Frayed knots

At the end of November there was a family event and an uncertain number of incommmmers, so I threw money at the problem of my comfort and equanimity (quite the adult, me) and booked TB&Me in for two nights at the Generic Hotel & Wedding Venue in Tramore. It was where the family had hosted the tea and sangers after Pat the Salt's funeral a month earlier. The Hotel was fine, the breakfast was fine, the anonymity was fine, I guess the price was fine, too. ProTip: off-season breakfasts midweek are cooked to order; at weekends guests are confronted by 40 unblinking fried eggs in a steamer; which cannot be great when/if hungover. Also, in a cost-saving refurb, all the baths have been replaced with poky showers that leak over the bathroom floor. I should have checked that prior because having hot baths is one way of getting value out of the room-price: I can't afford 'em at home. Notice anything strange in this view from the en-suite window? (apart from the whipping on-shore salty wind).

Flying a tattered flag is romantic enough when flown from the mast The Revenge at Flores in the Azores in 1591 or  HMS Glowworm as she turned to ram the Cruiser Hipper in 1940. Outside an off-season hotel in a slightly tatty resort in Ireland, not so much? I am ambivalent about patriotism: born in one country, living in another. I am happy-out as an EUropean which has done so much to shake-up and stir nationalist silos. So my response to seeing the Tricolour of this our Republic being displayed like an old rag is not visceral. But I nevertheless find it disrespectful . . . and unnecessary. If the hotel's Holding Company can't afford the cost of a client's bathwater to replace the flag outside their premises, then don't display the flag at all. 

Once a navy brat always a navy brat? My father was retired from the British navy at the age of fifty, when I was 17. So for all my childhood, I shared a home with a naval officer. He taught us kids . . . how to knot and splice; how to sew on a button; semaphore and Morse coding; the names and functions of rigging and sails [and parts of sails!]. He explained that matelots saluted the uniform and not the officer inside it. And, on occasion, they saluted the flag. Those occasions included hoisting the flag in the morning and hauling it down at sunset. Flags have accrued quite the charge of symbolic meaning and you can really rile up patriots if you seem to disrespect the flag.

The USA has codified a protocol for respectfully disposing of worn out flags: "The approved method of disposing of unserviceable flags has long been that they be destroyed by burning."  In Ireland similar conventions pertain: "In raising or lowering, the National Flag should not be allowed to touch the ground. When being hoisted to half-mast, the Flag should first be brought to the peak of the flagstaff and then lowered to the half-mast position". And "The National Flag should be displayed in the open only between sunrise and sunset." I've written of my father's Thang about seeing The Flag fouled or snagged on the pole and how he would habitually take steps to [have someone else] tidy it up.