I am not really equipped to write about sailing, as I am someone who once wished to die rather than stay on a sailing boat and feel sick. I couldn’t understand how everyone else managed to swig back the rum punches and dance, while I lay rigid on the deck. My sister one got seasick on a windsurfer, so it obviously runs in the family. I crossed over on the QE2 from New York to Portsmouth in 1992 (at the end of a three-month race around the world, sponsored by a champagne company. We were meant to travel by rail and sea) and was sick all the way, so sick at times, that I fantasized about throwing myself overboard. The medical room gave me some pills that knocked me out and I slept for the remainder, thus missing all that caviar, ballroom dancing and lectures on the Ice Age. I travelled with a moth eaten man I called Nev, but who’s real name is Nigel. I was writing and promoting the trip while he took photographs, but he never actually managed to print them and give them to the sponsors. I could have killed him. I still could, but he doesn’t know that. I wrote about him endlessly in a column I used to write for Tatler, called The Single Girls Diary. Oh happy days!
Anyway I digress. It’s the end of Cowes week, and I am thinking about the coastguard cottage we rented for five years on the Solent, opposite the Isle of Wight at a place called Lepe. We gave it up in January. It seemed like too much of an extravagance, a second home, in a credit crunch, that we rarely visited in the winter. And it was small, like a dolls house, and gave me cabin-fever another aspect of boat life that I don’t really like. You really feel English in that part of the world, because everyone sails. Everyone who sails is white and middleclass and rosy-cheeked. Sail boats bob up and down on the sea all through the year, but particularly during Cowes Week. Platoons of sailboats race around ‘the The Island’ as the locals call the Isle of Wight. On the last night there is a spectacular firework display that we watched from our beach, or our small shared garden, but last year it was no longer enough to be a spectator. Either you had to be a sailor and get out on that water, or just go home. Sailing isn’t my thing. I know that now. I always knew that. Getting drenched and bobbing around feeling hearty and nauseous just isn’t what I do. But I do love the sea, walking by it, looking at it, being replenished by it. I miss that aspect, and I miss swimming in it. I am very brave about swimming in cold sea, and luckily I haven’t yet got seasick doing that, but my sister does!
