My hire car came early on Monday afternoon, and my flight to Edinburgh from Stansted on Tuesday was looking dicey due to the winter travel disruption around London. Only one thing for it. I finished my jobs in the shipyard and signed myself off the ship early. A quick eight-hour drive through the freezing fog […]
Category: Religion
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 […]
Categories
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 […]
Categories
The Philosophy of ‘No’
I have returned to the sea, for a three-week trip. On this occasion, I have signed on as Mate. That is second in command on this ship and entails a 12-hour night shift from 7 pm to 7 am. After the manic trip we had last time I was here, nights are a blessed relief. […]
This week, I’m exhausted. Although I’ve never been happier. I have a beautiful wife and three beautiful children. I’m making decent money and learning how to actually manage it for the first time in 37 years. Meeting wonderful people. Enjoying the autonomy and education of self-employment. Learning new skills and building on old ones. I […]
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 […]
Categories
The Unfinished Trust Exercise
Failure as a human being and as a leader. The curse of self-awareness. When I was young, I had a strange experience. One that would probably have had me on medication or sectioned in a therapeutic home if I’d lived in the US and told an adult. But one that was absolutely real to me, […]
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 […]