Self-delusion, murders, computers and coincidence

4 April 2025

Peace in our time.  Thus spake Donald Trump before he was elected, saying he could end Russia’s war on Ukraine in his first 24-hours as president. Two and a half months into his presidency, he’s achieved nothing and is saying he’s now “pissed off” with Vladimir Putin because he hasn’t accepted Trump’s solution. 

In the Middle East, the criminal trial of Benjamin Netanyahu continues to be delayed, thereby keeping him out of prison, because he’s prolonging his war in Southern Gaza.  On 23 March, Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including one United Nations employee, who had been in clearly marked vehicles.  It seems the victims were deliberately shot one by one almost two weeks ago and were buried, one on top of another, in a hole in the ground.  The Red Crescent’s Director of Health Programmes claimed at least one body had had his hands tied behind his back before he was murdered.

The head of UN humanitarian affairs office, who was in Palestine, said Israeli bulldozers had also buried the ambulances and a UN vehicle in the sand in an attempt to hide the evidence.

I can’t go on hearing about all this shit.

Let me tell you about something I did this week which took rather longer than I expected.  As part of my occasional actions to keep my computer systems reasonably safe, I ran a full anti-virus scan on what used to be my wife’s desktop computer, not the fastest machine even in its youth.  The good news is that it scanned 2,377,768 … er … things and took 82:41 hours to do it;  more good news is that it only found and sorted one problem and I didn’t spend all that time watching the screen – I’d just pop by after breakfast every day to see how it was doing.

I do of course refuse to accept ‘unnecessary’ cookies whenever possible and refuse to go any further with sites that won’t let me in unless I accept their cookies or want my email address, even though I always run a clean-up programme before I turn the computer off at bedtime.  And, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m convinced my satnav system sulks after I’ve argued with it.  Paranoid?  Moi?

But perhaps it’s just coincidence.  We’ve all experienced coincidences that seem to stretch the laws of probability and we all know about the “six degrees of separation” theory which suggests that any two people in the world can be linked by only six intermediaries.  This is of course impossible to prove but many of us have experienced much closer links with complete strangers.

I was once taking a group of staff up Mount Teide in Tenerife in a huge cable car that was also occupied by a group of English nurses and, to cut a long story short, it turned out that one of them was training as a nurse and shared a college room with my sister-in-law.  Two thousand miles away round the curve of the earth, and over 11,000 feet away vertically, and bingo!

When you think about how many people we’d each met and how many places we’d been, it would probably be stranger if this sort of thing never happened, even when some coincidences double-up.  The actor Anthony Hopkins once failed to find a book, The Girl from Petrovka, in any of the bookshops he tried but, on his way home, he found a copy of it that someone had left on a bench;  then, a few years later, he was talking to its author, George Feifer, who said he’d lost his last copy, in which he’d made marginal notes.  And, of course, it was the one Hopkins had found.

Another example is when a bridge player is dealt a hand that contains all 13 cards a single suit.  The theoretical odds against this are just over 635 billion to one but it happens much more frequently.  However, the order in which cards are played and gathered at the end of each game makes it much more likely that very few shuffles produce a random distribution of the cards.

More curious are coincidences such as people suddenly changing their minds about taking a flight which subsequently crashes, or why a working clock stops when a close relation thousands of miles away dies.

It’s tempting to consider that coincidences are significant.  Some people think that, if something is possible, it is bound to happen at some point while others believe there is some sort of cosmic or supernatural significance.  Carl Jung talks about synchronicity and Rupert Sheldrake talks about morphic resonance while Arthur Koestler described coincidences as “the puns of destiny”.

It’s no secret that I’m with Hamlet in believing there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy and I’d be deeply depressed to have to believe we’ve reached the pinnacle of human understanding.

So I remain puzzled by some of the coincidences I’ve experienced, often in dreams.  I very rarely remember my dreams, which melt away like the morning mist when I try to recall even the vaguest detail.  But sometimes a dream will feature a friend I haven’t seen for a long time and who has never before (as far as I can remember) appeared in a dream that has stayed in my memory.

Twice, I have contacted the friend the following day and been told that their partner died the previous night and I didn’t even know one of them had been ill.  More recently, I emailed another friend to ask why I’d dreamt about them last night and got the answer that it was because she and her husband had been talking just yesterday about coming down here for a visit.

Magic, or chance?   Are coincidences significant?  Who knows.

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.

Pessimism justified

16 December 2023

What a wonderful week for the Labour party as the Conservatives once again did the wrong things in the wrong way at the wrong time and ended up looking even more feeble and stupid than usual.  Rishi Sunak has surrounded himself with disloyal incompetents (but who else is there?) while the rift in his party between the far right and the centrists grows ever wider.

Meanwhile, Labour has also announced that, if it wins the next election, it will give Ofwat the power to stop the payment of bonuses to the management of the water companies that have been gaily polluting our waters for years.  In response to the public outrage at their (in)actions, six of the 11 companies have not paid bonuses this year while the other five think they’re doing a great job and have trousered millions.  (Imagine mother and child by a rockpool at low tide:  “Mummy, what’s this?” – “Don’t put it in your mouth dear, it’s a turd / condom / dead rat.”)

At least BP confirmed this week that its chief executive, Bernard Looney (another case of nominative determinism?), who stepped down in September, has been fired and will forfeit more than £32m in pay and share awards because of “serious misconduct” in his past relationships with colleagues.  That’s an even more expensive grope then Matt Hancock’s.

Still, if the Christmas spirit prevails, we might get through 2023 with only one prime minister, after having three last year.

Immigration was this week’s highlight with the minister responsible, Robert Jenrick, resigning because the new proposals wouldn’t allow Britain to ignore international laws.  What beats me is how anybody who believes Britain should do this can ever hold their head up high again.  Do British politicians retain any humanitarianism?

Not if you look at the government’s answer to the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers who are seeking refuge in Britain from death and starvation in their own countries but are being humbled and belittled by people who assume they’re guilty until proven innocent.  We’ve spent £22.5m on the Bibby Stockholm (what a bloody silly name), a barge now moored in Dorset that will hold only 500 of them in conditions that are so poor that one of the 300 people already moved onto it has already committed suicide.

People forced to live on the barge have also revealed that they are subject to the sort of security and body-searches you expect at airports, even if they’ve just popped out for a smoke.

We’re also being encouraged to believe they’re all scroungers and wastrels and terrorists who just want to claim benefits from the state despite many of them having qualifications and skills which the British economy so desperately needs;  and that state benefits are only paid to scroungers and wastrels, despite state benefits being utterly inadequate for many families who have to rely on foodbanks and charities and individuals to make ends meet. 

Many people are taken in by these weasel words and talk about boats, not people, and forget they are the symptom.  More intelligent people try to identify and treat the cause rather than its effects.  At the moment, it’s a bit like giving people back-scratchers to help us find a ‘cure’ for chickenpox.

And now Israel has admitted it’s killed three unarmed Israelis waving a white flag who had been held hostage by Hamas, but it was a mistake.  Ah well, that makes it OK then, if it was a mistake.  The implication of this is of course that it’s also OK to intentionally kill Palestinian civilians, women and children in their homes, schools and hospitals, as long as it’s not a mistake.

But there was good news this week when the court decided that Mirror Group Newspapers were guilty of “extensive” phone hacking and that Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time, knew it was happening.  Morgan immediately lashed out with a vituperative response saying he had “never hacked a phone” and “Nobody has provided any actual evidence that I did”.  He’d also said earlier that he was “100% sure” he hadn’t seen phone hacking.

What’s so revealing is that he did not say “I was not aware that any phone hacking was taking place”, the omission implying that he had known all about it.

I find I’m becoming more pessimistic as time passes so I’m now going to start sniffing things more diligently because I’ve just read a report that dogs that are allowed to take their time sniff at interesting smells are more optimistic.

My first reaction was to wonder how you tell if a dog’s optimistic and then I realise that ours will ignore other dogs until he’s decided which pocket the owner keeps their dog treats in, absolutely confident there will be some somewhere.  So I asked him what he thought about the state of the world and, quick as a flash, he said “Putin will admit defeat and climate change will reverse itself overnight and Israelis and Palestinians will accept they’ve both got some Neanderthal DNA and chat about their families over cups of mint tea and the Tories will admit they’ve totally trashed Britain’s reputation over the last 13 years and I’m just about to get a treat because I’m a good dog.”

In fact, we have inherited some DNA from Neanderthal ancestors who interbred with homo sapiens and an epidemiologist at the University of California believes there’s a link between this and whether we’re early birds or night owls although he did say this is not the only factor determining our diurnal rhythms.  However, Neanderthals might have become early-risers because they lived further north where there are greater variations in light and dark over the year and developed more flexible sleeping patterns.

(I wonder why mankind called itself homo sapiens.  Looking around, I wonder if homo stupido mightn’t have been a better description.)

A mixture of stuff including onomatopoeia, kindness, stupidity and sleep

9 December 2023

A friend has a spirit guide, Soon Rain, who left their wisdom for us when they were elevated from their corporeal existence on earth, leaving behind a memorial shrine and spiritual sanctuary at Aps-Thab.  One such gem was “If someone doesn’t understand words, draw pictures”.

This has been taken up in Japan, whose foreign population is reaching record levels as more immigrants arrive to fill gaps in the workforce. but not all of them are fluent in Japanese.  Volunteers for a non-profit group in the western prefecture of Mie have therefore produced a guide to commonly used onomatopoeic words and illustrated them with pictures to show what they mean, and verbal descriptions in Chinese, Vietnamese, Nepalese and Indonesian. 

The whole point of onomatopoeia is that the sound of the word conjures up a vision of what it describes – like ‘slurp’ in English for example – but Japanese likes repeating words to emphasise their meaning in everyday situations.  One of the most ‘obvious’ of the Japanese examples is tsuru tsuru, which warns that the floor is slippery – the exact sound of feet slipping on a wet floor (which omits the exclamation that follows).

Another gem was “If you can’t be careful, be kind” and Åsa Koski, a municipality worker in Luleå, a small town in northern Sweden, has launched a ‘Säg hej’ campaign which encourages people to say “Hi!” to each other in the street.

The idea is that, if you’re greeted by a passing stranger, it makes people feel a little bit better about themselves.  It works down here in the country of course – and dog walkers are obliged to stop and exchange compliments about the other’s dog even if they’re jumping up and leaving muddy footprints on our jeans – but remember we have to be careful doing this in a city’s back streets, or even the main streets.  Isn’t that sad.

This news inspired a letter in the Guardian remembering the old New Statesman competition to find the best advice to a foreigner coming to London for the first time.  It was won by Gerard Hoffnung with “On entering a railway compartment, make sure to shake hands with all the passengers.”  Another of his suggestions was to try “the famous echo of the reading room in the British Museum”.

As a raconteur, his style was mannered and squeezed every last second out of dramatic pauses, but it worked.  His most famous story is probably a bricklayer’s request for sick leave, a 1958 audio recording of which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZUJLO6lMhI.

Tragically, he had a cerebral haemorrhage in September 1959 and died three days later at the age of 34.

The guru Soon Rain also said “If people are poor, screw them.”         

One of the major triumphs of Margaret Thatcher’s reign was to allow people to buy houses they’d previously been renting from local councils with the inevitable result that 40% of housing stock is now in the hands of private landlords and tenants are now paying extortionate rents to them instead of into the public purse. 

What didn’t occur to Thatcher was that this didn’t reduce the number of people on the waiting lists, it just reduced the number of houses available for them.

Her other parallel triumph was to privatise the utilities, starting with BT in the 1980s, allowing us all to become shareholders in the ‘new’ business so its ownership would be spread amongst all those who used it and we would become a nation of shareholders.

There was a huge marketing campaign at the time (“Tell Sid”) to make us all greedy to own a share in the body that was providing services for us.    I refused to buy any at the time because I didn’t see why I should pay more for a service that, as a taxpayer, I already owned but friends of mine made profits by buying shares and then selling them.  Then they cashed in their profits and sold the shares.

This was entirely predictable, as was the end result that, in 1979, before this first sale, 7% of us had money invested in shares.  Eleven years later, following lots of other similar sell-offs by the government and then the individual investors, 8% of us have money invested in shares, so that didn’t work either.

I did once hear something interesting about Thatcher when a key person was late for a board meeting attended by a close friend of mine.  When he did finally bounce in, he apologised for being late and explained he’d been helping Margaret and Denis hide their money so that, when the law caught up with their idiot son Mark, their money would be safe. 

In a survey carried out by the property website Rightmove, the London borough of Richmond is the “happiest place to live in Great Britain”.  It’s also, of course, home to some stunningly expensive houses which is either coincidental or it means that the people who can afford them don’t have to cross paths every day with the hoi polloi who can’t afford them so of course they say they’re happy.

I nearly lived there for several years when I was in my twenties:  I actually lived on a boat moored on the opposite bank so, technically, I lived in St Margarets but Richmond centre and station were much closer. 

A study of the sleep patterns of chinstrap penguins on King George Island in Antarctica shows that they apparently nod off more than 10,000 times a day so they keep a constant (well, presumably, almost constant) eye on their eggs and chicks.  Despite sleeping only for seconds at a time, they still manage 11 hours a day and – here’s one for next year’s IgNobel Prize competition – Paul-Antoine Libourel, from Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre has said “Sleep is much more complex in its diversity than what we read about in most textbooks.”

Which made me think of a lorry I saw last week with “Transport and Plant Training” painted on the side which immediately conjured up a picture of the driver telling an aspidistra how to jump up onto the back of a lorry so they could take it to Kew.

It’s probably time for my pill …