You know, it’s a funny old thing: we can put a billionaire into space on a commercial spaceship; we can put a robot lander on Mars; we can plumb the depths of the oceans; we can create a device that replies sensibly to questions when asked by voice. But we cannot produce a bootlace that doesn’t come undone. There is something wrong with our priorities today.
We spent a delightful day in Plymouth the other day, at one time my favourite city. I spent an aggregate of six years in the city studying engineering there, and three of my ships were based at Devonport. The city took a mauling in WW2 and so what one sees in the city centre today is a clean modern early 1960s ordered layout, supported by the ubiquitous use of concrete. Despite that, I always found Plymouth to be varied and vibrant: a pleasure to visit. Alas, as in many other cities and towns, a further redevelopment to the east of the city centre to create a more-modern, covered, shopping complex has sucked the life out of main shopping streets themselves. Some shops have closed, others are of dubious attraction, and the streets are dirty and wind-blown. When we visited, the only thing missing from completing the image of Ghost Town seemed to be the tumbleweed, though the litter and take-away cartons, blown around by the south westerly wind, made a reasonable substitute. The ancient harbour at The Barbican, to the south east of the city, used to offer a quaint stroll, some good fish and chips, and the Plymouth Gin Distillery: our Mecca. The last time we visited the distillery (claimed to be the oldest working gin distillery in England) we took a guided tour and sampled an included gin and tonic in the bar, a room with a ceiling fashioned like the inside of an upturned boat. We bought a crate of Navy Strength Plymouth Gin afterwards (yes, a crate). Alas our visit to Mecca this time was in vain, for the gates were closed, with no explanation (probably “Due to Covid…”). After a difficult search on the website I found that Plymouth Gin was also continuing to demand face masks and social distancing for visitors despite the government relaxation, so I metaphorically crossed the establishment off my list of prospective suppliers (their loss, Amazon’s gain). We drifted around the rest of The Barbican, but were disappointed to see how many shops were shut. Yarmouth Stores, an excellent source of seamen’s, fishermen’s and submarine sweaters in the past was boarded up (closed several years ago apparently); Edinburgh Woollen Mill in its prime site on the harbour had gone; we could not get served in Weatherspoon’s pub as the bar staff ignored me; and The Tudor Rose Tearooms in their genuine quaint Elizabethan building were closed. We could, however, have treated ourselves to several tattoos on various parts of our bodies. Overall, The Barbican was disappointing and looked a bit seedy, but it did fit the bill of a dodgy quarter in a seaport, where sailors go to spend their wages and discuss the cultural aspects of their extensive voyages with loose women, and – of course – that is what it has always been.
While I remember, I do wish (non) service providers and the media – who should know better – would stop using that dreadful hackneyed and ungrammatical phrase, “Due to Covid” as an excuse for poor or non-existent service. First of all it is not an excuse, it is a reason: an excuse excuses something and there is no excuse for inefficiency and not adapting to circumstances. Second, the term “Due to…” is incorrect; the phrase should be, “Owing to Covid” or “Because of Covid”. Harrumph. My old English teacher must be spinning in his grave.
We tried strolling on Plymouth Hoe, but the wind blew Jane’s skirt up so many times that she decreed enough was enough (sailors can only get so much excitement in one day).
After The Barbican we negotiated Plymouth’s complex and busy road system (it wasn’t like this in my day) to be lunch guests of our old friends Margery and Benjamin, with their daughter and grandson. I am a great advocate of the WC Fields school of thought on human behaviour that anyone who hates dogs and children cannot be all bad. I have cultivated and refined the same persona over many years. Margery and Benjamin have both creatures, and I dare say they feared that I would kick one and eat the other, but they need not have taken out that insurance policy, for Lucy the dog did not drool over me, ruin my tights, smell, try to copulate with my leg or bark; and as to children, well, there are children and then there are children: not all are noisy and misbehave. Their little grandson Bartholomew was a great delight once he had overcome his shyness. We chatted on the floor for some time discussing his range of toy motor cars, me speaking English and he speaking Twoyearoldspeak, the language of the parallel universe, which I understood perfectly. I had made him a two-foot model of the Brittany ferry PORT AVON, a vessel that steams in and out of Plymouth on a regular basis. It was a project that started off during the Third Great Lockdown of 2021 with the concept of making a ship that could be viewed in real life locally and related to, and in which Bartholomew could store his cars. I know that little boys like to have toys with hidden compartments and so on, because I am a little boy myself. Alas, I got a bit carried away with the project and, instead of making a brightly painted simple boat with a hole in it (fundamentally, the initial plan) I ended up making a full-scale model of the ferry based on the shipbuilder’s plans; this for a 2 ½ year-old. I had hoped to scale the model to take standard small toy cars like the old Matchbox cars of my heyday, but I soon realised that such a vessel would have to be several yards long and almost big enough for Bartholomew himself to crawl inside. I did not think that this would find favour with Honeysuckle, his mother, so I made some tiny cars and lorries to fit the model. These were so tiny as to guarantee that Bartholomew could fit several of them up his nose without difficulty, thus ensuring him a free adventure visit to A&E in Plymouth Hospital for a whole day and assuring me of a place in Honeysuckle’s heart forever. Honeysuckle is my proxy daughter, the daughter Jane and I never had, and a young friend. It is essential to have young friends (ie people younger than 45) so that you can suck the youth out of them and retain an up-to-date cool vocabulary. Having a proxy daughter has most of the advantages of a real daughter, but without the disadvantages of having to endure the terror of her going through the Goth stage of development, the inappropriate boyfriends and the suspicions of boys’ lecherous behaviour. Honeysuckle also had her baby son with her, young Joey. He was no trouble at all, but I don’t do babies as they all look the same to me. Indeed, Joey looked to me like a miniature version of The Mekon. Honeysuckle looked at me blankly when I ventured this opinion, clearly not knowing if I was being insulting or complimentary (few people can ever tell with me). I was surprised to find that she had never heard of The Mekon and Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, but then she is Young according to the Shacklepin Scale of Age.
Dan Dare, Pilot if the Future was one of the characters in the boys’ magazine Eagle, first published in 1950. The magazine (I will not demean it with the description ‘comic’) was the brain child of the Reverend Marcus Morris and the illustrator Frank Hampson. The aim was to produce a boys’ magazine that would have high principles, educate, and encourage good behaviour while still being a good read. There were many features, but the adventures of Colonel Dan Dare, a spaceman, led the front page with its beautifully drawn, full colour illustrations and excellent storylines. The Mekon was an evil, two-foot tall, green megalomaniac humanoid from Venus with an enormous forehead (hence brain) who floated around on a big saucer, like a serving dish. His ambition in life was to conquer the solar system with, perhaps, a secondary aim of conquering the galaxy. Another feature of each edition of the Eagle was a brilliantly produced cut-away colour drawing of some engineering artefact, such as a ship, an aircraft, a car or a coal mine; taken with the cartoon strip Captain Pugwash, it helped to inspire me as a naval engineer. Issued every Friday for the princely sum of 3d (threepence to young readers of this blog), Eagle came just at the right time to complement the adventure playgrounds that were the bombed sites of post-war Britain, when WW2 was fresh in the memory of many children, austerity and rationing were still a feature of life, and an exciting future (beyond collecting shrapnel) beckoned. The magazine itself was limited in size because of paper rationing, but it packed a great deal into its high quality and detailed pages. Soon, it was The magazine to have. Alas, all good things come to an end. The magazine was expensive to produce and, after a change in publisher, the loss of Morris and Hampson as editor and illustrator, and a general lowering of quality the magazine gently died in the 1960s. You can still buy Eagle annuals, however, or the several adventures of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future in illustrated book form. I have several, purely for historical and sentimental interest you understand.
Oh dear. I have just realised that I described Honeysuckle’s baby, Joey, as looking like an evil green megalomaniac from Venus. Sorry about that. What a lovely little chap he was, so like his mummy. Oh heck, I’ve done it again.
Thinking of gin and tonic (I could just manage one now) there are almost as many ways of making the drink as there are of making a dry martini. We prefer ours in a long glass that is packed full of ice and with a slice of lime or lemon, making it a long drink with dew forming on the side of the glass. Jane prefers Durham Gin with Schweppes tonic; I prefer Plymouth Gin with Fever Tree tonic. But, of course, that is just a personal preference: there is no standard way of making the drink. There are some people who like their G+T in a short glass with just one ice cube, others who like the drink in a balloon glass like a wine glass. We tend to order something else if it is likely to come warm (ie with less than two ice cubes) as that is even worse than being offered a glass of white wine at room temperature. And let’s face it, there is nothing worse than warm champagne. But to get back to the old G+T, we had a new variation the other day, courtesy of our Dartmouth friends, Raymond and Carol: it was gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber in it instead of a slice of lemon. I thought at first that Raymond had failed the Logistic Officer exam by forgetting to buy a lemon at the local Co-op, but – no- the drink was delicious and tasted much better with the cucumber. So there you are: try a G+T with a slice of cucumber; it’s good. And don’t forget to add the iceberg if you are kind enough to offer us one.
The traditional naval officer’s drink (before my time) was not rum (see Blog 44), but Pink Gin. This comprises a few shakes of angostura bitters swirled around in a wine glass, topped up with a measure of gin and water added to taste. As a young midshipman on leave I once ordered the drink (to try) in a dockside pub in South Shields, my home town. The barmaid’s response, in her fine Tyneside sing-song accent, was,
“We’ve only one sort of gin here, hinny, and it’s not coloured pink”.
This was greeted with much mirth from the assembled tugboat men, river pilots and rough sailors in the bar and I realised that I was among Philistines. Years later, I did make a Pink Gin guided by Jane (who had been a part-time barmaid in her youth). It was absolutely foul. Naval officers of my era drank Gin and Tonic or Horses’ Neck, both with ice and lemon.
The latest development in the Covid saga is that some people working at home are not only reluctant to return to work, but are proposing to sue their employers if they do not continue to allow the new relaxed style of honest toil, working from home. One challenge being considered is on the basis of “commuting causing stress”. You couldn’t make this up: employees demanding that their employers pay them for not going to work. Methinks (me hopes) that a few dismissals will be in the offing; let us see if they will be able to still afford that BMW when on the dole.
In my comments on Covid and the UK government’s response to it over the last year or so, I may – just occasionally – have been known to hint at my opposition (and Jane’s) to wearing face coverings, my argument being that their effectiveness is so small as to be negligible. About half my friends disagree with me, saying that wearing a mask is no big deal, but I consider myself as that sound stepping stone standing firm in the fast flowing stream of public opinion. Given my declared stance on the matter, my interest was fired, therefore, when the consumer magazine Which? conducted a review of face coverings a few months ago. The best mask was the Airpop Pocket Mask costing £24.99 for four and it had a proven industry-standard filtration efficiency of 99.9% for particulate and bacteria. Testing was conducted using bacteria, which are 3 microns [three thousandths of a millimetre] in diameter, in an aerosol spray. I was impressed, despite myself, and started searching the internet for recipes for humble pie. Then I read on. Which? explained that it could only quote figures for bacteria and rank masks according to that criterion. It then admitted that a Covid virus has a diameter of 0.1 microns, 30 times smaller than a bacterium. So even the best commercial face mask available to the public has holes in it thirty times bigger than the Corona virus it is trying to prevent. One scientist has likened the effectiveness of facemarks to someone firing tennis balls at a matrix of scaffolding poles six feet apart. England legislated for compulsory face masks to be worn in inside public spaces in June last year and one would expect the measure to have had a significant effect on the incidence of infections; however, if you examine the graphs of infections and deaths from the Office of National Statistics website for that time and thereafter you will see no corresponding drop in infections or discontinuities in the curves after the measure was introduced. Given all this, why then do the government and some scientists and doctors continue to recommend the wearing of face coverings? Beats me. I have no idea, other than, perhaps, wearing face coverings provides assurance and a sense of security to some very frightened people.
The madness continues. We have already been told that the countryside and food are racist, along with all Anglo Saxons in the United Kingdom, its Dominions and the United States of America. We have now moved on, and the latest thing to be so labelled is eating with a knife and fork. Yes, it’s true: some chef or other has decreed that eating with a knife and fork has colonial overtones and is therefore racist. I can only assume that the chef, himself, eats with his fingers. Still, if we regress, it will avoid accusations of HKLP I suppose. I wonder what will be next? Best sell those shares in Andrex toilet tissue and buy up shares in Pampers disposable nappies instead (I am, in any case, getting on a bit now). The other latest revelation is that it is illegal to call a grandmother a grandmother. Well, not illegal exactly, but an industrial tribunal has ruled in favour of a woman who resigned from a firm because she was referred to as a grandmother in one of the company’s written car reviews, despite actually being a grandmother. Apparently it was age discrimination. This is Alice Through the Looking Glass at its best.
We have been “Oop North”, visiting my brother and sister-in-law in South Shields, then later on to Altrincham to inflict ourselves in some old friends who could not think of an excuse fast enough. It was a culinary experience and travel adventure that was so so fun-packed that it is worthy of a separate blog, so I will wind up this one now.
Gosh, I wish I could be a fly on the wall when Honeysuckle sees the pseudonym I have given her.
3 August 2021
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 