Middle-Class Chavs

Right, I'm going to get this off my chest once and for all. It's not nice to talk about class or style and the English – unless you're being rude about the rich, wealthy and stylish, of course. The proper view is that the moral worth, personal charm and pleasance of a person cannot be known by outward signs but only by keeping their company on their terms. This is, of course, the most arrant bosh but it goes down well. It's true that none of us are on interview form all day and all of us would like to be able to take back the odd first impression. But some people go way past this. They thought about what they did to make this list and so they don't get excused.

Dreadful Parents, pushing their huge strollers and frustrated, wailing children round suburban shopping centres; Commuter Chompers, desperately scarfing down Burger Kings on the later evening commuter trains; Pavement-Blocking Paula and Friends, walking slowly four wide on narrow London pavements as if there are no other people in the world; Tennants Terry, drinking himself inebriate on his way home and stinking the place out with booze fumes; Popcorn Peter, chomping away in the seat behind me at the cinema; Mobile-Phone Mandy, making her social arrangements so, like, we can all hear her; Chanting Colin and Scarf-Waving Wally on their way to a football match; Wales-Supporter Clive and all those self-satisfied overweight bozos who fill Richmond and Twickenham after a rugby match. Anyone who drives an SUV. There are probably a hundred more, but those are the ones who appear in my little world.

Some of these people earn six-figure sums as consultants at Accenture, BBC bureaucrats, senior civil servants and soi-disant senior managers in local councils. I don't care where they went to school or what Daddy-in-Law does for a living. They are middle-class chavs.

Dreadful Parents should leave their children with their friends (oh, wait, maybe they have no...). Pavement-blocking Paula is doing it deliberately (she's in London, it's busy, don't tell me she hasn't noticed). You have to live in the area to know what a pain Wales-Supporter Clive is. Commuter Chompers? Tennants Terry? Popcorn Peter? Mobile Phone Mandy? SUV Drivers? We're in agreement here.

Chavism is not about accent, education or undesirable post code. It's about a gross and wilful lack of style, taste, manners and consideration. And no, it's not a wonky little part of them. It's who they are through and through. And I don't care if they do love their cat and randomly donate to charity.

Vanilla Shakes at Ed's

I took this very early one Thursday morning at the start of the Oughties, on my way to Tower Hill and all things AT&T. Thursday was "routing day" when I tipped up early to get the LCR analysis done before the crowd appeared and distracted me. I was using a simple camera and analogue film. But when it works, it works.

Yup, it's a photograph because I felt so down today I had a vanilla shake from Ed's in Soho. There's nothing wrong with the shakes at Ed's - in my not-so-humble opinion, they're the best in town, and priced accordingly. It's just that I don't want sugar when I'm feeling okay. I'll blame the weather and the darker evenings. At least I'm two-thirds of my way through the Phenomenology.

On AA Birthdays

There's another reason I'm feeling odd and unsettled and my diet still has too many carbs and and and. It's almost my AA Birthday. My last drink was Saturday 9th October 1993, when I went to see Sleepless In Seattle with an attractive former colleague. I had one or two glasses of wine and it felt like someone was scraping the inside of my skull with a fork. I called the AA telephone office at ten o'clock that Monday and went to my first meeting on Wednesday 13th October 1993. I haven't had a drink or a drug since that Saturday but I count the 13th as my AA birthday. Of course, the programme is one-day-at-a-time, so no day is supposed to be special, but sobriety birthdays have a meaning way beyond what we call a “belly button birthday”. All that time ago, I made this huge decision because I felt my life was totally f....d. I was tired of being drunk, I was tired of being tired and I was tired of thinking it was all my fault, that I was useless, that I didn't understand the world and was making no progress in it. I had no idea what relationship drinking bore to any of that because my drinking never took me anywhere dangerous or illegal and I never harmed anyone as a result of it (I pissed plenty of people off, but pissed off isn't being harmed.) I was, of course, way more emotionally jerry-built than I had any idea at the time. It's taken me years to sort all that stuff out. Sometimes I wonder if I ever will. Someone said something at my meeting the other week: as an alcoholic, you survive, but you don't rise. And that's what comes back to haunt me. I crashed and I've got back to where I was, but I never get any further. Most of the time I can ignore that. But on my birthday, it looms large.

The A - Z Classical Music Project

A couple of years ago my morale was really low and only started to recover when I thought up a little project. One CD by a composer I had never heard of before from each letter of the alphabet: it had to be budget-price and on the shelves of the old Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus and I had to buy it on a Friday evening after work. I could buy in any order. This was how it went:

Anton Arensky, Piano Trios, Chandos
Rutland Boughton, Oboe and String Quartets, Helios
Doreen Carwithn, ODTAA and Others, Chandos
Francois Devienne, Four Bassoon Concertos, CPO
Giles Farnaby, Complete Fantasias for Harpsichord, Naxos
Francesco Geminiani, Cello Sonatas Op 3, L'Oiseau-Lyre
Johann Hasse, Salve Regina, Arkiv
Akira Ifukube, Ritmica Ostinata / Symphonic Fantasia 1, Naxos
Hyacinthe Jadin, Sonates pur pianoforte, Harmonia Mundi
Ivan Khandoshkin, Violin Music, Naxos
Thomas Linley, Music For the Tempest etc, Helios
George Muffat, Florilegium Secundum, L'Oiseau-Lyre
Ernesto Nazareth, Tangos, Waltzes and Polkas, Naxos
Georges Onslow, String Quartets Op 9, CPO
Giovanni Platti, Six Flute Sonatas, Op 3, Naxos
Max Reger, Four Sonatos for Unaccompanied Violin, Dorian Recordings
Johannes Schenk, Le Nymphe de Rheno Op 8 Vol 2, Naxos
Ernst Toch, Tanz-Suite etc, Naxos
Leopoldo de Urcullu, Guitar Music, Naxos
Henri Vieuxtemps, Cello Concerto No 1 and 2, EMI Classics
Unico Van Wassenaer, Six Concerti Armonici, apex
Iannis Xenakis, Various, apex
Eugene Ysaye, Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, Helios
Jan Zelenka, The Lamentations of Jeremiah, Helios

I called it quits after five months in Spring '08. No E. It turns out every composer beginning with an E who isn't Enescu is Elgar. The most commonly-used letter in the English language has the least number of composers. There was Thomas Quilter, but I just can't do historical English folk songs. I did cheat slightly: the Reger was in my collection before I started, but I hadn't heard of him when I bought it. I had heard of Xenakis (who hasn't?) but it was an excuse to buy a CD of his stuff. A couple of weeks after I bought the Carwithen, I heard it on Radio Three. That happened again with the Linley. If you're going to do this, you have to stop listening to Radio Three.

Sadly Tower Records has been no more for a long while now, which means that Central London has nowhere good to browse through classical music. To Amazon we all have to go.

Ed Hamrick at VueScan

This is a shameless plug for a product which, and a developer who, deserves it.

I have a Canon N656U scanner and neat, slim piece of kit it is as well. It doesn't play nice with Snow Leopard – neither does my Samsung U600 which I free-upgraded to way before I bought the MacBook (what's wrong with companies? Don't they know to co-operate with Apple?) - so I paid for Ed Hamrick's VueScan program, which lets my scanner work with my Mac. Until recently when it decided to produce a whole bunch of gibberish. I sent Ed a mail like as his site suggests, and was amazed when, as promised, he replied personally. We've been going back and forth for a while on it. The IT Support desk at work would have given up on the second or third exchange of mails. Ed kept going through a number of cycles and we've sorted the problem (I hope – electronic gadgets have minds of their own). So VueScan and its creator gets my whole-hearted recommendation.

VueScan is here http://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html

Blaaahhhhh

There's a feeling we ACoA's have: there's no point in going away because you have to come back to exactly what you left. That's what I felt today, first day back after a two-week holiday. It hit me like a brick wall at half-past three and I spent a long while deciding I'd go to a movie after work, naaahhh, I'd go home, naaaahhh, I'd go to a meeting, naaahhh, I'd go home, and so on round in circles. I ate a chocolate brownie at tea-time for God's sake. I never do that. Almost never do that. The grey skies and drizzle didn't help much either. Nothing had changed at work, but I'd become sensitive to it. I can tolerate the place, especially when I think of the hours, the location and the fact that I don't work too hard for the money.

(Sandbachs, Poole, Olympus OM10 (I think))

But I don't really want to be there. People show up at my desk and have conversations with me and I know I've talked to them before but I have no idea who they are, what they do and as for names? It's not just me: others feel the same. I just take it to an extreme. When I know where I want to be, really want to be this time, not just “anywhere-but-not-here”, then I'm going to do whatever it takes. As it was, I did what a good alkie should do and went to a six o'clock meeting nearby. I shared exactly this stuff and started to understand what I was feeling. As a result, I started to feel better. Tomorrow, I get my act back together. Now, if only this craving for chocolate would go away.

Attempts to Read The Phenomenology of Mind

A long time ago, when I was younger and my brain allegedly worked faster, I attempted to read the Critique of Pure Reason and gave up, put off by the sheer unreadability of the thing. I decided that I would go to my grave never having read it, got over it and moved on. Recently I have been attempting (no other verb will do) The Phenomenology of Mind. I have read The Philosophy of History and The Philosophy of Right, I've even flipped the pages on the Aesthetics and that looks readable, but the Phenomenology leaves me confused.

Why bother reading it at all? First, for much the same reason that you should sit through all Wagner's operas at least once: Hegel is to philosophy what Wagner is to music. You don't have to like it, use it or even understand all the finer points, but you do need to have experienced it. Second, there's a chance that Hegel really was trying an approach to the human experience of knowledge that is worth understanding.

Since the early Eighties, philosophers haven't really bothered with the older problems of epistemology. The philosophy of science taught us all that the old discussion of defining knowledge, belief, justification and evidence are not as important as explaining why Quantum Electrodynamics is a serious scientific theory, evolutionary psychology is pseudo-science, classical dynamics is useful engineering (while being false physics), epidemiology is a shoddy and confused misuse of everything from statistics to the taxpayer's money, and why String Theory is just on the right side of speculative theorising while phrenology isn't. It's fair to say that before Popper, philosophers thought about knowledge as a personal possession, while after it, they recognised that it's theories and their methodological status that matter, not what's in people's heads or how it got there.

Hegel wanted to describe the experience of knowing and understanding and of the interaction of concepts. He saw knowledge as a process, not as a book of words: knowledge is something people do as well as have. This is an interesting approach, taken by Imre Lakatos in Proofs and Refutations, where he describes informal (that is, as actually done by mathematicians) mathematics as a process of proposing proofs and counterexamples for theorems. Lakatos, as a good post-Popperian, is talking about theories; Hegel is still inside our heads.

No-one has to read the Phenomenology, it's just that you're missing a lot of context if you don't. The catch is that the bloody thing is practically unreadable. Where Kant leaves you gasping for oxygen, Hegel leaves you dizzy. There's a slight possibility that it's all a fraud written under the influence of nitrous oxide or some other substance (he wouldn't be the only one – Freud wrote under the influence of good medical cocaine). Or there's a chance he's saying something genuinely different that even German has trouble expressing.

But here's the thing: I have an utterly clear conscience about not reading the Critique of Pure Reason, whereas I don't about leaving the Phenomenology on the shelf. Continental philosophers all made the effort and all got something out of it - even if it was nothing Hegel may have put there. It influenced and informed their thinking - and I guess I'd like to share in that.