Latterly Speaking By Humphrey Walwyn

Man-Made Miracles

Laterally Speaking by Humphrey Walwyn

It’s amazing what various scientists around the world have been working on during many months of lockdown. Here are just a few lateral examples of possible new products that might be available soon. In case you’re worried by some of them, don’t be. Most of them will never receive any financial backing to make them into real products. And if you do find some of these online, my advice would be NOT to buy them. They are probably untested, and might explode and turn you into a frog or something.

The Anti-Vax Vaccine (AVV): We may have rolled out the Covid vaccine to millions of people, but not everybody wants to take it. That’s quite understandable - nobody actually likes having needles stuck into their arm. This AVV jab will help you as it’s designed to soothe any fears about being vaccinated. It’s like a placebo—completely harmless and 101% safe—because there’s actually nothing in it! Just a few drops of sterilised water! It should remove any fears about needles or hurty arms or any Q-Anon conspiracy worries about politicians dressed as lizards and fake sugar ingredients. You can see with your own eyes that the AVV vaccine is completely transparent and clear like water, because that’s all it is. H2O. Water. Will it hurt? Will I get sick? Will I grow into an iguana etc? No worries! Once you’ve received the AVV jab, you then realise that being vaccinated is a perfectly OK procedure. Afterwards, you can go and have a real Covid injection without any further doubts or concerns!

The Time-Shifter: This is the month when the clocks go back one hour. Are you already worried about it? This little battery radio device (realistically priced at only £2,995) is tuned to the gentle muzak of Radio 2 and will instantly soothe you to sleep and remove any fears you might have about putting the clocks back. Turn it on all night on

October 31st and simply remember not to touch any of the clocks in your house! Just leave everything as it is. Simple,

Easy! The following morning, you wake up and look at your bedroom clock. Lo and Behold, phew—it’s still only 8am! But you’ll find that everyone else in the world has gone mad. They think it’s one hour earlier at 7am, but you just tell yourself they’re wrong. OK, so you might turn up one hour early for every meeting today, but you’ll be seen as energetic, fresh, alive and keen to get ahead (which of course you already are by one hour). It may be the rest of the world’s winter, but you’ll stay in summertime all year long!

The Sporty Pill: We all witnessed last month some amazing UK sporting successes. These were of course down to exceptional sporting talent and skill, but it’s a little-known lateral fact that some sportsmen and women may also have benefitted from swallowing a remarkable new skill pill. Exclusively imported from North Korea, it’s the same size as a Smartie and comes in different flavours: red is for tennis and blue is for golf. Don’t take the yellow one—it’s supposed to make you a better swimmer but it’s still in development and all it’ll do for you now is make you quack loudly and grow webbed feet. But the red one really does work and it’s available right now! Just take one at breakfast each day and you’ll be on Wimbledon’s Centre Court before you can say Emma Raducanu!

Fake News Detector: Sold as small packets of pink tissues, if you read something in the newspaper that you’re sure is untrue, remove a Fake News tissue and lay it on top of the offending article. If the newsprint goes bright red, you’re correct! It’s full of lies. This is so useful! Try it on the adverts in next Sunday’s newspaper. Or small ads for second hand cars. Watch as the porky pies are instantly revealed!

Tally Band: Pop this neat little wrist band onto your arm and within just a few days you will have grown a magnificent dense beard! I tried it and it works! See my photo on this page. Quite remarkable. Your beard almost grows in front of your very eyes. WARNING: not to be used if you’re female. Not only do women look fairly uncool if they’re sporting a large beard, the Tally Band is unpredictable and might cause you to be stoned without further warning. Either that or they might chop off your beard with an axe. Unfortunately, this often includes the removal of your head along with your beard.

Growing a beard can transform your look and your life. NB: I am the one on the right

BEER QUARRY CAVES IN OCTOBER

The exquisite English novelist LP. Hartley, like our caves, is a bit understated. But his best known quote that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” from his book The Go Between applies very much to Beer Quarry Caves. That’s why we invite you here to see them; to explore this foreign country that is our past. Recently, we have been humbled by the extraordinary enthusiasm, especially of our younger and teenage visitors, for what the guides have to tell them about the caves. We are working hard, especially through this Winter, to have a lot more of the detailed geography of the past to share with visitors next year.

In October Four of Swords perform Medea at Beer Quarry Caves,

For those who like the remote past in dramatic form our resident players to be, (we hope) the Four of Swords theatre company, will be with us in October to perform Euripides’s Medea, first performed in Greece in 431 BC. This is a play that is older than the worked parts of the caves, that has survived the test of time, uniquely. The work was rediscovered in Rome in the first century AD, then vanished until the European enlightenment of the 16th century. Now, it is never off the stage somewhere in the world, perhaps because there is something very modern about the plot. Faithless sailor husband Jason abandons posh celeb wife Medea for another. Medea takes revenge by murdering her replacement and then her children by Jason. You don’t have to ponder for long to see the plots of a thousand and one TV police-detective dramas here. Nonetheless, Sarah White, one half the Four of Swords founding team, with Peter Kingslan John, plays a Medea such as I have never seen, even on the West End stage in London. She performed sublimely beyond the professional. There was an intensity of passion that Sarah projected in her last performance at the Caves, that was totally riveting. You could feel the story reach out across all those centuries and pin you to the rocky walls of the caves, nail you there, even. In the local drama competition for the year 431 BC at Dionysia, Euripides came third out of three. Mind you, Sophocles was one of the other competitors.

Here is what a commentator in Exeter said about an earlier performance of Medea at the caves. “There’s only one problem with intimate and almost tangible theatre like this, the kind that which surrounds you, whisks you up and takes you with it – you won’t want to go back to sitting in an auditorium again.”

Fran McElhone, Express & Echo For booking visit www.beerquarrycaves.co.uk

Going even further underground at BQC.

In a bid to find out more about the past at the caves we are planning Project Arlo. This will see a camera sent down into a space we have only heard stories about. The story is that two potholers some years ago, got into a set of hidden caves beneath the caves you can see around you, for two days. Unfortunately they left no written records. We thought of hiring more potholers but Arlo Cahill, 10, Stoke Hill Primary School Year Six made the more practical suggestion that we send a camera down first, and limit the risk to humans—and costs. So that we’ll do, as soon as we can, hopefully with the media in attendance.

Young Arlo will deputise with Steve Rodgers in the project, perhaps learning one of life’s vital lessons; never volunteer for anything lest you succeed, and they give you the job.

Top of the world. Trip advisor.

To our huge surprise, since it’s a competition you cant apply for, and which only the subscribers to Trip Advisor can vote in, Beer Quarry Caves was rated amongst the top 10% of visitor attractions—in the world this year. Truth to tell our visitors this year do suggest that our caves are popular and all we, Steve, me and the guides can say is “Hey, you ain’t seen nothing yet” And, like our country, which is still suffering a bad pandemic, what we like to do is to look on the bright side of things. There is still plenty of it. The country made the UEFA final but far more spectacularly, came 2nd in a world of 197 countries in the Tokyo Paralympics. The only country that beat us, China, has a selection of 1.3 billion athletes to choose from, to our 65 million. And mentioning China, did anyone notice that our new tennis superstar, 18 year old Emma Radacanu from Bromley in Kent addressed her Chinese fans in Mandarin, the main language of the People’s Republic of China—and of 1.3 billion people. What a fan club to have?

Flint.

For over 2 million years flint was mankind’s main and only tool resource. Put another way, flint has only not been mankind’s main tool for a little over 2,000 or 3,000 years. Steve plods the fields and scours the hillside above the caves for the gorgeous flint artefacts he finds there. He is convinced and the evidence supports him, that the area of the caves was a flint source, supplying flint widely in the West Country and maybe abroad to the Channel Islands and to France. This Winter Steve will visit Stonehenge, the British Museum and places further north, to find out all he can for our visitors, about the story of flint at Beer.

Steve Rodgers. Member of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, Director and Flint Master at the Caves.

Kevin Cahill, Fellow emeritus of the Royal Historical Society, historian in residence and author of Who Owns Ireland, 448 pages, The History Press, Published on 1st August 2021