Author: chrisadmin

Created 3/5/17

Well, it’s been a long time since I last posted anything here.  Somehow, my life has been very busy and I’ve felt a bit persecuted by some big lumps of work analysing CORE data other people have made available to me.  I’ve felt the pressure to get results to them and haven’t squeezed writing new posts here into the crowded timetable.  I think there’s also something about only being able to stick my head up here when I’m in the right mood. Somehow, it’s much easier to feel in that mood when travelling, which I am again now (the Netherlands, work!)  However, that’s not the subject of this post.  The canaries are from last week.

It started last Wednesday, the 26th of April when I found myself putting in the London cycling miles.  Early afternoon I was in Roehampton for a meeting.  I got home from that and fairly soon set out again for UCL (University College London) for a “Rally for Academic Freedom” organised by SSEES, the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/).  Declaration of interest and, sadly, explanation of how I knew about the rally: SSEES runs the Russian Studies course my daughter is on, but she, daughter, is in the third year of that and in Moscow at the moment so in some ways I went on her behalf.  They were hosting the rally to raise awareness of the threats to close two George Soros supported universities, one in Russia and one in Hungary.

I was glad I went but there were perhaps only 70 of us there on an unseasonably cold evening. That’s a very small number if we’re going to change things.  Fortunately people in Hungary have been out protesting in their tens of thousands.  Anyway, we stood in the quad at the heart of UCL, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCL_Main_Building for some ‘photos of it in much nicer weather.  There were speeches conveying well the extent to which the ostensibly disconnected attacks on the two universities were political and about shutting down places fostering free thinking and free discussion.  One speaker described the farce of a recent conference in Budapest where political pressures insisted that Hungarians would only go to one part of the conference, where they would only hear carefully selected speakers who would not raise any questions Viktor Orbán’s friends would not want raised. Meanwhile a Hungarian, working at the Central European University in Budapest but with critical views, was only allowed to speak to the non-Hungarians.

So what about canaries?  Well, there were small but bright placards borne by fellow frostbitten audience and a number had one on an intense pink background I think saying “Universities are the canaries of democracy” (I think that was the line).  My first reaction was that canaries didn’t seem likely superheroes and I was feeling a real need for superheroes.  My first association was that the word can be used to describe a political informer (“stool pigeon” is another quaint English phrase, we don’t trust these birds do we?)  Then I got the reference: to the use of caged canaries in mines.  When the poor old canary dropped off its perch it was time to get the hell out of the mine as the air was dangerous (usually carbon monoxide).  I ought to get that reference to canaries: my paternal great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather both died in mine disasters (explosions or collapses I think, not CO poisoning) meaning that my father, and his late brother, were the first children for three generations to grow up knowing their father.

That canary idea really stuck with me.  My belief that universities should be vital places that detect early changes in our world, and offer places to discuss and evaluate all that’s happening around us, is why I’ve always been on the edges of the university world (and now, part-time, employed by one!)  The attacks on CEU in Budapest and on the Soros supported university in St. Petersburg (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/30/hungary-and-russia-western-style-universities-are-under-threat) are clear and nasty, and it’s good that the EU (remember we’re still in the EU oh Brexit stool pigeons?) is coming to the defence of the CEU though how much Orbán will care who knows?

However, what struck me standing there while my toes sent alarm messages to my brain saying they wanted me to dress up more for these things in future, was sadness about universities in the UK alongside the anger about Hungary and Russia.  I listened and thought that the self-censorship that one speaker commented on in Hungary in the face of Orbán’s attacks wasn’t so different from that in academia in the UK.  It is different: what is happening in Hungary and the Russian Federation is driven by blatant bullying, by putting people’s jobs directly, and pretty much illegally, under threat.  That’s not the situation in the UK.  However, the situation here is that academics in my field will only get government funding to the types of research the government think should happen and people need that funding to keep academic jobs, so only brave, old or very angry academics raise their voices against that and many think hard before overtly criticising government.  A few do raise their voices but some of them seem to me to get easily corralled and used to show how open things are, but, subtly though powerfully, also to show how marginal these people are.  The same angry voices are used time and time again and often this seems to create shouting matches or Punch and Judy discourse, not real exploration and criticism.

The following evening I found myself in another academic setting.  This time a modern lecture theatre in Queen Mary University London on the old London Hospital site in East London.  I was there as part of MedFest (https://www.medfest2017.com/).  An audience of people from the general public interested in mental health and medical students came to see, on this occasion, four short films and to listen to five of us on the panel comment and, at the end, to join a discussion under the great title “Eros and Thanatos”.  The idea is to encourage medical students to think about taking up a career in psychiatry.  If it puts anyone off then I think they wouldn’t have been happy in, nor good at, psychiatry though I guess we can’t know if it really works.

However, I ended the evening, cheekily grabbing the last minute or so of the discussion, to tell the story of the canaries of the mines and of democracy and the dangers in Hungary and Russia, but also to say, genuinely, that the discussion had felt in exactly that great tradition in which UK universities host things that really do feel vital. As a panel we managed to disagree a fair but I think intelligently and respectfully, and we agreed about a lot.  The audience were the real stars though: interested throughout, concerned about the state of the world and how to find healthier lives, both physically and mentally, both for ourselves but also for our children and children’s children who will inherit a world we seem to be putting under continuing war and whose atmosphere, oceans and land we seem to be poisoning.  We found it hard to talk about Freud’s Thanatos, his idea that humans really do have an unconscious death wish, of course we found it hard: it is hard.  But it felt less fearfully fended off than even in many psychotherapy training organisations.  We didn’t have answers but there was warmth and solidarity in all wrestling with the issues and not pretending that any of us will live for ever.

And yes, in case anyone thinks by clean air I’m not just talking about the vital clean air of critical, politically critical thinking and discussion but also of clean air to breath: yes, I think that’d be good too!  Cycling in the wrong bits of London at the wrong times of day may not be as bad as in places in China say, but my local high street, Brixton High Street (OK, it’s a mile or so from home which stretches “local” a bit) used up it’s air pollution allowance for the year in the first week of 2017.  That’s my route to pretty much all central London.  Yes, let’s really get things changing and let’s keep CEU and other threatened universities alive, and let’s make UK universities and society braver to question our politicians, media controllers and, frankly, the way we all let things run.

Yes, I admit it, I watched it!  I started watching American Football back in 1986 I think.  Around that time I and a former partner, and still good friend, watched bits of three rather odd international sports: American Football, Australian Rules Football and Sumo.  We both worked hard with full time jobs and more on top.  My partner had psychotherapy training activities and I was doing research work that would take me way beyond 40 hours a week.  As a result I think we liked the sense we could collapse in front of the TV and watch things which were engrossing, clearly foci of absolutely passionate devotion to their local followers, but really very alien for us.  Neither of us were particularly sports players or sports watchers, though I would watch what was then the five nations rugby at least if Wales were playing.

Those were days before domestic internet or satellite TV and I think we had four terrestrial TV channels.  I’m pretty sure we got all three sports courtesy of “Channel 4” which was quite interestingly experimental then.  The Aussie rules stopped quite soon I think and the combination of, as I remember it, an oval pitch, inner rugby posts with lateral additional posts, and officials in lab coats and white fedoras on the goals was bizarre and interesting.  The sumo lasted a bit longer but again Channel 4 stopped covering it (as I remember it now).  Again, the shinto elements and huge thread of genuinely old ritual, with the brute physicality but also huge nibbleness of the vast men, and all the psychology were fascinating and I felt that both Aussie rules and sumo said much about the cultures of Australia and Japan.

The one that survived was American Football, initially on Channel 4 and then moving around, now on BBC.  I stopped watching regularly after a year or two as my life got more busy (and I think the coverage perhaps stopped or thinned out heavily for a while) but most years the superbowl was broadcast to the UK and for quite a few years back then I would watch it live.  I went through more than a decade when I didn’t watch at all but took up again perhaps 10 years back, though only the superbowl each year as a sort of bizarre orgy of some beers and a strange solitary experience (J has zero interest in sport on TV: exposed to too much in her childhood she pleads).

It is solitary for me here in the UK but in another way it’s not: there’s a particularly chatty format to the US commentary on games, with two old wisecrackers swapping thoughts, reminiscences and gossip about the game and of course there are the reminders of a few (thousands) of people who have turned up to watch live often with placards and strange garb.  One is never truly alone watching NFL games I think!  Over the last few years first ITV (one of our terrestrial commercial channels) and now BBC have also created two very British commentary teams.  When it stopped I missed the duo ITV used, a Brit and a UK resident American expert: Gary Imlach and Mike Carlson and was sceptical about the trio of Mark Chapman (Brit, not an American footballer) with Jason Bell (US, ex-player) and Osi Umenyiora (British nationality(?) ex-superbowl winner twice) but they have become a wonderful, sometimes extremely funny, commentary team.

Anyway, I confess that I did stay up until 04.00 Sunday night.  I watch partly because it is a simply amazing spectacle and shows superhuman athletes playing a fantastically complex team game demanding not only incredible athletic skills of many sorts, but also enormous game intelligence to remember the huge team playbooks and the Byzantine rules.  However, I also watch because it can be enormously exciting but I know I watch partly because it gives me an insight into the USA.

And I need those just now!  One thing that intrigues me is that the US seems in some way so much in favour of a neocon interpretation of free trade and to have a deep mistrust of any levelling of the playing field by, for example, state funded health care making things better for those who are ill or disabled.  However, its NFL is built around very carefully structured rules that try to rebalance things so the team with the worst record at the end of the season gets the first “draft pick” of new players coming available and the superbowl winner and loser get the last and second last pick respectively.  Now that seems much better to me than the nakedly capitalist trading of players in football (at least in the UK) and in the cricket in the Indian Premier League where it seems that money wins with no re-levelling built in.  I think that does speak to a very different thread of thought and emotion in US culture. How can that be encouraged and the horrifying glorification of spending (half-time show adverts anyone?) and hyper-wealth discouraged, particularly in its effect on US political campaigning?

Talking of the half-time show, I’m not really a Lady Gaga enthusiast but hooray for her for giving us part of Woody Guthrie’s anthem for collective commons “This land is your land“, I think Bruce Sprinsteen does it better than Lady Gaga but I am glad made her statement.

It’s Friday evening now and I’m tired but I feel a real wish, a need, to put this up here.

Monday (30/1/17) I worked from home.  I took an hour out to do the annual RSPB “Great Garden Birdwatch”, more on that over the weekend I hope.  Even without that, as the day drew on I had the familiar feeling that I had achieved less than I had hoped, less than I had planned to, arguably less than I needed to.  However, as the day wore on I learned that there was another protest in London, again against Trump, this time against his “Moslem ban”, his executive order barring entry to the US of anyone born in or having nationality of the now famous seven countries, all predominantly Moslem countries by religion.  (I’ll come back to being pedantically, meticulously, precise later.)

The protest was to be at 18.00 in Whitehall, the big road Downing Street joins, and as near as one can get to our Prime Minister as a member of the protesting public.  I knew I had to go.

So Toto and I set off for Whitehall.  Coming over Westminster Bridge the stream of people was thickening and the traffic diversions were in place so I locked Toto up safely and made my way toward the junction of Whitehall and Downing Street.  It was a longer way than it might have been as one of the cut throughs I would have used was blocked by a friendly policeman explaining to us that that was just for people working in that government building.  The crowd was thick where I did manage to join Whitehall and it was clear that, as with the Women’s march, police had underestimated the numbers and the speed with we would stifle Whitehall.  Cars, buses and delivery vans were trapped.  I was impressed by how friendly and tolerant their denizens were being: the bus passengers were decanted I think, and sent on their ways by foot to find new buses beyond the masses, and the others were simply trapped.

Can I do this?  Can I put a link to the Sun, that disgusting pretence of a newspaper?  Oh joy, I will, I can, because google lobbed it to me and the picture at the top gives a good sense of the numbers and the trapped bus.  Even the Sun can recycle truths sometimes I guess.

I don’t know how many protesters were there and I never got near enough to the entrance to Downing Street to hear speeches.  I heard one person coming back through the crowds say they were good — when it had been possible to hear them over the cheers and chants.  This protest did, I think, have a clear leader: Owen Jones, an emerging young critic of our political messes.  It had its organiser, it had its speakers and, vitally, it had its many of us.  I must have seen over a thousand people as I let myself sift through parts of it, and as waves of people streamed past me slowly in different directions. I must have made quick eye contact with hundreds and probably read a hundred banners or more. The protest filled Whitehall, which is an ample dual carriageway width road and it was solid way back toward Trafalgar Square so the numbers must have been many thousands over the course of the evening. I never had a viewpoint to have a chance of even a rough estimate and it would be hard one to call I suspect as, when I decided to head home at 19.30, hordes of new people were streaming in still.

As in the women’s march the membership was diverse.  One very respectable man in what I’d call “senior civil servant” suit and very good overcoat, good hat and umbrella had no banner but was there with young child (2-3 years?) in pushchair, or sometimes on the tall man’s shoulders, and he was with the equally well dressed and respectable looking wife.  As at the women’s march, not your “usual protesters”. There were a very small group of “usual protestors” behind me for a bit, whose conversation seemed to me to be about them, well, mostly one young man, about his pleasure that he was against everything.  I can be intolerant and they seemed to me to be missing the point.  Oh boy were they the minority.  There were people of all ages, many very young and none of them seeming intimidated or fearful.  Many significantly older than me.  There was at least one expectant bump labelled with a sign telling us s/he was there in spirit and would be out and swelling the numbers in some months.  There were all colours of course (this is London and hooray for multicultural London), there were many, many with US accents and my US accent location isn’t that great but sufficiently good that I think I can say many States were represented.  Again there were the personal banners, many clearly improvised at the last minute from pieces of cardboard avaiable at home or work.  They were mostly amusing, often beautifully so.  Two men near me had a neat one improvised from an umbrella with a small bike light on the handle of the umbrella providing its own floodlight to their sign.  I confess I can picture the umbrella and the light now but I’ve completely forgotten the wording though I remember agreeing with it!

As I finally decided it was time to get home and, very, very slowly, joined a flow of us doing that, meeting a much larger flow coming in, I passed two particularly eye catching signs with their people (you know how it is in some demonstrations, like some dogs walking their people in more sparsely peopled settings).  One said (I paraphrase) “Child of Jewish refugees to the UK who fled from the Nazis welcomes Moslem refugees here” with a single woman (when I saw it and her) about my age but in better looking nick than me, standing by it and smiling warmly,  clearly as glad to be part of all this as I was and we shared a quick warm smile to each other.  Another, larger one, with a bunch of people said “Jews from xxx welcome all Moslems in the UK” (I’ve forgotten where “xxx” was). This was a mixed group in age and gender with calm demeanours and radiating that sentiment … as did so many others.

The chants came and went “Shame on May” and “Shout it loud, shout it clear, refugees are welcome here”.  I could smile assent but I’m not a chanter, it may be cowardly but I fear some of that sense of moving with and into a mob. I fear its nearness to what Trump and others use to rise to power.   That brings me to another issue for me, and to how I come to be writing this tonight.

I’ve been meaning to write something about the protest ever since Monday but needed to start with the post about the women’s march, and having done that, well, it’s been a busy work week.  As I said, I was tired when I got home tonight but I knuckled down to work some more (J won’t be home from her work day until 11.30!) I found myself looking at the Lancet and there was an article “Free speech and facts in the Trump era”.  It’s very short, it’s free to open so do click on this link: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673617302659  and read what that eminent journal’s editors are saying, and their stress on the need to hold to facts and everyone’s gains and losses, not just on the short term gains Trump promises to the already hugely priviledged.

So how does that link with my reluctance to join chants, and in turn with my interest in facts?  Well, at the moment I’m trying to understand why 19.8% of US citizens voted for this man.  Oh, you’re not sure about that 19.8%?  Well, it was 62,985,105 votes if we sidestep for the moment some questions about how many of those may have been fraudulent.  The estimated population of the USA on 23/1/17, from a quick hunt on the web, was 324,420,000 so he won on a landslide popular vote of just under a fifth of the population.  Let’s also remember that it was only 96% of the votes Hilary Cinton got (65,853,625), though, as we all know, Trump claims that at least 2,868,521 of her votes were fraudulent, well, let’s quote him “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802972944532209664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)  OK, I’m trying to hold onto the fact that by my calculations 255,914,895 upstanding US citizens, well, probably many prone or supine US citizens didn’t vote for him.  OK, OK, many of them were prisoners and homeless without a vote, many were under voting age, I’ve located that 19.8% of the US population were under 14 so I’m guessing we can exclude them.  That still leaves us with a lot of people who could have voted in principle and didn’t vote for Trump.  We mustn’t start blaming all US citizens but I really want to understand why 62,985,105 voted for him and why so many didn’t vote against him.

I think I understand something about why some of the 62,985,105 voted for him and I think it’s partly that he’s a chanter and some of those 62,985,105 wanted to rally behind an angry chanter.  That’s what his often fact free rhetoric is: modern chanting.  I’m not knocking the chanters at the protest, I don’t think the chants were in the same arena of content free rhythm: “Shame on May!” – Yes!  I think Theresa May should be ashamed, that all of us there wanted to say that we think she brings shame on the UK.  This wasn’t idiot chanting.  “… refugees are welcome here”: yes again.  We’re an overcrowded island but people shouldn’t be drowning in their hundreds already in the Mediterranean this year alone, people fleeing persecution in other countries should be welcomed here.  We all at that protest believe that.  I don’t think anyone there believes that’s a simple stance to take nor that it’s without risks.  Of course welcoming refugees opens one way for spies or bombers to get into a country but blocking all refugees is unlikely to prevent all murderously angry people from killing (was Timothy McVeigh an immigrant?)

So I agreed with the chants and they weren’t fact free.  However, going along with chanting overlaps with being sucked into the rhythms and rage of tyrants.  One thing that chills me about Trump, and quite a few other rising right wing figures, is their disdain for fact and the way this manipulation is masked by the crudest use of rhythm and repetition.  As an 18 year old at university for the first time I got to see most of Leni Riefenstal’s films including the famous “Triumph of the will” about Hitler’s 1934 Nazi propagand rallies in Nuremberg.  There are horrible facts about her awe of Hitler but she left a record for us and I think if you watch that you see the relentless, spitting, inarticulate speech patterns that foster a chanting, unifying, sickening collapse among the listeners and you see how many independent, diverse people get transformed into an organisable mob, and then into a wave of terror. I don’t speak German (for shame, three feeble attempts to learn some all failed) but you can hear that the content he is firing at the microphones is not really the message, that there doesn’t have to be any reality base to the content.  I know that native German speakers have analysed his speeches and comment on the reduced vocabulary, the minimal and, I believe, often (deliberately?) poor grammar.  What Hitler and others were using was a disdain for truth, a strategic use of “alternative facts” and a chanting seduction.  Trump is not Hitler, his nationalism seems much more about elevating a few than creating a new Nazi party, but there are chilling similarities in form, in the blaming of “others”, in the hatred, and in the complete disdain for truths.

So let’s fight in all the ways we can but with meticulous facts where we can: yes 62,985,105 voted for him, but it was under 20% of the population, it was fewer than voted for Clinton. As the Lancet says, we need to hold onto facts and back them up, protect them against attack and replacement with “alternative facts”.  We also need all our generosity: the protesting bump, the warmth of that child of refugee Jews fleeing Nazism, the love of diversity and the willingness to work at all that is hard about bridging difference to live with each other.  Enough for one night though.

Saturday before last, the 21st of January 2017 (I want to engrave the date in my mind) J and I joined an estimated 100,000 other people walking from Grosvenor Square to Trafalgar Square. It was damn cold, not the dry freezing cold of continental climates but the damp horrid cold that UK winter does so well and I had dressed badly thinking more of cycling there than the long, long wait standing still waiting for the huge crowd to move.  But oh boy was it worth it!  A huge turnout and though the reason for it is grim, there were smiles all round. I don’t think there was a moment in over four hours, across the thousands around us, in which I wasn’t seeing happiness and animation pretty much everywhere I looked.  Of course there was anger too: we were all there because we’re angry; we’re angry that Trump represents a new resurgence of misogyny and of gender hatred in blatant and nasty form.  We’re angry that so many Americans (a minority but the minority that carried the day) voted for him.  However, as many posters and banners said, this was about a belief that affection, love, humour and joining up with people across differences will win over anger, hatred, fear and contempt.

I’m sure everyone there shared that anger and I felt waves of it as I have from the minute Trump stood for the Republican nomination and started to reveal this side of him.   As the march went on I felt that and waves of disgust, and deep waves of fear washing through me, swashing back and forward against the sheer joy and hope at being there.  This felt to be about turning my anger and disgust, and my contempt even, the emotion of mine that I fear most, to fuel; putting it to constructive, creative use not letting it moulder away in me and poison my presence for others.

This event was driven by anger about anger.  My anger toward Trump is about two things he has brought together with devastating effect.  Most obviously, and the primary driver for the march that day is his understanding of the tragic appeal to humans of confident hatred — the terrifying ease with which we align behind a dictator or a dictatorial system.  He is of course a democratically elected leader, but so was Hitler, such is one of the many problems of democracy though it’s probably still better than the alternatives.  With the right presentation, the right massaging, the right rhythm and ritual we will vote for people who hate, who tell us it’s alright to hate, tell us that it’s OK to have contempt for others.  This is a a position he fills with consumate, disgusting, brilliance.  The other thing I hate is his indifference about facts, truth, his contempt for careful exploration of complex challenges, and his wish to stifle those trying to find sufficiently truthful, grounded, knowledge about our world and the parlous state we humans put it and ourselves in.  This is a vital complement that any dictator, any would be demagogue needs, this is a crucial part of what I call the massaging of the message, it enables the ritualisation of the speeches so they contain very little of any real substance at all, so they preempt all thinking, all exploring, all testing.  Suddenly Brecht’s “Resistible rise of Arturo Ui” seems less a burlesque, more a simple warning to us all.

We have to, yes please we have to, oppose both aspects of Trump’s rise to such power, as Brecht knew so well and personally, these things are resistible.  I know my part in that starts with protesting against these things, knowing that I am angry, I am full of disgust and contempt.  I know I have to both hold these passions, but also that I must challenge them, use them carefully as fuel to strengthen me to stand with others.  Held in that way then they are necessary emotions and the testing, trying to find facts and truths and share them, is the vital containment vessel that makes these feelings safe and vital

More on this to come I hope.  No photos, I know we were all there to make a public statement but that felt like turning it into political tourism, a spectator sport (that’s me: hooray for anyone who felt differently and is circulating their ‘photos of the smiles, the brilliant jokes on posters and so, so much that was good).  However, I do think Lily Allen’s video celebration of the event really captures it well:

I do love the fact that I found out that she had produced this because google pointed me to Piers Morgan railing against her when I searched for information about the march!  Now he’s another contemptible Trump puppet.  Ouch, back in the fuel tank hatred and contempt.  More protesting to be done (and ongoing) but also much, much resisting and finding creative alternatives to Trumpery and hatred to be found.

Edit note: First posted this morning 10:30ish 1/2/17 when it was garbled (too much anger, to little time!), now, 21:00ish 1/2/17, a bit better I hope.

It has taken me a while to feel I can post something about my trip to Albania.  Well strictly my trip wasn’t really to Albania, it was to Tirana: there is much more to Albania than Tirana, for all that Tirana is undoubtedly Albania’s “primate city”.

Honestly, I didn’t make that term up nor does it mean a city full of apes, hm, though perhaps it does mean that really.  I write of course as a ape who resides very fondly most of the time in London, England’s primate city, the UK’s primate city!

But back to Albania.  Tirana has between 600,000 and 900,000 of Albania’s 2.9M population.  That huge interval estimate of Tirana’s population is because one of my hosts was adamant that the official population for Tirana, of 610k, is way low and misses a continuing and explosive growth.   To be a primate city it has to be more than twice as populous and more than twice as important as the next largest city and Tirana ticks those boxes.  Though this is the situation now, Tirana was only a small town in the late 19th Century when Albania was a collection of Vilayets and Sanjaks: provincial divisions within a faltering Ottoman empire.

Ah, and I’m already into the problem: history, more particularly, Albania’s history.   It’s not that I usually ignore history.  In fact, whenever I go to a new country, or even a large town or area that is new to me, I try to understand a bit of its history.  Everywhere that has been populated by the dodgy human apes has history.  Or, if it has no written history, it will have archeologically inferred history.  Even the very few parts of the world that have never been populated by us have geology and geography that I like to check out.  My mind has a strange collage of rather skimpy, cartoon like, ideas of the geology, geography, prehistory of the many places I’ve been lucky enough to visit.  It also has and a very thin history there for each of them.   All that is there in rather unreliable stored mix in my head and I have no illusions that any places that have been populated by humans have had untroubled histories.  However, Albania has impressed me with something of the stark severity of its history.  That was in my mind during and since my visit more than for any of my previous visits anywhere.  The only close competitor is Vienna: the first time I went to Vienna I walked around on my free day feeling oppressed with a sense of the waves of horror it has hosted.  I’ve been back to Vienna several times since, all on work trips, and the sense of oppression has never been as severe and I’ve even developed quite a fondness for Vienna.  Neither for Vienna nor for Albania was it really fair of me to experience them in this way, but I did. Arguably, so many places, take York or Norwich for example, have arguably as severe historical stains on them as Vienna and Albania.  Humans, surely the least sociably competent primate species, seem to soak so many places in horror, blood, death and oppression as we strive to define our identities.  (Ugh, rereading this I realise I have left out visiting the concentration camp at Buchenwald while at a lovely conference in Weimar as I’m omitting places created purely for the purposes of horror from my comparisons, I’m interested at the moment in how “ordinary places of human occupation” affect me.)

Years ago, when I started working with an Albanian (Arlinda Cerga: thanks again Arlinda!) on the translation into Albanian of the CORE-OM I read up a bit about Albania as I always try to.  I read Ismail Kadare’s “The Successor” and felt it caught brilliantly some sense of what it is like to try to live, and to try to keep thinking, in an extreme and crass totalitarian regime.  Kadare is one of Albania’s considerable number of outstanding human beings and I thought the book stood up well in the comparisons that are made between him and Kafka, Gogol, Orwell and other great writers.  I’m about to read some more Kadare when I’m feeling strong enough.

After Arlinda, Blerta (Bodinaku) has been my main Albanian colleague and collaborator and we, with input from others, finished the Albanian CORE-OM and Blerta has gone on to do an impressive PhD using it and other measures.  Over the last eight years she and I have met a number of times, but never in Albania itself.  (Twice oddly enough, in Vienna.)  This trip to Tirana was my first trip to Albania and the reason was to sit in on the focus group for the Albanian translation of the YP-CORE (Young Persons’ CORE: for 11 to 17 year olds).  I was also doing a workshop and a plenary talk at an international conference which Blerta, with others, and with other collaborating institutions as well as Tirana University, were hosting in Tirana.

In my reading before flying out this time I discovered Edith Durham and started reading her High Albania (1909).  Durham was a remarkable woman, and though she’s no literary stylist, High Albania struck me as a very remarkable book.  There’s a rather thin and perhaps not very sympathetic wikipedia page about her at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Durham and the whole of High Albania is online here.  I  was reading a convenient Kindle edition you can check out here(1), despite my continuing love of “real books”.  I also managed to read Robert Elsie’s Albania in a nutshell while I was out there and, since returning, Marcus Tanner’s Albania’s Mountain Queen: Edith Durham and the Balkans.  That’s quite a lot of reading (I did also read more about Albania and Tirana on wikipedia and a guide to Tirana!), it’s probably twice as much as I’ve done for any other translation trip and it reflects something that developed as the trip approached and through it: a fascination with Albania and its history and also with this amazing woman Edith Durham and with why I’d never heard of her.

I don’t want to get caught up in clichés about Albania: it has undoubtedly had a warred over and at times horrifying history.  It is part of the Balkans and therefore part of an area that it has, as I see it, suited more western, northern and eastern parts of Europe, and suited Russia and the Ottoman empire, to have as a barrier zone into which to locate much of the worst of our territorial warring over some 500 years or more, a phase we’re hardly reliably out of now.  It has a history of blood feuding which, from talking to someone involved in refugee care in London is not completely over yet.  It has had perhaps the worst denigration of women in European history though hardly any of the world can look proudly at our histories there can we?  My refugee service leader said that the men who come to them from Albania are mostly fleeing death threats and the women are mostly moderately feminist, moderately modern and feisty young women from rural Albania who can’t face the options available for them in their home towns.  The most recent challenge Albania has had, under Enver Hoxha, was a particular “socialist” dictatorship and totalitarian regime only outdone by the regime in North Korea for its grip on its population.  Hoxha probably purged more religion and cultural/religious history and architecture out of the country than has happened anywhere in the world.  (IS in parts of the “middle East” and northern Africa and the worst the Taliban did in Afghanistan seem to me to be the only comparable planned destructions of art and ideas.)

Albania is emerging from all of those things and at pretty dramatic speed.  Tirana, this very recently created capital city has grown dramatically.  It’s acquired recent fame for its paint and it felt a friendly and busy place to be.  It shocked me to find I was in the oldest university in Albania but to find that that university is exactly as old as I am (Tirana university was created under Hoxha in 1957).  Tirana has a generally rather unappealing to me mess of a very few early 20th and pre-20th century buildings, many Hoxha era buildings, and a rapidly growing number of generally rather repellant and grandiose post-Hoxha office buildings.  There’s another fascinating juxtaposition of most of the obligatory shops that you see in any major city anywhere in the world now, against street vendors selling vegetables, collected essentials (tights seemed to be particularly common) from a sheet laid on the pavement or a few boxes. Another juxtaposition is generational: younger and youngest in bright colours, particularly technicolour faux fur trim jackets and coats, alongside parents and grandparents in black and very basic, hard wearing clothing. The older people often have a look of years of tough living in their skin, eyes and generally complete absence of any obesity. By contrast the younger and youngest look well nourished, clean and healthy (though nearly everyone seems to smoke and often heavily).

Pehaps oddly, the most similar experience I’ve had was of visiting Shanghai earlier this year where there are similar juxtapositions, particular by generations though Shanghai is so much build in internal migration that I remember few of the adult parent with child couples walking the streets that I saw in Tirana.  I can see that it’s odd to compare a city of 27M people with one of say 900k, in a country of under 3M: you would need nine Albanias to fill Shanghai.  Blerta thought the comparison hugely amusing.  Clearly Albania and Shanghai China come out of different ethnicities, different religions, radically different languages but they do share emergence from communism.

I knolw that I’m still digesting what I made of Albania.  I am keen to build work links there and fairly confident that that will be possible and supported by most people I met. Albania has a long, if sometimes oppressed (Hoxha again) tradition of speaking a number of languages. I found a real mix of people who speak next to no English with many who speak it so well that conversation was no problem at all.  Traditionally people have also spoken Serbian, Italian, Greek, Macedonia, Bulgarian, Turkish, German and French depending on the era and on the part of Albania in which they lived.  That’s great fo me as I’m no linguist.  I will try to add to my “faleminderit” (“Thanks/thank you”), “po” (“yes”) and “jo” (“no”) but I have no illusions that I’m going to learn even enough Albanian to do more than cope in shops without lucking on an interpreter.

People were pretty much all very welcoming and I had a great time in my six days there, culminating in one particularly splendid meal in a small restaurant where the chef is an artist by day and the food he served up was wonderfully diverse, fresh and tasty.  Through that meal the conversation with my hosts was full of laughter but we covered a huge range of topics that were often grim.  We talked about the challenges to art, creativity and empirical exploration of our world.  We shared worries about Trump in the States, Putin in Russia, Brexit in the UK and grim prospects of the rise of the right in Europe and about the the seeming total control of neoliberal profiteering everywhere.  We talked about how in Albania they are in many ways building research and academic work pretty much from scratch.  That was a state of affairs that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. That was not my experience in Croatia or Slovenian, the only other parts of the Balkans I know a bit, nor in former “Iron Curtain” countries I have visited like Slovakia, Lithuania, Poland or the Czech Republic, nor was it true in China.  Of course, no academic community is ever immune from pressures from its political surroundings.  What is happening the UK frightens me as I think it challenges independence of thinking and freedom to investigate things empirically and seeks to make sure that as little as possible in research, teaching and academia could challenge neoliberal ideas. However, in the UK and in many countries there are traditions of research and thinking located in a set of buildings, in jobs, in teaching and researching opportunities and these go back far more than 60 years in most countries I have visited. It’s easy to underestimate how such longevity has helped nurture moderately resilient traditions of survival, often perhaps more impressively than in the UK. I felt what I saw in Tirana and more generally in the delegates at the conference, suggests the growth will be good if having to grow on penuriously little funding.  It would be great to be alongside that in some small way.

More selfishly perhaps, I hope I will also get a chance to go back with some holiday time as well, get on a bike perhaps and see more of the country.  It’s clearly geographically diverse and beautiful, with a wealth of mountains, lakes and bird life to keep me very happy.  Ah, a cycle ride through the Balkans, Albania and down into Greece before I’m too old?!

Afterthought (19.xii.16): if you are Albanian or work with Albanian speakers and want to know more about the CORE-OM and YP-CORE in Albanian, go to the Albanian translation page on the CST web site.  It was work around that which took me to Tirana.  

I have still not really managed to digest my brief trip to Tirana, or is it too that I am still digesting my return to the UK, if I think about the challenge more evenly?  Anyway, that’s still work in progress, so one or more posts that seem to be brewing in my head out of that trip and my return must wait another few days (sorry Blerta!)  I’m sprinkling this post with some ‘photos, spread over some years, of Mont Blanc “calving” clouds.

However, that extraordinary and wonderful cloud I saw in Tirana took me back to something that’s been with me for some years now since I read a fascinating book: Hamblyn, Richard. The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.  The book is about Luke Howard (1772-1864).  Howard was a hard working Quaker and pharmacist from East London who invented the core of the naming system for cloud formations that is still in use today, first describing it publicly in 1802.  There’s a typically useful Wikipedia page about him and an Amazon page about the book here.  Howard invented the names cumulus, stratus and cirrhus and combined names, e.g. cirrostratus, for their intermediate forms.  He got this sufficiently right for it to have survived as a system for over 200 years despite there being very little then known about how and why clouds form, or even about meteorology.  He did it entirely through observational data, much of it simply qualitative descriptive data in the form of sketches and narratives.

I liked the book which seemed itself to have been carefully done and well written.  I admit that I have a weakness for biographies of brave eccentrics, particularly of the many who pretty much developed modern science and for works about and by the many who still do push forward the “hard sciences”.  However, what grabbed me on reading the book was not just the human story and the emerging science of clouds but also a metaphorical message: that this was probably a better model for where psychotherapy research needs to be than the models we currently worship.

Howard could conduct no formal experiments, no randomised controlled trials, he didn’t even have any real chance to take temperature and humidity readings or to collect water droplets or ice crystals from clouds.  He understood that one could have powerful reactions to clouds and he had a correspondence wtih Goethe and they admired each other’s work and Goethe wrote a short celebratory verse in honour of Howard.  However, he could put his feelings aside except perhaps for how much they helped him keep working.  He could put them aside because metereorlogy has the huge advantage over psychotherapy research that we can ignore our emotional reactions as meteorological observers. Our feelings and reactions are not cloud shaping forces.  In radical contrast, when there are two or more people in a room communicating (even if only non-verbally), then they always affect one another and this does shape the interactions that take place. That means that only “computer delivered psychotherapy” and “bibliotherapy” (reading therapeutically intended books) can ignore observer impacts on the process.

I am not saying that psychotherapy research just needs us to watch and describe.  I’m clear that we do need tools, measures and reductive, quantitative ways to describe things and I do believe the neuroscience has a bit to tell us about psychotherapies. (Though I suspect that it’s currently oversold and part of the “neurodolatry” afflicting late 20th and 21st century attempts to understand the mind).  However, the psychotherapies are, like cloud formation and weather, in formal mathematical terms, probably both chaotic and complex system phenomena. Despite their phenomena being chaotic and complex, the meteorologists who came after Howard could not only ignore their own rections but could also assume that regular laws of physics (and a bit of chemistry) will determine the processes that create clouds.  As we understand more about the mind it seems increasingly unlikely that any such linear or regular laws drive human minds in communication.  That shouldn’t stop us seeking simplifications, measurements and explanations, even guides as to how we might make psychotherapies more helpful*.

However, too much psychotherapy research wastes time and money applying tools that are fine where their logic applies but which have no epistemological coherence applied to psychotherapies.  The paradigm example is the randomised controlled trial (RCT). The RCT is brilliant and completely appropriate in the shape of the double blind randomised controlled trial in pharmacology but it becomes the at best single blinded, or frankly unblindable, RCTs of psychotherapies.  We know from much empirical work in pharmacology that even the prescriber knowing whether the trial participant is getting a supposedly active drug or a placebo, even when the participant doesn’t know this, makes a difference to outcomes. We know that on balance it makes the outcomes better (though almost certainly also creating some “nocebo” negative effects**).  We even know that this appears to have effects not just on how people feel but on their mortality.

All that tells us that psychotherapy in its simplest form works: the client sensing that that the therapist knows or believes something might help, is, on balance, better than doing nothing.  We can never separate that effect from “true psychotherapy” as we can never double blind the delivery of psychotherapies.  Sadly, at least in the UK and North America, and I think mainland Europe, psychotherapy research funding is overwhelmingly directed at RCTs.  Can we shake off this mad pursuit of pseudo certainties and trappings of “true science” and recognise that many “true sciences” came from, continue to come from, purely descriptive work and theory building?  Is Luke Howard’s story of what one dedicated person managed to do by observation and quiet persistence an inspirational story for us?  I think so!

Footnotes!

*  Where helping is a legitimate aim: arguably some therapies, say full psychoanalysis, or some other analyses (Dasein analysis, Jungian analyses) and some humanistic psychotherapies, rightly avoid any commitment to help and only offer to make self exploration possible and more thorough.

** Etymology and a little communicative recursion: “placebo” is Latin for “I will please”, I think “nocebo” is Latin for “I will harm”.  A little Latin or Greek goes a long way to make things sound erudite and impressive, particularly usefully for medicine.  Latinate terms are linguistic placebo ingredients.  And sometimes irritating nocebo ones too of course.

I was walking down one of the main streets in Tirana, as you do, well no, that’s silly.  Anyway, let that go, the whole experience of visiting Tirana has to have a post of its own and I don’t seem ready to do that justice yet.

So there I was, walking (not really a cycle friendly city though quite a few people do cycle, though about 10% seem to stick to the pavements) and I looked ahead and saw this:

Hm, perhaps this is one situation in which I should upload full sized ‘photos. I switched lenses (I was doing the real rubbernecking tourist thing with a “proper camera” and even multiple lenses) and got this:

Honestly, that’s what it was, no “photoshopping” or trickery here.  I’d never seen anything like it before in my life of gawping at pretty much anything. I wondered if there was a chimney I could see but it’s way too far away and too high.  I got back to the hotel and googled.  I put in “tornado between clouds” and, as almost always, wikipedia was offered me and had the answer.  It’s not a tornado as it’s not coming down from a supercell cumulonimbus cloud, it turns out it’s a “cold air funnel cloud”.  The page in wikipedia is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_cloud

I found it oddly disturbing as I have a few times when I’ve seen quite remarkable cloud formations.  I can understand why people read grave omens in the skies and some of the repeat nightmares I’ve had over my life have involved dramatic shearing open of the skies.  I guess it, and tornados, are iconic cinematic sequences, are they memes?  Never quite sure when I can use that word. I do have a sense that that nightmare image goes back so far it may well antedate my having seen such things in a cinema or on a TV screen.  Goes right back to the recurrent nightmare of greasy white snakes with square section bodies. Ah now, there’s a grand blog post some day.

By the way, if you’re walking around Tirana, don’t walk and gawp upwards at once: the pavements are pretty damaged and occasionally have gaping holes or trenches you could disappear in if you gawped up too much and neglected your footing.  Fortunately, formative years gawping more down than up up, looking for fossils on the beach in South Wales seems to mean that I am immune to that danger.  Now tramlines though, they’re a different enemy, but that too will have to wait for another time!

Afterthought (19.xii.16): if you are Albanian or work with Albanian speakers and want to know more about the CORE-OM and YP-CORE in Albanian, go to the Albanian translation page on the CST web site.  It was work around that which took me to Tirana.  

The bright yellow panniers that carried most of my baggage were Ortlieb ones and Ortlieb are supposed to be the best of the best.  I’d had them for over ten years and they’re very simple and the roll top is very waterproof if you haven’t overfilled them and can roll it up tightly.  However, I’d never really loved them and I missed the outer pockets on the pair of UK made panniers I’d had for probably 15 to 20 years before those wore out and were replaced by the Ortliebs.  On the ride to Compostella one of the closing fixers broke and the top fitting on the other pannier gave up so I’ve been meaning to see if I could repair them since I got back but I’ve been bodging things.  However, looking at the challenge carefully I realised that, though I quite like sewing, this was beyond me to do a robust job.  I started to fear that they would have to be thown away but I did some sleuthing on the web and found that Ortlieb do repairs.  In fact, a company called Lyon (www.lyon.co.uk) do them in the UK and not only will they do a welding (plastic welding) repair job on the one set at a very reasonable price, under a third of what it would cost to replace the pannier, but they do snap in replacement closing clips:

Very neat locking bar that and feels very solid so all I had to do was to use as small hacksaw to cut the broken one out and snap that in and here we are, all ready to go again.

OK  Ortlieb, and the lovely people at Lyon (thanks Mike) are high in my estimation: I love gear that is made to last and made so it is repairable when it finally breaks.

Now, let’s see if a little pre-Christmas “thank you” post like this can get me back into the swing of blogging again.  Boy I have been working hard (though technically unemployed!) and boy oh boy have I been missing the ride, and the blogging!  A lot of readjustment was always going to be necessary.

Saturday, in my old, pre-pilgrimage way of life, was a day in which I would generally cycle from home to Waitrose in Balham, and pick up foodstuffs for the week and a free coffee and a free Guardian. Such is the almost irresistible allure of Waitrose’s largesse.

This weekend was the first time I got back to the routine and Toto and I got soaked on a round trip.  We set off first to the local charity shop with two panniers’ of things to pass on, then the local recycling tip in hope some other things will be recycled.  The tip now requires proof of local residence, at least theoretically, in fact they didn’t check the bits of paper I’d found with my name and address on them.  Apparently this is now needed in case aliens from another London borough, or even, heaven forbid, even further away, attempt to use the facility.  I miscalculated, I’ve forgotten about British weather, and the heavens opened on us as we pottered off to those lovely locations, and Toto and were both pretty bedraggled, despite the sun coming out again, by the time we got to up market Balham.  The caked Spanish dust is slowly coming off Toto.

As I tethered him, with “two good locks”: this is London not the pilgrimage any more, a man hopped off a road bike of a certain age and tied it up next to Toto and said something obviously friendly but totally incomprehensible to me.  (I really am going a bit deaf!) I said “Sorry” in a very British sort of way and he said, more slowly this time so I got it “Have a good weekend”.  I managed “thanks, er, you too” and probably something about cycling being good despite the weather, with which he agreed.  Then I ventured, sensing he wouldn’t be offended, “Where are you from?” as the thick accent was recognisably European, and I was hazarding “former Iron curtain Eastern Europe” but nothing more localised than that.  “Poland” was the beaming answer, “Krakow” and now I could say …
“Ah, I/we have been there.  Lovely city.”
“Yes, 850 years”
“Yes, historical, very beautiful, lovely.” (OK, I’m rubbish at this conversation thing, I know.)
“Yes, 850 years”
“Yes” (OK, I was bluffing I admit it, I hadn’t a clue why 850, my recall of Krakow’s history wasn’t up to that.)
“When you there, [perhaps] you [went to?] salt mines.” (You have to hear his side of this in a really glorious, deep toned voice and a very, very thick accent, but now I’d attuned, completely comprehensible.)
“Yes!”  (With ear to ear grin on my face).  “Real tourists! Wonderful, amazing, enormous.”
“Thirty years ago I worked in salt mines.”  (I was computing that that was entirely possible from what I could remember, I’m stronger on the recent than the distant history of Krakow. I reckon it probably made him a member of the workforce that was there as they closed the mines, partly through fears that the washing out of the salt layers might be reaching under Krakow itself and be causing serious risks of subsidence.  That must have been quite a time to have worked there.  I’m damn sure he was telling me truth anyway.)
“Wow.  They were amazing.  Hard work.  That church.” (Yes folks, I think it was as staccato and disjointed as that.)
[He had huge grin now on his face too.] “Yes.  Yes. You saw that.” [Face changed, I think going back to the mines and picturing it too. I wonder how much what he would remember would match what we saw as tourists.]
“Yes. Hard work.”
“Yes” [Sounding unconvinced actually but too polite to disagree but then …] “Yes, salt mines same everywhere, Krakow, Poland, everywhere.”
“Yes.” (I’m inclined to accept that. In my view, damn hard and potentially dangerous work anywhere though I’m sure it varies a bit.)  “What are you doing now?”
“Work for Surrey council.” (Not far away, a few miles down the road.) “In Poland, I worked in revenue.”
“Ah” (genuinely interested but unsure how to move on and becoming faintly aware I needed to get a move on to get to Stratford East to meet J later.)
“Because my English not so good, I not so good job here.”
“Ah, and expensive living here.”
“Ah.  Yes, but good.  I go to Peckham Rye” (a few miles East of us and now gentrifying rapidly but until a a few years ago having been well down the social strata below Balham, or below our own neck of the woods here in South London.) “Big Indian shops. Buy five pound bags frozen mackerel for £5.  Cheap.” (Very true.  I must sleuth that out.  Maybe I should alternate Waitrose one week, big Indian shope in Peckham Rye the next.)
[Pointing into Waitrose, which for non-UK nationals reading this, is a very “posh”, and not a cheap supermarket.] “Ah, but this isn’t cheap.” (Ouch, as I write that it sounds rude, I think/hope my face was conveying what I was feeling, a complicity in self-indulgence. I think it was because …)
[With big grin on his face] “Yes, but I love Roquefort cheese!!!”
[At which we both started moving towards the entrance and he put out large hand …]
“Tomasz” (OK, that’s my guess at correct Polish spelling, I think I’ve met some Polish “Thomas”s.]
“Chris”

And then I found myself lingering, a bit stunned by the sheer pleasure of savouring such a lovely encounter, but also savouring memories of a very good work trip to Krakow, which is (and J and I have 100% agreement on this) a lovely, remarkably undamaged, truly historic city where we were made incredibly welcome by my/our hosts, Milena and Andrzej and their colleagues at the Polish Institute for Integrative Psychotherapy.

I stood there for a moment and was gazing at a wonderful, bright red bike with a full kiddie carrier at the front and onboard electric motor, clearly a pretty new Larry vs. Harry bike but my mind was miles away (just how far is Krakow?  Aha, 880.6 miles, 1417.3km  by air according to distancefrom.net, ooh, and 1,009.6 miles, 1624.9 km by road.  Aha, now that’s another nice cycle ride!)

Down tiger!  OK, I suspect my mouth was hanging open a bit, more in sheer pleasure at the conversation I’d just had, than at the bike, but not unreasonably a voice, this time with only the tiniest of accents, that might have been UK, said “Admiring the bike eh?” so I agreed (there’s only so much explaining the realities of his internal world that even this blogger will do outside Waitrose on a late Saturday afternoon in Balham).

Trying to recover my cool, I noticed that the man had a Clare Hall boat club top on.  Now, and this time not only for non-UK people finding themselves reading this, but probably for anyone who didn’t blag your way into Cambridge University, or who never wanted to, or who wouldn’t be seen dead there, Clare Hall is one of the smaller (smallest?, not quite) of the colleges that make up that august institution.  Oh and, yes as I’ve confessed before, posh person that I am, posho who shops in Waitrose, I spent three years there as an undergraduate.  Now, as well as seeing 40 films for probably about £20 in my first eight week term, and learning a bit about medicine, Cambridge was where I discovered rowing and, by a triumph of enthusiasm over any real ability, made it to the Queens’ College first eight and had great, great fun rowing, particularly in the second and third terms of my first year.  After that, sadly, I gave it up as Queens’ decided we were a good team, which we were, on team spirit again, rather than real ability, and decided that the first and second eights would train six days a week … not me mate,I had films to see, parties to go, lectures six days a week (honestly) and six training sessions a week was about two more than I wanted.  The twist was that if you’d rowed in a first eight, then the Cambridge rules of the river said you couldn’t row lower than a second eight … so, that was my short but fun rowing career over.]

So here you are.  One of the benefits of spending time recently throwing out old junk, is that I know where old junk I haven’t thrown is sitting.  So once more into the TARDIS (you did read the last blog post didn’t you?)

That is autumn 1975 and that I’m sure is the Cambridge “Head of the river race” and in there is your time challenged blogger himself with seven other completely novice oarsmen (though I have a faint memory that the cox had done his bit before at school).  That really, really is how not to row but dig those hair styles, come to that, dig that I had hair.

And this was what two further terms practice achieved.

That is the Queens’ College second eight, and yes, I’m there again, in fact I think I and that cox are the only people in common across the two ‘photos and perhaps I’m wrong about him. This crew were doing pretty well in the May bumps at the time of that ‘photo.  I’m pretty sure this time that the cox, number 8 and 7 had rowed before but the other six of us were beginners.  Hm. I can even find the names:

That’s the oar we won, well actually, you had to pay for one and it amused me at the time.  That’s not the seat order we were in in the ‘photo but I’m pretty sure that’s the right nine names.  (I’m not sitting in the seat in the ‘photo that the ‘photo has me in but someone gave the painter the wrong information including some pretty odd weights actually.  Anyone who knows me want to say which is me in the two ‘photos bearing in mind that the oar is not a safe clue except that it eliminates one seat.  Answers at the end of this blog, and a bonus point for anyone who notices anything else odd.

OK, back in the TARDIS and whizz forward about 40 years.  He of the rowing top and I talked.  I teased him that in my days, in the century before he’d been in Cambridge, I’d had the satisfaction of “overbumping” a Clare Hall boat and we immediately agreed that they were a tiny college.  [Ouch, I really believed that at the time I was talking to him, think I was muddling it with a bit of side-by-side racing we did against them at some regatta. As you can see from the information on that oar, we overbumped a much bigger college: Trinity.  How could I have forgotten that?  It was a huge feather in our caps!]

Somehow talking about electric bikes took us, via whether or not J should use one to my pilgrimage and he was enthusiastic and nice about it.  I learned what he, a Dane speaking perfect English with only that faintest of accent, was doing in the UK.  It turned out that he’d met his wife, a fellow student, I think from Spain, in Cambridge and they were both helping keep this country alive and both their children, the three year old for the kiddie carrier, and the nine month old, I am sure will do so in the future given a chance.

Damn Brexit, damn, damn, damn Brexit …. but oh boy, those were two, radically different, but lovely conversations. Both men leave me standing for warmth and willingness to launch into conversation with complete strangers. Both conversations were, I think, triggered by bikes which may be the trick to make me a sociable human being.  It all reminded me forcibly that conversations with complete strangers had seemed so mcuh to be permitted on the pilgrimage route and had all been good.  More importantly, it reminded me that the same is surely true anywhere (though I seem to need a pushbike to start the conversation).

Damn, damn, damn Brexit and, … oh boy we’re not in mainland Europe any more Toto. On which note, let’s hop into the TARDIS again and visit Krakow back in November 2010.

The main square, surely hints of Venetian gothic to the building on the left.

And, last but not least, samples of a huge table of food.

Very happy memories: thank you Tomasz.

Oh dear, this blog is getting out of order, no, not that sort of “out of order”, well, not very.  No, just in the wrong temporal order. This really should have come before the last post I put up but perhaps because it’s (mostly) about simple pleasures, I lost track of it.

Anyway, yes: continuity failure.  Toto and I clearly couldn’t have done London until he returned and caught up with me.  Oops.

Ah well.  Let’s go backwards.  Here he was after the ring on the door bell from a smiling delivery man.  (Honestly, he was smiling happily. I agree that’s not always the case for delivery people and I’m not sure it’d be my default expression were that my job.)  The cap had come back with me but I felt it belonged there for the ‘photo: it was as much appreciated leaving present before I went off, from a colleague in my last job.

The shop in Santiago, Velocípedo, S.C, who had partially dismembered Toto and packed him up, had done a great job.  As well as Toto, in the box were my mattress (black roll in next ‘photo), tent, massive bike lock, sleeping bag and liner and both empty panniers.

Toto’s was in quite a dismembered state, well, surgically, a mixture of dismembered and dislocated is probably more accurate.  The handlebars, front light and front rack were dislocated but still connected by cables, the pedals and saddle were truly amputated but everything was well wrapped in bubble wrap and attached to other things to prevent anything flailing around in transit.  Bits of old innner tube supplemented the bubble wrap ingeniously.  I love recycling.

I confess I’m not confident about reassembling a bike safely but it was all fairly easy and eventually, Toto was back in full working order.  Thanks Velocípedo: appreciated and a real pleasure to be back with my own bike available.

That was one simple pleasure of re-entry. Another was coming back to find that J had kept the various bird feeders in the back garden stoked up and the birds were flicking in and out of the bushes, to and from the feeders every bit as much as they had been before I went.  Oddly, they all look cleaner and more spruced up than they had looked earlier in the summer.  J agrees.  Odd, when do our common garden birds get a change of feathers?

Since my return the list welcoming me back is lots of great tits and blue tits, some coal tits, a few beautiful long tailed tits, one of my favourite UK birds, goldfinches (ditto) and the occasional parakeet.

OK, these were taken before I went off but they confirm the parakeet.

They’re just ‘phone ‘photos and through the kitchen window so, yes, they’re awful but as well as capturing that florid green and red acrobat, I particularly like that the second one has a typical flickering of a tit in the background. (You may have to look carefully.  It’s easiest to see on a small screen if you flick your eyes from the one ‘photo to the other and see the blur that’s in the right hand one and not in the left hand one.)

There are times when the back garden seems to have several such determined feeders zooming around continuously and they come in and out for five to ten minutes on end.  Then suddenly all will go completely dead for a while until they return again.  I haven’t worked out why the bursts of activity happen, but they’re certainly not simple statistical fluctuations on a flat base rate of visiting, there’s something more than that going on, some shared safety perhaps?

And, shoddy ‘photos thought they are, I do like that we get those technicolour exotica dropping in from time to time.  I think the accusations against them, that they’re taking local species’ food and nesting spots, feel pretty implausible.  They’ve been a slowly growing feature of London life for about 20 years in my experience and certainly they’re now pretty common, so you hear their unmistakable squawky shrieks a lot and see their purposeful green streak flight a fair bit, but they’ve hardly taken over.  I think the accusations are ornithological little Englander prejudice.  I’m sure there are Brexit voters who think President May should repatriate all parakeets as well as anyone else not “indigenous” and who like to attribute the cause of all that’s not OK in modern Britain to immigrants.

Oh dear, now I’ve gone and spoiled it haven’t I?  There I was, all happy at the simple pleasures of having reassembled Toto safely and finding him undamaged from his trip and the even greater pleasures of the bird life in our little urban back garden and I’ve gone and moaned and gotten all bitter.

I know not all Brexit voters are bitter, racist, xenophobic.  I know and sympathise that a lot were surely voting that way through understandable exasperation with London based politics so out of touch with so much of the country (trust me, pretty out of touch with much of London too).  I know the remain campaign seemed to me to be almost suicidally hopeless, as if they really didn’t want to win, just wanted to threaten people with the financial penalties of not voting for them and their smugly knowing status quo.  Who ever thought that was good lobbying?  I know a lot of the leave campaign looked jazzy, different, upbeat by comparison and, hey, it was liberally sprinkled with lies like the £350M per week for the NHS.  I guess we all have to work out how to hold onto our pleasures alongside our bitterness and anger about things. I guess I think that for some voting “leave” was one way they were getting that (and still think so, or so the Guardian tells me with a follow-up survey).

One odd ornithological thing took me two whole weeks to notice as it’s an absence not a presence.  While there were lots of swallows and swifts overhead when I went, and swallows particularly all the way to Santiago, there are none here now.  All gone, off on their migrations to Africa.   I’m fascinated that I’d had them with me all the way, in numbers and often with all the noisiness that particularly the swallows add to their aerobatics yet it took me so long to see that they had gone.

Oh well, they will return, though data on so many species numbers are depressing and clearly we can’t rely on some to return or even to stay.  When we moved into this house about 21 years ago the commonest bird in that back garden was the house sparrow and I thought they’d always be there.  We haven’t seen one in there for at least three years and I know the drop is similar in my sister’s tiny garden in North London and nearly as precipitate, and from absolute flocks of them, in my parents’ garden in South Wales.  Of course, species’ numbers fluctuate and some die out without human assistance.  However, we are now in the geological era of the Anthropocene: the one in which we as a species are reshaping our planet, and catastrophically so, more than any natural phenonenon is.  Much we must fight there.

OK.  Onward … and forgive me, because over the next few weeks here, things are going to get even more out of order here.  I’m going to go back to how it all started, back to an unfinished ‘photo tour of Chartres, the original inspiration from 1976; I’m going to go back to that first day (2/8/16) as I pointed Toto, who wasn’t even Toto back then, just a bike, out into the drizzle and the very dubious pleasures of the South Circular.  Surely some of you are “Doctor Who” fans: if that time disordered series can keep going for as long as it has, I can try to emulate it, and jump around a bit.