Ice Cliffs, Ross Island, Antarctica
“There is a place in the Antarctic where only I have been. Not Scott. Not Shackleton. Not Mawson. Just me.”
Emperor Penguin, Ross Island, Antarctica
“The emperor penguin, despite appearances, was nothing more than a modified sparrow.”
Leopard Seal, Ross Island, Antarctica
“A leopard seal is what you’d get if you could graft the head of Tyrannosaurus rex onto a torpedo.”
Westminster Abbey, London, England
“How strange should be our meeting place...”
Erasmus Darwin, plaque, Darwin House
“...the fat man with a way for words and a belief that life on Earth must have evolved from simple animals to more complex beasts.”
Shrewsbury School, Shrewsbury
“Red brick buildings and a chapel set in neatly manicured green lawns lent the school a kind of elegance that the stuffy buildings probably did not deserve.”
LSD at Darwin House, Lichfield
“We parked near the cathedral and walked to Erasmus’s house located in the close next to the cathedral – the irony of their juxtaposition just too choice not to enjoy.”
Darwin House, Lichfield, England
“A minister, about to be ordained and perhaps a little late, hurried past Erasmus’s house...like a child on the way to school running past a house where he suspected he may be tormented.”
City Centre, Shrewsbury, England
“...a town of crooked old buildings falling over themselves with charm.”
The Mount, Shrewsbury, England
“It was from The Mount that the young Darwin began his life-long association with natural history.”
LSD in Darwin's Bedroom, The Mount
“...my overall feeling was one of bereavement, that what should have been a shrine to the birthplace of such a great thinker should be so casually disregarded.”
River Severn, Shrewsbury, England
“...the need to hear, as Aldo Leopold put it, “goose music”...encoded in our DNA from some primordial time when we were little more than amoeba, slug or song sparrow.”
Cricket game, Shrewsbury School
“...a game of cricket was being played on the green and, with the boys dressed all in whites and shouting encouragements like “well bowled Anthony,” the whole school exuded an air of gentility.”
Darwin statue, Shrewsbury School
“...made by Jemma Pearson in 2000. What? Had the school only started to appreciate the import of their most famous pupil as some sort of millennium project?”
LSD and Darwin, Shrewsbury Library
“Apart from a statue of Darwin in its forecourt...there was really nothing to indicate that greatness had slept and studied books in what was now a library...”
Shrewsbury Library, Shrewsbury
“...now a library for a generation of snotty-nosed kids that wouldn’t know a foramen magnum from a foraminifer unless it was something that David Beckham wore.”
St Peter’s Square, Vatican, Rome
“I stood in a massive line of umbrellas waiting to get into the Basilica. Nuns and priests queued shoulder to wet shoulder with the devout and the tourist.”
St Peter’s Basilica, plaque, Vatican
“...for some reason, my eye registered that there were not enough Leos.”
Swiss Guards, Vatican, Rome
“Ceremonial maybe, but somehow symptomatic of the Church: colourful, splendid, archaic and political with a dangerous, even lethal, potential.”