John had to leave for Banz Abbey, near Nüremburg, early on Sunday 20th November. I opened the curtains to find everything shrouded in fog. Although he got to Heathrow on time, there was a very long wait on the tarmac, and he was to miss his connecting flight from München to Nüremberg. Luckily, he managed to get a later one. He told me he was met by a delightful man who drove him to the enormous and impressive abbey. (See his blog).
Meanwhile, I got cabin fever after lunchtime and decided to brave the unseeing fog and walk up the river for a while. Everything was muffled and ‘sourd’, runners came shooting out of the mist at intervals and I couldn’t see the water, even though I was walking along the bank. But there were people about with young children, who definitely needed a run, like dogs, on this ‘blind’ Sunday afternoon.
A foggy walk through Barnes …
I then found myself at the top of Barnes, where various roads collide, set to rights by a concatenation of traffic lights. If you want to cross, you have to continue to keep looking every which way, like being cautious in a foreign country, where people drive on the right. And danger always appears where you least expect it. I once crossed a very busy road in Amsterdam, congratulating myself on success and was almost immediately squashed flat by a speedster on his bike, whizzing along the separate cycle lane, which I had failed to notice. The devil is often in the detail. And how often do most of us read ‘the small print’?! We don’t have many separate cycle lanes in Britain, although I wish we did. We should. Can you come up with an answer, Boris?! (Boris Johnson is currently Lord Mayor of London).
If you’re thinking ahead of me, I didn’t have to cross the road this time!
I tried to take a picture in the fog, so I could show John how thick it was all day here, meanwhile hoping he had made it to Nüremburg. This turned out to be such a strange photo. John says it has to do with pixels but I had just been reading an article in ‘The Guardian’ by Alok Jha investigating various doomsday scenarios, in which the human species could be extinguished, sometimes in a split second.
Invasion of the nanorobots or strangelets …
He has written two books, both published by Quercus. One is called ‘The Doomsday Handbook:50 Ways to End the World’ and the other is ‘How To Live Forever and 34 Other Really Interesting Uses for Science’. He seems to be both a pessimist and an optimist. Or maybe just a scientist. I am not a scientist but am fascinated by the workings of the universe and how we evolved.
My thoughts re my photo are related to the author’s notes on nanotech disaster and ‘strangelets’. The first concerns nanorobots, which are apparently self replicating and could run amok and turn the world into a grey goo. I’m not sure where they came from but I secretly think I have caught them conferring in my photo. Strangelets are to do with quantum mechanics, which seem to act in a very similar way to nanorobots, rendering the planet into a fate of grey gooeyness also. This is previewed by a danger sign, where everything around you starts cooking and releasing heat. Not that that is a very comforting warning, given that you yourself will also be slowly roasting in this scenario, I assume …
If you are reading this you have been spared the nanotech disaster for now and maybe I just somehow took a photo of foggy globules … but no doubt danger lurks in a place you haven’t noticed …
With these doom laden thoughts lying heavy on my mind, I trudged home and consumed a large bar of chocolate – ‘Green and Blacks’ organic – which I am sure did me some good and was fatly delicious.
John, on his return, was not entranced by either nanorobots or strangelets. We were walking in Richmond Park the next weekend and the contrast in the weather couldn’t have been greater. The sky was crystal clear, throwing birds, trees and water into sharp relief. John often gets new ideas when walking or cycling and this was one of those weekends, no doubt also stimulated by his stay in the abbey. The clarity of everything around me seemed as if I had invested in superwoman XXX contact lenses.
Blue sunlit tree in November
Parakeets now rule the roost in Richmond Park but the ravens know their strength and there was incessant noisy squawking and cawing as they swiped at one another overhead while we scrunched our way through the now dry and brittle bracken fronds.
On guard – raven in Richmond Park
Pen Ponds and a dog, Richmond Park
I managed to take a photo of our shadows – in the late afternoon sun we look like Giacometti figures … well, John does – I look rather lumpy!
Giacometti John in the late afternoon …
We walked up the woodland path towards the ballet school, black outlined silhouettes of birds and branches on either side – evening was signalling in the breeze. A self important, plump little bird, singing its heart out, the witchy fingers of a storm damaged tree. Tree trunks on the ground left to rot are often havens for stag beetles and even some kinds of bats – and of course, plenty of ‘rongeurs’. The last is a very beautifully onomatopoeic word …
A portly twitterer in full flow …
Witch fingers …
The postscript to this entry is that I put it up on my blog, only to find that half of it had disappeared by the next morning. How could that be? ‘ Definitely your fault’, said John on his return but he wasn’t taking into account the existence of strangelets or nanorobots. In Alok Jha’s book I read that in the future these nanorobots will be able to break down oil spills by eating hydrocarbons. This seems a great idea but should one of them suffer an error in its programming, it would then start to eat anything with carbon in it. The end of life in general might happen quite fast as nanorobots appear to be very greedy, despite their minuscule size.
Anyway, I’m sure they are far too clever to get themselves photographed by a rather old camera used by an amateur photographer, whose computer skills are no doubt below average?! But I did just wonder whether they had done a bit of airbrushing…
END