I saw the good doctor P – my oncologist – yesterday and had my tummy jab. All things are going well. Thank the good Lord for modern medicine. Afterwards, the Old Boy and I drove across town to visit Father-in-law, in another hospital. The poor old fella’s been battling a nasty infection that made him really ill. Thank goodness the antibiotics seem to be kicking in and he’s finally making his way back to “normality” (whatever that is).

These two occasions set my little grey cells a-whirring. What a difference the invention of stuff like penicillin and antibiotics and chemotherapy and radiotherapy and vaccinations etc have made to the world! The marvels of modern medicine have ensured that I am still here in the land of the living and so is my father-in-law. If it was the early half of the 1900s or less, we’d both have been dead years ago.

So…this morning I’m thinking about humanity’s ability to invent stuff. For example: What strange little spark of genius would cause someone to invent the first piece of soap? Who was the first person to see some animal fat lying in the cold ashes of a fire and think, ‘You know, I could take that down to the water hole and I reckon I could work up a real lather of bubbles with that‘?  The discovery/invention of that stuff must have been revolutionary. He/she would have wandered back up to the cave and people would have said, “Who is that strange light-skinned person?” And the inventor would have thought, ‘Why have I never noticed before how much everyone smells?’

As a species, we’re certainly impressive when it comes to inventing stuff. I look around at buildings and roads and pipes taking stuff from one place to another and electricity and dishwashers and I am in awe that someone somewhere was the first person to think of such a thing. Yep, when it comes to ‘stuff’, you can never overestimate a human’s ability to invent new and better versions of it.

Why then are we so crap at finding ways to get along? Why can’t we figure out that we’d all be better off if we stopped treating those who are different to us as the ultimate threat to our existence (so we’d better kill them first) and, instead, embraced diversity as something to celebrate? Maybe it can be traced back to the invention of soap. Before soap, everyone looked and smelled the same. After soap, people were divided into the clean and the not-so-clean. That darn soap!

News update: Mrs Golden Orb Spider and her rapidly expanding bottom section is still with us. Her web still shines golden in the late morning sun. (I have no idea what it looks like in the early morning, as I don’t do early.)