They've lost the source code

According to the BBC this morning, Downing Street said it would be "difficult and complex" to change the law such that Prince William and Kate Middleton's first offspring would be first in line for the throne regardless of sex. (Currently it's the first boy). It doesn't sound like such a complex and difficult change to the wording......

For the New Year

How to lose weight

I produce one of these from time to time……

1. Know why you want it

Remind yourself of the reasons. Vague stuff like “being healthier” doesn’t cut it. How important is weight loss to you?

Do you really aspire to be like people who are slim? Or do you secretly despise them, or suspect them of being vain or puritanical or boring? If so, that’s a barrier to losing weight.

Do you secretly like being physically big and imposing? Does it make you feel more real, more substantial? Safer? Is it a justification for avoiding your sexuality? Is the wish to lose weight a form of self-punishment?

You need to be sure that you actually want weight loss. This isn’t a point to tick off in a few seconds.

2. Accept that your life may have to change

Be realistic. Build a clear visualisation of what your life would be like if you lost weight.

If you were a drug addict, you couldn’t expect to give up the drugs, but still hang out with the same people, spend your time in the same ways, etc. That wouldn’t work. Your whole life would have to change. New places, new friends.

Lots of people seem to want a result where everything is exactly the same, except they’re slim. That may not work. If your social life, for example, involves spending quite a lot of time in the pub, or in front of the television, that might have to change.

I accept that there are those who exercise, and eat healthily, and basically live the right lifestyle, to whom this may not apply. But for many people, it’s important to consider how your life will be different.

3. Psychological factors

Again, this is one that people tend to brush aside a little too quickly. Often, people tend to eat to meet some psychological “hunger”, some comfort need, or according to a habit. It may be a form of rebellion. You need to understand the payoffs to you in how you eat. As one book says, “it’s about your parents”.

Abandon self-criticism completely. You eat according to your appetite, like everyone else. The question is why your appetite leads you to eat too much. Understand the reasons. But never ever berate yourself self-destructively with terms like “greedy” or “lack of willpower”. It’s not true and it doesn’t help.

4. Learn to distinguish hunger from appetite

Hunger is the need for food; appetite is the craving for food. Hunger is usually a diffuse sensation in the body, a bit like a pain. Appetite usually involves imagining a particular food. For example, a craving for chocolate. Appetite and hunger feel different and are in different places in the body. You can feel appetite even when full. Experiment with this. Become more aware of your sensations.

If you really are hungry, you should eat. But be aware that it can take a while for food to “take effect”, so eat just a moderate amount and then stop. Give yourself permission to come back for more later, say half an hour later, if it’s really necessary. Give the meal time to work.

5. Get enough sleep

Lack of sleep disrupts the body’s hormones, and tends to cause overeating.

This falls under the general heading of “be nice to yourself”. You need to do things that you physically enjoy other than eating. Being adequately slept is one of them. (Others might be having a bath, having a massage, dancing, singing, sex....)

If your reaction to this is “I don’t have enough time”, then you need to ask yourself how important weight loss is to you. You may have to cut down on TV, or video games, or web surfing... or overtime at work. You’ll need to decide how much those things make you happy. (There is a distinction between enjoyment and happiness.)

The science on how lack of sleep disrupts the appetite control hormones is conclusive. Many people secretly view sleeping as some form of weakness, or treat lack of sleep as yet another form of self-punishment.

You’ll feel better for adequate sleep, and be more awake and healthier. Also more resistant to disease.

6. Make food boring

Avoid having food as fun. Find other sources of entertainment.

If there are certain foods that, once you have some, you have to have too much, then avoid those completely. One of those for me is peanuts. Once I start, it’s hard to stop, so it’s better not to start.

Research shows that the wider choice of food you have, the more you tend to eat. Stay away from buffets. Try to design a day’s food that works for you, then eat that same day’s food every day. Make it dull. If you’re actually hungry, you can still enjoy the food, but do not eat the sort of stimulating things that you could “find space for” even when not really hungry.

7. Avoid alcohol

It’s empty calories; it stimulates hunger and appetite; it undermines willpower. It also disrupts sleep.

8. Cut back on carbs

I find carbs make me hungry. They stimulate my appetite. I know low-GI carbs are supposed to be better, and maybe they are, but even those, in large amounts, cause me problems. You may be the same.

I’m not advocating an Atkins-style ultra-low carb diet. What I am saying is, if you eat less carbs (say no more than 120 grams a day), you may find it easier to stick to a lower calorie diet – that the cravings are less. Just try it and see. If it doesn’t work for you, you can stop it.

We do need carbohydrate foods to get our vitamins, and fibre and micro nutrients. So cut out forms of carbs that are not good sources of any of those, such as bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, sweets, puddings, cake, pastry, sugar, beer, sugar drinks, breakfast cereals, cereal bars, and so on. Cut all of those out or radically down. (My own rule is to eat those only after intense exercise).

By all means eat fruit, veg, black rye bread, and beans, pulses and lentils. Berries are very good for you, as are green leafy vegetables, cauliflower and broccoli. Eat vegetable soup.

9. Eat some protein at every meal

It’s filling. Aim for at least 25g of protein at every meal. Do not eat a meal of just “salad” or fruit or soup and bread.

10. Walk

Intense exercise is good for you, but I find it tends to make me hungry. Swimming is the worst for this, and there are good scientific studies that show that although swimming is very good for your fitness, it’s not so good for weight loss. By all means do intense exercise if you want, but I recommend the best thing is to build some walking into your day.

Xmas shopping

I couldn't help noticing that the shops claimed they would "lose" millions of pounds worth of sales revenue because the heavy snow stopped people going pre-Christmas shopping.

Now, I would have thought that no revenue would be lost, because, if people wanted to buy something, they'd go and buy it later once the snow had cleared.

Are the retailers' remarks tantamount to an admission that at Christmas people go out and buy millions of pounds worth of crap that they don't need and, given a brief pause for reflection, would decide not to buy after all?

The burning of books

Loth as I am to follow the media news agenda, I can't resist commenting on the Burning The Koran story.

It seems evident that anyone who would burn the Koran, is a stupid, troublemaking person, obsessed with what he "has a legal right to do", and no concern with his responsibilities in a complex world. That it makes sense to be mutually sensitive to each other's sacred symbols even if we don't believe in them ourselves. (Especially for someone who claims to be in touch with the sacred).

At the same time, I can't help noticing that in response, many Islamic people have burned the American flag. As they seem to do on an almost routine basis. They must have a large stock of them.

from Facebook

FIFTEEN ALBUMS

THE RULES: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen that come to you in no more than fifteen minutes. (Dave Gilles started this. Isn't it nice?)

No, I think Roy Plomley started it, but here goes in no particular order. The world-changers...

1. Abbey Road
2. Tadpoles by the Bonzoes
3. Fourth by Soft Machine
4. Roxy Music's first
5. Meddle
6. The Rotters Club (Hatfield and the North)
7. Ten New Songs (Leonard Cohen)
8. Solitude Standing (Suzanne Vega)
9. Do It Yourself (Ian Dury)
10. Speaking in Tongues (Talking Heads)
11. A Part, and yet Apart (Bill Bruford)
12. Tales from Topographic Oceans (Yes)
13. The Ladder (Yes)
14. FootLoose and Fancy Free (Rod Stewart)
15. Vertigo (Groove Armada)

Next week the answer might be different

Hello

I saw a "Qi" last night. No idea if it was a recent one or one from the archives.

Anyway, the very lovely Stephen whom God preserve, asserted that Edison invented the use of the word "hello" as a greeting. That previously, we'd only had "hullo" spelt without an "e", and that it had meant an exclamation of surprise or discovery.

The display behind him showed the word "hello" with the e underlined.

I've looked in Chambers and my SOED, and no mention is made of Edison.
They both direct me to "hallo" as the primary spelling, and the first meaning listed is indeed an exclamation of surprise or discovery.

The web, of course, says many contradictory things, with little proof.

I want to ignore the spelling part. We're talking spoken language, and the "hello" versus "hallo" or "hullo" thing doesn't interest me much.

I want to know which of the following is true:

1. "hello" was used as a face to face greeting before Edison, but he was responsible for suggesting that that was how one should answer the telephone (as opposed to Bell's suggestion of "ahoy").
2. "hello" was not, or rarely, used as a face to face greeting before the telephone; Edison suggested it for the phone; it caught on; and then also caught on for face to face greetings. (As asserted by Fry).

Presumably the answer is to find it in dialogue in novels written before the invention of the telephone. I may have to re-read my Austen.

I may also have to start answering the phone with "Ahoy".

Wikipedia, Knowledge and NLP

My teacher Joseph once asked me if I know what an apple is....

I was looking the other day at the Wikipedia entry for NLP – Neurolinguistic Programming. Wikipedia is an interesting phenomenon. It’s said to be more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s an unpaid social enterprise – “big society”? It’s an astonishing and valuable achievement. I use it a lot. To me, sometimes, it can be a bit like the media, a wonderful source of information, until you read an article on something you actually know a fair bit about, and then you realise the limitations.

Particularly interesting can be to read the discussion page behind an article, where the editors discuss what they should put on the page. This, like the articles, is open to the public. “Editors” just means anyone who decides to participate; you don’t have to be anyone to be an editor.

Wikipedia operates under some rules, which include “NPOV” – articles should take a neutral point of view, and “OR”, no original research. That is "all material must be attributable to a reliable published source, even if not actually attributed." You can’t include any information, or analysis or synthesis of information, of your own; it has to be from published sources.

So Wikipedia does not exactly contain knowledge. It doesn’t tell you what’s true, it tells you what’s been said elsewhere. It’s science-based, so where appropriate, that means in scientific publications. If you know something, you can’t put that in Wikipedia. This is the pons asinorum of Wikipedia, a point that those who “don’t get it” can never grasp. They’ll post something like “such and such a food is bad for you” and wail “but it’s true” as other editors remove the offending sentence.

Of course, that varies depending on the context. If you write that Winchester is in Hampshire, you don’t need to provide a journal reference. If you give a number for its population, you probably should state your source. It depends whether the topic is something science is applicable to.

And so to NLP. It is (in my opinion) a school of psychology and psychotherapy. I’ve been trained in it. I can be neutral, because I don’t earn my living that way, and I am sceptical about quite a lot of NLP. However, I wouldn’t recognise it at all from the Wikipedia article. And, interestingly, looking at the discussion page, this isn’t really the editors’ fault. They are working hard and fairly to present the facts. But they can’t really include an explanation of NLP – that’s against the rules, and quite rightly so. All they can do is extract things from NLP publications – which tend to be self-help books, with very non-Wikipedia-style dumbed-down introductory explanations.

NLP is controversial – it is probably the most widely used (again this my opinion), widely known to the general public (think e.g. Derren Brown, Paul McKenna), school of psychology, but for various valid reasons, is totally unaccepted in the academic psychology world. The Wikipedia editors have been forced down the road of “what academia has to say about it”. The answer to that is, very few studies have been done, and there is no scientific evidence to support it; and therefore the Wiki article is pretty uniformly negative in tone. It imparts the (true and correct) information that NLP is widely popular but scientifically unvalidated.

The thing is ... more or less no form of therapy rests on facts that are scientifically validated. Freud for example tells us we have an id, an ego, and a superego. No scientific studies exist to demonstrate this. Evaluations of Freudian therapy rest not on the evaluation of the stated theories, but rather on testing the effectiveness of the therapists. (Where it does pretty badly). Transactional Analysis, another popular form of psychotherapy, says we each have three ego states called parent adult and child. Again, it’s a way of thinking about it, but absolutely not scientifically validated. However, NLP was incautious enough to make some claims about representational systems and eye movements, which are fairly incidental to the therapy, but possibly testable in a lab, and the scientific evaluation has tended to be about testing these theories rather than measuring the effectiveness of NLP.

Gestalt therapy rests on no particular theoretical basis, but gets a fairly positive write-up in Wikipedia. In this regard, Wiki does what it’s supposed to: it reflects current perception. NLP is indeed regarded with suspicion in academia, whereas Gestalt and Transactional Analysis are well received there, even though they are no more scientifically based than NLP. If you read the editors discussion page on Wikipedia for NLP, you find that the editors are not discussing how to explain what NLP is, nor whether the evidence suggests that it’s valid. They’re discussing which journal papers referenced which, where they were published, what order they came in – it’s all about what can be cited.

In practice, the effectiveness of any form of psychotherapy is only 10% about the school, and 90% about the therapist. (I made those numbers up). I’ve seen some amazing NLP therapists and plenty of useless ones. I expect the same is true of TA and Gestalt.

So what is NLP? That’s for another day. This piece is about Wikipedia, science, and knowledge. It doesn't count if someone says it; it only counts if it's in a publication. Do you know what an apple is?

Healthy eating again

Interesting story in the papers the last few days about how sales of beetroot have risen since it was reported to lower blood pressure.

There was a similar one a while ago about blueberries -- how popular they have become since they were shown to be a good source of phytochemicals.

I think it shows that people do take in information, and do care about healthy eating.
Contrary to the popularised media vision of people who have no idea, or don't care, and just eat "junk food" whatever that is. Whenever the public get any clear and credible message, they'll go for it. I'm sure the "dark chocolate good for you" one has sunk in too -- the supermarket shelves seem to devote much more space than they ever used to to chocolate with 70% cocoa or more.

Regulating obesity

Yesterday’s Guardian (13th July) had an opinion piece by George Monbiot about deregulation. Not surprisingly, in the G, he’s against it, and describes doing anything without having government regulation as playing football without a referee. And he argues that the rich (corporations) will “foul” the poor (consumers). Red card. A nice “world cup” reference, but I’m not sure I agree with the analogy, nor about the balance of power between corporations and their customers.

It was a bit of an “and another thing” article: things thrown in on top of each other. I feel unqualified to comment on farming, property development or banking rules, all of which got a mention. He says the coalition is opposed to speed cameras, and if that’s true, then I’d strongly agree with him that it’s a bad thing; but I’m not sure what it has to do with regulation of the private sector. But the part that caught my attention was his paragraphs on food and obesity, a topic on which I am passionate.

He accuses the Health Secretary of seeking “to shift responsibility for improving diets and preventing obesity from the state to society”. I’m not sure I knew it ever belonged to the state. And says that “he [the health secretary] blamed the problem on low self-esteem and deplored what he called ‘a witch-hunt against saturated fats, salt and sugars’”.

Note: there is no scientific evidence whatsoever, not even any faint possibility or likelihood, that obesity is caused by saturated fat or salt, and the evidence against sugar is thin. Pretty much any expert you consult will agree that the causes of obesity are (a) not enough exercise and (b) the amount of food eaten – not the composition of that food. Carbohydrates are a problem, but sugar is not especially worse than other carbs. I am surprised, but very pleased, to hear that the health secretary’s views on obesity are so close to my own.

“From now on, he announced, communities will be left to find their own solutions. The companies which make their money from selling junk food and alcohol will be put in charge of ensuring that people consume less of them. I hope you have spotted the problem.” Yes, I think I have – first you say the health secretary is making individuals responsible for their health, and then suddenly you switch to saying he’s putting companies in charge of it. Make your mind up.

Monbiot goes on to quote a study that appears to weaken his own position. It says that “weight gain is the inevitable – and largely involuntary – consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle”. Which means, a sedentary one with food always available. How is he going to fix that by regulation?

But the really interesting point is “The same study points out that obesity rates are much higher among the poor than the rich”. Food costs money. An obese person could in theory save money by eating smaller portions of their accustomed foods, and lose weight. There is no such thing as “weight-loss food” – so it is not more expensive to eat a weight loss diet. (However, there is something close to a healthy weight-loss diet: a vegetarian diet – which is actually a lot cheaper). And the unemployed are more likely to have the time available to walk for an hour or two every day. So why are they more likely to be obese?

Tell me if you think I’m crazy, but in my opinion, the obvious explanation as to why the poor are more likely to be overweight is that their lives are unhappy. Food is one of the few pleasures and pastimes available. Does anyone think that’s an absurd suggestion? Strangely, having criticised the health secretary for saying that obesity is related to low self esteem, Monbiot is approvingly quoting the above study that seems to me to support the same idea.

That’s right. It’s not someone’s fault. People are obese because our lifestyle no longer involves much exercise, eating has become a cheap pastime, and because we’re unhappy. No villain. But Monbiot can’t have that; he needs a villain. That’s how you sell papers. He wants to say that it’s all because we’re being offered food that’s “fattening”, by “corporations”, and this should be regulated. He has to believe that we’re being made to eat the way we do by bad guys. Not by our genes and our emotions. Science (including the report he quotes) says the opposite.

Just supposing that obesity was caused by fattening food high in fat, or high in sugar, which it isn’t, how would you prevent that by regulation? Ban the sale of confectionery? Laws against cake? Doughnut prohibition? Are we to close down the local fish and chip shop that sells everything deep fried in batter, or the local Indian that sells everything cooked in ghee? Will the supermarket not be allowed to sell crisps, cheese, white bread, sausages? Can anyone paint me a picture of how this regulation would work? It’s insane.

Then he hits us with this: “Eventually (think of BSE, the railways, tobacco advertising) the government will be forced to re-regulate, but not before large numbers of people have been hurt".

Well, I am thinking of BSE. It is indeed tragic that there were no regulations against a practice that nobody, at the time, knew was dangerous. I don’t think the number of people harmed was large, not compared to obesity, but it would be better if it hadn’t happened. So yes, BSE is a good example – of how regulation could not help.

Please email me if you really think obesity could be reduced by anything the state can in regulating large food industry corporations. Anything at all.

The future of the media

An interesting paradox, it seems to me, about the “serious” media. Like newspapers.

I have the feeling they’re going away. Who wants a chunk of dead tree that costs money? And contains content selected for you by someone else? Who wants to pay to read opinions in a paper when you can find better argued opinions on the web? The Indy actually prints “selected tweets” for us! Like we can’t find them ourselves? And TV? Who wants to pay to watch a “broadcast” at a time they can’t choose, of something they can’t interact with? If I was short of cash, my TV license would be the first thing to go. I’m not sure I can remember the last time I watched it – maybe a few weeks ago? Oh, wait, it was the world cup :-(

TV seems to have descended to two things: live broadcast of sport, which some people are willing to pay for, fair enough, and in this case, it makes sense that the customer can’t choose the time. And soap and “reality TV”, the great oxymoron. I can’t imagine that newspapers or “serious” TV have any future in the world of the web.

Yet at the same time, the media seem to have tremendous power. They define “the agenda”. In the Independent this morning: an extract from the private diary of the immigration minister under the previous government, and how he found that the media simply defined “what the question was” and would not report the government’s point of view. (Not just that they disagreed with it, but that they wouldn’t even present what it was). The private thoughts of a very senior minister, in charge of probably the second highest question on the agenda at the election, and his main concern was not how to solve the actual problem, but frustration that the electorate were being fed a filtered and constructed picture by the media.

I do find it extremely offensive that the papers and the “serious” radio and TV (Paxman, Today, PM programme, etc) try to tell me what the issues are I should be concerned about. Here’s me wondering how we cut carbon emissions, how we fund old age when we’re living so much longer, and what the real purpose of education is in our society, and the papers are telling me today I’m supposed to be really up in arms about “non-dom peers”. Eh?

Similar points in the minister’s diary about the expenses scandal: he was not found to have done anything wrong, but had to repay money because of a retrospective rules change (this is his version). The media would not acknowledge that this category existed: you had to be either a saint or a duck-house owning trough-snouter. My own impression was that the media wanted it to be about wickedness, as always. A story saying “actually the system was just set up wrong and badly administered” wasn’t exciting enough for them. They told the story they wanted to tell, and any MP who argued with them, they just labelled as one of the bad guys.

It’s also true, of course, that the Westminster crowd are equally cut off from reality in their bubble. That came out in spades when Gordo labelled someone a bigot for having views that a majority of the electorate agree with. I remember hearing one of the MPs wives saying on the radio that it was outrageous that she could lose her job as her husband’s PA, when she hadn’t personally done anything wrong. Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.

How to reconcile my ideas of the media as on the one hand, having so much power that they effectively steer the result of the election, and on the other hand as being a dying institution, I don’t know.

But I strongly advise you not to take seriously what you read in the papers. It’s a construct, a virtual reality that bears little relationship to anything. Think of it as a cartoon strip.

The F word

Listening to the News Quiz this evening, Andy Hamilton (or Satan as I think of him) mentioned that his live standup is much more sweary than he is on Radio 4, and he gets letters from "older" people who have heard and liked him on R4, then get tickets to his live show and are surprised, and write about their dismay at all the swearing.

Another panel member said she'd had the same experience.

He asked, very reasonably, how on earth older people had got through life without getting used to a bit of swearing.

It did make me wonder, will I, at some point in the future, become shocked by the F word?

Or, I wonder, is what they're really saying, "you're actually clever and funny on R4, but in your live show, you seem to think all you need to do to be funny is say 'fuck' a lot, which is a bit patronising really".

But I can't believe he's not still clever and funny in his live show. He's so lovely on R4.

It's a mystery.

The Election

Karen stood as a Green Party candidate in the council elections, and got nearly 600 votes, beating Labour.

It raises some questions for me, because, on the one hand, I believe the environment is the most important issue on the agenda, but on the other, as one of the other Green candidates said to me, they are the party nearest to socialism, with which I disagree. I regret the fact that concern for the environment has been yoked together with a left-wing stance.

Mind you, it depends what he means by socialism. Someone said to me that up until today we'd had a socialist government in this country, meaning New Labour. Most people I know who call themselves socialists would strongly disagree. NL didn't meet the letter of the technical definition, nor, some would say, the spirit of it. Has socialism now come to mean just having a welfare state? In that case, we lived in a socialist state under Mrs Thatcher.

The mainstream parties now seem barely distinguishable. They all believe in the system of capitalism: you can start a company, sell things, sell shares, employ people. Nobody proposes nationalisation. Nobody proposes deregulating business: nobody proposes to allow you to sell mouldy food or operate saws without safety guards or send children up chimneys. Nobody proposes to abolish state schools, or private schools, or state medicine, or private medicine. Nobody wants to say anything at all about the Euro. It's all come down to bickering about foxhunting, and the precise details of the shape of the income tax curve. I say I'm against socialism, but nobody out there is offering it anyway.

- - - -

It's been an odd election. We were faced with the prospect that if we voted Labour, we didn't know who'd be PM. And the "leader" figure still matters to people. There was a big groan from the audience on Any Questions this evening, when the Labour spokesperson said "we have plenty of suitable people, for example Harriet Harman".

I suspect David Cameron is deeply relieved that he didn't get a clear majority. A friend described the current situation as "passing the parcel with a live hand grenade" -- nobody wants power. As Mervyn King said, whoever gets in will have to reform the economy, and will become hugely unpopular as a result, "out of power for a generation". I think that would be especially true if it were the Conservatives -- it plays to the standard "wicked Tory cutters" storyline.

Maybe if we get a coalition government, they can do all the unpopular stuff, quickly, with everybody's hand on the steering wheel, no blame allocated, and then call a fresh election. Oink flap.

A few bits from Intl Jnl Obesity

... which is my favourite journal ...

(a) A paper on "Effects of snack consumption for 8 weeks on energy intake and body weight" - showing that making people eat quite calorific snacks doesn't cause them to gain weight. (These were healthy non-obese young adults). In healthy people, the body compensates quite skilfully and automatically for what you eat or don't eat. It seems to me to be very likely that the converse follows: cutting out snacks doesn't make you lose weight. And snacks, really, are just food. Deliberately not eating doesn't make you lose weight.

(b) A weird one: "Development of diet-induced fatty liver disease in the aging mouse is suppressed by brief daily exposure to low-magnitude mechanical signals". If you feed mice a bad diet, you can reduce the liver disease it causes by vibrating them at 90Hz for 15 mins a day. Time for a trip to the disco?

Terrorist

I was a bit incensed by the main headline on the front of this evening's free London papers: "Child sent to live with Jet Bomber". Apparently a child was sent by Haringey council to be fostered with the family where a terrorist lived who was plotting to blow up a plane.

The paper referred to it as a scandal (without any quote marks). They quoted the local MP Lynne Featherstone as saying "Just when you think Haringey cannot get any worse, it does. This beggars belief".

The child was sent there before anyone knew the man was a terrorist. As soon as the council found out, the child was removed. The man was under police surveillance -- but the social workers had no way to know that. So, what exactly is the scandal?

I'm wondering what the MP and/or the paper think the council should have done? Should they have known psychically about the terrorist, perhaps? Or perhaps just assume anyone Islamic is a terrorist? And then the paper ritually mentions Baby P and Victoria Climbie, as if there was some similarity. There is no evidence the child in this case was harmed in any way whatsoever.

Just when you think newspapers and MPs cannot get any worse, they do. This beggars belief.

Compassion

I've wanted to write piece about "compassion" for a while. Various things I've heard and read recently have come together to trigger it. Compassion is a concept much referred to in Buddhism, and it's from there that I draw some of what I'm saying. Other of it comes from stuff I've been reading about psychological concepts of "emotional fusion" and "differentiation".

A while ago, I heard Billy Bragg on Any Questions, answering a question about whether the NHS should provide a very expensive drug that might extend the lives of kidney disease patients by about a year. "You can't put a price on a human life" he said, drawing an obligatory round of clapping. Strangely, when I typed his name above, I mistyped it as Bully Bragg, and that now sounds right to me. He has that air of menace about him: if you disagree with him, he's not going to present reasoned arguments, he's going to get angry.

That cliché about not putting a price on human life is fallacious. Try asking Oxfam -- they'll tell you exactly how much money they need to save a human life. Paddy Ashdown pressed him: if the drug cost ten million pounds, to buy one person one year of life, should we spend it? "Yes", said Billy: If you don't, your priorities are wrong. When he talks about wrong priorities, he must mean spending the ten million pounds on things like housing, education, foreign aid, pensions, or indeed other medical procedures and drugs.

Billy Bragg, to me, exemplifies the false form of compassion. An apparent "caring" very much about people -- but violent emotions close to the surface. I get the feeling that his "caring" is to meet his own needs, not theirs. What that need might specifically be is the avoidance of guilt.

As a general pattern, it goes like this: lots of bad stuff seems to be happening in the world but not in the part of it where I live. I feel guilty about that. How can I prove that it's not all my fault? I know, I'll make myself feel really bad about all the badness in the world. Very unhappy, very angry about it all. That'll show it wasn't my fault.

I think this unconscious pattern is formed in childhood, as they all are. If there's a playground altercation, make sure you're crying when the grown-ups arrive, because if you look happy, they'll assume you're the one to blame.

If you look at the Buddha, he's telling us the first Noble Truth: that to be alive is to suffer. He's seeing millions of people suffering; not just material suffering, but spiritual suffering. And he's sitting there smiling peacefully. What a bastard, eh? Doesn't he care?

To me, the Buddha's compassion consists of two things: first, he knows he's okay. He is not a deity or an immortal or a super-being or anything. He's just a man. (He dies of food poisoning.) But he's okay. And secondly, he knows that he's the same as the rest of us. That's the compassion. He knows he's in the same boat. He sees everyone doing their stupid stuff, and he knows he's no different. He knows that in the end either you'll get it, or else sooner or later you'll die, and either way, it'll be fine, really: don't worry about it. He doesn't think there's any "devil" or any "wicked people" making it bad; nothing to fight against or get angry about. Just things you should be doing. No “grown-ups” coming along to assign blame and punish the wicked. Either you'll get it, or you won't.

The other thing was an episode of The Secret Millionaire. This millionaire (worth £77M actually) dresses up poor and visits the needy. Just like a traditional fairy story. He thinks he's going to judge them and decide who best deserves a handout. He's one-up on them, both financially, and in terms of judging them. But what happens, of course, is that he soon realises they are his equals, if not betters. He helps out in a school for dropouts, and tries to tell a teenage boy that he needs GCSEs. The boy out-argues him, explains the realities of life to him, and leaves the millionaire in some doubt about the value of GCSEs. The boy is clearly intelligent and articulate.

The millionaire helps out in various groups, and rapidly finds that he's learning from them, and getting as much from them as they are from him. He no longer feels better than them. It's excellent drama. At least for a moment, he reaches a position of compassion, seeing them as who they really are.

The thing about differentiation and emotional fusion comes in here. I've been re-reading a favourite book in this area. Differentiation means having a stable sense of who you are, despite the circumstances and environment. The Buddha has it. It's what Mr Millionaire doesn't have. (Not that I dislike him or disapprove of him: he seemed nice, generous, and so on). He's one person at the start; then his sense of self wobbles as he meets the various people and learns some things, and then at the end he puts back on his suit of £77M and takes up again the identity that it lends him: he becomes "millionaire" again. Differentiation is stability: for example, being the same person with your parents as you are with your friends.

Emotional fusion is the opposite: taking your mood and state and sense of self from those around you. If you're emotionally fused with someone, you "care" a great deal that they should be happy . . . not for their sake, but for your own, because their unhappiness is intolerable to you. It's proper for mothers to be like that about their babies, up to a certain age. But in adult relationships, it's a big problem. If you can't stand someone else to be unhappy, then you have to control them, and if something bad does happen to them, it makes you resent them, and makes you angry. Which is where I think Billy Bragg stands with respect to humanity. He's emotionally fused. He wants kidney patients to be given all the treatment that money can buy, so that he can feel okay. But somehow, he never does feel okay. Always angry.

Playing in the big kitchen

I had a really good time last night, cooking dinner for the choir. It’s often one of the high points of my week. It works a bit like “Ready Steady Cook”, where some ingredients left over from shops and restaurants are kindly donated to us, and we have to conjure a meal using them. We shop for our own ingredients in advance as well, but that’s tricky when we don’t really know exactly what will be donated. It’s a lot of fun and usually turns out very well.

Last night, I saw some rump steak special offer in Tesco, about £2.60 a pound, and couldn’t pass it up. Nice tasty steak. So I got that. I knew I could use it with anything. As well as some tea bags, milk, and squash, all of which we turned out not to be short of anyway. And some chocolate digestives. Always a winner. We were told to expect some curry, some frittata, and some roast vegetables.

What turned up was a vast quantity of bread, which we gave the members to take home, some fruit drinks, and some roasted veg as advertised. No frittata, but fortunately some soya mince, half of which I froze for another time, and the rest of which I combined with some soup left over from last week to make a vegetarian dish. The “curry” turned out to be some spiced peas and cauliflower, not in a sauce, so I cooked some rice and mixed them into that. Then there was a tray of thinly sliced fried courgettes, so we cubed our steak, fried it, and mixed it with the courgettes and made a sauce. Oh, and there was a mixed salad, and a big dish of raw radishes, which we offered to people. An excellent meal, in all.

It’s always fun and interesting. I tend to overestimate on the food, but any leftovers are always eagerly taken home by the members. Many of the members seem to be used to eating quite little (or else they’ve had their tea before they come to choir!). I get burns on my hands. And I get to play with a big kitchen.

There’s nothing like that moment when people start to come in the door and say “oh, something smells good!”

Italian Restaurant

We've just had a very memorable lunch at an Italian restaurant.

Part of what made it special was that we didn't look at the menu or order things... the chef just brought us little bits different things to try, from time to time. It was very relaxed. (Usually I spend too much time trying to work out what would be "best" to have.) The lovely sunny day helped too.

The secret to how it's done? You find a nice Italian restaurant, where they make their own fresh pasta (they don't even have pizza on the menu). You go in and say you maybe want to book the whole restaurant for a big family lunch in a few weeks time, on a day when they'd otherwise be quiet. You talk about what kind of food they specialise in... and then you say, let's have some lunch now, and the manager just brings some examples of his cooking... some grilled vegetables, some olives, some sliced meat .... some unusual pink ravioli with asparagus .... a glass of wine .... a few gnocchi in a smoky sauce ... a cup of coffee ... some cheese with honey ... some grappa, the good stuff ... not too much of anything... whatever he comes up with .... while you chat about the arrangements ...

Calories

I saw an article in the current New Scientist about the calorie content of food.

Apparently the current procedure for calculating the calorie content is based on some quite old and out-of-date assumptions. It involves measuring the fat, protein and carbohydrate content of the food, and then multiplying by some constants (9, 4, and 4 calories per gram) based on the chemical energy of these substances and the presumed absorption rates. However, the absorption rates are not accurate, and not enough account is taken of the metabolic cost of digesting the different nutrients.

The result is that most calorie counts printed on food labels are too high, particularly for protein, which would be better estimated at 3.2 calories per gram. But it also depends (not surprisingly) on the texture and structure of the food.

Lenin

I'm very ignorant about history, generally. It's only in the last few years I've come to find it interesting.

Anyway, we were staying in this holiday cottage, and there were some books in there, as there often are. These were intended only for decoration, I think. Mostly volumes of an ancient encyclopedia, plus a book called "handbook of Marxism", which I began to read. It was condensed extracts from the writings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc.

Reading a particular piece by Lenin, on tactics for overthrow of democracy in the UK, what struck me was how biblical it seemed. In the Bible, not that I'm all that familiar, I believe there is this tone where, after the resurrection and the ascent of Jesus to heaven, they believe he's going to come again, to rule the world, judge everyone, etc etc, and they think it's going to be pretty soon. Like, he's just popped home to get some things sorted out, but he'll be back in a few weeks. Certainly within their lifetimes. (Someone tell me if I'm all wrong about this).

Then later, it gets changed to the current view, where this is all going to happen way way in the future, and anyone who talks about the end of the world happening soon is a nutter.

Anyway, the Marxist thing seemed just the same. The revolution had happened in Russia, and Lenin was writing about how it would happen everywhere. And because of conditions in Russia, it had taken 15 years there, but it would be much faster in (for example) England. They expected it to be happening almost at once. Whereas, I think now, the standard Marxist view is that it's inevitable and guaranteed, but may be after a very long time, maybe not in our lifetimes, and we all need to work towards it.

Cafe Mad

I've taken to having breakfast every day in "Cafe Mad", really called "Casa Madeira", a lovely Portuguese cafe near my work.

I think breakfast is the best meal of the day to eat out. It's the time of day I can least be bothered to cook for myself; the food is cheaper, for some reason; and there's no expectation that I'll buy a bottle of wine marked up 300%.

It's the perfect start to my day, sitting in this lovely cafe, friendly waiter service, watching the world rush by, reading my book or doing the crossword, with a cup of decent coffee (good enough to be worth drinking black) and reminding myself that people who eat breakfast are generally healthier. And there's always space for a whole table to myself. Life doesn't get better than this! Ahhhhh