Danskcolin: Tuesday May 11th 2021

Today would have been my late brother Steve's 69th birthday, had he lived: he died around 8 years ago this month. I've been looking at my photos, and I am reminded that the 1990's was perhaps Steve's best decade, when he suddenly seemed to adopt a whole new positive approach to life: it was a late flowering of his "ikigai" - his sense of life being worth living, which was great to see, I remember.

Flashback to 1968: Steve at age 16 on the Isle of Wight, in the garden

of the house of our grandfather, who had just died.

Having spent most of his life ensconced safely within his comfort zone, in the 1990's Steve suddenly seemed to find the courage to travel and do new things. He went to France in 1994, aged 42, and spent some time with his French ex-work-colleague Anne-Marie - "the girlfriend who got away" -and with Anne-Marie's parents.

1994: Steve with Anne-Marie, "the girlfriend who got away", and her mother,

at the Chateau d'Amboise in the Loire Valley

1994: Steve and Anne-Marie in Paris

At the time I remember I used to sing Judith Durham's version of Art Podell's song "Take Care of My Brother" (just singing to myself, not professionally!).

Not fair to say of Steve that he'd been "living like a loser", but nevertheless he hadn't been having such a great time, that's for sure.

Judith Durham

And in 1996 Steve boarded an aeroplane for the first time in his life, and flew to the States. He visited our late sister Kathy and Steve, Kathy's husband, seeing lots of sights and travelling to New York. All enormous adventures for our Steve, given the quiet life he had become used to.

Steve with our late sister Kathy: New York 1996

In his later years Steve's "ikigai" faded away again, as my brother-in-law has pointed out. But at least we still have the photos from those happier years, which is a bit of consolation.

11:00 Lois and I decide to catch up some of the house-cleaning: Lois cleans and dusts away in our bedroom and the bathroom, while I give the house a good vacuuming. This is a work-out all by itself, as I always say. My god - we're getting old, no doubt about that!

16:00 It's sunny today, off and on, but the big deal is that although it's still windy, for the first time it's not really cold, which makes a change - shock horror! Lois and I have our cup of Earl Grey tea and piece of Madeira cake out on the patio, for the first time since last year.

We let Lois's bean seedlings share the occasion with us, which is a nice gesture on our part - at last they're starting to look a bit more healthy now, which is nice!

Lois and I have a cup of tea, plus a piece of madeira cake with

chocolate buttercream (not shown), out on the patio, for a change: how nice!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining room to take part in her sect's "Tuesday Bible-reading Group" on google meet. I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, the second part of an interesting new series on the mind of the octopus.

Peter Godfrey-Smith continues his history of the octopus: the earliest possible "fossil" of an octopus is 290 million years old, although they don't preserve well - being invertebrates they don't have much in the way of hard parts: they're soft and squashy and can squeeze themselves through an opening the size of an eyeball. Gosh, I wish I could do that - how useful would that be haha!

At some point octopuses became "clever", and I remember that the same thing happened to me at some point. They have 500 million neurons (many of these neurons not being in their brains but in their arms), which is a lot less than humans, who have 100 billion. But it makes their cleverness rating similar to, say, that of a dog

Octopuses are the clever end of the invertebrate spectrum, that's for sure. But whereas our brains and that of other animals, birds and fish, have a broadly similar construction, the brain of an octopus is quite different: it's Evolution having a second go at designing a mind.

Tonight the astonishing thing we hear about octopuses is that laboratories around the world have, for decades, reported consistently that octopuses are by nature very mischievous, sometimes downright naughty - oh dear! If they feel they're being fed inferior food, for instance, they are capable of "dumping" it, untouched, into the outflow tubes of their tank.

There's a case of 3 octopuses who were successfully trained by researchers to operate a lever to release their food. Two of them carried on doing this nicely every time they were hungry, but a third one found a way to use leverage by means of the side of the tank, in order to apply greater pressure to the lever and eventually he broke it - the bad boy!

Unlike fish, they are very well aware that they are in a tank. And moreover that they are well aware that they are being "held prisoner" in their tank, and they will use the opportunity to escape if they see that staff are not watching them. They can recognise all the staff in their lab individually, even if they're wearing identical clothing, and if they take a dislike to one of them they may squirt them with water every time they walk past - my god!!!

As Godfrey-Smith says, what a pity it is that they can't talk. Just think of what they could tell us, if they could.

Fascinating stuff!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her google meet session and we watch a bit of TV, the latest episode in ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo's series on Great British Railway Journeys. This time he's travelling from Crewe, Cheshire and into North Wales.

Tonight, Michael, who used to be one of Margaret Thatcher's younger cabinet ministers, visits "Britain's most popular zoo" at Chester, and we hear about its founder, George Mottershead.

The zoo started in George's house, and there are stories of pelicans in the kitchen and chimpanzees running amok around the building: Michael is told that it would have been great fun to grow up there as a child, although difficult to imagine getting a bit of peace and quiet to do your school homework in - my god!