A Visit to Batalha.

My autumn campaign on the ‘Anna M’ is drawing to a close, along with the Church year on this feast of Christ the King. If I can get together the necessary readies over the winter to finish the job, the boat will be in good shape come the Spring.  

Yesterday, Saturday, we took the bus to Batalha, to have a peek at the famous ‘monastery’ there. It’s an impressive Gothic complex, ‘built to thank the Virgin Mary for the Portuguese victory over the Castilians in the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385’ as Wikipedia has it. I suppose it is just about conceivable that her sympathy would lie with the native and underdog in the battle (6,600 Portuguese heavily outnumbered by the invading Castilian host of 31,000), and indeed it would seem quite reasonable that some Spaniards were disposed to blame their own sins of pride for the defeat*.

The heavily outnumbered Portuguese, drawn up in their defensive position on a hill, probably were inclined to be praying for divine assistance, as two thousand heavy knights charged into the attack. The Castilian and French knights, in arrogance and anger, their foot soldiers however tired after a long day’s march in the hot sun, had closed their ears to a few wise voices among them who counselled delay. It was a classic case of ‘pride comes before a fall’!

However, as the monastery stands today, it appears to be more of a monument to the new Portuguese dynasty which the battle established than anything else. The concepts of a divine king and that of a humble Saviour bringing universal peace and brotherhood always sat somewhat uneasily together. Our King only smiles at human efforts to bolster his glory with our own attempts. Is not creation itself rather grander? Still I think there is one part of the buildings where prayerfulness lingers; in the humbler cloister, presumably used by the friars, beyond the very grand 'royal' one.

By the time Napoleonic troops had sacked the monastery in 1810, and Portuguese anti-clericalism had finished off the job in the 1830s, any aspirations to maintain a real prayer life there were finished. The Dominicans were gone. Nowadays the place mostly has the atmosphere of a museum. One is left pondering the relationship between patriotism and religion, and the differing strands of human pride and the nature of true kingship and humility and prayer.

If the Catholic Church is to recover her credibility as the Church of Christ, she was due a spell in the desert to rid herself of the smell of temporal power. But our European nations were nonetheless built up with some footing in her truth. Pride, the deadliest of the deadly sins, was duly noted, seen to be punished and occasionally repented of. As they became more and more obsessed with their own power, they lost what sure footing they once had in humility and prayer.

These nations will have to recover such a footing, along with that vocation to universal brotherhood, if their future is not to become more and more dire, as they continue on the path of pride and disintegration, trusting for their security in their own power. and their weapons of mass destruction for their security. But anyone should be able to figure out that it is 'soft' power that will triumph in the end.

*http://deremilitari.org/2014/05/the-punishment-of-pride-castilian-reactions-to-the-battle-of-aljubarrota/

Getting Rid of the Rot.

The Autumn sunshine caressing those sweet mahogany planks, for the first time in the 50 years since they were cut and shaped, picks out the stunning underwater profile of the 'Anna M', in the photo above. It also picks out the sharp turn to the bilge, behind the ladder  and in the vicinity of the engine. Whatever strains were built into the steamed oak frames, combined with the heat and the vibration and thrust of the engine, are what has caused them to fracture, which is the main problem we have been addressing.

It was a dirty job, removing all that paint, but I am already applying red lead paint again, heavily thinned with white spirit (aguarras). I don't want those planks exposed for long! Like any boat-owner, especially of an old wooden boat, I put her on the concrete in the first place with the greatest reluctance and trepidation. Besides losing a sailing season, one knows in advance that the time and expense involved will be something of a nightmare. How far does one go? Do I have to remove all the paint? And all the caulking? The paint yes, but only the caulking that is rotten, is the answer I've settled for. 

In the main it turns out that I am enjoying the whole business. It takes me back to working on my Dad's boats down at Harry Phillips' in Rye in Sussex. Harry and his son Derek used to make the clinker-built fishing boats, with their wonderfully buoyant elliptic sterns, that worked from the beach at Hastings, where we lived. I could see the boats coming and going from my bedroom window, and used to go down and mess about the beach and see what the fishermen were up to. What it all led to!

Sixty years later, wooden boats are even more precious and continue to exercise their special fascination. What a crazy business, one might think, to try to fashion such craft, and enable them to withstand the battering of the waves, out of all those bits of wood! But with care and skill, the shape actually comes out of the wood, and withstand the waves they will, like all the wooden ships that went before. While the likes of me will never be a craftsman, most of the skills involved are pretty basic, and we are able to do our share to keep them sea-worthy. They may remain so as long as long as someone puts that effort in. I offer a parallel from my personal take on life: truth is to be coaxed out of words, and cared for in the midst of the batterings it gets, in a similar way.

Working on the 'Anna M' makes me realise just how precious she is. She speaks all the languages; Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, German, they all understand. And what fun it is to work with the different nationalities, and find the words to communicate the same old problems! Here is the latest recruit to the job, Stefan, who is German. 

It is so sad that the Brexiters of this world don't seem to understand what opportunities for all of us the EU has opened up. It is also an awful failure of leadership. For all the talk of the advantages of the single market and the necessity of pooling sovereignty in Europe if we are to respond effectively to the threats and challenges that we face, how about trying to tell them of the fun to be had in a united and peaceful Europe? Yet there is something else to be said; no matter how beautiful something may be, rot will set in. It must be faced up to and got rid of, and that hard and dirty process is what brings the beauty out and establishes genuine solidarity. I leave the reader to deduce what I conceive of as the rot that must be tackled in the British ship of state! It won't be easy, but the longer it is left, the worse it gets.

Above the fog, and where N.S. de Nazare was discovered, in cave beneath chapel at left.

Paradise on Earth.

George Orwell famously said that ‘the first victim of war is truth’. I would go a good deal further and say that war is the final offspring of lies. A statesman is someone with a good grasp of reality who manages to get his followers to accept inconvenient truths, and to blow away the smoke screen of lies and even sink a few of the ships that they conceal. Not even the Boris could expect anyone to see the Duckie in such a light, indeed he has such a tenuous relationship with truth himself that he might not even grasp such a notion; so how does he describe the Duckie when he wants to put him in a positive light? ‘A great huge global brand’!!! (on Fox News, 9th November).

So the question is, what is it that is being sold, not to mention being hidden (generally the flip side of selling things), and by whom? What is being sold is a dream of paradise. As it happens, we were provided with yet another whacking mountain of information about this just lately in the form of the Paradise Papers. Behind the golden gates like the ones in Trump Tower is a paradise inhabited by the billionaires, the celebrities, the sport, film and rock stars, the royals etc. Even education is enthralled, the prize offered being access to the 'elite', its leading institutions already enmeshed. Fantasies of this wonderful world apparently keep an awful lot of people going. It is all so very much more interesting than addressing the intractable problems of day to day living. This is why we continue to prioritise keeping the paradise in existence over the potholes and the health service.

This is not what our leaders profess, but it is what they generally do. Of course, those billionaires have their little ways of keeping the politicians on side. Dear Mrs May seems a well-intentioned person, but she let herself be drawn into selling a big bundle of lies that she did not even believe in herself to begin with. The likes of me watches aghast as the country of my birth hurtles towards its coming encounter with reality. I am in no position to influence it, except in one little matter. It’s not actually ‘the economy, stupid!’ that really drives people; it’s more like their dreams. Personally, I derive some encouragement from seeing this fact laid bare.

It happens that yachts figure prominently in the Paradise fantasies. Well, Paradise does exist, there are intimations of it even in this poor abused planet, and we do need a relationship with it, and yes, sailing boats do promise some little participation in it. But there are two radically different alternatives on this road to Paradise; the high road of super yachts costing millions and registered 'offshore', and the low road of struggling to get to sea with a low budget, the work of one’s hands, and the support and participation of one’s fellows. Let us not try to destroy the dream of Paradise, but reclaim it from those dodgy ‘stars’ and bring down to Earth!

Short Days.

There is a Madonna in a big square glass box beside the altar in the Sanctuario de N. Senhora de Nazaré, from which the priest took a delightful idea when preaching on All Saints’ Day. To paraphrase, he said that we all tend to live in glass boxes, and to see everything through an image of ourselves. He was saying we are all called to be saints, but this does not mean we have to be perfect; the important thing about the saints is that they let the divine light flood their box and drown out the image of self, which generally so preoccupies us and prevents us from seeing the other.

November came in with a couple of rainy days and a substantial fall in temperature, but it will recover as the sun comes out and the chilly north wind settles down. Anyway it’s just as well; I can do without too much heat as I strip the paint off Anna M’s planking and prepare to caulk it, now that Alec has pretty much finished the new ribs. The mild, dry weather is perfect; it’s hard to imagine a better climate for this kind of work.

Dave and Hazel in the Ros Alither, with their children Katey and Ruben, on their way south back to the Guadiana, have got a bit delayed here because their v-drive packed up; a brute of a heavy shaft fractured, but Alec got a replacement machined locally within two days. Sounds to me as if their prop was made for trawling, and they could do with a lighter one. Anyway their delay made for some very pleasant socializing, as did the presence for a couple of nights of Denis Dunne from Dublin, also heading for the Guadiana for the winter. Ah well, I shall hope to be able to spin down there for a while in the Spring! Meanwhile, Fiona is due here on Tuesday, so I'm looking forward to that.

Dave is an exception to most of the passing sailors in their grp or steel boats, who look at me struggling away and think I'm a barmy romantic. He lent me some lovely caulking irons, which was very kind indeed. Actually I'm enjoying the work on the whole, in a way I neither could nor would with those sensible modern materials. To go sea-faring with natural materials worked by your own hands, and in the tradition of the great men who sailed off to discover this world in wooden ships, is very special! Anna M will be 50 years old next year, and it is thrilling to be getting her into good shape again for that occasion. A long way to go yet, though, with the days getting short, and the sun setting just to the southward of the Ilhas Farilhões, though not the Berlengas. Their almost mystical presence in the West at sunset is most impressive!

Sorry there are no photos; some bug has got into my set-up that won't let me upload them.