18/1/08 14:30

My son Demetri celebrates a major life milestone today, and while thinking about it, I realize it was virtually 40 years ago to the day when I disembarked in the fog from a Greek Freighter in Tilbury Docks on the Thames, downstream from London, having left NewYork in early January 1968. Some things don’t bear thinking about. The least I can do is put a bottle of wine in the fridge so we can toast Demetri tonight at supper.

Anyway we have broken cloud and some sun which makes a huge difference.  In london when it’s cloudy it’s warm, the cloud acts like a big blanket keeping the cold air out, it’s just the opposite down here, when it’s cloudy it keeps the warm air out.

The wind has dropped below 10 knots so we are motoring again.

18:00

Still motoring. Sunny afternoon. Very pleasant reading in the cockpit. There’s almost enough wind to sail, but the temptation to keep on motoring is that we would get in Saturday night in time for fish and chips. Our good friend Gabriele who lives in Venice, was present on the Moody 64 trial sail in Plymouth prior to purchase, and who has crossed the  Atlantic on SPINDRIFT West to East with us in 2005, arrives in Port Stanley on Saturday.  He has taken a small hotel room and I’m sure will be pleased to move on board on Sunday. He will be with us until Valdivia.

On re-reading the books of your youth. 

This afternoon I finished Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. This is a work I read in my very early 20s a million years ago, and along with my college chum Frank was very impressed by. I thought to read it again a few years ago but loaned my copy to a Greek Egyptian from Alexandria who neither returned it nor read it before he died. So when I chanced upon a copy in a Gibraltar Book Shop a few months ago, I though I would add it to the SPINDRIFT Library.  I dimly remembered needing a dictionary a lot when I first read it but I thought now I am a man of the world so that won’t be necessary.  Before I knew it I was having to deal with “blue-veined phthisic hands,”  “etiolated flowers,” “to sharpen my taedium vitae,” “a pegamoid sloth of a man,” “this tenebrous penisula,” etc. etc. etc.

Then I got to the famous quote of Pursewarden’s, a literary writer character in the “tetralogy.”  See, I’m getting the hang of it.  On a post card to DH Lawrence he wrote; “My Dear DHL. This side idolatry.  I am simply trying not to copy your habit of building a Taj Mahal around anything as simple as a good f---k.” Frank and I were extremely impressed with this line and roared with laughter, indeed I can still hear Frank chortling after all these years, but I’m afraid it hasn’t quite  got the same effect for me any more. It is of course in many ways exactly what Durrell is doing in “Justine” the first of the four. I will admit that as they progress you get swept away by the work and it is certainly a monumental piece of writing.  I just wish Durrell didn’t have to show off so much his dexterity with language and all the touches, references and linguistic detail, his intellectual erudition and thereby be so intimidating as to make me feel stupid and inadequate. I feel much of  Durrrell’s writing  excludes the likes of me, an ordinary mortal. But perhaps this is the desired objective of the English Oxbridge upper class public school elite, to write in an intellectual code  A more appropriate quote of Pursewarden’s might be, “I have always believed in letting my reader sink or skim.” Tough call.

But enough of that, this is supposed to be a marine diary. 195 miles to go.  Steve is lying in hiding on the aft deck, in a khaki jacket, a paparazzi with a long lens, waiting for that perfect Hello Magazine picture…. only in this case the celebrity is a naked Albatross.

21:00

So we sink a bottle of  Rose in honour of Demetri. The Chef produces a pork casserole which is much better than it sounds. And the motor goes on.

19/1/08  7AM

Another cold grey morning with nearly no wind. Its 18 Degrees C below decks( 62F) but it feels colder probabaly because of the damp. 

Only 100 or so miles to go so we should be in well before dark.

13:00

24 Hour Run 194 miles, only 1 ½ hours under sail.  55 miles to go. ETA 8:15 this evening.