Making My Mornings Mine Again

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that my mornings were not working for me. I was arriving at work feeling slightly rushed and resentful, I was missing my walk and I was generally not feeling the love from life. So I admitted my faults to myself and another human being (in the team, who asked me how I was and I said "my mornings aren't working") and then became ready to change, having already taken an inventory. It's all about the train times. The next morning I woke up at 05:30 instead of 06:30 and caught the 06:46 instead of the 07:46. This propeller is a symbolic tribute to the airplane hanger / factory that used to be here before Cineworld took its place. I walk across the Cineworld car park every morning.)

No race for a seat. Room to tap on my netbook. Walking across Waterloo bridge (note time on clock) I realised my pace was a relaxed stroll rather than a press to make a deadline and that I was feeling way better: the walk belonged to me, not the timetable.

I parked myself in the Caffe Nero near Holborn Underground and tapped away for about forty minutes, strolled over to the tube and arrived at work feeling unrushed and already having had a useful, personal morning.

This photograph was a Saul Leitner moment. Someone branded Holborn, St Giles and Bloomsbury as "Midtown", which isn't all that pretentious when you consider that it's full of offices and is a mad rush all day. That's what the "Yum" sign is about.

So I'm going to go on doing that for a while. Especially after I get over this f.....g cold and cough.

Richard Curtis On Love, or Not, Actually

It's said that English - read, London-based - movie critics don't like Richard Curtis's films. It's something about the way he doesn't have guttersnipes and pony criminal types yelling at each other all the time. His casts are almost always pretty people who have enough money for poverty not to be the driving force of their lives, and they have good manners, nice voices and a sense of humour.

I'm referring to his three masterworks: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love, Actually. 

Let's deal with Notting Hill quickly. The only think I can remember from that film with affection is the fruitarian joke: "so this carrot..." "...has been murdered. Yes." The movie ends with Hugh Grant persuading Julia Roberts to stay in England - presumably forsaking not only all others but also her career. This really doesn't happen. In a huge way. A discreet affair perhaps, but not marriage and children. Way too many economic inequality issues. It's a fantasy, but it didn't need to be. The heroine could have been a British actress who went over to Hollywood and had a couple of big movies, but was losing her novelty in and attraction to the industry and was looking for a way out. British actresses who make big time movies have a habit of coming from middle-class places like Twickenham (Kiera Knightly, Clare Forlani) and would plausibly settle for a bookshop-owning Hugh Grant, if there was more money or connections knocking around. With that story they don't get American money for the movie, but you get the point I'm making. Even if we insist on actually Julia Roberts, we could have had a real friendship with a little nookie, and then a to-the-point but kind scene where she has to say goodbye. She can explain that she has obligations "I'm not an actress, I'm a small corporation. Actually, not that small." ("You look petite to me.") Again, you get the point. And you could keep the fruitarian.

But no. Love between pretty people is a fantasy. 

Love, Actually was supposed to be a ghastly, sugary Christmas confection with a cast of pretty faces and only one poor person in sight - and she had a job. As Prime Minister Hugh Grant's tea lady. I don't know about you, but the film I saw was a meditation on the hopelessness of love and desire. Skip the Hugh Grant-Martine McCutcheon story - that was there so Griffin Mill could have a happy ending. There's nothing wrong with a happy ending: it lets you get away with all sorts of cynical stuff in the second act.

Quick, name one couple who actually have a believable resolution. That's right, the body doubles John and Judy. Oh, and the Laura Linney character having her life taken over by her brother. Where there is disappointment -  the Alan Rickman  / Emma Thompson marriage or Colin Firth being cheated on by Sienna Guillory - it's real, and where there is happiness, it's a total and obvious sham. Everything from the idea that there's another woman on the planet who looks like Claudia Schiffer to the idea that hot American girls would fall for a Basildon burke is a rampant nonsense. Sam the schoolboy finally kisses Joanna his American crush as she's leaving the country. This looks like a win if you're really not paying attention. It isn't. She's on the other side of the Atlantic. No Joanna nookie in Sam's future. You just got fooled by that "or you'll regret it the rest of your life" bit. That's a consolation prize. The Hugh Grant - Martine McCutcheon story is there to make the rest look almost plausible. If he'd left it out, the utter unreality of the other stories would be running all over your Christmas cake. This leaves John and Judy. The not-so-pretty real people who are shy but attracted. This is hopeful and believable. 

Which brings us to Four Weddings and a Funeral - a film which should live in blessed memory for being one of the very few that actually makes London in particular and Britain in general look like somewhere you might want to live. The prettiest couple in the movie - Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell - are the ones least certain about how they really feel, most distracted by anything else in their lives and most tentative about committing. Kristen Scott Thomas - an Englishwoman so elegant she had to move to France to survive - is hopelessly in love with Hugh Grant, who barely even knows she's there (and it's a tribute to everyone's acting that we believe that). Everyone else, however likeable in short doses, are twerps, shy, dorks, thumping crass idiots and braying shelias - think of the "ghost of girlfriends past" scene (which is the most important in the film). It is such people who fall in love and walk down the aisle - not pretty people with self-doubt. (Note, "pretty people with self-doubt" is a tautology: pretty implies self-doubt.)

I doubt it's the "author's message" that only the crass and the below-the-pretty-line people can fall in love and marry. I'm guessing it's something he's seen and found makes a useful skeleton for a script. It is, after all, comforting for the majority to see themselves winning in the game of love while Hugh Grant only gets to the end in what any fool can see is a fantasy. It lets Curtis set his characters up for us to laugh at them while seeming kind in the end. There is one movie where the pretty people do fall in love, and we believe it, and that's Four Weddings. The last act of that film is one of the neatest pieces of dramatic plotting ever put on the screen. Everything comes out of the characters, which is where good drama comes from, and it calls on a principle we can all believe: if you're not in love, you shouldn't get married. 

I'm A Million-Dollar Programmer

I've long believed that I'm at my most valuable when designing and coding software for my employers. Getting in the outsiders does result in a more polished and bullet-proof application - but then they get to use tools that I would never be allowed to use, like actual programming languages.

The other day I received this e-mail... (starts)

Hi All,

Unfortunately we’ve not been successful in securing the history for the XXX data feed. The main reason is due to the £1m cost and extra 3000 man days required to deliver this. The key benefit for having the history is to feed into the XXX pricing model but on balance, accounting for the additional cost and prolonged delivery of the feed, the decision has been made not to bring the history across from this source.

The history will start to build when the feed is implemented in July but history should already be building up in (system name)...
(ends)

What you need to know is that the work we were asking for was the productionisation of some routines that a co-worker runs on a Monday morning. I wrote the routines in about four days, which update tables I created and data-filled about nine months ago. That exercise - including documentation and manuals - took about four calendar months, so maybe 40 working days (I had crud work to do as well). It did build on some other exercises I'd done, count maybe 20 working days for those.

I do not get paid £300 / day. Not even close. We have asked how this was arrived at, but silence as there been deafening. Half of it will be for £400 / day "project management" and "design". That's why you have in-team analyst/programmers like me: it's way cheaper and faster. My managers have sent this up the chain saying "look how much value the smart people who work for me create". I'll go for that.

Need I tell you that these numbers come from a Big Name management consultancy and our own IT people? What I said to my managers (but not the high-ups) was: what else are they lying to you about?

On Freedom of E-Mail Expression

I write a weekly commentary about the competition's price changes. I use a sharp style, speculating about why the change might have been made and how important or effective it might be. I've been working in this market for a long time now and I'm fairly confident I can call the changes with a high degree of accuracy. People actually like my "edgy" tone and comments.

Recently I expressed a dim opinion of a competitor's change - saying that it was simply too small to make any difference to anything: margins, positioning or customer perception. This was included in a regular newsletter compiled and sent by a colleague  that circulates confidentially. He incorporated my comment and sent out the newsletter.

Someone sent this back...

"Thought I should point out that we are in a 50/50 joint venture with XXXX and I am not sure that we should be referring to their offerings in quite this manner. As equal partners they would probably not appreciate the tone. Perhaps some feedback to give the YYY team for their future updates."

My first reaction was "oh shit - I've overdone it. The boss will be round muttering at me in a moment." I didn't apologise or explain to the sender, let alone the competitor, and just left it for a while. 

About twenty minutes later, I found myself in possession of a pair. I sent this back to my newsletter colleague...

"We may be partners in a joint operation, but not in the sales arena. XXX run their own business and they take customers from us – they are a leading competitor for our best customers. I don’t see them backing off our customers because we are 50-50 partners in a joint venture - I see them offering the second most aggressive rate in the market.

Individual people may be upset by our opinions, and while that might be understandable on a personal basis, it’s not a professional response. Pricing and propositions are highly public activities and need a thick skin.

We’re as entitled to express an opinion about those decisions as we are about the decisions of ZZZ or anyone else. We’re also entitled to express it as we choose. Do we really want to be the kind of company that only expresses its real opinions in speech, and whose internal communications are anodyne twaddle that’s therefore read and trusted by no-one?"

My colleague agreed, pointing out quite rightly that the newspapers often say much ruder things. and we decided to carry on. No-one of weight has said anything.

It would have been so easy to back down and moderate my approach in future. So easy to agree that we shouldn't express the slightest criticism - by content or tone - of anyone we were even vaguely associated with. So easy to think that maybe the competition knew something we didn't. 

The point isn't that I might be wrong. The point is in the last sentence. "Do we really want to be the kind of company that only expresses its real opinions in speech, and whose internal communications are anodyne twaddle that’s therefore read and trusted by no-one?" Nothing thrives in denial, except confusion, politics and distrust. 

On Pleasure, Dopamine, Oxytocin and Bullshit Therapy (Dear Diary 3)

Recently I read David J Linden's book Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Junk Food, Exercise, Marijuana, Gernerosity and Gambling Feel So Good. For a pop science book about sex, drugs, gambling and other pleasures, it's a refreshingly Vulgar Evolution-free and judgement-free treatment of the subject. (If you're a man, the stuff about women's sexual responses is going to freak you out: if you're a woman, it will be perfectly normal.)

There are only a few books I've read and recognised myself in. Melodie Beattie's Codependent No More of course, and Janet Wotitz' Adult Children of Alcoholics. Linden's description of how addicts respond to pleasurable events felt like the answer to why I react the way I do, or rather don't, to what are supposed to be pleasures.

Addiction, it seems, comes with its own brain chemistry. The counter-intuitive part is where the addict gets less pleasure, not more, than the Normals, from whatever it is. Addicts don't do dopamine as well as the straights, and it's dopamine that gives you that, well, whatever it is that you feel when you have sex, or see your baby, or whatever. I have no idea, because I don't feel it. All that stuff Normals think is wonderful and pleasant and makes their days worth living through get this reaction from me: "well, uh, it's... okay. I guess. Yeah. It was all right." And that's not because I'm trying to be cool or am afraid of showing my emotions or can't engage with the world or any of that guilt-tripping therapy crap - it's because I don't get the chemical high the Normals do.

I don't do oxytocin either, and if you don't produce or respond well to oxytocin, you're not going to experience a lot of bonding urges. It's not fear of commitment, or being vulnerable, or being known, or being rejected or any of that blame-the-victim therapy garbage - it's because I don't get the bonding chemical surge and reaction that Normals do.

If I were inside a Normal's body, I'd feel like I was blissed-out by the slightest thing. If they were inside mine, they would feel that they had gone to a hell where everything was an effort and nothing was a pleasure, and a shoulder-slumping weights of willpower was needed to do the simplest thing.

Linden says that the research suggests that what keeps the addict going isn't the pleasure - that's what keeps the Normals going. That feels like my life. The addict keeps going on anticipation. Addicts hope against all experience that the next time will feel, not better, but whatever it is they are supposed to feel to make it all worthwhile. Whatever it is the Normals feel. We never do feel it: drugs, booze, food, a moment of peace and tranquility under a blue sky - these are all respites from the weariness, the un-satisfaction, the sheer effort of grinding out day after day for no good feelings whatsoever.

This explains why the majority of people are over-weight, under-exercised, don't go beyond pop-culture, are innumerate, and so incredibly self-satisfied: they are blissed out just from waking up. Achievement takes a huge capacity for dissatisfaction, and you can't be dissatisfied with a brain full of dopamine making you feel good at the slightest trivial thing you do.


I'd rather be sober than drunk, clean rather than high, single than divorced or in a worn-out marriage, and if you knew what Normals look like to me, you would not want to be a Normal. But anticipation only works until the day you stop believing, then the weariness sets in. That's where I am now. I don't believe that anything will make me feel better, or even make me feel anything except
uncomfortably numb. And I don't know when it changed.

When There's Always Someone Who Comments Are Sour Grapes

So there’s an article by James Whittaker, who it seems is a software development superstar, about why he left Google. He didn't like the way Larry Page had responded to the success of Facebook by turning Google from a tech company that happened to make money from advertising to an advertising company that happened to do tech. Whittaker had the reputation to be able to walk into another job - at Microsoft. 

Buried away on page 4 of the comments is this from a Daniel Redman (who he?)

I'm sure it was completely unbearable to work at one of the most powerful companies in the world, well-documented as having the best employee benefits.  I hope the truth is that you actually got let-go and are bitter, rather than you're beating up your former employer for allowing you to lose your passion.  Either way, sounds pretty childish if you ask me.  

In any comment string to an article about why someone found Situation X unattractive and left for Situation Y there’s a snark like this. This one just got me riled enough to comment.

First off, it’s downright rude. I don’t mind vigorous and colorful language and commentary, I use it myself. Calling someone “childish” is neither vigorous nor colourful. It’s a Parent sneering at a Child. Second, it’s nasty. Hoping that someone was let go is just unpleasant: I’ve been made redundant more than once and there are only a couple of people I dislike enough to think would benefit from the experience. It’s also rather shallow: anyone who thinks that a market-leading salary and benefits can make up for doing something they don’t believe in and have the choice of leaving, is a little, well, inexperienced. Salary and benefits make up for bad jobs, products and managers only when you can’t find somewhere else to go (which is the position a lot of people are in).

Seems to me that Mr Redman is sucking up a lot of pain where he works. People who have no choice but to suck it up hate it when those who have a choice exercise it publicly. Now why would that be?

What’s puzzling is why anyone would post their pain so publicly. Actually, my psychiatrist tells me I have to stop saying things like that. Anyone who would post their pain so publicly has a head the rest of us would be better off staying away from.

Dear Diary (2)

(Continued ranting...)

All sorts of things used to make my life better, some for the moment and others for longer: hanging out with people, booze, movies, TV, books, music, chocolate, sex, women, food, blue skies, sunshine and warm air, beaches and noisy waves, and now and again doing stuff that makes the house feel more like home. Holidays are an odd thing which I enjoy more in the memory than the doing - except for the bit where I'm dining someplace like Chez Phillipe - because taking a holiday on your own is just slightly harder work than you might think.

I feel like a man who is slightly hungry all the time because he doesn't have the money or the time to eat well enough. When someone offers him a decent meal, he has to say NO. Why? Because he doesn't want to be reminded of what it's like to eat well and feel satisfied: it would make the hunger he's going to feel after his temporary benefactor has gone feel even worse. Now it's a permenant dull ache he's used to, but having something to contrast it with would bring back the sharpness and the pain and the sense of being deprived.

An addict does everything for two reasons: The High, and Stuff To Do When Waiting For The Next High. It doesn't really matter what that Stuff is: work, hanging out with your mates, watching TV, cleaning the bathroom, walking in the park... it's all just passing time. Some Stuff is better than other Stuff, but it's degrees of Stuff. It's not The High. Sometimes something I think is going to be Just Stuff turns out to give me The High, but that's rare. Stuff has no meaning to an addict: style, cool, yes, but no meaning. Sometimes hanging out with the guys gave me The High, and others it didn't.

I'm not supposed to be aiming for The High anymore. I'm supposed to be finding the purpose of my life in serving others and the Will of God As I Understand Him. I never did get that bit of the Program. Take away The High and it's all just Stuff. As a good Nerd, I can get a High from problem-solving and cool stuff, I don't need drugs or booze. Sunsets will do, or clear air and beautiful distant views. The catch is that my body still wants company. Bodies have lives and needs of their own. Get me a warm female body to be next to, it says. Get me someone to hang out with and get sweaty with. And my head and heart says that it isn't going to work out like that. My head and heart can't see the benefit at all. Neither wants to feel The High from desire that's going to be requited and all the rest of those feelings, only to know that it isn't going to happen again.

What's different this time is that I can't be bothered to do the displacement activity I used to do. Stuff I Thought Would Make My Life Better: decorating the house, visiting the few people left in my life, going for walks (a time-honoured displacement activity which only really works when the weather is good or the scenery is spectacular), going to the RA, Tate Modern, National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery. I could explain it by the cold weather, ten weeks of viruses and colds and coming back tired from the gym, but I know that's not it.

(And it ain't stopping yet...)