When I was young I asked myself the question, ‘why do people think differently?’ I realise this is not a question of great moment but it fascinated me because I saw people discuss passionately different sides of the same problems and I wondered how people drew different conclusions when faced with the same facts. Later…
Month: July 2011
Active Minds
This week some Breton musicians came to the village to entertain and a lot of work was done in the school with the children to make sure they had a fun evening. It made me think about the attraction of cities where culture dazzles and is on tap, as against villages like this where everything…
Those We Have Tortured
I have always liked Michael Palin, probably because he acts like one’s favourite uncle but also because of his hilarious take in the Python series about the Spanish Inquisition. And one has to laugh at the hideous and long lasting (nearly four hundred years) Catholic slaughter which burned people for not being good Christians and…
Help!
I have never had much time for modern popular music. I enjoy a little traditional Jazz, I think some of the twenties songs hilarious even when they are not supposed to be and I can see the allure of fifties rock and roll and the political strengths of the sixties but the comments and music…
The Highest Form Of Imitation
We are endlessly copying. From the hidden cave paintings to the attempts to perfect almost photographic images in oils human beings love to imitate what they see around them. The drive to copy infests science where study of plants and animals has given us new ways of dealing with the physics of living and new…
Sultry Summer Days
I remember in 1976 revising for my O’Levels during one of the hottest summers on record up to then, and I think it is still considered a very hot summer. Trying to work hard whilst sitting on the grass under trees is not probably the most obvious way to show you are being studious but…
Hobbies
When I was not quite a teenager a man came to our house to wallpaper the room and he either got ill, or something happened to him, because he left behind his trellis table. This immediately became my table and for a couple of years I happily made my Airfix models on it. I wasn’t…
When You’re Ready
This is, apparently, going to be a fascinating century. A century in which the challenges of our science will force our ideas about ourselves and how we build civil society to make such a radical change, it could be described as evolutionary. Where it will become impossible for someone to draw conclusions about the universe…