Thursday 20th March

At sea again sailing down the coast of Shikoku Island towards Nagasaki still in the Pacific, but after Nagasaki we shall be entering the East China Sea days at sea will be scarce soon so best get the most out of this one, i.e. doing not much. Late breakfast again and then to another of Robert Winston’s talks, this time Human Instinct – Can Science make you happy? He talked mainly about how the brain has not changed in structure for millions of years, but grown in size and power. Hard wired functions like fear of spiders and the need to eat when food is abundant, but more importantly it was the ‘acceleration’ of power of the brain. This talk was followed by Ian Brown on the Ronnie Biggs story using a lot of Charmian Biggs and family material and refreshing the story of how he was not included on the robbery originally but as he said the he knew a train driver they let him join. Only to find out too late (i.e. on the train) that the train driver drove steam trains and couldn’t drive diesels. Another case of the master criminal myth buster. Oh! and he gave us the reason why they got thirty years each, a massive sentence at the time. He met the judge many years later and asked him why. The judge said he wanted them to serve ten years, but the labour government had just introduced two thirds remission for good behaviour in an effort to reduce prison populations, so in order for them to serve ten years he had to give thirty. The unintended consequences of good intentions. That’s all for today onwards to Nagasaki.