I found the Scillies to be quite as twee as I expected — although far more beautiful. They really are stupendously lush in high summer, the teensy fields bursting with a host of flower and plant varieties not ordinarily seen outside the greenhouse. With no motor vehicles at all — except on St Mary’s, the biggest island — and everything not simply within walking, but even strolling distance, it was hard not to view the place as not so much a land mass as a scale joke. Pottering out to Porthellick, I was startled by the clatter of the twin-rotor helicopter which is the only other way of getting to the Scillies besides the ferry. I half expected the massive whirligig to let down a hawser, then winch the island to safety.
I’ve no doubt that when all the tourists are gone the islanders pack the clotted cream fudge away and revert to aggressive type. After all, it was Porthellick where Sir Cloudesley Shovell swam ashore after the wreck of HMS Association and two other ships of the line in 1707. The Scilly woman who found him promptly beat him to death and nicked his emerald rings. This disaster cost two thousand lives and demonstrated the absolute necessity for an effective method of calculating longitude. Still, perfectly calibrated chronometers, compasses and GPS didn’t stop a Polish freighter, the Cita, being wrecked off St Mary’s in the 1990s. I bought a little booklet about the wreck in the local bookshop and gathered that it had happened because the ship’s master fell asleep at the wheel somewhere in the region of the Strait of Gibraltar. The ship’s automatic pilot managed to get it all the way round the Iberian peninsula, across the Bay of Biscay and the Channel, but sadly hadn’t factored these flyspecks of land into its computations.
The islanders benefited to the tune of a superfluity of Jack Daniel’s, mahogany doors, trainers and car batteries. Of course, in the Orkneys orientation is a tad more robust. When I lived on Rousay there was one celebrated local who’d arrived a few years before from London, having sailed a Thames barge the entire way. Boarded by the coastguard off Peterhead in a Force 10, he was found to be setting his course for the flat-bottomed craft with a map of the Orkneys printed on a tea towel.
Tsunami
The ‘Surfers’ television commercial for Guinness beer was voted — by members of the public who, bizarrely, care enough about these things — ‘The Best Advert of All Time’. But I too found it compelling, and in the wake of the hideously destructive tsunami I find myself pondering again why it is that this filmkin should have such a visceral appeal.
For those of you not familiar with it, Surfers is, as its title suggests, a seconds-long drama in which a brawny young man — together with his sinewy pals — catches a massive wave. And I mean massive: if this were a real-life wave it would require a 9.4 Richter Scale earthquake to generate it. The surfer bests the wave, sliding down its great, dark flank in a white spume of spray. Shadowy stallions tossing their manes begin to emerge — in a subliminal kind of way — from the breaking wall of water, and yet our man holds his course and even manages to strike some attitudes. The soundtrack accompanying this feat is a mounting crescendo of bass and drums. Resolution comes: the surfers gain the beach, the stallions subside into the undertow, the tap drips its final dark jewel of Guinness and the glass is set up for our adoration.
I think the reasons this advert is so admired have nothing to do with Guinness itself. ‘Surfers’ is a timeless evocation of humankind’s Promethean urge to master natural forces. The surf, the stallions — they are both wild aspects of a world to be tamed — and when they are we rejoice with a tall glass of dark ale. Sadly, real life isn’t always like the movies — or the adverts for that matter. In a piffling, prosaic way I wonder if ‘Surfers’ will continue to hold on to its No. 1 spot post-tsunami, or if at this very moment the ‘creatives’ responsible for the Guinness account are pondering how stout adverts will never be the same again; in much the same way that commentators anticipated a re-evaluation of all imaginative values post-9/11.
And what about Hokusai prints? As a child I was fascinated by a portfolio of these belonging to my mother: the empurpled, anfractuous waves; the black, rapier-like boats; the enormous tension implied by so much movement depicted with such a static line. In Japan, where tsunamis are frequent, they have no problem with wavy art — but then this is a culture where the meaningful coexistence of savagery and beauty is, perhaps, better understood. According to the Tao there can be little distinction between the surfers and the wave, when it comes to intentionality.
Personally, great waves have always scared the shit out of me. As a child I imagined death itself in the guise of one, rising up out of the shallow bottom of the North Sea and tilting the Thames Valley region into its own basin. As I grew, so the wavy representations washed over me: Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, in which and Aboriginal juju summons a tsunami to devastate Sydney; Katharine Bigelow’s Point Break, in which maverick surfers pull bank jobs in order to finance their quest for the ultimate, gnarly experience; and even John Martin’s The Fall of Babylon, a nineteenth-century vision of the apocalypse as a watery tumult, spumy masonry and stony whirlpools. The first time I saw this painting (which hangs in Tate Britain) I was transfixed by it, and remained gawping for hours until forcibly removed by the staff.
The word is that avid surfers have been quick to claim that, had they been in the Indian Ocean in the right place, at the right time, they wouldn’t have hesitated to try and ride the tsunami. I don’t doubt it. Surfing is synonymous with risk and adrenalin junkies are the same as any others: they always require a bigger hit. I remember it used to be the Severn tidal bore that they were always attempting to ride, but presumably this is now viewed as small beer. When I lived in Australia I felt driven to at least try and surf, but my inability to read waves correctly cost me dear and I was unceremoniously dumped. This is when the wave collapses in on itself instead of cleanly breaking, and drives the foolish surfer straight down into the seabed. I was under for long seconds, nearly concussed and was lucky to escape with a wrenched back. In Canberra an osteopath jumped on my crotch and then relieved me of $80.
All of this is by way of saying that nothing can remain off limits. We plant once more on the slopes of Vesuvius; the tourist returns to the sun recliner and the fishermen to the sea. Hokusai sends out for new horsehair brushes and a big pot of blue paint.
Rotten Smoke
I once visited the Netherlands three times in one year, which, frankly, is pushing it. The third time I went I was met by a Dutchman at the airport. We were queuing to get a car park ticket when I dropped the English Sunday newspaper I’d been reading and its thirty-seven property sections flooded across the floor. One of a pair of burly fellows who were behind us in the queue muttered to his companion ‘Zwaar’, and they both dissolved into Low Church giggles. As I picked up the newsprint I asked my Dutchman: ‘What does that mean?’ And he replied, ‘Heavy’. That to me encapsulates the Dutch sense of humour: the pratfall is conceived of as ironic. It’s a form of Little Country Blues that’s oddly — if painfully — endearing.
In the Year of Three Trips, the last time I went by ferry from Margate to Zeebrugge, then drove through Belgium to Rotterdam. My girlfriend at the time discovered when we reached Margate that she’d forgotten her passport. We decided to wing it and she attempted to enter Europe using a British Library card — arguably a more impressive travel document. Belgian immigration wasn’t impressed and deported her. The official sneered, ‘If only your Mr Major would ratify the EU Treaty these problems would, I think, not be happening!’