We stayed on land today and tried to forget our Apocalypse Now boat trip, although I saw the "I have a fish" lady at dinner tonight and had flashbacks to our nightmare. We had had the option to eat the fish we'd caught, but neither of us wanted to (I am sure it will be eaten by someone though, so its death is not totally in vain). I suspect the German couple ate their fish. But I didn't hear her shouting, "I have a fish" during diner so maybe they couldn't face it either.
Unlike AA Gill I don't need to shoot a baboon to find out what it would be like to kill a man. I just have to watch other people kill some fish to know that murdering a person would be pretty nasty. I am clearly no Hemingway either. Proper writers can look death in the face and laugh. I just feel nauseous. Fish don't even taste all that good. Not enough to justify those bulging eyes that I can still see staring at me in anger (even though I had nothing to do with the fish's demise, though I can understand why it blamed me). One day, when fish have risen up against their human masters in a Planet of the Fish style scenario, everyone on that boat will be hauled before the Fish Council to be punished for their actions. My wife and I will plead innocence, but our eyes shall be pecked out just like the others. To be honest as long as the "I have a fish" woman is killed I will happily lay down my life.
I am pretty determined to take it easy and had another lazy day by the pool, reading and playing Countdown. I finished "The Age of Wonder", which I thoroughly recommend. Humphrey Davy turned out to be a bit of a prick. Fishing was his main hobby for a start (he even wrote about whether fish experience pain in one of his books, which was an interesting coincidence). It's hard to countenance how different the world was 200 years ago - there was no anaesthetic for a start which meant operations and amputations were carried out whilst people were awake. Davy very nearly discovered the anaesthetic qualities of nitrous oxide, but instead used it as an experimental drug to make people laugh and caper about and so he could date-rape women (citation needed). Yeah, so he saved the lives of lots of miners and wrote a book which influenced Darwin, but think what he could have done with that laughing gas. The prick.
What would these scientists make of the modern world that theywere setting into motion? I wish I could show Babbage my Macbook Air or show the Herschels my interactive starmap on my iPad. But I also wish I could travel back to the court of King Arthur with an iPhone and be worshipped as a god (until the batteries run out). If Davy was right then our spirits exist on other planets in the solar system after our deaths, so all these people probably know what's going on now in any case.
We managed to make a trip to the gym today - I noticed that the hotel also has a billiard room, so if I get really bored I might be able to record a Me1 vs Me2 holiday podcast (I won't do this). After dinner we played Scrabble in the bar and drank beer and watched a smiling Maldivian man in a waistcoat doing some magic. I thought about offering to get up and do 20 minutes of stand up to the smattering of people in the bar, but I am not sure the Maldives is ready for my comedy stylings just yet (atheism is a capital offence apparently) and in any case I think most of the people were Russian (they'd been celebrating new year - bit late Ruskies!) and they seemed happy to move on to a disco instead. The young people were dancing Gangnam style. I thought that that probably meant it was time for me to go to bed.
