Dragon Boating and Champions League

One of the many things I love about Hong Kong is the greater number of public holidays, 17 to the UK’s 8. Related to that I also love the fact that these public holidays all appear to exist for a valid reason, whether that be because it is the traditional day to go tend to your ancestors graves or like yesterday which celebrates the anniversary of the death of the great poet Qu Yan. It is also widely know as the Dragon Boat festival, where across all of China teams gather to compete in races.

You may ask how we got from poet to Dragon Boat racing, well let me explain. Qu Yan died by throwing himself in a river after his city was captured by the Qin dynasty (from which he was previously exiled). The local people admired him so much that they threw food in the water so that the fish would not eat his body and the locals rowed out at great speed to recover his body. This rowing out at break neck speed is supposed to be the origin of Dragon Boat racing.

In a modern Hong Kong it means that large groups of people gather at Stanley’s main beach to watch and compete in races throughout the day. Many of the teams are now done in a corporate manner, I saw a Stanley Morgan boat, a University of Toronto boat etc. I was down their largely because Debbie was competing for the University of Cornell team (her alma mater). Her first race was at something like 8am and there was no way in hell I would be getting up for that as I only went to bed at 6:30am.

I was in bed at 6:30 because I was awake to watch the Champions League Final between Barcelona FC and Manchester United. As with all football fans who aren’t Man U supporters in England I was cheering for Barcelona. Why you may ask would I support a Spanish team over an English team? Well that is quite simple, I had Man U they may play some great entertaining football at times but they play it with a horrible attitude. They always whine about how the other teams try harder against them than their rivals, about how the referees are completely biased towards them. They are not gracious in defeat but they don’t lose vary often. They are epitomized by their star player Cristiano Ronaldo who can go from the brilliant to the ridiculously petty.

Therefore as I settled down at 3am (god damn you HK time difference!) to watch the match I was practicing my Spanish and talking up Barcelona. Barcelona (apart from 10mins at the start of the game) controlled the game completely Xavi and Iniesta were sublime and made sure United could not play their usual game. Eto’o scored a cracking opener for Barca and Messi produced one of the best headers I have seen to seal it for the Catalan team.

The match finished at not long before 5am HK time, so me and my fellow companions went and got breakfast at one of few 24 hour diners in HK The Flying Pan. As usual the food was tasty and the company was just as good. We were all knackered by this point and I watched Bharat nearly collapse into his plate at the table. I would like to congratulate Paul, Chloe, Sarah, Sarah P and Bharat for staying awake long enough to watch the match. Extra brownie points for Sarah P who also managed to get up and come meet me at the Dragon Boat racing (see came full circle bet you weren’t expecting that huh?).

I got up at around 11am later on that morning and did a bit of cleaning about the flat in preparation for Gemma’s return and my Sister’s visit today. I had some lunch and left for Stanley at about half 1. It took me an hour to get to Stanley time spent finishing my book, playing on my PSP and listening to my I-pod. When I got to Stanley it was very breezy and it was beginning to rain, luckily I had my brolly with me so I kept out of the rain. The same could not be said of Sarah P however who was pretty soppy by the time we met up to get the water taxi. The water taxi was necessary to get to the Junk the the Cornell team were using as their base. After about 30 mins we managed to get to the Junk and join the team who were celebrating their failure to make the final races by getting absolutely trashed.

We met Talya and Debbie on the Junk and we had a roaring good time all round. This was aided by the free beer and food laid on for us my the generous people of Cornell University and pass on my thanks to them now. I got to watch several Junk races from the boat and ran in to someone who had also gone to Sheffield University all be it 15 years before I had done so! The boat was a mix between a full blow frat style party and a family gathering (due to some people having to bring their kids along). I think we improved the kids language skills through the medium of 50 Cent quite effectively.

When I was leaving the Junk towards the end of the proceedings I had a most unfortunate accident. As I placed by foot on the water taxi a large wave rolled throw jerked the bow of the taxi up and flicked me straight into the water. If you were paying attention further up the page you will have noticed that I was carrying in my bag an I-pod and PSP along with my BlackBerry in my pocket. They luckily managed to pull me onto the boat pretty quickly and I was able to pull the batteries out of as many of the electrical items as I could. The most annoying of these things to drop in the water is definitely the PSP, the phone is a company one so they will be paying for the replacement and the I-pod was nearly 5 years old I was actually planning on replacing it sometime soon (this just means I will do it quicker). The PSP is also the most expensive of all the items listed above and the one most likely to break due to it being a rather sophisticated piece of hardware.

However I am not angry about this and I feel that I will be able to cope easily without these items for a short while. I am just glad I had a really fun time over the last 36hours and I hope that this bodes well for the future.

Music:

This week we have an excerpt from a song that I have been trying to learn to play recently. The full version is here put I include the below snippet because it is the more public friendly part of the song and also gives you an idea of what I am up against technically speaking in learning this piece. I give you Selkies: The Endless Obsession by Between the Buried and Me.

Paul Waggoner - Selkies: The Endless Obsession Solo

Not Finishing

I don’t finish stuff that I start, that’s my thing and it’s also my life’s truest philosophy. Many people may see this as a failure on my part, I pity them for they do not know the true joy that comes with the simple act of leaving something incomplete.

I was not always this way, once I was like the rest of you; determined, single minded and driven towards a particular goal. Oh! what a fool I was back then. To clarify I will explain why I stopped this narrow mindset and moved on to a higher plain of mental existence.

As people who have known me for a long time will be aware I used to be a competitive paralympic swimmer. I started swimming before I could walk and following my accident when I couldn’t walk easily again I returned to the pool as part of my recovery. I got good at it without any informal coaching and was devastating at school swimming events, I didn’t lose a race through my primary school years, baring in mind that I was keeping against full able bodied kids.

When I was about 8 I joined a competitive swimming team and we would train 3 times a week after school at one of the local swimming pools. Outside of school competitions and having had no formal training in swimming I was hopelessly outgunned and lost quite a few races miserably, mainly due to a lack of stamina and having no race tactics (I used to lead until the last lap and then fade away and finish 3rd and 2nd a lot). However with the training and the patient work of Doug my coach I got better and by the time I was about 13 or 14 I was starting to consistently win at county championship levels.

Unfortunately for me I was also at a very academic secondary school and the teachers had high hopes for me to do well their also. At 14 you are coming into the run of the English school system where they start preparing you for GCSE exams. These are probably the most important exams, as everyone in the country is supposed to take them. They are the marker for whether or not you can go forward to higher education like A-levels and if you don’t they highly influence who will employ you.

To cut a long story short I was asked to make a choice at this point between going full blown with my training for the swimming. This means training 5 days a week possibly twice a day, morning and evening. I had 3 close friends for the swimming club who did this, all 3 of them went to the Olympics at some point or another 1 won Gold, 1 won Bronze and the other didn’t place. That was the aim of my coach to try and get us to Olympic competition standards. My parents didn’t push me and left me to make a free choice on this. I chose not to go for the win I chose not to finish this, I left this half done. I still trained and competed and kicked some ass in school events but I decided that I didn’t want my knowledge and intellect to suffer for the sake of finishing this.

This has been my philosophy ever since, I would rather do a little bit of many different and varied things, than become a specialist at one thing at the expense of others. I am not a specialist academic, I did a mixture of sciences and arts into senior education. Even doing History at university I would quite happily take modules from different fields, be it biology, geography, philosophy etc. I am still not what I would call a specialist historian, it is the subject I enjoy the most certainly but I would never want to become a specialist expert in one field like my professors.

This is also the reason why I play several musical instruments to a reasonable standard but none of them what I would call expertly. It is the reason I have started novels and poems and left them unfinished if I found something else interesting. It is why I have been in successful bands and quite happily walked away from them to try something different (I walked straight out of a very promising rock band into a jazz band, switching instruments in the process). It also the reason I had no problem leaving this blog for over a month without updating.

I recently read an article about what happens to those people who do finish things properly who do reach the mountain top… they hate it. Once you have got there, what do you do? There is nothing for you to do now. If you are a swimmer and you beat the world record and win that Gold medal, you have done what you set out to achieve and now… You are left being good at only one thing, one thing that you have enjoyed because you had something to focus you and something to aim towards. You leave yourself with a set of skills unsuited to anything else. Many people, athletes, writers, composers and the like fall into bleak depression once they have succeeded and may never be the same person again. One of my friends who I mentioned above, who went to the Olympics now works at a supermarket trying to save up some money so she can go to Uni to get a qualification. A qualification to do sports, so she can train other people to take the same route as her; to me that seems like madness.

The same can be said of true love and companionship. Love is a rare find and something that is always new and fresh and exciting. To me every day with her is like discovering something new again and that is where true happiness lies.

The true joy for me in life is knowing that there is always something out there that I haven’t tried. Something that is new and exciting to stimulate my mind with and have a good crack at. I may not be the best at it and may not finish it once I start it, but there will always be something else for me afterwards. Because I keep an open mind, because I refuse to finish anything.

Music:

That said without people who do go to the top and finish something properly I wouldn’t be able to enjoy this song! I respect and appreciate these guys, I just don’t want to be them. Also this is close to the most pretentious video you will every see, I suggest you close your eyes for the first listen as the song is brilliant (Grammy winner? Oh yeah!) and then watch the video the 2nd time around and laugh heartily at it. Even Steve Vai himself does these days!