Madam Tussaud's Major Contribution To The World

 Madam Tussaud’s Major Contribution To The World

 

I stood in the carpark at my local break and diligently devoted myself to the all-important task of applying sunscreen to every single exposed and discernible surface of skin sticking out anywhere outside of my rashie and my boardies. The Golden Hour, that period of time when the tide is coming in and bringing along with it the vital push that makes the waves here break and turns them into rideable entities, fell in the middle of the day. While it is an absolute luxury and a pleasure to be able to surf during the day, under blue skies and in sunshine, and without crowds to boot, one minor drawback of surfing in the tropics is that, if you do so, the beautiful blue sky and sunshine will roast you to within an inch of your life.

   So with great care I covered myself in sunscreen. I painted my face a ghostly white with zinc cream, paying particular attention to filling up my ears, nostrils, mouth, and, of course, eyes. Avoiding sunburn on the eyeballs is an absolute imperative, and the actual ability to see anything, or, for that matter, not to weep in acidic agony for the next three hours, pales into insignificance in comparison. In keeping with that principle I covered my arms, legs and feet in long white streaks of toxic UV-reflecting chemical, till I looked like a snowman about to go out onto the beach to melt within the first five minutes. Let it not be said that I am not Sun Smart. Besides, donchaknow, Bob Marley died from skin cancer on his toe. If only he had thrown himself into beauty masks of sunscreen with the same dedication and enthusiasm as me, and had put some on his toes, he might well have continued to live to die happily a few short years later of lung and-/or- throat cancer, from smoking drugs all day every day.

   Eventually, after a good three quarters of an hour of lathering up, and incidentally dislocating my shoulder trying to reach that one little spot right between your shoulder blades where you can never get to, no matter how double- or triple-jointed you are, I grabbed my board, locked the car, and made my way down to the beach. At every step of the way I was confronted by attractive young women in tiny bikinis, who took one look at me and fell over laughing lengthways on the ground, thereby filling their g-string cracks up with sand they wouldn’t be able to get out for the next three days. I shrugged magnanimously and continued on my merry way in the secure knowledge that their beautifully tanned brown skin would soon kill them, while I stayed pasty-faced deathly white, and would continue to live to a ripe old age, at least if the chemicals in the sunscreen didn’t kill me first. Your skin is really nothing but one big sponge, and everything and anything you put on it will get sucked up and absorbed into your innards. It’s anyone’s guess what things like Butyl Methoxy-dibenzoyl-methane, Octyl Salicylate, and 4-Methylbenzylidene Camphor are going to do to your delicately balanced human physiology. I live by the general notion that if 1. you can’t pronounce it, and 2. you don’t know what it is, you shouldn’t eat it. Especially if “3. you’re not hungry anyway” applies as well. So I spat out an unnecessarily generous mouthful of  sunscreen, accidentally hitting bullseye on the bellybutton of one of the gorgeous women in skincancer-inducing tiny bikinis, and strolled onwards.

   I paddled out with great gusto, smashed my way heroically through the two-foot breakers, and pulled up in The Sweet Spot, that section of my break where a sandbank reliably forms around the tip of a slightly protruding low jumble of rocks, creating a feature where the sand swirls around and gets attracted to like a mouthful of sunscreen and spite to a sexy bellybutton. I sat up and cast my appraising, expert eye over the swell rolling in. Sometimes my eye appraises the swell so expertly that I sit there all day without getting a single ride, while kooks, grommets, beginners, dolphins, turtles and old-age pensioners on li-los score waves left, right and centre.

   Shadows swirled in front of me, shades of green and blue amalgamated into a shape, flecks of white foam materialised on crests folding pliantly into the onshore breeze, a curve deepened and widened, and, timing myself precisely to align with the perfect arc and push of the wave, I cork-pushed the tail of my board into the gaping mouth of the crescent of water, propelled myself forwards, and with one fluid, graceful, dynamic, and, especially, highly impressive to the bikini-clad chicks watching me from the beach, movement, I jumped up with the gravity-fall of the opening slope, and planted both my feet firmly on my board, ready to carve the wall of green into oblivion.

   And slipped.

   I was catapulted forwards at a force of approximately three G, and landed flat on my face in the water. The wave barrelled onwards on its way towards the distant horizon and greener pastures.

   I stuck my head up out of the water, and spat out a mouthful of seaweed.

   My board, in slow motion, completed its circuit through the air, and, bungeed back by my legrope, gently, lovingly and tenderly smashed me in the head, pushing me back under.

   When I emerged for the second time I noticed the bikini wenches on the beach rolling around in the sand at the shore line, convulsed with hysterical laughter. Good, I thought sourly. More sand in their cracks.

   I inspected the shiny, smooth and apparently well-polished spot on my board where my feet were supposed to have stayed put.

   Slowly, like a dimwitted, tired and hungover sun rising up from behind a big dark cloud on a stormy morning, it dawned on me that, just maybe, it might be a good idea, after spending three quarters of an hour putting on sunscreen, to take a quick casual five minutes to actually rub some wax onto my board.

   Maybe.

 

 

 

 

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First Day Of Winter

I got out of the car and froze to death instantaneously. My bare feet landed on the cold hard concrete, which immediately sucked all life blood and warmth out of me and straight into the stony uncaring world. To add insult to injury, a gale was blowing so hard the casuarina trees were laying over near-horizontally. Even though it was pitch-black dark, I could tell from the white caps on the water, the sea horses of the mythology of old, that the surf was going to be shithouse, blown hell west and crooked into nothing resembling any surfable shape. I shivered violently. The Chief arrived and bounced out of his van, dressed in a woollen beany pulled over a thermal hat, an overcoat, an under coat, a middle coat, three jumpers, his mum’s woolly vest, long shorts (a contradiction in terms, much like, e.g., military intelligence or political integrity), and, the prize piece of his collection, double-grade Explorer socks in his sandals. Dressed to impress, for sure. Dressed to s...
Read more

Riding With the Wind

Before I learned to surf I was a kayaker. I worked as a seakayak guide, taking paying customers, usually tourists, out on the ocean to find, observe and interact with marine wildlife, like turtles, dolphins, whales, and, occasionally and unintentionally, sharks. Before that I worked as a guide on whitewater rivers, running kayaks through rapids. For years I led multi-day kayaking trips on creeks, rivers and lakes in remote and wilderness areas for a living. My first forays out into the world of catching waves on the ocean were done in kayaks. I’d use a small, short kayak with a lot of rocker, a lot of curve in the bottom shape, and I would drop down into holes and race away along towering green walls while paddling like mad. The first barrel I ever got myself into was in a kayak. There’s drawbacks to that. You can get in there all right. You just don’t get out in one piece. The shape and size of a kayak is ill-suited to the confines of a barrel, and there’s no room to swing a paddle ar...
Read more

Moon Barrel

The full moon sat high in the sky. It smiled down upon us in a benevolent, silvery sort of a way.    We had gathered again for our monthly ritual of surfing by the light of the moon. The wind, swell and tide had conspired to produce first class waves for us to ride. I had arrived early, and had climbed the look-out by myself, for a sticky-beak. The quiet night-time bay stretched out endlessly in front of me, with long, straight and regular lines of swell rolling in from the wide ocean, pulsating in regular intervals. It looked very promising indeed.    Five of us members of the crew, of the Brotherhood of Madmen, waded out through the shallows near the rocks and pushed out into the waves. First cab of the rank was The Pocket Rocket Grommet, pint-sized and possessed of never-failing good nature and an eternal smile and limitless kindness for everyone. Hard on his heels was myself, The Baboon, living evidence that primates left Africa millions of years ago and padd...
Read more

The Mask

  ‘Can you please take your mask off?’      I’m sitting leisurely stretched out on a bench in the afternoon sunshine when this voice comes drifting down from above me. I’m in town getting new tyres for my car, and have got time to waste, so I’m enjoying some rare downtime. Having wandered in and out of a few shops, without stealing hardly very much at all, I’m wearing the regulation Covid-mask required now for entering premises. In spite of the big signs on all the doors and shopfront windows, politely requesting all customers to be considerate, do the right thing and cover their faces, when lining up in the post office, of all places, I hadn’t failed to notice that at least one in every four or five people were not wearing a mask. Judging from the way they were greeted casually by their first names by the staff behind the counter, they appeared to be locals.      Beware the local yokel, because they will always be above the law. Tadati...
Read more

The Shirt

   Bernie was an arsehole.    He was a bully. He was built like a brick shithouse, tall, wide, massive, with bright red hair, fairy skin full of freckles with a predilection to skin cancer, and no neck. In his younger days he had played rugby, and had enjoyed smashing people down, grinding them into the ground and just generically hurting them.    A serious knee injury put an end to his playing days. He'd learned the trade of diesel mechanic, and after a punch-up on a Saturday night at his local that left a bloke in a coma with brain damage, he'd pulled the pin on living in town, or at least anywhere within reach of coppers, and he'd gone bush. He'd poked around for a while here, there and everywhere, plying his trade. The one thing there is always a need for out the back of woop-woop is a diesel mechanic. People didn't ask too many questions, or even none at all, as long as he could get the engines going and fix the gear boxes on the fourwheel drives, ...
Read more

Hang Five

The fog drops down heavy and fat from the morning sky and settles like a blanket on the grey water of dawn, muffling all sound and squeezing unnecessary noises from the world. Contrary to all expectations there is not a breath of wind to be felt, heard or seen, and the mighty north wind that was meant to be still roaring after eight days straight is now conspicuously absent. In its wake however it has left us the swell that it has spent the last eight days whipping up, as it howled down from the mystic Far North possessed by its own insanity, whizzing, buzzing and whistling like a giant bullroarer, and with all its might pushed walls of water out in front of it. Like a metaphorical bulldozer scooping up bucketfulls of warm surface water, chasing it away in front of it, and making room in the upper layers of the ocean for the cold dark water from the deep down below to come welling up. It brings nutrients to the surface, plankton, algae, micro organisms, and injects life and vital...
Read more

Crossbone Bay

Long centuries ago, when no one knew where Australia was except the people who lived in it, hapless European would-be colonising world powers would stumble across it by accident. Tall ships would get blown off course, of course, mostly Portuguese and Dutch trading ships trying to find Indonesia and their arses in the bath tub, and they’d end up here.    The big winds would blow them hell west and crooked, till they landed on the coast, if they were lucky, or on rocks and reefs offshore if they weren’t. Those who managed to land in one piece took one look around, found nothing but sand, rocks and flies up their nose, pushed their boats back into the water as fast as they could, if they didn’t have holes in them, and bailed out again while they were still able to. No gold, no spices, nothing here worth killing and enslaving anyone over. Those who didn’t manage to land in one piece lived to bitterly regret it, but usually not for very long. They left a long trail of abandoned c...
Read more

Blind

For the past seven days I have not been able to see. Something got stuck in my left eye, some sort of dirt-piece, a bit of dust, or a grain of sand, or a smidgin of stray mitochondrial DNA, or, quite likely, a snippet of random toenail. Either way, the upshot of it was that by nighttime seven days ago my eye was bloodhot, swollen, almost squashed shut, and pissing forth liberally with fluid, presumably tear-water. I couldn’t open the eye, looking at any light source bigger than a lit match was excruciating and impossible, and I was in agony. It was like someone stabbing needles in it. So the day after it happened I spent the whole day inside the house, sitting in the dark,   wearing sunnies on my face and a towel over my head to block out the light. I pulled any and all blinds I could find, squeezed my eyes shut and whiled away seven hours straight playing music with my eyes closed. I played the bagpipes, the whistle, the banjo, the mandolin and the guitar, comprehensively pi...
Read more

Moondark Madness: The Hole In The Moon

  Our town of Eagle Bay in the southwest corner of WA can get pretty crowded with blow-ins from the big city up north, so we, in our desperate drive to be able to surf uncrowded waves, have cultivated the art of surfing at night.    Preferably by the light of the moon.   The moon comes up about 45 minutes later every day, so that a half moon, a gibbous moon, appears around lunch time and stays in the night sky for the first part of the night, setting around midnight, leaving the second half of the night moonless and dark. The moon times shift through the cycle until eventually the full moon comes up when the sun goes down. Therefore, by the same token, the moon goes down when the sun comes up the next day. If you time it right you get an abundant amount of light between the moon and the stars, and when the surf is cranking it is pure magic.    If you time it wrong you don’t.    Not satisfied with merely surfing by moonlight, we thought we’...
Read more

Remote Solitary

Crowded waves and competition for rides are the bane of the existence of anyone within cooee of a passably decent ride. Drop-ins, snakes and shitfights in the water are par for the course, or so it seems.    It certainly is that way in our home town of Eagle Bay. Proud possessor of an enviable first class longboard break, we habitually get flooded under a never-ending stream of holiday makers from the big city, all out to make the most of their few precious weeks under the sun, and determined, come rain, shine, hell or high water, to score some of these fabulous waves. As a result hostile altercations in the surf abound, and our erstwhile peaceful, quiet and low-profile town is now more commonly referred to as Ego Bay.    With one thing and another things came to a head, and I had decided to take a sabbatical. Time out from the neverending screaming arguments and occasional punch-ons. An interesting job opportunity came up, and so I took it.    I foun...
Read more