The Road to Little Dribbling (30 page)

It was in the Cavendish in 1953 that Crick and Watson were photographed together posed before a model of the DNA molecule that looked as if it had been built from parts taken from an Erector set. I once asked someone from the Cavendish lab why the model isn’t on display anywhere. It is, after all, surely one of the most famous scientific models of the twentieth century. He told me that the model in the photographs wasn’t the actual model they had used. That had been dismantled. Crick and Watson had to assemble a new one for the photographers. Meanwhile, people had begun taking pieces from the kit as keepsakes, many of which subsequently ended up being sold as collector’s items. As a consequence, the model has essentially duplicated itself, just like real DNA, as there are more pieces floating about now than existed in 1953. That, I was told, is why it is not on display in a museum.

My favorite Cavendish person is possibly Max Perutz, who spent forty years of his life working out the structure of a single protein, hemoglobin. It was such a challenging proposition that it took him fifteen years just to figure out how to go about it. Perutz was a spectacular hypochondriac. He carried a card with dietary instructions in five languages, which he sent to the kitchen wherever he dined. He refused to be in rooms where candles had recently been burned or that had been cleaned with any of several common cleaning solutions and disinfectants (even though he wanted everything around him disinfected). Because of chronic back pain, at symposia he would often introduce a speaker, then lie down in front of the lectern for the duration of the talk. Sometimes he delivered lectures himself while supine.

I am also an admirer of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on X-ray crystallography in 1915. Bragg later became president of the Royal Institution in London. He loved the work, but missed gardening, so he took a job as a gardener one day a week at a house in South Kensington. The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: “My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?”

Late in the afternoon I walked back to the railway station. I’d wanted to take a train onward to Oxford, but it turned out I was nearly fifty years too late for that. The line from Cambridge to Oxford—known affectionately as the Varsity Line or sometimes the Brain Line—was closed in 1967. Today the fastest journey between the two cities (which are just eighty miles apart, you understand) takes more than two and a half hours and involves two changes of train.

I decided to break the journey in London and travel on to Oxford in the morning. At the station I bought a one-way ticket to London and proceeded to platform one, the London platform. When I lived in Norfolk and traveled regularly between there and London, I had to change trains at Cambridge each time. This usually meant getting off one train just in time to see the other departing. So I am well acquainted with Cambridge station and know from experience that the people who run it don’t like to give away too much information. Every visit there is a little like being a guest on the game show
Would I Lie to You?
On this occasion, a train looking very like a London train pulled in at platform one and stopped there. But the TV screens said: “This Train Terminates Here” and clearly intimated that it would be foolhardy to board it because it might at any moment leave to go to a depot at Royston or someplace equally desperate and unwelcome.

So about five hundred of us stood around looking at the empty train for ten minutes or so. Eventually a few brave souls got on, and then there was a kind of rush, like when they opened up the Oklahoma Territory to settlers, as nearly everyone hurried to get a seat. But we all had to remain poised to leap off again if it turned out that this train really was headed for servicing (or, a better idea still, retirement) at Royston. In the event, it turned out we had all guessed correctly. This was and indeed always had been the London train. So we won the game. Our prize was that we got to ride to London seated. The thirty or forty people who had remained on the platform because they trusted the television screens got to play a new game called Standing in the Vestibule All the Way to London.

I noticed that I was seated at a window with a good view of the Jeremy Clarkson poster that I had noted earlier and this got me to thinking about ignorance again, in the universal sense. I had recently read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is named after two academics at Cornell University in New York State, who first described it. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me. So what I began to wonder was this: What if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don’t realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we’d see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it’s not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgment or diminished taste?

We all know that regular exposure to lead can seriously impair brain function, yet it took decades for scientists to figure that out. What if something even more insidious is poisoning our brains from some other part of our daily lives? The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than eighty-two thousand at the last count, and most of them—86 percent, according to one estimate—have never been tested for their effects on humans. Every day, to take just one example, we all consume or absorb substantial amounts of bisphenols and phthalates, which are found in food packaging. These may pass harmlessly through us or they may be doing to our brains what a microwave oven does to a tub of baked beans. We have no idea. But if you look at what’s on TV on a typical weeknight, you have to wonder. That’s all I’m saying.

Chapter 16

Oxford and About

I

I
HAVE DECIDED AFTER
considerable thought that the honors system in Britain—that is to say, the giving out of knighthoods, lordships, and the like—is not a good thing. I realize I can be accused of hypocrisy in this because I accepted a small honor myself a few years ago. But then I have always made it my practice to put vanity before principle.

My award was an honorary Order of the British Empire, or OBE, which, because it is honorary and not really real, is not presented by the Queen but by a minister of her government. Mine was given to me in a brief ceremony in her office by the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, and jolly nice she was, too. According to the citation, the award was for services to literature, which is very kind and generous but what it really meant was that it was for services to myself, because I didn’t do anything that I wasn’t going to do anyway. That’s the problem with honors, you see. On the whole, people are rewarded just for being themselves, which in a lot of cases frankly is quite enough already.

America has two principal ways to receive formal adulation. Either you single-handedly take out a German machine-gun nest while carrying a wounded buddy on your back at a place called Porkchop Hill or Cemetery Ridge, in which case you get the Congressional Medal of Honor, or you buy society’s admiration by paying for a hospital wing or a university library or something along those lines. You don’t add something to your name, as in Britain, but rather add your name to something. The warm glow of unwarranted prestige is just the same in both cases. The difference is that in America the system produces a hospital wing; in Britain, you just get a knobhead in ermine.

I bring this up here because I was on my way to see one of the supreme seats of privilege, Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut. Blenheim was also, of course, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, so it must be said that occasionally aristocrats do produce something worthwhile. Anyway, someone had very kindly bought me, as a present, afternoon tea and a tour of the palace, and the voucher was about to expire, so I had hastily made a booking as I was going to be in the area.

Blenheim is a most remarkable house, no doubt about that, and I was looking forward to seeing it. I don’t know what went wrong exactly—whether I entered through the wrong door, stood in the wrong queue, or whether my ticket was restricted, but I was placed in a group of fourteen other slightly bewildered people and herded into something called “Blenheim: The Untold Story.” This turned out to be an audiovisual adventure that took us through seven upstairs rooms. A lady gave us a short introductory spiel and then we were left in a small room and watched in quiet horror as an automatic door closed behind us. Everything from this point on was automated. In each room there was a recorded commentary and an animatronic figure or two—a duke sitting at a desk writing jerkily with a quill pen that didn’t quite touch the paper and that sort of thing. We were treated to about two minutes of diversion in each chamber and then a new door swung open and we were instructed to move on to the next space. We weren’t visitors so much as prisoners.

The rooms each covered a different period in the palace’s history, with the idea, I gathered, that collectively these were to provide us with a moving appreciation of Blenheim Palace’s role in the history and heart of the nation. But in fact the presentation was mostly incoherent. In two of the rooms it was simply not possible to know what was going on. One was about a plan to put on a play in the palace in the nineteenth century—the relevance of this to anything was never clear—and the other, even more confusing, was a meeting in 1939 between an eighteenth-century time-traveling servant and Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was then mistress of Blenheim. No part of the experience conveyed meaningful information or provided real entertainment. The rooms were small, airless, and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others. After twenty minutes or so of this audiovisual extravaganza, we were decanted into a gift shop, where our attention was drawn to the many other places on the estate where we could spend our money—on tea and scones, on bedding plants and designer trowels from the garden center, on rides on a little train. It was shit.

I had a reservation for a champagne tea in something called the Indian Room. It was very nice, with a flute of champagne, a big pot of tea, and a selection of little cakes and delicate sandwiches, but what I mostly enjoyed about it was that I wasn’t paying the £35 that it cost.

Afterward, I strolled around the grounds, which are splendid, and then into the stately village of Woodstock, just outside the palace gates. When I came to Woodstock for
Notes for a Small Island,
it had a full range of shops, including a glover’s, a gentlemen’s hair stylist, a family butcher’s, a secondhand bookshop, and lots of antique shops. Many of those have now gone, alas, though there is still a good bookshop and a popular delicatessen that didn’t use to be there. But the overwhelming theme to Woodstock now is cars. They were parked everywhere, jimmied into every possible cranny and so thick on the high street that it was hard to cross on foot. Many of the houses had signs in their windows expressing alarm at proposals to build fifteen hundred homes on the edge of the village. As Woodstock has only thirteen hundred homes now, that didn’t seem to me an unreasonable objection, particularly as the designated land is part of Oxford’s green belt. The land is owned by Blenheim Palace, which said it needed to sell it to fund £40 million of palace repairs.

The problem with building big housing estates in places like this isn’t just the loss of land, but that the new places overwhelm what exists already. Woodstock won’t continue to be Woodstock if you put a new town with a shiny new supermarket and business park on its outskirts. I’ve no doubt that there is a powerful case for more housing for Oxford, but surely there are more sensitive and intelligent solutions than just plonking down fifteen hundred new houses in one giant field and hoping that the roads and doctors’ surgeries and middle schools and everything else can handle an instant doubling of local burdens. Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb livability. Just a thought.

—

I spent the night in Woodstock and in the morning rode a smart and stylish double-decker bus to Oxford. The bus was very blue inside and out, and very clean, too. This was the bus I had expected on my journey from Bognor Regis to Hove. The seats were exceedingly comfy, in a deep blue leatherette finish. I sat upstairs and enjoyed the views. The bus was popular, though not nearly as popular as the private car. All roads into Oxford were choked with traffic—backed up at roundabouts, queuing at petrol stations, creeping into town in barely moving lines. I don’t mean to bang on, but am I the only one to wonder if the best solution to Oxford’s problems is to make it more suburban?