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    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Life
    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Life
    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Life
    Ebook129 pages2 hours

    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Life

    By Martin Goldsworthy

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    About this ebook

    This book contains 60 separate articles which are about life, in all its richness. Life has a Past and a Present. The selected articles are divided into two sets reflecting these states, and also into a third set which are more about how we might make a useful transition towards a Future state.
    Experience, especially in places other than your home town, can trigger many types of responses, and almost certainly some learning. I was optimistic enough to go and live and work in a wide variety of places in different continents. From such places your perspective is automatically reorientated. These collected articles are one result.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMartin Goldsworthy
    Release dateNov 16, 2018
    ISBN9780463109465
    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Life
    Author

    Martin Goldsworthy

    Martin Goldsworthy lives with his Peruvian partner in Lima. He comes from a large family and has two daughters of his own, both of whom live in Europe.He completed his university studies in Cambridge and in London, and has lived and worked in the UK, Malaysia, Germany and Perú. Currently he works part-time as a consultant.

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      Book preview

      Reorientations - Martin Goldsworthy

      Reorientations - Collected Articles On Life

      By Martin Goldsworthy

      Copyright 2018 Martin Goldsworthy

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      1 Introduction

      2 Past

      2.1 Moving Plants

      2.2 Why In The UK?

      2.3 Summing Up A Progression

      2.4 Greek Difficulties

      2.5 Sited In Ireland

      2.6 Time For A Tiger

      2.7 Birdsong Cues

      2.8 Reflections On Fog

      2.9 Planning And Hubris

      2.10 International Relationships

      2.11 Multinationality

      2.12 Dangerous Groups

      2.13 Monitoring Potential Conflict

      2.14 Proportionate Response

      3 Present

      3.1 Believing Is Seeing

      3.2 Memory Surfaces

      3.3 Reporting Inaccuracies

      3.4 We’re Limited

      3.5 Shades Of Anger

      3.6 Autonomous In Lima - The Rules

      3.7 Maid In Perú

      3.8 Enhanced Reality

      3.9 Life In A Video Screen

      3.10 Arranging Marriages

      3.11 Positive Parkinson

      3.12 In The Family's Way

      3.13 Furthest And Dearest

      3.14 Behind A Smile

      3.15 Cracks And The Wall

      3.16 Reflections On Identity

      3.17 Risk Or Opportunity?

      3.18 Thinking Inside The Box

      3.19 Brittle Or Robust?

      3.20 Know Your Onions

      3.21 Water's Colour

      3.22 Why Is Winter Cold?

      3.23 Awkward Asymmetry

      3.24 Asymmetric Earth

      3.25 Climate - Negative Feedback

      4 Future

      4.1 Robotic Behaviour

      4.2 Increasing Improvisation

      4.3 Need To Know Basis

      4.4 Smoothing Change

      4.5 Living Dreams

      4.6 A Good Life

      4.7 What's Important?

      4.8 E-feeling

      4.9 Living With Jet-lag

      4.10 A Largely Undigested Truth

      4.11 Elixercise?

      4.12 Step Up To Live Longer

      4.13 Virtual Attendance

      4.14 Virtual Trips

      4.15 Changing Preconceptions

      4.16 Slipping Apart

      4.17 Christmas And Solstices

      4.18 Still Who?

      4.19 Perfect End-Of-Life

      4.20 An Arboreal Legacy?

      4.21 The End

      About The Author

      1 Introduction

      This book contains articles which are loosely about Life, in all its richness. Life certainly has a Past and a Present. The selected articles are divided into sets reflecting these states, and also into a set more about how transition may occur towards a Future state.

      Experience, especially in places other than your home town, can trigger many types of responses, and almost certainly some learning. There is a joke about types of education, and one of the types it considers is the experience gained when you don’t read the small print. I didn’t, and I was optimistic enough to go and live and work in a wide variety of places in different continents. From such places your perspective is automatically reorientated. It remains to be seen whether you, the reader, will judge that this experience resulted in me learning something useful.

      The majority of the articles in this book and its two companions (Reorientations - Collected Articles On Society, and Reorientations - Collected Articles On Culture) were originally posts to a weekly blog which I began when I stopped working full-time. I had time available to develop more fully and then present some of my ideas. For many years I had kept a file with notes and clippings. As I worked with those, I found that I had more ideas, based on where I am living now, on events and on my current activities. These new ideas also resulted in posts to my blog and in articles in these books.

      One of my teachers described a piece of my work as wide but not deep. The comment must have stung, as I still remember it, many decades later. The articles presented here certainly cover a range of topics, but I think that they now also have a useful depth.

      Apart from the organization described above, each article can be considered as separate. You can just dip in wherever you find an interesting title.

      2 Past

      2.1 Moving Plants

      Since experiments with agriculture started, around 20000 years ago, plants have travelled. Some moved with people who knew how to grow them and process their produce. There is genetic evidence that the people were the main vector, and this makes sense when the knowledge aspect is considered.

      As Jared Diamond pointed out in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, there are biological limits to easy plant movement. Moving a plant E-W is more likely to be successful than N-S. Climatic conditions and seasons vary less E-W. He used the possibility of prehistoric movement of food plants within the wide Eurasian land mass as one of his explanations for the faster development of this area, in comparison with that within the American continent.

      Within the historical period the initial spread of coffee consumption and production seems to have been fairly simple. It followed the well-established trade routes from its African source through the Muslim world, which extended from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the East.

      The voyage which ended in the mutiny on the Bounty had a more explicit economic root. The ship reached Tahiti in 1788, to prepare breadfruit plants for starting plantations in the West Indies. The idea was to obtain a cheap food for slaves. Breadfruit was successfully introduced into the Caribbean, but later.

      Anyone with a widely-desired product is likely to try to protect its manufacture. A monopoly may result. And then attempts will be made to break it, which is good for everyone apart from the original monopolist. In the modern world we have patents, as a way of giving an innovator a period of monopoly on the basis that thereafter the benefits will be made available to all. The applicability of patents to natural biological entities is still being argued about.

      In the historical world trade protection sometimes concerned natural products. Examples are tea from China, quinine from South America and rubber from the Amazon.

      As far as tea is concerned, it was in 1841 that seeds were taken from China to India in an attempt to break the Chinese monopoly. This monopoly, and particularly the Chinese demand to be paid only in silver, had already resulted in trade distortions. One attempt to correct those involved sales of opium to the Chinese. This led to the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60) between China and Britain, and other belligerents.

      It was a perceived need in British India which resulted in an intercontinental transplantation, this time for the production of quinine. Clements Markham knew of the properties of the bark of the cinchona tree from a visit to Perú, and of the need to protect troops in India from malaria from his work in London in the India Office. In 1859 he led a mission to obtain cinchona plants and seeds from Perú and Bolivia in order to establish plantations in India. They say that the development of gin and tonic resulted from the measures needed to persuade the soldiers to take the bitter infusion of quinine.

      Rubber production was also strongly controlled, and for a while it produced a boom in the Amazon city of Manaus, of opera house fame. However, in 1876 Henry Wickham found a way to send seeds of the rubber tree to London’s Kew Gardens. Of the 70000 only 2400 germinated, but this was enough for seedlings to be sent to various potential plantation areas - India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Singapore and British Malaya. The rest is history.

      Climate change may require more such movements, if genetic manipulation can’t solve problems of adaptation.

      2.2 Why In The UK?

      A recent exhibition in Lima of Perúvian art influenced by British pop culture, and especially by pop music, revived many memories. My own window of strong interest didn’t really extend much beyond the Beatles. Indeed, I found some later styles, such as punk, ugly. A couple of names from the exhibits said it all for me in that respect - Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten. But everyone to his own.

      What resulted in that outbreak of talent in the UK, and in its sustained development for more than five decades? Of course it wasn’t only in the UK. The market, and this was as much a commercial phenomenon as an artistic one, was much bigger in the USA. The USA was both an influence and an important opportunity for UK performers.

      Popular music was not new in the 1950s. What was new was that this popular music was not for everyone, but was focussed on the tastes of the youth of the day. The other factor was economic. Post-war USA and UK were very different in that respect, with life in the UK being much grimmer. It was not until 1954 that all food rationing was ended. It has been suggested that at that time music was a cheap form of self-expression, especially for young people. Data show that only in the late 1950s did consumer spending in the UK start to increase.

      Unlike in Germany, where music was the one art which Luther had encouraged, in the UK there was less formal teaching and opportunity for practicing it. The dominant influence was undoubtedly from across the Atlantic in the USA. Its popular musical styles, such as folk, blues, and then rock and roll, came first with the wartime physical presence of GIs and then post-war with the continuing economic and military dominance. In the early 1950s skiffle, with its mainly low-cost instruments, was developed in the UK from folk and blues, and its success encouraged many British youngsters to try their hand in groups.

      The UK music group scene continued in the later 1950s, with an increased rock and roll influence from across the Atlantic. In the UK the Beatles had emerged by 1960, and by 1962 the Rolling Stones. Fortunately for them and the other performers, the purchasing power of young people was now increasing. They had paid jobs but did not yet have their own households and families to maintain. They could afford to buy the records and the clothes which appealed to them, rather than to their parents. In London, Carnaby Street fashions were already

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