I was cruising in the Caribbean.  The sea was an azure blue and the boat rolled gently in the swell.  It was lovely and warm, and I was approaching a sandy beach as white as icing sugar with the intention of anchoring.  Jane was wearing a green bikini (at least, I think it was Jane) and her cool arm reached over and tenderly held my hot left elbow.
“Sorry”, she said, “ I was just checking you were alive”.
“Oh, thanks very much”

Of course, I had been dreaming, but the last bit had been real.  It seems I had fallen asleep over my book.  Unlike my spouse, who could fall asleep on a clothes line, I hardly ever doze off in a chair.  This time I had let the side down and done the Old Man thing.  I wasn’t too sure about the frank, “checking you are alive” bit, but I suppose it was nice of her to make sure.  It was the antihistamine that was making me groggy, of course.  I had tried a different type after my left arm had turned into that red dirigible referred to in Blog 55 and this new drug seemed to be helping in the arm deflation process, though with the penalty of a permanent state of doziness.  Jane hates it when I am dozy: not because she begrudges me a little nap, but because it is punctuated by very frequent loud yawns of, “A-A-R-G-H”.  She does not like the “A-A-R-G-H”; it drives her nuts.  I have great difficulty in yawning quietly in accordance with her frequent requests, but sometimes I get as far as the “AAR…” before I stop myself which, for some reason, annoys her even more.  I did point out to her that I feel the same about her sneezes which, like most women, just consist of a “Ssst”.  There is none of the full blown, “ ArRR – TISHOO!” that men do, blasting their mucus and germs everywhere and deafening the populous in the process.  Women just do this, “Ssst”, which is neither use to man nor beast.  Where is the pleasure in that half-hearted effort?   It doesn’t even clear their noses.

You will be pleased to know that my left arm did not drop off after all, but – boy – did it take a long time to heal.  I still don’t know what stung me, but it might just as well have been a scorpion for the pain, swelling and recovery time that it produced.  The latest theory is that it might have been a ladybird, as we found quite a few hibernating onboard.  If true, then it would be amazing that such an innocuous insect could produce so much damage.  We are now beating out our clothing before putting it on, as if on safari in deepest Africa.

It is far too busy in the marina.  Children run up and down the metal pontoon, lively conversations with raucous laughter are rife in the still evening air, rubber dinghies or RIBs with outboard motors race everywhere and – clearly – others are doing what we are doing: relaxing and using their boats as a floating holiday home.  This is very poor:  don’t they know that this marina and river are for our exclusive use?  We have been spoilt, of course.  Last year we came down in April and May during school term time and virtually had the place to ourselves in perfect weather.  This year, the whole world is topsy turvy and many people seem to be permanently on holiday (or “furloughed”).  It did calm down a little after the weekend, suggesting some small trend towards normality, but Dartmouth itself is heaving with people whenever we go over there.  Clearly the “staycation” is in full flow.

When we moved our boat from the inland waterways of the non-tidal Rivers Thames and Severn to the coast, I had hoped to see a vast improvement in knowledge of the Rules of the Road at Sea (now known as the Colregs).  Sadly, I have been disappointed.  Cruising downriver on the River Dart beside Dartmouth is utter bedlam: boats come at you from port, starboard, astern and ahead with complete disregard to any rules whatsoever.  The other day one sloop, under power, crossed my bows from port (he should have gone round my stern), turned directly in front of me, then crossed back from starboard to port (causing me to alter course around his stern); when I looked back he was still zig-zagging across the fairway as if avoiding a torpedo.  If I had had one, I would have fired it myself.  On another occasion a ketch shot out unannounced from behind a line of boats to starboard and cut sharply in front of me; I altered course around his stern, only to find, as I passed,  that there was no-one at the helm at all – the sole occupant was up for’d, stowing his sails.  Sound signals (to indicate intended changes of course) are unheard of, except from the naval boats of the college.  All this unpredictable behaviour is overlaid by commercial ferries going wherever they like, rubber dinghies coxed by blind men, and day or hire boats blithely criss-crossing without any fear whatsoever.  I can forgive the ignorance of the day trippers and the arrogance of the ferries, but the yachtsmen really should know better.  I would wager that all of them are competent sailors, can hand, reef and steer, and can hoist or lower a spinnaker at the drop of a hat; but Colregs and sound signals?  Naah.  They are for other people.

The contrast between the boaters’ behaviour on the different waterways is actually quite interesting. We bought our first boat (a narrowboat) in 2002 and, for a few years, kept her on the canals. The canals are largely populated by narrowboats or wide-beam barges; the narrowness of the canals, the height of bridges and the shallow depth of water all combining to restrict users with fibreglass cabin cruisers or similar craft. It is a slow and very relaxed lifestyle on the canals and everyone waves to each other as they pass. The enemy on the canals are the fishermen, who believe that the canals were built solely for them, and hate all boats with a passion; they certainly don’t wave to anyone. Now I have noticed that many narrowboat owners do develop distinct characteristics. For a start, their dress is different from other boaters: the muddy towpaths and heavy work of manually operating locks partly dictate the wearing of scruffy jeans and tops, top knots in men, and solid builders’ boots with steel toecaps or similar attire. Secondly, the women are almost always enormous, with arms on them like ham shanks, tattoos and jolly red faces. Finally, they very much hate it if you do not slow down your boat as you pass their mooring. This last is a legitimate and understandable complaint because, for hydrodynamic reasons, a boat passing close at speed will suck a moored boat away from the bank and – in extreme cases – pull out a narrowboat’s moorings. But there is a psychological element too: the moored boat must hear your engine note change. Even if you crawl past a moored narrowboat at tick-over speed, if there has been no previous change in engine noise, then the front doors of the moored boat will hurtle open and a large muscular woman will bellow at you to SLOW DOWN. I put this down to the introverted hermit-like existence of some narrow-boaters and the fact that they have little else to do but listen for approaching boats and find fault with their speed. The speed limit on the canals is 4mph, chosen mainly to prevent excess wash damaging the environment or washing away the canal banks but, in any case, a fast speed is not physically possible because of the hydrodynamics of moving in the shallow water (at speed the boat just gets pulled deeper into the water and can ground, a phenomenon known as “squat”). Not all narrow-boaters bellow at you, of course, and the canals are actually a very laid-back and friendly place to enjoy boating, but the behaviour is definitely a characteristic.
Now move on to the the inland rivers, such as the non-tidal Thames or Severn. Here, the speed limit will typically be a bit higher (for example, 5mph on the Thames), the rivers are much wider than the canals, but there is still a camaraderie and everyone waves to each other as they pass. The enemy on the inland rivers are the university rowers, who believe that the rivers are there solely for them, stop dead in front of you, and simply ignore all other craft. On the inland rivers, there are boats of all sizes and the key characteristic here is the hierarchy. At the top of the tree are the gin palaces: the big white sea-going cabin cruisers built from steel or fibreglass, with their whip aerials, their radomes, their inflated fenders with little socks on (to keep them clean), their twin turbo-charged diesels throttled right back like race horses champing at the bit, and their bathing platforms; they surge everywhere with great self-importance, leaving vast wash behind them; they are the BMWs and Audis of the waterways (I am sure you get the picture). Below them are the middle class: the smaller cabin cruisers, built in white fibreglass and usually quite old, their ownership often passed down through the generations. And at the very bottom are the narrowboats: at least 20 tons of steel, flat bottomed, long, narrow and low, painted with black bitumen and sometimes decorated with traditional artwork or plantpots. There is no-one below them. The sartorial standards and the crew girths match the boats. On the gin palaces you have the striped jerseys, the Gucci deck shoes, the designer white jeans cut off at the knee and the headscarves for the women, all of whom will be trim and well-preserved, though the menfolk will often be fat, florid and haughty; the narrowboat crews will be dressed and sized as previously described; the small cabin cruiser crews will be dressed as in everyday life ashore. The gin palaces hate the narrowboats. This is partly because – at up to 80 feet in length – the narrowboats take up a lot of space at a mooring and leave no room for the gin palaces to come alongside, but also because – in a lock – the bitumastic paint on the narrowboat hull can leave a greasy black mark on the gin palace’s pristine white gelcoat or on her fender socks. The crews of the gin palaces look down from their fly-bridges with disdain on narrow-boaters, both figuratively and literally, so there is definitely a snobbish element to the behaviour, though the top-end narrowboats are often superbly equipped with designer kitchens, marble baths and washing machines, and cost a great deal of money. Just as car drivers cannot bear to be stuck behind a cyclist, so a gin palace cannot bear to be stuck behind a narrowboat: they will move heaven and earth to beat a narrowboat into a lock then close the lock gate on her (I have actually seen this happen several times). The narrow-boaters, for their part, are mostly bemused by this behaviour (rather like the story of the tortoise and the hare), though they do resent having a gate slammed on them. Narrow-boaters call the gin palaces (and smaller cabin cruisers) “crunchies” because of the noise their fibreglass hulls make as they are compressed between two 20 ton steel narrowboats in a lock. The gin palaces, for their part, call the narrowboats “black slugs” or “ditch dwellers”.
Finally, the coastal rivers and the sea, populated by jet skis, gin palaces, sailing craft, and the rubber dinghies (called tenders) carried on the last two. Despite speed limits on the coastal rivers (for example, 6 knots – about 7 mph – on the River Dart) few boats take any notice and the resulting wash throws moored boats all over the place; you just get used to it. The enemy here are the paddle-boarders and canoeists who, like rowers on the inland rivers, ignore all other boats and have a death wish. Curiously, there is no real hierarchy on the coast despite the size of the bigger motor cruisers that border on being ships or private yachts, but there is no overt friendliness either: few wave at each other on the coast. There are no narrowboats of course, and the standard of dress is common throughout: deck shoes or the occasional designer leather seaboots, striped jerseys, shorts or cotton trousers, smocks, lifejackets.
The common elements (apart from the water) in all three environments are an apparent ignorance of the Rules of the Road and sound signals when on the river, and the ownership of dogs. Virtually all boats have dogs, sometimes more than one, and I have never understood why you would want to share a confined cabin with a smelly and wet animal. But there you go – I am not a doggie person, as you probably have already guessed..

It will not have escaped the astute reader’s notice, by the way, that I now own a gin palace by the above definition.  But, having experienced what it is like to be a narrow-boater, I never looked down on any of them when I was on the inland rivers.  And I do not have socks to cover my fenders.

“And here is the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency  at 0800 Greenwich Mean Time on Monday 27th of July. Wight, Portland, Plymouth: south south westerly Force 6, gusting Gale 8; 998; rain; poor…”.  So chanted BBC Radio 4 on Monday.  I don’t think I need add any more, other than to say it was as black as your hat outside despite it being daytime, the rain lashed the windows like a fire hose, and we did not leave our mooring. The high wind has characterised our entire stay afloat this time.  If we had owned a sailing boat, then we would have delighted in the wind: beating close-hauled into a stiff south westerly, with the spray flicking over the weather bow can be exhilarating.  In a motor boat the pleasure is not so great and the heavy swell (as explained in earlier blogs) can be a nuisance.  When we did eventually go to sea, we tried to find a sheltered cove where we could drop anchor and relax, but on each occasion the boat tossed around like a cork after we anchored, and we had to weigh and move on.  We did have a good day on Thursday, when Jane’s brother called for a visit, and we took him out to sea and then up river to Totnes, relaxing with a beer on the quarterdeck afterwards.  We were looking forward to the next day avidly because it was billed as the hottest day so far.  This prediction lasted until about noon, just as we were crossing the harbour bar; then the cloud came down, a squall swept in from the west and – would you believe it – mist and fog seeped up the river, blotting out Dartmouth and the surrounding countryside.  I don’t know which parts of the country received the really hot sunny weather other than Heathrow airport.  Certainly we didn’t.

Well we are back home now, after ten days escape on the boat, and we have decided that ten days (or possibly seven) are probably about right: we are glad to be back.  No more sliding off the bed lengthways to get up, no more 35 pumps to flush the heads, no more creaks and groans (at least, not from the boat), no more falling head-first into the engine compartment with Jane holding my belt and trying to pull me out.  As we finished loading up the car for the return I was amazed at how much stuff we were taking back.  Much of it was dirty laundry, spread over three large sacks, and I could not fathom how it had been generated.  Although I maintain a high sartorial standard onboard, this does not run to dress shirts and several changes of clothing, nor does Jane favour the A-line skirts or smart dresses that I would advocate ashore and she would reject. By normal standards we are pretty scruffy and casual onboard.  Whence this dirty laundry then?  No idea.  It took me two days to wash and iron the stuff, with the washing machine working almost 24 hours a day.  Do you find this when you return from holiday, though?  An initial period of flapping about and trying to catch up, sifting through the mail, junk and otherwise; catching up on emails; mowing the lawn; dead-heading the roses and digging up the weeds?  I suppose it is all rather normal.  Anyway, we do not plan to return to the boat now until September when, we hope, many of the tourists have gone home.

The CV19 situation is generating mixed messages: the whole of the UK of some 66 million souls had only seven deaths from the virus the other day, and the south west of England (where we live) has had no deaths for over two weeks.  This encouraging news belies the new and ubiquitous use of face coverings and gloomy predictions of a second wave of infections.  Certainly the number of tests proving positive is increasing, but this is directly in proportion to the increased number of tests being undertaken: as President Trump has more-or-less stated, the more tests you do, the more cases you will find.  I would like to know a bit more about the new cases that are identified: how many of them require hospital treatment, how many make the patient seriously ill, how many involve existing medical conditions or the aged, and how many are asymptomatic or mild.  This information does not seem to be available.  I still say that, if the death toll in the UK is in single figures and dropping, and is consistently below the 5-year average for all deaths at this time of year, then surely things are getting better?  As I said in an earlier blog, we may have to get used to the idea of living with this virus and carrying on as normal, accepting that some of us may be ill, recover, or die from it; it is, after all, what we do with other illnesses such as measles, tuberculosis, cancer or influenza, and it is what our ancestors did with the Spanish flu in 1918 – 1920.  I won’t be holding my breath for an effective vaccine and I have been surprised by the number of people who have told me that they wouldn’t have the vaccine even if there was one.  While conformity with the current regulations in England has been remarkably good almost to the point of zealotry, there are cracks appearing in some sections of the community: illegal raves or wild house parties have occurred among some of the younger generation, and some holidaymakers are shedding their precautions with their cares when they leave their cities.  The response to holidaymakers in some English tourist spots has been interesting: Cornwall – a county whose economy relies heavily on tourism – has been grumbling about tourists and second-home owners from the very beginning of the crisis and has consistently shown hostility to its own source of income (there may be a reckoning when all this is over); I read of similar parochial attitudes in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.  Yet in Devonshire (or the bit where our boat is) visitors were very welcome as businesses struggle to recover from the economic effects of the lockdown.  Jane noticed, however, that the price of her Dartmouth Ice Cream Company cone had gone up by 25p, bringing the cost of two (generous) servings up to £8.  I imagine the company is making up for lost time, but that still seems like a lot for two ice creams.  But that is a small price to pay for Jane’s happiness.

The UK Government’s Covid-19 Contain Framework now grants new powers to local authorities that will allow them to destroy cars, buses, trains or aeroplanes suspected of being contaminated with Covid 19.  They will similarly be able to destroy care homes, offices or private houses as a last resort if the virus is considered to be out of control.  I had to read this news twice and check my calendar that it is not April 1st when I read it.  This is going totally over the top and is quite worrying.  I may be losing faith in central government’s grip on this crisis, but I have no faith at all in the competence and judgement of local government. Covid 19 is not novichok and it is certainly nowhere near as lethal.  It also dies out naturally on inert surfaces after 72 hours.  A friend recently put forward the concern that the Machiavellian measures being introduced by central government were the first stages of an emerging totalitarian state and I just smiled at his conspiracy theory.  Now, after this new development, I am not so sure that he is wrong. Scary.  Distinctly scary.

Tragedy.  Her Ladyship has cracked.  I don’t mean that Jane’s sanity has finally shattered after 37 years of living with me, I mean her early-morning tea mug.  We were presented with two mugs, labelled “Her Ladyship” and “His Lordship” as presents by some very good old friends many years ago, and we have used them exclusively for the early-morning tea ever since, to the point where it has become a ritual.  In a similar vein, we have special red coffee cups and saucers, from the same source,  used exclusively for breakfast (except on Sundays when they are given the day off).  I wonder if others have similar traditions and rituals or is it that the Shacklepins are very slowly going round the twist?  Poor Her Ladyship: now as cracked as her owners and destined for the scrap heap in the same way.  It is the end of an era.

As I was shaving this morning I reflected, not for the first time, what a chore it was.  It is a task so difficult to get just perfect.  Use an electric shaver and the job is not done properly; have a wet shave and you risk a death from a thousand cuts.  I use both methods, not always in one session, and I suppose it is something I have done some 18,000 times.  I pondered this morning on whether to grow a beard, an affectation so much easier now that I am no longer on the active list of the Royal Navy.  You see, in the Service you had to ask permission to grow a beard; officers asked the Executive Officer and ratings asked their Divisional Officer. There were certain other restrictions attached to the process too.  For a start, you did not ask permission to grow a beard, you asked permission to discontinue shaving.  There is a difference.  No goatees, half beards, or weird styles were permitted: it had to be a full set.  You will never see a member of the Royal Navy with a moustache unless, possibly, it is a female Chief Stoker.  Secondly, you were not allowed ashore on leave while the beard was growing, so the best time to grow one was when embarking on a long voyage.  Finally, at the end of a month the growth was vetted and, if it was scraggy, patchy or half grown, the owner would be told to shave it off.  Do you remember those toxic cigarettes called Senior Service, which had a picture of a Jolly Jack Tar, bearing a full set, on the front?  The caption was, “Senior Service Satisfy”, something I have always tried to do over the years.  I considered all this after I nicked my chin this morning and wondered if I should ask permission to grow a set from my Executive Officer aka the memsahib.  I put the proposition to her over breakfast and was surprised by the liberal response,
“Yes, no problem at all…”.
My eyebrows rose.
“…but, of course, there will be no kissing if you have a beard”.

Pass me that razor, would you?

6 August 2020

They follow me around you know. The children, I mean. I am convinced that God is putting me to the test like He did with Jesus when He spent 40 days in the desert (and there the comparison between me and the Son of God definitely ends). We are back on the boat and, in the sloop moored ahead of us when we embarked, were three tiny tots screaming the place down and bouncing off the bulkheads with boredom. The sloop had a tiny cabin, but there was a mesh canopy around the cockpit to create a sheltered extra space and it was in this barred pen that the children were corralled, banging on the meshed canopy like enraged monkeys in a zoo. This was just as bad as the screaming and tantrums that we have to put up with from the children next door, at home, and one of the reasons why we had escaped to the boat. The screaming could be heard inside our boat, with all the windows closed, and continued until well past sunset. I felt like bouncing off the bulkheads myself. The next morning, I enquired of the Marina staff if the sloop was a visitor; she was. How long was she staying? The chap I asked said he didn’t know, but he would find out. One hour later, the sloop was moved to a spot further up into the marina, as far away from us as possible. Thank you marina staff. Thank you Father. I’m sorry I failed the test.

It is bucketing down: what the locals call “Devon sunshine”.  I won’t dwell on this misfortune, as I gave it some lengthy attention in the last blog.  Suffice it to say that the weather improved when we left the boat last time – and promptly deteriorated again as soon as we came back onboard for a second batch of punishment.  We have not taken APPLETON RUM away from the jetty yet, though I hope to do so in the next week or so: the rain does not bother me, but Miss Caribbean 1951 turns into the gingerbread woman in these conditions and runs the risk of dissolving into a soggy mess.  And, as I revealed at the end of the last blog, we all know who commands this vessel, don’t we?

The emphasis on Health and Safety in the 21st century has gone mad.  How things have changed since the Admiralty Manual of Seamanship Volume 2 (1967), in its section on Survival, stated, 
“Do not sleep under a coconut tree, or you may be fatally injured by a coconut falling on your head”.
I have just taken delivery of a portable battery operated wet & dry vacuum cleaner and the accompanying nannying instructions (which I usually throw into the recycling bin, unread) state:
“Persons lacking experience and knowledge may only use the appliance if they are properly supervised, have been instructed on use of the appliance safely by a person responsible for their safety, and understand the resultant hazards involved. Only people who have been instructed on how to use the device, or have proven their ability to operate it, and have been explicitly instructed to use it, may use the device.”
Thank heavens mummy is here to guide and instruct me on how to use this dangerous vacuum cleaner. I know she cares for my safety because she took those scissors away from me the other day and replaced them with a plastic pair with rounded tips. Yep, I was right the first time: straight into the recycling bin with those instructions. Unfortunately, I cut my hand on the paper in the process.

Many years ago, when our son was a little boy, we were playing together in the living room and I thought it was a good time to give him a fatherly lesson in credit scoring with women.  I suggested he approach his mother in the kitchen and ask if he could help with anything.  I counselled that she would say no, but that the offer would be worth many credit points that could be used in his favour in the future.  He duly trotted off.  Time passed by and he did not return, but I assumed he had found something else to amuse him.  After about half an hour he returned, indignant, and demonstrated some remarkable verbosity for his age,
“I’m not doing that again!”, he grumbled, ”she set me dusting the bedrooms”.
Oh dear: failed in my fatherly advice, though I suppose he did earn the credit points and I had, at least, taught him Sod’s Law.  I was reminded of this little incident the other day when I fell into the same trap.  I had commented that the morrow was a completely clear day with nothing to disturb our peace, only to receive the tart reply that my day might be clear, but hers would be spent preparing the lunch for our friends, who were coming the day after.  Like a fool, I offered to help with the cooking (I knew she would say no) but, true to historical form and to my dismay, she accepted with alacrity.  The day dawned and I expressed the intention of sorting out the screws in the workshop.
“That would be after you have helped with the pie, would it?”
Damn. She had remembered. I was allocated the task of producing the sauce for a chicken, ham and leek pie, and directed to the recipe on her iPad. I am not always good with recipes. When the memsahib was still working, but I was retired, I once produced a successful dish from chicken breasts with goats cheese and red peppers. The recipe told me to cut slices in the breast, 3/4 of the way down and stuff the goats cheese and peppers in the slices before baking the whole thing. As I say, the meal was a success (we still produce it today on occasion), but Jane was baffled as to why the goats cheese and peppers were clustered just on one end of the breast, with the rest clear. I showed her the recipe and she burst out laughing. I dare say you have already guessed it: the requirement was to cut the slices all along the chicken breast, but 3/4 of the way deep (ie in the vertical plane). I had interpreted the instructions as 3/4 of the way along the breast (ie in the horizontal plane). I told her that I was glad she found it amusing and if the stupid book had given me a drawing in 3rd Angle Projection there would have been no problem. This little incident was in my mind as I produced the roux, as we professional chefs say, adding to the flour and butter mixture a little milk at a time while stirring conscientiously.
SPLOOSH.
She poured the entire measuring jug of milk into my creation, all in one go.
“That’s my roux!”, I cried, “you’ve ruined it.  The milk has to be added a little at a time”
“Just keep stirring, buster”, she said,”we haven’t all day to waste on that nonsense”

And, of course, it all worked out perfectly, as she knew it would.  The pie, by the way, was excellent and she never noticed that I had sliced the leeks into little boat shapes as a final mark of defiance.
Buster?

We met some friends for lunch in Taylor’s Restaurant in Dartmouth yesterday: our first outing to a restaurant since February and a belated celebration of our birthdays in June and July.  Taylor’s is a small but excellent restaurant specialising in fish and is located on the first floor of a building in the centre of Dartmouth, with excellent views of the river.  As it does not encourage children under the age of seven, does not allow dogs, and has never disappointed us in the culinary department, the establishment ticks all the boxes on the joint Shacklepin/WCFields selection sheet.  On entry, the waitress asked if she could take my temperature and I offered to bend over and drop my trousers, but she declined the offer and I was given a stern ticking off by the memsahib (“Horatio, one of these days…”).  All the tables were screened from others by Perspex and well-spaced, but the arrangements were otherwise as normal if you exclude the waitress wearing a visor as if just about to weld two sheets of mild steel together.  The food, as ever, was first class: I had sea bass followed by vanilla panna cotta, Jane had frito misto (mixed fried seafood with skinny chips) followed by Eton Mess.  The seafood salad, consumed by one of our friends, was enormous and declared delicious.  I wonder why everyone else’s choice in a restaurant always looks better than your own?  Other patrons of the restaurant included the TV personality, Angela Rippon, who asked me for my autograph (I made that last bit up – the autograph, not the fellow guest).  

We took the yacht taxi across to Dartmouth and back: one mile in an open boat on the river in a Force 3 breeze, the only passengers, while wearing mandatory face masks. How utterly ridiculous. Of course, we have to wear face coverings in shops now, despite the late stage in the epidemic.  I predict that the government’s next move will be to require us to wear face coverings in all public places, including the open air (principle: “We must be seen to be doing Something.  This is Something”).  I won’t toot on more about this, as I gave the subject a good airing in the last blog, most friends seem to disagree with me, and I don’t want to sound like a damaged record.  I will point out, however, that there was a report in the newspaper the other day that a female motorist had engaged in a row with another motorist because the latter was not socially distancing from her motor car with his motor car.  Dear God: the virus is spreading to the brain.

The lunch out was partly marred by me being stung or bitten by an unknown creature, living in the sleeve of my wind-proof jacket, when I put it on. We have no idea what it was as the creature did not survive the slap I gave my arm when I felt the sting, and the mutilated corpse was unidentifiable when it fell out. I am prone to these stings and they are always agonising and often traumatic. I was once badly mauled by a swarm of wasps when cruising on the River Thames and sustained multiple stings to my arm, hand and nose cavity. This produced an enormously swollen hand, like a boxer’s glove, that turned septic and required emergency treatment with antibiotics by a local doctor three or four days later. Literally once bitten, twice shy, I always carry a copious quantity of antihistamines in case of further attack and I rapidly dosed myself on this occasion. Sadly, this time the swelling in my elbow is not responding well to the pills and the whole arm is gradually turning into a red dirigible (I am typing this with one hand). There is no point in trying to find an emergency doctor in the current crisis, and the NHS help line, 111, just rang and rang. Jane is being very attentive and concerned at the moment, which is most gratifying. Note to self: play this for all it is worth, but keep an eye on those lymph glands.

Good grief.  The sun has come out.  There is even a blue sky above those dark glowering clouds. With a jaunty ‘toot’, the steam train on the Dart Valley Railway has just chuffed its way by the marina on its adventurous trip to Paignton, and a river trip boat is surging up the river to Totnes.  There is a world out there other than rain. Time to trot ashore and experience the fresh air I think, dragging my poorly arm behind me.

Have a good weekend and spare a thought for this poor little injured sailor. If you never receive another blog then you will know that Jane has had to hack off my arm with my seaman’s knife and douse the stump in hot tar.

25 July 2020

July is the start of the new autumn. I hesitate to parrot my good wife on the subject of the weather, but the British climate really is the damned limit. No sooner had the restriction on staying overnight away from home been lifted, than the weather closed down. This, of course, was coincident with us embarking joyously on our boat in Devonshire. I did not mention this in the last blog, partly because I was overcome with the euphoria of being away from home and partly because moaning does not come naturally to me (stop snorting at the back). But honestly: it was so cold on occasions in Devonshire that, not only did we have the heating on at night, we even switched on the electric blanket on the elliptical bunk in the Master Cabin. The electric blanket is a new addition to the boat following the suggestion of friends of ours who have a second home in the South of France (we mix in affluent circles): they found that fitting and switching on an electric blanket after a long period of being away aired the bed nicely and took the edge off any feeling of dampness. Finding a suitable electric blanket that would fit our odd-shaped bunk proved difficult, but we finally settled on the sort that comes in the form of a fleecy over-blanket and duly stowed it in a locker for use in the winter. Halfway through our stay, the outside temperature fell, the wind blew mightily, and the good Devonshire rain came down. We sat in the saloon in the early evening, reading our books, lights on, the heating going full blast and the boat rocking with every gust. I announced that I was going to break out the untried emergency electric blanket to warm up the bed. To my surprise, there was some mild protest from the memsahib who, as I have stated before, does tend towards the philosophy of “no gain without pain”: it was the middle of July, she said, surely it was unnecessary; think of the electricity…But I fitted it anyway and switched to pre-heat. At the infantile time of 2130 we decided to turn in and read in bed, me climbing in first while she did things to her face, and Jane’s comments were a delight to behold,
“You must be baking in there…totally unnecessary…ridiculous…electric blankets in July”. Followed by (as she climbed under the covers),
“Oooh. This is rather nice…”. She purred like a cat and snuggled under.
And it really did take the edge off any dampness and chill on the unused bed, with the added benefit of doing the same thing for the occupants.

Of course, the weather wasn’t all bad for the full time we were embarked, but it certainly wasn’t what we had hoped for in July when one would expect consistently sunny days.  We did get at least two sunny days and, on the first, we took APPLETON RUM out to sea to explore Tor Bay and look at two redundant cruise ships that are currently anchored there.  Off we went with the sea quite calm and set course for the distant ships, which were visible on the horizon.  I found a good cruising speed that was a compromise between engine noise and boat motion and we settled down for the passage of about 12 nautical miles (NM).  When I first bought APPLETON RUM I was struck by how many of our friends asked if we would be travelling over to France or the Channel Islands in this new seagoing boat.  I had to explain to them that, actually, after the initial fun of wizzing round on the sea and bouncing off the waves, travelling on a boat at sea is quite boring and tiring.  APPLETON RUM’s top speed (I have now discovered) is only 12 knots (14 mph) and her comfortable cruising speed in nearer 7 knots (8 mph).  It takes quite a long time to get from A to B at that speed and, as Jane is not a qualified watch-keeper, we could not sensibly travel overnight to exotic places like France or Jersey.  Bear this situation in mind when you consider us heading for Tor Bay 12 NM away.  We pitched, we rolled, we looked at the cliffs, we dodged lobster pot buoys, we avoided wicked-looking rocks that looked like dinosaurs.  We sat and we sat, and the engines growled and roared.  And those ships on the horizon barely got any closer.  Finally, we passed Berry Head at the southern end of Tor Bay, and Torquay, then Brixham, came into view to port.  And things started to get lively.  Out of the shelter of the land, the calm sea developed something more of a swell and we really started to shift.  We pitched into each wave, throwing spray over the bows and still those ships sat on the horizon.  The windscreen wipers were going full chat and we were wedged into our seats.  After about fifteen minutes of this we concluded that we were on a hiding to nothing.  I would estimate that the cruise ships were still about a mile away, but the swell was getting worse.  Where was the pleasure?  So we gave up, turned, and headed back to the Dart.  When we finally came back alongside we were exhausted from bracing ourselves, sticky with suntan cream, and half deafened from the constant engine noise.  We really needed that drink.

Well, I have defended this government’s stance on CV19 all through this epidemic, but now I think they have finally lost the plot.  Face coverings are to be compulsory in shops in England from 24 July, with a £100 fine for not conforming.  The police say that they cannot and will not enforce the penalty, and there are unconfirmed reports that many shops will also take a flexible approach to the requirement.  We have gone right through the worst of the crisis with no requirement to wear face coverings at all (indeed, they were discouraged) and now, as we are emerging, with CV19 deaths down to an average 80 a day in the whole of the UK, we suddenly have to wear them.  It is illogical and the compulsion grates with me.  Don’t get me wrong: I always foresaw that face coverings would probably be a quid pro quo for letting us out to mix again, and I can see their value in close quarters situations indoors when people converse (I, for one, tend to spit a bit when I rant – which is frequently); but wearing them should be left to our own common sense.  I have read several scientific papers on the effectiveness of masks and face coverings, and the case for using anything other than the full surgical masks is very dubious.  As to wearing them in the open air or alone in a car, their use is ludicrous.  We now have a situation where we can go to a pub, restaurant, museum or library without a mask – but must wear them in a shop, where it wasn’t necessary even at the peak of the epidemic.  The memsahib is apoplectic about the edict and vows not to visit a supermarket or shop while the restriction is in place (we will shop on line).  Ironically, the government apparently believes that this mask wearing will increase confidence in customer safety and encourage people to go out and visit the High Street; I predict that the opposite effect will result, partly because of the gross inconvenience (you cannot speak clearly and your glasses steam up) and partly because it reinforces the fear that the Black Death is stalking out there.  I remain astonished by the number of people who still believe that a face covering will protect them from the virus: it won’t; the aim is to protect the rest of society from you.  And there’s the rub:  soon, if you don’t wear a face covering you will run the risk of being that pariah in society, the Anti Social Person.  Soon you will be glared at for not conforming, like the poor soul who forgets to wear a poppy in the weeks up to Armistice Day.  And when will it all end?  We are already down to only 337 daily new cases in England as I write.  The total deaths in the UK (ie from all causes) is below the five-year average for this time of year.  Will we still have to wear face coverings when there are zero CV19 deaths and cases, just in case we might catch a cold?

It has now emerged that the published data on CV19 deaths in the UK may be a trifle pessimistic. Quelle surprise.  I alluded to this some time ago in Blog 44, when I said that just about every death imaginable was being included in the totals in order to satisfy a national Press clamouring for bad news.  It would seem that my view has been confirmed.  It has been revealed that Public Health England (PHE) – an organisation that I had never heard of until this epidemic – has been calculating and publishing deaths from Covid 19 by the simple expedient of taking the number of known cases of people who have been tested positive with the virus, then checking daily how many of them have died.  Thus, a person tested positive in – say – March who has recovered, but has then been run over by a bus in July, will be counted as a CV19 death even though that was not the cause.  Similarly, people who have died of old age, but earlier were tested positive for CV19 and either recovered or were asymptomatic, are also counted among the UK CV19 death toll.  No wonder we are recorded as having among the highest CV19 death tolls in the world.  I think the knives will be out for PHE when all this is over (if ever), for I understand the organisation is also being blamed for the poor early response and preparedness for the epidemic.

Hrrmph.  Definitely a double hrrmph.

Following our policy of alternating a day at sea with a day walking ashore, we spent the next sunny day walking to the fishing port of Brixham, about ten miles away.  It is a walk that we have done before and we know it so well that the waypoints have names. Incidentally, in contemplating this hike you have to take into account the geography of Devonshire: even one mile on a map in Devonshire will inevitably include several steep hills or valleys, especially in the coastal region, and will feel like ten miles.  We trekked through the Wild Wood, slid down into the valley, passed The Babbling Brook, and scrambled up the Very Steep Path.  Twice. Then, we slogged through the fields of wheat and barley (Jane pausing frequently to talk to the plants or photograph them), spent ten minutes trying to get across a busy road, then onward along a dog toilet, otherwise known as a public footpath, to Brixham where the whole up hill and down dale saga started again, though on narrow urban streets.  Brixham was heaving: it was as if there was no epidemic at all.  There were no bandits (people wearing masks in the open air or in cars) and Jane queued for the inevitable and mandatory ice cream with very little social distancing.  We consumed these treats sitting on the harbour-side in great contentment and gazed around us.  The people, oh my dear, “Nurse – the screens!”: tattoos, baseball caps on backwards, baggy shorts with elasticated waists that appeared as if they had been slept in, bare chests and beer guts (and that’s just the women), flip-flops, ferrel children…There were no “Kiss Me Quick” hats, but it was a close run thing.  NQOCD, but I don’t suppose they thought much of me either as I gazed around as if I were a visitor to the zoo and had a boiled cabbage under my nose.  The memsahib wanted to buy some groceries (why she inevitably does this when we are on a walk and without a car never ceases to amaze me) so we wandered up the High Street to the local Tesco.  It was there that I had my excitement of the day.  There was a Customer Service Operative (translation: a young lad) outside the door controlling entry to the store, the limit inside being 22 – see how I remember useless things.  Near him, in the street, was a trolley for, what I thought, selling ice cream but which subsequently proved to be the now usual paraphernalia of hand sanitising.  An older woman was standing beside it and I went over to sterilise my hands.  Crikey!  You should have seen the reaction.  She recoiled from me as if I were a leper: physically jumped to one side with agility you would not expect in such an aged harridan.   Jane said afterwards that she shot me a look of pure poison that would have shrivelled lesser people; me being me, I did not even realise that I had done anything wrong.  Silly old biddy – I was no closer than a metre.  I should have given her a reassuring pat on the back.  The plan was to catch the bus back to the marina from Brixham (we had done ten miles: we certainly weren’t going to make it twenty, we are not Zulus), but we had forgotten that the bus queue would be spaced at two metres and that space on the bus might be rationed.  We waited in a queue of the aged, halt and lame, rigidly spread a metre apart, for about ten minutes – the bus being due in half an hour.  Across the road from the bus stop was a taxi rank.  I nudged Jane and gestured.  She pulled a face: we are of a generation for whom taxis remain an exotic luxury.  Still…I wandered over and asked the price.  It was £11.  Hmm. The bus would have been free, but would have entailed a further wait of 20 minutes and a three mile walk (uphill, naturally) at the other end.  It didn’t take us long to decide and we piled into the taxi (no face coverings, no sanitiser, chatty Devonian driver as if things were as before).  Twenty minutes later we were back onboard, £11 poorer, tired, but immensely smug at the exercise we had taken.  A hot shower onboard and – yes, you’ve guessed it, a glass of Plymouth Gin on the quarterdeck in the sunshine.

A huge box was delivered to our door the other day and we were baffled as to what it was or where it had come from (does your family do this: pick up a letter or parcel and wonder out loud who sent it instead of just opening the thing?).  We eventually opened it and inside, well packed, was a bottle of Mary Rose Gin.  It seems we had won a prize draw, entered by participating in a customer survey for our marina.  What a lovely surprise.  We tried it out on Friday – purely in the interests of research you understand – and found it very enjoyable: up there with the best (we had never heard of the brand before, but the bottle looked nice too).  We are still reeling under the shock of winning a prize: I never win anything unless you count my dear wife (peace be upon her) on our wedding day.  Speaking of whom, she has just appeared in the study with two home-made jam tarts and a cup of tea.  Love is the sweetest thing.  She has been engaged all morning in baking and preparing a meal for friends coming to lunch tomorrow.  Jane loves cooking and her favourite hobby is baking cakes that neither of us dare eat.  She ends up freezing the cakes in ready-cut portions so that they can be eaten later with a reviving cup of tea, usually after an arduous trek somewhere.  We have a friend who is a fitness instructor, and she once said that calories and carbohydrate consumed after exercise do not count.  Or I thought she said that: she has since told me that I misunderstood her statement entirely, but I have stuck to the mantra ever since as it sounds feasible and I can blame her for any extra pounds that ensue.

My birthday went well though I can no longer claim to being Jane’s toy boy, the two of us now being the same age. The special meal of tinned green beans, oven chips and steak from Marks & Spencer’s prestigious ready meal range (“It’s Not Just Food – It’s Marks & Spencer Food!”) was, by joint agreement, declared pretty awful. I am not sure what sort of boat shoe sole M&S used to create the steak, but it must have been a robust brand. There was nothing wrong with Jane’s cooking and the “steak” was the correct rare pink inside, but the meat otherwise failed all tests. However the wine was good and the company excellent so I enjoyed the day. Two separate friends made me birthday cakes and both were delicious. Being, now, sixty nine years old reminds me that the US Navy always found it hilarious that the Royal Navy frigate, HMS BACCHANTE (goddess of wine and debauchery) had the pennant number F69 on her side. I am sure the choice of name and number by the Ship Naming Committee were purely coincidences. Or not.

I mentioned our first boat, a narrowboat, in my last blog.  It was onboard her that I worked up the crew into the efficient nautical unit that you see today, though there were difficulties and occasionally some indiscipline in the early days.  I always recall when we were cruising the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and looking for a mooring for the night.  Usually on a canal you can moor anywhere on the towpath side and you simply stop at a picturesque spot (in my case, somewhere as far from other boats and people as possible) and hammer in long metal spikes for the warps.  Unlike virtually all canals in England, which are usually quite narrow and only four feet deep in the middle, the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal is a shipping canal designed to take sea-going vessels so it is wide and deep accordingly.  I had identified a good spot to moor next to some long grass or reeds, off the towpath, and very secluded.  The crew disagreed on its suitability.  There was a brief discussion during which the phrases such as “Master in command under God” were pronounced and the crew was ordered to get on with it and stop arguing.  We stopped.  The crew stepped ashore with the bow line, under protest.  I don’t know if you have ever seen that film African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn: there is a scene in there where Bogart is towing the boat, with reeds growing way above his head.  Well, that was exactly the scene for us that day.  From my place at the tiller, I could see the bow line disappearing into the reeds on the bank, but otherwise nothing else except the occasional bobbing head of red hair on the end of the line.  The bobbing head of red hair was, as they say in the vernacular, “ giving it some”.  Above the engine noise, I could hear snatches,
“Ridiculous place to stop….can’t see where I’m going…stupid people…should have pressed on to that other mooring…”
At that point Jane stepped into the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal.
And she said a very rude word.
But we eventually secured safely for the night (she didn’t fall completely in – just one foot and half a leg), and command and discipline was upheld.  I told her at the time,
“There can be only one Master of this vessel.  I will have a taut ship. We will have order here”. She seemed to accept this sensibly and (I thought) meekly. 
We are much better at working together on the boat now.  I just do as I’m told.

18 July 2020

Ahoy, my hearties.  I write to you from the high seas, well my yacht alongside a pontoon on the River Dart with the high sea a mile downstream, but the principle is the same.  We are still bouncing around even if we are alongside, and the wind is howling through the rigging like a banshee.  July in Devonshire: a brisk Force 3 from the south west, overcast, mist, drizzle and 18C.  You can’t beat it.   “Bracing” , is one adjective you could use.  But the thing is this: we are, at last, away from home and in a different environment, with different scenery, different walks to do and the opportunity to breath in some fresh sea air.  That has to be worth a great deal.  Jane really takes to these little visits to the boat and revels at playing the deckhand/cook.  I think she secretly enjoys my authoritarian style as Master and Commander, though she tries hard to conceal it, just as I have to suppress a naturally relaxed and benevolent style of leadership.  Her competency as cook is a given, of course, and her deckhand skills are coming along, though her terminology and language skills need a little more work: after 18 years of boat ownership she still calls fenders bollards, the bows the front, the galley the kitchen and speaks of going downstairs.  I sometimes despair of converting her, but I suppose I can’t have everything.

Like many naval officers, I planned to buy my own boat on retiring and duly “did the rounds” of boat shows and magazines to identify that 30 knot motor cruiser that would take the family to the Channel Islands at weekends and the Bahamas in August.  This ambition foundered on the hard rock of hard cash as the size of my terminal gratuity from a parsimonious Royal Navy became apparent, and it soon became clear that I would have to readjust my sights significantly.  The 30 knot cruiser became a 30 foot canal boat or narrowboat; the weekend destination became Dorchester on Thames; and the annual excursion became Hampton Palace.  Hey ho, at least the navigation was easy and I didn’t get seasick.  We cruised many of the inland waterways of England for about 14 years with our narrowboat and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but it had only one large open-plan cabin and the double bed had to be converted from the settee every night.  Moreover, all the conning was done outside and there were occasions when, kitted out in full foul-weather gear, I looked like someone advertising John West Kipper Fillets.  I remember once coming below after mooring in a blizzard, frozen stiff.  So I hankered again for that twin screw motor yacht that would take us, if not to the Bahamas, at least to the Channel Islands (and preferably back again): one with separate cabins and space to take friends with us; one with a wheelhouse from which I could con the boat in warmth and the dry.  I mentioned this to Jane as we lay alongside and she claimed we could never afford it.  I disagreed and we placed a bet.  Within four months we had found APPLETON RUM  (not then her name) and sold our beloved narrowboat, and I started stamping my personality on my new charge.  Jane was not at first keen on the new boat (I discovered many months later that she was totally opposed to the purchase – I hadn’t realised in my enthusiasm).  She thought that the cooker onboard was antediluvian, the refrigerator falling apart, the main saloon very shabby, the boat smelled of boats (?) and the Master Cabin looked like a bordello. This last criticism baffled me a bit at first,  not least because I could not believe that such a delicate little flower as my wife would know the meaning of the word.  It turned out that her description was based on the fact that not only was the deck of the Master Cabin carpeted, but also the bulkheads and the deckhead, giving the cabin a cosy, furry, intimate feel.  The final proof that justified her description was the elliptical-shaped double bed which, I can only presume, she thought would encourage gratuitous and licentious sailor-like behaviour on the part of her husband, who, before her very eyes, was already taking on a new persona as a 21st century version of Captain Bligh of HMS BOUNTY.

Anyway, we replaced the cooker and refrigerator, fitted a heating system, reupholstered the saloon furnishings, disinfected the bilges and deep-cleaned the rest. We compromised on the bordello bed by renewing the mattress and fitting a bolster (I made that last bit up – someone has to warm her feet at night).  Of course, it all cost an absolute fortune, but the RUM makes for a good holiday home, some great fun, and the perfect means of supporting the marina  and chandlery industry with large amounts of money.

It must be the sea air, for we always have good appetites and sleep well on the boat.  Not having a television, and radio reception being variable, we tend to read a lot and to go to bed early (2030 is the record for retiring) .  One could reasonably suppose that going to bed early would lead to rising early too.  This is true for me, but not Jane, who would cheerfully count the rivets in the deckhead until 0930 if left to her own devices (she is taking a dogwatch zizz even as I write, making up for sleep lost when our son was a baby in 1979).  I think the great thing about the boat, and the reason why it is so relaxing, is that there are lots of things you could do, and some things you should do, but very few things that you actually have to do.  There are no deliveries, no appointments, no visitors, no noisy children outside: just the sea, the sand and the gentle lap of the waves on the hull.

The nearest significant habitation to our mooring is Dartmouth, with my alma mater – the BRITANNIA Royal Naval College – towering magnificently above the town with its mellow Edwardian architecture and ship’s bell striking the progress of each watch every half hour.  On the river, the naval cadets are still wizzing around in whalers and picket boats at all hours, practising coming alongside, picking up buoys, and retrieving men overboard – all accompanied by lots and lots of authoritative shouting and firm leadership.  Excellent.  It is as if I had never left.

We took a trip to Dartmouth to see how the town had faired during lockdown and found most people and shops behaving almost normally. The trip boats were running again and the Dart Valley steam train was, once more, chuffing its way along the riverside. A handful of pedestrians wore masks in the street (a practice that we thought weird, given the stiff south westerly breeze blowing), but most folk wore none.  Unlike in our Big City at home, roads had not been narrowed to make way for pedestrian social distancing (there would be no road left if they had) . All shops had sanitiser at the entrance, and a few shops limited the number of customers, but most seemed to have adopted a sensible approach, leaving customers to do their own social distancing.  I bought Jane her customary ice cream in the Dartmouth Ice Cream Company and she declared herself very happy as we sat on a park bench, people-watching, while she consumed it.  People watching is great fun.  Apart from counting the bandits (those wearing face masks in the open air or in their cars), we observed one man with a black beard and a top knot, who was undoubtedly a Dothraki (only Game of Thrones fans would understand the allusion); three Captain Birdseyes (long white hair and beard, Breton cap); many grockles (Devonshire term for a tourist) from Yorkshire or Lancashire; and several groups of the affluent yachting fraternity (faded Bermuda shorts, Gucci deck shoes or sandals, loud drawling voices talking about spinnakers).  And what is this thing of wearing a baseball cap backwards?  Didn’t their mothers dress them properly before they went out?  They will be putting their shoes on the wrong feet next.  After wandering around, we concluded that the town was as pleasant as ever, but we could not avoid noticing the number of independent shops that were either temporarily or permanently closed, the shabby and unpainted benches on the embankment, and the dirty pavements soiled by dog faeces.  This last saddened me, for it is rare to see in Britain these days, but Dartmouth (maybe Devonshire as a whole) – for some peculiar reason – has always had a high dog population.  That said, there is no reason why the owners should not pick up their pets’ mess. Yuk.

Despite relaxing the CV19 restrictions, the number of daily deaths from the disease continues to fall, and stood at 16 for the whole of the UK on 6 July, though the number of cases is falling at a slower rate.  The emergency hospitals were mothballed some time ago without ever receiving a patient, but their rapid creation remains a credit to the system.  The carping by journalists regarding the government’s response to the epidemic, a feature of the whole crisis, continues.  I must be the odd one out, or perhaps it is because I never received that degree in hindsight and on-line epidemiology, in thinking that the government has performed reasonably well in very difficult circumstances.  At least one survey shows that confidence in the government’s handling of the cris is now down to 24% (from 59% at the beginning of the epidemic).  I have not agreed with everything the authorities have done, but I would not criticise them at length on their response.  Even the experts cannot agree on a common approach to the virus, so heaven help a politician tasked with trying to satisfy everybody.    I thought the lockdown was essential to prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed, but otherwise think the Swedish approach would have been better.  Shutting the schools and “furloughing” workers until October has been a disaster for the British economy which, at the end of the day, has to fund an enforced idle workforce.  Many will undoubtedly disagree with my scepticism, but I am used to that: I have never been in tune with the majority of the populace (though that doesn’t necessarily make me wrong).

As outlined in the last blog, the pubs and restaurants in England were allowed to reopen on 4 July and a great eruption was expected.  Not living in London or other large city, I cannot comment first-hand if that was the case.  Certainly sleepy Barsetshire barely opened an eyelid, and although we noticed a queue of four (each 2m apart) outside our local pub the establishment was certainly not throbbing then or since.  My dentist said that some pubs in our nearest Big City opened at 0600 (bizarre), but I have seen no reports of rowdy behaviour.  Overall, the take-up is reported to have been quite muted and publicans have reported that they will need a much greater footfall if their pubs are to become viable.  Journalists seem to think the tentative response is because of a fear of infection, which may be true in some places, but Jane and I think the reason is more likely to be the present onerous precautions that take any pleasure out of visiting a pub or restaurant at the moment and, perhaps, uncertainty with the procedure: social distancing, masks, registering name and address on entry.  We think it is just not worth the hassle, but we may try a restaurant in Dartmouth when it opens in a fortnight.

Always up with the latest news, I read that in Canada the police are investigating tyre marks on a rainbow-painted crosswalk (the North American version of a pedestrian crossing I think) because they think it might be a hate crime.  Presumably the Mounties have nothing else to do now that the Gold Rush has ended.  As far as I can discover, this is not a joke.

It is my birthday tomorrow and we will be taking the RUM out for a spin on the open water to celebrate.  Steak and chips (courtesy Marks &Spencer “two courses and a bottle of wine for £12 deal”) are planned for birthday dinner.  A very good friend and neighbour has baked me a fruitcake for the Big Day and we have been eyeing it up ravenously all week, every time we have our afternoon tea.  Tea in bed has been promised by Jane and it is just possible that she may also perform the ceremony of Colours for me too, at eight bells in the morning watch (0800 – do try to keep up).  We hoist the blue ensign in APPLETON RUM, a rare privilege granted to commanding officers in the Royal Naval Reserve and  those in the Royal Naval Sailing Association.  I am punctilious in observing the Service customs onboard though I have relaxed the practice of using the bosun’s call to pipe the “Still” for Colours and Sunset.  Jane, of course, just rolls her eyes at these ceremonies and has been known to opine, “it’s just a flag”.

Well, the mist has cleared over the headland and the wind has veered to the west and dropped very slightly.  The sun came out briefly as I started this paragraph – but it has now disappeared again.  A herring gull is breaking open a mussel for its supper by the simple expedient of dropping the mollusc onto the steel pontoon from thirty feet (damned clever these seagulls).  Jane is flushing the heads by pumping out the pan with the customary 35 strokes (having a boat brings you closer into contact with the baser side of life and she really joins into the spirit of this evolution).  The sun is well over the yardarm as I feel the urge for a Plymouth Gin.  Time for a shower and a change into Night Clothing, I think; Rounds are at 1930.

Keep polishing the brightwork and remember, if you must throw up, then do it to leeward.

9 July 2020.

Root canal.  The very words seem deliberately calculated to scare the living daylights out of you.  It is the treatment suggested for dealing with my toothache (yes, I still have it, though it has eased considerably).  I returned to the dental surgery the other day to have the errant tooth removed as previously arranged but, after conducting a full series of sophisticated tests that would have done justice to a wheel-tapper on the Great Western Railway, my new dentist, whom I hadn’t yet met, pointed out that the errant tooth was actually quite sound and it would be a shame to remove it; removal would also leave a significant gap in my mouth.  Had I considered the alternative?  I knew where she was heading and, yes I had considered it. It apparently involved a great deal of drilling and digging on a live person’s gums, namely mine, and I was not keen.  Nay, let me expand on that: I was absolutely terrified.  But the thing is, this dentist proved to be very attractive, with a delightful Irish brogue and fascinating big brown eyes that I could hardly miss gazing into as I lay horizontal in the chair.  How could I, a trained killer of men, a one-time guardian of the North Cape against the Soviet hordes, a Cold War veteran admit to being afraid of pain?  As it turned out, the potential agony was as nothing compared with the cost of the treatment when I received the estimate: £875.  Good God.  This is the drawback of using a private, as opposed to an NHS, dentist.  Seeing my shock, Miss Brown Eyes thought she might have found a palliative solution: she asked if I ground my teeth.  I thought back to occasions when I might have done that: the times when the BBC used the ungrammatical, “Due to…” when they should say, “Owing to…”; an incorrect use of the apostrophe that I had seen outside a greengrocer’s the other day; that article in a magazine when they used “Comprised of…”…Other than that, no, not really.  She studied my face carefully, I assumed making a connection between my chiselled features and those of Daniel Craig but, as it turned out, merely looking at my jaw. 
“There –  you’re doing it now!”
Ah. Not Daniel Craig.
It seems there is a pinnacle on the errant tooth that I keep worrying at, and this may be causing undue pressure when I clamp my jaw.  So she is going to grind that off in the hope of solving the problem.  When I returned home I discussed it all with the memsahib and it turns out that she had had the aforementioned root canal treatment herself (it had escaped my memory).  She said that the only awkward bit was lying in a chair almost upside down for an hour and a half.  Thoughtfully (and, I suspect, with some relish), she then went on to describe the whole process in gory detail, from the first pain-killing needle to the injection of the disinfectant.  I was not convinced about the painless thing – every man knows that we men are cursed with a lower pain threshold than women (it is a cross that we have to bear, along with the heavy shopping) – but I was a bit more reassured.  Anyway, after the grinding session I am to be booked in to see The Man Who Does – some sort of itinerant dentist who specialises in root canal work and travels around various dental surgeries like a tinker selling his wares – to get a second opinion.  The intervening period will give me time to raise a mortgage to pay for the treatment.  Note to self: must remember not to make that remark to him about a tinker.

Well, I take it back.  No sooner had I moaned about the ineffectiveness of the NHS on non-Covid illnesses in the last blog, than Jane received a phone call the next day, arranging an appointment with an ophthalmologist at the hospital on the same day.  We were not too sure what to read into that: either it was good news and the ophthalmologist had been sitting around twiddling her thumbs, or it had been judged so urgent that Jane should be seen immediately.  We duly drove to the hospital in the Big City, which is about 45 minutes’ drive away, encountering every possible obstruction en route such as dozy pensioners who shouldn’t be on the road, lumbering lorries, road works and cyclists, all of them making Jane fret as she hates being late for anything.  Just as we came within ¼ mile of the hospital she gave a sudden cry, clutched the dashboard, and said,
“I’ve forgotten my face mask!”,
and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  If we had had any cloth we would have done some rending of that too.  There then followed some scrambling around in the car trying to find something that would do as a face mask: a scarf, a boa, a pashmina, a bag to pull over her head…None of those things was available.  My suggestion of her removing her brassière and using one cup as a mask was rejected with a stern look and an accusation of being frivolous.  In the end she went into the hospital clutching a grubby yellow duster from the car bearing the logo “Rover Cars”, the aim being to tie it on as a triangle, like someone about to hold up the next Wells Fargo stage coach for Dodge City.  She needn’t have worried of course, because the hospital provided a mask as she went in.  A pity in a way, as that yellow duster matched her hair quite nicely I thought.  Anyway, she came out smiling.  The ophthalmologist gave her a very through examination and reported that the cataracts were nowhere near the stage for surgical action, the haemorrhage was extremely minor and nothing to worry about, and there was no need to worry about her blood pressure.  What a relief!  Now all we have to twitch about is finding the the £875 for fixing my tooth and a further £700 or so to pay for new lenses for Jane’s spectacles; my suggestion that it would be cheaper to saw off the bottoms of beer bottles was not well received.  What’s that?  Oh, all right: “Thank you NHS”.

Looking back, I suppose I have mentioned the NHS several times in the recent blogs, but it is inevitable in the present situation.  Formed in 1948 despite strong opposition from the medical profession, the free-at-point-of-delivery service was created by the then Labour government after a series of studies dating back to 1909 that recommended an improved system of health care and a significant development from the Poor Law that roughly preceded it.  The plan was that the NHS would be proactive and everyone’s health would improve so much that corrective medicine would reduce and the cost of the service would reduce with it.  Dream on.  Today about £150 billion is spent annually on the NHS in the UK, or roughly 20% of every tax-payer’s contribution.  I think it is fair to say that the system is very good, though as flawed as any big organisation.  It would also be fair to say that it is open to abuse.  I remember that, on one of the significant anniversaries of the the service’s formation, a doctor wrote to The Times to say that he was a new NHS GP on the day that the service was formed in July 1948.  At five minutes after midnight  he received a telephone call, summoning him to a patient in a run-down part of town.  When he arrived, he was puzzled to find the family awake, fit and well, and he asked where the patient was.  He was told that there was no problem, they just wanted to know if the new, free, NHS really worked.  Over seventy years later one still finds Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments dominated by self-imposed medical conditions such as intoxication, drug abuse or overdoses and one still reads of people attending with trivial problems or demanding sanitary towels or paracetamol.  No-one with any sense goes to A&E unless they are dying or have the masochistic desire to sit for twelve hours with a bunch of sick or raving people.  I mention all this because the latest plan is, apparently, that we should book an appointment before going to A&E and trials are to be undertaken to prove the proposal.  While any proposal that reduces the waiting time in A&E is to be commended, I am baffled as to how an appointment system will work.  For a start, who plans to have an accident or a heart attack?  On medical appointment systems in general, when is the last time you or I got to see our GP at the appointed time?  Finally, as the plan states that people can still turn up on spec and be treated (good to hear), what will be the point of booking an appointment?  For what it is worth, I think a better arrangement would be to make more use of the existing Minor Injuries Units in local cottage hospitals to screen out minor injuries and minor complaints, and perhaps have separate units attached to A&E for dealing with drunks and drug victims, paid for by the patient.  I shall include those proposals in my manifesto for the new Shacklepin Republic.

It was my sad duty, recently, to write to a colleague whose wife had just died.  These things are never easy, for words are hard to come by in such circumstances, but – in this instance – I was struck by another problem: my handwriting had deteriorated significantly.  I pride myself on my handwriting and, for that reason, I always write with a fountain pen (I abhor ball-point pens).  On this occasion the end result looked like a spider had walked across the page.  It dawned on me that, quite simply, I was way out of practice.  I am of a generation that always wrote longhand and I was a regular letter-writer, corresponding with my father when he was at sea and, later, with my family when I was at sea myself.  All my engineering examinations were completed in longhand (and using a slide-rule, but that is another story).  Even typed letters from the ship were drafted in longhand.  Any younger person reading this (if any) will probably think that I wrote with a quill pen and stood at a desk – ‘not quite’ is the answer.  Now, almost all my communication is by email or text; I only write longhand in ‘thank your’ letters and letters of condolence.  And here is another odd thing: as I wrote this condolence letter, I kept waiting for the spelling checker to correct doubtful words, but there wasn’t one, and it didn’t.  I had to get out the big Oxford Dictionary from the bookshelf and look words up.  That was a distraction in itself and I went spiralling off into the English language for half an hour finding all sorts of words that I had been misusing and all manner of other ones that I could sprinkle into a blog.   It would be a great shame to see the art of handwriting die and I must do something to rectify my personal situation, perhaps by writing to a friend with a traditional letter.  That will floor them, but I am realistic enough not to expect a written reply: even before the age of computers I found that some people just do not like writing letters.  Now where did I put that blotting paper, and who can I surprise?

Jane has recovered from the many bites, blotches and scratches of the last blog, but has not been put off the garden.  As I write, she is out there now, between showers, peering under foliage and cutting slugs in half with secateurs.  There is none of this humane nonsense of collecting slugs and snails for transportation into the countryside and release with Jane: death is the penalty for any creature messing with her garden and eating her hostas and lupins.  She has even been known to go out at night carrying a torch and secateurs, yet dressed in evening wear, to find more interlopers foolish enough to think that the coast is clear.  There is something of the night with Jane, literally and figuratively: as a little girl she apparently chased her elder brother around their smallholding with a pig’s eye because he annoyed her once too often (he still has not forgotten it, over 50 years later).

The total of daily deaths attributable to CV19 in the whole of the UK was down to 155 on Tuesday 30 June and it continues to fall.   One newspaper has reported, with evident relish and concern, that the gradient of the graph is worryingly beginning to flatten out.  I think someone needs to explain to those journalists what an asymptote is; they will be really worried later, when the graph flattens out completely at zero deaths.  Up to the end of June 2020, 43,730 people had died from Covid-related illness in the UK, yielding an overall probability of death from CV19 in a population of 66 million of just under 0.07%.  The probability of catching CV19 in the UK (whether mild or severe) is currently 0.47%.  The total of weekly deaths in the UK is now actually less than the five-year average for this time of year.  Significantly, the graphical trend of cases is diverging from the trend of deaths: an extensive programme of testing is identifying cases much better, but you now stand a much improved chance of survival if you do catch CV19 than you did in February, owing to a better understanding of the beast and better treatment.  The optimists are beginning to emerge from lockdown like moles crawling into the daylight; the pessimists (which include many of those over 70) are still distinctly cautious.  Of those for whom the glass is half full, many are looking forward to US Independence Day for totally different reasons to our cousins across the pond: on that date the pubs and restaurants will open again.  The general consensus is that all hell will break loose on that date, with High Streets busy again and roads to the coast clogged.  Notwithstanding the general improvement, the city of Leicester has been put back into lockdown because of an apparent localised spike. I wonder if it had anything to do with the Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests, with their total absence of social distancing.  I see that the nearby county of Wiltshire has featured in the headlines because of a 300% increase in cases; when you look into it in more detail, however, you find that, in the entire county of over 720,000 souls, the number of cases has gone from one to a grand total of four.  Statistically correct, but journalists: don’t you just love them.

I see that President Trump in the USA has been quoted as saying that he has ordered the US government to slow down on Covid 19 testing, as the programme is revealing too many positive cases.  I am sure he has been misreported by those pesky journalists.  True or not, it reminds me of the story of a local councillor (I cannot remember where) who stated at a council transport committee meeting that if buses kept stopping for passengers then they would never be able to keep to the timetable.

The BLM witch-hunt continues, with institutions still falling over themselves to virtue signal.  The latest is the Church of England which, in some churches, is to remove stained glass windows depicting anyone even remotely connected to slavery.  On the 3D front, “some statues will have to come down”,  according to our trendy Archbishop of Canterbury.  In yet a further development, we now read that St Albans Cathedral is to replace the current altarpiece with a pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper with Jesus recast as black, in respect to the BLM movement.  Yes, They are coming for Jesus now.  I understand that the artist produced the pastiche as a protest against Jesus “always being depicted with fair hair, fair complexion and blue eyes”.  In my 68 years on this planet I cannot say I have ever seen Him depicted like that.  Surely Jesus was neither white nor black; if anything, I suppose, he was olive-skinned with black hair and, to my mind, that is how our portraits or sculptures show Him.  In a further, totally-off-the-planet allegation, someone has now complained about how the obscure honour, The Order of St Michael and St George is depicted.  The emblem shows St George standing on Satan, but apparently the concern is that it looks like a white man standing on a black man’s neck. For heaven’s sake.  In Cambridge, a university professor has been promoted despite declaring, “white lives don’t matter”: a statement which undoubtedly is racist, and would be regarded as such if stated the other way. This BLM movement may be well-intentioned, but it is in severe danger of creating the opposite effect to that intended, as resentment grows against spurious or imagined slights. It seems to me that all lives matter, whatever people’s race, creed or sexual orientation. I think some people have too much time on their hands and we should be looking less at each other’s skin colour and more at how we respect others and behave towards each other. Here endeth the lesson (and that’s the last money the Church of England gets from me, by the way).

Right on cue, as we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel with Covid 19, The Times reports that a new strain of Swine Flu has been discovered and there may be an epidemic this winter.  Excellent: I wondered what we would do for Christmas.

We are heavily into “Game of Thrones” again.  We first heard about the series some years ago when it was on Sky TV but, not being avid watchers of television,  we did not subscribe to that extravagant indulgence.  But you know how it is: you hear lots of people waxing poetic about a programme and eventually your curiosity gets the better of you.  We finally started watching the DVDs when we were on holiday in France and became totally hooked.  When we returned home, we continued watching piecemeal, but lost the flow and continuity, often forgetting where we were and spending half an hour or so in setting it all up again (please tell me that we are not the only people to do this).  We didn’t get the final series when it first came out (“How much?  You must be joking!”), but have now just ordered it.  However, we had forgotten the plot by this time, so have started all over again with long sessions in a darkened drawing room.  I must say, it is a jolly good drama.

The Prohibition may be over (Blog 51), but it appears that we are now into famine.  I sat down to breakfast this morning, rubbing my hands in anticipation of the latest creation by the Head Chef, and had placed in front of me a large plate with a tiny puddle of yellow mush in the middle,  complemented by a single sliver of pink, semi transparent, protein.
“Oh.  How nice.  Pray, dear, what is this?”, I (more-or-less) said.
“It’s scrambled egg and smoked salmon”
“There doesn’t seem to be much there”
“Yes, it’s only one egg.  No toast – it’s carbohydrate. We’re on a diet”
“Since when?”
There then followed a protracted discussion, during which phrases such as “60 grams of salmon”, “five-two diet” and “cutting back” were mentioned.  I could not remember discussing any of this.  Indeed, the only thing I could remember was suggesting that we skip the usual bowl of fruit this morning, the better to make room for a hearty cooked breakfast.  Something seemed to have been lost in translation in the transit down the stairs, from bedroom to Garden Control Tower where we eat breakfast.  Conscious of the fact that if I commented any more about the breakfast then either I would be wearing it, or it would be decorating the dustbin, I woofed down this cheeky little repast in thirty seconds flat and filled up the corners (as the hobbits say) with copious amounts of coffee.  As we sat afterwards, reading the papers, Jane declared that it had been surprisingly filling.
“Oh, absolutely”, I said.
Ten minutes later she said,
“God, I’m still hungry”.
We just looked at each other. 

So here we are.  We have had the drought and we have had the famine.  I now look forward to the plague of locusts to make my biblical experiences complete. But you know, as I said to a friend the other day, I reckon that – with God’s blessing – I may have only about another 20 years left on this planet.  It seems to me that what’s left of life is too short to worry about Covid19, drinking a few glasses of wine, or putting on the odd pound or two.  I intend to enjoy life while I can. I must put that proposal to the memsahib, ideally when she is hungry, thirsty or both.  I’ll let you know how I get on. 

I leave you with a quotation from the author William Golding of Lord of the Flies fame, which I think is very profound:

“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior and always have been. Whatever you give a woman, she will make it greater. If you give her sperm, she will give you a baby. If you give her a house, she will give you a home. If you give her groceries, she will give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she will give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be …ready to receive a ton of shit!”

– William Golding, British Novelist, Playwright and Poet, 1911–1993

2 July 2020

Prohibition has started. Not in Britain, you will be relieved to hear, but in the Shacklepin Household. It came to pass on Sunday, when there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus the memsahib stating in capital letters: There Will Be No More Alcohol Or Puddings During The Week. This Draconian edict was, apparently, necessary because she was “concerned about her fat tum”; no specific reference was made regarding my own streamlined form or anatomical deficiencies, but the inference was made plain with a glance: we are both putting on too much weight. I had heard such pronouncements before of course and had, in the past, managed to get around them by a combination of my boyish good looks and blue eyes, charm, pleading, lying about the day of the week, and sheer dogged persistence. This time, however, it looked like she really meant it. We went on a long walk on the Thames Path in Oxfordshire on late Monday afternoon – eight miles altogether in the sun – and returned late in the evening tired, starving and somewhat dehydrated despite the water we took with us. I suggested, tentatively, that we might have a glass of beer (not really alcohol is it?) to help us recover. The reply was very firm and forthright; robust, even: no alcohol or puddings. I could have a beer of course, she said primly with a sniff, she wouldn’t stop me; but she herself would be sticking to the agreed (?) plan and would take just a large glass of tap water. Of course, I had a glass of Adam’s Ale too. Very sensible and most refreshing. Didn’t mind at all really, and I slept the sleep of the just that night (that is, the just craving for a pint).
But there is a happy ending to this sad tale of deprivation and proscription, for Tuesday dawned as the start of a predicted heat wave in England. The sun it came and beat down upon our house and, verily, the heat was hot. We returned from an exciting dentist appointment and tedious shopping expedition, and sat in the shade in our back garden in unusual peace and quiet. In the tranquility, broken only by the buzzing of the bees, Jane said after about ten minutes,
“I don’t know though…it’s times like this when you could do with a drink”
“Yes”, I said wistfully. Then,
“A Pimms perhaps? Weak of course…”
I went on to expound on how a Pimms No 1 is defined as a “fruit cup”. Hardly any alcohol in it at all, and the ice would dilute it. If one added the recommended sliced orange, apple, cucumber, strawberries and – not least – the lemon in the accompanying lemonade then that would count as our recommended “five a day” of fruit or vegetables. Practically a health drink then. We looked at each other.
“Shall I switch on the ice machine?”
“Go on then”
And so that is how the Prohibition Act was finally repealed after 42 hours: an important event in our household’s history, not quite long enough to merit the establishment of a pop-up speakeasy in my garage workshop, but one worth recording as an example of the weakness of the human flesh.

Incidentally, the label on the  Pimms No 1 bottle no longer says, “fruit cup” (I checked).  But let us not bother with the detail, shall we?  I won’t tell her if you don’t.

Poor Jane.  She has been in the wars yet again.  We have moved on from the peculiar and long-lasting abdominal pains of Blog 1 (signature tune: “Don’t touch my tummy”), through the damaged ribs of Blog 48 (signature tune: “Don’t touch my side”) and we are now on to the era of the insect bites and plant stings (signature tune: “Don’t touch me anywhere”).  This last is a result of a rebellion in the last place that Jane expected: the garden.  As I outlined in Blog 36 and elaborated in Blog 40, that garden is dangerous.  It has turned on its creator: yes, the garden strikes back after everything she has done for it.  There’s gratitude for you.  It started a few days ago when Jane decided to do a little impromptu dead-heading, pruning, blackfly killing and slug mutilation.  Jane was in one of her rarely-worn hot summer rigs (No 17 I believe) comprising shorts, sandals and one of those backless topless strappy tops that women wear in the tropics if you are lucky.  In and out of the foliage she went, snipping here, pinching there, treading in areas where I have never been allowed, and happy as a sandboy.  But the garden knew fresh meat when it saw it: that night she was covered in bites, blotches, scratches and prickles on her legs, arms, back and unmentionable squashy bits.  The antihistamine pills and cream are now working overtime, and we have that new signature tune: “Don’t touch me anywhere”.  As if I would.

“Thank you NHS”, runs the refrain on banners and posters throughout the UK, a tribute to the dedication of our medical staff in coping with the Covid 19 epidemic and, undoubtedly, saving many lives including that of the Prime Minister himself. Alas, the downside of that coping process is that all other medical services, with the exception of Maternity and Accident & Emergency, have shut down, the staff being transferred to CV19 duties. If you have potential cancer, pain in your chest, an injury requiring investigation or anything requiring hospital treatment then you are, in naval parlance, fresh out. The backlog of people requiring all manner of treatment is enormous. This was brought home to us when Jane visited the optician today and was told she had cataracts, might have high blood pressure, and had a problem in her eye that needed the second opinion of an ophthalmologist specialist. And the chances of her being seen by a specialist in the near future? Zilch. I only hope that the new phase of relaxing the restrictions will extend to our hospitals and medical services – with only 4,657 hospitalised patients with Covid 19 in the UK as of 25 June, surely those requisitioned staff can be spared to return to their normal duties? For some unfathomable reason, the only service that has been reinstated (as far as I know) is IVF treatment. As has been observed elsewhere, the collateral damage caused by this virus could well end up greater than the 43,230 deaths in the UK attributed to just the virus itself. “Thank you NHS?” Hrmph.

With the daily death toll for CV19 in the UK standing at 149 and still falling, we have encouraging news, at last, on the virus front in England.  As anticipated in the last blog, on 4 July all pubs, restaurants, cinemas, hotels, campsites, hairdressers, libraries, museums and art galleries can open; the two metre distance rule reduces to “one metre plus”; two households can meet indoors; and weddings can take place provided no more than 30 attend.  The “one metre plus” definition is an odd thing in itself as it gives the impression that the government has reduced the contact distance to one metre, but is not entirely confident about it; what it means is that people should keep one metre apart, but two metres or more would be better still if possible (a kilometre would be ideal).  The only significant places that cannot open are gyms, spas and (oddly, given the chlorine) swimming baths.  Various precautions have to be in place, of course, but it is a step in the right direction.   Significantly, the government is moving away from legislation, laws and criminal prosecutions and moving gently towards guidance and encouraging the public to make their own judgements and risk assessments (at last).  As a reflection of the reduction in alert state, the last routine daily briefing to the nation was held on Tuesday 23 June – a sensible decision, in my view, as it will match the CV19 alert level and the reduced publicity might help to ease the level of anxiety.  In many ways we will miss the briefings at 1700 as they have been part of our lives for the last three months; we grew to have favourites among the secretaries of state who hosted the events and the experts who supported them: we particularly liked Professor Van-Tam and Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officers for England, and took great delight in the sport of watching them swat away the more inane journalists’ questions. Never mind, their absence is a small price to pay for a significant step towards normality.  Shortly after the relaxation was announce, and so as not to allow the English morale to rise by an improper or an enjoyable amount, the medical establishment immediately predicted a second spike in cases, with deaths by the millions and bodies in the streets.  As I have said on previous occasions, the English simply do not do enjoyment or earthly pleasure: they are regarded as naughty.  Incidentally, just to reiterate an earlier blog, these relaxations only apply to England, not Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland who are doing their own thing.  

Crucially, the lifting of the ban on overnight stays in England means that we can go and stay on our boat again, so brace yourself for lots and lots of tales of nautical adventures: a whole new genre in these ramblings.  As a taster for this last observation, we drove down to our boat on Wednesday (hence the tardiness of this blog).  Much to my astonishment, Jane suggested that we rise at 0400 and leave home at 0500 – the better to avoid the heat and any potentially traffic.  Sure enough, we rose as the sun was still just a soft glow in the eastern sky and headed south at 0500.  I was surprised by the amount of traffic that there was around at this ungodly hour: it looked like everyone else had the same idea (to travel, that is, not specifically to visit my boat).  But the journey went smoothly  and we topped up with electricity at Lidl in Paignton while Jane did some shopping.  It was interesting to note different attitudes in a different part of the country: in Paignton, almost everyone in the supermarket was wearing a mask whereas in Melbury, a mask is still a rarity and Jane certainly did not wear one.  I put it down to the paranoia of the people of Paignton, who are mainly retired and geriatric; you, of course, are entitled to believe that those Devonites are Mr And Mrs Sensible.  We found the boat in better shape than we expected.  True, we had employed a contractor to pressure-wash the decks and superstructure to remove the accumulated filth, salt and greenery of winter (he was just finishing off as we arrived), but we expected the interior to be grubby and damp, and this was not the case.  The carpets were a little dirty from the marina staff’s boots, where they had come onboard to run the engines, but otherwise she was fine.  As predicted by the weather forecast, the day grew hotter and hotter (it reached 31C [88F]) at its peak) and, in order to achieve some relief, I decided to take the boat on a shakedown cruise up river, then out to sea.  She performed well, but we were still in full sun despite the cooling breeze and we were back alongside after two hours, craving for the shade.  We also managed to top up with diesel fuel on the way, a snip at £226 for half a tank (if you are ever thinking of buying a boat, then be advised that the noun is an acronym for Bring On Another Thousand).  Alas, the boat does not have air conditioning unless you count the side windows, so we were both melting by 1700.  All jobs completed, we set off for the return journey home at 1800 when it was expected to be cooler and, indeed, it was if you count 25C (77F) as cool.  Fortunately, our car does have air conditioning so the journey was pleasant, if a little tiring.  We staggered in at 2110, stiff, enervated, dehydrated, greasy with suntan cream and utterly shattered.  A cool shower and a sensible cup of tea revived us a bit, but we were in bed and at 500 fathoms by 2230, all upstairs house windows open and still hot.

Britain is not used to heat.  The British are used to overcast, rain, wind and the occasional (and welcome) mild sunny day – the first three being more likely the further north and west you go.  Air conditioning is unusual, except in shops where it is often negated by the proprietors wedging their doors open and, hence,  air-conditioning the environment at vast expense.  Given the comparative rarity of really hot days it is, perhaps, not surprising that the British cope with the heat badly.  It amazes me to see, in this current heatwave, houses with their windows wide open in the vague hope that the (hot) breeze will cool the house down.  It won’t; it will make it hotter.  Forgive me for lecturing on what may, for some, be perfectly obvious and already practised but, for the benefit of those with windows open, let me offer the following advice.  Get thermometers for the house and outside . No, not that one that you stick in your ear or the one that you inherited from your mother that she used to shake to bring the mercury down, I mean proper room thermometers or a weather station.  Put both where they will always be in the shade.  Every night, when the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside, throw open all the windows and doors (shut the downstairs ones when you go to bed in case of burglars, cats, foxes, snarks, leprechauns and other unwelcome visitors).  As early as you can the next morning,  throw open the downstairs windows and doors again to get a chimney effect and let the cool breeze wash through the house.  Ignore your wife’s grumbling about the need for cardigans, trousers and fleeces.  Monitor the temperatures.  When the cool temperature outside approaches or matches the temperature inside, shut every single window and door, draw all the blinds and curtains, especially on the south side of the house (north if you are in in Southern Hemisphere).  If you have external window shutters (rare in Britain) then shut them too.  Keep all internal doors shut in order to form a series of airlocks.  This will trap the cool air in your house until the next evening and will work particularly well if your house has good insulation.   It may be counter-intuitive, but it does work; it is certainly better than leaving windows open during the day.  If you are lucky enough to have air conditioning then, for heaven’s sake, keep the doors and windows shut all the time – I have had many running battles with ship’s companies who leave screen doors open and breach the air-conditioned citadel.  And don’t stand in front of an open fridge or freezer to cool down: the air inside may be cool, but the machines work by extracting the heat from inside and throwing it out at the back with the addition of waste heat from the compressor, so the overall temperature of the room will go up.  Trust me: I’m an engineer.

Of course, humidity plays a major factor in how well a human copes with the heat: we can cope much easier with a dry heat than a humid one.  Anyone who has been in a sauna can testify that the heat is tolerable, and even pleasant, until someone pours that water on the coals and makes the air humid.  I did read once that even the Australians in Britain sometimes find it too hot because of the humidity.  I used to complete machinery rounds in ships’ boiler rooms, where the temperature on top of the boilers could reach 60C (140F) – a temperature which, if applied to water, would be too hot for the hand to bear – but I felt no ill effects other than being a little warm.  Mind you, on one occasion, it was so hot that the St Christopher medallion that I wore around my neck actually burnt a round red disc on my chest, though I myself was not overcome.  Which anecdote reminds me to confess that I have just read that the politician William Gladstone was apparently quoted as saying that there were two stages of dotage:  anecdotage and just dotage.  Alas, glancing back at previous blogs, I am clearly at the first stage.  Oh dear.  Oh well, here is another one.

I had a chum or, as we sailors say, a shipmate, who had a fund of anecdotes.  He once told me that, when he was serving in a frigate, he had a bet with a fellow officer who claimed that the Captain never really listened to reports given to him by the Officer of the Watch (OOW) at sea at night.  I should, perhaps, explain that the Commanding Officers of HM Ships always have a requirement in their Captain’s Standing Orders that they are to be called by the OOW at all times of potential danger: ships coming too close, the ship sinking, OOW lost, that sort of thing.  This means, in practice, that the Captain is called on the intercom many times during the night with a report, the commonest being that another ship is likely to pass within – say – one mile.  To facilitate these reports his cabin has microphones fitted in various locations, even in the heads and the shower.  Usually the response by the Captain is a simple ‘thank you’ and an order to monitor the situation.  Anyway, to go back to the story, my chum reckoned that the Captain did listen to the reports; his friend (and fellow OOW) maintained that the Captain just spoke in his sleep.  They placed a bet, with a stake of a bottle of champagne with breakfast.  That night, my chum had the Middle watch (midnight – 0400) and his friend had the Morning watch (0400 – 0800).  When they had completed their handover of the watch, his chum picked up the microphone to the Captain and said,
“Captain, sir, Officer of the Watch”.
“Captain”, was the distinctly sleepy reply.
“BOW WOW WOW WOW WOW. WOOF WOOF”, said the OOW.
“Roger, watch”, said the Captain in a muffled voice.
Yes!  He punched the air. He had won the bet.  My chum accepted defeat and went below to turn in, agreeing to meet the winner at breakfast, with the bottle of champagne, when his watch finished.
Civilised day dawned and my chum went down to late breakfast at 0800, arranged the champagne, and waited for his friend to appear to claim his prize after being relieved on watch.  And waited.  And waited.  Where had he got to?
Well his friend was not there.  Why was he not there?  Why, because he was in the Captain’s cabin, being given a stern interview without coffee, which went on the lines of,
“…and if you ever do that to me again…!”
You couldn’t make it up.  No, they didn’t have the champagne.

So after that further anecdote in my anecdotage I will sign off: all that talk of champagne has whetted my thirst for a glass of illicit hooch to celebrate the repeal of the Prohibition Act.  It is Thursday and, therefore, the weekend for those of us taking Extended Long Weekend Leave or – in my case – Permanent Leave.  What shall it be: a glass of Wadworths Old Timer Classic Strong Ale, Pimms No 1 or Plymouth Gin and Fevertree tonic?  It’s a hard life making decisions when you are retired.

Stay safe, wash you hands and remember: never eat yellow snow.

25 June 2020

“What’s for breakfast tomorrow, darling?”
“You should know.  You’re cooking it”
“Oh”
I had forgotten that, in a moment of weakness and generosity, I had promised to make her “Queen for the Day” tomorrow.  These exceptional occasions are chosen on a random basis (keep ‘em guessing is my motto) and are characterised by me preparing the breakfast for madam and waiting on her every need during the first meal of the day: a role reversal.  In this way I try to ensure that she does not feel put upon in the catering department (well, not permanently anyhow). 

My breakfast creations have come on since the disastrous fruit mutilations of the past (Blog 38). My simple banana fruit compote is much sought after I believe (it consists of a banana, sliced). My cooked preparations are – dare I say it – improving too, and a goodly range has been tried. The Big Fry Ups are very rare as Jane is not over-fond of fried food, but when they are produced they have been appreciated; my breakfast curry has been politely declined (“For breakfast? You must be mad!”); my loaf-cutting skills are valued and admired (I address the loaf with the bread knife in the same manner as I would a billet of mild steel with a hacksaw); my coddled eggs can be a little runny, but have been received tactfully; I think the low point may have been my kedgeree made with tinned tuna. However, my safest bet, and one which I produced this time, is simple scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast, the salt and pepper grinders placed, just so, on the table within her reach, and the red coffee cup of fresh coffee at her right hand.

It is rare that I produce food other than breakfast, though I have had my moments. I have a limited repertoire for other meals, though I hope that what I do produce is edible. Like most men, I can burn a steak on a barbecue, create a mean chilli con carne, conjure up a curry and boil up what the navy calls “pot mess” (any kind of stew). My yankee succotash is bizarre in name and colouring, yet popular after a long day. But my piece de resistance is bœf stroganoff, a meal not often produced for the simple reason that I use fillet steak and, hence, it is expensive. Bœf stroganoff and twice-baked soufflés are on the menu for Jane’s birthday in eight days time. Before you get too impressed I should point out, for the sake of honesty (and because she sometimes reads this), that the soufflés were prepared by Jane some time ago and currently live in the freezer; I will, however, provide that crucial second bake. In the days after I retired and Jane was still at work, I experimented with the food and had mixed success. Once, I spent the entire day, from 1000 to 1900, preparing and cooking some sort of lamb concoction only for it to end in failure (Jane commented that even she would not have attempted that recipe). At another time, my curried apple soup was rejected by the family and I remember haranguing wife and son as they stirred it around their bowls as if it were something that had leaked from a nuclear power station (such ingratitude). My root vegetable cobbler (a rare branching out into vegetarianism) was also judged a failure and Jane shudders, to this day, at the thought of it. Yes, I can do cooking but, on the whole, it is not my forte or pleasure. I have other talents.

Thinking of cooking pot mess, it was common in steam ships to acquire the raw ingredients (vegetables, meat) by nefarious means from the galley.  These would be thrown into a fanny, water would be added, and the whole lot boiled up using a steam drain from one of the steam-driven machines.  It is amazing what superheated steam at 450C (850F) can do. Potatoes would be baked by the simple expedient of lying them on the sliding feet of the main turbines.  Members of the duty watch other than the Marine Engineering Department would sometimes come below and ask to use the facilities too: ki – a frothy hot chocolate made from shavings of solid chocolate boiled up in water with a steam drain – was very popular.  However, outsiders had to be supervised.  In one ship, it is said, a seaman came down below and asked to boil up his pot mess.  Unfortunately the small bore pipe that he stuck into the fanny was not a steam drain, but a drain to the main engine condenser, which operated at a vacuum.  When he opened the cock the drain sucked up his pot mess and deposited the whole lot into the main boiler – apparently peas could be seen bobbing up and down in the boiler gauge glass.  This disabled the main propulsion on that shaft, necessitated a major internal clean of the boiler and closed feed system, undoubtedly led to a Board of Enquiry, and guaranteed a fun time for all.  No, I do not think he got his pot mess back.

Poor Jane has been in the wars again, this time by trying to emulate Supergirl and attempting to fly. We were on another long walk when, suddenly, she stumbled on a rut and fell, bruising her side, grazing her shin and bending back her fingers. After dusting herself off and receiving my comforting pep talk (“It’s only pain. Lucky you missed that dog turd”) we carried on with the walk but, would you believe it, a few days later, after another walk, she stumbled in the garage and fell over again, this time onto a bag of scrap wood. She is now convinced that she has bruised yet another rib (Blog 43), though I think she has pulled a muscle, which is just as painful. Surprisingly, there is no bruising. Being Jane, she is carrying on life as normal, bustling here and there, talking to plants, digging little holes, baking cakes and only wincing occasionally. Also being typically Jane, she avoids taking painkillers on a regular basis, so that doubles her discomfort. There is something of the puritan in that girl: “suffering is good for the soul” appears to be her motto. The real performance comes when she gets into or out of bed: these evolutions are characterised by grunts, groans and creaks as if the duty part of the watch were hauling up a 27 foot whaler by hand after a particularly good run ashore the night before. Frustratingly, there is not much I can do to help her, other than the occasional shove or heave: it will just have to work itself out. This falling over lark is a little worrying though: perhaps it is symptomatic of the return of her labyrinthitis (Blog 40). Note the term “fell over”, not “had a fall”: a distinct difference that my godson once pointed out. We are not yet old enough to “have a fall”, thank you.

Whenever I ask a young person of my acquaintance, “How are you?”, I often seem to get the reply, “I’m good”. I always feel like saying,
“I was asking about your health, not your behaviour. I’m not Santa Claus”.
Look, buck up. The reply to, “How are you?” is, “I’m well, thank you”.
Similarly, the correct reply to the greeting, “How do you do?” (the correct way to address a stranger for the first time) is another, “How do you do?”; it is not an invitation for you to launch forth with a summary of the state of your haemorrhoids, or to say, “I’m good”
Do try to get these things right. They do matter. Hrrmph.

Now have you ever noticed how useless a first aid box is in an emergency?  I had an unfortunate accident during my wood-turning the other day – nothing serious, just a scratch – but what a job I had to stem the blood.  My tools are very sharp so I felt nothing at first: just a nick.  Then the blood started.  At that point I came to realise how hopeless a first aid kit can be.  I scrambled to get it open, smearing blood all over the box, then found it contained everything but the small dressing that I actually needed: scissors, Savlon, triangular bandages, burn cream, eye wash all fell out into the sawdust which, with the addition of gore, was beginning to look like an old fashioned butcher shop of my childhood.  I finally found some plasters, but couldn’t open the packet because my hands were slippery and I only had one good hand.  There was nothing else for it but to wrap my finger in a paper towel and go up to mummy in the house, leaving a trail of blood up the garden path, through the utility room, and over the best part of the kitchen.  What a mess!  Naturally, I received a damned good telling off for being careless…dangerous to be left on my own…might need to visit the hospital for stitches…Eventually we managed to get it all bound up – it really was just a scratch, but the aftermath and cleaning up was out of all proportion to the original injury.  I am not sure what the solution is regarding the value of a first aid box and instant access to something that stems the blood.  Boiling pitch would do, I suppose, but that would be a bit drastic.  And what is the point of a tube of Savlon –  has anyone ever treated a wound with antiseptic cream?  I certainly haven’t.  And burn cream?  Surely the best thing is to just stick the injured bit in running cold water.  And plasters: so double wrapped for hygiene that you cannot get at them and, when you do, you find they are time-expired and won’t stick.  I think I had better keep to writing for a while.

Things are starting to ease on the virus front here in England, and some year groups of primary school children have returned to school. Apparently only 60% of those children eligible to return have done so; presumably the remaining 40% had been taken by their concerned parents to the Dorsetshire beaches at Durdle Door to soak up the atmosphere, the sunshine and the virus. More significantly for us, we can now entertain people in our back garden up to a maximum of six (including us) provided we keep the usual two metres apart. To celebrate, we had two good friends and neighbours over for lunch yesterday and had a splendid time, the weather continuing to be hot and sunny. The numbers of daily cases and deaths in the UK continue to fall but, looking at the Shacklepin graph and trend curve, I think the gradient may be reducing ie the numbers are not falling as fast as they were. I mention this now, as a marker, so that it cannot be attributed to the current loosening of restrictions, the effect of which will only manifest itself in about two weeks time. Nevertheless, we are entering the asymptote of the curve so things continue to look encouraging. Most things are now available in the supermarkets (except vanilla extract, of all things) and queues are minimal if you go at the right time and get your wife to do the queuing. I was astonished to see a picture in the paper of about half a mile of people queuing for five hours to get into IKEA in Warrington. Just how desperate can you be to buy cheap furniture? Daily deaths from CV19 in the UK stand at 359 as of 3 June. Apparently Melbury has the fewest CV19 deaths in Barsetshire, and the county lies in a region of England that has also recorded the fewest deaths in the country so, in some ways, we are dumb, fat and happy. Well, dumb and fat anyway.

As I write, there is a mass gathering in Hyde Park in London to demonstrate that “Black Lives Matter”.  British policemen have been attacked. This comes shortly after what appears to be the unlawful killing of a black man by a police officer in the USA and a report, in this country, that Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) men are significantly more vulnerable to the Covid 19 virus than white people.  While I have every sympathy with the sentiment, I consider any crimes and social inequalities that may occur in the USA to be a matter for the people of the USA.  It does not justify attacking British policemen and I cannot believe that people in London can be so foolish as to attend this mass gathering, given the circumstances and their vulnerability. Total stupidity.

I have toothache.  I never get toothache, but now the record has been broken and I am in agony.  And it is a real pain in the jaw.  For why?  Because there are no dentists working.  There is some hope on the horizon as dentists are expected to be able to open again on 8 June.  I rang our surgery yesterday and the dentist said they would be operating a triage from that date and he would add my name to the list.  There would be no instant treatment, as there would have been in the past: it would be an assessment only.  Still, it is better than nothing.  In the meantime, I am mainlining on the paracetamol and just about getting by, suffering in silence (as I do). The problem is, Jane is hitting the painkillers too occasionally,  and so we are going through paracetamol like no tomorrow.  Of course, we have been limited to buying only two packets of paracetamol per person for quite some years now and at least there is now plenty of the stuff in the shops, but it does mean having to go out almost every day to top up, and to buy the painkillers individually from several chemists.  Right now I am tempted to take a mallet and chisel and remove the damned tooth myself.  Why did it have to happen now?

I was chatting to a neighbour the other day and he was describing how his mother was very reluctant to leave her house, not because of a fear of catching the virus so much as a fear of actually going out: agoraphobia. This did not surprise me, and I fear it may be a problem that a lot of people are experiencing after so long in confinement. I remember when we had a canal boat years ago, and spent the summer weeks cruising the canals and rivers of rural England. Life for just the two of us was so tranquil, slow and largely devoid of people that, when we did venture forth into a town or city for provisions, we hated the bustle and noise and could not wait to get back onboard and away into the countryside again. I think that our experience was a minor version of the agoraphobia described earlier. The collateral damage to mental health from this epidemic can be added to the absence of dental, optical and – indeed – any other non-CV19 medical treatment during the current crisis. I hate to wish what is left of my life away, but I do long for the day when things return to normal (or something close to it).

The good news is that we have our new ice machine (Blog 47) and it is up and running.  The bad news is that we have run out of both Durham and Plymouth gins.  Regular readers will recall that these are Jane and my favourite tipples respectively.  How could this have happened?  I summoned the Supply & Secretariat Officer and remonstrated with her over the shortfall, but found her just as crestfallen as I was by the deficiency.  It would appear that we have been drinking the stuff a little more than usual.  We still have gin, of course:  Gordon’s is a good substitute and we also have bottles of House of Commons Gin (a gift from our son, who works in high places) and Three Queens Gin (speciality of Cunard).  But none of them is as good as our favourites.  Fortunately, we have the internet.  Jane started surfing immediately (note my use of the hip, modern terms) and she finally tracked down a supplier of Durham Gin – even the distillery was out of stock.  Four bottles were immediately ordered and the crate is due today.  As to Plymouth Gin, well, that will have to wait a little longer.  Jane has not forgotten that remonstration and my referring to her as the Supply & Secretariat Officer.

After proof-reading my opening paragraphs above, I reminisced with Jane about the first meal I ever prepared for her when I invited her to lunch in my house, very early in our courtship.  Women appreciate it when men cook food for them, especially if there is also a cosy fire and a warm, homely, romantic atmosphere.  I pointed out that, even then, I had culinary talents and was perfectly capable of independent living.
“It was the summer.  You opened a packet of smoked mackerel, added half a bag of lettuce, sliced a tomato and offered me a dressing of bottled mayonnaise.  And you used to eat tinned Tyne Brand Minced Beef with Onion, Yeoman Instant Mashed Potato and Heinz Baked Beans in the evenings”.
How clever of her to remember the exact details of that special meal of 1982 (he said through gritted teeth).  And how impressive that she still married me. 

Perhaps she could tell that I badly needed help.

4 June 2020

Tragedy: the ice machine is broken. No more gins and tonic, no more Horse’s Necks, no more Pimms: not unless you like your drinks warm. This is truly a disaster. Well, we have had that ice machine for at least 15 years, so I suppose it has had a good innings. I could tell that there was something wrong with it when I noticed the rust among the ice cubes (just brushed it off without telling her – a little iron in one’s diet will do no harm). Later, I found a rusty mild steel bracket in there and I knew then that our loyal and trusty servant had coughed up its last ice cube. Out it went onto the pile of junk that awaits an opportunity to visit the recycling centre; into the freezer went the old-fashioned ice trays that you can never extract the ice cubes from. These are desperate times, and needs must. We have, of course, immediately ordered a new ice machine and it is due this week. Warm gin and tonic? I don’t think so – it could be the end of civilisation as we know it.

The ice is important because the warm sunny weather in England continues without a break (26C [79F] today). Jane is fretting over her garden because the ground is like concrete and her precious charges are gasping for water. The rainwater butts emptied yesterday, so all that rain that we collected over the long wet soggy winter has now gone. The hose has been rigged and it is only a matter of time before Jane asks for the sprinkler to be deployed; already, Horatio’s highly sophisticated Hozelock drip irrigation system for her pots and hanging baskets has been brought into operation, and soon that little gauge in the water meter will be spinning like a top. Before long, I dare say, a hosepipe ban will be brought in to add to the everyday restrictions of our lives.

All this lovely weather and we are still stuck at home, but there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon: outdoor markets, car showrooms and some schools will open on 1 June, and other ordinary shops will open two weeks after that. Predictably, a whole host of restrictive practices are being mooted to accompany the opening up process, such as shoes that have been tried on being quarantined for 24 hours, closed fitting rooms, and sofas in furniture shops being cleaned after anyone has sat on them. Paradoxically, Joe Public, who is apparently terrified of returning to work, is flooding the beauty spots, parks, beaches and promenades with no social distancing at all. I have come to the conclusion that people can be grouped into roughly three camps: those who are genuinely terrified of catching and dying from CV19 and never cross their threshold; those who think that the virus is little worse than influenza and think that restrictions should be lifted immediately; and those with an open mind on our vulnerability to the pandemic, but who are conforming broadly to the law for a quiet life. At one point early on I thought the three camps could be defined by their age group, with the older generation featuring high among the pragmatists; however, I have now come to the conclusion that the camps cannot be defined by age alone. It is all most curious and, when this is all over (as it will be), psychologists will have a field day analysing it all. As I write, the number of CV19 cases in hospital stands at just over 8,000, and daily deaths from CV19 in the UK stands at 134, both figures still falling. My own trend curve, based on regression of an exponential form and data since the peak at mid April, indicates that the daily total of deaths will fall to zero somewhere near the end of July, all things being equal.

Saints be praised, some other creature has stepped up to the line to replace me as Public Garden Enemy Number 1. Mr Pigeon now has the top slot in Jane’s mind. Mr Pigeon sits on Jane’s plants and squashes them. Mr Pigeon (and not I) is responsible for broken stalks and flowers. Mr Pigeon sits and poops in the bird bath and tries to steal seed from the bird feeder to the detriment of the little song birds. Mr Pigeon is hated and, if he is not careful, will soon be gracing our dinner plates as a dead pigeon. I tried to point out to Jane that Mr Pigeon is one of God’s creatures and is only looking for a home for himself and Mrs Pigeon, but the argument did not cut the mustard with the Head Gardener. That Pigeon has to go. She is already reaching for the air pistol.

I may not have mentioned before that I have other duties in the Shacklepin household as well as the onerous one of Executive Command. My secondary tasks can be summarised by the four Ds: Drinks, Decks, Dhobying and DIY. “Drinks” I have covered in an earlier blog and “Decks” (swabbing and vacuuming thereof) are self-explanatory. Dhobying, however, is worth an expansion as it brings with it so many credit points in the memsahib’s little black book: I do all the washing and all the ironing, tasks that she detests. I enjoy ironing because it enables me to don sound-reducing headphones and listen to audiobooks, radio plays or language courses in my own little world. Naturally, this state of self-imposed incommunicado drives Jane mad, for she hates me being outside her sphere of influence, rather like when the lunar module is detached from the mother ship to visit the far side of the moon. Of course, she dare not express her frustration overtly: to do so would risk her being landed with doing the washing and ironing herself. Instead, her annoyance manifests itself in her trying to talk to me when I am shut down (so to speak). She will wait until I have a complete incommunicado ironing operation under way with all its impedimenta, then she will direct a question at me. This I will be unable to hear because of the sound-reducing headphones and a man telling me how to conjugate verbs in French, but I will know that it is a question for me because of her body language in my sightline. A response requires me to stop ironing, grovel in my pocket for the iPod, drop it, pick it up, stop the programme, unhitch the headphones, and ask her to repeat the question. She will then apologise profusely for interrupting my listening session, state that the question was unimportant, and carry on with whatever she was doing before (with, I suspect, a secret smile to herself that she has re-established the pecking order of who has priority for my attention). This process carries on in a do-loop with a frequency period of about ten minutes and continues until the ironing is finished. It is for this reason that I have never been able to get beyond the past imperfect in French.

My allusion to credit points in the last paragraph refers, of course, to the relevant section of The Book. Regular readers will recall from Blog 43 that The Book is Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps by psychologists Allan and Barbara Pease, and it explains the differences in how men and women think. In The Book, the authors postulate that women keep a subconscious record of plus and minus points tallied against their husband’s behaviour. Naturally, they will deny this because it is a subconscious act, but it does happen apparently. As an experiment, the authors asked couples to keep separate written tallies of credit points against items of male behaviour ie the wife recorded her tally, and the husband recorded his own assessment of his own actions. At the end of a month they compared the two assessments. On one occasion, the husband had spent an entire Saturday helping his son assemble a model of a B17 Flying Fortress, and duly awarded himself ten points. When he compared this task to his wife’s score for the same event, he found she had awarded him just three points. He was baffled: he had missed an important football match to do that bonding session with his son. Why so low a score? She replied that she had only given him three points because, despite the task taking up a whole day, he had enjoyed doing it. Yet, bafflingly for him, she had awarded him nine points in her own record for presenting her with a posy of wild flowers, something he had awarded himself only two points for. The reason? Because he had taken the trouble to pick the flowers himself. Yes, that dhobying and ironing is worth so many credits points. Let’s face it, I have a lot of demerits to make up for.

Well, the new car is going well. Or as well as I can judge from the few times that I have been able to use it. We only bought the mighty machine (a new Nissan Leaf) on 5 March and lockdown descended on us on 23 March, so we have hardly driven anywhere other than the supermarkets. Being all electric, it excels at short trips and I derive immense smug satisfaction from my green credentials. Actually, that is not the reason why I bought it (heaven forbid): I just feel, as an engineer, that one should have as efficient a system or machine as is possible and I love the way the car regenerates energy when braking. I hate wasted energy (hence my aversion to sport). Our previous car, a Volvo with a petrol engine, barely reached operating temperature on our shopping trips and – consequently – rarely achieved better than 30 mpg on short journeys; with this new vehicle, of course, the distance covered is unrelated to its efficiency. The other great thing about the car is that you can pre-condition it before going out: you can tell it what temperature you want the interior to be before departure and it will duly deliver, hot or cold, using power from the grid. On sunny days we charge the car for free because we have photovoltaic panels on our roof; on dull days we charge the car off-peak during the wee small hours. Driving the electric car takes a little getting used to at first. You have the option to select ‘Eco,’ which limits the acceleration to the benefit of battery range; or ‘E Pedal’, which maximises regenerative braking; or both. With ‘E Pedal’ selected you can drive the car solely using the accelerator pedal: lift your foot off and the car comes to a stop, like a Dodgem car at the fair; you rarely need to use the brake pedal except in an emergency. Of course, the whole set up is geared towards the driver minimising all energy losses and driving economically. Deselect the ‘Eco’ switch and the ‘E Pedal’ switch, however, and the car takes off like a dingbat when you accelerate. I cannot recall the precise figure, but I seem to recall that she will do 0 – 60 mph in about 7 seconds; it certainly feels pretty fast to me. Range is probably the main concern with electric cars. This varies with the ambient temperature, how you drive the car, and the number of accessories (including heater and air conditioning) that you have running. With heating and air conditioning shut off, the present indicated range of my car at 23C is 172 miles; take seven miles off that if you switch on the climate control. I have yet to put it to the test. Charge time on a fast charger, such as is found in motorway service areas or public carparks, is 45 minutes to bring the battery up to 80% charge. Again, I have yet to put it to the test. Watch this space.

You can put away your tin hat and re-emerge from that earthquake shelter. Assume Third Degree of Readiness. Jane’s passport application (Blog 46) has been approved. Hallelujah.

We had quite a scare on one of our walks the other day, when I was convinced that I was coming down with the virus. It was shortly after the government formally recognised the loss of taste as a symptom of the illness and we had just completed an arduous climb. The memsahib had recourse to break out the emergency ration of boiled sweets in order to restore our blood sugar and, to my horror, I could not taste a thing. I tried to keep calm as I drew Jane’s attention to the problem, not wishing to alarm her (the loss of her Chief Dhoby Wallah and Shirt Presser Boy would have been a serious blow to her horticultural ambitions).
She was puzzled, as her sweet tasted fine.
“You did take off the clingfilm I presume?”
“Oh”
It seems she had wrapped the sweets individually before our departure in order to avoid the sweets picking up fluff and other detritus from her trouser pocket. Well how was I to know? I had not been properly briefed. This was very poor, I expostulated. She just rolled her eyes: dumb insolence. What her poor father must have had to put up with.
The boiled sweet, sans clingfilm, was very nice – thank you for asking.

I leave you with a prayer:
“Please God, after you have made me more tolerant of my fellow creatures (or maybe before that if at all possible), please send these noisy little beggars back to school. Please”.

28 May 2020