Thin Ice

We're all skaters on the pond-ice that is civilisation. For most of us in the West it feels solid and good beneath the feet.
When did you last feel the ice cracking? Was it during a power-cut? Was it while you were in a queue on a motorway, unable to move? On a train or waiting for one that didn't come? In the airport or on a 'plane? In a crowd of people, stuck, powerless? These things are trivial, but through them you can sometimes feel or intuit the terror of the cold water beneath, and this piece by Timothy Garton Ash says a lot about the world to come.