London is in the throes of springtime, and everything is in bud.
Last year this time, my belly was swelling ever bigger in pregnancy. Now, my son – nearing the seven month mark – grows so fast that he seems almost to lengthen in real time. Continue reading
I wasn’t really paying attention to the radio. I was busy cooking, but it sounded to me as if the question Clive Anderson asked the film-maker Andrea Calderwood on Saturday’s episode of Loose Ends amounted to ‘how come a nice woman like you is making films about the nasty episode that was the Biafran civil war?’. Of course h Continue reading
Tonight, I know, is the first night of Pesach-Passover, the Jewish festive celebration of the historic/mythical tale of escape from slavery in Egypt. Being an atheist with a complete lack of interest in any religious or pseudo-religious customs, Passover has never been a holiday that I’ve really celebrated. In fact, I don’t celebrate mu Continue reading
Time was when the model of human evolution went something like this: our ancestors essentially evolved to climb and live in trees, but with the general drying and cooling of the Earth’s climate over the past few million years, the great African forests shrank, to be replaced with the kind of tropical grassland known as savanna. Our ancestors Continue reading
Trolls seldom have anything worthwhile to say. They twist, bully, rant and rave and insult, putting forth their worst drivel to provoke a response. All behind a cloak of anonymity. That is the nature of a troll; inevitably a loser who dares not show his face. So when such a troll spouts outright lies that can easily be refuted, there is seldom any Continue reading
That migraine I was waiting for finally struck this week. Amazingly it didn’t throw my life into disarray, because it hit me during a week I was supposed to be having ‘off’. Consequently it only spoiled a day of relaxation, the day I intended to sort out and take a bag of old clothes to the Oxfam shop and do otherwise virtuous but Continue reading
Set somewhere in the north of England where ancient shadows hover just beyond glimpsing, teen novel Bone Jack by Sara Crowe shows that fiction for young readers needn’t stint on horror and darkness – and can cleave to much more genuinely rooted ancient wisdom than you’ll ever find in burlesques about schoolboy wizards and high-sch Continue reading
Last week you would have found three professors gathered nervously together in the depths of (Old) Broadcasting House waiting for the studio to be ready to air the week’s broadcast of In Our Time. Three professors who had never met before but who instantly got onto the subject of nerves in the face of the coming performance. I was one of the Continue reading
Many geologists and climatologists believe that global warming aside, the next major global climate issues are most likely to come from the explosion of a super-volcano; after all, just look at what an isolated Icelandic volcano did to air traffic across the globe recently.
The Arenal stratovolcano in Costa Rica. Dormant since 2009, it has a frigh Continue reading
Britain is presently swaddled under a thick cloud of pollution. This, we are told, has been caused by a mixture of regular industrial and motor exhaust, spiked with a lot of sand from the Sahara Desert.
Yesterday Cromer laboured under a light fog, but the air was fresh – no more than the sea-fret one expects from time to time.
Continue readingA opinion piece by Anurag Agrawal that was rather skeptical about some aspects of moves toward open access was published in the March issue of Trends in Plant Sciences. I felt several of the arguments advanced by Agrawal were rather weak and was glad to have the opportunity to write a rejoinder which has now been published in the April edition of t Continue reading
The comments on my last post have prompted me finally to write this one, one that I have had in mind for a few weeks. In fact, ever since I gave a talk at Merton College, Oxford, when an audience member pointed out I had both stated that one should seize opportunities and not say no without thinking and that it was important to be able to say no wh Continue reading
You probably won’t believe this, it being 1 April and all, but I have literally just taken delivery of 250 live worms.
Mrs Crox ordered them to replenish our wormery, which was looking a bit tired, many of its inhabitants having died or retired.
I know the parcel was specifically addressed to Mrs Crox, but she’s out, and I felt I had to Continue reading
No-one likes to be pigeonholed but the tendency to pigeonhole, or put things into boxes, comes naturally to us and can be valuable, within reason.
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I think pigeonholing gets an overly bad press. The word has a pejorative ring, suggesting a kneejerk, over-simplistic focus on superficial elements. Continue reading
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