The Scientist and the Poet can be Friends

Stuck on your science? Unclog your brain with poetry, advises scientist and poet Sam Illingworth in Nature.

And why not?

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 to go Over the Top

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.

Workspace

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 butler the 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 theory hypothesis hunch lunch 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 Ladder I knocked out not only The Science of Middle-Earth but 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.

The Recycle of Life

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'.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

This one borrowed liberated shamelessly stolen from Professor S. C. Of London, who was on his holidays in Ireland.

Say Cheese

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.

Another Mystery Object For You To Identify

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.