This Week At The Gym: Week 9

Well, last week at the gym. For the first time I did not leave Cathy Brown's Thursday boxing class feeling like a complete klutz. I had an aching waist the next day, but that was because I was moving my torso with the punches, just as Cathy tells us to. It's something you have to do to understand just how much more power it gives you. It seems impossible that a swing of the torso and a little pivot on the foot could add so much clout, but it does. It feels way more aggressive as well: an uppercut that comes from the whole body feels like the nasty and dangerous punch it is. There's still no way I can do forty squat thrusts, and the hold-the-position press-ups (hold-ups?) had me collapsing at number six, but I'm okay with that. That's what I'm there for.

The real breakthrough came on Monday, when I did something that in October 2010 I would have told you I could never do. At lunchtime I ran two miles at 9.3 kph. I felt like I had distance to spare, it wasn't the painful effort that one-and-a-half miles had been the previous week. On the Wednesday lunchtime I ran 3.5 kilometres, which is just over two miles.

And three towels under my head, together with a class tutor who doesn't try to make us do advanced exercises, means that the Pilates class is now working. I have lordosis, so when it comes time to do the rolling bit, everyone else gets going, while I lift my chin and pelvis and any attempt at rolling stops at a flat spot in my spine ten inches long. I can do one of those rolling sit ups, but only if I have a towel in the hollow of my lower back.

Lordosis will also guarantee that you'll never have that flat, sleek footballer torso and that your tummy will never be truly flat. I'll be happy as long as it's not making my coats bulge out in front of me.

Reasons I Don't Do Fluffy...

We had an off-site meeting to talk about the goals of our little section recently. The first part of the exercise was a new-age-y fluffy thing about drawing pictures to tell everyone something about yourself without using words. Everyone else did primary-school houses and schools and The Bank's symbol and like that.

So this is one reason I didn't. A couple of years ago, in a distracted moment when I should have been paying attention to something more important, I wrote this down.

1959-60 Uplands Infant School
1960-61 Northumberland Park Infant School
1961-65 Belmont Junior School
1965-67 Erith Grammar School
1967-70 Hampton Grammar School
1970-72 Kingston College of Further Education
1972-73 Polytechnic of Central London
1973-76 Exeter University
1976-78 London School of Economics
1978-83 Freightliners Ltd / British Rail
1983-86 Hertz Europe
1986-89 Davis Associates
1989-90 Control Securities
1990-93 The RiverBus Partnership
1993-96 Unemployed
1996-97 Teacher Training
1997-98 Accounting Temporary work
1998-99 Global Crossing
1999-2001 AT&T (UK)
2001-03 Sonera UK
2003-04 Contracting
2004-05 Inclarity plc
2005-07 Contracting
2007-present The Bank

That's nine different educational establishments in nineteen years and fifteen different jobs or situations in thirty-two years! D'ya think there was a problem somewhere?

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 27

Clear blue skies are rare in London now. When they arrive, it's an excuse to walk and take pictures. I may wind up just taking pictures of the blue.

Absolute Radio has its offices on Golden Square, which has been for a while the coolest single place in London.

Central London has cranes all over it. According to which economist you listen to, cranes are either a leading indicator of economic activity or a lagging one. In London, it's so hard to find development opportunities outside the City (which marches to a different drum) that building is basically random, more, I suspect to do with ego than economics.

Emerge from the ICA and this is the light that greeted me. Late afternoon winter. My personal favourite.

This Week At The Gym: Week 8

I may also have neglected to mention that I'm on a diet. That's because I want to lose weight, and I want to do that partly because lugging ninety-five kilos around at my age is getting a bit much, but also because I am vain - to the point where the only mirror in my house is in the bathroom and used for shaving. It's a door from a bathroom cabinet I threw away and it's not even attached to the wall. (Very vain people don't look in mirrors.)

The idea that you can lose weight by "exercising" is right up there with the idea that you can save enough money for a decent pension as one of the bigger bits of codswallop passed off as sensible advice. The human body is a very efficient machine which with training can run an entire marathon on a very large plate of pasta and some water. According to the tables, running at just over 9 kph for an hour (!) at my weight will burn 940 calories. So if I run for four hours, 36 kilometres or roughly a marathon, I will burn one pound of fat. So let's just drop this "exercise helps you lose weight" thing. It doesn't. What it does is make The Diet easier to bear, and I suspect it helps even out the blood sugar and stop the metabolism going into Low-Power Mode quite so frequently.

The US Army has a Weight Control Program which at Appendix C on page 41 gives you an idea of the kind and amount of food you can eat. It is also simple and smacks of common sense - also since the US Army can't afford to have its troops falling over from silly diets, I'm inclined to believe it. Of course this means I look at the calorie-count labels in Pret and other places. 540 calories for the Tuna Fish Bloomer?! 400 for the Chocolate dessert?! 350 for the Smoked Salmon? 500 calories for a bar of chocolate and 100 for a luxury biscuit?!

The Big Lesson is: stop eating the junk: the morning croissant, the afternoon bar of chocolate, the bag of crisps, let alone the three pints of beer and MacDonalds that you put away and I don't because I don't drink. Next is avoiding food that spikes your blood sugar and therefore insulin response: for me that is mashed potatoes, rice and Stockpot's apple crumble, amongst others.

So just after Christmas, I set out on this diet. 1,500 calories a day. No junk, no fast-action carbs. Basically, I eat what I usually eat, but in smaller amounts and without the extras. It is working, but by God am I glad I don't have to do it forever.

Gory details to follow.

Sir John Lavery's The Tennis Party

The other Sunday I had one of my days in town: the Glasgow Boys exhibition at the Royal Academy, lunch in Soho, Slackistan at the ICA, and afternoon hot chocolate, Love and Other Drugs at the Apollo Cinema and ending with a quick swim at the gym. Which is after all a hundred yards from the Apollo.

The Glasgow Boys exhibition was pleasant. A bunch of thoroughly professional painters making perfectly acceptable art. Nothing that makes you go "wow!" or makes you wonder if they would notice if you took it off the wall and hid it under your jacket. This one caught me.

It gets better as you look at it. There's the gate to the court, open as if to let us in. The way the figures seem to be caught in movement - especially how the central players. Then there's the way the dappled light points into the court, leading the eye, the light on the chicken wire at the back of the court on the right, the way the spectators are grouped, and finally the trees, forming a backdrop but not overwhelming the scene. That fence around the court is extraordinarily well-done: it's the same height all the way round - a detail that many painters would not bother with.

I found myself smiling after a while and was sure I could hear the sound of the match - shades of Blow-Up. It's a small painting of a small subject, but nonetheless charming for that. And there's nothing wrong with charming, especially when it's this well done.

Steppin Out to a Waterloo Sunset

Joe Jackson's Steppin Out is one of my all-time favourite songs. The original video tells a neat, yearning little story. And it's always reminded me of something, but I could never work out what.



And watching it again on You Tube, it suddenly hit me. It reminds me of Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks, one of the all-time great singles.



Set aside the difference in pace between the songs. Go for the feel. Both have a descending riff or featured phrase and the dominant direction of the tune is downwards rather than hovering round a central tone. Both have a downbeat feel, and both are songs about the romance of a night out in the Big City: the difference between the 60's passive loner protagonist of the Kinks' song, and 80's active, coupled-up protagonist of Jackson's song is somehow not as important as the fact that for both of them, the Big City beckons. Manhattan in Joe Jackson's song is as inviting and comforting as Ray Davies' sunset over Waterloo.

How Adults Make Moral Decisions: Part Five

If a morality isn't a set of rules and regulations that relieves us of the responsibility of estimating the consequences of our actions as long as we follow the right procedures, then what use is it?

I suggest the value of a moral code is not in its rules but in its concepts: what is important about it are the harms and benefits it identifies and what it says nothing about. Those concepts are realised and exemplified in definitions, examples, case law, novels, plays and films, in maxims, slogans, imagery, tones of voice and of course the disciplinary practices of parents, schools, employers, public spaces (from parks to restaurants) and individuals. A moral code is created, modified and kept alive by individuals, not abstractions. Of course, it is a trivial exercise to translate all this into rules and maxims, but just because we can doesn't mean there is any insight to be gained by so doing. Indeed, it's all the other way. If we persist in thinking of morality as principles, we will fail to understand why people behave worse and worse despite exhortations and legislations to make them behave better.

The concepts I'm talking about combine descriptive and evaluative content. The formal evaluative concepts such as 'right', 'wrong', 'good', excellent' and 'better' or 'worse' are not unique to morality. Concepts such as "greed", "charity", "honesty", "caring", "murder", "theft", "busybody", "thoughtfulness", "selfish", "selfless", "ambitious" and a thousand others, describe specific types of behaviour as well as carrying evaluative force. A number of them come in pairs: sharing descriptive content, one has negative and the other positive evaluative content. (This is the basis of the game of Declining Verbs, as in: I am focused, you are single-minded, she is obsessed.) Some languages don't have certain concepts, and their speakers have to import them directly: Yiddish has the concept of a mensch but try translating it into English without losing something essential. You can't. The English don't do being menschen. Middle eastern languages all have a concept of "honour" in the name of which you can commit actions with a clear conscience, actions which Western language-speakers would regard as so awful that they haven't yet wanted to import a word for it.

How do such concepts help us think about moral issues? When we describe a situation using them we get at least one evaluation as a consequence. It's this that affects what we feel because it triggers the release of certain hormones (or stops their release, or of course, does nothing if we don't have those links). The accompanying feelings literally tell is how we feel about the situation and if we are at peace within ourselves when we make moral decisions. Literally, we want to feel good about the decision. If we don't, we try describing it in other ways to see if that works. Or we may hear a description from someone else that make us feel differently, and changes our mind about what we can live with. Morality is properly about feeling, because that's how language has its impact on us: words are linked to feelings via the brain's links with the hormonal system. We are supposed to feel things: that's how we know we can live with the situation. Because we are intelligent, we can change what we feel by thinking: we can and do literally "feel better" about something after discussing it. Those links between the words and hormones are perhaps the best way to understand how our everyday (as opposed to existential) conscience operates. Our mind gives us the facts from the words, and our body tells us what we feel about those facts.

These feelings are messengers, not messages. Just because we feel, say, relief at the some news does not mean we shouldn't act entirely conventionally for the sake of social propriety. When someone has "strong feelings" about a something, that is literally what is happening to them: they are having a strong feeling. You don't argue with feelings, but you can try to change the way the person sees situation, to change, that is, the feelings that get triggered. And that is a delicate process best done with tact, a show of respect for the other person and gentle, non-confrontational language. Which is not easy to do if you are having strong feelings yourself. That's why we employ diplomats and negotiators, that's why some people are persuasive and others just cause more stubbornness.

This is why a moral code is more than just a bunch of dry principles and why moral decision-making is more than an exercise in logic. Emotions are part of how we experience morality and why we react to moral situations the way we do. The connection between words, concepts and emotions are the way that reason and the emotions interplay.