Amazing Disgrace Read Online Free PDF

written Millie! sober. As Churchill noted in relation to the navy, there abideth rum, buggery, the lash, these three; but the greatest of these is rum. Admittedly there have been a good few moments in my life, especially in Morocco, when I would have challenged his priorities, but just at present some prosecco will do nicely. The glass brims, the tiny bubbles ascend in wavering chains, so let me begin.
    A few years ago there was one of those awesomely tedious panic stories that nowadays hit the headlines with increasing frequency and tell of the different versions of imminent doom that are probably in store for us, as if we cared. Sometimes it’s rogue asteroids, often it’s dread epidemics, and eternally it’s global warming (or in my preferred version, a growling lamb or even a grim ball-gown). This particular story concerned avolcano called Cumbre Vieja or ‘Old Peak’ on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. The diverting scenario on offer was that Cumbre Vieja might be seized by a sudden fit of vulcanism such that its already fractured slopes would fall off into the sea, causing a tsunami of epic proportions. It would be goodbye to time-share cottages in Lanzarote as the wall of water sped off to lay waste the west coast of Africa before fanning out across the Atlantic to do the same to the eastern seaboard of the United States. Until the story hit the news, such vulcanological work as had been done on Cumbre Vieja was not imbued with much sense of alarm. Suddenly, however, having learned of the damage the wave might also cause low-lying coastal areas in Europe, the EU decided to fund an urgent geological survey of the seabed around La Palma to see if it could yield advance warning of disaster, and to deploy some instruments that would enable permanent monitoring.
    This project, the European Atlantic Islands Geomorphological Instability Survey (or ‘EAGIS’ for pronounceability), duly rose through the usual bureaucratic strata in Brussels from the depths of feasibility into the sunlit realm of implementation. That it did so with unusual despatch was surely a measure of how worried Brussels functionaries were about their timeshare cottages, not merely in Lanzarote but in Funchal over in Madeira to the north. The declared aim of the survey was ‘to produce a three-dimensional model of the volcano’s submarine roots by using acoustic signals to penetrate several kilometres into the earth’s crust and reveal the faults leading down to the magma chambers of molten rock’. Can you seriously imagine this as a plausible ambition? Others could, it seems, for EAGIS recruited oceanographers from several countries and disciplines and finally put to sea late in the year in no fewer than four seismic-survey vessels. These were specialized craft of massive and hideous design known as ramform, being wedge-shaped with an extremely broad stern over which as many as twelve streamers of sensing instruments could be towed simultaneously . What with fuel tankers and other supply vessels, itwas a fleet of a dozen ships, hired under very tight time restrictions and with overrun penalty clauses, that finally set sail out of Rotterdam. If they were lucky the scientists would have a bare sixteen days on site. A series of Atlantic squalls would be enough to abort the whole programme and write off some twelve million Euros. True, this was merely cash from the bottomless sack of that perennial Santa Claus, the European taxpayer , so it was literally of no account. Yet if the enterprise failed somebody somewhere might be forced to account for it, so everyone duly assumed a serious expression while it was planned.
    So also did the EAGIS scientists as they put to sea, daunted but eager. They were daunted because the area around La Palma to be surveyed was large, but as scientists they were licking their lips expectantly because it was an unheard-of luxury to have four survey vessels at their disposal. In the normally cash-strapped world of