Our Mortality

There was a very moving article in The Times yesterday about the last days of Philip Gould, Tony Blair's architect of New Labour. Philip died of cancer and wrote a book about his dying to be published shortly. The account in The Times was written by his daughter and describes his last few days of life and slide into death. I was moved to tears reading this.

In the last few months several people I know have been affected by cancer and have died as a result, or are still battling against it. As a result I have been reminded of my own mortality as in the famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

When my father died I saw his body in the mortuary. It was cold and lifeless yet my abiding memory of seeing him in this state was of a soul that had flown: the essential him was no longer there, yet I felt the real dad was not gone forever, but somehow released like a butterfly on the wing. My little grandson, just 4 years old, talks about us going back into the universe. Dust to dust? Who knows.

Lynton and Barnstaple Railway

"Axe" pulling the L&B train last week

On our holiday in North Devon last week we enjoyed a ride on the steam hauled Lynton and Barnstaple Railway. This is a delightful narrow gauge line that runs through a small piece of Exmoor countryside. When the line was originally build and opened in 1898 this 1ft 11.5in gauge line ran all the way from the market town of Barnstaple to Lynton on the north coast winding its way around the hills. It included some long 1 in 50 inclines. The narrow gauge was chosen to minimise the costs and to allow tight curves on the line. It closed in 1935. Today the line is run as a trust and only over a very short length although, funds permitting, it is eventually hoped that the whole length can be reinstated as few obstructions prevent this. If you are in this part of the west country I can recommend a visit to this fascinating little line.

Eureka magazine (in The Times)

Dumbing down science yet again?

Every few weeks the UK's The Times newspaper includes a "science" colour magazine that is meant to "inform" us about things in the world of science. Well Rupert Murdoch, please get a new editor for this as it is, in my humble opinion, (others may disagree) a load of rubbish written probably by failed arts graduates with primary school science at best.

I find the presentation of this magazine appalling - I can never get to what little meat there is in the magazine with all its fancy graphics - and the content is IMHO not worth the effort of sifting through. If The Times wants to inform and educate us then please treat science and technology properly and don't try to dumb it down for the epsilon semi-morons. The UK needs to enthuse people with science and not turn them off.

The Eureka magazine has its uses though - to wrap dead fish skins in or perhaps as garden compost.

Fuel strikes in the UK?

Delivery drivers who are members of the UNITE trade union are threatening to go on strike over pay and conditions. If this happens it will disrupt supplies of fuel to many garages around the UK and cause widespread chaos and misery for people who need to drive for work and everyone else. Already people are panic buying causing shortages in many places.

Now, I have no issues with people using peaceful means of protest to get a fair deal on pay and conditions. However, as I understand it, these drivers have a fairly easy life driving fuel tankers around the country and earn around £45k average a year, a salary that many in work would be very happy with.  Many without jobs would happily take over the work.

So, I really hope that everyone in the UK (government, people) resists the pressure to cave in on this issue: these drivers do NOT need the money and are just trying to use their powerful bargaining position to win the day. The same applies to London tube train drivers who also earn collossal amounts (luckily new underground trains are being made driverless soon).

Where ancestors walked

Starehole Bay near Salcombe, Devon

Today my wife and I walked to Bolt Head in South Devon, not far from Salcombe. The weather was perfect with bright sunshine and a not too cold wind with temperature about 11 deg C.  My ancestors back to at least 1428 lived and worked just a few miles from here.

Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

Sometimes you read a book and know it will make a deep and lasting impact on you. This will be one of them.

We all wrestle with trying to understand why we are here and whether or not there is purpose and meaning in our lives. Some are able to accept a religious faith and find it satisfies a spiritual quest for meaning, whereas others never rest easy in that bed, like me.

Richard Holloway's book walks us through his many years in high church office (finally as Bishop of Edinburgh and Primate of the Scottish Episcopal Church) to an eventual resting place where religion is cast aside and an honest acceptance of man's plight reached, although he remains agnostic about God and life after death. Here we see a deeply religious man even when religion is cast aside. There IS depth in humanity and an enduring mystery, but religion is not the answer.

I was moved to tears in the epilogue: this was his life laid bare, a struggle shared with us in the book, and all the more wonderful for it.

Dropbox registry issue - any fixes?

Anyone here know how to PROPERLY fix a Dropbox error with message "unable to access vital account information" Windows registry error?

I have tried ver 1.1.45.exe and that worked for 10 minutes OK then the message reappeared. Uploaded 1.2.45.exe and that was worse. The Dropbox forums are full of people with the same issue. In the past 3 months I've deleted registry data, uninstalled and reinstalled umpteen versions and STILL it doesn't want to work on this WinXP SP2 PC.