Blog 60. Winter Is Coming

The cardigan has re-emerged from its summer stowage and is now much in evidence.  There has also been talk of wearing vests, tights and pyjamas (not all at the same time).  As they say in the television epic, Game of Thrones, “Winter Is Coming”, but we have had a good innings this year when it comes to sunshine, if not when it comes to health.

Yes, I’m still here.  We have been jetting hither and yon since the last blog.  Well, driving here and there (who would fly voluntarily in the present situation?).  We went down to the boat just after the last blog and it was my intention to blast off a missive while afloat, but someone (I promised not reveal her name) left our iPads in the garage in the course of loading the car and the poor things spent a week in the cold, neglected amidst the sawdust and detritus of an abandoned workshop like lost children waiting for their parents. I could, I suppose, have written a blog on my iPhone while afloat…but, no, that wasn’t going to happen.  This deficiency brought forth considerable pangs of guilt and withdrawal symptoms. 
“My public, my public”, I cried, “My public needs me.  They will be bereft without a weekly blog”
“Don’t be ridiculous”, was the heartless reply, “they could do with a break from your moaning”.
She just doesn’t understand the work of an artiste. I bet Hemingway never had this trouble.

Of course, there is much to report.  Shortly after arrival in Dartmouth we met Raymond and Carole, the crew of our “chummy boat” (the boat we are moored next to) for a little snifter in the Dartmouth Yacht Club before tacking up the pavement to the Rockfish café for a fish lunch.  The Rockfish is an unpretentious fish restaurant that serves basic cod and chips or, depending on the catch that day, a wide variation of alternative fish to go with the chips.  This is all explained by the waitress when you order by her writing on the place setting.  The other characteristic of the restaurant is that you can have as many refills of chips as you want, so the technique is for one of you (the sanctimonious one) to ask for salad with their fish, while the other (the piggy one) asks for chips.  In this manner, both of you can stock up on as many chips as your stomachs can accommodate.  We did not avail ourselves of this facility because, basically, the initial portion was more than enough.   The restaurant was (is) very popular, as was evidenced by the fact that Carole and Raymond (who live in Dartmouth) could only get a booking for lunch at 1430.  The only downside of the lunch was the presence of a slobbering dog at the table next to us, fed under the table by its owners at regular intervals.  I do not like eating with animals, especially those being fed at the same time as I am (I am a bit dubious about some humans too).  I do not think dogs should be allowed in restaurants, but you are free to disagree with me.  At £70 lunch was also quite expensive for two courses and a share of a bottle of wine at a fish and chip café but, hey, we did enjoy it and businesses have had quite a hard time this year with CV19.  We would go again if there were no dogs.

Some lovely friends, whom we had met on our cruise on QUEEN MARY 2 (Blog 3), were holidaying at a hotel in Sidmouth so we headed over there by car to meet them.  If you have not been there, Sidmouth is a quaint and unspoilt town east of Dartmouth, but still in Devonshire, accessed by very narrow roads that instil in one the virtues of patience and the ability to use manoeuvring and reverse gear frequently.  There are several independent shops, a few expensive hotels, and some very nice restaurants: the sort of place where one would like to live if one could afford it.  Its other claim to fame is that, when the railways were being expanded in the mid 19th century, the good burghers of Sidmouth at first resisted a railway station but, when pressed,  then demanded that the edifice be sited on the edge of town in order to discourage plebeian visitors.  Our friends were staying in one of the expensive hotels (the Victoria): the sort of establishment with a top-hatted and liveried doorman, where people hold their knives and forks properly, where patrons wear a jacket and tie for dinner, and where people put their clotted cream on top of their strawberry jam on a scone (as opposed to the other way round) for a cream tea; the sort of hotel where I would stay if only I could.  Sadly, even this haven of gentility had been contaminated by Covid regulations, and we found it a bit bizarre.  We had to wear face coverings to walk in, but as soon as we entered the lounge to meet our friends for coffee we could remove the muzzles.  Cross the invisible line in the carpet to transit the lobby and use the lavatory, and it was masks on; return, and it was masks off.  All the tables in the lounge bore a card, like a menu, stating “Table Sterilised” but, as soon as we sat down, this was replaced by a card stating “Table Unsterilised”, as if we had ebola, leprosy, or some other deadly disease. A sign of the times.  The bit that puzzled me was that the hotel had relaxed the dress code for dinner because of Covid 19; I could not understand how wearing a jacket and tie could increase the risk of cross contamination unless such contamination meant improving the sartorial elegance of those people who traditionally would wear jeans with rips in them, tee shirts not as underwear, and dirty white athletic shoes for an evening meal.  Odd relaxation and very poor, very poor.

It was great to meet our friends again and we went out for a stroll along the promenade, but Sidmouth was heaving.  Clearly, there had been an influx of charabancs in the town (it was a Sunday, so that made the likelihood of crowds greater) and the place was awash with what my friend Raymond would describe as “The White Walkers” (old folk).  We did find a nice place for lunch in an outdoor café in a park by the sea, but we were lucky to get a table and we had to beat off the wasps that were competing for our food.  At least the coffee in the hotel was civilised and I struck a blow for freedom by refusing to wear a face covering as I transited the fifteen feet across the lobby from lounge to lavatory before we left.  The defiance felt quite liberating.

The next day, back on the boat, saw the Great Dinghy Trial.  Regular readers will recall the introduction of this little accessory to our boating family, its dry run on the kitchen floor, and its associated procurement programme that was comparable to the Royal Navy acquiring a new anti-submarine frigate.   The same readers will, undoubtedly, be intrigued to read the next chapter of this little craft’s development: something akin to reading of a new baby’s first tooth.  Read on.  We took APPLETON RUM out of the harbour and along the coast to a sheltered little cove, dropped the hook and, in the translucent green waters, launched our new offspring like Mummy and Daddy Bear sending Rupert off to school for the first time.  The difference, of course, is that Daddy Bear had to go with him.  For some reason, Mummy Bear declined to get into this bobbing and potentially unstable craft, claiming another engagement (notably, the need to photograph the whole event between bouts of giggles).  Conscious of the need to withhold the reputation of the Royal Navy in an atmosphere of apparent levity (though it is said, in the Service, that the two most useless objects in a boat are a naval officer and a bicycle), I manfully pulled the dinghy to the deserted beach in the cove as if conducting a subversive operation in foreign territory, relaunched, and headed back to the boat via rocky parts of the coastline and a diversionary course for France (difficult to steer when facing the wrong way).  This was watched by an anxious wife, who was taking photographs when not telephoning our solicitor to check on the beneficiaries of my will.  Finally, the shuttle returned to the mothership and yours truly re-embarked, dry and exhilarated from his little adventure.  Verdict: the dinghy is rather small and a bit wobbly (to use a nautical term), but perfectly adequate for our needs.
Of course, this was just Phase 1 of the trial.  Later in the week we secured to a buoy at Dittisham, which is on the River Dart upstream of Dartmouth and (this will amaze you) the memsahib actually condescended to enter the Royal Barge herself for Phase 2.  She sat unceremoniously on the floor of the dinghy after a very dodgy embarkation during which both of us nearly ended up in the oggin,  and we headed for the shore so that we could go for a healthy walk to Cornworthy (a village nearby).

Dittisham is a small village located mostly on a steep hill leading down to the river, and at the quayside there is a conveniently located pub, The Ferry Boat Inn and a popular ‘shabby chic’ outdoor fish café, The Anchor Stone.  When we landed the quayside was packed with singletons,  families and dogs: some people were sitting outside the pub with drinks, some were queuing for the café, and some were queuing for the ferries to Greenway (opposite) and to Dartmouth.  We could hardly get through the crush and were glad to get out of the village, though it was quite a steep climb to escape.  We completed a short, but pleasant walk to the next village, though it was a bit hazardous on the narrow roads and we had to dive into the hedge a few times to avoid being run over.  We arrived back at the quay and our dinghy just before the rain started and were back onboard in time to watch everyone shoreside getting soaked – the Covid regulations dictated a finite limit on the number of people allowed inside the pub, so everyone outside was drenched.  They did not seem to mind as they sat on the wall with their pints; rather them than me.

After a brief return home to process an enormous pile of dhobying and to rehabilitate ourselves into the land-based human race, we were off again – this time to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk where our friends, Sean and Sheila, are building a house.  They are not laying the bricks themselves, you understand, they are employing skilled artisans to do that job.  How exciting and what an opportunity!  They were staying temporarily in a rented house packed (literally) to the ceilings with their worldly goods, so we stayed at the Premier Inn in the centre of town.  We are very impressed with the Premier Inn chain generally, both for the standard of comfort and value for money.  This time the hotel excelled itself with a bargain deal of three nights for £120 in a very fine building by the abbey.  Of course, in the present CV19 situation our room was not made up every day, but this was reflected in the price and we were still impressed.  Moreover, Bury St Edmunds turned out to be a gem of a town, with beautiful architecture and a generally good feel about the place.  We would not have minded living there ourselves, though Suffolk is quite a long way from just about everywhere in Britain.  When you cross the A1 heading east into that big rump on the right of England you think you are just about there, but the road goes on and on and on, populated by mile after mile of lorries heading for the channel ports of Ipswich and Harwich, usually overtaking each other at a relative speed of one mile an hour with a consequent tailback in the overtaking lane stretching for miles.  Still, the journey was worth it and we achieved it in our new electric car with just one recharging stop in the ‘new’ town of Milton Keynes: an odd sort of place with lots of roundabouts but, at least, plentiful charging points.

Our first serial in Suffolk was a walk at Orford Ness, a picturesque low-lying coastal hamlet with a beautiful castle, an impressive seascape and excellent shoreline walks devoid of any people. One characteristic of the view was a series of huge abandoned concrete bunkers and sinister-looking government buildings on the offshore spit of land, which had been used previously by the Ministry of Defence for testing detonators (I wondered where they did the testing now). The buildings were somewhat surreal, and I suppose some commentators could take issue with a description of the view as being ‘unspoilt’, but I thought they added a nice touch of mystery to the place and they certainly livened up the flat landscape. Apparently, in pre Covid days a ferry operated between the mainland and the spit and this expanded the range of walks available; however, that service had been abandoned ‘for the duration’, which was a shame. It was not clear to me why a trip in an open boat could be classed as dangerous from a virus point of view, but someone had made the decision and it was, after all, the ferryman’s privilege to do so. We thoroughly enjoyed Orford Ness, which was beyond our experience in terms of seascape, history and architecture. We rounded off the visit with lunch in yet another fish restaurant, the Orford Oysterage, which came highly recommended and Sheila had booked a table to be sure of a place and a plaice. Covid being Covid, we had to knock on the window and say that Joe had sent us in order to gain entry, but the meal proved to be a good call. The fish (grilled or baked only, no chips only boiled potatoes) was excellent and obviously very fresh, well worth the £63 for two courses for two, including a glass of wine. There were no dogs, but two well-behaved babies in pushchairs (I did tell you in an earlier blog that they follow me around).

Day Two in Suffolk found us at Holkham, an estate on the Norfolk coast with mile upon mile of wide sandy beaches and well-established walks.  In contrast to Orford, the place was full of people, something I have found increasingly odd and an apparent characteristic of these Covid 19 days: where had all these people come from on a weekday in mid September and why weren’t they all at school or at work, contributing to my pension?  We walked a path to the nearby town of Wells-Next-The-Sea and, there, sat on a sea wall eating fish and chips.  These had not been easy to obtain because we had forgotten that face coverings had to be worn to order a ‘take-away’, and the outlet was enforcing the regulation by means of a prefect at the door, armed with a visor and stick (I made the stick bit up).  This always annoys me with shops in the present crisis: it is bad enough having to wear a face covering (a rule I do conform to despite my grumbling), but I do object to having some busybody making sure that I do it as if I were a naughty little boy.  Any shop that does it (are you reading this Lakeland, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer?) goes on my blacklist for retribution when normality returns.  Anyway, we overcame the mask problem by wrapping my large bandana around Jane’s face and shoving her through the door with an order for four cod and chips.  I suppose, in hindsight, I should have gone in, it being my bandana, but I can never get served in pubs or ‘take aways’: it is my quiet and retiring nature.  Suitably replete, and with greasy fingers from eating the fish and chips al fresco, we returned to the car via the beach: a vast and largely empty swathe of fine sand.  It was a beautiful walk of about seven miles in total and we enjoyed it, but there were too many people for my liking and I preferred Orford Ness.  Regular readers will recognise that my comment regarding too many people is a reflection of my misanthropy, not a fear of catching Covid 19.

As regards the aforementioned virus, we are allegedly on the cusp of a ‘second peak’ and Dr Gloom and Mr Doom are predicting a bleak autumn and winter, with bodies piling up, unburied, in the streets and handcarts clattering over the cobbles, pushed by masked men ringing handbells and crying, “Bring out your dead”.  It is true that the number of positive outcomes to tests (renamed ‘cases’) has soared, but this is not matched by the number of deaths, which remains low in double figures for the whole of the UK and is less than the death tolls for cancer, influenza and pneumonia.  Restrictions on the size of parties in England have returned to a maximum of six, and pubs and restaurants now have to close at 2200.  This last bothers me not at all, and it would be better still if pubs returned to their pre-Blair licensing hours of 1100-1500 and 1800-2300 to counter the drunks and the disorder on the streets.  Threats of a return to lockdown have been made and, quelle surprise, panic buying has started again in the shops.  It seems to me that a return to lockdown is just kicking the can further down the road and we would be better off going for herd immunity, as in Sweden.  I started these blogs in full support of the government; I now think it has totally lost it. Still, the whole thing gives me something to moan about and makes a change from dogs,  children and my fellow human beings. Where would I be without these topics of constant wonderment?

Jane continues with her programme of CPD (Continuous Pop Development) (Blog 38) to improve my knowledge of contemporary music, though I think her enthusiasm may wane in the face of continuing failure.  We were listening to Smooth Radio this morning and she lobbed in a fast ball:
“Who is this singing?”
Quick as a flash, I said, “Gladys Knight and the Pips”
“Excellent”
“Was I right?”
“No, it was Michael Jackson, but I’ve given you points for a quick-fire reply”
Say what you like, she is persistent and fair.

Right now, we are back on our boat again, enjoying a sort of Indian summer.  I hope you are keeping up with our travels as I may have to ask you where I am after all this travelling around.  I had to ask what day it was this morning.  Monday was a particularly nice day, with mild winds and plenty of sunshine.  Jane was down below preparing breakfast while I sat on the quarterdeck sipping my cup of coffee and revelling in the sheer pleasure of just sitting there, on my own boat in the sunshine.  You know, I thought,  as I cast an eye over the pristine decks, she may be expensive to run and she may break down occasionally, but she has given me a lot of pleasure and a lot of fun.  Yes, a loving wife was well worth having.

We took the boat out for a run to Start Point, a headland that I am determined to get beyond just as early navigators sought new horizons to see if they would drop off the end of the world.  Alas, it was not to be.  The north east wind may have been relatively benign, but the south easterly swell was not.  There were some mutterings from the ship’s company regarding the boat’s movement as early as us passing Slapton Sands, but I ignored that and the hands (hand?) retired below to wedge themselves onto the settee. However, as we passed Start Point the swell on the port quarter increased enormously and we started to corkscrew violently.  Our boat is what a naval architect would describe as a ‘stiff ship’, meaning that the righting moment is strong, leading to a whipping action as she returns upright.  Consequently, stuff literally gets thrown around when the rolling starts. There was definitely a bit of a chop on and even I was taken aback by the suddenness and viscousness of it all, so I turned around and headed back, close inshore to minimise the motion.  Down below, the memsahib was not happy as various items had come adrift, containers had spilt, or lockers had burst open.  The contents of our bookcases in the main cabin had distributed themselves across the bunk and the kettle was lying in the sink.  We did anchor for lunch later, just beyond the harbour bar, but we afterwards returned back alongside weary and a little bruised.  Yet again, that land beyond Start Point had proved illusive.  One day, I promise: one day.  There must surely be land to the west of us.

I was completing a shower in the bijou compartment onboard that doubles as a heads and bathing cupboard while Jane was boiling a kettle for an early morning injection of tannin.  Suddenly the door flew open, ushering in a refreshing draught of sea air and ushering out a cloud of steam into the boat.
“You won’t believe this: the gas has run out”.  The door shut again.
How helpful of my wife, I thought, to keep me informed with the state of defects onboard.  Clearly, yet again, Mr Fixit was being called upon to rectify a system wanting for efficiency.  Wrapping my towel around me I headed for the upper deck while Jane took the opportunity to take her own shower in the newly warmed compartment, the tea-making process having been aborted.  I swapped over the gas bottles, but could not unscrew the cap on the new bottle (yes, yes, I know that it’s a left-handed thread).  So back I went down below to extract the Mole wrench from the toolbox in the locker under the seat, spilling out, en passant, a coil of wire, a spare fuel filter and an open packet of cable ties.  Back on the upper deck I was hanging on to my towel in the fresh south westerly wind (the world was not ready for sight of that caged beast that lurked beneath) while wielding the wrench, when a further summons emerged from the steam below:
“Which way do I turn the hot tap to make it hotter?”.
I gave some sort of reply and applied myself, successfully at last, to connecting the new gas.  A squawk from the heads suggested that I may have given the wrong advice.
“I don’t find that very funny!”, said a muffled voice.
“Sorry!  Try the other way”.
It was a genuine misunderstanding, but I confess to a little Muttley chortle.  That will teach her to drag me out of the shower to fix something.

This year commemorates the sailing of the MAYFLOWER to the New World and it had been planned to have several ceremonies in Southampton, Dartmouth and Plymouth to mark the event.  Alas, CV19 has put a stop to all that.  It is interesting to note that the MAYFLOWER fleet had to turn back twice because one ship, SPEEDWELL, was leaking badly (hence the ambiguity as to which English port the pilgrims sailed from).  The pilgrims in the MAYFLOWER were not the first settlers in what was to become the United States of America, of course; the land had been settled significantly earlier (in Jamestown) by the Founding Fathers, who are not the same people as the MAYFLOWER pilgrims.  Only half the passengers and crew of the MAYFLOWER survived the first winter.  Several modern day presidents, including the Bushes and Franklin D Roosevelt, can trace their ancestry to the MAYFLOWER pilgrims.  What a mine of information I am.

It was a typically gentle start on the boat, set against the usual backdrop of having nothing urgent to do and a lively anticipation of taking my habitual double espresso on the quarterdeck, taking in the ever-changing river scene in the sunshine while Jane did things to her hair and face. As I slogged through my punishing cosmetic régime Jane commented that she had had a lovely dream last night. I was all ears.
“Did you dream that you were in bed with a hunk of a man of not unpleasant appearance; with distinguished grey hair; masterful, yet with a sensitive nature; a good sense of humour; and a virile disposition?”, I asked, flicking a stray hair back into place with a sweep of my comb.
“Actually, I was dreaming of my garden”.

Oh.  Fair enough I suppose.  Shouldn’t have asked

23 September 2020