Note to self
Throwing yourself out of a moving hovercraft is considered silly.
Yesterday we did some "team building" thing at work. I'm not convinced that these things ever really work to build a functioning team - a day of mucking about in vehicles and mud won't fix serious organisational problems. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying them. The highlights for me were clay-pigeon shooting and hovercraft racing.
It's years since I last went shooting, but I'm glad to say that I can still shoot straight. I am partly ambidextrous - I do most stuff right-handed, but I play squash left-handed for example. the instructor thought, based on the way I held my head, that I should perhaps shoot left-handed too. So I fired off a few rounds left-handed. It felt very odd, but I hit two out of three clays, which, while maybe worse than when I shoot right-handed, shows pretty good control. So next time I'll go left-handed all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if, after a bit of practice, I can shoot at least as well from the left as from the right, and maybe better.
Turns out that quite a few of the others really enjoyed shooting too, so we might get together for a full day of making boom-sticks go bang.
As for the hovercraft - we had a timed relay. I went last in our team, and, if I may say so myself, had pretty good control of the thing after just a couple of practice laps. I had problems with going too wide on a sweeping corner at the bottom of the shallow gradient and lost time there. I finished my lap *most* impressively. Sliding into the box sideways and then, because I'm ever so team oriented, leaping out of the hovercraft before it had come to a complete stop - and falling arse over tit on my right arm. I didn't realise quite how badly I'd hurt myself and got back up and dashed back to the rest of the team so we could get a good time. The good news - I got the fastest individual lap out of the whole company. The bad news - I *really* fucked my right shoulder when I fell on it. At least the constant dull pain has gone now, but I have very limited movement in it now before it gets excruciatingly painful. Thankfully, I haven't broken anything or dislocated it, but I need to be careful for a few days methinks.
None of this, it should be noted, will stop me from leaping on and off moving Routemasters. To stop doing that would be to stop being a Londoner, and I would never want to be one of those odd country folk :-)