Going round the bend while messing about in boats

‘There's nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats,’ the Water Rat tells Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

If the sentiment is an exaggeration, it’s a forgivable one. Few things can give quite as much pleasure as wandering around on water, aimlessly or aimfully, whether the boat’s driven by wind, by oars or by paddles.

That’s a truth we’ve proved again during our visit to family up here in Scotland, out East of Edinburgh.

Aimfully, we took kayaks out a couple of days ago to Bass Rock, described by David Attenborough as one of the wildlife wonders of the world. It has a 150,000-strong colony of gannets, supplemented by countess  cormorants, various gulls, and other sea creatures including puffins and seals.

I can’t confirm the number of gannets, but have no trouble believing it. As we approached the rock, a volcanic extrusion thrust out of the seawater of the Firth of Forth, the sky seemed to fill with clouds of birds. 

Well, OK. Swarms at least.

Swarms of sea birds filling the sky at Bass Rock

More aimlessly, we went out today on a river, or perhaps more accurately a long, narrow lake. Now, that was really just messing around in boats. 

I should point in passing that, for me, it’s the word ‘in’ that’s truly key in that expression. I suffer from a tendency to lose concentration and forget that the quicker and easier to drive through the water these boats are, the less stable they’re likely to be. Rather more often than I’d like, I’ve found myself leaving my boat precipitately and involuntarily, and finding myself messing around not so much in a boat as alongside it, or even underneath it.

That’s not always much fun. Particularly in Scotland. Never let it be said that Scottish summers don’t have their charms, because they certainly do. It’s just that the message that it’s a warm season seems not to have got through to bodies of water out of doors. The sea’s really bad, but even rivers offer sharp reminders that Edinburgh would be in the middle of Hudson’s Bay if it were a few thousand miles to the west, or form a pleasant twin city with Norway’s capital Oslo if it were a few hundred miles to the east.

So I get into a boat up here with some trepidation. And today the Scottish weather was at its tricksiest. It waited patiently while we got the boats out on the water, remaining pleasantly warm and sunny until we got past the point of no return where we might have changed our minds and headed home. Then, with frightening speed, it quickly covered the skies with clouds before opening them up right over us and pouring torrents of rain directly on to our heads.

I’m not talking pleasant refreshing showers. Or at least, it was the kind of refreshment you get not from a glass but from a fireman’s hose. Any sense that falling in would be a problem was quickly dispelled. It would hardly have made any difference.

What passed for shelter when the Scottish weather
sprang its surprise on us

The conditions didn’t stop us having a great outing, once we gave up on the forlorn enterprise of trying to find shelter. We ploughed on through the downpour determined to enjoy ourselves instead of complaining. I even found the experience quite instructive. I understood why we use the expression ‘going round the bend’ for losing one’s sanity. I kept thinking ‘I’ll just go round the next bend – things may be better there.’ 

I can confirm that madness really does lie at the end of that belief.

But a good time was had by all. Because, when all’s said and done, Ratty was right. There’s little in life quite as much fun as messing around in boats. Whatever the conditions.

For your own safety, do try to avoid being black

Intent on steadying young people, the Mikado of Japan decreed, according to Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘that all who flirted, leered or winked, (unless connubially linked), should forthwith be beheaded.’

Generation after generation has laughed at this crazy idea ever since The Mikado was first performed in 1885. But it’s a lot less funny when the attitude’s taken seriously and actually put into action. 

Particularly when the form of execution isn’t as simple as beheading, but involves being savagely beaten and having an eye gouged out before being shot through the head. And it doesn’t make the event any funnier if the victim is 14.

Of course, he wasn’t just any old fourteen-year old. He’d made a serious misjudgement, and allowed himself to be born black. He’d then travelled from his native Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. And that’s where he’d committed his offence, talking to or possibly whistling at, a young white woman. 

For that, her husband and a friend of his kidnapped the boy, Emmett Till, and gave him a lesson he’d remember for the rest of his life; and then made sure that the rest wasn’t long.

Emmett Till: paid dearly for his errors

Perhaps the only admirable aspect of this story was the behaviour of a young black man, Willie Reed. He witnessed Till being taken into a barn, heard the beating and screaming, and saw the perpetrators emerge. From somewhere, he found the courage to testify at the subsequent trial, even though he had to force his way through a crowd of Klansmen to get to the court building at all.

Reed was later smuggled out of Mississippi to protect him from reprisals. He moved to Chicago where he lived under the name of Willie Louis until he died peacefully last week, on 18 July 2013, at the age of 76. For decades, he kept his past secret even from his wife. He only began to speak publicly about the case ten years ago.

Willie Reed (Willie Louis)
Testified in vain at the trial

His testimony did no good, anyway. The all-white Jury acquitted the defendants, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam; later on, protected by double-jeopardy legislation, they admitted (boasted of?) their guilt. 

Bryant and Milam, upstanding citizens of Mississippi
and clearly proud of it

The case became a cause célèbre and another of the trigger events for the civil rights movement and the reforms that followed. Because all this happened a long time ago: in 1955. Today things have changed monumentally. We’d all like to think that this kind of thing is behind us for ever.

Though it seems it’s still not a judicious choice to be born black. And it’s dangerous to persist in being black if you’re going to take irresponsible action, such as purchasing groceries at night in Miami while young. That was 17-year old Trayvon Martin’s mistake on 26 February 2012, and it left him dead too.

Trayvon Martin
Executed for the threatening behaviour of carrying groceries by night

I suppose we ought to be grateful that Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, at least didn’t beat him first or gouge out one of his eyes. But just like Till’s killers, he shot his victim. And at the end, Martin was as dead as Till.

While Zimmerman walked just as free from the court that acquitted him this year as Bryant and Milam did from theirs.

Celebrating the arrival of a new Chief Rabbi. For the sake of argument.

According to broadcaster Vanessa Feltz, ‘if you put a Jewish person on a desert island, that person will construct two synagogues, not one, and you’ll say “but you’re a lone inhabitant of this desert island, why do you need two synagogues?”, and the answer is “so that I have one not to go to.”’

She made the comment in an excellent programme this morning on BBC Radio 4, ‘What’s the point in the Chief Rabbi?’ The question is topical because Lord Jonathan Sacks, the current Chief Rabbi of the UK, is about to retire.

Jonathan Sacks – Lord Sacks – on the right,
with another religious leader.
Sacks, never very retiring, has chosen retirement

Not that the holder of the post is the Chief of the whole Jewish Community. His title is ‘Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth’ and those ‘united Hebrew Congregations’ are the orthodox strands within British and Commonwealth Jewry representing, according to the source you listen to, a bare majority or a very large minority of the entire Community.

So the Feltz story, like most Jewish jokes, expresses an important truth. Around half the community are happy to be represented by the Chief Rabbi; the other half, whether ultra-Orthodox, reformed or frankly free-thinking, feel he has no right to speak for us. Each group worships at one synagogue, and avoids the other with disdain.

And yet the Chief Rabbi somehow presides over us all. In fact, not just over the Jewish Community. I was fascinated to discover from the programme, that Edward VII, one of our most philosemitic Kings, used to talk about ‘my Chief Rabbi.’ I never set foot in a synagogue unless asked for a wedding or funeral, and yet it’s true that I see the head of the orthodox congregations as in some sense the spokesperson of a community I belong to, at least as much as Edward VII did.

I suspect I might feel that way even if I had not a drop of Jewish blood in my veins (after all, Edward VII didn’t). In much the same way, a large number of British Jews see the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of ‘our’ Christian Church.

Having said that, my identification with the Chief Rabbi is of a special kind. Again, it was Feltz who got it right: ‘what one needs in a Chief Rabbi is someone to take a stand with which one can then disagree.’ Now, that’s a sentiment to which I’d happily raise a glass. A glass that would, no doubt, lubricate a lively and entertaining argument.

In any case, in a more important sense, it doesn’t matter what one feels about the post of Chief Rabbi, or about either the present or the next holder of the post. There is in any case some pleasure in feeling that the Community as a whole, with its contradictions and its schisms, has been able to build itself institutions in this country that seem to work and that satisfy those who identify with their leader as much as those who oppose him. It’s even more encouraging that the country as a whole seems to have embraced those institutions and made them part of its fabric.

That’s a long way to have come. In 1190, the Jewish community of York was massacred in Clifford’s Tower. Jews were excluded from England until Cromwell let them back in the seventeenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, many powerful circles in Britain were shot through with anti-Semitism and, indeed, Nazi sympathies.

Anti-Semitism hasn’t gone but it’s certainly receded to nearly insignificant levels. The election of the new Chief Rabbi is consequently something to celebrate, even for those like me who have so little in common with him. 

So, Ephraim Mirvis, my warmest congratulations on your appointment as Chief Rabbi. To be followed, no doubt, by your elevation to our Upper House of Parliament as Lord Mirvis. A fine tribute to the assimilation of a formerly persecuted, immigrant minority.

Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis
Next in line

It's a riot, an evening with the Irish. So why waste it rioting?

I hate expressing a view which is tantamount to racist, but I can’t remember meeting anyone from Ireland who I haven’t liked. Whether they’re from North or South of the border, when I think ‘Irish’, I think of a smile, of friendliness, of wit or more commonly, of both.

So it was wonderful to take advantage of the summer we’re enjoying by having two couples of Irish friends around for a barbecue and a balmy evening in the garden.

Both couples came from a sub-group of Irish people I find particularly amusing: the Irish brought up here in England.

The main thing about them is that you can’t tell they’re Irish. At first. One of the couples spoke in the accents of the English Home Counties; the other, had accents from right here in Luton, our town and theirs.

Those who may not have studied the fascinating subject of Englishness sufficiently to seize those nuances should think, for the first accent, of Michael Caine in Zulu; for the second, of Michael Caine in The Italian Job. If you don’t know either film, you have some entertainment ahead of you.

Neither accent sounds even remotely Irish, so it came as no surprise that both couples expressed a little disbelief about the Irishness of the other.

So they asked exactly where they were from. That triggered the inevitable wandering discussion around Ireland: four sets of parents between them covered eight counties, in a country where counties still count. They quickly identified villages they all knew, indeed pubs or churches or hotels they had all visited. I was a little surprised that they didn’t discover that they’d been at weddings that took place in the same place within hours, or at least months, of each other, or that they had cousins, even if only third cousins of second cousins, in common (and blood does run thicker than water).

At least one of our visitors was from Donegal
Clearly a place people are dying to get to.

Once they’d established the authenticity of their shared roots, the evening could really start and the conversation could truly flow. Because it doesn’t matter how long they’ve lived in England or how English they sound, that bond lets the Irish feel at home so they can let go of their inhibitions. And believe me, that’s worth seeing, since they don’t generally start with a lot of inhibitions in the first place. 

What we then had was that long undulating mix of well-lubricated anecdote and wit for which only the Irish have a proper term: craic. Inevitably, some stories required the repetition of dialogue from across the Irish Sea, and it’s at those moments that you find that English accents are only skin deep in the Irish: they can quickly produce a perfect brogue, far beyond the ability of any true Englishman such as myself.

So our friends retained an unquestionable Irishness despite being born in England and having lived here ever since. Which sounds like perfect assimilation: completely at home in this country, sounding like its inhabitants, without losing their distinct identities. What could be better?

That’s all slightly curious, though. After all, those four are all Catholics, in principle and even, to some limited extent, in practice. Yet they have no difficulty living under the shadow of the Union Jack – the baleful shadow, some of their more nationalist countrymen might say – in a nation whose monarch is still the head of the Protestant Church of England.

They do fine over here, as do those who eventually go ‘back home’, to a country in which they’ve never lived, and settle down just as comfortably under the Tricolour. An experience shared with many thousands of Englishmen who’ve moved across.

So here’s a question. If Irish and English can live under each other’s flags, their religions rubbing along together in general harmony, both here and across the water, just what is it that gets into the bloods of those tedious minorities who make all the trouble in the North of Ireland?

What on Earth does it matter which flag flies over Belfast Town Hall or for how many days of the year? Why should one Community get upset by another Community marching along its streets? Why should that second Community insist on marching along the street knowing that the first will be offended?

As happens nearly every year, when the Glorious 12th of July came, the riots started in Northern Ireland. Men and women, police and civilians have been injured, over matters no other country or community can begin to understand.

Belfast: what a waste of barbecue time
And a missed opportunity for craic

With absolutely no necessity. Believe me, this precious summer weather which we see so seldom, isn’t something to waste on Molotov cocktails and tear gas. Nationalists, loyalists: get the barbies out. Get the friends round – perhaps even some from the other community. Break out a few cans and let the conversation flow. Believe me, with people from anywhere in your island, it just works. And it’s a hell of a sight more fun.

As I experienced again this weekend, it’s a shame to miss the craic.

Bad arguments about healthcare: if you can't stop them, at least give as good as you get

Marc de La Val had built an enviable reputation for complex cadio-thoracic operations on babies, at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the most prestigious children’s hospital in Britain. But then things started to go wrong. 

The always fascinating David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, recently told the BBC what happened:

‘A cluster of his babies died when he was doing these really difficult operations for transpositions of great arteries, and then he actually wrote a paper about how he stopped and retrained and changed the way he did the operation, and after that he was very successful, but he had this real blip, this real cluster of failures, and he nearly gave up...’

Spiegelhalter: well worth listening to

Spielgelhalter maintains that it was careful analysis of the data that showed that de Laval hadn’t just been unlucky, that there really did seem to be something going wrong with his surgeries, something he had to fix.

That was one surgeon. Outstanding, a practitioner to seek out, then dangerous, a surgeon to avoid, and then outstanding again.

And no doubt many of the other surgeons at GOSH were achieving excellent results, even at that time. When de Laval was struggling, the department might well have been fine overall. It was only he who was having bad outcomes.

But sometimes it isn’t just individuals. Whole departments can be in trouble. I worked at one time with the Bristol Royal Infirmary, when there were terrible problems in paediatric cardiac surgery that led to a major scandal and the closure of the department; but much of the rest of the hospital was performing more than adequately.

In fact, I’ve spent 30 years working with healthcare information, and if it’s taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as good or bad hospitals; there are often good or bad departments in hospitals; more often still, there are good or bad practitioners within departments within hospitals; and as de Laval’s case shows, there can be good and bad moments in the career of an individual surgeon within a department within a hospital.

So I look on with wry displeasure when I see yet another scandal about bad hospitals in England. A report has just been published into fourteen hospitals that were giving cause for concern. It had been extensively leaked before publication, and we were softened up for hearing of 13,000 avoidable deaths across the 14; we were told that heads would have to roll.

In fact, the report was much more intelligent than that. It identified failings and errors that needed correcting, but it pointed out that these hospitals were already correcting many of them. In addition, the heads that could be made to roll were in many cases new people in post for a relatively short time, brought in to put right what had gone wrong under predecessors who had resigned or been forced out.

But that didn’t stop Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, making a real meal of the report – and, in particular, using it as a stick to beat his opposite number, Andy Burnham. He’s an unusual opposition spokesman, Burnham, in that he had been Health Secretary at the end of the previous government: most shadow ministers can’t be attacked for their own track record in the post, because they don’t have one. Burnham can.

And Hunt went for the gullet. The problems at these hospitals had arisen under the previous government and so they were Burnham’s responsibility. He should take the blame, resign his position and slink off into obscurity.

Burnham fortunately wasn’t having any of it. For instance, in connection with one of the hospitals, Basildon and Thurrock, he pointed out it was one ‘on which I placed a warning before the last Election. The news that this hospital has cut 345 nursing job from its front-line workforce should be greeted with real alarm.’

In other words, the present government has had three years to fix the problem. Instead it’s pursued policies that have led to serious cuts in staffing levels. That’s likely to have made the problem far worse.

Hard to see how Burnham’s to blame.

These exchanges do prove one thing, though. However inappropriate it may be to try to judge the quality of an entire hospital, it’s a brilliant way of turning healthcare into a political football between the major parties. And there are serious electoral points to be made from doing so.

Moreover, the attitude that says that heads have to roll is likely to be particularly out of place, as de Laval’s story shows. Sometimes, the people responsible for poor performance are actually excellent practitioners, they’re as devastated as anyone over the failures, and they only need the opportunity to improve again. But calling for retribution is much more effective with voters.

So it’ll go on happening. The mere fact that the argument is based on flawed premises doesn’t make it less effective politically. Which means the recriminations will go on being hurled.

Pretty miserable stuff. Which leaves me with only one consolation: at least Burnham gave as good as he got.

Not before time. This is a government that specialises in handing out low blows, few lower than trying to blame problems it’s failed to address on a man who's been out of office for three years. It was good to see him hitting back. 

It’s been one-way traffic for far too long.

Auld acquaintance not forgot

It’s always good to be reunited with an old and valued friend after a separation.

The other day a box was delivered to my door. I was only in by chance, since no one had warned me it was turning up. It was marked ‘6 Sets of Solar Rock Lights’ and apparently came from Felixstowe. That’s a fine port in East Anglia, and I have nothing to say against it, even if it’s practically a suburb of Amsterdam, but I don’t know anyone there and had no memory of ordering anything called a ‘solar rock light’.

Come to think of it, I had only the dimmest idea what solar rock lights were. It seemed unlikely that they would be drops of sunlight caught by some miracle of science in living rock, so I guessed they might be electrically-powered lights using batteries charged during the day by solar energy. Danielle looks after the garden and has put some splendid lights in it, so it seemed safe to assume that she’d ordered some more.

I carefully put the box to one side where it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way but she’d see it when she got in.

‘What on earth is this?’ she asked as soon as she had, ‘did you order some solar lights?’

So it was nothing to do with her, then. There was nothing for it but to open the box and take a look.

What did we find? Our Espresso machine. We bought it over a year ago, and paid extra for a special five year warranty. Sadly, the company we bought it from (Comet) has since gone bankrupt, but the warranty people are still in business. So we contacted them when the machine went wrong.

Now when this happened in the past, with other machines, the shop simply replaced them. Not in this case. They sent a courier round to collect it. They then went quiet for nearly three weeks.

The effect was terrible. An espresso at the start of the day is such a delight to me that I usually have two of them. Three weeks of separation were a painful deprivation. Danielle had had the foresight to buy a fine little cafetiere which makes one generous cup of coffee, or two mean ones, so we weren’t without caffeine. But it wasn’t the same.

When the withdrawal symptoms were really setting in, we phoned the warranty people.

‘Err... the contract gives us 28 days, you know,’ they told us.

So it was back to patience and reliance on the cafetiere. Until 24 days had gone by and, hey presto, the solar rock lights box turned up, with our espresso machine travelling, as it were, incognito. Pure joy.

An old friend, back in pride of place

Funny thing was that we had received no message to warn us, there was no note in the box, we’ve had no call since to check that everything was OK. The image this leaves me with is that of five guys in some back-street workshop in Felixstowe, frantically trying to repair all the appliances sold by Comet that have since gone wrong, and without secretarial support for correspondence or the funds to pay for their own packaging. 

To be honest, it’s quite an attractive image. Why just replace something that’s gone wrong? It’s gratifying to discover somebody that still actually repairs things instead. By the same token, why not re-use an old box?  

It has also to be said that the machine’s been doing sterling business ever since its return. My two espressos, Danielle’s latte, every morning, without fail and without problem. We’re entirely satisfied clients, delighted to have our old friend back amongst us.

In fact, the only problem is that I feel guilty about the cafetiere. It served us well. I washed and burnised it lovingly each day. And now it’s stuffed at the back of a cupboard again.

A faithful friend in need,
now sadly abandoned among mere glassware

How must it be taking this sudden and undeserved rejection?

A woman's achievement, a man's prize

It’s a long way from a school where little girls are expected to study sewing and cookery, to a position as a leading woman scientist; it’s a long way from failing the 11+ examination, that terrible barrier that stood in the way of so many gaining access to adequate school education, to a PhD from one of the most prestigious world universities; and it’s a long way from doctoral studies to a discovery transforming our understanding of astronomy and confirming one of the key points of a theory as important as General Relativity.

The way must feel all the longer if the Nobel prize for that discovery is then awarded to others.

So spare a thought for Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Back in the sixties, having risen through an educational system which did little to open doors for her to pursue a scientific career, she was a doctoral student at Cambridge, building a four-acre array of frames and wires that formed a radio telescope. She was studying quasars, quasi-stellar radio sources, the compact cores of remote and massive galaxies. And then she came across something else, something strange and inexplicable.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell in front of her radio telescope.

As she told the BBC in 2001, ‘there was this curious, curious signal, pulsing ever-so rapidly, ever-so regularly. I though I’d connected the telescope up wrong, I’d got some wires crossed or something.’

But she hadn't. It took a lot of hard work to prove, but a month later she was able to confirm that she was on to something.

‘It was actually something out there... we nicknamed it Little Green Men, LGM, because it looked artificial, man-made, and yet it was out there with the stars.’

That was exciting enough, but there was better to come. 

‘The sweetest moment was finding the second one, very similar but not identical and in a different part of the sky, that really says it has to be something astronomical. [...] I came out here on my scooter at 3:00, 2:00 in the morning. It was perishing cold and unfortunately [...] when it was cold the telescope and the receiver seemed only to work at about half power and you had no chance of discovering anything. But I flicked switches, I breathed on the receivers, I swore at it, and I got it to work, I got it to work for five minutes and on the right setting and in on the chart came peep-peep-peep-peep-peep... very like the first one but sufficiently different. It really looked as if we’d got another type of star and we were just looking at the tip of the iceberg. It was fantastic.’

Bell's first recording of the radio signal from a pulsar

It’s excellent news for us to discover that even leading scientists use the same techniques as everyone else, swearing at bits of equipment until they work. And it was excellent news for her that she was on to something entirely new.

What she’d found was a type of stellar object later nicknamed pulsars (from pulsating radio stars) by a Daily Telegraph journalist. The name has stuck. Behind their hallmark regular pulse is a neutron star, the residue of the massive explosion we call a supernova. They are small (in astronomical terms - they can be as little as 20 km across) but colossally massive bodies rich in neutrons, which are major transmitters of radio waves.

This is a remarkable discovery in itself, but it had another even more significant impact: study of pulsars orbiting round another star has shown that this kind of ‘binary system’ transmits gravitational waves and generally behaves in the same way as Einstein’s theories of gravitation would predict – to within 0.02%. Science doesn’t do absolute certainty, so that’s remarkable accuracy.

The finding is a spectacular vindication of relativity, one of the pinnacles of human scientific achievement. It was made possible by Jocelyn Bell’s discovery. It is clearly significant enough to warrant the awarding of a Nobel Prize.

And the Nobel Prize was duly awarded. In 1974. To Anthony Hewish, Bell’s PhD supervisor and another radio astronomer, Martin Ryle. Both men.

What did Bell say about being denied her share? In an after-dinner speech to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1977, she explained:

‘Demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve.’

She argued that ‘it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project’ and also that, in her view, ‘it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.’

Extremely generous comments and a tribute to a fine scientist. But the most telling and important comment was her last:

‘I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not?’

Indeed she is. Take Rosalind Franklin, for instance, another woman whose work on the structure of DNA made a key contribution to a radical breakthrough in science, a contribution not recognised by the Nobel Prize committee.

These things happen, of course. Not everyone’s contribution is always rewarded. It would be nice, though, if it happened a little less often to women.

In the meantime, raise a glass, or a prayer of thanks if that’s your bent, in honour of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of Lurgan, Northern Ireland, whose 70th birthday falls today, 15 July. And whose contribution to our understanding of the universe far exceeded the recognition she ever won for it.

And an update on 6 September 2018: she's finally won a top honour she clearly deserved.