his is not becoming a yachting column, but I nonetheless want to write about Theseus’s Boat. It is not so much a waterborne vessel as one of history’s oldest mind-games, originating with Heraclitus, the Greek thinker who believed that ‘the only constant is change’. And the game is this. Theseus has a well-used boat, the timbers of which are beginning to rot. During routine maintenance, timbers are replaced until, at some point, none of the original clinkers or lapstrakes remain. Is this still Theseus’s
