Welcome Aboard The Black Pig - Shipping & Freight Blog

So Where Are those Ruddy Horseman ? Not on Our Patch.

Ahhh.

The sounds of British conversation, weather, weather, moan Ruddy Icelandics, coming over here, nicking our cash, exporting their air………..

Volcanic ash then, what’s that all about ?

Coldest may night in forty years.

Now there’s ANOTHER breakdown in the Channel Tunnel.

Can’t get any consignments there on time.

All we need then is a hurricane and dear old blighty can say the four men in black are riding their trusty steeds across the UK (common misconception that, they actually had a colour scheme more Viv Westwood than Alvin Stardust).

Take a look.

I don’t want to get biblical on your backsides but look at the facts:

Pestilence, (that’s the geezer on the white horse) fires his arrows into the crowd. What could that be then, swine flu? SARS? MRSA?

Pick a bug, any bug, let’s face it the biggest problem for most caused by the recent flu outbreak (considering it didn’t happen) was that the dear old Labour Government had spent millions upon millions buying in a vaccine which didn’t work and wasn’t necessary.

OK, OK. The Captain is a closet conspiracy theorist, but consider that, a few months before this stuff reached its sell by date they spread the vaccine amongst every GP in the country with instructions to “save the old and vulnerable” (and I don’t think they meant the government).

Every “Health Trust” (now there’s a contradiction in terms) in the country was coerced into spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on what seemingly was a useless, or near as dammit, preventative.

Now doesn’t that make you think maybe someone needed to save face?

Approach an election when you have to admit you’ve just slung millions of pounds worth of pharmaceuticals down the pan?

War, you don’t need me to figure that one out. Type in Wooton Basset or Helmand Province into your News browser.

Famine, (how come no grub equals the black horse, I’d have thought Death would have put up more of a fight for that one, maybe Famine used the old putrefaction argument, no, hang on, Death’s mount is pale green???).

Anyway, famine. Now the UK argument begins to run out of steam around here.

When the Captain’s hungry, he goes to the fridge just like most of his countrymen. None of us starve.

Consider that statement for five seconds.

None of us starve.

So maybe we should widen out this complaint into the ether to a global scenario and suddenly it all starts to make a lot more sense.

Pestilence, War, Famine and Death (you didn’t need assembly instructions for the Death argument).

When JC opened the fourth seal at the right hand of God (I can’t believe I’m going along with this) he released these four agents of evil upon the World, with me so far?

The World.

Not Folkestone, London Heathrow or Leamington Spa, but the lot of us.

As I don’t go much for the big beardy man (either ecumenically or sexually) I’m going to give Saint John the Evangelist who “revealed” all this stuff the benefit, and allow for the fact that this whole four blokes on gee gees is in fact a metaphor, although why he had to slander the son of God for releasing it on us when he came up with the tale goes right over my bonce.

We in the UK live in a wonderful world, the nature of which we fail to notice on an everyday basis.

When a drifting cloud of debris prevents us coming back from a short Spanish trip (don’t ask, 10 hours drive to Bilbao, hire car, hotel, ferry……), or a train gets stuck in the tunnel we seem to feel we have a hard life.

Not so.

The election dust having settled we know we’re in for a hard time, most of us look to the future with more than a little trepidation. Many will lose jobs, many more see living standards plummet, aspirations will need to be reined in.

Just don’t tell me it’s hard before you look at the wider picture.

They say a child dies every 17 seconds for lack of water on a planet where it covers most of the surface.

Next time I whinge in this column feel free to criticise.

.....(now come on be fair, I don’t care how devout you are, Death? Pale Green? What’s that all about?).

HAITI

I had a nice little blog sorted for yesterday.

Not one of my better ones, usual old tosh, this one about New Year Resolutions but the flood of videos, news reports and talk on the street as the horrific situation in Haiti unfolds has thrown such frippery into sharp relief.

As the first stories came in there was talk of “hundreds” dead.

Now I’m not particularly familiar with Haiti, other than it’s on the left hand side of the island which also contains the Dominican Republic for which my expertise is also sadly lacking.

What I do know however, from a brief sojourn in the Caribbean and the general information which all of us glean from the endless “real world” style documentaries we get bombarded with, is that this is a “backward” country, by the old colonial style definition, which basically means there’s not a lot of money about.

Also communities tend to be in disparate and remote areas where the facts concerning a disaster of this magnitude take time to emerge.

As those first reports trickled in I was struck by the thought that the initial estimate of casualties was liable to be, to say the least, conservative.

Although the nature of journalists, especially in the national press, is to exaggerate any story this does not usually apply in the case of such international disasters. Until actual facts start to emerge even hard bitten reporters seem to maintain the element of hope that things will not be as bad as they might be.

Alas, this disaster has proved to be far more tragic than first hoped.

It is usual for this blog to show related photographs and associated videos to illustrate the thread of the story.

Not on this occasion.

The sight of an aid worker throwing a single child’s body out of the wreckage of a school, simply to save time in reaching any possible casualties still buried, summed up for me the horror even more than other shots of streets lined with bodies.

So what can we in the logistics community (apologies to Private Eye) do to assist? No doubt over the next few days we will see the freight community “step up to the plate” as so many times before, much as the Handy Shipping Guide report of the 14th January on the generosity of UPS ($1 million donated). What interests me more is how to solve the problems created by the collapse of transport infrastructure.

So many of these huge disasters occur in regions where transport is difficult even in better times. It is at such times that the US military machine (plus so many other operations too numerous to mention) show their true value. Only an organisation with the resources of such a giant war machine can provide some instant relief in these circumstances. The airport too small for effective use, the nearest bulk landing point miles to the East in another state, roads blocked by landslips and fallen buildings. Helicopters are often the only way of reaching the remoter areas in time to save lives and, as we all know they are often impractical for reasons of cost, availability, location etc.

What is needed from the logistics community is a better system for spreading essential supplies, food, water (or means to purify it) medical items, shelters etc. faster and more efficiently.

So that’s your task for this week.

Find better ways to relieve situations like this. Doesn’t matter what it is, airships, folding containers, all terrain delivery trucks, whatever. Post anything you think of and we’ll publicise it.

In the meantime http://www.dec.org.uk/donate_now/ is the place to go to give some help.

If you’re an ORANGE phone customer you can add a contribution directly to your bill plus I’m sure there are many other ways to donate something.

No matter how cynical we often are about charity appeals (…how do I know the money gets there?) it simply doesn’t apply to cases like this.

The Captain’s Christmas Message

And Ho Ho Ho to one and all…….

…..But especially the drivers of Arrow Trucking in the US who found out two days before Christmas that they were losing their jobs – and their rigs – with immediate effect.

Others in the trucking community have set out to do what they can (see the Facebook link on the original Handy Shipping Guide story) and we wish all you guys a happy Christmas despite your getting dumped by a firm, which by all accounts, wasn’t up to much anyway. Let’s hope it’s a turning point for you all.

…..And to the drivers who use the only access point to get into Wales, namely the Severn Bridge, after the English and Welsh authorities colluded to increase the toll charges despite a deep recession and fair words saying how much they care for the .community with a strong desire to increase opportunities for trade in the area.

…..And to the management at Eurotunnel who, despite my excusing them for all delays by stating that at least they hadn’t used the old “wrong type of snow” argument, obviously read the latest Captains Blog and decided that, actually, that was a pretty damn good excuse for all their trains breaking down and immediately issued a press release that “cold fluffy snow of an unusual type” had actually caused all the problems. Shame it wasn’t the normal square, warm stuff we usually get then.

…..And of course the politicians who worked so hard at the Copenhagen conference that they managed all the objectives they had promised, or rather precisely none of them, which of course was exactly what the bulk of us thought they would achieve.

Thought it best to put that in as I seem to have slipped into sarcasm at some point there so it’s probably best just to thank all the regular readers of the Handy Shipping Guide and those who also find their way onto the blog site for all their support over the past few months.

The news readership now is reaching astonishing levels with thousands of people in 177 different countries using the site daily.

Not bad as we actually went fully on line in September.

Don’t forget that you can freely comment on any of the blog topics just by using the “comments” link.

So thanks to all and a very merry Christmas.

Here’s a final Christmas Video – Just Don’t watch it if you’re easily offended!!!

Copenhagen ---And Beyond!!!

Gordon "Buzz" Brown heads for the Climate Conference.

Last time out I was banging on about the tenuous nature of existence.

Well folks get ready for some more homespun philosophy,

The Captain is about to leap up and grasp at the coat-tails of ecoism (pat pending on the ism there). Anyone who reads the news on the Handy Shipping Guide main page regularly may have noticed today that our game was, well, to be frank, a tad off form. The reasons for our lamentable performance, was due to several factors:

1) It’s Friday, nobody ever works as hard as they might on Friday

2) There was a distinct lack of News. This was in part due to the fact that, you’ve guessed it, nobody, including PR companies, media departments in shipping companies etc., works as hard as they might on Friday.

3) We lost all our power.

By this I don’t mean that the staff all fell to the floor limbs twitching, nor that the normal super heroic feats we perform here every day suddenly were beyond our grasp. This was much simpler. The electricity failed.

Then it started up again, just long enough for us to start work again and then bang.

The lights went out, literally.

Unfortunately the fault was more than a little elusive and, whilst all about went around to discover if we were in the middle of a general or specific power failure I was transported back to the heady 70’s, three day weeks, transport workers strikes and all that (sighs of pathetic nostalgia from all readers over 50).

Finally the fault turned out to be office specific. A tired piece of wiring was discovered and electricity board seals tampered with by expert hands that had been using and abusing customs seals for decades (allegedly), repairs made, and the twenty or so times the lights had literally gone out in a few hours were almost forgotten.

Not quite. For in the long moments of darkness and confusion it became obvious how dependant we have become on all the trappings of modern life in a civilised country.

Flick a switch you have light, turn a knob – heat, a tap –water and so on. There is always food in the shops and money to buy it, transport is easy, we complain about the tiniest things, not the right kind of biscuit or crisps available, the train is half an hour late, you know the sort of thing, you are likely as guilty as the rest.

And that’s when it came home to me how important this Copenhagen deal really is. Sometimes when you watch a football match and one side attacks incessantly with no luck you instinctively know they won’t score that elusive goal. They could play on for another half an hour but you just know that it isn’t written, it’s not their day. You know it and the teams out on the pitch feel it too.

For me that’s how Copenhagen feels, or rather the situation we are in. We have to do something concrete to reverse the effects of the problems we are causing ourselves and our fellow man. The problem we have is that we are these days led by little men. Somehow we have to ensure that everybody is on the same page on this one, and, unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to happen. Promises and speeches will be made but I can’t see the generation of PR savvy wasters, shysters and swindlers that pass for many of the strictly average politicians we are now cursed with can grasp the nettle and organise a night of celebration in the place the beer comes from.

The thing which may save the day is the overwhelming feeling I have that the man (and of course woman) in the street really wants to see dramatic changes in energy use and the consequential cutting of pollution. If the will of the people prevails we may be in with a chance.

And one other factor. I watched in awe the other night as two scientists, Austrian I believe, revealed the artificial trees they have developed. Looking vaguely like a tree shaped like one of those early machines used to present an illusion of a moving object as you peered through slits in the side of a spinning drum, a zoetrope. 

These tree contraptions grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities. I believe the figure quoted was 60 million “trees” could absorb all the CO2 we produce at any one time.

The special plastic which catches the CO2 is then rinsed and carries on sucking the nasty stuff out of the atmosphere. So what happens to the CO2 you ask? Technology still needs a bit of work but apparently if they sort out this big underground storage idea you simply place the trees around the dumping site, the position of the trees in relation to areas of pollution is irrelevant, they simply grab the same amount wherever in the world they are, lowering the overall amount of pollution. The recovered CO2 goes straight down into storage in whatever form they mange to convert it to.

So don’t despair just yet, but let’s be clear, no matter how clever we think we are Nature, in all her glory is waiting out there for us to screw up. And if a little thing like the power going down for a few hours can cause such confusion, what are we, and more to the point, the next generation, going to do if we screw this one up.

God it’s Tough in Front of this Computer -Food for Thought

A horror story in the international press the other day as I checked up on the opposition got me thinking about a few things.

Firstly how tenuous life is and also just how lucky we are.

Yes I do mean we.

You might be there considering your own mortality and how to put an end to it at this precise moment (although reading this would be a bit of a risk at such a time - even I don’t think of this blog as a sort of scripted Happy Hour) but no matter what your state of mind you are still one of the lucky few, oh blessed band.

I know this because you are reading this from a computer screen, and unless by some unfortunate mischance it is on display in the window of a tekkie shop somewhere cold and dangerous with you sliding down the frosted window after some terrible accident, these being the last words you ever see, then believe me you’re lucky.

Today’s fateful tale came from India.

A waste truck driver was delivering a load to some God forsaken landfill site where labourers toil amongst the muck, seeking waste metal and other goodies from each load of junk.

In the usual scramble to be first, seven people, three of them children, could not avoid being buried alive when the truck slid part way into the pit, tipping its load upon them.

The unknown driver panicked and ran off and by the time rescuers had dug the unfortunates out, all were dead.

So life is, as I say, tenuous.

My reading of that scientific Bible by the wonderful Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) just lately, doesn’t help.

By the time old Bill has finished quantifying just how insignificant ones life is and the frankly miraculous fact that you are even able to read this or indeed anything else, one is wont to turn to either:

a) God

or

b) the bottle.

So as we move to what for many of us is the festive season, take a minute to consider just how lucky you really are.

Take the time to look at the rolling waves, or smell the difference in the air under the trees, you know the sort of moments, soppy stuff.

And thank whatever God (or bottle) you have that you don’t earn a pitiful living working on the dust heaps of the subcontinent for less than a quid a day.

Any one moved by the Christmas Spirit could do worse to take a look at where I sourced this picture.