Pleasant Sunday

Share something lovely, please.

I hope everyone is having a pleasant Sunday? Please share a photo of something nice in the comments if you are. I often wish that people would post more online about decent cups of tea, or encounters with nature, or friends, than about philosophy or politics. Particularly on a Sunday.

Social media was better when it was stupid pictures of people’s dinner, or something. Even LinkedIn is now a place where outrage is taking over. It’s not helpful.

I’m having a fairly relaxed time at sea, with most of my trip behind me now. I was supposed to be going home today, but I think I’ll be on board for another 4 to 10 days, due to weather delays and remedial works to be done on our subsea construction.

Between Norway and the Southern North Sea, I have been treated to some seriously beautiful sights, that no camera could ever do justice to. Sailing through a double circular rainbow this week returned me to a childish state of wonder. Something that doesn’t happen too often when you’re pushing 40.

So that’s been nice.

I think I’ve broken my toe. A closed, non-displaced, metatarsophalangeal stress fracture, I believe. Just where my big toe meets my foot. It’s a bloody nuisance.

I may only have a few days left, so it isn’t worth doing much about. I’ve double-bagged my socks and loosened my shoelaces on the right hand side. I’m using the elevator and trying not to make my limp too obvious in case they decide to make a fuss and med-evac me. I can’t be bothered with all that, so I’m just going to munch painkillers, put my feet up in the office and let everyone think I’m just being lazy for my last couple of weeks.

Fingers crossed, the sailor’s traditional medicine of sleep and stubbornness will cure the worst of it over the next few days.

That’s the worst thing about getting older. You go to bed with a niggle and wake up injured! What’s up with that?

I’ve been reading Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland. If you’ve never read the British version of The Spectator, Rory had a regular half-page column at the back called Wiki Man. The column was very good and full of lateral thinking combined with titbits of fascinating trivia. The title of the column implies the same personality that you will find in his books and podcast appearances. That kind of person who is full of puppy-like enthusiasm, bubbling with information like a pot that is boiling over.

Naturally, you need a posh public schoolboy accent to pull off that act. If you’re working class or lower and you pull that act, they’ll diagnose you with ADHD, drug you, or worse. But the Stephen Frys and Rory Sutherlands of this world can say anything with that accent, and 99% of you would believe anything they said as though it carried divine authority.

But we can’t hold that against the chap. The credulity is our fault, not his. And he does make some very fine points, in a very entertaining way. Even though I’m quite dubious about his claim to be a conservative.

Since the 05^th of September, I’ve spent all of my free time finishing off a ship security training course for a client. I finished that around the 20^th, and I’ve been in a bit of a reverie since. I started the Orthodox Study Bible, which has an Old Testament translated directly from the Septuagint, and a New Testament translated from the New King James, I believe. I’ve listened to 1177 B.C. by Eric H Cline, and The Creative Act by Rick Rubin on audiobook as well.

God, marketing, behavioural psychology, design and the Bronze Age Collapse.

Trying to see the path ahead of you is an interesting thing. All of the little signals we get from the world around us are continuously feeding us with new elements to be integrated into our self-identity. Family, food, friends, and stories. Fears. Pleasures.

One of the things I love about this stage of my career is that I don’t really have to think about things too consciously now. I’ve spent enough time, on enough ships, doing enough different things, with enough different people, that I can just kind of operate on gut feelings. An approach speed feels too high. Vessel movements are too large. That vibration means something. That noise has changed. I’d better tell someone about this or that. Or x, y, z, would be better resolved without paperwork. A quiet word will be enough.

TS Elliot once said: “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Working at sea is the remedy to that sentiment. Getting used to storms, and nightshifts, and constant motion and noise is the pre-requisite conditioning that allows you to not notice these things anymore. Isolation, short colleague-level friendships, and meditation are the basic monastic elements of the life at sea. Fasting, exercise, and harshly strict routines become comforting centres.

To give the libtards their due, there are in fact other ways of knowing. :)

The creative element of the job may not get you into the Tate Modern, but it is art, in the traditional sense. Subsea construction requires constant effort, an exceptional level of problem-solving ability, teamwork, and an unrelenting amount of planning, contingency planning, revision, remedials, and hypotheticals. Interpreting a weather forecast is no simple thing, when you are trying to manage the minute detail of swapping out 27 off-signing crew for 27 on-signers, coming from all over Europe and the Philippines.

At sea, no thing is static. Every target is a moving target, and there are no goalposts or backstops. If mistakes don’t cost lives or livelihoods, they often cost millions. And very often your day-to-day direction is utterly minimal. I think I’ve had a maximum of about 3 emails from the people who sent me here. Everyone on board has to be a self-starter. Offshore vessels are great that way. Everybody wants to work. We had a Russian and a Ukrainian on board together here, just getting on with it.

It is an art in the sense that it requires the coming together of every aspect of your conscious and unconscious being. That the mission requires you, and 60 other people on board, to subordinate yourself to a single aim.

If you have ever been on a long hike in the mountains, when you are low on water, you’ll know the feeling. When you are thirsty you are no longer walking past mile 8 of a 20-mile route, near x landmark that you expected to see on your map. You are walking to the next source of water.

Reducing your life, your wants, desires and attention to a single aim is a spiritual thing. And it is something that thousands of people do, every day, in pursuing a vocation.

I’ve been asked to write about salty characters I’ve sailed with and Viking history. I was quite keen to comment on that, but to be honest I’m in too much pain to think at the moment, so that will have to do for this week’s article I’m afraid. Although here are a few pics from a Norwegian Fjord, to sate the Scandi-philes.

The village of Dirdal serves the quarry that our ship was visiting. Owned and operated by locals, they kindly sell bits of their mountains to us, so we can protect energy infrastructure on the seabed. Reportedly, the owner of the quarry is a proud Dirdal-ian, and is generous to the local community in terms of employment, training and philanthropy.

What is so awesome about the Fjords is how vast and unchanging they are. While you may not appreciate the scale of their grandeur from a snapshot on your phone screen, you may appreciate that you are looking at a view that has not changed since the time of the earliest Germanic settlers in Norway. The Vikings’ ancestors looked out upon the same view that you are seeing now.

But if you don’t mind, I’d really appreciate some comments below. Let me know what you’ve submitted your life to over the years. What mundane job or seemingly humble routine and unrelenting task has given you satisfaction, purpose or meaning?

Please share, and I’ll raise a cup of tea in your honour later tonight.

Anyway, time to go munch some more painkillers. :)

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