Boat Trip

Today we went for a ride on Fiddler's Green IV, our friend's boat, off to the Northern Arm of Halifax to look at rich people's houses on the waterfront. It must be a hard life being uber-rich; you spend all that time acquiring a fortune, then spending it on a beautiful house on the waterfront, and then some idiot with slightly more money than you builds an enormous eyesore slap bang next to your house and ruins your view.

Fortunately we don't have enough money to afford an enormous beautiful waterfront house, which means instead of being enraged by our neighbours, we can enjoy schadenfreude as we float past the victims of modern development. I'm not quite sure why so many rich people have decided to build enormous charmless buildings resembling the prosaically ugly excesses of 4-star hotels, but the rich are not like us. They have planning permission, or whatever Hemingway said.

We did have a Nova Scotian Duck toller with us, one of the most cheerful breeds of dogs I've ever met, an orange table-shaped canine that doesn't bark, eats carrots and wags its tail a lot, which is much preferable to most of the dogs I've met.

Well, most of the dogs that I've met in Hong Kong, which are all horrendous and yappy, but then plenty of people in Hong Kong are horrendous and yappy (including myself from time to time) whereas the majority of Nova Scotians are calm and cheerful, so perhaps it's an environmental thing.

I learned very little on my boat trip, except that you can power a boat with a two stroke diesel engine and enjoy great fuel economy, as well as making a hell of a lot of noise, and that going on a mackerel fishing trip is a two day endeavour for a Haligonian fisherman, which is rather more work than me popping to the office for a few hours work. On the other hand, I doubt very many fishermen could put a database into third normal form, and that's an undertaking that's far more risky and painful than being stuck on a boat in raging seas in December.

Hardest job in the world, typing things into a computer.

Er...

Well, almost. Maybe?

It wasn't a stormy day for us - it was one of the more pleasant, warm and sunny days we've had on this trip. The main health risk wasn't drowning or being licked to death by the dog, it was more the potential for doom from the kilogram bag of wine gums that our host had brought on the trip, possibly on the assumption that while a little bit of tartrazine might make food an interesting colour, an enormous amount of tartrazine would be even better. I consumed about half the bag before I realised what I was doing, but by then I'd eaten so many wine gums that I really couldn't think straight, which made it hard to stop eating them. I suppose it was a break from all that cake.