GHOST SHIPS

They emerge from out of the mist, seeming to float above the horizon. The sea fog thickens and fades and these ever-present ocean-going vessels appear and disappear just like ghosts, sometimes clearly visible, and sometimes the vanish as if they were never really there at all.

These are what I came to know as the "Ghost Ships", a cluster of huge oil tankers moored just off the bay, which seemed to hang around for days without ever really going anywhere.

After a while, I started to feel quiet poetic about them as days inevitably turned into nights and their lights burned away on the horizon ever more brightly as the mists would also burn away.

Where had they come from? Why were they here? More to the point, why were they still there?

So many questions and precious few answers, so, as the mists swirled around them on those less than blazing mornings and evenings I tried to capture them on film thinking, at the very least, that the strange image of them floating there above the landscape might make an interesting cover for a book or inspire another painting, or perhaps even a story or two.

Sometimes they are there for many days, perhaps even weeks, and, apart from those night-time lights, they shows few signs of life as they sat there lurking, waiting...

The reality is of course far more mundane and has more to do with economics that lost souls forever condemned to sail the high seas and wait for the right moment to be invited ashore. With the price of commodities fluctuating on the world markets, it's sometimes cheaper to pay the crews to sit and wait offshore until the price is right and profitable enough for the owners to sell on their cargoes.

But I don't know...

Like the lighthouse-keepers of old, too many days at sea can do strange things to the mind...

And, perhaps, thereby hangs another tale...

MINE ALL MINE

Harwich, August  25th 2012

A SENSE OF SCALE

So, whilst I was lurking near to the coast the other week,  I happened to point my camera out to sea and took this picture of what I thought was a pretty “big” ship. Then we strolled around the town a little and watched as the so-called “big” ship passed an even bigger ship which suddenly made it look rather tiny in comparison and meanwhile, my own personal sense of scale got well and truly bamboozled.

I hadn’t been this confused about the relative proportions of things since I’d first seen “Return of the Jedi” back in 1983…

Pauses to remember driving home from a late night showing of that in my midnight blue Cortina MkIII having watched the “Falcon” flying through the insides of the all-new “Death Star” just ten minutes earlier.

There may very well have been speeding going on…

(I was young, I was foolish…)

There may very well have been an idiot driver making zappy laser blast noises, too…

(I was young, I was very foolish and the girls all avoided me like the plague…)

Still… All water under the bridge now, eh…? Or, at least, flowing into the English Channel...

Anyway there’s a bit in “Return of the Jedi” where some of those MASSIVE spaceships that opened “Star Wars” (when it was still called “Star Wars”) get well and truly dwarfed by the REALLY MASSIVE super-duper spaceship that was being used to ferry Darth Vader and his collection of various shades of cloak around the galaxy.

(I’m sure his vast expenditure – presumably on his expense account - on buying all of those pastel outfits which he then never wore was a source of much controversy at the time, but it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, so we ought to let it lie…)

Eventually, due to the requirements of the plot (and therefore perhaps worthy of a SPOILER ALERT even though it was a very long time ago, etc…), the REALLY MASSIVE super-duper spaceship crashes into the all-new and REALLY REALLY MASSIVE “Death Star” ruining everyone’s day and quite a few “No-claims bonuses” at the same time I should imagine.

At that stage, the REALLY MASSIVE super-duper spaceship suddenly looks very tiny indeed and our minds had been melted by the sheer awesomeness of a sense of scale that we hadn’t really understood since that strange film that they used to show us at school which zoomed out from the atoms in a mosquito on a bloke’s arm to encompass the entire universe as we knew it back then.

Of course the REALLY REALLY MASSIVE all-new “Death Star” is then totally dwarfed by the bloody great big planet around which it is orbiting - you know, the one populated by all of those cute little teddy bear things - and we finally get some kind of sense of perspective of the limits of our own engineering abilities and the size of things that we can build when you make the comparison on a universal scale.

We might be able to build things that are visible from space, but not all that many, and the forces of nature and gravity can do it all far better and more impressively that we humans ever will, even if they can get a little bit slack about meeting delivery dates...

Anyway, big ship, bigger ship, small rowing boat. You get the picture...