Martian invasion

We have always been imaginatively concerned with a Martian invasion, but in just six days time, our own invasion of Mars takes place.

It is an extraordinary endeavour. We are sending a vehicle to explore the Martian surface, the most complex vehicle ever sent into space.

It is a roving laboratory that is intended to ascertain whether conditions have ever been suitable for organic life to have existed.

It seems that it has been accepted that if life ever existed, that the general conditions as they prevail, would make it highly unlikely for life to be able to exist to day.

Temperatures seem to be consistently around -150° centigrade, and solar radiation make conditions particularly inhospitable.

Once again, the team of scientists working on this extraordinary project have been looking at some of the most extreme environments on Earth to assess the possibility of life existing, or having existed, on Mars.

The Rio Tinto was used as a particular example, where water is a deep red because of Iran's, and the pH of the water is extremely acid, around 2.7.

And yet extraordinarily there is life, microscopic life, in this water and actually the cause of the acidity. metabolising what at first sight appears to be pollution from mining in the area, microscopic life forms then excrete acid, and the consequence is the extreme acid environment in which this life exists.

Curiosity, as the Mars Lander is entitled, will make its landing with extraordinary ambition to ensure that the billion-dollar craft lands safely.

A parachute will be deployed at first, using the thin Martian atmosphere to slow entry, and then a remarkable rocket powered crane will lower Curiosity to the surface.

And all of this takes place in just six days time.

It is a remarkable endeavour, and if successfully deployed, is remarkably well equipped to discover if the right kind of minerals have ever existed for organic life as we know it to perhaps have once existed.

It seems that it is already accepted that we are the only complex lifeforms that exist, and to that extent what is being sought is simply the conditions in which perhaps single cell lifeforms may once have developed.

The philosophical implications are enormous: that we may well be alone in the universe. That life exists at all on our planet seems to have been an extraordinary thing, but that it has become as complex as we see around us is all the more miraculous.

And so, no doubt this eight month journey will be more highly publicised once it is reaching its conclusion, and if successful, perhaps this question of whether other planets in our solar system may once have enabled life to be created will be answered.

The implications are extraordinary, and perhaps might make us think for a moment how special this planet is.

For it seems that space is a hostile environment, and the sun can be a most destructive force as much as it is an important source of energy for us.

That our atmosphere has not been stripped away by solar winds appears to be a function of our magnetic fields, which protect us from the worst excesses of the solar wind, and this in itself seems to be dependent on the fact that we have a molten iron core, that same phenomenon that gives us the destructive power of earthquakes.

A Lasting Legacy Already Achieved?

I have already watched the opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympics twice more since I watched the first hour or so live, but it did start later than my normal time for sleep.

The more I have had time for the incredible spectacle of the ceremony to sink in, the more I have realised that already I feel it has made a substantial difference to me.

And likewise, I am sure it must have made a similar important difference to many other people, and perhaps particularly those that were present on the evening, or who were lucky enough to have been personally involved in some way.

It is like having been present at the first performance of a new opera, which is something that I have had the privilege to have done many times during my professional life in The Arts.

But this has been something quite different. Engaging in quite an extraordinary way, through the brilliance of the storytelling, and perhaps in particular by the way in which it was achieved, by the involvement of so many volunteers.

I have suddenly become so much more interested in watching the sporting events as they happen, whatever they are.

Because what they all have in common is that they have had their birth with this extraordinary opening, which has somehow made clear the significance of the Olympic ideals.

And the context of this event as the summation of our cultural heritage and history, and from the imaginative and creative world that has been so intertwined with the lives of all of us.

This is quite an achievement. Happening at this point in time when our future seems so uncertain, I can only hope that the message of these games will have moved the hearts of many more like me, and that this above all things in our common experience will be remembered as a catalyst for a new and resurgent sense of Self and of Society.

It hardly seems important exactly how many gold medals we may win. It is definitely simply the taking part, and perhaps this may translate across more than simply the arena of sport and supporting excellence.

It is more than simply the regeneration of my part of East London, where i was brought up, but of myself, and of my Country - the Country to which we can all offer our proud allegiance.

Pride And No Prejudice - 2012 Opening

I have just finished watching the recording I made of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, and I can only echo Sebastien Coe's words in his speech as the President of the Olympic Association, and central to the bid itself, in that my most immediate feelings are a sense of Pride in being British.

The opening ceremony was always going to be difficult, following in the footsteps of the remarkable Beijing ceremony four years ago.

But I can speak as someone that went to school in Stratford itself for part of my education, just a few hundred yards away from where the amazing development has taken place in which the games will be hosted, and in which the opening ceremony took place last night.

I am immensely proud of what has taken place, and I suppose I speak as someone brought up in precisely that part of London, which is now so much in the world's eye.

The point was well made by presenters at the end of the nearly four hour event, it was bold, British, barmy, and brilliant.

There were numerous moments when I was completely moved by what was presented, and I was continually surprised at how the whole event unravelled.

There are too many memorable moments to mention, and no doubt many people unfamiliar with the particularities of British culture and social history will have missed the numerous intimate details.

But what no one can have missed is the sense of spectacle, and the scale of the spectacular.

I have had the good fortune to have met in meetings with the Artistic Director Ruth Mackenzie, when she was the Artistic Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse and I was a humble Education Officer at Opera North, also based in Leeds.

I have known her to be a great visionary, and well deserved with a reputation for working well with communities of ordinary people to manufacture something of great artistic merit.

In my professional life, I was for five years the Director of an Arts Trust concerned with the regeneration of a coastal town in the East of England, and my remit in that role was to create through community engagement multimedia projects, with substantial funding from The Arts Council of England and from many other sources.

And so I suppose I watched the celebration with a professional eye, and I was certainly impressed.

Mixing the range of disciplines that the event did is not straightforward at all.

And the fact that so many of the participants were not professionals but members of the community is just amazing.

It is unfortunate that it did not start until 9 PM, which is typically when I go to sleep, and unfortunately though I tried to watch the whole event live, I only managed to watch it until about 10:15 PM, perhaps because so many people were watching online and my normally reliable broadband connection was just not up to it.

But I am so pleased that I recorded the nearly four hours it took, and I have watched all of it today.

Last night, I only reached the part where it appeared that the Queen and James Bond, in the guise of Daniel Craig, parachuted into the stadium.

This film component of the celebration was inspired, and perhaps is testament to the fact that Denny Boyle is a filmmaker, and he was the Director with overall responsibility for the event.

He has certainly added to his reputation with this extraordinary beginning to the 2012 games.

But everything about it, from the design of the torch that has travelled 12,000 miles around the country to the amazing theatrical impact of the Olympic Cauldron in the stadium, was just stupendous.

Anyone that hasn't seen it should certainly try to catch the first one and a half hours, and perhaps then the final 15 minutes or so when the Olympic oaths were taken, and the event formerly opened after the lighting of the Olympic Cauldron.

It has been memorably emotive, expressive of so many values that we would wish could be more universal in the world.

I hadn't quite realised that London is the only city to have played host to the games three times since the games were reinstated in the modern era by Baron De Couperin at the end of the 19th century.

Something special is happening, and its commencement has been memorably special too.

Bread And Circuses

This phrase has suddenly come to mind because I have began to feel myself swept up with the sense of National zeal that is sweeping the UK at the moment, as the Olympic torch makes its way throughout the country.

Billions of pounds has been spent on this project, that is no doubt fulfilling the purpose of distracting the populace from the difficulties of a recessionary period.

I am not decrying this nor thinking it is a bad thing at all, simply it has suddenly struck me how appropriate that this phrase is for this moment in time.

It originates in the Roman poet Juvenal from about 100 AD, and was very much intended as a satire on the way in which Rome had begun to be governed.

It is perhaps ultimately a good thing that we have something to distract us, and there is a tangible sense of expectation surrounding the opening ceremony for the Olympics, which as I write will take place this evening.

This morning, I was excited in expectation of hearing church bells from my open bedroom window.

Sadly, I could hear no bells, not even a local doorbell.

I watched the Olympic breakfast News programme, broadcast for the first time this morning from the beautifully situated BBC studio overlooking the Olympic Park.

Rain is possible during the course of today, but it seems not to matter, and everybody is talking up the chances of the ceremony this evening not suffering rain at all.

Enough television footage of the theatrics we will see this evening for everybody to be keen to see it, and there is a conspiracy of silence around the question of who will actually light the Olympic flame at the culmination of the opening ceremony.

If I were a gambling man, my money would be on it being the Queen herself, or perhaps the eldest of Prince Charles's sons, who one day himself will be our King.

I cannot imagine what other celebrity might be asked in this special year to undertake such a significant symbolic act.

But it is certain that the event this evening will perhaps break the record for the largest ever television audience worldwide in history.

Tomorrow will tell.

This is certainly a moment of history in the making, and I feel certain that we will all look back at this moment in time as a great moment of satisfying success, and certainly everything I have seen to date of the arrival of the Olympic flame has had an almost religious sense of purpose.

But it is Bread And Circuses, what was satirised by Juvenal, almost 2000 years ago, and perhaps the first recognition that the great ambition that was Rome had become lost in the midst of entertainments that were to distract the people from lack political of direction.

I say again, I do not wish to come across as cynical about everything Olympian, at this moment in time I am puffed up with pride at what is unrolling.

Perhaps I just wish that as a Nation we might recognize something important in our joint enterprise as a society more often, and in ways that perhaps might cost less when everything is said and done.

I Was A Ringer Once

Unlikely as it seems, I once learnt how to ring bells in my local church.

I was never a churchgoer, but I lived in a housing co-operative in East London close to Bow Church.

Not the one that makes you a Cockney if you are born within the sound of its bells, that is the church of St Mary Atte Bow, which is in the City of London itself.

The Church where we lived was a beautiful old church, with a fine set of bells.

I was invited to join a group of ringers that called itself the USSR, the Union of Socialist Secular Ringers.

As with many Churches in the UK, there was a decent Public House nearby, and in some respects my joining this group of ringers was as much an excuse for a social evening at the pub. We would always retire to the pub after a couple of hours learning how to ring the bells.

Bell Ringing is an extraordinary pursuit to master, perhaps for the simple fact that it involves controlling a bell which can weigh several tons, but which is carefully balanced within a wooden frame.

And thus, the main skill is to learn how to pull the bell from its point of balance, maintain control of its swing within its frame, and thus enable the clapper to strike the bell at the right point in its swing, and thereafter return the bell to its point of balance ready to commence another Ring of Bells.

There is a small wooden strop piece against which the bell will rest just so that it can be pulled gently into its swing, and giving the bell just too much momentum can cause this wooden stop to be broken so that the ringer could in theory be pulled out into the bell tower if they kept hold of the rope.

So, bell-ringing is very much a Zen-like activity, finding a means of balancing something that is much heavier than a person, and giving it just sufficient momentum to keep it swinging, and in a manner so that the individual bells, which are of course tuned to different pitches, will strike in the right order.

We often practiced with simple handbells to learn specific rhythms, but the practical art of controlling a bell was the main part of mastering bell-ringing.

I am sure it is quite common for a secular group of people to be involved with ringing the bells in a particular church, just as in William Golding's novel The Spire the workmen constructing the spire of the Cathedral Church in Salisbury, not named as such in the novel, but Golding was an English Teacher at a school in Salisbury, and this was clearly his inspiration for the story.

I met Golding once, when I was about 17, and studying The Spire for my English A-level. It so happened that in my school on the south coast my English Teacher had been taught by Golding, and he simply invited the author to come to our school, and to speak to a group of students about his novel.

I remember he arrived in a fabulous old Jaguar, red in color, just the same model as the kind of Jaguar that Inspector Morse drove in his television series.

This would have been about 1977, and I don't remember much about the detail of the session, although I think I must have enjoyed it enormously. Golding looked exactly like the successful author he had by then become, and although he taught English for some years after the publication of his most successful story, Lord Of The Flies, by the time I met with him he had retired from teaching, and was no doubt writing full-time.

I remember that in his novel, the spire builders were very much of the ‘old religion’, and the contrast between the driven Deacon of the Church and the Masons constructing the edifice was tangible.

Thus I learned the rudiments of bell-ringing, and never attended church once.

But this didn't stop our enthusiasm for learning about the relationship between a man and a bell. And the world inside a bell-tower in an old church is an extraordinarily fascinating one, and the group was fascinating too.

The Bells Will Be Ringing For The Olympics

It was only last night, listening to night-time radio, that I had confirmed what exactly would be happening on Friday.

At 12 minutes past eight in the Morning, exactly 12 hours before the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics begins, all Church Bells will be rung, and Big Ben will chime for three minutes solid.

All citizens are encouraged to ring bells if they have them, and my first feeling on hearing this, I must admit, was to be moved almost to tears.

There is something almost magical about the ringing of bells in such a synchronised way, as it has so often been reserved in the past for such occasions as victory over an enemy.

On Friday, it is perhaps an appropriate rallying call, to remind everyone of what will take place that evening, the opening ceremony to the Games.

My first visual thought was of that moment in the second of the Elizabeth films when Cate Blanchett, on a white horse and in shining silver armour, addresses her troops as the Spanish Armada approaches this island Nation.

On that occasion, the weather played an important role in defeating the invading army, and in a similar respect, the weather has seemed to play an important role over the past several weeks, when we have had one of the wettest periods in living memory.

This historic week, however, the sun has appeared, and it is 30°, with blue skies.

I shall be listening to hear local church bells joining in this national call, and perhaps to Big Ben chiming for the longest time.

And perhaps I may join in myself, by composing something with bells on my Macintosh computer, using Apple Creative Software, something to be played loudly through my super speaker system attached to my computer. They can make quite a racket when needed.

I'm not a musician, but these days such software makes composition a simply visual effort, and I do have a symphony orchestra add on.

So, a three-minute special contribution, perhaps a poem without words appropriate to the occasion. My own contribution, flat on my back, and wishing for once that I could run and jump and leave behind my Multiple Sclerosis.

6° Of Connection To Everything

I'm often surprised at how connected things can seem to be.

Another example has just revealed itself to me, and I feel compelled to write about it in this blog. If nothing else, the way we are connected to things, however loosely, makes for a good idea for generating blog postings.

In this case, the catalyst for my thinking was in fact an advert sent to me by e-mail, after I had purchased a book through Amazon.

Perhaps Amazon have become very sophisticated in the way in which they develop advertising after you have expressed a choice by purchasing something through them.

But even Amazon couldn't have suspected the link that I have with what they sent to me.

My purchase had been The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins, first published as a pamphlet in 1924, and then followed by a more developed book in 1925.

This book was about what have become known as ley lines, the links in ancient landscapes whereby our predecessors demonstrated quite sophisticated surveying techniques, and which often link sites from very early origins in ways that are not always easy to fathom.

For example, Churches are often on sites of more ancient sacred origin, but can be seen to be oriented in ways that make them in a direct linear connection in the landscape.

Needless to say, this book was out of print for many years until in the late 60s interest in this kind of subject matter increased enormously.

My interest in it is connected to the plot of a novel I have been writing for some time, and I wish to continue my researches so that I can complete more of the novel.

I won't outline the way in which Alfred Watkins’ book is linked to the plot of my novel, but I have published the first four chapters of the novel, Sacred Places, in my collection of short stories, Mother And Child with other stories. This can be viewed free of charge online through the print on demand printer that I used, completelynovel.com.

The advertisement sent to me might seem at first glance as completely unrelated to this book.

It was for a selection of books in which the history of human curiosity is the common link.

In other words, books about freak shows and ways in which men have exhibited, in often lurid ways, people with unusual characteristics.

This is not a subject area that is of any interest to me, but one title in particular struck a chord.

It was a history of the showman that exhibited The Elephant Man, in London in the late 19th century.

But the strange connection that I have to this rather brought me up short.

About 10 years ago, when I was still working, long before I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I was the Director of an Arts Trust, and for a brief period we were given premises to use as a means of support starting.

It was an elderly lady that was one of the two people that gave us the use of the premises, in which we would be based for several years whilst we developed the Arts projects that were concerned with regenerating this East Coast holiday resort in the UK.

The strange coincidence was that this woman's grandfather had been that very showman that had exhibited The Elephant Man.

We are always fascinated with discovering the lineage of famous people, but of course if we examine our own family trees, we are bound to discover something of interest somewhere eventually. Or that of our friends.

What is extraordinary is simply that I should discover some personal connection with some potentially random choices made by a computer because of my choice of a particular book to purchase from Amazon.

Although perhaps I should not be so surprised, as if everything is as I suspect linked ultimately in some form, it is simply waiting for us to piece together the connections between otherwise seemingly random events.

Werewolves And Vampires Explained

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream.

Every night, I would go to bed dreading I would have my dream again.

I must have been only 9 or 10, and it was only suddenly sometime in my early 20s that I realized what had been happening.

Every night, out of love and care for me, my mother had been coming into my bedroom, and placing an extra blanket at the end of my bed, to keep my feet warm.

My recurring dream had been that every night, a wolf would creep into my bedroom, and lie at the end of my bed.

I would of course pretend to be asleep, and I suppose pretence must have led to sleep eventually. But I was terrified.

In my sudden realiztion, I recognized that what in fact my loving mother had been doing, without realizing its effect on me, had been to come into my bedroom with a blanket that she placed on the end of my bed.

As soon as I realized this had been the case, something lifted from me. I have never told my elderly mother what her love and care had been doing to me, it wouldn't be fair.

And somehow just the realization of the source of this nightmare has been a relief to me.

I have recently been reading Cities Of Dreams by Stan Gooch, a quite remarkable work in effect of anthropology.

Werewolves and Vampires do not figure at all in this book, but it is clear that the rituals followed by Neanderthal peoples may have included the drinking of human blood, and to some degree cannibalism.

And the worship of the Moon figured highly in their belief structures, and just this morning, I had one of those moments of realization just like the explanation of my childhood dream.

It seems likely that we have inherited, consciously or not, considerable understanding of the Neanderthal understanding of the world. It is likely in fact that there was a degree of absorption of Neanderthal genetic material, and perhaps something of the rituals that they will have developed over thousands of years.

It is a simple fact that when one species or culture supersedes another that almost all aspects of the superseded culture are rooted out, and at best frowned upon.

It is likely that the witch trials of the 15th and 16th centuries were in some way related to this rooting out of the old culture, and no doubt of an old sense in which a female goddess had been the focus of world understanding.

In some respects, it is perhaps easy to understand that the moon should have played a central role in the lives of primitive peoples, if only for example because of the fact that the 28 day cycle of the Moon from new to full moon mirrors the female menstrual cycle.

If in some Jungian sense any memory of the past 30 or 40,000 years have survived within us, perhaps it is a natural thing that the moon should be associated with feared creatures that perhaps in fact we competed with for food and shelter.

In an extraordinarily hostile environment, particularly during the last Ice Age.

It is perhaps highly significant that werewolves change with the full Moon, and vampires - within many cultures - exist to prey upon humans and are particularly feared at night.

This would be just when a moon-centred ritual culture would be most active, and I suddenly thought this morning, that perhaps these things are connected. at a deeply psychological level.

It doesn't make Werewolves or Vampires any more real, simply that their strong presence in our modern consciousness perhaps has deeper roots than we realize.

Stan Gooch died only recently at the age of 95, and he never received the kind of honor for his work which I believe he deserved.

It isn't difficult to discover on the Internet how well thought of it he was by many people that recognized that his life's work, although counter to the prevailing theories about human development, may well have a resonance that will continue for many generations.

Cities Of Dreams is well worth reading, whatever your personal perceptions of human history might be.

Snottites & Archea - The Search For ET

For someone that dislikes television intensely, I occasionally catch something interesting in a programme, usually BBC's iplayer so that I don't watch television in the way that I used to, mainly as a child.

There was a recent series about the wonders of the solar system, and the episode that has most intrigued me has been entitled aliens.

It looks at the possibilities of life on other planets, and looks at the philosophical implications of the answer, in that if we were to find that we are not alone, or indeed that it is likely that we are entirely alone because of the extraordinary circumstances that have enabled life to evolve to such complicated forms as ourselves.

It has been fascinating to see how an examination of the most extreme environments on this planet seems to have been most helpful in identifying the most likely possibilities within our own solar system.

It seems that life can be found in the most extraordinary locations, and perhaps most interestingly, deep in a glacier frozen for thousands of years, bacteria have been found living in tiny particles of water that have been defrosted by the way in which the bacteria have evolved means of secreting what amounts to antifreeze.

This makes it likely, or is a good indication, that one of Jupiter's moons Europa, might sustain life of some kind.

Although it seems likely that if life exists elsewhere, it will be microbial and more likely to be on a bacterial scale.

It is the extraordinary coincidence of factors that have enabled life on Earth to evolve in complexity over millions of years that seems to be the most important reason for our existence.

Europa is a frozen world, but beneath its surface, it seems to be likely there is liquid water, and on the surface there are observable colored markings which may be evidence of bacterial staining.

The organisms I have mentioned in the title of this posting are real, and the second exists in a most extreme environment where it metabolises sulphur dioxide, and excretes sulphuric acid. With a pH level equivalent to battery acid.

But it seems that we have discovered features on Mars that indicate erosion historically by large quantities of water, as well as discovering gypsum, the chemical composition of which seems likely to have required long periods in which standing water may have existed on that planet.

Gypsum contains calcium, and I can't help but imagine that this must have come from the primitive skeletal systems of small living creatures.

What a fascinating programme, genuinely looking at something with which mankind has been obsessively interested in for much of the 20th century and beyond, perhaps as long as we have been possessed of self-consciousness.

Afternoon Tea With Professor Langdon

I think perhaps I may have discovered something the other day.

Nothing of any value, and of no academic significance whatsoever.

I believe I must share some of my interests with the author Dan Brown, and I think the other day I may have stumbled upon the reason why his hero in The Da Vinci Code is called Langton.

I may of course be wrong, but as a writer myself, clearly of a different level of success as Dan Brown, I can't help but think I may have some access to the way in which a writer's imagination may work, when it comes to the choice of important things like names.

What's in a name? And the answer of course is absolutely nothing, except that in fiction, a character's name must just feel right.

Just think for a moment about anything you may have read recently, and the chances are that the names of the characters in any story just feel right for that character.

And so my discovery may simply illuminate the fact that I have been treading a similar pathway in my researches.

I have recently been reading a little known book by an author that sadly died over the last few years.

Aged 95, he certainly deserved to have more success from his writing than appears to be the case.

He was by training a psychologist, a profession which he left quite consciously, even though it may well have provided a more lucrative career than the one that he followed.

The book that I was reading is entitled Cities Of Dreams, and it is a fascinating work which I suspect might have been read by Dan Brown at some point, since it would have provided some very useful research for his genre of fiction.

In simple terms, it is a book that explores the ways in which so much of the knowledge that we accept as Orthodoxy may well have been quite mistakenly be deemed so, and he puts forward some rather interesting ideas that encourage us to rethink so many of the things that we take far granted.

Published originally in 1989, one of the most controversial ideas that he explores is that we have been quite significantly affected by the way in which Neanderthal culture, quite different to the culture of Cro-Magnon man, provided a startlingly different perception of the world.

Principle to this is the idea that they were far more interested in the Moon as a sacred symbol than Cro-Magnon man.

In some respects, this chimes quite neatly with the title of the book purported to have been written by Professor Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, The Sacred Feminine.

Just as a for instance, it is well known that the 28 day cycle of the Moon from new moon to full moon is exactly in general terms the length of the menstrual cycle for the majority of women.

The author of the book, Stan Gooch, provides some compelling evidence for his theories, and most recently, in chapter 6, he has mentioned a rather interesting book title, The Myths Of All Races. By S.R. Langdon.

I can't help but feel that this particular author may have been used as the namesake of the Professor of Symbology in Dan Brown's books, it almost seems too good not to be true.

The kind of material this book contains seems to be just the kind of research that Prof Langdon himself might have undertaken, and where it has been quoted in Cities Of Dreams, it would be quite believable for the author of this work of anthropology, to be the same character as figures in several of Dan Brown's output.

Stan Gooch has written a fascinating book, which challenges so many of the things that we absolutely accept as the basis for our common cultural heritage as human beings.

It is from this book that I have begun to suspect that I myself may indeed exhibit some of the traits that may demonstrate the truth of the idea that we do indeed share genetic material with this subspecies of Homo Sapiens.

I was quite surprised recently to hear in an episode of QI on BBC one, that it is generally accepted these days that we do indeed share some of our genetic makeup with Neanderthal genes. Just a few years ago, I seem to recall that this was not accepted, something which Stan Gooch proposed way back in 1989.

The Internet provides some very interesting reading about the life of Stan Gooch, and he certainly seems to have had a significant following of people concerned for his welfare, especially in his later years.

It seems he never made much money from his somewhat unorthodox views as to the origins of mankind, and the role we may have played in the destruction of the culture of a subspecies of humanity that we may well have considered subordinate in intelligence to ourselves.

But the title of his book, Cities Of Dreams, says a great deal about the nature of his views, he proposed that rather than a material culture such as the one we have created, Neanderthal culture existed in the realm of thought and ritual, nevertheless rich albeit vastly different from that which we accept as the norm.

I will continue to read my copy of Cities Of Dreams, hoping to discover more of what Dan Brown has so carefully crafted into something spectacularly unorthodox and yet compelling. Much of which may contain grains of truth.

Although I suspect that not so many of the injected conspiracy theories that powerfully provide plots for the books and the resulting movies, as an insight into the subtleties of what makes us human. And how we have seen ourselves over the course of thousands of years of history and pre-history.

Climate Change Hits Our Street

The Day After Tomorrow was a brilliant Hollywood box office success, and perhaps dramatised something that we have all been in denial about over the past several years.

But behind the sensational drama of a disaster movie lies a bedrock of unpalatable truths, which are this month beginning to be talked about at last.

In its simplest terms, our climate is changing. On the one hand, this shouldn't be something we panic about, because the truth is that it is constantly changing.

Perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this is the fact that in 1814, the River Thames in London froze, and the last recorded Frost Fair was held on the River.

In other words, it froze sufficiently for hundreds of people to be able to set up stalls actually on the River, and for citizens to skate and play on one of the busiest waterways in the country. Frozen solid.

Historically, there is apparently an approximate 300 year cycle of significant changes in the European climate, which no doubt exists in the context of larger cycles, perhaps spanning across thousands of years, trekking back to the last Ice Age.

No doubt we will all be familiar with the notion that Northern Europe was covered in an ice sheet, that was large enough, deep enough, and strong enough, to have transformed the geography of our country, with glaciers slowly eroding entire mountain ranges, and leaving after their thaw erratic rocks pushed hundreds of miles from their source.

Within living memory, it is possible to discern sometimes subtle and sometimes less subtle changes that have taken place.

When I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border in a small town, my 80-year-old neighbor could remember when the river that was just 100 metres from our house, would flood and create regular streams that would cross the street.

This was transformed when sluices were introduced to this small river in 1932, making the river, where we lived 20 miles inland, no longer navigable to the sea.

This emphasizes a simple rule, that if you make one change in a river system, perhaps to stop water from regularly interrupting the lives of local inhabitants, there will be consequences. In this case, the (benign) consequence (perhaps?) that shallow bottomed boats could no longer travel from the end of our street as far as Great Yarmouth, and from there, to Holland and the Baltic. Both of which were sources for the building materials from which our 17th-century house had been constructed.

Our neighbor could remember the installation of those sluices, and the changes that came about because of them.

For most of us, local memories take account of much shorter periods of time.

Last week, our street flooded, quite simply because the drainage system couldn't quite cope with the amount of rainfall.

It shouldn't have been as much of a surprise as it was, as the last time it happened was about five years ago. And
there is a substantial hint in that most of the houses in this part of the road, constructed in the 1920s and 30s, have a step at the front gate, over which you gain access to your front garden.

It is only a small step, just over the height of a brick, and in fact those houses which have retained this small step, and not opened their front garden for the parking of a car, were protected from floodwater which didn't fortunately get much deeper than a few inches.

Enough for my immediate neighbor to have to have to resort to using grow-bags as a defence against the ingress of water.

Since we have only recently closed the street to traffic so that children could play in the street on the Jubilee weekend, many neighbors have been introduced to each other, and with the extraordinary circumstances of a local flood, neighbors were out helping each other to cope with this local emergency.

Most notably, much forking of drains took place to encourage water to go where we have taken for granted it should go, but perhaps we have forgotten that it was only over the past several years that our local borough council have regularly banked up the shingle on the beach, just two streets away from where we live on the south coast of England, so that we are less affected by tides.

When I first arrived in Worthing, and I still walked my dog in my electric wheelchair, I remember one morning coming upon a young man surveying on the beach, and I asked him what he was doing.

To my surprise, using satellite technology, he said he was checking the alignment of the pebbles on the beach, and I suppose this would have been a precursor to further banking of pebbles as required.

It was one of my carers that recently pointed out to me that regular tidal flooding used to take place, and I suppose the way in which drains have been laid over the years, has reflected the need to accommodate this factor.

Most of this part of West Worthing was developed in the early part of this century, which perhaps means that services like drains have been laid out using modern methods of town planning. One hopes.

We haven't had much of a Summer in Britain this year yet, and for the first time this morning, in the middle of July, I have heard a weather forecaster from the BBC say that it is likely that our climate may well change over the next 20 years, so that we have more extreme weather.

The simple fact is that we don't take bad news easily, and the idea that we might have to get used to more extreme weather conditions, perhaps increasing periods of heavy rainfall, won't make anybody's day more cheerful.

And so I expect it may be some time before we see the carefully crafted analysis programmes about what we might expect from the weather.

Ever since the weather forecaster David Fish failed spectacularly to predict the enormous storm that destroyed thousands of trees and devastated woodland around the UK, as well as in France (which of course is much more forested than England).

No one will want to stick their neck out and get it wrong, and certainly politicians will not want to recognize that we may have to change how much we spend on planning for a more sustainable environment, within which we can live without having to rebuild our homes more often than we can afford.

Let's face it, the climate is changing, has always changed in any case, and we mustn't just take for granted all of those things that we think are fixed and immutable.

They simply aren't.

Perhaps I'm Glad I Didn't Go To Cambridge After All....

I went to a good school. No doubting that. Of course, it wasn't a public school, just a decent local grammar school.

But then, there are some very decent local grammar schools to go to.

My parents moved to Bournemouth because my mother had always harbored the dream of setting up as a seaside landlady. And running the kind of bed and breakfast establishment that she would want to stay at.

The choice of Bournemouth came about because my aunt Jane had worked most of her life as a chambermaid in seaside hotels, and I suppose Bournemouth was therefore top of my mother's list, because her sister was working and living there.

We moved when I was 11, at Christmas during my second year at senior school. In some respects, it was a shame that I had left the school I had only been attending for one term, in Stratford, East London.

Before that, I had been allowed to follow most of my primary class into the new Comprehensive school that had just opened close to where we lived.

If I am honest, I was a bright kid, and this school didn't really suit me. After a year, in which I didn't progress much, my mother had me moved to a school much further away, but much better. In that one term, and earned much more than I had in the entire previous year.

But we moved to Bournemouth, and the first impulse for the local Borough Council was to place me in the nearest local Comprehensive.

But Bournemouth still had its grammar school system, and though I had missed my 11+ examination, which might have enabled me to be selected for this school, my mother insisted, and I was duly individually examined at the school to see whether I would be a suitable entrant.

Needless to say, I was immediately selected as suitable. Initially, I was placed in the lowest of three streams, but within weeks I was promoted to the highest stream.

Bournemouth is not the kind of place from which many interesting and successful people have come from. The only two that I was previously unaware of was Tony Blackburn and Benny Hill. Benny Hill actually attended the school that I found myself attending. He had been evacuated to it from where he had been living in Southampton, which of course as an important port, had been subject to intensive bombing during the Second World War.

But then, I recently discovered that a previous interesting person that had attended the school was Anthony Blunt. Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, and Knighted for his services, until he was stripped of his Honours when it was revealed that he was in fact a Soviet spy. In fact, the fourth man, along with Philby and Maclean, and Guy Burgess.

All of them had attended Cambridge, which had been a famous recruiting ground for Soviet spies during the Cold War.

Although in his biography, Blunt attended Marlborough School in Wiltshire, he had previously attended Bournemouth School, which no doubt had provided a useful preparation for attending one of this country's leading public schools.

He was the son of a Bournemouth Vicar, who was awarded the prestigious placement as the Church of England Vicar to the Paris Embassy, and his family moved to Paris in about 1910. Where he developed his love of paintings by numerous visits to the Louvre.

His parents were not of grand backgrounds, although when his father remarried, he had married a third cousin to the Queen Mother, and in fact would therefore have been a regular visitor to the house from which our present Queen travelled to Westminster abbey for her Coronation.

This would have been long before it would have been expected for the young Elizabeth to have become Queen of England, but it would certainly have made him quite an asset to the Soviet secret service.

It was only in 1979 that he was stripped of his Honours, as he was unmasked as the spy that he had been.

And he went to my school.

Needless to say, not a great deal was made of this fact when I was there, and in fact 1979 was the year that I left, to go to university.

I was never entered for the Oxbridge examinations, perhaps because of my class. I was a bright pupil, and gained a significant number of good GCE examination grades.

And in fact went on to study at UCL in Gower Street, one of the Russell group of Universities, and generally acknowledged to be the next best thing to Oxford and Cambridge.

And perhaps since I am not homosexual, I may not have been of interest to those Dons that seem to have been the major source of recruitment to the ranks of spies.

Whatever the case, it is an interesting reflection, that I went to the same school that Anthony Blunt went to. Before he went to the more prestigious Marlborogh College.

Which ironically was just a few miles from where my sister has lived for the past 20 years or so, and so a place that I have passed so many times when visiting, especially after my mother moved to be close to her.

Strangely a good friend and neighbour of mine did attend the College, perhaps because his father was a civil servant, and it would have been expected of him.

He did not think much of his education, and then I suppose you will either make something of school or not, whatever the circumstances.

I was good at school, and enjoyed learning. I would probably have been happy anywhere, that stretched me in the way that Bournemouth School did, for which I am very grateful.

At least, Anthony Blunt adds something more interesting than Tony Blackburn and Benny Hill provide.

History Is All Around Us

I suppose I have been a professional event organiser for most of my working life, using the resources of an Opera Company and later a Chamber Orchestra as the excuse for events which had some meaning for potential audiences for both kinds of organization.

But strangely, perhaps the most interesting event I have ever organiz ed was one of the easiest. Suddenly today I thought of it, and how appropriate it would be to write about it, since I have been writing recently about some of the street closures in which I was involved when I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border.

In the historic street where we lived, and in which we were restoring a 17th-century house, we got to know almost all of our neighbors thanks to the way in which we closed the street to traffic, out of which came so much by way of good things from getting to know our neighbors.

On one of our first street closures, it was Easter and we organized quite a range of Easter type activities for children, such as rolling eggs down a gentle slope in the road.

But we did organize one or two events which were perhaps of more interest to adults, and one in particular appealed to everybody of all ages.

The gardens of our houses in the street must have had early origins, perhaps as far back as mediaeval times. In other words, they weren't straightforward square or oblong portions of land, but far more irregular in shape.

This meant that in our back garden our next door neighbor was in fact someone that lived three houses down the street, an elderly gentleman who had we learned bought his house, with several outbuildings, from the estate of the Rider Haggard's, in about 1945 and when he returned from his war service.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the important Victorian author, lived on the outskirts of this small town, in a rather grand house that was famous for being haunted.

I don't know anything of the truth of this, but stories did circulate concerning the apartments into which the large house had been converted when the estate was sold. Whether this was at the time that our neighbor purchased his portion I do not know, but there was something of romance in the idea that he had purchased something of history at a time when no doubt much was dissipated after the war.

This elderly gentleman's land had once been the site of the town slaughterhouse, which had apparently doubled as the place to which sick animals were taken for treatment, in other words, a vets in modern parlance.

There were several buildings on this site, which over the years had become filled with numerous items of historical significance locally, perhaps simply because they had taken the fancy of the elderly gentleman, and in effect the substantial yard soon filled with sufficient items to be of interest to local builders, and so it became a kind of architectural salvage yard, as well as a place where old things were brought perhaps simply to get rid of them.

The elderly gentleman himself lived in a house that fronted onto the street, the ground floor of which had been once upon a time a butcher's shop. You could see through the windows of this shop the white tiled nature of the building, but it was never open as a shop, although it became filled with the smaller items of historical interest, such as might be available for sale in an antique or junk shop.

It was never open as a shop, although many people would stop to look at what was displayed haphazardly inside.

The elderly gentlemen would never sell what he kept in the shop, but he did give things away to those people that he liked.

My best friend was one such person, and the elderly gentleman would deliver home-grown vegetables and leave them outside our back door, often in small bowls or containers from the contents of the shop.

Occasionally, he would leave flowers grown in his gardens, placed in a glass vase which had also found its way into his strange curiosity shop.

Similarly, in his yard over the years had accumulated numerous objects the use or purpose of which had perhaps been forgotten.

Along one wall of the yard the elderly gentleman had quite without thought placed many of these mainly metal items, and I suppose it was from this that the idea arose for something that would entertain people of all ages during one of our street closures.

Quite simply, we placed around 20 numbered tags to various items, and the game was entitled something like name this object, or describe what it was used for.

In other words, we simply fixed a time when people should gather in this yard, and armed with a sheet of paper, the object was to be able to name or describe the use of a range of objects. Many of which we guessed had some kind of old agricultural purpose, given the nature of the town in which we all lived.

We depended upon the long memory of the elderly gentleman to furnish us with either a name or at least a description of what the object had been used for, and that was it.

I myself took photographs of the event as it took place, and 30 or 40 people pondered over the mysteries of these bygones.

It was a fascinating journey into the past, and we came up with some kind of serious of prizes donated by neighbors for the first second and third best attempts at fulfilling the task.

It was astonishing at how absorbed people became in what was after all a rather difficult task to accomplish, but often whole families would make an attempt to answer what the object had been used for, or indeed what it had been called.

I can still remember the way in which everyone listened with great attention to hear the elderly gentleman describe how the objects had been used, and in many cases what they were called.

It was as if history were unravelled before us, and a glimpse at a life past were revealed.

It was a simple pleasure, but one experienced by all that took part.

I don't think anyone got above 15 or 16 items classified, but it wasn't simply winning that was important.

As they say, it was simply taking part that meant the most. And everyone gained from the experience.

Slower Traffic And A Stronger Community

I spoke with friends recently that still live in the street where once I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. In the six or seven years since I moved away, much has changed.

Apparently the street has become the place to live in this picturesque town in the Waveney Valley.

To be fair, when I still lived there it was a beautiful place to live, one of the oldest streets in the oldest part of a town that has a history tracing back at least 1000 years.

Although much of the street was destroyed by fire in 1688, many of the houses contain elements that predate the fire, and in fact one or two houses managed to survive.

One in particular has been lived in recently by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. It is recorded that this particular house survived by virtue of the quick action on the part of the then owner, who prevented its destruction by fire with the use of copious quantities of water soaked blankets spread on the thatch of the roof.

The house in which I lived was a rare survival in itself, because it had been abandoned and then squatted so that it had been unrestored during those years when most inappropriate restoration of old houses took place.

Part of a neighbour's house in the street contained one room that dated from the 15th century, but survivals like this are rare.

It isn't the first time that on leaving somewhere it has become more fashionable to live. Just after I left Leeds, in West Yorkshire, where I had lived for 10 years, the City became much more fashionable to live than when I had lived there. I don't take it personally.

My friends recommended that I have a look at the Street using Google Earth, which I have done. This makes it possible for me to see the way in which the Street has become so much more colourful as the houses have been restored so much more than when I lived there.

Most of the houses have been painted in bright colours, but nevertheless in sympathy with the historic nature of them.

One of the other things that I noticed was the way in which the street has been filled with traffic markings, that are no doubt intended to slow traffic in this historic street.

In my time the street underwent the dramatic transformation from being a narrow two way street to one in which the traffic was reduced in speed to 20 mph, and made one-way.

There was much lobbying to encourage this change, and much measurement of pavement width. In places, this was less than 1m in width, which is barely sufficient for a mother to push a pushchair containing a toddler.

This no doubt aided the case for slowing the traffic in the street, as it is apparently a European regulation that pavement width could be a minimum of 1m.

Seen from the air, the street today bears many more street markings than I remember, which I can only assume are designed to ensure that drivers fully appreciate they are in a special zoned area.

And all of this seen from my computer. Not even leaving the house.

In the five years that I lived in the street, restoring the 17th-century house in which I lived, we held a number of events designed in part to highlight the problem of traffic flow in the street.

We held at least one street closure each year, during which at our own expense street signs were erected and traffic redirected as to ways in which the town bypass could still be reached.

During such closures, we held numerous events which brought neighbours out to meet neighbours, often to participate in celebratory events, such as a theatre performance, and at Halloween something that has become an annual fixture for the town, and taken up by the local Tourism Committee, as a means of promoting the uniqueness of the town.

A local farmer that each year produces pumpkins for Halloween has become involved in regularly providing sufficient pumpkins so that the entire street can have a pumpkin outside each house, with candles lighted inside, and it is a wonder to see traffic slowed down to appreciate the spectacle of an entire street dressed for this special occasion.

My friends still living in the street have become the key organisers of this event, for which the pumpkins are provided free by the local farmer.

In more recent years, the Street has been closed to traffic for Halloween, making it a much safer place for children to play Trick or Treat. People from miles around have descended upon the town to take part in what has in effect become an annual Festival.

One of my friends in the street has become a Councillor serving for the past six years, and increasingly the local Tourism Committee have taken on board the significance of this locally inspired event as a means of promoting the town.

The town in question is Bungay in Suffolk, and a quick search on Google will enable anyone to see photographs of the street decorated for Halloween. Not however in this year, 2012.

I have been amazed at the way in which things have grown like Topsy since I have left, but I still have wonderful memories of the way in which neighbours got to know most of their neighbours.

There are few places in Britain that can claim the same, that just about everybody knows everybody else.

Would that it were the case everywhere, not in some memory of of "how things used to be", but here and now, and how things are, or can be.