Almost in the Same Boat
Don’t you just love the way the English language, especially the version over here where we invented it, flagrantly re-uses words with different meanings to confuse the unwary. ‘Bat’, for example; it’s a verb and a noun essential for cricket, unless it’s flying blind at night and sleeping upside down. ‘Bow’ can mean a kind of gentlemanly curtsey, or the front of a ship, or something you’d use to fire an arrow, with us happily flip flopping between verb and noun and sundry different pronunciations or meanings, with whatever ‘gay abandon’ is called today. Similarly, you can ‘punt’ an idea, or a rugby ball, or a boat, and in the last case the verb doubles up as the very noun on which you perform the action, with or without Pimms. Lest you object to this object lesson, subject me to a different subject, book out a book from a library (that’s a novel idea), jump on a train to go training, fix a date to date, eating a date, crane your neck to see a tall bird or park your bum in a public green space, you have to work out not only what those accumulations of letters mean in context, but often how to pronounce them too. Clearly HomonymsRUs, in a sort of verbal recycling scheme. How very green. At least ‘practice’ has the decency to change to ‘practise’ if you want the verb form. Unless you’re American of course. Or a badly-educated Brit.
We do it with place names too; not far from me, the River Aln, pronounced as in Alan Rickman, flows to the North Sea at Alnmouth, pronounced as you now suddenly expect it, with his name included. But upstream, as it meanders through Alnwick, it suddenly identifies as a woman; the exact same word is pronounced like ‘Anne’. Thus Anne-ick. (The W is silent of course, just to be more confusing). This sudden sex change is not, so far as I’m aware, some kind of sorcery emanating from Alnwick Castle, home of the Harry Potter movies, and for that matter Alan Rickman too; no, the trick is much older, beyond even Severus Snape, and designed to confuse the unwary - those who might not guess that the start of ‘Penistone’ in Yorkshire sounds like ‘penny’, for example.
Our language is full of this, but in recent weeks I have been mostly pondering one word in particular; how my new favourite sport can also mean arguing with your spouse. I mean rowing. With an ‘oh’ not an ‘ow’. Not that I have much time to reflect on domestic disagreements these days; I’ve been far too busy piling up and down the River Tyne at Hexham, preparing for a forthcoming race. It’s happening today, in fact, probably exactly as you read this: yes, as you stretch and yawn on your sofa, or sup the perfect morning coffee in New York (hopefully with an everything bagel, always my favourite), I shall be jumping into an implausibly thin boat, strapping on the shoes which are meant to detach if anything untoward happens, and competing in the world-famous Wansbeck Regatta.
Where? it’s near Blyth, where Noel Coward’s homonymical Blythe Spirit didn’t come from. It’s a river a little south of the name-shifting Aln, flowing through a place called Cambois, which of course is not pronounced like the French word it is clearly channelling, instead being ‘Camus’ …. though not as in Albert, which would be far too obvious; it’s ‘Cam – Us’. Quelle Peste.
This race prep has thrown together what I suppose I should describe as a motley group of men, strangers at the start of our practice, now sort of friends in a slightly gritted teeth ‘I blame him’ kind of way. Don’t get me wrong; we are all hugely nice to each other, and unfailingly polite, being Brits, but there’s something about close proximity to capsizing that creates a certain terror, and it is entirely natural and in the spirit of teamwork to presuppose that your fellow boat-mates are entirely to blame. (Couldn’t possibly be me. And if we ever do capsize it absolutely won’t be my fault). I sit at number three, which is two from the back, and there are four of us in total, each holding on for grim but hopefully not inevitable death to two blades (which are not swords or knives – here we go again), while the man behind me shouts instructions in a stentorian tone that exposes his day job sitting in legal judgment on miscreants. And the chap in front of me?
He’s the stroke, who soaks.
Mr Splashy, I call him: his left hand oar (called ‘bow side’, but not as in Robin Hood) refuses to skim coquettishly and silently a few inches above the water, instead bouncing up and down on each and every stroke, slicing off tranches of rather muddy river which head straight for me with malevolent intent. As a result, I receive an involuntary shower roughly twenty-two times a minute. Or thirty-one when we are practising our starts, where the intermittent deluge turns into a constant inverted waterfall, an organic power washer, an enema of the people.
And starting? High pressure. We slide forwards, not yet moving the boat, except to wobble mercilessly from side to side. Then we panic a bit, stick our oars in the water, wobble some more, and wait for His Honour to send us down for five years or start the heart-throbbing action, as the case may be. I sometimes think the former would be preferable.
‘Attention!’ he intones, at which point we are all meant to push our hands away from us a tiny little bit as if we know what we’re doing: ‘Go!’ Then the red mist descends, the back-aching starts, and with it come the showers from Mr Splashy. Après lui, le déluge.
Between each and every stroke we have to go through a right faff, rotating the blades ninety degrees (which is called ‘feathering’ but does not make them as light as one), then pointlessly, barely a second later, going straight back to vertical, which is called being square, but not in the sixties sense. Or back to forty-five degrees if you’re Mr Splashy, to up the cascade quotient.
The fourth member of the crew is the man at the front of the boat, or the back as we think of it (since rowing is all about having no idea where you are going until you’ve gone there, a bit like life). I call him Dr Nice, because he’s both. He says hardly anything, which is absolutely fine by me as he’s responsible for steering us away from trees, other rowers, or (as one day this week) a target-rich environment of four canoes full of giggling schoolkids, all doubtless unaware that we literally cannot see where we’re going. So I think it is rather preferable, on balance, if Dr Nice focusses on steering, not chatting. Meanwhile I perform the habitual role of a drummer in a band, which of course I also am, and tell some crap jokes.
So off we go, grunting like a herd of middle-aged bison, building up from three initial and usually pathetic little strokes to five bigger and much worse ones, then finally settling on a pace which causes your lungs to scream, your heart to stop cooperating, and more water to be injected into the boat, thanks to that errant bow-side blade. All of this effort is for the ultimate privilege of racing side by side with just one other boat, which will inevitably be peopled by stronger, more experienced and better rowers than us, who also – being a tiny bit older, apparently - will be given a head start. That’s probably a good thing though, since watching them pull away from us with effortless skill as we force our legs back and forth and dump a quart of Wansbeck per minute in the gunnels may not be entirely motivating.
And so we shall proceed, as the boat fills with water, and His Honour shouts at us, and Dr Nice tries to avoid an underwater tree which God rather unhelpfully dropped onto the course, and I will sit there hydrating from the outside in, thanks to Mr Splashy. All the while, we hope nobody catches a crab, which is a ridiculous phrase by the way; crab-catching needs nets, and we have no time for fishing. Least of all for compliments. Which we shall certainly not deserve.
So that’s the Wansbeck Regatta, today’s current affair. How will it go? Will we bow to the inevitable? Fail miserably and endure a stern talking to? Will we – knock me down with a feather – win fair and (mostly) square, feel like young blades, and finally splash out in celebration? Perhaps we’ll row with Synchronicity, like The Police’s last album. Their second was Regatta de Blanc ….. I’m just hoping we avoid Regatta de Sink. (And I don’t mean the thing you wash your hands in).
