An update, a suntan, and a day spent finally sailing.

The website – http://www.jennifer-kirk.com – has been spruced to allow for the publkishing of ‘Bringing home the stars’. There a new front page, and the Bibliography has been revamped too. As ‘Bringing home the stars’ replaces the short story of the same name, you’ll find that the link to the short story has been removed in favour of the book. The book, in any road, contains much of the material of the short story, as it grew from that initial piece written for ‘Folio’. As a new feature, ‘Buy now’ buttons have appeared, and this is to make it easier for those who want to buy books to get to where they can buy them at the best prices. Well, it beats working for a living!

I’ve spent the weekend sailing boats after having slaved so long to rebuild them. It was very sunny, and I now have a healthy reddish glow. I’m just hoping that it turns into a healthy brown tanned glow! With hindsight, I think that if you are going to get a radical tan, it is worth paying attention to some little details. Like where your fringe is if you have long hair (I can see where mine was yesterday, regardless on how I style my hair today! Ooops!) and what top you were wearing (a vest top seems to have allowed the maximum flexibility to wear something different without having white lines showing). I also wore very short shorts, so my legs have, for the first time in living memory, turned from a Goth-as-f**k white to a healthy darker colour higher than any skirt I wear will go. Result.

Sailing, it seems, is like riding a bike. It’s been some fifteen years since I last stepped foot in a sailing boat, much less sailed it. So it was with some trepidation that I stepped foot in a type of boat I have never sailed before, and took it for a spin on the lake. Actually, I came back to the sport rather well, though the voids of my memory need to be refreshed a little on tacking technique as I’m sure there’s some tips for sail positions that I forgot. However, whilst the novices were complainging “there’s not enough wind!” I was zipping up and down the lake at high speed, amazing quite a few. On the journey back to the jetty, I had got twice as far as anyone else, yet managed to arrive back at the jetty at the same time as two other boats just by knowing how to catch the wind better. No wind my arse! It was actually breezy enough for me to get the dinghy leant over enough that my feet ended up grazing the water.

All in all a rather fun day, even if I did spend most of it manning the safety boat. Now that’s a difficult task akin to herding cats to keep seven other boats all marshalled together and get in to help them whenever there is a problem. Especially when they are all novices. Still, I’m sure all the children had fun, and that’s the main thing. This thirty year old child certainly enjoyed herself!