So the Bill Is Coming In!

What an autumn we are facing! Especially here in Ireland, as we find ourselves once more in severe danger of being the cockpit of Europe. All the good political progress of the last thirty years is in danger of being undone. With excessive complacency, we assumed things would only get better. Now Brexit is bringing to light multiple fractures in the culture that I grew up in, which transcend Brexit itself. 

     It has long been commonplace to regard England as a particularly class-ridden society, albeit one that is adept in putting a respectable face on the now drastically aggravated chasm between rich and poor. Less noticed are related fissures between, for instance, the immediate physical facts of life and those who live their lives largely concerned with them on one hand, and the abstract world that the well-to-do mainly inhabit on the other, which is dominated by wealth rather than mere money.

      While feeling oppressed as I grew up by the class divisions that infest England, I was threatened with complete paralysis or breakdown as a young man by the fractures in my own personality, notably between that abstract world in which I was largely educated and the physical one which both enchanted and exasperated  me. Sailing the sea, both as a yachtsman and a fisherman, greatly helped me to establish some kind of sane balance between them. So it is that I only allowed this blog somewhat reluctantly to be drawn into the Brexit maelstrom, and then have tried to always relate my comments to the physical circumstances of my life. I hope my views are not unduly influenced by the fact that my boat and sailing days are under severe threat!

     The maelstrom is certainly real enough, and it is about a

lot more than Brexit. It is as real as the autumn gales here in Sherkin, sweeping destructively over this garden with which Fiona and I try to make a little prayer together each year, and likely to bring a similar wave of destruction to this country of Ireland.  It is true that the declines of our plants go hand in hand with their fruition, and we may enjoy the fruits for the rest of winter before the cycle starts again; yet the decline remains painful and to be combatted, like old age.  

     It is likely that Ireland would be even more grievously affected by a 'no deal' Brexit than England. Aside from the estimated 8% reduction in GDP, amidst all the disruption of so many vital supply chains, the border is a political and cultural fault line with unparalled potential for nasty eruptions. Anyway it is an outstanding reality of the modern world that no one 'people' can shape their course without impact on their neighbours, any more than a skipper can sail on his way without paying attention to other sea-farers.

     To most Brexiteers no doubt this image does not stand. For the wealthy minority that fancy themselves as world-treading buccaneers, evidently it would depend what you mean by 'paying attention'; no doubt a predator pays attention to its prey. But one suspects that the greater majority of Brexiteers would prefer the image of retreating into their island fortress and pulling up the drawbridge. If they get their way, it will be interesting to see how the tension between them plays out; amazing as is the ability of the present British Prime Minister to pull the wool over people's eyes, I find it very hard to believe he and his spurious invocations of 'the people' can prosper for long.

     Unlike Clement Attlee, father of the NHS, the buccaneers of this world do not of course really respect their crews; they regard them as so dim that they can find a way to manipulate them. They count on their ability to play on their susceptibilities, fears and passions. Such truths are becoming clearer by the day. A healthy ship's company will indeed have good empathy between the officers and crew, with commonly accepted goals, and moreover it will be accepted that the officers are necessary because while the crew actually mans the ship, someone has to be guiding it. This calls for a kind of effort distinct from actually doing the hard work. All sorts of information has to be gathered from far and wide before important decisions are made. It would of course be madness to expect the crew to make those decisions. 

     This is all the more true with the ship of state, and is why the likes of Clement Attlee was so emphatically opposed to the 'use of a device so alien to all our traditions and so beloved of fascist dictators'. It needs to be recognised that referenda have no place in a parliamentary democracy. We may furthermore ring our hands at the failure of our democratic officers to bear their responsibilities, but there are other fashionable notions that will have to be firmly renounced if things are to change for the better.

       Good leaders need to be somehow schooled in an holistic way. The posh schools may have largely failed to educate people beyond their personal and class egoism, but the alternatives are mainly geared to the labour market, as are the so-called universities. Specialization may be good for the honing of particular skills, but if a person's horizon is limited to one field of vision, they cannot make good officers; and yes, some kind of an officer class is necessary in the real world, where people have to fight battles and vile weather, while it should of course be open to recruitment from the lower deck. It will be dangerous if the officers lose touch with the crew, where anyway some individuals are likely to be much wider awake than the officers. I consider that the Catholic Church has been noticeably successful in this respect, as one would hope since the Most High founded her in the flesh of a humble man, and in spite of her many abuses of power. There are very many examples of humble men achieving the highest offices, including that of Pope.

     A common sense of purpose is essential in overcoming the alienation of the crew. Here we come to perhaps the most important unfashionable realisation:- religion is not a voluntary extra. It is indeed the ground of humanity's most spectacular successes and failures alike, rather like gardens, but if you try to write it out of the picture, it will only pop up in another form. Surely it is the void left by the decline of the languages of meaning with which people grew up that drives contemporary mayhem and madness. However, spilt religion is no substitute for the real thing. The sad fact is that the British officer class have not succeeded in realising, let alone communicating, a common sense of purpose, to replace the British Empire and inspire commitment to the European Project, along with, let us say, the transition to a just and sustainable society. Why, according to the Tory goddess Mrs Thatcher, 'there is no such thing as society'!

     You can only sustain such illusions when things are going reasonably well. They tried to fall back on a mere promise of greater individual wealth and security to motivate the crew, but clearly this does not stand up when it comes to addressing our present predicaments. Mr Nigel Farage has it that 'the father of Brexit' was King Henry VIII. I maintain that to really find a good way forward, the English need to start by recognising that the two related events, of King Hal's Reformation and the Referendum to leave the EU, were frankly mistaken; and even if you say there was something inevitable about them and all that happened in between, meaning in particular the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution, these projects were severely and radically flawed too.  Does it really take the Irish to point this out? The bill is coming in now! 

     

     

The Middle Way

There is a little strip of gravelly sand between rocks down on the shore in front of our cottage. It faces south and when the tide is out provides a glorious suntrap, on the very rare occasions when I get to take advantage of it. But even then I am conscious of Spain across that sea to the south; I also find myself frequently conscious of St Michael's Way, the mysterious line that originates on Mount Carmel where the prophet Elijah called down the fire of Yahweh, flies to the Northwest by Delphi in Greece, and on by way of various special sites associated with St Michael, up through Italy and France to Mont St Michel, Mount St Michael in Cornwall and finally by Sherkin to Skellig Michael in Kerry.

     Paris and London, Rome and Jerusalem, probably most great cities are inclined sometimes at least to think of themselves as the Centre of the World. Since I conceive of the world in dynamic rather than static terms, I consider an arrow to be a more appropriate image than a point, if one is to seriously envisage this Centre; and a Centre of some kind there needs to be, if we are to conceive of some kind of united humanity. However the transition from a static concept of 'The Central' to a dynamic one is perhaps the essence of our contemporary crisis, because such 'Central' images that we have inherited tend to be stuck in a 'static' mind-set. In this context, and it may be nothing but my fanciful conceit, I have found myself conceiving of this St Michael's Line as a powerful physical emanation of the flaming central arrow of human consciousness, from the Holy Land by way of Greece and Rome and on to where the summer sun sets on old Europe.

     I say that the old business of a Centre that can 'hold', and which our Irish poet Yeats averred not to be holding, has tended to assume a somewhat anaemic complexion too much of the time because our understanding of it is still moored in the static concepts of the past. 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity'. With English politics stubbornly installed at the forefront of our minds these days, it seems more critical than ever that the political Centre pulls itself together and finally finds its voice. There has to be more to it than the ususal 'bread and butter' stuff, but here is a voice that dare not speak its name, for fear of being called arrogant, imperialistic etc. It is however the one and only voice that can genuinely rise to the challenges, for instance, of climate change, of keeping the world safe from nuclear weapons, of developing the stable economic and social conditions necessary for humanity to flourish, of motivating us to overcome our differences and do the great deeds that we are at last being forced to recognise as essential to humanity's very survival.

     Even as I lie on that strip of sand, feet to the South, I am vaguely aware of America over to my right, and China away to my left. America may be fixated on the individual, and China on the collective, while of course in fact neither can do without the other and so they more or less cancel each other out and neither of them provide a satisfactory narrative of what human life is about. We may wonder at them and their great achievements, but I for one cannot admire either of them as a polis or wish us in Europe to emulate their societies. The question is, how can our tired old Europe hold the balance; and so we come back to this business of the Centre. I will no doubt stand accused of a blinkered arrogance, but  I do believe that it's as true nowadays as when Teilhard de Chardin said it that Europe cannot escape the responsibility of bearing the spearhead of human consciousness; the question is, how do we recover the strength and dynamism necessary to do so?

     Most of the time the wisest of us are only very faintly aware of all that is involved in sustaining our individual existance. We delude ourselves if we think politicians or anyone else is really capable of being in control; this perhaps is the reason why intelligent and balanced people have a tendency not to take politics seriously and to consider politicians most likely to be dodgy chancers with delusions of grandeur. Meanwhile we can find ourselves assuming that 'the Centre' is a boring place where everyone is trying to see everyone else's point of view and getting nothing done; full of intellectual, wishy-washy types, 'losers' as the Ducky would call them. So it is exciting to see in London politicians of the Centre showing real conviction lately and doing bold things. For myself, I cannot even vote for them, but they are making a difference even for us here in Sherkin; I would like to send them my good wishes and my prayers.

A Sea of Troubles.

What with looking after Fiona, with her broken collar-bone, doing the work that she usually does as well as trying to keep my own projects going, I have been working harder than I have done for a long time. Like so many people, according to what one hears, I am sick of following the twists and turns of British politics - it takes too much time and intellectual effort. Most of us would like to live our lives 'above politics', like the Queen. The royal example however is not good, and a Head of State that cannot call conflicting parties back to dialogue is of no use. The fact of the matter is that politics have a profound effect on the lives of everyone, and it's worse it's going to get; they are an essential dimension of our lives, and while most spirituality directs our minds beyond them, the Lord's prayer kicks off with what is surely a political statement - 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth....', even if at the same time that Kingdom is 'not of this world'.

     The trouble starts where politics descends into a mere power struggle, as it always tends to do on account of the prevalent narcissism of the human race. Why should we be bothered with that? Well, do we want to be slaves? The life-blood of real democracy is the sharing of both power and responsibility, and resolving conflict through dialogue and rational argument; it begins and ends with the sincere quest for truth and justice. What then can one say to power when it becomes the mere expression of will to dominate and manipulate? Which is about where the present British Government evidently stands - and this the first occasion I have had to say this in my lifetime. 

     No longer even truly rooted in the political tradition from which it sprang, or even in the collective mind of its boot-licking members, it is being driven by a shadowy and ruthless unelected individual and clique, who even have the previously bumbling and ineffective Prime Minister in hand - not that he has been elected to that office either. They really seem to believe that redemption can only come by way of disruption and indeed chaos. Whatever happened to 'the party of business'? One day it will all make a good film - not yet though, for it is actually happening now, though one has to pinch oneself to realise it.

     Yet such a will-to-power cannot get anywhere unless it taps in to some deep and widespread condition in the minds of its victims. In the backgoround of the present drama is deep and widespread anxiety about the way the world is going, and this is an intolerable and paralysing condition. It is so much easier to take refuge in the past than to set out against the 'sea of troubles' that confront us now. How nice the 1950s of their childhood appear to so many old voters now. England was full to the brim with complacent self-satisfaction, and a rosy future beckoned with all the goodies of technology. Pull up the drawbridge; let us get back to the good old days! The odd gent with a posh accent, a plausible way of talking, a smattering of learning and preferably a double-breasted suit is all to the good. 

     But what's in it for the men with deep pockets behind it all? Oh for the days when one could be a real capitalist, with none of your damn social and environmental responsibility! The world will go to Hell if it must - but in the meantime let those of us enjoy it who are smart enough to do so! And if swathes of industry is destroyed, along with the livelihoods that depend on it, well the little people can just get on their bikes. Not, however, to saner parts of Europe! But the real rich of this world have better ways of making money than actual production, and they don't even know what real patriotism is, in the sense of putting one's country before one's own interests.

     Clearly all this must be combatted, but what can we poor powerless people do about it? Well, we can start by listening to people who know what they are talking about and recognising the facts of a world so very much more inter-connected than it was even in the 1950s. We can insist that politicians are called back from mere power struggling to facts and to real dialogue about them. No grand and specious merely national aspirations can possibly deliver the goodies we all desire in the line of the quality of life. 

     The way ahead lies not in less inter-connectedness, but in much more of it, deeper and richer. We must not give way to anxiety, paralysis and laziness, along with the preference not to think or talk about how we can possibly get there! Discussion, meetings, strikes, demos, online efforts, they all have their place, but we must not forget to listen to those with whom we disagree and must insist on non-violence; non-communication is always the prelude to violence, so when people will not genuinely talk to to each other, watch out! There is plenty that can be done, - get out there, you young people, and do it - it's your future that is at stake!

Ut Migraturus Habita

The summer proper ended on Sherkin on the evening my Fiona fell off the style and broke her collarbone. It was one of those perfect evenings, August 11th; then the old west wind set in, cool and pleasant, but blustery and with the odd bit of rain. In addition to working away at finishing the West Room, I now find myself nurse, cook and housekeeper; it is my privilege and pleasure to be looking after herself for a change, but a shock to the system nonetheless, and a reminder of our mortality.

     When Ken Thompson came to visit us in our cottage in Somerset nearly 50 years ago, he spent most of his time chiselling Migraturus Habita across the large stone chimney breast. It means something like 'Live as one about to migrate'. I suppose he had the final journey in mind, but perhaps he didn't want us to get too comfortable where we were either, though I doubt if he foresaw that we would up and go to live in Ireland. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that we would have done so without his influence. I remain most grateful, even more so lately. I always felt that I was banging my head against a brick wall in Blighty. Nowadays, bad and all as it is to be watching the B saga from here, it would simply do my head in to be so arbitrarily deprived of my European citizenship. Had we stayed, I would not rate the chances of either my sanity or my marriage being in one piece very highly.

     Ireland is far from perfect, but especially here in the West I find myself on firmer ground. Our island home is better still.  Then there is the sea, which prevents us from getting too

Landfall, Galicia, 2007.

introverted. Over the horizon as we look out to the south is Santiago de Campostella. I find that very many people these days do not even know where the South is, but you may be sure the dear little swallows do, as they head that way so bravely; and just as surely, there is a sixth sense in every human being that tells them of that City over the far horizon which they yearn for even if they do not realise it. In fact every human society worth the name is like a ship's crew, bent towards that goal; otherwise they will soon be nothing but a mere brawling rabble, and their destination will be wreck upon the rocks.

     The inescapable life-task of a person, however dimly perceived, is to understand that far city more clearly and to relate to it more nearly, which necessarily entails sharing this perception with our fellow crewmen. Like any image of God and His Kingdom, such perception is necessarily very partial; but we have to try to share it with everyone whom we encounter, while respecting any concept they may have which enables them to steer a good course in more or less the right direction. As a Catholic I may believe that the Church actually holds the coordinates, though even this fact can bring on a kind of pride that takes us astray. As one approaches the Port of God's City, the entrance is fraught with danger; yet we have available to us the Supreme Pilot, who will not let us down. The wise ship's captain will trust this pilot, listening for his commands!

     Yet a funny thing happens, in any ship that is under good command, the crew working well together as they sail toward that far haven - which actually as it were comes to meet them, materialises even in their midst. The good ship already partakes of the life of her distant destination. That destination turns out to be something more than a city - it takes on the form of a person with a face. We may become caught up in the dynamic of the Trinity. God is both in His far, transcendent city, and in the here and now. But meanwhile vessels tack about with all kinds of strange ideas born of the longing deep within the breasts of their companies.

     I used to think that the 'Roman' bit added to the term 'Catholic' was rather an unfortunate prefix born of the need to distinguish us English Roman Catholics from our 'Anglo-Catholic' brethren, with their insistence on the outstanding classic English formulation of  'having one's cake and eating it'. Now I think it is much more valid and important, for it is this little prefix Roman that actually and genuinely situates the universal religion in history and the here and now. If we cannot identify it so, in our story and our human relationships, Heaven becomes pie-in-the-sky, hardly to be preferred to the fantasies of, for example, some workers' future utopia, a consumerist cornucopia or a myth of National Destiny.

     Messrs Johnson and Farrage are correct in identifying the EU with its Roman predecessor; there is a noble aspiration there that keeps cropping up in different forms. It's such a pity that they, and so much of contemporary culture, cannot appreciate the wonderful formula whereby the essential and positive spirit was in principle long since detached from the will of proud men, and remains available to form the basis of a new world. It is interesting that even the British Empire, having turned its back on 'the ghost of the Roman Empire', nonetheless continued to educate in the Latin language, to use it for mottos and scientific terms, and even to copy classical architecture. The awareness lingered that it remained embedded in the foundations of our later buildings. It was only in the death throes of the British Empire that the requirement to study Latin was dropped, if one was to study in the leading universities; it hardly helped in my working life that I was just in time to learn it, but I am grateful now.

    Our blessed Saviour drew a red line in history - no more narcissistic rulers setting themselves up as god-kings-emperors. However, they keep trying. Prophets who stand up to them and criticise them are being jettisoned again, though in this part of the world at least, they generally keep their heads on their shoulders nowadays. But must ships be actually wrecked before they are found to have been right? It's rather like watching drunken alcoholics going on a bender - how bad does it have to get before they pull themselves together? Or will they even manage to do so at all?                                                         

     

     

The Prize.

A world at peace with itself, mankind working in harmony

with nature. No more greedy individuals seeking to manipulate and dominate the rest of the world, everyone taking their share of ownership and along with it, responsibility, within renewed families, communities and indeed nations. Humanity cured at last of narcissism, orientated rather to the common good, to beauty, truth and justice. This prize, this dream is as old as human consciousness. Usually it has remained but a dream, more in the line of a fantasy than a firm vision upon which most people act. The difference today is that there are only a few short years left for us to actually make it happen, the alternative being unthinkable.

      Which presents us with the gravest of problems. Because this alternative is so unthinkable, we desperately avoid admitting that it is what we are currently heading for; added to which contemporary culture finds it very difficult to get a serious and practical handle on notions like 'the common good' and any vision that might sustain them. We are now way ahead of Narcissus, and we don't have to gaze into a pool to reassure ourselves with looking at our glorious reflection therein, to polish our 'image'; nowadays our mobile phone will do. Mighty corporations, with Facebook at their head, feed our narcissistic dreams. Small wonder that we find ourselves with narcissistic leaders. The cult of the individual, celebrating autonomy above all, has brought us to the very brink of massive self-destruction, with deranged individuals already and increasingly acting this out.

     This is the end of the road for 'progressive liberalism', now hopelessly compromised by the neo version. I do not mean for believing in human progress and freedom, but for the mistaken idea that these can be achieved by stripping humanity of all context and reference points beyond those dictated by the cult of individual autonomy, the markets and the survival of the fittest. As liberalism became neo-. we have watched on as progress came to mean deconstruction, a zero-sum game, till madmen gun down their sisters and brothers for no reason but the anti-logic of evil, while, by no coincidence, we find ourselves increasingly subject to leaders who take that narcissistic cult to levels beyond the constraints of your normal, sane and decent person. The results are coming in. For instance the Ducky, who set out 'to make America Great Again', has much diminished the standing of his country in the eyes of sane people all over the world. As for what Mr Johnson bids fair to do to his country.... 

     Our dilemma may be becoming more acute by the day, but such observations as the above are very far from being new. Sometimes they have sent people crazy, ricocheting off into other forms of madness, be they of the left or right wing variety. One institution, one tradition, has managed to keep more or less a sane balance down two millenia. I refer to the Roman Catholic Church. Yet trying to extract a viable political stance from it remains problematic. I had a go in the 1990s, as a parliamentary candidate for the Christian Solidarity Party here in Ireland. Among other things, I got myself called a fascist by some for my trouble. Indeed one finds that the very mention by Catholics of the term 'the common good' sometimes provokes this reaction, from people who of course have not bothered to look up the term in, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which begins by stating 'First, the common good presupposes respect for the person as such.' Such is the difficulty that contemporary culture tends to have with what the Catechism calls 'the social nature of man'! We are however in the process of getting a crash course in this, a lesson which will just get tougher and tougher until we take it aboard. Evidently the last such course, at the time of World War II, was suffered and taken much more to heart by our continental neighbours than by the English.

      Uppermost in the minds of the founders of the European movement, many of whom were influenced by the social teaching of the Catholic Church, was the absolute desire that such a calamity should never be repeated.  They proceeded on the basis of mutual respect and negociation between the parties, which of course was the opposite of the way the British Empire was founded. Meanwhile our Brexiteers evidently care to ignore the stupendous fact that the European nations have been living an unprecedented degree of peace and prosperity since it was initiated. Mr Johnson of course pays lip service to this unity, and indeed, at least in that iteration of himself which produced a tv series and book entitled 'The Dream of Rome'  back in 2006, is fascinated by it and its historical pedigree. One reviewer states:'his points on the free movement of goods throughout the Roman Empire contributing to a sense of commonality of identity among Europeans are well taken'. 

     Meanwhile nowadays Mr Johnson even trashes its fruit of peace in Ireland; however, I shall grudge him a little credit for at least taking an interest in the relationship between Ancient Rome and the EU.  We seem to have reached very different conclusions, yet even from an Irish perspective, one may well ask whether it is desirable, having recently (more or less) escaped one empire, to get involved in another? How are we to disentangle the common threads, and the radical difference, between the Roman and the British Empires and the European Union?

     I came across this very amusing transcript* of a conversation between Mr Johnson when he was researching that book of his and an archaeology professor, Andrea Caradini, who was excavating a Roman Imperial Palace at the time:- Professor Caradini: "You would like to be an emperor, I can see it in your eyes." Johnson: "I can see a worse fate." The very essence of empire after all is top-down rule - command and control by the great Emperor. Is this the kind of rule that Prime Minister Johnson aspires to? There are signs that this is so, in the way pioneered by his friend The Ducky, which nickname, I would remind you, is my way of rendering Mussolini's title of Il Duce, the Leader or Fuhrer or whatever, into Donald Duckese. 

     Perhaps in its dependence on love of the Supreme Leader, we may actually also divine a positive side to the concept of empire, as it came down to us with so much influence from the Roman version, pace Asterix. A Protestant such as Thomas Hobbes found it aposite to dismiss it as a 'heathen empire' and along with it the 'kingdom of darkness' that was the papacy as 'the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof'. Not that he eschewed the concept of empire itself - in his dismal and materialistic world view, 'The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone', so the only alternative to life being 'nasty, brutish and short' was a strong monarch. 'To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.' How could this conceivably describe an empire that was supposed to be not 'heathen' and the opposite of 'a kingdom of darkness'?

     Such thinking had a dire but formative effect upon the British Empire. Thomas Hobbes and Mr Johnson would seem to have this in common: they lack a genuine, interiorised sense of good and bad, right and wrong, and are good at standing words on their heads. The one seems to have studied  well the other! But that ghost of which Hobbes speaks in fact performed the amazing feat of disentangling from any narcissistic ruler the personal love, upon which any transcendent commitment of our fealty, and hence sense of truth and good, must depend, if it is not to diminish us and destroy our integrity and freedom as a an individual person. Instead supreme fealty was invested in the Lord Jesus Christ. Did this entail the end of the Roman Empire? Maybe; yet it left that vital positive force for love of our fellows and the whole world available to future societies, and to ourselves in the here and now. The history of Europe since could be seen as one attempt after another to embody it. Now it is looking as if we shall not last much longer unless we make a better fist of it!

     
*https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197612/

Time to Call Out British Imperial Nostalgia...and Unite Ireland.

Back in Ireland, a glorious summer is in full bloom. When summer actually ends is of course one of quite a few points of disagreement between the Irish and the English, the former teaching their children that August 1st is when autumn begins, while the latter insist on September 1st. The truth is no doubt somewhere in between, but already here on Sherkin there are occasional hints of the forthcoming decline. 

     Why must the blissful days, bedecked with a riot of colour, pass so swiftly? How are we to cope with such apparent disillusion, such reminders of mortality? Some would rather push the knowledge that such is our condition from their minds, pretending that the idyll will go on forever. Anyone who refers to the facts of the matter is liable to be dismissed as a gloomy pessimist and thrust aside. Yet the same 'pessimists' may be storing their minds with happy memories, as a squirrel stores nuts against the onset of winter. Their realisation of the transient and fragile nature of the blooms will turn to treasuring their fruits. How I shall enjoy recalling my delicious swims of the last few days, when once again I look on a stormy, foam-flecked Horseshoe Bay! Meanwhile 'optimists' merely gambol on to their demise.

      What can one say to these gung-ho types who berate the wise ones for their 'pessimism'? They go around saying 'don't listen to them - summer will last forever! In fact it will get better and better. All you have to do is believe in it -  believe in me in fact, I will show you the way! I will show you how to get every goodie you might desire, and with minimal effort too! Ignore that lot with their nit-picking little brains, they're wasting time worrying about the details while they could be enjoying themselves, the miseries! What are facts anyway? Down with anyone who will not follow us - all we have to do is to stay united in the true belief!

     By now you will have worked out where this is going. The peculiar kind of spurious optimism pedalled by the new prime minister of the United Kingdom is pure poison. The best thing we can do for our friends in England is to help puncture the balloon of illusion as soon as possible. But it won't be easy. This particular balloon has been around long enough to have developed a pretty thick skin. 

      Meanwhile we in Ireland may as well turn to our own project of reuniting this little island as best we can, and work with Scotland to keep the aim of a united, peaceful and genuinely prosperous Europe on track in these islands. After all it's not as if a majority in their famous United Kingdom support either Brexit or Mr Johnson. We must help them maintain belief in real progress, based on hard work and the continuous effort to achieve consensus through dialogue, rather than the establishment of a spurious semblance of unity through the age-old methods of the bully demanding credence for his false promises. It is an unfortunate fact that with their 'winner takes all' version of politics, having tended to be so pleased with themselves, they failed to move on to a more mature form of democracy in the 20th century.  

     Mr Johnson has a real talent for standing things on their head. Unused to the continental style of politics, which on account of proportional representation calls for the establishment of consensus through dialogue and communication, he charges in with his rejection of the work of the last three years, not to mention the last fifty years in Europe, and instead insists on the acceptance of his totally unreasonable demands. What's more, he sadly bids fare to caricature and indeed endorse so much of the world's distrust of England. Even his friend the Ducky, though less erudite, is also less duplicitous; we know where he stands, as he doesn't even try to, for instance, paint himself green. But to say the least, the two chums bid fare to present Ireland with some very difficult choices. It would be so much better if we could face them with our integrity restored and our country united.

      It's going to be difficult, but maybe there is a bright side - it might finally force people to recognise that the border is a gerrymander, and the whole huge effort of the plantation was British imperialism at its worst, aimed at the heart of the Irish nation, of which the Gaelic population of Ulster under the ONeills was the very backbone. It is most important that such facts be not abandoned to men of violence. At this stage, especially since we are fortunate enough not to have found ourselves in their line of fire lately, I find it possible to be quite fond of those DUP types with their brittle edginess and their 'we won't staand furrit'; in fact I also think that we would all be happier if we finally let bygones be bygones and settled down to making a success of Ireland. 

     However, this would require the sins of the past to be finally called out; and yet there can't be much joy in being ruled by those Englishmen who, for all their talk of 'the precious union', in fact know very little about Ireland north or south and frankly care less. It will require us in the South to be rather less lazy about the North, and do all we can to make the protestant population feel welcome and wanted here. If they really don't want to come aboard, well there should be a resettlement scheme for them to go to Blighty. But an independent Scotland might help too. 

     It is quite odd how it all chimes with my own little effort to promote a reorientation of our culture to the Gannetsway, from Scotland to the south of Spain, and what's more, how in some rather mysterious way this reorientation chimes with that other one, one might almost call it a migration, from the fossil fuel age to a sustainabile one. When western culture ceased to see God in beauty and in all the marvels of the universe, to almost effortlessly perceive the amazing intelligence and love that fashions and sustains it, and to see the physical not in the sacramental way as an outward sign of inner grace but rather merely there for us to exploit, the parameters of our present predicament were laid down. A return to its catholic past will be necessary for us to get back on track for the 'new heaven and new earth' where true hope lies. 

On the Gannetsway in Co.Clare.

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.'

Take Your Seats, Ladies and Gentlemen, With a Drop At Hand.

In the England that I grew up in, one had become accustomed to getting by on some vague assumption that for all their faults, the people that we elected to lead us act basically in good faith. Some people might darkly aver that foreigners were different and one could not trust them - but Englishmen anyway were somehow supposed to be different. One was widely expected to be leftie in youth, main problem being to get a slice of the action for oneself, and conservative once one acquired a little property, main problem being to hang on to it. We might disagree, but on the whole, we could see where the other lot came from and generally managed to respect them. When push came to shove, we could agree to differ and pull together.

Have I merely got old, I ask myself, or is it true to say that such basic trust has largely evaporated? How can it be that the Conservative Party, that liked to think of itself as the repository of national values, seems to be on the verge of choosing a leader devoid of the basic principles of truthfulness, good faith and responsibility, and who in the interest of 'taking back control' is foisting this leader on the country as an unelected prime minister and insisting that he pursue to the bitter end a discredited* and most damaging fantasy? I look on from my Irish island home, aghast and appalled.

I realise that we are hardly dealing with a new phenomenon. Public life, with the opportunities it presents of getting one's fingers in the communal pot, has always attracted a share of two-faced, self-seeking chancers. On the other hand, is it just my imagination that something new has happened, when the Tories do not even feel the need to pay lip service to those basic principles, and a potential leader can openly flout them, and even garner some votes on the principle that, being 'a bit of a lad', at least he is 'one of us'? The only value that seems to be generally recognised today is that of personal autonomy. Well Mr Johnson just about sums up where that trip ends up. Undoubtedly he will sooner or later self destruct, but how much damage will he do in the process?

If this is the price that has to be paid, I think I might even be tempted to say, 'could we have a little hypocrisy back please'? Maybe that's a lazy attitude though. What we really need is a whole new commitment to truth, and it may well help us if we realise that failure to recognise the truth is invariably sooner or later punished, unfashionable though such a conclusion may be. 

At least old Father Neptune teaches that. I am surely not alone in having had recourse to the sea, as a remedy against chaos, insanity and a pervasive disconnection with any sense of reality. It is precisely the opportunity it provides to confront chaos in a tangible and physical form that is therapeutic; it's a case of healing like with like. But time goes by. I cannot even be sure that I will be able to go seafaring again, in any serious way.

When one is young the physical and the spiritual are so tightly knit together that it is difficult to distinguish between them. A process of distillation occurs with time. The physical inexorably reverts to the dust from which it came. What is left, as we cast around more and more desperately for whatever still floats amidst the wreckage? Is there anything to life other than futile, inevitably drowning egos? Is there an indestructible spirit in us, and might we even take some distilled essence of the physical with us, if we do succeed in breaking free from everlasting disintegration?

Meanwhile, humanity has to learn the same old lessons over and over again. As my mother used to say, 'God is not mocked'.  I for one am settling in for this morality play in London with both a grim fascination, a frisson of amusement, and a fair degree of trepidation. Ladies and Gentlemen, let us take our seats! Here comes the ogre, but where is the hero who will slay it?

I find that I am fonder of my old country than I realised, do not like to see it thus debased, and can only hope that somehow it will find it's way back to what was good about it. Meanwhile, in another couple of weeks, I shall be back to Nazaré, and trying to get that Anna M back on the water. But is this yet another unreasonable fantasy? It's not that I am unable to do without that basic prop or extension to my personality which she represents. If I have to give up, I will do so with good grace - there is another sea, that I am even more interested in. 

Actually, at this stage, it is not so much that I miss sailing her a great deal, but what this project represents; at once an assertion of the world of the Gannetsway, which means more to me than any old nation, and of the kind of approach to Nature as well as to social organisation and technology that offers an attractive and fruitful prospect for the future. That other sea, that other world, can only be accessed if one is true to the immediate ones to the very best of one's ability. The Great Still only yields up the magic spirit in its own time!

*In this respect, do see Carole Cadwalladr's TED talk.

Happy Days!