"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.