Er, today is Saturday the 18th.

From the official site for the Pope’s visit.

Hmmm… Maybe he’s on some variant of the Julian calendar.

My friend and Wolfson colleague Malcolm Burrows is retiring from his position as Head of the Department of Zoology in Cambridge, and his colleagues put on a whole day of talks to mark the occasion. Even the Vice Chancellor showed up — to explain how, shortly after her arrival in Cambridge, Malcolm had managed to persuade her to do something she hadn’t wanted to do “without ever raising his voice”. (The visit that resulted from that conversation, incidentally, led to an endowed Chair in his Department.) At the end of her speech, she unveiled the portrait by Tom Wood (who did the National Portrait Gallery’s portrait of David Hockney) which has been commissioned to honour him.

Malcolm is one of the cleverest, nicest and sanest people I know. Unlike many high-profile academics, he doesn’t do histrionics. Yet during his tenure, the Cambridge department became the best Zoology department in the country, and one of the best in the world. Unusually for such a large, high-octane outfit it also seems remarkably friendly. Certainly there was a lovely, affectionate tone to the day’s proceedings.

Malcolm’s speciality is neurophysiology — more specifically the neuronal mechanisms by which a nervous system generates and controls natural movements (top right in the portrait). His chosen animals are insects, including some (locusts) that you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night (bottom right in the portrait). One of his colleagues captured his character neatly when he said that he combined a childlike delight in insects with a very grown-up style of administration. During his tenure, for example, the University’s central authority (the General Board) agreed to write off a huge ancient debt which had for decades “squatted like a huge black toad” on the Department’s back. And, believe me, the General Board didn’t get where it is today by writing off departmental ‘debts’.

It was a really nice occasion which reminded one firstly, of how important people are, even in prestigious institutions, and secondly, what a difference good leadership makes. Most of all, it was reassuring to know that, tomorrow, Malcolm will be back in his lab. He may be technically ‘retired’, but most people wouldn’t guess that.

Before I left, I asked him to pose with his portrait. Here’s the result.

Image from the Powerhouse Museum. No known copyright restrictions.

This is the clever headline over an interesting report (sadly, probably behind a paywall) in this week’s Economist about the outbreak of egg-borne salmonella in the US. The report says that the US poultry industry produces 6 billion eggs a month, and then continues:

Over the past few decades every sector of American agriculture has undergone dramatic consolidation. The egg industry is no exception. In 1987, 95% of the country’s output came from 2,500 producers; today, that figure is a mere 192. Though the salmonella problem appeared to affect two dozen brands, those were all traced back to just two firms in Iowa, the top egg-producing state. Critics suggest that this shrivelling of the supply chain leaves consumers vulnerable to bad luck or bad behaviour. Inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported this week that a recent visit to Wright County Egg, one of the Iowan firms responsible for the recall, found rats, maggots and manure piled several metres high at or near the egg-producing facilities. Robert Reich, a former labour secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration calls these “corporate crimes” and argues that “government doesn’t have nearly enough inspectors or lawyers to bring every rotten egg to trial.”

The numbers set me reaching for a calculator. Let’s see now, 6 billion eggs and 192 producers; that’s 3,125,000 eggs per producer per month, or 104,166 per producer per day. I don’t know much about hens, but if they lay one egg a day, that’s 100,000 hens per producer. This is battery farming on an unimaginable scale.

This dropped through our letterbox the other day. Living, as we do, in a small village, we’re accustomed to the occasional heartfelt plea over a lost kitten or a missing pet rabbit, so at at a first, casual glance it seemed innocuous enough. But then I gave it a second look — and turned the page, to find this:

Sneaky, eh? Who’d have thought that a former monopolist would stoop to this? It’s also damned cheeky, given the snail-like DSL service that BT provides to my home.

To Ely, on a glorious September evening, to hear Nick Carr expound on his new book, The Shallows. The event was held in Topping & Company, a charming independent bookshop on the High Street.

The attendees were squeezed into a long, narrow room. Wine and soft drinks were served. The audience was predominately female, middle-aged or older and predictably middle-class. It was a quintessentially genteel, English occasion. Mr Carr gave a lucid, accessible talk about the main themes of the book (about which I have written here) and then threw the floor open to questions. These fell into two categories: (a) thinly-veiled opportunities for questioners to parade their qualifications, professions or obsessions; and (b) genuinely troubled inquiries about where all this networking technology was taking us. One woman — who worked for a photographic agency — excoriated the way the Net was ruining her firm’s business. Another asked about censorship and China. One or two just mounted their hobby-horses and rambled away.

The author dealt with all of this in a graceful and tactful way, even occasionally managing to staunch the flow of the more determined bores. Then the evening ended with him signing copies of the book. I bought one (the copy I possessed was an uncorrected proof given to me by the Observer) and he wrote a nice dedication in it, which I appreciated.

Afterwards, my companion and I pondered the cost-effectiveness of all this. On the one hand, it’s a reassuring assertion of the civilising effect of bookishness. But as a way of selling books, getting Nicholas Carr all the way from the US to Ely can hardly be justified. I’m sure he learned very little from his audience, and he must have given his spiel dozens of times in other venues like this. But it was good to meet someone whose blog I always make a point of reading, and who swims so productively against the tide of conventional wisdom.

Frank Kermode’s funeral took place yesterday in King’s chapel. It was a small affair (there will be a memorial service later) which was elegant, moving, celebratory and only slightly elegaic. I think he would have approved. Afterwards, there was a splendid tea in the Senior Combination Room. His friends Anthony Holden, Ursula Owen, Karl Miller and John Sutherland spoke, and Tony and Ursula read a couple of poems which seemed spot on for the occasion.

I felt for both of them, for they had known and loved Frank more intimately and for longer than most of us, and these things are always, in the end, an ordeal. Tony chose to read the sonnet he’d written for Frank’s 80th birthday:

Where once you were a name on spines of books
Read, marked and learned in duly franker mode,
Of late you are a friend with knowing looks,
Warm heart, wise counsel, welcoming abode.
Together we have stalked the Stratford bard,
Hip-flasked at Highbury, chalked the Savile baize,
Wept at the opera, watched Lara taking guard,
Set towns from Yale to Barga all ablaze.
Your students know the learned, measured sage,
Your readers the insightful polyglot,
I the chimes-at-midnight chum, sans age
And for all time — whose winged chariot,
refusing to believe you’re just four score,
Is posting flight-plans for a good few more.

Nobody could have known when those words were written that Frank had another fruitful decade ahead. And what a decade! There was a small ripple of astonishment when Tony reminded his audience that Frank published ten books in that last decade. Imagine it: a book a year — and the funny thing was that he always swore that the one he was working on at the moment would definitely be his last. When he knew his time was coming to an end, he briefly contemplated writing a book about dying but decided against because he wouldn’t be able to finish it! This was, after all, the man who wrote that memorable book, The Sense of an Ending.

At the tea afterwards, I ran into an old friend who told me that she had just been re-reading that particular book. She had first read it as a young woman many years ago and it had whistled over her head then. But now, she said, it made perfect sense. It’s strange how we often realise the significance of things — and of people — too late.

Ursula told a lovely story about a trip she and Frank had gone on together — to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, where he had been invited to lecture. When they settled into their seats on the plane, Frank opened his folder and realised that he’d brought the wrong text. So they checked into their hotel and he then calmly reconstructed the missing lecture, walked out and delivered it.

Afterwards they drove down to Gort, to visit Coole Park — the home of Lady Gregory, Yeats’s great friend — and Thoor Ballylee, the tower that Yeats restored (and which, IMHO, is still one of the most magical spots in Ireland). Then they returned to Coole (where the demesne remains even though the house has long been demolished) and stood by the lake, counting the swans. She then read Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole, which is one of his loveliest and most accessible poems.

It begins:

The Trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

On that magical day when they visited, Ursula said, there were only nine swans. But in an odd, poetic way, I thought, that seemed to fit.

At the end of his eulogy, Tony said something that rang true for all of us. “What I did to earn Frank’s regard”, he said, “I’ll never know”. Me neither. To be granted the friendship of such a great man was a wonderful privilege. So I’ll just count it as one of my blessings and leave it at that.

One of the things I like most about the Web is the quality of the writing and thinking one finds there. (If this runs counter to mainstream media’s “the-Net-is-full-of-crap” meme, then so much the worse for the meme.) Of course there’s great stuff in print too, but much of what I enjoy and value most is exclusively online.

Another Web-essayist I always read is Paul Graham. His “Hacker’s Guide to Investors”, for example, is a gem of insight derived from experience. His Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age: Essays on the Art of Programming is also lovely.