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Witham

  Every town begins as a story. Some stories are short. A crossroads, a pub, a church, and a few sheep with ambitions. Others acquire additional chapters whether they were planning to or not. My hometown is one of those. Once upon a time it was a quiet Essex market town called Harlow. It had fields that behaved like fields, streets that meandered in the way old streets do, and a pace of life that suggested nobody was in a hurry unless a cow had escaped. It also had a literary resident. Dorothy L. Sayers lived there for a time, and her plaque still sits quietly near the old almshouses, watching the town with the thoughtful expression of someone who knows a great deal about human nature. This is appropriate, because Harlow has provided quite a lot of human nature to observe. For many years the town went about its business in a perfectly ordinary way. Markets happened. People knew each other. News travelled at the reliable speed of conversation over garden fences. Then the planners ar...
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Boolean

  Cities accumulate ideas the way old libraries accumulate dust. Quietly. Persistently. And occasionally in quantities that begin to influence the architecture. The city of Lincoln is one of those places. At the railway station, where trains arrive with the purposeful sigh of metal creatures that have crossed half the country, there stands a statue of George Boole. He is best known as the father of Boolean logic, which is the mathematical system that allows the modern world to decide whether something is true, false, on, off, open, closed, tea, or no tea. Every computer on Earth quietly relies on it. Every search engine mutters Boolean expressions under its breath like a monk counting beads. This would already be impressive. But in Lincoln, the effect appears to be… localised. Now, when a person spends long enough thinking about precise logic, something happens to the surrounding environment. The universe begins to tidy itself up. Near Boole’s statue, the world behaves with noticea...
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Fat statue two

  Every town has something it is known for. Some have castles. Some have cathedrals. Some have particularly aggressive seagulls. Our town has gravity problems, a cherry tree that negotiates with fate, and a statue of Margaret Thatcher that appears to influence the behaviour of politics in much the same way nearby physics was influenced by Isaac Newton. The statue stands in Grantham, which is where she was born and where history has decided she ought to remain for the moment. The statue was originally intended for Parliament Square in London, which is where most statues of prime ministers eventually end up once time has sanded down the arguments. Unfortunately time had not yet finished sanding. So the statue stayed here. Now statues, like trees and old houses, have a habit of absorbing the personality of the people they represent. Most statues merely stand around being symbolic. This one appears to be… active. Not physically active. It does not climb down at night or reorganise the ...
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Thatcher impact on Grantham

  Every town has something it is known for. Some have castles. Some have cathedrals. Some have particularly aggressive seagulls. Our town has gravity problems, a cherry tree that negotiates with fate, and a statue of Margaret Thatcher that appears to influence the behaviour of politics in much the same way nearby physics was influenced by Isaac Newton. The statue stands in Grantham, which is where she was born and where history has decided she ought to remain for the moment. The statue was originally intended for Parliament Square in London, which is where most statues of prime ministers eventually end up once time has sanded down the arguments. Unfortunately time had not yet finished sanding. So the statue stayed here. Now statues, like trees and old houses, have a habit of absorbing the personality of the people they represent. Most statues merely stand around being symbolic. This one appears to be… active. Not physically active. It does not climb down at night or reorganise the ...
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Mums tree blossom 2

  Not far from the speculative physics surrounding Isaac Newton and the slightly sideways gravity of kitchens within range of Woolsthorpe Manor, there is a small woodland where the universe appears to run on a different operating system entirely. The governing principle there is the Cherry Tree. The Cherry Tree stands above my mother’s grave. It blossoms once a year, and when it does, the world becomes… cooperative. Not dramatically so. The universe does not drop sacks of gold or rearrange the constellations. Instead it performs small, precise adjustments. Doors appear where there were previously only walls. Problems untie themselves. Kindness shows up slightly ahead of schedule. Which is how we came to the Incident of the Church Tea. It happened on the very morning the blossom opened. My son and I had visited the tree first. The branches were full of pale pink flowers, the sort that look less like botany and more like a thought someone had about spring. Petals drifted lazily throu...
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Mums tree blossom

  Not far from the mathematical contemplations of Isaac Newton, and only a modest distance from the gently misbehaving gravity around Woolsthorpe Manor, there exists a small patch of woodland that operates under an entirely different set of universal principles. These principles are not written in Latin. They are written in blossom. In the middle of this woodland stands a wild cherry tree. It marks the resting place of my mother, which is already the sort of thing that causes the universe to pay attention. The tree itself is not particularly grand. It does not tower above the canopy or command respect from passing birds. It simply stands there with the quiet competence of something that knows exactly what it is doing. Most of the year the tree behaves perfectly normally. This is suspicious. Then spring arrives. Now, most cherry trees blossom, and people admire them politely before returning to whatever they were doing. But this particular tree produces blossom with… consequences. T...
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Local gravity

  Not far from the quiet manor of Isaac Newton, there is a small and mostly respectable village where the laws of physics have developed what might politely be called… interpretive flexibility. Most of the residents blame the apple tree. Strictly speaking, the famous tree at Woolsthorpe Manor is supposed to have clarified gravity for the entire planet. Unfortunately, it appears that explaining gravity to the world had the side effect of slightly confusing it locally. Gravity here works perfectly well. Just not always in the expected direction. Take my kitchen, for example. In most kitchens in England, gravity points downward. Cups fall off shelves and land on the floor. Flour, if dropped, makes a polite little cloud that settles respectfully on the tiles. In my kitchen, gravity points toward the west wall. You notice this first thing in the morning when the kettle slowly slides sideways across the counter until it bumps into the spice rack with the weary resignation of a commuter a...
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