This morning heavy, heavy rain fell on our little spot on the earth’s surface and despite having only recently paid a company to re-waterproof the roof of the bay window, a stream of water poured into our bedroom.
I got dressed in my oilies, carried a ladder up to the top bedroom (third floor), put on my swimming shoes, slid the ladder out of the window and down onto the slope of the roof, until its feet were resting in the lake on the roof of the bay. I climbed out into the deluge and down the ladder until I was wading in the three inches of water. The parapet around the roof of the bay is about fifteen inches high, so I suppose I should be pleased that it wasn’t full!
The drain was blocked with fallen leaves (which immediately reminded me of the Bob Newhart sketch about Sir Walter Raleigh bringing tobacco to England so I stopped writing and watched it on youtube, it’s still funny after all these years) I cleared the leaves out and watched the water drain away. ‘Even so’ I thought, ‘the waterproofing should have kept the water from leaking through into the bedroom.’ But I bet the building company will deny responsibility when we complain.
And, almost the moment that I climbed back into the bedroom, the rain stopped!
Sometimes life rushes by in an ever changing jumble of activity, sometimes it crawls through mud and misery. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember it all.
If you asked me what I’ve done so far I’ll tell you about the good bits.
I’m not going to mention the bad bits – if there were any.
‘Like some sort of exotic sea creature. It had fine tendrils coming out of one side, and a long, thin papery tube coming out of the other. Amazing.’
‘How big?’
‘About like a golf ball, that was the main bit, the tendrils and the tube were sticking out from either side, it was more or less a ball, but it was flatter where the tendrils were and pointed towards the tube.’
‘Well, what colour was it?’
‘White, I suppose, well, sort of off-white, like I said, like a golf ball. With brown powdery lumps stuck to the edges, which came off when you rubbed them.’
‘Sounds like dried-on mud to me.’
‘Hmm, yes, you could be right. That was on the swollen bit, the bit between the tendrils and the tube.’
‘So it had probably been buried in the ground?’
‘Could be’.
‘And what about these tendrils?’
‘Brown, tangled, brittle, a bit thicker than a hair.’
‘How long?’
‘A couple of inches.’
‘And the tube?’
‘Oh, that was long, really long, a couple of feet – well, eighteen inches – but narrow, maybe a quarter of an inch across, and made up of overlapping sheets like fine paper. At the end, the sheets came apart and were greeny-brown and shrivelled. In fact, the whole thing was covered in this fine white papery skin that came off really easily.’
‘So what happened when you pulled it off?’
‘Oh, amazing. You see, it wasn’t really a ball, when you looked at it closely; it had ridges going up the side from the tendrils to the tube. In fact, when I turned it over with the tendrils towards me, it was this beautiful shape, not a perfect circle, but with a scalloped edge. And when I stuck my thumb nails in between the ridges, it pulled apart into little segments, shaped like crescent moons, tapering at the tube end and slightly thicker at the tendril end, covered in another layer of skin, pale red this time. Behind the first one, there was another layer of these segments, they all fitted together perfectly into the overall shape.’
‘And what was inside the segments?’
‘The skin was much harder to pull off than the outside stuff had been, but I broke the segment apart with my nails. Inside it was white and solid, a perfect oval in cross-section, and if you looked carefully you could just see a much smaller oval right in the middle, a slightly darker, creamy colour. But I’ll tell you one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It stank. I still can’t get the smell off my thumbnail.’
The most basic rule of life is the human and animal instinct to survive. By whatever means.
Survival includes procreation which often means competition, usually between males.
The best player wins.
Compassion isn’t a factor in life’s considerations until one, or both, of two things occur.
The birth of young. In animals, compassion – if it occurs – is mostly maternal, instinctive and doesn’t usually last beyond weaning and independence.
Thought. Humans have a greater capacity to feel compassion because they are capable of thought.
And because of their ability to think they long ago recognised that living in groups offers a better chance of survival, the larger the group, the better its chances of survival in the competition for resources.
But the bigger the group the bigger the chance of not all the players being the best and of some individuals needing more support than they can contribute.
Compassion is not normally an ingredient of a winning philosophy.
The burden of compassion, with all that ensues from the desire to protect others from pain might severely constrain, even overwhelm the groups’ ability to compete. Especially when the group has grown too big for the available resources.
What do we do then?
Every day people ask me to support what, on-the-face-of-it appear to be really worthwhile causes: Children in need, Greenpeace, The Homeless, etc, all of which, assuming they’re genuine, are worthwhile and worthy of everyone’s support. I’m willing to add my voice to the causes, and I so wish that it wasn’t needed. But I do not wish to foist my specific recommendations on my friends and relations, so I don’t want to be asked to share anything or put stickers in my front window. And I don’t want to be ‘morally blackmailed’ into ‘chipping in’ to use the current, comfortable-sounding request for money.
Ida and I have standing orders to three charities that we think are worthwhile. Perhaps we could afford to give more but we also have and have had unexpected and unforecastable expenses for which we deem it wise to maintain some reserves.
So what’s all that about then?
Well, I believe that easily accessible havens and medical support should exist for all abused, sick, drug and alcohol addicted people and homeless, adults and children, and animals, worldwide.
So why are elected governments not eliminating the need for human and animal needs charities?
Waiting for inspiration
Be creative
Be creative
Be creative
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OK
I ride through the city on my bike. I walk in the fields we’re lucky enough to have behind our house and I despair at the quantity of litter I come across. It’s mostly empty sweet-packets, beer cans, empty, plastic water bottles and paper cups. My wife and I collect the stuff and dispose of it. We sometimes ask ourselves if we’re risking close contact with Covid 19 particles, and we wonder who so carelessly dumps it, I ask myself, privately ‘cos it’s too sensitive to talk openly about it, could it possibly be the same people that want to instantly resolve the colour prejudice and the guilty history questions?
‘A photon is a type of elementary particle in the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum’. I got that from Wikepedia, to which, by the way, I donate £5 every year, so I consider myself entiltled to quote from it now and again and, in any case, I think it’s allowed, whether you give ‘them’ money or not.
Anyway I was thinking about photons when I switched on the landing light. I’d just been to the bathroom you see, and as I came out onto the landing I turned the light off. I shuffled forward in the dark – you know how black it is when you’ve been in the light – and pressed the switch for the landing light.
Instantly the landing and the top of the stairs were flooded in photons, although there were dark, dark shadows here and there. Well, not just randomly here and there, but where something, a banister spindle for instance, obstructed the passage of the photons, there was a shadow.
You probably know that one of the characteristics of a photon is it’s tenacity in sticking to straight line travel. Of course that’s not just one photon, that’s all of them – and there are lots.
But they do deviate sometimes. It’s barely noticeable but gravity does bend their path a bit if they pass close by something big, like Jupiter or Saturn, or Arcturus.
They also travel at the speed of light – which is not surprising because they are light.
And, of course, there’s reflection. It’s obvious that photons can bounce off mirrors because you can shine a torch beam onto a mirror and redirect the beam in almost any direction. I’ve often wondered if there might be some commercial benefit to be gained from this reality, like when it’s a new moon f’rinstance: with a big enough mirror, strategically located, you could light up the ‘dark side of the moon’ as-it-were. Of course that wouldn’t be the real dark side of the moon because no matter where you are on earth you won’t get to see the dark side of the moon, ever.
I realise that I haven’t explained what a photon is. I suppose I assumed that everyone knows. But I’ve been surprised recently that, for example, there are people who don’t know who Ruby Murray is, even though her name is in the Cockney Rhyming Slang Dictionary! Well, if you don’t know, look it up, it’s easy enough these days.
But I was talking about photons, and how, contrary to one of their main, observed characteristics, they sometimes – or maybe more than just ‘sometimes’ – do a zig-zag when they hit glass at an angle, or water. Watch someone wade slowly into the shallow end of a swimming pool. If the water’s calm you can still see their lower legs but they look much shorter, that’s because of refraction. You have to wonder how a photon knows that it should change its direction of travel when it passes into water, or glass. And by how much? Imagine being the first photon to arrive at the surface of a window pane. How do you know that you have to change direction before passing into the glass? And by how much? And you have to make that decision at the speed of light! And, indeed, how do we know they change course on their way to an object? What if they only change course when they’re on their way bacxk to the eye of the observer, after they’ve bounced off the object being observed?
It’s hard to imagine but the sun is blasting out millions and millions of photons every millisecond of your (and my) existence. Many of them are totally wasted, they just shoot outwards from the surface of the sun in every direction and, if you think about the earth as being a target of this wild, random, and virtually unending, explosive emission of photons, it seems such a waste to think that about 99.999 percent of them just get spattered all over the galaxy providing nothing for nobody. The only other beneficiaries are any loose astronauts whizzing around in orbit, and the moon, and the planets.
And, there are places where photons are precious, places that could do with a few million of these wasted particles, like dungeons and deep caves. But, as already noted, excepting the exceptions mentioned above, photons only travel in straight lines, so after you’ve gone around the first bend in a cave there won’t be many about.
But, (another ‘but’), nowadays people create their own photons, with torches and car headlights for examples, and the electric light in your kitchen or on the landing. How photons are actually born and where they go to die, despite a massive, ongoing research effort, remains a mystery.
And, as Wikipedia tells us, the invariant mass of a photon is zero, which means, effectively, that photons don’t exist.
I re-wrote the first line of my unfinished, but very long, ‘blockbuster’ novel this morning.
Southsea Storytellers 