Setting Out My Last Wishes

I had a meeting with my solicitors a couple of weeks ago to review my Will. It was made a while ago, and since then, amongst other things, we in the UK can not only appoint people with power of attorney over our financial affairs in case we go gaga, we can also appoint someone with power of attorney over our care arrangements if we become incapable of looking after ourselves. This is because Care Act 2014 (effective May 2015) basically puts a social worker in charge of my life if I get dementia or even seem like I’m not taking care of myself. The Act and guidance is full of twaddle about “personal dignity” and the £72,000 limit on what the old person will have to spend, but what it doesn’t say so loudly is that £72,000 is to cover a very narrow range of costs. It's the council which decides what it's going to pay for, not the law or your attorneys.

Choosing someone to act on behalf of my future gaga self is tricky, because they have to know how to deal with bureaucrats and procedures, how not to be fooled by the set speeches about how Social Services have my best interests at heart, and the veiled threats about how hard it is to be responsible for a gaga person.

My wishes as regards my old age are really simple. I want to be dead before I get there. If I’m still alive and decaying, the doctors and social workers are not allowed to perform any “life-saving” (read: “death-delaying”) procedures that will leave me dependent on regular care, assistance or continued medication. I walk out of the operation autonomous or not at all. If we have the option by then - say in about ten years - I will go for AS anyway. I’m done now. I’ve had my life, and all this continuing effort of work and gym and reading and so on is just plain bravado. I’m going to be fairly badly-off when I stop earning, and that ain’t gonna be no fun. I do not want to be surrounded by old people, even if they are five years younger than me.

Asking someone to stand in front of people who manipulate emotional friends and family for a living, and say “He wants out. It says so in his testament. Have the decency to observe his wishes and inject the morphine” - well, you picture yourself saying that about a friend or sibling, let alone an uncle or a nephew. It’s what lawyers do, because they are paid to manipulate bureaucrats into doing what their client wants.

If I become incapable of looking after myself, I don’t want someone doing it for me. I won’t have the money to pay for it, and I wouldn’t want to take up another person’s time and life like that. It’s selfish to expect others to carry you when you can’t support yourself, and it’s sentimental to carry on supporting someone in that condition. Morphine. Out. Cold. Thank you.

I’ve had these views for a long time and I haven’t changed. But setting it out so my solicitor can put it down on paper for me to sign… just a little different.

St Anne's Court

I have been writing and thinking, but a lot of it is still in-progress. I've dropped a couple of comments at other blogs, but those were re-stating things I've said here already. I'm not quite sure where the time and attention is going, but it's going somewhere. Also, it's hot.

Aluminium Vision, Feltham

One morning a couple of weeks ago on the way to the station, I saw this...

The owner returned as I took the last picture and I asked him what this wonderful machine is. It's a converted Triumph Herald. You should google that to appreciate how much work the man put in. 

June 2015 Review

Seems I was busier last month than I thought. I took a day off to let British Gas tell me my boiler was fine, and then did some gardening. A couple of weeks later, I took a long weekend because the MI mainframes were offline, and did more gardening. The important bit on both occasions wasn’t that I cut huge amounts of shrubs and cleared out the garden shed, but that I took the rubbish to the Tip immediately. Those with gardens will know how significant that is.

I saw Les Sept Doigts du Main show Traces at the Peacock Theatre, Paco Pena at Sadler’s Wells and fitted in an emergency visit to the orthodontist. Sis and I dined at Picture on a Wednesday, and I had lunch at Moro the Saturday of Paco Pena.

I wrote three Python programs, getting just familiar enough with IDLE to decided to try PyCharm Community edition, which is excellent.

I watched Sons of Anarchy S6. Jesus H Christ. Only Shakespere littered his plays with more dead people than Sons does.

I read Mathematics Without Apologies, Michael Harris; 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, by Ruscio and Beyerstein; I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That, by Ben Goldacre; Decoded, by Mai Jia; Cakes, Custard and Category Theory, by Eugenia Cheng; Behind The Housing Crash, by Aaron Clary; Stand By Your Manhood, by Peter Lloyd; The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, edited by Paolo Mancuso.

Having braces is one of those things you should only do if you really need to. You will salivate all the time. Eating chocolate and biscuits is nowhere near as pleasant the excess saliva removes the taste, and you feel your inner mouth rubbing against the plastic bits they stick on your teeth. Plus your teeth move, so every five days another bit of your mouth hurts or gets rubbed by metal.

The personal training is doing what I wanted it to do. I’m working hard, but not waking up the next morning aching and in need of more sleep that I can’t have. I have learned various moves, such as The Nine Squat positions, and The Twenty-Seven push-up positions, and the Three Ways of stepping up onto blocks. Not to mention the Three positions for doing lateral raises, and more ways of swinging a vipr and weighted ball than you would believe. It is slowly coming together and I am more flexible than I was.

And I bought an iPad Air. Heaven’s it’s lovely. Streaming music is so much better than using Chrome on my old Asus netbook.

A conference with my solicitors about Wills and Powers of Attorney was maybe a little more real than I was expecting. I will discuss some of those issues in another post as well.

And setting the alarm for 06:00, and not starting the morning routine until then feels a lot better. If I’m awake earlier, I make coffee, sit by the window and read, even if it’s only for ten minutes. Feels a lot more relaxed. I will meditate on what the FitBit is telling me later.

Beach Body Ready and Other Women: It's About Settling

Quite rightly the ASA didn't find the Protein World Beach Body Ready poster offensive .

They did find its claims unrealistic, and banned it on those grounds. That achieves the result the body-positives wanted but not for their reasons, and in ideology, reasons are more important than results.

First time I saw it I thought the model had been photo-shopped, looked more closely and realised she hadn't. Renee Somerfield is the one young woman in the world who really does look like that, and it must have taken the agency days looking on Instagram to find her.

It's not easy finding a non-photo-shopped image of Renee, Why anyone would bother, I have no idea.

I don't have carved abs and 10% body fat. But I'm not put off by photographs of men who do, whether they are Men's Health Hunk of the Month cover model or the poster for the Magic Mike movie. I know what they had to do to get to look like that. It takes a brutal diet, exercise, the genes to put the abdominal cartilage in the right place to pull the abs into a six-pack, and personal trainers and dieticians of the kind you and I can't afford. Also I know they only look like that on the day of the shoot, since there's a fair amount of water loss involved to look that ripped. I don't mind that they look like that. If I put that much work in, I wouldn't look that good, but I sure would turn heads on the beach.

A man who trains and diets may have a look that's a little strained but it speaks of self-discipline and application, it speaks of manly virtues. A woman who trains in that way sends the same message, but those virtues are not feminine. There are a handful of mid-thirties to mid-forties women in media and PR who train hard to stay tight, but keep the body-fat higher than an athlete's so that they still look feminine. It's a narrow line to walk. But (model) just looks like that. She may keep those looks by eating sensibly, and doing some light circuits to stay tight, but by the look of her other photographs on Instagram, she doesn't do athletic training.

A model of Ms Somerfield's looks reminds most of us that we are settling with our choice of partner. However much we are aroused by them, and find them attractive in so many other ways, and however much we might not think about it, we are settling. Many people can live with this knowledge, as long as it remains unsaid and mainly invisible in their partner's behaviour. (I have roving eyes.)

But the body-positives don't want their partners to be settling. They know they are overweight, have short limbs and chubby fingers. They know they don't fit anyone's idea of even a Six. They know they aren't above the Pretty Line. Yet they want to be found attractive without reservation. And who can blame them? Most men know they can't spit sharp Game, don't do Bad Boy things, and don't have much of a sense of thier own direction, but want to be found attractive for who they are, not what they can provide, and who can blame them? Both are doomed to be disappointed, but I feel sympathy for both groups.

This is why the the funky Sevens and Eights, like Lili here, in c-heads can at times leave me in despair,

 or a stone 10 like Alejandra Guilmant

who occasionally pops up on Fashioncopious. Let alone Malgosia Bela in the 35th Birthday edition of i-D.

They remind me that if I were to set out again, my reaction would be to settle for yet another Six. Which I don't want to do and wouldn't like myself for doing. Just like the body-positives.

Speaking of living with oneself, recently I made an approach that to the only Eight that's passed through the office in a large number of years (Khazakstan via five years at an English university). I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't. But something happened between the time we arranged to meet for coffee and I was getting yes-please smiles, and the day we met. I was gently re-buffed, and she's blanked me since, but who cares? Sometimes you gotta do it, for your self-respect's sake.

Same-Sex Marriage 4, The Economy 5

It seems the Supremes have ruled 5-4 that it is no longer legal for individual States to make same-sex marriage illegal. The contention was between legal consistency across the Federation and the right of States to set their own laws. There were only thirteen hold-outs, which made the consistency argument easy. Had there been only three which allowed gay marriage, the consistency argument would have gone the other way.

Everyone pretended the argument was about “human rights” or “equal rights” for people wanting to marry someone of the same sex. That it was about Good Liberals vs Bad Religious Fundamentalists. Some, of course, see it as a sign of the continuing moral and political degeneracy of the USA. Others that the USA is gradually becoming a Better Place. This is all self-obsessed twaddle by the special interest groups.

The acutest comment about same-sex marriage was made several years ago. It was to the effect that, since the last remaining tax concession for marriage is in inheritance, and the changes in Family Law had turned marriage into a minefield of responsibilities-without-rights for men, and rights-without-responsibilities for women, marriage has no special status, is valueless or worse, and extending it to all comers was not sending any moral or social signal of approval. In other words: the minorities could have it, because it wasn’t worth having anymore. (I’m going to pass over Justice Anthony N Kennedy's tacky pro-marriage sentiments. That passage is tactical PR of the highest order, a sugar-coating to help the pill go down.)

The religious people were upset because they saw this as a sign that their State had abandoned them. Well, duh! We’re running an economy here: we have taxes to collect, workforces to populate, and the appearance of hunky-doriness to maintain. The Rainbow People got marriage because the economy doesn’t care who anyone sleeps with, or what ceremonies and legal relationships they want to enter into, or even how many there are in the bed, as long as they show up to work on time and spend their salary, pay their taxes and don’t interrupt the flow of goods and services throughout the economy. I tend to agree. Personally, I don’t care who you have sex with, or where and when you go to shul, as long as you behave in public with decorum, consideration, take your share of the tax burden and don’t want Government hand-outs for your activities. You can be as diverse as you like, as long as you stop making noise when I need to go to sleep. (A requirement that has everything to do with my participation in the economy, and nothing to do with my participation in society.)

The transition from a mono-cultural society to a multi-cultural economy is difficult. People are still struggling with it, because they don’t understand nature of the transition. Governments started to run economies rather than societies back in the 1980’s, but since the economies were in largely mono-cultural societies, nobody really noticed. Then those governments started to import large numbers of immigrants to service the economy. “Diversity” was the social disguise for the economic reasons.

Only after a while does it become clear that Diversity encourages the formation of mono-cultural societies within the multi-cultural economy. As long as there is no discrimination in the economy (because it’s participation in the economy that now matters), there can be all the discrimination and segregation within the society that we want. It cannot be imposed by the State, because the State is now in charge of the economy, but it can be imposed by the various ethnic and cultural groups. It’s not easy to cross the borders between the groups, and it’s almost impossible to make it into the political, economic and artistic elites unless you had the right background or the right luck. So a multi-cultural economy is not a society with shared values and culture. It’s just a bunch of different people who happen to live next to each other.

This is exactly why the SJW’s on the left and right are hopping up and down and screaming. They see that the Government has withdrawn from legislating and running society. SJW’s and tradcons want to legislate society: they want to tell you to do this and don’t do that. Western Governments are not in that job anymore.

The Supremes didn’t vote 5-4 for same-sex marriage. They voted 5-4 for the economy over society.

Girls Communing With Smartphones, Soho

There are so many things I could say about these images. Mostly, however, I love the colours and the light. Sunday morning Soho. Women looking communing with their smartphones is one of the new sights and indeed iconographic images of our time. I don't know what it means. But these strike me as images of devotional attention.