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....