How to Fix the MICX.

So here I am in Nazaré, just about reconciled to the fact that I have to get Alec to move the Anna M to the cheaper and less accessible part of the boatyard, where the lift cannot go but Alec can with his trailer. There I shall simply keep her from the elements as best I can until such time as there are serious funds available to fit her out again. At least I seem to have worked through my grief at this state of affairs, and Nazaré has a fairly ideal climate for the job. While being fairly dry, there is often a good deal of cloud cover and a breeze from the north, which stops things getting too scorched.

My concept for the Anna M has changed somewhat. To save the expense of a serious bank of batteries, and maintain autonomy, the Beta diesel is going back in after all; however it will be drinking hydrogen as well as diesel oil, and an electric generator will be bolted on instead of the gear box, and the electric drive will go in as planned. One decent lithium battery should provide about three hours of drive, enough for going in and out of harbour and so on.

I have had a change of heart about my diesel engine since seeing what Alec has done with his old van. He has installed a simple electrolizer for hydrogen, which with about the same amount of battery power as the headlights, produces enough hydrogen from water to reduce his diesel consumption by about 30%, and drastically cleans up the exhaust and the engine too, with cleaner and more efficient combustion going on. There is no need to store the hydrogen or even to separate it from the oxygen - both gases are simply fed into the air intake. Alec has invented an ingenious and simple way of insuring that the electrolizer only runs and produces hydrogen when the engine is running.

Alec topping up his hydrologiser with tap water.

Especially for a boat, this is a very promising way to go. It would seem impossible for everyone to get huge battery capacity, even if they could afford it, and anyway what nasties does the production of the batteries involve? Ideally one would eventually replace the engine with fuel cells, as one gets on to producing enough hydrogen aboard from sea-water, but that too is all some way down the road, at least unless one happens to be super-rich. Similar considerations apply to land vehicles, and we need big change 'yesterday'. I realise it is already late in the day, but better late than never, and it's no use sitting around wringing our hands while one target for carbon reduction falls after another and while more and more people all over the world are finding their way of life becoming impossible.

Then there is the consideration that many, perhaps most, of the country people are far too dependent on diesel engines, and under too much pressure to survive, for them or their communities to think of buying electric vehicles any time soon; anyway, if one were to work out the carbon footprints incurred in the making of the ev's, one would surely find there is nothing to be gained from too sudden a changeover, even if it were possible.

Moreover governments will be imposing carbon taxes; but squeezing people financially, as well as trying to make them feel guilty, is not the way to pursuade them to buy into sustainability! One is more likely to make gilets jaunes of them, or have them vote for the likes of the Ducky. Then again, there is the possibility of transforming the emptying countryside, especially hot desert places with their massive resource of solar power, by means of 'farms' for making hydrogen with sunshine.

Now the first priority for the Nazaré Project is to put together a marketable kit of Alec's hydrogen gear. It looks like I shall be going back to the role of my great grandfather Aston, as a salesman! But like his son, I do enjoy experimenting and tinkering with machinery, which he did with planes; and besides, if I am ever to have the peace of mind for swanning around in my boat again, I would like to have made some little contribution to saving the planet.

The big mystery is, why does it fall to the likes of Alec and myself to do this kind of work? The internet reveals plenty of people at it, but they mostly seem to be working on a shoe-string, while any amount of money can be found for arms or banks. Old Ike, President Eisenhower in case you don't know, who did perhaps more than anyone to win the Nazi war on the western front and thereby establish the USA as 'Leader of the Free World', famously warned in his valedictory address of the 'military-industrial complex' (MICX for short). Their power today, and their unprecedented degree of connection with the current US presidency, no doubt far surpasses his worst nightmare. The only antidote he could suggest was 'an alert and informed citizenry'. We evidently need to do better, yet I suggest something similar is required with regard to climate change and all our other woes!

Of course the oil industry is in there with the MICX, but I would furthermore suggest that the one thing the whole MICX crowd hate is people they can't control, who have the effrontery to take power into their own hands! Good Heavens, if they do that, then besides not having the world 'over a barrel' for the oil, there won't be any excuse to spend all those zillions of other people's money, in no inconsiderable degree upon themselves, in order to 'defend the oil supply'*.

How much safer and better it would be if the MICX crowd stopped baiting Iran, as well as meanwhile selling arms to other equally (or more) deplorable regimes in the Middle East! And instead of fighting or being terrorised, how wonderful it would be to see people there farming hydrogen, sending cylinders of it to market rather in the way that family farms in Ireland used to send off their churns of milk! The lorry that takes them away could be delivering sun-distilled sea-water. The money is there to set it up, along with everything else to do with solving the whole climate/fuel/environmental crisis, but unfortunately it has been diverted for evil purposes.

Empty country and sunshine in Portugal.

Instead of driving up the autoroute from Faro, I came up through central Portugal, via Almodovar, Beja, Evora and Santarem. A beautiful drive, with empty roads, though very bendy in parts especially the first leg in the Algarve.

*More on the MICX here.


 

Sine tuo numine....*

I remember thinking, while listening to a sailor who had been through the Second World War, how sad it must have been to have to snatch a chance to hurriedly lay up his boat, wondering if he would ever get to sail her again, or what sort of shape she (or the world) would be in if and when, perhaps some five years later, he had once again the liberty and leisure to attend to her. The very fact that life had so overtaken both boats and sailors in this way brought home to me how appalling war is. By the time we came to the sixties, we assumed that the world had turned some benign corner and was to be our playground.

It couldn't last of course, but it has taken this long for dreadful reality to so impinge on our lives that the notion that we are free do as we please with them, with or without good reason, is fast disappearing again. 'Man proposes, God disposes', and He doesn't quite seem to be prepared to dispose in our favour the way we assumed He was!

Now I am back in Nazaré, a full two years after sailing in

here in my leaky old boat. It seems I am further than ever from getting her back to sea, and in fact am at a stage of seriously questioning how or even whether I can possibly see the project through. I am currently thinking in terms of mothballing her as best I can until such time as I have either somehow come up with a firm plan and finance to do it, or found a way of passing the ball on.

However, I have the dread feeling that the world is rapidly descending into such a crisis that all our lives will be caught up in it, and for an individual like me to have ambitious schemes of his own will be a thing of the past. While most of us will be struggling to survive, the few who do have wealth will be in such a state of seige and struggle that they too will have lost such freedom. Our whole way of life is descending into such a state of uncertainty and flux that our ability to do anything about it is being rapidly and severely curtailed.

Supposing one imagines that it may be possible to do anything in terms of politics? Where is the glimmer of sense or hope? On one hand we have a gang who flatly refuse to recognise the science of climate change, let alone to admit to any debt of solidarity with those who are being displaced by it. The same crowd very likely refuse to see the value of the European Union, and have a bit of a soft spot somewhere for the Duckie and his mini side-kicks in England. But then on the other hand you have the crowd who, also for instance, refuse to recognise that there is no magic border between being and not being a unique human life, with its own trajectory and dynamism, though science itself also clearly spells out how from our very beginning we are just this.

Again, it was generally assumed until lately that the transmission of life from one generation to the next also constitutes the basic rationale for marriage.  However the British Labour MP Conor McGinn, who just put forward the same-sex marriage amendment in the Westminster Parliament in order to foist it on the Six Counties, described it as "a fantastic victory" in these terms:-  “the LGBT community in Northern Ireland now know that Westminster will act to ensure equality and respect for all citizens, and finally give them the right to marry the person they love.” It’s no wonder that the British body politic is in such a mess.

Putting it in such romantic terms may be advantageous to a politician who likes to be touchy-feely, but like most things that lots of people like to hear (including the notion that British subjects are ‘citizens’), they just don’t stand up in reality. How many people, homosexual or otherwise, love just one person in their lives? So the phrase ‘the person they love’, is bogus. The truth is that love means a whole lot of different things in different contexts, and when it comes down to romantic feelings, any meaning is notoriously unreliable.

The only way for marriage to attain solidity and meaning that I have discovered, in 52 years of trying to practise it and the previous 21 on the ‘receiving end’ of it, is for it to be based on the covenant with the origin of life Himself, who alone can breath ongoing life into it. The covenant of our marriage takes its meaning from the everlasting covenant of humanity with God, as indeed do sex, the whole business of female and male and the procreation that this polarity enables.

That He did and continues to do a good job in creating us is sometimes open to question;  indeed according to the Book of Genesis He is said to have questioned it Himself, and long ago all but decided to drown the lot of us; but as we see all around us, it is in the context of existential despair that both marriage breakdown and homosexuality proliferate. While in the absence of the knowledge of God, we may do our best to set up our own little ‘communities’, we will only succeed in rediscovering true cohesion by getting back to that knowledge and reestablishing our lives on that Covenant.

There is not much sign of  those who have something of an objective and balanced approach, their voices being drowned out by clammering mobs. One crowd rush to label anyone who criticises Israel as ‘anti-semitic’, the other crowd rush to label those who do not accept homosexual marriage as ‘homophobic’. It is one and the same mechanism at work, with half-truths dragooned into shoring up the various bogus identities that people cling to so passionately. Who is responsible for this dividing people up into apparently irreconcilable camps? Is it simply that the internet so amplifies the age-old problem of ‘us v them’? But who is stirring it and profiting from it too?

I sometimes pine for the years I spent fishing and sailing that Anna M; life becomes a whole lot simpler at sea, and if I don’t get back there, at least I may as well die trying. Hopefully, when I do die, it will be the start of a yet more fascinating voyage, and I like to think that seafaring is a good training for that. Yet I must await the starting gun, and meanwhile I continue to place the whole situation along with the infant in the arms of the Madonna up on the hill!

*'Sine tuo numine, Nihil est in homine' is a line from a beautiful Gregorian chant that Fiona and I have been learning with our neighbour Fr Des O'Driscoll. It roughly translates 'Without your numinous presence, there is nothing in mankind.'