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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones and this week I'm talking to John Lancaster, who has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the Sears Canal,

the ever-given, container ships that don't run aground, globalisation and much

else. It's a review of sinews of war and trade, shipping and capitalism in the Arabian

Peninsula by Lali Khalili. John Lancaster is a contributing editor at the LRB and the author

of several books of both fiction and non-fiction, the most recent being the story collection,

reality and other stories. And he's also one of the few people to have been on a ship

diverted round the Cape of Good Hope because the Suez Canal was closed, although not this year.

Hello, John, and thank you very much for joining me. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

Perhaps we could begin with you telling the story of your own unexpected voyage,

how you were nearly trapped in the Sears Canal.

Yeah, well, this was when I was a kid, I grew up in Hong Kong.

And in 1967, we were due a holiday.

My dad used to do this thing of his employer.

You could take, I think it was four weeks a year, eight weeks every two years, or three months every three years holiday. It was a sort of

legacy of, in fact, it was a legacy of the length of the ship journey working in East Asia,

...