Blog: The Motherlode

Why Mahmoud wears cologne

The incidental benefits of cycle touring are well known: fitness, tan-lines, an insatiable appetite. But I think I can say without fear of contradiction that cycle touring isn’t particularly famous for its promotion of good personal hygiene.

This year, I am proud to be a part of the Thighs of Steel core team for the glory run to Athens. During those last three weeks of riding, I’ll probably have only 8 showers and wash my clothes twice. Most days, I’ll wake up in the sweat I accumulated the day before, and step into the clothes still encrusted with grime from yesterday’s riding.

Most days, our only chance to scrub will be in rivers, lakes and perhaps under a bucket. Shampoo, perfume and pomade are, for most of us, redundant.

But not for all of us.

~

Mahmoud couldn’t actually cycle, but joined the van team for two weeks from Paris to the Pyrenees. He couldn’t ride because of a long-term knee injury sustained during the Syrian war. He now lives in Germany.

One thing you should know about Mahmoud is that he is very particular about his personal hygiene. Every morning, he combs wax through his styled hair. He applies perfume to neck and wrists, and coats himself in a layer of antiperspirant.

Where most of us have perhaps one change, Mahmoud seems to have a bottomless wardrobe of crisp, clean clothes. He refuses to swim in our wonderfully wild rivers and lakes because the water is dirty. It’s a fair point, and one that he emphasises with good old soap and tap water.

He does everything he can to hold back the inevitable tides of sweat and grime that two weeks’ camping set down. His careful preening is a good-humoured joke. Good-humoured because he wears his fashion lightly; a joke because, standing next to us cyclists, he looks superb.

~

‘I had days where I slept with the blood of other people on my body,’ Mahmoud says. ‘Because you sleep when you are tired, you don’t care about yourself. You can’t imagine the dirt – sometimes I slept in some shit.’

We’re sitting on an artful block of concrete on the banks of the Garonne in Bordeaux and Mahmoud is explaining why he is such a stickler for cleanliness.

‘Because of this trauma – why do I have to be dirty? Why do I have to smell?’ His voice rises in incredulity that anyone would choose dirt.

‘Everything is in my hands now. I don’t want to go back to those days. I have a developed nose and any smell could bring me flashback – I don’t want any flashback.’

~

‘I feel like cleanliness makes me trust myself more,’ Mahmoud explains. ‘If somebody smells in front of me, I take a step back.’

As a refugee, Mahmoud feels like ‘the whole society has taken a step back from me already.’ He doesn’t need to add bad hygiene to the repulsion.

Mahmoud met Harri and Annie, two of the brains behind Thighs of Steel, at a grassroots community centre in Athens. ‘At Khora, everyone was lovely,’ Mahmoud says. ‘Fucking amazing lovely people. But Khora was a small world, really.’

The small world of fucking amazing lovely people doesn’t care whether you’re a refugee, whether you’re dirty or smell bad, or are dressed in cheap clothes. But the big world does.

~

‘The big world really doesn’t like you, really doesn’t want you, and doesn’t accept you,’ Mahmoud says. ‘So I have to do what other Syrians do. They spend money to wear Adidas, to wear Gucci – why? To fit into the society, so people know they have money, so people stop judging them. You cannot afford Gucci if you are not working.’

‘I could lie to myself and say everyone is nice – no. People smile in front of your face, but they don’t like you. They smile in front of your face for the society. Do you think that everyone talks to me nicely?’

‘For me, to look good and to be clean could help me in front of society. People might accept me.’

~

Thighs of Steel is Europe’s biggest charity relay bike ride, taking 9 weeks to cover the 6,000km from London to Athens, with a frankly silly detour via the Pyrenees to make it more than 90,000m climbing over three of the continent’s toughest mountain ranges.

Over the past four years, Thighs of Steel supporters have raised more than a quarter of a million pounds for grassroots refugee organisations like Khora. Already this year we’ve raised more than £50,000.

If you want to help…

If you have any trouble donating, let me know – the website isn’t always the friendliest. Thanks!

Leave love letters

What, if anything, makes you fall in love with a person?

I reckon we can climb that fence. Yes!
Here, try this. She hands me a forkful of mozzarella.
At 2 a.m. we are still sitting out on the rocks overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Kindness where kindness is unexpected. What’s mine is yours. Sharing private moments together, even in public. Saying yes. Eye contact, smiles, easy laughter, a light touch. Conversation that burrows deep. Lingering.

There is magic in play and even more in secrets.

My companion on last week’s Neapolitan food tour was a woman from Texas. For the sake of this email, let’s call her Sylia because, quite frankly, that’s her name and it becomes impossible to conceal later on in the story…

I only knew Sylia for the 64 hours it took us to eat our way around Napoli. After our final espresso breakfast, I was travelling back to England via Milan and Paris, and she was flying to Dubrovnik before flipping over the pond back to California.

She told me that she had a layover in Paris too. In fact, less than a week separated my overnight sojourn in the City of Light and hers. We parted.

~

I walked down to the Seine to watch the sunset. I’ve been here before. Crowds milled around Notre Dame, taking selfies in the golden hour.

Below the busy streets, nowhere-steps led down to the river’s edge where a few of us enjoyed a private showing of the day’s final rites.

I sat on a polished stone wall and let the sun soothe my travel-tired face.

Then I had a thought.

Sylia felt like more than a fleeting acquaintance. For 64 hours, we behaved as if destiny played our hand and, as ever when destiny gets involved, much had gone unsaid.

For 64 hours, we had sailed that soft shoreline between the moment now and the future then, saying nothing that might come too close to broaching our pleasure.

But now I wanted to feel my feet on solid ground; and I wanted her to see me standing there too.

So what if I wrote a letter and left it for her, here, in Paris?

~

I had a notebook in my bag, but no pen. I heard an Australian voice a couple of steps down: a middle-aged woman and her Belgian lover sharing a dusky pique-nique of ham and torn bread.

‘Excuse me, do you have a pen I could borrow?

I sit back down and tear a single sheet from my notebook. I promise myself no more than one side of A5. That is surely enough for me to say what I need to say. I’m not a schoolboy any longer.

So I begin, sure that I will find the right words as a rhythm starts to flow.

Sylia – Did you know that your name means ‘If there is…’ in French? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I met you…

I fill one side of A5, but it’s half baked, scatter-brained. I promise myself the second side and turn over.

There are so many things I haven’t said here – and the ones I have, so poorly expressed…

It doesn’t quite happen on this side either. I say some things, I fill the space, but it’s not right. Oh well. My promised time is up.

I origami myself an envelope, write her name on the outside, and fold the whole into a dart of paper. Then I feel the stone walls for a crack that might hide my letter until she arrives.

I look around. Everyone is either on their phone or with their back to me. I slip the letter into the wall and smile.

I return the pen and share a few words of thanks before sitting back down on my wall.

Fuck.

It’s not right. A writer and I never found the words.

‘Sorry, I don’t suppose I could borrow your pen again, could I?’ Mild surprise, mid-mouthful. ‘I’m writing to a friend, and you know when you realise that you haven’t said a word of what you meant to…?’

I unfold the origami envelope. The inside of the envelope is blank: enough room for a dozen lines, no more. The mind is focussed and I write.

p.s…

~

I fold the envelope back over the letter and squeeze it back into the letter box, certain now that someone has seen me and is only waiting for me to leave before tearing open the letter for a laugh. I hope they return it instead of chucking the feeble paper into the softly infinite river.

But I have said almost exactly what I wanted to say to Sylia and the rest is now in the hands of fate.

I brush my hand over the wall where the secret is hidden, casting a spell. We can turn the city into a place of magic so easily. A place of games and play, of secrets and love, that stretch across time and space.

I walk back up the steps and into the gloaming night. The streets are still busy, but now everyone’s clutching at home.

As I walked, Sylia, the person at the heart of the story, became almost irrelevant. I sent her a few photos that I hoped might lead her to the location. Notre Dame in the background. A distinctive piece of graffiti. The crack in the wall. Enough that, if she wanted to find the letter, she could.

I returned to London, and then Wales for a week of writing with friends.

In among the laughter, the work and the dog walks, of course, I didn’t entirely forget about the letter, or the woman; but as time passed, the immediate sensation that we were close enough to touch faded.

I sent her a message on Saturday: Are you in Paris?

She didn’t reply.

But, then, a few days later…

I’ve just landed in LA.

Followed by a photograph…

The 64 Hour Neapolitan Food Tour

Some people might like to go for a drink or something afterwards. Who knows.

Those were the last words I wrote in my diary before heading out for an evening food tour in Napoli.

64 hours later, my Neapolitan food tour finally ended in an orgy of pastries and coffee – my companion and I fervently insisting with each successive bite that we were quite replete and couldn’t possibly finish it all.

Reader: we finished it all. Not just that morning, but the whole long weekend. All of it. There was not a corner of Napoli that went unsampled by our insatiable taste buds.

The official tour started from the shadow of Dante’s statue and led us around the street food of Napoli.

Buffala mozzerella fresh that morning – quite unlike the mozzerella palmed off on us in Great Britain. Served with carralo biscuits made with almonds dry as dustpaper, best suited to mopping up the olive oil dripping from your antipasti.

Limoncello, of course, made with lemons from Sorrento and alcohol from Dante’s Inferno. Aperol spritz in cheap plastic cups, served from windows open straight onto the street.

Two species of pizza, from Sorbillo’s – the finest pizzeria in Napoli and thus the world. First pizza a portafoglio – a simple wallet pizza that’s eaten folded and on the run, then pizza fritta – a deep fried specimen that wouldn’t be out of place on a night out in Glasgow.

Frittatine di pasta is a depth charge of carbohydrates, macaroni, bechamel and pork weighted with enough oil to power a medium-sized caravan. One to be halved, quartered, and shared to soak up the limoncello.

Sfogliatelle, rhum babá and gelato to finish. Or so I thought.

‘You guys wanna come for a drink?’ asked a voice I would come to know well from the late night, early morning menu inspections that would plaster our weekend.

She’d come for the coastline, Capri and Amalfi. But the storm we watched roll in one night – sea spray dousing our wine – put paid to that. So we sacrificed ourselves instead to tracking down the city’s gourmet offerings of seafood and pasta.

I don’t have the heart to ruin your Friday lunch (nor mine) with any more distant dishes. Suffice to say that, were I still wandering the alleyways of Napoli, I suspect I would already have Type 2 diabetes and a drinking problem.

Smooth stone slabs and close houses make for a furnace. Narrow alleys burst open onto ornate cathedrals. Religious niches behind glass. A white dog with a pink tongue. Songbirds. The street spills into houses, households tumble onto the street. Families in states of undress around a floral tablecloth, bunk beds in the corner. Impromptu greengrocers and fruit-sellers. Washing lines decorate the walls. Courtyards hidden behind doorways and pillars. Cigarette vending machines. And, above all, mopeds.

Croissants for breakfast: Remagicking the world

The other day, I did something described as ‘so silly’.

I was passing through Paris, arriving in the afternoon, and leaving the next morning on an early Eurostar.

The train was due to leave Paris around about the time boulangeries open, and get into London around the time people have breakfast at their office desk.

So I messaged a friend I knew would be working in central London: ‘Fancy croissants for breakfast tomorrow?’

~

‘You’re so silly for doing this.’

~

The world can be a very prosaic place. It is full of offices and commutes and the tiresome effort of staying alive: breathing, eating, sleeping.

There is very little magic, it seems, in day-to-day life. We don’t expect it, so it never comes.

What do I mean by ‘magic’? I mean those moments when the world seems bigger and more connected than it ordinarily does.

Magic imbues the world with meaning where before there was none. And who doesn’t want to live in a world suffused with magic and meaning?

When you notice the size of the moon, when you write someone a letter, when you hand-deliver croissants from Paris.

This is magic.

It’s different for everyone, but you know magic when you feel it. There are other words we could use: ‘romantic’ is another good one, but that gets confused in our heads with sexual objectives.

Young children rarely see much that is unmagical, but for us adults, the world is often stripped bare like the lighting in our most ghastly supermarkets.

The world has been unmagicked. And by whom? All by ourselves.

~

It’s a shame because magic costs so little. As any child will tell you, the only obstacle to magic and the only limitation on your spell-casting is in the vigour of your imagination.

We get out of the habit of casting spells, so our imagination dullens, and we miss the opportunities for magic that are all around us.

What did it cost me to cast the spell of croissants for breakfast? Almost nothing; only the exercise of a little imagination.

The boulangerie was on my way to the train station. I was second in line after it opened. Not knowing how many people my friend worked with, I bought five croissants and paid an extra ten centimes for a sturdier paper bag to protect them on the journey.

Then I caught the Eurostar and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later in London. I picked up my bags and took the Underground two stops.

As I walked the eight minutes to my friend’s office, the rain fell in a drizzle. It was refreshing after a month of continental baking. I arrived at 8.50, ten minutes before my friend was due. I read the last pages of my book.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

She arrived. I handed over the croissants. She smiled. I walked to catch another train, to catch another few hours’ sleep.

The world desperately needs remagicking, but we forget that we are the magi.

~

Ingredients for spell-casting:

  • It takes practice and a little imagination to spot opportunities for magic, but they are all around, all the time.
  • We need audacity and courage to step outside of the limitations of self-imposed adulthood.
  • Magic is founded on delighted surprise and the joyful unexpected. Or silliness.
  • You’ll need empathy and thoughtfulness so your spell makes the kind of magical connection you want.

~

‘You’re a legend in my office now.’

Always take the swim

It seems hard to believe it today, as I dry myself off in the sun after a swim in the Bay of Naples, but in 2011 I managed to cycle around the whole coast of Britain without once going for a swim in the sea, or in any of the dozens of rivers, lakes and streams that I passed.*

It was this realisation that led me to the maxim that I carry around the world’s waters with me: Always take the swim.

Myriad are the times that I have really hated the idea of jumping into a river or lake, but zero are the number of times that I’ve regretted doing so.

When faced with a wild swimming opportunity, my brain does something silly and the combined efforts of willpower and desire are not enough to get me into the water.

I need automatic thinking – and I’ve come across enough other people in the same metaphorical boat to believe that many could benefit from this humble maxim.

Always take the swim.

Whenever there is an opportunity to swim, you should take that opportunity. And you’d be amazed how many opportunities there are in your day-to-day life.

Seas, oceans, rivers, streams, burns, fountains, lakes, ponds. The water is waiting.

Don’t let excuses get in the way. Your brain, for some reptilian reason, will furnish you with dozens of excuses ripe to fit any occasion. You must ignore them and instead trust and follow the maxim.

Always take the swim.

Not having your bathers is no excuse. I have taken swims naked and in my boxer shorts when nakedness is scorned.

Not having a towel is no excuse. On days like today, I dry in the sun, on less clement days I have dried myself with a t-shirt – or simply shaken myself down and put on my clothes still wet. It’s never that long before I have the chance to find a towel or a change of clothes. And I have still never regretted taking a swim.

Cold water is no excuse – although it is a very good reason to be cautious. Cold water makes for the most invigorating swims. Cold water should make your maxim yet more urgent.

But beware: enter the water slowly, and make sure you are confident about warming up again afterwards. It doesn’t take much (and you still don’t need a towel) – just run up and down on the shore until you’re warm again. Then put your layers back on.

Poor weather is no excuse. This overlaps with cold water, but I would hasten to add that there is no more joyful swim than that taken in pouring rain. How perverse, how apt!

Even better: high winds equal high surf and vastly more pleasurable sea swimming. Although, please be careful and watch out for rip tides.

Not having time is no excuse. Whoever said a swim has to take a long time? There aren’t many places in the world that are a long way from a water course – almost by definition. Humans need water, so settlements rise up along their route.

When I am in Bournemouth, blessed with a 10km shoreline, I calculate that the minimum viable swim (out to beyond my depth, plus three head dunking dives) takes exactly 13 minutes, from fully dressed at my desk, into the sea, and back. I defy anyone unable to find 13 minutes in their day for a swim.

Not being near the sea is no excuse. For some reason, rivers and streams are usually excluded from most people’s acceptable notions of outdoor swimming. This is madness for I find that they are the most rewarding.

The sea is relentless and – dare I say – a little dull sometimes. The river is never short of interest, from the sludgy coolness of the mud shore, to the abundant wildlife that coos and chuckles from the treeline. Plus there is the eternal pleasure of striking out upstream until exhaustion, before drifting back to base on the current.

If you have never thought of taking a river swim, I urge you to take one today. Be not afeared of cleanliness. If you are worried (and in the UK), check the government’s designated bathing water website or the Environment Agency Water Quality Archive for wilder swims.

I have swum now in rivers all over Europe and never once contracted ringworm.

I dread to think how many swims I missed out on during my round Britain cycle, but I am glad in a way that it has brought me to my fool-proof maxim. I cannot turn back the clock, but I can try to convince you to always take the swim.

May the tides be with you!

* Full disclosure: I washed myself once at a friend’s local watering hole in a river near Bath, and I also got my feet wet in the North Sea at John O’Groats. Up to my ankles. Doesn’t count.

The Trials and Tribulations of Van Days Thighs of Steel 2019

Being part of the core team for Thighs of Steel this year is a very different experience to riding the full week as a fundraiser. Mainly because I spent two of the six days driving Calypso, the team’s support van.

That’s not to say that van days are easy. There’s an intimidating list of jobs that need to be done:

  • Pack up the campsite
  • Plan a meal and buy food for dinner
  • Drive ~120km (on the wrong side of the road)
  • Find the perfect wild camping spot for ~15 cyclists, not too far from the pre-planned route, but quiet, secluded, flat enough for tent-pitching, and ideally close to a river or lake for swimming
  • Cook the perfect camp dinner

A dozen hot and hungry cyclists depend on the van team getting this right. Oh – and you have to do all of this while feeling like absolute crap.

It is an unfortunate side effect of long distance cycling that your body mistakenly believes that van days are rest days. The body shuts down, the mind follows suit.

I felt like an extremely hot zombie. This was not great news, especially as I was driving and my French was in high demand to help secure us a wild camp site.

But on Thighs of Steel miracles happen. Indeed, the ride depends on miracles, almost every single day.

I’d been warned that finding wild camping for a dozen cyclists and a humungous van is the hardest part of the job. The plan is completely reliant on some kindly farmer, landowner or mayor taking pity on our ridiculous endeavour and letting us camp on their land.

After all, what would you do if you saw a circle of chairs, filled by dirty-faced foreigners, set up in your orchard?

But, in more than 20 weeks of touring, only once have Thighs of Steel been asked to move on. It is a daily miracle. Thank you, kind-hearted people of Europe.

With the help of my co-driver, I rang the doorbell of a likely-looking landowner, not far off route. We’d spotted a campervan parked in a closely-mown field behind his house.

With the help of his excitable dog, the owner was roused. He opened the door, and the dog bolted for freedom.

The man apologised, but couldn’t help: the owner of the field was in Belgium. He suggested that we ask the mayor, gave us directions to the town hall, and started calling for his lost dog.

We drove Calypso up to the quaint village Mairie. It felt like we were parking our tank on their lawn.

I began in faltering French: ‘We are 12 cyclists looking for wild camping…’ And, hallelujah, it was as if he’d been expecting us. ‘I have the perfect place,’ he smiled.

What followed felt like the oral part of my GCSE French exam: ‘At the crossroads go straight on and follow the road for 3km. You’ll see a low, white wall, with a gap in the middle. Go down this track, over a disused railway line through a wood, and then over a small bridge into a field.’

I follow the directions with apprehensive nodding. The mayor finishes by kisses his fingers: ‘And the river is perfect for bathing!’

We took his address to send a thank you card from Athens, and then drive out – slightly nervous – to our campsite.

To my astonishment, I’d understood his flawless directions and we found the field atop a tiny island, split by lazy turns of the river. Fishermen dabbled in the shallows and a paddleboard drifted past.

It was perfect (especially when the insects clear off).

We set up chairs in a circle, looking out at the sun dunking itself into the stream away to the west. We set the pot boiling with a vegetable curry.

Half an hour later, the cyclists arrive, stinking of joy, bells a-ringing. It’s only then that we notice the chairs are arranged in a perfect ring around a single, plump dog turd.

Thighs of Steel is Europe’s biggest charity relay bike ride, taking 9 weeks to cover the 6,000km from London to Athens, with a frankly silly detour via the Pyrenees to make it more than 90,000m climbing over three of the continent’s toughest mountain ranges.

So far, the cyclists and supporters of Thighs of Steel 2019 have raised over £38,000 £50,000 for Help Refugees.

If you want to help keep the lights on at grassroots refugee organisations across Europe, you could do a lot worse than contribute to my page here.

THANK YOU. I promise all donors something delightful by the end of the year…

Foiled is finished

Foiled: Beth Granville, David Oakes, Richard Clifford and Derek Jacobi

Foiled is over for another year.

It’s odd because, of course, Foiled has yet to begin for most of you. The broadcast dates are lined up in August, but all our work is done and we’re already looking ahead to what’s next.

Tom and Dave have finished editing episode one and say that it sounds like the best thing they’ve ever produced. Certainly from the writing side, I feel like – somehow – Beth and I have delivered on our grandiose ambition of writing our own (more modest) version of Radiohead’s OK Computer.

Which brings us to the cheerful faces of those sprightly actors in the photo above. Our guests for this last episode were Sir Derek Jacobi – so good they knighted him twice – and his partner Richard Clifford.

Sitting in the rehearsal room with these two grandees of British stage and screen was a pinch-yourself moment. All the actors were stealing glances at Sir Derek as if they couldn’t believe what was happening – but also to learn from a master of their craft.

Every single one of Derek’s choices was spot on. He took the lines and lifted them beyond wherever they deserved to be.

In all the knight-of-the-realm kerfuffle, Richard Clifford could be overlooked. But that would be a serious mistake. An equally fine actor, although undecorated, Richard brought relish and gravitas to his role as Professor of Celtic Studies from the University of Monmouth.

And, so I’m told, the actors we know and love from Foileds past, raised their game to match theirs. I can’t wait to hear the finished audio.

This episode was written inside three weeks – only 30 hours of scriptwriting compared to the 50 or so for the other three episodes.

With no writers rooms, we had only ourselves and a little assistance from producer Tom Price on story, and from comedian Ed Easton for a few lovely gags here and there.

Everyone has said maybe we should write all our episodes with a three week deadline. Maybe they’d be right, but that method leaves no leeway for mistakes.

In three weeks, we could afford course correction, but no full rewrites. If we’d fucked up too badly, then who knows what would’ve happened. Maybe it would’ve ben fine; maybe Sir Derek might have politely declined. Who knows?

People like Sir Derek get fifty offers a day. He has no need for a job on Radio Wales. No need whatsoever. This is a man who has played Hamlet at Elsinor Castle.

Derek and Richard only do passion plays now and it’s down to my wonderful writing partner that they felt this project was worth their time and creativity.

As they rushed off home to get back to their dog, Derek chortled: ‘Let’s get this on TV, shall we?’

What a day.

Foiled Series 3 Episode 3 Cast
L-R: David Charles, Beth Granville, Richard Clifford, Derek Jacobi, Tom Price, David Oakes, Garnon Davies, Dave Cribb, Stephanie Siadatan

Of The Lime

On Monday, I was given this ridiculously good-looking book as a birthday present. On Tuesday, I spotted a line of limes politely shielding All Saints graveyard from the impertinence of neighbours.

And so I began to turn the pages…

The book is a twenty-first century update of John Evelyn’s Sylva, a comprehensive ledger of Britain’s trees published in 1664.

Evelyn had this to say about the lime tree:

the carvers in wood use it … for the trophies, festoons, fruitages, encarpia, and other sculptures in the frontoons, friezes, capitals, pedestals, and other ornaments and decorations, of admirable invention and performance, to be seen about the choir of St Paul’s

Four words that I don’t understand, and one not even known by the Oxford English Dictionary.

The New Sylva adds the following:

Limes are among the few insect-pollinated trees in Britain and do not flower until June or July. … Planting of small-leaved lime is greatly encouraged by those seeking to increase biodiversity in woodlands. Lime seeds have no invertebrate predators, and the ripe fruits are eaten by birds, mice and voles.

What can actors can teach us about the good life?

Those of you who follow my thoughts to a frankly intrusive degree, will know of my fondness for Albert Camus.

Not only was he a goalkeeper of some repute (see Monty Python), but as a philosopher he had the flair of a novelist. Or as a novelist he had the flair of a philosopher. I’m not sure which. I’ve asked Jeeves and he doesn’t know either.

In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, Camus lays out the logic of his practical philosophy. The argument (as pertains this newsletter) goes as follows:

  1. There is no god.
  2. So there is no ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad.
  3. Therefore the old philosophers’ hunt for ‘the good life’ has been a wild goose chase. It’s impossible to live a good life because there is no good if there is no bad.
  4. So are there no suggestions a jobbing philosopher can offer on how to live? Yes, there are – Camus proposes. To live not better, but more.

By aiming to get the most out of life we are not dependent on outcomes of subjective good and bad. Camus offers up three avenues for most living.

The actor gets the most out of life by playing hundreds of different roles, sometimes covering the entire span of a life from birth to death in a single day – twice if there’s a matinee. This is the archetype of freedom.

The conqueror – whom Camus imagines a kind of soldier – lives constantly in the shadow of death. When you deal in death, life tastes moreish. This the archetype of revolt.

The Don Juan uses romance as the road to most living. Rarely do humans feel more alive than when indulging the fiery emotions of love. This is the archetype of passion.

These are the three archetypes that Camus sketches for us, but it’s easy to imagine myriad sub-types – the paramedic and the mountaineer are sub-types of the conqueror, for example.

The Actor

My primary interest here, of course, is the actor. In fact, most of us are actors already – but perhaps we’re not getting the most out of the masks we wear. Perhaps we try our hardest to apply the same make-up and costume every day.

There are good reasons why we might want to do that. But if there is no good… What harm can come of trying another role today? It’s not forever – the actor melts into another role as easily as night follows day.

So what harm can come of trying another role for ten minutes, in the time it takes you to ride the train two stops?

Expression and Suppression

We seem to have two modes of living (here I deviate from Camus): expression and suppression. I am either expressing something or I am suppressing something.

There are good reasons, again, why I might want to suppress some impulse. And, besides, we can’t express everything all at once: that way mania lies. But the basic distinction is there: either I express or I suppress.

But if there is no good or bad, and our only philosophical position is most living, then there is nothing to be lost from expression.

So why then do we suppress? Personally, it comes down to a fear of rejection by other people. Even when there is no one in earshot, I can feel a weighty oppression from social norms.

Rejection challenges are a great way to turn such obstacles into opportunity. An obstacle isn’t a roadblock if it’s a game.

Games are areas of life around which we draw a boundary of rules. Inside, we play; outside we work. But those boundaries are arbitrary.

There is no reason why – again, given that there is no objective good or bad – that we can’t as individuals draw our boundaries in a wide compass around all of life, and play as the actor plays.

Permissive Characters

Can I give you an example?

In Foiled, Sabrina is a god-awful hairdresser with a penchant for chucking customers out of her salon. One of her favourite lines is ‘No, absolutely no way, come you – out!’ I think Camus would have approved: she says exactly what she wants to say.

It’s a role, of course. But it’s an extraordinary useful role for us in day-to-day life. Sabrina speaks the unspeakable. And she speaks in such heightened language that, with a smile, she helps us say things we could never say.

We put the words into her mouth that we dream of saying to others. And little by little we build our courage until one day some outrage is visited upon me, like I’m served a dodgy cup of tea, and I say those words: ‘No, absolutely no way…’

Sometimes we need permission to express ourselves and, in a world with no good or bad, fictional characters give us that permission. Roles like Sabrina are stepping stones that pick a path through our comfort zone.

We can try a new character on for size, change the cut of our clothes, use new language and tone of voice, take on different mannerisms. Take a peek over the other side of the wall. Try out the priest or the predator.

We have a choice. Expression or suppression, action or inaction, attraction or rejection, stasis or growth, sensitive or resistant, yang or yin.

Empathy

Acting begins with empathy. On stage, you know very quickly whether an actor is engaged empathically with the character and with you, the audience.

If all the world’s a stage, then we players must find the empathy in our roles and with each other. For empathy is the conduit that connects us and allows the plurality of experience that Camus prescribes.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.

What does it take to write a BBC radio sitcom?

The scripts are in! We record tomorrow!

In our third year of Foiled, I feel like I can say something about the rhythms of writing a radio sitcom. Settle in, this is a long read.

Writing a sitcom episode is like building a house. Kinda.

In reality, Beth and I usually start laying bricks before we’ve got any blueprints. If you hired us as builders, you’d probably want your money back.

Whether any of those early bricks make it into the final building is a matter of luck. The risk is that we’ll fall in love with some clever brickwork, which makes it all the harder to tear the folly down later.

But it feels good to write ourselves into the series, reacquaint ourselves with the world and the characters. Unlike in construction, in writing nothing is ever really wasted.

Typing through a script, once the plans are finally in place, is pretty easy now we’re in our third year – a matter of placing one brick alongside another and remembering cement. By this point, we know the returning characters back-to-front; and the hardest part is always putting together the episode’s new characters.

Once a story is written out from start to finish, it’s clear where the problems are. We can start the heavy manual labour of ripping walls down, moving the bathroom into the kitchen, and adding a loft conversion. This part of the process feels very physical – huge swathes of script cut and, sometimes, pasted.

As the story sorts itself out, we move onto the fine work of painting and decorating, sanding and polishing. At this point, we can stand back and admire our handiwork, or – as so often happens – realise that the whole edifice is about to collapse and we need to buttress our walls or tear them out.

The timeline of construction

Foiled was re-commissioned at the end of 2018. The first mention in my diary of any writing comes in mid-February. We were slow to get started, basking in the glory of a commission, putting off the actual labour.

By this point we’d already got the broad ideas for stories: something about a work exchange, something about hedgehogs, and something about a cash and carry. It’s not a lot to go on.

We really started working on the scripts from the beginning of March, with ten days together in London. By the end of this spell, we’d pulled together the ‘beats’ of each of the episodes, and run them past the producer with mixed results.

The ten weeks through the rest of March, April and May were mostly spent working separately, with increasing dedication.

By the end of April, we’d sent the producer first drafts of two of the episodes. The third episode follows in early May. The producer sends us notes. We tear our hair out in gratitude.

The week before the writers rooms, we send the producer what we think will be approximate working drafts. We’re wrong, for two of the episodes at least. Frantic re-writes ensue.

The two days of writers rooms at the end of May give a burst of energy to all three scripts. Which is handy because we only have 9 days before the recording.

Luckily, by this point I’m in London and Beth and I can work together more closely, in the high-rise, riverside solitude of my friend’s flat in Woolwich (thanks Tim!).

A hangover the day after the final writers room doesn’t help, but long days mean that by Monday lunchtime we can send the producer what we think are two finished, record-worthy scripts – Episodes 1 and 4.

Again, we’re wrong about one of them – something we realised only yesterday.

In the meantime, we go over the final script – Episode 2 – with a fine tooth-comb, tightening the nuts and bolts of the story and turning place-markers into zingers. We send it off on Wednesday morning in a blaze of emotion.

Why are we doing this, again?

That night, I re-read Episode 4. After two days’ creative distance, and having raised the bar with our work on Episode 2, we decide that the mid-section is completely wrong. One of the characters is just floating along and a pair of titanium toaster tongs appear at the episode climax for no discernible reason.

It’s not just the amount of work needed that’s a concern. The scripts have already been sent to the actors and the sound engineers have already done the work needed to make sure all the SFX are in place. A new script for Episode 4 is completely out of the question.

So yesterday morning, I start working on the re-working, and Beth starts working on the producer. She jokes that she’ll pull out of the project if he doesn’t accept the new script. At 2pm, with the ‘new’ script almost finished, I go for a swim in the Thames to await his answer.

None of us do this for the money. I don’t think the producers have made more than a few pennies from Foiled. Beth and I get paid, of course, but it’s not much more than minimum wage.

The only real reason for writing and recording Foiled is for the sake of the work itself. This is our creative reputation. Tomorrow’s recording will almost certainly outlive all of us. The oldest recording in the BBC archives is dated to 1890. The scripts that go into St David’s Hall tomorrow will be humbly printed on eternity.

So it’s fair to say that my leisurely swim yesterday was quite stressful. Could I even bear to sit in the room as the old script was being recorded?

The good news is that our producer gave the new script the green light. And we worked into the summer dusk sanding and polishing Episode 4. It’s now a piece of writing that I’m proud of and I reckon it might make you laugh.

So the writing is done. All that remains, for me at least, is to send one of the actor’s a recording of my sister’s partner speaking Danish, and to get myself to Cardiff tomorrow.

Oh – and then start work on Episode 3, which we’ll record in a studio in London at some point over the next month. The cycle continues!

~

For those of you interested in a more detailed breakdown, the first two weeks of March involved about 8 hours per week of script-writing. We stepped up script-writing to about 11 hours a week for the seven weeks from the beginning of April up until the week before the writers rooms at the end of May. For the last three weeks I have done almost nothing other than work on Foiled: more than 20 hours a week on script-writing alone.

I write this not to show off, but to show you honestly the work it takes to write three episodes of a radio sitcom: about 150 hours of pure script-writing, plus plenty of other work behind the scenes on story-writing and talking things over with Beth and the producers.

By complete coincidence, I got an email this morning from a man who saw Foiled at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016.

We met you in George Square gardens in 2016 when you talked us into coming to see Foiled that afternoon. Brilliant!! We’ve raved about it ever since and watched its success since then.

It blows my mind to think that there are people out there who, years later, are still thinking about the work that we’ve done. This is what I mean when I say that we don’t do this for the money.

Series 3 of Foiled – indeed all of Foiled since 2013 – has been a wonderful experience; thank you for your support and I really hope you enjoy listening as much as I’ve enjoyed writing.

UPDATE: After writing this, a fellow writer of radio sitcoms got in touch to share his data. In terms of hours, I was reassured how similar they were: he takes 55-65 hours per episode.

Where we differ is on how spread out those hours are. Beth and I spent about 74 days working on Foiled since the beginning of March; my correspondent and his writing partner cover similar ground in only 40-50 working days.

But they do have 30 years’ writing experience on us!

Willow the Wisp

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream

The path under our feet was springy with the litter of fluff-ball catkins blown from the branches above.

The leaves are shaped like cats’ paws, glossy on the recto, gentle silver hairs on the verso.

Aspirin bark is cleft with character, shimmering on the surface, lichen in the crevices.

The pussy willow, common sallow, broadleaf grey willow, is native to Britain.

Comedinsanity

We’ve been in the writers rooms for Foiled and we record next Saturday so I’ve spent most of the week staring at a computer screen and laughing.

To the untrained eye, there really is very little discernable difference between writing comedy and insanity.

It’s hard to explain what’s so great about the Foiled writers rooms, but I’m not exaggerating when I say they are my favourite two days of the year.

I suppose, imagine that you’re buckles deep in the hardest part of your job, with only two weeks until the deadest of deadlines. Then imagine that your supervisor pays for six specialists to come in and work on your project with you for two days.

There’s no element of competition, everyone wants the best for the project and, ultimately, it’s still your name on the project.

Wouldn’t that be cool?

So the next 8 days will be spent trying to sift what was just funny in the room from what might actually be funny on the radio.

I’m sure these last 8 days will still get stressful, but it’s a whole lot less stressful for us now, knowing exactly what needs to change, and with a carnival of suggestions on how.

There’s also not much better feeling than having a roomful of professional comedians laugh at something you wrote. Imposter syndrome is fading…

The Beech Boys

Nothing quickens the blood like a beech forest in May.

Perhaps it’s just me, but something about the beechy shade of green pairs particularly well with the limpid May sunshine.

Beech is a gregarious sort of a tree and the avenues are sprinkled with holly and oak, as well as the last of the bluebells.

Up above, caterbugs put on aerial acrobatics from fine strands of trapeze webbing anchored to the leaves.

Down below, the ground is crunchily paved with last year’s fallen beechnuts, every one industriously cracked by the squirrels who are always darting out of sight.

You get the feeling that the beech, queen of the forests, enjoys life with a lightness of touch.

What I learned from shadow walking

The weekend was spent ‘shadowing’ a Duke of Edinburgh Bronze practice expedition. Not in preparation for my own attempt – they tell me I’m too old – but as something of a ‘trial shift’ for future employment as an instructor on said expeditions.

What I learned from my shadow

1. Even the bronze expeditions are hard work.
These little guys (they were 13-14) have to carry 65 litre packs across two days of 8-12km hiking. Some of them were lugging 85 litre packs stuffed to the hoods. Lucky fools.

2. Why can’t most people get camp cooking right?
For millennia, humans just like us cooked out of doors. So why did even the instructors (at least those who didn’t drive back to their warm home, or slide open their luxury camper vans) make do with rehydrating packet noodles, or reheating leftovers?

For the kids, camp cooking is part of the syllabus and, for fear of getting it badly wrong, they exclusively plumped for easy cook pasta and ready-made stir-in sauce. The most accidentally ambitious of the kids brought along bacon lardons to add to his pasta – but only because he thought they were pre-cooked.

I have perused (in a scoffing sort of way) campfire cookbooks in the past, but if I am to commit to broad enjoyment of the great outdoors, then it’s time to take campfire cooking seriously.

On a continental bike tour in 2016, we took a humungous Camping Gaz hob burner. Nothing in our packs brought greater ridicule from other tourers; nothing brought greater pleasure to us.

3. I still can’t sleep in a tent.
I could blame the mummified claustrophobia of the sleeping bag, or the pattering of rain on canvas, or the rowdy teachers up late, or the ironic anxiety that I would oversleep, but where does that get me?

4. Kit is crucial.
Between the 50 or so kids and the half dozen instructors, we showed off the full range of hiking kit.

Within 10 minutes of leaving, we knew who had the right rucksack and who didn’t. By the end of the second day, you could easily see (or hear) who had decent walking boots.

It’s easy to be smug when you recently dropped £100 on boots and another £50 on a rucksack, but these two make such a difference to your enjoyment of an expedition that they have to be worth the investment.

If it’s going to rain more than a little, you can add waterproofs to that list.

5. There will be moments when it’s all worthwhile.
Walking and talking with people more than two decades younger than me; watching the sun rise through the morning mist; strolling alone through a dappled beech forest as I waited for the expedition teams to come past their final checkpoint.

6. I’d like to do more of this.
For too long I have equated ‘typing at a computer’ with ‘making a living’. This new outdoor office is a whole new liberation.

Computers are all well and good, and I am lucky to be able to write for a living, and join people up with words. But perhaps the most valuable thing I can do right now is help kids enjoy the outdoors.

As the lead instructor said: ‘our interventions make a difference to the lives of these young people’.

~

A friend was recently featured in a BBC photostory about escaping the city into the mountains. It’s a beautiful reminder of why we go outdoors, and why we share our skills and enthusiasms with others.

After all…

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sipping a hot cup of tea after six hours of freezing rain hitting you in the face.

What am I bringing into being that will outlast me?

What am I bringing into being that will outlast me?

Of course, it’s impossible to know, but it’s a reasonable bet that my writing will outlast me. Certainly the writing that’s kept in the BBC archives and (still can’t believe this) in the British Library.

My notebooks will probably outlast me. And any of my other digital writing stored on servers with a life-expectancy of greater than 50 or 60 years. That’ll all outlast me.

To a certain degree, my reputation and memories of my existence will outlast me, but probably not for long. My birth certificate will outlast me.

I work for a few organisations that will probably outlast me. Every morning I wake up and do my bit to perpetuate systems of control that will probably outlast me: capitalism, democracy, the British legal system.

I’m contributing my fair share of carbon emissions: their effect will outlast me.

It’s odd to remember that what is mine will outlast me – what does it mean to be ‘mine’ long after the referent has passed away?

In what sense are any possessions ‘mine’? What we call possession can only ever be temporary. To the survivor, the spoils. So too with the planet.

Abstract concepts have a habit of outlasting individuals of course – that’s how we have somehow conspired to cede ownership of Britain to the Forestry Commission, pension funds and the Crown Estate. But these fictions are held together only by a collective delusion.

For the same reason, I find it hard to credit the land to similar fictions like ‘God’ or even ‘Mother Earth’. Are there no corporeal entities who will outlast us in possession of this soil?

But of course there are: the trees.

In this country, there are more specimens of a single tree species – the ash – than there are specimens of homo sapiens. We are short-term tenants on this land and the landlords – in the most literal sense of the word – are our arboreal lessors.

Even the most flippant of trees lives their life on a time scale almost inconceivable to humans. The horse chestnut is considered flighty with a life expectancy of only 300 years. There are yew specimens that were sinking their roots into the soil when the Romans first arrived.

And yet deforestation is ‘the second largest anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, after fossil fuel combustion’. Seems rough treatment for the terrestrial biosphere that absorbs about a quarter of all our profligate carbon emissions.

Tree cover in Britain stands at 13%, rising, but still far below the European average of 37%. Last year, the government committed to increase woodland cover by a further 2%; its own Committee on Climate Change called for a 9% increase.

Britain is on loan and the debt is coming due. We would do well to get to know our landlords and call them by their names. Be good tenants.

There is a tree in a cow pasture near where I grew up (W3W: plotted.brain.forgotten) whose roots make a sublimely relaxing sun lounger.

Until last week, I never knew it’s name. Now I know: it’s an oak, one of a family strung out along the hedgerows, but its siblings don’t make such fine company.

In some ways, it makes complete sense that it took us 10 years to be properly introduced. That’s tree-time. But now I have a dependable friend to share the sunset with. And I know from the calls of half a dozen different birds that I’m not alone.

Whosoever plants a tree
Winks at immortality!
Felix Dennis, poet and planter of trees

tl;dr: Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered (NYT) How to shop, cook and eat in a warming world

tl;dr is internet speak for ‘too long; didn’t read’. It’s probably my favourite semi-colon-based acronym.

I am a huge supporter of thoroughly researched articles, but sometimes you don’t have time to wade through pages of text – no matter how beautifully laid out.

So this post takes the gargantuan Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered: How to shop, cook and eat in a warming world by Julia Moskin, Brad Plumer, Rebecca Lieberman and Eden Weingart (NYT, April 30, 2019) and boils its 3,300 vital words down to less than 1,000.

You’re welcome.

Does what I eat have an effect on climate change?

Yes. Food is responsible for about one-quarter of greenhouse gases we generate.

How exactly does food contribute to global warming?

  1. Deforestation, to make room for farms and livestock, releases huge amounts of carbon.
  2. When cows, sheep and goats digest their food, they burp up methane, another potent greenhouse gas.
  3. Animal manure and rice paddies are also big methane sources.
  4. Fossil fuels used in the industry.

Which foods have the largest impact?

Meat and dairy, particularly from cows.

Emissions from livestock account for roughly the same as all forms of transportation – including aeroplanes.

Is there a simple food choice I can make that would reduce my climate footprint?

  • Eat less beef, lamb and cheese.
  • Substitute with pork, chicken, eggs and molluscs.
  • Replace with beans, pulses, grains and soy.

How much would changing my diet actually help?

People on a meat-heavy diet could shrink their food-related footprint by at least 33% by becoming vegetarian.

If the average American replaced a third of the beef he or she eats with pork, poultry or legumes, his or her food-related emissions would fall by around 13%.

Dietary changes are often one of the quickest ways to lighten your impact on the planet.

I’m just one person! Can I really make a difference all by myself?

Yes.

Why does meat have such a big climate impact?

It takes more land, energy and water to produce 1kg of animal protein than it does to produce 1kg of plant protein.

Bacteria in cow and sheep stomachs create methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that is released through burps and flatulence.

Does it matter how the cows are raised?

Yes. If the Amazon is being cut down, that’s really bad.

What about grass-fed beef?

The jury’s out.

What about chicken?

Chicken usually produces far fewer emissions than beef and a bit fewer than pork.

Should humans stop eating meat altogether?

Not necessarily.

What about ‘fake meat’?

The jury’s still out. Looks promising, though.

Are there other ways meat could become more climate-friendly?

Yes, and there’s a lot of room for further improvement.

What kinds of seafood should I eat?

  • Wild fish: anchovies, sardines, herring, tuna, pollock, cod, haddock.
  • Mollusks: clams, oysters and scallops.

Warning: wild shrimp and lobster can have a larger climate impact than chicken or pork.

Huge caveat: most fisheries are being fished at their maximum sustainable level, while others are being overexploited.

Is farmed seafood a good long-term plan?

Depends. With tight environmental regulation (e.g. Norway), farmed fish can have relatively low impact. But that’s not what’s happening everywhere (e.g. Southeast Asia, China).

How do I know whether a farmed fish is good or bad?

It’s tough. There is a lot of variation from farm to farm.

So what’s the single best choice I can make about seafood?

  • Eat more mollusks.
  • Check your fish is certified sustainable.

[That’s two choices, ed.]

How much impact do milk and cheese have on climate change?

Milk (including yoghurt, and cottage or cream cheese) typically has a smaller climate footprint than chicken, eggs or pork per kilo.

Many other types of cheese (Cheddar, mozzarella) can have a significantly bigger footprint than chicken or pork, since it typically takes about 10 kilos of milk to make one kilo of cheese.

Wait – cheese might be worse than chicken?

Depends on the cheese, but yes.

Are some kinds of milk better than others? I pay a lot more for organic milk.

The jury’s still out.

Which nondairy milk is best?

Almond, rice, oat and soy milk all have a smaller greenhouse gas footprint than cow’s.

So are you saying I should become a vegan?

A vegan diet does have the smallest climate footprint around.

I don’t like vegan food. What should I eat?

Look again at your definition of ‘vegan food’.

I don’t think I can go completely vegan. What else can I try?

  • Eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains.
  • Go vegetarian: no meat, poultry and fish, but dairy and eggs are allowed.
  • Go pescatarian: add seafood to a vegetarian diet.
  • Partly replace meat and dairy with plants.
  • Replace beef and lamb with other meat.

Is organic produce really better than conventionally grown produce?

Jury’s out, in terms of climate impact.

Should I worry about whether my produce is local and seasonal?

Transportation is only about 6% of food’s total climate footprint, so don’t over worry. Avoid produce that’s perishable and needs to be flown between distant places.

Is food waste a big part of the climate change problem?

Yes.

How can I reduce my food waste?

  • Plan your meals.
  • Don’t order more food than you can eat at restaurants.
  • Use a freezer.
  • Ignore ‘sell by’ dates.

Should I be composting?

Ideally, yes – it cuts methane emissions.

Should I use paper or plastic bags?

Don’t freak out. Packaging makes up only about 5% of global food-related emissions.

Does recycling really do anything?

It can help, though it’s not as effective as reducing waste in the first place.

Why aren’t there labels in the grocery store explaining the carbon footprint of different foods?

It’d take a fair bit of effort.

Takeaways

  1. Beef, lamb and cheese tend to do the most climate damage. Pork, chicken and eggs are in the middle. Plants of all kinds typically have the lowest impact.
  2. What you eat matters a lot more than whether it’s local or organic, or what kind of bag you use to carry it home.
  3. Small shifts help too. Eat less meat and more plants, or switch from beef to chicken.
  4. Waste less.

Lime Leaves Loves

Lime trees wrap their greenery in a metaphor. The buds, with one small and one large scale, look like mini boxing gloves, spoiling for a fight. But they unfurl with the light into perfect heart-shaped leaves for loving.

The flowers are hermaphrodite so, perhaps understandably, the lime tree is well-known to aid fertility. And, like the toughest love, lime wood doesn’t warp. It’s still used to make piano keys.

Pick the leaves for a summer salad, particularly when covered in aphid poo, which makes them all the sweeter.

Horse (Chestnut) Play!

It’s a great time of year to be a Horse Chestnut. Many other trees are yet to don their leafy cover, and you are already bustling with green, and holding your blushing flower-candles high.

The Horse Chestnut is generous, offering not one but five or seven leaflets to a stalk. By Autumn, those pink-white flowers have been pollinated into the back to school bounty of those famous conkers. Don’t try eating them.

Introduced to these lands from Turkey in the 1600s, the Horse Chestnut is unlikely to be confused with anything else in our garden. The Sweet Chestnut sounds like a younger cousin, but isn’t even distantly related, and is more likely to be the older.

The three largest Horse Chestnuts are all to be found in Great Britain, proving once and for all that migrants can flourish wherever they land.

Talk Migration: Help Refugees

Last Sunday morning, more than 40 people crammed into a wide circle to ‘talk migration’ under the wooden beams of Impact Hub in Kings Cross.

Talk Migration was a day of talks and discussion around the topics of migration, borders and refugee rights, organised by Thighs of Steel.

Every year, Thighs of Steel cyclists come together to fundraise for grassroots refugee organisations around Europe. In 2019 they are aiming to raise £100,000 with their legendary London to Athens relay ride.

A bicycle bell called us to order and the smiles rang out…

We started the day with a talk by Philly, one of the founders of refugee support charity Help Refugees.

Help Refugees started as nothing more than a heartfelt response to the growing humanitarian crisis in Calais in the summer of 2015. A few friends and a crowdfunder aiming to raise £1000.

A week later, they’d raised over £50,000, and were receiving 7,000 donations a day – tents, sleeping bags, clothes, toiletries. They rented a warehouse in London, another in Calais, and Help Refugees was born.

Almost 4 years later, Help Refugees are now supporting more than 80 grassroots projects in 12 countries.

This year, 120 Thighs of Steel cyclists are aiming to raise £100,000 for Help Refugees. The funds will be split between grassroots organisations along the Thighs of Steel London to Athens cycle route.

Campaigns Help Refugees support in the UK

Thank you to Thighs of Steel for putting on Talk Migration, a day of talks and discussion around the topics of migration, borders and refugee rights.

If you want to support Help Refugees, then you could do a lot worse than donate to my Thighs of Steel fundraising page 😀

Talk Migration: The 21st Century Slaves of Indefinite Detention

Last Sunday morning, more than 40 people crammed into a wide circle to ‘talk migration’ under the wooden beams of Impact Hub in Kings Cross.

Talk Migration was a day of talks and discussion around the topics of migration, borders and refugee rights, organised by Thighs of Steel.

Every year, Thighs of Steel cyclists come together to fundraise for grassroots refugee organisations around Europe. In 2019 they are aiming to raise £100,000 with their legendary London to Athens relay ride.

A bicycle bell called us to order and the smiles rang out…

Our second speaker was Michael Darko, part of Detention Action’s out-reach programme Freed Voices.

Freed Voices are a group of ‘experts-by-experience’ whose mission is to increase awareness of the grim day-to-day reality of life in detention.

Michael’s story

Michael Darko was born ‘on his grandmother’s lap’ in Ghana. He spent just 4 years in Ghana, before travelling with his family to Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, finally settling in London when Michael was 12.

At no stage in the journey did Michael have any identity papers – no birth certificate, no passport, no visas, nothing.

When Michael was 15 his father abandoned the family, leaving them to fend for themselves. As the oldest, Michael dropped out of school to look for a job. Because he had no papers, Michael could only pick up casual work in Hackney Market, but at least it was enough to support him and his 4 siblings.

A year later, however, social services found out about the unusual family structure. Michael was still just a kid and, with bills piling up, the family lost their home.

Forced into a corner, and still head of the household, Michael fell in with a gang on the streets of Hackney. Unable to stomach the violence, he ran away and ended up in Northampton. There, he got a legitimate job at a logistics company – but only by using another man’s identity.

Being a smart guy, Michael rose through the ranks until he was earning £40,000 a year as a team manager. Then his luck ran out.

The man whose identity Michael had stolen made a claim for benefits – the computer threw up an error, and Michael was tracked down, prosecuted for fraud, and sentenced to 20 months imprisonment.

Michael accepts the punishment for his crime: he stole another man’s identity and deserved his sentence.

But what happened next was out of order.

Into detention

The day before he was due to be released from prison, Michael’s immigration status was investigated. Having no papers, he was told that he wasn’t going to be released after all.

Not only that, but because he was uncooperative with the investigation, Michael was transferred immediately to a high security prison. He languished there for another 12 months until his sentence was completed.

At this point, Michael had paid his debt to society and, if he’d been a British citizen, he would have been justly released. Instead, the Home Office transferred him to a detention centre – for an indefinite length of time.

Michael ended up staying there for another two and a half years.

Inside detention

During those years, Michael had plenty of time to study and he became an expert on immigration law. He helped 48 fellow detainees avoid deportation by writing their judicial review applications. In response, he was threatened with prosecution.

The irony is that Michael only ever wanted to work to earn a living. This right was denied to him in free society, but inside detention, compliant asylum seekers are allowed to work – for the princely wage of £1 per hour.

Almost all detention centres in the UK are now run by private companies, who run their business for a profit.

Over the past few years, the Home Office has reduced the amount they pay these businesses to £86 per detainee – and now these private companies need to find alternative streams of income to keep up their 20-30% profit margin.

One way they can do this, of course, is by exploiting these 21st century slaves.

Released

Michael appealed for bail 15 times and was finally released in December 2014 after taking charge of his own legal defence and making a request for his Home Office file.

In those papers, Michael found out that the Home Office knew that the Ghanaian authorities had no record of his existence and would not accept his return.

Rather than dropping the deportation, the Home Office was keeping Michael in detention, waiting for… What?

The day before his arrest for fraud, Michael was a high-earning, tax-paying member of British society. By the time he became a free man once again, his detention had cost the tax-payer around £100,000.

And for what?

‘My story is not an isolated case,’ Michael says, ‘and it shouldn’t shock you. It is a fraction, a fraction.’

The system

Michael doesn’t disagree that immigrants who have committed a crime should be deported. It’s the interminable wait that he feels is unjust.

Why does the deportation process only begin at the end of a custodial sentence? ‘The wait is mental torture,’ Michael says.

In fact, the whole asylum system is designed to work against the people it is supposed to protect. During Talk Migration, we discussed two such ways: the denial of the right to work and the denial of the right to healthcare.

Since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act of 2013, access to legal aid has been made increasingly difficult. This means asylum seekers are often faced with expensive legal fees that they can’t pay without looking for paid work – in contravention of the limited rights granted to them.

If they are caught, their asylum application can be rejected out-of-hand and they can be sent into detention. A vicious cycle.

That’s not the only way that the deck is stacked against asylum seekers.

Until they are granted indefinite leave to remain, asylum seekers have no recourse to public funds. This means that they can’t use the NHS for anything other than emergency care – and even then they will be expected to foot the bill.

One very common reason why an asylum seeker might need to use the NHS is during childbirth. On their journey, it’s not uncommon for female asylum seekers to be the victims of rape. The pregnancy comes to term in the UK – so what can they do?

Childbirth is primary care, but any pre-natal check-ups are not. This means that female asylum seekers come to hospital (if at all) at the last minute. This, of course, leads to poorer health outcomes for mother and baby.

But there is worse to come. A routine birth costs the NHS around £6,000, and asylum seekers are expected to pay 150% of the costs, so are hit with a bill for about £9,000.

Of course, there is no way that most asylum seekers can afford to pay these bills. You might be wondering why the NHS bothers to chase them at all. Well, it’s got nothing to do with covering their costs.

If a person makes a claim for asylum and they owe more than £500 to the NHS, then their claim can be thrown out without further consideration. These bills are an easy way for the Home Office to strip people of their refugee convention rights and deport them back to the country they fled from.

Our health service is being used for political ends to punish vulnerable refugees. Hats off to the healthcare professionals who do what they can to push back against the system and end the sharing of patient data between hospitals and the Home Office. You know who you are!

What happens after detention?

The strange thing is that most detainees are never deported: more than half are eventually released back into the community. Back to where they started, but with one crucial difference – they are traumatised through their detention ordeal.

Up until the moment of their incarceration, most detainees are simply trying to make a new life under extremely difficult circumstances. But if anything is going to traumatise, criminalise and radicalise, it’s the dehumanising conditions of detention.

This psychological trauma is not treated by the Home Office, of course. It falls on the community to absorb the damage. So if you think that you aren’t doing enough, take heart from Michael’s assertion that, ‘any little thing you do makes a big difference’.

How can that possibly be true?

The perception of detainees from the inside of a detention centre is that the whole country hates you. This is desperate.

Remember when you felt like everyone in your class hated you for letting in a goal on sports day? Now imagine that, but it’s not just 30 classmates, but 66 million.

This makes even the smallest gesture of support incredibly powerful to a detainee because it shows them at a single stroke that not everyone hates them. And if one person doesn’t hate them, then perhaps there are dozens, hundreds, millions of people out there who, in fact, support them.

Detention Action are currently recruiting for volunteers, particularly listeners with language skills. They are also fighting for a 28-day time limit on detention.

This limit would end the uncertainty, and reduce the trauma caused by detention. So far the campaign has the support of around 70 MPs.

Find out more

Watch and read Michael’s story on Detention Action, on The Guardian.

On life in detention: Working Illegally (28 minutes, 2015)

On life in Brooks House detention centre: BBC Panorama Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets (60 minutes, 2017) on BBC iPlayer [Not currently available], or HDDocumentary.com

Thank you to Thighs of Steel for putting on Talk Migration, a day of talks and discussion around the topics of migration, borders and refugee rights.

No Place Like Holm (Oaks)

I left it late to climb a tree in April, but here I am, high up in a holm oak, with what appears to be a dislocated jaw.

The holm oak is an evergreen, native to the Eastern Mediterranean. It was brought over here in the late 1500s and isn’t fussed about sea spray, which explains why there are a number scattered along the clifftops here in Bournemouth.

The leaves are glossy dark green, and the younger ones are spiny like the leaves of the holly – which explains why this oak is called ‘holm’, an old form of ‘holly’.

As a climber, this tree is a safe bet, with thick branches and helpful forks to wedge in. Snapped upper branches are evidence of recent high winds. The dense leaves make the holm oak a perfect hideaway for miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. After all, an Englishman’s holm is his castle.

I’ll leave it to the Woodland Trust to explain why you might want to explore this pleasing oak for yourself:

In ancient Greece the leaves of the holm oak were used to tell the future and they were also used to make crowns to honour people. The acorn was seen as a sign of fertility and wearing acorn jewellery was believed to increase fertility.

Foiled Diaries: On First Drafts and Producer Notes

And, just like that, it’s May and we’ve only got 5 weeks to finish Foiled. So far, we’ve delivered the first drafts of 3 of the 4 episodes, and got notes from the producer on 2 of them.

First drafts are funny beasts. Every time we finish a first draft, we think that it’s more or less great. In spite of all experience, we hope that this time will be different and the producer’s only note will come back: ‘This is so good, would you mind turning it into a Netflix series?’

Strangely, this is yet to happen.

All first drafts have problems. Some bigger than others. But those producer’s notes land in our inbox like a letterbox turd, stinking the place out with their effortless skewering of the plot holes, character motivations, and the Purple Line of Doom that strides over pages of boredom.

Made all the worse by the fact that, deep down, we knew these problems were there all along, and all we can say is daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

The only remedy to producer’s notes is, of course, panic. Swiftly pursued by exactly the same attitude that got us into this mess: sitting down and writing a lot more words.

Nothing ever came out right first time, and this series won’t either. But it’ll get written the same way it did last year: patient hours in front of a computer screen. Putting the time in. Sitting there and writing until eventually something good pops up.

The skill, if there is one, is in spotting the good when it pops, grabbing hold of it, pinning it to the page and not letting go until it’s been bled dry.

This episode of Rule of Three with Miles Jupp analysing his favourite episode of Frasier has given us good writing energy. Now all we’ve got to do is avoid plagiarising!

oh merde it’s a FUNDRAISING LAUNCH!!

Click here to cut the crap and go straight to my Help Refugees donation page…

This summer I’ll be cycling ~1,800km from Rome to Athens because I vehemently believe that borders are really dumb.

Everyone should be able to roam the earth freely and that’s why I support the work that Help Refugees are doing to help stateless human beings get a foothold in life.

As one of the lucky, lucky people on earth who haven’t had their home village bombed to pieces, I like to do what I can to support those who aren’t so fortunate. If that involves cycling an awfully long way in 35 degree heat, then so be it.

If you think that helping refugees is a generally good idea, then I’d be super grateful if you could donate whatever you can afford.

Click this link to make that happen.

Having visited projects supported by Help Refugees all over Europe, I can reassure you that the work they do is of immense practical support to actual human beings every day. (I’ve published a lot of these stories on my blog – drop me a line if you want a direct link.)

Thank you in advance for being so generous! And stay tuned because your donation will get you free entry to a very exciting thingy that we’re planning for the start of July….

Oh now you’re interested! (Donate by card or Paypal…)

+++ There’s still time to join this year’s ride. Maybe London to Paris, or Milan to Venice? If you want to ride with yours truly, then sign up for Rome-Bari or Corfu-Athens!

Audacity is our only option

My last blog post on audacity got a great response. I particularly enjoyed conversations with Documentally and Beth Granville, both of whom are models of mine for more audacious living.

My call with Documentally was interesting because, as someone often audacious, he was anxious that his audacity could be draining the world of generosity.

What if his asking meant other, more needy people would miss out? And what if everyone went around acting audacious and asking for free cups of tea? What would happen then? Wouldn’t all the tea sellers go bankrupt and leave us bereft of warming beverages?

Documentally also said that he always feels an obligation to reply his debt of gratitude to the people who help him. He’d been expecting me to share the location of the beachside kiosk where I got my free tea last week.

It didn’t even cross my mind. Why not? I have no good answer to that question, and now feel like an ungrateful little swine. 🙂

still.slave.status

In my defence, the thesis of my writing was not about the kiosk – or even about generosity. Generosity is the flip side to audacity, and a story for another day.

I also never imagined that you lovely readers would ever be interested in visiting that particular kiosk, so why would I share its address?

But why ever not? Embedded in my somewhat solipsistic writing was an endorsement of a generous hearted kiosk operator. Why wouldn’t other people want to visit this kindly young man and exploit – sorry, reward his generosity? Especially as I know at least 7 people who visit Bournemouth on the regular.

So, without further analysis, if you ever find yourself in Bournemouth, then the kiosk you absolutely must visit is attached to the Versuvio restaurant on the seafront at Alum Chine. If you’re looking for What3Words, it’s still.slave.status, which is heartbreaking.

The karmic torpedo

We could enjoy an hour or two addressing Documentally’s other concerns, throwing around arguments for and against the karmic repercussions of audacity. But a story Beth told me pretty much torpedoes the whole argument.

You see, something similar happened to Beth the other day – except she really had forgotten her wallet, and really was gasping for a tea.

She was out with a friend, walking the dog, so went into the park cafe and asked if she could have a free cup of tea. The woman behind the counter said yes.

So, while she was there, Beth asked if her friend could have a tea as well – oh and these wafers look good – and how about a doggy treat for Jilly?

Think that’s taking the piss? I shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Firstly because Beth offered to come back and pay – and actually did. But secondly, and I think more importantly, because of this story’s torpedo effect on Documentally’s karmic concerns.

What is normal? This is normal

Everyone has a totally different take on what defines normal behaviour. Did Beth think her ask was audacious? Maybe a little, but clearly not to the extent that I did when, knees a-knocking, I asked for my free cuppa.

For Beth this behaviour was, although not an everyday occurrence, at least within the boundaries of normal. And why ever not? She wasn’t coercing the cafe server. She didn’t act entitled (although it has been said that no one is more ready to be famous), she asked.

As long as you stay on the right side of audacity, you should have no worries over the karmic repercussions of asking.

Indeed, I’d go much, much further. I think it is vitally important – for all of us, people and planet – that you act with audacity.

Would the world be a better place if everyone were so audacious? Yes, without question, it would.

Why we need an audacious world

Audacity puts an end to all regrets (and crimes) of omission. It wouldn’t put an end to regret itself – it’s perfectly possible to do something audacious that you later regret. But we regret the things we do far less and far less frequently than we regret the things we never did.

In an audacious world, there would be zero elderly men, nodding by the fire, dreaming what might have been if only they’d asked Mary to the ball in 1953 – zero!

There would be zero working women wondering what might have been if only they’d asked for a raise ten years earlier – zero!

And there would be zero activists wondering what might have been if they’d only done something more than sign a petition – zero!

Because, in an audacious world, they would have asked. It is in our acts of audacity that we improve our lives and the lives of others. In audacity, we don’t hold back; we leave it all out there; we do our best.

Anxiety is the opposite of audacity

I’m not saying that if you ask audaciously you will always receive bounty, of course not.

But the energy we channel into our anxiety over whether we’ll be rejected would be far better spent on dealing with the rejection (if and when it comes) and then asking someone else on a date, looking for a new job, or starting a more ambitious campaign.

The opposite of audacity is not, as you might think, conventional behaviour. The opposite of audacity is anxiety.

No one goes through life thinking purely conventional thoughts. No matter how straight-laced that man you see on his office commute every morning, you can bet your life that he’s fantasised about some pretty audacious behaviour in his time.

And you can bet your afterlife that he beats himself up about his conventional existence every single day. Instead of audacity, he feels anxiety.

Why practise audacity?

Breaking our habits of convention is not easy. We focus on the pain of failure far more often than we dare to imagine success.

Some people, like Beth, are pretty well practised at asking for what they want, but the rest of us can improve by taking on low-stakes audacity challenges where our future (not to mention our fragile pride) doesn’t depend on the outcome.

These training challenges will be different for each of us. For me, it might be taking a guitar out to the beach and playing for passers-by.

For you, it might be sitting down on a park bench and talking to a stranger (wait – that one’s for me too).

For someone else, it might be leaving work unfinished and goofing off for an hour to listen to birdsong (wait – that one’s also for me).

If nothing too bad happens, then screw your courage to the sticking place and try something even more audacious.

Audacity today; audacity tomorrow

Slowly, through this practice, we hope to learn that no matter how audacious, neither our future nor our foolish pride will ever depend on the outcome of one act.

Yes, our actions today will go some way to moulding our tomorrow, but tomorrow will be as ripe for audacity as today ever was. Even if you totally mess up, you have the chance to choose again, and right your course.

So meet tomorrow’s audacious opportunities tomorrow, without looking past those coming ripe today.

The risk is that the alternative to audacity – anxiety – will keep us frozen in place. Do you want to keep on making the same mistakes tomorrow as you did today? That’s one definition of hell.

Far better to take an audacious step – in any direction – than to fall where you stand. Which reminds me of this maxim from psychiatrist Viktor Frankl:

Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

Documentally made some excellent points, and it’s always helpful to stress-test any theory against the pangs of your conscience. But, in truth, we have no worthwhile alternative to audacity.

Before you ask: the cafe Beth audaciously plundered was in Grovelands Park in Winchmore Hill, Enfield. W3W: universally.wisely.woven.

Subvertisers for London

This short film from Dog Section Films tells the behind-the-scenes story of subvertising, past and present.

Subvertising is the subversion of advertising, in which artists and activists take over public advertising spaces, usually to make political counter-arguments to the consumerist message.

Needless to say, it’s required viewing.

If you’re into the ideas behind the film, check out the companion book Advertising Shits In Your Head. (Which, incidentally, I helped proof.)

Subvertisers for London (21 mins)

Featuring: Jonathan Barnbrook, Darren Cullen, Dr. D, Hogre, Double Why, Lydia Dagostino, Protest Stencil, Sila Yucel and Special Patrol Group.

Music: Algiers, Biege Thickness, Jonny Drop.

Additional photography: Nekane Requejo De Ozamiz.

Dog Section Press is a not-for-profit publisher and distributor of seditious literature.

The best things in life are audacious

The best thing that has ever happened to me, has just happened to me.

In the spirit of rejection therapy, I left the house with the intention of sitting out on the clifftops and writing my newsletter with a nice cup of tea.

What’s this got to do with rejection therapy? Well, I didn’t take any money with me.

And yet, here I am, sitting out on the clifftops, writing my newsletter with a nice cup of tea.

There was no queue at the beach kiosk, but I still had to stand and wait while the kiosk guy faffed with the bins, head down. Pop music was playing loudly from an old speaker.

I was just wondering whether I should make some customer-like noise or take this golden opportunity to run away and save my embarrassment, when the kiosk guy lifted his head.

‘What can I do for you, buddy?’

Here we go: ‘This is an absolutely outrageous request, but I’ve come out with no money – I couldn’t have a tea, could I?’

He didn’t answer, just smiled a wry smile, and went to the machine.

‘That’s so kind, thank you. If you give me a receipt, I’ll come back and pay another time.’

‘No, no. I’m not going to make a fuss over a bit of hot water and a teabag – it’s nothing.’

What a legend. I mean, he’s not wrong: a bit of hot water and a teabag is nothing. But still! He didn’t have to do that.

As I walked away, I thought to myself – actually, I said out loud to no one but the gulls, ‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

Then I sat down on the clifftops and took a satisfied sip.

Do you think kiosk guy would mind if I went back and asked for one with no milk? No, no – forget it.

On audacity and entitlement

There is a fine line between audacity and entitlement. The distinction, I think, is in the emotions attached.

An audacious move expects rejection. As a result, rejection doesn’t lead to resentment, and acceptance gives you such a buzz of gratitude.

Audacity, somehow, brings people closer together. If you asked me right now, I’d probably give that kiosk guy my spare kidney.

Entitlement, by contrast, leaves both sides cold. Entitlement expects acceptance – or at least acquiescence. The entitled feel no such buzz of gratitude – because they’re only getting the bare minimum they reckon they’re owed by the universe.

Meanwhile, the victim of entitlement can only feel resentment that they have been plonked onto a lower station in the social hierarchy, and exploited. Were the victim to stand up against entitlement, they will face aggression, passive or explicit.

Audacity is the world as an open game of negotiation, engagement, and possibility. Entitlement, by contrast, is the world as a closed system of rules, privacy and hierarchy.

Do you dare to eat a peach?

Hot last weekend, wasn’t it?

Families were streaming to the beach in their thousands. As we pulled up to the cliffs car park, a family were relaxing in deck chairs around their camper, polishing off a barbecue lunch.

Hanging from the night before, one of our party made an audacious move: ‘Smells great, guys. Any chance you’ve got a burger going spare?’

Of course they have. The materfamilias takes delight in splitting a roll and filling it with charred meat and oleaginous relish: but who would dare ask? Who would squeeze the universe into a ball, to roll it toward some overwhelming question?

Do you dare to eat a peach?

Rebellion begins with audacity

Clearly, a burger and a cup of tea are pretty small fry. But you can’t begin by asking for the earth. Not even when you are asking for the earth.

Extinction Rebellion didn’t begin with a blockade of London. I imagine it began the same way as the US civil rights movement, the South African rebellion against Apartheid, the revolution in Egypt, and the English Civil War: with an invitation to a meeting in a small room in a flat.

But the modesty of that first meeting doesn’t mask the audacity of the agenda.

Rebellions begin with audacity. In fact, all change – large and small, public and personal – begins with audacity: the audacity to imagine an alternative.

Asking your future partner out for a coffee for the first time. Negotiating for a job, or a raise. Dropping everything to travel overland to Australia – or buying a £550 Nissan Micra to drive to Siberia (never mind that the interior is carpeted entirely in greengrocer’s astroturf). Replacing commercial advertising billboards with more honest messages. Typing the first words into an empty script.

They say that the best things in life are free; I wouldn’t argue with that. But I think it’s more accurate to say that the best things in life are audacious.

Training audacity

My audacity at the kiosk was contrived: I knew before I left the flat that I was going to ask for a free tea. I could instead have come out with my wallet and paid for a tea that I can easily afford.

Other people don’t have it so easy. Do you think the kiosk guy would’ve been so generous to a dishevelled man who carries all his worldly goods in two stuffed plastic bags? Maybe, maybe not.

But this was never a test of my privilege. This was a test of my mettle, training my audacity for greater challenges ahead.

By asking for a tea that I didn’t really need, I tested my courage to engage and negotiate so that when I do really need audacity, I have reserves of confidence to call upon.

There are three stages to a rejection therapy challenge:

  1. Aim for rejection. Expect the answer ‘no’, but ask anyway. Don’t worry that the challenge isn’t big or clever enough – if you think you’ll be rejected, that’s plenty big and clever.
  2. Failure is success. You’ve found your limits – for now. Try the same challenge again, with different people, and different approaches.
  3. Success is failure. A cup of tea – as the kiosk guy pointed out – is nothing. Next time, be bolder, push yourself further.

Above all, if other people are involved, be charming. Smile. Be frank about the fact you’re asking something ridiculous and weird. Have a laugh about it and you might just find yourself a co-conspirator.

And when you are rejected – congratulations! – smile again, say thank you, and walk away with the deep satisfaction that you’ve pushed against your horizon of audacity, and – for now – found its limit.

What about you? Is this concept of audacity useful? How could you be more audacious right now?

By the way, the smug photo of me with my free tea was taken by an Iranian MBA student I met on the clifftops.

As well as my wallet, I came out without my camera, so I walked up to this woman and asked if she could take one on her phone and email it to me.

She took four.

She was the third person I asked.

Get shit for free

Something remarkable happened to me a few weeks ago. Thanks to the resourcefulness and generosity of my friend and spirit guide Documentally, a rather exclusive, high-end and indeed Swiss tech company sent me their new Punkt MP02 phone. For free. No strings attached.

I’ve written elsewhere about how everything is free, but I’ve never had the gumption to straight up ask people to send me stuff. But The Swiss Phone Incident has inspired me: never again will I spend significant sums of moolah, until I’ve first tried to get it (or do it) for nothing.

Of course, nothing is for nothing. I doubt Punkt would have sent me a free phone if I didn’t have some record (however modest) of writing about stuff on the internet.

The Swiss Phone Incident has made me realise that, although writing isn’t a terribly well-paid job, it does open up opportunities to supplement one’s income.

For example, some friends recently invited me to Love Trails, a running festival in Wales that sounded right up my alley – if it wasn’t for the £130+ price tag. So, in the after-glow of The Swiss Phone Incident, I emailed the organisers suggesting that I give a talk in exchange for a free ticket and travel expenses.

To my enduring surprise (I still think it was all a dream), they said yes. What’s great about this – aside from saving well over £130 – is that instead of merely going to the festival, I am the festival – or part of it, at least. My experience of Love Trails will be all the greater for not spending money on a ticket.

I have found this again and again: spending money is the simplest, but also the lowest impact way of acquiring a thing or an experience.

Hitch-hiking will always be more latent with possibility than buying a plane ticket. Skipping food from bins is so much more fraught with surprise and reward than is shopping at Lidl. Sharing tools and swapping skills with your neighbours opens up futures that are sullied by contracts and cash.

By spending a little time figuring out how we might get shit for free, we not only save money, but also become more engaged with the people and planet around us, learn new skills or practise old ones, and – above all – have more interesting stories to tell of our lives.

Digital minimalism is a niche topic, and I doubt many people can afford to spend £300 for a phone that doesn’t even take photos – but I hope that The Swiss Phone Incident inspires you to look for opportunities where you can spend a little less and live a little more.

For those of you who are interested in what I think of the Punkt MP02, the review is here.

Punkt MP02 First Look Review

Technology is a funny old bird.

We get sold on a particular feature – like the ability to make social phone calls to friends and family – but find ourselves quickly overwhelmed by myriad extraneous features that distract us from our intentions.

This is where the Punkt MP02 feature phone intervenes: adding a step between my sociable intentions and the pernicious distractions of my ‘smart’ devices.

Note: Punkt sent me this MP02 gratis. Of course, it’s lovely to receive such a kind gift, and you would be forgiven for being suspicious about this the honesty of this review. But please suspend your doubt – as you will see, I’m far too reliant on connectivity to tolerate a device that doesn’t work properly!

The Punkt MP02 as a minimum viable technology

I’ve written before about using the minimum viable technology for a task, and the Punkt MP02 fits perfectly into my buffet of devices.

The MP02 does only two things really well:

  1. Phone calls.
  2. 4G tethering.

It does a few other things, like messaging and note-taking, but it doesn’t do them very well. These features are more for emergencies than day-to-day use.

Using the Punkt MP02 in combination with my laptop and my smartphone, I can still take part in extraneous ‘connected’ activities, without turning them into reflex habits.

But, best of all, the Punkt and I now prioritise phone calls.

Has the Punkt changed my behaviour?

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, or, as the saying goes, in the device use statistics.

With the Punkt in my digital arsenal, I’ve averaged only 15 minutes a day on my smartphone. For comparison, my average smartphone use – excluding phone calls – in the week immediately pre-Punkt was around 60 minutes per day.

Looking back over the longer term, my average smartphone use – excluding phone calls – in the last two months has been about 45 minutes a day – and that’s with a conscious effort to reduce my smartphone usage after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

It seems that, with the Punkt, I could be saving 30-45 minutes a day, a remarkable return for the device thus far.

I have also made more phone calls to friends and family with the Punkt than I used to with the smartphone. In my first week with the Punkt, I made 5 ‘social’ phone calls for a total duration of 110 minutes, averaging about 22 minutes each.

In comparison, over the preceding six weeks, I made 9 similarly social calls on my smartphone, lasting a total of 180 minutes. On average, that makes only 2 calls every week.

These smartphone calls were still around 20 minutes each, which reassures me that I’m comparing apples with apples, but with the Punkt, it seems as if I’m more than twice as likely to pick up the phone and call friends and family. Brilliant.

This might, of course, be down to novelty. It’ll be interesting to see whether I continue to spend significantly less time on my smartphone, as the unnecessary habit degrades, or whether instead I begin to crave the convenience of the ‘smart’ features I do use.

Which brings me on to…

Do I still need a smartphone?

There are several features for which I know I will still use my smartphone.

  1. Maps. Connectivity is not necessary: I have downloaded maps for offline use.
  2. Camera. Wifi will be needed to transfer these from phone to computer.
  3. Whatsapp messaging. I prefer to use my computer for the actual sending of messages, but this is only possible with a ‘smart’ connection as well.
  4. Strava tracking for bike rides.
  5. Banking apps. Not strictly necessary, but I can’t be the only person who finds the mobile apps easier to use than the web equivalents.

As you can tell, none of these activities are urgent. I could survive without any of them. Does that mean I will get rid of my smartphone? No.

My smartphone is still, for better or worse, the minimum viable technology for that grab bag of low-priority, but still useful features.

I’m not going to buy a dedicated camera because I hardly ever take photos. Photography isn’t a priority for me. Likewise, I’m unlikely to buy a Garmin GPS for my bike: they’re expensive and I’m not massively into following pre-planned routes.

It remains to be seen whether the Punkt MP02 has turned the smartphone into one useful tool among many, rather than one dominant tool to rule them all (and me) – but that is the hope.

Pros, Not bothereds, Cons and a Wishlist

With the psychological and practical aspects of the review dealt with, let’s look at the phone in more detail. What works, what I don’t care about, what doesn’t work, and what could work.

Pros (for me)

  • The phone works as a phone – hallelujah! This is huge.
  • Tethering works as well as with my old smartphone (after help from the excellent customer support team). This is also huge.
  • Excellent customer support, fortunately, because the phone needs it. It can’t be easy designing and launching an entirely new genus of phone, and early adopters need support.
  • Beautifully designed and feels good in my hand. I’ve dropped it a couple of times already and it seems robust.
  • BlackBerry security. Hopefully this means that my phone can’t be hacked. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what this means in practice: presumably the protection doesn’t extend to tethered devices. I’ve written before about the leaky nature of mobile phones, and how this data is big business. It feels good to own a device that, for once, puts my privacy first.

Not bothereds (for me)

  • For a simple phone, there’s quite a going on. I can connect to other devices using Bluetooth, WiFi and a USB connection. I genuinely have no idea why the phone has GPS.
  • There are a panoply of other unobtrusive features, including messaging, calculator, calendar, alarm, world clock, stopwatch, timer, and notes with timed reminders (including recurring reminders). They all seem to work well, but I doubt I’ll use any of them much.
  • The messaging system can display emoticons and QR codes. Wowzas.

Cons (for me)

UPDATE: Punkt are currently manufacturing an update to the MP02 which will be available in July 2019. Hopefully many of the bugs listed below will be fixed – and they have kindly offered me an exchange. As I said earlier, the customer service is excellent.

This is quite a long list, so I’ve bolded the cons that have a significant negative impact on my day-to-day use.

  • Limited battery life. The Punkt’s battery life is currently only about a day of light to moderate use. A couple of phone calls, a couple of hours’ hotspotting, and it’s dead. Even on standby, the battery drains remarkably quickly. Overnight, on aeroplane mode, I lost 15%. Frankly, compared to other feature phones, it’s feeble – and very nearly a deal breaker. Luckily, Punkt’s engineers are working on a solution and hope to release another firmware update in June. Watch this space…
  • I can’t have an audible ring tone without also turning on all the other annoying system noises (key-pad tones, lock and unlock tones, etc.). For a phone that sells itself on discretion, this seems very odd. The excellent customer service people don’t appear to have a solution either. What this means is that, for the sake of my sanity, I have to have the phone on silent all the time. It does vibrate, however, so I usually hear something buzz when someone calls.
  • The ringtones might be ‘the work of respected Norwegian sound artist Kjetil Røst Nilsen’, but in my humble opinion, they are all a bit weird. It’s not possible to upload my own, although they do say this might be a feature for a future update.
  • Likewise, I can’t change the alarm noise, which is unfortunate because it sounds like I’m under attack from quite a raucous seagull. Not the most relaxing way to wake up.
  • The earphones aren’t very good quality and only come with one earpiece. They are USB-C, though, so I could buy a new set, I guess.
  • You can programme shortcuts, which is handy. This would be a pro, but isn’t very well done so becomes a con, I’m afraid. The options are fairly limited and the execution isn’t always as clear as it could be. I set a shortcut to turn on tethering, but there is no notification that the shortcut has executed successfully, and I can’t set a shortcut to turn tethering off.
  • The power source is USB-C, so I can’t share chargers with most of the rest of the world yet, and heaven help me if I lose this one cable before I get a chance to buy a backup. A bit harsh to make this a con, but there we go.
  • I’ve also run into quite a few glitches:
    • I’ve experienced a few (5) dropped calls. It’s hard to say whether these were down to the Punkt or the caller’s phone. I’ll keep an eye/ear on it.
    • I had to restart after the home screen stopped working.
    • The notifications don’t always behave as they should.
    • The home screen clock takes a few seconds to update. (This bug seems to come and go.)
    • USB tethering only worked once and never again. Shame, because it could be a useful feature to keep the phone charged while using the battery-intensive hotspot.

Wishlist (for me)

  • I would love a voice note feature so that I could record notes to myself, rather than type them out, tortuously, on the predictive keypad.
  • A torch would be handy.

The Bottom Line

For me, at the moment, the Punkt MP02 just about crosses the line. After a week’s testing, I will definitely keep the Punkt in my pocket.

The annoying ring tones, the various glitches, and the more significant issue with the battery life, are still not enough to outweigh the importance of untethering myself from my smartphone.

I need a phone that keeps me in contact with friends and family, without distracting me from the way I want to spend my time. The miraculous little Punkt MP02 helps me do that.

If I were grading the phone as a whole, however, I couldn’t give it more than a B-Minus. Everything about the Punkt screams Premium – but I’d be a bit gutted if I’d shelled out the £300 asking price for a dumbphone that scarcely lasts a day, and does some pretty annoying things.

If they can sort out the myriad glitches, and significantly improve the battery life with the next firmware update, then we’ll be talking about a phone that delivers not only on the promise of digital minimalism, but also on the premium price point.

But the real test for me will be whether I decide to take the Punkt MP02 when I go travelling this summer.

When I’m out of the country, my reliance on the web increases. I’m much more likely to want to connect to look up places to go. I’m much more likely to stay in communication with friends and family over email and Whatsapp, and I’m much more likely to be away from my computer and a fixed WiFi connection.

Finally, space and weight are a consideration and, although the Punkt is small and light, every inch and every gramme counts when I’m travelling. The fact that I have no other devices that charge from a USB-C is another slight point against the Punkt.

So the Punkt has 3 months to prove itself indispensable!

Thanks a mill to Punkt for sending me this MP02, and thanks to their customer service team for helping me get it up and running. Thanks also to @documentally for putting me in touch with Punkt in the first place.

Happy Bicycle Day!

Today might be Good Friday, but it’s also Bicycle Day – the celebration of the first deliberate acid trip.

On 19 April 1943, intrigued by ‘a peculiar presentiment’ and ‘excercising extreme caution’, chemist Albert Hofmann ingested 0.25 mg of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate – ‘the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect’. Or so he thought.

Hofmann recorded the details of his experiment in that day’s lab journal:

4/19/43
16:20: 0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = 0.25 mg tartrate. Taken diluted with about 10 cc water. Tasteless.
17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh. Supplement of 4/21: Home by bicycle.

What followed was a remarkable descent into horror and beauty, confronting demons and angels, and finally an experience of death and rebirth. 0.25mg of LSD, it turned out, was a pretty big dose.

The next day, Hofmann writes:

A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me extraordinary pleasure. When I later walked out into the garden, in which the sun shone now after a spring rain, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.

For more about the discovery of this remarkable compound, read Hofmann’s autobiography, LSD – My Problem Child, available online, for free. The story of his first self-experiment begins on page 11.

Happy Bicycle Day!

Thoreau on Walking

I recently read The Atlantic essay Walking by Henry David Thoreau, published in June 1862. Firstly, how thrilling it is to read that by-line set in the 21st century medium of the Internet. Praise The Atlantic for doing such a beautiful job – imagine Punch or The Times delving so deep into their archives.

Walking touches upon an almost scatter-brained variety of tangentially related topics. I’m never sure whether the 19th century mind was more nimble, or simply that writers of yore lacked the affection of competent editors.

The essay is worth reading in its entirety – if only for his enthusiastic side-swipes at the small-minded European mentality (even the moon looks smaller there!) – but I wanted to pick out three themes that particularly caught my eye.

The Value of Time Spent in Nature

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

The Inexhaustibility of Local Walks

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. … Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.

The Re-Wilding of Humankind

I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe.

But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried “Whoa!” to mankind?

The Meteorological Secret of Comedy

The secret of comedy, they say, is timing. This is such a well-known truism, that it has, in its fame, become false.

The only remaining secret of comedy is the weather.

Like a meteorologist, comedians (by which I mean anyone attempting to make another person laugh, whether professionally or not) see the world around them in topographies of pressure.

They are constantly monitoring the world around them for areas of rising pressure that they can lance like cloudbursts with their wit.

The well-timed release of such pressure is what makes people laugh.

Ah – timing!

Yes, timing, although no longer much of a secret, is still important to comedy.

Lance too early and there is no pressure to release; lance too late and all kinds of things might go wrong. In stand-up, the audience might have got bored with the preamble; in conversation, they might have moved on to a different subject; in conflict, they might have got too wound up and become closed off to a comic intervention.

Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and the atmosphere can turn pretty sour.

That’s why the BBC won’t let us have a plot-line about a missing stylist – even though she wasn’t missing at all, but on holiday. They don’t want to risk the atmosphere turning sour.

Part of reading the meteorological chart of conversation is knowing not only when and where pressure is building, but also whether to lance that pressure at all.

Not all human interaction is served by comedy. There is a reason why lawyer and stand-up are separate professions. It’s not that the lawyer can’t use comedy, nor the stand-up evidence and argument, but each will favour the discourse style of their field.

You may spot the perfect moment to lance the pressure in a tense negotiation over the custody of your children during divorce proceedings; that does not mean that the judge will look favourably upon a hilarious reference to his wig.

On the plus side, you will know almost instantaneously that you have misread the comic moment. If you are sensitive without being precious, you use this failure to calibrate your instruments.

What are your instruments? Simply: your eyes and your ears. But more on that next week.

The Next Challenge Grant Winners Announced!

When it comes to awards, I’m not just a taker (Hold on, we really still haven’t won?) – I’m a giver too.

I help fund The Next Challenge Grant, an annual bursary for adventures chosen and administered by adventurer (and accountant) Tim Moss.

This year’s grant winners have just been announced and they’re a terrific bunch of adventurers who I’m proud to help out.

My personal favourites: Mark Holmes who’s making swimming escapes from the UK’s three prison islands, and Sue Manning who’s walking around Scotland with a pack pony.

I particularly wanted to help The Next Challenge Grant because my first big adventure, cycling 4,000 miles around the coast of Great Britain, was only possible thanks to support from my nan.

One of the last things she said to me before she died was ‘Do it while you can!’ She’d have loved to help out these intrepid adventurers.

Foiled nominated for Celtic Media Award!

SABRINA
Pay attention team because I’ve got some very important newses. We are salon of the year!

TANISHA
Wales’ least active salon of the year?

SABRINA
No, awards-wise: we are Clipadvisor’s Salon of the Year.

TANISHA
Really?! Us? How exciting! How?!

SABRINA
Oi! What do you mean how?

So we wrote way back in 2016 and now, just 3 short years later, Foiled has been nominated (Hold on, we haven’t won?) for best radio comedy at the highly prestigious Celtic Media Awards.

Proof.

Compared to theatre, writing for the radio is a strange experience. We write the scripts, have a laugh recording them, listen to the broadcast with butterflies in our stomachs and then – nothing.

No one reviews radio comedy. No one gives us the listener figures. We have no idea how the show’s gone down with our audience – or even if there was an audience. We have no idea which episodes – or even jokes – worked for our listeners, which didn’t, and why.

In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott paints a pretty picture of this eternal, gaping, yawning silence. She’s writing about book publishing, but it seems to me that the sense of emptiness and craving is the same for radio.

There will be a few book-signing parties and maybe some readings, at one of which your publisher will spring for a twenty-pound wheel of runny Brie, and the only person who will show has lived on the street since he was twelve and even he will leave, because he hates Brie.

So it’s wonderful for something, some acknowledgement and approbation, to come crawling out of the ether and say: YOU DID A THING AND WE LIKED IT.

The nomination cites my personal favourite episode from the last series, starring Miles Jupp as Richie’s dad. Sitting across from Miles as he read out words that I’d written was one of the most thrilling events of my life last year.

There is nothing more rewarding for a writer than to watch a talented actor rub your words together and make sparks fly until the whole thing catches fire.

But where do we go now, now we’ve been nommed by the Celtic Media Awards? Will the Celtic imprimatur spur us to write ever funnier scripts – or will we become complacent, crippled by our glory like Wet Wet Wet after Four Weddings came out?

I guess I can turn to Anne Lamott again:

The fact of publication is the acknowledgement from the community that you did your writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose. Now you’re a published writer, and you are in that rare position of getting to make a living, such as it is, doing what you love best. That knowledge does bring you a quiet joy. But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page.

Series 3.

For now, big love to everyone for supporting Foiled. I’ll get Beth to give you a shout out in her acceptance speech. (Hold on, we still haven’t won?)

Empathy, society, and a nice cup of tea…

I never drank tea until I went to China when I was 18. There, I had no option. Green tea was served by default at all meals, and there was always a flask by your bedside in guesthouses and hotels.

Ubiquitous doesn’t really do full justice to the omnipresence of tea in China. Although the Chinese only drink something more than a quarter of the quantity that we do in Britain, they are by far and away the largest producers of the precious plant, responsible for a third of global production.

Only after my visit did I fully comprehend the staggering contempt implied by the saying, ‘Not for all the tea in China’.

Clearly not tea, but some sort of paddy field in Yangshuo County, China. As seen from behind a Fujifilm camera in 2001.

My Chinese education explains why I take my tea with neither milk nor sugar.

I dread to imagine the state of my teeth had I starting drinking tea just a few weeks before, when I was in Egypt. In the Nile Valley, the default is tiny glasses of black tea filled halfway with white sugar and, perhaps, a sprig of mint.

It’s got more in common with a Magnum ice cream than the restorative brew I found in China.

I digress.

The point is that, since 2001, I have rarely been without tea. Often green, occasionally black if I need the astringent caffeine hit.

Just as often, though, I’ll have what the French would call a tisane, or what the more pretentious English would call a herbal infusion – a redbush, a chamomile, a peppermint, or some other preparation of dried organic matter.

For me, the point is not the caffeine or even the flavour, but the psychological comfort of having something to do with my hands (behave yourself) between essays at the keyboard.

In days past, writers smoked cigarettes, cigars or cigarillos; many still use alcohol. I used to chew gum and eat biscuits. But tea, I find, offers something else.

Bob Dylan: listlessly creative with a pot of tea (milk, sugar). SOURCE: Famous People Drinking Tea

I’m preaching to the choir, of course. All of my friends, bar one, drink tea in copious quantities. So why bring this up today?

Last weekend, after a day spent working on Foiled, Beth and I went dancing. On the way home, I can’t remember why, Beth was holding forth on the subject of morning tea.

She told me that, whenever she stays over at her parents’ place, her mum creeps up to her room in the morning with a fresh brew. She knocks softly on Beth’s door, lays the tea (milk, no sugar) down on her bedside table, and gently whispers: ‘There’s a tea there if you want it.’

Her mum does this all so lightly that there’s no chance of Beth waking from a deep sleep, but if she’s already drifting to the surface of consciousness, then – lo and behold – the greatest start to a morning imaginable.

How to prepare the perfect morning cuppa, according to the first page, no less, of The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

This vignette led to a discussion on the role of empathy in relationships.

The Golden Rule exhorts us to treat others as we would wish ourselves to be treated. It’s good enough so far as it goes, but in my opinion the Golden Rule does not go even nearly far enough.

Most of us, let’s be honest, treat ourselves like shit. We have such a low opinion of ourselves, that we would never in our wildest dreams imagine anyone else would ever make us a cup of tea in the morning.

If we were to follow the mere Golden Rule for our behaviour, we would likewise never think of making a morning tea for anyone else. And – lo and behold – this is how many relationships pan out.

Yesterday, the same topic came up with another friend – let’s call her Ariadne for no reason whatsoever – who lives with a couple. Ariadne told me how annoyed she was that the boyfriend would never make a morning cuppa for his girlfriend.

‘He’s up at the same time as me. I’m always in a rush; he never is. And yet he never makes her a cup of tea; I do.’

Sometimes Ariadne brings the girlfriend tea when the boyfriend is in bed kissing her goodbye. ‘You’re just shit-stirring now,’ he says.

And of course she is. But if he swallowed his pride for one second and saw how happy that morning tea made his girlfriend, then he’d see that the cognitive cost of doing something for someone else is, quelle horreur!, outweighed a hundred times over by the closer relationships we earn.

Science has shown this. Give someone a warm drink and they feel more warmly towards you – and not just metaphorically:

participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a “warmer” personality (generous, caring)
Source // Guardian write-up

We need a new rule. Perhaps we can baptise it the Astatine Rule, after the rarest naturally-occurring element on earth.

The Astatine Rule says that we should treat others as we would ourselves wish to be treated in our wildest fantasies of existence (behave yourself!).

This second part is crucial: unless your life has been an endless waterfall of rainbows and unicorns then there is no point merely repeating the behaviour you’ve learnt thus far.

Imagining a peak existence (or anything) greater than you’ve ever experienced is really hard; that’s why relationships all too often settle down to baseline.

We need inspiration more extraordinarily creative to set our empathic imaginations free and kick start a virtuous cycle of kindness (and cups of tea). Stories help.

The morning after our dance, I woke up before Beth. I crept into the kitchen, past where she was sleeping in the living room, and put the kettle on the hob. I caught the boil just before it whistled, loaded up her mug with black tea and milk, and stirred until it was the colour of caramel chocolate.

Then I tiptoed into the living room and laid the mug down by her bedside. ‘There’s a tea there if you want it,’ I whispered.

Small is Sociable London to Bristol

I am reaching the end of my winter sojourn in Bristol. I have been here, more or less, since October last year, and next week is my last.

Since leaving London permanently at the end of 2017, I have learned one thing beyond doubt: my local habitat plays an incalculably important role in the things I do, the people I see, and how I feel day to day.

Let me begin this piece by saying that I have enjoyed spectacularly wonderful days in London, and look forward to many more in the coming years. I particularly cherish the cacophonous abundance of nations and cultures, and the lush green patchwork of parks and gardens.

However, the accusation often levelled at London, particularly by outsiders who have never lived there, is that it is ‘too big’. After 16 years in the Big Smoke, I think I am at least qualified to agree.

Of course, many people live extraordinary lives of joy and connection in London and have no trouble bounding over its sprawling morass, or simply confining themselves to a more manageable slice of the metropolis.

I was not one of them. And, after a year apart from the old mistress, I think I understand why.

The truth isn’t earth-shattering; in fact, it’s pretty obvious if you’ve ever spent any time as a human being. In a smaller conurbation, it’s easier to be sociable and that sociability is what makes me happy.

Nowhere worth going in Bristol is more than about 20 minutes by bike from my house. The compact nature of the city has two effects on the population, each reinforced by the other, which I reckon result in a more sociable society.

In Bristol, I know that whomsoever I meet, and wherever I meet them, there’s a decent chance that they’ll live within about 20 minutes’ bike ride of my house. And this makes it likely that I’ll meet them again, either by chance or by appointment.

This likelihood has two consequences. Firstly, I’m less likely to be a dick to strangers because, chances are, our paths will cross either personally or through presently unknown mutual friends. Secondly, I’m more likely to actually meet up with people I do hit it off with, simply because it’s easy.

The second effect of smaller city size is that no one here has a commute time of more than 20 minutes – at least in theory.

Commute time is famously correlated with positive affect, or happiness. If you’re commuting for more than an hour a day, then you’re likely to be miserable. Or at least more tired and less likely to want to meet friends – old or new.

The converse is true. In a city like Bristol where commute times are short, people are more likely to go out after work to socialise and they’re less likely to want to stay in bed all weekend just recovering from work.

As a consequence, they’re more likely to have hobbies, be members of a club, or just have a local drinking haunt.

And what does that mean? You’re more likely to bump into them out and about, you’re both more likely to be feeling positive and open to new encounters, and, thanks to the size of the city, also more likely to meet up again.

In a city with an enormous population, people just don’t matter so much. You’re vanishingly likely to bump into the same stranger twice. When you spot a friend on the tube, you both react like you’ve won a million quid on the lottery.

(In fact, your chances of winning a million quid on the lottery are better. Assuming you only have one friend.)

If you’re confident that you’ll never see Joe Bloggs again, you’re hardly likely to be bursting with social bon homie – or even goddam polite, are you?

I speak primarily for myself, but that’s why we Londoners walk around with our eyes downcast, hidden behind sunglasses, or buried in newspapers and smartphones. What’s the point? Strangers aren’t important because they’re just one in ten million, all too often mere obstacles to circumnavigate on our way through the chaotic city.

In smaller towns, people are more precious. There are still 460,000 people here in Bristol, still plenty of personalities to mesh or clash with, but each one has a distinct value. I’ve bumped into countless people I know here. It happens most days I leave the house – and I’ve only been here for 4 months, remember.

Every interaction here carries higher stakes: we are both on something like our best behaviour because we both know that the social network will, more or less, hold us to account – even if we don’t get on personally.

Of course this close community has its downsides. London’s anonymity is not without its pleasures. You can do anything, be anyone, and reinvent yourself every other Tuesday if you please. But, for me, this luxury is not worth the price I pay in social isolation.

~

Talking of social isolation: here’s an interview with loneliness researcher John Cacioppo.
Talking of leaving London: apparently I’m not the only one.

The Tomb of the Unknown Arbour

This photograph is a sideways look at the distinctive bark of a maiden sweet chestnut standing in an otherwise harmless green in Wanstead, East London. The tree is nearly 6 metres all around, making it a veteran, perhaps 275 years old. What were you doing in 1744?

One tree that won’t be making it into the next century was found sprawled across the high street in the early hours of the weekend. 50mph winds were too much for the pavement roots. Wanting to write some sort of eulogy, I asked the tree surgeon / coroner what kind of tree she was. He drew a hand across his stubble and shook his head. ‘I know, but I don’t know the name.’

The Foiled Diaries: Life as a Way of Writing

Foiled has been clipping along all week, with the usual ups and downs. Example: We thought we had a lovely opening episode until our producers said the BBC won’t countenance anything to do with people going missing. Spoil sports.

As I write this, Beth is out networking with potential famos for Series 3. She’s pulled in some wonderful guests over the past two years: Felicity Montagu (currently in This Time With Alan Partridge), John Culshaw (Dead Ringers), Ralf Little (The Royle Family) and Miles Jupp (News Quiz). Blows my mind to see them all written down like that.

When writing with someone else, you have a balancing act to perform between working alone and working in tandem. Too much of one and you fall into narcissistic solipsism; too much of the other and you die from caffeine poisoning.

I think my favourite, most productive moments of writing Foiled have come in two thankfully common situations:

  1. Beth pacing up and down in the kitchen, and me at the keyboard frantically trying to synthesise her comic stream of consciousness into grammar.
  2. Working in the same house, but in different rooms at our different tempos, with enough excuses to share snippets while re-boiling the kettle or filling a bowl with homemade soup, and occasionally, for a change of scenery, swapping scripts.

These shared moments are why I don’t think I could ever be a solitary novelist – or at least, not a contented one. For some people, writing is a way of life; for me, life must be a way of writing.

The Hollow Pond: A Run

It was one of those March evenings where the sun lingers longer than you expect for a land that’s still expecting winter.

I had been writing all day, under the influence of a single dried psilocybe mushroom. In contrast to my sedentary workflow, I enjoyed the feeling of my legs pushing away the ground and graffiti.

I ran alongside Eagle Pond with its magisterial views of the Crown Court, dodging between two boys on push bikes, and brushing the shoulder-slung handbag of a schoolgirl who veered digital drunk into my path.

As I ran into the forest, the water table rose to meet my trainers with a soft spring. Mud sops and splashes. My eyes and feet worked together deftly, skipping over roots, sinking into the sand, to the edge of the mythological Hollow Pond.

The pond is the afterlife of a gravel pit and you can easily imagine how its undulating dunes and hidden beaches inspired a song by Damon Albarn.

It’s Swallows and Amazons in Central London, paradise for fisher fowl. The swans make perfect mirrors of themselves in the water. Moorhens and coots dip and defend their territory. Canada Geese make a fuss on the shoreline.

Two laps of the skirt of sand that rifts and riles the waterside: I pause on a beachy spit, lie on the scratchy ground and stare out at a forested island, a puff of traffic just beyond the tree line. Fractal oaks against the sundown. A crescent moon hanging among twisted ribbons of cirrus.

Looking around at the amphitheatre of trees, the beech, the oak, the willow and the birch, for a moment I wonder why we can’t see sense sometimes, and I think of a friend who is a very long way away.

On the other side of a lapping inlet, another man is drawn to the water’s edge, where he holds a telephone conversation. I decide to run another lap of the pond, and surprise a woman with a red scarf as I crest a bank of gravel. ‘Glorious evening,’ I say. She looks up from her phone. ‘Yes, it’s lovely.’

Domesday Trees

I’m not the first to notice that trees are operating on a completely different time scale to us puny humans.

Take this wild cherry, for example, just now coming into blossom in the park outside my house. She’s about as old as I, and yet still doesn’t have her own BBC radio sitcom.

Some trees – most trees – live lives that are unfathomable on our human scale.

What could I possibly have in common with a Norman gent of the Middle Ages? And yet, only twenty minutes’ cycle from my blossoming park is the Domesday Oak, a portly 8 metres in girth, perhaps trodden into the ground by one of the conquerors themselves.

There’s a yew in Wiltshire that’s been carbon dated to 2,000 BC.

We gaze in awe at the Pyramids, Stonehenge and other man-made wonders of the ancient world, but forget the astonishing ancient bark living and breathing beside us still.

‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Nothing beside remains, Shelley might have written, except a stand of oak trees, a churchyard yew, a scattering of larch, a copse of juniper and pine, a mighty beech and a 6,000 tonne quaking aspen.

OK Foiled

People talk about the difficult second album, but what about the third?

Studious readers of this newsletter will know that Beth and I are in the throes of writing Series 3 of breakout hit BBC Radio Wales sitcom Foiled. (I’m pretty sure I can use the term ‘breakout hit’ thanks to our repeat on Radio 4 Extra last year.)

Over the past three years, we have developed enormously as writers of sitcomedy. Broadly one could sum up the progress as psychological, from scatterbrained panic in the first series, through sophomoric eustress in series two, right up to this year’s waaaaay too casual late start.

Fingers crossed that our trajectory as writers is following the course of everyone’s favourite emo-rockers, Radiohead.

Our first radio series was very much a Pablo Honey – an enjoyable collection with some terrific moments, but very much the sound of a group of people figuring out who they are and what on earth they’re supposed to be doing.

Extended Metaphor Tracks: Prove Yourself, swiftly followed by I Can’t.

Our second series was The Bends – emerging from the zeitgeist with a confident sound that draws attention from some of the industry’s biggest names.

Stretched Metaphor Tracks: Writing: Sulk. Recording: Nice Dream.

Third time around, we’d absolutely love to present for your listening pleasure the OK Computer of radio comedy – as rule-breaking as it is ground-breaking; as rabidly reviewed as it is devoured by an adoring public.

But, frankly, this analogy is growing thin, and we haven’t got two years to write the bloody thing.

Tortured Metaphor Tracks: Fitter, Happier – and almost certainly very soon Climbing Up The Walls.

Having said that, we’re feeling pretty Lucky about our ideas for episodes one and three, and if we get anywhere even half close to the artistic and commercial success of Radiohead’s third album then one day, maybe, just maybe, Beth and I can finally launch our own line of commemorative beach towels, RRP £35.00.

Digital Minimalism Tech tips from Cal Newport

Not using computers for one day a week is fine as far as it goes, but it can’t go particularly far when you earn your crust within the confines of the information economy.

So what are we to do the other 6 days a week?

After devouring the excellent Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, I’ve been flush with ideas.

I’ve written before about what I call minimum viable technology, but Cal puts it nicely:

‘The power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.’

I found Cal’s most effective recommendation was using an app called Freedom to set boundaries on the multi-tasking powers of my technology.

With Freedom I can set an automated schedule of when I’m able to check email and Whatsapp, the two major distractions from focused time in my life.

Rather than slavishly checking for superficial social interactions every five or twenty minutes, I can corral those messages into fenced-off playgrounds of digital distraction. But the playground is only open for an hour in the afternoon.

The app works across devices as well. Using Freedom I can turn my smartphone in to a single-use dumb phone at the touch of a button. I can even have the smartphone capabilities turned off by default.

The feeling is indeed one of liberation; no wonder the app is called Freedom.

If you have any sense that your devices are distracting you from the deep work that you value, I urge you to give Freedom a whirl. It is free to try, but a year’s subscription is only £13 if you use the code FOCUS40.

5 Ideas from Digital Minimalism

1. Swap phones.

When you’re with a friend, swap phones so neither of you can be lured away to the dreaded ‘third place’. Your phones are still there in an emergency, but the embarrassment of asking for your device just so that you can crush some candy will be too much.

2. Spend time alone.

Solitude is vital to our emotional balance and too little time alone leaves us feeling anxious. Finding solitude doesn’t mean ship-wrecking yourself on a desert island; you can find solitude in a busy coffee shop. Solitude is simply time spent without input from other minds. Leave your phone at home. Take a long walk. Write.

3. Use digital to facilitate real world comms.

Social media, email and messaging is not an adequate replacement for social interaction, but our brains can be fooled into thinking it is. Set up a meeting on the phone or in person.

4. Hold conversation office hours.

Tell your friends and family that you’re always free to speak on the phone at X o’clock – and be available at that time. When someone ‘pings’ you a text message or email, invite them to call you at X o’clock any day of the week. Alternatively, set up a regular time for taking coffee or a walk and invite anyone and everyone to drop by.

5. Prioritise strenuous leisure activities over passive consumption.

Activity gives you more energy, not less. When you’re tired, simply switch task. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. Become ‘handy’. Join or set up a club, community group or meeting.

No Computers And my new favourite day of the week

I have a new favourite day of the week. It’s the day that I don’t use my computer.

To be fair, it’s only been two weeks now, but still. On my first day of No Computers I went for a long bike ride with friends, and then spent the evening reading and listening to the radio.

Last week I went for a long walk before eating my bodyweight in falafel and falling sound asleep. Tomorrow, I’m going to a day-long conference on the brain with my dad.

No wonder I look forward to these days!

But what’s No Computers got to do with it? Couldn’t I have a great day while still allowing access to those gleaming bits and bytes?

I suspect not, and my results over the last fortnight seem to concur. With my computer by my side, I find it hard to switch off – literally.

My humble Acer is a gateway poison: the one keystone habit that supports (what feels like) all the stress in my life.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I am able to work at any time and from anywhere. Thanks to the wonders of late stage capitalism, it feels like I always should be.

Remove the keystone, however, and the arch comes tumbling down. Sorry, but I can’t log on, I can’t publish, I can’t reply to your email. I am not available.

It’s not like I’m bereft of technology on my No Computer days. I can use anything else from my panoply of devices:

  • My smartphone for internet, email, messaging, music, radio, camera, podcasts, maps and yoga.
  • My digital radio and MP3 player for auditory entertainment, and my speaker system for amplification.
  • My Neo typewriter for distraction-free writing.
  • My GPS watch for tracking my runs.
  • My stop watch timer for meditation, saunas and HIIT exercise.
  • My clock, thermometer and hygrometer for tuning in.

As you can see, it’s not like I’m limited in what I could do. But the tool selection changes everything.

I really don’t like responding to email on my phone, except really short replies, and I don’t like browsing the web on my phone, except really simple, factual searches.

Without preventing me from addressing anything that’s really urgent, the tool selection gently pushes me into doing other things, like getting out of the house, listening to music, or reading a book.

I can still do the type of work that really nourishes me, like writing and thinking, but I can’t do work that’s draining, or straight-up unproductive.

No Computers has been such a relief that I’d like to expand it to two days a week. Older readers might remember these kind of regular breaks – they used to be called ‘weekends’.

I’d like to end by quoting from a long article I read this week that’s consonant with these ideas: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen.

We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.

I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them.

Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.

Switch off.

The day after Valentine’s

If the day after Christmas is nicknamed ‘Boxing’ and the Friday before Easter is supposedly ‘Good’, then what shall we call the day after Saint Valentine’s?

Love is something of an empty word, in that it means so many different things to different people with no one agreeing on much aside from its intrinsic value.

It’s the perfect hook for a marketing campaign.

Even the local British Heart Foundation are leveraging the season to hoick donations from people looking to advertise their love in the shop window on Gloucester Road.

But what I never hear about is the relationship between love and ambition. Bear with me.

You can’t love someone unless you truly love yourself.

Not only do I disagree with this card filler, but I actually think it is much easier to love someone else than to love yourself.

Do you love yourself? I don’t. Quite a surprising revelation if you’ve never properly entertained the question.

It doesn’t mean that I loathe myself, but I don’t love myself as much as I love other people in this world.

Think of how you feel when a loved one walks into the room.

If you’re anything like me, then you’re absolutely THRILLED. Your face lights up and you feel a ripple of excitement about how the next ten minutes are going to play out.

That is not the feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. ‘Ooh, look – I’m ME again!’

No. My first thought on regaining conscious control of my higher faculties is more along the lines of: ‘Ugh. How can it be morning again already?’

If you do react with unalloyed delight every time you realise that you’re inhabiting your own skull, then all credit to you. That must be a pretty special place to be (if a little disturbing for the rest of us).

The people I love, I love unconditionally. If there’s one thing about love that we all agree on, aside from its enormous marketing potential, it’s that it should be unconditional.

No matter what your loved ones do, you’ll always give them the benefit of the doubt, you’ll always support them, you’ll always think that what they’re doing is awesome and deserves to triumph.

But hold on. Always?

Actually, no. On serious mathematical reflection, I estimate that I unconditionally love my loved ones about 95% of the time (and yes I am aware of the contradiction in that sentence).

But 95% of the time is still pretty amazing, and sufficient that we all use the shorthand ‘love’ to account for such madness.

Madnesses:

  • You wildly exaggerate their positive qualities. In particular, you overestimate their intelligence, sense of humour, beauty and profundity.
  • Pretty much all the time, you can’t see their faults. When unambiguously confronted with their faults, they’re charming – or at least off-set by the fact that they own a Lexus.
  • You unfailingly interpret their intentions as good, even when bad things happen. Again and again.
  • You talk them up to others, who may or may not roll their eyes.
  • You feel completely comfortable around them (this might be a good test for whether a feeling is love or infatuation).
  • You are astonishingly patient with them. So patient are you that you can bear to live with them in the same house. Sometimes even the same room or – in exceptional circumstances – a two-man tent.
  • You are proud of what you see as their stunning achievements. Maybe not always in their presence because no one likes a braggart, but if anyone challenges them on their stunning triumphs, you’ll knock them out.
  • You do shit for them that no one in their right mind would do for another person. You find yourself doing things that you’ve never done for anyone ever before. Like their laundry.
  • You want to be close to them, physically. You miss them when they’re gone. Sometimes this hurts, physically.
  • You believe in their dreams and are pretty confident they’ll get there, unless the universe conspires cruelly against them.

Based on this list, I reckon that I ‘unconditionally’ love myself about 30% of the time.

I definitely overplay my strengths and I’m as susceptible as anyone to the cognitive bias that makes me overlook and excuse my own faults.

I don’t, however, own a Lexus.

I also give myself a much harder time than I do the people I love. I’m less likely to cut myself some slack, trust my good intentions, or even recognise, let alone be proud of my triumphs.

However, where I think our struggle to love ourselves harms us most is in the arena of ambition, life goals or dreams, as you prefer. After all, these are the momentous things that end up changing the world.

It scares me to think of all the dreams and glorious futures that go unrealised because no one ever thought that they were worth believing in. That belief comes from love. It’s called the astronaut test.

The Astronaut Test

Someone comes to you and says: ‘One day, I’m going to become an astronaut.’

If that person is just another Joe, then you’ll say, ‘Really? That’s great. Good luck.’ And in your head you’re probably thinking, ‘As if!’

If that person is someone you love, however, then you’ll probably say something like, ‘YES YOU ARE. THAT SHIT IS AWESOME.’ And give them a massive hug.

In your head, you’re probably thinking, ‘Fucking hell, that’s amazing! I love this human!’

Further back in your head, you might also dimly recall that the last time they got on a plane they had to be stretchered off while it was still on the runway because ‘It was a little bit high up’ – but overcoming such adversity only goes to show how incredible they are.

Now. Which of those two reactions do you show yourself whenever you dream big?

If you’re anything like me, it’s hands-down the first – to such an extent that I mostly keep my dreams buried deep down in the mudflats of my heart where no one can see them, least of all myself.

That seems like a bit of a shame. It’d be cool to get my love-of-self up to more like 50% unconditional and see whether there’s a corresponding rise in ambition.

The Day After Valentine’s Day

This is where we come back to that silly homily: You can’t love someone unless you truly love yourself.

But if it’s easier for me to love another than it is to love myself, then I’d bet it works the other way around too. (Standard exclusions apply.)

Valentine’s Day is all about showing our love to others – and I’m all in favour of that. But today I’d like to dedicate to ourselves.

What dreams and ambitions could we discover and realise if we all took February 15 to recognise and actually acknowledge the love-of-ourselves in the eyes of someone else?

Is there a Saint Narcissus*?

Thanks to the PTA for conversations leading to this. Love ya!

* Narcissus would be a totally inappropriate patron saint of love-of-ourselves. Narcissus was actively disdainful of the love people showed him: the exact opposite of what I want to encourage. But I really needed a flippant sign-off to this post. Sorry.

‘Sylva’

It is natural for a man to feel an aweful and religious terror when placed in the centre of a thick wood.

John Evelyn (1664)

We point at the stand of trees that soar into the waterside air. Arranged in tribal rows, they are branchless for five metres before spreading spare spindly arms to the sky.

We speculate. Birch? Larch? Aspen?

I open the Woodland Trust app and we try to identify the trees from their only distinguishing feature: the bark, striated with fissures running deep in a sort of triangular fusion.

‘Twigs are amber or slightly pink – no – and hairless – maybe.’
‘Can you see any woody knobs?’
‘This one’s a hermaphrodite.’

It’s an entertaining game, but a lot like trying to guess someone’s Christian name from their birthmarks.

A man walks by on the path.
‘Excuse me, you don’t know what these trees are, do you?’
Without breaking stride: ‘Poplars, int they?’

Whence comes this easy knowledge?

The juice of poplar leaves, dropp’d into the ears, asswages the pain; and the buds contus’d, and mix’d with honey, is a good collyrium for the eyes; as the unguent to refrigerate and cause sleep.

Tame the Mane

After last week’s missive on rejection, this week I’ve dabbled in a little rejection therapy. I can’t tell you the story of what I tried on Wednesday, but I can describe what happened when I took rejection out for a spin yesterday.

Picture the scene…

Drenched on the aptly named Fishponds Road, I walk out of the rain and into a hair salon. A lone woman sits in an armchair (I can already see that it’s a special kind of salon), footling with her phone.

‘Hi there. I’ve got a bit of a strange request.’
Oh god. That sounds like I’m going to ask for a lumbar massage.
‘Well, it’s not that strange. I’ll explain. I’m a comedy writer and – ‘
Confused looks. Legitimise, legitimise!
‘It’s for the BBC.’
Back on track.
‘It’s a sitcom set in a hair salon and I like to come into salons and, you know, soak up the atmosphere.’
What am I saying? Who, you know, knows that?
‘Would you mind if I sat here for fifteen minutes, if you’re not busy – or you can get on with what your doing, I can sit in the corner while you…’

This is a definite no.

She puts her phone down: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

I’ve caught Lara at a good moment. She’s got 15 minutes before her next client – an unusual occurrence at Tame The Mane, the only all-vegan, all-natural hair salon in the UK.

Teaching English to Libyan teenagers divided by Gaddafi’s Little Green Book, Lara dreamt of escaping that dead-end and running her own business. She spent 3 years writing up a business plan to set up a cafe, before her little brother had the temerity to suggest she open a salon.

Temerity because Lara hates hairdressers and, even more so, salons. She couldn’t sleep for three nights after her brother’s infuriating suggestion.

But the barb had lodged.

‘I’ve loved hairdressing since I was five or six. I used to beg my grandmother to do her hair. Every Sunday night: Can I do your hair, can I do your hair?’

As a teenager, Lara learnt hairdressing from an Italian woman and cutting hair became a great sideline for cash right through her English degree and even while she was teaching.

Then she realised that maybe her brother had a point: she couldn’t be the only one who hated your typical salons.

Sometimes we struggle to see what was right in front of us all along.

Tame The Mane looks more like a stylish living room than a styling salon. Potted plants crawl along any available surface. The walls are decorated with portraits of colourful women – not crass posed photographs, but original oils and pastels.

Lara wanted to create an anti-salon atmosphere and thought that her all-vegan, all-natural approach would draw in an exclusively (and quite possibly penniless) hippie clientele.

There’s a record player (‘Can’t play records, though, because of all the hair – didn’t think that one through’) and a bookcase where she does book swaps.

But she was far wrong about the hippies.

The mirrors are covered with scarfs, and Lara will only remove them if a client asks. So she gets a lot of clients who suffer from anxiety in other salons. ‘I get people who haven’t set foot in a salon for years.’

(Plus it’s weird, huh, having someone watch your every move while you do your job. I hate people looking over my shoulder when I write.)

Lara passes me what looks like a laminated menu. It’s a lucid explanation about why she only uses natural products, about how the salon business is so often built on convincing customers to put crap in their hair.

She offers suggestions about how we can reduce our reliance on products that aren’t all that different to Fairy Liquid, from diluting harsh shampoos to simply using a squeeze of lemon juice.

The back of the ‘menu’ has two recipes for Lara’s products: an oat conditioner and a flax gel. They sound delicious. There are more on her blog, free for you to create for yourself. If you don’t have the time, Lara’s got her own apothecary out the back.

With a mischievous smile she suggests that, if you want a protein-enriched wash, you should really just crack an egg on your head (although not in her vegan salon). It strengthens the hair, and gives a really nice shine, she says.

As an English graduate, Lara often dreams of writing her salon stories up. I’m lucky to have the chance to turn lives like hers into, well, this. And who knows what snippets from our conversation might turn up in Series 3 of Foiled…

I believe in Rejection!

It’s not every week that I read a book cover-to-cover in under 48 hours.

Admittedly, at only 200 pages Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang is a quick read, but I absolutely guttled those pages.

Why? Because Jiang offers a creative solution to a problem that I think almost every live human being struggles with: rejection.

This video is how I first heard about Jiang’s 100 Days of Rejection experiment. It’s a good primer for what follows. Enjoy.

Dave’s Short History of Rejection

My history of rejection is short not because my life has been an endless cavalcade of glorious successes, but because, for the most part, I have gone to great lengths to avoid sticking my neck out and asking for anything, you know, worthwhile.

Example 1: Romantic Rejection

It took me until 2013 before I first told someone I really liked that I really liked them. Terrifying.

They did indeed reject my approach, but frankly by that point I didn’t care. The panic over saying anything to this person far outweighed the disappointment of the negative response by about a million to one.

This million-to-one ratio is about the same for ‘Love interests I longed to approach’ against ‘Love interests I actually approached’.

Combined with my everyday fear of social rejection, the number of missed opportunities for connection with other human beings is staggering, and all because of an egotistic, and unnecessary, fear of rejection.

Example 2: Book Rejection

For the most part, I have avoided professional rejection by not taking a profession. When I have held jobs, I have tended to do the work and then go home, not doing anything that would call attention to my work and thus invite rejection (or, indeed, approbation).

I have, however, written several books. Occasionally, I have sent the manuscripts to agents and publishers and have been rejected every single time.

I think I’ve received about 5 rejection letters in my life, ever, including the following unexpectedly expensive one.

Rejection Letter £1.11
Hilariously, this rejection letter was sent without the correct postage. I had to cycle to my local Royal Mail depot and pay £0.11 in excess postage, plus a £1.00 administration fee.

J.K. Rowling famously received 12 rejections for Harry Potter alone; William Golding got 20 for Lord of the Flies; Carrie by Stephen King garnered him 30 rejections before selling over a million copies in its first year and being turned into, not one, but three feature films, and, improbably enough, a musical.

It’s pretty easy to avoid rejection if you don’t put your work out there. I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t embraced professional rejection despite knowing full well that it is an essential part of the process.

Example 3: Rejection on the Road

Hitchhiking has taught me a lot about rejection. Standing on the side of a busy road with a smile and a sign, or walking up to strangers in service stations and begging for a lift: it’s a cold recipe for relentless rejection.

Even so, somehow I’ve always managed to get where I was going. Somehow, as Jiang says, ‘rejection has a number’ and persistence usually pays off if you’re willing to be flexible.

My least successful hitchhike involved about 3 hours of rejections – but I still got a ride (after changing my approach). How’s that for rejection? Pretty good, I’d say.

In most of the rest of my life, however, I give up after a single rejection (if I even get that far). Why is that?

Example 4: Critical Rejection

When me and Beth took Foiled to Edinburgh in 2016, we wanted to be judged. So much so that we actually paid a PR company to get critics in to review our show. We positively invited rejection.

The hefty weight of that judgement was shared between us, but it still wasn’t very nice when we got a stinking review from a well-respected critic.

I don’t think we ever seriously doubted our material, and it helped that the audiences didn’t seem to either, but the review was (and still is) there in black and white on the internet. A fulsome rejection of everything we’d worked so hard to create.

In this case, there was nothing we could do except rationalise what he had to say (it’s just one opinion, it was based on a preview, and we’d already addressed some of his criticisms) and use it as motivation to make the show the best it could be.

We didn’t shut down the PR company and tell them to invite no more critics. Thankfully, the critics kept coming and Foiled ended up with a couple of phenomenal reviews, which we could use to sell the show to producers and, ultimately, to the BBC.

Phew!

Example 5: Reader Rejection

My Friday newsletter is a weekly opportunity for people to reject me and my work. The unsubscribe button is right there at the bottom of every single email.

Even if people aren’t unsubscribing, I can still see who is opening the newsletter and reading to the end. It’s usually just under half.

After over 2 years of newsletters, I have become comfortable with the fact that some people will unsubscribe and no longer read my words of comfort and joy.

I have eventually come to see unsubscribes in a positive light. It’s not that I’ve failed them, or that they are repulsed by the very essence of my being; it’s just that we weren’t a good fit for whatever reason.

Indeed, with the unsubscribers gone, my reader percentage numbers should go up – and that’s a good thing. Seen this way, unsubscribes are a gradual honing of my audience to the shape of my work.

Notice that, unlike my approach to publishing, I have persisted at newsletter-writing, drilling through the prison walls of ‘rejection’ to the green pastures of unbounded creativity.

(Whereupon I abuse my freedom and write ridiculous sentences like the foregoing.)

The lesson is that avoiding rejection can be incredibly damaging – not in the short term, perhaps, but certainly and abundantly in the long term.

What opportunities have I passed up through fear of rejection? Could I be a published novelist by now? Could I have found the loves of my lives?

Fear of rejection is a crime of omission. If you give yourself no chance of rejection, then you also have very little chance of progress.

Tolerance of rejection is the difference between the approach and avoidant mentalities described by Carol Dweck, and these mindsets spread their influence through every domain of our lives.

If we follow the society status quo, it’s pretty easy to feel accepted. But is society perfect as it is? Is the world? Is life?

I don’t think so – as much as my gut screams at me to conform or die.

So, this year, I want to put myself into situations where I am rejected. And I want those rejections to really hurt.

Painful rejections will show me that I’m doing meaningful work, that I’m opening myself up and making myself vulnerable in the places that really matter, deep down.

And, if Jia Jiang’s experiment is anything to go by, this should be fun!

This is not the only Universe

In 17th century Europe, ‘a black swan’ was a by-word for an impossibility. But it took only a single observation of such swans in Australia to undo the presumption forever.

Today, Black Swan theory uses the metaphor to describe any argument or system of thought that can be undone at a single stroke

A psychedelic experience has the potential to be a Black Swan event for the individual.

Brain scans of individuals high on the drug revealed that the chemical allows parts of the cortex to become flooded with signals that are normally filtered out to prevent information overload.

Study shows how LSD interferes with brain’s signalling (The Guardian)

By ‘switching off’ the filtering mechanism of the thalamus, psychedelic compounds can, at a single stroke, help us overturn entire systems of thought that we once presumed not only true for us, but ‘real’ and inviolable.

This might explain the seemingly paradoxical subjective effects often reported in psychedelic-induced altered states of consciousness that are characterized by increased arousal as well as a dreamlike experience, impaired cognition but at the same time reported perceived mental clarity, and psychosis-like effects combined with blissful experiences.

Effective connectivity changes in LSD-induced altered states of consciousness in humans (PNAS)

As Aldous Huxley wrote after his experience with the psychedelic mescaline:

It’s a very salutary thing to realise that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is.

Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

Thanks to DRL for the inspiration for this little piece.

I believe in not taking showers! (Or do I…?)

The first time I visited Egypt, I was struck by a notice above a sink in a hotel in the Red Sea port of Hurghada.

We live in a desert. Please don’t waste water.

I’ve never forgotten that sign and, just 18 short years later, I’ve taken action and stopped taking showers.

Or rather: I’ve stopped taking showers a bit. Like the guy I met last week who was doing ‘a bit of dry January’. He told me this in the pub. With a pint in his hand.

In the last 10 days, I’ve had 3 proper showers. Normally, I’d have had at least 10 – without really thinking about it.

Avid followers of The Charles Offensive will suspect that No Showers sounds a lot like one of my famous positive constraints.

Although I haven’t been as strict as I would be with a true positive constraint, this experiment certainly bears their most important characteristic: challenging thoughtless patterns of behaviour.

Not doing what I’ve done almost every day for the past 25 years forces me to answer questions that go deep into my psychology and ecology:

  • Why, for the last 25 years at least, have I taken a daily shower?
  • Is daily showering strictly necessary?
  • What are the consequences of daily showering for my mind, my body and the rest of the planet?
  • What could I stand to gain from not showering every day?
  • What alternatives are there to daily showering?

Why do I take a daily shower?

The simple answer is habit.

I’ve conditioned myself to feel ‘a bit gross’ if I don’t have my daily shower: it keeps me clean and wakes me up. But these are easily divorced from the gush of water from a pipe in the wall.

It is true that water on the face helps humans become alert. Nothing says WAKE THE FUCK UP! like the imminent threat of drowning.

But there are plenty of ways of getting water to face in the morning. My personal favourite is jumping in the sea, but even a wet flannel will do the job.

In fact, the best wake up call is cold water so my hot shower isn’t even optimal in that respect.

Staying clean isn’t even best done with a 5 minute hot shower either. Stripping our skins of our natural oils every day isn’t necessarily conducive to a healthy microbiome – the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in our glands and hair follicles and on our skin.

The New York Times has a story about David Whitlock, a chemical engineer who hasn’t showered for 12 years: He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his skin’s bacterial colony to do the rest.

And, according to journalist Julia Scott, he doesn’t smell.

After a few days without a shower, however, I do. Not crazy bad – nobody swerves to avoid me on the street – but I do fail a pit sniff test. Perhaps I’m expecting too much, too soon from my surprised microbiome.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have any glorious rivers or waterfalls that I can jump into. Instead, I’m measuring out a litre of water into a bucket and using a flannel to wash. Side note: aren’t flannels great?

After a week of insipid bucket washes, I don’t feel like I’m really doing this experiment justice. I’ve only learned one thing for sure: showers aren’t necessary, but they are one heck of an aesthetic pleasure. That gushing water? It feels amazing!

I console myself with the feeling that every skipped shower saves the planet from needless water wastage. Doesn’t it?

What about the environment?

My shower takes just 10 seconds to spurt out a litre of water. The shortest shower I took in the last 10 days was 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which guzzled 21 litres of water.

According to the Guardian, the average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water.

Both these numbers sound – to me, at least – huge. Even if I was only taking those short showers every day then I’d still be flushing 7,665 litres of water down the drain every year.

This is where it gets controversial because those numbers are, in fact, tiny.

Miniscule. Infinitesimal. Minute.

According to a 2008 WWF report on the UK Water Footprint (PDF here), household water use including showers, but also including washing machines, toilets, kitchen sinks and hose pipes, makes up just 3% of our total water use.

Showers contribute perhaps 0.5% of my personal water footprint.

Most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ‘drinks up’ 1,500 litres. (WWF)

In their summary of actions that we can take to reduce water consumption, WWF conclude:

As a consumer you can ask businesses, including your local supermarkets, to tell you what they are doing to ensure good water management along their supply chains. Everyone can help by reducing food waste. As a citizen you can urge your government to make good water management a priority both in this country and overseas.

Note that they say, Everyone can help by reducing food waste – not water waste. Household water waste isn’t mentioned at all in their summary of the most important actions we can take because it is a relatively insignificant contributor to our personal water footprint.

So what are our alternatives to the daily shower?

  • Go vegan, or at least stop eating meat. A 200g beef steak saps about 3,000 litres of water; a nice lamb cutlet drinks 2,000 litres, a pork chop more like 1,200 litres, a goat curry would be about 1,100 litres and a chicken supreme around 850ml. (SOURCE)
  • Stop buying new cotton clothes and bedsheets. Cotton sucks up 9,114 litres for every kilogram of product. (SOURCE, as above)
  • Drink from the tap. It takes at least twice as much water to produce a plastic water bottle as the amount of water contained in the bottle. (SOURCE)
  • Recycle paper and plastic. Recycling the equivalent of a typical newspaper saves 16 litres of water. (SOURCE, as above)
  • Don’t buy cheap consumer goods, buy quality that will last. Chucking stuff away is chucking away water.
  • Don’t waste electricity. Power stations use up to 168 litres of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity they generate, depending on how they’re cooled. (SOURCE: Table 1)

In the course of writing this email, for example, my laptop has wasted as much as 16 litres of water. You can see now why showers are considered pretty small fry…

But if you’re still up for changing your shower routine – and I’d always support that sort of thing – then you could:

  • Time yourself in the shower and challenge yourself to keep it below 3 minutes.
  • Turn off the tap while you scrub.
  • Capture your used shower water and reuse it to water your plants (if you don’t use soap) or flush your toilet (if you do).
  • If you want a really long shower, run a bath instead. A bath takes about 100 litres, so the equivalent of a 16 minute shower.
  • Fill a litre measuring jug and use no more than that. I found I could do a good job with a flannel and about 500ml of water.

Check out Rob Greenfield, who lived for (at least) two years without taking a conventional shower. From his photos, it looks like he had a much better time than me, frolicking in rivers, lakes, waterfalls, torrential rain and leaky fire hydrants. Not a bucket in sight.

Rob reckons he managed to conserve about 23,000 litres of water in that time. This is clearly awesome, but even he says:

Rather than giving up showering for a year you could just pass on six hamburgers. That seems a lot easier to me.

I guess that’s why there’s this Veganuary thing going on right now.

34 Trees, 2 Magpies, and Me

There’s a small park less than a minute from my house. Squeezed between residential side streets and the A4032, it boasts no unbroken vistas, no soaring heights, nor even, in winter at least, a single startling flower bed.

This is, instead, a landscape for tree watching.

I count 34 living in the park and in the neighbouring playground. All but three have long since left their leaves to litter the lawn and their deciduous branches hold still in the dry air.

The sun splits the empty branches of a London Plane, and chases the shadows across the grass towards me.

In the playground stands a palm, its pineapple crown surprised to be here. Side by side in evergreen solidarity are a pine and a mature holly.

The pine’s cones have fallen barren below their mother, but the needles are shelved out of my reach, and well beyond my powers of identification. Scots or Black. No idea.

The gentle waxy leaves of the holly, on the other hand, wreath her unmistakeable berries. At her feet is a prickly child, keen on the shallow sunlight of the open parkland.

The sound of construction filters across from the street beyond the Plane. The workmen are from a company called Maple. The litter on the bench beside me is a bottle branded Oasis. Trees, huh.

But I’m not alone. A pair of magpies strut their way over the grass, turning over dead leaves, looking for lunch. The shoots of next month’s daffodils, meanwhile, go about their quiet business in the soil.

The dual carriageway bawls a background sludge of white noise, but I can still hear twittering hidden in the holly, while the magpies chatter companionably among themselves.

I’m less than a minute away from computers and phones and notifications and emails, but I could be on a different planet entirely.

I’ve only been here half an hour, but I could be a different person entirely.

My fingers grow cold, my Thermos runs dry. Sometimes we go outside to return indoors.

Transcendental Meditation

Over the course of four days just before Christmas I learnt the Transcendental Meditation® technique.

Transcendental Meditation® is a simple form of meditation that involves sitting with eyes closed while mentally repeating a meaningless mantra for 20 minutes, twice a day.

I was given my mantra in a ceremony that involved incense, a photograph of a dead guru, a single white handkerchief, a Russet, a pineapple and a credit card.

As someone open to experiments with consciousness, I took up regular meditation in March 2018, practising for anything from 2 to 25 minutes a day, every day.

But meditation never quite found a regular habit-making slot in my day. I never even really knew what kind of meditation I would settle on until I’d sat down.

Vipassana? Body scan? Loving-kindness? Mindfulness?

It didn’t really seem to matter because most of the time I was fretting about work anyway. And then fretting about why I couldn’t meditate properly.

Although I didn’t miss a day between March and December, sometimes it was a close-run thing, and often I’d end up cramming in 5 minutes before bed.

All in all, I was left with the faintly unsatisfactory feeling that meditation had more to offer.

So when generous benefactors offered to pay for me to take a Transcendental Meditation® course, I was delighted.

This post is about what I learnt, starting with all the things about Transcendental Meditation® that make me want to throw up…

Those bloody ®s!

Transcendental Meditation® and its promulgators the Maharishi Foundation® seem irritatingly obsessed with protecting their intellectual property.

It’s not only the constant assertion of ®, but we were also made to sign an agreement that promised we wouldn’t tell anyone else about our personal experiences.

They say that this is to reduce expectations of other people coming to the practice, but their whole sales technique is about raising completely unrealistic expectations.

Browse through the Transcendental Meditation® website or brochures and you’ll find promises (scientifically proven!) that the unique Transcendental Meditation® practice will reduce crime, cure Irritable Bowel Syndrome and insomnia, and basically write that film script for you.

This is, essentially, nonsense. So I feel no shame whatsoever in breaking my agreement and telling as many people as will listen about my experience – exactly as I have done for other similar practices like Vipassana and Psychedelic Breathwork.

The science is overstated and crappy

On a more serious note, the scientific evidence for the benefits of Transcendental Meditation® is massively overstated by the Maharishi Foundation®.

This makes things very confusing for people without the inclination to go trawling through the hundreds of publications to see whether there is any merit at all in what the website claims.

Luckily, we don’t have to go trawling because there is a whole chapter on the science of Transcendental Meditation® in Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm’s excellent 2015 book The Buddha Pill.

Farias and Wikholm are academic psychologists used to picking apart research papers, and they found that a lot of the Transcendental Meditation® research suffers from:

  • sampling bias in the selection of participants
  • passive rather than active control groups
  • no placebo comparison
  • no double-blind experimental design, which can cause an expectation effect in both experimenters and participants
  • cherry-picked results that exclude negative or neutral outcomes

Unfortunately, this bad science casts doubt on everything the Maharishi Foundation® claims, and would rightly put off most people from spending their money.

Is it even worth practising Transcendental Meditation® at all?

Amazingly, Farias and Wikholm report one placebo-controlled, double-blind trial that tested the claims of TM.

The 1976 study by Jonathan Smith included an ingenious placebo for Transcendental Meditation® called PSI and compared the two for the treatment of anxiety in college students.

After 6 months of twice daily meditation, Smith concluded that:

the crucial therapeutic component of TM is not the TM exercise.

Psychotherapeutic effects of transcendental meditation with controls for expectation of relief and daily sitting. Smith, Jonathan C. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (1976)

In other words, when it comes to reducing anxiety in college students, Transcendental Meditation® works equally as well as sitting quietly in a chair for 20 minutes twice a day.

But, remarkably, it does work: both Transcendental Meditation® and Smith’s placebo PSI led to a significant reduction in anxiety and a more relaxed physiological functioning.

As far as I’m concerned, this paper is great news: a placebo-controlled, double-blind trial shows that Transcendental Meditation® works!

But you will be less than astonished to learn that this paper is not cited anywhere among the hundreds listed on the Transcendental Meditation® website.

Oh, and it’s appallingly authoritarian, exclusively expensive, and essentially amoral

The Maharishi Foundation® seems to promote a very authoritarian, paternalistic view of the world.

On the wall of the room in which I studied was an enormous schematic of the Transcendental Meditation® world view. It runs from the Unified Field of Pure Consciousness right up to the Head of State – who is, of course, a male.

Every head of state can fulfil his parental role of bringing maximum success and happiness to his people, and thereby create unified field based ideal civilization through the application of Maharishi’s Unifield Field Based Integrated Systems of Education, Health, Government, Rehabilitation, Economics, Defense, and Agriculture.

(c) International Association for the Advancement of the Science of Creative Intelligence (1983)

Scary.

Especially as, thanks to its £290 to £590 price tag, Transcendental Meditation® is also very exclusive. Hmm. Not sure I want to be a part of yet another boys club.

Side Bar: PSI

If you want a practice that gives you all the benefits of Transcendental Meditation® without the exorbitant price tag, then try periodic somatic inactivity – the meditation placebo created by Jonathan Smith for the paper cited above.

  1. Twice a day, sit comfortably on a chair, or upright in bed.
  2. Close your eyes for 20 minutes.
  3. Let your mind do whatever it wants. Whatever you do mentally will have little or no impact on the effectiveness of the technique. The important thing is to remain physically inactive. Do not talk, walk around, or change chairs. You may engage in an occasional action such as shifting your position or making yourself more comfortable. And you may scratch.
  4. At the end of the session, open your eyes, breathe deeply a few times, and continue with your everyday activities.

Adapted from The Buddha Pill by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm.

Finally, there is nothing in the initial Transcendental Meditation® training about ethics. Yeah, ethics! It’s all very well connecting to the unified field of pure consciousness for 20 minutes twice a day, but what about the other 23 hours and 20 minutes?

Transcendental Meditation® is Hindu meditation stripped clean of the supporting ethical framework – presumably so it would be more appealing to our godless Western minds – but in throwing out the bathwater, we have also lost the baby.

Nevertheless…

Despite these complaints, I enjoy doing the practice, by and large. It’s a good excuse to sit and becalm myself.

I enjoy doing it in the morning, I enjoy doing it in the middle of the day, I enjoy doing it on public transport, I enjoy doing it before I go to sleep.

As far as I can tell from my experience (and this is supported by the more rigorous studies) the benefits of Transcendental Meditation® are similar if not identical to any form of relaxation.

However, this should not be underestimated (or misunderestimated).

I have never consciously dedicated time to relaxation this regularly ever before in my entire life.

Any practice that can actually convince human beings to switch off for 20 minutes twice a day is doing a fine job.

It doesn’t really matter to me that the Maharishi Foundation® use bad science to mislead: practising Transcendental Meditation® will still make me less stressed, less anxious and lower my blood pressure. (Probably.)

The method of Transcendental Meditation® is simple and structured and, as a result, many people including myself are able to stick to the practice for 20 minutes twice a day.

That is a considerable achievement and for that reason alone I would say that Transcendental Meditation® – if you can afford it, if nothing else seems to stick, if you can look past the bad science, and if you can fill the ethical vacuum – is worth trying.

Just don’t expect miracles.

Tim Ferriss, podcaster and self-help celebrity, also took the Transcendental Meditation® course, and seems to have had a similar experience.

For me, [TM] is what kicked off more than 2 years of consistent meditation. I’m not a fan of everything the TM organization does, but their training is practical and tactical. … The social pressure of having a teacher for 4 consecutive days was exactly the incentive I needed to meditate consistently enough to establish the habit.

Tim Ferriss, Observer

And if you find that Transcendental Meditation® doesn’t work for you, then don’t worry: there are a multitude of ways to find whatever it is that people call transcendence.

Try self-hypnotism, progressive relaxation, roller-blading, walking in nature, breathwork, yoga, a different form of meditation, climbing a mountain or contemplating the ocean, psychedelic trips large and small.

Good luck!

Note: I only learned the technique a month ago and will update this page as I discover more. I might be wrong about the benefits in the long term; I might also be wrong in my criticisms. Who knows, I might even become a patriarchal despot. 🙂

Note 2: Experimental shortcomings are by no means unique to Transcendental Meditation® . A more recent study into the prosocial benefits of meditation co-authored by Miguel Farias concluded the following:

We further found that compassion levels only increased under two conditions: when the teacher in the meditation intervention was a co-author in the published study; and when the study employed a passive (waiting list) control group but not an active one.

The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2018)