Page 45 Review by Jonathan
Collecting all material from the six Ganges periodicals in one glorious hardcover! Split therefore into six chapters, here are my original reviews of issues four and five.
Chapter 4…
I've only had the misfortune of suffering real insomnia once, after a rather foolish third post-prandial double espresso at a particularly good Italian restaurant in Bedfordshire following a 'business' meeting many years ago. Sadly for me, I wasn't at home with a full range of distractions available to me, unlike Glenn Ganges in this latest instalment of his ongoing grapple with life in general. Instead I was staying at a quiet hotel in the middle of nowhere.
This was also in the days where '24 hour' television consisted solely of Pete Waterman and Michela Strachan 'aving it large on the Hitman and Her on a Saturday night. Unfortunately for me, however, it was a Wednesday, so I had the choice of the test card or teletext. And, as the clock ticked its merry way on throughout the night, I, sans reading material of any nature save my road atlas and meeting notes, just lay there as my sense of wakefulness moved gradually from initial amusement, on to mild despair, developing into full blown existential crisis, before neatly circumnavigating briefly through hysterical laughter at about six a.m. when I finally fell asleep. For all of an hour before I had to get up….
Amusingly enough Glenn seems to pass through most of the same stages, whilst also finding time to fret about the size of his book collection, accidentally let the cat escape from the house and then have to retrieve it, and also get rather spooked by some innocuous shadows whilst half-asleep. Great fun as always from Kevin, he certainly knows how to spin a yarn out of almost nothing.
Chapter 5…
"Mom, how old is the Earth?"
"It's like, 4.5 billion years."
"Yeah right, ha ha… that's what they'll try and teach him in public school."
What you can't see from the above exchange between Kevin, his wife Wendy's cousin Angela and her son having dinner together after the funeral of Wendy's Great Aunt Shelly is the huge kick under the table Kevin receives from Wendy, when he answers the young kid's question without thinking! I should probably add that Shelly's family are Baptists living in Florida and smack bang in the heartlands of America's Bible Belt. Creationism is rife down there and offense can be taken very easily.
Meanwhile, not thinking, and indeed, not doing, are two things Wendy accuses Kevin of rather a lot. Quite rightly so, by his own admission, but it's to the extent that not only can he now usually see an admonishment of yet another transgression coming, but he's developed a whole range of deflective techniques to avoid said lectures on the twin topics of his thoughtlessness and procrastination.
This time, though, Wendy's needed to put the boot in sharpish before he can sink his own foot any deeper into troubled temporal waters. It's not even the first time she's had to do it today, either, having already dispensed another covert leg sweep during the eulogy itself as Kevin zoned out to a happier place of pondering the big question you might find yourself asking at any funeral… of what they were having for lunch…
As ever, Kevin does a marvellous turn in self-deprecating humour and once again the amusing auto-biographical material provides a neat lead-in to this issue's topic on which he'd like to enlighten us, the evolution of our planet, and the timescales thereof. Or as he much more prosaically describes it… "Time Travelling: Deep Time."
I love how Kevin really let's his talents for composition run wild in these sections. He always starts us off gently with a few simple devices, gradually increasing in educative and artistic complexity, as he explains how Scottish "Gentleman Scientist" James Hutton, who we could arguably call the first geologist, decided in the 1700s (pre-Charles Darwin mind) that the Earth simply had to be considerably older than the perceived scientific wisdom of the time of a mere five to six thousand years.
Kevin then walks us through Hutton's theories and thought experiments to show us how he hypothesised the formation of the planet, plus also illustrating the geological processes actually involved, culminating in a truly impressive double page spread. His ability to get what he's visualising out of his head and onto the page is exceptional.
