That Gatwick Drone Scam In 10 Points

1. £2.9bn deal for Vinci SA to buy a 50.01% share in Gatwick airport being discussed in private

2. One dumb report about maybe a drone from clueless members of the public, none of whom have been named or even described

2a. If it had been a pilot, ground controller or some other authoritative source, we would have seen them on TV every half-hour

3. If it is a drone and an aircraft strikes it, Gatwick will be hit with CAA enquiries, insurance claims, terrible publicity if there are any dead or injured people, along with attendant civil suits, for the next five to ten years

4. And the airport will be closed for at least thirty-six hours while they clear up the mess

5. At this point the decision is a no-brainer, because no-one wants to take any risks

6. Bring on Gatwick’s PR department / agency. You know they’ve got one, right? You know that PR departments’ job is to fill the press with BS that suits their company / client?

6a. “I know,” says Rebecca (25) in PR, “let’s say it’s a drone. The public hates drones, and only creepy weirdos use them.”

6b. PR Director calls the CEO and says “We’re going to say it’s a drone.”

6c. CEO asks “Is it a drone?”

6d. PR Director says “Who cares? It’s the right story. The public hates drones, and only creepy weirdos use them.”

6e. CEO says “Okay. Sounds good to me. We cannot screw up the thing we’re talking to the guys about, until the guys sign the thing.”

7. The media are briefed by Gatwick’s PR department and does what it is supposed to do: repeat what corporate PR departments say.

8. Absolutely NOBODY in the British public believes it, because...

8a. No authoritative witness, not even “Sharon Williams, 27, Schoolteacher from Penzance, said…"

8b. No video - there’s always video. Ten seconds of a dot does not count.

8c. Absolute unanimity in the media, which only happens when they are all singing from the corporate hymn-sheet

8d. Only creepy weirdos use drones, and creepy weirdos don’t do things like fly drones over airports because they might be creepy but they aren’t dumb

8e. Everyone knows drones have to be line-of-sight to the operator unless it’s a military drone, and those are very large and not subject to vague reports

9. On Monday, the deal goes through.

10. On Tuesday the story vanishes.

Things that make you go "Mmmmmmmm"

Eighty-Eight, The City

The Postern, Barbican

Happy Christmas.

November 2018 Review

Am I the only person who leaves it way too long between changes of guitar strings? I had to clean the fretboard and bits of the soundboard with a slightly damp scouring pad applied gently, which is far more than you really wanted to know. And spray furniture polish over the whole neglected instrument. So I now have nice new bronze wound light-guage strings on my guitar.

I read Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske, Ben Judah’s This is London: Life and Death in the World City, Hamilton Gregory’s McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War; Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth-Century; Anonymous’ The Secret Teacher; and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.

I saw Red Lights, 10,000km, The Wanderers, Season of the Witch, and The Apparition on MUBI; and I, Anna, and A Pigeon Sat on a Tree Reflecting About Existence, on Curzon Home Cinema; and Tout va Bien, Revenge, Taken, Taken 2 and Taken 3 on DVD. Those Takens are well-made ninety-minute action movies.

Sis and I had supper at Picture on Great Portland Street. We like the other Picture, but we like sitting at the bar in Great Portland Street more.

And the slump went on. How do I know I'm having a slump? I watch way, way too much You Tube. I feel tired and start to lose enthusiasm for the gym. These days I feel like I put a lot of effort into sleeping, especially into dreams with incredible levels of detail.

The trick with slumps is not to try to explain them with some pop-psychology cliche so worn out it gets used the script for a Channel Four movie. No, it’s not the weather. Nor is it the ‘andropause’, or a reaction to a friend dying. Any of those things might have triggered it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is getting out of the slump. Slumps aren’t exited by the entrance, but by the exit. That came in December, when I used the lack of hot water at the gym for a week to give myself a decent rest.

There is also the fact that it’s one thing to wake up, drag yourself off to work and wish you didn’t have to do it; and another to wake up, drag yourself off to work, and know that you can stop doing it in about fifteen months, if you want to. The cure for that is to enjoy the days that one has to drag oneself off to. It’s also to remind yourself that only people with a long and ambitious to-do / project list get the feeling they are slipping. Everyone else goes home and watches the match.

Fountains, The Barbican

Brexit Chaos aka Democracy In Action

Puzzled or infuriated by what’s happening in the House of Commons around Brexit? It’s called democracy. Democracy is supposed to be messy when big decisions are at stake.

The EU does not want the UK in the EU anymore. It is too Socialist and the UK is too Free Market. The EU countries love being run by administrators who went to good schools - like the ENA - while the politicians are rendered powerless by their lack of education and inability to make friends. Quick, how many European countries have a two-party system? Yep. The UK. The EU wants an European Army and there is no way that Her Majesty - the C-in-C of the UK’s Armed Forces - is turning her lads over to a Belgian General who is at the behest of a bunch of unelected officials. The EU wants the unrestricted immigration of unskilled, uneducated young men from all over the world who have been thrown out of their home towns and villages for bad behaviour. The UK thinks would rather have well-behaved, educated, skilled people who speak English from all over the world.

Theresa May has known this all along. So did David Cameron. What do you think MI6 and GCHQ have been doing all this time?

The EU bureaucrats and other elitists thought that they could do a deal and not involve Parliament. Really. That’s elitists for you. Theresa May knew that even if she got The Best Deal Ever, she would have to present it to Parliament. This is because the UK is a democracy. There aren’t many of those in the world, so it’s not surprising that you don’t recognise one in action when you see it.

No negotiator, no Cabinet member, not the Prime Minister, nor even HRH QE2, can decide the terms on which the UK leaves the EU. Only the elected representatives of the British people can do that. Only they can do it, because only they can lose their jobs if they go too far against the wishes of their constituents. Read that again carefully: unless I can get rid of you, you don’t get to make decisions that affect me. That’s the basis of democracy.

Those elected representatives have had their orders for a long time. The opinion polls confirm month after month that those orders have not changed. Sovereign courts and border control. Free trade is a nice-to-have.

Hence Theresa May had to work hard to get the best deal from the EU that she could get. So we would see how devious and one-sided it was. She has to champion that deal, because it is her deal. The House of Commons should rightly reject the deal and send her back to the EU to re-negotiate. Because they know that the EU never folds until 23:59:59. And if it isn’t going to fold, it has to be the EU who is shown to be intransigent and devious.

It’s supposed to be all about The Backstop. The Irish border is the biggest non-issue in contemporary politics. Anyone who makes it one is effectively threatening us with a new IRA / UDA bombing campaign. Everyone knows this, and no-one is going to make a decision about the UK’s political status on threat of a few IRA bombs. We did this already. Remember? Bombing the British doesn’t work. We’re stubborn like that.

Right now, the matter is in the hands of the members of the House of Commons. No lawyer predicts the jury decision. I hope they feel they have blustered too loud now to turn and accept the deal after Christmas. Unless it turns out that when Junker clarifies ‘No’ he means ‘Yes’. The Honourable Members will not be voting for a hard Brexit, but for more negotiations. If the EU refuses, the EU will be the one forcing a hard Brexit.

So expect lots of noise about preparing for a hard Brexit. Which is, I repeat, something that your employer should have done already. My suspicion is that most companies will have done this, or replaced their EU business with exports somewhere else. If you are working for a company that does business in Europe, and does not know how it will carry on if the UK is not in a free-trade zone with Europe, look for another employer NOW. And ask the interviewers what their hard Brexit plans are.

Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Late Twentieth-Century Music

Recently I read Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music. Now, I get that the Oxford History of Music will have a bias towards ACM (Acoustic Composed Music). That’s what has survived, because it was written down. There was no Now That’s What I Call A Drinking Song! double-CD in the seventeenth century. Nobody wrote down the popular tunes. We know there were popular tunes because the Church composers used to get told off for adapting them, and other composers swiped them for their written work. We just don’t know how many others there were. Or what the Top Ten sounded like.

The point is, that for the majority of the Twentieth Century, we do. The traditional excuse for only covering the music of the church, aristocracy and popular opera - because we don’t know what else there was - does not apply after, say, 1920. There’s no excuse for not covering it.

What has to be covered? In no special order: flamenco and its revival in the 1980’s; the development of jazz from be-bop to free jazz, perhaps told through the careers of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the rise of chord-scale Euro-jazz; the continued use of orchestral music in film; the Beatles and Bob Dylan (a Nobel Prize winner, for heaven’s sake), Jam and Lewis, and Stock, Aiken and Waterman; the Hollywood and Broadway musical; ambient and electronic dance music; the evolution of rock music from Chuck Berry to Nirvana; and finally, to the factory-like output of modern chart music. On the composed side: serialism, minimalism, electronic music, and a chunk on the Period Performance movement and its re-discovery and re-habilitation of dozens of composers. If I was commissioning such a history, I would ask the writer(s) to show, with examples in score, the links between the Minimalists and ambient music; or between the harmonies and chord changes of the Beatles and earlier composers; and I will happily contribute an essay on rock musicians’ plundering of the avant-garde for technical and musical devices.

There would not be much about the academic music to which Taruskin devotes much of his book. First because there was very little of it. Second, because only the same one hundred people ever listened to it once, and fewer a second time. Taruskin makes this seem like a virtue: here is music so pure, nobody can actually stand it. It’s true that only a handful of people ever listened to a Hayden string quartet, at the time, and wanted something new afterwards, but now those string quartets sell in the thousands every year and are listened to again and again in people’s homes. That’s going to be true in a hundred years’ time. In a hundred years’ time, no-one will listen to Boulez’ first piano composition, except out of sheer curiosity for a couple of minutes on You Tube, and they will agree with the first comment: there is a cat on the piano?

The court composers wrote music for a wealthy economic and political elite, but it was written to entertain and delight the audience, and in some cases, show off the playing skills of its sponsors. It was popular in intent, for all that it was aristocratic in audience. When it was made available to larger audiences, they took to it. When a larger bourgeois audience appeared in concert halls, they took to the earlier aristocratic music, and to the music written especially for them. When that music was made available on recorded media, it was and still is bought and enjoyed by people from all walks of life.

The career challenge for young composers in the twentieth century, who were being turned out in ever larger numbers by an expanding music education industry, was finding a way of making an impact, of being shocking and surprising without turning away the audiences. Stravinsky more or less sealed that off. Where do you go after the Sacre du Printemps, the fin de musique for the twentieth century? All twentieth-century string quartets sound like one or other of the six Bartok quartets. The options seem to be that you either write perfectly competent stuff that might have been written in the middle of the nineteenth century (with the addition of a couple of bracing twentieth-century harmonies), or you write stuff that very few people will ever listen to.

Read Taruskin and you may imagine that every music department in the Western world turned serialist. You might imagine the same about mathematics departments and category theory as well. The truth is that music departments went on teaching common practice, regular ol’ triads, inversions and all the other stuff available in Hindemith or Piston, in the same way that mathematics departments carried on teaching real analysis the epsilon-delta way. Serialism was confined to a handful of academics in a handful of elite colleges, the journalists that hyped them, and the foundations and clients that backed them. Electronic music and musique concrete, by contrast, was rapidly taken up by broadcasting companies to accompany dramas. How it came to be regarded as the signature "serious music" of the last half of the twentieth-century is the subject for a book on history, hype, personalities, and politics.

Taruskin calls the academic music he’s writing about, literate, as if to separate it from popular music, which is not written. Except it is. Jazz musicians pride themselves on their ability to play at sight, and most popular music session musicians read fluently. The prolific pop producers of the 1980’s all wrote music, and the virtuoso soloists of rock and jazz both extemporised and read the charts. The only significant musical tradition that does not use written music is flamenco. The legend is that Joni Mitchell had no background in music theory and composed entirely by ear, but she is remarkable exactly because almost no-one else could produce music of that quality without the theory and the staves.

So should you devote the many hours needed to read this volume of Taruskin’s History? I don’t regret it: I do after all have Varese, Xenakis, Berio and Boulez in my collection. I understand more about serialism than I did, and appreciated the coverage Taruskin gave to some research that concluded that serialism was, in fact, profoundly unmusical. I don’t mind his coverage of that period: I do mind reducing the entire history of Miles Davis’ music to a few quotes from critics about the politics of his later adoption of ‘rock music’. Taruskin doesn’t even discuss the well-known suggestion that On The Corner was influenced in part by Stockhausen. Taruskin’s book is also very heavy on the politics - but then to understand Russian music in the twentieth century we do have to be reminded of life under Stalin. So, no, you don’t need to read it. It’s not a history of later-twentieth century music.

The Orange Tree (Barbican)

This has to have been one of the best and longest-lasting autumns I can remember. This was taken at the end of October and most of the tree is still green.

Retirement Thoughts - Part Three

The longer I go on working, the later I have to live on a very much reduced income – though also with (not as much as you’d think) reduced expenses. However, I can’t say that I’m enjoying the life I lead while working. It’s not a drudge, but it is a chore – though that may be a fine distinction. There’s not a lot, if anything, about it that I’ll miss, and I have tried to make out a list of things that I really might miss. In terms of quality of life, I’m not convinced that life on a lesser income in retirement will be less than on this income working. Life will be different. Slower. Smaller things will feel like worthwhile achievements and it will take less to make a good day. (Pottering up and back to a museum between the rush hours will constitute a ‘good day out’, for instance. Some work in the garden or a spot of decorating will be a ‘good little job’). Right now, I’m not doing anything much except working, the gym, and basic housework / shopping / washing / stuff. This does not feel like achieving anything except a vague defiance of the Gods of Ageing.

You know the joke? The older I get, the less I pay to live. I get free NHS prescriptions, free eye tests every two years, and because I’m in London, I get free travel on London Transport at any time, plus free National Rail travel out to Zone 6 after the morning rush hour. After January 2020, my net salary will go up, because I won’t have to pay National Insurance (!), though the extra will be taxed. And I can take the State Pension and still work(!!), thought that will still be taxed. Tax or not, that’s a decent lump of money to put in the bank if made for a year, so maybe I should go on until June 2021 just because devilment.

I have been trying to figure out how to improve the quality of my life while I’m working, but that damned 05:30 wake-up and commute gets in the way. Maybe I need to accept that, at this age, simply getting up, commuting, putting in a day’s work amongst people half my age, three times my energy and in the same league as regards smarts, well, that’s enough for one day. I can get home, goof off reading or watching something, go to bed, and that’s been a good day. Sounds simple enough, but I’m having problems with the idea that it is enough.

Oh mutter mutter. This doesn’t have a neatly-resolved conclusion. I can tell. So here’s a photograph instead.

Retirement Thoughts - Part Two

“I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that”. That stayed with me for all of the Wednesday evening I wrote it and then evaporated on Thursday. My brave plans to commute in on Friday evaporated, and I schlepped the laptop home Thursday evening. Friday morning I was tired, tired in that I-have-to-physically-recover way, in the way that means the only thinking I wanted to do was the stuff on reflex, that happens in meetings.

Another twenty months of that?

I didn’t feel like this at the start of the year. I have spared you from reading all sorts of probably bogus pop-psych reasons why I might be feeling this way. Two major things have happened this year: my friend died over the summer. and we moved offices. Loss can be mourned, bad offices have to be worked in every day.

After leaving the Paradise that was the Shaftesbury Avenue office, they moved me to Bishopsgate. Where I am now makes Bishopsgate look like the West End. I get in at 07:30, and carry on with reading overlooking the back streets of the Barbican until 08:00. A few years ago, I would sit in the Caffè Nero near Holborn station for an hour, read, write or watch the people go by, but City workers are not watchable people and no City street has the presence of Kingsway. There’s no buzz in the City, just bustle. There’s a difference.

The new office is dark. The floor space is huge. The staff / desk ratio is 1.85:1. The per-person desk space is half what is was at the last office. There’s no assigned seating, so I can have total strangers sitting next to me. Even if I know them, it’s possible that we will go the whole day and not say anything to each other - office cameraderie is a thing of the past. This isn’t because I’m a mardy old git: I see the same happening to other people. They spend much of the day with headsets on, staring into an empty middle-distance. Before they would have travelled to a meeting, and actually seen the people they were talking to. Yeah, I know, productivity. However, a conference call is cheap, and if it’s a waste of time, who cares? Not so productive.

I can’t work in the chairs, and the desks are the wrong height, so I take my laptop, put on my Bose noise-cancellers and find an armchair(!) to work in for as long as I need to. I need the noise-cancellers because there are people talking in loud-and-clear telephone voices everywhere. No work requiring concentration gets done in that office except under headphones. Want to know why bank systems keep going wrong? One reason is that the on-shored workforce can’t concentrate because they keep bashing each other’s elbows, and they can’t focus enough to see the edge case they missed, which is why you see that webpage telling you there’s been an error. The air-conditioning is at least two levels cheap below where it needs to be for so many people and computers, and as we found out when there was a fire in the cafe on a lower floor, the air is re-cycled, not exchanged. The place smelled of damp-bonfire smoke all day.

It doesn’t help that the uber-manager is two hundred miles away and appears once a week. That affects the way the unter-managers are motivated and behave. They aren’t getting regular in-person verbal and body-language feedback from the only person who matters in their (working) lives. All they get are e-mails and the boss’s carefully managed behaviour on visiting day. The unters don’t feel secure or validated. Absentee uber-managers are not a good idea.

I find the place draining: lord alone knows how I get to the gym afterwards. The most I can hope for after this monumental whinge is that I stop wondering if it’s something physiological or some pop-science nonsense about getting older.

Okay. That’s the whinge over. Let’s try to be constructive here.

Retirement Thoughts - Part One

I can collect my State Pension from the 6th January 2020, about eight months later than they originally promised the schoolboy me. For some reason, this thought is at the front of my mind a lot of the time. Being able to ‘retire’, to give up the daily grind, to lay in bed until I want to get up, instead of when overcrowded trains say I need to get up. And most of all, never to have to go through the annual appraisal process, which is like going into a dark room where someone might throw the lights on and shout ‘Suprise’, or they might just stab you in the back over and over and then expect you to get back to your desk and work.

However, I’m cranky and odd enough at the moment as an older man who lives alone. Withdrawing from all contact with the human race might not be good for me. Except...

Was I the only person who wondered about equating dealing with the people at work and on trains as ‘contact with the human race’? Is it really? Are they really? I don’t mean that they may as well be Russian bots... no actually I do. Because the contact we have with people at work is not the contact the therapists and psychologists allege we need. And it’s certainly not the ‘intimate’ - the great weasel word of pop-psychology - contact they promise will make us all feel better.

Retirement partly promises a respite: the end of all the keeping-up-appearances for the sake of what-for-Christ’s-sake? Partly it’s a threat: much smaller income, no protection from inflation, continued exposure to property taxes and income tax. And sometimes I look at it as an opportunity: time to rest at last, to watch movies, to read and re-read, to potter round the house and garden, because that’s self-care as well, to work out at the local gym in the quiet periods. And maybe to go on the occasional Diamond Geezer-esque excursion on my Freedom Pass. I don’t want to go round the world: it’s not what it was when I was at school, and I can’t afford it.

So how long do I go on working? Until January 2020 at least. And unless I get a bad appraisal, I may as well hang around to collect what little bonus it will be, which means I stay until June. If I don’t take much holiday, I can walk away with three week’s holiday money as well.

Or I could ask to do a four-day week, and work from home Mondays. This still brings money in, but it’s the expensive option. I lose twenty per cent of my income and that’s where a lot of the cash saving is coming from. Reduced days feels like a compromise that won’t really work. The point is to be free of work forever, to change the way I live, not just to have an extra day off. ‘Working from home’ on Fridays gets much the same thing accomplished.

I retire full-time or carry on working full-time. And I do that until I really can’t do it anymore. As in, I get half-way to work on the morning commute and go sit in a caff until the rush hour passes. That’s going to be a long time.

Until then, and to get through to at least June 2020, I need to adjust how I’m eating, working, exercising, challenging and entertaining myself. It really is getting to the point where I believe that simply going through the commute-work-gym-commute cycle is taking as much energy as I have. This is not true, but thinking makes it so. It’s not forever, but the next twenty months. I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that. I may carry on working until I drop, or I may barely make it to June 2020. All sorts of political and economic mayhem can happen between now and then, and I may be working for the rest of my life, or lots of us might be out of work.

Get The Drums Right: The Free Jazz of Miles Davis

I’ve been listening to some of the Miles Davis live concerts from 1973. I love the studio album Get Up With It but I found Agartha and Pangera live albums a noise. Mind you, I found the first FIllmore album a bit ragged. This time round, I find the music oddly compelling, even though it’s still a mess compared to the studio work.

Then I realised. It’s Miles doing Free Jazz. As he’d been doing since the mid-60’s.

Go back to the early Sixties, and there’s not a lot of difference between Miles In The Studio and Miles On The Stage. The live performances are generally a little faster and more intense, the studio performances are more polished and considered. Then came the Second Great Quintet: Shorter / Hancock / Williams / Carter. Shorter, Hancock and Williams could all play free jazz, and often did, on stage. Miles let them: that’s what he had hired them for. Carter was there to stop them going totally berserk.

The cliches of ‘free jazz’ include lots of over-blowing, honking, squeaking, rattling percussion, discords, noisy guitars, a very busy but inaudible bassist, no obvious tune nor chord structure, and clearly some rule that a hint of a tuneful phrase will be punished by loss of any and all grants the player may be receiving. And Lord alone there’s still enough of that stuff going around. This is a less noisy but just as directionless example:


However, ‘free jazz’ can also have a defined rhythm and a something like a tune. Here’s Coltrane doing it:


Coltrane went on from the sublime heights of the Village Vanguard sessions to the organised chaos of Ascension...


...and then even further out. Miles did not follow. That sort of stuff was not going to buy him any Ferraris. He recognised as well that he couldn’t go on doing If I Were A Bell live. I suspect Miles realised that the Vanguard sessions work because of the telepathic communication between Elvin Jones and John Coltrane. One reason Ascension does not work is that not even Elvin Jones can figure out what he should be doing. The rhythm section comes across as an afterthought.

What Miles realised was: get the drums right, discourage honking and over-blowing, the soloists can blow as free as they like, and it will make sense to a reasonably hip audience. So he hired three guys who could do free jazz and let them figure out how to do free jazz in the Miles Davis Quintet. One of those was the seventeen year-old Tony Williams: Miles knew that kid could drum up a storm in three different time signatures at once. He followed Williams with Jack de Johnette, who drummed up a rock-influenced storm, and he followed de Johnette with the powerhouse combination of Al Foster and James Mtume, who did heaven knows what, because it’s not jazz, funk or rock, but is exactly what Miles needed to make his then style of free jazz accessible to the majority of jazz fans.

Because what’s going on over that percussion is as free and weird as anything anyone else in free jazz ever did.

Ben Judah's This Is London

I bought this book a while ago, but wasn’t in the mood to read what I thought it was until a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t a series of bleeding-heart tales of how bad life is for illegal immigrants to London. It is a kind of psycho-sociology. Judah says he wrote the book to understand this new London of the early 2010’s, full of Africans and Eastern Europeans, that has appeared in the last twenty years and that he doesn’t really understand.

Judah’s book avoids the bleeding heart. He lets his people speak, even when, like the rich kids, they are total jerks. He describes the quality of the light, the smells, the chicken shops, the smell, the damp, the bodies pressed together in the subways and the doss-houses. The description of the bus stop on the Old Kent Road at four in the morning, and the ride in to the City of London, is masterful. He shows us the strange London of the early 2010’s, that will be a distant memory by 2030 (“Daddy, were there really African witch-doctors in south London?”) because in the end, the best way to drive away the poor is to import the well-off, to gentrify, to build high-rise apartments in the Elephant and Castle. Then the doss-houses get converted to middle-class accommodation again. Look at what happened in Notting Hill, or Brooklyn today. And Judah sees that as well.

Invisible in his book are the middle-class immigrants, with their university degrees, knowledge-economy jobs, and reasonably stable family backgrounds, who are already integrated into the world-wide Westernised middle-class that exists in Egypt as much as Australia. This is a clue. It isn’t the foreign-ness of the people that strikes him, it’s the sheer poverty. Why would anyone come from Albania to some doss-house in East Zone Three?

Immigration is manifold. There is a constant, small flow of people from one country to another that has been going on forever: these are the hard-working, skilled, risk-takers of myth, the ‘Brain Drainers’ who went from the UK to the US in the 1960’s, the professionals who seem to happier in a different country than the one they were born and raised in, and in the 1980’s and 1990’s the children of the elites in politically unstable countries, sent to The USA or Europe for safety. To all intents and purposes they assimilate, even if they don’t eat British food and prefer to worship the Gods they brought with them. This is Good Immigration.

Then there are people who are imported to fill a specific need. The Irish who built the UK’s roads and railways in the nineteenth-century. The West Indians brought over on the SS Windrush to drive the buses and trains because London Transport would not or could not compete with the salaries being offered by the reviving post-war British manufacturing industry. The Poles who came over to fill the skilled-worker shortage caused by the abandonment of apprenticeship schemes in the 1970’s. And the nurses poached by agencies from every third-world country for an NHS that cannot or will not compete with the salaries that men and women who would have been nurses are now offered by banks and other service industries. This is Employer-Pull Migration: there are jobs waiting for the immigrants.

Then there is Push-Migration. The immigrants are more or less thrown out of their countries. Castro’s boat-lifts of the 1980’s and 1990’s are the paradigm: he emptied his jails and hospitals, added a few old people and children for press photos, and packed them off to Florida, seventy-five miles away. All those people who passed through Ellis Island? They were the weak men and obstreperous women who were going to pull the village or the small town down in the next bad winter after the last bad harvest: the people who could not (the men) or would not (the women) pull their weight when the going got tough. Don’t forget all those criminals the UK exported to Australia and to the US for about a hundred years. I’m sure other European countries did the same. Nobody now doubts that the million-strong Angela’s Army of 2016, mostly young men of military age, were the misfits, petty criminals, mentally-unstable and generally useless, carefully selected by the village elders, and shoved onto the NGO lorries, and told not to come back.

Pushed-Migrants are the unskilled, the weak, the mentally-ill, the criminal, the gullible and a horde of naive dreamers exploited by con-men telling them how easy it is to set up an International Business in London, where the money grows on trees. Polish builders brought over by dodgy agencies aside, these are the people Judah is writing about.

The third wave of immigration is driven by, populated by, and produces profits for, criminals, from drug-suppliers, through crooked landlords packing in four-on-the-floor and three-in-the-shed, to families who don’t pay their Filipina maid’s national insurance for years. (Judah blushingly notes that these are almost always Jewish employers: the French and the Germans and the British pay fairly and on time.) Criminal too are the agencies breaking UK employment law by only hiring Eastern Europeans, and only advertising the jobs in foreign countries, and then shielding employers from their full obligations to the workers with zero hours contracts and pseudo-self-employment. He sees it as exploitation, but actually it is crime.

The UN’s and EU’s ideal of Free Movement of People is not supposed to mean Free Movement for gangsters, drug barons, pimps and their prostitutes, and endless numbers of gulled low-skill workers. Yet it means that far, far more than it means Free Movement for decent middle-class graduates from Poland to get jobs as data analysts in market research firms in London. What we’ve learned is that the first people through newly-opened borders are not doctors and research physicists, but the advance guard of the gangs, looking for drug markets to take over, and flats for their prostitutes.

Judah notices how the poor immigrants bring their institutions, food, religions, social structures, crime, and beliefs with them. The woman who lives in Lithuania E16, shopping at a Lithuanian supermarket, speaking Lithuanian at home, watching Lithuanian television; the Africans with their witch-doctors and exorcisms. Everyone eating their home food and drinking their home beers - especially the Poles.

Which brings us to the idea of ‘integration’. We think that the integrated immigrant should ‘behave like us’. Who are the poor immigrants expected to behave like? They can’t afford the middle-class life, and who would want to behave like the English poor? Why watch awful British TV soap-operas when you can watch awful Lithuanian soap-operas whose characters you already know? In many cases, the immigrant poor sense they have better moral and social standards and practices than the English poor. The poor never live like the middle classes, as the middle classes never live like the rich. Who isn’t integrated with whom?

What does ‘integration’ mean in a post-modern economy and society? Immigrants must enter the country legally, else their first act on its land it to break its laws. Then they must do the same as any child born there: they must abide by its laws, earn a living, pay their due taxes, and behave in public as the locals do. How they behave in private is their business, as long as the taxpayer does not end up picking up the costs. These are the same requirements placed on the children of the citizens of that country. (The children must learn to speak and read the language, the adult immigrants should learn to speak and read ‘enough’. Some languages are almost deliberately withheld from non-natives, as the natives prefer to practice their English / French / other colonial language.) ‘Integration’ is not watching Eastenders instead of the Nigerian equivalent, it is letting daughters go to university, not using counterfeit train tickets to get to the building site, and not running a heroin distribution operation from the back of a dingy corner-shop, just as for the native children it is not disrupting classrooms and for the native businessmen it is not running Ponzi schemes. Native-born people can be as un-integrated as any Romanian sent by his debt collectors to beg on the streets of London.

I read the title of Judah’s book as This Is London (As Well). The Other London, where people have jobs, functional lives, friends, families, and don’t break the law. That London has no glamour, almost no piquancy, and little colour. After all, most of those people, on the trains into Waterloo and on the District Line, earn well into the top salary decile. And they have no secrets and no stories. At least, no stories that the reader will want to read.

Two Photographs from the Barbican Highwalks

Why is this top picture boring? 

While this one is pretty good?

It's something more than just the greater detail of the greenery. It's something about the geometry of it as well. But I can't explain what.

Answers please in the comments

October 2018 Review

I used up one of my many outstanding week’s leave, and did various bits of clearing up messes in the house, had a health check from the Gym’s GP, and settled into my new Wednesday evening routine with my commitment at the Soho meeting.

Wait. What was that again? Health check? You know, like blood panels, testosterone, body fat, medical once-over involving being poked and prodded, blood pressure and pulse, all that good stuff. It’s one of those things one should get if one has the money or the insurance coverage, and I wanted to be sure that there were no major changes in my body chemistry that might account for my recent feelings of blah. Turns out there isn’t, but I did get a whole bunch of blood test strips just to make sure that the reading I got that morning was anomalous.

(OK, since you ask, I have a pulse oximeter, a blood-sugar reader, and an electrical blood pressure reader. Any time I use them, I’m so damn healthy it’s not true.)

For no reason I could think of, I stopped taking the magnesium, vitamin D and multi-vitamins. I didn’t even think about it. The magnesium returned within the week. You don’t want to know the details. And since the days are getting shorter, I put the vitamin D back in. Because superstition. Haven’t noticed not taking the mutli-vitamins.

I read Brian Sewell’s Outsider II, the second volume of his autobiography; Terence Popp’s The Warrior’s Way and the Soldier’s Soul; Peter Robb’s A Death In Brazil; Media Lens’ Propaganda Blitz; tried Schonberg’s Harmonielehre and gave up; Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things; finished William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, and also the Burkholder / Grout / Palisca History of Western Music.

(1,000+ pages of serious reading - with musical notation)

My sight-reading has always been a little flakey, and one exercise I did with the History of Music was to read all the notes aloud in the examples they gave. It was hard work at the start - I had a real slippery spot with D-E-F at the bottom of the stave for a good few hundred pages - but it was worth it. Treble Clef only, of course. I’m not a Real Musician. (Real Musicians can sight read through all the changes of clef at the end of the prelude of Bach’s sixth cello suite, the one for a five-string cello.)

I saw Automatic at Sea, Cotton Pickin’ Chickenpickers, Landscape In The Mist, The Rover, all via MUBI, and all of S8 of House.

Sis and I had supper in Hammer and Tongs on Farringdon Road, which was pretty good, better than the frankly ordinary supper we had at the end of the month (timing) at Rules.

When I went back after the break, I went straight back to having a working-from-home Friday. The five-day-a-week commute thing was okay, but it makes the weekends feel very short and man-I-am-tired-at-the-end-of-it. (You have not heard the last of this.)

Freedom of Internet Speech

No sooner does someone get banned from Twitter, You Tube, or Facebook, than their Bros are out talking about Freedom of Speech.

The political right of Freedom of Speech is the State’s promise not to punish anyone for expressing any opinion, no matter how wrong or offensive. All rights come with obligations, and for Freedom of Speech there are three. First, no inflammatory speech intended to lead to violence and uprising soon after the talking stops. Second, opinions must be expressed with an acceptable vocabulary - freedom of speech does not mean freedom of cussing. Third, restriction which amount to no treason. I can live with this as long as the definition of treason is very, very narrow, and does not amount to “offends or upsets some civil servant working for the security services”.

However, just because the State won’t prosecute you, doesn’t mean you might not get sacked from work for being nasty about your co-workers in public. The State promises to keep its nose out of your blog, it does not promise to keep your daughter’s classmates' parents’ noses out of your blog.

There’s an often-quoted sentiment to the effect that if you aren’t prepared to let other people say things you think are wrong or even despicable, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech. This is not about the political right, but about people’s social behaviour. The State can be generous with its freedom of speech because it knows your son’s classmates’ and their parents are a bunch of bigots who will put you out of your business, house, health and sanity if you step one millimetre off the straight and narrow of whichever Fundamentalist Christian / Muslim / California Left-Wing Billionaire / LBGQTHS orthodoxy you are supposed to be keeping to.

Social control is achieved with sheer brute force, in business by sacking, de-monetisation, vicious PR campaigns, and personally by exclusion, lies, threats and the threat of violence. That’s how society has always worked and we have the Social Media companies to thank for making it so clear. All conformity is enforced by the threat of violence: the State writes laws to make its use of violence acceptable, and your employers, family, acquaintances, co-workers and neighbours use moral posturing and self-rightousness to cover up their shaming, guilt-tripping, false allegations, lies, threats, and retaliations.

Should content creators expect the management of You Tube to behave any better than the people who used accusations of witch-craft to manipulate the rest of the village? No. Does that mean the management of You Tube should get away with it? No. Does it mean the management of You Tube will get away with it? Yes. Until they commit the cardinal sin of Losing Money and Losing the Audience.

However, virtuous bullshit is the best response to mendacious bullshit. So the Bros should be out yelling about Freedom of Speech. What they mean is social freedom, not legal or political freedom, but don’t let’s confuse the issue.

However. Be careful what you wish for. Break up the current monopolies and replace them with smaller companies staffed by middle-of-the-road managers overseen by equally middle-of-the-road government regulators, and in a few years the whole place will look like a 1950’s teenager’s magazine. We may be still be able to listen to Sandman and Terence Popp, but the algorithms that suggest one when you visit the other will have gone.

You see, SJW’s only care about their issues. If you’re off their radar, you’re copacetic, and a lot of people never get onto their radar. The middle-of-the-road types care about everything and it’s their job to generate ‘policies’ and ‘guidelines’ to remove or hide anything that they don’t want their daughter to see, or their husbands to hear.

So enjoy the Wild West of the Internet while it’s still with us.

Building on Bishopsgate

Four buildings - large ones, way large than the Gherkin or Tower 42 - under construction along Bishopsgate. What do the developers know about next year that we don't? Or what do they know about the ageing of the existing office stock in London?

How Are Things at Work? I'm So Glad You Asked

Recently I entered the late-twentieth century at work: I was gifted a Tableau licence. Tableau is a data visualisation tool, basically a slick pivot-table and pivot chart program: the graphics are sharp and there’s a wider range of calculations available than Excel offers. And it doesn’t re-format graphs every time you change the underlying pivot table - Excel users will understand how valuable that is. It’s fast and organises a heap of charts way better than scattering them around on a worksheet. It’s a wonderful tool for analysts who do what I do.

At the moment my supervisor is a mid-level manager, rather than the ‘Head of’ I’m used to reporting to. She has chronic but low-level insecurity about her continued employment, so she thinks she needs to look as if she’s doing lots of things and taking lots of initiatives. In vain would I tell her that as a Head Office staff officer, she’s as secure as a) her ability to be seen to be bringing in business, or b) her ability to handle crap for her supervisor. Busy doing stuff is a nice-to-have in the good times, a point she doesn’t understand, but her predecessor did.

And somehow Tableau wound up on her busy-doing-stuff list. Which is exactly where it doesn’t belong. Because in and of itself, it reaps not, neither does it sow. It’s a better basket for carrying the corn, or perhaps, a better pair of sandles for walking over the field.

In the part of the business where I work, they are interested in two things: a) meeting their numbers; b) handling the crap that gets sent down from above. When we’re below budget, everything is judged by one criteria alone: will it get the business back on track? (You may think that everyone is business thinks like that, but in service departments, they don’t, and in analytical and strategy departments they never think of these things.)

This leads to extreme blinkers: if it doesn’t help the managers get done what they need to get done to look good against their targets, they simply aren’t interested. Dealing with the alternative reality of the company’s monumental bureaucracy takes up all their brain space, and they have nothing left for the real world. Consequently they have no interest in background knowledge, context and the broader view.

And then along comes my supervisor, asking for the benefits of using a souped-up pivot table, where ‘benefits’ means ‘something that people would think is useful, when they don’t give a crap about anything except making excuses for last week’s sales, improving next week’s sales, and progressing their projects’.

Um. No. Not going to happen. The only benefit to them is that it makes ‘more compelling’ Powerpoints they send back up the line when the high-ups ask silly strategic questions. Which, since that ‘compelling’ makes it look like we all know what the heck we’re talking about, is a helpful contribution to everyone’s job-retention. But of course, this is the one benefit that cannot be said aloud.

So my supervisor is looking to me to provide reasons that don’t exist for something that shouldn’t be discussed at that level anyway. (Tableau isn’t that expensive. If I wanted £100,000 for some of the fancy SAS visualisation tools, sure, I’d want a case as well.) Does that sound like something I can do? Or she should be doing?

That’s one reason I feel uneasy. I’ve got a supervisor who can’t read the politics very well. Still, she goes into bat for me at appraisal time, so I have to keep her happy.

The other is the thought of having to deal with the bureaucracy, with the incomprehensible online forms, sequences of web pages, questions that are written in a secret code that looks like English but really isn’t, and that require far too much background reading to deal with. And which end by sending my request for approval to a chain of people I’ve never heard of. Nobody understands this stuff, because there’s nothing to understand: it’s a series of ritual incantations: chant the right words in the right sequence and you get what you want. Get anything out of place and nothing happens, or you get refused and have to chant it all over again. And when I give up and have some priest talk me through it, it always turns out that the system wasn’t really designed to cope with the type of request I’m making.

If I’m not looking at data about customers and processes, I don’t feel like I’m doing the job I’m supposed to do. The bureaucracy can eat up all the time I give and ask for more. That’s not what I want to do.

Reception(s) 07:30

I suspect this sight can only be seen in one building in London. 

It's not that I haven't been starting posts, it's that I can't get those posts to end in a sensible manner. I can't even list the subjects I start and then don't finish, because when I'm half-way through, either it doesn't seem that important anymore or I realise I'm on the wrong track. So there's going to be a bunch of photographs to keep ticking over until I find something worth writing about again.

Random Thoughts - Part One

I read Jocko Wilnick’s Discipline is Freedom before the hot weather set in. He’s the Extreme Ownership guy with various TED talks and interviews, during which he suggests we all wake up at 04:30. Because, why wouldn’t you? It was just one step of gung-ho too much for me. I know the hurt-your-legs-train-your-arms routine. I do it myself from time to time. But not all the time and anyway, he must have at least 50% more testosterone than me. After a while at the self-improvement game, I have reached a state I can maintain that is challenging but leaves me able to deal with the day job and the household routine. If I don’t get out as much as I would like, that’s a consequence of where I chose to live in 1987, not of doing bench-presses in a gym in Soho.

Being an ‘older man’ also means that my health and fitness targets are about maintenance rather than improvement. If you’re under fifty-five and have not had a serious medical event, you should be looking to improve: mo’ weight, mo’ reps. Over fifty-five, and there will be a day when you realise that maintenance is demanding enough.

Reach this steady state and the excitement, the sense of purpose, goes. A daily and weekly routine, that ten years ago would have been a serious challenge, is now exactly that: a routine. It’s not ho-hum, but it’s not a thrill that I made it to the end of another week.

What do we do self-improvement for? As if the answer is: to be more attractive to women, or to get a promotion at work. We do self-improvement because our lives had become a mess and we looked, ate and felt like shit. Then we get to a decent condition and we realise: it’s one thing to get here, and another to stay here. It’s as much work to stay in shape as it is to get in shape.

As if the question is: now I’m in shape, what am I in shape for? The answer is: so you don’t get out of shape again. And that takes work. Everything around you and your own bodily self conspires to drag you back into the mire of out-of-shape. Being in shape is a goal in itself. It’s like making money: we have to keep on doing it.

The steady state gets to be a different kind of comfort zone. Waking up and going through they day after a decent amount of sleep, knowing that another decent night’s sleep awaits is a pleasant feeling. Going out at 19:30 to something that won’t finish until 21:30 and that I won’t get home until 22:45 and so will miss a cycle of sleep and wake up groggy the next morning...? That grogginess starts to be, not exactly unappealing, but inconvenient.

It’s been a while since I saw something at Sadlers Wells, or an early evening movie in the West End. Or since I’ve been to one of the major museums or galleries. I feel I should be doing those things. Perhaps on some kind of rotation. The truth is, when I leave the gym, either at the end of the day or on a Saturday morning, I don’t have that what-does-the-rest-of-the-day-hold bounce.

Maybe there’s a role for the gang-ho, JFDI, losers-make-excuses-winners-make-things happen, attitude in doing regular going-out stuff. After all, my ‘objective’ for the recent few and next few weeks amounts to re-establishing a routine that worked well a couple of years ago and I let slip. It’s not much, but it’s enough.

Drag your ass to the Tate Modern - what else are you doing today?

Doesn’t quite sound right.

September 2018 Diary

September 10th was my friend’s funeral. Ever get the wrong time for something in your head? Despite what the diary says? So I arrived what I though was ten minutes early to find I was twenty minutes late. One of the staff opened the doors for me, and I snuck in and sat at the back, while his partner was reading her tribute to him. We stood, sat, and sung half-heartedly, and his son and daughter read a tribute and geared up at the end of it. Then we trooped outside, I paid my condolences to the kids and his partner, made a vague gesture about having to go, and left.

I had lunch in Richmond, went home and read in the garden, and kept busy tidying up bits ands pieces. That felt a lot better than eating chocolate and tearing up over Rent, which was what I did the last time I went to a friend’s funeral.

When you get to my age, you will understand. The older I get, the more life is about dealing with today, and the greater proportion of my flagging energy it takes to do that. It’s not that older people are harder-hearted, it’s that we just don’t have the energy for demonstrative emotions.

I started the month by buying an Apple TV. Only after I had checked that I could use it to show Curzon Home movies on my TV. And that the MUBI monthly subscription is half the price of a single movie. Come home, pick a movie, stop half-way through to set up the next morning’s breakfast and gym gear, finish some time after 21:00, and just plain going to bed. The simple life.

I saw Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman at the Curzon Soho; The Lovers, The Soft Skin, 360, The Woman in the Fifth, The Nile Hilton Incident, Lourdes, 13 Assassins, A Man Escaped, The Decent One on Curzon Home Cinema; The Sheltering Skies, The Andromeda Strain, Spring Fever, Avalon, The Lady Eve, The Bling Ring, Enter The Void on MUBI; and The Sweet Smell of Success on DVD. Which is exactly what I got the Apple TV for.

I read Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor; Virginie Despentes’ Baise-Moi; Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography; and Dr Graham Easton’s The Appointment. I’ve also be riding through William Cobbett’s Rural Rides.

I stopped with the evening meal. No, really, just a piece of fruit and some fizzy water. While watching the movie. I don’t get acids reflux an hour after going to sleep and I feel better the next morning. It’s not strictly intermittent fasting because the fruit is in the evening, but it’s as close as I’m going to get.

I got myself a commitment at the meeting I go to. Literature secretary. It feels right, and it will make me turn up every week for a year. It was also the only time I’ve ever known three people put themselves forward on the day for Literature. One withdrew, as they were totally new to the meeting, so me and the other guy had to go outside while about eight people voted. That may be the first time that has ever happened in any meeting anywhere for that commitment.

Then I got The Autumn Cold. Once upon a time colds were all the same. Now every cold is different. This one hit me with a fever for the first two or three days, let me get back to work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then just could not be assed to get out of bed for the Thursday and Friday. I felt rotten for the first couple of hours, and then picked up, thought I’d be up and running the next morning, and the next morning I’d feel like crap. Despite this, I only missed one training session.

The training you do when you’re feeling like crap is the best training you do. Because when you’re feeling okay again, you don’t have to spend a week or so getting back into shape.

We live, and the things around us live, through daily care

The title is a line from Ilse Crawford's Home Is Where the Heart Is. On the opposite page is an open shed door with four spotless brooms hanging on the inside of the door.

It’s one of those lines that I’ve always just nodded along to, consisting of words I understand arranged into a sentence whose meaning I never knew I didn’t know.

Then one day I got it. Daily care means use, cleaning, mending. That’s how, on a very elemental level, we live. Our lives consisting of using things, cleaning and repairing them. The brooms in the photograph are brushed out at the end of the day to remove the bits and pieces that remain in the brooms in my garden shed. Clean tools are the mark of a good tradesman: mine show I’m an amateur.

When I was at secondary school, the bicycles we rode to school were, every week, wiped over, chrome shined and moving parts oiled - cleaning the chain in turps and re-oiling it was considered hardcore. The point of ‘cleaning your room’ is only partly a clean room, mostly it’s that the time spent cleaning that speaks to self-respect. Take it too far, and it’s mere compulsion that gets in the way of life and speaks to mental instability. The balance matters.

The more things we have, the more things we have to care for, to use, clean and repair. Some will get more attention, some less, and some none. I have a food mixer in a corner of my kitchen that gets wiped down from time to time but never used. I keep thinking food mixers are something I should use, and then never do. After a while I take them down to the tip. Most of the other things I have I use, and feel I should dust and clean more often than I do.

The fewer things we have, the more care we could take of them, and the older those things, the more care we need to take care of them.

In the life of a commuter, what gets daily care?

So much of what we use belongs to someone else, and we spend so little time at home, we have too little time to clean and repair. Take a look at people’s shoes: some haven’t been polished for months. And how long does it take to polish shoes? Ten minutes? Sure, clothes washing. Bedsheets. Towels. How about wiping the iron down after using it? Cleaning your mobile with a glasses-spray? Brushing the dust off the remotes around the house? When was the last time you cleaned the TV screen?

Sound silly? Try it.

Stuck Inside of A50 With The Brexit Blues Again

Are you fed up with the Brexit propaganda in all the media? I am. The only thing I’m more fed up with is yet another article whinging about how it’s a terrible injustice that privileged ambitious white women aren’t being given even more privileges. I don’t read those articles past the W-word in the headline. Anyway…

To recap: the EU cannot and should not give up the demand, that two conditions of super-privileged access, are a) the legal sovereignty, of the European Courts, and b) the Four Freedoms. The UK Government was given strict instructions by 17+ million voters that it was to regain control of its borders and legal system. So no capital-A Agreement is possible. The people whose jobs it was to understand this stuff knew this about thirty seconds after the referendum result was announced. The A50 rules forced them and everyone else into two pointless years of fake negotiation and preposterous posturing. The only real diplomatic problem was wondering how to blame the Irish, and the Border did the trick. (Irish and UK Customs authorities say they don’t need a hard border to make it all work post-Brexit, but hey, where diplomacy needs, the Devil take the Customs man, or something.)

We’ve reached the stage where everyone is talking openly about a hard Brexit, and the most sensible remark I’ve read about that is that, while the British will pay the price of a hard Brexit, it is not so clear that the individual European countries will want to.

Remember your history: the Brits are good at four things (as well as pop music, inventing stuff, banking, flexible legal systems, and a bunch of other things, and on the other hand they did need the EU to tell them to clean up their filthy beaches, but I digress)

First, getting off ships before anyone else has heard the water coming into the bilges. The EU will never be a federal nation state, but it will ruin itself trying. Time to leave. Especially before the Euro falls apart.

Second, being prosaically, anti-climatically, practical. The Brits can reduce the consequences of what looks like an history-shaking event to a handful of petty changes. For instance, the uncertainty about customs arrangements, all that huffing and puffing, and what does it mean? That a firm in Rochdale has to fill in EU/HG/12-35UTF/RE and file it a week in advance, instead of getting by with a UK registration plate on the day. And UK Passport-holders have to line up behind the Ugandans rather than the Poles when they pass through Immigration at Nice Airport. Duh.

So don’t be surprised when whole swathes of the British economy wind up being prepared for 30/4/2019. Some won’t be, but that’s only because they wanted to create a crisis they didn’t want to waste.

Third, being able to handle ridiculous amounts of ambiguity, aka It’ll all work out in the end. God, as we know, is an Englishman, and he looks after his own, ever since he took his eye off the job in 1066. So it will work out. How far away that end is, and how much it will cost to get there doesn’t matter to the Brits, which brings us to...

Fourth, the UK Government has never been shy of bankrupting and indebting its taxpayers to win a war. They did it twice in the twentieth century. They only beat Napoleon at Waterloo because they borrowed a ton of money to hire the German Army. Further back, they paid the Danes boatloads of silver to stop looting and raping in the streets of Newcastle. Real historians could doubtless list a dozen much more ordinary examples.

Few other countries are prepared to bankrupt themselves in any cause. That’s why it’s taken the 27 an age to understand that the Brits will bankrupt themselves to keep their precious independence. While a hard Brexit might hurt the British more than any random European country, it’s going to cost that random European country, and not spare change either.

And remember, in a hard Brexit, the EU doesn’t get its money.

So there will be a hard Brexit, because there can’t be a capital-A Agreement. But it won’t be a malicious Brexit. The EU can’t afford the PR. The French will be awkward for a couple of months, but they love that kind of publicity. The Dutch don’t. The Germans don’t. The Iberians and the V4 can’t afford it. Everyone else wants as much business-as-usual as possible. So there will be lots of temporary transitional arrangements (TTAs) to keep things going. That, I’ve always thought, is what the negotiators are really doing now: working out the TTAs. There will be Trade Agreement on the Canadian or Japanese model agreed tout de suite (once special access is publicly acknowledged to be non-negotiable) and the EU will get a chunk of its €50bn.

The final part of the drama will be that those TTA’s will only be introduced at the last moment, when it can be spun as preventing a world-wide economic crisis the like of which mankind would never have seen before or after. TTA’s can’t be introduced sensibly, beforehand, as that would let Parliaments argue about stuff. It has to look like an emergency.

Can’t help feeling this is exactly how Donnie told Terry to play it.

Why Were The Good Old Days?

Sis asked recently why The Good Old Days were simpler or better and I had a hard time answering.

The Good Old Days was the period between the end of WW2 and September 1972 (when the school leaving age was raised to sixteen). In European countries during this time, a large proportion of the workforce were working for the Government through the Health Service, the railways and associated haulage companies, the regional Electricity, Gas and Water Boards, the Civil Service and Local Government, and the General Post Office and its attached telephone company. Many other industries were subsidised - such as British Leyland, whose Austin / Morris Mini lost money on every single vehicle.

The Good Old Days were marked by three things:

1) Morally, politically, legally and in the tax codes, the (Western) world supported the Normie Life: marriage, mortgage, children and employment. There was a clear idea of what it was to be a Normie: heterosexual, with children, mediocre of talent and energy, leading lives of compromise and frustration with occasional moments of satisfaction and peace, and wanting to spend time with other people like them. In return for leading these lives, they were granted steady employment and would not experience any real economic hardship, which brings us to point 2)...

2) The majority of employers accepted that jobs had two functions: to produce goods and services, and to support the Normie life, which is in an employer’s interest, as it means they get a steady workforce with non-transferable skills of value to the employer. There was a strong link between school and employment. Five O-levels including-English-and-Maths was enough for a young person to start a career in a bank, insurance company and with many other employers. There were apprenticeships for practically-minded young people, and the teenagers who could not keep still could leave school at fifteen so that others could study for O-levels in (relative) peace. Which brings us to point 3)...

3) Domestically, the Crazies were locked away in Asylums and Special Schools, the Rainbows were in the closet, the Diversities were still in their home country, extremists were merely Communists or wanted hanging, and moral posturers were obvious prigs and cranks. The Good Old Days had awful food, poor health, headaches, way too much smoking and drinking, sexism, racism, class prejudice, teenage pregnancy, killer smogs, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It was not perfect. But the imperfections and deviancies were hidden. Each imperfection was known perhaps by a few, none by everyone. People whispered secrets, but none of it appeared in the media and Parliament.

Now, if we could keep the good bits and get rid of the awful food, poor health, headaches, way too much smoking and drinking, sexism, racism, class prejudice, teenage pregnancy, killer smogs, and a whole bunch of other stuff, we would have a Pretty Perfect Society. In the 1970’s that’s what it looked like Western Governments were trying to do, The Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976, and the Divorce Reform Act 1969 (in force 1971). There were a lot of other changes, far too many to recite here.

The Good Old Days had an illusion of consensus. That illusion disappeared with all that legislation and the behaviours that went with it. It turned out that the good food, decent health, cutting back on smoking and drinking, removing the most overt sexism, racism and class prejudice, reducing teenage pregnancy and a whole bunch of the other stuff, seemed to require that all the social and economic support of the Normie life be dismantled. Which no-one saw coming. Now...

1) All that's left of the support for the Normie lifestyle are some minor administrative privileges for husbands and wives, as against ‘partners’. There is no viable idea of a ‘normal life’ that receives State and public support.

2) Employment no longer supports social roles, indeed, companies no longer see themselves as under any obligation to employ the citizens of the country in which they make their profits. Employers don’t train anybody, and new hires are expected to have the skills and knowledge they need for the new job already. Employers lost expertise and knowledge with rationalisations and downsizing in the 1980 / 1999, which is why they didn’t lay people off in the same way after 2008. Jobs are more secure than in the Dumbsizing Era, but still can’t be counted on.

But most of all...

3) Crazies, rainbows, and diversities are everywhere, and all the secrets are shouted from the rooftops. Extremists now blow themselves and everyone around them to pieces, and moral posturing and virtue-signalling is entitled and aggressive. Normies don’t feel as if the public spaces belong to them, but instead to drug dealers, beggars, rough sleepers, and the drunks who pissed against the wall at 4 A.M. Normies don’t feel like the society and economy supports them, but that they are mere tax fodder to support subsidies, and legal and employment privileges, for ‘minorities’ who don’t make any contribution to the economy or society.

Nothing now supports the Normie life. Which is why they yearn for the Good Old Days.

Sure, they have iPhones and decent coffee and Netflix, and cars that don’t rust, and heart transplants and hip transplants, and cheap air travel to faraway beaches, and all that stuff.

They also have uncertain employment, ridiculous house prices, static real income for the majority of workers, forty per cent of marriages end in divorce and under-performing children, the queues for heart and hip transplants are years long, the drugs used to work but the germs are becoming immune, there’s nowhere to park your rust-free car if you do drive it, and the real difference is not between the Haves and the Have-Nots - which is the historical condition of the human race - but between the Normies and the self-improvement and self-management people, with their Continuous Professional Development, three-times-a-week gym sessions and half-marathons, and their low-carb, low-fat, low-taste diets.

The Normies have the distinct feeling they got screwed. They didn’t. They just got their noses rubbed in the truth that, for a lot of people, the Good Old Days were the Bad Old Days. The Normie life required huge amounts of denial and a metric tonne of complacency, which was possible only because the rest of the world was shut up behind the Iron Curtain and had the economic development of the mid-nineteenth century.

August 2018 Diary

The heat really did take it out of me. I took a week off after the weather cooled down, and in the few days up to the break, I could feel the gears in my head grinding. I was making mistakes at work that I would never normally make. I could not think straight. It was so bad I woke up at 08:00 for three days during the week off.

I read Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler; John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-Up; The Secret Barrister; The Panama Papers by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier; G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday; Alan Furst’s A Hero In France; and John Lange (aka Micheal Crichton) The Venom Business and Drug of Choice; and Olga Sviblova's book on Rodchenko

I saw no films and finished S7 of House. I watched Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and both the Jack Reacher films on DVD.

Sis and I dined at Delamina, off Wigmore Street. I lunched at The Botanist on Sloane Square because the District Line was up the creek and it was a way to sit it out. I had supper at Blanchette in Soho as well.

I decided it was time to knock working from home on the head. I lost a day of walking - I do 10,000+ steps a day with the commute and other walking - and I was not making the best use of the time. ‘Working from home’ is good when, instead of chatting with others in the office networking with my colleagues, I can do some light housework. With the hot weather, I hadn’t been doing that.

I took my Bose cans into work - I use the in-ear QC20’s for the commute - and that experiment worked: the cans are more comfortable and provide a bit more physical sound exclusion. And I went back to sitting on all sorts of seats around the office, because I’d let myself slip into sitting into a tolerable chair that is still distracting enough that I can’t work fluently in it. Hey, given a choice between reducing property costs per employee and decreasing productivity per employee, there’s really no choice, right?

The white tee-shirts under the blue work shirt came back as well. I’d let the previous lot get too old and scratchy, and of course they shrank in the wash *cough* and became uncomfortable, so as an experiment I stopped wearing them. Finding: wear tee-shirts under the work shirt, and renew the tee-shirts every year or so.

The Great iTunes Album Art project got completed, and only those who have done it will appreciate what that means.

I took some photographs. I know everyone does that all the time, but I had stopped. The Rodchenko book made me think about what taking photographs is about. I don’t have any profound answers, but it shifted how I saw some of the things around me. Made me want to take photographs again.

Policed Speech is Dishonest Speech and Other Thoughts on Call Centres

Taping phone calls at call centres is a good thing, right? Keeps everyone honest, yes?

Not so much. Get the popcorn and read this tale.

The other day I got one of those just-calling-to-see-if-you’re-on-the-best-account-for-you calls from Vodafone. We chatted about the cost of the Samsung Note 9 and the iPhoneX, and then I asked if it was possible to move to a SIM-only contract on my phone. I didn’t think I could, as the contract runs out at the end of January, but hey, no harm in asking.

To my surprise the salesman (it always is a man) said that, yes I could, indeed to a 12-month contract offering 20GB of data per month. Sounds good to me. (I have an iPhone SE, it’s not very expensive, but this was still a saving, and much more data.) He said he would send me a SIM out that evening, which would reach me Friday, and I should call 191 to get everything set up.

The SIM arrived Saturday. We will pass over the call to Vodafone 191. It was long, it was full of people in Chennai popping off to make a cup of tea consult with a colleague while I was on hold, and none of them seemed to be able to grasp the problem, or of they did, they didn’t prove it by describing the problem and the remedy to me in their own words. In the end I think I hit the wrong button with my ear and dropped the call. Or they did. I can get upset after forty-five minutes going nowhere on a call.

It was during this call I learned that I had two lines. I explained that I didn’t want two lines, only one, and I wanted the SIM-ony tariff transferred to my existing number, not on the new number.

What had happened was this: the salesman created a second line for the new SIM card which would be billed alongside my existing monthly contract for the next five months. I am going to pass on speculating whether that was intentionally setting me up for double-billing. The usual way of changing is a tariff doesn’t involve changing a SIM card, but hey, who knows how these things work?

I went into that oasis of sanity, a Vodafone shop, and explained what had happened, showing them the SIM and the letter that came with it. The assistant looked at at his screen and in reply to my comment “I think the guy on the phone messed things up” said that, indeed, the guy on the phone had done bad.

Here’s the thing. In the shop, they can say that. On the phone, they can’t, because everything is taped, and so they have to go through a dozen contortions to avoid saying “Yeah, he pulled a fast one on you, let me straighten that out”.

Turned out the new card was cancelled on Saturday evening, when I made the 191 call, so something came out of that, but they could not tell me they had done that, because that would have been tantamount to admitting that the salesman had tried to con me. Or had misunderstood what I wanted and caused me a bunch of nuisance and potential double-billing problems. Neither of which make ‘Vodafone-the-corporation’ look good.

That’s what tapes do to any attempt to be honest.

In the shops, nobody is taping, so the staff can be honest with the customers. They can also deny they ever suggested that the salesman was pulling a fast one. Sometimes deniability leads to greater honesty for the customer.

Want it in five words? Policed speech is dishonest speech.

A brisk 10 minute walk twice a day cannot improve your health

No. A ten-minute walk twice a day won’t make the slightest difference to your health. Except in some very rare circumstances, none of which will bring you to the platform at St. James’s Station. In fact, if you are reading this poster there, chances are very high you are already walking ten minutes twice a day - just for the commute.

But these ads are not for the benefit of the audience.

These ads are there so the Government can say “We have a health awareness programme. You saw our ads on your way to work.” 

Nice Red Shed

Every year I re-paint the garden shed. Having a garden shed is an important part of being a Normal Person. If I have a garden shed, I must be Normal. And if I paint it Cederwood Red every year, I must be a good Normal. So here's my nice red shed.

Fixing That Missing Artwork in iTunes

Macs make a lot more sense when you think of them as designed to be stand-alone. OS X can do networking, but it doesn’t really get it. That’s partly because of the UNIX everything-is-a-file philosophy: Unix doesn’t see networks, it only sees external drives. Windows sees networks and drives on the networks, which sounds as if it should be the same, but really is not.

Windows exposes the filesystem to the user in its programmes, and asks the user to make the filesystem their friend. In Windows you open a file by navigating through the filesystem in the File Open dialog or by clicking on a name in the Recently Used Files list. The only time you see icons representing your files in Windows is a) when you’re looking at the directory in Explorer, or b) when you’re using a programme that’s modelled on something from OSX, such as Calibre or most music management programs.

By design, OS X hides all the nasty OS stuff - such as the filesystem - from the user. This is usually done by adding an intermediate layer between the user interface and the filesystem. In an OS X programme the user sees a friendly icon and clicks on that: the programme looks at a database file - usually in XML format - that tells it where the file is stored. This works wonderfully until the user does something with their music files directly via the filesystem, say, with Finder and then everything goes to pieces. Because the database behind the cool interface has not been updated and indeed can’t be updated with changes made directly via Finder or with Unix commands on the Terminal.

OS X wants you to deal with your music collection ONLY through iTunes or a similar programme. That is the only way the database is kept up to date. It’s also the only way that the very quirky file permissions that iTunes uses get handled correctly. It’s possible to alter the file and directory permissions to 777 (all access to everyone) in Terminal but not have that show up in Finder, or have iTunes behave as if the files and directory have permission 777. (Oh yes, I have done this.)

(Windows programs assume that you’re going to do all sorts of things, so they have a ‘Watch this directory’ function that scans and updates the cool interface when you start the program. That can be kinda annoying at times. But it’s swapping one annoyance for another.)

Suppose you copied Volunteers by the Jefferson Airplane from your Macbook iTunes directory to a backup directory on your NAS. When you later build an iTunes library from this NAS directory, it will add the Volunteers album and files it finds, but you won’t be able to modify the album info, and the artwork will get lost. What’s happened is that the file and directory permissions have become mis-aligned - not in Terminal world, but in the parallel universe of iTunes / Finder permissions.

So how do you get the artwork back, and become able to change the album info?

Here’s the fix that occurred to me…

1. Create a directory in the Music section on the computer that has the iTunes you are using. This will typically be the SDD of your Mac Book / Air / Pro. I called mine Temp. It doesn’t matter.

2. Copy the files from Volunteers (or whatever) into this Temp directory.

3. Use iTunes to delete the original Songs and the Files.

4. Check that the directory for Volunteers (or whatever) is also deleted, as it might not be if it has artwork files or other stuff in it

5. in iTunes, do File -> Add to Library and choose Temp. iTunes will now do its stuff.

6. Now you can add the album artwork and make whatever other changes you want, and it will stick.

7. Delete the files in Temp.

8. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

9. Works On My Machine and NAS. YMMV.

It sounds clunky, but it soon become muscle memory. Do it as a background job when you’re writing blog entries or something, and you’ll be all caught up before you know it.

Ripping The CD Collection

I’m not an audiophile, but I want the music to sound right. What comes out of my iPhone through the Bose QC20’s noise-cancelling earphones is right for the purpose, but what comes out of the headphone socket through my hifi is muffled and tiring. Same signal, different context. Hence all my fussing around with Dragonflys and Jitterbugs earlier this year. While not quite up to the DAC in my Marantz CD player, the combination is close, and the sound isn’t tiring. And I fall asleep to music from the Bose Colour Sound fed via Bluetooth from my iPhone streaming via WiFi from the NAS.

I was not ripping the CD collection for backup. That would have meant copying the discs. And then buying another NAS to backup the backup, because NAS can fail more frequently than a CD. Anyway, there is a CD backup service: it’s called Amazon, or Foyles, or any number of other online retailers. This won’t work for compilations of obscure composers by performers whose careers never lived up to their early promise (British Piano Music of the 1980’s where art though now?) but then, well, how often did you listen to it when you had it? Classic performances that you really want tend to be re-released. Or surpassed.

I ripped the collection because I stream more than I do, and may stream more, especially with the Sonos in the front room, and because I do put some of it on the iPhone and the Nano for portable use from time to time. And I’ve only got 128GB on my Air SDD. Which is my way of explaining why I used the iTunes default of 192kps M4a.

Why did I use iTunes? For one thing, Hans Beekhuysen mentions it as one of three which are decent rippers. Since one of the others is Roon, that’s a pretty good recommendation. iTunes is good at getting song titles and parsing the artist / composer, no worse than any of the others at getting album art (I tried Clementine: it won some, lost others) and once you accept its quirky little ways is pretty good at managing the library. It’s not Roon. But neither is the price.

So the workflow looks like this:

0. Create an Album Artwork directory on your Mac. Open a new music library in iTunes and point it at your NAS. Save.

1. Put CD into drive

2. Choose the album title that a) isn’t in Japanese, and b) doesn’t say it’s Disk 3 of some ‘Best of Bach’ collection when your CD is a stand-alone

3. Let iTunes do its thing

4. While it is, if you ripping a jazz or classical CD, copy the CD title, paste it into the Amazon search box and see if they have a decent copy of the artwork. Almost always they will, but if not, use Google. I did so on less than one in thirty CDs. Paste the CD title into the the ‘Save As’ name and save it to your Album Artwork directory (*).

5. When the CD is done, eject it, and right-click for Album Info. Here I put in the artwork, change the Album Artist to the composer for classical music, and get rid of the [Disc 1] that often appears in titles. Sometimes, as with the 22-CD Stravinsky set, the disk number is useful, but not for double-albums.

6. Untick that damn Album is compilation of songs by various artists box. Otherwise it winds up in a Compilations directory. And you won’t find it when browsing with File Explorer.

7. Press OK and find something to do while iTunes does its thing with the music files over the WiFi to the NAS.

It’s tedious. It’s best done while doing something else, pausing to deal with the album info, eject the disc, put another one in. I did it in batches of about twenty, one day at a a time, until it was over.

8. Review the results and edit. How much work you put into changing what iTunes (or any other organiser) found is up to you. Filling in the missing artwork, un-compiling compilations that aren’t really, making sure that J S Bach is spelled and spaced like that in all the albums so it’s easier to find when browsing outside of iTunes… just how anally-retentive are you? (Turns away as if this doesn’t concern him…) The day you see me changing genres, I really will have nothing to do.

9. Accept that the music catalogue is a case of progress not perfection. I’m going to make tweaks every now and then when I notice something.

Because some of the files I have were ripped earlier, under different versions of iTunes, there were permission issues, and I needed to refresh the library in the way described in a future post. It was worth it. A library with every bit of cover art and all the double-albums put together is a thing of delight.

(*) WHY THE FRACK DON’T JAZZ and CLASSICAL CD’S HAVE ARTWORK? I load a progressive house CD, it has artwork. I load a Mahler box-set, I have to get the artwork myself. Digital music libraries and organiser programs have been with us for over a decade, and iTunes, Roon and all the others aren't going to disappear. How difficult can it be for a record company to package all its artwork up and send the zip to Apple? And how difficult would it be for Apple not to charge the record company, in the name of giving us all a better experience? Not even Amazon restrict the number of times we can find and download artwork. (Because they’re smart: every time you get some artwork from them, they get some more goodwill, and you might buy something.) Music industry, get your freaking act together on this.