Sailing

Patmos A very long time ago I wrote in these here pages that spending a summer on the Riviera or the Greek isles without a boat was as useless as a eunuch in a cathouse. That was then and this, alas, is now. The French and Greek seas are the same, if a little bit more crowded, but the people with boats are very, very different. Back then one knew almost everyone worth knowing — that is, everyone with a smart sailing boat, and a few with gin palaces that were graceful. These modern horrors that look like refrigerators on steroids, with top-heavy superstructures from bow to stern, helicopters, jet

Alan Bond was a rogue and a rich man, in every way your typical Aussie larrikin. In 1983 he bankrolled Australia’s challenge for the America’s Cup, the blue-riband sailing trophy held permanently until then by the New York Yacht Club. Sensationally, Australia won and that triumph did as much as anything to put rocket fuel under the young country’s confidence and self-belief. Australians still remember the massive crowds pouring out to welcome their winning boat’s return to Sydney Harbour. Now, whisper it, something very similar could be happening for Great Britain across the Tasman Sea. There on the waters of the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland, Sir Ben Ainslie is leading

Across Europe, hospitals have been filling up again with the second wave of coronavirus. France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands have all been hit, as has the Midwest of the United States. In England we’ve gone from fewer than 500 Covid-positive patients in hospital at the start of September to nearly 15,000 now. Each morning, we anxiously scrutinise the overnight figures. Thankfully, in the past week Covid inpatient numbers have begun to plateau — although they’ve still been rising in parts of the Midlands, London and Kent. So it’s an uneven picture. But unlike in March, community testing gives hospitals advance warning, so we’re able to adjust the provision