Abandon ship

Today was very busy but satisfying because I felt that I got a lot done. Also it's the last day of January so we can start looking towards the Spring! This evening we watched a documentary about the cruise ship Costa Concordia which sank last week off the coast of Italy. It seemed a bit soon and a bit morbid to make a documentary about it, especially since not all of the bodies have yet been recovered from the ship. However it was very interesting, mainly because of the immediacy of the footage from passengers' phones and the audio recordings from the coastguard as he angrily ordered the captain to re-board the ship from the lifeboat he had got into (he didn't!) There have been so many films made about the Titanic which went down a hundred years ago this year, but this documentary about the Concordia captured the actual moments as the ship listed and the lights went out. There were some spooky parallels with the Titanic; the unexpected amount of damage to the ship (three compartments ruptured by the rock) and the problems with lowering the lifeboats because of the tilt of the ship. If the ship hadn't been so close to land there would have been many more lives lost. Now we are going to watch an episode of our current favourite programme - Mad Men - before bed.