In the last couple of months it seems to have become routine that every time a family member or a close friend has a birthday I paint a small picture of a place that has a special meaning or is a favourite for them and use it to make a bespoke birthday card. Back towards the end of January it was my sister’s turn, and knowing how much she liked to visit the Periwinkle Tea Rooms at Selworthy, on the fringe of Exmoor in Somerset, the choice of subject matter was an easy one for me to make.
The result of my efforts is the picture above. I think it captures the look of the place pretty well – the thatched roof, cream-painted walls, red tiles and ornate windows and the general setting of the building nestled within a wooded area. There is perhaps only one snag… Every time I look at the picture I can’t help but see the twig-covered canopy that forms the roof of the porch as a big, bushy, and somewhat unkempt moustache. It’s just as well that there is only one window placed immediately above it. If there were two, spaced slightly apart to form a pair of eyes, I would never be able to look at the picture and see an old, quaint, thatched cottage ever again!
At work, I am part of the supervisory team for a part-time PhD student who is trying to explain the relatively recent (2001) appearance of a tree bumblebee Bombus hypnorum in the U.K. My involvement in the project arose because one possibility for explaining how these bees made the hop across the English Channel from mainland Europe is that they might have been carried over be easterly or southeasterly winds. As the only person who teaches some meteorology in my department I was drawn into discussions at the outset of the project about 5 years ago, and my involvement has continued ever since.
What do I know about bees? Almost nothing… I completed an ‘O’ Level in Biology back in 1981 but I don’t recall bees ever being a topic that we learned about. Since then, although I have a general interest in natural history, I can’t say that I have thought about bees very much. But sometime around 2017 or 2018, the bird box in our garden was taken over by bees, I mentioned this to my the Head of School (who does know about bees), learned that most bumblebees nest in holes in the ground but that some, like my ones, were tree bumblebees, and from there I gradually became enmeshed in the ongoing attempt to explain why one type of these tree bumblebees had suddenly appeared in the U.K. Eventually, I decided I really should get to know a bit about more about bumblebees and that led me first to read Dave Goulson’s book ‘A Sting In The Tale’ (in June 2022) and then at the start of this year, Lars Chittka’s book ‘The Mind of a Bee’.
‘The Mind of A Bee’ was a fascinating book, covering bees’ sensory capabilities, instinctual behaviours, intelligence, communication systems, spatial memory and navigational capabilities, learning, brain structure, personality and consciousness. Packed with easily understandable summaries of a huge of scientific experiments and interesting background information about the scientists that conducted them, ‘The Mind of a Bee’ leaves no room for doubt that despite their small size, bees brains are capable of many astounding feats and that the bees themselves are highly complex animals with many sophisticated behaviours and skills.
The part of the book that interested and intrigued me most was the section early on about sensory capability and, in particular, bee vision. Bee vision is shifted to shorter wavelengths than human vision which means that bees can ‘see’ in the ultra-violet part of the electromagnetic spectrum and are effectively red-blind (which explains why red flowers are relatively rare in European fauna [research has also shown that flower colours have adapted to match insect vision and not the other way around as would perhaps seem more intuitive]). Bee vision is also trichromatic (UV, blue, green) and bee brains mix these three colours in the same way that human brains mix red, green and blue, ending up with a mixed colour that is indistinguishable from pure light at the relevant frequency. Apparently, this is unusual… and it is also very different from the way that we perceive sound, where we can perceive many frequencies at the same time so that we hear chords, harmony and dissonance. This difference arises because we have thousands of auditory receptors responding to different frequencies. I found it fascinating to think about what sound would be like if we could only sense three frequencies and mixed them to make a single note and what vision would be like if we saw objects as chords of different coloured lights. To be honest, my mind was a bit blown by thinking about all of this!
Reading ‘The Mind of a Bee’ certainly gave me a lot of insight into the brains, behaviours and learning capabilities of bees. It’s certainly a book that opens up the mind of the human that reads it and makes that mind think about just how different the game of life can be for different animals.
Back in August 2024, whilst running the second half of the West Devon Way from Peter Tavy to Okehampton, I managed to land heavily on my left leg, jolting the knee inwards. At the time, it was just one of those slightly missed steps that occurs when out running on rough terrain, but in the next couple of days I found myself in a fair amount of pain, with my left knee feeling oddly loose and unstable. The pain subsided, and by the following weekend I was able to test myself out with a short run. Yes, okay, there was some reaction afterwards, but would it stop me completing my plan to run a section of the South West Coast Path from Par Beach to Looe a week later? What do you think?
Sometimes in life one makes mistakes… On Thursday 29th August, after being dropped at Plymouth Railway Station, I caught the 0747 train to Par, and having jogged the mile or so from Par Station to the beach, at 09:28 I began my self-propelled journey west. It was a beautiful sunny day, giving me spectacular coastal views and some great running… but by the time I reached Fowey, almost six miles into the route and having rounded Gribbin Head, my leg was screaming at me that it was sore… very sore. Did I do the sensible thing, and call it a day? You’ve probably gathered by now that the answer to that question is ‘no’. Instead, having cross the River Fowey on the passenger ferry, I climbed out of Polruan to begin the(how shall I put this?) somewhat undulating section of the path that would eventually take me to Looe, ten miles or so further along the coast. It was not a good decision – for undulating read brutally up and down and blisteringly hot… By the time I reached Looe I was hobbling along, and hardly able to run at all. It got worse. My wife had driven over to pick me up and in time it took us to drive home again my leg had decided that it wasn’t really interested in moving anymore – so it didn’t.
What followed was an initial period when my left knee felt like it could collapse on me at any time, and when it wasn’t making that threat it was clunking nauseatingly, as some internal part of it moved in a way that it clearly wasn’t supposed to. So, I rested up, took things carefully, and went to see a Sports Therapist who agreed with my self-diagnosis – that I had damaged my Medial Collateral Ligament (which is located on the inside of the knee joint and acts to prevent, or at least limit, unwanted inward movement). Over the next few months I paid regular visits to the clinic for ultrasound treatment, nerve stimulation and massage, and I completed (not especially diligently) a set of stretches designed to improve the overall strength and mobility of my leg. Things sort of got better…
Just before Christmas, still experiencing pain, especially after I had been sitting down for any length of time (which is essentially how I spend the bulk of my days…), and still unable to run, I switched to seeing a Physiotherapist. She immediately targeted my hamstring and quad to carry out some excruciatingly painful massage and trigger-point needling. Things continued to sort of get better…
In January, I caught a bad cold, had to cancel a physio appointment, and following the resulting unplanned period of rest and inactivity, found that my leg was definitely starting to feel quite a lot better. It made me wonder whether that was what my leg really needed – complete rest, or as close to complete rest as I could get – and so I avoided walking as much as I could (getting a lift into work), and waited for time to do its job (which, as I write this at the end of February, it is still doing…).
All of which is a very long-winded way of explaining why, one Sunday afternoon towards the end of January, with us unable to go out for a walk anywhere, I drove down to The Box (museum) in Plymouth where I subsequently sat with a coffee and some of my drawing and painting gear while my wife walked down to meet me and hour or so later. I didn’t have any kind of plan, but after a quick search for interesting images of local places, I selected a photograph of Cotehele Quay on the Cornish side of the River Tamar about ten miles north of where I sat and set to work.
The picture at the start of this entry is the result. I was a bit limited by the range of watercolour pans that I had with me, but it’s a reasonably satisfying little picture with some nice details, and I think it captures the overall feel of the place fairly well. It was certainly an interesting experience to sit painting in a public place (not that I was aware that any of the people around me really noticed what I was doing) and something that I am sure I will do again. It would be better, of course, to be sitting out in nature actually looking at the view I am painting, but for that to happen it seems that I will need to remain patient a little longer…
Last summer, we had stayed in a tiny AirBnB in the garden of a house near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and loved the red-clay crockery that was provided for us to use so much that when we found out that it was hand-made by the owner, a highly-skilled potter, we asked tentatively asked if she could some like it for us, thinking that it would be way beyond our price-range if she could, and were pleasantly surprised to learn that she could and that it wasn’t. After a delay of a few months, while we waited for our new kitchen to be finally in place and she worked on other jobs, we received a big box of plates, bowls and mugs. Unfortunately, in that first delivery there were two or three breakages and one or two pieces that we were told were not up to standard (but looked fine to us) and so we had to wait a little longer for everything to be made and be with us. A few weeks ago the final package arrived and we were so pleased with our acquisition (apparently it has only been made before for a couple of fancy tapas restaurants somewhere in London) that we wanted to send a card as a thank you for all of the effort that went into fulfilling our order, including making replacement and a few extra pieces as we decided that we did want mugs after all.
So, I sat down to paint a picture to make the card with and was faced with a decision: what to paint? I thought about painting a countryside scene from somewhere near the holiday let or one local to us (e.g. Dartmoor) but in the end I plumped for a view of Plymouth waterfront and found a suitable photograph online to use as a basis. I was really pleased with how the resulting picture ended up – it is the first time that I have tried to capture such a large built-up area in a painting and whilst the size of the picture (~10 x 15cm) means (deliberately) that there is little scope for lots of detail, I’m happy with the extent to which I have worked in sufficient detail to capture the main features of the buildings in the foreground and enough of their sense in the background.
Subsequently, I have been exploring getting some of my artwork printed with a view to seeing whether anyone might part with a little of their hard-earned cash for any of it in the future, and as a test piece I got my Plymouth Waterfront picture printed as an A6 postcard using the cropped version shown below. I’m really please with how the postcards have come out and I now have a staggeringly large number of them that I will, at some point, either sell or give away!
The fourth book I completed in 2025 was xGenius by James Tippett. This is Tippett’s second book about the application of data analytics to football – I read his first, The Expected Goals Philosophy, back in May 2022. xGenius follows up TEGP by digging deeper into the mathematical basis of a range of football statistics such as Expected Goals (xG), and the history of how these measures were developed by professional gamblers looking to get a edge over traditional bookmakers. It turns out that those gamblers were so successful that they pocketed large enough fortunes to become owners of football clubs (e.g. Brentford, Brighton and Hove Albion) and then proceeded to transform those clubs by basing all decisions about things such as player transfers and on-field tactics on those same statistical measures.
I found it interesting to read some more detail about the individual statistics and the various ways that they can be applied, but the most interesting parts of the book were when Tippett highlighted how the way that football is now being played has been transformed by coaches adjusting their tactics to reflect what the data/statistics reveal to be the most effective strategies, despite these often being counter-intuitive. For example, data analysis shows that the chances of scoring a goal from a shot taken from outside the penalty area is very low (around 2%), and so even when an opportunity to shoot from distance presents itself it is arguably better not to shoot but to try to work the ball into the golden zone within the central part of the penalty area – i.e. to take less shots but ones with a higher probability of being goal-scoring ones. Shoot less to score more! Similarly, goals from aerial crosses are rare, as are headed goals and goals scored direct from corners. So, the modern trend of the top teams to focus on retaining possession with lots of ‘tippy-tappy’ passes, whilst trying to get the ball into the perfect spot for a high-probability shot, is rooted in the message that comes out of data analytics, as is the preference for taking short corners rather than launching the ball straight into the box in the hope that a big striker will get his head onto the cross.
A lot of what I don’t particularly like about the way that many of the very ‘best’ teams now play, which I think can make a game really quite boring, can be blamed on the attention now paid to data analytics. This makes sense I think. If data analytics show that a certain approach to games is the most efficient way to win games, then the teams that adopt that approach best become ruthlessly efficient winning machines, and much of the drama in the game, aka the uncertainty, falls away. But I think there is some hope, because surely as more and more teams adopt the same, supposedly most effective tactics, there is increased scope for a team playing differently to surprise their opponents and gain an advantage in the process. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, after a decade or so in which possession-based football, leading to opportunities to create near-perfect, almost unmissable, chances to score, more teams start to return to a more direct, and potentially more exciting, approach to the game.
One other thing that was very much on my mind while reading xGenius was that the whole field of sports data analytics has emerged in the last 10-15 years. At the time when I was thinking about what I would do with my life back in the early/mid-1980s, the idea that it would be possible to be a professional data analyst for a football team would have seemed laughable. I can’t help thinking that as a scientifically-minded and mathematically-capable teenager who was somewhat obsessed with football scores, facts and figures, if such a career avenue had been possible I would have been all over it. Patterns, trends, maths, numbers, tactics, strategy and football? What’s not to like!
The third book I read (or in this case, listened to as an audiobook) was Michael Hyatt’s ‘Free to Focus’. I had listened to a podcast interview with the author one morning (an episode of A Productive Conversation with Mike Vardy) and, although much of Hyatt’s advice on productivity and getting things done was common fare, I liked one or two of the descriptions he gave to some of the ideas that were spoken about and thought I would follow up by listening to his book to see whether there was a bit more meat to put on the bones.
I found the book rather dry, with little content that was at all original, and little further depth on the elements that had piqued my interest in the podcast episode. I did like his way of thinking about areas of activity through an analogy with acting – that we do some of our work on the front-stage (the parts we do for public consumption, the locations of our performances and outputs), some on the back-stage (behind the scenes work preparing, rehearsing, grafting away in private) and some on the off-stage (the other activities in our life not directly linked to our main, professional work). Sadly, that’s nowhere near enough for me to suggest that this is a book that anyone else might benefit from reading/listening to.
Yesterday was 14th February, commonly known as Valentine’s Day – a day for celebrating the romance in your life and letting your ‘special person’ know that you love them. I have to admit though that I am not known for my romantic gestures, or for expressing my emotions (fortunately for me, neither is my wife!), so in our household, Valentine’s Day is not a day filled with red roses, soft music and a candlelit dinner. Nevertheless, we do acknowledge Valentine’s Day in our own way, and this year I spent an enjoyable hour painting a watercolour sketch to turn into a special card. I based the painting on a photograph that I found online of a couple sitting on a bench looking out towards a magnificent view. It’s the kind of bench and the kind of view that my wife and I enjoy sitting on (the picture also had the advantage that I didn’t need to try to paint the faces of the happy couple…). I personalized the couple’s clothing and the colours of their hair and the caps that they are waving just enough so that the couple in the painting could certainly be us.
I’m glad to report that the card and the picture were very well received – evidence, I think, that it means far more to have taken the time to produce something personal and meaningful for the love of your life than to fork out a few quid for a generic heart or flower themed card and a bunch of flowers from the supermarket!
The second book that I finished reading in 2025 was ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. I had previously listened to the audiobook version almost immediately after it was released in 2018 but I picked it up again because it was selected as the January title for an online book club that I am a member of within The Timecrafting Trust (Mike Vardy). I will admit that, as much as anything, this time round my interest in Atomic Habits was focused on why it has occupied the bestseller lists for pretty much the entire period of its existence, selling an astonishing 15 million copies in the process (the irony of the fact that I have contributed two of those sales over the years was not lost on me!).
As the subtitle suggests, Atomic Habits positions itself as a guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones. It certainly does start off with a strong focus on (daily) habits, but as I worked my way through the text I soon found myself thinking that it wasn’t really about habits, rather it was simply about how to get things done.
Early in the book I found myself railing against Clear’s argument that habits are such powerful things because they act like compound interest – if you adopt a daily habit to become 1% better in some respect then the power of that habit compounds each day. Clear suggests that if you get 1 percent better each day for one year then you will end up 37 times better by the time you are done and implies that such improvements in personal performance or skill can be achieved by repeatedly performing a 1% better habit each day (note: 37 times better, not 37% better – I checked the maths!). But this is surely not true. A habit that makes you 1% better on the first day continues to make you 1% better than you originally were on the second and subsequent days, but to get better and better (i.e. to grow or compound the percentage improvement) I think you would have to change your activity on each successive day. I accept that there might well be some additional gain to be had by repeating the same habit each day, but not to the extent suggested by the comparison with compound interest. For example, if you adopt a habit of running a mile each day then you will certainly get fitter over an extended period of time than if you just go for the run once, but after a while you will find that your fitness has reached a plateau and to gain further improvement you will have to start running two miles each day etc. In my opinion, if you have to constantly change what you are doing then you are not developing a habit, you are just carrying out an ongoing programme of self-improvement! [I suppose it could be argued that the habit is then repeatedly showing up to complete that ever-changing activity.]
Setting aside my reservations about whether the book is really about habits or, as I think, about setting up your life so that you are more likely to get things done in general, where Atomic Habits succeeds is in distilling the ideas covered into a very simple set of four principles or laws. Each of these laws is matched to one of the stages associated with taking action: cue, craving, response and reward. Clear states these laws as follows:
make it obvious
make it attractive
make it easy
make it satisfying
I think it is hard to argue with this framework. Clear considers each of these laws in some detail offering various suggestions to help in each case, but I think that much of this material is not that necessary because the four laws do most of the heavy-lifting on their own.
Put simply: if you want to increase the chances that you will perform a task or activity then you need to make it more obvious and/or more attractive and/or easier and/or more satisfying. Similarly, to combat a bad or unwanted habit, you need to make the cue that triggers it less visible and make the habit itself less attractive and/or more difficult to do and/or less satisfying. I think it is this simplicity of the core message in Atomic Habits that is the secret of its success and its astonishing sales figures. It’s a message that is obviously right (or at least feels obviously right), easy to remember and also easy to make use of. Job done.
OVERDUE: [ ] all the tasks that I said yes to when I ought to have said no [ ] all the calls I need to follow-up so their businesses can grow [ ] all the projects I took upon myself so that I could people please [ ] all the projects I need to do to put myself at ease [ ] all the urgent emails that I know I should have sent [ ] all the bookings that I should have made ahead of the event [ ] all those things that no one cares about but I think are a must [ ] all those gadgets that need mending before they fully bust [ ] all the delegated tasks from others resulting from their lack of time [ ] all the things I think I should do so they think I’m fine [ ] all the action points from meetings that I think were flagged for me [ ] all the edits to the documents that I know you need to see
OTHER: [ ] more tasks that I said yes to when I wanted to say no [ ] more calls I’d like to follow-up to help my business grow [ ] more projects I have taken on so I can people please [ ] more projects that I want to do to put myself at ease [ ] more emails that I know that it would help for me to send [ ] more plans that I could make for upcoming events [ ] more things that no one cares about but I think are a must [ ] more gadgets that need maintenance to stop them going bust [ ] more delegated tasks from others resulting from their lack of time [ ] more things I’d like to finish (only then will I feel fine) [ ] more action points from meetings that I let them flag to me [ ] more edits to the documents that I’d like you to see
SOMEDAY/MAYBE: [ ] try to make some art [ ] try to pause a while [ ] try to take time for myself [ ] try to have fun [ ] try to meet up with a friend [ ] try to smile [ ] try to laugh [ ] try to simply do the things I want [ ] try to quench my thirst [ ] try to look after my brain [ ] try to use a different font [ ] try to listen to my heart [ ] try to sit in the sun [ ] try to soak up the rain [ ] try to read the books that are piled upon the shelf [ ] try to have a nice relaxing bath [ ] try to ‘pay myself first’ [ ] try to ignore the latest trend
WAITING FOR: [ ] the perfect time [ ] the stars to align [ ] the mists to clear [ ] the loss of fear [ ] all of the pieces to fall into place [ ] and, of course, the ideal space [ ] the feeling that it’s right [ ] and for my chest to feel less tight [ ] a decent night’s sleep [ ] the bravery to take a leap [ ] something to drink, and some food [ ] the right mood
TODO TODAY: [ ] put a cross in the unchecked boxes and strike-through all the words in the following lists: …….[ ] WAITING FOR …….[ ] OTHER …….[ ] OVERDUE [ ] wherever they appear in the SOMEDAY/MAYBE list strike-through the words: ‘try to’ [ ] start a new list with the title ‘TODO (RECURRING – EVERY DAY)’ [ ] add the unchecked tasks from SOMEDAY/MAYBE in a pleasing way [ ] tear up all of the old lists and throw them right away
PRESENT
OVERDUE: [x] all the tasks that I said yes to when I ought to have said no [x] all the calls I need to follow-up so their businesses can grow [x] all the projects I took upon myself so that I could people please [x] all the projects I need to do to put myself at ease [x] all the urgent emails that I know I should have sent [x] all the bookings that I should have made ahead of the event [x] all those things that no one cares about but I think are a must [x] all those gadgets that need mending before they fully bust [x] all the delegated tasks from others resulting from their lack of time [x] all the things I think I should do so they think I’m fine [x] all the action points from meetings that I think were flagged for me [x] all the edits to the documents that I know you need to see
OTHER: [x] more tasks that I said yes to when I wanted to say no [x] more calls I’d like to follow-up to help my business grow [x] more projects I have taken on so I can people please [x] more projects that I want to do to put myself at ease [x] more emails that I know that it would help for me to send [x] more plans that I could make for upcoming events [x] more things that no one cares about but I think are a must [x] more gadgets that need maintenance to stop them going bust [x] more delegated tasks from others resulting from their lack of time [x] more things I’d like to finish (only then will I feel fine) [x] more action points from meetings that I let them flag to me [x] more edits to the documents that I’d like you to see
SOMEDAY/MAYBE: [ ] try to make some art [ ] try to pause a while [ ] try to take time for myself [ ] try to have fun [ ] try to meet up with a friend [ ] try to smile [ ] try tolaugh [ ] try to simply do the things I want [ ] try to quench my thirst [ ] try to look after my brain [ ] try to use a different font [ ] try to listen to my heart [ ] try to sit in the sun [ ] try to soak up the rain [ ] try to read the books that are piled upon the shelf [ ] try to have a nice relaxing bath [ ] try to ‘pay myself first’ [ ] try to ignore the latest trend
WAITING FOR: [x] the perfect time [x] the stars to align [x] the mists to clear [x] the loss of fear [x] all of the pieces to fall into place [x] and, of course, the ideal space [x] the feeling that it’s right [x] and for my chest to feel less tight [x] a decent night’s sleep [x] the bravery to take a leap [x] something to drink, and some food [x] the right mood
TODO TODAY: [x] put a tick in the unchecked boxes and strike-through all the words in the following lists: …….[x] WAITING FOR …….[x] OTHER …….[x] OVERDUE [x] wherever they appear in the SOMEDAY/MAYBE list strike-through the words: ‘try to’ [x] start a new list with the title ‘TODO (RECURRING – EVERY DAY)’ [x] add the unchecked tasks from SOMEDAY/MAYBE in a pleasing way [x] tear up all of the old lists and throw them right away
FUTURE
TODO (RECURRING – EVERY DAY): [ ] quench my thirst [ ] ‘pay myself first’ [ ] read the books that are piled upon the shelf [ ] take time for myself [ ] soak up the rain [ ] look after my brain [ ] make some art [ ] listen to my heart [ ] sit in the sun [ ] have fun [ ] have a nice relaxing bath [ ] laugh [ ] pause a while [ ] smile [ ] ignore the latest trend [ ] meet up with a friend [ ] use a different font [ ] simply do the things I want
(c) Tim O’Hare, June 2023
About this poem: I’ve been something of a ‘productivity geek’ for quite a few years using various systems of lists to track what I need to do (or think I need to do). Much of this tracking behaviour is built on a very well-known system known as ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) from a book with the same name by the author David Allen. This uses lists for things To Do, things that you are Waiting For, things you might do Someday and/or Maybe etc. Recently, I’ve been trying to relax my use of such systems, especially as I have realised that tracking everything in this way also feeds some of my obsessive collecting and perfectionist behaviours and supports my ‘people pleasing’ tendency. Todo List tries to capture a way out of this pattern of thinking, turning the controlling power of a Todo List into a weapon to destroy the worst aspects of the behaviour such lists can engender.
‘Orbital’, the 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel by Samantha Harvey was the first book that I finished reading this year. I will admit that I am not usually a reader of what might be called ‘literary’ fiction but as this book was fairly short and has a science-based theme (the book recounts the thoughts of a group of astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) as it orbits the Earth over the period of one day), my wife thought it would probably interest me and gave it to me as a Christmas present.
I find books like this, that don’t really have a story as such, quite intriguing. It is interesting to ask the question: What it is that makes spending time with one set of fictional characters doing nothing in particular, apart from existing and thinking, interesting? (especially as it is easy to imagine many instances when it certainly wouldn’t be).
As it turned out, I did enjoy the day I spent with Harvey’s collections of imagined astronauts as they repeatedly observed their home planet (the ISS completes 16 orbits of Earth per day) and mused on their connections with the people, places and events down below. The writing challenges the reader to consider their own place in the world and the perspective from which they view both ordinary and extraordinary events. For me, the core themes that emerged from my reading of Orbital were the extent to which so much of human endeavour is bound up in the pursuit of progress, both the grand-scale technological progress shared only by a few such as the astronauts on the ISS, and the small-scale, day-to-day progress, shared by everyone of us, and the fragility of the world that all of this progress has created.
While gazing down onto the planet’s surface, one of the astronauts muses on this theme of progress in connection with his relationship with his daughter and the passage in the text that captures the stream of his thoughts as he does so was one that resonated deeply for me:
‘But what he meant to say to his daughter – and what he will say when he returns – is that progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong). It’s a feeling he has almost perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments – this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars. A beauty he feels while he vacuums the control panels and air vents, as they eat their lunch separately and then dinner together as they pile their waste into a cargo module to be launched towards earth where it’ll burn up in the atmosphere and be gone, as the spectrometer surveys the planet, as the day becomes night which quickly becomes day as the stars appear and disappear, as the continents pass beneath in infinite colour as he catches a glob of toothpaste mid-air on his brush, as he combs his hair and climbs tired at the end of each day into his untethered sleeping bag and hangs neither upside down nor the right way up, because there is no right way up, a fact the brain comes to accept without argument, as he prepares to sleep two hundred and fifty miles above any ground for their falsely imposed night while outside the sun rises and sets fitfully.‘
Tim O'Hare 