Anchored with Blockchains?

Late October!

Here we are at the end of October in Nazaré, and I am wandering around in shorts and t-shirt, with temperatures getting above 30 degrees in the afternoon. The sea has settled and I've just had a gorgeous swim; it seems to me the weather is better than it was in the summer. However this reprieve from winter comes with something of a vengeance, in the form of fires up the country and the threat of serious drought. It may be great for working away at a wooden boat in the open air, though maybe just a bit too good for working at all, and also it’s a pity my boss Alec has been knocked off course, firstly by his farm being burnt, and then by having his hand nastily cut by a falling chisel when he did land back into the boat. Not that I haven’t plenty to do, in the tedious and dirty form of removing all the paint from Anna M’s underwater planking. However just now I’m taking a long weekend off to enjoy the weather and also to practise my other hobby, if that is the right word; reflecting on what’s going on around me with a spot of writing.

It was good to have a visit from a friend on her way home to Ireland from the goat farm where she has been woofing for the past month, and interesting to talk to both her and Alec about what is happening in rural Portugal. As life in the dysfunctional post-industrial parts of Europe, and particularly England, becomes more and more difficult and unsatisfying, both Ireland and Portugal have been getting a fair share of ‘refugees’. Indeed Fiona and myself could be counted among them; but when we came to Ireland in 1973, we deliberately did not head for West Cork because we did not want to merely join a community of ‘expats’, but wanted to try to integrate with the local community.

We sent the children to school in Glencolmcille in this spirit, despite serious reservations about so doing. Crucially, we got around to going to Sunday Mass again. ‘A mere social ritual’ is how a lot of people see it. The fact is, it refers our lives to a single central and coherent reality, mysterious indeed, but which has stood the test of time and actually continues to work for those who choose to go along with it/Him/Her, as anyone who wants to may find out for themselves. With such reference points everywhere apparently in decline, the disintegration of our societies proceeds apace.

The English Crusties that a friend encountered in recent years in rural Ireland had no such desire to integrate with the local community, she said, setting up their own school and if possible replacing the money economy with barter systems. In Portugal of course with the language barrier this situation is even more extreme. Then there may be a further dimension of mutual disesteem when it comes to the matter of sexual mores. Though of course in politically correct circles one is not supposed to admit it, even arty, liberated types, have been known to be shocked by the antics of some of the blowins.

Now that Ireland has thrown off 'the dreadful weight of Catholic repression', our young Taoiseach has famously stated with reference to homosexual marriage, ‘It does seem a bit strange at first, but you get used to it’! Yes, I suppose for that matter that you can get used to just about anything, and people do so, blowing each other to bits as in Belfast in the ‘70s for instance, or, well, the list could be endless. The solution to such problems recommended by some is to adopt the enlightened attitude, that’s life, get used to it! And so on, down to Professor Veronica O’Keane of Trinity College informing the Government Committee on abortion lately that "We need a real-life solution to the real life problem of unwanted pregnancy and not a moral, ethical, metaphysical, philosophical discussion about abortion.”

Who, let alone a university professor, would need to be bothered with all that boring stuff? Well then, if we don’t, but on the other hand are too sophisticated for settling for such simple formulae as ‘Thou shalt not kill’, not to mention more positive aspirations to, say, protect the innocent and vulnerable and also the dignity of women, how are we to constitute society and establish that essential basic trust, the absence of which is something all of us must hope, however dimly, we do not have to endure?

My country, right or wrong! was the cry in the heyday of the nation state, and one was supposed to believe that the nation's interests constituted an adequate basis for our conduct, but that is a very tattered notion at this stage, irremediably so indeed, and good riddance to it! Meanwhile, we all of us must come back eventually to the imperative to address such little matters as just what is right or wrong. As Dostoevsky had his Elder Zossima say:-

"To consider freedom as directly dependent on the number of man’s requirements and the extent of their immediate satisfaction shows a twisted understanding of human nature, for such an interpretation only breeds in men a multitude of senseless, stupid desires and habits and endless preposterous inventions."

Is this business of ‘independence’ for Catalonia, like 'choice', a matter of ‘senseless, stupid desire’ or not? It does seem to me to have a good deal in common with Brexit; indeed some strange bedfellows emerge these days. When one considers them as related to the depth of disillusionment that now exists with what until recently tended to be considered exemplars of civilisation and democracy, such as the USA and both the UK and the EU, maybe they also have common ground with those communities of Crusties.

The bedfellows I have in mind tend to relate to utopian hopes that surround the internet. The Brexiters appear to think that technology will somehow enable a borderless border in Ireland. Catalonian independistas believe that they can bypass much of the cumbersome machinery of the old nation state, not to mention the likes of the banks, and thus, with the help of the blockchain technology that underpins bitcoins, create a parallel economy, based on what is called ‘digital trust’.* Is this a visionary leap into the future or just another ‘preposterous invention’?

Trust is trust and unity is unity, and without them there is only war and destruction. That is what we all must focus on, while the things we make, be they of wood, gold or bits, cannot stand in the end by themselves, nor substitute for those intangible goods. Which is far from denying that we must keep ourselves and our societies anchored in physical truth; curiously this is a condition for justly appreciating metaphysical reality. No amount of blockchain would keep the old Anna M from being blown on the rocks in a gale, and I would have very small hopes of it keeping human society in safety either. That Committee declined to watch a film of an abortion being carried out, and do the warmongers of this world really understand the physical effects of their weapons?

As my waiter, while serving me delicious sardinhas assadas, commented on the news from Spain on the tv: ‘ha que fallar’.  Yes indeed,  hay que hablar, il faut parler, cal parlar, they must talk! Anyone who worships the Word made Flesh can only agree. As their society dissolves in chaos, I reckon that even those enthusiasts for blockchains will have in the end to listen to such words as these from the prophet Isaiah in today’s Liturgy of the Word:-

Announce it – come, ponder it together –

 who was saying this from the beginning, who foretold this from the start?

Am I not the Lord?

 Is there any other God but me?

 Do you seek a just God who will save you? There is no other.

Turn to me and you will be saved, all you ends of the earth;

 for I am God, there is no other.

Nossa Senhora da Nazaré.

So get off your high horses, Castellanos and Catalans alike, and look about you for the only way forward, that strangely enough has been right under your long noses all along! There is no other way, and the Paddies would do well to remember it as well.

*https://cat.elpais.com/cat/2017/10/26/espana/1509027957_904688.html

Waves, Fire and Salmon (FFFXXIII).

The waves have finally got serious here in Nazaré, but I've little time for taking photographs. The work on the Anna M goes on steadily, though Alec is rather distracted just now on account of his farm up the country being burnt out. All his olive and fruit trees and vines destroyed, along with his machinery there. At least his house survived.

The scale of the fire disaster in Portugal is horrendous. There is much anger at the Government and the Interior Minister resigned. It is claimed that some of the fires were started deliberately. However the facts remain that the country was tinder dry after weeks of drought and a very hot summer, while the evidence piles up that such events are what we must expect from global warming. The hot southerly breeze generated by Hurricane Ophelia as it headed for Ireland was incredible for October even here on the Portuguese coast.

Alec knew a man who could not outrun the fire on a road in a tractor at over 40 km/hr; he was very lucky to find a safe place to turn into. The death toll from the latest fires stands at 46. Many of his neighbours have lost everything, including their houses. At this stage the main priority is burying dead animals. Many of the animals that survived will have to be destroyed because there is nothing left in the country to feed them. Hay of course is one of the first things to burn.

One wonders how the countryside can recover, when surely one element in the tragedy is already the decline in the rural population. A traditional fire break was to cultivate and irrigate vegetables around houses. What happens when there is nobody left to do this work?

Enough of this, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane, though there too we encounter rural decline....

FFF XXIII, The Fish of Knowledge.

In Donegal in the 1970s, myself and Fiona were privileged to witness the last days of an ancient way of life. Paddy’s Day (the Feast of St Patrick on the 17th March) marked the beginning of the serious Spring work. The days were getting longer, and with luck drier, though the weather could still have a vicious sting to it, which goes to show how right T.S.Eliot was in his assertion that ‘April is the cruellest month’. Reserves are low and, if Spring lets one down in the line of weather, it is difficult indeed to get on with the work of cutting turf and sowing spuds. But if that fine dry spell came, it was great to be up in the fragrant air of the bogs, slicing out heaps of the dark squishy sods, laying them out to dry and gazing out over the ocean as we took our tea-break, before those darn midges come to make life there Hell!

By the middle of May, salmon fever would be gripping the coasts of Ireland. Soon it would be time to spend the short summer nights down there on the waves, with the hills now rearing up above us, to be unforgettably etched against the early morning light…. There would be a looking out of nets, repairing them and mounting new ones. This was the chance to break out of the straightjacket of subsistence living, maybe to buy a better boat, a decent car or even to build a house. The main craze at that time was the drift-net fishery, which was what my double-ended half-decker, An Cnoc Mor, had actually been built for; this fishery was in its heyday at the time, but first I must describe a very ancient and beautiful way of fishing the salmon that was still practised in Teelin Bay: dulling with a draft or ring net.

In a punt a crew waited quietly with their oars at the ready and net ready to shoot, with another man tending one end of the net ashore at one of several special spots around the bay. Sometimes they had to wait for long hours, but alert all the while for the least sign of a school of fish. Once it came, they were off in a flash, trying to encircle the fish with the net, with the man ashore throwing stones to try to scare the fish into it. The dull complete, both ends of the net would be gathered into the boat, with a great splashing of oars to deter the fish from escaping beneath it. Maybe one or two or maybe a hundred of the gorgeous great fish were taken, as the bag of the net was hauled aboard. Once a boat had shot their net, there would be a general change of station, each boat moving on to take the place of the next one. Of course it was hard to get a licence for it and it was a bit of a closed shop. It was also in danger of being made obsolete by the scarcity of fish, for which drift-netting was particularly blamed, since the fish had to evade one barrier of net after another all the way round the coast.

The conditions of this drift-net fishery were on the mad and dangerous side. The only legal nets for it were made of yarn rather than monofilament gut, and only 30 meshes deep. This meant they only worked in the dark, or the fish would see them, and indeed the darker the night and the rougher the sea, the better! John Maguire was a good fisherman, but he had a neighbour, Jerry McNern, who I suppose we have to say was an even better one. Certainly he was the right man for that game, and pursued it with great passion! He hailed from Dunkineely, the other side of Killybegs, and was of a different temperament altogether to the gentle men of Glencolmcille; he was very wired and sharp. He was a successful mid-water trawling skipper, but did not like the tedious summer trawling for whitefish. Indeed there were trawlers of 65ft at the salmon with 20 miles of net when the thing was at its height, but besides being totally illegal, this was not going to work for long, as we shall see! Anyway John prevailed on Jerry to join us.

Now Jerry was not one to cut much slack for this hippy bloke with ‘the BBC accent’! I have to say he sharpened me up no end; not a second’s lack of concentration went without rebuke; and it was just as well. As far as Jerry was concerned, there were basically three places to be: back of Rathlin (O’Byrne) Island, Malin Mor or Glen Head, and if necessary there was another stand in the mouth of the Glenbay. One had to be on the ball to get a good one, and that meant a clatter down from Teelin which was soon testing the workmanship of the man that built the Cnoc Mor. It requires great skill to put exactly the right shape on a clinker-built boat; it is all in the cut and twist of the planks, which must not be forced into shape. Anyway my boards were just a bit too flat under the bow, just where the boat hit those waves coming up past Slieve League as we bashed westward from Carrigan Head. By the second season, lift the cuddy floor and we could watch the water squirting up between the planks every time she hit a wave.

We would tie a tyre onto one end of the drift and shoot away our nets, something over half a mile long; normally we shot in towards the land, and of course having no radar or plotter, it took fine judgement to finish up the right distance off. Generally, the closer the better, but it was getting dark by now. Over went the winkie on the end of the net, and we would settle down for a bit of grub and a mug of tea,  while keeping a good eye on that winkie. One never quite new what the drift would do. Sometimes it would keep straight and behave itself, sometimes not. The tea taken, off we would go with a searchlight, made from an old headlight’s sealed beam. The net could be all bunched up any which way, zig-zagging here and there. That was ok too, it was fishy enough if it wasn’t too bunched up, but it also made it pretty good at catching fishing boats!

Now and again I got it on the prop, which would elicit a string of oaths from Jerry. It would have to be cut off with the scythe blade mounted on a shovel shaft that we carried for the purpose. At least you could more or less get at the prop on those double-enders. Once it also got caught around the bottom of the rudder, and as I pulled it to try to pull it off, I lifted the rudder clear off its lower pintle. So there we were with the net caught around the prop and the rudder swinging by the top pintle, half a mile or less from the rocks. Take it easy, get the net off and tie it forward, then I could go over the side hanging on to a couple of tyres, and while being dunked up to the chest in the sea with the lads stopping the rudder from dashing around too much, with a foot on the prop-shaft, I managed to get a spare rowlock in the place of that (now bent) pintle.

On another memorable occasion, when we went to check the drift, we found it had done a complete somersault in the short time while we had our tea; the outside end had come right around and was nearly on the rocks. We went to haul it like mad. It looked as if we would have to cut and leave some of it to do so, but it would have been a serious blow to lose half the nets at that stage. I kept going, but will never forget that big wall of black rock with the water gushing down it, that seemed so close I could nearly touch it; but I had to concentrate totally on hauling those nets, and kept going, half expecting a horrible crunch. Next moment we were clear of the rocks, safe and with the nets aboard, thank God!

The biggest problem however was getting worse all the time. Jerry referred to the seals alternatively as ‘Whiskers’ and ‘Wallace’. In previous less enlightened times, they had been mercilessly culled. One received a handsome bounty if one presented a seal’s snout at the Guarda barracks, having most likely clubbed the seal to death on some remote shore where they were hauled out to breed. I would not commend that method, but in those times one only had to shoot the drift in the evening and haul it, fish and all, in the morning. Now if you did that, with the seals getting much bolder, chances are you would only get the odd fish that had struck lately, some heads, and observe some more holes in the net with a few scales beside them. Jerry had us travelling the net all night and taking any fish we saw gleaming in our light out of it straight away. That was even more fun than hauling the blessed nets! Sometimes we actually scared fish into the net. But if we left them there, chances were they would be gone in the morning. Wallace was on the job!

Sometimes in the early light we would see the seals working the nets ahead of us. They really liked their salmon, were getting better and better at helping themselves to our nets and were just about impossible to shake off. I bought a .22 rifle, but it was very difficult to shoot them. Anyway they would see the moment you took it up, and take more care. Lucky Jerry didn’t shoot himself in the foot one night, or make a little fountain in the bottom of the boat, when he discharged it by mistake in the cuddy one night. Fortunately the bullet lodged in one of the oak timbers. We were more careful about the safety catch after that!

Gradually we started to get ahead, but it was all a bit too much for the poor Croc Mor. Into the second season, when I left her on her mooring for the daytime and came back in the evening, it was touch and go whether the bilge water would be into the gear box. So to the sad business of depending on automatic electric pumps! GRP seemed to be the answer, much as I have always loved wooden boats. I managed to get a new 36ft Ocean Tramp built in Wicklow after this, and called her Screig n’Iolar. It was just one of those things, there had happened to be Cnoc Mor (Big Hill) up behind our house in Braide, and there was a Screig n’Iolar (Eagle’s Crag) beside it.

As far as I remember we had another couple of seasons salmon fishing with Screig n’Iolar, and she was indeed more fit for it, but as is so often the way of things, by the time you get properly organised for something, the best of it is gone. My most vivid memory of salmon fishing in Screig n’Iolar was when the engine gave some serious trouble. We limped into Malin Beg Uig, where there was a little quay but it was open to the south. I was moored off but got ashore in our little dinghy and eventually got a friendly mechanic to help. Meanwhile the wind went to the southward and a right jopple came into the Uig. Seamus the mechanic was so relieved to get back to the concrete that as he jumped out of the dinghy I was thrown in the water. John was all excited concern, while Jerry just laughed. ‘Do ye think we’ll get rid o’ the f***** that easily?’

What finally knocked our salmon fishing on the head was the fact that I caught a virulent dose of jaundice from some South African visitors, which left me very weak for months. Meanwhile the summer was actually fine, but that was not good for that lark. More and more fishermen were surviving by using illegal deep nets made of monofilament (gut). The salmon fishery descended into a state of war, with shots actually being fired at fishermen by the Navy. Between that and the fact that seals were taking more fish than were being landed, the game was up as far as I was concerned. After a few more years the driftnet fishery was banned altogether.

This was another big nail in the coffin of that way of life. The once teeming salmon, the king of fishes, the fish of knowledge, was in danger of being wiped out. What a category of miseries! The clear, swifting-running rivers where he renewed his tribe were polluted, his feeding grounds were robbed for fish-meal, and yes, man’s ingenuity and his greed were too much, not to mention sentimentality about seals. While it is taken for granted that deer, for instance, must be culled, not so for seals.

Big companies with buckets of oil money think fit to speculate on salmon farms, trusting people to continue to enjoy their salmon despite their being reared somewhat like battery hens. Occupying many a beautiful stretch of sea, they put those noble fish in big cages. At least Whiskers and storms effect the odd escape, with what effects on the remaining wild stock we do not know. The sea-lice thrive in them anyway, and infect wild fish. The salmon must be laced with chemicals. They are suffocated in hundreds of thousands by jelly fish*. The firms will eventually go bust, leaving desolation where there should be wild and pristine coasts. The few jobs minding the farms are no substitute for the fishermen’s livelihoods. Is there any way ahead for our grandchildren’s generation?

The Fish of Knowledge, that expired thrashing their tails on the deck of my boats, their glorious multi-hued skin gradually turning dull, gave me a little advice as they did so: ‘You have a choice!’ I pass it on from them. We too will expire in huge cages unless we have a massive change of heart and mind. Our salvation does not lie in ever more ambitious applications of technology, but in a spiritual and moral revolution.

All forms of greed and pollution will have to be expunged.  If we would live, we will finally have no choice but to become socially and environmentally responsible. For the salmon’s sake, and that is as close as dammit for all our sakes, both the rivers and the high seas must be conscientiously husbanded. The salmon stocks could be nursed back to health. It is hard to think of a better touchstone than our success in doing so, for the earnestness with which we desire a worthwhile future for our grandchildren! Probably the only methods of cropping the salmon that should be tolerated at sea will be such as that of the Teelin draft-nets.

Rigging a net in Nazaré. 

On the Nail

Now and again I find myself with the privilege of a practical and necessary role in

Alec laminates a rib.

this difficult world. Two persons are necessary to rivet the new ribs to the planks of my old boat; Alec on the inside of the hull, myself on the outside. He drills the appropriate hole through both rib and plank. I drill it out a bit more to counterbore the copper nail, which I drive in, having previously tied a little caulking cotton round its head. Then I apply the big heavy dolly to it so that Alec can close it with a rove, cut the nail to length (half the nail diameter above the rove) and peen it with a ball-peen hammer on the inside. (He claims to have had this hammer for 40 years, and it has only had 4 new handles and 2 new heads. He says at the end of this year he is going to renew both!)

Clamping ribs in place.

There were so many dodgy ribs in the vicinity of the engine and its beds that one could not simply remove the lot and start again, for fear that the boat would lose her shape altogether. Alec has been replacing a few ribs at a time, which involves cutting strips of iroko to the right length, carefully bending and clamping them into place, leaving them overnight to get used to their new bends ('normalise' them), laminating them together with epoxy and again leaving them overnight, removing them to clean them up and then the nailing can begin.

Roves.

The dolly.

Between whiles, there is not a lot I can do beyond passing this or that or getting rid of junk, but Alec has plenty of interesting stories. He was born on a farm in Devon, but when he was 9, his parents divorced. A granny took him home for a while, but he ended up in care. As a teenager he soon started getting into trouble, robbing boats and cars and whatnot. By the age of 14, he found himself banged up in military detention for 6 months. He was however getting on well with one social worker, when the poor man jumped out of a window and killed himself. Fortunately another good social worker took over. Alec could now see that his life was going nowhere unless he could ‘turn over a new leaf’ and start making something of it.

Actually it was the travellers’ book that he took a leaf out of, finding he could make good money gathering scrap metal, especially aluminium. An eccentric but clever engineer, who drove around in dirty overalls in his Rolls-Royce but lived in a mansion near Shaftesbury and played classical piano music to revive himself when he got depressed, paid good money for the aluminium, which Alec started to smelt into ingots. He got interested in metal-work and machinery, and had always been interested in boats. He went to work in a boatyard in Bristol.

He decided he would build a small steel sailing cargo ship for himself, but he couldn’t find anywhere to do it in England. He had to have 3 phase power and a shed in which to do it there. He went to work in Holland and Brittany, and reckoned they were far ahead of Blighty. He met a girl and built his boat in North Brittany, and eventually sailed off to Ireland and the Continent.

Money got to be a problem. He sailed into Nazaré, liked the place, found an opening lifting and moving boats with a small crane, put his little ship on the concrete and has now been here solidly 4 years. Speaking French and Portuguese, he loves the easy-going international way of life and of course the climate. Now in his early 50s, he was thinking about how to get himself a bit secure in his declining years when Brexit suddenly loomed.

When it comes to seriously breaking into the business scene here, the difficulties are already daunting. Alec says there are a lot of obstacles when it comes to seriously building the place up. It is a problem for anyone from Northern Europe who may upset the established vested interests of those who are doing alright for themselves quietly milking the system. However the E.U. does provide a basis on which one might hope to see things getting straightened out, providing as it does some degree of the impartial rule of law. Now, with that being pulled out from beneath his feet, Alec faces the prospect of losing his rights as a European citizen here. There are many people in the same situation.

In Ireland, are people again going to find themselves confronted with barbed wire and nervous, gun-totting teenage British soldiers as they go about their lives? Or pulled over by aggressive Orange customs men, as I was in the ‘70s as I took a net-hauler on a trailer by the shortest route from Dublin to Donegal, who were quite pleased at the prospect of making things difficult for a ‘Southerner illegally importing machinery into Northern Ireland’? I took out my posh English accent to confuse them, but still they messed me around for a while!

We Europeans have acquired valuable rights which have, on the back of much bitter experience, been painfully if precariously established over half a century and mean a great deal to many people; how is it possible that they now look likely to be suddenly and arbitrarily removed from some, and all in the name of ‘Democracy’?!?

Sanctuario de Nossa Senhora de Nazaré.

Reprieve in Nazaré.

It happened that I flew from Dublin to Porto with Nutan, who was coming to give a photographic workshop here; we were very kindly met on the late late flight and put up for the night by his friend Luisa, who left me at the bus station for the easy 3 hour journey to Nazaré. I noticed that, towards the end of it, we passed the site of the Battle of Aljubarrota, where in 1385 the Portuguese army, consisting of 6,600 men, completely defeated an invading Castilian army of 31,000. I must visit the nearby Abbey of Batalha which was built to commemorate it. The Portuguese army included an hundred English longbowmen, well experienced in taking on French-style cavalry; now that is a detail of their engagement with the Continent that the English can be proud of, though of course it was before things went badly awry in their country.  I suppose one might add, God be with the days when matters could be settled by a battle with bows and arrows and swords and so on! I rather fear that the Catalonians have left it a little late in the day to assert their independence; but I do wonder if their relationship with their neighbours would be easier if Spain were a republic?

What a pleasure to come down the hill and see the sun shining high and bright on the ocean! It was now three o'clock in the afternoon, I had missed out on a proper meal the day before, so the first move was to find a restaurant still serving. Our Fionnuala had asked me what I would order when I sat down to eat for the first time again in Portugal? It turned out to be dried carapau; three little horse mackerel that would be disdained in Ireland, served warmed in a large dish swimming in olive oil and liberally sprinkled with flakes of garlic (cost Eur3.50), and supported with chunks of good solid bread. Delicious! They make a thing of their dried fish here, with wire racks for drying them and old ladies selling them on the beach. I followed through with a full meal and then staggered down to sleep it off there, taking care to keep out of range of the surf that surged and roiled powerfully on the steep sandy shore. Yet the sea was calm beyond, with a boat sailing serenely up for the harbour entrance.

Today, Friday, the Anna M has been right on the frontier 

 between the bright, warm sunshine that has bathed the town and beach of Nazaré all day, and the sea fog that has rolled down from the north, over the Pontal, just over or

outside the harbour entrance, and in over the low-lying littoral to the southward. Conditions aboard are perfect for work, neither hot nor cold, and while the saloon is a floorless workshop, and the fo'c'sle is full of sails and stuff, my little cabin alone remains a snug retreat. It has to be admitted that it is a big improvement on the grey skies, rain and wind that I left behind in Ireland; it feels like a reprieve from the onset of winter!


Alec plugs away at the old boat's reprieve too. It was very obvious, when we came to look at it properly, that there was precious little left keeping the planks together there beside the engine. One more good gale and, between the pressure of the rig and the pull of the keel, they would likely have parted to let the water gush in and send us all to 'Davy Jones' Locker'.

Not for the first time in my life, may I say, the cussed habit that I have of eyeballing reality, not infrequently condemned as 'being negative', seems to have paid off. But no, they often won't take it, you know! Like from someone in the present British establishment trying to say that the good ship Brexit just ain't sea-worthy!

Talking of facing reality, it is obvious that the Anna M will not be ready to sail again until the Spring. Progress, though steady, is darn slow, what with Alec struggling on between his other tasks.

I am still hoping to get her in the water before heading home in November, but engine-less, so that we can let her take up and make sure she is tight before the tanks and engine go back in. I am now aiming to recommission her in February, which would leave time to check her out and enjoy the Spring in Guadianaland before sailing north.

The Dance of the Spheres.

With distress, I am following events in Catalonia from the comfort of this little Irish island of Sherkin. I can sympathise with both sides, while I understand that it must be very difficult to do so if one is caught up in the immediate situation. We hear many families and friends find themselves unable to talk to each other about it, as has been happening in the recent spate of referenda in these islands. Si, the Catalans and the rest of the ‘inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula’ know each other all too well and better than me; however, I do know the whole lot of them to a degree. Anyway, we are all members of the EU, and ultimately will have some responsibility for what happens. For what it’s worth, and at least with no axe to grind, I shall offer some detached but sympathetic comments, while staying away from the gripes they have about each other and that we can all read of easily enough for ourselves in their own words.

We men are often accused by the ladies these days of having ‘fragile egos’. I do not deny it, except in the sense that the remark implies that they have no such problem; they are merely inclined to express it differently. But it is ever a grave temptation to reinforce one’s own sense of identity by opposing it to some ‘other’. Unfortunately, the closer this ‘other’ is, the more effective the ploy becomes; after all, it can only work to the degree in which one knows one’s Other! As with our partners, we can only ask them to forgive us; it is generally counterproductive to get defensive.

Does this mean that one just has to roll over and take abuse? Of course not. Life is a constant struggle against hostile forces of one kind or another. Life itself stands opposed to death, and this confrontation runs all through our lives. But this being so, how do we imagine it must end? There is a man who apparently accepted death head on, and went right on through it. He recommends that we turn the other cheek, forgive our neighbour their sins against us, and in this way we can come to the conviction that actually He is Life itself, and does prevail, evil itself being ultimately reduced to pure nothingness.

Let us accept the principle that in general Life is calling the human race to ever greater cohesion. Our lives are enriched in countless ways by the fruits of a knowledge-base and technology that is increasingly globalised, but it is also true that with them come unprecedented threats, both physical, moral and spiritual. If one takes for example climate change, it can only be addressed successfully if human beings at every level, from the global via continents and countries to the personal, turn their minds to the business. Certainly, we cannot possibly leave such matters merely to ‘the experts’, though we do have to pay attention to them.

In this view, the notion that any nation is self-sufficient is nonsense, any more than any individual is. It would be a very good idea if we substitute the word ‘role’ for ‘identity’. If we are to establish satisfactory and effective identities/roles for ourselves, we must do so on multiple levels, and old-fashioned nationalisms or any other kind of egotistical short-circuit, any attempt to duck this imperative, have no place in the becoming world. On an equal footing with one another, while also with due self-respect, we must go out to encounter and embrace the Other.

All the various spheres of life have their own role and indeed autonomy, provided this autonomy is conceived as playing its part in the totality of life rather than as an end in itself. It is important that every sphere does so, both great and small, otherwise it will spin off into irresponsibility and ultimately self-destruction.

The ‘Enemy’, who wants us to do just this, always says, as in the Book of Exodus: ‘I will pursue and overtake them, I will divide the plunder, I shall have my will. I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.’  All one can say is, let those whom this cap fits, wear it! But he, the Prince of Lies, comes in many guises.

Meanwhile, in despite of such problems, getting the right balance between the various spheres is a never-ending and intriguing affair; let us enjoy the dance; let it be fun!