Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:59:59 +0100WeeblyThu, 09 Jul 2026 15:41:46 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/memories-of-clactonI have very fond memories of Clacton-on-Sea. In 1974, newly married, my wife and I needed somewhere to live. I had a job at Essex University, and she was teaching in Colchester. We had two offers of accommodation: an idyllic cottage in rural St Osyth—a real love nest at £65 per month—or a three-bedroom semi in Clacton at £39 per month. I had been a student for six years, my wife for four, and we were both bankrupt with crippling overdrafts. We just could not afford to pay the 50% premium so, with some reluctance and apprehension, we opted for Clacton.
 
The house was on a main road and there was no central heating, but it had a very long back garden of the sort that an enterprising gardener could use to feed his family. I did grow some tomatoes, just in time for a snowstorm on 2 June 1975… But Clacton was charming. There was a pub nearby, and a very pleasant old-fashioned shopping area where we were able to purchase items almost unknown to us as students—pâté, French bread and cheese, and wine… There was a tailor’s shop with ‘Hamish Macbeth’ over the door, and a delightful ‘odds and ends’ store with its wares spread over the pavement. We watched a box set of Wagner operas recorded at Bayreuth marked up at £30, reduced to £20, reduced to £15, finally ending up at £5, at which point I bought it… Having some ready money at last, I had built a HiFi system, and the Wagner got a good workout although I would tear my hair out trying to eliminate the cracks and clicks from static on the records and was never able to eliminate them.
 
There was a local cinema which we visited regularly. Every programme included an advert for a local car mechanic “Dennis’s Auto Spares”; consisting of a man in a white coat checking the oil on a car; did car mechanics ever wear white coats? On one occasion, and for reasons that escape me, we went to a double-bill porn show: Deadly Weapons followed by Flesh Gordon. The protagonist in Deadly Weapons was one ‘Chesty Morgan’, in possession of gigantic—apparently genuine—blue-veined breasts which she would use to suffocate her victims. In the other film, Flesh Gordon, Dale Ardour, and professor Flexi Jerkoff visited the planet Porno ruled by Emperor Wang to find out why Earth was being attacked by a deadly sex ray; they were promptly attacked by a penisaurus… You get the idea.
 
The one source of heat in the house was a coal fire in the front room. I would sit in front it for hours on end crunching the numbers for my thesis on what was then a technological marvel, an HP-21 calculator with a red LED display, using Reverse Polish Logic, and having trig and log functions. In 1974 it had cost £80—more than two months’ rent—but since this was before PCs, it was an essential tool for science research.

We needed to get the chimney cleaned and I spotted a chimney sweep on his bike near the house. I ran after him and asked for his name and details; he was a Mr Ashdown…
 
The house was old. Once, returning from the pub I decided to see if the obsolete gas light in our bedroom was still working. I turned on the tap and was met with a loud hiss… We did some painting, and on using a blowlamp in the kitchen, I managed to bring down a fair chunk of thick plaster from the lath and plaster ceiling. Our kindly next-door neighbour showed me how to replace the lath and plaster with plasterboard—virtually all of which he did himself—and skimmed the ceiling with thistle plaster. A very good neighbour indeed. Unfortunately, I managed to upset him some time later; we had a fancy-dress party, and I came as an angel. Around midnight, I attempted to fly off the front wall and woke my neighbour up with the merriment. He eventually forgave us.
 
I have nothing but good memories of Clacton-on-Sea. I am sad to see several less than charitable comments about the town and its inhabitants in the media, now that it has become the epicentre of the latest political firestorm. The Reform mantra seems to be that if the Clacton voters elect NF again, notwithstanding Count Binface, that vindicates whatever misdemeanours he may or may not have committed. Shame on you Farage for bringing the townspeople of Clacton into undeserved disrepute.]]>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:52:38 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/thermodynamicsI came to academic study late. My ‘good’ school—a cross between a boot camp and a Jesuit seminary—failed totally to instil any sort of formal learning into me. After night school etc., I finally managed to achieve a half decent degree in Physics due mainly to slog and rote learning, and at an age when most people have been in work for several years. Subsequently I have become much more interested in social history and history in general, but I never regretted the science education and science paid my wages throughout my working life. 
 
C P Snow famously commented on the ‘two cultures’—arts and sciences. Our governing classes are almost exclusively drawn from the former—very occasionally a medical doctor gets a look in—and yet science, engineering, technology, and medicine provide us with the standard of living that we enjoy; science and engineering separate us from stone age culture. Snow commented that an ‘establishment’ person educated in the arts would express shock and disbelief that an engineer or scientist might be unacquainted with Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Turner. And yet that same establishment person would have no knowledge of quantum mechanics, relativity or the second law of thermodynamics, and be perfectly happy in that ignorance. One of the few things that virtually all eminent scientists agree on, is that whatever developments there are in the attempt to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics, or even to understand quantum mechanics, the second law of thermodynamics will never be superseded. It is among the most fundamental of the laws of nature.
 
Simply stated, the second law says that disorder always increases. It may appear to decrease locally, in an animal or plant for example; in fact, the ability to reverse the second law has been mooted as a test for life. Sooner or later though, the animal dies, and disorder takes over. The second law also removes the ambiguity of the arrow of time; Newton’s laws of motion can be arbitrarily reversed by changing the polarity of the ‘time’ variable, but in a real situation, the second law always separates reality from illusion. It means that ultimately the universe will run down. The energy will all still be there—first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy—but it will be degraded to nearly absolute zero temperature. There is plenty of energy in a block of ice, but you can’t heat your house with it if all you have to work with is another block of ice…
 
Which brings me to thermodynamics as a subject for study. We did a series of lectures on it as part of my degree course. The lecturer was a nice man, Mr Sidney Weintraub. He was good hearted, close to retirement, a pillar of the local Jewish community, but a very indifferent teacher. He would shuffle and snuffle around the lecture theatre like an old badger making the weakest of mathematical jokes… I learned not a thing. If you’ve been extruded through the British educational system, you will be familiar with the very wide variation in ability of the teachers, lecturers, supervisors, professors etc. Most are adequate; a few know their subjects really well, and a small subset those, are great communicators. It is the latter, particularly in the science subjects, that are worth their weight in gold.
 
Stung by the C P Snow comment when I came across it sometime later, I decided that I needed at least a broad-brush understanding of thermodynamics since the second law is so fundamental. I have made a few, half hearted and unsuccessful attempts over the years, but when I came across the Oxford ‘Very Short Introduction’ to the laws of thermodynamics, I thought I was onto a winner. This series, published by the Oxford University Press, is, as the title suggests, a brief introduction by an eminent person in the field to a whole variety of topics in the arts and sciences. Peter Atkins is an emeritus professor of chemistry at Oxford. He has written books and won prizes for them—popular science books as well as textbooks—so he would appear to be the perfect choice to elucidate an abstruse subject. Not a bit of it. After the third ‘explanation’, that was no explanation at all, and after I read a particular paragraph four times and still could make neither head nor tail of it, I gave up. Very disappointing.
 
And then, almost by accident, I come across a course on thermodynamics on Audible, the talking books website. It was free as part of my membership and has course notes as a pdf. It is presented by Jeffrey C Grossman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the audio part of a visual presentation. It is American and chatty and lacks the visuals—in spite of the pdf which seems odd. Nevertheless, it scores over the Atkins effort in its straightforwardness and clarity, and the course notes are far more understandable than the Atkins ‘Short Introduction…’, so I shall persevere; so far, so very good. Already I’m intrigued. Entropy is not, apparently, disorder, and even scientists argue as to exactly what it really is…]]>Sun, 10 May 2026 14:57:08 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/deformedI really think that the country has suffered enough; what on earth have we done to deserve this? Between the disastrous and divisive European referendum in 2016, and 2024, we have had six prime ministers, five of them Tories. Only one of the latter came to power via a general election and two of them were obliged to resign in disgrace. There was the pain of austerity following the financial crash, seasoned up by bickering, uncertainty, and general discontent with negotiations over our departure from the EU. And on the basis that—if you lose your job and your wife runs off with your best friend, it doesn’t stop your house burning down—we had the 2020 Covid Pandemic. No wonder people were dissatisfied.
 
Cue the 2024 general election: the Tory vote halved, and the Labour vote for Starmer et al was less than the popular vote for Jeremy Corbyn (remember him?) in the 2019 election. Labour did not really win, the Tories lost. Labour inherited a dire mess, and proceeded to make one disastrous decision after another, culminating in the truly unbelievable decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. 
 
A perfect opportunity for a ‘White Knight’ to come along and save the country, but who did God send? Farage! A man straight out of Trump’s play book. Give him his due, he is very clever; he has focussed the extreme discontent among the electorate onto a tiny minority of unfortunates, viz the stream of illegal crossings of asylum-seekers. They are a very easy target and form the tiniest part of the tiniest part of the enormous stress on the country’s finances. If, Heaven forfend, Farage and his cronies ever do get into government, they will find that out.
 
Meanwhile, hoards of Labour supporters and MPs, after less than two years in government, are seriously calling to change the PM again! Seven prime ministers in ten years? You really couldn’t make it up, as I thought when Mandelson came crashing down for the third time. It seems almost that we are totally unable to govern ourselves. The danger is that when such things happen in a country with bankrupt finances, cf 1930s Germany, very nasty things can happen. Given the conflict in the world, unpleasantly close to home as the prices at the petrol pumps attest, this is not a time for weak government.]]>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:31:23 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/copenhagenTo the Hampstead Theatre yesterday for Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen. The basic premise of the action was a visit in 1941 to Neils Bohr in Copenhagen, paid by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Bohr was the acknowledged father of atomic theory, and Heisenberg had co-invented quantum mechanics; they had previously worked together in Copenhagen. It was the height of the war, Denmark was under German occupation, and Denmark’s Jews were soon to be deported to the camps. Bohr himself was half Jewish, and in 1943 would escape to the USA via Britain to work on the Manhattan Project. Heisenberg was an ‘Ayrian’ physicist working in Nazi Germany. Because he embraced ‘Jewish’ physics—most of the pioneers of atomic physics at Göttingen where he worked were Jews—he was called a ‘White Jew’ in Nazi circles. Nevertheless, the subsequent suspicion regarding his visit, yet unresolved in spite of numerous interviews with Bohr and Heisenberg after the war, and the recent emergence of previously unpublished letters from Heisenberg to his wife, is that Heisenberg was seeking knowledge of the Allies progress in the construction of an atomic bomb. The corollary being that had he suspected that they were working on such a device, he potentially, would have had the knowledge and motivation to build a Nazi bomb.
 
Quantum Mechanics—the basis of atomic theory—has the curious attribute that it produces results which agree with experimental observations to a quite astonishing degree of accuracy, while having no point of contact with the real world as understood by classical physics. As one of the greatest physicists of the modern age, Richard Feynmann observed, ‘Anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics, doesn’t understand quantum mechanics.’  Thus, anyone seeking to add quantum mechanics to a discussion of the mechanics of building an atomic bomb and presenting the result to a mainly non-technical theatre audience, is swimming in shark-infested waters indeed.
 
The play was a three-hander, with Bohr, Heisenberg, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, who acted as a sort of narrator or Geek chorus. Furthermore, it was set in the future when they were all ‘safely dead’, so the action included mention of history’s interpretation of the meeting, their own memories of it, the evidence after the war of actual German progress towards atomic power, and the development by the allies and then use of, the bomb on Japan. Intermixed were discussions about aspects of atomic theory and quantum mechanics, together with the mechanics of how to make a bomb. A recurring theme was uncertainty; if non-scientists know anything about Heisenberg, it is that he formulated the famous Uncertainty Principle. One formulation of this, is that the better you know the position of a particle, the less you know about its velocity and vice versa. Furthermore, the very act of measuring something, changes it. The uncertainty principle spelled the death-knell of a purely deterministic, classical world. In the play, this idea counterpointed with the ‘uncertainty’ of Heisenberg’s motive for the meeting. 
 
Even with (or perhaps because of) my long ago background in physics, I was frequently confused; it was necessary to concentrate the entire time. The Times theatre critic gave the play four stars, and the audience at our performance seemed to be appreciative; I’m guessing that they were both overawed by the outpouring of complex and esoteric information. My wife said she thought her head would explode. Much was said without proper explanation, and in my view confused the issue. For example, Bohr was credited, and it was mentioned several times, with the invention of ‘complementarity’, (which I was unfamiliar with and does not appear in the Wikipedia page on Bohr). This refers to the wave/particle duality of light and matter. Hardly an ‘invention’, more the naming of phenomena that existed and had to be accepted. To clarify: experiments confirm, unequivocally, that light takes the form of waves. Other experiments, equally unambiguous, prove that it has the nature of particles. Furthermore, and stranger still, fundamental particles like electrons, can be diffracted; since diffraction only works with waves, electrons and by extension matter, can also behave either like a wave or a particle. In my view, the play confused the wave/particle duality—hardly if ever mentioned—with Heisenberg’s formulation of quantum mechanics using matrix algebra as opposed to Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. The two are totally different mathematically, but they produce the same answers. However matrix algebra is fiendishly difficult, and nowadays people mostly use wave mechanics for calculations.
 
Then there was the question of the possible manufacture of a bomb. An atomic bomb is frighteningly simple in concept. All you need is a lump of fissionable material—say uranium 235—larger that the so-called critical mass, and it will explode spontaneously. The simplest bomb, that used on Nagasaki, used a cannon to fire a piece of uranium that was below critical mass into another piece of uranium, also below critical mass. As they came together, critical mass was exceeded, and they spontaneously exploded. The difficult part is refining the uranium. Natural uranium contains less than 1% of the U235 isotope; the rest is mostly U238. The numbers refer to the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, so U238 is very slightly heavier than U235. Since isotopes are chemically identical, a physical separation technique sensitive to the 1% difference in mass must be used. The only method available in the 1940s was diffusion, and this only works with a gas. The uranium was reacted with fluorine to produce uranium hexafluoride, and the gas was passed through myriads of filters, using the fact that the rate of diffusion goes with the square root of the mass. Uranium containing around 95% of U235 is needed for bomb manufacture. The process is enormously longwinded, and enormously expensive, so absolute confidence in the calculation of the amount needed is essential before you start.
 
Heisenberg made the case that he and Germany had not been developing a bomb by saying that he had calculated the critical mass of uranium needed to be 1000 kg, and it would have taken decades to enrich that amount. The actual amount needed was only 20 kg, so he was out by a factor of fifty and Bohr chided him for that, but it did appear to show that he had decided that such a weapon was not possible. In which case, why the visit?
 
Such from the action on stage, the programme notes, and my own knowledge, was I able to glean from the play. But it was hard work, and I really did not enjoy it. What the rest of the audience made of it is difficult to fathom. Science can be presented successfully in a theatre—Stoppard can do it, but he interlaces the action with sparkling wit and repartee. There were very few laughs in Copenhagen, and I was somewhat relieved when it was over.]]>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:26:09 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/if-this-is-a-manPrimo Levi was an Italian graduate chemist who joined the anti-Mussolini partisans in 1943, was arrested and, as a Jew, was deported to Auschwitz. His book, If This Is a Man, is a memoir of his time there. As he says in the introduction, he had the ‘good fortune’ to be sent there in February 1944, after the German Government had decided—due to a shortage of labour—to ‘extend the working life of prisoners before elimination’, and to improve somewhat their conditions. It is not, therefore, a litany of SS brutality and summary executions; in many ways, it is worse. There have been many accounts of the awful conditions in the camps, but the seeming mundaneness of the day-to-day, week-to-week grinding torture of the routine, lends authenticity to Levi’s account. It is horrifying but compelling reading. I’m tempted to say that older schoolchildren ought to be obliged to read the book so they may understand what racial and cultural intolerance can lead to.
 
I was once acquainted with an Italian survivor of the camps. I have mentioned in these posts events from my time playing with an English rock band in Rome in the summer of 1965. For us it was a time of wonder, but we encountered not a little name-calling from the Italians since three of us, me included, had regulation Rolling Stones type long hair—regarded by the locals as outrageous. The staff at The Piper, the famous night club where we played from 10:30 pm to 3:30 am seven days a week were, on the whole, very friendly. They of course had seen many bands come and go, and were familiar with the more flamboyant and bohemian set in Rome who frequented the club; long hair was no big deal to them. 
 
I struck up an acquaintance with the bouncer, Franco. He was a solid man of about 40. Not tall, or broad, or imposing, but with a definite air of controlled strength; a man you would want on your side. At the time I could not speak more than a few words of Italian and he had no English, so we conversed in the time-honoured fashion using mainly sign language. One day, he called me over and invited me to look at a 20 Lira coin he had removed from his pocket. He pointed to the ‘heads’ side—an anonymous female profile—took a pin from his jacket and wiggled his finger in his ear to indicate that the pin should be placed in the ear on the coin. Doing this, since the ear happened to be at the exact centre of the coin, he could balance it and spin it round. Such were the sundry ways we amused ourselves.
 
There was some more joshing around, and then without warning he rolled up the shirtsleeve on his left arm and showed me a number tattooed there. I recognised it immediately and realised that he had been in the camps during the war. However, I did not know until today that even though there were many concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and even Italy, it was only at Auschwitz-Birkenau that the prisoners were tattooed with numbers. Franco had been sent to Auschwitz. He must have experienced the same horrors as Levi—they might even have known each other.
 
At the time I was upset by the revelation, but the real significance escaped me. From Levi’s book, I now know, and cannot stop thinking about it.

]]>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:04:23 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/friendsAn exceedingly pleasant afternoon yesterday, spent in the company of very old friends Roy and Jacquie. Roy and I used to play in the band together—several previous posts have described aspects of our adventures. And although for several years back then we practically lived in each other’s pockets, we have barely met a dozen times in the intervening six decades. When we do meet, within seconds the years have fallen away, and we take great and relaxed pleasure in each other’s company.
 
A few years ago, we spent several days in Rome visiting old haunts. On one day, indifferent weather forced us into a fairly pedestrian department store where we were obliged to spend some hours sheltering from the rain, even eating in its decidedly unexciting café. But the time was as relaxed and enjoyable as our visits had been to the Trevi Fountain and Colosseum. This, it seems to me, is the mark of true friendship.
 
Roy, or it might have been Jacquie reminded us of a very amusing incident. They had invited us and two other couples over for a carry-out Chinese supper and quiz night. The teams were boys vs girls. One of the ladies, I won’t reveal her name—she knows who she is—was getting frustrated with the rate that us chaps were getting correct answers. I dare say that the alcohol intake may have contributed to the loosening of her inhibitions, notwithstanding that she was a mature lady not normally given to gay abandon. She picked the next question and announced to the company that if the men got this question correct, she would immediately lie down on the table and invite her husband to ravish her in front of everyone—or words to that effect. The question was something like: “Name the late 19th century German philosopher who said that God is dead.” While I have been trying to understand something of philosophy for a long time with very little success, what I have managed to achieve is knowledge of many of the philosophers' names and what they are best known for. I announced in a loud clear voice: “It was Friederich Nietzsche!” She went ashen; it was clear that the answer was correct, as I knew that it was, and after a split second everyone broke into barely controlled hysterics. It was a famous moment, and one that I had quite forgotten until reminded of it. ]]>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 11:43:12 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/the-bbcThis is a very bad day for the BBC. It is an organization that I have grown up with and has informed my cultural and intellectual development ever since my earliest years with Listen with Mother, until just a few minutes ago listening to Melvyn Bragg on In our Time on BBC Sounds, a peerless masterclass of information on the arts and sciences. Perhaps the most infuriating thing I heard today was the quite breathtaking hypocrisy of Charles Moore, sometime editor of the Daily Telegraph, a so-called news-paper, lecturing the BBC on impartiality…

The doctoring of Trump’s speech was unforgiveable. Those responsible should have been immediately dismissed, and an unflinching and entirely uncompromising apology offered. After all, Trump’s utterings and actions are so outrageous that no editing is necessary. It doesn’t matter that the BBC’s detractors use lies, innuendo, bias, and half-truths to attack it. It must always remain balanced, even to a sometimes absurd degree. By doing what was done in a serious current affairs programme, the BBC provided its detractors and enemies a golden opportunity to destroy it.

It is clear to me that the deafening silence from the BBC board as I write this—11:15 am, 10 November—signifies chaos. Whatever the reason, and there are rumours of a conspiracy which I do not intend to pass on, the BBC is very troubled. It could not have come at a worse time on the run up to the negotiation on the charter.

My experience of BBC programmes over a period of seventy-five years, both on radio and television, is that they absolutely do succeed in their objective to inform, educate, and entertain to a very high standard. Clearly, reform is needed and it seems to be the top that needs it most. But we must be very careful that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our main public service broadcaster must be protected at all costs from the free-market jackals that wish its demise.

Note added 4:00 pm, 10 November. I read—on the BBC website—that Trump is threatening to sue them for a billion dollars, and has given them until Friday to respond. And the ghastly truth is, that he is entirely justified in doing so! I don't know how we get out of this one. It is the most frustrating thing when you're in serious trouble, and you know that the only person responsible is yourself. I am actually quite close to despair.]]>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:17:18 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/six-months-of-wonder-and-optimismI include here a story told by my father and written up by him. It is quite charming and self-explanatory, and explains his, and my, attachment to South Kensington and its museums—and also the Albert Hall. It relates a time when some people with vision forced through vast and expensive public works for the common good.

My great grandfather, Frank Maggs—my father's grandfather in the tale—was born on Salisbury Plain; his father William Maggs was a shepherd, and his mother, Rhoda Kyte was the daughter of a shepherd. My great grandmother, his wife, was Harriet Elizabeth Chilman, one of six daughters of James Chilman and Jane Brookson, born in Merton in what is now South West London.

The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens—opposite the Albert Hall—stands pretty much in the centre of where the original Crystal Palace containing the Great Exhibition of 1851 stood for that six months of wonder and optimism. 

All Because of Crystal Palace

When I was a boy in the thirties, growing up in a London suburb, there was a man living up on the hill above us who had a large telescope on his house. Well behaved children could visit him and look through it. Older ones went there on clear dark evenings and saw the moon and planets. In the daytime, especially during the summer holidays, the telescope was pointed at things on earth.
 
One fine morning when I went up there the man said I was in particular good luck. I would see the sun’s rays reflected in prismatic colours on Crystal Palace, which stood on a high point right over the other side of London. The effect was unique, he said; no artist had ever been able to capture it. I was fascinated to have seen a palace of crystal that actually existed and must contain wonderful things. I went round to see my grandfather about it. He was something on the Council to do with getting Works done so he would know about anything special that had been built, how it had been done.
 
Grandfather could be funny, serious or stern. He used to fight the canary to amuse me, putting his finger up at it, threatening to have it cooked for his dinner. The canary just spread its wings and put its tongue out at him which made him shake with laughter and his head go red all over because he had no hair on top. When I went round after looking through the big telescope, grandfather was sitting at one end of the table and granny at the other. “Did you ever go up to Crystal Palace?” I asked him. To my surprise he began to shake as he did when fighting the canary. Eventually he stopped and, grinning, said: “I went up there many years ago but I wasn’t looking at that old palace; my idea was to get my arm round my beloved here!” Granny feigned embarrassment and said: “What a wicked man he is to tell a child such a thing!” But grandfather was unabashed. “All the same,” he declared, “it so happens that because of that old Crystal Palace, I am here, your father is here and, by consequence, you are here!” Then he became reflective as he began to relate the reason why.
 
“My mother that was to be,” he said in measured tones, “was born in a village of Salisbury Plain way back in the 1820s. Now Salisbury Plain be not flat but a mighty expanse of rolling downs where the sky meets the horizon on every side so that people living there think they can see away to the edge of the world.” Grandfather paused, then added: “Some of them get the idea they’d like to fly over and see what is on the other side!” He grinned again. “My mother that was to be was such a one,” he announced. “When she grew up she gave out that village people ought to see London and like places to broaden their minds!” Grandfather gave a serious chuckle. “But those old village people were like a lot of people everywhere,” he went on. “On one account, they’d like to fly away, while on the other hand - ‘better the devil you know’ - they prefer to stay put.” He allowed the point to be taken. “However,” he then said, leaning forward in a characteristic manner of his: “That old Prince Consort, who married our Queen Victoria, got to thinking, according to his idea, that if the different people of the world got to know each other, they might get on better. He reckoned that a Great Exhibition of the Arts and Industries of all Nations, to be held in London, would do the trick. People didn’t like the notion of all those foreigners taking over London, but the old Prince had his way, and there was the question of putting up a building in Hyde Park to house the Exhibition. They did not want an affair of bricks and mortar, so in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one they gave the job to a maker of greenhouses! He puts up a mighty greenhouse of iron parts bolted together, paved over with thousands of panes of glass, for which reason it got to be called the ‘Crystal Palace’”.
 
“Now when my mother who was to be heard about that, she announced that, being a young woman of full age, she were going up to see it! Why, they said, she’d be murdered on the way! She was persuaded to take a situation with a lady at Plymouth, but that was a mistake: excursions went from there to Crystal Palace, and my mother who was to be went off and saw the Great Exhibition!”
 
Grandfather paused as he laughed, yet seemed to reflect seriously at the same time. I supposed that having some of his mother’s spirit in him he would have run off himself to see the wonder of the world of that time, while marvelling at the risks his mother had taken. “When she comes back,” grandfather began again, “she were mighty told off for the worry she had caused.” He stopped as if to let the point sink in, children being inclined to view their parents as just strict rather than concerned for their welfare. But then grandfather shook with laughter: “There was only one thing for it,” he declared, “that was for her to be married off! She had her eye on a handsome young master shepherd of the locality and she hauls him away to the altar!”
 
Granny now had to protest. “What a thing to say about his mother,” she observed, “that she carried off his father!” It was the accepted view – I had often heard my mother express it – that men inveigled ladies into marriage and not the other way round. “I hope he has finished his tale,” added granny. “Nope!” said grandfather decisively. “I be now going to relate the siege of Fiddler’s Barn!” Granny sat back with a really embarrassed smile, for this part of grandfather’s tale plainly concerned her.
 
“When that Great Exhibition of 1851 ended,” said grandfather, “they found they had made a good profit of money. They decided to apply it to education for all classes of people, building colleges and museums. Then Crystal Palace itself they made fly away to Sydenham Hill. They took it apart bolt by bolt and rebuilt it bigger still.”
 
“On Salisbury Plain, my mother and father had sons and daughters, but sheep rearing there were out of fashion. When I grew up I had to leave to seek my fortune in the town, and it was when I was working for a council near London that my eye lighted upon a certain damsel! Why, that put me out of sorts!” he said, shaking with laughter as granny tut-tutted. “Says I to her,” went on grandfather, “‘will you come up with me to see the great fireworks at Crystal Palace?’ Well, she agreed, and sitting in the dark gardens there, lit up only by those old coloured rockets bursting over our heads, I broached the notion of matrimony.” He shook with mirth again and added: “she were for it!” Granny just managed to remark: “What a silly old man he is!” as grandfather continued: “I took my beloved away to Salisbury Plain to see my mother.”
 
“Now life on the Plain was natural,” he said, meaning it was near to nature and a challenge. “A man would need a woman and woman a man to get on there, and both of ’em must be fit!” he added as a serious aside in the manner of stating a fact of life. “My mother says to my beloved: ‘Could you walk alone over the Plain to Stonehenge and back?’ Now it’s not all that far and the road is straight, having been made by the slaves of the Romans, but it rises and falls quite steeply in parts, and it could be creepy even in daylight, with not another soul to be seen for miles around. But my young lady agrees to do it, and she got to Stonehenge and, after resting on the grass within the circle, she set out for the return. She was not far off home, however, when a cloud came over, bringing a shower with it. Fearing to be wetted, she looked around for shelter when she sees the wide open door of Fiddler’s Barn. Not wanting to get her finery damp, she hurries straight to it and sits down on a bale of hay.”
 
“Now it so happened that a troop of mounted Hussars in ceremonial uniform, all polished and smart, were out riding on the Plain, probably rehearsing their appearance on some State occasion. The officer, mad at the idea of their uniforms being spoiled, ordered his men to make for Fiddler’s Barn at the charge. They went through the doors uttering lusty oaths, only almost to fall off their horses with embarrassment on finding a damsel sitting there! ‘Why, ma’am,’ cried out the officer, doffing his helmet, ‘I had no idea . . .’ He wanted to send one of his men to order a carriage, but hearing she was contracted to walk, declared that the least he could do would be to escort her once the shower was over. So it was that my beloved here arrived back in the village, escorted by an officer of Hussars with his troop leading their horses. My mother took the view therefore that if she was capable of commandeering a unit of the army she was capable of taking me over.”
 
Grandfather laughed as granny said: “What nonsense!”, then made his point: “So you see that it was all on account of that old Crystal Palace that we are all here!”
 
In 1951, a hundred years after the Great Exhibition, the government mounted the Festival of Britain to mark the centenary. Unlike its predecessor, it made a financial loss of eleven million pounds. One section of it, however, did make a profit, and this was a show in the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the site just below where Crystal Palace had originally stood, of exhibits surviving from the Great Exhibition of 1851. In a case containing small items, I spotted a souvenir lead model of the facade of the 1851 Crystal Palace and I gazed at it with emotion. For a card told me it had been lent by a lady of my own surname, which gave me a sensation of travelling through time. I thought it likely I could guess who had originally bought that souvenir a hundred years ago, when the variety of the world had been brought together in Hyde Park for that six months of wonder and optimism.
 
Norman Maggs, 1994 ​]]>Wed, 01 Oct 2025 19:49:29 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/does-god-existIt’s a good question, and one that seems to become more relevant the older one gets. I was brought up a Catholic—I may have mentioned that before. Not a strict upbringing, but any deficiency from my parents was more than compensated for by various forms of mental and physical abuse meted out at the Catholic schools that I attended.
 
Catholicism I shrugged off as soon as I left school. It is, after all man-made, and since there are so many religions—more than you can count affirming various flavours of just Christianity—the chances are not great that the Catholic Church is the actual true one, even if such a thing exists.
 
Freed from the chains of Catholic belief, I found myself starting to think the unthinkable: was it possible that the God of the Catholic church did not, actually, exist? And if He was a myth, was it possible—since we had had it drummed into us at school time out of number that the Catholic God was the only true one—that no god existed at all?
 
Minds many times greater than mine have considered this problem over the ages, nevertheless it is a subject that I have continued to ponder. C S Lewis was a notable writer and academic who famously converted to Christianity from atheism. His book, Surprised by Joy, is supposed to describe this conversion. A further work, The Problem of Pain, explains how and why pain exists in a world created, allegedly, by a loving God. In these two works there must, I felt, be some answers…
 
Both were a great disappointment. I must have misunderstood the point of Surprised by Joy—a limited autobiography of Lewis’s early life. ‘Joy’, which I assume he saw as equivalent to spiritual revelation, he tried to explain—in terms of a toy garden made by his brother and Squirrel Nutkin (yes really)—as a sort of supercharged nostalgia. As for his conversion to Christianity, which seems to have taken place on a bus, the best I could make of it was that those of his colleagues at his Oxford college whom he most admired were all Christians.
 
The second book, The Problem of Pain, seeks to counter a common assertion used by atheists to attack the idea of a loving god. Stephen Fry makes a good argument here. Why on earth would a loving god create a parasite that bores into the eyes of children making them blind? Lewis’s thesis appears to revolve around the concept of free will. Individuals’ free wills impinge on each other and thus cause conflict and pain, although this hardly counters Fry’s point, nor does it address the acute pain in diseases like cancer. Instead, Lewis presents a series of carefully constructed philosophical arguments—bordering on sophistry—to support his case. This is all interspersed with plenty of devotional mumbo jumbo. All in all, a very disappointing effort.
 
And so, I am no further forward. Even Bertrand Russell is no great help. He was a towering intellect, a philosopher and mathematician and a notable atheist. And yet with all of his analytical ability, he was an ardent supporter of CND. He failed to grasp the burningly obvious point that once invented, nuclear weapons could not be un-invented. Thus to give them up, is potentially to surrender to those who still have them, pace Ukraine…
 
On balance I don’t believe in God by quite some margin, and the fact that certain devotional music regularly reduces me to tears, I write off as sentimentality and stupidity in old age.]]>Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:39:39 GMThttps://www.mirlibooks.com/blog/the-road-to-hellI have been reading Professor Ian Kershaw’s magnificent history of Europe between 1914 and 1949, To Hell and Back. The book details the two devastating wars that between them killed around 100 million people in Europe and throughout the world. The reality of the slaughter and destruction is almost unimaginable to us today, until we look at our TV screens and see what is going on in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere…
 
There is terrifying déjà vu in the account of how Britain and France allowed Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia by annexing the Sudetenland—with its ethnic Germans—and his promise that that would satisfy him. Within months he had invaded the whole country, and not many months after that most of Europe was at war. The parallels with Putin and his so-called ‘ethnic Russians’ in Eastern Ukraine, and the suggestion of giving up land for peace are all too terrifyingly obvious. And there are plenty of ethnic Russians in several other NATO countries...
 
Now, as then, we—the so-called Western European democracies—do not want war, we have far, far too much to lose. World War Three is, in any case, unthinkable; we must believe that Putin and Trump et al are not stupid enough to think that it could ever be winnable. But limited war, as is happening in Ukraine, would be enormously expensive and damaging not to mention the lives lost.
 
I am reminded of Orwell’s 1984. It describes a state of permanent war between two of three great powers, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—rotating between the three—as a method for those in control to stay in power. I suspect that it is only the mythical threat of ‘The West’ against Russia, that keeps Putin and his cronies in The Kremlin. His invasion of Ukraine to remove the ‘Nazi’ regime is necessary to validate the on-going ‘threat’ against Russia and his valiant defence of the fatherland. If he is successful in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states will be next on his list. The fact that Ukraine is armed and assisted by the Western Democracies, serves to confirm the analysis Putin wishes to portray to his public that The West has military ambitions towards Russia.
 
Sadly, there is very little that can be done other than to counter the threat by spending whatever is necessary to defend the NATO borders, and continuing to support Ukraine. This is money that could far better be spent on the NHS, social care, and public services in general. And if Trump, Vance, and the Tommy Robinson crowd think that democracy and free speech in Britain is under threat, they should spend some time in Russia, try articulating their ideas there, and see how far it gets them.]]>