Extreme Dude

Geeez-sus I'm f*cking boring. It occurred to me during an email detailing my previous weekend. Went to the gym, watched war doco's, ate healthy food despite the lure of the various curry menu's on top of my fridge, and went to the gym again. I even deliberately ignored calls because I knew the lure of a beer would be too much. At least that's what I'm telling the courts, what really happened was that I spent the weekend lying low and not answering the phone as a matter of life and death - at least it was a matter of life and death for my mate. But I don't mind, he is far more important than me.

But I reason that this amount of Boring-ness will pay off once we get to the mountain in Everest and I join the extreme sports crowd. I know I'll only be walking and then playing cricket, but at that height, playing chess is extreme.

Which is a strange motivation as joining the Extreme Sports crowd is something that I have never, ever wanted to do. I was once in Morocco with a bunch of surfers. Surfers, individually, are generally nice guys with a relaxed take on the world. Surfers en masse are, without doubt, the most BORING bunch of people you will ever find. They are limited to 3 words 1) adjective of choice is 'Epic', 2) Emotion of choice is 'Stoked' and any form of elation/celebration is displayed by giving the devils horns and making the 'yeeewwwwwwwwwww' noise. And their only topic of conversation is boring personal surfing anecdotes. For example, 'That reminds me of this time when I was at this secret spot that only the locals knew about*, man I was stoked they took me there, and it was perfect left-handers and I just pulled into this epppppic barrel and I looked at the blue wall and I was just like ... yewwwwwwwwwwww' - This behaviour is not exclusive to surfing. You can interchange BMX/Rollerblading/Basejumping/anywhere-it's-appropriate-to-take-crystal-meth-and-call-everybody-dude and it will fit nicely. Butting in with a boring personal anecdote of my own that relates to an off-break I sent down in the 'right areas' will be an interesting addition next time around.

As for proper news, things are hotting up. We got a mention on cricinfo (that's me to the left of Brett Lee) this week, and Gray Nicolls have agreed to supply us with some cricket kit, which will be in-turn donated to the local schools in Nepal. With any luck we could see some of those kids representing their country one day. We also have a major meeting coming up where fundraising mechanisms will be announced and so will the team captains. To be honest, I have no idea who these captains will be (always assumed it would be Wes and Kirt), but it should be an interesting decision and lead to whole lot of homo-erotic cliché’s about 'getting behind him' and 'full backing' and 'whole lot of men under me' etc etc


*No surfer will ever admit to surfing anywhere other than a local secret spot