Found a 3-part documentary charmingly titled Suez: A Very British Crisis, which I have yet to watch. Aperitivo: “The Story of British Canals”, in which I learned a number of interestoids (IODs).
IOD 1:
- UK “canal boom” started in the late 1700s to join 4 main waterways: Mersey, Severn, Trent, Thames
IOD 2:
- By 1793, more than 60 canals in construction, leading to
- a gaggle of “hopeful investors”* hoping to get a bit of the new stock market, and
- an eventual 50% reduction in coal prices as the black stuff could be moved around more swiftly
IOD 3:
- A key engineer was a Scottish dude called John Rennie (‘the Elder’, nogal), who I think Boris Johnson must be a secret admirer of
IOD 4:
- Leonardo da Vinci invented the “miter/mitre gate”, ie. canal lock. I’d be smug about that too
IOD 5:
- Being a “legger” was once a legitimate and important job
* Speaking of “hopeful investors”, I’m reading a book my mother stumbled upon in the Red Cross second-hand shop in Holbæk where she volunteers once a week:
The Big Container Heist: Deceit, Tax Fraud, and Disappeared** Containers
**The Google assistant thing suggested “disappeared” for forsvundne. It could work, with a sinister grammar-bending ring to it. “Missing” probably better, though I haven’t read far enough to figure out whether the boxes ever existed, so…
Anyway, the title in either language/translation is pretty salacious, and I imagine it being an exciting find for my mother in the Red Cross shop in Holbæk because a) being in the Red Cross shop in Holbæk can be quite boring (cf. where and how she’s lived), and b) she realised at that moment that boxes are indeed full of stories. Even the missing ones. So her daughter is not mad.
Plot summary so far: 1980s in Denmark were apparently all about investing to avoid big taxes for the wealthy. Sleuthing journo undercovers scheme involving both one of the top insurance firms in the country, and – dung, dung – biker gangs. So those with cash to spare became the “hopeful investors” in a shit-load of containers yet to be built, but sure to make a LOT of money. (Probable pitch: “do YOU want to be the next AP Møller?”)
I’m guessing it’ll turn out to be a story about swindlers swindling the rich and gullible. The blurb begins:
The original sentence stumped me because of the strangeness of buying fictitious containers (stupid people) vs. being persuaded to buy things which turned out to be mostly on paper (naughty swindlers). Now I shall have to finish the book to find out how poor or clever that sentence is.
(My mother will be moving from Holbæk to Copenhagen soon. Closer to the biker gangs, where the action is. That’s how she rolls.)