Day 29: are friends electric?

Are they? Mines broken down and now I’ve no-one to love.

So sang Gary Numan somewhat mournfully in 1978, and again last night when I found to my delight that I had his greatest hits compilation on my iPod. I was always a huge fan of his and loved his bizarre performances on Top Of The Pops where he always appeared as some kind of electro alien. My favourite was when he came on stage dressed in a silver spacesuit driving around in what was probably meant to be a scary alien transport podule but was actually a thinly-disguised dodgem car sprayed silver.

I remember as a teenager being terribly excited when he crashed his plane (again) on a road near Southampton, not far from where I was living at the time. I felt honoured that out of all the places he could have come down it happened to be so close to me, and it almost felt like an alien visitation.

So, last night the eastern Atlantic reverberated to the sound of such classics as I Nearly Married A Human, We Take Mystery To Bed, I Die: You Die and Remember I Was Vapour, and of course the timeless Cars.

However I don’t live entirely in the 1980’s and today have been paying homage to God himself, aka Mauro Picotto, whose Lizard Man from 2000 is still one of my favourite and most played CDs with it’s flawless production and smooth blend of techno and trance. Lovely!

True to yesterday’s promise not to touch anything on the boat I’ve been having a very peaceful 24 hours and am delighted to report no further breakages. This is clearly the way to do it! I let Odyssey get on with what she does best, namely the sailing bit, while I lounge around eating peanut butter Ryvita sandwiches and listening to 80’s pop. Fab! Why didn’t I think of it earlier?

Meanwhile we’ve just crossed the 3,000 mile line so with 1,000 to go I’m now three-quarters of the way to France. The wind is still a brisk westerly and yesterday we sailed 160 miles, the second best day’s run of the trip. At this rate I should be there in no time, although best not count my chickens before they’ve hatched. Not that I would have any, of course, being a vegetarian animal libertarian who would never dream of enslaving another living creature (cabin boys excepted).

And in other news I’ve nearly finished stitching up the genoa so it should be ready to put back up this afternoon, but that means stopping the boat which I’m reluctant to do while we’re sailing so well, so I might just wait till the wind drops again. Anyway, we really don’t seem to need it at the moment, and I’ve got quite used to climbing over it to get around the cabin.

Ooh, guess what I’ve found on the iPod now – John Foxx!!! That’s this afternoon’s listening sorted 🙂

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