Photo: Steve Bond
Oh this is just brilliant…
As usual trying to make connections between things - trying to see if the threads want to make a knot together. Going back over old stuff and things seem to sidle up close to one another as if they're checking each other out. This, this and this have been having an odd flirtation for a while.
But a couple of days ago we were out on a boat, jumping into the cold, cold sea and swimming to shore. Afterwards we were talking about all things boat-ish and it came up that it's the worst thing in the world to change the name of your boat: that it'll cause you the most dreadful bad luck. On further research, apparently every vessel's name is recorded on Poseidon's or Neptune's Ledger of the Deep. In order to change the name, it has to be totally and thoroughly removed from the ledger so that all memory of it is obliterated. This by means of the name's removal from every ledger, map, lifejacket, boat-key and buoy, not to mention the boat itself. (Apparently, some say Tippex will do… others say most certainly not, it must be sanded down, if not at least filled with putty and repainted.) For more details about how to purge your boat of its name though a complex ceremony, read here.
I'm excited by these mariner's laws and other bits of random information: the gold earrings worn to pay for your funeral, the knitted names on jumpers to identify each sailor if they drowned, my maps of beautifully printed pieces of sea (these particularly after visiting the Royal Observatory in the summer and beginning to properly appreciate the inextricable link between land, water, time and navigation), even my weeping sea-captain's chair (there are now signs of actual tears that have dripped onto its base. So bizarre. So timely). And now this. Each one is worthy of some sort of individual project… Or altogether. Or something. It feels like it could all become a complex exercise in narrative suggestion. I'm just not sure how yet. Or why it's valid.
