Nature vs Nurture: a positive outlook

I mailed my uncle recently (not the one from one of my earlier posts) and one of my comments about hitting 40 was how, in my youth, it took me a long time to realise that I wouldn't be a professional footballer, citing at one point, "it takes some people longer than others to come to terms with their mediocrity". (I am not having a mid-life crisis by the way - at least, I don't think so :-/).

My uncle was a journalist for many years and has had a novel published, and I really appreciated the wisdom and sentiment in his reply, so put it on the web because there are some words that I thought might be interesting to others (you never know!). Here is the abridged version of his reply. I hope it isn't too cloying :

Glad you got the birthday card. With the Post Office strike (then) entering its second week we were wondering if it would ever be received.

...

Come to terms with mediocrity....it's a feeling often felt as you grow older. I was sure I was going to be the youngest editor of a national newspaper in Fleet St, believing that I was the best reporter that ever walked the hallowed streets of London;
...

Alas it never was to be but I have still lived (and hope to extend it) an incredible life full of excitement, tragedy and stacks and stacks of fun and enjoyment.

Now in retirement it doesn't move at the same pace but is still there to be lived and four grandchildren have opened up a new vista. Life does go on.

...

I thought of writing on and started another book but a voice was constantly saying to me that there's much to do; you spent your life writing to earn a living; why spend days indoors pounding away on the typewriter (ooops! word processor) get out and enjoy life.

...

Take care and whatever happens be happy and be lucky. You don't need anything else.

I really liked his reply and I hope you did too.

Some people say you make your own luck, but luck, by its very nature, is uncontrollable.

Being happy though, is something we should be able to have some control on. That's the premise I'm working on in any case, but I'm lucky (sic) that this hasn't really been put to the test as of yet.

Unchained Metaphor

OK, after reflection, I changed the title of the last post so that it has the more pretentious title that I decided not to use. Sorry - if you already read it, then you don't need to re-read, unless you didn't get the obscure message...

There is a thriving set of "associations" in our town (An association in France is a publicly-funded organisation that makes no money (a .org)). Last weekend was an exhibition organised by the local ornithological society. Now, I am fond of birds- I have bird boxes and feeding boxes ready to help them through the winter and give them a home in the spring. However, what I hate is to see caged birds. I have an almost overwhelming urge to open the cages and set them free. Pet shops are a nightmare for me as seeing caged parrots hopping from perch to perch makes me sad and angry - I have seen them in the wild and that is where they belong.

Visiting the exhibition last week brought this urge to new heights. Picture the scene: You walk into a room and are confronted with 6 rows of cages, each row with 4 cages piled on each other, and each row containing 40 cages: 480 bird cages. Each cage is 50 x 50 x 50 cm and there is a single tiny bird in each, all of them singing and generating a reverberating cacophony in such a small room. It was an impressive sight!

Each bird was beautiful, especially from someone who comes from a place where there is a constant screech of seagulls and the only colour is provided by blue-tits and robins if you are lucky (although pigeons do have an impressive chest when puffed-up during the mating season).

I have never seen such shapes and colours in birds. Tiny birds with striking purple, yellow and red intertwined, pale yellow, bright pink birds, birds with crests, feathers pointing in all directions and many more. My kids were fascinated: a beautiful sight when viewed individually.

However, the ensemble, to me, was depressing - these birds did not belong here, neither free-flying or caged. Although I could never have acted on it, the urge to set them all free was overwhelming. I imagined a lever which would open all the cages at the same time and set them all free to fill the hall with their noise and colours before flying, as one, through the door to freedom. It would have been like the explosions of colour that Sony put together for their TV ad recently (the one with the explosions of paint from tower blocks) - maybe they should consider it for a future version.

It could never have happened, but what a sight it would have been!

Heisenberg's Bicycle

I saw a quote from Oscar Wilde yesterday: "Only the shallow know themselves" which I thought was a nice one. I definitely can't claim to be an expert on me: in the past I have been called shallow, deep, smart-arsed, stupid, intelligent, a leader, a follower, brave, cowardly...all of this is completely subjective and depends on the relationships and circumstances. I definitely don't really know the real me, so cannot, by his definition, be shallow.

So, can shallowness be measured? Probably not, but that doesn't stop me from having a go and writing the following nonsense. Bear with me, if you have time on your hands.
The treatise of this scientific investigation is this:

"The shallowness index: Just how shallow is a person and can it be measured?"

Is everyone else as "shallow" as me? Are my thoughts on the same level as a goldfish, or did Einstein need such thoughts before he came up with E=MC2? Maybe my shallowness will lead to the realisation that Einstein was wrong and that E is actually equal to MC3, or that E stands for Elephant and not Energy.

The first thing to do is to remove the other parties - they are the ones that label you: the subjective parameters. This means that only I can measure my own shallowness and likewise for anybody else.

Have you ever heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? Forget the dry explanation: it goes something like this: "the very act of measuring something changes its behaviour and therefore affects the measurement".

I cycle to and from work. It's about 7km and takes about 30 minutes. I like to think that I can use this time alone to plan my day and then, in the evening, review what actually happened and modify for the following day. However, I have noticed over recent weeks that this is not actually what happens. The truth is that, during the ride my thoughts are so banal that, written down, they seem ridiculous.

As a trained scientist (no, really?), I decided, over the course of a bicycle ride, to try to list the random thoughts and write them down in order to measure their shallowness index and come up with an aggregate score. However, as I stored them for later retrieval, I realised that Heisenberg had caught me out. By thinking about what I was thinking, my thoughts were altered. Confused? Let's see if you can work out at which point Heisenberg kicks in.

1. That truck looks like it's from Finland. I wonder what it is doing here?
2. There's a BMW with tinted windows: probably a drug dealer...
3. If I fall off now, it'll be a 10 metre drop, straight onto the motorway and instant death. Will my kids miss me?
4. I'd better cycle on the pavement here 'cos it's a bit narrow. Oh no, back on the road, there's a cyclist coming the other way on the same pavement. But wait a minute, she looks quite nice...no, wait, she's as old as me - back onto the road.
5. Is this saddle too low? I've got a sore backside
6. I wonder what we'll be eating tonight?
7. Bloody hell, it's cold enough to freeze the nuts off a brass monkey - I wonder where that expression comes from?
   
8. How am I going to get over my Snickers addiction? Why don't they call them Marathons any more? Tomorrow, I will eat only fruit. Opal Fruits? Oh no, they call them Starbursts now. I wonder why that is?
   
9. The light is red, but I can cross because there is no-one and I don't see a policeman.
10. I wonder if that hedgehog is still in the garden?
11. What can I think of next?
12. Come on, there must be one amusing thought...
13. Could I kill a tiger, armed only with a biro? No, I can't use that - it's straight out of The Office.
14. Doh. And that one comes from The Simpsons.
    

Yes, Heisenberg caught me out at #11. Up until that point, banal and trivial, yes, but spontaneous, no; afterwards, they were laboured, searching actively for banality.

So what have we learned from this exercise? What is my shallowness index? It is impossible to measure is the conclusion: objectivity doesn't come into it.

I'll have to think about the deep implications of this investigation when I'm cycling to work tomorrow and when the wine that led me to write this nonsense wears off.

Trouble down the line

There is an interesting political situation brewing in France at the moment. Let me try to explain my take on it...

The perceived impression of the French is that they like nothing better than a good strike (as in stopping work rather than in a sporting sense). There is some truth in this and they generally seem to happen around summertime (just to piss off the holidaymakers, avoid picketing in the rain, or just pure coincidence...you decide).

You probably know that France recently elected a new president (if you don't, read the newspapers and not blogs). "Sarko", the new incumbent, is a long way right of centre. His policies were described as "almost Thatcherite" during the run up to the elections - he soon distanced himself from this - that would be political suicide!

France is by generally considered to be a socialist country. Until recently, transport infrastructures, utilities etc. were nationalised and the government highly centralised. The country is crippled with debt, there is high unemployment and it is top-heavy with civil servants. I can tell you from bitter experience that waiting 1/2 a day and trailing from one person to another in the town hall just to fill in a form that could be done in 1 minute is not the most pleasant activity. I recently had a training course, "Finance for non-Financiers". It was all balance sheets and P&L. We had the Anglo-American versions of balance sheets compared to the French versions. 2 pages for the Anglo-version, 200 for the French (permit me to exaggerate).

One of the bug-bears of French employees in the private sector is that the said civil servants get to retire before them (us) at 55 years old - except, that is, for the train drivers. They have a special dispensation to retire at 50. I don't know the exact reasons for this discrepancy, but one of the factors is due to the danger associated with pointing a metal tube down a straight line at 300km/hour. Personally, I have already written about how I feel that getting into your car is a far more dangerous activity, but there you go.

The unions in France are very strong (CGT and FO notably) and they seem to have taken this situation as their opportunity to stand up to Sarko and let him know who is boss. Last week was the first of what I suspect will be many strikes - no trains ran at all last Thursday, and things are still not back to normal. The unions are currently discussing how to proceed, but it is probably with more strikes.

However, Sarko is a strong leader if nothing else. He has clearly defined a program to "trim" the civil service and I am pretty sure he will not capitulate without a fight. I also think he has the public largely on his side at the moment, although that could change.

I am reminded of two (extremely loosely-related) precedents:

1. Margaret Thatcher's fight with the miner's unions in the mid-eighties. I am afraid that my political interests were limited at the time - I was more interested in girls and football (erm, actually, not much has changed - nature 1, nurture 0)
2. The 9/11 terrorist attack. It was on this day that a British government civil servant suggested in a leaked email that because of the attack, that would be a good day to publish all the current bad news (job figures etc). Sarko also chose this day to publish the fact that he and his wife were divorcing and this took many of the headlines - OK, it's not same magnitude, but I am sure it was a spoiling tactic anyway.
   

In any case, like the TGV (arf arf) this one could go a long way...or, because I lack the courage of my convictions and full knowledge of the facts, I could be completely wrong.

40 - Love

John predicted I would write something like the following entry:

I work in a company where there are around 40 people - I am the only English person. The rest are French apart from one Dutch guy.

If you follow rugby, you will know that it is the World Cup and that England play France tomorrow in the semi-finals - I am being constantly taunted about how we will lose (I actually agree with them, but would never admit it). The Dutch guy has regressed 300 years and become a South African for the weekend (not that the Dutch or English have anything to be proud about with their colonies, but that's another story).

In the style of Kevin Keegan (see the last 3 seconds of this video), I would love it if we beat the French by 40 points tomorrow. If we lose, I have to bring 40 croissants to work; 1 for everyone.

Oh yeah, and I am 40 years old today...