November

Halong Bay

According to my diary I should be in Halong Bay today, drifting around on a Vietnamese junk. Of course, owing to the death of my father, I'm not. I'm at home enduring my least favourite month of the year, November. Can anyone tell me anything good about this month? For me it a time of long, dark nights and perpetual wind and rain. Uggh! The only good things I can find about it are the grass doesn't need cutting and warm and cosy nights in by the fire become very appealing.

Not visiting Vietnam as planned not only dashes my long established desire to flee the English autumn for a warmer climate, it also makes achieving the challenges I set for myself a while back very difficult.

There are 20 challenges in all and I drew them up at the beginning of my gap year as a way of bringing structure to what I wanted to do with my time. I'm not going to list all 20 here, but I will review some of them.

6 of the 20 have already been achieved. They included taking a Turkish bath, coming face to face with mountain gorillas and going white water rafting. So far, so good. Others have a definite antipodean feel to them and I hope to tick them off in January and February. For example: Climb Sydney Harbour Bridge; see the sun rise over Uluru; and take an epic train journey.

Many of them appear to be in jeopardy now that I have cancelled my trip to Hong Kong and Vietnam. Visiting 10 countries I have not visited before should have been easy but now I will be 2 short of the target. And what about 'Fire a machine gun'? I put that in there because a good friend assured me that there are lots of munitions in Vietnam and that blasting away with an M16 would be a great experience and easy to achieve. Not so easy to achieve in East Yorkshire though.

Another of my challenges was optimistic to say the least. This is the one that reads: 'See the Northern Lights.' It sounds easy but if I want to do it I need to get something sorted in the next two months. I think I can hear Iceland calling.

I said that I have ticked off 6 challenges as being achieved, but at a push I could claim 7.

The dubious challenge is the one entitled: 'Appear on TV.' Now, when I set that challenge what I had in mind was either an appearance in something as a TV extra or on a quiz show, such as The Weakest Link.

Neither of those look like happening but I may be able to claim it on a technicality.

Just over a week a ago it was Remembrance Sunday. Some months ago, after a visit to the Lakes, I commented on here that if people could trek up Great Gable for a Remembrance service then the least I can do is walk down the road to my local cenotaph. This I duly did, along with my eldest son and we marked our 2 minutes of silence at 11 O'clock. The point here is that I take remembering the sacrifices of others very seriously.

I then dashed off to watch Hull City play Stoke. Once the players were on the field there was another 2 minutes of silence. Naturally, I stood in due solemnity once more. What happened next is a disgrace in every way.

There must have been some problem with the PA system as it began to make an awful racket, completely at odds with occasion. This annoyed me. The match was televised on Sky and unbeknown to me the camera zoomed in on me stood there looking somewhat bemused by the noise but wearing my poppy with pride. Unfortunately, this was the precise moment when I expressed my dismay at the harsh sound coming from the speakers around the ground and in all the glory of high definition I was televised during the 2 minutes of silence mouthing words to the effect of 'For flip sake!', or maybe something a bit stronger.

Oh, the shame.

Live long and prosper.