Month: November 2013

I was just finishing mucking out when Mary came into the barn and asked;

“Would you like to go on a hack to Kilruddery? I want to give Lily some exercise”

The look on my face said it all, “Good, get Honey in, tack her up, we leave at 10”

Soon we were on our way with the two horses in the box behind, Kilruddery only 15 minutes away from Enniskerry

Kilruddery is a huge sprawling place on the East coast, ideal for cross-country

We walked them through the dense forest, the November colours all golden reds and russets

Out into the close-cropped winter fields, a steady trot takes us to the higher ground, on the side of the Little Sugar Loaf

Mary greets some hill walkers making their way to the top, turns to me

“Now keep Honey close to me, Lily will take off, but you must try to keep up”

Lily is Mary’s hunter , a huge grey Irish Sport Horse with a big gallop.  Lily is hard to hold back, snorting, throwing her head, dancing on the spot

Honey is also a grey, a  bit of a plod, with a big heart.

We are on a high track cantering amid the thick gorse. Lily spooks sharp left startled by a shook up pheasant in the undergrowth. Mary sits well. Honey doing her best to keep up

Mary shouts back, “Have a look over your shoulder” Not easy trying to sit on a galloping horse.

I glance  quickly at Killiney and over the grey stillness  of Dublin Bay

We are fast cantering now and Mary again points out  – Greystones this time

Another glance over the  Irish sea.  The mountains of Wales, so far yet so near. Amazing

Honey is running out of puff, Lily far out of sight. When we catch up we’re looking out over Glen of the Downs and the tiny golfers in the distance

Mary says, “I couldn’t hold her, Lily is so strong, too much thoroughbred in her..”

Honey is trying to recover, taking fast shallow breaths. We go back  through the sheep covered countryside into the forest. Mary is happy, says its good for the horses, letting them gallop away in their own place.

I think she is relieved to have stayed sat on Lily all the way

Two hours later we are back at the box. Tired but exhilarated.

The drinking man couldn’t see all this

The drinking man wouldn’t have been here!

“Yet we are talking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each as far as we know, vital to a sound and happy you. And it goes on from there. To be of use a protein must not only assemble amino acids in the right sequence, it must then engage in a kind of chemical origami and fold itself into a very specific shape. Even having achieved this structural complexity, a protein is no good to you unless it reproduces itself and proteins can’t. For this you need DNA. DNA is a whizz at replicating – it can make a copy of itself in seconds – but can do virtually nothing else. So we have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so, wow”

“Proteins are what you get when you string amino acids together, and we need a lot of them. No-one really knows , but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids (which I am obliged by long tradition to refer to here as “the building blocks of life”) in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word.”

“Proteins are the workhorses of all living systems; as many as a hundred million of them may be busy in any cell at any moment. That’s  a lot of activity to try to figure out. Worse, proteins’ behaviour and functions are based not simply on their chemistry, as with genes, but also on their shapes. To function a protein not only must have the necessary chemical components, properly assembled, but then must be folded into an extremely  specific shape. “folding is a term that’s used, but its a misleading one as it suggests a geometrical tidiness that doesn’t in fact apply. Proteins loop and coil and crinkle into shapes that are at once extravagant and complex. They are more like furiously mangled coat hangers than folded towels. Moreover proteins are the swingers of the biological world. Depending on mood and circumstances , they will allow themselves to be phosphorilated,glycosylated,acetylated, ubiquitinated,farneysylated, sulphated and linked to glycophosphatidylinositol anchors among rather a lot else. Often it takes relatively little to get them going, it appears.

Drink a glass of wine, as Scientific American notes and you materially alter the number and types of proteins at large in your system.

Ethanol is one of the few nutrients that is profoundly toxic. Alcohol causes both whole-body and tissue specific changes in protein metabolism

It took several billion years to evolve this complexity of life,  yet we can throw it into disarray with one glass of wine

Silly

With thanks to Bill Bryson’s , “A Short History of Nearly Everything”