By
noeleenm on August 10th, 2007
Last night we had a midnight feast…
We didn’t set out to have it, unlike Kasia’s birthday which we celebrated a week after Jan’s, and unlike the dinner we’ve planned for Sunday week for no other reason than it seems like a good idea - and Gail and Jan have been nagging about it.
Since Kasia’s birthday, she’s been to Belgium to visit her parents (her Dad works there and her Mum had gone for a holiday), Jan went home with Leti to receive his Degree, and Gint went home for nine days to Latvia. It was this latter event which serependitiously triggered our midnight feast last night.
Gint arrived home late last Monday night and had to go straight to work on Tuesday morning. By last night he was so tired that he went straight to bed and only woke up at midnight to get something to eat. I had gone to my bedroom around 10pm to work on e-mails for the flood campaign, and came out to check that everything was locked up for the night when I discovered Gint in the kitchen. I had hardly seen him since his holiday so sat down to hear about his travels and, of course, he insisted that we try a bottle of something that was balsamic and herbal and 45% alcohol. I had enough sense – or cowardice – to say ‘no’ to this but instead started grazing my way through the chocolate sweets filled with liqueurs that he had also brought back from his trip.
Then Jan arrived in and joined Gint at the drink – just to be sociable – with the occasional foray into the chocolates – just to be sociable. He was swiftly followed by Kasia, finishing her late shift at the hotel, who spat out the balsamic drink saying it reminded her of medicine her mother used give them when they were small, but was easily tempted by the chocolates.
By then it seemed like an awful pity that Alba had come in and gone to bed before Gint’s emergence from his slumbers so Jan and Gint went up and woke her to come down and join us. She was on antibiotics, she announced, and couldn’t drink, but the chocolates…
At two o’clock in the morning we finally all went back to bed, having decided it was just a little too early for breakfast. I’ve still only the vaguest notion of what Gint did on his holidays, but the bit I heard was interesting enough to make me want to hear more. He visited someplace that was sacred to the Druids, if I got it correctly, and I think it was in the middle of a forest where the birds didn’t sing, and there was something in there about hollows lined with stones, and as soon as I get to sit down with him over a mug of tea I might get it right yet…
It will have to be soon. Kasia’s going home to Poland on Sunday for a few days – where she’ll again see her parents – and Alba is finally getting to go home to Spain for her holiday at the end of September. And on Sunday I spent the evening in my niece’s home in Ashford at a family get-together. They had just returned from a holiday in the Appennines in Italy, and we saw slides of the most fabulous scenery imaginable.
All their stories of their travels are being woven in my head against the background to a wonderful book I read last week, which was set in Nova Scotia and is called ‘The Birth House’, and through the descriptions of Jenni Diski travels in Antartica (and in her head), which I’m totally absorbed in at the moment. These two books – and G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Fr. Brown’ stories, which I was re-reading in the middle – formed another kind of midnight feast for me, this time for my imagination.
Sometimes, though, I think it needs to go on a diet just as much as my body. Does anyone know how you can tell when your imagination has become obese?.
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Czech Republic, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Wine and Some Spirits | Comments Off
By
noeleenm on August 9th, 2007
Last week I was arrested in the middle of the kitchen by a radio interview with Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I had never heard of the astrophysicist till then, despite the fact that what was essentially her work won, in 1974, a share in the first Nobel Prize in Physics ever awarded for work in astronomy. The prize was awarded jointly to Antony Hewish, Jocelyn’s supervisor (she was working on her Ph.D. at the time of her discovery in 1967) from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and Sir Martin Ryle, also from Cambridge.
Having listened to the story of her discovery, it was easy to hear, and to understand, the indignation in the interviewer’s voice as he asked Jocelyn Burnell if she hadn’t resented bitterly the fact that she was not included in the award. Her response, in a soft Antrim accent, demonstrated a pair of feet as firmly planted on the ground as her eyes were drawn to the skies…
She pointed out that it was the first time a Nobel Prize had recognised astronomy as a branch of physics, and said that “politically” it was wise to give it to her supervisor, rather than herself, a lowly research student, as well as a woman. It was more important that astronomy was recognised, seemed to be her argument, than Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She then added, practically, that the campaign by people like Sir Fred Hoyle, the eminent British astronomer, to have her share in the award, did her career a lot of good anyway!
It was a fabulous piece of radio journalism. Jocelyn Bell’s story is truly fascinating, and she has the real teacher’s ability to make very complicated things seem very simple.
Her father was the architect for the Armagh Observatory, and Jocelyn spent a lot of time there as a child – the beginning of her interest in astronomy, she says. Amazingly, she failed her 11+ and was despatched to a Quaker girls’ boarding school in York, where she discovered her love of physics.
She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in physics in 1965, but described her choice of physics as isolating her from many of her fellow students. The women students seemed to resent her choice, she says, while the male students engaged in a ‘ritual’ of foot-stamping, whistling, and cat-calling everytime the lone female physics student entered the lecture hall – and this was in the ‘liberated’ 60s…!
At Cambridge, preparing for her Ph.D. dissertation, she helped, physically, to build a giant radio telescope that was, she explained, “about the length of 57 tennis courts”.
“It was a very useful exercise”, she added. “I’ve been quite handy with a screwdriver and other tools ever since.”
The real object of the exercise was to use a newly discovered technique called IPS – interplanetary scintillation (and don’t ask me what that means) – to study quasars, but Jocelyn, who had sole responsibility for operating the telescope and analyzing the data, under Antony Hewish’s supervision, began to detect a regular signal coming through that nobody could explain.
“It was more regular than the tick of any watch”, she explains now.
She had discovered pulsars.
Throughout all of the consequent fuss, including newspaper reporters who were delighted to find a woman scientist at the heart of a ‘Are we receiving signals from little green men?’ story, Jocelyn Bell kept her head, emerging from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in 1969.
She continued to keep it throughout the controversy surrounding her exclusion from the Nobel Prize in 1974, through the birth of a son, through the break-up of her marriage, and through an outstanding commitment to education (particularly through Open University), as well as to astrophysics.
Towards the end of the radio programme, the interviewer asked her if many scientists believe in God. “A good number”, she replied, “but you hear more about those that don’t…”
She went on to explain that she felt she was lucky to have been brought up in the Quaker faith because it taught its followers to ’search for the truth’.
It was a fabulous documentary. I was glad I picked it up on the radio…
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