Hijack!

We went down to the sea at Meon Shore on Sunday afternoon, where we encountered an exhilarating autumnal mix of sunshine, strong wind, and torrential downpours. The Solent often seems to generate spectacular cloud formations and rapidly changing light conditions, and Sunday was no exception. On such days the photographs take themselves. Well, almost.

Meanwhile, however, completely unknown to us, or to the dogwalkers, the bird-watchers, or the hardy windsurfers riding the waves, a high-seas drama was taking place just over the other, south-east side of the Isle of Wight (that's the IoW on the horizon in these photographs), where seven stowaways from Nigeria were intimidating the crew of an oil tanker sufficiently violently for them to lock themselves in the so-called "citadel", a safe strongroom installed in tankers for just such eventualities. Unfortunately for the stowaways, the Special Boat Service – the maritime equivalent of the SAS – are based just down the coast in Poole, and the attempted takeover was extinguished fairly rapidly.

Quite why stowaways would choose to make themselves known in such an attention-grabbing way in such an odd location is a mystery. And, let's be honest, the idea of hijacking an oil tanker in the Solent is the stuff of comedy, not high-tension drama. "Quickly, as fast as you can, turn this tanker around..." If you've ever taken the car-ferry from Portsmouth to France, though, you'll know how easy it is to mistake the island for the mainland, so perhaps they thought they were about to head into the Fawley refinery, and hoped somehow to escape from the ship by bullying the crew. But – like those desperate people who have concealed themselves in an airliner's outer cavities, and occasionally plummet down from the skies when the aircraft lowers its undercarriage as a dead, frozen block of ice – you have to think this was a plan that had not been thoroughly thought through.

Most mysterious of all, though, to many Brits is why this constant stream of refugees and economic migrants want to come to our overcrowded, increasingly squalid and fractious little country in the first place, to the extent of paying huge sums of money to people-smuggling gangs, who eventually pack them into death-trap container-lorries, or consign them to overcrowded rubber inflatables, in which they are sometimes given spades to row with – spades, FFS! – in what generally turn out to be ill-starred attempts to cross the Channel from France, bobbing about on the open ocean over what is said to be the busiest waterway in the world.

Apart from speaking our own parochial variety of that world language, "English", a marginally less racist culture – questionable – and a more generous benefits system – also very questionable – what on earth do we have that the French or the Germans or even the Italians do not, that is worth risking your life for? You do have to wonder whether our TV and movie exports paint a false picture of what to expect here, or perhaps some boosterist body like the British Council has been over-selling our brand somewhat. Come to Britain and... Well, what? Languish for months, sometimes years in some asylum-seekers' detention camp? Hot-bed it with a dozen other illegals in one room, cleaning hotel toilets or harvesting vegetables? Vanish into the sleazy underworld of the sex trade? It's a shitty old world, one ravaged by conflict, persecution, and injustice, where the prospect of any of that is enticing enough to cross half the globe at great expense and enormous risk, isn't it?

But on Sunday it was all happening on the other side of the island, miles out to sea, and resolved under cover of darkness, so we were oblivious until we saw the evening news. We had a really nice afternoon, and I expect the SBS lads had a terrific time, too; the tanker crew and the stowaways, not so much. So, welcome to Britain: your cell awaits you. Aren't you glad you came?