Back from holiday

September 28th is about the time when summer is definitively over in London.  Even for universities.

Alexander, working in London in 1928, returned from vacation on September 28th.  He hadn't cleaned up his food before he went away from his laboratory and so was greeted with a none-too-pleasant sight.

Yet that sight changed the lives of us all, interpreted by his medical-scientific imagination.  The mould was overpowering the bacterial culture and, at last, bacterial infection might be defeated.  In the words of Alexander Fleming himself, "When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic. . . but I suppose that was exactly what I did.”

While we plan the enjoyment of holidays they are not necessarily the places where the truely wondrous things happen.  They can happen anywhere and any day.

Silence

The other day I was speaking at a meeting and we had a problem with the loudspeakers.  That is not unusual.  The more specific problem was that we were hearing the radio through the speakers.  It was a fairly conventional station fortunately but irritating nonetheless.  we twiddles with a few buttons and knobs to no effect.  

The matter was resolved when a lady found that it was her radio (or at least the radio on her phone) broadcasting from her handbag . . .

This summer I wandered into St Clement Danes church in Central London.  As an island in the middle of a very busy road it must have wrestled with background noise for over a century.

I picked up a leftover Order of Service.  These days it is the Royal Air Force London chapel rather than a parish church so I was most impressed by the appropriateness of its advice about mobile phones - switch them to 'flight' mode.

Could the Great Fire of London happen in 2016?

It's the Anniversary of the Great Fire of London so here's a reminder of one of its legacies . . .  In the centre of London there are many monuments.  There is one monument, however, which is called Monument (it even has an underground station named after it).  It stands amid many tall buildings today, but once stood high above other buildings as befits its name.

Sir Christopher Wren did quite well out of the Great Fire of London for he was commissioned to design many of the replacement buildings.  And so, perhaps appropriately, it fell to him to design the Monument that still stands today near the spot where, in Pudding Lane, the great conflagration began.  If you laid the Monument (311 steps high) down its top would lay at the exact spot the fire began.

You might imagine that such an historic edifice would have remained largely unaltered but, in these Health and Safety conscious times, its viewing platform is now surrounded by a comprehensive fence, creating the sensation of climbing 311 steps to experience life as a budgerigar . . .

 

But look again.

There, 350 years late (the Great Fire was in 1666) is the Fire Extinguisher that would have made all the difference.

Quite why there is a fire extinguisher on top of a stone monument remains a mystery though perhaps of all the places in London this is the one where you'd have to say, "You can't be too careful about these things . . ."