Following news that a Romanian civil servant sat slumped at her desk for two days before her colleagues realised she was dead and not dead drunk, I wondered how long it would take before anyone gave me a shake.
One cynic said: ‘If you weren’t up and away at five thirty one. I’d have known something was wrong.’
Bit different to falling asleep at the helm, although in a yacht as well balanced as a Contessa 32 it might take even longer for the Coastguard to notice and probably not until she ran up the beach in Ostend.
This would be not unlike the time my old Alan Buchanan broke her mooring and glided away with a north-west wind down through the Thames Estuary on the ebb, back up on the flood and then back down again on the second ebb until somebody noticed and towed her into Whitstable.
A friend later told me: ‘We saw you going away and thought it strange: you had a fair wind but you were motoring.’ I had to explain I wasn’t aboard!
Proof perhaps that it is a perfectly human reaction to rationalise the unexpected, but rarely to lateralise the rational.