Happy New Year!

Heavens, is that the date already? Yes, it's time to bid farewell to 2014 and wish all browsers in the pastures of Nigeness a very happy new year. A shame we can't get together and dine inside an Iguanodon mould like the jolly fellows in the picture. They were guests at a New Year's Eve banquet held at the Crystal Palace in 1853, where the great life-size dinosaurs were being built for the surrounding park by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, with cutting-edge scientific advice from Sir Richard Owen.
 The trouble with dinosaurs is that our knowledge of them even now is patchy and liable to be transformed by stray finds - and it was even patchier back in the 1850s. The result was that the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, built to embody the latest scientific knowledge, soon proved themselves risibly inaccurate. Gradually, along with the park itself, they fell into neglect and disrepair. However, wholesale restoration of dinosaurs and habitat - mostly on three islands in the lake - began in the 1950s, and the models continue to delight visitors. More quaint than terrifying, they are, among other things, a monumental reminder of the folly of taking current scientific knowledge as the Last Word. There - a thought to take into the New Year. May it smile on you.

The Up Side

Well, I celebrated Christmas in traditional manner, i.e. by falling ill with this year's variation on the debilitating cold/cough/flu syndrome. In this case it was a rip-snorting, body-wracking cough that at least had the decency to stay at a distance till halfway through Boxing Day (and before that, Christmas, with son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter, was a joy).
 The up side of these flattening seasonal malaises is that a person can lie around doing nothing very much with a clear conscience, there being little other option. So I spent a lot of time dozing to Radio 4 and Radio 3, and to whatever seemed bearable on TV - Simpsons, Big Bang Theory, Family Guy (including an episode in which the action was suddenly suspended in favour of glossy 1980s colour footage of Conway Twitty singing all three and a half minutes of I See the Want To in Your Eyes - brought in as a distraction technique by Peter Griffin. I thought I was hallucinating...). But I also managed something more substantial - i.e. two Laurel and Hardy features.
 A Chump at Oxford, which I haven't watched in ages, is a patchy affair, beginning with an irrelevant 20 minutes, tacked on to bring the film up to European length. After that it improves rapidly, though it's not much of an advert for Oxford, where the strangely middle-aged-looking students seem to be sadistic psychopaths to a man (one of them, bizarrely, is the great Peter Cushing, in his second Hollywood role, and sporting a moustache). Things take a very interesting turn when Stan, for reasons too far-fetched to explain, becomes Lord Paddington, the university's most comprehensively gifted ornament. It's the only time Stan ever stepped out of character, and he makes a brilliant job of it.
 I'm sure I needn't tell you that Way Out West is a comic (and musical) masterpiece, but if you want to confirm that, check it out on You Tube. You will feel better for it. In fact, come to think, it might have been Laurel and Hardy who made me feel better enough to haul myself back into work today. Gee thanks, fellas...

Season's Greetings

Just a word - and a suitable image (Christmas Eve at Mr Wardle's from the 'good-humoured Christmas chapter' of Pickwick) - to wish a very happy Christmas to all who browse here.

Mount Cocker

Joe Cocker has gone to join the celestial jam session (up where he belongs?). Naturally Radio 4's rockin' Today programme had extensive coverage of his death, including an interview with Joe's older brother Vic, who rose to be Chief Executive of Severn Trent Water. Joe seemed to have found peace and contentment towards the quiet end of his raucous life, settled with his wife in the mountains of Colorado. 'I think I've become a mountain,' he told his brother.
 Then - prompted by the fact that Cocker's breakthrough hit was a soulful waltz-time reboot of the lame Beatles song With a Little Help from My Friends - there was a discussion of cover versions that eclipsed the originals. Taking of which, this one certainly doesn't eclipse the original - but golly it's beautiful... Enjoy.

Lumsdale

In Derbyshire at the weekend (yes, again), I visited a quite extraordinary site/sight that I'd never even heard of before. Lumsdale is a spectacular wooded gorge high above Matlock which, not content with being an area of 'outstanding natural beauty', is also one of the most important water-powered undustrial archaeological sites in England, the location of at least seven mills dating back to the Arkwright period and before, plus various other industrial and domestic buildings, nearly all of which are now more or less ruined.
 The water from Bentley Brook flows into two placid mill ponds before tumbling over the edge of the gorge in an endless succession of waterfalls. This dramatic combination of falling water, rugged rocks, romantic ruins and encroaching trees is quite achingly picturesque, and it's hard to imagine why Lumsdale isn't better known. Even by Peak District standards, it's a gem.
 That it has come down to us as it is today is  largely thanks to one woman, the aptly named Marjorie Mills, who in 1939 bought the then thickly wooded site, determined to preserve it. She rejected all offers for the building stone, refusing to permit demolition, but the task of maintaining such a site was too much for one person, and 40 years later it was leased to the Arkwright Society, who undertook to offer safe public access where possible, to maintain the charm of the wooded areas, and not to restore the buildings but to preserve them 'frozen in their picturesque decay'. They have done a brilliant job.

A Sad Triad

Today is the 25th anniversary of Samuel Beckett's death and, by grim chronal coincidence, news comes of the death of Billie Whitelaw, his 'perfect actress', who rose gloriously to the challenges of his fiercely concentrated late dramas - and the photographer Jane Bown, who captured perhaps the greatest of all images of Beckett (above). It was, incredibly, a stage door shot, caught as Beckett exited the Royal Court during rehearsals for a 70th birthday production of Happy Days.

It's Life, Jim...

Last night, belatedly, I caught up with the second of Jim Al-Khalili's two-part Secrets of Quantum Physics, and mind-boggling stuff it was, featuring the Quantum Robin, whose navigational skills depend on quantum entanglement, the Quantum Nose that doesn't smell but listens, the Quantum Frog whose metamorphosis depends on quantum effects - to say nothing of Quantum Ghosts, Quantum Weirdness, proton jumps and quantum mutations. Al-Khalili was exploring the emerging field of quantum biology, which sees quantum effects not as strange things that happen at the subatomic level and don't affect the 'real' macroscopic world,  but as essential elements in all the processes of life. If this approach is right - and Al-Khalili certainly made a strong case - the possibilities are endless, and life (in the scientific sense) suddenly becomes vastly stranger and more interesting.
 Most science documentaries I find either boring or annoying, or both. Too many of them overdress their assertions and explications with dazzling graphics and camerawork; too many are dogmatic and/or bombastic and overreach themselves. With Secrets of Quantum Physics, however (a low-budget production), the content was so strange and fascinating that it needed no dressing up and could hardly be illustrated - so Al-Khalili, rather endearingly, made do with a range of balls of various sizes and colours, the larger ones reminiscent of The Prisoner. They worked rather well.