Mark has called to say that he might be coming home early.
By early, actually I mean tomorrow.
At the time of writing these words we do not yet know if this will happen.
It would not surprise me if it did, because frankly they have not done a sausage since they went out there. They have moved a few things about and drilled a few holes, and that, it seems, has been just about it.
This was not because they are stupefyingly idle, indeed, fewer activities are duller than Doing Nothing, especially when you are Doing Nothing in the penetrating cold.
The problem is that the weather has been quite monumentally rubbish, I mean completely and utterly rubbish.
For anybody who is not currently on a boat in the North Sea, they are having high winds and choppy seas. By choppy, I mean nine meter waves, which is making it exceedingly difficult to achieve anything useful, like standing up for very long.
Nine metres, and there isn’t even anywhere you can run away to when you see a wave that big barrelling down on you. You have just got to hold on and hope that the boat goes over the top of it rather than underneath it.
They are on a boat, as it happens. Some of the more exciting aspects of the trip are as follows, that a) Mark has gone out there for the purpose of mending the holes in the boat through which the sea is currently leaking in, and b) one of the lifeboats has just been deemed unfit for purpose and therefore there are not sufficient lifeboats for the number of people on board, which might remind readers of the excitingly-filmed story of another boat, way back in history.
Nobody has been able to do anything about this because no helicopters can get to the boat to get anybody off it, because of the aforementioned waves.
I have not been in the least worried about any of this. Mark is perfectly capable of looking after himself. I would back Mark against a massive wave, a sinking ship and a dodgy lifeboat any day. He will be perfectly all right.
However, the oil industry has quite reasonably insisted that since the lifeboat is not working, they have got to get some men off the boat. I say Men, because we all know that is what most of them are, the number of women who like the idea of hard work and nine-meter waves is vanishingly small, although of course there are a few, a friend of mine was one of them for a while. I would back her against a nine meter wave, a sinking ship and a dodgy lifeboat as well.
They are expecting a small window in the weather tomorrow, when it will have subsided sufficiently for helicopters to reach the boat, and then the vile weather is going to resume on Tuesday. The oil industry has not yet decided whether the best thing Mark can be doing tomorrow is getting on a helicopter or scurrying about fixing the worrying cracks in the boat.
I will probably hear more before the end of the night, and will keep you posted.
In other news, I have been working in the taxi all weekend and writing my story. The weather is a bit rubbish here as well, although it is a junior school football match compared to the World Cup Final With Real Madrid of the weather out at sea. I have plodded up and down the fells emptying the dogs. I have carried in firewood and hung up laundry and swept and done some dusting, although not much.
LATER NOTE: We still do not know if Mark is going to come home. The oil industry is still pondering whether or not crack-repair is an important thing to be trying to do. There might be a couple of days of good weather, and they seem to think that perhaps they might fix as many cracks as they can whilst it is still possible to stand upright and wave a welding torch about.
I think that is very sensible of them.
