Bert Wildebeest8

Bonjour...

2008 - The Channel

We had two attempts at swimming the Channel. The first attempt was cancelled because the weather was against us.

The second time we made it but I've scribbled down my first trip to Dover here.

As background I think I was just about to turn 40 at the time. The business had paid for Agnes to take a month off work to go and do unpaid charity work in New Zealand.

We'd argued on her return, insecurity on both sides, and I'd struggled to get across how much I loved her. I was keen to settle down, start a family and live happily ever after. It just wasn't the right time for her. I started to feel more and more frustrated.

In a gentle way the family were pushing me to start my own family and in conjunction with pressures and anxieties at work we split up.

To Ags credit when we started talking again she'd remembered that I'd always wanted to swim the Channel and had seen something in the paper showing a bunch of chaps who were about to do a relay swim to France.

Bless her she'd cut the piece out of the paper and I contacted those chaps to see if they needed another swimmer. They did and whilst I'd no great swimming experience I got on the team.

For long distance, cold water, swimming you need a lot of chunk on you. Forget abs of steel. To weather the cold you need a tum based on Mars bars. There's the odd exception but in general terms long distance swimmers are big bloaters.

When I started training I was somewhere round 13.5 stone. After all the cold water swimming sessions in the local reservoir I got up to 14.5 stone.

I will never ever, ever forget the first time, in late February, I reluctantly jumped into a very nearly freezing Bolton reservoir.

 

I might be wrong about this but I seem to remember Agnes made me jump in. She had a look on her face that said, "you wanted to do this... now get in or I will kill you".

 

Plus just in case I wasn't sure where the big watery thing was (4ft' away from me) she did a lot of pointing, too.

 

I hesitantly jumped in and screamed at the prehistoric cold. Everyone else was brave about the temperature. I bloody wasn't. Whined like a little girl.

 

Me and the other chaps subsequently swam around for twenty minutes.

When I finally crawled out I was a wreck. That's the closest I've ever come to hypothermia. My brain felt like it was closing down. Couldn't feel anything. My man bits disappeared. I was a blueberry colour.

As I said you need to aclimatise to the cold over a period of time. Plus the heavier you are the better.

 

Anyway on our first trip to Dover it was just me and the swimming chaps who went down. We stayed in two static caravans just above the white cliffs. There was maybe a dozen other caravans, full of swimmers, and everyone was waiting on the right weather to swim the Channel.

We ate very well each of the 4 days we were there. We didn't drink. We watched lots of telly and didn't even make it to the pub.

 

Plus every time I went to bed I was always cold. There was train track behind the caravan park and every bloody evening some train or other would slink past and wake me up. I was also worried about work so all in all it was a difficult time.

 

On the last day of our stay we decided the weather wasn't going to work in our favour, for a channel swim, and we started to make plans to head home.

It was morning and the weather seemed OK. So we opted to go down to Dover and have a final swim in the sea before returning north. It was slightly overcast but the sun was shining through occasionally.

 

There's a small beach by the side of the harbour. Mostly sandy, I think. The beach is maybe 100 yards long with a steep slope behind it and slightly further along there's a concrete walkway which is, maybe, 2 or 3 yards above the waterfront.

As you move further along there's a whole bunch of large rocks at the base of the cliff and then the headland. From that point the coast curves around and you can't make out anything except sea and sky.

In a nutshell beach, concrete walkway, rocks, headland and then just the sea.

Myself, Matt, Chez, Pete and Justin all changed into our swimming gear. Put our yellow swimming hats and goggles on and headed into the sea.

Apart from all my high pitched wailing, I hate being cold and generally let everyone know, we piled into the sea and agreed to swim to a buoy maybe three quarters of a mile off shore.

At the point we ducked our heads below the water, and started to front crawl, the clouds assembled overhead and the sun said goodbye. It was completely overcast at that point. The wind whipped up. After about twenty minutes the waves got to about 6 or 7 feet tall and I wasn't happy. The wind was making me cold, too.

It was intimidating. One second you're in a big water filled trough and the next you're being thrown upwards. At the same time you're trying to swim, make progress and breathe.

 

This chap, nothing to do with me, put a video up of a baby version of what I'd been facing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdEsUib0XMM&feature=related . He was close to shore hence the waves are less intense. Check out 25'ish seconds into the clip and imagine the waves are 6' tall. Scares me just watchin' the damn thing.

 

I lost sight of the chaps but could see the buoy. It was 20'ish feet tall, red and white. An all metal affair.

I kept on going. After an age I finally got there. I then started to worry about the waves throwing me against the damn thing. When I was at the top of the waves I kept looking for the chaps but couldn't see them. The waves were getting bigger.

When you're in a harbour the sea can be quite calm. Outside the harbour the waves can be killers. The shape of the coastline had been providing a harbour style calming effect. I was outside of that protection.

 

Hence the waves didn't seem to be getting bigger, they genuinely were. I had a real anxiety I was a gonner.

The waves were becoming bloody enormous and they seemed to be trying to smash me against the buoy. I kept swallowing sea water each time a wave clobbered me.

It occurred to me as I was going up and down, up and down, that maybe I should try to climb onto the buoy and signal help. I decided that I'd either knock myself out, break a bone or if I was successful subsequently suffer from the cold and pass out.

Hence I started trying to swim to shore. I put my head down, started to think about Agnes, and headed off.

After 30 minutes I didn't seem to have moved. I was getting cold & tired. Whilst I'd been aiming for the beach I was being pushed off course. A little panic appeared on my horizon.

I kept on swimming. I don't think I'd ever put such effort in. Fear was driving me on. Wanting to see Agnes and the family again. After an age I looked up again, the clouds made everywhere seem miserable, I took another mouthful of sea and realised I was being pushed towards the rocks.

 

It may well seem that I'm making this up. I'm not. Everything happened as I've said. There've been times in my life when I've just wanted to give up. Forget about pushing on. Accept whatever's going to happen. This swim was very, very intense.

The wind seemed to pick up, yet again, but this time I could see people running around on the distant walkway. I knew I was being pushed beyond the headland. If I missed it I wouldn't have made it back. I was being swept out to sea.

I dug deep and kept swimming trying my damndest to get the maximum movement through the water for each stroke. My arms, shoulders, legs and stomach muscles were aching, big time.

I'm not sure how long it took but the next time I looked up the last of the rocks were 50 yards away. So was the headland. The waves were crashing against the shore and the spray was leaping twenty feet into the air.

I kept pulling through the water and all of a sudden the water seemed to calm and I was swimming at a bloody impressive pace. I'd broken through. I then had to slow down to make sure I wasn't plunged onto the rocks. I was safe from being washed out to sea by about 20 yards.

The chaps finally spotted my yellow swimming cap and game legging towards the end of the walkway. Pete slipped and went head over heels. The waves were smashing all over the place and I clambered onto one of the medium sized rocks and just sat there shivering. Water and spray blasting into me.

This video is Dover Harbour, again just a Youtube vid, but it shows the spray hitting the front further along from where we were.     www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vy_xZfYKis&playnext=1&list=PLA6A42F32861631C9&index=6 . One minute twenty seven brings back memories.

Ten minutes later I got some energy together and slowly clambered over the rocks to the walkway. Feeling happy to be alive me and the guys made it back to the car. Pete was bleeding from the head. I dried off. Put my clothes on. I then started shaking. Mild shock setting in.

Another ten minutes later the police called by to tell me off. Diane, the organiser of the trip and our matron figure, had called the authorities when the other guys had returned without me.

When they'd lost sight of me they'd abandoned the idea of getting to the buoy and headed back. I hadn't. I'd been swimming for a smidge under two hours when I finally got back.

In a funny'ish twist of fate when the weather worsened Diane had got the air sea rescue folks involved. Unfortunately, just one of those things, she'd given the authorities the wrong beach name. Hence the helicopter had been looking for me miles away from where I'd been swimming.

 

After the police chap had told me how much of an arse I was I phoned Agnes to tell her how much I loved her. I'd been constantly tired during the 6 months build up to the swim and not the person I should have been.

As I say I called but she was busy and I didn't get to say what I wanted. I think she thought I'd been having a mad beer fest, and partying every night, hence it wasn't the time for a deep conversation.

 

We left to come home the same day, I believe, and I walked through the door and just collapsed onto the settee. About an hour later Agnes walked in, took one look at my distended stomach and said, "that'll have to go"...

I played the whole swimming saga down and laughed off her fat comment. We'd both missed an opportunity to reconnect. 

2008 + Cat

The cat is female. Of the white and black variety and goes by the name of Tiger. Why Tiger ? Two reasons, firstly I call everyone tiger especially if I can't remember or can't be bothered to recall their name. Secondly, sometimes, it's a term of endearment.

When Aggers upped sticks and walked out she took her cat with her. Despite my initial reservations about cats, apart from really missing the Ex, I also missed the cat.

So off I trotted to the animal sanctuary and asked if they'd got any abandoned felines.

They had only one at the time. A little bitch called Missy who'd religiously attacked all the other cats, hated being picked up and would hiss and scratch at the drop of a hat. She didn't purr. They 'd had her for 9 months. Which equated to half her life.

I'm a sucker for a sad story and the sanctuary had deliberately put people off adopting her & figured she was a lost cause.

The room they keep the cat's in is about 10 feet long and possibly 6 feet wide with fluorescent lighting and the kind of sterile surfaces you find at the Vets. There were 4 metal cages, each of about 3 feet long, with two stacked on top of the other two.

 

There was a window that looked out onto the kennel block, where the dogs were kept, and that'd been her home for pretty much half her life. Missy was in the top right hand bunk.

The chaps at the sanctuary are lovely people but they don't expect cats to hang around so the cages are meant as temporary homes.

Incidentally the lady who dealt with the cats had a cut on her hand where she'd recently got too close to the little shit and suffered as a consequence.

That aside I went into the room a wee bit tentatively. She told me I'd now been officially warned about Missy's behaviour. I put on one of my, "I laugh at danger" veneers and waited to be attacked. Inwardly I was a tad concerned. That hollow tum feeling I sometimes get was making me twitchy. I'm such a lightweight.

 

The lady unlocked Missy's cage and left. I looked at the devils very own cat. She looked at me. I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. She looked at me. I didn't say anything. And then she looked at me again, looked at the floor, jumped down and came and sat next to me.

 

Two days later I'd completed the paperwork, adopted her, changed her name to Tiger and now I'm a cat owner. Which is bizarre because my family have owned, if that's the right term, mountain dogs for the last 25 years.

I've had Tige's for about two years now & she's been great.

 

We've had the odd run in regarding her scratching stuff, and she's a moody cow sometimes, but she's learnt to trust me and she can be quite affectionate at times.

Legal Brokers Ltd now sponsors two cages at the Animal Sanctuary.

 

PS. Man logic. Women are like cats, I've decided. They'll pay attention to you when they want feeding. Other than that they will ignore you as they see fit. They'll curl up with you, on the settee, at their discretion. If you tease them they will not take kindly to it. If it gets cold outside that's you're fault.  

 

When it's bed time... despite being ignored & only used for food... they'll feel they have every right to get on the bed and purr right in your ear.  If you can't therefore sleep, and turnover or god forbid ignore them, then you are in deep shit and should expect to be hissed at.

 

I see many similarities between felines & females.   

 

2009 - Tin Man

Will complete later

Legal Brokers Ltd

Set up the business about 5 years ago.

Started off with a £300 overdraft. For me the process of beginning, trying to establish and grow the beast has been a continuing headache. Literally. One step forward, three quarters of a step backwards.

Two quotes come to mind that are close to representing what I've gone through;

Firstly. If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs and blaming in to you.... then your's is the earth my son and everything that's in it.... Rudyard Kipling.

Alternatively. If you can keep your head when all around you have lost theirs.... then you probably haven't understood the seriousness of the situation.... David Brent / Ricky Gervais.

Both quotes have validity.

For me I took every setback personally. When people tried to help I didn't trust their advice. If office staff made mistakes, arrived late or wanted to leave early I resented them. I had precious little patience.

Certainly in the first couple of years I was grumpy, worried, easily annoyed and very rarely happy. I could never relax. I worked too hard. I couldn't switch off on the weekends. I didn't want to feel like a failure.

I worried about our obligations to the VAT man, the Corporation Tax man, the PAYE man, the staff. I second guessed decisions. I was distant with the people I loved.

I put on weight through comfort eating. I felt so drained my health suffered.

Doing Ju Jitzu helped a little. Being bounced on my arse on a regular basis helped me reset my mental self. 

When I started training for the Channel swim I thought that would help further. It didn't. Too much physical exertion drained me and made every little work incident seem so much more stressful. I had no patience what so ever.

And then I made peace with what I was doing. I hit my own breakwater, I guess, and things became easier. 

Maybe it was the death of the relationship with Agnes that made me reassess what's important in life. Maybe it was getting a system in place that worked for me.

Nowadays the business has a pot of "peace of mind" money in the bank. We've got several sources of income. The business has allowed me to buy an aircraft & drive a new TT. My life is, hopefully, my own.

The SRA still wind me up and there's constantly a new round of challenges... but I'm more relaxed, not completely chilled*, but more relaxed these days.

If you're thinking of setting up your own business, or LBL franchise, I know what you'll face.

I wish I'd had a mentor when I started.

Fare well, tiger.

Jon Hilton

As of the 28th November 2010... that's all I've got to write. I've got a few adventures to add somewhere but I'll get that sorted overtime.

Whoever you are, if you've read this far, you've got a very impressive boredom threshold. Give yourself a pat on the back !

 

* As of the 8th December 2010... Matt has just broke his arm out side the office and our searches will suffer. I'm trying to stay calm !