Six Things, Volume 3

Wisdom, Lehrer, Aspel & Blair, Glory, The Joy of 52, Windows.

Thing 1: Wisdom

She’s back.

Every year we hope she’ll make it. Every year, she does. Each return feels like a bonus, a sort of miracle.

'She' is a Laysan albatross, identified by her leg band, no. Z333 – 'Wisdom' to her friends.

Wisdom is at least 71 years old, which makes her the world’s oldest living wild bird. Ageing of birds isn’t always a precise science, but in this case there’s a degree of certainty. Wisdom was first ringed in 1956, shortly after laying an egg, and as Laysan albatrosses don’t breed until they’re five, the number has (I’m so sorry) the ring of authenticity.

For Wisdom, ‘home’ is Midway Atoll, a group of three islands slap bang in the middle of the North Pacific, known in Hawaiian (so Wikipedia tells me) as either ‘Kauihelani’ – ‘the backbone of heaven’ – or ‘Pihemanu’ – ‘the loud din of birds’. Either would suit me just fine.

But while home is where the nest is – Wisdom and her partner Akeakamai have returned to the same site for decades, rearing a single chick each year – albatrosses are known as nomads of the sea. Out of breeding season many of them avoid land completely, and even in season they are drawn to the water: while one partner incubates the egg and cares for the ensuing chick, the other roams the oceans on immense foraging trips, sometimes following the faintest of scents across the water in search of a food source. They’re helped in this endeavour by huge and sensitive olfactory bulbs which put our lame excuse for a sense of smell to shame.

To cover such huge distances, albatrosses rely not on flapping flight – for which their long, slender wings are ill suited – but a technique known as ‘dynamic soaring’, with which they can stay in the air for days on end with barely a twitch of the wing. They exploit the predictable variety of wind speeds in the boundary layer above the huge waves – float up, U-turn, dive down, U-turn, repeat repeat repeat – to zigzag their way across the ocean’s vast featureless expanse with minimum effort, correcting their direction with small adjustments of the angle of the wings. They counter the fatigue brought on by holding your wings out stiffly for hours on end with a handy catch mechanism in their shoulder joint – a sheet of tendon that extends to lock the joint in place, saving valuable muscular energy.

In the course of a life as long as Wisdom’s an albatross might cover as much as five million kilometres. Or, expressed in the conventional currency, six times to the moon and back. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

Albatrosses thrive in conditions that would make most humans cling wanly to the ship’s railing while trying to keep their lunch down. And given a favourable wind and an open ocean, they are about as good at being in the air as anything else on the planet.

On land, not so much. Those very adaptations that make them so effective and economical in the air work against them when executing any manoeuvre that requires agility, such as landing.

Crash landings aren’t the only example of endearing albatross behaviour, as demonstrated by this pair of Laysan albatrosses on another Hawaiian island, Kauai.

Our relationship with albatrosses – our knowledge of them – is limited by their wise decision to eschew our company as much as possible. But something about them chimes with something deep in the human soul. They might live in the mind either as Coleridge’s perpetual burden or Monty Python’s interval snack, or we might simply think of them as kind-faced pelagic nomads, but at the heart of it all is an aura of unknowability. Albatrosses are mysterious animals, embodying for many a freedom of spirit to which we can only aspire.

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Thing 2: Tom Lehrer

Few people have given me as much pleasure as Tom Lehrer.

"Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."

I spent hours as a teenager listening to and memorising his recordings. They were hours I should probably have spent studying German irregular verbs, reading Great Expectations, or calculating where train A would meet train B if they left different cities half an hour apart and travelled at, respectively, 35 and 68 miles per hour.

But I consoled myself with the thought that by memorising The Elements and New Math and Lobachevsky and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and all the others I was providing myself with a different kind of education. And you’d be hard pushed to argue otherwise.

“You might wish this chordate

instead of mine were your date”

He withdrew from performing in the 1970s and has largely kept himself to himself since then.

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”

In 2002, commenting on the role of the satirist in the 21st century, he said, “Things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

And that was just in 2002.

A couple of years ago, Lehrer did an excellent thing all up on the internet for anyone to use. All of it. The words and music to all his songs. Glorious.

And now he’s taken it a stage further – all the recordings are up there, free for anyone to download and use as they see fit. Not only that, "permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action. Help yourselves, and don’t send me any money."

It would be churlish to refuse.

"As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense,

'to be smut it must be utterly without redeeming social importense.’"

Thing 3: Aspel & Blair

I don’t know why two minutes of Michael Aspel introducing Lionel Blair gives me such pleasure, but it does.

Pip @pipmadeley

Michael Aspel introducing Lionel Blair on Give Us A Clue. That's it. That's the tweet.

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Thing 4: Glory

Back when the internet was young, and our senses of humour hadn’t yet been eroded by cynicism and snark, we were easily entertained by the simplest of things.

Many of them don’t stand the test of time, and that’s as it should be – few things do. But I will still be sent by even the thought of Fenton.

And this glorious display of exuberance still elicits tears of joy and remembrance when it resurfaces every year in the weeks before Christmas. Never not worth watching.

And if you’re wondering what happened to her, and whether she’s ever lived down her unsolicited fame, this from 2015 tells at least part of the story.

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Thing 5: 52 Things

Yes, it should, strictly speaking, be ‘Things 5 to 56’, but never mind that. Here are Tom Whitwell’s 52 things – from '⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ' (that’s not your computer playing up – it’s one of the things, but you’ll have to click through to find out why) to 'zhènlóuqì'. A treasure trove.

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Thing 6: Window swap

A simple, peaceful idea. People all over the world set up webcams looking out of their window and share them to a single website. Recommended if you’ve had enough of the view from your own window.

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Thanks for consuming. If you enjoyed it, do tell a friend.

I welcome comments, too. No, really.

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