Regular readers who have grown understandably tired of my overuse of poor sea and water-related metaphors will no doubt be delighted to hear of the delights Santa brought me this year.  Not only am I now the owner of this new recording of the wonderfully-watery Sinking Of The Titanic, but also of Peter Ackroyd’s new book of meanderings on the subject of that most gloriously-filthy river - Thames: Sacred River. I’ve only just begun to dip my toes into the book’s black and fast-flowing depths.  I’m pretty sure I will get sucked in soon, read half of the thing in one sitting, but then inexplicably forget to return to it i.e. like I do with all books.  I can glance across at a pile of started-but-not-yet-finisheds which features – just above the Koran - Will Self’s Book Of Dave on top.  I met him once, he scared me by barking like a dog, so he is lucky I bought the damned thing at all, never mind read it.   

Already, the book (the Ackroyd, not the Self) and the recording, the sea and the river, the flower and the sinker are becoming inextricably tangled together in my mind, which itself is an eddy of confused currents at the best of times.  The sense of history looms over both like a fine mist.  Do the same molecules which dragged the ship under now flow between the river’s banks?  Did they rip the Princess Alice asunder in the filthy reach off Crossness, painting a bloody smear across the fourth dimension?  Ackroyd talks about how the river suspends time - “the almost imperceptible motion of expectation and remembrance, poised between the two worlds” - and I have no doubt that this dislocation can be felt as keenly when adrift on the ocean.  And I find myself wondering about the very end of their time, wondering about how while - on land, at least - our sense of time is in some way proportional to the depths of our accumulated experience of it, did those last few seconds atop the not-so-unsinkable-now stretch out to infinity, becoming a screaming singularity? 

Unlike the boat itself, this new recording of The Sinking of the Titanic cannot fail to move.  Jeck’s patina of vinyl crackle adds a fog of age to the fragments of the band’s one last hymn, and the vivid reminiscences of the survivors.  The tale encapsulated, one of the simultaneous triumph of technology (first radio rescue) and of its failure (they probably would rather not have had to attempt it, to be honest) resonates as starkly now as it ever has.  Somehow, perhaps, it proves Marconi’s point: that sounds never die, just become fainter, and you need to work harder to hear them.  How hard?  Well, this is a limited edition of just 1,999, if you exclude the one I’ve bought.

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