Being scared would be welcome

Posted on 21st May 2019 by Ian

Scary music was the topic suggested for a listeners’ response on BBC Radio 6 at 6.30 this morning. One listener spoke for many when saying there was no music more scary during childhood than the theme music of Doctor Who.

It was certainly music that frightened me. We had only two channels on our black and white VHF television set and I hated Doctor Who with its daleks and cybermen. I hated stories of “flying saucers”. I once spent an evening on my grandad’s farm avoiding a television version of War of the Worlds. As the years have passed, the aliens have become an increasingly attractive option. If they have arrived here, their technology and knowledge is infinitely in advance of ours, and surely they would be more inspiring than the rulers of our world?

The Drake Equation calculates the possibility of an imminent arrival of aliens. If they arrived in Somerset, it would presumably be a case of landing their ship on Glastonbury Tor. The Drake Equation is the mathematical calculation devised by Dr Frank Drake to estimate the likelihood of there being someone out there. For someone whose mathematics knowledge did not extend beyond that required to pass the Certificate in Secondary Education, the Drake Equation is almost comprehensible. The Drake equation is:

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible

and

R* = the average number of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

It is an equation that would have terrified me as a child because it suggests that there is a likelihood of  other civilisations in our galaxy. Of course, the problem is that our civilisation is likely to end before the flying saucers can reach us. What a depressing conclusion. Is there not a single extra-terrestrial out there who save us from our incompetent governments? Scary music would be welcome.

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Wet Monday endurance

Posted on 19th May 2019 by Ian

Somerset County Cricket Club play in the one day cricket cup final next Saturday at Lord’s. It is good that they have retained their proper county name instead of adding words that have nothing to do with cricket. Somerset have never won the county championship, the premier prize of county cricket. There have been times when they came very close, losing out in the last minutes of the last day of the competition in 2010 and 2016 (losing only by a statistical quirk in 2010), but the title has eluded them for more than one hundred and forty years. The team forty years ago was particularly strong, losing two one day competitions in a final single weekend in 1978, before winning the respective competitions in a final weekend of the season the following year. Three more one day competition titles were to follow in the next four seasons, and one day titles in 2001 and 2005, but the county championship was always beyond them. A commentator on their prospects for the 1981 season said they lacked the consistency to win matches on “wet Mondays in Chesterfield.”

Chesterfield is a very fine town and a fine place to be, even on a wet Monday, but the image has remained of a cricket team trying to grind out a result on a pitch that is greasy, with a ball that is slippery, in humid conditions, under grey clouds, with a handful of hardy spectators dotted around the stands. It is an image of gritty resolution and plodding forebearance.

The metaphor of “wet Mondays in Chesterfield” has often been useful in getting through daily work. Flamboyance, beauty, and significance are rare commodities, life is mostly  unremarkable, like the Monday of a county championship match.

There is heavy cloud cover this evening, a deep slate grey colour fills the sky towards Yeovil. The light has faded early, it is dark enough to stop play at a cricket match. If the umpires took the players off now, there would be no resumption of play today

Like Somerset on their “wet Mondays in Chesterfield,” there are probably more defeats or draws in ordinary daily life than there are triumphs, but the game is still played because, one day, the elusive might be reached; perhaps, one day, the long awaited victory might be achieved. Somerset will hopefully triumph on Saturday and go on to win a first county championship at the end of the summer – and the mental picture of wet Mondays in Chesterfield will remain as a reminder that the game is there to be won.

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Driving to hoe

Posted on 16th May 2019 by Ian

Don would drive the Land Rover with one of the old hands beside him in the front. The rest of us sat in the back, on the bench seats that ran down either side. The journey  was made from a nursery in Langport in order to work on fourteen acres of land used for growing herbaceous plants.  An schoolboy who knew nothing about plants would not have been entrusted with anything responsible, instead the rows of plants had to be hoed. A tractor was used for clearing weeds between the rows, those growing between the individual plants had to be cleared by hand; the hoe would cause blisters on the palms of the hand that would eventually harden into calluses. It was tiring and boring work, the only consolation was that the journey to and from the land was made in working hours. A slow journey there and a slow journey back could take an hour off the eight hour working day which began each morning at 7.45 and finished each afternoon at 5.00, no-one was paid for taking breaks.

Only years later did it occur to ask the question as to why did the nursery grew plants on land that was so distant from its premises. The best suggestion was that the soil was different, that plants which did not thrive at the main nursery might grow well in the soil of the fourteen acres at South Petherton. Perhaps they might: nursery plants were unpredictable species. Sometimes they might not grow as  people had expected, or sometimes they might not grow at all.

Irritated customers sometimes arrived at the nursery with a complaint, intent upon imparting a piece of their mind to the nurseryman responsible for the fact that their plants had not thrived. Standing in the packing shed one afternoon, Don, the foreman, spied a woman crossing the yard from the office, a determined look on her face. “Here comes trouble”, he muttered.

The woman opened the door, “I want to speak to the foreman. I was told I would find him here.”

Without flinching, he said. “I’m terribly sorry, madam, he’s not available this afternoon. May I give him a message?”

Don particularly enjoyed the opportunities to be in South Petherton, where no-one could find him. Although this week he would have been busy in the sheds, preparing plants for the annual trip to Chelsea, where old Land Rovers would have been a rare sight.

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A cider house in the family

Posted on 14th May 2019 by Ian

One Sunday morning in the spring of 2012, I stood in a church watching people arrive for service. A parishioner who attended every week came into the church and I realised that I could not remember the name of someone to whom I had spoken countless times.

It was an experience so disturbing that I made an appointment to see the doctor. He listened to my story and then said, “what age are you?”

“Fifty-one,” I replied.

“Do you not think that is the reason why you are forgetting things? It’s what happens. As we get older, our powers of memory decline.”

It wasn’t very reassuring advice, but seemed a satisfactory explanation for the number memory blips I had suffered.

Seven years on, and the capacity to forget is as strong as ever, unlike my mother, who has a prodigious memory.

The death of one of her cousins brought a searching of family photo albums for pictures of the man, who had been a farmer at the foot of the Polden Hills. Having many memories of his sister, I wasn’t aware of ever having met him. He had been reclusive when he was young and had become more so when he was older. In recent years, he had gone into nursing care.

Never sure how each part of the family jigsaw fits together, I was not sure of the man’s roots. My mother explained that he had been her first cousin on one side and second cousin on the other, such was the habit of intermarriage in small rural communities.

The cousin’s maternal grandparents had lived at the end of the road on which we live. There had been few houses at the time, but the people who did live here formed a close community. Uncle Jack Cox had kept a cider house in the barn that adjoined his home (I assume he was called by his full name to distinguish him from the other Uncle Jacks in the family).

Cider houses were unlicensed drinking places, rough buildings in which friends and neighbours would gather for conversation and drink.  Perhaps they only lasted as long as the cider lasted, perhaps they were more permanent.

The cider house did not meet with the approval of Aunt Florrie, who drew a bucket of water one evening, stepped into the cider house, and threw the water over those assembled – including the local police constable who had stepped in for refreshment.

It was the first time I had ever heard the story. Perhaps being able to recount such tales is a skill built up over years of telling and re-telling. Lacking the capacity even to remember names, it is not one that I would find easy.

 

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Idle hands

Posted on 12th May 2019 by Ian

“The devil makes work for idle hands,” was one of the maxims that governed my life in childhood years. Not being a religious family, the devil was of little concern, but idle hands were a more serious matter. There was always a feeling of a need to be doing something, always a need to feel that times was being wisely spent. Perhaps it was logical, if time is the greatest gift in the universe, then to sit and do nothing is surely to waste it?

But might not the reverse be true? Perhaps time is wasted when every moment is filled with busyness, perhaps those who waste time are those who fill every hour of a diary and never stop to think. Perhaps there are conflicting views of the world. Perhaps, sometimes, the impetus to activity needs to to be counter-balanced with the a wish for time for reflection.

There is plenty I could be doing. An assignment is due at the end of the month and I haven’t started it yet. The lessons for tomorrow are prepared, but the rest of the week still needs preparation.

There is a blueness over the hills in the distance. Pilsdon Pen is said to be twenty-seven miles from here: to see that distance at an altitude of just 300 feet above sea level always seems impressive. Spring came early, and then stopped, and then started again; now there is abundant growth everywhere. There is still a chill in the air at night: a wisp of smoke rises from the chimney of one of the houses.

It is the wisp of smoke that recalls Alexander McCall-Smith’s character Precious Ramotswe. Living in Botswana, that greatest of all African countries, Mma Ramotswe laments the European wish to be always doing something:

There was a slight smell of wood-smoke in the air, a smell that tugged at her heart because it reminded her of mornings around the fire in Mochudi. She would go back there, she thought, when she had worked long enough to retire. She would buy a house, or build one perhaps, and ask some of her cousins to live with her. They would grow melons on the lands and might even buy a small shop in the village; and every morning she could sit in front of her house and sniff at the wood-smoke and look for­ward to spending the day talking with her friends. How sorry she felt for white people, who couldn’t do any of this, and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass? None, in her view; none at all, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realised how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion.

Had farming life here been as it was when I was a child, I might have sat here watching the cattle grazing, as it is, the sheep will suffice.

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