Last Night I had a Dream

Last night I had a dream.

I was a boy of eleven again, and I was with my parents.  After our teatime picnic somewhere in the New Forest, Dad suggested that we head for Southampton Water as he had read that there were lots of ships in the Port of Southampton that evening.

Just as the Golden Hour was upon us, at about the time of sunset, we joined a friend with a small boat at Totton, then sailed down to Hythe Pier and back.  Back in 1957 there were no container ships and no container terminals.  There weren't many planes, either.  Those that had to travel, travelled by ship.

A series of ships with white hulls and yellow funnels were moored one behind the other in the New Docks.  These were vessels of the P&O and the Orient Lines.  All of them were moored in a straight line, bow to stern along the mile-long quay.

In those days, the local papers used to have a column giving dates, ship names, shipping lines, destinations, and sometimes even cargoes, so a small boy had much to dream about as he read the Shipping News.

Our little boat sailed down the River Test, past these huge liners, some of which were preparing for six- or even eight-week voyages.  The Chusan was in-bound from Singapore via the Suez Canal, while the sharp-eyed would notice the little blue flag with the white square flying from the bridge of the Orcades that denoted she would sail within the hour for the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Aden and India.

Also outbound, but not until after dark, the Ocean Monarch of the Shaw Savill line made ready for her long journey through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to Sydney, Australia.

The light was fading quite rapidly now as we passed two Union Castle Liners.

The Durban Castle and the Edinburgh Castle were smart as paint with their lavender hulls twinkling with the fairylights of the portholes, and their large floodlit red funnels with the black tops.

A Red Funnel ferry fussed out of the Town Quay on its way down Southampton Water to Cowes on the Isle of Wight.  Red Funnel was also the company that supplied the tugs at Southampton.  In the days before fancy devices like bowthrusters were invented, tugs had to manoeuvre the large vessels until they were going fast enough to steer by themselves.

Easily larger than the others, the Queen Elizabeth, of the Cunard Line was at the Ocean Terminal.  There was a deep sonorous note from her foghorn and she began to move!  She was outbound for New York, and would be there in about six days time.  She, too, had her two red and black funnels floodlit, and twinkles of lights in her black hull and white superstructure.  Soon, her passengers, film stars, politicians and businessmen would take their places at some of the many onboard restaurants as the ship sailed round the Isle of Wight.  She had four tugs round her, like a mother hen and her chicks.  There was a tug at the front, one at each side, and one at the stern, facing the other way to keep her straight.  They were soon discarded.

It was now dark and we were below Hythe Pier, almost as far as the huge Warsash Naval Hospital.

A wonderful sight!  The two-funnelled Queen Elizabeth, having discarded her tugs, disappeared down Southampton Water, and as she did so, the three-funnelled Queen Mary, inbound from New York, passed each other.

We turned round and headed back to Totton, past the "Mary", which was berthing at the Ocean Terminal.  Past the Orcades as she began her long voyage to India.  We passed the other liners, everyone a mass of lights, until we got back to Totton.

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Thinking about it, it was, when I was fast asleep.

What a shame digital cameras had not been invented when I was a boy.

Hydrogen for power

Hydrogen we are told is the miracle fuel.  You see, when it burns, you don't get any nasty carbon dioxide.  All you get is lovely clean water.

However . . .

ll those of you who are older than a certain pre-computer age, you will remember the spirit duplicator.  Without going into the technicalities, you put what you wanted to print into the duplicator, wound the handle, and out came some damp pages with fuzzy violet writing on them.  I say, writing, because you could hand write on them.

I mention this, because in my year 9 Chemistry exam we were given our papers, but before we could get started, a very embarrassed Chemistry teacher announced that

"Question 4 is not very clear.  It should read "What is a fuel?". 

What a swizz!  It clearly said "What is a Fuck?"  This rapidly went round the classroom producing "fucks" all over the place.

The following week, the marked papers came back.  Question 4 had not been done very well at all.  Our teacher said that a fuel was something that could be changed to something else and give out heat.

None of us seem to have learned much at all since that day, but the sad fact is, that if you want to produce energy, you nearly always have to use fuel, and that fuel heats up the planet.

If you take a glass of water, you have zillions of atoms of oxygen joined on to two zillion atoms of hydrogen.  You need quite a lot of energy to separate them into the separate gases, molecules of oxygen and molecules of hydrogen.

You separate the two gases, and then you burn your one zillion hydrogen molecules (two zillion hydrogen atoms) in oxygen to form water and heat.

Hydrogen is a fuel, and far from being the wonder of the century, we are still fucked up.  Big time.

So what can we do?  Well, there are just too many people on the planet.  We could kill off the baby boomers, but as a boomer, I have to tell you I would resent that solution.

We need to grow plants which will remove carbon dioxide from the planet, NOT provide food and NOT provide forest fires.

Make everything out of wood, preferably hand made.  Grow pond weed followed by water lilies, and rhubarb, (we don't want forest fires!) and gradually we could work up to vast areas of rice, which could be used for thatching.  This would tire people out until they were too shagged out (see question 4) to do anything except sleep until sunrise. 

With fewer people, who knows, maybe the planet will have a chance.