RealSurf Surfers' Forum

Mick Fanning’s mother was the guest on Conversations (ABC radio) today.

Why?
Genuine question, is she known for something else?

I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s even a book. It was a decent listen while I was cooking though.

Her being a community nurse for the poor in Birmingham, migrating to Australia, 5 kids, the breakdown of the marriage and dealing with the repercussions of that, being a mental health services manager in a number of locations, Mick’s rise to glory, being Mick’s manager throughout his career, the unexpected death of 2 sons. Sharks etc. It’s mostly not specifically about Mick, except as one of her children. A women’s life.

I did not know she was a Pom.

Funny how little we know of people. Just about everyone has a radio conversation in them. At least once they’ve lived a bit

steve shearer wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 19, 2021 3:48 pm

I did not know she was a Pom.

Yes, a Pom. But very much an Irish Pom.

Losing two kids. Jesus, tough going for a mother/parent.

Everyone's lives are epic.

Nick Carroll wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 19, 2021 7:19 pm

Everyone's lives are epic.

That's a most excellent perspective Nick

foamy wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 19, 2021 4:53 pm

steve shearer wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 19, 2021 3:48 pm

I did not know she was a Pom.

Yes, a Pom. But very much an Irish Pom.

Mick’s got the flag of his clan on his inner arm.

Yeah, Mum would describe herself as an Irishwoman ahead of being an Englishwoman. And Fanno’s dad was an Irishman.
As I recall, Fanno’s Mum’s only comment about Mick’s surfing style when he first got sponsored at about age 12.
He surfed like a duck with his arms, but he had speed.

Small shitty waves this morning so had a quick surf with my son and then we dumped the boards on the beach and did a few swim outs from the shore out the back and then in again as his confidence is growing in the surf but he doesnt really spend much time swimming. Must make a habit of taking his board off him and making him swim in.

...

This is heartwarming. I can see a feature article or perhaps a novel in the making here.
Maybe a podcast.

Nick Carroll wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 19, 2021 7:19 pm

Everyone's lives are epic.

Not really, in fact, hardly at all.

Unless you count lives of "quiet desperation" epic.

Most people are boring as batshit, and quite stupid.

I think C.S Lewis illustrated in the Scewtape Letters, which this passage is indicative of:

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

Steve going on a major downer here in Jordan Peterson style. Contemptuous of human frailties and condescending at a mythic level.

Contemptuous?

au contraire.