But in converting a passion into a set of facts, the spotters are at least following a pattern with an established pedigree, most noticeable in academia, where an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, may end up writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto.
It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.
They are like children, too, in their upending of conventional ideas of what might constitute a good job, always valuing a profession’s intrinsic interest over its relative material benefit, judging with particular favour the post of crane operator at a container terminal because of the vantage point it offers over ships and quaysides, just as a child might aspire to drive a train because of the seductive hiss of the carriage’s hydraulic doors, or to run a post office based on the satisfaction of adhering airmail labels onto puffy envelopes.
The ship-spotters’ pastime harks back to the habits of premodern travellers, who, upon arriving in a new country, were apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbours and workshops, feeling that the observation of work could be as stimulating as anything on a stage or chapel wall – a relief from a contemporary view which tightly associates tourism with play and therefore steers us away from an interest in aluminium foundries and sewage treatment plants in favour of the trumpeted pleasures of musicals and waxwork museums.
Their satisfactions are akin to those of an ornithologist who, on glimpsing through a pair of binoculars a creature which most people would dismiss as just another blue-grey bird, knows to celebrate the spring’s first sighting of a Phylloscopus trochilus
Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through – and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one’s own alienation. It
The tuna’s lessons, while played out in particularities, are nonetheless general ones about the value of swimming upstream in order to observe the forgotten odysseys of crates, to witness the secret life of warehouses and hence to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators. I decide that I will anchor my journey around images, for it is tangible details in which the logistical field seems to be most sorely lacking.
