Sir Cliff, the tube, the meadow vole and his lover

If I were made to choose a binary distinction it would be fluid or fixed. Some people find happiness as a journey. Last week Sir Cliff Richard disclosed that the typical 2 point 4 marriage didn’t do it for him but rather the companionship of a male partner. In the eyes of the fundamentalists this might make him less of a Christian and yet how can he be free to love others unless he has found love himself? The nuances of loving within a less rigidly defined matrix will be fluid, on-going and non-formulaic. In stark contrast there is the search for the answer to everything with the big bang big switch on of the Large Hadron Collider taking place in CERN. Will it be 42 as in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? This has not a jot to do with a fluid search for love so much as a desire to find the one true beginning. What will we do when we find it? It’s not as if these forces are easy to harness. Likewise the search for a gene for everything including holding down a happy marriage. If you can’t you may have something more in common with the meadow vole then you thought. It seems that happiness for a prairie vole is monogamy but for its meadow cousin promiscuity rules the roost or nest. The culprit is the genetic predisposition for a receptor for the hormone vasopressin which plays an important role in social behaviour, pair-bonding and sexual attachment. And if you have that I suppose you’re doomed. I would make a bad geneticist or particle scientist. There is a certain inherent pessimism in finding a gene for failure. And the fear that we might not only genetically engineer crops but moral obligation too. I am much more interested in where we might be going rather than where we have come from. Perhaps it would be more useful to put all the politicians in a nine mile tube and bang their heads together. They might discover the answer to global warming or ending poverty. Meanwhile let bosons be bosons and the world a better place for gay Christians and meadow voles.