HOMO SURREYCUS

We were at dinner with some old friends last night.  No, not that old actually, but we’ve known them for . . . OK, hundreds of years.  It’s an extraordinary coincidence, but we met them overseas, as I say, many years ago, and then, when we returned to this country, after much globe-trotting, we discovered that they lived just down the road from us.  Well, perhaps that isn’t such a coincidence – we both pronounce ‘bus’ as ‘bas’, rather than ‘boos’, and we both the sort who like a nice cool pinot on a patio and to listen to Radio 3 and despise people who walk around the High Street in the summer in their vests.  And neither of us shops at Tescos.  So maybe we both felt the gravitational pull of Surrey.

Anyway, the conversation, after dinner, as is often the case at parties, turned to the origin of the species.  Well after we'd done the high cost of staff, the scourge of benefit cheats and the impact of Holly Willoughby's decollete appearance, obviously.  

I don’t go along with all this ape stuff incidentally, do you?  I mean I can accept that Man came from apes, but has anyone found a skeleton or a fossil of something that went before apes, linking them with amphibious reptiles or something?  So where did the apes come from?

Anyway back to the sofa and the postprandial Drambuies.  My friend had recently been to the movies and seen a film with some frightening content and had made an interesting.  He wondered why such films were so enjoyable and indeed why the audience had enjoyed being scared.  His conclusion was that human beings need adrenalin to survive.  It’s a thought, isn’t it.  I mean, think of the prevalence of horror films at the moment.  All those zombies for example.  By the way, who was it decided that zombies should eat human flesh?  The original undead in Haitian culture was summoned back with voodoo for a specific purpose and the word ‘zombie’ came much later on in US literature as some sort of black slave.  It was not though until The Night of the Living Dead in the 60s that undead creatures feasted on humans and I don’t think the word ‘zombie’ was used in that film either.

And then, getting back to adrenalin, there are these increasingly scary fairground rides.  Whatever happened to the straightforward ghost train?  Even our local zoo has something described as ‘the most fearsome ride since the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ or some such.  So what induces people to get on it?!  Well, the answer might well be vitalising adrenalin.  Perhaps life has become too bland these days, with none of the coal mine disasters or plane crashes or measles epidemics or blitzkriegs (or is it blitzkriege?) that our parents used to suffer.  Or maybe they only survived because of this regular stimulation of adrenalin flow?  So perhaps we have to seek out these terrifying activities to keep our life-preserving chemical levels up.

I had similar thoughts today as I walked along the beach.  No, that’s actually not such a dangerous pastime, but I have often wondered, when at the coast, about our love of the sea.  You know how on a hike you emerge from a forest or breast a hill and see a panorama of fields and villages and so on.  Well, you might stand there in awe for a moment of two, but you don’t sit and stare and say, ‘oh, look at that cottage down there’, or ‘wow, there are twenty-seven sheep in that field’, or indeed focus on any of the many details in that vista, do you.  But come across a view out across the sea and frankly we could sit there for hours (and sometimes do) just staring at it.  No thought of remarking on a speck of a yacht on the horizon or a wave that reminds you of your next door neighbour’s coiffure, you just sit and stare at it.  And there’s actually nothing there – no village, or field of sheep, nor any familiar waves in actual fact.  Nothing.  So what’s that sea fever all about?

Well, I think it has a lot to do with our evolution.  I think I may have mentioned this before.  Clearly we still have a gene that makes us subconsciously hanker after submerging ourselves back into the ocean.  When we stop and stare at the sea, the sight has triggered some primeval nostalgia that, beyond our comprehension, stirs in our sensory databanks and sparks in our psyche, harking back to the era when Earth was one great ocean and Man was still an amoeba or a plankton or just some chemical impulse in the sea.  

But there’s something missing here, isn’t there.  Why don’t we feel a connection to apes?  Apart from a long-running obsession with chimpanzees and tea parties, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a human looking at a monkey and feeling anything stir inside them, except perhaps a thought that it reminds them of their neighbour, what with the wavy fringe and all.  So, if they are indeed our closest relatives, shouldn’t the sight of one in the zoo stimulate some base instinct in us?  Should we not feel instinctive horror at their being caged, or empathy with their miserable existence, or even fancy one of them a bit, like we all did with Ari in Planet of the Apes.  Now you see, Ari fancied Mark Wahlberg (and I think we all expected him to fancy Ari), but there was no prehistoric genetic uncontrollable attachment involved, that was all to do with Hollywood instinctive script-writing.  And in real life there isn’t any automatic reaction either.  

In fact we feel far more attachment to dogs or cats.  And I don't think anyone has ever posited that we're descended from them.  Yet why the closeness then?  And what has that to do with big dippers and the sea?  And why are we here?

In Surrey I mean.  What primal impulse led us to the summit of the Surrey Hills with nothing but pinot to provide the stimulation to survive?  Oh, and Holly Willoughby's dress sense of course.

WHAT'S IN IT?

I was fascinated to see that the latest Google doodle was in honour of the 127^th birthday of Niels Bohr, the Danish scientist.  Bohr produced the now famous atomic model, showing how electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom.  This is a pretty obscure anniversary, isn’t it.  Danish scientist!  127^th anniversary?!  Still, it did start me thinking.  Why do we find names so important?

I fret, every time I go to play bridge in Haslemere, in case that bloke with the checked shirt who always bids no trumps is there.  Because I’ve forgotten his name and am too embarrassed to ask him again what it is.  But what does it really matter?  It’s just that he always says, ‘hello, Neil.’  And I have to say, ‘oh, hello, you.’  But that ought to be enough really didn’t it.  We say hello and you know who he is (the one with the checked shirt).

I have followed with interest discoveries and developments in the atomic world (since Niels Bohr's discovery).  Frankly, I find it very hard to believe that I or for example this desk I’m working on are made of loads of atoms joined together somehow, each one made up of electrons orbiting round and round.  Well, I’m a bit malleable, so I suppose it could be possible in me, but the desk?!!

Once upon a time the atom was defined as something so small it couldn’t be chopped up.  I was happy with that.  I could see my desk being made of lots of little atoms.  Yet every year it seems someone invents another tiny bit of the tiny bits we already know.  I mean, you can’t even see an atom until it’s enlarged millions of times, as it’s only about one Angstrom in diameter (and I’m not even sure I can fully grasp what an Angstrom is).  But the nucleus of the atom, since Bohr, is apparently made up of protons and neutrons and now we are told that both consist of up quarks and down quarks and gluons, all moving about.  Ugh.  And more recently, lunacy on lunacy, we have spent £3.5b on the Large Hadron thingy, yes, £3.5 billion!  You could buy several apartments in The Shard for that.  And for what?  So that we can split these microscopic specks of matter (assuming they really exist at all) into smaller pieces.

Well, it is a branch of science that makes you wonder what beneficial outcomes there will actually be.  Let’s face it, what exactly has the Higg's Bosun done for us?  I’d rather have a flat in central London anyway.  But more importantly – why do we have to give names to these little bits of whatever they’re made of?  It’s like gathering up a handful of dust from under the sofa, or Jammy Dodger crumbs from inside the bed, and sitting down and recording names for them all.  What on earth would you want to do that for?

And talking of earth, do you remember, when you were young, when you inserted a stick of dynamite into a breeze block and dropped it into a bath tub of Golden Syrup, how the explosion caused tiny pieces of concrete to spray out in a circle in all directions?  You never tried that?  You didn’t have an enquiring mind like mine then?  Well, all right, in my case, it was a Mighty Atom firework in a brick in a tub of water, but the effect would be the same.  Tiny pieces of rock are sent spinning off in all directions, making their way ever outwards, until they reach the sides of the container. 

But the point is - do you recognise the phenomenon?   Yes, it's the universe after the Big Bang.  Even if you didn’t try this at home, you can imagine it, can’t you.  

There has been a debate on and off for many years now about whether the world was created or whether we evolved from synthesis caused by a bolt of lightning.  I have never understood why it has to be one or the other to be honest.  I have always had this picture in my head (as you will from now on no doubt) of God throwing a breeze block filled with dynamite into a tub of syrup (probably several tubs of different liquids floating in a vat of water) and kneeling there with his kids, watching how things evolve.

But anyway, whether it’s dynamite or a thunderbolt He throws, looking at this Big Bang in your mind’s eye, when you see all those pieces flying off, amid innumerable bubbles of gas and patches of dust, would your first thought be, ‘Ooh, I must try to name them’?  Would you really want to bother to identify all the pieces of rock and assign each one of them a label?  Or the bubbles?  Or the dust?  And what about plotting the movement of the pieces and predicting their position in the next second or two?  Of course you wouldn't. 

So what is it with names?  Or what is it with humans that we have to invent names and assign them to everything?  Why do we all spend so much time naming specks of rock in space and even black holes where there used to be stars but currently isn’t anything at all?  If I said at a dinner party, ‘I’ve just brushed a crumb of toasted Asino off my lapel; I’ve decided to call it Georgio’, the other guests would look at me very oddly and think I’d moved even closer to the mad end of the sanity spectrum, wouldn’t they.  So why do we not find it strange, when a new star is discovered, that scientists name it S0-102.  It’s just a tiny piece of concrete swirling round a vortex that someone created with dynamite.  It’s 26,000 light years away!  Who cares what it’s called?  And we've all managed perfectly well for the last 3.5b years without giving it a name.

Anyway, the latest piece of scientific news is that Voyager 1 has passed through a cluster of bubbles at the border of the Solar System (called the heliopause, should you want a name).  Now, if I’m right, this cluster of bubbles is actually on the side of a bathtub.  So soon we should be experiencing a rushing and swirling, as all the syrup pours out of the tub through the hole made by Voyager 1 (into a vat of water filled with the 12 other tubs of liquid).  I shall name this phenomenon the ‘Hook Effect’.  And it will last until someone in the divine family sticks a strip of duct tape over the hole.  

Or, hang on, the Mayans predicted that the world would end on the 21 December.  Maybe the hole made by Voyager 1 can’t be plugged and we have just fulfilled this prophesy by irreparably damaging the side of the tub and causing the emptying of space?  The Mayans named this the final day of the 13th baktun ('back' = furthest point or side; 'tun' = barrel or tub).  Everyone else now seems to call it the Apocolypse.  Why do we need a name for it?  No one’s going to use it again are they – hey, do you remember when that hole was blasted through the 13^th baktun, which we called the Apocolypse?  No, I’m dead.