Looking Out To Sea

On Saturday afternoon I felt pretty crap with a cold but we went out to Pilrig Park just behind the flat to take part in the Pilrig Park Clean-up organised by Greener Leith.

We were given latex gloves and those trigger-operated litter pickers and as many black plastic bags as we could hope to have a use for, and went forth to clean up the park. This was our first time on a clean-up so we’ve learned a few things:

• It’s not a very sociable job as there’s generally several hundred metres between you and the nearest person. I wouldn’t say bringing an MP3 player was a bad idea
• Holding open a black plastic bag in a windy open field is quite tricky. I wonder how we might improvise some kind of hoop or holder to keep the neck of the bin bag open.
• The rich pickings are to be found in the perimeters of the park, amongst the trees and bushes.
• Glass bottles are a pain because they’re so heavy. Something like a wheelbarrow to cart them to the nearest recycling spot would have been great.

And yesterday Greener Leith organised a Leith Commuter Breakfast with free bacon rolls and bike tune-ups for people who commute in Leith on bike or foot. There was a lot of passing trade — many people cycle along the Water of Leith and were drawn in by cries of “free bacon roll!”.

I’m very grateful to Greener Leith for being so active and coming up with new ideas to bring people together. If you’re local have a look at their website and maybe join their social network.

Last Friday we saw The History Boys at the King’s Theatre. It was a sign interpreted show; we got cheaper tickets because we went with the signing group. I’d never seen it before and really enjoyed it. I’ll have to catch the film at some point to see how it compares. We had good seats, in the front half of the stalls at the left hand side, but the signers were at right of the stage so the view for keeping up with the interpreting was a bit poorer. I missed quite a bit because a lot of the action happened directly in front of us, requiring a tennis-watching technique: left, right, left…

In other signing news, I was at an EdSign34 lecture on Symmetry in Sign Language. It was quite interesting in terms of picking apart common structures in signs — signs that are left/right reflections of each other, signs that rotate around each other, that are translated along a plane and so on. Some styles of symmetry are much more common than others and it seems that the less-common ones are generally harder to perform. Over time they tend to change so that they’re easier to produce, like words that get their hard edges ground down. (“Fo’c’sle” comes to mind, or “Wednesday”.) The symmetry aspect was also an appeal because who can really say no to a bit of group theory?

In a few weeks a friend of mine is doing her own presentation there so I’ll be hecklingshowing my support.

For the first time this year we spent the weekend working and lounging in the garden. The sun was warm and the walls high enough to keep out the wind.

Over the autumn and winter the weeds have come in great force. What few plants were there have been choked. A series of scaffolders, builders and glaziers have made a real mess of the lawn and there’s rubble in the beds. The remains of two windows — frames, broken glass, weights and plaster — were dumped on a bed of herbs in one corner.

On Saturday Helen worked on taking out a large bramble and trying to discriminate plants from weeds. I fought with the gate, which had rusted and buckled hinges. I replaced the middle hinge and removed the bottom one without being able to properly replace it. The rusted hinge is stuck fast to the gatepost and every attempt I make on it just destroys the gatepost further. So at the moment it only has the top two of three hinges, which is a bit top-heavy.

On Sunday we got outside earlier and went to B&Q for gardening gloves and plants. There were no plants but I did get a neat little barbecue. And those gloves. Then we had lunch in the garden, with potato salad and mini scotch eggs and mini pork pies and sweet chilli-flavoured Ryvita bite-size crisps and assorted things. Ella and Ben came and we tracked the sun around the garden and talked of all sorts. It was nice and I hope there will be many more days like it this summer.

Right, since I’m getting complaints from my mother that I don’t update my blog often enough, you have to suffer my thoughts on the two most recent books I read —

The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins

You might well think, “another in Richard Dawkins seemingly endless variety of books explaining evolution which will be ignored by the people who need it most”. And you’d be right. I really enjoyed The Selfish Gene. Climbing Mount Improbable was an interesting new take on the matter. But The Extended Phenotype was a bit too extended for my liking — so why did I think my book shelf needed this one?

It was mostly because of the fundamental premise of using The Canterbury Tales, a pilgrimage with varied storytellers, to tell a backwards story of evolution. I liked the idea of each animal telling a story — a scientific story, about what we learned from its fossils or its DNA or its behaviour. And it works very well. Starting from present-day Homo sapiens we step back in time through our recent ancestors, learning the problems of differentiating species across time and how it is we can say that humans are brainy for their size. At some point we reach our first waypoint, where the chimpanzees meet us. This is our common ancestor, some 6 million years ago, and we learn a little about common chimpanzee and bonobo social behaviour and why these can’t be generalised to find “human nature”.

Then we step further back in time to the common ancestor between us chimpanzees (naked and hairy) and the other great apes. And so on, learning what each animal probably looked like and where they fit into the wider scheme. At times I felt slightly overwhelmed by the names, which got worse as the book travelled further back in time — I could never tell when we were meeting several varieties of obscure worm or sponge or something else entirely. To say that the obscuriae family contain the thingimiumins and the whatchacallioids was not so enlightening.

Each chapter had a prologue and sometimes several ‘tales’ but sometimes the prologues dwarfed the actual tales. Sometimes a section seemed little more than an excuse to reference other tales without saying anything substantive. At many points I felt confused by the sequencing — I couldn’t really remember if a particular Tale was still to come or had already passed. At many points an interesting discussion is omitted because it is covered in another of Richard Dawkins’ books.

The flaw in the idea of delving backwards through time is that while we can follow the slow ‘regression’ of our line, occasionally another entire troupe would arrive that utterly dwarfed our own. The common ancestors of humans and insects is a long way into the past, but when we reach that point in the past all the interesting speciation of the insects has been ‘undone’ since they now look just like us! And so on for other major groups. There is great variety in fishes and plants and fungus but their interesting recent stories have to be ignored for the sake of scale. Which I guess is another way of saying that there are at least half a dozen further books to made from this idea, but not starting at the human leaf on the tree.

Borderliners by Peter Høeg

Peter Høeg’s a slippery one and no mistake. It is not surprising that this book is quite different to his others, though there is still a common style. The narrator is an orphaned(?) boy growing up in the institutions and child homes of 1970s Denmark. Seemingly by chance he ends up at a prestigious private school run on strict disciplinarian and ideological lines. He has trouble concentrating and keeping to the exacting timetables of his life. He becomes friends with an older boy and a younger girl, all outcasts and misfits in this school, and they try to find out why they are tolerated at the school despite being “defective”.

Alongside this story of institutional life is a strange dissertation on time, written by the author as an older man, but weaved into the main parts of the story in many places. It’s largely incoherent and contradictory, and what it tries to say comes across as either obvious or obviously wrong. At one point the author, or the narrator (the young boy’s name is also Peter Høeg), get to the point of denouncing all progress, much like the miserable people with their digital watches:

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

If you’re willing to sit through the babble there’s an interesting story in there, but it’s largely been smothered.