Okay, when we joined, at their first annual show last July, we had just two chickens, but whenever I mentioned this (for example, to the man selling hot-dogs made from his own Gloucester Old-Spot pigs), people would get all misty-eyed and say things like, “ah, I remember it well…” and “it’s a slippery slope…”. Maybe they were right – now we have four chickens and two more are on order.

Members of the Association regularly throw their smallholdings open to other members of the society to come and poke around: today the Gees clambered into Caroline, the Gees’ 1995 Volvo [thinks: must get the brakes looked at], and went to a smallholding a few miles down the coast, for a general consciousness-raising, bring-and-buy and barbecue.

We went with a bottle of wine and some beer – we came away with several plants, a peck of wistfulness and half a bushel of inspiration. We saw some rather hot sheep (unshorn, on a very warm day), several happy pigs, goslings, chickens, a very impressive cockerel, some truly dramatic Norfolk Black turkeys, and a litter of Airedale terrier puppies (very cute). There were lots of experienced smallholders willing to impart news on everything from the care of polytunnels to the dangers to poultry of eating slugs infected with tapeworm eggs (a new one on me, I admit).

We went home a lot quieter than when we arrived, stuffed full of Gloucester-Old-Spot bbq sausages and each dreaming a happy dream of smallholding bliss. Mrs Gee would like a pig (but not to eat, which I find strange); I’d like an orchard with some chickens pecking around below; a pond for ducks, another for fish and a couple of polytunnels to grow all the veg I want, all year round. Gee Minor (aged 10) would like a little of everything – pigs, sheep, chickens, the lot. Gee Minima (8) was sulky because we didn’t come home with one of the Airedale puppies.

Now we’re home Mrs Gee is surfing online forums about guinea pigs, chickens, smallholder-sitting services and tempting offers of plots of land for a song (or for a Wagner opera, if planning permission has already been granted).

It’s all right for a sunny day in May, I suppose. But when it’s blowing a gale in January and an incoming swan with H5N1 has sneezed all over your free-range Rhode Island Reds – perhaps not so nice.

But, well, you never know. For anyone in trouble, in need of a hand, some advice or even a trade (guinea-fowl eggs were exchanged for feed in my presence), the Smallholders’ Association is never far away. Who knows? It could happen.

On receipt of this envelope I advised Mrs Gee to put down that racing form and start combing the web for Grade-II listed Georgian rectories with several acres of chicken-friendly farmland.

And then I opened the envelope.

With receipts for sales going back two years (converted unfavourably into sterling from euros and US dollars), and a one-off payment for a Japanese translation that happened so many years ago that I’ve forgotten exactly when, the cheque came to … wait for it … wait for it … the life-changing amount of

£100.72

which after tax will be just over £60. It’ll pay for a nice dinner for two, which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. But evidence enough that writing books for a living is not only bloody hard work, but requires a generous measure of luck.

Now, where did I put that lottery ticket?

We take higher education very seriously here in Norfolk.

So imagine my delight on opening my inbox this morning to read this, from a potential referee:

1. The title and abstract of this paper are so thrilling that it is impossible for me to decline your request! It will be a pleasure for me to review this paper.

Puts a spring in your step, doesn’t it? Even in one’s remaining leg.

Mrs Gee is an insulin-dependent diabetic, so she has to visit a clinic every so often so that someone can squint into her eyes, to check for diabetic retinopathy, and poke needles in her feet, to check for diabetic neuropathy. (Really, it’s no fun being a diabetic). She’s also meant to take her feet to a pederast paedophile paediatrician resident of Portsmouth podiatrist, who will shave the excess bits and pieces off her feet (she usually has to accompany her feet, as they are reluctant to go on their own) and return them to a pearly-pink splendor that would shame a Botticelli Venus

(I think Mrs Gee looks like that anyway, but then I’m biased, and anyway, she might be reading this).

However, since we’ve moved to the coast, the necessity for podiatry has receded. All that her feet require for tip-top, heel-to-toe exfoliative health (mine too, not just hers) is a barefoot walk on a sandy beach, and a paddle several times a week (weather permitting). No need for all that fuss and bother with alcohol, scalpels and discussions about where one might go on holiday or the fortunes of Norwich City FC. No wonder that Venus was born from the sea (though we don’t get scallops as big as that in Cromer – you’d probably have to go to Morston, for those).

All of which confirms me in my view that Homo sapiens is perfectly adapted for life on the beach. Although I don’t buy Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape hypothesis for a moment, it remains true that no sooner had Hom. sap. evolved up country than he headed for the beach. Podiatry was a crutch, adopted when we made the ill-advised move back inland and adopted such bizarre accoutrements as shoes and socks, and could no longer walk barefoot on the sand as our ancestors once did.

So, Maxine, I shall continue to put my proud feet on the table. And, Richard, I shall wear my (sockless) crocs with equal pride. Evolution, you see, is on my side. It’s you that’s weird – not me!

1. Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
   Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advised?

I should say here that I’ve read and enjoyed the entire Potterama several times over, and am currently reading my younger daughter Harry Potter and the Geranium of Fear as a bedtime story. Or perhaps it’s Harry Potter and the Enchanted Trombone? After a while they tend to merge into one (though I’ll counsel her to save Harry Potter and the Call of Cthulhu until she’s older). But repeated readings of Harry Potter and the Decerebrated Armadillo have, for me, worn holes in the imagined universe inhabited by Potter and his pals.

Over the years, it’s become very difficult to imagine how the annual output of a few schools of Witchcraft and Wizardry, feeding into an admittedly very small community of magical people, can support

• an entire Ministry of Magic

• a diverse publishing industry

• a banking system with its own currency

• a major hospital

• entire leagues of Quidditch, including a world championship attended by tens of thousands of fans

• a thriving and diverse mercantile industry

and so on. There’s a demographic deficit here. Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons hardly produce enough output to populate a small village, and even if some wizards are home-educated, where do all those witches and wizards come from?

I like to think I’m a discerning reader of fiction, so such matters as the internal consistency of imagined universes is important to me. Writing in Nature’s Futures series, Dan Simmons speculated that fictional universes might become real, such that people might migrate there by quantum teleportation. The existence of a fiction-generated alternate universe (and the number of people such universes might support) would be dependent on the strength of the ‘entangled-pair consciousness wavefront’ with which the universe had been imagined.

For example, 21 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays generated viable universes capable of supporting between a few thousand (Measure for Measure) and more than a million people (King Lear). The works of Dickens had generated five alternate universes that people might colonise:

1. Flaubert, it turned out, generated two complete universes — the so-called “Madame Bovary’s World” and that of Sentimental Education — whereas Alice Walker, it seems, to the frustration of American academics, had created none.

Simmons didn’t mention Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but given the detail of its contrivance, I expect that it might exist, somewhere in the continuum. But I suspect that the world of Hogwarts and Quidditch, Platform Nine And Three Quarters and Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, remains firmly imaginary.

Why should this be? How can such inconsistencies arise, given the wealth and detail of planning that Rowling lavished on the Potterverse over many years? I think I have an answer and, as you’ll have suspected, it’s informed by Tolkien.

When I wrote The Science of Middle-earth my biggest problem was explaining all the properties of Bilbo’s magic ring (stop sniggering, Grant, I can hear you from here) in one self-consistent theory. The ring contains something of the personality of its creator, and its weight can vary without apparent cause – so much is explicable by finagling around with various exotic ideas about quantum gravity (though as one of my colleagues remarked, when we were discussing this – “isn’t physics bollocks fun?”).

The big problem is explaining, in physical terms, how a magic ring could make its wearer invisible along with all his clothes and anything he is carrying. This makes no sense at all. I finessed this problem by noting that the ring’s property of invisibility – and no others – was invented in The Hobbit, intended as a children’s fairy tale, and in which the audience would not be expected to ask difficult questions of the consistency of the world in which they are asked to inhabit (this despite Tolkien’s views to the contrary in his essay On Fairy Stories, in which he set out the necessary condition of the Suspension of Disbelief). The ring is (by Tolkien’s admission) the link between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which is, in contrast, a fairy-tale for grown-ups – and that’s where the problems arise. In The Hobbit, the ring is just a macguffin of the kind that one finds in fairy stories more generally. But in The Lord of the Rings, one is implicitly invited to ask questions about how such things come to be.

So much is clear from the Potterverse. The first book, Harry Potter and the Unicycling Girrafe, is plainly a ripping yarn for kids. Most of the action happens at Hogwarts school, so we are not invited to ask questions about the consistency of the universe in which the story takes place. The sense of confusion, followed by disorientation and then wonder, when confronted by a world that is exotic, fresh and new – which we experience through Harry’s eyes – blinds one to any internal problems.

But slowly, as Harry and his pals get older, the increasingly familiar world they inhabit expands until, in the final instalment, Harry Potter and the Facts in the Case of Monsieur Voldemort, when Harry is an adult, it is coextensive with the outside, ‘Muggle’ world, and Hogwarts appears only at the end. Now, this final instalment is as well-crafted an adventure as all the others (even the unintentionally anarchic Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Noise), and the craftsmanship carries the story. But the Potterverse itself has become, in my view, as evanescent as the silver fog of a failed patronus.

Well, now the Spring is Sprung, the EcoMo™ has come into its own. Here is our 4-GPP (guinea-pig power) model in action earlier today, shown here with its Egg-Laying Attachments (optional).

The R&D brainstorm focus group comment thread following my original post suggested that the presence of large quantities of GPp (guinea-pig poop – distinct from GPP as p53 is from p53, get the picture?) left over on the grass might be offputting to any discerning croquet-lover. Well, I’ve come up with a solution to that, too. Clearing up the GPp is easily and effectively achieved with this non-patentable heterotrophic coprophage

that consumes poop egested from a wide variety of mammalian orifices, not just its own (it’s not fussy).

I guess that the food chain at the Maison Des Girrafes might be tightened further were we to … ahem … harvest the guinea pigs and egest our own waste into a composting toilet. Thankfully, neither option is currently under consideration.

However, I can report that yesterday I sowed my sweetcorn into compost generated by the Noble 500. And Mrs Gee has ordered one of these:

a kind of rubber siphon thingy called a drought-buster (think of an old-fashioned pipette filler) which we’ll use to siphon our bathwater out of the window at need and into a tank, for watering the garden in the summer – for those times when our rain barrels are at their lowest and our watering needs are greatest. (Note – the yellow plastic duck is not included).

Some time later I met the journalist who’d written the article and congratulated her on it. Her response, as I recall, was dismissive. Perhaps she realized, as had I, that simply encouraging more women to become scientists will be counterproductive unless science itself acquires a meaningful career structure that is less demanding on the requirements of family life, and that phenomena such as the postdoc trap are consigned to history.

I also recall the occasion – it was an evening reception in a bookshop in central London at which various people were required to defend their favourite book. The initial choice of half a dozen would be winnowed down to a single one, which would win a prize. My task was to defend The Lord of the Rings, in ninety seconds, to an audience of left-wing intellectuals from the adjacent London School of Economics. Christians fed to lions could have hardly fared any worse. I went away with the booby prize – a copy of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, a diatribe which takes more than 600 pages to say what Tom Lehrer managed in just fifteen words, in Bright College Days:

Hearts full of Youth
Hearts full of Truth
Six parts Gin to one part vermouth!

Some related issues were raised in Jennifer Rohn’s lambently lucent blog, in which Dr Rohn referred to the gender balance in editorial office of journals, suggesting that it was about four-fifths women, a proportion that seems about right in my own experience. She also went on to document the entirely regrettable phenomenon of (female) editors being on the sharp end of the criticism of established (male) scientists who wonder what business these young women, all ‘failed scientists’, have making decisions about ‘their’ work, the implication being that failure as scientists (and, possibly, the fact that they are women, who, as all fans of Borat know, have no more brains than squirrels) render them incapable of making such decisions. I do not know how commonplace such an attitude is. Yes, I am an editor, but also, when I last looked, male. I’m also bigger and look fiercer than most scientists, so I don’t get the ‘failed scientist’ jibe, either. But perhaps the accusation of failure is levelled disproportionately at women. If so, that makes the matter even worse.

Railing that such attitudes are sexist will get us nowhere. Of course they are, and everyone knows it. But accusations are divisive. A while ago I ran a series of profiles in Nature called Lifelines in which scientists were asked serious questions about their careers, their attitudes to mentoring and so on, mixed in with impertinent demands to know the contents of their fridges and their most recent bedtime reading. I scrupulously invited as many women as men to participate, so it was a surprise to me to learn (as perhaps it should not have been) that women featured disproportionately rarely in the published result. I admit that this only came to my conscious notice when I was accused, rather rudely, of blatant sexism. Naturally enough I was somewhat riled by this, more so because the accuser was male (the unsaid implication that women, poor loves, wouldn’t have made such a complaint themselves). Getting editors riled is never a good way to achieve what you want. Nevertheless, I went back to my procedures, girded up my loins, and realized that I’d have to ask at least twice as many women as men in order to achieve parity at publication.

Why? A gender divide soon became apparent. Women were less likely to respond positively (or at all) to such an invitation, and when they did, were almost always too busy to complete the task. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that because women in science are outnumbered by men, they will always find themselves co-opted onto more committees and such, as well as taking on the traditional familial chores.

What, then, is to be done? The first thing is to remind those male, mid-career scientists that discrimination against people is a Bad Thing. The second is that in so doing, science is losing a potentially very great resource. If such hard-bitten old scrotes persist in the equation of women with failure as science, they should wonder precisely what it is about science that is a turn-off to women. And not just women – I looked for a career outside science when close observation of colleagues slightly older than me revealed that a to pursue science was to take an indefinite vow of poverty, if not chastity, when people my age doing other things could afford all those things that equate with an entitlement to simple human rights and dignity – a settled life; a home under a roof; and even a mortgage one could afford, noch. And should my right to such things be denied simply by my career choice?

It could be, however (now, I’m not going to be popular for saying this) that even when balanced rigorously for equality of opportunity, some activities tend to be more attractive to people of one gender rather than another. Men and women are, after all, different. There is no sexism in trainspotting (and no sex, either), but trainspotters tend to be men. Last night, I had the great pleasure of attending a dance show

in the venue whence this blog gets its name, in which my younger daughter had a small part, being a pupil of the dance school whose show this was. I learned two things from this show: the first was that it was remarkably polished and professional; the second was that of the 200 children and teenagers who took part, only three were male. Bloody Idiot Billy Elliot is alive and well. I am sure that the dance school will welcome anyone they can get – at least one of the dancers had a mild disability, and several had physiques which, to be charitable, were hardly sylph-like. So why so few boys? The answer to this is probably a long one, but all sorts of things play a part, parental expectations being less important than the peer pressure that is so important in shaping childrens’ attitudes. If you are a little girl, you’ll want to pursue activities with your friends, who will be little girls, who will do ballet, and a positive feedback loop is formed that’s hard to break. If you are a little boy, it’s more likely that you’ll be playing football. Explaining to your friends that you can be a ballet star and play football might, in some circumstances, be hard without getting smacked in the mouth teased. Not that people don’t break the mould – my niece, aged 11, is the star goalie of her school’s girls’ soccer team.

What was this journal of record, then? Some rugged, manly magazine such as Nature? No? Science, perhaps? Campanologists’ Quarterly? You And Your Goat? None of the above—it was Good Housekeeping, required reading of all Ladies of a Certain Age (and their husbands). At least you couldn’t accuse them of not trying.

I also would like to see editors having a stronger say in the research agenda. They spend so much time reading, researching and deciding what should be interesting for a certain community, why not be more vocal about their ideas?

My first reaction on reading this was oooh, don’t tempt me! followed swiftly by be careful what you wish for, Pedro, culminating in don’t editors do this already?

Because editors usually hide under a kind of invisibility cloak, it’s easy to assume that journals function entirely reactively. Papers are submitted, some are sent for review, a fraction are published. That’s that.

But even this caricature of how a journal works conceals much subjectivity. First, there is the decision about which papers to be sent to review. At Nature, this decision is made by the editors, either individually or collectively, occasionally supplemented by external informal review. And then there is the process of peer review, a whole subject in itself. At both levels, it’s important to remember that editors and referees are not robots, but human beings.

However, editors are not simply reactive, and do work to set the agenda – though not in quite the way that Pedro envisages. Editors commission reviews and feature (‘front-half’) articles on new and emerging disciplines or topics, partly because they are interesting, but also to encourage research papers (‘back-half’) in the disciplines or topics concerned. Editors also go to conferences and visit laboratories, searching out the latest and newest.

What editors don’t do is go on the stump, making general statements about the specific subjects they’d like to see papers cover, and what they don’t like. There are many good reasons for this. The first is that all papers are welcome, simply because some of the most important papers are the most unexpected. Another, I think, is that to be too specific about what sort of things we like is to throw the game of science: editors aren’t in the business of shaping science, they are there to select the best papers for their journals. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct.

Now, I feel I have a nose for the subjects I want to see papers cover. I think I know what’s hot, and what’s not. But I’m not about to publish a list of what my priorities are. That’s for you to guess.

I think I can boil down what a Nature editor likes to see in any paper into just two words – surprise me.

“What’cher doin’, mister?” the boy asked.
“Astronomy”, replied the old man.
“You’re a bit slow in’t’cha?” quips the boy. “We did that last year.”

Listen carefully, now, here comes the science part. Substitute ‘organismal biology’ for ‘astronomy’ in the anecdote above and you’d have a pretty fair approximation of the way in which old-fashioned zoology and botany are viewed (at least, from where I’m sitting) by some scientists, for whom molecules conquer all.

Writing in today’s Nature (‘Science teaching must evolve’, Nature 453, 31-32, 1 May 2008), Andrew Moore of EMBO argues that schools are backward in teaching students about molecular evolution, which he calls “the best approach yet to investigating biology’s central theory”. You can comment directly on that article here – needless to say, the opinions in this blog post what you’re reading right now are all mine, not necessarily Nature’s. But if they aren’t yours too, then all I can say is Shame On You.

“Worse still,” Moore continues, “the understanding [students] have – based on the fossil record – is easy prey to specious arguments from anti-science movements”.

It would indeed be a fine thing were students to learn about evolution at all, molecular or otherwise. And quite apart from the near-certainty that a beginning student would have more trouble grasping concepts such as molecules learned in sterile laboratory environments, rather than getting out there, seeing the diversity of real animals and plants – observing, collecting, dissecting and drawing – one is forced to contest the motivation of such an exercise. ‘Learning about evolution through molecules rather than the fossil record could be used to counter the specious arguments of anti-science movements’ – oh really?

Specious arguments remain specious, irrespective of our attitude towards them. In any case, anti-science movements are likely certain to cherry-pick their evidence to suit their needs, whatever scientists say. I disagree with PZ Myers on many things, but if we stand shoulder-to-shoulder on one point, it is that the way we do our science should, emphatically, run on our own program, and not dance to a creationist drum.

So much is clear, or should be. But Moore goes further.

“Phylogeny based on similarity of form is fundamentally unsound because of the adaptation and convergent evolution witnessed in nature. Such purely descriptive methods represent a mould out of which schoolroom biology must break to become more contemporary.”

This remark can but transport one to an alternate universe in which phylogenetic systematics, more handily known as cladistics, never happened. Cladistics uses the criterion of maximum parsimony to generate hypotheses of evolution in which convergence is at a minimum, a kind of ground state. The cladograms so generated are not wishy-washy family trees based on similarities observed subjectively, but rigorous hypotheses that can be tested, and which shed light on major evolutionary transitions in a meaningful, real-world way that molecules never can.

For example, no amount of molecules are likely to give the insight into the transition of tetrapods from water to land as great as that offered by the study of the mere morphology of fossils of Tiktaalik roseae or Acanthostega gunnari against a cladistic background in which the relative merits of various hypotheses about the evolution of major organ-systems can be tested objectively.

Evolutionary biologists were refining cladistics in the 1970s and 1980s, long before molecular evolution had the tools or, indeed, very much data. It would be funny, were it not so sad, to report that parsimony criteria formed the basis of many of the first-generation techniques of phylogenetic reconstruction used in molecular evolution.

Irony on irony, these techniques were developed largely by palaeontologists, as a specific response to the problems of evolution peculiar to the fossil record.

Irony degenerates to insult with the use of the word ‘descriptive’, which molecular biologists have appropriated as a perjorative term to describe the kind of biology which they consider outmoded – a biology of a theoretical and philosophical sophistication which still transcends the descriptive molecular stamp-collecting that masquerades as science, simply because it has big, shiny and expensive machines that go ‘ping’, which serve (among their more legitimate uses) to amplify the self-importance of their users.

This is not to say that molecular biology cannot play its part. For me, the greatest contribution currently being made by molecular evolution is helping to resolve long-standing morphological problems, such as the origin of the vertebrate head and neck, or the molecular basis for the variation in beak morphology in Darwin’s finches.

But these problems would not exist to be solved without the tradition of comparative anatomists going back hundreds of years, who defined the problems to begin with.

The Tao of Jew : A Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom

Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You’ll never meet the Buddha with posture like that.

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.

Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, Danish.

The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes!

• a large ball of gardening twine;
• a clever secateurs/penknife/trowel combo;
• a new pair of gardening gloves;
• a subscription to Compost World ;
• a Bugatti Veyron;
• lots and lots of packets of seeds.

(Okay, I was joking about Compost World). So, what with the recent spell of warm weather in which temperatures in North Norfolk remained above freezing for several whole minutes together, I set about sowing seeds, potting on a few houseplants that had outgrown their confines, and generally getting into the Gardening Zone after a long absence.

I think that what I like most about gardening is the amazing propensity of living things to grow. That tiny things like these – each no larger than the nail on your little finger – can, in a few short weeks, and with only minimal encouragement, turn into behemoths like this. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s not until you do a bit of gardening that this burgeoning productivity comes home to you in a visceral way.

What’s more, each type of seed is different – the smooth, almond-shaped seeds of pumpkins, for example, look quite different from the rough and knobbly seeds of nasturtiums, which look, to my eyes, like particles from a brand of breakfast cereal that never got into the shops for fear of scaring people in that critical state in which humans collide with the most important meal of the day.

Now, here’s the important part, so listen up. Each kind of seed grows, reliably, into its own kind of plant. Cucumbers always come from cucumber seeds, and onion seeds always turn into onions (unless the slugs get to them before I do). Isn’t that completely amazing?

Yes, I know we know all there is to know about photosynthesis, and metabolism, and cell division, and genomes, and all that stuff. But there’s something about the act of gardening that catapults me back to the simple wonderment of our ancestors at the bald fact of growth, and that each kind of plant remains true, more or less, to its kind. I can quite understand how religions got started – when it comes down to it, religions are generally rooted in fertility festivals, and superstitions connected with the seasons and the round of the farming year.

As for plants, so too for animals. When confronted with the imminent prospect of fatherhood, slightly more than a decade ago, I was set to wondering how it was that in fewer than 28 days, an apparently featureless fertilized egg turns into something that’s no larger than a pea, but otherwise recognizable as a human being. From this experience grew a book called Jacob’s Ladder in which I argued that the enterprise of the Human Genome Project grew out of this same, simple wonder- the wonder that drove Aristotle, Harvey, Goethe, Darwin and many others, right up to Watson and Crick and to the present day. The wonder of what agency it is that creates something as complex and well-formed as a plant, or a human being, from an apparently formless speck – and does so, time after time.

Gardening is science in the raw; science, green in tooth and claw.

At first, my reaction was to trawl from memory a slew of playground jokes on fake news items, such as

Yesterday an enormous hole appeared in the middle of the Balls Pond Road. Police are looking into it.

Thieves broke into New Scotland Yard and stole all the lavatories. Police say they have nothing to go on.

and the rather more developed items popularized by The Two Ronnies including (from memory, with elaboration)

Two cargo ships collided in the Channel, one carrying red paint, the other, purple paint. It is believed both crews have been marooned.

Edgar and Ronald Twinge, twin dustmen, got married today in a double wedding. After the ceremony the brothers carried their brides over the threshold, leaving bits of them scattered up the garden path.

Last night a thief broke into a chemist and stole a carton of eye drops. Police are looking for someone with sore eyes. In a related incident, a thief broke into a sweetshop and stole a jar of pear drops. Police are looking for a nude lady with a piano accordion.

and so on.

That’s when I asked Mrs Gee, who is a proper news journalist, to read the story. Her reaction was more sober: she suggested that there was a great deal in the story that we weren’t being told. Perhaps, she thought, the cushions were full of drugs, or diamonds. The thieves obviously knew what they were looking for, and nobody is going to stop a giant goods train for some tacky soft furnishings.

Or are they?

The report also doesn’t give any description of the robbers. I reckon they were heavily armed feminist rabbits, hell-bent on bringing down the Playboy Empire.

One cushion at a time.

Many years as a Nature editor has taught me the importance of reading between the lines. You’d think that a research report should be the plainest, most direct genre of literature imaginable. And why not, if its purpose is to convey research results succinctly and with clarity? But even research papers can be important for what’s left unsaid. The Case of Watson and Crick

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material

Is perhaps the most egregious example (the adjectival form used here is meant in the pre-16th-century positive connotation, which is the usage I fain desire, an I wot archaism as not in and of itself an errour, or so I deem, as well as in the post-16th-century negative connotation, which does not habitually commend itself to me. Pedants, take note). History has imbued this quote with the aura of victory – after all, history is always written by the victors. However, WC’s flush of victory might not have been merited at the time, because the precise copying mechanism was still in dispute, and one could argue that we’re still working out the details to this day. Papers positing a protein-based genetic mechanism were, I believe, being published even after the WC paper. So if W&C had empirical evidence for a copying mechanism, they should have set it forth, then and there, in that paper. People have often joked that WC’s paper wouldn’t have been accepted today. Whether or not that would have been true is impossible to say. However, I think that were I the editor, I’d have asked WC to come clean or cut that sentence. Cute closing sentences are all very well, but in a scientific paper you have to put up – or shut up.

One of the first things I do when confronted with a new manuscript is check the references, to see if the claims vaunted in the abstract are really only thinly separated from papers the author or others have published, or have under consideration elsewhere. That being satisfied, I go for the jugular – straight for the scientific nuts and bolts of the argument – to see if the actual substance of the paper merits the sauce of abstract and conclusions in which the author has dressed it. Is this the fundamental, conceptual advance the authors claim, or just a rather small (if worthy) advance that could have easily been predicted, and which would be of interest to specialists in the field?

When I first joined Nature, the then Editor, John Maddox, gave me a document summarizing his thoughts on how staff should conduct themselves. One of his rules was a ban on the word breakthrough (major was also somewhat frowned upon – major breakthrough, practically a hanging offence), and I can remember his justification, almost word for word.

Most scientific discoveries represent the addition of a single brick to a wall that’s already huge. The really big discoveries represent the addition of two bricks at once.

Given the volume of papers submitted to Nature, very few are going to represent a discovery of earth-shaking importance, even though most of them are perfectly fine pieces of work, in their way. But when a new manuscript arrives on my screen, my first thought is not to admire the Playboy cushions in and of themselves, but to wonder what’s inside them that makes them so special?

During the course of this discussion Jenny opined that it isn’t just the lives of scientists that produce stories, it is the machinery they work with, what she called ‘unsung apparati’. I begged to differ, to which Ms Rohn responded with characteristic asperity

“As anyone who reads my blog knows, machinery can take on a life of its own, so I reject the idea that a machine (or technique for that matter) can’t play a central role in a story of science.”

Thinking about this over the past day or so, I realize that not only is she right, but that I have also made the same point in another context.

Proximately, the relationship between people and their machinery is an abiding theme in LabLit and I should like to take as an example one of Jenny’s own novels. I am privileged to have read not just one, but, yes, two such novels. The first, Experimental Heart, is a tale of mystery, suspense, romance and the release of calcium from intracellular stores relationship between academic and industrial research.

The second is about a young girl who comes to a laboratory in the Netherlands to attend a huge and very specialized machine which only shRaison D’Êtree seems to know how to work. I found this much more involving than Experimental Heart because the characters were more rounded, but for the life of me (and without spending a lot of time digging into files) I just can’t remember what it was called (sorry, Jenny) so for the purposes of this blog I shall call it The Machine That Goes ‘Ping’. [It’s called Raison D’Être – Ed.]

And that’s just the point.

The machine that brings the heroine into her new environment is every bit as cantankerous and wayward as a real person, and does its share of driving the action along. The machine, like its young attendant, is a character, and the two have a meaningful relationship on which turns the entire plot.

Broadening the scope from LabLit, science fiction has its fair share of machines that are characters. By this, I don’t mean robots and computers that simulate the characteristics of humans, but machines of sufficient vastness that their very presence dictates the actions of the (more talkative if physically much smaller) human characters. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is the canonical example – Rama is a gigantic, uninhabited alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System on a hyperbolic trajectory. The tale is about a human expedition that intercepts the spaceship, explores it, and leaves, before the spaceship shoots off into the darkness of space. My favorite Clarke story, though, is The Fountains of Paradise in which the main character is a space elevator.

And it’s not just SF, either, which brings me to the context in which I first discussed the phenomenon of inanimate objects playing character roles in stories. The context is (as you’ll no doubt have guessed) Tolkien, whose fiction often uses personifications of various aspects of landscape as characters. To take just one example of many, the Fellowship in The Fellowship Of The Ring is prevented from crossing a high pass of the mountain Caradhras by the malice of the mountain itself (the film version has the wizard Saruman fulfilling this role, as malevolent mountains are rather hard to do, visually). One could argue that Middle-earth itself is as much a character in the story as Frodo and Aragorn.

To personify inanimate objects in this way may seem strange, but was entirely characteristic of Tolkien, who drew on ancient modes of storytelling in which inanimate objects are poetically described as if they had lives of their own (Beowulf, for example, is full of descriptions of this sort).

But is it so strange? From more recent literature, my friend the palaeontologist Kevin Padian- who is also a Thomas Hardy scholar – argues that the topography of Wessex in Tess of the D’Urbevilles influences the actions of the characters to such an extent that it can almost be considered a character. And if Jenny’s contention has merit – which it has – the personification of objects continues in stories right up to the present day.

Now then, admit it, which of you has never cosseted, pleaded with, wheedled favors from or even assaulted the tools of one’s trade, just as if they were people?

Sure: we’ve been called ignorant.

We’ve been called incompetent.

We’ve been threatened with the might of the law.

We’ve been labelled as bigots, misogynists, racists, fascists (moi?) and accused of harboring an agenda that discriminates against people of various nationalities.

On occasion, we’ve been threatened with death.

Who are we? We’re Spiderman St Trinians Nature editors, that’s who.

Some journal editors are hardboiled, but we – we’re twenty minutes. In any given year, I receive around seven hundred new manuscripts to review across a broad range of disciplines. I can accept around forty. Do the math, and you’ll see that the sensation of being a Nature editor is rather like standing in front of a fire hose and selecting a few choice droplets. Inevitably, we’ll miss a few good ones. Some we know are good, but we have to shake them off, or we’ll be drenched. And sometimes we’ll choose the wrong droplets. After all, we’re only human.

To be sure, most scientists know the way things are, and a rejection from Nature is soon followed by acceptance elsewhere. But there will always be a few who will treat a rejection as a personal insult, and seek some kind of retribution. For machismo. For honor. For la gloire. For the sake of Sticking It to The Man.

It takes dedication and a great deal of guts to be a scientist. I left research because I felt I deserved a more stable career structure than mid-1980s palaeontology could offer.

And, oh yes, the money.

My first job as a cub reporter on Nature accrued a relative pittance – but it was almost exactly thrice my graduate-student stipend. But, deep down, I felt that I was not cut out for the messianically intense focus on a very narrow slice of reality that scientific dedication demands. And when you have devoted months – years – to the ultrastructure of a crocodile’s eyelashes, it can be hard to take that step back, to see that most people, let alone most scientists, will not share your passion – even those who study crocodiles’ eyelashes for a living.

Sometimes monomania grades into madness, and there are those in the research community with idees fixe who simply will not take ‘no’ for an answer. For a LabLit perspective on this, do read Philip Ball’s forthcoming novel The Sun and Moon Corrupted, a fictional biography of just such a person. Those of us in the editorial game know just how close such fictions come to reality, so it is no surprise that the reaction to a rejection letter is, now and then, an outpouring of vituperative hatred. Strictly within the office, we work out the frustrations of being on the receiving end of such tirades by composing the rejection letters we’d like to send, but can’t, such as the generic

Dear Professor Trellis,
Which part of the word ‘no’ don’t you understand?

And one, which I saw pinned up on a noticeboard (don’t look for it, it’s not there any more):

Dear Colonel Gaddafi
Please would you add a Professor Trellis of the University of Northern Neasden to your death list? I overhead him say some distinctly uncomplimentary things about you, Sir.

To the outside world, though, we strive to be grace under pressure, and hope that the scientific world out there will follow this example. Although Nature’s Guide to Authors notes, in several places, the value we attach to courteous and inoffensive language during the process of peer review, nowhere do we say that we editors, too, are much happier (and much more likely to plead an author’s cause) were we treated with due decorum.

In a way, working for Nature is a 24/7 job, and few of my colleagues are willing to expose any other side of themselves to the community. Very few have blogs or personal websites. The reason is clear – the less the world knows about you, the fewer ways they can have to Get At You by virtue of some political view taken out of context, or even some casually and perhaps humorously meant aside, deep down in a stream of comments. I am one of the few who has put his head above the parapet, so I guess that I can only expect to be shot at. Sometimes the shots hit home, and when they do, they hurt.

So why do I do it? Offer a large slice of my personality online? What benefit might it have for my job as a Nature editor that people know that I live in a quaint seaside town ; that I am trying to write the raciest SF bonkbuster the world has ever seen; am no slouch at blues organ; and adore golden retrievers? After all, the one thing I almost never blog about is the work I’m paid to do – for fear of betraying, inadvertently, some privileged information, or saying something that doesn’t accord with Nature’s editorial policy.

The answer is twofold. First, I was born to blog. I love blogging, reading blogs, reading and writing comments, and watching for the latest responses. I am a nascent blogoholic. Most of my colleagues aren’t quite so … ‘ow you say … bloggy.

The second is more profound and connected with what, I think, is a purpose of the Nature Network, which is to make the whole publication process less mysterious and less frustrating for authors whose years of painstaking research are met with a form letter that says ‘no’, albeit with great politeness and much circumlocution. We know from experience that many authors see Nature as a Black Box and crave some human interaction, hence the frustration and anger when the Black Box is all they get.

My colleague Maxine Clarke blogs extensively on the mechanics of the publication process (this is just one of several blogs she runs about authorship, peer review and writing in general); and the Network has been adorned with many interesting discussions about editorial policies, accessibility and publication, in which editors and scientists have all taken part.

And me? I want to show that editors do have a life outside work; that they have families and pets and interests.

That we editors are humans, too.

And being human, we are fallible, and, as such, hopeful that this is taken into account on the (rare) occasions we get things wrong.

It’s all part of a strategy that I believe we editors should all follow: to go out on the stump, explaining to scientists at conferences and in labs what we do. Whenever I turn up to do my ‘Confessions of a Nature editor’ spiel, the
venue is always packed with a sea of gawping faces that look like New Guinea highlanders who’ve seen their first white man (and probably have the pot simmering, backstage). It really is the case that until you turn up, in the flesh and twice as handsome, people don’t click that Nature editors aren’t anonymous droids, but people. Just like them. Well, almost.

More, to entice scientists into our office where we can impale them on red hot skewers show them what the day-to-day life of an editorial office is like. What makes us tick. We do all these things all the time, of course. But there is always so little time, and so many people to see, and someone has to stay home and reject read the manuscripts.

So there I was, enthroned, at about 4.15 this morning, when I began to muse (as one so often does in that position) on the Questions of the Age. The nature of understanding; the limits of knowledge; and, in true Rumsfeldian manner, on the Knowns, both Known and Unknown (Actually, I do wonder if much recent US foreign policy has not been conducted from such a seated … er … standpoint).

Science is not about the Known, of course, it is about the Unknown. With every day that passes, scientists find things out about the world that were not known before. And, prediction being what it is, it is very difficult to prescribe or predict what discoveries might be just around the corner. Not that people haven’t tried. John Maddox, Emeritus Editor of Nature, attempted the feat in his book What Remains To Be Discovered.

Futurology – essentially, an informed look at likely new technical achievements – is a thriving industry. To be sure, one can make a rough order of priorities about things that are more likely to be discovered sooner rather than later. One can be fairly confident that in the next century, we are marginally more likely to see a laptop battery that lasts as long as you want it to than to find pigs sprouting wings and flying off (I’d give it no more than an even chance, frankly).

And there is nothing to stop one making a wish list. In 1900, mathematician David Hilbert kicked off the twentieth century with a list of the great problems in mathematics that were yet to be solved.

And so, from my seated position, I began to think about the Big Problems in science that remain to be addressed, and in which progress might be made in the next hundred years. Or perhaps the next thousand. There’s no hurry.

• What is the nature of mass?
• How can entropy be massively decreased?
• What is the nature of dark matter?
• What is the origin and ultimate fate of the universe?
• Can gravity and quantum mechanics be reconciled?
• Is the Earth the only planet with life on it?
• What, while we’re on the subject, is the meaning of ‘life’?
• What is the nature of consciousness/ sentience/ intelligence/ do-be-do-be-do?
• Is there a reliable way of finding an unpopulated checkout queue in Morrisons?
• Why is it that no matter how hard you shake it about, one drop always stays on the end?

I admit that it’s a pretty ambitious program. But no matter – science, being what it is, is rather like the apocryphally waggish (if not Whiggish) commentary on the Irish Question: just when the English think they’ve found an answer, the Irish have changed the Question. Science is not a zero-sum game, in which light of ever greater brightness is shone on an ever-dwindling puddle of ignorance. Our vistas expand exponentially with each new discovery, so much so that the nature of the questions we ask changes with every step. Yesterday’s questions might not only be solved in the light of the knowledge of tomorrow – they might actually be rendered completely meaningless, rather in the same way that the meaning of any word is vitiated as soon as it is prefixed with the word ‘social’, cf. ‘social science’, ‘social security’, ‘social text’, ‘social justice’, ‘social contract’ etc. [oooh, bit political – Ed.]

So, science is not just about plunging ahead into the Unknown Unknown – it is all about learning precisely which questions to ask. And, given that the list of questions I’ve framed above is likely to be turned into syntactic porridge by a week next Thursday, I’ve decided to leap one step ahead and offer a list of questions which, I hope and believe, will endure in their grandificently magniloquent timelessness.

• What becomes of the broken-hearted?
• Why do fools fall in love?
• What’s the story, morning glory?
• Who put the ‘bop’ in the ‘bop-shoowop-shoowop’?
• Where did our love go?
• What’s new, pussycat?
• Do you know the way to San José?
• Why have you left the one you left me for?
• How much is that doggie in the window?
• Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine?

And perhaps, most pertinently,

• How do I work this?

So wrote Ogden Nash in An Introduction to Dogs. This stanza is a pretty fair first approximation to dogs, but could also apply to most mammals, or, indeed, most tetrapods, and, if newspaper reports are any guide, summarizes the entire zoological knowledge of most journalists. In popular parlance, for example, ‘animals’ is synonymous with ‘mammals’.

So it was no surprise to read newspaper reports in which actress Amanda Holden, ex-wife of comedian Les Dennis, allegedly compared her former partner’s bedtime performance unfavorably with the behaviour of ferrets, to find these animals referred to as rodents. Ferrets, however, belong to the order Carnivora, so that if ferrets are rodents, then so is this:

Okay, one might excuse such zoological solecisms. After all, ferrets might easily be confused with rodents such as – say – rats. Like rats, ferrets have sharp teeth at one end, four legs underneath, and are likewise furry and intelligent (albeit with an attitude problem) but smell fairly rank if you don’t clean them out regularly.

But what I find really irksome is when I hear journalists using the terms bacteria and viruses as if they were interchangeable (even worse, using the word bacteria as a singular, cf. ‘a criteria’. Ugh!). You may think they know the difference between Fiscal Drag and the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, but don’t be fooled – when the chips are down, they don’t know the difference between their own anal orifices and an hole in the ground.

The United Kingdom has a state religion, and people take religion seriously – in their own quiet way. Thus arises the paradox that even though the UK has an established church, it is, for all practical purposes, a far more secular state than the US, in which the formal severance between church and state tends (from my limited perspective) to be honored more in the breach.

However, it would be truer to say that rather than being avowedly secular, Britons (with exceptions) tend to wear their religion lightly, making the UK a country of unusually high religious tolerance. People of different religions do generally get on very well together – most Brits ignore fundamentalists (of any stripe, including atheists) except to poke fun at them, or to ask them politely if they’d not mind shouting so loud, as other people are trying to sleep. The exceptions to this get a lot of headlines but are in fact minuscule.

The British tradition of pragmatism and tolerance is exemplified by the story of how the Jews were readmitted to England in 1656, after centuries of exclusion.

The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 by a decree of Edward I, after which the only Jews in England were extremely occasional traders who were just visiting. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, a sizeable Jewish community had become established in the Netherlands (many of whom descended from the explusion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal a little later). That period saw a thriving cross-channel trade, with more Jews appearing in major ports such as London. The Dutch Jewish community thought that it would be convenient were some of their number to be able to live in England, if only to have a kind of toehold.

Thus it so happened that rabbi and trader Menasseh Ben Israel was despatched to England to ask whether Jewish residence in England might be possible. It was perhaps fortunate that England at the time was enjoying, if that’s the word, its one and only episode of Presidential government (if you discount Tony Blair), in the form of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

Now, when Jews sought admission into any country, the response was usually a deeply qualified ‘yes’. Jews would be allowed in, but only if they accepted a long list of formally mandated strictures on where they lived, what jobs they did, how they would be taxed, and even what they could wear. Jewish representatives were quite used to this, which is why Menasseh Ben Israel was nonplussed by Cromwell’s equivocal response.

In December, 1655, Cromwell convened what has become known as the Whitehall Conference to discuss the readmission of Jews to England. The conference could not make up its mind except on one thing – that since Edward I’s expulsion was a royal decree rather than a statute, there was no formal reason why the Jews could not be readmitted. The final outcome was the kind of pragmatic fudge that seems so characteristically English. His advisers unable to agree on whether Jews should be admitted or not, Cromwell made an executive decision: he told Menasseh Ben Israel that Jews could come and live in Britain and do more or less what they liked, provided they were quiet about it. Menasseh Ben Israel was not asked to pledge good conduct in the form of some declaration or formal statute. Ever since then, Jews have lived in Britain according to an unsigned covenant of understanding that has since applied to any religious community in Britain – that people of all religions are welcome to live in Britain provided they do it quietly and with respect for the mix of people already in residence.

This is why, were there any screening of Expelled in Britain, the majority of the populace would probably not give it a moment’s thought, except to wonder if it was a sequel to St Trinian’s.

I should end this possibly contentious post with the customary picture:

However, a wider question is raised – should one be using Powerpoint at all? Do audiovisual aids act as a crutch, inhibiting the free flow of a presentation, rather than augmenting it?

One might argue that Powerpoint – or slides in general – are useful when presenting yer actual data. But are they? Most data-rich slides are impossible to read and are as soporific as Mr McGregor’s bolted lettuces to the flopsy bunnies.

Apart from that, slides serve as bookmarks for what the lecturer is saying: in which case the lecturer should carry their own notes, to avoid the temptation of looking at the screen rather than engaging with the audience.

That’s not to say I haven’t seen Powerpoint used to spectacularly good effect, but the occasions are memorable because they are rare.

Many years ago when the world was young, Nature held an editorial retreat in a very comfortable hotel in Bournemouth. More than a hundred editors from across the entire Nature Publishing Group attended, and all were encouraged to contribute a platform presentation about something or another.

Mine was about a pet editorial project (long since abandoned) and when confronted with the time slot I realized a number of things:

1. I only had five minutes;

2. that given such a short time, even a relatively minor technical SNAFU could completely derail my presentation;

3. the moderator was a lot fiercer than me despite being very much smaller, and would be unlikely to tolerate overruns of more than a few seconds;

4. in which case, using Powerpoint was out of the question;

5. especially as I’d never used Powerpoint before and was too lazy to learn;

6. er …;

7. that’s it.

Given these points (see 1-7) I decided to do my presentation the old-fashioned way. The night before I sat in my hotel room and wrote my presentation out in full, longhand, using ink, via a nib.

Then the script and I took a long, relaxing bath together, during which I could learn it, like lines for a play. The steam made the ink run a bit, but the effect on the paper might, to a disinterested observer the next day, look like I’d expended more passion and energy on it than I actually had.

The time came for the presentation, and I launched into it with gusto and a radio mike. It was all going rather well until I realized, quite suddenly, that what I needed most, at that instant, was – a histogram. Here was an occasion where Powerpoint – or even a flipchart – could have been useful. I was stunned that this hadn’t occurred to me before.

But there was me against more than a hundred rabidly slavering colleagues circling for the kill, so I had to improvise. Using the radio mike to explain what I was doing, I used my own body as the histogram. A tall bar was me standing up; a shorter one was me kneeling, a still shorter one was me sitting on the floor, and the long tail was me lying down, at full stretch.

Anyway, the audience loved it, and despite mine being only one of two presentations performed without Powerpoint, the delegates voted my presentation one of the most memorable events of the conference.

Nobody could remember what it was about, though – it was the Human Histogram that stuck in the mind.

For example, I always assumed that my pedigree was soundly European and Jewish.

My maternal grandfather came from Katowice, in Silesia; my mother was born in Berlin, and pitched up at Liverpool Street Station, aged 3, on what much have been one of the very last Kinderstransports before the outbreak of war – on 23 August, 1939 (still marked chez Gee as ’Up Yours, Adolf’ Day).

My father is a native Londoner, but his great-grandfather was a cabinet maker called Aaron Israel Ginsberg, who came from the Pale of Settlement in what is now Russia. His son, Grandpa Wolf, made the trip to England sometime in the 1920s or early 1930s.

Of my ancestry before that, I know nothing except what I might infer from watching re-runs of Fiddler On The Roof.

But, hey, it seems we’re all connected. Imagine my surprise when, just a few moments ago, the following communication plopped into my inbox, courtesy of the Nature Network.

From the Offices of Barrister Williams G. Khan Solicitors, 3rd floor Rue 6,Avenue 11 Cocody Lome Republic of Togo, West Africa

Attention: Henry Gee, Private Message

I am contacting you for the claim of your late uncle fund that was deposited with the Security firm Lome, Togo. I am soliciting for your confidence in this matter, this is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential. Though I know that a contact of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive, but I am assuring you that all will be well since I know everything about your late uncle fund.

I have decided to contact you due to the urgency of this matter. Let me start by introducing myself properly to you. I am Barrister Williams G. Khan, the personal Attorney to your late uncle Engr. P. B. Gee (Snr) a contractor and importer here in lome-Togo. 3 years ago he was involved in a ghasty motor accident along Nouvissi express Road.

He was Banking with Security finance firm Lome Togo and had a closing balance as at the end of september 2004, worth $ 8.5 million usd (Eight Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars).The Security finance firm now expects the Next of Kin to come forward as beneficiary.

Efforts have been made by the management of Security finance firm Togo to get in touch with any of the Deceased Family or Relatives, but they have met with no success. Now the management under the influence of the finance bank Chairman and Members of the Board of directors, has made arrangement for the fund to be declared Unclaimed so that they can share the money amongst themselves.

In order to avert this negative development, as part of my duty, I decided to track his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family hence I contacted you.

All documents and proof to enable you get this fund will be carefully worked out by me for this claim. I have secured from the probate an order of Mandamus to locate any of the deceased beneficiaries, and more so am assuring you that this claim is 100% risk free.

On the receipt of your response i will furnish you with detailed clarification as it relates to this mutual benefit transaction. Call me upon receipt of this information.

Yours faithfully,
Barristers Williams G. Khan

Now, it sometimes happens that people who meet me for the first time are surprised on being confronted by a great hairy white man, and say that from my name they’d always assumed I was Chinese. In a similar vein, I can cheerfully say that suspicions that I am related to Cecil Gee are a load of superannuated shoe manufacturers. This is because my surname is a new mutation specific to my lineage – my paternal grandfather changed it from Ginsberg in the 1930s.

Because of this I am fairly sure that I do not have a relative named Gee who was (until recently) a resident of West Africa, though I am of course desolated to hear of his tragic accident.

Personally, I blame the aliens.

This book taught me a great deal I didn’t know (but should have done) about basic English grammar. The blame for that deficiency – which is almost a disability (and I use words for a living) – I lay entirely at the doors of those trendy leftist so-called educationalists of the 1960s who were so fixated with relativism and class war that they scrapped the teaching of grammar as elitist and so effectively sacrificed the education of an entire nation for two generations or more: the same crapulous specimens, proud bearers of third-class degrees in social policy from Shitsville Polycrapnic, who marked me down in my 11-plus for saying that dinner was a meal consumed at dinner-time, rather than lunchtime, a solecism that marked me out as middle-class (and therefore wicked).

Now that’s fighting talk – and its essential rightness is demonstrated by the fact that Eats Shoots and Leaves was a bestseller. People discovered that they lacked something, and were, had they known it, prepared to rebel against the putrid attempt at social engineering perpetrated by the Left, a dumbing-down whose purpose was to render the population inarticulate and therefore powerless. The fact that people are more interested in game shows and reality TV, and are so uninterested in science, politics and the process of democracy and how their lives are ruled (and if anyone says disinterested I shall make a tape of them being impaled on red-hot skewers, and give the kittens a break) is a direct result of that dumbing-down: as is the gradual slide in status of teachers, until they are seen more as targets for schoolyard missiles than the figures of authority and respect that they once were.

Boris Johnson elsewhere said that the Left, having realized that socialism as a system of government is a failure, has lately taken revenge with Political Correctness, another way to control how we think by the words we use (the scientific basis of such an assumption is debatable, but that’s another subject).

And now, a story. When I was at school my ambitions were to do science, and also to write. When the time came for my A-levels, though, a timetable clash meant that I couldn’t study both English and Chemistry. I opted for Chemistry, reasoning that English was just books, so I could save it for Later Life, when I didn’t need a laboratory.

Later Life duly arrived and at the age of 33 I signed up for Adult Education to do my A-level in Eng. Lit. It was a two-year course, and initially the class was about twenty strong, being made mostly of those people whom education had failed. These people – the people that Adult Ed was meant to serve – dropped out, because they had never been taught the discipline of study. I was just one of three people who stayed the course, learning about Keats and Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, Hardy and Dickens and many other wonderful things. The lessons I learned in this A-level course I could apply directly to my job, and the joy of literature—and the ability to articulate and rationalize a literary criticism – has not left me since. I still didn’t learn any grammar, though.

(Thinks) I wonder how many people I’ve offended this time?

MACARTHUR FLIES BACK TO FRONT

and (my favourite)

EIGHTH ARMY PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMANS.

The world of science makes its contribution to random mirth, with

SCIENTISTS MAKE GORILLAS PREGNANT

and this one, which I spotted on BBC online:

EXPLODING STAR HUNTERS MAKE HISTORY

This last is silly because it lacks a hyphen (and even if it didn’t, it would still look odd). Hyphens, like commas, are among those tiny things we take for granted, those things that separate a world of peace and order from the crawling chaos in which anarchy rules, and Great Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath goat of the woods and the Piping Shuggoths of the Blind Idiot God Nyarlathotep squish wetly up from the basement to bite our heads off.

Over on the What’s Wrong forum (itself a title of surreally exiguous punctuation) Jennifer Rohn has been agitating for the ability to have tags that recognize hyphens in the way we’re meant to understand them – as signs used to group two formerly separate concepts into one single, new one – and to prevent unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding. And isn’t science all about being as precise as we can about concepts, in as elegant and concise a way as possible?

Oy veh is mir! Tventy years or more it’s taken – tventy years! Vot a schlap. And me mit zer headaches unt zer bad feet, not to mention zer rumblinks in zer tochas, unt now zer noise. Zer kids forever running up unt down zer corridors; zer mishpoche always begging for more of my shares in zer railways; unt Emma, my little Emmele, bellowing at zer maids to finish polishing zer candlesticks before shabbat, unt zen shrieking at me even vorse than that shlmiel Alfie Wallace (that shnorrer Owen is best forgotten. Always asking me for money, noch). And still I can’t finish off zer ‘abstract’ zat Lyell vonts me to write. “Chaim,” he says, “Stop prevaricating! Bist du meshuggeh? You must get zer patent on zat new idea for manufacturing species or that goy Wallace vill get zer one-up on you.” And if my name isn’t Chaim Dershovitz, vich it is, I should get on mit it, but, vell, you know how it is, mit vun sing unt another, and – vot is it now? – she only vonts me to come and bless the chollah. Can a man get no peace? Insisting that Ani Ha’Av cuts no ice with her. Okay – I said okay. Baruch atta Adonai, Eloheinu Melekh Ha’Olam, Bareh Puri Ha’Etz. Can I go now? You see vot it’s like, already! Not a minute ven I can get to write up my final transformation notebook, ze vun called Protocols for the Origin of Species. Vell, at least I sink I know how it vill end. Ze end of zer beginning. I like it! So here goes.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being expelled .

Unt zen, I must choose a pseudonym. John Murray says nobody will buy a book from a yiddischer, and who can blame them? Not me! Unt I wrote it. But vot to choose? Somesink very English. Lee Strobel? Nein, still a bischen yiddisch. Paul Myers? Fech – even worse. Richard Dershovitz? Richard Feynman? Richard Dawkins? Charles Dawkins? Ah, I know…

Not long after his arrival Chez Gee, Heidi took us both on a very long walk around Cromer and neighbouring East Runton during which we saw Cromer’s famous pier and discovered that really, given the circumstances, I could hardly be a resident of Cromer and not be a blogger. You see, until Bora (who, as Jonathan Eisen has elsewhere sagely noted, is one of those celebrities who, like Madonna, doesn’t really need a surname) had pointed it out to me, it never occurred to me that the name of Cromer’s local hero might have a weird kind of morphic resonance. Nominative determinism in action.

Horne: And now – Trends in Music. Folk music continues to make a comeback, so with us once again is that doyen of folksingers, that homespun folksy twit, Rambling Syd Rumpo. Tell me, Rambling Syd, why do you call yourself ‘Rambling’?

Rumpo: Because I ramble. I nark my fossets hither and yon, the sky my coverlet, the ground my bed, an old hedgehog as my pillow-oh, and naught for company but my guitar and this bird called Charmian what I picked up in a coffee bar in Golders Green-oh, well snargle me futtocks and a wurple-diddle-eye-do, crumpstrangle and a dingle-oh on the moolies-oh, and Johnny won’t come ‘ome no more-oh.

Horne: I’m sorry to hear it. So, what are you going to sing for us today?

Rumpo: I be singing a plaintive lament for the Plurdlin’ of the Grummet-Nadger’s Scrode. The lament be plaintive on account of the fact that the Grummet Nadger, havin’ fettled ‘is scrode, can no longer go a-plurdlin-oh.

Horne: Sounds fascinating. What’s the origin of this … er … plaintive lament?

Rumpo: The orgins of this lament ‘ave been lost in the grummets of time, abandoned to the winds o’ change-oh, buried beneath the gruntfondles of uncaring eternity-oh. I made it up special.

Horne: Any particular occasion?

Rumpo: Well, Mr Horne, as a matter of fact there is. You see, twenty years ago this Tuesday, being as it will be the fifteenth of April-oh, the cordwangler of what I’m lamentin’ finally put down his Splod in an Alien Place, to go a-ramblin’ and a-rovin’ no more-oh, well a-frangle and a-wurdle me thunder-jugs-oh, fundle all me trusspots-oh, down in dingly dell, and similar expressions of rustic whimsy in a like fashion-oh. Oh.

Horne: Well, let’s hear it then. The sooner you start, the sooner you can stop.

Rumpo: [tunes guitar, clears throat] Well, it was on a Sunday mornin’ clear/ The moolies came to me / I scrunted up me microarray/ and dingled me Gilsons three/ I …

Julian: Hello, I’m Julian, and this is my friend Sandy.

Horne: an unexpected pleasure, I’m sure. What are you doing here? This is the wrong part of the show.

Sandy: ooh, he’s bold, in’t ‘e, Jules? Bold. You’d think ‘e wasn’t pleased to see us!

Horne. Of course I’m pleased to see you. It’s just that you’re interrupting Rambling Syd.

[Rambling Syd Rumpo continues to ramble in the background]

Julian: Sounds like we arrived just in time, eh, Sand? Dreadful racket.

Sandy: Oooh, yes, dreadful.

Julian: And did you ‘ear that, Sand? ‘E scrunted up ‘is microarray, did you ‘ear that?

Horne: Why? What’s wrong with that?

Sandy: Ooh, ‘ark at ’im, Jules! Nobody scrunts up their microarrays these days.

Julian: That’s so last week.

Horne: How did you two get so scientific all of a sudden?

Julian: Sorry, Mr Horne. We quite forgot. We – that’s me and Sand ‘ere – we’re now in the editorial consultancy game. Let me introduce – Bona Science. We’ll take your half-baked old rubbish and drag it up lovely. Won’t we, Sand?

Sandy: That’s right, Mr Horne – just give us your huddled masses, your data sets from your teeming shore, and we’ll rewrite it so it gets into Nature.

Horne: Really? You can do that?

Julian: Of course. Money for old rope, ain’t it, Sand?

Sandy: Those Nature editors will buy anything. They’re desperate.

Julian: Great ‘airy fool.

Horne: Well, I like that, I’m sure.

Julian: No, not you Mr Horne…

Sandy: Perish the very thought.

Julian: That Henry Gee. He’ll accept anything.

Sandy: So there we were, just trogging along…

Julian: Extras, we were, in this drama documentary, about J. Craig Venter. An Ome Of My Own, it was called. Very moving.

Sandy: And Mr Venter. So masculine.

Julian: I played a technician …

Sandy: ... and I was a big-pharma rep…

Julian: ... and our eyes met over a crowded lab…

Sandy: Jules took ‘is part lovely.

Julian: So we got this idea. Anyone can troll out this old rubbish.

Horne: Well, as a matter of fact, you might be able to help me.

Julian: What ‘ave you got?

Horne: [hands over manuscript]

Julian: [cackling] You can’t call it that!

Horne: So, what’s wrong with A Blatant Self-Advertisement For Soliciting Yet Another Grant From NIH and The Release of Calcium from Intracellular Stores?

Sandy: Ooh, no. There’s no … there’s no … what would you say, Jules?

Julian: Mystique.

Sandy: That’s right, Mr Horne. No mystique. You ‘ave to make it so no-one understands it…

Julian: But no-one’ll ever admit that!

Sandy: ... so your Nature paper is as good as published.

Horne: What should I call it, then?

Julian: How about …

Gruntfuttock: ... On the positively negative interaction between one abbreviation and another abbreviation, conditional on the negatively double-negative interaction between a third abbreviation and one or other of the first two abbreviations.

Julian and Sandy: Fantabulosa!!!

Horne: Ah, it’s our old friend, Dictator J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock, King-Emperor of All Peasemouldia, who has chosen to grace us with his appearance.

Gruntfuttock: I am no longer Dictator Gruntfuttock. I am Principal Investigator Professor J. Craig Peasemould Gruntfuttock, F. R. S….

Horne: ‘F. R. S.?’

Gruntfuttock: ‘Futtock of the Royal Society’.

Horne: As you were saying, Professor…?

Gruntfuttock: Yes, Professor J. Craig Peasemould Gruntfuttock, Director of the Peasemouldia Research Institute.

Horne: Impressive facilities you have here. How far do they stretch?

Gruntfuttock: The campus goes from Railway Sidings, Hoxton, to the pub halfway up Buttermole Street.

Horne: So what does the Peasemouldia Research Institute do?

Gruntfuttock: we’re trying to find a way of fusing futtocks with grunts. First we take the ovum of a grunt and enucleate it. Then we suck out the nucleus of a futtock stem cell, put it into the grunt cytoplasm, and – bingo!

Horne: Has anything developed yet?

Gruntfuttock: No, but it’s a great way to get grants. And Nature papers, you know.

Horne: How did you get the idea?

Gruntfuttock: There I was, staggering home from the Empress of India, thinking about the release of calcium from intracellular stores, and I was just outside the ‘orsemeat shop in the Balls Pond Road when I heard the voices, you know. Yes, the voices. ‘Gruntfuttock, my child’, they said. ‘Gruntfuttock, my child, gird up your loins’, they said: ‘gird up your loins, and unlock the secrets of nature! And get us a box o’ Kimwipes© on the way home’.

Horne: Not much of a grant proposal, is it?

Gruntfuttock: But thanks to my vision and energy, it seems to have worked. That and my small army of graduate students, and my redoubtable postdoc, Buttercup. Say hello to Mr Horne, Buttercup.

Buttercup: HALLO PROFESSOR CHEEKY FACE!

Gruntfuttock: Ah, must be the long hours on low pay and no career prospects. Go on, Buttercup, you’ve another ninety-six wells to fill before lunchtime.

Horne: This science game sounds like a bit of a lark. A game anyone can play. So there I was, in the lab, after hours, putting my feet up on my new Zeiss 9600 Douglas-Smith, when the phone rang. Filling three Gilsons with my right hand, plating out a culture of Batrachochrytium dendrobatidis…

Dougls Smith: Bless you.

Horne: ... thank you, Smith. Now where was I. ... a culture of whateverit-was with my left, and pulling up the fume hood with my teeth, I cradled the receiver up my left nostril.

Haverstrap [on phone]: Haverstrap here, University Admin. I’ve got brown horrocks on my extension.

Horne: I think you can get a cream for that.

Haverstrap [on phone]: No, Horne, I meant Professor Brown-Horrocks, Vice-Chancellor.

Brown-Horrocks [on phone]: Ah, Horne.

Horne: Ah, Brown-Horrocks.

Brown-Horrocks [on phone]: Get over here right away, Horne, we have an emergency. There’s a Douglas-Smith leaving your building in three minutes. Be on it.

Horne: I lost no time. Bolting on my goggles, loosening the bolts in my neck, I climbed aboard my Douglas Smith bench centrifuge and pulled up outside the Vice-Chancellor’s office with a screech. Smith, you know know what to do.

Smith [resignedly]: Oh, very well. ‘Whirr whirr whirr clunk’.

Brown-Horrocks: Ah, Horne.

Horne: Ah, Brown-Horrocks.

Brown-Horrocks: Fancy a spot of lunch?

Horne: Don’t mind if I do.

Brown-Horrocks: Excellent. There’s a spot of soup on my tie.

Horne: On second thoughts … what seems to be the trouble?

Brown-Horrocks: well, it’s like this. Someone has been breaking into all the lab’s online publications and inserting random abbreviations.

Horne: How dastardly.

Brown-Horrocks: Exactly. The papers affected have become so difficult to understand that they’re attracting citations at an alarming rate. It’s starting to look suspicious. Horne, go and find out who’s doing this – and stop them.

Horne (aside). He looked at me quizzically. I looked at his quizzically. Then he straightened his tie, put his nose to the grindstone, his shoulder to the wheel, and fell out of the window. Alone again, I smelled a rat. In fact, I smelled several rats, quite a lot of mice, a tank of Xenopus, a bag of fruit well past its sell-by date, and a coypu. If only Brown-Horrocks didn’t have his office across the hall from the animal facility. Time flies like an arrow – but fruit flies like a banana: I knew what I had to do. Only one person was capable of scientific mischief on such a large scale. I rushed down the stairs and donned my Douglas-Smith…

Douglas Smith. Oh, if you must. ‘Whirr whirr whirr clunk’.

Horne: Thank you, Smith.

Douglas Smith: A pleasure, Sir.

Horne: We were at a crumbling warehouse round the back of King’s Cross Station. Disguising myself as a manuscript in an envelope marked ‘Proofs’, I sidled through the door. There, at the desk, was the lovely Ramona, Mata-Hari of Microarrays. She saw through my disguise in an instant. She ripped the envelope from my rippling body (I used to be an ice-cream cone). Her mouth was a scarlet wound, exactly where I expected it – underneath her nose. Our lips met…

Douglas Smith: Three days later…

Horne: Three days?

Douglas Smith: The script is hardly my fault, Sir.

Horne. Oh, very well. That was Douglas Smith, who is currently appearing at the YMCA, Tel-Aviv. Where was I? I freed myself from Ramona’s passionate embrace, and, dashing up the stairs, burst into the arch-villain’s office. That was painful. Next time I shall use the door.

Chou-En Ginsberg: Ah, Mr Horne.

Horne: Ah, Chou.

Chou-En Ginsberg: Bless you.

Horne: You won’t get around me that easily, Ginsberg.

Chou-En Ginsberg: But Mr Horne, a gentleman like you would not dispense with the traditional courtesies? I shall summon Lotus-Blossom, most beautiful of all my geishas, to entertain us. Lotus Blossom, where are you, light of my life, flower of my soul?

Lotus Blossom [gruffly] I hendeavour to do yore biddin’, cock.

Chou-En Ginsberg: Lotus Blossom, sing us that heartfelt lament of young princess in love with Sun God who impregnates her with clone army of mutant zombies clad in pastel shades.

Horne: How revolting.

Lotus Blossom: It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

Chou-En Ginsberg: Ah, they don’t write them like that any more.

Horne. Just as well. What’s the meaning of your little game? Adding abbreviations to online papers?

Chou-En Ginsberg: Ah, Mr Horne! No journal will accept my papers, not even PLoS One. So I must get my revenge. All papers will henceforth be about SH2 Src homology domains. The glory will be mine! MINE! Publications! Citations!

Horne: You won’t get away with it. Take that!

Chou-En Ginsberg: Aaaah!

Horne: ... and that!

Chou-En Ginsberg: Aaaah!

Horne: ... and that!

Chou-En Ginsberg: No thanks, I’ve already got two of those.

Horne: But Ginsberg is always villain enough to know when he’s beaten. He drew himself up to his full height (2’6”) and launched himself through the window into the canal, where he was picked up by a waiting junk. As he fell, he screamed -

Ginsberg: You may have beaten me this time, but you haven’t heard the last of me, Dr Chou-En Ginsberg, MA, Failed – GOODBYE!!!

This came home to me in dramatic fashion a few nights ago on my long journey home, nursing a migraine. By the time I actually arrived home I felt as if someone was trying to gouge out my left eye with an ice-pick. The pain was as excruciating as anything I’ve felt since I passed my PhD viva driving test a kidney stone.

My wife, who has seen this all before, many times, said it was probably a case of eye-strain and booked me an appointment with the optician. I went next day and the result was clear – my prescription had changed dramatically.

Thinking back, this explained many things – I had blamed my recent tiredness on anything but eye-strain, despite having been in this situation before. I ascribed my fatigue to my very long days, or the early-morning vivacity of our new puppy, using these to explain why, in recent weeks, I’ve preferred to spend my long train commute asleep, rather than eagerly writing about sex, violence