The Lechlade trip

The Valley calls it the Lechlade trip, other skiff clubs call it the Meander, and we have different ideas about how long it should take and whether it should be a serious challenge. We take it fairly seriously but we do it over 4 days, whereas it used to be only for the young and fit and it took 3 days. Also, we used to camp! in one tent for the girls and one for the boys, but now we sleep on the floors of other rowing clubs which is much, much nicer, and usually there are hot showers at least. One lady who took part this year is 61. In years past we thought anyone over 40 who tried it was a nutcase.

3 years ago I rowed two thirds of it, swapping with the cox, and this year they were short of coxes so I coxed, and the weather, which started very nice, turned very nasty so I got cold and wet. The boats are double sculling skiffs. They look old but we get new ones made for us from time to time. They are racing skiffs.

my crew

Helena and Alex must be the smallest, lightest crew to ever row all the way from Lechlade to Teddington in 4 days. Here they are. They are lovely and were entertained by, amongst other things, the story of Gilgamesh, from first to last, re-told by me - only I missed the bit about the flood.

One of the strange and rather unhealthy things about the Valley is that a lot of us are related to each other, and even if we are not, we have known each other for a long time, and we have also married people we met at the Valley when we were young, so for new members it must be a nightmare. "Who's this lady?" "John's aunt Mary. Sarah's mum."  Alex is my niece, the archaeologist.

Bald blokes talking about gardens

The first bald bloke is rather good. His subject is the history of botany and he really loves his story. He is  twinkly and fun, but a bit staring.

The flowers in the prog are lovely (the ones he doesn't rip up). The lucky man goes to see where Linnaeus worked in Sweden, Chelsea Physick garden, Oxford Botanicals and Cambridge, and he takes his camera and his thermos with him. To me, he doesn't seem the thermos type, and I am as unconvinced by the thermos as I am by the long shots of Linnaeus's ship sailing back to Sweden.

The second bald bloke is called Michael Collins. He wears a black suit like an undertaker in order to ask people how they feel about their suburban gardens. He wants to capture the joy of gardens to people who moved out from the city to the suburbs, but he does this in an academic, non-smiley way. It's interesting social history but they should have got a better bald bloke. It's here for a few more days but you have been warned.

First bald bloke has done another episode, better than the first! Here it is! He wants to share with us the history of understanding photosynthesis, and he has some good stories. Mean old Calvin, eh, with his cycle that he wouldn't share with Nicholson! The actual cycle is too Advanced level to explain to we non-scientists, and if I want to look at the chemistry, my daughter has a diagram of it on her bedroom wall. I will post a picture of this as soon as I find my camera. I'm a bit lost today after the Lechlade trip.

Science

Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe - a really enjoyable read

This book is comprised of letters. In 1982 the 20-year-old Nina came to London to work as a nanny to the lively sons of  a single parent who lived in Camden. The mum worked at the London Review of Books and lived in the most literary street in town! Across the road lived Alan Bennett, who came round to dinner every evening and made helpful suggestions about the food, and everything else. Along the road lived the Millers. Jonathan Miller seemed to be famous for his operas. Nina got the impression he was an opera singer, and when she mentioned his singing everyone thought her hilarious. Next door lived Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, with their son, and further along lived Debbie Moggach. These are just some of the characters who pop up in the story of Nina: (Nina and how she discovered literature!) the best thing about it being that Nina had no idea these letters to her sister, a nurse back home, would ever be published. She wrote about the minutiae of life: like the fridge making a noise, what the other nannies said, what the boys said, what Mary-Kay said.  She reports many conversations exactly like writing a play.

The reason her style is so great is that she lets all the characters speak for themselves.  She has a quite simple way of writing about her likes and dislikes, but she finds other people so interesting that she doesn't seem to write about herself much. (She is hardly going to describe herself to her sister, is she?) So we have her voice and we have all her comments about everyone, and she is young and fun, having a good time, with a great talent for taking people as they come. I didn't find the letters funny to start with but she becomes very funny as time goes on.

An article by Nina takes me back to that time, they were great times to be young. There was a rush to get into the few good jobs but it was equally OK to take low-level jobs and save to travel. But of course we worried that we were missing the boat. It's only natural.

(This is the 2nd half of it. It's all here. )

Being a London nanny was fantastic. The family was fun to be with and I fitted in like an older sister. To start with, I was preoccupied with domestic stuff, and my letters reveal much about the grocery shopping, the choice of soap powder and Mary-Kay's hair cuts. Then I met a friend, the helper at biographer Claire Tomalin's house (next door but one) and he dispelled the "You can't go to university" myth. In fact, he said "You should go" and my boss agreed, even though it would be quite inconvenient for her.

And it changed me. It wasn't that I had been excluded or underprivileged, I had had my share of devoted teachers and my family home was crammed with books, but the double whammy of not being entered for O-levels and being told I would never go to university had defined my adult life up to then. Having clever, trustworthy people around me saying I had all sorts of options marked a change of outlook for me. I stopped worrying about whether or not someone made their share of cups of tea or what shoes they wore and picked up a book. It sounds corny, but it's true.

So I read books that were interesting enough to captivate or stuffy enough to annoy, and I went to study humanities at Thames Polytechnic. It was marvellous: the learning, but more so "being a student". I was surrounded by silly 18-year-olds such as my friend Stella who lazed around and took it all for granted, earnest mature students whose work was well thought out and always typed, dropouts who should have been at Cambridge or Bristol, and local people who gained access and were as thrilled as I was to be there. It was a beautiful mix, and our tutors were of the modern type who had read Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton and scrapped with the fuddy‑duddies. They took us to see plays and to hear thinkers think and talk, and I think we learned to think and to talk ourselves.

In 1987, we graduated and most of us just got jobs in shops or cafes. Some got stalls at Camden market and sold handmade trinkets or multicoloured candles and had the weekdays off to make the trinkets in front of the telly. We earned enough to pay the rent and buy paperbacks and have a niceish time reading and chatting in our dingy flats until the moment seemed right (a couple of years later, usually) to move into our "professional career". Unlike graduates of today, we didn't think we had missed the boat, we didn't panic about not having stepped on to any sort of ladder.

I don't think it was just me. Graduates back then were confident that opportunities were there but, mainly, we weren't made to think of ourselves as successes or failures, particularly at such a young age. Of course, there were fewer graduates then and most of us had grants so we didn't have huge bills to pay when we left. There was less parental expectation and, consequently, less parental involvement. We never expected to live at home again as many have to nowadays. We probably also never considered working for free (in internships or work experience).

In the 1980s, graduates I knew chose to earn enough to pay the rent and to work in "dead-end" jobs for a while. Graduates now have to do the same but the difference is that they feel they have failed by doing so, that they are wasting their time. Is this just about student loans or is it part of a bigger panic about losing out? Is it forgetting part of the reason why they went to university in the first place? And should we stop this rushing into adulthood, this panic about success? Quite possibly, reading a wonderful novel behind the till of an empty shop is a good, and, dare I say, more "productive" way to spend your early 20s.

James Lovelock again : "A Rough Ride to the Future"

Sorry, I didn't finish writing about this:-  The thesis of this book is called "accelerated evolution": Since Newcomen invented the steam engine in the early 18th c. there has been an age in which human activity has had a rapid and profound effect on the planet.

"The changes in the environment that we see as adverse - from rising carbon dioxide abundance, climate change and population growth are all consequences of this new evolutionary inflation; as may be economic instability and the tendency of the human species to become city or nest animals."

He also posits the idea that one consequence of accelerated evolution could be that at some point we ourselves incorporate inorganic elements in our bodies.

"... already pacemakers are starting to be thought about that use the body system to provide the energy to keep them going. [My pacemaker] is coupled to the physiology of my body more or less completely, and much more sinister, it has a radio communication with the outside world so that the technician can check it every year to see whether it's working. This really bothers me, because I can see it's only a short time before my body's on the internet and receiving spam. Once you go in for this endo-symbiosis with the mechanical world, you're in for trouble, and we've started."

Lovelock's parents were working class and ran an art shop in Brixton. He hated school like poison, and taught himself science from books in the local library. He says he wanted to be a scientist from the age of 4 when his father gave him a primitive electronics set, and reckons the sense of science as a vocation has largely disappeared.

"The whole system of teaching has lost it, because it's taught as if you were going into a career. It isn't a career and never should be."

Lovelock's new book is likely to be claimed by both sides in the climate change debate. He has pulled back from the alarmist predictions of The Revenge of Gaia, published in 2006.

"You just can't tell what's going to happen". ...."It's just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can't be certain." So we need to take the politics out of climate science? "Oh sure, but we're tribal animals. We can't help being political."

"I'm an old-fashioned green, a person who's happy with that Selborne character, Gilbert White. I'm very old, and the British countryside up until world war two was glorious. ...we were just another animal in the place, but it got wrecked with the coming of cars."

Lovelock sees environmentalism as a form of "urban politics". "It's become a religion, he says, "and religions don't worry too much about facts." [Haha]. He is an enthusiast for nuclear power, which makes him unpopular with many greens.

Fracking: "it produces only a fraction of the amount of CO2 that coal does, and will make Britain secure in energy for quite a few years. We don't have much choice."

"Europe could get all its energy from the Sahara, but politics screws it. A solar farm 100 miles by 100 miles could supply energy for the whole of Europe, but terrorists would blow it up."

Lovelock manages to be both catastrophist and boundless optimist at the same time. He believes that humanity will suffer crises that threaten the species, but will somehow pull through.

"We are an extraordinarily special species, the first to harvest information." [what does he mean exactly? When I read news, am I harvesting information? Suppose I forget it straight away, have I still harvested it? Or is it harvested only if it is saved in an archive?] But anyway, I am a cunning bastard, thanks James.

Aldeborough and Southwold, Suffolk

Southwold, Suffolk

Aldeborough has got to be the poshest retirement place in the UK. You would go there to retire as there's not really a workplace within convenient reach. It's a long way from a real town (Ipswich). But for people who want to have a great place to walk the dog, volunteer, cook lovely fresh and smoked fish, do the garden, look at the view etc, it is absolutely perfect I think. It helps to have plenty of money as most of the shops are like Musto and Joules and worst of all, Jack Wills, very pricey. anyway I loved it. We went to the F&C restaurant which had very good service and wasn't too expensive, and we went to the cinema. Saw a long and almost dialogue-free film, with Scarlett Johnson doing an English accent. Under the Skin. Not very interesting was the general consensus, and I suspect that the problem was that it had been adapted from a novel (all words) by someone who had decided to tell the story with as few words as poss, which made it intriguing and experimental, but boring.

Walked from Thorpe to Winscale and sat in a really nice bus shelter thing and ate sandwiches near the nuclear power station. S. said: The nuclear family goes on a nuclear holiday. Lots of interesting tiny plants in the sand and Flo told me about pioneer species. She is a mine of info these days.

Next day we had a walk to Orford Ness where we used to do nuclear testing (Atomic weapons agency, not we/us personally). Husband very interested and took a lot of photos. Beautiful morning and a lovely walk near marshes: the path was raised because the whole area is so low-lying - just about sea-level. Saw newly hatched butterflies. Then to Southwold for a walk on the pier and a picnic on the beach. Perfect day! The pier has some amusements on it that are quite wacky: like: try to cross the motorway with your Zimmer frame (a walking frame for old people). Bash the Bankers with a big mallet when they pop up. Wind a handle to make Frankenstein's monster come to life and make you jump. (It made me squeal.) Here is the link to Tim Hunkin's site explaining the amusements

Pier

"As a species, we're cunning bastards"

Who said that?

James Lovelock, aged 94. It would be a great slogan to have on a T-shirt. What illustration would you put with it? I would quite favour a submarine, which is a cunning invention, but all kinds of things attest to our cunning, including the heart pacemaker and inoculation. The earliest cunning invention was the bow and arrow, I think, because with it we had such an advantage when hunting other species.

His new book, a Rough Ride to the Future, is part memoir of his long life in science and part prediction of whether humankind can survive. From the Guardian quite recently:

The concept for which Lovelock is best known is Gaia - the idea that the Earth is a single, self-regulating entity in which the organic and inorganic interact to sustain life. He developed the idea in the 1960s when he was working for Nasa and has returned to it frequently; he says defending it from detractors is one reason he carries on writing. "I want to keep fighting the battle because the academics just won't buy it, whereas most other people have."
Lovelock, who for the past 50 years has been what he calls an "independent scientist" unfettered by institutional links, reckons he knows why academics reject Gaia. "It's political," he says. "You can't run a university unless it's divided up into subjects. If you try and teach the whole lot, it becomes a complete mess and the vice chancellor goes mad, so they have to divide it up. But if you divide it up, you can't understand it." Lovelock, who trained as a chemist but is just as interested in and likely to expound upon physics and biology, detests academic compartmentalisation. "The universities have reached a point similar to the monasteries in the middle ages where the monks counted the number of angels that could stand on the head of a needle."

another post on this article

Last week I rowed down the river from Windsor with some friends and the river was rather rough as the wind blew against the stream. End of term. Just managed to get to the end without letting up. Speaking and listening exam session. Then a day off, and taking Mum for a walk. then teaching the Advanced au pairs. The advanced au pairs want me to be very prescriptive about grammar. I feel that they are getting quite angels-on-the-head-of the-pin about it. I feel they ought to know that there are also functional approaches to grammar, but they would probably explode if faced with such a concept. the CAE is a well-respected exam but it doesn't relate to the real world. When would you need to talk about a pair of photographs (that have no significance) for a minute without stopping? When and why would you cut up a piece of text into ten pieces and try to fit it together again? This last is part of the reading test but it doesn't only test reading in English: it also tests reasoning and logic. So why are we testing these in an English language test?

Then yesterday I got up in good time to make a lemon cake to sell at the Valley.  I had to cox in a race there which took 40 minutes, really exciting. Quite a good result. I then went to the garden centre and bought a lot of things, although I really went for 2 bags of compost and a large pot, with a structure for supporting tall plants. I have decided to grow delphiniums in this pot because there is no room for them in the garden. But I am happy because I found a spot in a border for my pot-bound rosemary and I think it will survive there, and at last I dug out a big sedge which I couldn't manage before, and I have got room for a few more things, as long as they don't mind shade. I bought some garotta, a scoop for the compost and some good gloves, which I used for about a minute and then I went back to using bare hands. I bought a few alpines, which are so lovely. All the pink tulips that I planted last year have come up in one side of the garden (I replanted them in the autumn) so they are looking good and also not a waste of money! The magnolia has had its best spring yet and looked so lovely and magical. Spent hours in the garden.

Today it rained and I felt incredibly tired. I made an apple pie and drove to Farnham twice. And that's enough for now.

What makes us feel as though we are going crazy?

an article from the Guardian on what prompts people to seek help from therapists:

Mental illness now accounts for nearly half of all ill-health in the UK, but its share of the budget is so small that only a quarter of sufferers get any help on the NHS. Private therapists talk about what their clients are worried about.

Internet porn addiction - (how many? "a lot of") young men make daily use of porn on the internet. They don't see it as a problem. It is for their girlfriends (if they have them.)  "it is a problem because it interferes with people's ability to form genuinely intimate, erotic and satisfying sexual relations."

Young person's depression - "young people have a discourse of success around having a well-paid job, but house, nice car, and that's hard to achieve..." this generation (in their 20s) has a strong sense of entitlement.

Relationship breakdown - people in mid affair or dealing with the aftermath of an affair.

 "Across all cultures, hardiness and adjustment to life is very dependent on having good relationships. whatever the stressors or conditions, you can resource yourself - or not- by having open mutual relationships that can make you feel OK about life." Can be one partner "but many good relationships - friends and family - are even better. Some people choose to be on their own, but it is often a question mark that people bring to me: "If I can't be in a relationship, why not? - and can I live with that?" (Janet Reibstein, psychologist, Exeter)

Body dysmorphia - dieting and size, bags under the eyes (that the therapist can't see!) and thinning hair. Asian people who are worried about racism whenever anyone is talking to them.

Internet stalking - people who don't want to check on their ex. (or whoever they are obsessed with) but it's too easy and people can't stop themselves.

Insecurity - there's an economic term - "radical uncertainty" that you can see emerging in people's daily lives. People realising that their future is very uncertain. Linked with this is domestic violence and alcohol and drug abuse. Families are stressed and are facing too many pressures.

Multiple relationships - people are experimenting with all kinds of relationships, threesomes and foursomes, Also BDSM or kink. These also cause anxieties.

Social anxieties - expectations and social pressures conflict with real needs. From around 30 yrs of age. women demanding too much of themselves.

Existential crises - who am I? what am I doing?

Social media addiction - porn, gambling forums, Youtube. More male than female. the therapist works on 1. How to manage the addiction and 2. what the client is avoiding.

Harshness in the workplace: there is a fear of asking for help. A fear of colleagues.  Overwork and stress caused by having to meet expectations, targets and deadlines.

"There's so much adrenaline that you have panic attacks, or get weepy, or can't sleep... Everything that used to feel comfortable doesn't any more, such as socialising, shopping, driving, going to work. Your brain associates that as a threat, and people feel as though they are going crazy." Nicola Blunden, psychotherapist practising for 15 years, Aberdare, Wales.