Ongoing disasters include the Carrick/City of Adelaide saga which has degenerated into an embarrassing fiasco at Irvine, HMS Plymouth which is rusting away in Birkenhead, the Earl of Zetland which is looking very sorry for herself in North Shields, Unicorn which is rotting away in Dundee with her back all but broken, Ryde which was broken up last year and Manxman which was recently scrapped in Sunderland. Even keeping an historic vessel operational is no guarantee of survival - Waverley is struggling to make ends meet as operating costs rise and revenue declines, and may well have to be laid up.
Proposals like the one to turn Invincible into a viable hotel are, as anyone who has been aboard one of these ships would know, frankly absurd. I don't blame the local authority in Barrow for giving it a very wide berth as they would doubtless have been left holding the baby when it all, inevitably, went pear shaped. More recently, there have been predictable, but equally daft, proposals to turn Ark Royal into an hotel and heliport in central London.
