The measure of days

I did a bad thing. I started using an electric sander instead of a heat gun, a scraper and a sanding block. Today I did all of the port or left-hand side of the hull above and below the waterline, as well as half the mahogany rails and the coachroof around the hatch which was blistering. It was unbelievably faster. A week’s work in a day.

Right-hand side done. It needs a soft brush to get the dust off it but maybe it'll be windy tonight.
Right-hand side done. It needs a soft brush to get the dust off it but maybe it’ll be windy tonight.
That isn’t to say it wasn’t tiring. I put about five hours in today and I ache. I wore a breathing mask to stop getting paint dust in my lungs, a wooly hat to keep my hair out of my eyes, safety glasses to keep them if something flew out from under the sander and ear defenders to damp down the noise. Despite wearing thick gloves there was nothing I could really do about the vibration and it’s still pretty cold being outside in the wind, mostly keeping fairly still for that length of time.

I’m getting back home, making a hot drink, having a hot shower and still by eight pm every move is accompanied by a grunt, like some parody of old age on an indifferent comedy show. Sometimes it’s better that I live on my own. It isn’t funny. I can hardly move or think or type. About all I can do is surf Facebook, which doesn’t actually progress any of the things on my To Do list, let alone the boat.

But it’s nearly, nearly done. The rest of the coachroof could have a rub over while I’ve still got the sander out and there is some more varnish that could be looked at. The Tonkinoise project was gone back a step because although I bought it the friend who was going to pick it up couldn’t find the place where it was and had to get her mother to the airport and she’s really sorry because she said she’d do it but luckily it wasn’t German Wings that flew into the Alps and sorry. Couldn’t be helped. These things happen. Would I like a swim and some breakfast tomorrow?

And if I can stop grunting when I move, yes. Yes I would. Maybe I can get the anti-foul on tomorrow before I catch the train to London so I can be at Heathrow to meet someone from Big Brother and take people to the theatre on Friday. It’s one of the things I do. I’m going to need some different clothes to the boat-painting kit though, I think.

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Our friends electric

One of the reasons I bought a wooden boat was that I like traditional ways of doing things. Or I thought I did, anyway. On Friday I spent six hours stripping old varnish with a heat gun and a scraper. Saturday I managed four. Sunday three and a half. I ache all over. By the end of each session when I get home I eat, shower and sit down. Within half an hour all I can do is grunt every time I move and I live on my own. This is how people used to spend their lives, until they died.

 

I sanded from the bow to the metal post in about two hours.
I sanded from the bow to the metal post in about two hours.

Today I made a start on sanding the paint down on the hull. I did the bad thing. I used an electric sander. After I went to the shop and bought some new sanding pads, enough to do the whole boat and some left over for £9 something, because the old ones had got damp in my friend’s shed and all the scrapey stuff had come loose and then spent the obligatory half hour fiddling about with the other sander, the savage belt sander that strips deep grooves into things because that’s what it’s for, not roughing up a paint surface, I got started.

A friend from a famous yard walked by. I didn’t know he was working here today. Sometimes he plays keyboard behind my spoken word stuff, when we’re Frank Admiration & The Extraordinary Renditions, but today we were wooden boat guys. I felt pretty wooden anyway.

As a break from the paintwork I ran the electric sander over the wooden rail I was going to strip the old way, the one that in three days I hadn’t got near to starting. It took all the varnish off in about a minute instead of ten.

The lighter part? About five minutes of sanding.  The old ways are the best? Really?
The lighter part? About five minutes of sanding. The old ways are the best? Really?

My mobile kept ringing and I made some arrangements for Thursday and Friday night because I have some work to go and do in London and I need to sort that out and not mess it up, but working on the boat is going to be a lot faster now.

I still ache. I will for a couple of days. Now I feel stupid as well. But that will go. And the boat is going to be fine.

 

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It’s a wrap

The boxy big cars chased each other into the disused place. Something was burning in an oil drum. A man in a vest looked out of the window of a caravan as the bonnet of the Jag flew up and the back end of the Granada slid out sideways on the oily ground. Parts of London like this you couldn’t tell if the Luftwaffe did it or the LCC. Certainly the second one did more damage. In black and white the men with the big tie knots and lapels hit the men with half a pair of tights off her indoors over their faces, flattening flattened noses. Iron jemmies slid from parka sleeves and someone shouted about a shooter but we knew who would win long before Reagan sneered “Shut it” and “Tell him, George” and the man with longer hair glanced sideways before he said “You do not have to say anything. If you do say anything it may be taken down and used in evidence” before he was faded out into something more interesting. Cuff him. Get in the car. They want us back in the office.

One last job, son. Or I  can shut the boot lid.
One last job, son. Or I can shut the boot lid.

Last time I went to Paddington Basin that’s what it was like. Well, not really, but it looked like that. Derelict, like a lot of London when I first went there and for a long, long time after that. What the bombers had missed (most of it) economics and the paid, trained planners had finished off. The docks were derelict apart from St Katherine’s toy boat harbour and they filmed huge parts of The Sweeney film there. You can see exactly where, just by the bridge.

I went for a job interview. The train was late coming out of Wickham Market. The Tube got stuck in a tunnel. When I got to the interview the girl on Reception told me the company had moved, although this was the address the recruitment agency gave me. I Googled them on my phone and called the company. I tracked them down on Google maps and found that if you type in their address the GIS thinks they’re in East London, seven miles away, but if you give it the postcode it tells you they’re less than five minutes walk. For a company that’s been here in the UK for ten years I don’t understand why their website is all American references and hardly anything at all about London or the UK.

There wasn’t time for the one hour interview when I got there. They asked if I wanted to come back and do it again but I told them things happen, that it’s how you deal with them that makes the difference. That if they were happy to do the interview then I was. In fifteen minutes they asked me back for a second interview and asked me if I was happy with that. I said I’d be happier if they just gave me the job now but that’s what I’d come to get as an outcome.

The agency said they’d asked for confirmation of the meeting and hadn’t been told the office had moved. In the middle of the week I had a phone call to tell me there was a test for the second interview and that would be next week. I got the text emailed to me at 17:26 on the Friday, with a deadline of 11pm Sunday.

I very seriously thought of simply not doing it. At least I’d have one when they said in the interview, “Do you have any questions for us?”

Well yes, I do actually. What did I have to cancel this weekend? What arrangements had I already made? Oh sorry, you can’t answer that, can you? And you don’t care either.

They were using a version of Word my version couldn’t understand, because the whole point of Microsoft is to keep you buying things you don’t need at £300 a go every time Bill Gates fancies another one of his secretaries. It took hours finding free software to convert one version into another before I could even read what the test actually was. That took me to 01:00 Saturday and I had a course booked all day Saturday starting at 08:00 and running through till six that I couldn’t get out of and didn’t want to anyway. I’d booked it weeks previously.

I got the test mostly finished around half-past one Sunday morning. I didn’t have time to do anything to it that morning because the course started again at 08:00 and ran through till lunchtime. Then I had to be on a train to London to do something on Monday I’d also arranged, another job. One that hadn’t messed me around. I had time to do a little editing on Sunday night before the deadline but I couldn’t get the bullet points to line up whatever I did.

I wasn’t happy with the flow of the piece but given I didn’t know what it was about anyway I didn’t entirely see what I could do about that. We talked about all of this at the interview on Tuesday. They said the email should have been sent earlier in the week. They apologised it had been sent so late. They said that wasn’t part of the test. I think they lied.

I didn’t get the job because they wanted a typist. They said I should do more than this, but not for them. And I agree. As I left the interview I accidentally took the picture at the top of these words on my phone. I’d thought I was in a good mood. See my face? That’s my face, that is. I think I wasn’t happy.

Wild West End

Then I saw the sandwich stall being trundled away by two men. Argentinian pampas-raised beef in a wrap £6.50. And £650 for a no-cooker bedsit one room halfway to Heathrow. It wouldn’t have taken long to get tired of this. As the train took me back to Suffolk I remembered the Sweeney, the grime and the sense of things abandoned that used to be London and the glass and chrome and chip wrappers that it is now, with TK Max standing proudly where there used to be a music gear shop in the Charing Cross Road. It’s not quite the same, somehow.

On your left as you pass down the street you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the site of the place where in the song Wild West End, Mark Knopfler got a pickup for his steel guitar. Now you can buy last season’s Ralph Lauren in a peculiar colour and something a bit wrong with the zip in the very same place.

About a million years ago one August I cycled through the back streets of Kings Cross, through piles of rubble. A kestrel hovered overhead in London’s hot diesel sky. There was nobody around as far as I could see. I don’t even know where that is now. You can’t go back. The past is another country. They do things differently there. And I’m not doing this again.

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No pain, no gain

My lunchtime view. I've seen worse.
My lunchtime view. I’ve seen worse.

Today was another day of varnish scraping. I meant to spend a whole day doing it, but I was too tired, too achey after spending the past two days doing the same thing, heating up old varnish with a heat gun and scraping it off with the other hand. There isn’t much room on deck amidships as I suppose I ought to call it, or half-way along the boat in more normal parlance. I didn’t particularly want to do a header over the side and drop eight feet onto the metal boat trailer if I overbalanced doing this, because with both hands full I couldn’t have the traditional one hand for what you’re doing and one for the boat that’s supposed to keep you safe, or at least safer. Obviously it doesn’t work if you get in the way of a super huge container ship coming out of Felixstowe, but nothing will. I did what sailing is all about and improvised, clipping a safety line through my leather trouser belt at one end of the other around the nearest fixed bit of metal attached to the boat. It would probably stop me hitting the ground, or at least at full speed. I didn’t want to find out anyway.

I started work on the boat at about one o’clock today and had to stop just before six. I couldn’t do anymore. It wasn’t as cold as yesterday, or at least it didn’t feel as cold. It said 4.5C on the car thermometer today, but 7.5C yesterday when there was a steady breeze blowing, which there wasn’t today. A huge high tide yesterday too, to go with the eclipse, the water up over the quayside. It looks very wrong when that happens.

This is what I did today. It felt like more.
This is what I did today. It felt like more.

All I did apart from drink tea and eat a banana was heat and scrape. It was ok. I like jobs where I can see what I’ve actually done, whatever they are. I wanted to get all of the port or left hand side of the deck rail done today but I just couldn’t do it all. I can’t work out what’s been going on with this boat. Parts of the rail had three layers of varnish on them, one of them a deep red. Other parts just a few feet away had a green coating that looked more like moss just beginning to grow and hardly any varnish at all. There is a six inch strip of toe rail – to stop your toes and then the rest of you going over the side – that is rotten and crumbling while the rest of it is completely solid. I don’t understand why that part would have gone rotten. It makes no sense.

So tomorrow is another day. I think it’s going to be two days to finish stripping all the varnish off and probably another two to sand down the deck unless I can find a sander. I thought I had one but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I don’t like using sanders anyway. I don’t like the vibration through my hands, nor the noise.

It’ll be another day to sand down the paint above the waterline on the hull ready to change it from red to white, the proper colour for Nordic Folkboats but the below-waterline part feels quite rough already. I’m wondering if just a wash down with water to get the mud off would be enough, without bothering to sand it. I can’t tell. It would save a lot of time.

It will be worth it. Really. It will. Honest...
It will be worth it. Really. It will. Honest…

Then a day painting, then she can go back in the water and I can paint the inside of the cabin white now that the wet rot cure has done its stuff. There is a crack along the cabin roof side that is letting in water too. I thought I could get away without stripping the varnish off that but I think the only thing to do is lift that off, fill the crack with clear epoxy glue and sand it back flush, then seal the wood up again with Tonkinoise. All day I have cursed the man who invented yacht varnish. He must have had his reasons to invent something rubbish that comes off again in big ugly yellow flakes like old man’s toenails. I just don’t know what they were.

I got back home about half-past six. I wanted something good to eat so I made the broccoli quiche I’d promised myself when I made the pastry and put it in the fridge yesterday. I was cold and aching and if I had had a tin of baked beans in the cupboard I’d have had that, but I didn’t. I hadn’t done quite enough pastry either and I rolled it out with a big Kilner jar, which was lazy and stupid because the fastener made a hole in the pastry and some of the filling dripped through. Not enough flavour. I should have put salt in and maybe just maybe a tiny sprinkle of chilli flakes. But it was ok, So was the cake I made yesterday. It’s now nearly nine. I haven’t seen anyone I know all weekend. I’m tired and aching and I seriously think I’m going to shower and go to bed with a cup of tea and a book right now.

It’s the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the town a friend of mine grew up in. The RAF did it. Nearly half the population was made homeless. There was nothing there apart from a beautiful medieval town and the war almost over. I haven’t known whether to mention it to her or not. She has. But what would I say? Sorry about the unpleasantness earlier?

I thought that as I saw someone pressure washing their plastic boat today, cleaning it up in about an hour while it’s taking me a week to do the same thing. That’s the trouble with wooden boats. Sometimes they make you too tired to think. But there’s nothing, really nothing like them at all.

 

 

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Stripping it back

The thing about wooden boats is they’re wooden boats. They start rotting from the time the first bit of water touches the wood after the sap has stopped flowing. But they’re still a million miles better than floating Tupperware, because you can fix them.

Something odd has happened to this Folkboat of mine some time in the past. There is a hairline crack in the side of the cabin roof that lets water in and where water stays in it starts rotting, so I have to fix that. There’s another patch where someone has drilled a hole through the roof to secure the grab rail that makes going forward from the cockpit not quite so perilous, given there are no rails at the sides and it’s a nice eight foot drop to the ground that I really don’t want to do. The water is getting under the wooden grab rail because there’s nothing to stop it. Taking the rail off, putting a dob of Silkaflex (a kind of putty that never really dries out completely) and put the rail back on should fix that, and there are a couple of other joins that need filling in with the stuff too.

A little imperial relic, from the days when you could sail away somewhere out East, cut the trees down and paint your ship with the juice. Obviously get the natives to do it for you and burn thier huts if they won't. British foreign policy hasn't changed in many ways.
A little imperial relic.

Yesterday and today I spent scraping off old varnish. You can see where it needs to come off because although it’s still glossy it’s a yellowy white colour, which tells you air or water or both has got in under the varnish. This is one of the reasons I hate yacht varnish. It sits on top of the wood as a hard impermeable layer, like concrete and just like concrete, while it keeps water out it’s great and when it doesn’t it’s a nightmare, because it traps the water underneath the varnish where it starts eating your boat. I don’t know why more people don’t use Tonkinoise. It’s French, it’s been around for a hundred years or more and it goes into the wood rather than sitting on top of it. You can see the advantage straight away. The disadvantage is all the old varnish has to come off first. Which means getting the scrapers and the heat gun out.

I sat there for six hours yesterday and three and a half today, in a wooly hat, four layers of clothing, safety boots, gloves and a PVC smock, heating up old varnish in one hand and scraping it off with the other. I froze. I’m writing this sitting on my sofa at home ninety minutes later and I’m still cold, with the heating on, a cup of tea and a disgusting shop-bought so second-hand biscuit, not really able to think straight yet because I’m so cold. But it’s getting done.

I’m getting the feel of the boat, finding out what needs to be done. There’s an electrical thing in the battery compartment which got rained on for six months and that’s going to need bypassing or replacing. At the moment bypassing looks the best option because I don’t know what it is, but I might revise my opinion on that. Really, all it needs apart from the electrical thing, whatever it is (and it’s metal with fins on and one wire goes into it and about four wires come out of it if that makes any difference), all it needs is doing it. Just scraping and sanding and painting. Wooden boat stuff.

imag0275
Making a start. The deck looks like teak but the varnish on the edges hasn’t worn well. I think someone just varnished over varnish, without taking the old stuff off first. Task One.

Practical meditation. It sends me into almost a trance state. It’s a great way to calm down and think. Except when it’s cold, when it stops you thinking long after you should have thought that it’s too cold to keep on doing this.

I spent six hours scraping old varnish off yesterday and another three and a half today. I’m getting better at it and it’s one of those things that improves with practice. I’d done just about a third of the deck now, and treated the wet rot around the windows inside. I have all the paint I need, the white paint for the hull and the black anti-foul and the Tonkinoise arrives on Tuesday. I have the brushes and the thinners and about enough sandpaper and all of this week to get this boat ready, if it doesn’t rain.

Years ago when I was learning to sail (me and Mr Dana, out of San Diego, obviously) I read one of those stupid folksy maybe-traditional sayings carved and burned into a plaque above a yacht club bar. It was empty, as they always are in the afternoon. A fly was buzzing at a window. The air was full of the scent of damp cotton drying in the sun with that special smell faded sailing it always has.

It was just a stupid motto:

A day spent sailing is not counted as part of your allotted span.

It was just a little sailing club on a lake by a dual carriageway. The woman at the next table finished organising her children. She looked at the sign, then at me, then she looked away across the lake as she said ‘A day on the water – sometimes it all feels like starting again.’

She didn’t mean learning. I knew exactly what she meant. Just that timeless thing about wooden boats and the water. Maybe it’s not part of your allotted span. Or maybe just days when you have the space to be on your own, doing something that needs doing that you can do, something you can work at and see the difference and think at the end of the day that maybe it isn’t completely fixed but you can finish it tomorrow, that you’re on top of this by just working at it, that you can work this out, maybe that’s what feels out of time.

Summer’s coming soon. And summer on the water is a special thing.

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Where I am

Yesterday I went to a friend’s before she was awake. I let myself in and quieted her dogs but not soon enough to stop them waking her.

“I knew it was you.”

The little dog had barked.

“She only barks for you.”

I took them out for a half hour while my friend got up, then we talked while she had a bath, the door left half open so we could hear each other, like people in a daring 1950s film.

We were going for breakfast, but we talked so much that we ended up going for lunch, then somehow it was half past four and time for my friend to do some work. I took the dogs out on the river path that leads to the sea. Deep in the woods on the promontory we found a plank laid over a ditch that we crossed over, into a place where no-one had walked since the floods.

imag0187We had big floods here last winter, the water even coming into the place my friend works, half a kilometre from the river. The ground was smooth in this place, with no footprints of deer or people. There were rabbits though, that the dogs hunted as a pair, one diving into the bushes while the other ran around the other side of the little copse to catch the rabbits as they ran out.

Technically I suppose it’s called hunting with dogs and illegal, but I didn’t make them do it and they didn’t stop when I called them. They didn’t catch any either. If there were really any rabbits there rather than just their smell I didn’t see any.

We walked for about an hour and a half until my friend texted me to see where we were. We were here. Ten minutes away. Five if we hurry. And no need. She was fine. Just seeing how we were. We were here.

 

 

 

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Bearing down

Before, looking a bit needy. The boat, not me.
Before, looking a bit needy. The boat, not me.

I went down to the boat again today to make a start on the renovations. I’m also trying to take my mind off the small and potentially fatal issue of how I’m going to get the boat around to Aldeburgh Yacht Club, which doesn’t sound too threatening in and of itself, but it means going out of the mouth of the Deben and into Orford Haven.

The entrance to the River Deben is protected by a shifting shingle bar that often has less than one metre over it at LW springs. The bar is dangerous in heavy seas and especially in strong onshore winds.

That’s the going out bit. About four miles north at Hollesley you have much the same thing, but in reverse.

The bar at the entrance to the river is formed by a shifting bank of shingle. Depths are subject to frequent change. Up to date local information should always be obtained before making an entrance. Broken water on the bar often looks frightening but is to be expected. Entrance should never be attempted in bad weather, especially during onshore winds.

This stuff can actually kill you. Either way, the boat isn’t going to make itself look nice so I thought I’d better make a start and get sanding down. I can’t find where my extension lead is, so I had to do it by hand. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I went around the whole boat with a scraper first, to get rid of any obviously flaking paint or varnish. There wasn’t much.

I got a phone call from a job agency about Tuesday, confirming. They were going to send me some background information too.

Then I made a start on the decks. Knee pads helped a lot, new protective gloves too. I got another phone call, from someone who made me smile and my heart lift. After we’d talked and got in that silly muddle about ringing off, each saying goodbye about three times like teenagers, although we really, truly aren’t, after I’d made the promise I always make to myself when that person rings me, if this job works out, I got back to sanding the afterdeck again.

After. About an hour and a half after.
After. About an hour and a half after.

I worked on this for about two hours, although with thinking breaks and phone calls and a trip to the shops for work gloves I was there for about three and a bit hours all told. The wind was coming up and it looked like rain with lights going on in the car-park by the station when I left. It was cold. I didn’t realise how cold I was until I walked past my car, not thinking. Careful.

I got fish and chips as it’s Friday and went home to eat them. Opening my email the agency has sent background information about the job I’m being interviewed for on Tuesday. I ache from sanding and bending and kneeling; I’m not used to this. The company has also sent a test. Literally. They sent it at 17:23 on a Friday. They want it by 23:00 Sunday, which seems remarkably precise, so they can have it for first thing Monday and review it for the interview. Part of me says they’re joking. I don’t even work for them yet and they want me to start on something through the weekend when they’ve known about this for two days. I can’t do it tomorrow because I’m helping someone demonstrate how to smoke fish, and although that sounds a bit optional I said I’d do it, so it isn’t. That’s important to me. Sunday. I’ll have to do it on Sunday and not go and work on the boat. I’m also supposed to be going to London on Sunday because I have to go and follow a tour guide around all of Monday, starting 0830 in Wembley.

I like jobs where you can see what you've actually done. The left half of the picture for example. Starboard side if you insist.
I like jobs where you can see what you’ve actually done. The left half of the picture for example. Starboard side if you insist.

But it’ll get done. Things do. And I want this job so I can keep the promise I made when I rang off on the phone. And anyway, the boat is getting done. The paint is all ordered and on its way and if the varnish isn’t because I want to use Tonkinoise instead, although what that is will have to be left until another day because I’m tired now, then all of that can be done when it’s actually in the water. And I can decide whether to get absolutely all the old varnish off or just re-varnish over the top of it later as well.

Assuming I survive the trip round to Aldeburgh. If I don’t then it won’t matter anyway but that’s going to be fine. The fish will get smoked. The test will get done. The sound edits for a demo I was supposed to finish today will get done soon, possibly on Sunday on the train. That would work. The interview….I will just have to do my best.  Today’s results made the job worth doing. Tomorrows – well, tomorrow is another day. Today is all you ever have. My day has been a happy one. I made somebody else smile too. I could hear it in her voice.

 

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Day One: The Reckoning

imag0253
Looking aft. As we salty sailor boys have it. As it were.

I went down to see the boat today. My boat. The boat that is mine. I took some water and bread and cheese. I’m taking some apples tomorrow because frankly, that all got a bit unduly Spartan but never mind. I opened all the hatches and got some air running through the boat and got everything that was damp out in the wind where it could dry out while I took stock of things.

I was just working out the tasks, what’s going to need doing first. I’ve given myself ten days to get her clean and tidy and in the water, which should be a reasonable time-frame. Should be. Except no sooner had I sat down in the sun with the main hatch open, sitting on the step so I could see out but protected from the wind by the coachroof in a really nice, comfortable spot I can see myself using a lot, the phone rang. Of course I had my phone with me. Everyone does. Even around here, where phones don’t always work.

I’d thought the boat needed a cooker and a sink, but when I had a good look around there was already a sink there, under a chopping board that disguised it. There’s a twin-burner paraffin stove with an oven in the boatyard shop. I’ll measure the space tomorrow.

Urgent stuff to do? I need to make a little wooden box out of ply to cover an unsightly hole you can see on the right hand side of the top picture, where the depth gauge display has been cut into the wood not very neatly. Some bolts need trimming so they don’t stick out, because it’s ugly when they do. There’s a bit of wet rot that needs stopping before it goes any further, but that’s what wet rot glue is for. Mostly it just needs sanding, a new coat of anti-foul to keep the weeds off, new paint to cover the few scratches where someone got a bit too enthusiastic about mooring and varnish to replace the old varnish.

Yacht varnish is a total waste of time, in my experience, so I’m not going to do it. Instead, I’m going to use stuff called Tonkinoise which the French Navy used to use out east, as we say in Woodbridge. It’s not varnish. It goes deep into the wood rather than sitting on top of it, so it doesn’t flake off again every single year. Unlike varnish.

Mind your head. I think this is the reason these classic little yachts are out of fashion. They were designed for sailing, not an aerobics trampoline class.
Mind your head. I think this is the reason these classic little yachts are out of fashion. They were designed for sailing, not an aerobics trampoline class.

So sanding tomorrow, but I’d better order the anti-foul and the paint and the Tonkinoise first as that’s going to take a few days to arrive.

I can’t decide whether to use a power sander or not. Somehow it seems a bit like cheating, but there’s quite a bit of hull to sand so maybe I’ll do the decks and the exposed wood by hand and everything else with a sander.

Either way it’s going to be a long day and there’s some other stuff to do, because the phone ringing meant I have an interview for a big job in London on Tuesday and I’ll deal with how I’m going to get there and/or where I’m going to live when they offer it to me. Along with the big fat cheque every month that they’re talking about, which is why I’m talking to them.

But meanwhile, there’s this lovely little boat to fettle.

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By the river

It's the red one. A 1992 Folkboat. And mine.
It’s the red one. A 1992 Folkboat. And mine.

I looked at boats to buy back in 2000. Somehow that was 15 years ago. It just flies by when you’re having fun. I was a different person then, with different dreams and expectations.

I wanted a house in Oxford, or maybe just outside it on the London side. I’d sold the house in Stow. I was trying to get an internet business off the ground but thanks to an accountant who didn’t do email and a vulture capitalist who thought I was going to give him half of the thing in return for working for him in deed, word and fact, that didn’t happen. Microsoft do the thing it did now. At least I got to be friendly with a six foot blond lesbian coder with a rubber dress. Not everybody can say that.

But the boat thing…we visited boat yards all over the East Coast. Stood on docks looking at horrible plastic boats with fins sticking out of them, stubbed toes on bits of things that nobody even knew what they were any more, so much so that in one of those yards up a creek in Essex someone now thinks they’ve found Darwin’s little ship, the one he sailed on to write the Origin of Species.

I wanted a wooden boat and I had about £10,000 to spend. It didn’t happen for all kinds of reasons then, but time goes on for the lucky ones. Yesterday I bought one. I didn’t pay anything like that. I first saw this lovely little boat in October or thereabouts. I’ve been going to this boatyard for years, thinking one day I might buy a boat there. Finally it’s happened. I’m just about to go down and see what needs to be done to get her ready for the water again.

I’ll just put a pen and a thermos flask in my bag and I’ll let you know.

 

 

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Even when we die

I walked out of the exhibition at SMM in Hamburg at the end of a day looking at ships engines the size of most people’s houses, dehydrated and wondering if I had time to have a shower before the Inmarsat party in the evening, and back then, Inmarsat parties were legend. You never knew what might happen, apart from that everyone would be immaculately dressed, the Inmarsat crew would be working the whole time even if they were singing, dancing or just talking and the drinks would keep coming, on the company. What happened a couple of times later definitely wasn’t working, but the past as we all know is another country and that’s about enough detail I think.

I had time to have a shower if I didn’t walk back to my hotel but it had been a long day. There were mysteries in Hamburg. My hotel near the big, blackened railway station gave the lie to all the rubbish you ever need to hear about precision bombing. The station looked intact but it must have been rebuilt, massive in the middle of a plain of buildings that had obviously replaced the ones bombed flat all around it.

I walked through a little park then crossed a road, quite a big road, then into another park. It was about an hour before dark so far as I could judge and I could see the big Hamburg transmitting tower that made me think of old radio dials, the kind that used to have magic words written on them: Berlin, Hilversum, Luxemburg, Hamburg, Moscow, Home Service, back when you could smell the radio waves. I walked past a little lake and a small cafe and along a path by some trees. There were only one or two people in the park by now, apart from me. Then I saw it.

Swastika? No, sorry, no idea what you're talking about...
Swastika? No, sorry, no idea what you’re talking about…

I’d read about how all the Nazi symbols had been smashed off buildings after the war, how swastikas or hakenkreuz symbols clutched in stone eagle talons had been chiselled off buildings. I knew this. There are before and after photos all over the web.

I didn’t expect to come face to face with a huge monument in the park. In lots of ways it was the same as any other big stone memorial to Our Brave Boys. But it wasn’t. It was to Their Brave Boys. The Germans. The enemy. And I didn’t know how to deal with it.

Monument to the 76th Infantry Regiment. A real slap in the face.
Monument to the 76th Infantry Regiment.

That was 2003. I couldn’t find any mention of it in guide books and I wasn’t sure which park I’d been in and eventually, even whether it had all been a dream. They couldn’t have left a memorial celebrating Nazi soldiers standing. They burned the whole city down. About 40,000 were burned alive here, by us, the Allies, the RAF and the US Army Air Force. It was called Operation Gomorrah. You don’t have to know a lot of your Bible to know this was about removing a city from the map. Forget the fairy tales of the Memphis Belle going round on its bomb run again to miss the school next door to the factory. 150mph winds burning at 800 C don’t miss things. They had no intention of missing things. I didn’t understand how this memorial had survived. If it missed the bombing there must have been no shortage of people with chisels and hammers in June 1945 to take care of it.

But there it still is, at Dammtor. You can read about it here. I’m not sure why it stuck in my mind. Because it wasn’t like a war memorial. Because it seemed triumphant. Because Our Brave Boys were wearing the boots and the wrong-shaped helmet, the Stalhelm. Because they were Germans. Because like everyone of my generation, the War was this huge thing that grownups didn’t talk about. That wouldn’t go away.

A man with one arm lived up the road from us when I was a boy. My parents disapproved of him because he wasn’t married to the woman he was living with. Her daughter bore the mark of their shame. Please don’t think I’m joking. It wasn’t all like the Darling Buds of May growing up in the English countryside.

“He didn’t lose his arm in The War, you know.”

It was always there. It was there in the names of the Polish kids at my school, it was there in the reason why there was an Italian motorcycle shop. It was there in the candles burning on a Friday night in the front window of the small family of pale, dark-haired people who kept themselves to themselves down a dark lane, the parents younger than I am now, the two girls, Miriam and Rebecca. I never heard them shout or scream, the way any other children did, but maybe there’d been enough screaming in their family already.

“Germany must live, even when we die.”

I left the monument and got back and walked up the stairs in my hotel, past the huge sailing ship hanging from the ceiling in the lobby and found a small window at the top of the building that didn’t look right. As I looked at it more closely I could see that the glass was thicker at the bottom of the window than at the top. I felt sick because I knew what had happened.

The fires from the bombs dropped by the RAF had burned so hot that the glass in the window had started to melt, 100 feet above the street. Now try to read that again after you’ve wiped your eyes.

It doesn’t matter how much you blow your nose. It will never be all right. It doesn’t matter who was right or who was wrong. The bell tolls for all of us.

Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen.

One of the inscriptions on the memorial says “Germany must live, even though we die.” Or thereabouts. Just by the passage of time almost everyone who put on a uniform back then, any uniform, has died now. Almost all of them. But Germany lived. It became something greater than practically anyone then could possibly imagine. A country without a war. Even when we die.

 

 

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