Protocol

A recent piece of research showed that people are very very conservative when it comes to weddings and notably wedding proposals. I would have found this surprising were I not married myself, but as I am, I am only too aware of the fairly rigid ideas a surprising number of people hold on the whole process.
Firstly there was the fact that Ms P proposed to me. This, according to the survey and the reactions of many people is incomprehensible. "But it's not a leap year," people would say, baffled as to how else this could happen. To be honest, until we started telling people, I hadn't thought that there was anything odd about this apparently transgressive flouting of tradition. Much more was to come: there is always someone who is going to be flabbergasted that you have failed to incorporate into your wedding some apparently indispensable custom. I don't think our wedding was particularly 'whacky', but it managed to confuse many people with its myriad breaks with perceived tradition.
I have been careful to say 'perceived', as tradition is really not as rigid as people like to think. Christmas is a very good example of this. Almost every single aspect of what is popularly defined as Christmas tradition is usually less than 100 years old and largely no older than 150 years. Everyone knows that the Christmas tree was brought to Britain by Prince Albert in the 19th century, but that is a long established tradition compared to eating turkey, which no one would have considered doing before the 1950s. Neither are these things universal: ask any child anywhere how their Christmas presents arrive and you will find a startling amount of variation. This just serves to highlight the purpose of most traditions: they are personal or family habits that we find it comforting to repeat at certain times. Such 'family' habits are often repeated at national level, probably because they help us get comfortable with our rulers, but even national traditions are easily changed. Modern British Christmas tradition includes the queen's speech, but this has only been on television as long as the telly has been around, granted before then it was on the radio, but only for about 30 years.
I'm a big fan of some traditions: I think wearing a tie with a suit is a good tradition based on the fact that not doing so looks a bit shit*; I'm all for Speaker's Corner and Black Rod and MPs not addressing each other directly, because such traditions preserve the conceptual framework of our democracy; I'm quite into pageantry in general, as it gives a framework to national community and is generally harmless. Many of the things associated with the official duties of the royal family have both a high amount pageantry and a large amount of tradition associated with them, mainly because if they didn't we'd all be wondering what the point of the royal family is. However, just because the royal family follow many arcane traditions doesn't mean the rest of us should. In the 19th century, the king of Thailand decided he wanted to take mistresses openly, and being the king, he just got on with it. Men in the Thai aristocracy thought that this was rather a smart idea and copied him. Middle class Thai men decided they wanted in on the act, but they couldn't afford to keep mistresses, so they just took prostitutes. Thus prostitution became normalised in Thailand, allowing thousands of creepy European men to justify their exploitation of Thai women because "it's tradition."
Tradition is not and never should be an excuse for unacceptable behaviour: no one ever says they're racist because it's tradition, but they might defend racist traditions. Traditions do not have to have a rationale, they do not have to be rational, but they should be essentially harmless. Most importantly in my view, traditions should never be compulsory and they are certainly not universal. What I find most astonishing is that a number of 'traditions' persist well into the 21st century, long after we would assume they'd have passed into obscurity. Turn on the television at this time of year and you'll see loads of mildly offensive adverts in which some poor woman works herself to the bone whilst her ungrateful family sit around watching shit on the telly. I get angry at the lazy assumptions of the creatives who came up with these adverts, but maybe once again it's me who's the oddball. Maybe most families do consider such massive gender stereotyping to be the norm, or tradition. I do not deny that 'traditionally' it was the case that women did all of the domestic work in households, but that is only because 'traditionally' men were working down the mines for twelve hours a day. Given that one of those traditions is well and truly dead, I would expect the corresponding one to be as dead.
Of course now I'm drifting into tradition as societal norms, but unfortunately the two are deeply intertwined and often get confused. A lot of this comes back to image making, and the ideas we present to each other as a society. If we reinforce bad stereotypes and feed them back to ourselves as tradition, then we allow ourselves lazy and thoughtless excuses for poor behaviour. Equally, if we actively question the stereotypes we are presented with, we might arrive at a better set of traditions. Maybe if we saw more Christmas adverts where the family prepare Christmas dinner together, we might not find it so odd. Maybe if we saw any adverts/films/TV programs where a woman proposing was not presented as hilariously freakish, we might not get quite so hung up on some of the ridiculous wedding 'traditions' that people seem to care so much about.

* at least that is my opinion. You might be perfectly happy dressing like a used car salesman.

Parochial

One of my colleagues is a member of a Lewes bonfire society whose chosen guy this year was apparently Angela Merkel sat atop a shattered Acropolis, doing some sort of cross between a Usein lighting bolt and a Nazi salute. This could be interpreted as exasperation with some of the most overexposed media images of the year, but I think that is possibly a little generous. In all likelihood this is a fine example of all that is insular, small minded and parochial about this great country of ours. It is a feeble piece of sixth form politics to think that Angela Merkel is singlehandedly responsible for the troubles that Greece currently finds itself in. Then again I guess it's hard to fit the overenthusiastic politicians and lawyers who drafted the Maastricht treaty, the legions of Greek politicians too full of the kudos of power to actually deal with political realities, the bankers hopped up on hubris who allowed the property bubble, all the people who bought property they couldn't afford with sub-prime mortgages and the tax-dodging Greek wealthy on top of a bonfire. So instead some of the good people of Lewes thought it might be easier to make an inaccurate political point and reinforce some fairly ugly stereotypes at the same time. Of course we shouldn't take any of this too seriously right? People just stick effigies of popular hate figures on bonfires because of how they are portrayed, not because they genuinely believe the portrayal, right?
Even if we assume that the highest intellectual standards are being applied to the casual demonisation of public figures we can't escape from the fact that such things reinforce negative stereotypes. One should always try to be aware of the consequences of one's actions, and that any nuance implied is likely to be lost on all but the most clued up observers. In a global society it worth thinking about the subtleties that are lost in translation. The song 'Gangnam Style' is a satirical dig at the ridiculousness of those who ape the elites of a district of Seoul, it is effectively the Korean version of a song ridiculing the cast of Made in Chelsea (except that would be pointless - they have a whole TV program in which to make themselves look utterly ridiculous). However it is likely that, as the song is untranslated, the majority of its 700 million YouTube viewers* watch it because of the man doing the funny dance. I guess there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this (and certainly Psy doesn't seem to mind), as it is light entertainment, but the fact that the point of the song is entirely lost on most of the people who watch the video is important. What if there had been something in the video that could have been misinterpreted in a negative way, what if the video had seemingly encouraged the abuse of horses? Doubtless there would then have been an outcry over the perceived encouragement of animal abuse, regardless of whether that encouragement was actual.
We live in a visual world where perception is everything and therefore it is our responsibility to make sure that every message we present is as clear and easily read as possible. With something like satire this is not so easy, as it relies implicitly on a decent amount of cultural and linguistic knowledge to be effective. However, that just means it is only truly great satire when not a single cultural or linguistic subtlety is misplaced. Making crass political points based on inaccurate generalisations based on prejudice is not satire, it is incitement.
I'm sure the people of Lewes would take me to task for being far too serious about something that is just a bit of fun and maybe they're right, but I can't help thinking that too many of the things we excuse as 'just a bit of fun' require that label as an excuse for their negative connotations. The bonfires of Lewes would be just as fun with historical or fictional demons atop them, without inciting needless and misguided hatred. Our society already has a surplus of that.

*obviously I am being simplistic. 700 million YouTube views does not translate to 700 million viewers. I assume (incorrectly) that everyone, like me, considers anything on YouTube worth watching only once.

Piles (part 1)

When we hear about the amount of money that we as a nation have lent to banks or the value of the total national debt, we struggle to comprehend the sums of money involved. This tends to have the effect of trivialising the amounts of money involved, they simply become conceptually small again, because in order to be able to deal with them we tend to remove the zeros. On top of this, when amounts of money can be related to us personally, we tend to concentrate solely (and understandably) on the part of the transaction that concerns us, rather than using our part of the transaction to contextualize the whole transaction. If we take a long haul flight, we might pay £850 (assuming it's not peak season), and our ticket will be one of 150 on that flight (150 x 850 = £127500), and if we add in some business class (20 x 2500 = £50000) and some first class (10 x 6000 = £60000) then we can pretty much visualise what a quarter of a million pounds looks like: like 180 people eating unfinished baby food, watching three month old films and breathing each other's recycled farts (obviously, some of them get more space to do this in than others). Once you fill the sky with these things, it becomes a very valuable place, but the sums of money involved quickly become incomprehensible again. If you look up at the sky and think 'two hundred and fifty thousand pounds (£250,000)' every time you spot an aeroplane, you'd lose count very quickly. This dissociation is both a symptom and a necessity of the systems of large scale capital: being in possession of large amounts of money obtained from the payments of a large number of people is only morally acceptable if we are entirely detached from the mass of humanity that lies behind the money.
Of course an amount of upscaling is required for large-scale economies to work, but the dislocation between the source of income and its output that this creates allows for inefficient distribution of the wealth generated. Indeed, as the systems and networks that the global economy relies on improve, it increasingly appears that the only reason for the traditional large scale corporate structures is to justify the payments of those at the top. The skills involved in the provision of any upscaled service cannot reside with one excessively remunerated person, so why do they get paid for making largely ineffectual decisions about 'direction', 'strategy' and other nebulous concepts? The only reason I can think is that they have persuaded us of the importance of what they do. In the past it may have been the case that the benefits of scale only came from behemoth companies with legions of superremunerated executives at the top dealing with their corporate affairs, but with the infrastructure that exists now this should no longer be the case. Smaller companies should be able to pool their specialities to form lose partnerships of common interest that would have the advantages of scale that large corporations currently do. Such networks could be formed and funded on a project by project basis. Obviously there are issues of joint liability that would need to be clearly defined at the start to avoid the sort of blame-shifting that can happen in large companies when something goes wrong, but the infrastructure required exists. So why isn't this happening? The main issue is one of perception: ask any young silicon valley/roundabout entrepreneur what their goal is and it will invariably be founded on an idea that they may one day be as unimaginably wealthy as the pioneers of the commercial computer technology: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Did you spot the odd one out? Mark Zuckerberg is not like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The latter two men found themselves at the head of multinational companies due to an overriding passion for their subject and after years of work. Mark Zuckerberg had one idea and almost instantly saw its potential to make him a lot of money as event software. There is no sense in which facebook was ever intended to bring benefit to humanity; Zuckerberg never had any of the early revolutionary zeal of Jobs or Gates, he wanted to fastrack to the executive boardroom. Sure, he made the early years like being at college, but that's because he was at college and so was his market. Zuckerberg unfortunately embodies the dreams of the people who could so easily change the way our society functions: at the first opportunity, sell out.
With the strange abstraction that comes from very large sums of money comes the assumption that, as we cannot really comprehend such things, they must be unimaginably good. Whilst we all dream of winning the lottery we will never move away from this flaw in our culture; whilst we believe that the only way to be truly happy is to have considerably more than everyone else, we will have a society where there are a sizeable minority with much more than everyone else. The only way to comprehend the big numbers is to think of the individual stories that make them up. Think of each of the people on the aeroplane and how each of them got there: the pensioners who have waited all their lives to make that trip; the young couple looking for a new life who have bought a ticket on credit and hoping their future will pay down the debt; the businessman chasing the dream of glamorous business travel. The stories quickly pile up and become overwhelming in themselves and we realise that it is money itself that allows us the separation from those who contribute to our wealth. The idea of owning slaves is reprehensible to almost everyone, yet many people have no problem putting a price on the value of another person if that transaction is indirect. The fact of money allows us to make a commodity out of anything without any associated guilt; it allows us to launder association and context, so that commodity may be sought from the ills of the world without any associated moral taint. I am not saying that money is the cause of all of the world's ills, but that it is the means by which we most easily allow ourselves to ignore them.
We don't need to burn all money and return wholesale to a barter economy, but maybe we should think about the true cost and value of the goods and services we buy. If we think about it as buying a segment of someone's life then maybe we'd be more concerned. Then again maybe we just don't care, maybe we're too selfish care, maybe we'd rather just think about all those people's lives as so many numbers.

Passing The Buck

Someone somewhere may well read this post and shake their head with exasperated condescension, or sigh at how naive I am to wish the world to be such a simple place. However, I am going to attempt to argue that just such people are very much part of the problem. But I am getting ahead of myself: first to set out my stall.
I had a little Twitter rant the other day about bond traders and their seemingly short sighted desire to cause a sovereign debt crisis. The argument being that by increasing the price of sovereign debt, they are increasing the chances of a sovereign debt crisis, which will mean they are less likely to see a return on their investments. Obviously, they won't lose out, as they will have bought credit default swaps to insure against a country going bust. And of course the price of those credit default swaps goes up the greater the risk is of a country going bust. Obviously, insurance companies have to price their products according to risk, so they get the credit ratings agencies to calculate the risk of a country going bust for them. The credit ratings agencies look at the amount of debt a country holds and what the bond traders are charging for that debt and decide on the risk of a default. So it is a self-perpetuating cycle, that amplifies the jitters of those involved into massive gains or losses, potentially ruining the economies of nations. Of course those involved in the process don't make massive losses, they have made sure that there is no chance of that. However there are losses and gains built into the system, so who pays for them? You do, you schmuck. Not only do your taxes go into paying back the money that your government has borrowed, but the money that was lent in the first place came from your pension scheme, or ISA, or other savings scheme. So you fund the system at both ends, yet the amount of your tax that gets spent on paying back bonds does not equate at all to the rate of return you will see on your investments. Obviously there is a need for companies to make a profit, but there seems to be a problem with the fact they can make a profit when the losses occur at both ends of the chain. It's odd that so much has been made of governments bailing out banks when government debt has been an essential part of the investment mix for years, quietly turning profits for financial institutions, and allowing a 'safe' investment vehicle for people nearing retirement. The current financial system needs sovereign debt to function properly, which cannot necessarily be a good thing. If we are replacing the welfare state with a system that relies at least partially on making money from government debt, what are we actually gaining? By 'we' I mean taxpayers, not the 'wealth creators' who profit from this situation and make sure that their money remains largely untaxed.
Anyway, the people who do profit from this system excuse themselves by stating that they didn't create the system, and that they are just reacting to market pressures. Brilliantly, they are instantly absolved of any responsibility, making it a classic victimless crime, except of course it isn't a crime. The significant lobbying power of the financial services industry ensures that time after time any legislation that may threaten their ability to exploit whatever market they chose is kicked into the long grass. The result is that it is only people who do not listen to the financial services industry at all who make new legislation, and because of the lack of dialogue, it is not very good legislation. This in turn fuels the view of those in financial services that politicians are not competent to regulate the system. In many ways of course they are right, our economic systems in their entirety are now so complex that economists struggle to explain them fully. It is easy for traders to understand the influences on their specific product, but as they have little concerns for the effects of that product beyond profit making, they cannot be considered to have a 'big picture' understanding. The economists who do look at the big picture can't agree on how it works, so how are we supposed to know what the effects of certain products are?
In such a climate, politicians can perhaps be forgiven for regulating the symptoms without any real understanding of the cause, but that doesn't mean they do any good by it. Self regulation would be much better if anyone had any enthusiasm for it, but they don't. The city's enthusiasm for self regulation is just a pretext for its enthusiasm for no regulation. You don't ask an alcoholic to look after your cellar.
So we are at a regulatory impasse: the only people capable of understanding the detail sufficiently have no interest in the big picture and the people whose concern is the big picture rely on others who only understand theory or poachers turned gamekeepers. I sometimes think that the solution might be arrived at if we all study economics, but I'm not sure: knowing the theory hasn't worked for anyone so far, so all of us knowing the theory is likely to just cause more confusion. Also, knowing the theory won't get us any closer to understanding the details, or understanding the relationship between the two. So we have to go one way or the other, either financial products must have clear definitions of their influence and impact if they are to be licenced, or they must only be allowed if they are simple enough for a politician to understand. And that's pretty simple.

Passage

I've reached an age where I am suitably embarrassed by how late in life* I was still enthralled by Star Wars. In that respect, I am possibly in the minority: Star Wars is a cornerstone of the contemporary cultural encyclopedia of many a man child, rather than something they were interested in as a kid. How else can you explain Vodafone considering Yoda to be a suitable brand ambassador?
Star Wars is a useful piece of rights-of-passage filmmaking that saw many a young person through the darkness of an 80s childhood. It taught us many useful adult lessons, not least about technology, which should be viewed as either:
a) polite yet totally ineffectual (C3P0),
b) belligerent and utterly incomprehensible (R2D2) or
c) functional but occasionally requiring a kick to fulfill its potential (Millennium Falcon).
Indeed a major lesson of the original trilogy is that efficient technology and organisations are to be feared, because it is impossible to be technologically and/or organizationally efficient without being evil. This is perhaps the most effective message that Lucas portrayed, indeed he is at least partially responsible for making this counter-cultural concept mainstream. Whilst we all consume goods from vast corporations at a rate unseen in human history, we get nervous and edgy when these corporations become too vast, and rightly so. The Microsofts and Apples of this world maintain their market dominance by methods not dissimilar from those of the Empire (minus the killing people bit). As a consumer of goods from these companies you are basically told to either subscribe to their system wholesale or not at all: protectionist strategies that even in the late 70s were viewed as undesirable and old fashioned. So, oddly, the technological universe can still be divided into the factions defined by Star Wars: those who are happy to be conform, to allow a single, faceless, homogeneous organisation to form their world view in exchange for technological efficiency, and those who are willing to accept a ramshackle technological landscape inhabited by myriad worldviews, personalities, races and cultures. I will not make judgment, but Star Wars clearly does.
Of course, it is not just (70s/80s) adult attitudes to technology that are presented, young Luke Skywalker has to deal with all the pains of growing up, from learning to operate his 'lightsaber' correctly, to fulfilling the oedipal cycle by killing his father (although he gets off with his sister, due to his mum being entirely absent from the picture). On the way he has to deal with the fact that adults lie to you if they think it's in your best interest, the knowledge that everything is not always as it seems and that to achieve anything you have to put in quite a lot of effort (and literally fight against yourself, etc etc).
Yes it's tough growing up, and Star Wars helped us get there. However, that doesn't mean we need to spend all of our adult lives eulogising it. Surely it should be like any other part of our childhood, which we remember fondly, but with an adult understanding of what's past. In that respect, surely the Walt Disney company taking over the franchise appears wholly fitting, they are specialists in children's filmmaking after all. If you find yourself in the position of being a grownup with genuine concerns over what will happen to the franchise next, you are either George Lucas, a Disney employee, a little bit immature or hopelessly nostalgic. If you're any of the last three, it's time to move on.
*about 24

Pret a Almond

So there's been a sort of anti-trend in the higher end of the men's shoe market for some time now. Whilst the man on the street has steadfastly refused to relinquish the pointy-toed shoe, the fashion industry has been urging us to look beyond the point. Their answer is invariably the 'almond', which is not rounded at the toe - that would be a conceptual leap too far - but kind of more rounded in the approach to the toe and generally shorter and more foot shaped (see example pictured).
So well done the fashion industry, well, a tempered well done. Most designers appear to be hedging their bets somewhat with at least one pair of (increasingly patent leather) sharp ended shoes. Also, as I've said before, the kids are way ahead of this particular curve (you won't see anyone under 21 wearing a pointy shoe unless they work in an estate agency), so none of it's particularly groundbreaking. Of course Prada continue to plough their own furrow with another collection of mind bendingly ugly men's footwear, but I'm sure they're not bothered: idiots will buy their shoes whatever they look like.
I'm drifting off message here, and the message is this: it may be that even my skeptic's brain has been softened by the sharper-toed shoe, as I find myself struggling with the almond. I look at them and think if I was wearing those, they'd be bound to lose their shape in the most unflattering way: they'd flatten out at in the middle, as if the front of my foot had deflated. I'd end up looking like I was wearing giant spades.
You see, my suspicion is always that makers of designer footwear are trying to work out just how much they can take the piss before people turn round and say "I'm not wearing that, it looks ridiculous." Right now, their gander must be up, as many many men have spent the last few years wandering the streets looking like they've borrowed their footwear from pantomime jesters. In these circumstances you can understand why designers might think they can get away with just about anything.
Of course there's every chance that I am just paranoid in my outlook and hopelessly conservative in my tastes, but so what, why shouldn't a shoe look like a shoe? In their defence, almond shoes do look more like a shoe (or at least a trainer - see the picture for reference Cons). Maybe I'll risk it an try a pair. Or maybe I'll just get another pair of classic brogues.

Portions

Day to day I find it quite hard to be positive about the future of the human race and the planet. I work in an office that has comprehensive recycling facilities and yet people still throw recyclables in the rubbish bin. It is a small thing, but this very fact is what makes me despair: if people cannot be bothered to do the small things that require absolutely no modification to their life beyond a little thought, what chance is there that they will even consider any kind of modification to their actual lifestyle?
Do people not let others off the train first before boarding because they have been asked to do so, or because they are so selfish that their pursuit of their own agenda must be to the detriment of everyone, including, quite often, themselves? Is humanity's greatest disadvantage shortsighted selfishness?
Selfishness itself has purpose. In crisis situations, selfishness is basically the survival instinct and is all we have to fall back on. In the fight for survival, selfishness is essential. However, daily life in the developed world is not a fight for survival, and if you think it is then you are probably the sort of macho twat who believes that they're actually living in a jungle. This is possibly not your fault, you might just be the sort of simpleton who mistakes what they see on television for guidance as to how they should live their lives. Or perhaps you think that the aggrandizement of selfish, thoughtless, macho behaviour by people who have failed to find a place in a developed society - let's call them Clarksons - is in some way clever. In other words, perhaps you are ten years old.
I am selfish, I like to get what I want, but I also like to think about how that can best be achieved. Quite often this will mean that the shortest route is not necessarily the quickest, or even that the quickest route is necessarily the best. Ultimately, the best option may be more complicated and involve more input from me, but if it's the best option, why shouldn't I take it. If I want to go to the local shops, the quickest option may appear to be to drive there, but if there's nowhere to park, then it could be more hassle than it's worth. Walking would not only potentially get me there faster, but would be better for me and the world in general. This may sound obvious as all hell, but it doesn't stop millions of such journeys a year being taken by car 'for convenience'. People's perception of what is most convenient is clouded by notions of luxury. Driving to the shops is luxurious because all driving is luxurious, this is what popular culture tells us; driving is an expression of our individuality, of freedom, of our wealth. Unfortunately, our measures of luxury have remained largely unchanged since the 18th century, when it was considered desirable to be morbidly obese. Furthermore, nothing in the fundamental structure of capitalist society is designed to work against this perception of what is desirable, indeed conspicuous, wasteful consumption and it's aggrandizement are fundamental to the 'growth' that is defined as a prerequisite for a successful capitalist society. Whilst it remains 'cool' to gain wealth and flaunt it, it will essentially remain 'cool' to be selfish.
As I've already said, I don't think there is anything wrong with being selfish per se, but if your selfishness is to the extreme detriment of others (i.e.you gain directly as a result of their loss), then I would say it's pretty bad. Of course people at the top of capitalist systems don't think of their accumulation of wealth as coming at the loss of others, they see it as gained fairly and squarely as a result of their genius. This is probably because they see wealth as an infinite resource that is only unavailable to others due to their lack of genius. This is to fundamentally misinterpret the nature of wealth, which, like any other resource is finite, and like any other resource, fiercely guarded by those with access to it. Not only do the rich tend to gravitate towards each other for protection and reassurance (a natural enough survival tactic), but they also spend money on the most effective propaganda machine invented for any system ever: advertising. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter what product an advert is in respect of, the ultimate message is the same: you will be an unfulfilled person unless and until you buy more stuff, and in order to buy more stuff you need to accumulate more wealth. In order to accumulate more wealth, you either have to work for the people who already have it or borrow it from the people who already have it. The rich don't need to force you to be beholden to them, they tempt you into it, and you submit willingly, convinced that it is your choice, part of your journey to commercial fulfillment. Thus we increasingly measure our happiness in possessions; we feel we deserve them because we've worked hard for them (which, in most cases we have) and therefore that those who don't have our possessions don't deserve them. Thus the concept of the undeserving poor comes into being: an other that we are entirely disengaged from because they are not like us, they are lazy and stupid. Usefully, this is a concept that can be applied wherever you are in the socioeconomic spectrum, as there is always someone poorer than yourself, they just may not live in the same country as you. The undeserving poor are even easier to be set apart if they are elsewhere; another country is preferable, but a ghetto will suffice. So if we can do away with things like the social housing requirement on inner city developments, then 'we' can keep 'them' at arm's length and therefore avoid any chance of meeting them and humanizing them. This is a point about perception and it works equally both ways: if those who are not rich gain their impressions of the wealthy solely from TV programs such as Made In Chelsea, it is easy to label them all as the idle rich. Thus by not knowing each other, we may label each other, demonize each other and blame each other for the state of the planet, when in fact we are all culpable. If we think about what we would do in different circumstances, would we be any different from whichever other we have demonized? Should we not try and consider the needs of others whoever they are before we make our choices? Even if that choice is just to let people off the train first.

Posterity

A few weeks ago I played cricket for the second time this summer. Much like the first time, it served to simply remind me why I avoided playing sport at school and pretty much ever since. I put this down to a combination of things: I am a bad loser, I am impatient, I have dreadful coordination and I don't like being cold/wet/too hot. This meant that as a youth I would give up on pretty much every sport instantly and with bad grace.
Not surprisingly, this defined much of my childhood/adolescence. I did not make friends with the sporty types, I hung out with the geeks and freaks: the interesting people. I actively looked for ways to emphasise my distance from sporty conformist types in all the ways that such teenagers usually do: by growing my hair and embracing counter-culture. The long hair changed with my changing tastes, but the sense that I was apart from the norm never did; what I call my 'indie sensibilities'. When Britpop went mainstream, I immersed myself in techno: that's the level of bloody-minded indie I'm talking about. However much I have integrated into society since I've grown up, I can never shake that sense of separation, nor do I want to. All people like to think they're different don't they, even when they're not. That is until we get to a certain level of identity. Most people are happy to share a common national identity, even if that is a less consistent identity group than most others. Many people are happy to share an amount of their identity with other supporters of a sports team, frequently donning matching clothes to further merge their collective identities. Oddly, many people consider this to be the behavior that defines them as individuals.
Needless to say, I find any collective identity larger than a few people and smaller than national something to be avoided. Also not surprisingly, such group identities usually only manifest around sport. Given all of this, I was clearly a prime candidate for the kind of skepticism that was in evidence amongst many of the population in the period we may now refer to as BO (Before Olympics) or perhaps more accurately BOC (Before Opening Ceremony). Like every other skeptic I've encountered, the opening ceremony was a kind damascene moment in which my natural cynicism was melted away by a warmth of feeling that seemed to wash over our (deserted) capital. I enjoyed every moment of the games in the weeks to come, although I didn't actually watch any sport, I just reveled in the good feeling (and functional public transport). In this (not actually watching the sport) I realise that I was in the minority; when I was at my second cricket match of the summer, most people who hadn't seen each other since talked about the Olympics.
Cricketer1: Did you watch the Olympics?
Cricketer2: Yeah, it was really good.
Cricketer1: What did you watch?
Cricketer2: Oh, I watched the cycling and the swimming and the athletics and some gymnastics, yeah it was really good.
Cricketer1: Yeah, it was awesome.
Cricketer2: Yeah, except beach volleyball, that's not a sport.
Cricketer1: No, that's rubbish. But everything else was great.
Cricketer2: Yeah, it was amazing. Imagine if it was always on, that would be great.
And so on. I relate this (perhaps not entirely authentic) conversation to illustrate just how much the Olympics changed our society for the better: many many men didn't talk about football for a number of days. Obviously the games achieved much more than this: undoubtedly they will inspire some children to become athletes, maybe some will be inspired by the opening ceremony to go and work in the NHS, maybe some will be inspired by the Paralympic opening ceremony to read books and be more like Stephen Hawking. The motto of the games was 'inspire a generation'. Hopefully that wasn't just 'inspire them to try running faster than everyone else', because that's a limited aspiration that is guaranteed to create more losers than winners.
I understand the need to get young people more active but as a youngster, team sports put me right off exercise for years. It took me a long time to find forms of exercise that didn't require me to associate with people obsessed with being better than me. I did eventually find such activities and I enjoy them very much, indeed it is the enjoyment of physical activity and exercise that led me to believe that I might actually enjoy playing a sport that I have loved to watch for many years. I was wrong. Or perhaps that was enjoying it, perhaps that is as much enjoyment as anyone gets out of playing team sports - I can only assume not.
I'll probably persevere with playing cricket once or twice a summer with friends, as I enjoy the peripheral activities and the company of friends, but I don't think there is anything that could have been done differently in my youth that would have made me passionate about playing. I had other interests, I developed other skills, I joined the the outsiders, and I'm glad I did, but no one was ever going to give me a medal for that.
The Olympics have been a great show and I think it's right that we acknowledge the monumental efforts of the athletes and the fact that the games bring the world together in a way that is genuinely hopeful. However, the Olympics are now over and it's time for us to get on with life, which, if you're not an elite athlete, is a very different thing from sport. 

Policing

I still need to check when applications close, but I'm thinking of running for the post of London's police commissioner. Why vote for me? Well I would spend my first month in office interviewing all police officers with more than 15 years experience and reviewing their records. After I had found the suitable candidate, I would make them my proxy and give them the rest of my salary. That way London's policing would be run by a professional, rather than some attention-seeking politician.
If my proxy preferred, I could stay on as the public face of the commissioner's office, to make the public apologies every time a tabloid newspaper decides to tell the police how they should have done their job. I know naff-all about policing, which I'm pretty sure qualifies me perfectly for discussing it with tabloid journalists.
So, would you vote for me? I promise that if you elect me, the person who does my job will be a suitable person for the job, with many years policing experience. How many other candidates can say that?

Pharisees

So I might be drifting up the leg of late, but that's only because it appears to have become such fertile territory. I mean I am well aware that all jeans have tended towards skinny for some time now: I believe that the term is that the 'silhouette has changed'. However, as gentlemen (sorry women/wimmin, I couldn't even begin to comment) we have choices within the silhouette. My casual trousers are undoubtedly thinner than they used to be, but they are nowhere near this thin. The reason being that, whilst I am relatively fit, I am a fairly bulky specimen, and wearing skin tight jeans would look as bad on me as it does on this chap. Also I am over 30 and therefore would look terrible dressing like a teenager.
The whole jeans/socks/shoes combo would tend to suggest that not only is this a 'look', but that it is a 'look' into which the owner has invested much care and attention. Unfortunately the socks merely serve to highlight the age/mass incongruity of the clothing choices. Oh, and the shoes. These were a purchase of love: that is evident in all the detail and the fact that they clearly get a polish every now and then. Unfortunately, no matter how much their owner loves them, nothing can stop this being an utterly fugly pair of soft-toed pointy shoes with some fairly dull stitching.
Next.

Post-sartorial

"Oh what's his problem this time," I hear you say, "this is just a classic skinny leg jeans/pointy shoe combination."
Well, my problem is twofold:
1. The shoes are (as ever) scuffed to buggery, which wouldn't be quite so bad with jeans, but
2. They are suit trousers.
Seriously, that was the lower half of a two piece suit! I only hope he wasn't going to an interview; I certainly wouldn't give anyone a job when their feet looked like stale croissants. But then I am pretty biased, I guess you've worked that out by now.

Positioning

Consistent with most of my internet usage, I'm a fairly lazy user of Twitter. I don't spend loads of time looking for new and interesting people to follow, I just tend to stick with what I know. Subsequently, one of the more heavily represented areas in my feed is the world of cricket. Interestingly, this is also the area from which I am most likely to unfollow someone. This is not entirely coincidental, cricket is the only sport I have much interest in, so the only sportsmen to appear in my Twitter feed are cricketers. Given the propensity of sportsmen to poorly articulate their really bad ideas, it is no real surprise that they are prime candidates for unfollowing. Kevin Pietersen was textbook: I followed him because I thought that the self-righteous claptrap he was bound to spout would be mildly entertaining and I wasn't disappointed for a while. Eventually however, the fact that his feed just painted a portrait of a total dick got the better of me and I unfollowed, more in disgust at myself for ever having got involved in the first place.
More recently the world of cricket presented me with a more complicated problem. One morning I happened to check my Twitter feed and noticed a tweet from genial cricket commentator and professional posh bloke Henry Blofeld. As a rule, he generally uses Twitter to promote his stage show or boast about where he had lunch. So far, so trivially entertaining. However, on that morning he felt the need to ask why people got so wound up about climate change when there were so many more important things to worry about. I challenged him on this, asking for an example of something more important. Not surprisingly, I got no direct response, but on checking my feed later that day it was apparent that I was not the only person to have reacted in this fashion. Blowers in his usual genial manner called us all losers and told us we needed to get a life and then spent the rest of the day retweeting messages from other selfish people or climate-change denying nutjobs saying things like "yeah, they're always trying to ruin our fun" or "yeah Blowers, that'll show the climate change Nazis". I am paraphrasing, but only just; the word 'fascist' was definitely used.
Eventually I got so bored of the braying of these dreadful people clogging up my feed I unfollowed their latest hero. I could happily spend a whole post venting at the selfishness and stupidity of people who, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, see the ramblings of a superannuated cricket commentator as justification for them to carry right on ignoring their moral responsibilities, but why bother. If you have read this far, you're either as enraged as me by the willful ignorance of a worrying number of people, or you're thinking "here we go again: more deranged ramblings from a climate change nut. Why can't they leave me alone to pollute the earth in whatever way entertains me most." If you're thinking the latter, I'm surprised and slightly impressed as you have exhibited behaviour that I failed to: you are willing to persevere with an opinion counter to your own. I always think I should be doing this sort of thing: reading the websites of the right wing press and engaging the people thereon in reasoned debate. I could have replied to all the people Blowers had forced onto my feed explaining to them (in 140 characters) why they were (in my opinion) in error. Of course such an action would have the opposite of its intended consequences, in that it would only serve to reinforce the opinion of the people I contacted that people concerned with climate change are obsessive fanatics. I am not a fanatic; I worry about our effect on the climate and I think a spot of individual responsibility wouldn't hurt in that regard. I think if you don't think about your impact on the lives of others then you are either a child or a bad person. Yes I am making a moral judgement. I guess I'd take a lot of persuading to pull back from that opinion and I think the argument would need to consist of more than the opinions of a handful of ill-informed celebrities.
Research into such things tells us that regardless of the substance of the arguments used in a debate, they will only serve to reinforce the opinions people had at the start of the debate. This depressing fact tends to make me think that if I can't change the minds of these people, then why on earth should I suffer having to listen to their idiotic opinions? At the press of a button, the unpleasant fact of their myopic views are removed from my life. I can retreat into my little liberal bubble and carry on with the charade that everyone is doing their bit, that everyone else cares about their fellows and worries about the consequences of their actions. But this is just as much a denial of the realities as anything else, just because some people are wrong, should we be happy to ignore them and allow them to remain so? How does a society progress without debate between these two sides? There appear to be two answers to this question: 'very well, thank you' and 'not at all'. The first can perhaps be seen as the traditional model, where groups with radically differing worldviews understand that in order for society to function, they must find common ground. Compromise is sought and reached because the parties involved accept that the functioning of society is a higher priority than the achievement of personal goals. Increasingly however, it seems that this is less likely to be the case, as across the established democracies, politicians of all stripes seem less inclined to negotiate with those on the other side of the argument. In the USA the Tea Party are barely willing to talk to others in the Republican Party, let alone Democrats. In the UK, the new cohort of Tory MPs have already rebelled against the party whip more than any other in history, keen to prove to the country that they will have their way even if they don't have a democratic mandate. Actually I imagine the Tory rebellions are more to do with MPs acting based on the only mandate they feel they have, i.e. as the party has no mandate, they act on the individual mandates that their constituents have handed them. However, the mandate they feel they've been given puts them an ideological pole apart from even the moderate wing of their party.
As I said before, extreme views are not a new occurrence in politics, but an inability to understand the fundaments of representative democracy appears to be. Regardless of the mandate you feel the people have handed you, unless 100% of them voted for you, you don't have a mandate to impose your will on the world in its entirety. Indeed you have an obligation to acknowledge the fact that you represent people with differing views and ensure that you seek at least a dialogue with those views.
We appear to have moved into a new era of belief politics, where politicians are driven not by ideology and pragmatism, but a belief in the absolute truth of their argument so fierce that it renders them intransigent. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is that people's beliefs seem to require more, well, belief these days. Whilst there is proof that the increase in the earth's temperature has accelerated rapidly since the industrial revolution, there is no way of proving the exact cause. Theories backed up by considerable experiment may illustrate the near certainty that certain manmade gasses are the cause of global warming, but there can be no absolute proof. We have to believe that 99% of the climate scientists on the planet are not wrong. Unfortunately, for many people it is just as easy to believe otherwise, because there is no absolute 'proof'. Equally, as there is no proof of the existence of a god, it is just as easy for people to believe that a book written by a bunch of Romans is to be interpreted literally as the word of God, that the world is 4000 years old, that we should stone each other to death for working on the Sabbath, etc. Perhaps because of the surge in the need for belief, religion has taken an increasingly direct role in politics, going from something that defines a person's moral compass to being the literal basis for a society people believe they should impose on their fellows. Such extremism begets extreme opposition, further polarising the world. The result is that people increasingly think that their beliefs are so right that they should overrule the democratic principal. I must confess that when I discover the thoughts of the climate change deniers, I am tempted to entertain the notion of some form of dictatorship of environmental responsibility. Like everyone else, I must resist such temptation; democracy must always have primacy, because once you let it go you have to fight hard to win it back.
Besides, I'd actually become the environmental fascist that the friends of Henry Blofeld dream up as their oppressors. And I'd hate to lose an argument in such a crap way.
Of course I don't follow Blofeld any more, so it's an argument I'm not going to have. Maybe it's time to get back into the fray...

Point of View

So after about 5 minutes watching from my window I got bored of the Shard opening ceremonies. I guess there are only so many exciting things you can do with a building: make it change colour and fire lasers into the sky whilst searchlights and helicopters circle it. I imagine it was pretty exciting if you were an invited guest, what with the LSO playing and all. However I wasn't invited and neither were most Londoners, which seems to be the thrust of the one of the arguments of the anti-Shard lobby. It is elitist they say, a giant monument to money and greed. No argument from me there, but why single out the Shard for this criticism, why not the Heron Tower for example which is a much less graceful building and nearly as tall.
Of course the Heron Tower is built within the main city cluster, which exempts it from the major gripe of the anti-Shard lobby: that the Shard, by virtue of of its location dramatically changes the London skyline. Yes it does, so what? The London skyline is not some kind of perfectly realised, perfectly organised picture; it is a muddle, like the city itself, a conversation between thousands of different ideas. When London was burnt to the ground in 1666, Sir Christopher Wren wanted to build an entirely new city on a beautiful radial design, in much the same way as the French subsequently did in Paris. Unfortunately, he instantly ran into disputes with landowners, whose properties were bounded by the pre-fire roads. Ultimately, the only part of that design that survived was St Paul's Cathedral, and whilst the immediate area around that building retains some the order that Wren wished for, the London that sprang up beyond it had none of the discipline of a well designed cityscape. This set a precedent that survives today: when it comes to planning in London, the ultimate result stems from an argument between the architects, the developers, the authorities and the neighbors. The London skyline is not a homogeneous vista, it is a messy assortment of architecture both good and bad, and opinions on each of these buildings will vary wildly. As they should do in one of the world's oldest democracies.
In his piece on the Shard, Simon Jenkins complained that it didn't belong in this country, but in a desert state (such as the one from which much of its funding came). Apart from the apparent racism inherent in this statement, it fundamentally fails to understand the nature of London's architectural heritage. St Paul's itself was controversial, as Wren had decided to build it in what was then an Italian style. Would all the skyline preservationists been so concerned if it was just another classical English style cathedral? St Paul's is so evocative of England because like all Englishmen, it is an immigrant. To accuse a new building in London of being alien is to fundamentally misunderstand the city. Also, associating the Shard aesthetically with its major funders is a bit lame when they only committed funding after building had commenced.
Simon Jenkins is right to get exercised about big developers and famous architects steamrolling planning law, but surely he should have done that about the Gherkin rather than the Shard. The site of the Gherkin contained the grade I listed Baltic Exchange, and before Sir Norman Foster got involved, all development plans involved the retention of the badly bomb damaged building. As soon as Sir Norman broke out the plans for the most phallic building in London, all and sundry got weak at the knees and quickly forgot about listings. The Shard is different though: it is built on the site of some pretty ugly modernist rejects that no one will ever miss ever, but because you can see it poking up behind St Paul's if you're rich enough to live on Primrose Hill, but not connected enough to get invited to the opening party then it is an abomination. Brilliantly, people like Simon Jenkins say that this will open the floodgates to legions of super skyscrapers lining the Thames and ruining the skyline, and brilliantly by saying such things they prove themselves wrong. Yes, unfortunately there are a small number of other less well imagined supertowers springing up in the wake of John Prescott's hubris, but they will become a natural antedote to themselves. They will become new Euston Stations. The destruction of the original Victorian Euston Station in the 60s lead to the introduction of grading and protection of historic buildings that is both a wonderful thing for posterity and a massive headache for anyone associated with listed buildings. Planning in a city like London will always be complicated because everyone wants to be involved, it will ebb and flow, the developers and the conservationists will each have their day. Neither will ever win and neither should they.
I have issues with aspects of the Shard's construction; the fact that they ditched the energy saving aspects of the building's original design should have resulted in fines, re-submission of the planning application or a commitment to offset the additional energy usage. I'm sure there are many other complaints that can be levelled at it, but to complain that it ruins a skyline as jumbled as London's is surely to miss the point entirely. If you're worried about rich people doing what they like with your heritage, you should look to parliament. Now there is a blot on the skyline.

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.

Post-feline

I saw these and I couldn't resist. They really are special shoes. Not only do they come in one of this year's most fugly shapes (square-nosed extra point), but if you look closer, you'll see that they have additional texturing. Texturing! They have what appear to be tiger stripes on them in what appears to be velvet. No, that can't be right, it must be suede. I'm afraid I was too chicken to make a closer inspection, so the material mystery will remain unsolved. However, regardless of the materials involved, you must agree this is a very 'special' shoe.

Postscript

I'm not really a 'real time' blogger. I don't really respond to events as they occur. At least that hadn't been the case until earlier this week, when I responded to my own organisational stupidity with a post hoping (genuinely in my despair and self-anger) to persuade someone serious enough to register but casual enough not to bother, that they should vote because I was going to fail to do so (due to nothing other than poor personal organisation). Due to the brilliance of the internet and the vagueries of Twitter, I find a reference to one the greatest television shows ever made lends unjustified weight to my simple attempts to vent at my own stupidity via my smartphone.
I feel like I need to go off piste a bit here and explain a ridiculous amount about the multi-party system in Britain to (both of) my US audience, but I think they'd probably understand it fine if I just explain that the popular press can't count above two. Hence most people in the UK aren't actually aware of the multi-party system.
Perhaps more embarrassingly, I made a plea (to my 20 Twitter followers) for more people to vote, and on Thursday night the radio said we averaged 33% voter turnout in the local elections across the country.
I would love to say shame on you, but it is shame on me. I can blog and tweet about this stuff all I like, but when it came to it I was not in the polling booth. I disenfranchised myself, along with 77% of the over 18s in this country*, although, in my defence, I did so not through an active desire to abstain, or as passive indecision, but through gross incompetence that I blame myself for. That is the only way, in the 16 years I have been allowed to, that I have found not to vote. I genuinely don't know how the rest of you live with yourselves.
'Largely, very comfortably' I would imagine to be the answer, except I doubt it is so. Increasingly disaffection with mainstream politics means that people in western democracies don't bother to vote, and like me, they wake up the next day with the impression that their inaction has changed nothing. Even without their vote, the system has perpetrated itself and government has prevailed. This is a very dangerous assumption. As has been proven time after time, voter apathy allows politicians with a small but motivated following to get elected and change things, and even when minority or extreme parties don't win out, the establishment can use voter apathy as an excuse to create their own (totally crappy) mandate. I wouldn't be massively surprised if many of the horror stories we have read about dodgy politicians have gone a fair way to actually consolidating their positions. Whilst the fair cannot always rely on the 'casual' voter, the corrupt can always rely on their cronies.
What has all this got to do with my plea for someone to vote as my randomly selected proxy? I guess in a way some people would see what I attempted to do as a form of subversion of the democratic processes. If I'd done a full 'Donna Moss' and wondered the streets around the polling station trying to get people to vote, I wonder how long it would have been before someone complained. But actually I couldn't do anything more subversive than encourage people not to vote. I did not attempt to unfairly influence people's opinion in favour of one candidate or another, I simply tried to encourage them to vote. Was I successful? I don't know, I rather suspect that the few people who do read my blog were all going to vote anyway. Certainly no one got in touch to say they were going to vote purely out of sympathy for my predicament, in an attempt to redress the balance as it were. Because it is a balance, and choosing not to vote shifts that balance. By not voting, we are not abstaining, we are giving undue weight to the votes of those who do. I guess that's what's bugging me most, but I've no one to blame but myself. I guess next time I just need to be more organised. Or befriend people who are more casual about their voting.

*This is a forced statistic, as all of the voting age public were not voting tonight - this round of local elections is for certain types of council only.

Poll Axed

At the earliest opportunity after moving in to my flat, I registered to vote. I was relieved when my polling card arrived some weeks back, as the worry that my registration details have somehow slipped through the system occasionally dogs my thoughts until I get my first polling card in any new flat. I am a democrat, I believe that the very least I can do is cast my vote; I once unleashed a tirade at a very dear friend who admitted to repeatedly spoiling his ballot. So I was relieved to know that I could vote on the 3rd May, which in my head was a totally different 3rd May from the first day of my holiday 200-odd miles away.
Except of course it isn't, it is exactly the same 3rd May. This fact was only brought to my attention a few days ago, which it turns out is too late to register either for a postal or proxy vote. For a while I railed against a system so antiquated that it required postal votes to be registered at least a fortnight before polling day (I would still like to understand the reason why I can't pick up my postal vote from my local polling office and return it by hand before polling day). But really I can only blame myself, and that is the worst thing. I feel that in my failure to adequately plan for the elections, I've failed as a democrat. Of course if I was really bothered, I could delay my holiday. I have very seriously considered this and if it had been an election that mattered more, I would have done so. Had it been my local council elections, or national elections I would have stayed at home, but London mayor... Besides, whichever person finally wins the London mayoral race will be unlikely to be the candidate that I would have voted for.
Am I convincing you? I'm not convincing myself. We cannot ascribe different democratic weight to different elections, as all have an impact on our lives. Equally, I don't believe in only voting for a win (I don't believe in tactical voting) as democracy only works properly if we vote honestly with our hearts and minds. My arguments were merely an attempt to salve my conscience and they have failed. It is slightly ridiculous how angry I feel at myself whenever I catch sight of an article about the London elections at the moment.
I can only hope to do a Donna Moss.
In an episode of the West Wing, Donna accidentally votes for the wrong candidate, and spends the rest of the episode trying to persuade a military officer (played by Christian Slater if memory serves) to vote for her choice.
So here is my plea: if you live in London, are registered to vote and weren't going to bother, could you get in touch and I'll tell you my choices. In fact, even if you don't get in touch, please go out and vote, it might help to ease my conscience a tiny bit. Besides, there are people all over the world who dedicate their whole lives, give up their freedom and sometimes their lives just to have a chance to vote, and we're so casual about it we don't even bother. I know this, that's why I feel so guilty.

Primary

We have recently been through an upgrade to Windows 7 at work. Now all you normal people are going to be thinking 'wow, so big deal, my laptop's had Windows 7 on it for years, welcome to the 21st century grandad', and kinda fair enough. Except my laptop's had Windows 7 on it for years, which is why I use Ubuntu.
Anyway, so the migration came, and because we're a systems team and use all sorts of non-standard software we had all sorts of problems. Well, I say 'we', I mean 'my colleagues', as I had almost no problems with the switchover. Now I have to say that this is at least partially due to the fact that I was one of the last to go through the transition, but I'm equally convinced it was partly because I am the youngest member of my team.
I hit my early teens just as the IBM pc (or clones of it) and Microsoft DOS were becoming the standard. Windows was just becoming stable in those days, and the second-hand pc my parents bought wasn't really powerful enough to support Windows 3.3 (besides which it was expensive), so whilst my friends played fancy-looking games on their Amigas, I was getting to grips with the DOS file structures that influenced the way we've interacted with almost all technology ever since. I don't think I'm unique in this: certainly by the time I was at university most of my friends were pretty well versed in most Windows software, and we started using email. I think all this meant that such technology - and possibly more importantly, the user logic of such technology - became embedded in my functional brain at a point early enough to become part of my primary functional reasoning. This means that when it comes to using a new phone, computer or pretty much anything else that requires an operating system I don't need a manual. The triumph of the Windows/Mac OS approach is that it has dictated the logical mapping of all other user interfaces. Some people may argue that apps create a different approach, but I would argue that these are just an extension of the sorts of programmes one has always seen on a desktop. Fundamentally, all these things work in the same way, and if they don't, I expect to work them out pretty quickly through trial and error.
My brain is adapted to technology, and in the digital world I'm pretty old (I actually used DOS!), imagine how well adapted to the use of any new technology a real digital native would be (not sure we have any real ones yet: people in their late teens have nostalgia for a golden age of pre-millennial pre-digital simplicity).
In practical terms, this is a good thing: we should be able to use all technology with ease, and as software providers have failed to make their software more intuitive, our learned intuition with regards to the functional logic of such systems is imperative. However, is it also changing the logic of our thoughts? If we teach ourselves to think in a way the follows operating system logic, is there not a danger that we dehumanise our thought process?
'Uh oh, here we go another panic about technology changing humanity' I hear you say, 'we had that with telly.' And we did, and it did, a bit, but telly is passive. The use of most modern technology is interactive, it is about our expectations of the world and how they are realised. The fact that our expectations are met almost instantly by technology is partially an illusion created by the fact that those expectations were created or at least heavily modified by that technology. So our expectations become distorted, and the rest of life, the natural world, politics, education, all will fail to deliver instant results. It is possible that we are already seeing this failure of the non-digital world to deliver instant gratification in the shock of recent graduates that they are not slotted straight away into the middle management position that they so obviously deserve for having spent the previous three years racking up debt, drinking and reading the occasional book. Then again maybe this is just the eternal hubris of youth.
It is entirely possible that the functional logic of digital technology has no impact on our ideas about how the world should work, but it's unlikely. If we interact with the world through digital technology, then it must of necessity have some baring on that interaction. The danger lies in whether the process itself, the actions of navigating a set of digital rules and conventions actually takes over from the ends to which it was designed to lead. A friend recently referred to Twitter as a potential 'Linus blanket' for people who would otherwise be finding more direct outlets for their outrage. I think that at their worst, Twitter and other social media can perform this function. However, at their best, such technologies allow us to organise and unite disparate groups of likeminded individuals. Clearly the way we live our lives and therefore the way we function is informed and modified by the technology we use. It is up to us to make sure that the uses we put it to encourage a human world rather than a purely functional one.

Pentennial

One of the things that constantly dogs my thoughts about the the way things could be is the obstacles presented by the way things are. Moreover there is the problem of my moral reluctance to change some of the things that are. This is far too abstract, let me elaborate.
Our democracy, like most others, is based around parliamentary terms of around five years, and whilst a government or leading politician may hope to extend the height of their influence to two or thee of these terms, that still only leaves them 15 years to make their mark. And let's not kid ourselves, politicians are in their job to make a mark. They're not there to better their constituents lives or the lot of the human race, although that may be one of the ways that they intend to achieve their goal; they are there because at some point during a history lesson they decided they wanted to appear in one of those books. We would do well never to forget this fact when dealing with politics . I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, just as I'm sure most politicians will have convinced themselves that they are that exception. However, we would do just as well to assume that there are no exceptions, as it will help us to understand the primary reason for the five(ish) year term limits: egos. Anyone who thinks that they deserve to appear in a history book will have a massively inflated sense of their ability. Given the chance to govern such people will naturally assume they are best at it and will struggle to see why they should stop doing it. The five year parliamentary term means that a reasonably regular intervals we all get a chance to burst their bubble. This is the very cornerstone of democracy and essentially its point: the power of any tyrant is in principle limited by time. However, the very thing that gives democracy its potency is rapidly becoming its biggest failing.
The short-term nature of parliamentary terms mean that politicians are only ever really interested in short term results that will stamp their image on the pages of history. Thus, every five years or so, they dick about with the schools or the NHS something rotten, just to prove they are doing something. Talk to anyone in any job that is in any way impacted by the government and you will quickly become acquainted with the the sense of jaded fatigue that such endless tinkering inevitably engenders. This issue is not exclusive to the public sector either (although they tend to bear the brunt): sectors such as financial services face a seemingly endless barrage of legislation. Certainly in the case of finance, this partly because there has to be an Income and Corporation Tax Act passed every year, so whoever's in charge at the time sees it as practically their duty to tinker with something whilst re-enacting the legislation required to collect income tax. Of course the argument is that the economy is constantly changing and so legislation has to be continually adapted to account for these changes. Indeed the Income and Corporation Taxes Act is the ideal short term legislation, better than much other legislation that is enacted permanently in order to deal with a transient issue. Weirdly, this legacy of obsolete legislation clogging up the statutes is a much overlooked consequence of political short-termism. The hubris that allows politicians to believe that they are the best person for the job also allows them to believe that they have found the ultimate solution to any problem: that the legacy of their time in office will be unimpeachable legislation.
Generally, it is more likely that our system would work better and our politicians would be more accountable if the majority of our legislation were time limited. Obviously that wouldn't be a problem if we were starting from scratch, but setting up the initial legislation required to effectively clear down the statutes would be a mammoth and complex task for which there is no appetite. Although it wouldn't hurt to see the short-termism in future legislation and draft it accordingly.
Much more problematic are the issues that won't affect politicians in their lifetimes but which nonetheless require action and legislation now. It is all too easy for is all to forget these issues or put them aside for another time. A strong favourite of the pro-pollution lobby is to insist that we all wait for the burden of proof to be incontrovertible before we decide to take rash decisions that may harm their short-term profits. Whilst this is a clear case of vested interests trying to influence policy for short-term outcomes, it does illustrate the biggest problem for long-term policy makers: how can you know what is the right solution to a problem due to occur in the future. Again, in such situations, politicians are forced to rely on a certain amount of faith, both in their own ability (not hard) and in the ability of those advising them and feeding them information. Again for a politician, such faith should be easy, as it reflects on their good judgement in seeking the advice of these people in the first place. Unfortunately the rest of us cannot be so confident, as we know that such advisers are largely chosen from a pool of people who position themselves to be chosen, ie they're only there in the first place because they have a vested interest.
So how do we ensure that the right people are chosen as advisors? Must we elect these people too? This is probably not a sensible choice, as these people are supposed to be there to deal with the complexities that cannot be reduced to a soundbite. However, even if we don't vote for these people, we vote for those who chose them, so the advice offered will vary with the government seeking it. Is it possible to have advisory bodies that are assigned as the official arbiters of knowledge on certain topics? It is not possible for an organisation to be entirely objective, but that should not stop it aspiring to be. Such organisations would need to be able to defend any point of view they held on demand. They would need to prove consideration of all relevant theories. They would need, in effect, to be above reproach. This is patently as impossible as being entirely objective. However, we have a model for such organisations: the recently created Office of Budget Responsibility, or the slightly less recently created Office for National Statistics. Both organisations have dealt with the issues of objectivity and impartiality and come out the other side, so could such a model be applied to scientific or other advisory bodies? Surely it's worth a try.
Unfortunately, the setting up of independent advisory bodies doesn't change the fact that the people making the policies based on that advice are still only looking to the short-term. We could try to find ways to make them more long-term in their actions, like ways of compelling them to act on the advice given by the independent advisory bodies. Of course we already have a way of compelling politicians to do things: our vote. Maybe then the biggest change we need is the way we use our vote.