#78: Park Run

Sizewell Park Run. Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations in the background

Park Run is great. A 5km circuit in the company of a few hundred others with your time recorded and emailed to you soon afterwards. Marshals cheer you around the course, dogs are welcome and mums and dads run with buggies. People wear ‘milestone’ T-shirts – 100 runs, 250, even 500. There's also an event for children. Some GPs even prescribe Park Run.

I’ve notched up 20 Park Runs so far, the first in the grounds of Bristol’s Ashton Court last June, the latest last month at Alexandra Palace in North London. Along the way I’ve run in other places like Oswestry, Cheam and Sheffield. As well as a burst of positivity and feeling of achievement to start the weekend, you learn something about the local area. For example, that Birkenhead Park in Liverpool influenced the design of New York’s Central Park. Or that Sizewell C power station, currently being built, is enormous already, maybe over twice the size of Sizewell B. Anyway, it’s a brilliant way to start the weekend.

Banbury Park Run's 10th anniversary celebrations

Is Park Run good for you?

Research with over 76,000 Park Runners just published by Sheffield Hallam University shows I am not alone. About 90% of participants thought it had improved their fitness and sense of achievement. On almost every measure their experience was more positive than they had expected when they signed up. Volunteers who help organise said it made them feel more part of the community, and just over 72% of volunteers said they were happier because of taking part. However, the research authors admit that since only Park Runners answered the survey, it could be biased towards the positive, and it didn't include people who dropped out or never ran after registration.

Reading the journal article reporting the research I learnt a new word – eudemonic, conducive to happiness. There is overwhelming evidence that physical activity improves physical and mental health and ‘substantial evidence’ that vigorous activity (like Park Run, for most people) is even better than moderate activity. Looking forward to the next one.

Find your local Park Run here.

Nonsuch Park, Epsom

#77: Withymead Nature Reserve

The Thames Path accompanies the great river from its source in Gloucestershire (where ‘an infant Thames runs shyly through its meadows’ says my guidebook), to the Thames Barrier 184 miles later. For the past two summers I’ve been walking it. One of the loveliest stretches so far has been between Goring, (11 miles west of Reading), to Cholsey four miles upriver. I was captivated by the trees leaning over to the riverside and delighted to see a kingfisher flash by.

The Thames path between Goring and Cholsey

It turns out the opposite bank holds a secret – Withymead Nature Reserve (not marked on my OS map). A backwater there provides a secure home for those kingfishers, and the 13-acre reserve hosts other flora and fauna such as foxes, bats, deer, grass snakes and slow worms. It is known for its Loddon Lilies, like snowdrops, in spring.

Reserve warden Pete lives as a volunteer on the reserve half of each week, cutting rushes, repairing the boardwalks and generally keeping it in order. He tells me he has seen a family of four otters playing ‘which is quite special’ and that the 7 mile strip of land between Wallingford and Goring makes up 14% of Oxfordshire’s fenland.

As so often happens with nature reserves, it was a farsighted public spirited individual who established it – in this case Anne Carpmael, who lived in the area for 60 years and bequeathed it to the public as a place for people, especially the young, to enjoy nature. It opened in 2004.

Slip rails from when it was a boatyard

Boattbuilding hut, now a bats' home

Before that it had been a boatyard and one can still see the winch and slip rails, as well as the boatbuilding hut, now a home for bats. It is well worth a visit, with winding paths and carefully constructed nooks for opening a thermos and maybe catching a glimpse of a whiskered head in the water or an iridescent fluttering wing.

Withymead Nature Reserve is open on Sundays from April to August, and for pre-booked visits on Fridays throughout the year, depending on availability.

#76: Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home

Radio did change the home, though not enough for the Bodleian Libraries, apparently. It was once ‘the disruptive new technology’, they tell us, which ‘transformed, or sometimes failed to transform, domestic and class dynamics, and in 1939 would unite households on the brink of war’. One senses a certain underlying disappointment that it did not wholly revolutionise the home, if not society. However, once past the rather heavy-handed political gloss, there is plenty of evidence of radio’s unifying, sustaining, educational power in this beautifully curated exhibition at the Bodleian’s Weston Library.

This, for example, is from a letter from a Birmingham clerk in the January 1928 Radio Times:

I’m only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It’s a real magic carpet. Before it was a fortnight at Rhyl, and that was all the travelling I did that wasn’t on a tram. Now I hear the Boat Race and the Derby… There are football matches on Saturdays and during the week music and talks by famous men and women who have travelled and can tell us about places…’

This listener actually felt physically transported through his set. He seems to listen alone, which was unusual – people usually listened together, and a picture in The Broadcaster magazine of December 1922 shows two couples in Christmas hats ‘listening in on a marconiphone’. When radio started, it was sometimes intimidatingly technical – and in fact, that is where the word ‘set’ comes from, as owners sometimes assembled radios themselves:

In its early days radio meant the BBC (amazingly, no commercial stations were allowed in the UK until 1973), and so one of its missions was to educate. These pamphlets (what design and typography!) accompanied broadcasts which were meant to be listened to and discussed in places like schools, libraries and working men’s clubs by people who had probably left school at 14:

One can’t help seeing this tradition continuing today in the impressively low-tech In Our Time and its reading lists.

So plenty of evidence that radio brought people together – any fears that it would inhibit or even replace conversation, like a 1920s smartphone? Fascinatingly yes, in this pair of cartoons:

Other documents in the exhibition are this early guide to BBC pronunciation (try ‘exquisite’ with the stress on the first syllable):

and this listing, showing how random early programming could be (interesting to see an early version of celebrity gossip):

There is some audio in the exhibition – excerpts of early 1920s broadcasts: ‘Hello Marconi House, London calling’, ‘Hello children’, and an SOS message asking Mrs May Dibble to go to Burton-on-Trent Infirmary ‘where her son is dangerously ill’. There’s also a lovely early bakelite radio (what curves!) and lots of technical equipment.

On the basis of this exhibition one could imagine radio as an old-fashioned technology, now superseded by multimedia. The amazing thing is that it is not. Eighty-six per cent of the UK population aged over 15 listened to radio in the three months to June 2025. This is even more than the figure of 77% in 1939, when the UK population was much smaller and TV yet to arrive.

Why does it remain so popular? The exhibition comments that ‘wireless was (and is) astonishingly inclusive, cheap, and accessible’. But this is only part of the story. Practically, one can listen to it while doing other things – driving, cooking, working. But does it not also allow you to use imagination while listening – encourage you to make your own connections, muse along with the music or commentary, in a way which TV does not? It’s also amazing how much can be done purely through audio – even topics which you would think demand a visual element, such as A History of the World in 100 Objects. There’s something about the auditory.

Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home is at the Weston Library until 31 August.

#75: More or Less

 

I'm very happy every time I hear that the BBC radio four programme ‘More Or Less ‘ is returning to the airwaves. The programme fact checks statistics in the news, from whether cutting the winter fuel payment to pensioners causes excess winter deaths (answer: possibly, but it’s impossible to put a number on it), to whether South-Eastern Railways clears 50 million leaves from their line each year (answer: unverifiable, file it in the ‘silly drawer’).

There are also year-round weekly podcasts with longer interviews, coverage of new books on numbers and statistics, and lately fact checking claims made by Donald Trump, which seems rather an easy target.

What’s it like?

The programme is non-polemical, light and often jokey in tone, and made up of varied voices. However, this does not stop it paying attention to the complexity of statistics and the questions being grappled with, showing how click-bait headlines often mislead (and occasionally don’t), how correlation does not mean causation and the results you get depend on the questions you ask and the factors you consider. Sounds pretty basic research practice, but as the programme shows, researchers don’t always follow best practice, and even if they do, journalists often don’t when reporting the research.

But it goes beyond fact checking; if a statistic is shown to be false, the researchers try to establish the real answer, and if not ask whether a real answer is actually possible. Along the way they dip into statistical principles such as different kinds of averages and sample sizes.

Three items

Here are three items from the programme which have stuck in my mind:

Have about one in three women in the UK had an abortion? (Answer: probably yes; 21.53 minutes into the programme).

Are black mothers five times more likely than white mothers to die during childbirth in the UK? (Answer: they are about four times more likely to die during pregnancy or up to 6 weeks afterwards. This is due to underlying health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes; also to behaviour, such as whether they attend antenatal classes. There is no evidence that it’s due to race per se, or mothers being treated differently because of race. The risk of dying during pregnancy or up to 6 weeks afterwards is very low for all women in the UK – about 60 women per year.

Can you divide 1 by 0? (Answer: it can’t be done; 22.25 into the programme; and the answer isn’t infinity; 14.15 into the following week’s programme after a storm of replies).

It’s very BBC, or should be

The programme hits all three targets of BBC founder Lord Reith’s vision for the corporation: ‘inform, educate and entertain’. In fact, I would like to see BBC content in general more like this – focused on fact-finding and checking, resulting in a valuable archive of programmes, educational not only in content but in investigative method. Fewer shock headlines and more measured findings. Less impact short-term, more long-term.

I would like them to look at…

And what statistical question would I like the programme to investigate? Well, Professor Brian Cox stated on Radio 3’s Private Passions that worldwide, more is spent on peanuts than on science; and, perhaps more verifiably, that more is spent on mobile phone ring tones than on meteorite defence systems. Sounds suspicious. Get onto it, More Or Less!

 

#74: Candlemas

                                    

Coming to the end of this cold, wet month, I’ve enjoyed Eleanor Parker’s book Winters in the World, an exploration of the Anglo-Saxon experience of the seasons through Anglo-Saxon poetry and historical and religious works.

Close to the weather

Several things struck me (apart from the beauty of Anglo-Saxon poetry such as The Seafarer, which I haven't read since my undergraduate days). Firstly, how dependent on and close to the weather people were then, since it could make the difference between famine or plenty. Also, the seasons gave meaning and structure to people’s lives much more strongly than they do now. Thirdly, how important communal celebrations were, and the sheer number of them that existed.

The origin of Candlemas

Often newly-introduced Christian celebrations were meshed into the year’s weather cycle. This happened with the 2 February Christian festival of Candlemas. The festival commemorates Mary and Joseph taking the 40-day-old Jesus to be presented at the temple. They were met by the elderly Anna and her husband Simeon, who recognised the baby as the Messiah. Simeon took him in his arms and spoke a prayer which became the Christian Nunc Dimittis: ‘Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation’.

Says Parker:

This means that Candlemas is a festival which has at its heart a meeting between childhood and old age, birth and death, and winter and spring. The dating of the feast was fixed by its biblical origin, because the period of purification appointed in the law of Moses meant it must take place 40 days after Christ’s birth. However, 2 February coincided with a significant point in the solar year: midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, it’s a time when the days are getting longer, daylight is growing stronger, and in northern Europe the earliest spring flowers are starting to appear. It was a natural time for a festival of light, and that was what Candlemas became.

So Candlemas fuses Christianity (and before that, Jewish law) and the natural rhythm of the year. People celebrated it, Parker tells us, by taking candles to church to be blessed, so echoing Christ being presented in the temple. Then, after a procession, people took the candles home and kept them all year.

Periods of dearth and plenty have disappeared in our age of supermarkets and year-round strawberries. But do we not still create them, showing that such rhythms are important, even if artificially-induced? For example, I’m just coming to the end of Dry January, which strikes me as a secular version of Lent.

Book recommendation

As for the book, it is scholarly but accessible. It explains clearly which sources are used and what they allow us to say, as in a two-page discussion of whether the modern word ‘Easter’ does come from the pagan goddess Eostre, the only evidence for which is one statement in Anglo-Saxon historian Bede’s Reckoning of Time, a discussion of the medieval church calendar. Parker thinks that on balance the festival may have been named for a Kentish goddess, and explains why she thinks so, briefly surveying the history of the argument and sources involved. It is brave not to fear losing the general reader by detailing sources and uncertainties.  

This is a good read for a chilly time of year. It encourages celebration or at least a marking of lean times, before the first blossoms appear. Happy Candlemas!

#73: The Places in Between

This book is a chronicle of Rory Stewart’s 36-day walk through central Afghanistan in January 2002, from Herat in the west to Kabul in the east, starting six weeks after the Taliban were removed from power after 9/11. Stewart likes a challenge. He decides to take the shorter, but harder and colder, route through the central mountains (rather than the longer southern route around them) since the Taliban still controls parts of the south. He goes in winter because he does not want to wait for the snow to melt.

In the footsteps of the first Mughal emperor

He discovers he is following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India, who crossed the mountains at the beginning of the sixteenth century when he was still prince of a poor part of Uzbekistan (before going on to conquer Kabul and then Delhi). Babur’s diary is a constant accompaniment on the journey, and Stewart comments on it: ‘What he did was very dangerous, but he never draws attention to this. Instead, he focuses on the people he meets and uses portraits of individuals to suggest a whole society.… He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal or more symbolic.’

Stewart tries to follow Babur’s lead by painstakingly describing people and places as he asks for hospitality each night. He generally rejects journalistic or political generalisations, and is unwilling to search for premature meanings, often leaving conversations and episodes open-ended without trying to analyse them. Like Babur, Stewart tries not to embroider, commenting early on that ‘abrupt episodes and half understood conversations already suggested a society that was an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humour and extreme brutality’, and describes an episode in which one of his companions points a gun at children for fun.

It’s clear that Stewart knows a great deal about which local people hold power in the different areas of the country, and about Western intervention, but this is mainly cleared to the sides of the main story – his trek in freezing temperatures, often living only on bread, spurning lifts when offered, experiencing great kindness from hosts who are much poorer than him. For most of the journey his closest companion is a semi-domesticated mastiff with yellow wolf’s eyes whose trust he slowly gains, who he names Babur. His relationship with the dog is for me the most touching thing in the book.

Detailed descriptions as a form of respect

Another joy of the book is its descriptive detail. One night just over halfway through the journey, Stewart is attacked by some boys throwing stones at him, and asks an old man if he can walk with him to escape the intimidating attentions of three other men. He is then invited by a man called Aktar to stay in his house and then to a castle guest room, where he is allowed to light a small fire but not the stove for lack of fuel. Stewart is ill and stares at the castle ceiling for hours:

[it] was made from a frame of poplar branches, their brown, curled leaves still attached. The mud floor was partly covered by a shabby striped blanket, two pieces of dark felt and a small cheap rug in the Bokhara style. Mattresses were stacked in the corner under a grimy white sheet. The walls were undecorated except for a photograph of my absent host, the feudal lord Bushire Khan, with a pencil-thin moustache and a trilby hat. He looked like a 1930s Shanghai gangster.

I woke later feeling a little better to find a girl by the fire. She looked about 17. Her beautiful pale face was scrunched in concentration as she crumbled dry animal dung into the hearth. Both her hair and eyebrows were very black, as though she had dyed them. She wore a gold cap in a blue embroidered turban and, over her dress of blue chintz, a purple waistcoat and a green embroidered wool cardigan. A pair of blue corduroy trousers showed beneath the skirt. She raised her head and met my eyes. I smiled. She looked at me expressionlessly and then turned and left the room.

Such descriptions are a form of respect for the country, and allow us to take our time imagining the journey, the landscape, the people.

The minaret of Jam

During the journey he comes across the minaret of Jam, a solitary column in the midst of mountains, decorated with turquoise tiles and densely patterned bricks. Stewart thinks this could be the remains of Turquoise Mountain, the capital city of the Ghorid empire, before it was destroyed by Genghis Khan. This had been excavated under Western-led programmes before but when Stewart visited, after a decade of destruction of cultural heritage under the Taliban, no one outside the region knew whether it was still standing.

Bushire, a powerful military man in the area, tells Stewart he gets money from foreigners to direct a society which protects the tower. He tells Stewart they have sold most of the things they have dug up. Stewart asks him:

‘What have you found out about the life of this ruined city?’

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

I tried again. ‘Have you found out roughly what the plan of the city was… where the bazaar was, the religious schools?’

‘No.’

‘The smaller mosques, the gardens, the military barracks?’

‘No. You are asking difficult questions. We just dig downwards and we find a jumble of things.’

Bushire says the city has been destroyed twice, once by hailstones and once by Genghis. The group laugh when Stewart tells them they are destroying what remains.

Stewart would like to see the villagers employed by an official archaeological team and the site enclosed and monitored, and laments that the ‘international community’ did not act before it was too late.

The minaret of Jam

Local, personal meaning

Stewart says at the end: ‘Nothing in my life has brought me as much fulfilment as my walk in Afghanistan and my work in Afghanistan.… I hope, therefore, the book will survive not as a metaphor of something international and political, but as a chronicle of an experience which found its deepest meaning when it was at its most local and most personal.’

He subsequently returned to the country and set up the charity Turquoise Mountain which restores buildings, has built a clinic and a school, trains craftspeople and helps them launch businesses. It has since expanded to Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and the Levant.

 

#72: In Our Time

 

One of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio 4 is the long-running series ‘In Our Time’, in which three guests, usually academics, discuss central topics, events and people from history, science, religion, philosophy, literature, natural history and more. Three weeks ago it was Italian writer Italo Calvino. The previous episode was on the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek bronze object rescued from the seabed in 1900 which experts think was a kind of analogue computer for calculating the movements of the planets and stars.

What does the programme contain?

Typically the three participants introduce the topic broadly, then explore it in more detail and finally comment on its legacy for present and future times. The programme is 42 minutes long (plus some ‘bonus material’ available on catch-up, in which guests add something they didn’t have time for). Veteran presenter Melvyn Bragg manages the discussion.

The medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen has featured 

One of the programme’s attractions to me is that it explores these topics on their own terms rather than through the filter of present-day preoccupations and values. It usually starts by placing the person, work or idea firmly in their own time (despite the title of the series). Only towards the end of the programme does Bragg ask explicitly about current opinion of the topic. The programme also eschews modern parallels with its subjects. And despite the efforts of the ‘In Our Time’ website to provide click-bait soundbites (‘it remains shocking today’ on the Sistine Chapel), this is long form listening without bells and whistles – just talk.

Why listen instead of read?

So why listen to the programme when you could read Wikipedia, more quickly, for an overview?

One reason is that because it is spoken, one is somehow more aware of the fluidity of knowledge, that it is always developing. In addition, something of the personality of the speakers and their enthusiasm comes across, and it is interesting to hear the often skilful way both they and Bragg marshal the material.

As an example of all of these, here is a fairly long, lightly edited, excerpt from the September 2024 programme on wormholes (shortcuts between galaxies):

Katy Clough: One speculative idea that’s quite fun to think about is the idea that universes are born in black holes. So when you have a black hole, instead of having a singularity, you actually balloon out into a new universe, so maybe the collapse of a star can be the birth of a new universe. And I’ve always kind of liked that, but I think I like it for purely aesthetic reasons and not for any good scientific reason.…

Melvyn Bragg: There’s talk that in one sense physics is as imaginative as science fiction – what do you make of that?

Andrew Pontzen: I agree that physics is fundamentally a very imaginative endeavour… We were talking about Newton and his unification of the heavens with earthly phenomena – if that’s not a leap of imagination, I don’t know what is.… Science more broadly requires a huge amount of imagination as well as experimental rigour – [we need to find] the right balance, and we’ve been right on the edge of that talking about wormholes because we are so far away from experiment.

Toby Wiseman: I might say actually it’s creative rather than necessarily imaginative. Particularly when we talk about these fundamental sciences, our understanding of the universe is really a mathematical one… Newton didn’t just give us gravity, he gave us the notion that you could really analytically control physical phenomena through mathematics, and he developed calculus in order to do that. Then for hundreds of years, the theme that has dominated is, you can imagine wonderful things and be creative in working with maths, but at the end of the day the mathematics keeps you honest. We would never understand the universe in the way it is today if it wasn’t for for the fact that it didn’t require imagination – it’s all there in the mathematics. When for example in 1916 the first black hole solution was written down… it wasn’t understood to be a black hole solution, but at the same time there it was.

Andrew Pontzen: I think we’ve finally found a point of disagreement, which is an achievement! If you look at someone like Faraday, for example, Faraday did remarkable experiments on electricity and magnetism in the mid nineteenth century and had very little mathematical ability… And yet he was able to extrapolate… He wrote about things like ray vibrations… – these were things that came out of his mind, they were not mathematically elucidated. And the fact Michell was writing about black holes in the time of Newton, long before someone came along and got the maths correct. So I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you say.

Actually the disagreement above is a rarity on ‘In Our Time’; the academics usually support or praise each other’s speeches. This is one deficiency of the programme, since differing viewpoints make a good discussion, and is a reason for inviting different guests. Another disappointment for me is the literature episodes, since guests talk about the literature but rarely quote it. This is a missed opportunity to let people, both guests and listeners, respond to poetry or novels moment-by-moment or to compare knowledge about the writer as a person with their actual writing. For example, in a programme on Simone de Beauvoir, Melvyn Bragg asked Professor of French Margaret Atack to give listeners a ‘taste’ of some of the disturbing content of the letters between Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. The Professor responded in generalities and it was left to Bragg to say that the letters include details of how the two philosophers took the virginity of girls and passed them between them. Even then there were no direct quotes from the letters. One can also hear Bragg’s occasional frustration with academics being over-subtle rather than defining their terms or stating their position straightforwardly.

My top three?

Three that stick in my mind are on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the idea that you can accurately measure either the position or momentum of an atomic particle, but not both; the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 50 million years ago, when crocodiles swam at the North Pole; and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, on John Maynard Keynes’s book attacking the 1919 Versailles agreement at the end of World War I. There’s also a listeners’ top 10 here.

The Muses and the history of inspiration were another topic