Our instincts seem to tell us to eat foods, which, eaten daily and in the quantities we would like, would damage our health. I, for one, desire cheese in quantities which would delight dairy farmers everywhere.

As humanity is maturing, we find more and more ways that generations of our evolutionary instinct is steering us in the wrong direction. The scientific method is a machine for making discoveries which are reported by the media with the opening sentence ‘It turns out…’. As in, ‘It turns out that our mother’s were wrong: eating red meat every day does not give you chest hair…’

I was wondering if we should start having the same lack of self confidence, and doubt in our ability to make healthy choices, when it comes to happiness and contentment. For example, everyone I know seems to think they would be much happier if they won the lottery.

But research shows lottery winners are roughly  as happy (or unhappy) a year after they won as they were before. So. maybe money is like water – if you have less than you really need, you cannot survive. If you have very little, you spend all your time thinking about it. But if you amass a lake of the stuff, you will discover that you can’t drink all that much of it.

So with money – having enough for basic comfort is great. But more will guarantee only as much happiness as you already have the aptitude to provide for yourself.

Recently, I have discovered an iPad/iPhone game I greatly enjoy, called Strategery. You can get it here.

In a nutshell, it’s a Risk-like strategy game, where each player gets armies based on the number of countries he or she controls. Online play is great fun, and it is possible to have multiple games in progress, with various different preferences, or just play a solo game. All fun. Add your user name as a comment if you want a game.

However, being the sort of curmudgeon who cannot be presented with a baby unicorn without loudly pondering whether it might not have been even nicer with wings, I have a suggestion. The big difference over Risk is that the board is randomly generated each time you play. With Risk, you got to know the board, and eventually developed a hankering after certain key locations, which had proven to be strategically significant in the past. I seem to remember making a bee-line for Indonesia.

In both games, each battle outcome is decided by dice roll. And here is where my suggestion comes in: I would like to be able to choose a ‘non-random’ mode in Strategery, where superior numbers always win, and where equal numbers cancel each other out. You see, I think that the randomly generated map provide enough randomness to make the game interesting. If battle outcomes were predictable players would win or lose depending on how well they read the map at the outset. According to the Art of War, this is how good generals think anyway – avoid any direct contact with the enemy until superior numbers and deployment make any actual conflict a foregone conclusion.

Chess has no randomness, but has the variety of pieces which makes every game very different for the casual player. Strategery’s random map is enough to make for a very interesting game without the dice.

And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins’ eggs for which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and three human frames strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance.

Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had written to say that I would bring the eggs at this time. Present, myself, C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows:

First Custodian. Who are you? What do you want? This ain’t an egg-shop. What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put the police on to you? Is it the crocodile’s egg you’re after? I don’t know nothing about ‘no eggs. You’d best speak to Mr. Brown: it’s him that varnishes the eggs.

I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily offensive even for an official man of science, for myself.

I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins’ eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period. Suddenly the Chief Custodian notices my presence and seems to resent it.

Chief Custodian. You needn’t wait.

Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you please.

Chief Custodian. It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn’t wait.

Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt.

But by this time the Chief Custodian’s attention is again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer’s thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his business. The reply is always the same, “I am waiting for a receipt for some penguins’ eggs.” At last it becomes clear from the Explorer’s expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman, but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him manners.

Some time after this I visited the Natural History Museum with Captain Scott’s sister. After a slight preliminary skirmish in which we convinced a minor custodian that the specimens brought by the expedition from the Antarctic did not include the moths we found preying on some of them, Miss Scott expressed a wish to see the penguins’ eggs. Thereupon the minor custodians flatly denied that any such eggs were in existence or in their possession. Now Miss Scott was her brother’s sister; and she showed so little disposition to take this lying down that I was glad to get her away with no worse consequences than a profanely emphasized threat on my part that if we did not receive ample satisfaction in writing within twenty-four hours as to the safety of the eggs England would reverberate with the tale.

This is from The Worst Journey in the World, his wonderful book on the expedition, which ends like this:

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, “What is the use?” For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.

 

He recently announced, via a rather angry newsletter, that he was being impersonated on Twitter. He went on to claim that he would never join Twitter, ending with the baffling line, ‘I will not be held hostage by you people.’

Which was odd.

Still, I thought about why he should feel such hatred for Twitter, when I loved it. And I gradually came to the conclusion that he should stay well away from it. Here’s why.

When I started using Twitter, only geeks knew about it, and I only followed people I knew. We talked amongst ourselves, as people do. This period was no doubt the basis for the early criticism of twitter: the boring tweet. If someone you have never heard of announces that traffic is bad on the motorway, it either seems either dull, or – worse – suggests the tweeter believes this information to be of enormous interest to the world in general. Of course, if you know the person, and you care that they make their flight, it is not boring at all. But people who failed to understand they were not being directly spoken to were confused by the apparent presumption.

Boredom is in the eye of the beholder. If you are listening in on a conversation – even if the conversation is being conducted in a public place – it is rude to loudly complain about the quality of the discussion. Out of context, any conversation can seem dull. I have a pet theory that the intimacy of a relationship can be measured by the seeming meaninglessness of the small talk. I think Harold Pinter made something of a career out of that.

What got me excited about Twitter was that it made it easy for anyone to become a publisher. This was the opposite of broadcasting, where we, the lucky spectators, gratefully receive the opinions of others, wiser than ourselves. Instead, we could escape the oppression of the established media, always pushing junk down our throats, and actually start sharing things that we really liked, with people who really cared about it.

Thus, the great criticism of twitter was actually its greatest strength. The rest of the world were like my parents, sticking their heads into my bedroom to tell me that the racket I was playing was not real music.

Being a romantic utopian at heart, I saw Twitter as a kind of independent republic. Here, I was free to create my own personal village, with just the residents I wanted. I could exile anyone who bored or annoyed me, and never have to hear from them again. Here, real talent could rise to the top.

But the established media – or the British media anyway – decided that the great strength of Twitter was that we simple folk could interact with celebrities. At last, we could see their actual words, typed by their very own celebrity fingers. Before we knew it, people were bombarding minor stars with tweets, begging for a retweet, perhaps because it was their birthday. As if being retweeted by a celebrity is the highest honour that the twenty-first century could bestow.

Twitter did create its very own celebrities, of course. Neither @hotdogsladies nor @apelad are people that I have ever met. But I almost always enjoy what they have to say. And they came to my attention via the recommendations of my friends on Twitter.

So seeing Twitter as a platform for the great and the good to instruct us to buy their latest offering is a great squandering of its potential. Disappointingly, it seems that humans self-organise into virtual communities which mirror the communities in the real world. Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, given that the world at large is ultimately self-organised as well.

But if the woman I love tweeted that she had just had a really nice cup of coffee, it would be more meaningful for me than a retweet from anyone, even Stewart Lee. Because, to me, ultimately, Stewart Lee is just a celebrity. If he joined Twitter, it would be because he was helping to reduce a potentially great and democratic means of mass communication into a street market, full of shouting hucksters and gullible mugs. And if I followed him, I would be accepting my former position in the old order: as a submissive, well, ‘follower’. Another digit to add to his index of Twitter significance.

Because all of that trivial banality that Twitter makes possible to share is exactly the stuff that makes us human, and the glue that makes human relationships possible. And the replacement of all that with PR, product placements and advertising is heartbreaking.

And although my romantic utopianism is bruised and bloodied, it is not broken. So Stewart Lee – at least in his capacity as a stand-up comedian – should stay well away from Twitter. Even though my Twitter idealism is slowly dying, I, also, will not be held hostage by you people.

This is a pretty good metaphor for a lot of things in my life: no formal training, I learn things as I go along, and spend a lot of time wishing I had more time to learn things properly. I suspect anyone over 35 who uses technology in their job feels the same way. There was no way to learn about HTML when I was at school. It didn’t exist.

The problems really arise when you have to go up a level, rather like a piano player who picks out tunes by ear suddenly being asked to play a Beethoven sonata.

Which is how my job feels at the moment. For the first time, I am working from home, not surrounded by people working on the same projects. If I forget something, there is no-one to ask, and no-one to make sure I am keeping focus. I have to know where any of twenty-five projects stands at any moment, and my tried and tested method of relying entirely on my memory does not work any more. My technique has collapsed.

I am sure this kind of predicament is very common: people who are perfectly organised gradually taking on more and more until they implode. And most of us have a self-taught self-organisation technique, because until recently no-one tried to teach it.

Hence the cult of GTD: like touch-typing for the mind, it promises to teach a method where you no longer have to look at the keys (metaphorically speaking) and just focus on what is being done.

To me, GTD has always sounded too good to be true. I keep everything in my head because that is how I have always worked best. That way it stays neat. As soon as I write things onto paper – do the complete Dave Allen mind-dump – my career becomes an illegible and depressing mess that makes me want to cry and take up lunchtime drinking.

Looking for a short term fix during a particularly frantic week, I downloaded a trial version of OmniFocus (a GTD friendly bit of Mac software) to help me get my ducks in a row. Initially it was quite frustrating and unintuitive. I found lots of material to help me use it, but that just annoyed me even more. I am used to working out how to use software by reading the preferences and menu items. Who needs manuals, right?

Then, a thought struck me. I remembered how computer games 20 years ago used to come with big, thick, manuals. You were expected to read them in their entirety before you could play them, and I used to do it gladly. The thicker the manual, the more absorbing the game. It also gave you something to do while the game loaded.

So, there I was, trying to keep on top of dozens of complicated things, all of which were very important, but expecting any helpful tools to be so simple that I could work out how to use them in 30 seconds. As if the problem with learning to play the piano was that it had too many keys. Cut it down to three, and we could all play it in minutes – but the music would not be very interesting.

So, I persisted, and I am so glad I did. OmniFocus is really, really good. So good, in fact, that I don’t use many of it’s features, but realise that I should. It’s like having a gnarled old pro telling you what you should be doing to make your life easier. Not always saying what you want to hear, but being right most of the time.

It even gave me the confidence to add an item to my someday/maybe list: learn to touch-type. Which I will do. Someday. Maybe.

It is increasingly obvious that it is hard to have a style of one’s own. It is impossible to strike the right balance between seriousness and humour, formality and accessibility until the words have sat unread for a week. It is also always important to avoid using words like ‘seriousness’. Yuck.

Part of reason for a more formal writing style is fear: fear of opening oneself up too much, but also the fear of making grammatical errors. I am not a great believer in grammar for its own sake. I would take euphony over some nineteenth-century syntax fetishist’s idea of correctness every time. ‘To boldly go’ just sounds a million times better than ‘to go boldly’, for example.

For me, blog posts are like a the father of the bride speech. I am sure we have all seen the sort of thing. We know a guy to be a confident teller of a joke, and declaimer of colourful opinions, who, when given the responsibility of making a ‘proper’ speech before a diverse audience, suddenly sounds as stiff as a board.

In this context, ‘I’ or ‘me’ are not posh enough, and no-one can ever remember which to use anyway. So ‘myself’ is used instead, as is ‘ourselves’ for ‘us’, and ‘yourselves’ for ‘you’.

In blog post writing, this also seems to manifest itself in an urge to mimic the style of broadsheet journalists. At one time, I read more newspaper inches than anyone I knew, and even cut out the columns of favourite journos for future re-reading. Now, when trying to write a short essay, I find myself reaching for that style, even cribbing the ‘winding up’ paragraph at the end from newspaper columns, which brings everything together. Which is euphony again – it just doesn’t sound finished until that bit is done.

It is also much easier, I am finding, to write about an opinion than to write anything factual. Factual pieces are much more useful, and much more widely read, I am sure, but terrifying to write. But I feel hypocritical: I have criticised journalists for years for spouting acres of opinion from a tiny scrap of fact.

What I will think when I re-read this in a week’s time, I do not know. At least I remembered to again split an infinitive.

We always think that times are tough, but are hopeful that they will improve. If they do not, and, instead, deteriorate, we are appalled, and declare the now-passed time a Golden Age. We thought we were working too hard for too little reward, and discover that we must now work even harder for even less.

What I find amazing in myself, and in other people, is our ability to forget selectively. Our minds are always looking for stories, neat arcs with heroes and villains, such that we forget all aspects of the past that do not suit the plot we currently hold to be the truth.

We do not really forget that much, of course, because as soon as we want to change the plot – when one of our heroes ‘betrays’ us, for example, and becomes a villain, we are very quick to rewrite history, recast and reshaped, where the betrayal is foreshadowed by signs and portents. ‘You may remember, my dear’, my grandmother would say, ‘I always said there was something suspicious about him.’ I never could remember her saying anything of the sort, but there is always a pressure to join with the groupthink in these matters, and go with the flow.

The only solution, I suspect, is to proactively declare every moment that we are alive to be a Golden Age. I think that is a pretty good summary of ‘Walden’ by Thoreau, which, as I concluded elsewhere, is not really a book about getting back to nature, but instead about savouring every day of life, whichever path one chooses.

I once had a dream, which I remember very fondly. I dreamed that I was sitting at our kitchen table, in the early morning, and suddenly became aware that I was dead, and that I would be doomed to sit at that table for eternity. Then, I saw my young son’s face look around the corner, and he came in to join me. It became obvious to me, in a second, that I was in heaven. That I had been in heaven all along. That I was living in paradise, and had never realised it. That the real horror of the moment – I realised on waking – was that these moments of sitting in a kitchen with my lovely boy would not last forever, but would soon slip away into the past, would one day be a Golden Age of precious memory.

The task of understanding this needs to be performed anew every day. Otherwise, all the days just run away, unmarked, unnoticed, into oblivion, to be yearned after, far too late.

After a late night conversation about the huge number of characters in Shakespeare’s history plays, a friend sent me a tube in the post, which ended up containing what you see in the attached video.

What we found interesting was how many characters remain through several plays, even though their titles change over the course of the plays.

It is arguable how much Shakespeare intended the continuity to be part of the meaning of the plays, but the ‘traitor’ scene in Henry V is certainly more meaningful when you have seen the ‘Edmund Mortimer’ story developing.

My friend, the creator of this chart, is one of those people who seem incapable of making an ugly thing. But I think the spirit behind this was a desire to read literature in a more literal way: that perhaps time should be spent just trying to read the words that Shakespeare wrote. We had grown up being told by our English teachers to always be on the lookout for ‘themes’ and meanings.

Another example: I remember having read a lot of discussion about the porter scene in Macbeth, which immediately follows the murder of Malcolm. Thousands of words about how this humorous scene breaks up the tension of the play etc etc. I certainly got marks for repeating this in an essay. When I mentioned it to an actor I knew, who had played Macbeth, he laughingly pointed out that he considered it a very handy scene, as it gave him just enough time to get out of his armour, and appear in his nightshirt.

Far away, on another continent, I had spent hours reading about the exploits of my favourite bands, like The Smiths or New Order, whose stories mentioned the streets and places that I now passed every day. It was electrifying. Madchester, with Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, was at it’s height.

The greatest Manchester band of them all, however, was Joy Division. The tragic early death of the lead singer, just at the point when they seemed destined for mainstream success, had frozen them into a never changing amber of coolness. All young men of my age imagined themselves in an urban setting, gazing – trenchcoated – into the middle distance, while Atmosphere played in the background.

The Haçienda club – owned by the former members of the band, now New Order – was a short walk from my home, and the legend of older clubs, The Electric Ballroom, and The Factory itself loomed large in the folk memories of the local youth.

I worked with a woman who was – perhaps – five years older then me, but I had no idea how close she was to the epicentre of this legendary time, until I overheard a stray remark concerning the closure of The Electric Ballroom.

‘Did you ever see Joy Division play?’ I asked excitedly.

She said she had, but without pride, or with any affected ease. Did she not know how cool this was?

What was Ian Curtis like, I asked, breathlessly.

‘Him,’ she said, her lip curling with contempt, ‘He was a compete twat.’

I was crushed. She had been there when all this had been going on, and that was her assessment?

I asked for more details, but never got them. Heaven alone knows what sins the rock god committed to earn her eternal contempt. But I learned something. The Manchester residents who had the most respect for the legends were the ones – like me – who had missed the formative years. The people who had seen it all happen had no great illusions. A prophet has no honour in his own country, even now.