September 2024
Walking in West Dorset the other day, I was pleased to be
next to a farmer friend who is a fount of information on the various agricultural
elements of the country we were passing through. A neatly maintained succession of fields led
him to mention the name of the farming family who managed this land, proof of
his omniscience. ‘Though the land itself
is owned by Gonville & Caius College’, he observed. Really?
A part of rural Dorset owned for some hundreds of years by a Cambridge
college? It put me in mind of the
Agitprop theatre company who featured in Scotland and England during the 1970s
and 1980s, called 7:84. The name was a
reference to an Economist article stating that 7% of the UK population owned
84% of the wealth. A number of social
activists worked with the company, though it eventually lost Arts Council
funding. David Tennant worked with 7:84
in 1991 in ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’.
Moving on we came to some wheat fields with ripe ears of grain
hanging limply down. My friend explained
that this was not due to drought but to poorly judged feeding leading to
overgrowth of the stalk during the earlier phase of growth. This phenomenon is called ‘lodging’. There are various causes of ‘lodging’ and the
nutrition cause leads to the floppy appearance which is called
‘brackling’. Knowing little of farming,
I pointed out that it had been dry for several days with rain forecast the next
day. My friend picked an ear and chewed
a grain with an experienced air, pronouncing on his estimation of the moisture
content (17%). Then as we walked down
through the farmyard we were both pleased to see a grain transporter and a
combine harvester starting up the farm track behind us. The conversation was an introduction to the
incredibly complex science of wheat growing.
An index called the ‘Hagberg Falling Number’ is extremely important in
assessing whether a particular grain is suitable for bread making. A low level correlates with high levels of
the enzyme alpha-amylase, which breaks down starch prematurely to sugars. An index between 250 to 350 seconds is best
for wheat flour that is going to be used for bread making. And so on…
It seems that the American Great Plains have the ideal conditions for
excellent grain production. The grain we
have sampled will probably end up as commercial biscuits. Paradoxically, it seems that the most sought
after wheat in the world is Canadian hard red – not because it is the finest in
the world, quite the opposite. It can be
milled extremely finely, resulting in that phenomenon known to all – the soft
white loaf. In demand everywhere for
sandwiches.
September 4th
Since watching the D-Day commemoration ceremonies earlier
in the Summer we had planned a trip by bicycle to Ver-sur-Mer, in the Calvados
department, where the British Normandy memorial is situated. This site was unveiled in 2021 and contains
the names of 22,442 British soldiers, and soldiers from over 30 countries under
British command who died between 6th June 1944 and 31st
August during the battle for Normandy.
During the 80th anniversary ceremonies,
silhouettes representing all 1746 soldiers killed on D-Day itself were
displayed. Most of these had been
removed by the time of our holiday in France, but the memorial itself is still
a sobering and trenchant reminder of that phase of the Second World War and the
sacrifices it entailed.
Unfortunately our weather was very mixed, such that on one
day we even took the train after about 20 miles cycling because of an
approaching storm. Nonetheless it was a
holiday to be remembered for both the right and the wrong reasons.
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| Gateway to France. Passing Handfast Point (Old Harry Rocks) en route Cherbourg |
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| The port of Barfleur - before the rain |
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| Utah Beach - rain |
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| Utah Beach |
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| Le Marin Solitaire (the Lone Sailor) |
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| Placemat from 'Le Roosevelt' cafe - The Beaches |
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| A welcome sight - the Domaine de Utah Beach. We dried out and the food was good |
As we pedalled along it was hard to escape the thought that
the French are doing very nicely thank you from the 80th Anniversary
of ‘Jour J’ as they call it. Memorabilia
everywhere. The hotels full of tourists,
particularly Americans, visiting the region.
Wine and cidre pressé bottles decorated with the flag and a
quatre-vingt-huitième symbol. Most of
the flags displayed are the French Tricolore and the Stars and Stripes. The French have bought into the notion that it
was exclusively the U.S. who won the war – as evidenced by many movies
including some of the latest such as ‘Saving Private Ryan’. On our way down the Cotentin peninsula,
pedalling through driving rain towards and around Utah Beach, the most westerly
of the landing beaches, I noted that the roads were all named for various
American heroes, e.g. ‘Named for Private First Class Walter F McGowan’. It would seem that all of these heroes died
on the day of the landing. Perhaps, I
thought, perversely, they would have preferred to have died much later of old
age, and foregone the honour of which they cannot be aware, a sign on a slim
lane in Normandy?
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| Better weather - the inner port of Issigny |
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| Statues at Arromanches |
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| British Normandy Memorial - at Ver-Sur-Mer |
Much later, on Monday 9th September, I am
standing in Lessay Abbey. (Apologies for
the switch to the present tense, but it encapsulates the immediacy of the
experience. In medias res as the Creative Writing Tutors would have it). This solemn, simple, but huge church is very
sparsely decorated, as befits its Norman Romanesque beginnings. The foundation in 1056 was by the Benedictine
order. The charter was confirmed by
William the Conqueror in 1080. The rib
vault over the choir is thought to be the first example of such a structure in
the world* (during excavation the remains of Eudes au Capel, known to have been
buried in 1098 were found beneath the floor, thus dating the construction). It is a Monday morning. It is very quiet. There is one penitent praying near the
chancel.
* Durham Cathedral
claims priority, but the buildings are more or less contemporary (the 1090s)
and it is impossible to know which rib vaulting was constructed first.
Two striking parts of its history I note. The Abbey’s charter, signed in 1080, was
signed by the Bishops of Winchester, Canterbury, Bayeux, York, and St Anselm*. The 1066 invasion of Britain by William the
Conqueror meant that the Abbey owned priories spread over a wide geographical
range, including Boxgrove Benedictine Priory in West Sussex.
The second is that the Abbey has been almost completely
rebuilt as it was, following an extraordinary act of cultural vandalism by
retreating Germans in 1944. They
detonated mines and bombs in the church, reducing much of it to rubble. There can have been no strategic advantage to
this site. The Abbey is inland and lies
on the tiny river Ay. The estuary of the
Ay at St Germain sur Ay on the west side of the Cherbourg (Cotentin) peninsula is
almost entirely marshland and unnavigable.
It seems to be on a par with the destruction of Palmyra by Islamic
State. The completion of rebuilding to
the original plan was accomplished in 1957.
* Curiously, St Anselm, although born in Aosta (then part
of Upper Burgundy), and a Benedictine monk, became Archbishop of Canterbury.
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| Lessay Abbey |
I find it recurringly strange that despite being a
non-believer, I am drawn to ecclesiastical buildings such as this. Being a British child the seepage of
Christianity into the psyche from one’s earliest days at school probably still
has profound leverage. In a church such
as this one is as close to a thousand years of history as it is possible to
get.*
September fishing:
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| A fishing interlude - the P.S. (Paddle Steamer) Waverley in Poole Harbour |
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| Returning from fishing. 16th September. Poole Harbour |
Back in England it is soon time to follow AFC Bournemouth
to Liverpool and to visit this great Merseyside city. We take a three-day holiday to do this.
Liverpool is a magnificent city with more Grade 1 listed
buildings than any British city outside London.
Naturally we know that its success and importance is associated with our
colonial past, and that the import of cotton, sugar and other goods from the
Americas (and around the world) were predicated on those goods being produced
in most of those countries (not all) by slave labour.
We walk around most of the famous sites – the Liver building
– originally the Royal Liver Assurance company building. One of the first buildings in the world to
use reinforced concrete in its construction.
Not mentioned in the online history is its use during the war. My father, Admiralty employee but officially
gazetted a naval officer, used to point out the tiny window near the top of the
building where he and colleagues organised naval munitions during the earlier
parts of WWII. He was lucky. His first work during the war was in Hull –
also a target for German bombers. But
the seven night ‘May Blitz’ in Liverpool in 1941 was the most severe. Only 15% of houses in the Bootle area, near
the docks, survived. Liverpool deaths
approximated 4,000 with 70,000 rendered homeless.
Thus, as we pose for photos by the Beatles statue, tour the
city on the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, and finish up at the famous Cavern club, it
seems to me that we are clutching at historical straws. History is impossible to re-create. Penny Lane, Strawberry Field (note the
singular), the houses of the Fab Four are just so much wisps of a past which we
experienced but cannot relive. The
oddity of it all is brought home to me when we ask a group of three giggling
girl teenagers to take our photographs beside the waterfront Beatles’ statue. Having dutifully taken theirs in return I
tell them that my wife went to a Beatles concert in Bournemouth in 1963. Their enthusiasm is immense. ‘What were they like?’ ‘Were they fantastic?’ Their incredulity over actually meeting
someone who actually saw the Beatles is fascinating. Had I told them that she was there when the
final Tyrannosaurus Rex succumbed to the asteroid they could not have been more
impressed and would almost certainly have taken the information at face value.
Less visited, but revered by the Beatles, is the statue of
Billy Fury (Ronald Wycherley), whose ballads I loved. Sadly Billy succumbed to the late effects of
rheumatic heart disease at an early age.
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| The Liver Building - by day and by night |
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| Ringo's House |
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| 'With The Beatles'. The title of their second album of course |
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| The Cavern Club stage |
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| Historic guitars. Cavern Club |
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| Anthony Gormley statues, Crosby beach |
‘O call back yesterday, bid time return…’
The visit to Anfield is equally inspiring. It seems to me that it is impossible to hear
50,000 fans singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ without goosebumps, nay tears.
And Bournemouth lost three-nil.
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| The Shankly Gates, Anfield |
And recently, more experiences with the Northern Lights seen
as far as Stonehenge.
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| Northern Lights, Stonehenge. Please note this is not my photograph and it is copyright. For private perusal only. |
September 23rd
Israel commences a new offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah is an Iranian backed Shia political and paramilitary (terrorist) group. Because of the now near permanence of Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah I would probably not have mentioned this were it not for the navel-gazing BBC who chose to place the Lebanese attacks/retaliations in second place in the morning news to a report into allegations of bullying in ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ (Dancing with the Stars in the U.S.). Amanda Abbington (actress) accused her professional dance partner of verbal and physical abuse. This resulted in an enormous BBC internal inquiry. The popular dancer, Giovanni Pernice, was in fact subsequently cleared of any physical abuse. It would appear that Amanda found the hard graft, hard training, and harsh comments about her dancing and participation a little hard to take.
September 27th
A dash to London. A
friend’s 80th birthday dinner, held at the Royal Society in Carlton
House Terrace. A hugely respected
cardiologist, with a creditable textbook to his name, I occasionally tell him,
tongue in cheek, that his son is now more famous than he. His son is indeed a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and undertakes complex molecular research, which may one day result in
a cure for cancer.
Another inspiring experience. We are allowed to see its Royal Charter, the
name of ‘Charles R’ at the top (1660).
The signatures of all of the Fellows on the vellum pages of the Charter
Book is a record of scientific fame.
Newton’s original Principia Mathematica is a highlight.
The motto of the Royal Society is ‘Nullius in Verba’,
literally ‘No one’s words’, or ‘Take no-one’s word for it’. The Royal Society’s website states that it is
‘An expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of
authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by
experiment.’ My favourite quotation from
Sir Peter Medawar in his ‘Advice to a Young Scientist’ bears exactly on
this: ‘I cannot give any scientist of
any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a
hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.’
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| Newton's 'Principia Mathematica' |
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| The Motto of the Royal Society |
I heard Medawar lecture once. Not only a gifted scientist but also a gifted
communicator. Naturally, looking up the
exact wording of the quotation remembered above I have found numerous examples
of his sayings. Here is a rather
delightfully waspish one: ‘The spread of
secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of
people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been
educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.’
Non-scientists may like to know that Sir Peter Medawar shared
the 1960 Nobel Prize with Frank Macfarlane Burnet for his demonstration of
‘Acquired Immune Tolerance’, the phenomenon which underpins all of transplant
biology.
Our friend’s speech of thanks is urbane, modest, and
amusing, by turns. A story I had not
heard before, of how, at the Middlesex Hospital, a deranged patient with
hepatic encephalopathy threw a bedpan out of a ward window which landed
squarely on the windscreen of his brand new Jaguar is hilarious. But an appendix to the story is also credible
in today’s NHS. The hospital director
wrote to my colleague to say that they would be funding the repair of the car,
not because they had failed to protect it, but because they had ‘failed in a
duty of care to the patient.’
And I also find myself thinking – if had happened today it
would merely have been one of those ghastly corrugated cardboard bedpans, not
the stainless steel beauties of the past, which resembled nothing so much as
the ‘peanut’* sculpture by Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
*Official name Cloud Gate.
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| Upside down bedpan aka Anish Kapoor's 'Cloud Gate'. Chicagoans call it 'The Peanut' |
West Sussex Golf Club, near Pulborough
We wind on, into autumn and my book club choice is ‘Rain’
(and any other of the short stories) of Somerset Maugham. Reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ and ‘Of Human
Bondage’ when young was inspiring but I had not read the short stories until I
was chatting with a fellow medical student at UCH, John Lourie*. I knew that John had done a PhD in
anthropology at Oxford before coming to join us at clinical school. The conversation turned to canals, of which a
fellow student, Gerald, was an enthusiast.
He was holding forth about sundry British canals when John made some
mild interjection about the remarkable nature of the Panama canal. This stopped Gerald dead. ‘You’ve been through the Panama canal?’ He gawped.
‘Yes,’ Was the answer. John made
a few remarks about it, and then said something like, ‘But the third time I
went through it was blah blah blah…’ (I
have forgotten the point he was making).
Collapse of stout party Gerald.
Some of John’s anthropological research had been in the
South Seas and Papua New Guinea. ‘I’ve
stayed in the room in which Somerset Maugham wrote “Rain”,’ He said. (For pedantic reasons I will tell you that
this was in Pago Pago, American Samoa.)
This minor episode led me on to read more of Somerset
Maugham’s short stories. I do hope that
my book club colleagues will have enjoyed some of them. In view of the location of so many of the
stories (Far East, South Seas, Malaysia (then the Federated Malay States or
FMS), Singapore, I have promised them Tiffin and some Gin Pahit when they come.
* John Lourie subsequently
trained as an Orthopaedic Surgeon in Oxford, but true to his wanderlust, became
Professor of Human Anatomy in Papua New Guinea.
He returned to the UK to recommence work in Orthopaedics. We first got to know one another when we had
to share a pigeon hole in the UCH Medical School entry lobby
(Lourie-McLeod). The mailbox was crammed
with reprint requests for his paper entitled ‘Hand-clasping and arm-folding
among middle eastern Jews in Israel.’ As
students on a ‘firm’ together I would note in him the impatience of somebody
with a proper scientific training (DPhil) when confronted with the arbitrary
diktats of medical teaching which often relied on accepted wisdom rather than
scientific proof.
A footnote to the Lourie story. Sharing the same firm and the same teaching
with him, we were both much amused by the vast number of eponymous medical
diseases. Osgood-Schlatter’s disease,
Dercum’s disease, Behçet’s Syndrome, for example. During a brief foray into urology, we were
introduced to the wide variety of urinary catheters available, many of which
were brought to the medical world by French physicians and surgeons. One is tempted to suggest that it was the
high incidence of gonorrhoeal urethral stricture in France (you may have to
look this up, non-medics; or possibly not), which gave birth to so many French
catheters. The catheters were even
measured in a bizarre French way. The
size (thickness) is measured in Ch. In
this instance, Ch stands for Charrière, not the unit of Swiss currency. Later changed to Fr for French in homage to
M. Charrière. But our lecturer caught us
out: ‘Who was Coude?’ He asked.
‘French
urologist, sir,’ was the prompt reply.
‘Wrong! Coude means bent or elbow in French!’ Ahhh, failed.
A favourite trick of examiners.
It is a bent (angled) catheter.
There is even a Bi-coude (double bend).
Coude catheters are still widely sold for ‘self-catheterisation.’ Aggghh!
The complete French physician of the 19th century carried a
variety of shapes and sizes of catheters stuffed into his hatband (sterility a
secondary consideration).
John
Lourie collated many of these eponymous diseases and subsequently wrote a book
entitled, ‘Who Was Coude?’
October 24th
This used to be celebrated as United Nations Day. When I was at Grammar School in
Haverfordwest, specific mention of it was made on this day in school
assembly. I suppose that only 14 years
after the acclamation of its charter there was still some hope that it was an
organisation which might save the world.
I travel to London to visit my daughter and her husband,
and then, on the following day (St Crispin’s Day) journey to Richmond for a
funeral of an associate from a very distant past. We were all students together at ‘ISH’. International Students’ House. The umbrella organisation was called the
‘Goats’ Club’, founded in 1956 by Mary Trevelyan to foster better worldwide
understanding through the mixing of students from all nations. Mary, or ‘Miss Trevelyan’ as we called her,
was a regular presence in the house at the time that I lived there – 1970 to
1972. More recently she has gained
prominence as the acknowledged companion and possibly would be wife (never achieved)
of T S Eliot from 1938 to 1957. Mary was
truly a saintly lady, as even a brief look at her biography will show.
Despite our ages, three of us (and one wife) are there to
support our companion Kitty, in the loss of her husband. Kitty being Irish, with a strong Irish
presence, the funeral is held at Saint Elizabeth of Portugal Roman Catholic
church in Richmond. A plaque on the wall
nearby indicates that Bernardo O’Higgins lived there in the late 18th
Century. Is there a link?
Attending funerals tends to provoke a philosophical mood,
especially as I note that the deceased was exactly one day younger than I am. I muse as the train gathers speed back
towards Dorset. Will the world one day
be taken over by buddleias? Or is it
just the wilderness around railway tracks which has the monopoly? The low-lying heathland of the New Forest
often has an inviting charm, especially when the heather is in bloom. But today it seems gloomy under louring skies
and the flowers are finished. Not until the
squat reassuring presence of the square tower of 900-year-old Christchurch
Priory comes into view is there the faintest hint of reassurance, of permanence. And it is now lit by a very low late October
sun. It stands resolute and defiant
against the fads and preoccupations of a world too busy to take note. Over the Avon, over the Stour, and into
Bournemouth.
But some final introspection – I recently had to apply for
a new passport. Will this be the last
one?
I sense that much of this diary so far is preoccupied with
tragedy, and it may well be time to draw it to a close. It is however in keeping with the season of autumn. But a final wry comment following my Richmond
experience. We ‘ISH’ residents, lifelong
members of the Goats’ Club, are due to meet again in London in two weeks’
time. I show my friends my original
Goats membership card.
‘Where did you get that?’
gasps Joe.
‘Well, I had an old cardboard one,’ I say, ‘But when they
issued the plastic cards in 1973 I was sent this.’
‘But they were all withdrawn,’ says Joe.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘Because the original Goats logo was drawn by an honorary
member.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Surely you can guess?
He sat on committees with us and helped to judge art and photographic
competitions. Rolf Harris.’*
*For
my non-UK readers, Rolf Harris was a very popular Australian entertainer,
musician and artist who settled in the UK.
(Some of his records were hits on both sides of the Atlantic). He appeared frequently on TV doing instant
drawings, and on one occasion even received the accolade of painting a portrait
of the Queen for her 80th birthday.
However, in 2014 he was convicted of a number of sexual assaults,
several involving underage girls including his daughter’s best friend. When I sat on committee with him in my role
of Chairman of International Students’ House in the early 1970s he was charming
and helpful. I have since wondered if he
associated himself with the House because of the many young students from
overseas, but that as the lawyers would say is pure speculation.
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| Goats' Club membership card. Designer: R.H. |
