Hello and a Happy New Year from the first newsletter of mine in 2009. I didn’t think that I needed to write newsletters about Darwin, partly because with four programmes there seemed not a lot else to say. Except that the experience of visiting the actual places in which the man lived and worked was remarkably – I hesitate to use the word ‘inspiring’ but I can’t quite think of another. It was extraordinary to go out into that bleak little patch of ground on the edge of Cambridge, just a few hundred yards from the centre of the city, and look at it through the eyes of Steve Jones who noticed different types of grasses and different types of plants, etc, and imagine oneself back, without a great deal of effort, to the time when Henslow walked and began what became an extraordinary journey of classification and discovery of variation which led to a great generalisation. They have reconstructed his study in Christ’s College, as we said on the programme, and it’s the sort of place any of you would want to read in for the rest of your lives. And that’s without much furniture! The furniture is to follow as, I assume, Darwin’s furniture followed after he came up to the college. Curiously enough, although Radio 4 was very happy for us to go on location to Cambridge and to Down House and to the Linnean Society in Piccadilly, London, they didn’t offer us a trip to the Galapagos Islands, truly to follow in the footsteps of the great man. Nevertheless, what we had was much of the original booty brought back and stored meticulously in these extraordinary natural history museums in London and Cambridge, a couple of which Steve Jones said are the sort of museums that ought to be in museums. There’s a link with Thoreau who read The Voyage of the Beagle very closely and also lived long enough to read The Origin of the Species (Thoreau died in 1862) and, I’m told by Stephen Fender, responded to it. Thoreau collected samples for a local naturalist who began by being anti-Darwin and then became converted. I didn’t allow the others to stress enough how careful and extraordinary he was as a naturalist. His library, I was told, was packed with all the latest state papers on the minutiae of the district. He was also an extremely competent surveyor – again I didn’t provoke that answer – and that combined with his farming – he specialised in the niche market of huckleberries – enabled him to rub along. And there was the pencil factory to fall back on whenever he needed to earn some of his keep or the exigent amount he was used to living on. I’m always astonished by the range of these great Victorian men. Thoreau had 28 volumes of Oriental philosophy on his shelves – a present from an admirer in England – and the evidence seems to be that he read them all. Off now to take advantage of a dry day and get into St James’s Park before moving on. Best wishes Melvyn Bragg Visit the In Our Time website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/

or download the latest edition as an mp3 file:

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

This thread is for posting random thoughts, non sequiturs, and displaced nonsense.

Moderators are encouraged to move such things here, if they occur elsewhere.

(obviously I hadn't got anyone in mind when I created this thread...)

mods are gonna be busy, then

Mr Livered wrote:


C'est moi!

Well, you seem like you're in a bit of an état this morning!

You're all speaking foreign now, c'mon mun. Chwarae teg.

Go random with abandon!

I used to play with abandon...

A helpful link for you, Jason!!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph

Ooooohhhh! Jase has borrowed the same av as me! I will beat a hasty retreat in case I feel the urge to post lots of random links......aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!