Happy Birthday To Me

I am now 69 years old. I prefer the round decade birthdays. The 9-ers are a bit of an anti-climax

I have worn discs in my neck vertebrae

I have to take ibuprofen to get a reasonable night's sleep as a consequence

I'm having private osteopathic treatment to help manage it

I take lanzoprosole for a hiatus hernia

Last week, I was putting antibiotic on my lower eyelid to get rid of a sty

My blood sugar is a little iffy

My skin is losing its elasticity

I have a discreet chicken-crop at my throat

It's hay-fever time and I'm fall asleep if I remain in the same position for more than forty seconds

On the plus side...

The osteopathic treatment does seem to be working

Everything else works

I still have all my teeth (*)

I was sober yesterday, and the day before, and the day before...

Proudly representing for lifetime bachelors

I live inside the M25

God bless the Freedom Pass

The car has been thoroughly serviced and repaired and is ULEZ-compliant

I'm getting some decent tones out of the Les Paul + Katana

And when the ****ing sun shines again, I will take some good photos with my Fuji



(*) You need to be pretty old to remember that one.

Frost Spiders

 Taken earlier this year. I knew I must have seen something when I snapped this, but it took me a while to see it.

What Proportion of Your Music Collection Did You Play...

Last week? Last month? Last year?

I have a thousand CDs (give or take) and of course many thousands available via Qobuz.

Suppose I listen for four hours a day - these days that's four to six albums. Twenty-eight to forty-two a week. Say thirty-five a week, or 1,820 a year. Some of that is going to be "new music" from the streaming service. I'd say around five a week or 260 a year.

I have not kept records, but I reckon on any given day, I will be choosing from a pool of about 150 albums or artists from the last two or three months' listening. I reckon I listen to about 300 different albums a year. Not new albums: all albums. Another way of saying that is that I listen to each album six times a year, or once every eight weeks or so. Half of those albums will be streamed.

So why do I need 1,000 CDs in boxes cluttering up my Kallax units? As for the books in the same units, I haven't read most of them a second time.

This is where the minimalist / maximalist thing comes in.

Maximalists love yards of shelves reaching to the ceiling, loaded with LPs, books, CDs, magazines and anything else. It's a record of their life and how it has changed, as well as how much continuity it has. Maximalists live in a present suffused with the past.

Minimalists be like: do I really need to be reminded of something I'm never going to play or read again? It was of its time, and that time has passed. Minimalists live in the now and the past only exists insofar as now reaches back for it.

I'm pretty much a minimalist. Also, I live in a small terraced house and I don't have a lot of room for what amounts to an archive. So it's time to move stuff in and out of archive. (The archive is a bunch of shelves in the box room.) Also, if it's in the archive, I don't need to feel guilty for not playing it.

Staying

My CDs fall into a number of groups:

Miles Davis 

Other Jazz 

Rock / pop / folk / flamenco 

EDM 

Plainchant / early choral music 

Bach

Other Baroque 

Contemporary avant-garde 

Other "classical" (inc Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler etc) 

String Quartets (good for working first thing in the morning while under headphones)

I haven't listened to the early Church music for a long while now. It was a period I went through. The same goes for the contemporary avant-garde stuff. Chalk that up to education.

Miles is staying. The jazz is staying. So is the Baroque, Bach and Handel. Probably the "other classical" as well. I'm never going to play Second Best In the Infants at home because it's just too loud, even if played quietly. It's train music. But I am going to play the less in-your-face EDM I have on CD (not a lot, a chunk of it was bought as train music from Amazon). The rest can go into the archive, until the day I think that I could just do with a blast of Luciano Berio.

Archiving

Upgrading My Music Experience

There's more to the hi-fi listening experience than the sound and the gear and sources that produce it.

Everyone talks about "the room" with its reflections, interferences and standing waves. It's a wonder we can hear anything really. But I'm not thinking about that.

Having a comfortable chair or sofa to sit and listen is important. If you think hi-fi is expensive, try buying a well-made armchair or sofa.

There's also the visual experience: what are you looking at when the music is playing?

And there's another one, which doesn't have a name, but is something to do with not making the best - whatever that means - of one's vast music collection. All those CDs that haven't been played in two or three years, and worse, all those CDs on Qobuz I haven't even found out are there. People with wall-high collections of vinyl will know the feeling of not even remembering they had that album. All that music, and we're ignoring it.

I thought far too much about this stuff (so you don't have to). As a result, I have

a) organised a wi-fi extender for the Hegel H120 so it can use Air Play and I can update it without running LAN cable all over the downstairs 

b) removed all the CDs from the top of the Kallax and put a vase of flowers between the amp and the left speakers 

c) spaced the speakers an extra six inches apart (makes a difference to the sound, really) 

d) turned up the subwoofer a tad (makes even more of a difference to the sound) 

e) accepted that at any given time, I will be playing 1 of about 150 CDs / artists, which is 15% of my collection, hence 

f) I have pruned some of the CDs from the downstairs boxes into the box-room archive 

g) made a directory of the pop / rock / electronic music I have ripped to AAC / MP3 that isn't in the CD boxes, and pointed the iOS Music Streamer at that 

h) resolved to play my Favourites on Qobuz more often 

i) put subscribing to Apple Music (for the classical service) on the to-do list 

j) appreciated that the Sonos app is an excellent consolidator for streaming services and files (the new search looks a lot better)

Which is a lot cheaper than getting a Roon subscription, less time-consuming than ripping everything to FLAC, buying another set of headphones, or upgrading the gear.

See, the problem wasn't the gear. That's as good as I'm going to get for the money.

The problem was the music collection, or rather, the way I was using it. All that music sitting there sulking because I wasn't playing it. No! said Jacob Obrecht, he's not playing Jefferson Airplane again! He did that two weeks ago! What about rotation? Diversity? Equality of playing time?

Anyway, here's a photograph.

Health News

So it's time to follow on with the shoulder problem, which I thought was due to poor posture and adapting to the narrower body of an electric guitar, and or some pulled muscles in my back from doing something silly when turning a heavy mattress.

Yeah. Not so much, it turns out.

I was getting pins and needles down my right arm, waking up in the middle of the night with a shoulder that felt like I'd been abusing it for hours, and otherwise a tonne of pain. This, I was told by my regular osteo, was a trapped nerve at C6/7 (because the pins and needles went to my thumb and forefinger, but not the others).

I went for some regular treatment, and while it improved, I felt it had reached a point where I'd have a good day and two bad ones, and it had settled into a painful equilibrium. After a very uncomfortable and abandoned attempt in the hygenist's chair, I wound up with a recommendation to a different osteo, and Allah or someone be praised, managed to get an appointment two days later. He preferred to get an MRI before starting on something like I had, and the next day I was gritting my teeth in an MRI scanner. He had the results three days later.

West End private medicine. (No, I am not a millionaire. I don't spend money on foreign holidays.)

The radiologist's conclusion was "moderate degenerative disc disease, most marked at C6/C7 with foraminal narrowing and multilevel neural impingement (bilateral C4, C5, C6 and right C7)." So basically my neck vertebrae all all slightly out of whack. Everything else is good: spine is okay, spinal cord is unaffected, and my bone marrow is fine. (MRI can see that?)

I'm now in for a once-a-week treatment, at the moment by electric pads on my back. Pressure-based treatment like massage isn't what's needed. It seems to work. I'm in for probably another three sessions at least and maybe some more after that. But as long as it works... 

I also take the ibuprofen and / or paracetamol. I'm still AA and I don't like to take any kind of drugs if I can avoid it, but a) medical people are suggesting it, and b) it's not mood-altering.

I have to remind myself that the pain is not where my brain / body is telling me it is: there is nothing wrong with my shoulder that moving my neck about carefully won't cure. The nerve is getting pressed and sends all sorts of random signals to the brain, which then thinks I need to massage my shoulder. I don't.

Train, tube and bus seats are especially good at putting me in a posture that impinges the nerve, and I can't sit at a table for long either. I have to sleep on my back with some very carefully set-up pillow support. No raising weights above my head, so shoulder-presses are out.

I can play the guitar, and it is not causing any problems to do so. I have to stand up. Doing that for over an hour a day has worked wonders for my leg strength.

This kind of neck problem happens to much younger people, but as far as I'm concerned, this makes me officially old. Young people don't have to think about their bodies (diet, weight, exercise, sure, but not whether you carry a full watering-can in your left or right hand), old people do.

Nick Timothy on the Boys and Men Crisis

There's a "men and boys are in crisis" article by Nick Timothy in the Daily Telegraph. He's a former political advisor to Theresa May and to judge from his articles seems to have sound views on many subjects. The article is a mixture of Islington Dinner Party appeasement - he actually says "women undoubtedly bear the brunt of the crisis of masculinity", which is right up there with "women have always been the primary victims of war" as a head-slapping idiocy - with some familiar Men's Rights stuff about suicide rates and similar. I quote his final paragraph...

We need to stop seeing masculinity as a retrograde culture from which we must escape, and instead find a way of reconciling the reality of who and what boys and men are with our society today and the economy of the future.

That's what I call having it both ways. Spend almost all the article running men down by listing every way they are doing badly and every way women are doing better, then conclude by saying something that sounds good but is lacking detail.

What the article should have done was start with that conclusion and move to the programme of work.

I'm not the person to do that. We old folk don't give a stuff about the future, because we won't be there, and as for the time we have left, there's not much incentive to take part in the present.

Also, I don't believe in a "crisis of men-and-boys". Everyone I see is doing just fine. Young men have jobs and get married, just like they should, often to women who appreciate what they have taken on as (say) the wife of a builder, because her father was a builder. Men know what they are supposed to be, even when they choose not to go that way. Provide, protect, love your wife and kids, work hard and take pride in doing a good job, be a contributing member of your local community, and play a sport of some kind. Freemasonry is optional. Depending on where they live, military service may be needed as well.

The people who believe in the crisis work in the media. A brief sidebar about the media. Back in, say 1950, the official view of mainstream life was a monoculture with significant shared values, with a lot of shared experience in many people's lives. The media did not need to go too far from the reservation to find a freak-show-from-the-margins story to titillate or distract the readers. In 2023, when the official view of mainstream life is a diverse, multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-cuisine, multi-lifestyle society with a very few shared values, in that circumstance, the media has to go way into the wild-lands before it can find something that will raise people's eyebrows, without offending some minority culture with a good PR agency.

Indeed, that is so difficult that it is easier for the media to invent marginal social segments. This is where the Mid-30's Girl Boss Who Can't Find A Man comes from. There are about five thousand of them in the whole country, none outside the M25, and everyone just loves the schadenfreude of reading about the inner failure of their outer lives. That's why the media run those stories. It's also why the media discuss Incels, Andrew Tate and the Red Pill - all more deep-in-the-wild-lands marginal activities.

Men are doing as fine as they ever did, which was always a bit patchy. The only Government intervention we need is one that eases the misandrists and misandry out of education, social work, universities, media, advertising, Family Courts, local councils, the Civil Service, and the Houses of Parliament.

And everyone really needs to stop playing the Societal Victim Card, which now I say it, was what I really disliked about Nick Timothy's piece. But until money stops following victimhood, everyone will line up to claim victim status. Except certain groups of men. Those men aren't allowed to be victims, even when they are. They don't want to be, either. It offends their identity. Women are victims, children are victims, minorities are victims. The Victim Money is reserved for women-and-girls-and-minorities. If we want to improve the lot of some men, it has to be done without Victim Money. Men aren't victims, even when we are. Until all the Nick Timothy's start from there, they won't get very far.

No, People Are Not Finding It Hard To Find Partners

One of the myths in my online echo chamber is that dating has become horrible and men and women in their 20's and 30's cannot find suitable partners. Marriage and partnerships are supposed to be on the decline. We are all doomed to atomised lives as single people. The claim is that this has been getting worse since the introduction of social media and online dating apps, which give women an inflated sense of their own worth, and that ol' devil online pornography, which gives men an unrealistic sense of what real women look like and will do in the sack. The Narratives pile up so fast...

The 2021 Census has some figures about living arrangements since 2002. This table is an extract from that report and looks at the 16-29, 30-34 and 35-39 year old cohorts of men by living arrangement in 2002 and 2021. Because the population grew in that time, we have to adjust the 2002 numbers by that growth to get the numbers on green, which can then be directly compared with the 2021 figures in blue.

The next table is a summary of the living arrangements for men and women.

The high proportion of Never-marrried 16-29's is due to the fact that almost no-one gets married before about 22 now. The average ago of marriage has been increasing steadily since the early 1970's - see this report.  (The 2019 version doesn't seem to have these useful time series. If you do take a look, notice that after all the social changes in the last sixty years, most women still want a man who is 2-3 years older.) Increasing age of marriage does not mean increasing age of finding a partner. That, to judge from the table, has remained about the same since 2002.

Cohort by cohort, almost the same proportion of men are in relationships in 2021 as in 2002. By math, it follows that almost the same proportion of men are not living in a couple in 2021 as in 2002. If we wanted to make a headline out of a one-percentage point(*) difference (and generally, we should not), slightly more men in 2021 were living in couples, and six percentage points more women were living in couples in 2021 than 2002.

There is only one genuinely significant change, in the proportion of divorced men and women living on their own: that has halved over the period. A greater proportion of people divorcing in 2020 had the next partner lined up than the divorcees in 2001.

So it's as easy - or as hard - for men and women to find a domestic partner in 2021 as it was in 2002. Despite social media, dating apps, more women having more education than men and earning more, job-for-job, than men, and all the other reasons it has supposed to be getting more difficult.

My take is that what we see in the figures is what happens when much of the social and institutional compulsion to "find a partner" is lifted. Most people still do. (Then four in ten split up within twenty years of swearing never to leave the other person.) Some people stay single by choice. The men who would have made reluctant husbands will not be disappointing their wives, and the women who would have made reluctant wives are spared the effort of trying.

What’s not to like?

Why the complaints about the lack of eligible men and women? I suspect this is an artefact of how the media works. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is. Attractive, ambitious, well-paid, well-educated woman in her early-thirties who can't find a suitable partner is news, because these are supposed to be the women who should have long queues of suitors. The Schadenfreude, for readers (and columnists) who lack one or other of the career girl's supposed advantages, is delicious.

(*) A percentage point is an additive difference of 1%, thus 35% to 36% is a one-point difference. A basis point is 100-th of a percentage point, this 4% to 4.5% is 50 basis points. Only people in finance use basis points.