'Going Global'

In the Iberian Peninsula the weather was still fine and hot, the land looking brown and parched, the sea out west calm, as I flew north on Saturday. Heavy white surf made its appearance on the coast of Galicia, and some scattered cloud. Flying on serenely above the weather, gale-force winds were whipping up the sea in that dodgy zone to the north of Spain, where two seas meet, and we even experienced some turbulence high above the clouds. Things settled down again as we approached Ireland, and although the cover was thicker over the land, the startling green landscape gleamed from Kinsale to Kerry's Reeks, as we came into land at Cork.

     Fiona was there to meet me, on our 51st wedding anniversary, and soon we were enjoying the peace of our island home together again. What a carry-on that decision to put the 'Anna M' on the concrete at Nazaré, in June last year, has turned out to entail! Yet it had to be done, and while it threatened to put an end to the whole Gannetswaysailing saga, I'm now hopeful it will prove merely the end of the beginning. We have become much more engaged in really doing something, in the challenge of putting our lives on a sustainable basis.

     This process of engagement is something that can only come about in its own time. I am tempted to think it a great pity that it did not kick in for me twenty years ago, but it turns out that my early 70s may be a very good time for it. Of course, the fact of having a pension, as long as the old body hangs in, frees one up a lot; and also in a sense one has more freedom in the mind. I had pretty well given up on having ambitions and plans for myself, which is a great way to be, genuinely throwing oneself on the will of God.  But He has a way of returning, with much interest, all the fruits of one's experience and indeed of one's care down the years. Now to apply them as best I can, in the serene awareness that I may well not be around to see much of what becomes of them!

     What hopes we have of something becoming of them are very much bound up with the European Union, primarily of course because of the funds we hope to access, but also in the light of the aspiration, still lacking in clarity and confidence, of developing an alternative to the kind of socio-political set-up propagated by the, dare I say, 'Neo-liberal nations of the Anglo-sphere'? I do not relish throwing such labels around, especially being aware that there are very many people in both Britain and the USA who would strongly wish to dis-associate themselves from such a one as this. The fact remains however that Europe, and especially Ireland, is very much subject to their economic and cultural hegemony, not to say 'neo-colonialism'. This largely accounts for my obsession with building up our relationships with our continental neighbours to the south.

     That neocolonialism is not without its advantages, I have to admit. God alone knows where Ireland would be at this stage without American and British multi-national companies and so on, economically speaking! In this interlinked world of ours, all economic activity depends on its context; however, that favoured by les Anglo-Saxons is showing every sign of exhaustion; for everyone's sake, not least their own, a new direction needs to be found. In Blighty one crowd seems to want to go in the general direction of Singapore, and the other of Cuba, while I suppose a majority know that they want something different, but have not the foggiest notions of what it might be.

     For them theological may very well be a term of abuse, which hardly helps them find that new way; they just don't realise that it is in terms of God that they might find the new language which they need so urgently, and in fairly simple terms actually. Take the work 'ecumenism'; high as it has been for years on theological agendas, rather few would think of it as I tend to myself, in terms of that vital reconciliation that is needed between the aspiration for individual responsibility, freedom and fulfilment on one hand, and the demands of sustainability and solidarity on the other. Broadly speaking the former comes more naturally to those of  a Protestant mindset, for whom salvation tends to be a transaction between the individual and God, and the latter to those of a Catholic one, who seek their place within the Body of Christ. Both are impoverished in this divided state; somehow they need to be reconciled, if our civilisation is to have any future.

     In practical terms of how people live, it helps a lot if we at least acknowledge with gratitude that God made us, and what's more did not just leave us to our own devices, without guidance. It's not that I cannot see my way to working with those who deny this, but I do take Jesus' advice on the matter, going on the basis of 'those who are not against us are with us'! Unfortunately there sometimes comes a parting of company; with Jesus, there can be no working just to make money, nor setting the pursuit of our own interests up as the main priority of our lives. We have to work on the basis of justice and the common good, while bearing in mind also William Blake's famous dictum, the 'the General Good is the Cry of the Scoundrel, Hypocrite and Liar'.

     Among the more absurd gambits of the Brexiteers is to make out that they stand for a 'global Britain'. In practice this seems to mean that they entertain the forlorn hope of squeezing a little more mileage out of the Imperial British heritage; Mrs May for example seems to think she is being generous in seeking to attract the brightest and best from impoverished countries  where they are desperately needed, so that apparently there are more Sudanese doctors in London than there are in the Sudan. However on the whole former subjects would rather bury the memory of Britannia's rule, would stay at home if the opportunities were there, and are much more likely to be impressed by a new British mind-set that is prepared to be a team player in Europe, and help the old continent rise to the world's needs. All of Europe's nations have their own lines of communication with the rest of the world, with their own possibilities, and those raised by sharing them are massive.

     Is Britain going to be able to do anything about global warming, or Syria or Palestine by itself? Is it going to help Europe find ways of doing so with this stupid Brexit? Where is the plan to create jobs in all those sun-baked countries, which could be developing energy farms in the deserts, using all that sunshine to produce electricity and so for instance water from the sea or hydrogen for powering fuel cells? This is where, if it is to succeed, the right balance needs to be struck between building on local culture and promoting development. The neo-liberal Anglosphere has failed dismally. Can old Europe still learn and do better?
     

Light's Coming, Slowly.

Every sailor knows the sense of blessed relief that comes with stopping their engine, when the sails take over and once again the dominant sounds are those of nature and the way of their boat through the water. Now the whole world needs such a moment, leaving dependence on oil and internal combustion engines behind, and indeed this does seem to be coming; 2018 looks like being the year when 'society' is at last getting around to think in terms of electricity for cars and transport in general.

‘Better late than never’! Why it took so long is a good question, considering that electric motors were on the scene before internal combustion ones in the mid nineteenth century. There was indeed a problem with regard to range, but realistically it would not have been such a problem were it not for a certain precious myth of limitless freedom, which advertisers take much 'mileage' out of but which most of the time does not correspond with people's actual usage.

As to the vital development of batteries, much is made of lithium-ion ones, and indeed they are excellent for laptop computers and the rest of things where weight is critical; however, if they get to be required for cars and so on, we are back into a problem of supply. For the Anna M, I am thinking of AGM lead-acid, because they are about a third of the price and anyway, being a displacement boat, if we put lithium-ion ones in, I should probably need to add lead ballast!

With regard to the big picture, I realise that there seems to be a lot of lithium in the ground especially in central Africa, just as there is still a lot of oil, but apart from the little difficulty of actually getting it out, dependence on a limited resource is not good. Future generations have surely a right to a share of them, and it is much better for them to be exploited gradually and carefully, with respect to the environment and also without distorting society by putting too much money into the hands of what is pretty much bound to be a dodgy and bloated elite, who will spend a lot of it on arms in order to consolidate their position. This way, we all find ourselves having to contribute to war!

It likewise distresses me that the hype about electric cars and yachts tends to concentrate on what one might term the 'Bond' class - very flashy things aimed at the small minority who can afford them. All the violence in the world actually does have its roots in our minds, our priorities and indeed our very souls. The company that Alec and I are setting up will be orientated not to the tiny minority in the market for super-yachts, but to people who want to sail or fish, to cruise and sometimes live aboard on a low budget, to be as autonomous as possible while 'treading lightly' on our planet; to people who would actually be very happy to slow down, slipping gently through the waters rather than churning them up, as well as everyone else in their vicinity!

Streets for what?

If we get to land vehicles, personally I would like them to be more in the line of a donkey cart or a pony and trap than a sports car: rugged load carriers for the country or people carriers for cities. It would be great to get back to transporting on sea and land by natural power, with the powerful help of electric motors. The steel schooner that Alec built for himself actually has a cargo hold, and it will be great to see how she works with an electric drive. He has for a while been already at work on how to maximise the regenerative effectiveness of electric drives in sailing boats.

Alec's 'Whirled'.

Where the cockpit was.

On the Anna M, the work of laminating and riveting in new ribs is almost complete, and I am starting to prepare the hull for the final treatment of caulking, plugging nail holes and painting. It should be possible to have the electric drive installed and functioning by the Spring, so that we shall be able to set about testing, demonstrating and selling it.

By then we also intend to have a company incorporated and a premises, and then we shall be in a position to formally issue shares, but in the meantime the age-old problem of getting going is getting us down, and if anyone out there would like to come aboard and invest at this stage, you would be more than welcome, giving us a very valuable leg-up, and the terms would be good!

From Dreaming to Doing.

In this age when computers have made it so easy to churn words out, we are suffering from a veritable blizzard of them. Many of them actually do more to obscure our vision than to enlighten us. To have the opportunity to do more than give them a cursory glance is something of a luxury; serious, joined-up thinking, and the listening and reading that might go with it and which might be expected of anyone exercising any serious judgement, is rare indeed. We all tend to fall back on glancing at our usual sources, rather than trying to wrestle with the very disparate voices that sometimes crop up very near to us, even within us.

Most people allow dodgy press barons or others with murky agendas to tell them what to think, even as they delude themselves that they are thinking for themselves. Hence my extreme distrust of this rule by plebiscite that has somehow crept into politics in some places lately. What kind of democracy is it, as proposed both by Mrs May and Mr Corbyn, which ignoring all precedent, sets up the result of a thoroughly bad and largely dishonest public debate as an immutable decision, which may not be revisited after two roiling years and billions of words have at least surely nudged quite a significant number of people into trying a spot of thinking for themselves and of seriously imagining the kind of a world which they are going to pass on? Still they are not being offered a coherent vision, nor even a viable concept, of where they are being led to. 

However, with the genie out of the bottle, for all its divisive and unsatisfactory nature, it seems that we shall have to go with this type of politics, and that the only hope must be to make the debates more informed and genuinely free. It is encouraging to see young people get stuck into efforts such as:  https://www.wewantthefinalsay.com/ . We can only expect to turn the corner into a more hopeful world when, not content with dispensing more and more words, we find ways of acting them out in positive ways, in our way of living.

This is easier said than done, of course. Practical types rightly tend to be suspicious of idealists, even of ideas and ideals themselves, and actually 'putting one's money where one's mouth is' is a dangerous business. It is not in fact something that one can do from mere intellectual conviction, or as a result of a simple decision. Let us say there has to be an element of serendipity, or if you prefer, plain old luck; and also realise we shall have to overcome a lot of scepticism with patience. It is one thing to deplore cynicism, and another to convince people of viable alternatives. In fact the only way to do so is to demonstrate them, and I suppose it is really only in relation to attempts to do so that the spouting of yet more words by people like me is acceptable.

I wish it had happened twenty years ago, but better late than never I am really enjoying at present the sense of 'firing on all cylinders'. This is surely what a creative and healthy culture bestows on its fortunate children, when the spiritual and physical, the idealist and practical, the social and personal dimensions of life start working together instead of being at odds. The media of our lives, in which term I very much include the means by which for example we get around and power our technology, are indeed the massage. I am showing my age perhaps with this reference to Marshall Mcluhan, but anyway, I want to make the old Anna M into one powerful little messenger with which to massage the folk of the Gannetsway. Away with the separately firing cylinders and struggling to get them to work together; let's get into the Electric Age!  

'Anna M' learning from dolphins that autonomy with solidarity equals freedom. 

Brainstorming Electric Drives.

The renovation of the 'Anna M' has escalated into an undertaking which is frankly beyond my means. I tried a bit of crowd-funding on the basis of offering trips, as I used to do, in exchange for participating in the renovation of this classic wooden boat, but we did not raise enough to make it work. This leaves the way clear however for an even more exciting project, a way that will not alone see the boat through to a new lease of life, but a highly significant and productive one at that.

A felicitous meeting of minds, between myself and Alec Lammas, who is directing the renovation, finds both of us keen on the idea of installing a self-regenerative electric drive in the now empty hull, soon however to be stronger than ever, and using the 'Anna M' as a research and development platform for same, while also sailing round the Gannetsway (predominantly Portugal, Spain, France and Ireland, where Alec has the franchise for selling Lynch Electric Motors) to demonstrate and sell them.

Our John invited us to a brainstorming session in the old cow shed that he has brilliantly adapted to this purpose at his place in Co Clare*, and Alec flew from Portugal to participate. John kicked off by asking us both to write up on the boards our answers to the questions Why? What? & Who?  Off we went to work in the stalls on each side of the shed, and this was the result:-

(Joe) WHY?

Boat

1. Finish ‘Anna M’ (Worthwhile keeping classic boat afloat).
2. Install electric drive because it’s quiet, smooth, cheap to run, instantaneous power, little servicing, puts emphasis back on sailing.
3. More interesting and more FUN than steaming along under power in the noisy little bubble of one’s own intention.

Family /personal

1. Need to spread responsibility and justify spending when this old man is on the way out.
2. Instead of being a mere ‘hole in the water for pouring money into’, the boat will create work and business opportunities for the new generation.
3. Been dreaming about it these last 10 years or so - it’s now or never!
4. This Gannetsway project builds on my long interest in Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal and the relationship between them.

General

1. Transition to sustainable post-Oil Age extremely urgent.
2. Many possibilities in both leisure use and fishing.
3. Developing a whole new culture and relationship with nature, especially for seafarers and fishermen, particularly between the Atlantic nations of Europe.

WHAT?

Phase I - Install self-regenerating electric drive in ‘Anna M’, monitor performance, modify/improve. The propeller will charge the batteries through the motor, when the boat is sailing well. The direction of the power, to or from the prop, will change easily as appropriate. There will also be as many solar panels as practical, and of course it will be possible to recharge with shore power.
Phase II - demonstrate, sell and install more drives, make money.

Phase III - if possible move on to manufacturing, with preference for cooperation with small artisanal outfits rather than big business.

WHO?

The Electrosail Project stems from a meeting of minds between Alec Lammas and Joe Aston. Alec will be Managing Director - see his Who? section. Joe will be focussed primarily on the Anna M and promotion of the equipment, as well as overall strategy.

(Alec)WHY?

• It’s something positive to pass the time with.
• It’s a collection of subjects I’m already linked to.
• I’m at a place in life where I need to lighten up the work I do (physically - clarify priorities - lighter mind).
• Money isn’t about to go out of fashion (i.e. need income).
• I trust the people and products I’ll be involved with.
• The potential for success of project is limitless.
• It’s something I’ve had on the backburner for years and the time is right now.

WHAT?

• Replacing internal combustion engines in both commercial and pleasure boats with electric propulsion units, principally ‘LYNCH’ marine drive systems.
• Developing, improving, conceiving, producing and researching new technologies such as battery management systems, regenerative charging systems, revised versions of ‘LYNCH’ motors.

WHO?

• Joe / Alec - communication, testing/researching, demonstrating, selling, promoting.
• Alec / Joe - ideas, technical improvements/ R&D, installing, selling.
• Secretary T.B.A. - paperwork, billing, accounting etc
• Investors welcome.

Heads together in the cow stalls - Ger Kavanagh,
Joe, Steve Morris and Alec Lammas.

The brainstorming session was brilliant and we have a clear idea where we want to go. One might ask also Where? Alec is based in Nazaré, Portugal, which is strategically placed between Northern and Southern Europe, and there we hope to open a premises with workshop, store and office. Conversion jobs would preferably be undertaken there, but Alec hopes to put a lorry with a crane on the road that will be able to transport small boats by road. If there proves to be the demand, we may look for premises elsewhere also, in Ireland for example. Now for the hard part - we have to set about seeing what capital we can raise! Any potential share-holders out there?

In the Party Shed at Astoneco.

*see https://www.astoneco.com/en/homepage

A Bit of Paper.

Two lung-fulls of Irish air, after getting off the 'plane from Portugal, and soon I had to take to bed for 3 days with a shocking chest-cold. Doc says I have also some 'atreal fibrillation' into the bargain and have to start minding the old heart. This has left me prey to some introspection, instead of for instance braving the weather like Fiona with  a respectable family representation for the Pope’s Mass.

En route to the Pope's Mass, by Fiona.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law Linda has come up with a pretty document, to wit, the Oath of Allegiance sworn by my German great-grandfather to ‘His Majesty King George the Fifth, His Heirs and Successors...’ on the 26th day of September, 1912.

Charles Albert Beck had dodged the Prussian Emperor’s draft and been in America for some years, before returning to his native Reutlingen with the intention of opening a bakery there, and then having to flee to London after being tipped off that someone had reported him as a draft-dodger and he was about to be arrested as such. Little did the poor man realise the catastrophe that was so shortly to materialise, otherwise he would have chosen some other place to open his German bakery. He died of a heart attack in 1915, as far as I know.

Such quaint documents have rattled around in attics down the years since without anyone taking them very seriously. Nowadays, with millions of stateless persons in the world while our own citizenship counts for massive privileges, as opposed to those others for whom the lack of the appropriate bit of paper constitutes destitution and virtual imprisonment or maybe worse, it may be appropriate to take a new look at them and consider carefully their significance (if we do not find it too painful to do so). Fortunately things are not so bad hereabouts (yet?) that one dare not say where one stands now and again, thank God. One of the best sayings to have come from Pope Francis is that ‘one not alone has the right to express oneself, but also the duty’!

Unfortunately I for one have long since ceased to be disposed to grant my allegiance to any of their Britannic Majesties. It is nothing personal; in fact I quite like Prince Charles, but the institution seems to me obsolescent beyond recall; in its political dimension for a start, how is it remotely compatible with the notion of popular democracy, whereby decisions of vital national interest are apparently to be taken by plebiscite? In what way has the Queen managed, or even attempted, to assert her declared authority in Parliament? As for the other dimensions of the Monarchy, the alleged moral and indeed spiritual leadership involved, it all seems a classic box of English fudge, no good and well passed its sell-by date anyway! About the only thing that one might say in its favour is, where are the alternatives? We can only hope that they will emerge in the course of the catastrophic upheavals that no doubt are coming round again. One thing is for sure: the massive inequities cannot go on for ever.

As an interim measure, I swore allegiance to this Irish Republic back in the ‘70s. While I still am happy to support it in law, the Irish Republic has not escaped the chaos of democratic disintegration that has overtaken its bigger Anglophone neighbours, has far too little to boast of in terms of addressing present problems, and has also forfeited much personal spiritual affirmation by taking its cue from the international Liberal Agenda. It's not by any means that I disapprove of the separation of Church and State. However the ‘progressive’ establishment is anything but focussed on the future, and having got the present so wrong is unlikely to be effective in addressing its challenges.

In the seminal matter of abortion, their smug self-satisfaction was gently but very neatly debunked in the words of Pope Francis as he flew home:- 'The problem of abortion is not religious. We are not against abortion for religion, no! It’s a human problem and it should be studied anthropologically. To study abortion, beginning with the religious fact is to skip over thought....There is always the anthropological problem of the ethics of eliminating a human being to resolve a problem.'  

If it is to get its priorities right, democracy needs to be rebuilt, from the bottom up. I am hardly saying anything new. I have spent my adult life watching the decline of the current version, which bases itself on an affirmation of individual autonomy that is of a largely spurious and illusory nature. Actually the very heart of the crisis is in the U.S.A.; the rot really set in there with the Vietnam War and the assassination of President Kennedy, which has appeared to me to be by no means unconnected with his decision to pull out of Vietnam and his refusal to really back the attempted invasion of Cuba. Nobody however has really been held accountable for his murder, and the fact seems like an unexpurgated sin that has dogged American politics ever since, constantly dragging them down.

Whatever about that, the tyranny of the ‘majority’ has to be repudiated, and genuine representatives installed at the higher levels who have proved their worth and sense in the course of real work and achievement at the grass roots. They should be held to account by the communities they represent, newly empowered by communication technology, and by no means merely take their line from some political party or ideology or leader, let alone from the diktats of big money. 

This is the agenda that the European Union must accommodate itself to, if it too is not going to die away in the coming bonfire of vanities! Meanwhile we must work together with whomever we may in good faith, concentrating on William Blake’s ‘minute particulars’ and building up mutual trust and understanding, with a common sense of responsibility for our dire problems, as best we can.

Entretanto, muchas gracias, Papa Francisco, por haber venido. It is a privilege to unite our holy sacrifices with yours, offering up our disasters and miseries and frustrations with those of Our Lord on the Cross, so that we too may participate in the eternal rhythm of death and resurrection. 

As for how my poor old Anna M  is to make her way to new life, I shall be back on the case with the next blog!

Book II. Beyond the Judicious Retreat.

Horseshoe Cottage was a great delight in those weeks of fine weather, and the bay was actually warm enough to enjoy swimming in. This warming climate admittedly has its advantages for some of us. I helped

Ger Kavanagh to finish plastering the outside of our new extension, and then it was time to head for Nazaré and another stint on the Anna M.

Arriving in a heat-wave.

The next and final item on the agenda of fixing the hull had to be tackled, and accordingly I dived under the cockpit floor. There were plenty of nasties there, and the decision was soon taken to rip the whole cockpit and steering out so that they could be tackled properly.

It was rather easier than tackling corruption under the floor of the Church, it has to be said, despite the Master's warning about certain people being cast into the sea with millstones round necks. Still I can't help throwing in my comment that the element of hypocritical hysteria in the stories about things that happened mostly half a century ago is somewhat given away by the fact that they are cast almost exclusively in terms of paedophilia, whereas in the majority of cases it was a matter of homosexual relations with young men. Did anyone ever notice any discussion of the borderline and distinction between them, or of 'the problem of homosexuality amongst the Catholic clergy', in the Irish Times or the Guardian?

The weather became cool for Monday morning, and Stephan Colsman showed up to my delight. He is a joy to work with and very steady, and was refreshed after taking a small boat down through the inland waterways from Germany to Marseille. The cockpit was soon torn apart, also the last remaining rotten ribs, and now at last the Anna M was on her way back to health and strength again. I have well over 2,000 copper nails driven in through the new ribs, with Stephan riveting them on the inside.

It is an odd thing how these cups of suffering have to be drained to the dregs! That lovely cockpit with its beautiful old wheel! We all like to hang on to our illusions, stick to the easy way out, as long as we possibly can. There was a copy of War and Peace in the Calypso when I sailed to England with Alec, if one may talk of 'sailing' when there are always two diesel engines thumping away beneath the floor, so I beguiled the boredom with rereading Tolstoy's epic. I actually enjoyed it more than I did 54 years ago, when I considered his work somewhat heady in comparison with Dostoevsky.

If, in Jungian terms, human perception occurs by way of the four modes of intellect, intuition, feeling and sense, then I suppose those artists will appeal to us most whose work agrees with our own makeup; still, the more they can bring them all into play together, I would say the greater the result, even if so many people these days just don't seem able to cope if they can't put things in their tidy boxes. As a novelist, Tolstoy is perhaps a bit heavy duty in the intellect department. However, I mention him because his portrayal of General Kutuzov and his tactics struck me forcefully; he overcame Napoleon's Grande Armée in the course of much judicious retreating, including even the abandonment of Moscow, much to the consternation of the Tsar and his court in St Petersburg. I somewhat sillily compare it to my abandonment of Anna M's lovely old cockpit, steering wheel and all. It will be gracefully retired on the wall of our new room, and the old boat will find herself being steered at the flick of a button.

Yes, I have been thinking about it long enough, she is going all electric. If I don't do it now, I never will; a case of the old man in a hurry. But it also happens to be a case of a planet in a hurry. At long last it is getting difficult not to be thinking, if the house burns down, and we ever happen to be in any way called to account, what did we try to do about it? Alright, there are always plenty of excuses for sliding out of responsibility. I myself tried not to face the Anna M's need for a drastic overhaul as long as I possibly could; however, I did so before she sank; better late than never!

Indeed, we all have our constraints. One interesting question for me just now is why those Lynch electric motors, if they are as good as they seem to be, are not already much more widely used? Perhaps it is just to do with the fact that Cedric Lynch was a bit of a maverick and eccentric, didn't have the right qualifications or hit the right buttons as he threatened to cut rather a lot of ground from beneath the great capitalist corporations of this world? A bit like the way the drugs industry reacts to homeopathy? But then some people just can't cope with things that come by way of a different mode of perception to what they are used to; they can't even cope with different languages to their own!

To what extent are such blockages maintained and indeed reinforced by certain powerful interests? I think for example of Brexit. I wonder in whose interests it may be to maintain ways of thinking that have led to so much misery in the past, to people maiming and killing each other in vast numbers? Well, here's to all the people who prefer sharing their gifts, listening to each other's languages and enjoying each other's company! There's plenty of that about Nazaré,

Nazare market

which I do enjoy, even if it is a bit too crowded this time of the year. I generally say it's the cars rather than the people who do the damage. It has to be said that I am looking forward to taking that Sherkin ferry again shortly!

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.