3. Time To Go - Track Three from "Head Above Water" by Marshlander

Time To Go

Goliath said to David, “Hey, man, it’s time to pay!

You’ve lived here free for centuries and, if you want to stay,

Dig deep into your pocket and give me what you owe.

And, if you don’t deliver, hey man it’s time to go!”

It’s time to go, time to go

Loose the ropes, pull the pins.

Adieu, adagio.

It’s time to go, time to go.

The tigers won your freedom, but now it’s time to go.

David turned in wonder at the brass of such a thing.

It’s true he’d always been here,

But listen, here’s the thing.

When, long ago, adventurers stole the wetlands from the poor

To stop the Tigers wrecking wrote free passage into law

You can’t tell us it’s time, time to go

Loose the ropes, pull the pins.

Adieu, adagio.

Time, time to go.

The tigers won your freedom, but now it’s time to go.

That statute stood for centuries.

Each time the law was changed

The one remaining constant is the freedom we retained

To travel unimpeded on the drains that gift you land.

Travel with no toll to pay, rejecting out of hand 

That it’s time to go, time to go.

Loose the ropes, pull the pins.

Adieu, adagio.

It’s time to go, time to go.

The tigers won our freedom, we’ll choose when it’s time to go.

(Music and lyrics by Marshlander - all rights reserved)

I spent a lot of 2017 and 2018, including eight days in Committee Rooms Two, Four and Five in the Palace of Westminster, speaking against and fighting a Private Bill going through Parliament. You may know that a Private Bill is a mechanism through which private interests can have access to the means of changing the law usually in pursuit of commercial advantage. The process for proposing and opposing a Private Bill is somewhat different from those of Private Members' Bills or Parliamentary Bills. A few of us who live on boats on a bare minimum wage were up against big business and landed interests. They eventually got the Bill through, but not before we’d managed to secure some twenty amendments and undertakings that would, if adhered to, make the new laws less draconian than they started out. It wasn't a bad result for a muso, a postie, a delivery driver and a care worker pitted against a barrister, three solicitors, two accountants and two chief executives. The fight continues as the waterways authority attempts to achieve its goals through introducing new bylaws.

I wanted to document my experience through song, but couldn't really think of a way to do it until the tried and trusted David versus Goliath metaphor came to mind. The tigers in the song are the "Fen Tigers" who opposed the drainage of the Fens in the seventeenth century which they could see was going to result in the loss of a way of life. As a way of stopping them wrecking the embankments leading agitators were offered inducements such as houses in nearby towns and the promise that navigation on the newly created and restricted waterways would remain free for non-commercial traffic in perpetuity. The law we were fighting threatened to remove that benefit amongst many other rights and freedoms.

2. Blame It On Me - track two from "Head Above Water" by Marshlander

Blame It On Me

Blame it on me and call me unreliable

The country’s deep in debt and who else is to blame?

The evidence of my collusion seems to be deniable;

Multi-national interests play the banking game.

Let’s talk about debt.

You know the cash we need to borrow to pay off for stuff we’ve bought.

Straightforward and yet

We’ve got it all in such a muddle that a puddle becomes a lake 

 Then an ocean of sweat.

So the banker sells the debt on, like it really is a thing.

When everybody knows it’s all a scam.

Like a pass-the-parcel nobody would ever want to win.

Sell it on, breathe again.  Then you scram     And then you …. 

Let’s talk about home.

Supposed to be safe as a castle.  It’s modest, but it’s your own.  

The family grows.

You proudly watch as they grow older and before you know what’s happening This is what goes -

The place you’ve lived for forty years, you’re told is under-occupied.

You pay the tax or move, but there is nowhere to go.

The government has stitched you up and you know they mock you by

mishandling the shortfall.

Frankly no one wants to know and so you ….

Let’s talk about waste.

You know, the stuff that proves we’ve been here and that we don’t want to see.

Just flush it away

Or you bury it or burn it and the residue will turn up on your doorstep one day.

Money changes hands to make the most of our excess.

Profit for the greedy from our profligacy.

You’ll never see the fires burn in the gardens of the rich.

You're the one whose lungs are trashed.

Ain’t life a bitch.   So go on …

Let’s talk about tax.

You know the share that you and I give to the man to keep things smooth.

Let’s look at the facts -

You and me, we’re simply too small to set up in offshore havens 

Look at the list of names in the polling booth. 

Were we international would pay our share?

We’d register head office in a place where no one goes.

Amazon and Google, Starbucks and all the others

Tell us it’s all legal.  

Meanwhile everybody knows you’re gonna …

Let’s talk about health

When you’re feeling good it’s groovy.  You’re the king of all you see

Apportioning wealth - it’s a game but when you need help

You become a punter in a postcode lottery.

The NHS once shone like jewels in Britain’s post-war crown

On principle health treatment came for free

But now it’s nearly all sold off, you’d better not come down

With something you can’t treat yourself because you’ll soon see how they …

Blame it on me and call me unreliable

The country’s deep in debt and who else is to blame?

The evidence of my collusion seems to be deniable;

Multi-national interests play the banking game.

(Music and lyrics by Marshlander - all rights reserved)

Whatever goes wrong in society is always blamed on the people at the bottom of the pile. Unfortunately the last few years have proven that I could probably have written an extra verse to this every day. I have had to sit on my hands and force myself not to add verses about education, human rights, public transport, water companies, MPs' expenses, unemployment, climate change, the widening pay gap, electoral reform, species decline, plastic pollution ...

Once again this was a case of words first, melody next and then the chords. Originally the final chord was an Am. One night I sang it with a fine songwriter named Fraser in the audience, who suggested the Picardy third. It grew on me.

1. Grey - Track one from "Head Above Water" by Marshlander

Grey

Untroubled I am by a burden of genius

I struggle with words to find something to say.

Life potters on - a distraction from boredom,

An attempt to stay solvent and living each day.

I'd like to be original; I know I'm derivative.

I wear my influences on open display

I grew up in colours I liked it that way.

Now I look in the mirror

And only see grey.

Look out of the window

Watching the river flow by

Look up to the skyscape

Clouds making shapes in the sky.

Make rhythms and colours from sounds that surround me

Watch how the wind shapes the river.

It changes each day.

Turn back to the blank page

Ink out a doodle.

I’m thinking in colour, but everything’s grey.

I hear my friends talking like proper songwriters

Of choruses, verses, key changes and all;

Of intros and outros and middle-eight solos,

Of descending bass lines and dominant chords.

I just tell stories or capture a moment

And fool myself it’s my inimitable way.

I imagine the colour in all that I say.

Then I look at the writing and only see grey.

Look out of the window

Watching the river flow by

Look up to the skyscape

Clouds making shapes in the sky.

Head full of music.  It’s all just the same tune.

The rhythms are boring and everything’s in the same key.

Turn back to the blank page

Ink out a doodle.

Another creation that nobody needs!

If I get close to finishing something important

I'll go and make supper though cooking’s a chore.

I could be at practice, or even rehearsing,

Or finishing something I started before.

I've books upon books of half-started writing

Or half-finished music that sits in a drawer.

The songs I’ve completed don’t leap off the score

I've started to practise them ten times or more.

Switch on the computer

Download the e-mails and weed out the spam.

Log into a forum,

Post in a thread, show how clever I am.

Share things on Facebook (too much information)

Leaving a trail through a garden of weeds.

One game of Tetris, one hand of Spider

Leaving a legacy nobody reads.

Sitting here pondering all my shortcomings

The list's getting longer and so is this song

I'll never be finished so maybe it's better if I simply stop.

(Music and lyrics by Marshlander - all rights reserved)

"Grey" describes my method for writing songs. However it may sound, it's not a completely haphazard process. While writing a song always takes me a long time - particularly writing lyrics - most of the time I don't like to think about chords until the lyrics and melody are in place, although naturally there are exceptions. I find that the songs I have written using a chord sequence do not give me the musical satisfaction that I get from those songs where I have to fit the harmonic accompaniment around a melody. A melody sometimes requires me to find, and even learn how to play, chords that don't always at first fall naturally under my fingers. Sometimes a melody insinuates itself at the same time as I am writing the lyrics, but I prefer to be able to focus on the lyrics first so that they have an integrity of their own, before I begin work on the music. I wouldn't consider myself a poet, but I guess many of my songs have begun their lives like poems. "Grey" took a while to emerge. It also had several more verses, one of them was even good enough to be in the song. However, the song was long enough with three verses, the final three lines and the choruses, so I edited out a lot of the text. Having to decide to lose a verse from a song is a bit like having to decide which friend has to be asked to leave an over-crowded boat!

I chose this as the first song on the album, because it sets a tone, opens up the songwriting process to possible discussion and the choruses mostly refer to what I see when I look out of the window, namely whatever waterway I happen to be navigating at the time. Living afloat, water seems to feature in a number of my songs, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically.

Of A New Album

"Head Above Water" by Marshlander (2019)

Marshlander by Mark The Artist 

Dear Friends - I write "friends" because I am pretty certain that most people who find this page are known to me personally! If other people read it I don't think I know who you are or really how to find out, although I would have to give some thought over any ethical boundaries of that one if I did.

For quite a lot of the past year I have been focussed on completing an album of some of my songs. It is the first time I have undertaken a project like this and it has been an interesting and challenging process. Twelve years ago I recorded five tracks of my compositions with my ceilidh band, but I didn't actually play much on the tunes apart from a few percussion overdubs. It was nice to hear my music in a replayable form, but I've never got around to recording much that was actually played by me.

For the album, "Head Above Water", I used a small studio in The Fens, Grange Farm Studio. It is a purpose-built facility housed in a converted barn and has worked with some illustrious names in the music world. The engineer, Isi Clarke could not have been more helpful. My rig is hardly standard and she tried out a few configurations for microphone placement achieving a good sound in the end. I was, though, specially happy with how she captured the guitar sound.

Now, many months later, the fruits of that labour have ripened and several other things came to the boil at the same time. An artist local to me, Mark The Artist (whose work I have admired for about thirty years), asked recently if he could paint my portrait. It was an honour to sit for him. The result was so good I felt it would make a brilliant front image for the album. It was not a foregone conclusion that he would agree, but I am delighted that he did. The rest of the design was done by another friend who lives nearby, artist/photographer/musician Dan Donovan, who took some photographs back at Grange Farm.

I really wanted to include the lyrics in the pack, but even though Dan tried many formats, he could not fit even three songs of the eleven on the album into the available space! I guess I am a little wordy at times ... I would still like to be able to share the lyrics with people who like to read lyrics - maybe eventually in the form of a separate booklet or songbook, so I shall put them on here as blog entries to follow this one. If you are interested in a cd copy of my album, "Head Above Water", released in May 2019 click the "Buy Now" button below which will take you to a secure page on PayPal. If you prefer you could stop me and buy one at a gig somewhere or send an e-mail request to marshlander(dot)musician(at)gmail(dot)com
(substituting the correct punctuation where I've put brackets!) and I'll send a PayPal invoice to your e-mail address. When you pay the invoice you'll be asked for a delivery address. The cd is £10 plus £1.50 postage and packing within the U.K. Obviously it could cost more to post outside the UK. I've made a point of keeping the use of plastic to a minimum (i.e. just the cd itself) and the packaging is recycled materials and good old parcel string. I'm not sure what is acceptable in other countries, but I'll try and find out if it appears necessary.

The album contains eleven tracks and runs to a total of one hour and fifty-one seconds with the following list of tracks, all written, composed, performed on voice, guitar, drums and harmonica by me, Marshlander. I've deliberately kept this album to the orchestration you will hear if you see me play live.

The eleven blog entries after this one contain the lyrics and a few words about each of the songs on the album. Each track listed below also links to the relevant lyric page.

1. Grey
2. Blame It On Me
3. Time To Go 
4. Dear Mr Carter
5. Pansy Potter
6. Cruiser
7. Be Home Soon
8. Lean on The Tiller
9. Damn You, Enchiladas 
10. In Your Place
11. Say I'm Sexy

EDIT:
Of course if you prefer, the album is now available on Bandcamp as a download in pretty much every format you might want.

Of Happy Sails & Cooling Pipes

Following the previously mentioned abandoned journey I came to a decision. It was time to get the boat re-blacked and three engineers had quite independently mentioned that my overheating problems may have been caused at least in part by having insufficient cooling capacity for my engine.  The liquid cooling system is sealed, as is a road vehicle's. A car, though has a radiator which is further cooled by air when the car is in motion. My boat has a "skin tank" through which the hot water passes to be cooled by near contact with the lower temperatures of the river. The boat engine has tended to overheat after about four-hours of travel. The suggestion has been that it takes this length of time for the coolant to be raised to a temperature where it can no longer be cooled in time for its next race around the system. The engine continues to heat already overheated coolant and eventually blows. That's the theory anyway. I tried it out on a number of marine and motor engineers and they agreed it was a workable theory. The boatyard had a "fix" it applied to a number of boats i.e. the fitting of extra cooling pipes. Since the boat was coming out of the water anyway, this seemed to be a good time to have the work done.

I had a few days of living in my van and cooking outdoors under my canopy. All rather risky for October, but I was lucky with the weather. I cycled sixty miles that week too between the boatyard and the farm and in, out and around the town near the yard ... plus one other cycle ride I'll get to in the next essay.

My last River Canal Rescue engine inspection suggested that I needed to check the security of the engine mounts. The inspector attempted to adjust the mounting bolts, but couldn't get at the two forward ones. At the boatyard they could only get a spanner on to the mounting feet after taking out the calorifier, which had to be done to extend the cooling system. Getting a spanner on to the mounts was only part of the difficulty, nothing would turn so the mounts had to be cut out with an angle grinder. It was then there was further evidence of the Bodger's influence. The BMC 1.5 engine was not the original engine. It is much older than the rest of the boat. Presumably insufficient allowance had been made for the slightly different dimensions of the replacement engine and the allegedly adjustable mounting feet for the engine had been welded into place in some kind of attempt to shoehorn the engine into position. Unfortunately it was the wrong position and the engine was not square on to the prop. Had I been confident enough to take the boat out more regularly over the past seven years I would by now have probably had to replace the drive-shaft, the gear box, the engine or all three. I suppose every cloud has that good old silver lining. As it happened I needed four new mounting feet and a new coupling for the prop-shaft. It may have been a £1500 job, but that is much less expensive than it could have been.

The boat was in the boatyard for a week and I couldn't wait to get it out and give it a spin. On the first day I was able to have the boat back there were winds exceeding 20mph. I usually avoid travelling in winds like that but I took a chance. Getting out of the yard was going to be the first challenge because boats are moored right up to the narrow entrance alongside the main navigation of the river. Also everything is very exposed in the Fens because there are relatively few trees and stronger winds can make manoeuvring a challenge. However, I managed to get out of the marina with an almost textbook turn (one of my proudest moments) and, for the next three days, the boat ran like a dream. The temperature stayed at a steady 78-80ºC and there was none of the clanking I often got after running the boat for an hour or two. The throttle was more responsive too. This was the boat I had hoped I would be cruising in nearly seven years ago when I bought it to replace the old and broken down Springer for which I had paid so dearly and on which I had lost £12,000 in two years by the time I sold it!

I decided to go the long way home and head for one of the nicest local moorings relatively nearby at Benwick, adjacent to the graveyard. I had been craving a plate of steamed vegetables for days. That would give me chance to spend the night near the village where I could buy some fresh vegetables. Living in my van on a campsite for nearly a week my camping stove is not up to the job and I ran out of gas anyway.

After a couple of hours cruising I rounded the bend to where the mooring is and immediately saw I could not moor there. Another boat had beaten me to it. There was nothing for it but to move a bit further on and try and moor against the bank. With the strong cross-winds this was not an easy task. When I found a place that was not at the end of someone's garden the wind proved too strong and blew the bow across the river while I was trying to get the stern in close to the bank to disembark. I was almost jammed between the two banks and naturally a digger driver and a small child were there as spectators - that is the law in boating!

There was no choice but to try and straighten up and find somewhere less exposed. I found a spot just before a bridge on a bend. There were also some bushes nearby to deflect the wind a little. Unfortunately I was not close enough to the village to buy the fresh vegetables I had been planning for supper, so it was more improvising with whatever I could salvage. I wasn't sure if this mooring were part of someone's garden, but I didn't have much choice with the failing light. I'm glad that no one seemed to object. I couldn't get as close as I'd have liked with my gangplank. I used to have a longer plank salvaged from a reclaimed scaffold board, but that one rotted through. During the great 2016 repaint, Gary at the boatyard found me a spare plank which he painted up in the colours he was painting the boat. That was really helpful, but the length is rather short for Fenland navigations where mooring close to the bank is often difficult.

The following day was much calmer and the sun was out. It was beautiful. I thought I would try the Facebook Live function for the first time and broadcast several shortish videos. I downloaded those from Facebook and edited them in Final Cut Pro into the following nine minute wonder. Most of these were taken on that journey between the bridge near Benwick and Stonea, a journey of four hours or so. Obviously, I haven't got to grips with FCP because the captions I added to explain a couple of things I stumbled over during my improvised narrative did not appear when I put the video up on YouTube. Oh well! For information, the name of the lock I couldn't remember was "Horseway Lock" and St German's Pumping Station is the largest in Europe and can move one hundred tons of water per second according to this website

I planned to stop at Stonea overnight and intended to treat myself to a delicious home-cooked meal at the The Golden Lion 

That plan didn't quite work out ...

Of People And Their Voices

I went to the People's Voice March on Saturday along with some 699,999 others give or take. I travelled with a couple of friends, real life brother and sister T and K. We drove down to the town north of London, where I opened for the Pink Fairies in 1973, met a couple of my friends' friends, J and D, and we all travelled into Central London by public transport. On our return K posted some photographs up on her Facebook page that she had taken during the day. One of my cousins responded with the usual kind of "the people have spoken" response. J called him a troll and it all came a little unwound. I wanted to write a response to Frank, my cousin, and take an opportunity to work out why I thought it was important to go to this event. What I wrote turned out to be too long for a Facebook post, so here it is instead.

Hello, Frank. Thanks for your thoughts on this. I attended yesterday’s march, not because I want to undo the democratic process, but because I believe in it. The June 2016 referendum struck me as being informed more by emotion and feeling than understanding or knowledge. Real information was hard to come by. Having got this far, we now know more about what is likely to be involved with leaving the European Union. As far as I am concerned yesterday’s march was an expression of desire for people to be able to vote on whether we prefer the negotiated deal after we know what it is over the bluster and myths concocted in advance by politicians and media moguls who had no idea or who seem to have a vested interest in misinformation. Your contribution gives me an opportunity to try and gather my thoughts. My reasoning for staying within the Union goes along the following lines. 

Firstly, the referendum itself, which I believe was an ill-advised tactic on behalf of David Cameron to hold on to power, was “advisory”. The documents made that clear. I believe it was a test of the country’s mood to try and prove to the Euro-sceptics in his party that there was no appetite to leave. Nowhere was it stated that the result would be binding. He should have got out more and talked to people round the country to find out what was worrying them. Somewhere along the way, though, Theresa May got caught up in the excitement and decided that “advisory” really meant “binding”. 

The referendum is not like an election where we would have a chance to change course every five years. It would result in a fundamental change to what passes in the UK for a constitution and lead to changes in our relationships with every other country in the world. In such a case it is imperative that this be got right first time. 

Fundamental changes, such as these would involve, are rarely left to a simple majority. Other important decisions in all sorts of organisations rely on at least a 60/40 majority. I would have preferred to see a much higher threshold for change considering this requires the unraveling of some 750+ treaties painstakingly negotiated over the past forty years. Two years was never going to be long enough to ensure a smooth changeover. Think back to when you bought your house. I bet the sale wasn’t completed in one day and I doubt you would have wanted it to be. You would have required your team to do its work properly. 750 treaties sorted out over two years amounts to about one a day in the time available. 

The figures were also interesting in that while very close, the 52% majority represented just 37% of the electorate. I can see any number of reasons why people didn’t turn out to vote. Many who were likely to be most affected, such as the young and those living abroad (thanks to the freedom to live and work anywhere within the EU) were excluded. Then there was the paucity of quality in the arguments for and against. I tried really hard to make sense of it all and failed. There must have been many who did not have the opportunity to give the time I gave in order to research to try and work it all out. No wonder many felt compelled to leave it to chance or simply ran out of time to make a decision. After all, people like Liam Fox assured us negotiating new treaties would be a doddle, while Boris Johnson pulled figures out of his ... wherever to try and fool us that money being given to the EU would simply be channeled back into the health service. They have both since been thoroughly discredited. 

Although my gut reaction was to be consistent and vote as I did in 1975, I wanted to give this matter serious consideration and was prepared to vote according to what appeared to me to be the evidence presented by credible witnesses. Without going deeply into the personalities involved I did not trust the noisiest politicians. In some cases I had good reason not to trust them based on the way many have treated experienced professionals when they held cabinet offices. Dogma over evidence doesn’t sit well with me. I researched, read widely, sat and watched many YouTube lectures by experts in many appropriate fields. I was looking for reasons to vote leave that actually had some substance. I found very few. One that almost convinced me was the so-called Lexit argument - based on the way countries like Greece had been held to ransom by the European bankers. In the end I decided that even this was insufficient to justify the chaos that would inevitably result if the leave result polled a majority. 

There are many shortcomings in the European Union, but I felt that there would be nothing we could do to change the situation from the outside. In 1975 I voted to remain within the Common Market. The accumulated effects of the successive treaties of Paris, Rome, Maastricht and Lisbon have, over the years, changed the nature of the arrangement. If we were to make the Union work for everyone we had to be part of the gang. Come election times I would prefer to vote for a government that is prepared to engage with the rest of Europe in the pursuit of the best interests of us all, specially in the face of challenges from further away. Instead, we have had to witness decades of arguments amongst politicians within parties while we try and make some sense of the constant drip-feed of propaganda spouted in the mainstream media by the moguls who are fighting to maintain their vested interests as they stash their millions in overseas bank accounts. 

Had someone, anyone, been able to articulate sound reasons for leaving, based on evidence of what would actually improve after leaving the EU I could have been convinced. I have a mistrust of large organisations and have always found myself drawn to a “small is beautiful” mentality. In practical terms acting locally while thinking globally requires us all to be more involved in grass roots affairs. This simply doesn’t happen. Even in my village the politics are too diverse for me to keep any kind of handle on what’s going on. I have personally spent a lot of time over the past two years (including eight days this year attending and speaking to committees of MPs and Lords in Parliament) as I have campaigned against a Bill that will cost me money and make my home less secure. This Bill will advantage those who have land, money and power already. It was nearly impossible to get support from others in my situation who would be similarly disadvantaged when this Bill receives Royal Assent. No doubt they will complain heartily when they see the new demands roll in to take their hard-earned cash. I don’t expect any thanks for an unprecedented twenty or so amendments and undertakings we forced through. However I don’t have the time or the inclination to be involved in the political process on this all-absorbing level. I have to leave it to others and hope that sometimes they do the right thing by the rest of us. I found nothing of sufficient substance in the “leave” argument that was compelling enough to sway my decision to vote in favour of leaving the EU.

Contrary to evidenced reasoning we were bombarded with platitudes that harked back to some imagined notion of Empire and how things were better in the past.  I was a child in the 1960s when post-war confidence and optimism finally seemed to gain some traction, so of course life was better then. However, there were massive problems with attitudes and priorities in society that have required thought and legislation to put right over decades, much of this actually encouraged by the European Parliament. This has inevitably brought us a more complex society and things are unlikely ever to return to the way we thought they were, but in truth probably weren’t. The rise of the Information Age and globalised industry has meant things are unrecognisably different from our childhoods. 

The issues that were raised as problematic by the leave campaign did not make sense to me. We never lost our precious “sovereignty”. We always had an option to agree or not with new legislation. New laws came from Europe because the UK government of the day agreed to them. We were never part of the Euro-zone and retained the pound, much to the delight and profit of the same bankers who were responsible for the crash. Every time I go to France I pay to change currency. This could have been avoided. Freedom of movement applied to all, including the Brits who take their pensions and relocate to Spain or Portugal. Objections to immigration seemed mostly based on prejudice and inaccurate information as far as I could see. We always had control of our borders. It was not the EU, but our own governments who set quotas or not. If we were concerned about immigration or asylum from beyond the EU, it was our own governments who helped create the chaos and bring destruction down on those in suffering societies by dropping bombs on them!

The referendum itself was deeply flawed. I am sure both sides stretched the truth to advantage its own message. The leave campaign, however, has been found to have broken the law in the way its campaign was funded. There is evidence to suggest that many messages spread by the leave campaign would not have gained the traction they did had the rules been applied honourably and rigorously. We all know that the despicable advertising showing queues of people from other ethnicities appealed to British xenophobia and not to any sense of accuracy and fairness. There’s also that small matter of £350,000,000 a week that was promised to keep the NHS afloat. That sounds pretty hollow now as we watch Richard Branson head the queue to buy up the profitable parts of NHS ahead of any number of US based insurance companies. Successive governments have sold off the UK and raided our pension funds at the same time as they sell licenses for speculative mining companies in which members of the families of our government and the judiciary appear to have shares in the companies that have brought at least nineteen earth tremors to the north-west in the past week as the process they employ also poisons the water. None of this is down to being part of the European Union. In contrast, the European project began, and may have had some success, in keeping a Third World War from beginning in Europe. 

So, with twelve years left to keep global warming down to an unprecedented 1.5°C increase, a target we are likely to miss which will result in catastrophic climate change and death to millions, increased migration and many species being wiped out, we argue about where the DUP want to put a border as we flounder about trying to withdraw from the treaties to which we have voluntarily signed up over the decades. 

I could go on, but this is long enough to give you some flavour that my path has attempted to follow a certain logic. 

By far the worst aspect of the whole miserable process has been the name-calling and abuse that has split the country. I have friends who voted to leave, and thankfully we have been able to maintain a civil discourse as well as our friendship, but even so most of them cannot give me one single reason why it has turned out for the better. It has mostly appeared to have been down to a hope that we’ll do better on our own somehow. I personally think it unlikely that we are going to be able to pick up where we left off in 1973. The rest of the world may have moved on and there are families of farmers in Australia, who have still not forgotten how we abandoned them when we joined the Common Market. I don’t think they are likely to welcome us back with open arms. Perfidious Albion indeed.

Of Another Unexpected Encounter

... Approaching the boatyard on the edge of town and still crawling along at about 2mph I heard a sound from behind me that made me freeze. Dogs ... yapping.

Some years ago I had a neighbour, Yappy-Dog Woman. This is how I met her.

I bought my present boat from the Bodger and the Fireman who had bought it from the Chippy who had sold up and moved to Bulgaria.  The Chippy sold them his boat for a song and they thought they would tidy it up and sell it on at a neat profit, which they did ... to me. The Bodger lived on his 60' narrowboat on the next door mooring and, a couple of years after selling me my boat, couldn't resist adding to his fleet by buying what could only be described as a floating night club now up for sale. He had first seen the shiny boat with the chromed interior, polished aluminium walls and ceiling, the mirror-tiled bar and the programmable disco lights some years earlier and, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, had coveted it since. He bought the boat which left him with a surfeit of boats for the available mooring space. He advertised his 60' boat on e-Bay. There were no takers for several months and he became despondent. His face did light up though when, in the fulness of time, he received an enquiry from a woman wanting to move up from Plymouth. She had no boating experience whatsoever, but fancied a change from living in a house and having neighbours the other side of a shared wall. She gave the boat a thorough looking at and liked what she saw. She commissioned a survey and the report came back positive. The Bodger offered to let her stay on the boat for a couple of weeks to see how she liked it. Apparently she liked it well-enough and stayed all summer. The Bodger had no idea whether she would ever pay up the agreed price, but eventually she paid a deposit and his blue face turned a little more pink as he began once more to breathe. As summer drew to a close, Plymouth Lady gave the Bodger the balance. He waited several days to make sure the cheque cleared and, on confirmation that the transaction had indeed concluded, they had a formal celebratory drinks party on the boat to which I was invited.

The three of us imbibed our favourite poisons (water for me and wine for them). Someone suggested a game of Scrabble. I used to enjoy playing Scrabble. I had a Scrabble dictionary and had spent some time learning useful two-letter words. However, by majority vote, my "Scrabble Dictionary" was deemed invalid, while the 1950s Chambers English Dictionary was decided by the two of them to be the reference of choice. I lost the game by a long way since very few of my words were in the Chambers and I had to miss several turns. None of the two-letter ones I had learned were in the Chambers either. After the second glass of wine I noticed a change in the atmosphere. The woman became increasingly abusive, loud and unpredictable. It didn't take long for me to decide I needed to leave. I was almost sorry to leave the Bodger in her gentle clutches, but I figured a man in his late sixties ought to be able to look after himself or deal with whatever was coming next - and I knew he was actually rather hopeful. The thought of that made me shudder, but by that time I was well beyond caring what happened to him. The two of them had turned rather horrible.

Within days she returned to Plymouth to wind up her affairs there. This seemed to take longer than expected, but the solitude and peace were what I enjoy most about living here. Eventually, though, she reappeared like a hurricane except that, this time, she had two Yorkshire terriers in her van. I heard them coming from miles away. This was the first that anyone of us at the farm were aware of her two boys. There were already five dogs living on the farm (along with three regular visitors, who were mostly well-behaved). Their arrival, however, signalled the beginning a a new kind of hell.

Around that time I was working on a complete new repertoire for a ceilidh project and the first performance was almost imminent. I did not realise it was possible for dogs to yap twenty-three hours of every day for months on end. These dogs excelled. I don't know if you, dear reader, have ever attempted to compose and arrange music to the overwhelming accompaniment of yapping terriers, but I would not wish that on Salieri were I Wolfgang Amadeus himself (and I assure you I have not one smidge of that man's genius ... nor any other as it happens). With a deadline fast approaching I was really struggling. I explained the situation and I pleaded with her to try and give me some peace to finish, but she didn't get the urgency. She was my new neighbour and I should learn to be more tolerant. Somehow I got through the writing and the gig was actually a success of sorts. My tunes came to have titles like "Dog In The Drink" and "Two Terriers And A Chainsaw". There may have been a connection.

Things didn't get much better. She used a shared cancer diagnosis to make friends with the Horse Woman, a powerful ally to have. She managed, though, to alienate everyone else for miles around. I have no idea what kind of skill it takes to upset the owners of the village chip shop, but she possessed it by the bucketload. She upset publicans and punters in most of the pubs within a six mile radius. She complained so hard and so often at the Bodger, that he bought a riverside plot forty miles away and left the farm after living there for more than seven years. She was rude to the Engineer, who spent a lot of time trying to work out just what the Bodger had done to his boat while he was living on it. She ordered people around; resistance was futile, specially from men who were deemed chauvinistic simply by nature of the sex listed on their birth certificates. As it happens she only called me a sexist a few times, but it hurt more when she accused me of "turning" the larger of her two male dogs who started trying to mount the smaller one. "What have you done to him? He's never behaved like that before!" she exclaimed. She spent all day shouting at the dogs and, when not shouting at them to "shut up", was perched on the foredeck of her boat, having loud and prolonged telephone conversations with traders who had failed to meet her exacting standards of whom there were many. It was a nightmare. The only relief came when she fell in the river (twice) in her first fortnight as my new neighbour. She couldn't get out of the river and on to the bank without assistance. After the second dip the Farmer fixed a ladder in the water against her mooring for the next time ... I was called out to tow her broken-down boat back a few times too.

I was there the day she went too far. For nearly thirty years a very nice couple from the Midlands had a mooring for their small cruiser at the farm. They came to visit two or three times a year. They also had two terriers. These, however were kept under far better control. Yappy-Dog Woman's boys had psychological problems. They were rescue dogs who had been raised on a puppy farm and treated poorly by (of course) men (chauvinistic ones too, no doubt). One of the Midland terriers decided to assert his superiority, presumably to shut up the neurotic yappy dogs. It was behaviour I had seen amongst the dogs on the farm many times - dogs doing what dogs do, nothing too serious. However Yappy-Dog Woman was having none of this. She asked me what I would do. I said I would leave it and let the dogs sort themselves out. She broke off the conversation she was having with me and may have thought about my reply for a nano-second before launching into a high-speed conversation with herself that ended with something like, "I'm not having this!" She fair stormed along the bank to let go at full shriek at the Midland Woman. I had never before heard Midland Man or Midland Woman swear, but there ensued such a high-octane exchange of profanities that I had to leave the scene.

There were two further incidents following this exchange. The first was that the Horse Woman gave Yappy-dog woman her sailing orders, "Be gone by Friday or I'm cutting your ropes!" Unfortunately a few weeks later Midland Man had a heart attack and died. Horse Woman regrets the way she ganged up against the Bodger. It is the only time I have heard her express regret.

"Yap! Yap! Yip! Yap! ..."was coming up from behind and it froze my very blood. I turned round to see a familiar green boat. I try not to hold too fast to grudges, so I hailed Yappy-Dog Woman as she surged past. She didn't recognise me at first, because my boat is a different colour these days, but she returned the hail.

It took me ten or fifteen minutes to catch up with her. She had pulled into a place to moor next to the town park and was engaged in a row with another boater who was there before her. Her skill at upsetting people remains almost without parallel in my personal experience.