Captain’s Log 15

21/01/19 A return to rambling on.

I have not written for some time and such a lot has happened, a hip replacement for one. That was an interesting experience, rather overshadowed by Prince Philip who was having his hip replacement at about the same time and who, I feel, rather unfairly got a lot more publicity than I did – although to be fair he is a lot older and everyone in the Ullapool area seems to know about my hip replacement.

Needless to say I talked with the very nice anaesthetist all the way through the operation and was only momentarily mildly worried when the read out on the monitor that I thought was my heart rate flat-lined and no-one seemed to notice I was dead. The ward staff, OT’s, physios and Doctors etc. were all brilliant, especially the night nurses who did one monitoring check as a musical! The next morning I thought that it was an opiate-stoked hallucination until one of the other patients confirmed it! As bad experiences go it was really on the top end. Having lots of physical hobbies and a wife who is a physio plus a croft to work on has been really helpful, to say the least.

I got rather put out regarding the social construction of ethnicity in relation to the myth of a Celtic Britain last year. This brought out the pedant in me, always relatively easy, as in terms of the archaeology and biology Celtic Britain has about as much validity as ‘British values’ does in relation to actual British behaviour over our history. Having read Murray Pittock, a wonderful writer with a brilliant use of language and an apparent contempt for anyone who isn’t Murray Pittock or a clone, I now feel I could make a pretty convincing case for Klingon ethnicity for people who speak Klingon and have the inclination to wield a ‘Baatlek’, or whatever it is that Worf uses, feel part of a persecuted minority and vote Klingon Nationalist. (Apparently there is, or used to be, an American University course in ‘conversational Klingon’, presumably with a ‘Professor of Klingon Studies’!)

Certainly that the tribal peoples who lived in the Pretanic isles from the arrival of the Beaker People through the Bronze Age and Iron Age to the arrival of Scando-Anglo-Saxon peoples would not have thought of themselves as Celts seems to be the consensus so why should we?

This is something I will return to.

My personal felt ethnicity is usually ‘working class’, although because of my last job – listed as a profession – and some of my pretensions, there may be a queue to call me middle class or even an intellectual snob. Over Christmas I read, ‘Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future’, and absolutely heart-rending and uplifting book written by a man born in Barnsley and brought up during the post WW1 depression and that previous era of ‘austerity’, I agreed with the conclusions that he drew from his experience at a visceral level, not just intellectually. Generally I feel I have more in common and am more comfortable with people who are working class or from a working class background and who come from anywhere than I do with people born in Barnsley but who consider themselves as intrinsically a class above working folk.

I say ‘usually working class’ in the paragraph above because I am infected with a post-modern perspective in relation to ethnicity, something that really attracts Murray Pittock’s disgust.

I am NFE, suffering from ‘No Fixed Ethnicity’ from a felt perspective. I partly blame this on Netflix, (by the way Netflix where has ‘The Magnificent Century’ disappeared off to? Bring it back!). When I was watching ‘Ertugrul’, with occasional dips into ‘The Magnificent Century’, I felt Turkish – well up to the end of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent at least, although you have to feel conflicted by the siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto. Hence the shamshir and some of my clothing including a kind of Kayi hat I made out of the remnants of an old sheepskin jacket.

Fortunately I discovered that Barnsley, where most of my family still reside, has three Turkish restaurants, three! The food is great at all three. Last summer I was sitting in the sun at one of these restaurant. The waiter was friendly, solicitous and looked very Turkish and every so often someone would turn up and there was a ‘Salaam al malaikum’, (I may have the spelling wrong), with an answering ‘Malaikum salaam’ and it seemed like I was in that place we call ‘abroad’. The illusion was shattered when an obviously Barnsley born and bred woman walked past and the waiter, with a big smile, said ‘Ayup love, ars tha’ bin?’

Barnsley even has two Latin American restaurants. Alex and I went to one over Christmas, on a Saturday night when they have live music. The woman singing had a wonderfully smoky voice. I said that she reminded me of Astrud Gilberto at which point she gave me a hug and went on to sing ‘the girl from Ipanema’ for us and Alex and I got up and danced round the restaurant, doing a variation of a Cha Cha Cha in  slow motion as it were. So if you see something on you-tube with this middle-aged geezer in a tuxedo and young woman in a lovely dress dancing in a restaurant to ‘the girl from Ipanema’ it’s probably us.

Of course ‘Quin Empire’ and ‘War of Kings’ makes me feel rather Chinese however at the moment the wonderful looking ‘pro-blades’ Chinese swords and pudao are not full tang – can you believe it? I know! Nonetheless my combined Christmas present was a jian and the brilliant Iain of Glasgow’s Armour Class Swords is fitting a full tang blade as I write.

Of course in relation to fencing I am trying to locate in the Highlands during the Linn nan Creach, mainly the 16^th Century as the local ‘Battle of Leckmelm’ was in 1586. Clothes wise this means leinne and brat and early ‘brogues’. (Arguably the most long-lastingly fashionable of shoes, in Western Europe at least, as the design was more or less the same from the BA to the 18^th Century.) Optionally plus hosen-like trews, cut on the bias and shrunk to fit. Add sword, targe and long hafted axe, with some optional armour and there we are. To note that if you have the kit, i.e. some of the material cultural signifiers, and if you speak Gaelic or had ancestors who did then apparently you are Celtic, ethnically speaking according to some. As a Skelly of fairly recent Irish descent I find I meet the criteria. I think that this might upset Murray!

Also Arturo Perez Reverté via ‘Capitan Alatriste’ is giving me a definite Spanish inclination. Any holidays abroad will now have to be to warm Spanish speaking countries. In effect this means the cheapest holiday we can find in Spain! I have become a fan of Lope de Vega and have reading glasses and facial hair that attempt to make me look like Don Francisco de Quevado, I sometimes even limp a bit like him. In terms of the fencing this is obviously pushing me toward ‘Spanish Circle’. This all stems from an interest in naval history and a mild obsession with the Spanish Armada of 1588. Much misrepresented by English writers I find, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto provides a more realistic, balanced and less mythic history than most.

The real excitement just before Christmas was due to Matt Knight, another really sound person and happens to be the curator of the Bronze Age at the National Museum of Scotland, who arranged for Reuben, who is part of the fencing group I facilitate in Ullapool, and I to handle one of the Yetholm shields! Around three thousand years old, weighing only 1.27 kilos and elegantly designed to be functional in highly dynamic combat. It is an incredibly sophisticated piece of combat equipment contemporary with the Type IV rapier and the partisan-like Yetholm spear. I have a proposal to research a standardised methodology for combat archaeology which I hope to get off the ground with replica Yetholm type shields, (around £3,000 a pop), that could be used by the museum for travelling/outreach display and educational purposes after the research since the originals could not be risked. I reckon that the total cost of the research would be around £20,000, just a rough idea – so if you know anyone with that amount of money just hanging about please put them in touch!

Thanks again to Matt Knight for a brilliant experience, it was truly thrilling.

I am in the process of reading ‘The Lies We Were Told’. There may be good reasons for ‘Austerity’, for Scottish independence and for ‘Brexit’ but none of them are economic or for the financial benefit of the many. All of them would be or have been disastrous and ‘Austerity’ has slowed economic growth. The worst, most cynical and cruel of the three, to date, is ‘Austerity’. Even before it was introduced it was widely known that it would have terrible economic effects on the poorest and financially least resilient with knock-on effects on health, wellbeing, morbidity and mortality rates, inclusive of suicide, and especially having a negative effect on Mental Health. Worse still ‘Austerity’ has been accompanied by tax cuts to the rich and a totally unjustifiable flow of wealth to the already obscenely wealthy.

See also the book ‘Breadline Britain’ and to connect these fully to health outcomes look at ‘The Spirit Level’ by Wilkinson and Pickett – which also references ‘The Black Report’ and ‘The Health Divide’, published together, in the book ‘Inequalities in Health’ around 1983! I.E. successive governments have known since the 1980’s exactly how their economic policies would impact on the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society but carried on anyway for ideological reasons. I think it was the Rowntree Foundation that estimated that from 1983 to 1997 this resulted in at least 6,000 excess deaths per year! The last two Tory governments have happily presided over increasing wealth differentials, dragging their heels over real tax and social reform, in the full knowledge of the damage this would do!

Surely this is the triumph of ideology over compassion and if anything is evil it is this. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would conclude that the Tory party, and some other politicians, have major shares in drug companies – especially in anti-depressants (see ‘The Emperor’s New Drugs’).

Postcard of the month:

Anyway don’t believe me read the books and form your own opinions. The consensus seems to be that we are being royally screwed by ‘globalisation’, the over-mighty and totally self-interested people who run the multi-national corporations and the media that these people control. Add in short-sighted nationalism, with ‘ethnicity’ as proto-racism, and the accompanying culture of ‘I’m a victim’ and ‘blame the other’, and we have a ‘perfect storm’, where the economy is conceived of as being analogous to the weather and totally beyond human control.

“Damn them all, damn them all to hell.” To quote Charlton Heston, more on the nose in Sci Fi than in real life.

John Major was also on the nose this last week on the Today Programme. Look it up on BBC Sounds to get what he actually said, I will try to give you the gist. He spoke to the interviewer something like this: ‘Let’s face it. If there is a ‘no deal Brexit’ people like you and I will be alright. The top ten to five per cent will be alright, it will not really affect us and we will not particularly notice as we will be able to absorb the higher costs. But anyone on the average wage, even slightly above, will really suffer in every way. And their communities will suffer and become worse places to live.’

I think that I may have put some words into his mouth so ‘sorry Mr. Major’. I thought at the time, he really gets it, he may not have joined up all the dots as some others have done and connected it all to a form of ‘toxic capitalism’ that is a combination of mere gambling and ‘rentee capitalism’ that would surely have offended Adam Smith, who seems to have prioritised a moral and more compassionate agenda.

Some ‘well-heeled’ upper middle class woman on BH on Sunday was totally relaxed regarding a no deal Brexit. So what if the pound lost value, it was over-valued anyway, so what if prices went up in shops and we had inflation. Obviously if we had inflation then we would make borrowing more expensive etc. Presumably making poor people even poorer and even less able to afford luxuries like food, housing, heating and water etc. Such people are obviously entirely off her radar or on it but not worth considering because they are poor and by definition ‘unsuccessful’, lacking in ‘aspiration’ and inferior types who it might be better to get rid of really. This was a gobsmacking lack of empathy and understanding regarding anyone outside of her comfortable ‘bubble’.

What can we say of such people? All too common in our careless society.

Fortunately Alex, Joe and I are totally on the fringes of all that and generally see the best in people, in both little and big ways, with small and reflexive acts of thoughtfulness and kindness. It is not all perfect here in paradise, where are the Turkish and Latin American restaurants then? Generally, in terms of the people we know and who we bump into, as well as those we see regularly, the people around us make you feel glad to be human.

Now you might accuse me of a degree of hypocrisy with my obvious penchant for escapism (though only jailors would be opposed to escape) and my self-indulgence spending money on my hobbies, rather than lots of holidays and disposable fashion or necessities like most, I am certainly no better than anyone else and given enough money would I be any less self-indulgent, I rather doubt it as in some areas I can resist anything but temptation. So should I be spending all my disposable income on charity? Probably but I am just not good enough.

Although I am living in a glorified tent and we have only recently ‘got’ electricity via our water-turbine and PV array and am currently freezing to death in the yurt as our main heater, which got damaged in transit from China – Ali thought it was coming from Liverpool, easy to confuse the two as it turns out, is not working, I remain convinced that I, that we, are much better off than most. The very nice lady from Ebay is helping to sort it all out re: the heater with great advice and practical help.

The electrical system dumps electricity into our electrical yurt heaters but two days after the water turbine started working the rain more or less stopped! Sod’s law strikes again!

Last week I planted the best part of two hundred trees. In seven weeks I will plant willow and alder and possibly more blackthorn. In the early spring some juniper and blueberry bushes and later in the spring more fruiting trees and bushes as we continue to create the arboreal/horticultural infrastructure for our ‘forest garden’ ‘woodland croft’. At my age I will never live to see it get anywhere near its productive peak, neither will Alex I suspect but it will be our legacy. A sustainable climate-Change proof area of working land that will form the basis of a wonderful croft life for people in the future. People who, like us, will have the joyful responsibility for restoring and maintaining this land and on into the far future.

I will never live to see it yet I already do in my mind’s eye. The larch clad round house with a roof of wildflowers, the trees great and small, sheltering the fecund fruiting bushes around them with all the plants slowly improving the soil in quality and improving structure and the diversity and complexity of the overall ecology. With various fowl, Indian Runner ‘cross’ ducks and re-created Victorian Standard Indian Gamecock, foraging amongst the plants and leaf litter.

(Magic! It has just started raining and the rain seems to be getting heavier!)

Last night, beneath an electrum moon, I stood in the cold at the yurt platform railing, looking out over Sail Mhor, An T-Eallach and the mountains beyond, all snow-capped across the glittering loch. So bright was the moon that it was hard to look full upon and it was not night but a strange form of day, outside of time and place as if illuminating some ancient fantasy or other world. Standing within that darkly glowing landscape it seemed almost possible to believe in anything, elven folk and gods, heroes, ‘wyse women’ and my personal wyrd, even in British Celts!