Half-Welsh?

Today - give or take a day or two - I will have lived in Wales for half of my life. By a calculation I did sometime ago - and which I have now lost - that's a total of 10867 days. I don't know if that makes me 'half-Welsh' or not but while I don't mind being considered a Londoner since I was born there, I'm not particularly keen on being considered 'English'. I don't hold to the values or attitudes that characterise the typically 'English'. If I could be naturalised, I'd happily become Welsh.

(NB So that I wouldn't lose the note I'd made about this and so forget, I wrote and scheduled this post to appear today on Wednesday, 13th July 2011. Over three years ago! I wonder what has happened between then and now?)

Tracks on Mars

Like others, I am getting used to pictures from the robotic explorers Spirit and Opportunity as they explore Mars. I was very struck though by this picture when I first saw it on Astronomy Picture of the Day.

I think I am struck because of seeing something that is so mundane in an Earthly context - wheel tracks - left on the pristine Martian surface. Sometimes the mundane becomes fascinating when it is encountered out of its usual context. (By now the Martian winds will have erased these tracks.)

Door? What door?

This picture was taken at work a couple of years ago. There is a glass door here and people did walk into it without seeing it. The things stuck to it were very much an afterthought. (How a door can be 'automatic' if one must press a button to open it is puzzling.)

Barcode - 17

A micro QR code saying Marginalia55.

Off to university? Why?

I'm not asking 'Why go to university?'. I am asking 'Why does one choose to go to university?' It is about this time of year that students in Britain are returning - or going for the first time - to university. (I would have put the less cumbersome '...are going up to university' but sadly that isn't phraseology that one tends to hear these days. I say sadly because there is a sense of gravitas in 'going up'.)

My question is prompted by something I remember Rabbi Lionel Blue saying many years ago on a television programme about his life. Reviewing his student days at Oxford, he said...

'I went to university seeking wisdom but all I found was cleverness.'

In going (up) to university, is one seeking wisdom? Will cleverness suffice? And if one is seeking neither wisdom nor cleverness, what else is there? Then perhaps one might legitimately ask 'Why go to university at all?'

The Den

When I was a boy, I was given one of my uncle's old Eagle annuals. One fullpage picture has stuck in my mind ever since. It was a picture of every 1950s boy's dream: a place of one's own where one could do the things that boy's found interesting. One day some months ago, I thought I'd do a web search and try to find out if it were possible to determine which annual 'The Den' was in. Maybe there was a cheap copy somewhere that I could buy. I found out that it was from an Eagle annual published around 1957. More than that I found a copy of the very picture. On the contents page it was called 'A Den of Your Own' but the page itself was simply labelled 'The Den'. It is very much as I had remembered it.