I’ve been trying to exploit the wisdom of this trite little question this week.
What if this is happening not to me, but forme?
Late on Monday night, driving home from visiting my sister, I missed my motorway exit. The missed junction added ten minutes to an already delayed journey. I hit the steering wheel in frustration and then, somewhat sarcastically, asked myself whether this curséd calamity was instead happening for me.
Once I’d calmed own, I noticed that the rest of the journey would take me through Reading, along a route I first travelled as an eleven year old schoolboy more than two decades ago. Annoyance turned to grateful nostalgia.
I’ve no idea where this ‘for you not to you’ idea came from. I first heard it on a Tim Ferriss podcast, but Jim Carrey puts it well:
And when I say, “Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you,” I really don’t know if that’s true. I’m just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as something beneficial so that I can deal with them in the most productive way. You’ll come up with your own style—that’s part of the fun!
~
UPDATE: When I mentioned this idea to a friend, he nodded calmly and added: ‘Or what if every that happens is happening with you?’ After all, each of us are only superficially different expressions of the same universal consciousness, right?
A thought crossed my mind as I walked through town yesterday: I’ve never knowingly littered. Then I doublechecked my thought: it’s completely wrong. I have.
I used to chew gum: Wrigley’s peppermint to be precise (never spearmint—I’m not a monster). When I was in school, I often enjoyed the satisfaction of spitting the gum out and volleying it into the middle distance. Wherever it should so land, there wouldst I litter.
After nearly hitting a bald man directly on the pate, I graduated to flobbing the offending masticatory latex down kerbside drains. Out of sight, out of mind: still littering.
Since the 1960s, chewing gum hasn’t been biodegradable—it’s made of plastic, for heaven’s sake. Did you know that? I had no idea. Thanks to its durability, local councils are estimated to spend £60m a year on cleaning up our spat out gum.
~
Littering is one of those antisocial behaviours that make people furious. Usually furious at the person littering; rarely furious at the companies that make the products most thrown away. This is upside down.
No one knows how long cigarette butts take to biodegrade, but the filters contain cellulose acetate microplastic so it’s going to be a very long time. Those used butts also contain thousands of chemicals with poisonous effects on humans, other mammals, rodents, birds, insects, fish and even plantlife.
Have you ever thought what responsibility cigarette companies are taking for that environmental damage? I hadn’t.
~
In their superbly titled 2010 study Covering Their Butts, Elizabeth A. Smith and Patricia A. McDaniel from the University of California looked at industry and media data from the past 50 years and concluded:
The tobacco industry has tried and failed to mitigate the impact of cigarette litter.
The researchers also found that tobacco industry anti-littering efforts were motivated by potential restrictions on sales rather than care for the environment:
[T]he industry was concerned about the “potential for anti-smoking groups to seize [the litter] issue to attack cigarettes.” In 1997, Philip Morris (PM) research found that “litter can move ‘neutral’ non-smokers to ‘negative,’” creating more tobacco control supporters.
Indeed, far from being an environmental concern, tobacco bosses sought to take advantage of the ‘litter issue’ in order to ‘undermine clean indoor air laws’. According to Smith and McDaniel:
PM [Philip Morris, the producers of Marlboro cigarettes] explored whether litter, as one of the “dysfunctions of smoking outside,” could be used to convince business owners to maintain or reinstate indoor smoking policies.
Breathtaking. In more ways than one.
~
But even more audacious was how, not only cigarette companies, but capitalism as a whole has successfully foisted the blame for littering onto the citizen.
Using cigarettes as a common example of standard commercial practice here again, Smith and McDaniel found that the tobacco companies’ priority was that they were ‘not held practically or financially responsible for cigarette litter’:
[T]he industry argues that “the responsibility for proper disposal lies with the user of the product.”
This approach resulted in what Smith and McDaniel call ‘industry-acceptable solutions’, including volunteer clean-ups and the installation of ashtrays. Both these focus on what the community to can do to manage litter, instead of preventing the harm caused by production of the litter in the first place.
In the US, the tobacco industry helps fund the nationwide litter-picking campaign Keep America Beautiful. The campaign was made famous by a 1971 television advert, which featured a tearful indigenous American. The campaign slogan left viewers in no doubt where the blame for litter lies:
People Start Pollution. People Can Stop It.
The campaign was and still is a media triumph, with Smith and McDaniel finding that ‘stories that mentioned [Keep America Beautiful] were also more frequently positive toward the tobacco industry.’
Remember that my use of cigarettes here is only one example. If this is how the tobacco industry is treating our environment and our ‘consumer choices’, then imagine how other companies with a vested interest in our throwaway culture are behaving.
~
In the UK, we have Keep Britain Tidy, which was set up in the 1950s by the Women’s Institute and is now what they call an independent charity.
Forgive my cynicism, but ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ is a difficult message to swallow from an organisation that is 35 percent funded by the same companies we find most often littering our streets, parks and beaches: Coca-Cola (Britain’s most dumped), Greggs, Costa, McDonalds, KFC—and, yes, you’ve guessed it: my old chum Wrigley’s chewing gum.
Keep Britain Tidy does good work monitoring littering in the UK and organising litter-picking activities—but a lot more good would be done if these companies stopped creating litter. Otherwise, the campaign smells faintly of corporate ‘greenwashing’.
Bearing in mind the positive media that tobacco companies in the US got from supporting Keep America Beautiful, it’s surprising to see Keep Britain Tidy boasting about how in 2015/16 the campaign generated 4,645 news media articles worth £24.2m in advertising. I wonder: advertising for whom?
Not for the first time, the blame for an environmental disaster has shifted from industry to the citizenry. So, next time you’re on a walk, take a look at what litters the ground. Instead of thinking about the person who dropped it, notice the companies who produced it.
~
This is something you get a lot—god damn little single packets of ketchup. That’s barbeque dip. Someone’s eating barbeque dip from a little plastic coffin. Garbage.
In a walk with Claire Balding, David Sedaris, writer and legendary litter picker, developed his theory that the products most thrown away are the things we’re most ashamed of: takeaway boxes, junk food wrappers, sugary drinks bottles (often filled with piss), cigarette packets, empty vodka bottles, used condoms.
As they pick litter along the verge of a country road in West Sussex, Sedaris speculates what compels people to throw rubbish out of the window of a moving vehicle:
Maybe they’re afraid that they’re doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing, and someone’s going to find evidence of it and they have to get rid of it.
We hide our shame and drive on. Am I ashamed now of my chewing gum littering days? Yes. Was I at the time? Perhaps—but I never would have admitted it. Because we hate talking about our shame, it rarely motivates us to change.
~
Although I stopped spitting my balls of sticky plastic down street drains a long time before, I didn’t stop chewing gum until 2015.
Why did I stop? I noticed that the behaviour wasn’t doing anything for me. It was a dependency and, like all dependencies, it was a little shameful. So, together with my partner at the time, I quit. I quit the chewing and I quit the littering.
I never once thought to blame Wrigley for either my dependency or for my littering. That piece of gum that I almost volleyed onto that man’s bald pate twenty-five years ago? It’s still there, ground into the asphalt of a railway station car park, perhaps less than ten percent through its centuries-long process of decay.
Even in later years, when I managed to find a bin, there are gobbets of my gum in landfill sites all over the country, decomposing no faster.
I’m not saying we should run a civil disobedience mass littering campaign (although that might get some attention), but we should shift the shame away from the users to the producers, away from dependent citizens disgusted at their consumer choices and towards those who should be disgusted: those most guilty of industrial-scale littering, our junk corporations.
Only when we’ve correctly apportioned the blame, can we hope to change the behaviour of our worst corporate litterbugs.
When artists become advocates
The audience become activists
I wouldn’t call myself an artist, but this message captures the best of what my writing can achieve. Worth remembering when it feels like pissing in the wind.
George’s line reminds me of how George Orwell explains his motivation in his 1946 essay Why I Write:
My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.
Three years later, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Art is at its best when it motivates action.
The last three weeks of lockdown have been difficult. I know there are people who have been and still are in much worse situations, but Covid-19 gave me 90 straight days without human contact and nothing to do really other than work and exercise—a reliable recipe for stress-related illness.
And for three weeks up to last Wednesday, I delighted in a wide range of symptoms, from wanting to sleep the whole time (and not feeling rested when I did) to brain fog, mouth ulcers, diarrhoea and IBS. Not pleasant.
Luckily, I’ve been able to take the whole week off (birthday week!) and spend time with other human beings, both socially distanced and in a bubble with my parents. The rest has released the pressure, the symptoms have largely disappeared and I feel restored.
This is all good: everyone needs human contact and a break from work every now and again. Ordinarily I might leave the insights there, but lockdown is encouraging me to reexamine the way I do everything.
What if there was a way of working where holidays weren’t medically necessary to cure my mouth of ulcers and clear my body of stress hormones?
The problem
As a freelancer, I’m paid by the hour. Time, sadly, is money. According to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Dana Carney, workers who have an ‘economic mindset’ about time—i.e. people who are paid by the hour—report higher levels of psychological stress.
One reason for this elevated stress might be because hourly workers spend less time socialising with friends and family. Gutted. If time is money, then we are constantly locked into a (subconscious) hedonic calculus: is seeing my friends for an hour really worth another hour’s work?
The answer is almost always yes, but salaried workers don’t have to answer this question, not even subconsciously.
Orthodox solutions
Look on the internet or in self-help books for how to reduce ‘time-stress’, you’ll read a lot of advice about efficient scheduling.
For example: the Ness Labs newsletter popped into my inbox this week with an article about how to manage stress. Perfect timing! One of her suggestions was, yep, better time management.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s approach is typical of the genre. This is her opener:
Except if we end up inventing time travel, we need to accept the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. In order to achieve our goals, we need to be smart about how we allocate our time to different tasks and activities.
Anne-Laure’s suggestion is ever more precise calendar use, with everything scheduled down to the last hour, including breaks and spending time with friends.
On the face of it: great advice—and I’m sure it works for her. But what if I already have a killer schedule? What then?
My current orthodox solution
My current schedule is managed on two spreadsheets:
One acts as my calendar and reminds me about deadlines and such like
Another tracks what projects I’m working on and for how long
Here’s how it plays out:
In the evening, I check my calendar and lay out the work I’ll do the next day, building a to do list text file.
In the morning, after yoga and breakfast, I get to work. I set a timer for 90 minutes and begin. Thanks to the timer, I find it very easy to prevent procrastination and slip into work mode, no matter how reluctant I was feeling before the clock started.
When the 90 minutes is up, I write down my hours in my working spreadsheet, which automatically tells me how much work I’ve done and, if it’s hourly paid work, how much I’ve earned.
It sounds like a great system and, for the most part, it is. I get plenty of work done, on time and with minimal fuss.
But if it’s such a great system, why did my body break down with time-stress? What if scheduling by the clock created my time-stress?
I suspect that this is more than an idle what-if question.
Taking on time in an arms race
The orthodoxy posits that the solution to time-stress is ever more precise time-scheduling.
But that sounds to me like an arms race, where there is no end until one side or the other blows up. In this case, I can guarantee that time isn’t the one that’s going to blow up…
My scheduling system probably could be improved with time-management techniques from high achievers on the internet—but I suspect only marginally. I haven’t found any advice online or in self-help books that offer the radical changes that I suspect would materially reduce time-stress.
If we guess that my system is already, say, 80 percent efficient, then the effort needed to eke out the last 20 percent of efficiency gains might only add to my time-stress.
I’d argue that time management in itself can be very stressful, especially as it becomes more and more precise. Time management forces us to think about time with a stressful economic mindset—especially if we are paid by the hour.
Side note on Covid-19
Of course, I’m not the only person who has found the last three months psychologically difficult. The World Economic Forum discovered that the number of people in Belgium at high risk of toxic stress had increased to a quarter of the population during the Covid-19 pandemic, up ten percentage points compared to last year.
I think a lot of my time-stress goes away when I’m able to whinge about stuff to friends. Nothing like a good old whinge. Isolated from these friends thanks to Covid-19, I’m not getting my quota of whinging.
But what kind of a time management system is founded on whinging? Not a very good system, if you ask me. I think we can do better. But how?
I propose a pincer movement:
Shift away from orthodox time management that promotes a stress-inducing ‘economic mindset’
Introduce activities that expand perception of time
I’ll explore these in reverse order, finishing with the antischedule.
Playing with time perception
Time is immutable, but humans aren’t embodiments of pure physics and we can play around with our perception of time.
Humans have an internal clock that beats ‘time’ throughout the day, but different activities are counted at different paces. Sometimes time crawls, sometimes it flies. When you’re asleep, for example, your time perception goes right out of the window.
Time-stress is what happens when we feel that there isn’t enough time to do everything we want to do. Time is real, but we should forget that time-stress is a feeling.
If we do more activities that make us feel like we have oodles of time, then we reduce our sense of time-pressure and so reduce our time-stress.
But what are those activities? They probably vary from person to person. Here are some of mine—a few of which have had their time-expanding properties documented scientifically.
You’ll have your own ideas. What makes you feel like you’ve got endless time?
These are ways we can trick our minds into dialling back time-stress. If I’m walking slowly to an appointment, I might arrive 30 seconds later, but I’ll be in a much more restful state of mind.
If you’re not sure you can spare those 30 seconds, that’s a classic symptom of time-stress. I prescribe Relax for the same result by Derek Sivers.
Now we’ve expanded our sense of time, we can try to reintroduce work in a way that doesn’t trigger the economic mindset.
The antischedule
The only article that I found on radical alternatives to the time-management orthodoxy was this piece by Dr Adam Bell.
A typical junior doctor on a tyrannical schedule, Bell found inspiration in a tweet by Naval Ravikant:
The single best productivity hack that everyone should aspire to—don’t keep a schedule.
So Bell stopped tracking time and keeping a schedule. The effect was transformational for him:
My inner tyrant had left his post, and so too had any sense of time pressure. Now there was an abundance of time, rather than a perpetual scarcity of it. And there was no inner voice barking orders anymore.
It’s a terrifying prospect, to work—or live at all—without my calendar, to do list, timer and working diary. How will I stay on track?
But. Wait. What kind of a track am I on? One that gives me mouth ulcers and diarrhoea? What kind of a masochist wants to stay on that track?
Some other ideas
My holiday ends on Sunday: what will I do when I start work again on Monday? I haven’t committed to adopting the antischedule. I’m scared.
Besides chucking out my orthodox scheduling tools wholesale, there are a few other options I could explore.
Seven week sabbaticals. This idea from Sean McCabe was one I adopted with relish before Covid-19 struck. The idea is simple: six weeks of scheduled work followed by one week of unscheduled, unstructured time—a mini sabbatical. For some reason, I thought Covid-19 meant I couldn’t take sabbaticals. Stupid.
Switch from a countdown timer to a countup timer. Hitting start on a timer is a great way to shortcut procrastination, but there’s no reason why that timer can’t count up instead of down. I’ve started experimenting with SpaceJock’s free TrackAMinute software, designed for freelancers like me but useful in most computer-based lines of work.
Sacrifice time-accuracy for reduced time-stress. I have to track my time because I must invoice for my work hourly. But I don’t have to track that time myself: what if I invoiced based on passive time-tracking software like RescueTime? It might be less accurate, but surely a reduction in accuracy is a good sacrifice to make for the sake of my oral and gastric health!
Find satisfaction from completing worthwhile projects, rather than from stacking up hours of work. This is a tricky one. On the one hand, tracking the hours I spend on my projects takes out the mystique of creativity and production. I know now that writing a BBC Radio series is simply a matter of showing up and putting in the hours: that’s tremendously liberating. On the other hand, sometimes the hours I put in can get muddled up with whether or not the work is taking me in the direction I want to go.
Decide on and stick to my boundaries. When is enough enough? Putting in the hours is all very good, but how do I know when to stop? Should I stop work at 6pm? 4pm? 2pm? I could take weekends off—or only work a half day on Wednesdays. I had some success with this approach a couple of months ago, working for 4 hours or so in the morning and then taking the rest of the day ‘off’.
Use technology less. I run everything through my spreadsheets, even my time-expanding activities like reading and exercise. I could use pen and paper much, much more—even if only to add the data in batches at the end of the week.
Say no more. Say no more.
~
Have you found a way of avoiding time-stress? Do you use clocks and watches and timers? Are you acutely aware of time—or not? I need help!
They say that every dog has its day—and some marketing departments take that literally. Next Friday, for example, is Pet Sitters International’s Take Your Dog to Work Day.
A quick scan of the internet tells me that Tuesday was Bloomsday (I’m listening to Ulysses at the moment as it happens). Wednesday, meanwhile, was World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought and yesterday was National Freelancers Day (I took it off work).
Today is World Sickle Cell Day. A sprinkling of sickle cell facts: sickle cell diseases are most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and kill over 100,000 people a year—but the sickle cell trait offers some protection against malaria. An iron fist in a velvet glove.
But tomorrow is World Refugee Day. Ah—that explains my headline!
Why should I care?
If you’ve ever crossed a border without being beaten up, then, in my own personal opinion, you are in credit. The closest I’ve come is a hard stare from a Serbian border guard. I owe it to my passport to care.
There are now nearly 80 million displaced people in the world, including nearly 30 million refugees. That’s a lot of people—but not in a Daily Mail kind of a way. Pretty much zero of those people have come to the UK.
Okay, not zero: precisely 0.43 percent of the world’s refugees have found sanctuary on this ‘sceptred isle’. For comparison, Turkey hosts nearly 13 percent of those humans.
Uganda, a country with a GDP a hundred times smaller than the UK, hosts ten times as many refugees. I don’t know about you, but I did not know Uganda was that poor—or the UK so rich.
I don’t think we’re doing our bit, do you?
Yay, progress! (Except not for people fleeing war, sorry)
You might not believe it from the headlines, but many indicators of global quality of life are improving: the number of people escaping from extreme poverty, for example, or the number of girls accessing education, or child mortality rates.
Unfortunately, for refugees, the world is a more hostile place today than it was a decade ago. As the latest UNHCR report states:
Over the last decade, only four million refugees were able to return to their native countries, compared with 10 million the previous decade. Roughly 0.5 per cent of the world’s refugees were offered resettlement in 2019.
0.5 percent?! Wow. We need more than one day to solve this problem. But let’s face it: there are other problems in the world, so…
Seeing as we’ve only got a day—let’s ride our bikes?!
This Saturday, in solidarity with refugees all over the world, Thighs of Steel and Help Refugees are riding their bikes all the way from London to Khora’s home in Athens—about 2,000 miles.
I’m asking—nay begging—for your support. As cyclists, as donors, as megaphones.
The theme for this year’s World Refugee Day is Every Action Counts. Whether you ride 1 mile or 100; whether you raise £1,000 or simply chuck in a tenner from your own pocket, every action really does count.
It’s only one day of the year, but your contribution tomorrow could make a real difference to refugees—people who truly understand the meaning of the trite saying ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’.
What will happen to the money?
We’re fundraising for Help Refugees, a grassroots organisation that grew out of the upsurge of empathy for migrants in 2015. Here’s what they say about how they spend the money raised:
Together, we are supporting hundreds of thousands of people—with access to medical care, sanitation, food, emotional support, and much much more. This isn’t the world we want to live in, and we are working to change it, but while refugees are forced to live like this, we will be there for them. Thank you so much for making this possible.
Thighs of Steel is the major donor to Khora, a voluntary organisation in Athens that exists to support displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers, homeless people and vulnerable groups in general.
During the Covid crisis, Khora volunteers have been preparing and delivering food to around 2,200 vulnerable people every other day. All this extra support costs money—as much as £24,000 per month. This remarkable act of solidarity relies entirely on money given by strangers.
Imagine…
I’ll finish with this little poem from Lemn Sissay, which the legends at Refugee Week are sharing as the jumping off point for the first of eight Simple Acts you can take to stand with refugees.
I will not limit myself
I will not be afraid
If it were not imagined
How else could it be made?
If it can be imagined, it can be made. Another world is possible.
This isn’t the world we want to live in, and we are working to change it, but while refugees are forced to live like this, we will be there for them.
This post is 2,000 words long, so here’s a brief summary:
Every year I give 10 percent of my gross business income to organisations that I believe promote equality and justice.
The Jewish word for financial giving is tzedakah—not ‘charity’, but ‘justice’.
Financial giving isn’t virtuous do-gooding; it’s an acknowledgement of what I owe for benefiting from often invisible inequalities.
For every hour I work, even modest financial giving could more than double the daily earnings of two people living below the extreme poverty line.
By committing to giving 10 percent of my income, tzedakah is not only part of what I earn—but part of why I earn.
Giving what we can
A few weeks ago a friend suggested that I write about financial giving. Although I appreciated her suggestion, I decided that sharing the reasons why I give money to charities and other organisations might really piss people off. No one likes a preacher.
Since then, I’ve been taken aback by astonishing demonstrations of public generosity, as ordinary citizens seek to challenge injustice with their money:
Covid-19 seems to have stirred a spirit of social consciousness. I might still piss people off, but I’ve changed my mind on writing about financial giving.
I’m far from being an expert—and I’m sure that many of you are way ahead of me in both thought and action—but this article is why and how I structure my financial giving to promote equality and justice.
Not charity
I’ve written before about the distinctions between charity and solidarity, so I won’t repeat myself but, quickly, here’s why I don’t like to call financial giving ‘charity’.
‘Charity’ includes giving that does little or nothing to promote equality and justice.
Giving money to a nominally charitable institution like a church so that they can fix their damaged roof is very generous, but I’m not convinced it does much to help those who need support most.
Sometimes registered charities (sometimes even churches) are worthy recipients of cash, but sometimes the world would be better off if we granted that money to community groups, online movements, small businesses, entrepreneurs or simply people we believe in.
The word charity also excludes the possibility that we actually owe this money to others.
Giving as repayment on debt
Charity, caritas, is one of the seven virtues of Christianity, but Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas had in mind a definition closer to universal love than to financial largesse.
Unfortunately, the sense of virtue has stuck to charity’s modern definition. But the story of slave trader Edward Colston, whose statue was recently torn down by Black Lives Matter protestors in Bristol, reminds us that charitable giving is far from a guarantee of ethical good standing.
In his career as a dealer in the lives of humanity, Colston was a member of the Royal African Company and, over the course of twelve bloody years, played his part in trading 84,000 African men, women and children. It’s estimated that 19,000 of these people died on their journey to the Americas.
Colston made a lot of money from this business, which he later gave away to found various charitable institutions in Bristol. But Colston’s financial giving had nothing to do with virtue or universal love; it was a debt that he owed—and one he could never fully repay.
So it seems to me quite right that Colston’s statue was torn down: debtors aren’t usually celebrated in bronze. (Otherwise, where are the millions of plinths dedicated to payday loan victims and university students?)
Invisible debt
I’m optimistic that I don’t have quite as much blood on my hands as Colston, but living as I do in a highly developed country, I still owe some sort of debt for my position.
My quality of life is founded on almost invisible inequalities and injustices that existed long before I was born.
The seductive invisibility of these inequalities makes me vulnerable to self-flattery, giving myself far too much credit for my good fortune. I’m not alone: this is a well-studied psychological phenomenon called the attribution bias.
To me, it felt like I worked hard to do well at university. It felt like opportunities came my way only after years of hard work for little or no reward. It feels like I work hard for the money I now earn.
The most I’ll concede is that there has been an element of luck.
But it’s not luck: it’s inequality and injustice.
The truth is that other people in my local neighbourhood, my country or elsewhere in the world simply didn’t, don’t and never will have the same opportunity to be rewarded so richly for their hard work.
Side story: cacao farmers in Cameroon
In my work for the Center for International Forestry Research, I’m lucky enough to speak to people all over the world about their lives.
I’m currently working on a piece about ecology and socio-economics in forest villages in Cameroon. One of the indicators that the researchers collected is called the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale.
Despite great success growing cacao as a cash crop for international markets, only 21 percent of households in the Cameroonian village of Bokito were considered food secure. In the poorer village of Talba, that figure dropped to 12 percent.
Four families out of five in these villages said yes to questions like: Did you or any household members go to sleep at night hungry because there was not enough food?
Despite working long hours on cacao plantations, these families are unable to feed their children, with all the knock-on effects that has on health, education and life opportunities.
All of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like I worked particularly hard.
Coincidentally, that’s about how much I’d spend on a quality bar of the chocolate the people of Bokito and Talba help grow. Something to think about the next time I bite into a bar of Green & Blacks.
Here’s something else: in Judaism, charitable giving is called tzedakah, a word that better translates as ‘justice’. I really like that translation. Financial giving is not virtuous charity, it’s an attempt to balance the books of justice.
Giving as politics
When someone sets up a charity, community project or social enterprise, they’re saying: I believe the world can be a better place in this specific, measurable way.
The enterprise doesn’t work unless they bring people along with them: the founders must become politicians for their vision. Donors and volunteers are their citizenry, who vote with their money or their time.
Together, these third sector politicians and citizens can change the world. Last month, a small charity that didn’t exist three years ago won a high court challenge to a vile government policy that prevented working migrants from accessing welfare support during Covid-19.
I’m not saying that governments can’t do much more to make the world a fairer place. Economist Joseph Stiglitz makes a strong case that politicians could do a lot more to fight inequality by forcing multinational companies to pay tax at a global minimum rate, for example.
But when governments fail us or when we disagree with the general drift of our politicians, it’s amazing that enterprising citizens stand up and say: no, we believe the world should be more like this.
And we, operating independently of our politicians and the state, can give money and say: yes, we’re behind you.
As we’ve seen so strongly over the past few months, we can’t rely entirely on the state to balance the books of justice. We all give tzedakah. The only remaining question is how and how much.
Quick reminder…
In this article I’m only talking about financial giving, but there are of course many other ways that we all try to promote equality and justice.
Voluntary service, including advocacy
Political action
Paid work
Work in kind
Raising and educating the next generation
Our giving in these different areas naturally fluctuates over our lifespan. For many, many years, I didn’t do much financial giving. I’m not beating myself up about that fact.
With that said, here is what I do now, along with the resources that inspired me.
Taking the pledge
In July 2017, I took the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 1 percent of my earnings that year to effective charitable organisations. I promptly forgot all about this pledge and have, instead, donated 10 percent of my earnings every year since.
The 1 percent pledge, it turned out, was a classic ‘foot in the door’ sales tactic. Once I’d made the decision that I was the sort of person who would give in a structured way every year, 1 percent felt insignificant.
I don’t have any dependents, I live in a country with a more or less functioning welfare system that includes free healthcare, and I come from a home-owning family. All this means that I feel more comfortable committing to 10 percent.
For clarity: that means 10 percent of my business income before deductions:
Before tax
Before National Insurance
Before business expenses
Before living expenses
This detail is important to me. When I formalised my financial giving in 2017, I wasn’t earning a huge amount of money and calculating from my business profit would have meant years of zero contributions.
Social problems like inequality and injustice get exponentially worse and harder to fix as time move on. I wanted to start giving immediately and, more importantly, get into good giving habits on the off-chance that I do one day start earning millions.
Working from gross income is also a lot less complicated to administer.
The mechanics
I’m freelance so I have a separate bank account for my business income. At the end of the financial year, I siphon 10 percent of the balance into another bank account dedicated exclusively to financial giving.
This creates a fund from which I give over the course of the next financial year. If there’s anything left in the account from the year before, I usually grant that money out after doing my tax return—or it rolls forward to the next year.
What difference could I make?
Median income in the UK is £18,630. I fall some way below that, but globally I’m in the top 11 percent of all earners. Even after giving away 10 percent of my income, I’m still in the global top 12 percent.
Yep: we live in a very unequal world.
Apologies for the excessive use of italics, but I find it hard to get my head around the following fact:
My 10 percent giving is enough that, for every hour I work, I could more than double the daily earnings of two people living below the extreme poverty line—perhaps two of those cacao farmers I’m writing about.
That shows what could be done with whatever sum a citizen in a wealthy country can afford to give.
Working for justice
By committing to structured giving, I can almost always say yes when friends ask me to donate to social causes that they believe in.
If I’m paid £300 for a writing job, then I already know that £30 will go toward promoting equality and justice.
This is a huge relief: no more awkward moments, worried I can’t spare another twenty quid. I know I can afford to give because it’s baked into every penny I earn.
Financial giving is part of what I earn—but it’s also part of why I earn.
As a writer, working in the highly theoretical field of abstract thought can make me feel disconnected from the injustice of daily life for farmers on cacao plantations in Cameroon.
Without overplaying my modest contribution, my work feels more meaningful now I know that a sliver of justice is served every time I sit down to write.
~
My contribution, however modest, only began when I stumbled across the Giving What We Can pledge in July 2017.
Much of what I’ve written here has been said more eloquently and with more academic rigour by the philosopher Peter Singer, one of the foremost thinkers on financial giving.
Did you know that trees can grow knees? A Bald Cypress in sunshine, Central Gardens, Bournemouth
I grew up in a swathe through beech forests so it’s no wonder that I find the pines, redwoods, sequoias, cedars and cypresses of the south coast alluring.
Today, Bournemouth is famed for its vigorous tree culture — famous enough in 1948 for poet laureate John Betjeman to take the piss out of the modernising town clerk who longs to build blocks of flats over the town’s clifftop pine woods:
I walk the asphalt paths of Branksome Chine
In resin-scented air like strong Greek wine
And dream of cliffs of flats along those heights,
Floodlit at night with green electric lights.
My view from the eighth floor of one of those ‘cliffs of flats’ is dominated by city and canopy, a testament to a centuries-old commitment to greening and salubrious landscaped woodland.
But it could all have been so different.
From heath to health
Meyrick Park, Bournemouth, ~1897 (from The Pines of Bournemouth)
Two hundred years ago, Bournemouth was at the arse-end of what Thomas Hardy imagined as ‘the Great Heath’ and described as follows in Return of the Native:
A place perfectly accordant with man’s nature – neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither common-place, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony!
At that time, stretching right away from Christchurch to Poole was a vast, desolate heath, covering an area of probably twenty square miles.
Meanwhile, at some point before 1875, a contemporary writer nailed Boscombe as ‘a scene of indescribable desolation’.
The turning point for the blasted land came in 1809, when, out of nowhere, a pub appeared. Where there is booze, retired army officers shall not be far behind and Lewis Tregonwell and family became the first official residents of the budding hamlet in 1812.
Latching on to far-fetched rumours that ‘pine-scented air’ was beneficial for popular nineteenth century maladies like tuberculosis, Tregonwell and Sir George Ivison Tapps, the owner of the pub, conspired to cover the heath with hundreds of pine trees, all the way down to the seashore.
Over the ensuing decades, these two wily entrepreneurs somehow transformed Hardy’s inhospitable heath into a miracle pine health spa.
But what’s almost more remarkable about this story is that those rumours about the health properties of pine were bang on the money.
Pine trees vs cancer
The scent of pine trees comes from its resin and specifically from two isomers of pinene. If you’ve ever used turpentine: it’s the same chemicals and the same woody smell. (Enjoy responsibly.)
Pinenes are a type of chemical called phytoncides. You might recognise the -cide ending there. Yep: pinenes kill stuff. It’s the pine tree’s all-natural antimicrobial killer defence spray.
And it works on us too.
Qing Li, an immunologist at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, has been investigating the effects of phytoncides on the human body since the early 2000s.
In one, frankly astonishing, 2009 study, Li invited 12 men to come and stay with him for three nights at an ‘urban’ hotel. If that sounds dodgy, wait until you hear what happened next: every night, he pumped vapour from the pinene-rich oil of Hinoki cypress trees into their bedrooms.
At the end of the study, the poor men showed a significant increase in the activity of their natural killer immune cells (this is good: these cells kill cancer) and a significant reduction in noradrenalin (AKA norepinephrine), which usually increases when we’re stressed or in immediate danger.
They also reported feeling less fatigued compared to a control hotel stay that lacked the vaporous phytoncide air.
And so back to Bournemouth, where the tradition of ‘taking the tree air’ continues with the council’s healthsome Tree Trail. (Betjeman’s town clerk was fired, I hope.)
Untold riches — of Redwoods, Cedars and Cypresses
The trail is heralded as ‘a two hour circular walk through Lower, Central and Upper Gardens’, but so far I’ve spent over four hours and have only rather shakily identified half of the 14 mapped trees.
I could spend two hours alone at the foot of Bournemouth’s Dawn Redwoods, a species once believed to be extinct, forgotten for five million years, rediscovered in its native China during the Second World War, and now lording it over the social distancing picnickers and parkour traceurs of the Upper Gardens.
Or I could cosy up for an afternoon with the Blue Atlas Cedars, re-seeded from the mountains of North Africa and now almost shyly gathering around the Hedgehog Kiosk, as if waiting to be invited for ices.
I must find time enough too, far from their Mississippi swamplands, for the Bald Cypress, those of the tree knees, whose canopy has that fibrous quality of ferns writ large, leaves that are hardly there, yet diffuse the sun into soothing colour.
And this walk of almost infinite discovery scoots over the single greenway of Bournemouth’s central gardens. The verdant chines — of which Betjeman’s Branksome is but one — are a tree trail tale for another day.
The English Channel from Alum Chine. A. R. Quinton postcard circa 1910 (From Winston Churchill, RLS, and the Literary Chines of Bournemouth by David A. Laws)
~
Thanks to A.T. for discovering and then sharing the Bournemouth Tree Trail with me!
On Thursday 5 June 2014, at Sanford Housing Cooperative, I called what I believe was the first ever Questionable Meeting: a meeting in which participants are only allowed to speak in the interrogative mood.
Questions have a habit of generating unexpected ideas. It is very hard to come up with good ideas if you’re just asked to come up with good ideas, but if you’re asked to come up with good questions, then the ideas flow naturally.
In life there is no such thing as a final answer, only better questions.
Rules of the Game
“All games have rules; it’s what distinguishes them from real life.”
T.P. Ruount
There is only one rule at a Questionable Meeting:
Participants may only speak in the interrogative mood, i.e. they may only ask questions.
There is, of course, one exception that makes the rule:
Participants may also use the exclamatory phrase, “Good question!”
Why?
“A child who is always asking “Why? Why? Why?” shows not their ignorance, but their wisdom.”
Dr Ros Wandkalf
a. Meetings are often charged with “know-it-all” ego-driven solutionising. The truth is that the best answers are very rarely those thought of on the spur of the moment. By removing the possibility of any instant answers to any questions, we remove snap judgements and improve the likelihood of a reasoned, thoughtful, considerate response outside of the meeting.
b. Meetings can be dominated by those who enjoy speaking, showing off how much they know or how important they are. In a Questionable Meeting, no one can speak without donning the cap of humility. To speak, you must concede that you don’t have all the answers. There are no categorically “right” answers in life, so in this meeting, we listen and question.
c. By posing questions without trying to answer them, the subconscious brain is activated. Perhaps, after a good night’s sleep or a week’s quiet rumination, a more creative answer will emerge from the depths of your subconscious. Or perhaps not.
Strategies
“Strategy, after all, is only one strategy.”
The Turquoise Empress, Xiaoling
Start each meeting with a period of silence. From the silence, reasonable questions shall emerge.
If desired, the meeting can then proceed to setting the Questionable Agenda: ten minutes in which participants can ask broad, thematic questions, which shall form the interrogative basis of the rest of the meeting. Alternatively, a Questionable Meeting could be called to query a specific theme, couched, naturally, as a question. For example: “How can Sanford help other housing cooperatives?”.
There are no bad, wrong or stupid questions. If you think there are, then you are either bad, wrong or stupid.
After each question, leave a respectful pause. Don’t barrel in with your oh-so-important question.
Make sure you are really listening to each question; allow it to sink deep into your subconscious. If in doubt, count to ten in your head.
No participant may attempt to provide any answer or solution to a question.
No participant should pass judgement on a question. Particularly not using body language, sighing, huffing, etc..
The questions shall be recorded, if desired, and Questionable Minutes, consisting solely of a list of questions asked, circulated by a Questionable Secretary.
Participants may ask questions about the questions. These cannot be answered, of course.
If you would prefer, the question can be written down and put into a Questionable Hat, for minuting by the Questionable Secretary. NOTE: Written notes will not reach the subconscious of other members, only yourself.
Think about your questions carefully. Be clear and concise. This respects the brains of the other participants and will inspire better subconscious responses.
For most of us, Covid-19 has radically shifted our day-to-day context: our work environment, social milieu, shopping and even our sleeping habits.
I think the most striking change for me has been stability.
I’ve spent the 74 nights of lockdown in Bournemouth. I haven’t stayed in one place for anywhere even close to 74 nights since my records began in July 2015. For those of you (hi) who love the stats, these are my longest sojourns over the past five years:
2019: 22 nights (Bristol)
2018: 23 nights (Bristol)
2017: 23 nights (Peckham)
2016: 27 nights (Edinburgh Festival)
20 July-December 2015: 25 (New Cross)
At least once every four weeks for the last five years I have been on the move, travelling across the country for work or to visit friends, or further afield on overland adventures.
Without lockdown, I don’t think I ever would have realised how much I travel—and the possible advantages of stability.
With a rocksteady context, I’ve been able to build consistent habits like never before. With no interruptions to my developing routines, I’ve seen improvements in both my work and rest.
So, before we rush headlong out of lockdown, I think it’s worth pausing and asking ourselves a few other questions about how our lives have changed and what we might be able to salvage for the future.
52 questions to answer before leaving lockdown
Readers of this newsletter come from all over the world, from extremes of both the World Clock and the Covid-19 infection scale.
It seems like the UK is slowly shaking itself off and starting to pick up old habits. But perhaps you are only now battening down the hatches, perhaps you have already returned to some semblance of work and play.
Wherever you find yourself, the idea of these questions is to build up a picture of your life under lockdown, to reflect on how your context has moulded your behaviour and, perhaps most importantly, to ponder on what and how you would change for the future.
I’ve split the 52 questions into 9 sections:
Daily habits
Your context
Health
Relationships
Work
Consumerism
Citizenship
The future
Noticing
I’m not going to even suggest that you sharpen your pencils and set aside three hours; this isn’t an exam. Feel free to let the questions wash over you as you read, and simply notice what bubbles to the surface.
Daily habits
How do you start your day? List the first ten things that you do. Have these changed since lockdown? Can you see any room for change or adaptation?
How do you end your day? List the last ten things you do. Have these changed since lockdown? Can you see any room for change or adaptation?
Think about a typical day in lockdown. What are you doing regularly now that you wouldn’t have done before Covid-19? What old habits have fallen away?
Is there anything you miss from your old life? Why do you miss these things?
What activities have been most important to your mental health over the past three months? Have these become habits? Would you keep them or adapt them?
Your context
Where have you been spending most of your time?
Name at least three things that you appreciate about where you’ve been staying.
Think about your best habits. How could you adapt your home environment so that it better supports your best habits?
Think about your worst habits. How could you adapt your home environment so that it inhibits your worst habits?
What places outside your home have been particularly important to you over the past three months?
How have your travel habits changed? What modes of transport are you using now? Has this made your life better or worse?
Health
How’s your physical health? How do you feel in your body?
How’s your mental health? How do you feel in your mind?
How have you been keeping fit? How would you change your exercise if you could magically do anything, with anyone?
How are your sleep patterns? Better or worse? Earlier or later? Regular or irregular? Are you napping? Dreaming?
Have your eating habits changed at all? What’s your diet like? Are you eating more, less or the same? Where are you when you eat? What are you doing while eating? What food has been particularly important you over the past three months?
How’s your oral hygiene?
Relationships
How have your relationships with others changed?
Have you formed any new friendships? Or rekindled old friendships?
Have you been using any new forms of communication? Would you keep them or adapt them to the new context?
How has your relationship to yourself changed?
Who are you speaking to the most? Who has been particularly important for your mental health over the last three months?
Who have you been neglecting?
Is there anyone—you don’t have to know them personally—that you’d like to say thank you to? Or say sorry to?
Work
How has work changed for you over the past three months? Are you working more, less or the same?
How are your working days organised now? How is that different to before?
Has anything changed at work, either in what you’re doing or how you’re doing it? If yes: do you want to keep, adapt or develop these changes?
What part of your work or business has disappeared? Do you want or need it back?
What is important or essential about your work? Can you uncover or emphasise these elements in the future?
Are there any educational opportunities you’d like to arm yourself with for the future?
What might your working future be like? In a disaster scenario? And in a perfect world? What can you do to start making those futures a reality?
Consumerism
How have your shopping habits changed?
Have you bought more or less than you used to? If that’s a hard question to answer, look at the raw numbers: have you spent more or less?
Can you remember how you used to shop and spend money? Would you like to go back to those days? Would you rather keep or adapt your new shopping habits?
What possessions have been particularly important to you over the past three months?
Are there any possessions that you thought were essential, but haven’t even thought of using since lockdown?
What clothes have you been wearing most?
Citizenship
Do you feel more or less a part of society?
What’s most important for the healthy running of our society? What’s the significance of being a citizen in our society? What role does government, both local and national, have to play in our society? How would you like to participate?
If you could change one thing about our society, what would that be? Could you take one small step today to help make that change a reality?
What have you learned about your neighbours? About your local area? Who are the key workers for you? What are the most important businesses?
The future
What’s the first thing you’d do if you were allowed to travel and meet people freely?
What’s important to you this coming summer or winter? What are your three highest priorities?
What are you most worried about as you emerge from lockdown?
Think about how you felt as the news filtered in about the deaths in China, the arrival of Covid-19 in your country and the announcement of lockdown measures. How did your past self feel about all this uncertainty at the time? How do you feel towards your past self now? How do you think your future self will handle future uncertainty?
What areas of life do you think you’re handling well during lockdown?
What do you think you could have done better? How? Can you think of anyone who you thought managed those problems particularly well? What could you learn from them? If you’re not sure: ask them.
Do you feel more or less resilient and ready for the future? No matter what your answer: why do you think you feel this way? What steps could you take to feel more sure-footed?
Noticing
What have you noticed about the changing seasons? The weather, the trees, the birds, the plants? The smells, the sounds, the colours, the growth?
If you look after household pets or plants: what have you noticed about their lives during lockdown?
What scents have been particularly important to you during lockdown? What sights? What sounds? What tastes? What other sensations?
What music, art and literature has been particularly important to you during lockdown? Why?
My answers…
Don’t panic, I’m not really going to bore you with my laborious answers to all 52. But I will finish the one I started to answer at the top, about the changes in my immediate environment.
As well as spending 74 consecutive nights in one place, I’ve also taken an equally unheard of zero train journeys.
In the 10 weeks prior to lockdown I took 21 rail journeys, spending a little over £40 and 5 hours on trains every week.
This is remarkably consistent with my travel habits across the whole of 2019, when I took 2.5 journeys and spent £40 on trains for every week I was in the UK.
Nice stats, but what have I learned?
My train travel is a change of context. The way I travel is not like commuting from one familiar context to another; it’s more disruptive than I thought.
Changing context so frequently is harmful to my habits, which thrive in stability. For example: a late train back from London interrupts my evening routine. Interrupted evening habits means worse sleep, which means a less productive morning and a drop in my sense of wellbeing.
I have a new respect for habits. My work habits are the rockbed of my productivity, as my health and fitness habits are of my wellbeing.
Therefore I should be more careful about how and when I travel, particularly when I can’t or don’t want to take a break.
The case for creative stability
There are quite a few things I wouldn’t change about my lockdown life and travelling less frequently is one.
Without long train journeys to disrupt my daily and weekly routines, my second self does all the heavy lifting: automatically preparing for work, systematically feeding, clothing and watering myself, habitually letting my fingers fly over the keyboard for hours on end.
In turn, this easy automation of the second self gives time and space for my executive self to do what he does best: creative direction.
As William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology (1890):
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
With little variation in my 24 hours, a surprising amount of writing work has been possible. Knowing now the benefits of creative stability, I will think twice about how and when I surrender the environment in which my second self thrives best.
Of course, I’ll still travel—if only to slow down time a little. Without changes in context, the days blur into each other and our perception of time condenses forgettably.
Routine might make us more productive and more content, but it sure as hell doesn’t make for great stories!
~
I know that I’ve been very lucky with my lockdown so far, but I hope that you’ve also discovered something interesting about your daily life.
I also hope you’ve found these questions worthwhile and have enjoyed taking a moment to think about where we are now. I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to share any of your findings.
Finally, if you know anyone who might also enjoy these questions, feel free to share the post. Thanks!
This post was written as a thank you to the generous folk who have donated to my Help Refugees x Thighs of Steel fundraiser. Collectively, we’re riding around the world to raise vital funds for refugees facing COVID-19 in dire conditions.
If you get anything out of this blog, I’d be very grateful if you could chuck us a few quid. Thanks!
I recently finished reading Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits and I thought I’d share a little more and introduce you to your own ‘second self’.
‘The world of habit is so self-contained,’ Wood writes, ‘it makes sense to think of it as a kind of second self – a side of you that lives in the shadow cast by the thinking mind you know so well.’
The distinction between these two ‘selves’ will be familiar if you’ve ever read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, where he describes the differences between System 1 (automatic) and System 2 (attention) thinking.
But where Kahneman is resigned to the incorrigibility of human error in System 1, Wendy Wood celebrates the superhuman strengths of our second self and urges us to harmonise our two selves or systems.
This is an idea with a long, if partially forgotten, lineage. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) William James declared:
‘The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.’
Both selves have strengths and weaknesses, but Wendy Wood argues that for too long we have ignored or maligned the second self:
‘If our noisy, egotistical consciousness takes all the credit for the actions of our silent habitual self, we’ll never learn how to properly exploit this hidden resource. Habits will be a silent partner, full of potential energy but never asked to perform to their fullest.’
It’s time we got to know our second selves.
Introducing David and Dave
So I have two selves: isn’t this great news? To get away from total confusion, let’s call them Dave and David.
Until now, David has been the all-conquering, egotistical genius taking the praise for everything this body accomplishes. As far as David is concerned, writing these words is an act of sheer will alone – the finely tuned composition and typing habits of Dave have nothing to do with anything. David is the ego-self, or Kahneman’s System 2.
In contrast, Dave goes about his business quickly, quietly and easily – automatically, in fact. Dave is the second self or Kahneman’s System 1.
We know almost too much about David, so forget him for a minute (he’s throwing a strop already). What, according to the science so far, are Dave’s strengths and weaknesses?
Let’s start with the weaknesses because that’ll keep David happy for a second:
Dave’s Weaknesses
Unobservant.
Completely thoughtless and utterly uncritical.
Heavily dependent on familiar cues, he’s a total fish out of water in even a slightly different context.
Can’t react to changing events and will carry on executing the same orders, regardless of whether the result is actually useful any more.
Can suck the fun out of anything, even the most exquisite romance, by sheer repetition.
Can’t set his own conscious goals.
Doesn’t Dave sound like an idiot? Yes he does, but stop judging and let’s look at his strengths for a second.
Dave’s Strengths
Can’t be bribed with rewards. Can’t be punished either.
Doesn’t need willpower to resist temptation: simply executes. Almost impossible to distract.
Utterly committed to delivering relentlessly, effortlessly, day after day after day, through good times and bad.
Cheap to run. Doesn’t guzzle calories like profligate David does.
Very chilled. Dave doesn’t panic, worry or ever get confused about what to do
Actually thrives in times of stress or when the body is tired, hungry, sleep deprived.
Incredibly fast – so fast that action comes before even thought (Dave is Kahneman’s ‘thinking fast’).
Waaaaay tougher, stronger and more resilient than weeny David.
Highly skilled. It’s Dave who can play guitar, speak pretty good English, chop vegetables with a sharp knife, and ride a bike (although not all at the same time) (yet). Dave can be trained to do almost anything.
Makes life feel meaningful (say what? for real – this is Dave’s domain)
Although Dave might not set goals initially, it’s Dave who achieves my goals and, through his repeated actions, ends up deciding what I value. Mind blown.
Dave sounds like a total LEGEND!
Not one, but two of Wendy Wood’s studies (2002, 2005) found that 43 percent of our behaviour is automatic. If that figure is anywhere near accurate, then the sooner David lets Dave strut his stuff, the better it’ll be for both (?) of us (!).
As Wendy Wood concludes in Good Habits, Bad Habits, working in harmony with our second self isn’t only more productive, it’s also ‘a simpler, more integrated way to live your life.’
We all live habitually already. Most of us just aren’t aware of it. And because of that, we’re ignoring a big part of who we are and why we do what we do. We’re also ignoring all the many ways we could be doing things better.
Sometimes I forget to breathe. I’ll notice that I haven’t taken a deep breath in the last hour (or week) and, standing by the sink in the kitchen or staring into the pixels of my computer screen, I’ll consciously make the effort.
I’ve spoken to plenty of people who feel the same: we’re shallow breathers. But given how wonderful that first deep breath feels, wouldn’t we love to breathe a little deeper all the time?
After all, the air is right there, waiting for us to swallow it down to the bottom of our lungs. There are deep, inexhaustible breathfuls of air all around us, all the time. And breathing can do wonderful things.
Air doesn’t care whether we clear landmines for a living or make bullets for child soldiers in the Central African Republic. No matter: air is there for us.
Air gives us breath in abundance: we take as much as we please, almost without noticing. And, on the exhale, we pump out that sweet, sweet carbon the trees thrive on.
Breath in, breath out: the atmosphere is kept in balance. It is the base unit of our existence—and the existence of every living being on the planet. Air must be circulated. Without circulation, the whole system breaks down.
This is exactly like love.
Love is nothing special. Love isn’t something that we have to mine from the sweat of our brow. Love isn’t something tangible like fruit or clothing. It’s not even something purely conceptual like war or money.
It’s like the air: almost ludicrously abundant, the fundamental currency of life. Intangible, but real; everywhere, but invisible.
We might not be able to see the air, but we can all feel it: the rustle of the wind in the trees or the almost imperceptible caress of a zephyr on our cheek. At other times, the air is master of our existence: trapped inside a hurricane or in a storm on the high seas.
So too love: if we stop we can usually feel love even on the calmest of days. But love is no less there even when we can’t perceive it, in the same way that the air is no less there because we can’t feel the wind or see the trees swaying.
We don’t need to notice or think about the air in order to breathe. All we need to do is let our autonomic system do its thing.
Like the air, love is always there for us, unconditional. We only need to open our nostrils, throat and lungs and breathe: love in, love out.
Of course, neither air nor love are always entirely wholesome. We have polluted air and we have polluted love. Most people some of the time have moments when they find it hard to breathe—most people some of the time find love hard to feel, detect, receive or return.
But tapping off another living being’s supply of love is akin to standing on the hose that pumps oxygen into the lungs of a ICU patient.
Maybe, I thought one morning as I awoke from an aural dream, maybe I’m worrying too much. Maybe I’m trying too hard. Maybe I don’t have to do anything for love except let my autonomic system do the easy work: breath in, breath out.
The out breath is important. We can’t stockpile air: we’d explode. We can’t stockpile love either. Love is desperate for circulation. Without circulation, the whole system breaks down. So we don’t hold our breath: we breathe out.
My breathing is shallow. Next time I’m standing by the sink or staring into the pixels, I’ll imagine I’m breathing in all the love in the world—wouldn’t I breathe deeply then?
And wouldn’t I breathe out as deeply, because I want to share this carbon with the trees and this love with all living beings.
Are you a hedgehog or a fox? It’s a question that goes back to an Isaiah Berlin essay and one that helped Malcolm Gladwell determine that he was destined to become a journalist, not an academic.
A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.
The distinction is wafted at, but totally unexplained, in this slightly unhinged profile of Gladwell in the Independent. The most interesting thing Big Malc says is when he’s asked whether he has ‘a gift’ for writing:
[I]f someone worked really hard could they write like me? Yes. But it’s a bit like saying, if someone worked really hard they could have your personality. My writing is who I am. Is good writing available to a larger group of people than we think? Absolutely. But the amount of work that goes into my writing… The last piece I did was 12 drafts, and if you write 12 drafts, I guess it’s going to be a pretty good piece, but how many people will do 12 drafts?
It’s not a style; it’s who you are. It’s not a gift; it’s hard work.
Which brings me neatly onto…
The value of persistence in comedy writing
I’m currently reading Good Habits, Bad Habits by Wendy Wood, one of the world’s leading social psychologists. She describes one piece of research that shows how we consistently underestimate the power of persistence.
At Northwestern University, Brian Lucas and Loren Nordgren asked a group of comedians to come up with as many punchlines to a setup as they could in four minutes.
Then they had to stop and tell the researchers how many more ideas they could come up with if they carried on for another four minutes. Typically, the comedy writers reckoned that they’d come up with fewer ideas after the break.
But when they were forced (presumably at gunpoint) to work for another four minutes, the comedians actually came up with more ideas than they expected—almost as many as in the first burst of creativity.
Lucas and Nordgren’s follow up studies showed that we particularly underestimate the value of persistence for creative tasks. In one experiment with over two hundred participants, the responses generated while persisting with the task in the second time period were significantly more creative than the responses generated initially.
A television pitch that I helped write was passed on by a production company this week. This isn’t, in itself, much of a surprise. Rejections happen all the time in life, let alone in television. But the manner of this particular rejection was, let’s say, interesting.
To be fair to the rejector, her words weren’t necessarily meant for our eyes — she was replying to another developer who’d forwarded our pitch to her — but nonetheless, I found those words, let’s persist in saying, interesting.
The email began:
It’s nice to hear from you — thanks for getting in touch with us about this project. I certainly admire their dedication and determination with this, they’re not ones to take no for an answer are they?!
And continued:
The project wouldn’t be one for us though at the moment unfortunately […] It’s a real shame because, as I say, I really admire their chutzpah!
Sending a pitch out to television companies looking for scripts to develop isn’t usually what I’d call chutzpah and the language of this particular rejection could be read as patronising, but that would do a disservice to the truth: chutzpah is what it takes to get stuff made.
Chutzpah is exactly what T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock struggled with: ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ and later, equally as ambitious: ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’
Needless to say, Prufrock ends his days gazing out to sea, wondering ‘would it have been worth while, to have bitten off the matter with a smile’? He’ll never know.
Chutzpah gets things moving. Chutzpah is what Prufrock needs to squeeze ‘the universe into a ball, to roll it towards some overwhelming question’.
That question, for Prufrock as for us, isn’t necessarily a cosmic one. It might be as simple as following up on an unanswered pitch I sent to the Guardian last week: I know you can’t reply to every pitch, but just checking — did you get my email?
The developer was absolutely right: dedication and determination are essential character traits – in pretty much every human endeavour, let alone the creative arts. We need to keep putting out what she calls chutzpah: a thick skin she just helped make thicker.
The job of the artist is to inspire the people with money to pay for the art. The people with the money never want to pay for the art. They are only there to make the money.
[…] Half the job [of being an artist] is making the art and the other half is being a politician for your art and coming up with a believable, positive, forward-thinking, money-making story around why your story matters.
So what have you been rejected for recently? Follow it up: maybe with an even more forward-thinking, money-making story, or simply by trying to inspire some other person with money to pay for your art.
Now is not the time to step back into the shadows, like Prufrock, and cry out, ‘No!’:
I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Instead: follow up, finish the scene, be there when the curtain falls.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been eating what I’m calling an eggy vegan diet: vegan plus eggs. (On the eggs: not many, and none in the past week.)
Why am I doing this? Mainly because there has never been a better time to make radical changes to my sturdiest habits — and that definitely includes my diet.
Contrary to appearances, this post is less about veganism and more about habit making and breaking, using as an example a fundamental part of our daily lives that a lot people believe is almost impossible to change: diet.
The story begins with fragility and its opposite: antifragility.
We are all antifragile
Extreme constraints like those we face in lockdown are often seen as negatives, but without anything holding us in we’d be nothing more than puddles of carbon and water.
Constraints aren’t just fundamental to our existence; they’re the only reason we have anything worth living for: the arts, crafts, science and even play.
In golf, players have to get a little white ball into a marginally bigger hole 410 yards away. That’s the game. But skill only comes into the picture when we add the limiting constraint: the players have to move the ball with a metal stick. Without this constraint, Tiger Woods isn’t worth $640 million.
Constraints ostensibly make things harder, but in so doing make things possible.
This guiding principle explains why humans are, to borrow the neologism of Nicholas Nassim Taleb, antifragile. Fragile objects shatter when mishandled. Robust objects are impervious to mishandling. But antifragile objects actually improve with mishandling.
It’s a wild concept, but true nevertheless: press ups only make you stronger by first breaking down your muscle fibres. At school, understanding begins with confusion.
Similarly, if we adopt an antifragile mindset, the rough treatment we’re suffering under Covid-19 will make us stronger. A sudden upturning of our nest might be mistaken for a vindictive catastrophe; it is rather a ‘moment of change’.
Isolation as a global ‘moment of change’
‘Moments of change’ are occasions where the circumstances of an individual’s life change considerably within a relatively short time frame.
Remind you of any recent events?
This definition comes from a 2011 report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which summarises the ‘moments of change’ research, analysing these rare opportunities for changing our behaviour, our habits and even our most primal conceptions of who we are.
The NEF study picks out some common moments of change that happen occasionally in most lifetimes: leaving home for the first time, the transition to parenthood, moving house, retirement, energy crises and global recessions.
But I can’t think of a more dramatic moment of change in my lifetime than the Covid-19 pandemic.
Change your environment, change your behaviour
Habits, by definition, are automatic patterns of behaviour: actions we take without really thinking too much. They can be remarkably stubborn and resistant to change — but they’re also tightly bonded to our surroundings.
Think about how hard it would be trying to work down the pub compared to when you’re in the office. You’re the same person — your habits haven’t gone anywhere — but the different environments cue different routines and end up completely changing how you behave.
The opportunities presented by moments of change come about because most of our habits are actually interactions with our immediate physical and social environment.
For most of us, these interactions have been disrupted by self-isolation. The transition from your workplace to working at home is an obvious example of the disruption in environmentally cued behaviour that a lot of us are feeling right now.
But what’s happened to your shopping environment, your eating environment, your exercise environment, your socialising environment? If you’re anything like me, then everything has been thrown up in the air.
All our habitual environments have been shaken up, interrupting the routine behaviours they usually cue.
As NEF put it:
When something interrupts performance of the old behaviour, the need for some degree of conscious direction returns — and once this has happened, the behaviour may be more susceptible to change.
Right now, interruption is happening on a massive scale. Suddenly, we all have to exercise a ‘degree of conscious direction’, perhaps for the first time in many years. The habit discontinuities we’re all facing are opportunities to change our routine behaviour in our relationships, work life, consumer habits, physical fitness and — why not? — diet.
Every breakfast for the past three years, I’ve unerringly eaten 250g of high-fat Greek yoghurt, with oats, raisins and nuts. Not, you’ll note, vegan.
A large proportion of meals also came with grated cheese and I’d frequently demolish an afternoon snack of creamy nuts: that’s about 100ml of double cream in a bowl filled with nuts. Not, you’ll note — heck, that’s scarcely edible for most people, let alone vegan.
So going vegan — even eggy vegan — was not going to be easy on my gut.
Lo and behold, my first four days without dairy were peppered with splitting headaches and slothish lethargy. From previous dietary experiments, I’d been expecting this miserable side effect, so I knew how to barrel through.
I like to imagine that these headaches were my dairy-loving bacteria putting up one hell of a fight. On the fifth day, though, they are defeated: starved out of existence and replaced with bacteria that prefer to get their nutrition from celery sticks and tempeh.
This explanation, if not completely upheld by science, is at the very least ‘sciency’, as I explain in this post about quitting sugar. No matter its degree of accuracy, this ‘explanation’ eases me through the temporary fog of headaches and tiredness, out to the other side: eggy veganism.
I have taken this moment of change to try on an alternate personality that’s interested me for a while.
But will I want to maintain the diet when lockdown ends?
We don’t want ‘normal’
Historical data from the NEF report suggest that behaviour changes made under pressure don’t tend to last once the crisis is over. Indeed, the hope that everything will go back to normal is why many people are happy to temporarily surrender their usual lifestyles in the first place.
It’s almost certain that I’ll be offered meat or dairy when I return to society — most of my friends and family aren’t vegan and I’m not so wedded to this lifestyle that I’d turn down food if they’re kind enough to cook for me.
But forget other people, after lockdown I myself will be tempted to choose dairy much more frequently than I am now.
Before Covid-19, I went food shopping every couple of days; at the moment, it’s once every 7-10 days. That means I only have to ‘resist’ buying meat or dairy once a week — easy.
My shopping habits feed (pun intended) directly into my eating habits. Change my shopping environment and I change my eating environment: at home I only have eggy vegan choices now.
When society opens back up, will I maintain my new shopping habits? Will my post-lockdown shopping habits, whatever they are, support or undermine my new eggy vegan diet? I don’t know.
But those of us who have used this moment of change to try on an alternate personality — and decide that we want to keep it — must reject the almost irresistible return to normality. We don’t want to abandon our old habits temporarily. We don’t want to go back to ‘normal’ any more. We want change.
It’s one thing to build good habits in this ascetic Covid-19 environment; it’s quite another making them robust enough to survive the shock of opening up. But by anticipating the challenge of impending normality — in the way that I anticipated the headaches and lethargy of quitting dairy — we have at least a chance.
Smug as
So, the big question: how did I replace my heaped bowl of yoghurt every morning? The answer, quite simply: I didn’t — I couldn’t. What in the plant kingdom could possibly imitate animal fats? Genetically, I don’t think it’s possible.
(And, no, the answer is not ‘oat crème fraîche’. Vegetables oils are exactly that: oily. They slimily slither over the tongue and cling to a clammy palate. Dairy fats are, in contrast, fatty. They somehow sink to the bottom of the stomach, leaving a feeling of satiety and a clean taste in the mouth. Mine at least.)
The answer was to cut the Gordian Knot, remove ‘breakfast’ entirely and replace it with something even better than breakfast.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve started my day with a 30g pea and rice protein shake, which I drink while cracking on with work. The green mush is much easier to digest than a big bowl of dairy and keeps me alert throughout my new-found, vegan-inspired morning work regimen.
Smug as fuck.
We’ve. Got. Time.
It’s worth saying that habit change isn’t the same for all people, in all environments and for all behaviours.
I personally find going ‘cold turkey’ has been the best approach for changing diet and has served me well when cutting out sugar and caffeine. I didn’t want to gradually phase out dairy: it would’ve been too hard for me to resist binging. The downside is that I knew I’d have four days of headaches.
But going from zero to a sixty with press ups or running is the quickest way to fail. Run a marathon tomorrow and I’ll be injured for a month. If I’m injured, I can’t build a habit. Far better to start slow and build than to rush for the line and fall.
As well as physical limitations, there are mental limitations.
It doesn’t make sense to force myself to do yoga if I’m not enjoying it. That’s why my daily yoga habit is simply to do as much yoga as I feel like. At the beginning, nearly five months ago, that was five minutes before bed. Now it’s around 20 minutes, twice a day.
My goal is not the accomplishment of some landmark. My goal is to build a sustainable, healthy lifestyle. Cold turkey is one approach and a slow-build while only doing as much as I enjoy is another. For both, I find this mantra helpful: don’t miss twice.
Whichever approach you find most helpful, if there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the past four weeks it’s to slow down and take each day as it comes. We’ve. Got. Time.
Over to us
Kintsugi is the traditional Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. Sure — super glue also works, but kintsugi is a reminder that we can choose to see the beauty in broken things.
Our work habits are broken. Good. Our social habits are broken. Good. Our shopping habits are broken. Good. We’ve probably got another 18 months of on-and-off lockdown. What are we going to do with this fracture in our habits? Are we fragile, are we going to shatter? Or are we antifragile, are we going to fill the cracks with gold?
My eggy vegan diet isn’t nearly as smug as it sounds. After two weeks, I still get faint bouts of acid reflux and I’ve had to shelve the peanut butter. I’ve read some stuff about ‘alkalising’ my food, but until I’ve had a chance to read more studies, I’m dubious.
This is still a journey of exploration for me. Yesterday I discovered one of the great secrets of vegan cooking: miso paste — in fact, sauces in general. The hand blender has become my closest ally.
I know some of you are plant-based: if you are vegan (or close enough), then I’d love to hear what you’ve learned so far. Honestly. Please drop me an email.
Whatever you think about veganism, I hope I’ve convinced you that isolation is a rare opportunity to get inside your own head, have a rummage around, learn some cool stuff and change for the better — or at least for the more interesting.
Following Edith Eger, I’m suddenly fascinated by choices. Particularly the way that we usually ascribe momentous deliberation to other people’s decision-making process, but know for ourselves that the process is far more chaotic and flukey.
For example: when I was a teenager, my mum decided to read for a PhD. I’d always assumed that this was the flowering of some long-held academic ambition, one rudely interrupted by the time-sink of raising kids. I assumed that the decision-making process was meticulously worked out over lists, spreadsheets and probably PowerPoint presentations with my dad.
But I’d never actually ever asked her how she came to that decision, until last weekend.
The truth is that, one day, her boss offered her a promotion that she really didn’t want. She went to sit in a cafe to think. She knew that she couldn’t simply refuse the promotion; she needed a good excuse. Then lightning struck — what better excuse than a PhD!
And there’s the chaos and fluke that we airbrush out of everyone else’s lives.
This is tremendously liberating. If everyone else is also floundering around life making decisions in much the same way that you make an omelette, then the pressure is off. It’s fine to flounder. More than fine: my mum also said that choosing to do a PhD was the best decision she ever made.
~
This conversation was inspired by another short passage in The Choice, where Eger writes about making the leap from school teacher to psychologist:
I told my principal I was considering getting my doctorate in psychology. But I couldn’t speak my dream without a caveat. “I don’t know,” I said, “by the time I finish school I’ll be fifty.” He smiled at me. “You’re going to be fifty anyhow,” he said.
Boom. Of course. We’re going to be twenty / forty / sixty / ninety anyhow, we might as well plunge.
Coronavirus is crap. Isolation is brilliant. I’ve spent approximately thirty-seven and a half years of my life trying to please other people and now I find myself entirely alone.
I know everyone loves bigging up their own particular foibles, but of all the neuroses of humanity people pleasing is surely the most pernicious.
First of all: a definition, my definition.
‘People pleasing’ is what happens when you worry too much about what other people might think of you, your behaviour and your life choices.
People pleasing isn’t merely finding it hard to say ‘no’ or a vague desire for everyone to like you. It goes much, much deeper than that, inveigling its needy little voice into every decision you make.
Your own personal pleaszus
Personally, I hear people pleasing as an internal voice of varying pitch and volume that chirps up before, during and after almost any choice or action.
It applies to thoughts great and small — and even to things over which I have no control, like my skin colour, place of birth and fondness for the word ‘quagmire’.
People pleasing kicks in no matter whether my behaviour materially affects anyone else, and regardless of whether anyone has ever even implied that they’re judging me.
‘I’m a writer’ — what do you think about that, friends?
‘I might buy some oat milk’ — any objections, random stranger?
‘Quagmire’ — is that okay by you, planet earth?
As you can imagine, it’s exhausting.
In my case, people pleasing tends to go alongside that ancient and noble art that counsellors admonish as ‘mindreading’ — I assume that I understand other people’s thought processes without actually asking them.
In other words, rather than double checking that the people I’m trying to ‘please’ actually give a shit, I tie my stomach up in knots trying to take into account whatever I imagine their lofty opinions might be.
You’re very welcome, people.
Please please me
Most of us — I’m including my former self — believe that people pleasing is one of three things. Moving up the scale, we think that people pleasing is either:
A charming and considerate personality trait.
Harmless.
A total waste of time because the people you’re trying to please won’t notice, don’t care or are disfiguringly ungrateful.
People pleasing is none of these things. (It is a waste of time, but not for those reasons.)
It’s taken four weeks of living with myself, with next to zero face-to-face critical feedback or approval, for me to realise that people pleasing is nothing — nothing — but passing the buck.
People pleasing is a bullshit excuse my subconscious uses to avoid taking responsibility for my choices. End of. (It’s not the end of, there’s more — keep reading. Please?)
Mind games, forever
In life, we all have choices — or at least the illusion of choices.
Embedded in every choice is a dollop of responsibility. Some people take responsibility for their own choices and some people don’t. People pleasers fall into the second category.
A concrete example is in order.
Mind 1: People pleasing
Ooh, maybe I should drop everything and become an academic because both of my parents have PhDs and I’m sure they secretly want me to be a professor.
Note how my interior monologue is subtly passing the responsibility for my genuine, if far-fetched, choice over whether to become an academic onto my parents. It’s not really my decision, my little voice says, it’s theirs by proxy.
Worse still, this people pleasing is based on a completely fictitious version of my parents: they’ve never even hinted that they might like me to work in academia.
In this mind, I’m not choosing for myself; I’m trying to second guess what someone else might choose for me.
Mind 2: Non people pleasing
Ooh, maybe I could drop everything and become an academic! Hm. I could ask my parents what they think, particularly my mum, who got her PhD in her fifties. Why did she decide to go back to university? That’d be really helpful to know and might give me a clue as to what I could expect from academia. But we’re different people and, whatever I choose, I will choose for myself, not for her or anyone else.
Isn’t this amazingly rational? After all, there’s nothing wrong in having far-fetched ideas like dropping everything to become an academic. Ultimately, though, the decision-making buck stops with me.
After hearing Mind 2, it seems hard to believe that anyone would think like Mind 1, but believe me it happens. And if the Internet is anything to go by, it happens a lot.
The other side of the mirror
People pleasing is a two person game, although the second player is usually reluctant. The people I am supposed to be ‘pleasing’ must either accept the responsibility I’m trying to subcontract — or they can reject it.
It’s an unwinnable game with only two outcomes:
I’ve not met anyone who can take bear responsibility for another adult human’s choices without buckling under the weight of expectation. The friendship is strained, the work becomes hard and everyone loses.
But if player two chooses to reject the responsibility (as they must eventually), that only hurts the people pleaser — and exacerbates their anxiety to please. It’s back to square one, or it’s game over.
You see, people pleasing isn’t only damaging for the pleaser; it’s also a cruel gift for the people we’re trying to please, usually those we love the most.
This is why I say people pleasing is so pernicious: people pleasers hide behind their ‘niceness’, but in truth it’s a poisoned chalice.
So far, so depressing.
‘And with a single mighty bound, he was free!’
Lockdown has been many things for many people, but for me it has been a once-in-a-decade opportunity to sit with myself, almost in hermitage.
One thing I’ve realised is that I really look forward to seeing people — as you would expect for a people pleaser. Quite often I would look at my calendar and fix on some future social event: going for a group run or ride, writing Foiled with my co-writer or going up to Bristol to play Frisbee with friends.
And then I’d just sort of fill time until then.
Yes, I would do some tasks that to the untrained eye might look productive, but often I hadn’t really taken responsibility for those tasks. I would do them competently, but mechanically, worried that someone would be upset if I didn’t.
I would subcontract my responsibility.
But since the middle of March the coronavirus has stripped away all of the things by which I would normally mark time. With the empty months stretching out before me, I faced a stark choice — and one for which no one else could possibly take responsibility because all the people I might hope to please are in lockdown too.
Coronavirus has made people pleasing impossible.
So what on earth does the people pleaser do when he knows he’ll not see another human being for a couple of months?
There’s only one practical choice left: he must take responsibility. And not only for the work that he’s committed to for the next couple of months, but for all the choices he’s made over the past thirty-seven and a half years that have brought him to this point.
This is a tremendously liberating feeling, impossible to overstate, almost impossible to put into words. That inveigling little voice? It’s not mine. It’s an eccentric visitor, a curiosity rather than a compass, like a stock photograph on the wall of a corridor.
Edith Eger is a psychotherapist who survived the Holocaust. Her book The Choice tipped the first domino of this mindshift. Particularly this passage:
Most of us want a dictator — albeit a benevolent one — so we can pass the buck, so we can say, “You made me do that. It’s not my fault.” But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet. A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.
I feel like I have stepped out from under someone else’s umbrella — and this whole time it wasn’t even raining.
It may feel like our days are shrinking, that our expansive social and working lives are being stolen away from us.
The reality is that our lives are now being lived in the details, and it is in the details, as any artist or scientist knows, that we find our richest rewards.
~
In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl likens human suffering to gas spreading through a chamber:
[M]an’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
The same metaphor, I would argue, could apply to almost any aspect of human experience, including curiosity, fascination and excitement.
But whereas suffering expands to our limits without much effort on our part, I think most of us have to work a little harder for these positive emotions to fill our chamber.
We might feel, since lockdown, that we’ve lost the richness of experience that comes from travelling up to London for the day, cycling into the country on a weekend, or hiking the Peak District for a week.
Some of us might even pang for the forbidden pleasures of formless office meetings, or fondly remember the frustration of traffic jams that held us up, once upon a time, when we had somewhere to go.
It might feel like we’ve lost something to our days and that the nights, though sleepless, can’t come soon enough.
But those lost experiences could only ever have swollen to fill a finite chamber, the finite chamber that is our destined interval of consciousness on earth.
The experiences that Newtonian physics demands must inevitably replace those that are ‘lost’ will, if we only get out of the way of ourselves, swell to fill an identical space in our soul.
The only thing we need is a little fascination for the details.
~
Rather than the broad strokes of outlandish living, rather than the transcontinental love affairs, the nights out on the dancefloor, the boozy Sunday roasts with friends and family, we choose to exist for now on a smaller scale, in among the overlooked details of our lives.
Be like the mycologist, who could happily spend a dozen lifetimes exploring the thousands of fungi that inhabit a handful of soil.
From where I stand at my desk, I can see sun-facing rooftops covered in bright yellow lichen — Xanthoria parietina (‘grows on walls’).
This week, in among the details, buried in books and podcasts and open access science papers, I learnt that lichen is not one organism, but two.
Most lichens are a mutualist symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, a collaboration that dates back hundreds of millions of years.
Long before humans discovered agriculture, fungi learned to farm algae for the energy they generate from photosynthesis.
(Side note: it’s not just agriculture we have in common; fungi are more closely related genetically to humans than they are to the algae they have domesticated — or indeed to any other plant species.)
I also learnt that lichens cover eight percent of the earth’s surface — more than is covered by tropical rainforest.
Without lichens, there might be no life on earth. They mine minerals from sheer rock and form the first soils in otherwise barren ecosystems. Lichen has been found inside lumps of granite.
Lichens have given us antibiotics, Harris tweed and, as black stone flower, garam masala.
I don’t suppose that I’ll look at that rooftop in quite the same way again. Will you?
~
All about us are the tools of enquiry — our senses, our curiosity and vast repositories of knowledge waiting to be dusted off and discovered. (I’m talking about the Internet.)
Has anyone else noticed how quiet the world is now? How ripe for observation?
That photograph at the top of the page, of the 140 million year old fossilised tree: I would never have noticed that staggering lump of palaeontology if it weren’t for the ‘boredom’ of lockdown.
There is an openness to the world right now. In our long days, we have time to notice the things that were once drowned out by the clamour of ‘business as usual’.
Rather than asking, ‘What’s on Netflix?’, we find ourselves asking instead, ‘How does the haze form, that makes this sunset so beautiful?’
Like the lichen on the rooftops opposite, everywhere we look there are questions that could seed many lifetimes of fascination, with each new discovery opening up new tunnels of exploration like the hyphae that forage and fracture to create the mycelium network that breaks up and becomes the soil beneath our feet.
Fascination is built from the combination of curiosity and imagination; given those ingredients, it is boundless. If you’re not sure, check the ingredients list on your garam masala.
~
I’m currently reading Edith Eger’s book The Choice. Like Viktor Frankl, Eger also survived the Holocaust. Like Frankl, Eger also moved to the US, also became a psychologist and also wrote a fascinating book about her experiences.
In April 1944, crammed into a cattle carriage with a hundred other Jews, destined for the gas chambers and smoke stacks of Auschwitz, Eger’s mother told her:
“Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”
These words sustained Eger during the year of captivity and abuse that almost killed her a dozen times over.
Our self-isolation is nothing remotely like what Eger and Frankl experienced during the Second World War, but Eger’s mother’s message holds true: it’s time to fill our minds.
~
You could do a lot worse over the next few weeks than to fill your mind with either The Choice or Man’s Search for Meaning.
After finishing an online game of Codenames on Tuesday night, my friends said goodnight, put down the phone and went their separate ways. I was left alone.
The nothingness swept into the emptiness and I had to sit down.
There’s nothing I look forward to more than seeing my friends. So, for the next couple of months, I have nothing to look forward to.
That was my thinking.
I undressed for an early night, hoping for consolation between the sheets of my bed, between pages of a book.
Then the phone rang. I looked at the unknown number, and unexpectedly answered.
It was a good friend I hadn’t spoken to for four, five years and my thinking was thrown on its head.
When life looks loneliest, there are people thinking and caring about you. Sometimes they’ll ring at that precise moment; sometimes they won’t and you’ll never realise unless you look at things in another way.
Sometimes these thoughtful people are friends, old or new; sometimes they’re people you barely knew, who crossed your path but once on the streets of New York, who you know can never find you or call you, but who are thinking about you with a smile, singing a song for you nonetheless.
~
Am I alone? There’s always another way of looking at things.
Here in Bournemouth, hundreds of people are drawn to the seafront. Keeping to the two-metre rule is difficult and demands nimble, if not outright acrobatic footwork.
This could be annoying. It could be an inconvenience. Or it could be the end of perceived isolation. How can I be alone on such a busy beach?
On Wednesday morning, during a half-hour run, I instituted a new rule: say good morning to every person I pass.
Yesterday, I started counting. I ran past 42 people and 32 of them, much surprised, said good morning back, making me fist-pump with pleasure.
(The other 10 mostly had headphones on so probably didn’t notice me.)
Perhaps now the time is ripe for extravagant enthusiasm: for us to go beyond everyday norms and stake out the boundaries of the world we want to see, rather than the world penned by the apparent limits of quarantine.
Extravagant: to wander out of bounds; fantastically absurd, flagrantly excessive behaviour. Also: a choice, a way of seeing things.
Enthusiasm: possession by a god; inspired greatness; a deifying of terrestrial behaviour. Also: a choice, a way of seeing things.
After all, I’d rather be known as the guy who says good morning to everyone than as the guy who… well, almost anything else, right? Perhaps this is the fourth sign of ageing: a contraction of ambition to the point where being known for decency is the pinnacle of heroism, but still…
A poster has recently been put up on Bournemouth seafront. It’s a crowdfunding campaign to buy a stroller for an elderly dog. The dog, the poster informs us, usually accompanies a man who has picked tonnes of litter from the beach over the years of daily exercise.
I don’t know anything about this man, except that he is known for his prodigious litter picking, for his extravagant enthusiasm for making our world more pleasant.
~
In isolation and loneliness, extravagant enthusiasm is a classic Stoic intervention: working within stringent limitations to explore hidden expanses of freedom.
~
Some ideas for extravagant enthusiasm:
Greet everyone. No exceptions. If you’re overtaking, then wait until you’re level or slightly ahead and then turn: most people will look at you.
Establish eye contact well in advance. This is not a drive-by; this is a firm, positive connection.
Speak up.
Smile.
It doesn’t have to be ‘good morning’. ‘Alright?’, ‘Beautiful day!’ and similar all work. Vary your game if you get bored.
Don’t be intimidated by groups or people in conversation: be confident and cheerful. You’re not interrupting; you’re like the weather: warm, sunny and just there.
Maintain eye contact after speaking. People will be surprised and think that you can’t possibly be wishing them well. Disabuse them of this notion.
If it gets weird, add a nod or a thumbs up.
Thumbs up is the perfect sign language for people wearing headphones and people at a greater distance as well.
Feel free to continue the chat at a safe distance.
Imagine a world high above the world, a world full of budding life, far from the ills of the world, where even the strayest human passes distantly beneath the world; a world of nooks and canopies giving out onto blue skies and blackbirds, a world we can explore anew, like we did when we were new, when hours would pass before anyone came calling; a world of secret hideaways and free isolation, where perspective comes easy, far over and above schooldays and workdays; a world where we might find refuge, shelter and peace.
This world is here. Up here. In the trees.
Last Saturday was the International Day of Forests and I accidentally observed the moment by climbing no less than six trees.
Crouched in the branches of a pine that grows like a climbing frame over the gate to our garden, watching the toings and froings of pensioners and parents in their two metre bubbles, I am struck by a memory of one of the first short stories I ever wrote.
Perched was written more than ten years ago, during the dying days of my office-based career, written while sitting at the foot of a willow along the banks of the Thames in August, on an evening before and after long days as a stifling data entry clerk.
It wasn’t obvious until a month later, when I walked out of the job without notice, what this story was about. Now, as I perch on this flaking old pine, I’m jolted back to its secret yearnings to escape the day-to-day, up and away, into the canopy.
He was perched high up in the tree with his fingers curled around the branch like a bird. He was frozen still, but his muscles were taut as if he were about to fly away. Which of course he wasn’t, because, aside from being a man in a bowler hat perched in a tree, he looked perfectly normal.
If you’re keen, you can read the rest of the very short story here.
You know why big retailers have loyalty cards, don’t you? Yep — so they can build a picture of your shopping habits and the shopping habits of three generations of humankind and use all this data to sell you more stuff. Cool.
The data these cards collect is a significant revenue stream for supermarkets.
Did you know, for example, that Tesco has its own international data analysis company, Dunhumby? They’re actually a pretty big deal, employing over three thousand people in more than thirty countries worldwide, analysing the habits of over 1.3 billion shoppers.
And their analysis can result in some terrifyingly precise marketing campaigns that exploit ‘downstream-plus-context-change’ interventions.
Your supermarket loyalty card scheme will know when you fall pregnant — sometimes before you’ve told anyone else — and will start bombarding you with advertising in an attempt to change your habits so that you’re more profitable for them.
Companies like Dunhumby know that if they can get you now, when your context is changing, when your life is in turmoil, then they stand a good chance of keeping you after the baby arrives and your shopping habits ossify once again. Cool, huh?
This is what we’re interested in.
There’s nothing sinister about downstream-plus-context-change interventions as such: they’re a powerful tool for breaking and reforming robust habits when changing your intention is no longer enough.
‘Downstream’ simply means that you’re in control of the intervention directly (rather than, say, obeying government policy imposed on you ‘upstream’) and ‘context-change’ represents those times in life when big stuff is happening: when you take a new job, move to a new city, start a family — or freak out during a global pandemic.
These are moments when you are vulnerable to substantial and enduring habit change. An opportunity to change ourselves forever. These moments are rare.
Side story: the same mechanism might be on offer during psychedelic trips. The snow globe of your mind is turned upside down and almost everything is up for grabs.
I’ll mention one hopeful grocery-based example here. Yesterday I ran out of fruit and vegetables, so I cycled along to the greengrocer. On my way there, I passed two-metre-spaced queues snaking out of a customer-restricted Tesco Express (housed, shudderingly, inside a deconsecrated church).
When I got to the greengrocer, the shelves were almost audibly complaining about the weight of colourful stacks of seasonal vegetables. Huge sacks of potatoes and other hearty roots were piled up on the cramped shop floor, as if in mocking defiance of the empty supermarket chains.
After filing up my panniers, I asked the woman at the till whether she was busier than normal. ‘A lot busier,’ she said. ‘Hopefully, after this is all over, they’ll keep coming back.’
Thanks to this context-change intervention of Covid-19, I think there’s a good chance this shopkeeper will be quietly pleased come Autumn.
Switching lanes: what other habits could we loop-the-loop with?
I’m a freelance writer, so — as I mentioned last week — my worklife hasn’t actually changed much. I still don’t go to the office, I still don’t chat to colleagues over a brew, I still don’t meet face-to-face with customers or clients.
I work mostly alone, in isolation, as normal.
What has changed, however, is my social connection. And not for the worse.
Over the past week, I have had twenty-six conversations with friends on the phone. As well as these conversations, I’ve also taken part in a virtual pub quiz with rooms full of friends, played online Codenames and Pictionary, had several massive Zoom video meetups — and, of course, cycled off on a remote Thighsolation group ride with a whole peloton of pals from around the world.
Because I need professional help, I have kept a spreadsheet of every single phone call or face-to-face meeting I’ve had with friends over the past three years. Happily, that means we can compare data.
Corona Isolation: 26 conversations
20-26 February 2020: 8 conversations
20-26 January 2020: 18 conversations
20-26 March 2019: 18 conversations
20-26 March 2018: 8 conversations
Three observations:
Weird palindromic pattern in the non-corona numbers.
Ordinarily, I’m pretty isolated, averaging less than two conversations with friends or family per day.
This past week, in contrast, I have had more than three and a half conversations with friends every day.
Obviously, for most people who aren’t freelance WFH writers, this social trend will have been sharply negative. My point isn’t to brag, but to show that change is possible.
If you’re feeling disconnected, then let’s set up a fifteen minute call. What’s to lose? On Tuesday, I had a really nice connection with a friend who got in touch after seeing my Calendly message in last week’s email. Simply book a time slot any day between 6 and 9pm GMT and let’s chat.
There has never been a better time to get into better habits.
We all secretly know this, by the way. It makes me happy to look out of my window and see so many people jogging, cycling and walking past in the sunshine, all discovering what Søren Kierkegaard observed:
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
One of the corona-habits I’m pleased to have slammed back into my routine is cold showers. I would write something inspirational about the experience, but James Parker at The Atlantic has done the work for me:
The water hits, and biology asserts itself. You are not a tired balloon of cerebral activity; you are a body, and you are being challenged. You gulp air; your pulse thumps. Your brain, meanwhile, your lovely, furry old brain, goes glacier-blue with shock. Thought is abolished. Personality is abolished. You’re a nameless mammal under a ravening jet of cold water.
How else I would like to change in the crisis?
I’d like to smile at strangers more (not in a creepy way). I noticed last week that I was avoiding eye contact, as if eyesight was corona laser beams. It takes some courage to look someone in the eye and smile, but it’s always worthwhile, especially if you’re otherwise avoiding one another, quite literally, like the plague.
I’d like to spend three hours outside every day. As this isn’t really possible anymore, I’d like to make the most of the time I can spend outside: suck up the sunshine, the scents and smells.
Related: I’d like to do more foraging. Nature’s allotment is overflowing with three-cornered leek and wild garlic at the moment, and a friend taught me last week that the beautiful hawthorn flowers are edible, leaving a delightfully peppery, buttery aftertaste.
Last weekend I spent four, five, six, seven hours a day rambling in the Peak District. It’s the perfect isolation activity. Solitary, wondrous: an easy way to free yourself from the invisible bonds that are tying you down.
Staggering down from Bamford Moor, I stumbled into a shady grove of stripped oaks, clad in living moss. I climbed over a crumbled drystone wall and sat with my back to the rocks and listened carefully for the sound of carbon-based lifeforms.
Back in Bournemouth, I’ve been breaking the isolation with walks along the seafront, watching the ceaseless, sleepless tide, in-out, ti-de.
I always make sure to ramble through the copse that stands on the clifftops and, invariably, my footsteps slow and I’m drawn upwards, climbing up through the stepladder branches that spiral a pine or holm oak.
My companion on these climbs is Jack Cooke, author of The Tree Climber’s Guide:
Trees anchor us in nature’s cycle; lining our pavements and filling our parks, they remind us of another kind of time-keeping, a vegetable clock that keeps ticking to an alternative rhythm.
In this strange alternative reality, trees are a comfort. All is not rosie in the garden: trees wrestle with their own diseases, of course, but they are a warm embrace when another warm embrace could be infectious.
The awakening buds and the loud birdsong remind us that life is still growing strong. It’s easy to spend my time in front of screens, refreshing, counting time until recovery. But the trees give me a reason to trust in time.
Space and time
Are not the mathematics that your will
Imposes, but a green calendar
Your heart observes
~ R.S. Thomas, Green Categories
I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that there’s a tree’s roots growing underneath me and that its branches reach up above me. That some people believe me and some people love me.
The mental health benefits from nature-based activities like gardening, conservation and farming are impressive:
Psychological restoration and increased general mental wellbeing
Reduction in depression, anxiety and stress related symptoms
Improvement in dementia-related symptoms
Improved self-esteem, confidence and mood
Increased attentional capacity and cognition
Improved happiness, satisfaction and quality of life
Sense of peace, calm or relaxation
Feelings of safety and security
Increased social contact, inclusion and sense of belonging (okay, maybe not so much right now…)
Increase in work skills, meaningful activity and personal achievement
There is good news outdoors.
The National Trust are closing their indoor attractions, but intend to keep the larger gardens, parks and forests open to the public, for free — even waiving car parking charges.
Close to home on the south coast, Purbeck nature sanctuary has recently tripled in size, creating the largest lowland heath in England at a site already renowned for its wildlife diversity. Life is still growing strong.
Transcend #2: Dark Skies
My last night in the Peak District was fresh and bright. I strode away from the acid lights of the youth hostel, found a sheep-cropped clearing, and looked up. The milky clouds rushed overhead, pulling back like a curtain on a light show for the rapture.
Seeing more stars than I had done for a long time, I stretched my power of imagination and learned a few nice things.
We are all poorer for our light pollution. The night sky outdoes any of our tawdry displays — but only when you can see the constellations that come alive in the dark. This is a map of the UK at night, with light pollution marked in colour from green through to yellow and red in our cities. Aim for the blackness: the Dark Sky Reserves.
The famous Plough is actually a small part — an asterism — of Ursa Major, the hind quarters of a much bigger beast that rears menacingly over the night. A mother protecting her cub, but only in the darkness. In most of our skies, the fearsome monster is reduced to an outmoded piece of farmyard machinery.
I connected the dots and found Leo for the first time. Leo is not a difficult beast to conjure, but if you don’t know where to look… He follows the Plough in the sky, facing the wrong way, with a question mark head and an isosceles rump. It’s really more spectacular than I make it sound.
In times like these, we can seek refuge in the infinite universe and feel the love come down.
For the past few years, I’ve contributed to The Next Challenge grant to help ordinary folks go on extraordinary adventures. The grant is run by adventurer and accountant Tim Moss and every year I’m flabbergasted by the audacity of the dozen or so winners.
People like Katie Marston, a swimming teacher from Cumbria, who is using the grant to embark on a ‘leave no trace’ adventure: paddleboarding across nine lakes and hiking the land between.
The grant is an annual reminder that everyone’s adventure is just over the threshold.
On which note: Alastair Humphreys recently started a newsletter that’s got me very excited. The Working Adventurer is his attempt to answer your — our questions.
I’m uncertain, for now, quite what direction all this all might go — that depends on the questions you ask. But in the same way that curiosity, serendipity, momentum and adventure show up once you dare yourself to get out of the front door and have a look around, I decided to just get started and give this a go.
The wind on Kinder is a sensory deprivation chamber.
The rattling, booming noise cuts out my sound sense; I can’t hear the tread of my feet in the bog above the screaming of my rain jacket and the howling of the withered grass.
My vision comes woozy from the wind: walking the path is like standing on the prow of a ship, eyes contending with a force that won’t be seen.
Proprioception is meaningless, my feet can only guess and hope where they might land next. Balance goes too, as moment to moment my ear canals rush with gusts and lulls.
The wind whips away my breath, making hard going over easy ground. Smells only come from the southwest, and much too quickly to distinguish anything of use.
Rushing up from the valley, the rain hits from below. I veer off course, staggering from one path to another until I reach a cluster of boulders, offering each other shelter since the last ice age, resisting the wind — and losing.
Last Saturday night, on Day 2 of a weekend bushcraft course, I slept in a shelter that I’d built out of dead branches, pine fronds and compacted leaf litter. As you can see, it was cosy…
When I woke up after my eight hours to a bright sunrise, I was actually a little disappointed that my shelter-building skills hadn’t been tested by the heavy rain we’d been promised overnight.
I don’t know if you remember the storm last Saturday night, but it turns out that, contrary to intense scepticism, our instructors were correct: compacted leaf litter is not only solidly stormproof, but soundproof too.
A fine skill learned, but I couldn’t help reflecting that this bushcraft course would have been laughable a hundred or so years ago.
As we threw ourselves pell-mell into foraging, fire-setting and shelter-building, the instructors asked us questions like, ‘Have you made bread at home before?’, ‘Do you know how to find the North Star?’, ‘What’s a good firewood?’ and ‘Who knows how to gut a trout?’
We weren’t a particularly naive group, but all these question were met with shrugs — not unanimous shrugs, perhaps, but certainly majority shrugs.
Surely these questions would have been batted off by our ancestors, laughed at by those who preceded us by a generation or two.
~
That said, you could make a case that none of the things we learnt on the weekend are much use in the modern age.
Who needs to know how to filter water through a thick-weave cotton shirt when it comes clean from the taps?
Who needs to know how to gather dry firewood in winter when we have central heating or can buy fuelwood from the local garage?
Who needs to know the waterproofing qualities of leaf litter when we have four walls and a roof — or, at the very least, a tent?
And yet everyone on the course — even the young woman whose main priority was to protect her impressive acrylic nail art — found a weekend in the woods somehow nourishing, in spite, or perhaps because of its primitivism.
~
So what is it that makes learning bushcraft skills valuable, even today?
I think the answer can be summed up in a single word: competence.
It’s not necessarily the case that I’ll use my newly-won knowledge of natural shelter-building ever again, but there’s something reassuring about knowing that I know.
Competence breeds self-confidence, self-efficacy and self-assurance — all soft skills transferable to the rest of our lives.
Can you find your way out of a pickle?
Can you fix things that are broken?
Can you survive?
One of the mantras of the instructors was, ‘In a survival situation…’. They invited us to imagine a catastrophe that left us all alone in the wilderness, with only our wits to feed, clothe and shelter us. (The phrase was usually followed by the description of something highly illegal in the UK.)
But I am not a prepper. I have no interest in building these skills for self-preservation. I only want to become a competent member of the tribe. Someone who can be relied on when needed. Someone who can help others become stormproof.
~
Being outdoors can look a lot like being for oneself, in isolation. But, for me, being outdoors is being for others. I would not be interested in learning these skills if not to share them with, and use them for others.
I’m lucky that I have an outlet or two for the skills that I’m learning. Over the past couple of years, and almost by accident, I’ve become an outdoor leader.
This summer I’ll be part of a team helping 60 cyclists travel some of Europe’s wildest corners, camping all the way.
Last year’s adventures on Thighs of Steel were quite possibly the greatest outdoors experience of my life thus far. Not because of being for myself, in isolation, but because of being for others.
Earlier this week, I got my first ever contract for outdoor instructing, working for a small company that delivers DofE expeditions for schools.
I’ll be part of a team that introduces dozens of children to the outdoors, perhaps for the first time. My competence is central to the success of the programme and I take pride in that responsibility.
~
One of my fellow students on the bushcraft course, an affable retired police officer, loves the outdoors. Beside the fire every night, he told stories of wild fishing in the icy lakes of Snowdonia, his eyes flickering in the flamelight.
He’d caught the outdoors bug as a schoolboy fifty years earlier: on his DofE expedition. These journeys can last a lifetime.
My own appreciation of the outdoors can be traced back to Christmas and Easter family holidays to the Lake District, the Brecon Beacons or the Yorkshire Dales.
My memories are of splashing through trickling, gushing, freshet becks, hopping from stone to stone, and scoffing Kendal Mint Cake.
I’m writing to you from Edale, in the Peak District. Yesterday I walked up Kinder Scout to see the boulders of the Wool Pack and the ice fields of Kinder Downfall, but the origin of this walk can be traced back to before I was born.
In the early seventies, my dad came here after handing in his PhD thesis: relief that it was over, looking forward to a year of adventure, travelling overland to Australia with his young wife.
My mum has even older history here: a photograph of her on Mam Tor in the sixties, feeling the same breeze that whips my hair from my scalp, decades later.
The outdoors is being for others.
~
I went on the Woodland Ways bushcraft weekend. It’s full on, with hardly a moment not learning something. Highly recommended.
I caught the train from Bournemouth to Edale, changing at Manchester Piccadilly. I’m staying at the Edale YHA for £13.50 a night and I had the place to myself last night.
As you may have heard, Turkey has opened their border with the EU, giving refugees the chance to try their luck at crossing.
This has very little to do with humanity; it’s a power game Turkish President Erdogan is playing, trying to leverage either more money or more support for his military manoeuvres in Syria.
The EU was supposed to give Turkey loads of money and ease restrictions on free movement for Turkish people. In exchange, Turkey would accept returns of ‘irregular migrants’ and enforce the EU border in Turkey.
In the meantime, those who break the line of defence will find their journeys stopped in the five ‘hotspot’ islands of the Aegean: Lesvos, Samos, Chios, Kos and Leros, where their asylum claims will be processed (interminably slowly), like as not destined to be returned to Turkey.
The deal has trapped millions of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond.
This was never going to work really, was it?
1) There’s no amount of money you can throw at a problem like this.
The only solution is to flip the script and give refugees the right to work for money themselves from Day 1.
Even the Iron Curtain was permeable. The folly of a hard border demands a Turkish coastguard that is omniscient and omnipresent. It’s not. So boats get through to the island hotspots in Greece, inside the EU.
A hard border also demands that the Greek island communities repulse the new arrivals. But humans don’t do that. We have too much in common; too much solidarity.
As mushy-minded flimsy fools, we are too touched by the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you. Despite reports of black-clad militants in speedboats, Greek volunteers rush the boats with water and warmth.
The xenia of welcome can’t be sustained, of course. Conditions in the island camps are sickening and, see point one: there is still no amount of money you can throw at a problem like this. Let people work.
We’re leaving the EU, not Europe. In theory, we could use our new status outside the supranational bloc to opt out of the collective punishment of border brutality and welcome refugees directly.
I’ve got to say, though: that seems unlikely to happen.
More likely is that we can continue to show faith in humanity. Sign a petition. Or…
Let’s tackle it together / AKA: Why I’m cycling 3,000km+ this summer
With Thighs of Steel this summer I’ll be cycling 3,000km, across the Carpathian mountains, through Transylvania and the Balkans, from Bratislava to Athens.
It’s an odd way to remember that our borders are trapping millions of people in intolerable conditions. But it’s my way.
And, of course, that figure of 42,000 is dwarfed by the 3,500,000+ Syrian refugees trapped in Turkey.
It’s easy to feel hopeless, but I think we can make a difference.
That’s why I ride with Thighs of Steel and why, as part of the core team this year, I’m doing all I can to help the other 100+ cyclists raise tonnes of cash for Help Refugees.
The main beneficiary of the money we raise will be Khora, a grassroots community centre in Athens that offers displaced people hot food, legal support and friendship. The centre is run entirely by volunteers on solidarity and donations.
I visited Khora last year and met a wonderful bunch of people who are already making a difference. The work they do is of immense practical and psychological support to actual human beings every day.
Alee is a long-term volunteer and refugee from Pakistan who found Khora after the factory where he worked was shut down in 2016.
‘I didn’t come here to volunteer,’ Alee told me. ‘When I came here, I was homeless, I was jobless, I was penniless — even hopeless, to some extent.
‘I was at the verge of mental collapse,’ he says. ‘I mean, I could have been suicidal. I could jump from the fifth floor. The Khora volunteers kept me alive. Honestly, I’m telling you, they kept me alive.’
Fluent in multiple languages, including Greek, Alee started volunteering as a translator on the Khora info desk, during refugee hospital visits and with the legal team.
Now Alee spends most of his volunteer time at the Khora Free Shop, where refugees and others can pick up clothes, shoes, toiletries, books, toys and other things they might not be able to afford.
‘Khora is about giving hope as well as help,’ Alee says.
If you think that helping refugees is a generally good idea, then there’s loads you can do.
If cycling is your cup of tea, join us! We are three-quarters full, but there’s still space for you. It’s a great bunch of people, passionate about making change happen.
If you can afford to donate to the Thighs 2020 appeal, then I promise you that even the most modest gift will do things that simply wouldn’t happen without your contribution. Honestly. Like paying the motorway tolls so that a library van can get out of Athens to the refugee camp in Corinth. Without that handful of Euros, the van doesn’t go and the kids in the camp kick cans in the dust instead.
Actor, comedian, dear friend and work colleague Beth Granville woke up on Sunday morning with a start: her alarm wasn’t ringing.
Fuck.
She had a sitcom recording to get to.
Fuck.
She grappled with her phone, eyes swimming in an abyss of darkness. An unresponsive power button; rising panic.
Luckily, it appeared that Beth’s phone was the sole victim of a vicious electromagnetic pulse attack, localised in the Wanstead area.
The rest of the capital’s telecommunications network and transport infrastructure was, thankfully, still working and Beth got to the recording studio just in time.
The only embarrassment, apart from losing the phone numbers of every comedy producer she’d met since 2018, came when Beth had to ask someone on the tube what the time was. Lucky not to be arrested, frankly.
But the black screen of death was the harbinger of an unexpected light.
Phoneless Beth picked up a book and finished it in two days.
~
As some of you know, over the last few months I’ve been much more deliberate about my reading.
Too much of my day is spent, not on my phone, but on my computer: either working or worrying that I should be working.
The computer, to me, symbolises the one true god of productivity. How poisonously wrongheaded!
This winter, I found a way around this awful bias, a way to trick myself into truly valuing the time I spend eyeballs deep in a book, without feeling guilty.
Today, I record focussed reading time as work time and ‘bill’ the hours in my working diary accordingly. (No one pays me, of course, at least not directly…)
I set my work timer for 45 minutes, sit down with a pile of sticky tabs and read, marking beautiful or fascinating passages and new words or concepts as I go.
As Beth discovered, and I readiscovered: reading is wonderful.
(Does ‘readiscovered’ work? Not sure. Let’s say yes.)
If you enforce reading, you are likely to enforce time for reflection because it’s hard to read without reflecting … Busyness does not make our lives meaningful; it is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.
Reading is restorative and relaxing in a way that computers or phones will never be.
At the end of my 45 minutes’ reading, I feel enriched in the equal and opposite way that I am exhausted by 45 minutes of browsing the same amount of material on the internet.
A couple of times this week I’ve even taken my book out to the pine woods near where I’m staying in Bournemouth, set up my hammock and gently swung through the pages for an hour or so. (Tuesday was interesting: sunshine and hail.)
This isn’t a lone response from someone who grew up reading.
Note: Fiction seems to offer more to our brains here than non-fiction.
Side note: Science fiction in particular might offer our brains something particularly valuable at the moment — the sense that the future is malleable and open to change.
~
Books also offer a counterpoint to the pell and mell of news, which I’ve written about and insulted before. As Marcel Proust said, long ago:
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
One of my reading mentors, Ryan Holiday, deliberately weights his reading choices towards ‘timeless’ books.
‘I don’t want to read things that are very quickly proven irrelevant or incorrect,’ he says in an interview with Tim Ferriss (~1h51). He continues:
You’d be better off sitting down and reading Shakespeare’s plays because they have not only had 500 years of cultural impact, but will probably have 500 more years of cultural impact.
Think of what Ryan Holiday calls ‘the halflife of information’. The news that fires itself, cannon-like, out of your radio has a halflife of perhaps a day or two: tomorrow the triviality will be forgotten.
But a book has already proven itself durable: even a book published this year has probably been a couple of years in the making. If a reputable publisher was involved, the ideas and concepts are, if not timeless, then at least enduring.
~
Too many people write reading off as unproductive and it’s true that sitting down with your head in a book can look an awful lot like doing nothing.
Inside your skull, however, your brain is doing imaginative weight-lifting.
Reading strengthens language processing areas of the brain, as you might expect, but it is also a tremendously embodied experience: we truly live the novels we read.
Explaining the results of a study that showed long-term changes in brain connectivity among 21 people forced to read a Robert Harris novel, a team of neuroscientists from Emory University wrote:
It is plausible that the act of reading a novel places the reader in the body of the protagonist, which may alter somatosensory and motor cortex connectivity. … Reading stories … affect the individual through embodied semantics in sensorimotor regions.
Humans are wonderful fabulists: reading is the next best thing to being there.
Reading itself is a creative act. Of course, good books are full of good ideas and I can’t count the number of passages that have changed the way I write, permanently.
Last week’s newsletter, for example, was built entirely out of my reading from the week.
It’s the same for Beth. I don’t know what book she was reading, but when she saw this picture between its covers, she laughed out loud and added a caption that has done rather well on Twitter…
Wandering the aisles of my local food shopping emporium the other day, I happened upon a misfortunate newspaper stand.
Before I could divert my hapless footwear in the direction of the sundried tomatoes and other preserves, I was revulsed by a series of headlines, all screaming something or other about immigration and Australia.
At first I thought that Boris Johnson might have re-requisitioned the earth’s largest island as a penal colony for The Crown. Then I remembered that it only feels like we’ve gone back to the eighteenth century.
The 2020 version of history could be recalled as bitterly, if we allow it.
The thing is, I can’t help feeling like the whole ‘pulling up the drawbridge’ immigration strategy is based on a gross misperception of who immigrants are and what they do when they get here.
To illustrate those misperceptions, we’re going to have a fun little quiz — YAY! — excised from The Perils of Perception by Bobby Duffy, the managing director of social research company Ipsos MORI.
Okay: ready?
What proportion of the UK population are immigrants?
If you said 25 percent, then congratulations! You have matched the average answer given by UK residents in a recent Ipsos MORI poll.
You’re also factually wrong by a remarkable 12 percentage points!
On average, we Brits think that a quarter of the UK population is an immigrant. That’s insane. The true answer is about half that figure: 13 percent.
In our heads, we’ve more or less doubled the number of foreign-born nationals in this country. Wow.
Okay, now our heads are a little tidier, here’s question two:
What proportion of immigrants to the UK are refugees and asylum seekers?
About a third? Bingo! That’s exactly what most people said, well done!
Yep: on average, people in the UK think that there are more refugees and asylum seekers than any other category of immigrant: more than those who came here for work, to study or to join their family.
Yep: we are wildly wrong.
Refugees and asylum seekers make up around 10 percent of the immigrant population — fewer in number than any of those other three categories. Cool.
Now onto the final question:
If you got question one wrong by 10 percentage points or more (and most people did), why do you think that was?
Think about this one carefully now — and be honest.
Almost half of everyone asked this question replied:
People come into the country illegally so aren’t counted.
Ah-ha — the figures aren’t accurate! That is true: there was something in the news about it.
But, sadly for The Daily Mail, all those lorry-loads of illegal immigrants couldn’t make up for our absurdly inaccurate guesses.
Even the most lurid estimates of illegal immigration, from a group campaigning for greater immigration control (Migration Watch UK), would add only 1.5 percentage points to the immigrants’ share of our population. Not 10 or more.
Never mind — press on — it doesn’t matter anyway because a gallant 45 percent of us, when challenged on our reasoning, added:
I still think the proportion is much higher.
Q.E.D.
Okay, we’re wrong about the tidal wave of immigration — but what is to be done?
In 1963, Dervla Murphy cycled from Dunkirk to Delhi. The book she wrote about her journey, Full Tilt, is full of stories of hospitality, from the Pathan tribesman who helped her fix a puncture, to the nameless Pakistani women who gave her unbidden deep tissue massages at the end of every day’s riding, and the Indian family who nursed her while she spent a few days enjoying good, old fashioned dysentery.
Towards the end of her journey, high in the Karakoram Mountains of Kashmir, she is beckoned over by an old man to help him dig an enormous thorn out of his foot.
After so many months owing her life to the generosity of strangers, Dervla pulls out her knife and spend a quarter of an hour in surgery.
She then reflects on the contrast between the baked-in hospitality of Afghanistan and Pakistan with how people behave back home in Europe:
Here [in Kashmir] one is merely another human being … and it’s taken for granted that one will help if necessary just as when one needs help it is unfailingly given without anyone stopping to consider inconvenience or cost.
When, I wonder, did we forget to be mere human beings?
It’s a numbers problem
When we talk about ‘immigrants’, ‘refugees’ or ‘asylum seekers’ our brains collapse and die. Statistically speaking, we can’t get our heads around the numbers.
But it’s only 0.6 percent of the total population of the UK — and nearly two-thirds of them had, by 2018, lived in this country for more than 15 years.
In other words, most successful asylum seekers have been in this country longer than our 11.5 million children under 15. How ‘foreign’ are these asylum seekers, really?
I could squirt these massive numbers into your eyeballs all day, but it wouldn’t make a jot of difference: they are all stratospherically incomprehensible. We simply can’t empathise when populations get that big.
Another question:
What’s the largest population size our puny brain can empathise with before it starts to struggle?
Congratulations to those of you who said one (1).
Yes: one whole human being. For populations in excess of one, we start to struggle.
This has been empirically tested by Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. In a series of experiments, Slovic and his team looked at how much money people were willing to donate to help starving children in Africa.
Donations to aid a starving 7-year-old child in Africa declined sharply when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in other African countries. The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim.
One starving child = pity. Millions of starving children = brain-melt.
Slovic calls this effect ‘psychic numbing’: the sheer scale of tragedy drives us to apathy.
And, as Slovic discovered in a follow-up study, psychic numbing begins at the vast number of just two human beings:
Feelings of compassion and donations of aid were smaller for a pair of victims than for either individual alone.
One starving child = pity. Two starving children = not so much.
No wonder we’re pulling up the drawbridge: our brains, if not our borders, are being swamped in statistics.
Wait — optimism coming up!
Remember Alan Kurdi? Of course you do. That’s the point: one human being.
Kurdi’s death was the story of one human being, tragically drowned while escaping to Kos — emphatically not the multitude of stories about the 7,000 or more nameless refugees who have landed (alive, thankfully) on Kos in the past two years alone.
The widespread media reports of Alan Kurdi’s death in September 2015 broke the dam on our natural instincts for hospitality, generosity and compassion — so apparent to Dervla Murphy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In fact, Thighs of Steel cyclists raise money for one of the appeals set up in that compassionate summer of 2015. Help Refugees is still going strong, although donations are harder to come by in recent years — a symptom of growing apathy around support for refugees.
I argue that this apathy is not because we have forgotten how to be mere human beings, but because our puny brains have been swamped by hundreds, thousands, millions and, occasionally, bazillions of — not immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees — but numbers themselves.
We need to go back to one.
When faced with one ‘mere human being’ in crisis, we respond with compassion and generosity. We do, we all do — yes, even the Daily Mail readers among us.
Think of the hoary line of the racist: ‘I just think people should go back where they came from — oh, I don’t mean you, Mr Melaku, you’re alright!’
In our ones, we’re all alright. So let’s not think then of the millions, but think of the one. Think of Dervla Murphy’s ‘mere human being’.
I’ve been listening to an excess of the Rule of Three podcast recently. As a podcast about comedy writing, it’s pretty much perfect audio for a comedy writer. I make a lot of notes.
(For those of you who are new here, I am one half of the comedy writing duo behind BBC Radio sitcom Foiled – permanently unavailable on BBC Sounds. Series 4 will be out in September — assuming I stop listening to podcasts and actually start writing…)
In an excellent episode with Katy Brand, Rule of Three hosts Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley discuss the concept of the ‘sitcom family’. The characters don’t have to be literal family — although in a lot of cases they are — but sitcoms are often built around family-type dynamics.
For those of you familiar with Foiled, you’ll recognise that the characters are, at heart, a classic Sitcom Family.
Tariq (played by Garnon Davies) is the ‘dad’
Roger (Miles Jupp) is the ‘loose-cannon stepfather’
Tanisha (Stephanie Siadatan) is the ‘mum’
Richie (David Oakes) is the ‘older child’
Sabrina (Beth Granville) is the ‘younger child’
Frankie (Garnon Davies again) is the ‘youngest child’
These roles weren’t always in the writing. We didn’t go into the process thinking, ‘We need an older child, who can that be?’
In the first scripts, on the page, there wasn’t an awful lot to Tariq’s character. It was only at the read-through, when Garnon played Tariq as a world-weary, dead-pan ‘dad’, that the character and, more importantly, the ‘sitcom family’ dynamics clicked into place.
Garnon gave us a ‘dad’ that we hadn’t even realised we needed. Genius.
I spent Valentine’s Day on Brownsea Island with a pitchfork. No, sadly not at the head of a Medieval peasant lynch mob; instead I was part of a volunteer conservation team that spent three hours sort of ‘tidying up’ a pine forest.
To the outside observer, we must have looked very Sisyphean: raking up tonnes and tonnes of pine needles and dead bracken only weeks before the spring growth and in the spitting teeth of the inevitable autumnal drop.
So why, why, oh why — tea and biscuits aside — were we there?
There are a lot of Scots, Monterey and Maritime Pines on Brownsea Island, a small island in Poole Harbour, Dorset. Pines grow quickly and tend to dominate. Very little flourishes in their shade, not least due to their poisonous habit of needle dropping.
Beautiful as they are, pine forests aren’t known for their biodiversity.
Two plants do thrive beneath the needles of Brownsea: bracken and rhododendron. Both of which are arguably even more antisocial than the pines who shade them.
There is, however, one unsung habitat on the island that is both a nourishing hotbed of biodiversity and, coincidentally, vanishing under the cities, forests and motorways of the mainland: heath.
Heath, as a landscape, is kind of meh. Underwhelming at best, if you’re not an ecologist. You can sort of see why it gets ripped up and paved over. Sorry.
We all love walking barefoot on the tickly needles of a pine forest, gazing up in awe at the shelfing branches, watching red squirrels scamper up and down the ruddy trunks.
But heathland is all scrubby with plants that are either prickly like gorse, knobbly like ling and bell heather, or slippery like moss. Basically: heath is a bit annoying to wander through if you’re not wearing full body armour.
I’m told, however, that the heath is positively teeming with life: butterflies, bees, spiders, lizards and invertebrates of all flavours. It is the amenable counterpoint to the inhospitable pine forest.
You can see where we’re going with this one, can’t you?
On Brownsea, Dorset Wildlife Trust and the National Trust are working (with the help of brute unpaid labour like me) to extend and connect the pockets of heath on the island, creating corridors down which the wildlife can mooch.
That’s why we spent three hours today raking and pitchforking bales and bales of dead bracken and rhododendron from the forest floor.
This work is a precursor to a ‘thinning out’ of the pines (the winter storms have made a start — I counted six felled trees in our little working acre alone) and a human-assisted return to open heathland.
Heather seed is everywhere on Brownsea, but in the forest it’s buried under a foot of mulch and will never taste the sunshine it needs to pop out and start singing.
I did find one tiny sprig of heather as I raked over the forest. The green filigree shoots were roundly cheered and the pathetic, heroic stem became a sort of totem for the work we were doing. You can spot her in the proud parental photo above.
But, hang on — knee-deep in a climate emergency, doesn’t it feel a bit wrong to be putting so much energy into felling trees? Shouldn’t we be planting them?
In general: yes.
However, also: no. At least, not here.
As one Brownsea conservationist explained to us, heathland is arguably more important to the health of the planet than the dominant, almost monoculture of the pines — and not only because heathland is a vanishing habitat, rich with life.
We all know that the headline climate crisis is too much carbon getting released into the atmosphere. Trees are good because they ‘capture’ (‘sequester’ if you want to get fancy) carbon. Ergo: plant more trees.
But did you know that most of the carbon captured by trees is stored in the soil and litter on the forest floor, not in the trees themselves? (I didn’t until today, to be fair.)
And — here’s the topper — the soil under heathland captures more carbon per hectare than the soil under forests does.
You could argue that, rather than interfering with conservationist projects like the heathland conversion on Brownsea, we should ‘let nature do its work’: let the pines march triumphant across the land, let the rhododendron and bracken crowd out every other species.
But for me this smacks of the similarly bogus ‘let the markets decide’ logic that some conservative economists are fond of trotting out.
No. We’re already interfering in nature for we are nature. The rhododendrons were brought here from Nepal, for goodness sake. Some of the pines were planted as a fuelwood crop. The cattle, pigs and ponies that once kept the Brownsea forests at bay were kept animals, not nature’s own convenient gardeners.
Dorset Wildlife Trust run volunteer conservation days on Brownsea Island every Friday. They’re very welcoming to idiot newbies like me. Peruse their events page for these and other opportunities across the county.
If you don’t live in Dorset (who does?), then seek out your local wildlife trust and volunteer. You won’t regret it. Unless you take a wrong turn with the pitchfork and get burned alive as a witch.
It must sound like I do hardly any work at all, but — outside the hammock — I’ve been rather busy. Secret signups for Thighs of Steel are going really well. The list is now over two-thirds full so if you’re umming and ahhing, don’t wait too long!
Beth and I have also been working on a new project about vans. We spent yesterday evening at a meeting for van dwellers in Stokes Croft, partially for research, partially because I’m genuinely interested in buying a van in which to dwell.
It turns out that van dwellers are a community under attack.
This ‘consultation’ is driven, once more, by a government eager to stamp out alternative — both desperate and creative — solutions to a housing crisis of their own making, and instead to protect the property investments of their friends.
It’s also worth saying that most Travellers — over 95 percent according to some estimates — live on land they either own or have rights to, like my friend who lives in a yard under the wonderfully named ‘Showman’s License’.
This ugly witch hunt reminds me of the 2011 Conservative anti-squatting ‘consultation’, which received little support from the general public and vehement opposition from those who would have to enforce the unfair, punitive laws: both lawyers and, again, the police.
Despite this, the harshest imaginable anti-squatting laws were passed.
When peoples’ only choice is criminalised, the legality of the law itself is discredited.
There is something ineffably childish about a hammock. It shouldn’t be allowed: to spend half an hour gently rocking between the boughs of a tree. Certainly not on a Monday lunchtime.
But that is exactly what I did, once I’d figured out — and learnt to trust — the soft shackle fixings of my new sling.
It weighs scarcely more than a third of a kilo and can hold two of me (although that’s against the rules laid out in the instruction booklet, and not only because cloning humans is ethically dubious).
Tucked up in the canvas, I feel swaddled. Staring up into the fractal treeline, there is nothing to do here except relax. So I let myself gently down into the golden apricity.
Watching the birds fly overhead, the squirrels skipping from branch to branch and the pigeons wooing from the upper boughs.
I’d love to hear from you if you’re joining me on my attempt to spend thirty minutes in nature every day for thirty days. Give us a shout and let me know. We can swap notes. There’s only one rule: don’t miss twice.
This morning I spent 60 seconds staring up into a tree.
On a circuit of the local park, I broke off my run to stand and stare at bark branches twigs sky.
I felt looks from dog walkers.
The first time I attempted this task, I checked my watch at barely 40 seconds.
40 seconds.
My untrained unfocussed attention span is two thirds of a minute. I can hardly blame that entirely on shiny screens, but the interior life dictated by the screen is suspect number one.
And it doesn’t feel great to be holding my breath.
I stared up for another 20 seconds, laughed at the lichen and continued my run with a light heart and a smile.
The Nature Fix
Why might staring up into a tree for a minute have made me feel lighter? One answer might be in the fractal patterns of the bark branches twigs sky, especially noticeable in winter.
What is a fractal? Essentially, a fractal is an image that exhibits similar, repeating patterns, whether you’re observing from far away or super close up.
It’s like how branches branch off into smaller branches and smaller branches branch off into twigs and twigs into leaves and leaves into leaflets and leaflets into veins and the whole set is mirrored underground in the roots.
Anyway. It turns out that a specific range of fractals are good for us.
In one of a series of remarkable studies, physicist Richard Taylor and psychologist Caroline Hägerhäll found that viewing images with a fractal dimension of between 1.3 and 1.5 easily led people into the alpha brain state (‘wakefully relaxed’) associated with increased creativity and reduced depression.
Nature adores these low- to mid-range fractal dimensions and they are found everywhere, from the patterns we see in snowflakes, coastlines and clouds to the structure of our lungs and neurons and even the movement of our eye’s retina.
This is an important discovery: our eyes work over an image in the same fractal patterns of which natural landscapes are composed. In nature, then, our visual cortex feels most at home: confident, comfortable and, assuming no tigers are detected, wakefully relaxed.
Such ‘visual fluency’ is stress-reducing in the same way that ‘French fluency’ is stress-reducing when you step off the ferry in Calais.
This is not, when you think about it, a surprise. Our eyes evolved to seek food and spot danger in natural landscapes, after all.
What’s mind-blowing is that scientists have studied and uncovered this and can point to our city streets and say things like: ‘The fractal dimensions are totally wrong here. You’re going to feel stressed’, or: ‘Looking up at those trees gives your visual cortex a fractal dimension of 1.37. You’ll feel wakefully relaxed.’
And doesn’t this computer-generated fractal pattern look like the outline of a winter’s tree against the sky, or a lichen’s tattoo on bark?
When I got in from my tree staring, I went online and bought a hammock as a promise to my future self to spend more time among the branches. I know that I want to spend more time outside, but I struggle to make it happen.
I’m not alone in this.
Humans are terrible at forecasting how great we’ll feel if we only get outside.
People may avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to underestimate its hedonic benefits.
It’s hard to prioritise the great outdoors when we persistently fail to draw a line of connection between going outside and feeling good. Would you keep going back to a doctor who you thought was a quack?
Somehow, we need to force ourselves outdoors and trust that nature will do its work whether we credit it or not. It’s not easy, in fact you might call it a challenge…
The 30×30 Nature Challenge
The David Suzuki Foundation run an annual challenge in which participants try to spend 30 minutes in nature every day for 30 days. That might not sound like much, but I for one don’t hit those kind of numbers, especially not in winter.
Since 2013, the Foundation have added science to their 30×30 nature challenge and have tested what happens to our wellbeing when we make a regular commitment to more outdoors.
The first thing to note is that, even before the challenge, the 1,896 participants were already getting their 30 minutes a day on average. But that wasn’t not the point. The point was to make a commitment to getting outside every day for 30 minutes – not just on average.
That commitment saw total time spent in nature double over the course of the challenge – an extra 8 hours per week.
Of course, those 8 hours have to come from somewhere and, on average, participants in the study spent 52 minutes less per week on their phones and a ridiculous 3 hours 57 minutes less time on the Internet.
None of the other measured categories of time use – shopping, at the gym, in vehicle, and sleeping – saw statistically significant increases or decreases.
Except one: visiting friends.
The challenge participants spent, on average, an extra 92 minutes with friends every week. That’s a huge increase. Apparently, humans love to share nature.
We haven’t even got to the proper results yet, but you can see where this is going, can’t you? Surely any activity that means less screen time and more friend time is going to be good for our sense of wellbeing, isn’t it?
Yes.
Positive affect (being content, enthusiastic, relaxed, joyous) went up over the course of the study. Negative affect (being anxious, sad, irritated, hostile) went down. Fascination (awe, fascination, curiosity) went up. Vitality (feeling alive and vital, having energy and spirit) went up. All results passed the test for significance (p<0.001, stats fans).
Topper: the more participants increased their time in nature, the stronger were the positive effects on their wellbeing. Good news for those of us who struggle to get outside: we’ll feel the most benefit.
Awe is an experience that reminds us of our puny position in the universe. Awe subsumes us into the whole and can help us forget our struggles, strife and stress for a moment. It’s mindfulness, only much more fun.
Paul Piff, psychologist at the University of California, has also found that nature is really good at delivering awe and that humans can convert awe into prosocial behaviour.
Staring up at those eucalyptus trees made the study participants more helpful to a clumsy experiment stooge who dropped all his pens than did participants who stared up at a building. They also reported feeling more ethical and less entitled. Rather than focussing on themselves, the tree-starers opened up and orientated more towards others.
Now, my stubby Bristolian park is no grove of mighty eucalyptus, but as I finished my run, I decided to try my tree-gazing minute again.
This time I didn’t check my watch until more than 90 seconds had passed.
Stand at the foot of a tree and stare upwards for a minute.
Get fractal and gaze into a fire (or a Jackson Pollock painting).
Do a sit spot in nature. Go to a favourite place and, um, sit there. Go back tomorrow. Nature Mentor has a great introduction to sit spotting, but it’s really no more complicated than sitting and spotting.
Climb a tree and find a comfy branch.
Watch the ripples of rainfall onto a river, lake, canal or – in extremis – a puddle. Alternatively, follow the traces of droplets down your window pane.
Hypnotise yourself with waves wherever you find them.
Look up at the cloudscape.
On a sunny day, watch the shifting shadows cast on the ground by the wind and the trees.
Watch a lightning storm.
Inspect the weeds between cracks in the pavement or the lichen on a wall.
If you really want to get sciency, commit to being out in nature for 30 minutes a day, every day, for 30 days. I’m on Day 1!
~
99 percent of the research for this post came from the excellent book The Nature Fix by Florence Williams.
When invited to volunteer doing DIY for a paramilitary youth organisation last week, I politely declined.
‘Paramilitary youth organisation’ is a deliberately precise way of describing the Sea Cadets, but I’ve had enough of euphemisms in the service of killing people.
A paramilitary is a semi-militarised force whose organisational structure, tactics, training, subculture, and (often) function are similar to those of a professional military, but is not formally part of a country’s armed forces.
Okay, so the Sea Cadets might not be issued arms, but they do train young people in target shooting and ‘follow a similar ethos, training plan, and ranks, to the Royal Navy, and are recognised by the UK Ministry of Defence’.
There’s another euphemism: ‘defence’.
The United Kingdom has an incredibly violent history and it’s almost impossible to justify any of our killing sprees with the word ‘defence’.
The biggest threat to UK citizens since the end of the Second World War has come from terrorist activities on British soil: the IRA in the 1970-1990s and the so-called Islamists since the British-American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003.
One important thing to note is that, although this terrorist activity on British soil has represented a real threat to our lives and livelihood, the defence of our citizens was largely performed by the police and other emergency services, not the military.
Terrorist activity is not a justification for the military. In fact, as I have rather clumsily intimated, I would argue that it was the activity of the British military that fomented these terrorist attacks, both from the IRA and so-called Islamists.
~
What most annoys me is that so many of my fellow citizens believe that a belligerent military is necessary for a flourishing society.
In 1947, Japan voluntarily surrendered its right of belligerency in Article 9 of their constitution.
ARTICLE 9
(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
(2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
The Japanese don’t seem to have suffered for the decision. From the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan grew to become the second biggest economy in the world (now third, blown away like the rest of the world by the rise of China), and one of its most technologically advanced, leaving the UK in its dust.
Please can we all give up on the idea that belligerence is somehow necessary for our flourishing as a society?
* Important Note: Since the first Gulf War in Iraq, and despite ridiculous levels of development between 1947 and 1989, successive Japanese governments have extended the scope of its now euphemistically titled Self Defence Forces. The nationalist government of Shinzo Abe are currently doing their damnedest to revise Article 9 as well. These militarising decisions seem to be based more on gaining ‘international respect’ and getting a seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council than on supporting the health and flourishing of their citizens.
~
Notice that I’m talking about belligerence, not violence in all forms. I’m not a Buddhist and nor am I a pacifist. In fact, I’m not much of any kind of an -ist.
Categorical decision-making can tie you up in knots and I’d rather judge situations on their merits.
I concede that, perhaps, when human beings have really fucked things up good and proper, it’s just conceivable that violence is our only recourse for genuine defence.
But this is not the same ‘last resort’ rhetoric that is wheeled out with such alacrity by our politicians at the first whiff of oil. Human beings have to make decades of poor decisions before violence might become a necessity.
Whenever I argue against the existence of (for example) paramilitary youth organisations, people often bring up the Second World War. Wouldn’t I support – even participate in – military action to stop Hitler?
Not only is this incredibly disrespectful to the people who fought and died in such misery, but it also ignores the history that led to the awful violence.
The Second World War didn’t come out of nowhere; it resulted from decades of horrific mismanagement of international affairs.
Diplomats failed, economists failed, politicians failed. In the decades leading up to the start of the Second World War, including the First World War and its aftermath, human beings failed, time and time again, to cooperate harmoniously.
Then the worst thing that could possibly happen, happened.
Defenders of ‘defence’ seem to forget that war is the worst thing that can possibly happen to anyone. They seem to see ‘defence’ as something that happens a long way away, to other people. And, growing up as we have in a time of domestic peace, they’d be absolutely correct.
British ‘defence’ drops bombs and wrecks homes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia. Each bomb is a testament to decades of shocking failure. But there is no doubt in my mind, having met quite a number of refugees from our conflicts, that war is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a human being.
Isolated and insulated, our military takes action too quickly, as if to justify their existence. So much can happen before violence breaks out: we should remember that side of history, not the reckless moment we start firing rockets.
~
But they do good things!
Humanitarian missions, disaster relief, ‘peacekeeping’ (another euphemism) – our soldiers do good work!
I wouldn’t even bother trying to argue over the value of our military’s humanitarian work. Only to say that there are, obviously, other ways of providing this relief through organisations that don’t rest on a fundamentally violent basis.
I believe that the fate of humanity is best served by cooperation between equals and that everyone is responsible for ensuring knowledge and power is shared equally.
This philosophical and ethical position is the diametric opposite of military organisation, where power is concentrated in the higher levels of the hierarchy, orders cascade down from above, and intelligence is shared on a ‘need to know’ basis.
If there is a kicker to this polemic, it’s this: in 2017, Panorama revealed that the Ministry of Defence had paid out more than £2 million to former Sea Cadets who were sexually abused.
As one of the victims said:
You are trained to follow orders and you are trained to respect the officers and do as they tell you. That includes having to lie on the floor on a dirty blanket and just lie there and… take it like a man.
According to the BBC, the Marine Society and Sea Cadets apologised unreservedly and promised that it wouldn’t happen again. Because that’s how power works, right?
I’ll leave the final word to a man who knew about military power and the paramount importance of both the unquestionable hierarchy and silencing those who strive for non-military solutions:
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? …
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. …
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
‘Have you got decent bins?’ I’m asked by a man wearing a cagoule.
Well, isn’t that an intrusive question! And I’m about to muster indignant excuses for forgetting to take the recycling out when the man waggles a pair of binoculars and adds: ‘They really help you get up close.’
I’m on a boat in the middle of Poole Harbour, in the squalling rain and the huffing wind of a gale blowing in. The boat has a full cargo of people in cagoules with decent bins, here for an RSPB bird tour of Brownsea Island.
I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a birder. And yet here I am – and next week I’ll be cycling around the RSPB nature reserve at Rainham Marshes. Maybe you don’t choose birding; maybe birding chooses you.
‘Great Northern Diver at eleven o’clock – no he’s dived. Shag at one o’clock. Spoonbill on the beach. Merganser pair just taking off – three o’clock.’
A running commentary sends us birders lurching from one side of the wind-lashed deck to the other, hunting through our misty bins for flecks of white on the storm-grey sea.
For the hobbying birder, this trip is all about spotting new species. When the commentator announces a Slovenian Grebe at four o’clock, there is quite the commotion, let me tell you.
I stare blindly over the hunched shoulders of twitching bin-bearers. I’m as astonished as anyone: Slovenia is all but land-locked – I wouldn’t have thought it’d be known for its sea birds.
Slavonian Grebe. Slavonian. They can swallow fish whole and eat their own feathers. And they’re so rare that they’re on something ominously called the Red List.
Despite frantic Wikipedia research and my rapid identification of a Swan at eleven o’clock, I think it’s fair to say that I’m still not a birder.
My favourites are the bobbers: those birds who bob on the tide, waiting patiently until I catch them in the rings of my borrowed bins before beating their wings against the spray or pulling a dive into the choppy waves.
Other than that, I still rank my birds by the romanticism of their names. Avocet. Little Stint. Black-tailed Godwit.
And, of course, the Wigeon. ‘Isn’t that just a wet pigeon?’ I ask a friend, also not a birder. ‘I thought Wigeon was a Pokémon character,’ she says.
After two hours of chasing feathers, we dock at the John Lewis castle and make our way onto the island.
Brownsea Island has been a National Trust nature reserve since the sixties, after the people of Poole somehow raised £100,000 to save their island from Billy Butlin, he of holiday camp notoriety.
But the only reason there was ever any question of Brownsea becoming a nature reserve was thanks to the whim of a monied misanthropist.
Mary Bonham-Christie bought the island in 1927 and immediately ordered the mass eviction of the 200 people who lived there, then banned the Boy Scouts from their historic campsite and finally hired goons to eject any meddling intruders.
By the time she shuffled off this mortal coil (the ultimate act of any self-respecting misanthrope), only she and her boatman lived on the island. It’s fair to say that Bonham-Christie was not a people person.
But her loathing for the human race did open up a hitherto overcrowded corner of the ecosystem for other wildlife. Red squirrels most famously, but also other cute animals including voles and sika deer (the pretty ones with spots).
This imposed haven from humanity made the island an appealing acquisition for the National Trust who completed the purchase in 1962 with help from the Dorset Wildlife Trust, the Scout and Guide Movements and John Lewis (whose staff holiday in the castle). Now goon-free, Brownsea Island has been open to the public for nearly sixty years.
Birders in particular are drawn to Brownsea thanks to the work of another, shall we say ‘energetic’, aristocrat, Colonel William Petrie Waugh.
When he bought the island in 1852, Waugh saw an opportunity in the shallow water to expand his territory. With a bulk order of over a million bricks, he and his lackeys built a wall in the middle of the sea, enclosing a vast paddling pool from which wind-powered pumps extracted the water. Hey presto – pasture for grazing cattle.
But you can’t keep the sea out forever, not without constant investment (see also: the Netherlands), and gradually the sea wall started leaking. As the salt water joined forces with freshwater leaking from inland, an enormous lagoon was created.
Cue cheers of delight from a multitude of invertebrates – and the sea birds who prey on them: the Shoveler and Teal and Turnstone and Dunlin that us birders had all come to inspect through our rain-splattered bins.
One morning wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a glimpse, a respite in a day battered by storms. We can, if we allow ourselves, be bewitched by nature. I returned to the fraying town doused and refreshed, content.
If you don’t know how the world’s longest (and bestest) charity relay bike ride works, then here’s a quick and dirty guide on How to Play Thighs of Steel:
1. Don’t worry – you’re not cycling the whole thing, this is a relay. Pick one week that fills you with butterflies of excitement rather than dread. There’s something on this route for cyclists of all abilities and we are totally non-competitive.
Historically, more than half of our cyclists have been women – I only mention that because cycle touring has a shit reputation of being lonely, miserable and macho. It’ll be challenging, but you’ll never be alone and, with smiles, songs and snacks, everyone helps everyone through. Most people only do one week of the relay – some crazies do two.
2. Do logistics. Book your time off work and your transport to and from the start and finish cities.
3. Train like heck. We have training rides every month in London and there are now over 200 current and former Thighs cyclists you can meet up with for beers and bikes. (In reality, you’ll probably only train a bit and then panic unduly. It’ll be fine. We all do this.)
4. Fundraise like heck. All the money goes to grassroots refugee organisations and we suggest you aim for a minimum of £500. We’re always on hand for fundraising advice. Putting on a party or a dinner is always a winner, but don’t forget the simple stuff like charity pots in your local cafes and pubs. Over the past four years, Thighs cyclists have raised over £320,000 for projects that are making a real difference to the lives of refugees in the UK and Greece.
5. Cycle a really long way. Wahay! Adventure and the unknown is our standard operating procedure as we wild ride, wild camp and wild swim our way across the continent.
People focus on the cycling, but what makes Thighs special is the people. Nothing bonds a campful of strangers like climbing a mountain in 40 degree heat, or getting sprayed down by a farmer with a power hose, or handing out a pannier full of figs picked straight from the tree, or mending a puncture in a thunderstorm, or just sitting by a lake at the end of a long day and watching the sun set in silence.
6. Come home with a suntan, steely thighs and stuffed full of stories to share. It won’t be the end unless you want it to be. Repeat with friends in 2021?
Signups open for real on Sunday 1 March, but you can get early bird access on Monday 24 February by joining a special mailing list. This is good because places go fast and no one wants to miss out!
A dear friend of mine is currently reading Factfulness, an optimistic book about facts written by development darling Hans Rosling and his able collaborators.
The book opens with an absolute minefield of a multiple choice general knowledge quiz, which you can take here.
I’ll wait.
As you may have noticed, the quiz is intended to blow your mind with how much better life in our global village is today than most people (including experts) believe.
Less people live in extreme poverty than we think, more young women have access to education than we think, and global life expectancy is higher than we think.
In 2017, Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Foundation asked nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries to answer these questions. They scored on average just two correct answers out of the first 12. No one got full marks, and just one person (in Sweden) got 11 out of 12. Fifteen percent scored zero.
In fact, chimpanzees would have outscored the 80 percent of humans who did worse than random chance when they took the quiz.
There are two reasons I like this book, despite not having read it:
The disparity between how well humans did – 2 out of 12 correct answers – and how well we should do if we simply picked one answer at random from the three given – 4 out of 12 correct answers – shows that our sources of information (AKA the news media) is systematically biased against reality and in favour of negativity. Newsless since 2017, I have long beenan advocate of the No News is Good News information diet. Now I have some evidence that I might also be better informed.
Although the general drift of the book is that things are, in general, getting better, the authors don’t argue that this is a result of anything other than decades of extremely hard work. Nor do they make the argument that everything is rosy in our planetary garden. As Rosling mega-fan Bill Gates puts it: ‘the world can be both bad and better’.
But one thing that immediately struck me as I was discussing the quiz with my dear friend was the absence of any questions about displaced persons.
And, as the 2019 Aegean Boat Report reminded me earlier this week, the world can also be both bad and worse.
At the end of 2018 – the latest year for which UNHCR have data – there were 74.79 million ‘persons of concern’ across the world, including refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons and stateless persons.
Ten years earlier there were ‘only’ 34.46 million such persons of concern. The number of human beings suffering has more than doubled.
Bad and worse.
UNHCR only have solid data going back to 1951, but, for reference, Wikipedia states that World War II created 11 million displaced people.
The last big surge in refugee numbers was after the break up of the Soviet Union. In 1992, there were 17.83 million refugees according to UNHCR figures.
At the end of 2018 there were 20.36 million – and this excludes the 5.5 million registered Palestinian refugees cared for under the auspices of a different UN agency.
Bad and worse.
Raw refugee numbers have doubled in the last decade, but the biggest single reason for the twenty-first century surge in UN persons of concern is down to a huge increase in the number of those displaced within the state they used to call their own.
In 2012 there were 17.67 million internally displaced persons in the world. At the end of 2018, there were 41.43 million.
This figure includes those driven from their homes in Syria, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine and Colombia. They don’t meet the technical definition of ‘refugee’, but when you’re fleeing for your life it doesn’t much matter where you draw the border lines.
I’m a huge fan of Hans Rosling’s factfulness because it reminds us where we should be putting our efforts. The problem of displaced people – whether we call them refugees or not – is bad and getting worse. It deserves our attention.
If the mixing of peoples was the order of empires and the ‘unmixing of peoples’ the order of nation-states, what’s on the horizon?
Kapka Kassabova, Border (2017)
There isn’t an awful lot of serendipity built into my writing process, but occasionally I accidentally dig up something worthwhile that I’d completely forgotten about.
As I’ve mentioned before, I use the last few days of the year to peer back at the past and to throw forward to the next. While hacking through the state of my existence, I decided to search my writing archive for the word ‘life’ – and was surprised to rediscover the following unpublished poem from 2015:
Life should be lived wearing shorts and sandals
Life should be lived wearing shorts and sandals
Dinner should be littered with corks and candles
Life is a matter of taking your chances
Making the most of your circumstances
Taking up hands at dinner-dances
Falling in love with the merest of glances
Life should be lived as much in the sea
Entwined in a hammock, or under a tree
Vows should be made down on one knee
In the dark, in a church, in Tennessee
Write your own doggerel verses
Sprinkle your talk with Shakespearean curses
Pocket your change and don’t pinch purses
Petition the government to hire more nurses
Don’t be afraid to spend time alone
Enter outdoors and exit your phone
Listen closely, you can still hear the silence
Traffic and television are an odd sort of violence
The sky is a constantly changing companion
Instead of a down, it’s an up sort of canyon
Every breath is there for exploring
Forget all I’m saying and take up drawing!
But pepper your life with shocks and scandals
Life should be lived wearing shorts and sandals
We are thrilled to announce that together this year Thighs of Steel have raised a staggering £87,184.40 for grassroots refugee organisations.
A big thank you to everyone who donated – it means a lot!
Guided by expert advice from Help Refugees, that money has been granted to five organisations we believe will do justice to your hard earned cash.
Picking projects to fund is a tough job, and of course we wish we could support every project with everything they need, but we’ve tried to cover a wide range of refugee needs, including emergency aid, legal assistance, social integration and human dignity.
Here is a pretty pie chart showing where the money’s gone:
A monologue, delivered by a young woman to her friends (and, incidentally, the rest of the carriage) on a GWR train from Cholsey to Paddington.
I got Netflix last night. It represents a real turning point in my life – basically an admission that I’ll be lonely the rest of my days.
I’ve always borrowed Netflix off my girlfriend or the person I was seeing so not getting Netflix forced me to continue the pursuit of love. Now I’ve got my own Netflix I don’t need to go out anymore. I’ve given up.
On the plus side, though, getting Netflix means I don’t have to stay too long in toxic relationships – that’s worth £10 a month!
Actually it was £6 because I got the individual account. They boosted me to premium for the first 30 days – I only wanted it for Christmas.
So I spent all last night watching Don’t F*** With Cats. Everyone’s talking about it – where have you been, under a rock or something?
I don’t know anything about animal cruelty, so I thought it’d just be that woman who put the cat in the bin, but it wasn’t.
Some parts of the Internet don’t seem to age. My website is not one of them. This was DavidCharles.info in June 2010 (courtesy of the Wayback Machine):
There’s something unmistakeably 2010 about this image. It’s hosted on Blogspot, for one. ‘Follow me on Facebook’ and ‘My Flickr PhotoStream’ – I haven’t used these services for six years or more.
I have no idea what ‘The Knowledge’ was. Presumably not a record of my attempt to learn all 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. And the less said about this ‘powerful tool’, the better.
On the other hand, there are some corners of the Internet that don’t date. This ridiculous Gnarls Barkley cover was recorded by Don Ross in 2010 and still sounds as fresh as ever.
This man is 10 years older now and, until a couple of days ago, I’d never heard of him. The Internet, sometimes, is cool. The work we do, sometimes, is timeless.
~
At the start of the last decade, I made the decision to apply for an internship at Amnesty International, and to apply for a place at a housing cooperative in London. I was accepted for both and set off on a course that directed my daily life for most of the next six years, and that still tides the general wash of my existence today, ten years later.
Amnesty didn’t really work out. I get strangely paranoid in large office environments and end up feeling stifled and powerless – even when the work is meaningful.
The International Secretariat remains the last open-plan, filing cabinet-filled, water cooler and canteen office I have worked in.
But Amnesty showed me what I did want work to look like: creativity and the outdoors. In 2010, I wrote my first books, including a tale about hitch-hiking to Scotland, The Soles of My Shoes, which is still on sale.
The 2010s was, for me, a decade of exploration. Sanford housing cooperative gave me that formative freedom to write books, start a theatre company, study English teaching, volunteer with refugees in Calais, and cycle around the country.
It wasn’t always healthy living situation, but a housing cooperative is run for the benefit of its members, not for the profit of its landlord. Everyone had a secure tenancy and a vote on how the cooperative was run, including rent-setting.
At the time, it was one of the few places in London where you could actually cover rent with a part-time job or with housing benefit. The rest of the week, then, was ours – to study, volunteer, travel, or create. It sounds like dream fairyland, but it could be the way we organise all our housing in this country.
Could be.
~
I’m glad I left Sanford, though. What my soul needs at the end of 2019 is not the same as it craved when the decade began.
In a 2015 paper published in Psychological Science, researchers found evidence for the instinctual notion that ‘temporal landmarks’ that signal new beginnings – such as the turning of a year – strengthen our motivation to achieve our goals.
Hence New Year’s Resolutions.
But the researchers also found that the bigger the sense of a fresh start, the bigger the motivation. A fresh start puts distance between our present and our past, imperfect, selves. The fresher the start, the greater the psychological distance, and the greater optimism we feel that we can finally overwhelm our ambition.
In a couple of days, we all have the opportunity to ‘spur goal initiation’ on a scale not seen the noughties clicked over into the teens. This gives a surprising weight to these few days that can otherwise slip between the cracks in the festivities of Christmas and New Year.
Turn-of-the-decade decisions echo long in the body, mind and spirit. Those two decisions that I took in early 2010 – Amnesty and Sanford – put me on a path that I was still exploring six years later and which have given me the life I lead today.
A great wave of momentum is coming, bringing with it the freshest of fresh starts – not merely of a new year, but of a whole new decade.
So, in among the minced pies and the turkey soup leftovers, I’m going to clear some time to make a couple of decisions that will set a new course and help me ride that wave long into the twenties.
What life choices will I look back on in 2029? What can I do today to increase the probability that someone, somewhere will find my work in 2029, surprised that it’s ten years old already?
What fresh start will you make in the twenties?
Above: The earliest photo of me taken this decade that I can unearth.
My first Crisis shift is on Monday. I usually do two shifts at the end of the holiday, when everyone is clean and refreshed – but apprehensive about leaving the warmth of the converted school for the freezing loneliness of the streets. This year, I’m looking forward to greeting the guests as they come in from the cold on day one.
I know I’ve written about Crisis umpteen times on this newsletter, but last Saturday evening I sung my heart out at the Crisis carol service at Southwark Cathedral. Between the carols and tidings of goodwill, we heard three heart-rending stories from Crisis members, before Jon Sparkes, the charity’s chief executive, took to the pulpit.
He did a very diplomatic job of welcoming the new Conservative government.
‘Homelessness is a policy choice,’ Jon said, before outlining the plans to end homelessness that the Scottish government already has in place, and that the Welsh government are currently piecing together, in close consultation with Crisis.
The government of England has no such plan, nor any plans for such a plan.
Responding to the Conservative manifesto before the election, Jon said: ‘It’s deeply disappointing to see the Conservative manifesto fall short of the mark when it comes to ending homelessness, in all its forms, once and for all.’
Crisis is instead working with local authorities to implement their own plans, helping them take control where national leadership is lacking. Newcastle, for example, has pledged to end homelessness within the next ten years.
This Christmas, about 4,500 homeless guests – or ‘fellow citizens’ as Jon called them – will join 12,000 volunteers at the ten Crisis centres around London.
12,000 volunteers! This is an incredible show of support for our marginalised fellow citizens, whose population has grown so vertiginously over the past ten years.
But what’s even more incredible is that we are all still living in a society beholden to the pernicious Vagrancy Act of 1824 that makes rough sleeping a criminal offence.
Crisis are currently running a campaign to scrap the act, but isn’t it incredible that they should have to campaign at all?
Yet here we are. In England, at least, we fall further and further every year from our goal of ending homelessness, in all its forms, once and for all. The United Kingdom is the sixth biggest economy on the planet. Shame.
Rather than leave you on such a downer, I want to say again that we are each of us tiny slivers of society. Yes, life would be so much easier if we had the backing of the government and that enormous economy, but we can each participate, with our time, money, anger, or simply with a kind word on the street.
The Thighs of Steel Core Team arrive in Athens after 9 weeks and over 6,000km of cycling. This photo sums up the best of what I learned in 2019.
Your gut behaves like a second brain of over 100 million nerve cells called the enteric nervous system, which can communicate with your head-brain through the vagus nerve, and also by releasing bacterial metabolites into the bloodstream. We are what we eat, in other words. Read a digest of the science on my blog.
Fingerspitzengefühl is a splendid German word, literally meaning ‘finger tip feeling’ and best translated as ‘intuitive flair’ or ‘instinct’. I have no memory of where I picked this up.
This year, The Guardian updated its style guide to recommend journalists use terms that more accurately reflect the science of climate change – sorry – climate breakdown. Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner says: ‘The phrase “climate change”, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.’ Words are important. Read about other word choices in The Guardian.
Fires in equatorial Asia contribute 8 percent of global carbon emissions and 23 percent of methane emissions despite only accounting for 0.6 percent of the world’s burned area. That’s down to the burning of carbon-rich peatlands in countries like Indonesia. I learned a lot more while writing this article for Forests News.
Rejection is joyous. Read more on my blog – or watch this TEDx talk by Jia Jiang.
‘Activity gives you more energy, not less’, one of five key ideas from the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Read the other four on my (new) blog.
Millennials are the burnout generation. There is so much in this article, but here’s one idea that struck home: ‘[Burnout] takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed.’Read the full article on Buzzfeed.
In Utah there’s a 6,000 tonne quaking aspen that is between 80,000 and 1,000,000 years old. I’ve learned how to age trees (without chopping the in half) twice this year and forgotten both times. Every species grows at a slightly different rate, and at different rates at different ages and in different environments, but a half decent rule of thumb is that the girth of the tree will increase by about an inch every year. I found this PDF from Wokingham District Veteran Tree Association useful.
A psychedelic experience has the potential to be a Black Swan event for the individual. Read through this thought on my blog. Better yet, read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind and/or watch this video of him in conversation with Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London:
As well as the amelioration of symptoms of depression, specific anxiety (not generalised) and PMS, psychedelic microdosing has been linked with physical enhancements in strength, stamina and flexibility. The talk I gave at Love Trails Festival showed me that runners are really interested in the practical application of vanishingly small amounts of psychedelic substances. Read more in Advances in Psychedelic Medicine (Google Books).
Injuring your hamstring can take months and months to recover from. Bloody annoying when fifty percent of your stress-reduction strategy involves running.
There are five major varieties of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers and taskmasters. The antidote to bullshit jobs and the bullshitisation of our lives is to care. We won’t be rewarded financially, but we will be rewarded in other ways, including with the intrinsic reward of being able to sleep at night. Read Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber at your local library or online for free at The Anarchist Library.
People on a meat-heavy diet could shrink their food-related footprint by at least 33% by becoming vegetarian. Eat less beef, lamb and cheese. Substitute with pork, chicken, eggs and molluscs. Replace with beans, pulses, grains and soy. Read my digest of a New York Times deep dive on the subject.
Reading a book is ‘forced meditation’. Please, please watch Bookstores, a documentary paeon to reading. It includes a wonderful interview with ‘total baller’ Dr Ruth J Simmons at ~29:30: ‘If you enforce reading, you are likely to enforce time for reflection because it’s hard to read without reflecting … Busyness does not make our lives meaningful; it is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.’
The average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water. That sounds like a lot, but 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. Read my investigation into the environment demerits of showering on my blog.
On 29 July, volunteers in Ethiopia planted 350 million trees across 1,000 designated sites in 12 hours. Read more on Atlas Obscura.
This year, I learned how to play The Trellis by Nick Mulvey (who, incidentally, went to the same university as me – I remember watching his old band Portico Quartet in the student union). Get the TAB from Bantham Legend and play along with this video:
From a standing start, fully dressed at my desk, the minimum viable swim (out to beyond my depth, plus three head dunking dives and back) takes exactly 13 minutes. Read why you should always take the swim on my blog.
Climbing trees is good for you in ways that you can’t quite remember until you’re up there, looking down. ‘Trees deliver us from the banal, and reaching the top of one is like coming up for air and breaking the bubble of our timetabled lives.’ Read The Tree Climber’s Guide by Jack Cooke.
On flat ground, I take 64 paces to walk 100 metres. A useful thing to know if you’re trying to navigate in low visibility (or trying to find an obscure map feature as part of your Lowland Leader Award assessment). Learn more about pacing from Mountain Safety.
Fractal environments, such as those we experience in abundance when in the countryside or beside the sea, help regulate emotions and reduce stress in a similar way to music. Read The Nature Fix by Florence Williams for a full exploration on the myriad ways nature does us good – or read this Atlantic article on Why Fractals Are So Soothing.
I really like Emmental. Also: always travel with a pat of butter. Tortilla chips slathered with butter makes for a surprisingly good cycling snack. Ignore the doubters.
Neapolitan street food is dangerous. Frittatine di pasta is a depth charge of carbohydrates, macaroni, béchamel and pork weighted with enough oil to power a medium-sized caravan. Digestible only when halved, quartered, and shared to soak up limoncello. Eat more on my blog.
Refugees and asylum seekers dress well and wear cologne because it helps them integrate into society. ‘For me, to look good and to be clean could help me in front of society. People might accept me.’ Read Mahmud’s story on my blog.
The Croatian Adriatic coast is beautiful, but the Adriatic coast road will be too full of touring motorists in mid-summer for you to fully relax and enjoy the ride. As you can’t see in the photo below.
Cycling around Ikaría, a Greek island home to Europe’s highest concentration of centenarians, is really fucking hard. Read the story on my blog.
Diving into the sea head first can really mess you up. From a height of ten metres, you break the surface at 36.6mph and that exerts crazy force on your body as the water slows you by more than 50 percent in a fraction of a second. I guess that’s why diving is an Olympic sport. I got a dislocated shoulder, but maybe I was lucky not to get concussed. Read more about the risks of diving on SportsRec.com. Next time, I’ll be following this sage advice from Tourism On The Edge.
Greek can be disturbingly similar to Spanish in the most unhelpful ways. For example: aquí in Spanish means here; εκεί in Greek means there.
17,205 people were granted asylum in the UK in 2018. Over the same period, Germany granted asylum to 139,555 people. In Turkey, there are in excess of 3,600,000 Syrian refugees, living with the limited legal rights granted under ‘temporary protection’, in the shadow of a war zone. Read my full report from İzmir on my blog.
You can know a culture through its language. While in the Netherlands I learned two Dutch word-philosophies: gezellig and niksen. Gezellig is an earthier version of the Danish hygge, while niksen is doing-nothingness. Both vital. You can take two minutes of niksen using this timer – it took me two attempts to complete because I am, at heart, a millennial.
TOTALLY UNRELATED TO THE RESULTS OF THE GENERAL ELECTION: it is theoretically possible to acquire French citizenship (and regain an EU passport) in only two years if you study for a masters in the country and have no ‘assimilation defects’. Read this petite histoire on Pret A Voyager before embarking, however.
Divock Origi.
I have already spent more time with friends and family in 2019 than I did last year. Yep: I keep a spreadsheet. I’ve spoken at least twice with a total of 47 people this year, 14 of whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to at least 20 times.
According to my rough estimates, I have visited 59,323 web pages so far this year – that’s over 1,100 unique pages every week and a 14 percent increase on 2018. Can I think of more than a dozen web pages that have made a positive difference to my life in 2019? No, I can’t. 8 percent of unique page views were on the BBC Sport website, for example. I frequently fantasise about a life without the Internet. But then I wouldn’t be able to write you these love letters, would I?
By and large, I stuck to my No News Is Good News reading habit. I accessed almost double the number of BBC News stories as I did in 2017 – but nearly half of them were actually sports stories like ‘Enes Kanter: Turkey seeks arrest of New York Knicks star’. WTF. I have no interest in baseball (is that even baseball?) If you exclude sports stories, then I only accessed 56 ‘news’ stories in 2019. Of those, my primary interests were Brexit, the General Election and the environment.
I enjoy ice skating exactly as much I suspected. I’ll try not to leave it another thirty years before my next outing. (Artwork below by my niece, aged 5.)
After keeping a nightly journal of ‘5 Great Things’ since 5 February, I have learned that the greatest things in my life are quite often miniscule, and almost always related to other people. The strongest element of keeping such a journal is reflecting on past entries so here’s an incredibly mundane sample of three, picked from random days in the two notebooks I’ve filled this year: ‘Loads of walking >18km’
‘Being woken up by Django licking my face’
‘Sauna’
I should say that Django is a dog. I was inspired to start the journal by this article on For The Interested.
Leather trousers are surprisingly comfortable.
That’s it!
Well done for getting this far. If you’ve enjoyed reading, then I’d be thrilled if you share the link with your friends or on your social media. Thank you!
This will be remembered as the election that brought us closer together.
Bear with me on this one.
For me, like many, this election was the first where I was an active participant beyond casting my vote. I wish I could find numbers to support this comment, but all I have is anecdote.
On Monday night I went to canvass in the Kensington constituency, but went home without knocking once – there were more than 200 volunteers and only so many doors.
But my canvassing in Bournemouth West and Reading West meant that for the first time in my life I was purposefully engaging complete strangers in conversation about everything we humans hold most dear: our health, wealth, families and futures.
How could such meaningful conversations fail to bring us closer together?
Perhaps half of the people I spoke to weren’t remotely interested in holding an unsolicited conversation on their doorsteps. They’d convey this in a manner either polite or abrupt – I hold short of saying ‘rude’ because who knows from what I interrupted them?
But half of my answered knocks ended up with a profitable conversation of some sort. Of course, some of those conversations were with people intending to vote for the Conservative Party. Of course, we started from opposite poles of opinion. But did those conversations drive us apart? No.
The original sense of the word ‘conversation’ is to ‘live with’, rather than to ‘talk with’. For these brief moments, facing each other across a threshold, we tried to find ways of living together, squaring the sympathetic human before us with the antipathetic opinions they espoused.
It wasn’t always easy, but I always walked away feeling like I understood a little better and had lived a little fuller.
From brief glimpses, I guessed that the lives I interrupted were trimmed from the same cloth as the one I returned to after the door closed softly: a mother and son watching the football on TV, a woman washing the dishes before going out, one man drinking a beer after work, another taking the dog out for a walk.
So, for me at least, this will be remembered as the election that brought us closer together.
What do we do now?
Today, though, everyone is asking, ‘What do we do now?’
I’ve done the research. France sounds good – citizenship in two years if I enrol on a masters degree and don’t develop any ‘assimilation defects’.
Italy is a viable option too, assuming I can find someone – anyone – willing to marry a jobbing writer in his late thirties.
Quitting the country aside, what do we do now?
Last night’s election results have made me think more carefully about what I’m already doing, and to measure that against the yardstick of my ideal future society.
It’s not a complicated calibration – am I pushing in the right direction? – and I think this election gives us all a moment’s grace to tap the barometer and take a reading of our purpose.
If we decide that what we were doing yesterday is helping to create our own vision of society, then we should double down and use the vacant impotence of the general election results to motivate ourselves to work harder and faster toward our goals.
If we decide that what we were doing yesterday doesn’t align with our vision, then we must change. We must do whatever we can to change whatever we can in our lives today so that we are always working towards a more promising community.
Life is too short to stay indoors, praying for rain.
~
So I spent the morning working on Thighs of Steel, a project that creates the kinds of communities that I want to participate in.
This year, for example, the 90 cyclists raised over £87,000 for grassroots refugee organisations that I know have a uplifting influence on the lives of the dispossessed in our society.
So what can I do? I can use the energy of this election to work even harder on next year’s ride to make sure that it’s as successful as it possibly can be. That’s what I can do.
In just over a week, I will be volunteering with Crisis at Christmas. This year I’m doing three shifts instead of my usual two. It’s not a huge amount of work, but it’s the kind of response that I can make to the crisis of five more years of Conservative government.
We know that homelessness will increase again during this parliament.
I cast my vote for a party that promised to end rough sleeping within five years. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a priority for most of my fellow voters.
So what can I do? I can, in some small way, stand in solidarity with rough sleepers and homeless people by volunteering my time over Christmas. That’s what I can do.
~
Reading that back, it sounds like I’m virtue signalling, wanging my holier-than-thou altruistic tittery around like a politician before his scandal hits the newsstands. Sorry – that’s not what I meant.
I’m trying to say that everything we do is political because everything we do contributes to the future society that we’re building together.
So how does that society feel to you? And how can we use the energy and momentum of this election – however you voted – to deepen the ways we live with each other?
The Punkt MP02 will liberate you from your smartphone. It’s not a smartphone-killer, but it will free you from the burden of the dreaded online default mode.
Most of us are stuck in online default mode. We need a phone for communication in the modern age and smartphones are the most flexible solution for those moments when we absolutely must get online while out and about.
I get it.
But those moments of the essential online are fewer than we think. And what we are left with is the online default mode, in which we carry around the internet in our pocket, with instant access at any time.
The Punkt MP02 relieves you of this default and replaces it with an offline default mode. The online world is still accessible, through 4G tethering to a second device – computer, tablet or smartphone – but it is never only a swipe away.
Reaching into my pocket, I’m separated from a swift fiddle with Whatsapp by a dozen key presses and a twenty second wait. This is just enough to stop me from using my smartphone when I don’t need it – but still convenient enough that going online when I need to is not a hassle.
With the Punkt MP02, I am liberated to use my technology as I need it. A good example is that I often leave the house with either one or the other, but rarely with both phones.
If I want to contact others, I can take only the Punkt and stay offline. If I want to take photographs, then I can take only my smartphone camera without being tempted to go online.
Best of all are the times when I leave both in their drawer at home!
New Model Update: Better or Worse?
This is the second MP02 that I have tested. The first model I reviewed back in April and you can read my thoughts here. Ultimately, this model was unusable long term, mainly because of the short battery life (scarcely a day) and the frequent dropped calls.
So is this new model any better? The short answer is yes, but there are still snags.
Limited battery life
Since the first edition of the MP02, the battery life has improved – but it’s still not sensational compared to other feature phones like the Nokia 3310.
I would say that my Punkt phone use is no more than moderate and I need to charge the device every 36 hours or so. Not terrible, as it was before, but not world-beating either.
As you would expect, the biggest drain on the Punkt battery is tethering. I use this feature a fair amount because I travel often and sometimes need to connect my laptop to the internet.
As a guide, 45 minutes of tethering used 10% of the battery; 70 minutes drained 19%. Sometimes I plug the Punkt in to charge and tether for longer periods, but the phone does get warm and I doubt this is particularly good for the battery life.
Unfortunately, Punkt have withdrawn the ability to tether over USB and Bluetooth connections, both of which use less power than a wifi connection. I hope these features will return in future updates, but customer support didn’t give me any cause for optimism when I mentioned it.
Dropped calls
After a month of use, I haven’t had any dropped calls. Fingers crossed that’s a vast improvement.
Home screen snags
There are still a number of glitches in the software – particularly in the way the home screen behaves – and that’s not cool in a phone that costs £295.
The main glitches are when waking up from standby. The worst of these is that the home screen frequently freezes, leaving me staring at an unresponsive phone until it recovers.
The clock also takes a couple of seconds to update – slightly annoying when you’re quickly checking to see whether you’re about to miss a train.
There are a few features that I’d expect to see that are missing, especially with contact management. The address book works in mysterious ways and there is no easy way to delete duplicate contacts, for example.
It would be wonderful if I could manage my Punkt contacts using my computer and a USB connection. Consider that a feature request!
On the plus side, it was easy to transfer contacts from my smartphone to the Punkt using Bluetooth. Full marks there.
I can’t have an audible ring tone without also turning on all the other annoying system noises
No improvement on the old model – actually worse because my phone refuses to vibrate, despite having that option turned on. I would ordinarily rely on the vibrate to get around the obnoxious system noises that come whenever the ringtone is set up.
I’ve asked customer support about this and they appeared baffled by the desire for an audible ringtone without audible key tone presses.
In conclusion, this new model MP02 is a significant improvement on the previous edition. I can see myself using this model for the foreseeable future, but I sincerely hope that further improvements to the software are in the pipeline.
Note: Punkt sent me this new model MP02 gratis. Thank you!
There’s nothing like a public sauna for meeting people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. The health benefits are well documented, but the real value of a sauna is in the friendships you make, however brief.
Saunas are too small for private conversations. None of us can help eavesdropping and I’ve not met anyone yet who minded.
~
Jack caught my attention with the conversation he was having with his pal. They sat down heavily on the wooden slats of the sauna in my local leisure centre.
Jack’s friend put his feet up and asked: ‘What’s your business name gonna be?’
Great, I think, I love hearing about people’s mad business plans.
‘What do you mean?’ Jack replied.
‘I thought you were going to pretend you had a business,’ his mate says. ‘But you said you needed to make up a name.’
Pretend? Make up?
‘Nah,’ Jack says. ‘I’m gonna tell her it was my grandad’s business.’
‘Oh, and you inherited?’
‘Yeah. So if she asks any difficult questions, it doesn’t matter when I don’t know the details.’
Her? She? Inherited? Difficult questions?
‘Like, if she asks what kind of car I drive,’ Jack continues, ‘I’ll just say an Audi S4 and tell her my grandad’s the one who was into cars.’
That seals it: these guys are clearly planning some kind of fraud or, at the very least, catfishing on Tinder.
I interrupt: ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Jack looks up from the floor, a bit sheepish. ‘It’s a new E4 dating show.’
‘What, really? I thought you were catfishing!’
Jack laughs. ‘Nah. This girl has to choose between four millionaires – except one of the millionaires isn’t a millionaire.’
‘And that’s you?’
‘How could you tell?’ Jack and his mate laugh. ‘I haven’t got a clue what millionaires do. I’m more of a Lidl kinda guy.’
The woman sweating beside me joins in: ‘Oh, I love reality shows!’ she says. ‘How did you get it?’
‘They just messaged me on Insta,’ Jack says.
‘Is there a prize?’
Jack scratches his head. ‘I guess the prize is her,’ he says. ‘The producers can’t tell me much, but they say she’s a ten.’
I’m not sure I like the general drift of this show. ‘What’s her prize, then?’
‘What do you mean!’ Jack says indignantly, before laughing at himself. ‘Her prize is all the swanky dates us four take her on, I suppose.’
‘You’re not paying, though, are you?’
‘No – that’d give the game away straight up. Cheeky Nandos, love?’
The woman on my left laughs with unpolished delight. ‘Or maybe it’s like Love Island and she gets a cash prize as well.’
‘I applied to Love Island this year, actually,’ Jack says. ‘Got down to the final round.’
‘Amazing!’ the woman says. ‘Are you gonna apply again?’
‘Definitely. Next year I’ll have this E4 show on my CV and I’ll be able to say I conned a girl into thinking I was a millionaire – hopefully.’
(This story was, of course, first written up as part of my daily diary.)
Last Sunday I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. With its tawdry promise of ‘a revolutionary system to get 1 per cent better every day’, I resisted reading this book for more than a year.
I wish I hadn’t.
It’s an excellent summary of the current research on habit-building and habit-breaking.
One of the deceptively simple insights that has stayed with me is that every action you take is a vote for your future.
If you write one newsletter, then that’s one vote for becoming a newsletter-writer. If you only ever write one newsletter, you’re not going to accumulate more than one vote and you’re unlikely to become a newsletter-writer. That single vote will be swamped by all the other votes you’re constantly casting for other future selves, whether that’s ‘master carpenter’ or (in my case) ‘internet browser’.
If you keep publishing newsletters every week, then you’re regularly casting votes for ‘newsletter-writer’ – and, more than 150 Fridays later, here we all are.
~
What’s made this newsletter-writing habit stick for the past three years? I think there are, appropriately enough, three major reasons.
Firstly, and most importantly, I’m accountable to my readers. I have made a promise to write something interesting for you to read every Friday and I want to make damned sure I deliver. So thank you for sticking with me. You are my habit!
Secondly, I have a set time every week that I publish: Friday. If I miss a Friday, like I did last week, then I publish as soon as I can. Missing one Friday deadline isn’t a disaster and skipping a whole week is hardly likely to cause much of a cataclysm either, but habits like this are all too easy to let slide.
As James Clear says: don’t miss twice. I’ve now got this motto written down in the notebook where I record my work progress.
Thirdly, I enjoy writing. Writing is creative, obviously, but it’s also critical. Writing is a way of being in the world. Putting words down on paper forces me to think a lot more about what I do – and pushes me to do a lot more than I think.
Writing the scripts for Foiled is a slightly different experience. Rather than delivering content directly to an audience every Friday, the accountability for a radio series like Foiled lies in making my co-writer laugh and in regular deadlines throughout the three-month writing process: pitching story ideas, drafting story beats, writing the first and second drafts, and incorporating writers room punch-ups.
What makes a writing habit hard is when there is no one reading.
~
Since 2014 I have written a regular diary and I’ve been aiming for at least 1,000 words per day since 2015. I have more or less managed to stick to this habit, as this count shows:
2014: 314,084 words across 353 entries
2015: 392,241 ” ” 354 “
2016: 327,837 ” ” 320 “
2017: 248,865 ” ” 254 “
2018: 292,593 ” ” 313 “
But in 2019 I’ve only written 159,220 words in my diary – less than half you’d expect by the beginning of December.
This year so far, I’ve skipped 141 days. On 42 percent of days, I haven’t written anything at all in my 2019 diary. Can this still be called a habit?
In comparison, during my most ‘successful’ diary year of 2015 I missed only 11 diary days, just 3 percent.
Browsing the data, it’s obvious that James Clear’s rule holds fast: don’t miss twice. It’s astonishing how quickly a habit as strong as my five-year daily diary can break down after I skip just one day.
When nothing bad seems to happen after I skip a second day, my habit easily unravels and I go one or two weeks with hardly an entry.
So don’t miss twice.
~
I say that nothing bad seems to happen, but my daily diary is where I work out all the kinks in my life, personally and professionally.
My 2015 diary was enough of a success for me to start putting together a collection of highlights.
Looking back over words that I wrote nearly five years ago, the value of this daily habit comes clear. I can watch as moments of realisation surface, like in this entry from 5 January 2015:
There is no such thing as a great writer or a great anyone. We are all partners. My story is your story. My story is only a story if you’re invested in it; the language of finance is not misplaced. You invest in my story; you become a partner – an equal partner, no less. My story cannot get off the ground if it doesn’t have outside investment. I need that, we need that, the story needs that.
Diary writing is one of the most important habits in my life. I can scarcely pinpoint what the diary does for me, but I know that I am better off when I am writing regularly for nobody but myself.
Postscript: There’s something similar going on with running. At first glance, the benefit of a running habit is that you get outdoors and stay relatively fit. But running is so much more than that. On my lunchtime run today, for example, I came up with six good ideas that I can immediately implement to save money, improve my fitness and get better at business. Not bad for twenty minutes’ work.
UPDATE 6 January 2021: In 2020, I’m pleased to report that my diary-writing habit bounced back, despite, well, everything. I wrote a total of 319,893 words over 335 days, missing only 8.5 percent of that momentous 366-day leap year.
The big news from my keyboard is that Foiled has been recommissioned for a record-breaking fourth series on BBC Radio Wales.
When we put down our deposit on a flat in Edinburgh during the 2016 Fringe Festival, who’d have thought that, four years later, we’d still be writing about a little hair salon in the Welsh valleys?
(Certainly not the Arts Council, who turned us down for funding. Ahem.)
It’s almost as hard to believe that – barring any Shining style breakdowns – we’ll be back here in six months with another four complete scripts, ready to record. So send your plot ideas to the usual address. (Not a joke.)
A huge thanks is due to every one of you for listening over the years. And, if you’ve somehow missed Foiled despite my constant carping, then I can only repeatedly apologise on behalf of the monopolies commission for the absurd fact that it’s only ever online for 30 days. The rules might be changing this year. Might.
Greetings from Amsterdam. I write this as the weekend is drawing its last deep breath, as I watch the sun diving into the IJ and stock up on black bread for an eleven hour coach back to London Victoria.
Aside from the windmills, the dijks, the pannenkoeken and the oil rigs, the main event of the weekend was, of course, Youtube sensation The Tim Traveller’s mass ascent of the highest natural point in the lowest province of the Netherlands.
It’s about an hour’s drive to Urk from Amsterdam and we had no idea how many people to expect at Tim’s first Youtube meetup. The sun was shining, though, so we thought maybe ten or twenty.
Arriving on Urk (‘on’ not ‘in’ – Urkers are proud of their former status as an island) an hour early, we had a cup of tea in a smokey sports bar before walking down to the rendezvous.
About a hundred Internet people were gathered at the foot of the lighthouse, most of them filming ‘the most exciting event to ever happen on Urk’ on their smartphones. Two drones buzzed overhead, flying out of the sun like a scene from Apocalypse Now.
Tim, it’s fair to say slightly overwhelmed, was soon swamped in a cloud of Internet people eager to meet the hero of the hour. Dozens had travelled for hours across the country to meet Tim. One guy had flown from Edinburgh.
After half an hour of hand-shaking and selfies, Tim addressed his public, announced the commencement of the climb, and we set off, a protest march without cause.
The walk from the lighthouse to the church took about five minutes. Visibility was good and there were no accidents, besides the outrageous accident that a silly travel video had brought a hundred strangers together for a very silly afternoon.
At the summit, we were met by a man dressed in traditional costume, who formally greeted the crowds before melting away into the churchyard.
Then we found a pub where, thanks to the extremely high average geek quotient in attendance, we proceeded to learn an awful lot about polders – an understandable point of pride for the Dutch, given that about half the land in the Netherlands is reclaimed from the sea.
‘God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.’
Other things I learned:
The Netherlands has a border with France. Can you point to it on a map?
In a politically correct move that divides the country, Zwarte Piet, Santa Claus’ black-face assistant, has become ‘Soot’ Piet.
People born on the Caribbean island of Curaçao are Dutch citizens, with Dutch passports, but they are not members of the European Union.
Every twenty-five years, the academy convenes to decide how the Dutch will spell words that might have shifted in pronunciation. In 1996, to the delight of menu printers nationwide, the word for ‘pancake’, ‘pannekoeke’ changed to ‘pannenkoeke’.
Talking of which, the day finished with a stop at a Hansel and Gretel themed pancake house, where animatronic statues of sinterklaas flapped their arms around and every fifteen minutes the tables started tilting up and down for the entertainment of the (mostly under eleven years old) guests. Very gezelligheid.
What was the point of all this? The Tim Traveller gave us strangers – united by nothing more than an interest in the world – an excuse to go out and do something, even if that something was as pointless as climbing the highest natural point in the lowest region of the Netherlands.
An afternoon outdoors, connecting with people you would never otherwise meet, in a place you would never otherwise go. Isn’t that the most beautiful expression of what it means to be human? I think so.
A hundred Internet people gather to climb the highest natural point on (not in) Urk. Photo: The Tim Traveller
On Wednesday afternoon, I canvassed the streets of Westbourne on behalf of the Labour Party.
People jump to conclusions when you wander around wearing a very large, bright red rosette on your jacket – I would too if someone knocked on my door saying, ‘Hello, I’m canvassing for the Labour Party.’
I watched a film last week. I don’t watch many – perhaps two or three in a busy year – so the ones that I do see tend to linger in the memory, especially when they are as personal as this one.
Official Secrets is based on the true story of GCHQ translator Katharine Gun, who in 2003 was sent an NSA memo that requested GCHQ’s help in spying on members of the UN Security Council to find leverage so that Britain and the US could get the votes needed for a second UN resolution to approve the invasion of Iraq. Pretty corrupt.
Gun leaked the document to the Observer newspaper, caused an international incident, confessed her crime and was charged with a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
When her lawyer decided to use Gun’s time in court to put the legality of Tony Blair’s Iraq war on trial, the government withdrew the prosecution.
