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@yngmar "Bunch of retired expats in the area." Yeah, no thanks.
I actually know Sicily reasonably well. None of its SE and S interest me (apart from their history) and given my checkered past, the mafia isn't among my concerns.
We'll see how we feel at the end of our fortnight here.
Sicily is cold and wet and I have a brutal head cold.
"So what do you think of it so far?" my wife asks. We've been in Palermo seven hours.
A super-long shot: is there anyone who can recommend a carpenter in Cagliari (Sardinia)?
Oh, ffs!
"...jurors convicted eight defendants on material support for terrorism charges for wearing black clothes to the late-night demonstration. That use of 'black bloc' clothing was an antifa tactic that assisted in the shooting of the officer, prosecutors said during their closing arguments."
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/13/ice-protesters-terrorism-prairieland-antifa/
Good news (finally): we found a small apartment to rent in Rome on Saturday morning. We meet with the agent again this morning to submit our application and to negotiate details on the lease.
More out of superstition than faith, we stopped at a couple of churches on the way back to Ostiense to light candles (yeah, two faithless souls resorting to prayer and cheap offerings to end their wandering).
Once we've secured the apartment, we'll haul Wrack ashore for the rest of the year and begin a long-neglected major refit. In a sense, I will be undergoing the same — thus the effort to settle a while.
Passenger boats at the port of Kinkole on the Congo River, on the outskirts of Kinshasa.
Photo by Hugh Kinsella Cunningham.
Our beautiful, wayward youngest, in Rome.
Photo by Finn L. O'Hanlon.
our boat makes a way for us
it is a free passage
held in the surges
or standing on the sea of glass
our words move towards
each other
– Mary Oppen, 1980
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."
– Antonio Gramsci
[from his Prison Notebooks, 1929-1935]
“Inequality is silent until it becomes scandalous”
1% of Indians take 40% of national income: latest World Inequality Report. Kavitha Iyer reports how such inequality entrenches unequal opportunities, worsen health & education outcomes for the poor.
I am ill — serious flank pain, fever and nausea, blood pressure up to 160/88.
Given wants me to go to a hospital but I can't be arsed so I'm curled up on my bunk reading a biography of Lancelot Capability Brown.
A painting (acrylic on canvas) by Lee Madgwick.
"Most of the creative people I know in the UK are resigned to an uphill struggle. Many work in a vacuum. The city is pocked with such voids. Sisyphus and his boulder have returned. Nor is it anything to do with finding the perfect landscape. No such place exists. Not to those chipping away at the cliff-face with their backs to the beauty. No—it’s all or nothing here, with little space for part-timers. And yet, as confessional Anaïs Nin said: 'We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.' "
"The wolves are still at the door; that’s a matter of course. But I continue buying into the idea that if we can just keep things flowing, depth charges at the ready, obstacles are swept away."
My friend, film-maker and writer Peter Bach, on...so much.
[via @counterpunch]
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/04/the-crack-in-the-sky/
@neauoire Most who watched it back in 1965, when it came out, are likely dead. Or maybe it's like Australians and 'Crocodile Dundee' — noone wants to admit it.
A couple of months back, I emailed someone I hadn't heard from in a long while. I told him it felt like the threads of our thirty year friendship were fraying.
"No lost threads here," he wrote back. "Just complex dynamics." I got the hint. I won't write again.
Last week, our sponsor on GoFundMe, the Irish artist and writer @lizcullinane, told me she had written to another friend of mine, to ask if he might be able to find accommodation for us to rent for the winter in the UK.
"Have you heard anything from him?" she asked me, this morning
"I didn't expect to."
"I think he finds your situation overwhelming and intractable...I think many people do."
We do, too. As the years have passed, as hopes have soared with various escape plans only to crater, as friends and even immediate family retreat from us, their empathy and understanding tapped out, and as poor health (mainly due to inconstant medical attention and access to medications) has taken hold, we find ourselves clasping at straws to remain afloat. We've lost sight of an end to this.
"...Our slow voyage has been plotted between imprecise waypoints, episodes of misadventure, and random, short epistles," I wrote once here. But we've long since thrown away the charts. Wrack is a life raft, untethered and adrift. Except there's no rescue — nor a refuge just over the horizon.
Still, against the odds, we hope and we remain resilient. We are still afloat...
"The strangest thing about traveling for a long time is the return. Your descent back into your old life and old patterns feels like a direct confrontation with your past self."
New Orleans artist and tattooist @lake on her random impulse to step away from her life ashore to spend months at sea with a stranger — a short piece for Burning House Press in the UK.
https://burninghousepress.com/2025/11/26/glittering-metals-by-lake-sleep/
A big swell driven by force 7 gusts is causing Wrack to pitch violently and snatch at its lines. A length of timber capping on the gunwhale has split and we're increasing a wrapping of cotton rags around the lines to absorb the shock loads.
Winter has found its way to the southern coast of Sardinia. Last night, the temperature dropped to 8ºC and this morning we wake to grim skies, heavy rain, and a mistral gusting 25 knots across the deck. A thin layer of condensation coats all the hatches, portlights and deckhead linings, and our bedding and clothes feel damp.
Living aboard a small boat — Wrack is just 9.75 metres long — can be challenging in any season but in these conditions, without an adequate heater and dehumidifier, it can be downright unpleasant. My wife's and my first experience together of winter afloat was on the south coast of England, three years ago, when we and Wrack were embarrassingly unprepared for weeks of rain, wind, and frost while tethered to a pontoon on a tidal river that dried to black mud at low water. But the worst was a succession of hurricane-force storms we endured in Cherbourg, the following year (it didn't help that our toilet, water pumps, and electrical system failed at the peak of one of them). Luckily, a friend helped us retreat to a small flat in Tangier, in Morocco, almost as windy but much drier and warmer.
We had been hoping to move ashore for winter, this year. But the last third of 2025 has proven to be dispiriting and hard. Initially hopeful about resolving our immigration issues, with optimistic responses to temporary residency submissions to Turkey and Italy, the final refusals were disappointing. Then came my heart attack in Rome in September, a few weeks later, and soon after my discharge from hospital, Wrack's reliable Swedish diesel engine died. We had no money for parts so it has had to remain unrepaired. Continuing health care has eaten up whatever money we have managed to beg or borrow.
C'est la guerre, I guess.
My favorite non-fiction book, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship And The Canoe (1978), is a memoir of time spent with both Dysons, juxtaposing Freeman's dreams of manned rockets to the edge of our galaxy with George's ambitious voyages in fragile, traditional, paddled craft towards the frozen north.