My Blog ThingAs you may have heard, London is currently on fire a bit.
As it happens, the fire is just over the road from where I work, so I’ve been able to point my iPhone in the general direction and get some images. Apologies for the quality of some of them, the only vantage point unfortunately had wired glass.
Current reports are that the fire is now out although disruption is still ongoing.
For ages I have been really paranoid about losing things. I guess it stems from going to an all-boys school where people will steal things out of your bag when you aren’t looking so you end up going to class without, say, your pencil case, under the impression it was funny (well, actually it is pretty funny, and I have a few stories to tell on that front which I’m sure I’ll bring out at some point).
Anyway, paranoid. Whenever I get up from a public location, such as the train or a cinema or the likes, I will pat down every pocket to make sure nothing has slipped out whilst I’ve been sitting (actually I can trace that quirk down to having a two-week-old iPod fall out of my pocket whilst sitting outside a London café, something I didn’t notice until some time after I’d walked off).
Even whilst sitting on the train, I will suddenly have a ‘oh crap my pockets feel empty’ moment and worry that I’ve left my keys or my phone (which also looks after my Oyster card) at home, despite the obvious evidence that I’m on the train, meaning that I’ve managed to unlock my bike, relock it at the station, then touch in through the barriers to get on the train. Then, when getting off the train, I’ll turn around and have a good check of the seat I’ve just gotten up from to make sure nothing has fallen onto it.
I even have those moments with things in my rucksack. A couple of weeks ago I had one such incident, I was walking from work to the station and suddenly thought, ‘shit, have I left my iPad in the office?’ I was reasonably certain I hadn’t, but I had to be sure. In order to avoid having to rummage through my bag, I did one of the most technologically augmented lazy things I’ve done in my life – I got out my iPhone, fired up the Find My iPhone app, and asked it to ping the location of my iPad to make sure it was in the same place I was.
Similarly, if I’m standing in close quarters with people on a packed train, I’ll worry that someone has picked my pocket and made off with something. This is also something that I worry about even in the face of all available evidence – such as the fact that someone would have to have had a really good fondle to dig my wallet out of my front pocket, or the fact that I’m still listening to music from my iPhone so if someone’s stolen it they can’t have gotten further than a headphone cable’s length away from me. Same too with my rucksack, if I feel someone making contact with it in a crowd I’ll shake it a little so make sure no one is having a rummage.
You know, on reading all this back, I’ve realised I appear to be pretty fuckin’ paranoid.
Every so often, my mind will take a situation I’m in, insert a hypothetical comment or action by someone (usually something that’s confrontational in some way), then run with the whole conversation.
Take the other day, for example (well, due to my peculiar drafting process and a inadvertent hiatus from this site, ‘the other day’ was in fact over two months ago, but still, that’s not strictly relevant to this post). On the way home I cycled past an ambulance that had seen to a crash of some sort just by the stadium. Wondering if they might chastise me for my lack of helmet, my mind then envisaged one of them mentioning me not wearing a helmet, then carried on the conversation with my response:
“Quit complaining; I’m a registered organ donor!”
At the point I became consciously aware that I was doing it, and stopped. But sometimes it gets carried away, and I end up getting angry at someone for something they haven’t done.
It happens quite a lot at work, where someone has phoned up asking for assistance, and in the time it’s taken me to walk to the room in question I’ve already run through the events in my mind of what’ll happen when I get there. Usually I end up disappointed because I’ve shown up ready for a fight with someone who’s being unreasonable, and they end up being a sweet old lady with arthritis who can’t operate the remote control, or some such thing (well okay, it’s not often that bad, but you get the idea).
Sometimes I do the same thing, but instead of getting ready for a fight, I’ll successfully get a red-light-running cyclist into a hammerlock until the police arrive, or some such thing.
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that most men do this.
Right?
My wife has recently stated calorie counting in order to trim off a few pounds and maintain a healthy weight. She’s logging everything she eats; keeping track every little calorie.
As you’d expect, there’s an app for that.
The app makes it easy to log any and all calorific intake, as well as any exercise done in order to keep on track to hit a weight goal. It has a database of food stuffs which can be added to by users so the chances are whatever you’ve eaten is on there, and a recipe function so you can mark the calories on the ingredients of a meal you’ve made yourself. It’s quite a nifty little app.
When she first started out, I was very supportive, asking if bogies were on the food list and if sex was on the exercise list (note: they aren’t, but you can add them).
However, seeing how calorific some foods are and how quickly those calories add up, I started to get curious as to just how many calories I was putting away in a day. Just curious, of course; I treat recommended daily calorie intake amounts the same as I treat speed limits – as a reference figure, not anything that needs strictly adhering to.
For a while I was contemplating downloading the same app my wife was using, so see how much of a calorie hog I was. I had a few reservations about it though; for a start I’m only reasonably sure that I put away a ton of calories, and knowing me I’d see the allowed limit as a target to be exceeded, not an upper limit. Also, I don’t plan on making any actual changes to my diet – I just want to see what’s what. That means that if I make one of my ShakeAway-style milkshakes that contains a few scoops of ice cream, maybe 300ml of milk, and a whole slab of Cadbury’s Caramel, I’d end up leaving a whole load of temptation on the recipe database for those who are doing serious calorie counting for serious health benefits. Well okay that wasn’t an actual concern, more of an added bonus. Same as adding sex or bogies to the database.
Anyway, I eventually went ahead and downloaded the app. Even telling it I wanted to lose an arbitrarily small amount of weight it still said I had to eat over 2,100 calories in a day.
Of course, such is the way when you have something new, you want a legitimate excuse to use it, so for a while on the first afternoon I was looking around for things I could eat to add to the log.
Unfortunately, that first evening was also the day of Eurovision, where we had a small ‘make your own pizza and shout at foreigners on the television’ party. My pizza – a six cheese, chicken and pancetta number – accounted for (and admittedly this is on slightly rough estimates on how much went into it) no less than 2,500 calories on its own. And that’s without the small garlic pizza we had to start, the slice of cheesecake that followed, and of course the drink. And what I had for lunch.
All told, I apparently exceeded 4,000 calories on my first day. When I logged it the app said if I carried on like that I’d put on almost 9kg (1.3 stone) in 5 weeks, if I lived that long.
The six cheeses on the pizza, if you were wondering, were mozzarella, spicy cheddar, Danish blue, Cotswold, goat cheese and Camembert. A pizza so awesome I’m sure I’ll be talking about it for a while.
Fortunately, two days later I spent the day helping some friends move home (in my first draft that said “some family” rather than “some friends” but reading it back I realised it sounded like I stopped and helped a random family on the street move their worldly possessions from a skip rather than, you know, my sister- and brother-in-law), and burnt far more calories then I ate, resetting the balance a bit and making me realise I actually appeared to have started caring about the calories I was ingesting.
Caring about, yes. Not actually reacting to, however; I overate by various amounts from a couple of calories to almost a thousand over the last week. But at is turns out, I’m still one of the bastards you really really hate who can eat what he likes and still not put on any weight.
Maybe that’s why, after a little over a week, I got bored of the app and went back to the old ‘how fat do I look in the mirror?’ technique.
It is sad to note that today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams.
In two weeks it will be marked, as it is every year, by Towel Day. Towel Day follows two weeks after Adams’ death simply because the first one was observed just two weeks after he died, and the date stuck.
On Towel Day, people are encouraged to bring their towels with them due to their fundamental usefulness as noted in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
I try to observe Towel Day every year (I am, on the whole, largely unsuccessful on that front). Partly because Douglas Adams is my favourite author and the Hitchhiker’s Guide my favourite book, but also because I am constantly inspired by the Guide and Adams’ writing style.
I have also before now decreed Douglas Adams’ passing as a pivotal point in my life. This is in part because I am often quite aware of the chain of cause and effect in my life.
The chain in this instance runs thus:
Douglas Adams died in May 2001. At the time I had no experience of Douglas Adams or the Hitchhiker’s Guide. A few months later, the BBC reran the TV series, which I caught by accident one evening, and was instantly hooked. I bought the book a few days later, and found it a massive inspiration which got me back into writing, leading me ultimately to study creative writing at university – where I met my wife (although obviously she wasn’t my wife at the time, would have been weird). And from there springs everything else.
Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is, we miss you Douglas, and I always find it so sad that it took your death for me to find you.
I was quite surprised to read yesterday that Sir Paul McCartney is to be married for a third time. I know I’m usually quite a cynical bastard, but I would like to offer my congratulations to Sir Paul and his bride to be.
Paul, well done sir. My sincere best wishes to you and your soon-to-be wife. Just, remember your last one Paul, and sign a prenup, or at the very least don’t marry a woman who is an insane paranoid delusional attention whore.
Well, as you may have noticed, I’ve just managed to – entirely accidentally – go an entire month without making a post. A very disappointing turn after managing to average over a post a day in March.
I could lay the blame on many things; drafts not coming together properly, my new job occupying more of my time than I intended, a lack of inspiration, tiredness, an iPad that distracted me more than I expected it to – so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. It’s all their fault.
Still, I have a handful of drafts with merit in them, and hopefully I’ll be able to find the inspiration that I’ve temporarily misplaced. Let’s see if I can at least get a post a week out in May.
Maybe.
Rob
I often find myself at this time of year proclaiming that democracy doesn’t work. In fact, my very first post on this blog was almost exactly a year a go, when I looked at the voting breakdown of the general election with a similar sentiment. In case you’re wondering where it came from, it’s actually a Simpsons quote.
Unfortunately, with each passing year I think I’m beginning to believe it more and more.
For a start, for the last year we’ve had a government that nobody voted for. Of course, the Americans had that for eight years, but then we mocked them for it. Incessantly. They tried to make up for it by electing a black man as their next president, but that only led to even more political division among the populace and the forming of a large group of people who still chose to believe that their president isn’t even eligible for the post because they don’t think he was born in their country (and why would he have been, seeing as how he looks so different). So then, it turns out that although America isn’t as racist as we used to think, it’s still pretty fuckin’ racist.
In this country, after twelve months of a government that nobody voted for, or even actually wanted at all, we had the choice to vote to remove the voting system that was partly responsible for the situation (that and the fact that very few of the parties were worth voting for which helped expose the holes in the system). What did we do? Aside from the fact that only a little over a third of us actually bothered to go out and participate in the vote, most of those that did decided that they liked the old system well enough, thanks.
Now, I admit, the main thing that swayed me into voting in favour of the alternative vote system (apart from working in another form of ‘AV’) was in fact the ‘No’ advertising campaign, who used a tactic almost on par with saying “see this kitten? This cute, loving kitten? Vote how we say or we’ll kill the kitten.” That and the fact that none of their arguments held up to scrutiny (in a race, isn’t the winner the one who comes first, they said. Yes, except this is a vote, not a fucking race). Oh yes, and they never actually denied the claim from the yes camp that AV was actually fairer.
I’m getting off the point a little bit here. I’m actually meaning to talk about democracy, and why it doesn’t work, rather than bemoaning our voting habits, although the two are obviously linked.
For a start, democracy is built on the simple tenet that every person gets a vote, and are free to do with it what they please (including not using it, but limited to not giving it to someone else). Unfortunately this premise overlooks two other very important tenets which I think need to be considered:
You should never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers (oh look, another Siimpsons quote). The fact that the The Sun is the most read newspaper and the X Factor is the most watched TV show in the UK goes to show that we have a significant number of – how can I put this politely? I can’t. Anyway they’re there, and there’s plenty of them, and they all have a vote each.
Fair enough, you might say, everyone’s equal so they all get a vote. Except, as I’ve noted before, everyone isn’t equal. Douglas Adams said it best: “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.” Some people, because of age, experience or teaching, are in a position to make a far better and well-informed judgement than others.
So what do we do? Well, we could do what we should be doing with drivers’ licenses and gun ownership and impose a minimum IQ requirement. Or, we could not open polling stations in Woking since living there is a sign that you are not of sound mind and judgement (did I say Woking? Sorry, I meant places like Woking, only without a fair chunk of my readers living there).
These are all potentially viable ideas, but all still battling with the overriding principle of trying to be democratic, or at least something approaching it.
Nope, I think we need a far more drastic change to our political system. Democracy doesn’t work, but dictatorships get shit done. I read somewhere that empires like Rome simply could not have stuck together as long as they did without a single person able to make the difficult decisions when it mattered. I don’t remember where I read that but I’m reasonably sure that one’s not a Simpsons quote.
The only tricky part is finding the right kind of person to be the sole ruler. Too soft, and chaos will reign; too hard and we’ll be too restricted to get anything done; too stupid and the whole thing will fall apart like a woman attempting to assemble flatpack furniture (did I just say that? Sorry that was horribly mean and sexist of me. Let me come up with another one: like, I dunno, something quite likely to fall apart).
Don’t worry though, I have the perfect person in mind (no, not me, I’m too hard, too soft and too stupid). There’s only one person who can be smart enough to know the right path, strong enough to tread that path, and yet still gentle enough to have the support of his people. And that person is (hang on, I just want to return to the ‘falling apart’ joke. Did you notice how the ‘falling apart’ but referred to both the mental state of the woman and also the physical state of the furniture she was building? It’s clever, it’s not my fault it’s sexist).
Where was I? Oh right, our ruler. Well, it just has to be Stephen Fry, doesn’t it?
We praise you, oh mighty benevolent ruler
Today contained what must be the most annoying piece of not-irony-but-what-most-peole-call-irony ever.
Long story short, someone who was giving a presentation had decided to bring his own equipment instead of paying to hire ours, and failed to bring a long enough extension cable. He came down to our office and announced that he was from Network Rail and he needed our help. After a bit of pleading, I told him we’d help him out this time, but if my train was late today I’d charge him double.
I think he now owes me quite a bit of money.
I got to Waterloo on my way home to fond only a handful of trains were on the departure boards, and all of them were already late. Figuring the earlier train might be the first to depart, I jumped on the 16:05 train, which at that point was already 45 minutes late in leaving.
Almost 30 minutes later, the guard finally turned up, had a quick look, and then let us know that there the driver hadn’t turned up yet so we weren’t going anywhere.
I got off the train to find the departure board had changed the train from being the 16:05 to being the 16:50 – and interesting choice, as that meant the train was still half an hour late. Why not change the time to make it a train that wasn’t supposed to have left yet?
At that point I gave up, met up with my wife (who leaves work after me) and headed for the Tube, and a journey that ended up taking over an hour to get as far as Richmond, where our final leg – a bus journey – was hampered by such bad traffic we decided it would be better to eat out that evening.
Even after we’d finished, the traffic was bad enough that we decided it would be better to walk to Twickenham Station to pick up our bikes and cycle home.
So, what caused this massive, widespread disruption?
As it turned out, it was caused by a single fatality, at Surbiton, at 10am that morning. Somehow, a single fatality at that spot, on a completely different line to the one I was using, caused total and complete havoc on the entirety of the South West Trains network, by causing both staff and trains to be stuck out of position.
Makes you wonder if they somehow knew that was a weak spot in the system.
Oh yes, and if you’re wondering, we did make it home – a total of over three hours after I left work, if you include stopping for dinner.
Dear Mr Postman:
Whilst I admire your careful and cunning attempt at hiding my parcel, I fear it has not been, on the whole, all that successful:
Although, I am happy you tried this rather than putting a stupid red postcard through the door telling me you’ll be keeping my parcel until the day before the time I’m able to actually get to your depot to pick it up.
My Blog Thing 