Cruisers

Being a cruiser is like belonging to a tribe, but there are many sub-tribes. My least favourite sub-tribe is the “CV cruisers”. People who in mid-career take off with a boat for a year or so, get as far as they can and then head back to home waters to resume their old lives. Many in this group bring with them the deadline orientation of their working lives and simply seem to race from one place to another. Their objective is to complete an “adventurous episode” to add to their CV – their focus more on the next thing than the now. My favourite sub-tribe might be called the “so what?” brigade. People who when faced with all or any of the following objections from well meaning friends and family say “so what? – I don’t see why that should stop us going cruising”:

• You haven’t got any money.
• You can’t sail.
• You’ve got a secure job.
• She’s half your age.
• You’ve only got one leg.

Allied to this tribe are what might be called the pure eccentrics – like David and Eli. When I stuck my head out of the companionway on the morning of 1st November it was grey and stormy. Waves were crashing onto the harbour walls and the wind was blowing a fine salt spray over the whole marina. Suddenly a couple of marina staff with crackling portable VHF radios stationed themselves at the berth next to ours awaiting the arrival of a boat. The entrance to the port here is very shallow and in strong winds there are dangerous breaking waves across it. “What kind of nutter is trying to come in here today?” I thought to myself. A few minutes later a small and venerable catamaran motored its way up to the berth, with a wild-eyed middle-aged bloke at the wheel, his long strands of greasy hair being whipped around in the wind. At the bow was a woman in her mid-thirties with long blond streaked hair, dressed more for an afternoon’s shopping at Camden Lock than for sailing. As they began tidying up their lines I called across and asked “would you like a cup of tea?” “No thanks, after coming through that entrance I think a large Scotch would be more in order”, he replied, disappearing below.

A few days after their arrival David and Eli rigged up a large striped tent over their after deck and announced an impromptu fancy-dress party to celebrate. Sue and I dressed as pirates, unable to find a parrot Sue put a carrot on her shoulder instead. David was dressed in a leather jerkin, I’m not sure what he was meant to be, Harold Steptoe, possibly. And Eli dressed in a tight orange corset with black laces and a flowing skirt looked like Moll Flanders. Their boat, Kilovar II, is a floating junk shop of 1960s memorabilia. On one of the cabin walls is a picture of a Turkish gunboat. It’s a little known fact that every year the Turks organise an East Med yacht rally which visits Syria, the Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, escorted by a gunboat and blithely ignoring the restrictions on sailing direct between some of these countries. A couple of years back David and Eli joined the rally and decided to get married, having a Christian ceremony on a Muslim gunboat in an Israeli harbour.

I could probably write a book about the many other interesting characters around the port, but I will confine myself to one other couple, who I admire more than most – Jude and Peter. They are Americans in their mid-fifties I would guess and they live on a small nine-metre boat called “Flight”, which they bought new about thirty years ago. Jude is a teacher and artist and Peter has been many things, including a professional swimmer, teacher, artist, photographer and insurance salesman. Jude has recently been made a Professor and usually teaches for about half the year in a college in New England. The rest of their time they spend sailing “Flight” around the Eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, the Caribbean and the Med. On New Years Day Jude rigged up an exhibition of her recent watercolours in the room the marina lets us use and it was a great fun to wander around looking at many places that were familiar to us from our Summer cruise whilst nursing a thumping hangover. I wrote a short story based on one of her pictures, which Peter recorded to play back to Jude’s students. Jude and Sue have conducted a two woman campaign to try to rid the marina of the sexism that exists among so many of our fellow cruisers. I guess what I admire about them is that they appear to be spending their lives being themselves and trying to live by their own standards and values rather than by those imposed by others. I think this is what David and Eli do too, but perhaps less self-consciously.

Porto di Roma

Now we’ve been in the Med for well over a year I think I can say I’m getting truly acclimatised. This has a downside. I can’t cope with cold weather any more. Italy is at this moment in the grip of a cold spell. There is snow from the Alps to Sicily and the TV news has pictures of frozen tailbacks full of juggernauts from one end of the country to the other. I’m writing this in the early morning in my berth watching my breath condense all over the laptop screen. Our fan heater is going full belt, I’m wrapped in a duvet and I’m wearing track suit bottoms, a sweater and thick socks. Here on the coast the temperature is actually at this moment a couple of degrees above freezing, a normal English winter morning which a couple of years ago I would have thought nothing about. The trouble is ... I’m bloody freezing!

When I wrote in October there were thirty odd cruising yachts here already and they continued to roll in steadily through October and November, so that there is now a community of more than sixty over-wintering boats. Many of the boats are from the UK and there is a sizeable US contingent, some Antipodeans and a scattering of Dutch, German and other European nationalities. At any one time well over half the boats are occupied and there is a very busy, sometimes too busy, social life. Every morning there is a VHF radio “net” during which we all exchange information about medical needs, parts for sale or wanted, forthcoming social events and the next transport strike. The marina have given us use of a large room and every week a social is held there and a range of other activities. Sue and I go to Yoga and Italian lessons twice a week each and I play bridge and attend a writers group as well. Once per week there are “destination seminars”, where people get together to share information about their favourite cruising grounds, Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea and the like. Also, Ruth, from one of the big American boats is an experienced piano accompanist and sometimes I learn to sing new songs and perform them to my fellow cruisers.

If you think this all sounds like a multi-national, middle-aged and middle-class version of Butlins - you’d probably be right. But it suits us for this winter and we’ve learnt a lot about cruising and cruisers. It’s a broad church, ranging from the seriously rich to the dirt-poor, from the dedicated to the dilettante. I enjoy getting along with people, but I also like to take a dislike to some. I feel it’s only when I find someone I dislike that I actually bring into sharper focus what I like about people. Finding someone to dislike has been a real problem this winter. I fix on someone and decide “yes, I really don’t like you”, only to find on subsequent contact that actually they’re alright. I guess I’ve never been in a community where I feel more at home. Why is this? I think it’s because the people here are all, in one way or another – doers. Folk who don’t just dream about what they want, but try to do something about it. For sure, many of the cruisers here are retired and don’t have to worry too much about where the next buck comes from, but it still takes bottle to buy a boat and up sticks and find your way around foreign seas, foreign ports and foreign countries.

Roma

Having been resistant to living in an English-speaking cultural bubble, that is exactly what we have been doing for the past three months. However, our Italian is progressing thanks to our lessons twice a week and to the three Italians in the port who also live on boats. However, Sue is progressing faster than me, especially with the dreaded Italian verbs. We don’t get into Rome as often as we hoped to, but we still manage it about once per week. We still haven’t made it to the Vatican Museum (which includes the Sistine Chapel), preferring just to wander around and soak up the atmosphere. In doing so the sheer scale of the ancient Roman city slowly begins to dawn on one. During the four centuries after the birth of Christ Rome had a population of one to one and half million inhabitants, making it by a multiple the largest city of the ancient world – no other city even came near this size until the industrial revolution.

We’ve also been doing more reading about Italian culture and history. Having been through a phase of seeing superficial differences and fundamental similarities between English and Italian culture, I’m now becoming more and more aware of the differences again. This really is a bewildering country with I now think a quite different system of values to that in the UK. For example, in Italy I think it is more important to be beautiful and to do beautiful things than to be good and to do good. It is, I suspect, the only country in the world with a verb “to suicide”, as in “Roberto Calvi was suicided under the Thames Embankment by persons unknown”. A few weeks ago Sue and I visited the Museum of Roman Civilisation. This is in the large modern suburb of Rome known as EUR, which was designed before the Second World War to house the 1942 Rome Worlds Fair, which was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. The museum was completed in 1939 in a style that might be called monumental fascist neoclassical. It has an enormous and very informative scale model of ancient Rome about thirty metres square, but what is even more interesting is that apart from taking down the odd bust of “Il Duce” and perhaps removing some of the more obvious parallels between the growth of the Roman empire and the invasion of Abyssinia, the place hasn’t been changed at all. It is a monument to Mussolini’s fascist state and even the curators look like the scowling sons and daughters of the originals. It does make one wonder what kind of society can leave this monstrous oddity in place without any sort of contextual commentary or seeming sense of irony.

As well as being wrapped in the comforting cocoon of expat life in Rome we have also done a little travelling. We spent a week at Christmas in Cologne with Thomas, Nicole and my Godson Joshi and we were, if it was possible, made to feel even more welcome than the Christmas before. Most of our time was spent eating, drinking, socialising and playing with Joshi, although I also served time as Assistant Cook to Thomas. Joshi is growing up fast and is now talking very well. At first this created a barrier as Joshi of course speaks German and we don’t, but he did a good job of teaching us some useful words which helped us overcome his initial frustration at the funny visitors who couldn’t speak properly.

Puglia

A couple of weeks ago we hired a car and drove down to Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot) with Claude and Jane, a couple that we have become goods friends with. Jane has worked in Taranto helping to project manage the development of a big new Container Port there and so has good contacts and is interested in buying a house in the area. Puglia is the market garden of Italy, being its largest producer of wine and olive oil, as well as having a big fishing industry. It is also the home of the Trullo – little round stone houses with pointed roofs which are built in clusters and are becoming very fashionable with holidaymakers and foreign investors. They are cute little buildings which often verge on the impossibly quaint – the town of Alberobello has thousands of them and frankly looks like nothing more nor less than Hobbiton.

Our time was spent in an exhausting blur of house viewing and sightseeing, followed by leisurely debriefings over dinner in local restaurants. Parts of Puglia have a curiously English feel, full of meandering country lanes and dry stone walls and overall the area feels both more friendly and sophisticated than neighbouring Calabria. The food is very good – the standard routine in the restaurants is to bombard one with at least ten different anti-pasta dishes of fresh cooked seafood and vegetables, so that it is physically impossible to eat any main courses. House prices are also very low. So much so that Claude and Jane actually made an offer on a detached five bedroom villa overlooking the Gulf of Taranto, which has now been accepted. The deal will be done in a couple of weeks time when they hand over the cash.

We were also very tempted. We fell particularly for a smallish house nestled in olive groves about three miles from the small town of Locorotondo. It’s an old stone building with a discrete modern extension, with all mod cons, including central heating (it snowed while we were down there). It has two or three bedrooms a big patio and a Cantina, which is used to store olive oil and wine and is complete with several massive pottery urns. It also has 3,500 square metres of land (an area about sixty metres by sixty metres) full of mature and well cared for olive, fruit and nut trees. What’s more, Ryan Air have just started daily flights from London to Bari which is about forty minutes drive away. The price? Well, a lot less than a studio flat in Basildon.

So, Puglia has given us a lot to think about. Sue is now about to start a one month full time Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Rome, so we can’t make any decisions until that’s over. But, who knows, we may pop down again to Puglia and make an offer on that house or something like it. If nothing else the possibility of a more self-sustaining lifestyle is beginning to emerge – cruising Greece, Turkey and Croatia in the Summers, funded by a bit of holiday letting, with Sue doing some teaching in the Winter and maybe me doing two or three months consultancy (if anyone will still want me).

We shall see.