Alarming Alarm

On Saturday somebody told me that Putin has got submarines surrounding the coastline of Britain.

I was weirdly pleased that the news, whether it is fake, true, partially true, or complete and utter b’lox, didn’t disturb my equilibrium one iota, even though my informer wasn’t somebody who I thought of as being prone to bullshit.

There is nothing I can do to change the situation.

Of course terror can more easily get a hold if we have already experienced bad news that then led to bad experiences. Real life consequences undoubtedly colour our psychology. If I was Ukrainian, I might not be so blase, about what Putin was allegedly doing.

But still, even then… what if there really is nothing I can actually do about it?

Yesterday I got a more immediate shock when my mobile phone gave off an Alarming Alarm. If you’re British you may already have known that the government was going to do a practise “disaster warning” for everybody in the UK who doesn’t have their phone settings changed to prevent it. I don’t watch the news, so I didn’t know, and I hadn’t changed my settings.

I’ve changed them now.

What’s the point of letting other people dictate to us when, what and whom we should be afraid. Personally I’m quite capable of being a scaredy cat thank you very much. But I’m not getting into the habit of letting terror have a hold of me before something has actually happened to get that kind of adrenalin pumping.

And the good news is that there were no periscopes visible in Campbeltown Loch on my regular early morning Submarine Spotting amble.