I wish ...

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Life doesn't give a lot of slack time for wishes, and I haven't wasted much of it on wishing.

My parents both died when I was in my early twenties, and just starting out. They never knew me as an adult, and didn't get to see any of my successes and failures. Maybe the latter is a really good thing.

But I did not get to know them well either. Sure, I thought I did at the time, but long reflection says that I didn't know them at all, really. When they died I had not grown enough to see things from their point of view, to see their aches and sadnesses, or to understand the ones I did see.

My mum was not a happy person, and had had a tough life. Her mother had died when my mum was 7, and that created anxiety which my mum carried  throughout her life.

And my mum could be volcanic. It seemed to me that she had only two settings, calm and explosive. You could never tell when a storm was brewing, but you knew when it broke alright. The climate at home was a bit unpredictable, and the storms could be scary.

So all my life I have thought of my mum as a little volatile and unpredictable.

Until quite recently.

It's getting late in life to have epiphanies, but now and again I just have to re-think.

My daughter is round about the age my mother was when she died, and sometimes when I see her, it is like meeting my mum again. She is facially similar, and temperamentally very similar indeed. Watching my daughter with her kids one day, a light came on in my head.

My mum did not have only two settings. She did not switch crazily from calm to explosive in a nano-second. No, she had fine gradations of increasing annoyance, moving incrementally and inevitably to a large BOOM. And I simply did not read the signals. I have Aspergers, of course, so have had to learn a lot about signals and reading other people, but at that early stage, I never saw those subtle signs, never saw the storm coming. It was always a vast and shocking surprise.

The faulty settings were not hers, but mine. Almost all my life I have done her a disservice in thinking of her as volcanic.

Now, of course, I wonder what she felt. She must have been astonished and frustrated that in spite of all her slow, measured warnings, I just kept right on being irritating, continuing to do whatever it was that was driving her nuts. It must have seemed inexplicable to her that I would be so wilful, so oblivious.

I never read her right, and often thought of her as volcanically unsafe. She never knew I had Aspergers, and must have thought of me as wildly infuriating.

Does wishing start when it is too late for hoping ?

I just wish I could say sorry, that we could have known each other better. 

Q & A

These aren't my questions. Every Saturday, the Guardian Magazine asks a bunch of celebrities for their views, and uses some of the questions below as a stimulus. I am pretty sure that the interview is done over the phone, and there isn't much time to think.

The spontaneous responses are really fascinating: some characters are insightful, moving, thought-provoking, while others answer with monosyllabic platitudes. In most cases you feel that you learn something about the person giving the answers, whatever style they adopt.

They don't ask ALL these questions, but just a selection. Some questions come more or less every week, while others appear now and then. The list below comprises questions collected over weeks.

No idea who complied the list originally, but taken together they are a work of genius. I think it's the deceptive simplicity which seduces the answerer into disclosure.

The categories are mine, and just seemed to make sense when I had collated all the questions I could find. If they don't help, ignore them.

Anyway, if the answers are fun to read, the questions are great to try out yourself, as long as you don't over-think the answers. And of course, trying them out on friends is the best !

It's also interesting to note the ones you avoid, or want to avoid.

Go on. Try them out. It's fun.

Thanks, Guardian.

	Past
You	·         When were you happiest ? ·         What is your earliest memory ? ·         What did you want to be when you were growing up ? ·         What is the most important lesson life has taught you ? ·         When did you last cry ? ·         What was your most embarrassing moment ? ·         What has been your biggest disappointment ? ·         What was the closest you came to death ?
Other people	·         What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to   you ? ·         What was the best kiss of your life ? ·         What do you owe your parents ?
Things	·         Aside from property, what’s the most expensive thing you have bought ? ·         Which book changed your life ?

	Present
You	·         What do you consider your greatest    achievement ? ·         What does love feel like ? ·         What is your greatest fear ? ·         What is the trait you most deplore in yourself ? ·         What do you most dislike about your    appearance ? ·         What is your most unappealing habit ? ·         What is your favourite word ? ·         How often do you have sex ? ·         Where would you like to be right   now ? ·         Tell me a joke. ·         What is your guiltiest pleasure ? ·         What words or phrases do you most overuse ? ·         What is your favourite smell ? ·         Do you prefer dogs or cats ?
Other people	·         Who or what is the greatest love of your life ? ·         What is the trait you most deplore in others ? ·         To whom would you most like to say sorry ? ·         Is it better to give or receive ?
Things	·         What’s your most treasured possession ? ·         What’s your favourite piece of music ?

	Future
You	·         What single thing would most improve the quality of your life ? ·         What would your superpower be ? ·         If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose ? ·         How would you like to be remembered ? ·         If you could edit your past, what would you change ?
Other people	·         Who would you invite to your dream dinner-party ? ·         Who would play you in a film of your life ?
Things	·         What music do you want played at your funeral ?

India in 50 Lives

I heard Sunil Khilnani reading this (his latest) book on Radio 4 and was instantly enthralled. The book is not less entrancing, informative, insightful, and delightful.

The book seemed like a good opportunity to begin to understand India, to unravel its rich contradictions, to peep under the canvas to see the puppeteers at work.

Anyone with any sense would have realised that this was too ambitious a goal, as I did half way through. It is not the book's fault that India is so complex, so confusing, and often so inexplicable. Indeed, even Sunil Khilnani seems occasionally baffled: for example, India's millennia-long obsession with caste, and its continuing acceptance of inequality (particularly of women) are simply impenetrable.

The choice of lives is interesting. There are some names here that are instantly recognised, but largely Sunil Khilnani has chosen unexpected subjects for his exquisite Stracheyesque pen-portraits. Smaller, but significant characters whose lives contributed to change, and characters who were briefly famous, but whose achievements quietly outlasted their names.

Sunil Khilnani writes elegant, clear prose, and achieves unity across 50 disparate lives by cross-referencing them frequently. Themes emerge, as caste does, and run through the lives like the lettering in seaside rock. The extraordinary Bhimrao Ambavadekar, aka Ambedkar, was born an untouchable, educated by the Raj, gained doctorates from Columbia and the LSE, was elected to Congress and was a pre-eminent intellectual and activist. He was an opponent of Gandhi, and worked with passion against the caste system. Laden down with degrees and mental agility, he had to leave a senior position simply because no landlord would rent him - once an untouchanle, always an untouchable - somewhere to live.

There are stunning insights, and powerful images. Khilnani imagines the women of India as a separate nation numbering 600 million. It would be the the world's third largest nation. Its population would have an average of a mere 3.2 years of schooling, 'neck and neck with Mozambique', and its per capita income would be comparable with Ivory Coast and Papua New Guinea. "It's sobering'" he concludes,"to see what a tripling of India's GDP since 200 has not done for its women".

If it's a desperate misfortune to be born untouchable, Khilnani leaves you in no doubt that being born a woman in India is worse: women buy into the very traditions (guess who established them) that continue to subjugate women in the home, at work, in society. 

He has a chilling image of a widow, aflame and in agony, attempting to leave her husband's funeral pyre where she is burning alive. As she struggles out of the flames, her way is blocked by a Hindu with a sword, and she obediently retreats to her death. She does not have many choices: none of them are good, and all of them are in the interests of men. It leaps out of the pages that living under your oppressor's rules is never going to bring about change. The puzzle is why India's women did not throw the men out of the balloon millennia ago.

This is a wonderful book: enlightening, humane, and quietly passionate. It is slightly earnest, and perhaps lacks a deft touch of humour. The brevity of each life is deceptive. Sharply focused mini-biographies are a difficult art form: Lytton Strachey made them possible with his beautiful experiments in biography, not only in Eminent Victorians but also in Portraits in Miniature and many of his tiny exquisite historical sketches. Over a period of 100 years he has had many imitators and few rivals. Sunil Khilnani pulls off the task with apparent ease. 

Taking things too literally

Aspergers people tend to take things literally, so I was momentarily (not in the US sense) bewlidered by this headline:

Man shot by police after drawing weapon at US Capitol

 

Frank Lloyd Wright

Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view

When Paul Simon wrote that song, he was probably thinking more about Art Garfunkel than about Frank Lloyd Wright, the connection being architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect who designed buildings, and also parts of buildings, notably stained glass windows. I love glass, and have made a couple of windows designed by FLW.

In terms of buildings, FLW seemed very courageous when he was dealing with horizontal lines. This is one of his most famous buildings:

And this is one of his most notorious. It was built long after his death to a design that was never built while he was alive, much to the annoyance of the FLW industry and fan club.

I am not suggesting that you would want to live in one of these, but they are visually interesting, and the horizontal lines are very striking.

When it came to stained glass design, something seemed to go awry. Windows tend to be portrait rather than landscape, and that meant that FLW had to work with a vertical design. I think that made him feel a bit lost, and he came up with designs like this one "The Tree of Life":

You can give yourself a headache trying to figure out where the tree is, and if there is one tree or three. There is a lot wrong with this design, in my view. It does have a stillness which is attractive, and the sparse use of colour does add to that sense.

But it fails to exploit the sensuousness of glass, which often comes from the impossible curves that glass can achieve. Here, there are no curves, just stark straight lines. The pattern demonstrates this better than he finished window:

So. Little colour, no curves. And no texture to the glass, either. The result is a panel which is very cold and cerebral. Easy to cut, easy to fabricate, but not very satisfying.

And to my eye, at least, the finished piece looks top-heavy, with all those mad chevrons and what might be meant to be foliage at the top.

Six of the vertical break lines run right through the glass from top to bottom, making the panel essentially weak. Without a frame, it would tend to fold.

This piece does make me wonder if FLW simply did not understand glass well enough to exploit its potential, and whether windows forced him to work in a vertical dimension that just made him feel ill-at-ease. It does look as if his house designs - like them or not - were confident, bold, organic. The glass feels formal, and does not really engage the eye at all. 

If eyes could shrug, they would.

FLW has little riffs and motifs which repeat in his glass - like the chevrons above. It is as if he was a musician who takes a solo and gets stuck with a riff and can't get off it. The result is often noise rather than melody, and there is something of that in these pieces of glass that try so hard - too hard - and feel so empty, soulless and unrewarding.

Glass is an exciting material, with potential that good designers are continuing to explore in new ways. Their designs are often successful in proportion to the degree to which they defy your expectations about glass and its limitations. 

Making pieces designed by the greats is a powerful learning experience. I can't say I learned much from working with FLW's designs beyond how not to go about designing glass.
 

Time management – aaarrrggghhhh !

Time-zones are a mystery to me. When people go away on holiday, I can never figure out whether they are behind or in front, or even what day it might be. Otherwise I cope well with problems, but time just freaks me out. 

OK. So I have Aspergers and am a semi-feral  resident in my own time-zone most of the, er, time.

I haven’t worn a watch for about 18 months now. It was a conscious decision. When the battery ran out, it seemed like a good moment to jump ship and do without one. At first I found myself checking my wrist maybe twice a day. Now I never check and don’t miss having time on my hand.

And now it’s five to April and clock changing time. I hate changing the clocks. Backwards or forwards makes no difference. I just hate the change and it spooks me for days. Generally, it takes me a week to recover, to get a sense of where I am, temporally speaking.

Time is a problem for me. Geography, too. So in my head the space-time continuum is one heck of a mess.

Every year I tell myself (twice) that I will stick with the time I have, and not change the clocks. And sometimes I have managed that for a week, or at least until it drives other people nuts. It never works out.

But, even if I am part of the problem here, changing the clocks seems to make no difference at all. If you want different daylight hours, why not simply get up earlier or later to suit ? If farmers need the hours to be different in summer, why don’t they start earlier (or later) to do whatever they want to 
do cultivation-wise ?

If I want to cycle when it’s quiet, I go out early. If I want heat, I cycle in the middle of the day. The clock isn’t the chief issue. If hours of darkness are unsafe, well, travel earlier or later.

The logic seems to be that we can’t change time, but we can change perceptions of time. And it is changing those perceptions that is so discombobulating twice a year.

If changing the clocks makes any sense to anyone out there, well, explain it to me.

Beautiful or useful

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

William Morris' advice makes me work hard to be useful, not just in the house, but everywhere. It seems to apply equally well to people as to things. 

Without William Morris' help, we had a sort of family version of this quote to encourage effort. It was along the lines that if you were not pretty enough to be an ornament, at least you could be useful. I paid attention.

The quotation always seemed to make such good sense. Maybe it's a cruel master if you take it too literally, and stick to it with too much rigidity, but as a general principle, it holds good for me.

I had to re-think, though. Recently I had to stop what I was doing to listen to a radio programme that was hypnotically gripping. It was essential to sit down and give the radio my complete attention. 

I often tend to have the radio on in the background. I have tinnitus and can't hear silence any more, and silence is something I loved, enjoyed, and found calming. Even in the deepest countryside, when the birds have settled, there is no silence. And I guess to mask this, I often have the radio on.

Suddenly, though, I realised that the William Morris dictum applied to sound, too. Doh ! Why hadn't I noticed this before ? Who knows ? 

But the epiphany has changed my listening, and I am trying now to have only beautiful or useful sounds around me. In the house. In the car. In the shed. (Tough one, that.)

Listen to this space !

Worker, artisan, artist

Chi lavora con le mani e un operaio

Chi lavora con le mani e il cervello e un artigiano

Chi lavora con le mani, il cervello e il cuore e un artista 

Francesco di Ser Bernadone

I always liked the story of the three bricklayers. Each was asked what he was doing.

The first said that he was laying bricks.

The second that he was building a wall.

The third replied that he was building part of a great building which would astound and delight people who saw it.

Saudi Arabia wannabes ?

This week I was writing to my MP, seething about Saudi Arabia and successive Tory ministers calling it our 'key ally' or 'key strategic partner'. 

At the back of my head was Cameron's rejoicing at having sold £5.6 billion-worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, and the recent UN report castigating Saudi Arabia for killing so many children and civilians in Yemen. Not only are they using British weapons to kill civilians, but British personnel are assisting them with targeting.

Hey, it doesn't matter as long as it makes us money and provides jobs.

There isn't really much point in writing to my MP. He has the intellectual depth of a small puddle, and thinks he represents only the interests of the minority who voted for him.

But midway though the letter, I had an epiphany.

It's not that the establishment loves Saudi Arabia. Rather they want to BE Saudi Arabia, with its splendid record of shrugging off all demands that it should respect human rights, its profoundly accepted inequalities (especially if you happen to be a Saudi woman), and its insouciantly unapologetic totalitarianism.

I mean, who wants democracy anyway ?

Not these characters:

If they could just get away with, I reckon these guys would be ecstatic with a system exactly like Saudi Arabia's.

If you thought satire was dead, think again. The UK connived to get Saudi Arabia elected as Chair of a UN panel on human rights.

When Cameron intones about British values, I wonder which ones Saudi Arabia embodies. More likely, I think, that our establishment worthies just wish they could share Saudi values, and the hell with this tedious pretence of democracy.

So what do animals think ?

There's a lovely little poem by Ezra Pound:

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled

If you change just one word, that poem could just as easily have been written by a dog, if you imagine literate dogs of a poetic inclination.

Animal habits are curious, and I am always in trouble for speculating about what they are thinking. Sue has no patience with this sort of line of thought.
But I really want to know. For example, when I put out food for the birds, do they think I am being generous or foolish, leaving valuable stuff lying around where they can quietly steal it ? They seem pretty furtive about the whole deal, so maybe it's the latter.

And the cat intrigues me. I recently heard Ian Duncan Smith described as not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and that's a perfect description of our cat, who has an air of permanent puzzlement. It is as if she has been struck sharply on the bag of the head with a rubber mallet.

But sometimes I wonder how she sees the domestic set-up round here. She has lived here for 9 years, and seems to feel she pretty much owns the place. When she is at the door waiting to be let out, I often wonder whether the miaow is not so much of a plea, but rather more of an order to staff: Open the door. Now. Just open the damn door.

The cat is not as brainless as she makes out, and seems particularly good at geography. She has figured out the layout of the house from outside and when she sees you move from one window, she can make a fairly accurate prediction of where you are likely to appear next.

When I sit on the sofa, she often sits on the arm and taps me lightly on the shoulder until I stroke her. It has the insistence of command.

But why does she STILL deposit bits of animals on the front doorstep, in spite of consistent discouragement ?

And what does the cat think we are doing when reading newspapers ? She has no compunction about sitting in the middle of any story, or about lunging through the paper when held at arms length. OK, so she is not a big reader. But what does she THINK is going on ? To her, hiding behind bit of paper must look like inexplicable behaviour.

As for dogs, they must really worry about what humans do. Why does this character keep chucking this ball away when I keep bringing it back ? How can I get them to stop doing this ? And there again, they must think it odd that owners (well, OK, some owners) bag up dog shit and carefully carry it away. Wow, they must think: this stuff must be really valuable. How can I break into the market and cut out the middle man ?

If cats, dogs, hamsters or whatever is your pet of choice had designed the world, it would be a distinctly different place. Cars would be a very different size and shape, and there would not be much call for schools. Bridge technology would not have got far, and there would definitely have been no space program. 

It would be lovely to know what goes on in their heads. It really would.
 
Alright, alright. I'll stop now.

 

Obama and Cuba

And they say the Americans have no sense of irony.

This morning's big news is the Castro/ Obama press conference on Obama's welcome and much overdue visit to Cuba.

Mr Obama took the opportunity to lecture the Cubans publicly on human rights, political prisoners, political reform.

Meanwhile, America continues, almost 8 years after his promise to close it, to run Guantanamo Bay, where the US has been able to detain small enemies beyond the reach of the law and the Geneva Convention. Many have been detained for a decade without charge, having arrived there through the dubious process of extraordinary rendition.

And Guantanamo Bay ? Where is it exactly ? Er... Cuba.

Doh !

Change isn't always improvement

I love scarf joints. So sue me.

It's geeky, but who cares ?

In the eighties I came across this book:

Now it may not look enthralling, but you have to trust me: it is. Cecil Hewett was one terrific craftsman - a carpenter - and also an impressive historian.

What really caught my interest was his appendix on scarf joints. I'll explain why in a bit.

A scarf joint is used when you don't have a long enough piece of timber, and you need to join two or more pieces together end to end to get the length you need. The trick is to try to make the joint as strong as a single piece of timber would have been, and to make the joint as neat and invisible as possible.

A scarf joint can be in many styles, but this gives the general idea:

The scarf joint above is not very strong, and would only be useful where there was no strain.

This one is better, but still nothing like a strong as an unscarfed piece of timber.

And the one below is really good.

  
It is amazing that carpenters could cut such complex joints with the high level of accuracy the joint demands when they were using fairly unspohisticated tools. They did not even have pencils to make the marking out easier. 

If you want to see a scarf joint being made with modern tools, try this. (Go on. Try it !)

Now this is where it gets interesting. (Honestly !)

Carpenters kept on developing the joint to make it stronger. It became more complex and sophisticated and was widely used in all sorts of construction, from barns to church spires.


The thing is though, that as the joint developed over a period of a couple of hundred years and maybe 10 generations of carpenters, the joint began to get weaker. The strongest version was made still more complicated, and as subsequent changes were made, the scarf became progressively harder to cut, but weaker in use. Nobody seemed to notice that they had had a brilliant joint, and had ruined it.

It's a lovely image of change and improvement not always being the same thing. Sometimes what looks like improvement can actually be a backward step. 

The scarf joint is wonderful evidence of that.

I like that a lot.