I felt a bit briefly maudlin today. I’ve been following the story about the typhoon in Burma since it happened and the first thing I had to do was work out where Burma was. (Between Bangladesh and Thailand is the simple answer, I’ve never been further East than Muscat). Burma is a socialist military dictatorship apparently and the lengths they have gone to in order to mismanage the aftermath is very depressing. (Mind you, so was New Orleans). The thing that actually got to me was seeing the news about the China earthquake, nearly 15,000 dead so far, and children being rescued from the collapsed remnants of a school. It occurred to me that the children were of course the lucky ones, as they were still alive. (There is no fate worse than death really, except perhaps when death brings release from terminal suffering). Lucky is a relative word, of course, as some children may have terrible injuries or have lost family members.

How would Britain cope if we were ravaged by similar natural catastrophes on a massive scale? Pretty badly I suspect. Our earthquakes and storms cause damage but they don’t generally flatten cities, for that we should be grateful for a quirk of geography.

After all, mankind is just a tiny speck of dust in the timeline of mother earth and we cling precariously to the thin crust of a raging inferno underneath. Earthquakes may be tumultuous to us but to the planet they are minor inconsequential shudders.

David explained to me the other day how the Sun was eventually going to expand, engulfing all the planets and burning us to a cinder, something even the Cockroaches can’t survive. He wasn’t overly bothered by it though, as it is five Billion years away. By that time, Man will hopefully have reached for the stars, or possibly perished along the way.