Posted January 31, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
Not a car for Batman but a mobile made from bats.
The school at which I worked in outback South Australia had the only swimming pool for hundreds of kilometres. The local bats would skim over it at night and drink. Occasionally, some of them would misjudge their trajectory and I would find them floating when I got to school in the morning. Some of them were alive and my treatment of quiet darkness followed by mincemeat in raw egg would allow them to recover.
When I first found a dead bat, I thought it would be a waste not to use it. My embryonic taxidermic skills were not equal to the task of stuffing something that small. I arranged the bat in a vaguely lifelike posture and injected its body cavities with a formaldehyde (methanal) solution. After several courses of injection, I had a fairly permanent specimen. The best way to display it was by attaching a single thread so it could hang from the ceiling and give the impression of being in flight.
After I had a few of these, I had the idea of displaying them as a mobile, similar to those made by Alexander Calder. I made a nicely balanced one with four or five bats. I don’t have a picture of it but I did once take one of the single hanging bats (A Lesser Long-eared Bat, Nyctophilus geoffroyi) into a country graveyard to take some pictures.
I made quite a lot of taxidermic specimens while I was at that school. On one occasion, I was preparing a Hoary-headed Grebe (Poliocephalus poliocephalus, one of the least pleasant scientific names I have read) with the formaldehyde injection method when the needle came off the syringe. I got an eyeful of formaldehyde, one of the most painful things that has ever happened to me. I thought it would permanently affect my vision but after an hour of lying down under a running water tap, I seemed to be OK.
I left that school with a ceiling full of stuffed flying things, including a really ugly Pied Cormorant (Phalocrocorax varius) that hung directly over where the teacher normally stood in the science laboratory. I imagine that the first thing that was done when I left that school was a cleanout of all my horrible specimens.
Click on the thumbnails for bigger pictures.
Posted January 31, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
This sounds like more fun than it was. I used to work in a girls’ school in England. There were a lot of charitable activities. In one of these, someone had the wonderful idea of bringing in someone to wax some of the teachers for charity. I think I volunteered to get my legs waxed but the comically hairy nature of my back was revealed by some of my ‘friends’ with whom I went swimming. Hence, one lunch time, there I was on the stage in the main hall, lying on what looked like a surgical bench, with an efficient woman tearing clumps of hair from my back. Not such a bad idea, I thought.
At this stage, a colleague thought we might be able to make a bit more money if students paid a pound for the privilege of tearing one of the strips off. Then followed an unending stream of girls queuing for the unique sensation of ripping hair off a male teacher and seeing him in pain. Things became worse when we ran out of back hair and shifted to the chest. I could probably have called a halt at this stage but the general air of excitement and continued calls of ‘We’re making so much money’ meant that the uproar would have been considerable.
The chest waxing really hurt. Each waxing strip looked like a dead squirrel when it came off and left a field of pinpricks on my chest. There was quite a bit of blood. The girls were fascinated. The look of schadenfreude when some of them ripped another patch of skin off me was frightening. The whole horrible thing was only halted by the bell at the end of lunch time. The waxing woman decided to end with a flourish and wax all of my chest except for a little hairy heart right in the centre. My wife did not find this in any way funny or stylish or romantic.
The Heart of Hair, complemented by a similarly Valentinic pastry
Posted January 31, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
It wasn’t actually a toad. It was an African Clawed Frog (Xenopus laevis). For some reason, it was referred to as a toad in the school in which it lived and I worked. It had a metabolic condition that meant that its cells took in water osmotically. As a result, it was almost spherical in shape. The sixth form Biology students and I had a ritual in which we would use a syringe to extract a cubic centimetre of fluid from the toad each day. It didn’t seem to mind but I am not sure that it made any difference to its condition.
Posted January 30, 2014 Posted by Adam in Uncategorized
The A205 is an awful collection of road across South London. I used to live in Wandsworth and work in Lee. This meant a bicycle commute of exactly 10 miles (16km). There and back was 20 miles (32km). A week’s commuting meant 100 miles (160km). A 37-week school year gave 3700 miles (5920km). Seven years of that means a total ride of 25900 miles (about 41440km). The equatorial circumference of the Earth is about 24900 miles (40075km).
I didn’t really ride around the world. I just did the distance on the South Circular. Instead of Iranian bandits or the risk of dying of thirst in the Gobi desert, I was relentlessly hit by white vans. And a bus.
I would also like to place on record that over a ten-mile course, I am faster on my bicycle than a Ferrari 360 (if the course is the westbound A205 at 6pm on a weekday).
Greenwich Park. Not far from the South Circular.
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