We have been so lucky with the weather recently, enjoying successive weeks of non-stop sunshine. Hottest May ever in the UK since records were a thing, apparently. It's been fabulous, and when it's like this there is no finer place (outside of Greece) than the jewel of the north. However, that magical sequence appears to have ended overnight and if the meteorological auguries are to be believed, our fine run of sunshine has been sacrificed on the altar of a great British tradition, the wet May Bank Holiday weekend. Sorry folks.
Talking of records, I can remember sitting in my parents' Vauxhall Victor in the muddy carpark of some National Trust property on the equivalent May Bank Holiday Monday back in 1970. It was pouring with rain and I'd elected to stay in the car rather than look around Old Tudorpile Hall (or nonesuch), so I could listen to the first complete play-through of the Beatles' 'Let It Be' LP on the car radio. In a sense the Beatles were already history, having officially split earlier in the year, but they still managed to fill the car with audio sunshine on a miserable, wet day.
What the teams found was that in the melanocyte cells responsible for giving a cat its skin, hair follicles and eyes their colour, one gene, ARHGAP36, was much more active. By comparing the DNA from dozens of cats with and without marmalade fur they found that those with ginger colouring had a section of DNA code missing within this ARHGAP36 gene. Without this DNA the activity of the ARHGAP36 is not suppressed i.e. it is more active. The scientists concluded that the gene instructs those melanocytes to produce lighter pigment.
Talking of records, I can remember sitting in my parents' Vauxhall Victor in the muddy carpark of some National Trust property on the equivalent May Bank Holiday Monday back in 1970. It was pouring with rain and I'd elected to stay in the car rather than look around Old Tudorpile Hall (or nonesuch), so I could listen to the first complete play-through of the Beatles' 'Let It Be' LP on the car radio. In a sense the Beatles were already history, having officially split earlier in the year, but they still managed to fill the car with audio sunshine on a miserable, wet day.
Of the four, McCartney and Starr were always the sunniest Beatles. Lennon was complex, sometimes dark despite the wit, often cynical. Harrison could be dour and moody. But Paul and Ringo were the upbeat half of the quartet, Ringo because he was always so easy-going, Paul because he was charming (if prone to arrogance), more light weight than John and of a naturally sunny disposition.
I suppose it was natural, therefore, that when the Beatles had a two-week break in the middle of recording songs for their second LP 'With The Beatles', it was the pair of Paul and Ringo who, with their girlfriends, took off for Corfu in September 1963, leaving the upswelling madness of Beatlemania behind for some unmolested relaxation in the Greek sunshine. It was McCartney, after all, who had written the song "I'll Follow The Sun" when he was still in his teens, though it wouldn't feature on a Beatles record until 1964.
The photograph above was taken by Lucy Hill, a friend of Jane Asher, at a restaurant in Paleokastritsa, Corfu on the 20th of September 1963. It was the first time either Ringo or his girlfriend Maureen Cox had been abroad, and it's remarkable to think that Jane Asher was only seventeen at the time.
It has been known for decades that genetics are responsible for the distinctive colouring of marmalade cats (also called ginger or orange tabby), but exactly where in the genetic code had evaded scientists until recently, when two teams of scientists at Kyushu University in Japan and Stanford University in the US solved the mystery and revealed all in scientific papers published simultaneously this month.
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| Ringo Starr, Maureen Cox (obscured), Jane Asher and Paul McCartney in Corfu (1963) |
That excursion gave them a taste for Greece and in 1967, at Lennon's urging, they all four travelled back to Greece with their partners with the intention of buying themselves an island retreat. Based in Athens for the duration, they visited several prospective small islands before deciding on one and had gone as far as arranging the financing when they took against the idea of the Greek military junta which had just seized power in the land, and the project was quietly dropped.
Other sunny Beatles songs of note include McCartney's wonderful "Good Day Sunshine" from 'Revolver', of which you'll find an audio link a the foot of this blog, Harrison's sublime "Here Comes The Sun" from 'Abbey Road' and (finally) Lennon's "Sun King" from the same LP - all mood-enhancing tributes to the light source that sustains us.
As a Beatle-related segue into the next part of the blog, these lines of Lennon's from "I Am The Walrus":
"Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun..."
Over these last sunny weeks, I've noticed a regular visitor to my back garden. He's a marmalade cat who gets in via a hole in the fence, heads to his favourite spot and suns himself in perfect contentment, disturbed only when I go out to hang up some washing. He's like a shaggy sun king.
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| the Sun King (a visitor) |
It also helps to explain why most marmalade cats are male, for ARHGAP36 is carried on the X chromosome. Male cats like other mammals have an X and a Y chromosome, which carry different genes. As it is a gene found only on the X chromosome, in this case controlling the pigment production, then one missing piece of DNA is enough to turn a cat fully ginger. By comparison, female cats have two X chromosomes, so the DNA would need to be missing in both chromosomes to increase lighter pigment production to the same extent. Fascinating.
I've written two new poems for you this week:
What The SPF!
How old is your sunshine?
Did you ever wonder?
I'll tell you...
I'll tell you...
Approximately eight minutes
and twenty five seconds
from the surface of the star
till it touches down
on your warming skin.
What happens before it's emitted
is way more complex,
incandescent nuclear fusion,
a massive H-bomb, giver of life.
That's twice as long as it would take
a volley of ICBMs from say Russia
on an insane nuclear mission
to wipe us all out, bringer of death
in a radiance of suns.
Kudos then to South Africa
and Ukraine, the only countries
to have possessed and relinquished
nuclear bombs. It can be done.
Marmalade Buddha
There is a cat who comes and sits
quietly in my garden, doesn't seem
to mind the weeds, just suns himself
in a favoured patch, looks as wise as
an old marmalade buddha, knows
that the moment is everything, so
live for it - but mind that stranger
when he comes to hang out clothes.
And as if all of that wasn't enough, here's a link to The Beatles performing: Good Day Sunshine
Thanks for reading. Happy holidays, S ;-)