True British Resourcefulness - A Birthday Card For Alec.

Photo by Stephan.

If you happen to need to move your boat, all 24 tons of her, and you are a real West Country man, it's simple enough. You just get your hands on an old motorway sign-post gantry at the scrap yard up the road, along with a few old wheels and jacks, and you make a trailer. Then you just have to get your hands on a big lump of a tractor, which you do by swopping it for a fine compressor that you had picked up cheap.

The particular specimen of that disappearing race to whom I refer happens to have wound up in Portugal, and he is none other than our one and only Alec. The poor old 'Whirled', that he built himself 15 years ago in Brittany, has for the moment been sadly reduced to his caravan, a somewhat unwieldy one it has to be said, which he is moving to a cheaper site. We are also in the process of moving all his kit into the new HQ, Yellow Windows. He is conscious that his time as an all-purpose marine Mr Fixit is coming to an end; together we are setting up a business that will enable him to use his head more and his limbs and muscles less, as befits his 54 years, and to do our bit to save the World while we are at it!

So many people in this world would have freaked out at the prospect of just making a trailer like that. They would have wanted some kind of engineer on the job, who had done all sorts of sums and drawings. Well I've nothing at all against engineers, but I do love that solid West Country approach of just doing it. It is however curious how the cobbling, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach lets the English down when it comes to politics and the country's leadership.

Nebulous incoherence is by no means limited to the present incumbent of No.10 Downing St. For instance I have always been puzzled as to how all those subjects of Her Majesty suddenly started calling themselves citizens. There was no such nonsense back in the day when I had a fine dark blue passport, with a great big coat of arms on the front and something about Her Majesty's Government requesting and requiring that I be allowed to pass without let or hindrance on the inside. Did I miss something while my back was turned?

It sounds like a revolution in toothpaste to me, that's the kind we generally can rise to these days, but if there was some kind of serious revolution back in the 70s or 80s while I was totally immersed in fishing and rearing children, it evidently didn't satisfy the present crop of rabid revolutionaries. I was forced back into taking an interest in British politics by the Brexit vote, and found to my amazement that the nice vicar's daughter who had just become P.M. was full of fiery revolution in her speech at the time, to the Conservative Party Conference of all things! 'The roots of the revolution run deep', she averred, 'Yet within our society today, we see division and unfairness all around'.

For some reason, under her inspired leadership, The Referendum, like 'the Revolution', has acquired some kind of quasi royal authority. The people have spoken, albeit by a slim majority in a flawed campaign, and their will must be done. Never mind that the issues have become so much clearer since; in this version of democracy, debate is a waste of time; there is no such thing as gradually finding one's way and painfully building a consensus, taking a shared responsibility. That's surely real citizenship, but evidently the sort of thing that  may be left to those misguided Europeans!

However, ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.’ What would Mrs May have us 'rootless cosmopolitans' be, cabbages? Actually, human beings come equipped with feet, for moving around, but let’s allow also, like monkeys, for climbing in trees. Then at least we would know where to look for roots. Let us imagine we are sitting on a branch of the great Tree of Life. It would for a start be wise not to cut off the branch that we are sitting on. Then we could go downwards, and find where our branch becomes part of a bigger one, and that one turns into the trunk, and then we may find some decent roots.

Mrs May prattles on about her desire to 'unite the country', while in fact it is becoming ever more divided under her leadership. 'Struth, Mr Junker's nebulous is too kind a word, but she is looking in the wrong direction for unity - at the clouds maybe? Never mind, the Tories are going to fix it, and apparently it all depends on Brexit! ‘Britain – the Britain we build after Brexit – is going to be a Global Britain.’ Meanwhile, everyone with a smidgen of coherence, from the Pope and the Secretary General of the UN, via David Attenborough and most scientists downwards, are telling us that we shall be very lucky if the Globe has not gone into catastrophic decline a few short years hence.

If only one could be confident that there was any other, more coherent, leadership on offer in England! It would be nice to forget about the whole circus in Westminster, as well as the violence in France, but the thing is, we none of us can avoid their effects; the world is indeed a global village now, whether we like it or not. Where does this Brexit leave us English people who have moved on, becoming Europeans of one kind or another (though perhaps with a deeper appreciation of England for that)? Sooner rather than later, Messrs Farrage, Johnson, & Co as well as their friends across the Atlantic have to be faced down - we cannot afford to just wait until they die off, or everyone will go with them!

Meanwhile, thank God for the odd Englishman who, precisely because he is firmly planted in physical reality, realises like the birds that there is more to the world than England, and also has the imagination to realise that there are other ways of relating to the rest of it than by mere exploitation or domination!