Philobiblon

Apologies for my absence all day, but I’ve been to Battersea Dogs’ Home (twice! – long story) and the Philobiblon household has now grown by one. I promise not to turn this into a dog blog, but thought you’d like to meet Prince:

He’s really more handsome than this photo indicates, but hasn’t really got used to the camera, yet. Prince’s an ex-racing greyhound, aged about five, who has spent the last two years already in a house (so he is housetrained – handily!)

He’s a bit bigger than I would have ideally liked – he’s having to wind himself around the house – but he came with rave recommendations from Battersea’s greyhound specialist, and he does curl up into a rather neat ball – as he’s just done, which suggests he’s already feeling at home.

I’m not entirely sure about the name Prince; alternative nominations are welcome – a blog first – “Name the dog competition?” A guy on the train to Victoria said he was the colour of champagne, but maybe that’s a bit too posh a name for an honest working dog. Then again, he does come from a long line of aristocrats – think of all those early modern and 18th and 19th century oils in which greyhounds feature.

Miss Williams Wynn is today passing on literary gossip about payments to Sir Walter Scott. Her editor, at considerably greater length, is commenting on the literary marketplace in the middle of the 19th century and its financial realities. I don’t know how reliable were his sources, but might be of interest to anyone into literary economics.

The United States, compared say to most European countries, doesn’t have a lot of visible history. Which might be a good job, given what it does with what it has.

Browsing around this morning I found that “Uncle Tom’s cabin” is for sale. Surely it should be a museum?

And, there’s a wonderful 2,000-year-old archaeological site. Or rather, it is a golf course, that occasionally, in a very limited way, lets the archaeologists in.

I was having a debate with someone last week about global warming. His stance was: “does it matter?” Well it matters to polar bears who are drowning and puffins, which are losing their nesting sites.

And this year, depending on which figures you believe, has been the hottest, or the second-hottest, on record. And so have nine of the last ten. (And the extra one in that set is 1990.)

Surely no one can now doubt the climate, not just the weather, is changing, fast.

As I look out the window on this crisp, clear December morn, I don’t see a poor man gathering winter fuel, but I do see, in the eighth of the sky visible from my window, one jumbo jet turning right into Heathrow (there’ll be another along in about two minutes) and the clear vapour trails of seven other planes and a smaller plane heading for the City airport. That can’t continue.

The Observer reports today on a television programme certain to provoke a storm.

Laura-Anne Hanrahan is sitting on her doorstep, playing with a pumpkin as she describes how she felt when her boyfriend kissed her.
‘Tingly,’ she says, dreamily. ‘He used to come over and cuddle me and put his hands up my top. It used to feel cosy. I feel desperate to go up to him and say “Ben, why don’t we kiss any more”. It hurts so much that we don’t kiss that I want to rip my heart out and throw it away.’
Laura-Anne, from Siddick, a two-street village near Workington in Cumbria, is nine years old…
Although the programme is not sexually explicit, Steven told The Observer he first had full sex when he was 11, and had been several times to the family planning clinic. All the children said they had their first ‘proper kiss with tongues’ when they were six or seven.

You can already see the Daily Mail et al going ape over this, but it is a documentary, and it is reality. The reaction in this story is all talking about the sexualisation of children by society, but the fact is that children this age are, in large numbers, starting puberty, the hormones are flowing, and this is what is going to happen.

When I look back to this age at primary school, well it wasn’t so much age nine (fifth grade), but certainly by sixth grade (roughly age 10) talk about the other sex, about puberty etc, was a huge part of the school day. (Although come to think of it in fourth grade there was a lot of fuss about a boy in the class who had a mild mental disability. The cruelty of children: the claim was that he had “VD” and that if you touched him you would catch it. I don’t think anyone knew what VD was, but there were posters on the train about it.)

My nickname in sixth grade was “bra baby” because I was the first to wear one – and that was because I had to, although several others quickly followed suit with “training” bras. And there was one girl – the class rebel – who reportedly took payment to let others watch as she kissed her boyfriend in the sheltered area behind the loos.

That was thirty years ago, so you can’t blame any recent “sexualisation of society”.

I can see how it is hard for parents to acknowledge what is happening, but if they don’t provide sex education and give children the tools to work through what is going on, the results won’t be pretty.

There have been 776 winners of Nobel Prizes – for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and (more recently) economics – since they began in 1901. Yet were they recognition for astounding, outstanding individuals, or parts of teams and milieus that happened to be picked out of a communal project?

That’s the central question of an exhibition that has just arrived at the British Library, Beautiful Minds, the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize.

One view starts the exhibition, that of Sir Alexander Fleming: “It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual.” Yet further on you go back to Lucretius in 55BC: “Nothing can be created out of nothing.”

The story certainly begins with one man, the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite in 1867. He proved himself not just an inventor – with more than 300 patents to his name, for goods ranging from artificial silk to aluminium boats – but a brilliant businessman, growing his explosives empire to nearly 100 factories around the globe. Some of their products – or at least one hopes only their packets – are on display. READ MORE