Writing Diary
A Story in a Petri Dish
Weird times require weird ways of working
These are strange times. For the first few weeks of lockdown, I couldn’t write. It wasn’t only the pandemic, but also other stresses, like having to find a new place to live. The old method of wrangling my writing ducks into a orderly row before starting no longer worked for me. So I abandoned waterbirds for a smaller source of inspiration.
Growing It Like Bacteria
To culture bacteria, you need a growing medium. The most widely used medium is agar, a gelatinous substance extracted from red seaweed. When poured into a Petri dish and left to set, it produces a surface as smooth and even as an unmarked page.
You can see where I’m going with this.
Bacterial colonies start from a single cell. Once the cell grows to a certain size, it divides to form two cells. These grow and divide, and so on. After ten rounds of division, one cell has turned into 1024; after another ten, well over half a million cells sit on the plate.
You’ve probably seen photos of Petri dishes with colonies of bacteria growing on the medium. Something invisible to the unaided eye grows into visible blots.
