51 things the MH370 story is about

1. It’s about 239 people.
2. It’s about an aeroplane.
3. It’s about mystery.
4. It’s about absence.
5. It’s about the families and friends.
6. It’s about the several meanings of “missing”.
7. It’s about the pilot.
8. And then it isn’t.
9. It’s about Anwar Ibrahim.
10. It’s about blondes in the cockpit.
11. It’s about the point at which the certainty of grief would be better than the ignorance of hope.
12. It’s about corridors.
13. It’s about Schrödinger’s cat.
14. It’s about 9/11 but, seriously, what isn’t?
15. It’s about China. Ditto.
16. It’s about too many disaster movies.
17. It’s about pings.
18. It’s about being told to pray.
19. It’s about the sneaking suspicion that the much-vaunted transition to the so-called Asian Century may involve more than a few mis-steps along the way.
20. It’s about stolen passports.
21. It’s about –stans.
22. It’s about conspiracy theories.
23. It’s about the Zionists.
24. It’s about the Illuminati.
25. It’s about electric cars.
26. It’s about the point at which Buzzfeed does a “What sort of MH370 conspiracy theory are you?” type of thing.
27. Or maybe there’s a Hitler parody.
28. It’s about cockups.
29. It’s about the internet.
30. It’s about how 24-hour news has to be filled with something, anything, even if it’s nothing.
31. Especially if it’s nothing, because that’s cheaper and easier.
32. It’s about sharks, circling, jumping.
33. It’s about wondering how this story would be turning out if more than three Americans had been on board.
34. It’s about press conferences.
35. It’s about The Rapture.
36. It’s about the Marie Celeste.
37. It’s about Lost.
38. It’s about Glenn Miller.
39. It’s about how quickly we forget Ukraine. And Oscar Pistorius.
40. And Syria. 
41. And whatever it was we were concerned about before Syria. I forget. Edward Snowden? Phone hacking? 
42. Dave Lee Travis?
43. It’s about 4’ 33” by John Cage.
44. It’s about Smile by the Beach Boys, or at least Smile as it existed in our imaginations, at the point where multiple different bootlegs intersected, before they actually released the real album and all the fun went out.
45. It’s about Google Maps.
46. It’s about people who are suddenly experts on aviation.
47. It’s about Chris Goodfellow and his startlingly simple theory.
48. It’s about Rupert Murdoch.
49. It’s about Courtney Love.
50. It’s not about you.
51. It’s about _____________

PS: Will Self on the collective delusions that get us into the sky in the first place.

Jim Thompson and the slap-up cream tea of stories

And we find ourselves in the Cameron Highlands, a weird but not unpleasant chunk of English countryside plonked down in the hills of northern Malaysia. The roadsides are dotted with hoardings promising cream teas and pick-your-own strawberries, and we enjoyed lunch in the mock-Tudor Smokehouse Hotel: mulligatawny, fish and chips, horse brasses and hunting scenes, to a soundtrack of ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant-Major’. If we’d spotted Celia Johnson enjoying a chaste tryst with Trevor Howard it wouldn’t have felt out of place.

In the morning, we worked up an appetite with a walk to the Moonlight bungalow. It was from this remote house that the Bangkok-based silk tycoon Jim Thompson set out for his fateful stroll on Easter Sunday, 1967, never to be seen again. In the intervening years there have been dozens of theories to explain what happened to him, going from the banal (he had a heart attack and fell into a ravine) to the deliciously conspiratorial, involving the CIA, MI6, Communist insurgents, Taiwan, Indonesia, Nepal, drug smugglers, Freemasons, Opus Dei, Martians, take your pick. Our guide, who was 13 years old in 1967, firmly believes that Thompson staged his own disappearance because his own smuggling operations had created too many enemies.

Thompson has become a sort of Schrödinger’s cat figure, only persisting in the public imagination because nobody can agree what happened, suspended undead in the midst of multiple possible fates. And if any one of those possibilities were to be proved conclusively, everyone would lose interest and Thompson himself would fade from view.