Performance Advice is No Use To Regular People

I read an excellent book about sleeping recently. Turns out that if you want a really good night's sleep, made round your body rhythms, you should sleep on your own. You can canoodle all you like before dozing off, but when it comes to sleep, the performance-minded sleeper sleeps alone. People whose partners snore will doubtless agree.

An end to this nonsense, I say. I have said before that physical sobriety is only for drunks and emotional sobriety is only for emotional fuck-ups. Both of which are me. In the same way, dieting is for people who can't stop eating the wrong food and putting on weight; exercise is for people who will otherwise spend all day on the couch; and managed sleep is for insomniacs. There are all sorts of people who benefit from exercise, managed sleeping and eating, a consistent programme of cultural and intellectual self-improvement, but all of them are either athletes, creative workers, or dysfunctionals. And the comorbidity between "dysfunctional" and "athlete or creative worker" is much higher than advertised.

Ordinary people - and if you bristled slightly at that phrase, you are one - should not adopt ideas intended for athletes, drunks, and violin students entering the BBC Young Musician competition. Ordinary people should not aim for consistent exercise, diets and exercise regimes, career development and self-management. Nor should they aim for a meaning, purpose, goal or story for their lives. They should not aim for balance, calm, and proportion in their emotions. Those things are for neurotic, driven, obsessed, unstable people who need to manage themselves, either because they will fly apart or because they are aiming for a distant target.

Ordinary people who can afford to eat just a little too much should be overweight; ordinary people should have no understanding of science and engineering, and even less of economics and the human soul. They should have as much knowledge and skill as it takes to do their job, and no more, certainly not enough to make it more difficult for the next person. They should not choke up at the end of Mahler's Second, the music of J S Bach should sound like busy fiddling, and their first and last reaction to a Basquiat should be that their children paint like that. Rohmer movies should feel like paint drying, and sushi should be cold rice and fish. Ordinary people should get hangovers, eat curry on a Saturday night, cereal for breakfast, and have chips with their rice. They should watch sports rather than take part; lie on the beach rather than climb mountains; and go to theme parks rather than art galleries. They should have arguments, rows, affairs, messy divorces, illegitimate children, complicated families, and unemployed older children.

Why?

Because the managed life of the athlete, top ten percent knowledge worker, or professional, is unimaginably bland. It starts with an education requiring years of deferred gratification, punctuated by moments of binging sensuality. It carries on through more years of deferred gratification, constructive habit-building, and the deliberate management of the self. In order to achieve at that level, such people do not think about winning or losing, nor savour the taste of victory nor feel the sting of defeat. That applies to lawyers, negotiators, and mathematicians as well as athletes. The last scientists to experience a hit of exhilaration at their discovery were likely Crick and Watson.

At the top levels, the concern is with analysis, method, practice, rehearsal, fine-tuning, acquiring one more useful technique. Amateurs train to prepare for the competition, professionals compete to identify training needs. For professionals, winning is not about better or best, but about money. The motive for participation for the top-end performer is not the rewards of success, but the participation in the process. Doing, not achieving, is the goal: the achievements come as a by-product. As does whatever sponsorship and award money is available. Sounds like fun? It doesn’t even sound like work. It sounds like some weird third mode of being that cuts one off from the very things that ordinary people think are the rewards of such efforts.

State control, otherwise known as emotional management, is essential. An ordinary person feels an emotion and lives it. That emotion may pass or linger, it may become a trace element in their base emotional state. They may fight the emotion to deny its existence, or, perhaps with that immortal phrase "I can't believe...", deny that they are responsible for managing the effects of the emotion. A high-performer treats emotions like weather: emotions are things that happen to them like winds, showers or hot weather. Feel it, acknowledge it, take action and move on. When it rains, find shelter. If someone steals their car, they call the insurance company. If their children are hurt, well, then play injured, like everyone else does.

The constant self-management required, much greater now than it was even fifty years ago, is easier, if not even only possible in the first place, if one simply never does anything remotely at variance from mainstream or regulatory expectations, and so if one creates a life and state of mind that does not provide chances to do something the regulators, official or unofficial, might censure. Everyone one meets and everything one does is vetted as a potential PR-disaster, as potential distraction, and only then for potential benefits. Top performers of any kind may tell you and the Press how important their families are to them, but don’t listen to what they say, look at what they do. Training first, diet, sleep and learning second, everything else a long third. And their families know it.

Their families accept it because there’s a gold medal in the sock draw. Ordinary people don’t have gold medals, and their families will not and should not accept it.

Enough I say. The idea that ordinary people can benefit from elite training advice benefits authors, publishers and maybe people who sell the gear they recommend. Not ordinary people.

Longford River Between Hanworth Air Park and the A316

The Longford River runs through a culvert across most of my local Air Park, and re-appears near the road bridge (top photograph). On a whim a few Sundays ago, I crossed the road, found there was a path on the other side, and followed it. It's not bad, given that there's an industrial estate on one side (the warehouse) and a council estate on the other (second from last photo). When the weather is as glorious as it was that day, it's an okay walk, but it must be grim when it's grey. The last photograph is the A316 looking towards Twickenham. I have lived in the area for *cough* years, and I think that Sunday was the first I'd ever stood on that bridge.

You can read all about the Longford River here.

Bank of China

My Talk-Talk broadband service went to pieces when it rained Wednesday and Thursday. It's not too stable if it gets cold either. Do you think that might be because the copper into my house has not been changed since I moved in thirty years ago? And it was old then. Insulation goes, moisture or water gets into connections at the pole... all sorts of things. And Talk-Talk wonder why I won't upgrade and watch TV over their service. Which is copper all the way from the local exchange.

And of course the weather was awful. I took the week off.

God hates me.

The Air Park in Spring

You wouldn't know it has council flats on one side, a municipal baths and the A312 on another, a light industrial estate on the third and some flats and my little estate on the fourth. It's not Royal, like Bushy or Richmond Parks, but it is about a hundred yards from my front door. It's been a good Spring.

Leaving Out The Gin Bottles, Soho

Steps of the Caffe Nero across from my gym, early one Saturday morning. I swear I did not pose this. I leave milk bottles out, but clearly the denizens of Soho get a wider range of products delivered by their milkman.

Punjabi National Bank

Another City photograph from last summer. Since the Punjab is a region of India, how can it be the Punjab National Bank? Anyway. I have distractions at the moment, so posting is erratic.

April 2017 Review

Maintenance month.

I watched a number of car maintenance and driving channels in April, and prompted by Scotty Kilmer telling us that he changed his oil every 6,000 miles and that anyone who didn’t was storing up troubles, I checked the service frequency on the Punto. Uh-huh. I was around 37,500 miles and should be having services every 12,000 miles. So I booked it in a local Fiat dealer and got a full service, with oil changes and other good stuff. This requires driving there at 06:30, leaving the car on the street, taking the slow train to work, and then taking the slow train back, and driving home in the evening. It makes a change, and if you look along the track at the station you could be in the country. My regular station is much less domestic and friendly.

The garage found a bunch of other things - leaking gearbox seal, worn rear shock bushes, a hole in the exhaust and thin front break pads - that I drive away, thought about, called them and said YES to. I’m passing on the new set of tyres for a few more months. I can’t tell you how many pounds lighter I am for all that.

The back porch acquired a vivid green sheen, which I killed with mosskiller. I tackled cleaning the path to my front door, which has been looking grungier as the years have gone by. This is not rocket science: wet the path, pour on diluted cleaner from a watering can with sprinkler head, scrub in with stiff bristle broom, count to a hundred, water again and scrub clean. However, it’s a lot more effort on muscles I don’t use in the gym. Lower back. Gardening is hell on the lower back.

My brown garden waste bin from Hounslow Council arrived within days of me applying for it at the start of the month - I was expecting it in mid-May - and I spent the first two shots getting rid of lawn cuttings and other stuff from months ago. This week they are taking away some plant trimmings and more grass cuttings. I’m far more motivated to do an hour’s hard labour with shears and trimmers when I can dump it all in the bin and not have to drive to the Tip. This is as big a result as buying your own washing machine and never going to the launderette ever again.

Talking of launderettes, I read a book about sleeping, and it prompted me to try cleaning my duvet and pillows. These are always washed, even if you take them to a Dry Cleaner. I took one of my duvet+pillow sets to the local launderette for a service wash, and while they got the duvet right, I had to air out wone of the pillows and dry out the other one with heaters and radiators. Not going back again, but the idea is a good one. Except, it isn’t cheap. Unless you have expensive Siberian goose-down pillows, it may be cheaper simply to replace them. In cost terms, two washes = one new feather duvet.

And yes, I did the thing with the mattress and a vacuum cleaner - I have a Dyson V6 with an animal-hair brush head - and it didn’t pick up a darn thing. But then I use a mattress cover. I washed the newer one and replaced the worn one, requiring a trip into John Lewis in Kingston, something I usually try to avoid as much as possible.

And as described elsewhere, I got my little Asus back working well again. Curse Windows Update.

So that was all the exciting stuff.

Sis and I just squeezed in a supper, at Native in Neal’s Yard. The food was good, but the atmosphere was a little too casual. Quite where they found carrots that small I have no idea. I had a trip to Gulu Gulu after the gym on Payday Friday. Oh yes. I know how to live it up!

No movies. None. I finished off Angel S4.

I read Nick Littlehale’s Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, and I thought it had a lot of good ideas. I have definitely switched over to thinking of sleep in 90-minute (ish) cycles. Also David Ley’s The Myth of Sex Addiction, Alex Reinhart’s Statistics Done Wrong, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ I’ll Sell You A Dog, and Thomas Oliveri’s anthology Geek Art, and I finally finished Michael Rush’s textbook on Video Art.

Maintenance. Does anybody really budget for it?

But I like getting maintenance done. And I don’t mind paying for it. Which doesn’t mean I rush about finding stuff to do, but I don’t grudge it when I have to do it. It’s a form of looking after myself. It lets me know I’m not letting everything slide.

And over Easter, I ate my way through a Tre Marie Columba from Lina Stores.