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Give something away today

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August 18, 2019

Where’s my spade? (Photo by Melvina Mak)

I went looking for my son’s lost spade today in the sandpits of Malmö. I found it in the same pit where we found his Spiderman cap the other day. Two kids were playing nearby and wondered who this man was stealing their digging toy.

In most of the sandpits in Malmö you’ll find buckets and spades. They’re left by people who are generous with their possessions.

My son didn’t want to leave his spade

I don’t blame him. It’s a nice spade. On top of that, his parents are twitchy, nervous London types who wouldn’t leave a chocolate bar unlocked, just in case. What’s a kid meant to do? Learn from the adults, that’s what.

But this simple act of anonymous generosity struck me in that moment. As the kids watched me slipping away with my retrieved spade, I suddenly realised how much better I’d feel if I went out, spent £10 and distributed buckets and spades in all the local playgrounds. So much better than scurrying around to keep hold of all my son’s missing toys.

My first Swedish lesson

It might not be very original, but my first lesson from those famously egalitarian Swedes is, unsurprisingly, generosity. Give a bit away and everyone ends up feeling richer. Including you.

For something else a kid can teach you, read my blog: Are You A Smartphone Addict?
Think you’ve got a good memory?

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August 2, 2019

(Photo by Aron Visuals)

Our memory isn’t as good as we like to think it is. I’m not talking about the dementia epidemic. I mean collective memory. Societies are built on the stuff. What we remember makes us who we are.

But I have a theory. It’s this: our collective memory is only ever 4 generations old. Even the things that appear older are only the products of the last 4 generations – appropriating older stuff for their own ends.

Tell me about your great-grandparents

On a personal family level, this is about when memory peters out. How many of us even know who our ancestors were beyond our great-grandparents, let alone anything else about them?

It’s nice to think of our own selves as somehow stretching back to George Washington, King Arthur, Aristotle, Suleyman the Magnificent, Confucius, Muhammad, Jesus – or whichever historic figures and movements you identify with.

It’s nice to think that our traditions and preoccupations have vast root systems. Our way of seeing the world is time-tested. In reality, our own lives are much more limited. Our sense of the ancient past is informed by the last 4 generations.

Who do you think you are?

When Scots wear tartan, they are communing with Sir Walter Scott. When Englishmen sing folk songs, they sing through the prism of collectors like Cecil Sharp. When Swedes revel in whitewashed pine floors with pops of colour they are heirs to Carl Larsson.

You might say, well, it’s easy to unpick popular culture and folk tradition, but not the great foundational movements of the ages – the monotheistic faiths. Yet even there, the Christian or the Muslim from Birmingham to Malmo is channeling the revivals of the past 150 years more than the time of the prophets.

Go back more than 4 generations and our nations and people were often living in a way that would surprise us now. We’d find them doing things we don’t see as traditional to our countries and our communities at all.

The rule applies around the world. We are prisoners of unreliable memory, and short-term memory at that.

Talking of unreliable memories, Britain Isn’t What It Used To Be
Who doesn’t love a sauna?

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July 25, 2019

Saunas travel well

I love saunas. I can remember when I first discovered the wood-fired version on a Swedish archipelago. The health-giving properties are obvious. It transforms your skin. You feel great – especially after the cold plunge.

But to the Anglo mind, it has always been an exotic, foreign kind of experience. For some reason, the sauna idea didn’t travel with the Vikings. That’s surprising, since it’s an idea that clearly spread far.

Everyone loves a sauna

Of course, as soon as I’d discovered the Swedish sauna, I discovered it wasn’t the preserve of the Swedes. In fact, sauna isn’t even a Swedish word. It’s Finnish. Swedes call them bastu.

Russians have their banya. The Turks have their hammam. And then there are the amazing historical discoveries…

I’m reading the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. (Why, you ask? That’s another story). In them, he relates his time in the Pacific North-West in 1852, when he rubbed shoulders with local native tribes.

This is what he has to say about a strange practice they used for curing illness:

Something like a bake-oven was built, large enough to admit a man lying down. Bushes were stuck in the ground in two rows, about six feet long and some two or three feet apart; other bushes connected the rows at one end. The tops of the bushes were drawn together to interlace, and confined in that position; the whole was then plastered over with wet clay until every opening was filled. Just inside the open end of the oven the floor was scooped out so as to make a hole that would hold a bucket or two of water. These ovens were always built on the banks of a stream, a big spring, or pool of water. When a patient required a bath, a fire was built near the oven and a pile of stones put upon it. The cavity at the front was then filled with water. When the stones were sufficiently heated, the patient would draw himself into the oven; a blanket would be thrown over the open end, and hot stones put into the water until the patient could stand it no longer. He was then withdrawn from his steam bath and doused into the cold stream near by.

Just one more thing that came across the Bering Strait to the Americas long before the European discovery.

While we’re talking saunas, fancy a cold plunge? Read about The Baltic Cure For Fear
I’m Gay Therefore I Am… Creative

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July 18, 2019

Let’s go outside (Photo by Katerina Pavlyuchkova)

Face it. Being gay makes you more creative*. The straight world just doesn’t always like to admit it.

On BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, an academic said how the family of Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca was silent on the subject of his sexuality until well into the 80s, after the fall of the fascist dictatorship.

Even then, his Sonnets of Dark Love were still published with a cover depicting a woman’s body – as if encouraging the reader to imagine they were written to a woman. His homosexuality was buried.

I am Generation Metrosexual

I imitate gay culture. I love the sense of style and beauty that pervades it. I ♥ gay (or bisexual or pansexual or, do we need a label?) artists from George Michael to Oscar Wilde, Christine and the Queens to Robert Byron.

It’s what makes those moments of social suppression so strange. Lorca’s family hushing up his sexuality. George Michael being made into a safe mum’s heartthrob for most of his career…

We are all indebted to gay cultural icons. But more than that, straight society needs to lighten up. The more rigidly defined by stereotypes it is, the less anyone can express themselves authentically.

Does homosexuality make you innately creative?

I’m being flippant. But hey, look how the ‘gay minority’ punches above its weight every day across the arts. So if it’s not just that being gay gives you a supercharged creativity gene, then what is it?

Is it something about being on the social periphery? Being an outsider? Seeing the fluidity beneath the surface more clearly? Seeing a world outside the box?

I think that helps.

*Disclaimer: Yes, I know. You can be gay and totally uncreative. It’s a hook to make you read.

While we’re talking about the power of identity, spare a thought for Being Middle Class Man
Is it news?

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July 8, 2019

Read all about it (Photo by Juliana Malta)

When is something newsworthy? The definition has broadened as the media has. Once upon a time, newsreaders would announce that ‘there is no news today’. Imagine. Unthinkable.

Two stories this week made me wonder. They were both small tragedies: the deaths of two people in mundane circumstances – one doing their job, another walking down a street.

Do I need to know?

The knee-jerk reaction to the idea that these deaths might be irrelevant to me is to call me callous. How can you not care? Are you so numb to the world that you can’t empathise with another’s pain? No.

I can empathise. I can fully inhabit the horror of what those close to these tragedies must feel in their own selves. If I turn my mind to it, these stories can cause me pain. Compassion is alive. But what is the function of these stories?

News to make you care

Is news there just to help us to care? Is that why we read it, in order to improve our empathy? I’m not absolutely sure. I suspect there is a compulsive quality to being informed of all the tragedy in the world.

Some tragedies no doubt have wider relevance. Terrorism reveals political and social conflict. Major accidents might reveal organizational chaos. Huge natural phenomena are significant beyond the destruction they cause.

But much of our news is now filled by stories of everyday tragedy. It tells of people suffering terrible losses that are, nonetheless, common ones. Tragedy strikes every day, somewhere on Earth.

All adults understand this

We have the capacity to know and accept that the world is full of good events and bad ones. Is it really necessary to pore over every single bad one that occurs?

Talking of new media we don’t need, Are You A Smartphone Addict?
A dad in the playground

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June 28, 2019
Play by the rules (Photo by Ward Mercer)

I spent the recent Father’s Day in a pub garden playing with my kid. A girl came up to me and enthusiastically tried to get me to join in her game. She grabbed hold of my hand and tried to lead me off round the playground.

Paedo paranoia alert

I flinched. I pulled my hand away. I tried to stand at a nonchalant distance from her. Why? Fear that the parent might look up from their smartphone and see a strange man ‘interfering with my child’.

Two depressing realisations:
- The reason this child was so eager for my attention was that I was the only adult showing any interest in playing with a kid. Whoever was their parent was too busy with their smartphone.
- Though I would have been quite happy to play with the child, my fear of engaging with someone else’s child sent the clear message to this kid that I didn’t want to play, just like every other adult.
Saudi-style isolationism

It’s a strange social phenomenon when we can’t be bothered to play with our kids (we’d rather look at anything, anything on our phones), but at the same time don’t want anyone else outside their age bracket to play with them.

The result is bizarre playgrounds like the one I found myself in, where children play with each other. Then occasionally a dad (it’s usually a dad, making up for his absence throughout the week) appears in the ring and they all want to engage him. But he will be careful to only play with his own child, and no one else’s.

Children have entered a realm akin to women in Saudi Arabia, able to interact only with members of their own family. For their own protection, you understand. Ironic, since I’m sure the experts are always telling us most abusers are family members.

What I should have done

Hindsight is bliss. Afterwards, someone suggested what I should have done. That is, ask the child who their parent was, introduce myself, and ask them if perhaps they’d like to pop the smartphone away and come play, too!

While we’re on the subject of what males should do, apparently Boys Don’t Like Flowers
What is Hong Kong?

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June 20, 2019

A city or a state? (Photo by Ryan McManimie)

Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997. Now it’s Chinese. Looking from the UK, that’s pretty much how things appear. It’s only as you get closer that you find it’s not so simple as that.

Sort of sovereign

In light of the current protests against extraditing Hong Kongers to Mainland China, I was reminded of my surprise – on crossing the land border – at the extent to which Hong Kong still feels like a separate state.

I first visited Hong Kong in the 2000s. At the time, I regarded it as my first visit to China. After all, it’s officially Chinese territory. On top of that, it’s quite clearly a Chinese city in ethnic and cultural terms.

When I took the boat to Kowloon, I was even surer I was in China. The district felt a little less Western, a little less British than Hong Kong Island. What’s more, Kowloon is on the mainland – in purely geographical terms.

Where does the mainland start?

I made my second visit to Hong Kong in January 2019. That time, I crossed the border between Hong Kong and what everyone calls ‘The Mainland’. I visited the Chinese city of Shenzhen – and this was no EU-style border.

The majority of Hong Kong’s land is actually a peninsula of the mainland, not islands. Along its 30km land border with ‘The Mainland’, there are several border crossings.

Whereas borders between sovereign states within the European Union can be crossed without even realizing it, you know all about moving from Hong Kong into Mainland China.

Passports and visas please!

You must pass Hong Kong border guards. Then you’re driven across no man’s land. Finally, you must pass Chinese border guards. All that can come as a shock to someone who thought it was all one country.

And officially it is. One country, two systems, and all that. Just don’t forget your passport.

Read more about my visit to Shenzhen in my blog: When Baldrick met a QR Code in China
Love your opposite

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June 14, 2019

What we think about when we think about love

Watching people in airports is a great pastime. During a session in Copenhagen this week, I noted, not for the first time, how sibling-like many couples are.

They say opposites attract, but it’s amazing how often we choose a mirror image of ourselves. We choose self-love, in effect.

My polar opposite on Earth

Which made me wonder whether it wasn’t a very well adjusted, secure person who is able to find the capacity to love one entirely different from them. That would be love.

The thought then chimed with something I read in the novel I took with me on my flight: Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga by Sylvain Tesson – a wonderful mix of raw backwoods simplicity and highfalutin intellectualism.

Here’s what he had to say after a few months alone by Lake Baikal:

Wouldn’t real love be the love of what is irremediably different from us?

Loving a Papuan, a child or one’s neighbour is hardly a challenge. But a sea sponge!

Considering how quick we are to love the comfortable and the familiar, it’s a good exercise to put yourself in the headspace of loving that which is weird and unfamiliar.

Love thy stranger

On the human level, this is a case not so much of Love Thy Neighbour as Love The Person You’ve Never Seen Before In Your Life. Feel love for someone truly from another place, climate, race, culture, age.

Beyond the human, as Tesson himself goes on to suggest, it’s about getting as uncomfortably far away from mammals as possible. Dogs, cats, rabbits, bears – they’re easy to love. Ants, reptiles, sharks, spiders?

Then comes the real test

What Tesson doesn’t extend it to, but which is perhaps still pertinent, is the love for anything, however repellent. Could you feel tenderness for carrion? Could you love a cancerous cell? Ultimately, could you as a living thing feel love for death and decay?

One way to feel what an animal feels is to move like an animal. Find out more in my blog Ever Wanted To Be A Bear?
If we go local do we end up divided?

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June 2, 2019

To drop in or drop out? (Photo by Karim MANJRA)

If we all go local, will the walls go up? It’s a paradox I mused on this week when I visited Hay Festival to see the incredible Spell Songs – a musical reimagining of Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris’ The Lost Words – a book that’s spawning its own eco-activist movement.

Extinction rebellion!

Everything right now happens in the shadow of Greta Thunberg – the Swedish teen who is bringing the adults of the world to attention about the crisis of climate change. So, too, Hay Festival. Her presence was everywhere in talks on every environmental subject of importance.

No more air miles

Greta has famously given up on air travel. She visits European leaders by train from Stockholm. Her stance is common. I know many who have limited or abstained from planes, cars and anything that has been brought a long way to reach them.

There’s a balancing act here. If we go local enough for long enough, will we simply develop silos? Stop flying. Go offline. Eat food grown within thirty miles of your doorstep. All cool. But limiting.

If we all followed through on this for long enough, would we simply reinvent the pre-industrial age? Would foreigners become like fairytale beasts? Would the diversity of the world start to evaporate from our minds?

I am an internationalist

For those who prize internationalism over nativism, climate change offers a tightrope. You wanna do all the right things, but you wanna keep waving to the others over there. You wanna stay connected.

It’s a sweet irony that climate change offers a rather neat excuse for nativists and protectionists the world over, and yet they are generally ideologically inclined towards denial.

The right spells

What I saw from Spell Songs at Hay Festival was eco activism. It was from-the-gut passion for the natural order of which we are a tiny part. It was a slow-down, do-less mantra. But it was offered by musicians celebrating the coming together of music and culture from around the world.

Are you local, or are you global? I am both.

When I showed my son The Lost Words, he began making up new ones. Discover some of them in my blog
Are you a smartphone addict?

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May 24, 2019

The perfect smartphone burial pit

Our household is having the zeitgeist conversation of the moment: how to manage smartphone addiction.

Then I got a lesson as if sent from heaven. My phone simply went missing. Was it a sign? Turns out it was, in a way.

iPhone found in pit

I don’t know why I even looked, but as I took away the carefully constructed pile of planks and sticks that cover my son’s excavation hole in the garden, under the final layer I struck treasure – the back of my iPhone case nestled in the soil.

The frenzied search had lasted some time. I pieced together my movements like a detective at a crime scene. Finally I remembered. I had been standing in the garden while my son was playing…

…browsing the BBC News app. Was it more important to know about the Australian elections than what my own son was doing in our back garden? Apparently.

His response had been to take it when my back was turned and bury it.

Smartphone containment

No one seriously entertains the idea that mere mortals can ‘do an Ed Sheeran’ and simply get rid of it. We don’t have an army of Personal Assistants, armed with their own smartphones, to manage our lives for us.

But for all the necessity, most of our smartphone use is utterly luxurious – none of it has to happen, probably not for as long as it does, and we all know the apps are designed to keep us thumbing and scrolling.

You’re all caught up!

Yes, I know. Apps like Instagram have fallen on their sword and started to tell us when we’ve literally seen every image in our feed once already and can probably switch it off. But it sure feels good to know it’s all done. I’m up to date!

The next challenge for tech is to see if it can find a place in actually freeing us to live our lives alongside it. TV always had trouble with that – but TV couldn’t move with us, which limited its power.

Our pocket rockets have to find a long-term way of making us feel better. If they ultimately get in the way of real life, they’ll just be switched off.

Or buried.

Turns out kids can even teach us about words (shouldn’t that be the other way around?). Read my blog Lost and Found Words