One Drug to Rule them All

 "It is far more powerful than I ever dared to think at first, so powerful that in the end it would utterly overcome anyone of mortal race who possessed it. It would possess him"  - Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring

Modafinil tris by Arenamontanus

Professor Barbara Sahakian, speaking at the Royal Institute on Monday, is a softly spoken academic. She's an unlikely-looking herald of a new world order, but that exactly is what she is for in her laboratory in Cambridge she is testing a collection of smart drugs that boost attention, memory and cognition and which, just possibly, could change what it is to be human.

She is disquietingly relaxed about it all; I wasn't certain that she realises the power of what she is helping to unleash.

Life as a Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology is varied. Some days she gives Ritalin to test subjects and monitors their improvement at Tetris; other days she slips the Ring idly on to her finger just for fun, and walks the halls of academia invisible and unseen (far away the Nazgûl stir).


The smart drug of choice at the moment seems to be Modafinil: with few known side effects and seemingly non-addictive it reliably boosts attention, concentration and cognition no one knows exactly how. What's not to like? Her drug-ingesting students are occasionally  asked how it feels. They tell her it feels good, and they scurry far away to make preparations for their exams.

How can you get some? Unfortunately it's prescribed only as a treatment for narcolepsy so it would take some dedicated fakery to get it from your GP, even if she is Private.  If you want it merely to become superhuman (this is called an off-label use) you'd need to buy it from a reliable source on the internet. Alas Professor Sahakian didn't give reveal her favourite, merely observing that when you buy something on the internet you need to be careful, or you might end up with an inert sugar pill. (not unlike the NHS)

It was an intriguing talk.

Smart Drugs offer a world where we all can become brighter and more focussed. Where the effects of old age are staved off, and where no one need fear the terrible loss of self that is dementia. It's an artificial boost for the mind - like plastic surgery for the body, but a lot less dangerous. It's the way we will all live someday: if Modafinil was cheap and legal now it's hard to imagine who wouldn't try it.

And eventually, like the one ring, perhaps it will gain control of us.

"A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later - later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last - sooner or later the dark power will devour him"

 ***updated ***

• the Guardian were there as well

Sam Gribley

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.

by h.koppdelaney

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.


I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Henry Thoreau - Walden


Botogol is on vacation.
and not doing DIY until Monday.

At least you'll know

Secrets by Avery Edison

So here's a difficult decision for a rationalist, philanthropic, scientifically-minded cycnic: I have been invited to share all my medical records with strangers, at the BIOBANK.

To help science.

On the one hand: the scientist in me whole-heartedly approves of long-term longitudinal studies, and applauds the sheer scale and ambition of this one.

But on the other hand I am of a school that says: be wary of divulging to the government any information you are not absolutely required to.

I wondered what was in it for me. "Well", said Mrs Botogol, "think about it: if they do notice something wrong with you - something else I mean - then they'll tell you, and then at least you'll know"

Oddly enough, when I found out that actually they wouldn't tell me,  I was reassured.

I see ghosts

My Ghost by piccadillywilson

How might you know if you are a brain in a vat? Short of being able to order up a useful mind-focussing, clarity inducing red pill, on the internet, that is.

One clue that might lead you to believe your life was a scripted simulation might be the sudden emergence of new themes, or abrupt changes in your story - as unseen undergraduate experimenters move on to a new module in their degree course and devise a new set of experiments for their imprisoned but unaware and virtual subject.

Has your life suddenly become dangerous?  Is everything recently very French? Are you encountering purple vegetables with worrying regularity?

In my case I am being tortured by frequent encounters with co-workers from my old consultant days.

They are everywhere.

Encountering two in a Canary Wharf wine bar last month was unremarkable happenstance; meeting a third at a mini-rugby festival felt like coincidence, but when I noticed fourth ex-co-worker running on my shoulder at the Richmond Park 5k  I suddenly suspected enemy action

By now I was even beginning to recognise them and recall their names. (Somewhere a tentacled hand pressed pause and made a note of my pleasing progress)

So, when a fifth ex-colleague phoned me up out of the blue last month to ask me for coffee, and then a sixth turned up at in a meeting at work I wasn't even surprised. "I've been expecting you" was my (slighty unusual) opening conversational gambit but she wasn't thrown (they're good, the holo-deck programmers, they're very good) and somewhere far away someone decided turned up the heat a bit "I know! How about giving him a an alumni reunion?" and lo, I have been to two such occasions in a fortnight.

I see ghosts, I see them all the time. And last night I saw very many of them. And if the spectres of age, and the credit-crunch and a sense that things could have been different, if those spectres were also there, and they haunted us, well, we didn't let it show for there was free wine and canapes.

It had been ten years since I last saw David and it's been fifteen years since we worked together in a city in Africa, and it was good to see him again, and when everyone else had gone we stayed and we reminisced about old friends and narrow escapes, sale pitches won and lost, clients satisfied and upset and do-you-remember-whens, when suddenly it hit me

"You know, David", I said, "you know - we used to be friends didn't we" and he laughed, "Yes Alibert, so we did".

Since I last saw him he had found time to get married and father an eight year old - and I didn't even know.

"Have you been to many other reunions lately?", I asked; and he looked at me strangely.

Close Calls, and Deep Regrets

frozen light in a snow weekend
by Paulo Brandão

In life they say that you regret the things you didn't do much more than the things you did: for while the bold mistake is easy overlooked, the fork untaken (or, worse, the fork unnoticed) gnaws the soul.


And it was in that spirit last week that I boldly attempted all the jumps in the snow park (I stacked), and it was in that spirit that I raced with middle-child madly, recklessly down the mountain (it was an epic tie) and it was in that spirit that I persuaded Mrs Botogol, a determined but improving skier to attempt the blue run down to St Martin, to return over the mountain via the gondola.

The previous few days, careering round the well-groomed pistes of the Three Valleys in bright sunshine, pausing only at high altitude bars to enjoy a €6 glass of vin chaud and free wi-fi, it was  possible to imagine that the Alps have been tamed.

Not so.

For when Mrs Botogol and our party found ourselves an hour behind schedule and 2600m above sea level, the sunshine long gone and a light snow falling, sliding and stumbling as fast as we could for the very-soon-to-close gondola which was Mrs Botogol's only hope of making her way safely down the mountain that evening short of an emergency helicopter, well the thin-aired, steep and freezing mountains were suddenly about as tame as a polar bear.

It wasn't as if the decision point that afternoon had gone unnoticed either: the metaphorical and literal fork in our road had been 45 minutes earlier and 800m lower when, behind time on a run that had proved too demanding by far, we had found ourselves at the top of Biolley piste and the bottom of the St Martin 2 chairlift.  The safe option was obvious: the five us should continue down the mountain to safety: an easy blue run, no more than 5 mins on a good day 25 minutes at current pace but to the wrong side of the mountain, and a good 30km taxi ride back to Meribel.

The other option, the silly option you could call it, was to head up the mountain the waiting gondola, 1000m above us and two chair lifts away.

I thought about it... and we blundered on.

It was when Mrs Botogol fell over getting off the first chair-lift that I knew for certain I had made the wrong decision, but by then there was no way to turn back and on we pressed, higher and colder, the pistes beside us all redder and steeper.

So, how close did we come to catastrophe?

Well, if I tell you that Mrs Botogol and her friend made it into the gondola but by the time the two boys – just a chair behind us on the way up - had taken off their skis and scrambled over to me the Retourner a Meribel door was shut and firmly padlocked.... well then you will realise that we had the nearest of near misses.

The ski down was fun though, and the boys and I easily overtook the mums in the bubble, who waved cheerily as we raced past.

“You skied down!”, they said when they eventually rejoined us at the bottom of the mountain, “but why didn't you take the gondola like we did”

“Well, you know, the boys fancied a run, so..."   

No regrets

Explaining Religion, and work

I have been reading an interesting book:  Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer.
Why is it that several religions feature things like:

• a statue that can hear your prayers, if you travel to see it
• a god who knows your thoughts wherever you happen to be

but religions never feature

• statues that can hear your prayers, wherever you happen to be?

How is that people in most cultures can entertain countless superstitions  only some of which qualify as a religion and every one will know the difference?  How  do they know which is which? Certainly it's NOT happenstance - if you were presented with a collection of the beliefs of the obscure Kargasses tribe in Siberia's Sayan mountains you would be able to discern their folk tales from their religiin without much difficulty.
Boyer does a good job of explaining.

But perhaps he treats religion as too special a case - for instance it's not so different at work: in every company a thousand crazy supersitions ideas, invocations policies and rituals best practices float down from the C-Suite high on the 29^th floor and, on the surface at least, every manager subscribes to them all.

And most of the memes are tacitly recognised for the casual fly-by-night superstitions they are, observed but lightly, with the occasional sideways nod and wink to one's peers: the importance of keeping expenses within our budgets (which are fiction), the need to develop our staff (we poach 'em ready-trained, later they leave for money) the importance of offering 'flexible' working (a boom-time luxury)

While other doctrines – with, really, no more grounding in reality or logic – assume religious importance: believed by most, followed by all, challenged only by the cranks and the self-destructively reckless: the preparation of cost-benefit analyses to accompany any decision, the fiction that we are motivated by generating profits for our company, and returns for our shareholders, the importance of the annual bonus.

But the oddest thing of all is that  - just as we know understand the difference insignificance between David and Goliath, and Jack and his Giant -  so every manager instinctively knows the difference between the trivial and the serious, can distinguish  superstition from the doctrine, but is only dimly aware of the dissonant implications.

-----------------------------------------------

Happily for me, this week I am not at work at all: it is half term and I am mostly skiing. Or to be more honest, mostly at standing in a cold, cramped corner of the chalet balancing my Jesus on the windowsill, trying to steal wi-fi from our neighbours.

If you are reading this it worked.

New Year Makeovers & What We Are.

Just like John Thain, I have redecorated.

He spent $1,200,000 on his office; I can report, dear reader,  that on my cubicle I spent less: Approximately $1,199,985 less.

Thain's centrepiece was a stupidly-expensive designer rug, purchased solely to demonstrate his wealth and power  (only a banker could do that, right?)  My centrepiece was some new art postcards from the National Gallery, which I blu-tacked onto the glass partition between myself and my neighbour to allow me to surf the internet undetected improve our mutual privacy.

Thain was sacked. But even so, I guess he won't have to worry about his pension like I do. Oh well.


New Years Resolutions - because We are what we repeatedly do.


This year I have stolen three themes from older, wiser friends, who know better.

Theme - learn moderation, not abstinence

• in drink: to drink with friends and loved ones not with clients or co-workers, to oil a conversation not to wash down a plate of pasta, to accompany a smoked salmon blini, not Trial and Retribution
  
• food: to eat three meals a day not four (or two). To be able to tell whether I am hungry and if I'm not, to stop eating. At all costs to avoid canapés.

Theme - to OCD only the good habits (because it's hard when a habit takes a hold)

• to weigh myself once a week, exercise five times - and blog twice
  
• to have breakfast with my children every Wednesday -  whether they like it or not
• to be nicer to Mrs Botogol
  

Theme - to have more human contact at work

• fewer emails, more phone calls
  
• seek out Kate, whomsever she is
  
• find out the name of the youtube, Ocado and google-news fanatic in the next door cubicle. I mean - why not? after all these years...
  

Meanwhile... at work 

In our secret santa  last month an anonymous co-worker bought me a book of art pictures. It turned out to contain two of the postcards I have on my cubicle wall.

My first thought was "That is an unusual present for a secret santa" 
My second thought was: "Ah, I can see why they bought this: just because I have art postcards on my cubicle wall they think I am some kind of arty-type of person"
My third thought was "But I do have art postcards on my cubicle wall.... perhaps I am some kind of arty-type person"

What we actually are.

We are what we hang on our cubicle walls.

Deadbeat

picture by ~ fernando

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
And all's to do again.

AE Housman.  'Last Poems'

We all need a break, sometimes. Even greedy investment bankers.

I'll be back on 6 Jan 2009.  Happy Christmas!

Paradise Lost last night

picture by AHMED...

Yes, the performance was in a church, yes, a real live vicar introduced it enthusiastically  [ "I just know this is going to be excellent. Unfortunately I can't stay to hear it myself. Bye"  Why do people do that?]

Yes, the subject matter is theological, and yes God, Satan, Adam and Eve all have speaking parts and yes it was written by a devout man - but still, but still. . .I reckon Paradise Lost is a deeply irreligious work.

And that's probably why I like it so much.

Perhaps, like any great work, there are so many threads, so many levels in Paradise Lost that every reader can find in it the narrative they want, and no doubt the other members of the audience in St Giles in the Field last night (the retired and aged, the rapper off the street for the free wine, the young earnest muslim, and the half-dozen assorted A-Level Students) no doubt they all heard, through the prisms of their conventions, something else entirely; but for me Milton is a subversive: Milton believes in a god, of course, but he believes in a god that no one could possibly worship:  A god that is cruel and humourless. A god that is sentimental and yet pitiless. A god of entrapment and condescension. I can't believe that Milton worshipped this god.

Whatever: he certainly didn't manage to justify His ways to this man.


The vastly likeable and entertaining, but slightly cheesy, Lance Pierson performed Book IX, in an assured and compelling piece of theatre, and it was excellent, but dispiriting:  a young married couple, idealistic and naive, commit a foolish deed in the pursuit of an illusory goal, and the roof simply falls in on their world, destroying the contentment they had.

But they were suckered, taken for a ride, and manipulated; as defenceless as the poor snake that Satan enslaves and are as badly treated. They have been advanced a loan they can't possibly pay back and suddenly it's the mother of all credit crunches.

It all ends in tears and, worse, mutual recriminations, Eve and Adam momentarily forgetting that they are on the same side.


It was an abridged version - of course it was - and naturally some of my favourite passages, it turned out, were not Lance Pierson's favourite passages and they were omitted. So in case any of the other forty people present are blog-searching for reviews tomorrow morning  (yeah, right) - here's two they missed:

Satan's state of mind as he approaches Eden.

                                          the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heaven much worse would be my state.
But neither here seek I, no nor in Heaven
To dwell, unless by mastering Heavens Supreme;
Nor hope to be my self less miserable
By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts

hasn't everyone felt like that. Doesn't everybody hurt, sometimes?

And here's Eve's defiance in the face of danger.

If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a Foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defence, wherever met,
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?

And so out she goes to face down whatever is out there. Doesn't everyone wish they were brave enough to feel like that?


Lance Pierson ended as Milton ended, and if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. Here's Adam and Eve as they leave paradise (It's kind of like being made redundant but being sent to a good outplacement consultant)

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Nerve Centre

picture by NinJA999

"If you're going to the Bank of England this evening", said Mrs Botogol from behind the newspaper, "to meet the Governor, then I think you should wear a tie."

I was halfway out of front door, but I paused.

I haven't worn a tie since investment banks dressed down in 2000 in response to the dizzy heights of the dot-com boom... but I had a horrible suspicion she was right.

"In fact", she continued, languidly, buttering her crumpet, "you could wear the tie I bought you in the Christmas of '05, you know: the one you've never worn yet"

"OK, but wh..."

"Second drawer: at back, on the left; still in it's box"; and when I fetched it, she put it on for me.

It was an alumni evening for graduates of my old alma mater: a tour of the Bank of England, and then drinks with Mervyn King himself. Just for a few minutes, he has economies to save. He shook hands and conversed enthusiastically with the assembled company.

"Do you feel sorry for all the investment bankers losing their jobs in the credit crunch", someone asked, "or don't you think some of them deserve it?". 

Nice to know where you stand, that's what I always think.

Obsession

picture by A5 Magazine

Does everyone have free will or just some of us, some of the time?

Last week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts a disparate group of collectors were taken by the hand and led gently up the slope of obsession to the precipice of madness.. whence they were invited to peer over the edge.

It was part of series called the Philosophy of the Overlooked (faintly ironic that it was a sell-out, then) and we were all there - well, I was there - to understand why people collect and perhaps (having been known to be a collector from time to time) to understand ourselves

And also, it must be said, because Mrs Botogol and I have joined the ICA and I want to get my money's worth.

The ICA had invited the audience to send in pictures of their collections and these were displayed overhead before the talk started, and then they showed us this film, which I would recommend to anyone who has ever alphabetised their CDs, catalogued their books, or stared forlornly at a garage full of stuff, wondering where it all came from (it's 20 minutes, and if you prefer you can watch it in HD here)


POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo


After it was done the collectors shifted their feet a little, there were some coughs of the "I am with you, but not of you" type, and we all looked around at each other wondering which one of us it was who collected the knives.

Do OCD sufferers have free will? They don't seem to have free will - not even to themselves and I wonder if seeming (to oneself) to have free will is no more or less than actually having it, and conversely to feel that free will is lost, is to lose it. In other words: No, they don't.

Or perhaps, some people might say: they should simply pull themselves together.

The panel smiled and articulated and opined, distancing themselves carefully from the subjects of the film, and certainly no one in their right mind could accuse Anita Zabludowicz of having anything other than the freest of will of the most expensive kind.... But still, but still.. a careless reference to continuing her collection 'to see what happens to my life' had unnerving connotations of a force just slightly beyond her control, and when she said it the phrase 'I could die like this', from Hampton's marvellous short film, echoed in my mind.

Poisoned Apples and Other diversions

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

Fictionalised story of two great thinkers (Charles Darwin, Robert Fitzroy) whose minds and ideas spiral around each other's through their parallel, intertwined and tortured lives.

Their ideas changed the world but the world didn't thank them for it; with genius came madness, sadness and suicide.

Funny, Distracting, Absorbing, Inspiring 9/10



A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

Fictionalised story of two great thinkers (Alan Turing, Kurt Godel) whose minds and ideas spiral around each other's through their parallel, intertwined and tortured lives.

Their ideas changed the world but the world didn't thank them for it; with genius came madness, sadness and suicide.

Funny, Distracting, Absorbing, Inspiring and self-referential 8/10

The odd thing: I picked up this book hard on the heels of Thing of Darkness, thinking it would make a change.

Tight Fit

picture by stringberd

I was actually slightly relieved to discover that apparently we don't have free will.

It explained my mysterious choice last Saturday of the chocolate brown / lime green colour-ways for my new Orca triathlon top - I just couldn't help myself: Evidently while my conscious mind was carefully examining each top in turn, assessing it for smoothness of micro-fabric, breathablility and rigidity around the abdomen, my unconscious mind was was leaning back in the best seats of the Cartesian Theatre with a box of epiphenomenal popcorn bellowing "Chocolate? CHOCOLATE?? I WANT!"

Unfortunately my amagdyla has no idea what size I am, so that decision was entirely to the cortex... and I'm going to have to to return the top this Saturday as I have come to the conclusion that it makes my belly look round.

"Don't be silly, darling", said Mrs Botogol, "what do you expect from lycra, and anyway your.....well yes, maybe a bigger size would be more streamlined.... and actually - were they all that colour?"

Preaching to the Converted

Picture: fotofill

The last time I attended an event in a church I was mysteriously smited as I crossed the threshold, finding myself bleeding suddenly and copiously from a flesh wound on my finger.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I entered St Stephen's last Saturday morning. Even so, I was still surprised that my demeanour was so uncomfortable and my appearance so out of place that I was challenged on the doorway and asked if I had a ticket.

Did a cold wind blow and a strange pool of silence follow me in? Do I have a 666 tattooed on my forehead? Will I ever succeed in entering a church without incident?

What made it even more strange was there wasn't, in fact, anyone actually on door duty and , so far as I could tell there were no tickets.

Perhaps I was intercepted by an angel.

"I'm meeting a friend" I muttered, and it was with some relief that spotted my host at the far end of the room and hurried off, where I was made heartily welcome with bacon rolls, warm handshakes and no fewer than three croissants.

I was there to hear Ken Costa, successful investment banker and pillar of the church to talk about his new book and it was two hours well spent.

For me Costa was best on 'how to behave at work'. In this area he was authoritative - it was interesting how often he returned to the theme of picking your fights - working out which issues are really important and worth fighting for, or even resigning over, and which are issues where you just have to just accept that you are living in a less than perfect world. That was good advice. He was also very sound on the importance on profit, and the need to comfortable with it.

But then.... but then.... there was also a lot of strange ideas about God....

Perhaps I need to read the book.

The dawn of Blogger power

dead at computer by badcompany_6

I had that Perry de Havilland on my blog once.

I don't suppose he's a regular reader of Green Ideas, but I still read him and it was odd to see him in the flesh Curbing the Crap Artists at the Adam Smith Institute this evening, sharing a table with giants of the blogosphere Guido Fawkes and Tim Worstall.

Politics neeks and blogging geeks are strange breeds and there were many of them (us?) crammed in a tiny front room, directly off the street. When each person spoke he (there were few women) introduced himself not by his profession but by his blog. As well as Samizdata, Devil's Kitchen, Englishman's Castle, Spinwatch, Great Simpleton, Despatchblog were all there although, much to my disappointment even surrounded as I was by early adopters, I spotted no one live-blogging, twittering or even rickrolling

From the panel it was all heady stuff: new technologies are empowering the common man to confound his betters armed the sword of accuracy, the rifle of knowledge, the rapier of complaint, the dagger of wit and, unfortunately also, the rubber cosh of coarse language. The blogosphere may be small but it's influential, it punches above its weight, it shines sunlight into the hideouts of the corrupt, and it exposes the ruses of the self-important.

Well, I'm buying it.

Tim Worstall's careful cynicism failed to conceal an infectious optimism for the growing power and influence of the ordinary blogger. Guido Fawkes - the rhythm, and cadences of his speech sounding unexpectedly and uncannily like Diane Abbot - bewailed the multiple failings of politicians and their trough-sharing lobby, but was strangely subdued compared to his lively on-line persona, while Perry de Haviland eschewed Samizdata's natural political stamping grounds for a paen to the new power of the complaining customer.


I'd like to hang out with those blogging guys. Perhaps I should quit procrastinating and start that single issue political blog I've been thinking about off and on this last year. (I've got an idea... and I know the time is right) But the thing is, I told Mrs Botogol over a London Pride and sun-dried tomato sandwich, I'd have to quit my indescribable job to find the time. If, that is, the credit crunch doesn't get me first.

Mrs B opined that I could, instead, quit surfing the net and emailing her 'interesting' tidbits all day long and use that time saved to write my blog from work.

Its not such a bad idea.

Zombies

By dcassa.

Wifey wonders how she slipped so easily from one persona to another; last week I was wondering whether I had a persona at all, or whether I was rather a multiplicity of different selves co-existing in a single body united only by a common set of memories,

I asked Mrs Botogol: "Do you think each of us is a coherent single self, or do you think we all contain a multiplicity? Different people, if you like, in the same body?"

"Please don't call me Mrs Botogol when we are at home, dear" she said.

At the ICA opinion was mixed: Rita Carter believed she has no free will and no self. "I, zombie" if you will - I am a zombie and so is my avatar. I didn't agree, but it's such a nihilistic viewpoint that is rather difficult to take issue with: arguing with a self-identified zombie is like arguing with the SatNav. I wished I hadn't praised her book, but comforted myself that perhaps I probably couldn't help it.

On the panel Raymond Tallis gallantly declared his faith in Rita Carter "I believe you have a self" he said and I was surprised to find myself on Tallis's side, arts against science, as Carter frowned at him (rather ungraciously I thought, but then it must he hard for her, surrounded by unthinking zombies acting mechanically and without imagination. A bit like being at work)

I jotted down random nuggets from each speaker. The most intriguing was the idea of different-sized selves (mania being swelling of self, and depression a diminution). The most confounding was the question of whether we are still ourselves when we dream...ouch.

The most amusing factoid (ie it appeals directly to my prejudices) is that, apparently, when a Myers-Briggs test is repeated there is only a 25% chance of finding the same personality type.

That would explain it then.

I'm back

For the last three months I have been mostly reading Paradise Lost

"No one ever wished it longer than it is" (Samuel Johnson)

It's all because of Philip Pullman of course. That's the trouble with hero-worship: it starts innocently enough with the books, then comes the much-better-than-you-thought film; before long you're in the front row at obscure gigs, hanging on every word, and three weeks later you find yourself striding round the house like armoured bear shouting at the children Surely. At. Least. ONE. Of. You. Must. Have. Seen. My. New. Alethiometer.


It's not that my other project didn't work exactly, it's more that I didn't try: I managed just two posts. My sister read them. She told me they were good but, compared to greenideas, they made me seem a little embittered. I must have been in a jolly mood.

Anyway its 2008 and I'm back...with resolution (it's to weigh myself every Tuesday)

----//----

After Satan sets out on his mission to Earth to suborn (or enlighten?) mankind the other devils are left to their own devices. Some horse around, some form a choral society (really) and others, well...

Others apart sat on a Hill retir'd,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute,
And found no end, in wandring mazes lost.
[Book II, 557]

They invented the blogosphere! How could I stay away?

Simplifying My Life

I could kick myself.

Really: what's the point of having a World Cup Wall Chart if I don't read it? What an idiot.

In my defence: I never seriously thought England had a chance of making the semi-finals; but obviously I would have at least pencilled it in to the calendar, wouldn't I? You would think so, wouldn't you? A clue: 'no'.

So, at 8pm on Saturday England will play France in the semi-final of the World Cup..... and Mrs Botogol and I will be at a gay poetry reading.


Early this morning, thundering four abreast on our hardtails down the tow path at Ham, my friend announced he was simplifying his life. We were surprised, we said. On whole, we told him, he seemed pretty simple to us already. No, he said, by simplifying he meant he was jettisoning the unnecessary, the distracting, the inconsequential and the inessential in his life.

Well, we naturally assumed he was dumping us and we were a trifle miffed. "What, after all these years?", we asked, and I quickly mentioned the inner tube he still owes me.

But it turned out he didn't mean us at all. He meant... well.... So far as I could gather he meant he couldn't make the poker school at the Cabbage Patch of a Wednesday evening.

Simplify his life. And he's not even a Quaker (#41)

But maybe he has a point; maybe you CAN'T follow rugby AND go to gay poetry evenings.
Not in the long run.

Back to Work

Rat in a maze by :: Varda ::.

How people are expected to come back from holiday rested, energised and raring to go is a total mystery to me.

It makes no sense: you take two weeks off running, you come back slower, not faster. You take two weeks off work, you forget all your passwords.

And in my case also you forget where your office is.

You can only imagine how amusing that was: bursting in to find the new Regional Cross-Functional Inter-Department Coordinator sitting in my office trying out my chair. I must have given her a good half-minute of the Goldilocks treatment before I remembered that I had moved again just three days before I went away.

I actually suspect I have been away longer than two weeks, but have forgotten it all in a haze of manzanilla, or perhaps we were all drugged on that bus. As well as the memory loss, this would explain why it's become winter. And why everyone seems to have forgotten about standing on the bleeding right on escalators.

At least they missed me while I was a way (well, I left some little booby traps behind to make damn sure, of course)

Zonked

Cornered Radiance
Originally uploaded by omalingue.

There are as many types of internet connection as there are ways to cook an egg. You have your basic hard-boiled dial-up connection; your easy-over DSL connection and your ADSL sunny-side up. For variety you might try poached wireless and for all round class and taste nothing can beat your T3 cable-modem a la benedict

In our beautiful, peaceful, shady Spanish villa on the Costa de la Luz we have the worst kind of internet connection; your deeply disappointing, white-only omelette connection: your infuriating intermittently working connection. Your OK, I can work around it, I can write it off-line…. hey look it’s back ! quick! edit / copy / blogger / new post / edit, / paste / publish, bugger, its gone again, did it go, did it go? kind of internet connection.

If you are reading this, it worked.

And if you are reading this then you will be most likely sitting at a desk in front of your computer. I will most likely be on the beach, or in the pool, or sitting in the deep, dark, cool shade of our perfect terrace, feet up, with the new Patrick Gale in one hand, a glass of ice cold Manzanilla in the other, and bowl of salted almonds balanced on my suddenly alarmingly ample stomach.

For I am on holiday.

This is the life, eh?