Sick Together

Integrity, and the summer of my life.

I’m back at sea. It was blowing a Strong Gale when I started writing this, so that meant the project slowed enough for me to sit and think for a moment.

I’m happy in bad weather. It forces you to stop. Nothing can be done outside. These are the days to focus on the inside.

Storms are the mandatory Sabbath of the sea.

I’ve been on board this specific ship for a couple of weeks now. It is my second time on this cable-lay vessel this year, so I’m quite used to her and her crew.

I’ve also been on this ‘project’ since February, including some work ashore. We are constructing a mid-sized offshore wind farm off the coast of Denmark. I’ve been involved in multiple marine surveys and aspects of the mobilisation for it, spanning several different ships, shipyards, a Danish beach, and several ports across Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and Germany.

Long-time readers would be forgiven for thinking I’d drowned, given the lack of blogging I’ve achieved this year. If I’m honest, it’s been a nagging feeling for several months, but one that has remained firmly near the bottom of my list of priorities.

The moment I got on this vessel in May, I had to go straight into polyphasic sleep. The tempo of operations and the frequency with which incidents and failures have occurred here has been quite tough to deal with.

Adding on top of that, fraud, deception, and high-stakes contract disputes.

Dirty tactics, like getting me out of bed at 3 in the morning to wear me down, and use exhaustion, confusion, lies, and social pressure to get me to sign off on activities, only for disaster and failure to follow. It’s been brutal.

Personality clashes between the contractor and the client were really tough as well. The psychologist types would run out of diagnostics if they tried to classify all the different types of dysfunctional and ‘toxic’ personality traits that have been on display here over the past months.

As the Marine Warranty Surveyor on the cable ship, I’ve been sent out on behalf of the construction insurance underwriters, as their marine representative. In essence, my job is to read and understand the many hundreds of pages of marine engineering diagrams and procedures in place for the project, witness the activities offshore, and ensure that “What they do, matches what they said they were going to do”.

Essentially, I’m here to act as an educated conscience for the project. And I have a big, giant, ‘red-button-authority’ to stop all operations at any time where I deem the contractor to be in potential breach of warranty.

It’s not a responsibility to be abused or taken lightly. With maybe 12 or 15 vessels involved in some of our operations, I’ve estimated the cost of me saying ‘Stop’, to be about £800K per day, about £35K per hour, or £580 per minute.

So, you don’t want to push that big button of authority unnecessarily. And when you do press it, you need to be able to be fully certain of your position, the logic of your argument, and the proposed solution, in very short order.

With a slippery operator and a suspicious client, you also need an iron will if you’re going to maintain your honour and independence.

If you stop that job on the contractor’s time, the client will support you. If you stop it on the client’s time, the contractor will support you. And when both parties are haemorrhaging cash, but acting against the long-term interests of their own assets, you need to stand firm and play it exactly down the line.

• Stick to the facts.

• Take contemporaneous notes.

• Write clear reports, immediately as events unfold.

• Take lots of photographs and videos as evidence.

• Do not respond to name-calling, complaints about your conduct, or lies.

• Just stick to your guns, and the facts, and nothing else.

• When you are paid for your independent judgment, taking sides is lethal.

So, when my own employer’s representative sat me down one day, in the middle of about 6 days of downtime, and said: ‘It absolutely sickens me that you won’t just take my word for it. We’re paying you, and you should accept what I’m saying.’

The only possible response to such hostility, if I were to retain my credibility, was, ‘I can only state what I have observed myself, and report the facts. Opinion and rumours are just that, and they will have no bearing in my report or decisions.’

Not losing your temper is hard sometimes.

I went home for the summer holidays. The children had about 6.5 weeks off.

I had a week at home with the wife, which was a little tense, because I had been away much longer than planned due to the problems offshore, and life naturally falls apart in your absence.

Tempers flared, but that’s part of coming home sometimes. Particularly after a hard one.

I then did a 2-week stint in Amsterdam offloading spare cables to a storage tank, before the kids’ summer started properly.

I travelled on my birthday.

I turned 40, so naturally, it triggered a moment (or two) of self-reflection.

Traditionally, when there were a lot more time-served skippers around, you would not be promoted to Captain until you were 40 years old. I don’t know how far that tradition goes, or from which culture it originates. Although I like to think it’s as ancient as Moses. He spent 40 years as a Prince in Egypt, before becoming the captain of his Shepherd-clan for another 40, and then spent 40 years leading the Exodus through the wild desert.

40 has a nice round feel to it. It feels like a life. But it also feels like a preparation for life.

I've been married for (about) 12 years. I’ve been present and hands-on during the births of all 3 of my children. I’ve lost friends. I’ve travelled the world, not as a tourist, but as a working man paying his way. I’ve been in some close calls and some tough scrapes. I’ve met and worked with modern-day indentured servants. I’ve been to funerals. I’ve spoken at one. A couple of those were for children who’ve passed.

I think you need to have lived enough of life if you’re going to be fit to take responsibility for anyone else.

I think that when I join a new ship, and there isn’t enough grey hair among the officers, I instantly know we’re going to have a hard time.

You can’t buy wisdom.

However, I must say, I really enjoy what I’m doing now, as a Marine Consultant and a Warranty Surveyor. Even if my publishing activities have stalled somewhat. It feels like I am where I’m supposed to be.

I’ve served on all kinds of ships over my 22-year maritime career. Maturity in my profession has been letting go of the desire to be ‘the one in charge’. Bringing others to lead themselves, and make decisions that lead responsibly is the mission.

Knowing that our actions affect everyone on each of the ships involved in this project, from the ones with a crew of 3 to those with a crew of 99, is the kind of vivid responsibility that very few professions demand. Literally, one of life and death. One decision to expose a diver to unnecessary risk, and we could easily take out a young man’s life, and all the lives of the children he might have had. Or failing to check the limit switches on a 20T tensioner could leave a father of 5 with a severed limb, unable to provide. Even the youngest 16-year-old trainee on a ship could kill everyone on board, with only a moment of reckless abandon.

We need sufficient self-awareness to understand not just the costs and benefits that will accrue to our own, short-term, narrow, material self-interest. But rather, the brotherhood of the sea demands that we look beyond the end of our own nose. Taking the morally and technically correct position, and refusing to move from it, even if people hate and attack us, is the job.

Honour.

Invisible, but real.

So, on this occasion, to be accused of having ‘Sickening’ levels of integrity, at my age, was the most timely and profound of compliments.

I thought, ‘I’ll take that’.

Part of my healing and purgative penance on return home was to plan the activities for the summer. My wife having had her nerves and stamina officially maxed out by the time I returned to parenting duties.

We did a wee Scotland & North of England road trip, including:

• Bannockburn

• Dunbar

• Hiking up to Pictish monuments

• Some lovely Air b’n’bs (Hotels are terrible for families)

• Lindisfarne

• Holy Isle

• Boat trips to the puffin and seal colonies of the Farne Islands,

• Bamburgh castle

• Durham Cathedral

• Whitby Abbey

• Newcastle museum - complete with Roman artefacts that you would need to see to believe,

• A trip on the pirate boat at Whitby

• Multiple trips to the beach, including camping, fishing, crabbing, and one sunny evening on Bamburgh beach, where my children saw salmon leaping from the water, dolphins frolicking to catch them, and seals playing just a couple of dozen metres away from where they were paddling (as if that were normal)

• York Minster Cathedral, AND;

• Their first visit to a Tim Hortons!

It was truly amazing.

I don’t have as many photographs to share as I would like, because my phone died. However, this did enhance my appreciation of the moment, relieving me of the burden to document everything I was experiencing. (Bliss, until you need google maps).

Oh, and while at Durham Cathedral, we saw their collection of Original Copies of the Magna Carta and the forest charters.

Let me say that again for you.

Their original copies, from 1216.

It was, so, so special.

Ladies and gentlemen, despite the sudden increase in children being named after terrorist heroes in the South East and in the capital, let me assure you that England is not yet dead.

But what England, or the United Kingdom, ‘means’, is something that we need to consider before our weight and attention are squandered by spurious online crusaders and shallow politicking.

The recent flag protests give us a clue.

Why are leftists and terror-supporters so offended by Union Jacks, Saint Andrew, Saint George and Saint Patrick flags flying in the streets? Why, if these people fly foreign flags or communist flags in their bio, are they now crying that ‘flags never solved anything’?

If they don’t believe in the unifying power of Saints, what are they so worried about?

Is there something magical happening that they are afraid of?

But here is the thing. Are you just a flag-waving moron, like the Left paints you to be? Or are you going to be British? Are you going to get married? And have some kids? Maybe go to church? Teach your children some history?

If not, then please, just stop. You’ve had long enough to do those things by now.

Since the legalisation of abortion in the UK in 1968, approximately 11.2 million abortions have been performed (source Grok). Grok reckons that, “Assuming the 11.2 million aborted babies since 1968 followed the UK’s average fertility rate (TFR ~1.8) and had no abortions, the female half (5.6 million) would have had approximately 8.8 million children by 2022, primarily from those aborted between 1968 and 1997. This is a rough estimate, as it excludes second-generation offspring and assumes all females follow the average”…

So, an opportunity cost of about 20 million British citizens have had their lives prevented by a government-funded disgenics program called the NHS, since 1968. Probably even more, if abortion hadn’t become a national pastime. (We do like a hobby, though, don’t we)?

Grok also estimates that Britain has imported 27 million immigrants to the UK in that same period. With about 5 million of those coming in only since Covid, in 2021.

Do you think we’d need 27 million immigrants in the UK if we hadn’t allowed the femi-nazis and the eugenicists to put our nation in debt, to subsidise the pre-emptive strike against 20 million of our children?

What are we fighting for?

The National-Socialist Health Service isn’t part of the Britain that King Alfred fought for. King Arthur wouldn’t be an advocate for censorship police:

King Robert the Bruce didn’t carry Saint Kessog’s bones into battle, for carbon capture schemes and CBDCs.

Saint George, Saint Andrew, and Saint Patrick would not recognise the society we have become as something they would wish to patronise.

If you are waving the banners of those great and holy men, I hope you are not doing it so that we can go back to the unthinking post-war, pseudo-socialist, nihilism that brought us here.

I hope you’re doing it because you love your country, and want it to live. Not because you hate ‘the muzzas.’

If you love Britain, get married, build a life, and Make Albion Grow Again! (Can we re-trademark MAGA over here?)

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Invisible Bonds - Rethink the Individual

I am married with 3 children. I have never looked back since I was married. Being a father and a husband is the greatest element of my life, and there is no close second.

There should be nothing but gratitude for the path that leads us to a union in marriage. But, in this modern world, both my wife and I had a history before meeting each other on a cruise liner.

We at least met the old-fashioned way. No apps. Just awkward advances and messy flirting. If I’d met her sooner, I would have married her sooner. But we needed to become who were before we met. So there is no second-guessing the past.

But I do feel sorry for the online generation coming up behind us.

One day last year, I had a dream that an ex-girlfriend of mine had gotten married. We said goodbye in my dream. It was real.

When I woke up, I checked online, and she had indeed recently changed her maiden name. She had married and taken her husband’s new name. And I knew it.

Since then, I have come to accept this as evidence of the biblical view that each soul is a part of a communal body. That, when we have sex with someone, we are not simply ‘having fun’. We are exchanging and intertwining our souls.

This is such an alien concept to the modern mind now. But, I, regretfully, feel it to be true.

I don’t know how this works, but I understand now that our soul (at the very least) is the permanent part of our life that exists outside of time and space. When we die, our chance to refine it further is over.

We are all taken to God, and the character of the person we have become will either bathe in His light; or be burned by it.

How can you express this to people who view themselves as mechanical entities, in a clockwork Universe, devoid of the idea of permanence? A world where seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are the only values? Maybe with a token gesture towards ‘consent’ as a moral garnish?

Yesterday, two shipmates of mine defended OnlyFans, digital prostitutes like Bonnie Blue, and whore houses. They applauded Bonnie Blue’s material success, her right to choose, and her enlightened ex-husband and mother for supporting her choice. They bemoaned only the fact that social media and cell phones had made conversation in the whore house such a rarity, as all the other patrons were glued to their screens.

‘It’s not like it used to be’, they complained.

I tried to express how porn is training people to be gay, sterile, pleasure-seeking, satiated drones, who fund child-trafficking, money laundering and criminal gangs with their pocket money via these websites.

No.

The entirely individual society, that thinks ‘judgement’ itself is immoral, and thinks that momentary consent is the only remaining value, has nothing to say against these issues of soul.

Let alone the soul of a family, or a nation.

Now, all I can think of is how much I have failed my friends and family in fellowship.

I am developing an extreme distaste for people now trying to talk up ‘Saving The West’, when this is what Western Values have led to. Atomisation isn’t an abstract concept. It is the shattering of communion.

While visiting Berlin Cathedral earlier in the spring, I saw a beautiful statue of Martin Luther. This Icon of the man who is credited, ultimately, with the destruction of icons and the veneration of saints in my home country produced serious cognitive dissonance in me. When I visited Saint Andrews in Scotland, there were many statues of saints there with their faces smashed off, in our great iconoclasm.

As it turns out, Luther, Knox, Calvin, and Henry VIII seem to have accidentally instilled in us such a thirst for rebellion that we can no longer conceive of the context in which these men championed their particular virtues. We have become such an extreme manifestation of the ideas that they spawned that we’re now adrift in the fog.

What people are truly mourning, and appealing to, when they call for a return to ‘The West’, or a desire to resurrect an Industrialised nation is really a call for communion. Unity in purpose, fellowship and meaning.

Mechanistic modernism comes out of the Schisms and from an embracing of the spirit of the rebel. And we should see now its fruits. Infanticide. Tyranny. Suspicion. Inversion. Fear. Narcissism. Loneliness. State-subsidised suicide.

The self is nothing without God, the family, the clan, or the society. These appeals to the past are a tacit acknowledgement that we are born of the past. That we are the image-bearers of our forebears. That we are connected with, and loved, by invisible beings.

That we are not alone.

The denial that communion is life is what has killed our society.

How many mums do you hear now complaining about the absence of ‘the village’?

They feel the ghosts of their ancestors weeping for what we’ve sacrificed, when they complain about that.

And no, it isn’t just that each generation bemoans the next. This is not inevitable, nor is it desirable. Suicide, depression, anxiety, sex-crimes, and all manner of other negative things are ‘up’. Marriage, child-births, home ownership, community, friendships, club memberships, and happiness are all objectively ‘down’.

Resurrecting the values that got us here is mere nostalgia and fetish.

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage will not stop that decline, and nor should they wish to. Winding back the clockwork universe, without changing its underlying assumptions, will only achieve a stay of execution.

Objectivity and strict material rationality have brought us to the brink of spiritual destruction. Terror flags and communist flags lined the streets of our capital after we abandoned the ideals of our ancestors. Not before.

Our only hope now is to pray for our enemies. Both internal and external.

We are not alone. And it is high time we remembered that.

Photo by Mark mc neill on Unsplash

When we visit places like Lindisfarne and Durham Cathedral, or look at Viking artefacts gifted to York Minster, we should remember that a nation is a living thing. Nobody can steal what we are.

The extinct languages of this land, the Manx, Pictish, Cumbric and Norn, should remind us of that life. The stone circles, a memento of our surrendered practices of slavery, paganism and human sacrifice. The Norman cathedrals and parish churches, a reminder of the faith in a distributed human authority.

As a people, we need not fear the end of this political cycle. The end of post-modern rebelliousness, globalist-techno-fascism, or good old national-stealth-service bureaucratic socialism. We’ve lived through it all, and much worse, before.

We should not cling to the things of the past, mindlessly or angrily holding onto them for fear of change. We should examine them to remember what brought us to unity in the first place.

There has only ever been one force that made us do that. And we will not find it again by going alone.

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