Quantum ille canis est in fenestra

Somewhere, about 8000 miles directly below me, the sea-bed of the South Pacific is teeming with all sorts of weird things some of which are not know to science. Only 8000 miles away as the crow flies or rather the mole burrows (if it had a pressure suit with high thermal protection and a full set of drilling equipment).

I was watching Fred Dibnah's program about various British buildings yesterday. He visited the huge Georgian dockyard buildings at Chatham which are huge despite being just large sheds. They also have rounded ends which makes them look very modern. It struck me that the number of placse I don't know about in the world is countless. I have been to a lot of places and yet obviously there would be more things in the world to look at than I could possibly ever get around to visiting. Even just in this country, there are many places which could keep your attention. I sometimes get struck by the thought of all these places existing when I am not looking at them. Right now, those dockyard sheds are still there, probably echoing top the start of the day but what about the middle of the night? Driving along a remote road in the rain, I will see a small wood, out on its own and realise that it has been there for years and will still be there when I think about it at night, with the rain dripping through the trees. Worse still, if I hear of some terrible disaster, I will imagine what I was doing at the exact moment it occurred. These devastating events, seem to occur without causing a ripple over most of the real world; it is only the man-made network which relates news as it happens, that makes these things real to us. The terrible thing these days is that it has to happen to the Western world for it to impinge on our media. The genocide in Rwanda was top of the news for days but it was all so remote, there was no real horror, just relief that it didn't happen to 'us'. When you think about these things it becomes clear that many times, thousands of people are killed in single massive events and it never reaches our main news unless of course it happens to white people in America, Europe - the usual places. There is a Posy Simmonds cartoon about the famine in Eithiopia where the usual middle class chatterers (yes I am probably one myself) watch the terrible suffering in the African camps. The scenes are marked in big letters - FAMINE - STARVATION - PESTILENCE - DEATH. The watchers have their emotions described in tiny letters - sympathy - anguish etc. The next scene shows the food aid reaching the camps marked again with little letters - aid - relief - medicine. Finally as the people see the television pictures of this, their reaction marked in big letters is HOPE - RELIEF - etc. Which sums up what we actually do by sending the small amount of aid. Most of the western aid is a sop to make us feel better. The real aid would be to change the way we muck around with the rest of the world. There is an exhibit at the Eden project which details the various stages which coffee goes through to bring it to our kitchens. I knew nefore seeing it that there were plenty of middle men and various mark-ups but I didn't realise that it was something like 40 stages - each of which adds to the price we pay without giving anything to the people who do the really hard bit at the beginning. Some people make money on coffee as it stands untouched in wharehouses, like they do with oil as it gets shipped around the world for the convenience of a few businessmen who have the cash-flow to juggle it, with the real risk that the aging ship in which it is transported will break up and deposit the stuff on a beach somewhere and still the owners get their money because of the insurance. Witness The Prestige. Everyone involved is pointing at everyone else to say who is to blame when in truth they ALL are. A little investment in double hulls would reduce the risk. A bit more investment in other forms of energy would remove the need to transport all that oil in the first place. Do you love your car?