Blog 146. Egg Nog Anyone? Or Cheesecake Perhaps?

Whatever happened to shirt tails?  I was pondering on that sartorial deficiency the other day as I unbuckled my belt and adjusted my trousers for the third time that day in order to tuck in my shirt.  Shirts just aren’t what they were.  I can remember when shirt tails stretched halfway down your thighs, providing that additional layer of warmth and padding, but those days have long gone unless you can afford those excellent shirts sold by Charles Tyrwhitt.  I suppose the shorter garments are to accommodate the current fashion, pioneered by schoolboys, of walking around with your shirt hanging out of your trousers and therefore looking a complete scruff.  Of course, many men adopt this style because it hides their fat belly, but I’m afraid I cannot contemplate such an approach despite my increased waistline.  No, the shirt must go in, the trousers must fit properly (not sag around the lower belly like a sporran), braces must be worn if necessary, and the belt must match the shoes.  Before the late 19th century, of course, men did not have underpants and so the long shirt tail served as underwear, being tucked round between the legs as a useful layer between the bare buttocks and the buckskin breeches. Women did not have even that luxury. Those were the days.  Gosh, the things you learn in these blogs.

Perhaps the ultimate shirt for size and endurance, in my experience, has been the shirts issued to me by the Royal Navy at Dartmouth in 1969 for wear with full dress uniform: they came with double cuffs, as one would expect, but without collars.  I was completely non-plussed when I first saw them, though the situation became clearer when I saw the separate stiff collars (some of them wing collars) that accompanied the shirts.  The only time I had ever come across such a combination before was on my grandfather.  I vaguely seemed to recall that the collars were attached to the shirts using collar studs, front and back.  I cannot remember if the Navy provided those items or if I had to buy them myself, but I soon got the hang of it.  We were issued with standard collar-attached shirts with shoulder straps for epaulettes also, of course, for everyday use, but I was to discover that a shirt with separate stiff collar produced a very smart appearance with a tie – far better than today’s shirts with attached collars;  the only difficulty came with getting the collars laundered and starched while ashore – at sea, ships’ Chinese laundries had no trouble with them.  There was a laundry in Anniesland, Glasgow, that provided a useful postal service for laundered collars, but I expect that closed down long ago.  Incidentally, the wing collars were for wear with the starched stiff white dress shirt worn in the evening for special events such as Balls or Ladies’ Nights (as seen in Downton Abbey).  Those shirts were a nightmare to put on, being as stiff as plywood and held together with decorative studs down the front instead of buttons; but they did add that special sense of  occasion that comes with accompanying a beautiful woman to a good night out.  Any ardour that might have been generated by the romantic atmosphere soon dispersed, however,  because it took you half an hour to get the shirt off again.  I was amused when, a few months ago, I received a lecture from a young shop assistance on how to wear cufflinks after I had just purchased a double-cuffed shirt; I smiled tolerantly at that spotty youth and thought, “I must look younger than I really am but, son, you don’t know the half of it.”

I am so pleased that our armed forces have moved on from the uniforms of 1940.  It was announced earlier this year that the RAF is to provide optional vegan uniforms for those aviators (we can no longer call them ‘airmen’) who have a strong aversion to wearing animal-based clothing, such as wool or leather.  How very 21st century and how very important that Biggles should be able to conduct his or her dogfights with a clear conscience in comfortable acrylic sweaters and plastic boots.  But wait – don’t  those materials melt against the skin in a fire or explosion and – oh horror – aren’t they produced from fossil fuels?  Oh dear, maybe they should move to linen, cotton or jute, but I wonder how much all that is costing the defence budget?  Can we really afford to indulge the whims of all parts of society when it comes to maintaining a defence force on a finite amount of money?  When you join the Armed Forces you voluntarily relinquish all manner of privileges: privacy, individuality, personal comfort, choice of appearance, liberty to come and go at will, and the right to strike, to name but a few.  In their place you adopt and accept uniformity, obedience, restrictions on leave, comradeship, honour, professionalism, a sense of common purpose, and recognition that there are practical and financial difficulties in providing for individual beliefs when operating in a war environment, sometimes in the field.  If you are a vegan with views so strong that you cannot even bear to wear leather boots, why on earth did you join the RAF in the first place?

On a light-hearted note, I am grateful to The Times for reporting an extract from a book by the actress Joanna Lumley, My Book of Treasures [Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN-13978-1399741613].  I quote the extract verbatim:

One of the jottings concerns a court case in Massachusetts, where a lawyer was interrogating a pathologist about a corpse. Had they checked for signs of life? No. Breathing? No. A pulse? No. “So how could you be sure the patient was in fact dead?” the lawyer asked. “Because,” the doctor replied, “his brain was in a jar.” The lawyer attempted a climbdown and asked if the patient could possibly have been alive. If so, the pathologist suggested, it was “probably practising law in Massachusetts”.  

Don’t we all wish we could come up with an instantaneous riposte like that?  Joanna Lumley’s My Book of Treasures is available in all good bookshops and will probably make a good stocking-filler for Christmas.

“May I help in any way?”  
How many men have put that question to their wives while secretly thinking, 
(“Please God, let her say ‘no’ ”)?  
Such was my dilemma the other day when, in a moment of weakness, I made my offer because Jane had a Big Cooking Day preparing a vegetarian lunch for friends coming tomorrow. Not only did she accept the offer with what I thought was almost indecent alacrity, she rather took advantage of the situation by saying, 
“Yes please.  You can make the cheesecake.”
She must have decoded the carefully concealed expression on my face.
“Problem?”
“Er, well I thought maybe I could just chop an onion or something.”
She raised an eyebrow. 
“For a cheesecake?”.
It turned out that the manufacture of the aforementioned item of patisserie would be perfectly straightforward (of course it would, I thought, for a cordon bleu chef like Jane): one crushed digestive biscuits in a bag then mixed them with melted butter to make the base.  The base was then baked in one of those cake tins with removable sides, held together by a spring clip.  After baking, it was chilled before some sort of gloop was mixed and poured on top.  I duly mustered in the kitchen this very morning, tied on my pristine chef’s apron, and immediately three predictable snags emerged: first, Jane and I would be sharing her iPad which contained two recipes (hers and mine) and which kept turning itself off; second, we would also be sharing one small kitchen workspace; and third, Jane is incapable of delegating any task.  Nevertheless, out came the digestive biscuits, and Jane insisted on showing me how to weigh them, as if I had never used a set of scales before.  Ditto the 50 grams of butter.  She left me alone to mix the crushed biscuits and butter, and tamp them down into the cake tin, but then could not resist commenting that the biscuits were not crushed enough.  Well, there might have been the odd piece with ‘McVities’ still stamped on it, I suppose, but I felt that that added individuality.  I duly put the cake tin in the fridge to let it cool and retired for a welcome cup of coffee.  I was summoned ten minutes later with a demand of ‘where was the base?’.  With a flourish I revealed the chilled biscuit mixture in the fridge, but was told (with some exasperation) that it was supposed to be in the oven, not the fridge; it had to be baked first, then chilled.  So in it went. Fifteen minutes later, the cake tin came out and, as I placed it on a griddle to cool, the spring clip on the side of the tin sprang open.  In panic, Jane shoved me to one side and tried to grip the hot cake tin to close the spring clip, while simultaneously making a chocolate sauce and a choux pastry mixture on the adjacent hob.  In the subsequent stramash, a knife dislodged itself from the adjacent magnetic knife rack and dropped into the cake tin, bursting upon the spring clip again and shedding biscuit crumbs and parchment paper in all directions.  
At this point, Jane said a very rude word.  In fact, more than one if I am to be accurate.
I made myself scarce after offering Jane a glass of sherry (declined). 
As I write, I am persona non grata in Jane’s kitchen and the beginnings of the cake are back in the fridge, chilling, preparing themselves for Phase 2: being drowned by Horatio’s cheesecake topping (yet to be made).  I’m sure it will all be alright on the night.  She should have let me just chop that onion.

It has been a busy time for us this Autumn and we are looking forward to a rest over Christmas, though our social calendar (I am pleased to say) remains packed solid.  After our exhausting visit to Paris and its environs (Blog 145) we vowed not to take another trip away from home for quite some time, but we were were already committed to a short break in London in October to meet my American cousin and her husband, both of whom were flying to the UK to join a cruise.  London, that most magnificent of cities, is only about 100 miles from where we live, but to us hayseeds it might just as well be abroad.   Driving there is not really an option because of the cost of parking, the Congestion Charge, the Ultra Low Emission Zone Charge and the difficulty of negotiating heavy traffic in an unfamiliar city.  One must, therefore, travel by train and, fortunately, there is a frequent – if expensive – service from close to where we live. We duly embarked on the 0558 train on a freezing cold morning, still half asleep, the other half wondering why we were punishing ourselves in this way.  Still, the benefit was that we arrived in London at the beginning of a full day, and ready for a hearty breakfast at my club (the Victory Services Club, not White’s of St James’s – don’t be silly).  My cousin and her husband were flying over on ‘The Red Eye’ from North Carolina and duly turned up, looking even more bleary-eyed than us, just as we were starting on the toast and marmalade in the Club. It was lovely to see them again and to catch up,  but if my cousin has a fault it is that she will insist on packing as much tourism into a day as is physically possible.  The process of showing her the sights in England is like undertaking a full-blown naval exercise off Portland: 0800Z breakfast; 0912Z clean teeth; 0930Z depart for British Museum; 1135Z arrive Kensington Palace…1730 Return to Club; 1745 Debrief and Wash-up.  You get the gist, I am sure.  Jane and I prefer to take London – or any other tourist spot – in a more relaxed way, walking everywhere and choosing places as the mood takes us.  We compromised with my cousin by suggesting that she do her own thing on Day 1 while we visited the National Gallery then met our son, Rupert, for lunch.  By her own admission, my cousin would be dead-beat and into bed by 1600 anyway.  We duly met Rupert, in the manner favoured by secret agents, on the bridge in St James’s Park before strolling over to The Cinnamon Club in Westminster for lunch.  The Cinnamon Club is not a club, but an Indian restaurant set in the building formerly used by Westminster public library, and one often favoured by Ministers of the Crown as the Houses of Parliament and various government offices (including our son’s) are located nearby.  The food is excellent, it bears no resemblance to the food found in so-called ‘Indian’ restaurants in every British High Street (which are usually Bangladeshi),  but – alas – it is very expensive.  It is a funny thing, but when you have a grown-up son and you suggest we get together for lunch, he never says, “Excellent idea, Father.  Have this one on me.”  Or, at least, that is our experience – other mature parents may have enjoyed more beneficence from their offspring.  But, hey – he works hard, he has a mortgage, he lives in an expensive cottage in the Home Counties in a village called Wrinkly Bottom (or whatever), and we see him but once a year; lunch is a small price to pay to enjoy our dear son’s company.  The bill came to £265 for the three of us eating two courses; the wine alone cost £65.  Ouch.  ‘Dear’ is the right word.

Day 2 found us escorting our American cousins through the intricate windings of the London Underground to Westminster, thence by Thames Water Bus to Tower Pier for a tour of Tower Bridge.  It was a very worthwhile visit as it enabled us to walk across the top gantry, which has a glass floor to enable you to see the road bridge or Thames below (not for the faint-hearted).  We also toured the (obsolete) steam machinery previously used to raise the double-bascule bridge sections (the mechanism is now electric-hydraulic).  Alas, the standard tour did not include the vast counterweights in their underground chambers, and there was no requirement for the bridge to open for river traffic, which would have been something worth seeing.  Nevertheless, it was a good visit and for a relatively modest price.  The Water Bus proved to be a good way to get across London, with sightseeing thrown in, though it was more expensive than the Tube.  We would have returned up river that way, but we had to change some money.
Did you know that you can actually visit the Bank of England as if it really were a bank?  My cousin had an old £20 paper note that is no longer legal tender, the UK having moved over to polymer bank notes about ten years ago, and she wondered what to do with it.  I made enquiries and found that you can change these old notes at the Bank of England, either in person or by post.  We all duly piled into the Underground at Tower Hill and, after a short journey, disembarked at (you’ll never guess) the station called Bank.  In the process, we seemed to walk miles underground: up stairs, down stairs, through tunnels… the Americans were definitely showing signs of fatigue by the time we reached the bank.  It is a curious thing: my cousin(s) never adapted to using the London Underground and they were like fish out of water as they followed me at my usual galloping walking pace through the subterranean thoroughfares.  On reflection, I don’t suppose they have the Tube or ‘Subways’ in North Carolina.
Kensington Palace completed our tour for the day, and it left us all totally exhausted.  The Palace itself was not tiring, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a long day on our feet.  The palace staff were very welcoming and excellent, but we thought the tour was rather disappointing, for most of the rooms seemed rather bleak, which is a bit worrying when you consider that several members of the wider Royal Family still live in the Palace.  The best parts of the tour were the rooms where Queen Victoria lived as a child before ascending to the throne.  She had a weird upbringing, sharing a bedroom with her mother until she became Queen at the age of 18, and having to be escorted by her mother or governess, hand in hand, whenever she used the stairs.  She abandoned those practises with alacrity when she came to power.  I can’t say I blame her. 
We called a cab to get back to the Club, for we had had enough of walking.  I simply love London taxis – the so-called ‘black cabs’.  I know of nowhere else in Britain where you can just stand on the street, wave your hand, and a taxi appears as if by magic.  The cabs are very clean, voluminous, private, and professionally regulated and driven.  I understand some Londoners prefer the private hire firms such as Uber, which are cheaper, but those people just don’t know how lucky they are with their ‘black cabs’.  I am very happy to pay the price for a quality product and, oh, what a treat to be chauffeured across London. 
Dinner in the Club was excellent, spoiled only by a diner at an adjacent table pulling faces because I was telling a story to my cousin about the history of the coroner service and the development of law for dealing with dead bodies (as you do).  This was brought to my attention by Jane using frantic hand signals to change the conversation.  It appears that the the gurning eavesdropper at the next table objected to my conversation about dead bodies but, as I pointed out to Jane with the same volume of voice, people really shouldn’t listen in to other people’s conversation should they?
Next day we were back on the train for Barsetshire and the day after that my cousin was onboard her cruise ship in Southampton, heading for Bermuda with a hurricane heading towards her.  It was a good break, but we needed another rest.  I can recommend joining the Victory Services Club for a stay in London, by the way, if you are serving or retired Armed Forces personnel of Britain, NATO or the Commonwealth – any rank, and including families. The Club is located in central London near Marble Arch and the accommodation is modern, and modestly priced for London.  The food is very good and the staff excellent.  The annual subscription for an individual is only £55 – just over a pound a week.  My cousin’s husband is ex US Navy and he took joint membership with his wife, on my recommendation (www.vsc.co.uk). 

“Would you kindly count your cards above the table in future!”, said the woman sharply as we prepared to play a round of bridge at our supposedly informal bridge club.  Yet she still lives.  My initial thought was, “Who am I, Brett Maverick?  Do I look like a card sharp?” and, indeed, I nearly retorted with that very sentiment and in the same tone of voice as she had used.  However, I swallowed my resentment and later consulted my friend, a well-established bridge player elsewhere, and he advised me that the request the woman made was not unreasonable.  I daresay it was and, as a newcomer to bridge, I welcome all guidance on playing correctly.  However there are better and more polite ways to instruct someone.  When I related this experience to my American cousin, also a bridge player, she said – in that philosophical Tennessee drawl of hers,
“Y’ know Horatio, the truth is, bridge is a social game for anti-social people”. 
She was dead right there.  We will press on with the game in a casual setting with friends, but I’m not sure about the club.  I might end up grabbing someone by the throat.

Now tell me: do you like spiders?  Or, more realistically, can you cope with them?  I only ask because I read in The Spectator magazine last month that, in a cave on the Albanian/Greek border more than 11,000 spiders have made the world’s largest spider web, covering an area of 1,140 square feet (106 square metres) – roughly the equivalent of a square 33 feet by 33 feet.  Two types of spider have produced the web, but neither is poisonous to humans.  Still, I’m not too sure about that adventure holiday to the Balkans now.

Well, it seems to me that, if it was good enough for George Washington, it is good enough for us.  I refer to that predominantly American drink, the Egg Nog.  I think it is fair to say that the tipple is not a common one in Britain but, every time we turn on our television set to watch an American film with a Christmas theme, there the drink is, apparently being drunk by the pint.  Jane is very fond of those American television romance films that seem to be playing non-stop on the box at the moment, and I confess to a weakness for them myself (this is my feminine side coming out).  You know the sort of thing: girl returns to Home Town (pop 5,000) in the sticks from a high-pressure job in The Big City for Christmas; meets hunky, kind, sensitive-yet-assertive chap selling Christmas trees/pastries/home repairs/houses [delete as applicable]; falls in love; gives up high-profile job to help Mum and Dad with their business in Home Town, where everyone is happy, smiley and friendly.  The snow is always ubiquitous, the outdoor clothing scant, and (as you discover later) the film is usually made in Canada, not the USA, because the snow is better north of the 49th parallel.  As I may have mentioned before, Jane and I take great delight in the filtration of these films before they are actually viewed, for if you do not like the characters in a book or film, you will not persist with them. Also, it is one of the few areas left where you can indulge your prejudices.  The stars of the show must look reasonably home-spun and not like something that has stepped out of a wool pattern catalogue; men should not sport the currently trendy half-shaven look as if they were Desperate Dan emerging from The Dandy comic; tattoos (on men or women) are taboo, as are face jewellery; the characters must be likeable so that you can empathise with them; and, finally, the dialogue must be intelligible, for the American accent does not always cross the Atlantic well (I don’t suppose our British Geordie, Brummie or Liverpudlian accents do either).  Anyway, we were watching one such film the other day and I suddenly asked,
“What exactly is an Egg Nog?”
So we looked it up in that well-known source of knowledge, ChatGPT, and Egg Nog turns out to be a concoction of egg yolk, milk, cream, caster sugar, nutmeg and the all-important final ingredient of ‘hooch’.  The ‘hooch’ can be dark rum, brandy or bourbon according to whim.  Apparently, the concept of Egg Nog actually originated in Britain when monks in winter time laced a posset with whatever alcohol they could get hold of, but it was our former Colonials who developed the drink further in the 18th century by using rum (grog) to make Egg Grog, which became known as Egg Nog.  If you are an American reader, you will know all that of course, but bear with us Brits who apparently still wear separate collars and think that cars with automatic gearboxes are a dangerous novelty.  Well, Egg Nog was too good an opportunity to miss, so it was decided that we would have a go at making one – and therein lay the problem.  In the Shacklepin household, I make the drinks and Jane makes the food, leading an innocent bystander probably to conclude that I should take on the job of Chief Apothecary.  But wait: the job entailed breaking and separating eggs; beating weighed quantities of foodstuffs in bowls; pans on stoves; stirring, blending, mixing, chilling.  Surely these required the talents of a cook (and a very excellent cook, if I may say so).  I submitted these cogent and logical arguments to Jane in a demarcation dispute that lasted quite some time, but it cut no ice (or egg nog) with her: Egg Nog was a drink – get on with it.  Of course, I got my own back, using that well-tried technique known as, “How Does This Work?”.  Mummy insisted on separating the egg for me and felt bound to supervise the beating of the egg with the sugar to the correct consistency.  She was preparing a Shepherd’s Pie at the time and it was becoming clear from her expression and manner that I was increasingly encroaching physically on her territory with my bowls and egg whisks and measuring jugs and pans.  But, as I pointed out to her, she had insisted that I take on the task of making the drink and – the truth is – it really was quite tricky in parts because (as she commented) I was essentially making an egg custard, which needed some expertise if I were to avoid making sweet scrambled eggs.  Anyway, the drink was finally finished, having been anointed with that most American of all American drinks, a large cupful of Woodford Reserve bourbon. The Egg Nog is chilling in the refrigerator as I write and we will give it a taste test tonight, toasting our American friends to the tune of The Star Spangled Banner.  It was a lot of hassle making it though – I bet you can get it as a powdered ready-mix in a US supermarket.

Christmas, for some, has come early this year in the form of several shipping containers washed up on the shore at Selsey in Sussex, having been swept off a container ship during a storm in the English Channel (‘What has happened to our cargo, Mr Mate? Bring me that Bosun!’). Naturally, this has resulted in a free-for-all on the part of the good burghers of Selsey.  The last time this happened, it was in Devon in 2007 and the shipping containers contained BMW motorbikes.  The locals had a field day, while the local bobby flitted helplessly along the beach trying to stop them, like a scene from a Gilbert & Sullivan opera.  This time the containers ashore in Selsey beach hold, not BMW motorbikes but…wait for it…bunches of bananas. The police have warned beachcombers that they must report any valuable flotsam that they find to the authorities within twenty eight days or face prosecution and a fine of £2,500 under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995.  But, my dear chap, of course we will…absolutely.  Anyone for fruit salad this Christmas?

So, seventeen days to go.  Where did all the time disappear to? It seems only yesterday that we were baking outside in the heat, praying for rain.  Now it is coming down in stair rods and Storm Bram is blowing Jane’s plant pots and our recycling boxes all over the garden.  There is not much likelihood of a white Christmas here unless you live on a mountain in Scotland; indeed, temperatures of 19C have been predicted for next week in Melbury, along with lots of soft refreshing rain. My distant cousin in South Dakota longs for a ‘brown’ Christmas every year, because snow for her comes early, stays deep, and leaves late.  I suppose I should be careful what I wish for.  Anyway, after a series of lunches and dinners with friends, Jane and I are on our own again this Christmas, but we have peppered fillet steak lined up for lunch, and we are comfortable in our own company.  

Merry Christmas to all my readers, wherever you may be: on land, at sea, under the sea and in the air.  Wishing you a joyful time and a happy 2026 with your friends.  I know I would be lost without mine.

Now, if you will excuse me, that Egg Nog chilling in the refrigerator is just crying out to be drunk.  I must satisfy its need.  And then there’s that cheesecake…

8 December 2025

Blog 145. Janet and John Go To Paris

It is a curious thing, but if you were to ask the average Englishman or Englishwoman which country was England’s oldest ally, he or she – if well educated – would probably say, correctly, “Portugal” (I refer the honourable reader to the Treaty of Windsor of 1386).  Ask the same English person which country is England’s oldest or natural enemy, however, and even the less-than-well-read would probably say “France”, for we have had a love/hate relationship with that country since 1066.  True, a lot of it has been because the English raided France for hundreds of years in attempts by Anglo-French kings to reclaim the land that they once owned, but the French have not been entirely blameless either, by never missing the opportunity to mess up England’s interests globally.   Yet the English love France.  They go there for their holidays, they drink French wine, they adore French cuisine; in fact they admire the entire joie de vivre that underpins the French way of life; but the odd thing is, few of the English bother to learn French.  Even ex-pats who have lived in France for years often have only a smattering of the French language and live an isolated life with fellow English.  The French see this reluctance to learn their language as arrogance; the English see the reluctance of the French to speak the de facto international language of English as arrogant and stubborn; and so the relationship goes on. 
I mention all this because, for many years, I refused to go on holiday to France for the simple reason that I could not speak French.  I take the view that one should at least try to speak the language of a host country, but I had never been taught French at school.   Eventually, I solved the problem by teaching myself French, and Jane and I embarked on our first French holiday back in the 1990s.  We have never looked back: beautiful country, friendly people, good food and wine, quaint customs – though, politically, France seems as hostile to England as ever (especially after Brexit). 
Given the Shacklepins’ relatively new love affair with the French, it will come as no surprise then that, when our local Arts Society advertised a four-day trip to arty sights in and around Paris, Jane and I jumped at the chance.  I had never been to Paris.

Our (luxury) coach left Melbury Market Place at 0700 on a Thursday, so we had an 0530 start to the day, with a taxi at 0630.   It took us 13½ hours to get to our hotel, the Novotel in Saclay, a rather nice village 17 miles south west of Paris – though we never managed to actually explore Saclay as there was no spare time.  Despite the location of the hotel, the optimum route to it from Calais was apparently to take a clockwise orbit around Paris from the north, like a space craft engaging in a sling-shot orbit. In the process we took in some terrible traffic congestion and some awful parts of the Paris suburbs that looked like some sort of dystopian nightmare – strange architecture, graffiti everywhere, a shanty town of refugees (presumably), and very heavy rain.   The hotel, when we arrived, was a weird contrast: it was clean, quiet and comfortable for sleeping, but fairly spartan elsewhere and with a strange taste in decor: a dark brown bathroom; dim lighting in the bedroom;  paper cups;  no tea; no spoons; a pinball machine in the lobby; no apparent sign of anyone senior in charge; a very nice building; a quite good breakfast, but appalling evening food (part of the package – the dinner, that is, not the appalling bit).  We got on well with our fellow travellers of the Arts Society, but there were a few of the inevitable dodderers and half-wits, some of whom missed the announcement at the Folkestone tunnel terminal to return to the coach and BOARD NOW, with the result that we lost our slot on the Le Shuttle that would take us through the tunnel, adding to the delay on the journey and throwing us into the rush hour on the Paris périférique. We staggered into the hotel, 2½ hours late, at 2130 (local time) for a dried-up meal of beef bourguignon with pasta. A bottle of wine cost 30 Euros, which we thought was a bit steep for a country which almost invented the stuff.
Day 1 (Friday) was a visit to Giverny: Monet’s Garden and the Impressionist Museum.  The weather was good, but the garden was packed, so the excellent guided tour was a bit like a trip to IKEA as we shuffled our way around.  Afterwards, we strolled through the village and enjoyed a good lunch al fresco in the French style.  I cannot remember much about the museum – very arty I think. We had boiled chicken for dinner.
Day 2 (Saturday) was far too busy.  Our first destination was Fontainebleau, arriving at 1130, but there was only time to look at the outside of the chateau and enjoy another excellent (though brief)  French lunch in La Petite Ardoise, a little backstreet restaurant that I had found on the internet. The very friendly patron and I enjoyed a good French conversation, though I think I might have sold him the Channel Islands.  At 1330 we were off to Barbizon, a little village noted for the emergence of the Colourists.   The guided tour of the museum was interesting, but very tiring (seen one painting you’ve seen them all),  and I nearly fell asleep in the video introduction that told us about Colourism. Heavy rain limited our stroll through the village and we left at 1600 for Chateaux Vaux le Vicomte – a huge privately-owned chateaux that seemed to be as big as Versailles.  The welcoming introduction was given by the Comte himself (nice chap).   The chateau was very impressive but – again – there was only enough time to gallop around its interior and snatch a bite to eat in the cafeteria before heading back to the coach in heavy rain.  The original plan had been to stay until 2300 to watch fireworks (in a downpour), but the crew mutinied and wanted bed.  We were back at the hotel by 2100 or thereabouts. No dinner (thank God).
Day 3 (Sunday).  Paris. We left the hotel at 0900.   Our driver kindly took an inner northern route so that we could see the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la République etc, but the plan came unstuck when it became clear that all roads south to the Seine and Notre Dame (our destination) had been, or were being, closed off by the police.  Place de la République was daubed in graffiti and a painted Palestinian flag, which we thought was appalling.  There was a heavy CRS and police presence.  In summary, we spent three hours in inner Paris in a coach, backing and filing, driving through back streets.  Our coach driver was brilliant and he never lost his cool or his determination to get us to our destination.  We saw most big sights in Paris twice or even three times, sometimes from different directions. In the end, our driver took a last desperate sling shot approach and managed to get us across the Seine to Notre Dame; but we were three hours adrift in our programme and it was about 1300.  The queue to get into Notre Dame stretched for four or five hundred metres so Jane and I decided to cut our losses and headed for Le Flore En L’ile, a nearby café that had been recommended by a Parisian friend.  We indulged ourselves with a delicious three-course lunch with wine but, afterwards, there was only time to stroll up the Right Bank as far as the Louvre before having to return to Notre Dame for a three-hour guided walking tour of Le Marais (the old quarter).   This was very well delivered and fascinating, but I suppose we must have walked at least six miles and we were exhausted by the time it was over.  We returned to the hotel for our final dinner and the worst meal I have ever come across. The starter was inedible and most people left it: it was a salad with some sort of sliced pressed meat containing gristle or cartilage;  I asked what it was (in my best French) and the waiter said conchon (pig) and indicated his nose.  Jane has since looked it up: it was Pig’s Snout Salad. The main course was breaded turkey escalopes, that well-known French speciality.
Day 4 (Monday). Day 4 saw our return home, which took another 13 ½ hours, partly because there was a long delay on Le Shuttle owing to a technical fault.  En route, we called in at Lens (near Calais) where there is a branch of the Louvre.  The latter was not really my cup of tea, I’m afraid and, in any case, by that time, I had come down with a stinking cold or the ‘flu as a result of the woman in the seat ahead of us coughing and sneezing throughout the entire trip. She was an interesting character worthy of singling out for a few special words in this journal: she was on her own and one of those people who listened to, and joined in with, all of our private conversation.  She had been one of the people who had caused us to miss our slot on Le Shuttle on the way out, and she spent the entire visit sighing, fidgeting and complaining about all and sundry.  The pinnacle of her contribution came when, on the way back to Calais, she suddenly said, 
“Oh God, I’m going to be sick”, 
and promptly threw up into a paper cup on her lap.  The smell of vomit stayed with us for the remainder of the trip home.  
We finally arrived back in Melbury at 2100 and grabbed a taxi home.  Jane and I slept like logs, both feeling a bit rough, but me worse (naturally).  I stayed in bed and cannot remember Tuesday or Wednesday.  I emerged on Thursday and did nothing; we finally managed to unpack on Friday.  We have almost recovered now – heaven knows what the bug was – but we now need a holiday to recover from the holiday.

So that was Paris: very educational,  very arty; some good people-watching.  It was not as bad as anecdotal evidence would have one believe, for the streets seemed to be free of dog mess and all the waiting staff we met were very pleasant and efficient.  I enjoyed speaking and eating French; we don’t think we will use a Novotel again and we don’t want to see the inside of a coach again for quite some time.  We really needed to stay in Paris much longer to fully appreciate  the city: another time perhaps (but not yet). 

The procedure for passing through the Channel Tunnel was bizarre, by the way.  After the coach driver had checked in, we drove up to a long building and all of us had to get off to walk through British passport control.  We duly queued for a nice man to look at our passports, walked the length of the building, then climbed back onboard the coach.  The coach then drove about 400 metres before stopping at another long building.  Off we got again, into the building, for two nice French chaps to stamp our passports, whereupon we walked the length of the building and climbed back on the coach again.  The requirement for the passport stamp was because of Brexit, of course, but wouldn’t you have thought that the two lots of immigration staff could have been accommodated in one building with one desk?  We had the same procedure at Calais when we returned to the UK.  Utterly weird.

There are so many eccentric things coming out of the establishment in the UK at the moment that I am spoilt for choice in choosing a good one to record and ridicule.  It has been a hard decision, but I think the madness that I will mention this time is the decision by the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) to change its guidance on emergencies at sea and insist that when someone falls overboard, the cry is not “Man Overboard” but “Person Overboard”.  The cry of “Man Overboard” might upset someone who considers themselves not to be a man, you see, there supposedly being God-knows how many categories on the gender spectrum.  Yes, woke is still with us.  So you have fallen into the oggin without a lifejacket, you are swallowing salt water and your past life is flashing in front of you, but suddenly the mental video of your life pauses and you think, 
“Hang on a minute…how dare they shout, ‘Man Overboard!’.  I am a Grade 57 non-binary”. 
I don’t think so, somehow.  Black mark RYA – you are clearly all at sea on this one

Now this is interesting (stop rolling your eyes at the back and keep your fingers off that keyboard). I am not, as you would say, ‘Green’ ie a person obsessed with the planet and the environment.  Even my best friends would not use that adjective.  Nor would they describe me as a socialist, despite my humble background like the Prime Minister’s (whose father was a toolmaker, you know).  I suppose most would say I was a cynic, but then a cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.  Cynic or realist will do for me, but such definitions do not deter me from wanting to get the most out of the energy available to us or to strive for the most efficient systems.  In striving for these goals I am well-qualified as an engineer: our house is fully insulated with a Grade A certificate in energy efficiency; we have solar photovoltaic panels on our roof which not only offset our electricity consumption but also generate an income; and we have had a fully electric car since 2020 whose energy costs us only 2 pence a mile to run.  Yet there there is more that could be done, and my research into these areas might be of interest to those seeking the transition to the colour of a frog.  No, don’t switch off, dear heart, this is an interesting lesson in why the UK government’s drive for zero carbon footprint is doomed to failure, but if you really are in a hurry, just jump to the last two sentences in this paragraph. 
The UK government offers a grant to households to adopt heat pumps for heating their houses.  A heat pump is driven by electricity and draws heat energy from the outside (the air, the ground, or a nearby stream or river) and emits it inside the house either via conventional radiators, underfloor heating or hot air vents.  And before you ask, yes you can still extract energy from freezing cold air.  It uses the same principle as a refrigerator, which draws heat out of the inside of the ‘fridge and dissipates it into the kitchen via those cooling fins on the back.  I won’t burden you with the thermodynamics, but basically, for every unit of electrical energy used to drive the heat pump, roughly three times that amount of energy can be transferred to heat your home.  Or to put it another way, if you currently heat your home with electric heaters, a heat pump would do the job for a third of the electricity consumption and cost.  It all sounds very good.  However, if you currently heat your home with gas, like we and most of the homes in the UK do, then the advantage starts to look a bit more shaky, because electricity in the UK costs considerably more per unit of energy (the Joule) than gas.  I did the calculation for a heat pump conversion of our 13-year old, modern, house and the cost came out as marginally more expensive than heating it with gas, as at present.  Nevertheless, I thought I would get a couple of quotations from heat pump installers to look at the feasibility of changing over, and this is where it gets interesting because it really surprised me.  Despite my house being what I would describe as modern and conventional, to convert it from gas central heating to heating by a heat pump, I would need: a fan evaporator unit about 1 metre x 1 metre x 0.5 metre outside our back door; all our internal walls ripped out to fit larger bore pipes for our radiators; existing radiators replaced with larger ones; and our airing cupboard enlarged into an adjacent bedroom to accommodate a hot-water storage cylinder about 1 metre in diameter and presumably weighing over a tonne.  Hmm.  I gave this a moment’s thought and then shelved any thought of having a heat pump. If you build a house from scratch and there is no gas laid on then, yes, a heat pump is worth having; but converting an existing house – even a modern one like mine – would be very disruptive and grossly expensive.

I never give up, of course, and there was one more thing in practical terms that could be done to improve our house energy efficiency, and that is to fit an integrated battery system with our photovoltaic solar panels.  That is what we have just done.  Currently, when the energy generated by our solar panels exceeds our domestic needs it is exported into the National Grid and we get paid for it.  A battery system, which we have just fitted, will store that excess and then use it to offset our domestic usage at night or in winter.  It will also top itself up from the Grid at off-peak times when the National Grid is making more electricity than the nation needs and, consequently is sold very cheaply.  The key thing is, we are already paid a certain amount of money for every unit of energy our solar panels generate (whether we use the energy or not); we are then paid a further amount of money for the proportion of that energy deemed to be exported to the Grid (an arbitrary 50%); we can offset our domestic usage during the day by running machines whenever the sun is shining; and finally (now) we can offset our usage on dark days by supplementing our usage from the battery.  It is all a bit complicated and involves some complex software and a flexible tariff from our electricity supplier that also charges our electric car when the electricity price is cheapest.  It is a “win, win, win, win” situation as far as I can tell.  The only snag is, the battery system has yet to be set to work by our installer as it has a fault.  
Now, I wonder how Jane would feel about having a wind generator in the back garden?

Things are becoming a little worrying.  I am starting to do some eccentric things and I am concerned that I may be slipping into some sort of dementia, something that might require me to take The Blue Pill and thus save the NHS from having to look after me until life’s end.  I’m sure the present government will help me on my way.  I bought a pair of bright yellow socks the other day and I have already taken to wearing cherry-red corduroy trousers in public (though, thankfully, not yet with the yellow socks).  That is worrying enough, but matters came to a head yesterday.  Jane and I went to the cinema to watch Downton Abbey – The Grand Finale and Jane went off piste by insisting on buying a bucket of popcorn.  This odd behaviour threw me out and clearly had some influence on what followed, because – brace yourself dear reader,  for this will really shock you –  I bought myself a Large Hot Dog with Onions and Tomato Ketchup for consumption in the cinema.  I have never bought a Hot Dog, or – indeed – any other form of comestible, in a cinema before.  No, not ever.  Of course, no-one of any consequence saw me as the cinema was in darkness.  My secret is safe (until I told you lot).  But it really is quite worrying, especially as I enjoyed the food.  Pray for me to return to sanity. It was a good film, by the way, and a fitting end to the saga.

With a whirr the garage door rose and daylight flooded in.  Cautiously and silently, I drove out the memsahib’s electric carriage for transport to our bridge club.  I stopped, and waited patiently for her to board the vehicle – the clang of the garage door behind me told me that she was on her way.  The car door opened and, just as she was about to climb in, she suddenly said,
“Oh my God.  Why didn’t you tell me that I was wearing blue tights?”.
I was totally nonplussed.
“I didn’t notice that you were.  Besides, what difference does it make?”
She looked at me as if I were being wilfully stupid.
“I can’t wear blue tights.  They don’t match the pattern in my skirt.  They should be black”.
And with that, she harrumphed and stalked off up the drive to the front door, tip-tap tip-tap in her high heels, there to re-enter the house and change her hosiery.  We only just made it to bridge club in time.
I remain baffled to this day.  I tell you, boys – women: I’ve been studying the species for nearly sixty years and I still don’t understand them. Still, without them what would little boys do?

25 September 2025

Blog 144. My Silver Coach Has Just Turned Into a Pumpkin

You know, there’s something about a steam cleaner.  When you’ve started cleaning with it, you just can’t put it down.  It’s a bit like when you use a pressure washer: you clean up a bit of the front drive and you think, “Wow, this is really good”, so you move on to pressure-wash the path; then maybe a bit of the wall; then you do the public pavement in front of the house; maybe you then start on the garage roof, which starts to look great.  At that point the front door hurtles open and your wife says,
“In!  Get in! You’ve been doing this for three hours, the light’s fading and the neighbours will start to complain. Put it away, come in, and wash your hands for supper”.
Or something like that. 
I digress slightly, but the steam cleaner has a similar influence.  I deployed the beast the other day to steam-clean the shower screen in our en-suite bathroom and, when I’d finished, I thought, “Hmm.  I wonder if it can clean the grout between the floor tiles?”, so I gave that a go.  Brilliant!  However, the steam blasted the muck out but, of course, it didn’t extract it, so I had criss-cross muddy lines all over the bathroom floor.  So I filled the washbasin with water and mopped up the dirt with a convenient sponge, rinsing between mopping.  In the process Jane’s electric toothbrush may have been knocked into the sink and, inadvertently, the wrong sponge may have been used, that is to say, the blue ‘clean’ sponge used for cleaning the taps and the sink, not the red ‘horrible’ sponge used to clean the lavatory pan and fittings [note my masterly use of the passive third person there].  The mopping up operation was going quite well, in my humble opinion, when Jane appeared to ask what I was doing (I having been absent from her influence for a suspiciously long time). It was then that she noticed the sponge I was using, the filthy water in the washbasin, and her electric toothbrush bobbing around in the aforementioned water like a nuclear submarine negotiating an industrial river contaminated with sewage.  She was, to say the least, not at all pleased.  Some harsh and unkind words were spoken. In vain I pointed out the new cleanliness of the bathroom floor, the spotless shower door and the potential for further cleaning opportunities using the properties of saturated steam.  I even offered to steam-clean and sterilise her toothbrush.  No, I was ordered to put it all away and to clear off while she recovered the bathroom from its grubby state (floor excepted), replaced one grubby sponge, scoured the bathroom washbasin, and decontaminated one electric toothbrush.  There’s just no pleasing some people.

England has become a nation of vexillophiles and local councils are furious.  Vexillology, in case you didn’t know (do buck up), is the study of flags.  No, not the flags that your mother scrubbed with Vim on her hands and knees in 1955 when you had a stone kitchen floor; I mean the other flags: bunting, the Union Jack, the St George Cross.  It all started when the good burghers of Epping, a leafy suburb north of London, started objecting to illegal immigrants being housed in a hotel in the town. This was partly because they objected to free luxury accommodation being used to house illegal immigrants, partly because they did not want the immigrants in their nice town (the immigrants were/are free to come and go, without confinement in the hotel), but mainly because some of the immigrants had been accused of sexually assaulting some local school girls (since proven in the courts).   Public demonstrations sprang up outside the hotel, the local council successfully obtained a court order ordering HM Government to house the immigrants elsewhere (a judgement since overturned), and the demonstrators began waving – wait for it – flags depicting the St George Cross, St George being the patron saint of England, just as the Scots have St Andrew, the Welsh have St David and the Irish have St Patrick.  Oh dear.  What started as a quiet public demonstration by decent people was immediately deemed to be an extreme right-wing riot.  Counter demonstrations sprang up in favour of the illegal immigrants (‘no immigration is illegal’), so more flags appeared: Union Jacks and St George flags, some on lampposts, as a gesture of solidarity for the original demonstrators.  The bunting spread beyond Epping to other towns, cities and districts all over England.  Variations on a theme sprang up, with mini-roundabouts and potholes spray-painted with the cross of St George.  It was then that local councils intervened, claiming that all those flags flying from lampposts and public property had to be removed as they were ‘dangerous to health and safety’.  Those mini roundabouts with a red cross (now much more visible) were apparently disfigured with graffiti and would be scoured clean.  No mention was made of the several towns and inner cities where Palestinian flags or LGBT Rainbow flags are similarly displayed – no, those Union Jacks and St George crosses must be taken down. 
You know, it’s a funny old thing: in all my time on this planet, working in the Armed Forces in what might be termed a varied and fairly dangerous environment, I have never come across a flag injuring anyone.  Moreover, in all my travels I have never come across any other country that appears to be ashamed of, and bans, its national flag. Council employees throughout England were directed to remove the flags from lampposts; the next day the flags were back up again for, if there is one thing that annoys and characterises the English, it is being told, in a free country, that they cannot do something that is perfectly within the law.  People will do it out of sheer imbuggerance (a fine example of the English vernacular), in defiance of petty authority.  As I write, there are Union Jacks and St George flags everywhere.  English men and women are driving out at night with step ladders and flags to decorate almost every urban lamppost, and it is driving local councils wild with frustration. As to central government, our lords and masters seem stunned by the strength of feeling that has suddenly burst forth.  I cannot resist the cliché that They just don’t get it.

Free speech, or lack of it, continues to dominate the news in Britain.  An Irish-born comedian, who wrote some unpleasant things about transgender people in a ‘tweet’ on X while he was away in the USA,  was welcomed home to Britain by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport.  They arrested him and took him off to be interrogated and charged with being offensive.  He is currently on bail, but there are unconfirmed reports that he has returned to the USA and is claiming political asylum.  Hmm: an Irish citizen, ‘tweeting’ on an American social media platform while in that country is then arrested on his return to the UK.  Jurisdiction lawyers in three countries will have a field day.   Apparently, in my country one is not allowed to state that one has to have been born a biological woman, ie with XX chromosomes, to be called a ‘woman’ or female human.  I couldn’t possibly comment. Apparently it is also against British law to offend people.  Gosh, I do it inadvertently almost every day; the country and my past are littered with folk who somehow found me offensive. Oh dear. Anyway, there is a fine brouhaha over the entire incident, not least because the Metropolitan Police deemed it necessary to use five officers to physically arrest the man (ie a human with XY chromosomes) as he left the aircraft.  Unlike in the rest of the UK, police officers at major British airports are armed in these troubled times, so that explains the fact that the arresting officers were carrying firearms; however, using them for this arrest made the incident even more disproportionate.  The fact is that, putting aside whether this man had committed an offence, the Metropolitan Police could just as easily have written him a letter when he got home, asking him to come in to the nearest police station to discuss his ‘tweets’.  Some fairly junior officer – an Inspector perhaps, or even a Sergeant – must have thought that sending in the riot squad with body armour, Glock 17 pistols and Hekler & Koch MP5SF carbines would send just the right message to the rest of us to keep our fingers off our keyboards.  I trust whoever made that decision was invited to a meeting with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, without coffee being provided.

As outlined in my last Blog (Blog 143), we enjoyed a splendid lunch in Portland last week, if that is not an oxymoron.  I make that last remark because my naval memories of the Island of Portland, which hangs off the Dorset coast, are as bleak as the island itself.  I have written about the place before and I refer the honourable reader to my missive in Blog 93.  For those who are pressed for time, I summarise by  saying that Portland (joined to the mainland by a causeway that rarely floods) was previously the location of the naval base HMS OSPREY, home of Flag Officer Sea Training, whose staff conducted Operational Sea Training on all British warships (and some European ones) in preparation for them entering the Fleet after building or after a refit.  The very necessary experience usually lasted six weeks and subjected ships’ companies to all the elements that war, peacekeeping or the sea could throw at them: fire; flood; collision; disaster relief ashore; air, submarine or surface action; attack by divers; piracy; smuggling; replenishment at sea; steaming through fog….the exercises were relentless and continued night and day for the whole period.  By the end of the ‘workup’, as it is known colloquially, ships’ companies were highly efficient as a team and better for the experience, but were left with an unerring hate of the bleak, wind-swept island where the whole thing had taken place.  I do know of two friends who were in ships actually based at Portland (as opposed to passing through on workup), and they have fond memories of the local hostelries, the sea, the sand and the fun (the ‘fun’ presumably being the enjoyment of observing fellow sailors suffering as they jumped through hoops); those two friends are the exception to the general rule.   The naval base closed in 1995 and workup now takes place in Plymouth which, in my opinion, lacks the bleakness of war that Portland Naval Base managed to inculcate, but times change and we must change with them.  Portland is now Portland Port, a commercial undertaking, and it was there that Jane and I enjoyed the splendid lunch last week. 
I had not been back to Portland since a bleak and traumatic workup in HMS NONSUCH in January 1991, and I approached the island warily, as if expecting a bomb to go off at any minute; but, heh, a free lunch is a free lunch.  The meal was onboard the small cruise ship, mv HEBRIDEAN PRINCESS which offers cruises, generally of only seven days’ duration, around the Scottish Isles.  She only carries forty eight passengers and so is able to provide a high-quality, homely, individual experience with top cuisine as part of an all-in package.  Typically, she will anchor off an island overnight then, after a relaxing breakfast, passengers will be disembarked by boat to explore the island on a guided tour which might include a local garden, a religious settlement such as Jura, or local cuisine depending on the theme of the cruise.  After re-embarkation of passengers in the afternoon, the ship weighs anchor and moves on to the next island or location before anchoring for the night, and so on.  There are usually two Gala nights (black tie) and occasionally there is a guest speaker or a performance by local artistes, but generally the passengers make their own entertainment, relaxing, playing bridge, reading or whatever.  If bad weather is expected, the programme is adjusted and the ship runs for shelter among the myriad of islands or along the Scottish coast.  As I stated in my last blog, the type of cruise offered is right up our street so we accepted the invitation of a free lunch and tour of the ship with alacrity.  We were not disappointed. The day proved a super adventure, not least because it provided the opportunity for me to see how much Portland had changed in thirty four years, and to put the ghost of my memories to rest. 
The first thing I noticed after we had crossed the causeway was the derelict concrete shell of the former HMS OSPREY wardroom (officers’ mess).  I think I am correct in saying that, in 1991, it was very new and the most modern shore-based wardroom in the Royal Navy: a two or maybe three storey edifice built like a hotel, with large double-glazed windows and very comfortable accommodation that could be used by visiting families at the weekend when husbands were recovering from fighting wars.  Now, it is an empty shell, windowless, covered in graffiti, like some relic of East Germany.  I have no idea why it was not converted into a hotel when the navy moved out; it would have been perfectly suited for the task, but there it is.  I am not sure what happened to the adjacent Senior Rates accommodation, which was just as modern; I did not have time to explore.  Perhaps that faired better.  Next stop was the dockyard gate, which was still there, but now the entrance to the commercial Portland Port.  We had been told to bring photo ID to get in, and this was duly scrutinised and our names checked off.  We were told to drive up the road, turn left, then report to the cruise terminal (a new addition) about 400 yards away, which we duly did.  While we were conducting the usual family debate about where to park there was a tap on the window.  It was a port policeman who asked what we were doing.  I explained. 
“Ah”, he said,”You shouldn’t be here.  Park in the visitors’ carpark by the main gate. Just drive up to the barrier and it will lift.  A bus will take you to the ship.  The staff will issue you with passes and so on”. 
So back we drove to the visitors’ carpark and stopped at the entrance barrier, and waited.  And waited.  Nothing happened.  In the end, I backed up, drove around the port again, and entered the carpark through the exit.  We clambered out of the car and made our way to a nearby Mercedes mini-bus, which was waiting to take us back to the ship, 400 yards away.  Our photo ID was checked again and we were issued with lanyard passes.  Crikey, I thought, this place is security and health and safety gone mad: I have managed to get access to MOD nuclear facilities with less rigmarole than this, and why on earth could we not walk through the port?  I thought of the many times I had made my way though HM Dockyards, stumbling over train lines, tripping on caissons, avoiding dry docks and bumping into discarded gun turrets; strolling through the new Portland Port would be like taking a walk in the park by comparison.  Whatever, off we went in the luxury Mercedes, which never got out of second gear, through a further security gate to draw up next to the ship, which was secured against what I think used to be ‘Q’ pier.  It is now called the Deep Water Berth.  The ship was reassuringly conventional.  Unlike a modern cruise ship, with its many decks spiralling off into the clouds like a floating wedding cake, HEBRIDEAN PRINCESS was constructed on traditional lines: trim, solid, robust and businesslike.  She had been built in 1964 as a car ferry for service among the Western Isles of Scotland, with scantlings to deal with the worst seas the Minch could throw at her.  Since then the car deck has been converted into accommodation and the whole ship reconfigured.  There was no sign of her age and she was as neat as a new pin: 236 feet overall with a beam of 46 feet, black hull, white superstructure, red funnel and not the slightest sign of rust streaks, dents or wear and tear (of course, I looked very carefully).  We made short work of the brow and were greeted onboard by the Managing Director himself, who directed us to a very comfortable lounge overlooking the foredeck.  A smiling steward presented us with a glass of Taittinger champagne and, for me, the exorcism of my Portland memories began.  The lounge was very homely, almost like a country house, with comfortable squashy sofas and armchairs, large windows and even a fireplace.  We made ourselves very comfortable while the MD explained the history of the ship, the rationale behind the Company, and the mode of operation.  The ship operated from Oban in Western Scotland, with weekly cruises starting and ending, usually, on Tuesdays.  Although the area of operation was normally the Western Isles, some cruises also covered the Orkneys and Shetland.  Every three years the ship cruised around the British south coast and islands: the Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly and ports along the English Channel (hence her current port of Portland).  After the presentation, our thirty-strong party was split into two for a tour of the ship, one party led by the Captain and the other by the Purser.  There were twenty double or twin cabins, and eight singles, all of various sizes ranging from two large suites with balconies in the superstructure down to four small internal cabins on the lower deck.  Whatever the size, all the cabins were beautifully appointed in a Scottish country hotel style and the housekeeping was immaculate.  I noticed that each cabin included a decanter of Scotch whisky for the guests (all the drinks onboard are inclusive and guests are asked in advance for details of their favourite tipple so that supplies can be obtained).  The ship’s bridge was a trip back in time for me, for it reminded me of the ships in which I had played when my father served in the Merchant Navy of the 1950s and 1960s: there was the brass ship’s binnacle with its Kelvin Balls and Flinders Bar; here was the ship’s wheel; there were the twin brass telegraphs for sending orders to the manned engine room.   Apparently, when the ship is under way passengers are quite welcome to enter the bridge to chat to the Officer of the Watch and helmsman; the only time they are excluded is during manoeuvring. I sighed nostalgically and could have spent an hour in that wheelhouse, just rubbing my hands lovingly over the polished wood and gazing at the shining brightwork.  Of course, there were modern additions such as the GPS, the Minerva fire alarm system and the VHF, but I still found that ship’s bridge to be reassuringly traditional.  Alas, we had to move on and soon found ourselves in the Dining Saloon with its crisp white tablecloths, gleaming tableware and attentive stewards and stewardesses.  White or red wine (or both) was offered to accompany three courses, with a choice of two dishes for the main course.  I ordered pork belly,  which was delicious and very professionally presented and served; Jane ordered fillet of plaice.  The wine was well-chosen.  Jane tried both the red and the white and seemed to enjoy them immensely, but I was driving so only had half a glass of the red.  We chose to sit at a large round table with about eight other guests and the atmosphere was very convivial (well, the wine and earlier champagne helped).  We all agreed that we would sign up tomorrow as soon as we found a particular cruise that would suit us.  We parted the ship as good friends, Jane burbling like a three badge parrot as she descended the gangway, and me looking back longingly – determined to book a cruise so that I could return.  Reality kicked in when we arrived back home and perused the brochure.  The cheapest seven-day cruise in the cheapest (internal) double cabin would cost us £3,870 each; the most expensive nine-day cruise in the most expensive double cabin (a suite) would cost us £22,060 each.  That did not include the internal transit costs of getting to and from Oban in Western Scotland, but I suppose if you can afford £44,120 for a nine-day cruise then a return train or air fare to Scotland will be little potatoes.  Oh dear: my silver coach had just turned into a pumpkin.  Oh, but that ship was so beautiful.  Ho hum: one day.

Well, the rats (Blog 143) have gone on holiday.  Or possibly to heaven.  We returned from an excellent two-day break with our friends in Altrincham to find one dead creature in one of our traps (presumably starved to death), but there have been no sitings since and very little of the official rat catcher’s poison has been taken.  Paradoxically, Jane is annoyed by the absence of corpses (bit of a bloodthirsty spouse I have there). She takes the view that we paid out £150 to the council rat catcher but none of his traps have activated and little of his poison has gone; I take the view that, whatever, there are no rats, ergo our goal has been achieved.  Anyway, the rat catcher will make one final visit soon and take away his gear, whereupon another exciting chapter in our day-to-day lives will be over.

Alors. We are off to France tomorrow morning for a four-day culture visit with our local Arts Society.  A bus – I beg your pardon – a luxury coach – will collect us from Melbury town centre at the ungodly time of 0700 and we will pass through Le Tunnel to arrive at 1900 tomorrow evening.  Visits to gardens, museums, Fountainebleau and Paris are in the itinerary and we hope to get into Notre Dame Cathedral on Sunday, returning to Blighty on Monday night.  Jane is very keen; I just wonder if trying to educate me in the arts will be like casting pearls before swine, but I do look forward to practising the language again and immersing myself in French culture and cuisine. Besides, if Jane is content it makes for a happy ship.  Wish us bon chance.

Summer is over.  It is official.  At long last we have soft refreshing rain, the lawn is greening up nicely, cracks in the ground are closing up and Jane wore tights yesterday for the first time in six months.  It won’t be long before her cardigan makes its appearance and our central heating cuts in.  We cannot complain for we have enjoyed an excellent summer; time to move on and get back to a normal England.  Only 106 days to Christmas!

Au revoir. Je reviendrai dans un mois, j’espère.

10 September 2025

Blog 143. Does Your House Have a Number?

Roland is back.  That is to say, Roland, his live-in partner, his mistress, his children, and his children’s children have decided that our home is a very desirable place to live (plenty of food and water, good schools, liberal policy towards down-trodden and much-maligned creatures, immediate accommodation with H&C etc).  They have, therefore, moved in.  No, Roland is not an immigrant or asylum seeker from the oppressive states of Wiltshire or Devonshire; Roland is a rat.  We first noticed Roland and his kin when we were taking breakfast in the Garden Control Tower (aka the Breakfast Room) at Shacklepin Towers with our Australian friends Derek and Laura, who were over in Europe to see the Old Country.  As we munched on our fresh fruit salad, Derek suddenly said,
“Stone me…a rat!”,
and pointed to the garden shed where a family of rodents were happily scuttling too and fro in a welcome dance for our antipodean visitors.  Jane, of course, nearly had a fit.  Roland – or rather, probably, Roland’s great grandfather had visited us before (Blog 98), but the meeting had been brief and he seemed to disappear after he took a particular liking to the rat poison that I put down.  Now, here was his family, four years later, come to say hello and catch up on old times.  It would be fair to say that they were not welcome.  The breakfast discussion immediately moved on to the best way of ridding ourselves of Roland and his family without infringing their entitlements as dictated by the European Court of Rodent Rights (ECRR).  In the years since the last infestation poison had been tried as a deterrent, but – clearly – it had become ineffective.  Derek suggested laying traps, as these had proved successful in Victoria: you baited a cage with tasty food and, when the rat trod on a trigger inside, the cage closed, trapping it.  The trapped rat was then given a swimming lesson in a convenient bucket or water butt, or transported humanely to Rwanda for release.  I immediately ordered two traps from Mr Amazon and set them up the next day, using peanut butter as  bait.  In the days that followed, we caught six rats of various ages, two field mice, one traumatised hedgehog and one very irate robin.  The non-rats were, of course, immediately released into the garden – the hedgehog, no doubt, vowing never to return.  Despite the modest success of the traps, however, Roland and his family continued to disport themselves every morning, so Jane wanted more immediate and violent retribution.  I immediately started research to identify the most powerful, yet legal and modestly priced, air pistol to arm The Great White Hunter.  Surprisingly, there were few weapons deemed suitable for the job within the chosen criteria.  A 0.22 calibre was reckoned to be the best sized round for a humane kill, and a rifle was more likely to be successful than a pistol.  However, legal though it might have been, I did not want to be reported to the police for hanging out of an upstairs window with a 0.22 rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.  I finally opted for a CO2 powered Webley pistol called, aptly enough, Nemesis.  I used to be a member of my college shooting team when I was a Sub Lieutenant and I also came to be a reasonable shot with the Service issue 9mm Browning pistol (officer I/C HMS BARCHESTER landing party, Portlandia, 1970).  The next problem was how to obtain the Webley.  Unlike in, say, the US state of Montana where you can buy a gun with minimal paperwork in less than a day, Britain (thank heavens) has very strict controls on the sale of firearms.  Even air guns or CO2 weapons below the threshold muzzle velocity that would require a licence cannot simply be ordered through the post.  To my surprise, I found a gun shop about ten miles away, situated out of town on a country road, and Jane and I immediately set off to make the necessary purchase.  Gosh, this was a whole new world to me.  Despite the remoteness of the gun shop, there were about six other customers visiting on the weekday morning that we were there.  Most seemed to be known to the staff and they spoke a private language of their own:
“Have you got any six-one-twos?”
“No, we’re out of them, but we’ve just had a delivery of five-three-eights.”
“Ah, right – I’ll take a box of those.  Is Charlie in upstairs?”
“Yep.  Away you go…”
Of course, although the UK has very strict gun laws, farmers and landowners can still buy shotguns or hunting rifles under licence to deal with vermin, cull deer, or bag their meal for the evening.
I asked for the Webley Nemesis.  The woman behind the counter said she had one in stock and came out with what seemed to be an enormous pistol, about 14” long, such as would be carried by Clint Eastwood in his campaign to clean up San Fransisco.  Whoa, I thought, this looks like the biz.  Best I get some ammunition at the same time.  Some money changed hands, a photocopy of my driving licence was taken, and we were soon out in the Barsetshire sunshine toting (discreetly, in its box) Nemesis – the new Rat Killer.  I tried it out when we got home: WACK!  The power was impressive.  But, do you know what? Ever since I reloaded the gun and placed it very carefully, half cocked, on the patio table, no rat has stayed still long enough for me to take aim on it.  The family is still there, laughing at us.  So, after all that, I have called in The Terminators from Barsetshire County Council to do a professional extermination job.  £150 it has cost me (three visits at £50 each).  I shall add the fee to the £130 for the gun and the £27 for the traps.  These immigrants have cost me a fortune, but they are about to get their comeuppance.  Anyone want to buy a powerful CO2 pistol?  Or maybe, on second thoughts,  I had better keep it in case Roland’s more distant relatives decide to move in after he is moved out.

“The clouds were afraid, one-ten in the shade, and the pavement was steaming”.  So ran the lyrics of Summer (the First Time) by Bobby Goldsboro in 1973, and it seems particularly apt here at the moment.  Well, not quite.  Actually it has peaked at 97 in the shade (36 deg C) as I write, here in Melbury, which is plenty hot for us in a country not used to it.  Not that I am complaining, for both Jane and I love the sun (she being Caribbean) and we have taken all the usual precautions to keep the house cool as the sun blazes down.  We haven’t even needed to use a fan.  This year has been tremendous for sunshine.  It started in March and has shone almost continuously up to now – I think I heard on the news that we are into our third heat wave.  The downside, of course, is that most of the country is in drought and the harvest this year will be a total failure.  Parts of the UK have received relatively short deluges of rain, but we in Melbury have had very little and our garden is as hard as iron, the lawn cracked and brown.  It cannot last, of course, but for now, at least two of us are revelling in the Summer.

The UK government, in its infinite wisdom, has declared that, in future, all interns recruited to the civil service, shall be ‘working class’. A worthy aim with good intentions, I dare say, but my reaction was to say, ‘define working class’.  I was born in a terraced house on Tyneside which had an outside lavatory, a coal house and no bathroom (we washed in the kitchen sink in water boiled in the kettle).  I bathed in a portable galvanised bath tub once a week every Friday.  My mother wore a turban around her hair.  Am I ‘working class’ then? Our socialist government is obsessed with anachronistic terms like this, as if we were still living in the 1930s.  The other common theme of our current government is that it gives preference to ‘working people’ – a group that excludes retired folk like me, the disabled, the mentally unfit, the unemployed and the simply bone idle, but includes high earners such as stock brokers and CEOs of large corporations.  It turns out that the government’s definition of ‘working class’ in this context is based on what your father was doing when you were 14. My father was an officer in the Merchant Navy when I was 14 so I guess that would have written me off for the intern job today.   There is, apparently, a list of ‘working class’ jobs to aid the definition.  ‘Working class’ jobs include labourers, clerical assistants, and shop workers as well as skilled trades such as plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, joiners and train drivers.  The latter recently received a pay rise taking their salaries up to £70,000 a year, and plumbers can do very well, thank you but, no, they are still ‘working class’ it would seem, and their children will still get preference for an intern’s job over, say, the child of a vicar on £30,000 a year. Mind you, being an intern may not be all it is cracked out to be: a well-known BBC journalist and newscaster has just been accused of berating a BBC intern for not spreading the Marmite on the journalist’s toast properly (if I was that intern, the journalist would be wearing the Marmite). 
Giving anyone preferential treatment for a job seems wrong to me, be it for reasons of colour, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual preference or background; the job ought to go to the best qualified person.  Positive discrimination just causes resentment in a society that places high value on fairness.  However, if the government must give bias to hoi polloi, perhaps they should base it on whether the candidate calls a lavatory a bog, or whether the family keeps whippets or pigeons.  Better still, the test that a recent correspondent to The Times was given in the Officers’ Mess of his British Army regiment before meeting royalty might do: he was asked whether the family home had a number.

They do say that an optimist describes his beer glass as half full, while a pessimist would say that his glass is half empty.  I am a pessimistic sort of chap, myself, having been around on this earth for long enough to know that, if things can go wrong, they usually will.  It is with some surprise and delight, therefore, that I can report that our impromptu stay at the voco Oxford-Thames Hotel in July (Blog 142) for my birthday proved to be very good indeed.  The hotel is located on the banks of the River Thames, about six miles south of Oxford and adjacent to Sandford Lock.  The establishment seems to have been developed from an ancient manor house with its adjacent stone outbuildings, but all are now linked internally.  There are large grounds and a well laid out garden, including a parterre.  The staff were welcoming, friendly and efficient; the fabric of the buildings was in excellent shape; dinner (included in our package) was delightful; our room was large and comfortable, air conditioned, and had a balcony overlooking the parterre and the Thames beyond.  It was all so good that I started wondering what the snag was, but, no, there were no snags (unless you counted having to pay for parking) and we had a very enjoyable stay.  The only incongruity we encountered was that the breakfast did not match the quality of the dinner of the previous night. It was most odd, for the buffet breakfast was really no better than one would receive in a Premier Inn or similar budget hotel.  The range of food available was quite good and seemed to cater for all international tastes, as one would expect, but the fruit was disappointing. For example, there were wedges of melon, but they were offered whole, so you had to eat them with a knife and fork; there were bowls of whole fruit such as apples, oranges and bananas, but pears and grapefruit were tinned so a fresh fruit cocktail would be difficult to concoct or would disappoint. The sausage and bacon were filling, but of poor quality.  The irksome things for me were the self-service tea and coffee from the machine (“Get your own bloody coffee”) and one of those dreadful self-service conveyer belt machines that warms up bread and calls it toast, while your coffee is getting cold.  Bearing in mind that the breakfast would have cost us over £20 each if it had not been included in our package, the meal was poor value for money and rather let down the general image of the hotel.  
We made good use of our time at Sandford, walking the Thames Path south to Abingdon (ten miles) on Day 2, then following the Thames Path north to Oxford (six miles) on Day 3.  Both days were very hot and we caught buses back to the hotel on each day (let’s not be silly about this).  Very unusually for us, we actually swam in the hotel pool after we returned from Oxford, and were the only people using it.  We passed on using the sauna – we were quite hot enough after six miles under a blazing sun, thank you.  Oxford city, by the way, was dreadful: very hot, very crowded and full of buses.  We were glad to get out of there.  All in all, a very pleasant hotel and recommended, though one should bear in mind that it is large, corporate, hosts several conferences, and is a wedding venue (for which it would be ideal).

It might be worth saying a little more about the Thames Path for the benefit of those who like a good country walk.  The Thames Path is designated a National Trail and it runs from the source of the River Thames near Kemble in Gloucestershire all the way down to the Thames Barrier in London.  It is axiomatic that it follows the River Thames the whole way and so navigation is easy and it is on level easy ground the whole way.  The Path is roughly 184 miles long, so best taken in small batches.  There are 45 locks on the non-tidal Thames between Lechlade in Gloucestershire and Teddington in Outer London, and these offer useful Wells-Fargo-like staging posts on the route, where you can obtain water, rest on a bench or just chat with the lock keeper.  Alas, you cannot change horses there, but they are usually very peaceful places if you just want to look at the water pouring over the adjacent weir or watch the boats pass through.  Jane and I kept two boats on the non-tidal Thames at different times and so we got to know the waterway very well.  The rural parts of the Thames Path are the best bits and we have walked several stretches on the Upper Thames, mostly upstream of Oxford where the going is particularly quiet and remote.  Recommended for those who like walking in the countryside without the extra strain of climbing hills, fording streams or falling into bogs.

Tell me, why are people so scruffily dressed these days?  On two nights at the hotel we were served dinner on a mezzanine floor above the bar because, for some reason, the restaurant was closed.  Our vantage point overlooking the bar was perfect for people-watching and we gazed down at our fellow guests like Greek gods looking down from Mount Olympus.  We were astonished by what people thought was suitable attire in a top hotel for the evening: shorts, grubby tee shirts or vests, flip flops on their feet – not one person in that bar had made any effort. Jane and I were hardly dressed in black tie, but at least she wore a dress with matching shoes, jewellery and lipstick.  I had ditched the tie and wore chinos, penny loafers and a lightweight linen jacket.  Our fellow diners were mostly similarly casually dressed like us, but the bar clientele, balancing their food on their laps or on low coffee tables, were just complete slobs.  Someone should have told them that they were in a decent hotel in the evening in England, not lounging on the beach in Benidorm.  Have a sense of dignity, decorum and self respect for heaven’s sake.

As a follow-on to the last grumble, why does no-one wear shoes any more?  Jane and I attended a matinee at the theatre in The Big City last week and baled out, as we sometimes do, during the interval.  The performance was lacklustre and amateurish in parts and we saw no point in suffering through the second half as well as having paid for it (besides, Jane fell asleep part way through Act 1).  Finding ourselves, then, at a loose end before attending our pre-booked early supper in the city, we decided to behave totally out of character and just sit outside a nearby wine bar, sipping cool glasses of wine and watching folk pass by.  We decided to conduct an impromptu survey on footwear and concluded that about 99.9% of the men, and maybe 90% of the women all wore dirty white gym shoes or “trainers” as I believe they are called.  I did not see a single pair of Oxfords or decent brogues on the men; the 0.1% not wearing “trainers” wore pointed black leather shoes that I would call winkle-pickers in the 1960s, and I immediately classified the men as probably estate agents.  Of the women, few wore pretty sandals as appropriate for the hot weather; some wore hideous clumpy platform-soled things and the odd one or two wore Doc Marten or knee-length boots (it was 30 deg C in the shade).  I gather these “trainers” are very comfortable and offer good support to the feet, but a properly fitted pair of men’s leather shoes can be just as comfortable and supportive. If properly cared for,  they will last a lifetime.  I have a pair of brown Barker Oxford shoes that I have had for well over a thirty years and they have only just been returned to the shoemakers in Northamptonshire for a full refurbishment and refit using the original last used to make them.  They will be returned in an ‘as new’ condition and I reckon they will see me out.  I still wear my navy-issue black uniform shoes occasionally too – stout Oxfords with years of life left in them, and fine examples of the English cordwainer’s craft.  “Trainers”, oh dear – save them for the running track. 

Suffering from withdrawal symptoms of our old friends Marjorie and Benjamin in Plymouth, we invited ourselves down for a night to reminisce and partake of the excellent fare that Marjorie invariably provides.  She did not disappoint, and we dined and breakfasted off beautiful china plates laid out in style in the large dining room.  We felt like the King and Queen of Barsetshire who had popped down to Plymouth for a state visit.  On the way home we called in to our old marina in Kingswear, near Dartmouth to see how the hotel and apartment development was progressing and to chat to the marina staff with whom we had become very friendly.  Crikey.  We were shocked by the state of the marina site, which seemed to be in a worse state than when we left it last December.  Builders’ rubble was everywhere and we had to park the car outside as the access road was blocked by lorries.  Even the pedestrian route into the marina involved us negotiating a deep trench then stumbling across rubble and stones as if picking our way through a bombed site.  The hotel did not seem to have progressed very far in eight months.  It was still windowless but we did notice that it now had a roof so perhaps things were happening inside.  Apparently it should be finished in October but it is not intended to open it until early in 2026 when the adjacent apartment block is finished – the guests would otherwise be afforded a view of the aforementioned bombed site.  The apartment block (note, ‘apartments’ not ‘flats’) was well up but, like the hotel, still windowless and – in our opinion – brash, dominating and totally out of keeping with Devonshire or the River Dart.  There are waterside chalets on piles and houses yet to be built on the site – heaven knows what price they will attract.  See for yourself at www. nossondart.com/ – it is a lovely part of Devonshire but Jane and I left wondering if, when it is all finished, it will be a mini village: overcrowded, noisy and unaffordable.  Maybe we left at the right time.  As to the marina itself, the staff were still lovely and the facilities for boats and berth holders superb – but they still hadn’t fitted a security gate to the access bridge so anyone could just stroll onto the marina and down onto the pontoons, unchallenged.  An odd set of priorities there.

Have you ever wondered what you would spend your money on if you won the National Lottery?  Well, I have just the answer.  Thorne Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales, is up for sale. The private island and its former Victorian fort have been totally refurbished to modern standards and the fort now includes five bedrooms, double-glazed windows, electrical power, underfloor heating using a heat pump, a reverse osmosis plant for fresh water, a sewage treatment plant, a helipad, and a crane for boats.  That will do me nicely: no noisy neighbours, no gratuitous hifi music, no dogs, no children…a snip at at offers over £3m.  You can be my first guests if I win the lottery – only four at a time please and let me know if you have any allergies.

12 August 2025

Blog 142. The Burning Question

“It’s a long ship, this.”
Thus spoke the memsahib as we sat outside on our patio in the shade, wallowing in the delight of a pleasingly hot day like hippopotami in the mud of the Rufiji River.  I could not resist the thought that I had trained her well, for the phrase is Royal-Navy-Speak for, “My glass is empty and I could do with a refill”.  This was the second such phrase that she had used, for she is already well-practised in, “Eyes in the boat”, an order given to naval boat’s crew as a lady is descending the accommodation ladder or gangway into a boat alongside a warship, that her modesty not be disturbed by the licentious eyes of rough sailors.  That phrase is obsolete now, as British warships no longer carry ships’ boats in the traditional sense and the historical practice of running a boat routine will have gone too.  But there was the phrase, still uttered by my dear wife a week ago, because (so I was told – I didn’t notice) some girl in a bikini and thong was sunbathing on the beach in Swanage as we strolled along the promenade.  But back to that drink. As The Drinks Person in our household I immediately leapt up to replenish her glass with a further injection of Pimm’s No 1, for Summer has well and truly come to Melbury and we are baking in 28C degree heat.  Why go on holiday when we can get warmth in England?  Besides, with temperatures around the Mediterranean reaching into the 40s Centigrade, we are probably better off where we are.  As in previous years, the weather has spawned new uses of English nouns and phrases.  We had ‘The Beast from the East’, ’The Troll from Trondheim’ and ‘Snow Bombs’ in recent Winters; we now have the phrase ‘Heat Dome’ this Summer.  To be sure, it has been an excellent year for sunshine so far, and I have been able to resort to short-sleeved shirts, chinos, desert boots, and the battered Panama hat – a survivor of many a run ashore in tropical climes.  Shorts?  Good Lord, no. My legs are not fit for public consumption, though I did, daringly, wear them in the back garden the other day with my (khaki) socks rolled down.  I believe in showing some sartorial decorum, even if most of the rest of the British public doesn’t give a damn. 

As I mentioned in the last blog, the sale of my motor yacht has given Jane and me new freedom, and we have been (seemingly) here, there and everywhere.
The end of May found us with our old boating friends Raymond and Carole in Melton Mowbray for a couple of days, during which our new electric car, a VW ID3,  performed admirably – completing the return journey of just under 300 miles without needing to be charged.  Our friends looked after us very well and we packed a lot into the time available.  One visit, to a local craft museum, was about the history of the weaving industry and we learned a great deal.  Not for the first time, I pondered on the miracle that we exist today, given the appalling work conditions that our ancestors had to endure: long hours, deafening noise, parsimonious wages, poor food, spartan living conditions.  Yet here we are. 

In June, a pop concert was scheduled to be held for a weekend on a site near our house so, naturally, I decided to evacuate the premises for the duration in favour of a quieter spot elsewhere. We were due to visit our friends Sam and Laura, whom we had not seen for a year, in Cheshire later in the week;  we therefore decided to tag on a weekend in Chester beforehand.  Golborne Manor, a delightful B&B in the countryside south east of Chester proved to be an excellent choice and made our visit particularly enjoyable.  I had never been to Chester before, but the city left a very favourable impression on me.  We walked the full perimeter of the ancient walls (about two miles), which gave us a good view of the inner city as well as an appreciation of its size and history.  We also admired the racecourse located just outside the city walls, dating from 1539 and the oldest racecourse still in use (the slang term ‘Gee, Gee’ for horses is said to originate from the course’s first owner, Henry Gee, in the 16th century).  It was a pity there was no meeting that weekend, for we would have had a grandstand view from the city walls.  Chester Castle was hosting a mini pageant when we passed and, as it was free, we went in and had a good chat with the stall-holders.  The most interesting was the gunsmith, who was dressed in 18th century garb and who gave us a fascinating lecture on muskets, blunderbusses,  ancient rifles and naval boarding pistols.  We were allowed to pick up the weapons and I was astonished by just how heavy the British infantry musket (nicknamed ‘Brown Bess’) was: it weighed about 10 lb or 4.5 kg. Carrying the thing any distance would have been hard enough, but aiming it would have been even harder.   Even the American Pennsylvania rifle, though seemingly smaller, seemed to weigh a hefty amount.  The latter was, apparently, the most accurate weapon of the 18th century and was used to devastating effect during the American War of Independence.  The backwoodsmen who formed the American militia were well-skilled and practised with the rifle, and were forerunners of modern-day snipers, picking off British army officers and sergeants, who were easily identifiable by their uniforms.  Oh dear – that might have been my great-great-great grandfather.  At some late point in the chat with the gunsmith I sensed Jane’s attention beginning to wander, particularly when the conversation moved on to lead shot, forging, hardening and tempering, and marksmanship.  I don’t think she quite appreciated the engineering challenges associated with gunsmithing, so I thought it better to move on to explore the rest of Chester.
Chester Cathedral was impressive and – for some reason – had waived the admission fee for the day, but I paid the standard amount anyway because I know the upkeep costs of our churches and cathedrals are considerable.  Architecturally, the building was inspiring, but we could not get away from the impression that the cathedral had lost its way and forgotten its principal purpose.  Requests for money were everywhere – even for lighting a candle to support prayer;  but the thing we found particularly disappointing was the fact that the cathedral was to be used for a Tina Turner concert that night, and the band was setting up its gear in the body of the building.  Using a church or cathedral for a classical music concert is now quite common, but it might be excused on the grounds that gentle music encourages meditation, contemplation and prayer.  I am not convinced that thumping Rock ‘n’ Roll music in the Tina Turner style would have the same theological benefit.  You are, of course, allowed to disagree.  Incidentally, I presume the concert was a ‘Tina Turner Tribute’ rather than a concert featuring the singer herself, unless the Church of England has managed to bring her back from the dead.
We lunched in the brasserie of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, which had been recommended by someone we had met en route.  It was very expensive, but quite classy, and ideal for people-watching.  Incredibly, given the price of the place, someone brought in a toddler in a push chair, who howled for the entire time we were there.  They follow me around you know.
The plan had been to move on to Sam and Laura’s place on the other side of the county but, alas, before we could get there, Sam came down with Covid19 (remember that?).  Laura tested positive shortly afterwards, so we were deprived of their company for yet another year.  We avoided the contagion by returning home.  It was a very satisfactory weekend, though we missed our old friends, who have since recovered.
So that was Chester: been there, done it, bought the medieval tee shirt.  Overall impression 9/10, litter 8/10, shopping 9/10, graffiti 9/10, dossers nil, skateboarders nil, B&B 10/10.

Well, that’s our impending holiday on Dartmoor cancelled then.  Regular readers will recall that we had booked the Lydgate House Hotel in Postbridge, right in the centre of Dartmoor, for four days in the middle of July.  The attraction of the hotel (which we have stayed at before, many years ago) was that it was perfectly located for walking on the moor and met all the stringent criteria that made for a happy Shacklepin experience, namely friendliness, good food and the fact that it did not accept children under the age of twelve, or dogs.  Ten days before we were due to depart for this nirvana I received a cheerful email from the hotel stating that it had decided to change its no-dog policy and to throw open its doors to canine guests and their well-behaved humans; indeed, the email stated, some rooms were big enough to accommodate two dogs (wouldn’t that be lovely!).  I was apoplectic.  I immediately cancelled our booking, which was to the value of just under £1,000.  A protracted, but very polite, exchange of emails followed, during which I was assured that no dogs were currently booked to stay before or during our stay but, if I still wished to cancel, the owner would refund my deposit in full as a token of goodwill.  I considered this assurance, but I felt that there had been a betrayal of good faith by changing the dog policy so suddenly, just before we were about to arrive. I therefore insisted on cancelling and I was assured that a full refund of my 50% deposit was on the way.  On that basis, Jane and I booked an alternative holiday (sans dogs) in a hotel near Oxford.  The next day, the hotel reneged on the offer of a full refund: the owner had reconsidered the situation overnight and now felt that they had met the terms of the original contract.  It was, of course, too late to cancel the cancellation (if you follow me) by then because we had committed ourselves elsewhere, so we had a ‘bit of a situation’ to be resolved. In the end, we compromised on me paying for one night’s stay (the standard cancellation fee, given the notice) and the hotel refunding the remainder of my original 50% deposit. Was I ‘cutting off my nose to spite my face’ , to use an appropriate idiom, by cancelling so impulsively? Maybe, but I feel there was a certain amount of justification. And before you start, yes I know that Jane and I are in the minority with regard to dogs in hotels and that the lovely creatures are wonderful companions, don’t smell, don’t bite, don’t bark, don’t fight other dogs, don’t defecate in the bedrooms and – of course – your dog is well-behaved.  The fact is, some people just don’t like them in their house or chosen hotel – it is a matter of choice, yet finding an establishment that does not take dogs is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

As a footnote to this sorry saga, the Voco Oxford Thames Hotel – which we booked as a replacement – assured us three times on the telephone that they only accepted Registered Assistance Dogs (which was fine by us) and we paid for the booking in advance and in full. When the confirmation email came through it said at the bottom,
Pet Policy
We are pleased to welcome well behaved dogs when booking our dedicated Pet Getaway package, complete with thoughtful touches to make their stay as special as yours.
I tell you, the irony just keeps on coming.  I will let you know how we got on.

Thump. The sound of Jane’s head hitting the brick wall was loud and unmissable. When I studied engineering, they taught me that action and reaction are equal and opposite, and so that brick wall – in theory – must have moved an infinitesimal amount.  Trust me: it didn’t.  Jane lay there in disarray, covered in cream, stunned but conscious, temporarily blind because she had lost her glasses.  
We had been to a barbecue with our neighbours in their back garden and a good time had been had by all.  Conversation and wine flowed, and the food was plentiful.  By 2230, however, it was becoming a little chilly and the wind was getting up.  Time to go, we decided. Jane led the way, clutching a jug of left-over cream from the pudding that she had prepared.
“Be careful of those steps”, I said, referring to a shallow set of three steps leading down to the garden gate.  At that moment, as the automatic courtesy floodlight came on, she stumbled and fell on her knees, the impetus striking her head against the garage wall.  The cream jug shattered, cream spattered everywhere, and her spectacles flew off and broke.  Fortunately, one of our fellow guests was an A&E nursing sister, so she immediately took charge, thrusting me to one side as I held Jane’s hand spouting helpful pronouncements about Newton’s Third Law.  We sat Jane up and a cold compress was applied to her forehead. Fortunately, she had not been knocked unconscious and she did not feel groggy or nauseous; she just kept repeating that she had been stupid, as you sometimes do when you feel embarrassed.  The whole barbecue party (there were only six of us) made it’s way back to our place, where we cleaned up Jane’s head, nose, elbows and knees – all grazed and bruised. Her spectacles and an errant lens were recovered.  Amazingly, the damage was limited to just cuts and bruises, though she did look a sorry sight.  Our local optician managed to fix her spectacles, so she could see again, and her fringe screened the grazes and the yellow bruise on her forehead.  She really cheered up when our barbecue host appeared on the doorstep the next day with a bouquet of flowers; it was hardly his fault but it was a lovely gesture.  As I write, business is back to normal with Jane.  Tough nut, my wife, but this is the third time she has fallen over and I am worried that it is getting to become a habit.  Two points she emphatically did make afterwards: she fell over and did not ‘have a fall’; and, no, she had not had too much to drink.

In Blog 139 I promised to give you an update on Henry – Henry the Flymo robot lawnmower.  Regular readers will recall that I bought Henry at the beginning of the year and spent an entertaining time in the cold, the wet, and the mud setting up the garden to receive said device.  We are now deeply into the Summer and Henry has been patrolling for some time around our minuscule lawn, silently snipping here and there.  On the whole he does well, but getting to the present status has not been without its trials and tribulations.  The fundamental problem has been finding the optimum distance for the buried boundary wire from the edge of the lawn.  This wire is stapled into the lawn, typically about ten inches from the lawn edge, and electronically it prevents Henry from running amok in the flowerbeds (the wire becomes invisible over time as the grass grows over it).  In the initial stages I had to adjust the distance of the wire several times before I achieved the optimum, for Henry, on a random basis, would occasionally get trapped over the edge of the lawn or lay waste to Jane’s flowers.  All is well now, and Henry bursts into life every two days, pottering around at random for four hours at a time, trimming the grass as necessary.  There is no collection system: the principle is ‘a little and often’ and such trimmings as there are are left (invisible) on the lawn as mulch.  Henry is virtually noiseless and I enjoy just sitting there watching him work – it is surprisingly therapeutic.  The lawn looks good (if you ignore the brown patches caused by the current drought); the only downside is that about four inches of the lawn around the perimeter does not get cut and has to be strimmed separately – or left uncut to encourage the insect life – according to whim.  Was it a good idea to buy Henry instead of continuing with a conventional electric lawnmower on our 20 square-metre lawn?  Hmmm.  Not sure, in retrospect, but he his here now and he does save me the fifteen minutes it used to take me to cut the lawn, as well as being yet another of Shacklepin’s gadgets.. 

The First Sea Lord – the professional head of the Royal Navy – has been sacked and dismissed the Service for having an affair with a married subordinate.  It is, apparently, the first time such a thing has happened in 500 years.  What an appalling end to a professional career and what an utterly stupid and disloyal thing to do.  By this weak act the Admiral has undermined the entire ethos of discipline in the Royal Navy and brought the Service into disrepute.  I can only assume that he considered the subordinate with whom he had the affair (a married woman) was worth it.  I wonder what Lord Nelson would have said?

I was just thinking, the other day, about the story of the boy at school who was summoned to the front desk by his teacher because he had been absent the day before.  The boy explained that he had been missing because his father had got burnt on the day of his absence.  The teacher was immediately concerned and sympathetic, and asked how his father now was.
“They don’t bugger about at the crematorium, Miss”, was the laconic reply.
Our local crematorium had an Open Day a few weekends ago and I was going to take Jane as a Special Day Out, but we forgot all about it and missed it.  Another time, perhaps.  I was curious about how one can guarantee that the ashes you receive in the urn are, indeed, those of your deceased loved one, though I had been assured by a friend, who used to be an undertaker, that the system is – indeed – genuine.  The concept of incinerating dead bodies has, of course, been around since the Romans and Ancient Greeks (and even earlier), but it was illegal in Britain until the late 1800s.  The Cremation Society was formed in 1874 in England to advocate the disposal of bodies by cremation on public health grounds, but there was strong opposition to the practice.  The first crematorium was opened in 1879 in Woking in Surrey, and a horse was cremated there to prove the principle.  However, it was not until 1884 that the law was changed to allow human remains to be so disposed – quite surprising really.  Cremation is now commonplace and, and far as I can recall, of all the funerals I have attended, only one has involved an interment.  I read the other day that some company or other is now proposing to dispose of bodies by dissolving the corpse in a chemical and flushing the resulting ‘gloop’ down the drain, while retaining the bones; perhaps the aim is to reduce our carbon footprint – an interesting, if unpleasant and macabre, development from the Green lobby.  So there you are – I knew you’d be interested.

It is amazing.  Jane and I have actually won a competition. We have been invited to (what is literally) a free lunch onboard the mini cruise ship HEBRIDEAN PRINCESS, alongside in Portland harbour.  The aim, of course, is a ‘hard sell’ to encourage us to book a cruise in said vessel, but that’s fine by me: the cruises she undertakes are just up our street.  The cruises are around the Scottish islands. The ship herself, built in 1989, is compact and has traditional lines. She was designed specifically for use in the Western Isles (= probably rolls like a bucket).  She only carries 48 passengers who, apparently, are very well looked after in comfortable accommodation with (it is claimed) superb cuisine.  I can well believe it.  The cabins and public rooms are cosy and of individual design in a style reminiscent of a Scottish or English country house, but with modern fittings.  The ship anchors off various Scottish  islands and lands passengers by boat so that they can enjoy exploring or picnicking. There is a full appropriate lecture programme. I believe the late Queen Elizabeth II used to charter HEBRIDEAN PRINCESS occasionally for cruises after a parsimonious and short-sighted Labour government decommissioned the Royal Yacht BRITANNIA in 1997.  The whole concept of a cruise in HEBRIDEAN PRINCESS sounds great to us, but the problem is that the cruises are very expensive, even before you take into account that you have to get yourself to Oban, in western Scotland, to join the ship.  Still, we will enjoy the day and the free lunch, and I am dying to look around the ship.

You know, I am convinced that the wind can make people irritable.  Our erstwhile neighbour, who was a long-serving headteacher, maintained that whenever there was a lot of wind the children at school always played up.  Thus it was (in my humble opinion) the wind – at a gusty Force 4 from the south west – that influenced the memsahib’s robust response to me when she returned from her weekly shopping expedition.   As was custom, I had leaped to the fore to help her unload the car in the garage and carry the heavy bags back to the house. In passing, I observed that she had failed to reverse the car into the garage in accordance with our recently agreed policy, and had driven in instead.  I mentioned this tactfully, referring to House Standing Orders Article 15.5.5, as amended by our last discussion, but was told flatly,
“It’s too difficult and I’m not in the mood, so I’m not doing it.  I’ve had a bad day at the supermarket, so don’t start”. 
So that’s me told.  The wind.  It must have been the wind.

Well, it is Wimbledon fortnight again and – as in previous years – Jane is incommunicado from 1430 each day until well into the evening.  Talk of Alcatraz, Camnorrie and Jockavitch abounds once more in the drawing room which is, itself, in darkness like a hallowed temple to some strange god.  Curtains are drawn, the room lit only by the moving images on the television screen.  At one end sits Jane in the Television Control Chair, her feet up, the remote control clutched in her hand, shouting incoherent invectives at the screen (“Oh my God.  What are you doing?”).  I supply iced water or chilled white wine at regular interval, depending on the time of day, but I might as well be a wraith for all the attention given to me.  The evening meals, eaten in snatches according to the programme of Centre Court, are carefully confected by my fair hand for the duration.  Meanwhile, my right ear, which needed minor surgery in April, throbs and has started to detach itself from my head while oozing yellow pus. My bottom-right molar decided to infect itself in sympathy and had to be extracted last Monday.  Woe is me. But I plod on – providing support as as best I can – just one of God’s little soldiers destined to serve the follower of “Out”, “Deuce”, “Fault” and “Quiet Please”.  Thank heavens I am not one to complain, that’s what I say.

Notwithstanding Wimbledon, we are off to walk bits of the Thames Path next week and it will also soon be my birthday.  Wish us luck, keep smiling and – to any Americans reading this – Happy Independence Day.
So follow me, follow. Down to the hollow. And wallow around in the glorious mud sun.

4 July 2025

Blog 141. The Great Alka-Seltzer Experiment

It would have been the year 1959, as I recall, that commercial television came to Tyneside.  Before that we only had one television channel, the BBC, and that broadcasting in black and white only from 1700 to 2300.  The hours for Independent Television (ITV) were the same as those for the BBC, but the channel, by definition, included commercial breaks – adverts.  I skim or mute the adverts on the television today, but in the late 1950s, for us, they opened up a whole new world south of the River Tees and we learned and experienced all sorts of things that we never knew or had never tried before.  We wondered where the yellow went when we brushed our teeth with Pepsodent, and we discovered that there was a margarine that was so good, people couldn’t distinguish it from butter. Apparently, men would even come round and offer to do a housewife’s washing for three weeks.  It was against this background of outrageous claims and naive viewers that the Shacklepin family encountered an incident that I now refer to as the Great Alka-Seltzer Experiment.  Up to that time the family had not used much in the way of modern medicines; indeed, by today’s standards, not a lot was available.  Vicks Vapo-Rub was smeared on your chest if you had a cough; headaches were eased by aspirin; indigestion was dealt with using Milk of Magnesia; and colds or flu were treated with Fennings Fever Cure – a foul-tasting acrid liquid that I discovered, years later while studying GCE ‘O’ level chemistry, contained dilute nitric acid (it worked well, in that you never again admitted to having a cold after experiencing one dose).  But one day in 1959 we saw an advertisement for Alka-Seltzer, the fizzing cure for hangover and other ailments.  My elder brother was suffering from such a malady (he usually was) and my mother took the bold step of buying a tube of the effervescent remedy for the first time.  The incredible thing is (and this is a true story) the family was so excited to see the Alka-Seltzer work that we all stood around the kitchen sink to watch the preparation: Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, Big Brother Bear and little Baby Bear (ie me).  Authoritatively, my father filled a tumbler with water and unscrewed the cap of the Alka-Seltzer tube.  He took out a tablet and dropped it into the glass.  We all watched, in great anticipation, for the tablet to burst into life – plop, plop, fizz, fizz and all that.  Nothing happened. No fizz, nothing; it didn’t even sink.  Father took a teaspoon and poked it; still nothing. He stirred it around and pushed it under, but still nothing. ‘What a swizz’, we all thought.  Clearly, we had been conned or had received a duff batch.  There was much disgruntlement and a sense of betrayal.  Mother stated the intention of returning the medicine to the chemist’s and demanding her money back.  Then we cottoned on to what we had done wrong.  The tablet in the glass of water was not Alka-Seltzer; it was the round polystyrene packing piece included in the top of the tube to stop the tablets rattling around. You couldn’t make it up.  Aye, we made our own entertainment when I was a lad – children today don’t know they’re born.

A few years ago we enjoyed a visit from one of Jane’s distant relatives, another ex-pat from the Caribbean, but one who had relocated to Canada instead of the UK shortly after her island became independent from Britain in 1963.   She now lived in Alberta – or was it Manitoba? –  somewhere in the middle, anyway,  and she was over in the Old Country for a few months.  As we were chatting away, the subject inevitably came around to the British weather.  What she said was interesting:  she could not understand, or bear, the near-constant low cloud in the Winter in Britain – it was so depressing.  In Alberta (or wherever) they encountered either blue sky (when it might be cold or warm) –  or grey sky (when it might be snowing or raining).  They rarely, however, had just overcast for week after week without any precipitation or sun.  Well, that’s what she said – I am not in a position to confirm or deny the climate of the Canadian provinces, but I did understand her sentiment, for Jane has been moaning about the British weather ever since she and her parents moved to England in 1964.  To Jane, suffering the cold in Britain after living in the tropics is bad enough, but what she really cannot stand is the clag, a delightfully descriptive word, which – I was once told – is an aviation acronym for Cloud Low Aircraft Grounded.  I have never found an aviator who can confirm that story, so it may be apocryphal; but clag does fit the description perfectly and, indeed, living under it can be very depressing if it goes on for long periods.  I have often wondered if our weather is one of the primary reasons why the British went out and founded an Empire, but that is by the way.  Given this situation, I am intrigued to know why on earth the UK government has just allocated the sum of £50M for scientists to develop ways of shutting out the sun.  Yes, it is true. Not content with dissuading us from driving fossil-fuelled cars, or  stopping us from travelling faster than 10 mph, or discouraging us from flying abroad to enjoy ourselves, our lords and masters now want us to sit at home – presumably wrapped in blankets for warmth – looking out of the window at lowering grey skies.  An unspoken bonus may be that some elderly people will be so depressed that they will take The Blue Pill as authorised by the forthcoming Assisted Dying Bill, thus saving the NHS the expense of end-of-life care for the aged – every cloud has a silver lining.  Apparently, the aim is to modify the clouds so that they reflect the sunlight and, thus, inhibit global warming.  There are also plans to develop ways of drawing in large quantities of carbon dioxide: one of these is to gather the entire British Army in Aldershot and order every squaddie to breathe in, all at once, then hold their breath.  I made that last bit up, of course; we do not have enough soldiers in the British Army to do any such thing.
Shutting out the sun: I have come across some crazy schemes authorised by the government in my time, but this one takes the biscuit.

As it happens, much of England has been basking in unseasonal sunshine this Spring, and we have had almost constant sun since March.  It has still been cold at night, of course, with temperatures in Melbury around 5C but, no matter, it has been an absolute delight to open the curtains each day and see a clear blue sky and enjoy the prospect of a fine day.  Even the daytime temperatures have been quite tolerable and we have hit 25C on occasion.  This has been nicely offset by a cold north easterly wind that makes sitting outside uncomfortable.  No, no global warming here, nor has there been in Melbury since the term was invented, but the sunshine has been very welcome.  There is, of course, a downside to the sunshine.  There always is when things seem to be going well with the British weather.  With all this sun, correspondingly, there has hardly been any rain.  There is talk of drought and conserving water and hosepipe bans. Poor Jane’s garden is parched and withering, the lawn is cracked and going brown, the earth as solid as a rock. We could do with a bit of rain, preferably overnight, but it’s all right, I have the solution to the drought: I am going to wash the dust off the car tomorrow. That always works.

Speaking of motor cars, we are now owners of a brand new Volkswagen ID3 – a state-of-the-art electric vehicle (EV) with a claimed range of 350 miles between charges which has controls that make the space shuttle cockpit look positively antiquated.  Friends who know me might infer that the capital gained from the sale of my motor yacht (Blog 138) was just burning a hole in my pocket but, for once, the inference would be incorrect.  True, since 1971 I have owned a total of twenty nine motor cars from which it could be deduced that I can be somewhat fickle when it comes to vehicles (the shortest ownership was six months).  However, on this occasion the decision to move on was a rational one, arrived at after lengthy discussion with the memsahib and the submission of several well-argued, costed and logical points.  We had owned our last car, an electric Nissan Leaf, for five years and we were very pleased with it.  It was possibly the best car I had ever owned, with all the ‘bells and whistles’, economical yet nippy, and a delight to drive.  Its Achilles heel, however, was its range between battery charges: an indicated value of 170 miles but, in practice, about 120 miles – and that only in the Summer.  Regular readers will recall several of my earlier blogs that set out the trials and tribulations of undertaking long trips in the car, the detailed planning involved, and the stress that ensued.   Since I bought the Leaf in 2020, technology has moved on a tad and EVs can now be obtained with much better ranges, the greatest claimed to be 481 miles (the Mercedes Benz EQS Saloon).  That car would do me nicely but, not being a millionaire, and having had terrible experience from Mercedes’ Customer Service in the past, I wasn’t going down that road.  Instead, I conducted a lengthy feasibility study looking at the ranges of all EVs that were just about within my budget, reading the reviews, and drawing up a short list.  The VW ID3, fitted with the larger battery option, came out on top. 
Now here’s the interesting bit: it was actually cheaper to buy a new car than it was to buy a ‘nearly new’, 6-month-old car (which was our original plan).  Few people buy cars for cash any more, the popular method now is Personal Contract Purchase (PCP).  For those who are not familiar with the term, you put down a deposit (usually your present car as a trade-in), pay a fixed amount every month for three or four years, after which you can either keep the car after paying a lump sum, return it at no expense, or start the process all over again with another car.  The key thing is, you pick the car and arrangement that suits your monthly outgoings so you can get a quite expensive new car for a relatively modest monthly budget.  In the past we have taken out a bank loan and bought our car outright; this time we went for a PCP and the monthly payments are almost half the previous bank loan payments.  OK, the VW is technically not mine, but so what? I get to use it and it doesn’t cost me much.  Lovely car, by the way: it is very cheap to run (on my own electricity), it is rather like an iPad on four wheels, and it goes like a dingbat. 

Ah, I forgot to mention another thing as a piece of advice if you are ever thinking of buying a new car: don’t believe that you’ll get the car straight away.  We made initial enquiries on 6 January, thinking the deal would be done by the end of the month; in practice, the car had to be earmarked for us in the factory in Germany and, what with IT failures, plague, famine, sea serpents in the North Sea, frogs on the carriageway of the M180 and other delays, we did not take delivery until the evening of 25 April.  The VW garage was so embarrassed by the delays and so impressed with our patience, that they gave us £125 as a goodwill gesture to spend on a meal in The Big City, which we thought was jolly decent of them.

It was the conclusion of my final cancer review after two years of successful treatment and, just as I was about to leave, I had casually mentioned a painful swollen lump on my outer ear.  The oncologist peered at it.
“Let me get this clear. You’ve been smearing it with after shave balm?”, she said in a voice that rose to a crescendo of disbelief. “What on earth were you thinking of?  And why with that?”
I looked suitably abashed.
“Well”, I said, “I’ve tried everything else – cold cream, hand cream, Vaseline, my wife’s anti-ageing cream…I thought I might as well give it a go as I was treating my face with balm after shaving anyway, as part of my punishing cosmetic régime…”
My voice trailed off.
Then Jane chipped in, moving over to stand by the doctor in a united female front.
“He’s had it for six months and I’ve been telling him to get it seen to, but it’s no good talking to him.  You tell him, doctor, he wont listen to me”.
The oncologist actually wagged her finger at me.
“You tell me you’ve had this three times before when you were in the Navy, and each time they cut it off, so you should know better.  I haven’t saved you from prostate cancer for you to die on me with skin cancer.  It looks like a BCC to me.  Make an appointment to see your GP, pronto, and get it fixed.  And stop putting after-shave balm on it.”
Both women gave me a stern look of admonition. Not for the first time I pondered on the powerful force that is The Sisterhood. I then went home and looked up what a BCC was – I thought it stood for Blind Carbon Copy, but apparently it means Basal Cell Carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.
The next day I was given an immediate appointment with my GP, who confirmed the diagnosis and referred me to a plastic surgeon.  I was impressed.  When I had had the problem in the Navy, the doctor had more-or-less lopped off the offending growth there and then as I sat in the chair; in civvy street, apparently, I was to be treated by a real plastic surgeon.  I wondered, wistfully, if I could get the bags under my eyes fixed, or my nose straightened, at the same time as a discount.  Later, I was to learn that, this time, the operation would be more complicated, partly because the growth on my ear was close to my skull and partly because a biggish chunk of outer ear would have to be removed.  Within three weeks I was at a private clinic, funded by the NHS. A very nice surgeon performed the deed, stitched it up, and told me to return in two weeks to have the stitches removed.  In the meantime I was to keep the wound dry, not wash my hair, and refrain from having a full shower. Blimey.
It was when I returned that the fun started.  It turned out out that the surgeon had had to use so much Superglue to seal the wound that he had succeeded in gluing the stitches in place at the same time.  Despite her best efforts, the nurse could not get the stitches out.  I was sent away with a sore ear, a tub of Vaseline, and instructions to wash and grease the wound twice a day before returning in another two weeks.  Surprisingly, that treatment worked and the stitches were removed, complete with sheets of dried Superglue.  Mind you, you almost had to scrape me off the ceiling as the stitches came out and I am left with a right ear sticking out of my head like an asymmetrical African elephant.  I still say the after-shave balm might have worked.  Just call me Dumbo. [Post script: the thing proved to be benign.]

An interesting aside to the above experience was that, when I mentioned to one of the theatre nurses that I had served in the Royal Navy (“The Falklands? Aw shucks, it was nothing really…”) she offered to provide me with a form for claiming compensation for injury caused in service.  She presumably thought that I had spent my time at sea on the open bridge of a destroyer, gazing at far-off horizons under a blazing sun, my cap at a rakish angle.  I did not disabuse her of the image, which did fit the bill of my year as a Midshipman in 1970-71, but I had to admit  to myself that the rest of my time at sea was actually spent looking at a far-off superheated steam gauge in a very noisy steam turbine room, my cap at a rakish angle after bumping my head on a hot steam pipe.  I declined the offer with a modest smile. 

Whatever happened to the Continental Quilt?  Does anyone remember that term?  They are called duvets now, of course, but when they first appeared around the late 1970s they were initially given the rather odd double name, tacitly implying that this was an eccentric European fad, not to be taken seriously when compared to good British (or, rather, Egyptian) sheets, woollen blankets, counterpanes and eiderdowns.  The duvet had the last laugh.  When I joined the Royal Navy in 1969, they issued me with two sets of sheets, two pillow cases and two hand towels as part of my initial uniform allowance.  You carried this bedding around with you to every ship or establishment and handed it over to your steward on arrival to make up your bunk.  Your cabin was not like a hotel room with all this basic stuff provided: you had to supply your own.  As the duvet came along, some officers and men used those instead and there was considerable flair for artistic individualism as an alternative to the standard naval counterpane with its logo of a fouled anchor set precisely centrally on the bunk.  This all went well until the Falklands Conflict, when the Royal Navy re-learned the lessons of World War 2 and discovered that fires or the flash from an explosion melted man-made fibres that were next to the skin, causing horrible burns.  After that bedding moved on to compulsory naval-issue sleeping bags with removable liners made from natural fibre such as cotton, all provided by the establishment or ship.  Sensibly, personnel moved back to cotton or woollen socks and underwear at the same time. I think we all heaved a sigh of relief at no longer having to carry our own sheets and pillow cases with our dunnage.  I still have some of my sheets – we use them to cover the floor when we are decorating.  Not a bad record for a piece of cotton issued fifty six years ago. 

So, anyway, five hundred or so years ago the Portuguese, those great explorers, discovered a group of islands in the Indian Ocean roughly somewhere between India and Madagascar.  The islands were totally unoccupied and one might reasonably think that Portugal would claim sovereignty but, for one reason or another, France eventually took occupation in the 18th century and started copra plantations using slaves from Africa. They administered the islands from their other possession in the Indian Ocean, Îsle de France.  When Britain beat Napoleon in 1814, she took possession of the islands from the French, along with Îsle de France – the spoils of war.  The islands, in case you haven’t already gathered, are the Chagos Islands, and Îsle de France is now called Mauritius.  The British freed the slaves on the islands, and they remained as contracted workers on the plantations.  The workforce was enhanced by people from Mauritius and the Seychelles and eventually became the de facto inhabitants known now as Chagossians. For convenience, the British continued to administer the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, 1,300 miles away to the south west.
Fast forward on to the 1960s, when Britain ‘did a deal’ with the USA to let that country use one of the islands, Diego Garcia, as a military base. The civilian Chagossians (between 1,000 and 2,000 people) were deported to Mauritius (by then independent of Britain) and financial provision was made for their resettlement. As part of the deal with the USA Britain received a discount on the Polaris ballistic missile system, a lot of goodwill, and some excellent port and airfield facilities.  Anyway, here we are in 2025 and the British government has made the bizarre decision not only to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius (which never owned them in the first place), but also to pay that island a generous payment of £101M each year for 99 years as rent for the USA to continue to use Diego Garcia as a defensive base.  For the exiled Chagossians, wallowing as untermensch  in Mauritius, there is no hope of return to their native land – indeed they are threatened with ten years in prison in Mauritius if they even claim the Chagos Islands as theirs.  So, in summary, we have the crazy situation whereby Britain owns of a group of islands, it lets another nation use the islands pretty-much free of charge, then it gives those islands away to a third nation, 1,300 miles away, and pays that last nation rent to continue to use the islands while denying the civilian population a return to their homeland.  And the amazing thing is, the British Prime Minister thinks his action was a good deal.  The presidents of Mauritius and USA must be laughing all their way to the bank, but I don’t think the Chagossians are.

Have you ever played Contract Bridge?  We have started to take lessons, following the recommendation of a good friend of ours, and we find it mentally challenging but a goal worth pursuing. It is, after all, a good social skill to have. For those who are not familiar with the game, you work with a partner (who sits opposite) and probably about 50% of the game is spent on bidding on how many tricks you and your chum think you will win, based on clues that pass between you on what each of you has in their hand.  By clues, I don’t mean scratching your ear or twitching your nose; I mean by what each of you bids (it’s complicated).  Eventually, around the table someone wins the bidding (like in an auction) to make the claimed number of tricks (hence ‘contract’), gets to declare trumps, and you move on to the next stage of actually playing the cards, rather like whist.  At the end, you score points (or lose them to the opposition) according to what you won as opposed to what you claimed you would get.  As far as I can make out, the game, which has a strict etiquette of its own, is taken extremely seriously by some people, which excludes me from playing in a club straight away.  Even my best friend Christian and his wife Victoria, who are expert players, no longer partake of the game because they kept falling out as partners. I think Jane and I are all right because neither of us is competitive and neither of us takes the game seriously.  Time will tell if we survive.  For the time being, I think I will bid One No Trump.

Speaking of our old friends C & V (above), we spent an excellent few days with them in their holiday apartment on the Costa del Sol last March, a welcome break from the chilly English early Spring.  I think they were a bit taken aback when we accepted their invitation with alacrity, but we are in the new ‘no boat’ era now and we have the time (and a bit more cash) to do spontaneous things.  Their generous offer cost us nothing other than the airfare and they were free with their hospitality and transport.  Mind you, we nearly didn’t make it because another friend, who lives in a nearby town, very kindly offered to transport us to and from Bristol Airport, thus saving the cost of parking.  What we hadn’t realised was that she only knew the route to the airport from her own house and town, and that route was a convoluted one.  A journey that would have taken us exactly one hour from our house ended up taking an hour and a half, resulting in a mad rush through the airport to catch the flight.  And guess who triggered the security alarm and was singled out for a personal search (actually, it was Jane – dodgy looking character).  Anyway, Spain and its alfresco style of living and very amiable people proved to be absolutely delightful and a good time was had by all.  We even played bridge and are still friends.  Christian and Victoria won, well they would wouldn’t they?  Incidentally, there is British Bridge, played in Britain –  and then there is International Bridge, which is played by the USA and The Rest of the World.  Each has its own rules, though the principles are the same and it is possible to play a mixed game.  I am not sure why Britain stands alone against the rest of the world, but I rather think it has always been thus.  It’s what made Britain great, you know.

I see that a Norwegian gentleman woke up a couple of days ago to find a 135 metre, 11,135 deadweight tonne, container ship in his garden (as you do).  Apparently he slept through the whole grounding experience and only discovered it when he went outside to water his prize begonias, or whatever. It reminds me of a submariner’s anecdote about a submarine that dragged her anchor in a storm during the last war and ended up beached across a coast road during the blackout.  Her captain was surveying the sorry situation from the conning tower when a cyclist appeared on the road and promptly ran into the submarine in the dark.  Swearing profusely, the cyclist shook his fist at the captain, who apparently replied,
“But my dear chap, you should have rung your bell.”

Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to look at the rain, which has arrived at last.

24 May 2025

Blog 140. I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

Death may be inevitable, but that does not detract from the emotional upset of losing someone or some living thing close to you: a living thing that you have nurtured and cared for from its very beginning until the life is snuffed out of it.  Jane has just suffered a tragic loss and, even now, one week later, is having difficulty in getting over the tragedy.  Alas, I am the one who is partly responsible, and I feel it very strongly.  We will not see the like of that climbing rose and clematis ever again.

Jane had made a tentative booking for my services in the garden several weeks ago.  It is a reservation that is necessary in order that I can prepare myself mentally and physically for the ordeal for, as I have stated previously in these blogs, that garden hates me.  A simple trip to our detached garage often results in me being pricked by roses, stung by insects or soaked by overhanging plants; consider, therefore, what injuries can befall me if I actually venture off the garden path and into the undergrowth, balancing precariously on stepping stones or patches of virgin earth, yet still managing to tread on some growing plant or fall into a pyracantha while receiving the lash of Jane’s tongue.  No, a job in the garden for Jane requires full PPE of stout clothing, leather gauntlets, steel toe-capped boots, the low-slung tool belt, safety goggles and a careful programme of pre-meditation. 
The booking was to cut back a climbing rose with intertwining clematis that infested a pretty little arch over the garden path that leads to the garage.  Even Jane admitted that the rose had grown just a little bit too cocky for its own good to the extent that its trunk was even thicker than the steel arch that was its home, and prickly offshoots threatened all humans within a two foot radius.  The burgeoning clematis which, in the summer, added a colourful addition had also become a little wild, clearly influenced by its prickly host.  Sensibly, Jane would normally deal with all matters of pruning personally using her secateurs but, on this occasion, the rose trunk was too thick for her to deal with and so, perforce, she had to fall back on The Last Resort: macho muscle man (well, me).  Alas, the weather caused two cancellations of my horticultural adventure and so the rose remained in place, thick and malevolent, mocking Jane whenever she looked out of the Garden Control Tower (aka the Breakfast Room or Orangery), but she could do nothing about it.  However, while she was away playing mahjong and bridge with members of her coven one afternoon I had a sudden burst of love and charity: I determined to do the job for her before she returned, as a surprise –  I could then bathe in the warmth of her undying gratitude and affection, for she would know that it was a task that did not come easily to me. On went all the PPE, out came the step ladders, the big loppers, the hedge trimmers, the chain saw and the garden shredder.  Crunch, crunch, crunch – the rose was soon trimmed right back; snip snip snip, the dead clematis strands followed suit.  I shredded the debris to hide the evidence, swept up the area, treated my cuts and abrasions, and repaired to the house for a welcome cup of tea and a feeling of a job well done.
I had to wait an entire week before Jane noticed the naked rose arch.  We were returning from a shopping expedition and making our way up the path when she suddenly stopped dead with a cry of,
“What’s happened here?  Someone has cut back the rose!  And look at my clematis!”
I gazed at my fingernails with an air of modesty, the phrase, “Aw shucks…” poised on my lips. 
Some years ago I read in a psychology book that it takes the average man 9 minutes to realise that his wife is punishing him.  As I stood there on the garden path on that day, it began to dawn on me in somewhat less than that time that the warm wind of gratitude had not only veered dramatically  to the north, but was now building up to an impending storm.  The temperature dropped, the air pressure went with it, and Jane exploded.  I will not recount verbatim the harsh words that sprang forth: suffice it to say that her sentiment was not one of gratitude so much as severe disapprobation.  Apparently one should prune a rose just above a joint.  There were no joints; none had survived.  Also, the brown twiggy strands of clematis that I thought signified dead wood were, in fact, healthy parts of the plant that had previously borne shoots; they had not survived the shredder.  The final blow came when she discovered a thick trunk of rose in her flower bed that I had missed in my tidy-up, and it was crushing a polyanthus.  I hung my head in shame as the storm raged around me, protesting feebly that I meant well and that I thought she would be pleased, but that seemed to make matters worse.  Finally, finally, the hurricane abated and a sort of calm descended.  After gazing wistfully at the stump of her clematis and taking several deep breaths, Jane made a visible effort to calm down.  She put her arm on my shoulder, looked at me, and said quietly,
“Darling, I know that you meant well…  but you are NEVER, repeat NEVER, to go into this garden again without adult supervision”. 
I nodded.  I always knew that garden hated me.

Well, that’s the Radisson hotel group crossed off my list then.  Jane and I had planned to visit York in July to celebrate my birthday and, now that we have a little more cash available after the sale of my boat, we decided to make it a special occasion and travel by train (parking in York being at a premium).  Initial planning yielded an eye-watering figure for First Class rail travel, but we were not immediately put off and pressed on to find a luxury hotel in the city centre that met the usual demanding Shacklepin criteria.  We finally settled on the Radisson as a tolerable compromise and duly booked the hotel for four nights. Having sorted out the accommodation in York we moved on to detailed planning of the travel arrangements and it soon became clear that First Class rail travel would not only be very expensive, but it would be far from straightforward.  There were two options for the routes to take: via Bristol (two changes) or via London (three changes).  It was all getting a bit complicated and the risk of missing connections as we galloped around with heavy luggage on an increasingly unreliable rail network was high.  We therefore decided to change the plan and travel by car, which was perfectly feasible as the Radisson in York had a private carpark (though you had to pay for it).  The only potential snag that I could see would be if we arrived after a tiring five or six hour journey only to find the carpark full and no alternative parking in the medieval city.  I therefore emailed the Radisson in York, reminded them that we were coming to stay in July and asked if it was possible to reserve a place in their carpark; also, did the carpark have electric vehicle (EV) charging facilities?  The reply came back,
“Hi Shacklepin, the parking is on first come first serve [sic] basis and it is not prebooked [sic]”
That was it.  No, “Dear Mr Shacklepin, thank you for your enquiry.  We are very sorry but…” I was incensed by the rudeness, the slap-dash approach to customer service and the fact that the issue of EV charging was not even addressed. Moreover, why should a hotel guest not be able to book a parking slot?  Would that not be a strong selling point for the hotel? 
I replied that, clearly, politeness and helpfulness were not strong points at the Radisson, but received no answer.  So that was it as far as the Radisson and I were concerned: I cancelled the booking on the spot.  We are now going to a delightful little hotel on Dartmoor, the Lydgate House Hotel at Postbridge, which we visited many years ago and which now offered to make ad hoc arrangements to charge our electric car.  Over reaction to the Radisson?  Maybe, but nobody addresses me by my surname and gets away with it.  Besides, Dartmoor will be a lot more fun, quieter than York, and there won’t be any parking problems. Alas, poor Yorvick, I [almost] knew him well.

Oh dear.  More expense.  It seems we will have to change a proportion of our glassware in the drinks cupboard because champagne flutes are Out and the old-fashioned champagne coupes are In.  Or so I read in a top newspaper the other day, in an article about how to drink champagne.  Apparently the coupe – the balloon-type glass beloved of black-and-white films and Babycham drinkers in the 60s and 70s – is the best-shaped glass for appreciating good champagne.  I cannot really comment, as we can never afford ‘good’ champagne (truth to tell, we prefer Crémant de Loire anyway); either way, it means four sets of six flutes in our collection will be consigned to the recycling bin if we are to remain ‘U’.  I don’t think that will be happening.  I suppose we could look at buying champagne coupes to test the theory – I will submit the proposal to the memsahib.  At the same time, maybe we should consider buying a few bottles of Babycham, for the drink is back on the shelves again after a revamp.  For the benefit of younger readers (if any) and those outside the UK, Babycham is a perry – a sparkling  alcoholic drink made from fermented pears – and it is a drink created by the Showering brothers of Shepton Mallet in Somerset, primarily for women in Britain after World War 2.   It was a time of great social change in Britain, particularly for women, who were considered to be someone no better than they ought to be if they entered a pub bar unaccompanied.  The time was ripe for a sophisticated lady-like drink, and Babycham was born.  The top London advertising agent Jack Wynne-Williams, who developed the advertising campaign for the drink, accepted the contract to promote Babycham for no fee as he was so impressed by the drink’s potential.  The Showering brothers joked that they would present Wynne-Williams with a Rolls Royce when sales topped £1M.  A mere twelve months after Babycham’s launch, they were able to deliver on their promise and duly handed over the car keys.   The jingle, “Everyone loves Babycham, the genuine champagne perry” was the very first alcoholic advertisement to appear on British television, and it continued to be a common feature of television advertising in the 1960s and beyond.  Pubs initially did not have glasses to suit the Babycham image, so Showerings developed their own to fit their target audience: the characteristic coupe with a logo of a Chinese Water Deer on the side.  The Showering company was bought by Accolade Wines in the 1990s and Babycham withered on the vine (no pun intended) thereafter.  However, the company was bought back by the descendants of the founders in 2021 and the drink is available again under the family ownership of another four Showering brothers.  The Showering factory is still a dominant feature of Shepton Mallet and Jane and I occasionally drive past it.  Maybe we should pop in and buy a few bottles of Babycham to support British industry. I have never tried it, but I understand it is a lighter, sweeter alternative to champagne.  Perhaps we can also buy the characteristic coupe glasses at the same time.

So that’s it.  I have finished my two-year treatment for prostate cancer.  The saga that started with the bad news on 9 March 2023 is now over and Jane and I celebrated with a bottle of fizz on 20 February 2025.   The unused pills have been returned to the oncology team and I can begin to return to ordinary life, though I will still be monitored remotely every three months.  Apparently it can take a year for my testosterone to return to normal and the hot sweats may linger for a while (useful tip here, girls, the doctor recommended sage tablets to reduce the frequency and severity – they did help).   I shan’t mention the topic again, for there is nothing more boring than reading details of a person’s medical conditions (one’s own are always far more interesting).   I only mention it now, finally, to emphasise to any male readers that The Thing can be defeated totally and the diagnosis and treatment are painless; but it is essential to get it diagnosed early.  I cannot fault the NHS for its care and treatment, both of which have been impeccable. My main task now is to lose all the surplus weight that I added during hormone treatment, so it’s back to the broccoli for breakfast (Blog 130).

Now here is an interesting question: how much soap powder do you use for your regular laundry?  I ask because the Consumer Association magazine Which? has just run an article on the subject and, as a subscriber to the magazine and Chief Dhobeywallah in the Shacklepin household, I thought I would read it on the principle that there is always something new to learn.  The result was a revelation.  The amount of soap powder you should use for a normal wash is two level tablespoons full, or roughly an eggcup-full (30 ml) .  It is a tiny amount. I was so surprised that I double checked the article by reading the side of the soap powder box (I was between books at the time): it was absolutely correct.  Of course, you should double the amount if you have clothes that are badly soiled or if you have hard water, but – on the whole – most people (including me) use far too much soap powder, which is expensive, unnecessary, leaves a soapy residue, and inhibits sewage treatment further down the line.  Gosh, the things you learn in these blogs.

We really do live in a topsy-turvy world in 2025.  I won’t go into detail, as I’m sure you can think of your own examples.  Suffice it to say that things that were set in tablets of stone to my generation as indisputable ways to behave, of right and wrong, of black and white, or of plain common sense have all gone by the board.  And that is not just in my country.  As the old song says, things ain’t what they used to be.  But never mind, here is some good news. There was a 3% chance (1 in 32) of an asteroid hitting the Earth on 22 December 2032 and wiping out Dhaka,  Bogotá or another city around those latitudes, or hitting the sea and creating an enormous tidal wave that would sweep round the world.  Fortunately, the latest estimate by NASA is that it will miss the Earth and there is now a 2% (1 in 50) chance that it will hit the moon instead, no doubt causing severe tidal disturbance and possible floods or tsunamis.  Phew! That’s a relief – I had plans for that day. I do wish I hadn’t sold that boat though.

26 February 2025

Blog 139. The Watch Ashore

“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone”.
So ran the song by the late Bill Withers in 1971, when I was a fresh-faced young Midshipman serving in a destroyer, I had a 30” waist, plenty of fair hair, a brand new Triumph Spitfire to impress the girls, and the world was my oyster.  That ship has sailed, but I find myself humming the tune now as I contemplate being in the Watch Ashore, otherwise described as ‘life beyond my last Command’.  Yet – you know – I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would.  The sale of APPLETON RUM, our thirty-three foot motor yacht, in December, was very sad but – as they say – every cloud has a silver lining and we now find ourselves substantially better off.  We can now afford holidays that are not on the water; we can repair or replace broken domestic appliances; we can expand our financial horizons; and I can buy more waistcoats and gadgets.  I have been surprised by how little I have been upset about losing my boat and by how stress-free I feel.  Maybe I was subconsciously worried about the next bit of boat that was going to break.  We had a mammoth sale of all the items from our second (floating) household and it all added to the coffers for funding all manner of goodies on our wish-list.  It was amazing how much there was: foul-weather gear, seaboots, lifejackets, dehumidifiers, tools – all disappeared courtesy of Mr eBay.   That money will burn a hole in my pocket, but that is another story.  Incidentally, the real name of the boat, now sold, is PLYMOUTH GIN – I used the pseudonym APPLETON RUM to avoid having bricks thrown at me.  The distillery allowed me to use the name but, alas, I never received any free gin.

Speaking of gadgets, I simply must introduce you to Henry.  Henry is the latest newcomer to the family, one outcome of the Shacklepin equivalent of the ‘peace dividend’ that resulted from the sale of PLYMOUTH GIN.  Henry is not a dog, no, we don’t do dogs; Henry is a robot lawnmower.  No matter that our lawn is a modest 20 square metres in area; no matter that (as a friend so tactfully put it) I will be totally bored and unemployed without a boat to fix or a lawn to mow; no – I must have the latest technology.  Henry arrived on our doorstep in December when, as we all know, grass is at its most vigorous, and I spent a rewarding day on my hands and knees on a muddy lawn burying the boundary wire.  The way these things work, you see, is that the robot lawnmower is constrained electronically by a wire that is stapled into the lawn about 200 mm (8”) all the way around its edge.  The wire is effectively buried by grass growth over time, so you don’t see it.  There is a similar wire that runs from an arbitrary point on the boundary wire to the lawnmower’s charging base – a  platform that is anchored to the the lawn close to the nearest external electrical power point.  A robot lawnmower operates on a random basis daily, trimming the grass ‘a little and often’, pottering silently around the lawn, returning to its base to recharge, and never going rogue.  Well, that’s the theory.  I did have a few teething problems with Henry, the little rascal.  The plan is that, as the robot crosses the boundary wire near the edge of the lawn it stops and retreats to move elsewhere.  The distance that you must staple the wire from the lawn edge varies, depending on whether the lawn is on a slope, whether the edge abuts paving, or whether it drops off into a flower bed.  It seems I may initially have stapled the wire a bit closer to the edge than was sensible in a few places because, on his prototype run, Henry celebrated his new-found freedom from his box by exiting the lawn and savaging Jane’s chlamydia (or whatever) in the flowerbed.  This called for some rapid adjustment before Jane returned from her shopping expedition.  I then found that, at the lower end of our sloping lawn, Henry often became stuck because he rolled off the lawn, then could not get back because his little wheels were slipping in the mud.  Thinks: maybe December was not the best time to install and use a robot lawnmower but – hey – it was my new toy: no point in buying it and then stowing it in the shed.  Anyway, I think I have cracked it now and the lawn has almost recovered from being a diorama of the Battle of the Somme.  Henry has been removed, washed and placed in the shed until the Spring, and the debris of Jane’s flowers have been removed and safely buried in the compost bin under a pile of rotting cabbage leaves (what the eye doesn’t see…). Roll on the Spring, and we will see some action!  Watch this space for a later report.

The email from the local council pinged into my Inbox and I casually opened it.  What a shock!  The email read,
“WE HAVE INVOKED THE EMERGENCY PROTOCOL”.
Whoa, I thought; crikey.  What?  Are we under a threat of nuclear attack?  Has Mr Trump pre-empted his inauguration by declaring war on Russia?  Should I be shaking the mothballs out of my old uniform?
I read on, and discovered that the Emergency Protocol was because of Impending Extreme Weather.  I looked out of the window.  It was grey and slightly damp outside, the wind was ‘light airs’ at most, and the temperature hovered around zero Centigrade.  In other words, a typical January day in South West England.  Where was the problem?  Ah, the forecast was for – wait for it – heavy falls of snow – and we were all to batten down after laying in large stocks of tinned food, rice, pasta and other comestibles.  All persons over 60 should not leave the house in order to ‘protect the NHS’ (ie not overload medical resources by hobbling into a hospital dragging a broken leg).  Not that old chestnut again – it is about time that the British government realised that the NHS was created to look after us, not the other way round.  Jane and I had no plans to go out in the cold anyway, so we snuggled down in the Drawing Room after taking the precaution of digging out thick tights for her and my seaboot stockings for me, and bringing in our Wellington boots from the garden shed, that they may be warmed ready for use. 
Nothing happened.
The temperature did drop to -5C at one point, but no snow fell in Melbury.  Snowdonia, the Pennines, the Cairngorms, the moors and Salisbury Plain received a good dollop of the white stuff of course, and the A303 trunk road that crosses east-west through Wiltshire, Somerset and Devonshire was closed because of (what appeared to me to be) about 2” of snow.  Local television pictures of the devastation revealed fields like a winter wonderland – with tufts of grass poking up through the snowfall.  Whatever snow that did fall in Barsetshire, it was all gone in half a day.  Later, the UK Meteorological Office issued a warning of rain for Melbury.  What, rain? In South West England? In January? What is it with these people?  It’s called Winter – get over it. Oh, and stop ‘crying wolf’ – one day the real thing will come along, as it did in 1963, 1975 and 1981, we will be given warnings, but no-one will believe the authorities.  Emergency protocol, forsooth. 

‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us’.  The quotation from Rabbie Burns, so apt as we approach Burns Night, could readily be applied to the Shacklepins. We recently spent a week sleeping in our guest bedroom and using the family bathroom while our bedroom and en-suite bathroom were being decorated and – oh dear – what our guests have been tolerating without complaint.  The bed creaked; the water carafe rattled; one bedside lamp had a defective switch; the small landing courtesy light (intended to deter guests from falling down the stairs and overloading the NHS) did not operate; the lavatory cistern took two hours to refill; and the shower over the bath flooded the bathroom.  Otherwise all right.  Of course, we have slept in the guest bedroom before for the very purpose of ‘seeing ourselves as others see us’,  but never for more than one night and rarely using the family bathroom.   I did know about the lavatory cistern, but had not got around to fixing it.  I also knew that the shower screen on the bath could be better.  However, neither of us was aware of the scale of the shortcomings. Behold, all is now revealed to us and major changes have been implemented, starting with the introduction of a shower curtain.  I also fitted a new filling valve to the lavatory cistern, a process that involved me lying on my back for half a day in a pile of rust, with water dripping into my eyes, swearing profusely.  I could hardly stand up afterwards and I still have the bruises (what it is to be old).  Still, most of it is done now and future guests can visit the Hotel Shacklepin in full assurance that all defects are fixed.  Well, nearly all – I’m not sure what we can do about the creaking bed but, hey, you can’t have everything: it’s not The Ritz you know.

My name is Horatio Shacklepin and I am a chocoholic.  There – I feel better for that.  Fortunately, I am not yet quite a card-carrying chocoholic, for I would never specifically buy chocolate when on a shopping expedition, nor secretly poach an existing supply in the house.  Place a box of chocolates in front of me, however, and I will comfortable clear the top tier and even start on the bottom level – and my digestive system will suffer for it accordingly.  With this in mind, Jane and I tend to follow the words of the Lord’s Prayer to ‘lead us not into temptation’, and chocolate is rationed accordingly.  Alas, we have the good fortune to have many kind and generous friends and last Christmas generated a positive cornucopia of chocolates as presents: After-Dinner mints, Swiss chocolate, Belgian chocolate, British chocolate – it was all there for my delectation, and I was sorely tempted to succumb.  Fortunately, Jane recognises my weakness and so, this time, she stowed most of the chocolate away in some hidden repository in the kitchen where I dared not venture.  The exception was a box of liqueur chocolates. That box had already been breached when we had some visitors and, hence, was no longer virgin.  It lay on the coffee table, stripped of its cellophane wrapper and all but crying out, “Take me, take me”.   Christmas is over and so is the season of sweetmeats taken on a random basis.  We do not snack, and even the pudding course during dinner is restricted to weekends only.  Yet those liqueur chocolates could not be left to waste and I reasoned that it would be impolite to spurn our friends’ generosity by leaving them to rot.  And so it came to pass that, on a Monday evening, with puddings and alcohol banned on weekdays, Jane relented and handed me not one, but two liqueur chocolates from the box.  I savoured each in turn: the Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry and the Courvoiser, as I recall.  I can still taste them now.  They were delicious but, of course, the ingredient in chocolate that triggers addiction immediately did its work and I was desperate for more.  I looked appealingly at Jane with my ‘little boy’ look and my big blue eyes; I mentioned in passing what a treat it was for one who has suffered cancer, who has gazed into the abyss then stepped back, to have little treats; I even assumed the puppy ‘sit-up-and-beg’ position. With a sigh, she reached over for the box and I congratulated myself that I still had the old charm – I reckoned I was good for another one or even two chocolates – she could refuse me nothing.  She opened the box, closed the lid, and returned the box to the table.  I looked at her incredulously.
“Right”, she said,”We will allow ourselves two a night, which we’ve just had.  I have now counted those that are left, so you can’t have any more”.  She pushed the box away with an air of finality.
That’s my girl: firm but fair.  Apparently I was wrong to think that she can refuse me nothing, for she can refuse me chocolates too.  Ho hum.

In thirty two days I will complete my treatment for prostate cancer, a process that started in February 2023. Radiotherapy completed in July 2023, but I have been injected in the belly every three months since the start, and I take hormone pills twice daily. The side effects have been the loss of libido and chest hair, an increase in weight of about a stone, and frequent urination, but these are little potatoes and God has been good to me. So, 20 February is the Big Day, when all the pills and injections stop and I can return to normal life again. Raise a glass to me – I will. Here’s hoping…

So, what can Commander Shacklepin do with all that money sitting in the bank, just waiting to be spent?  Well, we are off to Spain in March to visit friends who are richer than us poor folk; we are off to York, which (surprisingly perhaps) I have never visited; and we are off to Paris for a cultural visit with the local arts society.  Oh, and maybe we could get a new car…But Jane has declared firmly that there will be No More Cars, which is quite right and sensible.  But you and I know better than that don’t we, dear reader?

Now if you will excuse me, I am off to be issued with my liqueur chocolate ration for the day.  Happy New Year.

19 January 2025

Blog 138.  Finished With Main Engines

Frankly, I blame the manufacturer of the claret-coloured corduroy trousers.  I had bought the rather daring  aforementioned items in the Spring because I thought it was time to be a little more adventurous in my sartorial habits, and claret seemed a sophisticated colour.  But I had hardly worn the trousers before what is laughably called Summer was upon us, and I reverted to chinos for the duration. As Autumn unfolded, the wine-coloured corduroys were unearthed from their stowage, found to be somewhat crumpled, and tossed into the dirty clothes bin for washing and ironing.  As Head of Dhobying in the Shacklepin household I adopt a no-nonsense approach to my charges, for life is too short to discriminate or give preferential treatment to garments that go into the washing machine.  True, I have learnt the odd lesson and suffered the lash for a few cockups: that time when I washed Jane’s underwear and tights with my workshop apron and floor mats springs to mind (she was picking sawdust and grit out of her brassieres and knickers for quite some time afterwards).  I occasionally even remember to separate out woollen sweaters – Jane’s wearing of my shrunken ex-uniform seaman’s sweater acting as a useful reminder.  Beyond that, I take no prisoners.  And so, it came to pass, that our newly-bought white sheets and pillowcases,  and Jane’s white floral nightdress, were bundled into the washing machine in loving communion with my claret-trousers.  They went in white, but slightly soiled; they emerged clean and – well – a bit pink.  Jane was not amused and my remark that a (slightly) pink nightdress for a girl was customary did not seem to help matters. Oh dear, in trouble again.

As predicted in the last blog, we spent an excellent three days in the Priory Hotel in Wareham, Dorset last month.  Regular readers will recall that the hotel’s success in attracting the Shacklepins’ custom was that it did not welcome children or dogs, that it had an excellent reputation for friendliness and hospitality, and that it offered top-class cuisine. I am pleased to report that it met all expectations. The hotel is located in four acres of land on the banks of the River Frome at the site of the headquarters of the Viking chief, Guthrum, when he captured Wareham from the Saxons in 875AD.  The building dates from 809 AD and has been, at various times, a nunnery and a monastery, making the hotel one of the oldest in Dorset.  Naturally, the history of the place made the layout distinctly quirky and the hotel comprised several linked buildings around gardens and courtyards.  We had a courtyard room on the ground floor, which was well-appointed, somewhat bijou, but all we could afford.  Access to the main block was either across the external courtyard or, as Jane very cleverly discovered, internally via a series of twisting passageways that formed a bridge.  As with all ancient buildings, floors tilted and creaked, landings went up and down, staircases abounded and public rooms were numerous;  a printed plan,  or a ball of string, would have been useful.  We were absolutely delighted with our choice despite the fact that the weather was wet and we could not take advantage of the attractive gardens, one of which swept down to the riverside.  Meals were taken in a cleverly and tastefully designed annex with huge picture windows that overlooked the garden.  The staff were excellent: attentive, professional and friendly.  The food was superb and of Michelin star quality, included in our package.  Of course the whole set up cost us a few bob at £1,080 for three nights at half board, but seeing as how the dinner, if taken separately, would have cost £80 each a night, and the quality matched the price, we reckoned it was good value.  You are permitted to prefer the Premier Inn and a meal at McDonalds or an all-inclusive seven-day package holiday to Benidorm if you wish – different ships, different long splices.
Of course, three nights in a place means only two days to actually explore, but we did our best to pack a lot in.  Wareham stands on a peninsula on the oddly-named Isle of Purbeck.  I say ‘oddly-named’ because a glance at a map will show you that the Isle of Purbeck is not an island at all, and never was.  I assume the area got the name from the fact that the sea borders three sides of the peninsula and the fourth side is marsh, making the ‘island’ a natural fortification.  Wareham and Poole lie at the root of the peninsula in the north east; Swanage at the tip, to the south east. 

After exploring Wareham, one of Alfred the Great’s fortified burgh towns to keep out the Danes (fortified after Guthrum left) we took a bus to Corfe Castle, the impressive medieval ruin set high on a hill in the middle of the peninsula.  The Norman castle is over 1,000 years old but was largely destroyed by that rascal, Oliver Cromwell, during the English Civil War because the castle’s then owner, Lady Mary Bankes, resisted the Parliamentarian siege while her husband was away fighting for the Royalists.  Cromwell was a kindly soul, however, for he gave Lady Bankes the keys to her ruined castle after it had been blown up, as a token of her courage in resisting his attack (she later recovered the castle and her estates when Cromwell died and Charles II took the throne).  I seem to recall from my history lessons that Corfe was also the place of assassination of the teenage Saxon king, King Edward in 878AD.  He thought he would just pop in to see his stepmother, who lived at the castle, just to say ‘hello’ or whatever, but as he dismounted from his horse he was offered a cup of poisoned wine while someone slipped behind him and stabbed him to death.  His stepmother wanted her son Ethelred, Edward’s half-brother, to have the throne you see, in what must be one of the earliest examples of ‘the wicked stepmother’.  All that was before the present Norman stone castle was built, of course, but at the same site.  The castle was well worth the visit, despite the climb to the top, for the views were outstanding and enough of the castle remained to appreciate the skill of its builders and the way of life of the castle occupants. Even the village of Corfe looked jolly nice in its ‘Olde Worlde’ way, though we did not experience it beyond the National Trust shop as time was short.  We took the private steam train to Swanage and, there, embarked on a bracing walk to the headland in a half gale to look at the sea.

The next day found us at the Bovington Tank Museum for that cultural historic visit that I had promised Jane.  I must say, I was very impressed. It is housed in a vast modern building with several distinct sections, each covering the various stages of the evolution of the tank. Claiming my veteran’s discount on entry, I was asked for the name of my regiment and evoked a raised eyebrow when I replied, ‘Royal Navy’.  I pointed out that I was curious about tanks because the Royal Navy had none, unless you counted the ones that were full of diesel oil, aviation fuel and water (a witty remark that passed right over the head of the ex squaddie at the reception desk).  Hall Number 1 covered the invention of the tank, the first being Little Willie and the second (inevitably) being Big Willie.  The term ‘tank’ (in case you didn’t know) springs from the pseudonym allocated by the British government for security reasons during manufacture in World War I.  The tank tracks were copied from the caterpillar tracks used by tractors in the USA, but initially they were not successful when cross-pollinated for Little Willie, and some further development work was required.    Development of the tank as a whole came initially under the Admiralty, and the first crews were naval, but the Royal Navy did not wish to continue with the weapon and the project was passed to the British Army.  Officers of the Royal Tank Regiment (as it became) carried  – and still carry – knobbly Ash Plant walking sticks as part of their formal uniform to test for firm ground (and mines) in front of their tanks.  I was deeply engrossed in all this detail and it was some time before I realised that Jane had, well, drifted away.  Time passed by and I had graduated from World War I to the 1930s when, from behind a particularly large steel behemoth of that era, Jane appeared with the friendly greeting of,
“My God.  Is that as far as you’ve got?  I’ve just finished the 21st century and the Challenger II.  What have you been doing?”
My explanation of the mechanism of the (literally) ground-breaking tank-track linkage that enabled tank development to proceed was not well received and I was encouraged to make better progress.  We did complete Halls 2, 3 and all halls west, and the whole experience was excellent; but I couldn’t help feeling that Jane’s heart was not quite in it somehow – at the end she had retired to a convenient bench to play Words with Friends with her international chums on her iPhone.  As we left for the car, I heard her mutter,
“Seen one tank, you’ve seen them all”.  I despair.
Overall, Great; Tanks, huge and frightening; Restaurant, a bit basic; Man Factor, 10; Woman Factor, 2.  Note to self: must return on my own or with a little friend who is not female.

I can hardly write a blog without commenting in a disinterested way about the US election. Wow, I’m not too sure many people expected that: Trump for president for another term.  Not only did he win by Electoral College votes (a bit like how British Members of Parliament form a government), but also by the popular vote ie, taken across the whole of the USA, Trump won the most votes.  Republicans are in the majority in Congress and I understand the party is likely to achieve a majority in the House of Representatives too.  Many Democrats are, quite literally, in tears.  My cousin in North Carolina is beside herself in despair, for (apparently) this is the end of civilisation as they know it.  Can it be that bad? I have no idea, but one American cruise line is offering a four-year cruise around the world for those Democrats needing counselling, only returning to the USA when Trump’s presidency is over.  That smacks of desperation if not hysteria.  
I can empathise to some extent, for things are far from rosy on this side of the pond, where a new government has been in power for six months and is already making itself felt – and not, in my opinion, in a good way.  We just have to live with the consequences of democracy and accept a majority verdict.  I believe someone quite famous once said something like, “democracy is a good idea until the people elect the wrong person”.

The concept of free speech in Britain, epitomised by Speakers’ Corner in London where a citizen could speak as freely as they wished, has long gone.  A woman preparing to commemorate Remembrance Sunday last week opened her door in the early morning to two policemen who told her that they were investigating a complaint about an alleged racist ‘tweet’ made by her over a year ago, which had subsequently been removed.  Challenged, the police officers would not (or could not) reveal the nature of the ‘tweet’ or the name of her accuser (the correct term was ‘victim’, the officers told her).  Unfortunately for the police, the woman visited turned out to be an award-winning journalist for a top UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, and she and the British press have reacted accordingly.  The British police largely gave up pursuing thieves of bicycles, shoplifters and burglars long ago and they have a poor record for catching other felons, all because of a shortage of resources, but this particular constabulary could spare not one, but two police officers to visit a middle-aged woman on Remembrance Sunday at 0930 in the morning, when Britain was about to remember the sacrifice its armed forces made to defend – among other things – freedom of speech.

We have got ourselves in a right muddle with our well-meaning equality laws, for the definition of a racist remark is entirely at the discretion of the person who feels offended, or even a bystander who thinks someone else might be offended.  In other words, if you think about it, anyone can make a complaint about anyone and the police are obliged to follow it up without assessing the validity of the complaint on common sense or any other grounds.  That said, it all comes down to priorities of policing: it is far easier to pursue a middle-aged woman against whom there is a trivial year-old spurious, or possibly vexatious, complaint than it is to track down a rapist.  Easy meat.  As I write, Essex Police (for it was that constabulary) is digging in and determined to pursue the matter to the full extent of its powers, and we still do not know what was said or who the complainant was.  Hmm: a police force on shaky ground, and with a not particularly impressive record, versus the British press – I wonder how that will work out?

Elsewhere, we have moved on from the British countryside being declared racist (because, apparently, not enough black or brown people visited it). Now, it seems, dogs are racist – at least in Wales – because a black woman has complained that she does not visit the Welsh countryside because she is afraid of the dogs that roam there: she wants to ban our little canine friends from the countryside so that Wales can keep a welcome in the hillsides and a welcome in the dales.  Whoever she is, I expect she will want a ban on cows and sheep next.  

It was a fitting day to say goodbye: sunny, no wind, a mild temperature for November, tide at slack water.  As I stood on my quarterdeck for the last time I took the opportunity for a valedictory look around at the River Dart with its verdant Devonshire river banks, the sheep in the fields, the steam train puffing its way up to Paignton, and the bustle of the marina hotel still under construction.  My eyes refocused on my modest command: still as trim as a new pin, her twin engines rumbling quietly, the Royal Naval Sailing Association’s jaunty burgee fluttering at her stubby mast.  I thought of the great fun and adventures Jane and I had enjoyed onboard and the hopes I had had for the future.  I shook my head: no point in looking back; one phase of life ends and another begins.  Heaving a sigh, I hauled down the Blue Ensign for the last time and folded it carefully.  Down came the burgee.  Finally, I turned off both ignition switches and all was silent.  I made my last entry in the log: 1500 – Finished With Main Engines.  I might just as easily have written, ‘Finished with Boating’ for, yes, APPLETON RUM has been sold (subject to survey) and with her goes twenty two years of recreational boating.  We left her in the tender hands of the boatyard crew who would lift her ready for her last repair under my ownership, that of replacing her port propeller shaft.  In all likelihood, the ownership would formally transfer when that repair was complete, and the boat was still out of the water, the final stages of her buyer’s survey done.  We would not see her again as owners.  I patted her hull affectionately, Jane shed a tear, and – without looking back – we walked to the car, removed our lifejackets and drove away from Noss Marina for the final journey home.

Regular readers will recall that we put our thirty-three foot twin-screw motor yacht up for sale in May after it dawned on me that, in the event of my death, the small Royal Navy widow’s pension that I left would be insufficient for Jane to keep the boat in the marina, even for the short time it took Jane to sell her.  Although not the trigger for my ‘light on the road to Damascus’ moment, my recent scare with prostate cancer served to underline my mortality.  Boats are, in any case, very expensive to keep and APPLETON RUM had been dominating our accounts spreadsheet ever since we bought her.  Increasingly we had no spare cash for holidays, luxuries or even major household repairs.  No: she had to go. The yacht brokers were happy to take her on, but warned that the market was cool at the moment.  We had a couple of viewings  towards the end of the Summer, but then all went quiet and I genuinely expected to see no movement until next year or even longer.  Then, out of the blue, a couple showed some interest in October.  A sea trial and part survey followed.  Before you could say ‘rum punch’ an offer was made, a price negotiated and a deal struck: I would complete the planned repair on the boat’s propeller shaft so that she was in tip-top condition for handing over; a hull survey would follow while she was out of the water and – if that went well – sale would complete.  The new owner would keep APPLETON RUM in her existing berth until the present term ended in April.  So – there you go, as the Americans say – twenty two years of boat ownership over at the stroke of a pen.

What on earth am I going to do to pass the time now?

18 November 2024

Blog 137. Mudlarks

‘Stop peering’. 
I was thus addressed by my dear wife one Sunday lunchtime as I scrutinised the plated-up Sunday roast.  She followed this up with a threat, and a gesture with the loaded plate,
‘You’ll get this over you in a minute.  Stop peering, I say’.
Of course, I backed off immediately and gazed innocently out of the window at a passing pigeon.  I reflected on my error, a habitual one, I am sorry to say.  The fact is, I had been puzzled by the presence of a strange looking vegetable on the plate – a sort of white spherical thing with tubes coming off it, which rather reminded me of a mini version of a closed feed controller in a steam plant: what on earth was she feeding me now?  Alas, I have never been good at concealing my feelings and several friends have commented that my face with its steely eyes is an open book. This failing had manifested itself, on this occasion, in the close scrutiny which Jane had damned as ‘peering’.  You would think I would have learned by now to be more discreet, but, at my age, alas, I am past redemption.  The first Mrs Shacklepin (yes, indeed, there was once a prototype Jane; the poor soul may have recovered by now – I do hope so) would occasionally prepare a fried breakfast with an undercooked fried egg, the white of the egg liquid and unappetising on the top of the yolk.  At that time I had perfected the ‘sniff’: a sort of non-verbal comment of quality assurance regarding the cuisine.  One day I sniffed once too often at the fried egg, and the breakfast made its way very rapidly to the kitchen gash bin;  I seem to recall that it got no further, but it was a close thing (I have often wondered, since, where that marriage went wrong).  Thereafter, the ‘sniff’ was consigned to history, but here it was in 2024, apparently reincarnated as ‘peering’.  In my defence, as I explained to Jane while out of range, I was merely curious about the rich variety of vegetables that she was preparing for my culinary delight and intestinal delectation.  This cut no ice with Jane however, who gave me a ‘sniff’ of her own and told me that I had had the unidentified vegetable many times before.  Annoyingly, however, she would not reveal its identity and so we spent the whole meal playing a guessing game, with me desperately suggesting increasingly outrageous and obscure vegetables and she rejecting them (‘You should know these things.  I hope you aren’t going senile’, were her encouraging words). We were well into the pudding course before the penny finally dropped and I remembered what the vegetable was: the mini closed feed controller on my plate turned out to be fennel.  It was very nice.  I knew you’d be interested.

Our boat, APPLETON RUM, is still for sale and interest has dwindled, as one would expect as summer fades into autumn, then winter.  We have now found that she needs a new port propeller shaft, having discovered that the existing one has a stripped screw thread on the end, which makes the propeller somewhat insecure.  So the old girl will have to be lifted out of the water in November and blocked off ashore while a local firm manufactures about nine feet of 1½” marine-grade stainless steel, complete with tapers, keyways and screw threads.  Money, money, money.  Whoever buys that boat will get an absolute bargain.  Relaunch is scheduled for 6 January 2025 – I promised Jane a New Year treat away from home, but I am keeping the event as a surprise.

September was definitely autumnal, but it did have the odd day of mild weather.  We took advantage of the weak sunshine, and the absence of wind and rain, to take the boat away for a trip up river to Stoke Gabriel for the night.  This was not exactly an adventure like beating close hauled around Cape Horn, of course, but we are at that happy time in our lives when sitting peacefully in a remote place, sipping gin and tonic in the sunshine, beats intense physical activity while standing, soaking wet, on a sloping deck.  Besides, we didn’t have enough fuel to get to Tierra del Fuego and my library book had to be returned in three days time.
Stoke Gabriel is a small village on the River Dart about six miles upstream from the harbour mouth.  Road access (like most towns and villages in Devonshire) is somewhat cramped, but you can reach the village in a medium-sized boat like ours, three hours either side of high water.  The last time we visited the village (as opposed to just cruised past) was during the Covid restrictions (Blog 98) in a blistering hot summer.  Then, like many places of small population at that time, the village was distinctly parochial and unwelcoming – so much so that we were put-off ever visiting again.  But time is a great healer, and three years on we thought we should give the place another chance.  We moored to a buoy just off the village creek, which dries out at low tide, and watched the sun go down while we sipped the aforementioned gins and tonic.  The scenery was beautiful, the sky was streaked with the red of a forthcoming fine day, and the weather benign – one of those perfect evenings that you so rarely encounter in Britain.  We looked forward to our exploration of the village in the morning. 
After a leisurely breakfast in the sunshine we launched the dinghy and, in an uncharacteristic drive for fitness, I decided to ship the oars and pull the dinghy to the small pontoon that forms the low-tide landing stage for the village, rather than use the outboard motor.  This was my first mistake of the day.  Rowing a skiff on the Serpentine in London, or even pulling a warship’s whaler in the Atlantic, are experiences quite different from pulling an unevenly loaded small inflatable dinghy against an ebbing tide.  In the dinghy, the cramped layout was such that I fouled my legs with the oars every time I made a stroke.  There was no room or seat for Jane in the stern, so she had to sit in the bows, which trimmed the boat by the head and made it awkward to handle.  So there it was: swearing mightily, I pulled towards the pontoon about 400 metres away against a 1 – 2 knot tide, zig-zagging like a drunk tacking his way home from the pub while Jane issued contrary helm orders (“More to the left.  No, not that way, my left.  Too far now.  More to the right…”).  We did make it eventually and were able to crawl out onto the pontoon in the usual undignified fashion, on all fours, before securing the tender and setting off into the village.  All that hard work had whetted my appetite and I remembered that there was a rather nice little café, The River Shack, right on the waterfront: a pot of tea perhaps…oh no, I couldn’t possibly have a toasted teacake so soon after breakfast…well, perhaps just one…We quickened our pace accordingly.  Oh dear.  The café was closed and it would not be open until Thursday (it was then Tuesday).  We gazed around us and it became apparent that, not only was the River Shack closed, so was the whole of Stoke Gabriel for there was no sign of any human life.  Like most riverside towns and villages in Devonshire, Stoke Gabriel is built on the side of a river valley, so any exploration of the village involved slogging up a steep hill.  After having heaved that dinghy across the river I was all for climbing back in and letting it drift gently back to our moored boat, there to imbibe a glass of ardent spirit.  Jane, however, was determined that we complete our daily four-mile walking exercise and so she resolutely set off up the harbour road with me huffing and puffing behind.  I thought that there was always the chance of a quick pint in the pub but, alas, it was not to be, for both pubs were shut as well.  Yes, Stoke Gabriel hospitality had shut down for the winter.  Determined to make the most of the place on our run ashore we wandered around this apparently deserted village, climbing ever upwards and admiring some quaint houses and cottages, the village shop (open) and a very peaceful church.  We even met another human being (the postman).  Finally, we reached what appeared to be the summit and rested on a convenient bench while we discussed how to get back.  We could have just trundled back down the main road by the way we had come, but Jane always likes to make a circular walk and so, sighing patiently,  I unearthed my Ordnance Survey map and spread it out for her consideration, like Hannibal laying out his plan for crossing the Alps.  It seemed to me that there was a perfect circular route that we could take, through the upper village, across several fields, than back down to the foreshore.  Indeed, scrutinising the map, it seemed to me that the track emerged on the shore almost at Mill Point, where we had secured the dinghy.  All we would then have to do is walk along the foreshore, with the tide out, for a short way and we would be back at the mooring.  I put this plan to Jane and she was all in favour, so off we set.  We passed three ladies doing their gardening, who clearly were baffled as to why two people should wander down an urban road wearing lifejackets and seaboots, but were too English to mention it – such a friendly village once we had found some people who were alive, we thought.  Then the route left the road and we followed the track across two grassy fields before it started to descend, presumably towards the river, into a small dell.  We found ourselves scrambling down a dark tunnel, almost entirely enclosed by trees and undergrowth, like Rupert the Bear and Tiger Lily going to meet the wood elves.  Down and down we went until, at last, we emerged on the river foreshore, where we paused to get our bearings.  Well, we were undoubtedly back at the river, but there was no dinghy or pontoon in sight.
‘Not to worry’, I said, ‘We just have to walk downstream a bit and it will be just around that corner’.  I gestured at a rocky point about a hundred metres away. 
The foreshore comprised firm gravel and dirt with a sprinkling of seaweed and bits of driftwood, though it was a little muddy closer to the water. It would be easy-going.  We set off and soon reached the point, where we paused again to get our bearings.  Oh dear, still no dinghy, but there was yet another point in the distance, so we headed for that one, only to find that that, too, was a ‘false summit’.  To cut a long story short, we found ourselves walking about a mile along the foreshore in order to reach our dinghy.  That track had not emerged on the riverbank quite where I thought it would: bit of a minor navigational cock-up there, but hey, I’m a naval officer – I’m best at reading charts not maps. Besides, as an engineer officer I always found that my turbines went wherever the ship did.  As the journey progressed, what was initially firm gravel underfoot began to deteriorate into slippery rocks, piles of seaweed, low overhanging tree branches, and mud.  Towards the end the two of us were scrambling over slimy rocks almost on all fours, slipping on seaweed, squelching through deep mud and occasionally falling into concealed rock pools.  Jane was not a happy bunny and was complaining mightily.
‘Lucky we had those seaboots on’, I observed cheerily.  I was taught at Dartmouth to always maintain the morale of the troops, you see,  and to project an air of confidence in times of adversity. 
Finally, the inevitable happened.  From behind me I heard a cry of,
‘Awk!’,
followed by the sound of a loud ‘SPLAT!’
I turned and found that Jane had disappeared.  Well, disappeared from immediate line of sight anyway, for she was now lying in a large puddle of mud, spreadeagled on her back like a candidate for Aztec human sacrifice, her rear quarters covered in filth.  Rolling over to clamber upright, she succeeded in covering the rest of her body in alluvial matter too, so that she now resembled some subterranean sea monster emerging from the depths, though incongruously with strawberry blond hair decorated with seaweed.  What made it worse was that she had been wearing white trousers and a white top. They were no longer white, and nor was the dinghy by the time we made it back to APPLETON RUM.  We staggered onboard leaving muddy footprints on the quarterdeck and, there, removed our filthy clothing and boots before going below. Those hot showers and cups of tea were looking good.  Fortunately, no mention was made of the minor cartographical error that had led to the diversion, for which I was grateful. Hannibal’s reincarnation could live to plan the crossing of the Alps another day. What larks!  Must do it again some time.

Tell me, have you ever been invited to a country house for the weekend, there to mix with the Marquess and Marchioness of Barsetshire and fellow guests, perhaps to partake in a little shooting or to stroll, like a character from Agatha Christie, through the estate after luncheon?  I will take your answer as a ‘no’, though I could be totally wrong in my assessment of my readers’ social circles.  I have not experienced such heady delights either, but having started life from quite humble beginnings like our prime minister (whose father was a toolmaker, you know) I am fascinated by etiquette and good manners, and always aspire to excellence.  I have all the books on the subject and continue to encourage Jane to practise the correct behaviour in our humble mansion.  She, who lived in a household that had servants in her childhood in the Caribbean, continues to resist my suggestions for improvement – the implementation of the toast rack (Blog 121) springs to mind – but I put this down to colonial practices that are divorced from those of the mother country.  We must be tolerant of those brought up in the Dominions.  Anyway, to get to the point, I am a subscriber to The Spectator, a 200-year-old current affairs magazine that exemplifies high quality journalism and provides a good weekly summary of international and national affairs without being too heavy.  Tucked away in the back of the magazine is a small section entitled ‘Dear Mary’, a column devoted to readers seeking advice on social matters.  Jane and I read this section avidly, for it rarely fails to entertain.  Often, the answers (to us) are pretty obvious, but one question that came up recently completely baffled us.  The question was,
‘How can I tell guests to remember to bring enough cash for a tip for the staff?’. 
It seems that, in the higher reaches of British society, staying guests are expected to leave cash for the domestic staff on leaving.  I seem to recall that the figure of £10 per night of stay was mentioned if your host has only one member of staff; £20 if there is more than one.  Presumably you bung the butler a wad of used fivers personally for distribution to the staff (‘There you go, dear boy’, stuffing the money into his top pocket), or discreetly you leave the money in an envelope in your room as you leave – I would hope, the latter.  Jane and I were totally astonished by this revelation.  Really?  Gosh! But if you are a guest in someone’s house, why should you have to pay?  What kind of hospitality is that?  If the staff deserve a supplement to their wages to compensate them for the extra work that a guest incurs, surely that should fall on the shoulders of the host?  Apparently not: the ‘done thing’ is for the guest to leave cash.  Jane and I push the boat out whenever we have guests and make a point that nothing is too much trouble.  We love having guests overnight, and we would not expect them to leave a contribution, even in the unlikely event that we chose – say – to have a take-away meal in the evening instead of a formal dinner: we would pay for it all.  Mind you, we have no staff, so maybe that clinches the argument. Still, we are grateful for the tip (no pun intended) so that we do not commit a faux pas next time we drop in on Lord Barsetshire for the weekend to bag a few grouse.

We are off to Wareham in Dorset next week for a short break in The Priory hotel, which promises relaxation, excellent service, top cuisine, no dogs and no children.  Bargain.  I will let you know how we got on in due course.  Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to do some research into visiting Bovington Tank Museum – I promised Jane some cultural visits while we were away.

12 October 2024