Poets often write about birdsong – Hardy’sThe Darkling Thrush and Keats’sOde to a Nightingale spring to mind.
Both these poets knew how to identify the birds they heard. Hardy also sees his:
An aged thrush,
frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to
fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
The nightingale is
never seen in Keats’s poem, and indeed an obliteration of the senses is strangely
part of what the poet desires to attain through the‘viewless wings of poetry’.
He imagines the bird singing after his death:
Still wouldst thou
sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.
These are solemn
interpretations to put on creatures marking their territory or trying to
attract a mate. Birds also make shorter ‘calls’ to sound an alarm, identify
other birds, connect with the flock or, in fledglings, beg for food.
The Merlin app
I’ve often wished I
could identify birds through their song – I could tell chaffinches, and more
characteristic callers like wood pigeons, the hoopoe or owl, but not much more.
Now the Merlin app, devised by Cornell University, has changed this. Holding up
your phone for a few seconds brings a picture of each bird singing. The bird’s
name is highlighted as they sing to help you link the song and the bird (if
there is more than one listed). I caught a lovely glimpse of a golden oriole
flying from tree to tree in Spain after being alerted to its call, learnt the
background tinfoil crinkle-song of serins and of course the everyday chatter of
sparrows. The app also allows you to compare birdsong with a recorded sample to
check its suggestions.
The more
virtual, the more real?
But does this mean
that, using the app, your ability to identify birds independently diminishes? I’ve
found exactly the opposite – once given guidance, you listen hard and learn to
identify them yourself.
This improvement in
my ability is an example of one of sociologist Steve Woolgar’s ‘five rules of virtuality’ –
‘the more virtual, the more real ‘. In other words, virtual engagement
increases actual engagement (although Woolgar was writing before AI). The
example Woolgar gave was of televised football leading to more, not fewer,
people attending football matches. Identifying the birds via the app means
identifying them more in real life. If you haven’t already, try it.
Raising Hareis
Chloe Dalton’s account of finding a leveret on a path near her house in the
country, taking it home (after initially leaving it alone for four hours to let
it move away or be reclaimed by its mother) and rearing it.
This is, initially, against advice. A conservationist tells
her he has never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret. A friend
advises her to give it to someone who knows about animals. But, says Dalton, ‘…
I felt an inner stubbornness stirring. I
will work it out.’
What do hares eat?
Dalton knows little about raising hares and soon finds out
most advice is about cooking and eating them, not feeding them. She eventually finds
out what to feed the leveret in Cowper’s poem ‘Epitaph on a Hare’, written
after the death of one of his three pet hares:
His diet was of wheaten bread, And milk, and oats, and straw, Thistles, or lettuces instead, With sand to scour his maw.
On twigs of hawthorn he regaled,
On pippins’ russet peel;
And, when his juicy salads failed,
Sliced carrot pleased him well.
This hare refuses carrot and lettuce, but oats prove a long-term
favourite, along with clover and grass from the garden:
It adored clover and
would bury itself in the deepest patches, until only the tips of its ears could
be seen, foraging freely for the plants that it had spurned when I cut them,
preferring to crop them fresh from the ground.… Grass it would eat from the tip
of the blade down to the stem, flowers the reverse. It would snap dandelions
off at the root and gradually draw the stem into its mouth until the vivid
yellow petals hovered at its muzzle, whereupon it would neatly sever the flower
head and let it fall by its paws.
Such close observation and description of the hare’s
appearance and habits was for me the main strength of the book. Here, for
example, is the arrival of the hare’s winter pelt:
At year’s end, its
coat was russet-coloured, almost flame-like in the sunset light. Its face bore prominent
white markings: a beautiful pale circle around each eye, with an additional
patch of white above and below it, presumably intended to break up the dark
shape of the face when seen against the snow. Just as when it was small, its
rear legs and lower haunches were once again a pale milky-coffee hue. At dusk,
these streaks and patches of white would remain visible while the rest of its
body disappeared in the fading light.
Dalton’s familiarity with the hare is shown by linking its
winter coat to the pelt of its youth, and her sensitivity to its surroundings
and habits by describing how the pelt appears in the light and against the
snow.
Citizen research?
I can’t help feeling such description may be of use to
scientists, and indeed Dalton once or twice finds the hare’s behaviour at odds
with what she’s read in scientific papers; for example Dalton reads that hares
are absentee parents, but when leverets arrive (showing the hare to be female),
she is an attentive mother:
The hare remained
close by throughout the day, ensuring that the leverets stayed undercover while
keeping an eye out for predators. On several occasions I watched her lunge fearlessly
at crows that came too close, wielding her front legs like a battering ram and
successfully chasing them off her territory, despite their larger size and
formidable beaks.
She also finds she feeds her young more often than asserted
in various studies.
Other things one learns in the book is how hares run and
leap; that they build ‘forms’, shallow grass-filled grooves in the earth,
rather than burrowing underground like rabbits; and they strongly dislike
changes in their environment, as when Dalton disposes of an old sofa, then has
to reinstate it after the hare is unsettled.
The sofa question leads gently onto Dalton asking herself
whether she should enclose the garden, which would deprive other gambolling
hares of their playground, then to a wider comment on all the human barriers to
animal roaming, and information that many hares may cover 9-12 miles of ground
per night to feed. Gentle seguing from personal observation, to questioning, to
factual information is another strength of the writing.
Helping hares
There is also a plea for a closed season on hunting hares
(amazingly, there is none at the moment), and information that they are often
killed by farm machinery, since leverets defend themselves by hunkering down
and staying still rather than running to escape, which makes them particularly
vulnerable. A chapter called ‘Blood in the Harvest’ recommends using drones to
detect the animals so often harmed through agriculture:
If it is possible to
create robots and drones to reap our fields for us, could we not use technology
to detect the presence of leverets, and fauns, and nesting birds, and could
reasonable efforts not be made to relocate them, rather than simply leaving
them to be crushed beneath our machines?
Raising Hare is (thankfully) mostly free from any ‘journey’ of personal development on the part of the author, although she does describe how being with the hare made her question her often frenetic life as a foreign policy specialist. The book’s core is her experience and observation of the hare, and any wider exploration is based on and grows out of this close observation and description. The hare’s pace of behaviour permeates the writing; the book takes its time on description, is not overly concerned to form a narrative and trusts the reader to try to enter into the hare’s texture of life.
Wilding is Isabella Tree’s account of how she and her husband Charlie Burrell gave their 3,500-acre arable and dairy farm back to nature. They started in 2001, initially since they could not make traditional farming pay, but discovered there was government funding for conservation. The subsequent transformation of the land has made Knepp one of the most important spaces for wildlife in Britain.
The book mixes delightful observation of the ever-changing
activity of animals, plants, soil and insects, with information about the
various species, as well as detailing the couple’s efforts wrestling with
various bureaucracies to convince government of the importance of the project.
Purple emperors
Knepp is the site of the largest breeding population of
purple emperor butterflies, for example, which, explains Tree, was always
thought to prefer woods, because woodland was the only habitat humans had left
to it. On the evidence of its behaviour at Knepp, it prefers the sallow, a type
of willow – itself given space at Knepp by patches of earth thrown up by the
rootling of pigs which were introduced in lieu of the wild boar which would
have been present in the true wild. The video below shows a purple emperor emerging.
The ‘magic of rewilding’, she says, shows us how little we
sometimes know about species:
… We forget that our
landscape is so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be recording a
species not in its preferred habitat at all, but at the very limit of its
range. Naturalists believe the purple emperor was a woodland butterfly only
because – with no significant areas of sallow left – that is where it has clung
on.… And we can dwell on the delightful thought that, in times past, purple
emperors would have been a feature of the English summer, present in huge
numbers in every sallow-strewn county.
If they had set out to create a perfect habitat for purple
emperors, says Tree, they would never have achieved the same numbers as flit
among the trees now.
The episode shows the interconnectedness of plant and animal
species – it is plainly difficult for Tree to describe one species without
showing how others interact with it, as the pigs do here in preparing the
ground for sallow, which nurtures the purple emperors.
‘Lettuce from hell’
The couple had to learn to leave nature to its own devices –
to work with it, not against it. One of the most striking episodes for me was a
spectacular outbreak of creeping thistle (also known as ‘cursed’ or ‘lettuce
from hell’ thistle) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Tree describes how the dusky pink
flowered plant heads covered acres of the park. She says:
It was the biggest
challenge yet to our rewilding ethos. We looked out on the day of the Triffids
and knew what our neighbours would be saying and the threat the thistles could
pose to our Countryside Stewardship Scheme funding with their unashamed
invasion of the Repton Park. Less than a decade earlier, under the old regime,
we would have been out with the toppers and weedkiller for all we were worth.
It took all the courage we could muster to hold our nerve and do nothing.
But in May 2009 there was a ‘bonanza’ of painted lady
butterflies migrating from Africa. They descended on the thistles:
That summer, spiky
black caterpillars swarmed over the thistles, spinning silken webs like tents,
which soon filled with frass and inedible leaf spines. The whole area took on
the appearance of a chaotic army encampment. By autumn, after the caterpillars
had wolfed down the leaves, pupated and flown, our creeping thistle fields were
in tatters, their stalks draped in dirty silk, the pink flower-heads nodding on
skeleton stems – easy pickings for the ponies.
The thistles did not return, perhaps because the
caterpillars’ devastation had admitted a virus or other pest. ‘Now,’ says Tree
‘when people stand shaking their heads in our fields of ragwort or – latterly –
acres of the pioneer fleabane, we smile benignly and shrug off their concerns.
Not even plagues of injurious weeds last for ever.’
Tree and Burrell also found that the thistles’ prickly cover
had protected other butterflies, moths, lizards and insects: ‘gravid females
with dark stripes scuttled between the thistle stems along tracks made by field
mice, hunting for insects in preparation for the birth of their wriggling
young.’ Anthills appeared, protected from animals’ hooves by the thistles.
‘Charlie watched for hours as, mandible by mandible, the worker ants cut down thistle
and grass stalks to add structure to the new mounds. By the time the thistles
died back in autumn the anthills had gained height and stabilised, capped by a
coating of living moss and grass like the rind of a cheese.’
So they were able to observe nature’s natural boom and bust,
‘thanks to sitting on our hands and keeping the diphosphate under lock and
key’.
Horses at twilight on the estate
Wrestling with
bureaucracies
She comments that management of nature to keep it static in
order to benefit a particular species may miss the larger picture, only
available when nature is allowed to take its dynamic course. Indeed, this was a
long-term frustration for the couple in trying to get funding. English
Nature, she says, wanted ‘computer modelling, targets, safeguards, setting
parameters for the number of animals and vegetation cover, and lots and lots of
further research’. But targets and parameters made no sense: ‘the only way to
test the impact of freeroaming grazing animals in a landscape was to put them
into action…The idea of constructing a computer model to identify the outcomes
of self-willed land seemed like trying to predict the lifetime achievements of
an unborn child.’
Throughout the book a bewildering plethora of organisations,
departments and schemes pops up – Natural England, English Nature, the
Countryside Stewardship Scheme, the Environment Agency, Rewilding Britain. It
is clear that rewilding needs subsidies. But then farming itself is heavily
subsidised, as are other estate parks. One wonders about the rewilding
potential of other grand estates. Knole Park in Kent, for example, is
maintained carefully for its deer populations. What would it look like under a
scheme like this?
Help from others
It is clear from the book how much the couple depended on
others’ expertise and influence to advise on developments and
assess and argue for Knepp’s importance in Britain, Europe and worldwide.
Naturalists and academics gave the project credibility and boosted morale. Tree
singles out naturalist Ted Green, who visited them early on to advise on tree
care and pointed out how a tree’s life-support system includes a vast
underground network of fungal filaments which may even span entire continents. Another early inspiration was Frans Vera, who had started a pioneering rewilding project in the
Netherlands which had attracted, among other creatures, white tailed eagles.
Beavers
One of the most moving passages is when Tree describes
seeing beavers released into the wild in Scotland:
Two of the beavers
slid down river and disappeared within seconds but the largest, a pregnant
female, after a lap of honour, emerged onto the sand-spit in front of us to
preen. The size of a portly spaniel, she sat up, whiskers diagnosing the air
and, balanced by the flat scaly tail on the ground behind her, began to comb
through her long, slick fur with a back claw. Perhaps the dream of having
beavers at Knepp was not so far away.… Our concrete dams and Lego block
slipways would be things of the past, the floodplains punctuated with woody
debris blockages not of our own making, our clumsy, artificial scrapes a
staircase of pools, Spring Wood a resurgence of coppice. And with this watery
refinement a whole habitat would spring to life, an aqueous kingdom such as
Knepp has not seen since the early Middle Ages, a place of vegetative
complexity where even water voles would have a sporting chance to outwit the
mink.
Knepp does indeed now have beavers, introduced in 2020, two
years after the book was published. Not only that, but stork chicks hatched
that year for the first time, and 45 hatched in 2025. Some of these will be
transferred to an open aviary in Dagenham this year.
Words such as ‘ecosystem’, ‘sustainable’, ‘diversity’ are so
common these days as to be unremarkable, but Wilding shows how delightful, unpredictable and essential they are
in practice. Rewilding is spreading, partly thanks to Knepp and Tree’s
optimistic, joyful, skilful writing.
Knepp offers safaris, tours and workshops as well as
accommodation and events. There are also public footpaths through the
estate.
Le Carré, who died in 2020, left 1,237 boxes of documents to
the Bodleian, and this exhibition delves into them to try to show his writing
and thinking processes. It touches on many of his 26 novels, from the early
ones such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
establishing George Smiley, MI5’s insider-outsider mole hunter, to the later
post-Cold War work like The Little Drummer Girl, set in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and The Mission Song, about a Western-backed
coup in the Congo.
Beyond the Cold War
We can clearly see how le Carré fearlessly tackled big
issues, placing his characters in war zones, hospitals and in the middle of
corrupt and criminal processes worldwide, whether as protesters, participants
or somewhere in between. He didn’t hesitate to move beyond his Cold War novels,
which made his name, to other conflicts. On display is a pithy typewritten summing
up of geopolitics, describing how ‘Third World potentates’ buy guns instead of
butter, adding to the ‘near-total poverty of their countries’ and how ‘We
embargoed South Africa for decades, put a real tight ring around her. What was
the result? The Israeli arms dealers had a field day, the South Africans built
up their own industry, and now they are out there in the marketplace, the
absolute leaders in crowd suppression.’
Who helped him?
Le Carré used a network of ‘friends and lovers, journalists,
academics, authors, politicians and others’ to help with his research (not to
mention his wife Jane, who typed everything out). There is a handwritten list
of contacts for The Little Drummer Girl,
given him by an Israeli journalist, which includes the Israeli ambassador in
London and Knesset members who were the Minister of Police and and a former
chief of Mossad (the latter has ‘articulate’ next to his name on the list).
Also on display is a letter to a friend, Ruth Halter, asking
for help in finding out if there are controls on First World countries’
manufacturing of drugs for the Third World, and particularly: ‘… If there are
any instances where there is a suspicion of dumping unserviceable
pharmaceuticals on Africa, or using Africans as human guinea pigs to test drugs
out for the Western market’. This query became The Constant Gardener. One may remember Tessa Quayle in the book or
film resolutely refusing to go to a Western hospital, preferring the basic
hospitals which most of the native population used in a country where indeed
‘guinea pigs’ are found and used to test an anti-tuberculosis drug.
How did he
decide research questions?
A draft for The
Mission Song shows clearly how le Carré identified research questions. The
main part shows the ‘premise’, introducing Salvo, son of a Congolese woman and
a Northern Ireland Catholic missionary. Questions in the right margin, to be
researched, ask: ‘Is this broadly feasible? What was happening in the Congo
around the boy as he grew up? Did the missionaries stay under Mobutu? Did the
boy witness atrocities? ‘ One can see how these questions come to form the
story itself.
The premise for The Mission Song on the left, research questions on the right
Getting to know his characters
Le Carré wanted to get to know his characters in depth. A
document here shows him writing about the Cold War as Jim Prideaux, the brave
agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:
‘the divisions of our time produce divided men and women on both sides of the
so-called Iron Curtain,’ says le Carré in Jim’s voice. ‘So many divisions, in
fact, that one can hardly speak of sides. We have to ask ourselves what the
real war is… A war between the divided ones and the absolute ones…’.
But by the time we get to the novel such explicit avowals
disappear – Jim shows his loyalty in action, not words, agreeing to undertake a
mission which he suspects is ‘poppycock’, for reasons which are unclear,
perhaps even to himself. ‘What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess
like this?’ he tells Smiley. This shows le Carré’s judgement that questions
like motivation cannot be easily summarised. It also shows the submerged work
le Carré did on his characters which never makes it explicitly into the novels
but which, on this evidence, was needed for him to understand and present them as
individuals. Is this depth of research partly why Tinker Tailor is such an intelligent book?
Le Carré's best novel, IMO
Matters of
geography
And research was
not only into psychology – here are painstaking evocations of geographical
locations, perhaps more important in the pre-cyber days of dead letterboxes and
paper. There is a partly fictional map of a few blocks next to the Berlin Wall,
with a Turkish café which readers of Smiley’s People will recognise as
where Smiley and Toby wait, over too much coffee, to see if arch-enemy Karla
will appear over Checkpoint Charlie to surrender himself. Here too is a snap of
the building at Cambridge Circus where in Tinker Tailor policeman Mendel
waits at night for the mole to emerge from the building opposite, standing in
the darkness ‘the way coppers stand the world over, weight on both feet
equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance’.
Partly fictional map of an area near the Berlin Wall
Could have been
more literary
Generally I would
have liked more of a literary element in the exhibition – for a writer who so
often describes what happens when ideology and humans meet, there could have
been more on literary craft, plot, characterisation. More on humans, less on
ideology and politics, in other words. (The exhibition is called ‘Tradecraft’,
after all). However, one display does focus more on the craft of writing and le
Carré’s feelings about it. Speaking of Smiley’s People, he says: ‘it
made me very sad to write it somehow – the spiritual death of a marooned Brit
administrator, Smiley as a doomed anachronism, me as author – it all seemed so
hopeless. Then somehow it became funny and somehow Toby helped.’ He is
referring here to one of the MI5 bosses, the slightly dandified Toby Esterhase,
who after being implicated in the admission of the mole to The Circus, moves on
to run a gallery selling fake artefacts, but returns two novels later to play
his part in Karla’s downfall.
The alchemy of
the writing process
But perhaps it is
less easy to trace the alchemy of the writing process, the repeated ‘somehow’
in le Carré’s comment above, than identify political stances. One example of
this alchemy, for me, is in the description of Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor,
after an informal interview with Smiley, walking back through a country church
graveyard to the school where he teaches:
The last Smiley saw
of him was that lop-sided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels
cracked like gunshot between the tombs.
The ‘Norman’ church hints at the result of
earlier, long-ago battles, the incessant military struggles which go way back
before the Cold War. Perhaps ‘gunshot’, as well as describing Jim’s curtness,
hints at the threat of aggression, necessary abroad in order to protect
peaceful country schools and churches at home.
Or back with Mendel
at Cambridge Circus, watching for the mole:
From his window he
covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys which
for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between
them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of empire: a Roman
bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque.
Here again are the faint
influences from past imperial power struggles, present now only in decorative
details, part of the same process of political rise and fall that has made
Smiley ‘a doomed anachronism’.
My other criticism
of the exhibition is my recurrent gripe about literature exhibitions – where
are the books (apart from in the gift shop)? Let visitors pick them up and leaf
through them, or project a quote on the ceiling, or put an extract on a text
panel – let’s read the final magical product, which all the research was in aid
of.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Coming to the end of this cold, wet month, I’ve enjoyed
Eleanor Parker’s bookWinters 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 asThe 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’sReckoning 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
