Last night I watched on TV the first edition of a new series about the trawlermen fishing around the seas off the northern coasts of Scotland. It was very clear just how hard life is aboard these trawlers; and a dangerous one. The Health & Safety Executive does not go out to seas with these men; they will only be involved after the event. I think that I was surprised at how small the trawlers actually are. I suppose if someone had asked me I would have said that a trawler was about 1,000 tons. It is much less. These boats were more like 250 tons and they took a battering from the seas. Weather forecasts could give an idea of what to expect from day to day but they would not tell the trawlermen the whole stories. Huge waves, 30 or 40 feet high could come from nowhere adding to a heavy swell and could swamp a boat in seconds. Men and machinery took a heavy pounding day after day and getting a satisfactory catch was a perpetual struggle. A good catch of the right fish and the men were well paid. A poor catch and they struggled at subsistence levels. Our seas have been over-fished and prices are squeezed but these men carry on doing their jobs and passing on their commitments from father to son over many generations.
Also, yesterday, we heard that some bankers in the city of London were about to go to court to sue Deutsche Bank for unpaid guaranteed bonuses. These hard done by men were demanding payments of the order of £1m for their efforts last year, a year when their company lost several billions of pounds - as a result of the expertise of their management and staff. I wonder how many, sitting down in some over-priced restaurant owned by an over-paid TV chef , will wonder how much was earned by the trawlermen who supplied them with the raw materials for their luxury lunch? And would they be prepared to consider that in comparison, perhaps investment bankers are rather ludicrously over-paid?
It's a funny old world.
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