Fast forward several hours – after I have wandered
Dartington Hall’s vast and beautiful grounds, and enjoyed a late lunch at the
Green Table Café – I found myself back in the Great Hall once again for Robert
McCrum’s Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture, the
tenth of its kind since Hughes’s death 20 years ago. Looking ever so slightly
like the late Poet Laureate, McCrum had had the good fortune to work with
Hughes (and several big names besides) as the former editor-in-chief of Faber
and Faber. Having suffered a stroke only a few years before Hughes’s death – an
experience somewhere between ‘a bad trip and a Lewis Carroll nightmare’ -
McCrum never lost his ambition, and it showed as he hobbled up to the podium to
deliver his lecture which read much like a eulogy to the dearly departed
Hughes. Leaning crookedly upon his silver-headed cane, he still managed to
stand tall and reverend-like. In the Great Hall, we as a crowd communed with
Hughes’s spirit just as Hughes himself communed with the likes of Eliot, Blake,
and Shakespeare – the latter forming the obsession which drove him to write the
notorious Shakespeare and the Goddess of
Complete Being, the lecture’s primary focus. McCrum delivered the details
of Hughes’s life and its tragedies with a level of emotion which occasionally
seemed to overwhelm him, from the death of relations to the failure of the
aforementioned book. By the lecture’s close, I swear he was wiping tears from
his eyes, yet, as he remarked regarding all big writers, their books may get
‘longer, baggier, and sillier’, but as a dedicated publisher, Faber and Faber
were there for their writers.
On that emotional note, the hall emptied, yet I chose to
stay put as I knew the next guest was going to draw quite a crowd (the ‘Sold
Out’ label on the schedule board was a subtle hint). And indeed, by the time
7.45pm came around, the once empty hall was full to bursting, people even
lining the walls on the window bench seats like an informally dressed choir,
while the floor was a sea of faces and white noise chatter. And who were they
waiting for? Only paleopathologist, TV presenter and author Alice Roberts, here
to talk to us about genetic history. Just as humans are a mutated form of
chimps and Neanderthal man, so too do other unassuming organisms have
intriguing origins. It may be hard to believe, but Butch the chihuahua deserves
his name after all because he is, in fact, a grey wolf – or at least descended
from one. For more than her allotted 45 minutes, Roberts delivered her lecture
on three of the ten species in her book Tamed
whose origins and functions helped shape our own lives, and she did so in a
uniquely comedic fashion. She aired her irritations at geneticists, depictions
of laboratories and operating theatres, Paleo diets, and the realistic uses of
‘ritual objects’ (which Roberts remarked were most likely toys, in the same way
Octonauts figures are toys – yet somehow a future archaeologist will still insist
they’re idols!) At the same time, this was a highly educational talk on how our
obsession with farming and domestication not only may have eradicated much of
the Earth’s Neolithic megafauna, but has now converted at least 40% of our
planet into farmland. And yet, as her rant included, teenage kids did not
consider science to be ‘creative’, a seeming blow to future generations of
scientists who need to learn to ‘stop fighting the wilderness and learn to
thrive with it!’, a message I wholeheartedly support.
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