Blog 94. You Challenge The Sisterhood At Your Peril.

The son and heir has gone vegetarian.  It could be worse: he could have become a vegan (though no prejudice there – I never missed an episode of Star Trek in its day).  Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy vegetarian food and we often have it; but I do object to having vegan or (less often) vegetarian views thrust upon me, especially if they are mixed with strongly-held opinions on man-made climate change that declare that cows and their flatulence are going to kill us all.  “Each to their own”, is my philosophy, and let me make my own decisions without being nagged.  Rupert (our son) came down for a day on Friday, possibly to commemorate Jane’s 70th birthday a week in advance, and it was a delight to see him after 18 months.  No, he doesn’t live in Australia, only three hours away in Hertfordshire, but he is a very busy man and things have been a bit difficult lately.  Don’t they say that you have a daughter for life, but a son only until he marries?  Jane was unfazed by the announcement that Rupert had renounced all meat as we have an old friend who is also vegetarian and Jane is quite happy to prepare a meal accordingly.  A really good vegetarian meal can be a bit of a challenge if the offerings of some some British restaurants are to be believed: the best some can offer is risotto, a nut cutlet or an omelette.  Things are getting  better, I understand, but it would be good if chefs saw the requirement to produce an imaginative vegetarian meal as a professional challenge rather than a chore.  Jane, with  the menus she uses,  is very good and I have yet to be disappointed.  We had Moroccan Spiced Pie with Yoghurt and Harissa Sauce (BBC Good Food website) for our meal with Rupert and it was very filling and delicious; he seemed pleasantly surprised: perhaps he expected a risotto or nut cutlet.  The only problem with vegetarian food generally (according to Jane) is the time it takes to prepare all those vegetables; in that, I do help and I am a dab hand at skinning a butternut squash, a technique that Jane has not mastered.

Rupert looked very slim and healthy on his vegetarian diet and I did wonder if we should become inclined a bit that way ourselves.  Not just for that reason; I was squeamish about meat as a boy (Blog 71) and, like many carnivores, would probably give it a miss if I had to catch a beast myself, skin it and dismember it.  Fortunately, in our civilised world, I don’t have to.  I remember that, quite a few years ago, there was a documentary on the television about the Royal Marines, specifically the mountain warfare cadre: the élite among the  élite, a pretty tough bunch.  We were shown some of their survival training, which included eating rabbits’ eyes (good for rehydration) and making an omelette with wild birds’ eggs and earthworms. A few weeks after that particular episode the Commandant General of the Royal Marines was attending a Mess Dinner with the army in Aldershot (the Royal Marines are part of the Royal Navy, nothing to do with the British Army).  After the food was finished, the Mess President announced that he had a gift for the Commandant General as an extra course and presented him with a tobacco tin containing four earthworms.  This was received with great mirth by the assembled army officers, but the Commandant General of the Royal Marines never turned a hair: he picked up and ate all four worms raw, washing them down with a glass of claret.  Those Royal Marines can be such rough men;  but then, I suppose, that is what they are meant to be.

I served alongside Royal Marines several times and always found them to be bit of a law unto themselves, though highly professional and very tough.  Like army officers, Royal Marine officers (at that time) bore their rank on their shoulders, comprising pips, crowns and – at senior level – crossed batons and sabres.  Unlike naval officers, whose ranks were shown by gold stripes on sleeves or shoulders, Royal Marine rank badges were hard to discern, particularly as their combat uniforms were identical to those of Other Ranks.  To further complicate matters, Royal Marine officer ranks used to be one step out from the ranks of army officers, so that a Captain RM was equivalent to a Major in the British Army and a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy; a Major RM was equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel in the army or a Commander in the Royal Navy – a Senior Officer (the ranks have since been aligned)  A fellow officer of mine, a Major in the Royal Marines, once told me of an encounter he had had that exemplified the confusion of identifying ranks.  He was walking through the dockyard one day and noticed a Midshipman coming towards him.  He prepared to be saluted, but did not receive the courtesy as they passed; he shrugged and did not follow it up.  However, five yards later he was arrested by a shout behind him:
“Royal Marine!”, shouted the Midshipman in a shrill voice.
My friend stopped and looked back.
“Yes?”
“ Come back here!”, commanded the Midshipman.
My friend lumbered his way back.
“Don’t you, in the Royal Marines, salute officers?”, demanded the Midshipman.
“Sometimes”, said my friend.
At that point, realisation dawned on the Midshipman’s face as he saw the  Major’s crowns on my friend’s shoulders.  Much spluttering,  apologising and saluting followed.  That Midshipman was very lucky: my friend might have eaten him.

Saluting is a courtesy in the armed forces and not an anachronistic subservient homage to one’s superiors: it is a way of greeting each other as fellow members of the Armed Forces working to a common cause, of people ‘all of one company’.  Occasionally one does encounter a rating or junior officer who fails to salute, usually in error.  Various techniques can be used to challenge such omissions, but the best I ever came across was the gentle reprimand used by a friend of mine, a solution that also summed up the ceremony very well.  He would call the miscreant back and say to the errant rating or junior officer,
“The Queen has commanded that, when we meet, we should salute each other”.  
“Now: you go first”.

Anyway, Rupert’s visit went very well and we enjoyed an excellent long sunny walk in the countryside after his arrival, followed by the aforementioned meal and a fairly large quantity of alcohol.  The Only Son went up ten points in his mother’s estimation by a) his actual arrival and b) bringing two bunches of flowers; he lost points when he later opined that her luxuriant and carefully planned garden “looked a bit overgrown”.  But, overall, the offspring could do no wrong and I was very soon relegated to second place in her affection.  I could live with that.  Twenty hours later, with a hangover, and after declining any breakfast other than two paracetamol, he was gone, taking with him the remnants of the Moroccan Spiced Pie and a complete Eton Mess (his favourite pudding) that he had declined the night before: a 20 hour visit over in a flash.  It was great while it lasted and we must be grateful for small mercies.

Yes, on reflection, we decided we would move towards a vegetarian diet in future.  First, however, we would have that barbecued fillet steak (rare) for supper, and I would need to use up our frozen stock of bacon as bacon sandwiches for breakfast.  No need to get carried away.

The Covid situation in UK trundles on, with little change from the last blog, or the one before that.  As I said in an earlier report, the statistics are bumping along the bottom now, with only the odd ripple disturbing the reports of zero deaths.  The casualty rate is currently below the figures usually reported on British roads. Weekly deaths are still around 50, daily deaths less than 10, daily hospital admissions still dropping; all this despite a rise in infections attributable to the Indian variant, now re-designated  the Delta variant.  Of vaccinations, 77% of the British population have received  their first jab, and 55% have received their second and full immunisation.  Despite this, the media are screaming with headlines of rising infection and warning of the government postponing its 21 June milestone for removing the final Covid restrictions.  I despair.  After the Delta variant there will doubtless be an Epsilon variant as the virus mutates yet again; then a Zeta variant, then an Eta variant and so on.  The vaccinations have been proven to cope with Covid and can be ‘tweaked’ to cope even better with each variant; let us accept that the virus will always be with us – endemic – and get on with returning to normal.  The vaccinations work. Kicking the can down the road is not the way ahead: the economy needs to get going again.

Regular readers will have noticed something of a hiatus in my blog frequency and will have inferred, correctly, that I have been away on my boat again.  With a fair bit of time on my hands in the evenings and no television to distract the mind I could probably have turned out a blog last week, but I was suffering from writer’s block or, to put it more plainly: as I could think of nothing good to say, I decided to say nothing.  If only I had followed that maxim for my previous life: I could have been a Vice Admiral and had more friends now.  Ho hum. The weather in Dartmouth was still variable.  While much of Britain – even Scotland –  sweltered in temperatures of up to 24C during the English Bank Holiday, Dartmouth had sunny days, but a persistent cool wind from the east.  This was sufficient to preclude any lounging on the quarterdeck quaffing gin and tonic, and generated a lumpy swell outside the harbour (“lumpy”: a nautical term that means Mrs Shacklepin cannot keep her feet onboard, gets her spectacles covered in salt spray and – hence – vetoes further marine exploration).   As usual, I completed lots of jobs onboard and, as defects fell off one end of the list, others emerged to take their place.  Perhaps this is called creative inertia; still, it keeps me out of mischief.

Jane had another one of her heart episodes while we lay in bed on the boat one night (they always happen when she is in bed). This time, armed with her rinky dinky AliveCor KardiaMobile EKG Monitor from Amazon (Blog 93), she captured the data (peak heart rate 185 beats/minute) and it has been sent off to her cardiologist for analysis. The episode went on for just under two hours and we were poised to call an ambulance at the two-hour point (as advised) when the whole thing subsided. It is all very distressing for her and we hope the new data will help generate a diagnosis and treatment

The world has gone mad.  Not content with breast feeding to be renamed as “chest feeding”,  cervical smears being offered to men who have decided to be women, and women themselves now to be called “people who menstruate”, the woke liberal establishment now demands that we stop using the term “mother”; instead, we are to refer to a “person who gives birth”.  Is anyone in authority ever going to stand up to these idiots, and tell them to b****r off?  As it is, all sane people will simply ignore the demands and laugh at the fools who issue them. If only Jonathan Swift were still alive: he could have incorporated the whole madness into his Gulliver’s Travels.

She will not let me buy a new inflatable tender for the boat.  And that after I had ordered her a pair of stylish seaboots to keep her diddy feet dry in stormy weather and when helping me scrub the decks (I didn’t mention that last bit to her, not wishing to complicate matters). There’s gratitude for you. Regular readers will recall from Blog 59 that I bought a tender last year in order to widen the scope of our boating adventures.  The choice was a compromise of several factors such as safety, ease of handling, packed size, weight and – of course – cost.  I settled on a 2m lightweight model that folded into a large rucksack.  We have used it once and it was, well, OK but a bit small and unstable.  Have you ever played in a swimming pool with one of those inflatable crocodiles? You know the sort of thing, where you sit on top, wobble, fall off, then spend ten minutes trying to get back on again. No? Not into inflatable crocodiles?  Well, anyway, you get the gist.  Our tender is a bit wobbly like that.  It is also difficult to row, difficult to steer, and Jane has to crouch in the bottom boards, her limbs rigid in terror.  So I have done a bit more research, asked around those who have tenders, applied some basic stability criteria and now propose a bigger and wider replacement.  I submitted these proposals to Jane with cogent reasons why we should change, several offsets to make the idea cost-neutral (buy fewer cravats and waistcoats; use less fuel; eat less)  and a list of the many places we could paddle to in the new tender.  And she said ‘no’.  She did concede that, if I sold the old tender first, then she would reconsider the proposal (I had intended to do things the other way round).  I can see that I am just going to have to chip away at her resolve by my usual subtle means.  Letting her fall in from the existing tender might do the trick, but is, perhaps, a bit drastic even for me.  Also, she is part of The Sisterhood and I must be wary.

The Sisterhood is a strong force and I, a mere man (or person who doesn’t menstruate), challenge it at my peril.  Its feelers stretch out across continents and oceans, and even extend to tapping into these blogs.   One female distant cousin in South Dakota in the USA took me to task for my remark to Jane in Blog 86, “My God, you’re a girl!” when she turned up for breakfast wearing a smart dress and court shoes (I thought I had been quite complimentary).  Now a further female cousin – this one in North Carolina in the USA – has given me stern advice regarding Jane’s heart problem, outlined flippantly in Blog 91 (“Don’t Touch My Button!”).  I quote my cousin verbatim:

“ Now, regarding Jane [and her heart], you must NOT push buttons, flip switches, or piss her off”.

Who? Me?  Never.

7 June 2021