In Moody's boatyard

At first I saw only beauty.

Entering the boatyard I perceived a forest of masts, thousands of lines like nearly-parallel cross-hatchings on an etching.  It was impossible to distinguish individual masts; instead they became a huge bristling three-dimensional entity.  But it was more than just an etching: it shifted subtly as the wind and the currents swayed the boats in their moorings.  It became real, kinetic art, an image that moved in indescribably and unrepeatably complicated ways. The effect was hypnotic.

I looked at the boats. Their hulls gleamed in the bright, grey light; colours emerged from the clustered shapes.  Gradually an Impressionist scene formed itself before my eyes, a day on the Seine, but extended, like a theme and variations, or an idea taken up and writ large.  The bobbing of the boats became soft, slow blurs of pigment, pointillist theories made manifest.

Then I saw only money.

I realised that these were not just masts on the coloured hulls of gently swaying boats; each unit was an object of desire, a luxury item.  At the least - even for the meanest vessel - each of those masts and hulls would cost £30,000; some cost more than a million pounds.  I tried to see each agglomeration of wood and steel and rope and plastic as all this money.

I cast a glance at the entire boatyard.  There were too many vessels to count - an indication in itself of the number, I guessed - how? - that there were 1,000 boats in all.  One thousand of these items, each worth - say - £50,000 on average.  In all, the boatyard held £50 million.

I could barely grasp the thousandness of the boats; the fifty millionness of their worth was literally incomprehensible.  And yet, today, £50 million is poor fortune for the really rich; at the very least you need hundreds, thousands of millions. Tens times, a hundred times, these boats - belonging to one person?

But if I was numbed by these numbers, what of the bigger figures? The U.K.'s trade deficit?  The National Debt?  The total TNT equivalent of all the nuclear warheads in the world?  If the rich inhabited numerical realms beyond this boatyard, and governments beyond them, and the arms race beyond even that, what chance had mere mortals like me?

Then I saw neither beauty nor money.

Walking along the quay's wooden fingers which poked out into the dark water between the boats, I read the names of the boats, and of their makers, and of their harbours.  Everywhere I went it was Moody's: the boats were built by Moody's, they were berthed by Moody's.  Moody's boatyard was more powerful than I had realised; all that beauty, even all that power, was subordinated to one, overriding principle.  And that principle was Moody's.
 
(18.11.89)

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