Memory, speech and balance

On September 2 2005, Wendy and I had a tasty meal and a bottle of Chianti with my second cousin Nick Potter and his wife Toni, at an Italian restaurant in Canberra. It was a special occasion, because I brought Nick into the world in 1959 and hadn't seen him since he was a baby. As we stood to leave at the end of the evening, I felt a sudden peculiar sensation inside my head and knew instantly that I had experienced a small bleed into my brain. I had difficulty forming words, and my balance was unsteady. These symptoms persisted, and to some extent, still persist more than 6 years later. Magnetic resonance imaging when we returned to Ottawa confirmed that I had multiple small infarcts in my basal ganglia. What slowly became apparent was that the small brain-bleed had impaired my short-term memory and wiped out some of my long term memories, including ability to understand and speak German, Italian and French. The memory loss is quite extensive, as I realize when I read Wendy's diaries: she often describes events and people of whom I have no memory whatsoever. I am thankful that the bleed was not more extensive. At least it didn't cause partial paralysis or more serious speech disorder than slight hesitancy and a frequent, not always successful, search for the right word when I'm speaking. As for balance, I don't try even to balance on the bottom step of my little ladder, I leave to my kids any tasks that require use of the ladder.

Surprising statistics

Narcissist that I am, this morning I looked at the statistics on this blog. I'm surprised about the identity of some visitors (average 20-30/day, also a surprise; I thought my jottings were mostly for my own benefit, a form of therapy, and that only a few family members looked at it). I greet my visitors collectively and reveal no identities, though now I know some that previously I didn't. I'm flattered and won't let this knowledge inhibit what I say in my posts.

Is physics wrong after all?

When I left school about 68 years ago, I had absorbed just enough physics and mathematics to understand how these two domains of scholarly activity related to each other to explain why things happen in the way that they do in our universe. This is (or maybe was) the universe according to Einstein. Over the decades since those far off and long ago school days, I've tried to stay, more or less, abreast of advances in physics. Not, alas, the mathematical basis of the physics of the very large, astrophysics, or the very small, particle physics, but at least abreast of the observations, and thence the comforting way the mathematical theories support these observations. I could understand how and why the atom bomb worked, because E = MC squared. C is the speed of light in a vacuum and nothing can exceed the speed of light. Now something has. It has been observed twice, because no one believed the original observation, which came from CERN, the European theoretical and observational physics laboratory on the border between Switzerland and France near Ferney, a sort of suburb of Geneva. The physicists who observed particles traveling faster than the speed of light are associated with the Large Hadron Collidor, and their second set of observations of particles traveling faster than the speed of light confirms their earlier observations, and overturns our 100-year old understanding of physics according to Einstein. I've got no idea what this means, nor do any of the physicists, apparently. Like other observations, such as the fact that the expanding universe is expanding much more rapidly than it ought to be to conform with the conventional mathematical theory, it suggests that much remains unknown about the basic fabric of the cosmos. Sometimes I think that if I were starting my career rather than ending it, I would like to work at the growing edge of physics, or better still, at the interface of physics and molecular biology. I have a feeling that the next generation of physicists might make some surprising discoveries at that interface.

Unrest all over the place

People, mostly young people, are objecting to the status quo in many parts of the world. In Syria several thousand have died so far in the past 8-9 months in what originally appeared from here to be a bloody one-sided battle to suppress them, but lately has seemed more like an armed insurrection or possibly a civil war. In Egypt, especially in Cairo, there have been a few deaths and some bloody heads and bruised bodies. In the USA and here in Canada there have been a few bruised bodies and bloodied heads as police dismantle camps of the "Occupy" movement that has spread widely from its origins in Lower Manhattan. The aims of this movement may be a tad fuzzy, but the reason for it is clear enough to me: if I were younger, I'd be out there supporting them myself. Educated 20-somethings can see little or no hope that they will be able to fulfill their aspirations, achieve income and positions comparable to those of their parents. To a large extent their parents' and grandparents' generation are to blame for this, or rather their anonymous investment advisers and pension plan managers are. They are responsible for dismantling industries in USA and Canada, shifting them to China, Mexico, India where large labour pools were waiting, and employers didn't have to contend with pesky occupational safety or environmental laws and when somebody got injured on the job, they could be "let go" - discarded and replaced without any fuss. Then there's the problem of criminal bankers and financiers who looted prosperous industries, stripped assets and destroyed whole sectors of the economy along with the jobs therein; and of course in the USA this included sub-prime mortgages, which meant that tens or hundreds of thousands of families became homeless when the mortgages were foreclosed. No doubt some of the "Occupiers" come from that background. What sickens me about this is that the American bankers and financiers who did this have destroyed their nation's economy, poisoned the well so there's unlikely to be an economic recovery any time soon, paid themselves huge bonuses; and the legislators they bought rigged the tax system so they pay less tax than people with much lower incomes. And none of them went to jail. It's a cruel world that doesn't deserve to survive. I hope the "Occupy" movement generates enough outrage to put an end to this soon, and that the wicked get their just deserts, preferably while I'm still around to relish the spectacle.

Speaking to a new generation

Once again this afternoon I felt a bit like the Eiffel Tower - everyone wanted their photo taken beside me. It happened after I spoke to the scientific staff of the Public Health Agency of Canada. Not all of them, about 30-35 I think. This took place in a fine new building on the very familiar campus of government buildings on Tunney's Pasture, just west of downtown Ottawa, where I have spent innumerable hours over the past 42 years. Looking over the audience, I didn't see a single familiar face. Twenty years ago I knew every one of them in the equivalent section of Health Canada, was on first-name terms with almost all. Now there has been a generation change - all those old friends have retired, some have died. After I'd spoken to them, a talk with which they seemed well pleased, at least a dozen people took out their cell phones, not to yack to somebody or other, but to use them to take my photo with each of them, sometimes several together, standing beside me. I asked a couple of the more handsome among them to email a copy to me, but none have done so as yet. If any do, I'll add a picture to this post.

At last we may begin to get some wintry weather. For weeks now we've had delightfully sunny days and temperatures in the teens, often high teens; but today the thermometer fell to low single figures and there were a few flurries in outer suburbs of Ottawa. Whatever else Wendy wrote about in her diaries, she invariably mentioned the weather. By this date we'd had our first snowfall, often more than just one snowfall, almost every year that I've so far read (I'm up to 1987 now, and my memorably productive sabbatical spells in Canberra and Sydney. We had our 30th wedding anniversary in Sydney, at a splendid sea food restaurant that, to my surprise, evidently did not impress Wendy as much as it did me. But I'm happy to report that she enjoyed that all-too-brief sojourn in Oz as much as I did.

Missing Wendy

Wendy died a year ago today. in retrospect, I can see that for at least 5-6 months, my mourning and grieving were indistinguishable from a rather severe clinical depression. Joining a couple of groups, a Tai Chi class and Ottawa Independent Writers to widen and deepen my acquaintance networks, was my self-prescribed treatment to help lift me out of this state of mind, and to some extent these worked. But nothing I've yet found can overcome the terrible loneliness which I often feel. My children are very good to me. Rebecca and Richard provide at least one and sometimes two meals every week either at their place or mine. If at their place, Jonathan drives me out to their home in Britannia. David phones me almost every evening to talk about matters great and small, world affairs or the latest events in his department at the Royal Military College in Kingston. Last weekend, Jonathan drove us both to Kingston to visit briefly with David and Desre, and to attend Doug Gibson's book launch - he was the senior editor of a major Canadian publishing house and in retirement he has written a splendid book of anecdotes about the personal quirks of some of the distinguished authors whose work he edited and published.

My conversational skills have never been strong, and one of the consequences of my solitary life nowadays is that I am becoming almost inarticulate in the company of others. I think I can hold my own on paper as well as ever. I've just finished preparing a paper by invitation for the Public Health Agency of Canada and both I and my handlers in PHAC are satisfied that this is up to my usual standard. But in conversation, I'm sure I have fallen off sadly.

Eco-troubles

The world is beset by economic troubles that have dominated news reports on TV, radio and print media for months. Much less discussed in the media are the demographic and ecological stresses that are ultimately responsible for at least part of the economic trouble the world is experiencing. For at least twenty years perhaps much longer, depending upon definitions, indicators and methods of measurement, humans have been extracting ecological goods and services from the planet at a faster rate than the planet can produce these goods and services - and two prominent components of the goods, carbon-based fuels and prime agricultural land, are non-renewable. Our 'free market' economy is based on the untenable premise that perpetual economic growth is desirable and possible. As I've said elsewhere, perpetual economic growth is no more possible than perpetual motion, the fanciful dream of the scientifically illiterate. We have reached 'Peak Oil,' where the cost and difficulty of extracting and refining this most convenient portable source of energy exceed the economic benefits of its use.Yesterday the International Energy Agency, a rather obscure United Nations agency, released a report stating that energy use is out-pacing energy production. I haven't seen a clear statement about loss of agricultural land to desertification, urban sprawl, sea level rise, soil pollution, but world food reserves have shrunk from about 100 days 40 years ago to less than 20-25 days last time I looked. Smart-aleck scientists say that the short-fall can be made up by hydroponic crop production; but I think that is another fanciful dream, like the unachievable fanciful dream, carbon capture and storage. Nobody is connecting the dots. The blunt truth is that there are too many people. We passed 7 billion last month. An increasing number of the 7 billion, optimistically projected to be 9 billion by 2050, face a miserable lot in life, as well as consuming their portion (I won't call it a share) of the planet's finite resources. Humanity has hit the wall, the irresistible force of human reproduction has hit the immovable object of finite planetary resources. The Public Health Agency of Canada has asked me to open next month a meeting of pandemic control specialists with a few remarks about the history of pandemics. I plan to say a little about the history, and also offer my forecast for the future. I hope for the sake of the future of life on earth that this future will include fairly soon a major pandemic or two that will reduce the surplus population by at least one order of magnitude. That seems to me to be the least undesirable of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Two other Horsemen, famine and war, would be much worse, more disruptive, although it remains to be seen how avoidable they ultimately are.

An anniversary today

On November 9, 1969, I arrived in Canada as a landed immigrant; so today is my 42nd anniversary as a Canadian. Three weeks later I went back to Edinburgh to help Wendy with the final clearing up of our wonderful home at 5 Greenbank Crescent on the south side of Edinburgh, and escorted Wendy and the kids from there to Ottawa, via London and Montreal. We arrived in Montreal just as a snow storm began and were on the last late afternoon flight before both airports (Montreal and Ottawa) were shut down by what turned out to be a brief but disruptive storm, the first of that winter. Our little family had our first night in Canada in the comfort of the Lord Elgin Hotel. Somewhere on that journey, probably on the frantic dash along an endless corridor from the immigration desk to our departure gate, Rebecca got separated from her precious Teddy Bear, a disastrous start to her life in Canada but she got over it as quickly as she replaced her lovely Edinburgh accent with harsh Ottawa Valley speech.

This anniversary has brought another warm sunny day to celebrate the event. Another celebration is the annual Massey Lectures which are on CBC radio this week. This year the subject is "Winter" and the speaker is Adam Gopnik, a public intellectual, a Montreal man now living in New York and writing for the New Yorker. In my opinion Gopnik is a rather light weight Massey lecturer; it's a pity that CBC couldn't get someone of more substance for this 50th anniversary of the Massey lectures.

I know what a Zamboni is; I can pronounce Etobicoke and Temagami; in January I wear a toque, not a sun-hat. But I have to confess that in January I would prefer to live where I'd wear a wide-brimmed hat while watching the batsman lift a slow ball over silly mid-on and the umpire signals six. All the same, having lived in Canada for almost half my life, and for several years longer than I lived in Australia, I am Canadian, or at any rate more Canadian than anything else.

Offenses Against Nature

Today, two days into standard (winter) time, is glorious; warm sunshine, temperature was 17 C early this afternoon, but blustery, strong north-west winds. At mid-day joggers were jogging in shorts and T-shirts. I went for a walk, as brisk as I can manage these days, and didn't know whether to laugh or to cry at the sight of two diesel powered little tractors, their cabs encased all around in transparent plastic and glass, their drivers wearing ear protectors. These expensive machines, $50K apiece or possibly more, were scurrying about on the lawns in the little park beside Patterson's Inlet off the Rideau Canal, leaf-blowers working overtime as they tried vainly to blow the yellowing fallen leaves into tidy heaps, while the gusting gales blew the leaves back faster than the machines could tidy them into heaps. Nature is untidy, let's face it. The air pollution from the diesel engines, and the noise pollution from their engines and from the leaf-blowers attached to them, were offensive, disgusting crimes against the environment. I think a few families with teen-aged children equipped with rakes could have had a lot of fun and got this job done more efficiently and more quickly and without the cost, noise and air pollution the National Capital Commission inflicted on this neighbourhood today. I found the entire proceedings a profoundly disturbing metaphor for a lot that is wrong with society today. Here were our tax dollars being squandered on a pointless exercise that was in every way an affront to how nature handles the process of death and renewal. If fallen leaves are allowed to lie where they fall, they nourish the land as they rot away into humus. It's untidy to behold compared to a nice neat lawn, I suppose, as some see it anyway; but if the seasons unfold as they usually do in these parts, the neat lawns will soon be buried under winter snows anyway, so what's the point of it all? These unnecessary diesel powered little tractors were using non-renewable resources and creating unpleasant noise and air pollution - and adding to the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide - to what end? To tidy an otherwise untidy-looking little bit of parkland for a few days, possibly for a few weeks at most. I wonder whether a society that has such values as this deserves to survive.

Recent and current reading

Here's a partial list of what I've been reading lately, and am still reading in several cases; I have that habit, some call it good, others call it bad, of reading many books simultaneously:

Wendy's diaries. I'm up to 1985; sometimes these diaries make me laugh, sometimes they make me cry

Cloud Messenger draft #2 by my friend Karen Trollope Kumar; a beautifully written account of Karen and Pradeep's courtship and marriage and their subsequent 10-11 years in the foothills of the Himalayas. A clever blend of lyrical travel writing, insightful descriptions of Indian family life, intimate glimpses of Karen's own family, and her endurance of horrific events including murder and a major earthquake. I hope she can persuade Penguin to publish this!

Ragnorak, or The End of the Gods, A S Byatt's retelling of the Norse sagas, a beautifully written and quite brief account that skillfully blends the "Twilight of the Gods" saga with modern, apocalyptic thoughts about collapsing ecosystems and the implications of this for the future of life on earth.

Victoria Nicholson's Singled Out, social history about the 2 million women in Britain with no mate because of the slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918. Sad, and not as good as Nicholson's later book, Millions Like Us.

Margaret Atwood's new collection called In Other Worlds, mainly elegant essays on science and speculative fiction, dystopias, etc.

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

Sex and Samosas by Jasmine Aziz

Oliver Sacks's latest, In the Mind's Eye, about the onset of his own blindness, among other things

The Emperor of Maladies, a scholarly study of the social and cultural history of cancer by an oncologist; I'm enjoying this and taking it slowly.

Articles and reviews in The Guardian, Walrus and New York Review

Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt, probably the best of the books about the present age of greed and widening economic gaps between the haves and the have-nots. Most appeared as essays in NYRB. Tony Judt's history of Europe since the end of the 1939-45 world war, called simply Postwar, is the best history of this period I have ever read.

Several thrillers by Henning Mankell, translated from Swedish -- far better than the 3 massive door-stoppers by Stieg Larsen about Lizbeth Salander, although these had their moments.

Several charming books by Alexander McCall Smith, about Bertie, the gifted 6 year old who lives with his appalling mother Irene and inoffensive father and baby sister at 44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh; and the other series about Elizabeth Dalhousie and the Edinburgh in which she lives with her lover Jamie who becomes her husband, and her baby son Charlie, not forgetting Brother Fox who frequents her garden and walks along the top of the garden wall. I've just finished the latest of the latter series on my Kobo e-reader, The Perils of Morning Coffee. I don't know how he does it, churning out several books a year, all of them good to excellent. Like many who know and love Edinburgh, I'm addicted to Alexander McCall Smith's books set in Edinburgh

Curiosity, by Joan Thomas, a Winnipeg writer; this is a splendid novel based on the life of Mary Anning, the barely literate village girl from Lyme Regis who founded the science of paleontology and an imagined love affair with Henry de la Beche who drew excellent pictures of some of her discoveries in the chalk cliffs that were full of fossils.

Three books about "The Big Questions" in physics, mathematics and philosophy that I picked up as remainders. Excellent way to get up to speed again in these three domains. I've posted remarks about some of these books on my blog

There are quite a lot more that I've read in the past few months, and many that I've reread wholly or partly, including Winnie the Pooh, Pride and Prejudice, Richard Feynman's essays and Charlotte's Web.

What a weird mixture! I spend a lot of time reading. It's much more rewarding than TV. I'm sure I'd be able to add lots more if I stopped to think.

Missed signals

HELLO
Hi is such a simple word,
A greeting, however fleeting
To acknowledge another being.
Ignored and unresponded,
It becomes a rebuff.
A hurt, Enough to bruise the heart.
Trust and affection turn shy,
I ask why?
Perhaps he didn't hear.
Was too near exhaustion to reply,
Preoccupied with boyhood dreams.
But still I cry.

This sad little poem slipped through the cracks when we were assembling Wendy's poems and stories for the book of her Selected Works - although if I had found it I don't think she would have let me include it in the book. I came across it among her old letters. Reading her diaries (I'm up to 1985) I've seen her complaints about my behaviour fall off to become quite rare by the early 80s; by then we had become a smoothly functioning team, and our lives had become more relaxed. Our nest was empty, our social life less frenetic and stressful, very enjoyable overall in fact. We had some wonderful European holidays, often tacked on the end of my interesting assignments for WHO in Geneva or at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Also, from about the mid-1980s we managed to get back to New Zealand and Australia at least once every year until 1999, always, until our second visit in 1999, without a dent in our savings: my fare was paid by some agency or other,and frequent flyer points paid Wendy's way. (I paid both our air fares that second time in 1999 so we could take part in the 50th anniversary celebrations of my graduation from medical school). Nonetheless, it's unbearably sad to read her complaints to her diary about my shortcomings. I suppose I can take comfort that these complaints were few and far between, only 2 or 3 in 1981 and 1982, only once each in 1983 and 1984. If only I'd known, if only I'd picked up those signals of distress while she still lived! I suppose these signals balanced out though: there were rare occasions when she tried my patience to breaking point. Perhaps there aren't many married couples who survive living together at close quarters for 54 years without a blemish - an angry word, tears, even almost coming to blows once or twice. But those blemishes got fewer and fewer as the years passed. I don't remember any in our last few years together. I hope her diaries when I get to those last few years will confirm my memories.