Pleasure

The recent re-introduction of telly into my life has led me to become reacquainted with adverts, and subsequently with with a sensation that (perhaps subtler) internet advertising doesn't induce: the wonder at who it appeals to. The latest occurrence of this sensation was brought about by an M&S Valentine's advert. Usually M&S do a half decent job of making their food seem appealing, but this meal just seemed tacky, plastic and artificial. Perhaps this was deliberate, perhaps people actually want to eat shiny pink food on Valentine's day because it makes them feel romantic. I looked at the whole package and got acid indigestion in anticipation. As I say, this was not what I expect from M&S, I'd expect something a bit more upmarket, which makes me think the whole package had been dreamed up by a focus group. Someone had done some research and decided that when it comes to romance, the great British public love it good and tacky. I just don't buy that, I just don't think that's what people want. They may have been convinced it's what they want, but I don't believe it is actually what they want.
I recently had a conversation with a friend which they took to be about taste as a learned behaviour. Of course, we both agreed that what we like to eat, wear or put on the walls of our flats is in some part influenced by the things we have been presented with at various stages in our lives. However, he argued that there is a limit to the environmental influence; that people are naturally predisposed to like or dislike the things that exist at the extremes of their taste spectrum. On reflection, I am more inclined to believe we have inherent absolutes, although I think our inheritance of them is as much behavioural as it is biological. However, the point I was really getting at was that it appears to me that it is not just the fact that we learn to like the things we like, but that 99 percent of the time it is solely the fact that we have chosen to like them that makes us like them. To put it another way, we decide to like things despite the fact that we don't actually like them. This is why advertising is so effective: because our willingness to participate in an activity that we see as desirable overrides our perception of whether or not we actually enjoy it. How else could one explain so many people claiming to like football?
I'm a pleasure seeker of sorts, at least I want to enjoy my spare time, so I want to make sure I fill it with activities I genuinely enjoy. To that end I'll try anything once. It's the only way I'll stumble across something I genuinely like.

Property

Along with the hedge fund managers, the other people to have benefited from the financial crisis are landlords. At least in London. As cheap credit has dried up and banks have become more cautious about who they lend to, the number of people moving into their first bought home has plummeted. As a result, the rentals market has suffered a capacity crisis. In such a seller's market, prices will inevitably increase, reducing the amount people can save for deposits, increasing the number of people looking to rent and pushing up the price of rent. This viscous circle will probably not increase indefinitely, as higher rents will eventually lure more landlords into the market, but it is a taste of things to come. We are never going to build enough houses in this country for everyone to become a home owner, so the government wants more people to get used to renting for life, or at very least much later into life. I have no issue with this in principle. As a nation, we are obsessed with home ownership to the point where thousands of people a year (more so in recent years) have bankrupted themselves chasing the ideal of homeownership: their desperation to own the roof over their heads has left them with no roof at all. So renting must form part of the new more sober economic reality. However, if we are to change our societal habits, shouldn't we also review the rules that govern them?
I am a long term renter. I have no desperate desire to own my own house. However, I am an adult, so I do desire to decorate my house in a manner that I see fit, which at my time of life is a bit more involved than putting up a few posters. Equally, I understand that when I relinquish my tenancy, my landlord should not be burdened with the task of letting a flat decorated to my idiosyncratic tastes. Rented accommodation should start and end a blank canvas, what happens in the interim should be up to the tenants. To be fair to my landlord, that is basically what they told us, although I'm not sure how they'd feel if we repainted the place a non-white colour. Still, any major adjustments would need to be reversed before the end of our tenancy, which would tend to discourage anything like, say, putting up shelves.
I suppose the problem from a landlord's point of view is that by allowing your tenants to make your property into their home absolutely, you run the considerable risk that they will be absolute slobs, whose idea of a home is a pigsty. Maybe longer term rental agreements would give people the security to want to invest properly in a rented flat, but then, really such agreements already exist, and buying a leasehold property is almost as expensive as buying a property outright. The other problem with such arrangements is that they don't suit the purposes of most landlords, who want to be free to do what they like with the property, and any long term letting arrangement precludes that. Perhaps some sort of happy medium could be reached, perhaps landlords with more than a certain number of properties should be obliged to let a portion of them out on a medium-term basis, in much the same way as inner-city developers have to provide an amount of key worker housing.
Along with the obligations, better incentives could exist for landlords who take a less short-term view. For example, there is currently no incentive for landlords to make their properties energy efficient, as they do not have to pay the related energy costs. The result is that they install lowest common denominator boilers, white goods and insulation. The costs to both the tenants and the environment are not insignificant and should be considered if we are to move to a society of long term lettings. Perhaps some form of tax incentive broadly equivalent to to the energy savings could be applied to rental income.
Of course there are some landlords for whom no incentives are required. They will fit a flat to the standards they would expect in their own home, and work with their tenants to make it a home that is well maintained and well decorated. These people are unfortunately the exception and are hard to find; they tend to be private landlords with only the one property. For bigger landlords, the market leaves them with little incentive to make any effort, and the law discourages them from even letting properties unfurnished. It is an arrangement that suits them very well, and it's perhaps time it was modified.
I have just started thinking about this and I've managed to come up with some ideas already. As buying a house becomes less of an investment and more of a risk, more people are likely to think about it. If the culture of renting is to become engrained in our society, the culture of letting needs to change. Whilst property law is notoriously tricky, that shouldn't discourage those who need to think about how to change it.

Percussion

One expects highbrow cultural events to be populated by the members of society who understand the protocol of such events. Perhaps it is testament to the growing popularity of the art (or more likely the pulling power of the principals) that many people appeared to be as unfamiliar with the protocol as I was. Fortunately I was attending the ballet with my wife, who is very familiar with the protocol that one only claps at the end of each act or after an exceptional passage* of dancing. However, a number of people seemed to think it was de rigueur to clap whenever Carlos Acosta entered or left the stage, or indeed did pretty much anything else.
I'm not talking about this to just to emphasise what a massive snob I am; the inability of many people to comprehend when it is appropriate to clap has been driven by a surge in clapping in general since the turn of the millennium. I first became fully aware of it whilst trying to watch the Arcade Fire at Glastonbury a number of years ago (2004?). I say 'trying' because the band were regularly drowned out by the people around me clapping, singing and wooing along. I'm fairly certain that most of them were entirely oblivious to the fact that they were doing it. When I mentioned this to a friend at the time, she dubbed it 'audience 2.0', an inevitable consequence of interactive culture and an evil to be endured.
My problem is that I don't see why I should have to endure it and I wouldn't have to if people were just a little more thoughtful about what they do. Reflex clapping is a symptomatic of a larger trend in society of thoughtless responses of all sorts. The results can have far reaching effects. Through lazy responses on social networks, you could easily become part of a Twitter storm that changes public policy in a way you were not anticipating. With great power comes great responsibility; with a tiny fraction of that power, we should at least exercise a modicum of responsibility.
I am not saying everything we do should be considered and premeditated, I am just saying next time we find ourselves doing something as a reflex (say, clapping at a funeral) maybe we should just take a moment to think 'why am I doing this?'
Maybe we should start with just clapping. Maybe every time you find yourself clapping, ask yourself 'why am I clapping?' Maybe we'll start questioning all our actions a little bit more.

* I'm not sure this is the correct term, but as I say, I'm new to all this.

Progress

So I joined Twitter. Not sure why now, maybe deep down I yearn to be pilloried in the popular press. Most likely I thought it was about time I engaged with some form of social media. Those who know me know I am not on Facebook, nor am I ever likely to be: I kind of missed the boat on that one. However, I realise that I exist in an age where many of my friends will not even email me to tell me of the birth of their child because they assume I will have become aware through the various social media. To be fair, before the invention of social media I probably would have heard by word of mouth anyway, so nothing has really changed for me. However, unless I am incredibly sociable, there will always be the nagging feeling that I am missing out on an exciting and socially active life, underpinned by receipt of the occasional email to 'my friends who are not on Facebook'.
This lack of internet socialisation betrays a greater trend: I fear that I am not a good user of the internet in general. I suffer terrible Google-blindness* and as a result tend to restrict my internet usage to reading emails, shopping research, solving arguments using Wikipedia and creating websites. You probably think that this last would require me to have a good understanding of the ways of the web, and I fear that it does, and that this is my one shortcoming in this area (a fairly important one I'll admit): I understand how it works better than how to use it. Again, when faced with the great white searchbox, I feel that there is a whole world out there that I am not privy to due to laziness or simplicity of approach. So I've joined Twitter in the hope that it will assist me in formulating a more sophisticated approach to the internet. If that doesn't work, at least I'll be able to find out what Katie Price had for breakfast.

*a condition whereby a user is rendered bereft of the memory of all the things they wanted to ask the internet the minute the Google homepage becomes visible.

Pretention

So I'm enjoying my new status as an east London resident properly now. I have a new favourite Sunday afternoon snack: Hereford Hop* with apple and ginger chutney on St John's brown sourdough. I'm sure there's a name for people like me, I'm just not sure I want to know what it is.

*not purchased in London

Protocol

For some reason I just snapped. I'm deeply intolerant of tailgating at the best of times, but I was in the middle of overtaking and this idiot drove up behind me flashing his lights and riding my bumper. I'm not proud of myself, but I braked hard and flipped him the vees. I didn't feel any better about it afterwards either, I felt like I'd confirmed a bunch of national stereotypes, whereas the other guy was just a bad driver. I could make all sorts of crass points about French temperament based on my observations of a single drive through freezing fog on the French autoroutes a few days after Christmas, but I would know them to be just that: crassly generalised observations. France probably has just as many crap drivers as the UK, so any inclination to ascribe a national character to some bad driving would say more about me than anything else. Conversely I couldn't get over the feeling that I had misrepresented my country and fed a growing national stereotype: the obstructive, self-interested Englishman. I wanted to catch the guy up and say, "I'm not another David Cameron, I genuinely was doing what I felt was necessary to make a point about road safety." But even as I write that, I realise that I would sound exactly like David Cameron: I chucked away a pile of international prestige to make a childish point that did nothing to advance my cause. Obviously my motoring indiscretion won't have as long lasting or far reaching effects, but it is perhaps a useful metaphor that I can milk for all it's worth. Of course it only works if you think that Cameron's recent willy waving exercise in Brussels was about doing what he thought was right, or just about making a childish point. The two are not mutually exclusive; like my brake-in-your-face gesture, Cameron could have been making a very dangerous, very childish point about something he believed in.
It's usually hard to know what any English politician really believes in when it comes to Europe, as they're constantly trying to ride the line of public hysteria whipped up by endless Eurosceptic rhetoric from our national press, whilst not totally alienating their European counterparts. Not so David Cameron, he doesn't worry about upsetting the Europeans, because when it comes to the crunch, they'll respect his integrity and listen to him. Sure thing Dave.
I should state my own position in all this: I am ideologically pro-European. Like Churchill, I believe that greater European integration is inherently a good thing. However, the EU as it exists now is a horribly distorted and dysfunctional institution that requires root and branch reform. How did it get this way? It's mostly our fault: if the UK had taken the sort of role in Europe that De Gaulle had feared we would, it would certainly not be the two horse race that it has become. It would probably be more efficient as well. I believe in a Europe with Britain at the centre of it, not sat in the slow lane making rude gestures as it passes is by.
In declaring myself pro-European, I realise that I am in the minority amongst my countrymen. That is not to say that the English (and it is the English - an independent Scotland would be a much more integrated part of the EU) are all avowed Eurosceptics, but we do have a funny relationship with Europe. It must stem at least partly from our island nation status (again something that's never bothered the Scots), which is bound up with all sorts of strange notions we got from having an empire (50+ years ago). If we could think beyond the concept of being in charge of other nations - which, like it or not, is still the English ideal of foreign relations - we might be able to see how a functioning relationship as a major player in Europe might work. Of course it wouldn't be plain sailing, there are always vested interests, and the French in particular would take exception to a stronger Anglo-Saxon influence, which in itself should be a good enough reason for most Englishmen to want to do it. In fact it is possible that one of the reasons the French are always pushing for greater integration is that they know it'll upset the English and ensure they don't want to get involved in any way other than a briefly obstructive one that leaves us in the slow lane fuming: it is the diplomatic equivalent of tailgating us and flashing their lights. It works every time, none more so than this time. Once again a British politician has returned from the continent banging on about principles and claiming to have got what they want whilst having achieved nothing concrete and given their opponents all the cards.
One of the problems is that it's hard to claim that we've got what we want when we don't know what we want. It appears that we're not keen to pull out into the fast lane and race ahead of the French. Stretching the metaphor as far as it will go, we want to lead all the other cars onto another road at the next junction. This is simply not going to happen: every other country sees greater integration as a natural part of their membership of the EU. The English on the other hand are unlikely to ever be happy with such an idea. This means we have to face the reality of our situation: we have probably blown our chance of having a Europe that is sufficiently to our tastes, so we are left with the option of either using our waning influence to modify the extremes of EU legislation, or withdraw altogether and be like Norway - the only European country to comply with all EU legislation because they need to.
Unfortunately if my little car journey is any indicator, the signs are not good. Shortly after my altercation with the Frenchman, I got on the train and came back to Britain.

Percentage

A few things I must remember to do:
1. Check how much profit my train operating company make.
2. Buy shares in my train operating company.
3. Check to see whether rail fares are included in the calculation of inflation indices.
4. Check this country's competition rules.
5. Marvel at the manner in which rules can be stretched for the right people.
6. Buy more shares in my train operating company.

I would be interested to know if anyone can find a price other than a rail fare that's increased by 7.8% this year.