Naming names

High blood pressure finally got me this year, and I started taking amlodipine to calm it down a bit.

It took me a while to decide to take the drug as it felt like a huge step: a lifetime drug regime and someone who hates medication don’t go well together.

After dithering for 10 days or so, I took the plunge.

The plunge was in September, and by January two things were clear. My blood pressure had not come down significantly and was stubbornly stuck on the 32^nd floor like a broken elevator. And secondly, I had gained the ruddy complexion of a farmer in a children’s story book circa 1955.

This bacon face is a known side-effect. It showed the drug had done something at least.

I consulted the doc by phone, this being Covid City. No problem, he said. We’ll double the dose. That will work. But will it, I asked, make the side-effects worse ? If it does, he replied, rather discouragingly, we will top it up with something else.

A month later, and by now something like a cross between a red-legged partridge and a hugely embarrassed lobster, my throat was swollen, and swallowing was a bit of a problem. Another side-effect. I consulted the doc again, and got a different one on the end of the line.

This doc was not a listener, and he was a little too quick in prescribing another tablet to deal with things. Another tablet ? Yes. He must have thought I was one of those old people who talk about ‘a tablet for my water’, or ‘my blue tablet’, happy to have no clue about what the drug might be, or what it might do.

The drug was ramipril. I will not be taking it. The side-effects are horrendous, no doubt to be ameliorated by some other drug and on and on. Remember the Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee Watcher from Dr Suess ? Well like that.

But it got me thinking. Amlodipine and ramipril sound so different. Amlodipine (the o is short as in ‘plod’) sounds if not avuncular, at least friendly. It could be the name of some vegetarian dinosaur. You can be sure it would have a smile as it munched. It’s the vowel sounds I think, and the open ‘am’ at the start. The word exudes some kind of medical warmth.

Ramipril, on the other hand. Well, what does the sound make you feel ? To me, it sounds like something for unblocking drains, poking a hole in something hard, or maybe something you sit on and wash you hadn’t. If it was an animal, it would be hiding in the shrubbery to take a chuck out of your unsuspecting calf as you walked by.

Again, it’s the aggressive onset – ram – followed by two prim ‘i’ sounds. It the sort of sound you might make when chewing a wasp. It has all the warmth of a block of frozen urine falling from a plane on some unfortunate pedestrian.

No wonder I have such difficulty with medication. But really. Names matter, right ?

 

 

 

The Zone

The dream bike

An absolutely joyous ride today.

It wasn’t just the sunshine and the feeling of spring a month early. It wasn’t even the greenest fields. It was the zone.

The zone ? Yes. More of the zone in a minute.

I cycled up to the High Peak Trail. I don’t usually manage to do this ride until late March, or at least the middle of the month. The weather is usually too unpleasant. But today, with a wide sky and the sun bravely elbowing February aside for a few hours, I set off on the steep climb up Sheldon Dale.  I always wonder if I will still be able to do Sheldon Dale. It’s a kind of test. Steep and unrelenting it rises from the river Wye and takes you up to the undulating switchback which winds up in Monyash.

The climb up Sheldon Dale is tough, and you have to get out of the saddle and dance for a quarter of it. There is a bottle cap pressed into the road surface on the lower part of the hill, and I let myself start to get out of the saddle once I pass the cap. If I start before then, I am not likely to make it to the top.

The climb is in deep shade, and this morning there were the remains of the frost that had melted elsewhere in the sun. At the top I rode in the sun and found the road to Monyash closed for 51 days. 51 days ? Yes. Who thought of that, I wonder ? Sounds very precise to give the impression that someone had thought hard about it.

But the closure meant a detour through the fields to Flagg, climbing well above Monyash to plunge down again before climbing to Parley Hay and the trail.

The trail is always a joy. It’s fairly quiet as a rule, and this morning was almost deserted, except for a few beaming hikers also gloating at the lack of people.

Sun, birdsong, green field, hills, blue skies. Joy. 9 miles of sheer joy dropping down to Longcliffe.

And the zone. Yes, the zone found me. As a young guy I used to go out looking for the zone. Now I don’t worry to much, and just occasionally it sidles up to me to say hello. The zone is when you build a steady rhythm on the pedals, when you are doing a fair speed that feels utterly effortless and you have the sensation that you could just go on forever. You aren’t breathing heavily, your legs don’t feel dead, even after Sheldon Dale, and you just go. You feel as if you are part of the bike or vice versa. The zone is a happy place to be.

Off the trail at Longcliffe and carefully through the squeezer trying not the scratch the bike. And then off to Grange Mill and home on the road through Bakewell.

It was just a glorious ride, and a bringer of happiness.

The only downside was that the hoggin on the trail was damp, so it came up and stuck on the bike which needed a bath more than I did when we got back.

I think it knew we had been in the zone, though.

Openreach cracks time travel

My internet has been playing up. Or rather playing down. Since last June.

Plusnet has been trying to fix it, and that involves Openreach. Openreach don't really seem too committed to sorting out the problem. They have heard of superfast internet speeds and want nothing to do with them. I have had six engineers since June. The internet is still behving like treacle at very low temperatures.

Finally. last week, Plusnet recommended a 'senior engineer'. An engineer so senior that he could check the line from end to end, and deal with any problems he might find there. An engineer so specially senior that he could only be booked four days in advance.

I was agog with expectation. All of a sudden, my mundane problem had been brought to the attention of this Openreach demi-god. What could possibly go wrong ?

The demi-god did not show up, that's what. I waited in, agogness drooping, until it became clear he had stood me up. He never rang. He sent no text. He just ghosted me and did a no-show.

The this morning, calloo callay, a text from Openreach.

 

This little message plays tricks with your mind, not to mention your tenses. It was a bit of a facer, and hard to make head or tail of. It's hard to figure out what tense to reply in.

But it does seem charmingly optimistic that after 9 months of an intermittent connection with the speed of a casserole, there seemed to be the chance that it would have spontaneously fixed itself.

I will wonder all last week  who they would might not have sent next yesterday.

Gotta love Openreach !

If not now, when ?

Brexit and the pandemic are a very unhappy combination and have brought much uncertainty about the future, not just the present.

But there are still huge and positive opportunities, which are in danger of being overlooked.

There is an urgent need for greater unity in our country, and a vision which looks forward to a future we can all aspire to: a vision which shares common goals and celebrates differences.

Now 70, I confess that I have no idea what our national values are, and those that are promoted tend to hark back to a past which I recognise, but do not feel is relevant now. Though my personal future is short, articulating national values which look forward feels exciting and inspiring.

At President Biden’s recent inauguration, Amanda Gorman read a poem which looked forward to a brighter future that the recent mean-spirited and self-serving past. And I found myself crying at Stefani Germanotta’s stunning rendition of the national anthem, in a performance which made clear reference to the storming of the Capitol two weeks before.

I found myself this week thinking about our national values, and our national anthem, and wondering whether the latter could ever stir or inspire, as perhaps it did when written in long-gone past.

When it was written, it must have strongly reflected our national values. Does it still do that now ?

The pompously turgid tune and lumbering words feel as hideously inappropriate as the statues of racists, and look entirely backwards. I tried to imagine it being sung with passion and a relevance that could move people to tears. Impossible to do, and impossible to imagine more than a tiny section of the populace feeling passionate about it.

Our national anthem, once relevant, is a musical fossil. Both values and anthem are mired in history, and fail to look forward.

Our national values are hazy and difficult to articulate. They are as wispy as our famously unwritten constitution. Conveniently unwritten, the constitution does not actually exist except in the minds of those who benefit from pretending its certainties.

Surely this is the moment to try to renew, unite, and set out a vision of the UK well beyond that of any current bunch of transient politicians. In the past we have been bold in articulating what made us pleased, or even proud, to live here. We need that again. And we have an unmissable opportunity.

One group of workers badly affected by lockdown is musicians. Unable to travel easily of perform, musicians are looking for new ways to promote music. Music can change our mood, inspire, comfort, cheer.

We have brilliant artists in every medium: writers, painters, sculptors, architects, printers.

It might be captivating to have a year-long project to re-boot as a national community. We could engage in an open competition to create a new national anthem which looks to a brighter future for all our citizens. Schools could join in, and could even start now. Politicians would not be the arbiters. Democratic voting could determine the outcome.

This might be an uncomfortable idea for those who venerate tradition. But tradition is always radically new at its birth, and a rebirth is what we need now if we are not to become entrenched in tribal divisions. The national anthem has served us well, but perhaps we could see it as a draft in need of revision.

Similarly, we could look to writers to articulate national values in an accessible way, and to artists to create works to reflect the riches of the nation, our diversity, our shared humanity, the things we stand for.

And finally, we could establish a written constitution for the first time, and one in which the people are involved in determining what should be there.

This project would not end up with a millennium dome and a theme-park transience. It could result in exhibitions and displays, in a celebration of who we are, and who we want to be, as a nation.

A clear statement of national values, a written constitution, and a national anthem relevant to all of us today, and to our grandchildren in the future. All three a stirring and powerful statement of hope and aspiration.

It is hardly subversive. Can we afford not to do it ?

 

John Renie's puzzling headstone

To cheer up a pandemic Christmas I got 536 Puzzles and Curious Problems by Henry Dudeney.

Henry was addicted to puzzles of all kinds. In the early twentieth century he was a prolific creator and publisher, and maths puzzles were his speciality. He was working long before calculators were invented, and the sophistication and challenge in his puzzles are astonishing. I came across him 50 years ago, and his puzzles have given me a lot of fun. (I know. Geek alert.)

I was intrigued by an odd puzzle which Henry had found. It concerned a gravestone in St Mary’s church, Monmouth. The stone looks rather like a word-search, and starting from the middle, is entirely made up of the phrase ‘Here lies John Renie’, repeated in every direction.

John Renie died aged 33 in 1832, and nobody knows why his gravestone is in this form. There are lots of theories, of course, but they are just that: theories.

Having read the puzzle, I had to see if the gravestone was still visible, and it is: 

This is the relevant part of it, and Dudeney’s challenge was to figure out how many different ways you can track through the phrase, moving for letter to letter. So how many do you think ? (Answer later.)

This is a very unusual memorial, and possibly unique.

The lower part of the stone tells us a little more about John Renie’s family:

 

 

His wife, Sarah, and his elder son James were both buried in London where they lived and worked. John ands his younger son died in Monmouth. In 1822, the year before his son’s death, John Renie was living in Monnow Street, Monmouth, and was listed in the town directory as a painter. He may have been a house painter, though at his son’s marriage he was described as a ‘gentleman’, a man whose rank mattered more than his profession.

We don’t know what the cause of his early death was, but in the early 1800s, a quarter of deaths were from tuberculosis, with John Keats being a famous, and similarly young, victim, in 1821.

James, the elder son, was a landholder and merchant in London, and later superintendent of the London City Mission, founded in 1835 to provide support and education for poor families.

So how many times can you read ‘Here Lies John Renie ‘ ? Let Henry Dudeney explain in his own words:

 45 760, or, if diagonal readings are allowed, 91 520

 Amazing, yes ? Henry was, annoyingly, usually right.

But he erred in one respect. He says that the stone gives John’s age as 32 at death. It doesn’t. It makes me think that perhaps Henry did not see the stone itself, but relied on a transcription.