Twice Brewed, For No Damn Reason

A New Year's adventure I'll never be able to repeat.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity and wonder.

Some of you reading this will officially be a quarter of the way through our current century! Congratulations! 🥳🎉🎉🎉

Others, like me, are still a few hours short, so we’re desperately mining our personal vices and behavioural flaws before finally, finally turn over a new leaf at midnight. Don’t judge, it’s rude.

On that subject (specifically the vice labelled “watching random online videos instead of doing what you’re meant to be doing”), it’s certainly not a seasonal thing but today I’ve been fascinated by this video of the head of a hydraulic press being torn apart by a tiny drop of glass:

It’s not a trick. That’s a real press exerting over 20 tons of pressure, and that’s also a droplet of totally normal glass, the kind you’d assume you could easily smash with a light tap from a hammer.

Yet it still had the power to do this to a block of solid steel:

It’s called a Prince Rupert’s Drop, named after the German prince who first discovered it in the 17th Century. These drops are easy enough to make - drip a lump of molten glass into water and it’ll form like an extended raindrop, with a long, thin tail.

If you lightly tap any part of that tail with a hammer, the whole thing will explode into dust - but any pressure at the bulbous end, even from a bullet (!), won’t even leave a dent.

The secret is highly compacted residual stresses in the glass, compressed up to 700 megapascals, which is nearly 7,000 times atmospheric pressure. This is why when it does break, it does so explosively. (Engineered residual stresses are what toughen the glass on the screen of your smartphone, but when they’re unintentional and uncontrolled - well, *BANG*. Not good at all.)

Secondly - of all my personal discoveries in the last few years, this remains my favourite:

It’s what happened when the sun lit up the stonework of the row of houses facing our apartment, and it conspired with a tiny gap in the curtains to turn the far wall of our bedroom into a Camera Obscura - so we could sit watching a live, upside-down feed of the street outside, walking pedestrians included.

I’ve heard this is how it can happen, and I’ve seen Camera Obscuras in museums - but when it’s accidental and happening in your own freaking house, what a thing. What an absolute thing.

Pardon me because I’m going to have to yell this bit:

THIS IS WHY SCIENCE IS FUN.

Okay! To today’s business.

It’s 2012, and everything’s become a blur.

Someone notices me standing there in the doorway of the inn, clawing at my face with useless fingers in an attempt to find my equally useless fogged-up spectacles.

“You have a room with us, sir? Ah yes. Shall I lead you there, because it looks like…oh dear. Yes it is lovely and warm in here. Only in here, though. The rest of the pub is like an ancient Scandinavian crypt which sunlight and joy will never penetrate. Anyway, here’s your key.”

(I’m not totally sure those were the exact words, but close enough.)

I follow Mr Dark Blob through the brighter blobs around me, reaching out a hand to feel my way along the edges of tables, doors and, judging from a stifled giggle, someone’s head. Then I’m clumping up stairs. It’s getting cooler – which is great, because a hole clears in the bottom of my vision and if limbo-dance my head back, I can start to see again.

But it’s so cold here. What? No heating? I’ve just spent hours walking through icy rain along Hadrian’s Wall, miles and miles of being blasted and scoured by the elements, I haven’t been able to feel my feet since lunchtime – and the bloody heating is off?

My room is at the end of two long and increasingly frosty corridors. My room is right at the end of it, against the wind-savaged back of the building. My basic grasp of thermodynamics tells me this is not good news. I enter my room. It’s immaculate, beautifully decorated and cold enough to make me splutter when I try to breathe.

I fill the plastic electric kettle and switch it on, more by instinct than anything else, and while it boils I pull my sodden boots off, place the just-boiled kettle on the ground, and curl my deadened feet around it in a prehensile manner. Ahhh.

(Yes, I cleaned it afterwards. I’m not a barbarian.)

When I can walk again, I run the shower in the hope the hot water is on a different system to the central heating. Alas, it isn’t. Does the bed have an electric blanket? It doesn’t. Is there any way to warm this room up? Short of arson, no.

Thoroughly annoyed with the inn, with Booking.com, with the English and with Northern Europe, I huddle over the kettle and grimly eat all the complimentary biscuits.

As far as I’m aware, I now have two courses of action available to me: go down into the bar-room, sitting there spattered in drying mud, glaring at people until they avert their eyes, warming myself with a glass of the local gut-rot and wallowing in self-disgust. Or I could just accept that I probably can’t feel much colder & more sodden than I do now, so I might as well go explore some more of the Wall until the heating comes on at 4pm.

One of these options is entirely sensible. The other is a course of action it’s hard to justify without making yourself sound unhinged (including 13 years later, when you’ll put it into a newsletter).

I already know which one I’ll pick.

Oh god, Mike. Why are you like this?

I’m staying in a village that doesn’t technically exist, because it’s been a good while since Twice Brewed, Northumberland (UK), showed up on maps.

Here’s the reason, according to multiple online sources and the indignant-sounding barman at the Twice Brewed Inn (above):

• Once upon a time there was a village northwest of Hexham called Twice Brewed – population: a mere handful of folk. It consisted of an inn, a couple of farms and a stretch of road first laid down in 1751.

• In 1934 the YHA descended upon the village to build a youth hostel – the very first in the whole of England, no less.

• During its opening ceremony, a local dignitary allegedly said “Of course there will be no alcohol served on these premises so I hope the tea and coffee will only be brewed once.”

• The “Once Brewed” Youth Hostel quickly became known the Once Brewed Youth Hostel, at which point someone - perhaps at the British mapping agency Ordnance Survey, perhaps somewhere else - either visited or heard about the village, spotted the youth hostel’s name, figured it meant “The youth hostel of the village Once Brewed”…

• …and Twice Brewed vanished from the official maps.

• To be clear, there appears to be zero certainty about any of this. For alternative explanations, Wikipedia lists the following:

  • “On the eve of the Battle of Hexham in 1464, Yorkist foot soldiers demanded their beer be brewed again because it lacked its usual fighting strength. The ploy worked as the Lancastrian army later fled after an early morning raid against the rejuvenated troops.”

  • “A more prosaic explanation is that 18th-century farmers tended to brew (and serve) weak ale, and hence "twice brewed" meant the inn offered stronger ale.”

  • “A third theory is that Hadrian's Wall snakes its way across the brows, or "brews", of two hills where there is also a meeting of a pair of drovers’ roads.^”

Zoom into the description of the village on Google Maps and you get the headache-inducing “Once Brewed, also known as Twice Brewed or Once Brewed/Twice Brewed is a village in Northumberland, England” – but on the map itself, it’s officially Once Brewed. Same on Ordnance Survey. Same at Wikipedia. Same everywhere.

It’s a bit like the vanishing trick played by cartographers to catch map-pirates…

…except in this case, none of it was intentional.

What was once a village is now just an inn – a haven for walkers making the long, rugged haul from the hills above Hexham, over the spectacularly bleak Sewingshields Crags and down past Housesteads to Sycamore Gap.

I’m staying in the inn overnight, and eventually I’ll be glad I’m doing so. Rooms are cheap – only £35 for a single room, compared to the £60 I paid for a fairly awful single in Hexham the previous night.

Since I’m the only one staying in the inn tonight (December 29th), I’m given a free upgrade to an ensuite twin room. The food is excellent – I know this because I ate here back in 2006, escaping from a nearby rain-lashed campsite with a friend. Hadrian’s Wall is a ten minute walk across the fields at the other side of the road. And to be fair it’s a really nice pub when the heating’s on…

I’ll shut up now – as long as you promise me you won’t pass it by if you’re in the area. Yes? Good. Because the inn isn’t the point of me writing all this.

In a few weeks it’ll be the fourth anniversary of the launch of Everything Is Amazing.

It began with a lot of confusion. What exactly am I supposed to be building here? Would anyone be interested in an enthusiast’s-eye romp through the modern sciences? Exactly how did my dad become an aircraft technician in the Royal Air Force, considering he was colour-blind? Why does everyone love the smell of coffee, even people who hate drinking it? And so on.

Four years later, there are over 27,000 of you reading this thing, so I have to conclude that my ongoing clueless amazement at everything I discover while trying to answer even the simplest questions might be a feature of my writing instead of a bug. (It might even be why you’re here at all: LOL, look at what this plonker is doing now, etc.)

This has helped me formulate some very broad guiding principles for trying to live a more curious life - the first being a forward-projection of my perpetual fascination with discovering how little I know: “You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason” - as I explained here.

(My thesis-in-progress: since we often argue ourselves out of doing things based on their apparent worth or usefulness in advance - aka. “nah, what would be the point?” - we fail to capitalise on potential serendipity and all those unpredictable moments of surprise, joy and wonder that will often become the things we love best about our favourite experiences. Hence the value of doing things on the faintest of whims, or even ‘for no damn reason’, just to see what would happen along the way.)

But doing things ‘for no damn reason’ is, by its very nature, hard to plan in advance. (Especially if it involves other people!) It’s easy to be whimsically driven with the small stuff when it’s just a minor diversion on your day that costs you very little in time or effort - hey, I’ve never gone down that snickelway, I wonder where it goes, or come to think of it, I’ve never tried cooking with fennel, go on then, let’s bung one in the basket…

But when it’s potentially a multi-day excursion in search of you-know-not-what, things get a lot trickier.

(Another factor is *points at everything going on in the world right now*. If your first instinct is to cling a little harder to your reassuringly stable routines, I can certainly understand that. There’s a time and a place for embracing recreational chaos, and if you’re not feeling it, send yourself in the other direction, until that’s made you sufficiently restless for novelty that you’re willing to put your daft-hat back on again.)

So - this year, I’m making a few tweaks to my normal routine.

1. Every day I’ll set myself a reminder to try something small that I’ve definitely never done before - just small things that aren’t too far out of my way but are still meaningfully novel, so it doesn’t feel like cheating. (For example, looking at science papers is something I do a lot of for this newsletter, so “read a science paper you haven’t read before” is outrageously self-fraudulent. I will be trying harder.)

2. On top of that, every month I’ll plan something similarly new and just-for-the-hell-of-it except on a much bigger scale - like spending a day on Hadrian’s Wall at New Year, when anyone with more than half a brain would rather be indoors and warm. That sort of thing. (And yes, this applies to this New Year as well. I’m just waiting for the weather to calm down a bit, since most of our trains and ferries are being cancelled right now.)

3. The guiding criteria for both of these is: they should be hard for you to explain to other people why you did them. Of course you don’t have to explain yourself, nobody does, but if you imagine you did, you should see their faces scrunch up in confusion and maybe even mild horror. Just…why on earth would you do that?
   

   (If you’re unusually adventurous - say, you’re

   Anne Kadet
   or
   Anna McNuff
   and you’re already used to everyone assuming you’re a bit bonkers in a thoroughly commendable way - well, you may have to try a little harder than most people. As perpetually atypical as your everyday behaviour is, what would be unusual for you? That’s your challenge here.)

So that’s what I’m cracking on with immediately. I know a couple of monthly challenges will involve getting on a plane, because of what I wrote about last time (thank you for the really lovely comments on that piece, by the way, they cheered me right up).

But beyond that? Not a clue. I’ll decide as I go.

Yet the memory of that day I spent in Twice Once Brewed is an appropriate prompt for all this, because of what happened next.

This isn’t my photo, but it’s more or less what I saw at nearby Sycamore Gap after I spent twenty minutes walking down the road as fast as my wobbly, cold-numbed legs would carry me.

It’s also what everyone else would have seen until September 2023 - when that beautiful 150-year-old tree was chopped down in an act of vandalism that left so many British walkers stunned and grieving.

Over a year later, the situation is rather more hopeful. In the words of Andrew Poad, the National Trust’s manager of that area of Hadrian’s Wall:

“Effectively, what the perpetrator has done is coppice the tree. So ironically they have prolonged the life of the tree.”

So far, 49 of these saplings have been chosen for replanting in other locations in the UK - and in a century and a half, all being well, a fully-grown sycamore should once again stand in place of the old one.

For my own lifetime, though, that chance is gone. If I’d left it until now to go see it - perhaps by waiting for a more “sensible” reason to go there - I’d have missed it. That’ll stay with me, as I cook up my next pointless quest in search of my unknown unknowns. Sometimes the best reason for doing something is that you can, and maybe that should be more than enough to get you moving.

Crack on, then. There’s another year to fill.

Happy New Year!

- M

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Images: Clementp.fr; Toa Heftiba.