Storytelling

C is for Covid 19

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. Since I didn’t discover the challenge till April 1st. – the first day of the challenge, I missed the pre-challenge post where you let readers know what theme your A to Z will be outlining. As this is day three, I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What is the point of a virus?

Our lives have been turned upside down by a virus, an object so tiny it is invisible to the naked eye. I say object, because although some commentators have referred to Covid 19, a Coronavirus, as “living” on different surfaces for various lengths of time, a virus is not really alive in the usual sense – it is a parasite that cannot exist long outside its host cell nor reproduce on its own. Scientists still debate whether the many viruses should be included in the “tree of life” for they do contain DNA and/ or RNA which are the building plans for all life and the chances are that they have accompanied us closely on our evolutionary journey. But if they are not really alive and their only capability is replication – in the process, damaging or even killing their hosts – what is the point of them?


Darwin, who gave us the Theory of Evolution, was originally training to be a clergyman but far from debunking the ideas that geology was spreading about the Earth being millions of years older than the Bible indicated, Darwin disappointed the devout Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle by postulating the theory which would explain the progression of life to be found in the rocks. After the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin settled down to marriage, family and working on his theory, holding back from publishing his work until the last minute, when others threatened to get there first, out of a touching desire not to upset his friend FitzRoy’s religious sensibilities. But during this period, Darwin’s beloved daughter – Annie, died of Scarlet Fever (a bacterial rather than viral) and Darwin’s own belief in God took a terrible knock. The final nail in the coffin for Darwin’s beliefs was his learning of species of parasitical wasps that lay their eggs inside a living caterpillar so that when the eggs hatch, the wasp young feed and grow – eating their host from within. For Darwin, the idea that God could create such cruelty not to mention take the innocent life of his daughter, was too much to bear.


So Darwin would have been fascinated but appalled had he been around to see how the development of our understanding of the parallel evolution of viruses and animals, reveals something so pointless and so potentially devastating for the animal kingdom. We sit transfixed by daily news broadcasts announcing death tolls reaching and exceeding thousands in different countries but this is nothing compared to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We think that 50 million people died worldwide but it could have been up to 100 million – our means of recording the deaths in that pre-global village world was simply not adequate enough to know. Given the ease of the spreading of the virus by modern transport and mass travel, we might think that we are doing very well to have contained the pandemic as well as we have, government failure to act notwithstanding…

So what is the point of virus? Well there simply is no point, they just are because they are. They hone our immune systems but if they didn’t exist we wouldn’t need such defenses. They are not living organisms such as bacteria (though we could do without some of those little critters too). If you believe in God, you would have to ask yourself why he would create such a thing. If you don’t believe in God then and you accept evolution as the roller-coaster ride that has brought species and their attendant parasites, including viruses, to the place we are today, then, ironically, something which is arguably “life”, is a metaphor for life itself. Life appears to have been, likely, accidental though probably inevitable given the inconceivable multitude of planets that exist in the universe. Life, apparently, exists for no purpose other than to exist and reproduce and as the mathematician  Augustus De Morgan, said in his short rhyme “Siphonaptera”, from his book A Budget of Paradoxes (1872), (Siphonaptera being the biological order to which fleas belong)

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Wikipedia)

If that analysis seems a little negative, stay with me, it’s not the whole story…

Now to the technical stuff:-
If you want to understand what a virus is, there is a good article here. This excellent article explains the body’s defence mechanisms – in particular B-cells and T-cells. A very technical article explains the body’s immune system over-reaction called the Cytokine Storm which is mostly the cause of death with Covid 19.



B is for Blog

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

Why do we Blog?

I love blogging, both writing and reading and hopefully, interacting with other people, bloggers or not, through comments. What makes a good blog for me? Words like interesting, quirky, fresh, well written and, mostly, personal come to mind.

What do I mean by personal? Well even if someone is writing about some thing, I like it if, in the way that they tell it – I learn something about that person. As I said in the previous post, blogs were conceived as nothing more than dated entries – diaries in effect, and though they have gone in many other directions since then, some people still use them as diaries. If you read such a blog, then you don’t need to ask the question which you might ask upon reading an old-school paper diary. Did this person write for themselves or did they have a view to publication and a wider readership? If a blog is published, made public it’s author hopes to be read. Those that are published privately are equivalent to the old private diaries – anyone keep one of these? Please, comment and tell us how it is for you and why you use digital to diary… One group who keep private diaries but with an eye to their future readership, are politicians who mine their diaries for their autobiographies. Do you use your blog – refer back to past posts – do tell!

I have no time for those who say they don’t read or watch fiction because fiction is the one way we have to see what it might be like to be someone else and some blogs can offer this too. I would go so far as to say that story-telling is one of our fundamental human characteristics – “Look! These paw-prints show that a lioness, oh and her cub, passed this way say, 3 days ago and she was limping.” A story formed in our big brains. They say that 80% of our big brains developed to work out what other people were going to do next – that all the other things we accomplish are byproducts of those big brain capabilities – transferable skills! I think that storytelling whether aural, novel, short-story or blog, is one of those defining characteristics of humans that emerged as byproducts of our need to understand “the other”. Never be afraid to share your stories…

Many blogs fall by the wayside after a few posts, a few months, and that is reminiscent of those New Year’s Resolution to “Keep a Diary” but then sometimes you catch the habit, your life’s schedules permit the space to write without struggle and best of all you find it rewarding either for yourself or because you get feedback from others. We all like interaction, but building an audience is hard work and it has to be said that Blogger does not make it easy to find other people – only by searching one “interest” at a time and sometimes it would be nice to conflate two or more – for example, science buffs who also play the ukulele and crochet…

I was spoilt by the experience of my first blog Ripple, hosted on Mo’time. Mo’time was a small blog operated by the manager of a large Italian blog which he used as a testbed before incorporating new wrinkles into the main one. I say small but if I remember correctly, some 10,000 bloggers had started blogs but due to the aforementioned rapid attrition factor, it seemed like there was quite a small core of stalwarts. A more accessible listing made it easier than Blogger to connect and befriend other bloggers. Sadly, the main Italian blog was sold and after a couple of months, the new owners closed down Mo’time. We were bereft at losing our eclectic community bunk-house and some of us tried to find alternatives and a few have ended up staying in touch via Facebook – a scattering of friends around the world…

So! Here I am having picked up this blog again after a few years when writing didn’t seem to fit, liberated by the lockdown and determined to complete the A to Z 2020 Challenge and hoping to make some new friends – hit that comment button, please!

A is for Alistair Cooke

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Part of childhood Sunday mornings back in the 1960s, was my father switching on the radio on the upstairs landing of our house whereby everybody in the house could listen whilst having a lie-in. After “Hymns from the little chapel in the valley” – a precursor of Songs of Praise and before the omnibus edition of “The Archers” there was “Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America”. I am starting the A to Z 2020 challenge with this seminal broadcasting giant because for me, this is where my love of the blog form begins.


There may be some among you who ask how a long-running radio series which began before blogs were conceived of, before PC’s were dreamt of and in fact before mainframe computers were invented, could be considered a Blog! Well in the beginning, Blogs were conceived as a simple sequence of dated posts – ideal for say, a diary. One of the hallmarks of a truly great piece of new technology is perhaps the degree and breadth of mission-creep which accrues to it as people explore it and blogs have moved from a diary to documentary, educational tool, club forum, therapeutic vent, political rant, and blogs cover every subject imaginable. But for me, the classic form is a missive from the individual to the world which reveals their thoughts, reflections and most enjoyably, their personality and it is in this respect that Alistair Cooke is the model for the form. In 2,869 episodes over 58 years, the longest running, spoken word broadcast ever, he spoke with a mellifluous, mid-Atlantic accent that gave his observations on America, explaining it if you will, not only to Britain but to the world via the BBC World Service, but as well, to Americans themselves. They were already used to Alistair’s voice because before he emigrated to America from Britain in 1937, he had delivered “London Letter” for NBS explaining British ways to America.

You can read the quite astonishing history of this prolific broadcaster and writer here and you can listen to the best of the broadcasts here but it’s the style and tone of Alistair Cooke which I love and aspire to channel in my own writing and although he read his broadcast aloud, – his material was, in the first instance, written. You can find the scripts here. He might begin with some observations about squirrels preparing for winter and then take you around the political action in Washington, the reaction of the people before returning effortlessly to the Fall, and the squirrels. The political content would be teased out and explained for the world in a way that was comfortable, reassuring without any hint of patronage. And when you needed to hear about the gravest moments in American history, such as the assassination of JF Kennedy, there was no safer pair of hands, no more moving commentator to describe the events and the reaction of Americans.

That radio on our landing, itself an object of Americana which my father adapted to UK voltage by mounting a light-bulb on top, took us to another country each week – to Alistair Cooke’s America as we lay in bed and listened.

2,869 letters – blog that!

Published as part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge