Things I once knew

 

When I look back over an increasingly long life, I am sometimes surprised by the things I once knew and which of them have stuck in my increasingly leaky brain.

Take using a theodolite, for instance. It’s the small box on a tall tripod which you see men use on footpaths around building sites (and they are always men; I wonder why). My theodolite lessons came on the first archaeological dig in which I participated, at the end of my first year at university. We were digging a very large midden under an extensive rock overhang and I think the theodolite was used to work out the height of various levels. There was no need for me to learn this rather arcane skill but the two chaps tasked with the job seemed to enjoy teaching. If I recall correctly, there was also the use of a slide rule, something which I suspect has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Now this is the extent of my memory of theodolites but there were several other things I learned that digging season which have stuck with me. For instance, if you dig a latrine in the bush, you have to pour creosote and lavender water into the trench on a regular basis to make it usable. Yes, much to the amazement of my friends, I survived four weeks of tent living and latrine use. I learned how to dress and undress inside a sleeping bag and I also learned how to make a Coolgardie Cooler, a rough substitute for a fridge based on the scientific fact that water cools as it evaporates. So you build a frame with shelves, cover it with some hessian, put a bucket on top with a tiny hole in its bottom and keep the bucket full. The slow drip of the water down the hessian evaporates and keeps your food cool. Brilliant!

I learned three other things in those four weeks. The most crucial was learning how not to get bitten by snakes as you walked through the bush. The secret is to make a loud tramping noise as you go, and always step onto logs, never over them, on the grounds that snakes often bask in the sun on the other side.

In these years before Vatican II, when the lives of Catholics were radically changed, Anglicans – my school mates – and Catholics had nothing to do with each other and whole professions were one or the other. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that, in my first meeting with a Catholic, she knew absolutely nothing about Judaism. She actually asked me if I had the same God as she did.

And the third thing was not to go in the public bar of a pub if you were female. Some lads who were giving me a lift home for the weekend took me to a pub – my very first time – and bundled me into the ladies section, to my surprise.

There is a range of other things I used to know which are spectacularly unimportant but it’s such a pleasure when my brain actually works properly so I’m going to list some of them.

For instance, I knew the longest word in the dictionary, which has now been replaced by something scientific. It was “antidisestablishmentarianism”.

I know the motto of NSW: “Orta recens quam pura nites” which more or less means “Newly rise, how brightly you shine”. I know one of Newton’s laws although I can’t remember which one. The one I know says: “A body at rest will remain at rest and a moving body will continue moving at constant speed unless acted upon by a force.”

Then there’s the opening words of Caesar’s Gallic Wars: “All Gaul is divided into three parts” or in the original Latin: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” I admit I had to check the Latin but I’m puzzled why this particular bit of ancient writing stuck when so much else has gone. For instance, I spent a year studying Egyptian hieroglyphics and could stagger through a translation of hieroglyphic texts. Now … nothing!

I know the distance of the earth to the sun in miles: 93 mjillion. And I know that “buggerup” is the New Guinea Tok Pisin word for “broken down”. I was also told the probably apocryphal story that in Tok Pisin (New Guinea “pigeon”) the phrase for “helicopter” is “Mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ”!

These trips down memory lane may be continued next week. Stay tuned!.

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

US writer and critic Alexander Woollcott coined what is now an immortal phrase: “All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral or fattening.”