This week I'll be mostly on a boat

"It's very very nice here"
Bown 2002

Right now I should be sitting at home, with my feet up in front of the fire, reading Autosport.  Instead, I'm on a boat half way across the English Channel.

Why?

Well, yesterday evening I should have been sitting on a plane, with my seat-belt on and my seat-back upright, reading Andrew Benson, Freakonomics, and Bel's Randomness on the Kindle.  Instead, I was on a train from Southampton to Chandlers Ford.

Why?

In a word - fog.

The fog has rolled in across the Channel Islands for a few days, and there is mayhem.  All the flights have been cancelled.  There have been no newspapers (or Autosport) since the mail plane can't land.  You've got hundreds of people at dozens of airports all thinking the same thing - catch the boat.  While BA, Flybe and Blue Islands might be making a loss, the cabbies at Poole harbour and doing a roaring trade between station and ferry terminal.

This week I'll be mostly covered in cellophane

"When you wake in the morning,
wake and find you're covered in cellophane"
Banks/Collins/Rutherford 1981

On Sunday we woke up to a world of white outside.  However, unlike the rest of the British Isles, it wasn't snow.  In the space of a day the folks who farm the surrounding fields had got out there, planted the Jersey Royals, and got the covers on sharpish.

I've thought on occasion that I'd quite like to get out there and give them a hand planting up those cotils.  Or even just help getting the plastic sheeting all lined up nice and tidy.  But I could never be a farmer.  On the one hand, I'd love a working environment that depends on the predictability of the seasons, rather than on next quarter's IT budget of whatever financial services institution I'm working for this month.  But the unremitting, incessant, inexorable relentlessness of it!  That would just freak me out.

This week I'll be mostly in a very, very mad world

It's a very, very,
errr, mumble cough...

For years, in fact decades, a generation of us have convinced ourselves that we know exactly what Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith meant when they sang the line at the end of Mad World: "It's a very, very, mad world, halogeon world".  Or something like that.  When singing along in the back of the car, it was always best to cough or mumble at that point, rather than sing it out loud and embarrass yourself.  Conversations in the school playground, or in later years in the back of a Peugeot 505 estate on the A2, would always end badly: "I think it sounds like imagian."  "Imageean? That's not even a word!"  "Well neither is halogeon."

Of course misheard lyrics are nothing new.  There's a whole website (not a very good one) dedicated to the subject at kissthisguy.com.  Yes, yes, Hendrix: "Excuse me while I kiss this guy".  There was also a survey a while back, listing some favourites like: "See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen".