Occasionally the dredgers haul up historical artefacts, such as canon balls or bits of Second World War aircraft and, even more occasionally, as I had been hoping, naturally, for my story, they haul up a dead body. And there is a real magic about seeing the cargo hold fill with stuff from the ocean floor that has lain for hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions, of years. It is underwater quarrying, on land leased from the UK government, and as strictly marked out as any farmland (see the chart). Some pebbles are used for driveways and garden decorations, but the majority of what is hauled up ends up being used in the aggregates business for concrete, cement, asphalt and tarmac. Another job, far bigger in terms of commercial enterprise, is excavating sand and pebbles from the seabed for use in the construction industry. But I've now learned that is only one of the roles of a dredger. I thought that all dredgers did was to dredge mud out of the harbour mouths, to keep the shipping channels deep enough. To reveal more would of course be to reveal too much of the story of Dead Tomorrow. I got out of it the kind of ‘Eureka' moment that happens on rare, precious occasions, when I am in the process of starting a new novel. I'm sure those of you who have read this far are thinking, after a big yawn, how great can a dredger be? Well, I thought that too, before my day with the crew, and it was something of a revelation for me. On one of the coldest days of the year, a freezing February morning, I rose at 4.30 and made my way to Shoreham Harbour, one of the two commercial sea ports bordering Brighton, to join the crew of the dredger, the Arco Dee, on which a friend, Tim Moore, is the chief engineer. We spend most of our lives in the dark, and occasionally someone opens the door of our shed and shovels shit over us. Someone once likened being an author to being a mushroom.
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