Uncategorized – Page 15 – Writer-insighter

At the point of demand

I had a health scare last week. There was nothing wrong with me. But there had been once, ten years ago this year. And frankly, I was scared.

I was also in pain. Intermittently. This was the main problem. The thing I had had sent waves of pain through me. Not just like shutting your hand in a door, although that’s painful enough. I’m not a notably small person and I’m talking about the kind of pain that drops you to your knees mid-stride, vomiting. It wasn’t a stomach thing. I guessed that was just part of an extreme fight:flight reflex. We’ve all advanced such a long way, haven’t we? Apparently not when the chips are down. Or coming back up again as in this case.

The thing is, when five minutes later apart from doubting your own sanity there’s nothing much wrong with you at all, it’s quite hard to get a doctor to take you seriously. Or at least, the doctor’s surgery I went to, the one where I was told “if you can cycle 20 miles there’s nothing much wrong with you.”

Well, there was. That ‘advice’ very nearly killed me. The doctor was trying to avoid doing a blood test that would have cost about 80p. It has a reputation for providing false positives, which means that sometimes it will tell you that you have something when you don’t. The up side is that if the test says you don’t have the thing it’s testing for then you really, really don’t. And obviously, terms and conditions apply. Nothing is 100% accurate. Not even me.

It was DVT, or deep vein thrombosis back then. It happened when I was flying long-haul a lot and my blood clotted too much and blocked a vein. Which hurts if it’s a big vein, which it was. It isn’t the vein that’s painful but the things around it which hurt, I think. I don’t think there’s anything veins are made of that can feel anything much. I felt cold and slow and old and as if I was dying, which thanks to my doctor’s desire for an easy life and saving 80p, I was. It was no thanks to her that I didn’t. Instead I woke up one morning a decade ago with one leg nearly twice the size of the other and raspberry coloured, after three nights of terrifying dreams. Even my useless GP had to admit there was something wrong then, the way I’d been saying there was for three years. When I wasn’t dropped to my knees vomiting in pain.

Then a brilliant surgeon asked me if I’d like to be in his experiment, which having seen Marathon Man I wasn’t totally keen on. So he offered me a choice. Be part of my experiment. Or go on Warfarin anti-coagulant, so your blood flows more easily because it’s going to be made thinner. The snag being that it’s a cumulative drug, varying the dosage doesn’t work immediately and it’s easy to over or undershoot, so you’ll need a weekly blood-test. And after ten years you’ll probably haemorrhage spontaneously and that will be pretty much splashily that.

It wasn’t a difficult choice, really. I became the third person in the UK to have an iliac stent. If you remember Slinkies, think of one six inches long and just a few millimetres wide. Now think of it stuck inside your iliac vein. That’s the big one that gets the blood up out of your left leg, crosses over your spine and takes it to your lung. Which is why an iliac DVT is somewhat problematic.

If the blood clot breaks up and moves to your lung you’ll have a pulmonary embolism. Which can kill you. If it keeps moving it’ll go through your heart and probably block the artery on the way out, so your heart will literally explode as it keeps pumping blood into a blocked tube. Which can, obviously enough, kill you. Or it might keep going and lodge in your brain, when you’ll have a stroke and not be able to speak and have to learn how to eat again but with a spoon this time unless you’re already dead, which might be preferable. It wasn’t all that much fun, any of this. I think it was worth spending 80p on a blood test. My previous GP didn’t.

An hour of surgery under local anaesthetic. I watched the whole thing live on TV. That was stupid. Even the surgeon said so, afterwards. More nightmares, for two weeks. But in a thousand years when my grave is excavated on Time Team the only thing left will be the stent gleaming in the bottom of a pit. There is no way my iliac vein will be blocked there ever again unless I’m hit by a steamroller, in which case it will be an inconvenient day anyway.

Some people live with near-constant discomfort from stents, I was warned. My surgeon told me that might happen, or it might be only when I’m really tired. Which is what happened the day before yesterday but I didn’t know if it was that or the whole thing starting again.

So I went for a blood test at a new, different GP surgery. I don’t understand the talk about waiting lists. I phoned up and got an appointment ten minutes after the surgery was closed. The woman on Reception said it was ‘urgent.’ I drove over and gave a blood sample. Four and a bit hours later they called me on my mobile. Clear. I don’t have DVT.

I do need to sort my sleep out and I think a lot of that is simply bad sleeping habits. Like doing Facebook in bed, for example.

I’m lucky enough to live in a country where I can get health care like this. Most of my ancestors ended-up dead from DVT. OK, everyone ends-up dead sooner or later, but it’s not a quick or painless way to go. Luckier still, this kind of health-care is free. Still, after everything.

It doesn’t matter how rubbish you think politics is, or how much you want to pretend ‘they’re all the same’ or it doesn’t make any difference if you vote or not. Because it does. The National Health Service, free at the point of demand, is probably the greatest single achievement ever made in this country. It’s benefitted more people more fundamentally that anything else. And it came about precisely because politicians are not all the same. And because people didn’t try to justify their inaction with a self-fulfilling script about their own irrelevance.

Simple pleasures

imag1730 — If not Paris, we’ll always have, well, tea, old girl…

I always wanted one of these. Obviously that isn’t true. I wanted one since about oh, I don’t know. More than fifteen years. It’s a thing called a Kelly Kettle. You pull out the cork and pour water in. The bottom bit you put some old newspaper in, or pine cones, or driftwood, or anything you like, and light it. The flames go up the chimney in the middle because that’s all this is, really. A chimney, with the water held around it.

One part of the Saturday Financial Times is enough to boil about one and a half litres of water in less than five minutes, which is about the best use I can make of a Special Report on Khazakstan, however it’s spelled. I take the kettle to beach so I can sit and very Englishly drink fresh tea while I read a book in the sun. Is it a survivalist thing? Well, only if survivalists are quite well organised. Which I suppose they’d have to be or they wouldn’t. And only if they like tea, of course, so not Murican ones.

It’s not very glamorous. I used to have fantasies about taking one fly fishing, but given that yet again I haven’t done any this year as the nearest fly water is 200 miles away and I am definitely not fishing in a pond to torture fish by keeping on catching them and putting them back, it looks as if I probably won’t be doing any this year. But I can still drink tea.

It’s not the kind of behaviour you’d look for on a beach on the Riviera, except the Cornish one, but I’ve been to the real one before. But it fits where I live and part of me now. And I like this small part of me, quite a lot.

No power without a purpose

Ed read it from cover to cover and still couldn't understand why he lost. — Ed read it from cover to cover and still couldn’t understand why he lost.

Radio4 just told me that Gordon Brown is about to make a speech in London. There are several newsy things about this, not least that he hasn’t made a big speech for years. The other is that he’s going to say how awful Jeremy Corbyn is, presumably because Corbyn actually has some socialist principles while when Ed Milliband was accused of being a socialist by David Cameron he acted as if it actually was an insult and all but said ‘sorry.’

Given that Milliband spent most of the five years he was leader of Labour seemingly determined not to do anything that would in any way resemble contradicting the Tory Party’s policies then the title Leader of the Opposition was always misplaced. The full title was and is Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition; where it went wrong was that it was supposed to mean loyal to the Crown, not to the Prime Minister.

Yvette Cooper is another contender for the leadership of the Labour Party. She got her own little soundbite in the same piece on Radio4 too, explaining that Labour was out there listening to people and ‘trying to understand’ why they lost the General Election.

She also showed again why Labour lost the election and why they deserved to. Gordon Brown was probably the least charismatic figure any party could have chosen as a leader. It wasn’t just that his entire public persona as someone who was barely containing his inner fighty pub drunk wasn’t very attractive to the people who he wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t just that like Callaghan before him, he was supposed to be Prime Minister by inheriting the title and nobody outside the Labour Party thought this was credible. If they did, they hid the fact at election time. It wasn’t even that he got into probably the least edifying public competition with David Cameron ever, both of them doing all but digging-up the tiny corpse and screaming ‘my baby’s deader than your baby.’

How useless do you have to be exactly, to lose to him?

More, it was the fact that he was a workplace bully whose behaviour was tolerated and encouraged by a Party who claimed to oppose exactly that behaviour. It was the fact that in selling off gold at its lowest price for years he clearly believed his own nonsensical ‘no more boom and bust’ rhetoric. He did nothing to stop the slide towards privatising the NHS and nothing to stop the City of London rampaging out of control. His Freudian slip when he broadcast that he had ‘saved the world’ rather than bankers and their bonuses, primarily by giving money to banks without any stipulation they should do anything with it other than keep it and count it now and then spoke volumes about his belief in his importance in the scheme of things. And as the 2010 election showed, it was a belief few other people shared. Being unable to win an election against a collection of cartoon characters drawn from the Lord Snooty faction of the Beano illustrates that point better than anything I could write.

Gordon Brown was a joke. Like Bernard Manning, he appealed to some people but from here you can’t really see why. Milliband was too, but like Yvette Cooper, for a different reason. In trying to listen he shows he doesn’t have any principles or policies or passion. Aside from anything else he uses the wrong tools to listen, if that’s really what he wants to do.

Shortly after he became leader, Ed Milliband – or someone paid to pretend to be him – went on Twitter mourning the death of a ‘pollster’ (to use Ed’s own words) who had done sterling work for the Party. Except he hadn’t. He was dead, admittedly, but what his company had produced, recruited, interviewed and reported on were group discussions. Whatever else they’re for, groups are not a snapshot of what people are thinking. They’re done in a hurry and there aren’t enough people talked to that could give a representative idea of what other people think. If you’re interested, group discussions are a great way of generating ideas and discussing things to clarify your own thinking, but they aren’t in any way reliable for polling opinion. Because they aren’t opinion polls. Notwithstanding that a large body of UK market research thinks that two groups (ie about twelve people) can give the answer to anything, (a) they can’t and b) it might have been nice for the dead researcher to have what he did described correctly by the person who wanted to be seen to be paying tribute to him. Assuming he hadn’t described groups as polls himself, of course.

Because I worked in market research at the time I tried to talk to Ed on Twitter about it. He did what he always did in Parliament: stay silent. I thought then and now how pathetic that response was. I wasn’t abusive or rude in any way. I just said that polls are not group discussions and hence the deceased was not a pollster. I didn’t say that calling anyone a pollster is a fairly yucky faux-chuminess that isn’t the best epitaph anyone could wish for, especially as it was wrong anyway. But I might as well have done.

I tried to find the Tweet but it was years ago. I found another more recent one instead, from just before the election.

Ed probably thinks this is fighting talk. This is why he lost. Because like him, it doesn’t say anything that means anything. It’s a silly, irrelevant platitude that can mean anything you want it to mean. It doesn’t just suck up to the Tory line about ‘hard-working families.’ It says nothing about cutting child benefits at all. It says nothing about what if anything he intended to do to help families who aren’t working. It says nothing about creating an economy that creates jobs. Writing this – and let’s assume he did – Milliband could actually have CUT Child Benefit to families who weren’t working and stay true to his word. But first of course, he’d have to have some rubbish research done to see if a few people liked the idea.

Blair turned Labour into an Alice In Wonderland Party where words mean anything you want them to mean. But people outside Parliament don’t think like that. Most people mean what they say. They think about things and put together an idea of how they see the world and how they’d like it to be, then they do what they can to make it that way. What they don’t generally do is keep pestering everyone to find out what other people would like them to think. Because it’s creepy. About as creepy as gurning over a newspaper that despises you, pretending you’d even keep it in the bathroom in case the loo roll ran out.

When the truth is found

There used to be a band called Jefferson Airplane. Their break-through song, White Rabbit, was an acid-drenched soaring scream of wonder about leisure pharmaceuticals, drawing on Lewis Carrol’s Alice adventures. One of the most memorable exchanges in the book was between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. Alice was puzzled about the way that according to Humpty and countless others, words could be made to mean anything you want them to mean. She found this odd and not the case; Humpty disagreed. I often wonder if it was just coincidence that on the very next track on a Jefferson album I have the very next track is “Somebody to Love.” It starts: ‘when the truth is found to be lies.’

MusicPlayOn – Let the music play on!

A fine dust

Longer ago than I want to think about I looked forward to everything Ian McEwan got published. I used my student grant to buy his books as soon as they went into paperback. The Cement Garden uncomfortably echoed living in a flat in Southampton while I was at university there, the hot empty cull-de-sac street and the smell of something that wouldn’t go away layered over the smell of life driving past on the dual-carriageway at the end of the road and the unhealthy relationship I was in at the time.

One of my favourite things he wrote I don’t think anyone has heard of now. Solid Geometry. It was about a man who inherits a notebook written by his great-great grandfather, who had disappeared; the reader learns how to do it. The one in the story you understand, not, oh, you know. Not, ok?

Reading it, there was a phrase which stuck in my head, about how energy can’t just disappear, as we know from Year Three Physics. It becomes something else, movement becomes heat in friction or kinetic energy from something small is absorbed by something bigger, but it’s still there. It doesn’t just go away. Except, we believe, when something dies. In the same way McEwan was speculating about the ‘fine dust blowing all over Cheapside’, the way we breath the atoms of everyone who ever lived, good, bad, or ugly, Saxon carters, Cumbrian tranters, Prince Rupert’s cavaliers and the sourest Puritans, all alike, around us all forever. This fine dust.

I absorbed quite a lot of it at the Sir John Soane museum last week in a visit I’d moronically put off for 20-odd years. And when I walked past the pop-up cafe nearby in Lincolns Inn Fields, at last free of the fear of spontaneous combustion that haunted me for years after having to read Bleak House at school, there they were, characters from a Lautrec painting, kitchen staff on their break, lounging in the shade of the trees in poses and light straight from the post-Impressionist handbook, or at least the one used by Pissarro or Bonnard. Here they are. I think they’re probably the best phone photo I’ve ever taken.

The waiting

It’s the longest day today and up here in Scotland where I am right now, holed-up on the run in a small hotel in Tomintoul, that means the days are very, very long.

Because it’s Scotland it’s raining and it’s cold. I had to buy a sweater yesterday. I’d packed a spare but when I put it on it looked as if dogs had slept on it. Then I remembered that’s exactly what had happened back in January. That was a nice time. A hopeful time, cold but the days getting longer, one by one till now.

Near Christmas you hear Peter Gabriel’s song about ring out Solstice bells. Nobody knows what it means. It’s just another word, the way words are supposed to mean anything anyone wants them to mean now. It’s another solstice today. I don’t hear any bells ringing at all.

The place I was passing had a sale on, so I got a really nice jumper for £20. But it’s not the same as the old one. That was Italian, from Peek & Klopenburg in Dam Square, and even though it was in a sale it was a bit more than £20. It paid for itself though; I bought it back in 2002. Or 2003. I can’t really remember. I was in Amsterdam quite a bit for a while, for reasons which need not be examined too closely but were legal if not perhaps entirely moral. It depends, I think. Possibly.

Anyway.

Anyway, after today we’ll all be able to say it once again, showing our true British pessimism. Altogether now at 7pm tomorrow night please, roll your eyes skyward and say ruefully:

“Aye, the nights are fair drawing in noo.”

Heavy relics

A joke. A pathetic one. There ought to be another control pot, labelled “Fakeness.” It should go all the way to 12.

I saw one of these in a shop window about ten years ago. I thought it was a joke then. I still do now, except this is a joke for people with two grand to spray up the wall.

Are the soles curling off of your blue suede shoes? Do your flabby arms chaffe when you windmill your guitar? Is your quiff, let’s face it, not quite as stiff as it used to be?
Ladies and elderly gentlemen, you need a Fender Relic.

Here are some words. I know all of them, just not in this order.

Fender USA Custom Shop 60’s HSS Strat guitar heavy relic Daphne Blue

As the ad says, 100% genuine and all original, but obviously it means 100% genuine fake. A ’60s guitar is what it says in one sentence, but a 2012 guitar not even 20 words on.

“Let’s talk about the finish first…” Oh do let’s, as they say in Enid Blyton books, which are more realistic than anything about this guitar or the company selling it now.

Relic® – There and back and still here today.The authentic worn-in wear of a guitar that has experienced many years of regular use in clubs and bars. Marks that tell a story, finish checking all over the body, and scars, dings and dents from bridge to headstock.

Can we have a look at that? Or doesn’t the Sale of Goods Act apply any more? It isn’t authentic because it’s fake. It isn’t worn in wear, because it’s fake. It hasn’t experienced many years of anything, because it’s three years old. It certainly hasn’t been played in clubs and bars regularly, if at all. The marks it has tell a story, certainly. A story of fake. It’s fake. Everything about it is fake. A fake story about a desperate company selling fake guitars to desperate fake posers. Jeez, I thought I was bad enough. Even I wouldn’t buy one of these. Not even women who’ve had screaming fits at me would accuse me of that.

This model that I have for sale here is a ‘Heavy Relic’ – a custom order Relic with just a little more ‘World Tour’ treatment !!

Many people think why would you buy a guitar that has been artificially aged ? The answer is very simple – the LOOK !.. and the feel. This guitar plays like new (because it is) rather than an old worn out Strat with a part-warped neck.

“How’s about that then,guys’n’gals?”

Why bother buying a Mexican Strat and a packet of sandpaper and still having change out of £400? I mean, that just wouldn’t be authentic, would it? It’s the look, after all. That’s got to cost £1600 on its own. Sandpaper isn’t cheap you know. Except actually, in real life, it is.

Relic®. When bullshit isn’t enough anymore.™

A learning experience

For the past four weeks I’ve been learning how to teach English as a foreign language in London, where despite UKIP’s opinion, it isn’t even vaguely. But London was foreign to me and I used to live there.

I lived there once for six months when I left university and it was crap. You could still smoke on the Tube in those days and people did. Entering a Tube carriage on a damp, dark November evening with your shoes soaked through to inhale 20 stranger’s Picadilly smoke was a budget version of Hell. A car I was trying to repair in the street fell of the jacks I had put it on and nearly fell on top of me. I helped save someone’s life when they walked straight off a station platform and fell onto the tracks one boiling afternoon when three trains had been cancelled trapping hundreds of us all trying to go home. It’s a lot further down to the tracks at a railway station than you think it is. Or rather it’s a much longer way back up, especially when you’ve got someone’s legs end and you’re trying to heave her back up to the platform while someone else you don’t know does the shoulders end, hopefully before the train gets there. Obviously as I’m writing this, we did. The other person was wearing a suit; I was wearing a leather jacket. He got thanked by the crowd. I got ignored.

I had a crappy flat off Westbourne Grove where one night a woman I’d never seen before knocked on the door and asked me to take her to hospital. She said she’d been in an accident. I’d just been to the launderette, so I was free. I called an ambulance because she was talking in a strange way. Within 20 minutes of meeting her I was seeing the X-Rays of her fillings and the size of her brain; they assumed I was something to do with her. I sort-of was a bit, after that. For a week or so, the way things went then.

I left, then I came back again, then twenty years ago I left for good. And I don’t recognise huge chunks of the London that was there then.

The liberal consensus

I don’t know what the Liberal Party is about. I avoided running over Paddy Ashdown this week who seemed pleasantly surprised that a bicycle was stopping to let him cross on a crossing, and he seemed a straightforward-enough sort of person. Given the deranged style of riding of most cyclists I’ve encountered this week I’m not hugely surprised, the same way I’m not now when I hear about cyclists in London being killed, but that’s another story. Keep going through red lights, treat one-way streets as advisory, overtake up the inside and generally act like an arse might work in a car but sooner or later when you haven’t got a tonne of steel around you, you’re going to say ‘ouch’ just once. And not for very long before your brain gets squashed between your teeth.

Be that as it may, the liberal consensus was what people used to call pretty much anything they sort-of liked a bit. The liberal consensus is that not stealing stuff is a good thing. Not killing people. Not beating someone around the head because they contradicted you. Not going to work, not being paid for it and being sold to someone else without any say in where you live, what you’re paid or who you’re going to work for. The liberal consensus then was that the Human Rights Act, the thing the Tory government want banned in the UK, was alright. Obviously, it’s got to go. The campaign against it in The Sun will start within days.

A Good Thing.

human rights

These are the fundamentals of this evil, dangerous, subversive and ought-to-be-illegal thing. Let’s have a good look at how wicked it is. Starting at the start, obviously nobody should be allowed to live without the government’s say-so. That’s what a right to life means. Without the express approval of the government, you don’t have a right to be born or to carry on living without their approval.

As for torture, ha ha ha!!! Of course you shouldn’t have a right not to be tortured whenever the government feels like it! I mean, look at all those people in Guantanamo who were kidnapped, taken half-way around the world, tortured and gave us all that Grade A intel. Oh. Well ok, bad example, because they didn’t have any secrets to tell anyone and if someone says they’re going to kill you unless you start talking then you just start making stuff up. You see? The government said they were all liars anyway! OK, so over 90% of them hadn’t done anything against the law anywhere. But bad example or not, you obviously don’t have a right to walk down the street looking the way you do without the right to have a bag stuffed over your head, get bundled into a van and held down while someone pours water up your nose. Who the hell do you think you are?

Poundland is going to have to start paying people if you have a right to be free from forced labour, so that’s out of the window. You don’t need a right to liberty, because the government obviously wouldn’t lock you up without a good reason or at least one that suited them. Just the same way that the police wouldn’t have arrested you if you hadn’t done it, would they? Stands to reason, do you see? They’re very busy you know. They haven’t got time to make things up.

It's only funny on TV. — It’s only funny on TV.

As for Article seven, the right not to be punished for something which wasn’t against the law, that kind of hippy nonsense would stop decent, hardworking people like Ian Duncan Smith from retrospectively changing legislation.

You do not need a right to the government not being able to root through your Facebook account or your mobile phone records or your bank statements whenever they feel like seeing if you really do know that person or not and how often. Whoever they are, with or without the egg whisk.

You certainly do not need to able to think whatever you like, or decide whatever you think is best. There’s no limit to some people’s effrontery, is there? All this “I can think as I please” nonsense. You’ll think as you’re damned well told, and like it. That’s what the British media is for now.

I remember all that silly nonsense we used to have where people used to talk the most absurd nonsense. Some of them even had different opinions to the ones the government gave them. ISIS is good. David Cameron wants us to fight with them against the government of Syria. ISIS is bad. David Cameron has sent the RAF to blow up one of their jeeps. Which seems quite an expensive way of getting rid of a Toyota LandCruiser, but you have no right to that opinion, there are no contradictions here, Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia and apart from Who’s That Girl nobody can remember anything they did anyway.

The right to freedom of assembly. No. Sorry. You may well have booked the Village Hall and paid the deposit, but you’re not coming in here talking about whatever you want without it being checked first. A what? An evening of people training their dogs? To do what exactly? No. They could be terrorists. The US Navy trained dolphins to carry bombs you know. I can see the connection even if you pretend you can’t. No, no and no.

Nobody needs the right to marry whoever they chose. If your uncle can’t find a decent person for you to marry then I’m sure the government can do it. Someone blond and Aryan and quiet, maybe.

The right not to be discriminated against? Don’t be disgusting. I’m trying to explain this sensibly, but if you’re just going to take this tone then I won’t bother. In a minute you’re going to say that people have a right for the government not to come along and take their things any time it suits them, aren’t you? Well?

You see, if you’d paid for an education to a school outside the evil clutches of the NUT then you might have a right to be educated. As it is, I’m sorry, but I can’t see any reason to believe that you’re entitled to send young, impressionable children, children for heaven’s sake, to be indoctrinated with the beleif that it’s perfectly normal for adults to wear beards and glasses, have leather patches on their sports jackets and say things like “Yes, there was homework – quiet!” or “it’s your own time you’re wasting.” You have no right to this at all.

I like a laugh as much as the next person and it always makes me chuckle when people talk about a right to a free election. It’s not as if ballot papers ever go missing, or the printing somehow forgets some of the main parties or the barcode isn’t on the back of the ballot papers so they’re invalid. Then that wretched Naomi Wolf woman starts banging on and what the Daily Mail is even thinking of repeating this nonsense I don’t know. If you do still have free elections it’s no thanks to Rupert Murdoch, who can tell you who to vote for if you still need to be told. Perhaps we’d better check your phone calls to find out.

As for the abolition of the death penalty, everyone knows they jolly well don’t do it again! Including the people who didn’t do anything in the first place.

Look. I’m trying to be reasonable about this. If you pay for a decent lawyer like a normal person none of this is going to be a problem for you, is it? Until then you can just shut up and do as you’re told. It’s not as if the government would ask you to do anything that wasn’t the right thing, is it?

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.

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.