The desire to build a boat … begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky so that you can think of nothing else.
– Arthur Ransome

This is the small but perfectly formed pirate ship my mate Amanda and I would love to build. Tomorrow we will have gone on to planning something else. A trek in Bhutan. Sailing to Fiji. Or something like that.
Instead we’ll probably have lunch and look at boating magazines.

The dreaming is half the fun. It’s much better than actually doing all that sanding and sawing, or hiking up a mountain, or anything too strenuous. (Well, she might do strenuous mountain climbing and undertake complicated building projects, but I prefer looking at the brochures.)