At 9:26 this morning I dried the seat of my trousers in a train station toilet. It was a unisex one. It’s a weird thing to bend over and present your bum to a hand dryer. I had to reach behind me and deflect the stream of warm air onto the damp bit. That's not really what I wanted to talk about. I’ll come back to it.
Some people know I go running, although lately I haven’t done much of it because of a knee injury. On Tuesday though, I went out for the first time since mid-August. At this time of year, when I go out in the morning, it’s still night, and I wear a headlamp. It’s a really good one, it's got bluetooth. It’s really bright, and I’m still stunned by how wet grass looks by headlamp in the darkness. Like a lenticular print, ten-Xed. You’re not completely sure it’s even there.
Anyway, key animals include foxes and cats, because the reflection on their eyes is also quite stunning. I think foxes’ eyes are brighter, and I’ve been wondering quite a lot, if I invented the reflective road stud today, would it be called a Foxeye?
I sort of thought cats’ eyes reflected at night because of how wide their pupils are in the dark. I thought that’s how they see in the dark, they can let in way more light. I don’t know if you saw the video of a woman interviewed by TV news, she’d been up all night - for hours - queuing to see the late queen. But she was so happy, she was grinning her face off. She was so happy to be interviewed, she was licking her lips and grinding her teeth with joy. And after the interviewer finished with her, she ran away up the street. She had big pupils. Imagine if you went out clubbing, and everyone’s eating carrots and in the dark and amidst the lasers we’ve all got glowing catseyes.
But anyway that might have been a fake video. I saw it about three days ago, and it only just occurred to me today, it could have been faked, quite easily. If it was fake, then that’s a pretty funny, pretty harmless way to get some engagement, get some reach, get some followers, build an audience, spread your message.
There’s a lot of the same information on the internet over and over again about cats’ eyes. We should write some content for clients about foxes’ eyes. I searched something like, “why do cats’ eyes reflect in the dark,” and not the top listing but one of the listings is from the Cats Protection League. But the Cats Protection League doesn’t offer a balanced view on cats. The Cat Information League would be better, but it doesn’t exist.
Both cats and foxes and lots of other animals have a layer of tissue in their eyes behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum. It’s reflective, and it’s for seeing in the dark. Some of the light that enters the eye hits the retina, but some that passes through or around the retina is reflected back onto the retina from the other side, so that the eye’s structure maximises the amount of light that the brain is able to process to think about why someone’s running towards them in the middle of the night.
A reflective road stud though is not an eye. It’s a flexible plastic dome with a reflective surface, in a metal housing. The housing has a reservoir to catch rainwater under the dome, and when a car drives over the stud, a fixed plastic wiper cleans the reflective surface. It was invented and patented in 1934 by Percy Shaw, and you would have thought that if you’d invented a road stud, that’s laid every ten metres along every edge of every lane on every motorway, A road - and some busy B roads - not only in the UK, but in many countries worldwide, you’d be absolutely minted. But Percy Shaw died with a relatively modest estate. I didn’t find out what he did with all his money, but I did find out that in his later life he kept four televisions in his house, all of them always switched on, but all with the sound turned down, one tuned to BBC1, one to ITV, and two to BBC2. One of the BBC2 ones was on a colour TV. He explained that this was to avoid arguments when his friends came round for beer and crisps.
Have a good weekend.