Early morning

It being rather early on Friday morning, I thought I would take a look at the New York Times, an online newspaper to which I pay a modest subscription, but have not actually looked at for some weeks.

From where I got to reference 1, all about TikTok, an app of which I am dimly aware but which I have never knowingly used -  but it seems that near 200 million people in the US do - and they can't all be children. The US is set to ban it in days, it being OK for Musk to own a social media platform - but not someone from China. A ban which, it seems, will mean that the app is removed from the Google and Apple app stores. What else it will mean in the free world is less clear.

From where Bing fairly rapidly led me to a sensible article at reference 2.

And from there to reference 3, which I have not read, beyond noting that the subject is one Johann Hari, a clever expatriate from Glasgow, the author of several best sellers, one of which is advertised above. At which point I started worrying about my own attention span and decided to call it a day.

I have also decided that banning TikTok is a rather crude response to a real problem. But it remains a product which I have not used.

PS 1: the basic TikTok format seems to be a short video clip rather than a short bit of text , what used to be called a tweet. With plenty of help provided to help you create click-catching footage. Said to be very addictive.

PS 2: a last word... It now seems that Hari is rather controversial as well as clever. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: For TikTok Refugees, a Wry Welcome on a Chinese App: In their mass migration to the Chinese app RedNote, social media users make a gleeful mockery of the American government - Amanda Hess, New York Times - 2025.

Reference 2: Has TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse: The case for and against TikTok as a cultural force - Rebecca Jennings, Vox - 2025. To be found at https://www.vox.com/culture/23660355/tiktok-ban-cultural-impact.

Reference 3: How Capitalism Is Killing Our Attention Spans: Johann Hari, author of ‘Stolen Focus,’ discusses the many ways in which tech companies are siphoning our attention for profit - Current Affairs - 2025. To be found at https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/03/how-capitalism-is-killing-our-attention-spans.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari.

Lithic studies (bone branch)

I have been trying to get to grips with the book at reference 1 by Zoltan Torey, a getting to grips which has already spawned a number of digressions and a number of posts, as can be seen by searching for ‘torey’, with the most recent, reference 2, being about an Australian who is interested in ancient artefacts, particularly those which are not tools.

What I am attempting is to see what, if anything, the goings on in the prehistoric world can tell us about the state of human consciousness now. Not so much how consciousness comes to be at all, as quite a lot of animals appear to be conscious, albeit in a limited way, more what it is that makes human consciousness special. Is consciousness responsible for our success as a species, or is it merely a by-product, a bit of froth floating on the top of the brew?

In what follows I use the word ‘hominin’ to mean early humans, after the divergence from the great apes, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. With hominins having been around for a few million years, following the figure above, say five. With the serious record not starting until not much more than fifty thousand years ago, just a thin slice of the right-hand column in the timetable above. Two alternative timetables are offered at reference 2 and there is yet another below.

To this end one can look at certain extant languages as a proxy for the languages spoken in the distant past. What does that tell one about what might have been going on in early consciousness? One can also look at the stuff left behind by the hominins, with the present interest being bone tools as opposed to stone tools, with a lot of effort being put into making bone branch a respectable part of lithic studies, a sub-discipline of paleo-archaeology. This last being what comes before archaeology, which is concerned with not much more than the last ten thousand years or so. What happened when the sun came out after the ice ages.

Then, poking around in the world of the Neanderthals of western Europe, I came across retouchers, which had me puzzling. Bing turned up reference 3, from which I learn that these can be bits of bone, which can indeed be used to touch up or resharpen flint (or quartzite) blades. Digging, I find that bits of bone can also be used as tools in their own right. And while bone might not last as long in the ground as flint, it does last a long time. Which takes me to references 4 and 5, to which I was attracted by talk of a logical analytical system (LAS).

But bones do present problems. Can you be sure that the bits of bone you are finding, in this case in the floor of caves, got there by hominin rather than other animal action? Hominins were not the only animals to use caves. Then can you be sure that they had been used as tools, rather than just the result of smashing up bones for their very nutritious marrow?

[Part of Figure 8 from reference 3. ‘Retoucher from Noisetier Cave with quartzite grains still embedded and microscopic view of one of these grains…’]

One way into this is to examine the bits of bone, to describe them and then to accumulate them in a database for analysis. With, ideally, everyone using the same method of description and the same database. An example of such a bit of bone, a retoucher from reference 3, is included above. References 4 and 5, are in large part, working towards such a method.

In the beginning, the point of these tools was butchery, the cutting up of the carcases of the large herbivores needed to feed the growing brains of the hominins. A rabbit can be torn apart, while you might struggle with a red deer.

[Victorian Solid Silver Marrow Spoon Scoop Double Ended 1843]

An important part of that butchery was smashing open the long bones, the humeri and the femurs, to get at the marrow within. A hundred years ago, marrow was still something of a delicacy and people with money had special silver spoons, like that one snapped above. Not to be confused with a range of other similar looking instruments and tools, some surgical and some cosmetic. While FIL was a bit cruder about it, and hominins were cruder still. They just smashed the bones open with rocks, perhaps large pebbles, perhaps with a crude flint tool called a chopper. This was apt to result in two end pieces – with the two joints (epiphyses) – and a number of fragments of shaft (diaphysis) from in between. Some of them quite large, like that snapped above.

Eventually the hominins worked out that these fragments could be used, either as they came or perhaps lightly reworked, or retouched. They could be used to rework or retouch flint tools – or they could be used as tools in their own right: cutters, saw or scrapers – tools for working with flesh, hide or wood, all important in the hominin world.

Maybe this learning was the result of play, or at least playing around with the fragments. Then after a while, a hominin just picks a fragment out and starts using it. Perhaps, rather in the way that we might choose a cake from a baker’s display, without much conscious thought about it. Maybe just the result of the action makes it to consciousness, maybe not even that.

Picking out a fragment and then working it up to be a useful tool requires rather more. Somewhere there has to be the knowledge that this bit of bone has tool potential – although whether or not that knowledge makes it to consciousness is another matter. In which connection language would certainly be helpful, but is it necessary?

Logical analysis system

This, to my mind, turned out to be a bit underwhelming, involving a lot of terminology which did not translate very well. The table above, taken from reference 9 is the lithic version, the stone version.

Generations do exist and do explain some of the variation, but to my mind the physical description of the bit of flint explains rather more. The sort of thing, for example, to be found at Table 4 of reference 4.

But, all in all, an attempt to get a grip on the description of flakes of bone – not an easy matter as anyone who has attempted such a thing will know – but well-tried strategy for trying to understand what is going on. Devise an appropriate method of classification (aka analysis), collect statistics – and, from them, hopefully learn something about the processes involved. This cave was different from that cave in this or that (statistical) way.

My stone version, based on the thought that most of the time one is taking lots of flakes, one after the other, off the same core. Usually there is lots of visible debris and lots of not so visible dust – but it can be seen if it catches the sun. Think sunlight coming in through the windows of a dusty shed.

This simple process can be modified by what is called the Levallois technique, invented (in term of the timetable below) during the Middle Palaeolithic, whereby one takes a lot of flakes off a core in order to get a good, big flake, which might then be finished off by retouching, possibly by pressure flaking. Good for the smaller tool – but another layer of planning for our hominin to cope with. In the figure, above this is the role of flaking. Added to which is the method of flaking – one of which is pressure flaking – all of which serves to make for a rather busy diagram.

Bone flaking is much less elaborate.

And as with many complicated crafts, there is usually more than one way to achieve the desired end. I associate to a childhood anecdote about a carpenter in training who showed off to his colleagues by producing a very small piece (a small box) which he had mainly made with a very big plane (a jointer). It can be done, although there are easier ways.

Noisetier cave

The locale for some of the work described at reference 3. In the French Pyrenees at around 800m and overlooking a tributary of the Garonne. Current indications are of Neanderthal occupation between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. More background on this cave is to be found at references 10 and 11, with the second of these being referenced at the first.

The main interest here seems to be using bone fragments as a clue to whether the hominins in question were using quartzite or flint for their tools.

All part of a mission to establish bone studies as a respectable adjunct to stone – flint and quartzite – studies in the archaeological world.

• Get to the right strata in the cave (temperate phase of OIS 3; the discovery of two deciduous teeth compatible with the range of variability of Neanderthal teeth allows us to exclude an interpretation of the site as a simple hunting camp – although what exactly the cave was used for by the Neanderthals remains a fairly open question)

• Pull out all the relevant stone and bone. Local chert, imported flint

• Sort out the bones which are the result of animal (wild Asiatic dogs, Cuon alpinus and bearded vultures, Gypaetus barbatus) rather than human action

• This leaves 18 antique bone retouchers (mostly red deer). The ‘A’ sample

• Create 73 new bone retouchers (horses and cows). The ‘B’ sample

• Test the B sample on both flint and chert and work out how the use marks differ between the two materials and other variables, for example freshness. Do some blind testing

• Use the work on the B sample to guess on what materials the A sample were used. Mostly on flint rather than chert – with this last being considered to be an inferior material.

 [A diagram of the cave floor, taken from reference 11]

From which I learn that the French divide up their digs rather like the cells of an Excel Worksheet, with numbers for rows and letters for columns. With detailed work taking place in complete cells. Perhaps we do it too.

Some of the bone fragments showing signs of hominin use as percussion retouchers, also from reference 11.

Experimental bone breaking

Reference 4. Here the authors took 45 long cow bones from a butcher and broke them open with hammerstones as if to get at the marrow. This resulted in 75 fragments which could be used directly and 37 which could be used as blanks for light reworking into usable tools with quartzite pebbles. The work was then to devise and apply a method for describing these tools.

Reference 5. An earlier paper from some of the authors of reference 4. Another experiment with cow bones, but this one involving the use of the resultant tools, followed by examination for use wear – examination which included the use of microscopes. Tool use included scraping hides, scraping wood, sawing wood and processing a carcass.

The motivation being twofold: first to provide a new method for examining ancient bone fragments for use; second to make some assessment of the use value of these bone fragments, lightly retouched or otherwise.

One diversion along the way was the effect of using hydrogen peroxide to clean bone fragments before examining them with a microscope. This appears to have affected their subsequent – rather short – working lives.

Other matters

I have been impressed by the quality of the drawings of flints to be found in the literature – leading me to wonder whether the teams that go on these digs include draughtsmen as well as photographers – as I would have thought that these drawings would be well beyond the average archaeologist. In which connection, see the advertisement at reference 12.

Bone can last a long time in the ground, provided that ground is not acidic. Very little bone is found, for example, on Dartmoor. But there is plenty of bone about which is more than a million years old. I dare say also that there is plenty of bone on the way to being fossilised, to being petrified. Halfway between bone and fossil.

I doubt whether I will make it to one of the flintknapping workshops on offer, but I have started reading reference 7, an accessible and popular book, from which the Old World timetable above – Figure 3.1 – has been lifted. A book which is in part a response to the flintknapping revival – not to say craze – of the 1970s. For me, armchair flintknapping. But I have already learned that the knapping of bone, glass and chert is not that unlike the knapping of flint. Pretty much anything which is amorphous, both brittle and elastic will do. 

One of the key tests here is whether you get conchoidal scars left behind when knapping. As it happens, the edge of the glass top to our sideboard got knocked a few years back and exhibits a clear if small example of same, with the scar rippling out to the left from the point of impact. It is the floor which can be seen bottom right, a paler brown wood than the sideboard. Stained pine as opposed to burr walnut veneer.

Along the way, I came across the open access ‘Journal of Lithic Studies’, to be found at reference 6, and which stretches a point to include bone as well as stone. I also found an article about riverine deposits in India, reference 8, a useful reminder that it is not all caves in the Pyrenees.

And to close, I was moved to check what ‘burr walnut’ was all about and Google turned up: ‘… the production of wood veneer burr begins with the meticulous selection of trees that exhibit burr formations. These burrs, or burls, are unique growths that occur on the trunks or branches due to stress factors like injury, virus, or fungus. These formations result in highly figured wood with intricate and unique grain patterns. Harvesting the burr wood is carried out with precision to ensure the preservation of the detailed grain, which is essential for creating high-quality veneer…’. So something that happens to a tree, rather than a sort of tree. Although that does not exclude walnut being good for burr. And maybe it should be ‘walnut burr’ (or burl) rather than ‘burr walnut’.

Conclusions

I am satisfied that I now know what a bone retoucher is, which is where I started out.

And I have found that the LAS, while interesting, is very much work in progress. 

References

Reference 1: The crucible of consciousness: A personal exploration of the conscious mind – Zoltan Torey – 1999.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-outsider.html. 

Reference 3: The Mousterian bone retouchers of Noisetier Cave: experimentation and identification of marks - Jean-Baptiste Mallye, Céline Thiébaut, Vincent Mourre, Sandrine Costamagno, Émilie Claud, Patrick Weisbecker – 2012. 

Reference 4: Experimental bone toolmaking: A proposal of technological analytical principles to knapped bones – Paula Mateo-Lomba, Andreu Ollé, Isabel Cáceres – 2023. 

Reference 5: Knapped bones used as tools: experimental approach on different activities – Mateo-Lomba, P., Fernández-Marchena, J.L., Ollé, A. & Cáceres, I. – 2020. 

Reference 6: https://journals.ed.ac.uk/lithicstudies. 

Reference 7: Flintknapping: Making & Understanding Stone Tools – Whittaker, John C – 1994.

Reference 8: Report: Peering into the Prehistoric Past of Bandhavgarh National Park, central India – Akash Srinivas, Nayanjot Lahir – 2024.

Reference 9: The Early and Middle Pleistocene Technological Record from Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) – Andreu Ollé and others – 2013.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisetier_Cave. 

Reference 11: Le site moustérien de la Grotte du Noisetier à Fréchet-Aure (Hautes-Pyrénées) – premiers résultats des nouvelles fouilles – Vincent Mourre, Sandrine Costamagno, Céline Thiébaut, Michel Allard, Laurent Bruxelles, David Colonge, Stéphanie Cravinho, Marcel Jeannet, Francis Juillard, Véronique Laroulandie, Bruno Maureille - 2008. At Downloads\Mourre_et_al_2008.pdf.crdownload. Funny suffix but it opens in Acrobat. One of the references given in reference 11 above.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/only-in-america.html. A relatively recent, but very fancy chert artefact.

Fishy affairs

A change from the Financial Times, that is to say the MIT Technology Review, where the piece at reference 1 is to be found.

It seems that the Chinese eat a great deal of fish, but are very concerned about the decline of fish stocks in their coastal seas. Part of their response is the construction of hundreds of off-shore fish farms, with the large one snapped above being a combination of fish farm, research station and tourist destination. Some of them do power as well. 

With part of what they do being the construction of reefs, seaweed meadows and kelp forests for the fish to live in and the release of large numbers of fish - and other marine animals - into the surrounding sea. 

And then the fish farm operators suck in large subsidies. And the researchers have to tread warily between the operators wanting to make money, the Party Line - the chairman never makes a bad bet - and the truth. Yet another part of the mix is China building up its off-shore technology base. Including lots of robots.

It all works very well with sea cucumbers, which do not move around too much after they have been released. For which see reference 2.

On the down-side, we in the west have had all kinds of problems with fish farming, not least mortality, disease and pollution.

Work in progress.

PS: a fairly new topic for me. I could only turn up references 3 and 4.

References

Reference 1: China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches: China is the world's top fish consumer and is spending billions on technology designed to restock the oceans. But will this expensive experiment actually work? - Matthew Ponsford, MIT Technology Review - 2025.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/trade-remedies-authority.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/03/river-cobblers.html.

Thames Water: progress

Back in October last year, I reported an interchange with Thames Water about the leaking water meter below the pavement, outside our house. A meter which has been causing trouble off and on for more than twenty years.

Then, in November, I made what I thought was an appointment to have the meter replaced, certainly for the second time, perhaps for the third time. Various emails and texts turned up in the weeks that followed to remind me about this. While the large blue arrow marking the spot gradually faded away.

Then today, a helpful engineer turned up to tell me, after poking around for quarter of an hour or so, that the meter did indeed need to be replaced, and that I will be making another appointment in due course. In the meantime, what appears to be a considerable leak continues, with very little to show for it, either in the ground or anywhere else. Maybe the grass is a little greener than it might otherwise be.

Various comments along the way about Thames Water working practices.

[A picture worth a thousand words: he seems to be doing alright. Thames Water’s chief executive Chris Weston received a £195,000 bonus for three months’ work last year © Yui Mok/PA]

After which, I was interested to read the piece at reference 2, the source of the headshot above. It's always the punters that end up paying!

Another sample of the work of Yui Mok. From the wedding of British Prince Harry to American actress Meghan Markle, apparently massively retweeted at the time. For more of the same, see the curiously named reference 3.

PS 1: all of which reminds of the curious custom according to which royals around the world like to dress up as soldiers. And I suppose to be fair, quite a few of them do put some time in in uniform. As did, I now learn, Chris Weston. Royal Horse Artillery.

PS 2: Thursday morning: I phone the number provided by the helpful engineer. Oh no sir, You don't want me, you want the billing team. Let me pass you to them. Period of tedious music. Oh no sir, you have got the wrong date of birth. What about your last billing date? No idea. In that case, I can't help you. We appeared to have got to an impasse - despite my resorting to the NATO alphabet (for which see reference 4) for the communication of letters. But I shall now try my luck online.

PS 3: been online for more than quarter of an hour now and have yet to make real progress. But the chat is getting quite long, as can be seen from the slide bar at the bottom of the snap above.

PS 4: 10:30. I give up. Maybe I can persuade BH to sit on the phone for hours and get cross?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/thames-water.html.

Reference 2: Thames Water plans to hike bosses’ pay in response to bonus caps: UK’s debt-laden utility warns it will raise salaries if bonus restrictions are enforced by regulator Ofwat - Gill Plimmer, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 3: https://www.adorama.com/g/about-adorama. '... Adorama is a company for creatives, by creatives to foster imagination. If you're ready to make the world a more engaging place, click below to learn about our open positions...'.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/breaking-rhythm.html.

Frost

This from Saturday past, following the very similar snap from about ten days ago at reference 1. No frost this morning and I am told none are due in the immediate future. Maybe that is it for a while?

In any event, I can report that the excess loft insulation above the study does seem to make a difference, and it is now probably the warmest room in the house despite having two windows. Maybe that is why I spend so much time there.

PS 1: hopefully the Germans will manage to contain their outbreak of foot and mouth, reported at reference 3.

[Smokers in China have a wide variety to choose from © Rolex Pena/EPA]

PS 2: while, according to reference 4, the Chinese authorities are being a bit half-hearted about cracking down on smoking, as per WHO directives (which they have signed up to) - with the snap above being something we have not seen in this country for a long time. Partly because it is a big earner for the government, accounting for 7% of the central government tax take. Partly, perhaps, because central government is backing off unpopular (if healthy) measures when things are already a bit sticky. It seems that China accounts for around one half of the world's tobacco consumption, largely home grown. While reference 5 talks of a third. A much more recent habit in China than in the west, and much more a male habit, although this last may be changing. I wonder what the story is in places like Russia and North Korea?

[Research Briefing: Tax statistics: an overview - House of Commons Library - 2024]

Well under 2% here in the UK. But I dare say it was once a lot higher.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/dover-patrol-three.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/09/roof-insulation-first-round.html.

Reference 3: UK bans meat imports from Germany after foot-and-mouth outbreak: Government says there are no cases in Britain as it vows to do ‘whatever it takes’ to protect farmers - Madeleine Speed, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 4: China’s smokers light up global tobacco sales despite bans: Authorities reluctant to clamp down on crucial source of central government revenue - William Langley, Haohsiang Ko, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 5: Tobacco: The growing epidemic in China - Richard Peto, Zheng-Ming Chen, Jillian Boreham - 2009. Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU), University of Oxford, UK.

Weaver one

As almost advertised at reference 1, from the days when trolleys were on, off to see Sigourney Weaver in the Tempest at the beginning of the year. A very modest amount of Arden revision for a lady who is ten days younger than I am.

The day in question was cold, colder at least than it had been. The duffel coat was still wet from the rain of the day before and in any event a bit bulky for a theatre, so settled for the padded jacket, bought something over a year ago, as noticed at reference 3. Not a jacket I get a great deal of use out of it, but it earns its keep with a few cold days on cold railway platforms. Plus stick rather than trolley, this last being deemed a bit bulky for a theatre too.

Passed a well laden trolley on the way down West Hill. Had some drunk pulled it out of the bushes the night before?

Saved a few quid on fares by settling for London terminals rather than Travelcards. To catch one of the new-to-Epsom style red train shortly after midday, already pretty full when it arrived at Epsom for some reason. We were reminded how much a pair of young people - probably students of some kind - can talk. I suppose we must have been like that once.

Nearing London, viewing conditions for aeroplanes were good, but I failed to make the jump from one to two. Disappointing.

Opted to take a snack at the Benugo up on the Waterloo mezzanine. A snack in the form of one of those toasted sandwiches filled with bacon and some kind of cheese - twice the calories and twice the price of the rather better bacon sandwiches offered by the market restaurant in Whitecross Street. Will I get to visit the place again before St. Luke's gets back into life sometime towards the end of this year? After completing a substantial renovation project with Alex and Elena Gerko as lead donors. With Alex being a philanthropic quant of whom I had not previously heard, but who is to be found at reference 3. Perhaps he can be persuaded to prop up the Wigmore Hall? Perhaps they wouldn't won't to be behoven to one big donor like him?

Sandwich aside, I took a lively interest in the roof of the station, a lot closer from the mezzanine than it is from the concourse below. I think what my father would have called a pleasing blend of structure and function, all there for the eyes and the brain to take in and appreciate. Furthermore, unlike, say, the vaulting of a cathedral, there is little faking and little superfluous ornament. What you see mostly does what it appears to be doing, rather than just giving a pleasing impression of so doing.

Only marred on our descent by an unpleasantly loud lady busker.

The theatre was very grand, with lots of pillars and flummery on the way in. And a very impressive auditorium. I suppose I was being a bit snobbish or elitist to find it a little odd that such a place had been home to 'Frozen' for three years - about which a slick and entertaining, if rather noisy, video is to be found at reference 5. But maybe what this did mean was that the whole operation was very slick, both front of house and on the stage. They could cope with the numbers in a way that many theatres cannot.

A bottle of beer was quite reasonably priced, while the programme was a tenner, up from the fiver that I remember. Furthermore, the text was printed white on black, hard on the older eyes, and the ink was stinky, hard on any nose. An unbalanced cast in the sense that while I had heard of Weaver - my main memory of her being an interview in which she explained that she was not a bimbo, rather a well educated woman who wanted to be treated as such - I had not heard of many of the rest of the cast and a lot of the CVs looked a bit thin. Maybe you have to skimp a bit on the supporting cast if you are paying for a star? 

But they did not skimp on the set which, while it did not involved much in the way of construction or furniture, made very clever use of lighting, wind and what appeared to be long pieces of fabric. A good sound track. I think all the actors were wired for sound, which meant that some of the time the speeches got a bit detached from the speaker.

No idea what the usual running time is, but here it was about two hours with an interval in the middle. Quite a small Arden and reference 6 confirms that at around 2,000 lines that the play is indeed a short one and that running time should be around two hours. So there were probably cuts, but perhaps not that many,

The page at reference 6 seemed to be copy protected, but it was not protected against Microsoft's 'view source', and from there I was able to export the data to Excel. A bit of trouble formatting it, but I got there. Even more trouble getting the histogram I wanted, with the Microsoft help I could find not getting me anyway. Eventually I was reduced to using Google's Gemini, which got me there in seconds. And I now find the Tempest in the third column from the left in the graphic above, well below average. Hamlet far right.

So visually impressive, but the words were not all they might have been - which was a pity because what little revision I had done suggested that this was a serious play, addressing issues which remain important today. Was back to nature, for example, something to be desired?  While in this rendering, the famous line about the brave new world, was rather lost. On the other hand, my memory said that the line should have been near the beginning of the play, whereas now I find it is very near the end. Act V, Sc I, Line 183. Roughly where it was on this occasion.

Out to take solid refreshment at the Delaunay on the Aldwych - with the restaurant being new to me, although I have used the café section next door once or twice. Lots of brass and brown wood - a bit like the Wigmore public house in a corner of the Langham Hotel. Pleasant and efficient service - including little notebooks to take the orders, rather than little computers. Very oldspeak. Also including what might have been EPNS cutlery. Not stainless steel, whatever it was. Busy by the time we left at 18:30 or so (on a Thursday).

A satisfactory German red in the liquid department.

Good white bread, very much in the way of that at Côte. But the custom here is to serve it without side plates - but which are supplied fast enough if you ask for them. Perhaps that is the foreign way.

Borsch for her, chicken soup (thin) for him. Both good. Followed by mackerel roulade for her and lambs' kidneys for him. Both good again. Plus some French beans on the side. The white donut in the snap above being mashed potato rather than plate. Followed by an apple strudel.

The contraption for tea. New to us. Any offers on what it was made of?

The strudel. Plus something that warms, left. Calvados from Camut. Unusually, I failed to get any nearer the source than reference 9. Looks to be a serious producer all the same.

A very satisfactory meal. I dare say we will be back one day.

Out to find that there was an alternative, should Delaunay's have failed us. No idea what was there when I was a student at LSE back in the 1960s - although it would not have been Greggs. Not much that I remember on this stretch at all.

Across the river, with it all looking very pretty downstream. What with the lights on the cranes to scare off the helicopters and one thing and another.

Just missed a train, but the view from the bridge was worth it.

PS 1: Weingut Battenfeld-Spanier Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir) is well known to the Internet, and I eventually tracked it down to its source at reference 10, from where the snap above is taken. Furthermore, reference 10 also talks of Spätburgunder grapes, which I now know is German for Pinot Noir. And suggests a Delaunay mark-up of between 4 and 5: fairly strong, but someone has got to pay for all that brass and brown wood.

PS 2: for some reason, Google thought to put an advertisement for an Argentine flavoured café at Windlesham, near Bagshot, in my email. With a connection to the Guards Polo Club. There are pictures at reference 11, but not very glossy ones. Probably a bit too far out of our way to take a chance on.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-755.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigourney_Weaver.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/shopping.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Gerko.

Reference 5: https://frozenthemusical.co.uk/.

Reference 6: https://www.playshakespeare.com/study/play-lengths.

Reference 7: https://www.thedelaunay.com/.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/modigliani.html. A visit to the Delaunay café.

Reference 9: https://madeincalvados.com/producteur-113-calvados-camut.

Reference 10: https://www.kuehlingandbattenfeld.com/en/battenfeldspanier/winelist.

Reference 11: https://www.clarascocina.com/.

Two McCarthys

[ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: “So what are we saying here?” writes Cormac McCarthy. “That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing.” (Above, a reproduction of a fresco in the Chauvet Cave, site of evocative prehistoric paintings.) JEFF PACHOUD/AFP/Getty Images]

A coincidence in the form of two McCarthys in one day.

The first was an Irish doctor, Aidan McCarthy, from Cork, who joined the RAF just before the outbreak of war and went on to spend some years in Japanese captivity. The second was the writer, Cormac McCarthy, from Rhode Island in New England. It turns out that second McCarthy took an interest in the unconscious, the principal subject of the present post. I shall return to his book at reference 2, my copy of which arrived during the recent festivities, in due course.

Aidan

There is no trace of the Irish doctor at Amazon, Abebooks or gmail, so I can only suppose he was a yet another find at RPPL. BH read it at the time, but I was not attracted to it, only coming back to it today in the intervals of the very long-winded (but very successful) batch No.738 of bread.

It turns out that this McCarthy, having survived Dunkirk and then several rough years as prisoner of the Japanese, was in a makeshift bomb shelter at Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb went off. He survived both that and the messy aftermath, eventually being liberated by soldiers of the US Army. All things considered, he appears to have come out of all this in reasonably good shape and went on to have a second career, as it were, ending up as a Group Captain in charge of a service hospital in Germany. A man of faith, the Catholic faith, and I imagine that he would have said that this helped him get through. Which means for me that it did – whatever I might think of that Catholic faith.

And he was without long lasting bitterness towards the Japanese. They were just very different, from another world. I imagine that this helped: hate, however justified, can be very corrosive.

An interesting read from a man who had both luck and a tremendous inner strength, a strength which kept him afloat both during the hard times and afterwards.

Cormac

I had just finished reading the book at reference 2 and was reading the supporting material, to find that this McCarthy took a serious interest in the unconscious and the presence or absence of language there, with the not-very-long and accessible essay at reference 3 being evidence of that interest. Where Kekulé was the eminent German chemist of the 19th century who got the idea for the structure of the benzene ring from a dream, an idea which was fleshed out over the following decades.

I was rather surprised by this essay, only knowing McCarthy as a writer of bleak and violent stories from bleak places. I thought perhaps a gun-toting enthusiast of the far right, along with Clint Eastwood. Checking today, I find that this gloss is not fair on either of them.

To return to the matter in hand, the Kekulé problem can be summarised as follows. Kekulé had been worrying at the structure of benzene for some time when he fell asleep in front of his fire and dreamed of Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. He wakes up and realises that the structure he was looking for was a ring, what we now know as the benzene ring. The problem is, why did the unconscious report the answer in this roundabout way?

The essay is discursive, touching on all kinds of vaguely relevant stuff. So, according to McCarthy, language is a good way of saying where we have got to with a problem – but it does not have much to do with the getting, with the process. And then, the key to human language is having one object – the signifier to use a bit of jargon – refer to, amount to, another – the signified. Once you have that, the rest follows. And for McCarthy, language and cave painting arrived at roughly the same time, say around 100,000 years ago. While the unconscious had been the engine making hominins work for maybe a couple of million years and had managed pretty well for nearly all of this time without language. And has retained, in the way that it works, a strong preference for images over words – this despite clearly understanding language well enough to know about the Kekulé problem.

Another bit of evidence being that the dreams manufactured by the unconscious involve lots of images but no words. Dreams don’t do words, so the benzene ring had to be passed to the conscious mind as an image. Which Kekulé had to translate into words as he woke up.

All of which one may or may not go along with. But McCarthy has done his homework, he has covered the ground, after a fashion. He is taking an informed and considered interest in the matter. I associate to the fact that Simenon took an active interest in medical and psychiatric matters and owned a lot of books thereon, despite making most of his money out of the Maigret stories, in which these matters do pop-up from time to time, but in a usually peripheral way.

As it happens, most of my dreams do not involve movement, do not involve working the muscles, which I believe are mostly turned off during sleep anyway – with two important exceptions being the heart and the lungs. Life does have to go on. So, when I do move in dreams, the motion is more flying, just gliding along, than walking. And there is a lot of imagery, mostly visual rather than aural or tactile. However, last night (Sunday night), as if to prove a point, I did have a dream which seemed to involve both words and speech.

I associate to the fact that thinking in words often involves the muscles in and around the mouth: the motor activity needed to say things is being at least partially activated, which is not going to happen if the muscles have been turned off. But I no not think that this blocks thinking in words.

A few other thoughts.

When lying in bed, either before or after sleep, I certainly do think in words. Contrariwise, bits of dream-like imagery, without words, are a reasonably reliable sign that I am about to fall asleep. Imagery which is perhaps put into some kind of working memory by the unconscious, from where it is fleetingly available to consciousness and its words, after the event, as it were.

Perhaps Kekulé’s unconscious did not solve the problem at all, it just happened to be ruminating about a snake for some other reason we are not told of. While it was the conscious Kekulé that made the connection to benzene, as he woke up.

In sum, while the unconscious might be good at images, and dreams might be stronger on images than words, which might explain the problem at hand, I think that McCarthy was wrong about the near absence of language in the inner workings of today’s brain. We might not know how it does it, but I do think that it is likely to involve language. Language is far too powerful a tool to be put to one side. 

Work in progress: next stop, reference 7, turned up by Bing.

Aside

In this essay at least, McCarthy does not seem very keen on commas. A device which I use a great deal, probably a great deal too much. Nor does he seem very keen on apostrophes in words like ‘don’t’.

Conclusions

McCarthy one was a good read. While McCarthy two offered an unsuspected side to that author. And a useful excursion into a real problem, a real problem in which I am indeed interested.

PS: progress report: further investigation has turned up the work of one Alan Rocke, from which I offer two snippets. First, the dream was very much part of Kekulés years-long search for the structure of benzene. A competitive search too, in the sense that there were other chemists on the same hunt, the same search. And rings were in the air. As it turned out, Kekulé won – but only talked about his dreams years after the event. Second, chemists, in their effort to unravel what was going on at an atomic level, were the first scientists to use visual images in their work. Maybe, under the hood, they really do think in images rather than words, just as McCarthy is suggesting. An introduction to all this is to be found at reference 8 and the full story at reference 9. Too dear and too long for me!

References

Reference 1: A doctor’s war – Aidan McCarthy – 1979.

Reference 2: The road – Cormac McCarthy – 2006.

Reference 3: The Kekulé problem – Cormac McCarthy, Nautilus – 2017.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros. There are plenty of snakes in Freud, but not this one, despite his interest in matters Egyptian.

Reference 5: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/. The text of the essay, complete with advertisements.

Reference 6: https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/cormac-mccarthy-publishes-his-first-science-nonfiction-nautilus. An institute with which McCarthy was associated.

Reference 7: https://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/SP20151130.html.

Reference 8: Chemistry’s visual origins: Vivid imagination was key to unlocking the secrets of molecular structure in the nineteenth century – Andrew Robinson – 2010.

Reference 9: Image and Reality: Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination – Alan J. Rocke – 2010. 400 pages of book. The subject of the review at reference 8.