1. Fertilisation

We all start the same way.  The precise circumstances can differ greatly, but somewhere a sperm cell meets an egg cell, they fuse and each of their twenty-three chromosomes combine to form a fertilised egg cell containing forty-six chromosomes made of very thin and extremely long, microscopic strands of de-oxyribonucleic acid – better known as DNA.  Encrypted on those two metres of DNA (if it were unravelled) in the nucleus of most of my approximately thirty trillion cells is the Toby code. 

In that original zygote (a fertilised ovum or egg cell), inside the fallopian tube of my mother, at some imprecise moment during November 1971, in the downstairs flat of my maternal grandmother’s house in Westward Ho! near Bideford in North Devon, was the biological recipe to make me.  The cell multiplied, specialised and grew into an embryo which by eight or nine weeks later grew into a thumb sized fetus of me, now recognisable as yet another specimen of Homo Sapiens.

We are biology. 

Animals.

Mammals.

Primates.

Apes.

Humans.

Until I started reading books on evolution and genetics in my thirties and forties, after the painstaking research of the Human Genome Project was complete in 2003, I had never considered how I am virtually identical to you, in biological terms.  I now know that somewhere between 96% and 99% of my approximately 22,000 genes, stored on my DNA are precisely the same as yours.  Genetically, we are only between 1% and 4% different. 

Our self-obsession with the ingenuity of our species, coupled to the genetics I was taught in Biology A level from 1989 – 1991 and the residue of religious faith and teaching which permeated into my adult life, led me to believe that it was our genes that made us different.  Whereas I now know that it’s our genes that make us – largely – the same.

Our genes provide the instructions for the membrane bound microscopic chemical processing factories we call our cells.  Simplistically, each different gene codes for a different protein which has a specific function within that cell.  That protein may be a digestive enzyme called amylase, found in saliva which breaks down starch – found in wheat, maize, rice and potatoes – into smaller sugar molecules.  Or it could be a small protein called Insulin, produced by pancreatic cells to regulate our blood glucose concentration.  Or myoglobin, the complex which stores oxygen inside muscle cells; or a monoclonal antibody integral to our immune system; or maybe it is a protein – coded for by a single gene which determines whether we have blue eyes or brown eyes.

Anyway, before I digress further into my amateur and likely inaccurate biochemical ramblings (I recommend What is life? by Paul Nurse; The incredible unlikeliness of being by Alice Roberts, Genome by Matt Ridley and Innate by Kevin Mitchell if you want to understand the wondrous biology inside all of us in more detail), let me pause to introduce this collection of reflections on fifty years of me.

            I’ve started with fertilisation because we have to start somewhere, and – for me – it is a more honest starting place than the day we immerse our mothers in pain by forcing our heads through their dilated cervix and slipping out, caked in blood and gore, through the soft and oft severed tissue of her vagina.

            It will be fifty years from that messy, joyful day on 24^th August 2022.  So, writing me has made a list of forty-nine key moments, people, places, events, experiences, stories and reflections which have infused with my genetic template to make me, me.  I hope to write them all by the end of August and certainly by the end of this calendar year.  I will present them here in chronological order: the number of each essay, story or reflection closely yet imperfectly correlating to the year of my life.   I probably won’t write them in order.  And I hope that the style of some pieces may vary too.  It will be – inevitably – heavy on biography, but I hope I will veer away from my analytical style to write descriptively and lucidly about trees, fields, the coast, tractors, music, festivals, family, friends, colleagues, science, teaching, writing, minor regrets, mistakes, lust, unrequited love, marriage, parenting, divorce and self-deprecation too.

            I can’t imagine such an indulgent and personal project to be of much interest to anyone else, but I am hopeful that my exploration of the people, places and experiences that have sculpted me enables you to get deeper inside yourself too.  I’m inclined to agree with Socrates’ famous assertion that the life which is unexamined is not worth living.

            As I write, I’m looking forward to reflecting upon what it is that makes me, me.  Am I shaped by decisions – made by me, or more significantly others – and experiences  throughout my life?  Or would an approximate version of fifty-year-old me have occurred come what may?  Was the fertilised Toby egg, raised by my biological parents, in the precise conditions of my childhood home and various educational establishments always going to turn out this way?  These are virtually impossible questions to answer – scientifically, philosophically; psychologically – but I won’t feel fully alive if I don’t give it a good old forensic and fun-loving crack.  

2. Nearly born a bastard
3. Mum
4. Dad
5. The Chocolate Factory
6. The Beech Tree
7. Wheelies on the Silage Clamp
8. The Outsider Begins (at St Josephs and Buckland)
9. The Avalanches
10. Photography
11. Three Days with Dad
12. The Ploughing Match
13. Milk
14. Lamp posts and Gate posts
15. I should have kissed Jo Chamberlain (Three regrets: not going to the ploughing match with Dad, not forming a shambolic and angry punk band at university and its consequent summer tour around dodgy pubs in desolate British seaside towns, and not kissing Jo Chamberlain).
16. The Day that Dad Died
17. Verbosity and other frustrations
18. The Strangest Day of my Life
19. Explosion
20. Half siblings
21. The Accidental Scientist
22. The Vale of Avalon
23. Like a Hurricane
24. Football, Fungicides and the One Million Pound Failed Batch
25. Christmas in a Corner of England with Dirty Guitars
26. Two Weeks of Madness
27. The Old Me (Smeeton Party)
28. Horses, Swimming and Sleep Deprivation
29. Beyond Offa’s Dyke
30. The Amorphous State
31. The Day I became a Dad
32. Blood (Ollie H.U.S, blood transfusion etc)
33. Getting Home for Bath Time
34. The Battle of Tunbridge Wells
35. Why haven’t you tidied the dog’s room?
36. The 0724 from Marden
37. La Mer
38. Status, Identity and the end of Science
39. Non-smiling Sarah and the Long Summer
40. Don’t touch my Mug
41. Psychology, teaching and death
42. Science and How to Kill It
43. A maths lesson drenched in anger and Brexit
44. Escape to the Country on Ancient Byways
45. A Luddite Embraces Twitter
46. Hartland, Love and Existentialism
47. Preservers, Disrupters and Dreamers
48. The Decision
49. Annus Horribilis
50. The New, Old Me