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There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

Beyond its romance, 'Titanic' offers an indelibly wrenching story of blind arrogance and its terrible consequences. It's the rare Hollywood adventure film that brings mythic images of tragedy - the fall of Icarus, the ruin of Ozymandias - so easily to mind.

I was absolutely obsessed with the Titanic - not the film, the actual boat. I'd draw diagrams about it and theorise that if it was built in a different way, it wouldn't have sunk.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

In April, God speaks to us in the seas whose rhythmic murmuring fills our ears from a long way off. It was in April that the Titanic went down into the deep to lie like a slasher's victim, bleeding the 'debris field' - its passengers' personal possessions, the everyday things of everyman and everywoman - across the ocean's floor.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

It's a funny thing, but today the Titanic is probably much more - that is people are much more aware of it than they were in 1954, when I was doing my research.

Many corpses will be floating in the sea.

I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.