Take Your Seats, Ladies and Gentlemen, With a Drop At Hand.

In the England that I grew up in, one had become accustomed to getting by on some vague assumption that for all their faults, the people that we elected to lead us act basically in good faith. Some people might darkly aver that foreigners were different and one could not trust them - but Englishmen anyway were somehow supposed to be different. One was widely expected to be leftie in youth, main problem being to get a slice of the action for oneself, and conservative once one acquired a little property, main problem being to hang on to it. We might disagree, but on the whole, we could see where the other lot came from and generally managed to respect them. When push came to shove, we could agree to differ and pull together.

Have I merely got old, I ask myself, or is it true to say that such basic trust has largely evaporated? How can it be that the Conservative Party, that liked to think of itself as the repository of national values, seems to be on the verge of choosing a leader devoid of the basic principles of truthfulness, good faith and responsibility, and who in the interest of 'taking back control' is foisting this leader on the country as an unelected prime minister and insisting that he pursue to the bitter end a discredited* and most damaging fantasy? I look on from my Irish island home, aghast and appalled.

I realise that we are hardly dealing with a new phenomenon. Public life, with the opportunities it presents of getting one's fingers in the communal pot, has always attracted a share of two-faced, self-seeking chancers. On the other hand, is it just my imagination that something new has happened, when the Tories do not even feel the need to pay lip service to those basic principles, and a potential leader can openly flout them, and even garner some votes on the principle that, being 'a bit of a lad', at least he is 'one of us'? The only value that seems to be generally recognised today is that of personal autonomy. Well Mr Johnson just about sums up where that trip ends up. Undoubtedly he will sooner or later self destruct, but how much damage will he do in the process?

If this is the price that has to be paid, I think I might even be tempted to say, 'could we have a little hypocrisy back please'? Maybe that's a lazy attitude though. What we really need is a whole new commitment to truth, and it may well help us if we realise that failure to recognise the truth is invariably sooner or later punished, unfashionable though such a conclusion may be. 

At least old Father Neptune teaches that. I am surely not alone in having had recourse to the sea, as a remedy against chaos, insanity and a pervasive disconnection with any sense of reality. It is precisely the opportunity it provides to confront chaos in a tangible and physical form that is therapeutic; it's a case of healing like with like. But time goes by. I cannot even be sure that I will be able to go seafaring again, in any serious way.

When one is young the physical and the spiritual are so tightly knit together that it is difficult to distinguish between them. A process of distillation occurs with time. The physical inexorably reverts to the dust from which it came. What is left, as we cast around more and more desperately for whatever still floats amidst the wreckage? Is there anything to life other than futile, inevitably drowning egos? Is there an indestructible spirit in us, and might we even take some distilled essence of the physical with us, if we do succeed in breaking free from everlasting disintegration?

Meanwhile, humanity has to learn the same old lessons over and over again. As my mother used to say, 'God is not mocked'.  I for one am settling in for this morality play in London with both a grim fascination, a frisson of amusement, and a fair degree of trepidation. Ladies and Gentlemen, let us take our seats! Here comes the ogre, but where is the hero who will slay it?

I find that I am fonder of my old country than I realised, do not like to see it thus debased, and can only hope that somehow it will find it's way back to what was good about it. Meanwhile, in another couple of weeks, I shall be back to Nazaré, and trying to get that Anna M back on the water. But is this yet another unreasonable fantasy? It's not that I am unable to do without that basic prop or extension to my personality which she represents. If I have to give up, I will do so with good grace - there is another sea, that I am even more interested in. 

Actually, at this stage, it is not so much that I miss sailing her a great deal, but what this project represents; at once an assertion of the world of the Gannetsway, which means more to me than any old nation, and of the kind of approach to Nature as well as to social organisation and technology that offers an attractive and fruitful prospect for the future. That other sea, that other world, can only be accessed if one is true to the immediate ones to the very best of one's ability. The Great Still only yields up the magic spirit in its own time!

*In this respect, do see Carole Cadwalladr's TED talk.

Happy Days!