Megaphone diplomacy from off his super-yacht swinging at anchor next to our more modest people-carrier version of a boat, You can’t discharge here, his amplified voice crackles across the bay, It is against the law.
What unnerves me most is that even here in these waters and not that far from Aleppo, Beirut, Jafna and the rest, the accents I keep hearing are educated English, not exactly upper-class, but look-alike Pinky and Perky just like you describe, in other words those constituted and delegated voices of authority, so that I have to rush off downstairs to check the lavs (or ‘heads’ as they like to call them for a reason which escapes me). There is a newly fitted stop-cock behind one of them, which the commodore put in over the winter, and there are two possible positions for the stop-cock handle, vertical and horizontal. The up position has ‘holding tank’ written on the wall in marker pen (in marker pen because these days we don’t like to be seen to be wasting money, and the writing has only slightly smudged). The other sideways position has ‘open’ written beside it.
Like the PR Career impossibility his Chief of Staff sneered about, when they found out ‘somebody went yacht racing last week-end’ instead of spending the whole time down on his knees personally sucking up the stuff, Oh shit, I say to myself, But the stop-cock handle is definitely in the up position, Valves get blocked, the voice in my head is telling me, Fermentation, Pressure builds in holding tanks, It has to go somewhere, Better out than in.
The last voice a Scotswoman, What is she doing here I think, the same horror which, or rather who forced me to hold the pencil and make letters with my right hand, when I was happiest doing it with my left. Before a little later she began mimicking Macmillan, You’ve never had it so good. That was 1961 wasn’t it, Supermac. Self-confidence, Echoes of Empire, Progress, and things can only get better. No, that was 1996, and things definitely didn’t get better, except of course for the likes of him in his superyacht, and to a lesser extent for us in our people-carrier boat.
So that now I start to feel guilty about it too, which of course is exactly what Pinky and Perky want. Guilty. Guilty. I don’t own the boat, I say feebly, I am just staying on it. It doesn’t wash. You will have to pay, a man in a peaked hat has arrived in a speedboat and has begun writing out what looks like a parking fine ticket, but I know is going to be far, far more expensive.