Moved to _here_

Apologies for the lack of posting recently, my blog and has been moved and amalgamted with one or two other things into a new professional website.  Blog posts are now split into three subject areas, Food, Science and Current Affairs.  New posts will be published there shortly. 

The website is http://www.samuelfurse.com/ -- please update your RSS feed. 

Any question, please do get in touch.

The death of print media

The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here:
http://felixonline.co.uk/comment/1452/the-death-of-print-media/

 I am not a journalist. I have never hacked a phone, written a meticulously-researched piece about an obscure detail concerning Princess Diana that would only be published because she was she, or lain doggo in one of Boris Johnson’s rhododendron bushes with pencil and paper at the ready to record indiscretions with his woman-who-does in assiduous detail. If I were a journalist, I would want these skills, but not just these ones. I would also want to be able to act.
By that token I should look upon the recent performances by Rebekah Brooks, and Rupert and James Murdoch, with damp-eyed admiration. In truth it is more like damp-trousered disappointment. The sliminess, the falsity, and the show of contrition were, in the words of Arnold Rimmer, as plain as a Bulgarian pin-up.  James Murdoch tried to sound like the informed and honest junior manager chap who cannot really bear to upset anyone. Rupert Murdoch tried to sound like a quiet old man who has been doing this for a while and is more than mildly diverted by the problem. Rebekah Brooks tried to sound slightly stupid and more than slightly vulnerable, and like the other two, as non-threatening as possible. It was the humble nature of it that stuck out for me. I am simply not willing to believe that people that ‘humble’ rise to the top of the second largest media corporation in the world. Despite that, the act seems to have been believed.

Although what else were we expecting? From asking a few questions about a particular issue, the answers to which were easily revised for, no revelations were going to be forthcoming. 
Does that mean there was not more to find? It is almost inconceivable that there is not more to find. Rebekah Brooks justified the closure of the News of the World at the select committee in the terms that it had “lost the trust of its readership” and that this had been going on for “some time”. If this is the case, the effort made towards the situation is not consistent with the problem. If a paper had lost the trust of its readership some time ago, why would the owners not re-invent it swiftly (and co-incidentally)? Why would they wait until something else had happened which forced them to close it? Even if we ignore this flaw, the argument has limited appeal; quite how Rebekah Brooks measures trust amongst News of the World readers I do not know. In truth, what seems far more likely is that that paper had become a liability and there was no way they could assess how disastrous it might turn out to be. In other words, the phone hacking scandal was pretty tame or ordinary and the last thing they want is for the really bad stuff to come out. So they ditch the title. The phone hacking scandal only became a proper scandal because it was linked to something that no one wants to be negative about – the murder of a school girl. Of course it is not really any worse than anyone else being hacked, and the argument that messages being deleted was some sort of an indicator as to whether or not she was alive is, objectively, breathtakingly weak.
But it still happened, and it is still disliked. Naturally the Murdochs and Ms Brooks used the most cutting language when describing their feelings about the fact of phone hacking – they could not afford to be anything less than the most scathing. I suspect that tactic probably will be seen as effective in pushing the issue away from the front pages. It is of course not over, there are still countless inquiries to be gone through whose findings will drift in at regular and toothlessly late intervals over the next three years until we are all thoroughly sick of it. I am still wondering what will happen next. Will all of the News International titles fold? Will print media be forever tarnished and be regulated to the point of pointlessness? Certainly it seems unrealistic for the defence ‘self regulation is best’ will be allowed any further credence. And so we can look forward to a castrated print media? My suspicion is that print media is a wily old bird and I think it will survive this cold winter. It has survived the introduction of radio, and television, and satellite news. And even the internet. It even manages to survive being monstrously loss-making: something that makes no sense given the basic principles of the free market in which it apparently operates. Compared to that list of setbacks, a bit of phone hacking by the vulgar press will very quickly become as pale and forgotten as any of yesterday’s headlines. 

#hacking up not much

Is it me or is the Millie Dowler aspect of the phone hacking scandal a bit over-blown?  Obviously I do not wish to sound unkind to the family, no one deserves what they have been through, but this has been going on a while, but one cannot help but feel that it is time to move on from this now.  But I must confess I thought that before the phone hacking scandal.  The latter has of course been covered in enormous detail, not least by The Telegraph. 

            This does not bode well for their involvement in the current saga.  The logic for their being a protagonist in this story is, as I understand it, that the interference with Miss Dowler’s mobile phone meant that messages on the answering service associated with it, were deleted.  This was apparently taken as objective evidence that she was alive.  Is it me or is that logical argument just a bit weak?  If someone is rushed into hospital, medical staff do not attempt to telephone the patient as a worthy alternative to checking for vital signs.  Why would they?  This may seem a harsh comparison, but even if we take the argument on its own merits, there are enough holes in the logic for the whole thing, whether one is in an emotional state or not, to fall apart very quickly.  There was apparently a focus on which messages were there or not, not apparently when they were left nor when the phone itself was turned on, nor where it was.  All of this information is well available and any assiduous investigation would have taken it up.  Further, it would have been a far better indicator of when and where the phone had been used.  But even if it had not been available, or not seen as reliable, the fact that messages were listened to or not proves nothing.  There is, as it turns out correctly, that it was she who was listening to them.  One would probably not have suspected hacking, knowing what we did then, but the killer may easily have done this, either out of curiosity or boredom or a host of other reasons.  This would all have been days, or even weeks after the beginning of police involvement anyway, after they would or should have taken action.  It just does not add up.

            This is not a defence of hacking or of News of the World,  or indeed anyone else, right or wrong, I hasten to add.  It just seems a very intellectually thin justification for publishing the story.  What this suggests is that there was an ulterior motive for publishing this.  The Guardian is not a News International paper, so they could publish it in a way that News International papers could not.  Did they want to see it fall?  Perhaps the NewsInt Empire had over-reached itself and it was a time bomb waiting to explode.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, then.  If you will forgive the mixed metaphor.  I wonder which camel we will have after the dust has settled.  

It's a red light for fat bottoms

Healthy eating is desperately over rated.  It is not that I believe we should not think about what we eat.  Or that we should not do something about it if we are obese, or plan things so we ensure we eat all the things we need to.  What I am referring to is how we measure ‘healthiness’ in eating.  You may be nursing doubts that the following is another boffin about to bang on about some obscure point that does not really concern anyone.  But, in the immortal words of Miranda Hart (On the BBC website), “Bear with…”

Going to a large supermarket, where surely most people do most of their shopping, can be bewildering for the uninitiated shopper.  One of the turmoils facing many a student who is out shopping for the first time is the question of how to choose between Sainsbury’s Basics and the cheapest branded product.  The array of types of baked beans is frankly dizzying.  More generally, I have seen many a shopper tight with anguish about which sugar to buy or which milk will be best.  (Supermarkets are great places for watching people.  You just have to make sure you are doing enough yourself such that if you are being watched, you do not arouse the suspicion of the security staff).   But the problem can go a stage further.  What if the shopper has it in mind that they should eat less salt or more fibre?  Or, more complicatedly, less saturated but more unsaturated fat, with less fat over all?  Difficult stuff.  In Britain we are lucky and well organised that the food packaging we have tells us what is in something – both the ingredients and the nutrition information.  This may seem obvious but it is far from universal: the Americans have a list of ‘nutrition facts’ which is manifestly token, and say very little.  However, even though we have all the information, this does not necessarily make it easier to judge what we should or should not buy.

Enter, the ‘Wheel of Health’ from Sainsbury’s and the less pretentious but equally useless ‘Guideline daily amounts’ on Tesco packaging.  In case you cannot recall them, these little note-diagrams comprise 5 of the entries from the Nutrition Information listThis list is: calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt.  I imagine the list has been chosen quite carefully by marketing types and focus groups.  It certainly has not been chosen by scientists.  Typically, the information is also used to give the listing a colour code – apparently red is dangerous, amber is not that good for you, and green is fine.  Despite my blustering tone you might be wondering what all the fuss is about – it is perfectly reasonable to want to advise and inform people on what they are buying.  And that is fine.  If it is that.  But it is not.  

The trouble with telling people how low in fat or amazingly sugarless a product is, especially with a  crass colour-coding system, is that the logical outcome is that a set of five green wedges in the Wheel of Health is something to aspire to.  Now these quintupletly-green-wedged foods may or may not be more profitable than others (fat is cheap, emulsifiers are not), but there is seemingly no understanding of where this leads.  Their website (See here) explains the Wheel of Health (also called the traffic light system) very breifly, and suggests rather patronisingly that we should “Try to go for more greens and ambers, and fewer reds”.  Yes.  Well.  Should we, though? 

It has been true for years that people could do with eating less fat and doing more exercise.  Various gimmicky inventions have been marketed to help with this.  My favourite is the caffeine tights.  Though, in the words of Stephen Fry, they are “not going to dissolve a fat arse”.  Do these colourful labellings help with that?  Of course not.  The trouble is that this system presents the ‘healthiest’ foods as being the ones that contain the least of anything: five green wedges means no energy, fat, sugars or salt.  This makes about the healthiest thing in the supermarket a 250 mL bottle of soda water.  What a load of tosh!  Soda water is great but if it were to disappear it would not be a great loss to humanity.  A loss to the drinks cabinet perhaps, but we would survive pretty well.  What it would not be would be a loss of the healthiest food in the cupboard.

An opposing argument might be that people probably do not take much notice of these diagrams.  I have not done any research on that—much as I would love to stand in a supermarket with a clipboard and a nauseating market-research-type-jolly manner, obviously—but a lassez faire attitude, or simply not having the time for them is believable.  And obviously someone on a diet or who is geeky (myself included) will probably ignore such parts of the label and repair immediately to the full nutrition information list.  In which case it begs the question of why it is there at all.  This is redoubled if we factor in seeing a nice-looking lemon tart that has been reduced in price and we buy it irrespective of the fact of having gone in to the supermarket only to buy the 'healthiest' thing in the shop in our jodhpurs.  Or is that just me?

Either way, these systems are long over-due for a re-think.  The list of nutrition information is a great idea, and even things that make this information accessible to consumers is also good.  But it is only good if it has a point.  This does not.  

The Scourge of Aspartame...

‘Aspartame is really bad for you’.  ‘You should avoid foods with aspartame in them’.  These appear to be the take-home messages from a variety of websites that state clearly that they think this compound is bad for human health.  They claim that this compound is the cause of a plethora of illnesses from passing headaches to Gulf Warsyndrome and cancer of the brain.  Needless to say they are not the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news) or the latest issue of The Lancet (http://www.thelancet.com).  What is from The Lancet are a variety of articles that make interesting reading on the subject. 

            It is well known that aspartame breaks down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol.  Aspartic acid and phenylalanine are both amino acids and are thus a necessary constituent of the proteinous parts of our bodies.  Methanol is not required in our diet and is toxic in higher doses, however Alan Meyers, of the Boston Medical Centre, did a basic calculation with respect to the products of the breakdown of aspartame (PDF here for subscribers).  Here, he notes that there is approximately twice as much methanol in the equivalent volume of fruit juice as there is in a soft drink containing aspartame.  As one might expect, Harriet Butchko, a representative from NutraSweet, also put forward strong evidence that Aspartame is not the known cause of brain cancers (PDF here for subscribers) in response to a claim that it is mutagen.  ‘Mutagen’ sounds like something out of Red Dwarf but is deadly serious – literally.  Mutagens cause mutations (these scientists are cunning with their words, as you can see).  Mutations are the name given to damage to strands of DNA.  This damage can cause changes to the ‘blue prints’ that our cells rely upon to make themselves.  Mutations can lead to cancers.  However, the evidence to date suggests that aspartame and its metabolic products are not mutagenic. 

          This is a big relief all round, given the number and types of foods that we would have to avoid if we wanted to avoid this compound.  What the argument reminds me of, and in particular the sort of arguments put forward by those trying to sell books on the subject (PDF here for subscribers) is why we buy into these ideas – intellectually if we believe it, and financially if we buy the book.  Is it sensational excitement?  This sells newspapers, and so we know it exists by that token of course.  I think it is partly this, but I also think it has much to do with human nature and how we have evolved.  A recent BBC series about Homo sapiens, that was almost completely scientifically sound, included episodes on our struggle against similar human species, namely Homo Erectus (iPlayer video here  for viewers in the UK, for a limited time), and Neanderthals (iPlayer video here, again for UK views for a limited time) .  Of course we cannot be sure what these other species were like precisely, but one way or another we outdid them.  Although they still haunt us: between 1-4% of our genome (the ‘full set’ of DNA that makes up a species) is Neanderthal.  Is one of those reasons we survived and they did not the fact that we are a bit more nervous than the others were?  We panic, we can imagine a danger to be imminent, in order to protect ourselves from things that could hurt us?  Perhaps aspartame is one of those things.  Perhaps climate change is too (the last decade has seen the six warmest years on record but the industrial-scale release of carbon that has been happening for hundreds of years has failed to produce Armageddon), or the perils of travel by railway (Spartacus link here). 

Either way, we are still here, and one day extinction will occur, whether or not we put sugar in our tea.

I’m too old to go on strike…

“Remember when Prison Officers, teachers, policeman, ambulance staff, nurses, doctors, social workers and fireman crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax?  No, me neither.  Please copy and paste to status for 24 hours to show your support against the government's latest attack on pensions and public sector workers!”

Does this look familiar?  It does to me as several of my (reduced) friend list on Facebook have made this their status.  This relatively small group are left-of-centre or out-right left wing.  None of my more conservative friends have touted this.  Perhaps they have not listened to the news, or just do not care.  Or perhaps they have not missed the point as these people have. 

            A variety of points spring to my mind here.  First, this is not an attack on anything, except perhaps a deficit that the coalition seeks to rein in.  Fiscally, this is clearly very sensible if we want to retain any sort of sense of independence and (national) self in the long term.  I do not want us to have to borrow money from anyone—we should not need to—I would like us to stand on our own two feet.  Pensions cost a lot of money and so along with other things that cost a lot of money, they have been cut. 

            No one ever believed that public sector workers had brought the country to its knees, so this comparison made in the first sentence of the status is a futile and pointless one.  It is also weak: what I do recall is when public sector workers and other go on strike when I and others need them to do the jobs for which we pay.  I also remember the years and years of public sector workers – normally not healthcare staff -- striking because they are stroppy about a pay increase that is only almost twice that of inflation (a 4% increase when inflation was 2.5% springs to mind).  I wonder what the cost of those increases has been – I bet that has run into many millions, and increased inflation and borrowing rates to boot.  But doubtless in practice that calculation is too complicated to make accurately.  One that is rather easier to make is that between the public and private sectors, where for the latter pay rises double that of inflation have been basically impossible since the 80s.  Certainly I have never had employment where my pay has been more than inflation.  I got my first job in 1998.  Other than jobs on the minimum wage, such as it is, first I worked for a charity, then a privately-owned retail firm and then a publicly-listed pharmaceutical services company.  In the last case, anyone who got a pay rise in line with the rate of inflation was doing well. 

Further, in the situation in which the effective pay was either frozen or reduced, the idea of striking seemed inappropriate and unworkable, even if I and others had wanted to.  Marching would have been ridiculous.  I did not want to do either, and I did not like the situation and so I left.  Even if I had gone on strike I fail to see what good it would have done.  It would have distanced us from those who ran the company and polarised everyone, forcing everyone to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ everything.  Of course, striking in general is conspicuously pointless: since the general strike of 1926 as it is illustriously called, the result of striking for any cause has at best been ineffectual, and at worst been damaging and disruptive.  Marching has fared little better.  Even the countryside march a few years ago – unusually for a strike a typically conservative bunch – achieved very little if anything, despite it being the largest and most clearly non-violent march in at least living memory.  Perhaps it is because people who wear tweed do not go on rampages.  Either way, it seems worrying that for those who support strike action that the industries that are typified by Trades Union (and thus strike and marching) activity are those touted by the populous as being the least reliable or of the poorest quality – railways, postal services, teaching and local authorities – whether or not this is fair.    

            Other than this politicking, there are some social issues that have received less attention than I think they should.  First, is retirement age.  Part of the “attack on pensions” is an increase in the retirement age.  In reality the retirement age has been out of step with everything else for decades but it has been politically awkward to change it.  When pensions were first introduced just over 100 years ago by Campbell-Bannerman’s government pensioners typically lived only a year or two past retirement age.  Now it is typically twenty or even thirty years into retirement before people die.  This, at least for child-bearing women, is half the length of their working lives.  How could paying a living income to that person for that long ever be sustainable with the current rate of tax for the working person?  What would satisfy this fiscal criterion and also be far more consistent with arguments about ageism is that we raise the retirement age by no less than ten years for both men and women.  I see no reason not to.  We are a lot healthier and stronger than the population a hundred years ago, the clear proof of which is that we can expect to live into our 80s, rather than our 50s or 60s.  On top of this, there is an argument about experience.  By retirement age people are not decrepit.  If anything they have probably reached a level of experience at which they may well be at their most useful and productive.  They may not be playing championship tennis or carrying hods up ladders but there is plenty else that needs doing and that people will pay for.  Also, if you ask any factory foreman or supermarket check-out overseer whether they would prefer to employ someone in their 50s or 60s or a teenager or someone in their early 20s you can be damned sure they will go for the group who turn up on time, do not make a fuss and get the job done.  Of course these are not the only sorts of job this age group should be consigned to.  And shock-horror, there are reliable twentysomethings out there.  But if this reliability notion can be applied to the older portion of the working population in such jobs, then it can be applied to medics, architects, designers, teachers and so on as well. 

            In fact, the psychological effects of retirement in a person’s life before they desire it has been the subject of a sit-com.  Do you remember Waiting For God, on the BBC?  Stephanie Cole’s character, and to a large extent Graham Crowden’s as well, are based on the fact that they no longer work and this takes away their daily activity, leaving them bored.  The psychological, and then physical, blow to Cole’s character is a constant theme.  This was written, made and aired in the early 90s – well before a long-running fiscal problem regarding long retirements was suggested as far as I know.  I also suspect some of the stress, or at least the psychological change, associated with retirement has contributed to the demise of several people who were of pension age, known to me.  And that is not a thought I like.

            So what I am saying is that we have an ageing population who should be allowed to keep on working longer because they are good at what they do and are as employable as any other group.  It seems fruitless to throw them on the scrapheap, especially when their contributions to the national pot are as strong and welcome and valid as any other.  Work will also mean they can keep healthy and active and definitely avoid becoming any sort of burden, something many fear.  Of course they do not have to work a fifty hour week – there is such a thing as early retirement, or going part-time, if they choose to.  I suppose the sadness is that the retirement age is being increased for seemingly purely financial reasons when the practical and moral reasons for allowing an experienced group of people to work are far more palatable.  I am also saying that striking is pointless, especially if you want to take the moral high ground.  We all have to pay for the deficit so wrap up and get on with your day and do not let down those who rely upon you—as they will not let you down.

So hungry I could eat a horse

The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here:
http://felixonline.co.uk/food/1435/so-hungry-i-could-eat-a-horse/

Hunger has taken me to many weird places – Zone 6, meat free foods and even Ginster’s pasties.  What I have not done is eat a donkey’s cock as Paul Merton almost did on his documentary series about China.  But if I were really hungry, would I?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/publicenergy/4937610935/

Having ridden horses for a while, including a few stallions, I am confident that the equine penis is pretty impossible to avoid noticing.  Despite the donkey’s reputation for pork swordsmanship, equine vets inform me that that it is trumped by the tackle of your average Grand National winner.  I cannot say that that particular factoid makes me any keener to go near either genital, let alone imbibe one should it rock up on my dinner plate—however much protein it might provide.  But what about the rest of the horse?

It is well known, if not well documented, that the number of Exmoor ponies in South Devon was considerably smaller after WWII than before it.  As every GCSE history student knows, rationing hit every food source hard, with meat as no exception.  But people were still hungry and wanted to eat.  And there is a lot of meat on a horse.  Even a modestly-sized but properly-fed Exmoor pony will net over 100kg of meat.  As a large steak weighs about 0·5kg, this represents a considerable supply of the red stuff.  My father’s family are from North Devon and so in order to survive the war healthily they probably ate horsemeat.  Even despite that, I am not that keen.  Sitting in a nice warm office writing this, with a freezer of venison, duck, beef, chicken and fish at home I am not much being tested though.

However there is an intellectual line that I make.  Horses are working animals.  I do not use them as such, but I do not use cats or dogs in their working capacity either: and neither do I eat them.  And it is clear that those animals are not stock animals anywhere in the western world.  What is equally clear is that cows, chickens and duck are not working animals anywhere in the western world either.  They are stock animals that are bred (or shot) for meat. At no point are they working animals.  This makes a nice distinction between the two types – animals bred and reared for meat, and animals that are not.  

  But there was one I could not put in the list – pigs.  Although they are not thought of as working animals, ethically I know they are not only used as stock animals in western Europe so I could not put them in the list above.  One reason is that they are used to find truffles on the continent.  More recently, heart valves from pigs have been used to treat heart disease in humans.  If you had had a replacement heart valve from a pig, would you feel the same about eating a Cumberland sausage afterwards?  It might be a bit close to the bone for me.

So unless I make a subtle and rather lame extension to the differentiation between the sort of meat I do and do not eat, that means it is alright for me to eat pigs (or not), I am cut off from any sort of moral imperative behind my choice of foodstuff.  I now wonder why I or anyone else makes a distinction between which meats to eat and which not on intellectual or moral grounds at all.  What could that possibly achieve?  All it does it lend a certain lofty high ground to a combination of personal preference, practicality, dated hygiene considerations and availability.  And what is wrong with those as reasons anyway? 

All dried up

The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here:
http://felixonline.co.uk/science/1389/why-does-it-always-rain-on-me/

Like recovering alcoholics everywhere, Britain has woken up to the declaration of droughts in several parts of the Kingdom.  Queendom.  Whatever—it is dry.  It is also the first half of June after a stinking cold winter.  It is tempting to strike up something British and indignant about why the weather is what it is and how exacerbating, inexplicable or inconvenient it is.  Although British, I am also a scientist and am going to take that perspective.

            Suspiciously, or perhaps not, climate change scientists have yet to be questioned publically about this.  This might seem reasonable in some contexts: questioning them as though they are any more responsible for climate change than the rest of us is unreasonable.  So far Water companies and the Department for the Environment have been bullied on the BBC’s Today programme about it, but that is only really about short-term measures for human water consumption.  What about the more serious long-term aspects though?

            

            The IPCC and others have published data suggesting that the changes to our atmosphere will result in an increase in the average temperature of the Earth.  This makes sense given what we know about the physical behaviour of methane and carbon dioxide.  Although the mean temperature is predicted to change imperceptibly to the average person (0·5 °C), there will be a decrease in cold weather and an increase in the number of hot periods.  This is mathematically rational too – see graph.  However, we were told that Britain’s climate would become warmer and wetter.  Warmer of course makes sense – we can see the distribution above – but that hardly reconciles with the coldest winter for years being just behind us and not being 30 years ago and slightly remote.  The wetter climate is also a ponderable.  How is that working?  We have flooding in parts of the country not seen in living memory at least, but it is not clear how often that is in the grand scheme of things.  It is slightly hard to work out what this means.  First, meteorologists seem to tout the cretinous-sounding idea that how wet something is is entirely determined by how often water is poured onto it by natural means.  This means that places like Antarctica (made of ice -- for the time being anyway) and the Atacama desert (next to the Pacific Ocean) are listed amongst the driest on the planet, without reference to how much water they contain.  So, does wetter mean wetter or watered?  Second, wetter when?  We are in drought before spring is even over (legally) – that rather rails against wetness, either by being poured on or by being wet. 

            I do not doubt that the climate is changing – it is a certainty even based on the chemistry alone.  But are we not losing sight of it all just a bit?  Apart from a 0·5 °C increase in temperature which is common knowledge, the current definition of ice age means we are in the middle of one at the moment.  We are also in the middle of a mass-extinction event.  But in the Earth’s history the Oceans have been filled with water-soluble iron oxides and there have been tropical forests at the poles, neither of which is conceivable to us.  So how seriously do we take this?  It is a crying shame that the blue whale, the largest animal ever to have lived on the Earth, will be extinct in the next couple of thousand years because whaling has reduced the numbers and thus the genetic diversity to 1% of what it was even 500 years ago.  The opposite point is that evolution cannot stand still.  Like language, politics and even reality television, it has to change and move.  The loss of amazing and boring species alike makes room for new ones.  It is sad that the dinosaurs disappeared, but without that happening, there would have been no room for the blue whale, or us, come to that.  

The minefield of apologetic etiquette

The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here: http://felixonline.co.uk/comment/1393/the-minefield-of-social-etiquette/

How many times have you ever wanted to tell someone who is apologising to you, to **** off?—Not because they slept with your best friend, brother/sister etc, but just because of the grovelling sick-making nature of it.  I amaze myself about how fervently I want to, some times.  But equally, how often has the fact of the apology barely scratched the surface?

            These two are relatively easy, but what about the middle ones, when someone probably should apologise and does?  There are various approaches one could take.  Some people thank them.  I am not so sure about this but it would show an acknowledgement of the apologiser’s effort.  However if you think they should apologise, why thank them?  I suppose the opposite reaction would just be to say nothing and walk away, but this is hardly positive re-enforcement.  What if they need to again?  The chances are that they simply will not bother.  Telling them “It’s fine/It doesn’t matter” is one I have done in the past, but I feel a pang because often it does matter.  Though I am pleased they have said so, I do not necessarily want to wear that pain on my arm.  I want to move on.  I suppose there is the big hug and “I’m-so-pleased-you-called” combination, but anything more clearly taken out of cheap American drama, and vomit-inducing, I cannot imagine. 

            Dodgy coloured hair, breast augmentations and accents that make me want to rip off my ears aside, it is not just apologies that make for a modern etiquette minefield, but a variety of ‘new’ situations.  I was asked if I wanted to go Speed Dating last week.  I am reliably informed that this has changed a lot since it first started – it is not the lonely hearts/stalkerfest that it once commonly believed to be.  But that does not help with the etiquette of the situation.  Clearly in one’s three minute slot, the need for jokes about unchristian acts with a banana are unlikely to go down well.  After all, one has hardly met the person, it is just not time for that sort of thing yet.  However a more circumspect approach might just leave me with nothing to say and so I would come across much like ‘Tim nice but dim’, or ‘Tim nice but not much to say’ at any rate. 

            Though it is not just these sorts of things people worry about – what to say and when, how to behave, what one expects in a flatshare and so on.  There is even an unwritten rule about the use of mobile phones on trains, i.e. the more people there are on a train, the more you should try to avoid using your phone.  Of course some people do not care about such rules, but everyone around them is silently firing large and entirely telepathic daggers squarely at them.  I suppose the question is partly ‘why does any of this happen at all?’  Why do I worry about what to say to someone when they apologise to me, or when a woman with a scary predilection for 80s fashion invites me to a party that I do not want to go to?  We are supposedly a less ‘buttoned-up’ society (disgusting word) than we were 50 years ago.  People dress differently and formal names and titles are less common.  However casual racism and people who wash only once a week have also become less common as well.  Ironic really, as people who indulge in casual racism and rarely wash are normally called common.  Or at least are thought of as common—no one is allowed to say it, that would be snobbish.  Etiquette is clearly as tricky a mistress as ever she was—be her in a spandex boob tube or grovelling for your forgiveness.

“It doesn’t get better than this …”

 The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here: http://felixonline.co.uk/travel/1402/why-drive/

I have yet to take helicopter gunships seriously.  Whenever I hear about them—which has been regularly since the business in Libya kicked off—I immediately think they are referring to something out of science fiction, or at least Bucky O’Hare.  As you might imagine, this is a far cry from commuting from London to Didcot on the 0702 from Paddington to Penzance. The absence of guns, bombs and Kate Adie alerted me to this quite early on, and Paddington station was the poorer for it I imagine. What I was equally unaware of was any alternative transport to work. If there were no fast trains, as happened occasionally, I would get a slow one. It would be annoying and take nearly twice as long.

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http://www.uktrainpics.co.uk/hst.htm

            I moved to London ten years ago and had never really used the tube before then.  I had used trains a bit, I went to school on the arse-edge of Kent and so in order to go anywhere interesting or see anyone who did not live there, in practice, I needed a train.  If I did not want to be accompanied by my parents that is. 

            I was quite tempted to start driving at age 17.  I got a provisional licence as soon as I could but perhaps wisely, my parents would not let me drive their cars and a year or so later I left home and moved to London to go to University anyway, and thus never needed to drive.  Relations who live in the country have since told me with a punishing regularity how important driving will be to me if ever I leave London.  And they are probably right.  And now that I have a PhD and am over 25 my insurance premiums will be less than once they were (apparently Drs get a discount.  Clearly they have not seen my friends from ICSM on a night out).  And I live somewhere where there is off-street parking, so not only would the insurance for that be cheaper but the inconvenience of it being broken in to or nicked would somewhat reduced. 

            So there is no longer anything to stop me.  The expectation up to now was that as soon as my PhD was over and I got a decently-paying job I would get a car.  I might have to save a bit: I cannot fit into a Smart car even if I really wanted to and a g-wiz looks to me like a self-opening sardine tin that will not survive an altercation with a cyclist, let alone anything else.  A nice little Volvo or something would work though, I thought.  So, only a matter of time. 

In the mean time I was offered lifts for things.  Clearly the expected standard of my conversation outweighed the palpable decrease in fuel economy that resulted from carting a man well over six feet tall about, around and outside the capital.  I was never sure whether this balance for my hosts ever came off, but I never noticed a problem.  What I did notice however, was how long journeys took. 

A few times I was driven from North London (near Enfield) to West London (near Maida vale).  The route usd the M25 and lasted no longer than any other as far as I could see.  But it consistently took comfortably more than an hour and a half.  Sometimes two hours.  The Piccadilly line from Oakwood, changing at Piccadilly Circus and the Bakerloo line to Maida Vale would take an hour at most, in fact it can be done in 47 minutes according to the TFL website.  If you are a Londoner, you may scoff at TFL’s estimates of journey times.  For those not so initiated, it is rather like the probability of getting speeding points if you are driving an old mini in a 50 miles an hour speed limit zone: they are more something to aspire to than to expect.  However more than occasionally they do turn out to be true.  (TFL estimates that is, not furious Clarksons in dated small cars breaking the speed limit.).  I thought little of it after that – just a quirk of those roads perhaps. 

But more recently (last year) I was offered a regular lift to my weekly riding lesson in Surrey.  The plan was for a pick-up just near Vauxhall and a drive down through a combination of motorways, A-roads and country lanes.  It seemed a sensible route.  I never really went to check this route but reasoning that the driver herself did not want to spend more time in traffic than she had to, and basing it on the pace of car journeys driven by my parents and so on, it all seemed normal.  There was a week when my regular lift was not there though.  I had taken myself to Vauxhall, which was always slightly inconvenient but doable, but she did not turn up.  Ten minutes or so later we exchanged texts to the effect that she was ill and not coming.  Oh well, I will get the train, I thought.  So, I got the tube to Victoria and got the train down, got a cab at the other end and made it to the yard in rather less time than it would have taken for the car journey over all.  I also got the cab-and-train combination on the way back.  I did not analyse this at the time, but later realised that if getting the train took half the time and half the fuss, and half the cost (no tube journey to Vauxhall) meant there was little competition between the two.  Also, the giver of said lifts and I ran out of things to say to one another rather rapidly and so a change was welcome on those grounds too.

Most recently, I was offered an interview for a job in Exeter.  At the time of writing I have yet to make the journey, but looking up the trains, it seems that the railway journey will take 2h24 from Paddington.  Add half an hour for me to get to Paddington and what I am assured is a ten minutes walk from St David’s station at the other end and we have a round three hours for the journey.  The AA route planner judges the best road route to be along the M4, loop around Bristol and then take the M5 down to Exeter.  Another sensible-sounding route.  Doubtless the M3 to Southampton and then a sojourn along the south coast would be a pleasing path, but I did ask for the quickest one and clearly that is not it.  The quickest route by road appears to be 3h32’, a full half an hour longer than the railway one.  Not accounting for lavatory stops and the tractor in front of you of course.  This journey does also rely upon an average speed of 54 mph.  The cheaper half of the train journey costs £0.06/mile with an average speed of £76mph, based on a journey of 193.5 miles.

With these examples, one may wonder how the car has ever been useful.  And clearly it has been and still is.  Although train journeys are increasing in number—the tube now carries 1,000 million journeys every year, which it did not ten years ago—so are the number of cars on the road.  However, cars are also coming under increasing fire for their environmental impact.  I am not sure what impact this aspect has for many 17 years olds who are talking their driving test but something one would expect them to say would be that driving will give them a freedom to travel.  This freedom is not free though, as we know from a back-of-an-envelope calculation of the cost of running a car for a teenage male who has just passed his test.  More a case of flexibility than freedom, perhaps.

You may have noticed earlier I sneaked in that I had used a cab on some journeys and that said journey was much quicker than a car alone would have been.  Clearly I would be disqualified had this been a Top Gear challenge, but it was not.  What the cab did do though, was save me from needing to walk.  That part of the journey would have taken me 40 minutes rather than the 10 it took in a cab.  And perhaps that is the point: cars are quick if they prevent one from needing to walk, but they are slow when compared to railway travel.  And slow up against railway travel in Britain?!  That is a poor showing.  Just imagine when the slow but sure improvement in railway infrastructure means fast trains that are fast over all of the main lines in Britain.  It will leave the car standing.

A fatal mistake

A piece of writing, from about 10 years ago.  Not sure why I wrote it but it is fun, if short.

"What is this I see before me?  Servant, what is this?  Some kind of Joke, perhaps?"
"I think not, my good man."  The voice came.  Quiet, rather like it does in those cheap films where the villain -- accompanied by some assumingly frightening music -- appears from the dark shadows, looking slightly damp, although masterful in his criminal wisdom.  Except, or course, for the fatal mistake.

        The fatal mistake this time, however, was the fact that our damp arch-enemy was attired with a rather floppy pink carnation in his Saville Row trilby.  Instead of dying horribly, our hero merely pissed himself with laughter, unable as he was to call his forever absent servant to fetch a vessel in which to relieve himself.  Such is life, not.

Deletion Therapy

 The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here:  http://felixonline.co.uk/comment/1358/flimsy-facebook-friends/

Deleting people is a growing form of therapy. Perhaps happily, this is not the latest jargon for serial–killing, but a synonym for a re-appraisal of ‘Facebook friends’ – those people you like or love, but also those people you have to put up with commenting on status updates when you would rather they did not, or who have married and not so much as told you, even after the event. If those two categories are indistinguishable for you…oh dear.

         The fact that we use the word ‘Facebook’ as an adjective for something like friendship instantly devalues it.  Think of all those films in which friendship is a strong theme: The Dam Busters, Peter’s Friends, Bridge over the River Kwai. Quite apart from their being from the wrong age, the idea that the characters could be described as something so flimsy as ‘Facebook friends’ seems an almost perverse comparison. 

That is not to say I do not use or that I dislike Facebook ­– it is good fun. Though I must admit unless you are careful (or paranoid) about your settings, it is a way for everyone you have ever met to catch up with you.

         Problem 1 with the system is the point at which one ‘adds’ a friend. How many times have you added someone via your phone after a bottle of wine and have never really met or spoken to them since? This is also serious factor in problem 2: at what point do you remove someone? In real life both of these seem far easier: if you want to talk to someone and spend time with someone, you do. If you do not, you do not. Not deleting someone because you might want to talk to them or know them has some credence, but no more than keeping something expensive that you do not have an immediate use for but do not want to have to replace. 

         Having said that, removing someone and even blocking them can be a punishment: deletion is referred to by many as the ultimate smack–down. Fair enough, but if someone deleted me and I found myself unable recall whom they were, smack–down it would not be. However, deleting someone you see regularly is dangerous. I was once deleted by a (now ex–) colleague who had not bothered to check whom she was deleting. The awkwardness on her part was delicious, though no apology was forthcoming. I have not re–added her, nor have I accepted a friend request from her since, needless to say.

         I suppose one could restrict Facebook friendships only to those one is in regular contact with. But what would be the point of that?—one sees them regularly anyway I do know people who use Facebook only for the opposite reason – for people they never see frequently because they are overseas. Seems sensible, though if you are in different time zones and doing different things, communication for anything more than correspondence chess seems as unlikely as it is unworkable.

         For myself, I use it for a mixture of these two reasons, and much else in between, as do most of my ‘Facebook’ friends. In practice this is rather like having my friends, school friends, ex–girlfreinds, drinking pals, and my mother in the same room, with social etiquette preventing anyone from introducing themselves to anyone else. Just putting that list together has made me more concerned. The sum total is that I cannot say what I think at any given time, though who of us can, but I can get in touch with virtually anyone of my acquaintances. Well, unless I have deleted them for not knowing what not to say at parties, that is.  

Referenda or Referendums? You decide...

Spiffing – another aggressive simpleton sticking their ignorant oar in.  A deep breath and a focussed but alienated mind tries to make the best of it.  In a world ruled by such overbearing non-entities that is about all one can do.  Or is it?

Feedback is an awkward business at the best of times.  Plenty of people, even professionals of a variety of kinds, interpret this as giving someone a list of mistakes in something they did.  One could argue that objectively, those are the thing(s) that need changing.  Why would we not just be happy with that?  Well, first, giving someone a list of their mistakes, even if they are one of the few freaks who actually want that, is at best a muted perspective.  In anything but the shortest effort, what has been done well, or at best what should be left alone, is not known to the subject.

Sadly, to those the feedback is being given frequently do not help the situation.  I have heard plenty of supposedly intelligent people mis-read balanced and insightful feedback, deliberately or otherwise.  Just as frequently they are someone who lays claim to knowing about something and has an accompanying obnoxious self-confidence that is fragile in a way that attracts the cruel (enter the commentator, stage left).   They are the majority of those who think that because something in what they did was good, that it should be expanded or somehow focussed upon beyond what it was.  Not only is that unlikely to make the good thing better—a moment’s thought would tell us it will make it manifestly worse—but it does nothing for the things that do need to be improved upon.  Thus, this giving of feedback does little to improve the situation.  Perhaps what needs to happen is that the Observer needs to relay feedback that is no more objective than the Observed can handle.  And if the sub-editor has changed those capital ‘O’s to lower-case ones, can they change them back please.  And no, do not delete that sentence from the copy, either.

And that is what I am getting at.  In case you are not aware of the process—why should you be—journalists, commentators, columnists, writers and critics churn out (sorry, ‘lovingly construct’) prose for your delectation.  This text, called ‘copy’, is sent to a publication and it is then read by section editors and sub-editors.  The former is there to decide whether or not the piece will see the light of day, the latter is there to correct typographical errors, and if they are a copy-editor as well, make it fit into the layout the (section) editor has specified.  Nice and easy? 

Well, it can be.  And at other times it cannot.  Giles Coren, a Food critic in The Times, once ranted about the sub-editing of his work when a letter ‘a’ was removed from the final sentence of a review he wrote.  Reading that last sentence, it is not hard to see his point (http://order-order.com/2008/07/23/sub-standard).  Trouble is, such subtleties are rather eclipsed by another Evil.  And it is an evil with a capital ‘E’. 

I suppose at this point I should rant about the misuse of English.  The sheer assininity of people too stupid or lazy or charmless to pick up a dictionary or even use MS spell-check.  Sadly, the software is mis-named: if it followed the rules of grammar, or even just meaning, it would be called ‘spelling-check’, because that is what it is, something that checks spellings.  Not something that checks spells.  There are endless rants one could have about people who say ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’ when they mean ‘me’ and ‘you’, and writing ‘which’ when what they mean is ‘that’.  The sharpest rants are reserved for the clearest evidence of illiteracy of all: writing ‘your’ when they mean ‘you’re’.  All such rants would be ‘right’.  At least in as far as we speak English now they would be – and that of course is the defence that many leap upon to justify their mistakes: “English is a developing language, you can’t stop it evolving”.  No, love, we cannot, however we can understand that ‘might of’ sounds lazy, childish and ignorant, where ‘might have’ is actually clear, is understood, and is what you mean. 

But I am not going to rant.  People make mistakes, and if you give them feedback and insodoing are more objective than they are, they will fail to understand you.  And if the ‘mistake’ is a deliberate one to get a subtle point across, and it gets missed out, who knows what might happen.  I will stop here, simply because if the copy-editor who is trying to fit this into the layout cannot do so, you will not read this sentence.  

A Woman I met on the train

It was fairly inevitable I suppose.  The train was not that busy but not having perfected, or employed, a kind of menacing force-field around me, someone was bound to sit on the other side of the table.  It was a table after all, and as much as I insist on facing the rear (“you should always have your back to the engine” Audrey fforbes-Hamilton would say), there are just as many or more who prefer to face the front and thus this is a plumb seat.  And she got it. 

            She sat down, faffed as people do when they sit down in railway carriages, fiddled with the newspaper sections she had and the plastic bag they were in.  She set down a drink on the table.  No food though, so we were spared that.  She has unconvincingly-fake-tanned skin on her face, with a foundation that neither covered it, nor matched it, nor suited her.  Her face was adorned by synthetically coloured hair that was as obvious as the vertical wrinkles on her upper lip, spaced a couple of millimetres apart, that are only possessed of women who have smoked regularly in young adulthood but given up later on; we see her now less than a decade before the modern answer to middle age.  After reading the free London newspaper that is only ever read out of boredom or by fools who wish to look intellectual, she opened her plastic quarter-bottle of cheap new-world white wine, and proceeded to drink it out of a plastic water cup that looked as though it had been taken from a water cooler. 

But.

This was unselfconsciously done.  The poured cups were not filled to the brim, she was not drinking it this way simply to avoid drinking it out of the bottle, this is how she liked it.  By this time she had moved on to reading the travel section of a Sunday broadsheet, and cracked open the reading glasses.  The combination of this and the time since, had settled her.  This was not to last however, and the colour supplement was replaced by an A5 catalogue from a budget supermarket from which she proceeded to tear a selection of pages.  These were to keep rather than to throw away one imagined.  They were recipes the pictures of which seemed to consist predominantly of green salad vegetables, and sweet cakes.  Not cakes merely for tea, but those that could only involve children.  Young children?  How would that work for a woman in her mid-40s? 

Of course.  Her lack of bright pastel colours had failed to alert me sooner.  Her wedding band and engagement ring were a pleasant silver, with the latter containing a single stone.  Tasteful, both of them.  Clean, tidy hands, but not lazy ones.  The care and attention was undoubtedly the result of the new lease of life afforded by hormone replacement therapy that somehow unaccountably took years off her.  That is how a woman in her mid-40s happened to be baking cakes for her otherwise unborn grandchildren on a train to Lingfield in late spring.

We never spoke a word of course.  This is the south of England, a place where one of the last bastions of what was once a much more ‘correct’ social structure is still observed.  Of course it exists now for more and different reasons than once it did.  First, it is easier not to talk than to talk.  Second, third, fourth and fifth, we have smart-phones and laptops and books and newspapers to busy ourselves on railway journeys.  And so the silence has lived on; it is as silent as ever it was, but it survives because it has evolved.  Other privacy has vanished of course.  Health records, how much money one has and where one has been and what has been done are far more readily available and they ever were, I feel sure.  The idea of privacy has changed out of all recognition.  Many of the manifestations of it in days of olde have disappeared.  Of course servants ate in the Servants’ hall and this was tucked away at the bottom of the house or right at the top.  How else were the staff to be given any privacy?  Of course their lot was not palatial – but surely no one was expecting that.  Rather as now, the lot of a Polish immigrant who works on building sites on the minimum wage is not palatial.  And he does not, as they did not, scurry.  Servants do not scurry.  Good ones at least do not.  Why would they? 

Oddly though, this structure also provided for the privacy of the above-stairs protagonists.  They do not have to eat in front of the staff, any more than the other way around.  I wonder how many would dissent from that now.  Even on a railway carriage: no one wants to eat ad hoc on a train.  We do because we are hungry or bored or disorganised but a choice between that and even the buffet car—for the time they are left on the network—is not a hard one to make, even for the uninitiated. 

But neither of us ate so no indignity could befall us, nor could any snobbery.  

Yo say what, Mo-Pho?

I want more wireless.  It is since getting a not-a-phone-iPod that the frustration has boiled so it is only in the last six months that I have really noticed this.  Having had a smartphone for two years had almost disguised the need for it.   

            In many ways I like the Touch, it does a variety of things my little old nano could never have done.  Typically for a computer-update, it also does a lot of stuff I never really thought nor cared about.  But now I can do these things, I do, and I think they are quite fun and only slightly procrastination-making.  I have not yet given in to the temptation of Angry Birds, however. 

            For those who do not know, the Touch does everything an iPhone does except be a phone.  Thus if I want to do anything useful, or even useless (Check-in on facebook) It has that nice large screen which is completely impossible to type accurately and meaningfully on (“these hands were absolutely built to play Rachmaninoff, darling”) but has plenty of space for music and whatever other dross I want to put on there.  The camera is a murky and basically an option-less affair but it is another feature and it does alright if you want to send a blurry photo to facebook that needs to be rotated through 90° by the viewer. 

            It does make one wonder what is to happen next though.  Where can the iPod Touch go next?  Apple might argue that it is one of many products that fits into a market that demands a variety of hand-held devices.  Despite Apple’s success, sadly, it has yet to gain supremacy of the smartphone market—that goes to Blackberry, at least in numbers.  In fact there are now estimates to suggest that the 8520 curve is a better selling phone in Britain, than any iPhone.  One thing the iPhone can do that the BB cannot however is a check-in on facebook.  Thus, the option is not so much an indicator of where you are, but which instrument you use.  However the tussle for first and second position is not over yet.  Other contenders seem unlikely for the time being though, with Android—the second and much more successful incarnation of the rather flat Windows Mobile—in third, and Nokia and Samsung with their efforts languishing below this. 

            So short of a shift in the market that I as one consumer cannot elicit, where do I go?  Internet on telephones—smartphones or not—is finding it hard to advance.  It feels pretty indistinguishable from what it was on computers ten years ago when broadband was just starting to fall into the mainstream, i.e. was still a bit crap, and websites were designed for 800x600 resolution as a maximum.  This was not a happy time, let me tell you in case you were not there.  Perhaps it will be like Africa.  Here there is a fast-growing market in smartphone use (Digital Africa, J. M. Ledgard, Intelligent Life, Spring 2011) on which they use any and all websites on the tiny screen and get on with it, to a fashion.  In the West, we use websites that are designed for it, or applications that avoid the need for websites altogether. 

            Whatever happens, the zeitgeist is very much with this movement.  Six continents demand it—wireless on Antarctica is just hassle, trust me—and yet it fails to emerge.  If you walk around with an iPod Touch and want wireless, such oases are few and far between.  This is the thing: there is no point in someone providing it because then you well spend the whole time chatting or doing or spending something or someone else.  And you can probably do that on your phone anyway.  If you have the right phone, that is...