In the UK, Christmas 2022 is going to be mainly notable for strikes, many of them by ‘essential workers’. Which does rather beg the question – If the services being provided are so essential, how is it that the people who provide them are not decently paid?
When Rose de Freycinet started to write her diary of her voyage on the Uranie, she began with two very personal paragraphs addressed to the person for whom it was intended. She did not name the friend, not did she explain why she ended her diary so abruptly, writing almost nothing about her last month in Rio de Janeiro and nothing at all about the journey home from there
Adria, or at least that bit of it positioned near the top of the crustal stack, just got a little bit smaller. At about half past eight local time in the morning of the 9th of November 2022, a Magnitude 5.6 earthquake nucleated at a nominal depth of 10 km beneath the Adriatic sea near Ancona.
Neither Rose de Freycimet’s journal nor the letters to her mother provide a complete account of her voyage but, by the greatest of good fortunes, they do when put together. Moreover, for the latter part of the stay in Sydney, and for the voyage as far as Dili, we have both letters and the journal. Where they overlap, the letters have been neglected in favour of the journal, but was that the right thing to do? A question that can be answered only by comparing the two. But therein lies an additional problem.
Among the people whom Ayn Rand consigned to their fate in the Winston Tunnel disaster was ‘the woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, …. a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had “a right” to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not’. But railway workers in the UK are to be denied the right to withhold their labour, should they not wish to provide it. Would Rand have approved?
Despite more than two hundred years of geological investigations, there are still huge unanswered questions regarding the Alps. Given my own geographical bias towards the extreme northern Adriatic, one question in particular dominates my thought. What was Adria?