Allans blog. My earliest memory is from about 1952 when I was four, I was walking across the field at the back or our house, we called it The Back Field, which was both appropriate and daft. Appropriate because it was at the back and daft because there wasnt one at the front and we had neighbours on both sides so there wasnt one there either so we could just have called it the field. Anyway, Father Dillon the parish priest of St Stephens who was so fat that he wore a leather belt to keep his belly from making a break for it, had just been explaining his belief that God was real had always been there and always would be and that this was called infinity. Always. No start, no middle, no end but always. Not even the big bang that that jolly nice Professor Cox from Manchester University, you know the one, the bloke who never seems to be off the telly talks about; not even his big bang: just always. Four years of age and I thought my head would explode. I remember thinking if God made God and that God made God who made the first God and then who made the God that made that God and on for ever, on until infinity. A decade or so later at school we started to get into mathematics, fractions first then decimals and the errant decimal point that can get you into just as much trouble as the apostrophe can in English. Ive been caned for each of them a few times and once both on the same day. Infinity appears in arithmetic, its symbol is the number 8 but lying on its side and you find it in sums that dont have a final answer such as ten divided by three. The answer is 3.33333 with the threes continuing to infinity where presumably they meet God. Sixty years later Im still troubled by infinity. I still cannot comprehend the idea of something, anything lasting forever. There was a story the other day about how planets and moons came into being, apparently specks of dust no bigger than one or two atoms collide in space and stick together until they meet another speck and on it goes for billions of years getting bigger and bigger until its big enough to be called a planet. Billions of years, not for ever. A start, a middle and one day an end when a meteor crashes into it and smashes it to smithereens where scintillas of dust go off in search of others to start the process all over again. It is one of those thoughts sent to make sure that everybody knows how little they know. I mention all of this because the schools are about to break up and your delightful progeny, or your progenys progeny are about to spend six weeks telling you that they are bored and there is nothing to do. Get your own back. Tell them about infinity, get them thinking about it get them wondering about it intrigue them and with a bit of luck it will shut the little darlings up for the whole six weeks. Its worked with me for sixty years; that Father Dillon liked a pie and a pint but the man was genius. © Allan Beswick July 2014 Allan is back tomorrow from 6
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 14:50:32 +0000
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