Out On the Streets!

O Lord, it’s true after all: too many of the English are still trying to live in the nineteenth century. Too much of that Postman Pat and Mr Oldcastle and Gumdrop stuff? The trouble is the old lights were not thoroughly extinguished in England, the way they were on the Continent. The Empire does not exist any more, but the mentality of many people, especially the elderly ones who won this vote, has not moved on.

The rhetoric of Empire has been replaced by vague talk of British Values and Democracy, as beloved by Mr Cameron. The British Constitution, insofar as it exists, in fact envisages rule by a sovereign whose authority is vested in Parliament. Where referendums come into it is by no means clear: a matter of good British fudge. Likewise the famous British Values are all over the place. Indeed more so than ever there is no proper respect for that which does not suit one's empire: for the other, for what is, irrespective of one's own interests, or for what has happened beyond one's control and its fruits. In fact where people let money rule their lives, you will end up with plutocracy; and Britain is now more of a plutocracy than at any time since the nineteenth century.

One ends up with a great deal of manipulation. That clown Mr Johnson with his jolly game and the rather seedy Mr Farage have ridden a campaign that (largely foreign) press magnates have been mounting for years, and it has been full of lies like the one on the battlebus. If one genuinely aspires to rule by the people, one first of all needs a People, a reasonable and coherent demos, with a genuine respect for truth; and then it does help if those who make decisions know what they are talking about, rather than merely shouting slogans at each other.

What exactly is this touted ‘independence’ anyway? The EU is but a (very inadequate) attempt to get a political handle on the many-layered interdependence of the modern world, both within Europe and beyond. For all its inadequacies, it is by far the most successful such attempt in the world. It was born of the painful realisation that there was no future in attempting to do so by knocking the **** out of each other, and it has achieved unparalleled peace and prosperity.

However, the times are getting difficult. It seems to me that the Brexit  vote was mainly an outburst of inchoate rage and misery. It is not surprising. Not alone have they lost an empire, but also they have largely lost both religion and a sound family structure to their lives. They feel they are being governed by forces utterly beyond their control, which is largely true; they are alienated exiles in what they took to be their own country. They have lashed out at the EU because it is in some people’s interest that they should identify it with these alien forces, rather than actually tracking them down and doing something about them.

Some very rich people are worried that the EU might even be going to succeed in making them pay their share of tax; however maybe now they will get to play golf with Mr Trump! But the battle is hotting up all the time. There are millions of unemployed, and more millions dying and displaced, beyond the borders of Europe. Thousands are drowning while trying to get here. Governments, including the UK, are being kept afloat by printing vast sums of money, and there is an end in sight for that. In Britain there is also a serious shortage of electricity coming down the tracks, which will have to be met by importing more power from the Continent. Then who is going to seriously address climate change? Our world presents a mass of problems that can only be addressed by building on the institutions, using the lines of communication, that have been so laboriously built up over the last sixty years.

The fantasy of ‘independence’ can only possibly be indulged at a very high price, which will have to be paid also by a lot of people who had no vote, in Ireland for example. One of the lies that I noticed from a Brexiter in the Spectator was that it would be a great blow for parliamentary democracy. Has the British Parliament voted for this? Would it have done so? No! This is a recipe for mob rule. It is also unjust, for the oldies who swung the balance will die soon enough, but the young who voted Remain have their lives to lead.

Well, people discover their brotherhood, their power and dignity, by facing problems together, in as honest and passionate a way as possible. It is up to the young to get out and show that they are not going to have their future toyed with. Let them get out and demonstrate. They could make it possible to hold a second referendum before this famous article is invoked. I think the result could be different. Many of those older voters had little idea what they were voting for, and might change their minds if they start listening to the youth rather than those Eurosceptic rags, and realised they had just voted for a reduction in the value of their pensions too.

Whatever anyone says, there is no time to lose; but oh, I do pity the people having to cope with all this nonsense, with the year on the turn and the month of July coming in. And after all effective action has to be rooted in quiet. It’s lovely here in Sherkin, but there is a lot to be done. If anyone out there fancies a bit of peace here, as well as doing some building and gardening and a bit of sailing, email me at:-

<gannetsway@gmail.com>

Flying the flag...

on a sombre morning.

Stand Up Fathers!

This Fathers’ Day stuff is all very well, but let’s face it, it doesn’t carry quite the conviction of Mothers’ Day. We pretty much all love our Mammies, but Daddies are perhaps more problematic. Some of the very greatest works of literature concern delinquent fathers, witness King Lear (again) and The Brothers Karamazov. Christ famously advised us to ‘call no man Father’, urging us to focus rather on Our Father in Heaven. While considering fatherhood, one should always bear this in mind. Now as a Grandad I’m getting a kind of double dose of it in one way, and a chance to view the business in a more detached fashion too. May I at last get the right balance between too much and too little fathering? But the bottom line is simply this: we have to figure out what is best for our families, and do our best to provide it and set them on the way of it....

A sudden eerie peace has descended on the house. The four grandchildren who have been staying here for the last few days, have departed. On the whole they coped with the computer game/video free life which we lead here very well. But then they were able to play on a little rocky shore below the house, and learn to row, and to sail out to witness a massive congregation of dolphins and whales, set off with the excited screeches of diving gannets, some 7 miles to the Southwest of here.

The display out-lasted the children’s attention span, and instead of relaxing as I would have them into the dream as the Anna M sailed gently along in such company, they had to go below and eat and draw pictures of whales. But, I reflected, that itself is some kind of victory. Images and food are after all two basic necessities for human beings. The problem is that humanity tends to get so interested in spinning stories, creating images, that we cease to focus on the thing itself!

Images are indeed the tools, the vehicles that we require to situate ourselves in the midst of life’s confusing complexity, to find our way. ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ But the first priority is to really get in touch with our own imagination and to remain rooted there, or else we must settle for second-hand images, fed us according to the interests of one mass image producer or another. At this stage it seems to be an even bigger industry than producing food! Meanwhile a good father does not attempt to merely impose his own preferred images, but to help his children to acquire their own.

Of course, the great Protestant and North American Dream was fashioned of just such an aspiration. Away with all your bishops and kings, with their dogmas and their enforced loyalties! Down with your scheming statesmen and their Empires! Down with decrepit Spain and bankrupt old Europe! We will even improve on old England, living free, relying on our own resources, according to our own lights!...  But where is the American Dream now? It seems that no people could be more obsessed with their images and stories, but less satisfied with them!

Then again what, in the aftermath of that brilliant Enlightenment, did old Catholic Europe fall back on? It may seem that about the only thing they vaguely remembered was that the well-springs of imagination were in a sense communal property; the individual imagination, to be activated, must paradoxically tap into a level of consciousness that transcends the individual; ‘No man is an island.’ Yet where was the ability to ‘plug in’ to the divine, that alone is able to reconcile the individual and social dimensions? Many fell back on a renewed tribalism, in the form of nationalism, with its male and female faces, namely fascism and communism.

One might have thought that all that stuff lay buried under the rubble of the mid 20th century. We have enjoyed in Europe nearly a full life-time of relative peace and prosperity, but the fabric has become frayed again, and the old primordial problems are forcing their way into our consciousness with renewed vigour. Who has been using the relatively peaceful times to access anew those well-springs of truth, deep within us? Well, says I, some of them at least were sailors!

The politicians and the media, the image masters and story-tellers, would on the whole rather we did not attempt to do so ourselves. They like to think it’s their prerogative to set the agenda, but since they are more interested in power and perks than in that dreadful business of taking responsibility, the agenda they set tends to be that which they calculate will deliver the power and perks. So we all tend to get caught up in a false loop that is sold as ‘democracy’. It takes a massive crisis to bring out leaders of real integrity, such as Churchill and de Gaulle.

The current craze for referenda illustrates such false loops. Your real leader would not say - this is a most important decision, almost a matter of life and death, but I’ll go along with whatever you choose - the democratic will shall prevail! Imagine such an attitude in the skipper of a boat!

The only honest thing for a true democratic leader to say, if he knows something to be of crucial importance, is this is what I believe. Now you can vote for me and I will act on that belief, or you can find someone else to lead you! The problem is actually one of the integrity of fatherhood, and it is reflected in the widespread failure of us fathers to take the responsibility of our role. People must be feeling the desperate lack….

The degree of success of the likes of Messrs Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in picking up such a mantle should be a wake-up call. But do we really want to be led by such people? In frustration, people turn to false fathers. I have been shocked by friends and family members who have bought into their stories. But having taken a good look down that hole, I hope they will yet turn away from it, rather as Ireland looked into the abyss back at the time of Bobby Sands’ funeral, and turned away.

For Europe, and Britain’s involvement in it, will not go away. There is no going back to some mythical state of independence. One has seen that bundle of lies trundling down the tracks of the great British media for years. It is a joy of the new media that, when one has the time, one can keep an eye on the various strands of opinion without actually buying their newspapers! Of course, like all successful lies, they proceed by distorting big truths.

I believe the vote will be to Remain, but it’s a close call. If Remain does prevail, I think that it will be in no small part thanks to Mrs Jo Cox. Her murder has given a crucial pause to think more deeply, a reality check, and lifted a corner of the mask of the Leave crowd. As usual, there’s a woman challenging us men to be true fathers! But now I have said all I am going to say about the British referendum, at least until there is a result. They must decide what they believe to be true, and stand up for it.

Home from the Sea

I raced Fiona home in the end, though I had left her over a month previously in Vila Real de Sao Antonio, on the train to Faro. She has been helping family while I've been sailing up. We came home to a very overgrown garden, and have spent most of the last two weeks taming the wilderness and getting some production going again. Quite a few dear people have tried to tell us that we cannot expect to both live the sailing life and keep a house and garden going, all on a small pension, and sometimes I am inclined to agree.

Taming the wilderness.

Of course it is Fiona who is most committed to the house and garden, and myself to the sailing. Some have suggested that the solution is simple - we each do our own thing, just getting together now and again; one might call it the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ solution. They miss the point that we each value the other’s predilections, that we actually like living with the tension. Fiona does not want to be a cabbage, and I do not want to be a rootless drifter upon the ocean. So far, by some kind of a miracle, we have managed to keep our balance between the two, and long may it last, I say!

Hajib weather!

It’s an ancient issue, and reminds me of the old tension between what might be called the monk principle, with its commitment to stability within a community, and the friars and missionaries and pilgrims who get out into the world. The Catholic Church managed to keep her balance between the two impulses. Again, much effort has gone into trying to achieve the right balance between the nation states and the EU.

The English like to see their country as a little garden, an enclosure of security and order in a dangerous world that is always threatening to invade and overwhelm it. One sees the point. The call to community with the rest of Europe has generally fallen back on pointing to material advantages, in trying to make itself heard. Now we see the inadequacy of this approach. Even Catholics have generally held back from expressing it in terms of basic concepts of what life is all about.

You might even ask why do I say ‘even Catholics’? Because the call to community is fundamental to our Faith. In Christ, we build the Kingdom of God with that basic rhythm, that balance and harmony of what is within and what is without. If one settles for the cabbage patch only, one is left with a stagnant pool in a river that has gone dry. Mr Boris Johnson tries to counter such thinking with talk about ‘going global’. What kind of global presence would he have in mind? He wouldn’t have the British Empire at the back of his mind, I suppose? Certainly one does not hear from his type of much repentance for its very considerable failings.* Judging by their stance on, for instance, tax avoidance, we may assume what they have in mind is a buccaneering presence in the fine tradition of the likes of Sir Francis Drake!

If anyone is serious about his own community, he also must be serious about global community, about tackling the big problems like climate change, environmental degradation of all kinds, world poverty and war. It should be very obvious that we can do so far more effectively by giving the world a lead in living in active community with our neighbours, and please, do not try to tell me we can do this while walking away from all that has so far been achieved, with much effort….  

Now I had better get back to the garden, hoping to look forward to lots more lovely fresh salad with my grilled mackerel, while not leaving the Anna M too long with her strange company!

*  * http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36339524

On Crossing Biscay

48deg24’N, 8deg4W is where I am beginning to write this post. Finisterre is 333 nautical miles astern (bearing SxW), Baltimore 192 nm ahead, the Ile de Sein 119 nm somewhat south of East, the nearest land being the Scilly Isles, 112 nm to the North-east. This day has been extremely peachy, with the sea calming down, the Anna M pottering along beautifully at 4 or 5 knots, with a gentle easterly breeze and kindly, warm sunshine. For once we have left the bad weather off the Iberian coast.

Yesterday, in nearly calm conditions with a very light SE wind and an unpleasant swell, our progress was not so good at all. Sailing at one or two knots, we had also been forced to sail to the north-east in order to catch what breeze there was, filling the sails and minimising their exasperating slatting. Apart from needing to conserve diesel, I didn’t use the engine because it would have simply killed what wind there was for us. Besides, while we had a better angle on the waves heading NE, we were not wishing to find ourselves in Brittany this time!

The day before there had been more wind but also an even worse sea-state. Looking to the East, we could see the swells coming down Biscay, while looking South-west, there were even bigger ones coming in from the Atlantic. We were like children sat on a blanket which some malevolent sea-gods were violently shaking up and down as they fought. So that was what AEMET had meant by forecasting a mar gruesa (rough sea), though with a maximum wind of only force 5 or 6 for a short while!

It always intrigued me that La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología*  present their charts for mar total before those for viento y mar del viento. In most cases the sea-state is a more vital consideration than the wind, in these days of engines and especially off that North-West coast of Spain. In a sailing boat one can shake sails and rig to pieces, and I was lucky to get away with only popping the odd slide off the mainsail. We literally had to head NE to survive, with the over- reefed mainsail pinned forward with a preventer as well as downwards….

Bow-riders

As we clawed our way up towards Brittany, the sea gradually settled, and after a very calm day a sweet easterly breeze sprang up. I was able to write this far, as we settled into a couple of days of perfect sailing, that took us to within 40 miles of Baltimore before the wind died out. Still we had a pleasant motor-sail in against a very light NE air, through the night and early morning, accompanied by many dolphins and also spying four basking sharks.We came to Baltimore in the midst of its Wooden Boat Festival, and then to Sherkin to find it settling into a most magnificent spell of weather.

Wooden Boat Festival with Sherkin Island +

It is hard to adapt to life ashore again, with its diverse preoccupations; an overgrown garden, even that strange EU referendum coming up in Blighty. In the long watches at sea, I found myself considering the long and frequently difficult relationship between England, Spain and Ireland. Where did it all go wrong? I suppose one starts with Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, which horrified right-thinking English people like Sir Thomas Moore. The Spaniards must have been horrified at every level, in sentiment, honour and religion.

No doubt simple resentment of the old established Spanish Empire by the young upstart British one was going to cause trouble, but surely it was not really necessary for things to come to the pass they did. The British Empire kicked off in Ireland, sending an army of 18,000 soldiers in the massive effort to subjugate this country, replete with appalling policies of scorched earth and destruction, that led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Irish civilians, mostly by famine. When I think of that Bay of Biscay, compared to the Irish Sea, I cannot really think that fear of Spaniards being established here could have warranted that kind of response. After all they only managed to send 3,000 troops to the Battle of Kinsale.

Much propaganda was made about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and their cruelty in America. Happily there is a much more general willingness to admit these days that the treatment of native populations in the British Empire, including the Irish and North American Indians, was as bad if not worse than what happened in South America, and what with the butchering of Catholic priests that went on in the market squares of England, the Elizabethans were certainly not to be outdone in the line of sadistic torture. I also used to hear talk in England about ‘dirty, lazy Spaniards’, and pretty much had to find out for myself how untrue that line of talk is. Besides being hard workers, they generally seem obsessed with cleanliness.

Such narrow-minded nationalism, and worse, has thankfully been in retreat in Europe for a good while - since the Second World War in fact, when the European Community project commenced. I am profoundly grateful for being spared the horrors of war in my lifetime. Of course one cannot put all this simply down to the EU, but much work has gone into it and it has at least been a massive help. Now Mr Boris Johnson and his friends are apparently willing to bring it to an end; for indeed, it would not be the same without Britain.

In a speech likening the EU to the efforts of Napoleon and Hitler, he said that ‘fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.’ I find this a strange statement. Does he not realise that this is precisely the essential problem of any democracy, which his Napoleons and Hitlers were trying to remedy by providing a ‘single authority’? Does he really think that this great exercise in democracy, the referendum, is going to bring people together? Even his Tory Party?

But things are not so very hopeless. Mr Johnson might not like to recognise it, but the ultimate answer to his ‘eternal problem’ is religious in nature rather than political; and fundamentally Europe is not quite so badly off as he makes out. Many of the founding fathers of the EU, such as Adenauer, Monnet and Schuman, one might include de Gaulle, were indeed practising Catholics, but I am not expecting the likes of Johnson to suddenly become one.  What I would argue is that Catholicism remains the bedrock of European culture, yes, in England and Ireland too, and if Mr Johnson really wants a single authority to fill the democratic void, that is where he may easily find it!

It is a big thesis, too big to tease out here, but quite apart from the many explicitly Catholic writers of England as well as the rest of Europe, let us just consider William Shakespeare a little. Take King Lear. The old king eschewed the responsibility of governing, divided the kingdom, and went mad. Are we to suppose that Shakespeare did not have his own times in mind when he wrote it, around 1605? Queen Elizabeth I had died, and the terrible war in Ireland dragged to a conclusion of sorts, two years previously. The ‘truth party’, Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, suffered and were largely defeated, like the Irish Earls. The values upheld are thoroughly catholic, and bear no traces of xenophobia…. Says Kent:

‘To plainness honour's bound,

When majesty stoops to folly.

Fare thee well, king: sith thus thou wilt appear,

Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.’

One more literary illusion, from the twentieth century, and I shall have to rest my case, that the Catholic tradition of Europe transcends in a sense the Roman Catholic Church, although the latter is indeed essential to it. This quotation from The Dry Salvages by T.S.Eliot does have the advantage, from my point of view, of chiming with my other great source of universal values, the sea and seafaring; but if it does not refer to the Catholic Church, then I don’t understand it aright:-

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

In navigable weather it is always a seamark

To lay a course by: but in the sombre season

Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

Islas Cies

The sooner Mr Boris Johnson, not to mention the great British electorate, realise this, the better! I pray that they may not be pitching themselves and us all into another sombre season or sudden fury! But I do admit it, I am getting a little spoilt in my old age. I will close with a few photos both of the fabulous Galicia we left behind, and the equally fabulous island we have come back to.....

What a wonderful place Europe is!

Abe swimming in the pools of Pobra

Anna M with Ros Alither at the Islas Cies

Different company in Horseshoe Harbour!

*http://www.aemet.es/

+ to see all my photos of the Baltimore Wooden Boat Festival, click here: 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3zin5QGbLMeVGxSclo0RVMwcUk

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