Met Demons, Made Acquaintances

Ninja is nearer the ground than us so she tends to see things on the floor that escape our attention. This morning she pointed out a spider that appeared to be carrying another spider.

At first I thought they were mating, but closer inspection revealed that the larger one, shuffling warily away from Ninja's prodding finger, had killed the smaller one: it was one of the only poisonous creatures in NZ, a white-tailed spider.

I had thought that bites from these things could be nasty: probably not lethal for an adult, but I wasn't so sure a child would survive. But more recent information seems to indicate that, although painful, the bite won't cause lasting harm.

Even so, since this spider was in the corridor where we keep our boots, and I recently found an earwig in one of my wellies, we are now careful to check our footwear before putting it on and Ninja is learning not to prod spiders indiscriminately.

Speaking of bites, despite my destruction of the concrete lining of the pond, which is now slowly being filled with wood ash and grass cuttings in preparation for planting, the flies are still breeding. Midges and mosquitoes have usually left me alone in the past, but the sand-flies here are indiscriminate: they bite anyone and their bites can itch and irritate for days. Any exposed skin ends up covered in angry red spots.

Since I also mowed the lawn yesterday, including the grass under the thorny rose forests*, my arms now look like those of a self-harming skag-addict. Which, as the Nuttsack saga rumbles on, brings me in a neat if wholly contrived manner onto the topic of drugs.

What follows is a fairly comprehensive list of my own experiences and is definitely not a recommendation either for or against a particular substance or substances in general. Though personally I'd legalise the lot.

Alcohol: varied. I don't like lager, rarely drink white wine, occasionally like a rich, smooth red wine and avoid spirits these days. A few pints of Guinness still works well, knocking the edge of any lingering social inhibitions while giving a warm glow and a pleasantly foggy hangover.

Amphetamine Sulphate: tried it, hated it. My heart doesn't like that kind of intensity. I was built for stamina, not speed.

Caffeine: nasty, addictive stuff. Until last year I avoided it entirely. Now I use it in specific circumstances, such as just before a gym weights workout or early in the morning to get a swift burst of work done. Never, ever as a means of keeping awake when I'm tired: that way lies loss of the invaluable skill of contemplation.

Cannabis: quite nice in good company with mellow music, but can quickly lead to (non-biochemical) dependency. It's a lobe-dimming anaesthetic in the same vein as TV, so I'm not a fan.

Cocaine: never tried it. I'm an arrogant, loquacious twat at the best of times; no point making it worse.

MDMA (the original/true ecstasy): exquisite. A peak of social, sexual and philosophical pleasure that I've spent my subsequent years attempting to emulate sans pills, with some success. If everyone took this there'd be no wars and few arguments: we'd all be bonobos instead of chimps. Which is why it'll never be legalised.

Nicotine: this one I really don't understand. I smoked a packet of cigarettes at a party once, got nothing from it but a dry throat and smelly clothes and never touched the stuff again. It's just a sharp, physiologically addictive nothingness.

Opium: not for me. I tried it accidentally once and the pleasant suffusion of mental warmth didn't really compensate for the 36 hours of total short-term memory loss and concomitant anxiety.

Most of this stuff I haven't tried for over a decade, though I probably would if someone could guarantee the quality and dose.

Knowledgeable readers will have noted the dearth of hallucinogenics on this list. I was always cautious, canvassing the experiences of friends and acquaintances before trying anything new. What I learned of LSD, psilocybin, etc. led me to believe that, based on my knowledge of my own psychological make-up, I wouldn't be wise to take them.

Probably I was overly cautious, but unlike some acquaintances from that era, I have no flashbacks, no nightmares and no pharmaceutical dependencies, so I can't complain.

Which is why I'll be pragmatic in my advice to my children about legal and illegal drugs. If they can't or won't say "No", they should always say "You first."

* Like rose bushes, but more ominous

Banking 2: this time it's carbon

It may surprise you to know that I'm in general agreement with the scientific evidence that human activity is leading to a change in the Earth's climate and biological composition. I'm sceptical of many things, but unless New Scientist has been lying to me all these years, the evidence seems incontrovertible.

What I am not in favour of, however, are some of the proposed solutions to this problem. Instead of simple structures like applying tax at the point of consumption or the point of production, politicians mysteriously seem to favour giving everyone a carbon quota.

Why such a deliberately complex proposal? Well, there are two potential 'benefits' to such a scheme for certain people: first, it would require some kind of central 'bank' for carbon credits, allowing a certain cabal of already-rich vermin to skim a slice off the top of every transaction, rather as they do now with nationally-mandated fiat currencies. And second, it would mean yet another database of everyone's transactions, to be stored, analysed and used against them whenever necessary.

In other words, this is a licence for a massive new global banking system and a massive new global surveillance system.

No thanks.

Turnabout is still fair play

Jeremy Clarkson has made a decent living by speaking what the unthinking believe to be his mind, and I respect him for that.

He's also a cut-and-paste merchant, with at least three newspaper columns over the years containing identical paragraphs about how only losers emigrate from the UK. This irritated me more than it should have done.

But judging by his most recent column [edit: The Times has removed the page but you can read it here], his daughter and many of his friends will soon be losers too ("There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go."). Either that or his public persona is being allowed to slowly come to the same conclusions that many of us reached - and acted upon - years ago.

Perhaps in a future rant he'll mention the elephant in the room that's strikingly absent from the litany of complaints about the UK in his current column; the real problem that has nothing to do with immigration, taxes, climate change, dead baboons or Albanians with wheelbarrows. But I'm not holding my breath. Mock-ivory towers have thick walls.

That said, he's dead right about Grand Vizier Mandelson.

When your heart skips in pleasure

There's a scene in one of the early Red Dwarf TV series in which the main characters apparently emerge from a fully-immersive virtual reality simulation to find that their true selves are their own worst nightmares made real. To add insult to injury, the VR game operator then ridicules them for failing to achieve any of the game's pleasure-related goals.

Coincidentally, while I don't think I'm living in a computer game (though I can't prove it logically), since my early teens I've kept a picture in my head of my future self, just before I die, looking back over the years and calling me an idiot for all the things I spectacularly failed to do when I had the chance.

This has had an overwhelmingly positive effect. It's led to me discarding our TV set a decade ago ("You spent 20% of your waking life watching other people?"), finding ways of earning money without being in an office ("You let fools tell you what to do, five days a week for half a century?") and pursuing as many different kinds of pleasure as humanly possible ("You didn't even enjoy it?").

The latter point seems to be a problem for some people. The protestant work ethic and catholic guilt syndrome are alive and well, it appears, since so many people I meet are scared to have fun. Some are worried about retribution by the state, others by sky pixies and others by their own inner demons that most don't even realise were embedded in their psyches during childhood and can, without too much trauma, be eliminated if they put their minds to it.

In one of my recent lectures we were asked what we thought was the purpose or goal of our lives. While the majority of respondents came out with the usual worthy lies about saving the poor, feeding the hungry and 'making the world a better place', and one or two opted for the refreshingly honest if short-sighted 'money and power', I suggested 'responsible hedonism', and was widely derided for it.

But why not?

Responsible hedonism is not defined by the illicit thrill of snorting a line of purest white powder off the firm buttocks of an Amazonian whore (though please; be my guest). It means fun, enjoyment, fulfilment, the abandonment of other people's rules in order to do what you really enjoy, as long as it doesn't directly hurt* anyone else.

Perhaps you get a serotonin cascade from helping old ladies across the road. Maybe your guiltiest pleasure is to gorge yourself on whelks while playing the bongos. Perhaps your definition of fun is sitting in a pub by an open fire talking to old friends. Maybe winding yourself up into a lather of religious ecstasy does the trick. Or exercise. Or threesomes with S&M enthusiasts. Or completing a sustainable irrigation system for third-world farmers. Or reading. Or narcotics. Or parenthood. Or researching a cure for AIDS. Or hammering rusty nails through your genitals while Bridget the Midget pours custard over your head.**

Whatever it is, do it now. After all, how long do you think you're going to live?

There's a serious point here. Unless and until you're doing things you truly enjoy, you'll be rubbish at everything else, because you'll be unhappy - or at least less happy than you could be - and also constantly distracted by the thought of the things you really want to do. And as Oscar Wilde probably put it, the only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it.

A couple of years ago a friend bought me the Hedonist's Guide to Life: preaching to the converted, but it's one of only a handful of books I've carried halfway around the world. I heartily recommend it, but if that doesn't float your boat, here's a suitable selection of related titles:



Have responsible hedonistic fun and everything else will fall into place. Your future self will thank you for it.

* Offending someone doesn't count, since nobody is responsible for anyone's feelings but their own. Neither does the harm caused by government policies that restrict personal freedom - e.g. substance prohibition - because at that point the state is the perpetrator (you may find this point hard to accept: I'll come back to it in a future post).

** Using a step-ladder, obviously.

Pyro

When I was a kid the families in our street would band together every November to organise a fireworks night, with a big bonfire in one of the farmers' fields and every family contributing to the supply of food, fireworks and bonfire toffee. It was a magical, primal experience and I looked forward to it every year.

In my early teens my friends and I would do things with fireworks that would, today, have the Prevention of Terrorism squad coming down on us like a ton of bricks. Gutting them, recombining their innards into makeshift bombs and much, much more, which to us was nothing more than youthful high spirits.

The high/low point came when my friend decided to launch an air-bomb repeater by hand using thick leather gloves: after the initial bomb was expelled, I saw him crouched down, thinking he was still holding the tube, which was actually now embedded in the ground behind him due to the reaction from the first launch and pointing at the back of his head. He ducked just in time, the next pyrotechnic flying over his head and startling a horse in a nearby field.

We survived. It was neither big nor clever, and I'm aware that many people lost eyes or worse. But to us it was just what we did every November, no less a part of our lives than flick-knife fights and throwing circular saw blades into barn doors.

It's been a few years since I've been able to let fireworks off myself, but tonight the tradition was renewed. We had 30 or so people at the farm, some from Wellington, some from this side of the hill and all in the mood for food, drink, flames and explosions. Having warned the neighbours - essential in a rural location - R and T made sure that the animals weren't spooked by the fireworks, while C and I fired several large boxes of explosives into the air over a period of half an hour or so.

After that, we all gathered around the bonfire and handed out sparklers to the kids (and the kidults), while hoovering up the remains of the beer, wine and food. All good, clean, mildly dangerous fun and not a Health and Safety Exec in sight. As is the norm with such things, I have several burns on my fingers and the smell of smoke in my hair. It was an excellent night and the last of the guests headed home after midnight.

I've just been outside to look up at the stars and kick over the embers of the fire. Life's good.

It's Mostly F*cked

Sometimes I see the IMF (International Monetary Fund) as a hit-man for US corporations, diving in and kicking smaller economies while they're down in preparation for big conglomerates to buy everything of value and sink the inhabitants with crippling generational debt.

Sometimes I see it as offering the only glimmer of sense in an otherwise 'To Zimbabwe... and beyond' la-la land of naive knee-jerk attempts to inflate debt away by developed countries that should know better but somehow believe it's different this time.

Either way, its figures make interesting reading. Turn to page 13 of this document, where the authors claim that "government debt for advanced G-20 countries would reach 118 percent of GDP on average by 2014".

Now that's an awful lot of chimneys to be swept by your children in exchange for bailing out a horde of over-leveraged idiots, don't you think?

In other news, I have read but not yet confirmed that the liabilities of RBS (approximately £2.3 trillion?) are greater than the entire GDP of the UK. Let's hope that little lot doesn't go tango-uniform, eh?

It ain't cheating if we tell you to do it

In the last few days I've had two English Literature exams. I'm unimpressed.

Some background: way back in the last century I completed a BSc in Physics with Astrophysics, partly because I enjoyed astronomy (the university, however, lacked a telescope) and partly because I thought it would impress girls (I met my wife there, so job done).

Utterly useless though this degree was to be in my career, it was so intellectually challenging that nothing before or since has really come close. Sixteen years ago I helped build a dark matter detector, for heaven's* sake. Not much matches that. I recently looked at my course notes and utterly failed to comprehend a single thing I had written. I burned them out of embarrassment.

That said, I can happily talk string theory, quantum mechanics, brane theory, modified Newtonian dynamics, various colours of relativity and any other branch of physics/cosmology you'd care to name. Just don't ask me to do the maths.

Earlier this century I did a second BSc, this time in Psychology. This wasn't particularly intellectually challenging but the workload was high (I did it part-time, distance learning) and the subject interested me greatly and still does. I had read a lot of psychology textbooks before beginning the course, and found out much that explains human behaviour (clue: we're all arrogant, stupid, selfish monkeys).

And now I'm doing a one-year Graduate Diploma in the Arts, English Literature, which is effectively an extra honours degree at 2nd/3rd year level. I'm doing it partly out of interest (I'm a distinctly unclassical oaf) and partly as a possible stepping stone to a future career change.

Arts students, take it from me: you really, really don't know you're born.

In my first degree we had tutorial sizes of 6-8 people and discussed things that would turn the uninitiated brain inside out. In my second degree we had tutorial sizes of 10-12 people and discussed exactly what happened when people's brains did turn inside out. In my third degree we have seminars of 30-odd people in which my brain turns inside out... through boredom.

While I still enjoy the topic, particularly the work of the wickedly satirical poets of the 18th century, I feel embarrassed at the lack of challenge presented by the course itself. I could be setting myself up for a fall here, of course, since I don't yet know whether I've passed or failed. But I've averaged around an A-minus on the coursework so far, with pathetically little work, and I feel a bit cheated by it all.

I'm paying to learn and be tested on my knowledge, yet one course module has been reduced from 9 to 7 to 5 plays over the last few years, and for another course module we were provided with the exam questions almost verbatim several weeks beforehand, together with the instruction that course textbooks could be taken into the exam, "annotated, even very heavily" [their emphasis]. In other words, "Cheat, you lazy sods!"**

There are several more modules to be taken over the next eight months or so, but I'm not sure it's worth my time or money to continue. I don't know if it's because this is a different country, a different university, a different century or a different subject, or a combination of all of the above, but this is not what I'd class as degree-level education. It's A-level at best.

* Pun intended.

** I didn't. My textbooks are pristine and unmarked, for several reasons.