Little Bits of Winter in April: The City and Marlow

Yesterday the weather was just warm enough to get every third garden-owner out with the mower for the long-overdue post-winter first cut of the grass. I'm still not quite sure how I made myself do it. It has been so cold that no-one in the whole town wanted to do anything more than go to work and go home. God alone knows what the poor bloody tourists thought of London this Easter.

My posting has been fairly lengthy and heavy of late, and that's going to ease off for various reasons. From top to bottom: how hip you need to be to ride that bike I do not know; two views of a sudden flurry Thursday lunchtime in the alleys behind Bishopsgate; look closely and that's hail on the grass outside one of the buildings at the SAS Institute outside Marlow.

A C Grayling - Traitor To The Working Man

"Egregious crap" is a term that should be used more often, but never lightly. "Traitor to the working man" is the same. A C Grayling's piece in the March 30/31 edition of the FT is both egregious crap and proves him to be a traitor to the working man. 

A C Grayling is what someone who doesn't know anything about philosophy would think a philosopher looks like and maybe sound like. His books have titles like The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, or The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life, or What is Good?: The Search for the Best Way to Live, or even, for Christ's sake, The Good Book: A Secular Bible. He has written a proper book, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, but seems to have gone the pot-boiler route after that. He is Master of the New College of the Humanities, which is a private undergraduate college with a bunch of brand-name academics, whose degrees are awarded by the University of London.

"Austerity helps us recognise the splendour of sufficiency" is the title of the piece. "Try to look at the bright side of our current misery" is the sub-head. Columnists don't usually have control over the sub-head, but I bet he wishes he had had in this case. 

"Austerity" according to my five-year old Macbook Pro, means "difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce a budget deficit, esp. by reducing public expenditure" or "extreme plainness and simplicity of style or appearance" or "sternness or severity of manner or attitude". My living quarters would be described by many as "austere" as would the way I dress. Austerity-as-style is, if handled with sufficient panache, a good way to go, speaking as it does to seriousness and self-discipline not shared by people who have several different shades of carpet on their floors. The  Amish, on the other hand, take it too far. That's Good Austerity.

Bad Austerity is when governments cut back needed spending and employers reduce the real value of their payrolls and make their staff use increasingly older and less effective equipment to meet the ever-increasing demands on products and services. Good Austerity would be cutting back on boondoggles, luxury and ineffective spending. But we don't get that kind of austerity. We only get the Bad kind.

"Is austerity a bad thing?" Asks our philospher-entrepreneur. And he answers "Not always. The austerity years of the second world war and its aftermath were surprisingly good for people; calorie restriction meant flat tummies and robust health, at least for those not smoking the lethal cigarettes of the day." Pardon? Have you seen photographs of those people? Of the bombed-out streets and the tattered interiors? Can he remember that this country was so poor for decades afterwards that there were still bomb sites in Covent Garden in the mid-Seveties and in East London in the mid-Eighties? Can he remember that in those Good Austere times most people took baths once a week and thought it barely necessary to wash their feet daily - unless they were miners. As for "robust health" - is he kidding? Look at those photographs of cheeky East London blokes again. They aren't sixty, they are forty. People wore out fast in those Good Austere times.

He continues: "It might be highly pleasurable to meet one’s friends in a fine restaurant, but to meet them on a park bench in the sunshine has almost all the good of the experience." Um? One meets one's friends in the local Pizza Hut in the evening because one is stuck inside an office or a commute when the sun is shining - if it ever will shine again in this benighted country. Where and when can normal people meet their friends "on a park bench in the sunshine"? Where in Wembley exactly? Or Hoxton? Or Hanworth? And are they meeting those friends hungry or replete? And no, I'm sorry, unless the park bench is in the Parc du Chateau in Nice or the parc du Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, I'll go with a pleasant restaurant, though I suspect by a "fine" one, Prof Grayling may mean "Michelin-starred", which is a little forbidding for me.

And then we get this: "Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher of antiquity, said that the truly rich person is he who is satisfied with what he has. Think that saying through. How rich one is, if content with a sufficiency; how poor, with millions in the bank, if dissatisfied and still lusting for more. Enforced austerity, as in a major economic downturn, might teach what is sufficient, and how one might be grateful not to be burdened with more than is sufficient." The Stoics were a bunch of Roman millionaires and billionaires, should you be wondering. Those guys had as little to teach ordinary people then as they do now. And how convenient that wage slaves don't need more, or even as much as they had last year, but all they do need is a state of mind, to be satisfied with what they have. I wonder if Mr Sainsbury takes that as payment for bread? As advice to parvenu millionaires, it has a certain use in pointing out that there's a time when a hundred million is enough and you need to think about charitable works. As advice to someone on the median (male) UK salary of £28,000 a year gross, it's simple callousness. Or plain stupidity.

Be content with what you've got. Advice from someone who fancies himself part of the ruling class to people he considers slaves. How dare you want more. So you can send your children to a school where they might learn something. Or have a property or business to pass on to them. Or so you can go see Shakespeare live or spend a weekend away in a "fine hotel" to re-ignite the marriage that is asphyxiating under making-ends-meet. Understand the true meaning of the government cuts that took away your carer, or your meals at home, as the "opportunity to live more richly" as Professor Grayling says austerity really is. Then you will be happy.

Yeah. Right. You get first swing at his skull. Then it's my turn on behalf of all the philosophers whose good name he besmirches with such craven lackey propaganda. Then we go for the editor who let it get printed.

March 2013 Review

If you asked me, I would have said March was a complete dud. Too cold to go anywhere or do anything. And snow. I saw Broken City, To The Wonder and Parker, at the movies, and Shut Up and Look at the ICA. I saw Eva Yerbabuana, Rocio Molinas, Tomatito and the Ballet Flamenco Andalucia (feat: Rocio Molinas in an entrancing performance) at Sadler's Wells. Sis and I had lunch at Byron, Islington, before the Ballet Flamenco performance, with the snow rushing outside and every child age six in north London inside. We went to Maki in Richmond for a Saturday lunch for her birthday. I had a curator's lecture and tour of the current Kurt Schwitters exhibition at the Tate Britain. I also added a weekday lunch at Galvin Cafe du Vin in Spitalfields Market to my 'been there-eaten that" list.

I took the hurting arms to my osteo, Taj Deoora on Harley Street, at the start of the month, and a fine job of getting rid of the majority of hurt she did. I had a Thai massage later in the month to keep my back happy. I've settled into a new routine at the gym, starting with fifteen minutes jogging or interval sprinting, ending with fifteen minutes abs and core, and two of chest / back/ shoulders each time, three sets of three different exercises. I got some very good advice from one of the trainers about posture and style, which I have been following and it's making a difference. To make any kind of progress on the Quest For A Pull-Up, I put a bunch of counterweight on the supported pull-up so I could feel the muscles in my back doing the work, and then I'll cut down the assistance. Towards the end of the month I bought a bunch of quality food supplements - multivitamins, vitamin D and Fish Oil - partly to see if I noticed the difference from the Boots versions, and in the case of Vitamin D, because with this weather, we all need it. I moved on to a low-carb diet, about which I have already written.

I treated myself to a Macbook Air, which I've been thinking about forever. I left the gym one Thursday evening, turned right up Regent Street and bought the thing. A week or so later I bought a really cool leather case by Decoded from the Covent Garden store. I spent more hours in the last two weeks of the month than I would care to count re-drafting a play I wrote a couple of years ago. Also, I treated myself to a fancy haircut at equally fancy prices by an Art Director at Taylor Taylor on the Commercial Road. Very good it still looks as well.

My (one) staff member left at the end of the month and I have to break my skull against the vacancy intranet to get an ad up for her replacement. And I went on a two-day course about modelling with logisitic regression at the SAS offices in Marlow. That was a real eye-opener in so many ways.

The monthly music download from Amazon was: Memory and Humanity, by Funeral For A Friend; Where You Want To Be, by Taking Back Sunday; The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, by Brand New; Lies For The Liars, by The Used; and Songs for Imaginative People, by Darwin Deez. Yea emo guitar bands! I read Common Errors In Statistics by Good and Hardin, and polished off a scholarly impressive book on Archimboldo.

Oh. And I had two telephone interviews for jobs paying about a fifth more than I'm making at the moment, and took an online aptitude test in the Eat branch in our building at 09:00 one morning, because there's nowhere to do that in the office. I was taking tea after work in Machiavelli on Long Acre, and the recruiters handling the positions called, and then came to have tea to meet me and talk about the roles. What a world this is now.

But if you asked me, I would have said March was a complete dud. Everything felt like I was grinding it out. That's what cold does. 

This Post Intentionally Left Blank

Because I've been very busy with job interviews, script re-drafts and staying warm. Back later.

Toronto According To Roosh, London According To Me

So you should read the original where Roosh gives his fifteen reasons why Toronto sucks for a young man on the make. So I compared and contrasted with London.

1. Girls are more excited about getting late night food than having sex. Uh-huh, London too.

2. Girls cockblock more than anywhere else in the world. I can't really comment on that one. I never approached sets, only singles.

3. Girls think they are cooler than they actually are. This is probably universal. Except in Paris, where they really are cooler.

4. Girls are obese. I've seen some horrors coming into the West End on the Piccadilly Line, but mostly the girls just aren't slim. Or shapely. We've done the Great London Girl Problem.

5. Girls don’t give eye contact Not true. For me, anyway.

6. You have to be approved by the “mother hen” See 2.

7. Too many Asian and Indian girls. In London, when these are pretty, they are very, very pretty, but when they are not, or when they have attitude, they are slightly worse than the Anglo women.

8. Ugly girls are desperate while attractive girls are inaccessible. This may also be universal, but I wouldn't know. Ugly girls are kinda invisible to me.

9. The entrenched PUA culture is raising the egos of all women. I read that London has a thriving PUA culture, but I don't think they are doing anything to girls' egos. Saturday nights, which I usually leave to the kids, can see some garishly-dressed and heftily over-weight females pretending they are hot stuff and a catch in the West End, but then I have yet to see a real porker in Chelsea or Kensington, and the rare occasions I've been out East on party night, the girls have looked pretty regular. It may be something about city centres that attracts girls with delusions. Generally, the immigrant girls think they are the shit because they came to London and got a job, while the English girls are pretty much a mixture of modest, strident, deluded, timid and shut down.

10. Last call is at 2am Uh, no. London stays open all night if you know where to go.

11. If you make just one mistake with a Toronto girl, you will be rejected. Rude women are everywhere. Seems Roosh met one.

12. It’s very expensive. Hell yeah.

13. It’s a suburban city. Double hell yeah. London logistics suck badly. Read Krauser if you want convincing. I live in the freaking suburbs.

14. It takes a lot of work to date up. Always and everywhere man, always and everywhere.

15. It beats men down.. I will quote The Man: "I saw too many men who looked like corpses. They had no color, no energy, and seemingly no will to live. Spending too much time in Toronto (London) will reduce your ambition, your horniness, and your happiness." Now, London men don't look like corpses, but they are overweight, flabby, soft, out-of-condition and that applies to their bodies as well. They drink too much and eat too much bad food. They don't exercise and dress badly. The older ones have residual booze-red faces, and a certain pallor seems de rigour amongst the younger East London-based men. However, they don't have much ambition, horniness or happiness. Or maybe they are incredibly horny and that's why the girls don't bother. But I think the girls don't bother because the guys mostly prefer to drink, work and do whatever it is they do for a good time. 

What struck me was 13 - it's a suburban city. That is exactly London's problem. The place is geographically huge, a twenty-mile diameter circle consisting of a lot of what-were-once-villages linked together by long roads of houses. The only people who sleep in the middle of London are the very poor, the very rich, tourists and council tenants. Middle-class people with jobs in the City or the West End commute in from miles away. Most of the people who live right next to the City of London don't have jobs, let alone jobs in those City office towers. So everyone's logistics suck. No-one in the centre of town is going to pull because she lives on one side, he lives on another, and the hotels are expensive and mostly full. Cab fares are astro-freaking-nomical. Most everyone in London knows they are going home alone. And most everyone in London drinks - like a guy at my gym said when I mentioned I don't drink "Oh, you're The Guy in London who doesn't drink". Well, there's more than one of me, but not many. Everyone in London drinks because the place would be hard to take without it.

Having said which, this was written after I'd left work at 16:00, crossed from the City to my gym in the West End, had a swim, changed into some casual clothes, had a light supper at Bills on Brewer Street and then crossed back over to Islington to see Tomatito at Sadlers Wells. That's a pretty good second half to the day. Notice that it doesn't involve any other people.

It's the logistics, isn't it? If I had a flat in the middle of town, She-Who-I-Want-To-Ask-Out would have been asked out by now, and been Back to Mine, and all the rest. No problem. That's why reason 13 hit me.  

Diet Stuff (3): Isolate and Eliminate The Bad Food

So the lard-ass next to you on the train this morning did not gain those excess 12kgs simply by eating an extra digestive biscuit a day. (12kgs x 7,700 calories / kg = 1,320 days or just over 3.60 years at 70 calories per biscuit.) They gained it because a chunk of what they ate was laid up as fat. That laying-up of fat is not inevitable, though it is common. The trick is to work out what food sets your body off laying everything you eat into fat.

There's an exercise tape somewhere by someone who trained all sorts of impressive people, whereon he says "There isn't one diet that works for everyone. If there was, it would be called "The Diet" and we'd all be on it." So how do I / you find out what works for us?

I have two theories. One is that each of us has Bad Food that reacts triggers the triglycerides that store fat. Stop eating the Bad Food and the weight drops off. Weight doesn't go on and on dropping off, but the junk weight you put on through your Bad Food does. Hence the idea of diet elimination: quit eating one food group after another until you start losing weight and feeling better. The first Bad Food candidate is bread, rice, pasta, flour, potatoes and anything else that's been near a carbohydrate. The slogan is "carbohydrates drives insulin, insulin drives fat". You will hear Gary Taubes' name mentioned in this context. He's a smart guy but not perfect. That's why I said the first Bad Food candidate is carbs. Serious distance runners eat the damn things by the plate-load and they aren't fat, so there's more going on here. Serious weight-trainers stay away from carbs, partly because carbs increase the amount of water the body carries, which means bloat and excess weight. But you don't see weight-trainers running very far either.

The other is that all this exercising and dieting stuff works for previously pretty people who subsequently mis-fed and under-worked. No previous pretty person, no real improvement. The lard-ass will lose weight, but still won't look good. This is what discorages a lot of ordinary people from trying: in that place in their head they deal silently with the truth, they know they will miss the after-work drinking sessions, the weekend curry, the crisps at snack-time and the chocolate while watching box sets, and will not be rewarded by turning into swans. Being a swan is its own reward, and so the maintenance is worth it. The reward for being a duck is that no-one really notices or cares if you're a fatter, flabbier duck than you need to be. Also, it doesn't help that those of us who push weights and eschew carbs now and again can come across as morally superior to all other forms of life except professional athletes. (But then, well, that's because the self-discipline required to eat and train like that proves we are superior.)

So what's my Bad Food? I don't know my answer, and there's no guarantee that an answer from *coughs* years ago is today's answer. And experimenting was one of the things I said I would do this year. 

Way back when, I went through a period of feeling bloated and tired, and I was overweight and flabby. I saw a nutritionist, who listened to my diet and told me to stop eating wheat. This was when wheat allergies were all the rage. I cut out wheat in all forms, and three days in had a craving for chocolate biscuits that told me I was right on the money. In about four weeks I had lost a stone, looked and felt completely different. (We are talking major improvement: a few weeks after that I was propositioned by four women in the office within the same week.) The nutritionist himself was surprised. I may not have mentioned that I cut back on the whisky-drinking at night as well, and I'm sure that helped a bit, but subsequently I drank more and weighed less. I've repeated this a couple of times and it has worked. I tend to think my Bad Food is wheat-based specifically and carbs more generally. 

Eating chocolate and other sweet stuff late at night really doesn't help. Recently I have cut out eating anything after supper at about 19:30 latest and I lose weight overnight. Of course some of that is de-hydration, but some of it is real weight loss from what amounts to a ten-hour fast. When I ate the 150 gram chocolate bar at 21:30, I didn't even de-hydrate as much.

The morning home-made breakfast smoothie works: I feel like my system gets a little sugar kick-start first thing. It is 05:50 when I drink the damn thing. I can eat a three-egg cheese omelette without flinching at 06:00. 

The evening is complicated. Another day with no satisfaction, back at my single quarters. Nothing from work. No sex. No tasty food, no highs, no laughter, no sunshine, no fresh air, no beautiful scenery, no attractive women, no freaking nothing. Food in the evening is pretty much all I have left to save the day: is it any wonder I get chocolate cravings? So I suppose I could just eat something and stop expecting anything from it. The best thing I can do is just go to bed early. Which kinda makes the whole quality-of-life thing even worse. 

It's the bit in-between that's a mess. I wake up at 05:45 and eat breakfast by 06:05. I go to bed at 21:30 - 22:00. That's sixteen hours, and supper is around 18:30 or 19:30. On a three-meal routine, that would put lunch at 13:00, which is what I used to do, and it didn't work. I'd be hungry and eat too much, so I'd be dopey in the afternoon, and need an apple before the gym to kick in some sugar and prevent a hypo or a severe lack of motivation. I took to having a sandwich at 11:00 (five hours after breakfast) and then another at 15:00 (four hours later, and four hours to supper). That kinda worked except for the bit where it means I'm eating at least two sandwiches a day. Protein can be had round Bishopsgate, and in quite large quantities. How many people are going to remark or complain about me eating hot meat at 11:00 in the morning? I'm bringing the mid-morning snack to 10:30, because eating lunch-part-two at 15:00 feels a bit weird. Even 14:30 feels better. Four meals a day is 375 calories a meal. You just try that.

Well, I am.

Eva Yerbabuana, Sadlers Wells Flamenco Festival 2013

"Is that it" the woman behind me said when Friday evening's performance ended at 20:50, having started the traditional ten minutes late. Well, yes it was, and what more could she have wanted. Possibly some sets, a troupe and a bigger band, plus some upbeat stuff, as in Eva's shows in the early years of the Sadlers Wells Flamenco Festival. Three years ago Eva gave us Rain, a piece that was modern dance for the first twenty minutes, last year there were some uneasy moments in When I Was involving pottery clay, and this year brings the stark and stripped down Ay!. Three cantores, a violinist, her husband Paca Jarana on guitar, a percussionist and Eva herself. In black. All the time.

The blindingly fast rat-tat-tat is still there, as was her trademark traverse of the stage by tapping and not seeming to actually move her legs. There was the dance with the shawl, and the passage I like best, where she portrays the angry and upset wife, throwing her hands around, stamping and being cross, while the cantore as husband pleads and remonstrates with her without for one moment losing his manliness. I have no idea what the row is about as I don't speak Spanish. There was a duel between two of the cantores, one passage of which delighted the Spanish in the audience, and there was drumming and guitar work.

It had, in other words, all the traditional moments. And it was more. This was the premiere, and they hadn't quite settled into it. There was a passage where they got lost in the improvisations and couldn't bring shape to it. And that's why it was more. I've said before and will repeat as often as necessary: the best flamenco artists today are amongst the best artists performing anywhere in any genre. When we get to Yerbabuana and her troupe, the comparisons are with the very, very best jazz artists. At that level, it simply doesn't matter if they lose their way for five minutes, because watching artists of that calibre teaches us something no matter what they are doing. Who cares if Ornette Coleman fluffs a note? Or if Keith Jarrett stops a minute in because he's not feeling it? At that level, simply watching the artists at work is a privilege.

That's what the lady behind me didn't get. Yerbabuana moved on from being a virtuoso entertainer a while ago. She's worked with Baryshnikov and Pina Bausch, and that's not something Arlene Phillips ever did. Her work is no longer judged by us, it's something by which we have to judge ourselves.

And when it all comes together, it is as ever breathtaking and moving.