The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [1]
The river’s ostensibly generous width in fact offers but a single, narrow navigable channel. Used to having hundreds of metres of water to play with, the ship now advances gingerly, like a proud creature of the wild confined to a zoo enclosure, her sonar letting out a steady sequence of coy beeps. Up on the bridge, the Malaysian captain scans a nautical chart, which delineates every underwater ridge and bank from Canvey Island to Richmond, while the surrounding landscape, even where it is densest with monuments and civic buildings, looks like the ‘terra incognita’ marked on the charts of early explorers. On either side of the ship, the river swirls with plastic bottles, feathers, cork, sea-smoothed planks, felt-tip pens and faded toys.
The Goddess docks at Tilbury container terminal at just after eleven. Given the trials she has undergone, she might have expected to be met by a minor dignitary or a choir singing ‘Exultate, jubilate’. But there is a welcome only from a foreman, who hands a Filipino crew member a sheaf of customs forms and disappears without asking what dawn looked like over the Malacca Straits or whether there were porpoises off Sri Lanka.
The ship’s course alone is impressive. Three weeks earlier she set off from Yokohama and since then she has called in at Yokkaichi, Shenzhen, Mumbai, Istanbul, Casablanca and Rotterdam. Only days before, as a dull rain fell on the sheds of Tilbury, she began her ascent up the Red Sea under a relentless sun, circled by a family of storks from Djibouti. The steel cranes now moving over her hull break up a miscellaneous cargo of fan ovens, running shoes, calculators, fluorescent bulbs, cashew nuts and vividly coloured toy animals. Her boxes of Moroccan lemons will end up on the shelves of central London shops by evening. There will be new television sets in York at dawn.
Not that many consumers care to dwell on where their fruit has come from, much less where their shirts have been made or who fashioned the rings which connect their shower hose to the basin. The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although – to the more imaginative at least – a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.
2.
The Goddess of the Sea is only one of dozens of ships making their way up the Thames on this October day. A Finnish vessel arrives from the Baltic Sea, laden with rolls of paper the width of railway tunnels, destined to feed the chattering presses of Wapping and West Ferry. A freighter sits low in the water next to Tilbury power station, weighed down by 5,000 tonnes of Colombian coal – enough fuel to fire the kettles and hairdryers of eastern England until the New Year.
At a quayside, a car transporter opens its heavy-jawed cargo doors to emit three thousand family saloons which have spent twenty days at sea since leaving their assembly plant at Ulsan, on the Korean peninsula. These near-identical Hyundai Amicas, smelling of newly minted plastic and synthetic carpet, will bear witness to sandwich lunches and arguments, love-making and motorway songs. They will be driven to beauty spots and left to gather leaves in school car parks. A few will kill their owners. To peer inside these untouched vehicles, their seats wrapped in brown paper printed with elegant and cryptic Korean entreaties, is to have a feeling of intruding on an innocence more normally associated with the slumber of new-borns.
But the port shows little interest in lyrical associations. Around Tilbury, the shipping companies present their services bluntly from within their smoked-glass headquarters. To reassure and seduce their clients, they imply that their vessels’ journeys – even those which involve rounding the Cape of Good Hope in