It seems like only yesterday when, as a young, slim fellow with hair, I took part in the iconic TV series University Challenge. My team, the University of Leeds, dispatched a college from Oxford and another from Cambridge, before wiping the floor with University College Swansea by 415 to 70, one of the highest scores ever. We were eventually knocked out by Dundee, who went on to win the championship. Here is the mighty team of the far-off days of 1983.
Imagine my surprise therefore when I was invited back for another go. For the past nine years, University Challenge has had a short series at Christmas featuring notable alumni - and now, me. I can now reveal that I've been up to Salford Media City to join this Happy Few, this Band of Brothers, and so on and so forth in like fashion. And here we are!
My colleagues are, from left to right, Jonathan Clements, author and TV presenter (BA, Japanese with East Asian Studies); self (BSc Genetics and Zoology); Rev Richard Coles (vicar, former pop star, broadcaster, TV personality and team captain, MA Theology) and Tim Allen (photographer and film maker, BSc Zoology). If you'd like to see how we got on, tune in to BBC2 at 19:30GMT, Monday 23 December. And if you missed it - here is the episode on YouTube. Enjoy!
*** UPDATE ***
I can now reveal that of the fourteen teams entering, we were one of the four to score enough points to qualify for the semifinals. We won our semifinal against UCL, and went on to win the final against Wadham College, Oxford. So that means we are now University Challenge Christmas Champions! This is the first time the University of Leeds has won any flavour of University challenge, and the first time that a non-Oxbridge institution has won the Christmas alumni edition. TV’s Jonathan Clements sums it all up better than I can here. All I can add is that the Rev Richard Coles is a National Treasure.
This one was sent to me years ago by Mr O. E. of Derby. I came across it yesterday by accident while looking for a picture I thought I had, of Professor J. L. of Los Angeles and I, dressed in evening wear, surrounded by orcs. Another time, perhaps.
Ladies everywhere. You just can't get enough Ladies, it seems.
Heidi, as I'd like to remember her. Picture courtesy of Ms. G. P. of Cromer
Heidi the Dog, social media influencer, movie legend and beloved family pet, died on Saturday 12 October. Having just turned twelve years old, she had been in failing health, and although happy enough at the front end, her back half suddenly gave way and, so paralysed, she had to be put to sleep.
She shot to stardom among the online science community and appeared as herself in a film made during the Cromer Is So Bracing Un-Conference of 2009. The film was premiered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, no fewer less. Here is the cast list ...
... and here is the film in extenso, and, what's more, in full. Scroll to 2'22" to see a very youthful Heidi:
Heidi was born on in mid-Norfolk on 6 October, 2007, one of a large litter of fluffballs when the union of one Nancy Travis and a Gentleman was blessed with issue.
Heidi as a Very Young Fluffball
She joined the Gee family in Cromer just before Christmas that year. She enjoyed beach walks from an early age. Being a retriever, she loved nothing more than retrieving tennis balls from the sea, whatever the weather, and viewed storm-wracked breakers and millpond-smooth tidepools in the same phlegmatic manner. Nothing, but nothing, would keep her from that ball.
She was also very fond of relaxation...
.... and food, especially when combined with being on the beach, and relaxation, as at this beach picnic.
She was kind, laid-back, loving and friendly...
... to the extent that she raised three of our four cats to be honorary dogs.
She also enjoyed gardening...
... and playing in the snow.
In her later years, increasing arthritis meant that sea bathing was supplemented by weekly sessions at Four Paws Canine Hydrotherapy ...
With her therapist Mr A. F. of Weybourne
... where she enjoyed a swim, shampoo and blow-dry with her therapist and best friend Mr A. F. of Weybourne, who became one of her most devoted admirers.
She is mourned by Gees of several different species and her many fans around the world.
Thanks to Mr G. S. of Glasgow for additional research.
You'll both recall that a little while ago I wrote about the surprisingly close alignment between science and poetry. This was brought home to me today after I was deluged with a message from my colleague Dr C. S. of Cambridgeshire who'd been leafing through a collection of poems entitled Spanish Fly by Neil Rollinson, and found a poem called Santa Claus as Macroscopic Quantum Object Delivers His Presents On Time, in which the poet prefaces the poem with a quote from me that runs
It is a feature of the Quantum World that particles can be in more than one place at a time, provided that no one is watching.
This quotation comes from a humorous piece I had written in the Guardian some time ago hypothesizing that Santa must be a quantum macroscopic object, as this enables him to be in more than one place at once (explaining how he can deliver all those gifts in a single night), but explains the taboo against seeing him at work, and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, why he lives in very cold places.
Never thought that anything I might write would inspire others to poetry. I have to say I'm touched. Wherever you are, Mr Rollinson, thank you.
Today is World Mental Health day. It also just happened to be a morning when my work tzores chores were relatively light, as was the wind; my friend Mr M. P. of Cromer had a day off; the Sun was shining; the tide was out; and it was one of those perfect October days when everything is well with the world.
So we gathered our gang of Jack Russell Terriers (two each) and headed for Cromer East Beach.
Cromer East Beach, looking West. Earlier today.
A Stack O' Jacks on Cromer East Beach. Mr M. P. of Cromer, for scale.
The dogs loved it, especially Dog#3 (A Jack Russell working under Deep Cover as a Dachshund), who is younger than the other Jacks and rarely gets a chance to run free, off the lead.
As you can see, she could hardly believe it.
The beach is heaven for dogs. It's not bad for people, either. It's a strange thing that no religion, as far as I know, places Heaven on a beach, given that people flock to the seashore for relaxation in their millions for recreation. But what the beach is good for is mental health - especially on a day like today when we had it almost all to ourselves.
I did do some work when I got home, but mostly I had a nap. I had my nap in aid of World Mental Health Day. I claim this did more to improve mental health (especially mine) than going on Climate Strike and marching up and down with a placard would do any good for the climate. On the whole, then, a positive.
Dog! Who has passed your Grand Climacteric
How many soft furnishings have you in your days
Destroyed? How many scraps scarfed up? Gaze
Dimly with those large brown eyes, and prick
Those velvet ears - but please don't stick
Your tongue in my ear, just after
You've enjoyed a snack from the cat-litter tray.
Nay not look down - I've hoovered all the crumbs
From the floor. For all that your hips are worn
Your knees are knackered, your body's covered in lumps,
You spend most days at rest, unmoving,
And on walking you are prone to stall,
Still is that fur as soft as when the surging sea
You first braved to retrieve that scruffy tennis ball.
Although one might at first think that science and poetry are antitheses, Erasmus Darwin, grandpa of the famous Charles, tended, in his reflections on natural history, to versify. And, yea! It was none other than the great Johann Wilhelm von Goethe -- novelist, playwright, philosopher, scientist and general all-round egghead -- who wrote that 'science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.'
Perhaps times have changed?
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I offer my own contribution, which came to me spontaneously after a heavy session at the Empress of India when I paused for a short rest with my head pressed up against the glass of the 'Orsemeat Shop in the Balls Pond Road, on the occasion of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I make no excuses for the fact that one or other of you might have seen it before. Good verse deserves repetition.
Ahem (clears throat).
The Boson
(with apologies to Hilaire Belloc)
The Boson is so very small
You cannot make it out at all,
Though physicists have money on
Its presence in the Tevatron.
Notwithstanding the concern
Of colleagues beavering at CERN
All hoping that it might emerge
Triumphant from a mighty splurge
Of hadrons which, when they collide
Reveal their secrets, locked inside.
Why all this fuss, I say? Alas!
Without it we can have no mass.
No Higgs, and we'd be thistledown
Floating high above the ground.
The ground itself would fly away
And nothing much would deign to stay
Attracted to its bounden mate,
We'd be in such a sorry state!
But hold! One cannot be so free.
There is still much uncertainty.
For science tells us we must wait
For sigmas to accumulate.
Oh! Let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!
Waiting for the order to go over the top, Gratin-Dauphinoise-en-Croute Salient, 1916. Another tableau from the Cromer Poultry Great War Re-Enactment Society.
I know you are both dying to know what my workspace looks like. Well, here it is.
It's not a dedicated workroom - but then, what is? Most houses don't have a 'study' or 'office' in the same way that they have an observatory to study worms bedrooms or a kitchen or a bathroom. Mine, for example, was once a kitchen. The kitchen window is on the right (you can see the light filtering through the goldfish tank on the windowsill). The desk once occupied the space where the kitchen sink used to be. To go further, the desk isn't designed as a desk - it's a piece of wood that was once the side of a wardrobe, supported by screw-on legs bought from a DIY store.
The bookshelves are deal planks.
It's also a music room (see the piano, top left). And, as you see, my office is also occupied by various pets. The family sometimes use it as a place to put random clutter ('don't worry, I'm only putting it there for a minute').
For full disclosure, here is a view from the desk, looking back towards the door. The ominous black mass bottom left is all the equipment with which I serenade the good burghers of Norfolk and the Lands Adjacent with my beat combo, and lucky burghers they are, too.
You might also be wondering why I have no fewer than three yes three not one not two but three yes count 'em three computers. Isn't that a tad excessive? Well, maybe - but they allow me to compartmentalize my various activities.
The one on the right - with the black keyboard - in the top picture - oh do keep up at the back - is the one on which I do my day job (I work for the Submerged Log Company). The screen is attached to a generic PC laptop (tucked away elsewhere) on a dock. When I go to the orifice office I detach the laptop and attach it to a very similar arrangement there.
The big one on the left, with the display showing a photo of Jupiter, is a 24-inch, 2.66GHz, 4Gb iMac running OSX Lion, bought new (by me) in 2009. Although ten years old, it's still central to my set up. I do most of my writing on it. After drafting much of my latest book on an iPad, I've been finishing it off here. The big screen is also lovely for watching TV - and, perhaps most important of all -- the computer has a CD/DVD drive, which allows me to burn CDs of the live performances of my beat combo. It's helpfully next to the piano: the audio feed goes to the piano audio input so I can play along to YouTube music videos and pipe the lot into my own head, so as not to disturb the butlerthe whole of Cromer my fellow residents.
The one in the middle - with the ladybird - is a 21.5-inch, 2.77GHz, 8Gb iMac made in 2012. I felt I needed a new(er) Mac as my iPhone would no longer sync with the older Mac. Technology, eh?
When I bought the new(er) iMac secondhand it was running OSX Sierra and was terribly slow. This was partly because I had divided it into two users, as Mrs Gee was the primary user, but I needed to get into it to look at my photo stream. Now, Mrs Gee is using Offspring#2's 21.5-inch, 2.5Ghz, 4Gb iMac, which Offspring#2 no longer uses as she has gone to college with a new MacBook (are you following this? - Ed) I've now streamlined it for a single user and upgraded it to OSX Mojave. It's less slow now - I use it largely for recreation, for social media. I am typing on it now.
My parents bought me the office chair sometime in the last century. It's a bit scuffed as you see but still just about managing to accommodate the Gee posterior with the appropriate lumbar support.
Now, I have a theoryhypothesishunchlunch hunch that people do their best work if they are slightly uncomfortable, in the same way that an oyster needs a piece of grit to make a pearl. Roald Dahl's writing shed, for example, looks decidedly makeshift. Michael Morpurgo wrote in bed until people complained of the inky stains on the bed linen. Most writers' rooms are a mess of makeshift and make-do-and-mend.
The mess, I think, is necessary - a tidy desk is the sign that nothing much is going on. J. R. R. Tolkien had two rooms in his Oxford family home. One was a study-bedroom in the house itself (he tended to be write late at night after heavy sessions with C. S. Lewis down at the Eagle and Child and didn't like to wake his diurnal wife). The other the converted garage, which is where he kept most of his papers. In a letter to one of his sons he wrote that he'd been spending that particular day tidying one or other of his offices as papers had got everywhere. An untidy office, he said, 'is a sign of literary or philological preoccupation'.
Tolkien's two offices leads me to my next point - writers never write in just one place. I suspect that even when a writers gets an office just to his or her liking, they probably do a lot of writing somewhere else instead.
I am sure that at least one of you is wondering where I wrote my various books. Well, I'm going to tell you.
(In Search of) Deep Time was mostly written in our first house, an Edwardian terrace in Ealing, in West London. I drafted as much in spare hours here and there until the text got to about 25,000 words, and too long to re-read all at once, after which I decided to take some time out. I spent a fortnight at my parents' house. Or perhaps at the library of the Linnean Society in London, to which I'd commute and work 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch, like a job. After all that I'd pretty much broken the back of it and I could finish the rest at home. I got paid a substantial advance for this (ah! those were the days! - Ed) -- enough to pay for Mrs Gee to take a 3-year sabbatical and start a family. I wrote the last chapter, a 6,000-word stretch, in one go, in the spare room, while rocking Offspring#1 in a car seat with one toe, not daring to stop. Although the editor pulled the rest of the text around quite a bit, this chapter was more or less untouched.
Jacob's Ladder took a long time to get off the ground. It was written at two or three different homes (there was a time when we moved house more or less for sport), and there was definitely a session at the Linnean. I finished it in what was by then our home, a small house in Barkingside, East London, in a space under the stairs, on a bright yellow desk called ROBIN, from IKEA, reduced from £110 to £45. The space was not just cramped, but open to the distractions of home (Offspring#2 had arrived by then, so we had not one but two count 'em two Offspring, both under five) - but the space proved highly productive. While finishing off Jacob's LadderI knocked out not only The Science of Middle-Earthbut also A Field Guide to Dinosaurs. After that I converted the garage into a much more spacious workspace .... and productivity dropped sharply. I did, however, manage to draft what eventually became the Sigil trilogy.
Not long after that we moved to Cromer. In those days I used to commute to London far more often than I do now. My novel By The Sea was written entirely on the train, originally on an Asus Eee and then an iPad Mk1, in weekly episodes that were published on LabLit. My first office in Cromer was a tiny cupboard under the stairs, (although this time it had a door and a window), but this extremely uncomfortable podule generated The Accidental Species, by far my most commercially successful book. Can you see a pattern emerging? My current workspace, to be fair, hasn't been so bad, having produced not only Across The Bridge but almost half of 30-Second Biology. And I am gearing up for two more projects. one of which is almost complete and was substantially drafted in cafes, on trains and hotels... on an iPad Mk2 with a bluetooth keyboard, now my favourite go-anywhere device.
The moral of this story is, I think, that the environment of a writer's room is really only secondary to what goes on inside a writer's head.
Did you know that this week is Recycle Week (excuse me - #RecycleWeek)? Neither did I until I saw a tweet from Norfolk County Council exhorting us to bring our huddled mattresses, sofas, rusty bikes, bottles, old boots and so on to our local Recycling Centre.
I view our local Recycling Centre as a kind of Temple. Yea! I bring Libations, Sacrifices and Offerings in the form of my unwanted worldly goods and leave spiritually cleansed and uplifted.
At the risk of sounding as smug as environmental campaigners tend to do nowadays, we at the Maison des Giraffes have cloven to the ReUse/ReCycle ethic for many years. We grow some of our own veg, have chickens, and put our food waste in the compost heap, the wormery, or indeed feed to the hens. Much of our furniture comes from charity shops, eBay, Gumtree or my shed, in which I repurpose old bits of furniture into creations that Mrs Gee charitably calls 'rustic'.
Should we be tempted to acquire Storage Solutions to store our Stuff, I recite the Zen koan - Have Less Stuff.
We can has solar panels.
Although we have yet to grow our birkenstocks or knit our own muesli (our car runs on diesel and I still fly to places, though these days I try to bring my own wings), we like to think we are Doing Our Bit.
Now that the Offspring have left home (for all that they keep coming back), Mrs Gee and I find ourselves in a state of Zugunruhe which takes the form of redecorating and decluttering on a near-industrial scale as we attempt to lead a simpler life.
We find much satisfaction in our Zen Recycling, so much so that we take delight in the smaller things of life. I have a suspicion that this matures with age. Some years ago, when Offspring#2 was small, she asked me what we were going to do one given Sunday. My eyes lit up.
'I'll tell you what we are going to do,' I said. 'First, we are going to the Recycling Centre. But wait - it gets better! - after that, we are going to the allotment!'
'That doesn't sound very exciting', she replied.
'At my age', I said', that's all the excitement I can stand'.
I love cheese. Whether it’s farmhouse cheddar or something stinky, runny and French, it finds a welcome chez Gee. From Ilchester to Red Leicester, Saint-Paulin to Danish Blue, Stilton to Double Gloucester, the Fermented Curd sparks much joy round here.
The problem is that the affection is not reciprocated. In fact I’d go as far as saying that the cheesy view of the Gee verges on hostility.
I have found, you see, that I have an intolerance of dairy products. Too much - especially cheese - and my skin falls off in great big scaly lumps. The only milk substitute used to be soya milk, which to me might as well be pus. The choice nowadays is much wider, from lactose-free milk, to substitutes made of such things as bouzouki players oats or almonds, though ersatz milk made from coconut ... er ... milk is rather like drinking suntan lotion.
Although dairy-free milk is tolerable, even rather pleasant, the world has yet to invent a dairy-free cheese that tastes anything like cheese, in my own rather limited experience. Science can now send spacecraft to distant planets and now peer inside subatomic particles, but is yet unable to create dairy-free cheese that tastes anything very much like cheese. There’s no way around it, but vegan cheese, though full of its own environmentally sound self-importance, tastes rather like earwax.
Any suggestions for palatable dairy-free cheese welcome.
As you both know, the family spent a pleasant week in South Wales recently, during which Offspring#1 and I spent many happy hours beachcombing. In Lydstep Bay, while I was fossicking around at low tide after spongs and bryozoans and other good things, Offspring#1 was scaling the rocks high up in the splash zone and identified a series of scratch marks. Here they are.
I apologise for the absence of a scale bar: I reckon this field is about three centimetres by two, more or less. In my earlier post I suggested that they are scratches made by the radulae of questing molluscs as they scratch algae from the rock surface -- but I have never seen anything like this before, and my postbag has hardly been bulging with comments on this either way. Now I've been on social media for a week or two, I thought I'd post this picture more widely to see if anyone had any ideas.
I've been writing down the author and title of each and every book I have read since the end of 2013, and, when I am feeling bloggy, I write an end-of-year round-up to highlight my favourites in any given year. Here is a brief summary of the story so far:
In 2018 I read 56 books, one for each year of my age. It's quite a task, however it was made somewhat easier by my having broken an ankle in August so I was Off Games (I brought a note) and could catch up with my reading. So, which books made my Top Ten in 2018, and which one gets the ultimate marmalade accolade of Read of the Year?
In no particular order, as they say on all the game shows, they were ... clears throatroll of drums
Ursula Le Guin The Dispossessed. Anarres is a planet where resources are scarce and the residents must pull together or starve. Shevek, a brilliant engineer from Anarres, travels to Urras, a much richer society, and is dazzled and baffled by its abundance. Shevek is working on the Principle of Simultaneity, a means of instant communication across interstellar distances -- and a possible leveller. Yes, it's brilliant science fiction, but as with all good SF it holds up a mirror to our own times. But as always with Le Guin its the clear, lucid and dignified prose that shines.
Charles Dickens Great Expectations. When a serial in one of Charles Dickens' periodicals turned out to be a clunker, the master had to turn to in a hurry to rescue the magazine's sales and his own livelihood. You'd never know it from reading this melodramatic rags-to-riches tale, as on every page you feel you are reading a classic of English Literature. It's also killingly funny. I read this as it was one of Offspring#2's set texts for A-level. In fact, I read all her set texts so we could chat about them later, which we enjoy doing to this day even though she's flown off to college. Sniff.
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby. The novel that epitomises the shallow consumerism of the Roaring Twenties in the U. S. and A., and can be seen, in a way, as a savage and less brittle counterpart to Evelyn Waugh's very English novels such as Vile Bodies. Amazed by how brief it was. You don't need to use loads of pages to tell a good story. This was recommended to me by my friend D. A. of London.
Neil Ansell The Last Wilderness. Few do rugged travelling like Neil Ansell. Now in his fifties and finding rugged travel to be taking its toll, Ansell returns to a part of the Scottish Highlands where he made his first trip into the wilds, as a very young man. Increasing deafness means that he strains to hear the songs of birds he has known all his life, perhaps for the last time. Beautiful and tragic.
Alex Clare She's Fallen. A guest at a wedding plummets to her death from a hotel balcony. Did she fall or was she pushed? Such matters are of secondary importance in this, the author's second policier featuring D. I Robyn Bailley, who is learning to live as a woman after deciding to change gender. The novel starts more or less where the first, He's Gone, ends -- and I don't think I'm spoiling things too much to say it ends on a cliffhanger. Can't wait for the third instalment.
Steve Brusatte The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Another Day, Another Dinosaur Book. This one, though, is written with such knowledge and infectious brio that it stands on top of the heap. If you read one dinosaur book in the next year or two, make sure it's this one. But only if you read mine first (it has better pictures). I reviewed this in the Literary Review.
Dan Simmons The Abominable. You won't read a more ripping yarn about the perils of inter-war alpinism this year. Or, perhaps, ever. Rich in detail, splendid in execution, this stirring tale of an attempt on Everest while trying to foil merciless gun-toting Nazis is as exciting as it is nostalgic (one imagines Tintin having similar adventures with Snowy, the Thompson Twins and Captain Haddock). Don't let the title fool you. This isn't a novel about yetis. Or is it?
Neil Gaiman Norse Mythology. My annual list is rarely without an entry from Neil Gaiman (or Dan Simmons, or Ursula Le Guin, come to that). Here Gaiman re-tells these misty old myths from the Creation to Ragnarok, most of which seem to involve Loki getting up to mischief and then having to find some circumlocutory way to put everything right. But such tales are in the telling, and reading this cast the same spell I felt as an eleven-year-old on first looking into Roger Lancelyn Green's Myths of the Norsemen. As enchanting as you have come to expect from this modern master of fantasy.
Alan Garner Boneland. I'd read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen when I was a child, but never read the sequel, The Moon of Gomrath. These two - well, the first, at any rate - concern the adventures of two children, a brother and a sister, when they come into contact with mythic ancientry in the landscape of Cheshire in the English Midlands.This, the third episode, concerns the adult life of the boy, who has become a radio astronomer and is trying to contact his sister, who it seems was astrally projected at some point in Episode 2. Not being aware of much of this, I read Boneland as a harrowing study of mental breakdown, written in the most extraordinary way, more like a prose poem than a novel. This was loaned to me by my friend Mr. C. F. of Cromer.
And the winner is ...
J. R. R. Tolkien The Fall of Gondolin. Recovering from trench fever after the Battle of the Somme, a young signals officer called Ronald Tolkien took an exercise book and scribbled a fantastic tale about a beautiful, hidden city assaulted and finally conquered by the forces of evil. The Fall of Gondolin was the first tale to be sketched in a sequence that eventually came to be known as The Silmarillion, even though the events take place towards the end of the overall story. Although most of the rest of The Silmarillion was sketched out in fair detail, evolving and maturing in all sorts of ways before Tolkien's death in 1972, Gondolin remained mostly unrevised, and although key to the mythos, much of it remains the youthful tale of heroic derring-do as it was laid down in 1917. It's one of literature's great tragedies that Tolkien - who could never bear to finish anything -- never finished this tale, the one that started it all, and from which sprang The Hobbit and of course The Lord of the Rings. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, this edition is a tribute to Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher, who has been ploughing through, editing and publishing his fathers' writing since the 1970s, and now -- at the age of more than ninety -- is hanging up his red pencil for the last time. This is the last that can be told of the matter of the Elder Days, in story or in song. Elegiac..
I know you are wondering - both of you - why I have rebooted this blog after an absence of more than a year, and why I have rejoined Facebook and Twitter. The reason, I think, is that my wheels are spinning without any traction, a state I get into when I am between books.
So let me bring you up to speed.
My book The Accidental Species was such a rip-roaring success - well, it actually made a profit in its first year, in hardback, something that has never happened to me before - that I was enjoined to write a terse technical tome called Across The Bridge, a project I had been at pains to avoid for years, but eventually I ran out of excuses.
'I'm not going to write another effing book!' I opined, one afternoon, after Across The Bridge had been published, notwithstanding inasmuch as which the request by my friend Mr B. C. of Swindon to write another novel featuring my detective heroine Persephone Sheepwool. It's all very well for Mr B. C., I thought, who churns out books faster than one can say 'Harriet Vane'.
My Carer and Private Brain Care Specialist Mrs P. G of Cromer, who knows me better than I know myself, remarked that I say that every time I finish a book, and that's when my former colleague Mr D. A. of London suggested I write a kind of memoir celebrating all the amazing discoveries with which I have been associated over thirty-plus years as senior bone-grinder at the Submerged Log Company.
And when my friend Dr S. B. of Edinburgh describes in his celebrated book the cocktail party where the first feathered dinosaurs were revealed, it was at second hand, because he was only seven at the time. But I was there, in the Room Where It Happened.
So I wrote it. The working title is Let's Talk About Rex: A Personal History of Life on Earth. I even have a cover to go with the working title. Here it is:
Don't look for it yet. It's not out yet, and may never be, though my agent liked it enough to read it and suggest emendations, which I have made, and it's now in Version 2.0.
So I am in that state authors call Waiting For Things To Happen. In the meantime I have what looks like a freelance commission that'll keep me from prowling the streets at night.
So why has it taken me more than a year to return to teh interwebs? Well, it was like this. In May 2018, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was hitting the news, I was at my desk one Sunday and looked out of the window to see the sun shining. Thinking I should get out more, I went into the garden and did a few odd jobs. The birds were singing. The hens were clucking. This is the life, I thought.
So I went indoors, wound up my blog, and deleted my social media accounts.
The Midl of Lidl (or as it may be Aldi) is a wonderland, full of all those things you didn't know you didn't need, such as stuffed warthogs, rat pressers, atonal apples and amplified heat. Some of the objects are so obscure that I simply cannot work out their intended function, not even when they are in the box with full instructions in twelve languages. If the object is found au naturel, in a state of deshabille, as it were, it can be a proper poser. I think I know what this object is -
... having seen something like it in a box last week, but one never knows. I do have a few ideas:
1 - a do-it-yourself home bungee-jumping kit;
2 - safety harness for indoor paragliding;
3 - a device for removing Boy Scouts from Horses' Hooves;
I own that it is resembles somewhat a late-eighteenth-century Gloucestershire grummet-tinker's scrode, though these are hard to distinguish from early-nineteenth-century Herefordshire grummet-tinker's scrodes, especially if it is missing its splod, as seems to be the case here.
Most years we go to the annual Green Build event held at Felbrigg Hall, a lovely National Trust property a gnat’s crotchet away from chez Gee. And so it was today. The event is sponsored by the local council and billed as a lifestyle event, encouraging us all to Go Green. Although one does wonder about the carbon footprint of all those cars queuing to get in to an event that grows in popularity each year.
A particular draw for us is the prospect of bags and bags of compost at £1 a go. This comes from all the garden waste collected kerbside in brown wheelie bins (a scheme to which we subscribe) which gets transported to the council’s industrial wormery. This is just like our own domestic wormery only bigger, and the worms, being employed by the Council, have to wear hard hats and high-viz jackets.
The excitement of the event can be in tents.
As you might imagine there is quite a lot of input from artisanal arts and crafts...
... although some of the arts and crafts are less artisanal than others.
Responsible use of a chainsaw. Don't try this at home.
Being as I am a Socks Maniac I was interested in this display of warm winter socks.
Some of the arts and crafts are not so much artisanal as industrial: there are displays of green tech, including Tesla solar batteries and a surprising variety of electric cars.
We are always interested in building, and building techniques, so I was attracted by this display on lime plastering and traditional insulating materials. Visitors are encouraged to get plastered and fleeced.
Special events, demonstrations and seminars occur throughout the Green Build event's busy program. We didn't attend any this year, but a few years back Offspring#2 and I went to a lecture about how to build houses out of bales of straw. At the end I asked whether such buildings were proof against being blown down by wolves.
For us the best bit is the chance to wander round Felbrigg's productive walled gardens, which are quite magical.
Another 250 years of loving care, we think, and our garden could be as good as this. And so we leave, daydreaming about smallholdings.
Quite often while performing or rehearsing with my beat combo I have cause to penetrate the interior of the surprisingly large county of Norfolk, and the Lands Adjacent, I find myself in remote country lanes that appear to go on forever. There are times when I feel that I am in the middle of nowhere. Imagine my delight when the other day I found that this was literally true. I had to stop and take this picture. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?
Sightings of interesting signs are welcome on this blog- send them here. All submissions will be enjoyed and cherished, though not necessarily published. If they are published, you will retain copyright and be attributed.
Dog#1 is a Golden Retriever. At almost 12 years old, she is getting on a bit, and like many of her breed she suffers from arthritis and hip dysplasia. Swimming is good therapy, which is why, ever since she was a pup, she's enjoyed chasing balls into the sea and retrieving them - which is of course more or less what retrievers are bred to do.
Well, the sea can be cold, and also quite rough, and although Dog#1 has hardly ever been known to baulk at enormous waves (have you ever seen a dog body-surf?) even in the depths of winter (it's all the floof, you know) it's nice for her to be able to swim somewhere calmer and warmer.
So, when I saw how happy Dog#1 was swimming in placid, gentle lagoons, I wondered whether I might make my fortune by inventing hydrotherapy for dogs. It was only when our vet recommended Four Paws Canine Hydrotherapy that I realised I had been beaten to it once again, following the discovery that other bright ideas of mine had been pinched by unscrupulous persons thought of independently, such as the Guinea-Pig Powered Lawnmower, and Short-Stay Airport Capsule Hotels.
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, Dog#1 has been attending FPCH weekly for more than three years. I can honestly say that it has materially slowed her rate of ageing. Here she is earlier today with her therapist, Mr A. F. of Kelling.
Dog#1 and her therapist. Earlier today.
After fun and games in the heated pool chasing a toy, she gets a shampoo and a blow dry, and of course lots of attention. It's the highlight of her week. Or, as one person retorted when I said this a while back, it would be the highlight of anybody's week.
One might wonder, though, how one gets to be a Canine Hydrotherapist, which is a profession with its own regulatorybodies and professional standards and everything. After all, it's probably not one of those careers to which one expects children to aspire, such as human resources officer footballer, palaeontologist, or pop star.
Mr A. F., for example, was a promising young long-distance runner and personal trainer until, in his late twenties and early thirties, he was struck down by rheumatoid arthritis and had to think up a way to make a living around his own health needs. Floating around in water all day helps his joints. And he loves dogs. Putting two and two together he trained as a Canine Hydrotherapist and runs a successful business. I would say more power to his elbow, except it probably hurts...
The family has lately returned from a restorative vacation in South Wales, though we didn't manage to encounter Professor Trellis. One of my favourite recreations is beachcombing, and for all its manifest delights, the North-Sea aspect of Cromer can't hold a candle to the Atlantic influence of South Wales as regards variety and abundance of rockpool flora and fauna.
I also got to use the smartphone hand-lens attachment given to me some time ago by my good friend Mr M. P. of Cromer, used to capture this rather pretty bryozoan colony
... and this altogether entertaining spong.
Though one hardly needed a microscope to photograph this whopper of a jellyfish, happily dead and somewhat decayed by the time it was washed up.
Perhaps more mysterious are these eldritch runessigils scratch marks on rocks high in the splash zone, spotted by Offspring#1. I think they are the marks left by the questing radulae of marauding molluscs as they rasp away at algae and other nameless encrustations. Unless anyone knows better. Answers in the comments please...
I am deluged by an image from my correspondent Professor Trellis of North Wales, sent from one of his seemingly unending peregrinations about the countryside by rail. Inspect if you will this photo of a trackside edifice:
Innocuous, no?
Well, look more closely...
Yes. you read that correctly. It can now be revealed - and you read it here first, folks - that within Network Rail, the body that runs the infrastructure on Britain's railways - is a secret organisation called the POSSESSION CENTRE devoted to banishing occult forces from its systems. One might argue that it's high time such an organisation were created, given the manifest unexplained delays and other mishaps that befall rail travel: either that, or it is not doing its job properly.
