Laughing frogs!

Every Sunday, BBC Radio 3 has a ‘Sounds of the Earth’ collage: a recording of nature (birds, trees, frogs, the sea, etc.) interspersed with relevant music. It’s fabulous.

Caroline submitted such a recording of the brilliant laughing frogs of Dungeness in Kent, which was used for Sounds of the Earth in May 2023 (below, with some pictures of the area). Do enjoy them!

{A previous Sounds of the Earth used my recording of birds in the Sine-Saloum Delta in Senegal.}

My stone-carving!

I made a stone sculpture! Basically I’m interested in cathedrals so wanted to know how one gets made. The answer is: slowly and with a ton of work.

The video below shows shows how it emerged, which I think is more interesting / unfamiliar than the finished object.

It’s not going to win any awards but it is recognisably a piece of art – even if not very brilliant art – which is a great improvement from half-way through the term, when it just looked like an accident! (I’d also never made a video before!)

Sound on:

The name

I hope that you like its cheery title! It means: shadow of death 🤣

My husband asked what it’s called, and I thought it can’t be called just “Untitled 2” or something. So I was thinking of names. This name is inspired by the amazing service I went to at St Bartholomew The Great (England’s oldest parish church, apparently): the Ô Antiphons. So much incense in there that you can see it hanging in the air. That service has many references in that to Umbra Mortis 😱

(My husband thinks that can be abbreviated to just ‘um’… 😒)

The music

Lol. The whole idea came from a friend’s suggestion of having a Big Reveal party! I’m not hosting one of those, but that did prompt a Big Reveal video. I first thought of Thus Spake Zarathustra… but that reaches its ‘ta-da’ moment quite fast, and the process of carving is pretty involved that I needed music with more time before the reveal. Zadok is perfect.

(In Zadok, that intro, though massively & rightly famous, is only actually 80 seconds long. Shows that you can do a lot with a little, if you’re good.)

That doesn’t look like a cathedral!

Indeed. My original plan was to make a quatrefoil, which are common in cathedrals. But it fast became clear that any shape which relies on symmetry, i.e., precision, is a bad idea. Abstract is more forgiving! For example, both the indentations on Umbra Mortis – on the front and back – were required to disguise scars which the stone already had when I got it.

The stone is Ancaster hard white. Quite difficult to work, apparently.

Actually, there is a magic money tree!

UK Prime Minister famously – and rather patronisingly – said that there’s no magic money tree. Actually there is one! I wrote about it in The Economist, no less. Normally, my letters there are about actually important things, such as ‘no, actually anti-malarial bed-nets are really effective‘, or the importance of involving African researchers in research about Africa… but not this one.

And here she is: bonkers, over-grown old dame:

Please add to my collection of words…

I collect a particular type of word. They are multi-syllable words, in English, which are verbs if the stress is on one syllable but nouns if the stress is on a different syllable. For example, prod-UCE is a verb, meaning to create something, whereas PROD-uce is a noun, meaning apples, lettuces etc.

They are all multi-syllable word. I’m not collecting single-syllable words whose meaning changes depending on how they are pronounced (e.g., “now I read the books I read when I was a child”, or “we lead the world in production of lead”, or “a tear in his muscle lead him to shed a tear”).

With two-syllable examples, it is often (always?) the case that the noun form has the stress at the front, whereas the verb form has the stress at the back. I’d be particularly interested in any opposite examples.

Below is my collection. Pls let me know of others!

Word	Meaning 2	Meaning 1
Produce	PRODuce Noun: typically farm outputs	proDUCE verb: to create
Escort	EScort Noun: somebody you hire	esCORT Verb: to take somebody somewhere
Compound	COMpound Noun: thing made of several parts	comPOUND Verb: to exaccerbate
Record	RECord Noun: documentation of something, or physical sound recording	reCORD Verb: to document something
Consort	CONsort Noun: somebody who accompanies, or a group (e.g., a consort of viols)	conSORT Verb: to operate together
Collect	COLLect Noun: prayer for the day in Anglican churches	coLLECT Verb: to bring together
Fragment	FRAGment Noun: a piece	fragMENT Verb: to split into pieces
Progress	PROgress Noun: a development	proGRESS Verb: to develop
Recess	REcess A break or a niche behind	reCESS To put behind
Converse	CONverse The opposite	conVERSE To talk
Second	SECond Unit of time, or to come second in a race	seCOND To move a person temporarily, say, from one department to another

Others:

Pervert, convert, project, reject, object, subject, permit, present, extract, desert, defect, contract, construct, import, export, progress, refuse, process, conscript, confine, incline, commune, proceed (I recently heard a non-native English speaker talk about using the pro-CEEDs from selling his house.) Some are nice sets with related meanings: insert, extract, recall, implant; and fragment and segment.

Those are all two-syllable words. Here’s an interesting three-syllable one: envelope. It follows the same pattern: the noun has the stress at the front (EN-velope) whereas the verb has the stress on the second syllable (enVELope: actually pronounced ‘en-VEL-up’. See below about pronunciation nightmares).

Obviously sometimes, the noun & verb are related (you produce your produce; a reject has been rejected; if you rebel, you are called a rebel; you present a present). But other times they’re unrelated, e.g., a legal contract doesn’t involve something shrinking (contracting).

Some cousins:

• Perfect. PERfect is an adjective (flawless), but perFECT is a verb (to make something flawless).
• AUGust is a noun, but auGUST is an adjective.
• CONtent is a noun, but conTENT is an adjective.
• Contrary is a weird one. CONtrary means ‘opposite’ (like playing musical scales on a piano in contrary motion: one hand plays it rising while the other plays it falling), whereas conTRARy describes a person who often disagrees /takes an opposing view. I think they’re both adjectives.

I recently discovered a word which can be a verb, noun or adjective(!). It’s ‘abstract’. An ABstract is the summary atop a scientific research paper; a painting can be ABstract; and one can abSTRACT the essence of something (rather like extract, or to summarise).

• There are some words in which we change the consonant sound depending on whether it’s a noun or a verb, though the stress is in the same place. For example, abuse. The noun has an s sound (‘child abuse’), but the verb has a z sound (‘to abuse a child’ – rhymes with ‘ooze’). Similarly, an excuse has an s sound but to excuse oneself has a z sound. Refuse is the same.

Most three-syllable examples work a bit differently:

Aggregate	AGGregate: small stones that go on a path	aggreGATE to bring together
Attribute	ATTribute A characteristic	aTTRIBute to consider as caused by something
Estimate	ESTimate An informed guess	estimATE* to make an estimate
Alternate (cousin!)	alTERnate (adjective) Every other one (‘we eat on alternate Sundays’)	ALternate* to take turns

* Maybe here, the stress in the verb is sometimes at the front and sometimes at the back(?)

There are some three-syllable words where the stress is always at the end but the meaning changes depending on whether how we pronounce the last bit. For example:

• Aggre’gate’ is a verb, meaning to pull together. Aggre’gut’ (when we don’t pronounce the last bit like ‘garden gate’) is a noun, meaning the sum total (3-nil on aggregate).
• Dele’gate’ is a verb, meaning to give somebody else a task. Dele’gut’ is a noun, meaning person at a meeting.
• Estimate is like this too: estim’ate’ is a verb, meaning to guess, but esti’mut’ is a noun.
• Gradu’ate’ is a verb, but gradu’ut’ is the person who graduates.
• Associ’ate’ is a verb, but associ’ut’ is a noun.

Those words have cousins which are verb / adjectives:

• Articul’ate’ is a verb, meaning to pronounce something, whereas articul’ut’ is an adjective, meaning able to express themselves easily.
• Consumm’ate’ is a verb, meaning to formalise a marriage, whereas consumm’ut’ is an adjective, meaning skilled and accomplished.

In short, be kind to non-native English speakers! This too will also help appreciate what they’re dealing with.

Senegal birds

Every Sunday, BBC Radio 3 has a ‘Sounds of the Earth’ collage: a recording of nature (birds, trees, frogs, the sea, etc.) interspersed with relevant music. Caroline submitted such a recording of birds in the Sine-Saloum delta in Senegal, which was used for a Sounds of the Earth collage in May 2022.

Ile des Oiseaux, Sine-Saloum delta, Senegal (Photo credit: Alex Freeman)

The Sine-Saloum delta is a UNESCO world heritage site where the Saloum river reaches into the Atlantic. It’s huge: extending over 30km inland. Because it’s fresh water and just south of the Sahara, there are a zillion birds, presumably stopping off before/after their migration. Some of the birds – notably heron – we were assured, are the exact same ones we sometimes see in the Thames in London.

This recording was made just at sunset, next to a tiny island known as Ile des Oiseaux, and specifically the Reposoire des Oiseaux: ie, the birds are coming in to sleep. The island is covered in mangrove trees. Bird-watchers stay on their boats and watch. When we arrived, the trees (which are white with bird poo) seemed full of birds. They include sacred ibis (so-named by the ancient Egyptians), African cormorant, African pied kingfisher and snake bird. What you hear is them landing, crashing about on the branches, talking to each other, and feeding their young. 

Our Francophone guide predicted that eventually “le vrai spectacle commence”. The pelicans. They arrive last. 

They first send a scout: a solitary pelican comes, and circles the island to see if it is safe. They don’t like being watched, so several times, the scout came and went. Eventually the scout deems it safe. And then they come: great squadrons of these huge birds, all coming in from behind us (we were more or less under the trees by now, so as not to deter them). It was getting dark by now: great orange streaky sky. A dozen grey pelican in a group, then twenty, then thirty, then another dozen… we must have seen several hundred of them arrive. They’re big, and all landing on a few trees which were already full of birds. 

{A subsequent Sounds of the Earth used our recording of laughing frogs in Kent in England.}

Doudou, our guide. Best guide in Toubakouta, said everybody

Pelican arriving

How to do videoconference calls

10 months into the epidemic of video-conference calls, and evidently we haven’t all figured out how to do them well. There are doubtless lots of other tips on the web, but here are mine:

In short, think about what the viewer sees.

• Stand up. Esp. if you’re presenting or it’s an interview for TV or a job. People sound much better when they’re standing. (Hence why pro singers always stand.)

President Biden, on his first day in office, following the first piece of advice here

• No back-lighting: do not be in front of a window or have a light behind you: they make you really dark.
• Have the camera at eye-level. Do not under any circumstances put a laptop on a desk and look down at it: for one thing, you will scrunch yourself up over it and not look elegant at all: look at the pictures of Prince William below. For another, it looks like you are bearing down on the viewer, really aggressively. No ceiling should be visible. Put a laptop on a stack of books, or use a music stand or something.
• Look into the camera – even though that’s a bit weird as you’re not then looking at the person speaking – but it makes them think that you’re looking at them.

Way too much head! Too much wall, and camera below eye-level

• Don’t be too close to the camera. You don’t want the entire picture to be your head (see
• Prince William, right). Make sure that you’re visible until at least down to your shoulders.

• Try to use a phone rather than a laptop because the picture from phones is portrait, (same shape as you!) whereas on a computer, it’s (inexplicably) landscape, so we see less of what we’re interested in & more of what we’re not. But make the phone stationary: e.g., attach it to a music stand. Note that the phone will need to tip forwards (the top forward of the bottom) to avoid it pointing at the ceiling – so you’ll need some string to tie it the music stand to prevent it from falling over.

Almost everything is wrong here

• Get your eyes no more than a third of the way down the screen.
• Have as little as possible in the background. Stand in front of a plain wall if possible. That can be inside -or even outside
• Using headphones & the microphone may be better. 

Some looks to avoid: If you speak to a laptop on a table, you’ll end up inelegantly hunched up over it:

See other golden rules of public speaking.

Be an activist about the authors you read

Wow: ALL the books that The Economist cites by its own writers in its year-end ‘what to read’ section are by men! Clean sweep. Good work, boys.

I’ve all but ceased* reading books by white men. I realised earlier this year that almost every book I’ve read in the last 5 years had a male author(!) – except the Wolf Hall duo.

So I’m on a drive to read more by women – and men of colour.

This skew is everywhere. For example, every week, The Week has an author (who needs some press coverage) recommend their fave books. This week, as quite often, they’re all by men.

It seems to be much easier to get published if you’re a man. One author approached 100 agents about a book: when the author’s name was a woman, it received just two responses, but when it was a man’s name, it got 17 responses. (Exact same book proposal.) Furthermore, the responses to the man’s name were much more positive and encouraging than those to the woman’s name. Sadly this wasn’t a ‘lab experiment’ but a real author’s experience of trying to get published. She’s a woman – Catherine Nichols – and said “it must be great to be a man!”.

It’s interesting: I read almost entirely non-fiction (science, maths, history, etc.) and, when I say that it’s mainly by men, people say ‘well yes’, as though women don’t/can’t write such books. It’s nonsense: there’s loads, if you look a bit. Here’s some of what I’ve read this year:

There are two good reasons for diversifying the authors you read.

First, to hear new voices and views. White men have certainly – ahem – made themselves heard (e.g., I have a degree in Western philosophy, which was entirely white men). I was inspired by David Evans who’s been reading this year books by authors from every country in Africa. For example, the book Nine Pints, science book about blood, is vastly different because the author is a woman than it would have been if it were by a man, e.g., she describes endometriosis and menopausal depression from her own experience of both.

I’ve found that deliberately reading books by people who aren’t white men opens up space: space for voices I’d not much heard before. Space to encounter new ideas and perspectives. Which, for me, is the whole reason for reading.

And second, because writing books is both a consequence of privilege and a cause of it. I say this as somebody who’s written a book. It’s a consequence of privilege because you need time to write: time when your employer pays you to write (senior people seem to get that more than junior people do), or time when you don’t need to be earning – or caring for anybody or commuting for hours because you can only afford housing miles away from your work. That is privilege. And it’s a cause of further privilege because books turn into speaking engagements, fees, travel, and press articles and hence better networks, clients, visibility etc. Cumulative advantage. In other words, your choice of authors whose books you buy / read / talk about / promote affects where power & privilege go. Be an activist.

So if you’re writing a book & you’re a white guy, get a co-author who isn’t. Share the spoils. I really mean this: it’s true for any book, and particularly if you’re a white guy writing about international development or philanthropy or some other thing designed to re-distribute power and privilege. Do some of that yourself. Go find a co-author. There are loads of people who can write books. Try to find somebody from a low- or middle-income country: we hear far too little from them. They will enrich your book perspectives and hence the book. 

*Not completely. I’m not a fundamentalist.

And anyway, Emily Maitlis has a new book out now, and the third Wolf Hall book publishes in March. I’ll be busy 😉

 

More on this topic:

• Oxford philosopher Rachel Fraser article in the Spectator: ”Reading shapes our moral sensibility: the literary dominance of white men impoverishes our ethical understanding.”
• Journalist MA Siegart on research showing that “men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman… All this suggests that men, consciously or unconsciously, don’t accord female authors as much authority as male ones…If men don’t read books by and about women, they will…continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens… this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. ” 

 

Post-script: Here are some books I’ve read since writing the post above. See: there’s no shortage of great books – incl. non-fiction – by women and people of colour:

Why I’ve more-or-less quit Facebook

I have pretty much quit Facebook.

I can no longer stomach its willful disregard for democracy: by enabling user data to be used to (eg) influence elections, and its refusal to even show up when requested by parliaments (now several of them: see below).

It’s really a shame / cost to me because I really value being in touch with so many friends on there all this easy way. But not at any price.

I’m not saying that you should quit, but rather explaining why I have.

So we’ll need to find other ways. Do write or call or come round. Or if it’s really important, there’s always Twitter 

9 countries.
24 official representatives.
447 million people represented.

One question: where is Mark Zuckerberg? pic.twitter.com/BK3KrKvQf3

— Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsCMS) November 27, 2018

The Brazillian, Singaporean and Latvian Parliaments have now joined us in the call for Mark Zuckerberg to give evidence to ‘International Grand Committee’ on Disinformation and ‘fake news’ on 27th November. Read our joint letter to @facebook here >>https://t.co/IG83pFtnnz

— Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsCMS) November 19, 2018

Social enterprise eateries & catering companies

I am driven mad by having meetings to discuss poor people in eateries owned by (often very) rich people. There doesn’t seem to be an easy list or map of social enterprise eateries, so I am collating a list: it will be useful to me and possibly also to you! If you know of any not listed here, please let me know (admin at giving-evidence dot com) If you’d like to turn this into some groovy map, please do.

London eateries

The Clink, restaurant in Brixton Prison. Very good food, much of it grown on the prison estate. Need to pre-book. Security procedures are, unsurprisingly, tight & a faff. The charity is entirely about getting prisoners into work and reducing re-offending.

Brigade, restaurant near London Bridge. “We help Southwark residents at risk of homelessness develop the skills and motivation to find employment.”

Places like churches (eg, the cafe under St Martin’s in the Fields, or at St Bartholomew the Great, Southwark Cathedral) and arts centres (South Bank Centre, Barbican, Almeida…) or the rentable rooms in things like National Trust properties are also public-benefit institutions.

Non-London eateries

The Clink, restaurants in prisons in Cardiff, High Down (Surrey), and Styall (Cheshire).

Catering

The various Clink restaurants also do catering.

Other

Family Foraging Kitchen CIC, an award-winning social enterprise that provides wild food education through foraging walks, cookery classes and courses in traditional countryside craft.

Golden rules of public speaking

I do masses of public speaking. These are my ‘golden rules’, which might help you. (If you have other good ‘golden rules’ to add to this list, do get in touch.)

1. Assume the technology will fail

It fails more often than not, in my (pretty extensive) experience. Be prepared and able to give your talk without any of the visuals. Have enough notes and know your talk well enough that you can proceed without them.

A good idea is to ensure that there’s a flipchart handy, and that the pens work, so that you can hand-draw any charts or diagrams if necessary.

I had an epic fail in which the slides appeared on screen in random order(!) so I just had to abandon them.

2. For in-person talks, most of the audience can’t see the bottom third of your slides, so don’t put anything important there

Pretty self-explanatory. Use the bottom third (or half, if it’s a big audience in a room with a flat floor) for notes about the source of your data: because that should be in the materials somewhere (unless you’re inviting the assumption that you fabricated the data…)

For on-line talks, people will be reading on a small screen and probably unable to read much at all, so put hardly anything on them. No font smaller than 16-point.

3. Talk slowly 

More slowly than you can imagine. It’s almost impossibly to speak too slowly on stage. The bigger the venue, the slower you talk: I read a lesson in Canterbury Cathedral – which is huge – and talked so slowly that it sounded to me as though I was deranged, but everybody else thought it was fine.

The purpose of your talk is to tell people things that they don’t know. So by definition your content will be unfamiliar. People need time to process what you’re saying.

Hence shut up for the 30 seconds after you put up a new slide to give people time to concentrate on that and interpret it. They can’t concentrate on both a new picture and new words simultaneously.

If you are speaking in your native language and there may be non-native speakers in the audience… well… think of your high school French (or whatever) and think about how slowly the speaker would have to be going for you to have a cat in hell’s chance of understanding them. Brits and Americans are particularly bad at this (presumably because we so rarely have to understand other languages at full tilt). Also avoid complicated vocabulary and idioms which non-native speakers may not know, and terms which are ambiguous or confusing (e.g. “since” means both because and after, so avoid that.)

After I’d been living in Vienna for six months, I told a Bulgarian colleague that my German had improved loads. He said “yes, and your English is much better too.”

See this.

4. Practise

This is like the best-guarded secret of public speaking. Practise. Out loud. Address the cushions in your living room. You’ll feel like an idiot at first. But you do not want the first time that you hear your talk to be when you’re in front of a big crowd. My cushions hear a lot.

My flute teacher used to say that “The difference between amateurs and professionals is that amateurs practise until they get it right. Professionals practise until they don’t get it wrong.”

I once gave a super-high pressure talk, for which I was being paid a lot. Mindful of my flute teacher’s advice, I learnt it verbatim.  A good job too: when it came to it, I was losing my voice, we had to decamp from one room to another, one prince flounced out of the room because another prince had allegedly breached some rule of etiquette (I’m not making this up). Because I’d learnt the talk, I could just ‘put the tape on’ and focus on the audience in the room – and getting the waiting staff to bring me water all the time so I could literally speak – and not worry about the content.

When I spoke at my mum’s funeral – obviously a high-risk idea – I practised my talk so well that several years later, I still know it verbatim. I practised it in three churches (‘hello, my mum’s funeral is next week: do you mind if I just practise my address in your church for half an hour?’) and in my head constantly for the fortnight beforehand.

5. Think, breathe, speak

This is the central advice from RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Use that in your Q&A session – and tricky meetings.

6. The slides

Oh man. The slides. They can kill your talk.

First, think how many of the slides you’ve seen in your life you can remember. That is about the chance that any of your slides will be remembered. You can probably bin at least half of them.

Second, they’re there to serve you, you’re not there to serve them. If you don’t need a visual, have the screen blank (make a black side: a slide with a massive black box covering the whole area). See my TED talk. Then, when you need the screen again, it’s way more striking.

Third, remember that you’re talking to the audience, not to the slides. You shouldn’t need to see the slide (except instantaneously to check that it’s there): you should know what’s on it.

Malcolm Miller, the expert in the windows of Chartres cathedral, gives all his talks about them with his back to them. “In the third pane from the left, on the fourth level from the top”. But then he doesn’t have to check that his visuals are still there 😉

Fourth, have a slide at the end with your contact details on.

——I hope that this was helpful! ——

Since I wrote this article, various people have written with their presenting tips. They include these:

Always, but ALWAYS go to the lectern beforehand, table or wherever else you are speaking, and check:

• the trip hazards en route – and back
• the table or lectern height
• ditto the mic
• that any notes won’t fall off the lectern (and number each page if you do use notes, for when they do fall off)
• that the lighting is OK and you will be able to see & read
• that ideally you can see a clock
• + test your voice in the room.