Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here
You might be thinking that, given today’s Dollop title, and the fact that I’ve been intimating life-threatening dangers ahead, that you’re in for a gripping tale about how we narrowly escaped death. But this is not the case. The reason why I shouldn’t be writing today’s Dollop and why you shouldn’t be reading this is because I’ve already done today’s Dollop.
Dollop 208 was meant to be a Dollop from a canoe. Me, Michael, and Michael’s girlfriend Hannah went canoeing on the beautiful Lake Louise – that’s the name of the lake, in case you thought that I’d just decided to specifically address one Dollop listener, and you were getting a bit jealous. We spent most of the trip chatting to you, the invisible fourth person, who turned out to be even more invisible than we thought, given that you will never hear it. The reason for this is because a minute after getting in the boat, the recording stopped.
It seems as if my digital recorder has the same philosophy as American chain coffee shops such as Starbucks. In such establishments, The notion of small does not exist, your options begin at medium, or with Starbucks, “tall” or “grande.” Similarly, my digital recorder apparently doesn’t have the facility to tell you that the battery is low, but seems to choose instead to keep telling you that the battery level is medium until it completely runs out. It goes from high, to medium, to dead. Ah, so there was a death, but it was just a couple of AA batteries.
Goodness knows what people on the other boats thought, because we weren’t talking to each other as such, but constantly to someone else who they couldn’t see. And I wasn’t holding any equipment such as a phone or camera, because the tiny microphones were in my ears, unable to be seen. At one point we engineered a race between us and some Japanese tourists, which involved a lot of drama with much clashing of ores. Our race rivals seemed rather bemused and entertained by the fact that the three of us were commentating on the race with great enthusiasm, shouting rather loudly to be heard over the sounds of the water, the ore clashing, and the strange rhythmic chanting noise that our opponents were making, presumably so as to keep in time with each other and maximise speed. Unfortunately for them, they were unable to forgo the stereotype of Japanese tourists, otherwise they’d have probably won the race, but one of them kept putting down his ore in order to take photos. Therefore, we won the race, and I then tried to conduct an interview with the losing team, which seemed to amuse them quite a lot, although they might have also been a bit concerned by our mental stability, and were perhaps just humouring us out of politeness or fear.
It’s a shame that the thing wasn’t recorded because I think it would have made for a good audition tape for the BBC, resulting in us being snapped up to host top gear, such was the brilliance of the recording and our presenting style. I even threw in some slightly dubious lines about the Japanese in order to curry favour with the Clarkson fans. But alas, it wasn’t to be. I guess we’ll just have to continue with this bloody folk music lark instead. Oh well.
On the positive side though, I suppose the fact that we thought we were recording meant that we ended up having a very different experience to the one that we’d probably have had if we weren’t hamming up things for the Dollop. We might have just had a relaxing boat trip, but because of the Dollop, we did things like racing Japanese tourists in order to spice things up a bit. So although the thing didn’t record, we probably had a more interesting and exciting time in the canoe than we would have had otherwise.
Perhaps there is a good moral in that last paragraph. Because, my faithful congregation, you should live your life as if you were trying to entertain a few hundred people online, and then it will take you to places and give you experiences that you otherwise would eschew. Bless you. You see what I did there. That vicar’s sermon bit with the eschew bless you joke wouldn’t have happened if the recording had worked. So what you lost in exhilarating top gear style boat-based drama, you gained in hilarious wordplay.
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