Still Chancing Away, and FFF XVI, London.

Nazare from beach near the Porto de Abrigo.

It's just as well this is a good place to be, because like most good places, things just doddle along at their own pace. Northerners who push their weight around are not likely to get on well, for all their complaints about lazy, corrupt etc locals. As I see it, they are neither particularly lazy nor corrupt, but they do tend to have a different approach to work and how things should be organised in general. We Europeans would do well to try to understand what is going on!
        At least when it boils down to English v Portuguese attitudes, I think one basic difference is that like most northerners the English more or less came to accept their state as a kind of church, which provides the basis for all legitimacy. Anything which bypasses state structures is therefore labelled as 'corrupt'. The Portuguese on the other hand are inclined to regard the state as more or less a necessary evil, especially when it comes to organising things that they think can be done better on the basis of personal relationships, be they within families or communities.
        Northern Europeans tend to divide all human activity into specialised units, that can all be regulated and taxed by the State. Actually Germany and France seem to be even worse than England in this respect. They call this 'efficiency' or something. Each little speciality has to have its exclusive qualifications. One ends up in a prison of regulations and taxes. As our French Sherkin Islander has it, 'En France ils sont tous en prison!' 
        It's a great pity when this attitude gets to be identified with the EU, because there is no good reason why it should be. We actually need to debunk the State somewhat. Subsidiarity is the answer, always taking decisions at the most basic level possible. However this can only work if the genuinely big decisions are taken well in hand at their appropriate level, in a way that certain well-known democracies have been failing dismally of late. Subsidiarity is the only way the ideal of democracy can be saved, grounded in personal responsibility at the level of communities where people actually know each other, but with effective overall direction. 
        The notion that democracy is achieved by the simple fact of being able to vote for one person or another through a ballot box, persons that one has no real relationship with nor means to hold accountable, is really little better than voodoo.
        Meanwhile this outfit where I am working in Nazare is a 'northerner's' nightmare. It is owned by the State, but is open and minimally regulated. Nonetheless, though somewhat tatty, it is liveable and it works. Well, eventually; we shall see! At least it is full of people 'doing their thing'; and how I enjoy the simple fact that fishermen, yachties and all sorts are dodging along together with very little friction or anxiety as far as I can see.  And they are mostly 'chancers' and Jacks of All Trades I should say!
 

Netters

  

Trawlers

Boarding pots.

Someone's idea of room for the future?

From the Fractal Frontier, XVI, London.

Joy was teaching at the Lycée Française de Londres, and found me some supply teaching there. It was nice to be working in a sane environment, but nonetheless I decided that teaching was not my thing. I then got a job through a Slant/Cambridge friend at the Catholic publishing house, Sheed and Ward. I would mostly sit in a little office correcting proofs, with the odd bit of excitement when it came to discussing a book or writing blurbs. After a couple of months I moved on to a job as a reporter on the Catholic Herald, mostly in its office on Fleet St.

It was now summer, 1969. We (Fiona, Luke and I) had moved into a flat in Southwark, so in dry weather I would walk to work, past Waterloo Station and over the Thames on the walk-way beside the railway bridge, and so on along the Embankment. The gulls on the river put me in mind of the sea, before I plunged through a few more streets laced with diesel fumes, and found my desk in the office, smelling strongly of stale tobacco smoke. It is incredible to think now, how we used to work in a haze of the beastly stuff! Not that I didn't contribute myself; if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! But I did give it up a few years later, when I started to feel the effects of it on my chest.

Somehow or other I got to go to Northern Ireland, a day or two after the British Army was deployed on the streets there. Slant came up trumps again, and I had a contact in 'Free Derry', so I headed there and was duly given an arm-band to pass freely. One young Bernadette Devlin was in full flight, newly elected as an MP, and I got to listen in on the budding 'revolution', even to join in a little in their debates. It was heady stuff, and inspiring in its way. I went on to Belfast and to Protestant areas too, though that was scary. Merely being a young English reporter was suspect, and he certainly would not admit to working for a Catholic paper, not indeed that it was clear to me what they had to fear, on either count!

The truth was that they had a bad conscience. They knew, as well as everyone else who cared to acquaint themselves with the facts, that the Civil Rights marches had been savagely set upon, and the B Specials had been on the rampage with their Saracen armoured cars, shooting up the Catholic areas. I saw bullet marks right beside a school. The barricades had been thrown up in self-defence and terror. When the army was deployed, the troops were initially very welcome there, out of pure relief.

The great British public meanwhile were mainly getting the message that the Army was being deployed to subdue some rioting Republicans, but that it would only be necessary for a few weeks. Being thus misinformed, they did not have to bother with the underlying reality, though even to a green young man such as myself, it was obviously not true that the troops would be home again quickly. You may have thought that the Catholic Herald with its office in Fleet St was ideally placed to correct that view of things. Not so. By the time my copy had been cut, changed round and head-lined, it was unrecognisable, and in no way challenged the establishment narrative.

'What is truth?' asked Pontius Pilate, though the answer was standing right there before him. It is hard to know which is the most alarming: those who maintain that their own outlook, unexamined and unquestioned, in fact constitutes 'the truth', or those who in effect deny that there is any such thing! And yet we more or less expect this of our politicians, and go on voting for them anyway. But perhaps it is the Establishment media, the BBC, the New York or the Irish Times and so on, who are the more pernicious offenders, with all their claims of objectivity. Watch out whenever someone says, you can't say that!

That every perspective has its limits should go without saying, and that does not invalidate it; but let us 'own' it. Once we recognise and acknowledge it, we have the chance to examine it and modify it. Facts, especially physical ones, indeed make good starting points, provided one realises that there are different ways of looking at them. The more complicated the facts, the greater the need for reference points to validate them, for a narrative to interpret them. A society with no reference points, no shared narrative, is hardly a society at all; those who claim to do without them are simply in denial.

I say to the atheists of this world, who say they do not believe in God, well what about Truth, can you believe in that? If they say no, well then I might propose they go sailing the sea. But if they say they can, I shall ask how much do you believe in it? Would you be prepared to give your life for it? A question indeed that not any of us can altogether answer until we have to, but we might aspire to do so, or at least envisage such a possibility. But to die for an abstract concept? A poor fate! Can we really give ourselves to anything less than another person? How about the person who actually claimed to be 'the Truth'? He also claimed he would be with us till the end of time!

If journalism boils down to telling people what they want to hear, or what some powerful interests want them to hear, then the society it is informing is in dire trouble. You may say that this is just the human condition, but it remains true that some societies can take more of reality aboard than others, usually after periods of great suffering. When things have been reasonably ok for a long time, delusions are inclined to build up. It has taken longer than I expected for British society to find itself in serious trouble as a result of its gross delusions, but it is getting there!

Fiona and I both felt we did not want to rear a family in London, and I'm glad we did not have to. Fiona was left a few quid from her Granny that enabled us to buy a cottage in the country. It will be said we were just lucky; but we also remembered my mother's side of that old argument with Dad; if you put your faith in God, he does look after you!