Scotland

"....Scotland as a damp, brooding place in which man's nobler instincts are invariably forced to confront a recurring cycle of evil brought on by politics and financial gain. Even the Christian institution of marriage is portrayed as a breeding ground for insanity and death,....." I edited out the word "medieval" at the beginning. Didn't seem necessary, really. Naughty me. These words are from http://www.mondo-digital.com/tess.html, by the way.

Neutrons

One can never read too many books about neutrons so I'm tackling Neutrons, Nuclei and Matter by James Byrne. Neutrons do everything: weak, strong, electromagnetic, and of course gravity. Everybody who remembers high school chemistry knows that the nucleus of the atom is made up of protons and neutrons. Hit a nucleus hard enough, with a proton for instance, and neutrons may be liberated. A neutron on its own is radioactive: unleash a cloud of neutrons and half of them will have disintegrated into other things inside about 10 minutes. Neutrons can penetrate deeply into substances that are opaque even to X-rays and are so useful as probes that the UK government has spent 100s of millions of pounds building the ISIS neutron source (I know - an unfortunate name nowadays).

In solar flares, individual ions are accelerated to high energies. They collide with other ions and produce all sorts of by-products, including neutrons. Some of these escape from the Sun. If we detect them with spacecraft experiments they can tell us about the events of the flare. Even light takes eight minutes to get here from the Sun so the neutrons need to be pretty high speed if they're not going to decay long before they reach Earth. When they decay they glow faintly in X-rays; maybe we'll be able to detect this radiation.

Anyway the prompt for this posting was not so much the wee neutrons themselves as the Preface to Neutrons, Nuclei and Matter, which begins by discussing George Bernard Shaw, looks back into scientific history, references several poets and includes a quote from Shelley, who Byrne is sure "would have understood what many of our legislators and educators appear to have forgotten: that science is concerned first and foremost with revealing the secrets of nature, and scientists have more in common with artists than they have with accountants, politicians or lawyers." What a great start!

MD40

What a lovely girl Gwen was, bright, pretty, outgoing, popular with teachers and class mates alike. School work came easily to her. She was particularly good at languages. Everybody assumed she would go to university and follow some professional career, like most of the other bright kids in her well-off part of town. But she and a boy called Daniel had caught each others' eyes and this secure, sunny future evaporated when she got pregnant at 16. Only when little Jessica reached the age of 10 did Gwen's thoughts turn again to education. Daniel - still with her - was supportive, but was there any way for her to recover what had slipped away?

Kyle was always a laid-back kind of guy, easy going, never had to work at enjoying life. He was bright but nothing in school outside football held his interest. He had little thought of further or higher education and drifted into a job as a salesman. Despite himself he was a success, earning good money, smiled at by managers but he was watching his mates from school progress through university to become the sort of people who told him what to do. He began to feel both that he'd missed out on something, and maybe also that he had more to offer the world than an easy manner and the gift of the gab. But how to step sideways from a well-defined, if limited career path?

Later in life Tommy told people, "my school was like a battleground. Nobody should have been allowed to go to that school." He escaped as soon as he could and started as an apprentice in an engineering works. Promotion to Supervisor took only a few years and he moved to a nicer part of town with the wife and kids he'd acquired in the meantime. He enjoyed learning from the graduate engineers he worked beside but he also began to realise they weren't any brighter than him. One even seemed pretty dim, despite the letters after his name. Sadly the goodwill of your immediate bosses is no protection from the winds of globalisation and Tommy found himself out of a steady job before his 30th birthday. Although his skills and his contacts kept him in short-term contract work he began to wonder if this was the moment to go back to education. But how to get there?

These aren't real people but their stories are like those I meet on our part-time, mature student Access programme. I could have invented lots more: people whose schooling was disrupted by family break-up, women chased by teachers into Arts degrees even although they loved science, people who suffered from depression in late teens... I imagine most of us would agree there should be ways back into education for such folk, both so that they can grow and develop as people and so that the economy can benefit from the full employment of their abilities. Adult routes to university do exist: university Access programmes like ours; the Scottish Wider Access Programme Access courses and many other possibilities in the Further Education Colleges; the Open University. But current "widening participation" policy in Scotland focuses almost entirely on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), and specifically on measures to encourage participation from the bottom 40% of postcodes as classified in the SIMD; so-called MD40. Are our institutions rewarded for helping Gwen? Only if she now lives in a MD40 postcode area. If she does, the fact that she went to a good school would be irrelevant. Tommy? He shouldn't have moved to a better part of town. Kyle? Depends where he lives.

Obviously our Access course still operates and we could be useful to all of these people. Some of the other possibilities might also work for them. The Part-Time Fee Grant is a great help to Scottish adults coming back to study and eligibility depends on income, not where they happen to live. But the lack of recognition in policy of the complexities of adult lives, and in particular the simple fact that adults don't have to stay where they were born, casts a shadow over this kind of work. If times get really tough, institutions will focus exclusively on the activities they're rewarded for. Of course we should start with identifiable, disadvantaged communities, but we need to think more broadly than MD40 if our answer to Gwen is not to become, "you went to a good school. You had your chance. Should have kept your knickers on."

A walk in the shadow of Chernobyl

I spent one of the last hours of 2015 walking in Whitelee Forest, on the Eaglesham Moor. I visit those forest tracks every now and again and they have already featured once in this blog. For the benefit of non-weegies, the Eaglesham Moor is a large area of high, rough moorland just south of Glasgow. After festive indulgence and indolence some cold breeze, rough ground and maybe a wee rain shower or two were called for.

Things are changing out there. Whitelee Windfarm continues to expand; or maybe other wind power developments are springing up on its edges. Anyway the road has been resurfaced, there is new fencing, access roads across what used to be solely farmland, fire rendezvous points. The picture at left looks down the road to the Myres Hill turbine test site, which was there before the big windfarm. It shows the rough, informal parking arrangements as they were in 2009 but improvements to road and fencing have left less space for cars. I first discovered these places just by following my nose on a bike run sometime around 1990. On nice days they're very popular with people looking for wee strolls somewhere close to the south edge of the city so it seems a shame that parking has been made harder.

Whitelee has civilised the wild, boggy, unfrequented Eaglesham Moor I first started to discover in the 1990s. I'm all for wind power, however, and you can still find boggy, unfrequented corners if you work at it a little. Walking about after dark helps!

I followed the sign across the field behind Carrot Farm and climbed up the track towards the Munzie Burn, aiming for a circular walk (made possible by a track established in the forest only in the last few years - something else that has changed). Eventually I came to an area where trees are being felled, shown at left. The light had faded a lot by then, hence the poor picture. Signs forbade me to proceed unless authorised. I'm seldom "authorised". Fortunately I didn't need to proceed and could turn right at this crossroads but I started to think about the fact of the felling.

Some years ago I was told about the origin of Whitelee Forest (where and by whom is a story, too. I'll save that for another time unless people tell me what follows is wrong). The rough, upland Eaglesham Moor used to be devoted to sheep farming. That ended after the explosive events of 26 April, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine. In the days that followed, radioactive fallout was deposited over most of Western Europe. ¹³⁷Cs (caesium-137) is a radioactive isotope of caesium that doesn't occur in nature, but was one of the most important sorts of waste carried across the continent following Chernobyl. Like all the best isotopes it has its own Wikipedia page. It accumulates in the bodies of animals that eat it. It has a half-life of 30 years, i.e. a fixed amount of it is half as radioactive after 30 years. So we have to be wary of eating animals that have been gobbling ¹³⁷Cs and it was almost 25 years before many upland farmers in the UK were allowed to sell the meat from their animals. Farmers can't survive indefinitely when they can't sell their animals and big bits of the Eaglesham Moor wound up sold for forestry.

Bits of Whitelee Forest have been getting cleared for a year or two now but coming across this area of felling, in the half-dark, got me thinking about this more than previously. I thought I remembered that a forest of conifers comes to maturity in about 30 years. I was wrong; it's more like 70 but selective felling might start from 20-25 years; just the right timing after all. The shadow of Chernobyl still hangs over Whitelee.

Chernobyl was a destructive incident whose wide-ranging consequences highlight the possible negative side of nuclear energy. There is no doubt that it has had an enduring effect on perceptions of nuclear energy, and must be one of the factors impeding its acceptance as part of a low-carbon future - just look at this article con, or this one pro. The phrase "low carbon" of course brings us back to Whitelee, second biggest windfarm in Europe.

Many of us head out onto various corners of the Eaglesham Moor to get away from complex, modern lives; to spend an hour or two away from machines and crowds. How strange to realise that the management of these places has for decades now been determined by aspects of one of the big technology debates of our time: how to keep heating and lighting and heating our homes, and powering our factories, without simultaneously driving catastrophic climate change. And how weird, particularly, to recall that the Whitelee Forest's existence and development stems from the few hours of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, 2300 km away, in 1986.

This won't stop me from enjoying the Moor and the Forest. If anything these realisations will add a certain piquancy and the quiet of the forest will be just the place to mull over these stories and their meaning.

I embrace my "strange kind of streak"

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl.

Skip this post if you're still planning to read H P Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. Otherwise, stand by for another horror story.

I joined DACE in 1991. It was an exciting move for me: a new role, of a sort that seemed intrinsically valuable, but one that would make real use of the sort of expertise I represented. I would still be a research-active astronomer, but with a job that looked out from the university, that aimed to provide something useful to people in the wider community. The Access course in particular seemed like - and is! - something that could make an enormous difference to its students' lives.

It was more of a change than I'd realised. Not the teaching, but the conversations that take place in the academic discussion of Education. The nature of those discussions, the sort of questions that are asked and the sorts of answers offered, are very different from physical science. It took me ten years to begin to appreciate some of those conversations. I still remember the precise meeting in which I found myself thinking, "Good grief, I understand what (person X) is talking about."

It seemed to me that many of those conversations would make little use of my talents, and that I lacked other talents needed to contribute to them. For almost all of that time I thought of myself as an astronomer working in adult education. I thought it was important that I kept my research life alive, that I kept working at being a proper university expert in my subject. I went only rarely to meetings on the subject of adult education. Nonetheless the years rolled on and I became something different from a Physics department academic.

The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth has laid eyes on creatures that nobody should see and live. An atmosphere of decay and unease grows to a climactic parade of horrors. But it's the twist at the end that makes that story something special: the narrator himself is one of the creatures, and he begins to perceive the inevitability of a future rather different from the one he imagined. Initially only madness and degeneration lie ahead but at last he is reconciled to the only possible course of action: embrace his true nature, evil to men possibly but authentic to him. Flee the sanatorium! Plunge into the ocean! Live with your fellows among the Cyclopean wonders of the sunken city! "Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me — yet perhaps a greater horror — or a greater marvel — is reaching out."

Three redundancy situations in six years have taught me: I cannot escape my true nature. Perhaps once I could have been like other university academics but the streak of adult education runs too deep now. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.

Nabokov

In Montreal we found a shop "overflowing with paper ephemera and found treasures" and bought a few yellowed paperbacks. In retrospect the blend of literary classics and out-and-out pulp may have been less random than it appeared but I was pleased to find a copy of Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory. A 1967 edition, it has had at least two owners before me, "Alison Smith" (in pencil) and "Evelyn (1976)". Although aged, slightly musty, it is otherwise in good condition and shows few signs of its previous owners. In the whole book just a single sentence has been underlined, in pencil: "Sitting as stiffly as if he were stuffed, he was driven in our car to the university, remained there till dusk, came back in a sleigh, in a heap, in a snowstorm, and in silent despair went up to his room."

Mushrooms, mist, Montreal

We spent two very enjoyable weeks, last of summer, in Montreal. We were on holiday but our daughter will study there this coming year so some time was spent viewing apartments with her, helping with paperwork, etc. We arrived home last Sunday, dazed and disoriented from a sleepless overnight flight and jet lag.

By afternoon our bodies were aching for some unknown combination of fuel and analgesic. I walked down to the supermarket and bought the largest Swiss roll I could find, then headed home through Cathcart cemetery; not the shortest route but a lovely diversion, especially on this balmy summer afternoon (still about 10°C cooler than Montreal!). Often there are others - dog walkers, kids swigging cheap illicit booze, ordinary people out for a wee walk in ones or twos - but on this occasion I met nobody. I wondered how often a man carrying only a Swiss roll is to be found on his own in a cemetery.

Set among the leafy suburbs, a couple of hundred feet above the level of Glasgow city centre, Cathcart cemetery really does feel like a green hill far away, an idyllic spot in which to rot once animation has ceased. I enjoy the glimpses of the city through leafy rows of stones. Often the stones themselves and their stories catch my eye. On this particular afternoon I noticed the grave of someone killed in the Castlecary railway accident of 1937. The stone noted family members subsequently interred, the latest having found his way to Toronto before passing away in the 1970s.

I passed through the cemetery into Linn Park by a shady path among trees. In a dappled spot I came on these eye-catching mushrooms on a tree stump. It struck me that summer had ended while we were away and that we were entering the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Autumnal mists had caught my eye as we banked above the Campsies and made our final descent towards Glasgow, fine layers of cotton wool blanketing the fields around Lennoxtown, Torrance, Kilsyth. It was not yet 8.00 AM Glasgow time; few people not suffering from jet lag were around to relish this soft, misty, morning.