The picture of the baby albatross that starved to death after being fed nutritionally useless bits of plastic by its parents shows just what happens when we treat the world’s oceans as a handy system of waste disposal. A few years ago, I got a do-this-before-you-die chance to sail across the Atlantic, among the best things I’ve ever done.  One startling discovery was that the sea is actually a kind of desert. For most of the trip, we rarely saw a bird, we caught no fish, and the only living things apart from us were the Portuguese man-of-wars, evil-looking jelly fish that drifted by in ominous numbers on calm days. But, like discovering rubbish on Everest, there was always plastic. Big bits – weather buoys that had come adrift, fuel containers and suchlike – and small bits, and even smaller bits. There are 269,000 tonnes of these fragments, according to the newest estimate. They come mainly from single-use plastic containers like water bottles, but even so-called biodegradable plastic only degrades quickly in commercial composting systems.  The particles, many of them minute, enter the food chain and do terrible damage to all forms of life. And because they are not only on the surface but also suspended deep beneath, trying to remove them risks doing more environmental harm. So next time you buy bottled water, remember the baby albatross.  The crew of the fishing boats caught in 140mph winds off the west coast of Scotland earlier this week may not have felt it at the time, but a storm at sea is an exhilarating experience. See Timothy Spall lashed to the mast to feel the reality of a deep-water weather bomb in the Turner biopic. It’s that combination of extreme loneliness and extreme jeopardy that has inspired some great writing about the sea.  In the ship’s library was a 1950s memoir, Once is Enough (absolutely unconnected to the recent film of the same name). It’s an account by Miles Smeeton of his terrifying voyage across the Atlantic. Neither he nor his wife Beryl were experienced sailors, and the voyage ended with the boat being pitch poled – turned over long ways rather than rolled over sideways. This is bad for the boat, and the people on it. Most victims don’t live to tell the tale. Miles, Beryl and their cat survived it twice, emerging slightly scathed and much less keen on the sea.  Next week, I get to interview a real shipwreck survivor who covered thousands of miles singlehanded, only to be turned over by a giant wave on his way home. Given how empty the sea is, it was a miracle that his distress signal, transmitted to the ever-watchful Falmouth Coastguard, was picked up by a Chinese supertanker whose crew plucked him from the water minutes before his boat sank.  The number of shopping days to Christmas is becoming one of the more pointless ways of measuring time. What’s a shopping day in the age of the internet? All the same, there is a rhythm to the build-up to 25 December and its aftermath that lends it a significance in our lives – all the more so now that most of us can only tell the cycle of the natural world from the degree of excitement of the weather forecasters or the state of the school year. This is the first Christmas for 20 years when none of my family will be spending a couple of weeks in the zombie state of a student resting between terms at some educational establishment or another, and it leaves an unexpected sense of loss.
Anne Perkins: Notebook: Like finding rubbish on Everest, when I crossed the Atlantic I was dismayed to see so much plastic – and that kills seabirds