It is a source of regional pride here in the southwest that we already have a heritage dome up and running at Plymouth, on the Hoe. My sister Viv and I went there recently to celebrate our birthdays, which fall on the same day. She is 38 and I am 41. We are Aquarians.
Viv hasn't been well. On the train she told me that she was wearing four layers of make-up: concealer, foundation, powder and blusher. She presented her face to me so that I might inspect it more closely and marvel at the level of deception attainable these days with the use of modern cosmetics. "Oo!" I said.
Viv also told me about Brian and Cathy, her next door neighbours, whose boozing has reached the stage where they cannot even remember what happened the day before. Not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps; but in their case conflicting versions of the previous day's events have led to acrimonious bickering. They have taken the extreme measure of installing a video camera in their kitchen so that further disputes can be conclusively resolved at the touch of a button. Viv was round there for coffee last week when Cath was replaying the previous evening's footage on the television. They sat and watched the picture of an apparently empty kitchen for a very long time; then a head, which must have been previously just out of camera shot, hit the kitchen table sideways with a terrific thud. It remained there, motionless, for the rest of the tape.
At Plymouth, it was too windy to put up an umbrella so Viv and I made our way to the dome with our chins on our chests, grimacing against the stinging horizontal rain.
Whatever grand themes have lately been dreamed up for the Millennium Dome at Greenwich-the unique spirituality of the human race, our amazing technological achievements, the rise and rise of democracy-southwest heritage grandees have opted for something either less assuming or more cynical, depending on your point of view. The main attraction at our dome is an exhibition of plankton, sponsored by Shell. Its centrepiece is the first-ever continuous plankton recorder. Invented by Sir Alister Clavering Hardy FRS (1896-1985), it revolutionised the study of marine plankton between the wars. Viv and I had originally planned to see a matin?e performance of Cannon and Ball for our birthday treat, but once Viv had seen the advert for the exhibition, entitled "Parables of Sea and Sky"-promising a continuous plankton recorder, as well as coloured plates from Sir Alister's books on plankton and some of his "sketches from the Cotswolds"-we abandoned Cannon and Ball and plumped for an afternoon at the dome instead.
We were not disappointed. The continuous plankton recorder was in pride of place on a dais. This bizarre-looking, bomb-shaped underwater craft looks strangely piscine; I imagine that the far-fetched creatures who inhabit the ocean depths must have regarded it without alarm as it passed by. Later models are still in use; global warming has given fresh impetus to plankton research and made the readings from these machines a matter of grave concern. (In case anybody was tempted to steal the continuous plankton recorder to carry out some research of their own, it was secured to the dais with heavy padlocks.)
Sir Alister had other strings to his bow. In the 1920s, he harboured a suspicion that moths were attracted to moonlight and spent some time in a hot air balloon studying the possibility of such a phenomenon. Later he became interested in telepathy. Before he joined the army in the first world war, Sir Alister made a vow to God that if he survived, he would do his utmost to reconcile science and religion. To this end he wrote a book called The Living Stream and founded the Religious Experience Research Centre. He also wrote The World of Plankton: apart from plankton, the book also deals with squid and cuttlefish and has a section under the surprisingly unscientific heading "Queer Creatures."
Sir Alister's watercolours of the Cotswolds were there ("Not bad!" said Viv); a selection of the hand-painted Christmas cards he sent to old comrades from the Northern Cyclists Battalion, in which he served as a young officer in 1914, when he and 50 Northumberland miners were charged with patrolling the Lincolnshire coast; and photographs of Sir Alister smoking his pipe in different parts of the world. Viv laughed so much that I thought she was going to wet herself.
We browsed through the exhibition for two hours. Slowly, the initial hilarious impression that it was some kind of complicated hoax gave way to fascinated respect for the industry of a thoroughly decent, gifted and kindly individual; then to sadness at the unbridgeable gulf that our knee-jerk cynicism puts between our generation and his.
We were there for so long that a dome official popped his head in twice to ask if we wanted to see a slide show of the blitz, which he was putting on in the "heritage" section. "We only came to see the plankton, thanks," I told him. As we continued to browse silently among the plankton exhibits, muffled sounds of screaming dive-bombers and Dame Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again" came from somewhere above our heads.
