So a man is bitten by a shark off Sydney, and the British medical team is credited with saving his life. How utterly predictable. Not the shark attack, mind you. That is merely nature’s brutish reminder that we are, after all, just meat. No, the predictable part is that it takes the old Empire’s surgical precision to undo the chaos of the antipodean wild. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the Home Counties: ‘Thank God for the NHS… or at least its better-funded, privately-schooled offspring.’
Let us be clear: this is not a story about a plucky Australian surfer’s triumph over nature. This is a parable about the intellectual and institutional residue of a civilisation that once painted the map pink. The British medical establishment, for all its current lamentations about waiting lists and strikes, still produces some of the finest trauma surgeons on the planet. Why? Because they are trained in the tradition of Lister, of Fleming, of the Royal College of Surgeons. They are the heirs of a culture that values empirical rigour over emotional waffle. And when a man’s leg is hanging off by a tendon, you do not want a postmodernist. You want a knife-happy Victorian.
And yet, we must ask: why did the shark attack happen in the first place? Because we have forgotten our place in the natural order. We swim in their waters, we feed the fish, we treat the ocean as a kind of wet theme park. The fall of Rome began when the citizens lost their sense of peril. They built aqueducts, they feasted, they thought the barbarians were a myth. Then the Visigoths came. In our case, the barbarians have fins. But instead of building walls, we build shark nets. And when those fail, we rely on British surgeons to sew up the damage. This is not progress. This is decadence.
The survivor, no doubt, will give an interview. He will thank the doctors, maybe cry a little, and promise to get back in the water. That is the modern script. We valorise the victim, we celebrate the survival, and we ignore the systemic rot. The real story is that a man nearly died because we refuse to accept that some places are not for us. There is a reason the Romans did not colonise the Arctic. They knew better. We, in our arrogance, colonise the sea, the air, the very gene pool. And then we are shocked when the natives bite back.
But I digress. The point is this: the British medical team did its job. That is to be commended. But let us not pretend this is a triumph of human spirit. It is a triumph of technique, of cold, hard skill. And it is a reminder that the old ways, the patient ways, the ways that measure twice and cut once, still work. The Victorians understood this. They built an empire on precision and stoicism. We have replaced that with empathy and hashtags. And yet, when the blood flows, we still call the British. That is either a compliment or an indictment. I am not sure which.
