So, yesterday I had the morning off as I had to attend the local surgery for a blood test. I can tell that it was at least red. I will go back in just over a week for the results and see where we go from there.
Instead of driving, I decided to walk over the fields to The Droveway; it was a grey and gloomy morning, but pleasant enough. It gave me the chance to look at the hedgerows and see where the fruit is growing, and I tried a couple of blackberries just to ensure that they are sweet enough for jams and crumbles. Good news they are. In a surprising move, it would appear that I lost 4Kg in the last week; something I doubt and I tempted to say that one of the measurements was wrong. However it was added to my notes. There can be no doubt that weight-wise this is a drop in the ocean…..
Walking back the sun came out, and whereas the land had been all drab browns and greys, were now alive with russets and reds. I took a few shots because I could and walked home for a coffee and a very late breakfast. I decided to work from home, which is what I did, and so the day passed rather pleasantly in all honesty, with the back door open and a pleasant breeze blowing through the house as the day warmed up.
In the evening I sat down to get stuck into the History of the NME book Jools bought me for my birthday, and in four hours worked my way from 1966 all the way to 1980. It was rather enjoyable I have to say, doubly so when I put Massive Attack’s Protection on, and then Massive Attack vs The Mad Professor’s No Protection, the dub version of Protection. Not sure of the neighbours were too happy with the heavy bass vibrating items off the shelves.
And finally, a new day, a new cold.
Yay.
Another night’s poor sleep lay ahead.
Sigh.
Here are some wise words from Robin Ince, erstwhile science partner in crime of the brilliant Dr Brian Cox, taken from his blog:
“One of my favourite train journeys is from London to Cornwall. It is a pleasant, sometimes beautiful, crossing through the pastures and countryside of southern England, but from Exeter St Davids to Newton Abbot it can dazzle and enlighten even when an umbrella of storm clouds overshadow it. The rails are as close to the sea as any train line I know. Tunneling through the cliffs and then almost avalanching onto the coast, it is a vision of the immensity of nineteenth century endeavour. If you are not content mulling over this feat of engineering (while trying to put the number of casualties incurred in its construction to the back of your mind), then you can enjoy the natural beauty of the sea which, on a stormy day, spits on the train windows. And if that’s still not enough, you can enjoy the views of crazy golf and deckchairs that have a nostalgia of things past yet still functioning. It is the remembrance of the smell of a cake immediately followed by being offered a plate of that same cake (I’ve not read Proust, but I’m told smelling cake figures prominently in his work) .
Looking out of the window on Friday, the rocky beaches of Dawlish were busy with children peering into rock pools in threes, fours and fives, looking for something of interest left stranded in a natural zoo created that morning by the tide. As I looked at this succession of images of inquiry, made flick book like by the trains rapid progress, I thought of my own son’s excitement at any crevice or pool. Those hours of holiday hope on the beach, waiting for something to surprise him with its shape or colour or movement, creating a multitude of questions, many of which I probably couldn’t answer without later recourse to my own childhood Ladybird book of the Seaside. This is one unchanging thing. However much society seems to change, whatever dire warnings are given that the delinquents are on the rise, children still look down in rock pools with hope and excitement. Our duty as adults is two-fold, to encourage that inquisitiveness, and to not lose it ourselves.
Carl Sagan once wrote, “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them”. It is a pity that from pub conversations to political diatribes, being cocksure is far more important that being correct.
There should be no shame in being inquisitive, unless your inquisitiveness involves placing video cameras in a public toilet or being overly enthusiastic in prodding dog faeces with your bare hands, but the older we become, the more we seem embarrassed to have questions. Once our schooling is finished, so our questioning must end. It seems better to appear knowledgeable and remain ignorant, than to admit to any limitations. “Why did you burn down the old people’s home?” “I thought I had misheard the instruction, but I didn’t want to show myself up by asking the lady to repeat herself. Yes, it was a mistake and many died, but let’s remember it was burnt down with confidence, and of that I am proud”.
We pretend to know bands or places or people because it seems to embarrassing to reveal our ignorance – “oh yes, I have heard of Naked Picnic, they’re on Domino records aren’t they?” “I think I’ve been to Boblangley by the sea, is that where the monastery is made of post it notes and butter?” and so on…
In western civilization, many of us can be blasé about knowledge, once we know the way to the shops and how to plug something in we can get away with the main question of each day being “how much is that?”
We are bombarded by so much information and digital achievement that rather than seeing more, we can become blind to everything. There is so much to notice we end up noticing nothing. When I was sitting in The Camden Head attempting a conversation after a show, I looked around and thought, “less, less”. Obviously the bar is hectic with a multitude of booze brands, then the walls of adverts or imagery of jazz musicians smoking near a trumpet or whatever (I saw them all of them, I saw none of them), then a screen was showing some Samurai set Kurosawa or other while the music was set so loud no one could be heard, yet everyone was talking.
How do we attempt to maintain inquisitiveness?
If talking to teachers is anything to go by, formal education has the problem that targets are frequently set for knowing facts, but less space is made for inquisitiveness or instilling the desire to question and wonder why things are as they are. It is hard to work out an exam to test just how much interest people have in knowing more, so better they know the kings and queens of England by heart (something Michael Gove seems very keen to instill in the young, as if his education policy is hoping to create the best pub quiz team in the world). I am sure most people reading this have a story of them or some friend questioning a teacher’s version of events in class and being slammed down harshly with a hint of Stalinist glare for daring to question the official history. Rather than constantly changing what children learn with faddy curriculum changes, it might be better to think of how they learn and what they are learning for – is it to know, or is it to understand? I know some teachers chomping at the bit to just err a little from the curriculum to inject a little more fascination into their classrooms. At times it sounds as agonizing as John Peel being forced to play the official Radio One playlist with no room for Steel Pulse or The Delgados.
The fun of having children is that it is a constant challenge of finding answers and attempting to work out what may not need to require a full answer now. Oddly, the clichéd child question “why is the sky blue?” is one many of us can’t answer, though numerous sitcom moments should have had us reading up on it by the second trimester. A few weeks ago my son saw someone with cerebral palsy and he wondered why he moved in the manner he did. And so I set about attempting to describe why this man’s body behaved differently to his. At four and a half he many not be able to comprehend it all, but as I talked and worked out my explanation I had a greater understanding by the end of it too. A few days later, on a trip back from the circus, I was talking about an event of a few years ago. My son asked where he was when this happened. I explained that it was before he had started to grow in mummy’s tummy. He then asked where he was. Before I got back any further I was told that we would deal with earlier non-existence at a later date, so my son and I got back to I spy. Hopefully if I bring him up well enough, my son will know how limited I am by about eleven or twelve.
Some say that you need to stop and smell the flowers, but don’t stop at the flowers, look to the trees, the sky, the bus stop, the sand and the pylon. At least once a day every day I find myself wondering “why is that like that?” I take a little extra time out for conjecture, and then I go to my bookshelf, the library or the internet.
In my current show tour show (see www.robinince.com for details. A gauche plug amongst the sentences) I used to talk about being delayed on a train outside Oxenholme. I looked out of the window and realized that it framed more life than there is in the rest of the known universe. There may be a planet with a greater richness and variety of life out there somewhere, but we can be certain that we would have to travel in a method perhaps imagined but not yet possible to have the slightest glimmer of hope of finding such a place. It was a mundane thought but looking out of the window has not been the same since.
It’s that moment of reaching down to grasp a fallen acorn and having that split second realization that the actions of recognition, bending down, and picking up, and at the same time breathing, digesting and hearing, all without any conscious thought, is an achievement of billions of years of heredity, mutation and replication. A bog standard human performing an everyday act that cannot be replicated with the finest factory made equivalent.
When things are new, we marvel at their novelty, but that soon wears off and they are just something waiting for its built obsolescence to occur or to remain forever unnoticed. At End of the Road festival this year, as I was only there for 48 hours I thought I wouldn’t bother with queuing for a shower, instead I relied for the shell of cleanliness that a few baby wipes can provide at morning and night. The idea of daily showering seems so much part of our lives that some people were a little taken aback at my decision even before I could have stunk beyond my normal level. And I thought, go back a few years, bathing was frequently a weekly thing, a horror or delight on a Sunday with an extra one on a Wednesday for the lucky (see the fild Deep End for more background). When hot water became instantaneous it must have seemed like a wonder and yet now if it take 30 seconds for the boiler to kick in we start swearing at the tap.
As Charles Darwin’s letters and books show, when he voyaged with the beagle his mind was frequently “a chaos of delight”. It seems hard to imagine how astonishing the flora and fauna he saw were to man more used to collecting bugs in Victorian woodland, fortunately his evocative writing helps trap the sensation.
“the delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind. If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the strange flower it is crawling over”
Now we can experience the colours and the alien beauty of Cape Verde or The Galapagos Islands simply by watching television or purchasing a DVD, and the beauty is alien no more. On occasion we walk down a street we have walked down two hundred times before but look up to see a building we’ve never been conscious of before, and we need to be aware that that is one of many everyday things we are not noticing. There should be nothing childish about the childish enthusiasm of looking in a rock pool, it is human enthusiasm and thirst to know.
It only takes a little thought to sit and stare and then just add some thought to that, or to ponder. We think we have no time to ponder, yet how could we have no time when we have time saving contraptions in every corner. What happened to the time saved? I can’t have lost all of it tweeting and watching youtube?
Some people suggest we should live each day as if it was our last, but I wonder if it might be better if we live each day as if it was our first.
We need to tell children and remind adults why we have the society we live in. the television you watch, the hot water you enjoy, the painkillers, vaccines and seaside railways, are all the result of others inquisitiveness. How unthinking and unthankful should we be to enjoy the results of others imagination and questioning, while switching off our own.
FOOTNOTE
While on the Beagle Voyage, after a day on the Cape Verde Islands, Darwin is awe struck by what he has see and writes, “it has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes”. The poet Ruth Padel, a descendent of Charles Darwin wrote a lovely collection of poems on his life – succinctly title Darwin: A Life in Poems and one is titled Like Giving a Blind Man Eyes. It can be found here.”
I don’t usually copy other people’s words verbatim, but this stuck a chord with me. The news is always full of league tables for this, league tables for that, and how well is your local school screams the leader from the Daily (Hate) Mail? Back in 1999-2000, I undertook further training in the RAF, and had to pass various exams as part of my BTEC in weapon system engineering. (Bet that sounds exciting? It wasn’t really; long story, maybe I’ll write about that at TAS at some point, but it really is very old water under the bridge). Anyway, we had to learn various aspects of maths including complex numbers, various equations and the like; engineering science focusing on forces and electrical theory (AC and DC). And we had a strict timetable in which to pass exams and move onto the next subject or go on guard.
Whatever.
In short, we learned what we needed to pass exams, dump that and move onto the next subject. Now some 13 years later, I have forgotten most of the maths, all the engineering science and electrics. And this is what is going to happen to kids, just learning to pass exams, and not to learn for the sheer love of it. Because, its what we do when we’re adults; we learn because we want to. We learn to drive, work a camera or other stuff like why the sky is blue, why the wind blows. Science was never moved forward because 95% of kids at that school could get a grade C or better; stuff happens because people are curious. They enquire, find how and why things happen and move human knowledge on. Sometimes things are invented, like TVs or a new medicine, or we understand how evolution of the universe works.
We have a list in our heads, Jools and I, of all the places in the world we want to visit before we die. It begins with Japan, Patagonia, Yellowstone, Russia, China, Mongolia, New Zealand and goes on and on. And yet, every time we walk in our neighbourhood, and we stop to look, a flower of an insect stops us in our tracks and just amazes us with the complex design and beauty. Even more so when you point a macro lens at it and look at it on a computer screen. Is that what early scientists felt when they looked at an ant through a microscope? I guess so.
And this wonder can be seen in our little corner of Kent; every corner of the world has wonders to explore and find. Just this weekend I pointed the camera as some old flower heads growing in the hedgerow and saw little crinkly balls, like withered planets. And there are the butterflies of course. I was lucky enough to have a Red Admiral land in front of me on Sunday, and so got some really close shots. The detail in the insect’s face, the hair, the eyes and the long tongue are nothing short of stunning. And this is something we see in our garden almost every day at this time of year.
I guess I am saying that the world is a wonderful place, even in our back gardens; right under our noses. We don’t really have to travel to Japan to have our awe inspired, it can happen walking back from the shops. And shouldn’t we share our wonder with the world? I think we should. We I’m asked what we are doing at the weekend, I will honestly reply. Sometimes we will be looking in the hedgerows for fruit to make into jam or wine, or we might be looking for a particularly rare butterfly that we have heard can be found in a certain field, or maybe heading up to London to participate on Open House or visiting the Paralympics. Whatever we do, it will be incredible, and memorable. And there is a strong chance I will have photographed the event from every angle.
Six years ago, I was working delivering chemicals, a horrible job in all honesty, but at weekends I would spend in my living room reading The Times and watching a lot of sport on TV. My living room had one small window and it looked onto my back yard. Now, at every opportunity, I am out snapping away getting out and about just doing stuff. Am I happier now? Yes. And no. You see I did the sitting around watching sport because at the time, that’s how I relaxed, and I was happy. Now, we have no sport on our TV, or very little, and I balance the rest of the time with taking photographs and editing photographs. Although very different, I am just as happy as I was then. I do think of lost opportunities for taking shots, but then again I can always go back.
Jools tells me I shouldn’t just look forward, sometimes I should stop and look behind too, as that view is just as important and can be beautiful too. Sometimes we should just stop and look. Sit down on the grass and just enjoy the moment. Or moments. Or afternoon. And I do try to tell myself that it is impossible to photograph everything, and that sometimes to put the camera down and view things in my almost 20/20 vision. I did do that on at least one occasion, and if I put my mind to it could think of another. I’m sure we went out for a meal one evening and I didn’t take a camera.
Oh, and one last thing. I have realised that I can do without my mobile phone, and so when my contract expires next week I shall not be getting a new phone. All rather liberating I have to say. In fact it is not switched on at the moment as I am getting lots of calls from other phone companies trying to tempt me to their network, and I’m not really interest. I have realised that I just use my mobile when I am on the sofa to check Flickr, using out hub, so it’s not like I’m going to miss it at all! In truth, I haven’t really used my phone that much to actually phone somebody. It is always showing an error message that it’s memory is full. I have emptied most of the photographs, taken off the apps, and it’s still not happy. Maybe it will be happier when it is sitting at the bottom of a drawer when I am disconnected next week.
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