The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [9]
I decide that I will anchor my journey around images, for it is tangible details in which the logistical field seems to be most sorely lacking. Herewith follows, therefore, a photo essay whose sole ambition is to alter, if only for a second or two, some of the thought processes that might occur the next time one is confronted by an object that has been transported mysteriously and at an implausible speed halfway around the planet in the darkness.
ii. A Logistical Journey
It is impossible to follow fish without an appetite for humiliation. No one wants to open up to writers, who bring in no money and are liable to cause trouble. Even in an era of increased political transparency, businesses remain uninterested in acquiring observers. Attempts to trace – let alone to witness or photograph – how warm-water fish reach our tables are liable to provoke within the industry some of the same suspicion which must have greeted enquiries into the slave trade in the 1780s. I contact fifteen seafood importing businesses. Three of them have the same sculpture of a marlin in the lobby. All refuse to discuss the details of their logistical networks.
There seems no alternative but to head to the Indian Ocean, hoping to pick up leads on the ground. In Male, the capital of the Maldives, the photographer and I check in to the Relax Inn, whose titular command we find ourselves unable to obey. For the first five days, we encounter nothing but dead ends. To kill time between fruitless appointments, we wander the city, visiting patriotic monuments and mosques. Behind the Seagull Café, we discover a small cemetery dedicated to dead holidaymakers, most of them from Norway, Germany and England. They are commemorated here not because they were unwanted back home, but because their relatives wished for them to spend their afterlives in soil more congenial than that found in their frozen, fog-bound homelands. The park honours not only those who managed to die here but also an equally large contingent who sorely wished to do so but in the end succumbed elsewhere, perhaps claimed by one of the many viruses which haunt the rain-sodden European plains in midwinter.
Our fortunes change when, after a discussion with a well-connected hairdresser, we secure an appointment with no less a figure than Abdulla Naseer, the Minister for Fish, newly returned from an official visit to the United Nations. Wearing a pair of crocodile shoes, the minister greets us with gravitas, having a lucid awareness of his power, not just over the lives of fish, but of their captors too. After patiently listening to our story, he shouts a few orders to his subordinates in the next room, then offers to introduce us both to a tuna exporter and a group of fishermen in the northern islands. On our way out, he hands us a set of his business cards, allowing us to flash them at anyone who might cause us trouble on our peregrinations around his heavily policed island fiefdom. Unsure of how to pitch my gratitude, I suggest we have tea the next time he is in London.
We travel to an almost perfectly round kilometre-long coral island, in the second most northerly atoll of the Maldivian chain. From the air, it is easy to mistake the place for a tourist resort, though from close up, it is lacking the requisite water villas, spas and couples from Baden-Württemberg renewing their marriage vows. There are only basic breeze-block huts,