I'm having a difficult time at work today. Frankly, it's just not happening. Monday's have never exactly filled my heart with joy and gladness but this one is particularly tricky.
Part of the problem is that I'm too insanely busy to breathe, let a
lone think, let alone wake up. I'm surrounded by a howling blizzard of meetings as I try to create newsletters, columns,
match reports while at the same time entertaining foreign visitors, planning scotsman.com's next Great Leap Forward and keeping an eye on our podcasts. (I recommend
Alexander McCall Smith's readings.)
As you may have noticed, the
World Cup is on and if God wanted us to work during the Mundial He would have given us workstations with integral beer taps. (If you hate the fact that the World Cup dominates the summer, then I have two things to say to you. First, tough doodoo, you Philistine. Second, you'll enjoy
this video conveying the crushing ennui that "the beautiful game" inflicts on, well, Philistines.)
But the main reason my mind is not getting out of first gear is that it is not in the office. Before the trained killers of the Scotsman.com IT Re-education Action Team storm my home to perform Productivity Rite X-47 over my still quivering entrails, I should point out that my body is at my desk.
My brain and soul, however, are still somewhere on one the most beautiful places in the world:
Sandwood Bay. For those who don’t know it, it's a mile of pure white sand by a loch in a remote wilderness owned by those fine people at the
John Muir Trust. It's hard to due justice to the place with mere words but I feel that after God had finished creating the universe, He rubbed His hands together in satisfaction. Some of the dust of creation brushed off His fingers and fell down to Earth. Sandwood is where it landed. If you doubt me, check out
these pictures from Flickr.
My bike broke on the four-mile trek in from the road. Actually, to be accurate my bike
imploded, meaning I had to push it loaded with gear for mile after mile, there and back. My tent sagged in the lightest of breezes, collapsed, then broke and also imploded. Then it rained from the cloudless sky, turning my once tent into a miniature version of the loch. And I didn't care. It was
that beautiful.
Even the presence of other people in what I (irrationally) think of as my special place didn’t bother me. You can’t really get upset about surfers crowding you out when there's only a handful of them half a mile away. In fact, for reasons of silliness and beer, my friends and I decided to adopt mock surfspeak - an argot entirely unsuited to our age-group and lifestyles. For the course of the weekend our conversation consisted largely of saying: "That's like totally rad, dude. Sweet, man," over and over and over again. To be fair, irritating though that may sound, an outsider would have found it more entertaining than our usual endless chat about football, politics and football.
However, this has had a major downside in that I am denting my chances of passing myself off as a high-flying new media executive (no, really) by referring to everyone as "dude" and using the words "like", "way" and "totally" several times in each sentence. Did I mention I was attending big serious meetings today? Without breaching commercial confidentiality I can reveal that these are not the kind of gatherings that welcome space cadets talking like educationally challenged extra from
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
I'd worry about that but right now, my mind is still somewhere on the beach. I like to think it's sitting on rocks staring at the sea stack and the sun glinting on sapphire waters that would shame the Caribbean. My soul is sitting underneath a waterfall in a sun-dappled hollow a mile up the coast, listening to birds sing and waves crash.
Normal service will be resumed next week, assuming I ever work out what "normal" is anyway.
Latronic, dudes.
