Four legs good, eight better

Dear all, the path uphill to Bradlow Knoll seems to get steeper with time. It didn’t help that it was actually hot and sunny, but it’s still worth the climb for the view and for the reward of parking your backside on CJ’s bench, but age does have an effect on the old limbs. Loss of muscle mass and other factors come into play in your seventies, so use it or lose it, they say. Any physical activity, like lifting some light weights at the local gym (ha!), will help keep your muscles big and strong. And also, follow the official recommended intake of oily fish. Solution? Keep lots of smoked salmon in the fridge and force yourself to get off the sofa to eat it.

A shadow of my former self

If humans had, say, eight legs, there’s no doubt running and climbing would be easier. Bradlow Knoll would be a doddle for any spider scaled up to the size of a human. Spiders are faster than humans. While we can run faster in absolute terms, a spider’s speed relative to its size is much higher. A hunting spider can move at speeds over 1 mile per hour – scaled up, its speed would exceed hundreds of miles per hour.

Palais des Vaches

The fastest-running spider is the desert-dwelling Moroccan flic-flac spider, which can reach speeds of up to 3.8 mph using a unique rolling movement named “flic-flac” (apparently a circus tumbling technique) launching itself into a series of forward flips, gaining speed with each rolling leap. Click here.

Ziggy

You ask: where does all this arachnid lowdown come from? One member of the PAC team is of course Ziggy (in charge of keeping fly numbers down) and he is a mine of information. He claims he has a flic-flac cousin in Surbiton. Another member of the PAC team is Spyro, who, as the Marketing Manager, is rightly reminding me that PAC is about ceramics, not spider speeds or muscle wastage.

Palais des Vaches

The Palais des Vaches is showing a number of new Peter Arscott ceramics in its spacious gallery, open on Thursdays and at the weekends 11 – 4. Those of you who’ve followed this blog for some time will remember that the building used to be a cowshed and milking parlour before its conversion. It’s the brainchild of Nick and Caroline Rothschild – he is a pioneer in the video industry in the 1970s, where he made films and won a Gold Medal in the New York Film and Video Festival. After living in London, Nick and Caroline (also an artist), moved down to the family estate, which includes the beautiful gardens at Exbury.

Palais des Vaches. Photo M. Law

It’s a unique gallery, just as cows are – just like no two humans have the exact same fingerprints, no two cows have the exact same spots. Farmers use individual cow spots to differentiate them apart.

porcelain cow

Sorry to go on about running up Bradlow Hill, but cows can run on average at 17 mph, with a maximum speed of 25 mph. So, they can easily beat a human. So far, eight-legged and four-legged beings have the advantage over us bipeds. But they can’t make ceramics.

stability on three legs

Three legs, on the other hand, offer stability, more so than four legs, as anybody who has bought a PAC three-legged bowl will testify. Think of camera tripods and, with Palais des Vaches in mind, milking stools (Spyro is quietly admiring this blog’s ability to bring in ceramics while also holding forth on numbers of legs).

Palais des Vaches. Photo M. Law

What about a hundred legs? There are several reasons for all of those legs on a centipede, but they mainly help make them very fast. Since they are both predators and prey, this helps out a lot. They can travel 1.3 feet per second.

Palais des Vaches Photo. M. Law

A man won £100 on the lottery and decided to blow it on something he wouldn’t normally buy. So, he went to the pet shop and looked around. There was a centipede for sale for £100.

“Why is it so expensive?” he asked the pet shop owner

“Because it can talk.”

“No way, centipedes don’t talk.”

But the owner promised him it was a talking centipede, so he bought it and took it home. That evening he spoke to the centipede:

“I’m off to the pub. Do you fancy a pint?”

There was no answer, so he went to the pub alone. Next day, he asked it again:

“I’m off to the pub. Do you fancy a pint?”

Again, no answer. On the third day, and a little fed up, he asked the centipede again:

“I’m off to the pub. Do you fancy a pint?”

The centipede replied:

“I heard you the first time. I’m just putting my bloody shoes on.”