Boardwise

Drive what feels like a million miles across England because I promised.

(Memo to self: stop doing that promise thing.)

Boardwise, for those lucky enough not to know about it, is a total be-all and end-all for windsurf gear in the UK, and Tiger knows about it, thanks to her windsurf instructress.

Worse, I have promised to take Tiger to this surfboard nirvana, so we can look at boards together, and I can make a plan to sell my body down the canal to pay for one. Either that or send Dig off pimping in Singapore. Either state will do, because I cannot find another option out of this foolish condition.

That condition is called, by the way, encouraging the children in bizarre and misguided enterprises, like one day becoming a windsurf instructor and travelling around the world selling your windsurf skills. If only we hadn't met someone who does exactly that, and looked like they maybe had taken a day out from heaven to be with us, life for me would still be calm and untroubled.

Perhaps I will say that is the gift I am giving to my children. Not a windsurfing board, but a pursuit of your visions and fantasies, and then working out either a way to pay for them, or for them to pay for themselves.

Anyhow, here is nirvana.

Just think! I grew up with the hobbies of watching TV, window-shopping, tormenting the Jack Russell, and my father had a vague ambition that I might become a nurse. Or a civil servant.