BACK IN IRELAND and testing kit

Due mainly to the fragility of the paddles i bought and the hell on fragile and awkward shaped luggage that is all air travel nowadays....oh, and the hell on fairly robust and normal shaped people as well that is most air travel...i came back from London by bus and ferry. There was the one obligatory passive-aggressive drunk, the two bemused young tourists who thought that this might be a romantic or fun way to travel (you'll learn guys....though now i think about it they did go off in a happy trio with the slightly less bemused blonde Irish girl i saw them drinking in the bar with at four in the morning, so maybe i have something to learn; the rest were the usual fodder for the more expensive and far longer bus ride over a hellish but cheap and short Ryanair flight, namely a few older folk who don't care to fly, people without passports using bus passes, driving licences or court orders as ID, and the chain smokers who leapt off into rainstorms, gales and pitch darkness every few hours when our driver stopped for his necessary fag break.

I read about walking. And made lists and dozed and looked out of the window at a spectacular sunset that turned Wiltshire into something like the African veldt. And then looked out of the window - huge great expanse of glass - on the ferry down on a grey, sullen sea and tried to measure the height of the waves and the strength of the wind and imagine myself down there amongst the swell and the few white caps. Thankfully i could and without too much horror. The sea was running - and i guess from the relative flatness in a stiffish breeze, it was wind with current - pretty hard but no worse than many a day i've put out to sea alone to head out along the coast of Cork to High and Low Island or across to Toe Head. This was cheering. Or i was just being foolishly upbeat through lack of sleep and because i was snugly warm behind glass with a pint of Murphys in front of me and nothing more demanding to do than get back onto the coach in Rosslare and sit on the bus down to Cork for another handful of hours.

This i did, and the paddles - still in one piece, or more accurately in the two pieces that they legitimately break down into - are now leaning up against a wall. My next task is to see if the tent i bought sight unseen from ebay actually works: when i pulled it out of the back after picking it up from the post in England it looked both very flimsy and as if there were some important pieces missing and a few pieces that weren't needed. The proof - as is so often the case - will be in the erection.