“And then the Piranhas come and eat you.”

This rather strange statement comes from a friend and colleague of mine this morning, as the finale to a discussion about drowning (or potential for). Eh? I hear you utter. Well, heres the story in narrative form.

“Did you know the average human floats?” – Me.

“Naw…i always sink in the water. Like when i go to the swimming pool, i always go underwater.” – him

“Even when you stop moving and just lie back?”

“Eh? I don’t do that! I go to the swimming pool to swim. In the name mate.”

“Well, if you do lie back in the water and not move, you float. The average human is positively buoyant.”

“Aye, but if you do that…then the piranhas come and eat you.”

I sigh. In a swimming pool in Atlantis, Oban. Yup, theres clearly a population of vampiverous piranha fish shoaling in the deep end, ready to swarm up and eviscerate anyone daring to lie and relax on the surface. Its why i don’t go to the public pool anymore. Not because i’m fat and horrendously semi-conscious, but because i fear for my mortal soul being torn to shreds, fragments of flesh and bone, in my own local bathhouse.

But i’m digressing into fiction. Here on the farm this morning the form is fairly funny. Freddie feels fundamentally feckless due to the effect of feisty fermented fineries (as does Ginge, as he has just admitted – his father in law was round the night previous and between the two of them they down an entire bottle of Glenlivet’s finest), and the days work is nice and calm. Even the unrelenting rain has relented for a short while.

But days like these are few and far between and thats the problem. We can only have days like this at the weekend because the company’s icy claws can’t scratch the surface off our sanity and poke about inside our mental state, causing irreparable damage.

The happy day where Freddie’s greatest fear is to be consumed by freak-of-nature scottish Piranhas whilst floating in the Atlantis Pool will remain in my head for some time. I think that i might see me returning to the memory during the darkest days yet to come. I’d like to think i’m being melodramatic, but i’m not. The trend is not on the increase.