THE news can make ghouls of us. Personal tragedy becomes public property and disasters turn into a grim sort of entertainment. Our interest in the latest earthquake, flood, fire, crash or headline murder can seem unhealthy, as we watch other people's horror and read the grisly details of how tragedy has alighted elsewhere.
Yet it would be worse to show no interest at all, as an acknowledgement of others' pain marks us out as human. That defence is good and true - and undeniably handy to newspapers, because bad news sells.
Anyone who has worked in the media knows the moment when something awful has happened. The newsroom buzz that attends disaster has a peculiar quality, part excitement at a job needing to be done in record time, part horror at what has occurred.
Disasters are often quick, as dealt by mercurial fate. Last month's Concorde crash in Paris was one such dreadful occasion. The calamity engaging us now is of a different, stranger order. The image of the Russian sailors entombed in the sunken submarine at the bottom of the Barents Sea is truly horrifying because of the slow fate that awaits these men.
A submarine is the perfect image of claustrophobia, offering a closed, self-contained world, a place of no escape even when everything is running normally. The 118 men aboard the stricken nuclear submarine Kurst face an uncertain fate - or, rather, if all rescue bids flounder, a most certain fate.
To be confined in a useless great tube, more or less in the dark and with a limited supply of air, is a doom to be wished on no one. Why anyone would even want to seal themselves in a submarine is a mystery to me, and it must surely be a strange way of life, hidden from the world, passing under the surface, lurking in the cold shadows.
Submarines have inspired a strange film genre of their own, with perhaps the most praised example being the 1981 German film The Boat (Das Boot). A more recent variant was U571, an American movie that inverted history to its own ends (turning British heroes into American ones).
The U-boats of the Second World War were not strictly submarines at all, more truly being submersibles, because they spent 85 per cent of their time on the surface. Only the arrival of nuclear reactors - such as that on board the sunken Kurst - allowed the submarines to plunge to the depths and stay there for weeks or even months.
Submarines go back a long way. A Dutchman, Cornelius van Drebel, successfully demonstrated a submarine in the Thames during the reign of James I. The first to be used in naval warfare was Bushnell's Turtle, which was built in America in 1775 and used without success in the following year to attack the British ship Eagle in New York harbour. According to Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable, David Bushnell's vessel "was made of oak, coated with tar and looked like two turtle shells joined together".
We've come a long way since then. But staying under the water is still a huge risk. It is interesting to note how different the distances are above and below. In the air, 350ft is nothing much at all; but under the sea it is hellish deep.
Some of us would always rather take our chances in the air.
HOW happy I was to read in Tuesday's Press that Forbidden Corner has been saved. Those killjoys at the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority had wanted to close this charmingly eccentric attraction. Now a Government inspector has over-ruled the authority's decision not to give planning permission to Forbidden Corner, near Middleham.
We had a perfect family day out to this elaborate folly and would gladly return.
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