One of four short poems* written to hang on one of a number of small artificial trees intended to decorate a local church at Christmas 2010.
Hearts of oak, once our defences,
Now support our garden fences.
Willow, though, still guards one’s wicket
(Other timbers just aren’t cricket).
*The others are Hug a tree, Poet-tree and The Music Tree.
Somewhere, there’s a command centre that coordinates Nature’s assault on our garden. I can almost hear the orders being barked out to the assembled forces. . .
“Right-ho, chaps, we’re ready for the action to commence.
The enemy is sleeping and will put up no defence.
Our spies have infiltrated, on their threefold pairs of legs,
And mined the field of battle with their countless tiny eggs.
“By now, those eggs have hatched, and our latest information
Is that thousands of their larvae are now wreaking devastation.
Phase Two sets off at midnight – pay attention at the back! –
You gastropods will hug the earth and lead the ground attack.
“You’ll decimate the veg patch as you ravage and despoil
All soft green shoots that dare to poke their heads above the soil.
Beware though, slippery warriors, for the enemy’s renowned
For scattering toxic pellets and crushed eggshells on the ground.
“At crack of dawn, Phase Three will start: you feathered, winged brigades
Will launch from all directions your coordinated raids.
Now, air-troops, you must set your course and from it never swerve:
The enemy will wave its arms, but you must keep your nerve.
“Peck off all fruits and flowers, hack into juicy leaves,
And watch those gardeners despair at what your air assault achieves!
Today shall be our day! But for them, a day of sorrow.
Once more unto the breach, lads – and we’ll do the same tomorrow!”
The European Space Agency and NASA have set up the ExoMars Programme to investigate the Martian environment. One of its aims is to look for exobiology (signs of past and present life). The ExoMars Rover is one of two autonomous rovers designed to be landed on the planet in 2018, and will be equipped specifically for that purpose including PanCam, a stereoscopic panoramic imaging system designed by the UK’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory.
A lanky-necked Rover with two beady eyes
Descends from a sky-crane through dust-laden skies.
From the Earth come “Hurrahs!”
As it settles on Mars,
And then comes the signal: “Go forth , analyse!”
Powered by sunlight and bristling with gear,
The Rover will map the terrain far and near
Using PanCam and software,
To sort out a spot where
Some exobiology might just appear.
Then Earthlings will sort out which target looks right,
And the Rover will plan out its route to the site.
It’s got six wheels to drive it,
And to help it survive, it
Has heaters to make sure it’s warm overnight.
There’s a drill to get samples from two metres deep,
With a built-in spectrometer, giving a peep
At the rock in the raw,
So its studied before
It’s degraded. Such instruments do not come cheap!
The samples get crushed and inspected, and then
The Rover will do it again and again.
But, I ask with respect,
Can it hope to detect
Those rascally Martians, the Little Green Men?
These ‘primitive’ meteorites preserve evidence from the formation of the Solar System and invite questions about even earlier times.
In the universe’s emptiness, a giant molecular haze
Collapsed because of gravity (which everything obeys).
Its primal specks collided, becoming molten grains
Which cooled down very quickly (for equilibrium reigns!).
These rounded blobs were chondrules: with silicates aglow,
Like olivine and pyroxene, as modern tests can show.
A solar nebular disk formed in the vastness of the voids,
Precursor to our Sun and planets, moons and asteroids.
The chondrules, in this milieu, found these asteroids attractive
And forced themselves upon them, but soon became their captive.
You’ll only find a chondrule locked in stony meteorites
That haven’t been re-melted: that’s the sort now called chondrites.
So if you spot a chondrite, with a chondrule crew on board,
Just think what ancient provenance is in its structure stored!
It holds, untouched, a record of the Solar System’s birth
Some four point five six billion years before our time on Earth.
But that invites another thought: whence came those primal specks?
Perhaps it’s better not to ask – we’d all be nervous wrecks. . .
One of four short poems* written to hang on one of a number of small artificial trees intended to decorate a local church at Christmas 2010.
I’ll hang a poem on a tree
And leave it for posterity.
And if, perchance, my verse you see,
Remember me – and thank the tree.
*The others are The Music Tree, Hug a tree and Oak and willow.
One of four short poems* written to hang on one of a number of small artificial trees intended to decorate a local church at Christmas 2010. This tree would represent the church’s organists.
The roots of rock and symphony,
Are pitch and tone and measure.
Composers channel them, like trunks,
To branch out for our pleasure.
*The others are Poet-tree, Oak and willow, and Hug a tree
One of four short poems* written to hang on one of a number of small artificial trees intended to decorate a local church at Christmas 2010.
Stop awhile amid your bustling:
Listen to my branches rustling,
Hear those birdies sing with glee,
Then hug me tight, for I’m a tree.
*The others are Oak and willow, Poet-tree and The Music Tree.
You can see strange apparitions while practising the organ in an empty church . . .
A feather-dusting phantom called Joan
Has a cleaning technique all her own:
Just a whisk and a flick
With her tickling stick,
And the world is a cobweb-free zone.
The distance of relatively nearby stars can be found by measuring their positional change against the ‘fixed’ stars as the Earth orbits the Sun; and there is a known calibration of distance with brightness for ‘Cephid variable’ stars. But the rest had to wait until technology allowed the spectrum of their light to be analysed in exquisite detail. Then you could classify them: a particular spectral type and the precise characteristics of line-pairs within the spectrum placed them in one or other of the regions in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. (This diagram plots data obtained from ‘nearby’ stars, and from it you can read off your star’s ‘absolute’ brightness – see The Sun and Hertzsprung-Russel.) Then, if you also know from observation how bright a star appears here on Earth, you can assume an inverse-square law was at work, and so calculate its distance. A certain wide-eyed and romantically inclined bird knew all this long ago.
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea –
They’d decided to elope.
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
And the Owl took his telescope.
The Owl looked up to a star above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
Just how far away is that star,
That star,
That star?
Just how far away is that star?”
Pussy said to the Owl, “That’s just like a fowl;
I thought we were here to get wed!
They’re so far away, surely no-one can say?”
The Owl clicked his beak, and then said:
“We must sample the light from that star above
And measure how brightly it shines.
Then, using a prism, O Pussy my love,
We can check out its dark spectral lines,
Its lines,
Its lines . . .
We can check out its dark spectral lines.”
A little while later, they’d got all the data;
Then a Piggy-wig watched them, aghast,
As they had a great tussle with Hertzsprung and Russel.
But they got to an answer at last.
“Oh Owl, that was thrilling! But look – that Pig’s willing
To sell you the ring in his nose!”
So, wed by a Turkey (which was shockingly quirky),
They danced by the light of the stars,
The stars,
The stars . . .
They danced by the light of the stars.
In the walls of some old Sussex buildings are blocks of chalk (‘Top Chalk’) from the shore-exposed eroded surface of the Chalk in Sussex, used as cheap infill on the less visible parts of the structure. The blocks are often peppered with holes: larger ones made by piddocks, and smaller ones bored by the marine bristleworm Polydora ciliata. In its larval form or when very young, Polydora invades the shells of oysters and mussels, irritating the molluscs; they respond by secreting repair material that can leave the shell blistered.
Polydora ciliata, my full Latin name,
Affords a respectable aura;
But to oysters and such I’m a troublesome dame,
And they know me as ‘Dora the Borer’.
I’m a polychaete worm with bristly projections,
Which are handy, and help when I’m boring.
My tentacles wave, making menu selections
From my burrow – I don’t go exploring.
I do like to drill in CaCO3,
And to burrow in wood and in clay.
(I practised on oysters who lived in the sea –
I was young then, and wanted to play!)
The holes that I make are distinctively small:
Compared to the piddock’s they’re wee.
Look out for them: next time you see in a wall
A block of Top Chalk, think of me!
It’s July 2010, Having got their long-promised new plinth and briefly dabbled their feet in its flowing water (see ’Swanderful), the bronze swans in Horsham’s Swan Walk shopping centre have for some time again been teetering over a water-less landing site.
Swan Walk’s swans, iconic things,
Are hovering on cast-bronze wings.
Passing by, I heard them shout
(In rough translation), “Why the drought?”
For ages now, their pond’s been dry.
I’m not surprised they’re wondering why,
For they can have no understanding
Of where the water’s gone for landing . . .
The leading swan (whose voice was crisp,
But suffered from an awful lisp)
Said, “Landing on that bone-dry plinth
Would break our legs and make us winth.”
It made me think. I’ll not be hesitant,
I’ll write a letter to The Resident
To make the case that Horsham oughter
Turn on the tap – bring back their water!
(The water did eventually return for the blink of an eye, but then disappeared again . . .)
Clouds often have interesting shapes. Despite the arguments of science, I reckon there are a fixed number of them, which just keep going round and round the world.
When I was a lad, I glanced up at the sky
Just as a castle-shaped cloud drifted by.
Would it ever come back? I hoped it would try;
But it hasn’t done yet, and I’m wondering why. . .
I learned that a cloud is a transient thing.
When the atmosphere’s right, its conditions will wring
From the air any water it cannot contain:
Each cloud is unique, and will not come again.
But now that I’m older, I look at the sky
And I want to believe that those clouds do not die.
That castle-shaped cloud will appear, drifting by;
But it hasn’t done yet, and I’m wondering why. . .
It’s July, and I’ve spotted a worker ant, struggling across some paving slabs carrying what looked like the wing of a small moth in its mouth. It couldn’t have been easy: the wing was sticking up near-vertically and being blown about by the breeze. She must have had a good reason for all her efforts.
Look! There’s an ant with a wing in its mouth,
Being blown to and fro by a breeze from the south;
But why would an ant be carrying a wing?
Self-adornment, maybe – a sort of ant bling?
Now she’s pulling it into her nest down below.
P’raps she’ll frame it and name it and put it on show,
And her ant friends will scoff at this formic upstart:
“You’ve been at the aphids again. That’s not art!”
I know what she’s up to. At the end of July
The drones and the queen ants will take to the sky
For a frenzy of mating and airborne attraction.
And this ant, a worker, wants some of the action.
So she’s thought of a way to pretend she’s a queen:
She’s secretly building a flying machine!
With six legs to pedal it, there’s plenty of power
To flap her new wing with for hour after hour.
She’ll test it out soon, perhaps add more wings,
And show all the drone ants she knows a few things.
(Here’s one thing she knows that would fill them with dread:
Soon after their flight, all the males end up dead. . .
Sharks’ teeth are constantly replaced throughout life: multiple rows of replacement teeth grow in a groove on the inside of the jaw and steadily move forward as in a “conveyor belt” formed by the skin in which they are anchored. Typically a shark has two to three working rows of teeth with 20 to 30 teeth in each row, although a whale shark has about 300. The rate of tooth replacement varies from once every 8–10 days to several months, some sharks losing 30,000 or more teeth in their lifetime. That’s why the teeth of ancient sharks turn up in abundance in certain strata, and are easy to spot at low tide on some sandy wave-washed beaches. Here, a shark laments such waste.
Oh, I wish I could keep all me teeth;
Now they litter the sea-floor beneath.
I can’t help lamenting
Such a waste of good dentine.
Oh, I wish I could keep all me teeth.
Evolution, it seems, has designed
That we always have gnashers to grind:
So, like soldiers at war,
When one falls, there are more
To replace their lost mate from behind.
But geologists like to find teeth,
So I solemnly hereby bequeath
My discarded enamels
To you beachcombing mammals.
I still wish I could keep all me teeth. . .
(With apologies to the Queen of Poemology, Pam Ayres.)
A local mobile ice-cream man periodically announces his presence with a few bars of this waltz by Johann Strauss, junior, played by his van’s minimal sound system over and over again without accompaniment or musical feeling. I felt that some form of action was needed. . .
A waltz by Johann Strauss
Echoes round and round the house
As an ice-cream van blares out its tinny strain.
That tune that Johann penned
Will soon drive me round the bend.
I offer up a futile prayer for rain. . .
Wait, a cunning plan I’ve got!
I’ll assemble at the spot
An orchestra, and wait for his next call.
Then we’ll join in on the beat:
There’ll be dancing in the street,
And the neighbourhood will come and have a ball!
But we’ll play the piece right through,
Nothing less, of course, will do.
Then we’ll play all Strauss’s other pieces too.
Ice-cream will flow like honey,
And he’ll rake in so much money
He’ll retire to where the Danube is so blue.
Stop! This grand orchestral scheme
Is a fantasy, a dream!
(He’d return with ‘Greensleeves’ blaring from his van
With the melody cut short,
Expecting musical support.)
I s’pose I must accept the ice-cream man. . .
Our human condition limits our ability to perceive and experience the realities of the universe. At times in our history, we have drawn ‘obvious’ conclusions about them from what little we have been able to sense; for example, everyone can see the sun clearly going round the earth, like the Moon and stars do. But science has looked beyond the obvious.
First impressions can mislead.
So change your point of view
To get a new perspective; then
You’ll see the world anew.
We see the amazing range of life, all creatures, great and small.
That’s why we used to think we were the greatest of them all.
The dinosaurs thought much the same, before we came along;
It only goes to show just how our boasting was all wrong.
We see the skies above our heads: the Universe surrounds us.
It’s only natural, then, to think it all rotates around us.
But, thanks to dedicated men who measured with precision,
We came to learn our place in space demands a wider vision.
We think time passes at the rate our clocks and watches tell:
The Greenwich pips and Big Ben’s strike confirm that all is well.
But that’s because we never move at near the speed of light
When time’s dilated. Then whose watch has got the time just right?
Diseases were a mystery: they’d weaken and they’d kill.
It must be something bad we’d done – or witchcraft – made us ill.
But scientific medicine has put such fears at ease:
And now we know that natural causes underlie disease.
The Earth on which we humans stand seems solid; and the pages
Of maps of continents and seas have served us well for ages.
But plate tectonics is for real: geologists hare proved
That ocean ridges make new crust, and continents have moved . . .
Surely matter is eternal? That at least can be observed.
Don’t basic laws of physics say that matter is conserved?
Try telling that to Einstein, or to people in Japan.
The energy in matter’s made its mark on every man.
First impressions can mislead.
So change your point of view
To get a new perspective; then
You’ll see the world anew.
Angela Connor’s giant watery sculpture at the meeting of Horsham’s West Street and Bishopric had been resting at the bottom of its pole for most of 2009 while the Council wondered whether to repair it or replace it. In December, they decided on the former option and it rose again on 8 May 2010. [Update: In 2016, the Council had another think and removed it…]
The Shelley Fountain spent long days
Supported by two RSJs,
Locked up inside a metal cage
And suffering the ills of age.
It’s Horsham’s Marmite, loved and hated.
So should the thing be reinstated?
Its busted guts would need some mending,
But would the work be never-ending?
Would repairs be economic?
Would the cost be astronomic?
Horsham folk were sore divided.
The Council dithered, then decided.
Now its plumbing’s back in action,
Horsham’s own unique attraction.
The Shelley Fountain’s operational,
A Rising Universe – sensational!
On their geological map of the Horsham area, the rascally folk at the British Geological Survey have designated the subsoil below my back garden as “Tunbridge Wells Sand”, even though it includes a range of deposits, some sandy, some clayey. Having recently encountered it with a spade, I felt I should write to complain. This is a draft.
Dear Sir or Madam, I write
To complain of the term you apply
To the subsoil that’s under my house.
I would value an early reply.
I wish to report a misnomer
Of the sort that ought to be banned.
I refer, with respect, to the stratum
That your map labels “Tunbridge Wells Sand”.
Now, I know what sand looks like and feels like,
For I lived by the sea in my youth.
How dumbfounded I was to discover
That your term was so far from the truth!
I have just dug a hole in my garden,
Quite deep, for a new soakaway.
What I found, when I’d shifted the topsoil,
Is what anyone else would call clay.
Well, if Tunbridge Wells folk think that’s sand,
I will happily let them all play in it.
They can jump in the hole in my garden
And make their “sand” castles all day in it.
Grinstead and Wadhurst and Weald:
They’re all clays with their own local name.
So why can’t the stuff that I found
In my garden be treated the same?
Let Tunbridge Wells keep its own Sand,
Then that name will be honest and true;
And the layers of clay in between
You can set about naming anew.
You have put Horsham Stone on your map,
So now, Sir or Madam, I pray
You’ll amend and re-draw all your charts
To identify our “Horsham Clay”.
I await your reply with great interest
For I trust we can strike an accord on
This name that’s so long overdue.
I remain, yours etcetera, Gordon.
Many websites have what they call Frequently Asked Questions, with their accompanying answers. The aim is to anticipate what most visitors to the site might want to know. But I’m not ‘most visitors’.
I’ve looked at all the FAQs
From the first one to the last,
But the Questions I want answers to
It seems aren’t Frequently Asked.
I’m sure that websites do their best
To give the answers needed;
For me, their efforts aren’t enough.
Why have they not succeeded?
I can’t be asking often enough. . .
So here’s my cunning plan:
I’ll stop each person in the street,
Each woman and each man,
And put my Questions to them all.
I’ll keep a careful score,
Then monitor those FAQs
To see if I need more.
How many times is ‘frequently’?
How often must I ask
My questions so they make the grade?
It seems a daunting task.
So just in case that doesn’t work,
I’d welcome more suggestions –
Perhaps a website that will list
Infrequently Asked Questions?
To-do lists are a pain. Here’s how to relieve it.
I’ve got a little list of all the things I ought to do.
(I’m sure I’m not alone in this – I bet you’ve got one too?)
It keeps on getting longer, even though I never stop:
When I cross one off the bottom, two more go on the top.
I tried to subdivide it, each a separate mini-list;
But keeping track of where they were just drove me round the twist.
So I made a list of all the lists, but that made matters worse.
I think the Devil’s in those lists – they’re nothing but a curse.
So here is my solution. It’s a single list, no more,
And one that only lengthens; but eventually, I’m sure,
It’ll make you feel contented – maybe just a touch conceited:
It’s a list of all the jobs that you have finished, done, completed!
If you ever have to empty the polystyrene balls from a beanbag, don’t do it outside in the garden on a windy day – they jump about and blow everywhere and have to be hoovered up. I did it recently, and started to imagine what people might have thought if they’d seen me.
I’ve just been out hoovering the garden –
Well, it’s ages since last it was done.
The folk who passed by were all smiling;
I expect they were thinking, “That’s fun!”
And they must have told people about me,
For soon after, some big blokes appeared
All dressed in white coats, who said sternly,
“Come quietly with us, mate. You’re weird.”
I explained that I’d hoovered the garden
To vacuum up lots of white spheres.
That must have convinced them I’m normal,
For they asked, “Have you done it for years?”
They said they’d a place with a garden
I could hoover up spheres that they had,
And they’d take me there now in their wagon.
I refused – they were clearly quite mad.
It’s April 2010, and a volcano below Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier has erupted, throwing abrasive particles kilometres into the air which has shut down all air travel in northern Europe.
Iceland, famed for ice and fire,
And banks that lose your cash,
Has hit the headlines once again
Erupting plumes of ash.
Atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
A fit-to-burst volcano
Blasts through a glacier with a name
Pronounced as only they know.
So now, no contrails scar the skies,
The air is strangely hushed;
For aircraft are not built to fly
Through fine volcanic dust.
It’s tough for some, but proves a point:
The Earth’s still hot below.
That heat is how we all survive –
It’s making sure we know. . .
A depressed zeolite, named after the Yale chemistry professor Horace Lemuel Wells (1855–1924), explains how it lost its individuality when in 1997 the International Mineralogical Association decreed it was just a variety of Phillipsite or Harmotome. There’s now a letter D against its entry in the organisation’s List of Mineral Names (http://pubsites.uws.edu.au/ima-cnmnc/IMA2009-01%20UPDATE%20160309.pdf).
I’m a zeolite mineral, now nameless.
But I once had my moment of glory
And a name: it was ‘Wellsite’ they called me.
But it didn’t last long. Here’s my story.
I was picked up in North Carolina
And soon found international fame:
For a century I was a mineral
With my own individual name.
My description was widely reported:
(Pratt and Foote, Am J Sci, ’97).
After years spent cooped up in a geode,
I thought I’d ascended to heaven!
But my raptures were cruelly ended
When the IMA’s list got re-edited
And the dread letter D was appended,
Meaning ‘Wellsite’ had now been ‘discredited’.
Was it something I’d done? I am innocent
(Lustre vitreous, whiter than white).
It’s a wicked miscarriage of justice.
Obscurity beckons. Good-night.
Reports reached me that a small, well-travelled canine acquaintance of mine had been helping people in a far-off land move house. I could only conclude that he had been putting his considerable people-management skills to good use.
Hi, I’m World-Wide Wallace,
You’ll have heard of me before*.
I’ve just set up a business
That can move you, door to door.
I’ve done a long apprenticeship
In all kinds of house removal
From continent to continent,
Winning customers’ approval.
I do things very subtly,
Keeping quiet and out of sight,
But poke my nose in everywhere
To check it’s all done right.
So e-mail soon to hire me,
For I’m always in demand.
You will find, with World-Wide Wallace,
That your wish is my command.
(* He’s a dachshund – see World-wide Wallace and A lasting impression.)
Cissbury Ring, a hill-top near Findon, Sussex, is indented with infilled Neolithic flint mines. It was one of the major commercial and industrial nerve centres of the Neolithic world, and supplies of Cissbury flints have turned up in northern England and all over Europe. A teacher at school once mentioned that flint arrowheads can still sometimes be picked up on the South Downs. Ever since, I’ve kept my eyes peeled, but to no avail.
The flint miners of Cissbury were tough and hardy bands.
Five thousand years ago with red deer antler picks and hands
They dug straight down into the Chalk, some forty feet or more,
Then hacked out spoke-like tunnels on the bell-pit’s flinty floor.
The flint was what they’d come to get: black, hard, and good for knapping.
Once out, each nodule would be flaked on site, by deft and skilful tapping.
A flake of flint is hard and sharp, but a practised stone-age hand
Could fashion tools and arrowheads for trade across the land.
It’s said that flinty arrowheads can still be found today,
In northern parts of England, and in Europe – far away
From Sussex, where those miners left, as far as I can see,
Just dents on Cissbury’s summit – and no arrowheads for me!
These days, a dog-walker is obliged to clean up anything their animal leaves on the pavement. I wondered how odd it must look to the dog.
We dogs are very puzzled by you humans and your ways.
We take you out for walkies in the neighbourhood most days,
And often change our route so that you get a change of view;
But you seem to be obsessed with bagging up our doggie poo.
Why is it that you humans find our droppings so attractive?
It’s not as though the stuff is horticulturally active.
We try to stop you doing it, by pulling on your lead,
But nothing works. It must be some deep psychological need.
When horses take their humans out, they seem to get away
With leaving piles and piles of poo along the Queen’s highway.
Their humans never tag along with plastic bags and scoops
To commandeer for who-knows-what their steaming horsey poops*.
It really is embarrassing, this manurial attraction,
It has to stop; we dogs must take some managerial action.
Next time we take you out, beware! We’ll take chunks out of you
If you should ever, ever stoop to picking up our poo.
[* An editorial note: That’s true, but gardeners, with their spade,
Will sometimes make a bee-line for where a horse’s dung gets laid.
They do it rather furtively: they’ll wait till no-one’s looking,
Then shove it in their bucket, even though the stuff’s still cooking.]
In September 2002, at Whitemoor Haye gravel quarry in Staffordshire, digger driver Ray Davies spotted something unusual in his bucket. It turned out to be the front end of a middle-aged woolly rhinoceros. These huge, 1.5 tonne creatures became extinct some 12,000 years ago, probably because they couldn’t cope well with severe cyclic climate change (up to 7ºC in a thousand years) and the hunting activities of early humans. Academics like to give names to such finds.
A woolly rhinoceros said,
“I think before long I’ll be dead,
For I can’t stand these changes
In temperature ranges;
It’s messing up things in my head.
“We rhinos like climate stability:
We have poor adaptive ability –
We’re built for the cold.
I’m not very old,
But I’m starting to feel my fragility.”
But the climate refused to deliver,
So the rhino expired with a shiver.
Quick-frozen he lay
Out of predators’ way,
By a braided periglacial river. . .
In a quarry at Whitemoor Haye,
A JCB driver called Ray
In 2002
Caused a hullabaloo
When he looked in his bucket one day.
He had dug up that rhino’s front end!
Academics began to descend
To share in his fame,
And they thought up a name
For their woolly rhinoceros friend.
After pondering day after day
In their quaint, academical way,
They cried with one voice,
“There is no other choice:
The name of our rhino. . . is Ray!”
A new unit was proposed in 1968 as a standard measure for geological movements and increments, named after Serge von Bubnoff (pictured below). For example, the average rate of erosion over the Earth’s landmasses has been estimated as about a foot per thousand years, or 30 Bubnoffs. It gets unmanageable at the human scale, though: a brisk walk is about 40 million Bubnoffs. I’m jealous.
The Bubnoff unit, whose symbol is B,
Is far too small for people like me.
One micron a year is a speed that’s so small
Not even a snail would detect it at all.
And what could you measure it with, might I ask?
No ruler that I’ve ever owned fits the task.
It’d have to be stable for aeons of time,
Free from corrosion, protected from grime.
I’d quite like a unit that’s named after me,
But I’d want it to measure a thing you can see,
Like poems in Stonechat*. So, if there were four,
You’d clock up four ‘Judges’ as that issue’s score.
Then folk the world over would know it was time
To count up in ‘Judges’ their output of rhyme.
Immortality beckons; life won’t be the same
Once the unit of verse is the Judge family name.
* Stonechat is the newsletter of the Horsham Geological Field Club.
Thanks to the world-wide web’s interconnections, my web-wise son and a West Yorkshire company called Ecological Hosting, this blog’s website parent, now deceased, used to beat under the sun on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
This website’s been preoccupied
By ecological fervour,
It’s moved its digital residence
To a solar-powered server!
It’s eco-friendly, clean and green,
And humming night and day.
So point your browser without guilt
To geoverse-co-uk.
Under the Californian sky
You’ll find it, gently toasting.
It’s up and running once again
Thanks to Ecological Hosting.
(Footnote: In March 2011, all these poems were moved to wind-powered servers – see Blow, blow, thou winter wind).
A crystal of zircon (zirconium silicate) contains trace amounts of uranium which decay radioactively to lead, and can have several concentric zones of growth of different ages. The Sensitive High Resolution Ion MicroProbe (SHRIMP) technique uses a double-focused high-energy ion beam and mass spectrometer to determine the age of a tiny area (<30 µm diameter) of a single crystal.
Engagement rings with zircon
Look sparkling and attractive
But zircons trap uranium
Which makes them radioactive.
So do SHRIMP-date your zircon
On the day that you get wed –
Then check again in fifty years
In case it’s full of lead. . .
On the north-west coast of Scotland, the Stoer Group of Torridoniam sandstones are exposed at Stoer Bay. Within the purple sandstone are thin layers believed to have been formed by ancient cyanobacteria making a mat which bound the sediment surface together, as in the famous stromatolites of Australia’s Shark Bay. But you don’t have to go to the wild west of Scotland to see them.
Gentlemen, when next in Town,
Seek out that tower of high renown,
Park Lane’s Hilton (one of many),
And, with your hand-lens, spend a penny.
Around this most luxurious loo
Are algal mats exposed to view
In sections through Precambrian sands.
Examine them – then wash your hands.
Man has visited the moon six times between 1969 and 1972, but on 1 February 2010, President Obama announced budget plans which, if accepted by Congress, will effectively kill the Constellation program that called for a return to the moon by 2020.
The US has not got the money
To put man again on the moon,
So their astronauts won’t be a-roving
The regolith any time soon.
It’s been landed on, orbited, probed;
It’s been sampled, impacted and tested.
A whole load of junk has been left there,
And a whole lot of dollars invested.
Now Obama has cancelled all landings,
And his critics in NASA are mad;
But no matter what anyone else thinks,
The Man in the Moon will be glad . . .
Ever had that feeling that you know someone’s face but can’t put a name to it? Trouble is, while you’re working out who it might be, you can’t have a proper conversation with them, and it’s only when they’ve gone that you remember who they were.
Your face is familiar . . . I think we have met,
But when the encounter was, I quite forget.
Was it yesterday, last week or several years past?
You’re not quite the same as when I saw you last.
Have you put on some weight? You used to be lighter;
And that dark hair you had – now it looks a lot whiter.
Oh dear, you’re offended. Well, I would be too
If Time had changed me in the way it’s changed you.
Your name . . . it was just on the tip of my tongue,
But it’s difficult, now that you’re no longer young.
Are you still friends with Whatsname, that weird-looking bloke?
He did like his drink, and he didn’t half smoke.
I don’t think you smoked, though your teeth are quite stained,
And you’re looking so knackered, exhausted and drained –
It must be your skin tone. To put it succinctly,
It looks rather leathery, dried-up and wrinkly.
I’m afraid we must now call a halt to our meeting,
For my breakfast is ready – it’s time to be eating.
We must meet again soon, when my memory’s clearer.
Same time and same place, then? In front of this mirror?
These days, people who sell you sharp knives or alcohol are supposed to convince
themselves that you are suitably old. At my age, it’s quite flattering when
someone actually asks me, but it does make me think. I consulted the
New York Times and prepared my response,
ready for the next occasion . . .
“Are you 18 years or older?” asks the lady at the till.
“It depends,” I say, “on what you mean by ‘you’.”
She glares, and I can feel the air acquire a glacial chill
As I try to give an answer that is true.
“My cells, you see, divide: they’re reproducing all the time,
And though it’s inappropriate to boast,
My bones are young and sprightly (though their owner’s past his prime) –
My skeleton is ten years old at most!
“Just fifteen years is all the time my muscles get to see,
And sixteen years for guts, before they go.
If your question is addressed to those inner parts of me,
The answer must predictably be ‘no’.
“‘You’ve got a lovely liver,’ someone said* the other day.
Not just lovely, but so young – about a year?
My red blood cells are younger still, no more than four months old are they;
And they’re the things that keep me in top gear.
“There are some parts of me that claim to be a certain age:
My eyeballs, bits of brain, and maybe heart
Have birth-certificated vintage, and as far as I can gauge
Are unsurpassed by any other part.”
“I s’pose you think that’s funny,” says the lady at the till.
“I have to ask the question, it’s the law.
I’ll let it go this time, and I will sell you what you want,
But next time, don’t be such a crashing bore.”
* See No place to hide
I grew up with a vague notion about ‘posh’ people. I didn’t actually know any, although there was an ‘auntie’ who seemed that way to me.
Posh houses had Bow Windows,
Posh houses had no dust,
Posh houses smelled of Polish
And housed the Upper Crust.
Posh people had Hall Tables,
Black Telephones and Wine.
Posh people had a Motor Car
Which took them out to Dine.
Posh families had smart new clothes
In all the Latest Styles.
Posh families had all their teeth,
Which gave them Radiant Smiles.
Posh Man would work in London,
Travelling First Class on the train.
Posh Wife would have her friends round
Till he came back again.
Posh Children went to Prep School
For a Private Education,
Which kept them safely distant
From kids below their station.
Absorbing this as I grew up
From things that people said,
I didn’t fancy ‘Posh’ at all –
I’d just be Me instead.
A little consumer advice for little consumers.
There are too many Santas in Sussex;
Only one is the real one, I’m sure.
Wherever you go, you’re invited
To “Come and see Santa instore”
I thought I would call Trading Standards
And ask them to sort out the mess,
But it’s probably not in their remit
To deal with a Saintly excess.
So instead, I suggest that all children
Should memorise this little motto:
“To discover the real Father Christmas,
Go check out the smells in his grotto”.
If he stinks of fresh soap and deodorant,
And his boots reek of polish, I’d bet
He’s a stand-in, a Santa-clone copy,
The closest the shop folk could get.
But if there’s a hint of warm reindeer,
And his clothes have a slight sooty pong,
And he greets you by name when you meet him,
Then you won’t go so very far wrong.
I am certain the real one’s in Horsham,
But as I’m much too old to find out,
I write hoping Horsham’s fine children
Will dispel any lingering doubt.
If you sniff him out, write to the paper –
Do it now, do not waver or pause –
“Dear Sir,” you should say, “We’ve discovered,
In Horsham, the real Santa Claus!”
In 2009’s post-credit-crunch recessionary climate, Horsham Council reduced by three-quarters the amount it spent on Christmas lights. I overheard three spooky visitors giving their views on the situation.
In Horsham, the Spirit of Christmases Past
Materialised in Swan Walk,
Its candle ablaze. I stood rooted, aghast,
For the phantom had started to talk.
“Long ago,” quoth the spectre, its anger contained,
“Horsham’s lights were a joy to regard.
What Scrooge in the Council has this year ordained
That its budget be cut back so hard?”
Christmas Present appeared. “Big spending has ended,
For the pressure on costs is severe.
Taxpayers of Horsham would be well offended
If its lights cost the same as last year!”
A third apparition arrived on the scene,
Ghost of Christmas To Come, with its head
Black-hooded, a void where its face would have been,
And as silent as if it were dead. . .
As it angrily gestured, I shivered with fear,
And the other ghosts fled from its sights.
Then it vanished. But, strangely, its message was clear:
Happy Christmases aren’t made with lights!
At Holmbury St Mary in deepest Surrey, is an outpost of University College London. In October 1965, a dozen members of UCL’s ‘Rocket Group’ moved to Holmbury House which, having been donated by the electronics company Mullard Ltd, became the Mullard Space Science Laboratory. It now incorporates a number of research groups, including one on Astrophysics.
Holmbury St Mary is rural,
A tranquil, remote sort of place.
Yet the quiet folk who work in its mansion
Are trying to make sense of space.
But Gamma rays, X-rays, UV,
Do not reach the Earth. What they do
Is send up a spacecraft or satellite
For an extraterrestrial view.
Radiations (electromagnetic),
Picked up by their sensors, are plotted;
And brains (those of Mullard Space boffins)
Conjure theories that leave one’s mind knotted.
AGNs, GROs, GRBs,
Compact binaries, quasars, the Sun,
Galactic dynamics and jets
Offer hours of head-scratching fun.
The furthermost thing they have seen
In the Universe, cold, black and vast,
Is a gamma-ray burst which was active
Thirteen billion long years in the past.
Four per cent of the mass of the cosmos
Is all that we currently know.
The rest is Dark Matter and Energy,
So they’ve still got a long way to go. . .
It’s said that there are no rhymes for the word ‘purple’. Now there’s a challenge. . .
Young Peregrine Purple
Knows well that to burp’ll
Annoy Mum and Dad every time.
And that sort of twerp’ll
Know, too, that to slurp’ll
Be to soup-supping parents a crime.
A remote-sensing instrument on India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission has found water on the Moon. It confirms suspicions previously raised by results from the Cassini and Deep Impact probes But it’s not water as we know it, but ‘molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimetres of the moon’s surface’, or very fine films of water coating the lunar dirt particles.
On the Moon they’ve found some water,
But it’s locked into the dust,
So you’d need to scrape the molecules
From the regolithic crust.
The problem has been aired before,
By Coleridge, I think:
“Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
Beales opened in Horsham recently, using this message to entice customers to buy their wares. But I needn’t have worried that local people would take them at their word.
There’s a shop that’s just opened in Horsham,
And its adverts are shockingly rude.
The message is clear: they’re suggesting
That you visit their shop in the nude.
But the good folk of Horsham are rising
As I write, and I’m very impressed:
They are gatecrashing Beales in their thousands,
Not naked, but properly dressed.
That’ll teach all those marketing whiz-kids!
They should realise, when push comes to shove,
We Horsham folk do what we want to –
We’re Sussex, and we won’t be druv.
The Mixon Rock, a reef of hard shelly Alveolina limestone 2km to the south of Selsey Bill near Chichester (known locally as Chi), protects the Bill itself from the worst effects of wave action. It contains the tests (shells) of the Eocene foram Quinqueloculina, whose spokeswoman is justifiably proud of her part in saving Sussex from the sea:
I’m Quinqueloculina,
A tiny Eocener.
My tests are choc-a-bloc
In Selsey’s Mixon Rock.
At Pevensey and Chi,
Romans built their walls up high,
Gaining strength by building wide,
Stuffed with Mixon Rock inside.
Now it came, that Roman core,
From a reef not far offshore;
So my part in its construction
Saved poor Selsey from destruction!
I’ve never really done this. I’m scared it might come true.
Once, I read all my poems to Maureen.
By the end, I found Maureen was snorin’.
When she woke, she said, “Lad,
Your poems aren’t bad;
It’s your voice – it’s so dreadfully borin. . .”
It’s a philosophy regularly trotted out by writers and broadcasters on gardening, but I don’t think they stop to ponder the implications.
Our garden’s wildlife-friendly,
But when wildlife comes to visit
It devastates our vegetables.
Now that’s not friendly, is it?
If wildlife won’t be nice to us,
I’ll go on the attack:
I’ll shout at them and be quite rude
Until they all turn back.
Then I’ll cover all the garden
With sheets of see-through plastic.
(Well, when food supplies are threatened,
The solution must be drastic . . .)
I’ll make some holes to let in rain,
Providing irrigation
Through special valves, which won’t admit
Those objects of vexation.
There’ll be some airlock openings
To ventilate the plot,
And automatic sun shades
For when the weather’s hot.
I’ll let in worms and hoverflies,
And pollinating bees,
For they are friendly wildlife
And may do just as they please!
Then we’ll look out at the garden
And think, “It’s such a shame.
Our garden’s wildlife-friendly,
But it isn’t quite the same . . .”
According to the presenter of the show at the South Downs Planetarium, the Sun is not behaving itself (it’s July, 2009). Its sunspot cycle, normally a fairly regular repeating cycle from virtually none to lots and back again, is overdue its next increase.
It seems the Sun has gone to sleep:
Its spots have disappeared
And not returned when they were due.
It’s really rather weird.
They’ve mostly been as regular
As a clock, well oiled and wound.
Eleven years each cycle took
On average, it’s been found.
When last this happened, Earth got cold
From 1645
For seventy chilly years, until
The spotless Sun revived.
But now we’re in a minimum
That’s stayed a tad too long.
I hope the Sun will wake up soon,
And nothing has gone wrong. . .
They were carving it in Lithuania around 3000 bc, and it’s mentioned by Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Strabo, Theophrastus, and Pliny the Elder. More recently, it was central to the plot of the 1993 film Jurassic Park. We hear more from a piece of what the ancient Greeks called ‘petrified sunlight’.
I came, so my family history tells,
From an ancient Estonian tree.
I was formed in that pine’s epithelial cells,
But I longed for the day I’d be free.
Soon gravity, leveller extr’ordinaire,
Saw me ooze from a branch and took hold.
As a glutinous globule, I fell through the air,
A teardrop of resinous gold!
For millions of years I was buried and heated:
To copal, then amber, in stages.
Now exposed at the surface, I’m feeling depleted –
I suppose it’s the burden of ages?
My volatile turpenoid fractions have fled,
They left long ago for the skies.
My colour, once yellow, is turning to red
As my molecules polymerise.
And inside, a lodger I can’t get evicted:
A spider, her web still intact.
(It isn’t my fault, I could not have predicted
She’d get stuck and entombed on impact.)
Organic, amorphous, and almost aglow –
‘Petrified sunlight’, that’s nice!
Its what those old Greeks called me long, long ago.
Now I can be yours – for a price!
Horsham’s Shelley Fountain is also known as The Rising Universe because of the way it appears to be propelled upwards by water gushing from its base, has been out of action for months. Its huge globe is resting on a steel framework behind a security fence.
When next will the Universe Rise
On its watery jets to the skies?
Must it see out its days
Perched on two RSJs?
It’s a sight that is sore to the eyes.
If the poor thing’s in need of repair,
Let me know. In a flash I’ll be there,
And its internal plumbing
Will again be heard humming
As the Universe takes to the air.
Postscript: See Horsham’s Marmite. . .
Dr Jonathan Paul, of Imperial College London, has studied the geology surrounding the London Underground. He explained how much of the system runs through the London Clay, and how this, though not homogeneous, is much easier – and therefore cheaper – to tunnel through than the overlying alluvium and gravels or the Lambeth Group of mixed, highly permeable, material below. That’s music to the ears of Transport for London (TfL), whose job is to implement the Greater London transport strategy.
Next time you’re on the Underground,
As you rumble on your way,
Consider what is all around –
It’s probably London Clay.
Below the city’s busy roads,
It’s sticky, cold and grey;
But nothing else around bears loads
As well as London Clay.
“Impervious, though prone to heave,”
Is what the experts say.
But tunnellers try not to leave
The trusty London Clay.
“The Lambeth Group is just a mess,
And TfL won’t pay
The higher costs, as you might guess,
Compared to London Clay.”
So on your subterranean travels,
As the Tube bears you away,
Be grateful you’re below the gravels
In the good old London Clay.
You’re chatting to someone when you begin to wonder if you’ve said it all before. Know the feeling?
I think we might have had that conversation once before.
If so, I’m very sorry – you must think me such a bore.
The memory’s not so good these days. (Oh dear, I can’t be sure,
But I think we might have had this conversation once before . . . )
[Image: sciencewith pallagi.blogspot.com]
In the human male, the annular positioning of the prostate around the urethra, and
its benign enlargement in later years, is a “design fault” that evolution has yet to
deal with. Mine has just been the subject of a number of non-surgical investigations.
They’ve had a look inside me
With X-rays and ultrasound.
They seemed to be quite taken
With all the things they found.
The youthful radiographer,
As he pointed out my bones,
Said, “Good news on your kidneys –
I can’t see any stones”.
The hospital’s sonographer,
As she smothered me with gel,
Said, “You’ve got a lovely liver,
And your spleen looks good as well.
“Your prostate is a bit enlarged –
That’s natural, never mind –
And that is why your bladder
Keeps a little bit behind.
“Your kidneys, though, are normal,
On the left and . . . on the right.
Internally, your body
Is a fascinating sight”.
Well, I’m glad I made them happy
By exposing my inside.
Beware, though: with these characters
There is no place to hide.
If your State of Denmark’s rotten
They will find the source of rot –
For they get to see right through you:
What they see is what you’ve got.
In the days of steam radio, the BBC used to broadcast what it called “SOS messages” just before the News on the Home Service. They became rarer and rarer and are now extinct. I miss them.
“Now here is an SOS message,”
The radio used to declare.
You’d know that someone was in trouble,
And you’d wait to learn who was, and where.
“Would Arthur McArthur, of Ayrshire,
Now believed to be somewhere near Rhyl,
Please contact this telephone number
Where his mother is dangerously ill.”
I used always to listen intently:
Would the next SOS be for me?
I wondered what SOS stood for –
“Save Our Souls,” said my Dad, “do you see?”
But today, you don’t hear SOSs,
It seems there aren’t Souls to be Saved.
So my name won’t be heard on the wireless,
And I’ll not win the fame that I craved.
When the senses aren’t there as a reference, the brain struggles to create a reality. I think I know why.
On the desk inside my head
Just before I go to bed
Are all my life’s events, stacked neatly there;
But, though I’ve never seen her,
In the night I’m sure a cleaner
Comes and throws the whole lot in the air.
Then my brain, or so it seems,
Tries to join them up in dreams;
And I’m sure it really tries to do its best;
But the sequence of events
In my dreaming makes no sense
As I scurry on a helter-skelter quest.
There are people I should know,
Who appear to come and go
Though I never seem to recognise their faces;
And the scene is always changing,
Never static, rearranging,
And I end up in some very funny places . . .
Often situations tricky,
And predicaments quite sticky,
Seem to come from nowhere just to test me out.
Will my dream-self stay alive?
Will I manage to survive?
I always do, despite a fleeting doubt.
At last my mystery cleaner
Comes (although I’ve never seen her)
To tidy up (although I can’t afford her).
Does she check there’s no mistakes
By the time my brain awakes?
I really hope she puts things back in order . . .
Some activities just can’t be combined.
An active young fellow called Simon,
Whose hobbies were jugglin’ and climbin’,
Thought he’d try both at once,
But found out such stunts
Demand very accurate timin’ . . .
The 3000 or so rock and mineral specimens that Charles Darwin sent back to England during his Beagle voyage languished in a basement at his home, Down House in Kent, until a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled them to be properly recorded and curated at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. An exhibition displaying them is due to open in 2009. This behaviour confirms that Darwin was a typical geologist. In his later years, he was afflicted by a mysterious illness. I wondered if the two facts were related.
If your field-tripping rocks
End up stashed in a box,
And the box is put somewhere secure,
And if soon many more
Are put into your store,
You’ve an ailment for which there’s no cure.
After years of collecting,
If you find you’re neglecting
To remember which basement they are in,
Your ailment’s the same
(Whatever its name)
As the one that afflicted Charles Darwin.
Horsham’s swans got their new plinth (see Promises . . .) in March 2009.
The folk of Horsham made a fuss
When Swan Walk’s swans took flight;
And, though the birds appeared again,
They carried on their fight.
Those swans have waited patiently,
Feet poised as if to land,
But not on water as they’d thought:
Instead, a box-like stand.
But now Swan Walk’s iconic birds
Can wet their webs once more
In flowing water, pure and cool,
Just as they did before.
“Hooray!” the folk of Horsham cry;
“Hooray!” the swans reply,
“It’s thanks to you, good Horsham folk,
Our pool’s no longer dry.”
It didn’t last long, though – see Swan talk 3.
Ostracods are generally rare at Smokejacks, the clay pit at Ockley, Surrey. But Dr. David Horne discovered a very localized assemblage of these microscopic bivalve crustaceans there, close to where Iguanodon bones had been found. He concluded that the area had been a ‘temporary pond’ on what is now an area of Weald Clay, and that the dinosaur’s decay had enriched the water to the extent that algae flourished. The ostracods probably arrived by air as desiccation-proof eggs on or in the bodies of migrating birds such as Arctic terns. The Cyprididae group of ostracods use various means of reproduction, including parthenogenesis, as one of the fossilised travellers explains.
A migratory tern
Carried me on his stern
As an egg, on his northward migration.
I didn’t feel well off
When at Smokejacks I fell off –
It caused me some great consternation.
For I’d not, as a rule,
Choose a temporary pool
To grow from an egg and to breed.
But an ostracod saying
Is: “A dino, decaying,
Makes a soup in which algae succeed”.
And at Smokejacks, I found
On its wet, clayey ground,
Where Iguanodon had slumped to his doom,
That the pool where he lay
In his mortified way
Was alive with a green algal bloom.
Now algae are food
For an ostracod brood,
So that saying turned out to be wise.
With my cells rehydrating,
I think about mating,
But where are the ostracod guys?
What few there have been
I think were last seen
In South Africa’s warm ecosphere,
So with no men about
I’ll manage without –
No sex, please, we’re ostracods here!
Iron-working in the Weald ended at Ashburnham in the early 1800s, stymied by difficult transport, Civil War destruction of forges, increasing demand for timber, Abraham Darby’s use of coke at Ironbridge, and competition from Swedish manufacturers.
“Any old iron, any old iron,
Any, any, any old iron?”
Across the Weald, ore pits would yield
Tons of siderite, then be backfilled.
In the past, bloom and blast
Fashioned iron you could rely on;
But the Swedes made it better and they made it cheap!
“Old iron, old iron?”
(With apologies to Charles Collins, Fred Terry and E.A. Sheppard)
‘Difficulties have been resolved’, declared a spokesman for the owners of Horsham’s Swan Walk, who removed Lorne McKean’s creation from the shopping centre in 2007. The sculpture reappeared many months later, but with a wooden structure replacing its original plinth of flowing water. A replacement plinth is promised. . .
This roving reporter
Is glad that the water
Will soon flow again in Swan Walk.
The idea’s a good ’un,
But the proof of the puddin’
Will be in the eatin’, not talk. . .
(For the next episode in this saga, see ’Swanderful).
On December 22, 1938, Hendrik Goosen, captain of a trawler approaching the South African port of East London caught an unusual fish, 1.5 m long and weighing 60 kg, near the mouth of the Chalumna River. The town’s museum curator, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (1907–2004), arranged for a taxidermist to prevent its further decay. She then called in James Leonard Brierley Smith (1897–1968), a professor of chemistry and amateur ichthyologist, who recognized it as a living specimen of coelacanth, a creature thought to have been long extinct. It was fourteen years before another was found, near the island of Anjouan in the Comoros archipelago.
Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae)
The fossil record seemed to show that, as far as we could know,
The coelacanth had vanished from the scene.
Its existence had been spacious, from Devonian to Cretaceous,
But science thought that’s all there’d ever been.
Then one day in ’thirty-eight, curator Marge was in a state –
She was puzzled, but excited to her core.
For a fish had just been caught which astonished her. She thought,
“I have never seen the like of it before!”
“This fish is quite unique, so, before it starts to reek,
I’ll take it back by cab to my museum.
Then I’ll search the world in earnest for a skilful taxidermist
Who’ll preserve its features so that folks can see ’em.”
That done, our Marge was chuffed to see the great fish stuffed,
And telegraphed James Leonard Brierley Smith.
He took one look, appraising. . . “A coelacanth – amazing!
This could become a modern urban myth!
“Now then, what can be its name? Who deserves the finder’s fame?”
He knew that only Marge deserved the praise.
“You saved the thing, it’s true, so I’ll name it after you:
Latimeria chalumnae, to coin a phrase!
“We must find some more of these, so I’ve hatched a cunning wheeze:
I will put up ‘Wanted’ posters all around,
Then the fishermen can match this fish’s portrait ’gainst their catch.”
And in ’fifty-two, another one was found.
So Smith pulled strings, and flew to Anjouan. He knew
He must wrest the thing away from French control.
But the Frenchies wanted fame in this living-fossil game,
And refused poor Brierley Smith his rightful rôle.
Since then, we’ve learned much more. When they’re near the ocean floor,
They may often seem to stand upon their head;
But today there is no doubt they have an electronic snout
Which can sniff out wriggly things so they get fed.
They hang out beneath the waves in the darkest ocean caves,
And give birth to live young coelacanths – it’s true!
But it’s thanks to Brierley Smith that we now have facts, not myth.
(Oh, and Marge and Captain Hendrik, thank you too.)
Mass, according to current thinking by physicists, might be a property given to certain particles by an all-pervasive field, named after its proposer, Professor Peter Higgs in 1964. As physics requires all fields to have an associated particle, finding the Higgs particle – the Higgs boson, or ‘God particle’ – would confirm the existence of the field, and thus also explain how some things have mass. One of the jobs of the Large Hadron Collider, built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, was to look for evidence of the Higgs boson. The LHC was opened on 10 September 2008, but broke down soon afterwards. If the Higgs boson is not found, it could mean that the Standard Model of how matter is constructed is wrong; but the Standard Model is in any case unable to accommodate Einstein’s explanation of what gravity is.
The Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN
Did God make the proto-Higgs boson?
Did He switch on His own LHC?
Has the Emperor of Physics no clothes on?
It seems we must just wait and see.
When the hardware at CERN has been mended,
Will the Higgs show its presence a bit?
If it does, physics’ work isn’t ended,
For gravity still doesn’t fit . . .
If it doesn’t, our model’s mistaken
(As it has been before in its history).
It will leave many heads being shaken,
And the nature of mass still a mystery . . .
It looks like a new Standard Model
Will have to be worked out at CERN,
Though I doubt if there’s room in our noddle
For all that we still have to learn. . .
Somehow, the 2008 Swan Walk Santa seemed remote and mechanical.
Has Santa got a problem?
His limbs look stiff to me.
He sings a bit, then dozes off,
While stuck inside a tree!
Swan Walk has fenced off Santa,
And children wonder why;
But if you watch him closely,
You’ll see him wink an eye. . .
“Don’t worry, Horsham children,
I’m resting, I’m alright.
My sleigh’s already loaded up,
All set for Christmas night.
“My grotto needs a refit,
My reindeer must be rested,
My eyes don’t see so well these days –
I need to get them tested.
“But I’ll be out on Christmas Eve,
For I’m a tough old chappie.
I’ll do my very, very best
To make your Christmas happy.”
They rarely get the good tunes – I wondered how they felt.
“I really can’t win, moaned a Second Violin,”
As its music was put on the stand.
“I think I’ve been cursed to not be a First,
Though why, I just can’t understand.
“I can cope with vibrato, legato, staccato,
Andante, vivace, the lot;
And I’m built just the same. What is their little game –
What have Firsts got that Seconds have not?
“Could I start pulling strings and see what that brings?
Catch the eye of the Leader, maybe?
No, that is just risible: to him, I’m invisible,
He has eyes for his Strad, never me.
“So it seems I am fated to be relegated
To pad out the sound of each chord,
Stuck under a chin as a Second Violin,
Second-fiddling, my talents ignored.”
A local enthusiast has plotted the course of Sussex’s River Arun across the range of Wealden geology using the impressive perspective imaging power of Google Earth.
Flying high in the sky with our friend Google Earth,
Looking down on the Weald’s massive horseshoe-like girth,
You can see all the rivers, the North and South Downs,
The roads and the railways, the hamlets, the towns.
You can see how the Horn Brook, on Tunbridge Wells Sands,
Feeds into the Arun on Wealden Clay lands;
How the Horsham Stone ridge makes it flow to the west
Before it turns south in its sea-level quest;
How the Rother, frustrated by Chalk, joins the flow
Near the Wild Brooks that Google Earth sees down below;
Over Greensands (not green, but an iron-oxide shade),
Through the Downs in a gap that the Arun once made.
Then it winds over terraces laid in times past,
Past steep-sided hangers until, at long last,
The voice of the sea calls, “Your journey was worth it,
And people will know they can now Google-Earth it!”
The signs are there for those who can sense them.
A teacher of dance once confessed
He’d discovered a pregnancy test:
He could sense the condition
From her weight disposition,
Long before the young lady had guessed!
Horsham council has hired snow machines to whiten the place up on Saturdays in December. (With apologies to Irving Berlin.)
The FTSE’s falling, your house won’t sell,
The economy’s in a bad way.
There’s never been such a day
In Horsham, I hear folk say,
For it’s November 2008.
Things can only get better – just wait. . .
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know,
But with global warming
No ice is forming,
But look! There’s artificial snow!
They’re dreaming up a white Christmas,
Biodegradable and bright.
So don’t worry, things will come right:
Saturdays this Christmas will be white!
I found a cream that stops my hands cracking up in cold, dry weather. The packaging describes how it does it. (Other creams do it too, of course)
As my age is increasing, my skin keeps on creasing;
The Sun is to blame, it would seem.
That’s why I’m applying
“Q10 Age-Defying
Double Strength UV-Filtering Cream”.
Will it “fight all the signs” of those wretched “fine lines”?
It had better – this stuff isn’t cheap.
Will it “re-moisturise”,
Or is it all lies?
Are its promises only skin deep?
Must I go on for ever with a skin like old leather?
No! Q10’s a “coenzyme”, you see.
It “supports ageing skin”,
Somehow, “from within”;
And that sounds just the ticket to me.
So I’ll carry on dreaming that regular creaming
Will do what the ads seem to say.
And my skin will stay smooth,
Without wrinkle or groove,
While the rest of me shrivels away.
Dentists must have a different view of life.
I saw my dentist in the town,
Approaching from the south. But
He didn’t recognise my face –
I must have had my mouth shut.
The talent doesn’t come with the name.
A singer called Henry Caruso
Had a terrible voice – and he knew so.
He thought, ‘It’s a shame
That a chap with my name
Cannot sing like Caruso would do so’.
They don’t seem to make things to be mended these days; am I a vanishing breed?
My passion is for mending things,
I’m just that sort of bloke.
To me, a thing’s more interesting
If it’s well and truly broke.
A rattly bike, a wobbly chair,
A clock whose tick needs curing:
What other folk would throw away
I really find alluring.
Just give me pliers, nuts and bolts,
A hammer, tape and glue,
And give me something old and broke –
I’ll make it just like new.
I can’t resist the urge to fix
Whatever needs restoring;
New things that always work okay
Are boring, boring, BORING!
Arthur Koestler, in his book The sleepwalkers (Hutchinson, 1959), relates how science is not immune from the stifling effect of dogmatic received wisdom.
Old Plato was dogmatic: “The world of you and me
Is but a shadow on a wall; it isn’t real, you see!
You cannot know the truth of things while you are stuck within
A body of decay and change: you must escape your skin.
“The real world must be perfect, for the gods would not make tat.
To know perfection, think it, there’s no other way than that.
It’s no good working out how stars and planets move,
For what you see is limited, and so is what you’ll prove.
“Well, I have thought,” said Plato, “and here is all you need:
All motion goes in circles and is uniform in speed.
The universe is spherical, the best and perfect form.
Your thinking from this moment must be governed by this norm.”
And so it was that Ptolemy, and Aristotle too,
And scientists for ages felt that’s what they had to do.
Their thinking had to get the answer Plato deemed was right
Or no-one would take notice. Oh, what a sorry plight!
When nineteen hundred years had passed from Plato’s time on Earth,
Copernicus worked loyally for all that he was worth
To build with epicycles Plato’s ‘perfect’ universe;
But then came Kepler, who could see this dogma was a curse.
In medicine, old Galen had the same effect. His creed
Meant progress in anatomy stood still: there was no need
For questions to be asked when everything was ‘known’.
For fifteen hundred years or so, old Galen ruled alone.
In 1628, bold William Harvey said, “He’s wrong!
The heart it is, and not the lungs, that moves the blood along”.
His colleagues scoffed, some patients left, but Harvey stood his ground,
“I’ve done dissections, done the sums, and that is what I found”.
When reputation blocks dissent, and evidence is ignored,
The human mind is hamstrung, and life’s mysteries aren’t explored.
It’s good to doubt a dogma: if there isn’t any proof,
And the facts don’t fit the dogma, use the facts to find the truth.
A milestone (probably) in a young life.
He’s six weeks old
And good as gold,
To granny and granddad beguiling.
I think he grinned –
Or was it just wind?
No, look, can you see? He’s smiling!
After nearly a year’s absence the swans reappeared in their original place in Horsham’s shopping centre, but on a ‘temporary’, waterless plinth.
I see the Swan Walk swans are back,
A sight-for-sore-eyes sight.
But something’s missing from the scene –
There’s something not quite right.
The other day, they seemed distraught.
Today, they seemed distraughter:
“We’re coming in to land,” they cried,
“Please give us back our water!”
[The shopping centre’s management heard their anguished cries, but considered that the best way to prevent the birds harming themselves was to remove the entire sculpture. After a long absence and a public outcry, the swans returned, but something was still missing. . . (see Promises).]
As customers of toddler groups will know, this rhyme (and its tune) sticks in your head. It certainly had an effect on mine.
I’m a dingle dangle scarecrow
With a flippy, floppy hat;
I can shake my hands like this,
And shake my feet like that.
And a lot of good it’s done me,
This old flippy, floppy hat:
All the crows just have a laugh
When I shake my feet like that!
Well, there must be more to living
Than a flippy, floppy hat.
Oh, for lively conversation
And some intellectual chat.
Are there any lady scarecrows
With a flippy, floppy hat
Who can shake their hands like this,
And shake their feet like that?
In my dreams, you’re standing out there
With your flippy, floppy hat,
And your hands that shake like this,
And your feet that shake like that.
We can never be united,
But our lives need not be flat
While we shake our hands like this,
And shake our feet like that.
If you’re real, please send a message
By a passing mouse or rat,
Then my hands will shake like this,
And my feet will shake like that !
According to research by Professor Richard Selley, of Imperial College London, persistent global warming will eventually make the south-facing slopes of Loch Ness suitable for viticulture. But a famous local recluse does not relish the prospect.
I am Nessie, the Monster, ye ken,
And ma home’s here in Scotland’s Great Glen.
I am shy, so I stay oot o’ sight in the day,
Though I do break the waves noo and then.
Folk try tae describe what I am,
While others believe I’m a sham.
They say, “Och, the noo, it just canna be true.
’Tis the whisky – ye’ve had a wee dram.”
I have noticed that this loch o’ mine
Is warming. To some folk, that’s fine:
They’ll plant grapes on the side o’ the Great Glen divide
And mak a real guid Scottish wine.
Then thousands of people will flock
Tae the slopes o’ this auld glacial loch
Tae sample, the noo, a wee tumbler or two.
And they’ll call it “Auld Nessie’s Medoc”.
But Auld Nessie they’ll not see again,
Warm waters I can’t entertain.
I shall sink tae the deep, and there I will keep
Ma ain counsel. Ye’ll seek me in vain.
This grandchild’s parents seem determined to make life poetically difficult.
A boy’s been born into the world
He soon will be let loose on,
A brother for Amelia:
He’s Nathan William Hughson.
(I thought there must be better things
To think about all day than
Trying, unsuccessfully, to find
A decent rhyme for ‘Nathan’.)
A turbidite is a deposit formed under water by the gravity-driven flow of an unstable sediment. It can be triggered by a storm, earthquake or rapid sea-level change. Deepwater turbidite deposits now provide excellent reservoirs of oil and gas worldwide, and are being prospected for by major companies. This is the life story of one of them.
Conceived from the grains of aeolian sand
Fresh-eroded from rocks of an earlier land,
Fallopially river-flushed mile after mile,
A turbidite foetus implants for a while
On a continent’s shelf, where there’s little impediment
To the gradual accretion of thick sandy sediment.
But when its time comes, its cohesion can’t cope
And it’s born as it plummets at speed down the slope,
Carving canyons that reach to the deep ocean floor.
Its arrival is followed by more sand, and more. . .
But gravity keeps a firm grip on its child
As it flows o’er the depths in vast fan shapes restyled.
Maturing, the turbidite slows to a stop,
Then layers of silt form a mud seal on top.
And now, as it rests from a life helter-skelter,
This deep-water turbidite acts as a shelter
To oil or gas seeping from rocks down below
And contains it, arresting its high-pressure flow.
That’s why it is searched for by seismic surveys,
By drilling and coring and 3-D displays:
Its oil and gas content is needed by man,
Who’ll burn the stuff up just as fast as he can.
So a peaceful old age without worry or toil
Is not for a turbidite full up with oil.
Getting the measure of things.
“I’ve noticed,” said ten year-old Peter,
“How incredibly distant my feet are.
From the tip of my nose
To the ends of my toes,
Is considerably more than a metre.”
On 6 May 2008, a landslip occurred between Lyme Regis and Charmouth, part of Dorset’s World Heritage Jurassic Coast. Geologists are drawn to such events in anticipation of abundant and unusual finds. The finds this time were particularly unusual, because the area affected included a former landfill site at the top of the cliffs. (The NHM is London’s Natural History museum, which likes to be informed of unusual discoveries.)
There’s been a landslip in Lyme Regis,
Revealing unexpected ghosts:
Fine specimens of fossil fridges
Exposed on its Jurassic Coasts.
Geologists arrive, excited –
Jurassic white goods are quite rare.
They all confer when something’s sighted:
“Electrolux, or Frigidaire?”
They can’t agree on date or name,
But when they’ve found a few more pieces,
They stroke their beards and then exclaim,
“We think we’ve found a brand new species!”
The NHM soon gets involved
And clambers o’er the jumbled scene.
“It’s clear,” they say, “the problem’s solved:
It’s Landfilloides (Holocene).”
With only a few quarries still active in West Sussex, there aren’t many natural exposures of the underlying strata; so the place to look for what’s under the ground is in the buildings on top of it.
The building stones of Sussex, like good Sussex folk and true,
Don’t advertise themselves by showing off like others do.
There’s limestone, sandstone, chalk and flint, arrayed in many a hue:
In watery beds laid down, they rarely surface into view.
Apart from Chalk along the coast, and shiny flints left high and dry
Along our Sussex shores, and sandstone rocks at Chiddinglye,
They’re reluctant to expose themselves, demure and rather shy;
And to tell one from the other often takes a practised eye.
There are Hythe Formation sandstone, Horsham Stone in slab and block,
Travertine and Carstone, ‘Sussex Marble’, Bognor Rock;
Foreign sarsens and erratics too have joined the local stock.
And maybe, on a sea-shore, you may see the geo-clock
Pressed as footprints in the sediments where dinosaurs would throng.
Sussex stones are in our churches and our castles, standing strong,
And roofing our old houses with stone tiles that last so long.
Sussex stone and Sussex folk: both to Sussex do belong.
(See also Sussex Marble and Paludina)
Don’t believe everything you read on a sign.
“Heavy plant crossing,” it said,
The sign a few metres ahead.
So I slowed down to see
This rare, ambulant tree –
But a digger was crossing instead.
The Moon has no atmosphere. But the Earth has, as a recent personal experience demonstrated.
A total eclipse of the Moon was due,
So the astronomical crowd
Got up at three in the morning to see
The Moon eclipsed – by cloud . . .
A birthday reminded me of the number rhymes used in Bingo (Lotto, or Housey-Housey in its less commercialized form). I had to resort to www.bingo-uk.co.uk to refresh ancient memories of Christmases past.
In Bingo-speak, I’m clickety-click,
All the sixes, sixty-six.
One past my old age pension, and
Three score past pick and mix.
It seems like only yesterday
I’d reached the key of the door.
After two little ducks, a duck and a flea,
The question was: did you score?
By twenty-nine I’m doing fine;
But after flirty thirty,
I get up and run at thirty-one
’Cos her boyfriend’s getting shirty. . .
Real life begins at forty,
And after time for fun
Comes Winnie the Pooh (and Tigger, too) –
Er, honey, anyone?
I rise and shine at forty-nine,
Then, in scarcely the blink of an eye,
I’m hurtling down the Brighton line.
My word, how time does fly!
Blind sixty next, then baker’s bun,
And then it’s tickety-boo.
But now I’m clickety-click; and that
Just now, will have to do.
For who knows what numbers might yet be called?
Is this Bingo game benign?
If I strive and strive at staying alive,
Will the top of the house be mine?
At Lynwick Street in Sussex, the Baggeridge Brick company (now part of Wienerberger) makes its product using clay extracted from what is now a large, muddy hole in the ground. We went there on a field trip, hoping to find the beautiful, faint remains of Cretaceous airborne insects. They have been found there in the past, but finds this time were, in geology-speak, not abundant.
Weald Clay is a sediment, laid long ago
As a rain of fine particles, falling like snow
Through water, to settle as thick, sticky dough
In which dragonflies fell when their time came to go.
In Lynwick Street, Baggeridge dug up a field
To strip out the clay where these fossils are sealed.
In their brick pit we searched for them, boots all congealed;
But still they remain in the mud of the Weald,
For we failed to unearth them, I’m sorry to say,
Save a wingtip or two. So that’s where they’ll stay,
Entombed in their Wealden Beds, gooey and grey,
Awaiting extraction the Baggeridge way.
It amazes me how they do it; are builders a special breed, or could there be a more sinister explanation?
Stock up on high-strength tea-bags, there’s cups of tea to make!
The builders are at work today: each time they take a break,
They sink a pot of Assam brewed up long and very strong.
The puzzle is, how all that tea stays in them, all day long?
It wouldn’t do to get caught short when halfway up a ladder;
So maybe, deep inside, they have a special Builder’s Bladder?
There is another answer, one on which I will not dwell,
But recently I’ve noticed that our garden’s growing well. . .
Microfossils are microscopic elements of ancient organisms, found embedded in ancient marine limestones and shales. To extract them involves dissolving away the surrounding rock and putting the residue through various separation processes. Through a microscope, they are beautiful but often enigmatic – rich material for academics!
We are tiny microfossils
Who are very, very small;
And some of us are so minute
You won’t see us at all
Unless you’ve got some solvents,
And some sieves (from coarse to fine),
Some sodium polytungstate,
And a lab, and lots of time.
It’s messy and it’s smelly,
But you’ll need all that to free us
From our Ordovician prison;
But we’re worth it when you see us.
We are conodonts and forams,
Ostracods and all the rest,
And we hope our great diversity
Will leave you well impressed.
You will wonder where we came from,
What we were in ancient seas;
Then you’ll write your learned theses,
And you’ll get your PhDs.
The world will never know what a gem it was. And neither will I.
Last night I dreamt a poem:
It was good, and it was clever.
But when I woke, the words had gone;
It won’t be published, ever.
It’s 2007, and local mothers-to-be are wondering how far they’ll have to travel when the time comes, now that NHS maternity services have gone from nearby Crawley Hospital and are likely disappear from the Princess Royal Hospital at Haywards Heath. The West Sussex Primary Care Trust (PCT) is consulting on three options for relocating them, but they all seem a long way from Horsham. . .
The journey to maternity
Is looking like eternity –
No unit left on Crawley’s soil,
And closure planned at Princess Royal.
It will be safer then, you see,
According to the PCT,
Whose options are for distant birthing:
Redhill and Brighton; maybe Worthing.
But if your baby’s in a hurry
And there’s no time to reach East Surrey,
You’ll have to do the best you’re able.
So how about a birthing stable?
It happened once before, I’m told,
When visitors brought myrrh and gold.
But risk assessments were not done
For what they said was God’s own Son;
And birth contractions in a hovel,
Obstetrically, though rather novel,
Are ill-advised. A better plan:
Move house to Redhill while you can.
That way, your baby’s free from dangers
Lurking in those messy mangers.
For stable births are pretty scary –
Unless, of course, your name is Mary. . .
Dr. Caroline Smith and colleagues have collected meteorites from Australia’s Nullabor desert, with a BBC film crew on their tail. The final shot was of the geologists walking into the distance, but as she did so, she spotted another meteorite and stopped to collect it. She described how the fate of such an object was to be sliced in half ‘to let the aliens out’. She thought she was joking, but a voice from within the meteorite tells its own story:
A long time ago, on the Nullabor Plain,
A shower of meteorites fell down like rain;
And ever since then quite unnoticed they’ve lain,
Until fairly recently. Let me explain.
Though my home planet, Mars, has ‘canals’ and a ‘face’*,
It’s really a most inhospitable place:
Ultraviolet and cosmic rays blast it from space
Through our thin atmosphere. It was tough for our race.
That’s why we’d evolved into creatures so small
That no Earthling, unaided, could see us at all –
We lived inside rocks. Things were cramped, I recall,
With a lattice of atoms for bedroom and hall.
But we’d seen how an impact, imparting a shock
To the crust of our planet, could break up a block
And send into space a huge fountain of rock;
Was that how we’d start a new Martian epoch?
Our question was answered: the answer was Yes!
And that’s how we came down to Earth (did you guess?)
In a deep hibernation, to offset the stress.
But we hoped we’d be found in an eon or less.
Few Earthlings have passed since our waiting began,
So imagine our joy when the BBC man
Said, ‘Just walk down the track, then its all in the can!’,
And you found us and took us to your caravan.
Now we wait for release. But you’ll miss us unless
Your microscopes carefully search each recess.
We might look like ‘aliens’, that much we’ll confess;
But please don’t give up . . . SOS . . . SOS . . .
* See Earth to Mars
A simple idea for an oil-rich country like Libya: build pipelines to move water from under the desert, where it’s not needed, to the populated coastal areas, where it is. Commentators argue that better things for the country that could have been done with the money, but it helped bring its military leader, Colonel Muammar Al Qadhafi, a degree of international acceptance.
The Great Man-made River is grand.
It’s a river but not as we know it:
It crosses Sahara’s vast sand,
Piped a few metres below it.
It sucks out the water that’s lain
Within aquifers formed long ago.
From desert wells, huge concrete drains
Route it north to the plain down below
In a ‘River’ three thousand miles long
For the cities on Libya’s coast,
Where its six million citizens throng –
Where Qadhafi says they need it most.
The aquifers, though, won’t refill.
Once it’s gone, it is gone, as they say.
So the outlook’s not quite such a thrill –
The River will stop, one fine day.
If they use it for crop irrigation
As well as for washing and drinking,
It will not be too long to cessation:
Within fifty years, some are thinking.
And hydrologists say, in a while
This rapid depletion could cause
Much seepage away from the Nile,
And Egyptian/Libyan wars.
But there’s something that’s certainly true:
For Qadhafi, it’s useful PR.
“Look, world, what we Libyans can do!”
Says the voice of the GMMR.
In September 2007, the management of the Swan Walk shopping centre in Horsham had an “environmental and safety review”, and decided that the bronze sculpture of three swans landing on water would have to go. Passing by the white, padlocked, tomb-like enclosure that temporarily adorned the centre of Swan Walk, I thought I heard this plaintive call from within:
We don’t know why we’re going;
We don’t know when, or where.
We’re innocent of any crime –
It all seems so unfair.
We pose no risk to shoppers,
In fact we give much pleasure;
And yet the management insist,
“It’s a Health and Safety measure”.
Have we been such a menace
Since first we landed here?
How come that all you Horsham folk
Survived for many a year?
We reckon there’s a reason
That we’ve been made to go:
We take up useful retail space,
And don’t make any dough.
Eventually, they were allowed back, but there was a problem – see Crash landing.
A holiday excursion reaped a small reward – eventually. (An SSSI is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. At such places you have to resist the urge to smash up the local geology just to get fossils for your collection; but you can collect fallen material from the beach, which the sea would otherwise destroy.)
Graptolites and trilobites, and other ancient ghosts
Are hidden in the rocks around the weatherbeaten coasts
Of Pembrokeshire in Wales, or so they say.
We thought we’d go and find them, so we bought the local guides
And worked out likely places; then we checked the local tides
At Solva and at Abereiddi Bay.
“The Cambrian at Solva, in its mudstones,” said the book,
“Has trilobites galore”; and so we went to have a look.
“They’re where the river starts,” the guidebook said.
Precision, though, was lacking, as we found to our vexation;
For, studying the rocks around with keen anticipation,
No trilobites appeared. They must have fled.
To Abereiddi next – an S3I – to try once more.
Forbidden here from hammering, we strolled along the shore
And searched the beach with practised, well-peeled eyes.
Each Ordovician rock we checked, but none appeared ideal –
Until the last. We picked it up and split it to reveal. . .
Displayed within, our graptolitic prize!
These days, thanks to DIY books, programmes and retail outlets, I must have saved myself and others a useful amount of money over the years. Professional tradesmen still seen to make a living, so I shouldn’t feel too guilty; and I do get them in for the big jobs, like re-wiring or extending the house.
I’m a Jack of all trades, but a Master of none.
I can wallpaper walls and paint woodwork.
Though I say it myself all the jobs I have done,
Though not brilliant, are adequately good work.
There’s not much I can’t mend (except glassware and plastic)
With adhesive, or screw, or new part.
(Oh, and plumbing I hate – it’s all wrenches and mastic,
And it never goes right, from the start.)
I can wire up a plug; I can put up a shelf;
I can knock up a mortaring mix;
I can build a low wall in the garden myself,
With neat jointing between all the bricks;
Just show me a bathroom that’s needing new tiles,
And I’ll show you what tiling’s about:
I’ll slap on bright new ones in up-to-date styles
And fill in the spaces with grout.
I can re-roof a shed in the blink of an eye;
When a tree needs a haircut, I’ll lop it;
Squeaky hinges get oiled if they’re rusty and dry;
If a tap starts to drip, I can stop it.
I may not be speedy, in fact I agree
Professionals do things much faster.
But I’m certainly cheap, for my labour is free –
That’s because this old Jack’s his own Master.
Some old sayings are best not combined.
If your back is put into it,
You will very quickly feel
That your nose is to the grindstone
And your shoulder’s to the wheel.
‘Keep your ear glued to the ground
And your eye sharp on the ball’
Is good advice for short folk,
But rubbish if you’re tall.
It’s best for normal mortals,
Eyes peeled and on their toes,
To relax and keep their hair on
In a less demanding pose.
Six year-old Owain Lewis was in the news when he found parts of a pterosaur’s wing on the beach at Compton Bay on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 2007. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that went extinct with the dinosaurs; they weren’t really ‘birds’, but that’s much too fine a distinction for a six year old. I wondered how he told his parents.
‘Dad, Dad, I’ve seen this smashing bird,
Down there in Compton Bay.’
‘Such silly talk I’ve never heard;
Now run along and play.’
‘But Dad, this bird is something else –
You’ll never see another.
I want to take her home with me.’
‘You’d better ask your mother . . .’
‘You’re only six,’ his mother said.
‘Though you might think that’s old,
It’s much too young to fancy girls;
Now do as you’ve been told.’
‘But Mum, this bird’s more beautiful
Than all I’ve seen before.
She’s not a girl at all, you see –
She is a pterosaur!’
‘A terror-what?’ his Dad replied,
‘She’s clearly turned your head.
It’s too much sun, you’re sick inside.
It’s time you went to bed.’
‘But Dad, I’m news, and it’s colossal!
Look, switch on the TV.’
And there is Owain, with his fossil;
And Mum and Dad agree.
According to an account of 1614, a ‘monstrous serpent or dragon’ lived in ‘a vast unfrequented place, heathie, vaultie, full of unwholesome shades and overgrown hollowes’ within St. Leonard’s Forest, near Horsham. It was reputed to leave a stinking, slimy trail and to slay man and cattle with its deadly venom. Its existence was attested by John Steele, Christopher Holder and ‘a widow woman dwelling at Faygate’. In 2001, Horsham Council opened a children’s maze in a corner of the Park, with Hannah Stewart’s bronze sculpture of the ‘dragon’ at its centre. Or maybe it wasn’t a sculpture at all. . .
I am a legend, so they say,
And come from over Faygate way.
I’m not a dragon, as folks claim,
And don’t deserve such awful fame.
St. Leonard’s Forest I well know,
For there I often used to go;
But not to frighten or distress.
I’m really harmless – more or less.
I must admit that, now and then,
I poisoned cows, and sometimes men;
But that was in my crazy youth.
It’s over now, and that’s the truth.
One day I thought, just for a lark,
I’d slither off to Horsham Park.
(I did it in the dead of night,
Lest you should see me and take fright.
You may have noticed, on the ground,
A sign that I had been around:
A glutinous and slimy trail
Resembling that left by a snail.)
Once there, I slipped into a doze
And spent the night hours comatose.
I woke at just gone eight o’clock
And froze quite rigid with the shock,
For in the dark I hadn’t clocked
This dragon trap where now I’m locked
Within the branching, dead-end ways
Of Horsham Council’s ‘dragon maze’,
Where children trace its tortuous paths
With shouts and screams and happy laughs.
But, though my ‘dragon’ days are done,
It’s good to see kids having fun.
There seems to have been a marked increase in global carbon dioxide emissions soon after 1942, the year I was born. I thought I saw a connection and began to feel guilty.
Two things occurred in ’42:
I was born, and CO2
Began its climb into the blue.
Is there a link between the two?
My breathing must be what’s to blame –
It’s all my fault! (This claim to fame
Will devastate the family name
And tarnish it with lasting shame.)
I’ve built up such a carbon debt
It represents a global threat.
I’ve got the answer, though – don’t fret:
I’ll just stop breathing. But not yet . . .
The name that used to be on the label of most of my clothes quietly vanished.
St. Michael was my tailor; alas, he is no more.
You won’t find him in M&S – he’s banished from the store.
He always knew what size I was, what leg, and waist, and chest.
His garments were well crafted, his quality the best.
St. Michael stitched for everyone, for children, ladies, men.
But once Per Una came along he never worked again.
St. Michael fought the Devil, according to the Church;
But M&S abandoned him and left him in the lurch.
They took him off their garments, his image was old hat.
The women are big spenders now, they thought. And that was that.
There was no big announcement, it wasn’t headline news,
They simply changed the labels – they didn’t ask my views.
I feel ignored. I’m angry, and as loudly as I’m able
I want to shout out, “M&S, bring back St. Michael’s label.
I want him on my underwear, I want him on my shirts.
If you don’t bring St. Michael back, I’ll hit you where it hurts.”
I’ll start a revolution, a cool new style for men:
I’ll go without my clothes until St. Michael’s back again.
In 1811, on the shore near her home town of Lyme Regis, Mary Anning and her brother found the skull of what was subsequently recognised and named as an ichthyosaur. In 2005, the vertebrae of another ichthyosaur were spotted on Charmouth beach by Dr. Paul Davis. Its ‘half-skeleton’ was cleaned up at the Natural History Museum before being returned to Dorset in May this year (2007) for a year-long tour of local venues, starting at the Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis.
Did you see me in the theatre, in my solo stand-up gig?
I’m too modest, or I’d tell you that I went down really big.
If you missed me, not to worry: when next time you’re down this way
Just ask anyone – they’ll tell you I’m on tour from next May.
An ichthyosaur on tour? The reason is because
My vertebrae had surfaced on the beach. Here’s how it was.
The eagle-eyed Paul Davis, as he scoured the rocks near Lyme
In Mary Anning’s footsteps, recognised me just in time.
He’d spotted, on the foreshore, a row of bumps, aligned.
“An ichthyosaur, I reckon; what a very lucky find!” *
I soon was excavated, translocated and, with care,
Delivered to the NHM. And there they laid me bare –
Chipped away my stony casing till my bones were clearly seen,
And my ichthyosaurial remnants were all scrubbed up squeaky clean.
And so I’ve gone on tour; but it won’t go to my head
For I’m only half a skeleton, and very, very, dead!
NOTE * It is possible that other, less poetic, language was used here.
Cows chewing the cud are part of our image of the peaceful English countryside. But it gives them plenty of time to think . . .
I’m a cow, and I’m bored with just chewing the cud
Which goes right through my system and drops with a thud.
There is nothing to do
But to chew, poo and moo,
And paddle about in a field full of mud.
The flies are a nuisance. Whenever I spot ’em,
I wind up my tail – then release it to swot ’em.
But it can’t reach my face:
It’s the most awkward place,
And it’s usually the place where I’ve bloomin’ well got ’em.
The bull seemed to like me: it wasn’t for long,
Then he found someone else; he’s very headstrong.
I get milked by a pipe –
I’m so sorry to gripe,
But my calves should be here to have had it. It’s wrong.
What’s the purpose of life? I keep asking the question.
I can’t find an answer, but here’s a suggestion:
I might be naïve,
But I’d like to believe
That it’s more than just bovine microbial digestion.
It’s a mineral. And so are adamite, eveite, boggsite, niggliite, maxwellite and murdochite, ferrowyllieite, plumbogummite and, of course, gordonite. (Find them on http://www.mindat.org/mineralindex.php.) Nick Park’s Plasticene Pals have found others:
“Grandviewite,” said Wallace to Gromit.
“Tiptopite, old friend, I should say.
Goldquarryite beckons us, Gromit,
There’s treasureite coming our way.
“It’s Archerite time on the radio
(The Simpsonsite’s been on TV);
There’s pigeonite pie in the oven
And Pringleite crispies for tea;
“For breakfast, Marumoite, Gromit,
Spread thickly on Wensleydale cheese.
Macdonaldite? Never, eh, Gromit?
We’re proudite, and eat what we please.”
