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!