Marsaxlokk-Jabal Ali: At last at sea 5 February 2015 11.00 Occasionally in the night, the ship bumps against the berth and that is when one remembers that one is not on solid ground. I can’t wait for our ship to take off tomorrow, so that I can actually feel the motion, and especially at night. […]
Marsaxlokk-Jabal Ali; First impressions 4 February 2015; 10.00 Malta time After what seemed like an interminable wait for the transport to take us (myself and three Croatian officers) from the hotel to the port, I am onboard the ship. I am rather impressed with the officers’ massive rolling suitcases. Climbing up that steep slightly swaying […]
How will I ever be able to return to life, “circumspect life” in Melville’s words, after that, the “delirious throb” of this research adventure? In his gorgeous opening to Moby Dick, Melville writes, “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; […] then, I account it high time to get to sea as […]
The Aerodrome By Seamus Heaney First it went back to grass, then after that To warehouses and brickfields (designated The Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate), Its wartime grey control tower blanched and glazed Into a hard-edged CEO style villa: Toome Aerodrome had turned to local history. Hangars, bomb stores, nissen huts, the line Of perimeter barbed […]
I have written lovingly of London’s canals before. I just want to briefly write out something else I have discovered which ties in nicely with the whole infrastructure thing. Today I spent an hour or so in the London Canal Museum. Not really a particularly interesting museum. Its location is stunning, and the ice-storage space […]
Associated Press reports that jets belonging to the Libyan government bombed a Greek-owned tanker, killing two crew members: A military spokesman for Libya’s internationally recognised government says its fighter jets bombed a Greek-owned tanker ship because it had no prior clearance to enter an eastern port and acted “suspiciously”. Spokesman Ahmed al-Mesmari said the jets […]
In the last two weeks, two ships filled to the brim with hundreds of Syrian refugees have been brought in to Italian ports. The ships seem to have left Eastern Mediterranean, and sailed parallel to the Turkish coast, picking up most passengers from Mersin or other ports in Turkey, and arriving in Greek waters, heading […]
I am reading two books simultaneously through both of which trains rattle and whistle and snake… But which in some ways are as different as they can be. Bill Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is a panoramic history of the making of Chicago in the 19th century; it is a work of virtuoso research and of historical imagination. It is […]
I am reading Bill Cronon’s extraordinary Nature’s Metropolis. For obvious reasons, the chapters on credit, on canals and water transport, and on the railways are most interesting to me. This, however, came as a surprise: Before the invention of standard time, clocks were set according to the rules of astronomy: noon was the moment when the sun stood […]
‘[Golden Dawn] created battalions against their political opponents, and then they rented them out, to whoever wanted to rent them,” he told Channel 4 News. In one of the most important cases, a network of businessmen active in the shipping industry allegedly involved Golden Dawn in their continuing struggle against the stubborn unions which wouldn’t accept […]
