In At The Deep End

It’s been ages since we got back, and even more ages since either of us wrote anything. Oh well.

This year I tried my hand at archery – I’d finally given in and bought myself a longbow at a historical fair, but hadn’t had chance to practice before going. I like longbows. Mine is ash, 35lb pull (which is rather weedy, but could still reach all the targets). Some of the other archers do loads of archery, and some of them have loads of money. So there was a proper 130lb war bow that I couldn’t draw, and lots of 70lb ones which were still rather powerful. I got to get quite a bit less bad at it, and particularly enjoyed clout shooting (shooting at a cloth on a stick at the far end of a field, aiming up into the sky to get more range – nearest the stick wins). Also I learned about archery, and how we defeated the French at Poitiers, Crecy and Agincourt against the odds.

The way that people were using a simple but powerful tool made of wood, how different people had different preferences and so on, made me think a bit about the bit in the first Harry Potter book where he goes to Ollivander’s to get a wand. Another thing that struck me this year, I think partly because of some of the other archers also made bows and chairs etc. was that at Kentwell there are people who can actually make things, real things, rather than words in the Web 2.0 user-generated content meaning of make. One bloke, who makes bowls with his lovely pole-lathe started as a geneticist, then changed to selling industrial amounts of liquid nitrogen and oxygen, and now makes pipes for a living (musical ones, but not bagpipes).

He had a second lathe with him this year, where the pole was a proper bit of timber rather than a chopped bit of tree. He was saying how it was all put together at the last minute, using bits of wood he had lying around the workshop – holly, box, ash etc. This impressed me: not only did he have the various kinds of wood lying around, but he could identify them. Then there
were the basket makers – one lady was making a new basket for her dog. I need a basket for my dog, so I’ll make one. Marvellous. They use wickedly sharp knives to cut the willow.

Anyway, as well as all that there were the usual out of hours things – ceilidhs, a boat race along the moat, green man (celebration of midsummer) eating tea out on the front lawn (A got scared of the peacocks, who can be a pest as they scavenge people’s leftovers, which sometimes haven’t been left yet).

K and L had to zoom back as they were singing in a concert. Fortunately we were just back in time to see the interesting part of the boat race. The concert was for all the music groups associated with the school where they do their Saturday morning music thing. The youngest performer was in their group (a 4 year old girl, who did very well), and the oldest was a six former in one of the school groups. K+L were excellent, enjoyed themselves, and also enjoyed the other groups.

Also, K and L got to be gentry for the day, with minimal effort from us. Normally gentry is a hassle, as the costumes are elaborate and fancy, and you need posh accessories too. The outdoors gentry (visiting gentry from elsewhere) a.k.a. gentry in a pavilion a.k.a. tentry, had some costumes spare that happened to fit K and L. K liked it, and L looked forward to it so much she occasionally literally jumped for joy. After all, it’s not every day you get to be a princess. (See Flickr for the many layers of getting ready.)

Katy’s dad was doing his first Kentwell for quite a few years. In recent years there had been a problem of young lads wandering around in feral gangs. There was a school room in the house, but that was fairly posh and small. So the big cheese PP asked David if he could start a second, less posh, school in one of the barns in order to keep these lads out of mischief. He was given a free hand and more help than most stations get as PP realised it was likely to be an unpopular thing.

David did his usual excellent job of preparation, and it turned out to be somewhere that the boys wanted to be. One of the archers had a son who was supposed to be there but wasn’t, and so was almost dragged there by his dad. Later on I asked the boy how it went and he said it was good. They made a sundial by working out when noon was by shadows and then using an hour glass to do the other hours away from that. They used slates and slate pencils, and did their proper work on one side and used the other to give a score to visiting school parties a la X Factor.

They had clay letters and roman numerals made by a Kentwell potter, and they were taught the pre-1588 way of doing roman numerals: XIV is the same as XVI as the position doesn’t matter – you just add up the individual letters to make 16. So 9 is VIIII. Actually, a run of 2 or more Is has a tail on the last I which makes it look like VIIIJ. Doing division by multiple subtraction is a lot easier if the position doesn’t matter. Oh, and chess played to Tudor rules (no castling, no en passant, and pawns never move 2 spaces). And there was delicious cake, made by David’s partner. Katy took some lovely photos of David and the school, again on Flickr.

As part of the Science festival, I took K, L and A to the Chemistry department. There was an unexpected bit of learning on the walk from the nearest free car park to the department – the very nice playground we went through had a Moebius strip climbing frame. I’m not surpised, given where it was, but it did make me smile and K and L had fun clambering over it.

I have memories of the Chemistry department from when I was a student – 3 9 o’clock Maths lectures there a week in my first year (because it had a large lecture theatre). When you got to the building, getting in was tricky because all the fume cupboards inside were sucking air out of the building and pumping it out of chimneys, which meant that the entrance doors were being sucked shut. My lecturer was Dr. De’Ath (convenient apostrophe), who was an astronomer, and the only thing I actually remember of his lectures was vector area. He held up an inflatable zebra and asked “What’s the vector area of this?” The answer was 0, as it is a closed surface.

Anyway, back to the present. The doors weren’t being sucked shut as the fume cupboards were off. There was a huge scrum in the entrance hall as lots of people were just about to go into a lecture. A quick hello to a local HE family who were about to go in, then we headed off randomly upstairs. The first room we came to had some nice crystal stuff – examples about the size of a rubic’s cube, and some kits for growing salt crystals with some here’s-some-I-prepared-earlier showing how they would work.

The best bit in that room was the liquid nitrogen. As well as the put something in, freeze it, take it out and smash it with a hammer trick (which was done with bananas, apples and an egg) there were two things I’d not seen before with liquid nitrogen. The first was making a chunky nail out of blu tac and then being able to hammer it into a plank of wood. The second was a foam trough that was having a blown up balloon pushed into it. The demonstrator asked us how many balloons we thought were in the trough. She then got some tongs and kept on pulling out more and more balloons. Most of them had gone down to as small as when they weren’t inflated, because all the air inside had shrunk down in the cold. The trough was about the size of 4 adult shoe boxes in 2 rows of 2, and there were 31 balloons in it. She put them on the bench where they warmed up and got back to normal size – the bench was covered with balloons, and it was a very impressive demonstration.

Next was a bit of Chemistry lego i.e. playing with Molymod. K and L made carbon dioxide. There were diagrams of common interesting molecules, and K asked me to make ibuprofen which while not being e.g. DNA is about 10 times as complex as CO2. The students demonstrating had helpfully made some building blocks (though none I could use) and K put the hydrogens on a ring to make benzene. The student said a bit about it (gives you cancer, good at dissolving things) and K said “The man had a dream about snakes eating each other and worked out its structure” – student was impressed and I had a PDM. They do remember some things I tell them .

Next door was another student with different bowls to smell. Which was the odd one out? Caraway, dill, rose petals, orange and spearmint. I can’t remember which one it was (but I think they both got it) nor can I remember which chemical was involved, but it was about chirality – four of them had one version of the smelly chemical and the other had its mirror image. That was interesting timing, as that week scientists had worked out the chemistry involved in Thalidomide harming the body. I mentioned that to the student, and he said that even if you could produce a pure sample of the good Thalidomide, your body would turn some of it into the bad Thalidomide anyway. Hmmm…

We then went to a bit where the children could do experiments. There was a lab given over to getting ready – racks of lab coats, boxes of disposable gloves, and boxes of safety specs. I had A on my back and surprisngly they had no baby-wearing lab coats, so we settled for My First Safety Specs for A and caution for me. K and L had the full works – see Flickr.

The experiments were making snot / goo (borax, PVA and colouring), cornflour and water and an excellent demonstration of density. There were beakers with sugar solutions of different strengths, ranging from just water to a saturated solution. The different strengths were coloured differently, and by carefully slurping some up in a pipette and putting it out into a test tube (in the right order) you could make a rainbow.

We were starting to flag a bit, so we headed up to the top floor where there was more liquid nitrogen, but this time to make ice cream . K and L were a bit too young to do it themselves, so they watched as a kind student made some for them and then gave us all some. Very nice it was too – very small ice crystals so not hard and crunchy, proper ingredients including cocoa and cream.

As we were going round we’d been doing a trail where you had to find posters about mystery elements. This certainly tested my rusty A level chemistry, but we got through it and collected the prizes just before chucking out time.

As for the title – my dad’s a physicist and was therefore indoctrinated with the view that chemists are just cooks in lab coats.