Lifestyles of the rich and virtuous

In our prematurely declared meritocracy, where the rewards are supposed to go to those that deserve them rather than inherited through social status, it suits the successful to regard their success as a sign of their personal virtue rather than as the result of being given a loaded set of dice by the good fortune of being born in the right place at the right time.

It's entirely consistent to imagine that if the rich are personally responsible for their own success then the poor must be responsible for their own failure. They're poor because they haven't made the right decisions, I'm rich because I have.

Whilst on a moments reflection the self serving stupidity of this world view is obvious, the indications are that if even simple facts about the world don't fit in with our world view it's more likely that we'll ignore the facts rather than change the view. 

If you live in one of the world's major polluted cities, you have little choice but to breathe in the noxious air. If you haven't got access to safe drinking water then you have little choice but to drink what's available. But if you smoke, drink too much alcohol, eat too many burgers, drink too many cans of Coca Cola or take too little physical exercise then you clearly do have a choice. You can make the decision not to smoke, you can decide to walk to the shops rather than take the car. But this ignores the fact that our decisions take place within a broader context.

For example, there are many places in the United States where choosing to walk to the shops not only poses great practical difficulties (there's a freeway to somehow get across and the nearest mall is 5 miles away) but social barriers as well. To put this simply, when its a strong social norm to go everywhere by car, and walking is seen as a badge of poverty, it takes a tough, eccentric, person to make the decision to walk. 

The decisions we make depend on the context in which we find ourselves. The prevalence of lifestyle illnesses, such as those caused by excessive calorie consumption or inadequate levels of physical activity, change as the social or environmental context changes. For example, it's now well established that citizens in the UK had a much healthier, though undoubtedly more boring, diet during the second world war and the period of rationing that followed than they do now. Recent studies suggest that pedestrian friendly neighbourhoods have lower rates of heart disease. 

If levels of physical activity are seen as a purely personal choice, rather than one modulated by a social or environmental context, then it's easy for those who are active, who've joined the gym or the boot camp, to regard this as a badge of personal virtue. Hence the incessant sharing of who does what in the gym, who's been to which boot camp or who's cycled where and how fast on Strava. The barely disguised implication in all of these self promotional posts is "If I can do it, why can't you?" 

You could probably guess that I'm not a boot camp kind of guy. I'll go off for a bike ride or a walk in the hills simply because I like doing it. If there's ever a challenge it's usually just to go all the way there and come all the way back. I feel no need to have someone shouting at me to make me do it. But, each to their own. If people want to obsessively quantify what they do and then brag about it then it's probably better than if they didn't do it at all. But I would be interested to find out if these habits of exercise are maintained when there isn't an audience, or the audience gets bored and moves onto something else. 

My real problem with seeing lifestyle issues as all about personal choice, without regard to context, is that it fails to deal with the big problem of low levels of physical activity and poor diet within the population at large.

A little while ago a local councillor posted about her latest boot camp exploits. I commended her on her efforts but suggested that now that she was a politician it would be good if she took up the broader issue of physical inactivity within the population at large. In reply she said she was NOT A POLITICIAN ( her capitals). You might guess her political affiliations. 

Frosty hollows

The climate in the UK is much milder than might simply be predicted from its latitude. Most places this far north are an awful lot colder. Of course, we owe this to the effects of the Gulf Stream, a current of warm water that arises in the Gulf of Mexico and then crosses the Atlantic bringing additional heat, and a whole load of moist air, along with it. This also affects the pattern of weather within the UK which splits roughly four ways with temperature decreasing as you go north and rainfall decreasing as you go east.

If, like us, you live by the sea, then the weather on the coast is often quite different from that inland. In particular, in the winter time, it often gets noticeably colder as you go inland and lose the protective effects of a relatively warm sea.

Last week I set out on an early morning bike ride with friends from the local bike club. Not a hefty training ride, just a couple of hours at a modest pace out into the surrounding countryside with a few chats along the way. It also happened to be my 61st birthday but I hadn't told anyone else in the group. 

Last year, on my 60th, I'd ended up doing a total of 60 miles. This year I'd set the more modest, and unannounced, target of 61 km. This ride was just going to be the start. 

November has been unusually mild this year and we set off inland with little thought of how conditions might change. I suppose that I should have been warned by the very thin ice I'd spotted in puddles near the bridge over the Scalby Cut at Mowthorpe (thanks to the internet anyone reading this can find out where this is) but we carried on through Hackness and up into Troutsdale. 

Looking down Troutsdale from the West

To get into the Dale itself there's a brief descent into Langdale and a crossing of the River Derwent. At this point the small group in front of me slowed a little and, not wanting to catch up too quickly, I briefly touched my brakes. It turned out that the road that I'd simply thought was damp was in fact covered with black ice, my front wheel went from under me, I landed heavily on my hip and elbow and found myself under the bike with a club mate sprawled alongside. He'd see me drop, made an evasive manoeuvre and been caught out by the same ice.

End result, a two for one ambulance ride into the local hospital. He'd broken his collar bone and left hospital the same day. I'd broken the head of my femur and escaped two days later, on crutches with a plate on the outside of the bone and a screw making sure that the two sides of the fracture stay put. (see the diagram for an intertrochanteric repair). I'll be on crutches for 3/4 weeks and it's strongly suggested that I don't ride a bike for 6. 

Lessons to be learned. 

1) Remember that cold air is denser than warm air and that valley bottoms can be frost pockets. In these sort of conditions assume that what merely looks damp is in fact ice

2) Live somewhere where the health service responds quickly, efficiently with care, compassion, no sense of blame and nobody ever mentions of how much it's all going to cost.

3) If in doubt stick to the coast.

But is it true?

Almost every year I get a phone call from a current student at my old college. They want to have a chat about the olden days, what you're up to now, how their course differs from yours etc. etc.  and it's usually a pleasure to talk to a bright young person who seems to be taking a genuine interest. Of course, it's all a lead up to a request for money and a few times I've even donated something to the college's funds, just enough to cover the pay that they've been getting to make the call, even though I really think that all students should get decent grants, like we did, and that the hardship funds shouldn't really be needed.

One year I was asked about our IT facilities and found it amusing to say "Well we were allowed into the library but had to supply our own pens and pencils". I could have added that when I was a research student I did begin to write a programme, on punched cards, to  work out something or other on the big computer in the Maths department but got so bored with the whole process that I found another way of presenting the data and never found out if my programme would actually work. 

Looking back it can sometimes seem incredible that we found out anything at all. How did I plan a trip to the Lake District from Bristol, and get hold of the Cumbrian bus timetables, without having an internet to use? For many years the very idea of being able to access huge amounts of information at the press of a button, the click of a mouse, from anywhere in the house, or even out on the street, literally felt like science fiction. Now, as we all know, it's commonplace.

If we were to divide the internet into two realms we could choose one of them to be "purported factual information", the other "entertainment" and that the social media contains a mixture of both. What surprises me, however, is that despite the ease of checking whether or not the things we post are true, or even could be true, they get posted anyway. So, as you could probably guess, I'm a bit of a Facebook curmudgeon. 

If someone posts something that I find surprising, and not so ridiculous that no amount of evidence could challenge it,  then my first response is to check up on the web and find out if its true, or if it could work, or if it could work and it's built like that then would it work. You get the idea.

Now whilst some skills, playing musical instruments, acting, being good at sport, are generally admired, and feted, others, like being a pedant for the truth, aren't. You don't please many people by challenging their thinking. Indeed, on a recent occasion when I questioned the actual existence of a supposed African tribe that punishes wrong doers by sitting around them in a circle and telling them about all the good things they've done, the final response I got was " Pedantic .. You are sad or wounded somewhere deep within I think ."

Given my background in Physics I have particular problems with postings about perpetual motion machines, or ones that make an unsung hero out of Nikola Tesla and confuse his ideas for the wireless transmission of electrical power with the idea that there's this hidden field of energy which, if only the big oil companies and the scientific establishment hadn't suppressed the knowledge of, would solve all our energy issues at a stroke. I've since realised that although I might be surprised by these things there are plenty of folk out there who find no conspiracy surprising. I suspect they've never tried to organise anything let alone a conspiracy. Can you imagine the diary secretaries of all these major players trying to fit the secret conspiracy meetings into already overloaded schedules?

Back in the days when we were obliged to chat to one another face to face and could respond with more than a like, share or troll, I remember that one of the participants in a conversation whose subject escapes me, a mathematics student, simply said "But is it true?"

In a feeble attempt to fight back against the anodyne aphorisms that often become internet memes I decided to make my own. 

I know, it could have done with a more relevant picture than a collection of lichen in the woods above Loch Ness.

Putting pen to paper

It's been a while since I wrote a blog post. I've still been churning out the odd post with a political purpose (e.g. The cost of sitting around in North Yorkshire) but the other sort, the ones that reflect on life and its mysteries, seem to have dried up. 

When I started this blog I knew from the off that it was really aimed at an audience of one. There was never any intention to garner a wider audience than myself and a few polite friends. After all, why would anyone really be bothered what I think when they've got so much to think about for themselves. 

A few years ago I found myself interested in the broad concept of memes. The two best books I read on the topic were Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" (1999) and the more recent "On the Origin of Tepees" (2012) by Jonnie Hughes (note the punning title). Both of them seemed to demonstrate to me that cultural evolution can be described in similar ways to genetic evolution. That all an idea has to do to succeed is to get passed on. It certainly doesn't have to be true. My son, a social anthropologist, doubts the utility of this particular idea, looks disdainfully at me when I mention it, and so it's a subject that we now tend to avoid ..... But, after reading Hughes's book I was still left with one mystery "what's the genetic advantage in wanting to pass on cultural memes?" Why do we have the urge to tell each other stuff? Is it the loudmouth that gets the girl?

Being the sort of person who's attracted to science precisely because it allows you to say you don't know I don't feel any obligation to come up with a metaphysical answer. One day an answer will occur to me, and then I'll check it out and no doubt find out that someone else has come up with it already, but until then I'm not unhappy not to know..   Answers on a post card please.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a dog swimming in the River Itchen near Winchester.

n.b. while its been well proven that students who do actually put pen to paper remember more of what they've written than when they bash away at a keyboard, this post's title really ought to be "Putting fingerprints on the keyboard". When nobody remembers what a pen is will we still talk about putting pen to paper ?

"Pulling the ice axe from my leg

I staggered on

Spindrift stinging my remaining eye

I finally managed to reach the station

Only to find that the bus replacement service had broken down

After wondering to myself whether or not it should actually be called a train replacement service

I walked out onto the concourse and noticed the giant screen seemed to have been tampered with"

The opening lyrics from "National Shite Day" by Half man Half Biscuit

Slowing down in North Yorkshire ?

For those unfamiliar with the structure of local government in the UK in some places there are two tier local authorities. In our case this means that some functions are carried out by the local Borough Council whereas others, most in fact, are dealt with by a County Council which covers a much larger area. One of our little local difficulties is that when someone wants to blame "the council" for something they end up directing their attention at the Borough Council whether or not it's actually their responsibility. To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain "Northallerton (a small market town that just happens to be the site of the County Council's offices; and therefore a little bit like Bonn in the Bundesrepublik, a place chosen as a seat of government to stop more significant places thinking it's all about them) is a far away place of which we know little".

I won't bore you with the details, but as things stand the County Council has responsibility for Highways. This means that when the Borough recently re-established a Cycle Forum, to champion the needs of cyclists in the Borough, it was important to get the County involved. Since the officers concerned would argue that they've already been given too much to do they found it difficult to attend our meetings. So, last time out we decided to go to them rather than have them come to us and scheduled the meeting in their local office.

An interesting time was had by all as we pored over maps and thought about how we could develop plans. Of course, all of this was done in the knowledge that in a situation where public services are obliged through common sense financial management to pay the costs of a banking crisis, lest the bankers lose faith in their own system and all choose to go off and plunder somewhere else, so we were all well aware that wouldn't be much money about.

Towards the end of the session I made a simple, very low cost, suggestion (one that's been shown to be very effective in lowering the perceived danger of traffic and encouraging more people to dare to venture out onto two wheels) of bringing in more 20 mph ( 32 km/h) speed limits. It's not that these don't already exist, just that they often seem to start and end in bizarre ways.

Start of a 20 mph limit on Glenn Bridge/North Leas Avenue

About half a mile down the road from where this picture is taken there are two primary schools. The streets to the left are narrow residential streets and there's no other route out from them except back onto this road.

First street off Northstead Manor Drive to the left

As you can see, the 20 mph limit doesn't include these streets and so, strangely some of us feel, going from a big road to a little road means the speed limit increases. Suppose that these streets were also given a 20 mph speed limit the you wouldn't need the signs or the road markings and you wouldn't need to pay to get them maintained merely the one off cost of taking them down.

This is not the only place in town where such strange things happen, so I asked the Highways officer if they might consider, in the interests of making cyclists and other vulnerable road users feel safer, rationalising the existing 20 mph limits into broader 20 mph zones. The response was short, I paraphrase, "It's County's policy to only have 20 mph limits next to schools" That was it, since he didn't set policy there wasn't anything more to discuss.

So who does set policy ? The obvious answer is politicians. Can policy be changed ? Well it's not like the laws of physics,  so yes it can.

My own barely radical suggestion would be to do what's been done in a number of towns and cities across the UK (including Oxford) and have a default 20mph limit in urban areas covering everything but the major roads into or our of town. in Scarborough's case this would mean 30 mph limits on the 2 major roads in from the South, the 2 major roads in from the North and the one major road from the West.

Guerrilla public information

Some of my blog posts are mere whimsy, others try to make a political point, this one lies somewhere in between.

Coming into Scarborough down the Cinder Track from the north there's a short stretch in Scalby where the old route has been built over and you're obliged to take to the road. To successfully follow the route you need to turn right onto a more major road and then take an almost immediate left. 

Since lots of people who didn't know the area got lost at this point, a few years ago we asked the County Council if finger signs could be attached to the lamp posts that are conveniently opposite each junction. The said that this would be OK but that they would have to put the signs up and that it would be at our, The Friends of the Old Railway's, expense.

Since then a number of bids for funding that would have paid for these signs have failed to be successful but earlier this year we were made aware of small small grants that might be available from the local Parish Council. To apply for this grant all we needed was to come up with some costings before a deadline that was then a couple of months ahead. No trouble we thought and I immediately got onto Sustrans, who manage the National Cycle Network of which this is a part, so that they could liaise with the County Council about designs and costs.

I've no doubt that the local Sustrans manager tried his best but if an official decides not to respond there's not always much you can do and our deadline for making an application for funding came and went.

By now bored with the entire long winded process I decided that I might as well just do it myself and, armed with a few bits of scrap timber, a small tin of blue paint, a small spray can of white paint, a craft knife to cut some stencils, a few cable ties and with a set of short steps strapped to my bike, I did just that.

There's another one like this signed to 

Robin Hoods Bay and Whitby

Now while we may have had permission in principle to have signs like these put up I did not have, or seek, permission to do this myself. Hence these signs are illegal. If the County would like to prosecute they're welcome. If they choose just to take them down then they'll have to explain why proper ones aren't put back in their place - or would they just go quiet and refuse to say anything at all?

Talking to Sustrans the estimated cost of proper signs was about £400. The materials cost me less than £10 and it probably took me about 5 hours so, at the volunteers rate for non menial work of £10 an hour, the total cost was about £60.

It's a socio-psycho-political issue stupid.

We've known about the possibility of man made climate change for well over 100 years but it wasn't really until the 1980's that the idea fully entered public consciousness. Even then, the scientific community, bound by the evidence, was unwilling to say that it was definitely happening. They knew there was a mechanism, CO2 absorbs infra red radiation and then sends some of it back where it came, they knew that by burning fossil fuels we were putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, but we hadn't been measuring global temperatures for long enough, or well enough, to say whether the observed warming was down to us or was part of a natural cycle. There is now no such doubt.

This scientific reticence enabled those who had lots to lose, or little to gain, by admitting the possibility of anthropogenic climate change (i.e caused by us) to argue that it was just scaremongering.  At best this led to indifference at worst to the idea that it was just an idea dreamed up by pinko liberals to give the state more control. Socialism by the back door as it were. The one thing that can be said about this position, now only seriously supported by the American right, is that at least it acknowledges that dealing with climate change will mean drastic changes in the way some of us live. Many others try to pretend that the rich 2 billion can somehow not only retain our high energy lifestyles but also that the poorer 5 billion can join in as well. All it takes is the right techno-fix and anyone who suggests that such a fix might not be possible is letting the side down by suggesting limits to human ingenuity. In an earlier post, Insulation and Bicycles, I suggested that two key technological innovations already existed but that, by implication, what was missing was the political will to take them seriously.

The few climate sceptics that are left, powerful though some of them may be, are having to make increasingly tortuous arguments to justify their position and what we're now left with is a  debate not about the science but about if we can actually do what it is  that we know we need to. It's gone from being a question about the science to questions about personal, social and political change.

As individuals we tend to adopt the value systems of those around us and we tend to favour evidence that supports our existing positions. If our social status is seen to depend upon our ability to demonstrate how much we can consume, conspicuous consumption, then it is unlikely that we'll want to lose status by restraining that consumption. We can't wish away our need for social status but, precisely because it is a socially defined quality, we can seek to change what we think gives us that status. Societies have existed, and can exist, in which status is defined in different ways; by how much you help your neighbours, by how much you know, by how well you can play an instrument, wield a paintbrush, make a chair, console the elderly, teach the young, look after public space. So, a start could be made by celebrating the lives of the rich and famous not by pointing at their bank balances, their ability to consume, but by the contribution they make to the common good.

This is easy to say, much much harder to put into practice. We can no doubt create little social bubbles where the individuals feel like this and are supported by others who feel the same way. We can all be cyber buddies, share witty pictorial memes, click on worthy petitions and go about our days in the happy glow of shared values. Meanwhile the rest of the world will carry on dancing to the tunes of the powerful vested interests that want to define us as consumers, to set us up against each other as competitors, define the rich and successful as winners, the poor and the needy as losers. 

So, whilst its easy to see that consumer capitalism predicated on continued economic expansion in a world of clearly limited material resources is unlikely to come up with a solution we've still got no idea how to get from where we are to where we need to be. It's now a psycho-socio-political problem.

Of course, in a few centuries or so, the blink of a geological eye, we will have been obliged by ecological catastrophes of our own making to live in a very different way with a very different set of values. Quite how many of us the planet will then be able to support we'll just have to find out. 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has a list of all the species at threat of extinction. The entry for Homo Sapiens from the global mammal assessment team says 

"Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline."