Hi I'm Roxy Carmichael and basically in my wild younger days I worked as a stew onboard superyachts. For five years I travelled the Med and the Caribbean. I had lots of wild adventures and recently I gave up that crazy life and settled down in the UK and decided to start writing my memoirs because basically you won't believe what goes on at sea - I guarantee it! I write when I can which isn't very often due to the pressures of the desk bound job I now have. But I find I love to write, and I'm really enjoying it. In fact, sometimes, when I'm writing something down and remembering all the strange characters I met during my career a lot of the time I'm just laughing my head off, remembering it all, and all the crazy parties we had. Pretty soon I'll be finished writing my book, and then hopefully I'll find a publisher and you'll all get to read it. That's the dream. Until then it's the slow hard graft of getting it down on the page.
One of the main problems of writing from home is that even if you tell people 'listen I'm writing a book so don't come round today' they seem to think you're bored or really want to have a cup of coffee and a chat. So this mate of mine, Lydia, she lives down the street and doesn't have much to do with her time so she's always popping round and asking me if I want to join her for a pedicure or a liquid lunch. Well of course I do but like I say I'm trying to write this memoir so I usually decline. So sometimes Lydia does get me to put down my quill pen - or rather to leave my battered old laptop for a few hours. Basically she always wants to talk about her marriage.
Well she has a really dysfunctional husband called Daniel who seems to me like he's got Asbergers. He's a bit like Martin Clunes in Doc Martin, kind of obsessed with his work and can't stop talking about it. Which would be fine if he did something interesting. Unfortunately he's a dentist and Lydia gets really hacked off when he brings home those dodgy dentistry magazines full of gums covered in weeping sores or in the middle of a dinner party he starts banging on about a fantastic root canal he did the other day in tedious excruciating detail.
So yesterday Lydia popped round with a bottle of wine and said did I want to take a break? Well I didn't really but what could I do? So I let her in. Sometimes her problems are quite entertaining. For a while they were trying to have a second kid so Daniel was popping Viagra but he'd always drink wine with it and she'd come home to find him with a hard on but unable to do anything with it as he was asleep over a bottle of wine. Their sex life is a disaster, as she's always telling me. She suggested watching porn together to give it some oomph but he quashed the idea, saying it gave him unrealistic expectations of women's beauty (which seemed like a pretty bogus excuse to me!) She eventually asked him why he never wants to have sex with her and he said sorry she was too hairy. She is kind of hairy but for God's sake he knew that when he married her!
Anyway this time Lydia was going on about how she'd booked a Sex Therapist for them to go to but Daniel said he had no slots in his diary until July for seeing the therapist! I told her that was bollocks. That he was avoiding going to the sex therapist like he was avoiding sex with her. The problem with it is that really she should divorce him but she won't because she wants all the nice trappings of being a dentist's wife. Finally I got rid of her and got back to my book.
The thing is when I was a stew I felt very free. Every day was a new adventure. Every day you might find yourself in a new port surrounded by a fabulous posse of new guests. I don't tell Lydia too much about it - it only makes her insanely jealous!
I mean, come on, what is it about me. Is it just me or do you find you're a sort of sounding board for other people's problems? Also is a messy lady garden a turn off?
Roxy
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