William Essex
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Love me, love my sandwich

29/11/2018

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Today, I went into a department store and bought myself a sandwich for lunch. Usually, I go into a sandwich shop and buy myself a sandwich for lunch. I’ve just read that back, and frowned, and added the italic type. Yes, I know that I’m the one who tripped on it. I’m not saying that you - oh, never mind. Memo to self: cut down on the coffee. Enough with the jitters.

Anyway. I realise that it’s customary on social media to post a photograph of One’s lunch, the O being ironic because One thinks One is an archaic usage for “I”, but my usual sandwich comes in a brown paper bag, and today’s - well, let me tell you about today’s. Triangular box, more card than cardboard, you know the kind of thing, with a perforation so that you can open the long side and get at the sandwich. I would continue, but it’s the kind of box that sandwiches come in, if you buy them in department stores. You know this box. It’s that box. No! Too late for a photograph. Sorry, sorry. It was good, thank you. No, I’m fine. Love one, but could you make it a decaf?

Where was I? Oh yes. Or buy them at train stations, I was about to say. Or in any setting where the actual business of making the sandwich is remote from the act of buying it. I can sit here and imagine the making of my usual sandwich, because most days, I watch the woman who makes it. I walk in, we exchange the look that passes between a woman who makes sandwiches and a man who eats them (to be clear, this look being the one that passes between them if they don’t know each other beyond this single transaction, and not the look [some text missing here] all passion spent - sorry, I really am going to cut down on the coffee), and she makes me a sandwich.

But today’s sandwich, the one bought from the department store. I suppose it was made by a human being, or at least by a long series of industrial robots with a human being watching over them. One dollops the filling onto the bread, another cuts, here comes the box (carton?) on another conveyor belt, somebody presses the red button and with a rush of compressed air sandwich and box are one. For One to open up and eat. So to speak. On the side of my sandwich box is the phrase “Discover delicious everyday…”, so I suppose I did that earlier, discovered delicious by eating the sandwich, although for “everyday,” I prefer my unambitious brown paper bag.

And its hand-made contents. I’m assuming the phrase is an invitation to discover “delicious” on a regular basis, and not a description of today’s opportunity to discover the “delicious everyday” just once. But your guess is as good as mine. My old Asus tablet used to start the day by displaying the phrase “In search of incredible”. Until I sat on it. Then it discovered recycling. Like the poet ee cummings, incredible preferred lower-case letters. I used to think of him as an unusually mild-mannered old gentleman sitting in the leather armchair next to the fire at the beginning of a story by M R James or, say, H Rider Haggard: oh, professor incredible had a story to tell, if you could get him to tell it.

The fire crackling in the background and the narrator pulling up a footstool, of course. Although if we’re going in search of him, rather than finding him at the outset, maybe I should put him at the heart of darkness and let Joseph Conrad tell the story. His son went into the movies, you know. Delicious, meanwhile, hung out at the Moulin Rouge and was close to the painter Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom she shared - wait a minute! This is a post about a sandwich. And the box it rode in on - came in, I mean. Delicious was only discovered at lunchtime. She won’t be a star just yet, although I suppose it’s just about possible she’s already caught the attention of a young painter - sorry. Returning you now to our scheduled blog post.

On the other side of this box - I just know I should be calling it a carton - is a further message: the principal ingredient of the sandwich was “marinated in a rich, slow-cooked stock then roasted for fantastic flavour and succulence.” It was a perfectly good sandwich, actually, but I won’t tell you what was in it because the more I think of it, the more guilty I’m feeling. Not because I’m unaffected by the mental image of all those cooks marinating my sandwich for fantastic flavour - huh? It was a store-bought sandwich - nor because I must have failed to spot the “I discovered delicious” t-shirt that must have been on sale next to the sandwich, but because…

I don’t know. We’re between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Season of depressing online cartoons about turkeys feeling apprehensive. Sigh. Although the hyped-up verbiage, in this case about a straightforward sandwich, is a year-round thing. I was in a coffee shop the other day, reading the stuff written on the wall about what the baristas do - and then watching the group of fresh-faced, young-looking people behind the counter chatting and laughing and making the occasional coffee - and I thought: no. Marshall McLuhan may have been perceptive, but he was also wrong. The medium is only superficially the message. But how much of the world has floated off into this described medium-reality of marinated sandwiches and lovingly constructed half-fat arabica cappuccinos and - I wonder if the Emulsifier E471 in my sandwich was organic, by the way - and how much of it is still grounded in real reality?

The medium isn’t the message unless you tune into it. The medium is the message if you have a Facebook account, perhaps. Buy a sandwich in one store, and a team of imaginary cooks gather in an imaginary kitchen to marinate and slow-roast and get in each other’s way generally. Walk into my regular sandwich shop and if you have the nerve to ask the woman to describe the origins of the sandwich she’s just handed you, she’ll look at you in a different way and tell you she cut the roll in half and put the [some text missing here] in the middle. Make your own, let’s say, cheese sandwich, and do you … wow, follow the steps in the recipe I’ve just found online for Cheddar Cheese? Your team of baristas - sorry cooks - will have to roll up their sleeves, secure their little hats on their heads, and - taking step 19 as an example - “remove the cheese from the press and air-dry for two to three days”.

I wonder if they’re allowed to blow on it. I’m impressed by how far you plan your lunches in advance. Oh no, wait a minute, sorry, this is imaginary reality.

Let us go then, you and I, to some place beneath the sky where we can hand-pick only the finest coffee beans - oh, okay, you can grab them between your toes - and milk a passing cow that’s only ever fed on the finest pasture, then leave our coffee beans to slow-roast over an open fire of apple-wood logs while we collect the dew from the mountain to fill our copper kettle, and then if the milk’s still fresh - important to do these things in the right order, isn't it? - we can make ourselves hand-painted bone-china mugs of coffee and scroll down together to below the picture, where we’ll find a post about Brexit. Oh, joy.


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"Fog in Channel, Europe cut off," said the apocryphal newspaper headline. The word "apocrypha" is used in another context to describe works that were excluded because they were not in line with official thinking. Such apocrypha weren't apocrypha when they were written, thought, and their insights add something to the story.

It’s morning in Cornwall. England. The UK. The EU. Today’s political messages tell us, one, that “it puts jobs and the economy at risk,” and two, that “it protects jobs, security and the integrity of the United Kingdom.” Pretty obvious what we’re talking about here, so if you don’t mind, I’ll leave “it” at that. If we took any of these people seriously, we’d either be looking forward to “a brighter future for Britain”, or we’d be fearing for our jobs and our rights.

One of those two messages uses the word “could” seven times in six bullet points, by my count, and the other bets, if not the farm, then at least several acres of prime grazing land on a surprising (to me) combination of personality politics and monologues delivered straight to camera by people in suits. Scroll down both - did I mention I’m on Facebook here? - and you get a distinct impression that one’s spent more than the other on buying a social-media strategy. Or paid more attention to the techies, at least.

Just as the Polish cavalry charged the German tanks at the beginning of World War Two, so the next UK election is going to be fought on the playing fields of the internet. Was that the lesson of Obama? Or Corbyn? I forget. But the most recent lesson of history that’s been learned in politics is that social media wins. You connect with young people, et cetera, and they get active. I’d just like to add, for any politicians reading this, that bullet-point lists have been around since magazine covers were printed exclusively on paper. Also, even Generation Whatever’s grandparents could tell you that a short bullet-point list always beats a long one. Maybe we could learn that again some time.

Those who learn the lessons of marketing probably assume that the winning strategies from last time will win again next time. I wonder. If only we could scroll forward to 2022 and read all the political commentators telling us what was obvious to them even as far back as 2018. For my part, I’d just like to clarify one thing. I’ve just re-read the paragraph before this one, and I’d like it understood that “the most recent lesson of history that’s been learned in politics” isn’t necessarily the same as “the most recent lesson of history,” full stop. The most recent lesson, strictly, is the unwelcome one - unwelcome in some of the more vocal circles of our good old liberal democracy, anyway.

We have “it” because a lot of people voted for “it”. We have - oh, never mind. US readers will know what I mean. The vote went that way, so we got him, and the mid-term re-vote wasn’t quite an unambiguous correction of a mistake by an electorate accepting that it got it wrong first time. But we’ve re-classified all that as populism, haven’t we? On both side of the pond? Which means it doesn’t count, right? The lesson of history is still the one before that, correct? Win the online battle for hearts and minds, and you’ve won the election. If participation in online hot-air extrusion is a sufficiently mass activity to ensure - no, forget I said that.

In other news recently, I learned from an inside-page story in a newspaper (younger readers: primitive news medium, printed on paper; newspapers can appear online, but here, the writer seems to be emphasising that this news item wasn’t highlighted in his online news feed) that Hungary, an EU member state, has passed a law criminalising homelessness. I don’t know what I think about the likely impact of the “Draft Agreement on the withdrawal [blah blah blah],” and yes, we have no capital w, on jobs and the economy, but I have scrolled through the 585 pages, and I’m pretty sure the Joint Committee’s going to give us some fun. The rest of it’s a fine example of a contract so very detailed and precise that it can only - I nearly wrote “can only cause argument”, but of course what I really mean is: can only be debated in summary.

Imagine politicians hurling scriptural one-liners back at each other, and you get an idea of what would happen if they decided actually to argue about this thing for real. Clause this, paragraph that, subsection the other says, “Thou shalt not…” Ah, but Clause that, paragraph this, subsection something else specifies that any such prohibition will only apply on Thursdays, when there’s a full moon and an r in the month…” Reading (skimming) this ultra-detailed draft, I begin to see why politics sticks to sound-bites. We can go with either of the messages at the top, according to our baseline emotional allegiance. Or we can ignore it all, because we’re “populists” and, I don’t know, we go with our gut.

But we couldn’t possibly get anything useful from reading this thing, surely? I mean, I’m reassured by this, which you’ll find on page 361. “Taking into account the importance of international cooperation and agreements on labour affairs and of high levels of labour and social protection coupled with their effective protection, the Union and the United Kingdom shall protect and promote social dialogue on labour matters among workers and employers, and their respective organisations, and governments.” Earlier, the negotiators have defined their terms: we know by this stage what “Union” and “United Kingdom” mean. They haven’t defined “protect,” nor “promote,” nor indeed “social dialogue”. But at least both sides can agree on what “United Kingdom” means. No grounds for argument there, eh?

My only problem with the word “populist” is that I can’t quite get alongside any definition that assumes populists listen to any politicians for long enough to be fooled by them. But never mind. My only problem with the Draft Agreement is that there are people in the world who believe that pulling together such a farrago of scrupulously assembled and cross-referenced minutiae could have any bearing on the way real people live. In the real world. Are there windows in the rooms where Brexit negotiators meet? I know they spend their nights as well as their days negotiating together, especially when they're close to deadlines. They negotiate without sleep. But they must get out some time - but never mind.

As I say, I don’t know what I think about the likely impact of the Draft Agreement on anything that really matters, here in real life. But thanks to the weather app on my iPhone, I do know that the temperature is expected to drop below freezing tonight, in Budapest.

Everything else I could have said here about Brexit, I said about some previous festival of tedium in my book Who’s Afraid of the Media-Political Complex? (2014). That’s out of print now, but you can work out most of it from the title. The cover’s over there on the right.

Not comfortable thinking this, and certainly not advocating anything, but if you go back to the simple question asked in the 2016 referendum - leave or stay? - you might begin to wonder whether a no-deal Brexit wouldn’t be the closest match to “the will of the British people”. It would make fools of a lot of people, and do a lot for Theresa May’s long-term reputation, if the eventual release of this year’s cabinet papers revealed that the whole charade has been a devious plot to get out without a deal.

What if she told her people, privately, that she would resign if she didn't get the vote she wanted?

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Stop me if you've heard this before

21/11/2018

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Oh, I love this. Nick Cohen in The Observer, 18th November 2018, discussing the Usual Subject, referred to “political correspondents who couldn’t find a big picture in a multiplex”. Yes! Thank you, Mr Cohen; you made me laugh out loud – sorry, LOL. The gist of all the UK-oriented political reporting that Sunday, and I doubt that anybody in this country could have avoided it, was: something big is about to happen; watch this space. Although something big hardly ever happens, and when it does, we get used to it so quickly. Even [insert your example here] is now a chapter in a history book; at the time, it was an outrage/impossible/too momentous to fit into our understanding.

While something big wasn’t happening in Westminster, whales full of plastic were swimming onto beaches, dolphins were becoming trapped in plastic, and moving from Facebook to another headline in The Observer, “California wildfire survivors now face dangerous flooding”. The number of people missing in California is above 1,000, and now there’s heavy rain forecast. Apparently, this isn’t good news (good news isn’t news; discuss): the rain will put out the fires (I assume, although it’s difficult to rely on any assumption these days), but all that water falling from the sky is a threat in its own right.

Third word in this piece is “love”. When I started writing, I had the first three sentences in my head and a vague idea of where I wanted to go next. I was going to say that yes, there is a big picture, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s bigger than we can see. [If this paragraph ever gets saved in a format that doesn’t degrade over time, and if you’re the forensic archaeologist tasked by the museum to decipher this ancient script*, my message to you is: love the white gloves. And to the ancient-historian standing behind you: no, we really didn’t see it coming. We couldn’t see the bigger, long-term trends that you take for granted as part of our history.]

Where was I? Flipped out there for a second. Oh yes - the bigger picture. Way back a long time ago (January 2012), the “American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360,” Kurt Andersen (he’s on Wikipedia) published an article in the magazine Vanity Fair titled You Say You Want A Devolution? Andersen’s theme was that culturally (not, back then, technologically), we’ve ground to a halt. That article stuck in my head; I might have mentioned it before. You can find it here. Andersen wrote: “Since 1992 … the world has become radically and profoundly new.”

Can we agree on that? Between 1992 and 2012, a lot changed? Yes? [No? Where are you? I’m on my way.] But Andersen went on to say: “Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world … has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past – the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s – looks almost identical to the present.” Look at what they’re wearing and what they’ve done with their hair, and you can tell a sixties person from a fifties person, and both from a seventies person or an eighties person. But not a late-eighties person from a noughties person. [Let's leave shoulder pads out of this.]

I looked up “goth”, just out of curiosity, and apparently the “goth subculture” emerged in the eighties, and has roots in the late nineteenth century. Then I read Jo Ellison’s article Another spoonful of nostalgia? No thanks on the back of the Life & Arts section of the Weekend FT, that same weekend of the 17th/18th November 2018, yes, and the theme was that, well, Jo Ellison wrote: “Idling over an ancient 1983 issue of The Face magazine on holiday last month, I was struck by how many cultural touchstones were still so familiar, and yet I was horrified to realise just how little things have changed.” Ah, The Face [^smiles faintly, faraway look, remembering^].

Jo Ellison hit para return and continued: “When did we get stuck in this compulsion to recreate the past?” Fashion, film and culture in general have become stuck on nostalgia. In fashion, which supposedly “venerates the new” (Jo Ellison), designers are being “drawn back into their archives” (ditto). Clothes are self-expression, which I suppose we’ve internalised via our assortment of smart devices.  I remember, vaguely, those successive experiences of catching up with something new, from hair that suddenly needed to be like this, to that sudden aching lack of, I don’t know, flares or drainpipes or - no, I’m not going to revive the memory of that outfit. I look at old photographs, and I think: did we really dress like that? In public? On purpose?

We did. And it mattered to us. Perhaps technology is a jealous god, and demands all our attention. Perhaps we’ve found technology’s unintended consequence. We’re so keen to be spontaneous that we trap spontaneity and repeat it - a store put out a witty Christmas ad a few years back, and now the annual debate over big-store Christmas advertising is, ah, traditional. There’s so much we want to do, but because tech’s made everything else so easy we’re too impatient to learn how to do it, so we teach. Count the online training courses in things you want to do; count the number in which instruction number one is, for example: write a good novel, or, say, first come up with a brilliantly innovative idea. Scrivener’s wonderful, to reply to my friend who asked my opinion of it, and it’ll do everything for you except have that original idea.

It’s as if we’re circling originality, circling creativity, round and round, very close, never quite connecting with whatever it was in our heads that made new ideas so easy. I won’t repeat my usual rant about all the films these days being remakes, because I’m pretty sure it was boring enough the first time, and I am (pretending to be) reluctant to mention the review of my book that couldn’t be posted where it was intended to be posted because it didn’t conform to that platform’s requirements. You can’t enthuse without conforming? [Wait a minute – only four stars?] It was emailed to me instead. But what I will do – getting back on track – is wonder aloud whether we’re in the middle of some vast transition from before to after; from pre-tech to post-tech?

Naah. Rubbish. See above re something big not happening. But I do think of technology in terms of unintended consequences these days. I do wonder, watching the politics, watching the culture, checking my Facebook, checking my messages, rechecking my Facebook, scrolling through my emails, checking my Facebook – no, wait, haven’t I just done that? – and just making sure that I haven’t got anything waiting for me on Instagram or Messenger, I do wonder whether it’s time for somebody, somewhere – hold on, just a sec … oh no, sorry, it’s just another Leave Home Without Your Phone message from the phone company – I do wonder whether, um, sorry, isn’t technology distracting? I had this idea, and I – hold on, my phone again.

Have you heard about the Christmas film, by the way? No, not – at least, I don’t think there’s another Star Wars due, is there? No, I’m talking about the one about the nanny. She’s called Mary Poppins, apparently, and she does magic. She has an umbrella. No, it’s nothing to do with the Dursleys; Harry stays at school during the holidays, doesn’t he? What bear from Peru?

Oh, hold on. “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,” said J M Barrie. Do you hear that sound outside the window? No, don’t open–

Oh. It’s you. Again.

It’s in the drawer, out of sight. As always.

Don’t let it get away. This time.

*I would provide a simultaneous translation into another language and script, perhaps two, as a self-conscious reference to the Rosetta Stone, but I doubt any of today’s available translation software would give you a close enough match.

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Looked at this picture, and looked at this picture, and eventually it struck me that this picture is on its side. Taken into the sun, perhaps. I don't know. But it held my attention for a while, which is the test (to the extent that there is one), so here it is.

This is how Western Civilisation works. We sell stuff to people who are paid enough to buy it. They make stuff, get paid, buy stuff, make more stuff. In their - our - free time, we’re shown advertising. Most of what we see promotes self-delusion, because (for example) roads are never as empty as they are in car ads, and it hardly ever snows at Christmas (although, looking out of the window…). We live in one world; we waking-dream in another. We track the production of stuff and the consumption of stuff, and the resulting numbers give us The Economy, which is discussed as though it exists.
 
That many young, attractive people have never gathered around the screen of your smartphone and laughed together in a touchy-feely way at whatever they saw there. [They have? Show me your smartphone.] You may have bought alcohol with a fancy logo on the bottle, but that was rarely because you were heading off to a late-night beach party with bonfires and lanterns and raucous background music, where several hundred of your coolest, funniest, most diverse (but still young and photogenic) friends were just waiting to let you in on the joke. [Really? I’m on my way.]
 
I’m going to guess that you don’t pop next door to chat to your friend about your washing powder. Or your brand of instant coffee. You don’t conduct tests on stains made by your baby, because your baby rarely makes exactly matching simultaneous stains bang in the middle of two white towels that are laid out side by side on your kitchen worktop. [She does? I’d love to come to lunch, but I think I’m busy that day.] Do you really think that desirable person in that eye-catching outfit is going to give you that expression as you drive slowly through the empty city in your stubby little primary-coloured new hatchback? No, never works for me, either.
 
What we think we think is important (sorry, but that really is what I meant to type) is different from what we actually think is important. Even politics is a form of self-delusion. The petition for a “people’s vote” (second referendum because of how much we didn’t like the first) on you-know-what had a target of 350,000 signatures and was close to that when I last looked. The petition to get Iceland’s Christmas ad shown on TV had passed 670,000 signatures by last week. There’s a Norway option and a Canada option for Brexit and maybe we need an Iceland option.
 
Why are we so exercised about a trade deal? Because it’s about prices in the shops? Because we need something to matter? Because it's on television, between the ads? Wait a minute - are we so exercised about a trade deal? Perhaps it's the being exercised that works for us, and not the trade deal. Perhaps we're just miffed that the voices of the centre (that cannot hold, by the way) never stop for long enough to let us speak? But hey - never mind. Populism has so many forms and now so many definitions but so few friends in the media that it's in danger of becoming fashionable. With the young? Like punk? Perhaps the whole thing will finally jolt us out of this current - or maybe it won't, but so what? There are Brexiteers hiding in the shrubbery at the far end of the communal garden. Does that matter? The dogs bark but life goes on.
 
The music you play is still beautiful. In Falmouth, the trees still talk in the wind and the sea gets rough and bracing and then, as you get closer, noisy enough to fill all the senses. There are still birds in the sky, and clouds passing. There’s a castle here, and last night we went for a walk around the moat: trees black against the last of the sunset; three dogs. Natural sounds are beautiful; the sea is the sea and always will be; life goes on.
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Swipe on the wild side

14/11/2018

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Delighted to discover, the other day, that the Dutch “media personality and motivational guru” (says the BBC) Emile Ratelband has asked a court in Arnhem to declare him 49. Mr Ratelband’s birth occurred on 11th March 1949, and he’d like it moved forward to the same day and month in 1969. He’ll remain a Pisces, but he’ll be remarkably precocious if he has any memories of, say, the moon landing. Or of, I don’t know, going fishing with an older relative when he was fourteen, six years before his birth.

Put that date (day and month) and the words “birth sign” into a search engine, and you discover that Mr Ratelband is “a complex individual full of intuition, confidence and a complex approach to life matters” (says www.thehoroscope.co - yes, just dot co at the end). Leave aside such considerations as possibly shunting the birthday forward so that it falls at the beginning of the Summer school holidays - Mr Ratelband’s nature “combines creativity and intuition with a sense of responsibility and with dignified behaviour” (ditto), and my guess is that he’s actually making a serious point.

“We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender. Why can't I decide my own age?" Mr Ratelband is quoted as saying (BBC again). Tinder doesn’t work for him at 69 as well as it would if he was 49, apparently, and his employment prospects would improve if he was able to tell a different truth about his age. “When I'm 69, I am limited. If I'm 49, then I can buy a new house, drive a different car. I can take up more work," is another quotation that I’ve just cut and pasted from the BBC. Mr Ratelband’s doctor, I read here, tells him he has the body of a 45-year-old.

Maybe I could drive into Truro and ask the Magistrates’ Court there for a ruling that I’m a “media personality and motivational guru”. Maybe that would be a worthwhile career move. But in the meantime, I remember hearing a scientist-on-TV, a while back, saying that he couldn’t refute any of the logical steps in the argument towards the conclusion that we live in some version of The Matrix (1999). Sorry - mentioned a film. More to the point, I don’t think I can - or at least, have any right to - reject any logical step in Mr Ratelband’s argument that, how to put this, he’s as old as he and his doctor feel he is.

If Mr Ratelband quacked in a certain way, and swam in a certain way, et cetera, I’d have to say that “Emile Ratelband” is a distinctly unusual name for a pet duck. But Mr Ratelband wants to succeed on Tinder. He wants to work more, drive a different car… I’d say he’s an obvious 49-year-old. The suggestion “act your age” cuts both ways, surely? And anyway, age, like the passing of time generally, is just something else onto which we’ve imposed measurement. We have “the economy”, for example, whatever that is, and GDP, and blood pressure; we had the millennium bug, and the Mayan calendar; an old wife told me a tale recently about twins, born either side of midnight, who had to start school in different academic years.

It’s pretty much arbitrary, right? I’m [some text missing here] in human years, but a dog would get to my age in [some text missing here] and a mayfly shortly after sunrise, possibly, but certainly before lunch. Tea, anyway. I’m old enough to be reminded, regularly, that “You’re as young as you feel,” but if the china-clay industry here is still building those “Cornish Alps” of waste near St Austell (I don’t think it is), I could claim to be as old as at least some of the hills. Age is just a number, and in this context, possibly not even that. [These days, come to think of it, a birth date counts as sensitive personal information: we have to use different passwords every time, and change them regularly; perhaps my birth date should have at least one capital letter and a symbol in it - and change regularly.]

We can change our birth certificates already, of course, as Mr Ratelband points out. We can change our names; we can transition from male to female, female to male, and have our legal system respect our new gender. Heck, when we marry, or enter into any equivalent arrangement (could we just let that pass?), the forces of law and order are on hand to change our status. I remember that news story, a few years back (wrote about it then): the Glastonbury Festival introduced an enclosure for people who “self-identified as female”. I could do that, if I was looking to meet women, and how would you challenge my self-identification? Heck, give me advance warning, and I could even bring a birth certificate.


I imagine that there are times - in the day, the month, the year, the life - when it would be convenient either to switch from one, ah, arrangement of bits and qualities to another, or failing that to self-identify as young, old, male, female, and then to switch back again later, or to some other combination of, um. Life deals us a hand, and the less we’re stuck with playing it, perhaps the better. Some of life’s differences - inequalities, unfairnesses - are inbuilt. You’re tall or you’re short, thin or big-boned, inconveniently attractive to nuisances or not allowed near the zoo for fear of scaring the animals - and it’s either difficult or impossible to switch any of that off.

But if I wanted to serve as a front-line soldier, or become a nurse (as distinct from a “male nurse”), or a PC (the term “WPC” is no longer used), or claim my state pension on the same day as my imaginary twin sister gets it, or join a Working Men’s Choir or a Women’s Group, I can see that there would be some advantage to going online and clicking the M box to F for a few days, or vice-versa. I can see why I might not be a popular winner of, let’s invent, The Young Woman Of The Year Award, but my point isn’t that I should be entitled to cross even the most well-founded boundary, but that the surmountable obstacles should remain, well, surmountable. Let’s all be equal; let’s make difference history.

The legal system can offer protection to the vulnerable, which makes sense, and I suppose a measure of social engineering is inevitable. But where I would draw the line: the state has no business insisting on the immutability of artificial difference. [I checked ‘immutability’ online, and the first definition given was ‘not mutable’. Uh huh.] State-imposed difference, on top of natural difference, is too much. Years of an exact length are as artificial as the pagan festival of shopping that we’re going to celebrate through December. Global warming, actually, changes the length of the seasons and thus makes years bendy anyway.


I’d say let Mr Ratelband be 49. We live in a culture that insists on self-expression - even my local supermarket tells me to “live my style”, whatever that means - and if young Emile proves after all to be older than he thinks he is - the people he meets on Tinder will convince him of that, not the court in Arnhem.

I wonder how he’s planning to celebrate his fiftieth, next March. Will he invite the same people as last time, or friends his own age?

PS: I wrote this, and then I watched Anne Lamotte’s TED talk entitled 12 truths I learned from life and writing, which was shared by Climbing Tree Books’ elegant and witty Head of Sharing a few days ago. Life, age and death all feature; recommended. That ended and on came Lidia Yuknavitch’s TED talk entitled The beauty of being a misfit. Watch that too. These are new names to me - life and writing are bigger than I realised.

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With this picture, Essex gives us a strikingly contemporary take on the theme "sunrise". Not for him the endless horizons, blue sea below and blue sky above, nor the familiar reddening sky above blue hills and green. No, this picture, "Morning in the City: Sunrise", at once challenges our preconceptions and reminds us of how far we have come from that primal, indeed mythic, scene. Note the wide strip of grey concrete that makes up almost half the picture, vertically cut by four straight lines and yet redeemed by the faintest narrow triangle of new sunlight. And inside: is that a mirror or a screen that the sunlight somehow fails to illuminate? I mean, who cares, right?

Do we even follow the rules of improvisation? I read somewhere, perhaps in one of the Malcolm Gladwell books*, that improvised theatre only works if each actor accepts (responds positively to) whatever’s just been said. So if I turn to you and say “Where did you get that black eye?”, the “rule” of improvisation, if there can be such a thing, dictates that you have to run with the idea that you have a black eye.

You might have been punched by one of the other actors, so the drama can unfold around that, or you might have inadvertently used black paint rather than make-up this morning - and we’re in absurdist theatre: the one-way pendulum still swings, Mr Simpson. Or you might be setting out on a date with a giant panda. But if you come back with some variation on “I haven’t got a black eye!”, the whole thing grinds to a halt, rotten fruit gets thrown, and the theatre empties in a miasma of grumbling and resentment.

The principle of what used to be called “brainstorming” is that you keep coming up with ideas. You don’t stop to comment on an idea, or discuss how you could implement it, because once you do, the session grinds to a halt and you all sit watching the person who’s, ah, killed the vibe. [Would "taken you out of the zone" work better there? Suddenly said; "How are we going to do that?" is what I mean.] Ideas spark ideas - you can weed out the silly ones later. Just keep firing ideas at each other, and let it go on until you’re pretty sure that four or five of the sixteen ideas you’ve got might actually work (then hang on for the seventeenth).

People who can do improvisation get the idea quite quickly; people who can’t, never do. There are people in the world who should never be invited to participate in a brainstorming session, and others who should be bribed to attend. But I got to thinking. We had a conversation about “mansplaining” the other day, my friend and I. Delightful word, inspired by Rebecca Solnit. A man had insisted on telling her all about a book she had herself written (and told him she’d written). Suddenly I don’t feel like explaining any more about the word “mansplaining”.

Women do it too, I said in the imaginary version of the conversation that ran through my head after the actual conversation had ended and I’d left for home. I don’t think there’s any need for the word “womansplaining”, but “mansplaining” isn’t quite as gendered as the term itself might suggest. I could give examples, but I’m not quite that stupid (perhaps there should be a word for the implicit micro-man-to-man-joke contained there?). Who cares, though? Just say “Men!” or ”Women!” in the tone that the word itself dictates, and leave it at that.

What I wanted to say was, we’ve all got our barriers up. Not exactly that we’re all ready to be offended, but that - well, if life was an improv., which it is when you come to think of it, we wouldn’t necessarily take kindly to the suggestion that we have a black eye. How dare you comment on my appearance? Have you considered the feelings of people who have skin blemishes around their eyes? I’m going to tell Facebook about you!


Sometimes, I suspect that being offended is the response that goes with seeing life as a competition. If you’re offended, you’re one up on the person who has offended you, and (I have a horrible feeling I’m about to use the term “passive-aggressive”) in a passive-aggressive kind of way, you’ve made them a target. Your comforters gather around you, and the prat who offended you gets carted off to the guillotine of public opinion (sorry - I wish I’d seen that overly lurid phrase coming too; I could have averted it).


But life isn’t a competition. Except to the extent that it is. Life is a something-or-other in which we need allies, friends, companions, supporters and people to support. There’s something naturally tribal in us that makes us competitive, but above that, the tribal instinct gives us a need for a tribe. May I say “Duh” here? We’re tribal, so we need a tribe. But a bigger tribe is stronger, and the boundaries of a tribe can be extended … a long way. And anyway - it’s only animals in captivity that get stressed enough to attack their own kind. Is this Western Civilisation that we’re living in, or some kind of captivity?


I like that colour around your eyes, by the way.

*Blink (2005). You can, if you wish, go online and find at least one impassioned refutation of Malcolm Gladwell's take on improvised theatre. I say: it makes sense to me.

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Surf's down

7/11/2018

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So anyway. I was thinking about what to write this time, and it struck me that I hadn’t said anything about mindfulness for a while. Or meditation. Words beginning with m generally. Then it struck me that I haven’t read anything about mindfulness for a while either. I’ve never written anything about mindfulness, I realised, thinking about it, and it’s been some time since I last got told to be mindful. And as for meditation - no, not for - wait for it - a while. [Don’t you hate that niggly thing where you realise you’re repeating a phrase, but you just can’t stop? Haven’t had that for a while either.]

Have we given up on all that, or is there an app for it now? I know it’s possible to be meditative by sharing dinky little pictures of candles burning, on Facebook, overlaid with pat little quotations from, oh I don’t know, brainyquote.com. Not that I’ve even heard of brainyquote.com, you understand. If I want a quote, I light one of the lanterns, descend the spiralling stone steps to the library, scoot along the racks with my library ladder (which is on wheels that don’t squeak, thank you very much) and bring out the ancient leather volume most likely to contain something pithy about whatever dull paragraph I want to enliven.

And then I go back up the steps to get my notebook and reading glasses, cursing inventively as I go, and descend again to the library. Once I’m there, I work out what I’m doing there from the volume on the table - old oak table with the faces of dragons carved at the corners - and the shape in the dust where the ladder is usually parked - yes, I’m old enough to walk into rooms and wonder why I’m there - and I’ll spend a happy afternoon filling my notebook with enough quotations to enliven - in fact, no. I’ll keep going until I hit a quotation that inspires (sic) a whole new piece of writing, and then I’ll rush upstairs to write that.

Leaving my non-writing glasses on the table, of course. The rest of the week will be spent looking for them. When I was a lot smaller than I am now, I remember reading/being read stories about Professor Branestawm, which I now discover were written by Norman Hunter. No, I consulted Wikipedia on that one. I have my principles, but I can swap them out quite easily - to misquote Groucho Marx. Anyway, it was the height of good humour, back in the young days, that when the professor couldn’t find his other glasses, they were generally pushed up on his head. Thank you, Norman Hunter, for the happy memory and those long-ago happy moments.

Where was I? Oh yes - my glasses. Spectacles if you prefer. They’re here - I’ve got them. But we’re no nearer deciding what I’m going to write about this time. Although it does occur to me…

What if we’d gone that way, rather than this? What if, somewhat less than fifty years ago, the proponents of meditation, mindfulness, mystical finding yourself and reading self-help books about bettering yourself from the inside out, regardless of whether you could afford the ticket out to the ashram and the time to sit cross-legged in front of a guru - what if those people had been just a tiny bit more persuasive, and what if the proponents of gadgetry had been just a tiny bit less persuasive?

We’d be waking up in the morning and aligning our chakras rather than checking our Facebook pages. We’d be doing the night before’s washing up while visualising (going to) our happy places, rather than grumbling about a certain person’s failure to honour the unspoken contract whereby you cook and she washes up after. We’d hug trees, and even - perhaps we’d buy clothes by trying them on. Flicking through my week-old copy of The Korea Times the other day, and yes, I know I'm changing the subject rather abruptly, I came across an article in the business section headlined AR fitting room enhances customer experience.

The picture shows a woman in a white dress facing an image of herself in a blue outfit. So far as I can tell, the image is as exact as a reflection - she has an arm raised, so does the self in the blue - but instead of a straightforward mirror, she’s looking at the company FXGear’s F X Mirror, which might be describable as a six-foot-tall screen that looks like a smartphone giving her back a selfie dressed in something else. Or it might not, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

I’d love to have one here, actually. Fine piece of kit, and no doubt the journalist/sub-editor who put the word “experience” in the headline was thinking about the experience of looking at yourself. I see how this works. It is a selfie, effectively, but with the clothing substituted. Think of the storytelling potential. Or the FaceTime. The model’s standing in a big, empty room - if you want a big, empty changing room, and/or your cat needs swinging, go to South Korea - while her pictured self seems to be standing in a slightly different empty room. But - well, I’d use it to see how I looked wearing this outfit while striding through the action in [insert name of film here]. Or I’d get together a picture of myself partying at - I don’t know where - and post that on Facebook while I meditated. You could have a mirror on the wall that showed a different room.

Not only that, that and that, but if I happened to wonder, say, how would I like the experience of surfing off the North Coast with a gale blowing and the waves crashing around me? In the first of the three parallel universes that have collided in today’s post, I could project that experience onto a giant selfie and look at it. In the second, I could sit cross-legged on my yoga mat and visualise the experience until I felt myself getting cold (my imaginary wetsuit is only Summer-proof). In the third of today’s parallel universes, which is the one so outlandish that I’m not even going to consider it - I could go surfing.

And wouldn’t that be a mistake?

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Yes, and let's not forget words beginning with a Z. Nice suit.

Come on, human race. You can do this. Stop warning me about plastic waste and come up with a solution. Ban the manufacture of new plastic bottles. Reclassify plastic waste as a resource, buy it, and make intelligent road surfaces out of it. With embedded wifi to talk to self-driving cars - oh sorry, I wrote about that already. Or use plastic to make building bricks. Life-size Lego houses. Mix it into cement. Fire it into space. Hey, wash the bottles and put drinks in them. I don’t know. But we’ve come a long way since those early days when the only problem was how to catch or cultivate lunch. I’m not convinced that there’s any problem we can’t solve, if we put our collective mind to it.

Create a new material that uses old plastic as an ingredient. Make clothes out of it. Fund some crazed scientist with a plan for turning plastic into food. I don’t know. But okay, you’ve got the message across. We hear you and we’re all in a quite satisfying state of deep gloom. Feel as self-righteous as you like. Now, can we do something? Collect up all the plastic waste and built a pyramid? A tourist attraction? Apply it in some clever way to sorting out global warming? Can we do that?

No, I don’t suppose we can. I’m not sure whether this is the age of “My contribution won’t make a difference, so I needn’t bother,” or of “This problem isn’t making a direct difference to my life, so I needn’t bother,” but either way - no, we can’t. We’re all doomed and we might as well stay doomed. People don’t heed warnings from the centre, and my guess is, we’ve all worked out that politicians agreeing to limit climate change doesn’t work. Sorry, “world leaders” agreeing, I should say. Leaders - ha!

Although… In my part of the world, people head to the beach with bin bags, and fill them. Early in the morning, on Gyllyngvase Beach, most mornings, there’s a group of year-round early swimmers picking up litter, and there are even small organisations now, rallying local people to clear up the waste left by, well, local people as well as tourists, I imagine, and while I realise blame is counter-productive, let’s bring in containers fallen off container ships and broken open, odd bits of yacht debris, and a base layer of completely inexplicable oddments that have tangled themselves up with the seaweed.

There was that year when a whole consignment of perfectly good planks washed up on Cornish beaches and, um, evaporated in the strong sea air. But there are also too many hooks and nets and sharp objects generally, killing the wildlife and endangering children, and it’s no surprise that the people around here take action. Plastic is in their lives.

But does that mean we have to wait for plastic to matter directly and immediately to everybody before we get our act together? Or is there an opportunity here to think satisfyingly pretentious thoughts about how we govern ourselves? Grenfell Tower - the locals came together and helped while central government blithered about in the background. Plastic - there are people in Cornwall picking up waste even as we speak. [A new “fashionable activity” flashed by on Facebook yesterday. It has a name, which I’ve forgotten, sorry, but it’s simply: when you go out for a walk or a swim or whatever, take a bag for rubbish. I hope it catches on.]

Yes, there are journalists in London writing articles about how futile it is to pick up waste, but, y’know. As long as they’re out of the way and kept busy.


Instead of bugging everybody to deal with their plastic now, maybe we should just give up on central government and embrace local - actually, I hate seeing perfectly good words with ‘ism’ tacked on the end. Maybe we should go back to running things on a human scale. Before everything collapses and we can’t do otherwise. Because the point at which plastic in what we eat - not to mention global warming - becomes a direct issue for everybody is also the point at which it’s too late.
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