In 1979 I was on the commissioning crew of HMRC Searcher. She was a 30m craft built in Lowestoft by Brooke Marine. I had a fabulous time on that shake down cruise circumnavigating Great Britain through a particularly stormy 4 months.

This morning the current day Searcher and nothing remotely like what I served on and now part of the Border Force after the demise of H M Customs & Excise, was berthed in her regular mooring beneath the James Hehir building (handy for the Cult Bar), where I spent a year with the Eastern Enterprise Hub learning new ropes of how to become a creative entrepreneur. I had spliced new head and stern ropes plus springs for the original Searcher but I have never stopped learning how to splice new threads into my ever evolving multifaceted career.

Last Thursday I was at the Agile Business Awards in Bloomsbury Square. The following day I was critiquing Taylor Wessing 2014 finalists along with Grayson Perry’s ‘Who are you?’ and the Snowdon retrospective. Today it was reference shots and later the purchase of wet scanning fluids to take my home scanning of negatives to a new level.

This morning I had been cycling around looking for new viewpoints from which to undertake the year long project I have embarked on with fellow members from the RPS. This panoramic composite shows two if not more sides to a dock that as I recall it had shed loads of pit props on the berths when I first sailed  in there in 1977. Trains still ventured onto the wharves in those days, trundling across the road at Stoke Bridge causing some minor congestion, congestion nothing like we see today at all times. Supposedly, there are plans to bridge the dock and cut out the bottleneck whilst making an Enterprise Island. Now that would be a good name for a Customs Cutter – Enterprise. Good name for a vessel.