The last day of the seventh age of man

It's me birthday today! 49 years old.

Which caused me to muse on the seven ages of man, which I take to be seven years apiece , so I must be officially old. Naaaaah! 50 is the new 30, next year I join the Saga Louts.

Old? I couldn't feel younger. Take yesterday for instance, not an unusual day for me, just another day in a joyously busy life. I woke at 3.30am, left home at 4am on the dot, headed down the A1 full chat, and straight through security at a remarkably unbusy Stansted for the 7.30am flight to Dusseldorf. I had an intense, but ultimately successful meeting at a biodiesel refinery on the Dutch German border, but cut it very close back at the airport to climb straight aboard the 4.05pm flight back.

I lost my mobile phone, the Precious, on the plane back, which was a surprisingly liberating feeling once I'd got used to the loneliness of being uncontactable, but high-tailed it to Tollesbury, and opened up the boat from its winter slumbers. It was surprisingly undamp, and soon warmed up. After freshening up in the Cruising Club, I had a non-alcoholic snifter with Julian Goldie (sorry, forgot to tell you, I have caused the greatest schism in the church since the Avignon Papacy by observing a different Easter date than the Gregorian Rule, due to having to drink lashings of beer and coffee in India, so I celebrate Easter on April 6th, and am just over one week into my Lententide privations), then cleared off for an 8pm AGM of Maldon Regatta in the Little Ship Yacht Club.

From there, I took in an excellent session at the Cuckoo in Radley Green, and played my socks off on the fiddle. That turned into a late old do, well past midnight, so I eventually rolled into my semi-dried bunk on the boat at 1.30am.

Twenty two hours, that is my kind of day.

However! The wind blew so hard last night, I genuinely feared the boat was going to fall over in the boatyard. I had placed a heavy outboard motor on the cockpit seats, weighing well over 30lbs, and the wind blew it bodily sideways, with a great crash. The ladder blew off the side of the boat, and the cacophony of destruction, or the Devil's Tattoo as it is also known made sleep impossible, so after a few hours of fear and fitfull sleep of exhaustion, I threw in the towel and packed up to drive north and home.

Here's a picture of the Muddy Island from Tollesbury in a gale of wind, Juliet. The lightship is the accommodation for Fellowship Afloat, a Christian charity that delivers the message a la pope on a rope.



This one is the Hard, long after a depressingly low neap tide



And this one is taken facing the other way, of my cheerfully disorganised boatyard home-from-home.




So it was great to wake for my birthday in my spiritual home, but with the wind so cutting, it was for once easy to drive north and enjoy a corporate junket at a rugby match in Bridlington. However, I'm now monumentally tired, so it's off up the wooden hill for me.