• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Count Your Blessings, Not Your Midge Bites

Posted on: Monday, 9 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

Glasgow may be less buttoned-up than Edinburgh, but having group sex in the middle of George Square is pushing things a bit far, even if you are an ant.

When swarms of male flying ants appeared in Glasgow this week in pursuit of their females, they managed to get into people's hair and up their noses as effectively as any gang of blokes on a stag night.

No wonder they have become the latest six-legged creatures to be vilified by Scots, alongside the fast-multiplying heather beetle and the almighty midge.

But let's not get our distaste for insect life as swollen out of proportion as our heavily bitten legs. Tourist bosses on the east coast might have netted a few headlines by highlighting the midge- free status of Fife and the north east, but they have stung their counterparts in the Highlands in the process.

Now, I'm not against a bit of friendly rivalry (and for the record, the response by some Highlanders that the east coast lacks scenic splendour is just nonsense) but surely it's time for a reality check. We're encouraging a view of Scotland as a place of fearsome creatures and forbidden forests of the sort Dorothy Gale and Toto would balk at. Midges and beetles and ants? Oh my: surely we're a bit tougher than that.

Maybe it's because all of our truly fearsome species have been hunted or starved into extinction, but we tend to forget that every country has its pestilential insects. On the grand scale of things, we're lucky to have ended up with the midge. We might have had the mozzie. On the Canadian prairies this year, the skies have been darkened by swarms of mosquitoes, which have been multiplying like, well, mosquitoes, because of the humid summer. As if that weren't bad enough, some mozzies elsewhere in Canada carry West Nile Fever, a potentially fatal virus. That's not even to mention malarial mosquitoes that are prevalent in many parts of Africa, Asia and South America.

We've got it easy by comparison and if we give in to midge madness, visitors might stay in towns, where the only beetles on show have wheels.

So let's stop the hype and start counting our blessings instead of our bites.

Where will our future Nobel winners train?

Anyone who saw the BBC TV film Life Story in 1987 will have been touched by news of Francis Crick's death. "Historic" is a much- abused word, particularly by politicians, but the moment he bursts into The Eagle pub in Cambridge crying "we've found the secret of life" richly deserves it.

He was "the Charles Darwin of the twentieth century", according to one of his peers, a true Great Briton.

It's not much of a tribute, then, that at the moment of his death, university departments teaching the "hard" physical sciences, chemistry and physics, are fighting for survival all over Britain.

Student rolls have been falling like feathers in a vacuum. Chemistry applications in Scotland fell for six years from 1997, only recovering slightly last year. The drop has been used by some principals as an excuse to close departments, but the underlying reason is that science offers greater savings because it is more expensive to teach than the arts.

The latest victim has been the small but highly regarded department at Swansea university - three Nobel prize winners joined in bitter protests at the decision.

Scotland has escaped the dramatic closures affecting England and Wales, but here, too, chemistry departments have watched their funding and status dwindle.

This is no way to honour the achievements of Francis Crick and generations of other great British scientists. Crick was a physicist by training and his American partner, James Watson, a geneticist. They used their expertise to come up with the helix structure for DNA, but could not see how it held together. The answer was hydrogen bonding, a chemical principle, which proved to be the final piece of the jigsaw. The Nobel Prize for chemistry crowned their achievement.

It's hard to see where future British Nobel prize winners will train if chemistry and physics are under threat of closure. Life Story should be compulsory viewing for any university principal who considers such a drastic move.

You may not be able to vote in the US elections, but you can wear the knickers: in the tradition of using underwear as a weapon of mass protest, started by the 1960s bra-burners, a "coalition of brazen women on a mission to expose and depose President Elect George W Bush" called Axis of Eve has produced a range of "protest panties".

Styled as "weapons of mass seduction" (they're elusive, well hidden and some men spend years trying to get their hands on them), the slogan-bearing knickers and skimpy tops are being deployed via a network of faceless operatives communicating largely on the internet (www.axisofeve.org, in case you're interested).

But don't buy them for your granny. Taking full advantage of the punning possibilities offered by the president's surname, not to mention the given name of his vice president, Mr Cheney, the humour is, well, pert.

Still, the hope is that the shapely forms of protesters in tight- fitting pants and vests will stimulate a response during a mass flash outside the Republican national convention in September. After all the boobs of Bush's four years in power, though, they might be lucky to get noticed. Shake up 007, give us a British Bond again It's that time of the decade again when we have to find a new Bond.

Irishman Pierce Brosnan may be stepping down, prompting speculation about the identity of the next 007, with everyone from Russell Crowe (too angry) to Ewan McGregor (too hairy) in the frame.

I wouldn't mention it except that nothing has made me feel this nationalistic since Will Young lost World Idol. Wouldn't it be a quaint idea to have another British Bond? Front runners include Australian Hugh Jackman, who is vying with Crowe (Australian) and Irishman Colin Farrell. The British hope is Clive Owen, who leaves me neither shaken nor stirred. If this were the Bond Olympics, I doubt that Britain could bring home the bronze. At least it looks like we'll be spared transatlantic Bond, but, as they say in Bond circles, never say never.

More News in this Category