Commitment Isn’t A Gate You Can Keep

There’s a Sphere phrase that everyone repeats: women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Everyone nods wisely. Except it’s not true.

Once the sex you’re having with her is done, she gets to decide if there’s going to be a next time. And she gets to stop you half-way through. She’s a doorman at a nightclub: just because you get in Wednesday night, doesn’t mean you’ll make it in Saturday night. That’s what being a gatekeeper means.

But once you’ve committed, you don’t get to throw her out if she misbehaves. She gets to throw you out if you misbehave. There’s no re-considering, there’s no natural break that gives you the chance to say NO to further commitment. Commitment isn’t a gate: it’s a leap over the cliff.

What men keep the gates of is attention, excitement, arousal and status.

In the past there was an option b): provisioning, attention, care and support. However, women can get jobs, and they get paid more than a man does for the same job. If they can’t get jobs, they can get welfare. If they lose their job, they can find another one faster than a man can. Men stopped being the gatekeepers of provisioning a long, long time ago.

(Small edit 28/1/2023)

Learning from Fitbit Food Tracking

I’ve had a couple of chats about fitness trackers and the real benefits of a Fitbit. Tracking what I eat is one of them, even if it feels a little obsessive at the start. Taking photos of bar codes to get the nutritional information turns out to be slightly cool.

The trick for the first couple of months is not to use the calorie counter to control what you eat, but to be honest in recording it and hence understand what you’re eating and how you feel when you do.

I got a cold and saw exactly what I’ve always suspected. My calorie intake goes up, I eat more biscuits and chocolate and my exercise goes down. Colds make me put on weight, or at least stop me losing it. It lasted a fortnight, and I can see it in the colour of the calorie counter target icons: green and red instead of yellow and green (yellow means I’ve eaten even less than my 500 calorie deficit).

Understanding must, of course, lead to action. So in the morning a single Penguin (106 calories) has replaced the cellophane pack of Belvita biscuits (220 calories), and a home-made sandwich (220 calories or so) has replaced something from Pret (400 calories or more). The ingredients (bread, ham) of the sandwiches costs as much as one Pret sandwich. So there’s a financial saving here as well.

I’m trying to find lighter lunches. I find an Itsu sushi plus a Miso soup, at around 400 calories, is a little light and slightly bland, whereas a Square Pie is tasty but has silly calories – because pie means pastry and pasty means calories: 620 for the steak and kidney. There’s a Crepe Affaire in Spitalfields Market which does a few reasonable savoury crepes. I suspect that if I didn’t eat the bread on a salt beef at the Lower Eastside Deli in Shoreditch that would take lunch back to around 400 calories. (It is at least solid meat, so more filling than the Itsu.)

The afternoons between 3 and 4 are my bugbear. I need something. My senses are bored, and I’m slumping. (If I go straight home, I fall asleep on the train.) I've been having a yoghurt and maybe tea or coffee and a Kit-Kat. A mess: useless caloires. Fruit doesn’t do it. Maybe the mistake I’m making is thinking that food will pick me up, and it won’t. Perhaps I need to schedule some routine stuff for that hour that I can bash out to pass the time.

I’m right now trying a couple of pieces of dark chocolate. Maybe I need something sweet at lunchtime instead of all that dreary protein and carbohydrate. Ice cream, for instance. That is well-known to be medicinal. Perhaps I have a starter and dessert at Canteen, instead of fish-and-chips. It’s worth a try.

Losing weight, I’ve had problems with constipation, which is what happens when you don’t eat enough fibre. Also, I think porridge on a regular basis doesn’t help this either, as it is soluble fibre and doesn’t help with bulk. So my evening meal is a full-of-fibre root-vegetable stew with added Polish sausage and some grated cheese. It gets cooked in bulk, and four servings get put in plastic containers and stored in the fridge.

We singles tend to eat the same meal at least twice in succession, and sometimes four times. It’s all very virtuous, except the Penguins, and I suspect I need to add some variety to it, probably from a restaurant at least once a week.

What to do with a £35m Rembrandt

The Trustees of Penrhyn Castle recently sold a Rembrandt portrait for £35m to a foreign buyer. The export license has been temporarily withheld to allow a UK institution to raise the money. More details can be found at Bendor Grosvenor’s excellent site.

If a bunch of private and wealthy individuals want to stump up £35m for the painting, by all means let them. If a bunch of charities want to, they must consider if there aren’t better uses of the money. Unless their aims are pretty much limited to “financing old estates by the purchases of assets from those estates” the chances are that there will be better uses of the money. “Better” here meaning “more closely aligned with the purposes of the charity”.

The real question is: under what circumstances can the tax-payer be rightly asked to stump up enough money to build several hundred homes for nurses and teachers, just so a canvas can go on hanging in a castle hundreds of miles from anywhere? “Sentiment” is not an acceptable answer. “Because otherwise the taxpayer would be stumping up for regional subsidies that they don’t have to now because tourism generated by the canvas” is an acceptable answer.

Art has two sources of economic value: its price to a buyer; and the NPV of the cash flows it generates as an exhibit. When art can’t be sold – as for example the Rothkos at the Tate Modern – its economic value is in its drawing power and the ability of the museum to extract money from visitors. (So those Rothkos at the Tate really aren’t worth the $200m or so that his auction prices would suggest.) If a buyer is willing to pay way more than the exhibit value, the seller is getting a good deal. I don’t know how much money Penrhyn makes, but it can’t be enough if they’re thinking about selling a Rembrandt.

The Rembrandt is worth £35m to the mystery buyer, because the buyer gets to enjoy it and whatever other benefits it brings. It is quite likely that ownership of a painting like that could lead to deals that would easily yield more than £35m. It is quite unlikely that anything like that much would gained if the painting remains in a castle in deepest Wales. It is not worth £35m to the taxpayer. Or to any kind of consortium.

But it is worth £35m of other people’s money to the Trustees of Penryhn. (Or £22.5m after tax, according to Grosvenor.) In fact, it’s worth any amount of other people’s money. Anything is. What the Trustees are really after is having their cake, the Rembrandt on the wall, and eating it, £22.5m in the bank to pay for the roof.

Nope. If they want the money, they can let the Rembrandt go to where it can do some good: the National Gallery, or the NPG. Or they could start renting it out for exhibitions and charge a decent rate for it.

But but but.... isn't the value of Art above mere grubby money? Shouldn't we keep it because Heritage and The Nation?

Art is not an essential part of our national identity, like, say, secure borders and a requirement that all dealings with British government organisations (social security, for instance) are done in English. (But I digress.) Art is, for all the attendance figures at museums and the queues of young foreign students at the Tate Modern, a minority occupation that takes a fair amount of reading, looking and changes of mind to appreciate. Also money. Art books aren’t as expensive as statistics text-books, but they aren’t cheap either. Art is not a spiritual substitute for religion, though we may get spiritual feelings from the contemplation of certain works. Neither is the mere looking at art a form of self-improvement: that comes with the discipline of learning and appreciating more. If you think that simply looking at art is improving, just examine the faces of all those young foreign students being dragged round the Tate Modern.

That's not the argument to keep the Rembrandt in the UK.  The argument is that it is more valuable at Penrhyn than it is in some mansion in Dubai or Peking. Because the setting adds, or subtracts, to the experience of seeing the painting. Old Masters make more sense in old castles than they do in new starchitect buildings.

So how about this, which I think Dr Grosvenor suggests as if it would never happen. How about we sell the Rembrandt, but it has to stay in Penrhyn? The owners can let it travel and keep the income, and they can pay the insurance as well. They get a bunch of private viewing days at the castle. And of course, they can sell it on. Under the same conditions.

What Really Motivates Me

I exercise and eat right because I’m scared that my blood-sugar may once again be 8 to 9 mmol / Litre, and I don’t want to turn into a fat, shapeless old man

I want to stay employed because I don’t want to be poor, and I don’t want to be made to work a zero-hours minimum wage job

I stay sober because I never want to be a self-pitying drunk again

I try to get seven hours’ sleep because I don’t want to go through the day tired and in danger of dozing off at my desk

I keep the house clean and neat because I don’t like mess and chaos

I read serious books and keep up with my bits of art and culture because I don’t want to have my brain turn to mush

I stay at the organisational level I’m at because I don’t want to do the jobs a grade higher

I don’t want you to expect anything of me, because I might not be able to do it

I don’t want any favours because I have no way of returning them: I have no contacts or useful skills

This just about covers every waking hour of my week.

What’s missing here?

Symphony In Grey - Broadgate Tower

So let's get a little Whistler on yo'ass with the titles here.

I've been doing a little more with my life than this, but it's all in Latek and I can't get Blogger to display that very well.

Also, it's been the week of my AA birthday, and that's always a little emotional. Twenty-two years sober, one day at a time. It's easy to think that sobriety is some kind of given after so long, and so it's no big deal, and that dealing with life is just a walk in the park. Well, it isn't. Every night I get to bed sober is another win. And I can forget that.

September 2015 Review

The month started with a grand signing ceremony of powers of attorney at my solicitors, about which I wrote in the August review, though it happened at the start of in September.

I saw Transporter Refuelled at Cineworld; Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Cartel Land, Irrational Man, 99 Homes, Life at the Curzon Soho; A Girl at my Door and The Forecaster at the Renoir; and Legend at the Curzon Mayfair. I’ve now grasped that all the good movies come out in autumn, hence the sudden rush after months of me moaning about there being nothing on.

I read Do No Harm, by Henry Marsh; Magnus Resch’s The Management of Art Galleries; Maurice Mashall’s book on Bourbaki; Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, by Robert M. Sopolsky; Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon; David Deida’s The Way of The Superior Man; Nat Hentoff’s Four Jazz Lives; Ralf Kromer’s Tool and Object: A History of Category Theory; and large chunks of the Bottazzine/Gray Hidden Harmony- Geometric Fantasies: The Rise of Complex Function Theory. Plus I made an effort at Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, and gave up.

Record of the month at Rough Trade was an extract from Has Richter’s Sleep. Noisy guitar band CD was from The Pretty Reckless. I think I may have downloaded Halestorm’s Into The Wild Life as well.

It was sort out the A/W look time. I have been going with cotton or wool casual shirts, but decided I was tired of it, and the cut didn’t, ahh, present my figure to best advantage. So I was looking up and down Regent Street and Long Acre for ideas. After a while it became, looking for anything that wasn’t black or grey. Ever try on a jacket and know you’re going to buy it before it’s even settled on your shoulders? From Hackett as well. But it’s perfect. And I’ll be wearing it on all informal occasions for the next two years. That jacket, a tee-shirt and chinos is my new casual look. Add a scarf and gloves if it gets colder.

I had lunch at Sketch, which is an experience. You have to go there just to see the toilets. It really is like something out of a 1960’s science fiction movie. Supper at Picture, where Josh the barman now makes amazing virgin cocktails based on the vaguest of suggestions from me. Mas Q Menos is my current go-to place for after-training-on-Sunday supper: the tapas are just the right size, it has a pleasant atmosphere, and Spanish service, which means they don’t rush you and a couple of hours can pass quite easily.

Back at the start of August I had supper with some old friends on Sunday evening, so saw the movie in the afternoon, then went training, and then to supper. This worked out rather well, and does solve the problem of passing time between leaving the gym at (say) 10:45 and the start of a film at (say) 14:00. So I’ve done that a few times, and it works well.

One other thing went on in the month, but I’ll write about that later.

Waterloo Sunrise

As long as I gaze on a Waterloo sunrise / I am in paradise.

Friday 9th October 07:40. Every second unit crew charged with getting pictures of London should have been there. So should every serious photographer looking for stock shots. Instead me and a dozen others with out iPhones were there to record one of the most spectacular sunrises I’ve seen from Waterloo Bridge.