William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
  • Dear Diary
  • About Us
  • Back Stories
  • Read My Shorts?

Swipe on the wild side

14/11/2018

0 Comments

 
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.

Picture
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.

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

    RSS Feed

    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

    Picture
    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


    There's a picture, it's just loading...
    You found me!
    Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
    William Essex? Click here
    to meet some more.



    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

    Picture
    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

    Archives

    May 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011

    Picture
    Out of print. Sorry.
No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.