The Good Listening To Show with Cal MacAninch

0:00Welcome to another episode of The Good Listening To Show. Your life and times with me, Chris Crimes. The storytelling show that features the clearing, where all good questions come to get asked, and all good stories come to be told. And where all my guests have two things in common. They're all creative individuals, and all with an interesting story to tell. There are some lovely storytelling metaphors, a clearing, a tree, a juicy storytelling exercise called 5-4-3-2-1, some alchemy, some gold, a cheeky bit of Shakespeare, and a cake. So it's all to play for. So yes, welcome to The Good Listening To Show. Your life and times with me, Chris Crimes. Are you sitting comfortably here? Then we shall begin. Welcome, welcome, thrice, welcome, let's go for four. Welcome again to Cal McAninch, who is a half-man, half-viking from the point of view of

1:03also being I Am Spartacus. He's just survived rowing across the Atlantic. And so this is Cal's kind of agreed to come for a second pass or a second row through the clearing to talk about his extraordinary epic quest of rowing in a squad of five, three thousand miles across the Atlantic as part of the Talisca Whiskey Challenge for Atlantic Body and Soul, which was the name of your boat, I believe, maybe it wasn't, but that's the charity you were there to row four. So welcome back from your epic quest Cal McAninch, how are you? Oh, how you doing? Just to clarify, our name was Atlantic Body and Soul. We were rowing for two charities, one of which was Body and Soul, which is based in London, but has a reach far beyond that. And the junction who are based in Edinburgh, and they both deal with young people's mental health, the body and soul dealing with people of experience, childhood trauma, and the junction is a drop-in cent of young people in Leith and North Edinburgh, and they both

2:07help young people navigate away back from suicidal thinking. So it was a great honor and privilege to be able to row across the Atlantic for them. And you're attaching yourselves to that specific charity. What was the journey and the reason why that was the charity you fixed upon to help? Well, initially, I was part of another crew, and somebody in my other crew at their relative had worked with Body and Soul, and I'd been cared for by Body and Soul, and said they were an amazing charity, and that we should speak to them. And we thought of, we spoke to three charities in total, and meetings with them for a long, just to talk to them. Body and Soul, the meeting went so well with them that we had a second meeting, so we took our chat, and we just felt an instant connection with them. So that's why we chose Body and Soul, and the junction is just a, we knew people who are connected to the junction in Edinburgh, they wanted to do something for local people as well. And it's such a triumphant thing to have achieved.

3:08I'm not even sure of the statistics of how few, few people in the world managed to row across the Atlantic. Did you bother to sort of do that to compare? No, I heard it recently, and I forgot the number, but it's certainly less than the people who have climbed Everest, for sure. And it is one of those great expeditions that you, you know, elemental things that people were still, feel inspired to do or to hit about. And it was just something that fired my imagination, and it was, it wasn't quite what I imagined. I thought it was going to be this communing with nature and lots of wildlife, and the wheels, and dolphins, and even sharks, and actual facts, and we didn't see any of them. We saw more wheels and dolphins up in the North of Scotland than we did our training, believe it or not. We thought they were, we were going to be surrounded by them, and they lied to caution, and we saw a million flying fish instead. Ah, so that was the sort of creature of choice that most showed up, is that right? Indeed, yeah, then they hit you in the face, and they go down your vest, and they're all over the place.

4:08And we spent so much time there, they land on the boat, and you had then had to rescue them and try and throw them back into the sea again. So we spent a lot of time doing that and cussing flying fish, to be honest. Oh, okay. So they're not arriving as free supper. You want to get them off the boat as quickly as you can. Exactly, yeah. And some of them were tiny, so they, I mean, little, little baby thing. So as soon as, as soon as they hatch, they must be able to fly. And partly, he was thinking, because the day before we finished, I saw, I was looking home, I wasn't rowing, I was looking out to sea, and there was about 15 of them all took off at once, it was like a squadron of flying fish, and I had the idea that, you know, because mankind is poisoning the seas, as we speak, that all the fish were communicating to each other, that we must evolve and was grow wings. Let's get out of here, guys. Before it's too late. Yeah, they did it well with feet back in the day. They did, yeah. So the next six wings. So flying fish are the new, the new world order, basically. Exactly, yes. So we're going to come on to the curated structures before. I thought it'd be really intriguing to, if I may, not to be too prescriptive, but use

5:09the extraordinary expanse of the Atlantic as a metaphor for your clearing. And then for me to just really explore with you how extraordinary a feat it was, but also how it must have changed you, because I can imagine that you were a very different man that set off than the one that arrived, and indeed your squad of five must have had an extraordinary, you know, shared experience, but also you must have gone, I would imagine the whole gamut of human emotion must have been experienced to the course of the journey. Pretty much. Yes. So how long have you been back? So how's Moral and what's the sort of timeline of it, and you arrive back? Being back about two weeks, I think about two weeks today, actually. And since the weekend just passed, I've been back out with my club or a club, Eastern. Again, we were across the rowing club. I was coxing on Saturday and then I was rowing on Sunday. And the good news is that my bum feel was good. At last. The bum has recovered. This is a world exciting.

6:10Exactly. Our McAninch Scottish actor extraordinaire, his bum has recovered. Exactly. You don't realise how important that is once I start to tell you. Yes. And by the way, your good lady, good lady, McAninch, and also, you know, Sean O'Donnell told me about something that you all got very versed on. The thing you need to avoid was trench foot of the arse, if I may say so. Yeah. Well, yeah, the first row out of like Omera, I could feel my ass going and it didn't let up until we actually finished, you know, because the two things you need to heal is to stop rowing and to keep it dry. And it's the two things you can't do. So for six and a half weeks, it just got worse and worse and worse. And that is so six and a half weeks was the epic quest in its sort of inception to completion. That's how long it was. Yeah, probably. It's 39 days. Wow. When I saw the most extraordinary film sequence of you arriving back, you were a bearded majestic, sort of almost like a bend gun.

7:12And you all look fantastic because, you know, obviously you must, I don't know how much lighter you were when you, you're half the man you arrive back being, I'm sure. But what sort of, what happened to your weight during the course of the? Yeah, we all lose weight, but we were very, one of our crew members, Mark, was very thorough. And he was given the task of sourcing the food and understanding about how much we needed to take in terms of calorie intake. And so he was on, so he's, he's about three, six and four. He was on six thousand calories a day. And I guess I was on about five thousand a day. So you've got the dry, desiccated food, the expedition food that you had to have. Two of those a day, plus a pudding, plus we made our own breakfast, musely, stroke porridge. If you added hot water too, you could make it into a porridge, but it was full of fruit nuts and all good things. And also we added nut butter to it and honey and maple syrup to make it absolutely calorie

8:15dense. Great way to start the day, you know. And it's, yes, keep going. I was going to say it's not as if there is a sort of luxurious sort of galley where you can prepare your food. This is an extraordinarily small craft, isn't it, as well? Yes. There was five of us on it as well, so the 26, 27 feet. And they made four, three or four people and we had five on it. So it was always problematic, in fact, space was problematic. But in terms of food, we also had what were called snack packs as well, because we were told by nutritionists advised us that we had to drink water every 20 minutes to half an hour. But also, because we knew that, but we also had to eat every 20 minutes to half an hour. So we had these snack packs, which were usually, I mean, we had dried fruit and things, but we had chocolate covered nuts and chocolate bars and all sorts of things, your whole variety. So there wasn't boring what we were eating, there was always a variety of stuff to eat. And we were pretty good. Matt was very robust when it came to have you eaten, have you drunk, you know, he was

9:20great at that. He was, you know, making sure that we all kept on it, because sometimes we were so tired that it would be very easy just to go, I'm going to sleep, I'm not going to drink and I'm not going to eat, but no, he kept on us and we kept, we kept up. And he was very, very important to keep me in nutrition going. Yes. And he wasn't just there doing the food. He was pulling his way, obviously, in terms of, he was powerful, he was powerful roar in the boat. Yeah, he was good. And every time he put in a shift, it was very, he was using a lot of energy, but we had to keep fueled and we had to keep hydrated, very, very important. And even before you set off in the story that you were telling me about the journey to come, even then it was this idea of being two hours on, two hours off, two hours on, two hours off, relentlessly for the entire epic quest. So yeah, I know it's a sort of fairly prestigious thing to say, but I've been going to the gym recently and even rowing for five minutes, I thought, whoo, you know, that's knackering. So I was just full of respect for just the sheer tenacity and, well, and what was that

10:21light? Because it was, you couldn't stop. We didn't relentless. Well, first of all, we did, most crews take two or three years to prepare for this in terms of raising money, raising profile and training. We did it in less than a year. But in saying that, we had a rowing coach called Gus Barton, who's rode the Atlantic twice. He coached many teams to world records. And so he would give us a training plan every week, which we would have to, well, we didn't have to follow it. You chose to follow it or not. And he would adapt to depending on, like the guys were working five days a week. So depending on what their schedules were like or my schedule was like, he would adjust it or you would do what you could. Yes. But basically he was building us up. He was strengthening our core and our movements and building up the time we spent on the rowing machine, the air because it's cold. So I mean, my final row before we left for like a mirror, I was to do two hours on the

11:23rowing machine. Now, two hours on the rowing machine is a lot harder than rowing two hours at sea, believe or not, because you're just you're the rowing machine and quite often just a wall and a gym in front of you. So mind-nominally boring. Whereas at sea, you've got everything around you, the beauty and the waves to negotiate and the crew members and it's much, much easier to do. But my last row for us, I rode 27,000 kilometers and kilometers meters. And so I thought I'd just do the 30,000 just to make it, to make up to the 30. And that felt quite okay because I'd built it up and built it up and built it up. So then, but when we went to sea in Lagomera, it was a lot hotter than we'd expected it to be. We were told it was going the first week would be quite cool and we might need our full weather gear because it might be storms and storms. And when we left Lagomera, it was baking hot. And so when you, I rode out for us, three of us rode out for us and I went for a break in the cabin, two tiny cabins and it was like 40 degrees in the cabin.

12:27So you couldn't move in the cabin without pouring with sweat. So that idea that your bum is beginning to get raw from the rowing, I couldn't stop rowing and you're drenched in sweat and if you're not drenched in sweat, you're hit by sea water. So you couldn't really keep it dry. So it was a constant battle. And you painted quite a sort of romantic, notional picture of the Atlantic, the sea, the sea skate, the wildlife. But what occurred to me was the notion of something like the darkness and then the epicness of the sea because obviously you're doing it day in, you know, doing it night and day. So I wondered what it was like wearing it in the dark of night versus in the daytime and what sort of thought processes you were going through. The first thing I noticed when we started rowing and we started to get away from land was just the vastness of the ocean and sound silly but the quantity of water, you just become aware of so much water. And it was almost like my brain wouldn't let me experience that without trying to protect

13:33me from something. I've been constantly trying to figure out what my brain was doing but I'd see this huge vast amount of water and initially it was just sort of rolling very gently. So your brain is dealing with the fact it used to be on land and everything is still and now you're in a space where everything is actually moving and it looks like a cloud field. I mean, or a field just beside you as it rolls down and underneath and off and away it goes. But it's actually water and it's moving and there's such a vast amount of it. My brain was, I'd begin to see things like silhouettes of farm houses and fields and trees and telegraph poles and things which happened throughout, it didn't stop. It was always like my brain was going, don't worry, don't worry, everything's okay, look, it looks like land. And there was even at one point where I saw there was a wave sort of broke and it was white. And my brain, half my brain said, there's the sheep, you see it's land. Mother brain went, oh shut up, it's obviously away. And the other brain was going, no, no, no, it's a sheep, it's a sheep, don't worry, don't

14:34worry, it's a sheep. Look, there's farm land, it's okay, it's not just water. You know, so I don't know what was going on, there's constant battle with my brain trying to protect me from the fear of not being on land or somewhere I don't know what it was or the fear of the other lawn. Yes, and trying to rationalize and make sense of escape that you've not been at sea for so long ever before, so it's totally unique to your brain as well. Yeah, exactly. And I love to all night time. At night time you'd be, it would do the same, it would be like, I would see silhouettes of woodland forest and it's almost like at night time you'd be rowing down this river which was really, when it was a full minute it was absolutely beautiful because you're rowing down like it's an optical illusion but it's like you're rowing down a river of moonlight. It's quite, it's quite incredible to see, but when it's darker you're rowing down this sort of dark river and either side always there was trees and fences and all sorts, you know what I mean, it was quite incredible and never, never, it was always this vague sense

15:38of something, it wasn't like specific trees or it was just a vague sense. And some of the other guys experienced that as well, but I don't know if they experienced farmhouses and tell you that. In terms of your sort of mental health and resilience, were you comparing notes with what was going on for you as you went through? Yeah, but to a point, I also began to get hallucinations of people on the boat beside this and I told a couple of the boys this and they were quite alarmed because they said, well, you've got to tell us that because it means that you're depleted to something you're dehydrated or you're so sleep deprived that, you know, something may go wrong and they were right to an extent, but these hallucinations I had them all the way through and only in the white navigation lights that we had on the boat, never when I used the red head torch, that's really quite interesting. And if I'm going to meet with some of the University, Edinburgh University who is a specialist in sleep and sleep deprivation, because after a few days, we were all sleep deprived.

16:42Of course. We were all in what I call breakdown and so what happens is that that doesn't go away. You just get used to it and so in terms of breakdown, that comes in waves in people. So there's peaks and troughs and as a crew staying together, you have to negotiate and navigate everyone's breakdowns, including your own, all the way through the journey. So that was one of the most significant parts of this trip for me was how we all managed to manage the breakdowns and because we're also, you're also in constant pain, all of us were in terrible pain and you seem to get new pains every day, different parts of your body would break down as well. So that for me was a huge, huge part of the journey. And in terms of giving space to each other whilst you processed whatever mental angst might be going on, I mean, was it quite sort of demonstrative and loud sometimes and sort of spontaneous, you know, tears or emoting or it can't have been a quiet experience? It wasn't loud in that sense. You'd have, it's basically pressure builds up in people and you'd have outbosts and

17:45then we were quite good at apologising and knowing when to apologise and accepting an apology and moving on. That was a huge cathartic feeling for everyone. And there's a thing that I was trying to process the whole experience and the interaction of everyone on board and the thing that I, the conclusion I came to was that in any of these group situations, especially when you're under incredible pressure, there's something that you really need. And I'll tell you that word in a second to make things function, but what was interesting for me was there was another couple of guys that we met who were going and they also left from Edinburgh, but I met them afterwards. One of the guys is Jamie's ex-military and after they had finished as well, we were chatting about the role and he used to work, he used to drive boats for the special boat service, very small teams of elite soldiers, sailors as well as the navy.

18:48But you know, top military people, Carcinnell and he said they had two rules on the boat and one was that if you make a mistake or you're out of order, you apologize and you also accept apology from other people and you move on. And the other thing, and this is what really surprised me and this was the conclusion that I'd come to myself, but I was surprised that the used in the military was he said you need to have kindness and I just went, oh my God, it's exactly, exactly what you need. So in terms of the military saying you need kindness, you need to look after each other, you need to be kind. I thought that was absolutely tremendous. And interestingly is that's the conclusion I came to myself because there's no place for aggression and anger because you're so frustrated, that's what naturally comes out. But if you can somehow turn that into kindness for people and forgiveness, then it's, Johnny Forever is so much better and healthier and I think people can use that and not just in crossing the ocean, it's they can use it in any group dynamic.

19:52Yes, extraordinarily powerful stuff. And the hope is that you've arrived a tighter unit of teamwork makes the dream work. It sounds like you are very close and it could have gone either way it would seem. Yeah. And you know what? We've I'm very proud that we managed to hold it together when it got incredibly difficult. The pressure that it puts on on relationships is you can't imagine. That's why some crews end up having fisticuffs, couples break up, you know what I mean? So it's intolerable, the pressure it puts on people and the fact that we came through that as friends is a testament to something about us, which is extraordinary. And you know, and we did this together and nobody can ever take this away from us. We've got this now and that's a bond that will never, never break between us. And the stuff you're describing is as the mental processing that's nothing you could have prepared for before you suddenly find yourself adrift at sea, but rowing. Now we had two wonderful psychologists to help us out with many sessions with them.

20:53And they gave us a groundwork to work from. So probably without that, who knows? So if anyone is thinking of rowing in Austrian, have psychology support, psychologists talk to them about what do you need to do to prepare for that and what you need to do to remember when you're out there and to have things that you can, places you can go to protect you from the worst excesses of our vulnerabilities. And it's called the Talentska Whiskey Challenge is a flotilla of vessels, isn't it? Talentska Whiskey Atlantic Challenge. Yeah. And yes, so every year it varies, but there was 43 boats in the fleet this year. And there are boats that are boats still out there? Still doing the trend. Yeah, yeah. And presumably it's about finishing. It's not literally about the race. It's just the challenge of getting across, I would say. Well, our club are very competitive. So we wanted to be competitive. We wanted to do, you know, and doing it as a five is still quite unusual. So it was a chance, you know, we got the right conditions.

21:53We could have set the record for the five, but quite early on, we got, we had technical difficulties and we lost power three times. So by the end of the first week, we knew we were out of competition. And in terms of morale, certainly for me, I've felt completely debilitated about that because I felt as if I'd let a lot of people down. They remember, I mean, we're already in breakdown. So I'm not thinking straight. And, but I was awful overwhelmed by the sense of letting people down. And when Sean and my wife had booked a flight to come out and stay with us, expecting us home by a place in by a certain date, I know it looked like we weren't going to end being with that date. So I'd messed up that as well. So I'd let down my wife and kids. And it was just quite overwhelming. But in fact, I spoke to Sean after one night shift and I learnt, don't phone home after a night shift because you've got the sat phone, you'd have a short phone call. And I said, I was so tired, I was so tired, I was so down. And as you said, she said, she just said, I love you.

22:54And that was me. I was broken. I just couldn't speak. My lip was trembling and I was like, all over the place. You know, I said, are you okay, are you okay? You sound like you're drunk. I'm certainly not drunk. I'm just in bits. So you do go to very dark, lonely places. But I was a wonderful actor, a friend of mine, Bertie Porto, who rode the Atlantic in 2011 before it became the Tarnasca whiskey Atlantic Challenge. And I don't even know what position he came in the race because it never really bothered me because Bertie rode the Atlantic. That's all that matters. And I thought it was a little moment of release for me because I went, it doesn't matter about as being competitive, it just matters that we stay together and we finish. And so that's what I've taken from it is that we rode the Atlantic together, we did it. It doesn't matter where we finished, you know. We didn't get the podium finished, it doesn't matter. Yes. And that's certainly the external perspective. It's just, you know, everyone I know connected to you and I have felt, you know, from

23:59a far, just nothing but immense pride at the fact that you did it. I mean, you're, as you've said, you've done it. There are a few things and gale Everest that have rode the Atlantic. It is a tremendous triumph. And hearing that, I mean, and people are like, there's a woman came up to me and just I didn't know her in the supermarket the other day saying, oh, we're so proud of you. I don't know you, but I saw you in the news and we're just so proud of you. And then she walked off and I was really touched and moved by that and hearing how people have been affected is, is really, you know, it's really moving. I do, I do love it. I didn't realize how much you can affect other people, you know, so that's wonderful thing when people express that to us, you know, it makes it all worthwhile. It makes all the pain worthwhile when you know you affected people in such a positive way. And I just reiterate the kindness word that you concluded, you know, there is that adage, be kind, be kind, be kind, but most of all be kind to yourself. And you know, absolutely, totally Chris, honestly, because you can give yourself, you're in breakdown. You can give yourself such a hard time as I did, I gave myself, I was so hard on myself,

25:04but I found strength and I gave myself a good talking to it. I managed to find a way, I empowered myself about three quarters of way through because I was up and down, up and down, up and down. And then I just gave myself a good talking to and I went, right, no, you just, just be present and enjoy it as much as you possibly can. And it's such a microcosm of life's mental health journey, don't you, it goes in waves. And obviously, the Atlantic is going to give and keep giving in the fact that you're struggling in, you know, things change, evolve different. The hallucinations you're experiencing as well, I mean, it's just such an extraordinary escape you've described. Well, there's one point where Alec, our skipper, he was trying to film some stuff to send back for social media. And I'd said my name and what I was doing and we were growing across for young people's mental health. And then he went, bro, okay. And then he paused for a second and he went, oh God, what about our mental health? Yes. I mean, it was just a moment of, we just laughed and we were like, oh, God, I know, we're going to sin. We're going nuts here.

26:06And you mentioned laughter there, what were the, there must have been extraordinary releases of, and the relief of laughter as a catharsis as well, I'm sure. Yeah, it was always delightful when we found something to, to laugh at. It was also a lovely moment where, again, Alec and myself, with a moment, a morning of, well, probably about an hour or so, of poetry aside, and we were just started reciting all the, and that was delightful. So I'm literally, oh, sorry, you went quite there. You recited what? Sorry. Oh, poetry. We did all the poetry we could remember. So it was like, maybe that's what we needed was more art on board to keep ourselves sane, you know, maybe there was a metaphor in that as well. And you've done a soundscape yourself of doing some rabbi barons poetry. I was, when I was reminding myself of the stuff that you've done in your career, you've actually read a, you've, you've recorded a lot of rabbi barons as well. Ah, for the BBC, yes, indeed, that was a while ago. I could just imagine you starting to pontificate the complete works of Shakespeare's you wrote across. Yeah. By the way, when we're going to come onto what, what I'd like to do is, is just go into

27:07some of the construct, because I think it could be lovely and delicious analogy stuff. So if we can agree that your clearing is the Atlantic, and we've been here, this is where we've been rowing across mentally in any case. So you just mentioned about, there is Shakespeare in the canopy there. So what type of poetry did you find yourself reciting? I did some Wilford Owen told a story of, I did a play a year ago called Not About Heroes, which is the meeting of Wilford Owen and Siegfried's as soon. In what was called the Craig Locker War Hospital in Edinburgh, they were sent there after us, after they came back in the front, both of them, and they met there in the hospital. And it's now Napier College or Napier University, as it is now. And so some of the Wilford Owen's stayed with me, but it was also reminding me, I told Ali the story of Stephen McDonald who wrote the play, he was also a brilliant actor and director. And he very kindly, because of myself and my friend Paul Feathersson, I put this, we wanted

28:11to put this play on ourselves and we did a, we created a tour around Feathersson in Scotland. Well, Stephen very kindly agreed to direct it for us, because he was up at the Citizens Theatre doing another play, I think he was doing the vortex, actually, with Rupert Everett. And it was he directed us, it was brilliant. So he knew the play inside out, he knew the period and all the rest of it, he knew the characters and he couldn't have had a better director, you know, so we put out a very safe hand. Now we toured with the show and we were partly through the tour. And Stephen phoned me up and said, would you, and Napier College, as it was called then, are doing a celebration of the armistice, for sort of armistice, and they've asked me to come and talk about Wilford Owen and C. Prysson, because they met at Craiglock at Warhorse, but oh, which is now Napier College. And that's where a lot of the play, in fact, that's where the whole player is set. And he said, would you guys come along and I'll do a talk, but you just come on and do a couple of scenes from the play. And we said, yeah, of course. And so there's a theater there, Napier College.

29:13And I remember, I was in the wings of boat to go on and I remembered that Wilford Owen had done plays in the Craiglock at Warhorse, and I imagined that this was a very same theater. And I imagined that Wilford Owen, who I was playing, was probably standing in this very spot before he went on during one of his plays. And in thinking that, I missed my cue, and I was late, but it was a great moment for me. You know, you actually played someone who was alive and standing in the very spot they were standing in, doing the very thing they were doing, which is acting. Yes. It's a bit like your mind went to somewhere even more present, because you're realising the sort of historical legacy of the moment of where you're standing, so it's very relatable, lovely. Yeah. Just borrowing from the construct of the good listening to stories of distinction and genius, this is obviously in spades a story of distinction and genius just from the very epic quest fact of what you've achieved.

30:13So to borrow from some of the construct, we'll talk about shaping, first of all, because it's four things that have shaped you. So how would you describe, and we don't have to make it as linear as this, but how would you say the journey has shaped you now that you've done it? I feel very humbled. I feel quite emotional saying that it was so hard physically and mentally. It was so overwhelmingly difficult, and then coming to conclusion about needing kindness and life and forgiveness, that's really powerful. And I think certainly in being a parent, I feel that the moment more connected to my children, I feel, I listen, I'm a better listening place to them and to people in my life, I guess. I think that's certainly what it seems to me at the moment. And people, I've done a few interviews and things, and I even did an interview when I was almost arriving into Antigua, and I realized that people were asking me questions, asking me to analyse what I've been through, and I, I'm not sure I was ready to analyse it,

31:16so I don't know what was coming out, and I realised, well, you know, the thing is, I'm going to keep analysing this probably for the rest of my life. So someone asked me a question at one point, me, me very from point to point, but that's my takeaway at the moment from it, is I feel very humbled by it in a good way. I don't mean that in a bad way, and I feel, as I said, in a better listening place to other people and what they may be experiencing in life. Lovely answer. And in terms of inspiring you, so how did the Atlantic, how did the journey inspire, would you say? Well, what have you said is inspiring. I don't know, it's just moments like, I don't know if I'm inspiring, but, rowing, rowing, rowing with a full moon, a night time across Atlantic, and going down that, as I said, that optical illusion of the river of light, and the warm air and rowing in the dark with a moon light with the top off and rowing, and realising that the nearest human habitation

32:16is the International Space Station, that's quite an experience, and it makes you feel very, very small, but, sort of, enormous at the same time, so, so part of everything ran about you. I don't know what it inspires me to do, but it just, it's certainly a lovely answer, because that was about awe-inspiring, the whole thing that you think it was. Oh, awe-inspiring. Yeah. Okay, awe-inspiring, I was certainly, yes, that's how you describe it. And in terms of star constellations, was there a particular guiding star that you related to? I was totally taken by Orion Hans, you know, Ryan and his glory, I don't know, their glory, but the star's head taught us how to always find a north star, for instance, and just the breadth of stars were just incredible. And also, quite early on, and it was down by the horizon on the port side, and, so talking east, and I was just right on the rise, there was this flash of light, explosion of light,

33:16and I went, what was that? And I like said, oh, it's, it's a moon flash. And I went, what was that? We'll just watch, and then, so there would be this flash of light, and then nothing. And then suddenly, the clouds sort of parted, and the moon appeared, and then started to rise. And it was just phenomenal, incredible, and I didn't see it again. We saw lots of shooting stars, you don't really get blazier, but then there'll be so a lot of them, and they were really clear, and they went off for quite a while, some of them. And then one night, again, it wasn't a moon flash, but we saw, it was quite high up, and it was just, so it was nobody or clouds or anything, just this explosion of light. We were rowing at night, there was this huge explosion, and we were like, what was that? And then you sort of go, wait a minute, we're not in contact with it, there could be a thud, what a wall we would live in a party, you know, we're in the middle of nowhere. But so, yeah, you see phenomena like that, in the night sky, and it's, yeah, as you see, you're awe-inspiring. It's just incredible. And, you know, bioluminescence across the ocean. That's quite incredible as well, you know. By the way, what's really profound is your own relationship to Orion's belt. So relatable to me because the middle star in Orion's belt is my navigation point to

34:21my sister's death. The day she was killed, I went outside and the star was that third, the middle star of Orion's belt. So wherever I have been historically since 1979, whenever I see Orion's belt, the middle star is always winking at me and that's Hazel. So that's, that's, that's really, really relatable. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Love that constellation more than any others. Oh, great. Yeah. In fact, someone offered to tattoo it for me on my body somewhere, so I'm going to go for that. Wonderful. And so, in the construct now, it's two things that never felt to grab your attention, which in the construct normally is all squirrels, but there aren't many squirrels unless you're hallucinating at sea. You have described flying fish, but mid row, mid everything you've described, mid turbulence, mid joy, mid, mid all the gamut of human motions. What would, what would never felt to grab your attention, even if it's the shooting stars or Orion's belt? What things never felt to grab your attention? Well, I haven't told you about my hallucinations, certainly one of them would be my hallucinations. So they were people on board the boat. First of all, the first one I saw was my wife on the aft cabin.

35:27I saw this figure and I'm like, oh, Sean, that's, that's, oh, Sean is here, great, great. And then the next night, it was, and the weird thing is my brain knew it was like the flag pull and the flags. It was, it was something hanging off the side of the boat. My brain knew it was something physical that I was seeing as this vision, but the visions were really clear. So the next night, there was a woman standing in absolute, I don't know what's the flag, I know what's the flag pull, I know what's the flag, but there was a woman standing on the aft cabin facing east this time. And she looked like a woman from like the clearances in Scotland of sort of periods, which she's got a shore and a shore as on a scarf on her head. And she was dressed in period clothes just gazing out east. And, and there was other characters, there was, there was three people appeared right beside Alec, a skip of when he was rowing and we'd music playing one now, we'd music playing a few nights, but the speakers broke, so we didn't have any music for most of the time. And they were sort of bopping along to the music, but they were real faces, real people,

36:29and I'm not that angry, I recognize. And then there was, there was a very profu looking black African woman who was on a port side looking west. At that point, I was thinking, am I in a sixth sense? Am I actually seeing dead people on board, what, they're so clear, they're so clearly people. And my brain's going, no, no, it's just, it's just an hallucination, it's just, yeah, I know it's an hallucination, but that's so clear. She's looking at, why is she gazing west like that? And, and eventually, I'd see lots of people, there's some, some were like protest puppets, faces, demon faces, but they weren't as interesting as they actually were real people faces that I saw. And, and then eventually there was, I was rowing and there was this young woman came up and came up at speed beside me and then looked on, run, looked me straight in the face and I got afraid. And then I got angry, I said, come on, no more, no more, you can all just fall down.

37:35And I didn't see any hallucinations for a few nights after that, but as always, my brain just shut down that I couldn't see it anymore. But then- Was it typically the dead of night or was it any time of day this could- Yeah, no, it was always night time, always night time. In the navigation, the white, I would call it the ghostly light of the navigation light, and never the red head torch light, so that's quite interesting in itself. Brain, whatever brain chemistry was going on, you know, so it's sleep deprived. I don't think I was so dehydrated and I was still eating, so I imagine it's just sleep deprivation. Coupled with a heightened, heightened sense of presence, I would say, because it's just so unique to find yourself in that seascape. I mean, that Atlantic is providing such a beautiful story scape in what you're describing here. What about fear? Did you ever feel scared if their stones kicking up? You know, what we didn't really feel scared. We lost power. We had to roll at night time in the dark without the navigation light, without the AIS system,

38:36which means that you can see other boats and they can see you, so no one could see us. And also, I didn't hand steer, I was always drawing, but a couple of the guys had to take tons hand steering and following a compass, which is furious concentration and doing it at night time is so hard to try not to fall asleep and you're trying to keep it on course. And hand steering is very easy to overcompensate and then you have to pull it back again and before you know what the boat's all over the place, you know, really, really hard stuff to do. And so that was concerning, but I know we could see us, but it was fear. We were quite lucky in that sense and we trusted the boat. There were some very, very big waves, but we never really felt threatened. And Alek and Ed kept us south as much as possible to avoid the full on the beam on winds it might tip us over. And when we heard that one of the American boats had been tipped over and they had to be rescued, we presumed that's what had happened to them. We turned out it wasn't, there was more technical problems, but when you hear that one of the boats has been tipped over and they had to take to the life raft and rescued by a tanker or a container ship or something, then you sort of

39:41go home, right? Well, maybe we were right to keep going south and avoid these winds, you know? But Ed and Jo, we didn't, we didn't, don't think we experienced much fear. We didn't see any sharks. So when we had to get in the water, I didn't get in the water, but so a couple of guys got in the water to clean the hull. Because we hadn't seen the sharks, we didn't really have that sense of shark turn about us. So we didn't even have that fear of getting in the water, you know? But I think if we'd seen a shark, then absolutely, we would have been very aware, but it always was like, you know, are there any big fish in the sea? We haven't seen any, you know? So I'm on them briefly, but that was it. Okay, and I'm so full of aberration because just that the sheer scale and epicness of it and the how far away you were from what was familiar to you, I think I felt scared for you a few times. And I know when I spoke to Sean, you were mid, you don't just got going and she was having to handle Christmas and you're knowing that your beloved husband is just out in the big expanse. I felt scared for you after I tried to say it. I can understand that, I can understand

40:42that because yeah, because when you're not doing it, you have no power over it. So I can understand why there is fear for other people because you can't affect it in any way, but we were there and having to get up and roll is so all all consuming. So you ride up physically, rowing or you're trying to wash yourself or eat some food and get some precious sleep. It wasn't a lot of time to be afraid, you know, it's you just have to go on and do the work. That's what it was like. It is keep on keeping on, you know, that adage which is keep on keeping on, just keep doing it. That's what you got to do. The only way to get through this is to keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, you know, and the pains we had, you know, the pain in my bum was just unbelievable and you've got to sit in every day and it was three weeks before I took any painkillers and then I was like knocking them back like crazy. But also your hands blister, your feet blister, the the ores smack off your shins. We get caught in the waves and they smack off your shins, you know, it's like

41:45I think it used to be a torture by some people. They used to smack people shins with bamboo poles. That's what it's like and the pain is, in fact, yesterday I caught my shin so it's still very delicate and the pain, because of that sort of the nerves running down the shin or they're about it, it goes right through your body and it's very painful when your your knees are all cut and scraped and your shins bruised and and that's just some of the pain. One of the guys he got his feet got infected and his knees swelled up and he couldn't nail it was now. He couldn't move for two days. Another woman from another boat she fell and hit her face first off the deck and she had a massive swelling coming out of her head and you know, so there's this pain you're living with pain constantly but here's the thing and something I realized in the boat, we knew it was going to end once we got to the other end, we got to the side, we knew it would stop, just get there, get there, fight through the pain, get there, it will stop and I had a whole new respect for people who have chronic pain and can't see a way out of it. My mother-in-law for instance had, she just

42:49died last year, she was an incredible woman but she lived in discomfort if not pain for most a lot of her life and so I really became very aware of people who cannot see the ending and just have to constantly live for that and find a way to be through that pain because we had a way out but it was most most uncomfortable. It's such a wonderful analogy about just the journey manning through life on this journey because it is just keep on keeping on it, there are so many analogies about just the journey of life and it's not over until it's over and keep going it will come to it, I mean it's just a you know, people will want to speak to you for years on end, I'm sure about the sort of seismic learning that one can gleam from somebody who's done it, it's an epic quest of an extraordinary nature. But there was some, just this morning I read about a couple of guys who's in and guys and they were saying they finished the row and they were saying we loved every minute of it and I was a little bit jealous of that, I was like oh my god but I don't know who's

43:53journey is going to be more valuable in life, somebody who really suffered through the journey or someone who would think it was just brilliant, I don't know. I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with the suffering, I think crafting, I think I think you learn more, the pain, you know, out of adversity comes great creativity, no pain, no gain, all the other additives, I think they're probably lying. Yeah, could be. So Cal, as this has been your moment in the sunshine of the good listening to as you row across the Atlantic, I'm going to ramp up to is there anything else you want to say, but I'm just going to pull out a bit of a comedy crop behind me, this is called the passing the golden batten moment, wait, so it's a golden relay batten, but who do you think would most appreciate within the journey meaning of what you've just done, who would most appreciate a good listening to in passing the batten onto them? I think my friend Tony Curran would love to go on the journey with you, we were fortunate, but I was away, there was a BBC TV show called

44:56Mayflies, which Sean and I were both in, but the two leads were Tony Curran and Martin Comston, and if you haven't seen it yet, Mayflies is on BBC iPlayer and you'll need a box of tissues because it's very, very moving, but it's almost like Tony, it was almost like the part was creative for Tony, it was just perfect role and it was great to see, you know, brilliant actor friend of you is getting this role that's so rich and gets them a chance to show off everything they've learned about their craft, and that's what it felt like with Tony, and yeah, you would love this Tony. And I'm very humbled myself by that recommendation because he's someone like you that I very much rate in respect and Mayflies is one of those things I'm yet to watch, but no, it's brilliant, because I was even moved in watching the micro clips of it as well, I know the basic premise, so thank you for that, so that is passing the golden batten keys and your mission judges to accept it as to furnish just sort of warming production clang in the background. So, and now, as this has been your moment, and thank you so much for taking a second row pass

45:57through the clearing, that was such a rich conversation, is there anything else that you'd like to say? No, just thank you, really. It's always lovely talking to you, and it was lovely the first time, and then this time was fabulous, I loved it. Me too, and if you have obviously been listening here on Facebook or on Buzzsprout, Cal was in the clearing about a year and a half ago, and thank you for saying yes, then, but since then, of course, you've just overcome the most extraordinary epic quest, and I have nothing but love, admiration, and respect for you, and thank you for sharing, I mean, that was so insightful, some of the stuff that you've just shared. I'd even look, she needs to be a court, we should forgot to do it, but that's all right. Ah, captain's up to mental, I thought he might be something from the tempest or something, but that was too prescriptive maybe, but what we're still recording, this can be a bit of captain's locks up mental, so. No, I remember this from Julius Caesar. Do I do it just now? Yes, please. Do you remember last time we recorded you came back into reread the speech that you read at my wedding? That's right, yeah. So I keep getting, you know, by one get one free, you keep coming back, which is awesome. So, yes, please, to your Julius Caesar.

47:00Well, I suppose this is the, this is the, but what I take from this piece is that there's no, there's no point in putting things off. Now is the time, just call for it, which is what I did with this Atlantic challenge, you know, just, just go for it. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. All the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea, I'll be now afloat. I mean, must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures. So that's it. Lovely. Thank you so much, Cal, a privilege talking to you. That was just amazing. Thank you. And a rich listening indeed. And so, you've been listening to Cal Mechanism. This has been stories of distinction and genius. And in a nutshell, that's you, that is, it's extraordinary. And I look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you very much indeed. And Jude Knight, you've been listening to the good listening to show with me, Chris Grimes. If you'd like to be in the show too, or indeed gift an episode to capture

48:00the story of someone else with me as your host, then you can find out how care of the series strands, the good listening to show.com website. And one of these series strands is called legacy life reflections. If you've been thinking about how to go about recording your life story, all the life story of somebody close to you for posterity, but in a really interesting, effortless and creative way, then maybe the good listening to show can help. Using the unique structure of the show, I'll be your host, as together we take a trip down memory lane to record the five, four, three, two, one of either you or their life story. And then you can decide whether you go public or private with your episode. Get in touch if you'd like to find out more. Tune in next week for more stories from the clearing. And don't forget to subscribe and review wherever you get your podcasts.