Comment from The Northern Echo; The impartial might of Nature

What happened on the beach near Ulverston is truly tragic - a father-and-son fishing trip ending in disaster.

As September 11 taught us, mobile phones are now ubiquitous. They are undoubtedly a great safety asset but when things go wrong, the thoughts and fears that they relay in the last moments are harrowing and disturbing.

What is happening in a hospital in Edinburgh is very sad. Gordon Brown is famously dour and grim. There genuinely seemed to be no other side to him than his obsession with the minutiae of macro-economics and his brooding ambition.

But anyone who has seen pictures of him since the birth of Jennifer has seen a whole new side to him. He left fatherhood rather late in life, apparently wedded to his politics, but in the days immediately after the birth he has been genuinely beaming, grinning unstoppably from ear to ear. He said: "Politics seems a lot less important to me today."

Sometimes even a man as mighty as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with billions of pounds at his command, needs reminding that the really important things in life do not revolve around money.

Deciding to raise a family is the biggest emotional gamble of our lives: the joy that children bring, as Mr Brown discovered, is unbounded but the heartache when something goes wrong can be unbearable.

These very sad stories serve to remind us that the forces of Nature are immense. Not only can they sustain life, even in the most miraculous of circumstances, but they can also snatch it away on a whim at a moment's notice.

And no one is invulnerable to their machinations. One of the most powerful, influential men in the country is as exposed to their vagaries as is an ordinary Cumbrian process worker.

Man may think he has conquered his planet, but for all his modern mobile technology and his modern medical know-how, he is not really in charge at all.