What About
the Rest of the Week?
7 May
Anyway, enough of this planetary business. "What about the rest of the week?" I hear you ask.
Well, you'll be pleased to know that Ross
did not go to sleep disappointed on Friday night.
Saturday turned out to be the first really warm day of the year. There have been days when it was warm in the sun but Saturday was the first day when the air itself was warm. Consequently, the air was filled with the rattle of lawn mowers and drills as people got about their outdoor lives. I did fix one of the security locks on the kitchen window but, apart from that, the day was mostly quiet.
That apart from seeing the estate agent. You see, I've sacked my other one. I did that on Wednesday. The house had been with them for three weeks, specifically over Easter and Bank Holiday, and I hadn't had even so much as a visit from a prospective buyer let alone an offer. So I sacked them and got in this new one and there'll be people to view later today.
It's been a busy week on that front. Tuesday the Pickford's representative called and told me how much it would cost for them to pack everything into store for six month for me. £2K. Sounds a lot but having used them for the t'otherways journey I know that I am buying a great degree of peace of mind.
On Wednesday, I got notification from the Halifax that an SAYE scheme I bought into will mature this June. I remember that it was Freda who I worked with in Liverpool put me on to it. It was one of the last financial commitments I made before I came down here and now it's worked its way through. And it comes out at just under £2K. Maybe I'm too busy finding symbolism everywhere but that felt really spooky.
Elsewhere in the week, I got drunk with Chris on Tuesday night and sorted some more things out at work. I have to say that they don't seem too bothered about organising my time to their best advantage.
And I took a half day holiday on Thursday and went to see Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. I'd been wanting to see it since it opened at the Royal National Theatre in 1998. The basic material of the play revolves around the friendship of quantum physicist, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, he of the Uncertainty Theory. In particular it centres on a trip Heisenberg made to see his old mentor in Copenhagen in 1941, by which time Bohr's country, Denmark, was occupied by Heisenberg's countrymen, the German army.
The play asks all sort of questions about the morality of the search for knowledge for Heisenberg was working on splitting the atom and was looking to Bohr for guidance on the commercial development of this. The meeting ended in a complete rift between the two men and the play posits that this was because Bohr felt that Heisenberg was looking to construct the atom bomb first for Nazi Germany.
And yet, Heisenberg never constructed a bomb. He gave evidence to the Third Reich that it was an impossibility. Instead, he looked to create affordable energy through fission. In the play, Bohr points out that he didn't achieve the Bomb because he didn't do a simple mathematical equation that would have shown him it was in fact possible. And he didn't do the maths because he wasn't actually looking to make the bomb. The historical view of Heisenberg as a collaborator may, in fact, be misplaced.
You see, Heisenberg working away in Germany, pilloried in the 50s, actually prevents deaths. Bohr, who is sort of the good guy of 20th Century physics, escapes from Denmark and ends up in America where an idea of his is used as the trigger for the Nagasaki bomb thus linking Bohr to the deaths of thousands.
The play asks one hypothetical question of the meeting. What if, instead of shunning Heisenberg and refusing to answer his question, Bohr had mastered his anger and had gone into the mode of Socratic dialog which the two had used throughout their times together. Surely, at some point, Heisenberg would have spotted the necessity of doing the maths he never did. He would have seen the possibility of making the bomb. And he would have made it happen giving the Third Reich a way of ending the conflict in 1945 in a very different way.
The best thing that Bohr ever did was not to talk.
It was a really good afternoon of ideas lightly used to great effect. I was mesmerised by the intellectual challenge of it and of the astonishingly assured playing of the company of three - Bohr's wife Margrethe is the keeper of the conscience of the play.
I'm really glad I took the trouble to go. I'm going to have to do a few more valedictory things like that. Letting go. Celebrating the parting.