Fire breaks out on container ship in North Sea
The Victoria L, which was carrying 19 crew members, was around 56km (34 miles) from the coast of the Netherlands when the blaze broke out.
Lifeboats were deployed from Scheveningen and Hook of Holland in the Netherlands and a coastguard helicopter was on standby on a nearby drilling platform in case it was needed for evacuations.
The Dutch coastguard has not provided an update on the status of the crew members but it did not report any injuries.
Local media had said there was an explosion on the ship but this was not reported by the Dutch coastguard in its live updates on the fire and its response.
A fire service team was transported to the scene by helicopter after the captain of the Victoria L requested assistance, the coastguard reported at 3.17pm local time (2.17pm UK time).
It added in an update at 5.16pm local time (4.16pm UK time) that firefighters had entered the engine room and put the blaze out.
The coastguard also said the situation is now "under control" and "most units" are returning to the mainland.
It added the ship, which had reportedly set off from Hamburg in Germany, was now expected to "sail to Rotterdam itself".
The coastguard had earlier said before the fire that one of its aircraft had been flying over to "gather images" and reported "little to no smoke development can be seen".
Two emergency response tugs and an oil response vessel were also sent to the scene as part of the response.
The Victoria L was not carrying any cargo at the time of the fire.
The container ship is Liberian-flagged and is around 161 metres long and 25 metres wide, according to MarineTraffic.
The fire comes around a month after a container ship crashed into a tanker in the North Sea - causing a huge fire on both vessels.
The container ship, named Solong, smashed into the Stena Immaculate around 12 miles off the coast of East Yorkshire at a speed of about 16 knots (around 18.4mph).
Rescuers saved 36 crew members from both ships but one sailor - named as Filipino national Mark Angelo Pernia, 38 - remains missing from the Solong and is presumed dead.
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The Guardian
20-07-2025
- The Guardian
‘What about me?' The confusing jealousy of being spared the abuse my father committed against my sister
A winter's day. My father in the dark room of my memory developing photographs. The door is shut. My sister stands with him. He aims to teach her the essentials of photography. How to turn a black and white negative rolled from the interior of his camera, unspooled in the dark, then bathed in trays of chemicals, to bring the past back to life in black and white. My sister's special treatment as the only one of nine siblings to learn this skill does not go unnoticed, by me at least. I am 10 years old and long to learn, even as I want only to be an insect in the corner watching unseen. My father taught me fear. Small children rely on their parents for sustenance and survival and when a parent is abusive, where the only love a child comes to know is corrupted, it comes with a sense that other siblings, who also seek his love, are rivals. Writing about child sexual abuse is hard. Writing about the unfathomable, yet surprisingly common jealousy experienced as the sibling of an abused child is even harder. This is what I aim to do here. The pecking order of people in my family fascinated me from when I sat perched on a bench at the kitchen table. We dangled our legs and looked at our plates still empty until our mother piled on a mountain of potatoes mashed with carrot and onion. Hutspot, a Dutch delight designed to fill empty bellies with basic nutrition and as easy to assemble as cheese on toast. Look around this table. Note the parents at either end. Mother closest to the kitchen sink, father at the head. A constellation that speaks to the order of things. Migrants to Australia from Europe after the war. Imagine this family and consider which of these children suffers most. Is it the girl who sits beside me? At nine years old she travelled alone in an ambulance to the Fairfield infectious diseases hospital and stayed there for three months in the women's dormitory with rheumatic fever, a strep throat gone wrong. Excluded with a communicable disease. Or could it be her taller brother on the other side of the table? Months earlier as a sixteen-year-old he copped the same fate. Only his rheumatic fever morphed into osteomyelitis after the infection travelled from his heart to his feet. He nearly lost a leg, but doctors dragged his life and limb back from the brink. Still functional, despite the crater in its centre. Was it the boy on the other side of me? The one christened the family genius, who scooped prizes in his final years at school, in Latin, French, English, mathematics, physics and chemistry. He was left-handed in the days when left-handedness was a curse to be ironed out. Or the other boy on the bench, the 'runt of the litter' because, unlike his four brothers, he failed to grow tall. He struggled to read in a family that valued literacy. He sat at the end of the table after dinner alone reading out loud. Each time he stumbled his father rapped a fork over his knuckles. None of these. From the oldest to the youngest, the one singled out for the prize of victim, goes to my eldest sister. She in the dark room. A red globe overhead, the only light as my father touched her body in secret. It took 50 years before she could tell me. How could I be jealous of an elder sister for having something I never wanted and yet at the same time longed for? My father's abusive 'love' and my mother's apparent gratitude towards her for enduring it. When Haruki Murakami's character Kafka, in his novel, Kafka on the Shore, experiences a stab of jealousy, Murakami reminds us, jealousy is like 'a brush fire. It torches your heart'. Heat that rises from your core. If there is any emotion that dogs me beyond shame and occasional deep longing, it is jealousy. And to understand this complex emotion I join with another who has researched this area for a deep dive. We met online. Social worker Anais Cadieux Van Vliet had read my book, The Art of Disappearing and was interested to discuss the impact of childhood sexual abuse on what they call non-abused and non-abuser siblings. Cadieux Van Vliet uses the term with reservations, as it fails to include the fact such siblings are also indirectly abused. As part of their research, Cadieux Van Vliet has interviewed clinicians to ascertain how they consider the experience for non-abused, non-abuser siblings within such families. Although clinicians might understand the vexed position we so-called non-abused siblings find ourselves in, others are more circumspect. Maybe more concrete in their understanding. As if the abuse matters only to the people within the abused/abusive couple, primarily the victim/survivor. The rest becomes collateral. One of the hardest things to understand, the extent to which a person who survives abuse by avoiding it, one who sits beside or witnesses the abuse like me, or who like Cadieux Van Vliet learns about it later, carries a question: 'What about me?' A tingling of jealously we find hard to understand because we know we're also the lucky ones to have been spared. My father never showed me love. He had eyes only for my big sister – she was the one who got 'special treatment'. Although she and I did not talk about it until I was in my fifties, I knew what had happened between my father and my sister even as a 10-year-old when we shared a bedroom. I had no words for it then. How can we call abuse 'special treatment'? In the mind of a child this is how it seems. Your father chooses you, or at least he chooses your body on which to focus his attention. As Maurice Whelan, a psychoanalyst describes it, for the abused child a deep confusion ensues. The father visits in the night, in secrecy and does things with their body that trouble, and disturb them, even as this touch might arouse them in ways they cannot understand. Then the father swears them to secrecy and in the morning and in days to come, says nothing. The non-abused sibling may not be aware of this. May not see it happening, as I did, but all non-abused siblings live in a hot house of repressed sexuality. It erupts in secrecy and silence in the shadows. A sexuality that is confused with power and shame. My younger sisters have different stories. They too came close to being sexually abused by our father. Non-abused siblings, whether they consciously know or not, are overtaken by an atmosphere of secrecy and violent underpinnings that speak to something dangerous going on. It does not feel safe in such a household. The unspoken rule is to stay silent. When I was 14, my sister told me the so-called facts of life as relayed to her by our father. He had given her this information to help her grow, he said, because our mother came from a repressed Catholic household and did not know what a man needed. He therefore taught my sister about his desire, confused as hers. And she in turn, wanting to shield me from the pain of his lessons, told me repeatedly: 'If he touches you, scream.' When you're a child, the life you lead is the only one you know. You catch glimpses of other people's lives from a distance. Our family was unique in our foreignness and in the abuses my father meted out. It shamed me when I looked at the fathers of other children at my school who seemed more loving. My father's choice was my fault. If I behaved in a different way, if I was more like my elder sister, if I offered him more by way of interest, or body shape or beauty then he might not only notice me but also he might be kind and not fly into rages at the simplest slight. My mother's overcooked steak. Dishes piled high in the sink. Any child who did not behave as they were told. When I was 12 and shared a room with my elder sister I went to bed ahead of her. Alone under the blankets I imagined myself as Maid Marion from Robin Hood and his merry men. I hid in the forest terrified the Sheriff of Nottingham might carry me to his castle and ravage me. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, I knew what was happening to my sister. I was almost asleep to the soft thud of my father's bare feet on the carpet between our beds. My sister asleep or so I imagined. I did not want him to take me in his arms and possess me. I did not want whatever it was my father did to my sister on those nights, night after night when he came into our room while the rest of the house slept. And yet, I wanted to turn him into Robin Hood. I wanted my father to want me. Looking back, it was as if any woman who commanded my father's attention was one who evoked sexual feelings in him. The rest of us were dispatched. People to cook and clean. My mother bore babies for him, but those already born were of no consequence. Except my sister. My mother believed our father had stopped visiting her in the night. She caught him once in our bedroom, my father hunched over my sister while I was in the next bed pretending to be asleep. 'If you ever come here again,' she said, 'I'll kill you'. Her threat did not stop him, but my mother could not bear to believe otherwise. When you're desperate, you'll do anything to survive. I was in awe of my sister's courage when she stood in front of my father's chair and sometimes asked for money. I could not ask for anything of my father beyond the good night gesture my mother forced on to us younger children. My father stretching up from his chair to make the sign of the cross on our foreheads as some type of fatherly protection. I despised this ritual. The rasp of my father's fingers on my soft forehead, the croak of his words, 'goedenacht', the air puffing back into his seat when he flopped down, and we, my younger sister and I retreated to our respective rooms, ready for the dangers of the night. Bless me father for I have sinned against my younger sister for wanting what was hers. I borrowed her dress when she did not give me permission. Then I ruined it. My sister's dress was too small. I slipped into it well enough, but the buttons could not hold against the pressure of my first attempts to skate around the ice rink at St Moritz in St Kilda with school friends one summer holiday. I came home in the dress; its underarms ripped from their sockets. My sister was enraged. I had destroyed her favourite dress. Blue denim with buttons up the front. Jealousy ruins things. Ruins people. But my therapist reassured me it was a feeling, and not evil, however painful. It's bad enough to endure this feeling, she told me, but ten times worse if you're given the message it's wrong to feel it in the first place. If we squash the feeling because we believe it's wrong then the feeling will bury itself inside, until the sinews of our hearts are like shards of stone that can harden into volcanic rock. Explosions are dangerous. They can destroy everything in their path. Better to feel the tug and pull and pain of jealousy than to let it enter the vaults of the hidden and forgotten. My father in the dark room of my memory holds my sister close and I shudder, relieved to be spared while sad to have missed out. Only in writing can I reconcile these two opposing emotions. When you know something is wrong it surrounds you every day. In families where child sexual abuse occurs, not only are you silenced in the childhood of your home, you're silenced throughout your lifetime, because it hurts other people to hear. But on the page, we can see it, the marks of memory. The open secret. The weird jealousy of an unloved child. The colour green.
Spectator
20-07-2025
- Spectator
Nurses deserve more credit
When I was recently in hospital for almost six months, one of my closest and most impish friends – who knows me very well and figured that I wouldn't be up for anything serious – would bring me the novels of Betty Neels. Neels is largely forgotten now, but between 1969 and her death in 2001 she wrote 134 novels for the publisher Mills & Boon. Her male protagonists are often Dutch surgeons (her own husband was a Dutch sailor) and the plots are a bit samey: spirited nurse hates arrogant doctor/surgeon/consultant but eventually falls A over T in love with him. At the same time as I was reading Neels's novels, I was watching with my devious little hack's eye the interaction between the doctors and nurses around me, and it couldn't have been more different. Nurses spoke to nurses, and doctors to doctors; 'The only time the doctors speak to us is when they want us to do something they don't want to do,' laughed one beautiful young nurse. I thought of this when reading about the new threatened doctors strike and how analysis from the Royal College of Nursing shows that 'nurses pay has been so severely eroded that starting salaries are now over £8,000 lower than if wages had kept up with inflation since 2010.' Is it a class thing? Nurses are more likely to have gone to state schools, while doctors are more likely to be from the middle class. Doctors staged about a dozen strikes in 2023 and 2024 under the Tories, were immediately given a 22 per cent pay rise by Labour and still feel like they're entitled to more. On a recent episode of Jeremy Vine on Channel 5, an older, working-class female community care worker in Manchester, Sarah, rang in to oppose the doctors' new demand. She took on a posh, young female doctor ('Helena Pugh' – you couldn't make it up) and matched her claim for claim about how hard she worked. All for a damn sight less money and prestige. One nurse at my hospital ward told me: 'I've done this job since I was young, and I'm just about to retire. In my experience, the hierarchy is still pretty much there and the consultants are still unapproachable.' (Mistrust of 'weird' consultants was very evident among the nurses I met.) 'Nursing is an ill-defined profession,' she continued. 'We're like a sponge sitting in the middle of the team, soaking up all the bits that no one else will do, from admin to cleaning.' A nurse at the Royal Sussex told me: 'Nurses make terrible strikers because we're out there on the picket line, then our alarm goes off and we run back onto the wards because we're needed. They know they've got us…' A thread on Reddit by a nurse summed it up for me: 'I'm not resentful of junior doctors striking. I am bitter how bad we do in comparison to their success though. If every nurse just walked out, can you imagine the chaos that would ensue? Patients would come to harm; there would be chaos on the wards, in ICU, in A&E. At the end of the day, nurses do the majority of the labour and graft. But look at the nurses strike in America; the majority walked out and the strikes lasted three days. They got what they wanted. I think if we stayed strong, we would be in a much stronger position.' To return to the class issue, maybe the difference is that nursing is a calling – like being a nun, if 'the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion' as Nigel Lawson quipped – while being a doctor is something clever bourgeois girls and boys become if they were good at science subjects at school. Whatever, the mismatch is unfortunate, and having reverberations far beyond who will and won't strike. People may be losing their religion; earlier this month the new boss of the NHS, Sir Jim Mackey, said: 'It feels like we've built mechanisms to keep the public away because it's an inconvenience.' Though she was a comedy character in Carry Onfilms, it's telling and slightly surreal how many people with recent experience of the NHS as patients yearn for a Hattie Jacques-type 'matron' to sort it all out. There is also a consensus that after graduating, doctors should be made to work for at least five years minimum in the NHS before decamping to distant shores – the same places that the nurses are now being tempted to by adverts on television. In the sunlit wards of Australia, away from the responsibility that comes with being the carriers of a religious flame, maybe at last the romantic alliances between nurses and doctors dreamed of by Betty Neels can finally come to fruition. Until then, it's ironic to think that even the snogging game my generation played as children – 'doctors and nurses' – assumed that this was the natural order of things. If the game was played realistically these days, the two chosen children would simply go into separate rooms, and fume about how easy the other one has it.
Scotsman
15-07-2025
- Scotsman
Did the Dutch teach the Scots how to make whisky?
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The origins and creation of any ancient food or drink are often myriad in myth and stories. Take, for example , the haggis . It's our national dish but did it come from England or the Vikings? And what about whisky? We're known the world over for single malts and blends, but how did we come to make it, as we do, today? Distilled to a very fine method, matured in oak for over three years and in Scotland. Whisky experts Dave Broom and Arthur Motley recently took a look at the Dutch influence in Scotch, and examined this country's part in how we made whisky, back in the 18th century. On their Liquid Antiquarium YouTube channel, the duo have taken a deep dive into Scotch's history and asked if the Dutch helped teach the Scots how to make 'refined' whisky. The story of the history of Scotch whisky tends to be around how distillation came from monks way before the rural farmer making singular, small batch production made from excess grain. While this is true, the growth and refinement of Scotch whisky - and how we'd recognise it today - came about with the 1823 excise act but Mr Broom and Mr Motley, in this online discussion, argue that this is not the start of 'quality' distilled whisky in Scotland. They showcase examples of how Dutch men - Henricus Van Wyngaerden, Herman Boerhaave and William Y-Worth - were key in refining Scotch, which in the 17th and early 18th century, was probably rough and inconsistent compared to the other distilled spirits of the time such as jenever, cognac and rum. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Did the Dutch help created "refined" Scotch? | David Woods - Mr Broom said: 'when did this idea of quality distillation, understandable to a modern audience, really start? There seems to be this idea when you looked at the the kind of authorised version of Scotch whisky history that this is going to be triggered by the 1823 Excise Act which undoubtedly was when kind of the proper commercial modern Scotch whisky industry began but the idea that 1823 was actually the start of quality distillation in scotch we think simply isn't true. Arthur, I seem to believe that you're coming dangerously close to saying that the Dutch invented Scotch whisky? ' Mr Motley replied saying: 'I don't think either of us believe that people really invent a drink. Drinks develop and people and groups of people have more significant contributions to accelerate progress, if you want to call it that, towards a modern drink. Although they do get referenced, the Dutch have a far more significant role in whisky's history than is given credit for. Moving it from the situation in the 17th century and early 18th century where stuff was distilled from grain undoubtedly in Scotland but during this 18th century period where there's a narrative that shows the Dutch were central to helping the Scots distill malt spirit.' Olga - Die-hard whisky fans may have heard of Henricus Van Wyngaerden as he has been mentioned in history books for influencing the Scotch whisky industry but 'as a bit of a byline' according to Mr Motley. Herman Boerhaave, Mr Motley said, is 'an extremely significant person in the history of science from 1668 to 1738. He taught at Leiden University and he is known as the father of chemistry.' So what did these two men do to refine Scotch whisky into what we know it as today? Boerhaave's book, the Elements of Chemistry from 1732 gives detailed instructions on how to distill, including cutting the spirit (which is still done today, the heads and tails going back to be redistilled and the heart cut being the spirit cut that goes on to be matured). These instructions and methods ended up being used in Scotland, not because Dr Boerhaave visited here but the educational links to Scotland during the Enlightenment. Many Scots will have been taught by Boerhaave at the Leiden University (or booked lectures with him), meaning this distillation knowledge will have been transferred. Edinburgh's Caledonian Mercury paper published in 1731 information collected from 'the learned doctor Bur Harava and his new method of chemistry' showing the spread of this distilling information had made it to Scotland. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad As for Mr Van Wyngaerden, in 1743 he was recruited by the Society of Improvers of Agriculture in Scotland to give technical advice to struggling estate distillers. His recommendations were on how to produce a 'clean, refined spirit' by a long fermentation, double distillation and reusing 'feints or tails' as we'd know them today. Another notable Dutch man who wrote about distillation was doctor, alchemist and distiller, William Y-Worth who published 'The Compleat Distiller' in 1705. In this there's a detailed account in how to distill 'the Dutch way', many points of which we'd recognise as how Scotch whisky is made today. English-based Y-Worth noted that a second distillation refines that spirit - something that English spirits were not doing at this time. These men may not have made it to be household names when it comes to talking about the history of Scotch whisky, but their refining techniques - at the time of the Dutch Scottish relations within the Enlightenment - have no doubt made our national drink what it is today.
