From the Selfish Gene to the Sermon on the Mount — Andrew Gosler's Journey

Early teens.

Or no.

Well, ve- very, very early teens.

In fact, I must have been pretty hooked by the time of my bar mitzvah at 13.

So there's a thing I don't think we've mentioned.

I'm a Jewish convert.

In that, it's customary to have y- you know, uh, presents.

And, and one thing I really wanted for my bar mitzvah, age 13, was a cassette tape recorder.

There may be people listening to this who don't know what a cassette tape recorder is.

[laughs]

But, but anyway, bless them, look it up on Google.

But anyway, it, it is basically-

[laughs]

... for recording sound.

And because I wanted, I was getting into birdsong, and I wanted to record birdsong.

So by the age of 13, I did that, and Dad bought me a cassette tape recorder.

I remember effectively...

So the thing about bar mitzvah as a kind of threshold, so this was the liberal and progressive, uh, synagogue in Ealing, in West London.

And the way our family regarded it was that is a sort of threshold event in life, and after that, you make your own decisions about, you know, religion and, and what have you.

So basically, I said, "Right, that's religion done with.

Now I'm going birding or bird watching or whatever," [laughs] you know.

Uh, I mean, that's how I would describe it today.

I didn't actually say that.

But that's effectively what happened.

And my impression of things religious as a, you know, by that age, was I was becoming very aware of the impact that humans, we, were having on the, on the planet.