So Occam’s Typewriter is a year old. Where does the time go…?
(No answers involving quantum theory, please. Or homeopathy. And especially not invoking both).
When someone pointed out a week or two back that we were approaching our first anniversary as an independent blogging network, there was talk about whether we should all put up thematic posts celebrating the landmark. Various ideas of what thematic shape these might take were kicked around, including a “Digested Read’ pastiche after the fashion of a well-known column in the Guardian newspaper.
I suppose it probably reflects how busy we all are – I have the impression that pretty much all of the decreasing number of people who are actually still employed in anything to do with science are busier than ever this year – that this has not come to pass. And you will also note that I have nearly failed completely to post up anything anniversarial (until now).
Which makes me late (no change there).
And also having seemingly contrived to miss a critical piece of information (no change there either), since until yesterday evening I had still been under the mistaken impression we were going to do that “Digested Read’ thing.
Whoops.
Oh well. Perhaps it’s just me. Indeed, perhaps I may have a special taste, out of all the OT bloggers, for things digested/digestive. The fifteen kilos (fifteen on a good day) that I’ve ‘acquired’ since my days in graduate school a quarter of a century ago might bear that out. As also might the fact that I once published a paper in the evocatively named Gut, the only scientific journal I can ever recall starring in the ‘missing words’ feature on the TV ShowHave I Got News For You.
And… I’ve certainly spent a fair bit of my scientific career working on cells derived from bits of the GI tract, including salivary glands (Yep, part of the GI tract. Who knew?), the exocrine and endocrine pancreas, and even the small intestine.
Anyway, Digested Read it is. For better or for worse. For richer, for poorer (And no prizes for guessing which, if you pick a scientific career).
So without more ado, I give you:
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The digested read:
‘Not ranting – honestly’ by Austin Elliott
I feel old. And grumpy. And grumpily old. And I write about… this and that. Including being old and grumpy.
Though not really about science. That would be a busman’s holiday. I dislike travelling on buses. Too slow. And smelly. Even if they Go To The Station.
So I’ve blogged about… stuff. Blogs are a collection of one’s personal likes, dislikes, and ephemera, after all. Though I don’t write about anything all that often. And when I do it often gets left unfinished. There is a folder somewhere on the computer full of drafts that never made it into posts.
So you can think of this blog as a kind of online public-access attic.
Like all bloggers, I am an egotist in denial, and often end up writing about myself. I was born into a scientific family – at least, my father is a scientist – and I’ve sometimes wondered what I would be if science, and academia, hadn’t therefore been something I was aware existed as a career. Journalist? (Almost certainly too pressured) Author? (Probably not pressured enough, and requiring self-motivation). Professional chess player? Definitely wasn’t good enough. My mother thinks I should have been a lawyer. Though I’d probably be a science teacher in a school somewhere, and arguably even more mid-life-crisis-ridden than now.
Sometimes I write about scientific history, or about science policy. Science seems to have been rather less complicated a hundred years ago… or rather, the life of a scientist was rather less complicated, as there were a lot less scientists, and they didn’t have to spend all their time chasing money. Instead, they probably spent the time doing actual science. With their own hands, yet. Even middle-aged full Professors. Not that I’ll ever be one of those.
If you go back a century ago, scientists also didn’t have the temptations of blogs, or Twitter, to help them procrastinate and avoid proper work. Or computers either, for that matter, though computers can be tools for progress, as well as (like in my hands) tools for procrastinating. One of the great AV Hill’s descendants told me that she suspected AV would have thought Twitter ‘rather trivial and time wasting’. But added ‘[AV] would have loved the internet and modern day computing.’
Now, just the other day on Twitter one of my blogging acquaintances posted something where a homeopath told us in complete seriousness that ‘sunlight destroys homeopathic remedies’. So sunlight appears to be a detergent of nonsense as well. Useful stuff, UV radiation. And it kills Vampires too. Though I haven’t heard if it works on biochemists… Or on people who invent idiotic abbreviations… or stupid words that end in -omics.
Where was I?
Oh yes. For some reason I get rather hot under the collar (though actually I don’t wear anything with a collar – no point in being an academic if you have to dress like a bank teller) about people like homeopaths, and chiropractors, and HIV-is-not-the-cause-of-AIDS obsessives, and anti-vaccine types, and all the other Unreality Enthusiasts.
Whether this recurring railing at Unreality is a consequence of being a middle-aged nerd of rather underwhelming success scientifically-speaking… well, perhaps. But on the subject, apart from quoting AV, I also tend to quote one of the best things Richard Dawkins ever said, which is:
“There is a real world, we live in it, true and false things can be said about it, science is how we find out about it, and it really matters.”
Which will do for me.
Finally – in order to reduce the borderline-high blood pressure that comes of a combination of getting annoyed, drinking beer, and sedentary middle age, I have taken up a new hobby in the year since OT launched. Or rather – I’ve taken up an old hobby again, since I have started playing chess again, some 30+ years after quitting.
So far I play about as well as I did when I was 15 years old. Which is a lesson of some kind.
*Sigh*
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The digested digested read:
Oh bugger – forgot to post anything. Again. Though it would only have been grumbling about nothing much, anyway.
You can blame the throes of teaching semester-time (into week ten, two and a half weeks to go…). Or perhaps the series of delightful illnesses the kids have been bringing home. Our three year old has had a jolly November, enduring a nasty case of antibiotic-necessitating bacterial tonsilitis and then chicken pox in quick succession… I blame his first year at the nursery. And as a family we have all had (the week before last) a rather unpleasant encounter with what my esteemed colleague Dr Gee likes to call “Effluvia”, but which I call norovirus.
Anyway – suffice to say that November has been one of those months we would rather forget.
Of course, apart from parental exhaustion, it may just be writer’s block. Or lack of ready subjects.
However, the main point of this little post was not to have a moan, or even to apologise.
It was to point UK-based readers to a fascinating documentary about the tragic chess genius Bobby Fischer that is on the TV this week. This is the documentary that I wrote about back in September. It goes out on BBC4 tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9 pm, and is well worth a look even if you know nothing about chess. The archive footage alone is fascinating, as is the Cold War allegory of Fischer’s 1972 World Championship match in Reykjavik with the Russian Boris Spassky.
Anyway, highly recommended.
And perhaps something more substantial than this on the blog in the next week or two.
“I think Stephen [Curry] is right to highlight the plight of senior postdocs. It can’t really be argued that these are not competent and productive scientists since they have been hired and rehired on successive short-term contracts in a highly competitive market. These people are evidently playing a pretty important role, albeit not as research leaders. They will typically have accrued very specialised skills which really will be wasted if not put to use in one of the few labs (at widely scattered geographical locations) which use the same techniques. As the Science is Vital submissions showed, PIs are often very sorry to lose these people.When I talk about waste here I am not arguing that the individuals careers have been wasted, but that the scientific establishment, and the absence of an effective career structure is wasting their talents by forcing them out of science while training and retraining newcomers to try to fill their shoes.”
This chimed with me, as I have commented before on the waste of talent and know-how, and the sheer unfairness, when senior postdocs (people with maybe six to ten years post-PhD experience) have to leave the business. I got my PhD in early 1987 , and in the nigh-on 25 years since I have seen a fair few not just good, but really first rate, scientists I have worked with leave research science in the UK.
Let me tell you a story to illustrate this.
For a good chunk of my career, I used to be part of a kind of linked complex of small research groups in Manchester working in the area of epithelial (mostly exocrine) cell physiology. Nearly a decade ago now one of my buddies and I did a kind of unofficial ‘audit’ of our complex of linked PIs/research groups, and compared ourselves to a couple of our main competitor outfits. These included one in Australia, a country which I would say has a rather similar research culture to the UK. At the beginning of the 90s we had rated this outfit as being very much comparable to us.
When we did our audit, one of the things that very much stood out was that our Australian competitors had the same two senior postdocs in place in 2001 as they had had in 1990. Our Australian PI friends had been sufficiently successful in grant-raising to be able to keep these guys, both excellent scientists, first on successive project grants and latterly on fellowships. We reckoned this was a key part of the way our Aussie friends had inexorably ‘pulled away’ from us, in terms of papers published and funding, over the decade in between.
The two senior postdocs in question are now (2011) a full Professor and an Associate Professor in leading Australian Universities. Both are prospering in research.
In contrast, in our Manchester co-op during the 90s we had almost never been able to hold on to our best postdocs for even the full duration of a three year contract (grant). The reason for this was not beccause they were unhappy, or felt they couldn’t do cutting -edge research. It was unambiguously that we could never tell them, in all honesty, that we were likely to have the grant money to keep them on when the grant employing them ran out. Under these circumstances, the better people would regularly leave before the 3 year mark rolled around, as they did not want to leave finding the next job to the very last minute. It was typically only people who were a bit less good, or who had other personal reasons for staying local, who would do the full three years.
Anyway, three of our four best postdocs from this period left at around 30 months into a 36 month (three year) grant/contract because they were offered something elsewhere, either something more open-ended (notably in industry), or just a further 3 years on a grant in another city or country.
The consequence was that, unlike our Aussie friends, we (the PIs) had to keep training and re-training new people ourselves to do the same jobs – including quite ‘bespoke’ stuff like patch-clamping and calcium imaging. And skill level in our labs thus never rose beyond the ‘2 yrs in-house training’ mark. Nor did we generate in house a supply of people who could easily ‘spin off’ to their own fellowships, as we were mostly taking UK people straight from PhDs, or employing short term visitors from overseas (e.g. Japan) to ‘mop up’ the leftover ends of grants.
The 1990s were, of course, a time of notorious scarcity of research funding in the UK. The relevance of that to now, and the next few years, should hopefully not be lost on anyone reading this.
The need to contract-hop ultimately did not really benefit the best postdocs that we had trained either. One of our two top ones, as good a research scientist as I have met, actually did become a PI – probably a bit too young, paradoxically. However, after several years of struggle in an English University he eventually tired of juggling stupendous and mounting teaching load and a young family with trying to write six funding proposals a year, and opted for a teaching-only post in a US medical school. As he put it to me a year or two later:
“I decided it was better to do one job well, rather than several jobs [at the same time] half-arsed”
The other one left academia to work for a large consumer products company with a research division, but eventually found the ramifying bureaucracy there too much and quit research, re-training as a hospital radiation safety professional. So both our best postdocs of the 1990s were ultimately lost to scientific research, though they did end up in jobs related to science, or perhaps more accurately to medicine. But these two guys were, in the unanimous opinions of us PIs who had seen them work, at least as good research scientists as any of us were. They were the ones we would all have bet on to go the distance to PI and lab head, and beyond.
But I wonder. Perhaps to succeed in the chase to PI you need, apart from strength and determination, a kind of lack of imagination as well. The imagination, I mean, to decide that this **** simply isn’t worth all the struggle, or worth the implicit gamble on your future that carrying on the struggle (staying in the business) implies.
The imagination to see that there are other things you can do to earn a living.
Ten years ago today, the World Trade Centre twin towers were attacked and fell, with terrible loss of life.
Like most people, I guess, I can remember exactly where I was during the attacks – watching CNN in a high-rise hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, a one day stopover on the way back from Australia (conference, holiday) and New Zealand (conference) to the UK. Checking in just before 9 pm local time, I walked into the hotel room, stuck on the TV to catch up with the world – and there was the first tower burning. I am pretty sure I checked whether it was really CNN I was watching, to make sure I hadn’t got a movie, or a ‘doomsday what-if’ show by mistake. A few minutes later, while I watched, the second plane hit. I was still watching when the towers fell. I remember my father calling me from the UK on my mobile. “Are you watching this?” Who could turn it off?
A couple of weeks later I wrote the following to run in Physiology News, which we had recently re-vamped to add an Editorial column, among other things. We debated whether to say anything about the attacks – after all, so much had been said by then. But somehow we felt something had to go in. So here it is, exactly as it ran then.
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A personal view – Science and World Events
In this first issue of the renamed Physiology News we report on the IUPS meeting, where over two thousand physiologists and other scientists from related disciplines gathered for “our” four-yearly conference. The delegates came from all around the world to celebrate our communal enterprise – the revealing of more about how living organisms, including man, work. As scientists investigating the natural world at the start of the new millennium we are privileged to be part of a truly international undertaking.
Less than two weeks after the end of the IUPS meeting, perhaps while some members of the Society were still abroad or making their way home, came the terrible events of September 11th. Perhaps many of us thought of people we know in New York or Washington, or contacted our friends there to check that they were safe. The events emphasise the fragility of the international systems of travel and commerce on which we depend.
As scientists we have the chance, not given to many people, to travel widely in the world, and to work with people from many countries and cultures. During my twenty years working in science I have shared lab and office space with scientists from all the continents of the world, from both rich and poor countries. I remember one lab in the USA where a large map on the wall indicated the countries of origin of the people working there, from Japan to Bangladesh, from India to Iran, from Britain to Russia to South Africa, and many others apart from the USA. This experience is hardly unique. We are privileged to work with our colleagues from other countries, discuss things in the common language of science, and to learn something about them and their cultures.
If this kind of experience teaches us anything, it must be that people the world over seek basically the same things: the happiness of those that are close to them, work from which they can take some satisfaction, a better life for their families. It doesn’t seem so very complicated.
However, in today’s world, not everyone is as lucky as we scientists. Science is international – that is one of its great strengths. It shows how a worldwide community can focus on a common goal, and draw strength from its diversity. As the world absorbs the horror of September 11th and its aftermath, we can only hope that, one day, the same will be true in all spheres of human endeavour. We can also hope that the international scientific community will do its part in helping to break down the cultural barriers.
In which I am reminded that once stuff is in your brain somewhere cluttering it up, it can be pretty hard to get it out. Random bits of chess knowledge included.
It is probably another of those middle-aged things, but I find myself lately reflecting on the reasons why I might have got into particular activities that have been important in my life – including my line of work, of course, but also taking in hobbies and interests, like films and chess. Can one pinpoint influential people, like teachers, or authors whose books you read, or films you saw, that ‘pushed’ you in particular directions? Or can one pinpoint key moments?
Perhaps I will write another time about my path to becoming a second-generation scientist – though I have written bits about it in different places, I have never collected it all together. One for a rainy day (luckily we have quite a lot of those in Manchester).
My path to being a teenage chess geek (see my April Fool’s Day post) was undoubtedly far simpler – there was a chess boom in England in the mid 70s, and indeed worldwide. This boom could be attributed to one man, the late Bobby Fischer, and more specifically to his 1972 world championship match in Reykyavik against Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union.
The 1972 match was the only time, before or since, that chess was the top story on the nightly news bulletins. The reason was the extraordinary drama that surrounded the match, and in particular Fischer and his essentially solo crusade to take the title from the Soviet chess establishment. It made for the perfect piece of Cold War theatre, all the more riveting as it pitted a solitary maverick genus (Fischer) against an entire national system. The Soviet chess system was, of course, backed by the Soviet state from the early 1930s onward as a pre-eminent national symbol of the intellectual superiority (as they saw it) of the communist system. Chess was taught in schools and in youth clubs, and promising players would be picked out for intensive training from as young as 7 or 8 years old.
I distinctly recall that the first time I read about the Fischer-Spassky match was before it started, in the early Summer of 1972 when I was not quite eleven years old. As I remember it I read an article, probably in the Sunday Times, about Fischer, describing his lone path to being the challenger and also indicating that the match actually might not take place at all due to wrangles over conditions and prize money. After that, when the match actually began, I was hooked.
If you don’t know this history, you can actually see it in a documentary film which has recently been running in some of the art house cinemas in the UK, and will probably show up on TV before too long. I mentioned this film briefly in a recent chess-related post. It is called ‘Bobby Fischer against the World’, and, recounts – using interviews and a lot of archive footage – the story of Fischer’s rise, from 1950s child chess prodigy to the 1972 match, and his subsequent tragic decline into increasingly florid mental illness. Even if you know nothing about chess, the film is well worth a look. You can read more about it in a nice blog by Jonathan Calder over at Liberal England.
Now, one of the ways that you can see the influence of particular figures on you, in any arena, might be the number of their ways of doing things – their strategies – or even their mannerisms, that you can detect in yourself. Your parents are of course the ur-example of this influence on you, but picking up influences doesn’t go away even once you are an adult. For instance, young scientists are often advised to imitate the writing style of particular papers, or authors, or find themselves people whose written style appeals, to use as models. And the scientific fields one chooses to work in as a scientist are a product of influences too, notably perhaps from PhD and postdoctoral supervisors, but also from elsewhere. One’s working practises, either as a postdoc or a lab head, will also be in part a product of examples one either consciously or subconsciously follows.
In a complex game and pastime like chess, one of the ways that you can sometimes tell who your heroes among the great players were is, a little analogously, by your adoption of aspects of their way of playing. As it is hard to really imitate a great player’s overall style – especially if you are an average player yourself, as is typically the case – this influence tends to manifest itself most obviously in one particular thing, the choice of ‘chess openings’. These are the way that a chess game starts, sometimes extending for twenty or even more moves. [Chess-interested readers might just remember the Steves Caplan and Moss and I having an incomprehensible-to-all-normal-people discussion about chess openings back in the comments here].
Looking back now at my teenage chess-playing career, I see a fair few of Fischer’s chess opening preferences reflected in my own. I can’t recall whether this was conscious or unconscious – probably a bit of both.
The thing I find most intriguing is that, even thirty years on, little bits of this youthful influence tend to surface unbidden when some kind of memory association triggers them.
Here is an example.
Among the games of the Fischer-Spassky match, game 3 often gets written about as a crucial turning point. Fischer had lost the first game of the match by a gross blunder, and forfeited the second due to a protest about film cameras being present in the playing hall. Game three very nearly did not take place, and had to be played in a closed room with no spectators. In the game Fischer played a very risky idea, later shown to be ‘unsound’ (as in ‘leads with best play to an advantage for the opponent’) on his 12th move. However, Spassky mishandled the next few moves, failing to find the best response, and Fischer gained the upper hand and won. It was the first time he had even beaten the Russian, having previously lost to him four times over the course of a dozen years. Following this, Fischer won six further games to Spassky’s one to take the match and the championship.
Thanks to the wonders of the splendid java-driven internet site chessgames.com, you can play over the moves of Fischer-Spassky Game 3 here. The risky idea is at Black’s move 11 ..Nh5.
Now, when I started playing chess again earlier this year after my thirty year lay-off, I began by playing against the online chess programme Shredder. In one of these games, I found myself a bit stuck for a plan of action as the opening transitioned into the middle game. This was not, by the way, a chess opening I used to play in my teenage chess years, so not one I knew terribly well.
And then suddenly the thought popped into my head: didn’t Fischer famously play …Nh5 against Spassky in a position a bit like this?
So I played …Nh5.
As far as I can recall, I had not played through the Spassky-Fischer game in more than three decades. So where had that nugget of information being hiding?
Which goes to show, perhaps, how deeply ‘burned in’ those early influences and memories can be.
Anyway, I have given my game with the computer below, for obsessed dedicated chess-ists, along with a couple of other of my more recent ones.
And do keep an eye out for the film.
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White: Shredder Medium Online Black: Austin Blitz game May 2011 Modern Benoni Defence
Also in chessworld, I recorded the first competitive game loss of my chess comeback last month just before we set off on our holiday. The game, with minimal comments, is below. It was an interesting and tense struggle, with (fairly obviously) a lot of mistakes on both sides. I finally lost on time, having survived a frankly lost position earlier via my usual desperate tactical swindles and bluffing. In the final position I think I might well have won had I had another five minutes on the clock. Hey ho.
DH – A Elliott Manchester Summer League game Aug 2011 Reti-King’s Indian
Time control: 1 hr each for first 30 moves, then 15 min each for all remaining moves
1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. b4 Bg7 4. e3 d6 5. Nc3 e5 6. Bb2 0-0 7. Qc2 Re8 8. Be2 a5 (possibly …c6 first) 9. b5 Nbd7 10. a4 e4 11. Nd4 Nc5 12. 0-0?! h5? (Black should play..Ng4 at once. As played he never gets a piece to g4) 13. f3! Bd7 14. fe: Nfe4: 15. Ne4: Re4: (already mostly deciding to sac the exchange on e4, but the more flexible …Ne4: should probably be preferred) 16. Rf2 Qe7 17. Raf1 f5 18. Bf3 Rae8 (offering the exchange to keep the pieces active, but almost certainly not enough) 19. Be4: Ne4:? (the Kinght is inevitably chased away by d3, so fe: was better) 20. Re2! c5 21. Nf3 Be6 22. d3 Nf6 23 Bc1? b6? (last chance to play a piece to g4) 24. h3! Nd7 25. Kh1? d5 (something has to be done to try and get some counterplay) 26. e4! fe: 27. Ng5? Bf5! 28. de:? (cd: should win) de: 29. Qd2 Bd4 30. Qf4 Nf6 (With seconds only to spare, but the reprieve is only temporary with a 15-min rapidplay finish) 31. Nf3 Qd8 32. Nd4: cd: 33. Qg5 Nh7 34. Qg3 Qb8? (…Re6) 35. Bf4 Qc8 36. Rfe1 Qc4: 37. Kh2? e3 38. Qf3 Be4? (better ..Bd3 straight away) 39. Qg3 (now with a threat on g6) Bd3 (and now …Nf6 was better, getting the Knight back into play) 40. Be5 Qd5 41. Bc7 Nf8? (Very passive. Again … Re6) 42. Bb6: Be2: 43. Re2: Qc4 44. Qf3 and Black lost on time.
Finally, here is a casual game from my latest weekly trip to the chess club. It was played at 15 minutes a side (each player has 15 min thinking time for all his moves).
White: AE Black: KS 15 min rapidplay game Sept 2011 French Winawer
A slightly non-standard kind of French Winawer – 4 ..Ne7 and 6 ..cd: are rare continuations (instead of the more common …c5 and ..Bc3:) presumably to try and get off the beaten track. Rather than 8 bc: it would have been better to play 8. Nf3!, sacrificing a pawn for speedier development after (e.g.) 8 ..cb: Bb2:. My 10. Qe2? blundered a pawn, though in return I got quite a grip on the position, especially the Black squares and the a3-f8 diagonal, and a strong Knight on d4. And 22. f4?! drops a second pawn, though the open f-file is some compensation. I may have got some of the move order slightly wrong between moves 19 and 22 – not absolutely sure, as I wasn’t writing down the moves and had to reconstruct the game from memory afterwards. Anyway, the most interesting point was after Black’s 25th move:
Position after 25.. Nh8
White has an attack on the K-side, and Black’s f7 and g7 are weak. The question for White is how to try and press home the attack. I now played:
26. Rf6?!
What they used to call a ‘coffee house’ move – a bit showy, and partly played for surprise value, but objectively not very good. It sets the trap that Black now falls into – luckily for me – but if Black plays the correct 26 ..Kh7 then White has to retreat the Rook and the attack is neutered. The right move for White was the rather more straightforward 26. Rg3., when if 26.. Ng6 27. Rf7:!, or 26 ..g6 27 Qh5. Best for Black after 26. Rg3 would probably be 26…Qg5, though after 27. Qf3 Black would have to find another square for the Queen and White would still have good attacking chances.
26 …g6?
– missing White’s next, after which, if 27..Nf7: then 28. Qg6:+ wins.
27. Rf7:! Qg5
28. Qg5:
Obvious, but not the best. The surprising 28. Ne6:! was much better, since if 28 ..Qg4: 29. Rg7 is mate, and 28..Re6: 29. Qe6: is winning for White.
28 ..hg:
29. Rf6 Bd7
30. R1f3
Objectively this position is fairly even, though White’s pieces are much better placed. 30. R1f3 protects the c3 pawn, but doesn’t actually threaten anything much. However, Black was very short of time and also a bit shaken after having missed 27. Rf7:, and played several poor moves.
30 ..Rc4
Not bad per se, but probably in a time scramble it was better not to allow White the obvious check on f8.
31. Rf8+ Rf8:
32. Rf8:+ Kg7
…and Kh7 looks safer here, for reasons that become apparent in a move or two.
33. Rd8 Bc6??
The losing move and an obvious blunder, leaving the e-pawn en prise (with check) and putting his King in danger. By now he was down to his last minute or two. 33. ..Bc8 is the move to hold everything – the B then covers e6 and is protected by the R on c4, with the position still level.
34. Ne6:+ Kh7
35. Ng5:+ Kg7
…Kh6 was the last chance, though White would still be clearly ahead.
I come from a family of decidedly womble-ing tendencies.
In other words, we tend to acquire objects, and do not tend to throw them away.
Ever.
In my own case we are mostly talking about books, though other things accumulate too (at work, microscopes and sundry microscope bits are an obvious example).
In my parents’ case it is books AND other stuff, including furniture. My father used to have his lab for many years on a site where extensive outbuildings offered virtually unlimited storage space, so he had all sorts of stuff squirreled away. When I first bought a house in the late 1980s, and was trying to furnish it without spending money I didn’t have, I ended up with a bookcase for the bedroom from the family ‘store’. I remembered the same bookcase had run along one side of the living room in the family home we lived in from the mid 60s to the early 70s. I was slightly surprised at its reappearance thereafter, since in that house the bookcase had been a ‘built-in feature’, fixed firmly to the wall!
Anyway, there are objects and bits of furniture to be found dotted around my parents’ houses and gardens that came, in turn, from other houses we have occupied, or from their own parents’ houses. Nothing unusual in that.
There are also objects passed along, or passed on, by friends.
One of the things I like about such objects are that they often have a story that goes with them.
One example: at the Summer place where the Entourage Elliott is currently encamped you can find the handsome refectory table pictured above.
The table is not an antique of any kind, though it is a nice solid piece and very handy for sizeable gatherings. For instance, we managed to get eleven round it for an extended family get-together last week without feeling particularly cramped.
It also makes a useful spot for writing, typing, drawing, colouring in the frontispieces of Tintin books, playing chess, releasing calcium from intracellular stores and anything else you can think of.
The main interest in the table is in what one might call its ‘provenance’. My dad was given it by a long-time scientific friend of his, the late plant biologist Daphne Osborne. She had received the table many years before as a leaving present from Churchill College in Cambridge, where she had been the first-ever female Fellow in the 1970s.
Though the table was by then in storage, having presumably been superceded by something bigger and grander, it had – so the story went – been a college dining table, and had done service at Churchill College dinners in the college’s early years in the 1960s.
Over at the Wikipedia entry on Churchill College you can find a list of some of the notable Fellows. I like to think some of these luminaries might have sat around the table having dinner and setting the world to rights. For instance, I wonder if Francis Crick – one of my father’s scientific heroes, as you might recall from here – the physiologist Richard Keynes, and CP Snow of ‘Two Cultures’ fame, ever sat at the table together in the 1960s? I would like to think so.
