Apologies for the slight delay in this (last) week’s edition of the blog. I’ll owe y’all one. I have been repositioning a little workboat from the Netherlands to Germany, and we had a few issues with watertight integrity, steering, power, and so on. Turns out engines and electrics don’t like being ankle-deep in seawater. It […]
Category: culture
Good morning, all. I hope you are well. I certainly am. The kids were off school this week for their October break. For non-Scots, this is a ten-day holiday subtracted from the summer holidays, to allow the children to help with the potato-picking season. And indeed, we did get a very full bucket of potatoes […]
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Lamentations for Leicester
It has been a peaceful, but rather dull week of decent weather offshore. With twelve hours on watch and a reasonable satellite internet signal, I’ve been trawling the depths of Twitter and Wikipedia. I finished In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland, as mostly peaceful ‘diversity-riots’ spread across England. I’m looking at real […]
My first duty this week is to thank my new friend Steven Wilkinson, of the excellent Substack Pitchfork Papers and his company Good and Prosper, for his continued support and encouragement. I’ve been following his work for some time, and his kind words on Friday, when he allowed me to guest post my article ‘Half-Mast’ […]
Monarchy, Mortality, and Morality. I never met The Queen. Neither did most of you. But I’m willing to bet that every single one of you had some sort of emotional reaction to the news of her passing. For my part, I have been reading the book of revelation, and Paul’s address to the Romans, in […]
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Atonement
We work long days at sea, and Sunday is no exception. 12-hour shifts are my current minimum each day, with occasional overtime required. We got a hurried order to leave port this morning, while I was halfway through doing an inventory of the medical locker in my cabin. Despite the warm sunshine, it was quite […]
Why the more subtle iconoclasms of the left, affect us all. ‘Haha. So you are employee of the month? These Americans. When I was a cadet, I won Communist of the month’. I didn’t mind Pavlo (not his real name, for multiple reasons). He was a grotesquely large Ukrainian man. Seriously overweight, but strong, with […]
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Titanic Omissions
The news of Boris Johnson’s, as yet only promised, resignation has not impacted my mood, or my worldview, nearly as much as you might have thought. The man wore the rank of PM, but was never a leader. Agenda 2030, 2050 and the Great Reset/Build Back Better, Greener, whatever/ Levelling Up, more green blah, blah, […]
Zero Nets, after Net Zero. In many ways, I am dismissive of people classed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ on the internet these days, not because they make preposterous claims. In fact, they’ve been right on nearly everything in the past two or three years, from Epstein to Covid, and after watching The Northman, probably Nicole Kidman […]
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Village Fate
What does it mean to believe in fate? Why bother with the ‘Christian Label’? We Merchant Sailors live a hungry freelance existence. Your dream job comes up three or four times a year, but you are already engaged elsewhere and unable to take it. The guy with his bag packed, ready to go, is the […]