Random Thoughts - Part One

I read Jocko Wilnick’s Discipline is Freedom before the hot weather set in. He’s the Extreme Ownership guy with various TED talks and interviews, during which he suggests we all wake up at 04:30. Because, why wouldn’t you? It was just one step of gung-ho too much for me. I know the hurt-your-legs-train-your-arms routine. I do it myself from time to time. But not all the time and anyway, he must have at least 50% more testosterone than me. After a while at the self-improvement game, I have reached a state I can maintain that is challenging but leaves me able to deal with the day job and the household routine. If I don’t get out as much as I would like, that’s a consequence of where I chose to live in 1987, not of doing bench-presses in a gym in Soho.

Being an ‘older man’ also means that my health and fitness targets are about maintenance rather than improvement. If you’re under fifty-five and have not had a serious medical event, you should be looking to improve: mo’ weight, mo’ reps. Over fifty-five, and there will be a day when you realise that maintenance is demanding enough.

Reach this steady state and the excitement, the sense of purpose, goes. A daily and weekly routine, that ten years ago would have been a serious challenge, is now exactly that: a routine. It’s not ho-hum, but it’s not a thrill that I made it to the end of another week.

What do we do self-improvement for? As if the answer is: to be more attractive to women, or to get a promotion at work. We do self-improvement because our lives had become a mess and we looked, ate and felt like shit. Then we get to a decent condition and we realise: it’s one thing to get here, and another to stay here. It’s as much work to stay in shape as it is to get in shape.

As if the question is: now I’m in shape, what am I in shape for? The answer is: so you don’t get out of shape again. And that takes work. Everything around you and your own bodily self conspires to drag you back into the mire of out-of-shape. Being in shape is a goal in itself. It’s like making money: we have to keep on doing it.

The steady state gets to be a different kind of comfort zone. Waking up and going through they day after a decent amount of sleep, knowing that another decent night’s sleep awaits is a pleasant feeling. Going out at 19:30 to something that won’t finish until 21:30 and that I won’t get home until 22:45 and so will miss a cycle of sleep and wake up groggy the next morning...? That grogginess starts to be, not exactly unappealing, but inconvenient.

It’s been a while since I saw something at Sadlers Wells, or an early evening movie in the West End. Or since I’ve been to one of the major museums or galleries. I feel I should be doing those things. Perhaps on some kind of rotation. The truth is, when I leave the gym, either at the end of the day or on a Saturday morning, I don’t have that what-does-the-rest-of-the-day-hold bounce.

Maybe there’s a role for the gang-ho, JFDI, losers-make-excuses-winners-make-things happen, attitude in doing regular going-out stuff. After all, my ‘objective’ for the recent few and next few weeks amounts to re-establishing a routine that worked well a couple of years ago and I let slip. It’s not much, but it’s enough.

Drag your ass to the Tate Modern - what else are you doing today?

Doesn’t quite sound right.

September 2018 Diary

September 10th was my friend’s funeral. Ever get the wrong time for something in your head? Despite what the diary says? So I arrived what I though was ten minutes early to find I was twenty minutes late. One of the staff opened the doors for me, and I snuck in and sat at the back, while his partner was reading her tribute to him. We stood, sat, and sung half-heartedly, and his son and daughter read a tribute and geared up at the end of it. Then we trooped outside, I paid my condolences to the kids and his partner, made a vague gesture about having to go, and left.

I had lunch in Richmond, went home and read in the garden, and kept busy tidying up bits ands pieces. That felt a lot better than eating chocolate and tearing up over Rent, which was what I did the last time I went to a friend’s funeral.

When you get to my age, you will understand. The older I get, the more life is about dealing with today, and the greater proportion of my flagging energy it takes to do that. It’s not that older people are harder-hearted, it’s that we just don’t have the energy for demonstrative emotions.

I started the month by buying an Apple TV. Only after I had checked that I could use it to show Curzon Home movies on my TV. And that the MUBI monthly subscription is half the price of a single movie. Come home, pick a movie, stop half-way through to set up the next morning’s breakfast and gym gear, finish some time after 21:00, and just plain going to bed. The simple life.

I saw Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman at the Curzon Soho; The Lovers, The Soft Skin, 360, The Woman in the Fifth, The Nile Hilton Incident, Lourdes, 13 Assassins, A Man Escaped, The Decent One on Curzon Home Cinema; The Sheltering Skies, The Andromeda Strain, Spring Fever, Avalon, The Lady Eve, The Bling Ring, Enter The Void on MUBI; and The Sweet Smell of Success on DVD. Which is exactly what I got the Apple TV for.

I read Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor; Virginie Despentes’ Baise-Moi; Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography; and Dr Graham Easton’s The Appointment. I’ve also be riding through William Cobbett’s Rural Rides.

I stopped with the evening meal. No, really, just a piece of fruit and some fizzy water. While watching the movie. I don’t get acids reflux an hour after going to sleep and I feel better the next morning. It’s not strictly intermittent fasting because the fruit is in the evening, but it’s as close as I’m going to get.

I got myself a commitment at the meeting I go to. Literature secretary. It feels right, and it will make me turn up every week for a year. It was also the only time I’ve ever known three people put themselves forward on the day for Literature. One withdrew, as they were totally new to the meeting, so me and the other guy had to go outside while about eight people voted. That may be the first time that has ever happened in any meeting anywhere for that commitment.

Then I got The Autumn Cold. Once upon a time colds were all the same. Now every cold is different. This one hit me with a fever for the first two or three days, let me get back to work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then just could not be assed to get out of bed for the Thursday and Friday. I felt rotten for the first couple of hours, and then picked up, thought I’d be up and running the next morning, and the next morning I’d feel like crap. Despite this, I only missed one training session.

The training you do when you’re feeling like crap is the best training you do. Because when you’re feeling okay again, you don’t have to spend a week or so getting back into shape.

We live, and the things around us live, through daily care

The title is a line from Ilse Crawford's Home Is Where the Heart Is. On the opposite page is an open shed door with four spotless brooms hanging on the inside of the door.

It’s one of those lines that I’ve always just nodded along to, consisting of words I understand arranged into a sentence whose meaning I never knew I didn’t know.

Then one day I got it. Daily care means use, cleaning, mending. That’s how, on a very elemental level, we live. Our lives consisting of using things, cleaning and repairing them. The brooms in the photograph are brushed out at the end of the day to remove the bits and pieces that remain in the brooms in my garden shed. Clean tools are the mark of a good tradesman: mine show I’m an amateur.

When I was at secondary school, the bicycles we rode to school were, every week, wiped over, chrome shined and moving parts oiled - cleaning the chain in turps and re-oiling it was considered hardcore. The point of ‘cleaning your room’ is only partly a clean room, mostly it’s that the time spent cleaning that speaks to self-respect. Take it too far, and it’s mere compulsion that gets in the way of life and speaks to mental instability. The balance matters.

The more things we have, the more things we have to care for, to use, clean and repair. Some will get more attention, some less, and some none. I have a food mixer in a corner of my kitchen that gets wiped down from time to time but never used. I keep thinking food mixers are something I should use, and then never do. After a while I take them down to the tip. Most of the other things I have I use, and feel I should dust and clean more often than I do.

The fewer things we have, the more care we could take of them, and the older those things, the more care we need to take care of them.

In the life of a commuter, what gets daily care?

So much of what we use belongs to someone else, and we spend so little time at home, we have too little time to clean and repair. Take a look at people’s shoes: some haven’t been polished for months. And how long does it take to polish shoes? Ten minutes? Sure, clothes washing. Bedsheets. Towels. How about wiping the iron down after using it? Cleaning your mobile with a glasses-spray? Brushing the dust off the remotes around the house? When was the last time you cleaned the TV screen?

Sound silly? Try it.

Stuck Inside of A50 With The Brexit Blues Again

Are you fed up with the Brexit propaganda in all the media? I am. The only thing I’m more fed up with is yet another article whinging about how it’s a terrible injustice that privileged ambitious white women aren’t being given even more privileges. I don’t read those articles past the W-word in the headline. Anyway…

To recap: the EU cannot and should not give up the demand, that two conditions of super-privileged access, are a) the legal sovereignty, of the European Courts, and b) the Four Freedoms. The UK Government was given strict instructions by 17+ million voters that it was to regain control of its borders and legal system. So no capital-A Agreement is possible. The people whose jobs it was to understand this stuff knew this about thirty seconds after the referendum result was announced. The A50 rules forced them and everyone else into two pointless years of fake negotiation and preposterous posturing. The only real diplomatic problem was wondering how to blame the Irish, and the Border did the trick. (Irish and UK Customs authorities say they don’t need a hard border to make it all work post-Brexit, but hey, where diplomacy needs, the Devil take the Customs man, or something.)

We’ve reached the stage where everyone is talking openly about a hard Brexit, and the most sensible remark I’ve read about that is that, while the British will pay the price of a hard Brexit, it is not so clear that the individual European countries will want to.

Remember your history: the Brits are good at four things (as well as pop music, inventing stuff, banking, flexible legal systems, and a bunch of other things, and on the other hand they did need the EU to tell them to clean up their filthy beaches, but I digress)

First, getting off ships before anyone else has heard the water coming into the bilges. The EU will never be a federal nation state, but it will ruin itself trying. Time to leave. Especially before the Euro falls apart.

Second, being prosaically, anti-climatically, practical. The Brits can reduce the consequences of what looks like an history-shaking event to a handful of petty changes. For instance, the uncertainty about customs arrangements, all that huffing and puffing, and what does it mean? That a firm in Rochdale has to fill in EU/HG/12-35UTF/RE and file it a week in advance, instead of getting by with a UK registration plate on the day. And UK Passport-holders have to line up behind the Ugandans rather than the Poles when they pass through Immigration at Nice Airport. Duh.

So don’t be surprised when whole swathes of the British economy wind up being prepared for 30/4/2019. Some won’t be, but that’s only because they wanted to create a crisis they didn’t want to waste.

Third, being able to handle ridiculous amounts of ambiguity, aka It’ll all work out in the end. God, as we know, is an Englishman, and he looks after his own, ever since he took his eye off the job in 1066. So it will work out. How far away that end is, and how much it will cost to get there doesn’t matter to the Brits, which brings us to...

Fourth, the UK Government has never been shy of bankrupting and indebting its taxpayers to win a war. They did it twice in the twentieth century. They only beat Napoleon at Waterloo because they borrowed a ton of money to hire the German Army. Further back, they paid the Danes boatloads of silver to stop looting and raping in the streets of Newcastle. Real historians could doubtless list a dozen much more ordinary examples.

Few other countries are prepared to bankrupt themselves in any cause. That’s why it’s taken the 27 an age to understand that the Brits will bankrupt themselves to keep their precious independence. While a hard Brexit might hurt the British more than any random European country, it’s going to cost that random European country, and not spare change either.

And remember, in a hard Brexit, the EU doesn’t get its money.

So there will be a hard Brexit, because there can’t be a capital-A Agreement. But it won’t be a malicious Brexit. The EU can’t afford the PR. The French will be awkward for a couple of months, but they love that kind of publicity. The Dutch don’t. The Germans don’t. The Iberians and the V4 can’t afford it. Everyone else wants as much business-as-usual as possible. So there will be lots of temporary transitional arrangements (TTAs) to keep things going. That, I’ve always thought, is what the negotiators are really doing now: working out the TTAs. There will be Trade Agreement on the Canadian or Japanese model agreed tout de suite (once special access is publicly acknowledged to be non-negotiable) and the EU will get a chunk of its €50bn.

The final part of the drama will be that those TTA’s will only be introduced at the last moment, when it can be spun as preventing a world-wide economic crisis the like of which mankind would never have seen before or after. TTA’s can’t be introduced sensibly, beforehand, as that would let Parliaments argue about stuff. It has to look like an emergency.

Can’t help feeling this is exactly how Donnie told Terry to play it.

Why Were The Good Old Days?

Sis asked recently why The Good Old Days were simpler or better and I had a hard time answering.

The Good Old Days was the period between the end of WW2 and September 1972 (when the school leaving age was raised to sixteen). In European countries during this time, a large proportion of the workforce were working for the Government through the Health Service, the railways and associated haulage companies, the regional Electricity, Gas and Water Boards, the Civil Service and Local Government, and the General Post Office and its attached telephone company. Many other industries were subsidised - such as British Leyland, whose Austin / Morris Mini lost money on every single vehicle.

The Good Old Days were marked by three things:

1) Morally, politically, legally and in the tax codes, the (Western) world supported the Normie Life: marriage, mortgage, children and employment. There was a clear idea of what it was to be a Normie: heterosexual, with children, mediocre of talent and energy, leading lives of compromise and frustration with occasional moments of satisfaction and peace, and wanting to spend time with other people like them. In return for leading these lives, they were granted steady employment and would not experience any real economic hardship, which brings us to point 2)...

2) The majority of employers accepted that jobs had two functions: to produce goods and services, and to support the Normie life, which is in an employer’s interest, as it means they get a steady workforce with non-transferable skills of value to the employer. There was a strong link between school and employment. Five O-levels including-English-and-Maths was enough for a young person to start a career in a bank, insurance company and with many other employers. There were apprenticeships for practically-minded young people, and the teenagers who could not keep still could leave school at fifteen so that others could study for O-levels in (relative) peace. Which brings us to point 3)...

3) Domestically, the Crazies were locked away in Asylums and Special Schools, the Rainbows were in the closet, the Diversities were still in their home country, extremists were merely Communists or wanted hanging, and moral posturers were obvious prigs and cranks. The Good Old Days had awful food, poor health, headaches, way too much smoking and drinking, sexism, racism, class prejudice, teenage pregnancy, killer smogs, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It was not perfect. But the imperfections and deviancies were hidden. Each imperfection was known perhaps by a few, none by everyone. People whispered secrets, but none of it appeared in the media and Parliament.

Now, if we could keep the good bits and get rid of the awful food, poor health, headaches, way too much smoking and drinking, sexism, racism, class prejudice, teenage pregnancy, killer smogs, and a whole bunch of other stuff, we would have a Pretty Perfect Society. In the 1970’s that’s what it looked like Western Governments were trying to do, The Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976, and the Divorce Reform Act 1969 (in force 1971). There were a lot of other changes, far too many to recite here.

The Good Old Days had an illusion of consensus. That illusion disappeared with all that legislation and the behaviours that went with it. It turned out that the good food, decent health, cutting back on smoking and drinking, removing the most overt sexism, racism and class prejudice, reducing teenage pregnancy and a whole bunch of the other stuff, seemed to require that all the social and economic support of the Normie life be dismantled. Which no-one saw coming. Now...

1) All that's left of the support for the Normie lifestyle are some minor administrative privileges for husbands and wives, as against ‘partners’. There is no viable idea of a ‘normal life’ that receives State and public support.

2) Employment no longer supports social roles, indeed, companies no longer see themselves as under any obligation to employ the citizens of the country in which they make their profits. Employers don’t train anybody, and new hires are expected to have the skills and knowledge they need for the new job already. Employers lost expertise and knowledge with rationalisations and downsizing in the 1980 / 1999, which is why they didn’t lay people off in the same way after 2008. Jobs are more secure than in the Dumbsizing Era, but still can’t be counted on.

But most of all...

3) Crazies, rainbows, and diversities are everywhere, and all the secrets are shouted from the rooftops. Extremists now blow themselves and everyone around them to pieces, and moral posturing and virtue-signalling is entitled and aggressive. Normies don’t feel as if the public spaces belong to them, but instead to drug dealers, beggars, rough sleepers, and the drunks who pissed against the wall at 4 A.M. Normies don’t feel like the society and economy supports them, but that they are mere tax fodder to support subsidies, and legal and employment privileges, for ‘minorities’ who don’t make any contribution to the economy or society.

Nothing now supports the Normie life. Which is why they yearn for the Good Old Days.

Sure, they have iPhones and decent coffee and Netflix, and cars that don’t rust, and heart transplants and hip transplants, and cheap air travel to faraway beaches, and all that stuff.

They also have uncertain employment, ridiculous house prices, static real income for the majority of workers, forty per cent of marriages end in divorce and under-performing children, the queues for heart and hip transplants are years long, the drugs used to work but the germs are becoming immune, there’s nowhere to park your rust-free car if you do drive it, and the real difference is not between the Haves and the Have-Nots - which is the historical condition of the human race - but between the Normies and the self-improvement and self-management people, with their Continuous Professional Development, three-times-a-week gym sessions and half-marathons, and their low-carb, low-fat, low-taste diets.

The Normies have the distinct feeling they got screwed. They didn’t. They just got their noses rubbed in the truth that, for a lot of people, the Good Old Days were the Bad Old Days. The Normie life required huge amounts of denial and a metric tonne of complacency, which was possible only because the rest of the world was shut up behind the Iron Curtain and had the economic development of the mid-nineteenth century.

August 2018 Diary

The heat really did take it out of me. I took a week off after the weather cooled down, and in the few days up to the break, I could feel the gears in my head grinding. I was making mistakes at work that I would never normally make. I could not think straight. It was so bad I woke up at 08:00 for three days during the week off.

I read Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler; John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-Up; The Secret Barrister; The Panama Papers by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier; G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday; Alan Furst’s A Hero In France; and John Lange (aka Micheal Crichton) The Venom Business and Drug of Choice; and Olga Sviblova's book on Rodchenko

I saw no films and finished S7 of House. I watched Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and both the Jack Reacher films on DVD.

Sis and I dined at Delamina, off Wigmore Street. I lunched at The Botanist on Sloane Square because the District Line was up the creek and it was a way to sit it out. I had supper at Blanchette in Soho as well.

I decided it was time to knock working from home on the head. I lost a day of walking - I do 10,000+ steps a day with the commute and other walking - and I was not making the best use of the time. ‘Working from home’ is good when, instead of chatting with others in the office networking with my colleagues, I can do some light housework. With the hot weather, I hadn’t been doing that.

I took my Bose cans into work - I use the in-ear QC20’s for the commute - and that experiment worked: the cans are more comfortable and provide a bit more physical sound exclusion. And I went back to sitting on all sorts of seats around the office, because I’d let myself slip into sitting into a tolerable chair that is still distracting enough that I can’t work fluently in it. Hey, given a choice between reducing property costs per employee and decreasing productivity per employee, there’s really no choice, right?

The white tee-shirts under the blue work shirt came back as well. I’d let the previous lot get too old and scratchy, and of course they shrank in the wash *cough* and became uncomfortable, so as an experiment I stopped wearing them. Finding: wear tee-shirts under the work shirt, and renew the tee-shirts every year or so.

The Great iTunes Album Art project got completed, and only those who have done it will appreciate what that means.

I took some photographs. I know everyone does that all the time, but I had stopped. The Rodchenko book made me think about what taking photographs is about. I don’t have any profound answers, but it shifted how I saw some of the things around me. Made me want to take photographs again.

Policed Speech is Dishonest Speech and Other Thoughts on Call Centres

Taping phone calls at call centres is a good thing, right? Keeps everyone honest, yes?

Not so much. Get the popcorn and read this tale.

The other day I got one of those just-calling-to-see-if-you’re-on-the-best-account-for-you calls from Vodafone. We chatted about the cost of the Samsung Note 9 and the iPhoneX, and then I asked if it was possible to move to a SIM-only contract on my phone. I didn’t think I could, as the contract runs out at the end of January, but hey, no harm in asking.

To my surprise the salesman (it always is a man) said that, yes I could, indeed to a 12-month contract offering 20GB of data per month. Sounds good to me. (I have an iPhone SE, it’s not very expensive, but this was still a saving, and much more data.) He said he would send me a SIM out that evening, which would reach me Friday, and I should call 191 to get everything set up.

The SIM arrived Saturday. We will pass over the call to Vodafone 191. It was long, it was full of people in Chennai popping off to make a cup of tea consult with a colleague while I was on hold, and none of them seemed to be able to grasp the problem, or of they did, they didn’t prove it by describing the problem and the remedy to me in their own words. In the end I think I hit the wrong button with my ear and dropped the call. Or they did. I can get upset after forty-five minutes going nowhere on a call.

It was during this call I learned that I had two lines. I explained that I didn’t want two lines, only one, and I wanted the SIM-ony tariff transferred to my existing number, not on the new number.

What had happened was this: the salesman created a second line for the new SIM card which would be billed alongside my existing monthly contract for the next five months. I am going to pass on speculating whether that was intentionally setting me up for double-billing. The usual way of changing is a tariff doesn’t involve changing a SIM card, but hey, who knows how these things work?

I went into that oasis of sanity, a Vodafone shop, and explained what had happened, showing them the SIM and the letter that came with it. The assistant looked at at his screen and in reply to my comment “I think the guy on the phone messed things up” said that, indeed, the guy on the phone had done bad.

Here’s the thing. In the shop, they can say that. On the phone, they can’t, because everything is taped, and so they have to go through a dozen contortions to avoid saying “Yeah, he pulled a fast one on you, let me straighten that out”.

Turned out the new card was cancelled on Saturday evening, when I made the 191 call, so something came out of that, but they could not tell me they had done that, because that would have been tantamount to admitting that the salesman had tried to con me. Or had misunderstood what I wanted and caused me a bunch of nuisance and potential double-billing problems. Neither of which make ‘Vodafone-the-corporation’ look good.

That’s what tapes do to any attempt to be honest.

In the shops, nobody is taping, so the staff can be honest with the customers. They can also deny they ever suggested that the salesman was pulling a fast one. Sometimes deniability leads to greater honesty for the customer.

Want it in five words? Policed speech is dishonest speech.