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.