It is my great privilege to have been asked to deliver the 38th Donald O’May lecture, organised by the Institute of Maritime Law at Southampton University. I am acutely conscious that I follow a set of far more illustrious predecessors, and I can only hope that, like flotsam and jetsam, I am dragged along in their wake. My personal engagement with shipping law began inauspiciously. In 1988, as Sir Bernard Eder’s pupil at what was then 4 Essex Court, I attended a conference with the future Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, at the start of which he introduced me to a number of men—and I am afraid they were largely men in those days—from the West of England. I had no idea what a P&I Club was, and proceeded to share my memories of growing up in Taunton, to find I had entered a world where the West of England meant something far removed from scrumpy on a Sunday afternoon and Ian Botham hitting sixes out of the County Ground. The prospect that I would ever deliver the Donald O’May lecture was vanishingly remote.