You may imagine us here at Global Cement Towers always beavering away on the next issue, collating information from around the world, updating the website, LinkedIn and Twitter and forever working on the next cement-related event and for most of the time it is indeed just like that. However, 'all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy' and so we are sometimes forced to go away on holiday to recharge our batteries, to be able to come back to work and to toil even harder.
So, in order to relax, I entered a yacht race that saw us sailing 160 miles in the storm-lashed seas on the west coast of Scotland, as well as running up and down a total of five hills (they call them mountains here in Britain) over a distance of 60 miles, some in fog, some in the dark. This 'holiday' - my idea of heaven - is my wife's idea of sheer hell.
First of all, I had to assemble the crew: they all had to be strong runners, ideally with some sailing experience as well, although as it turned out, they nearly all ran better than they sailed. We had a crew member go lame only 10 days before the race, and had to recruit a stand-in at the last moment.
Just getting the chartered yacht to the start of the race - The Scottish Islands Peaks Race - is a feat in itself: We had to drive 400 miles to pick up the boat, then sail it to the famous Crinan Canal, pass through the 15 locks on the canal and then sail up to the start of the race in Oban - and that all took three days of travel in itself. No wonder some other entrants didn't even make it to the start.
The race itself started at 12 noon exactly with a 4 mile run around the hills to the south of Oban, in blazing sunshine, before we runners were rowed back to the waiting yachts for a Le Mans-style racing start. Racing against 38 other yachts - some of them up to 35 tonnes - in the confines of Oban bay was very exciting indeed, since any collisions would have been excrutiatingly expensive.
Once free of the confines of the bay, we set sail for Salen, a tiny village on the island of Mull. However, the winds failed us and we were all soon drifting in a flat calm. Here we were able to enlist the use of our secret weapon - oars. Using rowlocks that had been built at the nuclear power station down the road, we used our 3m-long oars to row the yacht at 1 knot past at least another dozen boats and to find some wind, whereupon we managed to sail away, leaving them in our wake. Eventually they all caught up (we were one of the smallest boats in the race) and we came into Salen in nearly last place.
Our runners rowed ashore and in the gathering gloom and then in the dark they climbed Ben More Mull (966m), finding some very tricky checkpoints along the way. The runners took 11 hours to return, arriving back at 7am, having considered bivvouacing in very tough conditions. We rowed out into the Sound of Mull, looking for wind and eventually found it - lots of it: We rounded the coast off Duart Castle in a Force 8 Gale and sailed through the perilous waters off the notorious Gulf of Corryvreckan down towards Jura. A number of boats gave up at this point, for lack of wind, but we seemed to sail well all the same. No lack of wind for us - for now.
We found a mooring buoy in Craighouse Bay, and instead of trying to climb the mountains in the dark, we had a few hours sleep and started at first light. Alas, the cloud base was down to 300m, so that I never saw the three hills we climbed - visibility had reduced to only 30m in places. We took 9 hours to navigate the 14 miles and climb the 4500 feet (1386m) of the Paps of Jura.
Arriving back at the boat, we found that the wind had once again dropped to zero. We rowed our yacht out into the Sound of Jura, looking for wind, and we were still looking for it when darkness eventually fell. Some time in the night, the fog came down and the wind got up, while the boat's GPS started to experience periods of confusion due to a damaged antenna. It was at this point that I thought that navigating the perils of the global cement industry - with booms and busts and cartel allegations and labour unrest and the Arab Spring and all the rest of it - might be a little bit like trying to navigate a yacht in the fog, at night, with a broken GPS, knowing that the rocks are nearby. At least when the dawn broke and the fog lifted we could see the rocks.
The tides around the Mull of Kintyre are strong and dangerous - there is no hope for you if you arrive at the wrong time: Hope alone will not propel you against the current. At the crucial moment, the wind dropped again. We had no hope of rounding this perilous headland: we switched on our engine, retired from the race, and motored to the island of Arran. There, in fabulous sunshine, we quickly climbed and descended the last hill of the race - Goat Fell - and then made our way under engine-power to Troon. We had not managed to complete the race (like one third of the other boats) but we - at least - had finished the course. Now I'm back at work, thinking about what might have been - and about next year's race.