They stole an hour from me yesterday by putting the clocks forward an hour. Thus meant I got up earlier than I usually do. Yes, I know that as it was Sunday (as if Sunday is radically different from any other day of the week to a retired agnostic) I could just have stayed in bed a bit longer but that would simply have meant less time in the actual day. Once again, that should not matter to a retired person with no commitments but I do like to stick to some kind of routine in my day. They would still have stolen an hour of my time!
Consequently, latish in the evening, after watching the next acronym-filled, tension-filled episode of “Line of Duty”, I was feeling a little tired and was considering an early night. And then up popped a televised interview between the almost always interesting Alan Yentob and the writer Kazuo Ishiguro. They were in separate rooms, maybe even separate buildings, communicating electronically (a sign of the times we live in), their conversation interspersed with bits of film or TV versions of Ishiguro’s books, and various people reading selected bits or adding their two penn’orth of critical commentary.
And so I stayed up to watch the programme. It was a very interesting discussion, spurring me to rummage through our piles of book to find and reread Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s always good to have something to look forward to.
I say “rummage through the piles” because, as friends who have spent a night in our attic bedroom know, we do have piles of books here and there. From time to time I try to reorganise the books into some mind of alphabetical order, a task that would be easier if all books were a standard size, not a standard thickness obviously but with other dimensions matching nicely so they fit on the bookshelves. I’ve not tackled it for a good while as it’s one of those tasks you get half way through and wish you had never started. So there are indeed random piles of books here and there and sometimes finding the book you know is there SOMEWHERE can be a truly daunting task. So it goes.
One of the Ishiguro novels discussed was “Never Let Me Go”, almost a science fiction story, certainly rather dystopian, about human clones whose sole purpose for being alive at all is to provide vital organs which can be “harvested” for transplanting into “proper people”, “normal people”. Interestingly, just the other day I came across this article about the possibility of babies in the future being “grown” in artificial wombs, “freeing” women from that responsibility for reproduction which can cause career problems and sometimes endanger their health.
Oh, boy! What about that pre-birth bonding that goes on throughout pregnancy for many women? It’s one of the reasons you see pregnant women sort of cradling their baby bump. Then there’s the unborn baby growing accustomed to certain sounds going on around it - the mother’s voice, siblings’ voices, music - not to mention the older siblings gradually getting used to the idea that a new member of the family is about to be introduced.
Oh, I can see the benefits of an artificial womb, especially with increasing infertility problems (I really shouldn’t get started on how our use of plastics contributes to this, nor on how plastic particles transfer via the placenta from the expectant mother to the foetus). And I can understand the argument that foetuses from abortions could then continue to be grown and eventually adopted. But the whole thing smacks of serious science fiction and is rather troubling.
Thinking about the stuff of science fiction, here’s a link to an article about car tyres and pollution. Wear and tear on tyres, particularly as they drive around our cities in their stop start fashion, contributes almost as much pollution in the way of micro-plastic particles as our use of plastic bottles and the particles released from fabrics when they are washed. We should have worked that out, of course. After all, the bits worn off tyres don’t just disappear. Scientists observing such things hoped there might have been a reduction during the various lockdowns, certainly initially when our streets went really quiet, but it doesn’t seem to have made much difference.
I think we should go back to wooden wheels!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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