The Boy Who likes Chocolate and Academic Life...

Mismatched socks cool

‘A’ the boy who likes chocolate is visiting from university where his life is exciting, fulfilling, challenging, surprising: all one would wish. The usual subjects are covered: food, girls; a girl; studying; games; training. (As the game in question is American Football there is much to learn.)

 He plays me beautiful new sounds on his acoustic guitar which remains his relaxation in this welter of activity. He restrings his acoustic guitar. He takes to pieces his electric guitar and puts it back together again. It still works.

Secret Student

We talk quite bit, as is our custom. We get to genetics - his central study at the moment. He teaches me some very basic facts about genetics, with diagrams to  make it accessible. This is a world where the language is signs and concepts that can only be explained graphically.  New words emerge, which have a poetry all of their own: genotype, alleles, epistasis, diploid...

We discuss the  potential magic of intervention in the womb which could bring about the end of life-threatening genetic conditions. Inevitably we move onto ethical concerns and how medical ethics will be an important part of his future study.

Of course we move onto the way in which  nurture (my field) interacts with genetic predisposition. We talk about my own lifelong interest in twins – quite significant in the research into child development, which was once my own field of study.  My obsession was possibly due - I say - to the fact that my oldest siblings were twins,  christened the moment they were born  who died close to their birth.

 In the subsequent generation at the time of their birthday my mother would talk about them. The Twinnies would have been sixteen today … the Twinnies would have been twenty one today…  Calling them Twinnies made them seem so alive. She told me once that when the second twin died she stopped believing in God.

A man from around here once told me a story about an old woman, referring to her as ‘the Third Twin’, meaning the third of identical triplets. I looked it up and found that the likelihood of identical triplets was one in two million. That notion is at the core of my novel Family Ties. No novelist could resist it. Come to think of it my novel The Lavender House involved in-depth research into the Kray Twins, whom I used as models for two characters in that novel.  I suppose the notion of twins is closely linked to the nature of identity, which is a theme in so  many good novels.

‘A’ and I have played Scrabble together from when he was about four years old. For a few years I would manufacture sequences so he could make good words.  But soon we were playing  for real, which he enjoyed as,  despite being a quiet person, he is intensely competitive (think Rugby and American Football...) We played Scrabble this week-end. I banned two letter chemical formulae as it gave him an unfair advantage. It was a long, high-scoring game. 

Needless to say, he won.
wx

Once, in France

The Dictionary Game and The Boy Who Likes Chocolate

Angus, sixteen - who likes chocolate - has been feeling restless after a year of living industriously in preparation for pending GCSEs and more latterly deprived by temporary injury of the explosive relief of his beloved rugby.

The really hard times begin when the exams are done and dusted. Being advised to rest! chill! take it easy! is difficult when one has a black hole in a head which had - until very recently - been packed with facts and figures, concepts and theories, poems, plays and sophisticated equations. Games on TV and occasional sessions with the guitar go nowhere near filling the black hole in the head. And this, I feel, is where the restlessness comes in.

I want to help, and - being the pedant I am - I suggest a bit of challenging reading to fill the black hole. I have just been reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls (research for At The Villa d’Estella) and had come upon a very sharp series of Very Short Guides by OUP, including one very well written one on my subject, by Timothy H Lim. In the back of the book is a very comprehensive list of subjects from Archaeology to Machiavelli, from World Music to The Russian Revolution.

The chocolate eater gets his eye on the VSG s to Philosophy, to Consciousness, and to Logic. Then, while the little books whirr here from the Planet Amazon, he picks up from my shelves Fear of Freedom by the wonderful Erich Fromm. As he gets stuck into this book he whoops with delight, discovering that Erich Fromm has ideas that fit in with his own – sometimes very original – worldview. Then the little books arrive and the whoops continue right through the consumption of the books on Philosophy, Logic and Consciousness.

Then one day he throws the last little book aside and asks I fancy playing a game ‘for a bit of a rest’? He calls it The Dictionary Game. He’ll pick ten words at random and test me on them and I have to pick ten words to test him. And so on. We amaze ourselves with how many words we actually seem to know.

Then something strikes me and I tell Angus that when I was even younger than he is, my mother used to play this very game with my brothers and sister and me. That was in a tiny house a tenth of this size of this one, where the money was in very much shorter supply than the love and the language.

So we agree, he and I, that playing these clever games does not depend on wealth or privilege but on the nature of the people who play. And he tells me of this new word he has just invented – lucaviatic. He says it means eccentric but brilliant.

That must be a compliment.

Wx

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The Dictionary Game and The Boy Who likes Chocolate

Angus, sixteen - who likes chocolate - has been feeling restless after a year of living industriously in preparation for pending GCSEs  and more latterly deprived by temporary injury of the explosive relief of his beloved rugby.

The really hard times begin when the exams are done and dusted.  Being advised to rest!  chill!  take it easy! is difficult when one has a black hole in a head which had - until very recently - been packed with facts and figures, concepts and theories, poems, plays and sophisticated equations. Games on TV and occasional sessions with the guitar go nowhere near filling the black hole in the head. And this, I feel,  is where the restlessness comes in.

I want to help, and - being the pedant I am - I suggest a bit of challenging reading to fill the black hole. I have  just been reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls (research for  At The Villa d’Estella)   and had come upon a very sharp series of Very Short Guides by OUP,  including one very well written one on my subject, by Timothy H Lim.  In the back of the book is a very comprehensive list of subjects from Archaeology to Machiavelli, from World Music to The Russian Revolution.

The chocolate eater gets his eye  on the VSG s to Philosophy, to Consciousness, and to Logic. Then, while the little books whirr here from the Planet Amazon, he picks up from my shelves Fear of Freedom by the wonderful Erich Fromm.   As he gets stuck into this book he whoops with delight, discovering that Erich Fromm has  ideas that fit in with his own – sometimes very original – worldview. Then the little books arrive and the whoops continue right  through the consumption of  the books on Philosophy, Logic  and Consciousness. 

Then one day he throws the last little book aside and asks I fancy playing a game ‘for a bit of a rest’? He calls it The Dictionary Game. He’ll pick ten words at random and test me on them and I have to pick ten words to test him. And so on. We amaze ourselves with how many words we actually seem to know.

Then something strikes me and I tell Angus that when I was even younger than he is, my mother used to play this very game with my brothers and sister and me.  That was in a tiny  house a tenth of this size of this one, where the  money was in very much shorter supply than the love and the language.

So we agree, he and I, that playing these clever games does not depend on wealth or privilege but on the nature of the people who play.  And he tells me of this new word he has just invented – lucaviatic. He says it means eccentric but brilliant.

That must be a compliment.

Wx