Europa Oil and Gas (LON:EOG) is back to where I bought it, which is a relief, but a new punt on property (LON:WICH) has dropped slightly. Meanwhile, Snack Time plc (LON:SNAK) just sits and growls in the darkness waiting to pounce. I’m hoping my bets will come off so I can plug the profits into this Iceland trip. I might be kidding myself but without a plan, opportunity won't know where to knock.The Black Bullet has been booked into my local Enfield workshop for the week after next, the hundred quid I made on that green services company (LON:EAGA) is going toward a wiring rethink. Electricity is one of the black arts and I’m happy to pay for the charging issue to be sorted by someone who knows how. I’ve also asked them to put a new tube in the front, check the carb settings and tidy up the wiring loom.
There are two putative plans for this trip; one involves catching a series of ferries - Harwich to Esbjerg, in Denmark, Denmark to the Faroe Islands and The Faroes to Seydisfjordur, on the east coast of Iceland - all-in-all about five days at sea. This would cost approximately £1000 in fares but one imagines it would involve a great deal of warm and pleasant eating, drinking, reading and writing (about how great it is to be a modern adventurer), and photographing cloud formations.
The other involves the potentially risible idea that I might be able to persuade the skipper of an Iceland-bound vessel, of some sort, to fit us on board, somewhere in Scotland, and take us over. I would expect to pay something and perhaps do some work, like cook. My father made it from Holland to South Africa working on a ship. This was after the Second World War, mind, but you still see the likes of TV explorers striking this kind of deal, so why not me?
The second idea, I admit, I fear. Storms, sea-sickness, the rider doused in puke and the bike doused in ocean, never to start again. Not to mention the other imaginative things that Jane tells me happen at sea. She’s from Portsmouth which gives her the right, apparently, to talk about this stuff. Anyway, time and money will doubtless decide.
If I'm lucky with my bets, money should be no impediment either way. All that will then remain is the sensitive matter of negotiating the time off work and family responsibilities.
I use the word 'luck', in this context, with some hesitation beacuse the cheaper alternative is the more lucky, depending on outlook. As useful as money is, it has a tendancy to insulate us from raw experience - which is also part of its attraction, it has to be said. But for the purposes given here, where adventure is the aim, it could be said to represent the difference between something bought and something given.
Expanding on this briefly; you can say you deserve (to buy) something on the basis that somewhere, doing something quite unconnected, you earned the money to afford it. It is a third person exchange. It is more likely that something given requires the doing of deeds connected to the giver. Indeed, one should be so lucky as to 'deserve' such a thing. I don't know really where I'm going with this but it seems important.
