Lucky me

Times like this, I realise how lucky I am. An hour ago we crossed in a gale, gusting to 60mph. The boat took a good hammering and so did we, and if I was more than a little apprehensive, Lynn was downright frightened, and I don't blame her. In fact, I don't know how she puts up with it sometimes.

On eBooks

Responding to Friday's post about The Blue Cabin going digital, our friend Laura, a lover of books – by which I mean books – had this to say (with a smiley face of course):

"Don't go digital, books are supposed to have pages & not batteries & they are supposed to dry out after you've dropped them in the bath, not implode, and they are supposed to gather dust until you rediscover them 10 years later and you're supposed to be able to leave them on park benches and wonder about who will pick them up. They are also meant to keep you healthy, lugging large weights around is a great aerobic workout. Do you want to play a part in the death of libraries? Where's your sense of social responsibility!!"

I pointed out that the jury was still out for me but that Lynn was in the market for an eBook device because she is a voracious reader and, being island-bound much of the time, doesn't get to the bookshops often enough to feed her habit. To this, Laura offered Amazon:

"It does great reviews & after a few purchases suggests BOOKS (with real pages) that you may enjoy.  It has, however, to my great disappointment, strayed into Kindle territory (I wonder if it is so named cos it's subliminally encouraging everyone to burn their real books; maybe they could have been less subtle and called it Bonfire or Conflagration or something more obvious)."

I responded that our internet connection on the island is so patchy, searching sites like Amazon is an exercise in frustration – to post to this blog, for example, I do the writing and prepare the image off-line, then access my Blogger account and hope for the best (many a time the laptop has almost ended up, to borrow a phrase from our Sicilian friends, 'feeding the fishes') – and so far I haven't heard back from Laura. She'll have an answer though – she usually does.

One thing's for sure: she's not alone!

One after the other in succession..

When I correspond, as earlier today, with someone to whom words are important, I subconsciously self-edit as I go – perhaps we all do. It doesn't mean foregoing a conversational tone, or inserting every pronoun: 'Heard it was meant for Lynn and me' would be fine, but 'Heard it was meant for Lynn and I' would be run through the mental grammar checker and auto-corrected. So, when I said this:

'You know that feeling when you're digging a hole for yourself and you start trying to dig yourself out. . .'

there must have been a systems failure, because I was talking to someone who could spot a tautological construction at a hundred pages – not that they would dream of mentioning it. I might have got away with, 'You know that feeling when you're digging a hole for yourself and you start digging all the harder. . .' but hindsight is a fine thing.

In a 1988 campaign speech in Ohio, George H W Bush said, 'It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another', and Barack Obama once campaigned under the slogan, 'Beliefs we can believe in'. The first is a howler; the second, you could make a case for in the name of rhetoric. Many more have become acceptable through usage: 'free gift', 'unsolved mystery', 'short summary', 'new innovation' and the more contemporary 'digital download' to name a few. But my favourite tautology is by someone who is famous for its cousin, the paradoxical contradiction – Peter 'Yogi' Berra, the baseball legend. Berra once said:

'It's like deja vu, all over again.'

Which gives me an excuse for another Yogi Berra quote. When giving directions to his house, he used to say, 'When you get to a fork in the road, take it.' It was meant humorously, but the directions were good: whichever road you chose, you got to the house.

Tyrella beach

This rather 'could be anything' picture, taken on my mobile, is actually of plover rising from Tyrella beach, where I was walking mum's dog Sammy this afternoon. Time was, I always had a camera to hand – I must get back into the habit.

The virtual Blue Cabin

How surreal is island life sometimes.

Yesterday I was at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast with a glass of sauvignon blanc in one hand a nibble in the other, celebrating the launch of Blackstaff Press's eBook list and watching myself and five other Blackstaff authors give our impressions and expectations of this brave new virtual world in a promotional video; at this moment, I am sitting in semi-darkness in my office at the cabin, a pair of ridiculous-looking fleece trousers pulled over my jeans, two extra layers on my top half (one cashmere, one fleece) and a wooley hat, hoping that the dongle in my laptop will hold an internet connection long enough to upload this post and looking forward to migrating north, to the living room, where a blazing woodburner awaits.

The Blue Cabin, I'm honoured to say, is in the first wave of Blackstaff's books to be published in digital format, and as of yesterday is available for Kindle, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Sony Reader, PC, Mac and Android.

The link to the Kindle Edition of The Blue Cabin on amazon.co.uk is here, and on amazon.com here.

Otter on the jetty

We hadn't seen an otter for months, then this morning I was gazing out the window when I should have been working, and a young otter (pesumably this year's cub) climbed up onto the jetty, stared at me for a moment and plopped back into the water. Fortunately, Lynn came to the window quick enough to corroborate my story..

Masterchef: The Professionals

I caught the tail end of Masterchef: The Professionals on BBC2 last night, and I was so nonplussed by what presenters Monica Galetti and Gregg Wallace said to this guy that I watched some of it again on i-player a moment ago, just in case either I had misunderstood/misheard – or alternatively they weren't being serious. Amazingly, they were being serious. It would appear that Harley, a professional chef from Hull, is a seriously good cook, because both judges were impressed by his efforts; but Monica told him to 'get a shave and a haircut' before coming back and Gregg prefaced his remarks by saying, 'well, you hippie..' (granted, in the nicest possible way).

Neither Galetti nor Gregg meant any offence of course, and none was taken – Harley seems to be laid-back and decent enough to take it in his stride – but I just thought: is this not a tiny bit judgemental? Shouldn't the judges be concentrating on the dishes rather than the grooming? Was the length of the contestant's hair (not even particularly long by the way) not, well... irrelevant, and indeed none of their business? I couldn't help thinking that had this been a female contestant, she would hardly have been sent to the hairdressers.

I'll bet the guy comes back all clean-shaven and crew-cut, which is fine I suppose, but the only credit will go to him and his easy-going nature.

Maybe it's just me.

Great minds

Alistair Cooke reads 'Letter From America'

During her years as a BBC Governor, my mother fought the good fight on a number of issues which came up again and again in the boardroom. One was docu-dramas (she doesn't much like them); another was the commercialization of the Olympics (she doesn't care for that either); but the one issue which put her at odds with more producers than any other, was her cast iron conviction that extreme violence on television, fictionalized or real, is taken so far, so often that most of us accept it, and some of us copy it.

This is a passage from Alistair Cooke's Letter From America No.1816, from December 1983, entitled 'Hype':-

'Somebody – it may have been me – once said that a fire is easier to film than an idea. And this truth is, unfortunately, the first article of faith in the credo of all television news cameramen who are not afraid to move in for the first spurt of blood from a dying man, to remind us old film buffs of that ghastly shot of a body slumping out of a car in Bonnie and Clyde, which alas set the mode for a thousand subsequent blood baths.'

Great minds. 'Cookie' (not my nickname – I got that from John Cole) was born on this day in 1908.

Now showing

Rock Layers
Lynn McGregor RSW
Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire

I've just spent a happy hour updating Lynn's website with current and forthcoming exhibitions. She is showing in Christmas exhibitions at Fisher Gallery, Pittenweem; Aberfeldy Gallery; Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire (above); Strathearn Gallery, Crieff; and McAuley Fine Art at William Street Gallery, Edinburgh (from next weekend).

The William Street Gallery exhibition is a little different – they have asked gallery artists to provide A5-sized paintings, as it's Christmas, and Lynn gave them two (sadly, we sent them off without taking jpegs) That exhibition runs from Saturday 26th November.

Blown away

It doesn't look like much but I've just spent a frustrating half hour trying to get to that boat you can see in top right of the pic. The wind is coming from the south, ie directly up the sound, and I can't manage to row across it - on the last try I was blown into the weed halfway to the wreck and Lynn came out to help me drag the rowing boat back through the shallows.

Aargh. I was keen to catch the 5 o'clock post - never mind.

Silent attack dog..

Not really – just a little game Eddie plays when we've been away. Has some funny ideas, Eddie.

Madcap

A correspondent from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, who I get the feeling has forgotten more about boats than most of us will ever know, picked up on the tiny picture in yesterday's blog:-

"I do have one question: there is a lovely looking little gaff cutter with top mast (if my eyes don't deceive me) on your blog today...do you know any more about her? She's a beauty."

She certainly is. Her name is Madcap and as far as I know she is the oldest surviving Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, built in Cardiff in the same year that Thomas Mann, who wrote Death in Venice, was born: 1875. Why mention Thomas Mann? You might well ask.

***

It would be wrong to mention coastal Massachusetts without giving you this little gem from the great Jack Handey:-

"As I maneuvered my one-man sub into the enemy harbour, I smiled a little smile to myself. It amused me to think that the people of Massachusetts did not even realise that a Connecticut resident was right under their very noses."

Water water

Somewhere out there is a diver named James Jennings, working along the length of Islandmore's water supply pipe with one of those 007 submersible scooters, searching for any signs of damage. Actually, he told me later that visibility was so poor he ended up going most of the way hand-over-hand. The good news is that the pipe was looking pretty good for its age – an amazing forty-five years..

The day had started with a quick look round the back of the cabin, before I left for the mainland, for any burst pipes, the water supply having failed around ten o'clock last night. No joy, so I fetched the dinghy and crossed Ringhaddy Sound with two lists taking shape in my mind – who to call with a view to getting a diver down to Ringhaddy should it prove likely the burst was underwater; and what obscure 3/4" or 1/2" alcathene compression fittings I was going to need from Jackie Brown's hardware store in Ballynahinch, to repair the damage when we found it, on dry land or otherwise.

I called John Scott, who looks after the boats and moorings in the anchorage, and he put me on to the extremely helpful Morris Smith, who put me on to his diver friend Norman Wallace, who immediately offered to put the gear in his car and stand by in case he was needed. People are so kind. I checked the meter by the old quay on the mainland, found that the dial was rotating at an alarming rate, and turned off the stop valve. It would make no difference to Lynn, back at the Blue Cabin, because she'd been without water for ten hours already. Normally, that would be a minor inconvenience, but we can't light the woodburner when there isn't a water supply, and the woodburner is the only source of heat (and hot water).

Next stop Seaforde, to pick up mum, who volunteered herself to come with me on what was bound to be an uncertain enterprise. Challenged though she is by her stroke, mum is always up for an adventure.

We drove to Jackie Bown's, where there was the usual Saturday morning queue, and I presented my list at the counter to Jackie himself. Now, anyone who has read The Blue Cabin will know that on a very similar mission some years ago, I wandered round to the shelving at the back of the warehouse looking for bits, and Jackie frightened the life out of me by yelling at me from behind and asking what I was doing. Don't get me wrong, Jackie is actually a very nice guy – he just doesn't like customers disappearing round the back and getting up to heaven knows what round there. Imagine my surprise, then, when he looked at my list and said, 'Come on round the back and we'll see what we can find.' What? Round the back? Me? Well, of course I followed him. Meekly, at a distance. He found a black alcathene joint and demonstrated how it would work, with only the addition of a sleeve, for either old 3/4" or new 25mm pipe. 'Just the job,' I said, 'I'll take four. And a 10ft length of 25mm pipe. Please.' Then I followed him – meekly, at a distance – back to the counter. 'That should get you going,' he said, with a big smile, and off I went, as in a dream.

So, to Ringhaddy, where I left mum with a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich, and took the dinghy across the sound to Islandmore, landing roughly at the point where I knew the pipe emerged from the water and snaked up the forsehore to a stop valve buried in the bank above the high water mark. When sheep grazed the island, the stop valve was easily found, but since our end of the island has been given over to trees, the grass has become clumped and thick, and I'm willing to believe I looked a bit of a sight, crawling around on the bank, throwing fistfuls of grass over my shoulder and plunging my hand into every likely-looking crevice to feel for the pipe. Eventually, I stumbled upon it, and fetched a crescent wrench from the boat. I shut off the valve, thus isolating the island; then returned to the meter on the mainland, and turned on the mains. If the meter still rotated wildly, I would know the break was under the sound, and it would be over to the divers. Or, as it turned out, another diver altogether, the aforementioned James, who happened to be putting on his gear for some recreational diving and who offered (I should have guessed) to do the job himself. We both studied the dial, and yes, it was moving, but only at a very slow, stop-go pace. I called Morris, who called Norman to tell him there was no need for a full-on repair mission, and that James was going to take a quick look anyway for peace of mind.

While James "My name's Jennings, James Jennings" Jennings aqua-scootered into the murky depths of Ringhaddy Sound, I had a quick coffee with mum and then headed to The Blue Cabin to collect Lynn so that we could walk the length of the pipe from opposite ends, going from sheep-trough to sheep-trough, looking for signs of a burst. En route, we bumped into Brian McFerran, whose family own the island, out pottering in a dinghy with his dog, and he too joined the search. At the abandoned farm yard to the North of the cabin, I found a drinker with a working water supply, so we knew the problem had to be between there and the cabin. Lynn walked the last part of the pipeline, and I took the boat directly to the cabin with a view to working my way towards her. In the event, she had moved along pretty fast and we ended up meeting on the steep bank behind the cabin. To my questioning look she shook her head and shrugged, and we stood there, temporarily stumped.
Then Lynn said, 'Can you hear that?'
My hearing is going the way of my mother's.
'Hear what?'
'Running water.'
Just under the back wall of the cabin, obscured by grass (that's not true, I just said that because I had already made my early morning inspection at the back of the cabin) there was a little jet of water, which turned out to be coming from a fractured half-inch alcathene pipe. Bingo. No celebrations, because frankly I was feeling a bit of a twit, but bingo nevertheless.

Water is restored, Lynn is warm in the cabin and the world is no longer, as Sean O'Casey would say, in a state of chassis.

It's rainin' - rainin' in my house

You would think that 40 ltrs. of bitumastic paint would have done the trick, and for a while it seemed that way, but today the felt roof was tested to the limits, and found wanting. Six leaks in three rooms - I don't know what's for the best but we're not going to go through another winter like the last one, so I suspect I'm about to get a crash course in off-season felting. Ah well.

'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'

Hard to think of the late Roy Scheider, who was born on this day in 1932, without thinking of Jaws, and the scene (above) where Police Chief Martin Brody sees the shark for the first time. Interestingly, the famous line, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat', wasn't in Carl Gottlieb's script – it was improvised by Scheider.

Everyone remembers the body-in-the-submerged-wreck scene, which produced such a scream from the audience in pre-screening that director Stephen Spielberg re-shot it to draw out the moment for maximum effect. But for me, the most memorable shot was the so-called 'Jaws shot', when Brody is sitting on a deckchair on the beach and realises that young Alex Kintner has been killed by the shark. It was a cinematic first, a 'forward-tracking, zoom out' shot where the camera tracks in to Scheider's face and simultaneously zooms out, creating a visually unsettling but highly effective blurring-in-motion of the background. A similar effect, but in reverse – 'forward-zoom, reverse tracking' – was used by Irmin Roberts in the movie Vertigo, with Jimmy Stewart.

Joe Frazier

'Smokin' Joe Frazier in training in 1971

By all acounts Joe Frazier, who died today, was a sensitive and generous-minded person outside the ring. Inside it, his relentlessness inspired fear among his boxing peers, even those who beat him; and of course there were only two – Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Foreman was interviewed for BBC News tonight and he said (I think I'm quoting word for word), 'When I got in the ring I was frightened. I was hoping I'd never have to fight him, but I did...' On the night, he kept knocking Frazier down, and Frazier kept getting up again. 'I knocked him down six times, and the fight was over but he got up again and he was looking for me. What a tough man.'

"The Spencer Tracy of the '80s"

That's what the Los Angeles Times said, and I know what they meant. The above still, from a 1971 cult classic movie, even has echoes of my favourite Spencer Tracy movie, Bad Day at Black Rock.

The man standing in the Nevada desert was a hero of mine throughout the 1970s, and I suppose still is. If you're wondering about the movie, it may help you to know that the car is a 1970 Dodge Challenger. No? What about this: the distance from Denver, Colorado to San Francisco is 1,270 miles, and in the movie a car delivery contractor called Kowalski takes a bet that he can do it in fifteen hours – that's an average of just over 80 mph. Of course, the authorities are not as enthusiastic as the protagonist, and the result is the ultimate rebel without a cause road movie and, for my money, a whole series of better chase sequences even than Bullitt (which is saying something).

'Cool, with an edge', seems to sum up the critics' view of this man's acting persona through the 70s, 80s and 90s.

This is from the movie:-

Super Soul (a blind DJ following the star's exploits):  '...our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin' closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape... the last beautiful free soul on this planet... The question is not when he's gonna stop, but who is gonna stop him.'

The movie is Vanishing Point and the star, Barry Newman – who happens to be 73 today.

Jim Hunsdale

Jim and Cathleen Hunsdale

Today we said goodbye to a stalwart of the Strangford Lough community and a good friend of the family, Jim Hunsdale: a character and a gentleman – and a seaman through and through. His son, Jim Jnr. (always 'Young Jim' to this family), wrote a few tender and poignant lines of poetry for the service of thanksgiving, which ended with these words:

'Smell the roses... share the love and wear each day like a fine silk glove.'

His father did just that all his life, and I'm sure we could all do worse than follow his example.

Eddie's big (weekly) adventure

We had to laugh – Lynn mentioned going for wood on the next island and Eddie stationed himself on the jetty in case we left him behind. It's one of the highlights of Eddie's week because he thinks he might see Billy. Sadly, Billy hasn't been there for the last few visits so we're beginning to wonder about him.

Getting old

Having just hefted a reluctant 4kw generator out of a coggly boat in a stiff wind and dragged it up the jetty an inch at a time, Lynn and I are off for hot baths..

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The Spruce Goose

I'm jumping the gun a bit here, but I'm not sure I'll get to the blog tomorrow, the sixty-fourth anniversary of one of the most remarkable moments in aviation history.

On 2nd November 1947, off Long Beach, California, Howard Hughes took the controls of the H-4 flying boat, the largest aircraft ever built (I mean at the time, but as a matter of fact it had a wider wingspan than a Boeing 747), and taxied to and fro several times over the course of a couple of hours before accellerating to takeoff speed and lumbering into the air. He remained airborne for almost a mile, flying 70ft above the water and reaching a speed of 135mph – whether intentionally or not we'll never know, because when the chief designer asked Hughes later, that's what he said: 'You'll never know.'

Already controversial because of the enormous government investment in its development, and rendered obsolete two years before by the end of the war in the Pacific (it had been conceived as a troop and transport carrier), the H-4 would never fly again. Hughes had it sent to a climate-controlled hangar where a permanent crew of 300 maintained it in good flying order until his death in 1976, firing up the eight Pratt and Whitney radial engines once a month for twenty-nine years.

Detractors called the H-4 the 'Spruce Goose', a name which naturally, and to Howard Hughes's eternal dismay, stuck. It's a misnomer, because although the airframe was built entirely from timber and fabric (!), the wood was birch, not spruce.

For a fascinating portrait of Howard Hughes I can recommend Howard, The Amazing Mr.Hughes by Noah Dietrich, which is available from Amazon here. It's no longer in print, more's the pity, and a used copy will cost you almost £40. I must try to find mine..