La Romaria

The sky was an unblemished blue, the hills still green, as we let go the mooring where the Anna M had turned peacefully to the tide for the last six months.The nightingales were still singing away, though perhaps with a tad less urgency. Their singing would soon be giving way to the hard work of rearing young, while the sun, becoming fierce, will burn up the sweet green grasses and those so touching, delicate flowers.

The people of Sanlucar were doing some singing too. It was the weekend of the Romeria, when after Mass each family piles heaps of chairs and tables and goodies onto decorated carts, and dressed in their gorgeous flamenco gear, the fellas on their horses, they set off for a field half way to El Ganado, the next village up the road, to have a hooley with the folk from there.

Abe's photo, and he was too shy to get a good photo of the girls!

English Protestants are inclined to be snooty about the way these Catholics muddle up sex with religion, though D.H. Lawrence, no less, commented somewhere that ‘the Pope knows more about sex than an army of sex therapists’! That ‘old celibate in the Vatican’ scores because he sees sex in its spiritual context, or if you must merely think of it so, in its psycho-social context, instead of just focussing on individuals. The nightingales have no need of sex therapists!

Staying on the psycho-social level, as I recall from Somerset there would be ructions and fights when lads from Holcombe or Leigh-on-Mendip came ‘poaching our girls’ in Stoke St Michael. The Andalucians, aware of the danger of in-breeding in a small community, seem to take the opposite approach. As for the Pope, there is a feast of wisdom available on such matters in his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia - The Joy of Love. My top quote (on this wave-length) is ‘Communication is an art learned in moments of peace in order to be practised in moments of difficulty.’

Yet it remains the spiritual context that gives such statements their force. 'The family is the image of God, who is a communion of persons’, says the Pope, and it is the risen Christ who sustains our joy. Meanwhile the stretching of life to the dimensions of God is our difficult and never-ending project. Whatever about one village and another, I’m still working on this Gannetsway from the Guadiana to Sherkin Island….

The beginning of May is a good time to head north, with the days getting long and even warm there, and before that Nortada gets too established on the west coast of the Iberian peninsula. Right now a Levanter was forecast - the hasky easterly blasting through the Straights. Soon enough my crew, Abraham, a nephew by Fiona’s brother Anthony, would have his sea-legs tested. The east wind sprang up as we lay at anchor in Tavira, after a first cushy day sailing down the river. Abe’s sea-legs proved good as we had two lively day sails, to Culatra and then on to Portimao, where we went up-river to the pontoons just below the bridge. It is an excellent place for supplies, the cost of berthing is very reasonable, diesel is available and Pingo Doce and many shops nearby.

Going ashore in Culatra....

Abe swimming,

and a peaceful night.

Alongside in Portimao.

On the evening of its third day we still carried the easterly on round the Cabo de Sao Vicente, and headed north with that rare luxury, a gentle easterly breeze. It took us as far as Cabo Espichel before it finally expired, then a light northwesterly sprang up and we were just able to lay Cascais, where I’m writing this. Now the north-west wind is fresh, but it’s supposed to go south-west tomorrow, and we’ll be on our way again first thing in the morning. This anchorage will be untenable with the south or south-east gale that's forecast, but let's see how far it will take us!

Good job Fiona is off grannying!

Between Crickets and Nightingales....

A whole host of gremlins got into the Anna M's electrics over the winter, and the new fridge finally arrived, so there was much to be done, involving burrowing in awkward corners, while I myself was full of aches and coughs. I think I caught something from an old boy coughing all over the bus that brought us up from Vila Real, and was generally feeling ineffectual. Meanwhile the locals were delighted on account of some rain. In the circumstances there was nothing to be done but tie up to the pontoon in Sanlucar and see what the bit of extra convenience and human company might do.

Julian coming along the pontoon with Lily.

The sun was soon getting strong, I was feeling a lot better, and blow me if the Lord did not (after my smart remarks last week) send a wonderful Englishman to sort me out. With his Irish wife Martina and their second daughter Katy, they live on Carina of Devon*, to be seen in the left of the photo. With Julian's help those gremlins are on the run.

Rogan Wolf whom we visited in Clifton gave us a poem -‘A dotted line/ is like a prison window;/ between the bars infinity beckons.’ ‘... if I chanced/ upon infinity,/  would I ride it/ or just fall?’ Certainly not 'just fall', Rogan, but I'm not sure if 'riding' it is quite the right word for the alternative. And how does infinity beckon? When the sun comes out after the rain, the swallows are full of joy, the hills a riot of flowers, the nights a competition of crickets' song and nightingales', well, all this is a good start. Yet it is easy to miss.

Tom Jackson in his book on Darwin, subtitled The Poet Who Died, recounts how as the young man of the Beagle Journal ('surely to be numbered among the greatest travel writings in English') the great man was full of poetry and passion, 'unutterably thrilled by his wonderful experiences'; yet by his own account, in middle age all this deserted him. 'The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity.' Well, whatever it was, he lost it!

Our loving Creator works especially by way of the gaps, and uses them to gain access to us. But while He is indeed God of the gaps, the world does its best to ignore them. Poor old Darwin and his many followers want to stay on the solid ground of ‘science’, and Tom shows how he covered over the gaps with a lot of half-baked ideology about 'Natural Selection' and so on. Happily nowadays one gets the impression that even science is being forced to recognise the gaps.

 

Julian and Martina are scientists too, yet evidently seeking those 'gaps' here on the river. If perhaps not 'ride', what then shall we say, Rogan? 'Go with the flow'? Swim, sail, fly.... Here is Martina out walking the riverside path:

and here is Fiona on the same walk:

and here are more flowers along the way:

*see Martina's blog, just discovered and highly recommended  - https://carinaofdevon.wordpress.com/

On the River

Cistus, flower of Guadianaland.

Fiona and I came away from that mad day indulging dreams at the London Boat Show with one item purchased - a fridge, which precisely fitted the corner where I want to install it. It was supposed to be waiting for us here at Alcoutim when we came back, but it was stranded in a depot in Vilamoura. Having been chased up, it was actually brought as far as the bridge over the little tributary here at the top of town, maybe 300m from the waterfront on the Guadiana and the office there of Fun River where I had arranged for it to be delivered.

It was last thing Friday evening and raining. I got the driver on the phone as he returned to Vilamoura; a Brit. He said he could not find the Fun River office! But it is sign-posted, the town is very small and the Guadiana on the big side…. Could he not have asked the way? ‘I don’t speak Portuguese. I’m English’!!

Ay, probably hasn’t even learnt fas favor, onde esta, obrigado…., surely the basics one should learn wherever one goes. Will this kind of Brit ever learn community building? One is so used to wincing as they give off about the Portuguese, the French, the Irish  etc. Yet the same people come and throw themselves all over these countries! And now they hold this silly referendum!

Stop the world, I want to get off! I can only see it as a matter of nostalgia for another age, of a mythic time when Britain was indeed Great, wogs began at Calais, if God wanted something done, he sent for an Englishman while one could rob the world, glory in the buccaneer spirit yet generally convince oneself one was doing the world a favour.

That attitude may be largely discredited now, but how is one to account for the fact that (according to the London Independent) in a vote in the European Parliament on 25/3/16, all the Tory (14 of them), UKIP and DUP MEPs who casted a vote on the plan to ‘crack down on corporate tax dodging’  did so against it? Presumably all in the name of British sovereignty! One might be tempted to describe it as sinister.

I am currently on a second reading of Tom Jackson’s book Darwin and the Tragedy of the ‘Origin of Species’. In it he painstakingly evokes the great man’s state of mind and the philosophical, social and political context of his thought. While celebrating his insights especially as a young man, Tom goes on to a ruthless exposee (sorry you can insert all sorts of symbols on this machine but no sign of acute accents) of the way in which his insights were conscripted as a foundation myth for the great Victorian industrial and imperial project.

I consider that we are now witnessing the last stand of those whose main project, in their world of fierce and violent competition, remains that of ensuring that they will be among the fit who survive - but it has to be said this project remains deeply entrenched and persistent. Tom hardly surprisingly could not find a publisher for his book, though it is brilliant and very apposite. He published it himself and it is available on Amazon.com.

Tom Jackson signing his book.

I quote a key passage:- ‘Every society defines its understanding of itself and its relation to the natural world in a creation myth. The Victorians had embarked on bringing about the greatest change in mankind’s relationship with nature since the agricultural revolution, perhaps indeed since the appearance of self-consciousness, and it was for that reason that they already had problems about their own received myth of creation. For the first time in human history nature was being seen not primarily as a wonder to be contemplated but as a resource to be used and exploited. Genesis was no longer of any use, in fact it was worse, it had become a skeleton at the feast, a deep source of guilt and anxiety. The problem was that Genesis did not recommend getting rich at nature’s expense but, as God did, loving the natural things he had made. Genesis was therefore now a problem, even more for Christians than for secularists, but most of all for clergymen, for almost to a man the clergy were enthusiastic supporters of the middle-class project to become rich and then richer still.’ (pp156/7)

This project, essential to the life of a place like Downside, was seriously threatened from within in the 1960s and ‘70s. With some help from Teilhard de Chardin, some of us reckoned we had the makings of a new paradigm. We were no doubt somewhat naive, and we had no great triumphs in our undertakings. The gap between one paradigm and another is dangerous territory, as Dom Luke Suart, a leading protagonist at Downside, demonstrated dramatically with his nervous collapse and suicide. The other monks involved all left the community and were scattered.

Tom Jackson is one of the survivors. Well, God’s ways are not man’s. The work has been going on in so many ways and different places and people. The world is gradually learning, although frequently in perverse and misguided ways, to be kind - to nature, to ourselves, and to each other.

Acacia blossom

Acacia trees, Fiona at Sanlucar

And by the way, this old ‘drop-out’ couple here claims to have survived without major compromise, whatever about the yacht on the Algarve and the fridge, and there are quite a few of us here in Guadianaland who would say the same! Well we have at least learned por favor, fas favor, gracias, obrigado…. And with a bit of luck the Brits will vote to stay in, and we might all get on with a more courageous and effective approach to tax-dodging, refugees, climate change!

Azure-winged magpie.

Across the Water

At last I have time to post another blog; Fiona and I are a few nights together again in the one place, with our Mary Emma and Ross in Cheshire.

Mary Emma

 The huge flocks of Greylag geese, which I saw when I was last here in January, seem to have left the broad fields towards the River Dee and Wales. Across the marshes of the Dee estuary and the Irish Sea, the Minches with their wild islands, and the bitter ocean, they are probably in Iceland by now.....

The Dee estuary from Neston.

Some of the Greylag geese however seem to have been tempted to stay behind with the Canada geese on the quiet pond across the road - 

There is a monument beside the pond to the two sons of the squire, who died in the First World War. The plaque to the two young men, who bore the name of this village, is inscribed -

O God to us may grace be given
To follow in their train.

To contemporary minds, the idea that it is glorious to thus depart a fine old way of life sounds odd. Indeed it is surely not the will of the God of life to bring young men to such deaths. However, how does He give the wild geese the grace to leave comfort and security to find their wild northern breeding grounds? And what of those who are left at home? Will they ever be able to settle for the quiet life again? That family has left their Manor House, the heir is in Australia. 

The willows weep at Aldersey Manor

Here we have a crisis of meaning in terms typical of our times. We have come to the point where people shun the very notion of meaning. It is very easy to understand how our atheist friends come to hate the very idea of that God! But what have they to offer when it comes to the serious business of building families and communities, of educating our young and establishing priorities, all of which depend on an effective framework of meaning?

Donald Clarke, an atheist columnist in the Irish Times, went as far as to state recently (April 4th) that the idea of an “atheist community” is ‘preposterous’. Indeed it is, for as he said himself, one cannot base a community on disbelief. Yet still he goes on to insist that he is far from wishing to ‘suggest that the campaign against religious domination of Irish schools or Catholic doctrine in health practice should not be fervently redoubled.' 'These remnants of Bronze Age superstition are an outrage.' Heaven knows what kind of history he proposes to teach, confusing the Christian heritage with the Bronze Age! But then we have plenty of examples of the kind of society you are likely to end up with, working on such principles....

I see it as the most important job and privilege of old boys like myself to confront such issues of meaning, and to find the bridges, the ways across the water. We have been busy crossing them, here in Cheshire, in Scotland and south to Bristol. It is the chat with family and friends that I specially value. However it's not always appreciated, and it's no good if you just stick around honking too much. 

It will be good to be back aboard the Anna M soon. I don't reckon to be in the same league as the Greylags anyway, but it's surprising how going through the motions does help to train one up. I shall enjoy the good life down on the Guadiana again, but may the grace be given me to avoid too much shilly-shallying, to get the old raft and myself together for another bash round Cape St Vincent and Finisterre and on north to Sherkin. 

It may yet help me to acquire a better touch when I fly into the head-winds in my conversations! Take them obliquely if at all possible! Broad reach much better, when conversation comes together! Only power into the wind if it is unavoidable to stay off a lee shore! Respect, avoid if possible, but do not fear those sharp head-winds! There's a lot to be said for the quiet life, but I won't merely settle for it yet; I would still rather follow in the train of the great flocks heading north! 

Clifton suspension bridge

With Fiona and Raphael Appleby, my old housemaster at Downside on it.

Here she is with our John in Scotland.

And here is a bridge over the River Dee. Would that all frontiers were as peaceful as this one between Wales and England!

Wilting Shamrocks and Twelve Stars.

Brave Marchers

The combination of religion with nationalistic enthusiasm always made me slightly nervous, even when it was just a matter of St Patrick’s day. At Downside in Somerset where I went to school, the brave contingent of Irish lads would sport their shamrock specially sent from home, likely to be slightly wilting after their journey in a little box; of course this was the occasion of some gentle ribbing, of which yours truly no doubt did his share.

It was not that I wasn’t interested in St Patrick, who indeed might well  have come from Somerset. He was a Romanised Celt, which is an interesting combination for a start, and the poetry of his bits of writing and the story that he was first taken to Ireland as a slave and then returned to preach the Trinity with the little leaves of the shamrock appealed. My dear friend Ken Thompson went on to make a beautiful statue of him as a shepherd, which is atop a column in Westport, Co Mayo. The question was, what had that lark of parading round chilly streets waving flags got to do with it? Half the time it seems to parody St Patrick rather than honour him!

Ken rounded off his career as a sculptor with a magnificent Stations of the Cross for the restored Cathedral of St Mel in Longford, and has just given me a copy of a beautiful book with his reflections on them as well as photographs of them, which is available through Veritas Books. I have only had time to read what he says about the First Station, but I love his comment on Pilate’s question, 'What is truth?' - ‘Significantly he didn’t wait for an answer’.

One often meets people who quite proudly announce that 'they don’t believe in anything!' One has to ask, have they asked themselves that famous question at all, and have they really looked for an answer? It is in the vicinity of such questioning that one can glimpse the difference between mere tribalism and genuine community, indeed the very oneness of truth and love.

Love of course unites; however the first thing our culture does with knowledge is to divide it up into ever proliferating compartments. Along come the educators, often without the foggiest idea of an holistic principle that might enlighten them, and all they do is teach youngsters to assimilate and manipulate information within these compartments, so that they can produce as necessary whatever components that the market may require. No wonder they don’t believe in anything; they cannot even know what believing is! Is it not largely a matter of establishing connections?

When the victims of this fragmenting and compartmentalising education come for instance to being journalists, what language, what terms of reference have they which will enable them to stand up to the newspaper proprietor whose main interest is to exploit the prejudices of the tribe that he targets, for money and for power? Journalists get on who have a good nose for it all. They please editors, and editors get on who please their owners, and one can pick and choose one’s elected ‘facts’ to say just about anything. Even if the journalist has done his best to say things as they are, a cut here and there, a headline and a shift of emphasis can quickly change the sense of his report.

The most obnoxious newspapers are the ones with the most obnoxious owners, whether they are the plutocrats of the ‘free world’ or the dictators elsewhere. Take the British papers advocating Brexit. We know the great lengths some of their flag-waving owners go to in order to avoid paying tax, as well as to evade their beloved fellow countrymen as much as possible.  I might mention the ones who built the mansion on the small island of Brecqhou that I have referred to previously in this blog. Could it be that their patriotic zeal stems primarily from the EU gradually making tax-dodging more difficult? Then there’s all 'that damned continental socialism'!

The Brexit  thing does have a long tradition to build on, notably represented by King Henry VIII wanting to suit himself in the marriage stakes. Once the authority of the Catholic Church was overthrown, the attempts of Britain’s neighbours to ‘put manners’ on the islanders became more and more crude, through King Philip II of Spain, Napoleon and Hitler. Unfortunately nobody had properly figured out the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity yet, and though the founding fathers of the EU sneaked it into its ideology, in practice the said EU does remain somewhat stuck in the over-centralised Napoleonic mode. The disastrous Common Fisheries Policy is a good example.

It’s a pity the French never really repudiated their grand homme, as the Germans did Hitler. Of course the two were not in the same class as to sheer evil. When it came to constructing the EU, it was perhaps only the trauma of the world wars that had sufficient effect to overcome the resentments on all sides. The English had to recognise that after all their fate depended on that of Europe, and the Continentals that after all those maudits Anglais did have their value in counteracting the grand excesses. Now that the memories of all that are fading, it is a tall order to sustain the catholic project for a universal community.

One might ask why it is easier to do so in Ireland and Scotland? I think simply because here it is the English who have not just threatened as they have themselves been threatened, but who have actually carried out the invading. The Celts were not only pushed out of England in the first place, but they were not even left alone in their damp and rocky retreats. That Romanised Celt, Patrick, turns out to have been a very significant figure, a prophet who might have averted much subsequent grief had he been attended to better; you would hardly gather it from the parades, but perhaps he can still do much to help unite the peoples of these islands within the latest edition of the Pax Romana! Let me testify to the fact that while my genes come from both the Celtic and Germanic blood-streams, though marginally more from the latter, my life experience has led me to identify more and more with him. 

Meanwhile, the twelve stars from the crown of 'the woman adorned with the sun and standing on the moon' and giving birth, in the Book of Revelation, make a more meaningful emblem to me than any national flag! If we want the project it represents to have a new lease of life, we need to recall her; we also have to take Pilate’s question much more seriously and somehow find our way back to the only realistic and holistic concept of truth available.

Whereas my mind was nearly splitting with such preoccupations as a journalist, I found fishing for a living very therapeutic. Either one caught fish or one did not; there was the physical reality that could not be fooled and there was one’s own thoughts and actions in relation to it; no room for fantasies and meanwhile one’s mind was one’s own.  But the old thoughts were trundling along in the background.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said somewhere words to the effect that ‘good writing is the fruit of successful living’. No, he didn’t mean two cars and a nice house. I hope these last fifty years of mine have constituted what he did mean, but what of the fruit? If I don’t do something with my little stock of it now, it will only rot, but I have so far not found a market for it. Technology to the rescue! I for one shall not be crying if newspapers die out, but it remains to be seen where the internet will take us. I wonder where this blog will go? It is easy enough to get it out; the biggest problem is that everyone’s mind is getting saturated. 

It is a bonus that I can monitor where the posts go, but I would like to get more comments back and find out who appreciates what! There does seem to be some interest in the high-falutin' stuff like this one, but others may be relieved when I get back to sea next month!

Where is it going?

'Eft, 'Ight!

I well remember the day when it was definitely proven that I knew better than my father, at the great age of 17. We were sailing back to Cornwall from Ireland, in those happy days before fancy electronics, with only a compass and a patent log as navigational aids, in a 27’ sloop. Walker’s patent log came out of its wooden box, smelling of the special oil with which it was lubricated through a hole in the dial; it was fixed to its little plate on the taffrail, and its spinner was hooked to the revolving disc at the back of it, and solemnly streamed as we made our departure.

So we knew that we were somewhere in the general vicinity of the Scilly Isles or Land’s End, but the visibility was not great. A cliff with a tower on it appeared. “Ah, there’s St Martin’s Daymark, very good!” said Dad, mainly because that’s what he expected it to be. He was on the tiller, and I had the advantage of having studied the chart. “Doesn’t look like St Martin’s Daymark to me!”  And I was right! The tower turned out to be in Cornwall rather than the Scillies, which meant that we had to turn right rather than left. Such choices make a huge difference when one is in a small sailing boat off Land’s End!

I mention this not to blow my own trumpet, but by way of reiterating the truism that youngsters always delight in knowing better than their seniors, and sometimes they may even be right!  Age has its disadvantages, especially when it comes to dealing with preconceptions at a time of rapid change. Mind you a teenager today would probably just take out his smart phone to see where he was, if there was any doubt about it. All you need is the right technology man! So, mastering that, they reckon to be away ahead of the game. Never mind that old stuff about experience and tradition; the machine will keep you right!

For a modern person, the main preoccupation seems to be to get ahold of the right technology for the job in hand. I’m going to do a spot of building here on Sherkin Island  this summer, and here I am digging the footings, by hand! Where's the digger? When I mooted the notion to the guy in the building supplies place that it might not be necessary to have a big truck with a crane on it to deliver some blocks, he looked at me as though I had two heads. It’s rather the same story when I mention to some people that I have no car.

No digger!

If you take the odd break from technology, you will find out to what extent we tend to be conditioned by whatever technology we use. Perhaps it’s partly because you nearly have to use a car to get anywhere these days, and then immediately you must choose one side of the road or the other, that progressive folk in Ireland long for a proper left/right divide in our politics. The lefties are hoping the two ‘right-wing’ parties will have to get together to form a government, so that they can form the opposition, and when in due course it comes to the delightful business of throwing the next government out….

The fact that you really do have to choose one side of the road or the other, if you’re going anywhere by car, does make driving a pretty good image for politics. Democracy after all is a technology, a mechanism for undertaking tasks in common, like the building of roads, and agreeing regulation for their use, a matter that admittedly can assume huge proportions if there happens to be thousands of refugees on them! The word democracy means rule by a demos, that is a people who have more or less common assumptions and objectives. The more they agree and in fact have an underlying love for each other and for life in general, even when they quarrel, the better it works and the  less regulation is required.

Meanwhile, in this world where brotherhood remains aspirational, if you want to engage in politics, you must indeed choose one side or the other, either going to the left or the right. Which way you turn is a matter of where you want to get to, or to get away from. The young are liable to want to turn in the opposite direction to their parents, just to prove they’re their own people, and that more than anything else sets the tone for many people’s politics. My Dad had a saying about anyone under 25 who was not left-wing having no heart, and anyone over 40 who was not right-wing having no head; but it can take more than 25 years to get over the need to react to father!

All this is compatible with love, or at least with travelling in a loving way. But where love fails, one must fall back on regulation, on laws, on force. Whichever side of the political road you are on, if you leave love out, depending more and more on brute force as you go on, you will end up in a similar, nasty, place, commonly known as Hell; witness Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

It would seem that the place for a sane man would need to be on the left in Nazi Germany, and on the right in Soviet Russia. The important thing is to realise that the left/right thing, though it may be a necessary part of the practise of politics, is far from absolute, and will be irrelevant when we arrive home!

A sailing man like myself is more likely to take the line that if other drivers and the cops are getting even madder than usual, the best thing is to leave the high-road altogether, hoist sail and take to the seas. I cannot claim that this is necessarily heroic. It just doesn’t do to simply wash one’s hands of either politics or religion; they are both inescapable parts of what it is to be human.

Generally we must get along with other people as best we can, so there’s politics for you, with its laws and its compromises. Then there are absolute, transcendent truths in the world. For example, however one travels, patience and respect for others are good, while careering madly on one’s way with utter disregard for them is bad. Such truths, I would suggest, belong essentially to the religious dimension of life; religion when it is about anything worthwhile is about cultivating truth and love. People without any religious language are inclined to end up thinking and acting religiously in the language of politics, as if this could mediate transcendent truth, and they do nearly as much harm as those who act politically in the name of religion, having no hold on the real thing. 

If only get we can the right relationship between the two sorted out, we will have a lot less trouble on our hands. I do not mean to divide them into completely separate compartments. The embarrassing fact (to our secular society) is that the managerial and regulatory business of politics becomes destructive when it loses its basis in truth and love, inevitably pitting people against each other. One would hardly think, from the media coverage, that the outgoing Irish Government's crushing defeat had anything at all to do with its stance on abortion and marriage, though I can think of quite a few voters who turned against it precisely on these grounds.

While it is true that religion has the primacy, whether this is acknowledged or not, it must respect the polis and its autonomy, always remembering that our grasp of absolute and transcendent truth is very much a work in progress. Meanwhile it is good that some people, mystics, hermits, sailors, head off into the blue, trying to get a better handle on it. As one leaves the coast behind, one gets the land into a truer perspective!

Sailing into the Blue.