At the seaside ...

A day out yesterday to Frinton, to paddle in the sea. Lots of families out on the beach and in the sea.

Home via Holy Mass at Ingatestone; and ending here for dinner ...

The elephants in the park

And now for the matching elephants ....

The reason for the elephants? Go here.

[More about elephants at Bridges and Tangents]

Bradwell-on-Sea

The Times publish from time to time articles about walks in different parts of the country. The walk at Bradwell-on-Sea can be found on their website. So, on Sunday, Zero and I set off to investigate what turns out to be a place in the middle of nowhere. Well, not in the middle of nowhere - it is at the far end of nowhere, and then a bit beyond.

We started off by driving to Burnham-on-Crouch to catch 11.15 am Mass. Approaching Danbury, Zero recalled hearing during the week the quite shocking news that some 63% of men have never bought flowers for their wives. Apart from the fact that I don't meet the latter qualifying condition, I breathed a sigh of relief ... I have done the buying flowers bit. Phew!

The photograph shows St Cuthbert's Catholic Church, Burnham-on-Crouch, where we went to Mass. The parish priest serves this parish and that at Malden - with the whole of the Dengie peninsula (I hadn't heard of it either, until yesterday) as his parish. I think he is what you would call a "country parson", with a flock scattered across a wide area of Essex villages.

After Mass and a tea break, we drove on to Bradwell. Now, Southminster probably marks the edge of civilisation. Trains do get there - out from London Liverpool Street. But Southminster is where they stop. After that you really are in the lanes, white wooden road signs and country churches that could be the early 19th century rather than the 21st century.

Six miles, at three miles an hour, over flat land, starting off at 2.15 pm, safely back to the car at 4.15, perhaps 4.30 pm at a push. Still in daylight, even at this time of year. Not a bit of it. We arrived back at the car at 5.45 pm having walked the last half mile or so in the descending gloom of darkness. The weather was cold and damp, but the rain held off while we actually walked. This was so far towards the edge of nowhere that it really was quiet - you could hear the gentle waves of the sea and the sound of the birds.

Highlight 1: Bradwell nuclear power station.

Bradwell's nuclear power station, in the process of being de-commissioned. The upper picture shows the sign at the entrance to the power station site and the concrete runway left over from the wartime airfield that used to exist there. I didn't realise there was an airfield, with a memorial, there until I got back home. The Times should have perhaps included it in their walking route, though we walked for a short time along one of the roadways of the airfield. The lower picture shows more the view that we had of the power station, from the beach as we walked past it. Monstrosity was Zero's "word of the day" to describe it.

Highlight 2: St Peter at the Wall

This Church is as much in the middle of nowhere on the coast, overlooking a marsh and looking out to the North Sea as the pictures suggest. My photo from inside looking out through the door faces inland across the farm land that surrounds the chapel. The chapel does have its own official website, so you can go there to find out more about its history.

After getting petrol on the way home, Zero asked me what I thought of the Eagles. I didn't get away with "before my time", as Zero pitched to me the observation that they still played the O2 arena and the like. Desperate not to place myself back among the 63%, I duly checked whether or not this was a "buying flowers for wives" moment ... "It's much nicer to go with someone", was the reply. Now, what have I let myself in for?

Highlight 3: The Red Lion, Margaretting

.... for dinner on the way home!

John Henry Newman: phenomenologist or transcendental Thomist?

"Burning the midnight oil" often refers to the student desperately trying to finish an essay or assignment that is due in the next day, which might not have been started, and which simply has to be done before retiring to bed (or not retiring at all, if one is really taking the experience seriously!). For those of us for whom student days are a distant memory, it usually means that we haven't been sufficiently organised to get to bed and have instead just stayed up reading.

It is the characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgement on the things that come before us. No sooner do we apprehend than we judge: we allow nothing to stand by itself: we compare, contrast, abstract, generalize, connect, adjust, classify: and we view all our knowledge in the associations with which these processes have invested it.

Of the judgements thus made, ... some are mere opinions which come and go.... Others are firmly fixed in our minds.... Many of them attach to one and the same object, which is variously viewed ..... some are only not inconsistent with each other, in that they have a common origin: some, as being actually incompatible with each other, are, one or other, falsely associated in our minds with their object, and in any case they may be nothing more than ideas, which we mistake for things.

I will definitely show my age - or at least the era of my philosophical education - when I say that the two immediate thougths that came into my mind on reading this first section of Chapter I of Newman's An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine were the following:

Was Newman, without realising it, following the same sort of school of thought as would later be taken by Husserl and the phenomenological school? "Idea", the concern for "things", the delineation of the content of an idea apprehended? And, indeed, the very style of analytical writing?

Or was he a transcendental Thomist before such a thing was even thought of? Doesn't the first paragraph put one in mind of Lonergan? "Apprehend", "abstract" "judgement"?

You do not have to read very far into the Essay on Development to come across the much abused quotation:

In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

And recognising the context, is, of course, the key to understanding what Newman intended in this sentence. First of all, Newman has in the preceding pages given a phenomenological account of the way in which an idea can develop in human society as it encounters different ideas and situations and so shows itself in different aspects. And then the sentence immediately preceding the oft quoted one is:

It [ie the idea] changes with them [ie the surrounding circumstances, the history of its encounter with other ideas, etc] in order to remain the same.

In the preceding pages, Newman has clearly expressed an idea of development in ideas as

... the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field. On the other hand this process will not be a development, unless the assemblage of aspects, which constitute its ultimate shape, really belongs to the idea from which they start.

And if the "assemblage of aspects" does not meet this criterion it is not a development but a "corruption" (the word Newman himself uses at points in these same pages).

Newman uses the oft quoted sentence in a philosophical context, and not a directly theological one; this makes its simplistic use to suggest that Catholic teaching should change in order to live rather misleading. In its proper context, the sentence is just as much a statement about continuity as it is about change; and its application to a theological context needs to be made analagously and not literally.

Men are useless

Hero (ie Zero after Francis' comment on this post) asked me yesterday what I had been doing on New Year's Day last year (or, as I post, still this year, but I am sure you know what I mean).

I think I had three tries.

Then:

See here.

Then see the title of this post.

2+2=5

I am not sure I have fully understood this concept:

Silent Disco on Ice


10 December 2009, 19.45, 21.00 and 22.00 skate sessions

Tickets £16

The Ice Rink hosts London’s first ever silent disco on ice. Come and skate at the silent disco and listen to pop classics or the latest nightclub tracks.

The Fantastic Mr Fox

Zero and I went to see this film yesterday. The trailer is on Youtube. We regularly speculate on where we belong with regard to the median age of others in the cinema, but there was a second criterion in play yesterday. We were the only unaccompanied adults. We didn't see any one we knew, so our anonymity is safely preserved. Given the media attention the film attracted at its UK premiere at the London Film Festival, the attendance was poor - a dozen or so.

We both found the film to be not at all what we had been expecting. On my part, that was probably because I have never read Roald Dahl, the one or two quick looks I have had at his books leaving me totally un-interested. I suspect Zero of just wanting to swoon over George Clooney's voicing of Mr Fox. It wasn't a children's film in the conventional sense. Though it would be quite wrong to describe it as violent, one couldn't really describe it as gentle either. The episode in which a raid is launched by Mr Fox and company to rescue his nephew from captivity, for example, has images that rather reflect video games, with pine cone "grenades" being thrown to create mayhem. [Interestingly, a trailer for a film of Alice in Wonderland seemed equally intense.] This lack of a clear "positioning" might explain the poor attendance.

I wonder at where the film was trying to position itself as far as being "Politically Correct" was concerned. The three farmers (the baddies) were stereotyped as tall and skinny, fat and short. But at three or four points in the film, "being different" was praised. One part of this was the nephew who was good at everything and outshone Mr Fox's own son - the latter was encouraged, or at least the attempt to do so was made, on the grounds that it was good to be different. At another point the different abilities of all the animals was highlighted to be used in the plan for the rescue attempt, along the lines of them all being different and so having something different to offer. Now, there is, of course, a very good point to this; but it can also be read in a completely relativist manner, which isn't so good.

There were also a couple of moments of wonderful reverse anthropomorphism, when Mr Fox explained an aberration by the fact that they were wild animals after all, and that what had happened was just the wild animal part of their being coming through. Rather Darwin-esqe, and I am sure it was appreciated by the children present (!).

I should admit that there were elements that did reflect the film being a children's film. Things like Mr Fox's visit to the estate agent (a badger) early in the film struck me as being about something within the experience of children - moving house as a younger sibling gives rise to a need for a larger house. Similarly with Mrs Fox's announcing her pregnancies. Sibling rivalry was also represented, again I expect something within the experience of the child audience. Cleaning teeth was also there - and Zero liked the juice dribbled down the bib of "baby" fox towards the end of the film.

And, oh, those foxes were just so cute! Go and look at the trailer again. And then look at this featurette, which tells something of the making of the puppets, and this one,  which is an interview with Roald Dahl's wife Felicity. This latter suggests that the character of Mr Fox reflects that of Roald Dahl himself - one can realise why Mrs Fox is named Felicity, too. A taste of the soundtrack here.

Are you sitting comfortably? (Or, a story about the meaning of life)

One Saturday night, a physics teacher, another physics teacher, an English teacher (well, advisory teacher, which just about counts) and a midwife went to London.

They started from Newbury Park Station on the Central Line, where a serious discussion was held about midwife's parking. Herewith a previous example:

On the way, they realised they had time to tour the West End before dining, so visited Trafalgar Square to see One and Other: where this lady had just been deposited atop the fourth plinth. She can be seen here being admired by, from left to right, midwife, physics teacher (2) and English teacher (advisory):



There was a game of chess, complete with erudite commentary, under way in the square: The Tournament, a centre piece of the London Design Festival.


Midwife then requested a visit to Seven Dials, an area of London just north of Covent Garden. As you will realise from the map getting in to Seven Dials is easy, but if you are stood at the Seven Dials itself, with its different choice of directions to take, and one direction only being the one you want to take, and having lost your orientation from the road on which you arrived, all the roads look the same .....



It was then on to 2 Greek Street, just off Soho Square: to a restaurant called The Gay Hussar. This had been the suggestion of English teacher (advisory), attracted by the restaurant's reputation as the haunt of sundry politicians whose caricature portraits decorate the walls. This was, of course, the ideal place to discuss the future of the world and such like matters.

Physics teacher (2) and midwife

English teacher (advisory) and physics teacher (1)

Over dessert, a book was produced and the following problem posed by midwife and English teacher (advisory), who appeared to have been in deliberate collusion.

As a participant in a game show, you are given a choice of three doors to open. Behind two of the doors there is a goat (not the same one, presumably, two separate goats, each one behind a different door), and behind the third door there is a brand new car. You are given a choice of door to open, which you indicate to the show's host. The host then opens one of the doors that you have not chosen, and there is a goat behind it. At this point, would you change your choice of door to open?

Physics teacher began to think about the quantum mechanical wave functions of the two individual goats and the car, and that the original state before the opening of the first door by the show host was a superposition of the three overlapping wavefunctions. Opening the first door constituted a measurement of part of the system, leading to a partial collapse of the wavefunction, and the new situation being now represented by a superposition of the wavefunctions of the one remaining goat and the car ... at which point the effect of a glass and half of wine kicked in and he returned to his dessert without saying anything.

Then physics teacher (2) took hold of the book, and carefully set about studying the analysis of the probabilities of opening a door with the car behind it, calculated first with no doors having been opened and then with the one door having been opened. The argument was apparently that the chances of choosing the door with the car correctly first time were smaller than those of choosing it second time, after the one door had been opened, so you should change your choice of door.

At this point, physics teacher and physics teacher (2) both agreed that the situation of the second choice was a new one compared to the first choice, and so to compare a probability calculated on the basis of the first situation to one calculated for the second was nonsensical.

Neither midwife nor English teacher (advisory) offered a solution.

As I am sure the astute readers of this blog will realise, the key to finding the answer to the problem about the meaning of life contained in this conundrum is:

Should we really value to the car

more highly than we value the goat?

Plan E

This being the fifth version of half term holiday activities, it is Plan E!

Yesterday was spent at the Imperial War Museum Duxford. There are lots of aeroplanes to see, the site copes well with children and families. The Airspace hanger contains displays and activities about the history and science of flight. There are also displays about the manufacture of aircraft. The American Air Museum is an interesting building, as well as containing a wide range of American military aircraft reaching up to the present day. Some planes - I noticed this in particular with the Jaguar ground-attack aircraft in Airspace - are actually rather smaller than one might imagine. A "boys" day out!

Today was a healthy day, visiting Otford, the location of the world's largest scale model of the solar system. This was the idea of Otford Parish Council, and the model had to fit within the parish boundary. Each planet is represented by a column, with a to-scale representation of the planet engraved in the top.

First, the Sun:

Then Venus:

And here is Mercury:

Jupiter is down the side of the playing fields:

And Saturn is in the car park of the local doctors' surgery:

The other planets are further down the village, with Pluto outside the village on a local hillside. Each planet is positioned to represent where it would have been at 00.01 GMT on 1st January 2000.

As we visited, we met the designer of the model, who was cutting the grass to show the orbits of each of the planets that are represented on the village playing fields. The model extends beyond the United Kingdom, with columns in the Falkland Islands, New Zealand and Los Angeles, these columns representing the positions of nearest neighbour stars in the galaxy.

That was the easy bit of the day! We then went for a 5.3 mile walk from the village, up the Darent valley, up the eastern side of the valley and back down again. [The link will take you to an excellent four page leaflet giving instructions for the walk - it really is a very accurate guide to what you encounter at each key point in the walk.]

It was a beautiful day, but a bit muddy underfoot in places.

Lunch:

Photo opportunity:

And finally, a carousel to look after the cows:

Focolare Epiphany Party ... and ice skating again

On Saturday afternoon, Zero and I went to this:





This proved a very enjoyable occasion, reflecting Focolare's spirituality of unity. It was quite interesting to see how the songs, readings and little play by the children confidently presented the Scriptural accounts of the Epiphany. We have a "Word of Life" meeting here in Romford - I host it every second month - and this party gave us the chance to meet another group who meet in Forest Gate.


During the meeting we had read to us the text of an e-mail from the Focolare community in Jerusalem, made up of Muslims, Jews and Christians. They had come together to pray for peace during the current conflict in Jerusalem. We also heard of a similar gathering taking place in Haifa. This reminded me of accounts from the Focolare house in Lebanon which, during the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, had taken in families from the south of the country who had fled their homes to escape the fighting. We were particularly encouraged to take part in the daily "Time out" for peace that the young adults of Focolare have promoted since the first Gulf War in 1990. The idea is that, at any one time, part of the world is spending a a minute in prayer or silence for peace. It is intended that this "time out" occurs at 12 noon in each time zone.


There was time before the Epiphany Party for .... ice skating at the rink at Canary Wharf.

These boots are made for skating, and that's just what they'll do ...

It was very cold, especially for the one of us who fell over (twice):

And to finish:

New Years Day

Zero and I enjoyed a day out in London for the New Year. The Central Line wasn't enjoying a good start to the year, so we made it in to London in time for 11 am Mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception instead of our originally intended 10 am at St James' Spanish Place.

A bout of second adolescence set in as soon as we came out from Mass. The car involved here is a very nice one indeed - a Bentley. My other car, of course, is a Ford!

After some lunch, and getting lost around this part of London ...

... the Seven Dials area of Covent Garden .... "Seven Dials, Covent Garden – London's most fashionable shopping area", according to their website, and with quite a history if you have time to explore the site ... we finally found our way to the London Transport Museum. This is an excellent museum, with rather a lot squeezed into the space available.

I want to be a train driver when I grow up ...

... and Zero wants to be a bus conductor.

This is the example of the famous Routemaster bus in the exhibition. The no.11 is my favourite bus route - the full length of the route goes from Fulham in west London, via the Kings Road (very posh shops) to Victoria, whence to Parliament Square, Whitehall, the Strand, past St Paul's Cathedral and through the City of London to Liverpool Street Station. It can be a much more interesting ride back to Liverpool Street on the way home than using the Circle Line!

This bus would attract some very odd looks if it were to make its way along the A12 to Romford today.

Someone is a dedicated follower of fashion ...

A piece in the Times newspaper for 1st January 2009 covered some of the new regulations that came into force yesterday. Amongst them is one about the use of flares during night time rescue work. This is now forbidden, having been overtaken by the use of night vision goggles by many of the agencies involved in such work. However, a sentence in the Times report clarified that the wearing of flared trousers by rescue crews was not covered by this ban on flares.

A happy and blessed new year to the readers of this blog.

Second Adolescence: or ice skating

Last year Zero and I adventured in to the world of Christmas/New Year ice rinks around London. Our enthusiasm for this, or our insanity, depending on your point of view, has survived a year. A couple of photos from Friday evening at Hyde Park, in London.

We undertook very careful sociological research, at the rink at Hyde Park and then at Somerset House and the Tower of London. However, we could not convince ourselves other than that we were both well above the median age of those taking part in this slippery activity.

Apostolic visit to West Yorkshire

Veniteadoremus invited me for coffee - but like her, I generally drink tea. As far as helping to explain signal processing - age is affecting my skills in this area, the neurones do not connect as well as they used to, and when they do, the noise tends to drown out any useful signal ... An involved way of saying that it is a LONG time since my physics degree ...

Where am I going to be for the next couple of days? Haworth. Follow the link to the Brontes. I have read everything by Charlotte, but not succeeded in finishing anything by Anne or Emily.

St Anne's, Keighley, is where I am expecting to be at Mass this Sunday (probably Saturday evening, actually).

And on our way back we intend calling on Isaac Newton - well, his birthplace at least. I have to remember to buy some apples to provide the materials for a suitable photo opportunity!

So my next post is likely to be on Sunday or Monday.

Ice skating and second adolescence

The local Ice Rink not scoring very well on customer care, we ended up travelling to Canary Wharf in London, where the last of the Christmas/New Year outdoor rinks was still open. At least there we should not have met anyone we knew and could display our lack of expertise without due concern. Except that the girl selling the tickets had been in one of my A-level Physics classes only three years ago .... The (temporary) rink was located between the skyscrapers of Docklands. Video clip to follow when I have worked out the best way of posting videos to a blog!

This photo taken from beside the ice rink...

In the afternoon, we visited Greenwich Park. Pulse rates of 92 and 96 (don't ask) after we had walked up to the Old Observatory at the top of the hill.

To prove we did reach the top...

This was the view on the way back down again....

We finished the day with a real dose of adolescence, at the Greenwich Picture House (see review below). No popcorn, though. We shall have to have another go at this cinema thing ...