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Mohammad Al Fayed and the ports business

It seems like Mohammad al-Fayed (of Harrod’s fame – and obviously many other ventures) was also in the port business.   In 1964, he entered a deal with Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, whereby he invested $5 million in the harbours, established pilotage and ports, and in return was to receive the income from the […]

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Shipping Alliances

The world’s top three shipping lines are, in order, Maersk (Denmark’s second largest company after Lego), MSC (a privately-held Italian firm), and CMA CGM (a French firm).  Some time ago, they decided that they were going to start up an alliance, P3, that would have allowed them to share vessels, thus streamlining which ports they would […]

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Other uses of ships

The Guardian reports that the Libyan legislature has taken refuge in a Greek car ferry: A Greek car ferry has been hired as last-minute accommodation for Libya‘s embattled parliament, which has fled the country’s civil war to the small eastern town of Tobruk. The 17,000-ton Elyros liner has been deployed, complete with its Greek crew, […]

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How the (closure of the) Suez Canal changed the world

The segment of my January/February container-ship journey I am most anticipating is passing through the Suez Canal.  Here is what Horatio Clare writes about his passage through Suez: Unfinished wars lie under all our horizons.  The chart on which Chris plotted our approach to the canal shows Egypt, the Sinai, the southern end of Israel an Gaza. […]

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By the Sea

A truly beautiful book, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea is full of quiet insight about leaving home, about families, about illegal immigration, and about malice.  It has a brilliant humour.  Here is a bit about  a madrasa, a chuoni on the island of Zanzibar: Chuoni, that was where we went to learn the aliph-be-te so we […]

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The docks as a non-place

Francisco Goldman and Jean-Claude Izzo speak to each other through their respective novels, The Ordinary Seaman and The Lost Sailors.  Both are stories about waiting in the docks, literally, in a floating metal tub full of holes.  Both tell stories within stories within stories – which is what you do when you are waiting.  And waiting.  When […]

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A love story far from the sea

This beautiful little love story has some extraordinary bits about the Syrian revolution, the subsequent civil war(s), love, families, sectarian sentiments, and the sea: On the second day of Ramadan, I come home from work to find Jesus, Maalik, and Qais sitting on the back steps, vaguely matching in short-sleeved plaid shirts, whiling away the […]

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Jayaben Desai

In this moving obituary of an extraordinary woman, Jayaben Desai, this passage stood out: Desperate for work, the newly arrived accepted long hours and low wages, though the need to do so, Desai said, “nagged away like a sore on their necks”. When she decided she had had enough, the 4ft10in employee told her 6ft […]

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imaginary cities

Hav is like a nested doll.  There is an original fictional travelogue published in 1987 embedded within the arc of a narrative that updates the story originally published in 1987 with “the events”; with the resulting diptych published in 2007.  Then this embedded story is itself embedded within the life of the travel-writer/popular historian/fiction-writer, Jan Morris.  Jan […]

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The Port of Beirut

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