I've never been mugged, although I once had my wallet inexpertly lifted by a Romanian female who, when I declined her kind offer of a meaningful 30-minute relationship in exchange for $US10, decided to help herself to my meagre funds.

I have on occasion exchanged pleasantries with the odd strange woman, most of whom have looked at me strangely and fled, but I have thus far avoided dozing in gutters. Furthermore, I have resisted all entreaties to bungy jump, white water raft or expose myself to physical danger in any way, my father's words "don't do anything silly" ringing in my ears.

What remains unspoken between father and son is the knowledge that one of the burdens of membership of Clan Willems is the attraction which it exerts on misfortune.

We are particularly adept at incurring the wrath of the weather gods and my mother long ago became accustomed to enduring flood, snow, cyclones, earthquakes and volcanic disturbances whenever she and dad left the relative safety of their home.

I say "relative" as their house and the trees that surround it have been struck by lightning innumerable times and if there was but a single thunderbolt loosed from above in all of southeast Queensland, it would lock on to my parents' northside address like a laser-guided smart bomb and send dad flying from his favourite chair and mum scrambling for cover under the bed.

Still, I thought as the 35°C heat of a Mediterranean summer radiated from the deck of the small cruise ship on which I was holidaying, I was safe enough here.

The weather was perfect and my ploy to escape the Olympics had succeeded beyond all expectations. The Games may have been in progress just a short hop across the Mediterranean in Athens, but the ship only received the BBC world television service. Given that until curry eating became an Olympic sport, Britain would continue to languish in the medal count, the BBC chose to ignore the Games.

Thus, as my fellow Australians succumbed to mass incontinence at the achievements of Thorpie and assorted Olympian deities, the BBC contented itself with the occasional coverage of Turkish weightlifters and fleeting references to the valiant efforts of its athletes, ever glorious in ignominious defeat.

On this afternoon, having checked the progress of the Turkish weightlifters and noting that the cocktail hour - this being any time between noon and midnight - loomed, I headed up on deck.

"Hmmm," I thought, sniffing the air and nodding to the bar tender. "I believe there might be a change coming." And as I uttered the thought, a light breeze skated across the mirror-calm surface of our anchorage.

I was on the point of ordering another refreshing glass of barely drinkable French white when the storm struck at a speed later reported as being in excess of 100km/h, sweeping the trays of glasses from the open-sided bar. Women screamed and men swore as glass shattered and smashed and barmen grabbed at errant bottles.

"Another white wine," I yelled but the order was lost in the gale. Looking up, I saw white deck chairs flying across the bay, lifted from the open deck and carried into the far distance as the ship heeled and passengers went sliding across the deck.

It then occurred to me that while we were at anchor we were moving backwards and appeared to be heading for a rocky point which was disturbingly close.

Clutching at the bar for support, I looked to the other side where a large cruiser of the type favoured by Middle East Arab oil billionaires had also dragged its anchor and was swinging towards us, intent on ramming us amidships.

"Another white wine," I yelled but no one was listening. In about three minutes, I figured, we'd hit the rocks as the wind raged and the sea seethed.

We were, I would think, a couple of hundred metres from disaster when the deck shuddered to the vibration of the engines and, ever so slowly, we stopped our rearward progress and began to bear up into the wind and head out of the bay.

We had, by now, been herded inside where the more pessimistic of my fellows were fondling orange lifejackets and scribbling letters to their loved ones.

It was an hour before order again ruled whereupon the captain blustered in his Ukrainian accent that in all his years at sea, he had never experienced such weather at this time of the year.