I apologise unreservedly for scaring anyone still following this self-absorbed monologue. You'll be relieved to hear that this is the very last post from LitS. I'm not keen on the idea of death, still less on dying and I would like my family and some semblance of a life back. So, as soon as I can find a clinic stupid enough to take me on, I'm off to rehab. It probably won't work. Part of me hopes it won't work. But perhaps it will. Anyway, if you don't hear from me for a while, that's where I'll be.
Thanks for listening.
Tuesday 12 July 2011
Friday 8 July 2011
Post mortem
There's an almost perfect negative correlation between the amount I write and the number of readers I get on this blog, which is bad news for one of my imagined futures, as a writer. Speaking of imagined futures, these are diminishing rapidly in number, seemingly by the minute. I am sitting in my knackered old armchair in my squalid little cottage, which I share with forms of microbial life that even David Bellamy would find disgusting. For months now I have slept in an unmade bed so foul that none of the tramps under Waterloo Bridge would wish to trade it for his cardboard box. I should be at Hampton Court, chatting about Veratrum to punters but I have been too depressed to leave the house for two days now. I have run out of toilet paper and cannot summon the energy to buy any more. I have run out of red wine but there are a few bottles of grappa left. I have run out of money and of the will to earn more.
When people leave the City, they usually send their colleagues a fantastically trite email saying how much they've enjoyed working at blah, blah, blah... I had the perfect exit email prepared, a misquotation of a line from Douglas Adams. "So long and thanks for all the cash." I never got to use it because I had a breakdown and ended up in hospital, where I really should have stayed. Too late for regrets now.
Goodbye from torquatus. I'd like to say it's been fun.
When people leave the City, they usually send their colleagues a fantastically trite email saying how much they've enjoyed working at blah, blah, blah... I had the perfect exit email prepared, a misquotation of a line from Douglas Adams. "So long and thanks for all the cash." I never got to use it because I had a breakdown and ended up in hospital, where I really should have stayed. Too late for regrets now.
Goodbye from torquatus. I'd like to say it's been fun.
Thursday 7 July 2011
Is there a God?
"If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?"
Anonymous
Since almost every adult I've ever counted as a friend is an atheist or agnostic, most of them are puzzled or frankly worried about my obsession with organised religion. Some seem to suspect that I'm a closet god botherer or at any rate a Moonie waiting to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. My immunity to mumbo jumbo is industrial strength. Others fret that I am wasting what little energy I possess waging unwinnable war against a numberless enemy. These are usually the same people who patronise gyms and voluntarily train, like rats in a maze, to burn off the calories that they work, like rats in a maze, to earn enough money to purchase. A few agree in private with my view that organised religions, in particular Christianity, Islam and Judaism, are the most evil institutions human culture has ever spawned, but won't raise their heads above the parapet. Cowards.
The proximate explanation for my fascination with religion is mundane. My father's parents were both strict Christians. All his siblings were devout, in several cases to the point of insanity. Dad was also an active and practicing Christian as a young man and remained a deist all his life but abandoned early on belief in any of the specific Gods then swimming in their own shit in the meme pool. Religiosity, like most personality traits, is heritable and I appear to have inherited plenty of alleles that predispose me to think about god a lot. The only difference, in this respect, between my ancestors and me is that I received a first class scientific education. I also happen to have a brain that warms to scientific explanations for phenomena that generations as recent as Dad's attributed to ghosts, ghouls and gods.
Now I have two children, whom I adore and whom I wish to protect from evil for as long as possible. I would like to bequeath to them immunity from charlatanry. Since this is impossible I hope at least to innoculate them against the most monstrous of the various doctrines they will encounter far too soon. Since Elsje and Pieter have half my genes, there's not a bad chance that they've inherited the religiosity that runs in my father's side of the family, a legacy that could do them great harm, if left unchecked.
Earlier today, Elsje and I were walking through a graveyard on the way to her regular ballet lesson. She pointed to the crosses above some of the graves and told me that we mustn't touch them. "Why not?" I asked. Her answer wasn't very coherent but it involved bits of the bible story and culminated with her revelation that Jesus had been stuck on a cross. "And do you know what happened then, Daddy?" she asked. "What?" "He died." I presume the resurrection is introduced in Year Two because it's nearly the start of the summer holidays and Elsje is reassuringly still of the view that only a kiss from a bona fide Prince can bring about resurrection and a fairytale ending.
My wife (an atheist) has repeatedly insisted that this is all perfectly normal and OK. As I have said elsewhere, she believes that the kids will figure it all out for themselves and spontaneously undo the brain damage that she says it is fine for teachers to inflict on them while they are too young to argue. In almost every respect Corinne is wiser than I am and I'd trust her judgment over mine nine times out of ten. In this case, however, she is wrong and dangerously so. She is calculating without having taken into account the genetic millstone of my genes hanging around Elsje's and Pieter's necks.
I was in the local lending library with my children recently. I had said they could each choose a DVD and they were arguing about the relative merits of Fireman Sam and Angelina Ballerina. My eye was caught by "Is there a God?" by Richard Swinburne on the shelf of recent accessions. I had bought the first edition of this book a decade ago but never finished reading it (my vision was obscured by tears - of laughter - after a few pages). This was the second edition and I was curious to hear how god had been rendered more plausible in the preceding decade, not one obviously characterized by an outbreak of holiness on earth. I added it to the pile that Elsje and Pieter had accumulated and we left.
Is there a God? is a short book. The single syllable to which it could, without significant loss of explanatory firepower, have been reduced would probably not have been publishable, which is I assume why Oxford University Press insisted on some padding. In the first few pages the title is shown to be a misrepresentation of the contents, which in fact addresses the question "Is there one God and is he a Christian?" Indeed, only a hundred words or so in, Swinburne says:
" I am not directly concerned to assess the claim that there is a God, where 'God' is being understood in some quite different sense, as the name of a quite different sort of being from the one worshipped in Western religion."
Quite right. Those wogs can write their own books about the laughably implausible polytheistic deities they've invented. In the West we have educated ourselves out of such nonsense.
Swinburne's strategy involves taking the scientific method seriously. He argues that an omniscient, omnipotent god is in fact neutered when faced with the laws of logic (which for reasons that he might expand on in a third edition) are uniquely inviolable and cannot, for example, be suspended by a God who wants to make a man dead and alive at the same time. We are assured that the same God can allow a man to walk on water or lick his own balls (he didn't say that, but I'm extrapolating) at a snap of His fingers. Just as the reader is starting to smell a rat, Swinburne hits us with his central argument, Occam's Razor. Simple explanations are better than complicated ones. It's a superlatively useful principle and one that has served science very well. The core of the argument in Is there a God is that god is the ultimate first cause. He's the simplest possible explanation for everything. This argument is so facile, so infantile in its wide-eyed wonder at its own sophistication that one cannot help but be impressed that Swinburne persuaded the chaps at OUP to publish it. Replace the word 'God' wherever it appears in the book with the phrase 'fabulously complex black box full of very clever physics' and you'll see why it is cheating to describe a hypothesised entity of unimaginable complexity as 'simple'.
In the 1970s I enjoyed watching a science fiction series, Blake's Seven, then running on British TV. One of the most interesting characters was Orac, a supercomputer housed in a perspex box the size of a small aquarium. Orac knew everything, could predict the future and demanded fawning respect before he would intervene but could have rescued the crew of the Liberator from every disaster that befell them, had he not had a key, which was often conveniently missing during tense moments. Swinburne's God is neither more nor less interesting than Orac. He belongs in a low budget sci-fi series.
"It is a hallmark of a simple explanation to postulate few causes. There could in this respect be no simpler explanation than one which postulated only one cause. Theism is simpler than polytheism. And theism postulates for its cause, a person, infinite degrees of those properties are essential to persons - infinite power...infinite knowledge...and infinite freedom...zero limits."
Before setting out his stall, Swinburne is at pains to demonstrate his familiarity with science and mathematics and his appreciation of the enormity of the explanatory task he has laid at god's feet.
"Scientists have always been postulating infinite degrees of some quantity as simpler than postulating some very large finite degree of that quantity, and have always done the former when it predicted observations equally well."
"Zero and infinity are opposites."
"If the action of a person is to explain the existence and operation of the universe, he will need to be a very powerful person."
No shit? Fortunately Swinburne has just such a very powerful person to hand.
"God being omnipotent could bring about anything, and so showing that what we observe belongs to a kind of universe that, in virtue of his perfect goodness, God has reason to bring about. That does not guarantee that he will bring it about, but it makes it quite likely."
I'd have liked to see an estimate of p and confidence intervals here but perhaps that is mere pedantry.
If you've never witnessed a Christian stomping on a square peg positioned over a round hole, Chapter 4 - How the existence of God explains the world and its order - is a splendid example of the genre.
"The simple hypothesis of theism leads us to expect all [material phenomena] with some reasonable degree of probability. God being omnipotent is able to produce a world orderly in these respects. And he has good reason to do so: a world containing human persons is a good thing."
Swinburne doesn't say whether he ran this last sentence by the great apes or the whales but one assumes that they'd have a strong opinion on the subject. He does concede that "The suitability of the world as a theatre for humans is not the only reason for God to make an orderly world. The higher animals too are conscious, learn and plan..." so presumably he is concerned with their views.
Chapter 4 is essentially a rehearsal of the argument from design, which evolutionary biology and cosmology have trashed over the past century and a half.
Scientists regularly claim too much explanatory power for their theories and cosmologists are not among the most modest of scientists. Nevertheless, from the cloudy vantage point of our pale blue dot supplemented by data from a handful of satellites in orbit about it, they have inferred the age of our universe (12.7 billlion years) and its origin (in the Big Bang). They have understood in outline the way in which four fundamental forces (they are still working on unifying these into one) have resulted in the emergence of grand structures from infinitesimally small fluctuations in the distribution of energy in the early universe. They know how heavy chemical elements were formed in stars (nuclear furnaces) and how these elements are spread though the galaxies (by supernovae). All of these theories are materialistic. "God handled this step." is a sentence yet to make its first appearance in Physical Reviews. Perhaps cosmologists have reason to be a little arrogant.
Biological evolution by natural selection is, contrary to the view of most physicists, a much deeper theory than most in physics because it explains, rather than merely describing (as, say, general relativity does) reality. Natural selection is an algorithm that must result in the emergence of design given three starting conditions: variation, heritability and death caused by limited resources. There is absolutely nothing in the theory of evolution that leads us to believe that humans or 'higher' animals are an inevitable outcome of the process. Convergence (e.g. the similarity of mollusc and mammalian eyes, which evolved independently in the two phyla) teaches us that there is only a handful of solutions to the problems of life but we would be surprised indeed if we stepped out of our spaceship on another planet to be greeted in English by a bloke with pointy ears and Brylcreem in his hair.
Enter Swinburne, in triumphalist mood.
"So there is our universe (or multiverse). It is characterized by vast, all-pervasive temporal order, the conformity of nature to formula, recorded in the scientific laws formulated by humans. It started off in such a way...as to lead to the evolution of animals and humans. These phenomena are clearly things 'too big' for science to explain. They are where science stops...we should look for a personal explanation of the existence, conformity to law and evolutionary potential of the universe. Theism provides just such an explanation."
History is littered with embarrassing-in-hindsight claims for what science cannot do, most of them, let it be said, made by scientists ("Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" Kelvin, 1895). I am reminded of a scene from the wonderful cartoon series Asterix, which I loved as a young boy. In Asterix the Gaul, Centurion Crismus Bonus believes he has coerced the druid Getafix into making a cauldron of magic potion, which confers superhuman strength on all who drink it. Eager to test his new powers he rushes outside and attempts unsuccessfully to lift a massive boulder. Undaunted he tries smaller and smaller rocks until, eventually, he succeeds with a stone half the size of his head.
"Yes!!!" he cries, "I'm superhuman!"
The story of god in the last five hundred years is much like the story of Crismus Bonus (Getafix had in fact made a potion that causes hair to grow unstoppably). From setting the earth and its cargo of god-like humans at the centre of the universe and keeping the sun and stars tinkling away in their crystal spheres, god has been reduced to the bloke who pressed the big green 'GO' button then sat back and watched. Of course it is lost on Swinburne that the go button will, in due course, turn out to be an illusion too and what will god do then?
Now, until this point in Is there a God, one might think that Swinburne is nothing more than an amiable cretin. Chapters 5 and 6, however, reveal him as something much more sinister. I am choosing my words carefully here. In these two chapters he not only justifies god's acquiescence in human evil but argues that it is morally obligatory for god to let his creations suffer. A recent attempt to justify and encourage genocide, Mein Kampf, acquired notoriety in the 20th century. The Bible and The Koran (I am unfamiliar with Jewish religious texts, other than the Old Testament) are similar to Hitler's magnum opus in design but far more ambitious in scope and they have made a deeper impression.
Chapter five is an attempt to defend dualism, the view that there are two kinds of stuff. One sort of stuff is the physical, material, ordinary stuff from which rocks, plants and 'lower' animals are made. The other sort is soul stuff, in which human and certain animal consciousnesses reside and which in principle can survive the death of their associated body. Swinburne thinks it self evident that there are bodies and there are souls and also that Darwinism is of no help here.
"Natural selection is a theory of elimination; it explains why so many of the variants thrown up by evolution were eliminated...but it does not explain why they were thrown up in the first place...our problem is to explain why some physical state caused the emergence of souls...Darwinism is of no use in solving this problem."
Wrong, right, incoherent, wrong. Natural selection is a theory of design, which it explains given the three conditions I described earlier. It does not explain those conditions. Genetics is the study of "why those variants were thrown up in the first place" and its answer is clear. Cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals and transcription errors are some of the reasons why the variants arose. God is nowhere to be seen. Consciousness remains mysterious. It is not understood by any intelligent person, let alone Richard Swinburne. Dualism is no longer taken seriously by any of the neuroscientists, psychologists or philosophers who study brains and minds. The main reason for this is that selective brain damage reliably and predictably eliminates aspects of consciousness, strongly suggesting that brain and mind are identical. What is true beyond doubt is that, if consciousness is a natural phenomenon, encoded in genes or enabled by brains encoded in genes, natural selection will latch onto it and use it.
Merely because an idea is repugnant to human sensibilities, it is not necessarily a bad idea, one of the few sound points that Swinburne makes when he remarks "I would not...recommend that a pastor give this chapter to victims of sudden distress...to read for consolation" and one that is lost on idealists everywhere. In Chapter 6 - "this chapter" - he emphasises that he is not assuming god's existence, merely elucidating what sort of world it would be if the God of the Christians did in fact exist.
"...a generous God will seek to give deeper good things than [the thrills of pleasure and periods of contentment]. He will seek to give us great responsibility for ourselves, each other, and the world...And he will seek to make our lives valuable, of great use to ourselves and each other...God cannot give us these goods in full measure without allowing much evil on the way."
Why not? Isn't this hypothesised God omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good? Ah yes, but remember he cannot violate the laws of logic (see the chapter on miracles for arbitrary exceptions to this rule) - perhaps impotent would be a better term to describe his powers - so having given humans free will he cannot simultaneously intervene when we abuse it. A difficulty with this argument, as Swinburne is honest enough to recognise, is that God could have created us, free will and all, with the propensity to use our freedom only for good.
"It is good that the free choices of humans should include genuine responsibility for other humans, and that involves the opportunity to benefit or harm them."
"In order to have a choice between good and evil, agents need already a certain depravity."
And what about those who are denied the opportunity to exercise this great gift of free will, either because they are too young, because they are oppressed or because they are mentally disabled?
"...if I suffer the consequence of your freely chosen bad action, that is not by any means pure loss for me...Being allowed to suffer to make possible a great good is a privilege, even if the privilege is forced upon you."
Bear that in mind the next time some cunt in a keffiyeh tries to saw off your head with a bread knife. It's a privilege. In fact, according to Swinburne, death is god's built-in safety limit.
"Unending unchosen suffering would indeed to my mind provide a very strong argument against the existence of God. But that is not the human situation."
I am not in favour, personally, of censoring Mein Kampf, the Bible, the Koran or Is there a God? but I do believe that we ought to treat men like Swinburne, who publish theodicies and attempt to promulgate them, with the same contempt we otherwise reserve for neo-Nazis and those terrifying men in keffiyehs.
The final chapter of this revolting little tract concerns miracles. When god enacts a miracle, all previous arguments are declared off limits and god can do what the fuck He pleases. And we sceptics had better shut up if we doubt whether these miracles actually occurred.
"And it is another principle of rationality, which I call the principle of testimony, that those who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe any others when they say that they do."
I am not making this up. He actually wrote this and OUP actually published it.
Well, I'm almost done. Richard Swinburne is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. Whereas Hitler is rightly reviled for promulgating ideas that are seductive but immensely dangerous and, more importantly, false, Swinburne dines at high table while promoting the same theories.
When I am gone, keep monsters like this man away from my children.
Tuesday 5 July 2011
Flower rage
There were glum faces all round in the Plant Heritage Marquee at the Hampton Court Flower Show this morning, as we exhibitors surveyed the results of the previous afternoon's judging. The chairman of the panel gallantly visited each exhibitor to give 'feedback' (when and where did this loathsome term originate?). Medusa herself could not have gazed with greater malevolence at his broad departing shoulders than the man who grows auriculas - small, revolting plants like primroses on steroids - better than anyone else in the world, but whose efforts were deemed unworthy of a medal of any description.
I was in total agreement with the judges on the subject of my gong. I got a bronze medal, the horticultural equivalent of being the Norwegian entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest. All this came about because my dear friend Margaret Owen, with whom I share an unnatural enthusiasm for Veratrum, asked me whether I'd help her exhibit the genus at Hampton Court. I couldn't refuse, and didn't want to but, as the event approached, I realised that I hadn't paid enough attention to pampering the plants I was planning to show. I was trying to summon up the courage to suggest to Margaret that perhaps we should withdraw with as much grace as possible and try again another year when I received a phone call from her daughter-in-law. Margaret was in hospital, having developed arrhythmia during the night. In the circumstances pulling out was inconceivable.
Here is a picture of my losing entry, shortly before judging commenced.
Now I imagine that you are looking at this picture and thinking that the judges were generous but bear in mind that 24 hours earlier it looked like this.
About half a tonne of limestone went into making the cliff on the left and about 200 plants, from three continents. were incorporated into the display. One of the comments that the chairman made was that I had included too many plants, a little unjust I felt at the time, given that this was a flower show. In the film 'Amadaeus', Emperor Josef II, in discussion with the composer Salieri, is given the splendid line "My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect." I know now how Salieri felt.
Today was fun. The other exhibitors in the Plant Heritage Marquee loved the display, which means a great deal more to me than the judges' verdict, and I've made some new friends. I was talking all day to interested punters, most of whom were fellow enthusiasts. I got slightly bored with answering the question: "Oooh, is that an orchid? (pointing to Lilium martagon)" with "No madam, its a lily." But then I have been known to ask friends "Who wrote this song?" while inadvertently tapping my feet to "Hey Jude".
Flowers are cool and so are flower people.
I was in total agreement with the judges on the subject of my gong. I got a bronze medal, the horticultural equivalent of being the Norwegian entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest. All this came about because my dear friend Margaret Owen, with whom I share an unnatural enthusiasm for Veratrum, asked me whether I'd help her exhibit the genus at Hampton Court. I couldn't refuse, and didn't want to but, as the event approached, I realised that I hadn't paid enough attention to pampering the plants I was planning to show. I was trying to summon up the courage to suggest to Margaret that perhaps we should withdraw with as much grace as possible and try again another year when I received a phone call from her daughter-in-law. Margaret was in hospital, having developed arrhythmia during the night. In the circumstances pulling out was inconceivable.
Here is a picture of my losing entry, shortly before judging commenced.
Now I imagine that you are looking at this picture and thinking that the judges were generous but bear in mind that 24 hours earlier it looked like this.
About half a tonne of limestone went into making the cliff on the left and about 200 plants, from three continents. were incorporated into the display. One of the comments that the chairman made was that I had included too many plants, a little unjust I felt at the time, given that this was a flower show. In the film 'Amadaeus', Emperor Josef II, in discussion with the composer Salieri, is given the splendid line "My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect." I know now how Salieri felt.
Today was fun. The other exhibitors in the Plant Heritage Marquee loved the display, which means a great deal more to me than the judges' verdict, and I've made some new friends. I was talking all day to interested punters, most of whom were fellow enthusiasts. I got slightly bored with answering the question: "Oooh, is that an orchid? (pointing to Lilium martagon)" with "No madam, its a lily." But then I have been known to ask friends "Who wrote this song?" while inadvertently tapping my feet to "Hey Jude".
Flowers are cool and so are flower people.
Tuesday 28 June 2011
Pata negra, Black Wheatears and Veratrum album
Black Wheatears (Oenanthe leucura) nest in caves and on ledges on cliff faces in Spain and Morocco. As is the case for most bird species - and in contrast to mammals, which are typically polygamous - it requires two adults to successfully rear a clutch of chicks and so Black Wheatears are superficially monogamous, although a great deal of fooling around occurs behind the scenes.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is blissfully simple but it has many subtle consequences, which are still being worked out. One of these consequences results from the fact that the cost of sex is very different for males and females. Whereas males can, by and large, "fuck and forget", females are stuck with the baby until it is capable of defending itself. The standard evolutionary outcome of this conflict between the sexes is that females spend a lot of time choosing among potential suitors whereas males will, literally, shag a red spot on a stick (in the case of Herring Gulls). Sometimes, however, females have the last laugh. For reasons that are often lost in evolutionary history, choosy females prefer to mate with males that have a particularly extravagant variant of an arbitrary trait. The classic example is the peacock's tail, which is presumed to have evolved as a result of "runaway" selection. Runaway selection is one form of an evolutionary arms race. In the case of peacocks, males with larger and more elaborate tails left more offspring, which inherited the big tail genes and so on...until the tails became so big that their bearers couldn't fly any longer and were eaten before they could screw. So today there is an uneasy detente between male and female peacocks, with the most successful males having tails that are just big enough to lure a female but not so big as to be an insupportable handicap.
In the case of Black Wheatears, sexual selection has imposed a delicious cost on males. Although the females lay their eggs on bare rock and do not require a nest of any kind they do need a criterion by which to distinguish among the willing and wanton males. The criterion that natural selection latched onto is stone-carrying. Male Black Wheatears spend their summers carrying stones from the bottom of the cliff upon which their beloved wishes to nest to the top. A male Black Wheatear weighs about 35 grams and several times a day he carries to the nest stones that weigh about a tenth of that. This is the equivalent of a human male carrying small television sets up a mountain incessantly, every day for a month, using only his teeth. Would you do that for your girlfriend? A typical male Black Wheatear transports 3.5 kilograms, or 100 times his own weight, from the bottom of the hill to the top in a season. If he is lucky his partner will then consent to sex and, if he is even luckier, will not subsequently cuckold him. Think on this story, the next time you worry about your mortgage.
I learned about Black Wheatears this past weekend while driving though Monfrague National Park in Extremadura, Spain, with my old friend Rob. We had stopped at a famous viewpoint, from which you can look across the valley at a vast limestone outcrop, with massive strata wrenched into vertically aligned slabs by incomprehensible geological forces in the distant past. We didn't see Black Wheatears but there were Griffon and Egyptian vultures, Black Storks, four species of Hirundines and a pair of Blue Rock Thrushes to make up for it. Birding in the company of a genuine expert and enthusiast is a lot more fun than doing it on your own and I felt momentarily the tug of another obsession.
Rob did all the driving on this trip and so I was free to admire the passing scenery. While we drove, we talked. Conversations with Rob take some getting used to, because they are punctuated with irrelevant bird names. A typical conversation last weekend went something like this.
Tom: "D'you remember..."
Rob: "Woodchat Shrike"
Tom: "...when I stabbed your in the leg with a scalpel..."
Rob: "Booted Eagle. Yes. How could I...Golden Oriole...forget."
Tom: "I still laugh about that..."
Rob: "Hoopoe"
Tom: "...to this day."
Rob: "Ortolan Warbler."
Tom: "Oh, Elizabeth David says they are delicious."
Rob: "Rock Bunting."
After 25 years of traveling with Rob I am pretty much inured to his ornithological take on Tourette's Syndrome but I'm glad that there were no recording devices running last weekend.
From Madrid we drove west to the Sierra de Gredos, penetrating as far into the mountains as the road would permit. From the head of the road there is a broad path leading uphill that everyone follows. Leave the path and cut cross-country and you are suddenly, magically alone. Across the valley I spied a colony of Veratrum album, the plant that interests me more than any other, and while Rob waited on a rock, I struggled across the valley to the colony to take photographs. Higher up we found seed capsules from an unidentified daffodil and spent half an hour on hands and knees collecting them. It was a blisteringly hot day and higher still we swam in a stream that a month earlier would have been snowmelt and stood under a waterfall that pounded our shoulders like a Hungarian masseuse. That evening we sat on a stone slab in the garden of our hotel sharing a bottle of red wine and looked over the Rio Tormes to El Barco de Avila, Rob with his binoculars, me doing most of the sharing.
The following morning we headed south west through the Valle del Jerte through orchards of cherry trees laden with fruit and stopped in Jerte to buy a couple of kilos for a few Euros. The cherries were enormous, the size of small tomatoes, perfectly ripe and by far the finest I have ever eaten. We had lunch at a touristy restaurant on the the Plaza Major in Trujillo, a town built with conquistador gold. A vast statue of Pizarro, conqueror of the Incas, mounted on a warhorse dominates the square. Looking at the statue, it is not so hard to understand how this Extremaduran peasant and his band of scurvied followers struck such fear into Inca hearts that they gave him their nation and their very existence.
To reach Trujillo we had driven through the dehesa of Extremadura, an ancient managed landscape of scattered Cork Oaks and Holm Oaks, dissected by rivers and streams. It is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in Europe and owes its continued existence to three economically important components: Cork Oaks, pigs that eat the acorns and turn them into the world's finest ham and fighting bulls. With bull fighting on the wane and plastic corks and screwtops rapidly replacing the genuine article, the fate of the dehesa currently hangs in the balance. Only the (high) price of pata negra makes it worthwhile for landowners to continue managing the land in the traditional way. It was therefore with a sense of moral obligation, in no way influenced by gluttony, that we ordered and consumed a large plate of ham for lunch, along with various other tapas and a flask of cold red wine.
It was a fine way to spend a weekend. My flight home (Easyjet, obviously) was delayed by two hours and I finally crawled into bed at 2.15am on Monday morning. My descent into drug-induced oblivion was disturbed only by the knowledge that I'd have to be up at eight to take the kids to Legoland, more of which in another post.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is blissfully simple but it has many subtle consequences, which are still being worked out. One of these consequences results from the fact that the cost of sex is very different for males and females. Whereas males can, by and large, "fuck and forget", females are stuck with the baby until it is capable of defending itself. The standard evolutionary outcome of this conflict between the sexes is that females spend a lot of time choosing among potential suitors whereas males will, literally, shag a red spot on a stick (in the case of Herring Gulls). Sometimes, however, females have the last laugh. For reasons that are often lost in evolutionary history, choosy females prefer to mate with males that have a particularly extravagant variant of an arbitrary trait. The classic example is the peacock's tail, which is presumed to have evolved as a result of "runaway" selection. Runaway selection is one form of an evolutionary arms race. In the case of peacocks, males with larger and more elaborate tails left more offspring, which inherited the big tail genes and so on...until the tails became so big that their bearers couldn't fly any longer and were eaten before they could screw. So today there is an uneasy detente between male and female peacocks, with the most successful males having tails that are just big enough to lure a female but not so big as to be an insupportable handicap.
In the case of Black Wheatears, sexual selection has imposed a delicious cost on males. Although the females lay their eggs on bare rock and do not require a nest of any kind they do need a criterion by which to distinguish among the willing and wanton males. The criterion that natural selection latched onto is stone-carrying. Male Black Wheatears spend their summers carrying stones from the bottom of the cliff upon which their beloved wishes to nest to the top. A male Black Wheatear weighs about 35 grams and several times a day he carries to the nest stones that weigh about a tenth of that. This is the equivalent of a human male carrying small television sets up a mountain incessantly, every day for a month, using only his teeth. Would you do that for your girlfriend? A typical male Black Wheatear transports 3.5 kilograms, or 100 times his own weight, from the bottom of the hill to the top in a season. If he is lucky his partner will then consent to sex and, if he is even luckier, will not subsequently cuckold him. Think on this story, the next time you worry about your mortgage.
I learned about Black Wheatears this past weekend while driving though Monfrague National Park in Extremadura, Spain, with my old friend Rob. We had stopped at a famous viewpoint, from which you can look across the valley at a vast limestone outcrop, with massive strata wrenched into vertically aligned slabs by incomprehensible geological forces in the distant past. We didn't see Black Wheatears but there were Griffon and Egyptian vultures, Black Storks, four species of Hirundines and a pair of Blue Rock Thrushes to make up for it. Birding in the company of a genuine expert and enthusiast is a lot more fun than doing it on your own and I felt momentarily the tug of another obsession.
Rob did all the driving on this trip and so I was free to admire the passing scenery. While we drove, we talked. Conversations with Rob take some getting used to, because they are punctuated with irrelevant bird names. A typical conversation last weekend went something like this.
Tom: "D'you remember..."
Rob: "Woodchat Shrike"
Tom: "...when I stabbed your in the leg with a scalpel..."
Rob: "Booted Eagle. Yes. How could I...Golden Oriole...forget."
Tom: "I still laugh about that..."
Rob: "Hoopoe"
Tom: "...to this day."
Rob: "Ortolan Warbler."
Tom: "Oh, Elizabeth David says they are delicious."
Rob: "Rock Bunting."
After 25 years of traveling with Rob I am pretty much inured to his ornithological take on Tourette's Syndrome but I'm glad that there were no recording devices running last weekend.
From Madrid we drove west to the Sierra de Gredos, penetrating as far into the mountains as the road would permit. From the head of the road there is a broad path leading uphill that everyone follows. Leave the path and cut cross-country and you are suddenly, magically alone. Across the valley I spied a colony of Veratrum album, the plant that interests me more than any other, and while Rob waited on a rock, I struggled across the valley to the colony to take photographs. Higher up we found seed capsules from an unidentified daffodil and spent half an hour on hands and knees collecting them. It was a blisteringly hot day and higher still we swam in a stream that a month earlier would have been snowmelt and stood under a waterfall that pounded our shoulders like a Hungarian masseuse. That evening we sat on a stone slab in the garden of our hotel sharing a bottle of red wine and looked over the Rio Tormes to El Barco de Avila, Rob with his binoculars, me doing most of the sharing.
The following morning we headed south west through the Valle del Jerte through orchards of cherry trees laden with fruit and stopped in Jerte to buy a couple of kilos for a few Euros. The cherries were enormous, the size of small tomatoes, perfectly ripe and by far the finest I have ever eaten. We had lunch at a touristy restaurant on the the Plaza Major in Trujillo, a town built with conquistador gold. A vast statue of Pizarro, conqueror of the Incas, mounted on a warhorse dominates the square. Looking at the statue, it is not so hard to understand how this Extremaduran peasant and his band of scurvied followers struck such fear into Inca hearts that they gave him their nation and their very existence.
To reach Trujillo we had driven through the dehesa of Extremadura, an ancient managed landscape of scattered Cork Oaks and Holm Oaks, dissected by rivers and streams. It is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in Europe and owes its continued existence to three economically important components: Cork Oaks, pigs that eat the acorns and turn them into the world's finest ham and fighting bulls. With bull fighting on the wane and plastic corks and screwtops rapidly replacing the genuine article, the fate of the dehesa currently hangs in the balance. Only the (high) price of pata negra makes it worthwhile for landowners to continue managing the land in the traditional way. It was therefore with a sense of moral obligation, in no way influenced by gluttony, that we ordered and consumed a large plate of ham for lunch, along with various other tapas and a flask of cold red wine.
It was a fine way to spend a weekend. My flight home (Easyjet, obviously) was delayed by two hours and I finally crawled into bed at 2.15am on Monday morning. My descent into drug-induced oblivion was disturbed only by the knowledge that I'd have to be up at eight to take the kids to Legoland, more of which in another post.
Wednesday 22 June 2011
Elastic, low cost airlines and the New Messiah
The prospect of a summer's day spent pounding the sandstone pavements of Bath, grimly crossing items off a shopping list seemingly more populous than the Great Oort Cloud, holds about as much appeal as pushing a pencil up my knob in pursuit of sexual gratification.
Other than trips to Waitrose to buy oven chips and curry, I go shopping only once or twice a year and try to compress the entire loathsome experience into as few hours as possible. This is essentially an exercise in logistics that requires a terabyte-crunching supercomputer or a human female to solve on any timescale measured in units shorter than aeons.
If the findings of evolutionary psychologists are to be believed, womens' brains (even those of identity feminists) are hard-wired to find and remember the location of tubers in the African savannas of human prehistory, whereas mens' brains are hard-wired to hunt giraffe. Women are therefore superbly adapted to negotiate unfazed the maze of a contemporary retail environment whereas men in the same situation are apt to deliquesce in a puddle of sweat and cortisol. I am currently bereft of a willing female accomplice and my Mac is on the blink (see below), so it was with a heavy heart that I parked my Land Rover under the new Southgate shopping centre and sallied forth with the following list in hand.
1. Take two broken laptops to the Apple Store for diagnosis.
2. Have photographs for flower show laminated.
3. Buy extra large sheet of pink cardboard, elastic, glue, glitter, poster paints and brushes.
4. Buy minibar, microwave and espresso machine.
5. Buy heavy duty bread knife with extra long blade.
6. Buy 25 scalpel blades (also extra long).
7. Buy jeans to replace pair with large split in crotch.
8. Buy boots to replace pair with soles largely detached from uppers.
9. Buy 250 plain wage envelopes, several notebooks and printer paper.
10. Buy ice-lolly making machine.
Unlike its equivalent on London's Regent Street, which is a stinking sump crawling with callow adolescents mistakenly convinced that an iPhone will make them cool, the Apple Store in Bath is a place of calmness and peace, which is why it was first on my list of destinations. I had made an appointment at the ingeniously named 'Genius Bar', where you go when the on button on your computer fails to elicit more than a quiet moan and then silence from the useless hunk of metal you paid a thousand quid for in the not very distant past. A helpful bloke with more piercings than limbs led me to the bar and, while we waited for the genius to show up, I mentioned that I was in the market for a large monitor on which to display and work on photographs, a task for which my laptop is not suited. There followed an eloquent disquisition on the 27 inch monitor, with particular reference to the thunderbolt port which allows I forget how many gigabytes per second of data to flow in both directions simultaneously to and from the monitor. I said I'd think about it.
While I'd been listening to the list of ways in which a 27 inch monitor would transform my life I had taken my two laptops from their cases and opened them up. "Oh," he said, glancing at the smaller and newer of the two machines, "that doesn't need much diagnosing." Since the screen is splintered into a jigsaw of barely coherent shards, this remark was strictly speaking redundant. "What's wrong with the other one?" he asked, referring to the old laptop that I had recently replaced. "It won't boot up. When I turn it on it just moans," I said. "Oh." He said. "That's not good." He speculated on possible explanations before confessing to a lack of expertise in the area of non-booting laptops. "I'm just an evangelist, really." He added, before disappearing in search of the missing genius.
When the maestro arrived I explained the issue with the splintered screen. Now, when it comes to rage against the machine, I have previous. Every home I have ever lived in has telephone-shaped holes in the walls, usually the result of some cretin in a call-centre in Cardiff pushing me across the sanity event horizon, from which reason can escape only in the form of Hawking radiation and flying phones. The holes were larger in the days before cordless telephones. On this occasion, however, I am blameless. What happened is that I had packed my laptop, in its case, in my hand luggage for a short trip to Spain. I was flying Easyjet and, not having purchased the "Speedy Boarding" option, which confers on its bearer the right to be at the front of the scrum before boarding begins, I was one of the last on board. "Sorry, we'll have to put that bag in the hold." I was told. Unlike the Spanish woman behind me, who engaged in a long, loud and totally futile argument, I shrugged, took out a book and handed over the bag. When I extracted my laptop at the end of my first day in Spain, the screen was in its current sorry state and I can only think that some wanker at Stansted gave my bag a friendly kick as he threw it into the hold. When I returned to Stansted a few days later, I thought that I should probably report the incident to Easyjet, not in the hope of getting an apology or a new laptop, but with an insurance claim in mind. There is, however, no Easyjet desk on the arrivals side at Stansted, because they have nothing to sell you when you are returning home, so I gave up.
The genius listened to this tale of woe sympathetically. "When did you buy this machine?" he asked. "I can't remember exactly - about three months ago." I replied. "I'll tell you what, as a goodwill gesture, we'll replace the screen free of charge." Now I found this absolutely amazing and still do, reflecting upon the experience several hours later. Not only was this guy offering to repair for nothing a fault for which Apple bore no responsibility whatsoever but he didn't have to defer to a superior before making the offer. "What's the problem with the other laptop?" He asked. I explained the issue. He pushed a few buttons, took the laptop away for a few minutes and came back with bad news. Unfortunately the mother board has failed, he told me, and it would cost about £600 to replace. Then he typed the serial number of my machine into his hand-held pad and brightened. "There's a known fault with the mother boards on these laptops, so we'll replace it for free. This is your lucky day."
Ever since I wrote my PhD thesis on a primitive communal Mac in the Cambridge Zoology Department, I have been a fan of Apple. My enthusiasm for the brand has grown over the years to the point where nothing you can say will convince me that a PC is anything other than a clunky piece of silicon shit in comparison with the lowliest Mac. Over lunch in the next door Pizza Express I mulled my conversation with Mr Piercings and realised that his choice of the term "evangelist" to describe his role was most apt. The adjective "messianic" is the first that pops into many minds when Apple CEO Steve Jobs' name is mentioned but while chewing my "Etna" pizza I understood for the first time how accurate this label is. Jobs has done something to me that no religion has achieved. He has made me a true believer, inured against contrary evidence, programmed to spread the message and, like the victims of any religion, ripe for exploitation. Good job, Jobs![1]
Next stop, the laminating shop, where I left my materials and pressed on to item 3 on the list. My daughter has set her heart on a set of fairy wings that she saw in a book and she asked me last weekend whether I would help her make them. Lest I leave the wrong impression here I should make it clear that I am in most respects an absolutely dreadful father and I am sure that Elsje will in the distant future waste a fortune on attempting to exorcise the ghost of my memory. For now, however, she loves me and I love her and I am prepared in her behalf to endure retail hell to obtain the materials for making fairy wings. What I didn't appreciate is that I would have to visit four separate shops, dispersed across at least a square mile of central Bath, to obtain these materials. The first shop was able to supply the large sheet of pink cardboard but nothing else. I soon discovered that cardboard in a breeze acts much like a sail and so I tacked rather than walked for the rest of the day.
Attempting to engage the logistical centre of my brain, I visited Gap en route from the cardboard shop to the glue shop. Although heterosexual men in the early 20th century are almost redundant, we are still called upon to "do something" when our wives have a puncture, which mine did yesterday evening. In the course of changing the tyre I was forced to assume various unnatural positions that eventually resulted in a rending sound and a welcome but surprising breeze around my genitals. Hence my visit to Gap. The jeans were neatly arranged, by waist size, starting at 28 inches. How it is possible to contain a full set of adult viscera in a torso that thin I cannot begin to explain. Ten inches to the right, the options stop, at 38 inches, two inches short of my girth, on a thin day. "Where do fat people buy their trousers in Bath?" I asked, a reasonable question that was met with (barely) polite laughter but nothing in the way of a helpful response. As I was leaving, I noticed a rack of shorts with elasticated waist bands, reduced in price to £7.99. I bought an extra large pair.
Several shops later I found myself in "Joules", whence I had been directed by a man in Jack Wills, who said that was where his dad bought his jeans. Same story. The biggest pair of trousers in the shop had been cut to fit snugly around a waist two inches shorter in circumference than mine. Again I deployed the "F" word. More, I am certain, out of embarrassment than honest appraisal the young shop assistant said "Come on! You're not that fat!", graciously omitting the implied "in comparison, say, with Dawn French." She pointed me in the direction of a jeans warehouse which, she assured me, catered for persons of my build. By the time I got there, it was closed.
Defeated and dehydrated, I stopped for a smoothie, an amazingly refreshing combination of pineapple, mint and ice. Feeling better, I tackled items 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 in a half hour blur that left my debit card smoking and my feet aching in a new pair of boots that I had found on special offer in Blacks. The bloke in the kitchen shop insisted on giving me a large plastic bag in which to carry my bread knife (destined to be used dividing perennial rootstocks, not slicing loaves of wholesome brown bread) and advised me that the receipt would probably be enough to convince the rozzers that it didn't constitute a concealed weapon.
It was 6pm and most of the shops were closing but I knew that Currys on the edge of town would be paying its dismal employees the minimum wage to wait aimlessly for customers until at least eight. Three wonderful women, Kerry, Penny and Rachel, help me maintain a semblance of order in my garden. I pay them a lot more than the minimum wage but still less than they are worth and I had decided that I should outfit the potting shed where they spend much of their time with a small fridge, a microwave and a really good coffee machine. The first cup of coffee in the morning is one of the highlights of my day and there is no longer any reason to endure the powdered filth pushed on us by Nestle now that Nespresso machines (made under license to Nestle) are relatively cheaply available.
My last stop was Sainsbury, where I bought a couple of cases of wine and some avocado pears. Also, on impulse, a bulb of fennel. I noticed that each bulb was individually labeled "fennel", presumably so that both customers and check-out staff can distinguish it from, say, artichokes. I was reminded of my first job, stacking shelves in the local supermarket to earn money to go traveling. As part of my induction program I was required to complete a questionnaire booklet that contained questions such as "Which of the following is a banana?", followed by line drawings of a bunch of grapes, an apple, a pineapple and a crescent shaped yellow fruit, the name of which I forget. Presumably such questions are regarded as too challenging for the GCSE generation, further evidence that the world ain't what it used to be.
I didn't do an MBA, which probably explains why I find it odd that companies which treat their customers like pond scum (Easyjet) or mannequins (Gap) and their employees like retards (Sainsbury) are surprised when both groups come to despise them. Apple - and here I am going to deploy a word that I'd thought I would never again find a use for - empowers its employees, who reward this trust by proselytising with genuine enthusiasm and treating the company's customers with respect.
1. Since I wrote and published the first draft of this piece a friend has drawn my attention to recent evidence that viewing the Apple logo causes in fans of the brand the same areas of the brain to light up as in people undergoing religious experience. See here.
Other than trips to Waitrose to buy oven chips and curry, I go shopping only once or twice a year and try to compress the entire loathsome experience into as few hours as possible. This is essentially an exercise in logistics that requires a terabyte-crunching supercomputer or a human female to solve on any timescale measured in units shorter than aeons.
If the findings of evolutionary psychologists are to be believed, womens' brains (even those of identity feminists) are hard-wired to find and remember the location of tubers in the African savannas of human prehistory, whereas mens' brains are hard-wired to hunt giraffe. Women are therefore superbly adapted to negotiate unfazed the maze of a contemporary retail environment whereas men in the same situation are apt to deliquesce in a puddle of sweat and cortisol. I am currently bereft of a willing female accomplice and my Mac is on the blink (see below), so it was with a heavy heart that I parked my Land Rover under the new Southgate shopping centre and sallied forth with the following list in hand.
1. Take two broken laptops to the Apple Store for diagnosis.
2. Have photographs for flower show laminated.
3. Buy extra large sheet of pink cardboard, elastic, glue, glitter, poster paints and brushes.
4. Buy minibar, microwave and espresso machine.
5. Buy heavy duty bread knife with extra long blade.
6. Buy 25 scalpel blades (also extra long).
7. Buy jeans to replace pair with large split in crotch.
8. Buy boots to replace pair with soles largely detached from uppers.
9. Buy 250 plain wage envelopes, several notebooks and printer paper.
10. Buy ice-lolly making machine.
Unlike its equivalent on London's Regent Street, which is a stinking sump crawling with callow adolescents mistakenly convinced that an iPhone will make them cool, the Apple Store in Bath is a place of calmness and peace, which is why it was first on my list of destinations. I had made an appointment at the ingeniously named 'Genius Bar', where you go when the on button on your computer fails to elicit more than a quiet moan and then silence from the useless hunk of metal you paid a thousand quid for in the not very distant past. A helpful bloke with more piercings than limbs led me to the bar and, while we waited for the genius to show up, I mentioned that I was in the market for a large monitor on which to display and work on photographs, a task for which my laptop is not suited. There followed an eloquent disquisition on the 27 inch monitor, with particular reference to the thunderbolt port which allows I forget how many gigabytes per second of data to flow in both directions simultaneously to and from the monitor. I said I'd think about it.
While I'd been listening to the list of ways in which a 27 inch monitor would transform my life I had taken my two laptops from their cases and opened them up. "Oh," he said, glancing at the smaller and newer of the two machines, "that doesn't need much diagnosing." Since the screen is splintered into a jigsaw of barely coherent shards, this remark was strictly speaking redundant. "What's wrong with the other one?" he asked, referring to the old laptop that I had recently replaced. "It won't boot up. When I turn it on it just moans," I said. "Oh." He said. "That's not good." He speculated on possible explanations before confessing to a lack of expertise in the area of non-booting laptops. "I'm just an evangelist, really." He added, before disappearing in search of the missing genius.
When the maestro arrived I explained the issue with the splintered screen. Now, when it comes to rage against the machine, I have previous. Every home I have ever lived in has telephone-shaped holes in the walls, usually the result of some cretin in a call-centre in Cardiff pushing me across the sanity event horizon, from which reason can escape only in the form of Hawking radiation and flying phones. The holes were larger in the days before cordless telephones. On this occasion, however, I am blameless. What happened is that I had packed my laptop, in its case, in my hand luggage for a short trip to Spain. I was flying Easyjet and, not having purchased the "Speedy Boarding" option, which confers on its bearer the right to be at the front of the scrum before boarding begins, I was one of the last on board. "Sorry, we'll have to put that bag in the hold." I was told. Unlike the Spanish woman behind me, who engaged in a long, loud and totally futile argument, I shrugged, took out a book and handed over the bag. When I extracted my laptop at the end of my first day in Spain, the screen was in its current sorry state and I can only think that some wanker at Stansted gave my bag a friendly kick as he threw it into the hold. When I returned to Stansted a few days later, I thought that I should probably report the incident to Easyjet, not in the hope of getting an apology or a new laptop, but with an insurance claim in mind. There is, however, no Easyjet desk on the arrivals side at Stansted, because they have nothing to sell you when you are returning home, so I gave up.
The genius listened to this tale of woe sympathetically. "When did you buy this machine?" he asked. "I can't remember exactly - about three months ago." I replied. "I'll tell you what, as a goodwill gesture, we'll replace the screen free of charge." Now I found this absolutely amazing and still do, reflecting upon the experience several hours later. Not only was this guy offering to repair for nothing a fault for which Apple bore no responsibility whatsoever but he didn't have to defer to a superior before making the offer. "What's the problem with the other laptop?" He asked. I explained the issue. He pushed a few buttons, took the laptop away for a few minutes and came back with bad news. Unfortunately the mother board has failed, he told me, and it would cost about £600 to replace. Then he typed the serial number of my machine into his hand-held pad and brightened. "There's a known fault with the mother boards on these laptops, so we'll replace it for free. This is your lucky day."
Ever since I wrote my PhD thesis on a primitive communal Mac in the Cambridge Zoology Department, I have been a fan of Apple. My enthusiasm for the brand has grown over the years to the point where nothing you can say will convince me that a PC is anything other than a clunky piece of silicon shit in comparison with the lowliest Mac. Over lunch in the next door Pizza Express I mulled my conversation with Mr Piercings and realised that his choice of the term "evangelist" to describe his role was most apt. The adjective "messianic" is the first that pops into many minds when Apple CEO Steve Jobs' name is mentioned but while chewing my "Etna" pizza I understood for the first time how accurate this label is. Jobs has done something to me that no religion has achieved. He has made me a true believer, inured against contrary evidence, programmed to spread the message and, like the victims of any religion, ripe for exploitation. Good job, Jobs![1]
Next stop, the laminating shop, where I left my materials and pressed on to item 3 on the list. My daughter has set her heart on a set of fairy wings that she saw in a book and she asked me last weekend whether I would help her make them. Lest I leave the wrong impression here I should make it clear that I am in most respects an absolutely dreadful father and I am sure that Elsje will in the distant future waste a fortune on attempting to exorcise the ghost of my memory. For now, however, she loves me and I love her and I am prepared in her behalf to endure retail hell to obtain the materials for making fairy wings. What I didn't appreciate is that I would have to visit four separate shops, dispersed across at least a square mile of central Bath, to obtain these materials. The first shop was able to supply the large sheet of pink cardboard but nothing else. I soon discovered that cardboard in a breeze acts much like a sail and so I tacked rather than walked for the rest of the day.
Attempting to engage the logistical centre of my brain, I visited Gap en route from the cardboard shop to the glue shop. Although heterosexual men in the early 20th century are almost redundant, we are still called upon to "do something" when our wives have a puncture, which mine did yesterday evening. In the course of changing the tyre I was forced to assume various unnatural positions that eventually resulted in a rending sound and a welcome but surprising breeze around my genitals. Hence my visit to Gap. The jeans were neatly arranged, by waist size, starting at 28 inches. How it is possible to contain a full set of adult viscera in a torso that thin I cannot begin to explain. Ten inches to the right, the options stop, at 38 inches, two inches short of my girth, on a thin day. "Where do fat people buy their trousers in Bath?" I asked, a reasonable question that was met with (barely) polite laughter but nothing in the way of a helpful response. As I was leaving, I noticed a rack of shorts with elasticated waist bands, reduced in price to £7.99. I bought an extra large pair.
Several shops later I found myself in "Joules", whence I had been directed by a man in Jack Wills, who said that was where his dad bought his jeans. Same story. The biggest pair of trousers in the shop had been cut to fit snugly around a waist two inches shorter in circumference than mine. Again I deployed the "F" word. More, I am certain, out of embarrassment than honest appraisal the young shop assistant said "Come on! You're not that fat!", graciously omitting the implied "in comparison, say, with Dawn French." She pointed me in the direction of a jeans warehouse which, she assured me, catered for persons of my build. By the time I got there, it was closed.
Defeated and dehydrated, I stopped for a smoothie, an amazingly refreshing combination of pineapple, mint and ice. Feeling better, I tackled items 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 in a half hour blur that left my debit card smoking and my feet aching in a new pair of boots that I had found on special offer in Blacks. The bloke in the kitchen shop insisted on giving me a large plastic bag in which to carry my bread knife (destined to be used dividing perennial rootstocks, not slicing loaves of wholesome brown bread) and advised me that the receipt would probably be enough to convince the rozzers that it didn't constitute a concealed weapon.
It was 6pm and most of the shops were closing but I knew that Currys on the edge of town would be paying its dismal employees the minimum wage to wait aimlessly for customers until at least eight. Three wonderful women, Kerry, Penny and Rachel, help me maintain a semblance of order in my garden. I pay them a lot more than the minimum wage but still less than they are worth and I had decided that I should outfit the potting shed where they spend much of their time with a small fridge, a microwave and a really good coffee machine. The first cup of coffee in the morning is one of the highlights of my day and there is no longer any reason to endure the powdered filth pushed on us by Nestle now that Nespresso machines (made under license to Nestle) are relatively cheaply available.
My last stop was Sainsbury, where I bought a couple of cases of wine and some avocado pears. Also, on impulse, a bulb of fennel. I noticed that each bulb was individually labeled "fennel", presumably so that both customers and check-out staff can distinguish it from, say, artichokes. I was reminded of my first job, stacking shelves in the local supermarket to earn money to go traveling. As part of my induction program I was required to complete a questionnaire booklet that contained questions such as "Which of the following is a banana?", followed by line drawings of a bunch of grapes, an apple, a pineapple and a crescent shaped yellow fruit, the name of which I forget. Presumably such questions are regarded as too challenging for the GCSE generation, further evidence that the world ain't what it used to be.
I didn't do an MBA, which probably explains why I find it odd that companies which treat their customers like pond scum (Easyjet) or mannequins (Gap) and their employees like retards (Sainsbury) are surprised when both groups come to despise them. Apple - and here I am going to deploy a word that I'd thought I would never again find a use for - empowers its employees, who reward this trust by proselytising with genuine enthusiasm and treating the company's customers with respect.
1. Since I wrote and published the first draft of this piece a friend has drawn my attention to recent evidence that viewing the Apple logo causes in fans of the brand the same areas of the brain to light up as in people undergoing religious experience. See here.
Thursday 16 June 2011
Tears and Loathing in Lower South Wraxall
 |
| Life in my sauce |
I first thought about killing myself when I was thirteen years old. Forced to attend a school I loathed, I repeatedly ran away or refused to get into the car in the morning and had to be dragged, literally kicking and screaming. My father’s solution was ruthless but effective. Having initially acquiesced to my demand to be a 'day boy' in an all-boarding school, he made me return in my second term as a boarder. Life in an English boarding school in the 1980s was far less brutal than it had been even a decade earlier. Older boys were still, however, given the authority to order younger children to take ice cold baths at seven o’clock in the morning for minor breaches of school rules and, until the end of my second year, 'fagging' was still de rigeur (the Wikipedia article on this subject is an adequate introduction, if you are not familiar with the practice, now largely extinct).
"It never did me any harm.” Was the refrain of adults who had been broken by the system or naïve men like my father, whose parents had been unable to afford an independent education for him, and who was determined that his children would enjoy that privilege. Of course, it did immense harm, as the few friends I retain from those days will universally attest. The theory of evolution saved my life. I had few talents but I excelled as a biologist, a subject I had loved since before I knew the word. Biology wasn’t taught in the first year at Sherborne, so when I graduated to the fourth form my pent-up enthusiasm was unleashed. In a rare stroke of luck I found myself assigned a teacher, Byron Henry, who responded to and nurtured my undisciplined fascination with nature through the rest of my school career. He taught me how to be a scientist, a gift beyond price. I don’t think I’ve ever recorded in writing the debt I owe him, an omission I am glad to rectify now.
I have been thinking about suicide on-and-off ever since that early-adolescence crisis. Generally these thoughts take the form of fantasies. I imagine myself, post-suicide, thumbing my nose at the world I have left behind. I cannot imagine being dead because it is impossible to get into the subjective perspective about the objective fact of being extinct, so my brain conjures up a sort of avatar that comments on the situation as my body dies. So far, I have remained sufficiently tethered to reality to grasp that death and, more pertinently, dying wouldn’t be that way. As the wheels of the train rolled over my brain, whatever memories, ideas and wisdom those cells had accumulated would be forever and instantly extinguished. So far, the idea of having my essence smeared across a few metres of the Chippenham to Paddington tracks has been less attractive than the alternative.
But not much. I have actually attempted suicide only once, as recorded elsewhere on this blog. It was a pretty feeble attempt, if truth be told. I have enough pills in my medicine bag to kill a rhinoceros and I took only sufficient to ensure that I slept soundly for a very long time. I was playing a coward’s version of Russian roulette. The only other occasion when I came close occurred a few days before my precipitous departure from the City. Driven mad by the monotony of the commute to a job that I hated with a passion so profound that words have not been coined to describe it, I went to a bar with the explicit intention of screwing up my courage to jump in front of a train. By the end of the first bottle, I reckoned that another bottle would do the trick. By the end of the second bottle, I found that the idea of a third seemed attractive and by the time that was empty, I had lost the will to die. In a way, therefore, booze saved my life. At least, it postponed the inevitable.
So here I am, more-or-less alive, thanks to Charles Darwin and ethanol. I’ve been reading a short book, How Sadness Survived by Paul Keedwell. It is a brave attempt to argue the positive case for depression. This isn’t anything like as crazy as it sounds. Life consists in a series of trade-offs among various awful alternatives and natural selection takes no account of human values when wielding her scythe. Sickle-cell anaemia is common in some parts of Africa because carriers of a single copy of the relevant gene are resistant to malaria. Unfortunate carriers of two copies die young but natural selection will keep the gene in circulation until malaria is eradicated. I once engaged in an online discussion with a Christian who could not understand how a gene detrimental to its carrier could spread (1). I gave the example of the gene(s) responsible for making beef taste delicious to humans. These genes are now more numerous than almost any other in mammals but that fact is presumably of scant comfort to the cow in the queue at the abattoir.
Keedwell produces evidence to suggest that depression is both ancient and a human universal, contrary to the stereotype that only the current, enfeebled generation of adults in the West is susceptible. If true, and if mood is influenced by genes, for which there is abundant evidence, this implies that some benefit associated with depression may be causing the relevant alleles to persist in human populations.
In a section with the Pythonesque title 'What has depression ever done for us?' the book proposes two main benefits and a host of positive side effects.
1. Depressive realism.
In a recent article in New Scientist (The Grand Delusion. 2011. 210: 2812, pp 35-41), Graham Lawton reviews some of the many ways in which most people deceive themselves.
"One study found that 74% of drivers believed themselves to be better than average behind the wheel [not statistically impossible but highly unlikely to be true]...if you ask most people to rate themselves on almost any positive trait - competence, intelligence, honesty, originality...most put themselves in the better-than-average category. Ask them similar questions about negative traits and they will rate themselves as less likely than average to possess them...We also inflate our opinions of loved ones. Around 95% of people rate their partner as smarter, more attractive, warmer and funnier than average...optimism bias [is] a well-established effect characterised by unrealistic expectations about the future. Most people expect to live longer, healthier and more successful lives than average while underestimating their chances of getting divorced, falling ill or having an accident...The fawning doesn't stop there...In an ironic twist, most people believe themselves to be more resistant than average to having an inflated opinion of themselves."
I love that last sentence. What a deliciously succinct put-down of the cup-half-full crowd.
It turns out that patients diagnosed with clinical depression do not suffer from these biases. We rate ourselves, the way we are perceived and the likely outcomes in our lives more accurately than non-sufferers. It is plausible (but remains to be rigorously tested) that depressive realism could confer real benefits in certain conditions, perhaps more so in the very dangerous ancestral environments in which the structure of our brains largely evolved. Keedwell quotes one of my favourite psychologists, Daniel Gilbert: "Depression stops us chasing rainbows." And possibly also saber-toothed tigers.
2. Reflection.
Several of the symptoms experienced during an episode of depression - social withdrawal, intense introspection, feelings of worthlessness - are conducive to encouraging reflection upon the sufferer's life, goals and ideals. "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,..." said Robert Browning before spoiling this brilliant observation by adding "or what's a heaven for?" In less poetic language, we aspire too much. Almost none of us will achieve all that he (mistakenly) thinks he is capable of. Most depressions resolve spontaneously within a few weeks or months and there is plenty of case evidence that many people emerge from such periods having abandoned unrealistic goals, redefined their aims in life or having had some kind of epiphany regarding the mistakes they had been making.
Keedwell thinks that the similarity of the symptoms and typical duration of grief and depression is not an accident. The main 'goal' of grief, in an evolutionary sense, is acceptance. If we were not overcome with sadness on the death of a parent, child or lover, our feelings for them could not have been very intense. But unless we 'move on' fairly swiftly our own lives would soon be forfeit too. Enabling us to move on is the function of grief and the reason natural selection gave it to us.
Perhaps an analagous function exists for depression, at least in its commonest manifestations which, as noted, resolve quickly. Perhaps it is an evolved mechanism that allows us natural born losers eventually to let go of unrealistic but cherished plans and dreams and to accept our limitations.
3. Ancillary benefits.
A miscellany of hypothesised benefits is discussed, without much analysis, towards the end of How Sadness Survived. Keedwell argues that depression actually aids coping with suffering, enhances your ability to feel empathy and compassion, induces humility (by prompting feelings of worthlessness) and encourages creative thinking. He quotes another great poet with the first name Robert.
Speaking from my own experience, I find these claimed benefits only somewhat plausible (I am attracted for obvious reasons to the idea that clinically depressed persons are creative geniuses but, being a depressive realist, I immediately dismiss it). They do, however, suggest a research program.
Keedwell produces evidence to suggest that depression is both ancient and a human universal, contrary to the stereotype that only the current, enfeebled generation of adults in the West is susceptible. If true, and if mood is influenced by genes, for which there is abundant evidence, this implies that some benefit associated with depression may be causing the relevant alleles to persist in human populations.
In a section with the Pythonesque title 'What has depression ever done for us?' the book proposes two main benefits and a host of positive side effects.
1. Depressive realism.
In a recent article in New Scientist (The Grand Delusion. 2011. 210: 2812, pp 35-41), Graham Lawton reviews some of the many ways in which most people deceive themselves.
"One study found that 74% of drivers believed themselves to be better than average behind the wheel [not statistically impossible but highly unlikely to be true]...if you ask most people to rate themselves on almost any positive trait - competence, intelligence, honesty, originality...most put themselves in the better-than-average category. Ask them similar questions about negative traits and they will rate themselves as less likely than average to possess them...We also inflate our opinions of loved ones. Around 95% of people rate their partner as smarter, more attractive, warmer and funnier than average...optimism bias [is] a well-established effect characterised by unrealistic expectations about the future. Most people expect to live longer, healthier and more successful lives than average while underestimating their chances of getting divorced, falling ill or having an accident...The fawning doesn't stop there...In an ironic twist, most people believe themselves to be more resistant than average to having an inflated opinion of themselves."
I love that last sentence. What a deliciously succinct put-down of the cup-half-full crowd.
It turns out that patients diagnosed with clinical depression do not suffer from these biases. We rate ourselves, the way we are perceived and the likely outcomes in our lives more accurately than non-sufferers. It is plausible (but remains to be rigorously tested) that depressive realism could confer real benefits in certain conditions, perhaps more so in the very dangerous ancestral environments in which the structure of our brains largely evolved. Keedwell quotes one of my favourite psychologists, Daniel Gilbert: "Depression stops us chasing rainbows." And possibly also saber-toothed tigers.
2. Reflection.
Several of the symptoms experienced during an episode of depression - social withdrawal, intense introspection, feelings of worthlessness - are conducive to encouraging reflection upon the sufferer's life, goals and ideals. "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,..." said Robert Browning before spoiling this brilliant observation by adding "or what's a heaven for?" In less poetic language, we aspire too much. Almost none of us will achieve all that he (mistakenly) thinks he is capable of. Most depressions resolve spontaneously within a few weeks or months and there is plenty of case evidence that many people emerge from such periods having abandoned unrealistic goals, redefined their aims in life or having had some kind of epiphany regarding the mistakes they had been making.
Keedwell thinks that the similarity of the symptoms and typical duration of grief and depression is not an accident. The main 'goal' of grief, in an evolutionary sense, is acceptance. If we were not overcome with sadness on the death of a parent, child or lover, our feelings for them could not have been very intense. But unless we 'move on' fairly swiftly our own lives would soon be forfeit too. Enabling us to move on is the function of grief and the reason natural selection gave it to us.
Perhaps an analagous function exists for depression, at least in its commonest manifestations which, as noted, resolve quickly. Perhaps it is an evolved mechanism that allows us natural born losers eventually to let go of unrealistic but cherished plans and dreams and to accept our limitations.
3. Ancillary benefits.
A miscellany of hypothesised benefits is discussed, without much analysis, towards the end of How Sadness Survived. Keedwell argues that depression actually aids coping with suffering, enhances your ability to feel empathy and compassion, induces humility (by prompting feelings of worthlessness) and encourages creative thinking. He quotes another great poet with the first name Robert.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Speaking from my own experience, I find these claimed benefits only somewhat plausible (I am attracted for obvious reasons to the idea that clinically depressed persons are creative geniuses but, being a depressive realist, I immediately dismiss it). They do, however, suggest a research program.
There are weaknesses in Keedwell's analysis. He is a clinician and is clearly biased by his compassion for patients. He argues, for example, that genes predisposing an individual to suicide could not spread because suicide is rare. This is, of course, nonsense. If a gene predisposing its carrier to take his own life is manifested sufficiently late in life then it will certainly spread in human societies living in marginal environments, where the sudden removal of a mouth to feed could tip the balance between the death or survival of that mouth's relatives. It is a good start, however, and should be seized upon by population geneticists and neuroscientists, who have the tools and skills necessary to identify the genes involved in mood control, track their distribution within and between populations and begin to understand how they affect the development and functioning of the brain.
Sadly, vested interests in the pharmaceutical and psychotherapy industries will probably kill any such research stone dead. The reason for this, if it not already obvious, is that typical depressions should probably not be treated, either with anti-depressants or psychotherapy (which is largely bunkum anyway). You would not 'treat' grief because it is not an illness. Rather it is a perfectly normal and helpful reaction to a deep loss. Why then would you treat depression, if Keedwell is on the right track?
Part II - Malignant sadness
Lewis Wolpert wrote a brave book, Malignant Sadness, about his own experience of depression. Wolpert is a physiologist and understands how anti-depressants work on a level that I can't reach. He's an enthusiast and attributes to their influence his survival of the experience of depression. Wolpert contrasts ordinary sadness - a normal, perhaps everyday experience for everyone - with depression, which he regards as a disease, a pathological variant of sadness.
Keedwell draws a distinction right at the beginning of his book between typical (he might say 'heatlhy' depression) and persistent or recalcitrant depression. His analysis addresses the former. I think he is right when he implies that lifelong or suicidal depressions are generally pathological and it is then appropriate to regard sufferers as having a disease and attempt to cure it, if the patient wishes to be cured. Like the ex-leper in The Life of Brian, not everyone wants to get better (see clip).
Based solely in my own experience, I think that Keedwell is closer to the mark here than Wolpert in where he draws the line. I'd wager a case of Champagne to a pint in the King's Arms that Keedwell's thesis is essentially correct. I also suspect (but cannot begin to prove) that there exist unlucky individuals who have inherited too many allelles of too many genes that predispose them to experience depression. These individuals - people like me - really are 'marked for death'.
Last night, as a result of a recommendation from my plumber (who else), I watched on iPlayer Choosing to Die, a documentary made by Terry Pratchett about assisted suicide. This subject is much on (what is left of) his mind because he has early stage Alzheimer's and will soon be unable to make for himself the decision to go to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland and be given permission to die. He is clearly in turmoil as he wrestles with the terrible dilemma: die legally, before I want to or die at the right moment, when someone else will have to help, rendering them likely to be prosecuted for murder.
I think this is the most moving piece of television that I have ever watched (see it here). I was in floods of tears at the end, not for the two courageous men who's deaths were documented, but out of a strong feeling of solidarity with the family members and lovers who accompanied them to their bitter ends (apparently the killing drug tastes foul). In one case, a young, terminally ill man's mother accompanied him to Switzerland, so that he would not die alone. In the other, a wife of 40 years squeezed the hand of her husband as she watched him die.
Part III - Me
As I look back on my life, I see that it is a story full of loathing. Perhaps contempt is a better word. Contempt for my teachers and the arbitrary rules they unthinkingly enforced; contempt for my peers and their pathetic enthusiasms for sport, fashion and popular music; contempt for anyone less able intellectually; contempt for the adults too stupid to understand that the world was on the brink of environmental catastrophe and, later, contempt for the single-issue environmentalists too stupid to see that their obsessions aren't very useful. I am contemptuous of laws, lawmakers and law enforcers, of bureaucrats and the wage slaves who do their bidding. I despise the commuters who herd themselves like semi-autonomous sheep to and from contemptible jobs. I despise the system and also the spongers, like me, who parasitise it. I detest organised religion viscerally and feel physically sick when I contemplate the fact that my children are growing up immersed in its influence. I hate psychoanalysts and Supernanny and well-meaning friends who offer to pray for me.
Of course, above all, I loathe myself. The handful of people who read this blog are all kind enough to deny that I am a worthless sack of cells, with a decaying brain, a rotten heart and a rotting liver. I'm afraid, my friends, that I know better. I am, after all, a depressed realist.
Whatever happens next, it wasn't your fault.
1. Richard Dawkins, in one of the finest phrases he has ever coined, describes this sort of thinking as 'the argument from personal incredulity'.
Sadly, vested interests in the pharmaceutical and psychotherapy industries will probably kill any such research stone dead. The reason for this, if it not already obvious, is that typical depressions should probably not be treated, either with anti-depressants or psychotherapy (which is largely bunkum anyway). You would not 'treat' grief because it is not an illness. Rather it is a perfectly normal and helpful reaction to a deep loss. Why then would you treat depression, if Keedwell is on the right track?
Part II - Malignant sadness
Lewis Wolpert wrote a brave book, Malignant Sadness, about his own experience of depression. Wolpert is a physiologist and understands how anti-depressants work on a level that I can't reach. He's an enthusiast and attributes to their influence his survival of the experience of depression. Wolpert contrasts ordinary sadness - a normal, perhaps everyday experience for everyone - with depression, which he regards as a disease, a pathological variant of sadness.
Keedwell draws a distinction right at the beginning of his book between typical (he might say 'heatlhy' depression) and persistent or recalcitrant depression. His analysis addresses the former. I think he is right when he implies that lifelong or suicidal depressions are generally pathological and it is then appropriate to regard sufferers as having a disease and attempt to cure it, if the patient wishes to be cured. Like the ex-leper in The Life of Brian, not everyone wants to get better (see clip).
Based solely in my own experience, I think that Keedwell is closer to the mark here than Wolpert in where he draws the line. I'd wager a case of Champagne to a pint in the King's Arms that Keedwell's thesis is essentially correct. I also suspect (but cannot begin to prove) that there exist unlucky individuals who have inherited too many allelles of too many genes that predispose them to experience depression. These individuals - people like me - really are 'marked for death'.
Last night, as a result of a recommendation from my plumber (who else), I watched on iPlayer Choosing to Die, a documentary made by Terry Pratchett about assisted suicide. This subject is much on (what is left of) his mind because he has early stage Alzheimer's and will soon be unable to make for himself the decision to go to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland and be given permission to die. He is clearly in turmoil as he wrestles with the terrible dilemma: die legally, before I want to or die at the right moment, when someone else will have to help, rendering them likely to be prosecuted for murder.
I think this is the most moving piece of television that I have ever watched (see it here). I was in floods of tears at the end, not for the two courageous men who's deaths were documented, but out of a strong feeling of solidarity with the family members and lovers who accompanied them to their bitter ends (apparently the killing drug tastes foul). In one case, a young, terminally ill man's mother accompanied him to Switzerland, so that he would not die alone. In the other, a wife of 40 years squeezed the hand of her husband as she watched him die.
Part III - Me
As I look back on my life, I see that it is a story full of loathing. Perhaps contempt is a better word. Contempt for my teachers and the arbitrary rules they unthinkingly enforced; contempt for my peers and their pathetic enthusiasms for sport, fashion and popular music; contempt for anyone less able intellectually; contempt for the adults too stupid to understand that the world was on the brink of environmental catastrophe and, later, contempt for the single-issue environmentalists too stupid to see that their obsessions aren't very useful. I am contemptuous of laws, lawmakers and law enforcers, of bureaucrats and the wage slaves who do their bidding. I despise the commuters who herd themselves like semi-autonomous sheep to and from contemptible jobs. I despise the system and also the spongers, like me, who parasitise it. I detest organised religion viscerally and feel physically sick when I contemplate the fact that my children are growing up immersed in its influence. I hate psychoanalysts and Supernanny and well-meaning friends who offer to pray for me.
Of course, above all, I loathe myself. The handful of people who read this blog are all kind enough to deny that I am a worthless sack of cells, with a decaying brain, a rotten heart and a rotting liver. I'm afraid, my friends, that I know better. I am, after all, a depressed realist.
Whatever happens next, it wasn't your fault.
1. Richard Dawkins, in one of the finest phrases he has ever coined, describes this sort of thinking as 'the argument from personal incredulity'.
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