Stephen Phelan

THE oldest living thing on the planet is King’s Holly, a bush that has been growing in a Tasmanian river gully for more than 40,000 years. There are bivalve molluscs in Iceland that reach ages over 370. Bowhead whales have been discovered roaming the cold oceans with antique ivory spear points still stuck in their hides, which means these creatures have survived for at least two centuries longer than the pre-industrial sailors who tried to harpoon them.

CONSIDER the brain of Albert Einstein, which wasn’t noticeably bigger than anyone else’s. It was, if anything, slightly smaller than average, weighing in at a comparatively light 1.23 kilograms when removed from Einstein’s skull after his death in 1955. Fellow scientists have since been cutting into neural tissue samples from that brain, looking for the physical roots of genius and finding nothing conclusive. They cannot, as yet, explain why this particular complex of cells generated one of the greatest minds in human history. They haven’t precisely located the source of the “peculiar religious feeling” that Einstein spoke of when contemplating “the mystery of life, and the marvellous harmony manifest in the structure of reality”. But they’re working on it.

THERE WAS a time when people believed that only a virgin – and only females were considered true virgins – could coax a unicorn out of hiding. Like most other folk tales, that legend can now be easily re-read in Freudian terms. Seven centuries of secular thought and medical science have discounted, if not discredited, the idea that sexual inexperience is a source of spiritual power, along with any number of pseudo-biological theories as to how maidenhood manifests itself physically. But virginity has not yet been demythologised. A few still believe in unicorns. Almost everyone still believes in virginity, which is elusive in its own way.

A turbulent flight to Bristol, then a train to Totnes, via Exeter, along the bottom edge of England, on a track running so close to the coastline that the waves splash up against the carriage windows. After that, a bus ride to Buckfastleigh, down threadlike country roads, past a village called Hunter’s Moon and an inn that began serving in the year 1327. The driver will, like James Brown, “take you to the bridge”. From there, you can walk the last half-mile. Physically then, it’s a long way from the streets of central Scotland – where Buckfast Tonic Wine is drunk in public and private, by old-timers and underagers, habitually and anti-socially – to the Devonshire abbey where that wine is made in cellars by monks. And spiritually, it’s even further.

CHINESE literature is more drawn than written. In a language composed of characters, as opposed to letters, each word becomes a picture, and every sentence a montage. As Ang Lee has put it, in particular reference to the title of his new film Lust, Caution, “the shape itself means something”.

IN THE universe of Doctor Who, all moments in time are occurring simultaneously. The trick is moving back and forth between them. With that in mind, let’s go to Saturday, November 23, 1963, as this curious new programme about an irritable, inscrutable alien gentleman suddenly appears on BBC television, in the space between Grandstand and Jukebox Jury – although most viewers don’t notice at first, distracted by the news of President John F Kennedy’s assassination, which happened only yesterday.

OF all the clouds that cross our skies in a never-ending gallery of protean shapes and shifting dimensions, altostratus displays the least personality. A single, flat, off-white bloc of water droplets and ice particles, it will never summon the energy to release them as rain or snow. It is a featureless, life-sucking, contemptible, vaguely Stalinist cloud, depressingly familiar among the weather systems of northern Europe.

THERE is a fearsome song by Shellac called End Of Radio, which presents itself as the last piece of music on Earth. “This microphone turns sound into electricity,” sings frontman Steve Albini, if ‘singing’ is the right word for his vocal role as an imaginary disc jockey after some kind of apocalypse. “The last announcer plays the last record. The last watt leaves the transmitter and circles the globe in search of a listener. Is it really broadcasting if there is no-one there to receive?”

BEFORE STARTING work on His Dark Materials, a trilogy of what he called “science- fantasy” novels, Philip Pullman wrote an alternative Book Of Genesis to rival God’s own creation story. In Pullman’s version, God was nothing more or less than an angel, the first sentient being. He did not make the universe, but told the younger angels that he had, pretending to an authority that he never possessed. When the more liberal of their number rebelled against his dictatorship, they were cast out of heaven. The wisest of them – Sophia, who was not mentioned in the Bible, but later found a place in the Gnostic gospels – tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit purely and simply because it represented knowledge, which could never be a sin.

ON my first morning, I am issued with work gloves and boots, a hardhat, a dust mask, and a red and yellow boiler suit. My team leader Dave Ludvik, being Australian, calls this garment a “onesie”. I already love my onesie, and I will later wear it to jobs that don’t really call for it. Today, Dave says it’s essential, as the two of us will be driving to the “gomi-yama”, or “mountain of rubbish” down at Ishinomaki port, where assorted debris from the great tsunami is still piling up, more than two years after the event.