William Shepherd

Paul McCartney was 64 yesterday and had his first family with him in Peasmarsh…a few miles from Rye…to celebrate the occasion. Paul’s children met up at the Abbey Road Studios a few weeks ago and recorded a new set of lyrics for one of Paul’s best-known songs: When I’m 64. I thought of writing new lyrics for the song a few months ago. But my idea was to write the song from the point of view of somebody in his or her mid-eighties looking back at the time they were 64. No matter. We can make it a trilogy.

Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio is seriously under-rated and many of the songs he wrote as one of the four Beatles can be compared favourably with the best that Mozart or Schumann produced. The other day I listened again to the lyrics of his song For No One…a poignant love song from the break-up of a relationship…that appeared first on The Beatles’ Revolver Album and was then recycled into another underrated artistic work…this time a film…Say Goodbye to Broad Street. Paul wrote the song in a ski chalet while on holiday with Jane Asher.

The ability to write great songs does not diminish with age but the urge to do the necessary mental and psychological workouts to be able to do so gets harder as you get older. There will be more to come from Paul McCartney now he has broken up from Heather Mills and can start grieving properly for the death of his first wife Linda Eastman several years ago. Bereavement is hard enough without having to do it in the public eye.

My laptop refused to crank up on Sunday morning with a full day’s work planned…so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. The gods love doing this to me. I took my Apple Mac Mini out from the storage to which it had been consigned since my return from Llangolmen but it too refused to work. My third option was Heidi’s old desktop that has been under the cabin table for the past year or so. It started, went for ten minutes and then gave up the ghost. I decided enough was enough, removed my hard drive and a couple of working DVD Players and threw the remains in the skip. From boom to bust…but at least I have some legroom under the table now. I still have the keys to Clive Ogden’s bookshop so figured I would have emergency back up…something I used yesterday and today.

Last Wednesday NCAB gave us a newsletter to translate urgently. By Friday NCAB had asked for it in Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish as well as in English. Norwegian is causing us problems again…it is boom time for Norway and Norwegian translators. Our regular Norwegian translator has gone home for Midsummer and three other Norwegian translators have turned us down so we are scrambling. Our best hope lies with our Finnish translator who may have found someone. We will know tomorrow. It is irritating as the newsletter is only 380 words.

It has been a cultural few days. On Friday I was at Hastings College in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea for the private viewing of the college students’ end-of-year exhibition. The sheer range of arts, crafts and artefacts on display was what impressed me most. I did not get to meet Françoise but her pièce de résistance…a screen with thirty-six panels of black glass each with its own multi-coloured metallic flashes…was worth the trip across the county.

Saturday was the Ryesingers’ Summer Concert with a rehearsal at 5 pm and the performance in Rye Methodist Church from 7.30 pm until 9.15 pm. This may turn out to be my last appearance with Ryesingers although Princess Ida is on the schedule for February 2007. Hmm! We delivered our best performances on each item on our Mozart programme which is the way one hopes it will be...trusting to the adrenaline to kick in.

In between cultural events I have been writing my weblogs, keeping abreast with e-mails and reading Sarah Harrison’s 1980 novel A Flower That’s Free. This was given a boost on Sunday following the digital disasters of the morning. Being able to think of nothing better to do I took the rest of the day off. No bad thing as it meant Vemara’s engine got a one-hour workout between 1550 and 1650...its first since moving moorings. A birthday greetings card went off to my brother and my son over the weekend. Here is what I had to say.

‘This is the first and last time I can justify sending the same card at the same time to John Clive (62) born 19 June 1944 and Nicholas John (31) born 18 June 1975 because Nicholas will never again be half the age of John...numerologically speaking. If you count weeks, months or days and anything other than years it doesn't actually work out because the first year of our life is year zero. There's something to mull over for a day or two.’

‘And look out John. Nicholas is catching you up. The ratio of the length of your life to the length of his is decreasing steadily. And unless Nicholas gets run over by an elephant…this almost happened before when he was in Africa… the natural order of things is for the ratio to plummet to zero about thirty years from now when the mean average of the biblical three score years and ten (70) and the age of the oldest Englishman alive (110) brings The Grim Reaper to John's door.

Whether or not I'll be there to witness the event is a moot point. We're born with nothing. We go with nothing. So what have we lost? Nothing!’ John responded to my philosophical thoughts with the alternative view that ‘we are born with no memories and die with many memories…hopefully good ones’. Hmm! I know the theory.

Whilst wintering in Llangolman I made it through the long dark Welsh winter nights by watching DVDs of a twelve-part series of The Best of the TV Detectives acquired for the price of a copy of the Daily Express each weekday for two weeks. The plot of one of these dramas hinged on a claim that there was no mobile phone signal. The hero of the hour did his research and at the last moment…with the situation at its bleakest for the poor besieged train driver up for manslaughter…a defence witness was rushed onto the stand. He was an expert on mobile phones and duly explained to the judge and the jury that mobile phone signals are affected by wind and rain.

The strength of a mobile phone signal dips in the rain…and in sleet, snow and hail. The heavier the precipitation the greater the interference. So next time you are on the train tell your caller that it is raining outside as well. This presents an interesting opportunity for a new era of Gentlemen and People Science. Mobile phone networks can replace radar as a back-up to rain gauges…with the big advantage that they record what happens under the clouds instead of guessing that where there are clouds there must be rain like the radar does. But then guessing is what meteorologists do…and climatologists have carried on the tradition.

The atmosphere is a big mystery. The Carbonistas like to push the notion that Global Warming is going to raise the temperature so more moisture will evaporate from the ocean and put more moisture into the air and that this will increase the Greenhouse Effect by fifty percent. Their computer models tell them that a doubling of CO2 in the air will heat the planet by 3 to 8 degrees Celsius. The trouble is when you talk to people who understand things like the scientists at the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate in La Jolla California they tell a rather different story.

A warmer moister atmosphere will create a different pattern of cloud cover. This might dramatically enhance the heating…or it might counteract it. Five years of satellite measurements between 1984 and 1989 established that clouds cool the planet more effectively than they heat it…for now. Clouds remove the heat of a 60-watt light bulb from every six-by-six foot patch of Earth’s surface. These results show that net cloud cooling is four times greater than the warming expected from doubling CO2. Without clouds the planet could be twenty degrees hotter.

Clouds matter…so water is one of the greenhouse gases that Carbonistas have mixed feelings about because it might just play merry hell with their Carbon Story. The H2O molecule has four times the power of the CO2 molecule. So the climate modellers take the only course open to them. They make a stab at it when it comes to clouds. As far as cloud cover is concerned they guess…although it is only the very best scientists that call it that. The rest use words like estimate, parameterisation or approximation. But how do you approximate something you don’t understand? Finger in the wind? Whistle in the dark? It’s a guess. But perhaps the humble mobile phone can come to the rescue.

The evidence is not there yet but the thinking is that if the mobile phone mast is picking up fluctuations caused by wind and rain then it is probably reacting to shifting levels of water vapour in the atmosphere as well. Mobile phone masts might not be the scourge we all thought they were. They could be the leading edge of the War Against Global Warming. Now there’s a thought…and a rather useful one…because collecting scientific date is no simple matter.

It is no accident that so much science is qualified by the term ‘under laboratory conditions’. Operant conditions have a way of playing havoc with the best-laid scientific hypotheses so good scientists always record all of them. Take the temperature-time series to illustrate. You can do one of two things. You measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions.

The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre. In fact as a general statement towns have expanded to overwhelm most of the climate scientists’ data collection points.

Built-up environments are several degrees warmer than similar places without people. On that at least there seems to be a consensus…although I have not delved that deeply and have become sceptical about the idea of consensus. So what does our poor scientist do? He looks for an article in the scientific press with a graph of temperature versus land use. He gets a little hot under the collar when he sees that it swamps any shifts in his own data but he has learnt how you do this sort of thing in college…and besides everybody else does it. It is best practice. So he alters his data.

He has clever names for these alterations like correcting for anomalies. But to you and me what he is actually up to is crossing out the numbers he measured and replacing them with different numbers that he has made up. Now just a minute! What we thought was raw data is now adjusted raw data. And this brings in a whole new question about how the data is adjusted, where that graph came from, what algorithms are being used and the different operant conditions at the graph site and the measurement site. Even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple.

On Thursday I started a piece for Rye’s Own with the working title of The Ambassadors of Rye. I had my Coleridge Moment whilst in mid-flow when Martin Hutchings turned up unannounced to inspect his old boat. As I am considering making it his son David’s new boat once I no longer have any need of a cabin roof over my head in England I welcomed him aboard and invited him below for a cup of coffee...besides the guest is sacred.

However my good manners have consequences as I have now missed the deadline for the July issue of Rye’s Own. But to cut my losses I am minded to introduce the text of the article into next week’s blogs...so expect discussions of Locality & Interests, Structure & Behaviour and Property & Improperty. The current draft begins like this.

‘The Rye Town Region with its seven parishes and eleven thousand souls will one day have its own ambassadors. Diplomacy matters and a Town State like Rye does not need to be a Nation State with a seat in the United Nations before engaging in Foreign Affairs.’ At this point a geographer from the London School of Economics...in a book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality written in 1906 but not published until after the Kaiser War in 1919...enters the fray with his remark that in politics the future would be Locality vs. Interests. And by this he meant Outside Interests.

It is going to be a busy next few days on the scribbling front. Last Wednesday’s blog was supposed to summarise my recent research into what was really going on when King John signed Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15th June 1215. I posted a few pieces about Magna Carta to the history folder on my Swedish website as far back as 1999. This week I copied the folder to my laptop and started adding new files to it.

First was a talk given by Lord Woolf The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales at Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey on 15 June 2005 entitled Magna Carta: a Precedent for Recent Constitutional Change in which he quotes Rudyard Kipling’s poem on Runneymede. I also found four small vignettes from Dr Mike Ibeji on The National Trust’s Runnymede website about the events leading up to Magna Carta, the gathering of the rebels, Magna Carta itself and the death of John. Then there is Shakespeare.

I have Shakespeare’s King John on the boat and have dipped into it now and again over the past year. As with all his history plays Shakespeare relied upon the second...1587...edition of Holinshed's Chronicles. But he also consulted the fourth edition of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs as well as using a Latin text called the Wakefield Chronicle and the Historia Maior of Matthew Paris for many of the minor plot details in the play.

There is also the interesting matter of an anonymous play called The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England published in two parts in 1591. Some scholars reckon this is an important source of King John...Dover Wilson for instance suggests it is the sole source...but others reckon that Shakespeare's play was the source of The Troublesome Raigne. There is more to good writing than putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. There is good research too.

I was brought up on the edge of Oxleas Woods between Shooters Hill and Eltham Palace. The woods were planted by the English Navy to supply timber for the Naval Dockyards on the Thames at Chatham, Woolwich and Greenwich. My parents bought a house on Crookston Road named not because bankers lived there...as they do now...but because to the architects and carpenters of the English Navy the crooks on an oak tree were the most valuable part of the tree.

The strongest bent grown-wood sections are where the main branches of the oak meet the trunk of the tree. The ever-evolving glue technology may have beaten nature for the moment but nature has a way of having the last laugh so the jury is still out. During the latest Volvo Round the World Race boats for instance chunks started breaking away from the yachts’ hulls. These ocean racing yachts use the latest materials technology and such things should not happen.

The Royal Navy's forestry planning dealt in 200 year time frames. The trees I played in as a child were planted in the 1750s at the start of the canal-building age. As the Royal Navy had a policy of always having twice as much tonnage on the high seas as everybody else in the world combined...an amazingly arrogant ambition...they were doubtless none too chuffed when the pits, mines, canals and railways began putting demand on the country’s timber supplies.

The imperial myth may be best understood from the real histories of the Royal Navy and the City of London. Public policy from Samuel Pepys to the present day...or at least until the Wilson Labour Government started pulling back from East of Suez in the 1960s...cared little for the people of England but was designed to meet the strange needs of these two institutions and their subsidiary companies like the Bank of England and the East Indian Company.

Fear of the English Mob was the only effective restraining factor on the use and abuse of ordinary people before the likes of Charles Dickens and William Wilberforce began to insist on putting morality back into Political Economy in the nineteenth century. It is worth reflecting on this as local people everywhere develop their own local responses to globalisation and the use and abuse of local people for the strange benefits of a new gang of outside interests.