God is in this dog

Make the environment hurt at wallet level

2011-04-06T13:29:00.001+01:00

It's bin day today. I'm standing at the window holding on to E who is fascinated by the bin lorry. We watch as it takes our neighbors overflowing bin and empties it. Our bin, despite having one child still in nappies, is rarely more than half full. That's because we recycle just about everything. Each week when we run B down to his gymnastics class, the boot of the car is full of plastic, cardboard & packaging, newspaper, glass and metal... And I mean full, it is amazing sometimes how much we collect during a week
As a result when the bin lorry comes to us, there isn't much to collect. If everyone recycled like that, the bin lorry would have less to pick up, meaning it could empty more bins with fewer journeys, there would be less need for sorting at the other end and more re-usable materials would be recycled. A net benefit for the environment.
But of course it doesn't happen this way, bins are crammed full and very little of what could be recycled is recycled. Where does the responsibility lie? Ultimately with the individual, the problem is that the individual in many cases is fundamentally lazy and acts out of self interest. Let me give an example, look at the car market, you rarely see a car advert for a petrol car any more and for a while now, in new car sales, diesels have outstripped petrol cars. When did that happen? Well, the change came two summers ago, when the petrol price was high enough that it hurt people at wallet-level, and then 'change' happened.
I recycle because I believe we are in danger of seriously fu@king the environment if we haven't done so already. I recycle because I believe that small actions performed by small people, in small towns all over the world, can change things on a big scale. I recycle because I want to create a better world for my children and instill in them a recycling philosophy. But unless we achieve a snowball effect where a critical mass of people behave in an environmentally sound way, all these efforts are in vain.
Back to petrol prices hurting people at wallet-level. What would happen if each bin was weighed upon collection and you were charged for bin collection based on the monthly weight of your refuse? What would happen if the bin man had a little handheld and as your bin was emptied, he/she ticked a box if there was a large amount of recyclable refuse from your bin. Ticking the box results in an environmental surcharge for your refuse collection. Either making it cost less if you recycle or more if you don't may be one way to change behavior. Even if responsibility lies with the individual, government must be prepared to step in when required for the greater good. Prioritising the environment is for the greater good and occasionally you have to hit where it hurts.

4 Tips for making 2009 your year

2009-02-05T09:48:00.005Z

Are any of you plagued by seasonal tiredness? Twice a year as the light goes in October/November and as it slowly (ever so slowly) comes back in February/March, I am literally knocked off my feet. I go through the day as normal, but then from about 20:00 in the evening, I struggle to keep my eyes open. It normally last for two to three weeks and then disappears, only to come back again in late Autumn. Each time it comes around, the temptation is to hit the coffee, as it is frustrating to feel that my days consist of working, coming home, putting le Petit Prince to bed and then going to bed myself, without having time for my wife or ‘me-time’; but I have learnt more and more to go with the flow. Although it feels strange giving-up and going to bed at 21:30, it also feels equally pointless to fight back and just stay awake for the very sake of staying awake, when I feel so dulled that I can’t really do anything else anyway. To cut a long story short, my intention was to write my blog last night, but reality was that I fell asleep whilst putting le Petit Prince to bed, then got-up, rubbed the grit from my eyes and rang my brother and then gave up the ghost.

But all was not wasted as the parable above, that is to say the difference between my intentions (to write my blog) and my reality (I went to bed) was kind of what I wanted to write about anyway.

I don’t know how many of you have New Year’s Resolutions? I used to have them but have since gone over to a more user-friendly and rather less rigid goal system. For me, New Year’s Resolutions had a sort of cast-in-stone feel and as such often tended to be far too ambitious to be achievable. But, New Year’s Resolutions or not, if you decided that 2009 is a year for change, then about now is usually the time when those goals are flagging and slowly fall by the wayside and I want to share with you my 4 tips for keeping on track, so you can get everything out of 2009 that you want to.

Tip 1: All goals should be SMART! This isn’t rocket science and those of you in the corporate world will have heard the acronym before, but I keep going back to it and realise that it rings true time and time again. SMART goals are:
• Specific: So instead of ‘During 2009 I intend to get fit’ the same goal becomes specific by re-writing it thus, ‘I will run twice a week during 2009’, and if you are really feeling ambitious, the goal can be even more specific, ‘I will run every Wednesday and Sunday, during 2009.’ – A help to creating specific goals is to answer the following questions: Who, what, where, when, which, why? Specific goals make the next step easier…
• Measureable: If you goals are specific, such as the above example ‘I will run twice a week during 2009’ then they will be easy to measure and easy to track. Here the focus is not on punishing yourself if you fail to run twice in a week, but instead to aim to build on your successes. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld had a technique called ‘don’t break the chain’ (see http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php ), where he recommends getting a wall calendar and marking in red pen each time you achieve your goal. So in our example, I started the New Year with a run on Friday and so I mark that with red, then I did my second run for the week on the Sunday and that is also marked in red. Now looking at my wall calendar, I feel good as I see I have already achieved my objectives for the first week. The aim then is to get that red pen on two days a week each and every week and not the break the chain. The more red pen, the prouder you feel about yourself and the less inclined you are to break the chain. Measurability is not only about tracking, but also about achieving. If you goal is measureable then you know when you have achieved it.
• Achievable: This is a hard one for me as I am ambitious and always set my goals sky high, but it is very important that your goals are achievable. If the goal is too hard, the chances are that you will give-up before reaching it and if the goal is too easy, then you will probably experience diminished satisfaction upon achieving it. Achievable is of course a very subjective term, but it is you, the goal-setter, who decides your own parameters.
• Realistic: Is about forming goals that you both want and are able to work towards. It is the combination of those two words that is the key. For example I may want to run 5 times a week, but given my work and family commitments, I am only able to run twice a week. If I set a goal after my want then it is doomed to failure as it doesn’t reflect my reality.
• Time-bound: A goal that stretches to infinity is doomed from the start as you will have changed the goalposts a thousand times before you get there, and as it lacks a time frame, you will never get there as there is no ‘there’ to get to. A good goal has a defined beginning and end.

Tip 2: Share your goals: I enjoy running most when I have someone else to run with. I also have a far greater chance to achieving my running goal when I have someone else to run with. Those evenings when it is cold and wet outside and you have been freezing all day and just want to sit under a blanket and watch TV, it’s those evenings that I am glad I have shared my goals. The thought that there is someone out there expecting me to knock on their door, dressed for an evening jog, can be the difference between me succeeding or failing with the week’s goals. Whether it works as a carrot (your friends and family can encourage you to achieve your goals and can share in your success) or a stick (the thought of letting friends and family down is enough to get you off the sofa) sharing your goals increases you chance of achieving what you want and it is fun for others to be included in your journey.

Tip 3: Take one day at a time: In Hakagure, the book of the samurai, it is written that Ikuno Oribe said “if a retainer will just think about what he is to do for the day at hand, he will be able to do anything. If it is a single day’s work, one should be able to put up with it. Tomorrow, too, is but a single day.” Sometimes our goals can seem far off, they take too long to achieve and/or we have so much going on in our lives that just the thought of going out and running tonight is too much. This is when I remember Ikuno Oribe’s words and just focus on today. If my goals for today are to do my morning exercises and jog after work, then I focus on that and just take one step at a time. By focusing on what I need to get done today, it gets done, and each time that happens I move a step closer to my goals. Each successful day takes me a step closer.

Tip 4: Changes take time or the rule of 3: It can be disheartening to have started the year with good intentions about a diet regimen or an exercise programs, maybe coupled to an ideal image in your mind of how you want to look, and then, each time you glance in the mirror, you don’t see any change (or if you see change, it doesn’t match the ideal image in your head). This is where the rule of 3 comes into play. As your body becomes accustomed to change, a new diet or a new exercise scheme, it normally takes about 3 weeks for it to adjust and for the changes to become routine. After that, it normally takes about 3 months for the body to show results. So if you are training or dieting after New Year, keep at it, you are half-way through the 3 month period and soon you should see the results of your hard work.

(image from Rohitrohila.com)

For those reading this today, let me know if any of these tips work for you, and if you have tips of your own, please share them…

Ready for you coffee break on Monday

2009-02-01T19:10:00.003Z

It’s Sunday, the ’day of rest’ and all is traditionally quiet in the blogosphere. Most professional writers have the weekend off as a financially successful blog should be seen as a 9-5, Monday-Friday venture. As my blog is neither financially successful or successful for that matter, today can work for one of my sporadic bursts of ‘blog noise’.

… and blog noise it will be as I round-up the week in a sort of all-in-one post. I was recently browsing youtube (www.youtube.com) and was suddenly hit by a desire to listen to some ‘real’ music played by genuine craftsmen as opposed to most of the manufactured ‘same-same’ music that I hear on the radio today. You may not agree with my choice of band, you may not agree with my choice of song, but it can’t be denied, here is a master at work. Follow the link and let me know what you think (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2nQZPC2uTs).

As you sometimes hear on sports like tennis and football ‘rain stops play’ and over here, snow has stopped play. I am sitting here with a cup of tea looking out of the window as a very fine snow blows around in the wind. The garden is a pattern of powder white and green as the snow is too light and too fine to cover the ground properly. On my list of activities for the day I was planning to start clearing the garden beds in front of the house, but, according to the weather forecast, if you recon in the prevailing wind (30km/h SW), the ambient outside temperature is around -8˚C and so here I am, in the warmth with a cup of tea, writing my blog instead. Whilst I am at least thinking about my front garden, is there anyone out there who knows much about pampas grass? I have two large ‘bushes’ of it outside the front walkway and wonder whether I can trim it back and if so, how much?

Every morning, my routine is to get out of bed at 06:30, start the coffee going, then turn on my phone, open up a program called ‘newsstand’ and then click on ‘renew feeds’. This then immediately fetches the news feeds from a variety of news sources and blogs that I follow and presents them neatly for me in bite size chunks, so I can quickly digest the breaking news worldwide, locally and check out some inspiring blogs for up-dates. Any article that I find interesting, I can flag for further reading later on. This way, I go through about 140 news & blog articles in about 20 minutes and then I have a group of flagged articles to read in depth when I have the time. These articles often lead me to other sites that are worth visiting and so I wanted to share a few with you:

• http://hundredpushups.com - yes you do have to register but the site provides you with a 6-week training program which leads up to you being able to do 100 consecutive push-ups. If you don’t manage it after 6 weeks, you just continue with the program until you reach your goal. The whole program delivers you a training schedule to be done 3 times per week, based on how many consecutive push-ups you can do today. I use it as a new training tool in my morning workouts. (See also the sister site http://twohundredsitups.com).

• http://www.bushcraft.co.uk - a site tip from Mark containing a wealth of information about bushcraft, starting from beginners basics and moving through to advanced craft. I have taken a recipe for a ‘bannock’, basically a simple bread that can be cooked on a Trangia (stormkök) and look forward to trying it when I am next out (3 weeks time or so).

• http://squarefootgardening.com & http://frugaldad.com/2008/03/03/how-to-build-a-square-foot-garden/ for advice on how to make the most out of a small vegetable patch. I intend to try this at home and wonder if it could be of interest to some of the rest of you? (James, Therese, Dom, Mark & Sven) (Picture from frugaldad.com).

Well, that’s my lot for today. The sauna is warmed-up and it’s time to chill-out (or rather sweat it out) and reflect on the week ahead. Hope you all have a good one…

Keeping training simple

2009-01-26T19:43:00.001Z

With the schedule I have at work (some days, some evenings and some nightshifts) and with family as my priority, my exercise has to fit into the gaps; which basically puts gym work and other scheduled training passes on the shelf. To be honest, I am not a gym person. I have a runner’s body and one that does not easily put on muscle mass. I don’t find the gym intimidating, but more uncomfortable and I get bored of waiting in queues to use the different machines. For me, once I am geared-up, I just want to get on with it and train and I am put out of stride each time I have to back-off and wait for a machine to be free.
Instead I have gone back to basics, a pattern of training that has been with me for a long time, on and off. My goal is simple. I have taken what would be a year’s gym fee and have instead brought new trainers, a polar R200 pulse watch (pictured), a yoga mat and a pull-up bar. My goal is simple. Three times a week, I do a combination of upper and lower body strength work (pull-up’s, sit-up’s push-up’s, triceps dips etc…) in the morning before going to work, where I have been inspired by sites like www.onehundredpushups.com. In addition to this I am running an 7,5 km route a minimum of two times per week. I am fortunate in my job that I don’t sit behind a desk, but am instead about and moving. I would estimate that I cycle between 10-20km a day during my working week and when I am working evenings, I would estimate that I walk between 10-15km. I don’t count this as exercise as such as it doesn’t raise my heart rate much, but it does keep my body active and help me to maintain a good basic level of fitness.
With a simple schedule like this, I have not invested more in my exercise than the average over-enthusiastic ‘new year ‘ gym membership costs, I have a strength work-out that uses my own body weight (which is sufficient for me at the moment) and a running schedule that is as easy to achieve as coming home, putting your trainers on and heading back out of the door!
All in all, the aim has been to create a simple and cost-effective training regimen that is easy to follow, fits around a hectic schedule and will be effective over time. Try it at home, play around and see what works for you.

Stopped me dead on the way to work…

2009-01-12T19:26:00.003Z

Saw this incredible midwinter sunrise whilst I was taking my son to kindergarten today and it reminded me of some verse I have been reading recently:

”Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal through sodden towards sundown
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the shortest day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on ponds and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heart
Reflecting in a watery mirror.
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense that blaze or branch, or brazier
Stirs the dumb spirit: No wind but pentacostal fire
In the dark time of the year. ”

The question is, can you guess the poet? Those of you that know me can probably guess it straight off as it is a poet whose collection I have been studying now for a number of years.

Have a good day y’all…

Ok, so it's a giant lamp, in the middle of the town square. WTF?

2009-01-10T13:00:00.004Z

This giant lamp was in the middle of town today and made me curious. It has done a laborious tour around Malmö's various town squares and now it is in the centre of town. But it begs the question 'why a giant lamp?' Reading later on the net about the artist, his aim is to place everyday objects in a context that is not their own and by doing so wake us as individuals from the semi-slumber that is our daily lives. By posing the question 'what's a lamp doing here?' we wake-up ... if only for a moment.

For the record, this is my first ever entirely mobile blog. I took the photo with my phone and then composed the blog on the bus whilst traveling home. I then sent it to my blogger account and it posted automatically. I know that there are many of you out there that will read this and think 'duh! that's so 2007/8' but for me it's new and for me it's impressive. Point made.

Just after the New Year fireworks

2009-01-09T15:41:00.002Z

I yawn, I yawn and I yawn and it stings behind my eyes. As everyone else talked animatedly, I felt as if I was sitting behind a thick pane of glass. I could hear voices, but unfocused and it certainly wasn't worth me talking back as the glass was too thick and increasingly misty, like steam from a shower. The cognac I had drunk worked through me like warm honey. I was feeling tired and I was smiling...

Musings from the balcony in Lanzarote

2009-01-09T15:34:00.003Z

In what must be a blasphemy for austere Zen monks, I sit here nevertheless monk-like sucking in the moment like a desperate sponge. The setting sun, the palm trees, the sound of the wind blowing through their fonds, the ocean and the blues and blacks of the breaking waves. The sound of each wave as is breaks over the pebble beach and the distant view of Fuerteventura over the water. The whitewash walls and the contrast of the black lava stones on the wall in front of me. As I write, a container ship lumbers across the bay in front of me and all is well.

More time, more time...

2007-08-30T20:29:00.000+01:00

It seems that no matter how hard I try, I end up here... looking sadly at my blog having not had the time to up-date over a long period and presuming that you have all got tired of checking in over a coffee break to find the same old entry and photo of me gurning beside a canoe. I feel guilty about it and then consider whether it is worth it at all. Is it worth feeling guilty about it? Is there a reason why I just don't get round to up-dating it? It isn't due to lack of material, but may be instead due to the sheer amount of material that I have in my head and the effort of forming it into something worth reading rather than a string of unproductive thoughts.

Well, as the title states, I seem to be permanently chanting "more time, more time" and as such it is only right that I up-date you on where I am now. I finished my summer job on Sunday. During this summer I have cycled 820 km to and from work and have worked 11 of the 13 weeks of summer 'holiday'. Out of the 11 weeks I have worked, I have worked 6 weekends, got up at 05:30 more times than I care to remember and find myself at home counting the knives and forks back into the drawer after each meal and locking the kitchen knives away after I have used them ;-)

True to form, I finished my summer job on sunday, started back at university on the monday and then started my placement/internship yesterday. I will now be at my placement until mid-January next year! I will be splitting my time between a 'therapy and treatment' (best translation) centre for parents and children from 0-12 years old, where I will be working with supporting parents in their role often based around helping them structure up the practical side of daily living and helping them work with children with behavioural problems. In addition to this, I will be working with an ambulatory team based at a school in one of Malmö's more deprived areas. There I will be assisting in general social work and helping, amongst other things, with an Aggression Replacement Training (ART) course at one of the schools. Although I feel like a walking zombie at the moment as starting a new job is always tiring, I am really excited and have received a very positive feeling about my placement. Watch this space...

In the middle of all of this, I still haven't forgotton about my pledge and am planning my first walk for Sunday 23rd September. It is later in September than I would have liked, but compromises need to be made, and anyway where would I be without a challenge?

I know I am late getting there, but my latest 'stress me even more' discovery is podcasting. I had discovered it before, but after a couple of hours of listening to some very amateur podcasts on wine and an awful lot of other crap, I discarded it as pretty useless. Recently, I was just idly surfing the i-tunes music store and the patriotic side of suddenly found both a weekly podcast from The Economist and a daily podcast summarising the BBC news for the day. Now I can cycle to my placement whilst catching up on the daily news pumping through my headphones in the Queen's English. Even on these surprisingly and unfairly cold August mornings, it doesn't fail to bring a smile to my face.

Swimming and paddling in Halen

2007-08-07T10:35:00.000+01:00

As I bobbed back above the surface and made a quick grab for my floating rucksack with one hand and my oar with the other, I looked at the canoe, full to the gunnels with water, and wondered over quite just what had happened! My second reflection was over quite how unexpecteldly warm the water was as I bobbed about in it at nipple height.Then I started to laugh. After that it was just to float the canoe over to the nearest bank, dump our rucksacks on the bank, then balancing on submerged stones, to tip the water out of the canoe, climb back in, soaked to the skin, and paddle our sorry asses back to the hire station for a change of clothes and a hot cup of coffee.

That good readers is my dedication to the cause, as in conjunction with publishing my pledge, I decided to jump-start things and get outdoors for the first time in a while. I would like to say that the reason the canoe tipped is because I really wanted to test my new Wind Proof fleece, but I would just be lying (although it did get a thorough test).

Anyway, I took a canoe out of Halen, part of a large lake system in Blekinge and the scenery was stunning, far too good for my meagre camera skills, but rather something to be experienced in person. The lake system is interlinked and can easily accommodate everything from a 1 day to a week's canoe trip, so we now have something to add to the list (provided, that is, that we stay in the canoe!)

The plege

2007-08-02T13:07:00.001+01:00

Goal:

Short Term: To make day walking a regular activity in my life

Medium Term: To increase my outdoor activity to include weekends away, hill-walking and canoe trips. To become a confident navigator. To hike England, Scotland and Wales highest peaks.

Long Term: To become a confident outdoorsman. To be able, where possible to live off the land and thus to be a light-weight walker. To walk across England on the Hadrian's Wall trail.

Stage 1 and pledge for short-term goal:

In order to make day walking a regular activity in my life, I pledge to organise and walk on my own or (preferably) with others at least one walk every 5 weeks, aiming to accomplish a minimum of 4 walks before the end of the year.

My walks will be announced on my blog ahead of time and once the walk is completed I will report back on my blog with photographs as proof of participation.

I agree to be bound by a forefit, to be agreed upon by my sponsors and myself beforehand and which will also be posted onto my blog. I agree to undertake the forefit should I fail, without acceptable* reason, to complete my pledge. *acceptable = a reason accepted as valid by my sponsors.

Start date: 1^st September 2007

End date: 31^st December 2007

Sponsors:

Dom – a companion on many walks

Mark – an outdoorsman in the making and hopefully teacher.

James – has promised to improve my navigation skills and hopefully will be a walking companion as much as possible.

Andreas – promised once as a birthday present to accompany me – we shall see. Will act as the Sweden-based referee.

As sponsors you agree to support and motivate me, to hold me responsible for achieving my pledge and for undertaking my forefit should I fail. Ideally you will join my for a walk or two before the end date.

The pledge will be bound by your signatures in the comments box and the forefit can be agreed upon amongst yourselves and sent to me for agreement.

Using my blog to get me started and you are welcome to join me

2007-07-27T18:15:00.000+01:00

I have been looking into using pledging and sponsorship as a motivational tool and figure that my blog will be a good place to start a little experiment. Let me first start by explaining the concept. I make a pledge to do something, say for instance that I pledge to go running for a minimum time of 30 minutes, 3 times per week for a 10 week period. In order to motivate me to do this, I enlist a couple of sponsors, friends who will support my efforts, encourage me and to whom I am responsible for reporting my efforts and confessing my lack of effort. In order to further encourage my efforts, my sponsors may wish to devise a forefit, which I agree to undertake if I fail to fulfil my obligations without a valid excuse. Once all that is agreed, we get going, I start my runs, check in and report to my sponsors on my progress and they in turn help motivate me towards a goal that I would have found difficult to achieve on my own. - Obviously, the system is based on trust, that they need to trust me when I say that I did a run last night and they need to trust that I will actually undertake the forefit in the event of my failure, butr anyone with a little moral fibre in their body and a modicum of guilty conscience shouldn't have too much problem with the concept of honesty.

So, I have decided to use this method on myself and to use my blog as a tool to record and report my efforts and as a forum for you my readers and my sponsors to encourage, give feedback and to follow my progress. I hope by mid-week next week to have written my pledge document and I will then publish it on the blog and then we can take it from there.

Click here to motivate

2007-07-23T17:07:00.000+01:00

image from istockphoto.com

After a leave of absence, I am back on the air. As I have caught-up personally with most of you, I'm guessing that my absence won't have left too many coffee breaks empty and devoid of meaning!

As always just after a holiday, I have returned with ideas and inspiration for my blog, which is needed after my total lack of inspiration in the weeks prior to my holiday. I was tired to the bone and somehow each day just melted seamlessly into the next. I kept meaning to write and somehow never found the time, or, when I finally sat in front of my computer, my mind just went blank and after a while, I just shut the lid and went up again. But, now I have some ideas and will be using my blog, amongst other things as a kind of motivational experiment, so it's time again to make your excuses and leave office gossip around the coffee machine, get your cup of joe and tune in to godisinthisdog as this blog needs you!

A thousand shades of grey

2007-06-29T08:45:00.000+01:00

I have been sitting here just playing with the idea of what is considered sane, alternative crazy. Listening to some of the patient's talk when they are in a psychosis, often makes sense and doesn't make sense simultaneously. You understand what they are saying, but it has no place in the regulated world that we live in. I sometimes wonder as I sit here and listen to them and watch them react to stimuli that I can neither see nor perceive, who is the more free of us? Is it me, who can go out of the door, when my shift is over, but who is bound by the moral code, seen and unseen, of my culture and coupled to the rulebook, both legal and social of the system, or is it the patients, who are free from all of this, who can give free reign to their thoughts, expressions and emotions; who aren't limited by being called John or Simon, but can change their name at will, who aren't bound by ducorum and due process when they meet a doctor, or sit in front of a court, but who can just associate freely. Is freedom being able to walk out of here when my shift is over, or is it not having to call a tomato a tomato if I don't feel like it, and all that that entails?
If I then follow this line of thought, my next stop is the idea that the dividing line between 'normal' and 'crazy' is a social phenomenon. There is a range of behaviour that falls under the category of normal or acceptable, and everything that falls outside becomes thus deviant and in this case 'crazy'. To kiss my wife or my sister or a good friend is normal, to kiss a random girl on the street is not. But then this is further complicated by context. To kiss a random girl on the street is less acceptable if I am a dirty smelling homeless vagrant than if I was maybe a handsome chiseled film star. To kiss her on the cheek is maybe more acceptable than kissing her on the mouth. To kiss her and walk off is maybe less acceptable that to stay and explain, in a charming, alluring Italian accent, that my actions were a result of her irresistable beauty and could I buy her dinner. So we have a meta-rule, in this case that it is not socially acceptable to kiss a stranger. This meta-rule then has exceptions and within those exceptions, there are contextual differences.
So back to craziness being a social phenomenon. In the ancient Roman times it was enough just to be a red-head to be incarcerated as crazy. Times have changed and so too have contexts. In the 90's for example with the welfare state in mid-crisis, money to psychiatry was strangled and the number of beds available were vastly reduced. All of a sudden, a patient with a condition that resulted in him/her being restricted from public exposure, was suddenly classified as 'all right after all' and was let out. How much has deviation got to do with not being able to be a productive member of the system? By not holding down a job, you are not normal and are therefore marginalised. Couple this to not being able to take care of yourself and talking in riddles and you deviate far enough from normal to be seen as crazy. Accepted, there are psychiatric illnesses with serious and debilitating outcomes and by hanving this discussion, my aim is not to belittle them or those who suffer from them, my purpose is more to reflect around where the line is drawn and why and to look at the context that surrounds the drawing of this line. To acknowledge, simply that the world is not black and white, and to take a quick look at one of the thousand shades of grey that populates the middle space.

Civilisation is only skin deep, which is more than can be said for my writing

2007-06-19T10:26:00.000+01:00

This is my third attempt to write a blog entry for this week. The first two attempts were just crap and this one isn’t that promising either! The hard thing is that I really want to write but I just can’t. It isn’t that I have writer’s cramp or anything, but more that most of what goes on at work concerns my patients and is of course governed by confidentiality clauses and secrecy legislation. Outside of work, I come home, spend time with Ben and Ellie and then go to sleep. Today is my first free day in a while and will be spent filing, clearing my backlogs of paperwork and doing the week’s shopping. Such is my life. So most of my time is spent at work and I can’t write about that, and the time that I spend outside work is suitably filled so as to be almost void of inspirational themes. The net result is that I have nothing of value to write about (assuming of course that I ever did.)

On the ‘things that annoy me’ front, there is only one news item to report and that concerns the flooding is southern Australia last week, where home owners returned not only to find their homes ruined by flooding, but also to find that they had been robbed of their possessions. How low will some people stoop? I have said it once and I will say it again, civilisation is only skin deep with some fragile strings that hold everything in balance. Remove one of those, with a phenomenon such as flooding or a prolonged powercut in a major city and within hours, it seems, the monkeys come down from their trees, the grass grows through and cracks the sidewalk and you see that the difference between heaven and hell is often a matter of perception.

The response to my request that you can send in suggestions of topics that you would like me to write about has been, as suspected, minimal. James’ suggestion did turn-up some interesting results in Google, which amongst other things led me into spreadsheets from local country councils in England measuring the time spent on projects to the nth degree (a sign of bureaucracy run amok) and Andreas’s suggestion of seeking inspiration at the bottom of a large bottle of wine accompanied by music is a good one, but in my current state would just result in sleep and me being unable to drive and fetch junior from kindergarten.

Hopefully inspiration for some kind of moderately decent writing will come at some stage, but just right now, I need a coffee and a shave. Adios.

Scribbling before work, work before pleasure

2007-06-08T09:58:00.000+01:00

I am sitting at the dining table, my second cup of yesterday’s coffee is finished, leaving a brown stain round the rim from where I warmed it in the microwave. The door is open to the veranda, the sky is blue, the sun is shining and the garden is full of summer noises, the sound of bees and birdsong.

In some ways it feels like the calm before the storm. The relative peace and tranquillity of my house and garden stands in contrast to patrolling plastic-lined corridors, to watching the day go by through locked windows, to counting in knives and forks after mealtimes and taking roll-call lists.

In another way, I see that the ‘calm’ here is on the surface. I can sit here at the dining table, writing something for my blog and drinking crappy coffee, but I do that at the cost of the other things that I could be doing instead. The term we learnt in economics to describe this phenomena was ‘opportunity cost’, so the time that I spend doing this blog is time that I cannot spend doing something else. Then, depending on which principle I am currently following, for example if I was following the ‘pleasure principle’, then I need to therefore ensure that the activity I have chosen and that will consume my time, will provide me with more pleasure than the other activities that I could have chosen instead. – It become immediately apparent that, for our society to function, it is necessary to teach people from a young age, that they need to be able to defer their pleasure until a suitable time comes-up for them to be able to indulge freely in it… and there we have the concept of discipline. The system requires of me that I discipline myself and defer my pleasure until such a time as it is acceptable for me to release myself to its indulgence. The system requires this of me so that I may be a productive individual and thus contribute to the systems survival.

And where am I going with today’s rambling? Well, as I am rapidly running out of time and need to shortly hop onto my bicycle for my 10km commute to work, I shall wrap it up. I am going in three directions… The first is to say that pleasure needs to be found in your work, after all that is your function in the system, five days out of every seven. The second thing to say is that it is necessary to stop the pleasure deferment and partake of the pleasure. The thing about a to-do list is that it never gets done. Things get ticked off to be replaced by other things and the danger is that your discipline won’t let you take ‘time out’ until the list is completed, and it never is. It is important to take time for you and for those things that make you happy in the middle of the maddening rush, because otherwise it doesn’t happen and the risk is that one day you wake-up and just can’t see the point any longer… and Morpheus isn’t there to rescue us.

My final and I guess topical point is that it is Friday at last, which means that the discipline can stop this evening at 17:00 or whenever you finish work (21:15 in my case) and the pleasure, in whatever for you choose for it, can begin. Simply enjoy!

Next week is busy for me, but I will try and find time to fire off a blog or two (especially to comment on young Ms. Hilton’s 3-days-in-jail fiasco (see George Orwell’s Animal Farm ‘we are all created equal, and some more equal than others’) so stop by on your coffee break and share your ideas. Actually, do that. Give me ideas of what to write about next week and I will try and pick some of your topics and write on them. Now there’s a challenge for both of us…

Today’s new word is ’sisyphean’

2007-06-05T10:25:00.000+01:00

Today’s new word is ’sisyphean’ meaning ’impossible task’. It comes from Greek mythology where Sisypheus was given the eternal task of rolling a stone up a hill in Hades, only to have it roll down the other side and have to start again. I will now use it in context:

… it is coming up to 20 degrees outside, the sun is shining, there is a chair ready on the veranda and … I have housework to do, I have shopping to do, I have to visit the bank… So much for free time! You know, somehow this is just not how I envisioned life, as a Sisyphean ‘to-do’ list…

I feel really tired today and I guess with everything going on, I should really have a breakdown or something, but I just don’t have the time for that either. I just wonder for how long you can coast on automatic pilot before you run into trouble.

Anyway, as you can surmise from my nearly incoherent ramblings and in the slightly changed, but nevertheless great words of Ace Ventura, pet detective, ’I’m alive!’ This ranks, of course, alongside his classic ‘Do NOT go in there’ and many other wonderful lines from the Ace Ventura movies, which, it must be said, do still make me chuckle.

So my first three days at work are over. They have been long days and I have seen some weird sh*t but more than that, I will not say as the secrecy laws come into play. That aside, the teams I have worked with seem very nice and I have, hopefully, now learnt the routines and procedures and can carry my own weight. So today I am ‘free’ from work, tomorrow too and then I am back at work on the early shift on Thursday morning.

Now I am going to get the day’s third cup of coffee and get on with my chores….

A quick 'hello' to Sara, a founding member of the 'mutual admiration fan-club' if you have managed to get on line to visit us here today and if so, look how glad it has made me!

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go...

2007-06-01T08:43:00.000+01:00

Today’s blog entry will just be a short one as I will be cycling to start my Summer job in just under 45 minutes time, where I will be working as a ’care-assistant’ in the institution where criminals with psychiatric illness are interred.

I guess that I should be feeling nervous right about now, but to be honest I just feel that I want to get started with my summer job and the sooner I learn the routines of the place the better. I start today with a long working pass and will also be working Saturday and Sunday… although you can breathe a collective sigh of relief as come Monday, I am free and will once again sit here with a cup of joe and let you know how I have got on.

Wish me luck and have a good weekend y’all.

The loneliness of a long-distance runner

2007-05-31T08:40:00.000+01:00

It was all over yesterday, my essay was handed in, opposed and defended. It was as I wrote previously in my blog, ‘preparation can be summed-up in three words: leave nothing undone’ … and I hadn’t and so my opposition was short as they had nothing to oppose. Each and every question that they had about my subject was answered within the essay itself. ‘Leave nothing undone’ - but somehow I had.

And there it was, I had been so focussed on getting the essay finished and priming myself for defending it that I completely forgot that yesterday was the last day of the term. A little bit like the picture heading-up my previous article, suddenly amidst the crowd, I found myself all alone. The term had come to an end, my friends on my course all had different opposition times, so none of them were around and I suddenly had no reason to be in my beloved university (where I feel comfortable, where I enjoy being) until next term starts at the end of August. Rather than feeling the elated ‘school’s out for Summer’ feeling, I felt instead, melancholic.

But I was caught out by surprise as I had been so focussed on my essay, I hadn’t somehow seen the end coming. Suddenly it was there and it felt like I was a little kid who had saved his pocket-money to buy a giant filibuster firework, and then, almost breathless with excitement, to light the fuse and then watch it splutter out into nothing. A tremendous anti-climax. I stopped and thought, school’s out, my essay that has been forged with blood, sweat and tears has finally been handed in, and, although I will be working for most of it, the summer holidays have started – it’s something to celebrate! … and I had no-one to share my feelings of jubilation with. I wandered through town on my own, had a cup of coffee standing-up in a coffee bar and frankly waited for it to rain on me.

It is at times like this when I miss you Mark, when I miss you James and Dom and when I am almost pathetically thankful to Andreas for answering the phone when I called.

So, good people. Let’s chalk this one up as ‘one celebration missed. To be caught-up at a later date.’

In criticism of the Right Honourable Tony Blair’s article in the Sunday Times interspersed with quotes from T.S.Elliot’s ’The Hollow Men’

2007-05-28T10:19:00.000+01:00

Writing in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair stated that the disappearance of the three suspects under control orders was a symptom of a society which put civil liberties before fighting terror, and that was "misguided and wrong". This comes at the same time as proposals to allow police in the UK to question anyone under new anti-terror laws.

I would like to start with the new proposals for the police. Will now be able to stop people at random and question them? Apparently this is not quite so, they do need ’reasonable suspicion’ . I would just quickly like to look more closely at the word 'reasonable'. The word ’reasonable’ for me, unfortunately, is imprecise legal jargon used deliberately to create loopholes. One of the founding pillars of the legal framework within a democracy is that the law needs to be predictable for the people to follow. In order to steer my actions as a civilian in a democratic country I need to be able to clearly and indisputably understand the legal standpoint of my actions and the consequences thereof, and then be able to choose accordingly. The word ’reasonable’ is not a word that can be defined objectively, and as such, does not allow me to measure my actions against the outcome of the law. It is my fear that the word ’reasonable’ has been left deliberately wide in order to be able to accommodate as much as possible. What is ’reasonable suspicion’? Is it that I live next door to someone who is suspected of anti-establishmentarianism? Is it that I live in the same street as this person? Is it ‘reasonable’ enough that I share the same religious beliefs as this person? And if I challenge the police’s definition of ‘reasonable suspicion’? Well, this little act of civil courage will earn me a £5000 fine and I am sure will make it even more ‘reasonable’ to suspect me and therefore to question me.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
/…/ Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass

Now onto Mr. Blair’s comments. There are two inherent paradoxes in his statement, both of which scare me to the core. Before I go into them, I would like continue my discourse analysis, this time with the word ‘terror’. Mr. Blair’s contextual use of the word ‘terror’ is of something we need to fight. The Oxford Dictionary defines terror as ‘extreme fear’. So is it ‘extreme fear’ we need to fight? Or do we need to extend the definition and ask ‘extreme fear of what?’ Obviously the word ‘terror’ needs to be used in context, where terror has become objectified, this ‘extreme fear’ has been given an object to be fearful about. That object is the ever-present and imminent attack from terrorists, or literally ‘people who bring about extreme fear.’ – In his book Liquid Times, Zygmund Bauman (2007) presents a comprehensive analysis about how power has been separated from politics. Bauman defines ‘politics’ as the ‘ability to decide the direction and purpose of action’ (2007:2) and argues that while the state organs remain local, the problems they need to deal with are meta-problems on a global scale, and as such national politics are rendered powerless in the solutions of these problems. With power being separated from politics and an increase in individualism, where individuals are turning away from politics and religion and increasingly focusing on stage-managing their own narratives, ‘the grand ideas have lost credibility, /and/ the fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power’ (ibid:16). Through media influence, this ‘enemy’ these terrorists are blown out of all proportion and become ever-present on every street corner and in our very gardens and our fears thus become ‘self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing’ (ibid:9). The net result is that that politicians once again gain power over the populus as protectors and guardians of our personal safety. The question is how much this safety is actually threatened?

Between the idea
And the reality
/.../
Falls the shadow

So, ‘terror’ is contextualised as the fear of ever-present and imminent terrorist attacks and this we must fight by, amongst other things, not putting our civil liberties first. Now to the first paradox. It can be argued that the very thing that these terrorists threaten is our democracy. They are not just waging war against the UK or the USA, they are waging war against the Western hegemony of democracy, media and popular culture that is slowly dominating the world. So the terrorists are waging war on democracy. How should we respond to that? – Well, it seems to me that what Mr. Blair is stating is that it is ‘wrong and misguided’ to put civil liberties first in such a situation. Or viewed another way, we can fight the terrorists threat to democracy by being prepared to give-up the civil liberties upon which democracy rests in order to fight the threat to democracy. To simplify, it would seem that by giving-up our democratic rights, we can more effectively fight those who threaten those rights in the first place. The end sum of living in a democratic world would then be that we have less rights and more fear than ever before.

The second paradox is the ever-present circle that is at play here. The more we give-up our civil rights to more efficiently ‘fight’ the terror, the more the terror achieves its objective. The more we replace our civil rights with draconian measures to combat terror, the more we move to waging war, the more people feel that it is their moral duty to join the terrorists in order the fight back. The more we fight, the greater the threat becomes. The greater the threat becomes the more we give-up our rights in order to fight back. The more we give-up our rights, the more ‘they’ achieve their objective… and so on ad infinitum.

For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

T.S.Elliot 1925

Reality is an ever-shifting, colourful mosaic

2007-05-25T07:21:00.001+01:00

I would like to briefly continue our theme from yesterday, using Jean Baudrillard’s 5 categories of how the modern media apparatus, amongst others, has put a large ? over the word ’reality’. One of Baudrillard’s more notorious claims was the the 1991 Gulf War never actually took place and from start to finish was a media event. Today my analysis is not going to be quite as penetrating or even quite as large scale, but I would like to examine a little example of how small-scale reality-shifting is present all around us.

Yesterday, when I collected the mail, there was a catalogue for children’s clothes and accessories. On the front cover of the catalogue in bold text was the announcement ’Finally your summer catalogue from xxx has arrived!’ I stopped and thought for a minute… hmmm… finally the catalogue has arrived. The thing is that we hadn’t ordered the catalogue and we had not exactly been standing by the front door waiting for the post man/woman to arrive, so we could rush out and ask breathlessly ’has it arrived today?’

The catalogue arrived unannounced and uninvited, a fact which the company behind the catalogue was well aware of as they had sent a pre-stamped reply coupon where we could fill out our address and details to ensure that the catalogue would be delivered to our post box next time.

This is where things got confusing for me. Ok, finally the catalogue has arrived, despite the fact that I never asked for it and have not been waiting for it. This is then confirmed by the company as they enclose a pre-paid reply coupon should I wish to have it delivered regularly. But then, when they already have sent the catalogue to my wife, with her correct name and address and the catalogue was delivered directly to our post-box, I wondered what the point of the reply coupon was. I also wondered that, if I decided not to fill it in, thereby expressing that ‘no I don’t want your catalogue delivered to my post box’, whether that would actually have any bearing whatsoever on the fact that, come Autumn, there will be another catalogue there that, apparently, I have also been waiting for.

What or where is reality in this one? Comments on a postcard and have a great weekend y’all!

Another short commentary of post-modernisms role models

2007-05-24T07:33:00.000+01:00

When discussing how the playing field has been formed under post modernism, many of the leading theorists such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, point out to death of our meta-narratives, the undisputable BIG truths such as science and religion that have governed our lives, our understanding of the rules of the game and our morality up until post modernism came along and shattered the glass.

With regards to role models, the decline of religion and the subsequent decline of a religiously influenced moral code, I was amused to read the other day that the Bishop of Southwark will not face disciplinary action after his amusing drunken antics around Christmas time last year. After leaving a reception at the Irish Embassy in London, he reported being mugged on the way home, receiving injuries to his head and loosing his briefcase and mobile phone. It later transpired that his injuries may have been caused by something else… during the same evening, the owner of a Mercedes heard his car alarm and went out to see what was happening. He saw someone in the back seat throwing the children’s toys that were there out of the door. When the owner inquired just what the hell was going on, he received the classic reply ‘I’m the Bishop of Southwark and this is what I do’! (this reply had me laughing for a good week). The Bishop then allegedly staggered and fell to the pavement, basing his head consistent with the injuries he reported as being a mugging the day afterwards.

Once again, it is not my duty to say what is or is not true, as we know that by today’s rules how things appear to be is often more important than how they actually are. Jean Baudrillard (2000) comments on how image and reality go through 5 steps of change:

The image represents reality
The image masks and changes the underlying reality
The image masks the lack of an underlying reality
The image has nothing to do with reality
The image is the opposite of reality

Which of the five is represented here is up to you to decide, all I wish to do is just bring your attention to a number of key words that are in bold in my text: Bishop, Irish Embassy, head injuries, lost briefcase and mobile, throwing children’s toys and 'I’m the Bishop of Southwark and this is what I do'.

My first question is: ‘Is there any wonder that we have lost faith in religion, religious readership and the moral code it eschews?’

My second questions is: ‘Is this a case of religion trying to get back in touch with the common man/woman?’

My third question is: ‘Are we seeing another case of public ‘role models’ being given a ‘get out of jail free’ card?’

How to play Monopoly in the States

2007-05-22T07:54:00.000+01:00

As I have nothing better to do with my time at the moment, I have been following the farce that is Paris Hilton’s jail time for driving without a licence. Those of you who know me, may well be wondering ‘why’ as you know how much I hate that part of contemporary ‘plastic’ culture. The reason is this, I have been following it to see how the American legal system copes with celebrity… and the answer, as I feared is that it follows this Monopoly formula:

Celebrity status + minor misdemeanour = get out of jail free card

As you follow the progress of events, just keep asking yourself this question: ‘and what would have happened to an unemployed 23 year-old African-American or Mexican woman from the slums / trailer park?’

Her initial conviction was for drink driving where she was fined and placed on 3 year’s probation, in addition to which she lost her licence and was ordered to attend an alcohol awareness programme. It appears that she was then stopped again on January 15th for driving without a licence (which she somehow gets away with) and here she signed a document acknowledging that she was indeed ‘not allowed to drive’. The next time she is stopped again in February for driving with headlights off and is this time picked-up for violating her probation. She claimed not to be aware that her licence had been suspended!

So it goes to court and she gets a 45-day sentence and she arrives 10 minutes late for her court appointment. Once sentence has been passed, there is the usual outcry from her lawyers and general public about ‘how could this be so?’ and, presumably in order to justify their fat pay checks, an appeal is lodged.

And the result? Low and behold, her jail sentence is halved to 23 days. And the reason for this act of generosity? According to officials, several factors were taken into consideration, including the fact that she ‘had appeared at her latest court hearing’ and had displayed ‘good behaviour’ (news.bbc.co.uk).

And how will her sentence be carried out? Well, she will not be going to ‘jail’ as such, but instead will be housed in a ‘special needs housing unit’ for high-profile in-mates, so she won’t need to worry about dropping the soap in the shower.

So, my initial challenge for you was to ask, throughout my rendition of events, what would have happened to an unemployed 23 year-old African-American or Mexican woman from the slums / trailer park? – what would have probably happened to our ‘fictional other’ and the conclusions that can be drawn about the justice system of the ‘world’s greatest democracy’, are something that I will leave you to think about during the day, and I hope it won’t make your coffee taste too bitter!

When an essay isn’t an essay.

2007-05-16T20:57:00.000+01:00

I have news for you all… I have pulled my thumb out and I have started. On Monday, after much consultation with my fantastic supervisor, I finally came up with a project objective or to put it another way, with a subject to study. Believe me when I say that for me, that is 50% of the job done!! – Now I have stepped my game up and the hunt has begun. I have done some good work today and have come to the position where I wish I was last week. It may seem like a negative statement, but compared to where I was last week, it is progress!

In some ways, I don’t know why I worry. In the written paper for our last course on drugs and alcohol abuse, I got 100% and came top of the class. And besides, this is just a B-essay and in the larger picture it doesn’t mean anything. On the other hand it means a whole lot. The thing is that as part of my networking to create a path into my PhD, if I chose to take that route, I have ruffled enough feathers that people are watching me. That means that this essay isn’t just an essay, it becomes a method of judging my potential. Is my research topic relevant? Have I got an eye for picking-out a relevant topic? What are my research skills like? What about my use of methodology? How well do I write? Are my arguments convincing? It becomes more than just an essay and somewhere, somehow, that pressure weighs heavy because at some level it could play a role in determining my future. Oh and I forgot to add that I need to get a top grade on the essay too as top grades on the B, C & D-level essays are necessary for having a chance to get admitted to the PhD programme!

If that wasn’t enough, I had the ‘brilliant’ foresight to decide to write within the field of social psychology and thereby cover an area that I am interested in working in, and thereby, through the contacts that I meet during the research process, broaden my network and ‘get myself noticed’. And guess what, that has worked too and they want a copy of my essay when I am finished, which again, puts just a little pressure on the finished product.

So, to take it back to those of you who hinted at the fact that I am competitive… the answer is ‘YES’. Yes I am competitive. I compete against myself and it’s a game that I am not sure I can win. I am not sure I can be enough. I am sometimes haunted by the thought that ‘somewhere, someone is practicing and when I meet them face-to-face in competition, unless I have had the same discipline, they will win.’ Couple that to my two other catch phrases of ‘Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect’ and ‘ Preparation can be summed-up in three words: leave nothing undone’ I think I present a picture of me that you know and love.

I was looking through previous student’s essays today to get a feeling for the structure and form of the essay and I came to the conclusion that I must just be plain stupid. Some of the ones that I read were really ‘tight’ essays. They had a simple and well-defined problem. They had a well though out and applicable theoretical base and a simple and well-conducted method. The whole essay just flowed and was somehow like a Zen garden, beautiful and accomplished in its simplicity. Somehow I can’t achieve that and somehow I have to make it complicated for myself. I tried hard this time to make life easy for myself and somehow I failed again.

Don’t worry, I’m not depressed. I am just shaking my head in disbelief that I am here again. Now all that is left is to step my game up, to stare my dragon in the eyes and prepare to slay it.

Procrastination is the thief of time

2007-05-11T08:08:00.000+01:00

I was going to provide you with a bit more T.S.Elliot today but decided at the last minute that it was maybe a bit too heavy and I didn’t want to dampen that ’Friday feeling’ for all you working types.

.and besides I don’t have the time today to go into an analysis of his poetry and will spare you that for another day. I don’t have the time, you see because I am procrastinating like a champion. I really don’t know why, but I should be writing my B-essay and I just can’t seem to pull my finger out and get started. I now have just over 2 weeks left and I haven’t written one single sentence and still don’t really know what direction I am going to take. I can feel the panic rising and each evening when I go to bed, I am disappointed with myself and yet the next day is the same.

Procrastination is the thief of time and I don’t have much time left… so tell me, kind and generous readers, what tips and techniques do you use when you see that you are procrastinating and just need to sit down and get something done? Answers on a postcard or in my comments box.

More of this…

2007-05-09T08:51:00.000+01:00

I am just flicking through the morning paper whilst drinking the day’s first cup of coffee and I have just found this link : http://www.solkongen.dk/solio_mobil_solar_charger_63_en/
which leads to a Danish firm who has produced a portable solar charger for mobile phones, ipod’s etc… Ok, admittedly, looking out of the window today, I wouldn’t get much juice out of it, but this is the kind of technology advancement that I enjoy reading about. The product is even more environmentally friendly as production pollution has been made carbon neutral by planting trees in protected bio-diverse forests!

I remember reading somewhere that although we should take the environmental challenge very seriously, the people predicting doom and gloom often over-looked the environmental impact of technological advancement. All of a sudden we have hybrid cars, bio-degradable advertising billboards (nice one Dom) and now the possibility to charge mobiles and the other portable devices (that are so essential to our lives) off grid. All we need now is a bit more global warming so Sweden’s climate is the same as the Mediterranean countries and everything will work just fine!

Interviews, existentialistic questions and powerless structures

2007-05-08T08:35:00.000+01:00

This is my favourite time of the day. I have just dropped Ben off at kindergarten, I have a fresh cup of joe in my hands and I have the whole day to procrastinate away, so I can relax in bed in the evening, quietly panicking about how much work I am not doing on my B-essay. No, seriously, I am off to do an interview today in Lund with a psychiatric team who have been working with holistic solutions to enable young adults with psychiatric problems to reach turning points in their lives. I don’t as yet have any questions for them and the clock is ticking… but hey, I’ve got to get my priorities right and post my bog first!

I visited an art exhibition the other day, that I had read about in a brochure I picked-up. The exhibition entitled ‘This is the First Day of My Life’ was by Elmgreen and Dragset and challenged pre-conceived notions such as who we are, who we will become, as well as posing questions like ‘What now?’ and ‘What will I choose?’

The theme ‘What will I choose?’ came up straight away as you entered the gallery, a large white room, where there was a wall with a number of anonymous looking doors and you as the onlooker are invited directly to place yourself into the theme of the exhibition. Some doors are dysfunctional and don’t open at all, leaving you wondering what was behind them, leaving you wanting to know. Other doors opened to different experiences where you could take nothing for granted and should be prepared to be confused.

One room, for instance was entered into through a dark, narrow, black corridor. The room was lit by a single chandelier hanging in the middle of the room. The floor, ceiling and walls were black. In the room were 6 fireplaces, all painted white. Above each fireplace was a large mirror and on the mantle was a clock and two candles. Each of the clocks showed a different time and each of the sets of candles were burnt to different lengths. The effect of the room was heavy, all the darkness, the stark white of the fireplaces and mirrors and the only noise was the ticking of the clocks, the literal sound of your life ticking away. With this background you looked into a mirror, which was set-up with another mirror diagonally opposite, so each mirror reflected the mirror opposite, which in turn reflected the mirror you looked into, which in turn… The image you saw were the reflections of a thousand mirrors, and a thousand clocks all telling a different time. The question you were left with in this dark room, with all its mirrors and the sound of ticking clocks, was ‘Who the hell am I?’

The picture above is from another one of the rooms, where you enter a bar, faced again by large mirrors. When looking into the mirror, you see that the bar stools are on the other side, and thus I am behind the bar, thus I am the one serving. Here I was hit by two strange thoughts; the first being that I was within a powerless structure. Me serving behind a bar with no customers raises again the question of ‘who am I?’ and the bar itself is a functional structure, which, without guests ceases in its function and becomes as such, powerless. So who am I and what purpose have I behind a structure that has been rendered powerless by people’s absence? Where are the people? What are they doing and why am I in here all alone? The second thought I was hit by was that for a short time, I was a bar-tender in a gay bar, where I, male was the bar tender and I, male was the customer and each time ‘I’ smiled, ‘I’ smiled back…. Now it’s time for therapy…

PRODUCTIVITY MAN - a superhero for our time

2007-05-03T14:46:00.001+01:00

Note to the guy who cycled past me today with no hands on the handlebars and who was deeply engrossed in a phone call on his mobile...

... being as cool as you clearly are, you can also balance your laptop on your handlebars (as your hands aren't taking up any space there) and this way, you can connect to the web via your phone and read your e-mails or surf the internet whilst you are on your way to where ever, on your bike. In fact, watching you cycle past me inspired me so much that I rang Marvel Comics to see if they couldn't start a new comic strip about you entitled 'PRODUCTIVITY MAN' - he gets the job done. (said in a deep, Mississippi mud-like James Earl Jones voice)... Unfortunately they weren't remotely interested and so it remains up to me to preserve your fragile, yet almost tangible superhero status.

So inspired was I that I made a little shrine for you. 'Yes' it is in the form of a crude concrete bench, where I hope you will allow me to sit with you and partake of your teaching, for I too wish to learn the secret of multi-tasking. For I too wish to partake of a bicycle journey, not to a linear destination, such as cycling from A to B, but, like you have shown me, cycling within a multisphere, where the cycling is merely a side show in a larger picture. A picture where anything can happen, an e-mail can be sent and received, a phone call can be made, a frendship re-acquainted or a deal done. Teach me guru, for I don't want to just cycle from A to B, smelling the flowers and admiring the incredibly beautiful cherry blossom. I want to be like you... so engrossed in crap that could wait until you got to the office, that you missed out on the chance to live.

Chasing away black clouds

2007-05-01T12:48:00.000+01:00

Whilst browsing the net the other day, I found this piece of advertising, which I thought was strong use of an outdoor medium, making the message relevant and visible to the target group. It is part of a WWF campaign to kick off their 20 tips for sustainable development campaign and the aim is to highlight how much carbon monoxide is used / saved by cycling to work instead of driving. Have a look at the link and see what you think:

http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/
SINGLE_AD_PAGE.php?ad=wwf_blackcloud.jpg

Seeing this gives me a sense of hope. On my ex-blog a while ago, I wrote about how the high petrol prices might not be such a bad thing (http://chopandcarry.blogspot.com/2006/06/
can-high-petrol-price-be-good-thing.html) and it seems to me that it was exactly this that became the catalyst for change. I don’t know about you, but I feel that the last year, year and a half has been full of talk about environmental change, environmental damage, eco-friendly hybrid cars and living ’off the grid’. Slowly it seems that change is gathering pace and more importantly gathering critical mass. Individuals are taking action and speaking out and this is inspiring other individuals and the sum of this is starting to make a difference. I have read debates about how it is sad that the only thing that made consumers change their minds was when it began to effect their financial situation, but I feel that this is missing the big picture, which is that this is a much needed change and finally something is happening.

Eco-friendly living can be a lifestyle or simply a mind-set. It can range from building your own off-the-grid log cabin and hanging your own meat to just minimising your use of plastic bags, taking the bus into town instead of driving and using low-energy light bulbs. The thing is that it is the little things done by many people that make a difference, for instance if we said that the population of Sweden (8 million or so) were to donate the price of a big mac meal over a 24hr time period, to help the situation in Dafur (45 sek) then at the end of the day we would have sek 360,000,000 or $36,000,000 to donate. Repeat the mantra: small things in big numbers make a big difference.

My challenge to you as readers is to think about what small things you can do / or already do in order to have a greener footprint and use the comments field to let me and others know about them. The best suggestion gets a coveted ‘green footprint’ award and exclusive mention on godisinthisdog.

Walk softly good people…

The chance to be a superhero for the day

2007-04-25T21:54:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was my last day as a leader for COPE (Community Parent Education Program) education, which works with families whose children have attention and behavioural problems and teaches them coping methods to help improve communication and work towards the future. It has been a tough 12 weeks, but in the feedback session, the parents reported improvements with their children and we could see definite improvements in the interaction between the children and their parents and behavioural improvements in the children.

That aside, in their final feedback, one of the parents came up and thanked me and told me that I had given them their hope back. It stopped me in my tracks. Their relationship with their child had been so strained that they hadn’t known where to turn and were desperate and now they have their hope back and are looking towards the future as a family.

You will excuse me if I get a bit emotionally choked-up here, but there is a reason. I left my previous career because I found it meaningless. To cut a long story short, I helped clients strategically position their marketing mix, making sure that their message resonated with their target market and making sure that their advertising strategy aligned with their overall corporate strategy. As I started questioning what I was doing, I imagined a moment like yesterday, when another human being could look me in the eyes and thank me from the bottom of their heart for making a difference. Yesterday that happened. Yesterday I made the world a better place.

You in your world, me in mine and a blog in the middle

2007-04-24T08:45:00.000+01:00

As an introduction to my previous blog, my ex-blog so to speak, I had the following description: ’baring my soul to the scalpel of language’ except I never did. I never peeled myself like an onion, delicately slicing through each layer, carefully examining what I found there and then moving on, eventually to reach the centre and discover, well, nothing.

Instead, my blog became a vitrual prostitute, pandering to the whims and needs of the few clients who read it, I wrote for my audience and not for myself or more close to the mark, not of myself… But it may be just as well. One of my friends, who shall remain nameless, once told me that he really didn’t want to know sometimes what was going on inside of my head, however, I have decided to show him that it isn’t all that dangerous/subversive/perverted/wierd. Godisinthisdog is and will be a collection of randomised brain-farts resonating from what I am thinking about, what is going on in my life and a wider structural perspective with occassional comments about the system that surrounds us.

I am a social constructionist and as such see socially constructed reality as an on-going, dynamic process; reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. It is generally argued that that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. When people interact, they do so with the understanding that their respective perceptions of reality are related, and as they act upon this understanding their common knowledge of reality becomes reinforced. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality. It is in this sense that it can be said that reality is socially constructed.

And where am I going with this side-line is social constructionsim? I am going to use it to disprove the purpose of my initial blog. I can’t write for you. I don’t believe that there is an objective reality, instead reality is constructed by you and me. I write and you interpret, but you construct your own truths from my writing, which means I have no influence over them and thus the point of writing for you is defeated. So, I write for me, telling my story of how I construct the world around me and if you choose to, you can dunk your wicker basket into the murky waters, sift through the mud and stones that you drag up and see what you find. If it is of use to you, you are welcome to it, if not, throw it back!

The river is a strong brown god

2007-04-24T07:57:00.000+01:00

'I do not know much about gods; but I think the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier:
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in the cities – ever, however implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unapropriated
By worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching and
waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.'

- T.S.Elliot Four Quartets The Dry Salvages Stanza 1

I received T.S.Elliot's Four Quartets as birthday present from my brother four years ago and I am still working through this masterpiece. I find the Four Quartets breathtaking in places and like a pebble in my shoe in others where a particular line or turn of phrase nags away in my subconscious. I try to ignore it, but eventually have to stop and deal with it. How can I resist with such powerful openings such as the first line of East Coker, which begins thus: ’In my beginning is my end.’ I am just as blown away each and every time I read that line. Elegant in its simplicity, yet even after four years of working through its permutations and resonances, I still feel I am missing something, and have a nagging suspicion that what I am missing is not to be found in its depth of meaning, but is right in front of me, just floating there on the surface.

Dedicated to all the drivers who were unable to stop at the crossing today to let me, my son and my bicycle cross safetly…

2007-04-23T07:57:00.000+01:00

10 things to do with the 2 seconds you just saved

1. You can add them up and at the end of the week, convert them into a lie-in, where instead of having to get up as usual at 07:00:00, you can sleep right through to 07:00:10.
2. You can use them to get to the office 2 seconds earlier. That will definately impress your boss and the next promotion? Well, you know what they say, ’the early bird always gets the worm’ – you go get ’em buddy!
3. You can use it get to your mistress 2 seconds earlier, which is obviously why you are in such a hurry in the first place. But, your predisposition to hurry will probably mean that you will only last 2 seconds anyway, but then again, you are a sad bastard.
4. You can use it to get to your therapist 2 seconds earlier and discuss with her the latest research relating the need for speed to diminished brain size.
5. As you speed by me, just sit up in your seat, pull in your stomach, puff out your chest and feel like a REAL MAN. You’ve earned it!
6. You can use those two seconds to work through the following proven mathematical formula: 2 seconds gained x 0 converted into centimeters = your penis size
7. You can use those two seconds to think through all of your life’s achievements.
8. You can use those two seconds to dream about what you are going to do with all this time on your hands.
9. You can use those two seconds to speed-dial your optician for a much-needed eye examination.
10. You can try putting your foot on the fu*king break and driving safetly for a change.

God is in this wine glass

2007-04-22T22:22:00.000+01:00

It’s 22:50 I have once again consumed half a bottle of wine and a cup of coffee. Why the repeated mention of wine? Well, it is my drug of choice. It is just as well to get that straight. Wine and a good malt whisky. Both have symbolic and social functions and to be frank, I enjoy them. Like with all things it is important to maintain a balance. We had a discussion recently about whether it was one or two glasses of wine a day that are beneficial for the body. Let me just stop there and say that I enjoy this kind of research, research which comes up with a good conclusion that justifies what I was doing anyway! Now back to the two glasses of wine a day, I am sure it was two glasses, and if I choose the glass that is as big as a goldfish bowl, then half a bottle of wine = two glasses = beneficial for me. It’s been scientifically proven and ’no!’ I don’t want to hear what you think about it.

And why is wine my drug of choice? Firstly it is the associations. Wine and good food, wine and good company, wine with friends or my wife on a Friday or Saturday night. All the different tastes, the different grape varieties, the different vinyards in different countries producing different vintages. Wine is a science and an adventure and I intend to get good at it. I have come to the conclusion that those people who can identify grape, country, vinyard and year from a blind tasting have simply drunk a hell of a lot of wine, and there Ladies and Gentleman, there is the goal. You drink a lot of wine and you get respect for it!

The second reason why wine is my drug of choice, and here I will be personal, it because it takes the edge off. The first glass on a Friday evening allows me to step just enough aside from post-modern society’s demand for impulse control, self-discipline, constant planning and time management that I can make a good attempt at relaxing. I allow myself to become a shadow of myself in those few hours before I go to bed. I have grown quite comfortable with that shadow me, it is a mixture between parts of me that don’t normally come out to play and a part that kind of powers down and gives the Weekday Superhero part of me a chance to recharge his batteries. So, 'cheers' to the shadow, 'cheers' to the Weekday Superhero and 'cheers' to the wine that binds them together and holds them apart.

The face of a Buddha in a post-modern mangrove

2007-04-21T20:55:00.000+01:00

It's saturday night, I've had half a bottle of wine, it's 21:57 and I'm already feeling tired and this is my life. This is also my second blog, I divorced my first, mainly through inaction. Inaction caused by the challenges of new life as a father. Well that and my nagging perfectionism that meant that I tried to create something profound with everything I wrote. Now, as I am sure you have noticed already, the pressure is off.

They say to be successful that a blog should take the reader's perspective. It should fill a niche, it should be witty and entertain, encapsultate the reader and draw them into the experience, make itself invaluable to them so they feel compelled to visit it all the time, a coffee break, just before lunch or just before they go home for the day.

Based on that, this blog will fail in every respect. It's purpose is two-fold, both cathartic and an exercise in freedom of expression, I'll just write what I feel like and when I can. Read it or don't read it, comment or not. This is my time capsule and my art form and if you look carefully through this literary mangrove, you may occassionally catch glimpses of the face of Buddha.