Adventure becomes mundane

Once in a while, the BBC’s bland little bulletins can stop you in your tracks: I was brought up short by a casual sentence in something today: ‘the melting sea ice has also opened up new shipping routes. Russia is now advertising the Northern Sea Route, which cuts the journey time from China to Europe by up to two weeks’. Centuries of Arctic exploration and discovery, the world of Barentz and Bering, Nansen and Amundsen, the long dream of finding the North-West Passage, a route over the top of Europe which suddenly it seems just to have materialised, not as an occasional venture of the insanely brave, but an advertised route to be undertaken by container ships.