The Madness of Seagulls

Soundtrack - The Kathryn Tickell Band

There is a beautiful orange glow along the top of the long building outside the window. It's going to be a hot one Dano. Unfortunately I have help desk duty this morning but with luck this will be my last go at it - ever ever ever. I didn't actually have a tape running when my boss said this but I have enough evidence to believe him. And this music (see above) is happy enough to match my mood at this prospect. Folk is not all fingers in the ears you know. I do not own one fisherman's jumper. I used to when I was about ten but I got that in Shetland so I have an excuse.

Building the Frigates

At the end of this you have a thing. This comes from the mind of one person or at the most, two people and filters through a process that has not changed for hundreds of years. Someone draws out your ship for you and then it simply gets cut out of the steel that we stack up to the ceiling. There is no committee sat around debating what colour it should be; everyone knows what colour a battleship should be. We have a boy who takes the rolled up drawings from the drawing office to the cutting loft. He lays them out on the huge steel plates and then someone marks out where to cut and where to bend. We move the steel across the loft using the cranes but it looks as if the men here can simply carry the great sheets all on their own. The sounds are large and painful to the ear. We used to make our own ear plugs but now the company give us proper "defenders" - the bright yellow phones look out of place here because after a few minutes at the steel, we all look rusty and dirty. We bend steel into ships, we rivet them together and we send them down the slipway into the river. Other guys fit them out of course but to us they are like the plasterers and carpenters who come into a house after the brickies and roofers have finished. We do the hard work. And we make the bits, which have to survive the mess of the sea. We keep the crew alive and warm. We go home happy and drink ourselves into the ground because we deserve it. Reserved occupation? Certainly. All this comes to me when I close my eyes. Some nights I man the AA guns in the park but we rarely have to fire now. No bastard makes it this far up any more. It isn't the threat of our guns of course. It may be our ships out on the ocean.

We are all one now. The office boy with his drawings, the girls who come in as welders and riveters, the old boy - too old even for the last war - who comes in and makes our tea. You realise that the world will never be the same now. They talk of all sorts of good things now. The company look after us all very well. Maybe someday the country will look after everybody. How do the poor widows live when their men don't come back? The company helps them too. Sometimes you wonder what all this is for but then you tell yourself to stop being stupid because you know exactly why you do this; why everybody does this - it is the right thing to do. I bet the shipmen on the other side say this and probably they believe it. We had a group of them over ten years ago and they were good men. I don't know if they have reserved occupations over there but I can see them in my head, sitting by the slipways drinking their ersatz coffee. I wouldn't want to shoot any of them but in these times what can you do?

If only I could write a North East accent.

I have just heard that a bomb has gone off outside the Jakarta Marriott hotel. I had a few letters from an Indonesian girl who worked there. Saying I hope she is OK seems redundant seeing as I only wrote to her a couple of times never very seriously. I met her in a boat going across Lake Batur to the village of Trunyan. Bali was as much a holiday for other Indonesians. She was with three friends who seemed extremely happy even when we got taken to the local cemetery to see the bodies (which are simply left out under simple bamboo 'tents'. I have a picture which I feel slightly guilty about taking, of one of them holding up a skull. It was this that made me realise that there is not a great deal of difference between teenagers any where in the world.

Time to finish though as I am on helpdesk you may get some more later.

PS.

I have just found out that the hotel did not open until 2001 and so it cannot be the one where my friend worked.