John Butler

When I started walking as a hobby a couple of decades ago, there were relatively few websites and guides available online. One that I did come across was John Butler's landscape photography website. At the time John was walking - and taking beautiful photos - on a Land's End to John O'Groats walk.

We emailed each other a few times, and I found his website to be a very useful and beautiful resource. It is therefore somewhat of a shock to revisit his website and discover that he died over seven years ago. I'm glad to see his website has been preserved and is still available to read.

http://www.jbutler.org.uk/

RIP John. I hope the sun is shining on the hills of Heaven.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. From Wiki:

"(it) is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the tragedy of the Holocaust that occurred during the Second World War. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 5 million Slavs, 3 million ethnic Poles, 200,000 Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "

A few years ago we went to a talk by the great pilot Eric 'Winkle' Brown. We expected an entertaining talk about his experiences in the air, and that is what we got. However we also got a long section on his experiences near the end of the war. As a German speaker and pilot, he interviewed Hermann Goering after his capture, and also was one of the first people to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

He spent a fair while talking about the horrors he saw in the camp, and his feelings about the people who staffed it. Wiki has the following: "he soon interviewed the camp's former commandant and his assistant Josef Kramer and Irma Grese, and remarked upon the experience by saying that; "Two more loathsome creatures it is hard to imagine" and further describing the latter as "... the worst human being I have ever met."

The very powerful and upsetting talk made me realise one thing: I'd never actually heard a first-hand account of the camps before. I'd seen plenty of TV interviews with survivors, but whilst horrific, they lacked the impact that first-hand testimony holds. And as old age takes those who suffered in the camps and survived, and those such as Eric Brown who helped liberate them, first-hand testimony will evaporate. We shall be left only with recordings, and like pictures of emaciated survivors, or of diggers bulldozing piles of bodies into graves, they are easier to deny.

And this is a reason why we should all pause for a minute today to remember the Holocaust and to consider man's potential to inflict mass suffering on his fellow man. The Holocaust was not the first such atrocity, and sadly it was not the last. I fear to say there will be more in the future. The people affected my be different, and it may be rooted in different causes, but remembering the horror and saying "Never again," are good baby steps in preventing their recurrence.

Denying the Holocaust - especially because of dislike of the groups who were killed - is the first step to allowing something like it to happen again.

So pause and think. If you are religious, offer a little prayer. If you are not, think how you'd feel if it was your mother and father in such a camp, or your son or daughter.

For the people who died in the holocaust were not statistics, nor were they nameless bodies in a black-and-white photo. They were real people, as real as you or I.

Weighty topics

When I was young, I was scarcely concerned about my weight. As a teenager I felt I could eat whatever I liked without putting on weight, although my family might disagree with that! This was aided by the fact I was often in pain, and hence my appetite was stifled, and hindered by long periods of inactivity due to the pain.

But I don't think I was ever particularly overweight. I had my last operation in May 1998, I took up walking as a hobby immediately afterwards. 1,000 miles a year tended to keep me trim and, although I scarcely ever weighed myself, I got the impression that I could eat whatever I wanted, only to lose any weight gained during a walking trip.

Then came the coastwalk, a year and 6,200 miles of walking. Although I was already quite fit, my weight decreased markedly during the first three months, plateaued for six months, and finally increased for the last three months despite an increased average mileage. I can only assume that my body had got used to the exercise, so I required less calories per mile. Pictures of me from that time show a slightly gaunt, bronzed and well-weathered figure staring at the camera - I was certainly fitter than I had ever been before, and perhaps ever will be.

Perhaps the fittest I have ever been.
What went wrong?

As I passed through my thirties, work and other obligations weighed on me and my weight slowly increased. I got married, and happiness induced a certain sloth that also helped my paunch grow. Then, a small back problem and the birth of our son led to me reaching 100kg.

This is overweight, but I have short legs and a long body, and I kept on telling myself it didn't really matter.

Then, on February 1st 2016, I got meningitis.

The meningitis was not caused by my weight, nor by my general health. It just happened. But I was shocked when I went on scales in the hospital and discovered I weighed over 105kg. I had to face it: I was in my mid-forties, overweight, and with a young son who I wanted to see grow up into adulthood. The meningitis had been an almighty scare, and my mortality had been made clear to me.

I decided to do something about it.

I started in September 2016. A two-pronged approach of boring calorie counting and even more boring running led me to a weight of 95kg, which I was more happy with. I also cut down on my drinking, which I was less happy with. Since then, more of the same has led me down to about 90-92kg. This means my BMI says I am still overweight, despite there not being much more to loose.

I find I can maintain 90-92kg fairly easily, without undergoing too much suffering and without doing too much exercise. Best of all, it's not trying mentally: I don't find it hard to do. Attempts to go below 90kg always fail within a few weeks.

My ideal weight in my mid-forties seems to be about 90kg. I wonder what it will be in my fifties or sixties?

Meningitis: one year on

So it is now exactly a year later from my previous post, and it seems the right time to note down what happened in detail. Please note that most of the following was written in the days immediately after my illness, and so my use of language might not be perfect.

It was a Monday, and I had had a sore neck over the weekend. Şencan, my wife, had noted I was in a generally irritable mood that morning (or at least more irritable than normal).

Early on I walked with my son Robert (nineteen months old at the time) to Active Ants, a playgroup for children a little over a mile from home. We had a pleasant time, bouncing on the bouncy castle, pushing him around in cars and generally having fun. However I had a slight headache and my neck and shoulders ached, as if I had been carrying a heavy pack for a week.

We arrived home a little after midday, and after a quick snack Robert fell asleep. I put him to bed and went to my study to check some emails. However after a quarter of an hour my head was pounding; I’ve never had a migraine before, but my mum suffered from them and I assumed it was one. This was especially true as the headache appeared to get worse in light. So I went to the bedroom, closed the curtains and went to lie down.

I got a little sleep, but I kept on waking as I could not get comfortable with my stiff neck, however I positioned the cushions. A couple of hours later Robert awoke, and so I changed him and took him straight down to the kitchen for a meal. I felt grotty, so I just opened a can of beans and sausage. He was in a good mood, but after he had eaten I found it impossible to carry him upstairs. I tried to get him to walk up himself, but he just took that as being part of a game.

With hindsight I should have called an ambulance there and then, or phoned Şencan so she could come home and help. However I eventually managed to get Robert into the lounge, where I placed him in front of the TV and lay down on the floor beside him.

Robert usually takes my lying on the floor as an excuse to jump on me, pull my fingers in an attempt to drag me somewhere, or pass me a book to read to him. Oddly though, he left me alone and played by himself, which is almost unheard of – it was almost as if he realised I was ill.

Eventually the phone rang, and I struggled to get off the floor to answer it. It was Şencan: she said she was coming home soon, but when she heard my voice she realised I was ill and said she was coming back immediately. I went to lie back on the floor again and waited.

When she arrived she sent me straight to bed. I was feeling really cold, so I got under the covers whist she fetched me a hot-water bottle and put the heating on. My head was causing me tremendous pain, as if elephants were standing on both sides of my temple, pressing inwards. That was the background pain: in addition there were sharpish spikes that occasionally caused me to grit my teeth, gasp or even scream. I was also seeing strange patterns in my eyes, even then they were closed, and I spent a few enjoyable minutes trying to identify the shapes they were morphing into: a tank became a nude woman; a tree a mountainous landscape.

I’m not really sure what happened for the next few hours: I think I might have slept for a while as the next thing I can recall is Şencan saying she was going to call an ambulance. I did not want her to bother anyone, but I was not in a position to complain. Sometime before this I think the panting and gritted teeth had been replaced by more screams. I was, to put it mildly, in intense pain.

A paramedic soon arrived and introduced himself; he was going slightly bald and reminded me a little of Prince William (it is odd that despite the pain in my head I felt fairly lucid). He asked me some questions and got me to do movements: in particular the fact I could not move my head anywhere near my chest seemed to alarm him. My temperature was 39 degrees, and my heart rate 130 despite having been in bed for hours. The only thing that seemed to relieve the pain even a small amount was covering my eyes with a rolled-up T-shirt to block off all light.

He put a canular in my left arm and started to give me some drugs. I could hear Robert screaming from somewhere in the house; I assumed he was hearing my screaming and was upset by that, Şencan’s concern and the strange man in the house.

Two ambulancemen arrived, and the paramedic started to brief them. During this I asked if I was going to hospital, and he replied that I was. I think I was given some morphine at that time, but even that did not really seem to work. The paramedic started talking to someone on his phone, and he said they were going to ‘stabilise’ me before transferring me to hospital.

Now, ‘stabilising’ is not a word I have given too much thought to in the past. It turns out it is not a nice word to be on the receiving end of. ‘Stabilising’ means that you need stabilising; that you are essentially unstable. Whilst friends may say that I’m unstable at the best of time, I found that word more frightening than anything else.

About half an hour later they got me into some form of chair and wheeled me towards the door. I asked Şencan to throw a few things into a bag: my phone, some clothes, a little cash. I didn’t see Robert anywhere, but I could hear him screaming. This upset me more than my own pain. I wondered how they were going to get me down the stairs, but they had that covered: the chair had some form of tracks that got me down the stairs very gently. It was a sign of my rather odd mindset that I wanted to know how it moved, but was in no condition to get up and examine it.

I was put in the back of the ambulance, and they struggled to transfer me over to the trolley: any movement of my neck caused me to scream in pain. Once I was settled one of the ambulancemen asked me my date of birth, and he laughed: his was the same. Not just the date, but also the year. His colleague laughed when I asked which of us has worn the best.  The crew were from Swaffham, and had done a transfer from King’s Lynn to Papworth Hospital, from where they had been tasked to me. Ambulancemen certainly get around.

They blue-lighted me to Addenbrookes, the first time I have ever been in an ambulance as a patient. They gave me more morphine, for a total of (I think) 20 mg. I also got some anti-nausea drugs to counteract the other drugs they had put into me. They told me there might be a delay due to a queue of ambulances; as it happened we went straight to the front of the queue and I was taken in immediately.

What followed is very much a blur; people were asking me questions, but I could not see who as I had asked someone to drape something over my eyes to protect them from the light. I was soon taken up for a CT scan: there was another potential cause of my pain (stroke?) which the CT scan would remove as an option. In the scan I asked them how powerful their scanner was, and whether it would be able to detect anything as small as my brain.

I was given a cocktail of drugs: more morphine, some antivirals, and other things I cannot remember. The loss of control was upsetting: I had no idea who was doing what to me, and my brain itself felt as if it had been swapped with that of an identical twin. My mind, which I had come to know well over forty years, was a stranger.

They told me they believed I had meningitis, either bacterial or viral. It was odd not being able to see them work around me, but I was glad of whatever was blocking out the light. Time felt odd, as if minutes and hours had done a twirling dance, but soon I heard Şencan’s voice and felt happier. The next few hours passed in rather a blur; I was given more drugs, and in the very early hours in the morning I was taken for a lumbar puncture, the results of which would tell them whether I had bacterial or viral meningitis.

The lumbar puncture was more of a trial than it should have been. A doctor and (2?) nurses tried five times to get a sample, but failed. Eventually I was wheeled through the hospital, and I was surprised how strange I felt. I do not know whether it was the drugs or the feeling of being wheeled around whilst essentially blindfolded, but I felt simultaneously nauseous, dizzy and happy, even as the elephants performed a jig on my forehead.

I was wheeled into a room whilst nurses fussed around me. I could tell Şencan was worried, but I was more concerned about her: it was the early hours of the morning and she would have to get home. Perversely the car parking charges also worried me. My mind was evidently clear enough to worry about such trivia despite the pain.

Şencan eventually left and I tried to sleep. This was slightly difficult; firstly as I was still finding it difficult to find a position where my neck would feel comfortable, and secondly because my left arm was attached to a drip stand that was dripping 873ml of liquid into me every hour.

Now, I drink a great deal of water. But nearly a litre of water every hour is a little much, even for me, and soon the liquid wanted to find its way out. The whole protracted process of getting it out did not help me sleep.

Şencan returned at around ten in the morning, and it turned out she had had very little sleep. A procession of nurses and a couple of doctors came to see me, and I now felt well enough to take the t-shirt off my eyes for short periods. To my surprise, everyone was wearing masks. It turned out that if it was bacterial meningitis it might be contagious, and this explained why I was in a room of my own rather than a ward. The downside of the failed lumbar puncture the night before was that it would be longer before it would be known if these precautions could be dropped.

Just after midday a doctor from the infectious diseases came in. He exuded professionalism, and even looked as if he had just returned from examining patients in a jungle. He managed to perform the lumbar puncture quickly and with minimal fuss even whilst having to work around the four or five holes made by the doctors the previous night. His manner and talk relaxed me, especially when he persuaded a nurse that Şencan could stay with me over the lunchtime period when she was supposed to leave.

The doctor returned in the late evening, a while after Şencan had left, and told me that it was viral meningitis. This was good news as it is less serious than bacterial. He also said I had to spend another night in the room.

The next morning I was feeling a bit better, and I spent a while looking at the building site outside my window, and also wondering if the drip system could be miniaturised and made more convenient for both hospital and patient (despite its size it could only monitor and control one line at a time, which was a shame as at one point I had three feeds into my arm. This led the nurses to have to swap lines over). I had complained about my canular itching during the night, and although a couple of nurses examined it, it was only after daylight that one of them noticed that my arm underneath the canular had swollen like and egg: the canular had come out and it had been injecting the liquid into tissue.

About ten in the morning I started to feel very ill again, and for the first time in about twelve or so hours I was screaming once again as the elephant stomped their way back from their slumbers. I was given some oral morphine, but it was clear that they wanted me to leave.

Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I left. My parents were waiting for me at home, and as I climbed up the stairs Robert started screaming; I can only guess that he had been greatly upset over the trauma of a few nights before.

It took me a few weeks to even get anywhere near to normal (or whatever normal is for me), but I was still plagued with headaches, photophobia and issues with my short-term memory. A doctor said the headaches should last a couple of months, but they continued for much longer. In June I saw a specialist and had an MRI scan; an interesting experience in itself. Sadly a few days later I was being blue lighted to hospital again with what seemed like meningitis symptoms: very stiff neck and shoulders, photophobia, temperature, headaches; the exception was that my blood pressure and heart rate was not very elevated. After spending a few hours in A&E they released me.

I stayed with my parents for a week, and then returned home. In November I had another ‘attack’ of whatever it is, although this was much milder and, after the previous experience, we did not even bother calling an ambulance. Şencan is certain that these second and third attacks were meningitis as well, although doctors doubt it because recurrent viral meningitis is rare.

Now, a year later, I still get frontal headaches most days, and my short-term memory occasionally floats merrily away mid-sentence, leaving me trying to grasp the nebulous spectre of whatever it was I was saying or thinking. Bright lights can be troubling. But I have survived, and 2017 is a new year.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me, from my neighbour Joe who looked after Robert that first night without knowing whether I had an infectious disease, to my sister who drove down in the middle of the night to take over. My parents have been brilliant, as has my brother.

But most of all, thanks to Şencan. It was tough for her to juggle a difficult job, a teething toddler and a sick husband. She has been, and is, wonderful.

The perils of Dry January

Note: the following occurred on this day last year:

In the dying days of 2015 we were assailed by adverts and media chatter for “Dry January”, the campaign to forgo alcohol for a whole month. We were told we’d be wealthier, healthier and happier.

This seemed like a good idea to me. But in my usual over-the-top manner, I decided to also forgo two other nasty habits I had developed for crisps and Red Bull. And not just for a month, but for as long as I could. They were habits I could manage when my hobby was long-distance walking as I burnt off any excess calories, but my more sedentary toddler-dominated lifestyle has prevented that.

Too give myself an incentive, I decided that any money saved on alcohol, crisps and Red Bull would be put into Robert’s bank account. I also decided I could eat ‘gift’ items: for instance if someone offered me a drink, I could accept. The only time this happened during January were some crisps served on my plate at a playgroup, which I ate with some glee.

So when January 31^st came along and although I had lost a little weight, I did not feel healthier. In fact, I’d been feeling a little ill. I was not wealthier – the money was going into Robert’s account. And there were times when a glass of wine would have made me happier, if only for relieving stress.

But I was looking forward to the next day when, if you believed the adverts and radio talk about “Dry January”, I would be a He-Man. An Alpha Male. Instead of carrying a rucksack up and down mountains, I would be carrying mountains over a rucksack. I would be an Adonis.

So what happened that next day, February 1^st? The end of “Dry January”? Did I feel better? Was I wealthier, healthier and happier?

Was I heck. I was being blue-lighted to Addenbrookes Hospital with Menengitis.

“Dry January”: don’t do it. It’s not good for your health.

(Note: I may have got correlation and causation somewhat confused in this post)

Dartford Crossing

We've just spent an enjoyable weekend with friends in the south of London. This involves using the Dartford Crossing - the magnificent cable-stayed Queen Elizabth II bridge on the way out, and the adjacent twin-bore tunnels on the return.

Last time we did the journey, towards the end of last year, we paid tolls in each direction. Yesterday we crossed the bridge to find the road bypassing the toll booths as the old toll system has now been replaced with electronic payment.

This peeved me for the following reasons:
*) In what is obviously a cost-cutting move (they do not need the staff), the tolls have increased from £2.00 to £2.50

*) The prices were not displayed on the motorway on the run-up to the bridge - it would be good for people to know how much it cost, so that they could make a choice about whether to use it or not (even if most would not have a choice).

*) Although you can pre-pay, they give you up until midnight the day after to pay - not particularly good if you are away on a long trip. And the penalties are £70 if you miss that midnight-the-next-day deadline (halved if you pay within fourteen days).

*) Under the original PFI scheme, the tolls should have been removed in 2003, twelve years after the QEII bridge opened. Instead, they were converted to a 'charge', for which the company would widen parts of the M25 (using the cheap and not-so-cheerful active hard shoulder scheme) and renovate the Hatfield tunnel.

*) Even though I managed to get Internet access within the time period, this might not always be the case, and I really don't want to give my card details out on the Internet too much.

*) The signs state something like 'Go online to pay' without giving the URL. If I was an Internet scammer then I would copy the official site and give it a similar URL with SEO to get people in.

This seems a really poor and user-unfriendly move to me, with little advantage to the end-user over the old scheme. Or do you disagree?

Shipbreaking

Below is a video of a cross-channel ferry being beached in Aliaga, Turkey, ready for breaking.

As can be seen, this is an environmentally destructive way of doing things. I hope the various protesters who stopped Able UK from breaking ships in Hartlepool are satisfied when they see such scenes.

The weather

Being English, it seems perfectly acceptable to write a short post about the recent weather, especially as the wind is whistling outside my study, and the roof's making disturbing creaking noises.

This winter has, so far, been mild and stormy, compared to last year where there were very cold snaps in early December and early March. In fact, we have only had two and a half frosts here in Cambridge, but the garden is little more than a soggy green carpet.

And yet for what feels like a fortnight, we have been told of the massive floods that are affecting the country. Whilst some parts of the country have had it bad, I wonder if these floods are that bad from a a historical point of view, or if is due to the 24-hour media's thirst for *any* news story?

Memories

When I was a child, my parents owned an old walled garden in South Devon. They put a caravan within the walls, and we would go down every Easter and summer for a week or two to relax. It was a magical part of my childhood: we would clear the vegetation off the land using slashers (long wooden handles with a sharp metal blade at the end), and later on dad bought an old Fergie tractor to clear the many month's of vegetation that would build up between our holidays.

An old orchard lay outside the walls, and lack of care had converted the trees into a moss-covered, dark space that was a wonderland for an imaginative child. Pirates would be hiding behind that tree; treasure would be buried under another.

We would go down to Teignmouth and Shaldon to paddle in the sea, and eat rock cakes at the Clipper Cafe. Dad would collect a jar of pennies and tuppences during the year, and we would spend them in the machines on Teignmouth Pier.

Those holidays defined my childhood; I even took my first steps within the garden. Later on, during my coastal walk, I made a pilgrimage back to the place to find it even more overgrown and magical than it had been as a child.

Ornaments lay in the grounds, including two ponds (one broken by my dad to drain the water after my tomboyish sister fell in). A stone sundial with a carved lion's head on each of the column's four faces was situated just outside the wall, beside an old, overgrown driveway. Tall trees overhung the driveway, meaning the sundial sat in a shaded area with an ivy floor.

The gateway into a wonderland.

One day I watched an animated version of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', and immediately afterwards went down to the clearing and sat in front of the sundial, staring at the lions' faces. The column seemed tall, and the lions imposing. But they were not lions: they were Aslan.

Years later some of the surrounding land got developed, and builders cleared some of our property. So went the sundial, never to be seen again. But I still remember it with fondness, and hope it gives some other child a sense of wonder. But I doubt it: it belonged in that shaded dell.

We sold the land some time ago, and I will never be able to walk around it again. I have no pictures of that sundial, and have been able to find nothing similar on the 'net. Looking back over thirty-five years, it is one of the things I miss most from my childhood.

Open government.

A good friend of ours died earlier in the year. For various reasons we wanted to attend his inquest, so shortly after his death I phoned Cambridgeshire coroner's office. They told me that it would be a number of months before the inquest would be held, and that I should check their webpage frequently.

http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/community/bmd/deaths/coroner-and-inquests.htm

I did as requested, but there were problems. Sometimes the webpage would display inquest times and dates weeks in advance, with many separate inquests on the list. At others times it would display ones that had already happened, and only update a day or two before new ones were due. This meant that I was having to check the webpage more or less daily, a task aided by a little script I wrote to trawl the relevant page.

About a month ago I realised the webpage had not been updated for a while. I phoned up the coroner's office, who told me that our friend's inquest was due for the 30th of October.

I checked again today, and the webpage has still had not been updated. The inquest is to be in Wisbech, and to prevent Sencan taking a day off work for no reason, I wanted to make sure that it was still on.

Instead of checking on the webpage, I was forced to make another phone call.

It should be a simple task to ensure that a webpage is kept up to date with the latest information on when inquests are going to be held. Even better would be to allow people to lodge a request for information about when an inquest is due, and email them when a date is set.

This may sound like a whinge, and it is. However concern over missing the inquest has added a tiny bit more stress and annoyance at a very sad time for us.

Dumb ways to die

My childhood memories are filled with public service announcements. Whether it was Darth Vader serving penance as the Green Cross Man, or warnings not to mix cross-ply and radial tyres, each film sent a carefully-constructed message.

Looking back, many of the old PSA's were dated and laughable, especially for a modern audience. Times have changed, and so have PSA's: here in the UK we have a very effective anti-drink drive advert that has run for a few years.

It is rare for such po-faced adverts to become an Internet hit. But one has: here is the brilliant PSA  'Dumb Ways to Die'. With mind worm lyrics, a catchy tune and simple Mr Men-style graphics, it is both cute and weirdly disturbing.

I won't say what it's message is, but needless to say it is very effective.

Cats

I am not a pet person. I was raised amongst animals - my sister had a Cocker Spaniel and a plethora of semi-wild farm cats. But aside from sharing a couple of goldfish with my siblings, I have never had any pets.

I have managed to maintain this happy situation for nearly forty years. I do not mind animals, but have never felt any desire to get a pet, the practical elements always outweighing any pet-related urges. What do I do when I go on holiday? Will I be a good owner? Can I face cleaning up after them?

Sencan is exactly the opposite. Her childhood home was filled with cats, and her mother collected a menagerie of semi-feral street cats that she still feeds to this day. My wife loves cats, heart and soul.

Last Saturday afternoon, Sencan got a call from out neighbour, saying a cat had been wandering up and down the street, trying to get into houses out of the snow. After watching it for an hour, he let it into the warm. Sadly it did not get on with his cat, so he wanted to know if we could help.

Sencan almost ran next door, and a few minutes later we had an eight-month old cat roaming around. It seemed reasonably well-kept and knew its way around a house - it was soon racing up and down stairs, and found its way into Sencan's lap within a few minutes.

The cynic in me kept well away for a while, but within a couple of hours I was playing with it. It slept downstairs with a kitty-litter tray provided by our neighbour, and in the morning I let it upstairs as I worked in my study. Within half an hour I had abandoned my work and was playing with the cat. In the process it walked over my keyboard and found a debug mode in Google Chrome that I did not know existed. How could I not like it?

Mid-morning, our neighbour came around with a travel-case and took it to the excellent Wood Green Animal Shelter. Since then, it has been successfully rehoused.

I was amazed to find that I missed the cat. It had only been in our lives for eighteen hours, and yet it had firmly inveigled itself into our household. Added to this was a regret and sorrow for a family somewhere nearby who had lost a kitten.

How can such a little ball of fluff change my mind so quickly?

Happy Christmas!

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, and are now firmly ensconced in front of the TV with a glass of wine / whisky / sherry whilst daydreaming about next year's travels.

Professor Sidney Watkins

Few strangers have the ability to touch people's lives, to improve them for the better. I can name a couple in my life, but one outshines all the others: Professor Sidney Watkins.

I have written before about the troubles I had with my left ankle, the pain and discomfort that somewhat blighted my teens and twenties. A series of doctor and surgeons gave me long lists of activities I could not do: no ice skating, no skiing, no running, no serious walking. My life was constrained by the fear of pain and orders.

The Professor had little reason to show interest in the 20-year old who was introduced to him back in 1993, no reason to help him. He had achieved much in his life: neurosurgeon to three presidents, chief medical officer of F1 racing, and head of several safety organisations. He was semi-retired from private practice and had only a handful of people on his books.

For several years I had been bundled from pillar to post by doctors and surgeons, both within the NHS and private practice. I had undergone all sorts of tests, but no-one had worked out what was wrong. One day Andrea, my physiotherapist, decided to take me to see a 'rather good' surgeon who was in the hospital. I was taken to a waiting room, and after a few minutes a jovial white-haired man greeted me.

He studied, poked and probed my leg for a few minutes, before proclaiming: "I know what's wrong."

It took him several operations and five years, but he fixed me up. It is a measure of the man that he actually apologised for it having taken so long. Unlike all my other surgeons, when I asked him if I would ever be able to walk the Pennine Way, he immediately said yes.

Thanks to him, I can.

Sid, thanks for everything.I hope there are some good fishing rods in heaven, and that the salmon are running.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaEirq1vs3I

The Shard

I watched the Shard being built with interest: the plans, the controversy, the unusual construction mechanism (building upwards before building the foundations), the infiltration by base-jumpers; and I doubted I would like it.

On Sunday we went on a walk through London, and the Shard was visible for much of the way. Sencan instantly liked it, and my muted disapproval melted away as I approached. We would occasionally glimpse it around a bend in the river, or through a gap between buildings, its weird shape tantalising and enticing us onwards. By the time I reached its base at London Bridge, I loved it despite myself.

That great aim of architects and planners around the world - context - was scrunched up into a ball and thrown out of the window. The tower's context is all wrong: it is on the other side of the river from the large towers of the City; worse, it brutalises a large part of London.

But what a brutalisation. Viewing the Shard is like being hammered from behind by a large ape. However you find with shock that would could be horrific and bestial is actually rather enjoyable; a secret thrill.

It is the shape of the Shard that does it: nowhere near as phallic as the Canary Wharf Tower (especially in its earlier days, with the two much-lower buildings that flanked the tower). The Shard looks more alien, like a spaceship has landed and is awaiting permission to take off for an unknown destination. It makes the many towers at Canary Wharf seem both old-fashioned and unnecessary. Who wants a New York or Chicago skyline when we can have something so different?

Although the tapered shape is fairly novel, the eponymous 'shards' at the top are the real gimmick. They make the tower look incomplete, as if the builders have just gone for a tea-break and will be back soon. Or perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft that has landed in the city to await repairs after a prang with an asteroid.

I have no doubt that the Shard will not last as long as the Tower of London, or have such an illustrious and varied story. But, for the moment at least, it is a welcome newcomer to London's skyline.

Events have rather stifled my 2012 walking plans, but here are my first six walks of the year:

No.	Location	Distance (m)	Date Walked
947	Trent Valley Way: Holme Pierrpont to Thrumpton and return	20.4	30/03/2012
946	A walk along the Stour Valley Path from Newmarket	22.1	27/03/2012
945	A circular walk from Swavesey to Oakington, Childerley and Boxworth	16.3	30/01/2012
944	A circular walk between St Ives, Warboys and Somersham	25.2	28/01/2012
943	A linear walk from Godmanchester to Yelling and Houghton	18.6	23/01/2012
942	A circular walk from Cambourne to Elsworth and Papworth Everard	17.5	16/01/2012

This included perhaps the worst named trail I have ever done, the Pathfinders Long Distance Walk.

Hopefully I will get more walks done in the next quarter...

Eject!

The following link details an RAF pilot's recovery from horrific injuries after a mid-air collision and ejection. His life was saved by, perversely, a weak joint in the chin-strap of his helmet.

http://www.ian-weaver.com/ians_page/accident-10th-jan-1996/comment-page-1/

An amazing read; it is well worth reading the comments as well.

William Jessops

It may have been noted that I am rather fond of engineering. Indeed, the heavier the engineering - whether planes, trains, bridges, tunnels etc - the better. Given this, it is strange that I went into computer software, where the engineering is as light as it is possible to get. But my love of engineering  - and especially civil engineering - has continued unabated.

In 1992 I found a copy of Samuel Smiles' 'The lives of the Engineers' in the university library. If you wish to read this excellent book, then it is available for download from the Guttenberg Project. The book, written in 1862, describes the lives of the great early Victorian engineers. I read it, rapt at the descriptions of the great men and their equally great works. Many of the names were familiar to me, but there was one sad exclusion: William Jessop was only mentioned in three places. Indeed, the great engineers of the canal age were sadly forgotten in Smiles' fascinating project.

Many of the great names of the canal-building era (spanning from the opening of the Bridgewater Canal in 1761 to about 1840) are well-known: John Smeaton for his pioneering lighthouse on Eddystone Rock, now rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe; James Brindley, responsible for the Bridgewater, the Trent and Mersey and other canals; and Thomas Telford, whose fame is such that a town was named after him.

Yet arguably the most influential canal engineer, and one who was at his best at the height of the canal mania in the 1790s, was William Jessops. Born in Devonport in 1745, at the age of 16 he started work for the famous engineer John Smeaton. Soon the pupil overshadowed his tutor, although the two remained close until Smeaton's death.

Unlike many engineers he was keen to try new technologies; he was a pioneer in ironworking and was responsible for several early cast-iron aqueducts. He was also not entirely wedded to canals and often recommended the construction of plateways (a form of early railways) where canals were impractical.

Rather than give an in-depth description of his life, it is perhaps best to list some of the works with which he was involved to a large degree:

• Grand Junction Canal
• Grantham Canal
• Nottingham Canal
• Cromford Canal
• Caledonian Canal
• Grand Canal of Ireland
• The West India Docks
• Bristol Floating Harbour
• Surrey Iron Railway

He was also responsible for a multitude of harbour and drainage works; he was a master at the manipulation of water. Much of the design of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (routinely attributed to Telford) was performed by Jessop, who oversaw the younger man's work.

He also jointly started one of my favourite Victorian companies - Butterley Engineering, a steelwork company that sadly went into administration in 2009, over 200 years after it was founded. Butterley made the grand spans of the overall roof at St Pancras, and the company's stamps can still be seen on the ironwork. More recently they made the steelwork for the Falkirk Wheel and the Spinnaker Tower.

In addition, he was held in such high regard that he was often called to parliament to give his judgement on schemes proposed by various other engineers, and investors would call on him to inspect plans drawn up by others.

To become a great engineer you need to be a self-publicist; both Brunel and Telford were excellent at this part of their work. Jessop, however, was not - his family did not allow his personal papers to be used and no biography of him was written for decades. For this reason works that he deserves major credit for - such as the Caledonian Canal - are routinely credited to others, such as Telford.

Part of the problem is that he had his fingers in so many pies that he often had to let more junior engineers perform the actual construction. The same is true of other engineers such as Brunel, but they were better at making sure that they got the credit for the resulting works.

Wherever you go in Britain you come across his works: from the Caledonian Canal through the Great Glen in Scotland to the docks that lie in the shadow of Canary Wharf. What is more, his capability to swap between water and iron, canals and railways, helped set the foundation of the railway revolution of the 1830s.

He deserves more recognition.

Digging for the truth

I have long thought that it is going to be nearly impossible to get to the truth - if anything can be defined as the 'truth' - of the AGW debate. Partly this is because of the problems of modelling the future in a system as complex and little understood as Earth's, and partly because our actions and other effects can combine to make those models redundant.  For this reason, it will always be a best-guess estimate.

However it is interesting to see how both sides (*) are fighting each other. The AGW-proponents do themselves a disservice by lumping all critics into a 'global warming denier' grouping, where the spectrum of sceptic views are far more varied than that. Likewise, some sceptics tend to extrapolate from small problems rather than look at the big picture.

First, I would like to make a big proviso: the events in this blog post are recent and events are moving fast; I have had to look at many different sources to produce it, some of which are contradictory. I have tried to be as even-handed as possible, but that is not always possible. The links I have added should allow you to do your own research and form your own opinions.

'Climategate', the release of rather embarrassing emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was well covered in the media. At best they showed the researchers at the CRU as being obstructive and more interested in the politics of climate change than getting to the truth, which they seem to have predetermined. As part of that crisis, allegations of hacking led to an expensive criminal inquiry by the police. This was despite it being distinctly possible that the documents came from a publicly-accessible server (i.e. they had essentially been published). As far as I am aware, no charges have been bought with regards to the 'hacking'.

Last week some documents were released from an American anti-global warming group called the Heartland Institute (HI). The documents made some claims that some AGW proponents jumped on, claiming shadowy organisations funded the HI (**). However, pretty soon some people, notably at Watts up with That and elsewhere, noticed that the document that showed the HI at it worst was stylistically different from the others. There is also some doubt about the contents of some of the other documents, although HI have only claimed one is an out-and-out forgery.

The HI soon said that one of the documents had been faked; strangely enough this was the one that others had noted as being different. Further research by sceptics showed that aspects of the faked document were stylistically similar to those produced by Peter Gleick, the head of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics. Strangely, Gleick stood down from that position shortly afterwards.

A few days later Gleick admitted that he had got the confidential documents by deception: the accusation is that he impersonated a member of HI's board to get them. Instead of then doing an analysis under his own name, he then leaked them to a pro-AGW website. Although he denies it, he is also accused of faking the most damaging document.

The AGU do a great deal of good work; coincidentally I read several of their excellent blogs on geology and geography; I respect them far more than I do the CRU. However it is staggering that a scientist working for such an august and well-respected body can use deception to steal documents, then publish them. AGUs reaction has, so far, been good.

When the CRU emails were leaked the pro-AGW groups used (unproved) accusations of hacking to divert attention from the embarrassing contents. The HI scandal (and it s a scandal) involves impersonation and likely fakery. Potentially worse, allegedly some of the documents contained personal information about HI's employees.

Richard Black on the BBC has behaved disgustingly. When the CRU emails were released he refused to discuss the contents; in contrast he jumped on the HI's leak with gusto. Even his latest blog entry (on the BBC website) tries to paint over what Gleick did; instead he concentrates his fire on the HI. Black is purposefully missing the real story: one of deception and forgery, and instead attacks the victim. Well done, BBC.

It does not have to be this way. Judith Curry is an unusual scientist - she takes a rather different line to most, and gets shot at from both sides. She believes in AGW, but dislikes the way her fellow proponents are treating the science. Her blog post on this topic is far better, and compares Gleick's actions with his previous words as head of Scientific Ethics. BBC: get rid of Black and hire someone like Curry instead.

The truth matters. All Gleick and his supporters have done is make the truth harder to discern.

(*) Both sides is actually a misnomer - there are many different aspects and opinions in the debate.

(**) I find this interest in the funding of the HI funny - they have a small budget of $5 million a year, a tiny fraction of what pro-AGW organisations spend each year.

The elegance of FM stereo

FM radio is going to die. Slowly, inevitably, it is going to be overtaken by digital radio that squeezes many more stations into the same frequencies. Which is a shame, as FM exhibits what is, for me, an elegant engineering solution to a problem.

Originally FM was mono-only. That is, the stations broadcast just one signal that was fed to all speakers on the radio. In the 1950s it was realised you could broadcast stereo signals easily on FM. However this required sending two signals; one for the left-hand speaker and one for the right. An obvious approach would be for the left-hand signal to be broadcast on the mono frequency, and the right-hand on a frequency broadcast a short distance away.

However by this stage there were many mono FM radios in homes, and this approach would have made these useless as they would only get the left-hand signal (try listening to only one speaker of a stereo system to hear the problem).

To solve this, they came up with a simply cunning solution.

They broadcast a sum signal (left + right) on the main (mono) frequency and, a short frequency hop away, a difference (left - right). From these, both the left-hand and right-hand signals can be retrieved using simple analogue circuitry, and the mono signal maintains the qualities of the combined stereo channels.

Say at any one period the left-hand signal is at 5, and the right-hand at 7 (they are really sine waves, but the maths works well enough for discrete digital values).
This means 12 (5+7) is broadcast on the sum frequency, and -2 (5-7) on the difference.

To obtain the original left and right stereo values, you simply:
1) To get the left-hand signal, you add the difference and sum values, i.e. 10, then divide by 2 to get 5
2) To get the right-hand signal, you subtract the difference from the sum, i.e. 14, then divide by 2 to get 7

Of course there are other complexities, but the basic approach is simple: what is even better, it was easy to perform in 1950s-era electronics.

It is an utterly elegant solution. It also explains why, if you have poor signal quality, the radio degrades to mono, which is broadcast on the main frequency.

Digital radio has many interesting engineering and mathematical tricks, (for instance the magnificent Fast Fourier Transforms), but nothing beat the simple elegance of the FM stereo solution.

As usual Wikipedia has much more information and this page goes into more detail than almost anyone will want...