Wow! Has it turned autumnal all of a sudden. Anyone would think that the summer was over. (What summer, I hear you ask, but to be fair it’s not been a complete washout). The evenings are getting darker earlier, the mornings are “brisk” and the swallows/house martins have vacated the premises, beginning their journey to the warm winter weather. I guess we might get a bit of an Indian summer before we leave for China? Let’s hope so.
Last weekend we had the delightful company of our favourite diplomat again – Jordan was at a conference in Oxford and was able to spend Friday and Saturday nights with us. Clearly, he wasn’t completely disgusted with the accommodation we can provide on his first visit. It’s always a delight and pleasure when he visits.
On Saturday we ventured off to Bletchley Park on the outskirts of what is now Milton Keynes. Bletchley, of course, is the site of the World War II codebreaking operations where the Brits successfully deciphered the Enigma machine (and others) used by the Germans. It’s a place I have wanted to visit for some time and Jordan’s visit provided the perfect opportunity.
Bletchley is an excellent museum with some wonderful interactive displays which attempt to explain, to the mere mortals amongst us, how the codebreakers successfully carried out their objectives. Each of the huts specialised in a particular aspect of the deciphering challenge and the displays in each would attempt to explain the logic and rationale they tried to apply. Once Penny, Jordan and I had looked at the display and read the explanation several dozen times, we would look at one another with an expression of complete bewilderment – we couldn’t understand even the simplest of explanations and yet these guys and women solved the most incredible encryption operation available at the time. Stunning stuff and a great museum.
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We were so taken with the visit that we decided to find the film The Imitation Game and watch it that evening. It’s a great film which I guess most of you have seen. Benedict Cumberbatch plays perhaps the most famous codebreaker Alan Turing and, as always I suppose, he was very good indeed. As the visit to the museum was so fresh in our minds, however, we were able to identify the “inaccuracies”. Most notably, in the film Turing essentially designs and builds the Bombe (a calculation machine based on a Polish invention which churned through each of the hundreds of millions of possible combinations for each day’s setting of the German Enigma machines). While he did design the machine, it was built elsewhere by the British Tabulation Machine Company and installed at Bletchley.
I suppose one other aspect of the visit which impressed us all was the “luck” the British enjoyed in some of their deciphering breakthroughs. On one occasion shown in the film one of the women who listened to the German messages all day casually remarked to Turing in a pub (in the film, at least) that she knew that the German operator she listened to regularly was either married or had a girlfriend. When asked how she knew this she replied that it was because he always started his message with the same five letters, Cilla (her name). Each message was supposed to start with five random characters – gobbledygook, in other words. They also worked out that one message sent each day essentially started in the same way, i.e., today’s weather will be . . . These discoveries enabled the codebreakers to make considerably faster progress in cracking the code than might otherwise have been the case.
The other bit of “excitement” this week was an outing with our friend Mary to visit the Astley Book Farm near Bedworth which was an absolute delight. This is a collection of old farm buildings which have been converted into the most incredible second-hand book shop. There are something in the region of 75,000 second hand books, most of which are fairly “ordinary” paperback and hardback books which are on display in miles of shelving in various different barns. Occasionally, though, they do get some rare collector’s items which are priced accordingly. The shelves are well-labelled and organised but it was still simply overpowering to encounter so many books. Even better, they have an outstanding café and their treacle bacon sandwich was simply delicious.
The finalists for one of my favourite photography competitions were announced this week – the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. We’ve been up to London for the past five or six years to see it and it’s always outstanding. Some of the entries this year seem even better than ever before. The exhibition opens in October, I think, and runs through until about April so we’ll have to organise an outing when we get back from China.
Love to you all,
Greg