FEAST OR FAMINE

Green Hills of Africa (1935) is set in Kenya, on game safari. I’ve read this book several times, and I appreciate it more with every reading. For most, this is about hunting. But it is so much more than that. Apart from the fine writing, it is about pursuit. Look at the section headings: Pursuit and Conversation, Pursuit Remembered, Pursuit and Failure, and Pursuit as Happiness. It is about the chase, not the hunt, in everything in life, not just game safari. This is a true story: Hemingway’s first true story of four of his works. Hemingway is on a one-month trip in 1933 – part of a 10-week trip, hunting kudu (an antelope) with his wife P.O.M. (Poor Old Mama). P.O.M. is journalist, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, his second wife (married in 1927 and divorced in 1940 – the second longest of his four marriages). They had two children: Patrick and Gregory. It is a revealing account of the hunt – his exhileration, his patience, his relief, his mistakes: ‘Finally I found blood on...

This week is the 50 th anniversary of the death of British explorer Ewart Scott Grogan. Ewart Scott Grogan (1874–1967) was an English explorer, politician, and entrepreneur. He was the first person to walk the length of Africa, from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt. He was 24 years old when he started, reaching Cairo in 1900, two-and-a-half years later. He was expelled from both school and university, and fell in love with Gertrude Watt, the sister of a Cambridge classmate. Her stepfather disapproved of Grogan, sow when Grogan proposed the Cape-to-Cairo journey, Gertrude’s stepfather agreed that this would be a suitable test of his character and seriousness. During his trek, which he wrote about in From the Cape to Cairo; the first traverse of Africa from south to north (1902), he was stalked by wild animals and plagued by parasites and fevers. For his efforts, he was allowed to marry Gertrude. Most of his life was spent in east Africa, mainly in ...

Peas and pea plants don’t have brains. Yet, scientists say, they can make risky decisions – they can judge risks efficiently. Hagai Shemesh, a plant ecologist at Tel-Hai College in Israel, and Alex Kacelnik, a behavioural ecologist at Oxford University in England, conducted experiments with pea plants – the results were published in the June 2016 edition of Current Biology. The researchers grew pea plants in adjoining pots, or punnets. Each dual pot had a plastic dividing barrier between them. The researchers split the roots of the plants so that half of the roots were in one pot and the other half of the roots were in another pot. Both pots had the same amount of nutrients on average, but in one pot the nutrients levels were constant, and in the adjacent pot, the nutrient levels varied over time (they were unpredictable). Nutrients are substances in the soil that plants require for growth. Then the researchers switched the conditions so that the average amount ...