Come Sailing! And FFF XI

Towards Spain.

I am glad we have not been trying to sail from Spain this last while, with the Atlantic in very frisky form. It's the sort of weather that was great for drifting salmon, with the summer madness affecting many lads around the Irish coast, hanging on to their nets by the skin of their teeth in their wee boats, as the silvery king of fishes rushed blindly in the troubled waves into the invisible webs of their doom; death for the fishes, life for us!
I left Anna Legge aboard the 'Anna M' on the concrete in Nazare, went by bus to Lisbon and thence train to Faro, for a flight to Cork. After the heat in the Algarve, the fresh, cool weather here in Sherkin is welcome. The air is clear, when it's not raining, and the sun dances fitfully on the waves, giving all the more pleasure when it does so. If it's wet outside, well then I've little* excuse but to try to get my head around paying for those repairs to the Anna M. I am lucky to have hit on a guy who reckons he can make her fully sea-worthy again at reasonable cost, but cost it will.
Anna Legge and I are planning to run week-long trips on the Guadiana and the Algarve coast from early September. The cost will be Eur300 per head for the week, under 18s half-price, children under 7 free, plus a contribution to food, diesel and any berthing expenses. If anyone fancies coming, please stump up a 50% deposit asap, and help us to get those repairs done. If you want to cancel, it will be refundable up to 3 weeks before the booking, though this might take a while. Please use the contact box if you are interested:

'Anna M' on her Guadiana mooring.

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 *Little excuse, that is, except that the political Punch and Judy Show has been so very entertaining of late. It was a good result in Britain, for it is only right that the Tories should be left swinging in the wind for now, hoisted on the petard of their Brexit lark; and it is much better for Mr Corbyn to be able to bask in the delights of discomfiting them for another while, with that seraphic smile on his face, than to actually have to take responsibility for the mess!

Meanwhile, I am so lucky to be able to sit at my front-door, watching the white-backed gannets swoop and wheel outside the bay, wending their way over the sparkling waves!
FFFXI Even in the late '60s, it was clear that our civilisation was facing a crisis of meaning, with its moral and spiritual foundations profoundly shaken. We faced the prospect of a culture which had lost faith in the very idea of truth; there was to be only 'your truth' and 'my truth'. My Professor Raymond Williams, in his book 'The Great Tradition', proposed a socialist narrative to fill this void. He seemed rather non-plussed by an undergraduate who said that was all very well and quite interesting, but surely it leaves an awful lot out? And that surely there was a far greater tradition available in the Catholic one, which in fact underlay much that one could glean from English literature?

        The excitement among the Downside 'flower children' was a matter of sharing in the development of 'a new language', as Dom Sebastian put it in his book 'God Is a New Language'. We thought that we could propose a viable narrative, or at least had one in the making; a basis for the renewal of Western and indeed World civilisation, hand in hand with the renewal of the Catholic Church announced by the Second Vatican Council. Finding the teaching offered at Cambridge largely boring or irrelevant, no doubt I seemed pretty insufferable to my official teachers; but I was lucky in  my unofficial teachers, largely up in St Mary's at Liverpool. But after all I was 'reading' literature, and I spent most of my time doing just that, albeit with minimal reference to what the course demanded. 

One delightful, if somewhat surprising, strand to our narrative was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This proposed the exercise of a very different kind of power to that of 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' or to any softer majoritarian version thereof, and also to that of kingship, as understood in modern Britain. In Tolkien's tale, power is firmly rooted in transcendent reality, with Gandalf as its priest, guardian and proponent, though Aragorn the king is so deeply imbued with that transcendent order and tradition that he remains radically autonomous. Priest and king work in tandem to oppose the evil will to power associated with the Ring, symbolising the destructive aspect of technology (which has its apotheosis in nuclear weapons). But it was not only the 'great' who stood thus spiritually erect; little people were empowered to withstand the dark power and those who wielded it, and indeed their own initiative and role proved pivotal. This all represented a very different form of scepticism from that of the Marxists, with regard to the claims of liberal democracy to promote such empowerment. But was there the least possibility of its relevance, beyond its own world of fantasy?

There were plenty of other writers, coming from very different directions, whom I saw as feeding into some budding ideology of empowerment vis-à-vis the threat of alienation, disintegration or totalitarian enslavement posed by the modern world. Eric Fromm, R.D.Laing, Ivan Illich, and a bit later, E.F. Schumacher stand out in my memory still. R.D.Laing showed how mental illness is aggravated by the refusal of others to tolerate it; maybe overt schizophrenia threatens the firewalls that enable us all to compartmentalise, containing any whiffs of the unacceptable, or even of freedom, as spelt out by Fromm in The Fear of Freedom. On the theme of a prophetic minority breaking free, there was Watership Down by Richard Adams. But I am running ahead of my narrative in some of these references; I am referring to a process that went on into the seventies. Most of these writers came my way via St Mary's, where Sebastian Moore was producing his own contribution from a perspective of what might be called theological existentialism.

I read everything I could find by Teilhard de Chardin. That so few people have even heard of him speaks volumes about how difficult it is to 'break through the noise' and to speak (or to hear) a living word. But I went on my merry way, reading with scant reference to my course. I'm not quite sure where Dostoyevski for example came into it, but I read everything by him that I could lay my hands on. However, even Jane Austin, though apparently very tame in comparison, fed into the obsession with the theme of getting in touch with and being faithful to one's true self, despite all the power of money and the blandishments of society. It was no mere intellectual obsession; I felt that I was struggling for my very sanity. I had soon concluded that Cambridge was not the right place for me to be. At the end of my second year I determined to leave the place.

Fiona was similarly struggling for her sanity. All through her teenage years she had not been speaking to her step-father, and her relationship with her mother was not good. In Liverpool I found a niche for myself helping in the Simon Community, a house for the homeless just up the road from St Mary's, and from there, borrowing a van from a great new friend by the name of Ken Hosie (who ran an adventure playground nearby), I drove up to land on her doorstep in Scotland and ask her to join me at Simon. It was a matter of desperation, far from ideal though marginally better than 'meeting a man from the motor trade', as the Beatles song had it at the time.

Fiona and I put our lives in God's hands, and He has been good to us. One of Dom Leander's favourite sayings was that 'God is never outdone in generosity'; and if He brings one a person to share one's life with, it is a gift that should not be refused! Since however she was only 19, and the age of consent for marriage was still 21, we could not be legally married; at this stage we simply exchanged vows to each other over a copy of the Bible, at a roadside in Scotland on the way to the island of Barra, where we spent a week together before going to Liverpool.
I had camped on Barra with the Scouts from Worth, and it has always stood out in my imagination, with the peak of Heaval seen from the MacBrayne's steamer as one approaches, the silver strands, the other islands set in a shimmering sea, and the friendly islanders. There for both of us began a life-long fascination with islands, seen as beautiful places set apart and close to nature, where one might perhaps lead an authentic, self-sufficient and blissful kind of life....

When You Have To Admit That Your Old Boat Is Not Fit For Sea! FFF X.

Nazare porto de abrigo, with 'Anna M' on concrete top left.

You may think the above photo was taken from a helicopter, but actually I took it from the hill near the top of the funicular. The view that opens up as you ascend it is spectacular. That northern, port-hand mole was destroyed in a storm some years ago, but by and large the entrance is amazingly safe, especially considering the famous breakers that sometimes crash in under the lighthouse away to my right as I took this. To the south-west, the wave-swept beach stretches to Peniche, while out to sea, on a clear day, the rugged Islas Berlengas (the Burlings) may be seen, marking the mid-point of that slog up the Portuguese coast, or slide down it, as the case may be.

The Berlinga Grande can be made out at right.

We were lucky to get as far as Nazaré, a great place where there are still a good few wooden fishing boats, where the sun does not bite the way it does in the Algarve, and where we found prompt help in tackling the problem of the leaks, especially from Dody Stiller and then from Alec Lammas. Alec is a true son of the Gannetsway, a Devon man who has spent many years knocking around Portugal and Brittany working with boats. Now he realises he will not be fit and able for ever and is trying to do serious stuff in order to make some money against old age.

Phew, I'm feeling my age these days, along with my old boat! But for all the difficulties, it looks as if we shall be able to make her seaworthy before the high summer. It was hard to finally admit that she was not in a fit state to cross the Biscay again, and it was necessary to take radical action. Alec and his mate Rui whipped the engine out, and so at last the major problems were accessible and plain to see; for one thing the rubber engine mounts were knackered, and more importantly there are several cracked ribs in their vicinity.  There is no point in trying to fix leaks by caulking when the weight of the keel and engine and the rig are pulling the planks apart, with the sea and the vibration of the engine working away at them! However I hope that some new laminated frames and engine mounts will fix all that.

Meanwhile this general election in the U.K. has got to be interesting! Mr Corbyn seems to be making remarkable progress. If he can beat Mrs May, I shall be inclined to forgive his equivocation about Brexit! Good luck old chap, and I admire your spirit! Funny how it feels a bit like revisiting the late '60s!

From the Fractal Frontier, X.   Back at Cambridge, I managed to change my degree course to English, after as I have said coasting through Part One in the first year. I fondly thought that I might be able to relate my studies somewhat more effectively to what was bubbling away inside my head. At least the head of English at my college, Raymond Williams, professed to relate the study of literature to what was happening in the world we lived in, even if his Marxist methodology seemed to me to leave an awful lot of interesting human experience out of the picture, to say the least.
My superviser was an acolyte of his, Terry Eagleton, who even thought in terms of marrying Marxism with Catholicism. I'm afraid that I soon came to find Professor Williams positively boring; he seemed to be obsessed with his own (in fact blinkered) agenda, and to devour everything with a view to making it fit into it; I thought the great man actually had a closed mind. Probably there was a mutual dislike there, in my case not unlike the dislike many feel for Mr Corbyn today. Terry however was somewhat different. Perhaps he was just younger, but at least he could listen as well as talk, and would try to genuinely engage if you disagreed with him. I hope Mr Corbyn is like this too, even if I fear that quite a few of his followers are not.

Back then, Terry and I found some common ground, for instance in considering the Marxist concept of 'alienation'.  It illumined for me the doctrine of Original Sin; by some primal catastrophe that we cannot really understand, we became alienated from the knowledge of God, from our own true nature and from solidarity with one another. We find ourselves falling prey to dehumanising tendencies, to the worship of Mammon,  to the idolatry that puts money and power ahead of people and results in enslavement, indifference to human life and the reification of persons; this reduces them to mere objects, units of labour or consumption that both capital and communism exploit in the pursuit of power or profit (which amount to the same thing). Our Saviour comes to drive the money-changers and power-mongers from the Temple of the Earth, and restore our integrity and true nature as autonomous persons, brothers and sisters, beloved children of God.

Through Terry I became somewhat involved in a group loosely associated with a review called Slant, which set out to promote Catholic/Marxist dialogue; the sort of thing some of my friends love to mock. At the time it did not seem such a bad idea. After all we had recently lived through 'the world's most dangerous moment', when the Catholic President of the United States had confronted the Marxist President of the USSR over his attempt to send ballistic missiles to Cuba. For a few days it had seemed quite likely that nuclear Armageddon was about to overtake us all. Still the bombs and rockets were piling up..., as they still do today, and hooray for the Labour leader's insistence that they cannot solve anything! What with Pope Francis on the See of Peter, perhaps such the idea of Catholic/Marxist dialogue is coming round again.

Perhaps we may all be getting round to hearing what the other is saying. However, the attempt to interpret everything through the lens of Marxism soon becomes very claustrophobic for such as myself, and indeed the experience of socialist countries speaks for itself. Leaving matters of imagination aside, and the very different concepts of what really makes the world tick, dialogue between Catholics and Marxists finally tends to break down in the face of doctrinaire attitudes to class, class warfare and revolution. There was something ridiculous about preaching such things from comfortable studies in Cambridge, and yet one does have to recognise the way class interests shape people's attitudes and social relationships.
Many is the middle-class Englishman who would fancy himself in the role of an 18th century gentleman, and even today, many values are plainly to be identified with that cultural mode; those Cambridge academics were correct to ask us to face the fact that a fine representative of it such as Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park owed the wealth that financed that splendid cultural heritage to his slaves in Antigua. Jane Austen might have delicately alluded to it, but she was ahead of her time in even hinting that it might constitute something of a moral problem.

Now I had to consider the fact that my fine education had been largely financed by the proceeds of shares in South African gold mines that my good Catholic Grandad had invested in! Well, I remember his referring to the fact that men flocked to work in them from all over southern Africa. Nonetheless, I concluded it was not a very happy or sustainable basis for any kind of real well-being, and I formed the opinion that the neuroses of a place like Downside originated at least in part from the socio-economic basis of the place. The most important Marxist insight is that such a basis conditions your life; you cannot get away from it. Or as Jesus put it: 'Where your treasure is, there is your heart also!'

I did not put the famous poster of Che Guevara up, but I did take an interest in liberation theology and especially in what was happening in Latin America. The aspect of it that interested me most was that of the 'base communities'. I concluded then, and I still believe, that if the Church is to be renewed, then this concept will prove central to the renewal. The 'renewal of the Church' should not be seen as securing a new lease of life for the existing structure. What was that about 'putting new wine in old wineskins'?  The challenge facing us was nothing less than that of building a just and sustainable Christian way of life, from the bottom up.... It still faces us today, with ever greater urgency, but somehow it all seemed simpler in the primary colours of those days. We have lost the naive idea that it is possible to simply go out and do it; or was it a certain arrogance that caused us to think so? In the end, one has to recognise that real community is a gift of God. Still, it is possible to put oneself in the way of that gift, or to obstruct it!

I spent a large part of my first long vacation working for Fr Agnellus Andrew at the Catholic Centre for Radio and Television at Hatch End, Middlesex. We were also working with a lady called Grace Windham Goldie, who if I remember rightly was the first producer of Panorama and was a big deal at the BBC. I got on well with her and was quite interested in the idea of trying to get into the Beeb. She had a protégé by the name of Peter Watkins who had just produced a simple little docu-drama called The War Game; it powerfully conveyed the reality of a nuclear attack on Britain, and was to be put out on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Hiroshima. Much to everyone's consternation, the BBC withdrew it at the last minute, stating that it was too horrifying to broadcast, with rumours of political interference.

That promptly put an end to my interest in working for that organisation, and the perception hardened in me that mostly the British establishment was an insincere and unreal game of silly people playing King of the Castle, struggling for their own little share of power. Of course there's nothing uniquely British about that, but the trouble is the tendency to canonise it. Because the monarchy appeared to personify and validate the game, I took against that institution. What could anyway be the use of a vacuous kingship that was not permitted even to speak its own mind? Nothing personal; I rather like Prince Charles, I might even be tempted to feel a bit sorry for him. These days I'm inclined to feel he has made a reasonable job of a lousy role, and after all I'm not sure that a British president bears thinking about, if the presidential elections in the USA or even Ireland are anything to go by. In Ireland, presidents tend to function as cheer-leader in chief for whatever the Dublin 4 lot deem ok at the time.

My crew-mate Anna on the Anna M informs me that her brother Andrew Legge made a film about food for RTE, Ireland's answer to the BBC. It had a scene showing chickens being butchered. It was withdrawn, even though RTE had spent a lot of money on it, under pressure from the poultry industry, who said it would put people off eating chicken. It's the same old story wherever you go! But let us hope that gradually a new willingness to face reality, to call a spade a spade and act accordingly, is creeping into the world, under pressure from the growing realisation that if we continue to put off addressing radical structural problems, we will destroy ourselves. I believe there are even some signs of it in this British general election!

To Nazare and FFFIX.

Rounding Cape St Vincent.

Will the 'Anna M' make it home this year at all? At the moment it seems doubtful. We had a straightforward passage from Olhao to Nazare, but by the time we arrived she was leaking too badly to go on our way northwards. Now she is on the concrete. She also has her engine out. Ger has flown home to make sure Scamp is not forgetting him. Anna is quite pleased with her new gaffe. Joe is sad, his sailing so curtailed. 

Tough times in the Executive Suite!

However, once one can get at that leak, it may not be very hard to fix it. It is just beside the port rear engine mounting, where there are 2 or 3 cracked ribs; so no matter what one did with it in the line of caulking, it would not last until they are fixed. Meanwhile, once that engine space is cleaned up, it will be another Ryanair flight for me!

'Home', in a photo given me here in Nazare by Dodi Stiller.

Herewith the IXth despatch 'From the Fractal Frontier'.

There was more to that devastation than the tragedy of Dom Luke. In the community at Downside I had encountered an eccentric and intelligent bunch of monks, of very varied character. As my housemaster in Barlow there was firstly Fr John, with a scar in his cheek from a German bayonet; he had made a dramatic escape from a pow camp back to England. He was shy, kindly and straightforward. After two years, he was succeeded by Fr Raphael; here was a representative of the post-war generation, bright but 'uncooked' by the war and not quite realising yet how difficult the changing times were becoming. Of those who taught me religion before Dom Luke, there was Christopher the artist (who then left Downside itself for the parish in Liverpool, and like most of my friends, subsequently left the community), Oswald the Jungian psychoanalyst (who died of a heart attack before long), Illtyd the theologian (a brilliant scholastic but rather dry for a schoolboy). 

There was also quite a substantial Irish presence in the community, most of whom I think had hoped to form the basis of a new foundation near Gorey in Co. Wexford, which however did not happen. They brought a colourful dimension to the place, and included a West Cork man by the name of Leander Donovan, whom I only got to know through my dear friend Ken, he being a fully fledged member of the Irish contingent, that unfortunate little tribe who were packed off on the old Inishfallen to receive a 'superior' education, albeit Catholic, in a foreign land. Dom Leander however impressed one as actually being a real monk, as well as being great fun, malapropisms and all. By now a pattern had become established in my life, of having Irish friends and being attracted to their country.

What did the monks all have in common? If one is to become a Benedictine monk in modern England, it is unlikely that one will think very highly of the 'consumer society' and its values. I imagine they mostly had a more or less obscure hope that they were educating youngsters who might help to find a new direction, but there were very different notions of what such a beast might look like. After all the Second Vatican Council was promising to renew the Church, though such a promise was already looking problematic. Could it have anything to do with, for
instance, finding a way forward for 'Catholic Ireland'?

As for Downside, the divisions in the community found inadequate expression in such matters as the use of the vernacular in their liturgical office, such tensions being dumbed down into the familiar narrative of conservatives v progressives. In the aftermath of Luke's death, the more articulate of the enfants terribles in the community were despatched to join Sebastian and Christopher in the Liverpool parish; best to let them go and start their brave new world up there at St Mary's in the docklands, a good long way from Downside, but funnily enough, kind of on the road to Ireland!

I was soon hitching up that new motorway to visit them. It was a shock to find little interest at Cambridge in such matters that engaged me so profoundly, and to be expected to go back to the business of studying literature in a purely superficial fashion, from the outside, an author a week and an essay at the end of it – just learn to churn out the expected dope, four essays in three hours when it came to the exams! 

Sebastian introduced me to such books such as 'Deschooling Society' by the American Jesuit Ivan Illich, which confirmed the sense I had that the 'training' of conventional education was positively sinister in some of its effect; it actually schooled one in the 'disassociation of sensibility', in the atrophy of one's personal consciousness, with a resultant side-lining of our own personal creativity and conscience with regard to whatever tasks may be required of us. As far as I was concerned, Luke had gone down fighting that sort of stuff, and whatever else I was going to do, I was not going to fall in with it.

I managed to coast through part 1 of my degree, in French and Spanish, mainly on what I had learnt at school. It was easier in Spanish than in French, as I was less deeply engaged with Spanish literature, so I got a 2:1 in it. However I baulked at churning out the old stuff with regard to some French writers who had really interested me. In one exam paper, of the four essays in three hours variety, I settled for offering one decent essay. They gave me a third, which was I suppose nice of them. It was after all a more constructive kind of protest than what the lads in Paris were up to, hurling cobble-stones at les flics, some of them getting their own heads bashed in for their trouble!

There was only the one place where the turmoil in my head could be expressed and understood, and that was St Mary's in Liverpool. The first time I made the journey there, fresh air (or whatever it was that blew in from the Mersey across the dusty streets) had only penetrated the stuffy ecclesiastical gloom of the parochial house on the top floor, where Sebastian and Christopher were installed. It was wonderful to find myself listened to and understood there. Shortly afterwards Sebastian was made the parish priest, and they were joined as I have mentioned by three young monks, enfants terribles or otherwise described as flower children, Peter, Anselm and Kevin.

Facing North and FFFVIII.

My effort to fix the 'Anna M' 'leaks didn't turn out very well. For one tide the bilge pump seemed to be very quiet, but then we were hopped off the bottom by a bad wind blowing straight into the dock, which swamped a little speed boat on the pontoon beside us, and we were back to square one. The upshot is that going off-shore to the Azores is out; I shall have to nurse her up the coast and see what can be done in Galicia again. We'll be off this Friday afternoon....

Ger with John Peere in Ayamar, Ayamonte.

Ger made an heroic trip back to Ayamonte on the train to get a new liferaft; the old one was 5 years out of date and too big anyway. The new one goes in the deck-box and we have a much better view forward from the cockpit. I have another problem in that the dongle is working badly, if at all, so this is a hasty note before lunch in Olhao. But what I have below, From the Fractal Frontier, is already prepared.

Madonna of Culatra.

Part VIII Soldiers back from the front, sailors home from the sea, in fact anyone who has recently paid some kind of visit to the fractal frontier, are reckoned to be 'high on testosterone'. As usual in the scientific age, people tend here to use a little superficial knowledge of the way things happen as an account of why they happen, which is a lot easier than grappling with the deeper reasons for them. Things happen by way of a whole lot of different factors on different levels of reality, and we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble by simply alighting on the one that happens to suit our mentality or circumstances at any particular time, and pronouncing that that’s the 'real' one!
Dostoyevski famously stated that ‘it is a perilous thing to fall into the hands of the living God’. The mysterious gift turns out to be a call, which activates the coherence, the person in us, otherwise known as our soul. It undermines the disassociations that we generally deploy in order to maintain control. We are taken out of our comfort zone, exposed to dangerous forces that take us out of ourselves, and caught up into realities which transcend our individuality. Then we may experience something of the exaltation that Teilhard felt in battle.
It is a primeval business, frankly on the whole inappropriate and embarrassing in this age, where machines amplify the possibilities for narcissistic illusions of power and control so effectively. Frequently we settle for expressing ourselves in strictly contained and stylised forms such as sport. But after all human beings change slowly, and what has been established over the millennia can hardly be changed as it were overnight.

We have an inescapable need to know God, but all our concepts of Him fall short, and with half-forms of exaltation, when we become disillusioned, we find ourselves in a dangerous and vulnerable place. Our room, once swept clean of its demon and purged of the dreaded poison of boredom and annihilation, may be promptly reoccupied by him along with the seven worse ones referred to in the Gospels of Matthew (12:44) and Luke (11:25). So when Dom Luke, struggling with disenchantment, appeared to have practically fallen in love with one of his students, and when he subsequently lost his mind and killed himself, could one describe it as anything but the work of a troupe of demons?

It would seem that the ancient Greek philosophers would have taken it very easily in their stride, and indeed there is a bizarre and schizophrenic puritanism at loose in the contemporary world, which looks with horror at the notion of any intense relationship between a mature man and a youth, however chaste and spiritual, while being very proud of its tolerance of homosexuality. But how indeed was this particular visitation of the fractal frontier to be coped with? It is in setting up the battle between morality and feelings that the demons excel.

For right or wrong, Downside was always conscientious, in my experience, in not tolerating feelings such as this. From this distance, I feel very sorry for the likes of Dom Aelred, headmaster at the time, though his demand that I bite not the hand that reared me still rankles. But what, one may ask, was the nature of Jesus' relationship with 'the beloved disciple', who laid his head on Jesus' shoulder at the Last Supper?

It is helpful for a start to remember that demons are fallen angels. What’s more, one is caught up on this busy frontier in the whole mystery of the Cross, whereby our salvation was effected through what appeared at the time to be the ultimate triumph of evil. I particularly sympathise with the state of mind of St Peter and his friends soon after all the devastating heartache of Christ's passion, and even after their encounter with the risen Lord, when they took a boat out and went back fishing. It is one of those vignettes in the Gospels that smack of an authenticity beyond mere human imagination. So many years later, I got my dear friend Patrick Pye to paint a picture for our house of the Lord as they found Him in the morning, cooking breakfast on the shore of the Sea of Gallilee.

It is very difficult to settle down to the same old boring, humdrum business of ‘getting by’ when one has breathed some heady air of  exaltation, any kind of exaltation. Perhaps the default method of coping with this situation is to fall in love. Disappointed in one or another form of exaltation, one turns readily to this other one, that is pretty much always available, especially when one is young. In the darkness where one's sense of self flounders, we instinctively search out some other person in whose eyes perhaps we hope to recover our own sense of self. Even at the best of times, humanity is haunted by a sense of loss, a need to recover some mysterious lost completeness, and disappointments bring it on.

Teenagers are particularly vulnerable. I was more or less continually in love, with at least one person and not necessarily of the opposite sex, from the age of about 14 onwards. In the wake of Luke’s death, I managed it in a more serious manner than usually, in spite of the somewhat unpromising environment of a boys’ boarding school, even as I wrestled with, as it had now become, the sheer impossibility of exam work. I suppose I was fortunate that I already had a place at Cambridge, though that scholarship I was supposed to be working for would have been nice. As a practical attempt to break out of its hot-house atmosphere and to at least make some kind of practical move, myself and a few friends had got involved in the local village youth club, getting to know the lads, who naturally scorned ‘them college toffs’, and helping in some of the activities there.

It was run, I think under the auspices of the British Legion, by one Commander George Beal, a retired sub-mariner who worked for the Admiralty in Bath, and whose wife was rash enough to invite us round to tea. It was St Valentine’s day, 1965. Thus I met their lovely daughter, then a shy girl of seventeen, with bewitching eyes, by the name of Fiona. But actually George was her step-father; her father had been killed in a car crash when she was five. The fractal frontier again, lurking in those eyes!

She occupied most of my thoughts for the last few weeks at school. On the odd afternoon we went walking the countryside, and reading poetry in the Spring sunshine by some hedgerow.... I suppose we both thought it would be all over after I left, but we kept writing letters to each other, and managed to visit each other's homes for the odd weekend. Then Fiona's family moved to Scotland. I was at Cambridge by then. It was a fraught and painful situation for both of us. If we had been sensible, we would no doubt have settled for going our separate ways. Couldn't we agree to part for a few years, till we established ourselves in life? But whatever about Fiona, I came to feel that I had something that was too precious to let go of. I still think I was right!  It was just as well, because devastation is about the only word to use to describe my state of mind for much of my time at Cambridge.

Battling the Leaks in Olhao, and FFFVII.

We got as far as Olhao and the weather went on the bum; a strong WSW wind has been blowing here for 4 days. However the drying berth was free and the tides at the spring, so we haven't been losing time; we scrubbed her bottom and I had a session of one of my very favourite pastimes, 'battling the leaks'. Yes real ones. I might tell the politicians it's just one of those wars that have to be fought though they are never won! Here is 'Anna M' with her nice clean bottom:-

and here is the weapon I used for caulking-

It only cost EUR3.50, as a builder's chisel, and a friendly man in a workshop wouldn't take anything for doctoring its edge as the photo shows.

Meanwhile, apart from the wind bothering us, life is very pleasant here in Olhao, and there is an excellent eating house beside the docks where we can get out midday nosh for Eur 5 including plonk. But sadly, having anchored just off the markets for years, this time I was moved on by the maritime police. And so, little bit by little bit, our freedom is being taken away!
The forecast is not good for sailing north next week. We may have to go by the Azores.

Photos from Olhao by Ger Kavanagh.

As to politics, Felicitations aux Francais et bonne chance a M. le President Macron, but boy will he need it! The political question now is whether there is any chance of stemming the tide of reactionary nationalism in Great Britain? C'mon Tony, I'm afraid you'll have to do it, and maybe Ken Clarke will help. Let's have a Grand Coalition of those from any party who are opposed to Brexit, and make sure there are never any two such candidates in any constituency, even conservatives when they are committed bona-fide remainers! You can worry about how to form a new Government when you have won the election, and after all it is never more than a fairly small minority of the electorate who actually vote Tory, even when they get a so-called landslide.
These are dire times; it can and must be attempted. Anyway we need a new approach to politics, especially in England. The fact is that the Labour Party under Mr Corbyn hasn't a chance; he has too many people annoyed by ducking the central issue, besides which the whole style of old-hat socialism is not going anywhere. Meanwhile the USA under the Duckie is a menace; it is vital that Europe stands together to resist his bullying. One might say that Mr Blair is the wrong man for that, but after all he may well have learnt from his mistakes, and there does not seem to be anyone else around with the stature to do the job.



From the Fractal Frontier, Part VII   Teilhard de Chardin’s thought had been heavily influenced by Henri Bergson, who before the Great War had proposed a more spiritual concept of evolution than the dreary materialistic ‘survival of the fittest’ version attributed to Darwin. Bergson was half Jewish, and died of pneumonia as an old man, after being forced to queue for hours in Nazi Paris, in frigid conditions, to register as a Jew. In his will he stated that he had intended for some years to become a Catholic, but had not done so because he did not want to be seen as turning his back on the Jews; however he asked that a Catholic priest would say a prayer for him at his funeral, which was done. Also taught and strongly influenced by Bergson was the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, whose novel Zorba the Greek came out as a film in 1964, that went down very well with us youngsters of those times, and indeed exudes a flavour of them.
We were enthralled at the affirmation of spontaneous, natural human life in the strong and autonomous person of Zorba. We were dying for the individual at last to be free to express himself, but we had all also been profoundly shaken and scared by the Cuban missile crisis and the strong possibility, as it appeared, that civilisation itself could be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. This has been described as 'the world's most dangerous moment', though it seems to be losing any such dubious status these days; but occurring as it did just when I was beginning to think seriously, its effect on me for one was extremely profound. It greatly compounded the urgency and the poignancy of the situation of my generation, if they were any bit aware. Maybe there is any even more pervasive atmosphere of anxiety now.

So what of Teilhard and Dom Luke? I think the big deal about Original Sin was in the main cover for the fact that the Old Guard could not cope with a renewed Catholicism that actually affirmed our basic human aspirations, enabling us to love God and also His creation, including our own inner selves, in a single movement of the heart and mind. Stuck in defensive mode as they were, they did not take kindly to the opening up of their inner hurts and problems, despite the fact that it went with opening up both our minds and hearts to each other and thence to God. At Downside, those members of the community who 'came to grief' simply disappeared as far as the Establishment was concerned; they might as well have been thrown out of a helicopter like some South American dissidents!

Of course, one of the most serious charges one can lay against Catholic prelates was their tendency to cosy up to despots like General Pinochet; but Downside was to have an old boy who became a priest and suffered torture for getting on the wrong side of him. All that sort of thing rumbled on in the background of the 1960s and '70s. We remembered Franco too, but including the fact that if one was a priest or committed Catholic, one had little choice but to get on his side of the line, unless one wanted to be shot. This dichotomy cried out to be resolved.
In its essence, Teilhard's teaching was straight out of the Bible, the story of the opening up of our hardened hearts to God's love, of Jesus' teaching of the great crop or catch being prepared in our midst; it was elaborated most powerfully by St Paul in the letter to the Romans. ‘The whole of creation groans in one great act of giving birth’, as it ‘waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God’, of those who, steeped in the knowledge of His love, were to actively participate in the completion of His creation.
Here at last seemed to be a resolution of that old impasse, not to mention of my poor Dad’s problem about the Catholics heading off in their own little boat. “There is no such thing as individual salvation!” was Luke’s provocative phrase, which I eventually rephrased for myself “you can’t go to Heaven by yourself.”  There is just the one crop being prepared in the world, even though not of the world, which is to be gathered into the one barn, even if it was also described by Jesus as a mansion with many rooms. Then again, we were eventually offered it in the form of His body, the temple of God; we are to be built into it like stones, with Himself as the corner-stone. How many images it takes to try to describe such a mystery! It is beyond description yet so central and basic that images of it pop up all over the place; but the best is the one Jesus specially adopted, that of bread and wine, with ourselves as grains of wheat or grapes.

Because we are actually talking of a community of Persons, it is possible for each human person to find a place in it with no loss of true individuality. It is after all in relationship that we discover our personship; this is a most important principle. Teilhard indeed posited that the guiding principle of evolution was the unrolling of complexity/consciousness, and what is that but personalization? Hence the supreme importance of being true to oneself. Evil systems try to deprive us of our personhood, short-circuiting out the difficulties posed by human freedom and autonomy. Their ministers do not therefore consider themselves or anyone else ‘worthy of eternal life’, in St Paul's words;  God's servants on the other hand seek to help us all into it, so that every last scrap of loving humanity may find fulfilment in God. But should any prove devoid of all love, what can they do but fall away into the abyss of nothingness?

Rather to my surprise, I found many echoes of all this all through the literature I was studying, in French, Spanish and English. Myself and a friend translated a play of Camus’, Les Justes, for a drama group around this time. I don’t recall it very well, but I do remember being amazed to discover how even the writings of existentialists like Sartre and Camus, supposedly very far from Catholicism, in fact shared much common ground with it when one gets down to actual substance. However their starting point is generally one kind or another of frustration, the frustrations of humanity in their search for fuller life. They catalogue the many forms this frustration takes; how, baulked themselves, many people are apt to resent the flowering of others, seeking to stifle it because it evokes desires in themselves that they have had to suppress. But whether they bemoan its absence or celebrate its many forms, the writers of Europe are above all concerned with that very integral flowering of the individual-in-relationship which Christ lived and died in order to promote.

There was a truly extraordinary level of interest in that Religious Instruction course of Luke’s, but it has to be said that it had what was mostly seen as an increasingly whacky dimension. Breaking out of that rigid, buttoned-down way of life that indeed the whole of Western society was attempting as a new dawn of freedom and self-expression seemed to be dawning came with a new exposure to one's own inner needs and demons. Very often it was accompanied by the outbreak of emotions that were finding new scope; they were frequently disorderly. When good Pope John opened the windows, more of a gale came in than anyone had bargained for!

Dom Luke developed an inner circle of devotees who seemed to think that they were about to change the world. Among them one in particular evidently aroused emotions in him that he didn't quite know what to do with. Outside the 'inner circle', there were not a few like myself who were at once fascinated and repelled. He was becoming more and more 'wired'. I arranged to meet him to try sort out my conflicting reactions, but I was about three minutes late, and he had already been and gone. A few days later, he suffered the nervous collapse that led to his death.