Post

I’ve worn a grubby RNLI cap for decades. I sound London, but I was born in Truro and I was a basically feral (Gen X) kid wandering the coast path with a dog until sunset for a lot of my early life. The lifeboats are in the fabric like trawlers and farms and pasties and fish and chips.

This happened within sight of my house when I was nine. I wasn’t there - I was at school in London by then - but Penzance and Newlyn felt it for *decades*. The memorial garden on the cliffs is a hundred metres from where I scattered my parents’ ashes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penlee_...

The other day someone warned me not to wear that cap because it might be misunderstood. No, I don’t think it would be.

I used to live at the other end of these isles in a small community with a famous lifeboat station. The lifeboatmen and women were seemingly ordinary farmers, fishermen, plumbers etc. No hero image. When the beeper goes, they drive to the station and launched the boat.

I've seen lifeboats going out in seas so heavy you wonder how they'd ever stay alongside another vessel long enough to rescue anyone. In the 70s I saw successive lifeboat photos by an RN photographer in a helicopter. In the 1st it was almost side-on but the 2nd was like looking down on its deck.

Lifeboats are *built to be submerged*. Did you know that? They are constructed as surface vessels which *will* go under the surface; which *will* capsize. And they are built to come back up again and carry on.

We had lunch at the Poole RNLI centre in August and I bought myself a baseball cap in their shop. Did not realise then it was a political act, but I wear it with pride now.

do you know I think I might get *me* an RNLI hat

I've had a tab open on the RNLI shop since reading this thread, waiting for pay day. Just gone back to see "high demand affecting delivery times" which makes me very happy

They are built for a mission which is definitionally impossible. You cannot beat the sea. This Earth should be called Ocean and the water is the most powerful thing on it. But these folks volunteer to go out there and fight it anyway because humans should take care of humans.

Oh, boy! Time for one of my very favorite Herman Melville passages: “though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,

I always have trouble with whether I’m Cornish. My parents weren’t. I’m not ethnic Cornish. I’m partly Irish, mostly English, so far as I know. I was raised with my heart in three places: Cornwall, London, and the Bernese Oberland. (Try telling an Oberlander the mountain rescue teams are baddies.)