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…
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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…
Extending Speach
A few years ago a British magazine ran a brief and unscientific survey. They took two teenage boys, one who had left school early and one who was studying to go to university and asked them what law they would enact if they had the power. They both, in different ways, replied they would rather…
Homesickness
Being homesick can not only be debilitating it can be so extreme as to lead to depression and suicide. Some people are so ill they cannot be travellers or if they are they cannot go anywhere for long. We tend to dismiss this as something to do with ‘feelings’ and many people having no such…
All Fair For Eden
During the age of exploration when Europeans were going out to ‘discover’ the world (one that others had discovered long since) one of the things they were looking for was the Garden of Eden. I am always reminded when the seasons come and go in the UK how much people wanted to find the Utopia…
Best Medicine?
During her menopause my mother took to reading more about vitamins and how the body works than she had done for many years, finding out that some of her symptoms were not just because of her condition but the increased sensitivity it gave her to food additives. It was a very instructive time and one…
Moths
Last night I caught a moth to put outside and until it flapped its wings I didn’t know for sure I was holding it. It is strange to have the sensation that I was holding something without feeling I was touching it. I know the senses have their limits and can be fooled but I…