It was a week in which the temperature rose, the sea lay like glass and the sky blazed an intense, chemical blue. With an extreme heat warning in place – the forecast was “37 degrees, feels like 41″ – we toiled into Menton’s Old Town for a fellowship dinner. I sat next to a charming man whose profession is common in these parts: tax expert. “Were you affected by the Panama Papers?” I politely inquired. “No, I was only named in them,” was his amusing and diverting reply.
The food, the waiter announced, was prepared in a traditional style. It came hung on wires and would be flambéed. The whole restaurant felt like an oven. We sat in silence, fanning ourselves, as our meal was set on fire.
It was a week of shock news, of taunts from the universe. Back home in Auckland a heavy truck veered off course, crashed through our hedge and smashed down the carport, crushing the little boat my son had been standing in and fixing 10 minutes before. The property damage was enormous, my son’s near miss was horrifying.
Two days later, my husband crossed a Menton street as a giant piece of masonry broke off a building and hit the pavement where he’d just been standing. How do we interpret these tricks played by fate? We work to connect them; we create stories to explain them.
That week, on a breathless Menton morning, I was lacing my shoes when the room went dark. There was a stupendous roar, the sea roughened and turned wild, boiling with waves. The sky was purple then black, lightning zigzagged and thunder shook the building. The wind hit the apartment with such force all the doors slammed, and objects crashed to the floor. Fighting to close the balcony doors, we both shouted, “Oh, the boat!”
It was a little yacht, not far offshore, pounded by huge waves. It would have been terrifying out there. There was wild confusion, the air was screaming and then, astonishingly, it grew quieter, the sky began to clear.
A neighbour emerged into the garden holding a lampshade. Our kitchen was strewn with broken glass. The little yacht had ridden it out and was heading raggedly for the marina. The storm had lasted all of five minutes.
I knew the Mediterranean could turn wild. I have a childhood memory of dancing around in Menton’s olive grove with my brother, exhilarated by an autumn thunderstorm. But this was weather so violent I’d never seen anything like it.
The universe kept rolling out jokes and tricks. The next one upped the game. It insisted we search for hidden meanings; it demanded a conspiracy theory. In Sicily, Mike Lynch, a businessman known as “Britain’s Bill Gates”, set sail with friends and family on a luxury yacht. He’d recently been acquitted of fraud in a US trial. Two days before they sailed, his co-accused in the trial had been hit by a car and later died.
A storm-generated “downburst” overturned and sank the yacht, and Lynch and six others drowned. Among the dead were my niece’s classmate and my brother-in-law’s colleague at Morgan Stanley.
Lynch was a probability specialist. The boat was named Bayesian after Thomas Bayes, a famous probability theorist. What were the odds? Two men freshly acquitted, now mysteriously killed, a yacht that sank extraordinarily quickly. What conspiracies could such bizarre coincidences reveal?
Well, the universe is a random joker, but climate change is real. Rising sea temperatures are producing storms that are genuinely to be feared. This much I know for sure.
As Katherine Mansfield might have written it, “I seen the little yacht.”
