Nothing of importance happened.

Note to readers – the title of my blog post today is actually a misquote of something that wasn’t said in the first place but given the circumstances the made up misquote is quite funny ; i’ll get to it ‘dreckly’ as we say in Cornwall.

Blog time : it’s the end of week 3 of year 3 of my Pathfinder build and I can confidently say that nothing of importance got done this week because what I am waiting on is the trailer to be built at one end of the country and delivered to this end at which time we will go and collect it and then the work really begins. The only practical things that I got done this week were finishing and fastening the two oar risers outboard of the cockpit coaming – that being just about the last practical job that I can do before really having to heave the boat out from under the shelter and start to rig the boat. After last week’s excitement of having the name painted on the transom it’s been a flat…….although interesting week.**

The oar risers, by the way, do have a smart pair of Bronze oarlock sockets not fitted in the photograph below, my idea with the riser and it’s two different oar socket positions is to give two different rowing positions : the first is to allow a standing rowing position facing forward (standing in the cockpit obviously) using the forward of the two sockets, the aft socket should allow me to sit in a raised position on the center compartment and row from there using the aft socket for the oars. What I didn’t do this week is bond and fasten the aft sculling notch to take a single oar to scull the boat with – i’m just not sure about the position of the raised wooden ‘notch’ that I have made and i’m undecided on whether I would prefer to have another Bronze oar socket on a small riser on the transom to take an oarlock for the single oar.

Time to deal with that misquote and then to explain why I used it today.

First, the actual historical misquote is ‘nothing of importance happened today’ and is incorrectly ascribed to king George the third of Great Britain and is said to have been his diary entry for the 4th of July 1776 . Now, I know or hope that my American visitors will know that that was the day they declared independence from the British government – our problem today being that George never actually said that and certainly never wrote it in his diary because he just didn’t keep a diary. Had it happened it would have been ironically and hilariously funny but the misquote was actually made up for the television series, the X Files. It’s a good story though.

The reason I dropped the misquote into my blog post today is nothing to do with the boat and only slightly to do with the minor problem of the workshop electrics ‘blowing up’ – in fact the electrics didn’t actually blow up but there was a bang when I tried to flip the lights on and the main breaker board in the house tripped out. If you’re wondering we do in fact have ‘proper’ electrics from the house to the workshop in the form of a 20mm armored cable and a breaker box in the workshop as well. This is vastly better than what we inherited when we came here which is that the power supply to the workshop was in the form of a domestic extension cable crudely suspended from a length of cheap galvanized wire from the outside of the house to a pole outside the workshop……in the rain the whole workshop used to ‘fizz’ slightly until all of the house fuses tripped out.

Aft sculling notch proposed position but not fitted this week.

My ‘nothing much happened’ today is due to something else entirely and i’m not sure whether to be mildly amused or deeply troubled so here goes. If, in the next few moments of reading, you begin to wonder why this is here in my blog it is because my blog is a kind of personal diary and in it I get to chose the kind of things I take an interest in and write about. Over the last two years iv’e failed slightly with my blog because I didn’t give an intelligent commentary about the Covid 19 problem – there again my own views changed so radically during those two years that, just like fellow nurse John Campbell I went from pro-vaccine and pro lockdown to extremely vaccine skepticism and to mandated lockdown as sinister social control.

Anyway, what didn’t happen this week ?.

Over the autumn and winter iv’e been attending what is known as an RCIA class, rather than you having to do a search I will quickly explain that what the RCIA course is, is essentially a short crash course to prepare former unbelievers and members of other religious disciplines for entry and acceptance into the Catholic church. The stage I have been at during this winter is regarded by the church as being that of inquiry – a time to learn and ask questions and where the short term goal is to be baptized and confirmed into the RC church – that normally happens at a specific point in the church’s year unlike with the Anglicans for example where it can happen at pretty much any time.

To make a very short and more read-able story of this the short version of what happened this week is that I won’t and can’t be baptized in and accepted into the RC church because of a point of ‘canon’ law – the local priest who is a decent Nigerian bloke who I get along with very well had to ask a canon law judge about a potential problem which I volunteered to the priest and the result of which is a simple no. It’s actually a logical and understandable decision and in a way I have to admire the church’s decision to ‘hold the line’ although it felt a bit odd this week – in my own way I kind-of joke that it’s a bit like when I was kicked out of the boy scouts…..can’t remember now what I did but it might have been as simple as failing my knot badge (embarrassing for this later sailor) ……honestly I don’t remember but it can make for a good story when I choose to make something up about it.

This morning…….it’s about two hours now since I stopped working away at the keyboard, ‘girded my loins’ and got out there for my morning walk through the woods. It does sometimes just happen with a blog post that iv’e done the easy work but then can’t find a way to pull a post together at the end ; part of my problem is that for the last two years iv’e fallen into the habit of being a lazy blogger because of the kind of posts that iv’e produced. For most of my posts in the last two years all iv’e done has been to describe how I went about fastening part ‘A’ of the boat to part ‘B’ while simultaneously swearing a lot – my mental work has been in the making rather than the writing. Now though when I come to a difficult subject as I have done today I can’t finish because even I don’t quite know where to go next so instead I just went out for a walk and let the great outdoors work it’s magic on me.

Postscript.

I came back from my early spring walk with at least an idea of how to finish today’s blog and it’s with another quote which kind-of turns the story back around on itself and maybe even sends me off in a different direction so…..

If I have this right then it was the late Oscar Wilde who quipped that he wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have him and you might think that that’s my finishing take on the whole situation with the Catholic church. To that I would say ‘not so fast bucko’ because despite the situation with which I have run into the problem that is only the first of three that I , rather than they, have a problem and which I was also , with all due honesty, was going to have to try and work through with the local priest. As I say, he’s a decent bloke and I think even he was surprised to find an ‘inquirer’ whom he can’t , in all faith and canon law, baptize. Maybe for now that lets me off the hook a bit and the danger then is exactly that which Oscar Wilde’s off the cuff quip leaves me with and that being that maybe the club that would have me isn’t one that I would want to be a part of.

Strange times !