I’ve only had it once that wasn’t in a dream. Literally, that sinking feeling, when there’s water coming up past the floorboards inside the boat and despite the fact you know, really you know, that thanks to the mud that makes up a large part of the River Deben, your boat can only possibly sink about two feet at most, given the tide, some primeval part of your brain is screaming much louder than the rational part. And it’s screaming something you don’t want to hear.
“You’re going to die! Very soon! do something!”
I’d had my boat out of the water for several years. I bought it when it had been out for at least two. I worked on it, sanded it, varnished it, painted it, antifouled it, made it look what used to be called all shipshape and Bristol fashion, which doesn’t mean it looked like gigantic breasts because that would be too silly. What I couldn’t do anything about was the fact that it had been out of the water for years and it was a wooden boat. They dry out. The wood shrinks. And the gaps between the planks that make up the hull don’t. In fact, they do the opposite.
I’d told Everson’s boatyard, the one with the crane to put it in the slings on Monday and crane it into the water, leave it on the slip in the slings and I’d come down again on Tuesday to sail it away.
A friend took the day off work to come down on Monday with me to see what was happening. As it turned out, nothing was. The crane driver was off sick. Monday. Nothing to do with a hangover, obviously. It never was when staff went sick on Monday at my company, after all. Ever. Whatever the reason, the boat wasn’t in its sling and the sling wasn’t on the crane. Apparently, their phone had broken as well, as they hadn’t told me not to bother driving down there and wasting my time.
When I came back on Tuesday, without my friend who was going to crew, they hadn’t even bothered to start the crane up. When they eventually did get the boat into the water it leaked. A lot. It’s called ‘taking-up.’ It means the water flows pretty much uninterrupted through the gaps between the planks. This is why you put the boat in the water the day before you want it. Except the yard couldn’t be bothered to do that, or to tell me they hadn’t.
The pump worked. It had to.
It’s only about a mile down the Deben to Kyson’s Point. You turn 90 degrees West there and it’s about another much more winding mile to the mooring. I did it all under engine and everything, on this sunny day, seemed fine. The engine started up, the pump was pumping hard, no wind to speak of, it was just gone High Water and I had a new job starting the next day, teaching at a French summer school on the banks of the Stour, then starting a screenplay for Film Suffolk. Plus I had a lovely boat under me. Life was good.
dav
Life started to get less good when I got to the end of Martlesham Creek to find two things I hadn’t planned. First, the boat that was supposed to be out of my berth on the jetty was very much still in my berth on the jetty, and there wasn’t room for two. Second, and more immediately pressing, was the fact that the pump wasn’t keeping up with the inrush of water, as I saw when I looked down into the cabin and saw the floorboards floating. I did that because the odd noise I’d heard was an automatic lifejacket stowed under the seats had done what it was supposed to do when it was under water.
Don’t panic! Don’t panic!
Except I didn’t know what else to do. I’m in a rapidly drying-out channel, I can’t get onto my berth and the boat I’ve spent months making nice is sinking. It’s actually sinking. And I’m probably going to be drowned.
The fact I had a lifejacket on, the fact it could only sensibly have sunk about three feet at most, the fact that I could have stood on the cabin roof if it did without getting my sailing wellies wet, none of that came into my thoughts at all. The only thing that did was a primeval fear of drowning.
And of course, I didn’t drown. And nor did the boat actually sink, or not much more than it had, anyway. The boatyard owner told me to moor on the end of the jetty. When my voice was somewhere near a normal register I told him what was happening, so he told me to just point the boat at the bank and open the throttle. We’d sort it out later. Over there, between those two boats. I went for the gap, Fern softly stopped, we put some lines out fore and aft and that was pretty much that.
We got a big petrol-driven pump onboard and cleared her, then rigged a float so it would kick in if the water kept on coming in. From the streams of water visible under the cockpit floorboards that looked likely. I had to go to school so I couldn’t see Fern for about ten days after that. I ordered some caulking cotton and Stockholm tar but stopped short of buying proper caulking irons which was just as well, as Fern stopped leaking – sorry, taking-up – on the second day in her new berth, the yard told me. They’d checked. I’ve never caulked anything, then or since and never needed to.
I learned what a good boatyard I’d chosen, totally by accident, tucked away at the end of a forgotten creek in Suffolk. I learned that the tide goes out far and fast there too.
There’s a new movie out. In fact, like my revisited reaction to On The Road, the novel, when I saw the 2012 film for the first time the other night, there isn’t. It’s on Channel 4, if you’re interested. And maybe, as I was, you ought to be. It’s about an America that just after the war a group of young-ish people went looking for. Except they weren’t that young, having been you can find out online well out of their teens and for better or worse, having grown-up first in the Great Depression, which affected almost absolutely everybody, and then in the Second World War, which laughably or otherwise after Pearl Harbor charged many Americans with the belief that they had almost a spiritual need, call and duty to save the world, first and foremost by being American and secondly, almost incidentally, by killing Krauts and Japs, much as them pesky Redskins had been in the way of their grandparents’ manifest destiny.
Mommy’s Boy with ishoos has a mahoosive crush on this glamorous waste of space who gives him a free go on his girlfriend and travels across the country with him several times, by car, pickup truck, freight train and hitchhiking. The people they inevitably meet, history being inevitable, as Malcolm Bradbury’s Howard Kirk reminds us all, turn out equally inevitably to be either a) wild crazy hipster cats and proto-Beatniks who know no boundaries; or b) racked with wild and indescribable sadnesses the narrator thinks are the soul of proto-America ( so long as they ain’t Injuns who don’t get a look-in, obviously); or c) both.
The more I watched the movie the more I remembered things from the past, mine and Jack Kerouac’s. I loved this book and the way it changed my life when I was walking the mean streets of Trowbridge on my paper round. It made me go on my own road trip, one I planned for years and finally did, ten years later. It also reminded me how yes, I’d met people like that. And I also remembered I’d learned to avoid total self-absorbed blagging ego-centric arses, but only too slowly. As shop signs about asking for credit used to say, a punch in the mouth often offends, but equally often looking back it would have probably been the right thing to do.
But at thirteen, posting copies of the Bath Evening Chronicle through letterboxes in the gathering dusk on Pitman Avenue, (yes, the shorthand Pitman, he lived in Trowbridge, there’s a plaque about it where that policeman got stabbed) On The Road was a hymn to freedom. Not many years after that I read something written on a barn wall.
“Freedom? Are the sparrows free from the chains of the sky?”
Which for graffiti on a barn full of bits of ancient motorcycles that today would be somebody’s entire and very generous pension fund and then at best was some greasy hippy with a stupid name’s falling-down shed full of rubbish, was a pretty acute observation, then or now. Dean Moriarty’s 1949 Hudson didn’t buy itself. On the truck farm where Sal Paradise met his Mexican – ooops, sorry, Latino – stoop labour girlfriend, if you didn’t work you didn’t get paid and that meant you didn’t eat. Working for a pittance isn’t freedom, as he found out. It was no more real than paying your mortgage off, or getting your book about it published. And it was no more “America” than say, Sergeant York was a typical conscientious objector. The America of Mad Men and Wall Street, let alone Breaking Bad and 24 didn’t even exist in America back when Kerouac rode the range. They didn’t have Interstate highways back then. There wasn’t even a proper road when the US Army drove coast to coast in 1919. Aspen – yes, THAT Aspen, Dallas-opening-credits Aspen – didn’t have tarmac on its Main street until 1960.
But I didn’t know all that on Elmdale, Blair and Eastview, bringing the evening news about Chilean refugees to the good folk of West Wiltshire, first on my rubbish scrap bike then when I was 14, on my lime green metal flake Carlton Continental, £40 on installments to my mother, when £40 was a pretty big deal. What I thought was a pretty big deal by then was Hunter S. Thompson.
For our younger readers, HST was a man who wrote stuff. What he wanted to write was The Great American Novel, so after he was kicked out of the US Airforce, for many of the reasons Kerouac was kicked out of the US Navy, he went off to Big Sur and wrote in the place where Kerouac visited while Thompson was doing odd jobs, where Hemingway shot himself and Richard Brautigan did the same. Maybe it was something in the water. Or maybe it was because all of them were regularly off their face. Either way, Thompson learned that however much he got off his own face absolutely nobody wanted to publish his fiction, although ultimately that’s exactly what happened in a way he didn’t predict.
In San Francisco at the dawn of the 1960s he bought a Triumph motorcycle and rode around with the Hell’s Angels, always something of a high-risk hobby and one that ended the way a six year-old might predict. He wrote what I’ve always thought the best sociological study of a marginalised group I’ve ever read, the not-very-originally-titledHells Angels: the Strange And Terrible Saga Of The Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, which absolutely no Sociology lecturer I ever met at the University of Bath ever felt necessary to discuss or even acknowledge it existed.
The paralysing straightjacket of the legend Thompson became holds that he was way out there on the edge, feeling no fear. If you watch his post-being-beaten-up-by-them televised encounter with one of the Angels he used to hang around with, you’ll see for yourself what a crock that was.
But I didn’t know that either, back then. All I wanted to do was go to America and meet Hunter Thompson, then make a living writing like him. I did half of that.
I got the opportunity in the early 1980s to go to teach kids to shoot on a summer camp in Wisconsin. I found several things there; guns, cheerleaders called Nancy-Jean, a lake we parked by in the best Meatloaf tradition. I also found a Chevrolet Kingswood, a laughably massive estate car that did nine to the gallon around any town and a thrifty fifteen on the open road. Apart from the time I drove up over the Rockies, stopped for a break and when I tested the new puddle on the road below the exhaust pipe, when it seemed to be blowing petrol stright through, unburned. That was a Kerouac day, getting clean in a creek next to the road, seeing my big toenail turn the same colour as my jeans and only discovering later the water was so cold because it was glacier run-off; blowing a cooling hose on the plateau southeast of Buena Vista and getting a lift from a truckload of Latino migrant workers to a garage open on a Sunday that sold me a top hose for 82 cents. Like the dog named Boo, a screwdriver, a Jubilee clip and another tank of gas and we were back on the road again.
Was it worth watching? Yes. For me, anyway. Was it worth doing it, any of it? Kerouac’s road trip, Thompson’s desert run to Vegas, my own, more pedestrian meandering from Eagle River to Greencastle to Terre Haute, through tiny river towns of Missouri to St Louis guided by the Rand-McNally and stopping at gunshops – the easiest place to talk to strangers if you spoke the language, and thanks to shooting at Bisley and a summer of teaching it, I did, back then. After an abortive Saturday spent first driving through an electric storm, then in definitively the worst bar I’ve ever been in in my entire life, a barn of a place in Colby, KS, where everyone was carded on the door and bar staff wore Mace canisters on their belts I headed southwest towards Colorado Springs and then up over the first ridge of the Rockies.
On the last day of August I drove down Independence Pass into Aspen and my life changed. I don’t think it ever went back to how it had been before, but anyone can say that about pretty much any day they care to name, if they can remember it at all. There were some serious things wrong with the place, like oh, I don’t know, Goldie Hawn not looking like Private Benjamin when she went to the thrift store (no she didn’t and yes she did, respectively), Andy Williams reportedly buying-off the police investigation when someone got themselves shot dead in very odd circumstances, someone else deciding to sort-out who was going to bed with who with an AR-15 one dark night on a quiet backwoods track, or the dealer guy who got into his Jeep one fine day, turned the key and didn’t have time to even sing man, that’s all she wrote when it exploded. But hey, nobody ever said Aspen was perfect. It just pretty much was, a place of sun and snow and good-looking people and what looked like open-ness, a place where the dustman’s dollar was as good as John Denver’s in any restaurant. Cash, obviously.
Fat City
I tracked HST down to his house outside the city eventually. It took a little while, not least because some people thought I was a cop or someone serving a warrant and some just didn’t like him or the attention he brought to the town. He stood for Sherrif in the early 1970s and at least according to him, came within a spit of getting elected. One of the things he proposed still makes sense, renaming Aspen officially as Fat City. That way the people who just wanted to live somewhere quiet and beautiful, or the people who wanted to play music or listen to it instead of being seen going to listen to it, or the people who just wanted to be left alone to ski could get on and do that. Meanwhile the shopping malls and developers and people selling $200 T-shirts would have a hard time getting start-up funding for the Fat City Apres-Skiwear Boutique or Fat City Jetplane Concierge LLC. You can see the problem.
Thompson got himself arrested for sexual assault around about that time, which took the edge off wanting to be like him, for me at least. Last time I saw him was standing alone on West Hyman, very tall and balding in the sunlight, absorbed in something I’d now say was a mobile phone message, but couldn’t have been back then. I never knew what it was. But by then I didn’t care that much what he did. Nor, to be honest, what Kerouac did. I had my own things to do. I just wish I could have done them in that golden place on the Western slope of the Rockies a lifetime longer. Just like paradise by the dashboard light, it was long ago and it was far away. Still, as Bruce Springsteen told me personally, nothing we can say or do is going to change anything now.
According to the BBC today, students buying an essay and calling it their own work is going to be illegal in the UK. It’s sort-of good news, if it puts a stop to the ads essay mills posted for writers that fooled even a PhD friend into applying as a ‘sector-expert’ until she realised her expertise was intended to be used to give rich or lazy – or rich and lazy – kids a free ride – or at least, one they’d paid for – at university.
This was the future.
I looked at those ads too. I’d heard for years of Indian students rioting unless they were allowed to cheat in exams, and heard about Chinese students demanding better grades or the teacher was going to be reported to the principal. As soon as you start treating learners as customers then obviously they’re going to start negotiating on what they’re getting for their money. As the Advertising Standards Association said in 2018, upholding a complaint about a company that sold essays, their website gave the misleading impression that “consumers would be able to submit purchased essays as their own without repercussion”. Consumers seemed to be the key-word.
A better grade is just another way of impressing the boss, after all. How else do you get a better job, when many if not most jobs aren’t really about specific knowledge but more about not punching the nearest David Brent clone in the face before coffee-time?
So far, so good. No more contract cheating. Students will have to write their own essays. Oh dear, how sad, never mind, as Windsor Davies used to say. Personally, I found it sad that guidance was issued to universities on how to deal with the problem of students buying their essays and pretending they’d written them. Some of the measures were obvious, for example, setting university IT networks to block essay writing websites, or not exactly outrageously, getting familiar with students’ writing styles so that a lecturer would notice when Hugo all of a sudden isn’t writing like Hugo, starts spelling words the American way and hasn’t just readThe Ginger Man for the first time.
Equally sensibly, the guidance recommended that there should be clear procedures for reporting student cheating, now that most university disciplinary procedures don’t include a frosty stare over the rim of a sherry glass and the ominous ticking of a clock while a coal shifts in the fireplace in a book-lined study.
Some of the guidance though, seemed to be at odds with the whole purpose of a university experience. You could, it suggested, avoid students using fake paid-for essays by, oh, I don’t know, set them fewer essays. Or hey, if they can’t write essays, support the ones that can’t to improve their writing skills.
And here I have to declare an interest, because for the past several years, this is what I’ve been doing and being paid for it. I had a private student. She’d failed her A Levels and I was originally hired to get her through her re-sits. It was her written English that was the problem. She could explain an idea perfectly well out loud. Ask her to put it on paper and all you’d get would be at best blank paper, or a string of un-connected clauses and apparently random ideas that didn’t seem even vaguely linked to each other, let alone the subject. But after a year of once a week really quite hard work on both sides, we won. She passed and got into the university of her choice, to do a performing arts degree. The family thanked me, she thanked me, I got paid, smiles all round and I had the satisfaction of thinking I’d done something well that changed someone’s life for the better, the best thing about teaching.
A few months later I got a phone call from her mother. Um, could I sort of do the same thing again, but at university level? Because the university isn’t all that happy about the essay work. I surprised myself how much I knew about Cabaret, inter-war Berlin and the rise of Nazism, but I’d read Isherwood, met two very old men who had actually been in the Hitler Youth (they loved it, apart from the thought-control bit, apparently), written Janni Shenck and listened to a German girlfriend talking about her grandfather’s trek on foot from Czechoslovakia to Bremen, on the run from the Wehrmacht Heer after he’d laughed at a joke about Hitler and was sentenced to death by firing squad. It wasn’t that hard to help someone write about musicals, once I’d taken Howard Kirk‘s dictum that history is inevitable.
The two old men who had happily marched in their shorts singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me would probably have agreed that if you had any sense and especially if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders, all you had to do with history was lie back and enjoy it.
South Pacific was much the same. There Ain’t Nothing Like A Dame? Some Enchanted Evening? It’s yer actual sociological context and involuntary geodemographic displacements, innit. That and the prospect of being blown to fly-blown atoms or working on the Burma railway making the prospect of a final quick leg-over pretty darned good, anyway. Discuss, as examiners used to say.
Then we did 42nd Street. What was amazing was how little my student knew pretty much about anything at all that had happened in the twentieth century. And more so, what any of that might have meant to people and their dreams and ambitions. She had no real idea of the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl was something to do with cleaning products. Bread lines, pre-Brexit HGV driver shortages, were a totally novel concept and barely believable at that. Ok, she wasn’t a friend of mine but Dorothy was right, there’s no place like home and 42nd Street isn’t even vaguely like rural Suffolk, which was for this student. But I didn’t chose the degree course.
When I asked for some fact-gathering (How many people lost their jobs in the Great Depression in the USA? What was the population of the USA at that time? Proportionately, was that a lot?Did most people live in towns or in rural areas?) it all seemed an alien concept. I don’t understand how it could be, given the plot of 42nd Street specifically is about a small-town girl coming to the city to make it big. The facts weren’t gathered unless I gathered them. The essay didn’t have a structure unless I structured it. Themes weren’t explored – even purely musical themes and references – unless I not only suggested the links but sketched out a format and wrote a draft.
More than once a week went by without any work at all being done on this essay unless I did it. It was lockdown. Whatever the student was doing, it wasn’t being out being a student. I’d suggested using speech recognition software. Great idea. No follow-up on it at all. I suggested Grammarly, a free app that not only fixes your spelling but touches up your grammar and sentence construction too. Not downloaded. Finally, I talked to the parent. The issue had been going on for years. Talking, fine. Writing, forget it. Which is slightly problematic when you’re enrolled in a learning programme that requires writing. Unless of course, you get someone else to write it.
I didn’t know that who sang Elton John Your Song? is a genuine question online. To me, that question isn’t about knowing Elton John’s repertoire. I thought it was about being able to use English like an adult while calling yourself a university student. But I’m old and the past is a different country. They do things differently there.
Today’s sailing was good. I did loads of things wrong in the four and a half hours I got on the water, following yesterday’s three hours. It’s sunny again after a few weeks of not sunny at all, and 27 degrees on the car thermometer, so shorts and no sweater or coat for a change, and make sure there’s a bottle of water onboard. Which reminds me there isn’t now, so I’d better put one in the car for tomorrow’s sailing.
A couple of days ago there was an odd lifejacket incident. I’d bought a new Crewsaver Hammar automatic lifejacket new last year and thought it was pretty good. Certainly it ought to have been better than the 20 year old manual inflation jacket I’d been using for probably far too long, the one that dated back to Drascombe Scaffie days. I bought that boat the year the Twin Towers came down along with Tower Seven, the one that collapsed because a plane didn’t fly into it. The night before sailing I went to check my lifejacket and found it was partially inflated.
I didn’t really understand how. It hadn’t got wet. The indicator was slightly off centre, suggesting the trigger had been pulled, maybe when I put the jacket in the back of the car, stuffing it tight against the back of the driver’s seat because I had the car roof down and didn’t want the jacket to fly away. But it was only partially inflated. Next morning it was fully up.
None of this made any sense. Nor did what happened next. I checked the jacket all over. On the Hammar trigger that sets off the jacket if it gets wet there is a date stamp. It said to replace the trigger in 2018 or if you can’t see a green dot in the indicator. I could only see half a green dot. And the jacket was bought ‘new’ in 2020.
The seller couldn’t be found. So far, so Ebay. What was odder was Crewsaver’s reaction when I emailed them with the serial number, asking when the jacket was made, describing the partial inflation of the jacket and how it took all night to inflate fully, which is a bit slower than I’d like if I fell overboard unconscious, even though my Drascombe hasn’t got a boom to smack me about and sweep me over the side, one of the things I like about Drascombes. Crewsaver said…..nothing at all.
Nice website. All very straightforward and Ellen MacArthur used Crewsaver when she was wrecking boats and would I like to register for updates and all that blah. And when a customer has a query the response, as so often now, is simply nothing at all. Call me old, but I remember a time when Customer Service didn’t mean simply ignoring the stuff you as a company can’t be arsed to do. Answering emails asking why your product doesn’t work, for example.
I got a new lifejacket, fairly obviously not from Crewsaver, one much, much heavier but oddly much more comfortable to wear. It’s the alarmingly illiterately titled Ocean Safety Kru Sport Pro, with so many Newtons of floaty that if I ever do fall off a boat then conscious or otherwise, I’ll be coming back out of it like a Polaris missile. Without the exploding end bit. If they still make them.
I wore it for the first time today. All the way up to Bouy 30, up with the tide, down with the ebb (it’s a Lugger. You don’t fight the tide in a Lugger) I didn’t fall in or come anywhere close to, although one gust did see the boat heel far enough to see the bow wave visible over the gunwhale. The wind on the Deben is problematic at the best of times. There are hills as well as trees as well as shallows and silting and an anchorage, not forgetting the geriatric arses in boats the size and style of a block of flats who either don’t know or don’t care about ColRegs and seemed utterly indifferent to pointing their boat’s bow at me 30 metres away. As I used to tell gobby smart-mouth kids who thought they were hard when I was teaching, I’ve had several people point guns at me over the years, all of them professionals. It’s still just rude.
Words were spoken
Fairly short words, at some volume. They seemed to have an immediate effect though, which was what I intended.
I had enough to deal with, with the gusting and trying not to run out of water and short tacks through the anchorage, sailing the Lugger as if it was a dinghy, which isn’t ideal as it isn’t. But it was fine. Mostly, anyway. There was a point when the jib shackle came undone which meant firstly that the jib ran off on its own, so half the power gone. More bizarrely, the shackle managed to close itself again, over the starboard shroud. A couple of days ago I’d perfected heaving-too, otherwise known as a sailing crash-stop. You tack, push the rudder away from you making the bow of the boat turn through the wind to go the other way. When it turns you normally let go the jib sheets on the side they were on and tighten the other side after the boat. has turned – you’ve now got the mainsail and the jib out the same side of the boat.
If you want to stop fast, or if you want to stop to sort something out, or even both, you only do half of that. Push the tiller away, the nose of the boat comes through the wind and … No. That’s it. Because the jib is still on the wrong side the boat somehow stalls in the wind, not going anywhere. You’ll drift if there’s a tide but it stops forward progress very quickly and it gives you space to sort things out. So that’s what I did, albeit after more words were spoken, albeit to inanimate pieces of metal.
After that a good long reach doing a decent enough speed for a Lugger back to the entrance to Martlesham Creek, a couple of very short tacks through the little anchorage at Kyson’s Point but the boat and I had the measure of each other now and we managed just fine. We even sailed all the way up the Creek onto our mooring right at the end and only dropped the boathook over the side once. It floated. Loads of things went wrong. And everything worked out fine. It’s what I like a lot about sailing these days. I’m learning a lot of things I’d forgotten. And I’m learning that I actually can do so many things I didn’t really think I could. All you have to do is try.
My beloved probably life partner, given my age and Kate Bush almost certainly not going to a) phone me b) lose 30 kilos c) look the way she did at 18 again, made a cruel remark the other day. It’s been repeated quite a lot.
My best conference suit, a fetching single-breasted, very dark grey Daks chalk stripe, would look good for someone going to a fancy dress party as a gangster, apparently.
I objected to this on several grounds. Firstly, word on the street, or at least, on The Sopranos, and I’m hip to that jive, tells me that actually, fairly ghastly pastels leisure-wear in XXXL man-made fibres are much more the thing, or were 20 years ago when it was made. Which is probably the root of the problem.
That suit was one of two I bought in Newcastle, en route to Oslo, via Kristiansand, so long ago that they still had a ferry there, sixteen years back. I had to take the ferry because if I flew there was a sporting chance of dying, or more of a chance than usual flying, light packets of flak over Bremen notwithstanding, after I’d managed to get five massive Deep Vein Thromboses from flying too much. I was going to a conference. Not the one where the Financial Times described me as ‘the Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen of market research’ in a piece I wish I’d framed. But after that one I ended up speaking at a lot of conferences and I didn’t have a thing to wear. Actually, I did. I had a rather nice lightweight blue linen job from Cordings bought very late in 2001 which I’m definitely not throwing out. It isn’t just the fact it’s got years of wear in it, nor that it was and is the sort of kit James Bond used to affect for hot weather jobs. That one’s just My Suit. It er, suits me, sir.
For my younger readers, that was the catch-phrase from a comedy show, again about a thousand years ago.
I had the dubious pleasure of being mugged by two Geralds exactly like this in Turnbull and Asser one Christmas. I’d gone for a haircut at Trumpers, where probably on behalf of the Jermyn Street Retail Association they plied the customers with free whisky while you waited for your trim. For not much – or it didn’t seem like much after the whisky – they did your shoes and fingernails while you sat and waited. I’m neither going to listen to nor accept any criticism of this whatsoever. You don’t get full employment any other way. Irrespective, haircut done, tip given to Young Adam, counsellor, confessor and barber, I lurched into the glowing dusk heading West. Which fatally sent me past Turnbull’s Christmas window. If you’ve never seen this then you’ve missed one of life’s considerable treasures. The east window was all ties. Silk ties. Brightly lit. Fantastic silk ties, woven, Italian silk ties instead of the printed Chinese rubbish in Tie Rack. Ties, in those days, at those conferences, mattered. Ten minutes later, after I’d been comprehensively Geralded, two ties up and £105 down, I was back on the street, more than slightly dazed. I still have them both. The ties, not the Geralds, you understand. A hugely brilliant yellow Paisley and a not such a good idea multi-coloured Cubist creation. The Paisley I’d still wear anywhere that needed a tie.
I bought loads of other stuff for conferences. A grey flannel suit by Crombie, which I wore so much it actually wore out. Unlike the wool and cashmere houndstooth check trousers they made which turned an evening in a taverna in Greece into something of a shining memory still. The suit I had to buy when British Airways managed to lose my suitcase somewhere between Heathrow and San Diego didn’t get much wear apart from that one interview I had to do with SURFPAC and then again with SPAWAR, the weekend Sadam Hussein was found in a drain and once again, too often in my life, someone very calm in a uniform seriously considered shooting me. It’s so rude, apart from anything. not what you expect when you go to interview someone by appointment. I’d already told the taxi driver to slow down and don’t approach the gate that had big signs on it saying ‘Do Not Approach This Gate.’ Reading didn’t seem to be part of his core skillset.
The three sets of Italian Super 110 black wool trousers, another Ian Fleming recommendation for hot weather suavery – am I really ever going to wear them again? In rural Suffolk? Seriously? The brown double-monk Lobbs, possibly anywhere. The blue suede double-monk shoes, maybe Aldeburgh on a dry Saturday. But black Super 110 wool trousers…. probably not. And it hurts to type that.
But what do you actually do with this stuff? It’s going to stay in a charity shop forever, unless someone thrifty suddenly decides they need possibly somewhat dated hot climate business kit, which is borderline unlikely. It’s far too good for the clothes bin at the fire station where they probably put everything through a shredder and re-spin the yarn or send it in bundles to Africa. If that still happens. Ebay beckons if I can be bothered to go through the faff of writing it all up and getting tough plastic jumbo size envelopes.
It’s remotely possible that the well-dressed gangster, and possibly even the well-dressed conference-goer, speaker or not, might maybe, just conceivably not wear decent kit this stuff any more. I was moderately shocked when pilot cases were replaced by little rucksacks. I mean, really? A rucksack? And a water-bottle with a drinker thing on the top as if you’re still teething? Seriously? But time apparently moves on. I’m not doing conferences these days. Or market research – thanks to the Internet everyone knows everything now, apart from knowing that liars tell lies, obviously.
So a lot of my wardrobe is going to go. No reasonable offer refused. But not those houndstooth trousers. Nor the haunting strains of Some Enchanted Evening that seem to waft from the cupboard whenever I see them. I think it’s my age or something.
Have you bought anything online? Well, good for you. No Covid risk, no engagement, no chat, no ‘how does it feel in your hand?’ But hey, that’s all so like last century, daddio.
We don’t do business like that now.
Who we seem to do business isn’t governed by the Consumer Credit Act or the Consumer Rights Act. In case you’re unfamilair with it, (and as someone who buys stuff you shouldn’t be, it’s easy enough to find out about it. Here, for example: on the UK government’s own quite helpful website. It isn’t difficult to understand. If you want the actual text of what these Acts say, that’s pretty easy too, if for example, you want to see what your rights as a consumer are.
Yes, ok, there are no pictures of tits in it and it isn’t presented by Davina McCall or Nigel Farage, (which seems to be the baseline of UK medai and attention now) but despite that, it’s worth reading, whatever your reading ability, because it tells you, without any argument or what this bloke down the pub whose mate used to do all the servicing on a judge’s car said, exactly what your rights are.
As a model, ww.legislation.gov.uk does exactly and precisely what a government website ought to do for its citizens. It’s an index of un-engagement on both sides how few people know about it. In essence, the Consumer Rights Act, introduced, you’ll be absolutely un-astonished to learn not by a Conservative nor by a Labour MP, much less either Party itself, but by Liberal-Democrat Jo Swinson.
So you have rights when you buy something. You have right to get what you ordered. If you didn’t actually see the thing then you have the right to cancel when it turns up on your doorstep and it’s not what you thought it was.
This week this has happened twice, both times with an English company although one of them, registered in England, has a Chinese director and wants to pretend it’s Chinese.
?“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” ?“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” ?“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Lewis Carrol: Through The Looking Glass
The easy one to deal with was a T shirt. 100% merino wool was what it said on the description. That was what I wanted. What turned up said on the label 100% cotton. In many languages, English being the first. One of the laws of internet commerce seems to be that words mean anything you want them to mean, just as Lewis Carrol had one of his characters say. Cotton, wool, issa T-shirt, innit. Made of sunnink, mate. Merino. I like the sound of that.
Which seems to be the way internet copywriting works now.
The other way internet commerce seems to work depends on whether you pretend your company is Chinese or not, and depends on pretending when you’re sitting in your chair in England, ordering goods from a website displaying a company registered in England with an address in England, the goods being dispatched to, delivered to, and paid from an address in England, that actually, this is a contract made in China and Chinese law applies.
Which, to use a legal term, is utter bollocks. And I’m utterly fed up with it.
I don’t know if they know it is and I do not care. More on Friday if they haven’t paid up.
A curious summer. The weather is peculiar and I keep thinking about Summer Camp in Wisconsin, about four thousand years ago give or take some naughts. A time for shooting, cook-outs, marshmallows toasted over a twig fire (which I can’t stand), canoeing, sailing, Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn Bar, Chevrolets and cheerleaders, which I very much could, notwithstanding that heartbreakingly, every one of them is probably a grandmother now. Which isn’t much of a Springsteen song title, let’s face it.
Well I gotta get a new pack of Rennies
Got me a lot of acid reflux these days too
Takes so long to bend and tie-up my shoelaces now
Gotta do what nobody else will ever do.
But I still remember summer camp-outs
Still recall softball bleachers and the flag
I can still see her smiling in the dashboard light
Back when almost everybody had a fag.
Bruce Springsteen: Prob'ly A Grandma Now.
Maybe I shouldn’t quit the day job. But while I don’t still remember driving in my brother’s car, (her body tanned and wet down by the reservoir, each night on those banks I’d lie awake and hold her close just to feel each breath she’d take….. Damn, but I loved that car) I do still love Swing music, something that’s done the opposite of fading away over the years.
It almost started with Glenn Miller, thinking back, but before that I heard a tune I’ve never forgotten, Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, the most flying down to Rio song you could wish for. I have no idea why I liked this music aged thirteen. I liked what passed for normal music back then, or some of it, anyway. I still think ELO, Genesis, Godley and Creme and Roxy Music were sublime, from that time.
Maybe though, it was these two. Love it though I do, I can’t listen to Benny Goodman’s song without thinking of a cartoon cat dressing up to catch a mouse before getting smacked in the head with a ten-ton weight. Maybe it’s just me.
Yesterday I lamented the fact that deck shoes might be fine on decks and docks but they’re useless on a tidal slipway. Today I proved it. The Lizards arrived, fresh from Ebay.
So say goodbye, it’s Independence Day.
There are about seven million things wrong with the way they look. They look like….. they look like…… I can hardly bear to say it. They. Look. Like. Trainers.
There. It’s out. I don’t care whether they’re made of Happy Cow our not. It means the leather isn’t leather, but given the cow definitely doesn’t need its skin any more I have to say that doesn’t particularly concern me. They were a bit warm on the water today, but when I set off at 14:30 the car thermometer said 30 Centigrade, so they probably ought to have done.
They’ve got white laces. Not leather. Not even Happy Cow lookee-likee leather. I thought it was shock cord, but no, they’re actual laces. White ones.
But, and it is a huge but, BUT…. just look at that sole. It’s not just Vibram rubber, although Vibram is wonderful stuff, invented by an Italian mountain climber who was like me, even if only in that he was fed up of slipping, especially given that could have got him killed.
Slip Sliding Away
It’s a Vibram rubber sole with MAHOOOOOSIVE cleats which even more miraculously, doesn’t mark, doesn’t weigh as much as a handkerchief and absolutely definitely tested-it-myself-on-a-wet-muddy-slipway-today does not slip. Oh, and they actually support your foot too. You could go for a decent walk in these if you felt like it, which is something true deck-shoes aren’t really built for. Quite how the Last of the Mohicans managed in moccasins remains a mystery, but maybe being able to walk further and faster might have meant not going extinct. That and no fire-water, land-grabs and thunder-sticks arriving, anyway.
So I have to say it. Don Johnson wouldn’t have liked it. I don’t. But it’s true. This fake leather looks-like-a-trainer deck shoe does everything Sebagos or Sperrys do. Just about twenty times better. Ok, they’re even more expensive than either of those brands although thanks to some judicious shopping and a special offer from the seller mine were sniggeringly cheap. They’re made in Italy, not China, so whatever else you can say about them you know they haven’t been individually washed in children’s tears. They’re utterly brilliant.
You might think my boat shoes didn’t have much to do with Miami Vice. You would be wrong.
Imagine a world where an actress got a job without five kilos of silicon slapped on her sternum. I know, ludicrous, isn’t it? But also imagine a world where smoking, not just being smokin’… was ultra-cool. Imagine loose, deconstructed linen jackets with a buggy lining worn to drive a red VW Golf down the Route d’Or to the Med, still ranking as one of my utterly coolest escapades. A world where Rayban Wayfarers weren’t just the only shades in town, they were compulsory, back when Persol was a washing powder. A world where the coolest guys didn’t wear socks. And they definitely wore deck shoes.
So you had a choice. Sperry, the original, from 1935 Long Island Sound, or Sebago, the post-war baby-boomer born in 1946 a barely-decent interval after Johnny came marching home, from the shores of Lake Sebago in Maine. And you couldn’t afford either, back then. I couldn’t, anyway.
The story goes that Paul Sperry slipped on deck and took a header off the side of his boat. Or if you prefer, he saw his dog running on ice and had a good look at its paws to see why it didn’t slip. You pays your money and takes your fable, according to your inclination. What he didn’t do, obviously, was walk anywhere there was wet mud, or weed, or seemingly on any boatyard slipway with any tide. It’s just struck me in a real DUR! moment that no, he didn’t, because Lake Sebago being in inland lake doesn’t actually have tides. Just like the lake at Camp Menominee didn’t have tides. And while both companies sponsor things like transatlantic races and the Americas Cup, neither of those pass-times involve much carrying a rubber dinghy down a 45-degree ramp covered with river weed to row out to your boat. The point is, Sperry or Sebago, cool or cooler, while they’re great on a wet deck, those W-cut rubber soles are absolutely fricken lethal on a wet slipway. With a capital L.
Before I got a boat again I’d have said who cares? Certainly back in the ’80s, when to be young was if not very heaven then a pretty close second, when I was on summer camp in the land of a thousand lakes and ten million mosquitos, with free daily access to canoes and sailboats and a pontoon and a lake, and not quite as frequent access to cheerleaders with and without pom-poms, I’d have killed for a pair of Docksiders. Or Topsiders. I wouldn’t have cared which.
Last year, to mark well, getting old, probably, I bought some Sebagos in a sale. Not leather. Red. Neoprene, for sailing. They’re incredibly comfortable, but also incredibly fragile and the toe on the right one is currently delaminating after I got it stuck under a board on the boat. Something you might think a deck shoe should be able to deal with. So I bought another pair, but not Docksiders.
Campsiders are much the same but with a cleated sole. And camp because (waves hands too much, shrieking No silly, not that kind of camp! Oh, you are a one!) I don’t know. Because you’re supposed to wear them around camp I guess, (see how it comes back unprompted, Nancy-Jean?) instead of the tacky red nylon trainers I lived in back then when I wasn’t wearing Dutch paratroopers’ high-top boots, an incredibly comfortable thing you never see these days.
Slip them on and just like Meatloaf, I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday, parking by the lake and oh, you get the drift. And they’re sweet memories.
“You don’t know how to ease my pain…”
So when I bought modern deckshoes yesterday, having slipped just once too often, if felt like betrayal. They aren’t leather, for a start. They have a massively cleated Vibram sole. They’re quick drying. Non-slip. Non-marking. Italian. Even more ludicrously expensive than the most expensive Sebago. They actually (whisper who dares…) support your feet, something moccasins of any kind never do, in my experience.
By any rational measurement they’re about two hundred times better at being deck shoes for real-life boating involving slipways, weed, mud, boatyards and boats. I fell on that darned slip last year and didn’t rightly know what happened for a second or two. At my age, at any age really, I don’t really want that level of brain impairment, now or ever. But they don’t look right. Don Johnson would never, ever have worn a pair of Lizards. Not back then, anyway.
My school wasn’t famous, or private, or judging from its results, special in any way, certainly not academically. A lot of the time it seemed to labour under the delusion it was still the private boarding school it had been in the 1920s, insisting you needed Latin O Level to have any hope of going to Oxford or Cambridge.
What it made up with was better. It had a sailing club. That wasn’t very grand either, just two Mirror dinghies and two Enterprises on a gravel pit outside Westbury railway station. I guessed at the time they’d dug out the gravel for the railway.
It was only the kids who were different who did sailing. The kids who didn’t like football or rugby or cricket. Which was me. It was also the coolest couple in school, Peter Knee and Sandy Stanley. They were a big enough reason to go sailing on their own. They were magnetic. He was quite small, dark curly hair, very softly spoken with the hint of a lisp and the heir to the local department store. She was – well, she was just so utterly utter I could rarely even speak to her. Blond straight hair. Alpaca jumper. Jeans. Lived outside the town, somewhere in the wilderness around Dilton Marsh.
So far so teenage crush. But those two actually taught me something, by accident.
If you sail you need to cut rope, now and then. Rope isn’t what it used to be and it wasn’t back then either. Unlike the movies, rope is made of plastic and when you cut it, even with the sharpest Indiana Jones machete, it frays in seconds and makes a nice big fluffy unseamanlike pompom. Which is great if you’re a cheerleader but I never made the team.
Not all of them, anyway. We can leave Toni Basil’s frustration dating a closet football hero for another day
It was in the Sixth Form Common Room, near the record player, where if you didn’t have a lesson or at lunch or break you were allowed to just hang out not at a classroom. And it had a record player. You could bring in if not games, then at least your own music. I mean, how utterly cool was that? Lunch and pre-lessons to a soundtrack of Camel’s Snow Goose, Kate Bush’s Kick Inside, Lou Reed’s Transformer, the Floyd, obviously, and absolutely no punk rock of any kind whatsoever. It wasn’t really our sort of soundtrack in leafy Wiltshire. Lou Reed’s and David Bowie’s ghetto hymns were about the limit, really. Gene Genie loved chimney stacks – well, so did our parents. They forced rhubarb in theirs. We never really knew what Gene Genie did with them, but if we thought of it at all we’d have guessed probably the same.
The Thing I Learned
Apart from that I have a thing about girls in alpaca sweaters and tight jeans, obviously, was rather more useful. If you want to cut modern rope and line for sailing you need an electric cutter. The other thing you learn about that is you don’t do it very often, and certainly not often enough to fork out the £100-plus you need for a decent cutter. It’s insane. But you still don’t want pompoms.
You can try cutting the rope by holding it over a flame. A lighter gets too hot to hold and you end-up breathing in horrible black plastic smoke, apart from which if you’ve ever dropped molten plastic on your hand you’ll quickly realise you don’t ever want to do that again.
You’ll ideally need a candle, but a lighter would do. Most of all, you need silver paper. Cooking foil. Cut your line then twist cooking foil round the cut end, tight. Put it in the flame. Keep it there until horrible black plastic smoke comes out of the end of the twist, preferably without breathing it in. Then have a cup of tea, or at least two Lou Reed tracks. Perfect Day, maybe.
It’s ok now. It’s cooled down so you can unwrap it. And you’ll find, once you twist the silver foil off, you just saved £100-plus.
If that’s not neat I don’t know what is.
There you go. Knee’s isn’t what it was, nor is the rest of Trowbridge. The past is another country and besides, the wench is if not dead, then at least no wench any more. But Peter and Sandy’s tip still works. It’s just a perfect day. I’m glad I spent part of it with them, even if just in memory.
