Sheriff in High Speed Chase

It was reminiscent of Steve McQueen in Bullit as the rusty suburu cranked off the Green opp Post Box cottage and took off towards the Watersplash. The B.V. Delivery Man had been quietly making his way to Moorcroft when he met the High Sheriff who was having difficulties getting two young cows up the lane with only Pixie to help. With three it was easier and they were almost into the field at the Post Box when an out of valley person spooked them off and running. Pixie barking excitedly exacerbated the situation. The High Sheriff must have terrified the man in the Noddy car as she lept for her car and overtook him, exhaust smoking in the trusty Suburu and headed off the stampeding cattle just as they reached Brook Farm. The High Sheriff was in charge last week of the High Street in ‘Fordy’ for the late night shopping.

Do you know the link between the sexual habits of the Slipper Limpet and a Roman aqueduct? Or why they are sufficiently remarkable to be commemorated in its specific name (Crepidula fornicata)? Have you ever wondered how ordinary limpets find their way home after a busy day cleaning algae off the rocks? Do you know the best way to catch an octopus? Or why whales don’t get the bends? The answers to these and many other intriguing questions can be found in this engagingly haphazard collection of essays.

The author, Martin Wells, is a marine biologist, an expert on cephalopods, and a yachtsman. He originally conceived the book as a journal of a voyage, but his enthusiasm for his subject has led him astray, and we may be grateful for that. Life is, after all, what happens to you while you are making other plans. Each essay is based on some aspect of the life of an animal in the sea, but they develop fugue-like to encompass observations on Life, the Universe and even, as the title promises, on Civilization. The tone is set, and his philosophy of life begins to beguile, on the very first page of his preface, when he remarks that “some poor people work for all their lives, and all they ever make is money”.

He develops his discussion on the navigational powers of the limpet, through a discursion on the perceptual powers of octopuses in two and three dimensions, to explain how these are affected by their lack of bones, and joints. And thence to the ability of vertebrates to build cars, and computers, and bash the ozone layer! In a similar vein, a chapter begins with an uncle who was interested in lug-worms, and defecation, and develops into a discussion of biological clocks and free will. A comment on the sheltered life led by physicists, and its limiting effect on their powers of imagination, leads via the effects of entropy (and how to contain them using a can of WD-40), to your chances of surviving the next mass extinction.

Wells’s own speciality gets its fair share of the action, too, with accounts of the swimming and depth control abilities of the squids, and the locomotive and reproductive adaptations of the Nautilus, and its ability to tolerate low oxygen levels, and how this may be relevant to the success of ammonites in the remote past. In a final chapter “Does science have to be useful”, he mounts a spirited attack on the utilitarian orthodoxy of our time, asserting the claim of science (like the arts) to be supported not least because it amuses, entertains and enriches our lives. Along the way he claims that biologists are more realistic than “hard” scientists in their judgements because they are used to dealing with the messiness of the natural world. I think that physicists working as meteorologists, among others, may wish to disagree with that!

My only complaint is that there are no illustrations to add further spice to this rich mixture. If you need an antidote to the world of targets, objectives, milestones and deliverables, I heartily recommend this book. A scientist who is willing to say that his studies of Nautilus give him an excuse ‘to swan off to the Pacific, and there spend a quite unnecessary proportion of my time underwater’ should be cherished, for this is not politically correct, and they may become an endangered species. Read this and recapture the pleasure of mucking about in rock pools, just for fun. But spare a thought for the limpet, because “a limpet has nothing, or next to nothing, to fantasize about”.

John Shepherd

(Jude has clarinet, Alexander a euphonium and Nicholas a trumpet……are we almost there? Ed.)

Removal vans were recently spotted at Mayfield House, and the Big House is showing lights mid week. Has anyone visited yet? if so please give a full resume.

The yellow mobile remains calm and quiet, as Colin and Lynne have pulled off the impossible, by moving in sans offspring. How this is achieved, sadly remains a mystery to the writer.

Malc’s pony platoon has not returned to eat the hay at the gate, after being shipped away by the lorry load last Saturday – is this the end of the Horsburgh Horse Herd? Somehow we doubt it.

K.L.

with the thin, pursed lips of an enemy
interrogator. He pressed my father
to say what his father’s métier
was – an awkward question, for how many

schoolboys know the French for ‘Real Estate
Agent’? Adopting a tragic expression,
my father just replied,’Mon père est mort’

The professor blushed to commiserate;
when the results of the examination
were known, my father had the highest score.

Jamie Grant, The Spectator (November 1995)