Books Do Furnish a Room

(First posted, 17.8.13)

About twenty years ago I made a decision not to buy anymore bookshelves. It occurred to me that if I was going to have enough time to read all the unread books and also re-read as often as I wished, then I’d already reached some kind of ‘tipping point’. I invented one rule for myself, if a new book was to be introduced then something inferior had to go. And I’ve stuck to it, though at times I’ve cheated like crazy!

It’s helped that I prefer paperbacks, that over time omnibus editions have appeared that take up less space than original volumes, that cassette tapes became CDs, that DVDs could replace videos – but when it came to judging worth, that was quite another matter.

Very occasionally one undergoes complete reversals of opinion, making it seem unacceptable to keep certain books. But such new space isn’t afforded when it comes to scholarly debate, where having certain authors to argue against is the only way to keep critical faculties awake. Another ‘problem’ is that the better your choice of book in the first instance, the less likely it is to date!

The Web has helped immeasurably, removing the need to keep many reference books although I haven’t acquired the habit of reading online for any length of time, or overcome the need to browse bookshops.

Emotion, sentiment and nostalgia play a large part in keeping certain books on the shelves, but even these would not remain unless I still believed there was something new to learn from them when read by the older me.

In the last year I’ve added just two books to the collection of about four hundred. I like to read several books in series, so many are half completed. My best guesstimate is, that about twenty per cent of the total are unread, whilst fifty per cent have been read twice or more.

But many might argue that by doing all of this I’ve constructed the very opposite of what a library should be – that an ever expanding collection, of even greater numbers of unread volumes, is some sort of guarantee against tunnel vision, some protection from ‘knowing more and more about less and less’ and the dangers of confirmation bias.

Well I like to think of myself as a practical man of limited resources, who knows his time is constrained and can focus on what’s important. I’m prepared to make judgements (the willingness to be wrong) at the same time as accepting that no author represents the last word on anything. To achieve clarity of thought requires selection and discrimination.

(I find I’ve written this using slightly ‘oldie worldie’ English as if I were writing from the library of an old country house, or the smoking room of a gentleman’s club – but then this room does have leather bound chairs and I do enjoy the occasional ‘gasper’!)

It may be a tougher path, but it leads straight to the hilltops

(Email 06.09.08, first posted on Facebook 15.10.11)

Kipling wrote ‘If’ in 1895 supposedly about someone else. But I can’t help thinking of how at the age of twenty-one in 1886, whilst writing for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, he was ostracised by the English community for putting himself alongside, and being the first to write sympathetically about, the ‘native’ people of the city!

If -

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The Only Way Out (updated 2019)

(First posted on Facebook, 19.7.11)

If society (parents, siblings, peers, school, work, community...) is to blame for the way you turned out, and it almost certainly is, then the chances of it helping you out of the mess, is practically zero! You don't have the answers otherwise you wouldn't have got into such a mess. Neither do your friends or partners, it was their similarity to you which attracted you to them. That's why the only way out, is to find the few people who represent excellence (who have the life you want) and model them.

1/ Note for scholarly readers; in any medical or social scientific enquiry, the actions of the observer always affect the outcome, just like the actions of the participants; with any social species, agency never lies just with the an individual. Agency is always on a positive feedback loop within any human group, just as social structures are only ever temporary pockets of order. So, it’s just the same for the distinguished research professor, as it is for the guy on the street trapped by the habitual influence of significant others!

2/ In pursuit of the life you want; observation is all about recognizing patterns in the actions of others – habits, in everything! If a habit no longer delivers the reward it once did it is a bad habit, the only way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one that delivers the same reward.

3/ Pleasure (this feels good, I want some more); happiness (this feels good, I don’t need anymore.)

4/ Whatever it is you do, do it because it is a worthwhile and purposeful activity in and of itself, here and now.

5/ Money; is this expenditure essential, important, or just everything else?! Will it make you richer (an investment) or poorer (waste)?

6/ Diet: drink; alcohol (really bad), caffeine (not good), water (all you actually need). Food; refined sugars (worst), grains (human invention), dairy (mother's milk of another species), roots/tubers (good in an emergency, but costly to get at), fresh meat cooked fast (best), ripe red fruit and fresh green leaves (best).

Sherlock Holmes Syndrome

(first written 2008, first posted on Facebook 4.5.11, updated 2012, 2016)

You see the problem is there’s this strange phenomenon of people liking mysteries and not wanting them explained.

In the world of mental health it often appears that someone in distress, does not want, nor responds to, either explicit explanation of their difficulties, or to training in techniques to relieve them. It’s even got to the point in our individualistic society where many will argue that there are no universal ways of understanding or helping - apart from the mysterious ‘love conquers all’!

(photo by Nick Hewling)

And the more knowledgeable person certainly doesn’t want to end up suffering the emotional isolation of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome - of going to the trouble to explain (about inductive and deductive reasoning, how he built-up his library, apprenticed himself to learn about such things as horses and dogs, the logic of railway operations and timetabling, etc, etc) only for Watson to call it all inborn ‘talent’ and ‘genius‘, the police to call it ‘luck’, and the public ‘…well when you put it like Mr Holmes, I can see it really is so simple anyone could…’ It was others who set him apart. People fear something is lost in explanation when in fact the reverse is true - it only adds to the wonder of the world.

The wilful ignorance of those who see in others an inborn talent often drives those with such supposed abilities to distraction. The spectator at a golf tournament who said to Arnold Palmer - after he’d made a great shot - how lucky he was to have such a talent, got the reply: ‘Yes, it’s crazy, the more I practice the luckier I get! In traditional craftsmanship, ten thousand hours is the ‘rule of thumb’ for mastering a complex skill set - the point at which practice, becomes ‘seamless’ and the outsider cannot see ‘how it’s done’.

In the context of mental health, explanation leading to instruction, demonstration and practice meets additional resistance because the very subject is the inadequacy of early emotional learning from parents, other adults, siblings and peers. A large part of emotional learning is of course all about sexual intimacy, and here the Holmes analogy is useful again.

Dr Watson a believer in the mystery of love, as much as non-explainable 'genius', offers us this in, A Scandal in Bohemia: 'It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one in particular, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but reasonable balanced mind, but as a lover he would have put himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer - excellent for drawing a veil from men's motives and passions.'

Now we know that such a lack of emotion would have been impossible - modern opinion  divides two ways; either towards some effortful suppression or towards an autistic spectrum, even the sociopathic! It doesn't occur to Watson that Holmes might have applied the same methods to learning about sex and love as he did to everything else. If that were true, then his pursuit of excellence would have led to his rejection by almost all in Victorian society. (It is perhaps worth remembering that it is only points of similarity between people which attract.)

(All of the above refers to the character of Sherlock Holmes originally offered us by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)

It is nice to see that some of the themes above have been highlighted by Elementary, the contemporary take on Holmes from CBS.

HOLMES:  It has its costs.
WATSON:  What does?
HOLMES:  Learning to see the puzzle in everything. They’re everywhere, once you start looking it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions which inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzle of all. Of course they don’t always appreciate being seen as such.
WATSON:  Seems like a lonely way to live.
HOLMES:  As I said it has its costs.

(photo by Nick Hewling)

HOLMES:  ..the things that I do, the things that you care about, you think I do them because I’m a good person, I do them because it would hurt too much not to.
AGATHA:  Because you are a good person.
HOLMES:  No, it hurts Agatha. All of this, everything I see, everything I hear, touch and smell. The conclusions I’m able to draw, the things that are revealed to me, the ugliness. My work focuses me, it helps. You say I am using my gifts, I say I am just treating them…

(Elementary, created by Robert Doherty for CBS.)

What is cricket?

(Slightly edited since, 25.12.10)

'Unusual to see a right-hander coming round the wicket in rain..' said the commentator on TMS (Test Match Special 4.1.11) - but of course it is easy to 'see' on the radio!

So what is this game, and what are the rules? What follows are some short extracts from an academic paper on expertise which necessitated the authors attempt a technical description of cricket for a largely America readership.

‘..Cricket is a complicated game. We must explain some of the rules here on the assumption that not every reader of this journal will know them. We will, however, assume that readers who are not familiar with cricket will know baseball. 

Cricket is like baseball in that it involves the equivalent of a pitcher and a batter, known, respectively, as the ‘bowler’ and the ‘batsman.’ The bowler ‘bowls’ the cricket ball to the batsman and, as in baseball, the batsman tries to hit it. Unlike baseball, there is no limit to the number of balls the batsman may receive - on a good day a batsman may face hundreds of balls before being out. In international matches, one game may continue for up to five days. 

As in baseball, there are a number of ways of being out, such as when one of the ‘fielders’ catches the ball before it hits the ground. In cricket the batsman stands in front of a ‘wicket’ (otherwise known as ‘the stumps’) that he has to defend with his bat. If the ball hits the wicket, the batsman is out – there is no equivalent in baseball. The wicket is a set of three vertical sticks or ‘stumps.’  The wicket is 28 inches high and 9 inches wide overall. The top of each stump has a shallow groove cut at right angles to the direction from which the ball is coming; two smaller sticks, known as ‘bails’, are carefully balanced in these grooves, the ends of the two bails touching each other where they meet in middle of the groove cut in the central stump. The working, and universally accepted, definition of ‘the ball hitting the wicket’ is that one or both of the delicately balanced bails fall to the ground - the wicket must be ‘broken’. On very rare occasions a ball grazes the stumps, or rolls very gently against them, but no bail falls; in such a case the batsman is not out because the wicket has not been broken. 

In cricket, the bowler nearly always directs the ball in such a way that it hits the ground before it reaches the batsman and it usually then bounces toward the batsman’s legs. The batsman wears a ‘pad’ to protect each leg. Each pad is an armoured sheath running from ankle to just above the knee. The ball is very hard, about as hard as wood at the beginning of the game, though it begins to soften slightly as the hours pass (the same ball is used for many hours before it is changed). The ball can sometimes be bowled at more than 90 mph.  Allowing the ball to hit the pads is an integral part of the game. Clearly, the batsman would never be out if he simply stood in front of the wicket, kept his bat out of the way, and allowed the ball to hit him or his pads. To make that impossible the notoriously complicated ‘lbw rule’ says that a batsman is out in certain restricted circumstances if the pads alone stop a ball that would otherwise hit the wicket - this counts as out in virtue of ‘leg before wicket’. In the normal way, the umpire, who stands at the point from which the bowler bowls the ball, is the sole judge of whether the ball (a) falls within the restrictions and (b) would have gone on to hit the wicket..

.. A cricket ball is not uniformly spherical. Around its ‘equator’ it has a raised seam and the two ‘hemispheres’ become more asymmetrical as the game goes on. The trajectory of the ball after it hits the ground can vary enormously. The bounce depends on the speed, the hardness and texture of the ball - which changes during the game, the state of the ground at the exact point of the bounce, the spin on the ball and the position of the seam. The ‘swing’ - which is the aerodynamically induced curve in the flight of the ball, which can be in any plane - depends on the ball’s speed, its spin, its state, its orientation, the orientation of the seam and the state of the atmosphere. As a result, what happens to the ball after it bounces is not going to be fully predictable from its pre-bounce trajectory

.. In the case of the human umpire making an lbw decision it is acknowledged that the accuracy of the judgment is affected by how close the batsman is to the wickets when the pads are struck by the ball. If the batsman whose pads are struck is well forward in his stance then he is rarely given out. In this way, human judges deliberately introduce a systematic error into their judgments that favours the batsman - the so-called ‘benefit of the doubt’ rule. The importance of this rule will become clear later…’

Extract from draft of Collins H.M and Evans R (2008) You cannot be serious!  Public Understanding of Technology with special reference to ‘Hawk-Eye.’

If the above is unclear, the best I (or anyone) can do is to refer you to the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) located at, or otherwise known as Lord’s…

A Dance to the Music of Time

(photo by Nick Hewling)

(First posted, 17.11.10)

‘Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. ..something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned to the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene

..[The dance to the music of time - painting  c.1640].. in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.’

Part of the opening passage of Anthony Powell’s 12 novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time in which he presents his own life, across 55 years of the 20^th century, through the fictional form of his narrator Nicholas Jenkins. Nick stands at the calm centre of a social world of two hundred characters as the observer and chronicler of their lives. Yet he remains also the central character, changing over time, offering different observations and explanations as he ages. His only conclusion, that he has exerted little influence over the direction his life has taken, drawn along by the rhythm of the dances of others.

It’s my favourite work of English literature and I’m currently in my 5^th cycle of reading.                                             

(As you can see from the first photo, I’m now on my 6^th cycle!)

From virtual reality to mirroring society

(First posted as a comment on a community blog discussion about Facebook, 13.6.10)

It's just three and a half years since I acquired a computer - before that it had been twenty years since I'd used one. I've found myself thinking of Facebook as a bit like a cafe or pub conversation - you are talking one-to-one or to a small group but with the tacit understanding that it is okay to be overheard. On Twitter it is more like short conversations with complete strangers in the bus queue, or any queue - gossip, which you are only too happy to broadcast to the world. With a community blog, it seems more like being allowed across someone’s door into a party where there is a host. Personal blogs are more 'broadcast yourself' - anything from a personal journal, to blatant self-promotion. Each application offers levels of privacy and intimacy.

However, what has become clear to me in the last couple of years is that it is probably a mistake (when trying to understand how the Web is evolving) to compare and categorize - rather one should think in terms of 'connectivity' (the ability to link one application to another) as the key to what's happening, and what you find yourself doing.

Facebook is important because of its size (400m +), personal blogs (approx. 200m), but Twitter (although about 150m) is ideal for gathering in, and pushing out (and filtering) information wherever you want it to go!

As the Internet becomes more important (as others insist on it as a means of communication) and it becomes less virtual (more an aspect of the 'real' world) then isolation in one preferred application, may come to mean ignorance, exclusion and vulnerability! Equally, when you find yourself distracted from work, surfing off to somewhere you never intended to be, ask who sent you there?!

(A few months later, I posted a link on the same community blog, 25.9.10)

Tim Skellett in yesterday's Guardian: 'Many people find a solace and acceptance online that they cannot find in person. ..As a bulletin board administrator, I know online friendships are no easy matter and neither is providing a safe place for them...’

(Then one of the site administrators commented, emphasising another quote from the article.)

‘..The protection of the private sphere of your online community will be the toughest part of your administration. It is precisely on this aspect that many fail, ending up closing down private sections of their bulletin boards, or even their entire forum when they cannot cope with the demands that the protection of confidentiality entails. Boards without such protection abound on the net, but are often marked by either aggressive cliques effectively in control, or by artificial and hard limits being placed on what may be discussed.'

(Three years on, although those new to the Web - particularly the young - may encounter similar problems, the idea of a ‘virtual reality’ has become even less sustainable. With the mobile devices we carry integrating so much data about us in real time, plus the sheer numbers of people connected by phone and Internet, the possibility of an anonymous, alternative or contrived online personality is rapidly disappearing. People are now made conspicuous by their lack of presence on social media. An avatar, in the computing sense, has become all about how authentic you can make it. Indeed, data capturing capabilities are now so sophisticated that they reveal sobering sociological truths that many had hoped had gone away – that within any age cohort and socio-economic group, the differences in educational attainment, health and wealth are as great as they were before the first computers were ever connected. By offering equal access to almost anyone, the Web reveals what appear to be the inherent inequalities of modern society. Just as computers and the Internet subvert traditional education and some forms of wealth creation, the data on the lives of millions show how much government’s interventions to aid social improvement have proved ineffective. NSA/GCHQ trawl for all those connected to wrongdoing, as neuroscience and network analysis use similar techniques to demonstrate that much of our behaviour is unconsciously viral and socially contagious, leaving anyone hoping to attribute cause, blame or responsibility going around and around in circles.)

Q's Legacy

(First posted, 14.9.10)

It wasn't what they said, but the way they said it.

There are some writers you love to read, whatever the subject, whatever their views, simply because of the way they write. But how do you learn to write in such a way as to hold the reader’s attention long enough to say what you want to say?

There is much debate about how the Web has changed the way people write, and how the reader becomes ever more reluctant to give time to what they are reading. Try Kevin Kelly, Reading in a Whole New Way; Patrick Kingsley, The art of slow reading, and Jonah Lehrer, The Future Of Reading.

And when it comes to social media such as Twitter and Facebook, suddenly the old skills of the tabloid sub-editor would seem to be at a premium – say it as clearly as possible, but in the shortest number of words!

However the unwillingness of the reader to indulge the writer has been going on for a very long time. In 1906 the first edition of The Oxford Book Of English Verse was collated by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Q taught first at Trinity College, Oxford where he had been an undergraduate, later becoming a Professor of English at Cambridge. He was a controversial figure for his time - to put it crudely he taught 'language' not 'literature', the current usage to which a language was put rather than the classical tradition of great past writers - outrageous! But then he was a Cornishman, and horror of horrors, had been educated at somewhere called Newton Abbot College. The Oxford Book Of English Verse was criticised for its inclusion of 'modern' writers, that is those from the last one hundred years - in his case the nineteenth century. He was also, allegedly, the inspiration for the character of Ratty in The Wind In The Willows!

But it is two of Q's students I really want to talk about, two people I believe to be unacknowledged experts in writing concisely, now much needed on the Web. At the end of the 1920's a young man who had been born in Salford and grown-up in Blackpool called Alfred Cooke turned up in Cambridge. Q was his personal tutor and by all accounts gave him a hard time because he was potentially so good, but spent most of his time on amateur dramatics. In 1933 Alfred, who by this time had changed his name to Alistair, made his first trip to America and the rest, as they say, is history. Through his almost 60 years of radio broadcasts (Letter From America 1946-2003) he gave several generations of British people their first taste of America. He pioneered 'writing for talking' in which the broadcaster speaks directly and personally to what he imagines is an audience of just one, or two people at most.

(photo by Nick Hewling)

A few years after Cooke had sailed into New York at sunset, a young woman from Philadelphia made her way there in the hope of making it on Broadway as a playwright. It would be more than thirty years before she found success, but she educated herself at various public libraries and there discovered Q's writing. Indeed one of her books is entitled Q's Legacy. It's not as well-known however as the book that made her name - a very short book of personal correspondence, made up of brief letters between herself and a man called Frank Doel who worked as a buyer for one of the second-hand bookshops that once defined the Charing Cross Road (84 Charing Cross Road) Helene Hanff wrote very direct, powerful and funny letters, sometimes of only a few sentences, which would not look out of place on any social media or networking site...

(photo by Nick Hewling)

St. Kilda - it's a long way from anywhere

(Edited and updated from 14.9.10)

I've never been to St. Kilda and I'm never likely to, but it's held a place in my imagination for over 25 years. A few months ago when a friend told me she knew someone who was there, and did I know anything about the place, I was immediately transported back to my first lecture as an undergraduate at the University of Bath in 1983.

It was the opening lecture in a module about the sociology of industrial societies, and we were introduced to the subject with a 30 minute description and analysis of the UK's last example of a pre-industrial society. I found it fascinating, so much so that for the first and last time I went out and actually bought a book from a recommended reading list! (It very quickly became my habit to just photocopy anything I really wanted in the library - allowing myself a maximum of 10 A4 copies per book.) It was Tom Steel’s, The Life And Death Of St. Kilda.

A quick rummage through my files and I find this;

'Topic 1 St. Kilda 6.10.83

St. Kilda died on 30th August 1930 when it's remaining 37 residents were shipped of the island to the Scottish mainland, so ending a 1000 years of occupation.
- social organisation of this pre-industrial society had finally broken down.
- economy of sheep for wool, sea birds for feathers and oil.
- no specialised division of labour, all were boatman/ weavers/ farmers, some sexual division of labour...'

Being left-handed in a right-handed world

(Edited and updated since first appearing elsewhere, 12.6.10)

My inability to spell has been the most enduring embarrassment of my life. Only since the advent of word processing and sophisticated spell-checkers have I gained enough confidence to write on a regular basis. Before then, like many people with literacy problems, I became adept at avoidance and finding alternatives.

However my trials with spelling are just one part of a broader challenge, I often have numeracy problems too - just as I tend to transpose letters, I also do the same with figures. Years ago I failed the old 'eleven plus' examination, then spent many more years failing other exams, before finally going to university aged twenty-three and gained a somewhat dubious First. Back in the days when undergraduate essays were handwritten, or occasionally typed, and you received them back covered in red ink, mine frequently contained frustrating corrections, and comments about how could someone of obvious intelligence be so negligent! (See my post, That 'alternative' CV! )

These days I guess I would be diagnosed as mildly dyslexic, but my own explanation is a little different. First the spelling errors tend to get a lot worse when I become stressed or excited (or self-conscious you might say) but conversely often disappear when I'm relaxed - indeed I often don't believe the spell checker when I get things right! Secondly, for me bad spelling is all tied-up with getting things back-to-front in general, with being left-handed in a right-handed world.

About 10 to 13% of people are left-handed in an environment designed and dominated by right-handed people. Whatever the causes of this dominance, it is probably a modern phenomenon (some have speculated that amongst our hunter-gatherer ancestors there may have been a 50-50 split) and the consequence for me as someone who is very left-handed (instinctively a 'southpaw', always kicking a ball with my left foot) has been a tendency to become easily disorientated. I often automatically move counter clockwise, 'read' body language and facial expressions as the opposite of what the sender intended and find myself in all sorts of trouble. I write elsewhere about mental health, and won't bore you with the details here, but I have a diagnosis (for what's worth) of Bipolar, and it is a strange fact that if you have such a diagnosis you are 3 times more likely than the general population to be left-handed. But such asymmetry is all about us in many, many forms, the UK's foremost expert on the subject is ChrisMcManus who wrote the fascinating book, Right Hand, Left Hand in 2002.

Just for the record this short post alone has required 17 spelling corrections and that does not include the other thing I'm blind to, too - using entirely the wrong word, but spelt correctly!

The above led to a few comments when posted, mainly along the lines; ‘I’m a bad speller too’, and ‘these days it doesn’t matter’. I responded; ‘Reading the comments on spelling from December, it struck me that although I'm a 'bad' speller and would love to say 'life's too short' etc, etc - actually I do care. Something about still wanting the approval of those who gave me such a hard time as a child I guess?!’

My interest in handedness continues to grow, but naming it by which hand you use to write with becomes positively misleading the more you observe and study the phenomenon. Not only have many people had their writing hand chosen for them, but it makes much more sense to think of asymmetry, and of it being about the orientation of the whole body. Recognising it can be both simple and complicated. If you are a Leftie you’ll find yourself unconsciously noticing and gravitating towards other Lefties – you move the same way. (Nature and nurture makes for handedness, like everything else.) Consciously, it’s not enough to notice one ‘symptom’ you need a cluster, a number of indicators taken together. Take your pick; instinctively reaching with the left arm, whilst using the right arm and shoulder as a support or shield; leading with the left eye and left leg; turning counter clockwise when movement is unrestricted; pointing with the left foot when instinctively showing liking of another…     

The role or function of handedness in natural groups will be the subject of a future post on my blog, Hunter-gatherer - the past in us.

Further Reading:

Are the left-handed more intelligent?

Left-handers more affected by fear
Handedness and sexual orientation

So near and yet so far

(BroadhempstonCommunity Woodland - visit six 19.1.09)

Did you know that the summit of Beacon Hill is clearly visible from the top of a double-decker bus at several points on both the Newton Abbot to Totnes road, and the Totnes to Kingsbridge road? You have to be quick, wipe away the condensation and crane your neck a bit - but it’s there!

But the bus I was travelling on runs once every two hours, and the nearest it comes to BCW is Ipplepen. And therein lies the problem. I don’t have a car and neither do the majority of those that the community interest company is hoping to help. Now I don’t mind a walk, but having got into Newton from Dawlish, then made the connection - by the time I got to the Beacon I would just have enough time for lunch before having to start back! Besides the whole point is to do a day’s purposeful work.

So far I’ve relied on Verity and my friend Martin (see previous articles!) However when the management committee is up and running, and putting together bids for money, then the case for transport to and from Newton at least, will have be part of the equation.     

         ‘I followed this straight southern track for several days, living on figs and ears of wheat. Sometimes I’d hide from the sun under the wayside poplars, face downwards, watching the ants. There was really no hurry. I was going nowhere. Nowhere at all but here. Close to the spicy warmth of this foreign ground a few inches away from my face. Never in my life had I felt so fat with time, so free of the need to be moving or doing.’ From Laurie Lee’s, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

But my peers and I have become too fat with time, stuck in alienating urban places. We’re isolated and no longer skilled at being around others for any length of time. So for users of mental health services, becoming involved in BCW would be about purposeful small group work. The activity and physical skills learnt might well be environmental conservation and woodland management; but the so called ‘soft outcomes’ would be just as important. When the social policy people use this expression they mean the social benefits - a problem for them because they find them so difficult to quantify and cost! Yet it’s what we the clients need most - the social and communication skills, and the motivation that can only come from others. But if my memory serves me right, working as a team doing physical work in remote locations when the safety of everyone depends on everyone else - you learn because you have to, and you start to care again.

'Never volunteer for anything'

(BroadhempstonCommunity Woodland - visit five 1.11.08)

So goes the maxim of conscripted soldiers down the centuries. But that’s advice for dealing with those who have authority over you and for situations where you have no choice about being there!

There were fifteen of us who made it to the Waytown Cross car park, variously equipped with tools to make a start on attracting the right kind of life to the woodland’s pond. It’s artificial, and the problem is that for most of the year there isn’t enough run-off from the hills to allow it to flow and refresh itself.

But of what is in the pond, what grows by it, what is drawn to it and what you do about it, I know little. I listened and began to understand a bit more from those with an emerging expertise. Different people with different skills to share, for the benefit of all - strangely the ratio of women to men was 2:1.

Most of those present knew each other better than I knew them. But I could see enough to know that there must be hundreds of stories they could tell of what leads them to come along and the unlikely connections that make it possible. And you only need to have one thing in common, a desire to be there.

Of course the best kind of volunteering is when you find yourself stepping forward because you know you are the best person for the job, knowing that as part of a team your companions will act for you in other situations that they understand better - then there is no sacrifice at all.

Minutes after picking me up in the morning, Verity had set a pace for the day that never let up, bounding through ASDA in search of long matches for lighting a lantern trail to the bonfire at the beacon quarry that evening. On the run, our conversation is of how to generate income rather than rely on grants, of a business plan, and the transport problem for any user of the woodland who doesn’t have access to a car.

But I’m a guy in a hurry too, a ‘step slow’ perhaps - and definitely fed up with being late for my own life - but drawn on by her, I get younger by the minute!

And the pay-off for our efforts came just as it was beginning to get dark. First, arriving back at the quarry, Simon was there before us and pointed out an orange sunset, after what had been an overcast day. Then V and I set off to light the lanterns we’d made earlier and planted at intervals on the route to the car park. Would they work, would the rain come before they had a chance to work? Just as it was really getting dark we heard visitor’s cars arriving, and still with a couple left to light, I turned around and realised it was going to work.

Once others appeared to have finished arriving, we headed off back up the hill for the last time. The effect in the forest was mystical and magical - though we had created it ourselves! Suddenly my distant past was no longer ‘a foreign country’. Around the last bend there was, coming at me through the trees, Simon’s own flaming skyline. Just for a moment it was as if the nightmare of the last twenty-one years had never happened.

Peer Support - three men and a Nissan Micra

(BroadhempstonCommunity Woodland - visit four 22.10.08)

‘…In a car you‘re always in a compartment, and because you’re use to it you don‘t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. …On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it any more, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.’  From the opening passage of Robert Pirsig’s, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

Monday morning and the talk at the Pickwick Café in Teignmouth is about BCW. A friend of mine is saying how much he enjoyed the visit we made with Martin. It had been great to be out somewhere so undeveloped, but he warns me that once you set yourself up to help the ‘disabled’, then the rules and regulations that come with the money, may mean you end up destroying the very experience you’re trying to offer! And he should know if anyone does.

Skirting the edge of Channing’s Wood on the way from Denbury he’d said: ‘That’s one I was never in!’ He’s in his sixties now, and has spent a total of 25 years of his life either in prisons or other secure environments. He was put on psychiatric drugs whilst still a child, and labelled with a severe mental illness as a young man.

Only two years ago workers were telling him he would never live independently in the community. I remember being with him about a year ago, and after ten minutes or so of intense talk, he apologised and said he’d have to stop. I assumed it was because of the emotional nature of what we were talking about, but I was quite wrong, it was because he was not use to talking - full stop. The muscles that make speech, needed a rest!

But it wasn’t always that way, for about 12 years he was a casual agricultural labourer, migrating with the seasons on his bike from Cornwall to Scotland. And it becomes obvious as we set off to climb Beacon Hill that he knows more about trees than we do!

His community now centres around his local church, and his spirituality is something about letting go of that preoccupation with ‘self’ that comes with chronic mental distress. Once you’ve got yourself together you can start being of use to others.

The writer Karen Armstrong argues that the spiritual is making others, or other things, the central focus of your life, allowing transcendent experiences - going beyond our usually limited perception of others - and being guided by what seems a ‘golden rule’ of all faiths - doing to others, as you would have them do to you!

Going up the hill I’m still a little confused by the red and blue trails, but the other two expect me to lead, and to be carrying in my rucksack anything they might need!  (And Martin’s the worker, the one being paid to be there). At the summit I find myself giving up water, sandwiches and chocolate.

My friend and I are of course as different as chalk and cheese. He’s just beginning the challenge of learning to read and write. But since we are everything the other is not, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’.

My ambition is that he should get to grips with that great philosophical work Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. He is steeped in the biker ‘culture’ of the last forty years, whilst I know about philosophy and meditation. But the real connection of course is that Pirsig himself spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and was at one time, like yours truly, diagnosed as a manic depressive!

(Photos from Flickr: The Broadhempston Community Woodland)

The summer that never was!

(BroadhempstonCommunity Woodland - visit three 16.8.08)

‘The earth shows up those of value and those who are good for nothing.’ - a peasant judgement from Jean Pierre Vernant’s, Mythe et Pensee Chez les Grecs

Rain and the promise of more later. I take the early Saturday bus from Dawlish to Newton. With just half a dozen passengers I’m free to enjoy the Teign estuary and what I know to be Hay Tor in low cloud.

A leisurely cooked breakfast at the Carlton Café before Verity picks me up at 9,00am. She’d e-mailed a couple of days before to confirm, doubtful about the weather, I’d replied I would be there whatever the weather. After all, as Billy Connelly famously said: ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing!’

We speak of when we’d last met, and visited the Dawlish Garden Trust, which has a long history of trying to provided training and employment opportunities for people with learning disabilities, and of what we might learn from them.

It’s great to be a passenger with someone on the way to BCW who knows the route so well she doesn’t have to consciously think about it - she gives me a long explanation of what a Community Interest Company is, and how the project is about to become one. And I tell her that the bureaucratic trick I want to pull-off, is at one and the same time, to be part of the setting up of the project and, as a client of mental health services, be referred to it!

We stop by the farm to pick up bits and pieces for today’s task, planning and making a start on the quarry barn - which hopefully can be the base for activity around the beacon. I pause, roll a cigarette, absorb the rush of silence, slowly pick up new sounds and see movements on another scale. I feel suddenly jealous, and I’m someone who lives with the sound of the sea and a view of the coast! 

Was it eight or nine of us huddled in barn? As the rain got heavier, discussion turns to what needs doing, who can do what, what can be got on the cheap or for free. Then suddenly after thirty minutes or so, we’re a group.

The barn could become simply somewhere to find protection from the weather, but equally it could serve as a workshop or classroom. There’s a real possibility of a wood burning stove, but first it needs a floor and the two open sides enclosing. But the barn already has a history, and a sound timber frame, it doesn’t want transforming too much. There’s a hot drink for those who want it. Then Simon gets the itch to be doing.

We start clearing the overgrown vegetation from around the back and side of the barn, and we all chip in and the group holds for an hour or so. By the end there is the makings of a bonfire and a pile of scrap on the trailer.

(Photos from Flickr: The Broadhempston Community Woodland)

Escaping to the countryside?

(BroadhempstonCommunity Woodland - visit two  21.5.08)

‘Life, is not a walk across an open field’ - Russian proverb

I’d not been outside much that week. I was trying to finish some work for a course on mental health. The body slows down, you don’t sleep so well, you snack and consume caffeine drinks without taking the exercise to work them off. Your shoulders slump as your eyes focus downward on the computer screen - thinking too much, instead of being absorbed in doing - such things create low moods.

But that day was different, a group of us clients and a couple of workers from the Community Care Trust made our way out here. Out into the light, clean air, stretching the legs, reconnecting with a more natural environment - more ‘grounded’ in the real world.

Two car loads of loud chattering voices talking across each other, full of the concerns of urban people who find life impossible and want to blame it on others, or themselves. Me trying to give directions, others without a sense of direction, or an etiquette for driving the rural Devon lanes.

But once we’re there I begin to relax, roll a much needed cigarette and muse on how the body of a British Railways standard freight van (circa 1950) came to be in the car park!

Then suddenly Verity bounds from the undergrowth and all’s well with the world. She’s a catalyst, someone who can make things happen, someone to get us of our backsides! Her hands are red, first I think she’s been marking sheep, in fact the first wooden posts, marking the first trail, are now in place and it’s this route we follow.  

She takes the leads, I bring up the rear, but wrapped up in my own thoughts I fail to watch my back. Suddenly Simon is there introducing himself, and after 10 minutes chat on the way to the summit, you begin to get a feel for where a person’s character really comes from.

Our hosts have lived-out their lives in a rural landscape, we tentatively make connections as we descend the hill via the quarry. And what we’re really talking about is what is known as Care Farming, or Green Care - giving anyone with physical or mental disabilities the opportunity to experience purposeful activities in a farming environment. (Take a look at Care Farming UK).

And here it might mean anything from helping to improving access and facilities (car parking, paths, seating, shelters, an ‘eco loo’) to learning the actual skills of woodland management. In a sense what’s been created is a new ‘unspoilt’ environment. How could that be maintained at the same time as allowing access? Equally what should be done, if anything, about the wildlife which is migrating here?

We approach the pond, but here alas there is no sound of water. We stare gloomily at a gloomy pool. Not enough water comes of the hills to allow this artificial feature to flow, it needs some more oxygen, some creative ‘eco friendly’ solution.

Driving way, I think I’d happily commit to being here for a day a week; to be in Newton Abbot by 8,30 if someone could pick me up. I’d bring my own lunch and do a day’s work in exchange for the occasional mug of tea. It’s not an escape, because it’s more real than our lives back there.

And then, about a week later, a confidence passed on by a ‘third party’, from another client of the mental health services, who had said, ‘best day I’ve had in years’.

(Photos from Flickr: The Broadhempston Community Woodland)

'Do you know where you're going?'

(Broadhempston Community Woodland - visit one 13.5.08)

I knew there would be a great view, the map told me that. And I didn’t need to study the woodland’s situation or the surrounding contours - the name ‘Beacon Hill’ and the ‘trig point’ symbol were enough.

Leaving Newton, Martin thought he knew the way: ‘Used to cycle out this way as a boy, mate!’ I kept the map open all the same. Then he was off, onto the supposed mystical history of Denbury.

But I, as a relic of another age (I have no car or mobile phone - and only started using a computer eighteen months ago, after a gap of twenty years) am dependent on others when I’m up against the limits of public transport.

Having made it to the Beacon car park (sx801 678) we followed paths created by tractor tracks, and my mind slipped back twenty-five years to a time when, in some trepidation, I used to take ancient vineyard tractors along scary slopes in the Gironde, thinking if I tip this, its primitive role bar will be of no use at all! And then a summit becomes visible - with a picnic table silhouetted on the horizon.

The view looks south and west - from Totnes and the Dart valley below, to a horizon dominated by the Moor. The occasional sound of a steam whistle from the South Devon Railway adding to the feeling that it is quite possible to reclaim value from the past; as a child I was fascinated by railways, as a teenage I walked most of Dartmoor, and as a young adult lived and worked on the land for a while.

The table provided a convenient place to lay-out the map and orientate myself to what I already knew to be true - from the web site, Google Earth and of course Verity herself.

We met in early 2007, when she witnessed me telling something of ‘my story‘ from the past twenty years, to a group of mental health workers - me trying to explain the nature of mental disorder from the inside, and how it should and should not be treated. Later, during a series of meetings, in which Verity needed all her charm to help a group of us put together a booklet on how patients from across the whole of health and social care could become more involved in their own care, she mentioned how her family owned a woodland which might just become the location for a ‘social enterprise’ - somewhere of practical use to people with all kinds of disability.

And now, because just Martin and I were there, and we’d been quite enough for long enough, my ears began to hear real sounds, and I thought again of a book I’d recently reread, first encountered when it was read aloud to us at school. A ‘green’ fable, before there was a Green movement. A story of a man who visits a place many times over fifty years, and witnesses another’s success in transforming a landscape.

‘But now all was changed, even the air. Instead of the rough and arid gusts that I had met with before, there was a soft and scented breeze. A sound like water drifted down from the heights: it was the wind in the forests.’  From Jean Giono’s, The Man Who Planted Trees.

(Photos from Flickr: The Broadhempston Community Woodland)