Birvidik

Today's blog was going to be an erudite discourse on the evolution and nature of the tribal instinct in humans and its manifestation in differing types and degrees of corruption across different cultures in Europe.

But that is going to have to wait.

Because I want to have a rant about bloody power and speed boat drivers.

Every last ignorant, arrogant, thoughtless, antisocial, psychopathic, sociopathic, genitally-challenged, man-bloody tosspot-jack of them.

We're currently moored in Vlikho, which is over-run with the bastards. Thousands of them. Well, alright, hundreds of them. OK - tens of them then, if you're going to be pedantic. But it seems like sodding thousands. It also seems worse this year than in years previous. This, I suspect, is due to the improvement in Greek tourism and the concomitant increase in the number of small businesses hiring out light displacement boat with ruddy great outboards that wouldn't be out of place in the highly camouflaged boatshed of a Columbian coke cartel.

The improvement in Greek tourism is to be welcomed - God knows they need all the help they can get but as a result not only is the Ionian plagued with the usual bunch of full-time onanists who actually own power boats, but spots such as Vlikho are further swamped by small speedboats driven by gormless retards who've never been afloat in anything smaller than a cross-channel ferry and know about as much about boating as the average boater knows about quantum electrodynamics.

Before you unleash your inner Guardian reader upon me, I accept that not all of them are gormless retards in everyday life. Some of them (very few, I suspect) may, in everyday life, be intelligent, cultured and altruistic souls, functioning perfectly competently as consultant anaesthetists, investigative journalists, research scientists or bomb disposal experts. The trouble is that by the time they've been over here for a couple of days their brains become so addled by sun, retsina, dehydration and endless souvlaki that they become indistinguishable from proper gormless retards, born and bred. You know - like Michael Gove.

Readers who know me well are likely to be surprised at the tone of this entry. They are aware that I am a self-effacing, quiet and tolerant sort of bloke; a fully-fledged, wishy-washy liberal of a Guardian reader giving everyone the benefit of the doubt while I sit quietly in a corner artificially distressing my sandals and knitting myself a nice bowl of muesli. So what, they may well ask themselves has triggered this vitriolic and uncharacteristic fusillade of bile?

I'll tell you, since you ask.

It's the cumulative effect - the camel's back syndrome. Vlikho is a lovely protected anchorage, except for in thundery southerlies (of which more in the next post). Sadly, the plethora of speed boats hacking around it make it more akin to taking up residence in a washing machine (© J. Boulter).

If you're under way they're a sphincter-twitching menace. They wouldn't recognize a collision regulation if it crawled up the leg of their hideous shorts. If you're on a collision course with one (or worse, more than one) you can guarantee that they won't have the faintest idea of who is supposed to keep their course and who is supposed to take avoiding action. They certainly won't know what form that avoiding action should take. In addition they zig-zag about so erratically that even if they're not on a collision course now they bloody soon will be.

Things are little better if you're anchored. The aforementioned washing machine effect is caused by the wash produced as they hack through the anchorage at high speed and cut into within metres of anchored boats. They keep their idiot, grinning faces fixed ahead and never look behind them, so they never see the carnage wrought in their wake. One nearly pulled a water skier into our anchor chain, not realizing that when the boat makes a tight turn the skier describes a much wider arc behind it. Had the skier not noticed the chain at the last moment and let go of the tow he'd have been decapitated by it. That would, at least, have added a bit of colour to the proceedings.

All of these goings on I had suffered with tolerance if not equanimity. Then I was dispatched to make the bed.

Our aft cabin is lovely, but has one drawback; the bed is hemmed in by fittings on three sides and so can only be accessed down one side. As a result, the only way to install the fitted sheet is to roll it up from the side, grasp the two opposite corners, kneel on the bed and reach out to fit the two corners before shuffling back and fitting the remaining corners. It is at the first stage, of kneeling and reaching out, that one is most unstable. I was at this point when a speedboat shot past the stern. The wash hit the boat, the boat rolled and I toppled forwards. My arms being hobbled by the sheet, I was unable to prevent myself from falling. No problem though, my forehead did the job and brought me up short. Unfortunately, it did this by ramming itself into the metal flange attached to the open window. Said flange had similar dimensions to a blunt cold chisel with predictable effects on my forehead.

I clasped my hand to my forehead, crawled off the bed and staggered out of the cabin raining curses on the power boat driver and his descendants even unto the hundredth generation. It's a highly vascular area, the scalp. I also have a significant warfarin habit. The gouge in my forehead therefore produced copious amounts of blood which ran through my fingers and down my forearm. The cabin looked like a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Luckily, it was not as bad as it looked, especially after Liz had deployed the skills she developed patching up the worst excesses of the Jersey General surgical staff. A cat's cradle of steristrips and a quick op-site dressing and I was as good as new, although I like to think that I now exude a rather raffish, piratical charm.

The mental scars, though, remain. I have turned from a fully paid up Guardianista to a raving UKIPper as far as speed boats are concerned. Bloody power boaters! They should all be shot at birth.

All this, of course, poses no inconsistency with our declared aim of buying a motor cruiser for the next stage of our travels. It does, however, serve to highlight a couple of definitions:

A Conservative is a Liberal who's been mugged.

and

A Liberal is a Conservative who's been arrested.



Yours etc

Incoherent with rage of Vlikho Bay