Read The Manual

Most things now, from your mobile phone through Excel and on to cooking, are way too complicated to be understood from A to Z in one lesson. There are subtleties about the use of a paintbrush or a screwdriver that only craftsmen know. Quick: why should a frying pan be heavier rather than lighter?

The more you know you can do, the more you will do. The more you know about your tools and materials, the more you can get out of them and the easier your life will be. But you have to read the books. Why? well, spreadsheet software has been with us now for over twenty-five years and some of the smartest people alive have worked on developing Excel, Calc and the others. You're going to learn everything it can do in a five-day course and a Dummies manual? I don't think so. And that's just one of the applications you're using.

A good manual can be a straightforward how-to: Haynes car manuals and O'Reilly software books are terrific examples. The Dummies books are good as well if you can live with the style. Sometimes "the manual" is a love-it-or-hate-it book that makes you think – hate McKee's Story or like it, but you will never think the same way about writing after you're read it. At the other extreme is something as gnomic as The Art of War: that is a manual, but you've got to interpret it. A J Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is a clearly written and vivid manual - of how to apply Logical Positivism - and it made him famous. Categories for the Working Mathematician is a manual, and good luck.

A genuine manual does not promise to make you rich, tell you secrets, solve all your problems or otherwise change your life. Those are fakes, designed not to inform, but to mislead you into thinking that all it takes is a good idea and some trick of character. You're quite right to ask why if it works, the authors aren't millionaires as well.

The brain is a "use it or lose it" device: learning new stuff grows new neurons. You will learn stuff to do your job more easily and the other applicants didn’t. Read the manual.

The John Lewis Redhead

Today is utter trivia. There is something about tall, slim red-heads that cuts right through all my defences and makes me want to be... well, whatever it takes to be their husband or lover. Redheads are one of Nature's secrets: think carefully, you've never seen an ugly redhead. Ever. They are rarely shatteringly glamorous or sultry as brunettes and blondes can be, but they are always attractive and sexy. Well, John Lewis' agency Adam & Eve found a fine example and put her right at the end of their “Sweet Child of Mine” Christmas ad, and she's the best thing about Christmas so far.

I wish I could find a larger picture. I take one look at her and know that this is someone to whom nothing bad has ever happened nor will it ever happen. She's a one-woman oasis of calm, serenity and understated sensuality. In my dreams. And maybe in her life.

Examined Life - The Movie

I saw Examined Life recently: it's a film of interviews with a bunch of big-name philosophers: Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

Cornel West rapped away, interesting right up to the point where he mentioned 'white supremacy' and lost me. Are people still going on about that? Haven't they realised that it's only some white men who have the power and the rest of us are as screwed as everyone else? Appiah made sense at the time but nothing stuck. Singer is... Singer. Avital Ronnell made very little sense but sounded the part – that's what translating Derrida and studying with Kristeva will do to you. Michael Hardt rowed round Central Park, as he admitted that the idea of “going to the mountains, forming an armed cell and starting a revolution” was totally outside his experience. I got the idea he wanted some kind of revolution, but not what or how. It vanished into the mists of his syntax. Judith Butler takes a walk with the painter and activist Sunaura Taylor through the graffiti walls of San Francisco and they buy a sweater at a thrift shop. They talked about what it meant for someone in a wheelchair to “take a walk” and made the usual kinds of remarks about gender and disability being social constructions. Nussbaum mentioned capabilities and how she agreed with Aristotle that the aim of a society should be to allow each of its members to develop their abilities. I couldn't help thinking that she's a very handsome woman – but then I'm shallow like that. Zizek was huge fun, wandering around a rubbish tip, suggesting amongst a hundred other things that Nature is a series of catastrophes and not a beautiful system in fragile balance threatened by your breathing too hard. At one point he picks up a scrap from a porn mag and shakes his head “oh no, you call this porn?” suggesting a robust knowledge of the real stuff. The ICA audience laughed out loud. Of all of them, he's the best value for money.

The selection is not representative of modern philosophy, it's representative of the best-sellers of modern American philosophy. All of these people - except Nussbaum - are influenced by the French superstars: Barthes, Baudrillard, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault. They're all more Hegelian than Popperian, more inclined to using words at the edge of their meaning rather than using a plain-speaking style. None are technical philosophers: epistemologists, philosophers of science or mathematics, metaphysicians or logicians. But then perhaps those guys don't examine life, only knowledge and its relatives.

The philosophy section in Foyles is packed with the French superstars and their backing bands and influences. There are few of the British Analytical Philosophers I grew up with (though Gilbert Ryle must have had a birthday or something because there's a chunk of his stuff). These people are the current thing. But then Peter Strawson was a star once and while I don't wish to speak ill of the recently departed, his signature work Individuals was one of the more unreadable and pointless uses of the human mind until the minor String Theorists got going.

Props, however, to Astra Taylor for making the movie. She looks to be the next Brian Magee, a sensitive and informed populariser of philosophy, and we've been overdue one of those for a while. I found I "got" some of them the better for having seen them: having seen Judith Butler, her performative theory of gender makes a lot more sense (even if it still doesn't quite work at more than the hand-waving stage).

Professor Singer's Drowning Child

In the movie Examined Life the philosopher Peter Singer gets to rehash that parable of the drowning child. Here's how it goes. You're walking through a public park and you see a small girl drowning in a shallow pool. You could save the girl easily enough, but you're going to ruin your shoes. What do you do? Well, gee whiz, I bet you said you'd save the little girl. Singer then points out that there are children dying every day who could be saved for the price of a pair of shoes – so why aren't you giving? Feel a little guilty now?

He really should have worked on Madison Avenue. Because as a philosophical story, this one is awful. So you get a feel for just how manipulative the example is, here are some other ways of looking at it.

There's no need to ruin your shoes. Just kick them off. A woman in high heels would do so without even thinking about it. Doesn't take three seconds. So where's the dilemma? You have to force it: it's not genuine.

How is a child drowning in the six inches of water usually found in a public fountain? Kids are really good at getting out of places they don't want to be if they have the slightest chance, and they make enough noise protesting. So who took all the little girl's chances away? Did she fall and hit her head? What did she fall on and might you do the same, with worse consequences since you weigh more and are falling from a greater height? Maybe she's so heavy she can't move herself, and you might not be able to either. Maybe someone's holding her down, and you've got a fight on your hands. Or maybe someone dumped her there, drugged, and is watching to make sure she dies, and you still have a fight on your hands.

Aid is the same. It's not enough to toss bags of rice out of an aircraft. You have to make sure the rice isn't appropriated by warlords or sold to buy gee-gaws or hoarded by the Big Men. You have to make sure that the money you gave is matched by the country's government, or they may just buy a nice trip abroad with the money they would have spent on rice but now don't need to because you bought the rice instead. See why my suggestion that the little girl was being held down isn't so silly?

When you rescue that little girl, she's not going to die of famine, civil war, disease, ethnic cleansing or drought next year. She's going to go on to live a good life, albeit with ups, downs and the odd traffic conviction. The little girl you save today through your charitable donation has much longer odds against surviving past, oh, next year. Which is why newspapers love stories about the one girl in the village who made it to Oxford University and don't tell you about the five others who died before they reached sixteen.

I know you think Professor Singer is “just saying we should think of others and we should give more”. No. He's really not. Read his books. He says you should give ten percent of your post-tax income to charity. Not because he's about good works, but because he's about playing on your middle-class liberal guilt with specious arguments to build a reputation.

The way you know he's not about the good works is that he doesn't insist that you should make sure you don't waste your donation. He doesn't say, anywhere, that you should examine the aims and activities of the charity, its organisation, track record and expertise, and give if you think it will be successful. I say, if you don't do this, you are being irresponsible, because you may be giving money to an organisation which will achieve nothing with it, when you could be giving to one that will make your money matter.

Names for Relationships

On hearing the phrase “friends with benefits” recently, my sister snorted something about silly pretentious phrases. Why can't they say “boyfriend”, she asked. I thought the phrase was a tad silly until I discovered that there is an episode of Sex and the City actually called “The Fuck Buddy”, which is a phrase I had only heard once before used by an ex-girlfriend to describe a relationship in her life at the time. I didn't like it then and I think it's an ugly phrase, but it describes something real.

The name from an earlier time were all linked to an overwhelming assumption of marriage as the only legitimate means of (hetero-)sexual relations. An “affair” was a long-running sexual relationship between two people at least one of whom was married. If neither party was married, it might be a “casual fling” if marriage was not on either parties' mind. If at least one party was married, and the relationship was casual, she was his “bit on the side” if he was married, and vice versa if she was. A boyfriend was just that: a boy-friend. If there was sex involved, they were lovers. She was a girlfriend in either case, because a mistress was in it for the money as much as the sex. A mistress knew he wasn't going to leave his wife, just as a male lover knew she wasn't going to leave her husband. Marriage was the context and the reference point.

Well, that ain't so now. People still get married, but much later and often after they have had children. An “ex” is the divorced or separated mother of your children. If there are no children, she's not an “ex”, but a former wife or old girlfriend. Before she was an “ex”, she was a wife or a partner or in certain contexts, “the mother of my children”. Before that she was your fiancee, and before that, your girlfriend. “Significant other” is an affectation, like calling women "the distaff side".

What's new are words to describe relationships that involve sex but not the assumption that you will start along the route to marriage or children. If you're having sex and living together, you're partners. When you're having sex, going to the movies, not living together and not intending to get married or move in, that's when you need “boy / girl friend”. If you both accept that you're still looking for Mr/s Right while in the relationship, that's “friends with benefits” unless you are both grown-ups, when you can call it “an affair”. Do not talk about “girlf's” and “boyf's” unless you are as cute as Susie Bubble. And if you're having sex regularly, but only sex, and then getting back to your lives? In the old days that was called “having an arrangement” and personally I think that phrase is preferable to “fuck buddies”. The phrases “fuck buddy” and “friend with benefits” both, to me, speak to a certain shallowness, and even callowness. Which is probably what my sister was really objecting to.

Normal People - Again

For reasons too complicated to explain, I found myself over the weekend needing a serious definition of the phrase “normal people”. The flip definition is that a normal person is anyone who protests that there is no such thing as a normal person: genuine misfits, weirdos, addicts and head-cases know damn well that they aren't like everyone else and that normal people exist, even if they are defined negatively. As not having substance- or activity-abuse issues or a DSM IV-strength Personality Disorder – a group of people colloquially known as “screw-ups”. That's the strong sense of normal. The underlying claim is that you simply can't have much in common as regards background, upbringing, specific developmental abuses and personal attitudes with screw-ups without turning into one yourself. There are very few shades of grey between being a screw-up and normal.

There's a slightly weaker sense of the phrase, as it used in such as examples as “Windows 7 boots fast enough for normal people” or “normal people don't read postgraduate mathematics textbooks as culture”. Normal people, in this sense, are not at either end of the Bell curve: neither dumb beyond belief, nor smart enough to actually use LISP in daily problem-solving life. Normal people can do anything that clever or dedicated non-normal people can do, but just not as well. Doing anything really well – from cultivating a garden to chess - requires an amount of dedication, application and practice that is incompatable with a couple of pints with the gang after work, playing with the kids when you get home, paying attention to your partner when (s)he talks about, well, anything that isn't on your agenda, putting in time at the local church, visting friends and family and of course wasting hours watching reality TV (which is what normal people really do with their lives). Channeling Ambrose Bierce for a moment, in this sense, a normal person is a mediocrity whose motives elude you.

Then there's a judgemental sense of the phrase, as in “normal people don't do X”. Normal people don't blow themselves up on a crowded bus, they don't suddenly shout out a word-salad in the middle of supper, nor do they get fall-over drunk on the second date. They don't have mood swings, collect train numbers and they always notice when their lady partner has had a haircut. A “normal person” wouldn't do or say something you've just done or said that the person you're with wishes you hadn't. We can dismiss this sense of the phrase as nothing more than a fancy insult.

The converse compliment to that insult is as in “gee, (insert name of famous person here) was just like a normal person”. As in having no airs, false graces, attitude, extravagent demands, stand-offishness or distance. They said hello and goodbye and helped you carry your shopping to the car because they could see you were struggling.

For me, normal people live in the world but don't feel it under their skin. They can tune it out, let it in one ear and out of the other, and have most things pass them over like water off a duck's back. Occasionally something will rankle with them for longer than they know is healthy, but not often and not for much longer. As a result of this temperament, normal people generally have enough skills to do their job, but don't acquire any more for the sake of it. They don't stick at exercise regimes past three months (except Marathons – running Marathons is very normal as long as you take longer than three-and-a-half hours to do it), they can't play a musical instrument with facility and don't have maths, science or philosophy degrees. Barristers are not normal, nor are musicians, soldiers and athletes. To adapt the only phrase of Tolstoy's that everyone knows: all normal people are normal in the same way, non-normal people are each non-normal in an unique way.

Sonera, Helsinki and London

This is Helsinki Cathederal, taken, I think on a June evening in 2002. Back then I was working for Sonera, the Finnish telephone company responsible for international traffic (Helsinki and many other parts of Finland have their own phone companies). Every now and then, I would be deputed to attend the monthly meeting of all the subsidiaries: London, Stockholm, Frankfurt and New York. We would meet during the day and the Finns would use it as an excuse to go drinking in the evening. Being tee-total, I would head down to the excellent Nevski restaurant by the harbour for supper. That far north, it doesn't really get dark in June, though the quality of the light changes. In the afternoon, it's a regular summer day, but by 22:30 hours it feels like three o'clock on a sunny November afternoon. My inner clock and calander was seriously confused by the whole experience.

Sonera was at the time embroiled in a series of financial and management scandels and the Finnish government sold it to Telia, the Swedish telephone company. In the summer of 2003, Telia closed the overseas subsidiaries – despite being offered over £2m for the business – and made us all redundant. Our sorrow in London was mitigated by the fact that our CEO, Cliff Derbyshire, had put very generous reduandancy settlements into our contracts. So a quick shout to Shaza Rahhal, Peter Davidson, Jessica Henley and Paul Woolley, who were the team in the London office. Cliff retired, Shaza went to work for Telia, Paul Woolley went to work for his local police as a CSI, Peter went on to run a local business for BT and Jessica went chasing City boys. It was a terrific team.