Uncategorised

It is three months since my involuntary return from Asia, and about time I finished this blog. But there are still one or two experiences that I want to record, chief among which is the trip to Papua.

• **

Since the last post I have walked along Hadrian’s Wall. As built, it was 80 Roman miles long. A Roman mile (mille passuum, or a thousand paces), was 1,480 Imperial yards, so each ‘step’ was 1.48 yards long. As your average Roman soldier was five foot four tall, he had a remarkably long stride. Or, as I suspect, each ‘pace’ consisted of two steps.

It is lambing season, and Northumbria and Cumbria are full of sheep. Behind this one is a stretch of the Wall.

The trail along the Wall, only ten miles of which exists as a stone structure above ground, is 84 miles long. With tergiversations voluntary and inv my path took me about 95 miles. It took me a very long time, and I lingered at every fort and museum along the way.

These are some remains at Corbridge Roman town, just south of the Wall. The sinuosities are caused by subsidence into older ditches.

Niches in the changing room of the bathhouse at Chesters.

A phallic symbol nearby. There were phallic symbols everywhere in Roman society; their function was apotropaic (they warded off evil spirits). People wore phallic amulets.

Granaries at Housesteads.

Milecastle 37.

There are a number of Roman forts on the route. The easternmost, not even on the trail, is at the mouth of the Tyne, at South Shields. South Shields Metro station has signs in Latin.

This is a reconstructed gatehouse.

The fort was known as Arbeia, the place of the Arabs, as the cohort of Tigris bargemen were based here. They would have been from the south, perhaps even Basra. The Brits have recently handed back control of Basra; 1600 years ago the situation was reversed.

Without the historical interest it would not have been the most interesting walk, although there is a beautiful section in the middle, between Chollerford and Walton.

Sewingshields Crags.

Highshield Crags.

Crag Lough.

Meanwhile bluebells cover the country. Kew is blue right now. Here is our native bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta.

I actually meant to write about Penang and Melaka, but cannot be bothered right now.

I have been eating cheese and drinking ale.

Excluding nights spent on trains, planes, boats and coaches, in apartments and in random buildings in Papua, I stayed in 101 different hotels.

Range: 98º E (Phuket) to 141º E (Jayapura), 22º N (Sapa) to 8º S (Ende).

Books read on the trip: at least 72.

• **

I mentioned how difficult it was to find a decent bookshop in Singapore. In one large bookshop I found: eight shelving units devoted to home and gardens; twelve to cooking; six to travel; eight to parenting; sixteen to health; twenty to self-improvement; five to new age/feng shui; five to religion; and… three to science.

• **

Some websites I have been enjoying recently:

- Bad Science
- spEak You’re bRanes (don’t follow this link if you are going to be offended by bad language, or are thick or illiterate)
- The rotating skyscraper in Dubai.

• **

The last books of the trip.

Adam’s Navel, Michael Sims. As John Banville said in a review, “a witty and erudite jackdaw’s nest of a book.” And it’s brilliantly written. Did you know for example:
• Burned skin peels because the sun’s UV attacks and kills the skin cells. A good sunscreen does two things: the inorganic molecules help scatter the radiation, while the organic molecules absorb it.
• The body may have evolved its hairless state to assist in the functioning of sweat glands.
• The human foetus grows a moustache four weeks after conception, and by the end of the fifth month it is completely hairy. During the last few weeks of pregnancy the foetus usually sheds the hair, which joins mucus and bile to form the meconium, the baby’s first bowel movement after birth.
• We have an average of 5 million hairs, 100,000-150,000 on the head. Even aquatic mammals are hairy as embryos.
• Hair, like nails, rhino horn and skin itself, is made largely of keratin, and it’s insoluble in water.
• Samson was a lifelong Nazirite. So was John the Baptist, and so was the judge and prophet Samuel. The Black Jews of Ethiopia, the Falashas, are Nazirites.
• The head is the first part of the embryo to differentiate, and is more developed at birth, which is why development of the newborn baby moves down the body from the head to the feet.
• We recognise human faces more easily than chimp faces, and faces in our ethnic group more easily than others. Newborns prefer moving faces. Only after two months can they learn to recognise static faces.
• Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognise a face. From Greek prosopon, face.
• The word pupil comes from Latin pupilla, little doll, referring to the image you see of yourself in another’s eye.
• The eyebrows are raised primarily by the epicranius frontalis, pulled down by the procerus, drawn together by the corrugators supercilii. Supercilious refers to someone raising an eyebrow to express contempt.
• In ancient Greece and Rome, women prized monobrows, and painted them on if their brows were separate.

Also:

Flashman’s Lady, George Macdonald Fraser
Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, Giles Milton
Everyman, Philip Roth
Arthur and George, Julian Barnes

I'm supposed to be doing some work this weekend, so displacement activities are becoming attractive. It occurred to me that I hadn't seen or heard anything about iron lungs for some time, and in the circumstances it was imperative to find out about them right away.

An iron lung is a negative pressure ventilator that allows patients who are unable to breathe for themselves to breathe. The body is placed in a sealed tube and the air pressure is alternately reduced and increased, forcing the chest to expand and contract. They filled hospital wards in the 1950s and 1960s, when polio was common. The unluckier polio victims ended up with paralysed diaphragms, and only the iron lung, invented in 1928, kept them alive. I remember seeing references to them even in the 1970s, when new infections of polio had been eradicated in the UK. It seemed a hideous fate, to be encased for ever in a noisy tin can.

But technology had moved on by then. Positive pressure ventilation by intubation became standard procedure, and portable negative pressure ventilators were invented.

But they still exist and are very occasionally used: see this BBC article and this Wikipedia entry.