Carl Bennett – Page 6 – Writer-insighter

Hopefully useless

The best thing that can happen with any emergency equipment is that it turns out to be a total waste of money. Not because it doesn’t work, but because hopefully you’ll never need it. I’ve always been addicted to the stuff, especially for sailing. I’ve looked longingly at emergency nylon mesh cradles for getting people back on board. You need, you really NEED these if someone goes over the side in the North Sea because as you know from your extensive internet research, the Luftwaffe found more of their pilots survived after a ducking when they were recovered horizontally than if they were dragged out of the water the way you’d do it in a hurry – head up, feet down, along with all their blood, hence the heart attack seconds after they were supposed to be safe onboard. I still haven’t got one of those.

One of the first things I did get however, was a Bell throw-line. That was twenty years ago and it’s been used precisely five times, every one of them in practice. Essentially it’s like a plastic stick grenade except the inside has a coiled line inside instead of explosive, which makes it more acceptable at most yacht clubs. Probably even at Sydney Harbour. The idea is you can throw it further and more accurately than throwing a coil of line, especially into the wind.

But that was then. This year I went slightly higher tech. One of the things that I had instilled into me by my old clients Inmarsat was that mobile phones don’t work offshore. Now, the fact that I don’t go offshore, or in fact out of the treacherous upper reaches of the Deben last year, isn’t the point. I did get marooned, cast-up on an inhospitable shore at the mercy of the elements. It had been a bit of a day.

First, I was late getting out onto the boat. It’s an old, (very) Folkboat, which means it needs 1.3 metres of water underneath it (four foot nine in Brexit money) before you’re going anywhere. In the Deben, this limits your sailing to four hours maximum, or it does from where I’m moored at Martlesham. Still, I thought I had time for a little sail anyway.

I was single-handed, so I motored out to the main channel with the main sail slack and flapping about, then tightened it all up to head downstream. The tide was going out. I just hadn’t appreciated how fast. Off Waldringfield, where you have to stick to the west side of the river, it’s very fast. Too fast to tack through and turn around, but I didn’t know that until I tried.

The plan was put the engine on, tack round, get the main down and motor back while there was still some water. The engine always starts on my boat, so long as the battery is charged. If it turns over, it runs. The only flaw in this plan was that it takes about two minutes to do it. You have to make sure it’s in neutral, kneel down, unlatch the hatch, pull it up, latch it up so it doesn’t fall on your head. I hate things hitting my head. Really hate it.

Next you pull the valve lever up, hold it up while you push the starter button then release the lever, unlatch the hatch, close it and latch it down again. Obviously you can’t steer or do anything else while you’re doing all this. Nor see where you’re going.

Where I was going, or where the five knot current was taking me, wasn’t through the anchorage, it turned out, but into the mooring line of an anchored-up Essex gin palace about five times bigger than my boat. The first time I was really aware of its existence was when I got its bow-sprit in my ear. No matter. We can just push off and drift down with the current. Except we can’t, because the gin palace’s anchor warp (oh, alright, rope then…) was happily wedged between my rudder and the stern of my boat. Because I hadn’t put the bottom rudder plate back on when I replaced the rudder. Because I hadn’t, that’s all.

The Harbour Master came out in a dinghy before I actualised my plan to cut the gin palace’s mooring loose. He tried to pull my boat clear but it wasn’t having any of it until he went back and came out with a boat with a bigger engine. I started-up again, free of the big plastic boat and departed with a cheery wave with which apparently they’re unfamiliar in the nautical parts of Essex.

I hammered back up the Deben to where the creek reaches West to Martlesham and home. And stupidly cut the corner. And stupidly came to a halt, stuck in the mud. I put it in reverse and shifted a little bit backwards. Just enough for my fibreglass dinghy to keep coming forward and drop its tow line around my propellor, which it wound around until the dinghy was dragged under and into the prop. Which happily started chewing it up until it turned over. I reached for my old sailing knife then, convinced idiotically that the dinghy would pull the yacht down with it.

The knife worked very well indeed, I’m pleased to say. The dinghy sank under the Folkboat, in all of by now three feet of water. With the tide running out the Folkboat settled over the dinghy. And cracked it in half as four tons of wood and lead keel did what Mrs Shearn’s Physics O Level lessons predicted it would.

Just static

I thought the best thing to do would be to phone Devoted Partner, except my phone was on the driver’s seat of my car. I had a handheld VHF radio though (obviously…) so I put out a PAN call. No answer. Nothing. I tried to call-up the Coastguard by name, but still nothing. Just static. I was close enough to the river bank, about thirty metres, to shout to a walker. Could he call Devoted Partner whose number was luckily in my notebook which I did have with me, so she’d know I wasn’t lost at sea, just going to be quite late. Like ten hours late, by the time the tide had come back again and floated me off this mudbank.

He did. I didn’t know what was happening now, because he’d walked away on his walk. It was August, but I had some water onboard and some old biscuits in a tin. No Swallows And Amazons pemmican, but you can’t have everything. My biggest concern, apart from no dinghy any more, was I didn’t have a book nor even Radio4, and although we were aground, you can’t walk on Deben mud. You’d drown, very unpleasantly. All I had to do was sit there.

I set an anchor fore and aft, then busied myself recovering one of them and throwing it out as far as I could towards the bank to stop the boat falling over down the slope of the river bank in case it didn’t float when the water came back, just filled up and sank. By now the idea of a final insurance claim seemed quite attractive.

About an hour went by. The boat wasn’t going to fall over. It was warm enough. Just a bit boring. But that all changed when the flourescent jackets turned up on the bank. They obviously, from all the pointing going on, wanted to talk to me, all eight of them, but they were at Kyson’s Point, about 100 metres away and I couldn’t hear them. They got someone to get a rowing boat out of his boathouse and row them out to me. It was the Coastguard Mud Rescue Team.

I pointed out, through our Covid masks, that I had no intention of going in the mud, so I didn’t really need rescuing. They said they had concerns about my emotional health. I didn’t really know what to say about that. There were too many of them in the rowing boat to take me off, so the man whose boat it was rowed them back to the bank, dropped two of them off then had to row back for me. He just lived there. Amazingly, the Coastguard Mud Rescue team doesn’t have a dinghy.

As we walked back to my car and my phone I found out what had happened. The walker had phoned Devoted Partner who being a brick dutifully called the boatyard. Who told her they couldn’t do anything because their boat needed water as well as mine did, and why didn’t she phone the Coastguard? They were joking, but being a very nice, caring woman as well as Devoted Partner and a brick, that’s exactly what she did.

I went home, thanked her and drove back the next day. The boatyard gave me a lift down in their work tug. The Folkboat was fine, floating at anchor. My fibreglass dinghy wasn’t. We managed, somehow, to tow it back the mile up Martlesham Creek but by the time we got to my mooring it was pretty much in two halves. I bought a brand new, much nicer inflatable dinghy the next week, long overdue, but that isn’t the point of this tale.

Attention Seeking

I felt I needed a reliable way of attracting attention in future, preferably without my mental health being called into question. The Coastguard said their transmitter was out, hence no reply. Traditionally, you use flares. Not the velvet ones they used to advertise in New Musical Express, but the pyrotechnic kind, either quite exciting parachute flares, which shoot up into the sky and shine a red light for about 10 seconds, or handheld red flares which are great for blinding you, incinerating your hand and setting fire to your boat. They don’t burn for very long and they have a shelf-life. The end of that is when your problems really start, because it’s completely unclear to me where you can get rid of them safely. You used to drop them off at the Coastguard shed, but that’s stopped years ago.

But this thing solves both those problems. It’s battery powered. One twist of the switch and it burns not for ten seconds or so, but for 60 hours. Even groovier, it doesn’t use flash, it flashes S-O-S! How cool is that? It never goes out of date. It won’t burn your hand, your boat or your eyeballs out, although if you actually are stupid enough to look directly at it in the yard when you’re testing it one dark night as I obviously am, expect to still see its short-short-short-long-long-long-short-short-short ghost image burned on your retinae for the next ten minutes or so.

Even better, because good kit is never cheap, I got this one from someone who bought it last year and never used it, so half price. Like all the other safety kit I’ve ever bought, I hope it’ll turn out to be a total waste of money.

Want to know how it feels?

Yes, please. If that’s alright with you.

Kate Bush asked me this, years ago. Well ok, so she asked everyone else too, but still. I’m pretty sure I saw her and her Mum in Laura Ashley in Bath, when she and I were about 18. The location is plausible enough. Maybe we did actually share a moment. Certainly eye contact, the way you do over the years. Mine have included Kate O’Mara round the back of Sadler’s Wells and Pamela Stephenson (or to you, Lady Connolly as she styles herself now that her TV career has expanded from having a grenade stuffed down her blouse on The Professionals) getting off a Tube train I was getting on.

We didn’t, you know. Speak or anything.

But what-ifs aside – actually no. We’re living in the middle of the biggest what-if in England ever. What if we left a successful trading union that brought us countless benefits, had government ministers telling lie after lie after lie about how easy and successful it would be, had an Old Etonian Prime Minister who thought it was funny to call black people picaninnies in the papers, cut our exports by 68% overnight and 99% of the media told us it’s all totally brilliant? It would be laughable except for the fact that it’s true.

But Kate Bush. And this is true as well.

I went out one night. Drink was taken. I met this girl and we got on brilliantly, went back to mine and duly fell asleep. And asleep, you dream. I do, anyway. In my dream I met Kate Bush at a party. We’d both been drinking, which was plausible enough, not least as there’s video of her actually smoking a cigarette, which for me was like finding a film of the Pope with a remarkable command of Anglo-Saxon having a fight with a nightclub doorman.

Kate told me in that honeyed voice that this was something special. That she wanted to remember this. She didn’t want it to be just a drunken fumble that got out of hand. And in the morning it was going to be wow, wow, wow, wow, wow (wow) unbelievable.

I thought I took it on the chin. I didn’t ask for an actual printed receipt about the morning. I didn’t say there’s nothing wrong with a drunken fumble that gets out of hand. I did what you have to do (which in those days was an abortive fumble above the waist on the off-chance and dutifully heard the expected and resigned ‘Go to sleep’) and went to sleep. Hey, it was the ’80s.

When I woke the other side of the duvet was turned down. The sheet was warm where she’d lain. There are noises from the bathroom. There are actual noises of toothbrushes and soap dishes from my bathroom. I heard the bathroom door open and light, female feet in the hallway.

In about 30 seconds she’s going to open my bedroom door and step into my bedroom. There will be no morning-after dog-breath. Her hair will be well, like Kate Bush’s hair. See above. It’s going to be In The Warm Room in quadrophonic surround sound. My life is going to be complete, better than the way it was when I drove halfway across America to visit Hunter Thompson.

29, 28,27, 26 and the door is opening and …..

And suddenly there was a wrenching, churning pain in my stomach, an overwhelming feeling of loss, as if something had fallen out of me. I sat up in bed, arm outstretched, pointing at her. At the awful realisation, as I cried out, that …..that…..that….

You’re not Kate Bush!

The person who wasn’t took it quite well, considering.

So yes, Kate, or yes, as you were back then, anyway. I still want to know how it feels. Any time you want to finish that conversation is fine with me.

The Lieutenant’s Goose

I originally wrote this in 2003. I remember the sunny, windy day when I found what I didn’t know.

Walking back

Near the village where I live are small paved trackways made of pre-cast concrete. Some of them have had a layer of tarmac, but some of them are still the way the US Army Airforce laid them 65 years ago. Off one of them I found a pile of rubble in a field, where on my map an airfield should have been. The gate was open so I drove in, down a wide white concrete track, just wide enough to be a runway but nothing was going to land here now, with big piles of soil and bricks dumped on it.

The runway stopped abruptly and another concrete track ran left and right at the end of it. On the right I steered past old and rusty farm machinery along with big lorry wheels, railway sleepers and unidentified massive bits of metal. I found two low brick sheds with flaking plaster and asbestos roofs opposite each other off yet another side track.

I parked and got out of the car and looking up saw a Little Owl, a tiny thing with dark brown stripes on its head, watching me from an empty window. It flew off suddenly, not in a panic or a flurry, but still suddenly, up through a hole in the shed roof. IIn the entrance to the shed there was a pile of sturdy grey wooden cases, marked Rocket Motors, MkII, about five feet long, a foot wide. Some were open, all were empty and abandoned. The wood was thick and solid and 60 years old. There were also two smaller bright blue wooden cases, open and showing scooped rests for something, but whatever they used to hold was long gone.

The whole place felt as if everyone left in a hurry. (It turned out it had – after VE Day, May 1945, all the pilots were sent on two weeks leave pending orders they thought would ship them out to the Pacific war. Instead, they were sent to Neiubiburg. By July, they’d all gone). I knew this used to be a fighter airfield. These boxes must have held rockets for ground attack in the last days of the German war. (They weren’t in fact, these boxes were dumped there by the RAF, shortly after the USAAF left). “Buy Bonds!” was written in black on the walls of one of the sheds, all of them now empty of things from then, except for the wooden cases and the gaudy paintwork, yellow and green or blue two-tone walls.

There was some graffiti dated 1985 signed by “Andy” who would now be 32 if he was 15 then. But not a lot of it. Most of the windows were broken, some shot-out with a small hole so probably by an air rifle, but apart from that this was an abandoned place sleeping in the morning sun. I drove back down the runway and saw an old painted 5 gallon oil can, triangular, still with some painted logo on it. I always find I accelerate on a runway without meaning to. You can’t help it. There were just two or three other buildings, one in good condition, up the lane on the farm.

The gate was shut when I got back to it, but not locked, luckily. Three thousand people lived here for eighteen months. Nearly fifty people (actually it was 82) went from here and died within just a few hours. Apart from the two war memorials, both with different numbers of people listed as killed, there are very few other signs anyone ever lived here. Who do you ask?

I’d asked people in Leiston, the nearest town to where the airfield used to be. The cycle shop man had made a model P51 Mustang aircraft with his brother, one that actually flew with a motor, but said he’d not heard about the airfield. The greengrocer’s shop played swing music on a CD most days, but no-one there was anything like old enough to remember the airfield.

Only the lady in the corner grocer’s knew anything about it. She remembered playing on the empty runways in the days just after the war, before the 1950s, her brothers and friends standing on the hardstand, then spreading their arms as they ran faster and faster down the silent runways to their futures under the big Suffolk sky. And standing still, talking down the airplanes from their ghostly landing patterns, waiting until the last one was home, engine switched off, chocks under the wheels, wings tied down for the night, canvas covers over the engine and cockpit, the canopy shut.

The entire airfield was shut. By the time I found it even existed almost all of it was gone, returned as it should be to farmland. In one of the coincidences that are much more common than they seem to be, the land where the airfield had been was now owned by a German, who was not overly keen for people to tramp about his fields looking for evidence of the people who systematically destroyed anything they could see in his own country half a century before.

I wasn’t even born when all this had happened. The only way it was anything to do with me was the fact that I lived in a village called Yoxford. The first thing I did when I moved in was Google the name of the village, mostly to see if anyone there had heard of the Internet and put up a village website. The very first thing I found was a website called The Yoxford Boys. I thought it was going to be something like how I imagined the Boys Brigade, probably a boxing club or something similar, run by a keen vicar, or maybe a pub darts team with a waggish sense of humour.

Instead I found the first clue that there had been more here than I knew about, and more than it was easy to find-out. I’d already met an old lady at the bus stop who told me about the garage her husband used to have where the layby on the main road was now, and how he had made what they took for serious money repairing tyres for the American trucks running up and down the main road. I’d talked to a carpenter who lived on the main road itself, in a house 400 hundred years old, whose biggest regret he said was not having lived through the 1939-45 war. And here you’re going to have to bear with me, because I am not going to type 1939-45 every time I mention what to my generation will always just be “the war.” The big war, the one they made so many films about. The one that dominated my parents’s lives, that hung plastic Airfix kit models of Fortresses and Messerschmitts, Dorniers and Spitfires from almost every boy’s bedroom ceiling. He meant that the war was the last time anything really happened in Suffolk. I thought then that he was joking. Now I don’t think he was at all.

This is a true story. Some of it is about the war, but only in the sense that that is when it happened. This is not a story about war. It is a story about one man’s walk, when being 19 then he missed his last transport home from Ispwich. At around 6am the next morning he had orders to fly across Germany, in one of the last combat missions of the entire war. He thinks now the date was probably April 20th, 1945. Leiston Airfield, Station 373, is 26 miles from Ipswich. This is a story of how a young pilot had to walk to his temporary home, one warm night a long time ago.

This is the audio version of the story, broadcast on Radio Suffolk in 2020.

One night in Wisconsin

About a thousand years ago I was a summer camp counsellor near Eagle River in Wisconsin. It was the absolute middle of nowhere.

Eagle River without American graffiti. The cars were different but nothing else changed.

We had a night off every week, which proved slightly problematic as there was pretty much nowhere to go and nothing much to do. There was a coin-op laundry in town if you had spare laundry. There was a shop that sold Stetsons but real Stetsons cost a lot more than you’d think. There was a golf driving range near the town, but I didn’t do golf. There were occasional water pageants, where as I remember it, teams of cheerleaders went waterskiing for the crowd’s delectation and delight, but that may have been a dream.

*Nothing we can say or do’s gonna change anything now…*.

I had my own cheerleader anyway, the too-good-to-be-truly named Nancy-Jean, who was a Drama counsellor over at one of the other camps nearby, Red Pine or Minoqua, I forget. Me, I taught kids how to shoot, which I thought was a bit of a coals-to-Newcastle job, but that was how I got it: they didn’t have many/any English riflery instructors, my summer camp didn’t have a riflery instructor, I’d qualified as an adult marksman at Bisley when I was 15 so after a train ride and an interview in a forgotten Victorian room high above Paddington station, that was that. I bought if not Bernie Taupin’s old gold Chevy then at least an old green one, but I didn’t have a place of my own, so most of the time not spent at Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar where we met was spent driving aimlessly around looking for somewhere to (ahem) park, as it was politely called, where you might not get shot or eaten by a bear.

Ho ho, you might say now, but on one parking expedition I thought we’d better get in the car with the windows up pretty fast, prompted by grunting and snuffling that wasn’t coming from either of us. Another evening, with another two girls from another summer camp I got a .38 revolver shoved in my stomach, and not by either of them. Both stories from and for another time.

It was on one of those aimless nights riding along in my automobile I saw a UFO. I wasn’t the only person to see it. It was a starry night, the Northern Lights were doing their ho-hum-seen-it-so-many-times-now thing (sorry if you haven’t, but…) and it was a normal evening drive. Just the huge V8 burbling away for a soundtrack, slow talking and ….omg.

Just what IS that?

A black triangle moved silently across the sky. It moved across the Northern Lights display. It was triangular. And it didn’t make a sound.

All of this is absolutely true.

So that was one of my UFO sightings, I thought. Something in the I Don’t Know drawer that probably everyone has. I hadn’t intended to open that one again until last year when I went to Norwich. It wasn’t something I was thinking about until I saw it there, in the middle of this lovely medieval city. Just off the marketplace there’s a pretty Art Deco arcade. That’s where I saw my UFO again. In the window of a model shop.

It was real. Real enough for Revell to make a model of it. And like a lot of UFOs, it turned out it wasn’t, because it could be identified, just not at the time.

The aircraft that looks so ludicrously science-fiction that it has to be either fake, from another planet or both turned out to be a Rockwell B2. All that time ago, when I could still get into 30 inch waist jeans (on me I mean, Nancy-Jean’s were smaller than that) I really did see that black triangular shape cross the sky soundlessly, blotting out the Northern Lights.

The funny thing is, the same thing still happens.

Parrall lines

Boats give you a wonderful opportunity to spend money you didn’t know you had spare. Usually. The oddest thing about the Drascombe Lugger I bought myself last year is (whisper who dares..) it doesn’t really need anything bought for it.

My thoughtful partner insisted on giving me a 4hp Honda outboard for Christmas, whether to avoid rowing or to make sure I spent rather a lot more on her Christmas present than perhaps I’d originally planned, so that expense wasn’t an option. Some rowlocks came from the local Facebook marketplace thing, so that was £1 left on a doorstep.

We got new lifejackets last August and amazing strobe personal lights at a boat jumble just before the first lockdown – every time we go to that it’s absolutely freezing but worth it to pick up Jotun strobes for £10 when the first time I’d bought them 12 years ago they were nearer £50. Like any emergency gear, the best you can hope for is that they’ll prove a total waste of money by never having to use them.

So I was a bit stuck for something to spend money on. Luckily I looked at the parrall. In case you’ve never heard of one (in which case you don’t have a Drascombe) it’s a bit of string with some beads on. Not for your neck. To go around the yard and the mast. It’s not supposed to fix it tight, just to keep it roughly there. And the one that came with my boat was manky.

We have Webb Brothers, a very, very good odds and in this case ends shop in Church Street in Woodbridge, where outside lockdown they sell odd ends of rope in hanks in a basket outside, the way they do in films. That’s where I bought the white line in the picture. The first idea was a new, shiny parrall, but then I thought that might come in handy round the top of the mast, with some epoxy resin on it too, in case it ever looks like splitting. Or just because it looks right. The little metal clips were from EBay, to put a high-tech quick-release on the parrall. As one does.

The red and green line was just too tempting to leave in the basket. On the Drascombe Lugger the main sheet runs through a block on a traveller bar. The block has a habit of smacking into the gunwale, because there’s nothing to stop it. It makes a noise and it’s just not right, so I thought a metre or so of line wrapped around the traveller, green for starboard, port for left (the handy way to remember being either that’s the way you pass the port, or less yah, port and left have the same number of letters. I meant one passes the port, obvs.).

Well under £10 for all of it. As conspicuous consumption goes it’s not very good, is it?

NOS

I didn’t know what this acronym meant for years, until I discovered New Old Stock.

Stuff they found in a drawer, in some forgotten corner of a stockroom, in the months after a company went bust, quite often. Either that or things that for some reason, either they went out of fashion or they somehow just forgot to sell them, didn’t walk out of the door with the customer.

Barn finds are similar, the legendary “I was out for a walk, spotted this old car in a barn, the farmer said take it away for £50 and stone me guvnor cor blimey it’s only the Rolls-Royce made for that Egyptian bloke they assassinated on TV, you remember?”

So NOS – barn find except real, and more to the point, not covered in 40 years of guano and working the way it was supposed to.

Now, I’m quite old myself and my boats aren’t exactly brand new, so I was bit at a loss buying myself a Christmas present this year. Not because I hadn’t been given any, but because I always get myself something with the cheque my mother insists on sending. I feel I have to do something with it. Something I’ve never had and quite often wanted on a whim is and was an anemometer. It measures how fast the wind is blowing, which is quite useful if you plan on going gliding, flying a kite, sailing – you see, there was a point after all – or just want to know if the leaves moving not he trees are doing it at 10 km per hour or the Quixotic measurements of the Beaufort scale.

Obviously, anemometer shops not being in plentiful supply in these fields, I had a look on Ebay, staring glumly at the piles of trashy Chinese electronic toys with little wind turbines set in gaily-coloured plastic. Most of them were under £15. Good, you might think. But apart from looking like rubbish they all needed batteries. What didn’t was exactly what I was looking for.

A proper, vaguely nautical looking, thoroughly German Anemo, albeit of a certain age. For me, that’s actually a good thing, as it means it was made properly. This was easy to date anyway – it said Made In Western Germany on it. Given the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 – the biggest global event ever, for anyone of my generation, not least as I once met the girl (well, she was then, just) who did the outside broadcast for the BBC, live, as it happened – then it has to be at least 33 years old now.

It doesn’t ever need batteries, because it doesn’t need batteries. It came in its original box which I now don’t feel I can throw away.

The very best bit was the price. Who wants something 33 years old that works perfectly? Well, me, for a start, but also anyone who prefers to pay £14 plus £5 postage instead of the £160 advertised on a sailing gear website with the rider Out Of Stock, Delivery Date Unknown.

Deuta, before you rush to Google them, are still going very strongly indeed. They make highly technical measuring equipment and they’ve been doing it and winning awards for it for donkeys years. But not anemometers. Not any more.

My buddy Duane

It was about twenty years ago when I went to Washington D.C., to stay at the InterContinental, renew my acquaintance with Duane Reed and interview the United States Coastguard.

I was supposed to go to the Coastguard H.Q. to interview them face-to-face, which is something not many people can say because they don’t let people in, but we were a very specialist company and people very, very rarely said no to us. Hence the five-star hotels and Business Class flights.

I needed a haircut, and the uniformed, top-hatted junior doorman recommended a place just across the street. I also needed not to have the humungous cold I’d realised I was incubating. Which is where my old buddy Duane Reed came in. I’d met him before on a job in New York. I should have remembered what happened next, but thanks to him I never remembered anything much.

He sold me some nasal swabs. Like ear buds, but with the bud part suspended in its icky micro-capsule of god-knows-what. Nowadays they sell something similar as Zicam, but back then all I knew was it stopped you feeling you had a cold in about ten minutes flat. Now ok, there were some slight downsides. You stopped being able to remember the end of your sentences too, as well as their beginnings half-way through. Balance was a tad problematic too, but you certainly didn’t feel as if you had a cold. Bargain.

I’d had one just before I went downstairs and asked the doorman where I could get a haircut. That was several light years away from the chintzy confines of the InterContinental. Everyone in the place was black, like people in a film. Not the dawg droopy-trousered type of black person you see in films, but an older, familial culture I found if anything, more disturbing. There was a deference, an eagerness to comply, and at the same time a distinct impression that I was in the wrong place. I said, clearly enough, I thought, in my newish Crombie overcoat (single-breasted, single vent, very dark grey, slant flap pockets, ticket pocket, three button. By Crombie, of course, not some Charles Tyrwhitt knock-off. And yes, it did take some finding, thank-you. Some money, too), that I was going to do an interview at Coastguard H.Q.. I thought later that they’d took that to mean I was having an interview at Coastguard H.Q..

Which was why they gave me a Number One crop.

There is nothing you can do. They can’t stick it back on. And it was freezing outside. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know. It’s a special kind of freezing, like Amsterdam, or Manhatten or anywhere else surrounded by very cold water in the middle of a continental winter. And no hair. Luckily, I’d brought a fedora, but the stares it got made me think that Bogart style had left these shores some time before.

I was on my own on that trip, so I did some exploring. I walked everywhere. I went into the Metro once, and marvelled at the high ceilings, the cleanliness and the general feeling it was a set for a sci-fi film, but mainly I walked. I made some intriguing discoveries. Kramer Books was one of them, the most fabulous bookshop ever, where you can not just read the books before you buy them but have a glass of wine and something to eat at the same time. You could then, anyway. Monica Lewinsky had an account there. The FBI turned up one day, demanding to see what was on her book shopping history. Kramer’s told them to go away. Another less pleasant discovery was that eating out in D.C. was awful. I’ve been in Indian restaurants that smelled less strongly of damp and were tucked away up less inaccessible stairs in Wiltshire market towns forty years ago.

I had the weekend free, wedged between two sets of interviews. I think I remember a ludicrous power-walk through the streets at night, aiming deliberately for the biggest person in any group on any pavement in front of me, on the basis that the rest would back down or shoot me. Being in the USA it re-defined my calibration of ‘the largest person on the pavement.” Sorry, sidewalk. This is what happens when you meet some girl too much younger in Kramer’s and have to pretend you like her stupid music in a bar before you realise that notwithstanding the diminishing prospects of sleeping in her bed 10 miles our in the burbs you really have to go now, before your fillings fall out. And then realise you don’t really know where you are, apart from general directions.

Sunday morning was better. Alone, for a start. No stupid music. I walked up to a strange deserted plaza on a river, decked out in about 400 US flags. While I was getting a coffee I heard a cowboy assessing different brands of chewing tobacco. A cowboy. Non-midnight. With a non-ironic hat. In D.C.

I walked off again, past a little canal lock that made me stop, turn around and take a picture of it, because it was an English-scale canal lock of the kind you’d find in Manchester or Trowbridge or any leafy flatland meadow in England, and the kind you definitely don’t expect to see anywhere in the USA, let alone in D.C. I didn’t, anyway.

I was trying to find Georgetown. Because it was there. I found two things I really wanted to find, but both by accident. The first was a jewellers that had a Panerai watch just on the furthest reaches of what I could possibly afford if I spent everything in my bank account. So, no.

A while after that I found something cheaper at a boot sale, two embroidered pictures of the kind that girls – I think it was only girls – used to make before there was television or anything much else to do apart from embroider their initials, sometimes their names, sometimes a date on the pictures they made of their lives. One of the pictures showed a farmhouse, foursquare, with a wooden fence in front of it. The more upwardly mobile picture showed something else too – a carriage in front of their farmhouse, thank-you, not just the farm cart the other long-dead emroideress had to make do with.

I didn’t buy them. They were about $40 for the two but I couldn’t think of a way to get them home in a suitcase. They’d have to come out of their frames and even then I wasn’t sure they’d fit. Nobody else there had the slightest interest in them, even though they should have been in a folk-art museum.

I wish I’d taken a picture, at least. I wish I’d bought them. I wish I’d remembered the dates and the names of those long-dead girls, to remember the hours of nothing at all to do they must have had. To recall the pride of having a fancy carriage outside your farmhouse, so long ago.

I wished other things about Washington D.C. too. I wished I knew more about why whole blocks of buildings north of the White House had just one or two thin, long brick or wood houses when the rest of the block was now grass. I didn’t know then that in 1968 there were huge riots in D.C. Some black folks had gotten out of hand, according to some people I talked to in the InterContinental bar. Nobody actually recommended hanging them uppity negras, but it wasn’t far off.

Luckily it was only good ol’ boys never meaning no harm who invaded the White House with rifles yesterday. And there were all white boys, even the one who dressed -up like an over-excited Red Indian at his own sixth birthday party, so obviously they was just funnin’ and decent folks shouldn’t make no nevermind. President Trump said they were special yesterday, and condemned them today.

Funny people, some Americans. Funny place, Washington D.C.

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.