Dead Sea
This afternoon, I am going to the dead sea. I'm really quite excited about this. I remember at the age of ten or so at the beginning of term, opening a tattered old geography textbook in Mr Rice's class and flicking through it to look at all the pictures. There were pictures of steel works, rubber trees (spaghetti trees ain't got nut'n on them!), lava flows and deep sea fishing boats. Also, there was a picture of a man floating on this back, like this, reading a news-paper in the Dead Sea.

At that age, I wanted to visit a steel works/ climb a rubber tree/ bottle lava/ swim in the dead sea and try to sink. Instead, I had to endure hours and hours of Mr Rice's droning, un-naturally soporific mumblies. I'm sure he'd have done much better as a device to calm severely violent criminals. Coming back to the point, out of all those activities, the one I wanted to do most, is swim in the Dead Sea. And I never have. And this afternoon, I'm going to. Wheee!!!

Apparently, if you open your eyes, (a) it hurts and (b) your eyes collapse in on themselves due to fresh water migrating out due to the excessive osmotic potential. So I'm taking goggles.