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Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo collected his first official sunburn of the season this gergous day. (Robbo’s doctor has been fussing at him recently about Vitamin D deficiency. A few more outings per month like today’s and that problem ought to rectify itself.)
First, he spent the morning bench coaching the younger Misses Port Swillers’ softball team to a 12-7 victory. (They now stand at 8-1 on the season). Among other things, he was delighted to discover that the youngest gel has the apparent super power ability to become two-dimensional at will, this being the only explanation of how she managed to slide under a tag at home plate. I’d swear when she pancaked, she went absolutely flat.
Next, he spent the afternoon puttering about in the yard, mowing, trimming, weeding and (just to mix things up a bit), giving the front door portico its yearly scrubbing.
We are paying the wages for our sinful slothiness in not having got round to cleaning out the gutters last fall, insofar as one of the ones on the front of the port swiller mansion, chock full of dead leaves, mulch and new maple saplings, recently wrenched itself away from the fascia board and started bowing out ominously. Yesterday, we finally got them cleaned. Today, we had a local handyman out to re-attach the bowmeister. As I stood about jawing with him, I discovered that he is a licensed bow-hunter and helps the county with keeping the local deer population within something approaching reasonable limits. When I mentioned that I used to hunt deer myself in my misspent yoot and that venison sausage was amongst my very favorite foods, he replied that he makes his own (among other products) all the time and would I like to have some of it?
This looks like the beginning of a bee-u-tiful friendship.
So now it’s just a matter of waiting for five o’clock to roll around. As a treat for a productive day’s work, I hied me to the butcher’s counter at the local Gourmet Giant (pronounced “GER-may GEEE-aunt”) and nabbed one of their extra thick ribeyes. Yum. After dins, it’ll probably be Buckaroo Banzai. The Nats are playing tonight, but I feel I need a break from watching them strand so many base-runners. Not good for ol’ Robbo’s ulcer.
Not to give you too bad a case of mental whiplash in shifting subjects from the last post to this one (welcome to my world!), but I can’t help noting that today is the anniversary of the founding, in 1685, of the French colonial settlement of Fort Saint Louis near Matagorda Bay along the central Texas coast by the great René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle.
I’ve always had a particular fondness for this ultimately futile attempt at French colonization in the Gulf of Mexico, because Madagorda Bay is where ol’ Robbo learned to drive a boat, to fish and to hunt duck. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I’ve posted on all this before. Ah, yes, here it is.
What an awful time to start a colony. I used to go duck shooting during Christmas break from school and there are few times when I’ve been colder than I was sitting in a blind in the mud and marsh of Madagorda Bay.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
It’s very foggy this morning, for the first time in quite a while so far as I can recall.
Mornings like this always remind me of the days of deer and duck hunting in my misspent yoot. Not that it was always foggy on such occasions, of course, but it was often enough that even now, thirty-odd years later, the jumbled sensations all comes back to me. I can still feel the grogginess associated with being dragged out of bed at four ack emma, like Frodo at Crickhollow. I can almost taste the greasy brekkers eaten either at Jim’s (a local rival to Denny’s) when we were deer hunting, or else at a diner built out over the docks when it was duck. I can smell the blend of coffee, cocoa and cigarettes as the Old Gentleman and I sat out in the blinds. I can hear the drip off the oaks and junipers and the swish of the marsh reeds. And my fingers and toes start to ache because I was usually so damned cold.
Actually, it’s a very pleasant sensation because I always enjoyed those excursions, even when we didn’t bag anything.
Well, well. British law enforcement appear incapable of stopping gangs of young thugs rampaging through the streets, but when it comes to fox hunters, they’re all yoiks! and hark forrard!
Henry Hawksfield, joint master of the Crawley and Horsham Hunt, West Sussex, was filmed by hunt saboteurs at three meets in January and February this year.
The videos allegedly showed him using hounds to kill foxes and prompted a police investigation.
The 58-year-old from Partridge Green, near Horsham, Neil Millard, 44, from nearby Shipley, Rachel Holdsworth, from Washington, near Storrington and Andrew Phillis, 50, from Totnes in Devon, will all make their first appearance at Crawley magistrates on Thursday.
They have been charged under the Hunting Act 2004, which banned hunting all mammals with dogs.
Since the Act came into force seven years ago, only about 10 members of organised hunts have been prosecuted.
Anyone found guilty of a fox hunting offence can be fined up to £5,000 and have their hounds and vehicles confiscated.
The Crawley and Horsham Hunt, which has 70 members, refused to comment until after the case.
I thought I had understood that the Hunting Act was going to be repealed, or at least gutted, by HM’s new guv’mint, but apparently not. Perhaps, if the Crawley and Horsham are looking for blood sport, they ought instead to move to Hammersmith and start smashing shop windows. They’ll be safe enough from the law there.
Rook salad off Isle of Wight pub menu on police advice.
Hmph. Probably tasted like chicken anyway.
Greetings, my fellow port-swillers! Yes, Robbo is back from his hols and is tanned, rested and ready to resume the ol’ harness.
And how was the time off, you may ask? Well, just fine, thankee. Perhaps the simplest way to describe it would be to run through the to-do list I posted pre-departure and see how it tallies with what actually happened:
1. Sit and stare at the bay. Lots and lots of this. Which is, after all, the main point of going to the cottage in the first place. And this year there was no Antony and Cleopatra pair inhabiting the neighboring cottage and causing all sorts of embarrassing distractions, but instead a perfectly harmless family from New Hampshah. (Although I must admit that one evening, while watching a heavenly moonrise, I heard one of them calling the others with, “Hey! Look at that! It looks just like a movie!” This caused me some little trouble in extracting the splinters from my forehead after whanging it against the deck rail several times.)
2. Get some exercise. Yes, indeed-y. An hour’s walk first thing every morning.
3. Read some Dante. Oh, who was I kidding? I knew that was going to be a reach under the best of circumstances. Didn’t even bother trying.
4. Read some breezy trash like Bernard Cornwall or Tom Clancy. Knocked off four or five Richard Sharpe novels in rapid succession. I’d forgotten how awful the writing is – clang! clang! clang! So why read them? Because the battle scenes are coo-el. I also revisited Arthur Conan Doyle’s Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard which, if you have not read them and if you are at all interested in the Napoleonic Wars, I strongly suggest you try. Tres delightful. And in order to keep the ol’ braims marginally loose, I also took in Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. Sick-making to think we’re still fighting (and losing) the same battle that began1400-odd years ago. Oh, and finally, when we stopped at the in-laws on the way home, in order to humor the Old Man I read what appears to be a draft of a long article by some boxing writer about the “inside” story of Roberto “No Mas” Duran’s rematch loss to Sugar Ray Leonard. Possibly the worst prose I have seen since Lee Iacocca’s autobiography (mercilessly skewered in a review by Peej O’Rourke). It left me quivering with frustration that somebody was actually paying money for such hackery.
5. Visit Popham Beach. We had planned to go on Wednesday, but in the early morning hours the remains of some tropical system came in. Dawn found the wind howling, the air full of cold rain and the cloud base at about five hundred feet. The gels were dumbfounded and dismayed when I explained I had absolutely no intention of going to the beach that day. (Fear not – Mrs. R took them on Friday.)
6. Take in a Sea Dogs game. Missed them this year. Just not enough familial interest to make it worth the trip and expense.
7. Daily softball skills practices with the younger gels to get ready for the fall season. A bit, but not much. Never mind.
8. Lots of Geary’s. Indeed. With a toasted ham and swiss sammich for lunch, what could be better?
9. L.L. Bean. Again, couldn’t be bothered to stir from the porch to shlep into Freeport. And yes, my loafers still have holes in them.
10. Visit with Sistah and family. Yes, indeed. And, as I foresaw, a very noisy affair. For some reason, the principle form of communication among all the cousins seems to be a banshee-like shriek.
11. Plenty of lobstah. Again, yes indeed. A new lobstah shack opened up this year just across the bridge from the cottage, making things even more ridiculously convenient. The only hard part was keeping the youngest gel from throwing herself into the tank.
So there you have it, more or less. Oh, and as for the there and back again part, in which we were quite lucky about traffic this year, a few notes:
♦ When ordering at those Starbuck’s where they ask for your name for purposes of identifying your cup, I have taken to calling myself “Smith”. (I haven’t yet the nerve to insist on “Psmith”.) I do this because I consider the use of Christian names to be impertinently informal and because my surname (which is spelt “Raymond Luxury Yacht ” although it’s actually pronounced “Throat-wobbler-mangrove”) is too complicated. The eldest gel thinks I am very strange for doing this.
♦ Thanks to the fact that we now drive our Honda Juggernaut®, we had so much room this year that I was finally able to procure the Old Gentleman’s golf clubs, which had sat in the attic of the cottage for many years, and return them to the port-swiller residence. I now look forward eagerly to taking them out to the driving range at my next free moment [Ed. - Yeah, I'll start organizing that parkas-for-hell drive now] in order to assess the status of my long-dormant swing. You hold the knobby part and hit the ball with the thin end, right?
♦ The lady leading the hymns and psalms at the Church of the Assumption in Westport, CT, to which I duly repaired during our stopover on the way home, has a lovely voice. Pity it’s thrown away on the Novus Ordo mass, but what can you do?
♦ The middle gel is staying on for an extra week of spoilage with her grandparents and will fly home on Saturday. When we stopped over at the Delaware Service Area, I had a moment of near panic when I could only account for two childs and not for three.
♦ Whenever we return from one of our trips, we always joke that the first thing we look for when driving up our street is to see if there is any police-tape surrounding the port-swiller residence. Fortunately, the house was still standing, although the kid who was supposed to mow the lawn seems not to have appeared. Oh, well.
Anyway, it’s nice to be home.
BONUS TRAVEL BLEG: A completely random thing, but I wanted to open it up to my fellow port-swillers: I have often noticed on my journeys up and down I-95 that planes taking off to the south at Newark Int’l Airport for points west invariably jig left and east just off the end of the runway before beginning their turns to starboard. I assume this has something to do with airspace restrictions, but I’ve never been able to decide what, exactly, those restrictions might be. Anyone out there have any ideas?
The middle gel is visiting down at Stratford Hall, birthplace of Robert E. Lee, for a couple nights this week for a “grandparents camp.” (She’s actually there not with any of her grandparents, but with my godmother.)
At this camp, they are learning all kinds of ye olde colonial skills. Last evening, the gel informed me that she had spent time yesterday spinning yarn and making bricks.
I figure that if the course also includes field-dressing squirrels and distilling homemade hooch, she’ll be our go-to gal when civilization collapses.
Because it’s Tuesday, the traditional hole in the week. Because it’s another discombobulatingly hot and humid sauna bath out there with worse to come. Because I managed to run my credit card through the washer and dryer last evening. And because I have recently begun to feel the itch to get a club back in my own hands.
Electrician Simon Quince, 36, from Harthills, Barnsley, was fined £445 for shooting the swan and £100 for using the wrong shot.
He appeared at Harrogate Magistrates’ Court and admitted killing the swan near Knaresborough last December.
An investigation found he had been using the shotgun cartridges illegally.
North Yorkshire Police and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds found Quince had been using gun cartridges that contained lead shot.
Quince was on a shoot on a freezing cold, but clear day last winter.
He noticed four birds flying over and thinking they were geese, he opened fire.
One of the birds came crashing down badly injured and Quince realised he had shot a swan, which is protected by law.
The bird was later put down by a local vet.
Wildlife Officer for North Yorkshire Police Pc Gareth Jones said: “The onus is on the person to identify their quarry. There is a significant difference between a goose and a swan. If he wasn’t sure, he shouldn’t have taken the shot.”
It has been against the law to use lead shot on wildfowl shoots in England since 1999.
Lead is banned because it can easily find its way into the food chain of foraging birds on wetlands and is poisonous.
Back in the day, I used to go duck hunting with the Old Gentleman in the marshes of the Texas coast. Because of my awfy eyesight, I always had a terrible time identifying the breed on which I was drawing a bead. (Fortunately, the O.G. had eagle-like eyes and vast experience, and was able to advise on the suitability of the shot.) But jesum crow – as blind as I was, even I could have told the difference between goose and swan if it was close enough to bring down, or had the sense to hold my fire if I wasn’t sure. This guy obviously just let fly. An expensive mistake, indeed.
Here’s the thing about this article, though: The fellah wings the swan and then just leaves it until a vet puts it down later? Would not the more humane thing have been to finish it off, rather than letting it suffer?
University of Maine researchers want to drive the state’s lobsters back to sea — with a 3-iron.
An engineer, a scientist, a student, and an alumna have teamed up to develop a biodegradable golf ball from crushed lobster shells that could be used on cruise ships.
Inexpensive to make, the ball is designed to sink and degrade within weeks, depending on the ocean’s depth and temperature. The balls would degrade in a similar time frame in fresh water — and break down if lost in the woods, although that would take longer.
For years, a favorite cruise ship pastime was hitting golf balls from the decks into the sea, but the practice ended after an international treaty banned the dumping of plastic, including golf balls, at sea in about 1988. The biodegradable lobster balls could revive the activity, the researchers say.
I’m not normally one to trumpet enviro-weenie ideas, but I must say that I like this one a lot.
The only time of the year I eat lobstah is when we go on summah hols up to Maine. And the only place that I eat it – given how messy a process this can be – is in the privacy of our own cottage. It has become a time-honored tradition amongst the gels to fight for the privilege of getting to be the one to hurl the remainders over the cliff after dins. But how much more fun would it be to take, say, a 5-iron and knock a bucket o’ lobstah balls into the drink instead?
UPDATE: Speaking of launching golf balls into the drink, how about George’s story of saving the whale. Best. Seinfeld. Closing. Evah -
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