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.
In fact NOT a UFO at all.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Nowhere near Aylesbury, in fact.
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.
Washington D.C.. But 1968, not 2021.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
