Introduction

: Marina Lenti sent through the following from the Web Italy Real to Read mag: Steve Hogarth : “I met him on an aeroplane. I was sitting on one side of the aisle and he was sitting on the other side. And we just started exchanging glances and we said hello. We got talking about what we were doing there like two people might get talking. He asked me what I did for living and I said 'I'm a singer in a band' and I asked him what he did for living and he said he was a filmmaker and I asked what kind of film and he said he made documentaries and he was working on a documentary about the Estonia, which had sank in the Baltic, and that he'd been to Tallin, in Estonia, making his film.

“And I said, 'What made you chose this subject?' and he said, 'Well, I was on it!' And I said, 'My God, you're kidding. I suppose to ask you to talk about it it'd be too painful probably...' And he said, 'No, I'm happy to tell you about it', and he told me the whole story about how he'd fallen off the bench he was sleeping on in the restaurant and, of course if he hadn't been in the restaurant, if he had been in the cabin, he wouldn't have been there to tell me about it. But luckily for him he decided he would sleep in the restaurant and he woke up when he fell off the bench because the ship was leaning at 45° and ultimately he climbed up the ceiling of the restaurant and out of the side window and ultimately upon the deck, as the ship was rolling backwards the other way and for a very short time the ship became leveled, which enabled him to run across the deck and to get hold of a life jacket and enabled him to actually get off the ship. There were other people trying to do the same thing at the same time and being hit by waves and vanishing. And he managed to get into a life raft and as he got on the life raft, the wave hit the life raft and it turned it upside down, so he was under the sea inside this thing and ha managed to swim out and around and climbed onto what was the upturned base of this life raft.





“And number of other people managed to scramble onto the bottom of this life raft with him and he sat in the moonlight, he watched this enormous ship turn over, gradually turn upside down and turn pink in the moonlight because the underside of the ship was painted red. And he watched this enormous pink structure, the size of a shopping centre delicately sinking below the ocean taking with it about 990 people to their death. And then the weather got worse. He said the waves were about 30 feet high. So there were waves the size of houses hitting this life raft and every time a wave struck it, then somebody would vanish, there were less people on. He was pulled out of the sea after 5 hours by helicopter…”





Steve Hogarth has mentioned to the fact that the song was inspired by the sinking of the passenger ship Estonia but the song was more about the loss of loved ones in general than the disaster. Nevertheless, as it provided the genus for the lyric, I've included some information. Karl Laurits Olsen sent me a (no longer functioning) link to information on the Estonia Disaster, from which I've taken the information reproduced below.







