Category Archives: books

books, environment, history, science

Coming up in February

Interesting events and anniversaries in the coming month.
1 February
Start of the last London Frost Fair, 1814 which lasted four days, during which time an elephant was led across the river below Blackfriars Bridge. This was the last frost fair because the climate was growing milder; old London Bridge was demolished in 1831 and replaced with a new bridge with wider arches, allowing the tide to flow more freely; and the river was embanked in stages during the 19th century, all of which made it less likely to freeze.


2 February
Candlemas. This is the Christian festival 40 days after Christmas of the presentation of Jesus at the temple. This day is also celebrated as Imbolc in the Wiccan/Pagan calendar (although some traditions celebrate on 1 February) in honour of Brigid, the goddess of fertility, fire and healing. It is also a time of increasing strength for the sun god and is Groundhog Day in the USA.
2 February
British Yorkshire Pudding Day. What better way to cheer up a miserable winter’s day than with Yorkshire Pudding? Read more here >>>>
10-16 February 2014
Go Green Week. The idea for Go Green Week is to encourage people, especially young people, to think about the environment and climate change. Read more here >>>>

12 February.
Bagpuss. On this day in 1974 BBC TV showed the first ever episode of the children’s animated series Bagpuss, an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams. Sadly it was a bit too late for my childhood (I was a research student by then) but it was (and is) still fun and became one of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate’s iconic series. Read more here >>>>
14-21 February 2014
National Nest Box Week. Run by the British Trust for Ornithology, National Nestbox week is to encourage us to put up nestboxes for the birds. Why? Because so often these birds are declining due to a scarcity of nest sites as mature trees are cut down. This is also a good time to check existing nestboxes and (if they’re not inhabited by anything hibernating — insects, dormice, etc.) to clean them our before the new nesting season begins. Read more here >>>>
15 February.
Galileo Galilei was born this day in 1564. Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements included improvements to the telescope (and thus astronomical observations) and support for Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism. For this latter Galileo was arraigned by the Inquisition, made to recant and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Galileo was one of the all time giants of science. Read more here >>>>
17-23 February 2014
Chip Week. It seems that we Brits can’t get enough chips, so let’s admit defeat and celebrate! What? You mean they’re bad for us? I don’t believe it! Read more here >>>>

25 February.
Sir John Tenniel, British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist, died this day in 1914 just a few days short of his 94th birthday. He is perhaps best known today for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Read more here >>>>

beliefs, books, science

Book Review

John Conway, CM Kosemen, Darren Naish
Cryptozoologicon, The Biology, Evolution and Mythology of Hidden Animals, Volume I
(Irregular Books, 2013)

This is strange book. It is one I wanted to read and I was given a copy for Christmas. It sounded as if it would be interesting.
What the authors set out to do, and they are up front about stating this, is to look at some of the myths of strange animals unrecorded by science and then to look at how plausible the myths are and what the animal might be. They write a couple of pages about each of the 28 creatures they choose. All of which is fine, if eccentric.
What they then go on to do is to speculate wildly about history, evolution and taxonomy of each creature as if it were real. They do say repeatedly that what they are indulging in is speculation, but they acknowledge that it will be misinterpreted by the wilfully minded.
As they say on the cover blurb:

Cryptozoologicon is a celebration of the myths, legends, evolution and biology of hidden animals. Always sceptical, but always willing to indulge in speculative fun, Cryptozoologicon aims to provide a new way to approach cryptozoology: as fictional biology.

And in their Introduction:

For each cryptid, our entries consist of three sections. We consider it important that people understand exactly what we have done. In the first section of text, we briefly review what people have said beforehand about the given cryptid. We refer to the key accounts and describe what the creature is supposed to look like.
In the second section, we present an evaluation of the reports, make a conclusion about the identity of the given cryptid, and decide whether the accounts refer to a real creature or not. Given that we have included quite a range of mystery animals in our book — some of which are fairly ridiculous and others of which have essentially been debunked — our conclusions range from the open-ended to the “case closed” type.
Finally, we include a third section of text in which we deliberately jump onto the bandwagon of speculation, and wax lyrical about the identity, evolution and biology of the cryptid concerned, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Yeah, “fictional biology” is about the size of it. I had hoped that it might present some interesting new evidence for something. It doesn’t.
And I had hoped that even if it didn’t the book might be amusing. It isn’t that either.
I found it tedious beyond belief. There is nothing here except a regurgitation of the already known myths and their debunking with some wildly speculative and very tedious fiction. The text is extremely dull; not especially poorly written just unimaginative and not sparkling. On top of that I dislike the large colour illustrations; that’s down to their style rather than content; for me they didn’t add a great deal.
The book could, indeed should, have been interesting; and this could have been done with very little extra effort.
For me this book just didn’t work. I found it incredibly tedious and in fact gave up reading attentively no more than half way through and skipped through the remainder.
Unless you have to read this book for some reason, frankly I’d give it a miss.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

books, science

Book Review

Alice Roberts
Evolution: The Human Story
(Dorling Kindersey, 2011)
This is another of the book I have long wanted to read and which I was given for Christmas. And I was not disappointed.
As one would expect from Dorling Kindersley this is a sumptuously produced book with a very large number of outstanding photographs and illustrations. And it is a large, and heavy, coffee table sized volume, so not ideal for reading in bed.
But do not be decieved by this, or the Dorling Kindersley imprint. Evolution is a serious book documenting the story of our development from the earliest known hominins of some 7 million years ago to the present. It is very much aimed at the interested layman, although I would think that teenagers interested in archaeology, palaeontology or anthropology (or indeed just biological science in general) would also find it absolutely fascinating and useful.
The text, which although maybe a little on the sparse side for me, presents the prevailing scientific understanding in proper, but intelligible, detail — and it clearly highlights and explains where there are conflicting hypotheses. All of this is just as one would expect from Prof. Alice Roberts who is one of the current generation of outstanding British scientists and science communicators.
The book is divided into five sections: Understanding Our Past, Primates, Hominins, Out of Africa, From Hunters to Farmers. Each of the sections has been created by a specialist in the field and collated by Alice Roberts who wrote the Out of Africa section.
The middle section, Hominins, occupies almost half of the 260 pages. In doing so it presents several double page spreads on each of the 20 or so major species along the route from early hominins to us. Each of these mini sections tells the story of the species, how it was discovered, what characterises it and ends with a double page spread of photographs of a reconstructed head showing what the species might have looked like and highlighting the characterising features.
These reconstructions were done by the immensely knowledgeable and talented Dutch brothers Adrie and Alfons Kennis. These reconstructions really are truly stunning and must have taken a great deal of time and cost thousands. They alone are worth the cost of the book!
Having said all that, this is not a book to be read from cover to cover, and indeed I have so far skimmed it quite quickly stopping here and there to read in detail. Although readers will want to look through the whole book to understand its compass, it is really something to be dipped into repeatedly, reading small sections as the interest arises. And it is something I shall indeed be returning to time and again.
Along with Alice Roberts’ earlier The Incredible Human Journey, this is for me one of the outstanding science books of recent years.
Overall Rating: ★★★★★

books

Book Review

Mark Miodownik
Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World
(Viking; 2013)
This was one of the recent crop of accessible science books which I wanted to read. From the reviews it sounded amazingly interesting. And yes, it was interesting but for me not amazingly so.
Sure, I learnt a lot. I didn’t know about how concrete works, nor about stainless steel or porcelain, and certainly not about aerogel.
But nevertheless I found the book rather unsatisfying. I’m not sure if this is Miodownik’s rather bland style or whether it is because the content is pitched too low for me. Maybe both. I could certainly have taken more technical detail, but then I guess I’m not the prime target audience. And I wanted far more in the way of explanatory diagrams.
On top of that I didn’t find the book a pleasant object. Not downright nasty but unsatisfying. There is lots of text on poor-feeling paper. The few illustrations are equally poor and all in black & white. The linking photograph, around which Miodownik hangs the text, is unintelligible because too small, lacking in contrast and in detail. I wanted better paper, better and more illustrations and diagrams, and for them to be in colour.
All of which is a shame as the book should, and could, have been so much more enjoyable and so much more memorable. The content, which in isolation is interesting, deserved better.
Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆

books, medical

Book Review

Dr Tony Bleetman
Confessions of an Air Ambulance Doctor
(Ebury Press, 2012)
I was given a paperback of this book as a Christmas present, which was good as it was one I wanted to read. And who wouldn’t when the blurb on the back cover says:

Drug addicts, lorry crashes, open heart surgery, stab wounds, headless chickens, mating llamas and strip routines — it’s all in a day’s work for emergency doctor Tony Bleetman and his team …
Confessions of an Air Ambulance Doctor is a dramatic behind-the-scenes account of life onboard an air ambulance. Whether they are landing in the middle of the M1 or at a maximum security jail, Tony and his crew Helimed 999 are first on the scene in the most critical of emergencies.
This gripping read will make you laugh, cry and marvel at the wonders of life (and death) in equal measure.

The book certainly lives up to its billing.
Bleetman starts off with stories of the initial days for setting up the first UK Helimed service outside London — that’s no ordinary Air Ambulance but one which carries a trauma doctor plus paramedic rather than two paramedics. Experience has shown that having a trauma doctor on-board does save lives, because they are able to do so much more to help really seriously ill patients than even paramedics can.
And that is hardly surprising when one reads of some of the major surgical interventions that were done on-site by the side of roads and in fields — and yes that does include things like open heart surgery! Which is really scary when one considers that one would not normally want to have this done even in the controlled environment of a hospital operating theatre with three or more surgeons and a full theatre team present. Whereas here this is all done by one trauma surgeon and a paramedic (albeit a super-trained one) in the field with no sterile environment.
Yes I was surprised, amazed and really impressed by some of the things they were doing out in the wild. But when Bleetman tells you about saving severely injured casualties, who would not otherwise have survived to be put in a land ambulance, let alone got to hospital, you have to be impressed and immensely grateful …
… And even more immensely grateful because all of this (with the exception of the paramedics who are paid by the local Ambulance Service) is funded by charity and by doctors giving up their free time for no reward except the satisfaction of helping people. Yes, that’s right, none of this, except the paramedics and, I assume, the drugs, is funded by the NHS! The helicopter, its fuel, the buildings required — ie. all the running costs and capital spend — is all down to big companies and people like us being generous. Which when you consider they would often fly up to six jobs a shift with fuel at £1000 a flying-hour; a helicopter costing millions; and that this is replicated across around two dozen services in the UK means a lot of cash has to be found.
But what about the book? As you might expect it is full of tales of derring-do — real Biggles flying ace stories with a lot of serious (and often bloody) medical stuff added on top. Medical teams are put in positions we have no right to expect them to go (upside down in filthy ditches full of petrol), and they’re almost constantly hampered by officious firemen, police and on-lookers whose objective is to get people out and get things moving and unable to see that doing so will kill the casualty. No wonder these people regularly get called “Muppets” (and that’s the polite version) to their faces.
If you can stomach the medical bit then this is a light but engaging read which I found it hard to put down.
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆

books, personal

Childhood Reading

What follows is a slightly edited version of something I wrote for my friend Katy’s blog Making Them Readers, which encourages childhood literary, earlier in the year.
I’m not a fluent reader. Yes, I can read anything, am highly educated, have a good grasp of (basic) grammar and a huge vocabulary. But although I’m not dyslexic my spelling is, even now at 62, rather shoddy and I read slowly – it takes me about three times as long to read a page as it does most people. I don’t know why, it isn’t that I especially struggled to learn to read.
But the upshot of this is that I got turned off reading voraciously for pleasure and grammar school killed any enjoyment I might have had of the classics. Half an hour of homework (read the next chapter of Great Expectations) became a two hour marathon. So I was always behind. School absolutely killed the classics for me.
I must have read a certain amount at junior school otherwise I would not have got through the 11+ with ease. But my memory of what I read is hazy at best.
I remember we had a series of Janet and John books when I was learning to read and I remember reading Orlando the Marmalade Cat with my mother. And I must have read at least parts of Alice in Wonderland while still quite young.
I do remember, probably at about the age of 7 or 8, reading TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This started because it was something my father read to me at bedtime and before long I knew “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” off by heart.
Along the way someone obviously gave me a copy of A Puffin Book of Verse and Four Feet and Two. I know I read a lot of the former, dipping into it repeatedly over many years, but could never really get on with the latter.
Once I got to about 10 or 11 I started reading WE Johns’s Biggles books and over a period of about 5 years I devoured every one that our local library could throw at me — much to my parents’ disgust that I wasn’t reading anything “better”. Biggles became my alter ego.
Once past the age of about 14 I don’t recall reading anything much that I didn’t have to — I probably did, but it was unlikely to have been fiction and it hasn’t stuck in my memory. I remember trying War and Peace but soon found it turgid and heavy going. However I did buy John Betjeman’s High and Low when it was published, and this remained my “go to” book if ever I had a sleepless night, even into my student days. (I still have that first edition.) I must have read a chunk of Sherlock Holmes at about this time too.
And, oh dear, I think the whole school, read Peyton Place when it came out in paperback in the mid-1960s — incredibly boring. I also ploughed my way through my father’s copy of Ulysses at about 16 (why?) and about the same time decided that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was boring and gave up on it halfway through.
At 18 I ploughed my way through a large amount of my father’s copy of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex in an attempt to keep one step ahead of my girlfriend!
I didn’t really return to reading fiction, or indeed anything much outside my academic (scientific) sphere, until I was a post-graduate student when I discovered all sorts of oddities (Langland, Gower) as well as people like Evelyn Waugh, Laurie Lee and Don Camillo.
Although I’m now the Secretary of a literary society, I’m still not a great reader of fiction and to this day I cannot abide the classics.
And the moral is? Even if a child is not a fluent reader, don’t give up, don’t worry about it and don’t despair. Keep ensuring they have access to a wide range of interesting things to read (we had a lot of books at home and were always in and out of our local library), let them read whatever they choose, and there’s a good chance they’ll pick up on what they really like as they get older.

books

National Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month.
Can you write a novel in a month? That’s the challenge for all you budding authors. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in just thirty days. The deadline is 2359 hrs on 30 November!


What can you write? Any type of fiction you want! Horror, romance … erotica! Whatever you feel passionate enough to tell a story about. So far over 150,000 potential novelists have signed up to take part.
You can sign up to take part, and get support, on the National Novel Writing Month website at http://nanowrimo.org/.
And no, you won’t see me there. I know I don’t have an original story in my body, so I’m not going to stress myself even trying. Sorry!

books

Book Review

wonder1Marian Bantjes
I Wonder
(Thames & Hudson; 2010)
This is an odd book which I bought almost on impulse having seen it mentioned somewhere. It is so odd, and for me so unreadable, I merely skipped over large sections of it.
According to the cover blurb Bantjes is a “world-renowned typographic illustrator” who clearly also does some writing, journalism and graphic design. If this is an advertisement for either her writing or her design work then I fear the lady is doomed to failure, for the book is written and designed by her to be totally unreadable.
The chapters, which are really only extended blog posts, are mostly quirky in content, although the opening chapter on “Wonder” is quite an interesting excursion into something to which we give very little thought. And the final chapter about her mother’s scribbling pads-cum-notebooks, around which she ran her life, is a curious and poignant insight into how a clearly intelligent but quixotic mind can work. And how such a system can also help ameliorate the vicissitudes of dementia.

wonder2

But the rest of it I found unreadable. Party because the chapters and subjects didn’t work for me. But mainly because the design is so intrusive that it submerges the text into illegible incomprehensibility — as the above illustration I think amply demonstrates, despite the small size.
This is a shame as I suspect there are nuggets of gold amongst the words. But they’re so well hidden that I couldn’t face mining them. It is also a shame as a great deal of thought has clearly gone into the book which is rather well produced, even if I personally dislike the feel of the glossy coffee-table book paper.
So overall, this was a massive disappointment. And I hate disappointments.

amusements, books

Towel Day

Saturday 25 May is Towel Day.

What, I hear you exclaim, is Towel Day? Yes, that’s right it is the day on which we are encouraged to carry a towel in tribute to the late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On 25 May 2001, two weeks after Douglas Adam’s untimely death, his fans carried a towel in his honour. And they have done so every year since.

If you’ve already read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you’ll know the importance of your towel. If not, the book will explain why a towel is the most important item a space-travelling hitch-hiker (indeed probably any of us — just ask Linus!) can have.

Your towel is extremely practical: you can use it to keep warm, to lie on, to sleep on and to use as a mini-raft as you sail down the River Moth! Of course your towel is also a trusty companion and thus extremely important for a host of psychological reasons.

Towel Day isn’t just a day for doing the obvious: carrying a towel. There are also lots of events, all listed over on the Towel Day website at http://towelday.org/.