Ron's photo
https://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15559.0;attach=21666;image is hugely amusing, the bicycle campers and the cruise liner passing. My bet is the two cyclists camping aren't saying, 'Oh woe is us! We'd rather be on the cruise liner lining our arteries with killer fat.' But among the cruise liner's passengers there will be several who will say, 'I'd love to be camping there with those two fellows.' The grass is always greener...
Ron's other photo, of the mountain in the distance,
https://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15559.0;attach=21668;imagecaused me to look down at the wristwatch that I'm coincidentally wearing today, which has an illustration of Mount Fuji in the far background, the tiny white triangle the hour hand points at, and the 24 hour bezel index too. In a masterstroke, Katsushika Hokusai echoed the shape of the iconic mountain in the foam the great wave would overtake in a second. The ukiyo-e painting by Hokusai which inspired me to adapt it for the dial of the watch which has a Japanese movement, is called The Great Wave Off Kanagawa Prefecture, and even in his own time was considered so significant that it was used as the first in his 37 Views of Mount Fuji; today it is the most famous Japanese painting.
Okay, for those who're asking, Where's the cycling link? there is actually one, thought it happened over six decades ago. You can't see it very well, because the watch and the strap are so reflective that neither photographs well without setting up studio lights and spending days fiddling with them, but the strap is sharkskin. My roomie failed to teach me to surf (his 'lightweight' Hawaiian teak board jumped up and knocked me out and I nearly drowned), so his next venture was to teach me scuba diving. We made drysuits on custom cardboard cutouts with rubberized paint, then set out by bicycle from Stellenbosch for Hermanus (I'm not even going to look up the distance; it's probably the furthest I ever cycled) where the Agulhus Stream hits the Indian Ocean head-on. We dived for lobster and I was just going back for a last one when this idiot shark stormed me. I wasn't going to out-swim it, so I tread water and when it was within inches of me stuck my speargun upright between its gaping jaws, and removed my hand right smartly. The shark committed suicide by biting down on whatever was in its mouth and stuck the spearpoint through its brain. I lost a streak of rubber from the drysuit and the skin behind it as the shark thrashed about. It turned out sharks have teeth all over their bodies, literally. The lines on a sharkskin belt or strap are where the tanner cut off the teeth with a very sharp knife. Finally I got hold of its tail and dragged it out onto the beach, where it expired. 'You crazy bastard,' my roomie said, 'all you had to do was reach the shallow water and it wouldn't have followed you.' We skinned the shark (with the army knife my great uncle Barney used to cut the throats of German sentries when he was in the LRDG), gave the flesh to some colored people who appeared, and promised them money besides to look after the skin while we cycled back to Stellenbosch, me dripping blood all the way, to get my car. I didn't want to go to the student doctor, who was a blustering lush, and as for the doctors in the medical school, I took the view that they were teaching because they weren't good enough for private practice. Anyhow, besides trusting only my family doctor, I wanted to get the skin back home -- even if I had to drive all night --where I persuaded the ostrich tannery to do their magic on my sharkskin as they had the previous year on an ostrich skin for me, and eventually I gave the sharkskin to a leather artist in Germany and he got to make whatever he made for me for someone else who wouldn't baulk at paying twice the going rate, so that I got a pair of shoes that lasted forty years (made in consultation with the little old bootmaker in Lisbon who made my soft goatskin Chelsea boots), and endless watch straps, and a wallet, and a handbag for a girlfriend, all of it free of charge. That shark died in the cause of good taste. Years later, in Australia, I discovered that the deep-fried battered 'hake' which was sold at the fish'n'chips shops was in fact shark, and was sorry I hadn't eaten any of the shark that tried to lunch on me so that I could say it tried to lunch on me but instead I lunched on it.
The crazy things we did when we were young...
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