Summer of Doom.

Way back when I was just a youngster, I remember the good old days of heavy relationships, ploughed with emotion, and planted with what us young kids thought was Love.

It is only with hindsight that I can now look back and say "You know what? I was a right twunt." At the mere age of fourteen, and the what-I-thought-was ripe old age of fifteen, I had no real grasp of what Love was, only a misguided preconception that meant that if I held a girl's hand, it must be Love, right? Wrong. It wasn't even puppy love. It was kissing, hug, and a declaration of words which I didn't understand.

Now, you may be wondering "Why is he going on about all this?", and the answer is rather simple. It is now time to tell you of the time I got my Heart Broken. Torn up into shreds, spat on, and set aflame with the stark reminder of "I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire" ringing through my head. Yes, a heart-heavy lunatic, aged only fifteen, and I fell into a pit of despair, self-pity, and general mopiness. I admitted defeat, grew my hair long and became a mere shadow of my former self. No, really. But, my dear reader, it was not only the act of being dumped that destroyed me that summer, No, it was that combined with something else. Something far, far, more sinister.

Most of the people who know me will know that I once owned a jetski. Not, may I quickly add, a jetbike. There is a difference. Anyway, yes... It was a Kawasaki 550 SX. It was white, with a pink and purple Kawasaki sticker, and a few stickers that had been put on for comic effect, featuring such beauties as "I ride a nervous slapper" and "If this is the right way up, then you're facking not". Yes, we had two glorious years with that jetski, me and my family. It was a fast source of delightful entertainment for the family, and involved no shredding of dolphins fins whatsoever. Honest. Though we did once run over a duck.

Yes, we had fun times as a family on that trusty little motorbike-designed-for-the-water. Myself and my brother Barrie were, by far, the best on it, being the only ones able to stand up on our two feets, and keep this going for prolonged amounts of minutes, before falling right on our arses, swimmingly desperately toward the jetski, and starting it up again. The handy thing about the jetski was that, you see. If it remained at idling speed for more than thirty seconds, it cut out. Rather handy, as it meant it never ran off without you being on it.

Except one day. July 1st, 2004. Having split up with my girlfriend of 6 months [It was LOVE!] at school, I wasn't in the cheeriest of moods [and spent a fair while on the phone trying to patch things up, and failing miserably], but conceded to go to Hopeman harbour, and go for a belt about on the jetski to ease my stress. The jetski had been in for a servicing at the local maritime engineers, which basically consisted of it getting new sparkplugs to sort out the fact that it was running rather sluggishly of late. So, with renewed vigour, the jetski sprang to life, as Barrie took a quick shot of it, and bolted off into the horizon like a bat out of Hell. Then, he fell, and we laughed. We laughed some more. Then, we started laughing a little quieter, as it came to our attention that the jetski was still doing 40mph. Without occupant. Balls, thought we. Balls to you!, thought the jetski. And that, my dear friends, was the last we saw of it.

I never even got a shottie that day.

Well, I lied. We saw it once more, a few months later. The coastguard rung us to say they'd found it on a beach 40/50 miles down the coast, and that it looked "Alright". Apparently, they said, it looked fit enough for us to take it home and possibly go out on it after a wee touch of TLC. This, as we discovered upon arriving at it's resting place, was simply not the case. We'd been had. The once untameable beast had been reduced to a shivering, battered, halved-down-the-middle wreck. It was never going to be seabound again.

And that, my friends, is the story of how my summer was Ruined.