I Took The High Road South

These are my memories from being brought up on a sheep farm in the West Highlands of Scotland to escaping to the sea (merchant navy) to get away from the rain and the midges, but mainly my father, a violently wicked but equally thick psycho - even if it meant abandoning a wonderful mother (the main target of his frequent and unpredictable violence) - who was so special, so central to me and to my life, that for the next four decades, I saw all women as this uniquely superior species (knickers off or on) until a decade long and tediously teetotal second marriage forced me to grow up - and then women sadly morph into 'just people', so removing this wonderful and romantic imbalance in my life. I was to spend my working life, sixty years at sea (with a decade's interlude as an airline navigator) - and I stayed at sea despite shipping becoming a rustbelt industry because, as a grinding outsider, it was a life that suited me. There were effectively no rules (except the laws of physics, of course) so I could make them up as I meandered along and where for the time spent away at sea, I could have an equally period ashore, drinking gin and chasing the girls until they caught me - or the money ran out This life also enabled me to live in various places around the world such as Bombay, London, Hollywood, Holland and latterly Spain... while, amongst other things, I scrapped old oil tankers by running them up a beach in India, helped the CIA find a nuclear weapon lost off of Malaga at the height of the tourist season (1987), stole back a ship that was arrested & under armed guard in Suez, was invaded by pirates in the Singapore straits, captained a rig (tug & tow) hauling bad grain from the Mississippi down to in Mexico (Yucatan, read my 'Down Mexico Way' diaries) and piloted all kinds of ships up & down the English Channel, to the North Sea and the Baltic - it was my fall back employment... and this is not a diary nor an autobiography - but strands of memories from the best and worst of my existence...