I don't know if it is the same for everybody, but Christmas to me is it time of great reflection.
As if the whole of my life flashes before me, and I suppose particularly all of my Christmas Days seem clear side-by-side, remembering where I was and what I was doing.
One of my most vivid memories of Christmas cannot be of Christmas Day itself, but concerns my traveling on Christmas eve from Paddington to the West Country, where I was spending Christmas with my family in Wiltshire.
I have a thing about trains, and have often said that I have done some of my most important thinking on trains. They just have that effect on me.
This particular Christmas I must have been in my late teens or perhaps just 20.
The train was not very full at all, and it was one of those slam-door trains, which were divided into separate compartments, so that you had a compartment of six or eight seats.
It was therefore much more comfortable and cosy than travel on modern trains, in the days when there was much more woodwork and the seats were far more comfortably upholstered.
I don't remember anything particular about the journey, the memory is really I suppose a nostalgic remembrance of a different time.
The days of compartments in trains were quite different to modern travel, and I think as this was close to the time when these kind of trains were being discontinued, this must have been an old first-class carriage, now sadly reduced to standard class travel. And I was the beneficiary of its comfort and sense of occasion.
In those days, you really felt as if you were traveling somewhere, and there would have been a restaurant car somewhere on the train.
I can only remember perhaps once or twice eating a meal on a train, as it was not something I could easily afford as a young man.
But I am glad that I do have that memory of a quality of service and environment, that is so alien to modern train travel in the UK.
Whenever a film uses older trains for some scenes, such as in the opening to Swallows And Amazons, and similarly to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe in the first Chronicle of Narnia, the sensation is one of magically being transported to another world.
Of course it is a world divorced from the reality of those times, so that of course the children are on the way to their destination somewhere similarly to myself in the West Country (at one point the station name is called that was my destination, Pewsey) they were of course in the process of evacuation from wartime London.
Circumstances far different from my experience in about 1980.
And my first ever published poem was inspired by a train journey, and indeed perhaps reveals something of the rhythmic fact of train travel. Perhaps one of the reasons why it has so stimulated my thoughts towards poetry.
This poem is called The Journey, and the line on which I was travelling is called the Tarka Line. It still exists today, and is so called because the author of Tarka The Otter, Henry Williamson, lived in this area and perhaps wrote his famous book Drawing upon the natural environment in which his character no doubt lived.
It travels between Exeter and Ilfracombe, and is certainly a beautiful journey even in modern times.
The author is known to me in another context, so that when I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border I lived in a small town called Bungay that was close to where Sir Henry Rider Haggard once lived, and his daughter, I believe, called Lilias Rider Haggard wrote for the local press and at one stage ghost-wrote the memoirs of her gamekeeper.
She had encouraged her friend Henry Williamson to move from where he farmed in Devon so that he began to farm in Norfolk.
His political views were somewhat dubious, and this was central to his belief that working on the land was essential for a healthy life. He began to write a regular article for the Anglian Times on country matters.
This would have been in the 1920s, and his friends’ gamekeeper would have been perhaps in his 80s, and therefore had memories of this area extending back to the middle of the 19th century.
They are a fascinating insight into rural life in those times, and of course the Rider-Haggard's were an important local family.
Our neighbor had purchased his house from the Haggard estate on his return from war service in 1945, and his house fronted onto the street which in the middle of the 19th century had been the commercial centre of this thriving market town.
Our street, Bridge Street, is mentioned in one of the volumes ghost written as the memoirs of this country person. Who sadly committed suicide in a house visible from one of our upstairs windows.
The house no longer existed, but someone that we knew lived in a new house built on the site.
The past as they say is all around, and you only have two listen to the stories of those around you to discover some of it.
Our elderly neighbor still had a large pottery urn containing irises that had come with his purchase, of what had once been the local vets combined with slaughterhouse.
Strange to think that those Irises may well have gazed upon the Rider-Haggards, all those years before.
The Journey
Across the bridge our carriage steals
percussion locks the grinding wheels.
my neighbor glances, nothing said
while both of us pursue the thread -
As if the drawing of a sword
was heard by every ear on board.
Bright metal from its scabbard drawn
and then - the braying of the horn.
A trick of light, and tired ears
join end to end a thousand years
of listening to remembered sound
sense deceiving, sinking, drowned
These dirty little diesel trains
are all that cross these old remains
of Devon's ancient forestry
Northward to the Celtic Sea
where underneath the ploughed up fields
lie broken swords and rusting shields
there waiting still with bloody wounds
sleep Saxon knights in earth cocoons.
Across the bridge the carriage steals
awakening, with grinding wheels
on iron rails through blood red earth -
red ochre for our second birth.
Monday 24 December 2012
Saturday 22 December 2012
Another Apocalypse Comes And Goes
Yesterday was the putative end of the world as far as the Mayan calendar was concerned.
Apparently, archaeologists have recently discovered evidence that quite simply what had been theorised as an end of the world scenario was simply a misinterpretation of the fact that their complex calendar had only been calculated to a specific date, and to the modern mind, this must have seemed to have been the end of all things.
Of course, I'm quite grateful for having survived yet another suggestion that the world might end. I'm not quite ready yet to cope with everything that might happen if everything we have come to take for granted should suddenly collapse.
Coincidentally, it seems, my own broadband connection seems to have failed at the moment, although the more likely explanation is that my carers disconnected it accidentally as they were tidying up the mass of cabling that surrounds my computer, conveniently placed on a table that can be slid across over my electric bed.
The bed that gives me as a disabled person so much more access to ordinary things, like water so that I can take my various medications.
For me it would be a disaster if I were to drop my bottle of water, and not be able to easily to take my pills at the regular intervals I take them during the night.
It seems a little quiet outside as the world wakes, but it seems that it is surely waking. The world has not come to a sticky end, as has been predicted so often across the centuries.
Which has of course provided Hollywood with an entire genre of film possibilities.
It was rather interesting to try to read into the programmers’ thinking as to the films shown last night on Film Four, as Knight And Day was being shown as the nine o'clock film, guaranteed to take your mind off a potential midnight calamity. And after that, as a kind of subtle joke perhaps, Final Destination.
I myself chose to watch my own favorite Hollywood apocalypse movie, Knowing. I did watch recently 2012, which was more specifically concerned with all of what we are aware of as potential calamitous occurrences happening simultaneously.
A friend that is equally interested in film as myself lent it to me to watch, just a few weeks ago. Playing up to the potential a film like this to raise blood pressure levels among the general population, I said that I might require some counseling after watching this film, and perhaps behind my joke there is something quite genuinely dangerous about our obsessiveness with potential disasters.
Because film has become such a real image of what might be happening in the world, with the development of such techniques as CGI, and I suspect we are not so easily able to distinguish the real from the imagined any more.
It might do all of us a great deal of good if we were to not watch any films or television for a short period every year, simply to allow ourselves perhaps to recognize the world around us as it is, with all of its drama and beauty.
Apparently, archaeologists have recently discovered evidence that quite simply what had been theorised as an end of the world scenario was simply a misinterpretation of the fact that their complex calendar had only been calculated to a specific date, and to the modern mind, this must have seemed to have been the end of all things.
Of course, I'm quite grateful for having survived yet another suggestion that the world might end. I'm not quite ready yet to cope with everything that might happen if everything we have come to take for granted should suddenly collapse.
Coincidentally, it seems, my own broadband connection seems to have failed at the moment, although the more likely explanation is that my carers disconnected it accidentally as they were tidying up the mass of cabling that surrounds my computer, conveniently placed on a table that can be slid across over my electric bed.
The bed that gives me as a disabled person so much more access to ordinary things, like water so that I can take my various medications.
For me it would be a disaster if I were to drop my bottle of water, and not be able to easily to take my pills at the regular intervals I take them during the night.
It seems a little quiet outside as the world wakes, but it seems that it is surely waking. The world has not come to a sticky end, as has been predicted so often across the centuries.
Which has of course provided Hollywood with an entire genre of film possibilities.
It was rather interesting to try to read into the programmers’ thinking as to the films shown last night on Film Four, as Knight And Day was being shown as the nine o'clock film, guaranteed to take your mind off a potential midnight calamity. And after that, as a kind of subtle joke perhaps, Final Destination.
I myself chose to watch my own favorite Hollywood apocalypse movie, Knowing. I did watch recently 2012, which was more specifically concerned with all of what we are aware of as potential calamitous occurrences happening simultaneously.
A friend that is equally interested in film as myself lent it to me to watch, just a few weeks ago. Playing up to the potential a film like this to raise blood pressure levels among the general population, I said that I might require some counseling after watching this film, and perhaps behind my joke there is something quite genuinely dangerous about our obsessiveness with potential disasters.
Because film has become such a real image of what might be happening in the world, with the development of such techniques as CGI, and I suspect we are not so easily able to distinguish the real from the imagined any more.
It might do all of us a great deal of good if we were to not watch any films or television for a short period every year, simply to allow ourselves perhaps to recognize the world around us as it is, with all of its drama and beauty.
Sunday 16 December 2012
Some Things Take Longer Than Others
It isn't every day that you finish something you started 20 years before.
But this week, hopefully just in time for Christmas, I have finished my first novel.
They say that everyone has a novel in them.
But I suspect whilst this may well be the case, not everybody will be able to have the luxury of the time it takes to write their novel.Or the obsession.
It was for me when I was around 30 years of age, single and without commitments, and therefore I was able to be selfish enough to devote the best part of a year of my life to writing the great majority of my first novel.
I never did quite complete it, although this week I have completed it. At least I think I have.
I have a friend that is doing me the honour of reading it and correcting it where necessary, and of course advising on where the sense of sentences can be improved.
I am rather well known for using 20 words when two will do, and often longer words than may be strictly necessary.
These are all of the kinds of things that are essential to enable someone to have the will to read a story that in my case has slight to about 110,000 words.
Perhaps a few less, unless of course my practised reader has any suggestions about additional chapters that might be necessary to complete this work.
And how the world has changed in those 20 years.
20 years ago computers were primitive to say the least, and mobile phones virtually non-existent.
My story does not need me to change the period in which it has been told in my manuscript, and does not require or would not benefit from the inclusion of an occasional mobile telephone.
And so it is preserved in its time capsule, written when I could devote two hours every morning to writing before I went to work full-time, and then spending an hour every evening correcting and often rewriting what I had written that morning.
And this six days a week for almost a year.
Before this project and certainly since I have written numerous short stories, and some not so short stories.
One particular story of mine I have written a 3000 word version of as one is the original which extends to nearly 15,000 words. Hardly a short story.
But completing my novel is certainly something that I feel is a significant event. Of course, it is a first novel, and I did not write it with the expectation of finding a publisher.
And indeed the entire world of publishing has transformed in the time that it has taken me to complete this work.
Now it is so much more straightforward to self publish, and there is so much less stigma associated with it. It is no longer considered to be simply vanity publishing.
And this year, I have almost christened the year of the Kindle, a totally new means by which books can be both published and consumed.
I have already published five volumes on my Kindle bookshelf, and I am hoping that if my editor/reader thinks it is worthwhile, I shall publish this one in the same way. With all proceeds heading for my chosen charity, the Queen Alexandra Hospital just across the road from where I lived in Worthing.
I don't think my next novel will take quite so long, I have an effect already started it, and in some respects this is the most difficult task of all, having a subject and then starting to write it.
This one, Bela, has been based on the PhD thesis of a friend from 20 years ago, who was studying as a mature student for a PhD in Art history.
It was a gift of an idea, and although I travelled substantially ostensibly to undertake research for it, a great deal has simply been invented as a context in which I can tell substantially the story of my friend's thesis.
A couple of times over the last 20 years I have considered that my story is a little worn out by the fact that so many other authors have written something similar, on an art history theme, but the great thing about the novel as a means of telling a story is that so much of it lies in the way in which the story emerges in the context of the individuals that are participants in the story.
And perhaps in some respects it is a different person, myself at just over 50 rather than just over 30, that is so much more able to understand important aspects of my characters and their motivations.
There it is, finally completed. And hopefully soon to be available on every computer with an Internet connection.
So please do consider checking out my Kindle bookshelf, and perhaps taking advantage of the fact that you can borrow it for 90 days free of charge from Amazon before considering purchasing it.
Amazon are offering something like the public lending right so that anyone whose book is borrowed from their Kindle library will get a share of a substantial sum that has been put aside for this purpose.
And you never know, perhaps proper publishers are keeping an eye on what is being published, so that they might see opportunities for new writing talent.
How the world has changed in just 20 years.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Stephen%20Page&search-alias=digital-text
But this week, hopefully just in time for Christmas, I have finished my first novel.
They say that everyone has a novel in them.
But I suspect whilst this may well be the case, not everybody will be able to have the luxury of the time it takes to write their novel.Or the obsession.
It was for me when I was around 30 years of age, single and without commitments, and therefore I was able to be selfish enough to devote the best part of a year of my life to writing the great majority of my first novel.
I never did quite complete it, although this week I have completed it. At least I think I have.
I have a friend that is doing me the honour of reading it and correcting it where necessary, and of course advising on where the sense of sentences can be improved.
I am rather well known for using 20 words when two will do, and often longer words than may be strictly necessary.
These are all of the kinds of things that are essential to enable someone to have the will to read a story that in my case has slight to about 110,000 words.
Perhaps a few less, unless of course my practised reader has any suggestions about additional chapters that might be necessary to complete this work.
And how the world has changed in those 20 years.
20 years ago computers were primitive to say the least, and mobile phones virtually non-existent.
My story does not need me to change the period in which it has been told in my manuscript, and does not require or would not benefit from the inclusion of an occasional mobile telephone.
And so it is preserved in its time capsule, written when I could devote two hours every morning to writing before I went to work full-time, and then spending an hour every evening correcting and often rewriting what I had written that morning.
And this six days a week for almost a year.
Before this project and certainly since I have written numerous short stories, and some not so short stories.
One particular story of mine I have written a 3000 word version of as one is the original which extends to nearly 15,000 words. Hardly a short story.
But completing my novel is certainly something that I feel is a significant event. Of course, it is a first novel, and I did not write it with the expectation of finding a publisher.
And indeed the entire world of publishing has transformed in the time that it has taken me to complete this work.
Now it is so much more straightforward to self publish, and there is so much less stigma associated with it. It is no longer considered to be simply vanity publishing.
And this year, I have almost christened the year of the Kindle, a totally new means by which books can be both published and consumed.
I have already published five volumes on my Kindle bookshelf, and I am hoping that if my editor/reader thinks it is worthwhile, I shall publish this one in the same way. With all proceeds heading for my chosen charity, the Queen Alexandra Hospital just across the road from where I lived in Worthing.
I don't think my next novel will take quite so long, I have an effect already started it, and in some respects this is the most difficult task of all, having a subject and then starting to write it.
This one, Bela, has been based on the PhD thesis of a friend from 20 years ago, who was studying as a mature student for a PhD in Art history.
It was a gift of an idea, and although I travelled substantially ostensibly to undertake research for it, a great deal has simply been invented as a context in which I can tell substantially the story of my friend's thesis.
A couple of times over the last 20 years I have considered that my story is a little worn out by the fact that so many other authors have written something similar, on an art history theme, but the great thing about the novel as a means of telling a story is that so much of it lies in the way in which the story emerges in the context of the individuals that are participants in the story.
And perhaps in some respects it is a different person, myself at just over 50 rather than just over 30, that is so much more able to understand important aspects of my characters and their motivations.
There it is, finally completed. And hopefully soon to be available on every computer with an Internet connection.
So please do consider checking out my Kindle bookshelf, and perhaps taking advantage of the fact that you can borrow it for 90 days free of charge from Amazon before considering purchasing it.
Amazon are offering something like the public lending right so that anyone whose book is borrowed from their Kindle library will get a share of a substantial sum that has been put aside for this purpose.
And you never know, perhaps proper publishers are keeping an eye on what is being published, so that they might see opportunities for new writing talent.
How the world has changed in just 20 years.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Stephen%20Page&search-alias=digital-text
Friday 7 December 2012
It's a long way before we get to Manhattan....
Quite extraordinary really that just yesterday £64 million of a potential lottery win went unclaimed and will now be spent on charitable causes.
How far we have come, although of course the government has been raising funds through a lottery since the 18th century.
One of my carers mused as to how she would have spent the money if it had been in her own bank account, and because of some of the discussions we have had recently in our Shower Chronicles, she confided that one of her dreams [just a dream] would be to build a particle accelerator.
This is clearly not a sensible proposal. When pressed, Charlie was much more likely to invest significant sums in social housing, the kind of housing for which there is a chronic shortage, certainly in this country and likely in every developed country.
But this interest in particle physics demonstrates the impact that our discussions whilst I have been having a shower have had.
Beginning to discuss the standard model for the structure of the nucleus of the atom seems naturally to lead to a discussion of nuclear fission.
I have always had a great fascination for the history of how this knowledge came about, and it has surfaced for me in my creative writing.
The final piece of a complex puzzle arrived in the form of one of Alastair Cooke’s Letters From America.
I had already discovered a great deal about the personalities that had been involved in contributing in some way to the discovery of the potential for splitting the atom.
America’s development of the first usable nuclear device, which so dramatically brought the second world war to a conclusion, goes back well before the commencement of the war, and is linked inextricably with the exodus from Europe of so many Jewish intellectuals.
Hungary in particular seems to have been central to so many of the personalities that have been directly involved as physicists in determining the structure of the atom, and then later the potential for fission.
Einstein himself had originally fled from Hungary in the wake of persecution. Initially to London, and then eventually to the United States.
The community of physicists engaged in this particular field of work probably all knew each other and of each other’s work.
Another Hungarian refugee called Leo Szilard had found his way to London in the early 1930s, and it is to him that the credit must be given for imagining the possibilities for the release of energy that would lead inexorably to the detonation of the first atomic device over Hiroshima in 1945.
It is recorded that he came to the conclusion of the potential for splitting the atom and releasing vast amounts of energy as he was walking along The Kingsway, a street in central London, and he was aware of the potential dangers if such knowledge were to be pursued, as it almost inevitably would, by scientists working for the Nazis.
Leo shared his thoughts with a colleague, also a refugee in London, and they both agreed that they must consult with the Old Man, which is how they referred to Einstein. They knew that coming from them, warnings about such potential horrors would mean nothing. They were, after all, simply refugees in England, and although working on research in physics with some of the finest minds at the time in England like Ernest Rutherford, they knew that what they perceived as a possibility must be expressed by someone of Einstein’s stature.
Leo was aware that although uranium is found in many places around the world, the only place in Europe where it was found in significant quantities was in Czechoslovakia.
Germany’s expansionist preoccupations focused on first Austria, and Czechoslovakia would soon follow.
Leo and his colleague knew that Einstein spent his summers in a holiday retreat in the states, and although they knew roughly where it was, they did not want simply to write to him, but to put their ideas and their concerns directly to him, and to see what he thought.
and so in 1938, they both traveled to the states to find the old man and lay their ideas before him in person.
They couldn’t find exactly where he was staying that first trip, but they returned the next year, early in 1939, and this time they did find him.
In his isolated summer retreat, Einstein agreed that what his countrymen and colleagues had to say was important, important enough for Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt. Which he did.
The consequence of that letter, signed also by Leo, was the setting up of what became known as the Manhattan Project, the scientists in which together developed those first devices that were used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
It was perhaps the fact that the Germans had stopped all exports of uranium after they had invaded Czechoslovakia that most concerned scientists that understood something of the potential for such elements.
There was no doubt that the Germans had many scientists capable of stumbling upon on what had already been discovered almost accidentally by one scientist, and if one person had spotted the potential for unleashing such prodigious amounts of energy, then sooner or later someone else would do so. That is the nature of science.
How far we have come, although of course the government has been raising funds through a lottery since the 18th century.
One of my carers mused as to how she would have spent the money if it had been in her own bank account, and because of some of the discussions we have had recently in our Shower Chronicles, she confided that one of her dreams [just a dream] would be to build a particle accelerator.
This is clearly not a sensible proposal. When pressed, Charlie was much more likely to invest significant sums in social housing, the kind of housing for which there is a chronic shortage, certainly in this country and likely in every developed country.
But this interest in particle physics demonstrates the impact that our discussions whilst I have been having a shower have had.
Beginning to discuss the standard model for the structure of the nucleus of the atom seems naturally to lead to a discussion of nuclear fission.
I have always had a great fascination for the history of how this knowledge came about, and it has surfaced for me in my creative writing.
The final piece of a complex puzzle arrived in the form of one of Alastair Cooke’s Letters From America.
I had already discovered a great deal about the personalities that had been involved in contributing in some way to the discovery of the potential for splitting the atom.
America’s development of the first usable nuclear device, which so dramatically brought the second world war to a conclusion, goes back well before the commencement of the war, and is linked inextricably with the exodus from Europe of so many Jewish intellectuals.
Hungary in particular seems to have been central to so many of the personalities that have been directly involved as physicists in determining the structure of the atom, and then later the potential for fission.
Einstein himself had originally fled from Hungary in the wake of persecution. Initially to London, and then eventually to the United States.
The community of physicists engaged in this particular field of work probably all knew each other and of each other’s work.
Another Hungarian refugee called Leo Szilard had found his way to London in the early 1930s, and it is to him that the credit must be given for imagining the possibilities for the release of energy that would lead inexorably to the detonation of the first atomic device over Hiroshima in 1945.
It is recorded that he came to the conclusion of the potential for splitting the atom and releasing vast amounts of energy as he was walking along The Kingsway, a street in central London, and he was aware of the potential dangers if such knowledge were to be pursued, as it almost inevitably would, by scientists working for the Nazis.
Leo shared his thoughts with a colleague, also a refugee in London, and they both agreed that they must consult with the Old Man, which is how they referred to Einstein. They knew that coming from them, warnings about such potential horrors would mean nothing. They were, after all, simply refugees in England, and although working on research in physics with some of the finest minds at the time in England like Ernest Rutherford, they knew that what they perceived as a possibility must be expressed by someone of Einstein’s stature.
Leo was aware that although uranium is found in many places around the world, the only place in Europe where it was found in significant quantities was in Czechoslovakia.
Germany’s expansionist preoccupations focused on first Austria, and Czechoslovakia would soon follow.
Leo and his colleague knew that Einstein spent his summers in a holiday retreat in the states, and although they knew roughly where it was, they did not want simply to write to him, but to put their ideas and their concerns directly to him, and to see what he thought.
and so in 1938, they both traveled to the states to find the old man and lay their ideas before him in person.
They couldn’t find exactly where he was staying that first trip, but they returned the next year, early in 1939, and this time they did find him.
In his isolated summer retreat, Einstein agreed that what his countrymen and colleagues had to say was important, important enough for Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt. Which he did.
The consequence of that letter, signed also by Leo, was the setting up of what became known as the Manhattan Project, the scientists in which together developed those first devices that were used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
It was perhaps the fact that the Germans had stopped all exports of uranium after they had invaded Czechoslovakia that most concerned scientists that understood something of the potential for such elements.
There was no doubt that the Germans had many scientists capable of stumbling upon on what had already been discovered almost accidentally by one scientist, and if one person had spotted the potential for unleashing such prodigious amounts of energy, then sooner or later someone else would do so. That is the nature of science.
Tuesday 4 December 2012
The Shower Chronicles
Over the past few weeks, an idea has been germinating in my mind, stimulated by the conversations that have taken place when I had been showered each day by one particular carer.
Most of you, certainly in the UK, will be familiar with an American television series entitled The Big Bang Theory.
This has probably done more to improve the general understanding among the population of some esoteric theories, particularly concerning particle physics and so on.
Although I am by no means familiar with many such theories, my training has been to have obtained a degree in philosophy, which has in itself introduced me to some extraordinary ideas.
Recently, this particular carer has expressed some interest in some of the ideas that she has been introduced to through The Big Bang Theory.
We have therefore begun a series of conscious discussions which we have entitled The Shower Chronicles, which I have decided to begin to write down an account of before I forget about them.
It is a sad fact of human discourse that it tends to be forgotten quite quickly unless it is written down.
There have been some memorable discussions already, and I enjoy hearing about the way in which the family responds to this new-found knowledge expressed in conversations after work.
This morning was an interesting case in point.
Whilst I was otherwise occupied, I suggested that my carer look up on the Internet the philosophers song from the Monty Python team.
This has provided much opportunity for discussion, and other subjects for research.
Such as the work of the philosopher Wittgenstein, whose name is one of those mentioned in the Monty Python sketch.
I am finding it interesting to revisit some of my studies from 30 years ago, and interesting conversations have resulted.
So for example Wittgenstein only published one book in his lifetime, from which I can only remember one item, when the philosopher states simply that when we come across something about which we cannot speak with certainty, we must remain silent.
This is an unusual case of somebody admitting boundaries to knowledge. And definitely something to store away for Smalltalk at dinner time.
We have also discussed some of the writings of Plato, who records conversations with his tutor Socrates. About whom nothing would be known if Plato had not recorded his Dialogues with Socrates, and thus given the reputation that Socrates has of being one of the worlds greatest ever philosophers.
I sometimes feel as if I am like Professor Higgins from the musical version of the play in which he places a bet with a friend that he can make a Duchess from a flower seller, with extraordinary consequences.
It is wonderful for me to have a reminder of my distant academic past, and an excuse to brush up on so many of the things I have already forgotten from those days.
It is never too late for self improvement, and a reminder of previous education achievements is never a bad thing.
As The Shower Chronicles progress, who knows that they might not make for an interesting series of essays about interesting subjects, explored under exceptional circumstances perhaps, whilst I am simply undertaking my morning ablutions.
It is perhaps yet another example that I have too much time to spend on nothing of consequence, but it certainly makes for a more interesting time in the shower.
And I await with interest the stories of how these extraordinary moments of conversation are received, often with surprising results.
Nothing like keeping one's family on their toes.
Most of you, certainly in the UK, will be familiar with an American television series entitled The Big Bang Theory.
This has probably done more to improve the general understanding among the population of some esoteric theories, particularly concerning particle physics and so on.
Although I am by no means familiar with many such theories, my training has been to have obtained a degree in philosophy, which has in itself introduced me to some extraordinary ideas.
Recently, this particular carer has expressed some interest in some of the ideas that she has been introduced to through The Big Bang Theory.
We have therefore begun a series of conscious discussions which we have entitled The Shower Chronicles, which I have decided to begin to write down an account of before I forget about them.
It is a sad fact of human discourse that it tends to be forgotten quite quickly unless it is written down.
There have been some memorable discussions already, and I enjoy hearing about the way in which the family responds to this new-found knowledge expressed in conversations after work.
This morning was an interesting case in point.
Whilst I was otherwise occupied, I suggested that my carer look up on the Internet the philosophers song from the Monty Python team.
This has provided much opportunity for discussion, and other subjects for research.
Such as the work of the philosopher Wittgenstein, whose name is one of those mentioned in the Monty Python sketch.
I am finding it interesting to revisit some of my studies from 30 years ago, and interesting conversations have resulted.
So for example Wittgenstein only published one book in his lifetime, from which I can only remember one item, when the philosopher states simply that when we come across something about which we cannot speak with certainty, we must remain silent.
This is an unusual case of somebody admitting boundaries to knowledge. And definitely something to store away for Smalltalk at dinner time.
We have also discussed some of the writings of Plato, who records conversations with his tutor Socrates. About whom nothing would be known if Plato had not recorded his Dialogues with Socrates, and thus given the reputation that Socrates has of being one of the worlds greatest ever philosophers.
I sometimes feel as if I am like Professor Higgins from the musical version of the play in which he places a bet with a friend that he can make a Duchess from a flower seller, with extraordinary consequences.
It is wonderful for me to have a reminder of my distant academic past, and an excuse to brush up on so many of the things I have already forgotten from those days.
It is never too late for self improvement, and a reminder of previous education achievements is never a bad thing.
As The Shower Chronicles progress, who knows that they might not make for an interesting series of essays about interesting subjects, explored under exceptional circumstances perhaps, whilst I am simply undertaking my morning ablutions.
It is perhaps yet another example that I have too much time to spend on nothing of consequence, but it certainly makes for a more interesting time in the shower.
And I await with interest the stories of how these extraordinary moments of conversation are received, often with surprising results.
Nothing like keeping one's family on their toes.
Saturday 1 December 2012
Sixty Years Studying The Natural World
There has been a very interesting series of documentaries celebrating the many years David Attenborough has spent exploring the Natural World.
In the time that he has been seen as a fixture in our understanding of Nature, much has changed in the perceptions we have of the Natural World.
In one of the programs, he talked about the work of a young student in Chicago, Stanley Miller, who in 1953 spent six months looking at a practical experiment that was designed to discover if the conditions supposed to have existed during the early years of the primitive Earth might have generated Life.
Suffice to say he created in the test tube many of the organic compounds considered necessary as the building blocks for Life itself.
Laser analysis in 1995 of his test results established that even more complex organic chemicals had been created in the circumstances of his experiment, and in more recent times, it has been shown that deep under the sea there are places where living organisms survive around the heat of volcanic vents which generate entire ecosystems, deep beneath the sea, that challenge our preconceptions of the way in which life can be established.
these experiments in no way provide any sense of certainty over the creation of life on Earth, and do not lessen the sense of wonder at the variety and complexity of it.
There are so many questions to answer about how fragile the conditions within which the Earth finds itself to have found a suitable crucible in which to fashion life, that a sense of wonder is still undiminished.
That the sun is clearly essential for life seems to be equally balanced with the fact that the solar winds might have stripped our atmosphere, if it was not for the magnetic fields generated because of the core.
We have much to be grateful for, and much still to discover. And no doubt much that must remain unknown to us.
In the time that he has been seen as a fixture in our understanding of Nature, much has changed in the perceptions we have of the Natural World.
In one of the programs, he talked about the work of a young student in Chicago, Stanley Miller, who in 1953 spent six months looking at a practical experiment that was designed to discover if the conditions supposed to have existed during the early years of the primitive Earth might have generated Life.
Suffice to say he created in the test tube many of the organic compounds considered necessary as the building blocks for Life itself.
Laser analysis in 1995 of his test results established that even more complex organic chemicals had been created in the circumstances of his experiment, and in more recent times, it has been shown that deep under the sea there are places where living organisms survive around the heat of volcanic vents which generate entire ecosystems, deep beneath the sea, that challenge our preconceptions of the way in which life can be established.
these experiments in no way provide any sense of certainty over the creation of life on Earth, and do not lessen the sense of wonder at the variety and complexity of it.
There are so many questions to answer about how fragile the conditions within which the Earth finds itself to have found a suitable crucible in which to fashion life, that a sense of wonder is still undiminished.
That the sun is clearly essential for life seems to be equally balanced with the fact that the solar winds might have stripped our atmosphere, if it was not for the magnetic fields generated because of the core.
We have much to be grateful for, and much still to discover. And no doubt much that must remain unknown to us.
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