Sea weed
Jeremy Clarke
T had been on a health kick for three 1 weeks, eating pumpkin seeds and other healthful foods, doing yoga, and going to bed early every night with an improving book. 1 hadn't smoked or drunk alcohol either for three weeks. I had even cut out tea and coffee.
Then, last week, I was given a job of work. Two Teesside businessmen had crammed a 72-ft sloop with £800,000 worth of duty-free items purchased in Heligoland, then anchored 30 miles off Hartlepool, just outside territorial waters, and opened for business as a floating offlicence. Teessiders were paddling out on anything that floated and stocking up on beer at 10 quid a case, fags at £15 a sleeve, and spirits at £5 a bottle. Someone had even gone across on a jet-ski. Would I get myself out to the boat, said an editor, do a bit of shopping, and write about it?
But when I arrived at Hartlepool and phoned The Rich Harvest, it was bad news. There was no story. Bad weather had forced the partners to take shelter in Hartlepool marina, where HM Customs had promptly seized the cigarettes and spirits on the grounds that they weren't secure or 'bonded'. The floating off-licence was therefore closed, pending a legal appeal. I was hoping to be able to write about unseaworthy vessels crammed with whey-faced smokers, bobbing about in the swell 13 miles offshore, not legal challenges over nice points of marine law. Before returning home, said Phil, one of the partners, why didn't I pop aboard anyway for a cup of tea? Was there herbal tea on board? I said. (I didn't want caffeine and tannin mucking up my prana.) Phil thought there might be, so I parked the car in the marina and walked up the gangplank.
Three people were sitting round the table in the wood-panelled wardroom of The Rich Harvest: Dave, a retired trawler
skipper; Jade, Dave's 15-year-old granddaughter; and Phil. Stacked from floor to ceiling all around were cases of imported lager about which HM Customs, for some reason, hadn't been overly concerned. I was invited to sit on cases of lager rearranged into an armchair. 'Lager?' said Phil.
The speed at which the sight of all that beer undermined my determination to stick to herbal tea was ludicrous. All those ardent promises I had made to myself over the past three weeks not to touch another drop till Michaelmas at least crumbled instantly to dust. If you've got one handy,' I said, that would be very nice.'
The lager came in those daft little continental 25cl bottles. Four tilts at one, and it's empty. To save her legs, Jade, one of those mute, omniscient teenagers, put six each in front of us. 'Fag?' said Dave, offering me an unopened packet of 20 duty-free cigarettes and motioning me to keep it. A couple of hours later the consensus, endorsed by Jade, with a barely perceptible but authoritative nod, was that we'd polished off about 150 bottles of lager between the three of us. 'If we aren't careful,' said Phil, rolling a joint, 'this is going to turn into a booze-up.'
Phil was a man of the people, a visionary and a great talker. He saw his floating offlicence as a blow struck for freedom on behalf of the poor and downtrodden who enjoy a smoke and a drink. Moreover, he is seriously considering standing as an independent when Mr Mandelson's up-forgrabs seat is contested in the forthcoming by-election. He believes that there is always a good chance of being elected for political office in a town that has already elected a football mascot wearing a monkey suit as mayor. If he does stand, his principal electoral promise will be to legalise heroin. This would be a sure-fire vote-winner, apparently — especially if, on the day, Hartlepool's sizeable heroin-using community turns out in numbers. It occurred to me that, if I had been offered heroin at this point, I would probably have smoked that without demur as well.
Phil's free-the-people-by-giving-themwhat-they-want stance wasn't just all talk, He was once arrested off Torquay on the helm of a yacht with three and a half tons of cannabis on board — at the time, the largest sea-going consignment of cannabis that HM Customs' officers had ever goggled at. When the case came to trial 15 months later, however, he got off. How and why he got off took about another 20 bottles apiece in the telling. His account was fearfully complicated by legal terms, by the politics of the internecine gang warfare that erupted in Middlesbrough and by the constantly changing allegiance, then sudden death, of a key police informant.
I wasn't really listening, anyway. I was sitting there contemplating the spineless individual I had become. Not long afterwards we moved on to spirits.
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