The point is, when you log with a friend and colleague have parted with a six-figure sum, money is on a sliding scale. Take footballers. When I was based at Manchester Airport I'd be returned to the apart-hotel by taxi, and one day the driver pointed out the Genting's casino along with the fact that Wayne Rooney had lost a quarter of a million pounds there the previous evening.
A word here on the direction the UK is headed. Tony Blair, when not pursuing WMDs that existed principally inside his head, liberalised the gaming laws here to allow for mega-casinos such as that in Manchester. It coincided broadly with the introduction of the smartphone, which made the UK by far and away the global leader in leading any number of people down the path of ruin; until the US happily took up the baton. Whilst not actually one of the seven deadly sins, gambling does call upon greed and sloth in large part: Tony Blair's lasting contribution to the making of modern Britain.
But flying in China I was myself practically on a footballer's salary, albeit one nearer the bottom of the Premier League struggling to avoid relegation. And what I found was, you stopped caring how much things cost on one hand and on the other began to value time over financial reward. I realise this is no consolation to the homeless, for whom time may be the last thing they'd like more of, but there it is for what it's worth. You'll be pleased to hear anyway that I squandered the most of it anyway, eventually becoming known (as may one day Wayne Rooney) as the man who had a 500-Euro note lifted from a wallet he'd left in a toilet at Brussels Airport.
But we've strayed from today's lesson haven't we kids, which is not so much how to die as how to build a flat-pack catamaran? So take up your handouts if you could as I talk you through it, and no conferring.
We set out like Steve Jobs in trying to eliminate as much of the product as possible whilst still remaining afloat, and that produced the central section set to run on skis no farther apart than they'd be were you on the Ozarks, which are a river complex in the US and not a threat off the starboard bow of the starship Enterprise. The principal drawback of which was that the craft would flop on its side at the get-go: for what it needed was wiiings.
What we therefore do over a pork pie and a coffee at the brekkie-barm is to divide the problem in two, recalling how mum used to say problems shared are problems halved (Ed. Note to kids, they're not). Accordingly we shall build the decks that stabilise the craft as a separate module that can be stored elsewhere prior to use, like at a beach-bar for example where you can select one you feel suits your mood on the day.
Absurd, yes, but then so's life.
The laths in the upper sketch will be drawn to engage the beams projecting forward in support of the skis. Alternatively you can hitch horses to them to race across the Steppes.
