Here's a fascinating Sunday read — not about geopolitics or Presidential tweets but about the people caught in the middle of it.

This is a rare moment in the history of seafaring. No one outside the industry thinks about the crews whose work brings us everything we have and all the goods and fuel upon which our lives, globalisation and normality depend. To have the US president on their side is unusual indeed, though his words of support have yet to help them. [...]

True, I certainly hadn't. #1479712, #1433466

Once you have travelled with seafarers, as I have severally, on many kinds of ships, you never forget them, especially when war, storms or disaster bring them to the news. I was a lifeboatman and thought of joining the navy; my uncle was a warship captain; and in another life I was a second officer on a container ship. “What will the crew be doing on your sister ship off Iran tonight?” I asked a friend, a senior engineer, who is in direct if intermittent touch with colleagues there. “Karaoke,” he said, “and a barbecue at the weekend.”

"Unanswered questions and coldly economic decision-making are normal in this industry of nearly 2mn people, responsible for moving more than 80 per cent of goods traded worldwide.""Unanswered questions and coldly economic decision-making are normal in this industry of nearly 2mn people, responsible for moving more than 80 per cent of goods traded worldwide."

Most jobs in the industry make you glad that you don’t do them. Counting containers on and off in port for hours, when you’ve already worked a full shift. Watching pipe couplings as oil is pumped aboard is numbing and feels endless: the man detailed to do this is forbidden to take his eyes off the couplings for a second. Like the watchmen on the bridges of every ship in the Gulf tonight, staring out at the darkness in silence for hours at a time, he must be ruthlessly strong with himself, fighting sleep.Day and night, your life and those of your shipmates depend on individuals’ concentration and resolve

Not at all the usual FT stuff, but clearly they thought this weekend was ripe for good content (#1491154).

We should not forget, in peace or war, that these merchant ships are the homes of men, fathers, sons and brothers, who do the work upon which everything we do and are depends.

archive: https://archive.md/DL9a6