Memorandum

Even in the most oblivious of times, there are facts that resonate enough to penetrate a very dulled brain. It must be possible to tell a good deal about a person from what sinks in in these moments. I clearly found these facts quite remarkable!

That Dirk Bogarde has been outed as a raving narcissisist who lied and manipulated others throughout his life. He wrote of the death of French actress with whom he pretended to have a long term relationship that her body wasn't found until the flies were at her lips, which was completely untrue, (as well as gratuitous and unfeeling), since she died in the arms of the ambulance man.

That Pol Pot and the Khymer Rouge were motivated by a noxious mix of Marxism and the anti-individualism of Buddhism. (Will have to investigate further as had not realised that Buddhism could be fingered in any of this.)

That in 1606 there seems to have been a tsunami that struck coastline of the Bristol Channel, taking swathes of the agricultural populations from the Gower Peninsula right up the Severn Estuary. A headland off Cardiff bay was completely carved up by it. Granite is no object apparently. So get ready to grab those beach towels and run for the hills. The fault that caused the wave, which is just off the South coast of Ireland, is still active.

That the Cuban Missile Crisis really was as scary as it is always made out to be. It seems that the world could have been bombed to non-existence merely because a lift got stuck. The person carrying the crucial message of retreat from Moscow got stuck in the lift just before the deadline was about to be reached. Cripes. Even if apocryphal, it does capture the fearfully unstable nature of the whole situation.

During the most serious ice age, water levels were 150 meters lower than they are today, which made Florida look like a big fat pineapple rather than the banana it is today. There were no ice caps at all during the time of the dinosaurs. The carbon cycle is subject to so many variables and it is really only in the last 8000 years that there has been any semblance of stability about our climate. It could be that this stability accounts for the development of human civilisation but now that we have it and are reasonably canny as a result, are we really not up to the changes that we are about to incur?