GRANDAD'S SLIDES (PART 104) - ANOTHER NEW YELLOW BOX - STOCKPORT AIR DISASTER

SLIDES 0646-0650

STOCKPORT AIR DISASTER, JUNE 1967

A little over 49 years ago, at just after ten o'clock in the morning on Sunday the 4th of June, a British Midlands Airways Canadair C-4 Argonaut returning from Mallorca crashed into Hopes Carr right in the centre of Stockport.

Seventy-two of the eighty-four people aboard were killed and it is still, at time of writing, the fourth worst aviation disaster in British history.

News reports from the time tend to suggest that the pilot, who was one of the few survivors, chose to bring his aircraft down as best he could in an open area, with the plane reportedly making a sharp turn and levelling out just before impact. but the accident investigators could not find any evidence to support this notion. The official report maintains that the aircraft would have been uncontrollable under the circumstances after it lost power, despite what eyewitnesses who saw the plane come down claimed. Despite Stockport being a fairly busy urban area, however, there were no fatalities on the ground.

There but for the grace of, etc.

The house we lived in was (and still is) about a mile away from the crash site, so we were probably never in any real danger, but these incidents do rather make you think, even though I was utterly oblivious to it all at three years old,and I imagine that most of the family would have been on their way to church when this all happened.

According to the current Wikipedia entry, "The accident drew a large crowd, estimated at around 10,000 hampering the rescue organisations..." and it would appear, unless these were taken a couple of days after the accident happened, my Grandfather was one of those doing the hampering.

Mind you, looking at these pictures, you can immediately tell that "drew a large crowd" is something of an understatement, because there's a heck of a lot of people there who appear to have come to have a gawp at the aftermath of this tragedy, even long after the fact with the flames out and the area, presumably, declared "safe", and you do begin to wonder what passed for entertainment back in the late 1960s.

It does rather fit in with his slight tendency to photograph engineering disasters that have turned up from time-to-time in both the slide collection and his youthful box brownie pictures that you can find elsewhere on this blog if you feel like going looking.

VJ DAY +70

Dad,
12 IFMTU,
1944
(For VJ Day +70)

6 - 8 - 45, 8:16 AM

Six - Eight - Forty-five

The sky burned, the world boiled -

In Hiroshima

Eight-Sixteen A.M.

Human beings turned to dust

When the A-Bomb fell

SENSORITES AND OTHER ANNIVERSARIES...

 So, how will you be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of the final episode of "The Sensorites" then…?

I myself celebrated its first transmission by getting myself born just a few days earlier, arriving just in time for "A Desperate Venture" to reach its inevitable conclusion, and for this seemingly much-unloved of "Doctor Who" tales to reach its conclusion. If I hadn't been tardy in my arrival, of course, I might have been here for the previous episode "Kidnap" but somehow that episode title doesn't quite have the same air of appropriateness about it.

I've often wondered whether, given the dates, I was a post-JFK Assassination conception, but, given the amount of time in my fifty years that I have devoted to watching one particular TV show, perhaps I was conceived during that opening episode, "An Unearthly Child" (!!!) on a dark night in November 1963 after one too many sherries nipped back when the world was trembling over what the outcome of those dreadful events in Dallas might be.

Weirdly enough (because, when you start to look into such things it can surprise you…) it appears that I first popped into the world on what was technically the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, (if you go by the Austria-Hungary dates) which probably tells you something profound about something or other.

(As with most people, it is, after all, all about me…)

The oddest thing of all, I suppose, is that it's taken me so long to realise… or even take an interest in such things. Many people seem to have a distinct fascination for the circumstances of their birth and what was going on at the time, but I seem not to have ever really done that.

In fact I'm still not entirely sure at what time of the day I was hauled kicking and screaming into this world which might explain why I've always tried to be a little vague about the date of my arrival too.

After all (and despite what habitual bloggery might suggest to you), I've always felt that it's slightly undignified to try to keep on drawing attention to yourself…

DAD'S D-DAY

Watching all of those old soldiers last Friday has set me thinking about where the members of my own family were and what they were doing on that momentous day, because, to be perfectly honest, it's really not something that I can ever remember being mentioned. Mum's parents never mentioned it, nor did mum herself, and I was never really close enough to Dad's side of the family to ever really know much about anything they did, so I don't know how any of them felt about it, or how involved with it any of them were.

Did a huge sigh of relief cross the country, or were nails being bitten everywhere? After all, despite the feeling that the big push towards victory was finally on, many must have already realised that those much-feared telegrams would be getting printed in their thousands over the coming days, weeks, and months.

Maybe I was still too young when I was actually in the room with any of my family to have interesting conversations about anything other than my toys, or what we were having for tea, or whether I could go out to play, or perhaps I was just of an age when you got sent out of the room when the grown-ups wanted to talk, or I was already in bed when the big stuff came up. I remember being very swiftly "Shushed" in one hotel room when I asked (rather too loudly) what "The Dambusters" were when I read a page in the back of my book promoting another book about them from the same publisher.

I also remember a rather magical evening on holiday in Yugoslavia back when I was about ten when we were having an evening meal in a restaurant and my dad got chatting to another old soldier and started telling tales of their experiences in the war, of Oxo cubes, and boxing matches, and my father being mocked for his faith, but apart from that, and a few chunnerings around about the time of the 40th anniversary of V.E. Day with an old pal who had also still been battling away out in the Far East long after that, most of the time it just wasn't something that got talked about.

So, basically, I don't know where my dad was on D-Day, but I'm guessing it was probably working in a hospital in Bangalore. There's a photo from November 1944 which mentions being posted to Burma, but for most of the year before he'd been in India, working as a medic in various hospitals, cutting facial dressings into smaller pieces to make them less painful to remove, and dealing with unwanted pups in a slightly unfortunate way.

How he became a medic, I don't know.

I'm fairly sure that it wasn't for religious reasons. He once told me about injuring himself leaping underneath a gun, and a long story about getting drummed out of a parachute regiment which involved a badly packed parachute which would have killed him if he'd used it, but, generally, it looks as if my dad was just one of those people who the army had under their command but couldn't easily find something to do with.

It sounds as if the medics had a pretty tough job to do, on the whole, despite not being combatants, and dealing with the aftermath of some of those bloody battles can't have been easy. I did hear once that he got given a medal that few people get because of something particularly nasty that he had to do, but, once again, it was never talked about.

Well, not with me, anyway.

There was an interview with a conscientious objector on the radio on the day of the D-Day anniversary who was a medic on one of the Normandy beaches. He was a person who would not fight on principle, but was in just as much danger as anyone, as he ran about on those bloody beaches treating the wounded as best he could, so if you want to call such people cowards, I believe that you need to think about that again...

At that time, mum was twelve, which, given that she's gone now, just shows me how old the veterans are all getting, and how much we ought to be giving them our respect for what they did on our behalf.

Looking at them on Friday, though, it seems like some of them still look pretty spry though, and as if they'd do it all again if asked and, do you know what, I really wouldn't bet against them.

OVERLORD

I suppose that I ought to write about D-Day today, given that it is the sixth of June and seventy years to the day since the beginning of the Allied Invasion of Europe which, in time, led to the end of the Second World War, but I imagine that there are plenty of people writing mile after mile of copy about that today, all of whom are probably far more qualified to comment upon it than I am.

After all, even when I was a kid, "D-Day" meant little more to me than a few articles in a few comics and books talking about aeroplanes with "special" white-striped livery, and gliders, and operations with exciting sounding names like "Overlord", and beaches with code names like "Juno", "Gold" and "Omaha" and cards to collect and paste into our albums, and perhaps we never really understood what it all meant and how difficult it was to achieve and the sacrifices that were made in the pursuit of freedom from the yoke of tyranny, and that misty-eyed look that came into our parents and grandparents eyes whenever such things were mentioned.

Nowadays, of course, the Nostalgia game is big business and everyone in the media seems to be looking for an angle to make their programme or publication reflect those great big national events that suck us all in and give us some sense of pride in our homeland. Even dear old "Springwatch" managed to get in on the act this week by featuring an actually rather good item on the Poppy which, perhaps rather appropriately, seems to be blooming almost everywhere during this particular week.

In some ways it seems odd to mark the beginning of commemorations of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World war by marking a date which led to the end of the Second, but perhaps that is how it ought to be. After all, the slaughter of the so-called "War To End All Wars" led almost directly to the world-wide bloodshed of the Second, and much of the resolution of that conflict led to the fears of a Third which featured in so many of my generation's childhood nightmares.

War, it seems, and despite our very best efforts, is always with us. Perhaps it's a very human trait, or maybe it's even the most human one? Who really knows? All I know is that for every one of us striving to prevent one, there seems to be another who's just as eager to cause one, and sometimes it's those very efforts at prevention which seem to kick off the anger which causes these conflicts.

But that's not a discussion that we ought to be having today. Today we should just take a moment to remember those battles fought on this day seventy years ago, and all the days afterwards, and sink to our knees in gratitude that the people of that generation, some of whom perhaps now irritate us by getting in the way in the supermarket or in traffic, were prepared to stand up and say no, and risk everything they had in the fight against evil, so that we are able to have the freedoms and all of the other stuff that we enjoy and, perhaps, take just a little too much for granted these days.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

For everything.

INDIA 1943-1944 ADDITIONAL

Dad also kept these cuttings of contemporary pictures from the time, presumably as reminder, or perhaps because he wanted to send them home to let his family know where he was - although I don't imagine you were allowed to do that given the military secrecy of the time - or take them home himself during his next leave.

Anyway, I thought that they might also be of interest...

INDIA, 1943-1944

I've never been to India and, to be honest, I've never been all that inclined to go to India, either. That's not India's fault, by the way, it's really just that I've never fancied it.

I know that I like Indian food, and I know that the Indian cricket team is supposed to be very impressive to watch, two things - I imagine - which would be those which are most likely to make me venture there if anything would, but I don't really think that either of them are enough to make me want to catch that plane.

Basically the idea of the place terrifies me, especially as I'm someone who can suffer culture shock in a relatively conservative place like California over something as harmless as how a light switch operates, and who spent two weeks in Egypt a few years ago basically walking about in total terror of having to engage with anything outside our little "tourism bubble" that might require me to interact in a situation where I could get something terribly "wrong…"

It's a shame really because in terms of art, culture and design, India has given such a lot to the world, but it remains somewhere I'm not all that fussed about seeing, at least not unless I have a fully versed and capable guide to deal with every potential little problem which might occur and, to be frank, I hardly think that I'm ever likely to be in a position to afford that level of molly-coddling...

Of course, those mad mop tops, The Beatles obviously spent some time there during their mid-era Sgt Pepper phase and seemed impressed, and lots of people we know seem to have been on holiday there and been rather impressed too, and a fair amount of jobs seem to have been relocated there over the years, but somehow the idea of the place and the diseases I could catch or the places I could manage to get lost in far outweighs my intrigue, despite the many telephone calls I receive from that strange and mysterious land sometimes referred to as the "sub-continent" which seem eager to sell me something or other.

I'm never entirely sure what, by the way, because the calls seldom get that far...

Think of Denholm Elliott playing Dr Marcus Brody in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"("You know Marcus, he got lost once in his own museum…") and then imagine someone not quite as capable of coping and you'll be approaching the ballpark of my own incompetence.

Anyway, during the war, as the pictures on this page of his photograph album shows, my father was stationed in India, both in Bombay and Bangalore.

Very brave of him, I feel.

That page also mentions that he spent some time in Scotland.

I have actually been to Scotland… So, if you want to talk some more about terrifying and strange places, I could, at least, discuss my adventures in Edinburgh during two weekends attending the Fringe Festival, or the four days spent staying near Fort William, or even that day trip to Tignabruich when I was nowt but a new potato, but I suspect that you might just suspect that I'd be taking the McMichael if I did that.

Still, perhaps I do need to get braver and think about exploring more of the world. Maybe I need taking in hand by someone far more adventurous than I am to get shown the ropes of what life is like in the big wide world.

Mind you, knowing my luck, those ropes you're showing me will turn out to be some kind of deadly venomous snake after all...

EGYPT, 1945

Picking up the theme of Dad’s wartime snapshots from yesterday’s chat about Burma, here’s another page from that album featuring a few of the pictures of him taken in Egypt during 1943.

I think what’s interesting about these pictures, other than the fact that they exist at all and that they confirm the fact that dad actually was actually in Egypt, (which is something which still astonishes me), is how much the ordinary soldiers were allowed to interact with the ancient monuments back then.

I mean I know there had been a worldwide war on, and that preserving antiquities probably wasn’t near the top of anyone’s agenda, just I know that the idea of the value of ancient monuments, tourism and looking after them future generations was probably still relatively in its infancy, but being able to go up to a statue and give it a cuddle, or just clamber up to the top of a pyramid “because it’s there” is something that modern visitors to Giza can only really dream of.

I certainly know that during my own visit, sixty-five years later, we had about two hours maximum in which to try and absorb the sheer wonder of being so close to these remnants of the ancient world and much of that was spent trying to keep out of the way of the hundreds of other coach-loads of tourists and get away from the many, many locals who would latch on to you and try to sell you some tat.

Interestingly for me, I found that just strolling along the length of one of the sides of the Great Pyramid to an alternative corner where the crowds basically weren’t was the best way to get a moment alone with the ancient stones, and photograph it to buggery without getting too many strangers into your shot, and that, I suppose, is my “Travel Tip of the Day…”

Mind you, I think everyone in our little minibus would have been gut-burstingly envious of the kind of access to those monuments which my dad and his “gang” must have had all those years ago, although, on balance, I think that I still would have preferred to be there under the circumstances I was rather than those that took him there.

Meanwhile, I hope that my dad and his pals, including, I presume, his best mate at the time, the enigmatic “Cyril”, managed to have a great day out visiting the pyramids in the midst of all that madness, and managed to create a few good memories from amongst all of the bad ones.

The first picture, however, also fascinates me for other reasons. My dad would have been about twenty-one at the time (maybe this was his birthday treat) and yet there he stands, “Near top of Pyramid” as the caption explains wearing a flippin’ monocle alongside those ridiculous army socks and looking for all the world like the officer he so very patently wasn’t.

I wonder about the conversation that was going on when they decided to set up that snapshot and what joke they thought that him standing there like that would illustrate to the folks back home?

I don’t suppose any of us can ever know, now…

Mind you, it’s almost endlessly fascinating to me how much older everyone looks in photographs from the forties, fifties and early nineteen-sixties. I know that it’s most likely down to the clothes and the haircuts, but everyone looks so much more mature.

And then, someone in charge of such things must have dropped a tab of acid (Oh, look at me pretending that I know all of the vernacular) and decided that they’d had enough of this and changed the rules so that we all dressed like children who’d just raided the dressing-up box and decided that wearing some curtains was the most sensible option, which led directly to the modern age where pensioners feel that they have to dress like toddlers and mumsies are mortified if they don’t get at least one inside-pants-targeting smarmy “But surely you must be sisters…” comment during the day.

People fought a ruddy great big war for our basic freedom, you know… and now we’re left with a world designed for and run by children, where “acting your age” is more likely to get you rounded up and shipped off to a death camp disguised as a rest home than to get you anything approaching respect.

Still, I guess that’s progress for you.

BURMA STAR

It's strange where your leaps of thought can take you.

The other week I was watching the "Top Gear" Burma special and, because parts of the programme were irritating me quite intensely, my thoughts began to drift and, after checking my messages on the evil but handy internet monitoring device, I was looking around for something else to concentrate on other than the TV blathering away in the corner, when my memories took me to the photo albums my dad created in the months just before he died, way back in 1985 when I was still a student.

This was, of course, inevitably all connected to the zeitgeist of what I'd been (sort of) watching, because, as we all know, everything is interconnected, and you can't set out on a journey through your thoughts without a trigger of some sort.

You see, in the latter part of the second world war, my dad was stationed in Burma and had a number of snapshots that he'd taken at the time and, as I was watching that show, for the first time in years, I began to wonder quite in which part of Burma he'd actually been in and whether he'd seen any of the spectacular sights that those three idiots in the lorries were enthusing about.

Probably not, I reasoned. After all, there was a war on. Stopping to look at the scenery was probably neither the brightest thing to do, nor likely to be at the top of anyone's list of priorities if they were trying to avoid getting shot at. Anyway, if truth is one of the first casualties of war, then the landscape and scenery must be at least in the top ten.

Anyway, the point is that I know that my dad had spent some time in Burma during the war, but I didn't really know quite where he'd been based. They probably weren't generally actually being shot at a lot, I imagine, because they were a medical unit, but I don't suppose that was any guarantee.

I knew that after ending up as a trained Medical Orderly, having failed at being useful in several other areas of army life, and having spent at least one night being convinced that he was an Oxo Cube (long story), he'd ended up in the jungle and had once had tales to tell long into the night when we had met a chap with a similar background when we had been on holiday when I was a youngster. There were also rumours that once reached me that some of the sights he'd seen and things he'd had to do in that Forward Treatment Unit couldn't have been all that pleasant for a twenty year-old lad from the Welsh Valleys, although we never really got the chance to ever sit down and chat about these things ourselves.

By the time I'd got to an age to understand such things, and out of the age of total self-absorption, and might have finally taken an interest, he'd already gone.

Interestingly enough, I remember him getting quite stroppy during that last summer of his life - the summer, incidentally, when I celebrated my twenty-first birthday - because of all of the V.E. Day celebrations which were going on. His circle of friends would chunner away in irritation that they had spent several more months still battling away in what seemed to them like it was a forgotten war out there in the jungle whilst Europe seemed to be of the belief that the fighting was all over.

Well, I say battling. By that stage of the war, as I mentioned, my dad was working as a Medical Orderly, and was unlikely to pick up that many weapons, but I'm sure that they got to fight a few battles of their own, too, even if they were only psychological.

Mind you, like many of his generation, he rarely talked about it. well, not unless he happened across (like during that long evening in Yugoslavia), another member of the "Burma Star Association" to chat with. This meant that I never got to know much about what went on there. There are just these few pages of photographs, with the notes and the names and the places scribbled underneath them, and a few snatched memories of conversations had with other people before I got sent off to bed.

Oh and the scrapbook, of course. More photographs and correspondence and documents from that part of his life which I may need to explore further some other time, whenever the mood, or the TV, sends me back into that dusty corner of the room.

Flicking through the pages of that dreadfully destructive self-adhesive photograph album, I can't help but notice that because of the war, my father had been to some interesting and unusual places which he might otherwise never have seen. There are pictures from India and Cairo, for example (some of which I might post here some other time), as well as, to someone with such strong religious beliefs as he had, the "Promised Land", all of which must have seemed strange and exotic to this young kid from South Wales who'd spent a lot of his youth in hospital and probably hadn't ventured much further than Cardiff before.

In fact, it's hard for me to picture my dad in these exciting faraway places, even though I do have the pictures to prove it, but it really wasn't half bad for some kid from the valleys...

It would be remiss of me not to comment upon that smutty use of the word "BURMA" when written on the back of letters home during those frustrating war years. I believe that it was supposed to mean "Be Undressed Ready My Angel" although I don't suppose that this would have been the intention when this God-fearing son of Wales was writing home to his Ma...

YOU CALL THIS JUSTICE?

((I think that I promised you all this rant a couple of days ago... I’m not entirely sure that it makes any sense today, either, but in the absence of anything else, let’s just run with it and see what happens, eh...?))

Christmas Eve brought along with it a long overdue posthumous pardon for Alan Turing which should, I suppose, only be seen as a good thing. I do, however, still feel a qualm or twelve about the fact that he's only been granted this because he was someone who is recognised as having "done something" historically speaking, and anyone else who was prosecuted under those laws at that time remains as guilty as hell in the eyes of the law.

However laudable this decision is, should we pardon one "well known" individual whilst leaving the other forty-nine thousand convictions under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendement Act to stand...? It's a tricky call, and one to which there are no easy answers, but by putting one name "above the law" does this landmark decision already seem tainted?

Then again, you might just think "About bloody time" or "Too little, too late" with regard to the life of this one remarkable man, and not be bothered with the question it raises about whether or not the others ought to be taken into consideration.

Or, perhaps we just should see it as a step in the right direction towards a society that promotes understanding and tolerance and, God knows, the world could use some of that right now, especially where changes in the statutes of some other countries are concerned.

But that's the problem with the law when we view it retrospectively, we can always see what was once wrong with it despite remaining blind to the shortcomings of the law as it is right now. Sometimes it is better to "let it lie" although, thankfully, now that capital punishment is off the table in this country, at least the grossest of miscarriages have a slight chance of being rectified, even if an injustice done can seldom be undone.

As to the mistakes of history, well, we can't unburn the witches, unhang the petty thieves, or sew all those hands back on, and restore the lives lost or damaged by such errors of judgement or justice, nor can we "un-transport" all of those convicts back from the former colonies (and I'm not sure they'd thank us if we tried to...)

Mentioning "colonies" reminds me that recently there has been much talk of reparations for the bad things that the British Empire got up to whilst glossing over the fact that quite a lot of good came out of it too, and many countries can only thank that wicked Empire for the fact that they have been able to afford to build a modern infrastructure at all.

Dreadful crimes were of course committed in the name of Empire, but then, if reparations are to be made, can't we pass the buck onto the Hanovarians who were running the country when we did those very bad things to Scotland, or blame the invading French for all of our troubles, or the Danes, or the Romans...? If we can all trace our roots back to the Great Rift Valley, then perhaps everything is the fault of Africa anyway...

There needs, I believe, to be an understanding that a line needs to be drawn and we can't all be tainted forever by the sins of our forefathers who, quite frankly, knew no better. It was always wrong that there was a slave trade, it was always wrong that slaves would be allowed to drown whilst the crew would be rescued and very few civilised people alive today would think otherwise, or have ever contemplated doing something similar, and yet there are still people who believe that somehow it is the duty of people living today to be responsible for the idiuocies and injustices of the distant past.

Perhaps all of our problems can be laid firmly at the door of Ug, the caveman from another tribe, who turned up sometime in the stone age and got everyone all riled up about those bloody asylum seekers

But this is the problem of putting our modern, liberal values on the pages of history. We can only view the world from the standpoint of our current knowledge, and so could they.

Society progresses.

Civilisation builds.

Victorian justice might seem a savage and brutal thing, but it was a lot more civilised than Georgian justice, and Georgian justice was a whole lot better than Elizabethan justice, and that was generally an improvement upon Medieval justice, which did, at least have certain boundaries upon it that the rule of the mob seldom did...

And as for what the Romans got up to...

Retribution has always been the grubbiest of stains upon a nation's history, but we can only hope that we've learned from our mistakes and become better people because of it. Sometimes, looking around me, I doubt it, but we can only live in hope...

THE GREAT BEYOND

I just wanted to take a moment of our time today to remark upon the passing (a couple of days ago) of NASA's Voyager One spacecraft from within the boundaries of our solar system and out into the great, cold lonely and perhaps now slightly less unknowable darkness beyond.

Some people might think that it's nothing of any interest or importance that a relatively tiny bundle of electronics and metal is still travelling more than thirty-six years after it was first launched,  but, all these years later, I still find it all a rather humbling and frankly astonishing human achievement.

Way back on the fifth of September, 1977 when Voyager One left the earth for the last time and set out on its mission towards the doorway of eternity, I was just a thirteen year old kid avidly reading my "Observer's Book of Unmanned Spaceflight" by Reginald Turnill, which was the natural follow-up to the "Manned Spaceflight" volume of a couple of years earlier when "Skylab" was still making all of the headlines.

I was already hooked on all things outer space-y, being a child of the Apollo generation, and at that time, the future of space exploration still looked so promising and seemed to offer so much that, perhaps, the significance of the launch of another space probe was lost on me.

Even when its fictional cousin did turn up in the first "Star Trek" movie a couple of years later, I rarely got quite as excited by the Voyager missions as I ought to have done.

Not, at least, until its job really started and those incredible pictures of the outer planets started to show up. Then I became well and truly mesmerised by the breath-taking images of both Jupiter and later Saturn which it beamed back to us sitting on our own tiny little blue jewel hanging in the endless night.

Because, once those mighty giants of planets had been encountered, Voyager moved on, pausing on Valentine's Day 1990 to take the first "family portrait" photograph of the solar system as seen from beyond the planets, and then, after passing Pioneer 10 in February 1998, becoming the farthest human-made object from the Earth.

And so, as Voyager One passes through the heliopause and out into interstellar space, I still think about it with a certain amount of awe and wonder, and remain, despite all of the terrible things that we are capable of doing to each other, amazed and impressed that humanity has finally managed to build an object capable of breaking free of its home solar system and heading out to explore a "strange, new" region about which relatively nothing was previously known.

So, perhaps we should keep on trying to remind ourselves by simply looking upwards every once in a while that, with every day that passes, Voyager One increases the distance humanity has reached out into the universe, adding a few more miles to the twelve billion it has already covered, and that is something that we, as a species, have done - a genuine, positive achievement.

It's likely to lead to a cold, dark and lonely ending for humanity's first interstellar spacecraft, however. After its batteries fail, in about a dozen years or so, it will continue blindly on through an endless night, with little prospect of meeting another object for an estimated forty thousand years.

Forty thousand years... or about the time it took for the human race to move on from starting to develop the rudiments of language to being capable of sending out space vehicles to explore the stars.

It's also, in some small way, rather comforting to know that, whatever humanity manages to do to itself over the next forty thousand years or more, somewhere out there between the stars is a little lump of metal machinery that might just serve to tell and remind the universe that we were once here...

THE ELSIE TENNER

As I sometimes will, I ill-advisedly weighed into the debate on bank notes the other day by pointing out to someone who was complaining about the lack of female representation upon them that "the Queen is on all of them, of course" a smug comment for which I was quite rightly slapped down, but which I felt was a point worth making because in all of the articles that have been written about these matters over the past few days, that one point is seldom made.

For good reason, of course, because she's not actually there on merit but because of a tradition dating back through thousands of years and a fair few empires.

Anyway, the good-natured banter continued and the person I was e-chatting (actually the representative of the "Lass O'Gowrie" pub in Manchester) to mentioned that they were quite keen for the strong female characters from "Coronation Street" to appear on the notes, from Ena Sharples on the fiver right on through to Annie Walker on the fifty.

I "wittily" retorted "An Elsie Tenner...?" which was enthusiastically received with a hearty "someone should mock one of those up" and, with the aid of a handy ten-minute coffee break and a couple of Photoshop filters, ten minutes later, in my own lazy and slightly incompetent way, I had, because I couldn't imagine anyone else being bothered to...

Obviously, someone more committed to the "joke" might have spent an entire evening mocking up something far more elaborate and convincing but sometimes it's just about throwing stuff together to get the point across, and I hope that the two-hundred-plus people who went and had a look, and the debate that was started later on that evening about what people might spend it on gave them all a few seconds of fun as they travelled on through this bleak grey world of ours.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the chances of the powers that be putting either Emmeline pankhurst or Jane Austen on the fiver seems to be a pretty safe bet at the moment, considering that there seems to have been quite a backlash since it was announced that Elizabeth Fry was going to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill.

Emmeline Pankhurst makes the most sense, I suppose, given that her efforts did far more to change the ordinary lives of so many women than a lot of people have, although Mary Seacole, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte also have their supporters.

But this is the problem isn't it?

As "Horrible Histories" have also found, it's actually quite difficult to trawl through the pages of history and find many strong female role models to get the girls to also feel connected to our history because for so much of our history women were either not allowed to be in positions of power or simply not recognised by the patriarchal culture in which they existed.

So it might seem rather strange then that so many of that short list are writers, as if that was one of the very few ways that you could make any impact as a woman in those pre-twentieth century days. Unless you were a goddess of course, or an empress, or a queen, or a freedom fighter, or a saint, or a mistress, or a whore... The occasional scientist gets remembered, of course, and the odd economist, nurse, or engineer, but all-in-all, it's not the longest of lists.

Interestingly enough that anonymous person from the "Lass O'Gowrie" might have stumbled upon the interesting point that it is in television drama, and most especially the soaps, that the strongest female role models have been considered to be more universally acceptable and have been allowed to shine and dominate their environments.

It's also quite fascinating to see how poorly Australia treated its first female Prime Minister and not just this week, but over the entire duration of her tenure.

The world, it seems, still has an awful long way to go.

POMPEII LIVE

On Tuesday, June the 18th, I was fortunate enough to attend the first of the British Museum's "Live" events which were being beamed to various cinemas around the country in much the same way as certain theatrical events I have attended recently have also been.

A few weeks earlier, when we had first seen the advertisements for this event, I had, of course, got completely the wrong end of the stick about what sort of event it was going to be. I had visions of a camera crew walking around the Pompeii site and showing us around as if we were on a tourist visit which, of course, might be a very interesting thing to do one day, but sadly, for now it was not to be, even though that's how I described it to a few people before we got our tickets.

I became far wiser when it got mentioned on the BBC Website on the Thursday before the event and, having assumed that it would have sold out long ago, we found that "70%" of the tickets had been sold which rather implied that 30% would still be available and one swift kick-up of the laptop later and the deal was done and Tuesday evening would be spent in consideration of life and death in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum on that fateful day in AD49.

The British Museum are terribly good at this sort of thing, and the exhibition in London itself is a sure-fire hit, so this event, bringing the exhibition to a far wider audience than was previously thought possible, does seem like it might turn out to be another winner, and it is a good thing that these old institutions are embracing new forms of communication to get out into the big wide world and pique our interest. The museum staff even put out Tweets throughout the day adding links to help tell the story and build up the anticipation for the evening, which all helped to make it seem like an "event" in itself.

So, when the allotted hour came around, we shuffled into our seats punctually for a prompt seven o'clock start, noting with some trepidation that the front two rows were reserved for Manchester Grammar School and there was the prospect of a load of schoolkids turning up to spoil our fun, not that we needed to have worried, as not all that many of them actually showed up, perhaps preferring the "schools version" of the show which was planned for the following morning.

Still, as soon as Peter Snow bounded across the courtyard we knew that we were in pretty safe hands and, whilst it would never be quite the same as actually being in the building itself and looking at the artefacts "in the charcoal" as it were, I don't imagine that I would get personal tours from expert historians like Bettany Hughes and Mary Beard if I did that either.

The exhibition itself seems to be based around a set up in the form of a house, so that each room, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the sewers, the courtyards, the gardens and so on are allowed to tell the story of what day-to-day life was like in a society that was so instantly smothered upon that fateful day that ironically it can tell us more about what living there was really like, from the loaves of bread to the linen cabinets once tragically transformed instantly into charcoal, than a couple of towns which would probably have been otherwise almost completely forgotten by the march of time might have done.

Several uncomfortable topics were touched upon, from the mostly brutal lives of the slaves, and about how some of the freed slaves were able to rise to the top of society, to the rather frank representations of sex in Pompeii, which seemed to be everywhere, but which were most startlingly displayed by a statue of the god Pan in flagrante delicto with a live goat...

In the beautiful garden room some rather beautiful garden frescoes were discussed with Rachel de Thame as our guide to the birds and the flowers painted upon the walls. I was initially wary of having this kind of "celebrity opinion" piece, but it worked really well and you do have to accept that having recognised experts in their fields chatting about such things does make the whole thing rather more accessible to the general public.

After all, it was a baker who was able to show us all what the ridge around the instantaneously carbonised loaf of bread most probably meant; A piece of string with a built-in carrying handle, which few of the rest of us might have thought of.

Obviously the most moving aspect was perhaps, of the people. The things that they grabbed as they fled, only to die on the beach. The family baked alive whilst hiding under the stairs, so that the imprints of their bodies could be preserved in the ash and reconstructed by pouring in plaster to fill the voids left behind by their bodies. The fact that someone wealthy enough to have a gold bracelet that weighs half a kilogram could do nothing to save themselves or their children.

An hour and a half passed incredibly swiftly and whilst, at times, I felt initially slightly disappointed by lack of sense of where I was within the museum, and got the nagging feeling that if I was actually there I might be stopping and looking just a little bit longer at each of the pieces, when I thought about it afterwards, I realised that it was actually very well done and, even if I didn't get to virtually walk the streets of Pompeii, this was probably about as close as I was likely to get without leaving the Manchester area.

That sense of the timeline to imminent destruction, and the "room by room" structure works very well at getting the story across and relating it to us in our modern lives, which is, I suppose, what history needs to do if it is to engage us. Later on, the debates and arguments for and against further excavation of the sites also proved very interesting and show that some things are not as simple as they might at first appear, although you can sense the craving to know what else there is to find out there.

On occasions, the whole event felt a little bit like a TV show that hadn't yet found a broadcaster, but I suppose that they could only do it this way otherwise they'd have had to close the place to the public for weeks. But then again, this was the first time that they had attempted to do anything like this, so there may very well maybe be a few tweaks to the format next time...

But, as an experiment in opening things up to new audiences, it was something of a minor triumph and I'm very glad we went...

CHEESE SHOP

Okay, here's a couple of questions (or maybe just thoughts) for you...

If, whenever we come away from a cheese shop (especially a "dangerous" one like this one...), we always end up with a fridge that smells of unwashed and sweaty feet every time you open the door, why don't cheese shops smell like that whenever you open the front door walk inside them...?

It is, of course, only "dangerous" from the point of view of our credit and debit cards because of the many cheesey delights and accessories on sale within, and not because of any inherent dangers of the products they are selling (as he listens to the sound of his left ventricle slamming shut...) but, when it comes to matters of cheese, you really do have to tread very caerphilly...

I am unreliably informed that far eastern countries are not quite so keen on cheese as we are in western civilisation, and that tourists can be quite put off by the vaguely milky smell that emanates from all of us who have a diet with a high-dairy content, and, because so much of my own diet is cheese-related in some way, I do wonder quite what they discovered during their food history that managed to serve exactly the same purpose.

After all, as it  probably took a leap of genius for someone in history to make the connection between the fluid that you could draw from an animal and decide that humans could probably drink it, and further great leaps had to be made to allow it to turn into butter, cheese, yoghurt and all the rest, most of our human food decisions have been fairly universal, despite the various communities of early humans growing up in relative isolation from each other, so why that particular idea managed to fail to make the cut in a civilisation so old that it will pretty much eat anything, is a bit of a mystery.

Meanwhile we come to another question, and this one is about tea.

After all, whilst it probably took another great leap of faith for someone to look at a pile of dried leaves and wonder what it might be like to pour boiling water on them and whether that would make a refreshing drink, most of the tea leaves that we put into our teapots and mugs come from far eastern countries and yet what we call "tea" and what some of those cultures call "tea" are sometimes completely different things.

"Worlds apart" you might say...

Not only that but compulsive tea drinkers over here can find certain types of tea that they are presented with in those places thoroughly undrinkable, so what exactly defines a cup of tea, and is there a universal answer that would satisfy everyone who thinks that they know what makes the perfect cuppa...?

Something to ponder on during your next tea break, anyway...

THE HISTORICAL APOLOGY

I see that our beloved leaders have been apologising for our imperial past again, despite the fact that nobody living today had a great deal to do with the things that they’re apologising for on our behalf, or that anyone living here has actually asked them to do so. Still, a wrong done is a wrong done, and, whilst we can never turn back time and change any of what happened, I suppose it’s nice for the descendants of those who had the wrong done to them to feel that it’s been acknowledged.

Not that it changes much. Those who benefited from those outcomes can’t be forced to roll back time and change their history, any more than the victims can be resurrected, allowed to live their normal lives, and perhaps produce a dynasty of unborn people who might also have changed the world. So we can only be sorry for what other people did, and hope that enough of us have learned from history for similar errors of judgement not to be made ever again.

Some hope…

Time, of course, or at least “future time” as well as being a great healer is also a mass of variables. If you could go back to the dawn of life on this sad planet and drop the marble of life into the maze of history, the ball might bounce through different “flip-flop” doors in the maze and there’s nothing at all which guarantees that you’d get human beings out at the end of it.

The problem is, however, that if you think about what’s going on in just one second of this human construct we call “time” and changed just one tiny aspect of what is happening – BAM!! – right now, the ripples would be felt throughout future history and perhaps humanity’s marble would go in a completely different direction as it fell through the “flip-flop thingy” of eternity.

And then, I suppose we ought to ask how far back must our apologies go…? English history is stained by the blood of many wrongs committed, although many “rights” were also achieved because of its dominant position in the world. Many of our closer neighbours would attest to our brutal history and some still resent it even in these enlightened times. Much of our Tudor wealth came from raiding Spanish galleons, although they themselves were up to no good and it was really the fortunes amassed from their pirate’s raiding and pillaging that our pirates were stealing.

Of course, the national psyche was shaped by our occupation by the Romans two thousand years ago, and centuries of living in fear of Viking raiders, so you could argue that we are who we are because of them and ask you to re-focus all your requests for apologies in the direction of Italy or Denmark.

Then again, since 1066, England has essentially been an occupied nation anyway since the Normans crossed the Channel and nabbed our country from right under the eye of King Harold, so anything that has happened since then is pretty much  the fault of the invaders and occupying powers.

In other words, it’s all the fault of the French.

Hmmm… I may be onto something, there… This notion somehow sits rather well with the English way of life, when you think about it. Historically, and perhaps sometimes with pretty good reasons, we’ve quite enjoyed blaming our various European neighbours for many of our ills. Perhaps, if I were a politician, I might seize this idea and take it up as a rallying cry, because it would be a popular sentiment even if it does quietly forget Agincourt and the rather helpful alliances we had with France during the vast conflicts of the last century.

“Just blame the French!” - getting politicians votes almost since voting was first thought of…

And there was me hoping that we could learn from history…

OLD BONES

I suppose, in the end, even I was surprised by how little I actually cared whether the old bones they found under that car park in Leicester actually belonged to King Dickie III or not. I think that I’m rather more disturbed by it all than interested, perhaps because, even though I know I wouldn’t know all that much about it, I’d rather not think about the fact that this old skull of mine might end up being tossed around a lab somewhere by some spotty Herbert in a white coat, if such things would still be around by the time my old bones became something which might be of scientific interest.

Perhaps such disinterest might appear out of character, especially coming from someone who is quite capable of examining the minutiae of his own pitiful existence on an almost daily basis, and getting excitement from the presence of the most humble and mundane of subjects and objects, but I’ve rarely felt any real connection to the long dead, and I certainly have very little in the way of “romantic” attachment to the dead and buried, unless I knew them personally.

A pile of old bones is a pile of old bones, and it really doesn’t matter all that much to me who they once belonged to, unless of course it’s going to help someone get some peace if it can provide some closure to a living person who is missing someone…

Family history doesn’t interest or excite me very much at all. I’ve often said that I am probably descended from a long, long line of nobodies who I probably wouldn’t have liked all that much, and finding out that I was right, or just finding a long list of names of people I never knew, isn’t something that would give me personally any pleasure, even though I know a lot of people seem to find that sort of thing quite fascinating and a whole new industry seems to have been built up around such curiosities.

I’ve never been a fan of “Time Team” and its ilk, either, perhaps because I always had the sneaking suspicion that they really only wanted to find a hoard of gold coins rather than anything useful, so it’s a show that has passed me by over the years as so much digging around in mud and guessing. But then, I’ve always struggled with other people’s obsessions and how they sometimes fail to understand how whatever it is just doesn’t excite you in quite the same way…

Meanwhile, didn’t someone once say that the percentage of creatures which have turned up in the fossil record is so miniscule that we’ve barely scratched the surface, and much of what we think we know about life before humanity might actually give us a couple of thousand years out of the four billion or so that we can reasonably guess about with anything approaching certainty?

Even the ancient civilisations that we know something about tell us little about the day-to-day life for the ordinary person living in those times, and how they got up each morning and got through their day perhaps thinking that they were at the very apex of civilisation, things could never be better than they were that day, and that life was going to stay pretty much the same forever.

Some of us make that mistake these days, and it’s always a sobering thought that civilisations fall as well as rise.

History to me is more cerebral than physical anyway. The artefacts, and the bodies, themselves don’t particularly interest me as much as the philosophies, the mistakes and what we can learn to make sure that we don’t make those mistakes again and add to the long list of human misery.

And so, whilst the headlines that tell us perhaps less shockingly than they hoped it was, that a “Dead person is still dead!” I don’t think it’s simply because they are almost certainly the remains of King Richard III that my lack of being bothered is manifesting itself. I’ve certainly not got any “Lancastrian” axe to grind. My disinterest is more universal than that, as opposed to merely being disinterested…

The obvious unfortunate rhyming slant aside, and the Shakespearean connection notwithstanding, I suppose there is some mild interest to be found in the science of the whole thing, but it’s not as if he was found in an exciting or interesting place like the Tombs of the Pharoahs are.

I know that I haven’t really argued this all that well at all in these pages today. I’m sure in itself that the discovery remains mildly interesting, but perhaps I’m just feeling rather more cynical about the media who-ha surrounding something that seems a little bit trivial to me, and which is getting an awful lot of stupidity wrapped around it, not least by me, I suppose.

But a dead king is always going to remain a dead king and unless we are suddenly going to “Jurassic Park” the old feller, I don’t think anything’s going to change that all that much…

Except... Well, because this is precisely the kind of contrary nonsense I write when I’m feeling in a particularly awkward mood, one thing which might change is my opinion on all this. Tomorrow, indeed I might just find it all incredibly fascinating and the most interesting thing ever. It must be this winter of discontent getting to me...

TIME PASSED

One of the problems with the mad frenzy of wit involved in the average “Twittergame” is the occasional ill-thought-out faux pas you might commit in the giddy rush to pump out the next brilliant bit of banter before someone else thinks of it.

Ah, you know… I’m sure it happens to you all the time during your conversations with real people. The thing you wish you’d never said, the momentary lapse of taste when you are trying your very best to get the people to like you even though you don’t know why.

So it was the other morning when I mistakenly made a 9/11 reference in a game about “rejected Stephen King titles”

Oh, it wasn’t anything nasty or anything like that. I made, I thought, the not unreasonable – and perhaps (I hoped) mildly amusing - leap between the “significant date” in the title of his book about the Joohn F Kennedy assassination, and that perhaps most significant date of the modern era.

I even add what I thought was the common decency to add a “too soon…?” (famously - I thought – or perhaps infamously uttered during screenings of the movie “World Trade Center” a few years ago) to it to let the readers know that I knew what they knew; That this was still a “sensitive” issue to be handled delicately and no disrespect was intended, and it’s not as if I don’t have at least a tenuous connection to the tragedy, having been a playmate of one of the British victims when I was a boy.

Anyway, there was still a perceived and virtual “sharp intake of breath” across the wibbly wobby woo, and, after being mildly admonished that it was probably always going to be “too soon”, I left it at that and went about putting my banterous ways to other, safer, uses.

But it does strike me that there is room for much philosophical debate here. There is the eternal problem of how long it ought to be before a “difficult” date becomes less so. Is it all right to write humorous history books about the events of 1066 because nearly a thousand years have passed, or to make entertainments and action-adventure films about a ship sinking after nearly a hundred…?

The events of November 22 1963 still resonate with my generation just as much as I’m sure those of December 7 1941 resonated with my parent’s generation, and the many tragedies of The Second World War were still fresh in the minds of those who fought it when the films started to be released.

Is the modern world just more sensitive to such things and less able to heal its wounds, or are we just such a “connected” society that none of us want to be the one who stands up and says that the time has come to move on and try to let it go as best we can in case they get castigated and condemned for doing so…?

After all, moving on and, to a certain extent, being able to be more flippant about the tragedies in our lives is part of the great human “coping mechanism” and it doesn’t mean that we have “forgotten” or no longer think that the price was too high - The annual gatherings at the various cenotaphs are testament to that – but at some point we do all need to be able to talk about that most wretched of days without feeling so bloody awful about the numbers.

After all, whilst September 11 2001 might just be the worst day a whole generation can remember, it will also be somebody’s birthday or anniversary, and they ought to be able to claim it back for themselves.

LIGHTING THE TOMBS

Some Hieroglyphs...
but not the ones in the Valley of the Kings

Deep inside the tombs of the Pharoahs in ancient Egypt, the artisan craftsmen toiled away creating the most beautiful and colourful artwork to accompany the Pharoah himself in his journey through the afterlife. First the walls were prepared to a smooth, plaster-like finish, then the drawings were marked out using writing sticks. After that, each figure and hieroglyph was painstakingly carved out in relief work and finally each was painted with the brightest of colours before the whole chamber was hidden, supposedly forever, never to be seen again by human eyes at least.

We can only gaze in awe and wonder at the magnificent and ultimately thankless work of these ancient artists and wonder about them as they slaved away at these masterpieces that they believed would only be remembered by them in their lifetimes and never seen by other human eyes. How and why they did it remains the topic of much debate in archaeological academia, but you can’t help but admire the commitment and the craftsmanship.

But there is something more fundamental to this for me as a some-time artist and it’s about light. Creating a drawing or painting is not only about the light falling upon the subject that you’re trying to recreate, but also about the light that you need to see what it is that you’re doing. The fact that many of our treasured relatively modern masterpieces of art and literature were created in dark rooms where the main sources of artificial light were candles or oil lamps once the sun went down is sometimes astonishing to me, especially as I’ve occasionally struggled myself in my less than brightly lit home, but when I start to think about the work done in creating the artwork in those tombs, my mind is, quite frankly, boggled.

The decorated tunnels that lead to the main burial chambers are covered from floor to ceiling and indeed on the ceiling by beautiful artistic creations, and those tunnels are buried deep beneath the baking desert and are hundreds of metres long. Whilst modern day tourists are allowed to venture into the Valley of the Kings and can descend into these tombs and look at these images from so long ago, they are not permitted to take photographs as it would damage these fragile images. Whilst cameras were actually confiscated at the gates at the time of my visit a couple of years ago, I’m not sure whether these days they also have to confiscate all manner of other devices as they proliferate.

As to the artistic decorations themselves, the fact that we can see them at all when we descend into the tombs themselves, is mainly because we have modern electric lighting and generators to illuminate the darkness. The people actually creating them had no such advantages, so the question remains, just how did they provide enough light for them to do this particularly intricate artwork?

Some might think that all of the work was done outside in the blazing sunshine and then transported into the darkness for their eternal and very private art installation, but the tombs themselves tell us a different story. Like a series of diagrams in a Haynes manual or any other “how to” book (“Tomb Decoration for Dummies…?”) one or two of the tombs had to be completed with a certain amount of haste when the current “Living God” dropped dead unexpectedly, and so we can see them now in the form of a “work in progress” and work out, in so far as we can work out anything with any absolute certainty when it comes to long-lost civilisations, that most of this work – perhaps not the preliminary sketches - was done in situ and, more significantly, in the dark, and using the kind of equipment a modern day artist would consider somewhat rudimentary.

Nowadays we can grab a tube of whatever colour we need off the shelf, or mix other colours from them, but back in those times, any colour you needed had to be created from scratch. Likewise, the simple act of marking out a wall requires something resembling a pencil and a certain amount of precision measuring equipment, all of which people like me can get from our local art shop. A pencil, despite what you might think, is a fascinatingly complex piece of equipment.

Compared to the difficulties of knocking together a DVD player - and its internal laser beam - from its component parts and then being able to knock them out at Asda for twenty quid or so, you may think that a pencil is a relatively simple thing, but just think about what you would have to do to make one from scratch yourself and then think again. Centuries of innovation went into making the simple pencil something that we can all now take for granted. Yet, despite the fact of all my art school training and years of using such things, I can still struggle to draw something adequate with something as accessible as a pencil on a piece of paper if I am in a dark room on a cloudy day. 

But these ancient artists had nothing like pencils to work with. Their marks had to be made using much more simple tools. They couldn’t just pop down to “Staples” (other stationers are available) and get themselves another one like we can, and merely marking out their artwork in the pitch darkness was only the beginning of their problems.

So how did they illuminate their workspaces? Some might suggest that they used flaming torches, but the orange flickering light is really not very good light to create artwork to, and anyway there is no evidence of soot accumulation on the friezes or the ceilings. There is the possibility, I suppose that gangs of men were scrubbing down the walls and ceilings after the artwork was completed, but there’s little evidence to suggest they did, and that would surely have destroyed the very artwork that had been created.

Granted, more modern eyes might have said “So what? No one’s ever going to know…” and gone ahead with the scrubbing anyway but these were craftsmen culturally committed to painting for eternity, not Bob the Decorator and his dodgy assistants, and, despite the fact that their creations were supposed to be hidden for all time, they obviously took an astonishing amount of pride in what they were creating.

Much the same argument with regards to the torches tends to rule out tallow candlelight too, or tinderboxes, or even oil lamps. They too, with their sticky residues, bring up the same issues of the deposits they would have left behind them, not to mention the horrific fumes that you would have to be attempting to do your work in. Despite this, of course, I am willing to believe that, in the end, it is most probably oil lamps that are the most likely options in explaining how these things were done.

Others of a more fanciful nature have suggested a complex series of mirrors bouncing the sunlight down into the depths, but again, from a practical point of view, it seems unlikely to be a solution. Just think about how you struggle to change a spark plug on a dark night if someone doesn’t hold the lamp steady and imagine the difficulties your own shadow can cause you when you’re trying to do any kind of simple task in a dark or ill-lit place.

I heard Raafat, our guide to the sights and temples of Egypt a couple of years ago, chatting to another tourist about his belief that the ancients must have had some kind of knowledge of electric lighting, even if it was only in the form of rudimentary batteries and filaments of some sort, and, after watching a few documentaries on the discovery and development of electricity recently, I’m becoming inclined to believe that he might very well be on to something there. After all, we are merely scratching the surface when it comes to our knowledge about this ancient civilisation, but if you think about it for a moment, from a purely practical point of view, he may very well really have had a point.

After all, is it truly impossible that the principle of, for example Carbon Arc lamps, is not just a recent rediscovery of knowledge known to the ancients and forgotten about as civilisations crumbled and the great experimenters were no longer able to practice their arts? Charging up water using static electricity drums and metal wires doesn’t necessarily have to have been only a modern sequence of thought when you consider just how much experimentation the ancient necromancers and alchemists did when it came to chemicals and minerals. Such things really could have been well-known principles that we just lost the knowledge about somewhere in the intervening centuries when other priorities made for a less enquiring culture. After all, fragile materials do vanish given a few centuries and just because we’ve decided something is a “pot” or an “oil lamp” doesn’t mean that’s what it actually was. All it ever proves is that we can never be absolutely sure about anything and that all of our guesses about that day-to-day life was actually like for the average ancient Egyptian can never be anything much more than that - educated guesswork, and anyone who doubts the levels of technological sophistication of the old world should examine the “2000 Year Old Computer” or the so-called Antikythera Device which appears to blow a lot of our ideas about ancient Greek culture into very tiny pieces. (http://www.antikythera-mechanism.com/)

In about four thousand years, I suspect whoever is living on this planet then will struggle to understand much of what we get up to, either. Whatever photographs that survive that long might show us all sitting around staring at a screen in the corner, or walking around with strange wires clamped to our ears which the archaeologists of the future will assume to be house temples or some sort of decoration, because those silly primitives of the 21st century simply couldn’t have lived the kind of full and sophisticated lives that they do, could they?

It might seem very unlikely to us with our “enlightened” minds to imagine that our so-called “primitive” ancestors might have had knowledge that we think that only our culture was intelligent enough to have thought of, but then they managed to build some structures that have lasted over four thousand years, and there’s precious little of our modern world that we can really claim will last that long, is there...?