You may not have realised that this week alone, you have all survived a September the 11th and also a Friday the 13th – well done to you if you made it unscathed.

My trauma is all mental.  I am currently in the South of France on a boat.  They are not letting me do any work because there are guests on, but, legal requirements mean they must have an engineer aboard with my qualifications so I am almost getting paid for doing nothing.  Of course, there are the daily checks in the morning but this takes less than an hour.  I have also helped the other guys with their security watches as it does get bloody boring standing out there all day long, but apart from that, I am doing sod all.

I know what you are thinking, ‘listen to him complaining about getting paid for nothing’ but it is boring and I really don’t do ‘bored’ very well at all, and to think I could have been in Cornwall catching my first Cornish wave since 2004 with poopy pants Yates !

I also got to thinking back to school discos from middle school.  I was out running the other night when Bad Manners’ Sally Brown came on randomly.  Ska has just the right beat for putting a spring in your step.  Anyway, Bad Manners, remember the singer,  a big fat skin head fella called ‘Busta Bloodvessel’, always used to wear Doc Marten boots.  Now, back at middle school, Bad Manners realeased a cover of the ‘Can Can’ and back then, we used to form a circle to do the Can Can.  Eventually it digressed into a tight circle where effectively we were just trying to kick the shit out of each other – strangely, the teachers never intervened! This then became known as ‘Doc’ing’ or ‘giving someone a good doc’ing’ because you were kicking them with your Docs, whether they were monsterous 18 holers or simply the more formal Doc shoes.

Something else I heard the other day on tv – ‘bricking it’.  When you were so scared that you could shit bricks and maybe even build a wall with them, you were considered to be ‘bricking it’.  The implication was, when absolutely petrified, you could shit enough bricks and build a wall of protection – much like Batfink and his wings of steel.

Sometimes my mind wanders

You cannot harm me – my wings are like a shieeeeeld of steel