One of Them.

            

Beating to the Fastnet Rock

     August blues, the summer and also our life on Sherkin are slipping away. We are in the 'no man's land' between houses. Recovering from cancer treatment, my sense of the shortness of life is sharpened again. I look back over the last  half century, that in one sense has slipped away so quickly, and in another seems a long time. 

      All along, ‘America’ has been ‘fighting the good fight’, expending unimaginable amounts of blood and treasure in the noble cause of democracy and freedom. Don’t we all love that cause? But in spite of vastly overwhelming military superiority, it has been a story of failure. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, is it not about time we asked ourselves why do things keep turning out like this? Is there some underlying epistemological mistake? Do we need a different approach? Any chance of a reboot? 

       It should take no great wisdom to realise that bombs and bullets do not win hearts and minds, and even that ‘if a man were to try to buy love, contempt is all he would gain’. While from time to time lip-service is paid to such sentiments, one must conclude that our managers are not really interested in them, but that what really interests them is money and power. Never mind your hearts and minds; this kind of power bases itself on fear, and naturally finds an enemy very useful, both to provide cover and to put the wind up supporters and victims alike. Fear and hatred of an enemy enable the extortion of vast amounts of money, and after all the purpose of doing so is served by one great long failure much better than by quick success!

 

      Now it seems we are embarked on another kind of war, against that diabolical virus! Again, success is proving elusive. Again, the rich are very much better off than the poor, and the mega-rich are making vast amounts of money out of it. This time there is an even bigger power-grab going on, while fear of that alien enemy is proving a very useful tool indeed to some people. Again, the Powers will be boasting that things are going fine and victory is just around the corner. But supposing we were really serious about winning all these wars, how might we set about it? There was that talk about loving your enemies, though apparently it did not get very far.

  

         Against a deluge of propaganda, where does a layman such as myself start? It is only by sifting and comparing the statements of experts that we can make some kind of a start. Mr Paul Reid, chief executive of the Health Service here in Ireland, while celebrating the ‘phenomenal’ take-up of vaccines on the radio, professed to be "very conscious" to ensure that parents and guardians of 12- to 15-year-olds "think about it carefully and receive the right advice about vaccination.” 

 

          How can anyone honestly think it in the interest of such youngsters to be vaccinated?  According to the HSE itself, ‘The risk of severe Covid-19 illness for children is low, with a hospitalisation rate in Ireland for those with no underlying conditions of less than 1 in 100,000.’  The notion that it will prevent them spreading infection to their seniors only makes some kind of sense if one thinks in terms of ‘herd immunity’; it’s precisely that sort of thinking that we who see life in personal terms must reject.

 

         Anyway according to a report in the Guardian on 11/08/21, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said in evidence to MPs that Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, and the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was “mythical”. 

          Each individual  has their own circumstances and their own immune system. A rational response to the virus involves  considering the circumstances in which people are living and also the state of their personal immune systems. What makes some people’s immune system so much more effective than other’s might indeed involve considerable speculation, but does not seem to figure in the societal response to the pandemic.

 

         For my part, in refusing a vaccination, I am also declining to be part of any herd. I am aware that sooner or later I will probably run into some coronavirus, just as I reckon to run into a cold or flu every winter. I do not deny that this covid is more of a challenge. I hope to be able to overcome it, with the help of God and his gifts, in which incidentally I include medical science as well as homeopathy. At all events, as I replied to someone who complained that ‘I was one of them’ - the anti-vaxers - , ‘Somebody has to do it’!  However long it takes, I expect that the war on the pandemic will eventually transpire to be yet another dreadful mistake, and I hope that there will be someone around to show that there is another way! 

 

 
 

Farewell to Sherkin

photos by Fiona

     August is here, and a glorious summer is going into decline. It seems it will be our last summer in Sherkin, and a precious memory it will remain, while Fiona and I are taking the opportunity to move to the third house of a clachan in West Clare, where our two eldest sons live with their families in the other two. We shall be 'blow-backs' there, since we lived there for 18 years or so before we moved to Sherkin. The move may be described as 'circling the wagons' for our old age and indeed the difficult times ahead for all of us, but I am hopeful  it will facilitate in various ways the practical ambitions that have been outlined in this blog. It may also be described as another step in over half a century's quest for a more sustainable way of life, involving wider and deeper family and community engagement.

    We are sad to be leaving Sherkin and its people, where we have had a very happy 16 years, and especially so since we are only lately enjoying the improvements we have long worked at; but such is this life, mainly a matter of journeying, rather than actually arriving!  I enjoy a strong sense of being on a quest, ever since the 1960s, which might also be described as a great circle. Intimations of the Apocalypse have always haunted humanity, but we are pretty good at pushing them to the back of our minds most of the time. Perhaps youth and old age share an enhanced liability in failing to do so, and my life has coincided with an historical circle in this respect. Those who chose to think about things suffered great dread then too, more from nuclear catastrophe than anything else, but by 1970 the realisation was gaining ground that our civilisation was on an unsustainable trajectory anyway.

    Not that the widening gyres commenced there of course. Dread of disaster took on a more universal, total nature with the advent of the technological age and the First World War. As the London-Welsh poet David Jones put it with gentle under-statement in his preface to In Parenthesis, his most evocative account of life in the trenches:- 'That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated - but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement.' Yet how could one possibly describe the mechanised hell of that kind of warfare as an achievement? 

    Perhaps Long Covid is like Post Traumatic Stress, in that it leaves the sufferers unable to suppress anxiety and dread? Maybe a problem they share is that they find themselves no longer believing in the doctrines of Supreme Scientific Progress! Well, the first thing my father did when he had come out of the army and regained a bit of freedom, after the Second World War, was to find a little sailing boat. It is surely to the engrossing engagement which sailing involves with the more manageable chaos of the sea, leaving little space for more remote anxieties, that it owes much of its therapeutic quality; even if this chaos overpowers us, at least it does so naturally, and gives us a fighting chance to overcome it!

    But where may we find a thorough-going alternative to the doctrine of Scientific Progress, that still conditions so many minds? Is it possible to come to satisfactory terms with it, as indeed we might say that the Catholic Church has been attempting to do, especially since the Second Vatican Council. Here as in so many ways, the hopes of the 1960s faded; fifty years later, it may be much more generally acknowledged that, for instance, the ‘3.4 million aircraft sorties and 30 billion pounds of munitions, which killed some 2 million civilians and wounded 5 million more'* did not constitute an intelligent response to the threat of communism in Vietnam, let alone a humane or justifiable one. As for threatening to blow the whole world to bits.... The question today is, are our responses to current threats, such as the pandemic and climate change, any more intelligent? Am I so very far astray in thinking that throwing vaccines at the pandemic is not unlike throwing bombs at communism?

    Can anyone seriously imagine that our culture, let alone our politics, are on a radically better footing today? We must at last really try to understand what was behind those monumental blunders, for as is often said, those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them. Theology might be described as the attempt to codify the lessons of the human journey; as such, it is the Queen of the sciences. Indeed one mighn't think so, from the way some of its representatives carry on, but in truth it is supremely concerned with how we are to live in harmony with each other and with nature, while discovering that such an ability comes as a gift from Beyond, and the more we cling to our own limited notions of it, the more elusive it becomes. Meanwhile, many bright sparks really think it is just about angels dancing on pins and so on!

    This move I hope heralds more movement in the practical effort to get that old schooner of mine back in the water, with an electric drive.The blog did not set out to stray so far into the strange business of trying to take an holistic view of life, but it is not for nothing do we use such language as 'embarking on a voyage' when it comes to shaping up to such times as ours.

*https://tomdispatch.com

A Third Way?

    Anyone following this blog will have seen how I have consistently done my bit to call out the lies of Mr Johnson and his cronies, not to mention Donald Trump, without however labouring the point too much, since I set out neither particularly concerned with British nor American politics.  Remorselessly, principally via Brexit and then covid, I have been sucked into being so.

     President Trump revealed himself most starkly, I have said, in three monstrous lies:- that climate change is an empty myth, that covid is 'a hoax', and that in fact he won that election. Yet as it happens I also believe the monumental assault on the very idea of truth that we are suffering has deeper roots than right-wing politics.

     Consider two core beliefs of the other, 'progressive' crowd, with regard to abortion and homosexual 'marriage'; in common with previous generations and all major religious traditions, I consider it undeniable that the former is the willful destruction of a vulnerable human life and as such cannot be termed a 'right', and also that it is a lie to characterise a relationship between two persons of the same sex as 'marriage'.  The impact of the dramatic and sudden reclassification of these fundamental human functions, in spite of all previous conceptions, was bound to be immensely destabilising, and indeed destructive of the very idea of truth. Nowadays, apparently, there is only to be 'your truth' and 'my truth'.

     Until he failed so dismally to stand up against the Brexit bandwagon, I entertained some hope that Sir Keir Starmer might manage to bring about a change of direction across the water. One phrase of his in a tweet today completes the disillusion. He refers to 'Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers and people harmful to public interest'. Wow! I hadn't realised that things were that bad, as I lead my somewhat sheltered island life.

It's not however as sheltered as it might have been lately. This last week I have been to hospital in Cork every day for radiotherapy. I am taken by a wonderful voluntary outfit, Cancer Connect, sometimes by car and sometimes by minibus. So far so good, but one of the drivers, on learning that I am not vaccinated, said 'oh, you're one of them!', meaning evidently one of the anti-social types refusing vaccination. 'Somebody has to do it!' was my reply. Again, I have set out my reasoning in recent blogs. What I want to discuss in this one is the possibility of a third way emerging, beyond left and right. It turns out that this irremediably politicised pandemic provides a pretty good lens through which to do so.

The fact that, albeit eventually and reluctantly, I have accepted radiotherapy for this prostate cancer, demonstrates that I have an open mind about medical science, and am very ready to agree that there are many caring professionals out there whose experience, together with the knowledge behind it, have to be respected even if not always agreed with; I also think that they are subject to massive commercial influences which they may not even recognise themselves, and what's more that their whole training and mindset is conditioned by the Cartesian split, which pits reason and science against spiritual reality. It was how the western world chose to proceed into the modern age, by hiving reason and faith off into separate compartments (and frequently then binning faith).

I do not categorically reject the use of vaccination, anymore than I dismiss scientific knowledge, vitiated though it may be by the aforesaid Cartesian split. As the saying goes, science is a good servant, but a bad master. In urgent and particular circumstances, vaccination may be very useful. However, it is a mistake to think it desirable for everyone, or even that it constitutes an ultimately viable escape route from the pandemic, and I vehemently object to anyone who thinks so being labelled anti-social and equivalent to a holocaust denier.

It is very curious how, for those of us able to recall the 1960s, 'individual freedom' used to be sacred to the young and lefty, while 'social order' was the cry of the old and right-wing; but now it seems to be the other way round. Be that as it may, I would suggest that those who think they are promoting social thinking in their support for vaccination are short-sighted and in fact too individualistic in their outlook. I suspect that dependence on vaccination to end the pandemic will only prolong the agony, and anyway it will vitiate the necessary development of each individual's immune system.

How each one can foster his immune system is something that each will have to work out for himself. However, I shall throw out a few 'straws in the wind'. Governments can't be expected to help very much, but nonetheless, we are not alone and cannot do it alone. We need to be more socialised at the inter-personal, as opposed to the mass level. We need to reduce our dependence on cities and mass everything, including health, entertainment, sport etc. A football game actually participated in is worth any amount of mass hype. We should not allow our lives to be 'all in the head', but should participate in the physical labour of existence. We need to be careful of what we eat; locally produced, organic food is to be preferred to the produce of agri-business.

The list goes on, you can add to it in your own way. Let it be repeated; the epidemic is a cry for attention from a wounded planet. There is indeed no going back to 'normal life'. A new world is struggling to be born; we must welcome it with joy! Joy and the sense of being loved and of life having meaning are the prerequisites for healthy immune systems, as is the ability to cope with seemingly endless set-backs, disappointments and death itself. The integration of mind and spirit, reason and faith are conditions for this too.

We must not be dismayed, or allow ourselves to be overtaken by despondency! 'The whole of creation groans in one great act of giving birth!' We shall be amazed where the answers come from; certainly they will not come from 'getting back to normal' and the same old same old!

Migraturus Habita

       

A Tale of Two Olivers

 

Summer Calm in Horseshoe Bay.

     Here in Sherkin Island, we are enjoying fabulous weather of a kind normally associated with more southern climes, while on a similar latitude in Canada 'The devastating “heat dome” has caused temperatures to rise to almost 50C  and has been linked to hundreds of deaths, melted power lines, buckled roads and wildfires.' One cannot but reflect how confusing, unfair and deceptive the reality around us is. Where can one look to try to make some sense of it all? Catholic Christians such as myself reflect on Scripture and the ongoing salvation history, the story of saints and martyrs who have handed on the Faith.

    Today is the feastday of Saint Oliver Plunkett, Primate of Ireland whose life's work was to overcome the devastation wrought in Ireland by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, and the last of the Catholic Martyrs to be hanged, drawn and quartered, in London in the year 1681. Meanwhile I read on the RTE website how our current Primate, Archbishop Eamon Martin, is protesting the sudden reversal of Government advice that First Communions and Confirmations were to go ahead. Apparently they are not formally 'banned', the Government merely advises 'that they should not take place at this time'. Meanwhile the article in RTE twice refers to the Archbishop as 'Mr Martin', as if to reinforce his complaint that the 'the manner of communication in this case was grossly disrespectful.... A journalist's tweet and the Tanaiste dismissively saying oh they're off - that was how we were told about the change in direction.'

    Back in the 17th century, those following 'the way of the world' would have been widely imagined burning in Hell. Is it a mere coincidence that humanity currently appears likely to burn on an overheated planet? Is it totally out of order to associate the possibility of life actually surviving and going on to thrive with the idea of 'everlasting life'?

    We can confidently identify a few of the conditions that might enable us to do so. Both a new sense of purpose and of community are evidently required, leading to a new sense of responsibility and willingness to sacrifice our immediate interests and indeed our very selves. These happen to be the very qualities that the rituals of First Communion and Confirmation are intended to promote. Whether the devastation we suffer be caused by Cromwell or Covid, in such basic respects our response needs to be the same. Hence the Government advice in this respect has to be rejected.

    Scientists work in narrow areas of specialisation; it is not appropriate for their figures, inevitably highly selective, to be the basis of political action; indeed the very nature of the authority that bases itself on such figures, one of command and control however much they try to pretend otherwise, is to be firmly rejected by any freedom-loving people. What's more, the O'Grady says do this approach, do that ..., whereby one is trained to immediately respond to the sargeant-major's orders while filtering out other influences, is a classic command and control technique.

     The Irish sense of community, it has to be said, is propagated by another institution altogether besides the Church. I refer of course to our Pubs. Who could have imagined that these twin pillars of rural Irish life could come under such sustained attack, together? And that the Irish mainstream media should be so complicit? Everyday we are treated to the figures of those who have died from Covid, at the top of the news. Where are the figures for all the other victims of this situation?

    So we suddenly find ourselves in a totalitarian society. We are not to be allowed to worship, to travel or even to go into a pub without a party card. It would appear to be only a matter of time before those like myself who insist that the way forward does not lie by way of universal vaccination find ourselve in re-education camps!

    I have already written a good deal about vaccinations in this blog, and will not repeat myself here; however I want make it clear that I am not anti-science. Scientists must be listened to, but so must everyone else. The way our Government is carrying on is not the way to achieve a respectful ear for their advice. Covid is a nasty disease, nobody wants to get it and if advice is sensible and coherent, it is likely to be listened to. It needs to be holistic and consistent, in tune with the other even nastier threats to our freedom and our future. That other Oliver, Cromwell, must not at this stage have the last word! 

    

    

A Good Moment Again!

     

Farewell to the Praia do Norte for another while!

In Nazaré, we were concentrating on that relatively still point in my turning world which is the Anna M and the long, tortuous process of restoring her to seaworthiness. Our limited mission was accomplished,- we have the steel floors that Stevie made last autumn bedded down in epoxy and bolted in, so that at least the hull is now securely attached to the keel. She will hopefully get back into the water in the coming winter.

     We took a bit of a detour on the way back to Bilbao, by way of glorious Asturias and the Picos de Europa, and a fleeting visit to the little mountain village of Garabandal, one of those places where country children had visions of Our Lady, who was trying to tell us that we urgently need to change our ways. 

We also had time for a swim in a sweet bay, the other side of all that water which we look out to from Horseshoe Cottage!

     Back in Ireland, the mood had changed. 'The pandemic is over' seems to be the general idea; the sun is shining, and the square in Baltimore crowded with drinkers again. 'The vaccines are sorting it out' was the fond verdict. A week later, the scene is in danger of changing again. The covid cases at the moment are worse than they were this time last year. On the HSE's covidtracker, the latest date for which they provide a 7day average of persons hospitalized and in intensive care is 12/6/21, and the respective figures are 69 and 25. For 12/6/20 on the other hand, they are 25 and 12. 

      Across the water in Blighty they are apparently still anticipating going back to normal lives, enjoying 'football, beer and burgers',- though what's this? Johnson says they will have to wait another little while before letting their hair down and really getting back to 'normality'. The sad fact is, that for all their 'vaccine success story', whereas the 7day average of new cases was 939 on 20/6/20, this 20/6/21 it stands at 10,075, and is going up fast, though admittedly they are getting by with a much lower rate of hospitalization.

     Meanwhile people such as myself, who consider that we would be better off thinking in terms of maintaining our own immune systems and adapting our way of life, are being put under increasing pressure to take the vaccination. Compulsory PCR tests when you travel, costing around €100 a go, are the start. Will we be shut out from the whole medical system if we persist in our 'vaccine hesitancy'?

     My reservations about vaccines are considerably exacerbated by the fact that those who question the line that commonly headlines any discussion of adverse reactions, namely that their benefits outweigh their risks, are usually dismissed as cranks and conspiracy theorists, while responsibility for investigating adverse reactions seems to lie predominantly with the manufacturers. One suspects that commercial and short-term political interests dominate the narrative, while they should be rigorously discounted.

     A just appraisal should take into account a long-term and holistic perspective. The pandemic is but a symptom of the deeper, systemic crisis which is afflicting the world! It may be that while vaccines have a certain short-term utility in preventing health services from being overwhelmed, it is a huge mistake to think of them as 'the solution'. 

     Personally I have long resisted taking the 'flu vaccines. 'Don't come to me when you get pneumonia!' was my doctor's last comment, a couple of years ago. I have not had pneumonia yet, nor have I any reason to believe that I could not cope with a 'flu by means of a couple of days in bed and some homeopathic remedies. Now why should I change my ways because of covid? Am I to take 'flu vaccines and covid vaccines, new ones for every strange variant, year after year? Who is going to be assessing the long-term effects of such an escalating dependence on vaccines? The people making shed-loads of money from them?

     Talking to someone recently returned from Africa, he was saying how the people there were laughing at us for being in such a state about covid. They are used to living with more dire risks, and had concluded that our fuss is more about money and control than anything else. Certainly the morbid fear of death in our modern culture contributes greatly to our neurosis. Whatever about that, assuming that in a few thousand years' time archeologists are trying to understand the global collapse of the 21st century, it seems probable that they will point to the escalation of vaccine dependency as a key reason. It was long after the event that people realised, for instance, that it was a bad idea to use lead to pipe or channel water, and it contributed to the collapse of Ancient Rome.

     On the other hand, it is just possible that the pandemic will stimulate us to make the changes necessary to achieve sustainability. Things that have seemed desirable, but impossible, for years, may now be feasible,- for instance the deconstruction of our bloated cities, and the reconstruction of rural living, featuring  sustainable communities that largely look after the nuts and bolts of life themselves, mostly providing their own food, shelter, clothes, even energy and health care. 

     The trauma of the pandemic yields a sharp reminder of our interdependence; it is time to realise that if we do not combine effectively at the personal and family level, we will fall victims to one form of horrendous depersonalized totalitarianism or another. The myth of personal autonomy and independence so beloved of Western culture needs to be radically overhauled, if it is to survive at all!

     Well, sadly, we are putting Horseshoe Cottage on the market, intending to 'blow back' to County Clare and live out our days close to family there. We might even live to see some of these fine ideas become more of a reality!

Now and Forever

Here I am in  Nazaré again, this time with two wonderful grandsons, David and Aaron. On the ferry trip to Bilbao the weather not so sensationally good this time, but it was still very pleasant. I love the opportunity to just relax; it's all the better with no internet and a spot of sea-motion! This time David did most of the driving, and I arrived in excellent shape, back to contortions in the Anna M.

Bertha

It's been a great pleasure to be working with the two boys, and finding them very effective. Now we have most of the steel floors in place, and the old boat feels as if she is beginning to come alive again. We also have Alec's hydrogenny in the car, even if it is only in a fish box in the back. Alec hadn't the time to fit it properly, before he went off to the Canaries to do a delivery trip to Ireland. He needs some sea-time, having had his head addled this last year with the coronvirus problems. I shall have fun getting someone to fit the thing properly back home.

Hydrogenny

We did have it running on a bench in Alec's workshop. It is simple enough, though not without its subtleties. He has been 3 years messing around with the concept, and seems to have it down to a tee. It produces plenty of hydrogen for the Citroen from about 10amps,- too much if the electrolyte is too strong, as it was at first - which meant it was producing too much hydrogen and using too much electricity, and running rather hot. Once it is installed, with a non-return valve on the supply to the engine and an ampmeter, we shall soon find out how well it works.

I have a log of the petrol that I have used for over a year and the kilometers travelled. A preliminary bit of arithmetic is showing 10.1 litres per kilometre, or 45.7 mpg, but I shall get a better head for figures on the job, and we shall soon know what the hydrogenny can do, which is very exciting. Alec claims about 30% better mileage in his Ford transit van. He says the saving comes primarily from better combustion; normally a petrol engine is only about 30% efficient, so that much of its energy in lost in heat and exhaust. Another advantage of the hydrogen is of course a cleaner engine with much cleaner emissions.

How the roll-out of electric cars is supposed to enable us to meet the ambitious targets for CO2 reduction beats me. The infrastructure of charging points is rudimentary; even if the people could afford to buy the cars, they are far from meeting the needs of people living in remote places like the West of Ireland. Then what would the carbon footprint of manufacturing all those cars be? Hydrogennies might plug the gap, enabling us to continue to drive old bangers for another while, and meantime to reduce their pollution very considerably; also to afford the sky-rocketing price of petrol.

Fiona and I did live very happily for 5 years with no car, but it does severely limit what one can do. When it comes to building projects or working on a boat, or doing anything but living the simple life, it becomes very difficult indeed. However when it comes to having real grunt in a truck or a fishing boat, I am inclined to think that hydrogen powering electric motors via fuel cells will be the answer, but there is a huge amount of work to be done on the distribution and storage of the gas.

As regards the Anna M, I am hopeful of getting her in the water again next year, with an electric motor and just enough battery power for a couple of hours' endurance. It will make for a very interesting kind of cruising. I shall be hoping to test/demonstrate and sell Alec's concepts up and down the Gannetsway!

Besides finance, it will all depend on some kind of normality returning to our troubled world; not that I am expecting too much, for when were the times ever 'normal'? This world is always a dangerous place, though occasionally there are periods when it is a bit easier to pretend that it is otherwise. The trick is to keep our heads amidst the welter of false consciousness. I recommend keeping one's inner gaze fixed firmly on the Lord,- in fact I can't see any other possible way of keeping our bearings, much as images from sea-faring for instance may help.

     Modernity of course thrives on those illusions. All our contemporary confusion about truth is built into the deal. By relegating such questions as whether or not there is 'life after death' to that unimaginable future tense 'beyond the grave', awareness of which is for the most part systematically repressed anyway, we moderns tend to effectively dodge the issue of whether there are any absolute realities at all. Truth, beauty, justice are accounted as basically whatever you want yourself, though in 'normal' times some kind of uneasy consensus about them prevails.

     In the absence of such concensus, the world becomes increasingly dysfunctional and neurotic. Governments, the media, all kinds of nutty ideas and false gods rush in to plug the gap. I find that it does help to respond by doing one's own bit to address the practical issues; the necessary interaction with natural reality helps to ground and focus our efforts, while willy-nilly we encounter the Creator; in this way we may in fact discover transcendent meaning in all we do, right here and now. I may be where I am for practical reasons, but being here is all the better for that!

     

      

The Rock We Stand On.

 

Sherkin Mass Rock

One may read frequently these days about the English public schools and how dreadful they are, including from many who reckon they were 'scarred for life' by being hustled off to some preparatory boarding school at a tender age. The Catholic ones come in for a slagging no less that the others, but I have to say that my experience at Benedictine boarding schools, from the age of 9 to 18, was on balance very positive, while I am sad that it proved to be but a privileged moment in time. In particular, I am grateful for having been given the tools to think critically, and challenged to think about the fundamental questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is life for?' It was the radical commitment of some of the monks that above all constituted the challenge, not merely the ideas they taught. Where are the alternatives to mass education now?

     'You were well indoctrinated!' I was once informed by a Protestant clergyman. Such a charge is not easy to refute; I tried to explain why I thought that he needed to straighten out in his mind the difference between teaching and indoctrination. Was he never the beneficiary of teaching? Did he perhaps invent whatever ideas and opinions he professes out of thin air? Or did he absorb them uncritically from wherever? The encounter with another mind is essential to jog our own into authentic action!

     A good teacher does not impose his ideas on his pupils. He will respect the fact that each individual must arrive at truth in his own way. It is however essential that the teacher be convincing in the expression of his own convictions, otherwise he gives the impression that there are no grounds for conviction at all, no such thing as truth whatsoever in fact. The various views expressed in literature, as in life, are not represented in this case as possible pointers, if they are genuine, each presenting a different bearing on the truth, which can mean nothing however if it is not ultimately indivisible. Otherwise one is left with the canard of 'your truth and my truth'; at Cambridge I got the impression that it didn't matter much what one did or did not believe, so long as one did not really believe it, which leads to a highly corrosive state of mind. 'Religious studies' not rooted in a solid tradition are a nonsense.

     From my grandmother's knee, even in the 1950s, I imbibed the impression that our civilisation was slipping into irremediable decadence precisely because it was losing any sense of a shared conviction that, however difficult, it was nonetheless possible to access truth, indeed that there was any such thing as truth at all, and that it is the bedrock of civilisation. Being half German, she was no doubt particularly shaken by recent experience in that nation, which she in a lonely way continued to love and admire, even while it had so radically lost its footing in what was true and what was not. Neither however did she buy into the notion that the democracies necessariy represented all truth and light. Today this is much more obvious. But it was to the other Catholic side of the family that I had to turn for a convincing 'language of truth', which the Benedictines tried to build upon.

      Some of them naturally were more convincing than others. There was always that tension between the need to obtain good exam results and real education, which seems to have proved impossible to ultimately maintain at Downside. 'It is in the depths of minds that literature exists', wrote Joseph Joubert. It is in the study of literature perhaps that the conflict can become most acute; at least that is where I encountered it, but no doubt it can be equally so for real scientists. The depths of the mind actually need to be concreted over so that the trucks of commerce can run over its surface. This is how we have ended up with so many people who actually have no notion of truth whatsoever, and we even find ourselves apparently incapable of taking in and acting effectively on such truths as that our set-up is not sustainable and a radically new approach to life is urgently necessary, no matter how clearly they are spelt out for us.

      Where to begin? Solutions can only come by way of the human imagination. It is a steep and narrow way, but the wide and easy one has to be rejected. We have to start by breaking up that concrete, paying attention to nature and the depths of our minds. We are likely to find ourselves in a deserted wilderness, or to put it another way, at sea; hence the fact that a bloggeer who set off comfortably sailing from Baltimore can find his way without inconsistancy to these distant shores, whereon he now finds himself an intellectual stranger!

      While our imaginations must come up with answers, they will not come out of nowhere, nor should we set about ignoring science. Tired as I am of hearing mass vaccination being preached in the name of 'science', and Israel being held up as a good example of its benefits, I have a juicy anecdote from a niece who lives there. She is a student nurse, but just like everyone else, she was virtually compelled to take the vaccination. When she reported uncomfortable side effects lasting a month, she was told to forget it, it could have nothing to do with the vaccination, and no records were being kept of reported side-effects anyway. How's that for 'scientific method' in the application of a brand new therapy?!

     Simple questions remain unanswered. What are the reasons why covid passes so many by lightly, while it kills others? Why not put the emphasis on understanding and enhancing our immune systems rather that usurping their function, undermining them? What resources are being put into researching such possibilities? Oh silly, of course one could not patent them, and it is precisely the possibility of making everyone depend on something that one can patent that makes the monster capitalists salivate! Where does this path of depending on big Pharma (or Monsanto) to keep us alive end? Is it actually practical in the long run? If the vaccines are so safe, why are their manufacturers not required to take responsibility when they go wrong? Why are effective steps not taken to track side-effects? 13 people died in a Bantry nursing home within 10 days of being vaccinated. Why were there no post-mortems nor efforts to determine the cause of death? Why are there plans to vaccinate children? 

     Are there signs that our society is losing the ability to sustain criticism, let alone pay attention to it? Would we happen to be deep into the prioritisation of technology and 'scientific' experimentation, not to mention the commercial interests, over elementary human rights? Are we not treating our bodies in precisely the same way that we have been treating the rest of nature in this technological age, with the disastrous results that are only now beginning to be widely recognised after so many years of being known to science?

     What Irish government would want to fall out with Big Pharma, when it earns it so much tax, or for that matter, how many doctors' conscience would rise to forgoing that handy €60 a shot and falling out with the establishment? The Nazis and the Communists exploited such weaknesses to catastrophic extremes, but the insidious  alliance of high technology and market capitalism makes me particularly nervous, although I am not living in fear of the bang on the door, thank God, yet! Are we not however in danger of travel bans and what not?  More than ever, my mind goes back to those who tried to stand up to the 20th century totalitarians. Things may be more subtle these days, but who, I ask, is being indoctrinated now, and who is really thinking for themselves? 

     

The Alternative to Vaccination

Day after day, the miseries of the pandemic are paraded at the top of the news. Funny we hardly hear of many other plagues actually killing more people, wars, pollution, other diseases and starvation! Meanwhile the massive propaganda blitz in favour of vaccination presents it as the only game in town, as if it alone is capable of delivering us from all the miseries of the pandemic, while people questioning this are represented as purveyors of doom and gloom. Actually answering their questions or attending to the points they raise hardly features,- they are generally merely dismissed as cranks, conspiracy theorists, etc. Anyone would think that the world has not seen plenty of plagues in the past, albeit sometimes with horrendous loss of life, but we got through them! Since I have looked out in vain for an exposition in plain terms of a positive alternative to mass vaccination, I shall just have to attempt it myself. But how might I think I am in a position to do so?

     I have prided myself in recent years of being one of those elderly people 'qui osent, enfin, être eux-mêmes', though I would also like to think the effort to 'be myself' goes back a lot further, especially since I wrote across the top of my answer in a tripos exam, in 1967, that 'expecting me to write four essays worth writing in three hours is absurd - I will give you one good one'. The esssay I did write was about Baudelaire, and I'm sure he was proud of me. Meanwhile I shared digs with a medical student, who thought that the only realities one could be sure of were bio-chemical ones. I thought that if our lives were going to be run by such people, God help us, though I doubted if Baudelaire provided quite the best alternative. Anyway the fact is that while I am not an expert about anything, I have been thoughtfully present to this world for a good while, and I have no need to look over my shoulder at anyone telling me what to think! What is more, I am at bottom hopeful.

One thing that I have realised over the years is that everything is interconnected, and on the subject of hope, I would point out that we are faced with multiple much more serious threats than the pandemic. The pandemic is a mere squall before the coming storm; it might be described as a little challenge to limber us up somewhat,- to get us used to the idea that the normal notions of Enlightenment and the March of Science have had it, and what's more the entire human race is in one big dire mess together. Curiously enough, we may find that the very things that will sort out this pandemic connumdrum may also be what we need to do to prepare for that storm, so clearly delineated by David Attenborough in A Life on Our Planet!

First move must be to batten down the hatches and take in sail, quickly. An end to speeding about! Less flying, less motoring, less crazes and crowds! We must quieten down, be more thoughtful and indeed contemplative, though certainly not just putting our heads back under the duvet; we must look after one another, while also attending to our own health and food, where it comes from, how it is produced; we need to test our resilience and see to the things we rely on, which so often we have merely taken for granted,- to keep our heads up as long as we possibly can, while being mindful of the ground on which we stand, appreciating nature and the wilderness and comprehending the extremely dire damage which we are inflicting on it. Everything that is normally good for our own and nature's health, and so often gets ignored, will increase our resistance and resilience; but we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we want to face reality, indeed, whether we really want to live at all.

This is not possible on the basis that we are merely the product of blind bio-chemical processes. Are we not called to anything more than keeping as cosy and secure as possible, to mere survival for a short while before the curtain comes down on a miserable farce of an existence? Is squeezing the very last drop out of our orange the supreme value? But even if we cannot get our heads around the idea that we are creatures of a loving God, indeed the very apple of his eye, and that he loves us and wants us to thrive, surely it should be possible to acknowledge that the human immune system, along with all of nature, is a most amazing phenomenon, worthy of our greatest respect, indeed reverence, mostly way beyond our understanding as it still is? Certainly we should seek to understand it better, but no doubt every answer we get will raise greater questions. Meanwhile a wise man will certainly not think, as Boris Johnson said recently in a unguarded moment*, that greed is a sound motivation for intervention, nor indeed that a clever new technological fix can do better than our immune system, or even foster it better than nature, enhanced as may well be with methods produced carefully and disinterestedly over time. Actually any really good fisherman could tell him that there is no luck in greed!

Let it be noted that I am not claiming that technology is necessarily destructive and idolatrous. Like capitalism, it is a good servant but a bad master, and we too need to see see ourselves as servants of the Supreme Good. If we confide our undertakings to God, he will indeed lead us into the fullness of truth and empower us to complete his creation. No doubt many medical practitioners of all kinds aspire to work in this spirit, but few express it as well as did the father of modern homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, who is said to have had a notice on his desk stating 'I treat, God heals.'

Homeopathy today continues to attract the scorn and indeed opprobrium of the medical establishment, and one has to ask why? They claim it is a dangerous fraud, which anyway does not work, for the simple reason that it does not work according to their way of thinking. One can only reply that as a matter of definite experience it does work, but in a subtle way more in the nature of a work of art or indeed a sacrament. As a matter of fact the Eucharist, as understood by Catholics, provides a good approach to the understanding of homeopathy. If you put brain cells under a microscope, of course you do not find ideas, memories or thoughts, any more that you can find feelings, emotions or love by looking at a heart, or the body of Christ by inspecting a consecrated host. They are nonetheless really present, just as Catholics down the centuries insist that the Blessed Sacrament 'works'. The attempt to 'go straight to God' started out by denying this; away with papist or any other paraphenalia! But it is not given to us to comprehend reality directly, head on; it would probably destroy us if we did; we must work obliquely, as it were, and mainly content ourselves with images and symbols, while remembering that effective ones do actually embody what they represent....

We do not understand properly why homeopathy works, though it may be that quantum physics will prove enlightening. Meanwhile we see that it does work, and since it also works on animals and babies, don't go down the rabbit hole of placebo effects. Certainly, there is a chicken and egg dimension to it all, and Christ could not perform his miracles where there was no faith.,- but faith is not necessarily blind, rather it is a matter of looking at things differently. It by no means excludes reason, any more than love itself does; there is just a lot about it which is beyond reason. If one cannot accept that, one has to say goodbye to love, beauty, and as it turns out, health and life itself.

So having thus attempted to clear the ground, as it were, allow me to report that covid 19 has proved quite amenable to homeopathic treatment, and indeed there are prophylactics that appear to be as successful as any vaccine in preventing it. There are also other holistic treatments, ones that do not consist of arrogantly brushing aside our immune system, but rather of seeing what we can do, respectfully, to enhance it. Zinc, vitamin D supplements, among other things, have their place in overcoming the deficiencies of our own particular constitution and life-style. Collectively alternative therapies do however have the 'disadvantage' of threatening the interests of a multi-billion dollar industry, with very many interests vested in it.

It's not that I would necessarily rule out the use of vaccines, in the fire-fighting mode that allopathic medicine excels at. I do however much doubt if they constitute a viable mass method of moving beyond the pandemic, and Fiona and I agree that they do not offer either of us a desirable way out individually. People are not all identical bio-chemical machines, and the road to healthy living is different for each of us. We all have our problems, and we must also remember that none of us will get out of this world alive. What is important is living in a vibrant way; while we all should try to live our lives to the utmost, prolonging physical life in a fearful, zombie fashion when our vital force is spent and especially when our every move is commanded by a controlling Government, does not avail! Meanwhile, who would buy a new car from a manufacturer who does not stand over it, one that is likely to be obsolete by the end of the year?

Does a future beckon in which we must be taking shots for every disease and variant that comes along, while not alone depending on governments to pay for them, but also to pick up the tab for casualties? The Irish Government is already paying out millions in compensation for victims of the swine flu vaccine. What sort of a bill is coming down the tracks for covid ones, while we have to take more and more of them? But the homeopathic approach trains and strengthens our natural immunity; they say it is like training a horse to jump higher and higher fences, and will tell you how sickly children thrive better after overcoming a disease like measles, which our mothers used to send us around to the neighbours in order to catch and get over with, while we were young.

We have come a long way from 'sailing the Gannetsway', and with my poor old boat laid up and gasping for life in Portugal, I sometimes wonder why I keep on with the blogs. Yet they keep presenting themselves to my mind, generally in the early hours of the morning, and I know of no better paradigm for the voyage all of us must make on the seas of life, nor particular context more interesting to me than this west coast of Europe, nor opportunity to bring vibrancy and interest into my own life, nor any more likely place in which to keep the flags of joy and freedom flying.

I hope the blog will soar better than this old steamer called 'Gannet', which can't have been very gannet-like when my father as a student sailed on her from Hamburg to England on the 2nd August, 1932. I think it must have been much more fun that flying is today, or even going on a liner, but as my brother-in-law Anthony points out, who dug the photo off the internet, that was two days after the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. My father's aunt had said to him 'This means war, Bernard. All they think about is war.' I wonder if he thought of the Gannet when, after long and difficult years when civilisation seemed to be dying, he and I sailed west from Rye in the Scoter, a 27' sailing boat, and our hearts soared with the first gannets which we met off the Dorset coast. I never saw them east of the Isle of Wight, where I suppose the water is too opaque for them, and presumably the southern North Sea is the same. Still, I expect that other voyage similarly felt like an escape!

As an 'anti-vaxer' one feels rather as a pacifist must have done in Germany in the 1930s, but as surely as we most urgently need to find an alternative to war as a way of coping with the difficulties of life, so we need to stop thinking about this pandemic as a war, with vaccines as our weapons. I do not underestimate its miseries, but this pandemic in itself is a less drastic challenge than that other one, and furthermore we need to see it as a potentially creative opportunity.

The good news is that I shall hopefully be back to confronting more immediate obstacles than the likes of the pandemic and Brexit soon, though they will still be there, and not in any abstract sense either. I am planning a trip to Nazaré next month....

*https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/23/greed-and-capitalism-behind-jab-success-boris-johnson-tells-mps