The Last Post of Book I.

Anna M at Sherkin Island in 2010, by John Aston.

Deliberately going to live on a remote island says something both positively and negatively. Well, it is a common human experience to feel alienated from one’s society, and surely nothing new.  The pain of being ‘cut off from the herd’ goes a long way towards explaining why human beings can so passionately embrace both light-heartedly absurd group enthusiasms, like those of football supporters, or more sinister ones of a political, ideological or even spiritual nature. But what might constitute a sane and rational response to a sense of alienation? Well, what causes it in the first place?

Not being heard, for a start. Certain things are important to you, but the world ignores them and shrugs them off. One’s questions go unanswered, even unacknowledged. If one digs to discover why, there is resistance, resentment that the question should be insisted on. How dare you disturb me, demanding that I respond to awkward queries and challenging my assumptions? Most people, most of the time, are too lazy to examine themselves in any radical sense.

Eventually however, one comes up against the final questions. What is to be done about this or that dreadful problem? What is it all for anyway? What is the point of living? Yet perhaps the world was never more determined not to answer them. Even the liberal contemporary establishment seems to experience them as a dangerous threat. One is inclined to conclude that they fear there is no point in living, though maybe they merely fear that any answer to such questions would constitute a threat to their ability to do as they please and to live without anyone being able to hold them accountable.

The Irish Constitution begins however, ‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred’. No doubt the secularists would change this preamble if they had a chance, but why bother, once the meaning has been sucked out of it? And what meaning can it possibly have, if one cannot agree where such authority, the basis of such accountability, is to be discovered? Not alone have they spent their major efforts in discrediting its traditional seat, but nowadays they tend to deny the very existence of any such authority. Hence the refusal to face those ‘final questions’; unfortunately however, human life becomes simply impossible without some viable answers to them, and, while our human societies will always be of a provisional and unsatisfactory nature, they cannot thrive at all without a basic consensus in these matters.

The results of that refusal are plain to be seen all about us, and the more dramatic victims include such youngsters as the 23 year-old grandson of a friend of mine, who died of a drug after a party the other day. They are victims of us all when we refuse to answer the questions they are actually schooled these days not to pose. Does one spend one’s life getting more and more frustrated and crotchety, trying to work a system that has lost its way, or maybe does one try to strike for something new? At which point, is one merely taking off into a fantasy land? How does one avoid falling into some kind of schizophrenia? What kind of connection must one maintain with what is called ‘the real world’, ‘as long as we are in this body’?

St Paul’s answer was faith, in the Lord and also in the ‘great act of begetting’ that He has initiated and continues to sustain; but we must have signs and symbols of this Faith, words and structures to give it effect! There has been a widespread attempt in recent centuries to do so primarily on a national basis, but today it is no longer possible to maintain the fiction that our lives function primarily on a national basis. Hence it is not just wrong-headedness that has sucked the life out of, for instance, that Irish Constitution. No amount of huffing and puffing by, for instance, Brexiteers, will put life back into national myths. On the other hand, they are right when they say that institutions like the EU can be hopelessly remote from 'the action'.

This can take place on all sorts of different scales and levels at the same time, and the trick is to somehow integrate them. While I believe that the Catholic Faith is vital to this process, it is not helpful just to throw it at people, off whom one knows it will probably bounce, as some kind of abstract system; nor is it designed in such a way, being thoroughly earthed in physical process. One does not cast pearls before swine, but one does try to plant little seeds.

Catholic social teaching proposed the idea of subsidiarity. This is not to be envisaged in merely regional terms; zones of concern of one kind or another are equally relevant. One of my particular interests is Fisheries Policy, and how this may be made more functional and, as a quid pro quo, accessible for fishermen; less a matter of dysfunctional 'command and control'. This fits my approach of coming in sideways to the big questions, with what Hilaire Belloc called ‘the common sacrament of Mankind’- the Sea, which teaches with an authority that nobody who experiences it at all can deny.

Taken from the Sherkin Lt. Ho.
by Jamsie Durrant.

Belloc sailed his little boat about the British and French coasts with no engine. I am hoping to get the Anna M  back in the water with an electric drive that will be primarily an extension of the power of the sails, but this will nonetheless involve a slowing down, even one might say, a limitation of one’s horizons. Sometimes anyway breadth is only achieved by a lack of depth. My limited energy, I expect, will be fully stretched upon the Gannetsway, from Scotland to south of Spain. Digging deep in this zone, and with the help of the powerful action of the sea, I try to discover and expose that wonderful pearl, that buried treasure that makes life worth living, and may yet enable us to avoid destroying this beautiful world, through a combination of boredom, laziness and disgust.

Where do we start? One possibility is by doing our best to reply honestly to the least of questions that are sincerely put to us, promptly and without evasion. How can the Common Fisheries Policy be made to work? How can we really wean ourselves off fossil fuels, fast? That's just a couple of the more salient questions relevant to the Gannetsway. Diving down deep into the sea, let us seek those shimmering answers! For they are there yet. These are William Blake's minute particulars if you like, without which good intentions become vacuous or even worse. However if Faith means anything, it involves the conviction that the answers are there for those who seek them!

This post is bringing to an end the first Book of Sailing the Gannetsway. I am looking for a publisher to bring out a printed edition. There will be more to come, after a few weeks' break, as we discover whether the Anna M makes it to a new lease of life as an electrified, autonomous sailing boat....

Hoping they Understand the Buoys on the Other Side of the Lake.

Alec and I left Camaret in the Calypso with a calm sea and a light westerly breeze, only to find ourselves steaming north in the Chenal de la Helle in thick fog, with just the odd glimpse of the buoys marking the channel between the rocks. No doubt those lads I mentioned in the last blog, who headed for England in 1940, would have liked it, but having neither AIS or radar, we were not too happy. At least we did have GPS and a good chart, unlike them, or indeed unlike myself with my father sometimes back in the day.

Alec was chuntering on about how we couldn’t cross the shipping lanes like that, but fortunately the fog lifted before we reached them. It came down again though, and we weren’t free of it till we were in the lee of the land off Dartmouth; the only sign of Start Point was the odd blast on its foghorn, now sounding very close, now far away, now not at all.

We spent an agreeable night in Brixham, so that we could hit the tide right for Exmouth next day; then we found the entrance buoys easily and whistled in on a strong flood. No room at the little marina at the town, so on we went up to Topsham. The channel swings unexpectedly to port when one passes the entrance, then there are a few miles of winding between the mudflats, marked by buoys here and there. We just managed to scrape into the one and only berth alongside where there was enough water; the one and only spot in all England that served our purposes to a tee!

The Mouth of the River Exe.

That was the end of the trip for me; we hired a car in Exmouth next day and drove to Honiton to visit the Lynch Motor Co, whose electric motors I am very interested in; then Alec left me to Bristol airport, and soon I was enjoying fabulous views of the coast of South Wales and Pembrokeshire from one of those nice turboprop aircraft. I never had such a fine sight of the Irish Sea, with both sides visible at once, though low enough to still feel part of it all, and so I came back to Killruddery that evening and Sherkin next day.

I  was reminded of it today when our priest Fr Michael was commenting on Jesus in the Gospel ‘going to the other side of the Lake of Gennesaret’, otherwise known as the Sea of Galilee. He pointed out that this was a journey to a different people and culture, where the cultural reference points of Jesus’ homeland did not apply, by way of encouraging us to ‘go to the other side of the Lake’, to listen to and try to understand those whom we often meet these days, even in our own families, who no longer share our culture or values. Nonetheless, on that other side, they could tell the difference between life and death, when it came to Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from death.

The contrast struck me between Fr Michael’s approach and that of our  high-priests and priestesses of Progressive Liberalism, who are in full cry these days back in Ireland. Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times for example, along with other commentators I’ve glanced at, is gearing up for another ‘epic struggle with Fascism’. ‘What we are living with is pre-fascism’, just getting warmed up for the real thing, according to Fintan. One understands what he is on about; I too decry the Duckie and Brexit; the problem is his want of self-awareness, let alone of hearing those ‘on the other side of the Lake’. But if we allow this approach to roll out, the result could make World War II look like a tea party.

He avers that one of ‘the tools of Fascism’ is ‘the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities’, which unfortunately seems to me to be what he and his likes are at the whole time, along with  undermining moral boundaries, inuring people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty’, ‘dehumanising… members of despised outgroups’, such as unborn babies for instance? Indeed the recent referenda in Ireland and Britain bear many of the hallmarks of Fascism, but the likes of O’Toole are wholly impervious to such a view of them, where it applies to the ones he campaigned for, and indeed he is apparently unaware of the whole sorry business of pseudo identity building that are their stock-in-trade.

To add to the fun, we have our former President, Mary McAeese, on a Gay Pride march with her poor darling son, announcing that the teaching of the Catholic Church on homosexuality is ‘evil’. Along with that of every major religious tradition in the world? Some people have noticed that life flows in a binary fashion, even down to electricity and computers. The buoys are there to mark the channel. Those who stray are likely to get stuck on the mud, if not rocks, and there is nothing that anyone can do about that. But the likes of Mrs McAleese are in danger of putting a generation astray and wrecking a whole society.

At Sherkin Regatta, by Fiona.

Meanwhile it is hard to bother one’s head about such things, in the midst of the best spell of summer weather in Ireland that I recall since the ‘70s. It is positively delightful to swim in Horseshoe Bay, more so than in any of the previous 13 summers we’ve been living here. But if these dear grandchildren who are staying with us are to have the future we would wish them, those buoys must be maintained, even while there’s going to have to be a lot more ‘going to the other side of the Lake’ to both listen and help other people to understand, in language they can hear, where the deep water lies.

A calm evening in Horsehoe Bay, by Fiona.