Truth is what you make of it

My iphone informed me I’d walked 47 steps and used up 2 calories on Christmas Day. Not a cause for despair. The 47 steps, I imagine, recorded the trip from bedroom to lounge, where I placed my phone on the couch and forgot all about it. That’s the problem with ‘smart phones’ and apps like Pacer that record your activity. They’re not very smart, which poses a problem.

Somewhere that data is stored and potentially available for those who sell insurance or who have other reasons to monitor health and activity. Data is big business; experts pore over it with finetooth combs. But if the data has been measuring only the couch and not the potato what then? Or if the data is inherently faulty?

My wife’s fitbit for example is generous, far more generous than my Pacer app. We go on the same walk and she invariably takes a thousand or more steps than mine. A smaller stride is one obvious answer, but she also walks a mile more than me, too, even when walking side by side the entire route. It mounts up. Based on such data I’m for an early grave and my wife will live to a hundred.

‘Experts’ we all know are wonderful, even when they speak nonsense with or without dubious data.

This was tested recently and I’m not talking about Public Health England, which has just come out with the idea of a calory chart dictating how much we should be allowed eat in restaurants and takeaway meals. The last time we had rationing, there was a war on. Now we’ve all been enlisted in a war against people who’ve lost control of their appetites. This calory control nonsense may prove the breaking point in our trust of ‘experts.’ Up until recently, we’ve been as gullible as sin. 

Like I said, this has been tested.

‘Coffee drinkers can add three more years to their lives and save the NHS millions if they stir their cups thoroughly. Doing so reduces inflammation and reduces blood sugar levels.’  Or consider this:’ carbon emissions could be cut by 30 tonnes a year by limiting the use of hand-dryers to three minutes a session.’ Drivers, too have a responsibility. ‘The U.K could meet its climate targets if we reduced the number of right hand turns.’ These three claims are fictitious, created by social scientists testing the limits of public credulity. Britain proved less credulous than Americans, but only just. That’s the point of course. We’re bombarded with exhortations and soundbites and it’s easier to accept—and ignore them than put them under any form of scrutiny.

What to make, for example, of the cardiologist who last week renounced decades of exhortation in favour of healthy vegetable oil? Apparently we should now be consuming the new healthier option of saturated fats. For one who loves his toast and dripping, that suits me just fine. And what about male and female green peppers? Facebook told me one pepper had four bumps on the end, had more seeds, and was sweeter for eating raw. The other sex had only three bumps and was better for cooking. Muggins, here was often to be found in the vegetable aisle groping green peppers – until last week when Facebook informed me it was a myth debunked by Snopes. If you can’t trust Facebook, who can you trust? I blame it on the Russians.

The last such claim to catch my eye—and I think it is genuine—is that a weak handshake denotes an early death from lung cancer. I remember the headline but can’t now recall the evidence: Does a strong handshake prevent lung cancer, or does it merely denote its early symptoms? Such is my continued trust in experts I take no chances, subjecting all meet to eye-watering grips. A shame my iphone can’t measure my grip. It might add another year to my life.

Where imagination begins

Where Imagination begins

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

 I'm done for 2018  : )

Hand-dryers, Miracles and St David's Cathedral.

It is hard to get drunk on a pub-crawl in St Davids, because there are only three pubs.

One of them, however, has an interesting hand-dryer in its toilets. It roars like a jet engine and flays the skin as it dries.

I enjoy hand-dryers – innocent enjoyments for simple minds, I suppose. I'm not talking about those where you slip your hands down into a glorified letter box. No, the ones I love are those that blast down on the hands.  These cause the skin to pucker and move; it’s like watching low dunes ripple in wind and beats much of what is on TV. Sometimes I linger longer than I should until my hands are super dry and I feel like I've just experienced a Turner Art Prize Installation. 

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 But the one in St Davids was a different beast, with enough power to flay the skin from your hands as you watched. The skin rippled in sheets, puckered and rose into the air – or at least seemed to. I withdrew hurriedly and without shame, hands still damp but otherwise intact. But moving on from the trivial to the sublime. The landscape speaks for itself. So does the cathedral if you let it sink in. 

Most people know it was founded by St David in the C6th - the Dark Ages were hand dryers were in short supply. He was born in a storm from the womb of St Non, whose well is just a mile away on the coast. It looks unhygienic but has restorative properties, so they say. The Cathedral was constructed much later as were the legends  which accrued about him. My two favourites tell of him preaching, the ground beneath him rising so that those at the back could both see and hear him — a white dove landing on his shoulder as a sign of God's presences. The second legend tells o of how on his death the monastery was filled with singing Angels accompanying his spirit to heaven. 

There is something magical running on sand or diving into the sea - even on a cold say.

Part of the coastal path that encircles much of Wales

Wild horses. They are periodically rounded up and driven

to other areas of the coast where they keep grass and gorse

under control. 

                                           Posing pony. Watch out Kim Kardashian. 

A small herd . . . and is that Kim?

St Davids Cathedral

Stained glass commemorating the murder of

St Thomas Becket. 

The wooden roof and a man lost in his own thoughts. Medieval earth tremors and the naturally

swampy ground made a stone roof impracticable. Several pillars are already at a slight angle, and the weight of a stone roof would have caused the walls to buckle. Hence the beautiful roof of Irish oak, painted above one of the altars. 

The painted roof

Relics and bones of St David and St Justinian (reputedly)

Edmund Tudor's tomb chest. Despite being the grandfather of Henry VIII he was moved from his grave in Carmarthen Abbey during the dissolution of the Monasteries and ended up here. Much more salubrious, I think.

And finally a minor treasure. How to make a well known prayer even more magical.

Seagulls, chips and the question of God.

I read of a man beating a seagull after it stole one of his chips. He grabbed the bird by its legs and bashed its brains out on a brick wall. In the great scale of things, pretty small beer. Far more evil things go on in this world, but whether it’s seagulls or holocaust an assertion is made – an act of faith as much as anything else: There cannot possibly be a God to allow such things.

Without doubt, the holocaust and similar events far transcending the fate of a seagull have turned many into atheists. They pose the question:  how could God allow such a things to happen? And by doing so suggest that the presence of evil negates the existence of God. They highlight the apparent contradiction of God being both all-powerful and all good ie if God allows evil, he can’t be all good and, on the other hand, if he’s unable to prevent evil, then he can’t be all-powerful.

The traditional answer is that we were created with freedom of will and with it the responsibility of moral choice. We can choose to do good or bad things. Like bashing in the head of a seagull.

But, one could argue, there is nothing to stop God extending a feathered hand and protecting that seagull. The man lamenting the loss of a chip was given the choice to do a bad and foolish thing, but the seagull didn’t suffer from it.

The question then arises, what would happen if there were no evil in the world? And, on a social and political level, the further question. Who gets to define what is evil? — a pertinent point when drugs, microchipping and the possible spread of the Chinese concept of ‘social value.’ We all ready accept ‘credit scores,’ why not ‘conformity scores.’  Of course, if we were robots the concept of good and evil would cease to exist. We would do as we were programmed to do, truly ‘following orders.’ And in an alternative universe, God could have created us so. But creatures stripped of meaningful choice cease to be moral beings.

So, back to this world and the feathered hand of God protecting innocent seagulls. (Well, not so innocent. It stole a chip.) Where would it stop, this interventionist God? Are we to be protected from every consequence of a bad or foolish decision? From the consequences of every natural disaster or virus—God, clad in Lycra and cape, zooming from crisis to crisis? And if we lived in a world without crisis or challenge or meaningful moral choice, what exactly would we be?

The Tennessee Cheese Wars

A few nights ago, I had the devil’s own job getting asleep. It happens now and again, usually in the small hours of the morning between two and four, so perhaps I should qualify that by saying ‘getting back to sleep’. No problem getting there. Returning is the problem. And I’m desperate to return, if only for the dreams.

Last night I dreamt of the Tennessee Cheese Wars. My wife, usually less trusting, asked me whether there ever was such a thing. No, I said. I’m fairly sure that there hasn’t. Then again, who knows in the future? Was it prophecy?  This world is getting crazier by the minute, and I might well head a flotilla of Tennesseans, furiously paddling canoes burdened with Edam and Camembert pursued by lactose starved, tomahawk waving Indians.

But those nights I can’t return to my dreams . . . I just lie there an hour or more, switching from one side to another, checking the clock, and uttering that age-old prayer: ‘Why me Lord?’

I want to go asleep, and the process is akin to a slow moving football match. . . the goal is in sight but I’m shadowed by a tenacious defender. However I weave and twist and turn, it’s always there, soft and black and blocking my route.

 The worst bit of all is being on the verge, and in my experience there are two kinds of verge: the ‘cliff edge’ verge when you feel you’re so near the edge… you just have to roll off…and then some invisible but bloody-minded membrane bounces you back, and you open your eyes—shut them again quickly to find the cliff edge has vanished.

The other verge is what I term the ‘hammock.’ As the name suggests, you’re lying there comfortably warm when the bottom slips away taking you with it. That’s my favourite, the one I normally go to sleep by—but rarely at 2.39 in the morning.

On this particular night, seeking verge after verge, I finally got up 4.49 in the morning. It was fairly pleasant at first—a warm fire, hot tea and a third rate Stephen King book ‘Bag of Bones’. By ten in the morning I was a wreck and went for a bath.

That was weird in itself. I never have baths—well at least rarely—but there I was, lying in hot water and wondering what I was doing there. On the floor, I noticed a supermarket magazine – the Waitrose Weekend. Well, it had to be better than sitting in hot water staring at tiles. On balance, it was. I read Mariella Frostrup’s take on the menopause, Fi Glover’s opinion – I’ve forgotten on what, and learn’t many interesting recipes: sausage rings soaked in cider, stuffed with chopped apple and pine nuts, the best way to cook salsify, a recipe for Larb noodles with passion fruit chilli dressing, another for Hoisin Tofu and rice burritos. I was on the verge – the cliff edge one—but the water was cold and I got up.

I’ve kept the magazine for the next time I’m awake at 3.25.