The strangest mix of people survive disasters. If one grabbed a random selection of people from a busy street and dropped them into the heart of an earth-shattering disaster one would have little means of predicting who could or would not survive.<\/p>\n
For those who do survive whilst others die, the sense of self-blame and guilt can be overwhelming: throughout the rest of their lives there is, in the darkest hours of the night, a constant murmuring refrain \u2026. “Why me?”<\/p>\n
Rowing is one of the most strenuous activities we humans can engage in, but competitive rowing over long distances for several days on a river is a very different sport to rowing a kilometre or two on a man-made lake.<\/p>\n
Late in the 19th century in central and western Europe a new sport began to be popular; rowing from one city to another. Prague to Dresden or Hamburg, Paris to Le Havre, Strasbourg to Dusseldorf. By modern standards the boats were large, wide, heavy and cumbersome; the sliding seats familiar from modern racing shells were almost unknown; the oars were large hunks of ill-carved timber. It’s a wonder the teams managed to move their boats at all, despite the fact that they mostly rowed with the current.<\/p>\n
Rowing a river in the lowlands is relatively straightforward, despite the pressures of any competition, or the hazards of shallows, gravel bars and bends. Rowing out of the foothills of a mountain range in the spring thaw when the rivers are in spate, where there are weirs and white water and drops not quite<\/i> large enough to be called falls, but large enough to take any unwary boat; that’s a serious challenge even in modern zodiacs: in an antique broad-beam eight seat wooden rowing boat with only the clothes one rowed in is insanity. Or sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The strangest mix of people survive disasters. If one grabbed a random selection of people from a busy street and dropped them into the heart of an earth-shattering disaster one would have little means of predicting who could or would not survive. For those who do survive whilst others die, the sense of self-blame and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":3231,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3236","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3236\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mythopoeics.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}