Webcharms

I was recently introduced, by my son Charles, to the realm of psychogeography, something I really should have known about as it has been going on for years and, according to some, has almost exhausted its possibilities.  Usually though it is to do with urban wandering, so the rural dimension is, perhaps, a rare variant. However, urban or rural, it is new and interesting to me.  I won't try and define what it is because it is easy to look up on the Internet, but I have appended below one of many examples of the genre penned by myself without knowing what I was doing. Solvitur ambulando , it is solved by walking, a Latin phrase normally attributed to St Augustine of Hippo.  But quite what is solved by walking I am not sure, though it sounds good. Anyway, here is my rural psychogeographic text (from 2001): 8 July 2001 (A walk from Coleford in the Forest of Dean where I was staying for a couple of days with David and Vicki Thornton. I got up early one Sunday morning and, ...

How have I got into evolution anyway?  It goes a long way back.  From early childhood I was deeply interested in wildlife and when I was 8 or 9, towards the end of World War II, my mother bought me a book called The Story of Living Things and their Evolution , written and illustrated by Eileen Mayo (1944) who was not a professional biologist. I was enthralled by this book and, turning the pages today, I can remember the pleasure each picture and the accompanying text gave me. The book was scientifically blessed with an introduction by Julian Huxley.  This contains some astonishing remarks.  For example, Huxley writes that Darwin and others "finally dethroned man from his claim to a unique position of Lord of Creation."  (I though that was God!).  Then Huxley rather contradicts himself in the next paragraph by saying that "as a result of studying evolution, we now know not merely that man has evolved from lower animals, but that he is now the sole trustee ...