THE
PAPERS
Some Helix Aspersa snails attached themselves to various semi-concealed parts
of a parked automobile. Before they could safely be removed they survived various
hostile and unnatural environments including an automatic car wash.
Other snails cemented themselves to hub-caps and endured high-speed thousand-kilometer
journeys on British motorways, apparently surviving the return to their home habitat.
A mathematical analysis of the dynamics endured is elaborated in this celebration of
Europe's sturdy Garden Snail.
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An idyllic and formative twelve months of fulfilled boyhood at the vanished world of a
Cornish fishing village in the mid twentieth-century.
We observe people and institutions, economies and lifestyles that have gone forever from
our world and live on only in the mortal minds of the aging.
In 1953 Hartley said "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".
Cornwall was even more foreign then than now, and yet the first time I saw The Cross of St George
it was fluttering over the stumpy tower of Ruan Minor church.
A little later Maxwell said "The rocks remain".
They do in Cadgwith, as even such fixtures as buildings and winches, but the social and
the psychic have perished, mutating context and purpose.
Read this Paper
The Author takes a walk through the scarred but prolific landscape of The White Peak, a limestone plateau in Central England.
Through sunshine and showers, he passes hill, rake and dale to meet a forester at The Sallet Hole, a reputedly haunted mine adit.
A landscape is arrested, and perforce relinquished, in a tableau of death, change and re-growth.
At the writing of this abstract ( 4 March 2006 ) the Derbyshire fluorspar industry had already vanished into history.
Read this Paper
Men and women attempt to represent a tangible reality and, quite literally, to guide themselves using road maps.
But maps are deliberate and obvious abstractions and oversimplifications as any work of man must be.
Yet maps seem almost to take up a life of their own, evolving over the years, and reflecting the creation and destruction of the things they depict.
Together, we take an allegorical journey, by turns comic and pathetic, with our tireless but inconstant guides, the road maps.
Read this Paper
The Author describes some of the seemingly supernatural encounters
of his life, noting that he is no psychic, and that these unexpected
experiences are not usually recognised for what they are until minutes or decades
after the event.
As both atheist and Christian he was just as prone and just as insensitive.
After a brief look at Saul and the Witch of Endor in classical art,
we review the Antithesis of the Idiographic and the Nomothetic.
Read this Paper
In a plenum of infinite universes at infinite junctures, spacial and temporal,
all things are not only possible but actual, whether monkeys typing Hamlet
or the dead rising.
Reason is an adjunct of biological survival, and as provisional as that.
In fact, Reason is very much a department of Nature.
And where all is possible, no science can be general,
though language and technology are often of course useful.
The Creative Program of Selection, Arrangement and Optimisation is
briefly considered.
Perfection is impossible and Error has full play.
Read this Paper
I have a fall accident in a street in Coventry city in Central England.
I return home, some thirty-four miles away, and am taken
to The Manor Hospital at Walsall, where attempts are made to
repair a broken humerus and smashed right shoulder.
I nearly die when the right axillary artery is broken and I lose several liters of blood.
There are other near-death experiences and a strange non-conversation
with a rag-and-bone man.
Read this Paper
Recovering from a triple heart bypass, I visit Caerwent, the Roman commercial capital
of their Silurian province. I enjoy the defiant decay of the Roman ruins, and the
kind friendliness of the natives, whose fathers were feared by the men of Rome.
I accidently attend a crowded funeral, where I pray and remember some
of the famous English literature of grief amidst the gaiety of a British spring.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | A Snail Survives an Epic Journey in |
| My Hubcap | |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 16 August 2000 |
| LENGTH: | 10 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 5 including 1 photograph |
| EQUATIONS: | 22 |
| TABLES: | 1 |
| REFERENCES: | 1 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | snailru8.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
Some Helix Aspersa snails attached themselves to various semi-concealed parts
of a parked automobile. Before they could safely be removed they survived various
hostile and unnatural environments including an automatic car wash.
Other snails cemented themselves to hub-caps and endured high-speed thousand-kilometer
journeys on British motorways, apparently surviving the return to their home habitat.
A mathematical analysis of the dynamics endured is elaborated in this celebration of
Europe's sturdy Garden Snail.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | Sunrise on the Sea |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 17 June 1999 |
| LENGTH: | 13 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 3 photographs |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 0 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | sunrisee.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
An idyllic and formative twelve months of fulfilled boyhood at the vanished world of a
Cornish fishing village in the mid twentieth-century.
We observe people and institutions, economies and lifestyles that have gone forever from
our world and live on only in the mortal minds of the aging.
In 1953 Hartley said "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".
Cornwall was even more foreign then than now, and yet the first time I saw The Cross of St George
it was fluttering over the stumpy tower of Ruan Minor church.
A little later Maxwell said "The rocks remain".
They do in Cadgwith, as even such fixtures as buildings and winches, but the social and
the psychic have perished, mutating context and purpose.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | The Sallet Hole |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 29 June 1998 |
| LENGTH: | 3 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 0 |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 2 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | salleta.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
The Author takes a walk through the scarred but prolific landscape of The White Peak, a limestone plateau in Central England.
Through sunshine and showers, he passes hill, rake and dale to meet a forester at The Sallet Hole, a reputedly haunted mine adit.
A landscape is arrested, and perforce relinquished, in a tableau of death, change and re-growth.
At the writing of this abstract ( 4 March 2006 ) the Derbyshire fluorspar industry had already vanished into history.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | Road Maps |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 24 March 2006 |
| LENGTH: | 12 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 2 photographs |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 2 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | roadmaps.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
Men and women attempt to represent a tangible reality and, quite literally, to guide themselves using road maps.
But maps are deliberate and obvious abstractions and oversimplifications as any work of man must be.
Yet maps seem almost to take up a life of their own, evolving over the years, and reflecting the creation and destruction of the things they depict.
Together, we take an allegorical journey, by turns comic and pathetic, with our tireless but inconstant guides, the road maps.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | Ghosts |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 6 October 2010 |
| LENGTH: | 9 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 7 color photographs |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 0 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | ghosts-compressed.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
The Author describes some of the seemingly supernatural encounters
of his life, noting that he is no psychic, and that these unexpected
experiences are not usually recognised for what they are until minutes or decades
after the event.
As both atheist and Christian he was just as prone and just as insensitive.
After a brief look at Saul and the Witch of Endor in classical art,
we review the Antithesis of the Idiographic and the Nomothetic.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | The Infinite Unknowing |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 14 January 2011 |
| LENGTH: | 3 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 0 |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 0 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | unknow.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
In a plenum of infinite universes at infinite junctures, spacial and temporal,
all things are not only possible but actual, whether monkeys typing Hamlet
or the dead rising.
Reason is an adjunct of biological survival, and as provisional as that.
In fact, Reason is very much a department of Nature.
And where all is possible, no science can be general,
though language and technology are often of course useful.
The Creative Program of Selection, Arrangement and Optimisation is
briefly considered.
Perfection is impossible and Error has full play.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | A Trip to the Manor |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 7 February 2016 |
| LENGTH: | 5 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 0 |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 0 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | tripmanr.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
I have a fall accident in a street in Coventry city in Central England.
I return home, some thirty-four miles away, and am taken
to The Manor Hospital at Walsall, where attempts are made to
repair a broken humerus and smashed right shoulder.
I nearly die when the right axillary artery is broken and I lose several liters of blood.
There are other near-death experiences and a strange non-conversation
with a rag-and-bone man.
Read this Paper
| NAME OF PAPER: | The Walls of Venta |
| DATE OF WRITING: | 16 June 2016 |
| LENGTH: | 15 A4 Pages at Times New Roman 12 |
| ILLUSTRATIONS: | 8 color photographs |
| EQUATIONS: | 0 |
| TABLES: | 0 |
| REFERENCES: | 0 |
| APPENDICES: | No Appendices |
| FILENAME: | wallvent-compressed.pdf |
| ABSTRACT: |
Recovering from a triple heart bypass, I visit Caerwent, the Roman commercial capital
of their Silurian province. I enjoy the defiant decay of the Roman ruins, and the
kind friendliness of the natives, whose fathers were feared by the men of Rome.
I accidently attend a crowded funeral, where I pray and remember some
of the famous English literature of grief amidst the gaiety of a British spring.
Read this Paper
| Compiled: | 20 February 2006 |
| Last Revision: | 20 March 2019 |
| Revision: | 3.0 |