Nigel's thoughts....

A cold grey day, and I am reminded I haven't posted anything for a long time. A vintage has passed, a very fine one it seems. Anyway I am in contemplative mood and have been reading some old physics lectures (I'm like that). These were by Richard Feynman (who won a Nobel prize as well as being the bongo player in a pole dancing club!) in the 1960's and he has a wonderful way of simplifying the world with bald honesty. This is what he has to say about a glass of wine:

…It is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid that evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates and the products. There in wine is found the great generalisation: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe into parts- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology and so on- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

Nice one Richard!