How Long Is A Piece of String?
09 January 2018 | 425 Miles to Cape Horn
11:00am Tuesday 9th January 2018 ( UTC-4 ) Young people of today worried about the ever increasing pollution of our oceans with the excess of plastic wrapping must yearn for the simpler times of my childhood. We lived in a little village without a corner store so each Saturday morning the grocer from Brooklyn ( only That railway station was called Hawkesbury River ) would come down the path with a large wicker basket under his arm with the weeks supply of groceries. The flour and the sugar and the salt came in brown paper bags tied up with pieces of string and once the amount was totted up on a pad headed " Bushells - The Tea of Flavour" and paid for, with a flourish, by cheque and pleasantries exchanged, the first job was to carefully save the pieces of string. The brown paper bags were smoothed out and saved to contain our school lunches and of course as the week progressed the wrappings on the butter were saved to line the tins of those most gorgeous sponge cakes. Made with the whites of the eggs from our own ducks , with a squeeze of Valencia orange juice from our tree and cooked in a wood fired oven and with passion fruit icing from our own vine they had a flavour not attainable from your modern food factory. And those pieces of string? Well of course they were all of different lengths so a popular saying of the time when asked how long a job would take would be " How Long is a piece of string? " And perhaps a Professor of Astrophysics had a similar background and sought the answer through the rigorous application of the equations of Einsteins Theory of General Relativity. You will be pleased to know that he found the answer so if anyone should ask you " How long is a piece of string? ", just shoot back with the reply " .00000000000000000000000000000000001616 of a millimetre" which is the exact length of one of those strings which is trying unsuccessfully to hold the Universe from flying apart. Much more successful was our grocer who never spilled so much as a grain of salt.