Matthew Parris

This January Prometheus paid our era a call. Scientists (it was reported at the end of the month) have ‘announced the creation of a synthetic chromosome, knocking down one of the final hurdles to building the world’s first artificial life form’. In Maryland, at the institute of an American biologist and entrepreneur, Craig Venter, a team are now working on the final step to ‘create’ life. They aim to transplant into a cell the synthetic DNA they create, in the hope it will ‘boot up’ the cell and take control of its growth and reproduction. At last. The breathing-into-clay of the Promethean fire; the insertion of the ghost into the machine.

Presenting Pick of the Week on Radio Four the other day, I was determined to feature (and did) BBC Radio One’s Annie Nightingale, and Radio Two’s Janice Long — both excellent presenters who take us through the watches of the night; but my producer and I didn’t find it easy to identify any short clips that triumphantly demonstrated their brilliance. The skill of a presenter/disc jockey (or what use to be called a compère) rarely resides in showpiece tours-de-force, but in the whole atmosphere in which by chit-chat, humour, wit and sympathy they contrive to cocoon their hours on air, so that we feel we know them, and are sharing our morning cup of tea with them. Which brings me to Ken Bruce.

Rubbish has always fired my imagination and set my pulse racing. I don’t know why; it may be an inherited trait. My late father used to rifle through our bins lest anything useful had been thrown away, and in unhappier circumstances might in old age have extended his research into the streets, parks and railway stations. Perhaps one of our ancestors was a vulture in another life. Little gives me greater satisfaction than my old flip-flops — rescued (broken) from a crow-patrolled tip in Rurrenabaque in the remote Bolivian lowlands and lovingly repaired using some bailer twine and an old nail in place of a needle.

Cricket. Aargh. My gorge rises at the very word. Days — months — years of schoolboy misery; long, wretched, empty afternoons of boredom, fear and wasted time. Which is no way to say thank-you to Sir John Major for inviting me to a remarkable book launch for what looks and sounds like rather good book: More Than a Game. But the truth is that I made my way to the John Major suite at the Oval in south London on Monday last week more out of affection for Sir John than for cricket. I’m so glad I did. That busy, crowded room will fix itself in the memory as a sort of still-life of Majorism and his seven long years as prime minister from 1990 to 1997, a strange time in British politics.

‘I was much surprised,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in 1873, ‘at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.’ He was right. Guarding the entrance to the city’s great inland harbour system at North Head and South Head are lookouts and fortifications in the most beautiful of situations. The coincidence last week of the short walk to South Head, the long journey to Australia, and a book, led me to a curious sideways reflection on the fine old cannon still pointing across the harbour mouth. Which way to face? Who are the next enemy?

As we go to print the five kidnapped tourists in Ethiopia have been returned alive, but mystery still surrounds the circumstances of their capture and the motives of their kidnappers, while some of the Ethiopians who were captured with them are still missing. I expect a good deal of theorising in the week ahead. Some of it, like the speculation we’ve been hearing over the last ten days, will be wide of the mark. The released tourists are themselves likely to be confused about what was going on. This, I believe, may well be because their kidnappers themselves were confused. Chaos and misunderstanding are the explanation for so much that baffles us in Africa, and attempts to explain events within the framework of European logic are often misplaced.