Speed, matricides, Anora and hearing problems

8 March 2025

Imagine a car travelling at a legal 60 mph on a straight country road and an identical car, also travelling at 60 mph, coming towards it and they collide head-on.  The effect on each car will be like driving into a brick wall at 120 mph, their speed relative to the other car. 

Now imagine you’re standing beside the road where they collide.  If we ignore the small variation caused by the angle between your line of sight and each car’s direction of travel, you will see both cars travelling at 60 mph relative to you.

Now imagine you’re in a helicopter travelling at exactly 40 mph at right-angles to the road and you pass over the place where they crash at exactly the moment they do.  As you approach the road, the speed of each car relative to you will change even though their speed and yours remain constant relative to the road.

Now imagine your helicopter is approaching the point of impact at an angle of less than 90^o, or approaching in a regular curve round a central point 1 mile from the point of impact.  Now calculate the speed at which each car is moving relative to you.

At this point, I have to tell you I failed my A Level maths quite impressively so I don’t even know how to start calculating the relative speeds of the cars and the helicopter but there are two important things to remember:  (a) the speed at which anything is travelling can only be measured against an external point, which might help explain Einstein’s idea that nothing can travel faster the light and (b) if you’re driving, it’s not just the speed shown on your speedometer that decides how bad a crash will be.

Another horrifying number that really needs some sort of comparison to give it a context is that, of 2,000 women killed by men from 2009 to 2021, 170 of them were killed by their sons or grandsons, 70% of whom had mental health problems.  The research was carried out by Prof Rachel Condry and Dr Caroline Miles, from Oxford and Manchester universities, in collaboration with the Femicide Census, and is to be published shortly so the full report may give a perspective by comparing the figures with the number of men killed by their sons or grandsons in the same period, or equivalent numbers from other countries or different time periods.

It was glad to hear that the film ‘Anora‘ won several Oscars, because I’d seen and enjoyed it – none of the ‘villains’ was actually that villainous, Anora herself was believably naïve and some of the scenes had me laughing out loud.  What I didn’t notice was that the F-word is apparently used 479 times, an average of almost 30 times a minute over the 140 minutes of the film, or once every two seconds, which is a new record.  Just imagine it:  “What do you do for a living?” / “I count the number of F-words in movies.” / “Are they good films?” / “I don’t know, I’m counting the effing effs.”

Mind you, with my hearing as bad as it is, I struggle to understand the ‘normal’ dialogue so I probably missed the swearing.

There was an interesting article this week by Rachael Groessler, a writer who lives in Brisbane who first noticed hearing problems when she found she could no longer eavesdrop on people at neighbouring tables (which was also one of my favourite hobbies).  Groessler suffers from a specific and rare form of deafness but I have had similar problems for many years as I’ve gotten older:  in crowded rooms and bars where a lot of different conversations are going on, I find it very difficult to separate the voice of the person I’m talking to from the background noise.

Curiously, the consonants go first while the vowels remain, giving rise to some surreal mishearings.  When I turned the radio on in the car last week, I landed in the middle of a programme about Roman gods which didn’t make much sense until I realised they were talking about Venus, not a Penis.

When I realised I was going deaf, I did of course get (free) NHS hearing aids.  These improved some things but not the full spectrum and the top three keys on the piano still made only a clicking sound and produced no audible note.  An added complication of hearing loss is that, if your ears are different, you misjudge the direction a sound is coming from, which is particularly annoying if you’re trying to find the bird with that unusual call.

Then of course, one’s nearest and dearest sees an advertisement and suggests you look at the miraculous hearing aids offered by people who’ve graduated from used-car sales training and are tremendously keen to get their commission.  So I went to a private shop and they convinced me their hearing aids would do everything the NHS ones did but much better, and all for only £3,000 because they have a special discount on this week (you know the spiel).

What they failed to mention is that their hearing aids are just one step ahead of the NHS ones and the NHS will catch up quite quickly. I gave them a year or so to improve my life and, after failing to notice any real difference, I had a long fight with Boots to get 50% of my money back.  To be fair, you can pay for prettier ones that are less obvious from outside if you care about people seeing them, but I don’t.

Talking of what one hears, I read that Timothée Chalamet spent a long time working with a professional harmonica coach so, when he played Bob Dylan in the film ‘A Complete Unknown’, he could make it sound exactly like someone has accidentally trodden on the cat.

Bob Dylan reimagined, Donald Trump for real, and the climate crisis

25 January 2025

On Sunday, I went to the cinema and saw a film nominated for 8 Oscars, loosely based on Bob Dylan’s early life, ‘A Complete Unknown’ (words taken from Like a Rolling Stone).  It’s not biographical but it’s a representation of his early life as a chancer up to when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band.

All the real-life characters are brilliantly cast although Dylan asked that Suze (pronounced ‘Suzie’) Rotolo’s name didn’t appear.  She was an established artist and a political activist with her own ambitions and ultimately escaped to Italy to make her own life because she didn’t want to be known as Dylan’s muse.  In her memoir ‘The Freewheelin’ Years’ she comes over as a lovely, independent and talented person who deserved, and got, better than Dylan.  In the film, she’s sort of represented by a character called Sylvie Russo but ‘Sylvie’ seems feeble and more compliant than Suze.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, whom he treated just as badly (listen to Baez’s later song Diamonds and Rust), and Barbaro gives an very good impression of her voice;  Edward Norton is sensitively avuncular as the folk purist Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook plays a small role as Johnny Cash, lightly revealing the problems he had with alcohol.  Dylan is rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand but references to his use of other drugs are played down.

Even with such strong support, the film belongs to Timothée Chalamet’s as Dylan, performing all the songs himself.  He gives a subtle but totally believable interpretation of the Dylan who was becoming famous and moving towards the first of many new directions he was to take in later years, not really caring about other people who had helped him on the way, like Seeger and Baez (who says to Dylan “You’re really kind of an asshole”).

Dylan himself approved the script but didn’t influence the final cut, probably because he doesn’t care what people think about him and was happy to see the legend further confused.  There’s a lot of online discussion about whether he suffers from Aspergers and has no way of knowing how other people are feeling, which would be consistent with some of the casual cruelty the Dylan character shows in the film.

Scenes from his life are mixed up and conflated – the cry of “Judas” was actually recorded in Manchester on his British tour but was put into the film’s Newport concert.  Although it now grieves me to admit it, I felt similarly betrayed at his London concert on that tour and by hearing for the first time some of the electric songs in the second half, which seemed particularly shocking after the acoustic first half he had just played. 

But I got used to them and now accept his broken voice doing little more speaking the words, backed by a piano, a cello and some subdued percussion, and I’m happy to accept a recent song whose title he borrowed from Walt Whitman:  “I contain multitudes”.

Other news this week included Donald Trump on Monday, with his left hand on a Bible, saying “I do solemnly swear that I will … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

Within hours, he had forgotten his oath and pardoned 1,500 violent criminals who had been properly convicted for their parts in the 6 January 2021 insurrection that Trump himself had encouraged by telling them to “fight like hell”.  In doing this, he described attacks on police officers as “very minor incidents”, even though hundreds of police officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol Building and nine people, including police officers, died as a result of the attack.

Pamela Hemphill, 71, refused to accept the pardon, saying it was an insult to the police officers who she credits with saving her life after she’d been knocked over and trampled on.

Trump then signed various racist (second-generation birthrights given by the Constitution), isolationist (Mexico and WHO), transphobic (only two genders), dangerous (climate crisis denial) and other executive orders that descended to the ridiculous (renaming the Gulf of Mexico and an Alaskan mountain).

Shortly before this, JD Vance, a former Marine who had accused Trump of being a white supremacist and compared him to Hitler but changed his tune when he saw his own future at stake, was sworn in as Vice-President.  And Pete Hegseth, who believes government should be subordinate to Old Testament laws, was made Defense Secretary.  (I thought the OT was originally Jewish and adopted by Christianity but Hegseth is obviously closer to God than I am.)

I’m also beginning to wonder if Melania has hidden shallows.  No normal FLOTUS-to-be would have dressed for a funeral and worn a hat that prevented her husband kissing her at his inauguration.

Trump obviously wasn’t affected by a recent study at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, published in Nature Climate Change, which had measured changes in 200 sites between 1990 and 2020. Too many long words perhaps.

The study showed how Arctic forests, wetlands and tundra are being transformed by the planet’s rapid warming.  Since before the last ice-age, these ecosystems have held immeasurable amounts of carbon in the permafrost but, as temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, tundras unfreeze and more CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.

Their analysis shows that 30% of these lands are now releasing the carbon they’ve been storing for tens of thousands of years which is, in an understatement by the lead researcher, “a pretty big deal”.

GBNews has quoted the Telegraph’s report that “an Israeli official close to the negotiations” had said that “if Hamas adhered to all the rules set out in the new deal, Israel would leave the strip”.  I wonder if they should have said “ … what’s left of the strip” because Gazans returning to the devastation will be left to guess where their house was and where some of their missing relatives probably still are.

Pardons, Wills, films, children and kindness

28 December 2024

A quick update: Joe Biden obviously read my comment that he hadn’t pardoned any federal prisoners on death row because he’s just commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 of them to life imprisonment without parole. In doing so, he said “I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss … but, guided by my conscience … I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” You see the influence I have with American presidents. (Incidentally, have you noticed people are beginning to use ‘trumpy’ as an insult?)

Thinking about death, have you written your Will? In the UK, a frightening number of people haven’t and die ‘intestate’ so, if you’re one of them and superstitious, I can reassure you it doesn’t hasten your death. I wrote my first Will when I was in my twenties and I’m still alive.

I wonder if eunuchs die intesticulate?

Of course, if you really want to piss off your family, don’t do a Will and leave them to spend your money on lawyers to fight through the Courts to get probate (permission to deal with your stuff) before telling your survivors what the law says about who gets what. Does anybody know who got Shakespeare’s best bed?

Remember to allow for contingencies: if you’re leaving everything to your partner and you’re both killed in the same accident, it’ll be assumed the older one died first so their estate will then go to their partner and then, in the absence of a Will, to the partner’s beneficiaries. So why not leave stuff to people on condition they survive you by a set period – 3 months? or until probate is granted? – and, if they don’t, it goes to your children, or your favourite charity?

And do it properly. It needn’t be difficult but it is absolutely vital to get some very precise formalities right, like getting it witnessed. Handwritten notes saying “All to Chris” don’t work unless you’re dying on a battlefield. Many solicitors now do Wills free and larger charities offer support in writing them.

This is the season of films which gives us nitpickers the chance to spot continuity and bad editing. A few years ago, we watched a recorded Christmas special edition of Sherlock. Not having seen any of the original series, we got a bit lost about characters and plot but I did enjoy the interchange between Holmes and Watson in a coach when Watson’s wearing a hat, then he isn’t, then he is again. Mind you, not everybody notices these things and I had to replay that bit to show my wife ‘The Case of the Disappearing Hat’.

There are websites devoted to such errors, including famous ones like a Fiat 500 in the distance in a Roman chariot racing scene, a Viking wearing a wristwatch in another film and contrails in the skies of Westerns. And, in the 1964 Western ‘Cheyenne Autumn’, members of the Navajo nation spoke their own language but, instead of the scripted words, said things like “this man has no penis”.

Which inevitably reminds me of the monologues Joyce Grenfell gave in the role of a primary school teacher, before she went to the big kennel in the sky. Here’s one that, as far as I know, she didn’t write about a teacher explaining metaphors.

“Metaphor, George – that’s very good! Do you know what it means? / It’s a more picturesque way of saying something. / What? / Yes, pictureskew, it’s the same word, but you pronounce it ‘picture-esk’, not ‘picture-skew’. / Well most people do. / It’s like when you’re grown-up and play a game called ‘Hide the Sausage’ but there isn’t a sausage. / Because ‘Hide the Teddy’ wouldn’t … / Teddy bears don’t smell … / You did what on it? / Yes, Amanda, it would be easier for a dog to find a sausage but we’re not talking about dogs. / Well, I wasn’t talking about dogs, I was talking about metaphor, which is a figure of speech. / No, not that sort of figure. / No, not eight either. / No, not even a million, oh gosh, look at the time, it’s nearly time for break so let’s all tidy our desks shall we, spit spot.”

As inspiration for the new year – and thank you to the friend who told me about this – let’s remember the spirit of the beautiful Kindred Spirits sculpture near Cork in Ireland that was ‘opened’ in 2017 by the artist Alex Pentek and a 20-strong delegation from the American Choctaw Nation. Planned to mark its 170th anniversary, it commemorates the 1847 gift of $170 given by the Choctaw people to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger caused by misgovernment and the repeated failure of potato crops.

The value of the gift in today’s terms is about £5,000 and was given by people who were themselves still suffering after being ‘relocated’ 500 miles from their 11m acres in the deep south of America to Oklahoma in the 1830s by the white occupiers who wanted to grow cotton on their original homelands.

In 2020, when the Covid pandemic badly affected the Choctaw, Navajo and Hopi communities, the Irish people raised an estimated €1m to help them out, many donors each giving €170 in recognition of the original gift.

Gary Batton, the 47th Chief of the Choctaw Nation, said “Adversity often brings out the best in people. We are gratified – and perhaps not at all surprised – to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ – it means serving those in need. We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish Potato Famine. We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have. Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”

Let’s all practise ‘iyyikowa’ in the future, starting now.

Love and peace to you all in 2025.

Books, films and cheese

2 November 2024

This time next week we might know who will be America’s next president so I’m going to avoid politics and keep taking the Valium.

Books would be good. 

I’ve always needed books and still find it difficult to pass a charity shop without going in to have a look through their books, rarely leaving them empty-handed.  This is not to say that I’m a serious reader, revelling in the artistry of Greek philosophy* or Victorian poetry or learned treatises on … whatever people write learned treatises on … but I‘m always comforted, when I say how much I enjoy relaxing with a Reacher book, how many people say they too enjoy them.

I feel the same about books as Joyce Grenfell did about radio plays:  the pictures are much better than those in TV and film adaptations of them.

My last purchase was a Robert Galbraith novel I hadn’t read and it wasn’t till I got it home I realised what I’d done:  the damn thing has 1,000 pages and weighs one and a quarter kilos so it’s difficult to hold up in bed as Morpheus is creeping up on me.  (I’ve tried and don’t like Kindles – it’s not the same as rupturing yourself with a real book.)

In one place I worked, the head librarian and I were once lunching together in the staff restaurant and, when I asked her what books she read for pleasure, she said “I like big books”.  I couldn’t resist gently taking the mickey back then but where is she now when I need her to read one to me?

I enjoyed the earlier Cormoran Strike books and love the tensions in his relationship with Robin Ellacott (did you know Cormoran was a legendary Cornish giant?).  The author seems, as she did with Harry Potter, to be gaining confidence as the series develops.  The first Harry Potter was an average Young Adult size book while the last in the series was massive, and even included a joke about boys’ fixations on the size of their wands and how many feathers they had while Hermione scornfully pointed out it was much more important what they did with them.

My reaction to the early Harry Potter books was that they were no better than Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence (which my children also loved) or Alan Garner’s many books but she did develop the Harry Potter series well and – spoiler alert – it all came out right in the end.

Being suspicious of the recommendations of other readers whom I don’t know (and of literature prize winners who I tend to find pretentious), I put off reading Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club for a long time but finally gave in and read it.  Reader, I loved it!.  It’s written about a bunch of retired people amusing themselves investigating old, unsolved crimes and tripping over new ones.  I’ve since read the two follow-ups and am waiting for the next one to heave into view.  Osman writes with a downbeat, deadpan sense of humour that can make me chuckle out loud.

Something else that made me laugh last week was the film Anora (yes, I went to the cinema, alone!).  It’s about a sex worker who meets the immature son of a Russian oligarch and marries him, whereupon Mummy and Daddy send in their local representatives to sort things out, then fly over themselves to extricate him from the marriage.  That basically is the plot but the scenes in the sex club are handled very sensitively and make the men look stupid while some of the later scenes had the whole audience laughing.  I was still smiling as I remembered a couple of the lines several days later.

I’ve always been interested in films and my earliest ambition was to be a film censor so I could watch all the new films that came out for free but I’ve been restricted in recent years to keeping a note of films I want to see and recording them when they appear on TV.

I will even sometimes watch a film simply because it was made in an interesting way, like Victoria, a film that was reportedly made in one take, or Run Lola Run which presents the same story three times, each slightly different, or The Blair Witch Project, which wasn’t actually the first film using ‘found footage’, but was the first that popularised it.

I rarely watch horror films because I don’t see the point in spending a couple of hours while somebody is trying to frighten me but the Blair Witch technique was interesting, even if I did spend most of the time thinking that, if I’d been the witch, I’d have appeared for the first time in 40 years just to chuck these irritating teenagers out of my woods and send them back home to their breakfasts of waffles and maple syrup.

Naturally, I also watch anything by the Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodóvar even though not all their films are worth the effort.

I also list books I want to read and have occasionally worked my way through the list when I’m in one of the better-stocked charity bookshops (there’s a very good one in Topsham – and yes, thank you, I know about the Oxfam online bookshop).

Another cheerful note is the report last week that a 63-year old man has been arrested and questioned about the theft of 22 tonnes of cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy.  The good news is that Neal’s Yard still paid Westcombe Dairy in Somerset, and the producers, Hafod and Pitchfork, for the lost cheese (valued at some £300,000) because they knew they could bear the loss more easily than the smaller companies.  Isn’t it heart-warming to hear of honourable capitalists who are willing to go beyond the letter of a contract.

*          I have read Aesop’s Fables and Ovid’s Metamorphoses but I’m not convinced they qualify as philosophy.