cloning

Saying Grace

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 13 Comments

And now, new on BBC Radio Four, a well known author, blogger and podcaster, brings her unique views to radio. Grace Darling says it as it is…

Hello and welcome. Here we are going to talk about anything and everything. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why it took humans so long to invent the bicycle or where Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor goes to do his shopping now?

My guests this week are not revealing their names in case they are persecuted in social media, but I’m sure they will chip in with some acerbic comments.

What careers did you aspire to when you were at school? I wanted to be a journalist, but my home town only had one newspaper and nothing happened to be reported anyway. Now we can all be journalists with the wonders of PressWords and suchlike. My blog Scribbletide. com has millions of followers, some of them even genuine.

My next career idea in sixth form was to be a Political Editor, they don’t seem to have to do much except talk a lot and occasionally stand out in the rain.  Where did all these talking heads come from? That girl you went to school with who wanted to be a hairdresser, suddenly appears on ‘Late Night News for Intelligent People’ as Chief Financial Editor of The Times. How on earth did she get there?

I blame it on Brexit. Endless discussions on what the results might be, followed by wailing and gnashing of teeth when the results came out and then interminable years of talking with the EU on how to do it. When Brexit was finally signed and sealed we had a world wide pandemic to commentate on plus Trump in Triumph and the game of musical chairs in our Cabinet.

My father loves to watch all the political and serious news programmes, with a running commentary

‘He’ll be gone next, she’ll be getting a vote of no confidence by the end of the week.’

My mother meanwhile will be busy knitting and making her own comments ‘I don’t care how clever that woman is, nobody with such an irritating voice should be allowed on television or radio. Oh for goodness sake, what does he look like, has he glanced in a mirror lately?’

Her knitting group once knitted the whole royal wedding, William and Catherine. While her friends created exquisite uniforms, beautiful dresses and realistic faces, Mother was consigned to knit the corgis. I don’t know if Sarah Fergusson, formerly known as The Duchess of York, knits, but she has apparently cottoned on to a more sophisticated method of copying corgis. The late Queen’s corgis were ill advisedly bequeathed to Andrew and Sarah and expected to live out their days in Windsor Great Park. We hear Sarah had plans to have them cloned and make money selling royal corgi cloned puppies. Do not try this at home, it is illegal in this country to clone your dog.

Another animal swept Trump from the headlines this week, the escape of a giant guineapig caused great excitement in Hampshire. Two Capybara sisters escaped soon after their arrival at Marwell Zoo, one huddled under a bush and was easily caught, while the other has been on the loose for over a week, with sightings but no chance of capture.

But let us finish today’s programme on a cultural note. The Bayeux tapestry is returning to England after more than 900 years in France. But whose idea was it? A French antique arts expert, defender of the tapestry, told me of his shock when watching President Macron and our Prime Minister having a jolly chat.  Then out of the blue, in a throw away remark, Macron says ‘We’re sending the Bayeux Tapestry to England.’

What!!! That has never been mentioned and art experts were never consulted. The whole tapestry will fall to pieces if it’s moved…

Watch this space. If it disintegrates in England we will have to make them a new one and how long will that take?

Well that’s it for this week folks, my thanks to my guests, oh I’ve just realised I did not give them a chance to speak….

If you would like to listen to this week’s episode again you can listen later on BBC Radio Four Extra, BBC World Service and anytime on your smart speaker or whatever devices you know how to work with BBC Sounds.

What ideas would you like Grace to ponder on next week?

Do you kNow who you Are?

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 2 Comments

If someone wanted to make a clone of you they could; people are already getting their dead dogs cloned, claims have been made that humans have been cloned. Most people have had a blood test of some sort, many of us have parted with gallons of blood to the NHS at blood donor sessions. If a blood sample was secreted away to the establishment of a mad or bad scientist they could be making clones of you at this very moment, supplying childless couples perhaps, it’s unlikely you would recognise your baby self in a pram. Or perhaps your hapless clone is being reared in a laboratory at this very moment for experimentation purposes, would your clone inherit your memory, is our DNA who we really are?

Recently I thought it would be fun to have a go at one of those on line tests, AncestryDNA. It involved spending money and quite a wait and how would we know the results were genuine? This particular test did not involve tracing your mitochondrial DNA back to Neanderthal man; it merely shows you what percentage of people in areas of the world share your DNA and is totally biased towards the Americas and Europe, because the system works on the basis of the data they have already collected. Did I believe the results? Yes; my husband’s results were neatly divided in half as we expected, although his born and bred Scottish half was classified as Ireland, a look at the map clarified that Ireland also covers Scotland and Wales.

I was hoping for something exotic, but was disappointed, I blame my parents; it seems I was neither mysteriously adopted nor are there any skeletons in our family cupboard. However I am only 14% Great Britain, so my gut instinct to voted Remain in the Eurpean Union Referendum was correct, I am 77% Europe West. The other 9% grey area of ‘low confidence region’ with some European Jewish, Irish, north west Russian and a dash of Iberian does add a bit of seasoning to the mix.

We have not so far delved into tracing family trees, finding out who shares similar DNA, but I did agree to accept a message from a name I’d never heard of and was astonished when one set of grandparents’ names came up. The granddaughter of my grandmother’s brother had traced me! I had never met this great uncle because he and his wife emigrated to Canada before they had their children. Perhaps my grandmother vaguely mentioned her older brother, but I now know for certain I have lots of Canadian relatives.

But does our DNA really matter? Only an adopted person who has never been able to trace a single blood relative can answer that question. We are all individuals who have to make what we can of our lot in life; the adopted person might be moved to have a large family of their own, or perhaps they will be forever genetically unique.

Depending on your religious beliefs  you might subscribe to the wardrobe theory; the true individual a soul waiting to be popped in to any available baby body until the return to heaven or reincarnation, or perhaps you think our whole personality and memories are passed on through our genes.

DNA remains a delightful mystery for lay people and a source of inspiration for writers. My novel ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ explores what happens when the DNA of ordinary people is tampered with.