Disaster on the mind

All kids are morbid in some way, fascinated by the whole concept of death and tragedy and mortality while still trying to get their heads around it, and slowly come to the realisation that they never, ever will. At least that's what I tell myself anyway, when I remember how much I used to be into reading about disasters.

I got out every kind of book that was in the 363.34 non-fiction section of Highfield Primary School, and could reel off stats about natural and man-made disasters to a frankly disturbing degree. There was the big stuff like the Hindenburg and the Titanic sinking, but I was equally fascinated by obscure bridge collapses and strange landslides that nobody ever made movies about them.

But I was always into the ones that they did make movies about, as well. After draining that little corner of the library dry, I was desperate to see movies with massive body counts, especially with the lurid adverts you could find in the back of American comic books. 

I was considered too young for things like the Towering Inferno, where the star-studded cast burned alive or plunged to their deaths, but Earthquake, where they were crushed and drowned, was okay. And I was so fuckin' excited when Mum and Dad let me stay up late and see the Poseidon Adventure, and was absolutely gutted when A Night To Remember played on a Sunday afternoon, but we had to go visit my cousin Maria. (I love my cousin - who took me to my very first movie that I can recall -  very much, but this was even before video tape, so if I missed it, I missed it and it was all her fault, and I pulled an epic sook.)

It might not have been me just being morbid, there might have been some fascination with the way things can go wrong, that adults were fallible to an alarming degree, and it could have monumentally tragic consequences. Its never too early to learn those kinds of lessons.

One day, I was in the library got in a new printing of The Hobbit, wondering if I should get the 50 Great Disasters book and I didn't give a damn about real disasters anymore, because fantasy was much more fun. I still watch Air Crash Investigations (I'm absolutely terrified of flying, and it puts my mind at ease), and I still believe that human beings are capable of creating great calamity through sheer incompetence, but there have been a lot more obsessions since then. And most of them weren't tainted by real world tragedy.