Sister morphine. H. Driving round Suffolk in 1971 in my van with a dog. The big house out at Loddon. The bat that flew around our bedroom. The gallons of oil I had to pour into the engine during the overnight drive down from Hull. The moon in the corn field that night. Cycling to Southwald and Warbleswick. Asparagus shoots every morning. Claire and other writers/journalists.
Category: Biography
Research conference
Killing me softly, Rebecca Flack, at La dolce vita, Newcastle. The pulsating dance floor. So pissed. Some diabetes research conference, around 1973
I even asked someone for a dance!
I remember we drove off the road across the university park on the way back.
I gave a paper on non-linear modelling of insulin metabolism.
Hiding in plain sight
I remember going for a walk with my mother in some woodland west of London, probably when I was in my late teens. I don’t remember what we were talking about but suddenly I realised that the biggest questions about biology would not be answered through experimental studies, but through analysing the observations of the naked eye, through just looking at living objects like these tree, that the secret was hiding in plain sight.
Much later I learnt about fractals, about life evolving at the edge of chaos, about complexity – how the linear science we have exploited so successfully in technology has so little to offer when we look at the natural world.
Dawn
It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come. It was on the spur of the moment, an hour before dawn, just time to drive back to that hill I used to visit over 50 years ago, looking for something, some inspiration or insight, some resolution to the unformulated questions of my lonely confused youth.
Dawn is so magical. It arrives so quietly, without a fuss, the lights gradually coming on.
Dunstable Downs
But there’s nothing here, and there never was. It’s a sad place, empty of life, of excitement, of desire, abandoned, left behind. It’s where nobody wants to be, unless they just want to hide. Safe, wholesome, England, with its deciduous trees and rolling hills, endless childhoods spent playing on the downs. The English countryside of Adam Bede, the dutiful life, the sexless Methodists, the repressed conventions. Until, of course, the young woman arrives, the exciting object, intoxicating.
07:41. I leave at dawn.
Car headlines on a distant hill. Watching the road that descends over the lake, waiting for the lights of the mini returning from London… until one day it didn’t. I wasn’t the exciting object for long, perhaps a few months.
Solitary isn’t OK out here. Solitary is OK in a city, in a pub or restaurant or cafe, in a cinema or theatre or concert hall. Out of hours, out of season is best. A newspaper or book for company. Or gazing out the window at the river, or writing notes in a Moleskine, taking a photograph.
Solitary is OK (just OK or more that OK?). Company can be better. Company can definitely be worse. And solitary is not the same as loneliness, missing, wanting company. Loneliness is desperate, missing one’s self.
07:55. Dawn. Heading back.
Regeneration
I burned out in 2001 whilst working as a community psychiatrist in the hell hole of Kings Cross. It’s left me quite misanthropic – but it’s strange how you can find soul mates in that waste land… the exciting objects (I’m a Kleinian).
Despite the recent springtime of regeneration, I remain deeply cynical. I think religion is a form of illusionment. Reality is much harder. Camus wrote in The Wind in Djémila – “For human truth lies in accepting death without hope”.