Flotsam & Jetsam

Obviously as a gay, oat milk-drinking Scottish eco-celebrant I’m not qualified to speak on matters of state. I leave such things to the alpha male leaders who so skilfully guide our world. People like “Bibi”, the saintly ayatollahs… and of course the Drama Queen of Queens herself, Donald T.

But amid all the breathless excitement over the “blowing up of things”, I do sometimes think of the little people unlucky enough to have their things blown up. Some bewildered shopkeeper in Tehran or Haifa. Some hapless conscript waiting for the all-clear or the impact.

It’s hardly an original train of thought. Actually, every decent person in the whole world is thinking exactly the same. But I am the son of a seafarer, a tanker captain who in his day knew the Persian Gulf like the back of his hand. Not one to tell too many old sea yarns, he nevertheless did recall the time in some previous Gulf conflict (one forgets, doesn’t one….) when he called for help from the Royal Navy. It was refused.

So my eye was caught by this report on the stresses and fears that seafarers face on all those ships stuck in the gulf. A reminder that these huge ships that carry the oil and the gas and the fertilizer and everything else we take for granted are crewed by ordinary people just like the shopkeeper in Tehran or Dundee or Detroit.

When we write the eulogies for this particular struggle we will of course remember the noble and beloved statesmen selflessly carrying the world on their broad shoulders. But like any good celebrant would, can we also remember the “unsung heroes” sweeping up the mess after them? And a special plea for the men and women in the merchant ships, sitting targets marooned in a pointless war.

Flotsam and jetsam.