Good evening, on what is the end of week what ever in the long list of whatever’s that we are making for ourselves at the moment.

There is a certain safety in routine, it gives you a fixed point to work from, even in the height of conflict the underlying routines continue. In the Second World War when my father was serving in destroyers the paymaster used to dress for dinner each night. During the Falklands campaign we used to meet for a sherry before what ever meal it was at 7 pm. As we operated in Zulu time (GMT) and the Falklands is several hours behind us in time (several decades if you have been there) you can understand the confusion our body clocks were suffering.

We are settling into a gentle routine, that involves all the usual domestic chores and then the sudden added excitement of seeing how flat and small a parcel you can make with the cardboard before the recycling team arrive on Friday morning. The joy then becomes breaking the routine. We are limiting our excursions in line with the recommendations, Jun staying in more than I, since I do the weekly shopping run, although we have discovered it works better at five days for fresh fruit and veg. So having shopped on Tuesday, which was also my exercise trip, two sort of non days were rewarded with sun, light westerly winds and an urge to be out there. So we did a milk run to the machine on the farm, followed by a slight detour to a quiet lane where the wild garlic grows. Jun loves it, but it has a short season between pickable and flowering usually about three weeks, so today was our second forage. So whatever we may die from, it won’t be vampires for the next few days. The odour oozes from your body like the scent of vodka from a Russian alcoholic, it just does not go away.

So the end of week two, I think of semi isolation. In admiration for all those who are working to keep things going. We applauded the NHS last night, which allowed distant conversations with neighbours. Today it was the turn of the recycling crews who got my thanks.

I hear you ask, what did you do with garlic, well tonight’s delight was Thai sweet chilli scallops with stir fried Chinese cabbage and garlic. The sweet chilli sauce was excellent a recipe from Nigel Slater, stolen from Peter Gordon. The kitchen was wonderfully aromatic. We aren’t!

For that other world we live in, rather like – which window shall we look through today, the dressing up box said Pope! So I am am writing this epistle to you in ecclesiastical white on the sofa in the living room. Over the weekend we will empty both boxes (trunks) and set apparel to where we are travelling, but for tonight after scallops I am in the shoes of the fisherman.

What ever you do, do stay safe.

As always

Geoffrey

Sweet chilli scallops with stir fried wild garlic and veg

From our evening walk.

Good evening, as we continue our voyage of discovery. It becomes more like a ship deployment each day as you are unable to escape each other. In real terms there are conflicting stories of hope and dismay, it is of course dependent in which camp you wish to sit.

For those of you with only black and white

Finally, having discover my treasure trove of shemaghs I have lost the ones with tassels.

A shout out to Stephen our journalist neighbour who is sitting this out in the Plague Pit that is South London. Stay safe and wash your hands!

Good evening, well we have had Captain’s rounds and are sitting waiting for our Greek Cypriot supper to cook. Pastito if you ask.

For so many years of my life in the Royal Navy, my daily routine was governed by a marvellous document, produced by the Routines Office Writer on a Gestetner, typed onto a blank foil and then produced in hundreds (on the carrier). It contains abbreviations that a code breaker at GCHQ would find difficult to fathom. A bottle of something if someone comes up with a translation.

DAILY ORDERS
Routine Office
HMS ARMAGEDDON

29 March 2020                                                                            at sea

Sunrise 0624/Sunset 2108
Sunday Anchor/Sea Routine                                                       Duty watch 1 Port
OOD Lt Ringbolt
DPO PO Cook Typhoid

Routine
0700          Call the Duty Watch
0800          Colours
0805          Scrub the upper deck
0930          Communion Quarterdeck
1100           Call the hands
1100-1300 Brunch
1230           Weigh Anchor/passage/canal transit brief
1330           SSDCUANBCDS3CYHOOTROTDCOTUD
1400           Weigh anchor passage to Port Said
1800           SSDCUANBCDS3CYCASDAHHOOTROTDCOTUD
1830           Anchor Port Said roads, transit preps
2108           Sunset
300030      SSDCUANBCDS3CYCASDAHHOOTROTDCOTUD RM UD sentries close up
0100           Embark Canal Pilot commence transit

Captains Rounds
The Captain was impressed by the high standards achieved, all round, today. It was an excellent effort by the whole ships company. We are better prepared for the tasks that now face us.

Cakes were awarded to Verd Redwood for his determination in continuing to clean his spaces when the upper deck was closed to him.

Best spaces overall, most improved and Captains pet to Jun for her hard work to ensure the continued cleanliness of the whole ship. BZ

Communion
The Chaplain requests whoever replaced his bottle of communion wine with a bottle of Buckfastleigh Tonic Wine to return same to Chapel ASAP.

The Captain Writes
I received a letter in the mail from the Ships sponsor, Lady Thrice-Nightly. She has been touched by the kind letters of support on the passing of her husband in a hunting accident. She singled out the letter from the Stokers Mess offering to lend a hand and send a party to help her and her three daughters, Chastity, Felicia and Virginia in picking fruit and bringing the harvest home. Well done Stokers Mess, please talk with the Master Gunner, who accompanied L T-N to a hunt ball on etiquette and the use of stamina tablets.

Beard growing competition
Entries for the competition are now closed and the Captain looks most likely to win.

Library
The library will be open from 1900 to 1905 for return of books

Naval Stores
Note that the stores will be closed for the next three days for stocktaking

B D Drummond
First Lieutenant

Verd receives his Lemon drizzle cake

Jun receives her prize cake.

Good morning, day two of government imposed lockdown and we are both alive. Jun manages to disappear within our tiny house so we are going hours without seeing her. No doubt there is a bag somewhere with my loud shirts and flared trousers waiting for the binmen.

Driving back from a friends wedding in Taunton last Friday I was struck by the number of CCTV cameras in place as you approach the Glastonbury site. On poles, cherry pickers and I expect trees. I was then talking with Jun as we drove to my aunt’s in Sevenoaks Kent, just how heavily surveilled we are in the UK.

Then we looked at some of the houses close to my aunt’s home,  high fences and walls, CCTV and cameras on the gates. Some private roads seem to have systems as well before you even get into the road. Is valuing your privacy so that no-one gets close without your approval or is it a fear the family Van Dyck might go missing when you go to Waitrose for the weekly shop.

It is all rather scary and brought to a head in a way by the Johnson Scandal this weekend. I will have to check that my neighbours little solar panels for their garden lights on the fence are just that. It seems that you cannot go far without being observed – electronically. We now notice houses in Wells that seem more akin to Fort Apache the Bronx than desirable des res on the edge of the city. It is all a sad reflection on our society.

Then someone trashed the tubs that my neighbour put together to try and make it a little more attractive where we live. Just to add insult to injury they came back and took our doorside hanging basket.  All rather sad, but following our local Police advice I am able to say, Big Brother is watching you.

As we enter June you need to remember the weather is fickle. The commemorations for the 75th anniversary of D Day will take place this week and that was a close run thing with the weather. I recall a mid summer party a few years ago where people huddle in my small marquee in my back garden dressed like members of Shackleton’s ill fated expedition. So June is a month to be  treated with caution.

As a country we seem to have lost those things that other nations looked up to us for, fair play, honesty, kindness and a welcoming out stretched arm to those avoiding oppression. I wonder how Karl Marx or Gandhi would fair at Heathrow or Southampton nowadays. Our ability to be impartial has gone, social media connects you to millions (potentially), but denies you an opinion. A local MP has, I think bravely, come out in support of Boris Johnson for PM, looking at the twitter feed swathes of comments have been deleted and the general thread of those that remain are fairly emotive and derogatory.

Over the weekend a band has been dropped from the Glastonbury schedule because of the lyrics of their songs, Ann Widdecombe has said some things that have been edited to make them more inflammatory than they were by the media. I don’t like many politicians, but we must allow them to have opinions even if they are wholly wrong, because they are just opinions. We used to be able to discuss and rebuff them by well thought out argument, now our screams at the television become badly put together Tweets and do nobody any good. Look at the current state visitor who shoots from the lip repeatedly.

So my opinion for what it is worth, is break their arguments in discussion, you will win more people to your cause than demonstration or violence.

Today I had my first swim of the season in our local Lido, the boiler is broken, so rather like the current political environment…’Ooo baby it’s cold inside’

Before you dash off a letter to your MP or scream on social media please read:

”Friends, remainers, leavers, countrymen, lend me some years..

I come to praise the NHS, not bury it.”

It has been a stressful twenty four hours. It started last evening with a telephone call from an elderly neighbour, “can you come over, I have collapsed on the floor, the back door is open”

My initial response was soon thwarted, as a short arse, I couldn’t reach over his back gate to undo the bolt, so back home to collect Jun, so I could lift her up to gain access. His knee had given out in the back garden and he had crawled back in, tried to pull himself up, but his leg let him down and back on the floor he went. We made him comfortable, but he didn’t want an ambulance. After some persuasion he allowed me to call 111, who as you might expect put me through to the ambulance service. Who, for some unknown reason in Somerset, were receiving an unprecedented number of calls. A discussion came to the result we would sit tight and they would get to us as soon as they could, as he wasn’t in danger and no apparent serious injury.

Two hours after our call, the fast response paramedic arrived, lots of checks and tests and an ECG, by now our neighbour was sitting in an arm chair, which was good. His state, coupled by the priority meant we would have to wait, which was fair enough, he was in no imminent danger. I was given advice, incident numbers and instructions what to do if…..

Jun went home as it was now after ten pm and there was little two of us could do, I stayed. At 0200, I had a chat with the 999 ambulance operator, there were tens of calls with a higher priority than us, but we were not forgotten.  The same at 0540.

At 0715 we had a call from a paramedic who said that an ambulance would be available to come to us shortly…..and it did. What a great crew, apologetic, reassuring, the young paramedic was as chatty as Barbara Windsor on gin and steroids. More checks, but the realistic observation, that the need to go to an A&E at a  distant hospital had passed. Our local cottage hospital has a minor injuries unit and X-Ray department which would negate the twenty two mile journey to Yeovil and it would be easier to collect later etc.

So strapped to chair our neighbour left gently in an ambulance, the paramedic still staccato like a machine gun. She was great.

A couple of hours later, X-rayed, checked, tested, relaxed he was released and we could bring him home.

Our NHS is under great pressure, but by God it is good when you see it working.

Is my neighbour upset by a twelve hour wait for an ambulance, not at all. Ninety three year old ex Royal Marines are made of sterner stuff, and we hope that there are a lot of people across the Somerset area, who found themselves ringing 999 last night and whose loved ones are in a safer state because we had to wait.