Big flames 2009

My neighbouring village Burghead brought in the New Year in its usual style last night: burning the clavie while walking it around the village, delivering new fire to waiting households (who have presumably put out their old fires in anticipation), and boiling up a damn good fire on the hill by the Pictish fort. And then, so I hear, a ceilidh of suitable proportions.

The clavie sparks and billows on its journey around the village but that is a sideshow to the burning on the hill (also of the hill itself). There, the clavie is stoked up with wood and oil. Lots of oil. Oil poured in until it is overflowing and then more and more oil thrown on, and thrown again. The sky-high flames and burning oil are awesome. The grass burns too. And the villagers fuel the clavie up until it falls and shares its smouldering coals. Intense and profligate, the clavie on the hill is better than any bonfire. Bliss.

No distant grandstand view for me: I eased my way into the crowd on the hill, as near as I dared. I wanted the heat, the sparks, the black smoke too if it came my way (and it did). Firstcomers cannot possibly know what to expect. Two guys behind me started up a conversation just as the clavie was being set in place: "Your first time?" "Yeah, and you?" "Yeah." And then stunned silence when the first oil was thrown. Their lives will never be the same.

Satisfied, I went to the offie on my way home. The shop assistants expect the rush on this, the busiest night of the year. And they always know who has been on the hill: the clavie leaves its mark, if only with soot. Straight home to the bath for me.

Sometimes, smouldering just isn't enough. Big flames are needed once in a while!

We are shown but we don't want to see

Barnardos' new video Breaking the Cycle is shocking. Will it be banned like their 2003 campaign, which featured a cockroach coming out of a baby's mouth? Let us hope not.

The outrage hasn’t started in earnest yet, but it seems certain it will do. There are already angry comments such as "they'll stoop to any level to get money nowadays".

Some parents fear for their children because they might see it while watching X Factor or I'm a Celebrity. My just-turned 13 year old would be uncomfortable but she would not thank me for keeping it from her. She knows what sadnesses there are, in the world, not just in the UK. She has been aware for a long time from my magazines (New Internationalist, Amnesty), radio and family conversations. Now she is well equipped to receive these shocking moving images and maturing all the better for it.

If children are old enough to see others seeking fame and the sarcastic "wit" that the judges are encourage to utter, they are old enough to assess the other types of damage that humans can wreak on other and experience the hurt that comes from it. I suspect that those who don’t see Breaking the Cycle in this way don’t see X Factor or I’m a Celebrity in this way either, and are as self-obsessed as the stereotypes they watch. The comments "one thing raising awareness but another upsetting people" and "if i want to give to a cause, its because i belive in their plight not because i was shocked into it" dismiss that shock comes first, then awareness, then belief. Let's hope that once their shock has dissipated, a true awareness will develop.

Let’s think again about what this video does. It shows a cycle of desperation, punishment, abuse and escape through drugs that then leads to desperation. It is vivid because that IS what is happening to people in some parts of UK society. Another’s comment is "I don't think these type of ads are constructive to be honest and just give people the wrong idea that if they have seen it on tv then it's the norm." This person obviously hasn’t sat on a bus and seen a mother punch her daughter with sovereign rings on her fist -- someone in this household has.

Another comment is "there is enough awareness at the mo especially after Baby P", Victoria Climbie’s death came before Baby P’s, but the horror of her death didn’t prevent his. Shortcomings in social services can only be part of the problem if we believe that there is enough awareness. This is why such a shocking video is needed.

The nation needs to wake up and get its brains and hearts. "A 16y girl from care-home needed shelter, I asked Barnados & NSPCC to put her up” says another comment. How can the UK expect charities to act on behalf of our social responsibilities, expect social services to do their job when we don't press them to do it, expect that keeping only one eye open is enough to prevent These Things happening again and then damn those that would try? With hypocrisy, I imagine.

It will be very bad for us indeed to damn the advert. If we do, we will be more Dickensian than when Dr Barnardo started his charity. He used the media and we responded to it and made the charity successful. Let’s not change our minds now.

One tribe goes to war; one tribe fights the fires

A couple of days ago, I ended a comment to this blog with the words Viva Humanity!

This morning, I was reminded of the nightmare that comes when inhumanity lives and thrives, while listening to Lyn Witheridge* on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live.

Lyn is one of the first people in the UK to prove her case of bullying in the High Court. Her story of the ridiculous professional demands and personal insults is not the whole of it. Nor is it sufficient to recognise the depression and the effect on her family life while she was being bullied.

What tips the balance into a nightmare situation, a nervous breakdown and complete feelings of helplessness is when the legal process goes wrong. In Lyn's case, the tribunal rejected her complaint on the basis that she had bullied her employer, the organisation itself. She called for apparently too many meetings to discuss the issues. This is again a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. My deepest sympathy to anyone forced into this situation anywhere, at work, at home, with their neighbours.

Lyn's efforts were viewed as bullying itself. The court was used by the bully to further their own actions.

This is where our legal system goes wrong; still even today I believe it is happening.The victim is placed on the same level as the bully, where the implication is that there are "two warring parties". With this, a court gives the bully a voice and places value judgements on the victim's responses to the situation that they have been placed in (remember, they were not looking for it). Hence, the bully's actions are condoned and the bully's effects on the victim are strengthened.

This is the nightmare; a war is being fought between an aggressor and a fire fighter, and the fire fighter is damned for his efforts to put out the fire that no one wants but the aggressor. The bully has the Law on their side.

Fortunately, in Lyn's case, her union was funding her case and supported her taking the case to appeal. A nightmare within a nightmare and thank goodness she had her union; it is nigh on impossible for anyone with a private case. Appeals are expensive, transcipts have to be taken of the original hearing; the focus has to be that the original hearing was not conducted properly. And new evidence can only be presented with good reason. If you are forced in to this situation with a civil issue, where you are paying, make sure you get your case clear from the start. All the emotions don't make it easy but get it right first time -- the right to go to appeal is not a matter of course.

The result: Lyn's was worst case of bullying that the judge had ever heard and the tribunal had to be held again.

There are many good people forced on to the back foot by a few. It would serve the world well if the practioners of law were to routinely recognise even just the coarser grains within humanity.

So, Longue Vie à La Bonne Humanitié!

---

* Lyn Witheridge's account starts 20 minutes into the programme.

Slow stories

Having a blog ID of The Slow Smoulder, I was rather gratified yesterday at an event which talked about Slow-ness.

Indeed, the speakers on Slow Technology gave us a menu of the sections of their talk, which included Slow Technology, the first main course, being "infused over a low fire". Big satisfied smile :D

In fact, one of these speakers had taken the idea of sitting around a fire and designed a heated coffee table, the focus of a social setting in the modern age -- yeahh!

But it was really Glorianna Davenport's description of slow stories in the spectrum of stories in general that really interested me. Slow stories allow time for reflection; they don't follow a plot -- they represent an attitude, emerge out of a need to tell the story and respond to reactions.

She didn't talk about blogs, but it is what The Slow Smoulder is about. Another :D

Another aspect of a slow story is how it can represent real time, either really as real time or as a careful compression of the story. Glorianna reminded us of writings that represent real time in the reading (Shelley, ). She described the worth of having unedited real time footage: sunsets, children learning, creature's activities in a mud flat. But she also described her research with video and sound stories, both in terms of recording the events that happen and in terms of compressing time but keeping information. Food for thought on how the making of history works.

Also, my thinking about news, or fast stories, was ratified: news is a progression of ideas that should generate interest and feedback so that the overall story can continue. Food for thought on how newspapers rarely keep accessible old material on a breaking news item, as mentioned here (thanks to ms_wellwords). This also applies to me as a scientist: updating data while keeping that for old timepoints is essential.

Finally, take a look at myconfectionary.com, a result of Glorianna's work: multimedia slow stories!

Damnation and Hope

A month ago, I praised the skies because Mother was moving closer to me. A positive start to the next era in our lives ...

Now, I am damning the gods because Mother is not committed to her decision. She cannot see past the difficult time of waiting for a house sale and living in my (very large) sitting room to the better times afterwards.

Mother is moving back to her house. She decided this within the week of arriving at my place and I have not been able to stop her slide into damnation of everything about me and my locality.

So, No Change? apart from the loss of about £2000 on a round-trip for her things? It is not as simple as that.

A Disaster? Mother wants to re-establish her status quo; it will surely be further entrenched. Being based on a behavioural disorder, her status quo is not happy.

I am accused of coercion. Although a month ago I said "the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm", it was actually the time of the decision that was forced. She did have the choice to move within her town so she could get away from her new neighbours rather than move closer to me. Thus, she has rejected me, my attentions to details as well as the bigger picture, my execution of her wishes, and asserted that she herself is "the only one" who knows what she needs. She is confirming what I have long suspected but was hoping I was seeing the end of, a lack of trust in her daughter. No one has yet been able to be her advocate and the shell around her will only be reinforced.

Also a month ago, I was "expecting other instances of uncertainty": I knew she would be anxious about what was going to happen next, and indeed such a major change is fraught with difficulties as well as delight. What happened was that I could not maintain a delightful life for her for sufficient time -- I became a workman in her home, then a mother herself with her children visiting -- and Mother could not maintain her enjoyment -- therein lies the story of her life.

So a potential Disaster? No end to the frantic calls telling her daughter the latest atrocities against her? No end to her fight against the world? No decrease in the risk that she will be upset and fall again (a real possibility which has happened once this year). I wait to see. I have little hope of a new and positive attitude.

Yet I damn the gods mildly. One can only try, and I have lived being damned if I do and damned if I don't. I damn the gods thus:

Mother has “nerves” (also "nerve": her mother told her in no uncertain terms what she thought of her wearing a lime-green suit in the late 1940s and one could postulate that, even then, Mother had no regard for how others saw her). At the age of 13, about 1940, she was put in an institution for some nervous condition for six weeks, at the time not knowing if she would ever come out. Never mind that this was frightening – all types of "not-normal" people have been institutionalised for the rest of their lives -- there was no diagnosis, no follow up, no healing.

Thus, Mother developed coping strategies that have made her really quite dysfunctional. She has emigrated at least three times in her life and regularly wants to make big moves again. She is constantly dissatisfied with people and events, belligerent and obsessively aggressive to the point of upsetting whoever is her target. She defends herself to the hilt by pleading reactions she can't control and by attacking with emotion and little empathy for how others may feel. She complains that she “has to do it all” herself yet trusts no one to be her advocate.

Thus, we have one more person who is difficult to care for in their old age. We have two children, my brother and me, who are still learning how not-normal their mother is and their childhood was (such that my brother was distressed enough to seek counselling). We have a person who has not been able to fulfill their potential in this world.

Mother will return to her house and her frequent visits to the doctor. And here may be the silver lining to this Disaster.

Evidence for better funding for mental health services?

Surely yes! Although Mother may reject seeing a psychiatrist, a treatment already being suggested by her doctor, because she thinks she is doing alright, there are people who want to receive counselling because of a behavioural disorder or mental illness yet cannot because services don't have enough money. Here is a parallel, the non-availability of mental health service provision in the 1940s, which has turned out to be a false economy in Mother's case.

Indeed, I will thank the gods when the English government finally comes up with a holistic and evidence-based Mental Health Act. The Act of 2007 introduced Community Treatment Orders, an extreme treatment that is at risk of being over used.

The next Act must describe a full range of counselling treatments for a broader spectrum of patients and could-be patients, and make it accessible to anyone who wants it.

Scotland is already taking up this challenge, as well as looking at what contributes to good mental health.

Thus I live in hope rather than damnation.

Pit-stop pits

The 11-day DIY-and-pack-to-move franticness at Mother's ended last week with a 400-plus mile journey home (don't we wish that 1000 mph were the norm). Driving time on the car's computer = 7 1/4 hours (average for a straight drive with no hold-ups); total travel time = 10 1/4 hours; food hunting = 4 pitstops.

It seems that Jamie Oliver's efforts for school canteens has not stimulated the motorway service providers and pub restauranteers to think again about what their customers may want or need on their plates at their home from home. I'm talking Whole Food; I'm talking control on ingredients, for my partner who has diabetes and, as the tale will tell, anyone with a food allergy. A tale of a desperate hunt for food on the UK's main trunk roads and of inappropriate business models.

Pitstop 1: a service station that my partner and I rarely use but placed at the right distance from our last pitstop and at dinner time. The menu did not seem to offer anything Partner could eat without detailed discussion and so we moved on without trying. Little did we know that this would be the tale for the next NN miles.

Pitstop 2: a popular service station. The only thing on the menu for Partner was the mixed grill -- but could he have extra salad instead of chips? No. The only salad they had was for the burgers, which they needed to keep so they could put a large pinch in each burger. They could give a whole tomato instead of a half, and an extra fried egg: they tried their best. Partner is not on a no-veg diet but said OK, only to find the last mixed grill had just been sold, and the only other option was to have an entire protein meal (ham and eggs).

No problem we thought, there is always ------ services, 40 miles down the road.

Pitstop 3: no options at all. The chicken was battered (flour alone in batter exceeds the daily intake of carbs), the fish was battered, the sausages had unknown rusk content, and all other meals had pasta, potatoes or rice as a main constituent of the recipe. The staff were thoughtful but could not help, other than to point us down the road to a restaurant.

Pitstop 4: the restaurant, a pub-chain restaurant, and our previous experiences with motorway service stations showed this type in a slightly more favourable light (we could actually eat here -- a choice of any number of steaks or chicken with a dipping sauce (no chips or sauce please)), but still illustrate a contrast with whole-ingredient cooking and the eating-out-with-economy culture in the UK.

So what happened here, in this haven of edible food, that makes this tale go on?

(a) Partner discusses with till operator about wanting extra salad (which he can have) and no sauce (he can have olive oil instead to stop the chicken being so dry). When the meal comes, the salad looks (and feels, so I'm told) like it was prepared for yesterday's night's dinner) and while our main waiter goes to fetch the olive oil, another waiter tells us that there is none in the kitchen.

(b) Another customer is also in intricate discussion at the other till while Partner is ordering: his wife has an allergy to wheat, so: Which dishes do not have wheat? The reply: The chefs won't know what's in the meals. Though we are not surprised, read our reaction as !!!!?? (used especially well in the Peanuts comic stip, and illustrated here in the second strip down for those Not In The Know). The customer continues discussion with the ever-helpful-in this-situation assistant, who does have a chart of the suitability of dishes for different allergies/intolerances (nut, milk, etc), but susceptibility to wheat is not listed, not are specific ingredients, so it is still a guess as to what the wife will be eating ...

(c) Mother is having fish. At Pitstop 2, the fish is panga, from Finland. At Pitstop 4, the fish is panga, from Vietnam. Highly recommended at both pitstops. "Hmm," we think, "sounds like the same fish, is it really caught in coldwaters and tropical waters, a worldwide catch?" It seems not. The name panga is used for more than one type of fish but it's highly likely that the fish on the UK convenience eat-out scene is from Indo-Asian waters. Now is not the time to linger on the demise of the British fishing industry, the transportation of pangas to Europe, the state of pollution of the waters of their provenance, or the farming techniques and poison concentration within the fishes' flesh. The point is that we had lost trust in what we were being told.

Will we go back there again? No, not to any of them. We are not persuaded to part with our money again (and there are no plans for Mother to make this journey by car again, which is the only reason why we stopped at all for food).

When will food providers learn that there are (and will be) an increasing number of people who want to control what they eat. They want to say "I don't want that, I'd like that instead".

Top management will have to change how they serve food so staff and customer can know what they are serving or eating.

Yet still, Partner and I have been to a "top" restaurant whose chef understood why "no chips", or so we though, but still served meat with a honey glaze. It's still back to school for some chefs.

Note:
Partner chose a low carb diet 4 years ago to enable him to better manage the consequences of his pancreas no longer producing insulin (Type 1 diabetes) after 20 years of struggling with the protocol advocated by this country's health system. After these years of searching, he found the research of Richard Bernstein, a medic from a engineering perspective.

Partner keeps his carbohydrate intake very low, to about 20--30 g carbohydrate for the whole day.

Before he changed his diet, his blood sugar levels were very variable. He experienced extreme hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar), which leads to glycosylation (sugar binding) of nerves, tendons and blood vessels, to name just a few parts of the body affected, which can lead with time to numbness, blindness, high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease, impotence, depression. He experienced extreme hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), which starves the brains and muscles of sugar, and at best made him shaky, unable to concentrate, unable to stand, and at worst put him in hospital. His insulin intake was high, to control the effects of relatively large amounts of carbs, and as well as this contributing to the cycle of hypers so take more insulin, then hypos so take more glucose (simple carbohydrate), and so on, insulin has its own detrimental effects on the body.

After diet change, his blood sugar levels are very much more stable. His blood sugar levels rarely rise above 8 mmol/l (up to 20 mmol/l before diet change) and the severity of hypos is reduced. Insulin intake is reduced by at least half. Stiffness and numbness of fingers has been reversed and the deterioration in his eye has been halted .

His blood sugar levels remain at the mercy of the rate of digestion and the rate of insulin absorption from the injection point, both of which are difficult to control in themselves and need tweaking with carefully measured amounts of insulin and glucose.

Going faster during the slow-down

Richard Noble and Andy Green, who achieved the world landspeed record in 1997, last week announced that they want to go even faster: 1000 mph in fact. We can expect to see this in 2011.

The BBC announced this news on the same day that Governor of the Bank of England uttered "Recession" on Radio Four's Today programme.

Breaking the LSR to an extent of 1000 mph will be utterly awesome if it faces anything like the challenges presented on the fly during the last project, which achieved the still-standing record of 763 mph. And it will indeed be awesome. Engineering will again be at the edge of its limit: the record stands for over 10 years, and 1000 mph is faster than the record for a low-altitude aircraft. Already, the plan is to change the jet when turning around for the return trip. The team is now looking for a 15-mile stretch of flat stone-free desert, and it is justified in doing this considering the footage of route walking and incidence analysis that it went through last time (The Mission: Supersonic Dreams [not playable online]). This project has the experience to fulfill its goal, regardless of a recession.

It makes me wonder whether it is that the big ideas will keep succeeding while every other is put on ice, and whether the big ideas will be kickstarting those that have stalled whenever there is a return of Confidence.

If so, I hope that the big ideas pushing through to the end will belong to a New Economics (sales of Das Kapital have risen 300% in Germany this year), that they will recognise the value of a producer's labour above that of materials, which is the way that Richard Noble approached his last project.

He operated on a shoestring, not knowing if a sponsor would come forward with his fuel costs, and even, towards the end of the season, with the vagaries of climate (quite ironically considering the stock markets' volatilite reactions to the economic climate); he succeeded because of the dedication of his people. Now he helps teams become more effective using his Transformation Dynamics model.

The concomitant announcements of the LSR and a putative recession could be prescient with my first-hand experiences on the same day (I'll give the wry details another day, suffice to say that I'll be talking about the food industry within the UK motorway service and pub restaurant chains), but it is just that I am looking for such connections and choose to interpret my observations. Staff can be hindered from serving a business's customers or the converse, staff can be empowered and make profits when there are less people prepared to part with their money.

Businesses with the big R on their minds have a choice: do business better for the same price (in this instance, invest in staff and they will be more inspired in their work) or do business worse for cheaper (cut investment in staff and offer nothing special). The difference in choice reflects the dogma, with which I happen to agree even while I don't like it, that selling for cheaper doesn't work in a recession: that is, when money is tight, sell to those want to pay more simply because they are the ones who can afford to make the decision to spend. Are China's toy and textile industries suffering simply because they serve the lower income market?

Taking a long-term view, businesses should follow the first option, maintain and improve standards and operations, and even more so in a recession so they can be ready to take opportunities when they present themselves again.

In fact, the supersonic car website says much the same thing in terms of education. Go faster, Andy, go faster!

Clichés? Let's use them

Last week, the Guardian published a series on "How to write", which included "The Guardian Book of English Language" (read " .. of Guardian style". The Guardian's style includes the proscription of certain phrases, clichés. I disagree: I truly appreciate the image of a business "haemorrhaging cash" if they really are losing money hand over fist. Clichés are powerful. They get an idea across straight away. They may avoid the use of thought. But that is no reason to dogmatically refuse to use them: writers just have to make sure that they are using the right idea.

The Oxford Shorter Dictionary lists "cliché" as "a stereotyped, expression, a hackneyed phrase or opinion" and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors as "unoriginal phrase". Therein lies the sometime nature of the beast: negative, careless and wrong. "Cliché" first appeared in the English language in 1892, according to RW Burchfield: this is about the time that publishers had become established and were beginning to put their own style, their own choices, their own dictats on what they published. The style of "avoiding clichés" must come from this time. One definition of a cliché includes "overused to the point that its sole function is to mark its user as a lazy thinker". Hmm, so using a cliché reflects badly on the writer, which can only be when the cliché has become popular enough to become a cliché? It's a good example of a circular argument, which it seems is the best way to tackle any discussion of clichés: Stephen Fry wrote in his book Moab Is My Washpot, "It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue." It seems that it is very difficult to talk positively about clichés and Burchfield himself wrote of them that they are "always reminding us of the repetitiveness of things, the humdrumness that lies beyond and within the doorstep if one's imagination should weaken or one's sense of humour runs out". Oh help, how do we get away from such dogma about what is often a non-issue?

Clichés are metaphors, dead metaphors, those that we know so well that we don't have to think about to understand. People use idioms, analogies, colloquialisms because they are useful in their quirkiness. It is as simple as that. Idioms, I note, are OK: there is even a dictionary of English idioms. Phrases such as "like a fish out of water", "a feather in his cap", "Hobson's choice" have a historical and cultural basis, and refusing to use them risks losing the diversity in the English language.

Yes, there is a caveat: clichés can be misused for didactic purposes. They are familiar, instantly recognisable, and therefore dangerously powerful, and the message becomes subliminal, one that enters the mind yet only skims the surface of conciousness. This is just what is very handy about them, to get the message over, but lazy readers, that is lazy thinkers, may be more likely to accept a point that they otherwise wouldn't. Well, good writing should make reading easy, but writers can't and shouldn't second guess their style to accommodate potential laziness in their readers. Let's use the English language as it is given to us.

Are non-native English speakers put at a disadvantage when a cliché is used? Is the material made inaccessible to them? On the down side, reading has to stop until the meaning has been researched. On the up side, there is going to be no slipping fast ones past these readers, they aren't lazy. And the nuances of the language that are otherwise so difficult for non-native speakers to access are made available. Spoon-feeding (my choice of phrase) non-native readers, like spoon-feeding in general, does not allow development.

Finally, I am reminded of a colleague's comments when our supervisor was interviewing candidates for a post-doctoral position within our research group. " Oh her, that one. She was nothing but clichés. They can't appoint her." Well, "that one" got the job. And brilliant she is, the longest standing member of the group bar the supervisor himself. Not that I always agree with her, and she has views on a lot of things. Indeed, I relish the challenge of keeping on my toes in conversation with her and making sure that I don't just allow her latest point of view to slip in unnoticed, to flavour the rest of the conversation with a premise that I don't agree with. She doesn't second guess me; she trusts in my intelligence.

Talk until you are tired

"Talk until you are tired" is the translation of the words printed on a kanga I was buying in Dar es Salaam in 1989: Mtasema mtachoka. With many of the kangas in East Africa having a jina, they were clearly important for communication. I didn't want to be in ignorance; I asked the shop assistant.

She paused and laughed, clearly having difficulty. She explained: "It means that you keep talking about things that matter to you, whether it is a certain problem or just things. It is very important to talk as much as you can. You have to keep talking until you cannot talk anymore because you need to sleep."

Talking until you are tired is a way of life. It is the only way to sort things out. I spent 3 years in Africa, where women talk all the time as they walk, wash clothes in the river, wait by the bus stop. Men sit in groups in the evenings and talk. Great efforts are made to talk to the right people: in a country without a fit-for-purpose telephone system, people made long journeys, over the hill on foot, by bus or by train, and I am sure they still do.

Now, I'm blogging until I am tired. There is much to talk about. I'm writing from a UK perspective and I'm hoping, not least because the seed of this blog's attitude originates in Africa, that the blog will generate a collection of world views simply because there are issues that affect us all.