Living in Hope, and FFF XIV.

"Unfortunately you fall just outside our criteria", said one crowd. Well when a society is run by people, notably bureaucrats and bankers, whose main principle is to watch the 'criteria' at their backs, then we may take it that society is on the way out. But with what can we replace them? Well, in the case of raising a few euro to repair the Anna M, a bit of family solidarity has happily done the business. Let's hope that when I get down to Nazaré next Tuesday, the other bit, actually getting the work done, falls into place as well! 

The precepts for human flourishing have been clearly laid out in theory - I mean faith, hope and love and all that goes with them - but how to live them out is of course another thing. How, for example, does ordinary day-to-day hope stand in relation to that transcendent hope promised by Christian faith? And how do we go about building real practical solidarity, even in our families?

For myself, ordinary human hope is like a spring-board. You have to jump firmly on it, and in fact go down with it, in order that you may take off with it into transcendent hope; in fact getting the Anna M to sea again is a pretty good little image for it. And indeed we need such little, practical, physical images, and you may be sure that any vibrant human culture is rich with them!

Sometimes the Church has concentrated too much on the hopelessness of life in this world, offering a transcendent hope more as consolation than as a fruit for our human strivings. Even when these appear vain, faith is trusting that they are never utterly lost. If we are to have a genuine faith in eternal life, it must come at the very pitch of our efforts here on Earth!

But not to mention the transcendent bit, ordinary human hope, and the beauties that go with it, was sadly lacking for the kids I briefly tried to teach in Liverpool, back in 1968. Read on! 

FFF XIV. The little segregated schools of four parishes had been amalgamated into the coeducational paragon, the Archbishop Whiteside Secondary Modern, but as yet only the new intake was integrated; the older boys and girls were still segregated. The headmaster was desperate for staff and seemed to be pleased with the new victim, in spite of the fact that he was totally green and with no training in teaching. BA Cantab was supposed to qualify me! He gave me the lowest stream of the last year boys for over half the timetable. He asked me what I could teach and I said that I supposed I could make some kind of fist of anything, except Maths. He gave me more Maths to teach than anything else. I also taught all the first year students French, for one class a week. Things were getting classy on the Scotland Road!

       The outfit was held together, in the sense of not descending into outright riot, by the deputy headmaster, a cynical thug. I have noticed that all weak bosses tend to have a hatchet man at their side! There was also a female deputy-head for the girls, breaking her heart at the chaos. She had been headmistress of one of the parish schools, and was that rare and precious thing, a good school-teacher. She stuck it for a lot longer than me, but didn’t last long there either. I find this reference on the internet to that school:- ‘I taught for a short while at Archbishop Whiteside RC Secondary on Silvester Street as a supply teacher in the early 1970s and the sense of failure permeating out of the place was almost tangible. However bright a child was, they had little chance of succeeding in such negative places.’*

       I was confronted with a place, a community, with no future, while its denizens had no hope unless it were to get out of it. Yet my lads were totally alienated from the whole idea of education. Many of them had elder brothers in borstal or prison. It was rare for any of them to go home to a square meal, though some Mums no doubt made heroic efforts. They were lucky if they were thrown a few bob for (fish and) chips. Chip butties (sandwiches) or jam ones, with grotty sliced bread of course, was what a lot of them seemed to live on. Since I taught them both Maths and English, I made valiant attempts to get them to do simple arithmetic and to write. What could I get them to write? I managed to get permission to take parties of them down to the docks, and tried to get them to write about what they saw, and whatever images it provoked.

        I undertook to produce a school newspaper, and this was thought very bright. In a moment of naive folly, I got some of the more articulate to write down what they thought of the transition from the parish schools to the new one. Of course they were brutally damning, with their sharp Liverpool wit and some surprising perspicacity. I printed much of what they wrote, and that was the end of my career there. I spent more and more time playing football with the lads. This was the one thing that fired them up; they were transformed when kicking a ball around. They knew very well they were trapped, and the dream of making it as a footballer was about the only escape they could imagine.

       The way the end came for me was rather amusing. What to do with the French classes was a good question. The curriculum was absurdly inappropriate. If I could just give them some idea of France, and teach them to say s’il vous plait  and merci, I thought I would be doing well. It was uphill. Towards the end of one class, when I was failing dismally to get answers to questions like ‘ou est Paris?’, I said in desperation ‘Right, you ask me questions!’ This deteriorated rapidly into ‘Sir, where do babies come from?’ In my naivety, I said, ‘don’t you know?’, and gave them a brief account. Rapt attention! But next morning I had the headmaster on to me. ‘Mr Aston, I hear you were giving sex education in French class?’

       The previous summer, while fixing the roof of the Simon house in Shaw St, I had fallen in with an alcoholic Paddy by the name of Rory Dunbar. Rory had grown up at the foot of the Dublin mountains, which might as well have been in the wilds of Donegal in those days, before Tallaght came sprawling out to meet it. When he was young there had been no electricity there, water was drawn from a pump and turf for burning from the hills. Modernity Dublin-style had soon swept away that way of life, but I suppose Rory had never quite been able to adapt. We became friends, and down the years to come Rory taught both Fiona and I many basic survival skills, helping us to come down to earth.
He also fostered our interest in Ireland, in my case much aroused by the very good Irish school-friends I already had, especially Ken and Rodney. It was another few years before I actually got around to even visiting Ireland with him, and we'll come to that later, but here in Horseshoe Cottage right now a great friendship lives on that he initiated, with the Pye family. Rory used to help Patrick Pye to lead stain glass windows, up the road in Piperstown, looking down across Dublin from the hills above Tallaght.
I like to think that something special has occurred, what with Ken's and Patrick's art, and Rodney's eremitical life, and perhaps even my own poor scribblings, that one day might be recognised as a glimmer of a new dawn of Irish Catholic culture. Poor Patrick, an artist and devotee of beauty if ever there was one, is temporarily in a care home right now, but here having a bit of respite from looking after him is his wife Nóirín, a lady of real hope! -

Nóirín Pye.

       

*<http://streetsofliverpool.co.uk/lost-schools-of-liverpool-2/>

A Matter of Credit, and FFF XIII.

When I was a very young man, I walked into a bank and got a whopping overdraft with ease. Whether it is the times, or my age, or the struggling life that I have led bringing up a family of nine in the West of Ireland, deliberately turning my back on a privileged English background - whatever - the fact is in recent years it has been impossible for me. However, needs must try, if the old Anna M is to get back in the water; and blow me, I have after all found signs of life in the Bank of Ireland. Is it possible that we did get something of value in return from the Duckie's Commerce Secretary, Mr Wilbur Ross, as he doddled off with his Eur500million profit from his investment in our bank?* It still remains to be seen if the bank will come good with a piddling loan for me! 
       There is a presumption among the powers that be that our future depends on the big players, the kind of guys that the Duckie has in his Administration, with which of course our Irish Government coyly concurs, even as, like the English Tories, they pay lip service to equality and social justice. One might be tempted to consider that we need a new French Revolution, which would involve chopping a lot of heads off! But the weeds only spring up again, as we see now so clearly in the 'home of democracy'! 
       I think that no matter what system one has, its success or failure in real terms depends on listening to and empowering all those who stand outside of the magic circles of power, whether these circles consist of members of 'The Party' or simply those who have access to credit. In the end, an economy depends on those who actually rear families and both produce and consume goods or services, because they must, along indeed with those who facilitate them by trade or finance. Which way should the communication should 'face'! If you are interested in how this kind of thinking worked out in my life, read the despatches From the Fractal Frontier in the small print at the bottom of my posts.

*http://www.thejournal.ie/wilbur-ross-trump-bank-of-ireland-2-3103430-Nov2016/

Summer in Sherkin.

FFF XIII. I finished the degree in Cambridge, after a fashion. My cavalier attitude must have been frustrating for my teachers, and I must say they were kind. There had been moves to get me to see a psychiatrist, however, which I did not appreciate.  Meanwhile there was a kind of gathering going on in Liverpool, and Fiona and I headed back there. Sebastian was now the parish priest at St Mary’s, and as well as Christopher, there were Peter, Kevin and Anselm in the parochial house, while Rodney and Ken Thompson and John Stokes were living in a flat in Liverpool 8.

       As for what each of us expected to come of it all, it is impossible to speak for any but myself. Anyway Ken got a  job helping to tidy up the church-yard around the Anglican cathedral. There were some broken down graves in it that needed mending. Next thing, he had the bath-room of the flat he shared with Rodney and John covered in stone-dust, as he chipped away there at blocks of stone. He at least had found his vocation! Rodney was to become a hermit in a wild Connemara cottage, while John became a priest of the Westminster archdiocese. Meanwhile some of us were thinking of trying to establish some kind of sixth-form college, to give it possibly too grand a name. Perhaps it could be done at Downside, perhaps we could get some other house, where youngsters from all social backgrounds would be able to spend a year completely free of exam pressure, studying essentially on the basis of Dom Luke's course, with a view to figuring out what to do with their lives, and what life in general was all about.

       St Mary’s, Highfield St, near the Exchange Station and at the back of the docks, was a Downside parish and I suppose a testimony of the monks’ desire to break away from the ‘best gentlemen's’ club west of London’ aspect of the mother house. The first Catholic chapel thereabouts was built around 1726, but destroyed by an anti-Catholic mob 20 years later. The next chapel was disguised as a warehouse. Into this area, many refugees from the Irish famines were to pour, arriving packed into dodgy craft even as refugees elsewhere do today. A fine Pugin church was nonetheless built around that time, only to be destroyed by German bombs in WWII. The church where Fiona and I were married had been opened in 1953. By 1968 the rows of tenement houses had been replaced by soulless blocks of flats. N'ere a tree survived in that urban desert. The whole area was eventually flattened, mainly to make way for flyovers and whatnot as far as I have made out, while the church was closed in 2001 and demolished in 2003.

       The role of physical place in our lives is a mysterious business, and of course goes with the whole business of ‘roots’. It is hard to know how much credence to give to the notion that the Celtic side of the British Isles functions as a kind of foil to the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon side; a semi-suppressed underside wherein lurk subconscious and imaginative resources that the brittle, disciplined superstructure of the Sassenach ignores, to his own impoverishment and peril. The Mendip hills, upon which Downside stands, would constitute part of the frontier between them, if such a thing can be said to persist nowadays.

       The Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have barely penetrated the Somerset marshes beyond them, where stands the Celtic stronghold of Glastonbury. At the southern end of this border country was my mother's home country in the Isle of Purbeck and the marshy levels about the River Frome, at the back of Poole harbour in Dorset. Here was another Celtic outpost, and subsequently recusant refuge, until Corfe Castle was destroyed by Cromwell. Her family evidently attracted recruits from distant Celtic parts, for one of my mother's grannies was an Irish Catholic from Co. Monaghan, and the other a Highland Scottish one.

       But the beautiful West Country seemed very far away in the urban jungle behind the Liverpool docks, and indeed what the bashed-up Irish who lived there were to make of the priests with posh accents is anybody's guess. As one looked down from the heights of Everton, across a waste of chaos, remnants of old streets with their rows of grim back-to-back Victorian housing, swathes of empty spaces where they had been demolished but not as yet replaced by anything, corner pubs or other slightly distinguished buildings that had as yet been spared, tower blocks of new-grim flats, various industrial buildings down nearer the docks, some cranes and ships, the Mersey - only then, in the distance on a clear day, would the hills and mountains of North Wales remind one of that other world where Nature retains her dignity and beauty. And at night the odd ship’s hooter reminded me of the sea!  

       Was it possible for those hungry 19th century Irish eyes to glimpse those Welsh hills occasionally, above or between the slate roofs, through the smoke of many chimneys? Did they pause to wonder, like me,  whether the Mountains of Dublin or of Mourne might be spied from them? Did they think then of the grand and graceful places that they had been forced to abandon? And what of the gulf between their heritage and ours! Was it really possible that the Catholic Faith could transcend it? To be middle class might be defined as having a fair chunk of hope in terms of this life; to be poor is to have to face 'a vale of tears' in which you must locate your hope firmly elsewhere, in Heaven, (unless in some alternative, 'the Revolution', or whatnot); can they be reconciled? Going to Liverpool from Downside was certainly some kind of a statement, but of what?
Was it a matter of trying to reconcile beauty with ugliness, or our fine aspirations with the reality of post-industrial Britain, or Celt with Saxon, or rich and poor, or hope for this world and for the next? Or all of them and more? We were still working on it, but the fact that the situation remained unresolved in that lump of a place on the Mendip Hills, which is Downside, did not help us to find our way. Meanwhile I don't think our monks' sermons found many hearers in the tenements; suitable ears would have to belong to workers in the nearby city centre or to blow-ins like me. Fiona and I moved into the parish youth leader’s flat, over a chipper across the square from the church. I can still smell that horrible smell of rancid cooking oil that wafted up from below. The cops only ventured into that area on foot in threes, and were lucky if they were not hit by the odd bottle whistling down from the surrounding tenements. I found a job in the new ‘secondary modern’ school that was attached to the parish of St Mary’s, but that's a story for the next post.

       
See poor old St Mary's Church!

FFF XII

Summer has finally arrived in Ireland, and to prove it I even went for a swim yesterday in Horseshoe Bay. With fine weather came a tribe of grandchildren, so

there's not much time for writing; but there's not much to blog about anyway. What is there to say about contented times? I have been meanwhile doing little jobs about the house, while also trying to put money together for the job below in Nazare on 'Anna M'.
There's no wriggling out of the for better or for worse bit in the case of boat-ownership. If your boat is crocked you must try to fix it, and quickly. Boats die if they are neglected. Well now, of the hundreds of people who have sailed aboard Anna M, and even those who just might like the idea of doing so, surely there are some who can afford a few euro to help fix her up? You have the chance of a week's sailing aboard this autumn on the Algarve. Please see last week's blog.... Meanwhile, Anna Legge seems to be taking to life with the Anna M, despite the difficulties. I am hoping she will do some of the things I havn't time for, like driving the Facebook page.

ps - very sorry to hear about the fires in Portugal. Is this our future?

I continue with my account of a life On the Fractal Frontier....


FFF XII I have occasionally encountered strangers in conversation who assumed that my convictions were the result of ‘successful brainwashing’. I hope that I have shown that this is far from the truth, unless one means something very different by the term ‘brainwashing’ to what they meant. They tend to imagine that any faith-based education must be in the line of those madrasas wherein the Saudis for instance indoctrinate vulnerable young men, having them for a start learn off the Qur'an by rote. While we Catholics are capable of understanding that there may be a more positive side to all that than the West appreciates, and that we may even possibly have something to learn from it, nonetheless since Vatican II the lesson has been well learned that faith is a pilgrimage that everyone has to make for themselves, in their own time; besides, Christ himself asserted that, beyond what he tried to convey in his earthly life, that which Holy Scripture reveals, we still have much to learn in the course of the journey. It is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that enables us to move beyond the notion of a static deity, whose self-revelation has been fixed once and for all; instead we are introduced into a divine community, a nexus of dynamic relationship.
Unquestioned assumptions and unexamined lives are that which may lead one to suspect real brain-washing; victims will refuse to engage when questioned, possibly announcing that 'they are offended!' 'Hallo, yes, sorry about that, but so what?' I am tempted to reply. There seems to be a fierce outbreak of 'offence' these days! Meanwhile our minds tend to be so battered, cluttered and mired in ‘stuff’ that we all actually stand in need of a real brainwash now and again. Perhaps that's been the most important function of sailing in my life. Certainly it was a very positive counter-balance to all that education, when I was growing up. The whole business seemed to have been far too cerebral.
Yet one has to watch out. As privileged members of the ‘affluent society’, we are good at compensating and distracting ourselves. Still sea-faring does tend to underline the imperative of a coherent sense of meaning, of a viable narrative to shape our course, or to put it another way, to find the right pitch for our song, to take responsibility and to face difficult decisions. One way and another, this imperative had impressed itself upon me in absolute terms; any society which tries to do without these 'cardinal virtues' will fail, decaying within and without; and claptrap about ‘Western’ or ‘British’ values fails to fill the bill. Note however that the intellectual dimension is far from absolute. Those who go in poverty, uncompensated by ordinary human consolations, stand in particular need of such hope, and the faith and love that goes with it, as do also young people generally. Luckily for the poor, the uneducated and the young, it is their very poverty which enables them to access more easily the 'divine community' which provides them.
The Golden Age we were supposed to be entering of universal literacy and general Enlightenment was already, in my youth, giving way to incoherence and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness. That was then. Now we have a Big 'Chief of Democracy', for whom wealth is a great deal more important than truth, who has weapons at his fingertips fit to destroy the Earth several times over and wants yet more of them, who expresses himself in banal and ill-conceived ‘tweets’, in denial of the threats posed by over-dependence on fossil fuels and the midst of endless savage acts of violence stemming mainly from the attempt to preserve the wealth of the oiligarchs. We also have for example the bizarre tendency to assume that such contempt for the natural world is to be associated with the denial of the facts of life implied by the concept of homosexual marriage, witness the many references to the DUP at present that begin along the lines: 'The gay-hating, climate-change denying and fundamentalist Northern Irish Party'. Our world is struggling with a very confused and inadequate culture and resultant politics, grossly distorted by massive imbalances in wealth and power, marred with horrendous violence, but for all this rich in new possibilities for communication, sustainability and general flourishing. How is the mess to be untangled?
There was once a time when even the printing press caused horror, churning out reams of material without the sweet mediation of being painstakingly written by hand, with much loving embellishment; and perhaps more importantly therefore without the mediation of an actual human context. With the advent of printing, knowledge could apparently be merely bought and sold; it no longer depended on a community, but on a few bosses; it went on to lose its footing both in our own imaginations and in the physical business of living that may provide us with authoritative and constructive images. Nowadays, with knowledge flickering everywhere, it is frequently at the mercy of interests which have no rationale but their own power; they tend to hate transcendent forms of knowledge that threaten to thwart their aspirations. What ‘sense of purpose’ might we require, besides serving them?

So back in the day, we who had shared that uncertain epiphany at Downside found ourselves fragmented and unsure about how to deal with our newfound words of hope. The digital revolution was still the preserve of boffins with big clanky computers, but Marshal McLuhan’s ‘The Media is the Massage’  was out, and we were aware that there was massive potential for good or ill in the electronic media. 'new worlds, i suggest, are born but not made, and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals,' wrote e.e.cummings, which is all very well, but they don't just happen and one does have decisions to make! I had clearly blown the opportunity of some kind of Establishment career, of going to the Foreign Office or something as my father had dreamed of for me. (The idea had been attractive at one stage, but how glad I am now that I didn’t go down that road. I really feel for any genuine people there having to cope with the current Brexit mess!)
If my and Fiona's actions had something of the nature of an eruption from the underground, the forces of law and order or whatever were soon on our case. While we were helping to run the Liverpool Simon Community, an open house for the homeless, with me saying I was not going back to Cambridge for my last year there, my father and Fiona's mother teamed up to sort us out. Poor Fathers Sebastian and Christopher in St Mary’s were under the cosh for giving us succour; I vividly recall poor Christopher sucking on his pipe as they laid into him, when he happened to get caught in the line of fire. Well, I agreed to go back and finish my degree, on condition that Fiona's mother would give her consent to our getting 'properly' married. Somehow Sebastian as parish priest managed to get us through the necessary hoops in time for this to happen before the new academic year started in mid October.
It was a low key affair. Poor Isabel, it was no doubt not the wedding she had dreamed of for her daughter, but we were happy. It was simple and to the point, with Mass at St Mary's and a party in 'Ma Boyle's' pub, featuring Guinness and oysters! Back at Cambridge, we were very lucky to be able to rent a little terrace cottage from my college, just across the road. I can't say I followed the course much, but I did do plenty of reading in the year that followed, and even ended it with a 3rd class degree. We had heavy-duty conversations with our small circle of friends, including Dom Clement Birch, a Downside monk who was studying there, while Fiona taught herself to cook from Elizabeth David's books.
Was there any viable way of starting a family in sight? We both started reading books about remote island communities, from St Kilda via the Blasquets to Tristan da Cunha. This was a few years after the volcano erupted there, and the population had to be evacuated to Blighty. I always remembered an interview with one of the islanders when they were going back to their speck of land in the South Atlantic, as most of them chose to do. The BBC man was puzzled as to why anyone would want to go back to live in such a hard and remote place, once they had experienced the delights of modern Britain. Finally, somewhat in desperation, he asked whether they were not afraid of the volcano erupting again? 'At least we didn't make it ourselves!' was the reply. He was referring of course to nuclear weapons. That kind of destruction we have so far been spared. How to survive, and lead an authentic life in tune with the insights we had been given, was as unclear as ever!

Come Sailing! And FFF XI

Towards Spain.

I am glad we have not been trying to sail from Spain this last while, with the Atlantic in very frisky form. It's the sort of weather that was great for drifting salmon, with the summer madness affecting many lads around the Irish coast, hanging on to their nets by the skin of their teeth in their wee boats, as the silvery king of fishes rushed blindly in the troubled waves into the invisible webs of their doom; death for the fishes, life for us!
I left Anna Legge aboard the 'Anna M' on the concrete in Nazare, went by bus to Lisbon and thence train to Faro, for a flight to Cork. After the heat in the Algarve, the fresh, cool weather here in Sherkin is welcome. The air is clear, when it's not raining, and the sun dances fitfully on the waves, giving all the more pleasure when it does so. If it's wet outside, well then I've little* excuse but to try to get my head around paying for those repairs to the Anna M. I am lucky to have hit on a guy who reckons he can make her fully sea-worthy again at reasonable cost, but cost it will.
Anna Legge and I are planning to run week-long trips on the Guadiana and the Algarve coast from early September. The cost will be Eur300 per head for the week, under 18s half-price, children under 7 free, plus a contribution to food, diesel and any berthing expenses. If anyone fancies coming, please stump up a 50% deposit asap, and help us to get those repairs done. If you want to cancel, it will be refundable up to 3 weeks before the booking, though this might take a while. Please use the contact box if you are interested:

'Anna M' on her Guadiana mooring.

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 *Little excuse, that is, except that the political Punch and Judy Show has been so very entertaining of late. It was a good result in Britain, for it is only right that the Tories should be left swinging in the wind for now, hoisted on the petard of their Brexit lark; and it is much better for Mr Corbyn to be able to bask in the delights of discomfiting them for another while, with that seraphic smile on his face, than to actually have to take responsibility for the mess!

Meanwhile, I am so lucky to be able to sit at my front-door, watching the white-backed gannets swoop and wheel outside the bay, wending their way over the sparkling waves!
FFFXI Even in the late '60s, it was clear that our civilisation was facing a crisis of meaning, with its moral and spiritual foundations profoundly shaken. We faced the prospect of a culture which had lost faith in the very idea of truth; there was to be only 'your truth' and 'my truth'. My Professor Raymond Williams, in his book 'The Great Tradition', proposed a socialist narrative to fill this void. He seemed rather non-plussed by an undergraduate who said that was all very well and quite interesting, but surely it leaves an awful lot out? And that surely there was a far greater tradition available in the Catholic one, which in fact underlay much that one could glean from English literature?

        The excitement among the Downside 'flower children' was a matter of sharing in the development of 'a new language', as Dom Sebastian put it in his book 'God Is a New Language'. We thought that we could propose a viable narrative, or at least had one in the making; a basis for the renewal of Western and indeed World civilisation, hand in hand with the renewal of the Catholic Church announced by the Second Vatican Council. Finding the teaching offered at Cambridge largely boring or irrelevant, no doubt I seemed pretty insufferable to my official teachers; but I was lucky in  my unofficial teachers, largely up in St Mary's at Liverpool. But after all I was 'reading' literature, and I spent most of my time doing just that, albeit with minimal reference to what the course demanded. 

One delightful, if somewhat surprising, strand to our narrative was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This proposed the exercise of a very different kind of power to that of 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' or to any softer majoritarian version thereof, and also to that of kingship, as understood in modern Britain. In Tolkien's tale, power is firmly rooted in transcendent reality, with Gandalf as its priest, guardian and proponent, though Aragorn the king is so deeply imbued with that transcendent order and tradition that he remains radically autonomous. Priest and king work in tandem to oppose the evil will to power associated with the Ring, symbolising the destructive aspect of technology (which has its apotheosis in nuclear weapons). But it was not only the 'great' who stood thus spiritually erect; little people were empowered to withstand the dark power and those who wielded it, and indeed their own initiative and role proved pivotal. This all represented a very different form of scepticism from that of the Marxists, with regard to the claims of liberal democracy to promote such empowerment. But was there the least possibility of its relevance, beyond its own world of fantasy?

There were plenty of other writers, coming from very different directions, whom I saw as feeding into some budding ideology of empowerment vis-à-vis the threat of alienation, disintegration or totalitarian enslavement posed by the modern world. Eric Fromm, R.D.Laing, Ivan Illich, and a bit later, E.F. Schumacher stand out in my memory still. R.D.Laing showed how mental illness is aggravated by the refusal of others to tolerate it; maybe overt schizophrenia threatens the firewalls that enable us all to compartmentalise, containing any whiffs of the unacceptable, or even of freedom, as spelt out by Fromm in The Fear of Freedom. On the theme of a prophetic minority breaking free, there was Watership Down by Richard Adams. But I am running ahead of my narrative in some of these references; I am referring to a process that went on into the seventies. Most of these writers came my way via St Mary's, where Sebastian Moore was producing his own contribution from a perspective of what might be called theological existentialism.

I read everything I could find by Teilhard de Chardin. That so few people have even heard of him speaks volumes about how difficult it is to 'break through the noise' and to speak (or to hear) a living word. But I went on my merry way, reading with scant reference to my course. I'm not quite sure where Dostoyevski for example came into it, but I read everything by him that I could lay my hands on. However, even Jane Austin, though apparently very tame in comparison, fed into the obsession with the theme of getting in touch with and being faithful to one's true self, despite all the power of money and the blandishments of society. It was no mere intellectual obsession; I felt that I was struggling for my very sanity. I had soon concluded that Cambridge was not the right place for me to be. At the end of my second year I determined to leave the place.

Fiona was similarly struggling for her sanity. All through her teenage years she had not been speaking to her step-father, and her relationship with her mother was not good. In Liverpool I found a niche for myself helping in the Simon Community, a house for the homeless just up the road from St Mary's, and from there, borrowing a van from a great new friend by the name of Ken Hosie (who ran an adventure playground nearby), I drove up to land on her doorstep in Scotland and ask her to join me at Simon. It was a matter of desperation, far from ideal though marginally better than 'meeting a man from the motor trade', as the Beatles song had it at the time.

Fiona and I put our lives in God's hands, and He has been good to us. One of Dom Leander's favourite sayings was that 'God is never outdone in generosity'; and if He brings one a person to share one's life with, it is a gift that should not be refused! Since however she was only 19, and the age of consent for marriage was still 21, we could not be legally married; at this stage we simply exchanged vows to each other over a copy of the Bible, at a roadside in Scotland on the way to the island of Barra, where we spent a week together before going to Liverpool.
I had camped on Barra with the Scouts from Worth, and it has always stood out in my imagination, with the peak of Heaval seen from the MacBrayne's steamer as one approaches, the silver strands, the other islands set in a shimmering sea, and the friendly islanders. There for both of us began a life-long fascination with islands, seen as beautiful places set apart and close to nature, where one might perhaps lead an authentic, self-sufficient and blissful kind of life....

When You Have To Admit That Your Old Boat Is Not Fit For Sea! FFF X.

Nazare porto de abrigo, with 'Anna M' on concrete top left.

You may think the above photo was taken from a helicopter, but actually I took it from the hill near the top of the funicular. The view that opens up as you ascend it is spectacular. That northern, port-hand mole was destroyed in a storm some years ago, but by and large the entrance is amazingly safe, especially considering the famous breakers that sometimes crash in under the lighthouse away to my right as I took this. To the south-west, the wave-swept beach stretches to Peniche, while out to sea, on a clear day, the rugged Islas Berlengas (the Burlings) may be seen, marking the mid-point of that slog up the Portuguese coast, or slide down it, as the case may be.

The Berlinga Grande can be made out at right.

We were lucky to get as far as Nazaré, a great place where there are still a good few wooden fishing boats, where the sun does not bite the way it does in the Algarve, and where we found prompt help in tackling the problem of the leaks, especially from Dody Stiller and then from Alec Lammas. Alec is a true son of the Gannetsway, a Devon man who has spent many years knocking around Portugal and Brittany working with boats. Now he realises he will not be fit and able for ever and is trying to do serious stuff in order to make some money against old age.

Phew, I'm feeling my age these days, along with my old boat! But for all the difficulties, it looks as if we shall be able to make her seaworthy before the high summer. It was hard to finally admit that she was not in a fit state to cross the Biscay again, and it was necessary to take radical action. Alec and his mate Rui whipped the engine out, and so at last the major problems were accessible and plain to see; for one thing the rubber engine mounts were knackered, and more importantly there are several cracked ribs in their vicinity.  There is no point in trying to fix leaks by caulking when the weight of the keel and engine and the rig are pulling the planks apart, with the sea and the vibration of the engine working away at them! However I hope that some new laminated frames and engine mounts will fix all that.

Meanwhile this general election in the U.K. has got to be interesting! Mr Corbyn seems to be making remarkable progress. If he can beat Mrs May, I shall be inclined to forgive his equivocation about Brexit! Good luck old chap, and I admire your spirit! Funny how it feels a bit like revisiting the late '60s!

From the Fractal Frontier, X.   Back at Cambridge, I managed to change my degree course to English, after as I have said coasting through Part One in the first year. I fondly thought that I might be able to relate my studies somewhat more effectively to what was bubbling away inside my head. At least the head of English at my college, Raymond Williams, professed to relate the study of literature to what was happening in the world we lived in, even if his Marxist methodology seemed to me to leave an awful lot of interesting human experience out of the picture, to say the least.
My superviser was an acolyte of his, Terry Eagleton, who even thought in terms of marrying Marxism with Catholicism. I'm afraid that I soon came to find Professor Williams positively boring; he seemed to be obsessed with his own (in fact blinkered) agenda, and to devour everything with a view to making it fit into it; I thought the great man actually had a closed mind. Probably there was a mutual dislike there, in my case not unlike the dislike many feel for Mr Corbyn today. Terry however was somewhat different. Perhaps he was just younger, but at least he could listen as well as talk, and would try to genuinely engage if you disagreed with him. I hope Mr Corbyn is like this too, even if I fear that quite a few of his followers are not.

Back then, Terry and I found some common ground, for instance in considering the Marxist concept of 'alienation'.  It illumined for me the doctrine of Original Sin; by some primal catastrophe that we cannot really understand, we became alienated from the knowledge of God, from our own true nature and from solidarity with one another. We find ourselves falling prey to dehumanising tendencies, to the worship of Mammon,  to the idolatry that puts money and power ahead of people and results in enslavement, indifference to human life and the reification of persons; this reduces them to mere objects, units of labour or consumption that both capital and communism exploit in the pursuit of power or profit (which amount to the same thing). Our Saviour comes to drive the money-changers and power-mongers from the Temple of the Earth, and restore our integrity and true nature as autonomous persons, brothers and sisters, beloved children of God.

Through Terry I became somewhat involved in a group loosely associated with a review called Slant, which set out to promote Catholic/Marxist dialogue; the sort of thing some of my friends love to mock. At the time it did not seem such a bad idea. After all we had recently lived through 'the world's most dangerous moment', when the Catholic President of the United States had confronted the Marxist President of the USSR over his attempt to send ballistic missiles to Cuba. For a few days it had seemed quite likely that nuclear Armageddon was about to overtake us all. Still the bombs and rockets were piling up..., as they still do today, and hooray for the Labour leader's insistence that they cannot solve anything! What with Pope Francis on the See of Peter, perhaps such the idea of Catholic/Marxist dialogue is coming round again.

Perhaps we may all be getting round to hearing what the other is saying. However, the attempt to interpret everything through the lens of Marxism soon becomes very claustrophobic for such as myself, and indeed the experience of socialist countries speaks for itself. Leaving matters of imagination aside, and the very different concepts of what really makes the world tick, dialogue between Catholics and Marxists finally tends to break down in the face of doctrinaire attitudes to class, class warfare and revolution. There was something ridiculous about preaching such things from comfortable studies in Cambridge, and yet one does have to recognise the way class interests shape people's attitudes and social relationships.
Many is the middle-class Englishman who would fancy himself in the role of an 18th century gentleman, and even today, many values are plainly to be identified with that cultural mode; those Cambridge academics were correct to ask us to face the fact that a fine representative of it such as Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park owed the wealth that financed that splendid cultural heritage to his slaves in Antigua. Jane Austen might have delicately alluded to it, but she was ahead of her time in even hinting that it might constitute something of a moral problem.

Now I had to consider the fact that my fine education had been largely financed by the proceeds of shares in South African gold mines that my good Catholic Grandad had invested in! Well, I remember his referring to the fact that men flocked to work in them from all over southern Africa. Nonetheless, I concluded it was not a very happy or sustainable basis for any kind of real well-being, and I formed the opinion that the neuroses of a place like Downside originated at least in part from the socio-economic basis of the place. The most important Marxist insight is that such a basis conditions your life; you cannot get away from it. Or as Jesus put it: 'Where your treasure is, there is your heart also!'

I did not put the famous poster of Che Guevara up, but I did take an interest in liberation theology and especially in what was happening in Latin America. The aspect of it that interested me most was that of the 'base communities'. I concluded then, and I still believe, that if the Church is to be renewed, then this concept will prove central to the renewal. The 'renewal of the Church' should not be seen as securing a new lease of life for the existing structure. What was that about 'putting new wine in old wineskins'?  The challenge facing us was nothing less than that of building a just and sustainable Christian way of life, from the bottom up.... It still faces us today, with ever greater urgency, but somehow it all seemed simpler in the primary colours of those days. We have lost the naive idea that it is possible to simply go out and do it; or was it a certain arrogance that caused us to think so? In the end, one has to recognise that real community is a gift of God. Still, it is possible to put oneself in the way of that gift, or to obstruct it!

I spent a large part of my first long vacation working for Fr Agnellus Andrew at the Catholic Centre for Radio and Television at Hatch End, Middlesex. We were also working with a lady called Grace Windham Goldie, who if I remember rightly was the first producer of Panorama and was a big deal at the BBC. I got on well with her and was quite interested in the idea of trying to get into the Beeb. She had a protégé by the name of Peter Watkins who had just produced a simple little docu-drama called The War Game; it powerfully conveyed the reality of a nuclear attack on Britain, and was to be put out on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Hiroshima. Much to everyone's consternation, the BBC withdrew it at the last minute, stating that it was too horrifying to broadcast, with rumours of political interference.

That promptly put an end to my interest in working for that organisation, and the perception hardened in me that mostly the British establishment was an insincere and unreal game of silly people playing King of the Castle, struggling for their own little share of power. Of course there's nothing uniquely British about that, but the trouble is the tendency to canonise it. Because the monarchy appeared to personify and validate the game, I took against that institution. What could anyway be the use of a vacuous kingship that was not permitted even to speak its own mind? Nothing personal; I rather like Prince Charles, I might even be tempted to feel a bit sorry for him. These days I'm inclined to feel he has made a reasonable job of a lousy role, and after all I'm not sure that a British president bears thinking about, if the presidential elections in the USA or even Ireland are anything to go by. In Ireland, presidents tend to function as cheer-leader in chief for whatever the Dublin 4 lot deem ok at the time.

My crew-mate Anna on the Anna M informs me that her brother Andrew Legge made a film about food for RTE, Ireland's answer to the BBC. It had a scene showing chickens being butchered. It was withdrawn, even though RTE had spent a lot of money on it, under pressure from the poultry industry, who said it would put people off eating chicken. It's the same old story wherever you go! But let us hope that gradually a new willingness to face reality, to call a spade a spade and act accordingly, is creeping into the world, under pressure from the growing realisation that if we continue to put off addressing radical structural problems, we will destroy ourselves. I believe there are even some signs of it in this British general election!