Countdown to a new life

It was August 2011 when the seed of an idea germinated that turned into a four-year project.  We were living in our town house in Bordeaux - Ticia and me, along with Lucie, who was soon to start the final year of her degree at the University of Bordeaux.

Having finished all the renovations three years before, we'd been enjoying the fruits of our labours in terms of our immediate environment, the house, the courtyard.  I'd been making music in my studio in the basement, Ticia had been getting more and more involved in an organic lifestyle, trying to make our food, the products we used, as natural and as harmless and as effective as possible, whilst producing the occasional painting in her own studio, her atelier, in the converted attic space.

I would catch a plane to go to work in London most Monday mornings, and return early Friday evening to spend a weekend writing music, eating (and sometimes cooking) the latest inventions to issue forth from our kitchen and our imaginations, and generally enjoying the city life and the seasons in the south-west corner of France.

The only real problem was money.  Life was very expensive.  In addition to a mortgage on the house in Bordeaux, another on the apartment in La Rochelle we hadn't yet managed to sell, and the rent on a flat in Earls Court where I stayed during the week, there was the cost of my flights every week and the expenses and upkeep of three properties, two of which were lying empty.   But still, if all we wanted to do was keep that lifestyle going, it didn't really seem to be a worry: debts built up over the course of the year and then in February, a hand reached down from somewhere, lined the bank account with a bonus, and everything reset to a little above zero again.

So life was bumbling on in a comfortable kind of way, and then two things happened that made us reconsider.  One - Lucie decided to move in with her boyfriend and we realised that, if we had seen her being at university in Bordeaux as a reason for us to be there, that reason was gone.  And then in the same week...

...in the aftermath of a storm that lasted just half an hour, the road in front of the house was flooded with water that rose up out of the drains as the underground system overloaded.  And it flooded the basement, where I had built my music studio, again...  After the first time it happened, back in 2008, I was always a little wary of having my gear down there, with all those electrical connections.  This time I started to get depressed about the whole idea. If it had happened twice, it would happen a third time, and a fourth...

The two things together - Lucie checking out of home and the wet basement - catalysed our thinking, and over the next few weeks a plan emerged.  We'd sell the house in Bordeaux, and the apartment in La Rochelle.  If possible, we'd sell the house in Sonnac too, but that was more of a difficult one to find a buyer for.  In any case, we'd pack up all our stuff, and we'd move to England, where - if we had just one house and one mortgage and no rented flat, and if we watched out for the pennies a little - we could think about me taking early retirement.

As the plan hatched, and then developed, I worked out that the date of my retirement could be three years after we sold the two properties in France and bought a house in England.  We put a big effort into advertising and selling the apartment in La Rochelle, and by the following spring, we'd found a buyer.  After that it was time to try to sell the house in Bordeaux.  That took a little bit longer. After a lot of promising starts that came to nothing, and a big part of the summer spent installing Lucie in an apartment in Toulouse,where she had been accepted for a Masters degree, we'd still not found a buyer by the time our plan reached the next stage - moving over to the UK to start out in rented accomodation.  But in December, two months after taking up temporary residence with Djé and Pastelle in a freezing cold flat in Porlock, we found a buyer for the house and set about our own search in the UK in the run-up to Christmas.  And in the last week of February 2013, we completed on the purchase of Vexford House, and there we were.

And as the plan said, three years after that date, I could retire from my job in London...  And here we are, we've been in the house for two years and nine months, and I have just 16 weeks of work left to go...

It is going to be strange to stop.  OK, I tried it eleven years ago - I gave up work, and for eight months, I stopped living by the clock, but that was kind of different and life was complicated.  This time, everything is more simple.  And giving up work is for real, it's based on a stronger financial position - I can't wait.  It's not that I don't enjoy what I do - sometimes it can be really quite fulfilling.  But ask me whether I really want to get myself out of bed at 4am on a Monday morning to get myself to the station for the early train to London, ask me whether I can truly be bothered about what the audit trail of my sales activity looks like on the management information systems, ask me whether I truly believe that what I am doing is bringing people a better future.  Much as I am sure somebody, somewhere would like me to say "yes" to all those three, the enthusiasm and the belief are starting to wear a little thin.

It's said that as we get older we get more cynical about things.  I don't really want to think of myself as a cynic - a sceptic, yes, but not someone who has no faith in anything.  All the same it does seems to me that a lot of what I hear from a corporate level these days has a bit of the unreal about it.  I have a picture in my head of increasing stress in the system, in me, in those I work with, in the whole environment.  A few years ago, people were far more relaxed.  The working day had some holes in it - for example when travelling to and from client meetings, or when entertaining, or being entertained.  These days the ubiquitous iPhone or Android or Blackberry is always there, always alive, always giving you that guilt feeling - the vaguely uneasy realisation that someone is watching you.  There is no escape, and unfortunately, we're not actually paid more for the added burden or stress of being permanently connected by the technological umbilical cord to the office.  I feel quite sorry for those in the generation after me.  They will likely never know the feeling of freedom that we had in the past, the space that existed for those of us who were prone to laziness.  There is no opportunity to be lazy these days.  And that's a shame, because some of my best thinking - professionally speaking that is - probably came from those moments of idleness.

I pick up a Times from my hotel reception each morning I am in London, and I attack the crossword on the tube.  The stress of the coming day is there, in my head, and sometimes I find it really difficult to make those lateral connections, to solve those left-field clues, on the way to work.  But coming back in the evening - if I feel I've one a good day's work - the answers seem to flow out of my pen without thinking a lot of the time.  It's because I've switched off, and I can free my thinking and get it away from that structured, time-constrained pressure that is the working day.  Periods like that used to happen within the working day too, but now there is no time - there's always a list of goodness knows how many things that shout for my attention in my inbox.

The stress in the corporate system is increasing.  Everyone has to become more efficient and more productive every year, or - well - the system doesn't work.  Because there isn't often much focus on investing to grow the business - now it's all about maximising existing assets, and if possible, stripping the asset base a little.  And those assets, in a business like the one where I work, are the people.  So much so that there is (I discovered last week) a "human capital committee" in my organisation.

For me, the rather nasty inference of that title - the "human capital committee" is that the capital belongs to the firm, in the same way as financial capital or intellectual capital.  I rather prefer to think that my own "human capital" belongs to me, and that if I choose to, I can rent my skills to an employer, but I never become a part of their capital - I never become a part of their balance sheet.

OK, so I agree, it's not a nine to five job.  We get paid a lot of money in the city.  But this relentless grind upwards in terms of activity levels, technology, efficiency, connectivity, productivity, it can't go on for ever.  Something, somewhere has to crack.  Either it's the people, because they are pushed too far, made to run too fast, or it's the company itself.  And if the company cracks and the profits fall, then the market will beat up the share price, and there'll be cutbacks and down-sizing and more efficiency drives, and a proportion of those people - even the ones who didn't crack under the pressure - will be out of the door and on the market again.

I'm not saying that life in the finance industry has not always been very competitive and relatively high-risk in terms of job-retention in the bad times.  But things have changed a lot over the past five years or so.  It's like those dustbin men in France.  I'm sure that ten years ago, they could walk around the city, lobbing the bin bags into the back of the lorry as they made their measured way around a familiar route with the lorry keeping up with them and following their pace.  Clearly the demands from management to squeeze more collections into an eight hour shift have increased, because now, those bin men seem to spend the entire day running in order to keep up with the progress of the lorry.  So where once the lorry was a useful tool for them - effectively their servant as they went about their business of cleaning the city of waste, now the lorry is the tyrant and it inflicts its hard regime on the bin-men, who are forced to run in order to a) keep up with it, and b) keep their jobs.   And that is pretty much exactly my picture of the asset management sector now.  Where once, the company's progress and velocity was the result of its collective employees' individual progress with some benefits of synergy, now the company says what it is going to do, and God help the employees (and the share price) if they don't keep up with the corporate forecast. 

All I can say to that is thank God I'm retiring next year.

And yes, the weeks tick by... 

As I'm eating my breakfast on a Monday morning, I usually write Ticia a little note to leave under her laptop on the kitchen table.  Around two years ago,  I started noting down how many weeks remained until i could give up work - so the number was around the low 100s.  And now, it's down to just 16... March 2016 is D-Day - or maybe R-Month would be a better description.  In any case, the tax year 2016/17 will see me return to being a basic rate taxpayer for the first time since about 1990 I think. 

There's loads to do for a couple of years anyway - finishing off the earthworks in the garden, and getting on with the house, which has been somewhat neglected over the first three years, apart from the bathroom and our bedroom, which is still not finished.  But also, I'm going to spend a certain amount of my time meandering round the country lanes on my bike and getting fit again, writing some new music (God I'm bored with all that stuff I did in 2009-2011!) - yes there will be time for all of that, and maybe even time to spare.  After all, if you can get by on a limited income and be wide awake and healthy, then what is life but to be enjoyed?.

Come on, March 2016, I'm ready for you

Who on earth am I?

How different am I to everyone else?  That's a question that has puzzled me most of my life, and it's rather a silly one perhaps.  Not having studied philosophy, or psychology for that matter, I don't have an armoury of the right vocabulary, or a method of thinking, that could lead me to an intellectually acceptable, conformed answer.  But "I think, so I am" as somebody smarter than me in that field once said, so I guess from that perspective I have as much right as anyone, philosophically educated or not, to come up with an answer.

I could also say "I eat, so I am" which would give it a rather more physical sense, and indeed I do have some rather strange eating habits when compared to the majority of people I know.  For example, how many people do you know who religiously (and yes, I guess it is a part of my religion) eat half a pound of raw broccoli every day?  And not because I'm a health freak - far from it - but just because I like the taste and the crunch.  I also have a taste for raw brussels sprouts, half a pound at a time, but I do try to keep that one in check because they wreak havoc on a quiet, relaxed digestive system...

But this particular train of thought is about just that - thought - so I'll leave my strange eating habits out of it for the moment. The point is, I only know what it is like to be me - as I would imagine all of us do.  Empathy is one thing, but that's really only a stab in the dark at what someone else is feeling.

For a very long time, I struggled with the idea that I was unique in my attitude to life, or in the way that I thought about life.  I quite understood that there is a different set of circumstances for everyone - we all live different things, we all follow different ideas and we see things in subtly different ways.  At some points in my nearly fifty-five years, I would have recoiled in disbelief at some of the things that I came to do, some time later.  If you try to define yourself and your values, then that can only be at one particular moment in time. You start out with influences from your parents - or whoever was around you when you were very young. From the moment that you start to think for yourself, rather than following the guidance of someone else, you start to move away from those values and influences and become yourself.  But your "self" is always changing - at least mine is - and you define yourself in a time-line that moves from one thing to another as you gain experience of life.

When I was young - let's say ten years old - I really had no idea what life was about.  The influences around me encouraged me to learn, and to ask questions about what I learned, and depending on the answers to those questions I could form opinions on the world, on myself, on others, and on whoever gave me that particular answer.  For me, learning was all about facts.  Dates in history; mathematical processes; how to play the piano; how to paint; the capitals and cities of countless countries; how to read a map; why and how electricity worked; how big my lungs were; formulae and equations; how to spell words.  I learned them all with an appetite that knew no bounds.  I was ten years old in a class with an average age of eleven or twelve, and I fought to be the best, and most of the time I was.  And I also learned that I had a very good processor in my head - I got the highest score in an IQ-based test in the whole county of East Sussex, and all the others in my school year were a year older than me.  And then, a couple of years later, a change of school, and I was cast back a year with the kids of my own age, and I grew bored with learning the same stuff again, and started to think about other things.  I stopped my formal study of music and decided that the music I wanted to play was what was in my head, not what was written in manuscript.  I stopped learning and started sensing, feeling instead, and that change had a big effect on me, on my way of thinking, on my methods of reflection, on what I thought of the world.

Suddenly, the world stopped being this wondrous thing where there were facts to learn and to process and to store away - it became a miasma of sounds, and of colours, and of confusion.  On reflection, I guess at least a part of that was the angst of being a teenager and realising that I wasn't always going to be a part of a family, I was going to be me, and I didn't know who I was.

Without reference points from other people, I still don't really know who I am.  I know things I like doing - I know that I'm quite lazy, that I'm a dreamer who can pass hours doing nothing but reflecting, sifting over things. In some things I am horrendously disorganised, in others I am fastidious, at times I am completely laissé-faire, at others I am an utter control freak who doesn't trust a soul.  Maybe I'm schizophrenic, maybe I'm just plain human, only I can know, and most of the time I neither know nor really care.  Are we defined by what we do, or by what we think about what we do?  But I can't be a schizo, because I am everything at once, I don't have two different phases or anything, it's all there all of the time

From time to time I have tried to change my behaviour in some way or another - as often as not because there was something about the way I acted which didn't gel with someone else - someone with whom I wanted to gel.  There's a method to this - it's thought-word-action.  You would think that the easiest way to change your behaviour would be to start by thinking in a different way.  But it's very difficult to think about something in a different way when you are used to thinking differently.  So you start by doing whatever it is differently, and then you incorporate that action into how you talk about it, and finally, if you do it enough, you will think that way too, and you will then act differently to how you did before, but quite naturally.

That's the theory in any case.  And from personal experience, I can tell you that it's absolute bollocks.  It doesn't work at all.  If you want to change, you'll change, but you've got to want to change to make it happen.  And if your attitude (like mine most of the time) is "why the hell should I?" then you won't get anywhere with that.

One thing I have no time for is the idea that you "should feel like this".  Sometimes I want to stick to convention, sometimes I want to stick two fingers up at it.  There are certain values and beliefs that seem to be drilled into our civilisation, and they don't always sit well with me. And once you break with convention, it's difficult to see things the same way again.

I'm a natural introvert. I don't like to talk about things much. Unless, that is, I'm excited by something, and then try and stop me from filling every available pause with words.  There's always a conversation going on in my head with myself, and I can say what I like in that interaction without the fear of upsetting anyone or finding disapproval.  I'm very open with myself, and mostly closed to anyone else.  But... if I think that someone sees things the way I do, I can talk openly because it doesn't feel threatening.   And I'm hugely susceptible to the moods of others, they can colour my mood and my outlook enormously at the drop of a hat.

I guess that the bottom line is that I'm scared of something.  I don't want to let myself go, for fear of... what? I don't know really.  But there's this big wall in front of me that protects me from things, and if I climb over it, I won't be safe any more. I'll stick my head over the parapet from time to time to have a peep, but climb over? No way.  Maybe if I do climb over that wall, then after a while on the other side I'll find out what I'm really like, but for the moment, I don't really have the strength (or is that the courage?) to do it.

Life's not that bad on this side in any case.

Sold!

A Paul Gauguin painting "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" sells for $300m, apparently bought by a museum in Qatar.


How much???

Strange, the thoughts that went racing through my head when I heard this story.  Almost every one of them was negative.  The first thing that struck me was that it was an obscene amount of money to pay for a painting.  Something that maybe took, what, two or three weeks of the artist's time (forgive me if I am underestimating, but even if it took a year, then so what...?) winds up having a "value" of $300m.

According to various action charities operating in famine-hit parts of the world, $5 a will feed a child for a month.  So $300m would feed five million children for a year.  I think that is what I find obscene about it - the fact that somewhere in this world there is someone who thinks that the best thing to spend $300m on is a painting.

My second feeling was to despise the middle man.  Somewhere in the depths of this story, of course, there will be a clutch of "middle men".  For a market of madness to operate - as in the tulip mania of 17th century Holland - there have to be people who stand to gain by the transaction.  Something like an estate agent, but operating in a very different sphere, where the thing being bought and sold isn't a necessity. For these people, a rising market is absolutely essential, and they do everything they can to manage it, and nurture it, and push prices ever higher.  The valuers and the agents, the experts and the connoisseurs, they all work together to ensure that the price of their beloved product keeps on going up.  They sell exclusivity, they sell ownership, they sell an aura of the thing that money can't buy, and yet they assure you, it can.  The seller is of course happy that the price is high, and yet the buyer is too, because the ability to show that they can pay that high price may well be one of the things that they are "buying" in the transaction.

The third feeling was a vicarious one of loss, of being deprived of something.  From time to time, although not very often, I have put paint to canvas and come up with something that I found vaguely pleasing to behold.  But to be completely honest, even if somebody offered me a huge amount of money for one (which they won't of course) then I'd really rather burn it than sell it.  Because it's a bit of me, and I couldn't possibly have somebody else walking around owning a bit of me that I no longer had any right to.  OK, Paul Gauguin is dead, he died long ago, and hopefully he made a few quid from this painting when he was alive, if he sold it during his lifetime, and if not, well, he may well have considered himself richer for not selling it, because it was a part of him.

It's not quite the same thing with music.  If I write a song, or a piece of music, and someone wants to buy a copy, or pay to download it, that's a completely different thing.  I still have the original, it's still mine.  All I have done is let them have a copy of it.  I am still complete, intact, whole.  They have bought the right to listen to it whenever they want to, but it is still there, inside of me, and when I hear it in my head, I know that it doesn't belong to someone else.  If you're an artist, and you've sold a painting, and sometime later you picture it in your head, how does that feel, knowing it isn't yours any more?

But the last, and probably the deepest feeling I had was just one of despair at the continuous monetarisation of everything.  I wouldn't be surprised to find that, one day, ten foot walls had been built along the sides of roads, and every so often there would be a parking area with some stalls selling the ubiquitous global brand name refreshments at exhorbitant prices.  And when you'd bought them, you could either sit in your car to eat them staring at the wall or you could pay to take them through a turnstile to a seating area with picture windows where you could look at the view.

Not enough money to go to the moon

I was on my way home last night, as usual on a Thursday evening. got off the train at Taunton at 9pm, into the car and on with the radio.  Inside Science has a spot from 9 to 9.30pm on Radio 4 on a Thursday, and as usual I was listening as I made my way home.

Last night the programme was about the moon, about how it came to be, and about how the last time we took any samples from its surface for scientists was over forty years ago.

There was a lot of discussion about international treaties, which mean that space (including the moon) cannot belong to any one country, but also that there is a hole in those agreements, which means that it's not impossible for a company, rather than a country, to exploit the moon for its own ends.

But the bit that grasped my attention was when I heard that, whilst scientists would love to have more samples to work on given what we have learned about the other planets during the last forty years, we don't have the money to go there.

Interesting, I thought.

We (i.e. the human race) don't have enough money to go to the moon.  Money, a fabrication that we have made for ourselves on Earth, is the limiting factor in mankind going to the moon.

What a crazy system...

So what's it all about then?

What is the meaning of life?

Why are we here?

Why do I keep having to deal with all this?

About ten years ago, in fact almost exactly ten years ago, I was going through a difficult time in my life.  Well, to be honest about it, it seemed to me that all the pillars of what I had considered to be a pretty good setup for the previous seventeen years had come crashing down.  I felt used and betrayed, and I was left in a pretty miserable state wondering what to do.

While I was in that vulnerable place, I was introduced to something that felt like it was close to a revelation.  It was that first book by Neal Donald Walsch, Conversations with God.

Now you can (and I did) look at the motivation behind that book in two ways.  It could be:

- wow, here's a great idea to make some money and to get famous, I'll write a book and pretend it's been written by God, and I'll find a publisher, and I'll soon be a multi-millionaire"

or

- wow, here's a great idea to make some money and to get famous, I'll write a book and pretend it's been written by God, and I'll find a publisher, and I'll soon be a multi-millionaire"

The only difference between those two, of course, is that one of them (which, I'm not sure) is being used as an instrument of communication by a deity, and the other is a scam.

In the end, you can make your own decision as to whether you believe that it's divine intervention or human greed which is behind it all.  Either way, it doesn't really make a lot of difference, you probably read it anyway.


And I read it, anyway.

And the first thing that it told me was that I wasn't alone.  And a couple of days after I read it, I found another book, which jumped out at me in WH Smith's.  It was called "Who Moved My Cheese?"

Suddenly, my life was a very different place.  I had arrived in a different sphere of thinking, where there was a sensible, logical reason for every emotion, and once recognised, it could be controlled.  I also had a friend, this thing called a "soul" inside of me, and I discovered after a bit of practice that I could talk to it, and that it could talk to me, and that what it and I thought were really quite different, and that it was probably right, and that I was probably wrong - or rather, given that it was apparently The Real Me, then I was probably right, and now I was realising that I was probably wrong until I realised that I was right.

That's a bit complicated, but it makes sense to me.

The silly thing is that, unless I am faced with an unsurmountable problem, I tend to leave The Real Me in his box, and carry on regardless.  This is strange, as he was a great help to me ten years back.  Within the space of about three months, I changed from being someone deep in the throes of despair to someone who was pretty well balanced.  

Maybe I should commune with him more often in the good times - take him for a beer sometimes.

Sounds like a good idea, after all, what are friends for?

Out of sorts

Today the world is not where I want to be, but I don't know how to be anywhere else.

Where is the me of yesterday, the me of tomorrow?

Where is the me of confidence, of eloquence, of optimism?

Who is this person who inhabits my skin, and doesn't want what I have chosen?

Who isn't me?

Musings on an irrational fear

I have an irrational fear.

I'm scared of dams.

I'm so scared of them that, whilst I like putting pictures on posts to make them visually more interesting, I can't do it or I'll be too scared to come back and write anything else.  Just a picture of a dam can get me very worried, and sometimes I scare myself stupid by peeping at them on google earth. 

I just googled "fear of dams" and found that, rather comfortingly, there are a number of people out there with the same fear.  But it's a really stupid fear all the same.   I'm 53 years old, I've lived all my life up to now, and I'm still here.  I've been very close to a number of dams, and each time they've made me very, very worried.  My heart starts pounding in my chest, my palms, and various other parts of me, start to feel damp, the rate of my breathing increases. Some of the more modern dams that resemble a grassy bank I can just about handle, but the towering wall-type ones may quite possibly put an end to me one day.

I've wondered many times where this fear comes from.  A few ideas of things I remember:

- When I was very young, three or four, we lived in a house that had two stories and an attic, and up in the attic there was a cold water tank which, presumably was fitted with a stopcock.   It was also fitted with an overflow pipe, which protruded from the outside wall at the side of the house about twenty five feet up.  The next door house wasn't far away, there was about ten feet in between the two which had been concreted so that our neighbour could park his car there.  I don't know why I found it frightening, but somehow the sound of that overflow spilling water twenty-five feet onto the concrete below used to scare me stiff.  I think it was the echoing nature of the sound rebounding between the walls of the two houses.  This seemed to give me a fear of water being higher than I was, and may be a part of the cause of my phobia.

- I read a book once in the children's section of the library in our home town.  I was probably five or six years old - it was about the construction of the Boulder Dam in Colorado.  I remember feeling scared looking at this book, and my mother asking me if I wanted to take it out on loan, take it home, and I said "No!" very quickly and slammed it shut.

- A few years later, when I was nine, I think, I had a dream that I was up at the top of a very big ladder, cleaning the windows of the Houses of Parliament.  And I don't know what made it happen, but the ladder came away from the wall and tipped me into the Thames, and I hit the water at such a speed that I touched the bottom before I came up again.  The next day I asked at school how deep the Thames is and someone told me 70 feet, which I now know was somewhat more than the truth, which is 10-20 feet depending on the tide.  However, the fear of deep water from that dream has stuck with me ever since, despite the fact that I can swim all day long with no trouble.

- A few years later again, I'm about thirteen and we've just moved to Somerset, and I'm reading this book about the Lynmouth flood disaster, which talks about a thirty-foot wall of water coming down the Lynn valley and taking out anything in its path.  That probably added to it, too.

- A year or so later again, I'm fourteen and for some inexplicable reason, I've joined the school sailing club.  My physics teacher had asked who was interested and I put up my hand, and the next thing I know, one afternoon after school, we're winding our way up a lane in the school minibus to the local reservoir, and suddenly this huge concrete wall appears in the corner of my eye.  It's the first time I've ever seen a dam close up and I'm transfixed by the sheer size and imagined power of the thing.  The moment passes quite quickly and we are up there on the shore of the reservoir.  I'd sailed a boat before, done a course, even, but on a shallow lake, not on a reservoir.  Anyway, I get allocated this Enterprise dinghy, and my boatfellow is none other than the school oddball.  Since I arrived in Somerset, I've seen him in conflict with someone at the school just about all the time.  He's an uncontrolled rural hooligan, and suddenly I'm aware that I'm in a boat with him, and we're sailing on this reservoir.  Suddenly, he makes a lunge for the tiller, and I move quickly so as to balance out the boat.  But now, he's in control.  He decides to take us closer to the dam to have a better look.  There's a rope stretched across the water with those plastic floats attached to it twenty yards or so before the dam to stop you getting too close, but he sails up to it and tries to sail through it.  Luckily, the rope stops us and the boat rebounds, turns itself round and heads back to the shore again.  I get out as quickly as I can and sit out the rest of the session - it's the last time I go anywhere with the sailing club.

Yep, I think it was that one that did it.

It's a shame, because one of the things I've really enjoyed doing in my quieter moments is trout fishing.  And reservoirs are generally very good places to go fishing for trout.

I was OK in the Isle of Man, because all the dams were the grassy bank variety.  These, after a few visits to get my courage up, I could actually walk along.  And the fishing was better off the dam, because your fly didn't keep getting snagged in the gorse while you were casting. 

And then one time, just to remind me that I wasn't cured, I was in Spain and driving up to Granada through the first bit of the Sierra Nevada from Motril, and suddenly the most enormous, towering grey wall came into view and it was all I could do to keep the car on the road, I was scared absolutely shitless by the sight of that thing.  It's called the Rules Dam I think, and I'm certainly NOT putting a picture of that one here, I just tried to look at it on google earth but I didn't have the courage to zoom in to make it any bigger than half an inch on my screen, and I'm still feeling the adrenaline now.