Speaking personally I love the experience of sitting in the seat of a jet plane as it roars along the run way towards the point at which the thrust of the enormous engines lifts the huge bulk of the metal body and wings off the concrete base. However I am also very conscious of the environmental cost of each journey and so I have probably only been on a plane 10-12 times in my nearly 54 years. On the other hand I have driven along the M23 near Gatwick and M25 or M4 near Heathrow on far more occasions than I can recall. The sight of one of these huge people carriers taking off, or queuing to land as I drive along the M4 towards London creates a sense of wonder at the engineering know-how that has seen such a huge change in our understanding of the sky in around 110 years since we ‘learned’ to fly.

As the newspapers and broadcasters struggle to sustain our interest and theirs in the fate of Malaysian Airlines MH370 it seems inconceivable that such a large piece of metal with so much technology embedded could have disappeared, apparently without trace. This is in an age when so many of us feel nervous that we are under surveillance so much of the time. No doubt some who are certain we are all being watched by a Big Brother somewhere, are just as convinced that these 300 or so people onboard are not important enough for the eye in the sky to give its position away. I hope that they are wrong. For my self I usually feel reassured by the CCTV cameras that are trained on the Streets where I patrol as a Street Pastor. I regularly speak to groups of Church members about the work of Street Pastors in Brighton and Hove. One of the most frequent responses is for people to tell me how brave I and my fellow Street Pastors are in taking to the Streets of Brighton on Friday nights to help reduce crime and improve the experience for some of the 8M visitors to the city each year. Although I would love to be thought of as brave, this is simply a form of displacement psychology at work. The pavements of Brighton on a Friday night are far safer most of the time than the roads I happily drive along. There is no indication from my extended exposure to the Streets of the city on a Friday night that any of those who are partying on the Streets modify their behaviour because of some technology stuck high up on a pole. Their behaviour, where it is modified is as a result of human intervention. Sometimes the sight of a Police Uniform or one of the door-staff outside a club or pub will tip people towards violence, and sometimes the sight of a Street Pastor or a friends words of caution tip people back towards remembering that the night out need not involve violence.

As the relatives of the passengers of MH370 continue to try to make sense of their own feelings of grief in the strange context of a Japanese Hotel, I imagine they would give all they have for the reassurance of what did happen to the plane and when. The same must be true of the relatives of Mark Duggan, torn between their own instincts and the outcome of the Court case. I don’t mean to suggest that I want my every action to be observed and scrutinised by strangers. However our selective use of technology can sometimes prevent us from having the reassurance that we would like to have. For my own part the confidence that if trouble does break out on the Streets of Brighton, that there are CCTV camera operators that can keep a watching eye on my fellow Street Pastors and I is very helpful, even if some other people think we are being brave.