Notes From the Front - of Green Park

After spending no time in Europe for over a decade, I have had to cross the Pond twice in the past few weeks. This time I am in the U.K. making a few appearances in service of my ‘academic career’, better described as a fleeting and bizarre alternate reality.

As I am paying for a good part of this excursion myself, when a friend offered spartan but inexpensive lodgings as a guest at his sailing club, I jumped at the chance. The ‘lodgings’ themselves are too tiny for anything other than bathing and sleeping, but the common rooms are beautiful, and, as I settle down in the library to sweat out my jet lag on a Sunday night, deserted.

The club was founded in 1927, and it appears they have been steadily building up the library since then. The books fill a ceiling-high shelf at one end of the room, with the remainder of the space taken up by some easy chairs, a single round table covered in the day’s newspapers (‘Russell Brand Confesses: Obsession with Helen Mirren’), and a well-worn Persian rug that does not fully cover the well-worn wood floor.

Above the fireplace hangs a 19^th century painting of a Venetian scene - St. Mark’s with a nicely-painted gondola in the foreground, and a pair of luggers moored at a nearby quay. On another wall there is a magnificent 1808 chart of the English Channel, about 6 feet long and 3 feet high. It is framed, but upon inspection, yellowed and stained from use.

In the corner, old photo albums – one entitled simply ‘1925-1937’. Within, sepia-toned photographs of sailing yachts of that era. Each photograph is a formal portrait of one boat only, with the name inscribed in white at the bottom of the print, along with an inconspicuous reference number in the corner:

• “Zig-Zag” (22133) – A graceful white 2-master schooner, broad-reaching in calm seas with two jibs up.
• “Thalassa” (16386) – Sleek but bluff-bowed, she is making good headway near shore under her gaff rig, a solitary figure in black standing at attention at the stern.
• “Driac” (15374) – This slender hot rod is flying along in strong winds under her triangular dark mainsail, with four men and a lady (in a nice white hat), crowded in her cockpit.
• “Ailee” (13648) – More ship than boat, she has a black Xebec-like hull and three identical masts. In light airs she has raised all possible sail, presenting an unbroken wall of canvas from stem to stern.

And then there are the books…

• South From the Red Sea, Plymouth, 1956
• Elements of Yacht Design, New York, 1927
• 117 Days Adrift, Lymington, 1973
• Voyage of the Tai-Mo-Shan, Glasgow, 1935
• Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Ephemeris and the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, London, 1960
• Thames to Tahiti, London, 1933

And, oh yes, bound issues of The Yachting Monthly, with miscellaneous articles and beautiful drawings. The first issue is from 1906. Those were the days when a yacht was a yacht: “Messrs. Ramage & Ferguson Ltd., Leith, have launched from their yard a steel screw steam yacht of about 700 tons…”

I am supposed to go to sleep in an hour or two, but I don’t suppose I will.