Crisp packet ecology

This morning I went for a swim in the sea first thing, and as I swam around looking at the shallow sandy bottom, I saw a crisp packet. I picked it up to throw away, because apparently turtles and whatnot eat plastic bags thinking they're jellyfish (although this was quite a colourful bag). I picked it up carefully from the bottom by one corner and shook out the contents in case there was something poisonous inside. Out fell a few pebbles (which had been keeping it on the bottom) and a small hermit crab, which started wandering around apparently aimlessly. I felt a bit bad for the crab, but thought it would probably find another place to shelter.

I started swimming to the beach to throw the packet out/away, then as I went I noticed that attached inside the packet there were a load of translucent white spheroids, about the size of marbles or a bit smaller. They looked like eggs, so then I felt even worse for the hermit crab who had been deprived of his/her brood (and for the "eggs" themselves, which would dry out in the sun). I wondered about the pros and cons of throwing the packet in a bin or putting it back, then I swam back and managed to find the place where I'd picked it up. The hermit crab was still wandering around. I put a couple of pebbles back in the bag (trying not to damage the eggs), and tried to put it where the crab could go in; but instead it kept running away from the descending bag and hand. In the end I left the packet on the bottom and thought the crab would probably find its way back in if it wanted. As I watched a tiny fish (the size of a fingernail maybe) appeared and went inside the bag to explore.

I'm still not sure if I did the right thing... Maybe the crab would *eat* the eggs - on reflection they seemed too big to belong to it. Which is fair enough, crabs need to eat.

Polo

Today I watched a game of polo - first time I've ever seen it. It was great! On a wide, brilliant green field in the evening sun the two teams rode around on horses, all together, galloping and turning and swinging long sticks to hit the ball. When they're riding they hold the stick upright, so they look like a load of knights thundering around the field.

weeks

Who invented the week?

A week is different from a day or a year or a month because it's artificial. For cave-people a day is pretty easy to notice: it gets dark, it gets light, then when it starts to get dark again you know that a day has passed - plants and insects get this, and people must have caught on quickly too. A year is sort of long term, but again people would notice that the weather gets colder and warmer, plants and animals come and go, etc. A month... well, the moon comes and goes with the months (more or less - and in the Islamic calendar the moon is King in determining the months), which affects the tides, which affects fishing etc; also menstruation? ...

But a week is really an invention. I think in some parts of the world they have five-day week - that is, there's a market day every five days, I think that's the main thing that distinguishes a week. Who decided there would be seven days in a week?

... Well, now I know the answers to a lot of the above, having looked "week" up in wikipedia. For example, I know now that some societies have a week of three days, or eight; and that the "French Revolutionary Calendar had 36 weeks of 10 days and five or six extra days". It seems that weeks are mostly for purposes of commerce: market day, work days and rest days, etc. So weeks are unique to humans: birds, bees and educated fleas do without weeks, as do the Sun, moon and planets.

Ozymandias :-)

Last weekend we went biking at Wadi Tayyiba (no, I didn't know where it was either till I was directed there). Well, a wadi is a valley, as you may know, and this particular valley used to have the only tarmac (asphalt) road going through that part of the mountains. I suppose before that there was just a path, then a track, then one day they made the tarmac road, and people thought it was really modern and cool, and they whizzed through the mountains and visited their relatives more often and went shopping (this would be maybe in the 60's).

But then... A new six-lane road was built through a different part of the mountains. Which is great, of course: now people can whiz faster and from further away through the mountains, visiting people, or places where they don't know anyone, and going home again almost before they realize they've been away. Meanwhile, the glorious tarmac road up Wadi Tayyiba has gone into disrepair - well, that's putting it mildly because now there are just a few spots of tarmac dotted up the valley, as if dropped from a giant's tar brush as he moved it from somewhere to somewhere else. There would be seasonal floods in this wadi, and they've undermined the road and it's crumbled away. The bits that are left look like real bits of road, but they appear and disappear as you go along:

I love ruins in general, especially things like castle walls that some time were built to keep people out, and maybe had people swarming up them and fighting to conquer them; and now they sit peacefully with ivy on them and birds nesting in them, wondering what all the fuss was about. And this road seemed like that.





Look at the road past your house, the road you drive to work, and imagine that one day it will look like this:

Arrived

Just arrived back from the States and UK. At the airport at Greensboro, NC I picked up a copy of a book called "Misquoting Jesus", which is about the various material that later became the bible: and how they got copied and re-copied, quoted and re-quoted. Words and ideas were changed, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately, and sometimes whole passages were added, transplanted from somewhere else, etc. Like a mutating organism I suppose... For example, they reckon the story about the non-stoning of Mary Magdelene ("let he without sin cast the first stone...") was inserted from somewhere else. Does it matter? The story strikes a chord with lots of people. Anyway, I found the whole thing fascinating and thought I'd name this blog after it. I haven't got the book now - I left it in the UK with M, who also got into it. And so the book virus passes to another person... :-)