In the beginning - with apologies to Douglas Adams by Finbar

In the beginning there was something. Nobody knows what it was, or how much of it there was. All anyone can know is that something was there. After the beginning most of us think we know roughly what there was and is, though we really haven’t a clue. After the beginning, the universe had been created. “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move,” (this is a quotation from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and begs to be excused).
Island Swift at anchor in Falmouth June 2013



At this stage, just after the creation of the universe, a lot of very interesting things started to happen. These were all to do with quarks, protons, anti-neutrinos, positrons and a lot of other fascinating elemental particles. This is unfortunate as the only people who actually understand how any of these elemental particles actually behave are astrophysicists, who, sadly, don't seem to be able to explain it to anyone else.
This is why we must fast forward quite some time, a very long time, and I mean a really, really, mind twistingly ginormous very long time, to a cloud of gas and dust. It was situated in a galaxy which, it seems, formed some time ago, for no readily apparent reason. In a short space of time, a very small part of this cloud of gas and dust started to contract and to spin. It became a star, a very average star, and on one of the rocks that had formed with the star there came life. This situation is complicated by the fact that no one seems to know why it came, or even what exactly it is, not even the astrophysicists.
In the blink of an eye, metaphorically as there were no eyes to blink at that point, life had spread all through the planet’s oceans and after a bit longer it started changing very fast. Then it spread onto land. About half way through the life time of the star there was an explosion of one species. This explosion happened so fast that the other species had no time to evolve defense mechanisms to this new predator. Humans spread all over the world, and in the next instant the whole world was lit up with tiny sparks of light which flickered on and off, but never at the same time.
It was about this time when a Mum, sitting at the breakfast table, finished her bowl of porridge. It was just after an ancient festival that was older than memory and writing could trace, however it had its roots in the old pagan fertility celebrations, and it was at the time of the winter solstice. It was already established before Julius Caesar had brought civilisation, in the form of art, learning, sophistication, Christianity and science, to the British Isles, again no one seems to be able to agree on why he did this.
Mum, using a part of her body’s mechanism to allow oxygen to diffuse into her blood, expelled, along with a puff of carbon dioxide-laden air, a very specific combination of sonic waves, more commonly called sound. The information in these vibrations will, to save time, be presented in a form that is, hopefully, meaningful to the greatest number of people.
“January is going to be awful weather, let’s pack up and go to Spain for a month”
This was met with general approval by the rest of us. So we went to Spain.

The year before, we had purchased a boat, a very nice one. There was a great masterplan behind this, which was to sail to the Caribbean. The mastermind behind this masterplan was Lochlann, my brother. It was he, who after we had met two old friends of Mum’s, and sailed on their beautiful boat, Miracle[1], had decided, with the aid of his ‘friend and fellow conspirator’[2] (Mum) and sceptical ally (me) that he would never cut nor comb his hair until he had succeeded in enveigling Dad to agree to buy a boat. After Lochy had succeeded in his campaign, and we had bought the boat, we discovered, after much brushing, that he had a beautiful head of hair. Thereafter we have called him Lochy Fair Hair. This is a joke that only people who know of Harold Fair Hair the first king of the ‘Vikings’ can get.

It is now the 7th of July 2014 and we are going on the adventure in 5 weeks time.
Written by Finbar




[1] The miracle was: 'that it ever floated' Quote from Maggie
[2] Quote from The Hobbit.

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