Uncategorized – Page 7 – Writer-insighter

Making signs

I didn’t go to church this year. I mean, I did. I went to a few. I like to look at how they were built, the small doors, the forgotten, blocked-off stairways and here, where I live in exile from my land of lost content, Wessex and its blue remembered hills in the mountainous coastal region of Suffolk, the evidence of the shrinking churches showing how even hundreds of years ago the decline began, when storms and shingle and sheep meant it just wasn’t worth hanging around here any more. The people drifted away and with them the money to keep the roof on huge churches once full to bursting; they pulled down parts of them to keep the bills down, long before Cromwell’s Puritan taliban came along to chop the heads off statues and desecrate fonts. God told them to do it, after all.

Aloysius was actually John Betjemann’s bear. No, really.

But I didn’t go to Midnight Mass. Now, I’m happy to admit that my only real interest in religion was sponsored by Sebastian Flyte in the 1980s TV Brideshead. I liked all the bit about the green hill far away because it reminds me of where I grew up; it had a white horse carved on it, as proper hills do.

But. But. I once delivered my own sermon of dismount to my mother, taking as my text the hypocrisy of people who did one thing and claimed another, who sang about being meek and mild and were the opposite, whose attitudes seemed to indicate to me that the bit about suffer little children to come unto me they took all too literally.

I railed about how people seemed to me to go to church to be seen to go to church, that the quality of their mercy was strained to non-existence, that they talked about and prayed about kindness and helping those less fortunate and didn’t do anything about it, the fakery of the compulsory church service for a boy at school whose family was wiped out in one fell swoop not as a freakish accident that predictably nobody could ever have predicted, according to our head of year, but because all too obviously, coming back from holiday his father had driven onto a roundabout thinking the lorry on it would get out of his way. It didn’t.

All pretty standard sub-Holden Caulfield adolescent stuff I pretended I’d forgotten I’d ever said, so I was a bit surprised when my mother, the church elder leader of the break-away church choir said exactly and precisely the same stuff at my step-father’s funeral.

I’ve tried to read Betjeman maundering on about religion positively and I just can’t do it. The more I read about other people’s religion the more it seems they just make themselves more and more unhappy. Maybe it’s just the people I read, but there’s enough potential for torment in every day without telling yourself that if you think this is bad, play your cards wrong and you could get torment for the rest of time. Don’t even get me started about people who think there is a right to live somewhere and throw other people out of it because a Bronze Age fairy story said they should.

Do they know it’s Christmas?

They wished it could be Christmas every day.

The last time I went to church for a service was 2014, appropriately enough a hundred years after the Christmas Truce. It was Blythburgh, one of the most beautiful churches I know, rising like the beacon of hope across the marshes that it must have been when this coast was even more waterlogged than it currently is.

Then as now it was Second Home Central, with all the temporary locals from Walberswick and Southwold (60% of Southwold is second-homes) trudging humbly to this freezing, shining church with about six million pounds worth of Lamborghinis, the occasional Ferrari (no Maseratis. They’re a bit, well, (cough) ….Essex, really) and the ubiquitous Porsche Cayenne shopping trolleys in the tiny gravel carpark across the hollow way.

I can deal with that. I had friends in Fulham and drank in the Sloaney Pony too, yah? Now and again, anyway. That wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t the carols; although there are a couple that bring a manly lump to my throat I was still a choirister, pal.

Towards the end of the service the vicar told us all ‘turn to your neighbour and make the sign of peace.’ I had no clue whatsoever what he was talking about. Like a hippy? Like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo? Draw a CND sign? Apparently not. We were supposed to shake hands. Really.

This was supposed to be the Church of England. I don’t know these people. They don’t know me. I came here to sing some carols and get a buzz from the atmosphere and the candles (oops, that Catholicism sneaking through again…). Maybe if we were lucky, a bit of incense wouldn’t be too much to ask for, would it? I mean, if you’re going to do this stuff you might as well do it properly. But shaking hands? I’ve always thought the best sign of peace with a neighbour is a well-maintained hedge, preferably above head-height and definitely with a good proportion of pyracantha mixed in with the box and hawthorn. But shaking actual hands without even knowing their name?

Luckily there was no chance of that this Christmas. I didn’t want to stand at any distance enclosed with strangers in a cold stone barn at midnight. Not when I know there isn’t any incense involved.

And so it begins

I’ve found out that the “new” Drascombe Lugger isn’t new. I know! Amazeballs, yah? In fact I always knew that, but I’d blanked the fact that it’s getting on for fifty years old.

As with humans, and my own life, I’ve been thinking ‘1975, yes, so?’ 1975. That means, IU don’t know, The Sweeney? Awful tee shirts with collars layered over the outside of equally dreadful chequered sports jackets? 10cc singing “I’m not in love”? Roxy Music? You see, it wasn’t all bad.

What I don’t think is ‘1975. That’s 45 years ago.’ Just O.M.G. At my age the biggest question is ‘How?’

Not that it really matters. Without gloating, lots of other people didn’t get here, but I did, along with my not-very-new but definitely lovely boat. As with anything 45 years old, it appreciates a bit of touching up, so I’ve started having a look at what needs doing, despite the resolutely foul weather lately.

The gunwale is split on the starboard side, but not all the way through so that’s been simply glue and a clamp. It’ll need sanding down when the glue is set and then the whole gunwale needs a few coats of varnish or my preferred not-really-varnish Tonkinois, which doesn’t look as if it’s been done for the past 40 years at least.

The bumpkin hadn’t been varnished either, so I did that today. First I removed all the old, splitting varnish with a pad sander, then despite the weather, two coats of Tonkinois. The nicest thing about it is that it doesn’t smell much, and it doesn’t make you go a bit funny when you work with it, unlike a lot of varnishes. You don’t even need a mask.

What it really needed was somewhere to dry, preferably hanging up and luckily I was able to borrow a barn, as one does when one lives at an eighteenth century Hall in Suffolk. I chucked a ball of twine over a roof tie-beam, tied that off to the fitting at the end of the bumpkin and hauled it up until it was a few inches off the ground. Just one coat of Tonkinois makes a difference.

So obviously, I put another coat on today. It’s not drying very fast in this damp, cold weather, so I’m just going to leave it tomorrow.

A bumpkin, in case you didn’t know, is a stick that juts out from the back of the boat, that the sheet – oh rope then, if you insist – that keeps the mizzen sail taught is attached to.

Much more potentially serious is the beginning of a split at the top of the mast. I don’t want it to get any bigger, and if water gets into it, as it will left outside in winter, and it freezes then the split will get bigger. I’m thinking dry it out in the barn, layer some very thin fibreglass matting over just the top foot of mast, then put white whipping cord around it and essentially glue it all together with fibreglass resin.

That’ll keep it from splitting, surely. And there’s one way to find out, after all. As 10cc used to sing, big boys don’t cry.

It was 40 years ago today

In fact, it wasn’t 40 years ago today, only twenty in the Beatles’ song Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Being about 8 years old when it came out I had no idea what it was about at all. I still pretty much don’t, unless they were doing that oh-so-British I-rony thing, mocking the loss of Empire while losing it, like the fox pretending the grapes he couldn’t have were sour. So far so blah. I always preferred the Stones to the Beatles anyway.

But 40 years ago today was the night not that the music died, but John Lennon certainly did. I wasn’t much of a Beatles fan and I wasn’t much of a John Lennon fan. There was a bit too much of the Northern cultish about the whole thing, I thought. Too much McCartney fakery – I loved the fuzz guitar but listen to that Macca “scream” in Revolution. Then tell me about integrity.

Too much 1950s and skiffle and that corniness about the whole act. The Beatles. Because like beat, daddio. Geddit, hepcats???? Sure, Help was a great movie you could happily dump your kids in front of, if you had any, but that faux-knowing smart-mouth mockery thing got a bit stale and old. Maybe I knew I was going to be a teacher one day.

But I didn’t 40 years ago. It was cold that night, a bitter cold just like tonight, when I’m wearing a wooly hat indoors. I was living in Bath, just at the end of my first term at the university there perched high on a green hill far away, with a room in a house in Larkhall. Not the Scottish one.

My Larkhall was near Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill the other side of the scar of the A46, a place of woodsmoke, a pub with stone flag floors and a wooden skittle alley out the back, just to the side of the area where they’d so obviously once changed the horses on the coaches for the very last leg of the journey from London to Bath. It had a supermarket, a pub, a chemist, a hardware store, a grocer and a Chinese take-away, everything in weathered Bath stone in a little hollow on the edge of the city, within walking distance of the eighteenth-century buildings that made it a World Heritage site. It was pretty much all I wanted in a place, then or now.

I had a 650cc Triton with cut-off exhausts and high bars, a degree course in the city I love, a warm room in a nice house with nice people, a couple from London, their eight-year-old daughter and their nutty dog. He was an engineer who did his apprenticeship just after the war in a garage behind the Portobello Road. He told me about how he bought a V12 Cadillac some GI had abandoned. It had four carburettors. Each of them took a half gallon of petrol, he told me. All he could afford to do was start it up and run it for a few minutes once a week. Petrol was still on ration anyway. She was a deb at one time. She worked on the checkout in the supermarket now, still with an accent that could petrify a Labrador across four fields.

I had a girlfriend too, those dark, cold nights. She had a fast orange car and a pony-skin coat, long boots and a black jumpsuit. I know. But she really did. I couldn’t believe it either. They let anyone work in a bank in those days.

She was staying over the night we heard the news. We’d been out somewhere, to some pub, because we didn’t know much else to do in those days and what imagination we did have was devoted to how we were going to get together after the pub in the shared house with an eight year-old monitoring every creak on the landing.

I remember we lay together listening to the news. It didn’t make any sense. OK, I didn’t much like John Lennon’s stuff, but although I used to shoot back then, I couldn’t imagine shooting John Lennon. He was 40. He’d be 80 tonight.

A man called Mark Chapman shot him, claiming according to Wikipedia that he didn’t like Lennon’s lifestyle, his remarks about Jesus and as a catch-all, that Holden Caulfield, the central character in the Catcher In The Rye made him do it, which probably trumps the putative answer to “What would Jesus do?” being “Go and shoot John Lennon, obviously.” Catcher has sold north of 65 million copies, which isn’t bad for a first-person narrative about a self-regarding teenage mess-up who spends so much time thinking he has a monopoly on authenticity that he can’t even keep an eye on a bag full of games kit on a school trip.

Seventeen years later I spent a spare day in New York walking Holden Caulfield’s day out. It was freezing. I thought I was going to get mugged outside MOMA when someone begged for change and I offered them some energy bars I had. The guy said he wanted money instead, proving that in New York at least, beggars can be choosers. I told him to go and get a job, the same way I got money. We didn’t part as friends. I remember the cold that seeped through the foggy November streets of New York. I remember the freezing fog of my walk back across the fields this afternoon, when I miscalculated how long it would take to go and get some Eccles cakes in the nearest town. I remember the cold the night John Lennon died.

I remember a lot about that time. The smell of woodsmoke in that little Georgian village. The frost. The feel of the cold in the bones of my arms. The sparkling beginning of everything, despite the dark and the cold inside my nostrils, the cold of Carol’s pony skin coat; her elfin face, cold from outside. I just don’t quite understand how somehow it’s 40 years ago today.

A matter of Honnor

Honnor Marine was one of the companies which made Drascombe Luggers and they were definitely the company that made mine. It was delivered on the second day of December, after the Covid lockdown delayed getting it. It was pouring with rain when we went to find it and it’s freezing fog today, the first time I’ve had a chance to have a look at it at my house.

It isn’t new, and at £16,000 for a new one there’s never going to be one of those in my yard, but I can’t understand why anyone would pay that anyway. There are some things to do, but nothing major. The most ‘structural’ thing is a crack in the gunwale about six inches long where someone obviously messed-up docking.

This is clearly not what anyone would call a big deal.

As you can see though, at some point someone decided the original GRP hull was the wrong colour, so they painted it. And predictably, the paint needs sanding off and putting back on again. I’m thinking white, the proper colour for a boat, but maybe the top strake should be a pale, pale green and the lower strake white. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe. Whatever, the anti-foul should be black. Mainly because I have a brand new un-used tin of it.

So what else? The very first job was to get a lock for the trailer and a lock for the outboard, to stop someone borrowing either or both of them. The GRP lugs surrounding the ends of the traveller bar are a little bit chipped, which isn’t a huge job but because it’s small is going to be a fiddly one. I could just do some fancy rope work on the traveller bar and cover that over. That needs to be done anyway to stop the main block banging into the side of the boat. If that had been done in the first place it wouldn’t need to be fixed now, but who knows when it happened between now and the mid-1970s when it was built?

Or was it? There’s no serial number I can find. They used to have a number stamped into the bronze stem head, but there certainly isn’t one on mine – I checked, despite the freezing fog. All I could find is this little circular disc, with the number 46093. Right now I don’t know whether that’s the number of the boat or the makers, like a membership number for the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights. Or this federation.

Either which way, as soon as the fog’s cleared and the temperature rises some way above the zero it’s hovering around today a little bit of renovation will see this boat shine again. And then the Spring and then the Summer and then the Autumn, all to be spent sailing. 2020 hasn’t been all bad.

Je ne m’appelle Escoffier

My name is not Escoffier. I know that may come as some surprise. Admittedly, it’s never been a great source of confusion in the limited parts of nautical society I’ve inhabited over the years, from the Trowbridge High School Sailing Club to the Nautical Institute and the Honourable Company of Master Mariners. It’s a long story.

My sailing career, such as it is, went from Enterprise dinghies to fun things called Sunfish on summer camp Wisconsin lakes to a ridiculous Laser to a Drascombe Scaffie, then a Mirador, now a Folkboat and today as well, a Drascombe Lugger.

a little Sunfish A long time ago, in another life.

Enterprises are just lovely and life would probably have been a lot simpler and definitely a lot cheaper if Mr. Escoffier and I had stopped there. Lasers – well. What are they actually for? No, really, actually FOR, apart from an excuse for loud-voiced overweight men the worn side of 50 to squeeze themselves into wetsuits on Sundays without even having the grace to wear shorts over the collection of overstuffed black puddings they always appear to be overly fond of?

I capsized the Laser badly once and scared myself. Capsizing a Laser isn’t exactly news, obviously, but the scary thing was realising that thanks to the water temperature I couldn’t get myself back into the boat, and the longer I was in the less I could feel I could do. I’d never felt increasingly physically helpless before. Starting to die isn’t a nice feeling once you work out what it is. My partner of the day called the Laser a plastic tea tray and refused to have anything to do with it. That was a fairly apt description if you’d stuck too big a sail on the top of a tea tray, alongside the utterly depressing wetsuit element of the exercise. The talcum powder and having to dislocate your arm to reach the long strap which is the only way of doing up the back zip – I mean, please. Really, don’t tell me that’s all about sailing.

A Laser. Seriously.

The Mirador was another frightening disaster. Disaster One happened when the engine stopped working in Southwold Harbour with a tide running out. Southwold is marked Dangerous on the chart, principally because when the wind blows from the East it ramps up big waves all the 140-odd miles from Holland. Stuff them into a tide ripping out at 5 knots – faster than you walk – in the opposite direction, in three feet of water and you can quickly have something of a learning opportunity. When your engine stops, for example. And won’t start. But no matter, because we can just steer for the bank. Except we can’t, because all size six of the woman who claimed her ancestor built the Balcarry Lass on the beach in Kippford – and why would you make that up? – managed to snap the American oak tiller in half with her bare hands. And no, it wasn’t rotten. Afterwards I couldn’t stick a knife in the end we had, anyway.

More fun happened on the next trip, which my by-now mutinous crew sat out. There is a lump in the middle of the river in Southwold Harbour, as well as the notorious three feet of water just outside the harbour mouth, so I thought it was as well the Mirador had a lifting centreboard you could wind down. When it was up the boat pulled just about nine inches of water. It was up. It was still up when I got into the North Sea past the harbour mouth, with big rollers coming in. I couldn’t physically leave the tiller to get to the winding handle without the boat turning itself sideways to the waves, and with just nine inches of hull under the water the whole thing, including me, would have been rolled over and under in a second or two. All I could do was time the waves, get out a bit, away from the concrete posts at the harbour mouth and turn the boat on the outboard, timed to avoid the waves hitting the boat beam on. As we salty sailor boys are wont to say. Sideways, in other words.

It was rubbish. The Mirador was a boat which managed to sink itself on dry land. A big tide in November lifted it off its well-appointed trailer but luckily or not, the boat was tied loosely on so it didn’t go far. It went up though, just enough for the rollers underneath it to flip upright, end-on, which is where they were when the tide went out and the boat settled down onto about a square inch of metal post, which predictably went straight through the hull. The next big tide that night filled the boat up inside. On the dock. It had to go.

This year, with lockdown and furlough and so on, I’ve done more sailing than I have for years, all of it in the Deben in Suffolk. Which means I’ve gone aground more than ever before too, and got not only the Coastguard called out but, it being the Deben, the Mud Rescue team, none of whom were needed in the slightest.

All of which means I have to confess to taking some schadenfreudian delight in much better sailors than me utterly and totally messing it all up. The Sunday Times 1969 Golden Globe race has always been supposed to be one of the cornerstones of modern sailing legend being the first non-stop round the world single-handed race. Bernard Moitsessier became famous for refusing to stop sailing “parce que je suis heureux en mer et peut-être pour sauver mon âme” .

It’s been translated as “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul.” Or “perhaps because he’s gone a bit nuts” as his wife (yes, he actually had a wife…) probably put it. In 1982 he sailed with an actor who had a sailing film coming up. HIs boat dragged her anchor in Mexico, hit another big yacht, had her mast smashed off and wound-up on the beach full of sand and sold for $20. Even I don’t mess up that badly. I mean, $20.

Donald Crowhurst was another competitor in the Golden Globe Race. He went slightly more nuts than Moitessier and almost certainly ended-up stepping off the back of his boat in the Caribbean and forgetting to ever get back on.

IT IS THE MERCY

Apart from the classic look-I’m-really-seriously-not-coping-well phrase “it is the mercy,” Crowhurst’s logbook noted “The quick are quick, and the dead are dead.’ In ocean racing they’re sometimes very nearly both. Other boats cracked up and literally fell apart during that race. In 1985, Simon Le Bon’s brand new Drum did the same thing. This week it was Kevin Escoffier‘s turn.

Me, I’m not that mad. I don’t want to sail around the world. The Deben and maybe, once I’ve conquered the equally not-to-be-done-lightly entrance to the Deben at Felixstowe Ferry a trip up the Orwell to Pin Mill is about as much as I want to do. It would be nice to trailer down to Dittisham again, to sail under the trees that look exactly like the ones in children’s books I recall.

And maybe I will, because today, after a long lockdown wait, I took delivery of my Drascombe Lugger, a boat that’s been sailed to Australia. I have more modest ambitions. I like the fact the new boat needs only ten inches of water because my name is not Escoffier. But neither is my boat snapped in half.

Ocean Mist

I learned to sail at school, although we didn’t have an ocean, just a very small lake with an island on it, next to Westbury station. It was probably where they dug out the gravel for the railway, but my school used to have two Enterprise and two Mirror dinghies there for compulsory double Games on Wednesday afternoons. I hated football and didn’t much like rugby. You try freezing fog and serge shorts with a big seam on the inside leg then tell me about it.

It was a very ordinary state school I thought at the time, but it seems most schools don’t have a sailing option. Along with that we had two utterly cool teachers to look after us, Mrs Shearn and Joe Collins. And yes, those are their real names, that I can safely use as they’re probably long dead and in any case, they were both brilliant. Mrs Shearn used to teach Physics. Mr Collins was the senior PE teacher. There was another PE teacher who had all the gear – the Adidas tracksuit, the white T-shirt, the Acme Thunderer whistle and shiny white trainers, along with the pyscho “I’m really dedicated/hard” attitude who now I feel a bit sorry for. However hard he thought he was, he could never be as utterly rock as Joe Collins. Something to do with being a paratrooper in the war, I suppose.

You didn’t mess Joe Collins around. And we never wanted to. That was the difference. He was gentle, I suppose in the way that people who’ve seen and done serious un-gentleness often are.

It wasn’t a very serious sailing club. We’d drive out on a Wednesday lunchtime in a Ford Transit with a change of clothes and apart from having to wear a lifejacket, that was about as far as supervision went. We taught each other to sail. That’s how it worked. And mostly it did. I learned I thought the Mirror dinghies looked ugly with their blunt plywood bow and it was years before I knew anything about the fairly substantial part of English socio-economic history they represented.

I only capsized once, when I half-knew I should have pushed the tiller away instead of pulling it closer to me. It was summer so it didn’t matter – you just paddled with your feet, floating on your back until everyone was mustered on the dock and we worked out what to do about the boat. No biggy.

That was where it started, there and under the Dining Hall in the old Girls’ School block, where the boats were stored for the winter. One Easter my friend Phil and I got the job of re-painting the Enterprises. We were supposed to be revising for A Levels, but instead we were entrusted to go and get the paint in Trowbridge, turn the boats upside down, sand them then paint them, two coats minimum. We – well ok, I then – bought paint called Ocean Mist, which I’d thought to be a sort of Ocean Mist colour. You know, misty. You don’t have to play it for me. Because it was cheaper than white and I seem to remember some sort of scam whereby I got to keep the money I’d saved by not buying actual white.

The problem was, in daylight Ocean Mist was a sickly light green. There wasn’t any daylight under the Dining Hall. We didn’t find that out until about a week of talking about girls and painting the boats. In those days you could go to the pub afterwards. It wasn’t just that pubs were open, but so long as you could pretend to be over 18 then they’d serve you. If you couldn’t they’d throw you out. It was a different time.

The very last time I sailed there, just after A Levels, was the best sailing I’ve ever done. I was single-handed, running downwind to the dock on the very last sail at school, one summer Wednesday. Not much wind, but a nice speed. I went past the little pontoon jutting out into the water, then went about and got the speed just right, so I ended-up with the boat stopped absolutely dead in the water, exactly on the dock where I wanted it.

I’m just about to get a new boat, or new to me, anyway. Just as soon as lockdown is over. It’s not an Enterprise. Nor, thank God, a Mirror. I don’t know how long it’ll take to be able to sail it like that little dinghy that golden afternoon.

Buster Friendly

Long long ago when the world was young, or I was, anyway, instead of more usefully reading Sociology texts I used to go to Bath market and raid the second-hand bookstall. Along with far, far too many Joseph Wambaugh LA cop tales, I read the book that lead to the film Bladerunner, which back in the day, I used to watch on video cassette, over and over again, quite often with the sound off and Queen on the CD player, while I attempted to maneuver someone or other onto my Finsbury Park futon. What girl could possibly resist that kind of allure, other than a fair few of them who managed to do that very well indeed?

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

It’s set, like Bladerunner, in a dystopian future. I know. Sci-fi. Imagine my surprise, too. But the thing that I’ve always remembered about the book was something that wasn’t in the film. Buster Friendly.

In an entirely imaginary world where millions of people sat on their arses doing nothing all day long watching TV, Buster was the putative host of the massively audienced show, Buster Friendly And His Friendly Friends. At breakfast time Buster would interview an actress about the film she was about to make. It didn’t help that I always imagined (that’s the thing you can do with books. Who knew?) the actress to be pretty much Cupid Stunt, Kenny Everett’s creation in whose films all of her clothes routinely fell off, but only, as she said, “in the best possible taste.”

Around about lunchtime Buster would interview the actress about the film she was making. You’ve guessed it, probably. In the evening Buster Friendly would interview the actress about the film she’d just made.

The central character in the book slowly comes to realise there is no film being made. There never was a film being made. There is no film that is going to be made. And it doesn’t matter, because people don’t want the film. Nobody has any interest at all in the film, which never existed even as a pitch anyway. What they want, in their tens of millions, is hype. Chatter, banter, noise. Fake debate, exactly the same as “Will Trump Go To Jail?”

To which the answer is always: Grow up. Of course he won’t, whatever he’s done. Presidents never, ever do. Didn’t you know that? How old are you? And you’re still asking questions like that?

Buddy Holly died more than twenty years before Bladerunner came out, but he got it exactly right for then and for now.

It really doesn’t matter anymore. Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends – all of them replicants, androids, skin-jobs, all of them totally detectable as the one thing they couldn’t replicate was empathy – still get all the airtime we need them to have.

Blue eyes of the belle

It was a John Otway song, back when you didn’t have to explain who John Otway was.

It wasn’t love. It wasn’t sex, although she was pretty sexy. She was one of those iconic girls at school.

And we had several. She was very, very pretty, the type of girl you think you just can’t talk to because she’s so pretty, but then when eventually you do you find out something even more amazing about her. She was kind, and caring, and considerate.

She wasn’t that good at school, I think. She got a job, as people did in those days, in a pub, the Rose and Crown, on the railway bridge in Trowbridge, decades before anyone ever thought to describe it as a rustic-chic pub with live comedy and pizza. One night when things weren’t going at all well for me and I’d stormed out of my parents’ house I ended up there. She and I had hardly ever spoken, but she found out what the problem was. Namely that I hadn’t anywhere to sleep that night.

Utterly tragically she didn’t have her own place. But she tried to find me somewhere to crash, as we said back then. She didn’t have to. She didn’t even know me, really. She was just kind.

She wasn’t in my school photo.

The girl who I’ve meant to write this for, for years, this kind, gentle, pretty girl was called Debbie O’Mara. She really did cross the seas of angry water and never came home again. She took to wearing a full cover-up headscarf while she was working in the Rose and Crown, and everywhere else as well, before she died of cancer, aged twenty.

Sleep well, Debbie. Bless you.

Resilience

My partner and I, separately, had rubbish childhoods. Although we were 100 miles apart, for different reasons and had absolutely no idea of the other’s existence until we were very long past twenty-one, we grew-up in very similar circumstances, mostly alone.

I moved house. Her family moved out. We grew up scared, desperate for friends and without children of our own age, pretty much unable to work out how to get them or what you were supposed to do with them when you had them.

Without getting into a Monty Python sketch, we had lots of things young folk don’t have today. Apart from rickets and Hitler, which we were thankfully too young for, we had windows that grew ice inside and ourselves. Separately. That and the ghosts that she hid under the covers from in the house that had been hit by a bomb in the war; that and the poltergeist activity I seemed to attract. I watched a lightbulb unscrew itself from the socket and fall unbroken onto the floor one day, which unlike doors opening and closing by themselves, seems rather harder to write-off as just the wind blowing.

What we didn’t have was a culture which taught us we had a right to be entertained constantly. There were no such things as computer games. I remember being astonished when people paid money to play Pacman. I thought then and think now no adult who wanted to be called that would possibly spend money to shoot stuff on a screen. Everyone knew the only way you could have a mobile phone was if someone carried it on their back.

“Then I bought more special skills by clicking Alt+F12 and game over, dude.”

It wasn’t fun. It was lonely and cold. It was damaging and limiting. It was unforgivable.

But it did one thing very well indeed.

It gets us through lockdown a lot better than the millions of people who are having to be by themselves for the first time ever. People starting to realise that if you can’t cope with being you then no amount of electronic consoles are ever going to make-up for that. It isn’t even that people can’t cope when the batteries go flat. It’s almost as if once the distraction isn’t distracting any more then they can’t deal with what’s in their head. With themselves.

We’re not crowing. It was horrible for us as children and it’s horrible now for anyone going through it. For us in lockdown we did our stuff, pretty much as normal. We had the time to go for walks together, out across the fields as the days got warmer and longer. When we got back we played three games of chess. One day one of us would win, the next day or the next, the other. We played it hard, without any favours, the best we could. For both of us, our chess game improved a lot. But we improved a lot too.

We knew who we both were, because we’d had to find out. Lockdown taught us much more about each other, the dyadic dynamic. You and me is never just me and you. It’s me, you and us. One plus one equals three.

Entertainment never teaches that. Nor resilience. Nor does any school I’ve ever seen.

False positives

I haven’t written anything for a long time. Months. Mainly because anything I thought of to write about has become so preposterous that I couldn’t think of any point in writing about it. Trade deals? Don’t make me laugh.

On top of the national suicide pact exit from Europe, we’ve also had the PM-induced compulsory suicide pact of the Corona virus. Today’s farce on Radio Four was about false positives. First Matt Hancock, the alleged Health Secretary, then a ‘crusading’ journalist totally misunderstood what they pretended they were talking about, which isn’t that reassuring.

A false positive is supposed to mean a test result that says you have something, a disease, a temperature, a virus, when in fact you don’t. Hancock was trying to pretend that actually his government hadn’t ballsed-up at all and all those people testing positive for Covid-19, with an infection-rate doubling every eight days, all that was actually just a misunderstanding and there was nothing to worry about, as the tests were false positive. Yes, most of them. Yes, despite the government’s own leader calling their testing regime world-beating. All false. Nothing wrong with most of these chaps after all. As you were. Carry on, that man.

Even for a government lead by a man sacked from his first job for lying, sacked from another job at the Spectator for lying about producing yet another illegitimate child, number unknown as he can’t or won’t say how many there are, that used to be a bit breath-taking. Now it’s just another day.

You or I may think the issue of illegitimacy went the same way as sideburns and Slade, but the Prime Minister certainly doesn’t. Or he didn’t when he wrote in the same magazine that the offspring of single-mothers were “ill-raised, ignorant and aggressive” as well as being illegitimate. After all, he’s fairly well-qualified to judge, having produced at least five.

And this is the problem. This is why I’m finding it so hard to write anything.

What does it matter? Nobody cares if the Prime Minister is a liar.

Nobody cares if he can’t or won’t say how many illegitimate children – a category of child he clearly despises – he does or doesn’t have.

People actually like all this. They gave him an eighty seat majority in Parliament to prove it. I’m finding it really difficult to be positive about any of this, falsely or not.

Fifteen years ago I very nearly died as a result of a series of doctors refusing to administer a blood-test that sometimes delivered false positive results.

It was called the D-dimer test. It looks for tiny protein fragments in the blood whose presence shows you’ve had a blood clot. Come on, you know all this. It cost about 80p.

The backstory:

Once upon a time I got stabbing pains in my groin for a few minutes at a time. They could be a month apart, a few weeks apart, six months apart, but when I got them they literally dropped me to my knees, vomiting. Five minutes later I was fine. The only evidence anything had happened was the pool of vomit. There was never any warning and a series of doctors, NHS and private, couldn’t find anything wrong.

I was freezing cold all the time, my foot sometimes hurt and I was depressed. But I’d been in luuuuuurve and she’d dumped me so I thought that was the reason. I thought I was dying of a broken heart. Thanks to a succession of rubbish GPs at Leiston Surgery, I very nearly ended-up just dying, either a Guinness Book of Records-sized blood clot or five different pretty huge ones.

I went to the doctor for nearly four years. Apparently there was nothing wrong with me if I could cycle twenty miles, which I could and often did. One morning I woke up with one leg nearly twice the size of the other and a fetching shade of raspberry, at which point even my rubbish GP felt there might be something wrong. Eight days in a high dependency unit. Thanks, doc. You only cost me three years of my life in limbo where I thought I was going insane. Which I suppose is better than the idiocy of not administering an 80p blood test and nearly costing me all of the rest of my life, not just three years of it.

False positives

The D-dimer test sometimes says someone has had a blood clot when they haven’t. My GP explained this after I got out of hospital alive, despite her best efforts.

I asked what would have happened if I’d had a D-dimer and it came back positive?

Oh, you’d have been booked into hospital for an ultrasound scan.

Which is exactly what I had when I presented at Emergency and didn’t go home. How bad would that have been?

Still. 80p. Matt Hancock’s said less than one percent of tests were false positives. Radio host without a calculator Julia Hartley-Brewer worked out from that that most Covid-19 tests were therefore bollocks using this logic:

If 0.8% of all tests carried out in the community (Hancock’s figure) were coming back as false positives, and 1,000 people were tested at random, (Hancock’s phrase) then eight of those thousand people would test positive but not actually have anything wrong with them. Or not have Covid-19, anyway.

But wait though…. random testing isn’t what is being done. And won’t be. We don’t random test. We haven’t got the resource to do it. It’s never been suggested we do this. And the Health Secretary, as so often in this Cabinet, is either stupid or a liar or both to suggest that’s what we do.

But that didn’t matter to Ms Hartley-Brewer. She reasoned that if only say, nine of those fictional totally hypothetical 1,000 testees came back positive then eight out of nine, 91%, would be false. So you see, children? It’s all just a bad dream after all. Unlike say, Brexit, which with such a firm grasp of fantasy statistics, you may not be surprised to find she supports.

The Honorable Toby Young, the son of a baron who didn’t get the A-Levels he needed to get into Oxford but got in anyway because Daddy made a few phone calls after writing a book about meritocracy in Britain, then accused the government of hiding the scale of the inaccuracy of the tests, despite the fact that all of these figures were totally made-up nonsense.

This is England. This is public debate. These are the leaders and their pile of Third Year logic. I really must be more positive. Soon, I promise. Just as soon as Sig. Other gets her Italian passport.