“I wish you had been a parson or anything but a sailor,” wrote Jenny, wife of Captain Rodney, in 1756. “Then I had not known the uneasiness of being parted from him I love better than life.”For some, the loneliness was the worst thing. For others, it was the prolonged separation and the anxiety that their husband and the father of their children might be lost at sea.As for the sailors, they spent, and no doubt still do spend, a great deal of time thinking about women. Many of their songs and sea shanties featured women; they decorated their arms and chests with tattoos dedicated to their mothers and sweethearts; they collected souvenirs to take home to their women; and above all they wrote letters to their women.Captain Collingwood, who would not tolerate women on board his ship, desperately missed his wife and two daughters. He told his wife that he had resolved that “when this war is happily terminated to think no more of ships, but pass the rest of my days in the bosom of my family, where I think my prospects of happiness are equal to any man’s.”He never obtained his wish. He took command of the British fleet in the Mediterranean after the death of Nelson, and died at sea a few years later..

There is something in the swagger and that inane look of intense concentration which is especially noticeable midway through a sentence. There is something in the swagger and that inane look of intense concentration which is especially noticeable midway through a sentence. Then, with all the publicity for the remake of Planet of the Apes, I realised what was bugging me about George W Bush. It was his simian side, the one that kept telling me that the most powerful man in the world was really a chimpanzee in a suit.
It’s not just me that’s noticed his ape-like mannerisms.

There is, after all, an entire website dedicated to photographic comparisons between the former Texan oilman and our closest living relative ( www.bushorchimp. com). But even this inventive webmaster was forced to concede defeat with one particularly stupid-looking picture of Dubya in mid flow “I apologise for this late entry. I cannot find a chimp making a face as dumb as this one,” the webmaster writes in the box where the ape should be.But, to be fair to President Bush, there is a little simian in all of us. As the geneticists are fond of pointing out, chimps and humans share something like 98.4 per cent of their DNA. We also shared a common ancestor a mere seven million years ago, a blink of the eye in evolutionary time. It is no wonder that we see a bit of them in us, and a lot of us in them, which explains why the remake of Planet of the Apes is fuelling such interest.To some scientists, Homo sapiens is the “third chimpanzee”, meaning we sit alongside the two other species – the common chimp and the bonobo, or pygmy chimp – on anatomically equal terms. The only thing that really separates us is our vast brain, which in Dubya’s case is perhaps not as vast as Mother Nature had originally intended.So although some of us possess a natural ability to ape our simian alter egos, none of us can claim to be above comparison.