Around this time of year here in the northern hemisphere’s winter, most of us will suffer some of the normal round of colds and flu. Specifically, in the UK one reads that the hospital Accident & Emergency departments are overstretched and the wards often full of elderly patients who could go home but can’t because ‘home’ does not provide a good enough environment in which to recover. They have even developed a name – bed blockers; modern times, life in the C21st!

The health conscious (aka The Worried Well) accept the government advice and have a ‘flu jab’, an injection that should prevent the recipient from getting 99% of the viruses around; they are free to the oldies! I overheard someone the other day saying it seems this year that those who have had the flu jab have all got the irritating dry cough that lingers and lingers. Maybe this is just one of the 1% viruses? (See note below)

Some weeks ago I started coughing (predictable huh!!)…… and it just developed into a dry hacking cough that resisted all removal attempts ….. and in case you’re thinking I should have tried that remedy that your grandmother always swore by, I tried gargling with cider vinegar & water (and swallowing … a bit yuk!), I tried Vicks chest rub, I tried Strepsils, I tried using an inhaler – I remember as a young boy bending forward over a steaming bowl of Friar’s Balsam, my step-grandmother’s potion, my head wrapped in a tea towel – I tried ‘Chesty Cough’ syrup …… but nothing worked.

At some point I thought I should just check in with the Doctors’ Practice nurse; not wanting to trouble a doctor, not wanting the general antibiotics, simply to make sure nothing sinister was developing. In PC 95 I wrote about the difficulties of getting an appointment with a doctor in Britain …… but I just wanted to see a nurse!! Even she was booked up …… but then the receptionist said I could have an appointment with a doctor in another practice that evening. OK, I thought, why not!

So one Monday three weeks before Christmas I arrived at The Charter Practice 15 minutes before my 8:15 pm appointment, a little early as I hadn’t been there before and I anticipated some form filling. Implanted in the DNA of us ex-military types is a need to be somewhere in plenty of time. It probably stems from the ‘5 minutes before 5 minutes before 5 minutes before’ regime we observed during our training. For example, if the College had a parade of the Officer Cadets at 10.00, the College Sergeant Major wanted everyone there in perfect order at 0945; so the individual Company Sergeant Majors wanted their own company there in perfect order at 0930; so the individual Platoon Sergeants wanted everyone there in perfect order at 0915 …… you get the drift …….it became important ….. and remains so. (15 minutes got contracted to 5!)

Having settled into the empty waiting room, with its antiseptic coloured plastic chairs and posters advertising everything from ‘Have you booked your Flu Vaccination?’ to ‘Need to talk in confidence about domestic abuse? Call 01273 590276’, I checked my messages/emails on my iPhone. The alternative was to look at either an April 2009 copy of National Geographic or a more up-to-date Readers’ Digest circa 2015.

At 8:10 pm I switched my phone to ‘silent ring’, in anticipation of the doctor’s call; sure enough:

“Mr Yates?”

I walked into the doctor’s consulting room to find him standing expectantly in the centre of his room; we shook hands.

“Now, tell me about this cough.”

Two minutes into a little ‘question and answer’ session, he suddenly stopped talking and stared at me. I seriously didn’t know how to react (!) so did nothing, simply looked back.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” he asked, a sense of irritation noticeable in his voice.

“Answer what?” I asked, hearing various background noises but none I recognised.

“Your phone. It’s ringing!”

“No it’s not!” I replied, trying not to cough, but knowing full well the ring tone of my own phone; I had assumed it must have been his.

“Yes it is!” he snorted; by this time steam was beginning to appear from his ears.

Sure enough, in my jean’s pocket my phone was ‘ringing’ but with a strange ring tone!! I switched it off and apologised:

“Not sure what happened here: sorry!”

By then he must have thought I was showing early signs of dementia rather than exhibiting a cough, wished me luck and ushered me out. I muttered my thanks. Back in the Waiting Room, before driving home, I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and switched it on.

Then I realised what had happened ……. whilst I had switched it to ‘silent’, I hadn’t locked the screen and random pressure in my pocket had somehow, unbelievably, initiated a sequence of ‘settings’ …. ‘sounds’…… ‘ringtone’ …….. and was offering me ‘ripples’ as opposed to my normal ‘crickets’ ringing tone. No wonder I didn’t recognise it!!

We live in funny times huh!

Richard 13th January 2018

PS Just in case you’re wondering, the doctor reckoned the cough would clear itself in another 3 weeks, irrespective of what I did. And you know what? It’s gone. And to concur with the GP’s thoughts, yesterday’s Times agreed ….. “ ….. there is no treatment.”!!

PPS   Two types of vaccines are available to doctors this winter, Quadrivalent vaccines offer protection against two types of influenza A and two types of B. Trivalent vaccines, cheaper and more often used by GP surgeries, offer protection against only one type of A and two types of B. Of 25 cases of influenza in the south west, Public Health England say 21 are of the B/Yamagata type not covered by the Trivalent vaccines. Bit of a bummer!

The little wooden cigarette box is in front of me, seemingly begging for its history to be read. And that’s one of the real irritations of life, isn’t it? If only inanimate objects could talk, could tell you who made them, who touched them, who used them. This one is seven inches long and 4 wide (18cms by 10cms); inside there are two compartments each capable of taking 20 normal sized cigarettes. I say ‘normal’ because ‘King’ size only became fashionable in the 1980s. On the polished lid the crest of the Royal Artillery has been carefully carved by some skilled craftsman. You can even read the motto – “Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt.” (‘Everywhere where faith and glory lead’); there is another extremely risqué interpretation which is only available on request!

Peggy gave me this box with The Gunner’s crest on the top when I became a Gunner officer. She’s long since departed after a full and rewarding life and only recently did I wonder who gave it to her. But then you imagine …..

It’s easy to forget, as time causes memories to fade, the heartaches that lives lost create. For this box probably belonged an officer killed in the Second World War, the boyfriend of Peggy. She never married and one can only assume that there was nowhere in her heart for anyone but her first love. I write ‘probably’ as I really don’t know for certain. It belonged to Peggy for sure, and it’s quite likely that any self-respecting officer at that time would have had a cigarette box. If it wasn’t silver, a beautifully carved wooden one would suffice and quite usual to have your Regimental crest carved into the lid. On his death I imagine his family gave her the box as a memento. But who was Peggy you might well ask?

Peggy was the P in C&P, Cynthia my aunt and Peggy, but she was equally the P in P&C to her family; it simply depended on your perspective!! They were Cambridge graduates but women were not officially admitted as members of the graduate body when they studied for their degree; this was rectified in 1998 when 900 of them assembled at Cambridge. They had met for the first time in 1939 and a year later they shared a flat in Walthamstow Hall School. That summer a bomb demolished most of the staff accommodation; no one had made it to the shelter and Peggy recalls seeing the tall Music mistress, the very short English mistress and Cynthia, blood pouring down her head, crawling towards safety through the dust – and thought they looked like three bears.

Having enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, both spent part of the Second World War at Bletchley Park, the secret establishment tasked with breaking enemies’ codes. Like many, they didn’t talk about their time there and it’s only by chance I found out that that was where they had worked. When the war ended Cynthia and Peggy embarked on highly successful educational careers (see note below) and lived together in Clapham, London. These days one might wonder whether there was anything other than companionship to their relationship but back then it was not something one could’ve raised.

Peggy and Cynthia on one of their European travels

Peggy and Cynthia ensured that their nieces, nephews and God children were introduced to London when old enough, with visits to the major sights, historic buildings, museums and pageantry; the Thames, the theatre and the zoo, the Monument (up to the top of course), St Paul’s (and again up to the Whispering Gallery – with Cynthia leading the way), travelling by double decker, escalator and tube. Then it was back to their flat to meet whichever cat was in residence, for supper and to play cards, playing pelmanism, a quiet intellectual game or more interestingly frenetic Racing Demon, when the sight of ‘Aunt’ Cynthia’s knees on the floor was quite a revelation to a young boy used to seeing the bun and rather long skirt.

I imagine this box sitting on Peggy’s dressing table in her single-bedded room, surrounded by hundreds of postcards that reflected the active travels that she and Cynthia had embarked on during their retirement. I don’t ever recall her smoking so it was probably full of ticket stubs from plays witnessed, for rail journeys made together, the menu from a favourite restaurant, little nick-nacks that mean so much to the owner but virtually nothing to anyone else; simply the flotsam of their short time together. Indeed currently it normally sits on my desk, full of odd keys from long lost padlocks, flints for old cigarette lighters, an odd shoe lace, three rubber bands and a piece of sealing wax – my flotsam you might decide!

Lives come and go …… but the little box on my desk continues to jog the memory.

Richard 31^st December 2017

PS     Happy New Year. May it bring you all you need and some of what you want.

PPS   Peggy was the author of the definitive work ‘The London Experience of Secondary Education’ – Margaret Bryant 1979. Cynthia was Head of Modern Languages at James Allen’s Girls’ School in London.

PPPS   Peggy died on 5^th May 2006 aged 90 ….. and 4 days. Cynthia had died on 27^th December 2004 aged 89.

 

 

 

I once went off to southern Turkey and round the corner from Fethiye was the birthplace and possibly burial site of St Nicholas of Myra, who was known for his generosity, particularly towards children. He morphed into Santa Claus through Dutch migrants to the United States calling him Sinterklaas …… and so Santa Claus. It’s quite a stretch to today’s Santa Claus and his sleigh covered with presents for the world’s children. Forget the fact that you’ve already seen Santa in his grotto in the shopping centre, ignore the fact you could have seen him, at the same time, appearing by an outside stall selling stuff for the local charity and offering selfies for children (and adults of course!). And you know he’s popular because all over the world people have dressed up to look like him and gone running in some local 10k race. But in this time of imagination and magic ….. let the mind run …..

Our Apartment Front Door Bow

Mrs Santa hears a crash and looks out across the sleigh park. Rudolph, a retired reindeer with an alcoholic red nose and used only once, in 1939, because it was foggy, stirs in his adapted St Bernard’s dog bed. “Wattts ttthhh ffuni” – sort of Reindeer speak for ‘What the fuck?’ Sure enough Mrs Santa’s husband has returned, the reindeer hooves and sleigh’s skids screeching on the ice and eventually the empty sleigh has skidded to a stop. The reindeers’ flanks are steaming from the exertion of galloping across the world and both they and Santa seem somewhat worse for wear.

“Christ! What the hell’s happened?” she calls across the frozen ‘sleigh park in the sky’.

The lead reindeer Dancer’s stomach and bladder are very extended and swollen as are the other reindeers’. He belches loudly and then, unable to contain himself any longer, urinates over the ground. This gives the other reindeers freedom to empty their bladders too, as they had all helped Santa drink his way through a million gallons of sherry as they dashed from one house to another across Europe. As the sky lightens in the early dawn, the hot liquid splashes onto the frozen park and a toxic smelly mist develops, encasing Santa and his sleigh in an ethereal glow. Sadly this year is the reindeers’ last flight as a team, for next year the sleigh will be pulled/powered by a hybrid, part reindeer and part electric. They don’t know it yet, but they will be asked to apply for one of only four places.

“And what’s that smile on your face for, Santa?” Mrs Santa yells.

Sure enough Santa is sitting rather quietly on the back of the sleigh, smiling as he thinks about No 26 Acacia Avenue in Berkhampstead. Traditionally Santa has been expected to climb down a chimney, deliver presents as per the wish list written by John or Jill and sent to Santa in Lapland, eat a mince pie, drink a glass of sherry and grab a carrot or two for the reindeer stacking overhead like some commercial jet over an airport. On arriving at the bottom of this particular chimney he had indeed been confronted by a glass of sherry and a couple of mince pies …… but also Sheila, dressed in a very revealing negligee, asking whether he wanted some extra cream with the mince pie. Hopefully Mrs Santa wouldn’t guess or she’d rake her claws across his back.

Mind you her voice barely registers in his befuddled brain, as he feels completely pissed from so much Amontillado Cream. Then he thinks about the letter from Sam in Vienna, who hadn’t been sure whether to ask for a train set or My Little Pony ……. and how he reckons he’d got it right by giving them an ambidextrous superperson outfit.

He muses that he spends 364 days a year sitting on his bum, putting up with Mrs Santa’s nagging, then in one 24 hour period visits 1000 million homes, each visit taking one trillionth of a second, when he tries to eat a mince pie and drink a glass of sherry, before flying off to the next house. And why does he do it? Well! It’s to celebrate of the birth of a boy whose father was so disorganised he couldn’t even book a room in a hotel for his pregnant wife, on the busiest weekend of the year.

“Jesus!” Cries Mrs Santa.

Amber House Christmas Tree Thingy

Have a great Christmas if this is a festival for you.

Richard 24^th December 2017

 

PS The title of this PC comes from the cry of the traditional newspaper sellers on the street corner, when an extra edition of a paper had been produced to cover some momentous event that had just happened.

On a visit to Estoril last month there was a need to travel into Lisbon by car. It’s not far along the toll motorway; you just have to be careful to get off at the right exit. Our destination was a lawyers’ office in the Chiado district, which lies to the west of central Baixa, home to all the cafes, shops and restaurants along Rua Augusta that make the city a tourist hotspot all year around.

The streets are narrow and where traffic is permitted congested. Some, thankfully, have become pedestrianized, for you take your life into your hands when walking in areas where lorries, cars, taxis and people jostle for space. The Portuguese are not renown for their driving skills so you just need to think that every driver is a manic …… and then you might survive. On Madeira, the Portuguese Atlantic island 1000 kms to the south west of Lisbon, they think that the ‘pedestrian crossing’ was designed to focus the drivers on how many people they could maim! And if you have ever tried to cross on a Madeiran pedestrian crossing, you’ll know what I mean.

I wandered off with Maria, my sister-in-law’s temporary carer, for a coffee. Up on Rua Garrett is a locally famous café, A Brasileira do Chiado, a busy place mid-morning. Opened in 1905 it maintains its Art Deco interior with mirrors, paintings and wooden panels. All the outside tables were taken by the well-heeled tourists from Germany and Italy – you can tell by their chic dress sense with its abundant fur and leather – basking in the quite strong autumnal sun and by those Portuguese who want to smoke, for smoking here is quite normal and acceptable. To keep them company on a permanent basis is a bronze statue of Fernando Pessoa, a famous turn-of-the-century poet who for some reason wrote under four different names and in four distinct styles. Its shoulders gleam from the cleaning effect of thousands of brushing hands from passers-by, presumably believing that a simple touch will imbue them with some artistic ability! We all do it, don’t we? “The Conversation between Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill” piece on Bond Street London is another example. The space in the middle is a completely different colour, shined by thousands of people’s bodies sitting down …. to join in the conversation?”

Inside the cafe with its long bar, it’s dark and rather airless but the coffee, when it eventually arrives, is strong and the obligatory Pastel de Nata quite good, although they’re better if they are slightly warm. The sugar sachet has a quotation by Fernando Pessoa: “A renúncia é a libertação, não querer é poder.” My rough translation would be “The act of giving up one’s claim (to something) is liberating, not wanting (something) is powerful.” After our fix, we welcome the fresh air as we wander 50 metres west into the next square.

At the time, I didn’t have my guide book with me and was initially unable to identify the man whose bronze statue dominates the square. From its base I read it’s of the poet Luis de Camoes, erected in 1867 and surrounded by eight smaller statues of other personalities from Portuguese literature. Mermaids and ships have been recreated in the surrounding cobblestones, reflecting Camoes epic poem The Lusiads. Further research reveals that Camoes is considered by the Portuguese to be on a par with our very own William Shakespeare. The Lusiads charts the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India and subsequent events and legends in Portuguese history. His poem was published in 1572 but only later was recognised as the work of a master. Camoes died at 54 unnoticed and unloved.

You walk on the sunny side of the cobbled pavements at this time of year, grateful for the warmth on your back, just as in the summer you walk in the shade, grateful for some respite from the burning sun. Further up a side street was another square, another church, another statue, this one of Padre António Vieira – a ‘Jesuit, preacher, priest, politician and diplomat’. Apparently he clashed with those Catholic zealots pursuing the aims of the Inquisition ie burning heretics in Lisbon’s Terreiro do Paco to ensure religious conformity, over his support for Christianised Jews. He fled to Brazil and died in San Salvador da Bahia in 1697

On the way back to meet up for lunch we drift into A Vida Portuguesa, a chain of shops promoting the porcelain, tiles, fabrics for which the country is rightly famous. This one is in Rua Ivens. There is a particular yellow, a sort of light Dijon Mustard quite popular at the moment and I spy a whole stack of plates, mugs and dishes. Five minutes later, a salad bowl safely inside some bubble-wrap, we make our way back to join the others.

We have lunch in what might have been described as a pop-up restaurant, rather scruffy and ‘making do’, although with reasonable food. Actually I think this one popped up twenty years ago! We wander back to the car for our return journey but our way is blocked – down the street someone has parked ‘for a few moments’ convenient for them but no one else. A traffic policewoman is awaiting the driver’s return. So we reverse and try our luck down a narrow alley. Fortunately the SatNav is as confused as we are so we are spared the ‘recalculating’ comment in that saccharine tone that makes you want to scream! Gradually we find our way back to the motorway and to Estoril.

Just a nice few hours warranting a scribble.

Richard 17^th December 2017                                 richardyates24@gmail.com

The other evening I was driving back from a day with my daughter – actually a rather rare occurrence, not because I don’t love her to bits but because it’s over 70 miles away. The idea of dropping in for a cuppa isn’t a practical one – that’s not to say I don’t want to and wouldn’t if we lived closer just that we don’t! I have a choice of many different routes, as you would expect in a part of the country as crowded as the south east of England. The motorways M23/M25/A3 all have good dual (or more) carriageways and if the traffic flows it’s a doddle – if it doesn’t it’s just boring, and the M25 has a rather unfortunate reputation as the world’s largest car park!

Another option is going in a more direct way, along country roads. I used to drive on some of these roads when I was at university, as home was 18 miles north of here and university north of Swindon. In those days the traffic was lighter than today and being young and carefree I wanted to get from A to B as quickly as possible, wanting to be in ‘the right gear at the right time’, overtaking and sneaking into small spaces! But because I was a sort-of responsible adult, as responsible as I have ever been, it gradually became important to me that I drove well. I had passed the fairly rudimentary mandatory Driving Test in a Morris Minor 1000.

But that was 1964 and I wanted to check I could drive well!! So in 1970 I took the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) test in Swindon – a 90 minute exacting assessment of one’s driving – in my old Sunbeam Alpine; its registration number was SMO 420H if you are interested! Swindon, a Wiltshire city, had a mixture of residential streets, 1960’s brutal city centre architecture and the most roundabouts of any UK city at the time. At some point during the test, the assessor said: “Can you pull over here!” And when I had parked along the curb….” We have just past an alleyway. Would you reverse into it ….. centrally?” Well, the Sunbeam was 5 feet (1.52m) wide and the alleyway …… probably no more than 7ft (2.14m). Exacting huh!

I liked the freedom of owning a car, of being able to go somewhere whenever I wanted and still do. Driving was fun and exhilarating. Turn the clock forward to today and those same roads are more congested, and now there’s a local speed limit which varies between 40 and 50 miles per hour. Frankly, with the additional traffic it’s nay impossible to go faster than that and you can forget any idea of overtaking a slow moving car. If you actually succeed, all you do is end up behind the next slow moving car. Takes a great deal of will power to just relax and ‘go with the flow’.

In my Army days, I had always believed that I had to be able to do what I asked my soldiers to do. So in Germany I often jumped into the driving seat of the M109, a self-propelled medium artillery howitzer, at the end of some training and drove back to barracks.

A M109

My ability to drive a vehicle steered by its tracks is still recognised on my UK Driving Licence – Group H. And although I occasionally I drove a lorry for fun, I was lazy and didn’t get my HGV licence, otherwise you might have seen me at the wheel of an articulated lorry on the M25!!

After university I was posted back to my regiment in Germany and was able to take advantage of the tax free allowances. I ordered a new MGB GT through the local garage that serviced my car. They were agents for Mercedes and Lancia …..  and I fell in love with a little red Lancia Fulvia with cream upholstery which was displayed in their showroom!! So I cancelled the MGB GT, which was going to cost £1258 and ordered a red Lancia for an extra £53. Months later I took the train from Paderborn in Germany to Turin in Italy to collect it from the factory.

This was my second Lancia, in blue. Note the Institute of Advanced Motorist badge!

You will know I love coincidences! Well, in 1982 I took over command of an air defence battery just north of Salisbury in Wiltshire. The Royal Artillery history is preserved by the ‘battle honours’ of its batteries – a Battery being a sub-unit of some 120 soldiers. For instance I had served in 132 Medium Battery (The Bengal Rocket Troop) the latter reflecting the development of rudimentary rockets in India in the C19th. My Air Defence battery was known as Lloyd’s Company – after William Lloyd who had put together some guns to support Wellington in the Battle of Waterloo (1815). Its number, an arcane designation no one really understood as they were not sequential in terms of seniority, was 43. So its title was 43 Air Defence Battery (Lloyd’s Company) Royal Artillery and it was equipped with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). My Honda Accord was bought in Swindon and its number plate, completely coincidentally, was SAM43S!

 

And come to think of it, I still smile when I remember Sergeant Cooke, my MT (Motor Transport) Sergeant and his driving test. The battery was down on Dartmoor for a fortnight’s training. Part of the training was all about driving, for instance testing the soldier’s ability to reverse a Landrover and trailer. He also wanted them to line up 50m away and drive the nearside wheels between two 4m long parallel planks, which he placed about 5cms more than a tyre width apart; a little light amusement! “Come on Sir! Have a go!” Well, never one to resist a challenge …… the result took the smile off his face!!

Coincidentally a neighbour five houses down here in Albany Villas Hove owns a Sunbeam Alpine (Tiger variant) and a Lancia Fulvia (Integrale) – now that’s weird.

A little nostalgia never hurt anyone and I hope you may reminisce on cars you’ve owned as a result of this PC.

Richard 3^rd December 2017

PS Cars I have owned:

Volkswagen Variant (Left hand drive)

Sunbeam Alpine Convertible (SMO 420H)

Lancia Fulvia (Red)

Lancia Fulvia (Blue)

Honda Accord (SAM 43S)

Volkswagen Beetle (KBA 51K)

Vauxhall Astra

Volkswagen Golf GTI

Volkswagen Golf Cabriolet

Saab Vecta 93 Convertible

My introduction to classical music was gradual and subtle – staying with my grandmother in Bath and having to listen as she practised that ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ over and over again for instance! You might have thought I would have developed an aversion to it, such is the repetitive nature of someone practising, but I didn’t and came to love the sound. And it’s the sound I love; I read erudite critiques of pieces of music and wonder where the writer’s imagination has been. Not where mine has been.

And then along came Cliff Richard.

The first record I bought was his single called ‘Living Doll’ in 1959 and that was closely followed by Adam Faith’s ‘What do you want?’ I didn’t have a record player so had to borrow a school chum’s; and that wasn’t big enough to play a 12 inch ‘long playing’ record – ah! The impecunity of youth!

And then along came Elvis (Do I need to write ‘Presley’?).

My grandmother didn’t like this ‘crooner’ but boy did we. He shook the teenage world with his songs and brash antics and our memories are unsullied by subsequent binges ……. and drug abuse ……. and an early death. At boarding school we opened the windows in the winter months after evening ‘prep’ and played ‘O So Mio’ or ‘Love me tender’ at full volume ……. and wondered about life and love.

And then along came The Beatles ….. and the Rolling Stones.

In the holidays I went home, went to the odd party and heard The Beatles for the first time. I can still picture the cover of one of their first LPs ‘With The Beatles’.

In 1968 my UK-based regiment went to Cyprus for a month of ‘adventurous training’, a mixture of training in the mountains of this Mediterranean island and canoeing, hiking, sailing, shooting and rock climbing. Towards the end of our time, the Commanding Officer asked me, the most junior officer, to be in charge of the Rear Party. My only task, hardly onerous, was to manage the ‘Rear Party’ consisting of four soldiers and ensure the Regimental freight was dispatched by the RAF on time. Sadly it meant I had to spend an extra 14 days waiting for that flight; ‘ah!’ I hear you sigh. Why am I telling you this? Because ‘Hey Jude’ by The Beatles will be forever associated with Gail, the daughter of an officer permanently based in Dhekelia, the Sovereign Base Area on the island, whom I met at the Officers’ Club.  (Tea & toast?)

Then there was an American duo that created some lovely ballads – Don & Phil Everly. One of their famous hits was ‘Ebony Eyes’. Today I went on to YouTube ……. and there it was ……. and I put the cursor over ‘play’ ……. and I found myself singing along …… about Flight 1203 ……. my Ebony Eyes ……the words just came tumbling out of me as if it was yesterday. Ingrained somehow!

Another influence of my generation was another American called Buddy Holly – all clean cut and glasses. He sang about Peggy Sue, True Love Ways, Everyday and Crying, Waiting, Hoping …… and then he was killed in an aeroplane crash in 1959 at the age of 22 …… and became a legend in the process! Ritchie Valens was another rising music star on that plane, causing Don McLean to refer to it as ‘The Day the Music Died’ (American Pie).

Here in Britain black & white television was becoming more common and a ‘Top of the Pops’ programme, with live acts performing their songs on television, established itself in the rhythm of our lives – it was mandatory viewing at The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In our Company ante-room we all crowded around a small TV, waiting with baited breath for Pans’ People, a dance group of 6 lithe women whose costumes were obviously deliberately designed to set our imaginations running.

The first musical I really loved was Evita, the story of Eva Peron and that song ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina’ still  runs around my head on occasions. As does ‘The Music of the Night’ from Phantom of the Opera, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Michael Crawford, its first leading actor, recalled how some months before he was taking singing lessons on a Saturday morning when the tutor’s front doorbell rang. Telling Michael to practise his scales, he left him upstairs and went down to open the front door. It was Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who was working on bringing ‘Phantom of the Opera’ to the stage. He immediately asked whose voice he was hearing. On being told it was Michael Crawford he exclaimed ‘I think I have found my leading man for ‘Phantom’!

In Germany in the mid ‘70s I went to my first Rock concerto in Dortmund, in Germany, a group called Santana. I was just ‘going with the flow’ with chums and don’t remember finding the ground moved, but I did get completely hung up on the slow guitar introduction of Samba Pa Ti. Years later on my way to see my soon-to-be in-laws, driving down a laurel-banked road, the radio played it, taking my mentally back to Dortmund.

I developed no real passion for one particular type of singing or music over another, just loved some, and conversely didn’t get on with others. Singers whose voices and the songs they have sung I have loved, in no particular order, range from Francoise Hardy and her glorious “Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge”, Carly Simon’s ‘I’m So Vane’, Jennifer Rush’s version of ‘The Power of Love’ and anything by Neil Diamond. I had all of his LPs up until the demise of my record player (!) and loved his ‘Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’ and ‘Stones’ LPs. I even saw him at the Wembley Arena one evening. And then, sadly, his voice was past its best and no one told him. I bought a recent CD and played it once; enough!

Sometimes you need a good belter to lift your mood. In the immediate aftermath of my first divorce, in my lower ground flat on Cavendish Road in Clapham, London, nothing better to lift your spirits than ‘You’re the Best’ by Tina Turner.

All the LPs eventually went – cassettes didn’t really do it apart from in a cassette player travelling on business. Gradually my taste has evolved and the music of Ottmar Liebert (Thank you Jonathan H for the introduction!) and voices of individuals like Enya, Celine Dion, Adele and Enigma fill my rooms. Even more recently Angus & Julia Stone’s songs have tugged at the heart strings.

Occasionally I think “Why don’t I have any recordings of ……?” (Barry White and Demis Roussos for example) and it’s soon rectified by a cheap purchase through Amazon. Or you watch a drama on television and love the accompanying music and wait until the end of the credits to catch the artist …… and go on to Amazon …… for instance the Israeli singer Asad Avidan ….. but don’t ask me what the drama was!!

Mere scribbles, mere memories

Richard 18^th November 2017

 

 

I hear the notes of the start of some music or song and almost immediately seem to be able to recall what it is called or remember when it meant something to me, such is the power of association. I doubt whether you are different and between us there will be hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music that we hold dear to our hearts, tunes that stir our soul. What follows are some of mine. Naturally some of you will identify with them and others will ask: “Really?”; such is life!

In my early teenage years I thought that the only ‘opera’ I liked was the accompanying overtures and none of the singing. This dislike was probably initiated at school as the teacher responsible for putting on the classical concerts and operas, Mr Oboussier, always seemed to choose Mozart. One year ‘Don Giovanni’ and the next ‘The Marriage of Figaro’; “One foot …. two feet ….. and that makes three….” sang Figaro and the squeaky strings of the school orchestra violins started these painful memories. However the school Tuck Shop was run by Mr Pickford, a delightful man with a clipped white moustache, short of stature but big in generosity; for some reason he always wore a white coat rather like a laboratory assistant. It was here we played cribbage, bought snacks and had our daily ⅓ pint of milk, invariably to the strains of Wager’s Tannhäuser Overture, obviously Mr Pickford’s favourite. I got to love it too and I get goose pimples whenever I hear those first stirring notes.

Years later my brother and I were making an infrequent visit to our father in Newcastle, driving north up the M1 in his Morris 1000 Traveller. At one point north of the Watford Gap Service Station the car radio played Rossini’s ‘Thieving Magpie’ overture …… and the link between this and travelling together on that wet grey day was cemented. I would search for record collections of ‘Overtures from the Operas’ whenever I could.

Then it all changed. You may recall my parents lived in the little village of Balcombe here in Sussex, and during my time at university (1969-1972) I would often drive down from north of Swindon for a weekend. On the Sunday evening, on the way back to a week of studying ‘Materials of Construction’ (good!) or ‘Mechanics of Fluids’ (not so good!), I would be passing through Camberley around 2100. At that time Alan Keith presented a BBC Radio 2 programme called ‘Your Hundred Best Tunes’; astonishingly he did so for 44 years – yes forty four years!! Quite often he would play the famous duet from Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers “Au fond du temple saint” (In The depths of the temple) – and in his wonderfully warm and cultured voice announce it would be the 1950 recording by Robert Merrill and Jussi Björling. I knew nothing about the opera but boy oh boy did this duet fill the car with a cacophony of passion, love and sheer magic. I was hooked. No more only orchestral pieces; duets and grand choruses became my love although I still dislike men or women ‘warbling’.

That dislike probably started in my teenage years if I think about it. My grandmother, a very accomplished pianist, would organise concerts to raise money for Bath charities. Occasionally some man or woman would get up and ‘warble’……. .not for me. But Granny practised …… and practised …… and practised Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, and then played it as a duet with a Rose Tobin in the concert. Hear this piece today and I am instantly transported back to the 1960s and Bath! Lovely huh!

On my journey of discovery of classical music I stopped learning the piano and took up the trumpet. The former had been taught at school in a small room by a teacher who, unbelievably, chain smoked! Clearly my strenuous but largely unsuccessful attempts to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps irritated him a great deal. I remember him trying to position my hands over the appropriate keys, leaning over me, all the time puffing on a cigarette that dangled precariously from the corner of his mouth. He gave up on me; it was mutual and everyone was happy.

A Mr Weeks taught brass instruments so I asked him to teach me how to play the trumpet. Being virtually tone deaf this presented a problem for me, well for him too I guess, but if I heard the music first, I sort of was OK. Mr Philip Oboussier decided one year that the school orchestra should perform Sibelius’s Symphony Number 2. Initially I didn’t like what I heard, as we all sat around his Grundig Gramophone and listened to a recording. Then we dissected the piece and rehearsed each bit. We brought it all together, performed in in the School concert and now it’s possibly my favourite orchestral piece. Sibelius scored his compositions with a heavy accent on the brass section, so maybe I was slightly biased!

Music can often be associated with the untimely departure of a friend or loved one. During our unforgettable first term at The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, one of our fellow Officer Cadets developed a particularly vicious form of Leukaemia. He went from being an energetic, charming chap to his death bed in about four weeks, or so my memory informs me. The Company Sergeant Major, a mature figure to us 18 year olds, loved Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto. Up until that point squeaky violins didn’t do it for me; maybe this was the right time to be educated. We cried our way together through this emotional music, laying the basis for a love of weeping violin and viola concertos that continues to this day.

In my second term at Sandhurst our intake were accommodated in some Nissen huts (see note) some distance from the main buildings. They were rudimentary, poorly insulated at best. I had been given an old record player, for which I was grateful, but there was something wrong with its ability to rotate the turntable at a constant speed – a fairly basic requirement you might think. Further investigation revealed that the drive was transferred from the central spindle to the turntable by a rubber belt attached to a plastic disc. This disc was not a true circle and despite endless attempts to shave it ‘round’ eventually I gave up ……. and put up with its idiosyncratic variable speeds! So why am I thinking of this now? Well, one of the records I had was a recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 – The Emperor ……. and I have always thought that the opening of the slow movement, the Adagio ‘un posso mosso’ was a dead ringer for the beginning of the song from West Side Story ‘There’s a Place.’ (aka Somewhere) written by Leonard Bernstein. Maybe he was a Beethoven fan? Let me know if you agree.

You might think that I only love classical music but that’s not true. As someone who spent some formative years during the Summers of Love in the 1960s, how could I have not been influenced by ‘pop’? More anon …….

 

Richard 4^th November 2017

Note: Designed as cheap accommodation in the First World War by Major Peter Nissen, these prefabricated structures had a half cylindrical corrugated steel skin, with brick ends.

 

 

Oh! If I could only talk I could tell you a thing or two …….  but if it helps I’m almost 50 years old; not that it matters as I don’t measure my existence by years but by my capacity to deliver what I was made to do. OK So I’ve got your attention, that’s good as normally I am just left in a cupboard hung up, feeling abandoned ……. until the next time. Currently I’m in the cupboard with the hot water tank, a lazy maid and some Samsonite luggage as there’s no garage or attic where we live. It’s warm when the water’s hot and quite dry, so I can’t complain.

My first memory I think comes from 1969, when my owner needed something like me; it’s a good feeling to be wanted. He had a large room in the Officers’ Mess Annexe of the Artillery Barracks in the German town of Lippstadt, on the edge of the Paderborner Plain.

You can see the building that was the Officers’ Mess in the top of this satellite photo; looks like a hotel now with sun umbrellas in the garden. The block on the right now labelled Radio Lippe Land e.V was our officers’ accommodation. At the bottom was Regimental Headquarters, now the Conrad Hansen Musikschule der stadt Lippstadt. But I digress!!

The barracks had housed a Luftwaffe battalion and the Mess itself was beautiful, but single officers’ accommodation was limited, hence the annexe within the main barracks. Sadly there were few electrical sockets and he saw a need for an extension cable of some sort. Ah! You’ve guessed it, I’m an electrical cable; three wires, green, red and blue (See Note) sheathed in a black outer casing. I used to be part of an enormous reel of cable that the army used for all sorts of things. Then one Saturday my owner soft-soaped the soldier in charge of the stores to cut some off; it was about 15 yards long (we didn’t ‘do’ metres in those days.) At one end he fitted a square pin extension block and at the other a German two pin plug. The smart record player, the radio and a couple of lights were all plugged in. Oh! And I am ¼ inch in diameter.

You might be surprised to read that I gave birth once! My owner needed about six feet of flex. He never told me why, just got a pair of pliers and cut it off! Didn’t hurt as I am inanimate but I healed up quite well, particular when the plug was refitted. By then we were back in England so my two end connections didn’t change. At one end I have a rubber coated square three pin plug, at the other a rubber coated socket. Both have become pretty grubby over the years but it’s been a long haul!

It’s hard to imagine today but outside lights at Christmas were a real novelty back in the 1980s …… and the best ones came from Germany ….. so a visit to a Christmas market in Hanover secured a large string that was rewired with a UK square plug  and that was plugged into me. In those days he didn’t have an outside socket and he relied on me, you see. But it was suffocating, being wrapped up in lots of plastic bags and duct tape to keep any rain out. Oh! The ignominy of it!

Wanda the bronze angel fish doing her thing, provided with power by me! (circa 2001)

I was also used to provide power to the pump that fed water up into Wanda; it came out of her mouth!! But when the outside socket was fitted, my job was done, and I went back to hanging around, for some time at the top of some cellar steps.

Occasionally I would have a car vacuum cleaner plugged in but the suction was never strong enough and invariably the domestic vacuum cleaner was used. Don’t ever do this on a driveway which has been surfaced with gravel. I have always thought of myself as a sort of DIY (Do It Yourself) extension cable; no pretences, me. But I remember he once was in B&Q (a DIY Store) and saw an extension cable in a proper reel, red I think it was. I could sense he coveted it, looking all neat and new, but he is loyal to me and walked away, shaking his head and muttering.

I am grateful for his love of sailing, you know. If he hadn’t learned about how to handle ropes (on board a yacht a rope is actually called anything but a rope – for example warps, sheets, halyards, guys etc,) I would not be in as good a shape as I am now. On board a sailing yacht a tangled rope is a disaster waiting to happen, so there was constant vigilance to ensure all ropes were tidy and coiled It’s best to coil the rope/cable into the left hand, as that movement of the wrist takes out any twists in the rope. Wire cables such as me are no different.

In my twilight years I am generally used to connect to a jig saw, a sander or a garden strimmer, as his drill is now a Dewalt cordless one. You might think this is progress but he uses it so little the battery is invariably dead and needs a charge!! Maybe he rues the day he got rid of the one that needed me; who knows?  I won’t mention the fact that he uses the garden table as his workbench and that it occasionally gets nicked, sawn and drilled into (so don’t tell anyone). I cringe when it happens but what can I do?

And my friend Wanda? Well, she’s come inside …… and seems content to look wistfully down the road to the sea …… some 150m away.

Sometimes one gets an idea and just needs to scribble …… inane really

Richard 21^st October 2017

 

Note: these days it would be yellow/green, brown and blue

Old (ie me!) on the left, new on the right

We had a drink in the Hotel Palacio in Estoril, Portugal, to celebrate an anniversary and learned that the bar had been a meeting place for British and German spies during the Second World War. Portugal had of course been neutral, as had neighbouring Spain, but that didn’t stop both Allies and Axis powers using these two countries for nefarious purposes!! The following day we caught the 30 minute train into Lisbon, and slowly climbed through the Alfama quarter to the site of Lisbon’s founding settlement, the Castel de São Jorge.

Castel de São Jorge

The placing of this Moorish castle was perfect and over a thousand years later you can look out over modern Lisbon. The Moors were ousted from Portugal in 1147 (compare with the last Muslim ruler sent into exile from Granada by the Spanish King Ferdinand in 1492). Down on the waterfront you can make out the Praça do Comérco and the statue of King Dom José on his horse. It was during his reign that Lisbon suffered its 1755 devastating earthquake which destroyed much of the city. What you see today is the result of 100 years of rebuilding.

Praça do Comérco

And it was during this lengthy rebuild that Napoleon’s troops rampaged through Spain and threatened Lisbon. The royal family, escorted by the English Royal Navy, fled to Brazil, leaving the British under the Duke of Wellington to resist the French invasion. History huh!! The monarch didn’t return for some 7 years, preferring to rule his empire (Angola, Mozambique, Goa and Brazil) from Rio de Janeiro. Modern Lisbon is littered with statues of kings and explorers – the most dramatic of which is the Monument to the Discoveries (1415 – 1543) overlooking the Tagus River.

Gradual exploration from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, firstly by Diago Cao in 1483 and then by Bartolomeu Dias, paved the way for Vasco da Gama to cross the Indian Ocean in 1498 and land in India. The Portuguese had a monopoly of what became known as the Spice Trade, ensuring great riches for Lisbon. Ten years later they captured Goa and established a colony. Two years after that Pedro Alvares Cabral reached Brazil and established a Portuguese presence at Recife. (See PC 34).

I saw a review of the book ‘Night Train to Lisbon’ by Pascal Mercier many years ago, liked what I read and bought a Kindle version. It’s the story of a Swiss Classics teacher, Raimund Gregorious, who, on his way to his stale academic job in Bern, prevents a Portuguese woman jumping to her death from a bridge. Nosing around in his favourite bookshop after work, he is drawn to a book by Amadeu de Prada, a Portuguese doctor who explores the philosophical issue of going back over one’s life and asking the ‘What If I had made a different choice?’ sort of question. (Compare with the film ‘Sliding Doors’ with Gwyneth Paltrow). The fact that Gregorious can’t read Portuguese doesn’t seem to put him off!!

Very quickly Gregorious senses he may not be living his own life to the full and determines on a whim, or maybe with the image of the mysterious Portuguese woman in his mind (!), to go to Portugal to investigate the life of Amadeu de Prada, who had lived through the right-wing dictatorship of Salazar (1926 – 1968). He catches the overnight train to Lisbon that very evening. I got stuck with this book, restarted it several times, and eventually gave up. But then the story was made into a film in 2013, staring Jeremy Irons as Gregorious, and I loved it!!

Today you can take the night train from Bern but it’s more a ‘day & night’ train and takes 27 hours; it’s over 1600 kms! To get to Lisbon I flew TAP Portugal from Gatwick. I’d been to the city back in 1987 on business and to southern Portugal on a yoga retreat in 2016. My parents had enjoyed holidaying in the Algarve and on Madeira and my maternal grand-father not only loved Portugal but also loved imbibing the famous Mateus Rose, the height of sophistication in the 1960s!!

So the tale plays out in this city, going backwards and forwards from the modern day to those of the dictatorship. If one hasn’t lived under a totalitarian dictatorship as Salazar’s was, it’s hard to really understand what life was like. In the story, Gregorious looks at the difficulties faced by Prada, exploring themes such as loneliness, love, loyalty, friendship and mortality. I’m not quite sure if the classic’s teacher from Bern found what he was looking for, identifying what could have been alternative paths in his own life, but I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood …….. And, sorry, I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long stood …….. And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

……. and I  …….

I took the one less travelled by ……and that has made all the difference.

We all have choices in life, to take this path or that direction, but whatever choice you make …… that is in my view the right one.

Maybe in time we’ll wander around the back streets of Lisbon at our leisure, trying to understand its unspoken history simmering beneath the surface. And of course get to know some of the places from the story, like Rua Augusta that runs north from Praça do Comérco and is often called ‘the most beautiful street in the world’.

The Portuguese monarchy ended in 1908 with the assassination of the king and, after a serious of weak governments covering almost twenty years, Antonio Salazar created a dictatorship which ran from 1926-1968. During this period the country was virtually a recluse in the world community, industry and commerce dominated by a few very wealthy families. His successor carried on for another six years, but the political mood had changed and the Carnation revolution of 1974 ushered in modern democracy.

More scribbles from Lisbon in the future, no doubt.

Richard 8^th October 2017

PS You can’t go to Portugal and not eat Pastel de Nata.

These sweet custard tarts were originally created by the Catholic monks at the Jerónimos Monastery in Santa Maria de Belém, a western suburb of Lisbon, in the C18th. Starching the nuns’ habits required numerous egg whites and making custard tarts was a good way of using the surplus egg yolks. Boy – are they yummy!

 

 

In the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 the spoils of war were, no doubt, extraordinary and various. One of them was a collection of yachts based in the Baltic city of Kiel, the centre for Hitler’s enormous U Boat fleet. The base itself had suffered extensive bombing and its huge concrete submarine pens lay crumpled and blasted, but the British Army established a sailing club on the western side of Kieler fjord, where these windfall yachts were moored.

The British Kiel Yacht Club (BKYC) 1969

Wind the clock forward to 1969 and the British Kiel Yacht Club still had a small number of these ‘windfall yachts’ as they were known; some 30 sq ms, a couple of 50 sq ms and one 100 sq m classic wooden yacht called Kranich, built in 1936. (For explanation of sq m ‘square metre’ see note). In addition they had a fleet of modern GRP ones that were used to teach the rudiments of sailing to British Army personnel; these were without engines!

Some ex-German ‘windfall’ yachts

I hadn’t sailed much as a child, one simple sailing holiday with my father when I was 10, but in 1968 sailed around The Solent a bit in a little 19ft yacht called Barbican …… and on a very wet yacht in Cyprus …..  and rather liked it. You might say I took to sailing like a, er, duck to water? So when my Regiment was posted to northern Germany, the obvious place to indulge the interest was in The Baltic. To refresh your knowledge of geography, The Baltic is the name of the shallow sea that is almost enclosed by European countries – Sweden, Finland, The Baltic States, Poland and Germany, and flows out through the low lying islands of Denmark, through the Kattegat and into the North Sea. It’s got a low saline content due to its mix of salt water inflowing from the North Sea and outflowing fresh water draining from a land mass four times larger than the sea itself.

Two shipping channels run between the large islands of Funen and Zealand and between Zealand and the western coast of Sweden. Otherwise the Danish waters are quite shallow, making for short sharp seas when it’s windy and always interesting navigation. Channels are marked by upturned broom sticks; some had one bundle of sticks lashed to the pole, others two and sometimes three. So typically Danish!!

Before going off to university, I was in Germany for 9 months in 1969, and took part in Kieler Woche, the country’s equivalent of Cowes Week, the sailing festival on the Isle of Wight in UK. I sailed on a long keeled yacht called Uomie, named as it was taken in payment of a debt!! We did well during the week and particularly coming first in our class in the Fehmarn Light Race. The skipper gave each of the five crew members a little silver schnapps cup.

After university I rejoined my Germany-based regiment ….. and naturally went back to sailing in the Baltic. The first time was actually racing from Cowes on the Isle of Wight to Skagen, right on the tip of Denmark. (See note) We then passaged south to Malmö in Sweden for a regatta. Teaching soldiers the benefits of teamwork through using the forces of nature, ‘adventurous training’ as it was euphemistically called, was considered a good thing!! The attraction was obvious; hundreds of little islands, narrow channels threading their way between them, charming villages and towns with enchanting names like Aerøskøbing, Middlefart, Juelsminde, Kerteminde, Lohals and Faaborg.

The Lohals marina was not there in 1973!

In my 5 years in Germany I must have developed a reputation for often being away from barracks sailing. Once, during a leadership course for junior NCOs, the Regimental second-in-command, Major John Harman, was explaining some aspects of the vital cooperation needed between the artillery and infantry. I won’t bore you with the details but at some point he asked, by way of confirmation that they had understood: “And where would you expect to find Golf 31 (my radio call sign) Captain Yates during this particular phase of the battle?” A wag at the back of the classroom shouted: ‘Sailing in the Baltic sir!’

In my room in the Officers’ Mess, I hung up on a wall four Danish maps sellotaped together so I could plot the course of each trip; after a couple of years it looked as though a drunken spider had walked into some red paint and then all over the map! Apart from trips up the Als Sund north from Sønderberg, drifting in and out of islands around Lohals on Langeland, and finding enough crabs for supper in a rotten rowing boat just alongside where we had tied up in Aerøskøbing, one major trip involved sailing St Barbara II, a 42ft Rebel, up to the Norwegian capital Oslo, when the engine had been taken out for its annual overhaul. This meant that we had to charge the battery, needed for navigational lights if nothing else, every time we went into a harbour. Going into a crowded marina without an engine was a tricky and anxious time and occasionally we gratefully took a proffered tow.

The Oslo crew on St Barbara II

On one trip sailing a ‘windfall’ yacht, we had just tied up alongside the village quay in Juelsminde and were getting down to the serious business of having a drink. People get attracted to yachts and boats in harbours as the poles of magnets to each other and we often had rubberneckers peering down on us. One particular old chap came wandering down the harbour wall and stopped; “Guten abend. Wie Gehts?” he greeted us. Then he proceeded to switch to Pidgin English. “Zis iz a lovely yacht, ja! Sehr schön. You took zem from us after ze war ja?” and with that, shaking his head as to what might have been, he shuffled off back into the village.

Generally the islands between the mainland of Denmark, Jutland, and the island of Zealand, on which Copenhagen is situated, provided ample enough cruising grounds, but one year I actually sailed into Langeline Harbour in Copenhagen, before continuing south through the Stege Bugt to Stubbekøbing. In Denmark’s capital city, down in the harbour, lies the delightful statue of ‘The Little Mermaid’, sitting on her rock since 1913. Her head is of the ballerina Ellen Price, but as she didn’t want to pose naked the sculptor persuaded his wife Eline Eriksen to pose for him.

The memories of sailing in these delightful waters will stay with me forever; although I have few still photographs, I have many hours of Super 8 Cinefilm, transposed to VHS Video and then to CDs as technology made one means obsolete! And so will the Danish sense of humour. Did you know that a ferry service runs between the Swedish city of Gothenburg and the Danish town of Frederikshavn on Jutland? Well, there is one and it’s rumoured that the skipper doesn’t need a chart, he simply follows the line of empty green Carlsberg bottles thrown over the side by Swedish passengers pleased to get away from the ruinously expensive alcohol of their home country!

 

Richard 24th September 2017

Note: The Skagen School of artists exists because the daylight at this particular place on Denmark is very special.

Note: For those technically minded, these ‘square metre’ yachts are measured by a difficult formula. R Metres = (L + 2d + √s – F) ÷ 2.37 where L is the waterline length, d the difference between skin and chain girth (?), s the sail area and F the freeboard