#66: Watching the detectives

 

On a list of my favourite luxuries, listening to detective stories would come pretty high. Intricate plotting, puzzling details which are all smoothed out at the end, broadbrush and bold characterisation — the flirt, the unhappy lover, the observant housemaid — and an action-centred story with little introspective agonising. And on top of that, characterful, endearing, quirky detectives. Here are my favourites.

My top six detectives

In no particular order:

Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey

1. Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’s tweedy sleuth, as portrayed by Ian Carmichael in the BBC Radio 4 series. His dropped gs (havin’, goin’ to) and question tag ‘ain’t it?’ are an endearing part of his upper-class speech. His faithful, stolid, literal-minded manservant Bunter provides the crucial assistance in untangling intricately plotted, usually rural, crimes.

2. Mma Ramotswe, proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, in Alexander McCall Smith’s series of novels. She initially employs a secretary, Mma Makutsi (proud recipient of 97% in the Botswana College of Secretarial and Office Skills), not because she has enough work (she doesn’t), but because no self-respecting detective can work without a secretary. Motivation for crimes runs deep and moral choices must be made by the two ladies. For example, should a client be told about his wife being adulterous with a richer man if spilling the beans would mean his son would be deprived of an expensive education?

John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot

3. ‘Hastings! Hastings! I have been blind!’ exclaims Hercule Poirot to his friend on finally seeing how the details fall into place. The vain Belgian who can solve everything with his ‘little grey cells’ is portrayed memorably by John Moffatt on BBC Radio 4 or of course by David Suchet in the TV series – the latter worth it for the costumes and lavish art deco clothes and interiors alone.

4. Sherlock Holmes. The prototype, with his solitary musings and slow, often clumsy sidekick Dr Watson, the proxy for the thick audience (us) as we need matters explained simply. My favourite story? 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist', for its plucky young woman who comes to Holmes because she wants to know why she is being stalked by a man on two wheels on her way to and from a job in an out-of-the-way spot. On examining the shape of her fingers, Holmes almost decides she is a typist, but then realises she is a musician because ‘there is a spirituality about the face… which the typewriter does not generate’.

5. V I Warshawski, in Sara Paretsky’s series. Radically left-wing Vic’s jobs usually involve uncovering murky doings by big business and defending the marginalised, such as victims of big pharma, or those who need to use her friend Lottie Herschel’s abortion clinic. Kathleen Turner and Sharon Gless portray her memorably on the BBC Radio 4 series.

The Penguin edition of The Big Sleep

6. Philip Marlowe. Wild behaviour and wild plots at the hard-bitten end of Los Angeles society where no one gives anything for free. The hard-drinking sleuth turns up in his car to poke innumerable hornets’ nests and see if the response will help him resolve matters for clients who are often themselves hiding things from him. Great sardonic lines, e.g. ‘my face was stiff with thought. Or something else my face was stiff with.’

What do they have in common?

Some curious common themes emerge:

- All but one (Mma Ramotswe) have relationships with local police, seeking help when they need to, keeping them at arms’ length if they can, sharing information when they must. Warshawski and Marlowe almost end up in prison themselves on various occasions.

 -All except Marlowe and Warshawski have dependable, though limited, assistants.

-Transport is important – cars feature heavily in stories about Marlowe and Warshawski. And let’s not forget Mma Ramotswe’s little white van, always on the verge of giving up, and the trains and horse-drawn carriages in the Conan Doyle stories. The detective must be able to travel easily and quickly to far-flung places and crime scenes.

-The detectives are all, apart from Mma Ramotswe and Lord Peter Wimsey perhaps, eccentric to various degrees. They could even be called outsiders, though they want to do good in society (why else solve crimes?) and are themselves regarded with various degrees of affection (though there’s not usually much love lost between Marlowe and the local police). Perhaps being an observer means being somewhat of an outsider.

-All except Wimsey (whose wife is crime novelist Harriet Vane – they have to solve a crime on their honeymoon) and Mme Ramotswe (married to the kindly mechanic Mr J. L. B. Maketoni) are single.

A critic speaks

Literary critic Walter Ong, in his charting of the movement from oral to literate societies, cited modern detective stories as the example par excellence of narrative in literate culture. Narrative in purely oral societies had necessarily been full of repetitions so the audience could keep on track, and was episodic rather than tightly plotted. But in a detective story ‘ascending action builds relentlessly to all but unbearable tension, the climactic recognition and reversal releases the tension with explosive suddenness, and the dénouement disentangles everything totally’. This thorough, intricate plotting is possible partly because the reader can notice intricate clues, turn the pages forward and backwards, check details, all of these impossible if one depends on listening to a story.

The joy of audio

Yet I often enjoy listening to, rather than reading, detective stories. I may not be able to keep abreast of all the clues, but enjoy the feeling of being swept along in a story which will come right in the end – the delight of observing a charismatic maestro or maestra who finds their way through a thicket of puzzling and contradictory detail. Mon ami! Let me tell you how it happened…

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#65: Ghosts of Adderbury

Cross Hill Road in Adderbury

Adderbury is a village north of Oxford, south of Banbury, which has enchanted me since I did the first of five catsits there in May last year. ‘Essence of the Cotswolds,’ said a visiting friend and yes, it is a beautiful village whose houses, some thatched, boast honey-coloured brickwork, famous in this area. Yet walking around the village, through some of those buildings you can trace the physical and even social outline of an older place.

School, Mill, Hole, Kennels

There’s the sixteenth century manor house next to the church with its ornate chimneys, which between 1780 and 1851 was ‘Dr Woolston’s boarding school for boys’, or The Rookery, an impressive house dating from the fifteenth century, which contains (says this guide) a priest hole. The Old Mill (working until the 1930s) was moved by the Duke of Argyll in the mid-eighteenth century because it spoilt the view of his grounds. The bluntly named Dog Close used to house the kennels for the Duke of Buccleuch’s hunting dogs. The guide mentions reminders of the other end of the social scale – the village green had stocks and a whipping post, as well as a cross.

Music and meetings

In Four Quartets TS Eliot speaks of hearing music in the long ago English countryside:

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—

(East Coker, ll. 23-29)

So if you do not come too close, what music and rituals can be heard and seen here? Perhaps that coming from the frieze under the eaves of Saint Mary’s church, where strange creatures play the drums, pipes and trumpet, and a mermaid seems to hold open her tail, split in two. 

Music-making figures on St Mary's Church

Or you might glimpse the lowered heads in a Quaker meeting – there is a Friends Meeting House, built in 1675, and Quaker gravestones nearby. The village was a home for many religious dissenters, with 27 family names recorded as Quakers. Bray Doyley, Lord of Adderbury West, went to prison for his beliefs.

To these voices I would add modern ones I have encountered – the groups who go out in all weathers on the very friendly Adderbury Health Walks, as well as dog walkers, library staff, attendees at a concert in the church.

An Adderbury Health Walk. Walk leader John Bellinger is fifth from left with blue walking poles. I am on the far right at the back with a pink scarf.

Stories on the stones

And the golden stone? Apparently this is local ironstone, not Cotswold stone, which is lighter. I wish I could read it better. Looking more closely, you can see how various the brickwork is, from clear-cut brownish material to different shades of yellow, brown and orange, all supplemented with the moss, lichen, ivy, periwinkle and other plants which seem irresistibly drawn to it.

It also has signs of older structures and patterns, such as these:

Other lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets seem appropriate here:

In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

(East Coker, ll. 1-8)

More information about the village is here.

#64: The Dancing Master

Instructions for taking off one's hat

Time to dance

‘I long for a dance. Mary — play Grimstock!’ demands Lydia Bennet of her bookish sister at the piano during a tea party in the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice. And so three couples get up, including Lizzie Bennet and her favourite, Wickham, who throws a flirtatious glance at a certain Miss King on the way.

‘Grimstock’ is one of the dances in John Playford’s book The Dancing Master, the centrepiece of a tiny exhibition in the foyer of Oxford University’s Weston Library. The book was published from 1651 right through to the nineteenth century and the exhibition has no less than eight editions on display. It is small, neat and rectangular, probably ideal for the master to tuck next to his pocket fiddle (also displayed) to use with the young masters and mistresses eager to learn the latest steps.

Leaping and… farting

Other dancing books displayed include John Weaver’s Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing, which gives a guide to ‘leaping or springing’. This is different from walking, he tells us, because ‘in leaping the whole body is thrown into the air, both feet being at the same time elevated from the ground or floor’ and ‘cannot be performed, except the joints of the limbs are first bent’.

Song lyrics were often ‘amusing, irreverent and coarse’. So one dancing book tells the story of how a lady and her maid ‘made a match at farting’ and the lady manages to both light candles and put them out with her farts. ‘In comes my lady with all her might and main, and blew them out, and in, and out, and in, and out again.’ One can only imagine what Mary Bennet would have made of that.

Dancing symbols

A freestanding audio-visual display with choreographic symbols from Mr Isaac’s ‘the Union’ invites the visitor to try dance themselves, though the symbols, which look like graceful, willowy music notes, are not easily understood. This visitor had a go:

Lovely labels 

What of the labels and audiovisuals? The top-notch labels will delight any interpretation nerd (such as me):

1. Connections with what the audience knows – Jane Austen:

2. Especially delightful! Present tenses on a label:

3. Humour, and research presented with a light touch:

Tiresome tech 

But the technology was mainly a letdown. Each book has a QR code next to it, promising to let us hear the songs. However, activating one on my phone led to a frustrating and unsuccessful 10 minutes trying to register with the SoundCloud app, which I suspect not many visitors would have the patience to navigate. The display could have used a few more sets of screens and headphones and a bit more video to add colour and movement. Why not just link to the YouTube videos instead of an app which needs registration? Failing that, try Grimstock or the Black Nag at home.

The Dancing Master is at the Weston Library until mid-January 2024.

#63: The Order of Time

There’s nothing like theoretical physics for making you feel that words are floating, untethered to any normal experience. Or to put it another way, that a self-supporting explanation for phenomena is being built without reference to anything verifiable on an everyday level.

This is at times how I felt on a first head-spinning reading of Rovelli’s The Order of Time, in which he tries to explain to ‘my dear, cultivated reader’, as he puts it, what time is in terms of physics. Why does time move from the past to the future? Does the present exist? Is time an objective ‘container’ for events which exists independently of them, or is it measurement of change, so that if nothing happens, time stops?

Well, here is my stab at a summary of the book’s answers to these questions:

Why does time move from the past to the future?

This is a tough question. Rovelli explains physicist Ludwig Boltzmann’s idea that the direction of time is due to our ‘blurred’ vision of microscopic events. If humans could ‘take into account all the details of the exact, microscopic state of the world’, the difference between past and future vanishes. What gives rise to our understanding of time passing is that the world is moving from a state of low to high entropy, meaning that disorder is increasing. One example of this is the sun, a source of low entropy when it emits photons, after which entropy increases when the earth emits 10 cold photons is in exchange for every one from the sun. This increasing disorder causes events to happen, and means traces of the past are found in the present. No? Me neither, well… maybe a little. This footnote from the book helps:

    The point is not that what happens to a cold teaspoon in a cup of hot tea depends on whether I have a blurred vision of it or not.… It just happens, regardless. The point is that the description in terms of heat, temperature and the passage of heat from tea to spoon is a blurred vision of what happens, and that it is only in this blurred vision that a startling difference between past and future appears.

Entropy itself is a result of our blurred vision, as is the ‘particularity’ of our universe which means that it is, extremely unusually, moving from a state of low to high entropy.

Does the present exist?

Rovelli thinks an ‘objective global present’ does not exist, since the most we can speak of, post-Einstein, is ‘a present relative to a moving observer’; time has been shown to be relative to qualities such as speed and proximity to an object. However, he acknowledges voices arguing for ‘a privileged time and a real present’.

Aristotle and Newton, p. 59

Is time an objective ‘container’ for events which exists without them, or is it measurement of change, so that if nothing happens, time stops?

Rovelli explains how the first view was that of Newton, the second of Aristotle. He brings in Einstein to create a synthesis of them: space-time is one field among many. (‘Fields’ are substances which ‘constitute the weave of the physical reality of the world’). Space-time is a field which exists independently of matter, but ‘stretches and jostles’ with other fields.

The 'curved' space-time field, p. 69

Connecting physics with other worldviews

Bravely, the book moves outside physics, into biology, philosophy and religion. Rovelli believes physics allows us to study time free of ‘the fog of emotion’, but he also celebrates our emotional need for time, its necessity for making us who we are through memory. Perception of time is also crucial for survival, since we have evolved neural structures that allow us to predict the future based on our understanding of the past. He also speculates that it is anxiety about time that caused Plato to imagine timeless, abstract ideas and philosophical constructs. A meditation on death comes at the end of the book. 

These departures from physics into different areas seem somewhat disconnected from the physics-based approach of the rest of the book, and less well-developed. For example, Rovelli thinks our sense of our identity comes from interaction with others, not introspection. But have not psychologists been studying this for decades? Perhaps these attempted connections with more human concerns exist to add interest to what could otherwise be a very dry book, or to clarify that physics coexists and is separate from other levels of understanding — psychological, biological, philosophical. How physics may, or may not, connect with these areas is something that, for me, awaits another book.

The Order of Time is published by Penguin.

#62: Otherlands: A World in the Making

 

Thomas Halliday’s book is a biography of the Earth, told backwards. He starts 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of the decisive thawing of the mammoth steppe, or grassland, in Beringia, now northern Alaska and the Arctic. The steppe rings the Pleistocene world and is home to creatures such as horses, bison and the now-extinct cave lion.

As the world warms over thousands of years, seas rise and the land fragments into islands, so these animals can no longer migrate widely. The decisive breaking up of the area will occur about 11,000 years before the present. Native species such as mammoth ‘will not survive for long, battered by the warming world and… versatile new predators.’ Who are these new predators able to move north because of the rising temperatures? Humans, of course. In our day only the caribou, brown bear and muskox survive of the species the steppe once hosted (the muskox as a reintroduction).

Time and space travel

The book then travels the Earth, moving backwards in time to land at different times and places. So there are abundant giant penguins 41 million years ago, some taller than modern humans; a gorgon 253 million years ago with a painful mouth tumour and a leg which has never been the same since she fractured it hunting Bunostegos (a creature looking like a stumpy, tall crocodile); and rock-eating bacteria in the Devonian, 407 million years ago, which make the surface of the water in which they live, intolerably hot to every other lifeform, shimmer with bubbles. The book ends in the pre-Cambrian 550 million years ago, with no life on land, a 22-hour day before friction slows the Earth’s rotation, and a closer moon shining 15% brighter.

The climate and geological processes are given as much space as plants and animals. Heading each chapter are helpful maps showing how landmasses and seas have changed, as well as illustrations of animals now unfamiliar to us. Halliday is at pains to explain scientific terms, for example on the difference between a ‘fundamental niche’ (the possible survivable conditions for a species) and its ‘realised niche’ (the way its niche is actually limited by interactions with other organisms).

In thrall to human language

In the pre-Cambrian world are the earliest creatures we can call animals. One of these is ‘a centimetre-scale flying saucer’ with eight arms, ‘spiralling clockwise from the tip of the cone to its base… floating hypnotically’. This is Eoandromeda, ‘so called because when flattened in fossilisation, its eight arms resemble the spiral galaxy Andromeda’.

Eoandromeda’s name shows how in thrall we are to our language and ways of seeing, and also to the limited range of evidence we have. So we discover this creature flattened as a fossil and name it after a galaxy at the limits of our world (which we have also previously named), a charming link between the earthly and extinct with the unearthly and infinite. So this creature has achieved a kind of immortality, in human terms.

Drama… with no humans? How?

How does Halliday add drama and interest to processes that happen over huge timescales, mostly with no humans involved?

Firstly, he picks varied moments — differently configured landmasses and oceans, with different climates and ecosystems, for example before or after mass extinctions. Secondly he focuses on movement. Movement of wind, waves and water and therefore of land; communities of animals migrating; individual creatures on the move. Thirdly, he mixes together disparate information — so as well as watching a short-faced bear rummaging in a mammoth carcass, we learn about Korean, Russian and European bear mythologies.

Lastly, he embraces human-centred ways of description. Literary quotations head each chapter (the last has Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’, commemorating the death of a young soldier in the Boer War — ‘Yet portion of that unknown plain/Will Hodge forever be’). He chooses anthropomorphic language such as ‘cyanobacteria discovered the magic of photosynthesis’, which would not get past an academic editor.

He is also happy to translate from the academic to the literary; so the academic term ‘index fossils’ (fossils which are so abundant they can be used to date the rocks they are in) becomes ‘fossil timepieces’ later in the same paragraph. The book ends with a plea to work together to stop climate change. It tells us the world will never stop being in the making, or making.

 Otherlands: A World in the Making is published by Penguin.

#61: Academic supervision

An academic supervisor is probably the person who reads your writing more closely than anyone else, more closely than an editor, than friends and acquaintances, or even eventual readers of the finished product.

What does a supervisor do?

Good supervision is demanding. ‘Typically, the supervisor acts as a guide, mentor, source of information and facilitator to the student,’ says University College London’s advice to doctoral supervisors. Their list of things supervisors can help with is long and includes formulating the research question, evaluating the research results, making sure the work is good enough and presenting work. 

The guidance acknowledges that there are different ways of supervising: ‘Supervisory styles are often conceptualized on a spectrum from laissez-faire to more contractual or from managerial to supportive,’ it says. Hmmm… I would be a bit suspicious of that ‘laissez-faire’ — in my view good supervision is essential to the success or failure of a Masters or PhD, and a supervisor needs to take an active part in its conception and development.

PhD student Dirk Frans, looking back on successful completion, comments: ‘there must be a “click” between student and supervisor. I spent 10 years looking for a supervisor who would suit me. Not only did we “click” but he is a world expert, committed to the poor and still doing grassroots work. Only then did I apply for a place.’ Not everyone will spend 10 years looking for a supervisor, but I agree that “click” is important.

My experience of supervision 

I’ve just submitted a 35,000-word dissertation for my Masters by Research (MRes) in English Literature at Liverpool University. Rather than being taught through set modules, a Masters by Research consists mainly of a long dissertation, the research topic decided by the student. It is a little like one third of a PhD, although it is given a grade at the end rather than passed, failed or changes required (as happens with a PhD).

The supervision I had was excellent and I wanted to share three of the reasons here.

1. The supervisor read and engaged with my work seriously and in detail.

The high quality of the feedback comments, which were both encouraging and demanding, meant that I returned to them at later stages of research as well, beyond the particular piece of writing they referred to. These comments referred to different areas: content, organisation, expression, method, further reading, general progress and formatting. 

For example, feedback on content was: ‘I think it would be good to register the instantaneousness of the transformation which is underlined by seeing it, rather than hearing it.’ (Talking about transformation of the meaning of a word by repeating it within a line of a sonnet). A comment on expression was: ‘this opening was very difficult to make sense of and might require amendment’. A comment on method was: ‘this is good and interesting but do due diligence on analysis of the final lines first, before moving to this conceptual level’. (Meaning I had not devoted enough time to analysing the poem — I found the idea of ‘due diligence’ helpful as I continued).

2. The supervisor drew out and helped me refine and develop my own best ideas

She helped me develop my own strengths rather than expecting, either implicitly or explicitly, a particular understanding or even a set of ideas which I needed to reach, which would be more difficult and discouraging.

The above two points chime in with a reflection by Dan Long, who studied for his PhD while a secondary school teacher. According to his 'PhD diary', his supervisor Linda’s ‘enthusiasm as a reader’ was crucial. He said: 

‘As a teacher I was always sensitive to the knack of encouraging people through the right balance of praise and criticism. Linda has this knack but the most important thing about her approach to supervision is the way in which she will allow you to develop your own ideas without butting in or annexing them to her own take on a subject. With the comments on my writing she has pointed me in the right direction on certain writers or approaches without being prescriptive or didactic. Thus I find myself going back to her comments for pointers and find that I’ve taken the path suggested without really having realised it. This process is difficult to articulate and much of it hinges on the supervisor being a good or pleasant personality – it’s a mixture of being positive, supportive, questioning, sceptical, appreciative, empathic, judicious, kind etc.. Often I can see that some of my ideas might be a bit inane and Linda has the knack of hoeing these ideas over in a supervision and putting oxygen and nutriment in them.

3. The supervisor recommended not only sources to read, but how to approach my reading.

For example, she gave me guidance about how much attention it might be necessary, or not necessary, to pay to different things. She also helped me work in different ways sometimes — for example, there was a stage when I definitely needed to take a step back, let things disentangle and see which ideas ‘floated to the top’.

The supervision process meant that I’ve been able to explore the questions I had when I started the project (although it’s changed quite a bit since then). So to a large extent I’ve been able to build on the preparation I did before the course started, rather than having to put it to one side. It also means I’ve been able to progress with ideas I’m genuinely interested in. I won’t be asking for my money back.

A very useful bank of PhD students’ reflections on the supervision process can be found here (scroll down to ‘students being supervised’), with a more extensive bank here. These focus on the student-supervisor relationship, institutional attitudes and processes, and the many problems that can occur.

#60: Pet sitting

Mercer in Hythe, South Kent

Over the past five years I’ve been welcomed into the houses of people I’ve never met and trusted with some of the things dearest to them — their pets. I’ve also welcomed strangers to my flat to look after my cat mate Indi.

This is pet sitting — to find sits and sitters I use the website Trusted Housesitters, but others are Mindahome UK and MindMyHouse (there’s also HousesSitSearch, which aggregates different sites). Some sitters travel solo or in couples, some with families or even with their own pets. No money changes hands, but the sitter gets accommodation and the owner a pet-loving live-in carer, so there are no kennel or cattery fees and the pet stays in their home environment. Truly a win-win, I think.

Tiny Man in Andalucia — 'why, what else are plant pots for?'

Why petsit?

For me, one of the benefits of sitting is an opportunity to discover places I never would normally. I’m currently in Market Rasen, a pleasant Lincolnshire town, but hardly on the beaten tourist track. But if I hadn’t come here, I would never have visited the wonderful Lincoln Museum or seen the only statue I know incorporating an algebraic calculation (the statue is to George Boole, whose development of algebraic logic laid the foundations for modern computer design, and who grew up and taught in Lincoln. Photo at the end).

Cats are lovely companions and need less attention than dogs, but they can be characters — a rather hyper pair near Bath had to be kept apart, and one of them was not above running into the kitchen and nipping my ankle to remind me to feed her. But such forward behaviour is unusual.

Kipper, an aged Oxfordshire gent

Memorable pet sitting experiences 

Some other memorable moments and experiences I’ve had pet sitting are:

•           walking between the beautiful Oxfordshire villages of Adderbury and Deddington as abundant Red Admiral butterflies flew up around my feet

•           making firm friends with the first people I sat for in 2018, in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge

•           seeing a deer raise its head from the grass in the twilight on Farnham Park in Surrey (I never expected deer so close to the town)

•           sitting in a top floor flat above the bustling streets of Brixton reading Keeping their marbles: How the treasures of the past ended up in museums… and why they should stay there by Tiffany Jenkins — the most detailed case in favour of retaining ‘contested’ objects in museums I’ve read (raiding new bookshelves — with permission of course — is one of the pleasures of sitting)

Arnold in Sheffield changes the settings on my laptop

Are sitters or sits in more demand?

Supply and demand? Sits seem to be taken very fast in London, as do longer-term sits anywhere. Those in remoter places may take more time, but my impression from the Trusted Housesitters site is that sits and sitters are fairly evenly balanced. And like me, many people have both sitters in their home and sit for others. So if you are either looking for care for your furry one(s), or a chance to travel with free accommodation and four-legged companionship, it is well worth considering.

Tony the little lion in Suffolk

statue of George Boole with two students…

… and the equation