On AA Birthdays

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

The A - Z Classical Music Project

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

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

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

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

Ed Hamrick at VueScan

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

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

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

Blaaahhhhh

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

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

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

Attempts to Read The Phenomenology of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

UK Biobank

A while ago I took part in the UK Biobank study. It's a very large study of the health and habits of the population of the UK. Sounds like a good way to spend my tax money.

Except it isn't. There wasn't one question that made me think “why are they asking that?” Every question came out of current Government conventional wisdom about diet, exercise and personal life. I could write the text of the report now, leaving blanks for the actual percentages. It will say that not enough of us are eating five-a-day and too many of us aren't eating enough lean meat, and no-one is doing enough exercise and we're all overweight. Worse, I know that if the survey did turn up something surprising – such as that people who eat lots of red meat aren't keeling over with heart attacks (and they aren't or you would be going to their funerals, wouldn't you?) - it would be ignored or spun.

At the end I was given a summary of some results. It liked my body-fat (23%) but didn't like my BMI (28). It told me to lose 23lbs, which would take me to a BMI of 24.4 – just inside the officially-acceptable range. The last time I weighed 79 kilos (about 12st 6lbs) I was in my mid-twenties. I don't really want to lose that much muscle or useful body weight, so this means losing about 8 kilos or so of fat. This would put my body fat at 15%, which is in the “serious athlete / special forces” range. Right. That would be nice, but at my age, it would also be just a little grotesque.

Not that some of the tests weren't interesting: the one about remembering to push the orange circle not the blue square at the end of the hour-long computer quiz was neat. I liked the reaction test: hit the big button when you saw two matching shapes on the screen. Sounds easy, but I was surprised how many times I had to stop myself reflexively hitting the button. Why medical people test strength by a grip test I will never know – I could heft some weight back in the day but my grip strength was always awful. They took bloods and urine as well, but I'm not sure if I hear about the results. You know the answer anyway – a huge proportion of the population are “pre-diabetic” or even have “type two diabetes” and need to exercise, eat less and be force-fed ghastly drugs that cause nausea and diarrhoea.

Will they test for blood alcohol and drugs as well? Now those results would be really worth reading - as if they would ever be published. After all, we know the answer: it's the underclass and younger people who take drugs and drink too much. Isn't it?

What I Did on my Holidays: Part 231

I had a few days in Nice last week – my first foreign holiday for almost a year. 

Holidays for me are about a) food, b) art, c) lazing about, d) ice cream. Nice has the best ice cream west of the Italian border at Fennochio. I had lunch mostly at le Safari on the Cours Salaya, dinner once in Le Merenda and twice at my new favourite La Villa on the Rue de l'Abbaye. (If you're the tall blonde girl in the leather jacket who had dinner there with a friend Wednesday evening – I love you madly!) This time I finally got round to seeing the Musee Matisse, Musee Marc Chagall and Musee Massena. To my mind, the Musee Massena is worth visiting just for four paintings on the second floor: portraits by Carlo Garino, Raphael Pontremoli and Alexandra Cabonel, as well as the frescos of the Massena clan (and a harder-faced lot you'll have a long way to go to meet) by Francois Flameng. Having said that, the Musee des Bueax-Artes has a whole bunch of Raoul Dufy's, the only Fauvist I like.

It was way, way too hot for me and I'm way too fidgety for public sunbathing and don't feel comfortable in shorts-and-trainers, and that's what you need to be doing in those temperatures. I stayed at the Hotel Windsor, which has a shady garden over-run by mature trees and plants.

Some tips:

Take the 98 bus from the airport into town. It's 4€ vs 30€ by taxi and the ticket is valid for the rest of the day. But before you get to the bus stop...

… Euro coins. You cannot get these from French banks, whose (lack of) service make you realise that British banks are unmatched exemplars of customer service. There are machines at Nice airport (left hand side on your way to the bus station) that will give you Euro coins in return for notes. Use them!

All the art galleries you want (Musee Matisse, Musee Marc Chagall, MAMAC, Musee Massena and the Musee des Bueax Arts) are on bus route 22. Get an all-day bus pass for 4€ from the ligne d'azur office in the Place Massena and pick up a map from the display by the door.

Check out the roller-bladers practising on the Promenade des Anglais on your way back from dinner in the Old Town. The girls are pretty and the guys have mad skills.

White tee-shirts (yes, I did) make you look like an English tourist. If you must wear a tee-shirt, wear coloured ones. This rule does not apply in northern Europe, where the weaker light makes white tee-shirts look acceptable.