Sam Redlark

  image generated by Grok One of the home economics teachers at my old secondary school was obsessed with a woman called Edith Morfett, who had paid for her daughter’s lavish wedding ceremony, at The Durrance Hotel in Teignmouth, by taking in their laundry. She did this for seven years until the debt was paid off. Ms Morfett lived in a Mornedh – a traditional style of house that is unique to the south-west coast of England. They are built over or among rock pools. The ground floor is designed to flood at high tide. Traditionally, Mornedh's were used as landlocked lobster pots and fish traps, providing their owners with a subsistence living, rather like a seaside croft. There is sketchy historical evidence to suggest that, prior to being used for human habitation, Mornedh's were shrines built to provide a home for the sea when it crawled up onto the land. (This claim, made by Professor Gerald Hillier in the 1960s, goes in and out of fashion; it has been discredited and reapprais...

  image generated by ChatGTP In July 1945, the chief architect of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, pondering on the success of the recent nuclear test at White Sands, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One hundred-and-forty-three years earlier, and approximately five-thousand miles to the east, another man of science, this one a “rattle-brained” naturalist by the name of Edward Caton, had also earned himself the moniker 'destroyer of worlds.' On this occasion the title was not self-appointed, but was bestowed upon him by his peers at The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Knowledge of the Natural Sciences (later it was renamed The Royal Society of the Natural Sciences by men with more common sense than its founders). Caton's grand folly, which was to earn himself a toehold in the footnotes of history, was the careless placement of a perfectly spherical gharial egg (a gharial is a narrow-jawed, fish-eat...