Reflections from a life lived, fractured, questioned and relaunched.
Going beneath the surface at sunset.
What you can expect to Find here in the raft of corks.
“The Raft” is a miscellany of tales and reflections on 78 years of life. You can expect many questions and few answers about this tremendous experience we all share: being alive. Philosophy, religion, and relationships will be explored. The nature of nature and the power of human emotions will also figure in The Raft of Corks. And a lot of pictures!
Do come aboard.
If you wish to contiue reading here is a short biographical introduction in 2 posts:
The original Raft-of-Corks blog appeared between 2011 and 2017. It covered my Caminos in Western Europe in those years. It can be found here.
I was born in Glasgow on 27th of March 1949 at 9am on Mothering Sunday.
My mother often spoke of looking out of the window from the bungalow and seeing the daffodils in the garden. The bright yellow flowers had opened up to the light that same morning. She took that as an omen.
I weighed over 12lbs (5,5kg) at birth. She told me it was an easy birth. I don’t remember it. I had no choice.
Being alive is an extraordinary mystery. Being aware of this is not simply a thought. It is a feeling. I’ve had this humbling amazement in me since my early childhood. That was long before I read Sartre’s “Nausea” when I was 19 years old.
For as long as I can recall education systems have intrigued me.
My primary schooling was in Scotstoun in Glasgow. I started a year early because my mother was urgently needed in post-war Scotland. She was a physics teacher. They were in short supply just after the war. For the next twenty years all my peers were older than me. At the time I barely noticed. Only later did I understand how human development unfolds in stages — and how often I lagged a little behind. Both my parents were teachers. We were relatively comfortable. My school, St Paul’s in Whiteinch served families living in deep poverty. They resided in red sandstone tenements with shared toilets. We would play in the rubble which still lay from the bombing of the Clyde shipyards.
Old tenements now modernised
I became bilingual: one language at home, another — broad Glaswegian — at school. I learnt it quickly. I soon picked up the most common word in my friends’ sentences. Then, I carved it into our elegant wooden mantelpiece at home. With no chalk available, I used something sharp. My father noticed. Very gently, he said the mantelpiece was not for carving. Then he looked at the letters — F-U-K — and added, “You’ve missed out a ‘C’.” He was an English teacher. Spelling mattered. For seven years I lived in two worlds, economically oceans apart. I spoke of neither to the other. My parents had asked me not to. I remain grateful for that education. Experience, I learned early, is our best teacher.
Formation
At eleven I was sent to a Jesuit college. At seventeen, in 1966, I joined the Jesuit novitiate, giving up a place to study mathematics at Glasgow University. For nine years I lived the traditional Jesuit formation: contemplative prayer, philosophy, theology — and relentless questioning. It shaped me profoundly. I made the full thirty-day silent retreat. I followed the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The text is a demanding medieval training manual. It is not a book to be read. I was immersed. Jesuit life opened the world of academia to me: Oxford, London, Chichester, Middlesbrough.
Education — its power and its limits — will be a recurring theme in this blog.
Faith, Family, Love is the final introductory post. It contains biographical clips from 2000 to now.
In the 1970s the world was changing. New music was in the air and Hippies lived with a freedom unknown to our parents. Ancient institutions struggled to keep pace. After ten years I left the Jesuits to marry. We have five children.
All our children are now parents. None are religious. None are teachers. Geraldine, my wife and the mother took this photograph. She was both a Head Teacher and a senior Inspector of Schools.
My faith has changed. I would not want to throw the baby out with the baptismal water — but my faith has shrunk. Once it was the universe itself. Now it is closer to an electron. I no longer believe in beliefs as defined truth. Articles of faith can become dangerous weapons. Yet stripped of intellectual acrobatics, Christianity — like many religions — centres on love. In that, they are right. Love will be a recurring theme here.
Fracture and Walking
In 1991 I shattered my ankle. I fell down a staircase in a barn we were converting in France. I was carrying one of the children at the time. He was uninjured. I had an open fracture. Chronic osteomyelitis followed. Recovery took years.
“The Barn” in Normandy.
Alcoholism then took hold. It could have killed me. In 2000 I stopped drinking and my life restarted. Addiction destroys, but overcoming it can bring profound change. That too belongs in The Raft of Corks.
I am now divorced — twice. I live in Spain. I once kept goats. I divorced them, too. I left them behind to walk.
Between 2000 and 2020 I walked over 10,000 miles on long-distance pilgrimage routes across Western Europe. Nature and kindness met me everywhere. You are invited to stay with me on the journey.
Perhaps you, too, will recognise some of the currents of life I have encountered. You may feel astonished, as I still do, to be alive.
