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Ice is not a monolith. It encompasses everything from the giant iceberg that sank the Titanic – "the most famous piece of ice in the history of the world," as the writer Mariana Gosnell observed – to the millimetre-thin stuff you find at the edges of ponds and puddles, also known as "cat ice" – ice so thin that it could support the weight of a cat, but nothing heavier. Ice is at once a byword for permanence and something whose evanescence is essential to how we use it.
冰不是一块巨石。它包罗万象，从令泰坦尼克号沉没的巨大冰山——正如作家玛丽安娜·戈斯内尔所说：“它是世界历史上最著名的一块冰，”——到可以在池塘、水坑边儿发现的那种只有几毫米薄的冰，也叫“猫冰”——冰薄到仅可支撑一只猫的重量，再重些就不行了。冰既是永恒的代名词，也极易逝去，所以我们如何使用它至关重要。
For something so apparently simple, it can be fiendishly complex. The science of ice is maddening, and features phenomena such as the Mpemba effect, in which hot water appears to freeze faster than cold. Ice is maddening, in fact; anyone selling it for a living fights a constant battle against the laws of thermodynamics and the basic tenets of common sense, filling their freezer in the winter and clearing it out just as the weather starts to get hot. Elizabeth David writes of early importers desperately pleading with port authorities about the amount of duty payable on a cargo that was visibly diminishing in size. Perhaps the most successful ice-man of the 20th century, James Stuart, abandoned his empire for unspecified personal reasons just months after Ian Parker had profiled him in the New Yorker. Even Frederic Tudor, the 19th century Boston Ice King, spent time in prison on several occasions, having been rendered bankrupt by his obsession. With ice, crisis is a constant, a looming threat and fatal flaw inherent to every cube.
一些看似简单的东西可能实则极为复杂。有关冰的科学令人发狂，它具备姆潘巴效应等特征，即热水似乎比冷水更易结冰。冰本身就令人发狂，任何以卖冰为生的人都在与热力学定律和基本常识作斗争，冬天的时候将冰装满冰箱，天气开始变热时再将冰清空冰箱。伊丽莎白·大卫写过早期的进口商如何绝望地恳求港务局对体积明显缩小的货物征收的关税数额。詹姆斯·斯图尔特大概是20世纪最成功的冰人，他在伊恩·帕克在《纽约客》上对他进行专访的几个月后便因不明个人原因放弃了自己的商业帝国。就连19世纪波士顿的“冰之王”弗雷德里克都铎也曾多次入狱，因太过执迷而破产。对于冰来说，危机是一个永恒的、即将面临的威胁，也是每个立方体都固有的致命缺陷。
So now Brexit looms – bad news for a business that exports products to the continent in temperature-controlled lorries – and Covid-19 drags on. The usual, virtual attempts have been made to keep morale high at The Ice Co during the pandemic – Friday afternoons see the doors open to The Ice-Olation Station, an online pub – but the apocalyptic subtext of the EPIA's newsletter from March this year – which promised "the certainty of a significant decline in packaged ice sales for this coming peak ice sales season" – was unignorable. Now the packaged ice industry faces a Christmas period that will feature fewer parties and, one can safely assume, less Party Ice.
因此，现在英国脱欧迫在眉睫——对于一家用温控卡车向欧洲大陆出口产品的企业来说，这是个坏消息——2019冠状病毒病还在蔓延。疫情期间为了保留士气，The Ice Co和其它企业一样也采取了一些线上措施——周五下午人们会看到一家名为Ice-Olation Station的在线酒吧——但今年三月EPIA(欧洲光伏行业协会)通讯中的末日潜台词——预示“在即将到来的冰销售旺季，包装冰的销量肯定会大幅下降”——不容忽视。如今，包装冰行业正面临着一个派对减少的圣诞季，“派对冰”的需求势必也将减少。
But it is further in the future that ice's real reckoning awaits. The Ice Co's management team talked in rapturous tones about the long, hot summer of 2018: the year the ice almost ran out, when a full lorry was dispatched from the factory every 30 minutes, round the clock, for weeks on end. And yet selling ice in a world that's demonstrably heating up presents both an opportunity and an ethical dilemma. From the hack-it-off-a-glacier days up to the present, ice has always been about mankind's relationship with the environment. Even if the industry is no longer so obviously extractive, it still leaves a sizeable carbon footprint.
不过，冰块真正的清算还要等到更久远的未来。The Ice Co的管理团队兴高采烈地谈论着2018年漫长炎热的夏天：那一年，每30分钟就有一辆满载的卡车从工厂运出，连续几周不停歇，冰块几乎售空。然而，在一个气温显然正在升高的世界里卖冰既是机遇，也面临着道德难题。从冰川崩解到现在，冰一直与人类和环境的关系问题息息相关。即便该行业的采掘性不再那么明显，但仍会留下相当大的碳足迹。
