Laura and I are off on our holidays tomorrow. Expect normal service to resume in about 2 weeks.

As we are going to one of the few remaining Communist countries there won’t be many Interweb updates.

Apologies for the silence….

I had a beery conversation with a Swedish colleague (Anna) in a Stockholm night club last night. I went straight to a pressing issue that has been weighing on my mind for a while – the famous Swedish blonde.

I have suspected for some time that there is a very high proportion of bottle blondes in Stockholm. But I was shocked when Anna (who admits to being a bleach blonde her self) confessed that pretty much every Swedish woman over the age of 30 with blonde hair is faking it. This is not what years of national stereotyping had led me to believe.

It is probably as well then that I generally prefer red heads. Except for my wife. Who is a brunette. Confused? Well so am I.

When we took Chico out of the water last weekend we all were stripped to short sleeves working in the brilliant 18°C October sunshine. It felt odd to be getting the boat ready for winter in weather we didn’t see during the summer. Here in Stockholm it feels wintery though. There was a freeze last night and another is expected tonight.

Various Swedes who think I am living in Stockholm (an understandable mistake as I have spent 54 nights here so far this year) keep asking me “Have you prepared for the winter”.

This seems to be a local ritual that has to be done around now. Anything that can’t take cold (like lawnmowers, boat engines, and so on) has to be taken in doors. The winter clothing is brought out of storage. You change your car tyres to winter ones. And you make very sure your central heating has been checked out.

It is all very different to live in Dublin. Laura and I are fortunate to live in a modern, well insulated, energy rated house, and the outside temperatures are unseasonably warm. We haven’t gone near the heating in over 6 months. And even this week we were wandering around our (un-heated) house in bare feet and short sleeves. In ever other respect I may be an environmental catastrophe but at least I don’t require much emissions to heat my gaff.

It is one of the really nice things about living in Ireland. We don’t have a climate of extremes.
I just wish we had fake blondes instead of fake oompa-loopa tans.

I haven’t posted anything recently about our performance in Chico. After our blistering start to the Kish series (where we were 4th after 2 races) we settled down to a much more realistic, and mediocre performance. Of course matters would have been helped if we turned up in time for races. Our worst timekeeping was for the Kish race itself.

We were over 10 minutes late for the start. Technically we should have been disqualified. But they gave us a finish time (34th out of 35). In our defence it was my birthday and our seconds wedding anniversary. We had dawdled over breakfast to open cards and so on.

We had 2 more races after that. Simple up and down runs where our crew shortage, and poor sails showed. The morning of the last race we had Chico measured for new sails. And I brought in a friend with loads of racing experience to give us a hand and some tips. Overall we finished the 6 race series in 8th place of 16 boats. We are pretty happy with that, seeing as it was our first time racing our little boat. We have high hopes for next year.

The final race was last Saturday. It was out last trip out in Chico this year. On Sunday we took her to one of the yacht clubs to be lifted out for the winter. Briefly Chico became a flying boat.

Once she was on her trailer she then was (very slowly) driven to her winter berth at a secret location somewhere in the mid west. My parents can be sure now that we will be down to visit them regularly. Because we will have to go down to sort out the long list of boat jobs!

I am going to miss sailing Chico for the next few months. In the four months or so what we had her we managed to sail over 220 nautical miles, just around Dublin bay. We have great plans for next year. At a minimum we have to sail her to Cork and back (which will be as much sailing as we did all of this year).

For now I will return to my first love. The mountains. It is going to be a winter of hill walking, maybe some snow plodding, and skiing in February.

If only I can remember where I left my hiking boots. They are so much easier to misplace than an 7m long sail boat.

I am not sure what to make of this comment. It has the be the strangest one I have ever got on this site.

In a new form mind you…

Heard in Limerick when discussing boats:

“It it flys, floats or fucks, never buy it. Rent instead.”

I have been struggling for a few days to decide what to put here for my 1000th post. Something witty, or profound, something memorable. In the end I decided I couldn’t be arsed.

Instead you can enjoy this nice photo of a Donegal cottage.

Laura and I were wandering through the first church of shopping in Dundrum last night (I am still struggling to find slippers with soft soles, rather than something you could tap dance in, and which aren’t slip-ons. Anyone know where you can get these?). We ended up having a spot of dinner in Yo-Sushi because we like that sort of thing i.e. conveyor belt, pay by the plate, faux Japanese dining. I enjoyed it, as I like sushi, and it’s a pretty informal way to eat. You do need to keep an eye on the plates piling up though, so you don’t get bill shock when you come to pay.

Despite being an island nation with a fair amount of fishing, it can be hard to find sushi in Dublin. And as for the quality… The one person I know of that gets good sushi in Ireland has it made for him by his Japanese wife. I am lucky they are big into sushi in Stockholm, and they have competent sushi chefs when they make it there. The people in Yo Sushi seem to know what they are at as well though.

Half the fun last night was watching the other punters trying the place out. Because Yo-Sushi is all very new, and in a very open highly trafficed part of Dundrum shopping centre I could see a lot of people staring at us. Those that were adventurous enough to try it could be heard saying “I don’t really do chopsticks” and “sushi isn’t really my thing”. But there is normal cutlery for the chopstick challenged, and they offer a lot more than raw fish to eat. Even the newbies seemed to enjoy the novelty of it though. Maybe in time they too will learn the proper etiquette for how to eat sushi.

Chopsticks have a lot in common with Japanese and Chinese writing. They are very characteristic of their societies, very distinctive, elegant, require a little skill to do well, but when it boils down to it, they are nowhere near as practical or easy to use as a fork or a phonetic alphabet.

When in Rome an asian eatery I use chopsticks myself. If if can blow my own trumpet I would have to say I am reasonably competent with them too. I have even been complimented on my chopstick skills. A while back, when I was in Mumbai, I was eating dinner in an Indonesian restaurant with 2 work people. One from Delhi, and Huimin who is from Singapore. Ethnically Huimin is Malay Chinese so she would recognise proper chopsticks usage when she sees it. I had ordered Nasi Goreng, which was pretty good, and was working my way through it with the chopsticks. Huimin said to me:

Huimin: “You are very good with chopstick Seamus”
SK: “Thanks, I use them pretty regularly at home”
Huimin: “But, Nasai Goreng is usually eaten with a spoon”

Ah…

The pictures were taken by Norbert Roshing in Canada near the Hudson Bay. They are from this slide show. I picked them up from a story on Snopes. The Polar Bear came upon a group of huskies. And rather than attacking each other they seem to have played instead.

There is an odd story going around about Willie O’Dea offering to fight someone who was hassling him in a pub. I don’t know if it is true or not. Even if it was of course he would deny it now.

Maybe this is a good time to resurrect the forsaken art of dueling? Part of my reason for asking is that I recently read a very enjoyable book on the history of dueling. One of the most famous Dueling Codes was:

The Code Duello, covering the practice of dueling and points of honor, was drawn up and settled at Clonmel Summer Assizes, 1777, by gentlemen-delegates of Tipperary, Galway, Sligo, Mayo and Roscommon, and prescribed for general adoption throughout Ireland.

There is a modern synopsis which would be very suitable in this situation.

Deputy O’Dea and Mr Fahey could give each other “satisfaction”, and defend their honour in the manner of gentlemen through the ages. Although this supposes that both of them is of sufficient standing to be regarded as a gentleman in the first place.

Reading the book I was interested to see how it was relatively rare to people to be killed in duels. At worst the fatality rate was only 1 in 3. But typically it was much lower about 1 in 14, and in many countries much lower again. The point wasn’t really to kill someone, but to show that you were willing to risk death in defence of honour.

Of course as duels are supposed to be about honour that pretty much rules out most modern politicians from participating.

Duelling itself was always pretty much illegal. Hence the need for the participants to meet in secret, somewhere private – they had to avoid the police. Which is also why meeting at dawn was popular.

What would be interesting to know is how legal a full duel would be today. If the primary intent is not to kill (but where that is just a significant risk), and both participants agree to the terms of the duel, then how different is it to boxing where the fighters also try to injure each other, and there is a risk of death?