It hurts on the inside

Holy shit!
Princess Diana died!
Why didn't anyone tell me?
Way to bum the Happy New Year vibe.

Unfortunately the only gravestone I have handy for the occasion is this cool one a friend gave me for helping her shift furniture on Sunday.
It's the best I can do.


So, unlike Lady Di, I have started making plans for the new year. I have been experiencing that excited prospect of new adventures to be had, jobs to quit and new women to do whatever it is one does with women these days.

And I was reminded of an old adventure I had in the desert back in, ooh, 1998.
It was a camel trek out to a desert lake where there was boating and dinner watching the birds dipping before flying off to their nightly roosts elsewhere.
The boating was an unexpected delight. They were authentic feluccas from the Nile. Some eccentric had taken a fancy to felucca cruising in the fifties and had some shipped out to Australia. Somehow they ended up with this trekking crew and, after a bit of repair, became this excellent feature. The fittings were all African bronze and genuine Nile flax sails.
Sailing was a welcome respite from the argumentative and testing camels who only responded to violence. They issued us with proper camel prods, but one of the English guys had found a whippy stick that he employed to much greater effect.
As darkness fell our guide, Max, was folding the sails away and the English guy was flexing his whippy stick when it sprang out of his hands and struck the guide in the crotch.

Everyone was stunned: Max the flax stacker was smacked in the jatz-crackers by a backpacker's ersatz camel whacker!