For some have entertained angels unawares

George Whitman passed away this week at the age of 98. I had never heard of him. His fame (to some) derives from the fact that his Paris apartment and bookshop (which is opposite Notre Dame and latterly called Shakespeare & Co), was an open house frequented by numerous struggling American authors and poets. Many went on, after staying with him, to become successful and highly regarded. I rather wish I'd been there. It sounds like William Thacker's bookshop in Notting Hill... the movie... But presided over by a mercurial American who clearly had some considerable wisdom to offer. And didn't only sell travel books. Anyway, I was taken with the news reports and obituaries not so much because of this, but because his shop appears to have been festooned in excellent quotations. One of these:

"Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise" caught my attention since ALL the news features have attributed it to the poet Yeats. Lovely, lovely quotation. Not Yeats. According to an avalanche of web content, the closest recognisable version seems to be Hebrews 13:2 "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." But how would I know? I just Googled it. Oh dear, here come the flames...

Anyway... I don't know why such august rags as the NY Times got it so wrong, or why every journalist in the American speaking world seems to have re-hashed the same article blindly and taken the Yeats attribution as read, but hey... I don't even care. The dude sounds amazing, and the signs he hung around his shop seem to have been an inspiration to many and a true reflection of his hospitality. Another read "Give what you can. Take what you need. George." Perfect.

I would rather read of the kindness, intellect and creativity of a man, than endure the dogma of bible-bashers trying to claim ownership of an infinite number of monkeys. I refer you to my previous comments about Christmas.

A thing I wrote that isn't a book

“What do you do?” Hardly a day goes by without someone asking me that dreaded question. What do you want me to say? I get up, I eat breakfast, drink coffee, I brush my teeth? I try to set events in motion that will ensure that I can eat again tomorrow, next week, in a year’s time? I think that’s what some people call “work”? Is that what you’re asking about?

Let’s say you’re a bank clerk. Then one day someone offers you extra money to look after their house for them, and someone else wants to buy a painting you did once when you were bored. Are you still a bank clerk? Or a professional house-sitter? Or an artist?? And which would you answer? Whichever sounded coolest, I suspect…

A friend of mine, when asked what he does, says “Anything I want…” which, depending what kind of mood you’re in, sounds either very smooth or extremely arrogant… or, better yet, there’s Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden character in Fight Club, who simply answers “What do you mean?”. I tried that one a few times and it doesn’t go very well at all. “Anything for money!” used to be my stock answer, but for some reason people always assumed that meant something nefarious, or sexual. Why, I don’t know…

Does the answer have to be your profession? I know a fair few people who say “surfer”, even though they are not a pro. Similarly, “model”, “film-maker” or something über-cool, even tho this may not be their main source of income. Because it’s laden with kudos, and a better conversational gambit than a more ordinary occupation might be. Sometimes their inquisitors let them run with it, and sometimes not. The one I never get away with is “writer”, strangely enough… There must be a lot of failed writers out there, meeting people and introducing themselves as writers, because without exception the next question is “But what do you do for money?” “I write things” say I, “Oh, have you had anything published?” say they, as I slump into my Guinness. No, I get paid to write stuff down and then screw it into a ball and slam-dunk it, what do you think? Of course I’ve had stuff published. Now, far from being genuinely interested, they just want evidence. Where might they find my work?  Fuck off and Google it, or look on Amazon or something… or go to a library, I’m sure they still exist. Somewhere...

So my current answer is “I do a bunch of different things - at the moment I’m failing to write a book.” Which is a) true and b) mildly self-deprecating, so I hope they won't think I'm trying to impress, and then perhaps we can circumvent the debacle described above. Well, it sometimes works...

"The Quiet Carriage"

I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune to travel on a British train, but the long-haul incarnations of said travesty of transportation feature something that is laughably known as "The Quiet Carriage" ... something of a misnomer from the outset.

The Quiet Carriage is anything but quiet. It's full of children crying, Crackberry keyboards sounding like a plague of locusts, fake nails clattering on horrible PC laptops, whiny people whining and a lot of people who have nothing to say but say it nonetheless, loudly and to someone across the aisle. The one thing you won't hear is the blessed silence of someone sitting quietly with their headphones on. Because the special sign adorning every window in The Quiet Carriage forbids music (even/especially with headphones) and mobile phones. It also precludes smoking. Personally, for reasons of consistency and clarity I think there should be a separate no-smoking sign, or else the carriage should be called something else, like the Quiet and No Smoking Carriage. But that's just me. I digress...


Anyway. I am the first to admit that ringtones can be (usually are) bloody annoying. They are like fashion. Something only your closest peers get. Everyone else thinks you look like an idiot. And people with sh*t headphones and the volume up full? Irritating, intrusive, tinny sound even if you like what they are listening to. And people who speak loudly on mobile phones? Idiots. But that is missing the point. It's The Quiet Carriage. Just be quiet. Converse quietly. Use your phone, quietly. Wear headphones to listen to your tunes, but put both of them in your ears after checking the ambient sound isn't audible. And then petition the rail company to change the sign to something that says "Quiet Carriage. Do whatever you want as long as it's quiet. PS No Smoking."


Or upgrade to 1st Class. Either or...


Inspired by http://www.godwyns.com/2011/04/is-quiet-zone-in-uk-trains-being.html which is a good read btw ;)

Something I wrote sometime before I had a TV. "The best thing about Twitter, so far, is that there are so many TV references. I can learn all about the world through the eyes of people who actually have time to watch television. Why I don't have time to watch television, when I do manage to peruse the feeds in Facebook, Twitter et al, is more of a mystery. Perhaps it is because I can read and write. We live in a world where both pastimes are, increasingly, lost arts. I like to do them at the speed of thought, which is a little bit quicker than watching video. TV is too slow. I'd watch at about x2 speed, ideally, but then the squeaky voices would annoy me. Even when the producer has left out everything he/she thinks could possibly be left out, it's still too slow, but you can't fast forward through the dialogue as you might with a porn movie. Because you miss the whole point.

There's a lot of rubbish in the feeds, a lot of people I should have deleted/unfollowed the first time I thought "What twoddle!?!?!" but didn't for whatever reason. But there are also a lot of gems..."


Update - I now have 1000 channels of TV and have watched it almost non-stop for 48hrs. Hasn't changed my opinion (above) and I'm going back to surfing the feeds. Because my "friends'" twoddle is better than TV, let alone the gems...

I love driving a car that makes people smile, and a car that makes people point and enthuse is the mustard on the sausage. Waving when you pass a similar car on the road is a different thing. I've always done it, whether in this car or my other one, but a friend was telling me how annoying it is driving his camper, and constantly being waved at by other camper drivers. What a shame, I thought, but then I realised just how often it would happen if the phenomenon extended to prolific vehicles. You'd be waving the entire time. For me it's an exciting thing to see a a distant relative of my VW. I get waved at from Beetles sometimes, VW Combi/Campers usually (unless they're hired), and of course always other Karmann Ghias, though the latter is so rare as to be not even an annual phenomenon. And, strangely, Porsche Speedsters. You have to be a car geek to understand why. It's because they share everything except coachwork and the badge.

Today I was waved at by the driver of a modern Porsche Boxster/Cayman/Carrera (ashamed to say they are all starting to look the same to me), but it's a tenuous connection at best - the cars were conceived by the same mind, I suppose, or perhaps you can see modern Porsches as descendants of the KG... but we don't share anything material, and I bet those guys don't wave at Beetles.

Recently I drove, perhaps for the first time in that car, past a rather intimidating city pub called The Falcon. It looks like a derelict house or perhaps a crack-den, has faded sofas on the veranda with their guts spilling out, and always (I mean always) has a handful of men outside, who vary from scary to hobo-like but never, ever, look high society. It's one of the few scenarios where I don't stare unashamedly as I pass. But today I was in the car that makes people smile, and the scary-looking men pointed and called out gratifying things like "Nice car, mate..." all the while favouring me with their variously gold encrusted or entirely toothless grins. It was the perfect moment to pull over, and go and buy a pint and talk to them, but I didn't. Maybe I'll have to try it again sometime. Because the only other way I'd feel safe there is drinking with a large team of special forces, armed to the teeth.

Country Life Fail...

OMG, how annoying is the English countryside? I may command spectacular uninterrupted views over a particularly beautiful, luscious, forested estuary, but it's not all plain sailing, I can tell you...

Last night I took one, last, lingering look at the clouds scudding hurriedly across the bright, full moon, and then ran for my life. I have always had an irrational fear of werewolves. But then I've never met one. I had a pretty well-developed fear of sharks, too, until I met some, and they turned out to be lovely. Werewolves on the other hand, are a big no. And in the same way that as a child I was convinced that streamlined bringers of death  and dismemberment stalked me whenever I was in the water, I cannot shake the idea that clouds-flitting-moon action means the imminent sudden appearance of a slavering, howling menace with an unholy amount of pointy teeth, propelled by a musclature that would have any self-respecting leopard trotting away to the gym with its tail firmly between its legs.

And people wonder why I hate camping...

Anyway, werewolves are not the problem. I can deal with them by remaining in large groups of (preferably) drunk people, and whenever I am separated from the pack moving very quickly in a sort of alert crouch. And then barricading myself in, somewhere very robust with plate glass windows. Because they can jump through ordinary windows. Anyway werewolves are not the problem with the countryside. Birds are. Whoever named it the "dawn chorus" either slept right through it, or was very stoned. "Deafening cacophony" is what I called it at 0430 this morning (expletives deleted). I thought I had gone to sleep in England and woken up (almost immediately, I might add) in Papua New Guinea! But, when I peered outside, the creeping light revealed nothing brightly coloured, interesting or edible enough to imply a geographical anomaly. In fact English birds are all camouflaged to look as boring as possible, probably to avoid the attention of werewolves. It also sounds as though they too gather together in large drunken mobs, but wait for the world to go to sleep before bursting into something almost, but not entirely, unlike song.

Eventually I became used to constant noise and drifted back into a fitful sleep, only to be precipitously awoken again, I don't know whether by what sounded like incoming gunfire or by actually banging my head on the ceiling (well, a surfboard, actually) which turned out on closer inspection to be a milk float. The noise did, not the surfboard. Duh. Now when I was an urchin milk floats were electric, and hence spookily quiet, so it seems ironic to me that in these days of people trying to heat up the world and cause motorway congestion by driving electric or hybrid cars, the milkman has gone out and purchased something that sounds as if it's powered by a whole row of marine diesels, or someone firing an Uzi on auto under a mattress. It's probably unacceptable everywhere outside of mainland China, and especially so right next to my head at five-thirty in the morning.

Now that I have resolved to have an early night in lieu of the sleep deficit unfairly imposed by these countryside irritations, guess what? The farmer is deliberately goading his cows into a bellowing frenzy, by (it sounds like) racing about in a tractor doing something entirely pointless in the gathering dark. The tractor appears to have a similar power-plant to the milk float, but infinitely more powerful and maybe equipped with a straight-through exhaust or possibly carbon cans and a cherry bomb. The cows are just annoying. Go inside, mate. Have a beer. It's the bloody night time, shut the f*ck up.

Technology fail...

In a break with tradition, I used the self service checkout at the supermarket today. It's usually against my principles, because it never works properly and you have to call a member of staff to help it carry on scanning stuff or to take the security tag off the vodka, which pretty much entirely defeats the object of using self service. I don't know why people persevere with it - do they not realise it's not for their benefit but the supermarket's? And I don't know why I did today, really. On this occasion, however, the thing was almost flawless and only faltered on two occasions - once to tell me that there was something where there shouldn't be something (there wasn't) and again to complain of an unauthorised error requiring the urgent attention of supermarket personnel. But I was able to overcome both unforced errors by dint of swearing and kicking the machine back into compliance before the uniformed attendant who stands watching over it from afar was able to waddle into frowning and dithering range. So that was a result. I managed to scan two items and put them in a bag and pay for them while only being reduced to a state of apoplexy twice... a relatively excellent automated customer experience, for this day and age.


Flushed with my success at interacting with modern technological miracles, I decided to use the pay at pump option on the petrol station forecourt on the way out, my enthusiasm further boosted by the presence of 99 octane fuel, which does make every petrolhead feel a little more optimistic than perhaps one should. Sadly this payment option also involves wasting much more time scanning things and button pushing than an actual stroll into the "kiosk" would have done,  and then at the end of the process it refused to give me a receipt. So I'm going to have a five minute conversation with an accountant instead of a sub one minute one with a filling station employee. That wasn't really designed for my benefit, either, was it?


Tesco, by the way...

So ends another weekend of being drunk and talking nonsense, and begins a week of training, problem solving, and generally seeking that warm glow that derives from making everything just incrementally better all the time.

Today I have decided to dress as if it's the summer, when it is in fact April. In England. Not the summer, then. Some people (OK, many people) might enquire as to when it is actually summer in England. I remember someone alluding to a two season year - namely winter, and July. I think it's a little more complicated than that. There's March and April, when most days will contain some warm, some cold, and some wet. And then May and June, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes wet, but for longer intervals, maybe for days at a time. July and August, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes wet. September, intermittently hot or wet. October through February, consistently cold and wet. So that's five seasons, but I'm going to plump for one more because I think May is, like September, a little bit more pleasant than its neighbours, even though I can't quite put a finger on why. Six seasons make for a massively over-complicated wardrobe, and probably very messy pizzas and orchestral arrangements to boot.

The reasons I'm rocking and/or channelling shorts and flip-flops today, then, are threefold. One, I couldn't find any clean socks that weren't woolly ones. I'm coming from living on a mountain in an Alpine winter to living out of a suitcase in England, Season One above. Sue me. All my summery socks are at my second home (a Transit van) a long way from here. But more about socks later. Two, the shorts are full of pockets that make organising the paraphenalia of a difficult day very much easier, and they really only go with flip-flops unless one is trying (failing) to pull off that metro sockless shoe look that absolutely no-one can unless they are standing on a cove or strutting a runway, and three a cursory glance out of the window led me to the idea that it's one of those sometimes warm days. So... today I am looking like one of those people who irritate me by believing that wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops around town in the winter makes them in any way look like a surfer dude.

Nutrition-wise, I’m pretty lucky. Because once I believe something is bad for me I stop wanting it, and once I hear something is good, I start to enjoy it even if I didn’t before. I think this must stem from some horrible over-achieving instinct instilled in me as a child. People tell me to chill out and just enjoy life, but the truth is I don’t actually enjoy doing that. I enjoy doing everything better I did than yesterday. The exception is alcohol, something I was not really exposed to in my youth. I enjoy drinking even though I know it’s really bad for me, but that just makes me concentrate harder on my nutrition and my training goals in order to compensate. Anyway, enough about me… I’m getting all verbose because I am displacing work I need to do by writing this instead.

Here's a bit of a rant about food, I originally wrote it as a letter to a friend but I thought it might go well here.

Point no.1 - it’s an increasingly widespread belief that cereal type carbs (wheat, corn, etc) are pushed at us only because they are incredibly cheap to make and the industry that makes them is one of the most powerful and influential in the world. There is a strong argument that we shouldn’t be eating them at all, since there is no way our prehistoric ancestors ever touched ‘em, and they appear to make people fat.

I know this argument is often levelled at dairy food, and rice also, but just because something isn’t natural doesn’t mean it won’t work. The Masai live on meat and whole milk, predominantly. They aren’t fat. A billion Chinese get most of their calories from refined white rice. They aren’t fat. Oriental/Polynesian people are almost never fat until they are exposed to Western diets, and that, I surmise, is because Western diets are full of refined sugar, cereal products, and hydrogenated trans-fats.

There is an astonishing statistic that in the average western diet (meaning American btw) 65% of the calories come from cereals. Scary huh? Mainly because most everything processed, ready-made or lo-fat contains Hi Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) because it’s cheaper than cane sugar and basically a waste product from the cereal industry.

PS to that - there is a lot of ad spend on convincing us that whole grain/meal foods are better for us. Trouble is in the UK (probably other places too) they only have to be a small percentage whole grain and the rest is refined. Also to get the benefits to the heart that athletes are paid a lot to advertise, you’d have to eat a wheelbarrow full of it.

Point no.2 - eating natural unprocessed fat IS good for you. It's the most efficient source of fuel for a human.  Inuit (Eskimos, sorry bad word but not everyone understands “Inuit” even now), they live on it. And they aren’t fat. So, don’t eat “lo-fat” stuff that is actually full of additives and “natural” sweetener HFCS.

Truth is, all industries try to tell us the things they sell are good if there is an ounce of research to support it. An aspirin a day is good for you? Wonder how many millions the drug companies earned from that piece of PR? A glass of wine a day, or four if you believe the Italian statistics (or a bottle if you believe my French friend Nicholas)? I remember last year reading one week that bacon is worse for you than crack, and then the following week another article (almost certainly “response PR”) that suggested a full English breakfast is incredibly beneficial and could actually accelerate fat burn throughout the day.

I think you can’t believe a damn thing you read but you can test things. I’ve been testing a very hi fat diet, but only natural unprocessed ingredients, and no cereal based products at all. And I think I am seeing some benefits, although I am having some blood sugar dips I never had before. But I have a strategy to control that. Cinnamon. True story.

I am also testing a theory that we eat too much - a friend of mine (who is very fit) suggested this to me and said while dieting with boxers he came to the conclusion that the tradition of 2000 cals for women 2500 for men is rubbish. He’s active, trains every day, and reckons 2000 is enough for him. And he weighs 80kg and is building muscle on that diet! But you have to remember that that is 2000 cals of actual food. 50% or more of the calories most people eat are junk.

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading that as much I enjoyed writing it. Take it or leave it. Have a nice day!

Regular readers may know that tea drinking is super-important to me, perhaps even vital. Long before the much vaunted health benefits became so widely marketed (seriously, is there any food that doesn’t have its healthiness hyped and its poisonous qualities glossed over? No, we live in marketing world) I was already chain-drinking the stuff; if anything I probably drink it less now, but that’s only because I have discovered other things that are fun to drink. Still, tea is still of great importance.  I had for years thought that I’d established my favourite variety (PG Tips) and although some people disagree vehemently with this choice, it seemed a fairly sound decision to me and I was pretty comfortable with it. Until on a whim I picked up a box of Yorkshire Tea, because a friend had hyped it, and because I was bulk tea shopping in the UK (impossible to buy proper tea in Europe, they only have Liptons, which is deeply rubbish) and thought I’d risk it. Check me out. I live dangerously. Anyway, this new tea is awesome and now I am brutally self-flagellating for having unnecessarily eschewed other brands for so long. However, having two similar kinds in the cupboard has led to a momentous discovery.

We all know that the first cup of tea in the morning is the best and that it’s rarely possible to match it in round two. I’ve heard a few explanations for why this might be, but nothing very conclusive and to be honest I don’t much care. I just know that I love the first one, and it leaves me wanting a second, which never quite hits the spot. But I’d never thought of switching types for the deuxieme. Which is a shame, because this so works. My current preference is for a cup of PG Tips first, followed by a cup of Yorkshire after I’ve read my email. I know a lot of people favour (meaning can’t function without) a coffee first thing, and I can’t help you with that, except of course to say that you’re wrong, but to any tea drinkers out there I do totally recommend it.

Since I wrote the above, which previously appeared on Tumblr, I have been thinking about the argument that has raged for decades about whether tea (or coffee, and probably other things I'm less interested in) actually counts as a rehydrating agent, given that they are diuretics and "may cause one to lose more fluid than was actually imbibed" This, in my (almost) clichéd opinion, is missing the point. Because the purpose of drinking is that you replace that which has been lost by perspiration and additionally use lots more to cleanse and lubricate the metabolism before passing excess fluid out of the other end. So long as diuretics are not the only things you drink, it's probably all working hunky-dory. Now off to Goooogle derivation - what does that expression actually mean?

Every little helps. The strap line for a British supermarket, and a trite cliché that makes my blood boil - I need to invent a word, here. I need a word for things that you assume to be universal truths just because they were shown to be true once. Perhaps "religion" is the word I'm looking for... but I'm going to use the word "querion". Because I can. "Every little helps" is a querion. Anyway, sometimes every little helps, for sure. But that doesn't mean you can say it about anything! For example, if you're trying to move one of the Great Pyramids by pushing it with an with an elephant, it does not really matter how many enthusiastic assistants (or indeed elephants) you enlist, because you are wasting your time. It is not going to move. You need to try something else. Like dismantling it.

Saving our beloved planet is one example of the "every little helps" myth. Incidentally, if I may digress, it amuses me that so many of us talk about saving the planet. We are not trying to save the planet. The planet is not going anywhere. We are trying to save the ecosystem we require in order to carry on living much as we do now. Which is not the same thing at all. Anyway... back to the point... the environmental lobby pleads with us to switch things off, recycle and to bicycle to work because every little helps - well it bloody doesn't! We are destroying the ecosystem in numerous ways, not least by perhaps irreversibly changing the climate, and we need to stop doing it right now if we are to have somewhere nice to live in a thousand years time. Reducing our impact very slightly and hence trashing the place infinitessimally less rapidly is no help whatsoever. We need to stop using, polluting etc. Not do it a little bit less. But that ain't gonna be popular, is it?