Just to add that the two pictures below the main one (note pint and pie, a good rower's diet) show the magic moment of my capsize - the only one so far, fingers crossed - and my early days as a born-again sculler on the darkly sinister Big Lake at Hinksey Park in Oxford which is crossed by an even more sinister bridge carrying a path known as the Devil's Backbone. This connects with the fragmentary remains of the famous road between North and South Hinksey built by undergraduates including Oscar Wilde under the altruistic direction of John Ruskin.

Wilde wrote about this with characteristic wit in Art and the Handcraftsman published in his collected Essays in 1879:

We were coming down the street—a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or cricket-field—when Ruskin going up to lecture in cap and gown met us. He seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat. He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all labour there was something noble. Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he wished. So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank—a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road. And what became of the road? Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly—in the middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice,when we came back for the next term there was no leader, and the 'diggers', as they called us, fell asunder.