Blog 68. Know Where You Stand.

I have had the most appalling news, the aftershock of which is still reverberating through the Shacklepin household. I really do not know to whom I can turn, but I only hope that by unburdening myself to you, dear reader, that I will be able to come to terms with the import of this shocking development. I will come right out with it: no holding back, proper report.
Jane has been advised by her osteopath to wear a pair of running shoes (I believe the vernacular is “trainers”) around the house to give support to her feet during her present leg problem.
I could not believe it when she told me. “Trainers“, I ask you: horrible white shoes with go-faster stripes on them; bright orange shoes with white laces perhaps; fluorescent shoes with little lights on them that flash when she walks…oh my Lord, the shame, the embarrassment of it all. She is now bouncing around the house in blue pumps with white soles, which are normally only worn on the boat, like some demented PT instructor on high octane aviation fuel, and she has taken to looking at a website run by someone called Mikey, who knows all about athletic footwear. The only comfort I can draw is that she has promised not to be seen in public wearing these horrible shoes; if she reneges on that promise then I fear I shall have to walk separately from her, two metres in front, and on the right. I know I will have the full support and sympathy of my readership (both of you) at this very difficult time. This is the beginning of barbarians at the gate, mark me well.

Well, it has stopped raining, which must be worth something I suppose. The English weather is all over the place at the moment: one minute it is very mild, raining and the wind is whipping up the autumn leaves and tipping up the garden chairs; the next it is cold and sunny. It has been warmer at night than it has been during the day. I wish it would decide which season it is and just stick to an appropriate pattern. We are still confined indoors and not mixing with our fellow creatures, of course, so I’m afraid you are stuck with me in my anecdotage and the continuing tales of Long Jane Silver and Captain Hook until such time as further life experiences with my fellow man stoke my fire. You are unlikely to have to wait long.

We have taken to watching Downton Abbey on the television again, and we had forgotten just how good a drama it was: well-written, beautifully acted and filmed in the quintessentially English setting of Highclere Castle in Hampshire. In a previous life I arranged and attended a Royal Navy PR presentation and cocktail party at Highclere, so I am fairly familiar with the house and recognise many of the settings, including one of the bedrooms which the naval team used as a changing room. I believe the owner of the estate, the Earl of Carnarvon, attended the RN event too, though I did not meet him. The housekeeper of Highclere was not a bit like the Mrs Hughes of Downton, but she certainly took charge of us as we were setting up and she even put the Royal Marine in our team in his place. Downton Abbey has been accused of being a fairy-tale version of life below stairs by those determined to criticise our past (a very current trend), but I thought it was fairly balanced in depicting a benevolent noblesse oblige landowner from an era no longer with us, when everyone had an ordered life, there was a hierarchy, and people knew where they stood – or everyone knew their place – depending on your point of view. Notwithstanding the spartan working conditions for the servants, the drama also made the point that the fictional estate provided income, employment, board and lodging, a sense of purpose and a family to a wide range of people who would otherwise have been unfulfilled and destitute. I daresay there were some estates like Downton in real life, but there undoubtedly would have been others where the landowner was not quite so benign and patriarchal as the fictional Lord Grantham. A few years ago Jane and I were given a special tour of the servants’ quarters of Stourton House in Wiltshire (now owned by the National Trust) and our guide was very illuminating about a servant’s life in the house’s heyday. The servants’ quarters were located, just like in Downton, on the top floor, but the windows of the rooms were obscured by a stone balustrade, which allowed light in while deliberately preventing the occupants from having a view of the gardens or the countryside; the privacy of the aristocracy was paramount. An elderly woman from the estate village of Stourton, who had been a maid in Stourton House in the late 1930s while it was still privately owned by Sir Henry Hoare, had told our guide of one occasion when the lady of the house (presumably Lady Hoare) was conducting her weekly inspection of the servants’ quarters: in one maid’s room she found a tiny vase with a posy of wild flowers in it, and ordered that it be removed forthwith; the servants were not there to enjoy themselves or to add any touch of personality or beauty to their rooms. It sounds like the late Lady Hoare was not a nice lady, but then, maybe she was just a creature of her time.

There is something to be said for the principle of “knowing where one stands”, a concept that is diminishing rapidly in the 21st century.  After retiring from the navy, a very good friend of mine embarked on a successful second career in facilities management and found himself as the Contract Director for the entire army garrison in Aldershot.  He told me the story of the (female) Mess Butler of the Officers’ Mess who was invited by the Officer Commanding, General Sir Ponsonby-Smythe MC KCB (not his real name) to come to a little formal dinner party that he was holding in the OC’s residence.  A single woman, she was very flattered to be appreciated and she accepted gratefully, taking the trouble to buy a new long dress for the occasion, have her hair styled, and to wear those new shoes that had been awaiting just such a special event.  On the evening, she duly turned up by taxi and entered the residence to be greeted by the General.
“Ah, Maude.  So delighted you could come.  I say, you do look jolly nice this evening…” He looked slightly puzzled, but continued, 
“Now, the extra serving staff have only just arrived and are mustered in the kitchen.  If you could just take charge of them and get them to serve the canapés at 1945 hours…”
It was an appalling misunderstanding on both sides which, I venture to suggest, could never have happened in the last century.  Poor woman.

The naval PR appointment that I held when organising the event at Highclere Castle and elsewhere was undoubtedly the best job that I ever had in the navy though it was a most unusual one for a naval officer and, of course, it did not require me to go to sea at all or to practise engineering. I travelled all over the country and met a huge range of local dignitaries, captains of industry and people active in the community. All were, without exception, delightful, but the common element in my encounters with civilians was that practically no-one understood my rank. I found that odd, bearing in mind that the Royal Navy is the Senior Service in Britain’s armed forces, but I could only conclude that it was a result of the navy also being traditionally the ‘silent service’ and, in the past, shunning publicity. All civilians understood what a Major was (my equivalent rank in the British Army) so I initially found that comparison quite useful, but the description of my rank that I finally found to work best was to explain that I was the same rank as Mr Spock in Star Trek. Thus, by the help of a successful American science fiction television and film series the one-hundred-year old rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy was finally recognised and understood by the movers and shakers of Great Britain.

The one place where rank is recognised by civilians is in the civil service. All military officers spend part of their careers in the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and, until 1998, wore civilian clothes instead of uniform when in that role. Some posts for professional engineers are interchangeable with civilian post-holders, so a familiarity with the civil service and its grade structure is useful. A civil servant once told me that his grade was equivalent to a Captain in the Royal Navy and I took great delight in telling him that the only person equivalent to a Captain in the Royal Navy was, just possibly, a full Colonel in the British Army or a Group Captain in the RAF; it certainly was not a civilian. Yet the belief in equivalence is common in the MOD and some civil servants (though by no means all) make a great thing of it, probably because they think a particular rank brings certain privileges. A friend of mine, who had spent a period on the staff of the BRITANNIA Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, told me of a day when the college was to be visited by a group of civil servants from the Civil Service Staff College. The day came and the bus bearing the civilians pulled up on the college parade ground to be met by the college staff officer appointed as the visit liaison officer. As the first civil servant descended from the bus he introduced himself to the liaison officer with,
“Good morning, I’m Commander equivalent”.
Completely unfazed, the liaison officer replied,
“Good Morning Commander, and welcome to Dartmouth”
He then continued, throughout the visit, to introduce the civil servant to everyone they met as Commander Equivalent, while the pompous popinjay spluttered in the background trying to correct his name. To be fair, most of the civil servants with whom I worked were not as self-important as that specimen, and I had a lot of respect for their professional abilities, but I never thought of them as equivalent to any serving officer. How could they be?

We are just over two weeks in to England’s second lockdown in the battle against Covid 19 and, though life carries on as before, there is some light on the horizon: examination of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) website indicates that the UK may have peaked on daily COVID deaths and positive tests (mind you, I have said that before only to be proved wrong). The number of CV19 deaths in the UK yesterday was 511 and lockdown does appear to be working, but I am willing to bet that the government will extend the existing restrictions in England, or reimpose them after Christmas. Boris himself has retired into self-imposed quarantine after meeting an MP later found to test positive for the virus, this despite the Prime Minister having already had, and recovered from, the virus and despite testing negative on this occasion; he probably feels that isolation is the best place to be in the present imbroglio. My heart goes out to those wretched people who are now unemployed or whose businesses have folded: lockdown may give a temporary respite, but at what consequence to the economy and long-term health? A Danish research study has found that wearing a face mask does not protect the wearer from infection (told you so). Someone has raised the spectre of the possibility of compulsory vaccinations when a vaccine comes available. Good grief! Even I, not noted for my libertarian views, would oppose that one: are some people seriously suggesting that fellow citizens should be strapped down and assaulted by the State? People will come around to the benefit of a vaccine once they are satisfied in their own minds that it is safe but, in the meantime, we must just ride out the storm as our ancestors did with the Spanish Flu in 1918, and get back to work. Would someone please wake me up when this is all over?
As always, I feel bound to wind up the topic on an optimistic, pragmatic and factual note: Covid 19 has been identified as only the eighth most serious killer disease in the world; occupancy of the Intensive Care Units (ICU) in most of the hospitals in the UK is actually less than is usual for November; the emergency “Nightingale” hospitals created to deal with the epidemic have yet to be fully utilised; Public Health England believes that a quarter of the English population may already be immune from the virus. And remember that, after all, everyone suffers from at least one fatal illness once in their lives (think about it).

You will be pleased to know that Jane’s ambitious programme for teaching me pop music under her CPD (Continuous Pop Development) scheme is beginning to bear fruit. The other evening we sat down together to listen to a concert featuring the Bee Gees and I was waving my iPhone around with the flashlight lit like a good’un before Jane told me to pack it in. You see, she just doesn’t realise what pent-up youthful emotions she has released in me and I perceive that she is beginning to worry that she may be unable to control the result. I think she does recognise, thankfully, that there is plenty of time to establish a strategy, and that the CPD still has a long way to go. She has yet to cure me of the mixed up lyrics that I sing (“You come to me in a submarine, safe from harm in the depths of the ocean…”, in How Deep is Your Love by the Bee Gees; “I believe in Murco…”, in I Believe in Miracles by Hot Chocolate) and my son corrected me the other day for singing “…caught in the lamplight: a shape that I couldn’t see…”, in Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Still, it is all a promising start and we are scheduled to watch the Mamas and Papas tomorrow. Cool.

Incidentally, you may have heard that the Bee Gees hit, “Stayin’ Alive” has an ideal rhythm for conducting CPR on a patient whose heart has stopped.  I mentioned this while on a first aid course a few years ago and the instructor agreed, but added that it also worked well with the song, “…and another one bites the dust…”.  Take your pick.

Christmas is only five weeks away. I know this because at least one TV channel is totally devoted to Christmas films, which seems bizarre to me in the middle of November. We in the Shacklepin household have, however, as a concession to the approaching festival, broken out the traditional Christmas jigsaw puzzle to keep us pleasantly amused. If you have not indulged in such a pastime (or, at least, not since the age of twelve) then let me commend it to you as a way of challenging your spatial skills and passing the time in the winter months; it is amazing how addictive, enjoyable and even competitive it becomes. I fitted in three pieces before breakfast this morning; Jane nil.

Where did 2020 go? One thing is for sure: we will not forget this year in a hurry, and 2021 does not sound too promising either. I normally love Christmas, but this year it is very likely to be a damp squib. The pleasant run-up to the festival, with Christmas shopping in the High Street, crisp dark evenings contrasting with brightly lit warm shops, Christmas Fairs, Carol Services and Holy Communion are all gone. True, technically we in England may be able to shop in the High Street after 2 December, but any of the pleasure of browsing will be inhibited by the hated face coverings and I, for one, will not be indulging. This year everything has come from Mr Amazon and the purchase of presents has worked functionally, but with none of the usual anticipation and enjoyment. Jane and I even debated whether we would bother with our Christmas lights and a Christmas tree this year, but decided that – in the end – we (like everyone else) needed a little boost of happiness after a miserable nine months, so the decorations will proceed as usual and I will receive my annual dressing down from the Head Gardener for treading on her plants as I hang the Christmas lights in the garden trees. ‘Twas ever thus. In the past we have sometimes engaged in exchange holidays with like-minded friends at Christmas, alternating each year, but this time it will be an at-home affair and even our usual rib of beef will be off the menu in favour of roast duck (we do not like turkey). But are we downhearted? Nay! Let us look forward to the anniversary of the birth of Christ in five weeks time with joyful and hopeful hearts, shrug off the bad news and our worries about the future, cherish our partners or lovers, appreciate our good friends, and recognise our good fortune in being alive. Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist wakes up in the morning, leaps out of bed, throws back the curtains, and says with joy in his or her heart,
“Good Morning God!”.
A pessimist opens a bleary eye, looks at the alarm clock and says,
“Good God: morning”

Incidentally, thinking about that reference to partners and lovers above reminds me that the traditional Royal Navy toast at dinner on a Saturday night at sea is,
“Sweethearts and Wives”
To which the oldest member of the wardroom mess usually adds,
“…may they never meet!”.
Indeed.

What does one do when every day is the same in lockdown, the sky is grey and BBC Radio 4 has resorted to playing extracts from The Lucille Ball Show? Why, the answer is to do Something Different. This morning, for a change, I decided to wear my Retired Naval Officer in The Country Rig (Rig No 4) comprising the Charles Twywhitt checked cotton shirt, the maroon Ministry of Defence tie, the mustard-coloured waistcoat with fob watch set to GMT, the beige cavalry twill trousers and the polished brown Oxfords. By thus breaking the monotony, and setting a high male sartorial standard, I hoped – by passive example – to encourage Jane to wear a complementary outfit involving, perhaps, a tweed skirt, stockings, court shoes and a blouse with pearls. Alas, it was not to be. She did falter in her step a little when she bounced into the breakfast room in her cords, pullover and plimsolls to find me ostentatiously checking the time in Greenwich on my fob watch (breakfast was running a little late); I did wonder if she might pop back upstairs to change. Instead, however, she remarked,
“Gosh, you look very smart. Going somewhere nice?”
Waving one hand modestly, I explained that it was a tribute to my beautiful wife.
“You remind me of someone on the television”
“Why thank you my dear”
“Yes. Was it Colonel Blimp or Mr Toad? I forget.”

You know, I don’t think my wife entirely understands or appreciates me.  But then, nor does the rest of the world as far as I can make out.

20 November 2020