Nice piece by Oliver Burkeman, musing on the container ship that lies beached off the Devon coast…

The fate of the MSC Napoli, still beached off the coast of Devon, serves as another reminder of a fact that dock workers and crew members accept with stoicism, even a bit of pride: ordinary people usually never think about shipping containers except when things go wrong. The Napoli has provoked an environmental crisis (200 tonnes of oil have leaked into surrounding waters), and some unsettling realisations about the eagerness of Britons to help themselves to other people’s belongings. But in disgorging such a variety of cargo – shampoo and steering wheels, wine and shoes, carpets and motorbikes and bibles and nappies – it also offers an inadvertent glimpse into a world we all rely on, yet barely consider. It is no exaggeration to say that the shipping container may have transformed the world, and our daily lives, as fundamentally as any of the other more glamorous or complex inventions of the last 100 years, the internet included…