Meeting your heroes is never a good idea.

I've blogged here about never meeting my ultimate hero; Jacques Cousteau perhaps that is why he has, for me, retained much of the mystique that is central to hero worship.

I have however been lucky enough to meet a few of my heroes and in some cases unfortunate enough to meet others.

By the time I got to meet David Bellamy (above) he had largely discredited himself as a scientist and had become the character he created. As we chatted over dinner the remaining vestiges of respect evaporated in a cloud of pompous nonsense.     

My mild obsession with David Bellamy OBE was instigated by my father, mostly as he was desperate to replace Jacques Cousteau in the hope that I would stop talking in a silly French accent. Given my penchant for imitating my heroes this was probably not as clever a move as he thought it was. I can still do a pretty good Bellamy impression.

When I was a kid Bellamy was pretty big, a serious botanist loads of publications and a string of successful television programmes behind him. He'd even done a superb underwater series looking at the native flora and fauna of the British Isles. I think it was this series that my father thought could be used to wean me off Cousteau.

My adulation for Bellamy took a bit of a tarnishing after he went and did this.



I'm all for promoting science education amongst kids and was a science teacher myself for a number of years but there's just no call for this sort of thing. David Bellamy had quickly become a caricature of himself and increasingly he became the bumbling, air groping, hairball character he created. I still think that his impression of Bellamy was the best and funniest thing that Lenny Henry ever did and quite possibly the only funny thing he did.

My positive childhood memories of David Bellamy probably have lingered on in my subconscious; what other explanation could there possibly be for the picture underneath!!!

lets never speak of this again!

Having fallen out of fashion Bellamy disappeared off our television screens years hence although in recent times has sought and gained notoriety as the, in my opinion badly chosen, face of the climate change sceptics, touting pseudo-science and fraudulent claims to anyone who'll listen. These days he's known for his bad hair, bad singing and bad science.



Now people who know me well, and those of you who have seen the picture of me above, will realise that I, more than most, need to be able to forgive bad hair and bad singing, which I think I can do but forgive bad science; Never, never, never.

My life as a frog expert

These days I manage some of the country's most innovative homeless hostels and work with people who are among the most socially excluded in our society, but it wasn't always so; in another life I had one of the most unusual jobs imaginable.

During my PhD. I spent a lot of time in the "frog room". As an aside to my research I set up some highly successful breeding programmes for critically endangered frog species. The programmes are still running today.

Pharmaceutical biotechnology was the subject area of my PhD and I studied the skin secretions of poisonous frogs.

The Chinese "smelly frog" has skin secretions containing natural antibiotics 

My research caught the interest of Brian Black a Northern Irish film maker and he was commissioned to produce a number of short segments on my work. After a week long series of three minute segments on Ulster Television I became known locally as "the frog expert"

My short-lived fifteen minutes was the cause of some embarrassment. For a few weeks people would shout "hey your that frog guy off the news" and around the University of Ulster campus I became known as Dr. Frog.

A small team of us had planned a field trip to South East China and the news segments were done as part of the build up to this, to raise awareness of the work we were doing. Brian the film maker joined us on the trip to Fujian Provence.

Documentary film maker Brian Black, Prof. Chris Shaw, Prof. Dave Greenwood, Dr Rob Robinson, Dr. Abo, Chen Lee, Dr Le long on arrival at Fujian airport.  

Once we had arrived in Fuzhou city there were endless meetings and dinners as we negotiated access to equipment, facilities and the parts of the country that we wanted to visit. Many of the meetings/dinners involved drinking and drinking games all of which were paid for by whoever was deemed to be the most important person in the room, luckily that was never me.  Initially we were bewildered by this and tried not to take part, then it was explained to us that in China a good way to pay respect to the host would be to get drunk. Once I realised that we could win favour by getting drunk I knew we were onto a winner. The Chinese officials would cleverly put us into drinking competitions with girls who were trained and hardened drinkers. We always lost, I've never enjoyed loosing quite so much. 

   

The intrepid and ever macho Brian (above left) was first to take on the challenge, but a nearly tea-total lightweight he ended up falling by the way side. The honour of the team fell to the youngest member; me. At this dinner I drank so much that I ended up singing and dancing on top of the dinner table before falling off, slam-dunking the provincial governor breaking his glasses. The next day the governor (who everyone called Mr Big) sent a messenger to say that we could have whatever we needed and to convey his personal thanks to the dancing Irishman who made him laugh so much. 

   

left: walking along the riverside in Wu Yi. middle: Wu Yi train station. right: Wu Yi cloud forest we were either above or in the cloud line for weeks at a time. 

We travelled to some of the most remote parts of South China often along roads that were little more than dirt tracks but eventually made it to the Wu Yi Mountain Reserve the first westerners to be permitted to enter the area in over a hundred years.

Often we would have to get out of the vehicles and walk behind due to the risk of land slides. On the right is the government research station deep in the heart of Wu Yi seen here on one of the rare times when the rain clouds lifted. 

  

We made many trips into the cloud forests and I had some amazing adventures there, I was stalked by a wild tiger, got lost for six days and had a giant gliding tree frog fall about 100 feet onto my face!!

There was a 300ft cliff on the left and a 300ft drop on the right. 

sometimes the river was the best road to be found

Brian's film was made into a half hour documentary called "one giant leap" shown as part of The Edge. The Edge was a series of cutting edge science programme's commissioned by the British Government to showcase the work of world class British scientists. My research was the focus of one of those programmes.

More on my misadventures in South East China coming soon.

Give a kid a book

Having long ago run out of book shelf space I now have several stacks of books piled about my Kemp Town flat and I am fast running out of floor space. What started as pondering on where the latest additions to my burgeoning collection could possibly go, ended upon recollection of my first ever book.

My mother assures me that the book in question was a red, leather bound, revised standard version of the bible given to me as a gift from a great aunt who was known more for her spirit than her spirituality. A quick check and wouldn't you know it I still have that bible in my possession and I have to say for something that I've had for forty years it looks remarkably unread. 

My mothers memory alas is filled with unrealised hope and promise for the first book I can recall as being mine was not the bible but a large, green, canvas backed, hardback, encyclopaedia of animals given to me by my father. It was to be the beginning of a life long love affair with science. 


I devoured the book, memorised it, quoted from it with annoying frequency and to this day know more about the habitat, distribution and breeding habits of everything from the Kakapo to the Ocelot than I do about almost anything else including the bible. 

So how come that great green font of knowledge is gone and the red leather bible remains? Well I guess I like the smell of leather and that particular story is told and unchanged whereas the encyclopaedias keep having to be replaced as our understanding evolves