Personal Blogs

Even

if

You could

turn

You would not find the way back

Too much snow has

Fallen

since

Then

I went to the Doctor, I said "Doctor I've got this funny feeling. Is it serious?"

Down in the Half Moon back bar tonight the conversation turned to horse race betting.

After a while the Oldest Regular gave a quiet cough, and the bar fell silent in anticipation.

“I’ll never forget”, he says, “One Grand National day in the Plough. Old Bill was there and he pipes up ‘I’m goin to pick the winner o’ this race.’

There was a stranger there as didn’t know Bill, and ‘e says, a bit scornful like, ‘If you can pick the winner I’ll buy your beer all the rest of the day.’

‘You’re on’, Bill says, sucking his teeth in a thoughtful way. A few minutes later he excused himself. We assumed he’d gone to the Gents, although he seemed to take even longer than usual. When he returned he sat very quietly at the back of the room while we all watched the race on the pub TV.

When the winner was declared Bill came forward with his winning ticket and claimed his free beers.

As he explained to us the next day, ‘I went out the back door, sprinted down the lane to the bookies and put 2p to win on every horse, so obviously I had the winner among ‘em. I feel a bit ashamed of mysel really, takin advantage of ‘im like that.’”

Yesterday I found a fine stand of teasels.

These are common teasels but a close relative, or perhaps just a cultivated variety, apparently with hooked spines, was once used for raising the nap on fabrics such as velvet.

It literally teased out the fibres. The suffix -le is an Old English or Middle English formation that indicates an instrument, a thing for something. There are other examples: a thimble is an instrument for a thumb; a handle for a hand; a shovel may shove; a beetle may bite, and a weevil may weave (a cocoon).

The botanical name is Dipsacus, from Greek διψακος = thirst (think dipsomaniac) which seems to come from the way the  connate leaf arrangment leads to small pools of water collecting around the stem.

Traditionally the teasel is also called (amongst many things) Venus’s basin/bath/cup, presumably for this feature. Small insects may fall into the water, so naturalists have often speculated that the teasel may be semi-carnivorous (compare Venus fly-trap). Francis Darwin wrote on this [1].

But there was no hard evidence, until a recent study [2] provided support for this idea. Researchers fed teasels with insects. The teasels didn't grow faster or bigger, but they did produces significantly more seed.

[1] Darwin, Francis. “On the Protrusion of Protoplasmic Filaments from the Glandular Hairs of the Common Teasel (Dipsacus Sylvestris). [Abstract].” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. 26, 1877, pp. 4–8. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/113363.

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017935

It had been many years since last I had seen Profiterole, when we parted that day in a patisserie on the Rive Gauche. But I recognised him instantly. "Choux", I said.

"Anyone can manufacture a chicken joke. They are not elegant."

Like as a chicken by the road

That soon makes up its mind,

To venture upon the carriageway

Whatever it may find

Because it knows, a hungry fox

Doth creep up close behind.

Recently I watched the Feynman Messenger Lectures, from 1964.

In this lecture Feynman discusses past and future, in a way that in some ways has never been bettered. Only recently has Carlo Rovelli explained it as well. The direction of time is driven by the fact that things easily become intermingled. If I drop some food colouring into a glass of water, then after a time the water will all be the same colour. In principle the food colouring might one day all collect together again, and the water once more be clear. But this is very unlikely to occur. An inconceivably large number of ink and water molecules would have to randomly make their way back to the start line.

The Unquiet Grave is a medieval folk song, that expresses the thought that things decay, and time cannot be reversed, at least as far as livings things are concerned. Joan Baez sang it, in the same era as the Feynman lectures, and I've always thought she performed it very beautifully.

Search for 'Joan Baez Unquiet Grave BBC 4' and you will find it.

Incidentally she has a cousin John Baez, who is a physicist, and a great teacher.

A chicken stood upon the kerb,

And on this thought did pore.

“Ought I to cross the road right now?”

“Or should I pore some more?”

"No-one wants to read the unpredictiable. They don't know what to expect."

Coral Dewis

I went to the doctor, I said “Doctor, Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a battery.”

She looked me in the eye “Sorry, I’m afraid it’s terminal.”

I played the Devil's Advocate. But the Devil's Advocate won.