Tuesday, 15th August, 2023
I’m sitting reading one of my favourite books from my youth. Fair Stood the Wind for France, by H E Bates. It’s like reading a new novel but with an echo of known excellence. I want to know if I feel it’s as good now, forty years on, as I did then.
It is.
The weird thing is I’ve not had an alcoholic drink or a coffee for four days. And the usual detox detriments don’t seem to have come on. Or not to the same degree. Nor the tiredness, bad energy, squalid thinking. Well, a bit, but in much larger spaced waves and with smaller peaks.
Wait! That’s not the weird thing. I’m reading because the skipper’s gone for a doze for an hour or two and I’m having a rest in the sun.
Skipper?
You see, I’m sitting reading on a boat. A yacht. It friggles and fidgets, sways like a drunkard’s walk, alters its position in space in three dimensions. Sitting in the cockpit with the sun on my back, changing horizons with other boats, the jetty, a distant bridge, the river. Even though we’re not moving, we’re tied to the jetty, we’re moving. Never still. Myriad colours of kaleidoscopic grey-y greens of the water, blues of the sky and whites shading to the different greys of the clouds. It doesn’t seem so dominant, the barely detectable movement of something that’s still, but still on a tide. Inside the cabin, in front of me is an oblong window, higher up, through which the movement of the mast and flying bridge of the boats opposite is more measured. Even looking within, at the panelled walls of the boat, my ears’ movement tubes (technical term) are detecting motion. It’s not unpleasant, just … different. Weird. It doesn’t affect my eyes’ movement across the line of the book, nor the reverse sweep cycads (now that is a technical term) that means my eyes arrive at the correct point to start the next line. Makes pouring kettled water into the coffee cup a skill, though.
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