Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Britain On The Couch

Oliver James is a celebrity psychiatrist with a private practice amongst the upper echelons of London's professional classes. I've no doubt his work in prisons, hospitals or wherever brings him into contact with people we would rather see dead than want to make better. He's well-read and knows his pop culture. I've no doubt he's a good man and convivial company. This much is obvious from his book Britain on the Couch.

His thesis is that between the 1950's and to the present, Britain has become a more uncertain, anxious, depressed and rancourous place. His reason is that we have weaker roles, especially around the family and marriage, and we make and are forced to make by television and magazines, far more comparisons with other people - which usually doesn't make us feel good about ourselves. Britain is a low-seratonin society, serotonin being a chemical that makes the body work better and is generated by being in higher-status roles, the lack of which makes you depressed and injections of which do wonders for previously glum vervet monkeys. Being low-income doesn't help much either, and he notes that especially since the 1980's the low-income got less and the better-off got more. Low income depresses, and depression lowers serotonin.

I'm not disputing the figures and I'll assume the anecdotes are real. What I'm disputing is the significance of those figures and anecdotes, and the idea that it was better in the 1950's. Or 1850's. Or classical Athens. Many of the anecdotes turn out to be about people who are suffering from alcoholism, drugs or psychiatric problems - either their own or someone else's. Once booze, drugs or mental illness creeps into the gene pool, you have to assume those are the primary causes of any odd behaviour, rather than anything more literary or cultural. Many of the studies are based on observation and self-reporting via questionnaires. The reliability of these can be judged by the fact that they invariably show - when used to ask - that men have more sexual partners than women. Everyone buys this one, along with the one about one in three marriages ending in divorce (because there are about 100,000 divorces a year, and 300,000 marriages). Anyone who buys either of these for more than five minutes - as James does - should stay out of the policy analysis business. The increase in divorce since the 1970's does not argue that people are more picky about marriage. It argues that they always were bad judges of good partners, married too young and changed too quickly and, of course, just plain got tired of each others' acts - only after the Divorce Reform Act 1969, they could escape their bad judgement and misery more easily.

James cites a number of studies suggesting that people who have suffered a serious misfortune make themselves feel better by comparisons with people even worse off: they amy have AIDS, but at least they don't live in Chad. But that's not why people say these things. When two people with the same misfortune meet and talk, how they talk, what they say, the emotions they can share, are totally different from what they can say - and want to say - to the ignorant who haven't been there and don't know. The "at least I'm not in Chad" comment is a stock response - like saying you're happy when that nice man with the clipboard asks you. It's also a brush-off, a way for the knowing to avoid having to deal with the ignorance of the unknowing, and for the unknowing to signal that they aren't handing out any sympathy. More speech than you think is to close off unwanted conversations, and more conversations than you might think are unwanted. There is no point talking to people who haven't been there and don't get it - you may as well be talking Uzbek in Marseille.

Citing pop culture is always tricky, because more and more, pop culture is about itself. There is a lot of gender rancour in pop culture - especially women being rude about men - but that doesn't mean women are actually being ruder about men, it means editors like it and comedians can make money from it. Throughout history a greater number of women than we think have disliked men and held them in contempt - it's just that now they can get a newspaper column out of it. What's changed isn't the reality, it's the Daily Mail.

There's something about the Fifties, if you were born in them, which both James and I were. The decade is preserved in black-and-white photographs, a time when working men wore suits on a Saturday, trains were drawn by steam engines, the roads were often empty, the lorries were small, the shops local and women in long coats went walking with toddlers in duffel coats. There's an innocence in those photographs - not a moral, social, sexual or personal innocence, but an economic one. Most people worked for the big nationalised industries or long-established family firms. Outside inexcusable practices around the docks and farms, most jobs for the lower-middle classes and above were going to last as long as they wanted. And if they got fed up with the boss, they could get another one. And of course the money was good and there was less to spend it on. That's the innocence of the 1950's. If it was so wonderful, the Sixties would not have happened. But it wasn't, and they did.

If you're in the psychiatry business, it must be tempting to want to know why people fall apart and why so many of the people you see are so miserable and confused. A decent person would want to help them and a psychiatrist dealing with ordinary cases of neurotic unhappiness must believe that they can help. But it isn't quite like that. Everyone has cracks in their soul, either from birth or being brought up in Britain by British parents. You do. If you are lucky, nothing will happen to you that makes those cracks turn into a break. If it does, you will find yourself as a client of Oliver James - if you're lucky. If it doesn't happen to you, it will happen to someone else. James is always going to have clients. The number of unhappy, crazy and downright evil people (these are technical terms of folk psychology) may change, but it never becomes zero. Most people lead lives that vary between ordinary unhappiness and moderate joy, never quite reaching the heights or plumbing the depths. They never meet Oliver James and so they don't figure in his world-view.

Monday, 1 February 2010

How You Don't Want To See Your Car

So I went to see A Prophet at the Richmond Filmhouse Sunday lunchtime. On my way back to the car, I was greeted by this sight on the south bank...


.... which made me wonder what I was going to see on the north bank.


Ooops! My car way further down the road. Which there was no way of getting too right then (3:30pm) because the pavement is under water. By the time it had receded, about 4:00pm, and I got back, it looked like this...

 

And that's after the water has receded. I opened the door and found about three inches of water inside - the level must have come above the sill. The engine started and I drove home with water sloshing from side to side when I turned and from front to back whenever I accelerated or braked. That's not covered in the Driving Test. And no, the water doesn't fall out the bottom of the car once you reach dry land, because in modern cars the underpan is pretty much waterproof. So I spent a good hour scooping out water, pressing the carpet, scooping out more water and getting frozen hands. All of which I took in reasonable spirits - unlike the way I'm going to take the insurance company's handling of it. To judge from the clueless questions and comments I got, no-one has ever claimed on some minor flooding before. But that's for another day.

Friday, 29 January 2010

Why BAA Should Apologise For Making You Take Your Shoes Off

When you pass through those pointless security checks at the airport, do you think you're owed an apology when they find out that, no, in fact, you weren't carrying explosives? Probably not, but you are and here's why. Let's start with a less emotional example. Suppose your house is carpeted throughout in white. Naturally, when guests visit, you ask them to take their shoes off to save the carpet, and you've got a couple of little phrases to make a joke or a little ritual of it. What you don't do is say "Remove your shoes immediately, I know you have deliberately walked through smelly mud before you got here and intend to make my carpet filthy." That would be rude beyond belief. But that's exactly what British Airports Authority are saying to you. They are searching you because they think you are carrying a bomb - just as you are asking people to remove their shoes because, intentionally or not, outdoor shoes will make your carpet dirty. But whereas my outdoor shoes do have dirt and so you are making a reasonable request, neither you nor I are carrying a bomb and no reasonable person could suppose we were, so BAA are not making a reasonable request. You're itching to make excuses for them, aren't you? Like how they can't take a chance with safety (they aren't, you're not a bomber, remember?), or that they have to be seen to be doing something (for your benefit? not for mine), or that if they didn't there would be bombers going through for every flight. Well, let's take that last point first: the only two forms of transport on which people have been killed are the Tube and London Buses. Strangely, no-one asks you to remove your shoes before boarding a bus or entering the London Underground, and by some miracle there hasn't been another bombing on either since 2005. There are no excuses.  Either their checks are sincere and so they think we're all bombers, or they don't think we're all bombers and their checks are an empty gesture. What the checks are really about is liability protection - it's for BAA's financial benefit, not our safety. Uh-huh.  It's corporate arrogance of the highest order. They owe us an apology.

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

Two Views at the Side of the Thames

It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's just that I haven't had the time to settle down and say it. I'm still wading through Solomon's book on Hegel's Phenomenology and there's a whole mass of stuff I want to talk about round that. So here are two more shots from last summer, both taken on the South Bank of the Thames.




Monday, 25 January 2010

Lazing on a Summer Afternoon

Was it only in October I was here? It's January, it's cold. Let's daydream.









Friday, 22 January 2010

In Which My Manager Shows Faith In Me

There's a phrase I use: "I wound up learning more than I really wanted to know about ....". Recently I have had to write some code in VBA for Powerpoint. I regard all presentation programs as if not abominations then certainly not something a Real Man would use. Real Men speak clearly, from memory, without visual aids and for no more than three minutes. But here I was this week, searching the Internet for some code that would break links between a workbook and a presentation. My excuse is that I didn't have time to read about the Powerpoint object model and work it out for myself. I know I can record a macro, but macros have a habit of referring to "ActiveWhatever" and what you really need is the name of the object and it collection so you can loop through all the text boxes on all the slides - or whatever.

The real point isn't about Powerpoint, it's about the manager who told everyone I could automate a presentation with about fifty links to different graphs and tables in a workbook. So that someone else could just press a couple of buttons and what used to take two guys two weeks would now take one guy a couple of days (there's some unavoidable manual fiddling involved). I had a rough idea it could be done, but with Office you never know if you're going to be tripped up by some arcane detail in the object model, forcing you to a complete re-design. I didn't know it could be done. The manager believed that if it could be done, I could do it. When someone has that kind of faith in you, it's very motivating. And it's the first time that's happened at The Bank.

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

Movies about Music - Part 2

You can point out that Sex and Drugs and Rock 'N Roll isn't a movie about music, it's a movie about a pop star - after all, why else would we be watching it? But why would we watch a film about a pop star? Because they made love to more and better-looking women than we did, or that they took more and better drugs, or that they had rows in big houses with swimming pools? Because we didn't already know they were screw-ups? Uh-huh. Their lives are interesting because they wrote Reasons To Be Cheerful, or Like A Rolling Stone or Love Will Tear Us Apart or even, for that matter, Always On Time.

I understand how philosophers can philosophise, mathematicians can produce creative mathematics, how J S Bach wrote his music and John Coltrane improvised. I know what it's like to have stories appear in my head from a sudden burst of sunshine. I get how painters can paint, though I can't do it, and I get how photographers can see a photograph. I can "pick up my guitar and play" in a kind of baroque-y improvisational style.

But I have no idea, not the slightest glimpse of an insight, into how someone can sit down and write Please Please Me, or Summertime, or Big Yellow Taxi, or Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, let alone how Jam and Lewis wrote those songs for the SOS Band. I have never, ever had a tune and a lyric drift through my head. Not once. I don't even understand how it's possible. And neither, I'm guessing, do you. I bet there are respected composers who have never had a possible chart-topper pass through their heads. Don't you want to know how Stepping Out happened?



Songwriters often don't do anything else, as if it is such a different use of the mind and personality that it won't let them be programmers or advertising creatives or tax inspectors before or afterwards. With a handful of exceptions they don't write songs for long either: they are more like athletes than, say, physicists. Like Auden said about poets, they burn bright and not for long, unlike novelists or conventional composers.

In a similar vein, The Damned United wasn't only nothing like the real life of Brian Clough, it was also a bad film about football - at the end of it you had no idea why or how he could take two medium-level sides to the very top of the game. The best film about football I've seen was Zidane, eighty minutes during which the camera just follows Zidane and you barely see the rest of the match. It was utterly riveting and informative.

The best movie about music (that isn't a straightforward bio) is Godard's Sympathy For The Devil, which is about equal amounts of the Rolling Stones trying out the song in the studio and classic Godardian agit-prop. What's surprising the first time you see this movie is that the song started its life as a blues jam going nowhere: it's only half-way through that we return to the studio to find the congas going and Nicky Hopkins going full-bore on the piano, in the arrangement that made it a classic. The moment that happens is not on film, but there's the sense of work, of trial-and-error, that even the greatest rock 'n roll band sometimes goes for a stretch with no clue of what a song needs.