HUSH: Easier Rider said than done...

Today I am listening to Julian Cope and it's a bruising shattering ride...

If you have not already watched Brian Cox's Wonders of the solar system, then as soon as you have finished reading this blog fire up the BBC iPlayer and watch parts 1 and 2...this is as beautiful as particle physics gets.

Brian Cox enthuses us,he brings the Sun and it's life giving power into clearer focus than ever before, through high calculus diagrams drawn in the sand at night in the middle of the desert with a burning stick. Now that, is how the laws of the universe should be explained to us. By someone who is truly excited and cares and wants you to care too, and to be as excited about it all as they are.

I remember being 12 and being at school and thinking to myself as the teacher was explaining some elementary biology..."I don't believe you". And that moment marked the beginning of the age of doubt. this boy did not need to be doubting yet, I needed to be fed truth. I soon understood that I was only being given answers to future test papers. I was not being given the building bricks of understanding that I so desperately needed. My respect for adults began to dissolve and did not stop dissolving even when I became one myself. I wanted to be given clues to how and why. I still do.

As a teenager my confusion and chaos grew, I found I was good at art and imagination, these were not passions that were shared by many of my classmates and friends. I trusted even less my peers than I did my elders. Through my troubled teens the Easy Rider poster hung on my bedroom wall even before I had seen the film.
Ride. Fast. Loud.Open Road. Free...

Later at 23 I had a motorbike of my own. I loved it with as much passion as it scared me. One sunny day a year later, I was riding through country lanes, the sun was fantastic and warm and bright and I felt great, I turned a corner the sun hit my visor, for seconds I was blind, the sun vanished, I could see, I could see a large black car waiting to turn, too late, I hit it, my bike and I left the road and summersaulted over the car, I landed on a grass verge the bike landed on the tarmac. My 20 some years flashed before me.

It is a bruising shattering ride - Julian Cope tells us - but i can not deny myself this luxury.

On Monday I go into school and spend an hour with high school pupils, the theme is Never Give Up - on friends - family - faith. In the PSE lesson I show them a video of a 60 plus man who tells us "I only trust 5 people in this world", He is a lucky man I think.

Brian Cox tells us how the solar system began, and how we are all made and he does not mention God, he talks about the Sun and dust and a physical law. I find myself sighing with relief that there is a fundamental physical law.

Life - it's a bruising shattering ride, but I can not deny myself this luxury....