The Dog's Rollocks

By Laura Tong

Out of their depths and out of their minds, The Dog’s Rollocks is the antidote to all those tales of daring-do by fearless indefatigable Supermen and women that leave one feeling woefully inadequate and semi-suicidal. Instead, it charts in a sometimes surreal diary the disastrous real-life journey of one middle-aged, middle-class, couple, along with their overweight Labrador, to escape mid-life crisis & canapes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laura Tong
• Release date: Oct 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301379859

Laura Tong

Welcome to Global Feel Good Company where life is always great because it's populated exclusively by fun, upbeat, feel good people. Started by us, Mark and Laura Tong to fling fun and feel good at the world until it sticks... and then fling some more! We're light, souffle types who bask and dally only in the fun side of life and have no idea why anyone would choose any other way to live! Both reared by licentious sea cucumbers, we've had 25 fabulous years together as genuine, bona fidae midgets without certificates to prove it. Credos may come and go (after all this is a consumer society) but despite being modern, impatient, no-attention-span kids, we have one that will never waver: people are great, really great the world over. And, we're irrefutably, immovably, unshakably sure about it because we get out there and experience them first hand around the world, and every time we do, all we find is a great bunch of people (and the odd nutter with stupid ears) who are just trying to get on, do their thing and help out by pulling on the saving-the-day-trousers for strangers where they can... not plotting to blow up the West, burgle us in our bed or even make life difficult. It's very refreshing! So, needless to say we take every opportunity to travel, work on fun projects and enjoy just how great people are and shout about it - hope to bump into you on one of our out and about tours, spreading fun and feel good around the world with Rugby, our gorgeous, greedy, silly Labrador.

Book preview

The Dog's Rollocks

Buggering Around Travel Series

copyright 2013 Laura Tong

smashwords edition

*

Also by Laura Tong

The Great Success Swindle

The Great Motivation Swindle

The Bollocks People Tell You

More Bollocks People Tell You

Buggering Around Travel Series:

Wild Dogs And Nutters

*

Hi, This ebook is licensed for your entertainment only. It may not be re-sold

or given away to your friends, neighbours, neighbours' dog or anyone else. If you think the book is so good you'd like someone you know to read it, then please buy another copy and send it to them or send them the link so they can read the free sample and buy themselves a copy.

Thanks!

Laura

**

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Not quite cricket

Chapter 2 - The Great Escape in reverse

Chapter 3 - Poor Man's Hotel

Chapter 4 - Lisieux's other claim to fame

Chapter 5 - Lolly Stick Dreams

Chapter 6 - Rugby goes Clubbing

Chapter 7 - From Gods to Dogs

Chapter 8 - The Big Stiffy

Chapter 9 - Sabotage

Chapter 10 - Breaking all the rules

Chapter 11 - Monsieur Bleu

Chapter 12 - Goat Man

Chapter 13 - The Chosen Ones

Chapter 14 - Mechanically recovered Poultry

Chapter 15 - Hairy arsed Texan

Global Feel Good Company

This book is dedicated to everyone who has always wanted NOT to do something so stupid

All names have been changed to protect the stupid.

****

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Chapter 1 - Not quite cricket

14 Guilbourne Heights - England - 5 days to departure

Over the duck, Gerard opened the batting.

So who do you think you are? Rowing from London to Lisbon indeed! There's more muscle on this bird than on the pair of you!

Being an arse without the redeeming feature of a hole, he could always be relied upon to enliven any dinner party.

Clara and Edward, our new next-door neighbours had invited round the pick of their arty clique, and then Mark and I, as the evening's entertainment, presumably the two-headed baby in a pickling jar having double-booked. Across from us sat Jeremy, a noted historian, and his wife Alice, noted for histrionics. Alongside them, needing no introduction, sat Gerard, a bullish bastard in the city, with his long-suffering wife Jocelyn, a Re-birthing Agent (whatever the hell that was), while to Mark's right was the odd sock out, Madeleine, single and already sloshed. Our hosts, by coincidence both Heads of Departments at the same posh girls school that I was currently wasting the greater part of my waking hours in, sat at either end.

No silly, don't bring anything. Clara had purred, It normally goes straight in the bin anyway. Just bring your stories. Oh, and Mark of course, the boy's almost edible!

Good job they were nice people… underneath.

Gerard was still going, Honestly darling, look at them! They couldn't row their way across the trifle.

Bastard!

Be nice Gerard! Jocelyn chided Or you'll be reincarnated as something small and loathsome.

Didn't you row for Oxford Gerard? Madeleine smarmed across the table

(they were definitely knobbing in the understairs cupboard between courses).

Bet you could still give these two a run for their money! chortled Jeremy

(my God perhaps it had been those two in the cupboard? Dirty buggers! And Jeremy a man of the cloth!*)

* a tailor's dummy

Now what about this boat you're building, what was it called again?

An Ozark float boat, or sneak boat, depending on which side of Arkansas you were born. Mark managed between mouthfuls of marron glacé and something that tasted like toilet duck but was probably far more expensive.

Jeremy raised an eyebrow, And what's its construction? Clinker? Double-butted? Tongue-and-groove? Larch? Teak? MDF?

Mark had been right, this was indeed turning out to be the Surrey Inquisition, complete with thumbscrews, rack and way too much mascarpone.

Actually I took another giant slurp of Clara's prune and tequila sauce, it's 9mm stitch and sew ply.

Stitch and sew! Oh Laura! exclaimed Alice, It's not a pair of jodhpurs, you can't sew a boat together!

The whole table laughed in agreement. Muppets!

Well Alice, Mark salaciously tongued the last drops of wine from his glass, that's where you're wrong. Laura crocheted most of it up in the lounge in four weeks.

And you're actually proposing to row from London to Lisbon with your dog in this self-built woollen packing crate are you? Jeremy butted in.

Sounds awfully dangerous, Mark Clara flirted.

Yeah whatever, more mead wench. he waved his glass.

Yes, but have you had it MOT-ed?

It's a rowboat, not a BMW. It doesn't need an MOT. Mark laughed.

But how do you know it's safe? She insisted, It'll probably sink, have you tried it?"

The fact was we hadn't, having neither the time nor the inclination, figuring the moment of truth would come soon enough and rather in faraway France than here as further entertainment for the assembled comedians. Besides, of course it would bloody well float! We were, as ever, supremely confident of our own abilities, despite a backlog of evidence to the contrary. There was also the slight matter of it not yet being quite finished.

But what's it all for? Edward asked refilling the glasses, I mean you've both got good jobs - well you have Laura, at the school - a nice enough house, landlady doesn't seem to mind dog hair. Why give it all up? What's the point? Though of course Lisbon is the perfect city for dolce far niente. Not really your thing I know but even you cultural Neanderthals must visit the Jeronimos Monastery. It was fascinating, wasn't it Clara?

No Teddy, it was dull as fuck. But there were some gorgeous department stores and they accepted one of my cards.

The table had consumed several cases of several wines by this, the desert stage, and it was starting to show.

Well I think it sounds bloody marvellous. You should be jolly proud of yourselves. Jocelyn chipped in.

Stop twittering woman and let them answer the original question. Gerard barked.

The sorbets cooled on the plates as everyone waited expectantly.

Well you two, enlighten us! Why?

Why? This dinner party was why! This dinner party, the good jobs, the nice house, the dog hair - that was why! Well, maybe not the dog hair but the rest certainly. Mark and I had met at Bristol Temple Meads railway station when I was nineteen after both having answered the same advert in The Traveller for 'anyone wanting to have fun and join Judy backpacking around Europe'. Three days later Mark told me he loved me and wanted us to spend the rest of our lives together and Judy told me she hated me and wanted to spend the rest of her life anywhere else. Mark and I had continued travelling until we had ended up on Christmas day romantically sharing a prawn curry and a bottle of Irish cream liqueur with our last fiver in a flooded Welsh valley.

Life continued to be exciting, unpredictable and spontaneous, though perhaps scary, disorganised and unplanned might have been nearer the mark. With a flash of spontaneity we married fifteen years later but somewhere in the intervening years daily life became too dull, too predictable, too Radio Two.

We were now in a rut deeper than the Marianas: each morning get up, clean teeth, go to work, clean teeth, and go to bed, with the occasional dinner party to 'look forward to'. And twice a year in-between, sit sardined on some nameless foreign beach and grill like a chicken kebab, with a side order of botulism; both of which could have been achieved with a lot less effort in the meat-on-a-stick shop round the corner by standing too close to the spit and chewing a strip off before it was cooked. And afterwards at the end of the two weeks, fly back from some Third World airport in the certainty of dying in a fireball because the amount paid for the ticket wouldn't even cover the wages of a crème caramel, let alone a highly-trained pilot with gold-braided shoulders and an IQ. Then spend six months waiting, and dreading, to do it all over again.

Well yes, yes, history can be like that too. Jeremy conceded, One hates to fly charter. So you want to break out and do something. But why particularly London to Lisbon? Why not say… Godalming to Karachi?

Or Ashby-de-la-Zouch to St Tropez? an inebriated voice giggled.

Truth is, we liked the alliteration Mark confessed, and London to Luton didn't seem much of a challenge.

But why a boat? Why not maybe ... bicycles? Alice called across the table; an ardent greenie, she always carried two in the back of her Range Rover.

This one was easy. Because we wanted to look like Gods! And not the lame-arse, self-effacing, giving-credit-where-due deities of yore but the hip, happening, limelight-hogging arrogant immortals of today. That's where it was at!

Each morning whilst walking Rugby, our gorgeous black Labrador, along the river we had watched the Guildford scullers swish effortlessly past, Supreme Sporting Beings, achingly sexy and ciao in their impossibly needle-like craft and we wanted a piece of that pie. It was neither sexy nor ciao sweating along a dusty road on an over laden lump of twisted metal, dodging trucks and road kill; we knew, we'd tried it.

Admittedly though, if one was to be uncharacteristically honest, in practice our rowing history to date had been more goon than godlike. It had started and ended in one glorious rush of blood to the head and resulted in two cases of permanent water on the brain.

Mark's parents* had kindly donated our first dinghy, a bright yellow beach inflatable, rated for a maximum of two undernourished, pygmy seven year olds, but welcome nonetheless, as we lived on the wrong side of the Thames to our crap 6am start jobs. Welcome that is, until without warning but with a mighty fart, it inexplicably expired mid-river. Thrashing in the dark like kamikaze sperm with the six-inch plastic paddles, we just made it to the pontoon with water up to our waists before gratefully scrambling up and falling into a mouthful of goose shit.

*actually a pair of licentious sea cucumbers.

Oh Laura, how utterly disgusting! Alice squealed.

The lesson learnt, our next acquisition had been a traditional, hernia-inducing, solid, wooden bugger which, though second-hand, was guaranteed unsinkable; unsinkable that was if we got round to fixing the small, persistent leak in one corner. Luckily we didn't, as it was nicked on day two and hopefully sank quickly, somewhere deep and murky with the bastards still aboard.

By chance, opposite our slipway on Ham or Whore Island or Whore`s Ham Island or something like that (we're talking twenty years ago here), stood a branch office of the Thames River Police. Their symbol, the diminutive water-boatman, hardly seemed designed to instil fear in would-be dinghynappers but then neither did Mister Bump who greeted us in a gardening smock. Business had been slow he explained; hence the prize-winning gardens we surmised.

Lumbering inside, he pulled out and consulted the Lost and Found Register where, to his surprise, it seemed a dinghy had been recovered the day before - maybe ours? Unfortunately on double-checking, 'the day before' turned out to be 'the day before, the year before'; business had obviously been really slow! Still, such a perfidious crime now having been committed on his watery patch, he weebled into action, meticulously recording every screw, nail and plank we could remember; which was pretty much naff all after only one day's ownership, though we did suddenly recall a 200hp BlackMax outboard we had initially overlooked. Radioed to proceed immediately to his waiting bacon sarnie (done just the way he liked it, with the fat left on) he had closed the book and promised to leave no stone unturned. We left with comforting visions of lardy water-boatmen battering down bedroom doors on our behalf and calling us to clandestine midnight dinghy identity parades. We never did get it back; or our jobs.

To save our tender sensibilities further anguish, we then jumped ship as it were and became bona fide canoeists, for an afternoon.

It was a slight misfortune that that afternoon in 1988 the Thames was in flood, the weather having been as comprehensively cock as the present spring was turning out to be. The other bummer was our newly acquired seventeen-foot Canadian canoe weighed just as much as the socket-wrenching dinghy it replaced. Having ruptured our livers lugging it down to the bank, we had barely enough blood left in our arms to slide it into the breakneck water and barely enough wherewithal to fall aboard and grab mouthfuls of overhanging branches whilst bracing our knees either side to stop it being whipped away.

With no idea what else to do, we grimly hung there, a couple of stunned sloths. Stalemate! We could carry on hanging like game until gravity inevitably won or... or we could... let go at the count of three, grab the paddles and lather the water to a foam like demented mechanical monkeys. Stalemate again!

Miraculously we were just managing to stay on the spot but without the breath to scream to each other, 'What the fuck do we do next?' Finally finding the strength of desperados what we did do was instinctively grab the branches again, drag ourselves and the canoe out and haul it back up to the boatyard where it was slung under a tarp to rot in hell (which, being polyester resin, it infuriatingly refused to do).

Are you two completely retarded? Gerard demanded, the wine drawing out his natural bonhomie.

Possibly. Mark granted. Clara, haven't you got any proper desert?

Oh do leave them alone Gerard, you bully. Jocelyn insisted, Really, they're so brave, rowing cross The Bay! I for one am terribly impressed.

And so would we have been, if we were. 'The Bay' in question was the Bay of Biscay and that would mean taking the sea route. Sod that!! We'd seen the TV footage of the mental cases who had thought that a good idea: emaciated, salt-encrusted wrecks of men, drinking their own pee (and enjoying it). No thank you! Besides, Mark brings up his lunch in choppy bathwater.

Well at least you'll have better luck on the canals, there are no waves and you won't have to lug your boat in and out; they have things called 'locks'.

Obviously Madeleine had taken Gerard's 'retarded' remark rather literally. Locks were one thing we knew all about, despising them and all they stood for. Every canal* from here to France and beyond is littered with absolutely hundreds of the bloody things; each one a nail in the coffin of progress, to the point where sawing one's legs off at the knee and stumping along the towpath would be quicker and more fun. And this is before the summer queues. Forget the A30 to Cornwall or the A6 to the Lake District or even the A23 to Brighton on a broiling August bank holiday, try instead the maddening frustration of queuing for Denham Deep Lock or the catatonic boredom of waiting to embark on the flight of twenty-nine at Devizes, where grown men have been known to turn themselves into human fender meat to stave off insanity.

*drain or sewer outfall

Jeremy interrupted, France is worse, the Canal du Midi was a positive zoo; spent most of our time moored up, kicking our heels.

Precisely! Mark crowed.

But how can you say you don't want to take the canals, you used to live on them didn't you? In some sort of Tupperware craft, wasn't it?

Tupperware indeed! Jacaranda she had been called, nineteen feet of seventies, crazed fibreglass with enough horses to chug her along at the pace of a kid's pedal car, had such an excess of speed been tolerated on the British canals: an eye-popping 4mph being the maximum allowed. Even the thrill of owning our first 'houseboat' and such a piece of history couldn't reconcile us to the cripplingly slow pace of life on the waterways; or the canal in-crowd. 'Gongoozlers'* they called themselves and 'Plastic Duckers' they called us, and never the twain were going to sit easily in a lock queue together; though we did eventually part on good terms.

* a bloody silly word.

Shame the good terms didn't extend to the people we sold Jacaranda to, who strangely enough, were the ones we had bought her from. Geriatric and Austrian, and alarmingly geriatrically Austrian, they drove us to near murder. From the day after we had bought her, they stalked us along the canal, peering through the windows and hounding Mark at work on a daily basis, demanding we let them buy her back immediately.

The crap summer led into a bitter winter, which we only survived by calling on Thunderbird wine and friends, until in mid-February the canal froze. Ice-locked, we were now sitting ducks and the Germanic duo became our constant shadows. Hans took to ringing Mark several times a day:

'Since 1941 I haf mein tank hammer und now it is not in its proper place in ze locker! Vot do you mean by dis? You haf sold her!'

No we hadn't!

'Hermione is führious! You do not haf ze right to take down her pictures of Fi-fi and Frou-frou!'

Yes we did! And we'd done it with gusto, strangely feeling that having paid for the boat, she was ours to do with as we pleased - and they were truly hideous Pekinese.

No offence Clara, yours are lovely.

Eventually under the weight of the cold and ever-present damp, the stupid-hat-wearing gongoozlers, the paling joys of crapping in a plastic bucket with a lid and Hans' constant demands, we had capitulated and sold her back to them, legging it down the riverbank, money in hand, to the sound of hysterical Teutonic voices screaming 'Full to ze brim!' and 'Filthy schwein!' fading behind us.

They sound even madder than you two. Clara laughed.

We thanked her for the compliment and confident that we had sufficiently amused, rose to leave. It was gone 2am and we now had less than five days left in which to cram in more than fifty days worth of things still to do.

Last question Jeremy slurred, coming to, What's going to be your greatest challenge, do you think?

That's easy I replied "Breaking the door down, we're locked out. Anyone got a sledgehammer?

****

13 Guilbourne Heights - England - 4 days to departure

In a windy barn with only the arse-end of the week left before D-day, we were so tired. It had never been our intention to undertake such a watery escapade in a boat built by our own fair hands, rather to ponse off someone else's nautical expertise and efforts and not pay too much for them either.

The original ethos of the trip called for the purchase of a lightweight, compact, portable craft and that meant a canoe, or an inflatable, or even an inflatable canoe. Rugby's vast Labradorian bulk and effervescence however, immediately precluded the first and last of these unless we fancied cruising downriver executing a permanent Eskimo roll. But a trip without Ruggers wasn't going to happen: since adopting him at eighteen months, he had come with us everywhere and that wasn't about to change. So an inflatable dinghy it would be. But which one? Without question, the deciding factor had to be how cool we'd look and everything after that was but an irritating practicality. Of these irritations, however, weight particularly couldn't be ignored, neither so the need for two rowing positions: it would take both of our grunt and more to make it upstream on the major rivers. Good job we worked well as a team, having learnt to pull together without strangling each other on a mountain bike tandem, our previous sporting weapon of choice. Size-wise, the craft had to be just big enough for the three of us avec baggage to shoehorn into, but no more. Increased size equalled increased weight and wind resistance, which equalled increased effort and cries of 'Bugger that!'

One of the main sources of inflatable dinghies were the e-fishing shops where apparently we had been mistaken: forget the above, one's over-riding criteria was 'spodding capacity'. It seemed to look cool in the world of fishing, bucket loads of spodding, acres of camouflaged, inflated vinyl, loaded rods and live ringworm-primed ammo belts were the only way to go. We could hardly disagree, but as budding international pan-rower types, we were angling for a different kind of record catch.

However, the only thing we had caught in cyberspace was decision paralysis.

In desperation the overwhelming choice available was viciously pruned by ruling out anything with a delivery time of more than one week (or if we didn't like the colour). Thankfully, this left us with only one choice: the Stearns Seeker 960, a snip at only £233. At nine foot six inches long and with two rowing positions, it was large enough for three and tough enough to withstand the attentions of a manic Labrador with sharp claws, nasty pointy teeth and a bad attitude.

Backing into a forty-five foot pantechnicon on collecting our huge parcel had put another dent in our van but not in our excitement. Unpacked, inflated and filling the sitting room, the Stearns looked too attractive not to spend the night in, although crabbing out of it the following morning, needing major neck surgery, made us realise why more intelligent people don't row across the Atlantic on airbeds or sleep in inflatable dinghies.

Later that morning in the canal side car park, unloading our now seemingly ginormous inflated dream along with the solitary set of oars provided, we felt pretty Billy Commando, Action Man. Black rubber from head to toe and break of dawn had been the original bywords of this operation until we had realised how stupid we`d look launching at an hour when there would be no fucker about to appreciate just how much the business we looked. Consequently zero hour had been rescheduled until we could be buggered to get out of bed. Eventually on squeaking down to the bank and sliding the Stearns into the dark uninviting water, the wretched thing took up most of the available channel - Houston, we had a problem.

The regulations for the principal Continental rivers specifically warned against interfering with the larger commercial shipping or breaking the 35kph speed limit, but we'd have to deal with that likelihood later. More immediately, there was no way a 100,000 tonne container ship was going to squeeze past; the Saône simply wasn't big enough for the both of us! This could be potentially disastrous in the locks where, although the Stearns would fit a comfortable four hundred and seventy-one times over, with the same freighter alongside, there would only just be room for some shreds of exploded vinyl and smeared human remains.

In addition, ten minutes into the mission, we had disappointingly worked out that the two long, black, cylindrical extrusions mounted either side were rod holders, not rocket launchers as first hoped. Five minutes further on from this, now feeling more Billy the Fish than Billy the Commando, we had also worked out that there was more to this rowing lark than we wanted to admit. And way more than we could cope with in the squall that then blew up out of the filthy sky. Lashing hail, gusting winds and Rugby cowering under our arms from both (Labrador or poodle?) further handicapped either of our already farcical attempts at rowing and left us lurching from near capsize to near collision with anything that was foolish enough to happen along in our direction. All thoughts of spodding capabilities and sangfroid out of the porthole, surviving this tempest was our sole concern, as with true grit and guts, we doggedly clawed our way back to the canal bank and aborted the rest of the mission.

This folly was then not repeated for a full week under the guise of two feeble excuses:

1) Concluding from our first exploratory debacle that floating around on a bag of air in high winds necessitated larding up to double as human ballast, we had spent all our spare time in the burger department.

2) Until Stearns sent the second set of oars, we couldn't be arsed.

In truth, we had failed to return to the canal because we hate practice, preparation and prosthetics; in fact, pretty much anything beginning with a 'P'. The whole raison d'être of the adventure was not to put in outlandish efforts just to join the weekend warrior set but to put in the minimum and still become fully paid up members of the too cool to touch, too hot to handle brigade.

Finally back on the water the following weekend, this time we had the advantage of two sets of oars and with both of us rowing, we should have been a match for any squall looking to spoil the party. However, instead of gliding along, a sleek coxless pair, all the second oarsmen could manage was to jerk back and forth a few inches like a spasticated frog: not a second rowing position at all but a gimmick, or, as Stearns themselves later casually informed us 'a change to the design'; from one that worked to one that didn't apparently. Even a Dry Land Dermot could plainly see that such an arbitrary sticking-on of rubber and plastic in the vague shape and position of a second pair of rowlocks was not going to get us to Luton, let alone Lisbon. So back in the box it went, ready to be returned and we were once again, boatless.

With a rowing adventure from London to Lisbon planned to start in less than five weeks and no boat (!), luckily there was no time for anything except panic. Mid headless-chicken impression, the answer came as a flash of inspirational arrogance: we would have to build our own - clearly no other bugger was capable. So that very afternoon, having drunk way too much Spanish table wine, we toasted the idea and, being modern kids of the techno era, commenced a hasty cyber trawl of DIY boat building sites.

For twenty-five minutes we threw everything we had at it, and it threw it all back - maybe not such techno kids after all! Irritatingly, whoever had designed the concept of search engines had spitefully built in the parameter that before they would furnish one with the answer, they had to be fed at least a clue as to what one was bloody well looking for. So we painstakingly typed in our criteria: LIGHTWEIGHT, PORTABLE, SELF-BUILD, GLOVE COMPARTMENT, DIRT CHEAP, DOG FRIENDLY

We hit ENTER.

123,268,436 matches found.

What about mentioning something about a boat, brainiac?

Good idea.

BLOAT, ROW, NON-CAPSIZABLE, OUTBOARD / INBOARD

I thought we were supposed to be rowing!

Just joking.

SEXY, CIAO, COOL

We hit ENTER again.

2 matches found: Reincarnation

Ozark Float boat

Also being modern kids of the we can't be arsed to wait two nanoseconds for anything age, we dismissed the first as too time consuming and plumped for the second, seduced by the instantly downloadable plans - our kind of shopping!

The printer ran out of paper a third time. What exactly in the wide, wide world of Jane's Shipping were we downloading? After two rounds of tea to sober up and a packet of bourbons split with Ruggers, we found out: apparently not a full-scale treatise on boat building through the ages, but just the bare minimum needed to slap together an Ozark float boat. Leafing through, the horrible truth had leapt out: all of this bumf had to be read and understood before we could even start - Yawn! And start to build what exactly? The picture showed a flat-bottomed, punty-cum-skiff type of thing, but with definite style and class and even though the Danish designer had intended it to be paddled (behave!), what we had here in essence was the perfect two man (and one dog), pan-European rowing machine. And the name? It seemed an 'Ozark' wasn't a floating Australian eco-zoo but a kilt-wearing Red Indian. And a float boat? (Not much of a boast really) some sort of sneak boat, as if that made things clearer - honestly those Danes, all smacked up on bacon and salami! Clearly it rots the brain.

To our layman's mind how the jumble of lines, figures and angles on the pages in front of us would translate into anything tangible in the next four weeks was a mystery: evidently by 'sewing'* together four sheets of 8' x 4' ply, swaddling it in a cocoon of glass fibre tape and then liberally pouring buckets of achingly expensive epoxy resin over the whole twisted blunder, that's how. Cool! We could just about manage that in four weeks; although the other thirty odd pages hinted that there might be rather more to it than we had fancied confessing to each other.

* see bacon and salami.

But we loved it. We loved every minute of it. Even when the epoxy resin we had needed to hawk a neighbour's borrowed kidney to buy split our skulls and churned our stomachs; and even when the sixteen-foot panel we had just fibreglassed jammed in the fourteen-foot stairwell and needed sawing in half to rescue; and even when it looked more like an ill-stitched banana than a water craft, still we loved it.

And we loved our new-found skills: the ability to sculpt a lunar landscape from fibre glass tape whilst actually trying to create a mirror finish and to temporarily incorporate disparate objects into the boat's design - a slice of toast here, a Labrador there - and most particularly, our ability to do it all alongside a thirty-nine hour working week, sustained with nothing more than a few hours sleep, a few extra injections of caffeine and the occasional sackful of amphetamines.

Fate meanwhile had been cruel and kind at the same time. Having started the build in the sitting room, it had quickly burgeoned out of control and we had been left fighting a rearguard action, engulfed in a world of sawn and splintered ply. It was clear a sixteen-foot boat could not be constructed in a one-bedroomed cottage, if on completion it was to leave in one piece. Then miraculously, with