When the stricken mega-ship ‘Ever Given’ blocked the Suez Canal many were amazed to learn that 12 per cent of global trade passes through the canal, making the economic damage caused by its closure very significant: a boggling $9.6 billion a day. 

All of this was something of a revelation to many of us, for as Rose George so powerfully puts it in her book Deep Sea and Foreign Going, shipping is an ‘invisible industry that brings you 90% of everything’. ‘It has quadrupled in size since 1970. We are more dependent on it now than ever’. And yet we suffer from what the chief of the Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, calls ‘sea blindness’. We pay little heed to the sea itself and those who traverse it, to the companies who run shipping under their very elusive flags of convenience; we pay scant attention to what goes on behind the high-security fences of the world’s container ports, and least of all to the conditions in which the world’s seafarers live. They will joke that their job is like being in prison with a salary - but those who know both forms of institution agree that sea life is the far harsher form of incarceration.

This talk attempts to overcome our sea blindness and open our eyes to these people who have brought us nine out of every ten things we own.

A talk for The Third Sunday after Trinity , 20 June 2021.

Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks.