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

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.

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

“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock”. 
So wrote St Matthew nearly two thousand years ago, but it is still apt: it has rained cats and dogs all day, it is dark and windy outside, all the lights have had to stay on, the central heating is thrumming away and, by golly, are we glad we are not back onboard our boat.  We are confined to barracks, and very happy to be inside.

England is still in its second lockdown, but it is different from the first time.  For a start, the children are still at school and that makes the weekdays significantly quieter (“thank you God!”); secondly, the weather is worse as we descend into winter, making confinement indoors more common; and finally, I would say that people – particularly students at university – are becoming just a little bit more lax about the whole thing.  When I was in The Big City last week to visit the hospital life appeared to be almost normal: families were wandering the streets or enjoying the park, children were playing.  It was, as I have said in an earlier blog, as if we were in a national holiday not a national emergency.  Some people still make a significant effort to swerve around you, but most just keep a sensible distance.  All in all, I think we are all getting tired of the whole thing now.  Notwithstanding a recent peak in readings (which I think may be stray data) the number of daily positive outcomes to tests is finally starting to flatten off for the UK as a whole, though there are some regions (eg the Midlands) where the rate is still increasing.  The rate of daily deaths, while still increasing, has eased off and remains (thank heaven) at a much lower level that the number of positive tests.  As far as I can discover, the younger people represent the majority of those testing positive and are mainly recovering without hospitalisation; the older generation – those over, say, 70 – are the ones in hospital and, sometimes, dying.  Statistically, the number of deaths from CV19 in the UK yesterday was 462 and the graphical plot is following a perfectly symmetrical bath-tub curve with the declining deaths plotted from April and May; we are at about the same level of daily deaths as we were in mid May.  51,766 people have died from the virus to date, yielding a probability of it killing someone in the UK of 0.08%; this is still less than the number of people killed by Hong Kong flu in 1968 (80,000).  There have been 1,344,356 positive tests to date which, if we ignore the number of “false positives” in the tests yields a probability of catching Covid 19 in the UK of about 2%.  There is very positive news about a vaccine becoming available, though the prediction that it will be coming on line before Christmas seems highly optimist to me; the infrastructure is, however, gearing up for mass immunisation and volunteers are currently being sought to man the facilities, provide marshals and so on.  I gather that two separate vaccinations will be required and there are some unpleasant side-effects, so I daresay that will discourage many from seeking the jab.  I will certainly have it though, from asking around, it looks like I will be the only person in Britain who will!  I am hopeful that, after receiving the vaccination, I will be given a boiled sweet for being a good boy, and a distinctive badge that excuses me from wearing a face covering or indulging in social distancing (ever the optimist).

“And where, pray, do you think you are going?”
“Um, I thought I would just recategorise the screws in the workshop”
“You will not. Back inside. I’m not having that wound opened up again. Go and do the jigsaw”
So went the conversation last week when I attempted to leave the house for the garage/workshop. Jane is very much On The Case as my carer, and has no intention of allowing a repeat of my recent accident. It gives her something to focus her attention on, I suppose, and I see my very minor injury as a worthwhile sacrifice as a means of diverting Jane’s mind from her own troubles. For poor Jane’s leg is still playing up and this, along with the foul weather, has rather restricted her gardening and her exercise régime. She is, however, gaining some relief from my oily massages, delivered with just my left hand and now increased to once a day instead of once every other day. Many years ago we visited the zoo and I remember watching a tiger pacing back and forth across its compound, clearly very unhappy with its confinement. Well, that is what Jane is like now: she hates inactivity. Unfortunately, she can only walk without discomfort on the level and, as we do not live in Holland, that makes finding a good walking route difficult. We did manage a pleasant stroll along our nearby canal the other day and the autumn colours were beautiful in the rare sunshine; the only snag was that the rest of the Barsetshire population thought it was a good walking and cycling route too. Indoors, all our freezers are totally full with all the baking products and food that Jane has produced and she is now seeking new outlets. I dread where her energies will be directed next: painting the bathroom has been mentioned and (Oh no!) she has hinted at getting down the Christmas decorations from the loft. On the plus side, Jane had a telephoned consultation with a cardiologist last week and he has told her to stop taking the blood thinning tablets and beta blockers, pending a proper assessment of rhythmic heart data. Instead, she will have to carry a portable recording device to record the next heart “episode”, then download the data to the consultant for analysis. She has yet to receive the device and my suggestion that she will wear it round her neck like Twiki, the little robot in Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, was not well received. What did that robot keep saying again? “Biddybiddybiddy”, I seem to recall.

Now here is an interesting conundrum, a good discussion topic for when you hold your next dinner party. You have won the National Lottery: a not insubstantial amount, let us say £10 million. Would you give some of it to your friends? Most people would say ‘yes’ (though there may be the odd one who says, “stuff them, I’m off to the Bahamas”) and share their good fortune. The question then moves on to how much you would give each friend. Clearly this would depend on how many friends you have and how generous you feel, but let us say you decide to give them £10,000 each. And now we come to the crux of the conundrum: would you distribute the money equally, or according to need; how would you define “friend” as opposed to “acquaintance”; would you consider one friend to be an older or better friend than another? For example, it would seem unfair to give a large sum to a friend who is on a high salary or generous pension already and is very comfortably off, whereas another friend may be as poor as a church mouse and have a huge mortgage with few prospects after retirement. Difficult isn’t it? Overlaid on all this is another consideration: that the friends may think you have been stingy in your generosity: “He wins £10 million and all he can give me is a measly £10,000”. This last is analogous to you going into a pub after you have won the aforementioned lottery and deciding whether to buy everyone a drink: do so and some will think you are bragging and throwing your money about; fail to do so and some will say that you are a stingy so-and-so, tight with your new-found wealth. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I do not have the answer to any of these questions, but the topic does make you think and the thought process does pass the time on a wet day in lockdown. One thing I will reveal is that, if I did, perchance, win the National Lottery then I would not tell anyone, though I daresay it might be hard to keep it quiet after buying that fort in the English Channel.

I am as frustrated as Jane because I still only have one hand, so my usual pottering and woodworking has been curtailed, but I managed to rearrange my workshop the other day when Jane was out shopping (received a severe reprimand and was banished to the house again after she noticed blood on my dressing from the re-opened wound). My injury is coming along, though I still have to wear a polythene bag over my hand when showering to keep the dressing dry, which is a nuisance. I am on the third dressing now. I seem to have a lot of bad luck with my hands and they have collected a fair share of wounds and injuries. The series started with a car accident 48 years ago in which the windscreen and/or road shredded the tendons in my hand and left me with a permanently stiff finger (yep, same finger) and I have collected lacerations from Stanley knives, chisels, saws and turning gouges ever since, like trophies. My experience is as nothing however, compared to my best friend whom we will call Christian. His hand injuries (also gained from a car accident) left him with permanently mangled bones in his hand (though, mysteriously, it is fully functional) such that I refer to him as Hand Major, while I, with a mere stiff finger, am referred to as Hand Minor. Following his accident, Christian’s period in the Royal Naval Hospital, Stonehouse, in Plymouth provided his friends and me with hours of evening entertainment. He lay there in his bed with his hand held upright in what appeared to be a lobster pot while we, ostensibly there to cheer him up, indulged ourselves in chatting up the many nurses in the Sick Officers’ Block. Periodically, he would make a pitiful groan in an attempt to regain our attention and some sympathy, but we just ignored him most of the time. As Christian’s recovery progressed and he was allowed out of bed, a young man’s restlessness reasserted itself and he allied himself with a Royal Marine officer, who was also recovering from something (saving the world, probably), and the two of them started to make mischief. They had acquired a couple of enormous syringes (I dread to think what their true function was) and found that they made excellent water pistols. At first, they deployed them from the Sick Officer’s Block lift, lowering it between floors and squirting water through the lattice lift gate up the skirts of nurses walking past on the upper floor. They then moved on to attacking their visitors. One afternoon another friend and I were leaving the Block after a visit and were soaked by Christian and his bootneck chum firing their syringes from the conservatory on the first floor. Well, we weren’t having any of that so we stomped back into the Sick Officers’ Block and up the stairs in pursuit of the “invalids” who (giggling like a couple of schoolboys) scuttled into Christian’s room and barricaded the door We were rattling the doorknob and suffering verbal insults from the other side when along the corridor came a delightful little Staff Nurse in her nice starched uniform and black stockings (very attractive as I recall). She addressed us thus:
“I presume you are officers”.
With a modest swagger and a gesture towards the single gold stripe on our cuffs, we confirmed that we were.
“Then kindly behave like officers! This is a hospital!”
We retired rapidly with our tails between our legs. As we descended the stairs we could hear her try the doorknob on Christian’s room.
“Open this door!”
“Root! Nadgers!” and similar insults came from behind the door.
“Open this door AT ONCE”, she said.
“Oops, sorry Staff…” came from behind the door, along with the sound of moving barricaded furniture.
We did not stop to hear the rest.
One of the many qualities by which we used to judge officers was “presence”: the ability to command respect and to be an effective leader. That Staff Nurse definitely had it, and she scared the pants off me. I never did manage to get her telephone number or discover her name. The difference between the Royal Navy and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

As a footnote, Christian aka Hand Major, recovered fully and went on to be a full Captain in the Royal Navy, a much deserved promotion, the ratbag.

Promotion and success in life or a career are interesting topics and not necessarily the same thing.  I was musing on this the other day, for no other reason other than that I had nothing to do except ponder on Life, the Universe, and Everything (as the author Douglas Adams would have it).  Quite a few years ago I was chatting to my late mother and I commented, philosophically, that I had enjoyed my career, but that I hoped I had not disappointed her and my father by not making promotion to Commander.
“You did better than we thought you would, hinny”,was her forthright Tyneside reply. “When you joined the Navy we all reckoned you would be back home in three days”.

Do you know, after all these years I still don’t know if that was a compliment or not?

14 November 2020

The sign said, “Accident & Emergency Department “.  It might have had, added underneath, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Herein”, but I didn’t need to be told that.  Like anyone in Britain with any common sense, I avoid the place like the plague and can never understand why one hears of people going in there for a paracetamol, a plaster or a sanitary towel (but, apparently, they do).  On this occasion I had little alternative.  Yes, it was my turn for The Emergency, Jane having exhausted her ration until the end of the year.  

I had been extending an articulated metal ladder that folds into a ‘W’ shape, but opens out like a Transformer to form a range of useful configurations.  It can be a little unwieldy and heavy, and the securing mechanism is fiddly; but opening it up can be done by one man if the one man is careful, or by a man and his wife if he is wise.  I tried the former, the memsahib appearing on the scene with a remonstration on her lips for not waiting for her, just in time to watch the action.  Two sections of the heavy ladder came together like a pair of scissors, trapping my right hand in the jamb with a leverage of about four feet, thus acting like a pair of bolt cutters on my right forefinger.  I immediately contributed to the proceedings by screaming, bleeding copiously, turning white, breaking out into a sweat and sitting down.  My finger was cut to the bone though, thankfully, it was still attached to my hand.  It was lucky that Jane was there for she did a good job at bandaging it up and stopping the bleeding.  We then had to consider what to do next.  Judging from the depth and raggedness of the wound I thought it might need a stitch or two, but I was also concerned that I might have damaged a tendon or a nerve, noting that my finger tip had lost all feeling.  In normal times I would have gone to the local cottage hospital Minor Injuries Unit and asked a nurse to give an opinion but, in these Covid times, I had to call 111 first to get an appointment.  I tried that.  They took down the details and said that a paramedic would call me back in half an hour but, if this did not happen, then to just go to A&E at the hospital in The Big City.  I waited for three quarters of an hour but no-one called so there was nothing for it but for Jane to drive me to the one place I really wanted to avoid.  To be fair, the triage process was reasonably swift: perhaps ten minutes after arrival, and I was given a quick X Ray.  After that I waited, and waited, along with about seven other people, all of us sitting in chairs set two metres apart.  New patients entered and old patients departed, changing the mix in the waiting room like a flooding and ebbing tide, but the number of people in the waiting room stayed the same, with only me as the permanent resident.  Entertainment was provided, at one stage, by a farmer with a broad Somerset accent talking loudly on his mobile phone to his friend and outlining the state of his catheter, the colour of his urine, and the health of his pigs.  I supplemented this pastime by reading, and bleeding on, an improving book that I had had the foresight to bring along. Rule Number One in the Shacklepin Book of Wisdom: always take a thick book if going to A&E for you will never be turned round in less that two hours; Rule Number Two: if on a weekend evening, then take two books.  Jane had, in the meantime, taken the car to a nearby park to wait – ever the hopeful.  After an hour I texted her to just go home and await my call.  The triage process had evidently worked well and I must have been Priority 9 (just under Priority 10 – “time waster”), for I was finally seen by a lugubrious nurse after just over three hours.  And the outcome? Nothing wrong with bone, tendons or nerves; a deep cut or crushing injury; wound washed fairly brutally with plain water; no stitches applied (“we don’t stitch fingers – they heal themselves”); finger dressing applied; no injections, no painkillers; out of the door in five minutes. Four hours out of my life and an improving book soaked in blood all for a cut finger.  If only I could have asked someone at the very beginning if the wound was serious.  Hey ho, I had no real plans for Friday afternoon anyway.

I am a bit late with this blog because I have been holding back in order to include the result of the US presidential election.  After a closely-fought contest it looks like Mr Joe Biden will be the next president of the USA and Ms Kamela Harris will be the next Vice President, though President Trump is contesting the result and will probably have to be prised out of the White House with a winkle pick.  I would guess that a lot of people in the USA will be quietly pleased with the result (which was not a landslide victory), while there may also be a significant number of people not very pleased at all.  I only hope, for the sake of that country, that this brings an end to a long period of politically-based in-fighting and nastiness that has characterised the present administration: it is time for Americans to come together again as one nation.

Before the CV19 crisis (remember that time?) we had my American cousin coming to stay for the first time, and she and her husband had not visited the UK before. Courageously, they were going to hire a car and tour parts of England after visiting us. I pondered on what advice to give them apart from telling them to drive on the left and how to negotiate single track roads when meeting a tractor coming the other way. In the end, I opted to lead the long list of advice with the thing that struck me as the most unusual piece of social behaviour that I had noticed when Jane and I had visited Wisconsin a few years ago: do not tip the barman. It seems that, in the USA it is common to slip the barman an additional dollar (probably more now) when paying for every drink. One is also expected to leave a substantial tip (perhaps 20%) for a waiter or waitress in a restaurant. It seems that catering staff over there are poorly paid and have to supplement their wages with tips. I wanted to explain to my cousin that, under no circumstances should she tip a barman or barmaid in Britain though one could, if pushed, offer to buy them a drink; restaurant staff could be tipped 10% or (extravagantly) 15% if service had been particularly good, but it was not obligatory; taxi fares could be rounded up to the nearest pound if feeling flush but, again, it was not expected. The Americans must simply love we British as customers in restaurants and bars, for we either do not tip or are not as generous as Americans. It is, of course, not stinginess, but ignorance on our part. I did read of one case in New York where a British customer was actually chased in the street by a waiter from a restaurant demanding, “Where is my God-damned tip?”. So this is my tip: if you are American in Britain, don’t tip a barman or barmaid (you will give them airs and graces); if you are British in America, then be generous.

Jane has advised me to (a) stop complaining about Covid 19, (b) stop moaning about facemasks and (c) stick to just the facts. So here they are. Against all my expectations, England has entered a second national lockdown period on 5 November that will last (allegedly) until 2 December. The move was taken because the number of positive outcomes to CV19 testing was increasing, as was the number of deaths, and it was considered that the Regional Tier System was not proving effective enough. It has since been revealed that the projected number of cases used to support the need for a national lockdown was overestimated by a factor of four, and that the Tier System had, in fact, started to produce a downturn in cases, but the lockdown has gone ahead anyway. Joy. As I write, a research study by King’s College in London reports that the number of positive outcomes to tests is levelling off, as is the number of deaths for the UK. The daily figure for UK deaths stands, today, at 156. Our neighbour, a paramedic aged in her mid 40s, came down with Covid 19 last week despite wearing full PPE including the ubiquitous face masks; she was quite ill at home for a week, but has now recovered and her family were, fortunately, unaffected though they had to self-isolate for two weeks. In some ways she fared better in terms of comfort than her husband, a Squadron Leader in the RAF. Although tested negative, he was confined for two weeks in a tiny cell in a Portacabin on the RAF base in Cyprus with no TV, no en suite facilities, no booze and his food served on a paper plate with disposable cutlery . I dare say they gave him the RAF Handbook (if there is one) to read. He was not happy. No witty comments by RN readers about the RAF and their home comforts please.

I have commented before about the Service way of life and the discipline that goes with it. If you have served since leaving school, as I did, then you think nothing of the constraints that serving in the armed forces impose; there are, after all, many perks too. I was chatting to a Chief Officer in the Merchant Navy many years ago and he opined how much easier it was for officers in the Royal Navy to deal with ratings backed up, as they were, by Queen’s Regulations; Merchant Navy officers had a harder job and had to lead by strong character and persuasion (in my father’s time, by fists too). He was right in the final analysis but, as I pointed out to him, we in the Royal Navy rarely had to use the ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’ to enforce an order and we gave orders pretty much the same as he did: a ship’s complement is, literally, “all of one company” and officers and ratings usually get on very well together in mutual respect as shipmates (Royal Navy warships never have a ‘crew’; they have a ‘Ship’s Company’). But the “iron fist” is still there. At a prominent place in every British warship (usually where the ship’s company queues for the Dining Hall) is published a large notice, perhaps one metre square, containing the Articles of War and setting out the basis of naval discipline eg “Any officer or man who strikes a Superior Officer shall suffer death, or any worse punishment”, that sort of thing. Nowadays it will say “man or woman”, of course. Despite this prominent reminder, it is easy to forget in the relaxed navy of late 20th and early 21st centuries that the Naval Discipline Act does exist, and this happened to four of my very senior Chief Petty Officers in my last steamer, HMS NONSUCH. The ship was emerging from a very long refit and the critical milestone of Ship’s Company Move Onboard was approaching The very senior Chief Petty Officers (equivalent to Warrant Officer 2nd Class) would be accommodated in 4-berth cabins and the task of deciding who would be allocated to which cabins was given to the Master at Arms (MAA). The MAA is the ship’s policeman, the senior of all ratings onboard, and the only rating in a warship to have his own single cabin. It just so happened that the MAA’s allocation of which Chief Petty Officers would go into which cabin did not meet my Chiefs’ approval: they wanted to be together and in a prime spot with a scuttle (porthole) appropriate to their seniority. So they stomped off, together, to the MAA’s cabin to complain. As they started to grumble to him mightily, he interrupted with just one sentence:
“If you approach me as a body to complain like this then I will charge you with mutiny”

It stopped them dead.

They had to go off up the corridor and return, individually, each in turn, to make their complaint.  Complaints or grievances can only be made individually, and two or more people complaining, fermenting trouble or defying an order is classed as mutiny; it is an extremely serious offence leading to Court Martial and, if found guilty, imprisonment.
Now you may say the the MAA was going a bit over the top in his response, but it certainly established his authority in NONSUCH (the word went round like wildfire) and shut the mouths of my Chief Petty Officers like a scene from a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

We managed a quick day trip to the boat just before lockdown was implemented, the aim being to check out the dehumidifiers, shut the seacocks and generally see that she was all right for her long period ashore on the chocks.  Work had started to remove the antifouling (the paint on the boat’s bottom) and some structural defects had been identified for later rectification.  Some of the new marina pontoons were in place and extended, it seemed to me, as far as the Channel Islands but I may be indulging in hyperbole there.  It was a beautiful sunny day but it was a long one, starting in freezing fog at 0600; we were quite shattered by the time we returned home in the evening.  Oh dear, we are getting old: at one time I never thought twice about driving for ten hours non-stop when going on leave, or staying up for 48 hours to supervise a defect repair at sea; now I am fagged out after an early start and just a twelve-hour day.  Tempus fugit.

I came across a box in the utility room the other day and found inside, to my delight, my old pipe.  I occasionally smoked a pipe in my younger days to produce a mature image based on Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck, the affectation being additionally useful as a pointer to indicate strategically significant places on a chart or unusual readings on a gauge.  I smoked either the RN-issue best shag (in those days the navy issued us with a monthly ration of free tobacco) or, later, Clan aromatic Dutch tobacco.  I liked to think that I cut an authoritative avuncular figure, though my fellow watch-keepers apparently did not agree with my choice of aromatic tobacco (they claimed it smelled like camel dung) and once sabotaged the pipe by stuffing it with a crumpled machinery log sheet when I was absent from the Machinery Control Room on rounds.  Anyway, to get back to the present, I seized the old pipe lovingly and rummaged hopefully for any left-over tobacco from 40 years ago, though to no avail. Undeterred, I strutted  around the kitchen with the empty pipe in my mouth, reliving those heady younger days while safe in genuine maturity and posing, once more, as the father figure of the 1950s.  This nostalgia lasted until Jane returned from shopping and took one look at me.
“Get that twitty thing out of your mouth.  You look ridiculous”
I confess I was a little hurt.  I thought I was cutting quite a dash.  And, as I pointed out to her, would we consider “twitty” to be a proper adjective?
“You still look like a twit”
“So if I bought some Clan and undertook to smoke it only outside, would that be acceptable?”
“No.  Throw it out”
I put her reply down as a “maybe”, but hid the pipe back in its box.  Yet another avenue of pleasure that has been closed off to me, along with wearing my Cunard Platinum Member badge and running a sea trial with that plastic submarine from the packet of cornflakes.  Life is hard but I still have the Lockdown Jigsaw to do and can play on this duff hand for all it is worth.  Oh dear, it’s bleeding again.  It must be all that typing.  Must go before the keyboard gets bunged up.

8 November 2020

Saints be praised, my ship has come in. I am required, officially, to give Jane a massage every other day using warm oil. I chortled with glee and flexed my fingers when she gave me the news. Whoopee!
“Don’t get any ideas, matey”, she said, fixing me with a basilisk eye.
“Heavens no, my dear. I shall be professional and disinterested throughout”, I said, gazing at her innocently with my baby blue eyes. She looked at me warily. I think she would wear a body stocking for the evolution if she could but, alas, the area requiring massage is her left thigh. After she imparted the news I considered the wide range of oils available, some with a marine engineering background to add that extra frisson of excitement efficacy: OEP69 for the extreme pressure? OMD113 for its detergent properties? Or simple Castrol GTX for a sporty flavour? She scotched my tribological ambitions in very short time: ordinary sunflower oil would, apparently, be perfectly adequate, but she intended to use, instead, argan oil from the Argania spinosa of south west Morocco; we just happened to have a bottle of it (as you do).

This new and exciting development in our mundane lives has emerged from a problem with Jane’s left leg, which – for quite some time – had been giving her pain when she walked, particularly when climbing uphill. She is being treated by our osteopath, an extremely capable practitioner who has also treated the England football team when not fixing Jane, and it was he who had prescribed the oily massage, along with some special exercises involving elastic bands that I am not permitted to describe to you: indeed, I am banned from the room when she is doing them, such is their provocative nature. It transpires that, paradoxically, Jane has been walking too much and too far: those nine-mile hikes in hilly Devonshire have done her no good at all and she has to take things a little easier for the moment. And as for that massage: why, it is a win/win situation for she gets a better leg and I get stronger fingers and the best laugh I have had for a long time. Right, my dear [cracking his knuckles], get your kit off and lie down. Now, I’m not going to hurt you…

Our clocks went back this week and we are now back on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is the correct natural time for Britain or, strictly speaking, those parts of Britain that lie on the Greenwich Meridian (zero degrees of longitude). At noon GMT on the Greenwich Meridian, the sun is at its highest point in the sky; after that time it starts to descend towards sunset. This is how navigators at sea calculated their longitude in the days before GPS (entering lecture mode here, pay attention). They carried a very accurate clock, called a chronometer, that remained set on GMT and they noted the time from it when the sun locally was at its highest in the sky (ie local noon). They measured the height of the sun (or, to be more accurate, the angle between the sun and the horizon) using a sextant. The time difference between noon at Greenwich (1200) and the time locally when the sun was at its highest (read from the chronometer) was then used to calculate the longitude because there are 15 degrees of longitude for every hour of time difference from Greenwich (24 hours in a day equating to 360 degrees in the earth’s rotation). The requirement for a highly accurate chronometer in this process is axiomatic, and achieving that goal historically is another story. I will not burden you with how to calculate latitude; I have probably tortured your mind quite enough, even supposing you got this far. I mention all this because, over my lifetime, the term “GMT” to define time has gone out of fashion; the preferred term now is “UTC” (Universal Coordinated Time), a time calculated by precise atomic clock based on the Earth’s rotation. I rather suspect that UTC is preferred now because the French hate any international standard that is based on English history, but that is just a scurrilous suspicion. I will stick with GMT, just as I will stick with AD and BC to describe dates rather than the trendy CE and BCE, woke terms introduced to avoid perceived offence to non-Christians. These traditional terms have been established for centuries, some for millennia, and I see no reason to change them now.

Time is interesting.  Einstein wrote an entire theory based on it (you will be relieved to know that I have no intention of describing it here).  Time can go slowly – such as on a wet Easter Sunday in Wales, or fast – such as after you reach the age of 60.  Time in Britain used to be measured locally, based originally on the sun, but later on the local church clock.  The church clocks in, say, Penzance, would strike noon about 22 minutes after the church clocks in London because they were farther west.   In Britain it was only the coming of the railways in the mid 19th century that standardised the time for the whole country into one time zone, and this was so that a proper railway timetable could be published.  The standardised time for the United Kingdom was initially viewed with great suspicion by the lesser educated, for it was believed that the government was stealing their time.  Arguments about our time continue to this day and scarcely a year goes by without someone complaining about the whole concept of moving from GMT to British Summer Time (BST) in the spring and back again in the late autumn.  This idea of Daylight Saving was first mooted by the American Benjamin Franklin in the late 18th century, but Germany was the first country to adopt the measure, during WW1. The United Kingdom followed suit when that war ended and, of course, many countries use Daylight Saving today.    In Britain, Double British Summer Time was used during WW2 (to increase war production) and a trial was undertaken in the late 1960s/early 1970s in which BST was maintained for winter as well as summer.  The latter trial produced inconclusive results and was abandoned.  So here we are in 2020, still arguing about whether Daylight Saving is necessary over one hundred years since it was adopted.  I suppose it makes a change from moaning about Covid 19.

Now: would you like me to explain how it is possible to over-lag a pipe? No? It’s very interesting…Another time perhaps.

The British are not good at complaining.  That is a very bold generalisation, but I think it is fair comment when one compares us to, say, Americans, who set the bar high and have a reputation for being very exacting in the level of service they expect for their money.  For example, tolerating poor food or service in restaurants is not uncommon in Britain:
“Everything all right here?”, asks the hotelier Basil Fawlty in his restaurant.
“Oh yes, lovely, thank you Mr Fawlty”, is the reply despite the meat being cold and as tough as old boots
Sadly, I fit the mould perfectly in this regard though, in my defence and the defence of my fellow countrymen, I take the view that it is not my job, as the customer, to act as the Quality Assurance Manager for a restaurant: if I get a bad meal then I simply tell all my friends about it and make sure that I do not return.  That is the British approach on the whole, though I do have some friends who are very tactful and fair in drawing management’s attention to shortfalls in service.  I have complained about food and service from time to time, but I have found that complaining only results, at best, in a delayed meal with the diners’ courses out of sync or getting cold while the defective dish is replaced or (rarely), at worst, in bad feeling and an upset stomach if the complaint has not been well received.   There is also the risk that the chef may spit in your food.  This reluctance to complain applies to other faulty products too and I tend to get Jane to take products back if they prove defective.  This is not because I am a wimp (though I am), but because by the time I have built up the pressure to complain I usually have become so angry that there is a risk of me losing my temper.  Like the Incredible Hulk, I am not likeable when I am angry.  Angry people sometimes say things that they should not say.  

An example of that little homily occurred several years ago; this is a longish story, by the way, but bear with me while I relate the salutary tale as there is a lesson to be learnt therein. I had decided to buy some new ink cartridges for my fountain pen (I normally fill the pen from an ink bottle; this was a rare, and not repeated, venture into modernity). At lunchtime I drove down to the centre of Bath (where I worked at the time) and visited WH Smith, the stationers. There, I scoured the shelves and finally found the correct ink cartridges for my Waterman fountain pen, bought them, and returned to work. Those readers who can remember, or may still have, a fountain pen will recall that an ink cartridge is about two inches long and is tapered at one end in the shape of a bullet, the ‘nib’ end being the narrow bit. Back at my desk, try as I might, I could not get the cartridges to fit my pen: the ‘nib’ end was too narrow. This was most annoying, but I decided that it was a consequence of my foolishly buying the product off the shelf from a general stationer’s instead of from a specialist pen supplier. It just so happened that, in Bath at that time, there was an excellent purveyor of pens and high-class stationery called Woods: the sort of place in which I could spend hours just looking at the pens, the propelling pencils, the bottles of green Stephens’ ink, the Filofaxes and the Basildon Bond writing paper. The staff in Woods spoke in hushed tones and wore brown dust coats, like doctors or pharmacists but at a more artisan level, and this garb added credibility to their expertise and authority. The next day I drove into Bath again, entered Woods, and approached one of these savants. I explained the situation and asked, could she help?
“Of course, sir”.
She presented me with the correct cartridges. I looked at them. They looked suspiciously like the ones I already had. I asked, was she absolutely certain that these were the correct ones for a Waterman fountain pen?
“Definitely”, she said.
So I bought them (at a price greater than the ones in WH Smith) and returned to work. I tried them in the pen. Yet again, the narrow ‘nib’ end was too small for the pen. Now I was getting annoyed: that was two fruitless trips into Bath in my lunch hour. Uncharacteristically, I immediately leapt into my car and drove back to Woods, this time taking the fountain pen and cartridges with me. I approached the woman who had sold me the cartridges an hour before and introduced myself. She remembered me. I did not lose my temper exactly, but (shall we say) I was not my normal happy cheerful self. I said firmly,
“You sold me these cartridges and assured me, twice, that they were the correct cartridges for this Waterman pen”. I held up a cartridge and the pen for her scrutiny.
“That is correct, sir. Those are the correct cartridges”.
I unscrewed the pen.
“Well, I am a Chartered Engineer”, I said, ”and I defy you to fit that cartridge into this pen”. I cannot recall if I snapped my fingers at this point, but the sentiment was there.
“Certainly, sir”, she said.
She took the cartridge, reversed it from the way I held it and inserted the larger, blunt end of the cartridge successfully into the pen.
“Ah. Well, thank you very much”, I said meekly. And crawled out under the door.
I revisited Bath quite some time ago and I noticed that Woods had closed after over a hundred years of service. But I still experienced a flush of embarrassment as I walked past the building. Not my finest hour, perhaps, but I learned from it: far easier to get Jane to take things back if they are faulty. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

We are still in the “second wave” of CV19 infections and the total deaths that were reported yesterday, as I write, stood at 310 for the whole UK. At one point it looked like the death rate might have been levelling off, but that does not now seem quite so likely. At least the rate of daily deaths is not as bad as it was in April. Those component countries of the UK that have their own governments or assemblies have revelled in their new-found autonomy from central government and have fallen over themselves to adopt different approaches to the problem. Entirely as I predicted in my last blog, Scotland has upped the ante on epidemic states (“I see your three Tiers and raise you five”); Wales has gone into a total lockdown (referred to as a “firebreak”, just to be different) and has banned the sale of “non essential items” such as clothes and books, while allowing the sale of alcohol; Northern Ireland has yet another version of restrictions. England is still tackling the problem regionally, with Greater Manchester, Liverpool, South Yorkshire and areas of Lancashire among those parts at the highest level of restrictions, Tier 3. The term “circuit-breaker” is replacing the term “lockdown” and I am sure that will help enormously. There is a strong possibility that a vaccine may be available by Christmas, which is good news, but I am puzzled by the number of people who have said they would not have it. Heck, I would piddle on a carburettor if it would help us to get out of the present restrictions.

“Don’t you know there’s a war on?”. So went the common refrain eighty years ago whenever anyone complained about service or the absence of goods in the shops. Someone must have rummaged in the archives, dug the phrase out, and repackaged it for Covid 19: “Don’t you know we’re fighting a virus?”. The current epidemic is being used as an excuse for every inefficiency and occurrence of poor service going, and no-one seems to challenge it. Go on almost any website providing a service such as a bank, an insurance company or the local authority and the warning is there somewhere: expect delays. Even Eurostar tried to use Covid as an excuse for not providing WiFi in some of its rail carriages recently. While some private companies have overcome the difficulties of the present situation by innovation, the ubiquitous use of Perspex or by manning telephones from home, others, and many public bodies, have just thrown up their hands and shut down their service: all too difficult. Yet, you know, throughout this seven-month epidemic the lights have stayed on, the water has flowed, the gas has lit, the bins have been emptied, the shops have been manned, and Amazon has managed next-day delivery. On top of this the medical and emergency services have saved lives, arrested criminals, put out fires and rescued mariners. My point is that, if these stalwart people can go out there and do their job in contact with the public for seven months, then there is no excuse for office-based people on the end of a telephone or computer terminal not being able to provide a service. This epidemic has become an excuse for laziness, risk avoidance and a lack of innovation. Hrrmph.

I outlined in my last blog (Blog 64) the tragic events surrounding the run up to D-Day in South Devonshire and, since then, I have read an extract from a leaflet issued to American servicemen to help them integrate with their host country. It was well-written and most illuminating, particularly the annex that listed the different meanings of words in American and English. Along with the rest of my generation I was brought up watching Broderick Crawford and Clayton Moore on the television, so many differences were already known to me, but it is educational to realise that, back in 1941, the American way of life was still something of a mystery to the British. For example, several older Devonshire natives had never seen a black man before and were fascinated by black US soldiers and sailors. Some of the terms that we British used then were new to me and, clearly, some of our words have gone the way of time. I noticed that the US leaflet did not address some of the more potentially embarrassing misunderstandings that could arise: “I’m just popping out for a fag” or “Can anyone lend me a rubber?” must surely have caused some incredulity among the GIs. Thanks to films and television, we in Britain are a lot more familiar with the American way of life now, though some aspects can still surprise us. I remember when a bunch of my Chief Petty Officers went for a run ashore in Mayport, Florida, consumed a certain amount of that stuff that made Milwaukee famous and, hiccuping quietly, took a taxi back to the ship, four of them sitting in the back. The taxi was pulled over by a traffic policeman for some misdemeanour or other and the policeman was giving the driver a serious talking to.
“But he was only…” interrupted one of my Chiefs in the driver’s defence.
The policeman put his hand on the butt of his revolver.
“Shut up Limey!”
According to the account given to me, you have never seen four senior ratings close their mouths so fast. We don’t tend to get that sort of robust response from the British bobby, on the whole.

Oh dear, I am in deep doo dah. The memsahib has just appeared in the doorway with a stern look and clutching an item of ladies’ underwear and a floor duster. My initial elation that a new and exciting diversion might be in store was dispelled when she explained her meaning. It seems she has discovered that I have been laundering her knickers, camisoles and other smalls in the same batch as the washable floor mops and dusters. I had applied that well-known psychological principle of “what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over”, which has worked well for me in the past. Unfortunately, I had failed to take account of Little Miss Pinkerton, she of The Eye That Never Sleeps: put succinctly, her wide-awake eye had seen. This came about because (as I pointed out to her) she had interfered in my part of ship, namely Dhobying, by transferring the latest batch of washing from the washing machine to the tumble dryer while I was occupied elsewhere; in the process she had discovered the extraneous items in the mix. During the lengthy dressing-down that followed, real or imagined historical occurrences of sawdust and grit in her brassieres, knickers and tights were mentioned, together with all manner of unexplained rashes and itches. I was told, in no uncertain terms, to desist from the practice of mixing household and personal laundry forthwith. Aye, aye sir ma’am. Phew, lucky she didn’t see how I cleaned those mooring warps taken from the boat.

Life goes on here in Barsetshire and we have adjusted back to life ashore, seamlessly. Jane is either gardening, cooking or baking cakes and I am either buying new gadgets or making model ships. It is all rather mundane, of course, and our expeditions into the wastes of the Great British Countryside have had to be curtailed because of Jane’s poorly leg, but we are content. Following the practice of some friends of ours we have decided to Go Out For a Drive two days a week, and visit different towns or cities. I am just a little bit worried that we are turning into our parents and emulating their behaviour in the 1960s (we are already using their phraseology), but we cannot stay at home every day or we will get cabin fever. When the clocks went back Jane commented that we would get a lie-in the next day and it would be like a holiday. I told her,
“Honey, for us every day is a holiday”.
We have good friends, good health, good food and are spending our son’s inheritance. What more could you ask?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think Jane is ready for a little heated oil therapy. Oh, and remember children what the grown-ups are telling us: face, hands, knees and bumps-a-daisy.

29 October 2020

As I attacked the sixth pair of trousers with the steam iron, I reflected that maybe, just maybe, it had not been such a good idea to strip the boat of all our items of clothing for the duration of her period ashore. In the past we haven’t bothered, simply relying on the onboard dehumidifier to protect our gear from damp and mildew for the winter; and, indeed, that had worked for sixteen years or so, the only exception being when we had had a berth that had no shore power. But this time, for no strong reason, we had decided to make a clean sweep, and what a trawl the resulting clear-out was: it filled an entire large suitcase and overflowed into the many huge canvas sacks that we normally use for transporting shopping and dunnage. We were astonished. All boats are limited on stowage space and ours is no exception. There are no drawers, just lockers and a few shelves, so clothes tend to get rolled up and simply crammed in using the haemorrhoid system. Items get added for some special occasion such as a celebratory run ashore but then, mysteriously, are never taken home again; extra underwear and socks are brought onboard in case of an unplanned immersion or an unexpected cold spell – and remain there. Why on Earth did Jane have six pairs of shoes onboard? Why did I have three dress shirts, one with double cuffs and cufflinks, and four pairs of smart trousers? When we turned out the suitcase back home there were so many pairs of socks and items of underwear that we could not cram them into the drawers in our bedroom and it dawned on me that we had, in effect, created a second home with duplicate items of everything. And all of it appeared to be in the ironing basket. I turned to the next item in the enormous pile: a pair of Jane’s flannelette pyjamas, worn only on the boat. As if by magic, a voice spoke from the hall,
“When you come to my pyjamas could you iron them please? The fabric is a bit rough otherwise”
Now who irons pyjamas? Still, her wish is my command and I pride myself in providing a comprehensive service. I reached for the spray starch; does one put the crease down the front of the trousers like a pair of slacks, or across the seams, like a pair of jeans? I opted for the latter, pyjamas being informal attire. I must say, the resultant package looked very smart when I had folded the ensemble into a crisp, neat, exact square with sharp starched creases down the jacket, as taught at Dartmouth. I wonder if she will notice? Probably not. And now for that brassiere: pass me that starch.

Onboard ship we had a ship’s laundry, usually a tiny compartment containing a range of industrial laundry equipment and manned by The Chinese Laundrymen.  This small band of Hong Kong Chinese toiled away in their cramped steamy den twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, rarely venturing out except to collect food or use the heads or bathroom.  They lived, worked and slept in there and only communicated with the rest of the ship through No 1 Boy, the head laundryman.  Of course they charged fees for their work: they operated as a private company and were not slaves; but they kept themselves to themselves and worked like Trojans.  I was the Laundry Officer in one ship, but even I had to consult the personnel files to remind myself how many laundrymen there were (about six in a frigate).  I dealt with Mr Tow, No 1 Boy. As Laundry Officer I received free laundry, but presented Mr Tow with a thick bundle of new £10 notes (as was custom) every Chinese New Year.  By golly, how those men worked and their product was always immaculate.  In the tropics, my white shorts and dress uniform could stand up on their own, so good was the starching.  Having Hong Kong Chinese onboard in a private capacity was a legacy of empire, I suppose.  When I was a Midshipman in 1970/71 my ship also had a Chinese cobbler and a Chinese tailor.  The former would run up a bespoke pair of boots or shoes in a week or so, based on a traced footprint; the latter could run up a suit or uniform in no time.  Both were ridiculously cheap.  As far as I know, no ship has these artisans any more and I am not sure about the Chinese laundrymen either, now that Hong Kong has returned to being part of the PRC.

Provision was always made in a ship’s complement for manning the laundry, just as provision had to be made for other communal tasks such as internal cleaning, washing-up and so on. There was no branch borne solely for these menial tasks though stewards looked after officers’ accommodation and waited at table in the wardroom. Instead, every department had to provide a number of hands for communal tasks on a rotational basis under the principle of “all of one company”. Describing this process could involve consequences in certain circumstances, as happened to a friend of mine, whom we will call Fred. Fred had been promoted from being a Chief Artificer (what is now, in the 21st century navy, a senior technician ) and was a Special Duties, or SD, Officer: an obsolete branch which, at the time, filled an essential role in providing specialised, though narrow, expertise in a particular subject such as engineering, seamanship or whatever. We were serving in an aircraft carrier and it was the Captain’s custom to write, every six months, to the parents of Juniors (ratings under the age of 18) to give them an update on their sons’ progress. Of course, these letters were drafted by the ratings’ Divisional Officers and the drafts (in longhand in those days) would pass through several iterations as they transited through various levels of command on their way to the Captain for typing and his signature. It just so happens that one of Fred’s men was a Junior Mechanic who was working as part of the ship’s Dining Hall Party, so when Fred drafted the Captain’s letter, he wrote something like,
“…your son is employed in the ship’s Dining Hall Party, a communal task which everyone has to do from time to time, but he will soon be returning to his engineering duties and training…”
and duly sent the draft up the line for approval.
Now, the way paperwork is done in the Royal Navy is that correspondence or drafts such as I have mentioned are placed in a file or pack and the pack is circulated to relevant officers. Each officer comments on the correspondence as a minute on a facing sheet of paper, starting with “By First Lieutenant”, or whatever their title was, and ending with the date and their initials. The exceptions to this “top and tailing” of minutes were the First Sea Lord, Flag Officers and Commanding Officers (= The Captain) who, instead, just wrote their minute anonymously in coloured ink: the First Sea Lord used green ink, Flag Officers used purple ink and Commanding Officers used red ink. Anyway, to get back to my story, Fred’s draft letter duly went up the system and after several days the pack returned to him with an anonymous minute in red commenting on his draft. It said,
“Be more specific!”.
As a newly promoted SD Officer in the Marine Engineering specialisation, Fred undoubtedly knew a Greer Mercier Flask from a Plummer Block, but he had not had the benefit of a Dartmouth education and the significance of the red writing passed him by. Snorting with annoyance, he re-drafted his letter to,
“…your son is employed in topping up the pepper pots and ketchup bottles in the ship’s dining hall and occasionally sweeping or swabbing the deck to remove discarded crumbs and spots of gravy…”,
and promptly sent the pack back up the line.
Several days later the pack returned to his IN tray, this time with a new anonymous minute written forcefully in red saying,
“Do not be facetious!”
Fred had had enough of this. Shooting his cuffs, and voicing the comment,
“Who is this so-and-so? I’ll give him facetious…”,
he drew the pack towards him, grasped his pen, and began to formulate a terse and witty response. Fortunately, one of us was passing behind him at the time, glanced over his shoulder, and saw the writing in red. It was like one of those scenes from the cartoon of Tom and Jerry where the cat goes rigid, points, and screams in terror. We just managed to stop him before he put pen to paper. His comment, when it was all explained, was,
“Well how was I to know…?”

On the Covid front we are still enduring the so-called “second wave”, though the disparity between the high number of daily positive tests and the relatively low number of daily deaths remains. The situation also varies significantly according to the part of the country one examines:  infection (with or without symptoms) appears to be high in the north of England, but is low in the south.  Cornwall, in the bottom left, East Anglia, on the right, and South Wales have low infection rates.  Notwithstanding the situation in South Wales, the principality has taken it upon itself to shut down and to close its borders with England, the latter of dubious legality and impossible practicality.  Scotland is extending its existing lockdown and is about to introduce its own grading system which, I dare say, will be as different from England’s as possible.  University cities typically have seven times the number of infections of cities with no students.    In England we have had a minor revolution in that the mayor of Greater Manchester refused to move to the highest response level, Tier 3, without a substantial compensation package from central government.  A negotiated deal could not be reached and so the laws were imposed on the region.  Liverpool, Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire go to Tier 3 on Saturday, meaning, broadly,  that pubs and bars which are not serving food must close; restaurants must close at 2200;  separate households cannot mix outdoors or indoors in private gardens or hospitality areas;  no more than six people can meet outdoors publicly; and people are advised not to leave or enter the area.  The aim, as before, is to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, but I note that hospital occupation and the death rate for respiratory problems in Greater Manchester are at about at the usual level for this time of year, and the new temporary “Nightingale” hospitals are still not in use.  I genuinely sympathise with the people being restricted in these regions as I believe that any form of mass lockdown is simply kicking the can down the road, but I admire the prime minister’s robust response during the negotiations with Manchester’s mayor:  at the end of the day it comes down to the question of “who is running this country?”.  The number of daily deaths attributed to Covid 19 currently stands at 191.

I have never been a great one for sport.  I will amplify that: I know nothing whatsoever about any kind of sport and, in the days before television remote controls, I obtained my exercise by diving for the television set to switch off the Olympics.  Alas, my son Rupert developed a taste for football despite all my efforts to shield him from the game, and he ended up supporting Sunderland United: a lost cause if ever there was one.  As Rupert grew into a teenager without any sign of a cure for his affliction, Jane took me to task for not developing a healthy rapport with the lad, citing football as a potential starting point.  I took this advice seriously and resolved to watch the next Sunderland game on the television so that I could clew up on useful phrases and comment on the action.  I seem to recall that I even took notes.  The next day I tackled young Rupert with an opening gambit.
“Not a bad game last Saturday…”.
He looked at me suspiciously.
“I thought Thompson played well, but that was a really dirty tackle.  And as to that ref…”
“Yes”, he said, responding at last, ”Since they bought in Cartwright their game has really picked up and they may make the Premier League”
“Did you see that bit in the second half – that was brilliant”
You get the gist.  At last we had a good rapport going and we were bonding.  In my mind’s eye I could see this relationship growing by the minute like the framework of a new house, no easy task with a teenager.  We chatted some more in great detail, me drawing on my mental notes of the game.
“It’s a pity they lost though”, he said.
“True”, I said, “but they did quite well bearing in mind that they were playing against a top Scottish team”.
There was a silence.
“What blinking Scottish team?”, he asked with some incredulity.
“Tranmere Rovers”
“Father, Tranmere Rovers is a team from Liverpool”.
The noise I heard was the crash of our newly found football relationship collapsing like a house of cards.  We never spoke again about football, but now and again he still looks at me and shakes his head.  Fathers.

Yesterday was Trafalgar Day: the 215th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in which Admiral Lord Nelson and the British Fleet took on the combined fleets of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar and defeated them: thwarting the attempt by Napoleon to invade Great Britain. Sadly, Nelson was killed by a sniper during the battle and he was greatly mourned by the Royal Navy, who loved him. He is still much revered by the Royal Navy. Last night, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in aircraft carriers and patrol vessels, in frigates and nuclear submarines, ashore and afloat, officers of the Royal Navy will have been sitting down at Mess Dinners to commemorate his memory We in the Royal Navy have the unique privilege of drinking the Royal Toast to the Queen while sitting down; but we stand to drink the toast to The Immortal Memory of Admiral Lord Nelson. A great man.

When I retired from the Royal Navy, the dried-up husk – emptied of all its energy and worth – was cast onto the shore clutching a personal “thank you” letter from the Second Sea Lord (“Dear Horatio… Yours sincerely…” personally added in writing). With the thanks came an extensive pack of papers telling me, inter alia, that I still held the Queen’s Commission and rank, that I should keep my uniform in a serviceable condition, and that if the balloon went up, I would be among the first to know. I could not recall having signed anything to that effect when I joined Dartmouth, but I shrugged, sharpened my sword, and bought a new uniform cap (well, you never know). Jane was still working and so it was at that time that I added the household duties of Dhobying, Decks, Dusting and Soogeeing to the existing onerous tasks of DIY, Drinks and Executive Command. How hard could housekeeping be, I reasoned: surely it was simply a Planned Maintenance task and could be tackled as such? But housework is literally and figuratively a chore, don’t you find? I lasted two weeks. It was so boring. I then suggested to Jane that perhaps it would be better to employ a professional for the job so that I could be released for more important duties such as drawing up and maintaining the Master Plan, creating a broad strategy for our retirement, and overall supervision of the household. Having capably juggled the housekeeping, childcare and cooking at the same time as holding down a job for the previous fifteen years, alone, while I was at sea, Jane just looked at me in that way of hers. In my defence, I have to say that women, by their own admission, are known to be superhuman and capable of multitasking, unlike us men. Also, the housekeeping was turning me into an old woman: at one point I ordered Jane out of the lavatory before she could use the facilities because I had just cleaned the pan (I seem to recall that I may have actually polished it too). No, I argued with cogent and logical reasoning, it would be far better to employ a Mrs Mop. This aspiration became flesh in the form of Sue the Cleaner, one of the many Sues we know (Blog 57). Sue was great, both as a cleaner and a source of local gossip and we kept her on until Jane retired and the housekeeping (excluding Decks and Dhobying) reverted to her. I always remember that, after Sue the Cleaner’s first day, the kitchen sink positively sparkled so much that I almost had to wear sun glasses. I pointed this out to Jane when she came home from work and she let me wax poetically and enthusiastically about it at some length before interrupting and saying,
“Horatio, I cleaned that before she came. I wasn’t having some woman coming in here and thinking I was a slut”.

I don’t think I will ever understand women. But it is fun trying.

22 October 2020

It was a typical late autumn dawn in Devonshire: cool, bleak and with just a hint of coming rain in the northerly breeze.  The sky was the colour of wet blotting paper and the sullen grey river ebbed its way past our berth, swirling with autumn leaves and the occasional log.  Huddled in my wind-proof coat and lifejacket I observed all this as I stood at the upper helm position watching Jane expertly cast off our bow line for the last time in 2020.  We were taking APPLETON RUM to the lifting-out berth where she would be scooped from the water, have her bottom cleaned, then be transported to the hard-standing for the winter.  When she went back in, it would be to a brand new individual berth on a new pontoon, some time in the spring.  A huge self-propelled barge had arrived at the marina the day before, bearing an enormous crane for driving in the new piles for the new marina pontoons; she had moored herself close to the access pier by the simple expedient of dropping a pair of legs onto the riverbed – look, no anchor or mooring lines.  She certainly looked businesslike.

We had been up since before dawn because Jane had another of her “heart episodes” at 0400 and there did not seem much point in staying in bed after it was over.  This time Jane insisted that we do not call an ambulance as she felt there was little point if it were not going to arrive for two hours like last time.  The incident flagged up an interesting conundrum if I did have to call for an ambulance: how would the paramedics get to us?  The main road gate and the access to the pontoons are both PIN-coded: would I have to leave Jane alone to open them for the ambulance team?  Should I get her dressed and walk with her along the cold pontoon to the carpark, where she could sit in the car next to the (conveniently fitted) defibrillator? If I overcame the security hurdles for the paramedics, would they be able to get access to Jane on our unusual bunk on the boat?  Fortunately the problem did not arise because Jane was adamant in not calling out for help, but I must give some thought to the problem in case it comes up again.  Jane’s heart beat returned to normal at about 0530 but she still felt a bit rough, which is hardly surprising.  You might reasonably ask, therefore, what on earth she was doing on the fo’c’sle and acting as deckhand for our move at 0830.  The answer is: she insisted.  I was all for getting the marina staff to shift the boat in our absence in what is known as a “cold move”, or asking one of them to act as crew for me; she wouldn’t have it.  She felt the fresh air would do her good.  Of course, the fresh air from somewhere near Iceland actually nearly blew her over the side, but she did her usual expert job with the lines and said afterwards that she did feel better.

Alongside the lifting jetty, with an air of finality, I shut down the engines for the last time in 2020 and went through my routine checks for closing down the systems onboard.  After I locked the companionway hatch I gave the helmsman’s seat an affectionate pat and told the boat I would be back to see her in her winter bed soon, and there would be new adventures to come in a new berth in 2021 (look, if I can talk to a shed [Blog 37] then I can certainly talk to a boat).  Jane and I disembarked and, after a last look around the developing marina, we set off back home. 

The drive back home was different this time in that we decided to have a late breakfast in a roadside café called Route 303, where we usually charge the car.  Normally we just sit and wait as the amps flow (it only takes 20 minutes) but my stomach was rumbling after being awake since 0400 and both of us felt like a bit of refreshment.  You may guess from the name that Route 303 is on the A303 and has an American theme.  It turned out to be better than expected, but we were puzzled to be asked – as we entered – had we booked?  Who books to visit a roadhouse?  Surely the whole principle of these places is the the visit is spontaneous.  Yet, apparently, some people had reserved a table so the place must be popular.  Fortunately they fitted us in and we had a nice break: I had the West Coast Breakfast which, fundamentally, was a standard English Breakfast of fried egg, bacon, sausage, beans, hash brown, tomato and (joy!) two slices of fried bread (the East Coast Breakfast was double the size); Jane had a toasted teacake.  The bill came to about £12, which I thought very reasonable, and we would visit again.  As we left, the queue to get a table stretched outside into the carpark, which rather surprised me given the cool temperature.  But then, I don’t do queuing and I would not have waited, good though the food was.

It had been a good week on our final trip to the boat. We took her away on Tuesday to visit Totnes, a small market town about 12 miles upstream on the River Dart and only accessible by boat between three hours before and three hours after high tide. This last limitation on a boating visit means that a trip has to be well planned using tide tables unless one wishes to visit Totnes at unsociable hours. Tuesday was the perfect day to go, with high water at 1500. We had visited before, of course, though more often than not we had moored up, had a cup of tea, then set off back again. Totnes, while undoubtedly architecturally quaint, has a reputation in the Shacklepin family as being a hippy town: a sort of micro-California set in rural south Devonshire. Shops selling mystic trinkets abound and folk wander the streets in all manner of strange flowing garbs, usually incorporating the wearing of headbands or body jewellery (and that is just the men). This time we thought we should give the place a fairer assessment by looking around properly. Indeed, on arrival this time we did feel we had been a little unkind in our initial assessment. Totnes is a Saxon town (“Tot” meaning lookout and “Ness” meaning a projecting finger of land) that was – inevitably – taken over by the Normans, the resulting castle being given to one of William the Conqueror’s noblemen as a reward for liberating that part of the south west of England (a euphemism for slaughtering anyone who stood in his way). There is a steep High Street leading up through the castellated East Gate, where shops on both sides have overhanging first floors to form a shelter underneath. The areas are called the Butterwalk and the Poultrywalk respectively, and their purposes are self explanatory. It was all rather quaint and, if we had had time, we would have progressed to visiting the castle and the Guildhall. As it was, we browsed through the Totnes Bookshop (several shelves empty – we hope not a bad sign), tried another bookshop (mystic and spiritualist – left as quickly as we went in), then drifted back to the boat where the tide was on the turn and it was time to leave. We decided that, next time, we would visit the town by car to give us more time to wander. Thinks: must stop using the adjective “quaint”.

Our wedding anniversary found us in our favourite restaurant in Dartmouth, Taylor’s, with our friends Raymond and Carole.  We were given a perfect table in the bay window overlooking the Boat Float (a tidal pond accessed by a tunnel under the roadway) and, from there, we were able to watch the world go by.  Dartmouth, again, was heaving with tourists (known locally as grockles).  I had asked a local, earlier, if this was usual at this time of year and he said it was unheard of: bookings for hotel accommodation, B&Bs and self-catering flats were well-up and solid into the end of November, which is good news for the economy of the place though bad news for grumpy people like me who find the slow-moving crowds somewhat frustrating.  Anyway, to return to the lunch at Taylor’s: I had Spicy Butternut Squash Soup followed by Poached Fillet of Brill, with a Cream, White Wine & Wild Mushroom Sauce, then Vanilla Panna Cotta with Summer Berry Sauce.  Jane had Roasted Beetroot, Creamed Goats Cheese, Almond Dukkah followed by Pan Fried Fillet of Chalk Stream Trout  then Black Forest Chocolate Ganache with Whipped Cream.  We washed it all down with a bottle of Sharpham Dart Valley Reserve from the local vineyard.  The meal (excluding drink) came to about £40 each, which we thought was good value.

You may have noted from these accounts of culinary adventures that we rarely – if ever – take dinner ashore.  This is not because we feature among that section of the senior community terrified of meeting footpads, snarks, leprechauns or rough sailors after sunset, but rather one of finance and risk assessment: dinner in any restaurant is always more expensive than lunch.  Moreover, in Dartmouth, our return to the boat involves a tipsy ¾ mile walk along the embankment; a trip across the Higher Ferry; a ½ mile slog up the unlit ferry road that has no pavement; down a set of wooden steps into the Dark Wild Wood; past the Babbling Brook; up the path to the Marina Access Road; down into the marina itself; down the steep bridge onto our pontoon at low tide; and along to our boat.  Overall, a three-quarter-hour trek, all in the dark.  The slog up the hill from the ferry is usually the most challenging, as we know that – once we have landed – we have only ten minutes to make it up to the top before the ferry returns with its next load of cars that will be charging up behind us; it focusses the mind and the determination beautifully, for there is no pedestrian refuge off the road which, as I mentioned earlier, is unlit.  So, no, we do not venture ashore at night and Jane provides, instead, excellent dinners: it is so amazing what she can conjure up in the small galley onboard.  I do the drinks and the washing up.  Afterwards, suitably replete and burping quietly, we only have to (literally) fall into our bed.

As I started these later blogs at the beginning of The Great Covid 19 Epidemic I feel duty-bound to give an update on the situation in the UK.  It seems my assessment last time that the “second peak” of infections had levelled off was somewhat optimistic: the graph of daily deaths is definitely rising again, though with a much shallower gradient than in March and April.  Hospital admissions are rising quite sharply but, as far as I can gather, patients are generally younger and more robust which, together with medical science being better at treating the disease, would explain the disparity between the infection rate and the death rate.  A traffic light system to indicate the threat level in various parts of England has been instituted though, oddly and pessimistically, the lowest level is Medium ie there is no Low or Zero.  Regions currently put into the Very High category, such as Liverpool and Manchester, are railing against the restrictions that go with it, claiming that they are being discriminated against.  We in the south west of England are in the Medium category.  The number of deaths that occurred in the UK as a whole on 17 October was 150 which, viewed dispassionately, seems not too bad to me for a country of about 66 million people.  

I have just read a very interesting article by historian Gail Ham in By The Dart, a local periodical, comparing the present epidemic with The Black Death or Great Plague in Dartmouth.  I won’t repeat the whole article (which, incidentally, can be viewed on-line at www.bythedart.co.uk), but several parallels can be drawn with our present circumstances.  Infected people were socially isolated in three “pesthouses’”and guarded by “watchers” to keep them in (a parallel with the proposed “Covid Marshals”).   As entire families were confined if only one person was infected, this guaranteed cross-infection and the death of the family.  Money was raised by charity to look after people who were ill or in poverty.  People fled the town as the plague arrived, leaving the infrastructure weak, with no external defences, no law enforcement and near anarchy.  The records for one parish in Dartmouth in 1627 are still available and the graph of deaths quite interesting to examine.

Well, we weren’t feeling entirely right after that flu jab (Blog 62) that I described last time, but that was on the cards as a known side effect.  However, after a week I was still feeling the effects, though Jane was pretty much OK (we men have a lower pain threshold than women, you know).  I wasn’t suffering bad flu symptoms, you understand, I just felt not entirely right.  It just so happens that we register with a Covid research project run by King’s College in London and log-in on a daily basis (they check that we are still alive).  After a week of firing not quite on all four cylinders, I thought I should answer their query truthfully ie, no, I was not feeling entirely physically well.  Back came an email asking me to take a Covid 19 test at the nearest centre and to bring a friend if I wished.  So I went on line and was given an appointment for both of us in two hours.  We drove to the nearby town and were given the kit to do the test ourselves inside the car.  We had to park with two-metre gaps from other cars, which I thought utterly ridiculous (is the car going to catch the virus?) and swabbed, first, our tonsils, then (with the same swab) the inside of our noses (noted to self: make sure to do it in that sequence).  The swab was placed in a phial, the phial bagged up in a sterile package, and the package dropped in a box on the way out.  It was very slick, I thought, and – although we were told the results would come within 48 hours – I had the result the next morning after about 20 hours.  It was negative.  Overall, the whole thing was very well done and belied tales in the press of people having to travel 300 miles to get a test.  As you ask, I am fit and healthy again now, with a wet tongue and a long glossy coat.

As we were cruising off nearby Slapton Sands the other day I reflected on the contrast between the peaceful scene of green Devonshire hills, golden sands and turquoise sea and what it would have been like there 76 years ago.  In late 1943 plans for D-Day were well advanced and the war planners had earmarked Slapton Sands and adjacent beaches as being the perfect place to practise D-Day landings on Utah Beach, destined for the US First Army.  The geographies of the shelving beach and surrounding countryside were almost identical.  In early November 1943 the government requisitioned not only the beaches, but also 30,000 acres of land – about 5 miles inland from the beach – for war use: some 180 farms, about nine villages and several hamlets, 750 families and overall about 3,000 people were told – with only a few weeks notice – to move out of their homes and find accommodation elsewhere.  They were encouraged to fend for themselves, but help was available to move and find new homes, though the latter could involve being billeted with other families in a stranger’s house.  A billeting allowance was payable after moving to new accommodation, but this stopped after the first two weeks and board and lodging then had to be paid to the host householder.  The families were promised that they could move back after the area was no longer required (this would be after D Day but, of course, that was not disclosed at the time) and any damage would be rectified.  As the residents moved out, the American forces moved in and the whole area became a strictly restricted zone.  The area was not just used for practising seaborne landings:  the navy also actually shelled the land to practise naval gunfire support for D-Day and used local landmarks as targets.  One hotel was totally destroyed and several churches and many houses were badly damaged.  But the biggest tragedy that must surely haunt the area has only come to light relatively recently and occurred on 27 April 1944.  Overnight a US convoy comprising a mixture of landing craft of various sizes, and carrying members of the US VII Corps, 4th Infantry Division was approaching Slapton Sands for a practice landing.  It was attacked by a flotilla of German E-boats, which had managed to get through the naval escort, and carnage ensued.  Further casualties were caused by “friendly fire” from the shore, the defenders having been issued with live ammunition to fire over the attackers’ heads to harden up the raw US troops.  It is now known that 197 US sailors and 441 US soldiers died on that night: 638 US servicemen in total, and more than the actual loss of life on Utah Beach on D-Day.  The whole affair was hushed up at the time for obvious reasons, but remained under wraps for many years later and – even now – is only grudgingly admitted by the US and British authorities.  A salvaged American tank now stands on the shore at Slapton Sands as a testimony to that very tragic event.

So here we are, back home at last in a cold house that is only just starting to warm up after a week with the heating on “holiday” setting.  We had long hot showers last night, luxuriated in the one-push flushing lavatory, used the electric blanket for the first time and had a lie-in this morning.  Ashore at last: home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.  What’s that?  Jane?  Oh, she’s fine now.  I gave her buttered eggs on toast for breakfast and I think she is currently employed in scrubbing the front doorstep. Which reminds me that I must get her a new scrubbing brush and a bar of Sunlight soap.

18 October 2020

Well, she is definitely going deaf. I mentioned this in an earlier blog, but I am convinced she is getting worse. I know this because I was explaining to her the difference between a bolt and a machine screw at breakfast the other day, and she said,
“I can’t hear you!”
Or did she say,
“I’m not listening to you!”..? Same difference.
She refuses to see the doctor again and, in any case, would undoubtedly refuse to wear a hearing aid. Vanity, vanity. Seeing the doctor is still difficult, but we did manage to get our annual free influenza vaccinations this week, a novel experience this year as it was executed as a “drive-through” to minimise the CV19 risk to the medical staff. We drove into the local rugby ground, were directed to a little pavilion in the car park, stuck our arms out of the car windows, were duly punctured, and were then sent on our way with a smile. It was different, but very efficient, as it avoided sitting in a crowded waiting room in the doctor’s surgery next to the usual sickbay rangers and sick people. As I write, of course, we have the predicted after-effects of mild flu symptoms. Or could it be…no, surely not.

This week President Trump of the USA joined the club of those who have come down with Covid 19 and was admitted to hospital though, having seen pictures of the hospital, I would say it was a facility that Mr Spock would describe as,
“It’s a hospital, Jim, but not as we know it”.
Still, he is the leader of the free world so I dare say he deserves a few perks (he is out now after three days, though still being treated). I have no comment other than that: I have American relatives or friends who are Republicans, and American relatives or friends who are Democrats; I am staying out of it, other than observing that the forthcoming presidential elections are going to be a bloody time for all of them, and our cousins across the pond have my deepest and most sincere sympathy for what lies ahead.

Here in the UK, the predicted “second wave” of Covid 19 infections and deaths appears to have levelled off and deaths are declining again, daily deaths (as I write) standing at 33 for the whole country. There has not been a single Covid-related death in our local Big City hospital since early June. Restrictions in the UK still stand, however, and doubtless will be praised for the avoidance of the second peak. It would not surprise me to read that Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, has decided to burn down Glasgow in an attempt to curb the spread of infection and bring it up with a round turn. Christmas and New Year are still cancelled and no date has been given for a review of restrictions.

At least Halloween has been cancelled, thank heavens. I hate All Hallows’ Eve, not because of the evil spirits, but because I object to the legalised blackmail practised by some children (“Give us some sweets or we’ll kick your dustbin over and spray paint on your front door”). Mind you, a friend of mine opened his door one year to find two well-developed teenage girls on his doorstep shouting,
“Trick or treat?”.
Quick as a flash he said,
“Wow! Treat please”.
They left, disgruntled.
We never used to celebrate Halloween in England when I was a lad, we just walked the streets carrying a hollowed out turnip (what southerners and the rest of the English-speaking world call a swede) with a candle in it. If pumpkins existed in Britain in the 1950s then they had not penetrated as far as Tyneside. Times were hard, the candle saved the gas for cooking and my mother would let me have a piece of the turnip for supper if I had been a good boy, once my father had had the lion’s share. The present Halloween, with its costumes and “trick or treat” behaviour is, alas, one of the less-welcome American imports. I did think of joining into the spirit of the thing many years ago by wearing a skeleton costume and shroud, hiring a fog generator, and scaring the living daylights out of the little blighters, but Jane stopped me, saying that the scythe of the Grim Reaper was too dangerous and the outfit too frightening. A friend of ours tells me that, when her daughter went “trick or treating” with friends about thirty years ago, the householder tipped a bucket of water over them from an upstairs window. This story cheered me up immensely.

It was a hard upbringing as a child on Tyneside in the 1950s and early 1960s. We lived in a tiny terraced house with an outside lavatory, no bathroom, no central heating, no garden and no car. The back lane behind our house was cobbled, and decorated with washing hanging out to dry (all whisked in when the coal man came to deliver his load). Sometimes the nights were so cold that my dad would suck a peppermint just to keep us warm as we huddled together in the one living room, with the cold north easterly wind rattling the window panes and Souter Lighthouse blasting out its mournful foghorn like the nautical equivalent of Gray’s Elegy. My Christmas stocking was a seaboot stocking from dad’s sea chest, loaded with two walnuts, a brazil nut and a lump of cold figgy duff. I had few toys, but I made my own amusements and would play for hours on the old bombed sites and pillboxes with a disused water pipe and a gas mask left over from World War II. My favourite toy was a piece of coal that I found one day washed up on the beach. That piece of coal was everything to me: it was an aeroplane, a space ship, a six-gun, a submarine, a ship, a car, an asteroid… I took it everywhere with me and my friends used to cast envious eyes on it. Then, one day – it would have been the year ’56 or ’57 as I recall – my mam caught the ague and had to take to her bed. The situation was grave and the whole family was worried. My brother and I were wrapped in old coal sacks and sitting on upturned buckets in the living room, gnawing on a piece of stale Hovis bread covered in dripping that was our supper, when my father came in and said,
“Horatio, the fire in your mam’s bedroom is about to go out, and we’ve burnt the last of the furniture. I’m sorry, son, we’re going to have to burn the piece of coal”.
I understood. I was only a small boy, but I knew what I had to do. With a little tear and an unspoken farewell, I handed over the piece of coal and my dad put it on the fire in the bedroom. And do you know, that piece of coal burned with a warm glow all night and all the next morning. When it had reduced to ash, my mam opened her eyes, rallied and smiled.
“Thank you son”, she said. She tucked into her whippet stew with gusto and never looked back.
Aye, they don’t make coal like they used to.

In Blog 58  I raised the question of whether one’s accent mattered.  This week I raise a similar question:  do we judge people by their style of dress?  Well, of course, I do but you could be excused for dismissing my views on the matter as the ramblings of an anachronistic relic from the 20th century.  But, in general, do first impressions, based to a significant extent on dress, count?  I think they do.  Why else do we dress up for a job interview (unless we are applying for a job in the entertainment industry)?  The question of sartorial standards came up in the Shacklepin household the other day when the memsahib, perusing her magazine, read out a rhetorical question by a journalist asking why it was that women spent hours perfecting their hair, eyes and face, and choosing a matching smart outfit and shoes for an evening out, only to be joined by their men wearing a pair of faded jeans, grubby trainers and a polo shirt.
“Hrmph”, said Jane, nodding. “So true!”.
I was a little hurt, conscious of the fact that I had worn that bow tie and shirt combination twice already this fortnight and noting a scuff on my gleaming right toecap.
“Not you, darling”, she said affectionately when she saw my expression, ”you’re different”, as if praising an ancient artefact crafted by Chippendale.  I was, of course, immediately mollified, but it made me think about the whole business of dress.  I was given a book on male fashion and style some years ago and it contained many sage comments, one of which being that if you dressed well and businesslike on “dress down Friday”, then you would stand out as exceptionally smart and competent compared to the rest of the office.  The Times newspaper has just started a current affairs radio station in competition with BBC Radio 4, and the content is worth listening to.  But the new station was advertised with a picture of two of its journalists who would host the first programme:  the female was smartly dressed and looked professional; the male was wearing a tee shirt and jeans and looked like he was a plumber about to change the lavatory cistern.  Given this introduction it was hard, at first, to be attracted to the new radio station and to be impressed by its credibility.  I suppose the “dress thing” depends on the job the wearer does: I would not expect a carpenter to wear a jacket, collar and tie, for example (though workmen did in the 1950s and 1960s).  I do expect a professional, such as a politician, a doctor or a lawyer to be smartly dressed, however if they are to inspire confidence in their ability, and I also think that special occasions deserve dressing up.  Some years ago, the TV chef Jamie Oliver was photographed receiving his MBE from the Queen while dressed in a nondescript suit with an open-necked shirt instead of the traditional Morning Suit.  The photograph was the subject of a caption competition and some wag came up with the perfect caption on what the Queen was saying to him:
“It’s an MBE.  It stands for Make a Bloody Effort!’”. 
My sentiments entirely.  Stand up straight, hold your gut in, shave off that stubble and smarten yourself up.  And wear proper polished shoes.  No, not you dear – I was speaking mainly to the men.

In the pre-muzzle days before CV19 Jane and I were in some café or other and I heard the bloke ahead of me in the queue say to the waitress,
“Can I get a cup of tea?”.
I was incensed: what was this, “Can I get…” business? Where was this man’s manners? You say, “Please may I have…” or, if that sounds too nursery, “Could I have…please?”. If I had been the waitress in that café, I would have said,
“You certainly can, sir. This is a café, so we do serve tea”.
But then I don’t suppose I would make a successful café proprietor. Or cruise liner captain, for that matter (“It’s one minute after leave expired, Mr Mate [tapping watch with finger]. Single up and let go the gangway”). Returning to the rude tea drinker, his “cup of tea”, when it arrived, comprised a large mug with a spoon, hot water and a tea bag in it; a capsule of UHT milk; and a paper tube of sugar. Since when has that been a cup of tea? Tea is brewed in a pot, preferably with large loose leaves, and comes with a teacup and saucer, a separate jug of fresh milk and a bowl of sugar. The water is added to the tea leaves when boiling hot (100 degC at International Standard Atmosphere) and the mixture is allowed to brew or mash for five minutes before pouring, usually through a tea strainer. Milk is added afterwards so that you can adjust the colour and strength to taste. Mind you, I have just read an article that says we British have been wrong for centuries in using boiling water: apparently we should be adding water at 80 degC, not boiling (50 degC for exotic green tea). Nice idea, but I won’t be changing my habits, not least because I don’t have a pocket thermometer to carry around. Tea bags, mugs, UHT milk and “can I get” indeed: this could be the start of the downfall of the British Empire. Appalling.

This morning I was reading an article in The Spectator magazine by a female journalist on the subject of gentlemen’s clubs and their exclusion of ladies as members. I always pay particular attention to articles by female journalists because it gives me a little insight into female thinking and I take the view that it is important to know your enemy. Anyway, the journalist was, surprisingly, supportive of all-male clubs as she felt that it gave men the opportunity to let off steam with their chums. Ditto for all-female clubs. But she then went on to decry some website or other called Bluebella, because she felt it was degrading to women. Well, of course, I couldn’t let that reference pass me by: I simply had to see the website so that I could sympathise appropriately with the next woman I met socially. Way-hay! I nearly choked on my morning coffee. It wasn’t a porn site, I was relieved to observe, but a site for selling exotic ladies’ lingerie (I mean the lingerie was exotic, not the ladies, though it was a close-run thing). I must say, women’s underwear has come along a bit since the days of the corsets and the ‘lift and separate’ Playtex brassieres in my mother’s mail-order catalogue. One pair of knickers on offer could probably have been more accurately described in the singular, since only half the garment appeared to be there: the model’s bottom was criss-crossed with bits of string like the complex rigging of a frigate under full sail. It was shocking, quite shocking. If you are a man reading this then I commend the web site to you as a lesson against impure male thoughts and the gross exploitation of women as a sex object. If you are a woman reading this then just roll your eyes; mine did.

Note to self: I wonder if Jane would welcome a set of underwear like that instead of those gardening gloves this Christmas?  Perhaps not.

Thinking of that website reminds me of a chap who was unfortunate enough to catch an anti-social disease – a hazard that faces all us sailors (except me, of course, as I used my runs ashore to view local flora and fauna, art, and historical artefacts before retiring to my bunk with a sensible cup of cocoa).  Anyway, this chap reported sick, was duly dosed by the full range of antibiotics and, after a lengthy period of treatment, was declared fit again.  At the next port of call he was feeling his oats and the need to celebrate his recovery .  Ashore, he met a pleasant young lady who shared his interests in cultural matters and friendly international relations.  So extensive was their discussion that she took him back to her flat to sample the local coffee, and he spent the night.  The next morning, as they lay in bed, he asked the inevitable question, to which she replied,
“Well, you weren’t very good”.
Wounded by the criticism of his masculinity, he protested,
“Have a heart!  I’m a bit rusty.  I’ve only just recovered from treatment at the STD clinic and it took ages”.
She came alive and was all ears.
“Have you?”, she replied with genuine curiosity. “What’s it like?  I’ve got an appointment there tomorrow”.

We still do not have our library back in operation.  Nearby towns have achieved that goal, but not here in sleepy Melbury despite the fact that we are all under the same local authority.  Instead, Melbury Library is offering a “collection after ordering on-line service” or the issue of a selection of books “that you might like”.  Browsing is totally out.  What kind of a service is that?  I don’t want a book that someone else thinks I should read, I want one that appeals to me after flicking through the pages.  Mind you, British libraries have been going down the pan for many years now and are no longer peaceful havens for bibliophiles or researchers, where people used to speak in hushed tones and could enjoy themselves for hours in a calm atmosphere.  They are now crèches, meeting places, cafés and noisy mad houses with a few (a very few) optional books thrown in for you to read – if you can concentrate, that is.  So the fact is, I won’t be missing our library as I haven’t been in there for years.  If I want to browse or read a book in peace I go to a bookshop in The Big City where some sense of decorum and respect still prevails.

Churches are going the same way as libraries. They are no longer havens of quiet spiritual contemplation: places to clear out the lumber of countless sins in hallowed portals imbued over centuries of worship. Insidiously, the Church of England is throwing out its pews in favour of portable chairs so that the churches, cathedrals and abbeys can readily be converted into all-purpose venues, suitable for concerts, markets, art exhibitions, coffee bars, skate boarding, money lending or whatever. The pews were introduced by the Victorians, so they are doubly condemned. Change for change’s sake, it seems to me, though a friend “in the know” tells me that the change is essential in order to gain much-needed upkeep revenue: sanctity forsaken for filthy lucre. I suppose it has to be, but noise and bustle are the bane of our modern lives and it is such a shame to lose the ability to sit silently in a church listening to…the sound of silence… or God. A church, cathedral or abbey being used as a general purpose hall will not provide that atmosphere. Incidentally, lest you think I am being facetious about the reference to using a church for skate boarding, this actually happened a year or so ago in nearby Wiltshire in Malmesbury Abbey. I wonder what William of Malmesbury (11th Century monk and historian) would have thought of it. I imagine he is spinning in his grave.

Technology is a wonderful thing.  I discovered the other day that you can choose a mobile phone ring tone to match the person calling, provided they are on your contact list.  I showed this to my son during one of his rare and fleeting visits, and waxed lyrically about the potential of having such a facility, but he was unimpressed   Apparently he had been aware of that feature since the Bronze Age (“Oh really Father, that is so passé!”), and used it on his phone extensively.  I was deflated, but impressed.  Did he have a ring tone for me, I asked?  Yes, he said.  Foolishly, I asked what it was.  He played it.  It was The Imperial March, Darth Vader’s Theme from Star Wars.  Get Alexa to play it or look it up on the internet and you will get the gist.  Bit of a back-handed compliment in a way.  That’s my boy for you: the Force is strong in that one.

I had decided, on the spur of the moment, to order some flowers for Jane.  I do this occasionally on a random basis under the policy of “keep ‘em guessing” outlined in Blog 48 and, once the decision had been made, I had to follow it through.  I have found, through long experience and the occasional twinge from unhealed scars, that women do not appreciate being told, “I nearly bought you a bunch of flowers”, well-meant though the statement always is.  It never goes down well.  Some years ago I passed on this little gem of advice to my godson as part of my valedictory guidance to him on the occasion of his marriage and him moving outside my sphere of influence, but (sigh) several years later he reported to me that he had made the slip himself, despite the sage advice.  Strangely, it didn’t go down well with his wife either.  Silly boy – I did try for him, but sometimes advice is not enough: you have to learn from experience.  Anyway, to get back to my story.  I normally order from the local florist, the aim being to keep our High Street as a running concern, but it is difficult to visit the shop without raising suspicion and awkward to make a clandestine telephone call for the same reason.  Besides, I always find it embarrassing dictating the card to the girl in the shop: “To Miss Whiplash from her Sex Slave. Mercy Mistress” always seems to result in a hollow silence followed by a nervous giggle. They also charge for delivery.  So this time I thought I would try an online company called Seranata, which we have used very successfully before to send flowers to friends outside the town or county.  They deliver the next day by courier, do not charge delivery, have very reasonable prices and (if the recipients can be believed) produce beautiful flowers.  They are also a very slick operation, with excellent – if somewhat unconventional and matey – communications (“Hi Horatio, our gift guru is excited to roll up his sleeves and warm up his paws to ensure the present you picked arrives perfectly packaged and right on time…”).  Seranata is highly recommended and, no, I am not on commission.  Ensconced in my study on the pretext of writing for you good people, I placed the order and, the next day, I retired to the garage workshop after asking Jane to listen out for a delivery that I was expecting.  Hours later, at about teatime, covered in sawdust and beginning to suffer the first stages of hypothermia in the freezing workshop, I was rewarded by the sight of my wife appearing in the doorway and wearing a beatific smile.
“It was such a lovely surprise”, she said. ”I thought the man must have come to the wrong house.  Then I couldn’t work out who could have sent them…I knew they couldn’t have come from you…”

My wife: as appreciative and forthright as ever.  So nice that I can still surprise her (he said through gritted teeth).

8 October 2020

“There is a snail living in that greenhouse!”
“Eh? What?”.  I dragged my mind away from the newspaper account of the impending war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and tried to refocus on matters mollusc.
“There must be a snail living in there! Look at the trail it’s leaving on the glass.  Just you wait.  I’ll sort him out”.
I craned my neck round to view the miscreant from my obverse position in the Garden Control Tower, but could see nothing.  Never mind.  It dragged me away from the reality of a disturbed world outside to the mundane microcosm of a garden in Barsetshire.  I didn’t want to read the world news anyway: it is universally depressing.  I have cancelled The Times again and have ordered a sand shovel from Amazon to facilitate the burial of my head.  I did read somewhere that a large proportion of Americans are totally unaware of news outside their own country, state or, indeed, county.  I can’t say I blame them for I came to the conclusion, some years ago, that a lot of stress and angst in my own life was being caused by getting worked up about things that I could do absolutely nothing about: wars in Asia; graffiti;  a nuclear armed Iran; people sporting tattoos and piercings; Chinese expansion in the east; the decline of the semi colon; woke liberals…the list goes on.  Jane and I were discussing this the other day and we agreed that we could not remember getting too worked up about politics or world affairs when we were younger.  Bearing in mind that our adult lives have embraced, inter alia,  Swine Flu, the Cold War, the Three Day Week and power cuts in the UK, petrol rationing, galloping inflation and mortgages of 15%, the Falklands Conflict, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Iraq, and my being passed over for promotion to Commander that is quite some admission.  Of course, it is probably because we had more immediate things to concern us. Or possibly that, in our present increasing senility, we have forgotten just how bad things were and how we did, in fact, care.  Having said all that, I will still read the world news and shout at the politics programmes on the wireless on a regular basis.  The fact is, we all need a little bit of stress in our lives now and again, or we would become benign smiling zombies sitting in our upright chairs in the old people’s home. Angst is good, and Jane vented hers by leaving the breakfast table and taking a pair of secateurs to Brian the Snail who lives used to live in the greenhouse. Alas, younger readers (if any) and non UK residents will not understand my reference to the children’s adult television programme, The Magic Roundabout, which combined a very dry and satirical English script with a French visual children’s animation to produce an adult cult-following in the late 1960s:  Dylan the hippy, Brian the Snail, dour Dougal…The French, I understand, were baffled by the English interpretation.

We are back on dry land again (hence the saga of The Death of Brian) and our boating year is drawing to a close.  Our marina in Dartmouth is undergoing a vast redevelopment from its previous existence as a shipyard and is about to start the phase that involves the sinking of new piles and the fitting of new pontoons.  Hence, the management of the marina is keen to get as many boats ashore and out of the way as possible.  APPLETON RUM will be lifted in late October, will have her bottom cleaned and polished (always a sound practice), and will be put to bed on the hardstanding for winter until the new berths are ready next spring.  We have scheduled a last visit afloat to celebrate our wedding anniversary at Taylor’s restaurant and to remove bedding and so on for the duration.  The promise of a new berth is exciting.  At present, the pontoons that we moor on were made by the original shipyard from steel that has been patched, re-patched and welded many times.  We berth against another boat and a degree of nautical shuffling is required to get out and proceed to sea.  Fortunately, we get on exceptionally well with our “chummy” boat next door and the crew make a mean gin and tonic.  When the new pontoons are ready – we hope by spring 2021 – we will have our own individual finger berth on a modern pontoon that has hardwood decking and looks very tiddley. Eventually, the whole marina will be utterly transformed to incorporate a hotel, holiday cottages, residential homes and a nautical college so we view each new development with lively anticipation, just as we look forward to the inevitable increase in mooring fees commensurate with the new facilities.

I should explain that our time on the boat is not spent solely on trips at sea and dinghy trial sessions. The original plan was that the boat would also become a holiday home in the south west: an area in which we used to holiday regularly. The cost benefit analysis that justified the shift in moorings leaned heavily on the savings we would make from not staying at self catering properties in Devonshire. A normal stay onboard usually incorporates lengthy walks in the area on alternate days, as outlined in Blog 54, and these are not without their excitement in a modest way. I recall that last year we walked to the National Trust property of Coleton Fishacre, previously the home of the D’Oyly Carte family of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. It is a modest and lovely house with a huge garden sloping down to the sea, so homely that I could just imagine us living there very happily (if only they got rid of the tourists). We were walking back along the narrow country lanes (a death trap, by the way, not recommended) and, as we approached a crossroads, Jane broke away from me to examine some item of flora on the opposite verge. This was very naughty, of course: as you will know from your Highway Code, (Rules for Pedestrians), (General Guidance), Rule 2, we should both have been on the right hand side of the road, and I did draw her attention to the fact, but she ignored me. At this point, a car emerged slowly from the right at the crossroads. It was driven by a respectable looking woman of middle to late years with permed hair and dressed in sensible tweed. Her resemblance to the late actress Margaret Rutherford was uncanny. She was faced by the sight of two people in the narrow road, one on the left-hand verge and one on the right (there were, at least, two grass verges). It was apparent that this close quarters situation was utterly beyond her experience or driving capability, because I could see her waving her arms, mouthing silently and, as they say in the vernacular, “giving it some”. She stopped, which was the sensible thing to do, and we strolled past. As I passed her open car window, I smiled benignly and said,
“I’m so sorry if it’s too difficult for you”.
“You sarcastic bastard”, she spat.
It is one of the many prerequisites of a successful naval officer that one should be able to inspire one’s people to do things outside their comfort zone and against all their instincts and ingrained behaviour. It was so refreshing, in this instance, to find that I had been successful in inspiring this doyenne of the local county set and Women’s Institute to vent her Anglo Saxon so well. I smiled again, gave her a cheery wave, and moved on whistling a merry tune. Sarcastic? Don’t know the meaning of the word. I must look it up in the dictionary.

The Covid 19 situation in the UK lurches on and the number of deaths per day has started to increase slightly, though at a rate nowhere near the same as the number of positive test results. The last is still being taken as a sign of a “second spike” and draconian measures have been imposed in some regions in the country. We now have to wear face coverings in restaurants and pubs as we transit to our table, whereupon they can be removed (so helpful when one is eating or drinking). Stand, and it is mask on; sit and it is mask off. We only heard about this new variation by chatting to friends, the news on CV19 being so annoying that we have stopped reading it. Jane and I are the only people in the United Kingdom who grumble about the ineffectiveness and pointlessness of wearing face coverings: everyone else in the country, including all our friends, are out of step. Scotland, wilting under the lash of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, appears to have been receiving the worst restrictions, with some students at university being told that they cannot leave their halls of residence or return home at Christmas, and the Scottish police stopping a 10-year-old girl’s birthday party and threatening her parents with arrest because too many people were popping in and out to leave birthday presents. I am glad I no longer live in Scotland: there is a fine dividing line between having a strong decisive leader and being ruled by a megalomaniac. Here in England, there have been so many bans, restrictions, curbs and U-turns that Boris himself could not explain the current state of “can and cannot do” in the north east region, when pressed recently. At last, MPs are starting to rally to demand parliamentary approval on all Covid 19 restrictions in England instead of the current chaotic dictatorship. I only hope that sanity is restored soon.

Quite a mild piece on Covid 19 there.  I must be mellowing in my old age.

An anecdote from my old chum of Blog 51 fame must surely be overdue.  For the benefit of readers who did not read the earlier blog, I should explain that my friend was a great raconteur of true stories from his naval career, with far more experiences than I.  I would give him credit here, but the anonymity rules of a blog dictate that he must remain nameless. He once recounted to me his experiences as a Cadet in the training frigate in the early 1970s.   The training that he (and I) went through involved a year of general training at the BRITANNIA Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, including three months at sea in a frigate of the Dartmouth Training Squadron; a year of general training at sea as a Midshipman; then specialist training – Engineers to read for a degree and Application Courses, Seamen and Supply officers (as the specialisations were then called) back to Dartmouth, then other establishments.  The period as a Cadet in the Dartmouth Training Squadron was spent, essentially, as a rating: we slept and ate in a messdeck, painted ship, scrubbed decks and hauled on ropes.  We were also required to watchkeep on the bridge, navigate the ship, and host guests at cocktail parties: a bit like sociable galley slaves.  And now to the story.  My chum was acting as the Bosun’s Mate (one of two guards on the gangway) on the night of a cocktail party in a foreign port.  After the cocktail party petered out at about 2000, the wardroom went for a run ashore, smartly dressed in their dog robbers, and the evening quietened down.  Some time before midnight, the wardroom returned in dribs and drabs, happy but not drunk.  Each officer saluted gravely and went below.  The Gunnery Officer came over the brow, saluted as was the custom, walked across the flight deck and, fully clothed in jacket and tie, dived over the side.  Astonished, the Quartermaster (in charge of the gangway) immediately sounded the General Alarm and piped, “Man overboard! Man overboard! Away seaboat, port side”.
This was virtually an unheard-of alarm in harbour and it resulted in much tumult and shouting, with members of the duty watch running hither and thither, boats being swung out, searchlights being manned and a general mêlée on deck.  In the midst of this chaotic scene, up the gangway again came the Gunnery Officer, dripping wet.  He saluted again, as was custom.
“What’s going on?”, he asked.
My chum the Bosun’s Mate, somewhat bemused by the whole episode, replied hesitantly,
“We have a Man Overboard, sir…”
“Strap me”, said the Gunnery Officer, “I’ll help”, and promptly crossed the flight deck and dived in over the side again.
You don’t get runs ashore like that anymore.

We continue the culinary experiences and adventures, this week with a visit to The Red House at Marsh Benham near Newbury. We discovered this epicure’s delight many years ago when we were cruising along the nearby Kennet & Avon Canal. The first time we visited was characterised by us consuming an entire bottle of wine with an excellent lunch, then tacking back down the lane to our mooring on the canal, Jane tottering in her high heels, before crashing out onboard to sleep it off. We were woken by heavy rain on the metal roof of the boat and a feeling of having no idea where we were, who we were, or in what dimension. But I digress. We have taken to meeting our friends Fraser and Isla at The Red House every few months, the hostelry being fairly equidistant between our two houses, and we have never been disappointed with the food. This time, we had not met since February, just before The Black Death descended on us, so there was much to talk about. It was very pleasing to see that the eatery was fully booked: a testament to to the quality of the food and, I hope, a sign that the establishment will not go to the wall in the present economic situation. The fact that the pub was offering 25% off food may also have enhanced the popularity. The pub was vigorously enforcing the new ‘face coverings on entry’ rule and this could have been a mark against it under my policy outlined in Blog 60, but the proprietors carry a lot of credit with me from previous visits, so I kept my little black book in my pocket. I had chicken chowder, followed by steak and kidney pudding with savoy cabbage; Jane had roast beetroot salad followed by liver and bacon and chocolate ice cream. I was a bit puzzled by the term “chicken chowder” because it was my understanding that the term referred to a thick fish soup, but it still tasted delicious, the only drawback being the chicken bones and skin that were left in it. I have an aversion to bones and finding one usually puts me off a dish immediately (I once nearly choked on a piece of lamb bone, such asphyxiation process being undertaken against the backdrop of my wife and dinner guests laughing about it in the next room). I persisted in this case. Steak and kidney pudding with a mustard sauce is an old English favourite and I tucked into that like a good trencherman, washed down by a hearty Malbec (what a joy it was to be retired, with no work to do that afternoon). Jane declared her roast beetroot salad to be a bit thin on the beetroot, a bit heavy on the apple, and a little overpriced for what it was. Very picky my wife. She relished her liver and bacon, however, because it is a dish very rarely eaten at home, I having an aversion to offal and it being awkward for Jane to cook separate dishes for one meal. Yes, I know that the kidney in steak and kidney pudding is offal; don’t be pedantic. Our 50/50 share of the overall cost for the lunch with drinks came out at £50 for a couple, which we all thought very reasonable indeed, and Jane drove home as she was more sober than I was (in my defence, I only had two glasses of wine).

We drove down to The Big City the other day not, as you might infer, to do some sightseeing, but so that Jane could claim her free packet of Percy Pigs with a voucher from Marks & Spencers (M&S): fourteen miles for a packet of sweets and an enforced visit to ladies’ lingerie and Per Una.  We found The Big City to be busy with tourists, but with many shops closed and boarded up.  Bill posters, proclaiming obscure left wing propaganda advocating the slaughter of all Conservatives, had been stuck on many of the empty windows. Many big retail names had gone: Radley, L K Bennett, Lewins, to name but a few.  The sales floors of M&S were very sparse and the quality of the clothes was a poor shadow of its former self.  I thought the menswear on offer was (how can I put this tactfully)  somewhat colourful and appealing only to a minority interest.  We drifted aimlessly around the city, Jane clutching her pink sweets like a little girl at a village fête, but we decided that shopping and browsing had lost its pleasure under the present muzzle-wearing régime, and we soon came home again.  It is very sad to see a lovely city dying on its feet and looking so shabby; still, Jane had her sweets, so she was happy.

Visits to big cities were not always so disappointing. I remember when our son Rupert was in his late teens he went through an “arty” phase and wanted us to drive him to some poetry extravaganza in far-away Bristol. Like good parents, we agreed and I appeared, ready to set off, in my Arts Rig (No 5) comprising large hat with floppy brim, a long silk scarf, a red silk shirt with top two buttons undone to reveal hairy chest, bright yellow trousers and suede boots. For some reason this annoyed him (“I knew he would do this! Mother! Tell him!”) and I was sent away to dress properly. The event in the Arnolfini, Bristol’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, was a bit bizarre to my mind (one poet spoke for ten minutes with every other word a four-letter one), but we made something of the evening by having a drink afterwards in the Pitcher and Piano and by me pointing out to Rupert attractive girls who would make pleasant companions for him. This last did not find favour. Eventually, we set off on the long journey home with Jane sober and driving. This went well until we came across a police road block in a nearby town because of a traffic accident and this threw out Jane’s navigation. She stopped indecisively.
“It’s no big deal, woman. Just do a three-point turn and we’ll go the other way”, was my helpful recommendation.
So Jane executed a nine point turn in someone’s driveway (security light coming on and curtains twitching) and we shot off the other way. By now Rupert and I, in our cups, were bonding at last and having an in-depth discussion about some matter of great import. Jane was sober and not entirely happy with this alliance and the boy-versus-girl situation that was developing. As we pulled up to the house, home at last, Rupert said,
“Oh Father, Alien 3 is on – we’ll just catch it. Mother, could we have some of those nice chicken sandwiches with mayonnaise that you do, with the crusts cut off”.
The boys did watched Alien 3, but their enjoyment was a little spoilt by the noise of someone dismembering a chicken in the kitchen next door with quite unnecessary violence.

As I write it is raining cats and dogs and the central heating is trundling away.  Jane has just brought me a warming cup of tea and asked me how things are going by the polite enquiry of,
“My God, how much longer are you going to be writing that thing?”.
It seems that the sun passed over the zenith some time ago and the evening is drawing in.  She is missing me, bless her, so I must draw a close and run to her side.  By the sound of the loud chopping going on below me in the kitchen she probably needs advice on how to slice an onion.  I simply must oblige.

Remember: stay dry, stay muzzled, and don’t kill granny.

30 September 2020