The Ascent of Man

New Month Old Post: First posted 21st March, 2016

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape.

Everyone needs at least one role model to inspire them: probably more – different role models for different roles. One of mine came in the unlikely shape of a little man with glasses who looked like my grandfather and had trouble pronouncing his ‘r’s.

How could anyone be so clever? How did Jacob Bronowski’s life come to be filled with such grand ideas while mine was littered with the tedious transactions of budgets and profit margins? Why was his world populated by brilliant minds while I shared mine with dreary accountants and businessmen? Why couldn’t I shape the landscape rather than being just a figure within it? I wanted to be an omniscient polymath, too.

I missed most of Bronowski’s momentous thirteen-part BBC television series The Ascent of Man when it was first broadcast on Saturday evenings between April and July, 1973. I would have been out at the pub. Even when it was repeated at the end of that year, twice a week on both Thursdays and Sundays, I doubt I caught it all. But it affected me profoundly.

Bronowski was passionate and mesmerising, with fascinating hand gestures. He spoke straight to the camera in precise sentences for minutes at a time without background music, rapid cuts, or unnecessary images. Yet he held your attention. He gave us a warm, intelligent, gimmick-free exploration of science and humanity. It was unsettling that a single individual could be so knowledgeable about so many varied subjects, from architecture to evolutionary biology, from poetry to relativity. When he appeared on other programmes, such as Parkinson, you realised he was not reading a script. The breadth of his knowledge and understanding were genuine. 

I bought the book. I read it, and then read it again. I knew all thirteen chapters. Turning through the pages now brings back so many fascinating things: the flying buttresses of Rheims Cathedral where the building hangs like a cage from the arched roof; the Peruvian city of Macchu Picchu; a demonstration of the Pythagorean proof in the sand by drawing real squares on the hypotenuse and the other two sides; the coloured shafts of the spectrum that beamed out of Isaac Newton’s “Triangular glass-Prism”; Gregor Mendel choosing to test for seven differences between peas when he could not have known that the pea had just seven chromosomes; the surreal massive model head, several metres across, that was visible to a radar scanner while the real man standing beside remained invisible to its long electromagnetic wavelength.

Of course the answer to the riddle of Bronowski’s erudition, as he himself might have said rhetorically of others, is that the man was a genius. When the television series was repeated again in 1975, I saw every episode, and something else then struck me. It was that Bronowski’s journey through science was personal and autobiographical. He recalled his own moment of revelation around 1950 when he was working on a mathematical model of the teeth of an Australopithecus baby, the Taung skull, to discriminate them from the teeth of apes, when, “... having spent a lifetime doing abstract mathematics about the shapes of things,” he said I “... suddenly saw my knowledge reach back two million years and shine a searchlight into the history of man.” From that moment his commitment moved from the abstract to the human.

He was able to talk about periods in his career when he had collaborated with other people of genius. He had known Einstein, Daniel Lehrman, James Watson, Leo Szilard, and John von Neumann. He spoke of them with fondness and enthusiasm.

He remembered Einstein’s lack of materialism in lecturing at Cambridge in an old sweater and carpet slippers with no socks. He talked of afternoons spent with Leo Szilard at the Salk Institute in California, and recounted a tale about the moment when, in a mental flash, Szilard conceived the idea of the nuclear reactor. He had stopped at a red light, and before the light had turned green had realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it broke up to release two, then you would have a chain reaction. The only improbable part of the story, said Bronowski, is that “I never knew Szilard to stop for a red light.”

Bronowski described John von Neumann, the founder of game theory and computing science, as “the cleverest man I ever knew,” and “a genius, in the sense that a genius is a man who has two great ideas.” He shared an anecdote of how, during the war, after they had been discussing a particularly difficult nuclear problem, he had telephoned von Neumann early the next morning to tell him he was right, and von Neumann complained that he only wanted to be telephoned early in the morning to be told when he was wrong.

This anecdote served to illustrate how von Neumann was in love with what Bronowski called “the aristocracy of the intellect”, with which he fundamentally disagreed and considered dangerous. What we need, he argued, is “democracy of the intellect”, where knowledge sits with people who have no ambition to control others. Elsewhere, in what is perhaps the most often repeated sequence from the series when he walks into the pond at Auschwitz crematorium and scoops up the mud of human remains, he talks of the dogma and arrogance that comes from a false belief in absolute knowledge. He talks about the devastation of Hiroshima. It was a moral and ethical lesson that all knowledge is imperfect. Bronowski would surely have been dismayed by the Monty Python quip that he knew everything.

Even today, despite subsequent developments in computing, neural imaging, molecular biology, robotics, and so on, his book and series remain an exemplar of intelligent broadcasting. I was in awe and in envy. His intellect ranged across areas as diverse as literature, poetry, art, architecture, chess, mathematics, nuclear physics and biology, and yet he retained a deep sense of humility.

It was unsettling. From that time I wanted to embark upon my own version of his personal journey, starting by going to university. It felt a failing not to have been. I was drawn towards the ideas Bronowski had talked about: the human sciences, cultural evolution, psychology, sociology and anthropology. I had no idea where it might lead except that it would be a step in the right direction. At twenty-four, without university entrance qualifications, when it was not easy to get in, when completing a degree was just as difficult, it seemed a mountain to climb, but I knew I had to try.


Jacob Bronowski
The Ascent of Man (5***)
When I read The Ascent Of Man again in August, 2015, I gave it a book review rating of 5*** because I had indeed read it over and over again, possibly six times, since I bought it in 1975, through which it became of considerable personal influence. I noted that reading it yet again, it may have lost a little of its freshness, but I remained in awe of Bronowski's encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to explain things. I keep wondering whether to buy the DVDs, or whether that would spoil it for me.

My Picture Book of Ships

New Month Old Post: first posted 25th July, 2016

On the bottom shelf of my dad’s bookcase were some of his childhood books. He was nearly as daft as me for keeping things. There might have been many more treasures but for mum’s propensity for throwing things away, although the bookcase was sacrosanct, even to her.

I always knew he had them, of course, but never took the time for anything more than a superficial glance at the pictures. He must have treasured them greatly. All have his name and address inside and some also the date.

The earliest and most dilapidated is My Picture Book of Ships which he got in 1926 at the age of five. To a child at that time the cover must have looked thrilling: the vast bulk of the ocean liner soaring proud above the waterline, the towering hull and funnels, the dense spray from the bow-wave hinting at the rumbling power of the great engines and propellers, the huge anchor tight against the ship’s side. People yearned to travel in the luxury of these floating palaces. They were the dream machines of their day: the supersonic jets, the Lamborghinis, the spaceliners, the high speed trains, the earth moving machines, the ice road truckers. Even their names implied substance and opulence: Majestic, Britannic, Olympic, Leviathan, Edinburgh Castle.  

We used to look at it together when I was little. We studied the sixty-two illustrations but never read it. The text tells of two children, Tom and Betty, who ceaselessly ask Father questions about ships. They also play at ships: Tom is Captain and Father the pilot, while Chief Officer Mother sleeps “on watch” below and poor Petty Officer Betty gets ordered around.

Father of course answers all their questions patiently, knowledgeably, and at length. He tells them about how the voyage of an ocean liner is organized, how sailors are trained, shipbuilding, shipwrecks, coal and oil power, sail, cargo vessels, lifeboats, lighthouses and lightships, paddle steamers, and ferries. How he knew all this stuff is not clear. He just did. Perhaps he was a seaman himself, or maybe like my own dad his grandfather had been a Captain and his cousin was at sea. Oh yes, all dads knew everything there was to know about ships; especially when they had grown up in a Yorkshire port.

Dads could describe and explain all the pictures: cargo being unloaded at London docks, the Harwich-Zeebrugge railway ferry with wagons on board, a big ship under construction inside a massive gantry, and boys lining a high mast at a sailors’ training school. I certainly would not have wanted to have been the baby thrown through the air to a lifeboat in a rescue at sea. My dad used to pick me up and pretend to act it out.

But that is not what used to frighten me most. I was terrified of the strange double-page cartoons inside the front and back covers. Why a factual book about ships should contain such irreverent drawings is a mystery. They are not even proper ships. They show traumatised people in canoes, punts and rowing boats on an overcrowded river, being attacked by pigs, cows and swans, knocked overboard by clumsy oarsmen or tormented by badly controlled fishing lines. They all have ugly ears, gaping mouths and grotesque faces. I could never bear to look. It is still difficult now.

As Nick Ross used to say: “Don’t have nightmares. Do sleep well.”

My Picture Book of Ships published by Ward Lock & Co. (c1922) is believed to be out of copyright.

Grandad Dunham’s Flight Simulator

New Month Old Post: first posted 18th November, 2015

SGI Dogfight for the IRIS workstation

Like something from the future, it was the most amazing colour graphics workstation I had ever seen. I had got a job in a university where it was used to understand complex proteins by constructing and manipulating computer-generated images of the kind of ball and stick molecular models photographed with Watson and Crick in the nineteen-fifties. These models give insights into life at the sub-microscopic level, such as how molecules of oxygen displace molecules of carbon dioxide in haemoglobin. The details are so magically implausible you could come to believe in creationism. One researcher was moved to tears on seeing for the first time an image of part of the antibody she had been working on for three years.

It was the nineteen-eighties. The workstation came with a set of demonstration programs, among them a flight simulator. It was well in advance of anything any of us had seen before. The best you could have at home at that time, which replicated the dynamics of flight and motion with any reasonable accuracy, were black-and-white wire-frame simulations such as ‘Aviator’ and ‘Elite’ for the BBC Computer. The workstation simulator had coloured graphics and a choice of aircraft. You may now pause for a moment to speculate about the relative amounts of time we spent flying aeroplanes and modelling proteins.

At first, I was the only one who could land the Jumbo Jet without crashing. I had not wasted hundreds of hours flying under the ‘Aviator’ suspension bridge for nothing. I was one of the glorious few to have fought my way through to the secret code for my ‘Elite’ badge. What the others did not seem able to grasp – and some of them are now eminent professors – is that the pilot of a Jumbo-Jet sits the equivalent of three storeys high. You are still thirty feet up in the air as you touch down. If you try to land with your seat at ground level you will be too low, and smash into the runway with terrific force and die.

It all seemed terrifically futuristic. Yet my brother had a flight simulator twenty years earlier in the early nineteen-sixties. You might call it Grandad Dunham’s flight simulator. How could that be? Grandad Dunham was our great-grandfather who died in 1941. He spent the last two years of his life living with his daughter’s family. When he moved in, his son-in-law carried his chair through the streets of the town on his back.

I now have that very same chair, twice refurbished, and very comfortable it is too. On its back and covered with an eiderdown it makes a wonderful aeroplane cockpit. My brother played in it happily for hours. Sometimes he would let me be his co-pilot. He chalked some controls and instruments underneath the seat. They are still there after sixty years.

What makes it particularly poignant is that my brother died at thirty-six. The grandchildren he never saw are now about the same age he was when he drew those simple chalk marks. They can have all the latest tablets and smartphones, and simulators so realistic you forget they are only software. But one thing I do know. No matter how advanced the technology, it will never be one-half as much fun as Grandad Dunham’s eiderdown-covered chair with the chalk marks on its upturned seat.

Elite and Aviator for the BBC Computer

Solar System

But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round

I have been watching Brian Cox's series Solar System in absolute astonishment for the past five weeks. Our solar system is bigger and far more complex than we could have imagined only just a few years ago. 

I write this from memory, so may have some things wrong. Whatever I write cannot possibly do the series justice. 

Most of us grew up with nine planets, more recently reduced to eight, but the latest telescopes and space exploration reveal infinitely more objects within the sun's gravitational field than this. Many are very small, while others are quite large. 

And while we may have thought there was little beyond the dwarf planet Pluto, there seem to be millions of icy objects in the same region, known as the Kuiper belt. The largest known so far, discovered only in recent years in the darkness, has been nicknamed FarFarOut. All these objects, like the planets, orbit the sun in the same plane, but even further out lies an enormous sphere of rocks and particles a light year across. It contains mobile objects that travel across the heavens and approach the earth from all directions. They are the comets. 

It is not just the number of objects that is astonishing. It is the variety. They can be made of rock, gas, water ice, nitrogen ice, or something else. Ice can form mountains and canyons ten times the size of those on Earth. Other objects have internal heat sources that create violent monsoons, dust storms, or volcanoes that shoot out into space. 

How these phenomena have formed can often be deduced from space probe photographs and other data. They are subject to similar physical and geological processes whatever they may be made of. Underlying it all are just a small number of forces, mainly gravity. But the gravity of different objects can interact in numerous ways. Some are heated by gravitational friction, alternately squeezed and released by the gravity of a larger planet. 

There are some very strange objects indeed. Once above a few kilometres in size, objects will be shaped by gravity into a sphere, but one body has been seen to defy this law. This is thought to be because it rotates at eight times the speed of the earth, which flattens it into an elliptical shape through centrifugal force. 

The strange rings of Saturn are also down to gravity. They consist of particles of various sizes, possibly from a decaying moon. They orbit at different rates, and the larger objects are gradually speeding and slowing the others with the eventual outcome that all the particles will fall down to the surface of the planet. They have not been there forever, and will in time disappear. It is only coincidence that we are here at the same infinitesimal moment in time, able to see them. 

Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, has a salt lake of water beneath the rocky surface, more than all the water on Earth. This was deduced from the magnetic aurora of the moon, which does not behave as it otherwise should. It has all the conditions we think necessary to support life. What form aqueous life buried deep inside a moon or planet might take, we cannot begin to guess.

But the strangest planet of all is the Earth. It is the only one with liquid water on the surface, maintained by a combination of gravity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure. If different, the water would boil away into space, or freeze solid.

What I like about Brian Cox is that he explains these processes, and how they have been worked out, in lay terms, without exaggeration or the loud, overenthusiastic excitement that spoils so many documentaries these days. Give him the concentration he deserves, and you are rewarded. What he is telling us speaks for itself. It is outrageous. And he laughs, as if he cannot quite believe it either. 

Then I thought about looking into the night sky and the millions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, probably most with solar systems of their own as complex as ours. And the billions of stars and planets in all the other galaxies there are. And the time scales involved: thousands of billions of earth years. 

Unimaginable. Beyond belief. Beyond understanding. 

The R100

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th July 2016.

In his autobiography, Slide Rule, the author Nevil Shute (1899-1960), a man of his time with attitudes to match, remembered working as an engineer on the R100 airship during its construction at Howden in Yorkshire in the nineteen-twenties. Much of the workforce consisted of local lads and girls trained to carry out riveting and other tasks high up in the ribs and spines of the airship skeleton. Of them he writes:

The lads were what one would expect, straight from the plough, but the girls were an eye-opener. They were brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits ... these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed ... we had to employ a welfare worker to look after them because promiscuous intercourse was going on merrily in every dark corner ... as the job approached completion ... we were able to get rid of the most jungly types. 

Jungly types? That is my maternal grandma you are talking about, Nevil, and her friends and cousins. They never had the chance to be privately educated and scrape through Oxford with a bad degree. While your evenings and weekends were spent dancing, playing badminton, flying aeroplanes and writing novels, they were toiling away tending crops and animals from their damp and dingy dwellings. Better check your privilege. 

And, how come the lads were “salt-of-the-earth, vital rustic types”, while their sisters were “jungly beyond vulgarity”? How was it different from when you were in the army? 

The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking... 

Workers at Howden, high up in the ribs and spines of the R100 skeleton.

Both my parents had memories of the R100. My mother’s mother worked there for a short time, and had a small, airship-shaped piece of duralumin silver metal, around an inch and a half long (4cm) and flat on one side. It was from a batch of airship brooches unfinished when they ran out of metal. She gave me it as a toy and it became an imaginary submarine. 

My dad remembered going to see the R100 in its construction shed at Howden. His dad borrowed the Model T van from work to drive there across the newly opened Boothferry Bridge. He said that the river was swollen by floodwater. Looking up in the shed, the airship was so big my dad could not see it. At 700 feet long (220m) and 130 feet in diameter (40m), it was around the size of two rows of twenty-five terraced houses with front gardens and a road between. He thought he was looking up at the roof.

The R100 in its construction shed at Howden
with one of the control gondolas hanging from the airship
which my dad thought was the roof.

The R100 squeezed out of its shed and left for Cardington in Bedfordshire in December, 1929. It was one of two airships built in competition to explore the possibility of commercial flights to Canada, India, and Australia, then still too far for aeroplanes to carry heavy loads. The other was the R101 built at Cardington. 

No more large airships were built in Britain. The R100, the better of the two, made a successful flight to Canada and back in 1930, crossing the Atlantic in three days. Rather than admit defeat, the R101 team attempted a premature flight to India, but the airship hit the ground and caught fire in France in October, 1930, with the loss of 48 lives. The airship project was abandoned and the R100 broken up for scrap. Large airships were built later in other countries, such as the Hindenburg in Germany, but these also ended in disaster. They were filled with hydrogen. 

The R100 over Montreal, August, 1930.

Mutations

This story on the BBC caught my attention because of its similarities to my own situation. 

My heart goes out to this young mother who, aged 33, has been diagnosed with cancer. After two weeks of “migraine”, she was persuaded to see a doctor, who immediately sent her to hospital. Two hours later, she was talking to an oncologist. An MRI scan had revealed 7 brain tumours, and a later CT scan found 3 in her lungs, which was the primary site. 

As I understand it, all tumours are gene mutations. She has a mutation of the ALK gene that produces a rogue protein that causes affected cells to grow uncontrollably. It can be controlled by a new wonder drug called Brigatinib which blocks the action of the protein. I have a similar but different mutation. 

An enormous amount of research is going into the genes involved in different kinds of cancer, and the precise mutations involved. In some cases, drugs can disrupt the growth of affected cells. More and more of these treatments will emerge in the coming years, but development is expensive. Drug companies charge thousands a month to recover their costs. Brigatinib is £5,000 a month; the Tepotinib I take is £7,000 (less confidential NHS discounts). It amounts to many tens of thousands per patient per year. The financial implications for the NHS and health insurers are astronomical.

Is it worth, say, £100,000 to prolong someone’s life for two years? For 10,000 new NHS lung cancer patients each year that amounts to £1 billion per year. What about other forms of cancer? What about other health conditions? What about other issues in the broader arena of health and social care? At some point, the answer will be no.  

Computers, Education and the Conservatives

Conservative governments are non-interventionist. They do not like the state to run anything. They spent the 1980s and 1990s selling off the country’s assets and giving away the proceeds. It continues today in their unwillingness to pay for public services or regulate things properly. Some of them would privatise health and education if they could get away with it. That is why, if my health holds out, I will not be voting Conservative at the next election. I will see the bastards* go to hell before I do. 

And yet, in the 1980s, they did intervene. A 1978 television documentary, ‘Now the Chips are Down’, made clear how woefully unprepared Britain was for the silvery white heat of the computer revolution. It scared the Thatcher government so much that they funded a number of costly initiatives. Two in particular stood out for me.  

A few of the many programmes in the BBC Computer Literacy Archive
https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/programmes

In one, the BBC was recruited to raise awareness of the skills needed. It led to the ‘Computer Literacy Project’, which ran from 1982 to 1989. It was linked to the specially commissioned ‘BBC Micro’, which was taken up by many homes and most schools, with over a million sold.

In the other, the ‘Microelectronics Education Programme’, massive amounts of money were spent putting computers in schools, setting up and funding resource centres, and training teachers. Politicians boasted that Britain led the world in “equipping the children of today with the skills of tomorrow.”    

Did it actually achieve anything, or was it bluster and spin?

At least it got my new career off the ground. After escaping from accountancy into a dream job as a university researcher, I knew as much about these new concepts and technologies as anyone. It would be hard to overstate how immersed, obsessed even, I was in this bright new world of colour and light.

I recently discovered that the television programmes, and more, are freely online in the ‘BBC Computer Literacy Archive’. It has the 1978 documentary which set things off (still informative 45 years later), and Dominic Sandbrook’s wonderfully evocative reflection on the social changes of the nineteen-eighties (not only computers). Incredibly, one programme even shows my own small part in this.  

Watching again now, I am struck by how aware we were of the social questions posed by what was about to come. How would people spend their time in a world with less work? How should wealth be shared across society? It is not turning out as well as it might.

Most fascinating for me is the series ‘The Learning Machine’ (1985), about computers in education, the area in which I worked. Here, once again, are the names and faces I knew and discussed things with at workshops and conferences, such as the main writer and presenter, Tim O’Shea.

He was scathing of the Microelectronics Education Programme, which, he said, had foisted cheap, underpowered computers and poor software upon parents and schools. The attractive message about improving the quality of education, disguised what was really on politicians’ minds: the job market, supporting British industry, and making education cheaper. Eventually, we might even do away with schools and teachers completely.

The then ubiquitous programming language, Basic, comes in for particular criticism. It encouraged tangled, undecipherable code, leading self-taught home and school users to think they knew how to write software, when, really, their knowledge was badly lacking.

I think Tim was broadly correct, but we were all still trying to understand how to use computers in education, and few teachers had the skills to teach programming. I was taught structured methods and had no difficulty creating reliable, intelligible Basic programs several hundred lines long.

It can also be argued that the initiatives did have benefits, but they were two decades in the making. A generation of youngsters became fascinated by computers, seeding Britain’s successful computer games industry. So, perhaps it did work out well in the end. Tim did well too. He became Principal of the University of Edinburgh.

One other series caught my eye: ‘With a Little Help from the Chip’ (1985), about helping those with special needs. I was astonished, in programme 3, to see a one-minute clip of software I designed and coded, being used in a school for deaf children. I have written about the programs before, but never seen the TV programme. It brought back all the satisfactions of going into schools to observe and collect data. 

Do you ever wonder, were it possible, whether you would happily go back to an earlier point in your life? I would, to this time for certain. And I would jump at the chance of another forty years. Most of all, it was an innocent, optimistic time, focused on what we were doing rather than the unrest and disruption taking place. We were trying to make the world a better place. We could do with more of that now. 

* A name used by Margaret Thatcher for Eurosceptic right-wing Conservatives. 

Proof of the Pi

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating, but what about the proof of the pi?

The ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, Archimedes and blogger Bob Brague will tell you that we need pi (π) for circle geometry, and that it is roughly 3.14159. Blogger Yorkshire Pudding will also tell you that we need pie, lots of it, but he would be referring to the kind he makes from minced meat topped with mashed potato and baked. Yorkshire Pudding is right. There is no need for mathematical constants and strange symbols. We only need to know that the distance around the circle of a shepherds pie, as near as dammit, is three and one-seventh (22/7) times the distance across. You can use this to ensure you are baking enough for everyone. 

I took for granted what they said about pi at school, without any real understanding. If understanding is the ability to think of the same thing in different ways, and to be able to switch between them, this is my attempt to do that. 

So, this is another mathematical post, like the one in January about the Pythagoras theorem. I wondered whether the same technique could be used to illustrate similar concepts; such as pi.  

Here is a circle of 14 units across, zoomed in on the top right-hand quarter to make it easier to see and count. The quarter-circle is 7 units high, and it takes 11 units to go around its edge. So to go all the way round the full circle would take 44 units, which is three and one-seventh times the distance across the whole circle (14 x 22/7 = 44). 

Does it also work for area? Can it show that the area of a circle is three and one seventh times the area of a square fitted from the centre to the edge (American: Area = πr²)? 

Here is the circle again, with a square drawn from the centre to the edge, zoomed in on one quarter. 

If the square is divided into a 7 by 7 grid of 49 smaller squares, then most of the smaller squares are inside the circle, but some are outside. Of those outside, some are complete squares while others are part-squares. Counting them, I reckon that a total equivalent of around 10½ smaller squared are outside the circle, leaving 38½ inside. I have tried to show how I counted 10½ by putting numbers on the quarter-circle. Those with the same numbers make up one square. 

Multiplying this by 4, it would need 154 (38½ x 4) of the smaller squares to completely fill the full circle. This is equal to three and one-seventh times the 49 in the square on the radius (49 x 22/7 = 154). 

To prove this visually, I used three larger squares to cover three-quarters of the circle. Then I moved the parts that were outside the circle (shown in grey) into the fourth quarter. So far, in all, this has used 3 larger squares, a total of 147 smaller squares. 

But it does not quite cover all the fourth quarter of the circle. We need an extra 7 smaller squares (shown in yellow), in other words, one-seventh of a larger square.  

So, the area of a circle is equal to three and one-seventh times that of a square drawn from the centre to the edge. (Area = πr²)

Arithmetically, it takes 38½ smaller squares to fill the fourth quarter, but there are only 3 x 10½, or 31½, available to move. We are 7 short. 

I get it. At least I think I do. 

Pythagoras

It was well-known to the ancient Egyptians, that a triangle with sides of 3, 4 and 5 units makes a right-angle. The Babylonians also knew this four thousand years ago, as they did in India. They used it to measure out precise squares and verticals. I would not be surprised if the ancient Tom Stephenson used it too.

Rotate such a triangle four times by ninety degrees, and you are back to where you began. Put four of them together as shown below on the left and it makes a perfect square. The one on the right is the same with the middle bit filled in.

This works for any right-angled triangle, not just those of size 3-4-5. 

The sides of the square are equal in length to the long sides of the triangles.

I am now going to move the top two triangles, top right to bottom left, and top left to bottom right. Hopefully, the arrows and numbers help make this clear. It results in an L-shape.

The L-shape uses the same pieces as the large square we started with, so the overall area remains exactly the same.

The L-shape can be split into two squares, a large one and a small one, as below. The sides of the smaller square are of the same length as the shortest side of the original triangle (see right-hand side). The sides of the larger square are of the same length as the third side (see left-hand side). 

The two squares still use the same pieces as the large square we started with, so the total area remains exactly the same as it was before we moved things around. 

In other words, the area of the square formed around the longest side of the triangle is the same as the combined areas of the squares formed around the other two sides. 

Or as Pythagoras put it in 550 B.C.: “The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.” 

Isn’t that just exquisite. They never showed me that at school.

Pythagoras may have discovered this by moving triangles around in the same way, one of the first to express the structure of nature as numbers, and advance understanding from the world of fact into the world of proof. He offered a hundred oxen to the muses in thanks for the inspiration (Jacob Bronowsti: The Ascent of Man).

And once you know this is true for any right-angled triangle, you can work out how much timber and how many tiles you need for your pitched roof, and are on the way to the kind of trigonometry that allows you to manipulate three-dimensional images on your computer screen. 

Wilson, Keppel and Betty

I call them Wilson, Keppel and Betty. They live inside my brain. I think they are three, but there may be more than one Betty. They are not the Wilson, Keppel and Betty some may remember, if anyone does, although, just the same, they sprinkle sand and scrape it around with their feet.

Betty, however many there are, is not too bad. She is not there all the time. She tries to make you forget things. Like when you know the name of the author of ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, but some cocky little sod from Edinburgh or Oxford shouts out Christopher Isherwood on ‘University Challenge’ while you are still thinking W. H. Auden, which you know is near but not quite right.

I can just about cope with Keppel. He makes your mouth slack and flobby, and blurs your words, but only when you are low on blood sugar. Others say they have not noticed, but that is how it feels to me.

No, Wilson is the worst. He used to put swirling patterns in my eyes. Dr. Hatfield tried to zap him away, but he came back. Mr. Thomson said he would cut him out, but he would not be able to cut all of him out, he would have to leave bits behind.

So Wilson is still there. He now blanks out a space just to the right of my point of focus, and if you can’t see the next             along a line of              then you can only read one word at a             rather than fluently. I should learn mirror-reading, right to left. He also moves words along, and up from the line below, and puts them where you are reading now, slows which letters slows things down even more. And, sometimes, he makes you look at letters for ages before you see what they are, and makes you write an M for a B, or a D for a P, or an S for C. He is a                        total                      mactarp. I have to get the computer to read things out, or Mrs. D.

They have stopped their sand dance for now. So long as I keep taking the Tepmetko Tepotinib they will be quiet. They don’t like it. It makes them ill. It makes me ill too, but not as ill as it makes them. Dr. Brown says that one day they will decide they have had enough and do away with me. It might be this year, but we thought that this time last year, so who knows? Perhaps they realise that if they do away with me, they do away with themselves as well. Mactarps!

https://youtu.be/pkhJpr2zR8s

The Mighty Micro

New Month Old Post: first posted 4th January, 2017. 

In 1978, Dr. Christopher Evans, a psychologist, computer scientist and expert on the future of computers, confidently made four predictions for the year 2000: (i) the printed word would become virtually obsolete; (ii) computer-based education would begin to supplant schools and teachers; (iii) money, in terms of physical bits of metal and paper, would almost have vanished; (iv) substantial and dramatic advances would have taken place in the field of artificial intelligence.
 
His only uncertainty was about the pace of change. It might take a decade or so longer, or occur more quickly, but the changes about to take place would be so stupendous as to transform the world beyond recognition. There would be more changes than in the whole of the two previous centuries. We were about to experience rapid, massive, irreversible and remorselessly unstoppable shifts in the way we lived.

Evans expanded his predictions in his book and television series The Mighty Micro. As well as the four main predictions, he thought we would soon see self-driving collision-proof cars, robotic lawn mowers, doors that open only to the voices of their owners, the widespread commercial use of databases and electronic text, a ‘wristwatch’ which monitors your heart and blood pressure, an entire library stored in the space of just one book, a flourishing computer-games industry and eventually ultra-intelligent machines with powers far greater than our own. Every one of these things seemed incredible at the time.

The social and political predictions were even more mind boggling. Evans foresaw a twenty-hour working week for all, retirement at fifty, interactive politics through regular electronic referendums, a decline in the influence of the professions, the emptying of cities and decreased travel as we worked more from home, and the fall of communism as underprivileged societies become astutely aware of their relative deprivation.  

I remember how fantastic and exhilarating this view of the future seemed at the time, but it gave me a serious problem. Having escaped my previous career in accountancy, I was half-way through a psychology degree trying to work out what to do next. If Evans was to be believed, and I believed a lot of it, then most of the then-present ways of earning a living were in jeopardy.

What was I to do? The answer seemed obvious: something that involved computers. So like Evans, I looked for ways to combine psychology with computing, and after gaining further qualifications that is what I did.

Dr. Christopher Evans talks about educational software

It is fascinating to revisit Evans’ predictions. How many were correct, what would have surprised him, and why? Many commentators conclude he got more things wrong than right, but I am not so sure. The printed word no longer predominates; computers now pervade education, albeit with teachers in schools as guides rather than in the didactic and solitary way Evans imagined; and nearly all significant financial transactions are carried out electronically. And the less-bizarre predictions are already here.

Undoubtedly, he over-estimated the pace of change, especially the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence. Futurologists are still predicting it. Stephen Hawking warned of the terrifying possibilities of machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. On the other hand, it may still be as far away as ever. It remains unclear what qualities such super-intelligence might have, or whether intelligence might have an upper limit. Perhaps our inability to imagine these things defines our stupidity. Where Evans was wrong, if it can be regarded as wrong, is that he was no seer. He could not escape the prevailing mindset of the nineteen-seventies, and foresee the innovative new uses of computers.

He did not foresee the internet. Multimedia crops up only in the form of a brief mention of “colour graphics”. Graphical user interfaces were still little more than a research project. He thought that electronic communications would take place through “the family television set” rather than personal hand-held devices.

And if you could not foresee these things, there is no way you could imagine how they would be used. Evans, with a seemingly naive view of human nature, imagined we would all be using computers to improve ourselves and make our lives easier; that our leisure time would be devoted to cultural, artistic, philosophical, scientific and creative endeavour of various kinds. I wonder what he would have made of internet pornography, fake news, selfies and cat videos.

Evans’ over-beneficent view of human nature coloured his vision of the social and political changes he thought would take place. Take the twenty-hour working week and retirement at fifty. The efficiencies brought about by computers could already have reduced our work significantly, but this has never been offered. It would upset too many powerful interests. Governments answer to the establishment more than the ‘man in the street’. As a result, for those who have jobs, the trend today is the opposite. And for those who don’t, wouldn’t it be fairer to share the jobs out?

Imagine if twenty hours per week up to the age of fifty was all we had to do. What would happen? For a start there would be those who decided to take on additional work in order to fund superior accommodation, private education, health care, better holidays, a more luxurious lifestyle and a more comfortable old age. Anyone content with just one job would begin to lose out. To keep up, we would all continue to work more than necessary, and the extra wealth would evaporate through increased spending, inflation and rising house prices, and disappear into the pockets of the elite minority, much of it overseas. Does that sound familiar? The only way to avoid the inevitable self-satisfied winners and miserable losers would be to ration the amount of work one could undertake, or the amount of wealth one was allowed to have. The necessary laws and financial penalties would be unpopular and difficult.

And how would we use our over-abundant spare time? One could easily imagine an intensification of social ills: epidemics of obesity, alcoholism, drug dependence, mental health issues and the breakdown of law and order. 

‘Parkinson’s law’ prevails: work expands to fill the time available. Anyone with experience of large organisations will know how work once considered inessential or unaffordable, now occupies an entire additional workforce who administer quality, accountability and ‘political correctness’. Rather than reducing the overall workload, computers have increased it by making possible what was once impossible.

Stephen Hawking concluded his forewarnings about super-intelligent computers as follows:

“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far the trend seems to be towards the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Sadly, Christopher Evans died shortly after his book’s publication, three weeks before his television series was broadcast. It is often said that if you make predictions about the future the only certainty is that you will be wrong. Evans would have known this, but I suspect he would have been fairly satisfied by the extent to which he got it right. 

My original post in 2017 was quite a lot longer and included links to the archived television programmes, so I have left it here. The programmes are fascinating to watch if this kind of thing interests you - the future as seen in 1978.

Exon 14

To paraphrase "GPs Behind Closed Doors", this post contains challenging medical issues.

Exon 14 sounds like a science fiction film. As little as ten years ago, it could well have been, but actually it is real.

I have something called the MET Exon 14 skipping mutation. It alters a specific gene, the MET gene (mesenchymal-epithelial transition) so that affected cells produce an abnormal protein which makes them grow uncontrollably.

The mutation causes lung tumours. It affects mainly smokers, but I put mine down to dirty Leeds in the nineteen-seventies when large numbers smoked, and offices, buses, cinemas, pubs and the shared houses I lived in reeked of a blue haze that stuck to your hair and clothes so much that you failed to notice. Leeds was also full of traffic fumes and pollution from coal fires and industries, and my accountancy job involved hours walking round warehouses, mills and factories where there were all kinds of dust and chemical vapours. The cause on my health record is "significant passive smoking". 

I was entirely symptomless until I had a seizure. Perhaps a routine chest X-ray might have detected it sooner and saved me a lot of trouble, but it was as good as impossible to get one during the covid lockdown, even if I had thought to request one.

Diagnosis begins with a CT-directed lung biopsy. You lie face-down in a CT scanner while a surgeon positions a thing metal tube into your back, through which they can then cut out and remove a small piece of tumour tissue for analysis and gene-sequencing. It is not a comfortable procedure. I wondered what was the cold liquid running into the back of my throat, which I had to spit out on to the scanner table. It was blood. We don't normally realise how cold the insides of our lungs get.

Gene sequencing is only the first part of the science fiction. There is a targeted therapy. The Merck drug company have licenced a chemical called Tepotinib (trade mane Tepmetko) in the form of a daily pill that blocks the abnormal protein, and slows down or stops the tumours from growing. It is a high cost treatment; I have heard a figure of £7,000 per month mentioned, but thanks to the NHS I do not have to pay.

Surprisingly, it is a relatively simple chemical - a hydrochloride hydrate of C₂₉H₂₈N₆O₂. I imagine that in some parts of the world they ignore the patent and make it themselves for a few pence per pill.

I have had other treatments too: chemotherapy which was awful, lung radiotherapy which was little trouble in my case, gamma knife radiotherapy which pinpoints and zaps small brain metastases, a brain op to drain the cyst that gamma knife left behind, which was scary. All over a year ago.

The side effects of Tepotinib are difficult, especially oedema (fluid retention). If you get cold it takes ages to get warm again because it is the equivalent of having 20 pounds (9 kg) of cold water bags strapped around your limbs and body, and, believe me, you would not want to have scrotal oedema (or vulval oedema I imagine, but don't know because I don't have that).

I am OK. It is but a scratch. I've had worse. None shall pass. I am still here.  

So, not only have we mapped the human genome to identify the 25,000 or so genes of our 23 chromosomes, we can gene-sequence malfunctioning cells to pick out a defective gene, understand its mechanisms, and construct a chemical to block its actions. To those of my generation, even the technologically literate, that really does sound like science fiction.

New things like this are coming along all the time. It should give hope to those who might become ill in the future.

Molly’s Family

One of the perks of working in a university is that you get to play with the latest bits of kit.

I was asked to get involved in one of the new multimedia courses springing up around the U.K. in the mid nineteen-nineties. Surprisingly, many were in engineering departments. I believe the first was started by engineers at Bradford University around 1993.

One element of our new course was digital video. We were all encouraged to understand how it worked. As a result I was allowed to borrow one of our new hand-held video cameras and take it home. It was great fun filming our children when little, playing in an inflatable dinghy in the natural pool on the beach at Sandsend.

I know that sounds like a frivolous waste of taxpayers’ money, but we needed to know how to use these new technologies ourselves, and understand how they might relate to other parts of the course and what their possibilities might be. Silicon Valley technology companies often allow staff time to ‘play’ with new software and equipment because it generates innovative ideas. In our case, it led to course developments and research funding. 

Handling a video on a computer was not straightforward then. You had to run it through programs to digitise and ‘render’ it into a viewable form. You needed to be aware of the type of video coding (‘codec’) you were using. Only then could you begin to edit it or write programs to do state-of-the-art clever things such as spotting objects and faces. There would be a lot of ‘re-rendering’. Computers were so slow that every stage took ages. Nothing was automatic and effortless like now.

Back home, I realised that the camera made it easy to create stop-motion animation. With my then eight year-old daughter’s lovely wooden dolls’ house, the figures that went with it, and her enthusiasm and child’s take on family life around her, this, below, was one of our first attempts. Yet another example of something that would be much easier with today’s software. You wouldn’t even need a real dolls house. I know which I think the most fun.

She made up most of the story and moved the figures, while I mainly operated the camera. Surely, the story is not based on her own family, is it?

Weekend in College

(New month old post: first posted 23rd September, 2015)

You been tellin’ me you're a genius since you were seventeen,
In all the time I've known you, I still don't know what you mean,
The weekend in the college didn't turn out like you planned,
The things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand.

It was as if Steely Dan’s phenomenal ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ was aimed directly at me, cutting through the pretentiousness to the stupidity beneath. It was actually four months but might just as well have been a weekend for all the good it seemed to do. With the anticipation of arrival smothered in a blanket of disillusion, I detested myself as much as the subject of Becker and Fagen’s song.

City of Leeds and Carnegie College

It was the first of two attempts to escape accountancy. After four mind-numbing years, I decided it was not the career for me, and applied to train as a science teacher. You needed five G.C.E. Ordinary level passes, and to have studied your specialist subjects to Advanced level. In other words, you did not actually need to have passed the Advanced level. That was me exactly. I didn’t tell them about the failed accountancy exams.

It beggars belief that you could become a Secondary years science teacher with nothing better than weak Ordinary level passes in your specialist subjects. They should have told me to go away and re-sit Advanced Levels and reapply, assuming I still wanted to. Anything less would be to inflict my limited knowledge and ineffectual learning techniques upon other poor innocents. But you can talk yourself into anything if it’s on offer.  

Around 1960

The City of Leeds and Carnegie College, now part of Leeds Beckett University, was one of the loveliest campuses in Britain. It was built in 1911 in a hundred acres of parkland that once belonged to Kirkstall Abbey. Hares ran free in the woods and each spring brought an inspiring succession of leaf and flower. The magnificent main building dominated a sweeping rectangular lawn called The Acre, lined by solid halls of residence named after ancient Yorkshire worthies: Fairfax, Cavendish, Caedmon, Leighton, Priestley, Macauley and Bronte.

But instead of moving into halls, I remained off-campus in my seedy shared house. It meant not taking full part in the friendly community of cosy study bedrooms around the grassy Acre, and the activities I might have enjoyed. I felt old and awkward. The music drifting from open doorways flaunted the easy friendships within. While the Carpenters sang that they were on top of the world, Steely Dan mocked that “college didn't turn out like you planned”.

The course quickly became tedious. Chemistry classes were interminable, like being back at school. I began to sink into the old malaise and find fault in everything. A biology technician “humanely” despatched rats for dissection by cracking their necks on the edge of a bench. We sampled the vegetation growing on The Acre lawn, my accountant’s brain adding up the data almost before the other students had got out their calculators. In English classes, reading through a play, I realised that some of the others were not fluent readers. It was astonishing. They were training to be teachers for goodness’ sake.

We were sent out on teaching practice. I found myself in a Comprehensive School on a council estate. After two weeks, we were asked to plan and teach a small number of lessons ourselves. I had good ones and bad ones. In the best, observed by the teaching practice tutor, the children used Bunson burners, all happy and engaged in what they were doing. Do they still let them do such dangerous things? Fortunately, no one saw the worst from which I was saved only by the school bell.

The school had none of the liveliness of the grammar school I had attended myself, and staff made no secret of their dissatisfaction. “Here I am with a First in English,” said one, “and I’m supposed to teach kids who have no interest in reading anything at all.” And one of the most inspiring teachers left to open a pottery.

Despite good marks, the doubts grew as I returned to my old employer to earn money over Christmas. The uninspiring course, the mediocrity, the dismal school I’d seen, it was not what I wanted. It was not a substitute for university. More hopes and dreams dashed by another abandoned course. What now?

I was by no means the last to leave. A few went on to successful teaching careers, but many never taught at all. During the year that my course would have finished, the press was rife with accounts of unemployment among new teachers. Despite a chronic shortage just two years earlier, Governments had not planned for the falling birth rate. Around two thirds of newly qualified teachers were unable to find jobs.

One poor girl in London had previously been guaranteed a post, but after staying on at college an extra year to improve her qualifications with a Bachelor of Education degree, she now had to find work outside teaching. Perhaps it was fortunate I did leave.

It was thirty years before I visited Beckett Park again. The passage of time gave rise to quite an unsettling experience. I was haunted by half-remembered faces and snatches of conversation from a particularly intense episode in the past: here is where I usually managed to find a parking space for my Mini; across there is where I resented a tutor telling me I would have greater authority if I stood straighter and walked with shorter steps; that window, in Leighton Hall, is the study bedroom where a girl I seriously fancied took me one afternoon for nothing more than a cup of coffee and a long talk.

Ghosts aside, the place looked much the same. Most of the original Edwardian campus survives, although the internal use has changed, such as residences replaced by staff offices and teaching rooms, with students bused-in from off-campus and financed very differently.

Smoke gets in your eyes. You can convince yourself anything is right when you’re desperate enough.

[The original post was even longer and more over-written than this, but if you are interested, it is still here]

School Chemistry

New month old post. First posted 14th November 2014

There was once a time when things at school looked promising. I was doing well in most subjects, especially science. My diary remembers I was top in biology, had got 20/20 in a chemistry test, and had enjoyed a ‘fab’ physics experiment: the water equivalent of a copper calorimeter. Yet I only scraped through ‘O’ levels and messed up ‘A’ levels completely. What went wrong? 

I was spellbound by the science labs the moment I went to grammar school. They had a permanent smell of pungent chemicals, coal gas, rubber tubing and wood polish that hinted at mysterious secret knowledge. What went on at those dark ancient benches with sinks, gas taps and glass-stoppered bottles etched with intriguing names: tincture of iodine, nitric acid, sodium hydroxide, lime water? Could they make explosives and powerful poisons? Could they turn base metals into gold? Did they have the philosopher’s stone with the secret of eternal life? Perhaps if you paid attention, you might have these things too.

In a room tiered like the Royal Institution, you looked down from beautiful oak benches upon Dr. Page as he heated potassium chlorate and manganese dioxide to make oxygen. It bubbled up through water into an upturned jar. He became a wizard, an alchemist, showing how it reacts with other substances. “Magnesium burns with a bright white light” he said, conjuring a dazzling ball of light too bright and too white to look at.

In biology, my dysfunctional memory absorbed the names of anatomical structures and physiological processes: xylem, islets of Langerhans, osmosis, mitochondria, mitosis. In physics, I was captivated by the sheer ingenuity of the procedures. In mathematics, the interactions of shapes and numbers seemed as exquisite as any art form.

And what a cheat! We listened to a weekly series of science programmes on the wireless. I might have been the only person in the class with a tape recorder. I showed my mother how to record the programmes at home and, after listening a second time, handed in outstanding essays.

But things began to go downhill. I have excuses, such as forgetting to revise for the summer science exam. “Position in class 2nd, position in exam 25th, a disappointing exam result” said my report. It put me in the second stream for science, where people messed about and I made the mistake of wanting to be liked. Things got harder too. Chemistry progressed from observation to experiments, quantitative measurement and atomic models. And we moved to new labs with benches in rows rather than islands, where teachers couldn’t see what was going on at the back.

The once admired Dr. Page, little and thin with an odd toothy mouth, small bony face and permanent worried frown, was not well equipped to deal with continuous low level disruption. An orchestra of clicks and pings from cupboard door catches and drawer label holders would start up every time he turned to write on the blackboard, only to be met by silent, innocent faces when he angrily spun back.

Occasionally he would catch someone still smirking, attributing blame by shouting their name: “Bullard!”, “Gelder!”, “Dunham!”. Geoffrey Bullard perfected the ability to click a cupboard door with his foot while the rest of him remained motionless, his face expressionless. He could continue this covert clicking after Dr. Page had spun, causing someone else to laugh and get the blame.  

Harvey Gelder started a league table of called out names. Geoffrey Bullard went straight to the top when he caused uproar by catching a wasp and dropping it into a bottle of sodium hydroxide. It didn’t half fly around fast inside the bottle.

It wasn’t long before everyone at the back had points except for Maurice Jupp. He remained bottom of the league until almost the end of term. The day arrived when, under conditions of intolerable harassment, Jupp was spotted not sitting quietly and had his name called out. We all stood up cheering and applauding. We had to stay late that day.

Jupp’s downfall was brought about by water. The bench water taps could not have been better designed for mischief. They were of the typical laboratory downspout design, and could be turned on just enough to drip so that a well-timed finger could flick drops of water at the head of the person sitting in front. Or, the top of a fountain pen, the kind with a small hole in the side for equalising air pressure, could be pushed on to a tap to squirt a powerful jet of water at someone sitting yards away. The rubber teat from a teat-pipette could do the same job if you made a tiny hole in it, except the spray was so fine that the recipient might not notice until the back of his jacket was soaked through. And a teat without a pin hole pushed on to a dripping tap would slowly expand like a balloon until it became a water bomb primed to explode. There was not a lot you could do about it. Pulling off the teat was suicidal. The best thing was simply to turn off the tap, hoping you had correctly remembered which way was off, and trust that the thing remained stable.

Hardly anyone from the back of that class passed their ‘O’ level chemistry.

Dad’s Thursday Helper

New month old post (first posted 18th August 2014)

Thursday afternoon was half-day closing. The whole town seemed to shut down. Retail businesses got the afternoon off in part-compensation for being open on Saturdays. So, Dad came home and Mum went off to Grandma’s leaving him to get on with his Thursday afternoon jobs. I ‘helped’.

 

We cleaned and brushed his boots and shoes, black and brown, with Cherry Blossom polish from a round tin with cherries on the lid, and Wren’s waterproof dubbin with a little bird. 

We replaced brake blocks and pumped tyres, and mended punctures by immersing the inner tubes in bowls of water to see the bubbles, marking with chalk, and sticking on puncture patches with stringy rubber solution. I learnt about tyre levers and tubular (box) spanners. We polished the wheels and handlebars with rags (old underpants were good) and mustard coloured chrome cleaner, transforming dirty grey to silver shine. We smeared on vaseline for protection from the weather – a magnet for yet more grime. 

We soaked the chains in trays of petrol to remove the oily grit, and then disposed of the petrol by setting it alight. Dad once just tipped it on the garden but had to stop after Grandpa came for tea one day and complained: “This lettuce tastes of petrol.” 

We cleaned Dad’s pipes, scraping out the burnt black ash with a gadget barbed like a miniature medieval mace, and soaking up the evil-smelling gunge with fluffy pipe-cleaners.

Then it was time for nicer smells and sounds: the matchsticks that rattled in their flat green and red box with a picture of a swan on the top, the firework hiss and smell of sulphur when he struck one, and the clouds of sweet St. Bruno smoke. He would pack the pipe bowl with tobacco from a black and white metal tin (with new tins, you had to pull a rubber vacuum seal from the bottom before you could open the lid), put the stem between his teeth, suck a flame down into the bowl, and blow smoke from the side of his mouth with a satisfied expression and popping ‘p’ sound.

“Can I have a puff?” I begged. “Let me have a puff”. I was only four.

“Oh all right,” said Dad reluctantly. He held the stem of the pipe near my mouth. I was instantly sick. 

And then there were the fun jobs – playtime. We had a model steam engine, the “steam boiler”, which drove a flywheel through dual pistons, exactly like the one pictured. It had a brass water tank heated by a methylated spirit burner that slid underneath. Dad loved to take it out of its oily cardboard box and fire it up on the back room table. Once steam was up, it could be set in motion. The flywheel revolved at a fair old pace, puffing and rattling, spitting out a lethal mixture of hot oil and boiling water. It had a screeching whistle and a safety valve that blew like a railway engine when the pressure got high.

It was important the pistons were always oiled and that the water tank did not run dry. The spirit burner needed topping up frequently. The smell of methylated spirit mixed with hot emulsified oil is unforgettable. Once, we spilled methylated spirit on the table and it caught light. I watched fascinated as a lucent blue pool of flame spread slowly across the surface, Dad flapping it frantically with his hands, looking panicky.

A move to another house brought a whole new set of Thursday afternoon jobs, sanding and painting skirting-boards and staining wooden floors around the edges of carpet squares before fitted carpets became the norm. 

We painted the garden shed banana yellow. It leaked, so we mended the roof. I sat up there with Dad, ‘helping’ him tack down new sheets of roofing felt and painting it with hot black tar. Dad heated the tar to boiling point in an old paint pot on the kitchen gas cooker. Then, holding it with just a wooden cane through the handle, carried it bubbling and the smouldering tar acoss the kitchen floor, across the garden, and up on a rickety stepladder and on to the shed roof. It must have been a thoroughly hazardous operation. There were splashes of black tar on the yellow paint for years.

But there was still room for play-jobs. 

We found some old lead piping in the shed. Dad melted it on the kitchen cooker in an empty tin can, and then, holding it with pliers, poured the molten metal into toothpaste tins which had originally contained hard, flat, tablets of ‘dentifrice’ wrapped in red cellophane. You rubbed it with a wet toothbrush to form a lather. The empty tins were just right for moulding make-believe medals – possibly something Dad had himself made in this own childhood. After pouring the lead, the medals were dropped into a bowl of water and sizzled as they cooled. The embossed ‘Gibbs’ lettering transferred perfectly to the moulded medals. No one knew about lead poisoning then.

Perhaps it was just as well Mum went to Grandma’s on Thursdays. 

‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’ would have continued for me until I started school, but Dad was then able to do it all over again with my brother.