Underestimating Neanderthals

Nature is reporting on structures built 175 000 years ago deep inside a cave in France.

These structures are uniquely old, and are made from stalagmites which have been broken off and piled together to form what look like walls. There are smaller mounds in the centre which look to me like sockets for posts.

What is so delightful about this is that we have tended think of the Neanderthals as fairly brutal, a sort of sub-human D-stream draft of the perfection that is us. It's lovely to get another shock to make us re-think that a bit.

Building these structures 330m into a cave is impressive. Building anything 330m into a cave is impressive. There was no light there. None. It would have been pitch black, and literally impossible to see anything at all. Anyone in there would have been effectively blind. So fire must have been used, not only to explore the cave and find the location, but also to light any construction work.

That's stunning technology from a bunch of people we fondly imagine to have been weighed down by overconfident eyebrows and limited to grunting.

As a species, we seem to be programmed to over-estimate out own importance, and massively to under-estimate the place, role and significance of others. 

Think about space, and the fact the we consider ourselves the only intelligent life in the universe, in spite of being incapable of exploring even our own tiny solar system. 

Think about history, where the assertion of superiority has shaped nations.

Those Neanderthals were not so shabby, and would have been at the contemporary cutting edge of technology. That's a thought I want to hang on to.

Dementia

A small but significant milestone this week.

I have the beginnings of dementia, and I feel it creeping on. So far, though, people have not seemed to notice it.

This week my daughter rang and during the conversation she asked my wife what was wrong with me, and why do I keep telling her the same things over and over.... 

What was wrong with me. It was the first time that that question has come up, and it did feel slightly distressing for a while.

So what's the progress, and how far up the slope am I ?

Oddly, I might be the last one to ask. Of course I know that I repeat things, and people who know me well are very aware of that. But I am not aware of specific things that I repeat: if I was, I would not repeat them. So there is an element of an incipient lack of self-awareness, and that could make me a very unreliable witness.

So what's the state of play ?

• Things I have written often seem fresh on re-reading, largely because I have forgotten writing them. It often feels as if someone else has written them.
• Reading for pleasure is over as it is so tough to remember what I have read.
• Hard also to commit music to memory, though that was always very easy in the past.
• The deep past is still very vivid: it is only more recent memories which have faded to inaccessibility.
• My vocabulary is shrinking and I am losing words. I understand words fine (at the moment) but often fail to find the word I want to use. 
• My sleeping pattern is pretty disrupted which I think is part of the problem. 
• It's just hard to lay down new memories, even of things that matter to me. Somehow they won't stick. They are there, as prompts can bring them back, while spontaneous recall is sometimes not possible. It's clear that there are memories there which I can just not get easy access to. They can pop up randomly.

Right now, the way I function isn't too much affected. (I think !) I am still making stuff and do not find that difficult. Still cycling, though more slowly (Oh dear !). Still playing music, though I find that accuracy is slipping a bit. 

Maybe the trickiest thing is trying to construct last week. Even with notes that's a little difficult. I suppose that this makes me a little more mellow and relaxed because there is much less to worry about, but it takes discipline not to be distressed by it. I am more aware than before of living in a permanent present. I have always done that, but the sense of present has always been thick, in that 'present' seemed to include now and a chunk of past and future which accompanied the now part. 

The present where I live now is shrinking, with less of the accompanying past and future. It is shrinking like drying wood, and the cracks are beginning to show.

I think the cat lives in this kind of thin present.

I want to try to set down progress here and right now have a kind of interested detachment as a participant observer. That's why the perceptions seem worth noting. I do not feel sorry for myself at all: this is just part of living, after all, so that would be plain daft. If that sort of emotional cancer creeps in, I will stop writing about it.

If you notice this beginning, tell me.

Desperate letter to the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/23/nicola-sturgeon-fear-based-remain-campaign-insults-voters

Nicola Sturgeon must surely be right that the tone of the European debate is alienating voters. The most depressing aspect of this is that politicians seem unaware of the impact they are having, and are happy to continue with the endless negativity and unedifying personal attacks which have characterised this grubby campaign.

I am enthusiastic and positive about Europe, but can find nothing in the remain campaign which seems more than grudgingly lacklustre.

And I am waiting for one side or the other to claim that leaving or remaining will make our pets die and our hair fall out.

Do we really want to be governed by these people ?

Mail order blues. Again

Still figuring out why the mail order catalogue made me sad.

It's not about having only things useful or beautiful in your home. It's not even about Thoreau and being rich in proportion to what you can do without.

These are not luxury items, not the apotheosis of conspicuous consumption.

And it isn't about taste. People like different things, and that's fine by me, even when it comes to pet steps.

Fluffy camouflage

Damp and hangdog

Baroque

Insane

The thing is that these are solutions looking for a problem. If ancient Fido can't make it onto the sofa, you could put cushions on the floor, use a versatile plank, buy a large inner tube. Keeping Fido on the floor will also save money on the super-suction pet hair remover on page 6.

I get really excited at innovative and off-the-wall solutions to problems.  They are always a buzz. But finding solutions and then working out a problem seems daft and otiose.

Nobody really needs stuff like this, and it feels a bit sad that they think that they do. 

Suddenly I am looking round the house with new eyes, wondering what I have that falls into pet step territory.

Aaarrgghhh.....

Mail order blues

Yesterday a little catalogue fell out of the newspapers. It was packed with gadgets of all kinds: a plastic pet step to help geriatric dogs on to the sofa; a special extendable brush for deep-cleaning wheelie bins; endless ingenious devices for personal organisation; and expandable plastic foliage to hide eyesores and disguise walls.

It was hypnotic and I could not help but flick through it.

But having flicked, I felt suddenly sad and could not figure out why. 

Maybe it reminded me of my parents: my father loved gadgets, and my mother liked all sorts of odd knick-knacks. Maybe it seemed, without saying so, to be aimed at those on the cusp of decrepitude, camped now on the borders of age and robbed of the ability to do ordinary things. For them, opening cans now a long forgotten and much-missed everyday ability.

Perhaps it was the thought of my own advancing age when even my already ancient cat will need a set of steps to ascend to comfort.

I was unnerved by the ambition of having the cleanest wheelie bin on the street, and realised I had never considered this a concern. Suddenly the thought came of hordes of casual observers on the pavement, checking all the local bins to ensure that their own still held the title, their lives as empty as their sparkling bins.

I don't want to disparage the collected and hugely well-intentioned items on sale. Some were a bit tacky, some a little flimsily made. Some were just not to my taste, as twee isn't really my ballpark.

They just felt almost unbearably sad to me, and I felt very deflated after my idle flicking through.

Suddenly I wondered which items would have tempted Beethoven, Wittgenstein, Anais Nin and Sappho. It was hard to imagine them rushing out to the post to see if their latest acquisition had arrived yet: an extendable arm for changing light bulbs, or a bath mat disguised as pebbles.

Having Aspergers, I am never part of any crowd, love my own tacky bright ideas, and sometimes my emotional reactions are a mystery to me. 

I still feel improbably sad. I still don't quite understand why.

Family research and family fiction

Family research may sound geeky, but it is endlessly interesting. Frustrating, too, as it can only take you so far, and you can never tell whether people whistled when they were happy, and whether they loved people well.

Just occasionally, some accident, some chance, suddenly gives a hint of something that shines a light on the person, and you catch a sharper outline than before.

Sometimes there are strong family traditions passed down for generations, and they pass down clear and definite stories about the past, and these give colour to dull records.

And even more fascinating, there are moments when facts and traditions clash and provide something illuminating as a lightning strike.

Robert Parkinson was my great great grandfather. He was born on 28th August 1836 and worked in a Bradford mill. He died in February 1869. His early death aroused my interest.

100 years after his death, a family member wrote an account of his life and death, drawing on oral tradition in the family. This was it:

Robert Parkinson was born in early 1830s of Lancashire parentage. I do not know whether the whole family came to Yorkshire or if our great-grandfather came on his own to work in Bradford. He was in the “Bradford Trade” i.e. the woollen textile industry, and family tradition tells that he was in partnership with another man, establishing a thriving business when he died in his late thirties.
 
The story goes that one winter evening, about Christmas time, great grandfather came home and collapsed. Great-grandmother, detecting the smell of alcohol, and being a staunch Primitive Methodist and therefore fanatically teetotal, decided that he was drunk and left him to sober up. She is supposed to have discovered later that he had been taken ill at work and had been given a drop of brandy to help him home, where he died of a heart attack. How much of this story is fact and how much is ‘embroidery’ I do not know.

Robert ‘s death cert makes clear that he died from an ‘effusion in the brain’ and the primary cause of death is given as intoxication. The certificate notes ‘several falls when running and walking’.

This did not fit with family tradition and was intriguing.

And then came the lightning flash. 

The death certificate mentioned an inquest, and I managed to find the coroner's hand-written notebook which recorded the inquest in full. It is fascinating reading, not least because you can hear the authentic voice of my great great grandmother in the (almost ?) verbatim record of her evidence.

My record contains all the underlinings, spellings and punctuation of the original and I have not edited it in any way:

West Yorkshire Wakefield Charities Coroners Notebooks 

8th Feb 1869

Death of Robert Parkinson

Thos Taylor

Honour Coroner

At the house of Jonathan Priestly the Swain Green Tavern Pudsey on Monday the 8^th day of February 1869 on view of the body of Robert Parkinson deceased

Eliza Parkinson of Stone Street, Swain Green, Pudsey Widow sw (?) says Deceased was my husband. We were married 9 years ago. - He was 32 years old and a Woolsorter. – He frequently had dizzy girds up to about 12 months since. He never had to be away from work on account of them. He generally got too much to drink on Saturday nights. He left home about ½ past 7 o’clock last Saturday morning to go to his work. He did not return home until about 7 o’clock in the evening. He was not quite sober then. He sat still for about an hour & a half & then went out alone. He did not say where he was going. I did not see him again until about a quarter past 12 o’clock last Sunday morning when he was brought home by John Lumby Oakes & Thos Sharp who were quite sober. Deceased walked into the house without assistance but when he reached the hearth he fell. He remained on his knees a short time talking to the two men. He went to the door with them & shook hands with them & they left. Deceased then said he would go to Henry Plurat’s & get a pinch of snuff. He went across the road & tried Henry’s door which was fast. Deceased then came back and tried the door of the house next ours. As the door was also fast he came in. He then told me to see how quickly he could run. He then set off from the hearth & ran round & when he got back to the hearth he fell sideways & his head struck the ribs of the fire grate. I helped him up and he sat in a chair for about a minute. He got up and ran across the street to Henry’s & there fell on the causeway. I then went and called up his father who lives in our street. When his father came he took deceased (who said his head was hurt) by the arm into our house & put him in a chair. Deceased was boisterous and noisy. He got up again & fell gently. I lifted him up but he fell again. I then let him lie. I put 2 Cushions under his head. I had previously unfastened his neckerchief. He laid on his right side & seemed to go to sleep directly. He snored heavily for about 2 hours and then began to vomit food and liquid & dark coloured blood. He frequently had vomited before when tipsy but I never saw any blood until yesterday morning. He seemed to die immediately. About a cupful came altogether out of his mouth. His father left when deceased went to sleep. Deceased was never so boisterous before as he was yesterday morning.

(Signature) Eliza Parkinson

Seth Pickering of Swain Green WR Policeman sw says:  I have known deceased for the last 7 or 8 months. Soon after 12 o’clock yesterday morning I saw deceased walking on the Causeway about 100 yards from his own house toward which he was going. He said “Goodnight”. He was tipsy. He had nobody with him then. There were several other persons in the street.

(Signature) Seth Pickering

Verdict Died from excessive drinking and falling.

Paid Seth Pickering PC 18/- Personal expenses

It's clear that the family story is embroidery without much basis in fact. Robert's long-suffering wife could not really give a better picture, not only of his death, but also of his life. You can almost see Stone Street when you read about his early hours trip to Henry's to borrow a pinch of snuff.

The most surprising thing for me was that surviving family members were keen to hang on to the strong, but erroneous, family tradition rather than even to consider the contradictory facts. Though the facts challenge the tradition at all points, they found the myth far more alluring and have clung to it tenaciously.

The lightning made me think about how easy it is to create and sustain comforting myths, and to wonder how much 'official' history is similarly built on sand.

Fire pit

My bloganonymous daughter rang to say that she was trying to make a fire pit out of an old tumble-drier drum.

No really. That's a sentence I never expected to write, and it sounds vaguely like a refugee from an English-Martian phrase book. 

She explained that these old drums sell well on e-Bay and are sought after as fire pits. It was just that she was having trouble getting the drum separated from the rest of the tumble-drier, and did I know how to do it ? 

This sounded like an urban myth to me, but I agreed to have a go.

I told her that my fire pit is a ring of stones where the bonfire goes, but no, that would not do.

So.

There must be a fire pit in here somewhere

I discovered two things. First off, tumble-driers are surprisingly well made, and second, there is a seriously good reason why you can't even bribe anybody to fit new bearings in washing machines.

Getting the thing out of its plastic surround was slightly Homeric, but eventually the drum came out, but with the bearing still attached.

Fire pit bearing

Fire pits need bearings like bikes need walruses. Obviously. Doh !

There was no way to attack this, as the shaft had been taken off with an angle grinder before I got the thing. In the end, I took off the mounting and ended up with a surprisingly clean fire pit. 

Annoying but beautifully engineered monting and bearing

Where the mounting for the drive went

Side view

Fire pit

The drum itself looks pretty good. Being stainless it will resist the weather well and should keep its shine.  Stand it on four bricks and you are good to go. Can't wait to see how it works back at BA daughter's. I can imagine sitting by a warm glow on cool summer evenings......

I will let you know.