The main action of the day was on Brede Moorings. It began at 1.30pm when a note was delivered to me by hand. 'Notice to Remove Vessel Mr W. Shepherd 16/02/06: You are required to remove the vessel Vemara which you claim as yours from River Brede Moorings immediately. You are not permitted to take electricity or use any facility in this boat yard. Signed MJ Roud. Note the backdating of the note.
I scribbled all over the note and sent it back by first class post at 3.30pm. Here is what I had to say: 'You must show that Vemara’s owner(s) are in breach of their moorings contract if you wish to refuse the services you have contracted to provide. I do not believe this to be the case. However I understand that if (as you claim) you can obtain new tenants for Vemara’s moorings at twice the £125 per quarter of Vemara that you should wish to do so.
My solicitor is in the final stages of agreeing an official date for the transfer of ownership to myself from the Connie Lindqvist Estate and arrangements are also in hand to then pass ownership from myself to a third party...our target date for completion is 16th April 2006. My calculations show that at least six months excess of mooring fees and electricity for Vemara have been paid cumulatively by various parties. The sum owing to these parties were Vemara to move to another mooring is estimated at £400 and is accumulating at the rate or over £20 per day until electricity is restored.'I sent a copy to my solicitor and instructed him to fire a legal broadside.
I wrote a paper on The Jewish Question back in the mid-1980s when I was hanging out with a Texan artist in Cambridge Massachusetts. Bob Stuart and I put together this character Lard Heep and ran out a few cartoon strips. We decided to base this character on real life so we gave him typical redneck attitudes...and these included the whole conspiracy Elders of Zion anti-semitic repertoire. We had a few laughs and enjoyed working together for a few months.
Then I left the States. Bob was set to come to Europe a few months later but kept putting it off and in the end he went back to San Antonio instead. However during the year or so after I left Massachusetts...when I was based in Canterbury...we corresponded and Lard Heep came up from time to time. But in the end he never went anywhere...at least not yet. But I still have the Bob Stuart Papers with a pretty pink ribbon around them in my archives. They are interesting. Bob's father was a headmaster who was hounded out during the McCarthy Era so his son grew up a serious dissident.
In Cambridge during the summer of 1966 I had dated Edna Weisberg a young student from Tel Aviv and met her twice in Israel in the next few years. My first visit was shortly after the end of the Six Day War in 1967. Edna's brother was high enough in the military to organise a tour of the Golan Heights just days after the Israelis had captured them from the Syrians. The second meeting was on my way back to England from Johannesburg after my second trans-African safari. I arrived unannounced the day before her wedding sending her family into quite a frenzy...fearing a replay of The Graduate.
Also one of perhaps half a dozen loves of my life was Rachel Kowalczyk, a Polish Jewish woman from St Louis Missouri who worked with Marilyn Ferguson in Los Angeles. I was in my mid-thirties and vulnerable at the leading cusp of my male mid-life crisis. Rachel was in Boston and on the rebound. On the afternoon we met I just happened to have the grandson of the Chancellor of MIT ...and President Kennedy's former scientific advisor...with me. He was my son's best friend at Cambride Friends School. She fell for someone she thought I was but wasn't. And I fell head over heels in love. We spent a few happy weeks in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara...and a few not quite so happy ones at Solviva Gardens on Martha's Vineyard before reality broke through, the relationship collapsed and I scurried back East...and then to England...to lick my wounds.
Bob Stuart entered my life at the end of my Rachel Kowalczyk escapade after I had done a fair amount of research into Judaism, Zionism...and anti-semitism. In The Jewish Question one of my conclusions was that despite the Holocaust anti-semitism had never gone away...and would rise again in my lifetime...before 2020. I thought that the most likely place was the United States of America. Now I am not so sure. The largest Jewish community in Europe is in France. The number of people emigrating to Israel from France increased by 27% last year after a rise of 12% the previous year. France is now there in the frame with the USA.
I would make one other observation. No latter-day Nazis could have devised a better final solution than to gather the whole of World Jewry together in one small state on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea. Here they are a sitting duck for any whacko American white supremicists in the mid-west who get themselves some funding and find a Nicholas Cage to buy them a nuclear device, a GPS and a workable plan. The Jews should have stuck to the idea of Judaism as a religion and kept clear of the idea of a state. Kirkpatrick Sale has suggested they abandon the State of Israel and retreat back into their diaspora. I would be seriously scared living in Tel Aviv. The city is indefensible.
