A skeleton: it’s a good thing bones don’t blush
When I was eight, my mother made me a costume for a Halloween party. Even at eight, this seemed like an important party. The costume was beautiful, as the things my mother made often were: more beautiful than a child’s thing ought to be, more beautiful than a mother ought to be able to make after work.
It was a skeleton costume: a unitard made from stocking fabric, painted with fluorescent paint; I remember the care she took to make the bones accurate, to make them just my size, matching femur to femur.
But when I arrived in the late afternoon – the importance of the party had a lot to do with the fact that it would continue into the night-time – one of the boys in my class realised that the costume was transparent. It soon got dark and the black fabric turned opaque and the bones began to glow.
Then, I did something wrong during “wink murder”, something that gave the game away, and I felt embarrassed a second time. It is a good thing skeletons can’t blush.
Recently, a skeleton expert wrote to me. He has studied bone biology for 35 years, and he explained that the skeleton has the “ability to adapt its mass and architecture to provide enough strength for habitual functions with a reserve in order to prevent fracture under unusual/unforeseen loads.”
The skeleton does not blush: it is our reserve, it outlasts us, it is stronger than all it protects. This should be comforting, but it is unsettling.
“He knew the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton; / No contact possible to flesh / Allayed the fever of the bone,” TS Eliot writes in Whispers of Immortality. When I think of a skeleton, I think of a skeleton family: putting my ear next to my father’s knee, which creaked and scratched from a cricket injury. My double-jointed sister digging her fingers in under her ribcage above her abdomen and bending the cartilage outwards. The skeleton hound in the Funnybones books: “The white, white Dog disappears in the white, white snow and the black, black Cat disappears in the dark, dark shadows.”
At university, I learned fencing. Recently, 15 years since I last picked up a foil – the long, thin, bendy sword – I happened to be near a group of fencers. I felt my marrow ache and flash: I wanted to duel. In fencing, you wear a white costume, you turn yourself into a skeleton, advancing and retreating, elegant and clean. I had forgotten the feeling of the foil poking you; that the point of fencing was to remind your opponent of their nerves and skin, of their fallibility, and at that moment, of their having lost.
The first time I tried fencing, I thought I looked fantastic. Afterwards, I made my way home: a long bus journey, in winter. An hour later, I saw my bright red face for the first time: a face boiled in a mask. I looked like a fool.
What to make of this experience? I remember that I waited for the bus with a friend of mine, and that she was studying linguistics. She showed me some of her exercises: they were about how one sentence could mean many things.
For 15 years, this memory has been rolling around my brain, protected by a skull, the skeleton expert tells me, which “has to be deformed by around 40 times its normal deformation before it is broken”. It is only now that I realise that the skeleton does not blush, but its marrow makes the blood that rushes to the surface. It is only now that I realise this: that words are skeletons. They provide enough strength for habitual functions and for so much more: both unusual and unforeseen.
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
• Thank you to Professor Tim Skerry for suggesting the topic for this week’s column – and for the insights into the human skeleton. Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
efficiently; by fishing firms prospecting sustainable grounds; by offshore windfarm developers looking for optimum locations. The list is endless.”
She teamed up with her boyfriend, Dowds, who was completing his own electrical engineering master’s, to register their company, Oshen, in April 2022. They bought a secondhand boat to live on, docked it in Caernarfon – “because it’s beautiful and close to the sea” – and began perfecting their device.
Since their first sea trial they have been granted £43,000 by the European Space Agency and another £75,000 by the government’s Innovate UK agency, with a further £30,000 generated from private investors.
They have also hired one member of staff – an old university friend – and tested the craft on a lake – Llyn Padarn in Snowdonia. “We follow it about in a kayak,” says Dowds.
They have faced challenges, however. “Building a small autonomous boat is excruciatingly difficult,” Laverack admits. No team has ever completed the autonomous category of the Microtransat Challenge – even the US Naval Academy hasn’t managed it, she says. The pair hope to succeed where others have failed by adapting new navigational concepts developed for small drones, and by creating algorithms to better respond to changing currents and wind directions at sea.
Testing is up and down. “Every time we test it on the water, it can be one step forward and two steps back,” says Laverack. “We’ve had eight different kinds of sails … [and] the internal mechanisms constantly need changing as different issues become clear.”
Even powering the boat is fiendishly complex. It runs off solar power but the small hull can only hold a few panels. “So we are trying to design sensor and navigational systems that need very little power,” says Dowds. “And we’re doing that pretty much from scratch.”
At the moment, the microcraft doesn’t look much: a slightly battered fibreglass body with a rough, rigid sail. Duct tape appears to be holding some parts together. When the thing is put on the water, it looks like you could blow it off course yourself. But when Dowds programmes in a short voyage, it defies the buffeting wind and sails more or less to where it should. And then it comes back.
The biggest test mission yet happens in July, when the boat will brave the Irish Sea to gather weather statistics and monitor mammal activity.
Should it succeed, their next step is to build an initial fleet of 10 crafts with their relatively modest funding, though they are also in talks with a handful of companies – including a shipping-route optimisation service and an offshoresurveying firm – about selling them the data the vessels collect.
The scale of the task ahead doesn’t daunt them. “The oceans are so important to our future,” says Dowds. “The idea we might be able to help understand it a little more is just exciting beyond words.”
I started thinking of all the ways that data could be used - by scientists researching climate change, by offshore windfarm developers ...
Anahita Laverack, engineering graduate