Daffodils at Christmas

As we boarded the turbo-prop plane that took us to Guernsey for Christmas, there beside the door on the fuselage was a notice that informed us that for each passenger it would on take-off inject an average of 10.5 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. This seems an awful lot to me, but evidently it is supposed to be something to be proud of. Anyway we landed on the splendid new runway at Guernsey, which is able to take jets. When they take off one even gets a good whiff of them at our daughter’s house over a mile away; no doubt they deliver plenty more of the dodgy stuff into the atmosphere, but they get the hard-pressed worthies of Guernsey to London ten minutes quicker, and should a chap happen to be making a million a year, time must be rather valuable!

Guernsey is a beautiful island and the weather was a whole lot kinder than in Ireland and the north of England. Going down the sheltered hill into St Peter Port from the south, there were already quite a few daffodils out, before Christmas! There are plenty of sweet and environmentally aware people there, and much talk of ‘a sustainable future’ and so on. Meanwhile there are three cars for every two adults on that small island, many  of them great big gas-guzzlers entirely inappropriate for the narrow roads. No matter, petrol’s not taxed!

‘The States’ is what they call the Government there, duly elected democratically. Funny thing is that any real islander whom I met grumbles about it no end. “How’s it going J….?”  “Fine, still battling the Gestapo!”  He was very fed up about the new marina in St Sampson’s; blokes that used to keep their wee boat on a running mooring there for 70quid a year are now expected to stump up 500 or so for a berth on the pontoons. Another friend mentioned the fancy new police station, court house, gaol, helicopter and flashy cars - “but the policing was much better when you had  a few bobbies doing proper community policing! Some good people get elected, but they don’t seem to be able to change anything. The place is run by the Masons!”

Everyone was complaining about the new Condor ferry ‘Liberation’, which let a lot of people down in the run-up to Christmas because it was not fit to battle the gales. It’s a trimaran but apparently has an awful corkscrewing motion when it gets lively and, like the big catamaran that was withdrawn from the Dun Laoghaire/Holyhead run, has to be regularly inspected by divers for cracks below the waterline. If it does succeed in the end, Condor ferries will reap the profits - but not to worry, the States has underwritten the loan on it. It’s the new whizz form of capitalism that we’ve seen in action so much lately: profits go to the capitalists, liabilities go to the tax-payer.  Bankers love it!

I was asking an old boy about it all, when I fell in with him walking the cliffs. He was one of those lonely old widowers, who made me feel young with his wheezing, but full of stories. He was a few years older than me anyway, and had witnessed the liberation of the island as a small boy. “Well what can you expect, Guernseymen had to scratch a living any way they could. That Saumarez crowd got the best property on the island from Queen Elizabeth I because they were on the ball rescuing a couple of ships laden with gold robbed from the Spaniards, and delivering it to Herself in London.

“The Bailiffs and top men made big money towards the end of the war, exchanging millions of Reichsmarks and gold robbed from Jews (or their corpses) for Pounds Sterling. The Germans actually kept meticulous records, which were taken away by the British after the war, but nothing was heard of it after….”

It’s a proud boast these days that ‘everything is kept within the law’, and lawyers on the island earn a fortune by making sure of it. The place is awash with money that has been kept safely and legally out of the hands of those greedy taxmen. But in spite of that and of all the expenditure on big projects of doubtful benefit, besides the fact that the States are not in debt, I read in the Guernsey Press of ‘a radical new tax plan that would see islanders working until they are 70, an end to family allowances and a cap on how much the States can take in total in taxes and charges.’

Sounds like a Tory Government on steroids! However, according to an old lady from Sark, the battle on that island with the Barclay brothers seems to be winding down. The islanders’ reflexive tactic of wearing them down and frustrating them has apparently reached a point where the Brothers have fallen out and one of them has lost interest. Meanwhile they have four newly refurbished (and empty) hotels on Sark. The Brothers were hoping to bring visitors in from France direct, but this bright idea ran foul of the need for customs officers to supervise it. Not being in the EU evidently does have its disadvantages! To get to Guernsey, that particular retired widow has to stump up the full 30pound fare….

Meanwhile, on the big island to the north, the main battle is warming up. We were quickly reminded of another example of that whizz modern form of capitalism that I mentioned, and its failure, when we took the train from Manchester Airport to Chester; of the three train journeys in Britain that we have made in 2015, this was the second that failed to run smoothly and on time; our connecting train was simply billed as cancelled as we stood on the platform awaiting it! Yet I read that in fact the British Government has spent much the same amount as the French on its railways this year, ‘privatised’ as they may be!

While we were in Guernsey, in memory of Victor Hugo who was exiled there for many years and loved the island, we watched the film of Les Miserables.  It’s fairly true to the original as far as I remember (having read the novel about 50 years ago). It’s a powerful story, but it’s a pity that he muddles the Kingdom of Heaven up with the Revolution, the Democracy or whatnot. One would have thought he had seen enough of the first French Revolution to have learnt that Heaven is always way beyond any such efforts! And yet, neither can it be said that they are completely unrelated; the desire for social justice and the love of truth do sometimes point in the same direction. Indeed, if this Corbyn effort is to get anywhere, it will need all the spiritual energy it can muster; in order to rouse a sufficient majority of the British populace from the torpor of tv, consumerism, cynicism and anxiety, it would help enormously to get that relationship right!

Tra-di-da, and a Happy New Year to ye all!       

Advent Hope, 2015.

Happy Christmas to you all, from Guernsey!

There is such a lot of madness around in the world these days that it’s hard to know how to deal with it. For a poor scribbler like myself, it must be a forlorn hope that my few words can make even the least little contribution to straightening things out. Our minds are all but buried under whole avalanches of words. You may well ask, on what basis do I venture to add yet more, and ask you to read them? I can only tell you that these little pieces come into my head in the early hours, unbidden, and I feel impelled to share them.

What have they got to do with the Gannetsway? Well, Europe is rather too big a mouthful for me. I could not begin to keep track, for instance, of the politics and media of all the countries of Europe, and neither would I have the interest to do so. But, on the other hand, my own country of Ireland, and indeed Great Britain, are too, well, insular by themselves. The essential Gannetsway countries of Ireland, Great Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, taken together with the catholic sea, provide me with a patria, a portal to the universal, which suits me; in my inadequate way, I try to follow what goes on here and use this basis for taking my fixes, my triangulation.

  
Still preoccupied with Islam and Isis, this piece at least ends on a more hopeful note than it begins!

Advent Hope, 2015.

I have previously expressed my dismay at the way in which the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. President Hollande, making scant progress with his economic and social objectives, seems to believe he has to counter the threat from the National Front with rushing about the world, his jour de gloire come round, thumping the drum for all his allies to join in the bombing of Syria.

Not to be outdone, the House of Commons has voted to do so as well. We don’t have to look far for conclusive evidence that their leading men have lost the plot, with the honourable exception of Mr Corbyn and those who voted with him. Both the Foreign Secretary and his Shadow saw fit to compare the battle with Isis with the Hitler War, and actually compared the sending of bombers to Syria with the Battle of Britain! Quite frankly, from the point of view of ‘the Few’ who fought that battle, and as it happens I knew one of them, this can only be described as impertinent. They fought, and many lost their lives, in a desperate battle against a threat of imminent invasion, and it was the invaders who were doing the bombing.

They were battling against the odds, but this Syrian affair is entirely asymmetric. The massively superior resources and technology of the advanced nations are pitted against a few crazed men, whose principal asset is indifference to human life, their own included. This needless to say is not a weapon that bombs can destroy; what they do do is promote the conditions on which that attitude thrives.  The terrorists are left with even less to lose and more hatred of the West. From the point of view of protecting our own populations from terrorist attack, the bombing is likely to be counter-productive. It is the proverbial stick stirring the wasps’ nest.

However, Arabs may already have plenty of understandable reasons for hating us. Beyond the matter of Israel, and divers problems like the fact that the developed world bears the responsibility of slowly cooking them by way of global warming, we exercise a cultural kind of colonialism that strikes at their religion and culture, their very operating system.

At this point Mr Cameron solemnly accuses the likes of Mr Corbyn (and myself) of ‘sympathising with terrorists’.  We are told that they ‘reject our values’; but precisely what are these values that they reject? I noticed a typical western reporter actually citing homosexual marriage in there, along with, it may be inferred, the rest of the ‘progressive’ agenda, such as our ‘rights’ to divorce and abort babies. Having disposed of fidelity, as of the permanent, generative and heterosexual aspects of marriage, we also apparently feel free to dispose of its offspring, and this is all supposed to be a matter of ‘western values’? But these are not values at all; rather they are anti-values. As a result there is in fact an appalling spiritual void at the heart of contemporary culture, that manifests itself in all kinds of self-destructive behaviour, which hardly need to be enumerated.

Real values are such as truth/honesty, justice/mercy, fidelity/peace, sustainability and life itself; and as a matter of fact they may be cherished by people of all faiths and none. However deeply buried, they are present in all human beings, even the Isis crowd; the task of people of good-will is to seek them out, especially in their enemies, and see what can be done to apply them to the horrendous difficulties of actual living. We may then be surprised by the potential for joyous transformation in us all. It is in the struggle to realise true values that friendship is formed and brotherhood discovered.

On the other hand it is painful for anyone to find that some people are intent on sweeping away their version of value. Admittedly, the fact being that breakdowns occur between differing narratives of what is of value, the first thing that anyone in a state of war does is to deprive the other side of their humanity, by denying them any true values, as opposed to our own good selves. In this case, we must first of all get very clear about what our values really are, and then go on to doing our best to appreciate those of our opponents and seeing if it is possible to find common ground.

For my part, I believe that it would help the West’s case no end if we junked the anti-values of the progressive agenda. It is precisely these that give power to Muslim fanatics: they have found our Achilles’ heel and how to prick it. Furthermore, the West’s amnesia about theology complicates the problem of conversing with Muslims no end. The sane way to tackle our problem with them is to begin by renewing and redoubling dialogue with them.  They are the only people who can effectively deal with their own fanatics, as we have to deal with ours.

Perhaps the worst feature of the whole business is that one suspects the likes of President Hollande and Prime Minister Cameron know very well that the reasons they put forward for sending their bombers are bogus. These reasons seem to me to have more to do with prestige and influence and selling arms and not letting the Russians have it all their own way than anything else. There is the risk that the West will be sucked into a war behind the Sunnis, while the Russians and eventually the Chinese fall in with the Shias; the world shambled into the First World War on an equally bizarre basis! I don’t really understand the Shia/Sunni thing, but once one tries to identify the Kingdom of God with any earthly set-up, one is bound to run into this kind of problem.

Let us try to clarify the real issues.  I am no theologian, but just possibly a seaman’s eye is good for spotting the essential ones, rather than submerging them in oceans of words. One such matter of metaphysics has to be the question, ‘what comes first, the acorn or the idea of an oak tree?’ Scientifically and logically, it would seem, it has to be the idea, and how can one account for this but by believing in God? Thus far, we can agree with our Muslim friends; but whereas they may be stuck in the desert with nothing but the idea of fresh green growth to torment their minds, we in Europe have it everywhere under our noses, even if we fail to give it the appreciation it deserves. However, in the very same reciprocal movement, in the same dynamic relationship between God and his creation, during Advent Catholics sing a wonderful old hymn to Our Lady, which includes the incredibly tight Latin words: ‘Tu quae genuisti, natura mirante, tuum sanctum genitorem.’   I make bold to render them inadequately: You who bore, with nature looking on astounded, your own holy creator.

It would seem to be impossible for Muslims to accept the paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation, whereby Almighty God became a humble human being who died on the Cross; however, this difficulty does have its counterpart in the difficulty that Western civilisation has with the absolute and transcendent authority of God.  Perhaps being a seaman also helps me to imagine what effect the desert has on people, the sea being a kind of desert; and surely, whatever else it is, Islam is primarily a religion of the desert; a land where the sun, that most powerful physical image of God, burns in the sky but little grows; it may be contrasted with temperate Europe, where the sun is often obscured by cloud but lots of things do grow upon the land.

We may insist that God in his mercy does not choose to assert His authority by force, and it is not for any human being to do so;  we may reserve the right to resist any such attempt, meeting force with force if necessary. Much closer to the spirit of Jesus it is, in humility and mutual forgiveness, to work hopefully for that realm of truth, peace and justice which some call Islam, some the New Jerusalem or the Kingdom of God!

Joe Aston,   December, 2015.

Fighting the Fight

Back in Horseshoe Cottage with the wind and rain outside, we might ask ourselves why didn't we didn't stay below, enjoying the winter sunshine on the Guadiana? What I reply to myself, over and above the family and practical reasons, is that there is time enough for perfect peace in eternity; meanwhile, in the few short years remaining to me, there is perhaps some small contribution I can make to the battle of life, even if it is simply a matter of attending to it and suffering it. Once aboard my boat, it has a certain habit of drifting out of my ken like a cloud of smoke!

This weekend I find myself more interested in following the fortunes of the British Labour Party than I ever have been before. While I would have my reservations about Mr Corbyn as a potential leader, I follow his story with interest for the simple reason that he appears honest and largely, in his attitude to the Syrian war, correct. He currently appears to be fighting for his political life. I expect he will lose it, but that only increases my sympathy for him.

I'm going to paste below a piece that I have just written for the Brandsma Review. I found myself giving the controversy about all the forgoing a rather novel twist, setting it in the context of another cultural war....

Yours etc, Offended!

and why Jeremy Corbyn should be attended to.

I know a grandmother who got into trouble with her daughter-in-law lately for trying to tell her grandchild that he had been made by God. ‘Nonsense, don’t ever mention that stuff to him again. Jim and I made him!’

Some people are going one better, and insisting that they make themselves. The media seem to reckon that their consumers are getting bored with photos of homosexuals getting ‘married’; they’ve moved on to holding up transexuals for our admiration. I used to take transvestites in my stride, not without sympathy for the  poor confused individuals, but something has changed with the ‘transexual’ variety; they insist we all buy into their self-mutilating fantasy-life, along with the media, the UN, and all the great and good of the enlightened democracies.

That old killjoy Technology  may be spoiling the fun with its sex-prediction, but up until very lately the first Word that was said about us, the moment when we entered human society, was either ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’. A sane voice like that of Dale O’Leary in The Gender Agenda may add that ‘biological sex is not determined by external organs, but by genetic structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female.’ That only confirms, should it really be necessary, that our sex is an objective fact, bestowing a particular kind of orientation which in a coherent person follows through our whole personality.

We got the Gender Agenda - it’s all only a ‘social construct’- stuff trotted out with depressing predictability from our own grand-daughter, just down from reading psychology at UCD. “Is that what they’ve been teaching you?” “Oh no, it’s just what I think.” Well I say, when such facts as those of our sex are dismissed as mere ‘social constructs’ which a person may change at will, then language loses its meaning, along with everything else; it is hard to find any basis for conversation within our own culture, and we are confronted with the death of a civilisation; if we value it, being offended may be rather too mild a reaction.

Martine Delaney, a transgender Green Party candidate in Tasmania’s Federal Election, has lodged an official complaint to the Anti-Discrimination Commission about a booklet produced by Australia’s Catholic bishops entitled Don’t Mess with Marriage. He claims it is ‘offensive, humiliating and insulting’. They’re all off to a ‘conciliation conference’. Da-di-da; it’s sad to see even the Aussies flailing about in such mire. Maybe Germaine Greer hit the appropriate response over in Melbourne, where she ruffled a lot of the politically correct feathers by remarking that “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock!”

But there is a lot more to the fantasy-life that we are expected to buy into than such matters as transexuals and homosexual marriage. I might mention the notion that the USA and western democracy embodies all that is good, and has some divine right to decide who shall be permitted to exist and who not. It’s not immediately obvious to me why a Mr Trump promising to “bomb the Hell out of Isis” should not be labelled a terrorist; actually he frightens me rather more than the Jihadis.

In point of fact it is neither easy to find an appropriate response to homosexuals, transexuals and their pc friends, nor to Jihadis intent on destroying Western civilisation in a different way. Hard enough as it is for the likes of us Brandsma readers, I imagine it is just about impossible to do so if one happens to be a young Moslem in the West, constantly exposed to put-downs of his religion while struggling with serious issues of identity; and if we ‘Christians’ in the West have lost the ability to communicate with each other, what possible hope is there for dialogue with them?

When one is comfortable and affluent, with all the props for one’s ego that could be desired, it is very difficult to realise how important even warped religion can be to a person who has nothing else going for them. One is threatening to deprive them of their very operating system. It is not at all surprising when their anger and confusion spills over way beyond taking offence and into terrorism, and if we want to see an end to it, we had better start by getting the planks out of our own eyes. We might make some kind of a start by distancing ourselves from the overgrown adolescents who thought it was clever to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed. In Ireland, we of all people should understand the dynamics of ‘terrorism’. Suppose the RAF had been sent to bomb the Bogside in order to get rid of the IRA? We might recall what it was like being Irish in England, when the Provos were on the go.  Pcdom is in danger of forbidding  that we should recognise any reason or humanity in Moslems.

Presidents Hollande and Obama’s rhetoric about ‘destroying Isis’ is pretty much on a par with Mr Trump’s. I find myself again going where I might expect only opposition, to the left-wing of the British Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, to find a sane voice on the matter. As he said in his response to Mr Cameron’s call to arms: ‘The PM did not set out a coherent strategy, coordinated through the UN, for the defeat of ISIS. Nor has he been able to explain what credible and acceptable ground forces could retake and hold territory freed from ISIS control by an intensified air campaign. In my view, the PM has been unable to explain the contribution of additional UK bombing to a comprehensive negotiated political settlement of the Syrian civil war, or its likely impact on the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.’

That the political/media elite do their best to rubbish Mr Corbyn only confirms the impression that he is someone who is really trying to see the truth of the matter. Almost alone among Western statesmen, he puts his priority where it belongs, on putting an end to the crucifixion of Syria. What more jets there are supposed to contribute to security in Paris or London is beyond me. The only justification for military force is to secure the Peace, and the question to be asked about any proposed use of it is this:- Is it primarily going to secure the Peace or amplify the Chaos? The more remote and depersonalised the force involved, the more likely it is to do the latter.

One immediate responsibility of us Catholics is to give the lie to those seeking to promote a populist agenda of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and war between Christians and Moslems. As I tried to indicate at the beginning of this article, ‘the West’ has anyway just about lost its credibility as the bearer of Christian civilisation. The future is there to be secured by building dialogue and trust, and the less bombers of all kinds have to do with it, the better, as indeed our Popes have ceaselessly tried to make clear.

The ground is clearly shifting under our feet, and if we are to build a new civilisation on the ashes of the old, there’s no knowing where we will find allies.  I would suggest the first move is to use language carefully, recognising that words mean something beyond what we would like them to mean; but if people insist on using them purely on their own terms, and interpret life only in terms of their own interests or obsessions, it is impossible for others to relate to them, and it is I’m afraid too bad if they choose to take offence. They might possibly learn a thing or two from Catholics - we are only too accustomed to being insulted, and worse!

Such misuse of language is the beginning of the process of dehumanisation that enables evil, which is so little understood in our contemporary Western world, to flourish in all its many forms. It is vital that our words should represent, not what we may think politically expedient or to our own advantage, as indeed most have been schooled to do, but rather our best effort at speaking truth. In the beginning was the Word. The good news is that the little flowers of truth pop up in all kinds of unlikely places, and it is not that difficult to recognise them.  Forgetful of themselves, they are orientated to the sun! And the Word was with God.                                                                      

Joe Aston,       

27.11.2015

Season's end on the Uadi Ana.

Some people don't like going anywhere twice, for without the factor of novelty, they cannot vividly appreciate a place. Well, a place does indeed feel different the second time you go there, and I was in a way fearful that I would find the fairy kingdom of the Guadiana (from Arabic Uadi Ana) had lost some of its magic, with its fancy new metal perches all up along it. But we soon settled in, and five weeks whistled by there as we pottered about in great contentment.

The moon waxed and waned, as it sent the tides pulsing up and down the river; the bright stars circled overhead and the birds went about their business up and down the river, all in the same old dance together. They twitter and sing blissfully in the riverside trees at dusk, giving way as night falls to the chorus of crickets and tree-frogs, with the odd heron screeching and owl hooting. In late October there came some rain and wind to ruffle our feathers, then high pressure reasserted itself and chased the clouds again, as the hills turned green and the sun turned less fierce and more smiling!

The morning mist is often slow to clear, giving us time to say and sing some prayers and even browse the web for a while before the sun comes over the hill, chasing the mist, drying the night-time damp and calling us to work. 

I chip away at the lists of jobs-to-do; the worst was to replace the rusty exhaust manifold that I found to be caput. We are slowing down, as another year dies, but thoughts are turning to the new one, and personally I feel good for another ten years or so of sailing, with the help of God! Fiona too is enjoying the life, and her company is very good. She however feels the sense of being in a kind of no-man's-land less positively than I do.

As well as being on water and between two strange lands, at this season, between one year and the next, one is in a bit of a temporal void. Memories well up from the past. A converted Irish fishing boat, the Ros Alither, has pulled into the river. She was built in Killybegs, the classic BIM (Irish Sea Fisheries Board) build, like all the Ros boats and our old Eiscir Riada, of which I became the proud skipper/owner in the late 1970s. 

When those little ships were being built with pride and joy in the BIM boatyards in Killybegs, Arklow, Dingle and Baltimore, and owned and crewed in the same tight-knit communities, with a sense of purpose and optimism, feeling themselves effectively supported by the State, what a different scenario was presented by the Irish fishing industry to the grisly scene evoked, exaggerated as it may be, in the recent Guardian article Revealed: trafficked migrant workers abused in Irish Fishing industry!

Of course the fish stocks were much better than now and the markets improving too.The white-fish boats in Killybegs had a fine time of it, even a fairly steady routine, fishing Monday to Thursday, servicing boat and gear on Friday, Saturday about the house, Sunday, going to Mass and a Gaelic football game in the afternoon. I vividly recall one crisp winter's day when I went out with 'Forty' Murrin on the Ros Alainn, for a day's seining at the back of St John's Point. We were back in Killybegs with a hundred boxes of fish before nightfall!

A Leprachaun postcard of Killybegs in the 195/60s.

Too good to last, you may well say! Once the bankers and the Government start to smell money, there's trouble ahead, especially in the context of an explosion of technology. Big loans were handed out to the select few. A class of millionaires emerged, while the majority of fishermen had to find work in factories or whatever. Not that they were able to make a steady living there. The women of course had to become wage-slaves as well.... Wonderful liberation!

Small boats were practically eliminated, markets rocketed upwards and then collapsed, places like Donegal Bay became fish deserts. The BIM yards were first nationalised and then mostly closed, while the big new trawlers were built abroad. Those fishermen who survived seemed to be serving the bankers and the machines, rather than the other way round. Needless to say, they mostly no longer found time to go to Mass on Sunday; perhaps that constituted some kind of 'tipping point'?

What conservation measures there were proved ineffective, while politicians collaborated in the process, with the odd brown envelope thrown in to encourage them. Some of us had dreams of doing things differently - Small is Beautiful and all that. Were we just impractical utopians? Maybe. Humanity, it seems, has to learn the hard way; but can we even be bothered to learn at all? Just how hard does it have to be? Well, I did not prevail with my ideas, but maybe I should be thankful for that too; it's hard to see how life could be better for us right now!

Delivering supplies

So long as the politicians manage to keep those pensions coming, it is hard to complain; but let us just remember that many of our fellow human beings have little or nothing coming; they have nothing to lose and are in danger of inheriting a bombed out world. If they rise up and try to destroy us in their anger, it is not good enough to respond in kind. I am writing this in the wake of the latest outrage in Paris, and I am distressed at much of the response as well of course at the murderous acts themselves.

Those crazy Moslems also have a story that must be listened to, and if we want Western civilisation to prevail, we must firstly attend to our own very serious shortcomings, and secondly make the effort to understand them. Maybe we just might be then able to make a wonderful new civilisation together, that will enhance the world rather than destroy it. Indeed there are many traces in the landscape and the towns of Andalucia (Al Andalus) of an Islamic culture worthy of considerable respect!

Fiona in Castellejos.

Laranjeiras

Last weekend, we took a spin down the river, spending a night alongside the pontoon at Laranjeiras, behind the riverside trees in the photo below.

Just another little village; it doesn't look much, and passing up and down the river on previous occasions, we had not given it much thought; but what a treat it turned out to be! The other side of our pontoon was a little fishing boat:

A short walk to the main road, and we came here:

Taking the road to the right up into the hills behind the village, here are some of the sights:

Fish, goats, pigs (did you spot them?), hens, olives, grapes, vegetables, not to mention the shrine with the little old lady saying the rosary, (did you notice her?)... what else does one need, along with the fragrant wild herbs on the hillsides? What a pleasure does to just breath in the atmosphere!

This is much the way of life that Our Blessed Lord grew up with, and from which he drew so many images, to such devastating effect, appreciating the perspectives of both the farmer and the fisherman. By His life, death and resurrection, He was able to interpret the basic rhythms of that life, and alone out of all humanity, He was able to open the way out of its apparent claustrophobia and final futility.

It's not that He was indifferent to or inappreciative of the city; but when a man sets off on the dusty road to find his destiny there, it is well for him to keep those country rhythms in his heart. No doubt the knowledge that spring comes after winter, that the seeds' death brings the harvest, helped Him as a man to believe in His own resurrection after death, when He tramped the dusty road to Jerusalem. 

It is well for us all to participate in 'the country life' when we can; I'm grateful that Fiona and I took drastic action to do so years ago. At least we should treasure the memory of it all when we can't, and do what we can to encourage it.

And so the matter stands with the nations. Let them value their 'peasants'; let them protect them from the predations of the greedy, and not tax them in order to finance folly; let them not devalue the money by printing more and more of it in order to build castles in the air; and above all let them realise that when we lose the ability to situate our lives in the context of death and sacrifice in order to rise again for that Final Harvest or Great Catch, then we are lost indeed.

Catholics of course help themselves to do so by celebrating the Holy Sacrifice whenever they can; and I think it tells even in the atmosphere of that little restaurant where we rounded off our few hours in Laranjeiras, with a delicious and very reasonable meal featuring their delicious porco preto, reared on the hillside, cooked and served simply but with love! 

Boat People on the Rio Guadiana

I fished the mooring up out of the mud easily enough. It feels different this year, mainly the difference between a new place and one you already know, I suppose. We were also here a bit earlier last year, and I think the weather was better. Also, we had a fellow Irish West Coast man nearby, and several people preparing to cross the Atlantic, who are missed. 

However we soon settled back into the river life. The temperature is perfect, neither too hot nor cold, and the calm and sunny days are all the more appreciated after a couple of windy and wet ones. There is no shortage of things to do; I always remember Molly Bevan's saying that if you manage to get one job done every day beyond mere survival, you're going ahead! Here, with heavy rain forecast, I am looking to fix deck leaks, and that fitting for the running back-stay had a fractured bolt as well as inadequate bedding- It's surprising how quickly a morning goes by with that sort of lark. 

I also spent a lot of time simply moving the filter for the cooling-water intake. There wasn't one at all when I came to the Anna M, apart from a perforated plate on the outside of the hull. That may well have been adequate; I only have to clean the filter about once a year, but the fact is I find quite a few little bits of this and that in it, which are surely better there that in the heat-exchanger or the Jabsco pump. I bunged that filter in a handy press, under pressure at the time, but now want to use that press for an ice-box. I'm thinking of putting a wood stove in where the old fridge is. I am very lucky that Fiona does most of the work of boat-keeping!

Besides the jobs on the boat,  there is this writing lark, and of course the dreaded internet takes up a lot of our time. It works well here, via our Vodafone dongle. Technically, they seem to be a good outfit, but I find dealing with the money side of it difficult. At present, a whole lot of payments we have made by internet banking seem to have gone missing. I am still getting to know my way round this Chromebook set-up, but am pleased enough. There seems to be more shape and coherence to Google than other internet giants, and I feel less manipulated and more in control.

Other activities include praying and dreaming and just looking at the river life around us. There is a funny kind of autumnal spring going on at present; it's a still and perfect morning after those three days of wind and rain, which have freshened the parched land up no end. As the sun came above the high hill opposite us, it lit up thousands of moths flying high above the river, shining against the dark hill-side. You cannot see them at all against the bright blue sky. They were zooming around in an ecstatic burst of life; but oh, so short! All of a sudden they began crashing down onto the surface of the river.

Now and again we go ashore, mainly to shop and maybe walk. Here is Fiona in Alcoutim, Portugal, with Sanlucar, Spain, behind her: -

This living in our boat, a little bit of Irish territory perched between two other countries, along with the fuss about Scotland and Catalonia, has jogged me into thinking about the idea of ‘The Nation’. It does rather shape our lives, and there's no better place for reflecting on it, as old man river drifts by regardless.

So long as peace and security are maintained in our part of the world (and money still arrives in our bank-account), for my part I’m usually inclined to be content, along with perhaps a majority, to let a minority of people wrangle and agonise about these things. However, there are so many people in the world with no peace and security, no pension, not even freedom of movement, thought or belief, nor even the right to life itself! Maybe we had better consider more attentively what ‘the Nation’ really means to us, and how those goods might be more widely shared and solidly secure.

Perhaps the most accessible basis for the concept is as an extension of the family. A viable nation is a kind of magic circle within which hopefully everyone can at least understand each other, even when they disagree, and they build up a sense of shared mutual responsibility and loyalty. But it should also be remembered how fundamental to such concepts are the Bible stories of a chosen people, on pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God.

There does indeed exist a visceral tendency to erect myths and shared narratives, with varying degrees of truth attached to them, in order to reinforce our human solidarity. I think these myths go bad in the absence of true religion. Anyway they are enacted and reinforced with all sorts of bizarre rituals, some innocent enough, such as rugby matches. Then there are the more sinister enactments, the warfare for which the rugby matches are perhaps a substitute, and which if anything has taken a more sinister turn with the annihilation of perceived enemies in distant places by operatives looking at screens in comfortable offices. A generation reared on computer games seem to be carrying their power fantasies over into the little matter of some distant ‘terrorist’s’ life or death, or that of anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of his phone … in the name of their nation! 

Lies always do damage to solidarity. The better the national myths are grounded in reality and justice, the more secure will the nation be. Although Pilate’s famous question to Christ - Truth, what is that? - represents the prevalent attitude among the worldly powerful, national narratives are in fact generally founded on territorial, racial and cultural realities, even when, as is so frequently the case, they are expressed in the terms of the victorious in bitter conflicts of the past. The fact that the myths are at best one-sided and frequently downright false is raised by the disaffected at their peril.

The tendency of states to become totalitarian needs to be balanced by an effective transcendent language of justice and truth, such as is generally conceived as a religion. Deprived of such terms of reference, nations have a dreadful propensity to fall back on finding enemies or aliens in order to bolster their identity; this seems to be indeed a psychological necessity, and the only way out is to rediscover those hardy perennials, Heaven and Hell!

How can we assess the aspirations to statehood of the many suppressed nations who have their own story to tell? When we have a genuine shared grasp of justice and truth, we can afford to be more relaxed about the whole business. In the absence of such spiritual cohesion, the process of endless jockeying for power and disintegration will be more acute. Usually the disruption of changing existing arrangements is costly, and beware the minority who profit from it, aspiring maybe to be bigger fish in a smaller pond! In fact provided the people can communicate with and respect each other, a degree of cultural and linguistic plurality enriches a nation-state.

As a Catholic of English background, I maintain the conviction that the narrative of national emancipation and freedom achieved by the Reformation was very far from the truth, and that the main beneficiaries of it were the members of the plutocratic establishment centered on the king, who set themselves up by robbing the church and enforced their rule with a reign of terror. Such has proved to be the true story of all too many revolutions and ‘liberation movements’.

Apart from those who heroically resisted, the mass of English people acquiesced only to show their disaffection by further using the protestant ethos to set up whatever new denominational identity that they could find to suit their temperament. With the Church suppressed or fragmented, the stage was set for the British Empire, empires generally being based upon an attempt to combine the functions of state and religion.

In Great Britain, firstly the Christian religion was largely ditched, and then the Empire, in favour of a narrative of technological and material progress, which while apparently evading the old problems, in fact finds itself nowadays bereft of coherence or even any terms of reference other than those dictated by the market, much as its fundamentalist adherents try to establish them in terms of ‘objective scientific fact’.

Whether the high priests, the politicians and technocrats and media bosses, try to disguise them with such ‘facts and statistics’, or simply invoke ‘the national interest’, the criteria for allowing or refusing access to the magic circle are in fact predominantly economic. Nationality provides a useful fig-leaf in order to justify levels of discrimination that would not be tolerated within a genuine nation. Ask the refugees about it, or those living in terror of drones visiting destruction from the sky!

Such is the situation we are stuck with, and will continue to be stuck with until that narrative of material and economic progress is exhausted and finally breaks down. We try to survive in this awkward situation by indulging in all kinds of technologically enhanced fantasy to an unprecedented degree. It may however be possible to make that breakdown less traumatic by anticipating it, and preparing in whatever small way we can for a new paradigm.

We have to begin by jettisoning the fantasies, ‘smashing the idols’, and setting about reconnecting with our forebears, with a history that has a future hope as well as a past, with physical reality and not least, with our own nature and bodies and our immediate friends and relations and, in the broadest sense, our neighbours; we may thus find it possible to rescue the rather beautiful related ideas of family and of nation, and even the family of nations, might I add, the Church!

Olhao to the Guadiana

After a couple of days chilling off Culatra, we headed across the lagoon to Olhao for supplies. It is a practical, fishy place, but has very little room for visiting yachts. Nonetheless I have never failed to squeeze into the little anchorage off the markets, even if only in a rather uncomfortably tight berth that one can only chance for a while in favourable conditions.

There's a big long rather dilapidated pontoon there, but they won't let you tie up to it. Well, at least it costs nothing to anchor, and the value and the produce in the markets are excellent.

This is how the John Dory (or something like) which I bought came home!

It seems that the Portuguese haven't gone overboard with big new boats, but there still are plenty of men fishing in their good old wooden ones.

 That's a big boat by the standards of Culatra, which hums with outboards day and night; and of course the pier-heads are always manned!

                                                               We left them to it, early next morning,

and said goodbye to the Cabo de Santa Maria for another while.These photos by the way are Fiona's;

the old man has his hands pretty full with these light, variable winds, and a spot of fishing himself too. Caught another little bonito this day, and four very respectable horse mackerel; enough to feed us for another couple of days. Ended up with a fresh south-westerly that took us all the way up the river to the Foz do Odeleite, against the tide.

They've dredged the Foz (Mouth) do Guadiana by the way, which is now supposed to carry a minimum of 3.5m, so it means we don't have to worry about entering at low water any more. Didn't fancy their other idea of progress though; they're marking the channel up from the bridge with steel posts, mostly painted black so far, except for the last ones that they've put in around Laranjeiras, suitably resplendent in red and green. Many of them are practically in the middle of the river, and I narrowly avoided hitting one. Someone seems to have got through to them that they are dangerous, unpainted, and maybe even that it is easier to paint them before they put them up than after. No darn use for small craft anyway; just another thing to look out for. They're probably thinking of cruise ships or something. Dodgy affair, progress; sometimes I prefer  going backwards! Not however back down the river; we dropped anchor as the breeze and the daylight failed.

Ria de Arosa to Culatra

O Nazareno was back in the church, with St Peter outside keeping the keys -

We wandered up to the woods behind the town, taking leave of sweet Galicia for another while. 

That evening the fiesta ended even more spectacularly than it had begun.

Time to think of the sea again, not quite in the same way as the guys on this tuna seiner!

I got Fiona back into it with a gentle afternoon sail to the Islas Cies, considerably tried as we anchored there by the fact that we were wasting a lovely fair breeze.

However it was still blowing in the morning, 

and Fiona put up with staying out the next night, as we powered down the Portuguese coast at up to 8 knots. The breeze died the next morning (24th September), so we went into Nazare rather than spend a second night out.

      I had passed it by in the past, thinking of the famous waves that the surfing dudes love, but actually it is a very good harbour. It is quite extraordinary how the massive breakers just across the bay don't affect the harbour overmuch. There is great interest on the quay at what this nice old boat has brought it -

Thankfully the swell had at last settled anyway, so next day we were able to enjoy the light breeze that took us the 26 miles or so down the coast to Peniche. We anchored in the harbour there, and pressed on with a better north wind in the morning to Cascais, with the sky clearing and the sun getting hot again. Still I wasn't inclined to linger, even though there was hardly any wind as we rounded Cabo Espichel -

and so came to Sesimbra-

It was gentle sailing or motoring all the way round Cape St Vincent, anchoring for a night at Sines and then at Sagres- 

A very sedate sail at 2 knots or less took us on to Lagos, for our usual date with Tony Simmonds at the Adega Marina. Yummy!

A fine breeze however took us on to Culatra,

and even jizzed up the fishing line enough to hook a very bonito bonito, even if he was small. That's the size that suits us, actually!

And so here we are chilling at Culatra again- 

The dull sky last night gave way to wind and rain this morning, but it's warm all the time and one knows it will soon blow over. The temperature is just perfect here at this time of year....