Would you row across the Atlantic with someone like me? I certainly wouldn’t | Adrian Chiles

Here are three of my favourite uses of figures of speech to describe the competence of footballers. Actually, there’s four, but one is too rude. Oh, to hell with it, I’ll share it anyway. It came from a caller on a post-match local radio phone-in and concerned a goalkeeper in an alarmingly lousy run of form. “He couldn’t keep a clean sheet on his honeymoon,” the caller said. If you don’t get it, probably best not to give it too much thought. Another one from a radio phone-in, related to me by the commentator and former athlete Steve Cram, was used to paint a vivid picture of an enthusiastic Sunderland full-back who did a lot of running with the ball without ever seeming to be fully in control of it. “He’s like a dog with a balloon,” wailed a despairing Sunderland fan.

The other two come from the same man, my late friend Jeff Farmer. A football reporter turned TV executive turned board director at the club I support, he was the kind of old-school Brummie I don’t come across so much any more. He had a good way with words. After being soundly beaten by a Blackburn Rovers team that featured in midfield an energetic, abrasive scouser called David Thompson, Jeff said to me: “That Thompson’s like a wasp in your car – an absolute effing nuisance.” But my favourite Jeffism is my favourite because it’s relevant in the real world as well as in football. Of one of our players coming back from injury, Jeff said: “He’s worth a few goals. OK, you wouldn’t want to row the Atlantic with him, but he’s a decent striker.”

Ever since I heard this – nearly 20 years ago now – at some stage I ask myself the question of anybody whose close acquaintance I make. Would I want to row the Atlantic with them? Obviously, I don’t mean literally. I wouldn’t want to do that with anyone. And though I’m not even quite sure what it means in the metaphorical sense, I do know who does and doesn’t make it into my boat. It’s not that much to do with how much I like them, interestingly. Although I suppose if you’re sharing a confined space with someone for a month or more, totally exhausted, with your lives in danger, it would be advantageous if they didn’t get on your wick too much.

Reliability is obviously key. This voyage is no place for a flake. Whatever it takes, they’ve got to keep going, no matter what. I want them dogged and with as much as grit as a salt-spreading lorry in mid-winter. They need to be upbeat as well, although not relentlessly cheery as that could get a bit wearing. When things are going badly they’d need to acknowledge as much. No Pollyannas, thank you.

But what do I know? I thought I’d better ask someone who had actually rowed the Atlantic. I considered looking up Debra Searle, the woman who set off to do it with her then husband, only for him to, in her words, develop “an irrational fear of open ocean”. So he got rescued, leaving her to do it on her own. She’s married to someone else now. I decided not to bother her. And I was only marginally less squeamish about troubling James Cracknell, Olympic legend, adventurer and transatlantic rower. He and Ben Fogle spent Christmas 2005 in the mid-Atlantic, arriving in Antigua after nearly 50 days at sea. It seemed something of a cheek to bother the great man with something as trivial as a metaphor in reference to something he’d done for real.

I am terribly glad he returned my call, because his take is fascinating, even though his main point was that I was asking the wrong question. He said it’s less about being happy with your rowing partner than being happy with yourself. Because if things aren’t quite right there, it’s not going to end well. Apart from anything else, if there’s just the two of you, you’re going to have to row in shifts. You’ll never be rowing together, therefore the rowing is essentially a solo enterprise. “You’re not actually rowing with anyone,” he says. “So don’t ask with whom you want to row; the main question is, do you want to row with yourself?” Hmm. I can say with some degree of certainty that the very last person on earth I would want to row the Atlantic with is me.

James says that before he set off, he thought that, as in his Olympic rowing career, the main thing he’d want from his co-rower would be a never-say-die competitive spirit. “But it turned out it’s not about that. It’s more about having someone who can see the positive side when there really isn’t one. And you need someone relatively cheerful, not a grump. I mean, it’s all bad enough as it is without being stuck with a grump. And you need to be a problem-solver. Things crop up all the time and they need sorting. It’s all the simple stuff. Timekeeping is massive. Don’t be late. Trust me, if you’re rowing two hours on, two hours off, and your rowing partner is two minutes late taking the oars off you, it’s really serious stuff. And obviously it’s all quite intimate; you’re sharing everything. Apart from anything else, you’re both naked the whole time so you really have to be with someone with whom you’re happy to have it all out there, in every sense.”

Cheerful? Positive? Problem- solver? Good timekeeper? The longer I listened to this list of attributes, the clearer it became that I didn’t have any of them, apart from the business of letting it all, er, hang out. And this led me to a rather dark truth: all these years I’ve had the temerity to be quietly judging people, weighing up whether I’d like to row the Atlantic with them, and I’ve never once considered whether any of them would have fancied rowing the Atlantic with me. If they did, I’m afraid I’d have to refuse the opportunity. I’m really not made of the right stuff.

An evening with Adrian Chiles
Join Adrian on 10 October 2024, 7.30pm-8.30pm, when he will discuss with fellow columnist Zoe Williams his brilliantly bemused tour of British life as captured in his new collection of Guardian columns. Book tickets at theguardian.live.com