Digger to the stars

world champion
Originally uploaded by Grain Damaged

Back in 2001, for reasons I won't go into too much, I was a bit on the skint side. On the other hand, I really, really wanted to go to the Eugene Celebration. So, what does a man do?

Volunteer. That's what he does.

So off I trotted to the Eugene Celebration offices and I offered my services.

"We've got just the thing for you," they said. "We're having a sand art competition..."

"Sounds... interesting," I said. "Pop my name down for 4 hours."

In the meantime, something horrible involving planes and tall buildings happened. I'm sure you remember: so you can imagine I was wondering whether anything would happen at all. I showed up on the day to find everything cancelled for the day EXCEPT the sand art.

When I got there, I was introduced to a rather engagingly charming bloke called from Cleveland called Carl Jara, who produced a Scooby Doo comic from his bag. It had a rather silly cover depicting Scooby emerging from the middle of a cake with a rather shocked Shaggy looking on.

"We're doing this," he said. "I reckon the kids'll love it, what with all the stuff in the news..."

And so we did.

Sand art is an odd discipline. It requires hours of prep work, which is hand-blisteringly, back-breaking work for a poor civilian like me. Then, if the sand is rubbish (and apparently it was that day), the best-packed sand can sometimes collapse, causing on-the-fly alterations to be made to the entire sculpture.

However, Carl was calm throughout (mostly) and kept me going with cracks about giving up smoking (I'd made the decision to quit not knowing about Al-Qaeda's plans and had spent the last three days wondering whether a Day of National Mourning was really now the best day to stop...), me being British and a never-ending stream of fascinating trivia about sand, Ohio and the idiotic questions asked by the general public.

Eight hours later, we'd finished. I was damn proud of my contribution to the festival, and well chuffed to have helped such a nice bloke.

And now, after visiting his flickr page, I find he is the 2008 World Champion Sand Sculptor. I'm made up for him. Well done, Carl. Proud to know you, mate.