The Calcutta Cup

Today at 5pm GMT the 119th Calcutta Cup competition will take place.  It struck me as an interesting fact that the trophy was inspired by a game between British expatriates in India in the late c19.  Of those British expats who lined up to play, the English took side against the Scotts, the Welsh and the Irish.  They knew they were British expats but a simple demarcation was to delineate on some pseudo ethnic grounds.  I say ethnic, but of course ethnicity is a socio-political construct.  Biologically we are all the same species and genetically the story is very much more complex.

This morning on Radio4, I think I heard Alastair Campbell  say he was Scottish before he was British.  I would like to deconstruct this sentiment in a moment but I believe he then went on to say his parents were Scottish, he was born in Yorkshire and moved to Leicester when has was 11.  So really, and by really I mean legally, he was British - English.  British since that is the internationally recognised nation to which he claims citizenship and presumably holds a passport for and English because he lives in an English county as defined in The Interpretation Act 1978, Schedule 1.  I find it particularly interesting that "Scotland" itself is only partially defined in legislation.  This definition is in section 126 of the Scotland Act and has the effect of specifying that "Scotland" extends into the marine environment to the limit of territorial waters (ie out to 12 nautical miles).  Alastair went on to lament the irony that his bag pipe playing father and staunchly "Scottish" mother are not even able to vote in the referendum for Scottish Devolution.  To me though this is fair, as the only sound definition of Scottish is: To be a British citizen and reside within the marine environment of the largest Island in the archipelago and not to be English, where English means to reside in the area consisting of the counties established by section 1 of the Local Government Act 1972, Greater London and the Isles of Scilly. (Note: Wales is explicitly referenced in this context, as it was formerly treated as part of England).  In short, do you have a UK passport? Do you reside north of the area defined as England in the 1972 Act?  If the answer to both is yes then you can rightly call yourself Scottish.  

Would you call yourself Scottish first though?  Even if you could claim a link to relatives that once lived there (ok, parents is a close link, but you get my point.  Al didn't live there himself, ever).  I have recently explored my not too distant heritage  and established that despite my evident Irish heritage in my surname I am 62.5% "English" from name origins.  First and foremost though, I consider myself British and part of me is deeply saddened when our nation, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, seems destined to break up the unity that has been fought for, for generations.  So why do people from certain regions feel that they need to put that first?  I appreciate the need to feel like you belong, to understand your heritage, and to honour your ancestry by remembering it; but why put it first?  Should we not be looking to secure our unity and to put our nation first?

There is a potential contradiction for me here though, I am a big supporter of localisation and devolving more powers regionally but not when it damages the necessary sovereignty of the nation.  Also why only the 3 regions of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?  This I think hit the heart of the problem for me about the devolution debate.  It should be about political power and regional control within our nation, it should not be about ethnic rivalry and cultural divide.  Alex Salmond, like Alastair Campbell, is British first and foremost.

So back to the Calcutta cup,  today I will be cheering my local team, England, where I live, but I will not be engaging in quasi-racist chanting at my fellow British citizens who choose to support their own local team, even if it was only their parents who lived there. 

Pedigree

Recently I have started building a family tree on ancestry.co.uk .  It's turning out to be a lot of fun.  One view is called your pedigree, like a prize bull or a Crufts winner.  What is fascinating to me is that I am naturally predisposed to having an affinity with the name McDermott, my father's name, his father's name etc. My great grandparents, the earliest was born around 1880 and the most recent died in 1978 (I met at least two of them), like most peoples' great grandparents they had 8 different birth names.  Each of these names is as influential on me as McDermott, so for posterity here they are:

McDermott  "a famous royal and noble Irish surname"  :-P

Gladden  "the Old English C.7th word "gloed", probably means 'the people of the merry, joyful one'"

Sherman  "this famous surname is English, it was originally an occupational surname for a cloth-finisher" 

Chambers  "is of French origin, and is an occupational name for an officer charged with the management of his lord's private living quarters"

East  "is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is derived from the Olde English pre C.7th "east", east, and is topographical for someone who lived in the east"

Chawner  "of early medieval English origin, and is an occupational surname for a maker or seller of blankets"

Bowyer "an English occupational name for one who made or sold bows"

Atkinson "This famous surname is regarded as being of Anglo-Scottish origins, although with Norman antecedents - Son of Adam"

So purely on the origins of my great grand parents' surnames I am, 12.5% Irish, 62.5% English/Anglo Saxon and 25.0% Norman/French. 

Jingoism and Xenophobia go hand in gauntlet

Is it more acceptable now to be jingoistic?  I find it difficult to be patriotic, many would call me English – I would accept this if it was seen as a synonym for British but it is increasingly seen as the partisan group with some romantic notion of English as distinct from the other geographies that make up the British Isles.  So I am British.  If this is shorthand for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  I say Northern Ireland but as recently as 1801-1922 this would have been shorthand for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, from the 1801 Act of Union.  In 1922, after the Irish War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the larger part of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom and British was redefined again.  Am I a patriot? I cherish what previous generations have achieved in the name of being British, I am embarrassed and apologetic for the atrocities that have been metered out in the name of being British, so I believe in that sense I am patriotic.  I have empathy with the need to belong to a society, I also realise that resources need to be protected and managed largely since humanity seems destined to ignore the benefits of enlightened self interest; but does this need to naturally progress to the extreme?  We seem to have a preponderance of patriots throughout our Union rattling their sabres in honour of disunity, of devolution.  Can they not see that jingoism will inevitably lead to xenophobia, whipped into a frenzy by the rightwing press, to the degradation of society for all. 

Its all in a name:  I suspect my desire to be seen as British, as a descendent of the occupants of the British Isles, stems from my name.

James  (in homage to James I of England and Ireland,  VI of Scotland)

Richard  (in homage to Richard I,  Cœur de Lion, King of all England [oh, and a bit of France])

McDermott (in homage to Dermot mac Tadhg Mor, King of Magh Luirg (Moylurg), progenitor of the surname McDermott in Connacht, Ireland.)

What's the point?

On Tuesday, 10 November 2009 I put my first post on my new blog Soliloquy.  It was called Existential Angst.  In fact I toyed with calling the entire blog Existential Angst.  This pervading theme may be a sign of my time of life or perhaps it’s the age in which we live: we are inundated with information and data streamed at us at such a pace it is virtually impossible to absorb, process and synthesise; we are destined to be standing like rabbits staring at the proverbial headlights of the information juggernaut.  I have three major themes which I cannot seem to get enough time to digest the current perceived wisdom and to formalise my own view.  The topics are quite broad (1) The nature of matter and the hypothesis of its creation, (2) The origin of human society and the resultant behaviours and (3) Exponential technological and biological evolution, the extrapolation of Moors Law and the Singularity

I feel like I am building three 10,000 piece jigsaws, each in a different room.  I am running from one to the other completing one part and then dashing back to look at the previous one – often finding that a small portion from my last attempt is in the wrong place. 

All three strands fit with the general theme and I wonder if its part of the nature of self-awareness that we must ask these questions.

On (1) I am intrigued by the celebrity presented view of Quantum Theory – packaged for the masses to consume – but feel that I have just scratched the surface and I want to know more.  I have this instinctive awareness that there are monumental and potentially portentous discoveries happening right now that I will only have a chance to marvel at in wonder but never truly understand.  I have bought a Quantum Mechanics text book but was shocked to find that I struggled to get to grips with the initial mathematics and physics – the very material I had studied and been examined on years ago.

On (2) I had completed .... you decide part 1, as an initial view of the origins of cities and city states, where apparently for the first time humanity decided to locate itself in a desired place and to defend that place and the resources it provided or represented.  I was intending to research if the first example on the planet of a city, Jericho, was still one of the global hotbeds of civil unrest and what this means for our civilisation.  If the descendents of those early inhabitants of the Levant who have migrated to Europe and the British Isles were not able to live closely together without the apparent need for demarcation lines and jingoistic sabre rattling from minority groups based around arbitrary geographic boundaries – what will our society become?  I have idealistic Start Trek notions of a United Federation of Earth – am I the only one? Or are we descending into a densely packed tribal combat zone?

and finally, on (3), The notions and postulations of Raymond Kurzweil and his disciples are intriguing.  Mathematically and logically they make sense – there is an elegant simplicity to the proposal that ensures that it seems like common sense – my cynicism alarm is still twitching.  I’m not sure I concur with the proposed endpoint of this exponentially accelerating evolution but nevertheless it provides an interesting perspective on how we will see an accelerating introduction of life-changing technology.  Critically it also provides a view of the life that our children might experience and will hopefully help us to prepare them better for their turn “holding the baton”.

And so, still no answers, only questions.  The eventual epitaph of all humanity.

I think I may immerse myself in fiction for awhile and see how things have moved on when I resurface……

An Egregious Motor Car

The OED defines egregious as outstandingly bad as a modern definition and remarkably good as an archaic definition.  I think its safe to say the Bentley Packard in the link below fits this definition accurately.  We may indeed be at the end of the epoch of the internal combustion engine and we may or may not believe that exhaust fumes generated by consumption of oil and its derivatives has set the environment on a cycle of terminal decline; what we cannot do is fail to marvel at the engineering phenomenon that is Mavis, the Bentley Packard.

I received a link from my cousin-in-law Mike, a fellow petrol head, to the following video and article from the Telegraph.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading the article and watching the road test and wanted to share.  I only hope you can suppress your eco-guilt sufficiently to fully appreciate the inherent beauty of this gargantuan machine and the wonderful eccentricity of anyone wanting to build it.

Didactic or Polemic? You decide - PART I

Not being a student of history, its often difficult for me to locate important events on a timeline and to see their relative importance and why they may have an influence on our lives today.  The hypothesis that humans have a single origin was published by Darwin in 1859.  There is significantly more evidence to support this theory today,  apparently hominids diverged from chimpanzees 5-7 million years ago and a discovery within the last decade puts this nearer the earlier date.  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens evolved in Eastern Africa 200,000 to 140,000 years ago and using genetic testing a much more accurate map of human ancestry and migration to all inhabited parts of the world is now available.

Apparently there is still much academic debate, which occasionally spills over to mainstream media, regarding the Recent African Origin (RAO) model.  Around 60,000 years ago a group of 150-200 early humans made it out of Africa and proceeded to populate the rest of the planet.  Ultimately surviving all earlier hominids that had journeyed out of Africa previously.  Looking at the timeline at the top, in the last 800,000 years (80% of the last section of the 7) there were eight ice ages, each interspersed with warmer periods of around 10,000 years.  The impact of the extreme cold on the planet does not only have the obvious effect, that of the ice sheets advancing across the northern hemisphere cutting off vital resources for these hunter gatherer communities, but also the locking up of water in these sheets meant that lower rainfall turned half the land between the tropics into desert.  A torrid time then for the human race.  About 12,000 years ago the last ice age was drawing to an end - temperatures rose, vegetation returned and animals spread into the former wastelands.  The hunters followed.  By this time in the Near East and Central America these humans had begun to develop new ways of producing food, farming had started.  During the 150,000 years that preceded this time, modern humans numbered only in their millions and had migrated the globe foraging and hunting in small groups.  This fundamental change in human behaviour signalled the start of the transition to modern society.

The Levant is an imprecise word with sometimes emotive definitions but in general it can be thought of to cover the area shown in the picture.  I have chosen the picture that has a very arbitrary shading and uses ancient names for the regions comprising it, clearly modern day  Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories fall within this region.  It is believed that the origin of the word is from archaic French and refers to 'rising' as the Sun rises in the East.  This crucible of humanity is where 10,000 years ago these once migratory small groups of humans had advanced their agriculture sufficiently to allow them to remain in one location permanently.  This is worth absorbing.  After 7 million years from the split from chimpanzee, 200,000 years after modern Humans evolved, 60,000 years after migrating out of Africa, after beginning to domesticate animals and selecting genetically superior plants to farm, finally Humanity started to take root.  Small villages with partially subterranean dwellings were clustered together in a community.  Around 8000 BC then, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), the world's first known town, Jericho, appeared in the Levant and was surrounded by a stone wall and contained a population of 2000-3000 people and a massive stone tower.   It was a further thousand years before the inhabitants of modern day China would start cultivating rice and farming appeared in parts of the Aegean, it was not until c 4000BC before this reached the shores of Britain and maize was first cultivated in Modern Ecuador and Columbia around 3000BC.  Tune in for part II, where I will explore what these pioneers in the Levant, our ancestors,  did with all their spare time, now they were not hunting for food every waking moment.