Carriage C (story 3)

This is the third installment of the 'appendix' to my post Shadows of Science: finding a new voice ...

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From one reluctant sliding door to the other, Carriage C was, at its heart, a linear world. The well-trodden, aisle carpet accentuated its nature with a weft of faded coloured lines. The ranked exhibition of seats was hung with a matrix of dashed lines on their tired upholstery. At their sides, pitted and slightly sticky arm rests seemed to point the way to somewhere – even as they held their occupants in place – and atop each one stood the ranks of fatuous reservation cards and bright orange hand-holds. The spaces between were obliged to echo this relentless theme, which was reflected by the metallic grills of a faltering ventilation system and by fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and by the luggage racks to the side. Around and about this world, in the streaking universe in which it sat, only filial shapes seemed to exist in the pallid evening light: tracks beneath, cirrus above, fences and power cables to the side. A straight line, made up of rows, moving linearly through life. Neither Carriage C nor any part of the train could have discerned at departure the significance of this particular set of lines-in-motion, this one date, this precise time. Complexity, discovery or empathy may dawn as lines branch or intersect or entwine, but ignorance rather than simplicity will partner the parallel or the orthogonal. Carriage C had already been, and was destined again to become the incubator of each.

None of this can be the concern of a watcher. They are never told the reasons why; their duty is to watch and to listen, unnoticed, and then to synthesise and report. That’s their job, it’s what they’re trained to do: embed themselves into a group in order to dig deep and range wide. There is a sort of beauty to the immersion process, at first anyway. But each time a diligently created and wholly inhabited character is set aside at the end of a run, a little more of the watcher is lost. Some begin to find it more difficult to relocate themselves, whilst others give up the attempt and fade away from the inside. Beauty begins to die and only the beast thrives; the Adams and the Eves have eaten of the fruit and then must come The Fall; judgement will surely follow.

----~----

Toilet			Luggage
John	Patrick		Charlie	Kez
Ros	Me		Cheryl	George
?	Phil		?	?
?	?		?	?

I was sat in my preferred rear-facing aisle seat. Opposite me sat Patrick – never, ever Pat – with an unopened book of word searches on the table in front of him. In the window seat next to him was John, who’d reluctantly closed the cover on his Tablet when he realised that there was no WiFi on the train but who still couldn’t bring himself to return it to his day-bag. Ros sat across from John, next to me, mostly content to gaze out of the window and to smile. On the other side of the aisle, and joining the conversation in their necessarily semi-detached fashion, sat Cheryl, George, Kez and Charlie. We’d be joined from time to time by the more sociable of the passers-by on their way to the toilets, each one being quietly cursed by Cheryl until the engaged light went out again. When he was satisfied that the hare was running well within his own group of immediate neighbours, Phil would kneel on his seat in order to peer over our table and drop an occasional aerial tit-bit into our midst. Together, our coach represented the young singles from last year’s intake.

We all agreed that few, if any of the passengers would ever have been in a chartered carriage before, let alone a whole train. It had taken several return trips to achieve the transfer using old London buses, the ‘Heritage Fleet’, replete with burly ‘conductor’ on the door. The station’s concourse had been largely devoid of people until we filled it. Pretty much the entire institute was on the trip – along with their partners and dependant offspring. At least, that’s what Phil told us, and he should know given whose desk it is he reputedly perches on so often. There had been a lot of suspicion, even hostility, when it was announced that we were being privatised, especially with the project finally edging towards the breakthrough everyone had been working such long hours to achieve. We rehearsed the arguments again in our little group at one end of the carriage – a location chosen in order that Cheryl could get to the toilets easily, although having seen them that proximity seemed less desirable – and it was universally acknowledged that our fears had been misguided. Well, almost universally. The ever-questioning Charlie had steadfastly declined to join the club and was still frowning now. Nobody quite followed her arguments through to any conclusion however. I made a real effort to support her though, and I could see she had a point or two but come on, I asked: how could it be all that bad to be taken over by a concern prepared to whisk us all off on a three-week trip? OK, the promised luxury hadn’t yet materialised, but we were on a train in the UK for goodness sake – ‘luxury’ would be more than a little surprising at this juncture. Set all that alongside the new salary package though … well, who cares?

Cheryl had dropped out of the banter and was staring at the ‘engaged’ light, which had been on for some time now.
“Sorry, got to go. I’ll pop along to the other end of the carriage; maybe the loo in the next one is free.”

She threaded herself out of her seat, then turned and walked towards the hoped-for sanctuary as briskly as the train would permit, one hand-hold to the next, until she disappeared through the sliding door. There had been a transient lull whilst we silently acknowledged her declaration, and a couple of us even turned towards her in order to offer a sympathetic smile, but the chatter picked up its pace again as she crossed our invisible border. Charlie, on the other hand, went quiet and simply stared after Cheryl; one eyebrow was slightly raised, I noticed, as though quizzical.

The late afternoon autumnal sun was good to see after a week of wall-to-wall clouds, but as it sank in the sky it dawned on me that I was likely to get dazzled fairly soon. For a moment I toyed with the idea of grabbing Cheryl’s seat whilst she was away; I’d explain myself away by saying something about being more sociable perhaps. In all likelihood I would have stayed where I was anyway, but spotting the pull-down blind eased the decision-making process. Almost as the request that the blind be pulled down had left my lips, the train went into a tunnel. Those who had travelled this line before ought to have expected it, but we’d all been so wrapped up in our little conversations that it seemed to come as a mildly irritating surprise. Had there been any mobile signal to start with I’d probably have joined in with the usual muttered annoyance, but no-one had picked anything up since we left the station; well, not in our group anyway. Much more surprising, and annoying, was the fact that the train’s brakes were slammed on once we were a few seconds in, and along with their screeching the carriage lights flickered and then went out. The transition from sunshine to tunnel-darkness left all of us sightless for a while, even with the benefit of the train’s so-called emergency lights – which didn’t seem even vaguely fit-for-purpose. Once the brakes had finally been eased off and back into silence, and when the lights had been reborn, no-one spoke until, a short while later, the train began to accelerate towards normality again. It was rapidly growing dark outside now and the fluorescent tube lighting in the carriage accentuated the change. Most people had lost all sense of where we were.

“What was that all about?”
There could be no answer to Charlie’s rhetorical question of course, beyond resigned shoulder shrugs.
“Cheryl’s taking her time isn’t she? I’m going to see if I can find a buffet car anyway so I’ll check on her as I pass. Anyone want anything?”
There were too many coffee- and tea-deprived people for one pair of hands to satisfy so I offered to go with her. Curiously, I felt my heart rate go up a little as I did so, but maybe it was just my stressed imagination; either way, this could be a golden opportunity. Charlie didn’t say no; in fact she didn’t say anything at all.

I couldn’t decide whether to walk in front of her or to follow and it all got a little farcical before we set off along the aisle. I ended up leading the way, but wishing I wasn’t. Two sliding doors later and we were in the next carriage. The toilet was vacant, no Cheryl. Charlie, now frowning in puzzlement and with something of an edge to her voice, thought she’d either had to walk to the next one or had decided to get something from the buffet herself, so we walked on. This time Charlie was in front, but walking faster than was comfortable given the imposition of random sideways lurches as the train adjusted itself to some new peculiarity in the tracks. The last thing I wanted was to end up on someone’s lap or to be spread across a table; looking ungainly was not an ambition right now. The next toilet emptied its middle-aged occupant as we approached. It certainly wasn’t Cheryl.
“The next carriage is the buffet car, she must be in there.”

Charlie didn’t turn or offer any acknowledgement of my helpful comment; maybe she didn’t hear. She walked on, if anything the pace was faster still.

The buffet car was empty and it took only a second to register the obvious fact of Cheryl’s continued absence. Surely she hadn’t walked even further? Charlie almost ran through to the other end, but the door to what must be the executives’ First Class carriages was not only locked but blacked out. I couldn’t see Charlie’s face properly until she turned back towards me. The frown was still there, but something new and vaguely contagious had been added: was it fear, or anger? I had no clear idea what to do or say, so I did what I always do: rush in like the foolish character I have become.
“Huh! I didn’t realise our bosses were that stand-offish; I’ll get us a drink: tea without sugar, yes?”
I turned, neither expecting nor getting a reply, and only then remembered that the buffet was unstaffed.

“Try not to be too much of an idiot, this is serious. I’m worried. I still don’t know exactly why I am, but I am. And it’s not just about Cheryl, although I’m sure she’s a part of it. I think we need to get back to the others and take stock: maybe someone has a piece of the jigsaw I’m missing.”
She started to retrace her steps at the same rapid pace she had adopted for the walk here, but we got no further than the buffet car’s sliding door. This too was now locked, and although done more crudely using plastic sheeting taped to the far side, it was also blacked out. We just stared at each other, momentarily transfixed within our respective worlds of confusion, but there was a familiar sound at the other end of the car. The door to the First Class carriages had slid open; we turned to see three people, a woman and two men, walking past the counter and towards us. They stopped a couple of metres away.

Cheryl had two guys standing close behind her shoulders, both dressed like the conductors on our ‘heritage buses’. I recognised one of them, or thought I did.

It was Charlie who spoke first.
“Cheryl?”

Cheryl stared impassively towards Charlie; she seemed not to register my presence at all.

“You still haven’t quite put it all together have you Charlie? But you’ve begun to get much closer and if you had only listened more carefully to Phil’s gossip and thought about its pedigree I think you’d have seen enough of the truth to have made the jump. You’re certainly clever enough; I’ve always given you credit for that. It’s the fact that you’re also such a very inquisitive person that tipped the scale in terms of my interest though; I’ve been staying close to you for a reason.” 

A hint of a wry smile played momentarily across her face. 

“I can see there’s a dawning of some sense of the reality of where this is all heading. It’s too late. You’ve walked into a swamp in which, whether you know it or not, you’re already sinking. Your colleagues are about to begin a new life at our replacement facility. They’ll be exceptionally well looked after as long as their work for us remains as good as it was. You, however, will not be joining them.”

Her face turned towards me with her eyes following a second or so later, after they had released Charlie’s incredulous stare. In that small act she had tacitly handed Charlie over to one of the conductors; without noticeable effort, he moved behind her and covered her mouth. Her attempts to break loose were futile; only her eyes were free, expressing the shocked supremacy of primitive emotion in their stare.
“Your file suggests a well-trained and effective watcher but, how shall I put it, you seem to have developed a tendency to be a little naïve, or downright sloppy of late. I’ve been evaluating you as a side-line: watching the watcher if you will. I’m sorry about that; one doesn’t like to undermine a colleague – even a colleague one’s never met before. You will be re-assigned.”

By the time she had finished speaking, the contents of a small syringe had already been emptied high up into the back of Charlie’s neck. Released from her conductor’s grip, she dropped to the floor in silence. Only then did I realise how much I had grown to like her or, rather, the idea of her.

I barely had time to see the taser before it was fired.

----~----

Refreshment trolleys had started to ply their way back and forth through their carriage and all its neighbours within minutes of the buffet car’s closure, and the fact that everything was free served only to enliven the nascent holiday mood. Perhaps it was the sheer volume of food consumed, but most people relaxed into silence after a while or drifted into a shallow sleep. Given the growing darkness, no-one had paid attention to the route the train began taking after it had left the tunnel, and the fact that their dimly lit terminus wasn’t immediately recognisable seemed to cause no great concern. Save for a few whining children, they left the train quietly, still feeling a little groggy but glad to have been told that their baggage would be taken care of by porters. It took no more than ten or fifteen minutes of gentle but efficient shepherding to funnel a train-load of people from the quiet platform into a couple of covered passageways that lead directly onto the waiting cruise ship. No-one had yet missed the two recent recruits from carriage C, and over the next day or so they would choose to believe the well-crafted rumours about them that Phil would whisper into their ears.

But I have a copy of the surveillance files, all neatly cross-linked using voice pattern and keyword analysis, and with the individuals’ movements tracked using both gait and facial recognition software. So, I know the truth, or at least I know something closer to it, and now also do you: take care …


© R.J. Newport, October-December 2016.

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New Blood (story 4)

This is the fourth installment of the 'appendix' to my post Shadows of Science: finding a new voice ...

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“ ‘When I found her, she was catatonic and emaciated, eyes vacant, arms protecting her chest, knees drawn up, almost foetal. I don’t think she’d have survived much longer in the darkened room where she had evidently been hidden for weeks.’ Oh, and I suppose she was naked too, right? Come on guys, you’re better than this … this, whatever-it-is. Our demographics peak in the 15-30 year band, and they’re mostly women: modern women. We don’t have the audience capital to make a rip-off James Bond; you sound like Tina Turner wanting her hero fresh from the fight for goodness sake. Pull it together, and quickly if you want to keep your jobs. Sam and Francis arrive tomorrow morning with their new legal team, and I don’t have a good feeling about it. Get to it.”
Zac clapped his hands twice as he turned and left the writers’ den; the irony of his use of an obvious physical cliché wasn’t lost on them and that at least brought some weak smiles to this room of frowns.

The writing team knew only too well just how tough were the times at most of the independent studios in their creative arts ghetto, and none were under pressure more than theirs. Realism wasn’t the issue here, the frowns were nothing to do with the potential for upheaval. These people were frustrated, confused and downright angry. It was no surprise to anyone that it was Beth who spoke first. She was their shiny graduate intern. This fact alone made her into a rare treat for the team, although she brought with her so much else that was uplifting, not least a naïve directness that made them all want to up their game – and thereby to remember and to begin to recover their earlier love of words. Passion is an odd thing: they could so easily have closed ranks and shut her down, but individually and severally they had, for reasons no-one chose to explore, opened to her without reserve. This was her undefined reward of course, but Beth’s interpretation was more straightforward: they were cool, and she liked them.

“What a prat. He’s just walked away from the best synopsis he’s ever likely to have seen; he didn’t even read it through properly. Idiot!”
One by one the other people in the room, eyes without expression, either tried to respond or sighed and nodded in assent.
“He’s got form Beth; once his mind is made up, no matter the evidence or the argument, there’s no turning him. It’s rubbish, but what can you do?”
“Jared is right Beth. I know it stinks, we all agree, but he’s the boss and we all need to keep our jobs if we can – I’ve got two kids and an ex who contributes almost nothing …”

“So, so what do we do?”
Beth was apparently undefeated, although puzzled and not a little exasperated. For the first time, the edge to her voice needled a couple of them into thoughts they’d not entertained before: of upstarts and the folly of carefree youth, and of jealousy for her possession of that which they had left by the wayside somewhere along the way.

It was, however, the obvious question, and it fell to their team leader, the once formidable Gwen, to define a way forward.
“OK folks, we have to be realistic about this. We have an afternoon to get something drafted, then those who are able might do some editorial polishing through the evening, yes?”
No-one spoke or even nodded, private thoughts, or none at all, consumed them in that never-ending moment of defeat. Gwen took the silence as acceptance – not that there was a viable alternative forming in anyone’s mind. She continued, although she was by then talking more to profiles than to faces: staring blankly out of the windows was a favoured way of avoiding eye contact, she’d slipped into it herself many times.
“Those who can get here early tomorrow will agree the final version and circulate copies. I see only one option given the timescales. We’ll have to use the same basic framework but try swapping the characters around a little to make the obvious victim a guy and the person who opens the door a woman.”
There was at this point the beginning of movement in the team. They were professionals after all, and they didn’t want to undermine Gwen.
“Come on; I know this is hard, but we need to make a start.”

It was Beth’s turn to drift away now, disappointment adding itself to her uncertainty; this was turning into a hard lesson, and she didn’t like it one bit. In a merciful attempt at diverting her focus, Gwen asked her to slip out to get some fruit and other goodies for the team. It would perhaps give her some time to process and reflect on what she’d seen. Beth accepted the proffered cash and left without saying a word. The closing door provided the catalyst for everyone to sit down and to begin. Jared got the rejected synopsis up on the screen and acted as their critical scribe whilst they jointly began to tear it apart and then try to put it back together again in a coherent form. None of them were surprised that the fruit didn’t arrive. It was a tough few hours.

---~--

Everyone was in by about 8:00 the next day, which was pretty amazing given school runs and so on, but they all wanted a bit of mutual affirmation before the CEO, Samantha Barnes, and her PA, Francis what’s-his-name, turned up with Zac and goodness knows who else. Beth walked in just before 8:30, struggling to control the door without up-ending the huge bowl of fruit balanced on a box of doughnuts on her arms. Gwen, grinning from ear to ear like the rest of them, rushed to help. Oh, how they’d needed the laughter that followed.

Some forty minutes or so later, Zac was holding the door open for Sam’s procession: Jared, of course, followed by three androgynous suits and their appended attaché cases. The supplicating introductory pleasantries dealt with, Zac dutifully stepped back a little to give Sam the stage.
“Good morning. I’m not going to beat about the bush, you’ll be well aware that the syndicate is under pressure, as so many others are. Much was riding on this new script proposal. I regret to have to tell you that I’m disappointed – deeply disappointed – and I cannot now see how we can continue to justify an in-house writing team of this sort. I have therefore instructed Zac to outsource operations from this point onward; these ladies and gentlemen accompanying me will explain to you your options in detail and answer any questions. I’m truly sorry to be obliged to deliver this news, but my primary concern is for the sustainability of the syndicate overall.”

The stunned silence that followed lasted only a second or two before Beth strode into the no-man’s-land between the team and Sam and her entourage.
“I’m not surprised in the slightest that you hate the synopsis Zac forced them to supply, it’s crap. But before you waltz off, please grant us a little respect and do yourself the huge, huge favour of reading what we’d originally crafted. Here.”
Beth handed her a paper copy. To everyone’s surprise, the frontal attack had an effect and without uttering a word or even registering a change to her body language, Sam actually started to read through the synopsis. In contrast to Zac’s peremptory evaluation of yesterday Sam, although reading very quickly, went past the opening scene. She followed the protagonist out of her prison room, through days of medical evaluation and into the months of therapy and the potentially re-traumatising trial. Turning to the final page Sam saw her rise above the simplistic success of the guilty verdict and take flight, as though, she imagined, on into the dawn of the very first day.

She lowered the stapled sheets to her side, but was otherwise quite still; no-one dared move or speak. With her arm guiding Francis to the far side of the room, Sam spoke briefly into the side of his attentive face; she returned to her commanding position whilst Francis repeated her manoeuvre with the suits. “Let me be sure I have this straight: this was the original synopsis you wrote as a team and submitted to Zac, but which he rejected in favour of the re-write I was shown this morning: yes?”

“Yes.” Beth and Gwen spoke in unison.

“OK, thank you for that confirmation. This is gold; pure, pure gold.” A smile could be seen forming on Sam’s face, slight and mostly from the eyes but good to see nevertheless. “Zac, would you walk with my colleagues to your office please – they’ll have some papers for you to sign. I’ll be there later.”
She waited for the door to close, never having made even the slightest eye contact with a shell-shocked Zac as he walked out, utterly dejected.

“Gwen, as team leader I’d like you to cover Zac’s role in the interim please. You’ll need to compete for the post in due course, naturally, but even a temporary exposure to the role should be beneficial.” Gwen nodded, although in truth she didn’t fully understand what was to be required of her.

Sam turned to the young warrior in front of her. 

“Beth isn’t it? Let me be clear: if you ever speak to me in that way again you’ll be fired on the spot: do you understand?”
“I’m an intern Ms. Barnes: I’ll be gone soon enough more’s the pity.” 

“You were an intern Beth: welcome to the syndicate. HR will be in touch within the next few days.” At which, she spun around and walked out through the door that Francis somehow already knew needed to be opened.

---~-- 

A few hours later, feeling an unaccountable concern for Zac and wanting to be able to bump into him in the supermarket without being enveloped in a cloud of bad feeling, Gwen turned up at his house. There was no answer at the front so she wandered around to the back as she had often done in the early days for staff BBQs and the like; it was a lovely evening, maybe he was on the deck. As she rounded the corner she found him, he looked almost trance-like and drawn, eyes vacant, arms across his chest, knees drawn up, almost foetal.


© R.J. Newport, January 2017.

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Mr and Mrs Micawber (story 5)

This is the fifth installment of the 'appendix' to my post Shadows of Science: finding a new voice ...

By the time their meal was over, a typically warm evening had turned into tepid darkness. Nothing of what ought to have been said across the small gingham-covered table-for-two near the back of the little café had actually been broached. Although both had hinted, neither of them wanted to be the first to cross the threshold; neither had the courage to follow through. It had to happen though, sooner or later, and both knew that it ought to be sooner. Without identifiable conscious choice, let alone explicit agreement, they walked – slowly, side by side, drifting inevitably towards the gardens in the leisure octant. It was as though they were characters in a silent movie or unwary sailors of old, lured onto the rocks by the irresistible call of the Sirens.

In most towns and cities of old municipal gates would have been padlocked shut before sunset, but not here. Senior City had no need of fences or gates within its skin. Giant fuzzy-edged lily pads of moonlight were created on the winding path by the ubiquitous motion-sensitive lamps. As though on auto-pilot, which in a sense they were, Emma and Wilkins reached the one seat they had habitually used since it had all begun so many months ago. The bench, in a polymer finished so that it resembled the sun-bleached elm they might have recalled from former days, faced the model boating lake and was shielded to the rear by dwarf fruit trees and a dense undergrowth of grasses and ferns. If they sat perfectly still, the moon would go out in a couple minutes; they sat perfectly still.

Senior City comprised, in essence, eight pods each of which was tethered to the service hub by an umbilical cord and to their neighbours either side via causeways within a sort of bellows arrangement reminiscent of the walkways between carriages in old-style trains. From a distance it looked like an overly engineered bicycle wheel, not that many residents had ever seen it other than in digital images of course as their shuttle had only a few tiny portholes. The pods had three levels, one upon the other – not that ‘up’ had quite the same intuitive meaning in the context of this giant rotating space station they now had to call home. Emma and Wilkins lived in the central level, which was regarded as being by far the best by virtue of its relative spaciousness and safety – and not a little marketing in Wilkins’ opinion. Constructed with a diameter of half a kilometre, and rotating around the hub once every minute or so, its effective gravity was only about two thirds of that felt on Earth. The load placed on the heart and the rest of the body was correspondingly reduced. However, these benefits came at a price and thereby gave rise to their problem. It had all seemed worth it of course, given Emma’s degenerative medical condition, which is why they had sold everything and leased their suite there.

It was Emma who broke the silence. She did so with only the slightest tilt of the head towards her partner of almost 16 years: a man who had offered such a safe and secure existence after the trauma that ended her first marriage. The ‘moon’ stayed off; only the background light from a myriad LED stars separated them from complete darkness and reconfirmed to each the presence of the other.
“I really don’t want to move Wilky. I love our rooms, especially being so close to the park. We have nice neighbours and I’ve made friends. I’m content there. I just don’t want to move again; I’m not sure I can stand more upheaval.”

“I know my sweet, and maybe it won’t come to it, but we have to think ahead and be realistic. We only have our pensions coming in and it’s not enough is it?”

“But we had all that money from selling the business and the house, and our other savings – we always knew we’d have to use it to top up the pension so I don’t understand …”

Her voice tailed off, but Wilkins, being the man he was, couldn’t tell whether she was sad, angry, disappointed, confused or something else altogether. He stayed silent for a few seconds, hoping that inspiration would come. It didn’t. He wanted to get across to her his discomfort at watching their funds trickle away – all those memories of a childhood spent in resentment at the lavish impulse-spending of his parents in the face of the shame of longer-term crippling debt – but he wanted to be able to do it without sounding irrational. Then there was the thread he dare not pull but which kept snagging on his thoughts, threatening to come adrift without warning or restraint even as he tried so hard to ignore it. He’d done the sums. He knew precisely how long it would be until their reserves were exhausted, and that this was an optimistic projection given the likelihood of more price rises for food and services. Emma had done well in Senior City; she seemed so much stronger. That was good, no, it was wonderful – but it meant they’d need to stay solvent for longer and that was the real issue.

What did his ex-journalist buddy tell him they used to say in the old days? ‘If in doubt, leave it out.’ Doubt filled him, and it drove goodness knows what else around his head. The words that came out would do nothing to assuage his money-troubled thoughts or redeem his broken sleep, but there was a sort of demon guilt which would, if not propitiated, assault him with a fear of hurting her – and that was far, far more serious.

“I’ll tell you what, why don’t we get a pass and do some exploring. We’ll think of it as a walking holiday to the inner and outer levels, just to see what they look like and get the measure of them. It’ll be a change. We might find we like it, or we might decide that it makes our level seem even better. Who knows; it’ll be a little adventure; no harm in that is there?”

Emma thought for a while, toying with her own long-resident demon of rejection and of the associated fear of change and the unknown; she’d still not fully got past the huge transition of coming here, surely she deserved a little peace now. Wilky had been so good to her though, and she knew only too well that he had sacrificed a lot for her.

“Just a change of route for our stroll then; exploring; nothing more. Do you mean it?”

He really did mean it as they sat side by side on their bench under the faux starlight. Only later, during the waking hours before dawn was initiated, would the old thoughts re-surface and jab at his soul. Maybe she’ll take a liking to the other levels, maybe the money will last until …

© R.J. Newport, 14/2/17

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At the End of the Rainbow

A few years ago three generations of my clan were strolling along the sea wall between Whitstable and Herne Bay on the north Kent coast, which looks a lot like the view in this painting by my talented wife …

Seeing a rainbow ahead, with one end seemingly touching the coast, my eldest grandson took off. Deaf to all calls from the adults-of-limited-imagination, he just kept on going; the only option was to follow, which I duly took it upon myself to do. I finally caught up with him after a few hundred metres, disgracefully out of breath, and persuaded him to stop and to tell me where it was he wanted to go. The answer was beautifully simple: to get to the gold at the end of the rainbow just as he’d seen cartoon characters do on TV. It ended in tears, lots of them. Only time will tell whether this example of reality’s disappointments will leave a long-term legacy in his mind; what I do know is that it near-traumatised me and I am unlikely ever to forget the event. However, on a more upbeat note, I recalled this ‘trauma’ only after deciding I’d like to write something about rainbows – and that decision arose from taking part in a recent Teachers’ Tea Party at a local art gallery on the theme of colour.

This photograph of a double rainbow at the Helford river estuary in Cornwall (UK) comes from fellow scientist Jon Butterworth – used here with his kind permission. (Jon and I used to work together whilst we both served on the Science & Technology Facility Council’s Science Board – for my appraisal of this and other committees I have known and loved/loathed, see here. He writes excellent and highly readable blogs on physics for The Guardian .) In the post associated with his photo’ (here) Jon covers some of the fascinating physics behind this beautiful natural phenomenon. It’s all about sunlight reflecting from and refracting within raindrops and emerging towards the eye at a specific, fixed angle. He’s also very careful to point out that what looks like it might be the rainbow’s reflection in the river is actually nothing of the sort; it’s associated with light coming from a different set of raindrops in the sky which happens to arrive at the water’s surface at precisely the right angle to give the effect we see. In this post I want to re-cover only a little of the area covered so expertly by Jon, I’m more interested in addressing one or two other aspects of rainbows.

As I hinted above, it’s motivated and inspired by a modest recent collaboration with the Turner Contemporary gallery in which I shared with local primary school teachers a few ideas on colour, inspired by an exhibition of work by JMW Turner. I wrote about this project here . Rainbows, as a manifestation of the spectrum of colours within visible sunlight, figured within the event only in passing since I needed some ‘show-and-tell’ that wasn’t weather-dependant and chose to rely on the use of the spectrum available from a prism instead. However, Turner himself was as fascinated by the rainbow as anyone – even if his depictions are often more emotionally suggestive than ‘accurate’ renditions, e.g. here – so the thought occurs to me that one might indeed say a little more on the matter. Specifically, why was it that my grandson could never, ever have reached ‘the end of the rainbow’ and what does it all have to do with the speed of light?

There is never truly a ‘beginning’ to a topic in science like this, but we’ll start with a description of an experiment I did many years ago using a rather basic item of laboratory equipment called a spectrometer. In essence, after a lot of trial-and-error, I managed to create the rainbow’s spectrum of colours from a single droplet of water which was suspended from the tip of a glass pipette. My intention was to explore the possible use of this setup as an aid to teaching, but it was far too tricky to get the conditions ‘just right’ for it to be a practicable proposition; so, whilst being pleased with myself for getting the hoped-for result, there was never a follow-up. Equally unfortunately given the topic of this post, I didn’t have the foresight to photograph the results – this was pre-digital remember, so it would have taken a little more effort than nowadays – and I no longer have access to such kit, so a diagram will have to suffice. The spectrometer is a simple, yet useful device: a source of light is shone into a collimator one side, which allows one to control the size and shape of the light beam that falls onto whatever sample is at the centre of the turntable; the light that emerges from our sample can be viewed using the telescope. Key to such experiments is the ability accurately to measure the angle of the telescope as it views this emerging light.

Hopefully, my simplistic diagram below will help me to describe what is happening inside the water droplet – and by implication within each and every raindrop giving rise to a full-blown natural rainbow. The sunlight, depicted as yellow in this diagram (top left) but in practice a mixture of all the visible colours* (and a great many others beside – like infra-red, ultra violet and so on), strikes the droplet. Some of the light is reflected of course, we couldn’t see the raindrop at all otherwise, but some of the light is transmitted into the water and this is where it starts to get interesting. When light enters a transparent material it gets refracted – ‘bent’ – and it turns out that different colours of light get refracted by different amounts: the red end of the spectrum less than orange, which is refracted less than yellow, which is refracted less than … violet. There’s a lot of physics behind this, but the essence of the matter is that, whilst the speed of all types light is the same everywhere in a vacuum (and almost the same in a gas, like air) it changes when it’s travelling through a material, and the degree to which it changes depends on the colour (technically, the wavelength) of the light. Our sunlight, now with its constituent colours dispersing due to the effects of refraction in the water, then reaches the far side of the droplet. As before, some of this light may leave the raindrop, but a significant amount may be reflected from the inner surface layer of water as though from a mirror. This reflected light now travels back across the droplet and may leave the water,# being refracted one more time as the slightly different speeds of the various colours once more become near-identical back in the air. This whole glorious process leaves us with the original sunlight now dispersed – ‘split’ – into its various colours.

Convinced? Sadly, there’s a need to complicate things for you at this point since, accurate though my description is in the context of a single droplet, the real thing arises from the combined optical effects of countless thousands of raindrops. The problem we now face is that our raindrops may be at altitudes of 1000-2000 m and this means that if we’re seeing the red end of the rainbow emitted by a given raindrop at our eye then the violet light from that drop will be travelling past us several tens of metres above our head. (Feel free to check my trigonometry, but the 2º gap between the direction of the red light and the violet leads to quite a separation over such distances.) The violet light we see must therefore come from other raindrops at a lower altitude. The existence of a rainbow just became a lot more remarkable. Not only do we need the properties of an approximately spherical droplet of water outlined above, but we need our tens of thousands of raindrops to exist in a cloud to permit violet light to reach the eye from raindrops towards the bottom and for the other colours, through to red, to reach the eye from drops higher up.

But why a bow – why the arc in the sky? Well, that follows directly from the precise angles we’ve already introduced above: for instance, the 40º angle between the sun’s rays and the violet light reaching our eye is all that is needed, and that can be satisfied all the way from the horizon on our left to the horizon on our right as long as we have raindrops at the appropriate altitude and distance. The raindrops emit the refracted light as a cone shape, not as a single line as most diagrams would depict it; we see only a part of the circular end of the cone either because the cloud isn’t extensive enough or, quite simply, the ground gets in the way.

We’ve got to the point of being able to say why my grandson could never have reached the end of the rainbow he chased along the coast. As he ran towards the rainbow he had first spotted, the angle between the raindrops in the cloud and the Sun remained almost the same for the duration; however, he was continually changing the angle between his eyes and those raindrops. As a consequence, that first rainbow had in reality disappeared as he ran, to be replaced by a new one wherein the necessary precise angles were again formed. The ‘end of the rainbow’ had therefore moved away from him at precisely the speed he was running. In the diagram above I have tried to illustrate this in the case of the red part of the rainbow: the required angle of 42 degrees for him to see the red light can only be maintained if it originates in raindrops at precisely the right distance from his eyes. Hopefully, one day, the beauty of the rainbow and of the physics behind its origins will be enough to overcome the disappointment of his failure to find that pot of gold … perhaps my memory of the traumatic incident will dissipate at the same time ;-)


Footnotes
*. The sun emits light of a great many wavelengths (colours), but the peak in its emissions happens to fall in the yellow part of the visible spectrum: that is why it ‘looks’ yellow to us. Other stars peak at different wavelengths; astronomers are familiar with red dwarf stars and blue stars – some are brightest in the infra-red or in the ultra violet wavelengths. It’s all to do with the surface temperature of the star; the physics behind this is not at all dissimilar to the way one estimates the temperature of a glowing metal: dull red, through orange, yellow and to ‘white hot’. Yellow corresponds to a surface temperature of around 5,500ºC.
#. Some of the light may actually be reflected for a second time and then leave the droplet at another point after further refraction. This is what gives rise to secondary rainbows, and it explains why the order of the colours is reversed in the secondary bow (see here or here or here).

The Science of Colour: from Newton to Turner via Goethe

A ‘Turner evening sun’ photographed from the steps of the Turner Contemporary gallery and its reflection in their café’s window. It’s of no direct relevance, but this is a relatively long post and a relaxing first image may help the reader ...

In earlier posts I have reflected on aspects of my series of modest contributions to the work of the Learning Team at the wonderful, and for me wonderfully local, Turner Contemporary gallery (e.g. here and here). It’s also rather nice that I get a credit in a couple of short films that have come out of our contact (here and here) – and even one of my many tweets is quoted in another of their celebratory videos (here – see if you can spot it, it’s near the beginning). My own appreciation of art and of those who work within and for its promotion has been transformed by my contact with the gallery and its team. However, I think this is the first time I’ve devoted an entire post to a project of theirs in which I was able to make a contribution. It’s associated with their current exhibition of some of JMW Turner’s wonderful paintings and drawings, Adventures in Colour, and it gets an entire post by virtue of the fascinating background I unearthed whilst reading up for my role.

Our protagonists. (Centre: the Turner Contemporary’s exhibition leaflet; left: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe above Sir Isaac Newton; right Joseph Mallord William Turner.  Goethe’s and Turner’s images are adapted from those at www.tate.org.uk, Newton’s from http://www.biography.com/people/isaac-newton-9422656#synopsis)

Having been trained in Isaac Newton’s theories of colour as a physics student – prisms, ‘rainbow spectra’ etc. – I found myself more and more fascinated by the influence that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s rather different approach to colour had on Turner’s work. Goethe came a century after Newton, and was a contemporary of Turner – although Goethe’s seminal work on colour was only translated into English, and thus made more easily accessible, in 1840. Goethe’s careful observations, made over a 40-year period, led him to reject Newton’s theory that all the colours we see are an admixture of two or more of the seven ‘rainbow’ colours he observed coming from a prism when illuminated by ‘white light’. ‘Darkness’, in this theory was simply the absence of light. By contrast, Goethe became fascinated by the boundary between light and dark, and was sure that colours emerged from the interplay between the two: in other words, ‘dark’ became an important and active component to the emergence of colour. He was, moreover, fascinated by the emotional connotations of colour: yellows and reds were warm, positive colours and blues and purples were cold and negative. Furthermore, he identified the concept of each colour having a complementary colour – look out of a window towards the sun and then close your eyes: the yellow of the sun becomes a blue ‘afterglow’; yellow and blue are complementary colours. Indeed, the concept of complementary colours becomes obvious when looking at the shadow created by an object placed in the beam of a single-colour light source. As an example, shine a green light onto the object and one will perceive a magenta shadow – the shadow is simply grey when looked at close up, but if viewed against the green surroundings our brains perceive it as magenta. This led him to define and draw a colour wheel showing the relationship between these complements. There’s so much more to all this, but I don’t want to overburden anyone with the details. To sum it all up one might say that we can explain all the optical phenomena we observe on a day-today basis using Newton’s physical theory, which has been tested out in umpteen ways over the years – even those ostensibly contrary observations of Goethe. Having said that, even though Goethe’s approach is not truly a scientific framework, his careful observations led him to some important conclusions associated with the role our brains play in our perception of colour. In that respect his ideas are actually quite contemporary. More to the point in the context of the project at the heart of this post, his observations caught the artistic imagination of Joseph Turner.

Goethe’s colour wheel showing the complementary colours on opposite sides of the circle (Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours)

Turner was an experimenter: trying out new pigments, developing (and teaching) ideas of perspective and exploring different ways of applying colour for example. He was working at a time when subject disciplines were not as rigidly defined as they can seem to be nowadays; scientists, engineers and artists would interact quite naturally, whereas it can take a special effort to cross the imagined boundaries we have more recently defined for ourselves. The Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Arts, now wholly distinct entities, were at the time housed in the same building; Turner knew and was friends with famous scientists like Michael Faraday and Humphrey Davy, mathematicians like Mary Sommerville and engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Goethe’s ideas evidently also excited him. There is clear visual evidence of this in so many of Turner’s paintings, more especially those created later in his life. The considered use of colour to express emotion, the subtle use of light and dark interfaces and the associated use of complementary colours are all strong indicators of Goethe’s influence. Given that Goethe’s observations are focussed on human perception and emotion it’s perhaps no surprise that Turner’s later paintings, which at the time were seen by some as evidence of a deranged mind, still evoke such a powerful response from contemporary viewers. Although it would be possible to list a great many examples of paintings which demonstrate Goethe’s influence on Turner’s artistic practice, it will perhaps suffice to reproduce (below) a pair that he explicitly associated with Goethe’s ideas.

Left: Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge and 

Right: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. (Images from http://www.tate.org.uk) 

Both were exhibited 1843, and reflecting not only Goethe’s ideas on colour but the fascination of the time in ‘apocalyptic sublime nature’. On the left we see Turner’s play on light and dark and on the use of the more ‘negative’ colours; by contrast, on the right we have the warm positive colours being used as well as more than a passing reference to Goethe’s colour wheel.

The issue that faced me on the day of the Teachers Tea Party was how to try and encapsulate some of these concepts and theories into a 20-30 minute chat prior to going into the gallery itself. I have no idea whether what I attempted truly worked or not, since that depends very much on whether the participants are able to use the suggestions and ideas offered given the reality of their primary school classrooms. However, I’ll try to outline here a few of the things I tried out on the day by using some ‘home-made’ images.

In terms of Newton’s theory of colour, life is relatively easy in that most people have seen a spectrum – from water droplets as they generate a rainbow and probably also from a prism. The image top left provides a good example of the generation of a spectrum by splitting white light into its colours. This splitting occurs via a process called refraction: when light enters a medium, in this case the prism, the speed of light varies depending on its wavelength (i.e. its colour) and this causes the light to be ‘bent’ to different degrees. My simplified demonstration used a couple of laser pointers, one red and one green; I attached them to a ruler in order to help ensure they were pointing in the same direction. They enter the prism at the same angle, but emerge at different angles. Although I only possess an inexpensive perspex prism, the demonstration worked tolerably well and a clear separation between the red and green spots on a distant wall was easy to see.

A good starting place for Goethe’s ideas was the projection of a slide showing a simple grid of black squares on a white background: grey ‘blobs’ may be perceived the corners of the squares. This is an easy way to signal the start of Goethe’s exploration of the interfaces between light and dark since we see something emerging in our vision which, were we to zoom in on the space, disappears: we need the light/dark interface and the imposition of our brains to make it work.

The next attempted demonstration was less successful at the venue due to the ambient lighting – it worked well at home with the curtains closed, so a re-run under more controlled lighting conditions would almost certainly improve things. (It probably goes without saying that colour-blindness, which affects about 4½% of the population – primarily men – will affect the results.) In order to illustrate our perception of complementary colours I projected a PowerPoint slide of uniform green and then created a shadow by holding an object in the light’s path: even with the background lighting it was still just about possible to see a slight magenta tinge to the otherwise grey shadow. A similar trial using a projected red slide led most people to say they could see a green tinge to the shadow. Now, the shadow is in fact grey; it’s not coloured at all in reality, but our brains have imposed on it the complementary colour to that of the light source. This can be demonstrated by getting close to the projected slide and focusing solely onto the shadow, which is simply grey (- maybe use a cardboard tube to help shut out the surrounding colour?). To see this effect in a more controlled setup, take a look at this video, about three minutes in. Next time you look at Turner’s paintings (and the work of a great many others since his time) pay attention to the colour of his shadows, and particularly those depicted with the sun low in the sky and thus giving a red/yellow light.

Returning now to our prism, it’s possible to use it to replicate something more of what led Goethe to state that colour emerges from the juxtaposition of light and dark. Instead of adopting the ‘Newtonian’ setup and using the prism to cast it rainbow spectrum from sunlight, try instead to look through the prism towards the window and look carefully at what happens in the vicinity of its stiles/rails or grills. There’s a need to experiment a little with the orientation of the prism, but eventually coloured bands will emerge at the edges – and the order in which the colours appear will differ depending on whether one is looking to the left or right, or above or below, the light/dark boundaries between glass and frame. This made no sense to Goethe in the context of Newton’s theory: not only had he seen colours not part of Newton’s basic seven-colour spectrum when exploring shadows (e.g. magenta from green illumination as above) but now even the spectra he observed through a prism differed from Newton’s.

My own simplistic attempt to illustrate these effects is shown above (- an elaborate setup involving an up-turned bin on top of my desk). Notice the appearance of the red end of the classic rainbow colours to the right or above a light/dark interface and the blue end to the left or below. Is this proof that Newtonian theories ought to be thrown out and replaced? No. I made the point above that all the colours we see, and which Goethe so carefully observed as he was getting to grips with our perception of complementary colours, may be generated by the admixture of two or more of Newton’s basic spectrum of colours. The apparently more complex observations associated with looking through a prism at light/dark interfaces may equally be explained using Newton’s theories. It this latter case, each part of the window glass is refracting the sunlight and therefore dispersing its various colours – but all of these ‘rainbows’ overlap and we see only the average of them all, which is of course white light/sunlight. The exception to this is at the edges of each window pane since at those places there can be no such averaging process. For instance, immediately to the right of the frame the refracted light through the glass overlaps with nothing to its left and we end up seeing the red half of the rainbow colours. It’s a little like having the window frame sit in the middle of the spectrum I’ve shown in the image shown third up from here.

Finally, one of my personal favourite paintings – or, rather, my talented wife’s version of it – serves to illustrate the way in which Turner made explicit use of the emotional connotations of colours described by Goethe. In his Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844) he uses colour to convey the sense of power and excitement he felt in the context of the newly-emerging steam railways. Such paintings are not ‘accurate representations’ of a thing, place or process so much as evocations of their impact on the artist – and perhaps thereafter on some of us who have viewed their work down through the years.

For those wanting to learn more about Goethe’s observations and ideas I recommend the four-part video which begins here.

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Postscript for any readers in the Northwest USA: Since posting this, I have been made aware of an up-coming exhibition of paintings which includes work by JMW Turner alongside other wonderful paintings. For details, please see here. Also, there is an interesting associated profile of JMW Turner on the Artsy site here.

Summer is Falling

A couple of years ago, closer to the nervous start of my blog, I wrote an entirely trivial post (here) which was little more than a ‘place-holder’ designed to demonstrate that I was still alive, but simply too busy to write. As the leaves fall and mark for us a pathway into the new autumn, I can look back on a summer which proved to be every bit as full as that earlier one, despite the fact that I had ‘retired’ from my former day-job in the meantime. On this occasion, by contrast, I resisted the temptation to post anything overtly trivial. After all, there’s always my Twitter feed …

Both our ‘ruby’ wedding anniversary (and the associated holiday) and my son’s wedding were time-consuming in the very best of ways, and a slew of gardening/DIY and other necessary tasks took a lot of the remaining time. (As a mildly techy digression, I’ve added as a postscript one such DIY task: installing a new TV aerial.) However, within that mix came some challenging but exciting opportunities in science communication, and it is these I’d like to major on in this post. It’s something of a smorgasbord (or tapas, if you prefer …) but, to my mind, that’s indicative of the fun of #SciComm. Included in the mix is the science of colour within an exhibition of the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, representing Canterbury Cathedral’s Glass Studio at what was almost certainly my last ever science conference, delivering my inaugural lecture series (on glass, naturally) for the local University of the Third Age, U3A, the possibility of sharing citizen-science ideas in the context of women ex-offenders and their children, and writing my first poem since school days. If nothing else, this ought to serve as evidence for the diversity of opportunity for those keen on science communication and public engagement with science.

Let’s begin with poetry, given that this was undoubtedly one of the more ‘off-piste’ undertakings of the summer. Readers of my blog will know that I have been an active supporter of the notion that scientists and those who work in the arts not only can communicate with one another but ought to. It takes effort, on both sides: new ‘languages’ must be learned and personal agendas left to one side, but we are all creative people and can, more often than not, tunnel through the cultural/educational barriers if we have a will so to do (see here for example, although half my posts are on this theme to one degree or another). It’s no surprise then, that I support the aims of the annual Fun Palaces initiative, including its unusual title (– see here for a post mentioning one such project). This summer I happened to spot their #WriteScience ‘competition’. The idea was that a scientist and a writer would get together to talk, and between them generate a poem inspired by that conversation. I am immensely blessed to know several successful authors, who between them write beautifully across genres from factual guides for young people to ‘Finnish weird’; included in their number is the hugely talented poet Nancy Gaffield, who I’ve mentioned before (e.g. here). Nancy was keen on the idea and we met over a mug of tea and talked for more than 90 minutes. We initially focused on the topic of waves since this was one piece of physics Nancy recalled from her own school days. My naïve expectation was that, inspired by my erudite teaching, she would write something amazing; instead, she issued a different challenge: we would each write a poem and then submit them both. I confess that my anxiety levels went through the roof at this point – I hadn’t written poetry since being forced to in my early teens; this was a bluff well called. The next 30 minutes or so were spent with me being inducted into a poetic form that I stood half a chance of coping with: concrete, or shape poetry (see here). I’ve lost count of the hours I spent obsessively creating my attempt at this, but eventually it came together and was submitted …

This is it, in all its 90-word glory.

Remarkably, a month or so later, I got an email from the national coordinator informing me that I was one of six finalists (here is the evidence). I rather suspect that the total number of entrants was close to, if not equal to, six; the result was nevertheless gratifying, and Nancy’s declaration of her pride in my work warmed my heart no end. Part of the finalists’ reward package was to pair them up with a local Fun Palace organiser; in my case it was with artist Sioux Peto, who had set up a one-day event (here) based in the Kent district of Swale. Sadly, the only time-slot left in her full programme of community events clashed with a prior commitment associated with my on-going work with the Glass Studio at Canterbury Cathedral. We agreed that in lieu of a personal appearance I would send her an audio recording including a reading of the poem. Sioux told me that it would play on a loop via a Bluetooth speaker in a rotating disco glitter ball … definitely a ‘first’ for me.

Usefully, this provides me with the perfect segue into another of the summer’s science communication highlights. I have been a fan of the Glass Studio at Canterbury Cathedral (here) for many years and have taken the opportunity to visit whenever the opportunity arises (e.g. here). Conservation and renovation projects are a major focus for the Cathedral at present, and this includes much work on its stained glass. A layer has been observed on the outside surface of some of the early Victorian glass which is puzzling the conservators and I was asked whether I might be able to help them understand it. The key point is that it can only be removed once everyone’s sure that it wasn’t put there intentionally by the glass artist, George Austin Jr., and on the basis of an informed choice of the most appropriate methods to use. Interestingly, the most severely affected areas are seen near the points at which the window’s leading is tied to the supporting iron frame (the ferramenta) by copper wire. This might suggest that one is seeing the effects of electrochemistry: dissimilar metals producing a small voltage in the presence of an aqueous medium (aka rain water containing dissolved salts of one sort or another) and thereby triggering a deposition process. However, this hypothesis might be disproved by direct experimental study: decisions should be evidence-based. Sadly, I’m no longer in a position to undertake such work in a hands-on way – that’s one of the very few downsides of retiring – but I do know people who are, and I know how one might seek out the best …

A small part of the seven large affected windows in the northern clerestory of the Cathedral’s nave; the external surface is shown on the left, the internal view is shown on the right.

(Image courtesy of Léonie Seliger, Canterbury Cathedral Glass Studio)

And so it was that, in early September, I travelled to Sheffield to participate in the centenary conference of the Society of Glass Technology. I took with me not only the laptop on which resided my talk on the “crystallization of a fluoro-apatite - mullite system using neutron diffraction” (- fluoro-apatites are a type of glass of considerable interest for dental applications) but also a large and beautifully crafted poster outlining the conservation problem and inviting collaborative input (see below). My own talk went tolerably well, according to those who heard it at least – I wasn’t very pleased with it myself, but the Cathedral’s poster generated huge amounts of interest. I stood next to it for the full two hours of the conference ‘poster session’ and discussed it with a continuous stream of interested glass experts. By the end I could barely speak. My oft-voiced apology for not being able to answer everyone’s detailed questions – on the ground that this is a topic at some distance from my own areas of expertise – turned out not to be a serious issue. I had been briefed well enough to understand what was being said and offered. Indeed, I was able to take back with me a collection of business cards, observations and recommendations that, between them, should allow the Glass Studio team to move forward on this important conservation project. I intend to stay in touch with them, naturally, and would like to think that a future blog post will contain some details of the final conservation strategy they adopt.

I cannot leave the subject of my four-day trip to what turned out to be an excellent international conference on glass art and science without noting the fact that the Society of Glass Technology, in this their centenary year, chose to honour me with a Fellowship. The award was made during the conference banquet, held amidst the stained glass and unique architecture of Sheffield Cathedral and in the company of some wonderfully talented people. I could also use the journey to and from the SGT conference as yet another segue to a new paragraph, this time citing the inspiration of a railway carriage as I drafted my ‘homework’ for the Creative Writing course I’ve signed up to. But that’s for another day …

As to the other science communication/public engagement opportunities I listed at the start of this post – some are arguably still at too early a stage to say much about, and others warrant a post all to themselves. I will however mention in passing the three-lecture course on glass I had the privilege of leading for the local branch of the U3A. This was a new challenge for me in the sense that my talks for the non-expert have generally been one-off events of 30-50 minutes, and now I had three 90-minute sessions available. The scope this gave me was very welcome, although it did gobble up a lot of preparation time – including a final stage in which I had to cull material in order to be able to fit it in to a comfortable pace that would allow lots of questions and discussion. I’d love to think that I’ll be asked to do this again next year since I enjoyed the whole thing immensely and have a better sense, post hoc, of how it might best be done, but I’m content to leave that in the hands of others.

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Postscript, which turns this post from one of ‘average’ length to a distinctly longer read …
As an example of this summer’s DIY I might mention fitting a new digital TV aerial in my mother’s attic to improve the signal quality and strength to the device she uses to record all her favourite programmes. That task was in itself fairly straightforward, despite the need to work in an overly warm, cobweb infested space with inadequate head-clearance and only rafters to stand on. Having looked up where the nearest transmitter was, I needed to get its magnetic compass heading from my mother’s location. I could have dug out a map and deployed my schoolboy trigonometry, but as most people would these days I used an online app … All that remained was to ensure I had the orientation of the aerial right for the polarisation of the transmitter’s signal and then work through the mechanics of aerial assembly and installation. All of this information is easily accessible online. What it reminded me of was a much earlier, pre-internet, attempt to install an aerial optimised to receive good quality stereo radio signals at a location in which I struggled even to get mono signals for some stations. I still have the book I turned to, which had been given to me as a school achievement prize (in 1968!); it was called Popular Electronics and Computers by F.G. Rayer, and it contained a guide to building a simple VHF folded dipole aerial. It proved to be a resounding success, and a variant of it sits in the attic of my current house and works very well in conjunction with my pre-digital radio tuner. There are days when being a bit of a geek has its rewards – although digital radio has altered the scene now of course. 

The current radio aerial: this folded half-wave dipole is made from copper wire stripped from an odd piece of cable, the two ends of which are connected to the central core and the surrounding shielding mesh of the coaxial cable that runs to the radio tuner. The length of the dipole wire is given by 0.95/2 times the wavelength of the radio station one wishes most to boost (although it’ll work reasonably well for anything broadcasting nearby – if in doubt, aim for the middle of the FM frequencies you tend to listen to). Wavelength is given by speed of light/frequency. Using BBC Radio 3 at 92.6 MHz as an example, the dipole wire length is (0.95 x 300)/(2 x 92.6) = 1.54 m.