The last shout?

We woke this morning to snow, which I had not been expecting. Snow was what happened up north and other foreign parts. Maybe even in the sunken roads coming down out of the North Downs, but not here in Epsom.

With this being the view from the kitchen. With a bit of life in the form of grey squirrels and a neighbouring cat. Hopefully, the end of the winter.

The brown pot, centre right, behind the (cheap, thin aluminium) jam pan used to be home to the avocado of reference 1. Used to be because we decided that, first, it was far too vigorous to be suitable as an indoor plant and, second, that we had failed to find a reasonably sunny spot for it, a spot, that is, without prior claims. Furthermore, proximity to the study radiator appeared to be killing off the lower leaves. While one of the upper leaves is still in pretty good shape after a week in the compost heap, despite the cold weather.

Snow dealt with, back to bed to read a few more pages from reference 2. To be struck by a couple of sentences about the disadvantages that land locked countries labour under - with the borders left them by the colonial powers meaning that there are rather a lot of them in Africa. A sufficiently big problem to attract a substantial entry in Wikipedia. Although, to be fair to the colonial powers, not so easy to avoid in the middle of a continental land mass.

But it made me wonder how much of the history of Russia could be construed as a struggle to capture and hold decent warm water ports - the long stretch of Arctic, substantially icebound, coastline not counting. How much of their paranoia over the Ukraine is driven by their need for a long stretch of readily defensible warm water coastline? Albeit only the Black Sea, hostage to the whims of Turkey.

Also about the extent to which being landlocked is apt to make a country more into cooperation with its neighbours, less into the sovereignty that Brexiteers are so attached to.

Maybe the Internet is not such a fanciful analogy: access to the Internet gives one access to the information of the world, rather as access to the open sea gives one access to the goods of the world. Access which, here in the UK, we did pretty well out of from the 16th century until half way through the 20th century, when it all started to go wrong.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/avocado-news.html.

Reference 2: Born in Blackness: Africa, African and the making of the modern world: 1471 to the Second World War – Howard W. French – 2022.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlocked_country.