Titanic . . .

I remember many years ago, singing a song at school about the Titanic disaster.  It was as I recall, way beyond the understanding and empathy of a mob of kids from the seventies, probably because of the almost whimsical way our music teacher always played it on the piano . . . like some pub room sea shanty, best suited to be sung with a belly full of rum, or Tetley's Yorkshire Bitter.  Whatever the reason, we let the event go bang over our heads, through our ears and out of our minds.

A complete heart bypass.

But, now we have reached 100 years since that great ship went down and the years since the school shanty's have rolled along to remind us all of our frail mortality, it has hit me with a greater force than ever before.  Maybe for me the writer's mind has kicked in a little here, but I think it's more down to the gauntlet challenge the numerous TV documentaries have laid down; just to consider what we might have done if facing an almost certain death in those icy waters.  And I have been staggered afresh by just how much serendipity might have played its part in the disaster, almost - like it was meant to happen.  Now, I know such a notion is surely ridiculous to most people.  These kind of unforseen disasters have happened before.  You can look back at any tragic event, take it apart, and find therein a web like tapestry of occurrences beforehand that finally led to the terrible climax.

The aforementioned song goes on further about the Lord's Almighty Hand knowing that 'ship would never land'. Now He might well have known it was never going to reach it's destination, but I don't believe for one minute divine interference caused the tragedy. It was, as is usually the case, a succession of 'unfortunate events' that placed the 'unsinkable' ship in the wrong place at the wrong time, to meet up with an iceberg she should have been nowhere near in the first place.  Throw in the vain eagerness to have her reach New York in record time, the calmness of the water that night, the cable messages warning of ice being missed - and you have a neat recipe for disaster, a perfect killer combination.

It's almost as if fate planned the disaster.

The unsinkable Titanic did just that.  She sank - with a loss of life to match the ill provision of the ship's owners.  Titanic carried the amount of lifeboats the wise thinkers deemed necessary, nowhere near as many as she needed.  There were 20 on her flanks, with room for about 1800 people.  She carried well over 2000 souls on board.  In fact she could have easily carried at least 30 boats, but it was thought unnecessary and not aesthetically pleasing to do so.  From all I have read and seen there appears to be a certain arrogance on the part of those who conceived the ship, to the point where they almost defied nature to do her worst.  In hindsight it seems that's exactly what she did.  Her very worst.  She destroyed Titanic with the quiet precision of a Ripper's cut.

The damage she sustained was just in the right position to kill her; a flank gash of around 300 feet long, well below the waterline.  It was an incision the designers had made little provision for, because they simply thought something like this would never happen.  The thing I have always found the most disturbing about this tragedy is seeing a CGI Titanic in every TV and movie adaptation, sitting there, moveless and crippled, like a floundering whale in a sea of black glass.  It was a mocking ocean that night, that saw no need now to kick up a storm to do it's damage.  It is an image for me of how man's greatest fanfare of ideas can be knocked cruelly into silence by the power of other, more mysterious forces.

The aftermath of the Titanic sinking will have been fraught with 'what ifs'.  That's the essence of regret.  And it's part of being human.  Ill considered actions are taken every minute of every day.  Some lead to an event as trivial as getting lost in a strange town.  Others culminate in death and disaster.  It's this freedom we have to invite such disaster or triumph makes us free indeed.

To me the fact remains; if things regarding that fateful voyage had been going 'by the book'  Titanic might never have gone down at all.  And if we were able to go back in time from this reality and warn Captain Smith of impending catastrophe, would it cause even greater disaster?  Is this fine tapestry of existence peppered with occurrences we would rather have not happened, because they were just meant to be?  You can either look at the past and see it as an elegant interweave of events that has led to where we are today, or you can call it a big mess.  It doesn't seem like endless chaos from here, because the world adapts to it's wounds - and then we carry on to the next crisis.  The thing that seems the hardest of all, is not being able to go back and fix things.  I have wondered just how many of those survivors, huddled and freezing in the lifeboats, remembered the comfortable experiences of the previous night.  Probably more than we think.  Yet, that iceberg was waiting, even as they wined and dined; waiting silently and callously to commit mass murder.

We remember tragedy down the years and the loss of life, and so we should.  But I sometimes worry about the 'game' the Cosmos likes to endlessly play - to put us in harms way.  Or maybe it's all just down to whatever we decide . . .