Thursday 19 December 2019
St Lawrence Jewry With The Lights On
It was the Lord Mayor's Carol Service Thursday evening, and they turned the lights on in St Lawrence Jewry, so they could move stuff around and have a dust before the City Gentry turned up. I'm not really a City person, but this did make me realise that, while the Bank of England at one end of Throgmorton Street might be the centre of the financial universe, the centre of the traditional City is St Pauls and the Guildhall. Which is where St Lawrence Jewry is.
Monday 16 December 2019
Simply Be - A Road Sign
This is a bus-stop and sign on a journey I make around once-a-week, and have been for years. Suddenly it became a photograph. The subject isn't the girls, or the silly ad, but the road sign.
Covered in pollen and tree dust, only really visible in winter, and offering a choice of destinations ranging from the downright insalubrious (Hanworth) to the supposedly posh (Twickenham), with Hounslow somewhere in the middle.
The advert gets cleaned and renewed because capitalism. The road sign stays dirty because why should Hounslow council spend my local taxes cleaning their road signs?
Week three of the Great SW Trains Guards strike. Nearly Xmas.
Thursday 12 December 2019
The Load We Have To Move
I read James Wallman’s book on how we can improve the way we use our spare time, and in putting some remarks together, kept going off at a tangent. Wallman’s book is full of life-hacks, some reasonable and some utterly silly, and I don’t like hacks because I’d rather identify and solve the underlying problem. The underlying reasons for why people waste their spare time on junk activities are about the structure of their lives, and that takes us away from simple hacks to some serious reviews and actions that lack best-seller friendliness.
Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...
and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.
Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.
Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.
That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.
Because that’s what living is.
Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...
and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.
You are someone who respects themselves, and is lucky enough to have friends and co-workers who are considerate enough to express their thanks for what you do for them. Earn a living working in a company that produces something legal that people want and are not forced by law to pay for (*). Pay your taxes and not whine about it. Work hard, exercise, eat right, not drink too much, and not buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t care about. Stay away from junk culture, junk food, junk activities and junk people. Try all sorts of things until you find food, drink, music, literature, movies, dance, theatre, sports, athletic and outdoor activities, that you like. Learn to cook, buy food, and keep your lodgings clean. Learn how to recognise users, losers and abusers, and keep them out of your life. Learn how to recognise scientific, political, economic, commercial and personal fraud. (It isn’t as hard as you might think.) Learn to follow the money: ask, about anyone who is getting press coverage and telling you how you should behave, where they are getting their money from, who is financing them? Learn how to find tradesmen to do what you can’t, and don’t begrudge paying them a fair price. Learn how to find and make friends - keeping them depends as much on them as on you. Learn how to find jobs and interview well for them, and also to leave politely when it’s obvious the job is a crock.That’s the load.
You are not going to get married or enter into a domestic relationship unless your parents and her parents are still happily married. You are not going to have children until you are married, and unless you can think, right now, of three ways of keeping a four year-old, a ten year-old and a seventeen-year-old from being bored in whatever the weather is right now. (You should remember those from your own childhood.) Learn Game so you are not tongue-tied and awkward when you meet a woman you want to have an affair with, and especially the one you want to have children with, because you're going to need to Game her for the rest of your life.
Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.
Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.
That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.
Because that’s what living is.
Monday 9 December 2019
On Death
Some philosophers are obsessed by death, seeing it as some kind of defining event in the human condition, but more than that, as a kind of swindle. Death steals life from us. Just when we got it all figured out and are no longer driven by tyrannical hormonal urges (either ours or the childrens’) - bosh! The Grim Reaper comes along and spoils our fun.
Or something like that.
The death of healthy young people is theft, a moral flaw in the Universe. They really have had their lives stolen from them. Old gits like me, not so much. I’ve had my life, made what little of it I could, and my time has passed.
Suffering is another thing. I regard death, mostly, as a release from suffering, and especially the suffering of injury, disease and old age. A young person who lives in paid and has to spend an hour a day on some machine is being released by death, not cheated.
Death was a release for my friend Terence last year, my friend Chris died in his early sixties from the after-effects of prostate cancer, after almost ten years of a second-chance after the first operation that gave a happy family life in those years. Another man I knew, Richard, fell over in the bath after a seizure. He was in his mid-forties. Outwardly his life looked just fine, but his emotional life was something out of a 1950’s black and white English movie, the ones with the domineering mother. Richard’s death was unfair: he still had time to change. My father died peacefully in his sleep after a post-operative blood clot hit his heart.
It’s not death that’s scary. Either nothing happens, you go to heaven, or come back as a donkey, depending on your religious belief. Our death, as Wittgenstein remarked, is not an event in our lives. It’s an event in other people’s lives. In our lives we are immortal: we are only mortal in the lives of others.
It’s dying that’s scary. The pain from the fatal injury or the terminal disease. The fast fading of our health and powers. The sense that we are becoming irrelevant, and maybe even a burden, we who only a few years ago carried the burdens of others. I’m sure there are pathological states (see those 1950’s English movies) best left unexamined.
Death is, ultimately, a release from dying. Our dying does happen in our lives, we do experience it, and we’d rather not.
Or something like that.
The death of healthy young people is theft, a moral flaw in the Universe. They really have had their lives stolen from them. Old gits like me, not so much. I’ve had my life, made what little of it I could, and my time has passed.
Suffering is another thing. I regard death, mostly, as a release from suffering, and especially the suffering of injury, disease and old age. A young person who lives in paid and has to spend an hour a day on some machine is being released by death, not cheated.
Death was a release for my friend Terence last year, my friend Chris died in his early sixties from the after-effects of prostate cancer, after almost ten years of a second-chance after the first operation that gave a happy family life in those years. Another man I knew, Richard, fell over in the bath after a seizure. He was in his mid-forties. Outwardly his life looked just fine, but his emotional life was something out of a 1950’s black and white English movie, the ones with the domineering mother. Richard’s death was unfair: he still had time to change. My father died peacefully in his sleep after a post-operative blood clot hit his heart.
It’s not death that’s scary. Either nothing happens, you go to heaven, or come back as a donkey, depending on your religious belief. Our death, as Wittgenstein remarked, is not an event in our lives. It’s an event in other people’s lives. In our lives we are immortal: we are only mortal in the lives of others.
It’s dying that’s scary. The pain from the fatal injury or the terminal disease. The fast fading of our health and powers. The sense that we are becoming irrelevant, and maybe even a burden, we who only a few years ago carried the burdens of others. I’m sure there are pathological states (see those 1950’s English movies) best left unexamined.
Death is, ultimately, a release from dying. Our dying does happen in our lives, we do experience it, and we’d rather not.
Thursday 5 December 2019
Habits That Remind You That You're Alive
I got this one from the penultimate episode of Fog and Crimes S2. The ageing Police Commissioner of Ferrara tells his wayward-yet-brilliant detective Soneri (Our Hero) that he goes to a traditional cafe for tea and cakes every chance he gets: it’s one of those habits that reminds you you’re alive.
Absolutely.
My weekly sunbeds - if I miss those, I feel like I’m neglecting myself.
Looking at the River Thames when in town (I don’t do this often enough, especially when it’s cold or the District Line has maintenance work)
I used to like stopping in at the Caffe Nero on Archway before descending into Holborn tube for the Central Line. My espresso and pastry at the Soho Coffee on Gresham Street just isn’t the same experience.
Saturday morning gym followed by a movie at a Curzon - I miss that. I could be being too fussy about the movies I see.
Visiting Zandvoort on my way to see my friend in Utrecht. It’s once a year, but it’s every year.
Choosing music on CD. Near-infallible method: go to the classical section at Foyles, look at composers whose names are new to you. Choose on the basis of musical period (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century, etc) and type (string quartets, piano, concerto, etc). I’ve rarely gone wrong. Except when I tell myself I really should try to like the Romantic Symphony.
Reading a book that takes me out of wherever I am. The most recent was a Donald E Westlake. I’d look up and think “I’m on the train? I thought I was in Hong Kong.” (Strictly that’s not a habit, but it will pass.)
Absolutely.
My weekly sunbeds - if I miss those, I feel like I’m neglecting myself.
Looking at the River Thames when in town (I don’t do this often enough, especially when it’s cold or the District Line has maintenance work)
I used to like stopping in at the Caffe Nero on Archway before descending into Holborn tube for the Central Line. My espresso and pastry at the Soho Coffee on Gresham Street just isn’t the same experience.
Saturday morning gym followed by a movie at a Curzon - I miss that. I could be being too fussy about the movies I see.
Visiting Zandvoort on my way to see my friend in Utrecht. It’s once a year, but it’s every year.
Choosing music on CD. Near-infallible method: go to the classical section at Foyles, look at composers whose names are new to you. Choose on the basis of musical period (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century, etc) and type (string quartets, piano, concerto, etc). I’ve rarely gone wrong. Except when I tell myself I really should try to like the Romantic Symphony.
Reading a book that takes me out of wherever I am. The most recent was a Donald E Westlake. I’d look up and think “I’m on the train? I thought I was in Hong Kong.” (Strictly that’s not a habit, but it will pass.)
Monday 2 December 2019
When Nothing is Quite 'Enough'
My Dutch friend and I are pondering a problem. It’s one of those you-wait-until-you-get-to-our-age problems, so I don’t expect you to understand it.
The problem is that we’ve lost our vim and vinegar and zest for living. We no longer get excited by whatever it is we used to get excited about. It’s getting too easy to let the few things we have to do slide, and let the day pass in activities that don’t add up to anything.
There are a lot of cliched answers to this, some of which are also true but nothing like the whole story. So we’ll skip the you’re-just-getting-old bit. And we’ll skip the movies-really-are-worse-now bit as well. I’m going to allow the 65-is-a-dangerous-age-cynthia argument, because it’s true. For my generation. Even though we know the Rules got changed. I reckon I’m just coming out of the post-significant-date phase now.
There’s nothing wrong with my friend’s life that couldn’t cured by: a) an income of around €3,000 a month after tax, b) being able to write one novel every nine months, and c) knowing that it will be accepted by the publishers and sell reasonably well. Which as any novelist will tell you is a pretty nice life. He would be a transformed man. He would be the writer he wanted to be. But there’s not a lot he can do about turning into that person now.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
My friend isn’t an alcoholic. I am and we alcoholics are, of course, stuck. What we want is not to be us, and we know that there is nothing out there that can do that trick. No matter how much money we make, no matter how many and sincere the friends we have, no matter how beautiful and charming our lovers, no matter the regard in which we are held by those whose regard we care for… at the end of each day, all those things will take their temporary leave and we will be left with the one person we don’t want to be left with. Under alcoholism and ACoA, everything gets a coating of emotional chilli pepper, so whatever it is, it’s also a distraction from ourselves. I think a lot of people in recovery get a glimpse of that, decide it feels a bit hollow, and stay at an earlier state of the process, where they can believe that their emotions are real, and not the hall-of-mirrors of addiction.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
There’s one thing nobody tells you about getting older: the sense of reward from doing something declines. It just does. Hormones, thicker skin, whatever. Back in the late 1970’s my friend and I used to go out Sunday afternoon. Simpler times when a pizza and movie at the Odeon was pretty close to living large. Part of that good time was each other’s company.
Other people's company is a valuable part of the whole thing. I heard a couple of twenty-somethings coming out of a Transformers movie in the West End: “that was by no means a good film” said one of them, but the fact it was twaddle didn’t ruin their evening. They could still go have a drink and talk nonsense afterwards. If I set off to see a movie on my own, I need to believe it’s going to be a good movie. If I set off for a walk, I need the sun to be out and the sky to be blue.
The trick is this: to recognise that the thing you decided you weren’t going to do because it wasn’t enough is still better than the default thing you will wind up doing instead. Which is often watching You Tube, or television. So do that anyway.
There’s one other thing, which I got from an episode of Fog and Crimes S2. But I’ll discuss that later
The problem is that we’ve lost our vim and vinegar and zest for living. We no longer get excited by whatever it is we used to get excited about. It’s getting too easy to let the few things we have to do slide, and let the day pass in activities that don’t add up to anything.
There are a lot of cliched answers to this, some of which are also true but nothing like the whole story. So we’ll skip the you’re-just-getting-old bit. And we’ll skip the movies-really-are-worse-now bit as well. I’m going to allow the 65-is-a-dangerous-age-cynthia argument, because it’s true. For my generation. Even though we know the Rules got changed. I reckon I’m just coming out of the post-significant-date phase now.
There’s nothing wrong with my friend’s life that couldn’t cured by: a) an income of around €3,000 a month after tax, b) being able to write one novel every nine months, and c) knowing that it will be accepted by the publishers and sell reasonably well. Which as any novelist will tell you is a pretty nice life. He would be a transformed man. He would be the writer he wanted to be. But there’s not a lot he can do about turning into that person now.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
My friend isn’t an alcoholic. I am and we alcoholics are, of course, stuck. What we want is not to be us, and we know that there is nothing out there that can do that trick. No matter how much money we make, no matter how many and sincere the friends we have, no matter how beautiful and charming our lovers, no matter the regard in which we are held by those whose regard we care for… at the end of each day, all those things will take their temporary leave and we will be left with the one person we don’t want to be left with. Under alcoholism and ACoA, everything gets a coating of emotional chilli pepper, so whatever it is, it’s also a distraction from ourselves. I think a lot of people in recovery get a glimpse of that, decide it feels a bit hollow, and stay at an earlier state of the process, where they can believe that their emotions are real, and not the hall-of-mirrors of addiction.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
There’s one thing nobody tells you about getting older: the sense of reward from doing something declines. It just does. Hormones, thicker skin, whatever. Back in the late 1970’s my friend and I used to go out Sunday afternoon. Simpler times when a pizza and movie at the Odeon was pretty close to living large. Part of that good time was each other’s company.
Other people's company is a valuable part of the whole thing. I heard a couple of twenty-somethings coming out of a Transformers movie in the West End: “that was by no means a good film” said one of them, but the fact it was twaddle didn’t ruin their evening. They could still go have a drink and talk nonsense afterwards. If I set off to see a movie on my own, I need to believe it’s going to be a good movie. If I set off for a walk, I need the sun to be out and the sky to be blue.
The trick is this: to recognise that the thing you decided you weren’t going to do because it wasn’t enough is still better than the default thing you will wind up doing instead. Which is often watching You Tube, or television. So do that anyway.
There’s one other thing, which I got from an episode of Fog and Crimes S2. But I’ll discuss that later
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