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.