What to do? Wait and go back, or go home? Once giving blood seemed to be easy and fun: the staff were helpful, there was almost a party atmosphere in the sesssions in the old Town Hall. You met your friends. Now in the vast hall of the Leisure Centre with six beds pressed against one wall and what seemed like an army of staff checking and re-checking lest someone who whose mother had Creuzfeld Jacob’s disease and who had sex (with or without a condom) somewhere in Africa that wasn’t Egypt might be trying to slip through the net. There's a mighty dead hand over everything. I suspect it has something to do with the re-organisation of the Health Service but in an attempt to cut cost and do things better they are killing the golden egg laying goose. In this curmudgeonly mood I turned away and went to have a small beer in Aboreal on the way home.
Aboreal, which is a pleasant cross between an restaurant and a bar is a lovely place, full of distressed and limed woodwork. There are street tables (the whole front can be opened up on sunny days so there isn’t really an inside and an outside) but also comfortable sofas. Dining tables also. It is a place to sit and read or to meet your friends. The staff are friendly and efficent and whenever I have eaten there it has been a happy experience. It was also once my office. I had a square little box which I rented which now lies in the middle of Arboreal. One corner has been cut off to provide access and one wall is now the rear bar, but I can still say, ‘this is where I had my desk’ and ‘here I kept my filing cabinet.’
After supper I wandered out just as the sun was setting to check the greengages on the tree. They are just turning and one or two are already ripe and beset by insects who mine deep cavities in the yellow flesh. Not such a good crop as last year - the spring was cold and wet and the wildlife that might have fertilised the blossom stayed firmly indoors. So I suppose I should be grateful for what fruit there is. Nothing quite beats the taste of a ripe greengage fresh off the tree, the soft feel of the fruit taken either by fingers or tongue is sensual and luxuriant. And next to the tree is a hibiscus whose flowers lend a touch of the exotic with their oriental shade of purple. It goes with the green fruit. Wimbledon colours!
Strange to think that these same sensations, the fruit, the light, the flowers would have been available (more or less) to my neolithic people who might have stood 6,000 years ago on this very spot, pausing perhaps from surveying operations. Earlier I had begun the job of condensing all my neolithic research into a little self-published book to take with me when I have to give a talk to a university student archeology club in Cambridge in November and I want to have something to take with me. It is a task that I have long put off and I was glad to have started it.
We tend to think of the Stone Age as above all else uncivilised and primitive. But they are only 240 generations away from us. They were also clever and - so I argue - could write and do mathematics. They measured the earth accurately and based units of linear and area measurement upon the result. We have them still today. The cricket pitch at one chain or four poles is exactly one two millionth of the earth's circumference. Busy with their monumental stones and demonstrating their mathematics these people unfortunately overlooked the science of metal working and so were wiped out by more aggressive folk in the iron and bronze ages.
