipitation. Winter is well and truly on the way, the leaves are going brown and falling from the trees and the temperature is floating around the 23 degree mark, which feels a bit chilly to me. It’ll stay at about this temperature until around June and on into July (mid-winter) when it’ll flit around the low ’20s on most days, occasionally drifting into decidedly icy territory of the mid to high teens. Our one year anniversay comes up in July – and we’ve decided to throw a little party. I’ll rent out the surf club, hire a sound system, get some slabs of booze in and invite all our new friends round for a bit of a piss-up. Should be a cracking night. Before then we’ve got Liz’s birthday coming up (on the 26th of May, for those of you who know us and are reading this in blighty, hint hint). I promised her a dirty weekend in Sydney – she asked if she could go water-skiing instead – who said the romance had gone out of our marriage!

So this morning was the first practical day of my Bronze Medallion. We’d done some theory the previous Monday but were told to come down to the beach at 8:30am on Sunday for a practical lesson. We’d been told that we’d be setting up the beach for the day’s patrol, but our instructor had other ideas.

Several of the guys doing the course didn’t show up this morning (it is Easter Sunday so let’s cut them some slack) so it was just me and a couple of young lads and a girl doing a refresher course. We had a bit of a chat with Powerpoint slides and then were told to get ready to get wet. We were then directed into the surf shed to get a rescue board. Okay I thought, this is a surf life-saving course, it’s a bit naive to think I could avoid this – but having it sprung on me was a surprise.

The surf life-saving boards are very specialised bits of kit. They’re fairly long (kind of mini-mal length), have loads of handles down both sides and are hollow unlike a surfboard (makes them considerably more bouyant – a good thing). They’re bright yellow and have ‘Surf Rescue’ on the underside, which I thought was handy, since I reckoned someone might have to rescue me.

I have two basic problems to overcome regarding this section of the Bronze Medallion. The first is that, whilst I’ve done a little bit of surfing, I’ve pretty much exclusively boogie-boarded – I just find it more fun. The second is that I’m overweight and unfit and in my 40s. So there I am, very limited experience with surfboards, first thing Sunday morning, about to try the surf rescue board for the first time. I thought that was bad enough, then we got down to the beach.

Our beach here is a bit of a bitch. It’s more bowl shaped than the rest of Seven Mile, it’s pock-marked with sand-banks and channels and it’s very rippy. It’s bad enough when it’s quiet, but as I walked onto the beach I realised the surf was anything but ‘quiet’. Turned out there’d been a bit of storm out to sea and the gods of the wind had propelled some fairly aggressive surf in our direction. If someone up there was trying to tell me something, I was rapidly getting the point. The waves were a good three metres big and pumping with high frequency. Three metres doesn’t sound like much till you’re at the foot of a wave that’s just about to break on your head. I’ve been in surf like that before, but I was still bloody nervous.

Nick says that we should split into groups of two, and he sends the first group (couple of 15 year old lads, born and raised in this coastal town) out first. They make straight for the rip thinking they could get a bit of assistance en route to the ‘the back’. The first guy gets out without too many problems, but the other guy’s getting hammered by the waves. I’m sitting there thinking ‘Great, someone who’s grown up on this beach is getting mullered – what fucking chance do I have?’. Then it’s my turn – Nick sends me and the young girl out and points to exactly where the best spot is. I walk into the water.

Even on the beach the surf’s pretty big and we have to fight to get the boards over the foamy breakers. We spot a lull in the waves, get on and start paddling. It’s going pretty well for a few minutes and then we start getting into the larger waves. Some of those waves you can sit back on the board and ride through, but most of them you have to roll through. You hold onto the handles, roll the board on its back, hold your elbows tight to your chest and wait for the wave to pass over you. Trouble is – the waves being what they are, I find myself doing this for pretty much every wave and before very long at all, I’m already feeling knackered. I make it out about another 10 metres, but can see no obvious way of breaking through the larger waves without dying. As I hold onto the board I notice that the other young guy, that was getting hammered, has given up and paddled back in. Phew, I think – I have an out. I turn round and paddle back, getting thrown into a spin cycle three times before my feet mercifully touch down on sand and I can walk in.

I compare notes with the other guy and it’s pretty obvious we had similar experiences – unable to break through the big waves which were firing down the beach pretty rapidly. To be honest I thought my surf life-saving adventure was going to end there, but none of the life-savers seemed bothered – nobody expected me to be a genius on my first time out. As we stood on the beach watching the other guys make their way back in, we were joined by the club president, Richard. He asked us if we wanted to go back out again with him – neither me nor the other bloke jumped in the air and said ‘yes!’. But Richard could sense our fear and knew that this was just one of those things you had to get through – “People rarely get into trouble in little surf” he said. Fair point – people get into trouble in heavy surf with nasty rips, not on days when you could launch skimmers across the water. So we picked up our boards and followed him out.

He lead us out about 40 metres to the right of where we’d initially gone in. He said that it was a much better spot with plenty of breaks in the waves for us to punch through to get out the back. Nevertheless, I was absolutely shitting myself as we made our way out through the breakers, because I knew what was waiting for me and I also knew I was a lot more tired than when I’d started. Richard lead the way and we soon found ourselves out much further than before. I was hesitant, not because I didn’t think I could make it all the way, but because I knew I’d have to make the return leg. Richard egged me on and then there I was, out the back, sat on the board.

We got our breath back and let the waves roll in. I was looking out at the sets forming and saw a really big wave building up. I pointed to it and we all bobbed over it – it was a good four metres big. ‘That was a big one,’ said Richard. Just great, I’m thinking – even the club president thinks the waves are big. ‘In fact, I think we’ll head back in now because I only think it’s going to get bigger’. He told me to wait for a smaller wave, sit back on the board and ride it in.

I turned the board round and pointed it at the beach. A large wave went underneath me, but I let it go and paddled after it, closing the gap between me and the shore. Then another wave reared up behind me and started to break. I slid down the board, holding onto the handles and by some miracle, rode that spitting nasty wave, most of the way into shore. To say I was elated when I finally walked out onto the beach is something of an understatement. I honestly felt like I’d cheated death out there. Sure it probably wasn’t big to many of the surfers who’d been surfing those same waves – but I’m a bloody pom, raised 250 miles from the coast and whilst I love the ocean and love surfing, it sure as fuck doesn’t come naturally to me.

Nick appeared from the surf shortly afterwards and congratulated me on my first go on the boards. He sent us back to the shed to hose down the boards and stow them and then told us to get showered and changed for a debrief and recap. We got changed, went over the days events and then split. I knew I had to learn to cope with the larger surf though, so I went home, had a coffee and then grabbed my boogie board and headed back to the beach.

I drove down to Gilmore knowing that whilst the waves would be just as big, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as frequent. It was pretty busy down there, despite the crappy weather. I paddled out the back and started catching waves. I forced myself to get the big waves too. I was in the water for three hours straight and by the time I got out, I was truly not bothered by the waves. Whether I feel the same next time I’m trying to paddle a surf rescue board out, instead of a boogie board (basically a big fucking float) is another story. I intend to book out the rescue boards this week and get some practice in on my own.

It has now been 7 days since I had a cigarette.