Pole Position

There was a time when Britain was literally the most powerful country on earth. We ruled the waves through a combination of relentless administration and brutal suppression. Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times. Since the mid twentieth century, the British empire has gradually been dismantled and Britain has tended more towards its place in the world as a country of middling global significance.
Of course, there are many in this country who view the loss of empire with great regret: seeming to believe that we as a nation have a right to lord it over others and plunder their resources because, well because we used to. There can't really be any other justification for it than that. Unless of course you are a racist. It is very likely that the Nazi appropriation of many features of the British empire (concentration camps, a belief in racial superiority, etc.) was one of the major influences on the change in policy towards empire in the later half of the twentieth century. Once the Nazis had demonstrated that the logical conclusion of the mindset that justified empire was morally and ethically repulsive, there was no real hope for it. So why do so many people still cling to it as something to be remembered fondly? It's all about prestige.
The other day, bonkers-rich-man-who-must-have-the-biggest-carbon-footprint-in-the-world, Bernie Ecclestone suggested that there be one of his grand prix races in the centre of London. Instantly myriad talking heads were on hand to blather on about how great this would be and how great it would be for London. The latter is where they're wrong: it would be great for Britain, but London doesn't really need such gimmicks. Through a combination of factors, London has managed to retain its position as a truly world class city. World class cities don't need gimmicky sporting events, certainly not any new ones, and certainly not ones that will most likely require a change in the law. When it needed it, London invented the modern marathon, we've got the Olympics (for better or worse - probably better on balance), but a city centre grand prix just feels a bit gimmicky, a bit cheap. I know that grand prix are anything but cheap - they are largely the preserve of the tasteless rich - but new grand prix are for countries that have more money than cultural heritage or are really keen for the world to forget that their governments are illegitimate thugs. Britain is none of the above, so it just feels a bit desperate to be considering pandering to such a spectacle in one of the world's great cities.
As a nation that desires prestige, we should be looking to big events to demonstrate that we're still capable of the sort of organisation that in the past allowed us to brutally suppress a fifth of the world's population. As a nation, we should also look to promote cities other than London, cities that actually need promotion. Have a grand prix round the centre of Birmingham, or round spaghetti junction, that would probably be more exciting. Bernie Ecclestone wouldn't be interested in this though, as it wouldn't have London's famous landmarks as it's backdrop. However, none of these landmarks needs a fast car driving in front of it to make it a destination, so London will gain nothing from such an event but traffic chaos. The Olympics have already proven that major sporting events do not add tourist numbers to London, as people not going to the event who might otherwise have visited have stayed away. If we are to have such an event in a British city, make it a city whose landmarks will benefit from being a backdrop. When tourists flock to visit the famous Bullring chicane, then we might actually have done something useful about Britain's prestige.
I guess even then I'm a bit meh about showing off our country by promoting a nearly redundant technology. This is fairly typical of the way in which this country has not helped itself to avoid decline: clinging on to the prestige of the past blinds us to the possibilities of the future. Why don't we have an electric car race around a city, in an elevated transparent tunnel - 360 degree racing. That would be genuinely exiting, progressive and wouldn't stop the city from functioning. Then we wouldn't be 'the country with the budget San Marino', we'd be the country with the race of the future. Prestige is what you make it, not what you borrow from mental old rich people.

Prorata

So it occurred to me in the gym last night that the gym is one of the greatest signifiers of 21st century first world decadence. It is an embarrassing fact that we have places to go where we burn off the excess food we have eaten so that we do not look as outwardly greedy as we actually are. This all came to me after I noticed someone had left a bottle of Original Source lime shower gel in the shower. The bottle was almost empty, but there was probably enough left in it for me to have a shower. Clearly it's owner could not be bothered with the hassle of carrying it round just for one more shower. Now, as the label clearly states, 40 limes go into making one bottle of Original Source, meaning that whoever bought that bottle wasn't fussed about the last lime or so. Somewhere in the world a child has rickets for want of a lime. Is Original Source the most decadent shower gel we can buy, not because it is particularly expensive, but because it uses ridiculous amounts of raw materials that would otherwise be food? I'm sure Original Source is not the most decadent shower gel but it illustrates my point more clearly than many more decadent washing products.
Statistical scientists recently calculated that the impact of feeding all the obese people in the world is the equivalent to feeding 1 billion extra non-obese people. Whilst some might see this as just an excuse to have another go at fat people, I see it as a new approach to Malthusian statistics. Whilst we are all worrying about our carbon footprint, we have apparently no concern about what consequences our consumption has for the ability of others to live comfortable lives. Surely, if we can calculate how much of iithe earth's resources obese people use up we can also calculate a sustainability mean: an average of consumption that each person currently alive would be allowed if the world's (sustainable) resources were shared out equally. Surely it could then easily become a middle class aspiration to consume below the mean.
Obviously for it to be simple and measurable, we would need to create a unit of consumption, but this would be easy enough, we could just create a grain equivalent. It would not work in same manner as carbon trading, as there is nothing essentially to trade. Your grainscore is simply a positive of negative measure of your consumption against the mean. This does mean that unlike carbon trading, the wealthy cannot buy off their guilt. Equally, as it is not necessarily tied to monetary wealth, it cannot be seen necessarily as a wealth redistribution. However, it could be used for a form of resource redistribution, tax rates could be based on annual grainscore indexes rather than income or out of date house prices, with a portion of the tax levied going to international development budgets targeted at redistributing resources.
Obviously I can see a number of flaws in this instantly, most worryingly that it could encourage over-farming, or unethical land/animal management. However if the unit of grain is set at a sustainable level, producing more of a commodity for the land available would count against the producer's grainstore balance. In this way profit is not punished but profiteering is. Such issues could be ironed out, indeed the problems presented by resolving them may provide many resource solutions that had not been considered before.
The other obviously bloated question is why would anyone bother with an index of guilt that isn't obligatory. The answer to this one is easy: in the 'first world', people love that kind of thing. They can't get enough of measuring their guilt, and when they finally do, they try and impose it on everyone else. Calculating your carbon footprint has gone from being a middle class Sunday afternoon guilt generation exercise to an essential part of the commercial strategy of every major multinational. There's nothing to say that calculating your grainscore can't do the same. The world is facing a large number of issues around resource scarcity, and we need to raise awareness these issues. If something like a grainscore will start a debate, well that's a start.

Preterition

When I was a kid my mum used to buy me shoes that I would grow into. If, over the year, my feet failed to grow their predicted amount, the resulting toe vacuum would cause unsightly front shoe collapse. Why then, as an adult would anyone buy shoes with space deliberately built in?
You would think such examples as these would fill me with righteous indignation or contempt, but they just sadden me. They make me realise that you can't really try on a pair of these kind of shoes properly, as when you get to the bit where you pinch the toe and say "uh yeah, that's my toe there" can never happen. Unless you have the oddest shaped feet in the world, you're only ever going to be approximating a fitting of a pair of shoes like these. Just one more reason never to buy them. 

Passive

Most of my observations about modern male footwear concern shoes that have probably been actively chosen. However, there are many men out there who don't really chose their shoes, they simply allow them to happen. As a child I was like this: knowing I wouldn't be allowed the shoes I wanted (which to be fair to my mum were generally overpriced trainers), I would settle on the first pair of shoes that were not ugly with a firm intention to do serious damage to them at the earliest opportunity. I was only weened off this abusive relationship by my first pair of DMs (incidentally the first pair of shoes I bought for myself), which probably had some form of accelerated wear applied to them initially, but subsequently required much care and attention to preserve their hard-worn appearance. Perhaps some men just accept their ugly shoes and then form a sort of grudgingly co-dependent relationship, a sort of addiction that carries on into adulthood. This may explain why even grownup men appear reluctant to polish their ugly shoes.
There are some men however, who appear either blissfully ignorant of their nonchant* for bad footwear or fully accepting of it. Thus they drift into middle age compulsively buying and caring for shoes that are not the most ugly, but still pretty duff.
I snapped these prime examples just the other day. They are, in many ways an inoffensive pair of shoes, but that doesn't stop them being woefully ugly. The snub-nose, the nasty welded-on rubber sole and the casual lack of attention to detail that screams 'mass produced' all add up to making them an affront decent shoemaking. I guess, in their defence, they were probably cheap, but cheap shoes are a false economy. Well made, well maintained shoes last a dog's age. Fact.
I guess many people who wear shoes like these would say that they're not bothered that they don't look very nice, "I'm not at a fashion parade," they might say, or they may declare that the convenience of buying and owning one cheap pair of shoes at a time outweighs the cost implications. Having shown such little interest in personal appearance and sustainability, I wonder what else these people don't care about. Yes I am saying that a lack of care about your footwear may indicate that you have a generally sloppy and reprehensible approach to life, the planet and your fellow human beings. I'm saying shape up bad shoe people, the rest of us are carrying you no further.

*Nonchant - a subverted penchant; a persistent preference arrived at through a concerted lack of active decision making.

Patriarchaic

The other day MsP asked why Siri had to be female. I didn't say so at the time, because I'm easily distracted, but I imagine it is something to do with the fact that many men (if no longer the majority consumers of iPhones, I would be willing to guess still the majority producers) still see women as providing their 'support' role. Traditionally this 'support' role has meant feeding, clothing and organising the life of a man, so that he can do pretty much what he likes and designate it as important. Obviously the 'pretty much what he likes' bit was not quite so free and easy when jobs involved greater manual labour, but since the middle class emerged and the vast majority of jobs became devoid of any kind of manual labour, men have had to pretend that their 'work' is in some way special in order to sustain the system of surrogate mothering that they appear to expect from the opposite sex. I am not saying that men are alone in perpetuating their infantile state: too many women support it too, perhaps fearful that telling men to grow up will brand them as man-haters - or any of the other childish epithets men ascribe to people who don't let them get their own way. However trying to blame women for the failings of men is exactly the kind of feeble excuse men hide behind.
There appear to have been a number of articles and even books recently that stitch together isolated incidents of discrimination by women against men and some observations about the impact that increasing sexual equality has had on the areas of life that men used to be able to rely on (not having to wash up, not having to help with the children, not being prosecuted for beating their wives, etc.) in an attempt to show that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. So just to clarify, they're saying that a shift towards a slightly more equal society has led to discrimination against men. Although, reading between the lines I think they might just be whinging that taking a bit of responsibility for one's life and one's actions is hard. Didums. For want of a better phrase, the only response I can find is 'man up!' And I don't mean 'man up' in the sense of 'do something spectacularly dangerous and/or stupid and, if you survive, brag about it afterwards'.
Unfortunately the people presented as male role models are all too often the kinds of people who can only celebrate their success due to some spectacular gamble having paid off. With hindsight it is easy too see their recklessness as strategy because it paid off. The countless other people who have pursued such 'strategies' and failed/died in the process don't get to write history and so do not appear on our radar. Men have therefore assumed that recklessness is the key to a fulfilling life and for centuries have been playing a kind of Darwinian lottery based on this assumption. I'm not saying that we should live a life devoid of risk - life is a series of calculated risks - I am simply saying that the (largely male) attitude to measuring risk and return should be reconsidered. Financial products always state that past performance is no indicator of future performance, yet the men who run those products take the exact opposite approach to risk: considering that a risk that has paid off in the past must therefore do so again, and to think otherwise would be in some way 'un-manly'. The implicit complaint is that mitigating risk by exercising due caution is boring. The only response to this I can think of is 'grow up'.
This is, of course, unlikely. Every generation since X has systematically failed to grow up, hence why we spend most of our spare time at festivals, or in the pub, or playing computer games, or at least we would if our responsibilities didn't get in the way. Many men tend to associate such responsibilities with their partners, and so the lingua franca of such men when away from their partners becomes utterly objectionable. Phrases such as "night off from the missus" or "free pass" portray the other (usually female) partner as undesirable and reinforce the gender roles as a direct male/female child/parent dichotomy. This is not healthy, either for the relationship or the general wellbeing of society. It creates schizophrenic behavior in that these infantile men, who effectively only behave when with their wife/mother substitute, yearn to get away and misbehave.
As usual, I am not solely an impartial observer of this condition: I have on occasion been guilty of using MsP as a kind of pressure valve for my worst excesses, knowing that her reason will eventually assert itself. By doing so, I inevitably paint her as the 'boring' one, creating resentment on her part and adding an element of dysfunction into our relationship. I am genuinely trying to mitigate this behavior by setting my own boundaries and sticking to them. Most importantly, I need to remember that this doesn't make me boring. Just an adult.

Pantone

OK so it seems like the good weather is bringing out a fine selection of bad footwear. Perhaps whilst groping around in the backs of their wardrobe for their summer trousers, people are finding long forgotten pairs of shoes and thinking 'why haven't I been wearing these recently?'
Here are some possible reasons:
1. You sobered up.
2. You lost your job as an extra in Babylon 5.
3. They were in the back of the wardrobe when you moved in.
4. Your mother got them for you (from her job as an extra in Babylon 5).
5. It was winter and you thought one-tone ugly pointy shoes would be more appropriate.

I want it to be understood that I am in no way anti two-tone footwear, indeed I own two pairs of two-tone brogues myself. However, these are the detail jeans of two-tone footwear, i.e. naff and much cheaper looking than they actually were. I image the poor fool that bought these paid a reasonable amount of cash, thinking being on-trend was worth the money. I'd be willing to bet he'd have got a decent pair of Loakes* for about half the price. I guess then though his shoes wouldn't have been so on-trend**, they'd have been timeless and stylish.

*Other brands of classic leather shoe are available.
**The trend in question here apparently being the clown-assassin look.

Poultry

I seem to spend much of my time in this blog defining what I'm not and what I don't do. Well here I go again: I am definitely not a food blogger.
There are a number of reasons for this, but most of them come back to my general laziness. This does not mean I am not in to food. On the contrary, when discussing my plans for the weekend with a colleague, he pointed out that my spare time revolves around the acquisition and consumption of food. My response was that one's spare time should revolve around food and light entertainment, what else is there?
I guess if I take last weekend as an example, there was quite a lot of food. After the gym on Friday night I went for steak with some friends. After rising late on Saturday, MsP and I tried a new place for brunch (Nude Espresso - very good), and got some bagels from the all night bagel shop, before going to Maltby Street Market. Really we were too late for the market, but we still managed to get chopped liver from Monty's Deli and a chicken from The Butchery. This latter was quite important for me as I've been looking for a good butcher for the last six months, and The Butchery is a bloody good butcher. They were closing when I got there, but I saw enough of their meat to know I'm going back. As we'd missed most of Maltby Street, we headed over to Borough Market to get the vegetables and bread. We roasted the chicken that very night and ate it with rice and a couple of top notch salads that are MsP's specialty (salads, gravy and risotto - I don't even try). The next day after a lunch from the Ribman at the Brick Lane Sunday food market, I made stock from the chicken carcass, some of which I used in the Bolognese sauce I made for eating during the week (a Felicity Cloake/Elizabeth David hybrid since you ask). We finished the weekend off with cold chicken, more excellent salads and 30 Rock. See: food and light entertainment.
OK, so last weekend was an extreme example, but I aim for my weekends to be like that as often as possible. What I love is that I can. This is at least partly due to the fact that I live in a large city that has in recent years gone food crazy, but it is also due partly to how this food craziness manifests itself. As with everything else these days it revolves around the internet and the technologies we use on the internet. I found out about two of the places I bought food from last weekend from Twitter and a third from a food blog.
When I was waiting tables in a hotel as a student in the days before cameraphones, someone told the chef that a diner had taken a photo of his food. The chef's response was "what an idiot, why'd he do that" (I am fairly certain that he used expletives, but as I can't clearly remember how, I have omitted them). To be fair this response was largely because the chef thought the food he was serving that evening was not worth photographing and he was right. However, the fact that anyone would bother to remark upon the fact of a diner taking a photo of their food seems so alien to our current food landscape as to seem ridiculous. Indeed, I am almost surprised to get through a meal in a restaurant these days without someone photographing their food, and half the time it's someone at my table. Occasionally it's me.
Even though I engage in this form of culinary documentation from time to time, I'm not quite sure why. I guess it adds to the conversation when I see friends: "I saw you ate x at y." It could be seen as a sort of brag, as in "check what I'm eating," but it doesn't really work unless you are in some utterly unobtainable restaurant (El Bulli, or right now, Dabbous), and I simply don't know any people who get tables at such places. So I guess it's more a way of sharing joy about food. And that has to be a good thing. Good food should be joyful. I will always remember my first bite of the corn cob at the centre of my main course at Greens in San Francisco. MsP said my face lit up with a look that one only gets from wonderfully surprising food. It is only logical that given the ability, we share the peripheral details of such joy with friends, and through social networks we enable them to find the same food for themselves, even if it's not pinned down. I doubt that the current street-food bonanza would have been anywhere near as successful ten years ago, without Twitter to guide the punters in.
Really I guess that kind of casual food tweeting (instagramming, lockerzing or whatever) is a form of food blogging that requires much less of the time, effort and discernment needed to actually write a proper food blog. Not to mention money. I marvel at some of these bloggers. I mean I spend a fair portion of my disposable income on food, yet many of the serious food bloggers must spend several times what I do on food every month. They must be very well off, or make considerable sacrifices in other areas of their lives. Obviously, not all food bloggers are endlessly chasing the latest high-end restaurant week in week out, many write about the many alternative ways to avail oneself of good food, but all appear equally fanatical. I guess it's just a form of fanaticism that translates well to a blog, or perhaps it's just what I'm willing to read about.
Food can be as faddish as fashion: one day it's all cupcakes, the next it's macaroons (I'm told it's all Lameters right now) and the internet just exaggerates this by disseminating fad further and faster than was previously possible. At least it also means that we all get a chance (in theory at least) to enjoy these fads before they pass.