The starting gun

One summer’s evening ten years ago I sat on the sofa while my guts moved nine foot to the left.  This placed them about a yard outside the house I was sitting in, which is a tricky sensation if you are trying to have a rational conversation.  But when your partner of 15 years says he wants a divorce, it does that sort of thing to you.

It was, not surprisingly, the start of an entirely new phase of my life.  It took us a long time to shift from where we were then to where each of us is now; it took us a good two or three years just to sort out the legals.  It would have been much quicker if we’d divorced in bitterness and acrimony. (Doesn’t acrimony sound like a wind-swept purple wild flower or a homoeopathic remedy for – well – acrimony perhaps).  But we were remarkably leisurely about the whole thing.  It’s irrelevant now if that was because of laziness or denial.

Suddenly I realise that something which has always felt very recent was in fact a long time ago.  For ages the late 1990s has been just before now, and suddenly it’s a decade behind me.

1999 – I am with a group of colleagues in the centre of Glasgow – a place I had run to out of dire economic necessity and where I was finding my feet in my brand new single life – and someone hands out a card advertising a nightclub.  I realise that the only words on the card I have any cultural references for are ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘to’ and ‘and’ and the dates.  I guess I’m not in my 20s any more.

2000 – I cross a road in Hamburg from a business hotel to the offices of the multinational company where I have a shiny new contract.   What happens if it all goes horribly wrong?  What makes me think I have anything to offer this giant company in this foreign country who are paying top dollar for my unexpectedly rare skills?

2001 – I walk back to the friend’s house where I’m staying in Sweden through sunlit suburban woods and find myself thinking fondly of the way my lover talks almost entirely about himself when we go out for a meal.  In a moment of self-awareness I realise that I’m falling in love.  I stop myself almost physically, by reminding myself that – no – his self-obsession isn’t endearing; it’s actually rather discourteous.  And a good thing too, since our affair has run its course and he leaves a few days later.

2002 – I unpack my suitcase one Sunday night in the business hotel where I have been staying for three months; I’ve been to Sweden for a wedding.  As I unpack, I find myself thinking “It’s nice to be home”.  Then I realise that, no, the Holiday Inn in Leopoldstraße in Munich is not my home.

2003 – I pick up a car from the airport just outside Stockholm, and drive it carefully north through Uppsala. “How’s the driving?” – “Fine; I could go right the way up to the Circle” – “You mean that, don’t you!” I think about it for a moment and realise that yes I do.  So we drive through hundreds of miles of austere Swedish woodlands right the way up to the Arctic circle, and photograph each other wearing sunglasses at midnight when we get there.

2004 – My life becomes briefly like a French art-house movie as I spend afternoons in a hotel with a married man whose name I never know and I become a way for middle-aged men to experiment with infidelity in the same way that they’d experimented with drugs in the 1970s, and I spend one unexpected night in bed with a bisexual woman and a transsexual man.

2005 – I accept a job with a Great Big Company in the spring and in the autumn I buy a small and awkward house on the edge of nowhere with a fabulous view.

2006 – I sit among fellow-members of the WI while a moan of appreciation emerges unanimously from 20 different female throats as we watch a cookery demonstrator fold melted chocolate into whipped cream.  It is exactly like the scene in Catch 22 when the Colonel’s secretary crosses her legs and the entire gathering of enlisted men groan.

2007 – I rage, endlessly, futilely, week after week as the government destroys an entire generation of junior doctors.  My energies are almost entirely taken up with this.

2008 – I take stock, and realise I’m surprised to that find ten years have got behind me, that I’m older and – as Pink Floyd remind me – shorter of breath and closer to death.  But I sure as hell heard that starting gun.  And I sure as hell have had an interesting time since.

 

Eating Less

Like very many people in this 21st century world of ours, I have a complicated relationship with food.  This is just a convoluted way of saying that – give the chance – I will eat too much.

There are many ways to think of this, some involving moral judgements. Thinking of it as an addiction is useful because it gives you a starting point.  Gillian Riley’s book Eating Less explores the implications of this idea and gives you practical ways of dealing with it.   You can blame our 20th century lifestyles.  We did not evolve with unlimited access to an effectively infinite supply of fatty, sugary, salty foods.  Au contraire, we evolved in an environment where calories were hard to come by and quick to burn.  If you want to know more about how our need for food shrank while the choices available to us increased and sugar, fat and salt became staples rather than luxuries, then listen to the programmme Eating through American History from the History Channel.  It describes a typical day’s food for Americans in the 1750s, the 1850s the 1950s and today and it’s fascinating.

I recently spent a weekend on a course run by Gillian Riley which looks at ways of tackling over-eating.  I went on the course because I wasn’t actually applying what I had learned from her sensible and thought-provoking book.  Let me thoroughly recommend both her book and her course.  She is a remarkably sane woman with a practical and effective approach to over-eating. I won’t go into the details of her approach here – buy her book for that.

Now I am indeed now eating less, and I want to jot down some of the things that I’m noting about it.  (This is not intended to evangelise or persuade – it is an entirely personal set of notes about my experiences as I have them).

• It is surprising how little food, by volume, one actually needs.
  The stomach is naturally about the size of one’s clenched right fist, or the size of a smallish bowl or a pile of food on a side-plate.   A substantial starter should in fact be enough.  I’m concentrating on eating physically smaller portions, eating them more slowly, and not having seconds.   The only word for how I feel is ‘lighter’: I feel less clagged up, less bloated perhaps. Maybe less drugged by the food I’ve eaten.  Certainly it’s been a while since I felt stuffed after a meal, and that’s good.

• Hunger pangs go away if you ignore them.
  Who’d have thought?  They are just acute physical cravings.  I never knew that.  I thought they just got worse and Worse and WORSE and were ultimately quite painful and you were just a mad thing wrapped around an aching void.  I’ve discovered that if I explain quietly and nicely to my hunger pangs that I’ll eat something lovely in an hour’s time (or whenever it will be) then they disappear.  As a result I no longer feel slightly panicky when I feel hungry.  Riley believes that our so-called “natural hunger” is not to be trusted.  I suspect that this is true for many of us but don’t particularly want to debate it here.

• I’m not sure if I’m complying or if I’m taking control.
  I’m a natural rebel, and I would often eat unnecessary or sweet or fatty food in a state of sulky rebellion: “I can have a bacon sarnie if I want to” I would say to myself just like a teenager, with the grease dripping down my chin.  But of course a polarised response doesn’t show freedom, it just shows rebellion.  The rebel is just as tied to the instructions as is the person who complies with them.  Right now I don’t know if I am complying with some internal instructions to eat less which I will inevitably rebel against, or if I’ve moved beyond compliance and rebellion into a space where I’m making truly free choices.

• The moment when I choose what to eat is where the rubber hits the road.
  The key thing is to make those choices consciously, and without lying to myself about the effects of what I am doing and why I am choosing to do it.  So often one – er that should be I – so often I make food choices absent-mindedly, but it is in that moment of habit or absent-minded choice that my addiction and self-deception slip in, like a bad fairy from an European fairy-tale quietly stealing the baby or taking over the christening.  Consciousness is the key.

• Knowing that I can eat anything I want at any time I can get hold of it takes a lot of the stress away.
  This isn’t my only chance to eat jaffa-cakes ever in the whole of my future life.  There are more than I could eat just down the road in Tescos.  So do I really want that jaffa cake, given that they are in fact abundant?  Well, actually, no.  I guess this is a very good example of how our minds have not evolved as rapidly as our Western economy, industry and agriculture have.

I may add more bullet points to this as I think of them.  As I said, this is more a set of musings than it is anything else.  It is certainly not intended to evangelise or persuade.

Green and golden

I am now at the age where I find the loveliness of teenage girls almost unbearable.  I have to look away from  them on trains because if I did look at them, I’d stare and stare and stare and it would all be very creepy indeed.

They are so young, and so beautiful, and they cover up skin that’s clearer than snow with claggy make-up because they have no idea how beautiful they are, or how soon they will stop being young.  And they are still beautiful despite the claggy make-up, and the ill-judged and unbalanced clothes, and their dreadful garish accessories.

Hark at me, as if I know how to choose clothes and accessories.  And I didn’t when I was young, either, but I bet I was beautiful then and I had absolutely no idea.

And you too.

And the old lady sitting across the aisle, fidgeting with her walking stick and her handbag.  So many summers ago, she was sitting on the train with her sisters, comparing the cheap trinkets they’d bought in town on a Saturday as the train sped them all into the here and now.

There are so many layers of poignance right there on the train.

Choices, choices

Do you think we have too much choice these days?

It is certainly possible to be too restricted – to be prevented from access to things that you would choose if you could – but I also think that it’s possible to be overwhelmed by choices.  I prefer Tesco Metros to their Superstores, and I prefer greengrocers to both, specifically because there aren’t 200 different types of Cheddar.  And if there’s no Cheddar that day, then I’ll get Red Leicester and who gives a damn about cheese anyway?  I’ve always had a sneaking admiration for Clement Freud: when faced with the overwhelming choice at a Chinese takeaway he would always order an 18 and a 47 without looking at the menu. (This worked wonderfully until the day that he got Prawn Crackers and Banana Fritters, but hey).

There’s a story about a visitor at one of the grandest country houses in the Edwardian hay day of the Country House Weekend.  It had been a good night and in the morning a footman brought a rattling trolley of hot drinks to his bedroom.

“Tea or Coffee, Sir” offered the footman.

“Uh. Tea, thank you” grunted the hungover guest.

“China or Indian?”

“Indian”

“Darjeeling or Assam?”

“Assam” – the guest was really feeling his hangover by this time and just wanted to be left alone, with or without his cup of tea.

“Sugar?”

“Yes please”

“Brown or white?”

“Err…. white, thank you”

“Milk or Lemon?”

“Yes.  Milk.  Thank.  You.”  Surely this is the last of these annoying questions?

“… Jersey, Hereford or Holstein?”

(In fairness, in those pre-skimmed milk days, different breeds of cow would be the easiest way of having creamy or low-fat milk, but why spoil a good story by considering milk-processing technology?)

Sometimes you don’t want choice.  Sometimes all you want is a cup of tea and you don’t really mind if you are given Assam with milk or Earl Grey with lemon, different though they are, so long as no bugger hammers away at your poor hungover head, making you choose between them.

All of which has come to mind because I have two sets of choices facing me at the moment and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by both.

First choice: I need to buy a new car.

My previous car was totalled on Monday night by a bunch of lads in a stolen van.  I really don’t care – I don’t care it was written off – I don’t care what I drive – I don’t even particularly care if the police catch them or not.  I just want a car which is (a) functional and (b) cheap.

My specific choice at the moment is whether to buy a car so small that passengers would know what I had for supper three nights previously (bad) but which runs on fresh air and fairy dust (good) and which I could have by Saturday (really good) or whether to spend more time and effort trying to track down a car which I’ll like more but which will cost more to run.  And if I go on to Autotrader  I am faced with thousands of cars to choose from.  Blah.   The red one or the green one I can cope with.  But 2000?  My eyes and mind are boggling.

Ultimately of course it’s a question of how careful I want to be with my money and just how expensive I think petrol can get before we storm the Houses of Parliament brandishing sharpened distributor leads by the light of burning MOT certificates.

Second choice: how do I clear and tidy the living room?

This is just whining really, but my living room is now full of a load of stuff from the car and an assortment of other detritus including recycling and redundant furniture, and I have no idea what to tackle first to make any kind of dent in it.  Particularly since I have no car at the moment and therefore cannot take any of it to the tip, away, or elsewhere.

What I really want is for someone to say to me – “See those cars?  Buy the green one”, and “see that crap in the living room?  Sort it into piles based on colour, call it Art and sell tickets”.

Interesting prepositions

Something odd is happening to the way that prepositions are used in English, and I think I may be the only person noticing it.

Prepositions are small words that add nuance, usually by modifying the verb or adjective that comes before them, or else by modifying the noun that comes after. It is simplest to give you examples. Please consider the differences between:

• gone to seed
• gone with the wind
• gone down hill
• gone up in the world
• gone off with the milkman
• gone along with the idea
• gone by Saturday
• gone across to France
• gone over it again and again
• gone off in the heat
• gone over to the dark side
• gone in a jiffy
• gone on the train
• gone for good
• gone off white wine
• gone off of the edge of the cliff (hmmm)
• gone out of control (as demonstrated)

I hope this list shows what prepositions are, and how powerfully they do their job. These examples are unusual because most words that need a preposition are associated with just one or two and not with a myriad of the buggers.

However I have become increasingly aware of prepositions being chosen seemingly at random. I find the whole thing interesting, so I decided to make a space where I could keep a list of odd prepositional usage out there in the wild. It says something depressing about my listening habits that so many examples come from Radio 4: I guess I could print this out in green ink and post it to the BBC.  Or start listening to podcasts again.  I add more to the top of the list as I hear them.

What they said	Who said it	What I expected	Comment
All sharps boxes must be returned to the pharmacy where patient picked them up from	My local GP’s surgery, July 2007	… where patients picked them up	Oddly I quite like this – “where patients picked them up” is so much better than “where they were dispensed” or any of the other horrors which could have been inflicted on us.  All that’s wrong with this is the extra “from” on the end.
… please keep [your belongings] with you while on or around the station	Train announcer, East Coast Mainline, July 2007	… in the station	Nothing really wrong with this, he just said the same thing twice.  To my ear, “in” sounds more purposeful than “around” which sounds as if you are just hanging out with da boyz.
… that has the potential to be absolutely transformative of this area	David Cairns MP – the World this Weekend, 08/07/2008	… that has the potential to absolutely transform this area	Actually I think that the problem is the choice of ‘transformative’.  I’ve no idea what preposition I’d expect with that.
… we made a promise with her …	Radio Wave Morning Show, Sunday 08/07/2008	… we made a promise to her …. or …. we promised her that …	I rather like the usage here. I’ve used ‘talk with’ in preference to ‘talk to’ for a couple of decades and I hope it hasn’t made me sound insincere. It very rapidly became habitual.
… in anticipation to …	Michael Simkins in A Good Read, 01/07/08	… in anticipation of …	One would expect Simkins to have a good ear for language because he is an actor and author so this example in particular suggests that this is about language shifting and not a matter of education.
Your character, Lucy, how different is she in this film than she was from the first film?	Natalie Barrass, Go for it, 29/06/08	I was taught that something was ‘opposite to’ and ‘different from’ but I’ve certainly heard ‘different than’ before. And of course I was expecting ‘in this film …. in the first film’.	Barrass seemed unaware of just how difficult it was to start a question with the words ‘Your character, Lucy…’.  She’d have been better with a simpler formation altogether: ‘how different is Lucy in the two films?’ or ‘how much does Lucy change between the two films?’  It is interesting to hear someone using two completely different usages within seconds: ‘in this film / from the first film’.
There’s a real apathy to this kind of thing	My boss	Amazing work Aphra; have a pay rise	Nah, just kidding. I expected ‘a real apathy about this kind of thing’.
I am absolutely fascinated in British behaviour … I am still fascinated by [it]	Lee Campbell, Midweek 25/06/08	… fascinated by …	Again, it is interesting to hear someone using different prepositions in the same context within about 15 seconds – did Campbell genuinely not know which one to use, or was the second time a correction?  Incidentally, Campbell’s an artist rather than a writer.
… I have no intention to do so	David Benioff, Front Row 25/06/08	… I have no intention of doing so	Presumably a corruption of ‘I don’t intend to do so’.  Benioff is a playwright, and one would expect him to be aware of the language he’s using.
Point of Inquiry is … recorded from St Louis, Missouri	D J Grothe, Point of Inquiry, 21/06/08	… recorded in … or … recorded at …	Possibly a confusion based on ‘broadcast from’?. Interestingly, Grothe said ‘Point of Inquiry is produced from‘ in another edition.
… since many years I have not seen a rifle in your hand…	Abba – Fernando – This is a little unfair, because Bjorn and Bennie were not writing in their first language.	Apart from the fact you hold a rifle in two hands? Either: … for many years I have not seen …. or … it’s been many years since I’ve seen ….	For some reason since/for is a common mix-up for speakers of English as a second language, and one you hear from a wide variety of people with a wide variety of mainly European first languages.  I guess the since/for choice is confusing.

Let me stress again that I’m not saying these usages are wrong, I have a distressingly post-modernist view that language is by definition local and that it’s ok to say just about anything so long as it works.  It’s also noticeable that all these examples come from unscripted conversations.

But am I the only one who finds these usages odd? If you find this sort of thing odd too, then please add your examples.

No-Spend Days

I’ve just spent most of an evening rattling around Martin Lewis’s Money Expert website, finding it complicated, confusing and inspiring.

Among thousands of other suggestions for saving money, he suggests the idea of a No-Spend Day.

I really like the simplicity of this. In any one working day I can spend a couple of quid on parking, drop into Tesco’s Metro for a croissant for breakfast which is another quid, and then get a couple of teas and a packet of crisps while I’m at work and pop goes a fiver. That’s a hundred quid a month and it doesn’t include lunches.

I’m not bad at choking off that sort of pointless spending, but I am better some weeks than others, so I really like the idea of setting a target for no-spend days each month.

Not today though – I bought a bookshelf and spent sixty quid with Tesco’s online. And yesterday involved lunch with colleagues and an evening meal with friends, both of which were booked and re-booked several times and had become un-cancelable. And the one I spend my evenings with has committed me to going out to celebrate his housemate’s birthday tomorrow night.

No wonder I’m feeling the need for some no-spend days!

Scaring trains

One of the reason I don’t travel by trains is that I frighten them. A train knows when I want to travel on it and cowers at the other end of the line shaking pathetically and has to be prodded and goaded to continue its journey towards the station where I’m waiting for it to arrive.

Yesterday however the effect was so strong that the train wasn’t just late – it had an existential crisis and turned into a different train entirely. Twice.

I was early at Ankh Morpork station, and waited patiently for the 18:05 for Genua to arrive at Platform 11D. I was happy enough waiting at Platform 11D because the departures board said that the 18:05 would depart from 11D at 18:28 going to Genua. I’d rather be on the train than the platform but hey.

At 18:22 a train arrived at Platform 11D but it clearly wasn’t the great big Genua train that I wanted, so I checked the board. This was a local train for Sto Helit and I was right to be suspicious. Meanwhile, according to the board the 18:05 for Genua was still due in at 18:28, and still due to arrive at 11D. So I cleverly didn’t get on the Sto Helit train. Good for me.

At 18:28 a much bigger train pulled into platform 11D.

18:28? Check.

Platform 11D? Check.

I got on the train. As it pulled out of Ankh Morpork Station the announcer said “Welcome aboard the 18:28 for Lancre”.

Fuck.

I said it out loud, actually.

“Fuck”.

“Don’t worry”, my fellow denizens said. “You can change at Quirm and catch the Genua train there. It’ll be just behind us”. And they were right, I could. I got off at Quirm and looked at the board which said the Genua train would arrive at Platform 5 Right Now. No surprise really, it had followed me all the way from Ankh Morpork, dancing sarcastically all the way.

And Lo! A train at Platform 5! It must be the train for Genua.

Except it’s going the wrong way.

“Excuse me” I asked a convenient station master – “where is the train at Platform 5 going to?”

“Ankh Morpork” he replied.

Arrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggg.

“How can that be?” I trilled. “See the board. See how it says the Genua train will be at Platform 5. See that it says it will be there at 19:15. See the clock. See it is 19:15. So why is the train at Platform 5 going to Ankh Mor- bloody -pork?”

Of such things are defence cases and case law made.

If you ask me, the fuel price hikes have been engineered by the Discworld Railway Company to get people to use their bloody trains, because no sane person would otherwise. And if you start out sane, you will be mad by the time you get to the end of the line.

Dagenham. Two stops past Barking. For a reason.

To boldly split infinitives

Have you ever noticed that Stephen Fry will never split an infinitive?

In the 1920s Fowler commented in ‘Modern English Usage‘ that there were four groups of people when it came to the vexed question of whether or not it was acceptable to split and infinitive: those who knew what an infinitive was and avoided splitting them, those who knew and discriminated, those who neither knew nor cared and those who didn’t know what an infinitive was and cared deeply.  It was a fair comment in those days of fearful snobbery based on arcane rules.  These days no-one apart from Stephen Fry cares, though some of us do know.

Star Trek provided us with the classic split infinitive ‘to boldly go …‘   This is a useful example because it shows us the different nuances suggested by where you place the adverb:  ‘… boldly to go …’ suggests that it was bold of them to do it even if they were actually shivering in their boots at the time.  On the other hand ‘… to go boldly …’ implies puffed out chests and strutting strides.  The split version blurs both meanings together.  Thus we have a choice of three different nuanced meanings, and most of the time I find my meaning is served best by splitting the infinitive.  After all, there is no rule to say that ‘they boldly go‘ is wrong.  Stephen Fry seems to put the adverb before the infinitive, but if I have to avoid splitting an infinitive for some reason I find I usually prefer to put the adverb after the verb.

However I think the whole thing is an irrelevance.   The idea of not splitting an infinitive came about when the rules of Latin were applied to English by the classics-obsessed grammarians of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  But English is the bastard love-child of Germanic and Romance languages and all the more vigorous for that.  Latin grammar is irrelevant to English.  The key feature of Latin is that words were modified by changing their endings, so it was physically impossible to split an infinitive in Latin because it was just one word.   We do still do this to some extent in English:  he / his / him, me / my / mine, change / changes / changing / changed, and so on.  But the real work of modifying meaning is achieved by word placement and by tacking words together with those very hard-working but almost invisible two or three letter words which help us out so much in Scrabble.

So though I delight in the way that Stephen Fry writes and reads English, and am impressed by the deftness with which he avoids splitting his infinitives, I personally fall into Fowler’s category of those who know but discriminate.  These days, thankfully, just about everyone else falls intot the group of those who neither know nor care.