Blog 77. Who Fancies a Cruise?

On the face of it, Jane’s request was quite reasonable: could I make the breakfast smoothie tomorrow morning while she was exercising, so that everything could be ready for when she came down?  Her supporting instructions were comprehensive, exhaustive even: she had prepared all the ingredients and all I had to do was pour them into the liquidiser with 300ml of milk and some spices (jars on the counter) according to the recipe (also on counter), then blitz.  Before we went to bed she repeated the above instructions and underlined them metaphorically.  She even started to read out the recipe before I stopped her:
“Yes, yes, whatever.  I‘ve got all that.  Even I can follow a recipe Jane”, I said.
The next morning, when I went to make the tea at the usual un-Godly hour before dawn, I switched on the ice machine (ice cubes to chill the smoothie) and glanced at the recipe book, helpfully propped open by two spice jars: no problem, a piece of cake.
The minor ripple in the space time continuum began when I came downstairs, fully dressed, ready to embark on this exciting culinary exercise while Jane was hosing herself down in the shower and bracing herself for the daily door-propping-up manoeuvre that dominates her leg exercises.  I looked at the recipe book: 
“Take half a cucumber…”, it started. But then I remembered that she had done all the preparation already.  So I opened the Main Fridge and searched: no, there were no ready-assembled ingredients with a cucumber in there…I then went to the Auxiliary Fridge and searched there: nope, nothing there either…I wondered where she kept the cucumbers and pulled out the chopping board (forcefully labelled Vegetables Only in stern writing after that time when I prepared a fruit salad on the onion board).  Then I realised that I was reading the wrong recipe: it was not the Green Smoothie that I was supposed to be doing, but the Mango Smoothie (bottom of page).  I put away the chopping board hastily and started a second search pattern in the two fridges.  I could find no pre-prepared ingredients.  There was a tray with mixed unidentified fruit and half an orange that looked promising, and a bowl of cut-up pineapple, but no other candidates.  Tentatively, I removed the tray of fruit, but thought I should page the oracle to provide some helpful feedback that, contrary to assurances, the pre-prepared ingredients were not, in fact there.  I called the Head Chef on Alexa.  The conversation went something like this:
“Are you there?  Hello?”
“Yes?”, was the somewhat terse reply.
“These ingredients: there are no pre-prepared ingredients in either fridge”.
“Yes there are”.
“No there aren’t”.
“They’re in the Main Fridge in a porcelain bowl”.
“No, I’ve looked in there and pulled everything out.  Definitely no fruit apart from this tray of half an orange and other things, and a bowl of pineapple”.
There was a thump from upstairs (as if someone had just lost their balance) followed by an uneven clumping noise that suggested that a poltergeist was coming down the stairs.  The kitchen door swung open to reveal Jane, still in her knickers, muttering with growing volume,
“What did I say to you?”
I drew breath to reply.
” I said everything was in a bowl ready”, she continued before I could speak.
” All you had to do was add milk and spices.  You Never, Ever, Listen”.
The last sentence was set in italics and bold for emphasis.
I was standing with the Main Fridge door open holding the tray of obscure fruit and I pointed out, confidently this time, that there was, quite definitely, no bowl of prepared fruit.  Easing me to one side she reached in and took out what I had thought had been the bowl of pineapple chunks.
“Here”, she said, taking away the tray of fruit that I held in the other hand.  “All it needs is milk and spices.  It’s all prepared.  It’s all in there”
“You never, ever, listen” was her parting shot as she stomped back upstairs.
I looked at the bowl of yellow fruit.  I still thought it looked like pineapple, such assessment being driven by the fact that I thought a mango was green (which it is – on the outside).  I placed the bowl on the counter and re-read the recipe. 
“Add the juice of half an orange”, it said.  “Ah ha”, I thought, “I can do this”: only a minute ago I had seen just such half an orange in the Main Fridge.  There was an orange squeezer conveniently drying on the draining board and so I set to work.
“Add two centimetres of root ginger”, continued the recipe.  Easy, I thought, I even know what it looks like.  I opened the Auxiliary Fridge and there were three twigs of the stuff. 
“Oh, we’re on a roll here”, I thought, but which one to use: the oldest perhaps?  Better check.  I called Jane again on Alexa (getting good at this),
“Hello, are you there?”, I said in mollifying, oleaginous voice.
“Yes”, said a world weary voice, grunting as if propping up a door.
“I’ve found the root ginger”, I said, not without a certain pride in my initiative. “Which one would you like me to use?”.
“What did I say to you?”
“Errm….”
“What did I say to you?  I said EVERYTHING is already in the bowl: the ginger, the zest, the mango, the lot.  All you have to do is add the milk and spices!”.
“So I don’t need to add any ginger…?” I said in my little boy voice.
“NO!”
“Right. Right.   Sorry to have bothered you”.  There was another thump upstairs as if someone had fallen over again.
I looked thoughtfully at the freshly squeezed orange juice. 
“So I won’t need that then”, I decided, “best get rid of it and clean up the evidence before she comes down”.  So I drank it off and just managed to get the squeezer washed and cleaned before she appeared for the final time in all her awful majesty.  There are no prizes for what she said,
“You Never, Ever, Listen”. 
No dear.  Peace be upon you.

As a footnote, the smoothie was delicious.  The next day I heard her rummaging in the Main Fridge muttering, 
“I could have sworn I left half an orange in here…”, 
but I was all right: I had buried the orange peel deep under some smelly rubbish in the bin where she would never find it.

Of course, we are still in lockdown and daily deaths from Covid are still greater than April last year, currently 1,401 in the last 24 hours.  Positive results of tests are still plummeting for the country as a whole, however, and the time lag between infections and deaths seems to be coming into play so that daily hospital admissions and fatalities may be flattening.  Inoculations are continuing apace, currently at 400,000 a day, and 5.4 million doses have been administered to date.  Almost all the over 80s in the UK have now been done, with the focus now on the over 70s.  Everyone I have spoken to who has had ‘the jab’, no matter where they are in the country, has reported a very slick and well-organised vaccination operation so I think we should mark that down as a success story and something to be proud of.  The government has stretched out the gap between the first dose and the second from the recommended three weeks to three months, the laudable aim being to concentrate on getting as many people partially immunised as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, the vaccine manufacturer, Pfizer, has cautioned that the vaccine was never tested for that extended gap between doses and such an approach may render the vaccination programme less effective or even useless; the debate continues.
To my dismay, I am beginning to sense that the government may be about to move the goalposts with regard to the immunisation programme and the current restrictions.  In Blog 75 I praised the Chief Medical Officer for his pragmatism and what looked like a recognition that once everyone at risk had been immunised, then hospitals would not be overloaded and society could return to normal, accepting a certain amount of risk and – essentially – living with the virus just as we do with other illnesses.  Now, there seems to be a drift towards wanting to totally eliminate the virus in the entire population before there are any moves towards relaxation.  Heaven knows when that situation will be reached, if ever; if we are to wait until all 66 million British citizens have been vaccinated then it will be September at the very earliest before we reach that stage.  That is totally ridiculous, in my view.  Next, they will be imposing lockdown to stop the spread of the Common Cold or the flu.  The experts are also saying that, even when we have had both doses of the vaccine, we must still isolate, wear masks, and avoid contact with others. The reason given is that an inoculated person might still be infectious.  I don’t follow that: surely if you have had the vaccine then your body will overcome any potential infection so you won’t have the disease; if you don’t have the disease then you cannot infect anyone.  Dear oh dear, just as you see the light of hope on the horizon then the fog comes down. Are we downhearted?  No, but I’m starting to get angry again.  Give us some hope, for heaven’s sake.

A stiff drink might help my blood pressure, but we are still on The Diet and that includes no alcohol.  I can’t say I have missed it most of the time, and the meals we have had continue to be very palatable, if somewhat heavy on the green vegetables.  We are still losing weight, Jane’s weekly weight loss being only a fraction of mine, but then she was quite light to start with.  We are keeping on with this low-carbohydrate stage until the end of the month but then, sensibly, we will be coming off the extreme measures and moving onto a more steady régime: the gentle jog after the short sprint.  For the first time, after just over two weeks of The Diet, Jane has complained that she is hungry at the end of the day and that she could do with a glass of wine; it hasn’t affected me quite so badly.  It is curious, both physiologically and psychologically, that she should have lasted 18 days without any pangs; she now talks wistfully of Shepherd’s Pie and Steak and Kidney Pudding on a daily basis.

The 20 January saw the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States of America and ex President Trump retired to Florida, refusing to attend the ceremony.  For the first time Jane and I thought we would watch the inauguration on television but, my goodness me, how it went on.  I had no idea.  We kept changing channels in order to get warm (it looked freezing in Washington, and apparently it was), but every time we came back the ceremony was still going on.  We actually missed the swearing in of Joe Biden, but we did see the singing of the National Anthem by a lady known, apparently, as Lady GaGa.   She looked like the Widow Twanky to me, and I thought she sang a bit flat at one point (why didn’t they use a proper opera singer?), but she certainly made one heck of an entrance: very showbiz.  That’s America for you: modern, bold, and the land of the free.  I wish our cousins well under the new administration.

With a loud ‘clunk’ the mail fell through the letterbox and Jane immediately leapt up to retrieve it.  It is a characteristic of our confinement that the simple visit of the postman should inspire such enthusiasm and activity.
“Anything exciting?”, I asked.
“Regency Cruises”, she said in a disgusted voice, “they never give up do they?”
Indeed.  Who would contemplate a booking a cruise in the present circumstances?  In our case, not for fear of catching Covid, but rather for fear of cancelled bookings and losing our deposit.  Oh yes, and the small minor matter that we no longer have money for such luxuries.  We thoroughly enjoyed our cruise to Australia and back (Blog 1 – Blog 26) and would do it again if we came into a small fortune, but the likelihood of that is not great.  Glancing through the hefty glossy cruise brochure from Regency, I wondered – in my usual pessimistic way – just how many cruise passengers ever considered how they would get off a cruise ship in an emergency: very few, I would imagine.  Sure, you can pile into the lifeboats if you have the time, the weather is calm, and the ship is on a reasonably even keel; otherwise, however, you could be on a bit of a sticky wicket.  That assessment is just for the able-bodied of course: I remember in Blog 1 commenting on the very large number of wheelchair and walking-frame users onboard QUEEN MARY 2 and deducing that they did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off the ship in an emergency, even if (as we were assured) a member of the crew were detailed off to assist each disabled passenger. In 2019 a cruise ship lost power in a storm off Norway and was drifting ashore.  The sea state prevented lifeboats from being launched and attempts were made to evacuate the 1,300 passengers by helicopter but, inevitably, it was a very piecemeal effort lifting people off the deck by wire, and only 500 were removed over a long period.  Fortunately, the ship’s anchors held and she eventually managed to restore power and make port under her own steam, but it was a close-run thing and – I hope – a salutary lesson to ship owners and cruise passengers.  In normal times I lecture on disaster at sea and I always tell the audience that, when they embark for a cruise, the first thing they should do is work out how to escape from their cabin in the dark or in smoke and to know their lifeboat assembly point.  I do the same thing on ferries and in hotels, and Jane thinks I am an old woman but, as I keep telling her, I will survive and she will go under.  The second thing that I tell the audience is that the ship is your best lifeboat and that they should stay onboard and dry for as long as they can (mind you, the trick is knowing whether the ship is going to sink or not).  There is a common tendency when abandoning ship to leap overboard, but that is one of the worst things you can do: if the fall doesn’t kill you then the shock of hitting cold water probably will, particularly if you are old or have a weak heart.  Once in the water you start losing body heat rapidly and hypothermia sets in, even in the tropics: you gradually become disorientated, lose the use of your limbs, ingest water and die.  You will die of exposure in any sea temperatures less than 37C, though it might take a while in warm climes (in 2018 a woman survived a record ten hours after falling overboard in the Mediterranean); however the sharks or barracuda will probably get you in that time, so the end result will be the same.  Yes, far better to wrap up very well and step, dry, into that nice lifeboat having, first, taken a seasick tablet because the change in motion will otherwise make you as sick as a dog.  Anyone for a cruise now?

I remember when I was the aircraft carrier HMS CASSANDRA in the Western Approaches and we received a distress call from a yacht that was in trouble.  She was reasonably nearby and the ship immediately worked up to full power and headed for the yacht’s position.  Main steam throttles were opened, the boilers roared and gauges quivered.  It was all very exciting.  When we were in range we launched the Search and Rescue (SAR) Helicopter and the beast clattered away in a whiff of paraffin while the sick-bay team under the Surgeon Commander sharpened their scalpels and prepared to receive casualties.  The SAR helicopter eventually found the yacht, but she had inconveniently beached herself in a safe, though isolated, haven and the crew could be seen strolling along the beach.  The helicopter landed and contact was established.  The yacht crew said they were all right, thank you, but the airmen weren’t having any of that: didn’t they know that an aircraft carrier and its entire ship’s company were, as they spoke, pounding along towards their rescue? They unceremoniously bundled the protesting yacht crew into the helicopter, citing safety concerns, and took them back to CASSANDRA for a health check. The disgruntled yacht crew were eventually landed somewhere, safe and dry and we all smiled smugly: job well done – please, no thanks.

Clearly my cooking skills at breakfast earlier in the week had impressed the Head Chef.  I know this because I offered to help prepare the dinner on Friday night (hoping that she would decline, so that I could scuttle off and watch Wheeler Dealers in peace), and she unexpectedly accepted.  Would I be preparing the sauce for the Prawn Korma with Cauli Rice, I wondered?  Peel a prawn, perhaps?  Well, no, she didn’t go that far: I was directed to pour the pre-chopped Cauli Rice into a frying pan and stir it while it was heated; and don’t let it burn, on pain of death.  Oh well, strong oak trees from little acorns grow, I thought philosophically.  Half way through this onerous and demanding task I was diverted to remove the Korma sauce and blend it with the hand liquidiser.
“But I can’t”, I said, “I’m doing this!”
“Nonsense”, she said. ”You can do both jobs. Women multitask all the time”.
“Well, I don’t know…don’t blame me if the rice goes brown…”.
I moved on reluctantly to parallel Task Number 2.
I was, of course, stick gathering.  You probably are not familiar with the term so I will explain.  At the Royal Navy Leadership School, where Senior Ratings are trained as part of their advancement, the students are set a series of outside tasks involving leadership, initiative and teamwork: get the whole team and a dummy across a chasm using an old washing line, two nails, three logs and a roll of sellotape, that sort of challenge.  Now here’s the thing: whatever the course going through, the instructors always found that there was one member of the team industriously beavering away on a a totally non-contributory task, trying to look busy whilst carefully avoiding any actual useful work – neatly rolling up a hose when others are fighting a raging inferno for example, or gathering up twigs and branches when others were bridging a chasm.  Stick gathering, in fact.  When that ‘stick gatherer’ was challenged and directed to stop doing that and, instead, do this, then he would invariably argue,
“But I’m gathering up these sticks, sir.  Very important job.  OK sir, but I must say that if I leave it then those sticks will never be collected…”
Anyway, to return to the cooking, I was actually quite flattered to be asked to do something mechanical that involved machines, and picked up the hand liquidiser with relish.  It was fortunate that she did not see me press the button and eject the business end of the liquidiser into the flask (wrong button, fool), but I managed to recover it (licking my fingers to hide the evidence) before she returned and I did a creditable job of blitzing the sauce, though I say it myself.  That the sauce looked like it had just been sucked from the starboard sullage tank after a particularly severe case of oil contamination could hardly be my fault: that was just the way it was.  As it happened, the meal was delicious and the team work that led up to it was most satisfying.  Oh yes: this week, smoothies and Prawn Korma; next week, who knows?  Sauce Béarnaise perhaps?

Be careful out there.

23 January 2021

Blog 76. Picnic Anyone?

Another day in ‘solitary’. Well, sort of ‘solitary’: I still have Jane for company. I thought of scratching off the days on the walls of my cell, but thought better of it as I would undoubtedly be required to repair the marks with Polyfilla and re-emulsion them in the Spring. My, how January drags on. The first big lockdown was not quite so bad because the two of us did get out into the bundu every two days, or sat in the garden; this time, it has been considerably more confining and I have hardly been out at all. Mind you, that is not necessarily a hardship, for the weather has been quite bitter and has not encouraged outdoor exercise. Parts of Britain (notably, Up North) have been covered in snow, as predicted in Blog 75, but we have seen none of it here. Nevertheless it has still been quite cold, with occasionally a freezing wind. Winter in fact; now there’s a surprise. In writing this I am conscious of the fact that some of my readership is international. If you are reading this in Saskatchewan or Mongolia then the British Winter, with temperatures merely hovering around or just below 0 degrees C, will be just little potatoes but, heh, for us this is cold and any flake of snow brings the entire transport system to a halt. I may exaggerate slightly but, from the the annual warnings in the media about clearing windscreens and driving carefully on ice and snow, one could be excused for wondering if some of the British public had ever come across this season before. I remember my Canadian friends once telling me that the worst thing about Winter over there was the time it took to put on all their outer clothing before going out – and the time it took to take it all off again on return; popping out to the dustbins to ditch the gash without putting on warm clothing first really could put you at risk of hypothermia. We don’t get that. Mind you, Jane’s cousin from Calgary once commented to us about the continuous overcast and clag in Britain. How did we stand it? In Alberta it was either sunny (with or without cold and snow) or overcast and raining; the climate never, or hardly ever, reverted to weeks of low cloud. I pointed out to her that our rotten overcast weather was the reason why the British had gone out and created an empire.

Writing above that phrase, “never, or hardly ever”, which originated in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, reminds me that it was quoted so often in an American newspaper (I think it might have been the New York Times) in the 19th century that the editor of the paper grew weary of it and finally called all his journalists together to tell them that the practice was to cease: they were no longer to use the phrase, “…well, hardly ever” in their articles.  Inevitably, someone at the back said,
“What, never?”,
and unthinkingly the editor replied,
“Well, hardly ever”.

I broke with my policy the other day and made the mistake of watching the television news:
“Another 48,000 cases of Covid 19 were reported yesterday and hospitals report that they are close to being overwhelmed. 1,248 people died from the virus in the last 24 hours…”, proclaimed the broadcaster in that urgent, thrusting headline tone that they use when trying to impart the fact that WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. I found it profoundly depressing and frustrating. What, exactly, do they want me to do about it? Could they not focus on the good news, that (for example) over three million people have been immunised and that the inoculation programme is going well? Some opposition politicians and know-it-all journalists have urged even stricter controls on lockdown, but there are virtually no additional measures that can be taken: Jane and I are already holed up here like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (I will leave you to decide which is which) and shouting at us that WE ARE DOOMED or IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT is not helping the situation one iota. Actually, if you look at the Office of National Statistics (ONS) website, you will see that the rate of positive test results in Britain actually peaked on about 1 January (ie before the present lockdown) and is now dropping. In a similar vein, if you look at the death rate by date when the death occurred (as opposed to date when death reported) you get a more meaningful and lower figure (eg 873 cf 1,162 on 7 January). The death curve seems to follow the infection curve with a time lag of about two weeks, so we should be seeing the fatalities easing off by the end of the month. All that is not to say that the situation is not grave: we are experiencing more infections, more hospital admissions and more Covid-related deaths than ever before and our hospitals are running at over 80% occupancy. Hospital staff, already weary from the day-to-day grind of looking after patients are additionally overloaded by staff having to isolate if they or their family get the slightest sniffle. However, shouting at us when we and the majority of the public are following the lockdown rules is unhelpful, lowering the morale and could be counter-productive.

There have been some well-publicised cases of “rule breaking”, with police apparently breaking up a few private parties and raves, but we don’t get that sort of thing in sleepy Barsetshire. Two women drove separately to a beauty spot in Derbyshire last week to go for a walk, two metres apart, in the wild blue yonder of the Dales but were pounced upon by several police officers and fined for breaking the Covid lockdown rules; their big mistake was to carry take-away cups of tea, which the police said constituted a picnic. The fines have since been rescinded after a public outcry, but a more clearer case of police over-zealousness would be hard to find (Derbyshire police has form: in the first lockdown they pursued hill-walkers, hiking miles from anyone on the Derbyshire Dales, with a drone). In Bournemouth an agent provocateur, who did not agree with lockdown, tried sitting alone with a flask of coffee on a bench on the seafront in a brisk westerly wind. She was immediately challenged by at least four police officers and, when she refused to give her name and address, was arrested and led away in handcuffs. Your papers please… She undoubtedly was “trying it on” for publicity purposes (how else could it have been filmed for social media?), but the Dorset police fell for it. Did they really need to use four officers and use handcuffs? Part of the problem is that there is a dichotomy between what the law says (as laid down in legislation by Parliament) and what the UK government guidance says: the guidance says that the public can only exercise once a day “locally”; the actual legislation says that the public must stay at home, but can leave home to exercise – it does not specify a time limit, distance or frequency. The police can only enforce the law, not the guidance, but they have stated that some people are not ,“following the spirit of lockdown”. By contrast, some police forces are not following the spirit of common sense and the principle of minimising the spread of infection. A person walking (or sitting) on a windy seafront over two metres from others constitutes no risk to others whatsoever; likewise for people walking in the vastness of the countryside, with or without a cup of tea, or people driving in their own in cars. The British police have a proud reputation of policing by consent and this epidemic has put them in a difficult and invidious position with the public whom they serve. Most people would be sympathetic of the position they are in and would advocate a clamp-down on genuine rule breaking, but disproportionate and over zealous action by a few officers could result in the loss of support for all the police. That would be a great pity.

Enough of Covid, depressing subject anyway, let us move on to holidays. Have you noticed that the television advertisements are gradually moving away from charities to, now, pushing holidays abroad? I am astonished. I would not contemplate booking a holiday in the present circumstances for the simple reason that we have no idea just how things are going to pan out with the current restrictions, whether in this country or abroad; some clown of a scientist has already predicted, with customary gloom, that we will still be under the thumb even in the Autumn. Yet I read in my newspaper today that holiday bookings, particularly for the over 50s, are up 300% . I can understand the desire to get away, preferably in the sunshine, after all this, but I shan’t be thinking of it until it really is all over. Besides, we are saving quite a bit of money at the moment through not dining out, buying clothes, going to the theatre or entertaining: I can buy quite a few warps, gizmos and sundry other desirable items for the boat with that. Best not mention that possibility out loud.

I read an article in the paper by an Asian gentleman the other day, about the difficulties he had encountered in mixing and settling down among the social classes from public schools as an undergraduate in Oxford (or maybe Cambridge). The thrust of it was that “things ought to be done” to make his life easier in that regard for him and people like him. It was not clear to me if he was writing as an Asian, drawing on the currently popular claims of “white privilege”, or as a person from a middle or lower social class background trying to mix with the “knobs”. Either way, I was baffled. Moving on to, say, university invariably takes you away from the social mix in which you have been brought up and involves you mixing with people from all classes, colours and creeds. It is part of growing up and maturing. It broadens the mind, teaches tolerance, and helps us all get on better in society. Having been brought up on Tyneside with its flat vowels and (at that time) fairly parochial outlook, I remember being baffled by some of my fellow Cadets’ accents and mien when I joined the Royal Navy. The bits that stuck in my memory were their odd names (some double-barrelled) and the practice of carrying an umbrella: you did not carry an umbrella if you were male and lived in South Shields; not if you wanted a quiet life. It did not take me long to merge in (the accent took longer) and we all got along together famously. Some years ago I read a book about National Service in the UK (a compulsory requirement to complete 18 months of military service that ran from 1949 to 1960): it was a compendium of short accounts by men from all walks of life who had had to do it. Most just got on with it, some resented it, but quite a few acknowledged the fact that National Service had broadened their outlook, opened their minds to the depths that human nature could descend to, allowed them to mix with people from all social classes, smartened them up, taught them tolerance, and – in some cases – allowed them to experience life abroad. Returning to the article by the new undergraduate, I just wonder if his view (which I may have misunderstood) may have been symptomatic of the latest student attitude that could be summarised as “I don’t want to hear your point of view and I don’t want to mix with you”. I may be wrong on this specific instance, but I still think that mixing with all, listening, debating differences and tolerating others are all part of growing up and living in society. Incidentally, none of the British armed forces would advocate a return to National Service today: it would take too long to train men and women up to the technological standard required to achieve a useful return on investment. Mind you, it might actually educate a few young people, teach them how to wash and shave, give them some pride in their appearance and help them realise the importance of working as part of a team or community instead of being self-centred. You never see a squaddy wandering the streets half-shaven, in pyjamas and flip flops.

Should parts in dramas, plays and films only be filled by actors or actresses of like colour or sexual preference? This is what has been advocated by a dramatist, who has suggested that homosexual parts should only be played by homosexuals. The Dickens character David Copperfield was recently played by an Asian and Anne Boleyn is shortly to be played by a black woman: is this dramatist advocating that this was, or is, wrong? Should a heterosexual only be played by a heterosexual? There could be a lot more out-of-work actors or actresses if this policy were followed. Surely the whole concept of acting is in the name: actors and actresses pretend to be someone else and there are some excellent examples of how well they do it. Conclusion: this is yet another example of woke nonsense.

I see that a Russian naval captain has been charged with selling his destroyer’s propellers and replacing them with poorer quality replacements.  I must say that this is the most extreme case of capabar  that I have ever come across.  The ship was in dry dock at the time, so at least he didn’t have to hold his breath while wielding the spanner.  Corruption in the Russian Navy is, according to the newspaper report, fairly commonplace but even in that environment the theft of a pair of manganese bronze propellers weighing several tons each must surely take the biscuit.

Well, the diet is going very well (I knew you’d be interested).  I am coming to the end of Week 2 now and have yet to have a meal that has not been tasty and enjoyable.  At weigh-in last Monday, after one week,  I had lost 3.2 kg (7 lb), much to my astonishment.  The exercise bike project is going well too, though I have yet to procure the outfit and am having to make do with an old shirt and walking shorts.  Oh yes, I feel like a new man (no, this is not an invitation, so don’t write).

At a time when the term “fake news” has become commonplace I am reminded of an instance when faulty information led to unpleasant consequences.  This was a true story told to me by a friend about the process of obtaining security clearance for Service personnel.  All government personnel are subject to the Official Secrets Act and have clearance to see documents up to a certain level on a need-to-know basis, officers routinely up to Secret.  For access beyond that level (required for certain appointments) they have to undergo a process that used to be called Positive Vetting (PV), now called Developed Vetting.  This involved completing a lengthy questionnaire on dubious things you might have done in the past, extensive probing into your finances and dealings, and interviews with people who knew you.  The aim was to assess whether you were vulnerable to blackmail, bribery or sexual temptation, to check your character and (by re-running the process later), to check if you were prone to lying.  For the Royal Navy, this process was done by the Director of Naval Security (DNSy) who employed retired officers for the front line work.  The story goes that one officer who had to be vetted was serving in a frigate and was told he would be interviewed. One day, the DNSy interviewer duly turned up at the dockyard gate, showed his identification, and was directed to the frigate’s berth.  About an hour after his arrival the telephone rang at the dockyard gate and was picked up by a constable of the Ministry of Defence Police (known in the vernacular as The MOD Plod).  The conversation apparently ran something like this:
Constable: “St Levan’s Gate”
Caller: “Is that Devonport Dockyard?”
Constable: “Yes, it is”
Caller: “DNSy here.  We are putting out an alert because we’ve had a series of incidents in which someone has been impersonating one of our vetting officers and infiltrating MOD property.  They claim to be a Commander Ponsonby and the description is that he is a short man in his fifties, greying black hair, fair complexion, walks with a slight limp.  If encountered he should be apprehended at once and held for questioning”
Constable: “Strap me!  He just passed through the gate about an hour ago.  He said he was visiting HMS CANTALOUPE”.
Caller: ”Excellent.  We may have caught him.  You must apprehend him immediately”.
Now the members of the MOD Plod spend most of their days in a gatehouse, twiddling their thumbs and thinking up new ways of making life even more difficult and obnoxious for honest sailors of the Royal Navy (this, an unbiased point of view).  There is not a lot of love lost between the force and the civilian police force either, not least because the latter have to run around actually trying to catch criminals.  Whatever, this telephone call was just what the dockyard police had been waiting for for years: a chance to do something exciting and positive.
Fast forward to the scene at HMS CANTALOUPE, lying alongside the wall at 7 Wharf (or wherever).  It was a relatively peaceful dockyard setting on a quiet weekday in harbour: some light dockyard traffic passed along the jetty; a few sailors on stages were painting the ship’s side trying to avoid the Chief Boatswain’s Mate; the quartermaster was strolling up and down at the gangway wishing his watch would end; the White Ensign was flying from its staff, stiff in the breeze.  On the whole, pretty quiet apart from the cry of the odd seagull,  the characteristic hiss of air cooling the ship’s radar system and the distant roar of steam from a ship that was flashing up further down the jetty.  Suddenly, into this gentle nautical scene came a screech of tyres, and round the corner of a building hurtled a Black Maria that then shuddered to a stop at the ship’s gangway.  Up the brow charged four large MOD Plods who challenged the quartermaster on whether he had seen the imposter.
“He’s with Lieutenant Podgson in his cabin”, said the bemused quartermaster gesturing towards the screen door and the cabin flat. They moved purposefully forward.
Meanwhile, in the cabin, the DNSy man was just getting on to the juicier bits of his interview with Lieutenant Podgson concerning that last run ashore in Malta.  Suddenly the cabin door was hurtled open and, without any challenge or introduction,  he was picked up bodily by four large policemen.  He was bundled unceremoniously along the upper deck and then dragged down the gangway with his heels bumping a rat-a-tat-tat on the treads of the brow.  Still protesting, he was thrown into the back of the Black Maria and the vehicle shot off. Peace descended again, the members of the ship’s company of CANTALOUPE who were on deck wondering if they had imagined it all.
Several hours later, after a long interrogation, a few telephone calls and some harsh words, the DNSy man was released.  The call had been a hoax with the aim of retribution on the DNSy man for some ancient grievance.  Now that is what I call fake news, but it entertained the ship for many years to come.

Thinking of interrogation, just as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) controls the extent that police interview techniques can go, so the Geneva Convention dictates and limits the form that interrogation can take. Traditionally, a captured serving officer may only be required to submit his name, rank and service number to his captors. Ships’ officers always have a range of other duties in addition to their primary task and one officer will always be designated as the Interrogation or Intelligence Officer, his or her role being to interrogate captured enemy personnel, such as divers trying to attack the ship. As part of their training they have to complete a course which, naturally, includes being interrogated themselves and on how to resist questioning. There was one chap who was in this position and went on the designated course, which was part run by the Special Boat Service (SBS) – part of the Royal Marines and a rival to the more well-known Special Air Service (SAS) in the cadre that we call Special Forces. He was given a secret password and told he was not to reveal it under any circumstances during a forthcoming interrogation. For the sake of the story, let us say that the password was “Hungerford”. Taken into a bare interrogation room that was furnished with just a table, two upright chairs and an incongruous galvanised bucket, he glanced warily at the two SBS men who were to interrogate him. He sat down opposite one of the Marines while the other Marine wandered the room randomly. They started questioning him, the seated man shouting and yelling, the standing man asking him more gently: the standard “hard and soft man” technique. He stood firm, repeating his name, rank and service number,
“I know my rights under the Geneva Convention”, he said, ”I cannot reveal that password. You cannot torture me or hurt me in any way”, he said, folding his arms and smiling smugly.
Without warning, the Marine behind him picked up the galvanised bucket, upended it over the officer’s head, and proceeded to beat the sides with a hammer: PING PANG PING PANG PING PANG reverberated around the interior.
“The password is Hungerford! Hungerford! For God’s sake stop!”
Game, set and match to the SBS, I think. And no animals were hurt in the course of that interrogation.

It’s a bit odd really.  We are both sneezing around the place as if we had head colds, but have no cough, sore throat or fever: just the sneeze.  I say ‘odd’, because we have not been out so cannot have caught anything from anyone.  I proffered a theory that might explain it: we are allergic to something. A squirt up the nose with antihistamine solved the problem and Dr Shacklepin scored yet again with another successful diagnosis.  But what are we allergic to?  It cannot be an allergy to pollen at this time of year.  What else?  Then, at breakfast, I hit on a possibly cause: dust mites.  Stuck indoors with no fresh air, we are breathing in an excess of dust.  I voiced this hypothesis with great triumph.  At that moment there was a distinct chilling in the atmosphere, as if some manifestation had been conjured up from the depths of the Mariana Trench.  I felt distinctly uncomfortable and looked up from my reading.
“What?”, I said.
“Are you implying”, she said with an icy voice,”that I keep a dirty house?”
“Ah.  Nay, nay my dear”, I replied, working up to Full Astern. “I was referring to the little creatures who live with us, your Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus, those pesky creatures.  They positively relish a clean house, just like us humans.  No, no, the house is immaculate…maybe that has encouraged them…”, I trailed off.
“Hmmm.”  She looked at me as if I were a house mite myself.  “Just watch it”.

Now, just drop your trousers and bend over.  This won’t hurt.  Oh, you’d rather give me your arm?  OK.

15 January 2021

Blog 75. Start Pumping That Iron.

Well, I never thought I would ever be reporting this: it is undoubtedly a tergiversation in Shacklepin behaviour, so marked that I am still reeling under the realisation that I have done it. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, better out than in: I have ordered an exercise bike.
Those who know me, or are regular readers of these blogs, will recognise that all sport and any form of organised exercise, gymnasia, sports gear and gym shoes are as horrifying to me as kryptonite is to Superman. The very smell of a medicine ball makes me shudder. Yet here I am, going completely off piste and siding with my nemesis. The reason, of course, is that the current confinement and Jane’s minor disability have made even me realise that I must take exercise if what passes for my muscles are not going to atrophy. Already those hams, once firm and the envy of many, are starting to wither and sag like the sails of a once-fine ship-of the-line becalmed in the doldrums. Drastic circumstances demand drastic action and I have done the deed. Naturally, I must now give consideration to the creation and purchase of a new rig to be worn for the cycling exercise: an old pair of grey flannels with bicycle clips will probably not do. I do not possess any sports rig: my Navy-issue gym shorts that reached to my knees (and would now be trendy) were outgrown quite some time ago; ditto my Jellicoe Division gym vest from Dartmouth. Tee shirts do not feature in my wardrobe. I did once have a track suit top with “RN Engineering College Shooting Team” on the back, but that disappeared years ago. Hence, a whole range of sartorial options is now available to me. Trim white gym shorts with zip fly, side waist adjustment and discreet logo, perhaps or maybe a track suit? A plain tee shirt or just a polo shirt with the RNSA crest? Lycra, perhaps, with those funny leggings and padded seat? I am not sure about the feet – I draw the line at “trainers” – but I think I may have a pair of old gym shoes, as required for wear in the petroleum-ridden atmosphere of the AVGAS pump room of HMS CASSANDRA, stowed in my old naval trunk, hopefully with a bottle of shoe whitener; short white socks to match the shorts should complete the ensemble. I wonder if a headband would be useful to keep the sweat and my hair out of my eyes; perhaps not? Gosh, this is so exciting. I suppose I will have to let Jane have a play on the machine, but that is only fair.

To complement the exercise, a weight-loss diet has started – this time in earnest.  Jane has borrowed The Fast 800 Diet by Dr Michael Moseley that reports the loss of  seven kilograms (~15 lbs) after two weeks by one user.  Yeh, right: I bet it isn’t that quick for us.  Weigh-in took place on Monday morning before breakfast (trust me, you don’t want to know) and this task will be repeated weekly.  Having measured her BMI, Jane subsequently claimed that a diet for her was unnecessary, but she felt that I would benefit from it (glancing at my firm pert buttocks) and thoughtfully said she would  keep me company on the journey.  Of course, alcohol is banned and we have had to scoop up all the Christmas sweets from the coffee table and donate them to the children across the road to avoid temptation.  So far it hasn’t been too bad: we do not snack or eat a great deal in the normal course anyway (though we do eat well – quality not quantity), so I am hoping the transition to a strict régime will be painless.  The other morning we had egg and bacon “muffins” for breakfast, comprising eggs wrapped in bacon, sprinkled with parmesan and baked in muffin moulds (there was no actual muffin).  They tasted a bit like mini Quiche Lorraine and were delicious. The trick of these weight-loss diets is to follow the recipes religiously and that involves weighing out each portion accurately.  The diets do work (we have been there before), but it places the onus on Jane to produce the food.  Before you leap to her defence, yes, I have offered to help with preparation several times and, no, she didn’t want my help.  You see, in the present confinement she is desperate for things to do and doesn’t want me stealing her jobs; she even asked me not to empty the dishwasher while I routinely made the tea in the early morning, because she wanted something to look forward to.  She is crackers, of course, but we all get our thrills in different ways.  As to the diet, my guess is that, by the end of January, every stick of celery on our plates will taste like a Mars bar and every grain of rice will be licked off the bowl.  But think how slim and streamlined we will be: positively svelte.  Maybe I should go for that lycra after all.

Poor Jane.  She has a punishing régime in the mornings which starts with her having to drag her eyelids up at Call the Hands and moves on to the 4-minute painful leg massage (by moi); a shower in the “freezing” 24 degree C atmosphere of our bathroom; the drying and styling of her hair; the usual mysterious female cosmetic treatment; ten separate leg exercises; and the application of ice packs for five minutes afterwards.  She then turns to on the breakfast, just to bring a smile to my little face (usually, after all that, it is about ten o’clock).  God broke the mould after He made her, for she is The Perfect Wife.  Mind you, it’s a pity about those plimsolls and she can be a bit bossy when she wears wellington boots.  Can’t have everything.

The United Kingdom is experiencing déjà vu.  As I predicted in Blog 68, on 5 January the country was plunged into Lockdown Number Three, but this one, unlike November’s, has no end date.  The Chief Medical Officer has even stated that lockdown may have to be reimposed next winter, despite the vaccination programme.  I will not repeat my two-word response to that announcement, and I would have added his name to The List if it were not already on there.  In announcing the latest lockdown, the prime minister suggested April as an end date, but no one believes that. 
It would be easy to become depressed by this development,  but one must keep in mind the positives: vaccinations using the Oxford-AstraZeneca have now joined the Pfizer vaccinations in a two-pronged attack on the virus and the aim is to immunise the most vulnerable by mid February.  The total number of people vaccinated as of 3 January was 1,296,432. Such a programme of inoculation is quite ambitious, but just feasible; it will depend on first rate organisational skills by the NHS (hmmm…), but the Armed Forces, in the form of the Army Logistic Corps, will be assisting, so that offers some hope of success.  It comes none too soon, as the rate of positive tests is still increasing markedly and hospitals in the worst affected areas are close to 100% capacity.  Daily deaths are approaching the value that we encountered in the April 2020 peak, currently 1,162. .  As a precursor to all this, on New Year’s Eve in London the mayor authorised significant expenditure on a firework display showing the flag of the European Union (which we had just left), a Black Lives Matter aggressive fist, and a display saying “I Love You NHS” (pass the sick bucket).  The public, having been drawn out to watch the pretty fireworks, were promptly ordered to disperse by the Metropolitan Police, London – at the time – being in Tier 4 (motto “Say At Home”).  You couldn’t make this up.  Like it’s predecessors, the latest lockdown will not affect us much personally because we have stopped going out anyway, but when Jane’s leg gets better we would have liked to have driven farther afield for a walk; that is now forbidden.  We have broken out the reserve jigsaws.

The choice of jigsaws can be an interesting one (or it can in a lockdown with not much to write about).  I favour the mechanical or industrial ones that involve artefacts, perspective, order and method; Jane (naturally) favours the ones that involve plants or birds.  I ask you!  How could you prefer wishy washy flowers to the firm lines of a locomotive with its strong elegant design and the Stephenson Link?  Alas, we have just completed an excellent jigsaw of St Pancras Station depicting a 1950s versus a modern scene and I have been forced to accept a new puzzle that takes in chaffinches, goldfinches, celandines and asters. The things you have to do for a successful partnership, but I shall survive.

Inevitably, a debate is developing over the priority attached to the Covid vaccination programme.  No-one has actually said “Let’s not bother with these dozy and dying old people: We are more important”, but the inference is there.  The latest section of the community demanding immediate immunity are the teaching unions, who are clearly terrified that their largely fit and young members Are Going To Die unless they receive a vaccination, because they are in close quarters with apparently contaminated children for six hours a day, 190 days a year (or they were before lockdown).  The fact that supermarket staff are in contact with the potentially contaminated adult public for 15 hours a day, 364 days a year without complaint seems to have escaped the teaching unions’ notice.  Priority for receiving immunisation was bound to be a contentious issue, but the primary aim of the UK vaccination programme is not, contrary to what many believe, to stop everyone from catching Covid 19: rather it is to ease the pressure on hospitals and and minimise associated deaths.  The people most likely to have to be admitted to hospital with the virus, or to die from it, are people over 65 and those with other underlying conditions.  To his credit, the Chief Medical Officer has pointed out that:

“We accept there is a level of risk that society will tolerate, and we should tolerate. People die – that’s one of the things that happens… zero risk is not something which is a realistic possibility”

Sixty years ago we had the public safety announcement, “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases.  Trap your germs in a handkerchief” and left it to the population to use their common sense.  In 2021 the government feels the need to put the entire population under house arrest in order to achieve the same goal.

“How many times have we seen this?”
So went the refrain when I selected The Good, The Bad and The Ugly on the television the other night (you can’t beat a good Clint Eastwood film, that’s what I say).  I clicked over onto Tora, Tora, Tora and there was an even louder groan. Scrolling through the channels, I hovered the remote selector over The Longest Day, but thought better of it.  I did point out that the network was showing Forty Shades of Darkness (or something like that), which we hadn’t seen, but my suggestion that we should give it a go was met with a very robust response:
“We’re not watching that!  It’s all about H&M.  We’re not having any of that nonsense”.
I pondered on what the ‘H’ must stand for, but then vaguely recalled that H&M might be a women’s fashion chain, hence the confusion.  Either way, the film was off limits.  The fact is, the television choices have been pretty dire over the last ten months and the festive period offered the worst selection of all.  We are not addicts of the television set, preferring other pastimes, but we do like the odd armchair treat now and again after a hard day of doing nothing.  As well as the free channels we do have the option of Amazon Video, but even when that is taken into account, there is very little there that really appeals to us.  As to the repeats that I mentioned above, it is sometimes nice to see an old programme or film again, but it becomes a bit tedious when the same feature is repeated two or three times in a week.  I think The Longest Day has been on about six times in as many weeks; likewise the (many) others.  Ironically, PBS America has come up with some good documentaries; I say ironically, because often the production originated in the UK in the first place. I started watching one programme about the Civil War on PBS America the other day, searching in vain for signs of the Roundheads and Cavaliers before I realised it was about a different civil war (odd that).   Sky Arts has also produced some good offerings that have been worth watching, such participation being the video equivalent of reading an improving book and being very good for increasing our smug factor when dropped into a Facetime conversation.  Quite a few of our friends like opera and we keep wondering if we are missing out by not sharing their enjoyment.  Every now and again we dip into that murky pool to try it out, but so far the pleasure has evaded us.  I was listening to Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot the other day and commented to Jane on how moving and beautiful it was; she agreed, but then asked rhetorically would we like to sit through four hours of it.  So the jury is still out on the subject of opera.  But I wonder if our disenchantment with the television programmes on offer is part of a broader fading of interest in television as a medium for entertainment: perhaps there is so much on offer on the networks that very little of it is a treat any more and we are much harder to please.  I also wonder if we have the attention span that we once had.  When we had one television channel, the BBC, it broadcast in black and white only from 1700 to about 2300 (concluding with a religious epilogue and the National Anthem), but we quite enjoyed most programmes.  A film was shown on Sunday afternoons or, later, on Saturday evenings, and we thought of that as a tremendous treat.  In hindsight, not all the other programmes that we watched were actually all that good, but I suppose we knew no different.  Come to think of it, I wonder if we in western society  are becoming harder to please in all walks of entertainment: holidays abroad (the more exotic the better) are a must-have; cruises in hazardous areas such as the Antarctic are popular; children must be entertained in Disneyland or Alton Towers; fairground rides must be absolutely terrifying and include near-death experiences; leisure trips in outer space will probably become commonplace in my lifetime.  We are becoming very sophisticated in our tastes.  It is odd, really, for I have always found the bracing easterly wind on the beach in South Shields in the summer to be very invigorating on a family holiday.  For the present, I shall derive simple pleasure from being able to browse through a shop again without wearing a face mask.

I have said it before, and I say it again. I will never understand women. Jane and I were sitting at breakfast the other day, quietly reading our digital papers, when she said,
“Are you having another cup of coffee?”
“Probably”, I said absently and continued reading details of the latest problems in Belarus.
Ten minutes later she got up abruptly and proceeded to get herself a cup of coffee. Difficult though it was to display a flounce while wearing cords and “trainers” in the short journey from the breakfast table to the coffee machine, she managed to do it. There was definitely an unspoken message there, and I raised an eyebrow (I am not insensitive to atmosphere you know).
“Did you want another cup of coffee?”, I asked. “You should have said, that’s my job” [regular readers will know that I am The Drinks Person and she is The Food Person].
She harrumphed.
“I asked for a coffee ten minutes ago”.
I was mystified.
“No, you didn’t”.
“Yes I did. I asked if you were having another coffee”.
“Correct. And I replied ‘probably’. You didn’t ask for a coffee for yourself”
“It meant the same thing”
I will not repeat the remaining dialogue as I am sure you get the gist and, if you are a man, you will understand my frustration. Women: they never say what they really want. I should have learned that after that dress purchase débâcle described in Blog 42.
Well that’s at least 50% of my readership that I have alienated I suppose.

Thinking of coffee, the success of High Street coffee shops, such as Starbucks and Costa Coffee never ceases to amaze me.  Of course, they are not a new thing as Coffee Houses were popular meeting places in Britain in the 18th and 19th century, but they experienced a revival after that chap started Starbucks in Seattle in 1971.  Jane and I really enjoy our coffee and are very picky about the form it takes: it has to be fresh, for we never drink instant coffee.  Consequently, you would reasonably expect us to love the likes of Starbucks or Costa but, actually, we rarely frequent them.  There are two reasons: first, because we could just as easily make a really good cup of coffee at home without the expense (we currently have three coffee machines); and, second, because I find the process of ordering the coffee and enjoying the drink awkward and annoying.  In Costa, Starbucks and other coffee chains I first of all have to queue to place my order, an exercise which is fundamentally anathema to me.  After I have waited while someone ahead of me orders six entirely different and complex versions of coffee with sprinkles, I finally get to order.  I pay for my drink then have to hover around at the counter like a lemon for an undefined period, wondering if I have been forgotten, while the brew is created.  Finally, when I have the coffee, it is usually delivered in a small bucket instead of a cup and I am faced with the prospect of finding a free seat or table, drifting around the coffee shop like a satellite lost in space, spilling coffee onto the tray in the process.  And that does not take into account of the difficulty facing me with all the choices of coffee available: skinny latte, flat white, macchiato, caramel brulée, cappuccino to name but a few; all I usually want is a black coffee, preferably made with Mocha, Java, Colombian or Jamaican Blue Mountain roasted beans.  If I visit France or Spain I can walk into a café (or sit outside) and I will be served a coffee, at my table, by an efficient waiter or waitress.  I can sit and watch the world go by, chat with my companion, and generally enjoy the relaxing experience in a pleasant atmosphere. I also get a little biscuit.  If I want another cup I can simply summon the waiter or waitress, who will also accept my payment in due course.   We cannot do that in the UK (or, presumably, in the USA).  There used to be a very good family-run coffee house in Britain called Cawardines, which mirrored the continental experience; the wonderful smell of roasting coffee pervaded the area around the shop and encouraged customers.  Rather than a choice of somewhat bizarre confections, the range of coffee was based on the type of beans.  Sadly, many of their shops have now closed, though a few still remain in the West Country.

The top news this week must surely be the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by supporters of the shortly-to-depart President Trump.  The politicians inside the building were debating the finer details of the November 2020 election with a view to endorsing (or rejecting)  the result when the incursion took place.  Rioters stormed the building and rampaged through its chambers and corridors. One posed in the Speaker’s chair. One person was shot and three others died from other causes.  The police and security officials were overwhelmed and the debate had to be stopped.  The National Guard was called out to restore order and a curfew was imposed in the city.  The rioters had been whipped up to a frenzy by a call to action by the outgoing President Trump, who felt that the recent election contained irregularities and was, therefore invalid.  He had made similar statements and rallying calls after the election result in November.  Later, a pipe bomb was defused and a lorry loaded with assault weapons was intercepted by the police.  After reconvening and examining the results from several states, Congress endorsed the election of Mr Joe Biden to be inaugurated as President on 20 January 2021.  I do not normally think it appropriate to comment on another countries’ political affairs, believing that such topics are an internal matter for the people of the country concerned.  However, I remember President Trump’s speech after the election result very well, and I have listened to his later speech just before the Congress debate.  There is doubt in my mind that in both speeches he was inciting revolution and insurrection because he did not like the democratic result.  I was shocked then and I am appalled now.  I do not believe any right-thinking American, Democrat or Republican, would endorse this sort of behaviour.  I would venture to suggest that the USA came close to a coup d’état on Wednesday 6 January.  It is unprecedented.  There is talk of the Vice President and Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment for the first time and removing President Trump from office now.  Whatever, the whole affair was deeply shocking and I think there will be a reckoning.  My heart goes out to decent Americans at this very difficult time.

The weather in Britain is currently running through a steady cold spell, with temperatures hovering around freezing for over a week now.  It was -3 degrees C at noon today.  For next week, the weather forecasters are predicting another “Beast from the East” (journalists love these terrifying phrases): a euphemism for a severe cold spell, possibly with heavy snow.  Well, it seems to me that, if we are to get heavy snow and disruption then this is the best time to have it, with many people working from home, minimal commuting, and schools shut.  Bring it on.

We were sitting there in the drawing room, reading our books and listening to classical music on the wireless, when suddenly Jane burst into life and started peddling her legs in the air and winding her arms around like a whirling dervish.  My initial thought was that she really had lost it this time and I gently sought an explanation (‘gently’ because you never know how these people will react).  It appears that her fitness watch (purchased after her heart episode last year) had told her that she had been immobile for too long and that she must start moving.  This was her solution.  I shook my head sorrowfully: a further manifestation of this dubious addition to the household.  Already, the simple question in the morning of, “Did you sleep well, dear?” produces a glance at her watch and a deep scientific analysis of her slumber, invoking terms such as ‘sleep quality’ and ‘REM sleep’.  Often, the objective report clashes with the subjective report so that a report of, “Gosh, that was a good night’s sleep” (no doubt dreaming of her garden again) will subsequently be tempered by, “Oh dear, only five minutes of REM sleep and Quality of Sleep only 30%”.  As I told her at the time, you can become too fixated on instruments: if you feel that you have had a good sleep, then you have had a good sleep.  In a different context, I remember once when I was in the destroyer HMS BARCHESTER and she was conducting a gunnery exercise with a consort, HMS PLYMOUTH.  I was listening to the conversation on the internal gunnery broadcast between the Director Control Officer (sitting in the high-up gun Director with powerful binoculars) and the ship’s Gunnery Officer (sitting over a radar display in the dark Operations Room, deep in the bowels of the ship).  There was a dispute as to what the Director (and, hence, the ship’s armament) was aiming at; it was supposed to be pointing at HMS PLYMOUTH.
[Gunnery Officer]: “Director, report target”
[Director]: Target is HMS PLYMOUTH
[Gunnery Officer]: “Director, check again”
[Director]: Target is HMS PLYMOUTH
[Gunnery Officer] (beginning to lose his calm demeanour): “It can’t be PLYMOUTH! Director, describe target”
[Director] (looking out of Director window with binoculars): “A vessel under way, long and grey, one forward gun turret, one mast, one funnel with black cap.  White ensign.  Looks like a Royal Navy frigate.  There is a number on her side: F 1 2 6”
[Gunnery Officer] (subdued): “Ah….Roger…”
Moral of the story: try to keep both feet on the ground and don’t always trust the instruments. 
The footnote to the exchange, by the way, was the pipe:
“Weapons and Electrical Officer, bridge” on the ship’s Main Broadcast.  When things go wrong then always blame the maintainer.

At a favourably reduced price we have acquired two more Amazon Echo devices, so that we now have pods located in the drawing room, the Garden Control Tower (aka the conservatory), the bedroom and the study.  The world is therefore at our vocal command from almost everywhere in the house.  The latest capability that we have discovered is to ‘drop in’ on another room, that is to say, to use the Echo as an intercom.  Initially this went well, but I have encountered a few technical problems more recently.  The command from the study, “Alexa drop in on the conservatory” and the subsequent request to Jane for a cup of tea seems to result in a somewhat loud garbled response and no tea.  I think there must be some interference on the wifi loop or something, which I shall have to pursue in due course.  Odd really: Jane heard me all right when we first tested it.

Now, if you will excuse me I must change into my kit and start pumping iron.  Or is that to do with the other end?

7 January 2021

Blog 74. Keep Taking the Tablets

Well, if you are reading this, then congratulations: you have survived Covid 19, a particularly unpleasant virus that has dominated the year 2020 and made it a thoroughly miserable one. The virus may still be with us, but I hope that – by this time next year – we will at last be free to resume our normal lives again, with hugs and kisses and no face masks: poor as a nation, but alive.

The Covid 19 epidemic continues a pace and the number of people tested as positive in the UK is increasing at about 23% per day. More regions of England have been placed in the highest state of readiness, Tier 4, joining Scotland and Wales in what amounts to a full lockdown, with a return to school for some children postponed. We in Barsetshire have moved up a tier to Tier 3. Frustratingly for the alarmists in our society, the number of daily deaths is not increasing at the same rate as the infections; indeed, the number of daily deaths from Covid currently stands at a comparatively modest 414 and is falling at a rate of 4%. The key concern, however, is – and always has been – the pinch-point of hospital capacity. Several hospitals are approaching full capacity, with admissions rising at 16% daily and ambulances queuing to discharge their patients. As surmised in my last blog, those vast temporary hospitals, the “Nightingale” hospitals, mostly stand idle because of a lack of staff to man them; indeed, the one in London has been dismantled. What was once a logistic triumph and a great hope has turned into a waste of money. A very worthy attempt to recruit retired NHS nurses and doctors to help with the crisis has been frustrated by red tape, each GP offering to return to service apparently having to submit 21 separate documents, such as certification that they had completed Prevent Radicalisation training. Of the 40,000 retired doctors and nurses who applied to return to service in March, 30,000 were considered eligible and only 5,000 had been employed by July; many had simply given up when faced with the bureaucracy. What an opportunity lost: personally, I would rather receive my vaccination from a retired healthcare professional than some heavy-handed layman who has only just received training. It is so heartening, at this time of national emergency, to find that the Department of Health has lost none of its standards and rigidity: if we were abandoning the TITANIC then the DoH officials would be there, checking our tickets and insurance documents before letting us into the lifeboats. On a high, and very encouraging, note the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has finally been approved for use in the UK and the programme of those vaccinations is due to start on 4 January. The Oxford vaccine is cheap, works differently from the other vaccines and is much easier to administer as it does not require near cryogenic temperatures to store it. GP surgeries can readily use the vaccine and a broader and ramped-up immunisation package is anticipated. Given our age (we are Level 5 priority), Jane and I do not expect to receive our first jabs until February, with the follow up jab three months later. On completion, I would still like a sticker saying “I’ve had the Covid 19 jab”, along with a barley sugar for being a good boy and not crying.

Christmas with the Shacklepins started with the traditional Christmas walk into the countryside: a daring move given Jane’s poorly leg (now diagnosed as “Jumper’s Knee”), but an adventure that she thought she would try.  You might be excused for conjuring up in your mind’s eye a scene of a crisp, sunlit day, with our two adventurers frisking joyfully through virgin snow from Wrinkly Bottom to the distant church tower of Little Smidgin, smoke rising vertically from a nearby cosy cottage and the homely smell of cooking turkey pervading the atmosphere.  Alas, it was not to be.  The day was, indeed, sunny and crisply cold after a hard frost overnight, but there was no snow.  There hardly ever is in England: I think all those Christmas cards that we send must be based on the hard Dickensian winters that the country experienced in the early 1800s, when the River Thames froze so solidly that the people could roast a whole ox on the ice.  Such practice would be vetoed today, because Health and Safety regulations would ban people from the ice, vegans and vegetarians would be offended by us carnivores eating an animal, and the Green Party would claim that eating beef was adding to global warming.  But I digress.  What the Shacklepins trudged through, instead of snow, was mud: ankle deep mud, enlivened by the occasional puddle that was knee deep.  After a mile of trying to make progress through this agrarian adventure playground that resembled the Battle of the Somme during a ceasefire, the novelty was beginning to wear off.  The memsahib, as was her custom, was covered in splashes of mud from boot to eyebrow and was grumbling mightily.  When she became temporarily entangled in a bramble hedge while trying to avoid a large puddle, the decision was made to loop around and return to base.  We lumbered across a field that was devoid of all livestock and followed an all-too-well trodden path that would eventually take us back to the road.  The usual argument as to the correct route punctuated the journey, with myself (holding the Ordnance Survey map and following a hand-held GPS) on one side versus Herself (spectacles flecked with dirt and relying on memory) on the other; I, of course, was Wrong and she was Right.  We did reach the correct stile using my route, for which I claimed a victory; unfortunately it was inaccessible, being surrounded by a lake about a foot deep, and so she claimed a late triumph based on hindsight.  Re-routeing and trespassing took us through yet another bramble and hawthorn hedge, across an electrified fence and over a five-bar gate, Jane scaling this final obstacle with an effort similar to Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tensing ascending Everest.  We eventually made the road and trooped back home fagged out and filthy after only about three miles.  Why do we do these things?

Christmas luncheon, with the Waitrose “De-boned Easy-to-Carve Duck with Rum, Pear, Chestnut and Prune Stuffing” was…different, mainly because of the addition of a Port and Redcurrant Sauce, formulated from our son’s recipe but allowed to over-mature while Jane had a sherry. In fact this year’s luncheon experience was so different that the Editor-in-Chief has imposed a D-Notice on the whole episode and I am banned from describing it to you: a shame, as there is probably a whole chapter of a blog in there; alas, it is now sealed in the National Archives for the next twenty five years. Let us just say that, next year, we will be returning to our traditional rib of beef (provided the Climate Change lobby has not banned cows from the face of the earth). After luncheon we enjoyed the opening of our presents and were very flattered by the thought that people had put into them: as ever, they were very well received.

On Boxing Day the weather returned to its more traditional English setting: it drizzled with rain all day.  We found that very reassuring, for it was what we were used to.  Stimulated by our walking adventures on Christmas Day, we parked ourselves in the drawing room, switched on the lights, put up our feet, lit the fire, and read our new books as the daylight advanced from dark grey to feeble light grey, then descended to night again.  You can only pack so much excitement into one seasonal festival. 

The hiatus between Christmas Day and New Year is always a peculiar time as one recovers from the anticlimax of one annual celebration and then tries to work up enthusiasm for the next, the week being overlaid with indigestion, guilt about the expanding waistline, a hangover and a diet of leftovers.  This year the week has not been much different from previous years for the Shacklepins, despite the fact that we did not over-indulge with alcohol.  Fortunately, Jane has been gainfully employed in making marmalade in the manner of Paddington Bear: an annual ritual.  The kitchen is full of steam, the gash bin is full of orange peel, the extractor fans are throbbing like the engine room of a destroyer at full power, and my contribution has been limited to tying a reef knot in the Soaking Bag.  I like marmalade time, for when Jane is chopping or squeezing oranges she is not casting an eye on me to ensure that I am not loafing.  Also, I enjoy the marmalade.

We do not not normally celebrate New Year, which is just as well as all socialising and pleasure is banned (unless you want to stand in the cold in the back garden).  We just cannot wait to get this awful year over with, and plunge into the hell that is January: possibly the worst month of the year because of its foul weather and its curb on outdoor activity.  At least January 2021 may feature a glimmer of hope in the form of a Covid 19 vaccination for us both, who knows? 

Whatever happened to First Footing? Is it, or was it, just a Northumbrian or Scottish thing? On New Year’s Eve when not at sea, my father would be sent out into the cold just before midnight clutching a piece of coal, which he would then present to a neighbour after knocking on their door after midnight had passed. He would be given a tot of spirits in gratitude. I never did work out the significance of the coal or the fact that the bearer was supposed to be a tall dark stranger. Midnight would be announced by the sounding of ships’ sirens on the River Tyne and a field gun fired by the army at Tynemouth. In the Royal Navy, sixteen bells would be sounded on the ship’s bell, rung by the youngest rating onboard. I wonder if these traditions continue? I would imagine that the sirens would still be sounded in seaports, and the striking of the bell in warships would continue, but as to the coal and the First Footing, who knows? Perhaps it has gone the way of “penny for the guy” during the run up to Guy Fawkes Night. For the benefit of younger readers (if any) or those not British, Guy Fawkes Night celebrates the successful foiling of a plot by a traitor called Guy Fawkes to blow up King James I and his parliament in 1605. The unfortunate Fawkes was one of several traitors in the plot, but the one always remembered. He was hung, drawn and quartered for his crime and the occasion has been commemorated ever since by fireworks and public bonfires on 5 November. In my youth, the “guy” was a stuffed dummy that children created and used as a focus for a begging campaign to obtain money to buy fireworks; it would be burnt on the bonfire on The Night. “Penny for the guy, mister”, was a common request on the streets in the early Novembers of my childhood; the more realistic the guy, the better the contribution. One friend tried using his brother instead of a dummy as the guy, but the public caught on to that quite early on. I don’t know when the tradition died away; perhaps it went out when “trick or treat” came in. It was not until I was well into my thirties that I discovered that the Gunpowder Plot (as it became known) was, in fact, a Roman Catholic conspiracy against Protestant England and the “guy” is supposed to represent the Pope, not Guy Fawkes. I must have been asleep during my history lessons of that period. It is curious: none of us children (including Roman Catholics) thought we were burning an effigy of the Pope; Guy Fawkes Night was (and still is) just a jolly occasion when one can watch fireworks, wave sparklers and stand around a bonfire on a cold winter’s night in the rain. We British really know how to party.

Now this is interesting. The punishment of being hung, drawn and quartered was a particularly brutal one reserved for traitors.  The miscreant was hanged slowly by the neck until almost dead from asphyxia (‘hung’).  He was then cut down, his genitalia were cut off, his torso cut open and his intestines removed, sometimes to be burnt in front of him while still alive (‘drawn’).  Finally, his heart would be torn out, his head cut off, and his body cut into four parts (‘quartered’).  The head would be displayed on London Bridge as an example to all traitors; the four quarters of his body would also be displayed or sometimes distributed throughout England as a similar deterrent.  No one could say that those early English monarchs were soft on crime.  Interestingly, hanging, drawing and quartering was not removed from the English statute books until 1870, and beheading remained on the books until 1973, though both punishments had become obsolete long before those dates.  The death penalty for treason in the UK was not officially abolished until 1998; the last execution for this crime took place after WW2 in 1946.   The death penalty was retained in Britain for arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards until 1971.  When you think about it, the term ‘hung’ as used in ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ must be the only instance in English when it is acceptable to use the term to describe killing someone by hanging them by the neck, the correct word for this method of execution is, of course, ‘hanged’ not ‘hung’.  I always remember my old English master pronouncing that only meat and portraits are ‘hung’; people are ‘hanged’.  For the benefit of any non-native English speakers reading this, incidentally, I should point out that to say that a man is well hung has a different meaning entirely.

Matters grisly have a certain fascination for boys (as you will have gathered from the previous paragraph) and I have read several books on the topic of forensic pathology as they are the perfect antidote to being overly cheerful.  One particular true story took my fancy as being more bizarre than most. This from Dr Iain West’s Casebook by Chester Stern.  In 1986 a chap was digging over his garden in his newly-bought house in Abingdon when he unearthed a human head wrapped in a plastic bag; not a skull, a complete head, with hair and flesh, and apparently not long dead.  Naturally, this triggered much tumult and shouting and he called the police, who launched a full-scale murder enquiry.  When the pathologist cleaned up the head and examined it, it proved to be something of an enigma.  First of all, the lower jaw bone did not seem to match the skull.  Secondly, the wear on the teeth indicated that, in life, the owner had been eating bread made from stoneground flour that contained grit – a commodity that had ceased to have traces of grit in it by the end of the 19th century.  The pathologist concluded that the head was clearly that of an old woman with grey hair, and it appeared from the teeth and radiological tests that she had died, not recently, but in the Victorian era. 
While this analysis progressed, the boys in blue had not been idle.  They traced the previous owners of the house, who had moved to the West Country, and sought an explanation.  The previous owners admitted that they had found the head in a shoebox in the house shortly before they moved out and after their troubled son had left home.  Not being sure of what to do with the head, they decided simply to bury it in the back garden, as you do.  The investigation moved on to trace the son who, it transpired, had moved to London but was no longer a man: he had had a sex operation to become a woman (are you still with me?).  The story that then unfolded was that the son had been interested in the occult and wanted to perform certain mystic rites, using a human head, to turn him into a woman.  Accordingly, he had raided a Victorian tomb in London, found the the corpse of a woman, well-preserved, and ripped the head off to use in his ceremony.  Disappointingly, the occult ceremony had not worked, so he had dumped the head in a shoebox in his parents’ home and the NHS had completed his transition from man to woman for him/her instead.  The apparent mismatch of the lower jawbone with the rest of the skull remains unexplained to this day, as the miscreant was adamant that she/he had removed just one head.  As they say in Yorkshire, there’s nowt as queer as folk.

Well, I have read through the details of the Brexit free trade agreement with the EU (that is to say, I skimmed through an article on the subject in the Daily Telegraph) and, as far as I can see, it can be claimed to be a success far beyond what I thought could be achieved.  That, of course, would not be difficult seeing as how I reckoned no deal would be agreed at such a late stage.  The only bit that the UK did not achieve was reclaiming full control of  its territorial waters for fishing rights, that area being the subject of a transition period of 5½ years.  It is rather odd that a sovereign country is only entitled to 25% of the fish in its own waters (as at present), but this quota will increase over the transition period.  It is time to start building those trawlers.  The remainder of the agreement looks good to me: the UK gets to trade with whichever country it wishes; there will be free trade with the EU; the country no longer will come under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice; we will be independent once more from midnight on 31 December 2020.  Parliament passed the bill on 30 December 2020.

“Don’t forget your pill”.
Jane gestured at the small anonymous white pill next to my breakfast plate and I dutifully popped it into my mouth and swallowed it.  It occurred to me afterwards that if my wife ever wanted to rid herself of this troublesome pest, all she would have to do is leave a cyanide pill in the same place, then tell me to take it; I would swallow it without a murmur.  We do trust our spouses or partners so much in these things.  The pill was a Vitamin D tablet: a supplement introduced by Jane every winter to make up for the lack of sunshine and to keep my bones in tip top condition. Entirely fortuitously, it turns out that the vitamin also enhances one’s resistance to Covid 19. Other than that, I take no regular medication: a situation that I hope to maintain for as long as I can, though the occasional Valium would be welcome, especially when I listen to the news in the morning.  

Talk of pills reminds me of a true story of a female university lecturer in London who was still working despite being in her late 70s.  She was very keen on opera and had attended a performance at Covent Garden with, what I suppose might be called, a date: a gentleman companion of a similar age as her. After the show, they shared a taxi back to her flat in Chelsea where she thanked him for his company and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in for a coffee?”, he asked.
“No, not tonight.  I’m rather tired and I have to give lectures tomorrow”
“But I’ve just taken my viagra pill!”, he lamented.

So I suppose there are pills, and then there are other pills.   Mine is just to keep the rickets away.

A very happy New Year to all my readers.  Heaven knows, surely 2021 cannot be worse than this one? 

30 December 2020

Blog 73. …For Mighty Dread Had Seized Their Troubled Minds…

Merry Christmas one and all. It is now Christmas Eve and, if our Christmas is not turning out quite as jolly as we are used to, then let us make the most of what we have. Reasons to be cheerful: vaccines against Covid 19 have been found and a programme of immunisation is under way; we have avoided the office party; we have saved masses of money on dining out, holidays and commuting; we have learned to appreciate our friends and their company more than ever; our houses are the cleanest they have ever been; those of us who hate the enforced company and bonhomie of Christmas have had their wishes fulfilled; a whole new genre of computer-borne humour has emerged; and, last but not least, the winter solstice has passed and so our days (in the northern hemisphere) are getting longer and it will soon be summer. We are not over the hump by any means, but there is a glimmer of light on the horizon, so let us make the most of the situation and try to celebrate Christmas in a special way.  Jane and I will still be setting the polished Queen Anne table in the dining room with the traditional place settings, the candles and the best silver, and we will be dressing smartly, as we always do on Christmas Day; Jane may even forego her plimsolls for twelve hours and wear a smart pair of high heels.  There may only be two of us, but our friends will be with us mind and in spirit.  I include my modest readership among our friends and so we will drink a toast to both of you too, wherever you may be, on the day.  

There will just be the two of us for Christmas this year, of course, because the UK government has been forced to withdraw its relaxation of a five-day window, free of Covid restrictions, when families could meet.  I knew it was all too good to be true.  As it happens, we had no social plans for Christmas Day, but we had hoped to entertain friends for luncheon just before Christmas, and to have drinks with neighbours on Christmas Eve.  That has all gone by the board and the country has been plunged into a fresh series of restrictions by the latest developments.

Last Saturday, 19 December, the Prime Minister announced that Christmas was now going to be (more or less) cancelled in the UK because of a “mutant strain” of covid in London and the South East that is “out of control” and 70% more contagious than the existing virus. Fortunately, the new mutation is no more dangerous than the existing strain, but it does spread more rapidly. Predictably, after the announcement on Saturday night there erupted a Gadarene Swine evacuation of the capital, with queues at railway stations and roads crowded, as people tried to leave before midnight. Heaven knows where they went, for in many counties the hotels are shut. As of midnight on 19 December, London and the Home Counties were plunged into a new, stricter, Tier 4: essentially, a complete lockdown. They must not leave home; they must not leave the region; they can entertain no-one. Of course, they can exercise and buy food, but that is about it: forget the five-day Christmas relaxation. The remaining tiers in England can now meet only two other households on Christmas Day only and guests cannot stay overnight. The situation is broadly the same in the rest of the UK, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Island have – for once – followed suit. It was further announced on 23 December that, immediately after midnight on Christmas Day, several other regions in southern England will also be placed into the new Tier 4 and some other regions increased in readiness. The regions currently in Tier 1 will move into Tier 2 or 3.

The method of announcing the changes on Saturday, with its alarmist talk of “mutant” and “out of control” could, perhaps, have been less histrionic. There was a knock-on effect, which I rather suspect the British government did not anticipate: mainland Europe immediately closed its borders to all forms of traffic and freight from Britain, with several other countries following suit. Eire even refused to receive British post. Lorries, the majority driven by continental European drivers, were stuck in the Channel ports or the approach roads pending drivers obtaining a negative virus test result. It was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction (lifted 48 hours later) from our continental cousins as, in fact, the new strain of virus first came to light in October and will not be unique to Britain: there have been reports of it from Australia, Denmark and Brazil. Only the British government was rash enough to declare a sort of ownership and flag the thing up as a new hazard: a new bogie to be terrified by. Just to add to this sorry state of affairs, a third strain of Covid has also been detected in South Africa and one case has been found in Britain. Anyone arriving from South Africa recently is required to quarantine.

When I had viral pneumonia back in the year 1979, I was seriously ill in hospital for a while and unable to take up my next appointment to HMS CAROUSEL. I remember telephoning the Officers’ Appointer to tell him the bad news that I would be unable to fly out to Malta to join the ship as planned, and mentioned what the ward Sister had told me, very soberly, that morning: that the virus I had was ‘plasma toxic’.
“Whooa..”, he said. There was a pause.
“Er, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but it sounds terrifying”.
“Quite”.
I was thinking of that conversation as I listened to the Prime Minister describe the new mutant strain of Covid. “Mutant”: disfigured gargoyle-like creatures with three arms; fluorescent rabbits with glowing eyes; bizarre Japanese tortoises with superhuman powers. Whooa. Bad choice of words, Prime Minister, accurate though they may have been. By the way, I still don’t know what ‘plasma toxic’ means, but I know an unarguable technical phrase when I hear one.

Ever the pessimists, Britons had anticipated an increase in Covid restrictions after Christmas, but the government having to advance their implementation, after the promise of a five-day respite over the festive season, has confounded many. Those who did intend to take advantage of the easing of the rules had bought in extra food or made travel arrangements.  There are now many families throughout the land with enormous turkeys, several hams, bushels of assorted winter vegetables and several Marks & Spencer Deluxe Puddings with only two people to eat it all.  It may be that not many people were going to have visitors at Christmas anyway after the previous dire warnings, but that is not the point; for those who did plan to meet, the news has been a logistical  disaster.  At least they will have plenty to eat for the next few months.

The number of positive outcomes to tests has, indeed, increased rapidly in the south east of England, and daily deaths for the UK as a whole have started to rise slowly, currently standing at 744 in the last 24 hours. We are clearly heading for a third peak of infections – all aboard for the rollercoaster. Lockdowns seem to be the only response to this epidemic until enough people have been immunised, but they are – at best – a palliative. At the beginning of this epidemic in March, Germany was praised mightily for its efficient and rapid Teutonic response to the virus, and its approach was held up by the British press as the model that we should all have followed. The Czech Republic was similarly praised for its very strict early lockdown in March. This time around, both of those countries have suffered far more deaths in the second peak than in the first. At the end of the day, no country has produced what might be regarded as the perfect response to Covid 19. Might there be an argument that we will never achieve herd immunity if we keep locking ourselves away? Perhaps some of us should let ourselves catch the virus to build up a resistance in the community. You go first.

In the UK we have heard little about the seven emergency temporary hospitals set up to cope with Covid victims: the so-called “Nightingale Hospitals”.  The whole idea of the initial lockdown in March was to buy time while the authorities built up PPE and an infrastructure to cope with the anticipated influx of Covid patients.  That has been achieved, but only Exeter Nightingale hospital is currently being used as intended, with Manchester used for non-Covid patients.  The five others are still vacant.  I suspect the problem is that there may be insufficient staff to man the temporary hospitals, but at least the beds are there if the worst comes to the worst.  

On a more positive note, my sister-in-law (aged 89) has had her first vaccination with no serious side effects, and two elderly friends here in Melbury received their injections earlier this week.  As of 21 December, half a million people in the UK had received their first vaccinations.  The other type of vaccine, the Oxford/Astra/Zeneca version, has been submitted for approval for use and we await the outcome: being easier to store, and being produced separately, that vaccine should enhance the immunisation programme significantly if approved.

The armed forces took charge of the creation of the Nightingale hospitals and they were praised for their efficiency.  They are also increasingly being utilised for other aspects of tackling the pandemic, and some 14,000 personnel are on standby to assist local authorities as required.  When all else fails and the rest of the country cannot cope or is hobbled by strikes, the armed forces are always there to pick up the pieces.  I always remember that, in the late 1970s and – again – at the start of this century, there were national firemen’s strikes and the armed forces were called in to provide emergency cover as best they could.  Forces personnel were not allowed to drive the existing modern fire appliances; instead they had to use ancient fire engines called Green Goddesses, mothballed from the 1950s from the days when the country had a Civil Defence Force to cope with nuclear attack.  The vehicles (green in colour, hence the name) had manual gearboxes without synchromesh and no modern equipment; you could tell when they were coming by the grinding of gear changes, the stuttering engines, the stop-start progress, and the pitiful ringing of a handbell (no EYORE siren).  Watching a Green Goddess go past was like watching a film of the Keystone Cops.  I recall that, in 1977,  one naval-manned Green Goddess was called out by an old lady whose cat had become stuck up a tree.  After a fraught journey, the team arrived on scene and the matelots duly managed to rescue kitty and restore the animal to the old lady.  Delighted, the old dear invited the fire engine crew into her house for a cup of tea and a piece of cake which, they accepted with alacrity.  Suitably refreshed, and basking in wholesome praise, they returned to their fire engine, waved a fond farewell to the grateful old lady, and promptly drove over her cat as they departed down the drive.

Talk of illness and epidemics reminds me that, in the early days of my career, having an accident or becoming ill while on leave away from a naval port required the implementation of a complicated procedure.  You could not simply pop into the local GP surgery or hospital to be treated, given a Sick Note or (heaven forfend!) self-certify your illness.  Instead, you had to visit the local Admiralty Surgeon & Agent (found from the telephone directory) for treatment.  If the problem was so bad that you were laid low, then the doctor had to give you a note stating that you were not fit to travel.  Note the last two words in italics, as they are important.  Fundamentally, the Service did not trust civilian doctors: only a naval doctor was qualified to say whether you were fit to do your duty or not.  Presumably it considered the civilian medical profession to be a bunch of charlatans and quacksalvers, though – of course – that was the very pool from which naval doctors were recruited. As an example of this, a chap I knew broke a leg in a climbing accident in Snowdonia and was laid up at a friend’s house in a small town in Wales to convalesce. Apart from having his leg in plaster he was quite comfortable and being well looked after by the females in his friend’s family. The Navy wasn’t having any of that, however: they sent a naval ambulance all the way into deepest Wales to bring him back and put him in a proper naval hospital, and he had a very uncomfortable and painful journey back.  Can’t trust these civvies. Nowadays, the Admiralty Surgeon & Agent scheme is long gone, but I would guess that the sickness certification criterion is exactly the same.

A further example of the peculiarities of the naval medical system may be found from my days when I was studying engineering for four years at the Naval Engineering College in Plymouth. We worked an odd quasi-university routine: although lectures were compulsory, we wore uniform, lived in the wardroom, had naval duties, and worked on Saturday mornings, we also occasionally had free periods or tutorials in the afternoons and played sport on Wednesday afternoons.  It was delightfully relaxed and laid back provided you were academically inclined and could cope accordingly.   As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, this could lead you to forget that you were still, fundamentally, part of a disciplined service.  I remember a chum of mine at college who was married and lived in a naval married quarter in Plymouth.  He woke up one morning feeling a little fragile and decided that he would not go into college that day, so he telephoned the wardroom hall porter and ‘called in sick’.  About two hours later he was sitting in his living room, reading the newspaper with his feet up and a cup of coffee by his side, when the room grew a little darker.  He looked out of the window and saw, just pulling up outside, a large white ambulance with a big red cross and “ROYAL NAVY” on the side.  Out of one door stepped a naval Surgeon Lieutenant in full dress uniform, and out of the other stepped the driver, a Medical Assistant in full ‘square rig’, carrying the medical bag.  They had come to see my chum.  He immediately tossed the paper to one side, shot upstairs, stripped off his clothes, and threw himself into bed just in time to receive the visitors.  I imagine they found him to be a little hot and feverish.

The hot news is that, just as the drawbridge was about to be pulled up, a breakthrough has been made in Brexit negotiations and a trade deal has finally been agreed with the European Union. Cynical soul that I am, I wonder what part of my birthright has been sold to achieve this goal, but I withhold judgement for now. Whatever, the discussions have been a long drawn out battle and all credit to the negotiators for their tremendous efforts. More details later, I dare say.

After Christmas, brace yourselves for the next hot topic in Britain: the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List. Lists of those elevated to the peerage, knighted or otherwise honoured will be published and – throughout the land – we will be grumbling over our breakfast toast and marmalade as to which buffoon, actor, footballer, guitar player or other perceived undeserving character has acquired the title “Lord”, “Sir” or “Dame”. Next blog, perhaps.

Christmas is a time for The Ghost Story.  I have never seen a ghost myself, but several warships in my career were reputed to be haunted, sometimes by a figure related to previous war service (in an old ship), or a suicide onboard.  A very good friend of mine, who was a submariner, did see one in a modern warship.  He was not one for making up stories, so I have no reason to doubt the veracity of his account.  He was serving in a nuclear submarine and the boat was dived somewhere under the Arctic Ocean, on patrol during the Cold War.  It was in the middle of the night and he was the Engineer Officer of the Watch in the Machinery Control Room with about six other men, keeping watch over the nuclear reactor and monitoring the propulsion machinery.  When a ship or submarine is on passage, there are no changes in speed to cope with and it can all become rather mundane just sitting there with little to do except look at the machinery gauges (and you usually hope it stays that way).  The Machinery Control Room crew were chatting away amiably and monitoring the reactor control panel automatically, when a figure in green overalls walked past the door and on into the main turbine room.  They all saw the figure, and they each looked askance at each other.  You see, in the Royal Navy, engineer officers wear white overalls and all ratings wear blue overalls.  Only dockyard maties wear green overalls, and the nearest dockyard was some 2,000 miles away.  A mechanic was immediately despatched into the turbine room to track down the intruder but, although he searched the entire compartment, no-one was found; there was no other way out except past the Machinery Control Room.  The crew was somewhat nonplussed as to what to do.  Nuclear watchkeepers are highly trained and monitored carefully for obvious reasons: a report to the Captain or the authorities that seven of them had seen a ghost would likely have resulted in them being led, very gently, ashore to a safe hospital with bars on the windows.  At the very least they would have been relieved of their duties and, heaven forbid,  lost their Submarine Pay (a supplement to the standard naval pay).  So they decided to say nothing to anyone.  Later, after the boat had returned to base, my friend made a few enquiries about the submarine’s history.  He discovered that, during a previous refit, the watertight compartment where the sighting took place was being pressure tested, but a heavy watertight door was not clipped shut properly.  As the test pressure was increased the securing clip gave way and the watertight door flipped violently open, hitting a dockyard worker and crushing his head against the boat’s side.  He was killed.  Was the mysterious figure in green overalls the ghost of the unfortunate dockyard worker?  Who can say?

It is a short blog this week as I have to polish the silver and trim the candle wicks for Christmas Day.  There has also been talk of me blackening the range and scrubbing the kitchen floor for the festivities.  So, I leave you with the words of Tiny Tim:

“God bless us, every one”

24 December 2020

Blog 72. Keep Your Bottom Clean.

I knew I was getting old when I was in HMS NONSUCH and responding to one of the many machinery breakdowns that characterised my time onboard.  I was sliding down one of the near-vertical ladders onboard, gripping just the side rails, with my feet off the treads like you see in those American films, when I landed in an undignified heap on the deck below.  I lay there for a bit, winded, waiting for someone to appear from a nearby compartment and say, 
“Are you all right there, sir?” or, 
“Are you hurt, old boy?”.  
No one came. 
So, philosophically, I just got up and continued my rapid descent down the remaining ladders, thinking to myself, 
“You’re getting too old for this sort of thing”.  
I was 41 at the time.  As if I needed further corroboration of my impending senility, at home ashore I later found myself sighing audibly as I sat down in an armchair to rest my weary bones.  Oh dear.  I looked in the mirror the next morning and saw this old man with grey hair, thick eyebrows and bags under his eyes looking back at me.  I had already found a hundred billion brain cells on my pillow when I got up, which surprised me as I never had that many to start with.  When Young Lochinvar, aka Rupert our son, approached 40 I warned him that these signs were coming, but he dismissed my fatherly wisdom and made some suitably derogatory remark to me about the hair in my ears.  I thought I would get my own back on that one: on his 40th birthday I sent him a box containing a photograph album recording each birthday, a cardigan, a pair of carpet slippers, a tube of Ibuprofen joint cream, and an electric nose hair trimmer.  He later admitted that he particularly appreciated the last, which also worked well on ears and eyebrows.  In a previous life I specialised in Reliability Engineering, a fascinating branch of engineering that you will be pleased to know I won’t burden you with, but one aspect is relevant to my theme here.  In terms of reliability, many machines are said to follow the so-called bathtub curve [the cross-sectional shape of a bath tub cut across] , with a high failure rate in early days of service, dropping to a reasonably flat period of random failure (the bottom of the bathtub) during working life, then – over time – a rising failure rate as the machine wears out.  For a lecture, I once extracted the failure rates for human beings in the UK (deaths per thousand population) from the Office of National Statistics and plotted the result on a graph, with age along the x-axis.  The graph followed the bathtub curve:  there was a high failure (death) rate in early years, corresponding to such conditions as cot death and so on; then a reasonably flat, random failure period (knocked over by a bus, murdered by wife for commenting on her shower cap); then a wear-out period leading to death in old age.  At what age do you think the wear-out phase started?  Well, I will tell you: at about 45, with a more marked point of inflexion at the age of 62.  That’s it then.
“Do I get another chance, God?”
“No, sorry, mate, that was it”
Ho hum.

Thinking of Rupert, he did once buy me a mug for my birthday, which was very kind of him.  It bore the logo,
“The Floggings Will Continue Until the Crew’s Morale Improves”.
I still have it, and use it regularly.  It is obviously a tribute to my strong leadership skills and firm patriarchal presence.  Or, at least, I think it is.

“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today”.
So commented Admiral Beatty at the Battle of Jutland after two British battleships blew up in short time during the battle.  The comment is relevant today in a different context and could be amplified by the aphorism,
“None can abide an ugly ship”,
a maxim apparently no longer followed by naval architects.  Why are ships today so ugly?  The worst of the lot must surely be the cruise ships, with high slab sides, and deck after deck of outside passenger cabins like the layers of a wedding cake.  Some cruise lines even have the bows of their ships decorated with painted smiles or symbols, like a tart touting for business on a street corner.  Yuk.  The ships may meet the IMO stability criteria, but aesthetically they are top heavy, look hideous, and dominate a port by their towering imposing presence.  Cargo carriers are little better, with containers piled so high on deck that the bridge windows can only just see over them; the superstructure and funnel are square and totally lacking in any grace.  Ferries are chunky and ugly.  It was not always this way: CUTTY SARK manages to look beautiful despite being a very successful tea clipper in her day; more recently, QUEEN ELIZABETH 2, now a floating hotel in Dubai, was a fine example of combining function with form.  Now, there are very few cruise ships that do not make a true seaman wince.  And as to warships, why, they can still look menacing and be highly capable without having to look simply ugly.  The German battleship BISMARK, for example, managed to look domineering yet magnificent.  More recently, the Royal Navy’s Type 21 frigates of the AMAZON Class (now sold) were sleek, attractive, functional and inspired pride in those who served in them.  Today, the Royal Navy has the DARING Class destroyer: no doubt very capable, but angular, boxy and dull, with few (if any) aesthetic qualities.  Of course, the answer to all these criticisms is that the ships are there for a commercial (or warlike) purpose; in the case of merchant ships, they are there to make money, pure and simple.  But then, that was always the case and you never saw a more hard-nosed bunch of coves than shipowners in the late 19th and early 20th century; yet they took pride in their ships and so did the crews who manned them.  A ship can be made to look reasonably pleasing to the eye without necessarily incurring extra costs: a rake of the mast here, a cap on the funnel there; even a change of paint scheme can make a huge difference.  Such a shame that few naval architects or ship owners seem to have any taste or pride in their ships.

An example of a ship owner’s pride may be found in a little story that my father once told me.  Immediately after WW2 he served in the coastal trade for a while – the trade being blessed with short periods away from home and – hence – a pleasant domestic routine.  His company carried coal from the north east of England to London for conversion to gas: not the most exotic of trades (it could have been worse; it could have involved transporting sewage) yet the ships were well-looked after, were kept clean inside and out, and the officers dressed in uniform for meals.   In the late 1940s, the company decided to invest in a fine new vessel, powered by a diesel engine, to replace existing coal-fired steam ships.  The order was placed, the vessel built, and the new ship, sparklingly clean and trim in her livery, completed her maiden voyage reasonably successfully.  Her main engine had, however,  developed the odd problem and, as a temporary measure, the engineers had disconnected two pistons and had hung them up on chain blocks, the engine operating adequately on the remaining six cylinders.  This is perfectly possible with big marine engines and is a not uncommon practice.  Such was the pride in this humble, but new generation, ship that she entered port to a grand reception, with the company Board of Directors, in their best suits and bowler hats, lined up on the jetty and the ship’s officers, in their best uniforms, on the bridge, fo’c’sle and poop.  I am not sure if there was a band playing, but there might as well have been.  The Captain was conscious of every eye upon him as he conned the ship alongside.  All went smoothly and the heaving lines were thrown.  The Captain rang down “Full Astern” on the telegraph to take the last bit of way off the ship and complete the perfect alongside manoeuvre.  The engine kicked into reverse with a puff of blue smoke, the propeller thrashed and the hull throbbed. 
Suddenly, there was an enormous BANG and a sound as if an entire scrap yard had suddenly been scooped up into the air, then dropped onto concrete.  The ship stopped and there was total silence, a settling cloud of dust, and a pervading smell of burnt oil.  It transpired that the vibration of running at “Full Astern” had dislodged the two disconnected pistons and their connecting rods from their securing chain blocks, and they had dropped into the rotating engine.  The noise was the components being mangled by the crankshaft.  In terms of sea trials it was all a fine example of defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory.  Apparently, the Chief Engineer was quite literally in tears.  I do not know if he kept his job or if the champagne reception party went ahead.  I would think not.

My little ship, The Boat, is still high and dry on blocks in the marina.  The antifouling was sanded off a few weeks ago, a few cracks identified and repaired, and the fibreglass hull is currently drying out after its prolonged period in the water.  In the spring a new coat of antifouling will be applied and, when the new pontoons are ready, APPLETON RUM will go back into the water with a smile on her face.  The subject of antifouling is an interesting one (entering lecture mode again: pay attention).  The coating is applied to the underwater area of ships and boats to inhibit marine growth like barnacles and weed, because such encumbrances reduce a vessel’s speed and increase fuel consumption.  It is not a new thing: the bottoms of the old sailing ships were sheathed with copper to overcome this problem and that of the nasty teredo worm, that bored into the wooden hulls and weakened the structure.  Nowadays the antifouling coating is applied just like paint and, at the expensive end of the product range, can be highly effective and save millions of pounds on a ship’s operating cost.  As an example of the importance of antifouling, the aircraft carrier HMS ILLUSTRIOUS was in the final stages of building during the Falklands Conflict of 1982, but was rushed into service early and sent down to the South Atlantic without any antifouling having been applied to her bottom.  After five months afloat in the River Tyne (at the time, so polluted that it would not support life) and a further nine months at sea the surface resistance of the hull was 2½ times that of a clean ship and it reduced her speed by 3 knots from her maximum of 28 knots.  On ILLUSTRIOUS’  return to the UK, her bottom was cleaned and antifouled.  After that, with a clean bottom, the power required to achieve lower speeds was reduced by 80%, and to achieve full speed, by 56%.  Yes, those pesky barnacles have a lot to answer for.  So there you are, you read it here first: keep your bottom clean.

Well, there is not much to report this week as Jane’s leg is still playing up and we dare not take even a little exercise because of the discomfort that follows.  We did try a six-mile walk with friends on level ground around a nearby village at the weekend, taking a flask of coffee and biscuits for a break while sitting in the cold churchyard (socially distanced, naturally).  It was actually very liberating, and she had very little pain at the time, but we did not sleep well for the next two nights: Jane because of her leg muscle going into spasm, and me because she kept kicking me as a result.  What was that I said earlier about getting old?

The television is awash with pleas from charities at the moment.  Regular readers will know from Blog 45 that I hate all television advertisement breaks and invariably mute the sound while seeking alternative viewing when they appear, but the televised pleas are so frequent and so strident that even I have been unable to avoid seeing them.  So far I have noted pleas for cash to support: water wells, tigers, leopards, monkeys, whales, penguins, rhinoceroses, children, cats, dogs, old people, blind people, cancer research, heart disease research, the homeless, the disabled, the Salvation Army, Africans, Indians (spot, not feather), soldiers, sailors, aviators and the mentally ill.  It is overwhelming for, like most people, I would love to support all of them, but I cannot.  One must, perforce, apply some sort of filtering system to the charities seeking funds if one is not to be emotionally overcome or bankrupt. To some extent one’s initial choice of a charity can be reasonably simple, as one inevitably will have favourites based on belief or strong feeling: giving to the Church, the dogs’ home, or a Service charity if serving in the armed forces for example.  For the other choices I pose yet another moral dilemma for you to consider: should we be giving to a charity that pays the Chief Executive and a Board of Directors a vast salary?  This was the subject of an in-depth discussion with a friend of ours some years ago:  she said that a big charity needed to reward its management board generously, under the principle of “pay peanuts and you get monkeys”; I said it was iniquitous that a charity should have huge remuneration packages and costly overheads, particularly if the charity relied heavily on altruistically motivated volunteers at the working level.  A friend once told me that he attended a meeting that involved various charity representatives at middle and higher management levels, and he was struck by the fact that every single attendee arrived in a brand new BMW.  Is that morally right? Only 52% of UK charities reveal the salaries of their CEOs and only 10% of those publish the information on their website for all to see.  In 2015 the CEO of Cancer Research UK received £240,000 in annual salary; the CEO of The Salvation Army received £15,500.  There is a bit of a disparity there (though, to be fair, the Salvation Army does have some senior staff on £160,000).  The Director General of the National Trust received £195,700 last year despite the trust relying a great deal on 53,000 volunteer guides and gardeners who receive nothing in the way of perks, other than free membership and a discount on catering.  For once I am coming off the fence on this one: charity is big business, expensive real estate and a lucrative job for some; the first may be unavoidable but the others are not.  My money is going to the charities that have the lowest overheads, the most relevance to me and the most visible outcomes.  You are allowed to disagree.

On the Covid 19 front, the number of daily deaths in the UK is still falling, albeit more slowly, and currently stands at 532. The alert levels in England were reviewed on 16 December, with the result that London and several other regions have moved into the highest level, Tier 3 (roughly, no hospitality or accommodation venue open, no indoor mixing, no outdoor groups more than six). Other regions were also reviewed and it was hoped that rural areas might move into a less stringent tier instead of being lumped with large cities and conurbations.  With a few minor exceptions, this has not happened, so we in Barsetshire are still stuck in Tier 2.  A relaxation that allows three households to mix indoors over Christmas for five days is still going ahead, relying (for once) on people using their common sense and making a decision for themselves.  Some parts of the Press and the medicos are up in arms about the relaxation, but the government is holding fast to its decision on the basis that the boost to morale offsets any potential increase in infection. Those who object to the brief relaxation seem to have missed the point that they, themselves, do not have to mix with anyone if they don’t want to – there is nothing stopping them from locking themselves up for the remainder of December if they wish.  Having declared the relaxation, the government advises strongly that we use it sensibly and minimise the number of households mixing, along with the time spent together: the Covid 19 equivalent of the instruction, “Eat what you like but don’t swallow”.  Vaccinations have started and about 138,000 have been immunised in the first week.

Our minds being so totally focussed on the nasty virus that is infecting the world, we have – quite understandably – taken our eyes off the ball being played in the great game of Brexit.  The UK comes to the end of its transition period at midnight on 31 December 2020 and, after some fairly encouraging progress on negotiating a trade deal with the European Union (EU) that would replace the privileges of membership, the whole situation is up in the air again.  As far as I can gather, the EU has walked back on some of the points tentatively agreed upon earlier.  The sticking points are Fishing in British Territorial Waters (who can fish there and what they can catch) and Unfair Competition (no longer encumbered by EU regulation, the UK may be able to undercut EU producers).  After all this time it would appear that the EU still cannot grasp the concept of sovereignty and why the UK voted to leave the EU.  No side wishes to be the first to admit that it is withdrawing from negotiation so, theoretically, talks will continue up to midnight on New Year’s Eve.  However it seems highly unlikely that an agreement will now be reached and, over four years after the UK population voted for it, the country will finally leave the EU and be independent again in fourteen days’ time –  provided Boris Johnson does not renege on his election promise.  This topic remains a highly controversial one in the UK and invariably invokes strong sentiments comparable with those held by the Royalists against the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War or Biden supporters against Trump supporters in the USA of 2020: friend against friend, brother against brother, wife against husband, father against son.  After the Brexit referendum in 2016, one correspondent to The Times reported that he had been un-invited to a barbecue hosted by friends because he had voted ‘Leave’.  I do not wish to fan the flames on the issue other than to observe that the UK has a difficult time ahead, but one that the country will overcome, just as it has in the past.  One door closes, and another one opens: every problem is an opportunity.

“Don’t mention the War”.
So went the main theme of an episode called The Germans in the very successful comedy series Fawlty Towers, produced 45 years ago yet still popular and funny.  There was an attempt in June to have the episode banned because the “snowflakes” of our modern society thought it was racist.  I was reminded of that old song by Noel Coward, “Let’s Not Be Beastly To The Germans”. Fortunately, commons sense (for once) reigned supreme and the episode was reinstated, a decision vindicated  by the revelation that John Cleese (the leading actor in the series) was once accosted in a restaurant in Germany by a fellow customer:
“John!”, the customer shouted across the restaurant.  He looked round.
“Don’t mention zer var!”.  
Everyone who spoke English laughed uproariously.  And who said the Germans don’t have a sense of humour? 
I was once told a joke by a colonel in the German airforce which would probably be banned by the sensitive flowers in our society who take pride in being able to take offence about just about everything these days.  In Germany, apparently, the people of the region of Frisia in north western Germany are considered to be somewhat – how can I put it – lacking in sophistication and intelligence because of their strong accent.  There was a man from Frisia who was an aspiring social climber, but grew tired of being challenged, whenever he met someone in Germany, with “Are you from Frisia?”; there would then follow a series of hurtful comments or jokes suggesting that he was not quite the full shilling.  Determined to overcome his accent, he took extensive elocution lessons over a period of several months and, eventually, managed to speak perfect German, free of any accent: the German equivalent of the Queen’s English.  Clutching his diploma, and determined to try out his polished speech, he went into a shop in Berlin.
“Good morning”, he said in perfect clear-cut German, “I would like two kilos of potatoes and half a kilo of carrots please”
“Good morning”, said the proprietor with a smile.”Tell me, are you from Frisia?”
“Yes”, said the man with great dismay.  “But how can you tell?”
“Because this is a furniture shop”, said the proprietor.

I suppose the “Don’t Mention the War” theme is an example of a Freudian Slip.  I was thinking about it when I read an account of the the play, Hobson’s Choice, which featured in a provincial theatre starring Julia McKenzie and Ronald Pickup some years ago.  If you are not familiar with the play, it is about a Victorian boot maker called Hobson, whose daughter Maggie (played by McKenzie) is in love with the apprentice Willy Mossop (Pickup) and has great ambitions for his future as a craftsman.  In the play, Maggie was required to summon Willy from the cellar. On his appearance, she was to say,
“Willy, show me your hands!”, and then to go on to convince him of the skills he had in his hands and the great future that could await him.
The little Freudian Gremlins got to work one night in the theatre, however, and when Willy appeared at the top of the cellar steps, what Maggie actually said was,
“Hans, show me your Willie!”.
Apparently Willy returned hastily back down to the cellar and Maggie directed her attention to a little impromptu dusting of the mantlepiece.
A faux pas worthy of myself, I feel.

As I write these concluding words, Jane has a mega-toot on about Covid (for not going away); the UK Government (for Everything); the Chancellor of the Exchequer (for extending the furlough scheme); the Royal Mail (for not delivering any post or Christmas cards for three days); teachers on quiz shows (for being ignorant); and teachers generally (for wanting more time off). Boy, was she going some and I was glad I was not in her direct line of sight. It was like sitting next to a spitting cobra. Only the arrival of an e-card and some snow scenes from a friend in New England managed to perk her up; that, and a glass of Rochester Extra Strong Dickensian Recipe Ginger Wine that I pressed into her hand. As the (non alcoholic) wine hit the back of her throat she spluttered and lost her voice completely, a fine example of using one fire to put out another. All is now calm; all is bright (especially her cheeks).

Never let it be said that the Shacklepin family is staid and out of touch. We have, this week, purchased and fitted the very latest item of technology, no expense spared. We have upgraded our house to include one of those vital aids to a gentleman’s comfort: a self-closing lavatory seat. This exciting acquisition came about as a result of Jane complaining that the existing item was somewhat tawdry and becoming difficult to clean. The self-closing feature was my own little addition, as a seat that falls down during full flow, so to speak, can be rather distracting to a gentleman. Kneepads squared off, and toolbox at the ready, I laboured away in the place of ease, fitting the new addition while Jane baked yet more minced pies. I called her in when I was finished, and – with a flourish – demonstrated the smooth action and many other features. She just looked at me.
“You’ve fitted it in the wrong lavatory, bozo. I wanted it in our en-suite bathroom, not here. Honestly…[she sighed]… you just don’t listen”.
She returned to the kitchen, shaking her head.

Bozo?

18 December 2020

Blog 71. I Don’t Like Sundays

“Deck the halls with leaves and holly”.  As I quote these words, with just a touch of irony, I bet most husbands know what I am alluding to: the annual grumble associated with extracting the boxes of Christmas decorations from their obscure stowage in the loft, the acquisition of a suitably shaped Christmas tree, mounting the tree, and decorating it; for it is usually (though by no means always) the women who want the decorations and the men who are pressed into service.  This year being peculiar in more ways than one, we decided to try a small pot-grown tree instead of the usual two-metre cut variety, the aims being to be kinder to the environment, the vacuum cleaner and the husband, in that order.  Initially, the tree was left outside in the freezing cold and wet (well, it is a fir tree from Scotland), but it was later moved into the garden shed to acclimatise it to its forthcoming holiday home in tropicana.  On Tuesday, the weather being dry, it was decided that the time had come for the tree to grace our drawing room and to start earning its keep.  There was some reluctance by the Head Gardener to do this at first, her concern being that it might die in the simulated Caribbean climate of our house.  However, I pointed out to her that her stance was similar to the one currently being practised by the UK government, namely that, in order to protect the NHS, we should not get ill.  Just as the NHS is meant to protect us, not the other way round, so we should not be nurturing a Christmas tree outside in order to protect it: it was purchased to decorate our drawing room, not the garden.  This firm patriarchal response seemed to find favour and she acquiesced.  Furniture was duly rearranged in the drawing room, as was custom, and my tray of single malt whiskies was transferred onto another occasional table that already contained a table lamp, four photographs, an Amazon Echo, a little owl, several home-made wooden bowls, and a box of matches left over from Christmas 2019.  I was not comfortable with this arrangement as it did not present an image of being secure for sea nor, indeed, shipshape in any sense, and I voiced my opinion accordingly.  My comment that the whole setup was in urgent need of being squared off, with spare whisky bottles emptied into near-empty decanters, and the tarnished tray and the decanter labels re-polished, was met with a somewhat tart response,
“Don’t start! You do this every year!  It’s only for a few weeks.  Leave it alone”.
When she was out of the room I consolidated the dregs of whisky in the near-empty decanters by the simple expedient of drinking them, topped them up from the bottles, removed and hid three photographs that portrayed me in an unfavourable light, and gave her a beaming (if mildly inebriated) smile as she re-entered the room.  She looked at me suspiciously.
“Right, we need to get the tree in.  Would you be able to manage it on your own?  I don’t want to get my new shoes dirty outside, you see”. 
She was still wearing those awful plimsolls, those “trainers” with the white soles, the ones with the quick release mechanism like granny’s zipped slippers.  I held up my poor injured right hand, the finger still swollen, the scar still vivid, and mewed pitifully.
“Oh, you’ll be all right.  It’s only a little tree.  Put a leather glove on”.  Clearly, Mrs Shacklepin’s sympathy bucket was finally empty.  Whimpering quietly, I went out to the shed, donned a pair of leather gauntlets, seized the tree as best I could with six fingers and two thumbs, demolished part of the shed interior and, doubled over, hobbled back to the drawing room French windows.  Naturally,  these were still shut and I sank a little lower with my burden while I waited.  Finally I was granted access and I staggered in, depositing the tree on its table in the corner with a great heave.  She began to arrange it tastefully while I looked on, mystified: how do you rearrange a tree?  She looked down at the cream carpet.
“Did you come in with your shoes on?”, she asked accusingly.
Resisting the urge to reply that, no, I was wafted in on the wings of an angel, I replied that yes, I had indeed been shod when I returned, heavily burdened, with the tree.
“You’ve left marks on the carpet”.
I looked at her incredulously.
“But it’s all right, I’ll clean them off”, she went on magnanimously.
She started rummaging in the many boxes of decorations, unearthing baubles and trinkets dating back sixty years, two remote controls for lights we no longer had, and a battery that had expired in 1996.  When she seized a large coil of Christmas lights that must have been at least ten fathoms long and advanced purposefully to the tree, I stopped her.
“Surely you aren’t going to use those lights.  You do realise that the tree is only one metre tall, do you?”
“I like lots of lights”, she said stubbornly. 
“Shall we have our traditional glass of sherry?”, she went on illogically.
I glanced at the ship’s clock on the wall: not quite six bells in the forenoon watch (11.00 am – do try to keep up) and the sun not yet over the yardarm.  The woman had clearly gone mad, but who was I to argue?  So, sipping Harveys’ best, we bound the tree with so much wire and lights that it stood no chance of ever escaping back to Scotland no matter how much it struggled.  The baubles followed.  If that tree survives to Twelfth Night it will be a miracle. As we packed up the boxes for temporary storage until January, Jane suddenly said,
“Where has that dirty whisky glass come from?”
I looked as innocent as that angel on the top of the tree.

I hate Sundays.  Don’t ask me why. I have never liked them.  When I was little boy Sunday was the day when my parents (if my father was not at sea) turned to as a team to cook the Sunday dinner starting at 0900 for a meal served at 1400.  For five hours the house was filled with steam and the smell of boiling cauliflower, cabbage and potatoes, the cooker was overflowing with pots and pans, and vegetables were not only being murdered, their bodies were being mutilated as well.  And as for the joint, well, I never did discover what sort of meat was being prepared, but I would hazard a guess that, whatever it was, it was a cheap cut. I recently asked my older brother if he knew what the meat had been and he said that he had no idea either.   It was not until many years later, when well into adulthood, that I could differentiate between beef, lamb and pork.  My mother, bless her, was not a brilliant cook and my parents were not well off: they struggled to feed and clothe my brother and me on a Second Mate’s wage and it is only now that I recognise the fact and appreciate it.  It’s a bit late to say ‘thank you’ really.  I rather suspect that that is the case for many of us: we take or took our parents for granted.  At the time, I did not realise that my mother’s cooking was not the best, for I had never had anything different.  In those days people of our social class did not host or go to other people’s houses for dinner parties, and we did not go to restaurants, unless you count the fish and chip café in Tynemouth next to the outdoor swimming pool, where – once every five years – we partook of cod and chips, with bread and butter and a pot of tea on the side.  Wine came from a vintners, but we did not drink it anyway, with the exception of the Asti Spumante that we had on Christmas Day.  Olive oil came from the chemist’s and you put it in your ear.   Probably because of my mother’s cooking, I hated meat and would not eat it: an early example of vegetarianism, though the word did not feature in the Tyneside vocabulary of the 1950s and 1960s.  I survived on chips and suet puddings, supplemented by baked beans (I didn’t like my mother’s vegetables either).  Of course, that changed when I joined the Navy, for it was a case of ‘eat what you are given or starve’ (there were none of these Halal, Kosher, Vegetarian or Vegan choices that they have today).  I mention all this, not to wallow in nostalgia, to sneer at today’s generation or to excuse my peculiar personality, but to make the point that we should appreciate the hardship that our parents and forefathers had to endure, and recognise the circumstances that they lived in, rather than condemn their actions by applying the standards of today to the past; we should be celebrating just how far society has come on over the years and the social mobility that goes with it.   Most of my male ancestors were coal miners, labourers or seamen and my father started life as a cabin boy before retiring as a Master Mariner;  but look at me now, writing to you good people on a device the size of a large notebook called a computer, in a nice warm centrally-heated house with a garden, with a car in the garage, and a glass of sherry at my right hand, waiting for Sunday luncheon (not dinner) that includes celeriac. The past is history; it is what we do today and in the future that matters.

Having written last week about my dislike of overfamiliarity by strangers using my first name (Blog 70), imagine my surprise last Sunday when I opened my copy of The Spectator magazine and found an article saying exactly the same thing, even quoting my examples of ‘vous’ and ‘tu’ in French.  My gob was well and truly smacked.  I would just like to make the point that this was emphatically not a case of plagiarism on my part, but rather an example of the fact that coincidences do happen and great minds think alike.  Although the The Spectator is published on a Thursday, I do not start to read it until Sunday morning: it is my Sunday treat to counteract the fact that I hate Sundays.  Did I mention that?

One of the less welcome aspects of living in the early 21st century is that we seem to live in a risk-averse society.  Some people, particularly those in authority, are increasingly unwilling to risk doing anything – even if the action may be to save lives.  Thirteen years ago, two Police Community Support Officers stood by and watched a child drown in a pond because they had not completed the appropriate training to rescue small children drowning in a pond; the local Police Authority supported their inaction.  When I was a volunteer lock-keeper on the River Thames a few years ago, a woman on a narrowboat fell into the lock and was badly injured by the boat’s spinning propeller; the lock-keeper dived in to rescue her, but was later reprimanded by the river authority for doing so (she died from her injuries nevertheless).  More recently, in Bristol, police officers stood by while a statue was pulled down by a mob, casually rolled along the street, and thrown into the River Avon; it was deemed ‘too risky’ to stop the vandalism.  I find these examples appalling.  Life itself is a risk.  As I said in Blog 45, there is, in the UK, a 4.1% chance of you having an accident in the home requiring hospital treatment; there is a 0.24% chance of you having a road accident.  I am even taking a risk in expressing my views in this blog.  The important thing, surely, is to make a personal assessment of the risk and make a decision accordingly: it is what humans have done, without knowing it, since the beginning of time.  And the risk you take depends on the circumstances at the time.  Emergencies and potential loss of life demand a high risk on your part; your job may also demand a high risk – it may be what society pays you to do, such as if you serve in the emergency services or the armed forces. 
I was thinking of all this while watching an excellent documentary series called Saving Lives at Sea on BBC television.  It covers actual incidents encountered by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in the waters around the British Isles (ie including Eire).  The action is recorded on head cameras and is put together with a narrative to form a very watchable programme (one of the BBC’s successes).  The RNLI is funded entirely by charitable donations and the service is free.  All those lifeboatmen (I use the term generically for simplicity; many are women) are volunteers who give up their time – and sometimes their lives – to rescue people in distress in the seas around our shores, and the footage shown in the programme is both inspiring and humbling.  But some incidents that the lifeboats attend are entirely preventable and watching them can be annoying or puzzling.  In one case, a surfer in Hastings, East Sussex thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of the Force 8 gale that was blowing one winter and promptly launched himself into the sea from the pier.  He just as promptly lost his surfboard and was swept out to sea.  Someone must have raised the alarm because the lifeboat was called out to search for him.  The filmed footage was terrifying: visibility from the lifeboat was obscured by heavy spray and the crests of waves, so it was very difficult for the crew to execute the box search pattern.  After hours of fruitless searching it transpired that the surfer, amazingly, had been swept ashore and was safe, and the lifeboat was ordered to return to harbour.  Unfortunately, the sea state was so bad that the lifeboat could not get back in; at one point it was swamped by a wave and rolled right over before recovering (as it was designed to do), though with the engine room flooded and several systems off the board.  It was forced to make its way to an alternative harbour, Eastbourne, involving a very difficult two hour passage against heavy seas.  Interviewed later for the programme, the surfer who had caused the call-out virtually laughed off the incident and thanked the crew on the programme: it would appear that he had not even bothered to call in to the lifeboat station personally to give his thanks.  I don’t suppose he gave a donation to the RNLI either: what price his life? £1,000? £5,000?  The men and women of that lifeboat knew the risk they were taking, but they went out anyway.  On the other hand, at the opposite extreme of incidents attended, lifeboats are often called out to rescue dogs, sheep or other animals that have become stranded on beaches or on cliffs; in this risk conscious society I am amazed that the RNLI considers it acceptable to risk human life to rescue an animal.  I am also amazed that the charity insists on the crews wearing face masks (because of COVID 19) despite the adverse conditions at sea: measured against the risk of death by drowning or being unable to breathe through a soggy face mask I would have thought that the risk of passing on COVID among the crew would be negligible.  But there you go: apparently even the RNLI has a fickle approach to risk.

“Invite.  Verb.  Request the company of; ask courteously; attract, call forth.  Invitation, Noun”.  So defines Collins English Dictionary stating that “Invite” is a verb: a doing word, as my primary school teacher used to say.  It is not a noun; the noun is “Invitation”.  Why, then, do I often receive communications that say that someone is sending me an “invite” when the word is invitation?  Why, also, do I receive requests from charities for me to “gift” them a donation?  “Gift” is a noun, not a verb: the word they are looking for is give.  Did these people never go to school?  In business, do their superiors not check the correspondence sent out in the company’s or charity’s name?  It is all very poor. I daresay that, in defence of this practice, the intelligentsia of the 21st century will argue that English is a constantly evolving language and that these colloquialisms do not matter; the fact is, however, that they do: bad grammar is sloppy and indicates a lack of education that reflects badly on the competence and credibility of the parent organisation as a whole.  Buck up.

Coincidentally, I have just seen a television quiz show in which a graduate who had just completed her degree, was not sure if “lone” was a proper word.  I despair for my country and its education system.  She graduated in History of Art, so I suppose words were not her strong point; I expect she preferred picture books.

It was the week before Christmas and my friend and I had only just been appointed to a ship in Plymouth. After dinner in the mess, we decided to go for a spin and explore Dartmoor, perhaps stopping for a drink in a little village pub. We duly set off with a blank agenda though – foolishly – no map, and soon we were driving in total darkness along a tiny lane on Dartmoor. A freezing fog came down, our speed was reduced to a crawl and it it was like driving through cotton wool: our headlights were useless. We had no idea where we were and the fuel gauge was hovering near ‘Empty’. All around was silent, though I could have sworn I heard the howling of a hound or wolf out there in the desolation. We went over hill and down dale, through fords and across cattle grids, and soon it became clear that we were totally lost. Then a glimmer of light appeared in the gloom, and materialised as a warm and welcoming pub in a tiny hamlet. Relieved, we parked the car and went in. The place was heaving with locals, but we managed to get to the bar to find out where we were and get directions for Plymouth. We ordered two pints and looked around for somewhere to sit. All the seats and benches were taken except at one small table where there were two chairs; one seat was free, but a small dog occupied the other.
“There will do”, said my friend. We went over.
“Get out of it!”, he said to the dog and kicked it off the chair. It ran off.
“Blimey”, I said to him as we sat down,”You’re taking a bit of a risk there, aren’t you: kicking the blacksmith’s dog? You know what these little country places are like: the blacksmith will be a big bloke”
My friend was baffled.
“What do you mean, ‘the blacksmith’s dog’? How do you know that? We’ve never been here before.”
Well”, I said, “it’s obvious: when you kicked it, it made a bolt for the door”

“You’ve been a long time up there.  Have you been writing your blog?”
“Yes, I’ve just written a page and a half on us decorating the Christmas tree”
“Good grief!  I hope your account isn’t putting me down again and that you aren’t still portraying me as some sort of dominatrix”.
“Good heavens no, my dear.  I praise you to the hilt, especially your cooking and your loving nature.  I may occasionally mention your strong leadership qualities, of course”.
She harrumphed.
Jane does not read these blogs, you see.  She prefers romantic and detective fiction to conjugal fiction, and that gives me perfect freedom of action.  Her comments have made me pause for thought, however, and I should make it clear that she is a demure little flower, ever ready to be at her husband’s bidding and to satisfy his every whim.  Also, one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story.  If Jane did have any strong leadership characteristics, incidentally, then it would be genetic on account of her being a distant cousin of William the Conqueror and the Duke of Wellington (this is a fact, by the way – she has a very classy pedigree).  The Duke of Wellington who, of course, led the British and Prussian victory against the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, went on to become the Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1828.  After his first cabinet meeting he is said to have emerged from the Cabinet Room and remarked, with some puzzlement,
“An extraordinary affair.  I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them”. Sounds like a good man.

I doubt if William the Conqueror would have approved the current trend in Britain for men to cry about everything in public.  We have just been treated to the spectacle of the Secretary of State for Health weeping on television on the news that a 90-year old woman has become the first person in Britain to receive the COVID vaccine.  On another front, we are very fond of a BBC television programme called The Repair Shop, which invites people to bring in damaged heirlooms for repair by experts.  Recently, however, it seems to have become the policy of the producers of the programme to favour projects in which the male owner of the heirloom breaks down when describing the ditty box once owned by Great Uncle Charlie (whom he never met) at the Battle of Jutland in World War 1.  Where did this mawkishness come from?  Whatever happened to the British stiff upper lip?  Get a grip, for heaven’s sake.

I think you deserve a break from my moaning about COVID 19 and face masks this week, it being the season of goodwill.  So I will stick to the facts.  The fall in daily positive test results in the UK appears to have been arrested after a fairly dramatic drop, and the trend is not yet clear.  Daily deaths from CV19 in the UK are still falling, and currently stand at 516.  Immunisation has started and a 90-year-old woman in Coventry has become the first recipient of the vaccine, followed (ironically) by a gentleman called William Shakespeare, but full scale immunisation is not likely to be under way until well into 2021.  A scientist has said that we may still be wearing masks in the winter of 2021.  Excellent.

Our town of Melbury has some absolutely splendid Christmas lights, funded by charitable donations and rigged entirely by volunteers.  They are the best in Barsetshire and put other towns and, indeed some cities, to shame. On the domestic front, however, I do wonder if we should consider having a British Standard or, indeed, an ISO standard for household Christmas lights?  Not a technical standard, but one of taste: the illuminated reindeer and sleigh on the roof; the brightly lit house frontage courtesy of Hinckley Point Nuclear Power Station; the flashing gold stars belting out  energy like the Eddystone Lighthouse…  I believe these displays started in the USA, an established extrovert nation, but do they really fit in with we subdued British?    Think of the environment and all that carbon dioxide; the trees, the newts… On the other hand, I see that, in Staffordshire, the police have threatened a household with a £1,000 fine if they switch on their vast illuminated display in the aid of a local charity as, “it will encourage spectators to flout COVID social distancing rules”.  And you thought I was Mr Humbug.  Here in Chez Shacklepin we have modest, understated, white LED nets on the two shrubs in our front garden that do not twinkle and simply imply a gentle discreet nod to celebrating Christmas.  However, we have just discovered that, around the corner, our neighbour two doors down has – wait for it – a large inflatable Father Christmas in front of his house.  Dear, oh dear, oh dear.  I think we should establish a Committee of Taste to consider this important issue.  Any volunteers to join?

I leave you with a cracker.
Two bits of string slid into a pub and went up to the bar:
“Two pints of bitter please, barman”, one of them said.
“Out!”, said the publican, “I’m not having bits of string coming in here. This is a decent establishment. Damned cheek. Who do you think you are?”.
They slid back outside and had a discussion in the forecourt.
“Maybe we don’t sound respectable enough, though it looks like an ordinary pub to me. Let’s try a different approach”, said one.
They re-entered by the Lounge Bar entrance and sidled up to the bar.
“Good Evening”, one of them said in his best cultured voice, “Could we have two gins and tonic please, with ice and lemon”.
The barman looked at them.
“It’s you again, isn’t it? The bits of string. Hop it, you’re banned!”
They left hastily and had another conference.
“You need to disguise yourself and go in alone”, said one, “That’s the only way we’ll get a drink. Tell you what, you tie a knot in your head and fluff the ends up: he’ll think you’re one of those punks. Order the drinks, and bring them outside”
He disguised himself as suggested and went back into the pub via the Public Bar entrance.
“Two pints of bitter please, mate”, said the bit of string.
“Certainly, sir”, said the barman and started pulling the pints. He paused and looked up.
“Hang on a minute”, he said, “Aren’t you one of those bits of string who I’ve just banned?”
“No”, said the bit of string,”I’m afraid not”

Ho, ho, ho.

11 December 2020

Blog 70. Too Many People

Everyone is my friend today.  And every other day.  I know this because, when I conduct any business or meet someone, they call me by my Christian name and introduce themselves in the same vein.  Emails start with, “Hi, Horatio” and end “Best wishes, Pete” (or whoever), as if I had known my interlocutor all my life.  I am sure these are all perfectly decent people and, perhaps, I would enjoy having them as a friend given a bit of time.  But could we not get to know each other a little first: share a cocktail, take in a show…?  I recently read of an elderly French woman living in America who, when addressed by her first name, always replied hazily, “Did I once sleep with you?”.  When I was a Midshipman I wrote in my weekly journal, shortly after joining my ship, that I found the members of my first wardroom to be somewhat remote, unwelcoming and distant; in reply, it was explained to me that, when one is going to live in the close confinement of a ship’s wardroom with someone for three years or more, one becomes very wary of making close friends too quickly. I have never forgotten that piece of advice.  The French and the Germans have the right idea: their pronouns distinguish between people they meet in everyday life (“vous” in French) and family or intimate and close friends (“tu”); to address a stranger with “tu” in France would be to take a great liberty and cause significant offence.  Good for them.  I don’t know when the British lost their formality and respect; it was certainly in my lifetime, perhaps in the 1960s when men in the City stopped wearing bowler hats and the BBC dropped the Light Programme on the wireless in favour of Radio 1, but it was a sad loss.  Being addressed informally by a stranger grates with me but, of course, like every other polite person when asked their preference, I invariably demur to familiarity: I would find it hard to reply, “Mr Shacklepin please” or “Sir, to you” when asked how I wish to be addressed, because it would sound stuffy and pompous (yes, yes, even if I am stuffy and pompous).  I think the rot set in when children started calling adults by their first name instead of “Mr Scrooge” or “Uncle Ebenezer” – the latter title even if not related.  We have a young Greek friend, the nephew of good friends of ours,  who has spent all his adult life in Britain and is now in his thirties.  Yet he still addresses us with the prefix “Mr” or “Mrs” because, again, that is the culture of Greece: respect for elders. This new chumminess is all very well, but what privileges do I offer my true friends, if not the ability to call me by my Christian name?  And speaking of names, why do people change their given names to abbreviated ones?  Why, for example, refer to someone with the proud and time-honoured name of ‘Alexander’ as ‘Zander’?  Personally, I am perfectly happy with my Christian name in full, but I’m afraid the abbreviated version has become established as the norm over a long career, so I have become inured to it.  Pleasingly, my full name is still used by my closest friend and by the memsahib – though the latter usually as the precursor of a warning or reprimand, which is frequently.  Concluding the nomenclature theme,  I remember a friend telling me that his young son once asked him why he could not call his father by his Christian name, like all his father’s friends.  In his reply the father confided to his son that he was a very special person, so special that he was the only person in the world who could call him “Daddy”.  An excellent point.

Erratum.  For “Christian name” above, read “First name”.  No-one is going to accuse me of being antiquated or “un-woke”.  I try always to be up with the hunt. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

As far as names go, it was much easier when serving in the Royal Navy because, in the matter of address, as in every other part of one’s life, you knew exactly where you stood: superiors were addressed as “Sir” or “Ma’am”, senior ratings were addressed by their rate and name (eg “Petty Officer Smith”), junior ratings were addressed in the same way or simply by their surname. It was also not that long ago that it was quite commonplace to receive official letters in the Service starting with the salutation, “Dear Shacklepin” or whatever.  Believe it or not, that was an informal type of address and not at all considered rude (as some people would consider it today); it was just the same as Dr Watson saying to Sherlock Holmes, “My dear Holmes…”: a familiar form address between friends.

I introduced this concept of “knowing where you stand” and having an ordered routine in Blog 68, and there is much to be said for it. When serving, I knew exactly what time I had to be onboard, what outfit to wear every day, what time to get up, when to start and finish work, when to eat, and what I would be doing on that day. I have heard it said that, as one became more senior, one could be a little more flexible in one’s routine but, while that may be true when one reaches flag rank, I cannot say I ever found it true among the hewers of wood and drawers of water at my sort of level. I well remember when I was Senior Engineer of HMS NONSUCH and she was alongside in Portsmouth. I was on the upper deck at 0930 examining the six-ton crane which was part of my considerable inventory, following the standard dictum that all machines like to be visited (Blog 44). As I gave the crane a good “looking at”, who should come over the brow but my boss, the Commander (E), still in plain clothes (he lived locally). I saluted and said,
“Good Morning, sir”. [I glanced at my watch]
“Ah, none of that, Senior”, he said, catching my subtle disapprobation, “I’m setting an example to the boys and girls”
“Now then”, he went on, ”when these young sailors look to us for example, who do you think they aspire to be? You, a Lieutenant Commander? Up at 0630 for a quick set of rounds before breakfast, woken up most nights at sea, working all the hours God gave you? Or me: all night in, nice cabin, comes onboard at 0930, plays golf occasionally in the afternoon. He or she is going to say, ‘That’s the job I want: I’m going to be a Commander’”
I confess, I had never thought of things that way, and I considered it a salutary lesson for the future as a means of inspiring one’s people and encouraging their ambitions.
Entirely coincidentally, two days later the Captain wanted to see my boss, the Commander (E), at 0830 and he was not yet onboard. The day after that the Commander (E) was onboard, in uniform, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 0730. And at the same time every day thereafter.
Just as a Roman soldier who is tempted off the solid Roman road ends up floundering in the marshes and fighting off the Iceni, so one deviates from the established path at one’s peril.

The downside of having served in the armed forces with an ordered routine, is that there is a danger of becoming institutionalised. It is true that, ultimately you put your life on the line, the hours of work can be long, you are not paid overtime and there is no annual cash bonus; but food and accommodation (at cost if ashore) are provided, if single you do not have to commute and, as I said in the previous paragraph, you do not have to think too much about your personal routine. Take this staple framework away, however, as happens when men and women leave the Service, and some single veterans have great difficulty in coping: it is estimated that as many as 6% of the homeless in the UK are veterans (11% in the USA), and these figures are exacerbated by those ex-servicemen and women who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is something to think about when we consider giving to Service charities such as the British Legion. Fortunately, I have not had that problem because I am no longer single and, when I retired, I moved from one ordered and disciplined régime into another one. Peace be upon her.

Well, here we are at Blog 70: thirty five blogs since I started these little missives when CV19 impinged on our lives in March.  I admit that I didn’t think I would still be writing a blog as we approached Christmas, but there you go.  England has, in name at least, come out of its second lockdown and is now back in its regional tiered system, with restrictions applied according to the perceived state of infection in different parts of the country.  However, as revealed in the last blog, 99% of England has been dumped into Tier 2 or 3, defined as ‘High Risk’ or ‘Very High Risk’ respectively, and the majority of us still cannot mix indoors with our fellow man (or woman). With daily positive test results yesterday down to about 16,000, and deaths at 504 in a population of 66 million, it is totally illogical and unnecessarily restrictive.   An MP was reprimanded the other day for sitting at the same table as his wife in the House of Commons Dining Room, invoking the comment,
“It seems in Covid-19 Britain you can sleep with a woman for 37 years but you can’t have lunch with her.”
However, there are some items of much-needed good news.  First, thank heavens I live in England and not Scotland or Wales, where the restrictions are, on the whole, more draconian than those in England though those countries’ infection rates and deaths show little significant difference from those in England.  Second, the rate of positive test results in England continues to fall rapidly, and the number of daily deaths attributed to CV19 has peaked and is now falling.  Third, the Pfizer vaccine has been certified as safe to use in the UK (apparently the first country to do so) and the immunisation programme will start next week.  Finally, Christmas is coming, we have illuminated our Christmas lights in the garden, and snow has fallen in parts of England and Scotland.  What more can you ask?

In years to come, if asked to summarise one of the key memories of this dreadful period in our lives, then I would do it with six words:
There are too many people around.
It seems that everywhere I go outside there are people: wheezing, red-faced, fat men and women huffing and puffing as they shuffle along in an attempt at jogging; brisk walkers in hiking boots, striding along with ski poles as if heading for Zermatt; dog walkers with their little black turd bags; clumps of earnest cyclists riding two abreast and clogging up the roads.  And this is not in the town centre (which is fairly quiet): this is on suburban roads and streets near where I live on the edge of town.  Even our regular milk collection at the farm across the road has been hindered by crowds of people hanging around in the farmyard, socialising at two metre distances or queuing for milk.  After nine months I still have not become accustomed to it and continue to ask myself, “why are these people not out at work?”.  I am being selfish and have been spoilt, of course.  When I retired I became used to the streets being fairly quiet after everyone had gone to work or school; my routine and tranquility is now being disrupted by these supposed “workers at home” and I resent the invasion of “my” space.  It is just one of those things that I will have to adjust to: “Love thy neighbour as thyself”, though I don’t love myself too much at the moment either; I am beginning to look old and I think I may be getting split ends again. Pass me that vanishing cream and conditioner – I wonder if my hair would look better with a side parting?

Right.  So what is this practice of men – some of them old enough to know better – walking around in the winter, in town, wearing shorts?  Can they not read a calendar? Do they not feel the cold?  Is this the Costa del Sol? Have they not yet grown up?  I stopped wearing shorts for everyday wear when I was eleven and only now wear them when abroad in hot countries or at home in the back garden on exceptionally warm summer days. I do not parade my shapely calves,  muscular thighs and thread veins to the general public in Britain: those treats are reserved for Mrs Shacklepin, and a very select number of close friends by subscription.  Putting aside the extraordinary seasonal sartorial choice, it is not as if the shorts worn are smart khaki cotton shorts with creases up the front, complemented by knee-length stockings and shoes: no, they are shapeless synthetic shorts with elasticated waists, worn with flip flops as if the wearer has just crawled out of bed.  They probably have.  Do men no longer care about their appearance?  And why do their womenfolk not keep them in order?  Mine does (“…and you’re going to wear that bow tie for our FaceTime session with Freda and Colin this evening are you?”).

Being in the right rig at the right time has always been a matter of pride to me, but I had one friend, whom we will call Robert, who was the epitome of preparedness and smartness. I always maintained that, if he swam ashore in a diving suit he would be able to peel it off to reveal a full dinner jacket with buttonhole, like James Bond in one of those 007 films. Robert was so unfailingly correct and punctilious that I decided, one day, to play a prank on him. I invited him to dinner with my wife and another couple and, when Robert asked me about the rig for the occasion, I was vague and offhand in my reply: “Just come as you are”. In the meantime, I told our friends that the dinner was ‘black tie’ and my wife and I dressed accordingly. On the evening of the dinner, all except my very parfait friend were assembled in the drawing room having drinks and looking awfully smart in our evening wear. The doorbell rang.
“That will be Robert ”, I said.”Let’s see how he copes with this!”
I opened the door, and there he stood in a sailing smock, baggy corduroy trousers and desert boots. Seeing my mode of dress, he looked so shocked and woebegone that I had to apologise.
“I’m so sorry, Robert”, I said,”But I couldn’t resist the prank. You are always so correct and prepared for anything that I always maintained that, given a situation like this, you would have a fallback solution and would still be able to come up smelling of roses”
“Like this, you mean”, he replied.
Whereupon he stripped off his smock and baggy trousers, and kicked off his desert boots, to reveal himself in full dinner jacket with buttonhole, stiff piqué shirt with gold studs, bow tie, dress trousers, cummerbund, and patent leather evening shoes. Of course, someone had tipped him off.

My jaw dropped and, for the first and only time in my life, I was totally, utterly and completely speechless. Which is how I leave you now.

4 December 2020

Blog 69. Mañana

I finished the breakfast fruit salad and placed the spoon down with great satisfaction.
“Thank you, darling, that was delicious. I’m really looking forward to this breakfast”.
I rubbed my hands in anticipation.
“You’ve just had it. That’s it. No food until lunchtime now”.
“But, but…”, my little face fell.”You said yesterday we were having poached eggs on potato cakes today, perhaps with a Hollandaise sauce or a rasher of bacon…”. My voice trailed away, choking with disappointment.
“That’s because I thought yesterday was Friday and today was Saturday. Today is actually Wednesday. No poached eggs, sorry”.
She didn’t sound very sorry.
You see, the weekday diet is back with us and we only have a full breakfast and a proper dinner, with optional alcohol, at weekends. I mention this little vignette to illustrate not only the hard life that I lead, but also the fact that neither of us knows what day it is most of the time. If it weren’t for us changing the sheets on the bed every week then we would not note the passing of the weeks either. I think the month is November. Dear me, this second lockdown is somehow worse than the first one. This is getting serious: the sooner this situation is over the better.

One of the many characteristics of lockdown that is worth recording for the sake of posterity must surely be the Spanish concept of “mañana”, literally “tomorrow”.  With virtually every day the same, and no urgency to do anything except, perhaps, switch off the heat under that pan that is boiling over, it is all too easy to reschedule every task until tomorrow.  This is exacerbated by the winter season, with sunset currently at 1606, that being the point when there is a strong tendency to switch on the lights, flop down on the sofa, and read a book or watch television, exhausted from a whole day of doing not very much.  Taken with sunrise at 0746 it makes for a short day and – well – a very strong inclination to total lethargy.  I confess that I have been tempted, but I put some of my weakness down to my temporary disability and Jane’s lack of mobility.  When both are overcome then I promise we will be active again, exploring the muddy countryside or whittling sculptures of Greek goddesses in seasoned American Cherry.   Honestly.

For those kind enough to ask, by the way, my injured hand (Blog 66) is healing slowly: the dressing is off, the finger has turned black, the smell has improved, and it twinges only occasionally. It still hurts when placed in washing-up water. Jane’s leg is still painful, but is showing signs of improvement. I won’t go on: there is nothing worse than reading, or hearing about, someone else’s ailments (except, possibly, warm champagne).


In an earlier blog (Blog 67) I commented on the dilemma facing anyone who wins the lottery and wishes to share his or her winnings with friends.  I now pose another one: should just anyone enter the lottery or take part in quiz shows?  Jane raised this the other day when reading about the case of a rich retired banker who had entered the television quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and won (possibly more than once).  Asked what he would do with the winnings, he replied something vague about enhancing his country estate.  Morally, it does not seem right for someone in that position to compete and exclude someone worse off from taking part in the competition, though the rules of the show may well be satisfied.  The same philosophy applies to the National Lottery:  why would you go in for it if you already had plenty of money? But I daresay some rich people do.  On a more down-to-earth level, have you ever come across the person who wins multiple times on a club raffle, and claims the prize each time?  Most people, in my experience, put the ticket back if they win a second time in order to give others a chance, but there is always the exception and I find their philosophy puzzling.  There you are: another moral topic for that dinner party that you are going to hold when all this epidemic is over.

As far as entertaining goes, we love hosting dinner parties for friends and take delight in the, now unfashionable, formality of it all: the exact place settings, the linen napkins, the best silver, the crystal glasses, decanting the wine, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the footmen, and so on (well, maybe not the footmen).  Jane is a very accomplished cook and I, well, I can make a good gin and tonic or Horse’s Neck.  That said, this year we have tended towards inviting friends to luncheon rather than dinner.  In the summer it is ideal, as one can enjoy the sunshine, possibly eat al fresco, and quaff Pimm’s as an apéritif.  Of course, the informal approach also makes us more hip and cool, and in tune with the modern generation and the ‘in’ crowd.  Whatever the season, entertaining guests to luncheon also avoids us having to wash up twenty or more wine, water, sherry and port glasses at one o’clock in the morning while in a zombie-like state and starting a hangover.  Well, now, as a trial, we have extended that lunchtime practice to our every-day lives, making luncheon our main meal of the day with supper being a collation taken in the early evening.  Of course, the downside of this procedure is that the zombie-like state kicks in at about teatime and there is a strong temptation to succumb to a Spanish siesta, but theoretically we are still awake and available for other things well into the evening, with the cooking and the washing up all done.  I am told that a light meal in the evening is also better for the digestion of those of us who (how can I put this) have accumulated more than 570,000 running hours and are overdue for a top overhaul.    Jane and I are still debating the ideal form that the supper should take, though Welsh Rarebit, an omelette or cheese and crackers have featured so far, and I am hoping for Devils on Horseback or Golden Buck in the future.  Wishing to avoid cooking, Jane suggested breakfast cereal for supper the other day and I shuddered with horror.  The daughter of a friend of ours once outlined the five stages of departure from this life as:
“First you move into the bungalow, next you wear bedroom slippers all day, then you stop going out at night and, finally, you start to have breakfast cereal for supper; after that stage you die and are carried out in a box”.  
Dear oh dear, we are not ready for that yet. 

On the Covid front, trials with the vaccine being developed by Oxford University show an effectiveness of 70% (which is better than the flu vaccine) with a potential to increase its effectiveness to 90%.  Although the efficacy is not quite as good as the vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna (95%) the Oxford vaccine has the advantages of being significantly cheaper, not having to be stored at near cryogenic temperatures (fridge temperature is good enough), and being more easily distributed.  No vaccine has received approval to be used on the general public yet. Priority for vaccinations in the UK will be given to those in care homes and their carers, followed by front-line NHS staff, then cascaded down according to age, starting with the old people. As far as the epidemic is concerned, the daily number of new positive tests in the UK has definitely gone over the peak and has started to plummet at 25% a week, but the daily number of deaths is still rising stubbornly, albeit more slowly. Yesterday the number of daily deaths attributed to CV19 in the UK was 521.  The research study being run by King’s College, London has concluded that the rate of infections in England was already falling under the previous tier system and that the current English lockdown was unnecessary. It has been announced that England will return to an enhanced regional Tier System at the end of this lockdown on 3 December, but measures will be relaxed for the whole of the UK for five days over Christmas, during which three households can mix indoors. Hogmanay has been cancelled in Scotland.  Entirely as I predicted, the new restrictions incorporated under the English regional tier system have turned out to be lockdown by another name, for 99% of England has been placed under the higher Tier 2 or Tier 3, both levels banning social mixing indoors or in private gardens, and the “rule of six” applying outdoors. All shops, restaurants, and pubs serving food can open for limited hours under Tier 2, which is about the only improvement from the present lockdown other than, inexplicably, sports events involving up to 2,000 spectators being permitted. The only places in England under Tier 1 – the lowest level – are the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall. It has been stated that the UK is entering its worst economic crisis for 300 years; history will decide if this was a price worth paying to overcome a disease that, overall, the population has a 99.92% chance of surviving. One of the government’s scientific advisors has cautioned,
“Hug your granny at Christmas and she will be dead in January”.  
Such a helpful and catchy axiom,  don’t you find?  I assure you that the scientist who came up with it will be the second one up against the wall when my revolution comes.

Encouraged by some of my seditious and, frankly, disloyal female readership Jane has ordered a pair of “trainers” and they arrived today (Blog 68). They are called Reebok, so I suppose they are of South African origin and will provide her with a spring in every step. Pale grey-green in colour, they have a quick release mechanism on the front to facilitate easy removal. My observation that that was just like a pair of granny’s tartan slippers with zips up the front was not well received. Moreover, the worst has happened, and she has taken to walking out in public in her blue pumps. I walk ahead of her with the expression of a herald presaging the arrival of a serving dish of boiled Brussels sprouts. This and lockdown: what a challenge 2020 has become.

You  may recall the sad tale of my RAF Squadron Leader neighbour, locked in a Portacabin in Cyprus for two weeks without en-suite facilities, booze, Brylcreem, or a television because his wife had contracted CV19 here in the UK (Blog 66).  He is out of quarantine  now, but it seems his privations were even worse than initially reported: it transpires that the shower in his bathroom down the corridor was fed from a polythene bag warmed by a tepid Mediterranean winter sun and the lavatory was an outside arrangement.  If only he were back in the UK where I could empathise with him as one officer to another…Life would be so dull if the Royal Navy could not tease the RAF and vice versa.  His experience reminded me of my very first shipboard single cabin, which was in the aircraft carrier HMS CASSANDRA.  It was a bijou compartment, seven feet by five, located below the waterline.  It contained a high bunk with drawers and a pull-down bureau below, a wardrobe ten inches wide, a folding metal chair, a strip of carpet, a sliding door, and a corner washbasin.  It was what a cruise passenger today might call an inside cabin or, possibly, a broom cupboard. Compact and basic it may have been, but it was my mine, my own little domain for three years, and I was delighted as I took occupation on joining the ship.  I slept like a top on the first night and leapt out of the bunk the next day, ready for a wash, shave and a hearty breakfast.  I was brought up short when I turned to the sink.  Where were the taps?  I rubbed my eyes and looked again:  no, definitely no taps, just a stainless steel quarter basin.  I opened the little door in the cupboard under the basin to look at the plumbing, but there was no plumbing: no water supply, no drains, just a square copper can under the plughole to catch drained water.  At first I thought it might be a joke played on me by my fellow officers, but then I cottoned on to the reason: the cabin was below the waterline, so water could not run out of a drain into the sea in the normal way.  In the cabin flat there was a large utility sink used by the stewards and that drained to a sump that was emptied by a pump operated by a float switch.  In the 1940s, when CASSANDRA was designed, the plan would have been for my steward to bring me hot water in a large jug and to empty the drain-can, after I had used it, into the communal utility sink (very Downton Abbey); in the mid 1970s, when I was in the ship, that sort of service had long gone.  It turned out that, to use a bathroom or the heads, I had to don a towel and flip flops and make my way forward across the cabin flat, up two companionways, forward through two watertight compartments, then down another companionway to an officers’ bathroom.  It took the edge off my initial joy of my first cabin a bit, but fortunately a solution was found: I simply took over the cabin of the chap whom I was relieving, and that was high up under the flight deck, well above the waterline.  That cabin was the same size as the original and was also “inside”, but it had running water and the heads and bathroom were in the same cabin flat: luxury, once I became used to the smell of burnt aviation fuel and the thump and throb of aircraft landing on the flight deck above.

Aircraft carriers are big beasts, and the Royal Navy now has its biggest such vessels ever, though even they cannot match the behemoths of the USN.  At one time, and certainly in my career, the Royal Navy had several aircraft carriers and the two biggest, HMS ARK ROYAL and HMS EAGLE, provided long and sterling service for a combined total of nearly sixty years.  There was a young man of my specialisation who was appointed to HMS EAGLE as his first appointment after training and he relished the prospect of serving in such an prestigious vessel.  On the appropriate day, he donned his best uniform and duly repaired onboard at 0900, saluted the quarterdeck and identified himself.  He was a little disappointed to find that the ship was not expecting him: as a junior officer he did not exactly expect a guard and band to be paraded, but he did think the ship would be a little more efficient.  He showed the Officer of the Day his appointment letter and a light did dawn on the duty officer’s face.  A messenger was summoned and the keen young man was, at last, recognised and taken down to meet the Senior Engineer (Deputy Marine Engineer Officer in modern parlance), then the Head of Department, the Commander (E) (the Marine Engineer Officer).  Both senior officers were most apologetic for their failure to anticipate his arrival – the department had been very busy in the present maintenance period, they explained, but he would be very welcome as an addition to the team.  They had decided that the young man would be the Outside Machinery Officer and, after changing into overalls, he was given a quick tour of his forthcoming extensive department and its myriad compartments all over the ship. When that was finished it was lunchtime and he was taken into the wardroom to meet his mess mates before lunch.  They were all a jolly crowd in very good humour, and he could see that they were all going to get on famously over the next three years.  For his part, after a beer or two, he explained how proud he was to be joining them in EAGLE, for his father had served in her twenty years previously.
“Yes, she’s a fine ship”, said the Commander (E), “there’s no doubt about that and I’m sure you’ll enjoy your time onboard.”
“By the way”, he went on, “this is ARK ROYAL.  HMS EAGLE is moored just astern of us”.
They had rapidly conjured up an enormous hoax when the young officer’s mistake became apparent, and had tipped off the Commander (E) in HMS EAGLE that his new protégé would be a little late in joining.  ARK ROYAL gave him a good lunch and sent him on his way to his correct ship.  I am not sure if he ever lived it down.  All these flat tops look the same when close to, though I would have thought that the name HMS ARK ROYAL in large letters on the side of the gangway, and the ceremonial life ring on the jetty, would have been a give-away.  Apparently not.  Ah, the enthusiasm of youth.

I was waiting for Jane at the osteopath the other day (she can drive, but I felt like a change of scenery) and, as I idled away the time, I pondered on the psychology of car driving.  You must have done the same thing and wondered just what it was that changed a person’s personality after they climbed into a motor vehicle.  Why do some normally decent men become so boorish when they get behind the wheel of an Audi or BMW?  Why do white van drivers drive two feet from your bumper?  Why do perfectly competent women go to pieces when required to reverse their 4×4 back up a single track road?  Why do veterans of 1970 car rallies drive tiny cars and at a speed concomitant with a funeral cortège?  While some of these questions are answerable by logic (for example, White Van Man is on a tight schedule and wants you to be part of it), others defy explanation and I am sure there is an entire PhD thesis buried in there.  My mind moved on to the joys of driving and the fact that it is one of the few areas left in our world today where one can still exercise one’s prejudices.  I don’t mean nasty prejudices like those about race or sexuality, I mean the trivial yet pleasurable and satisfying ones.  A friend of mine once told me that, when he drove his father’s little Ford Fiesta, he had no trouble getting out of his housing estate onto the main road in the rush hour; yet when he drove his own BMW he had to wait ages and ages before someone let him into the traffic queue.  Odd that. 
Yes, we must enjoy these little triumphs while we can, before the woke and the politically correct ban them, like hugs and expressing one’s opinion in the privacy of one’s own home (the last is a proposed new law in Scotland).  
Concluding the motoring theme, I read a wonderful quotation in a book the other day about Audi drivers: 
“Audis: four zeros in front and another one behind the wheel”.  Excellent.

Oh, is that your BMW parked outside?   Fine vehicle, how does she handle?

Psychology and patterns of human behaviour feature highly in our lives, and this is inevitable in a world populated by humans. One perfect example of the predictability of human behaviour can be found in my experience with the PR appointment that I held with the Royal Navy (Blog 68). Our job was to present the case for having a Royal Navy to an invited audience of the Great and the Good (and, I dare say, a few of the Bad) in towns and cities throughout the country. It took the form of a joint presentation or lecture, illustrated by slides, by a Captain and a Lieutenant; it was followed by a Q&A session, with coffee and biscuits or a short modest cocktail party afterwards. The Captain would always have just completed an appointment as Commanding Officer of a warship and the Lieutenant would always be a woman, for obvious reasons; nowadays I expect that that last requirement would apply to the Captain too. We found that, no matter where the event was held, broadly the same questions came up every time and so we had a library of slides on those themes, which could be flashed up to illustrate the answer to the question. Ninety nine times out of a hundred this worked well, but very occasionally we were bowled a fast ball. One day the Captain was asked,
“What effect has the change in gauge on the trans Siberian railway had on the logistic support to the Russian fleet in Vladivostok?”
The Captain repeated the question to give himself time to think, then confessed that he had no idea, but he would find out. He asked the audience member to leave his details so that we could answer his query in due course and, back in the office, we passed the question up to the Ministry of Defence. We eventually received the answer and replied to our original questioner by letter. We could not see that question coming up again but, purely for thoroughness, we included a slide of a Russian train in our library. Several months later, the team was presenting in a totally different part of the country and the Q&A phase was well under way, with the same range of reasonably predictable questions. Our slick response was noticed by one particularly sceptical member of the audience who stood up and voiced the opinion that the questions were obviously planted, because we had the replies and accompanying slides off pat. The Captain assured the questioner that this was not the case, and explained how the questions always followed a predictable pattern.
“All right then”, said the questioner, “here’s one that I bet you can’t answer”. [You guessed it]
“What effect has the change in gauge on the trans Siberian railway had on the logistic support to the Russian fleet in Vladivostok?”
Up came a slide with the photograph of a Russian train and back came the the reply from the Captain.
“OK”, said the man in the audience, totally deflated. ”You win”. He sat down.
Believe it or not, this is a true story. Man: totally predictable (women, less so in my experience).

Following my attempt last week to break the monotony of lockdown by radical expeditions into sartorial standards, I thought I would try a different approach this week.  Jane had commented that we seemed to be getting up later and later, such that no sooner had the day started than it was dark again.  A little “idea bell” rang in my head: clearly, a change in our pattern of behaviour was called for and, after discussion, we resolved to get up earlier.    The next morning I woke at 0555.  Remembering our resolution of the previous day I slid out of bed, cleaned my teeth, and repaired downstairs to make the tea.  I placed the resulting oolong by her bedside and blew gently in her ear.
“Good morning, darling.  Ten degrees and raining”
She opened a bleary eye.
“It’s a bit dark.  What time is it?”
“0620.  You said we should get up earlier”
“Good God!   It’s not even daylight”
“Er, no.  Not as such.  Not for another hour and a half in fact”.
She groaned, but made no further comment.
We lay there companionably, me sipping my tea, she in a twilight world.  I twiddled my thumbs and pondered.
“Jane…as we’re awake and in bed anyway, I don’t suppose…”
“In your dreams, boy”.
She switched off her bedside light and rolled over.  Still, we did get up at 0700 and greeted the dawn in the breakfast room (aka the Garden Control Tower) as planned.  We then spent the rest of the day wondering what to do.

Roll on those vaccines.

27 November 2020.

Blog 68. Know Where You Stand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 November 2020