Geting out of bed on the wrong side

I'm a generally a morning person, more active and (relatively) alert it in the first half of the day. Some mornings are better than others, though, and there are days when I'm awake ridiculously early, but would prefer to dive straight back into unconsciousness, rather than spending the pre-dawn darkness fending off the raging tyrannosaurus of despair armed only with the puny toothpick of hope. After a shower, a cup of coffee and bit of activity, I generally get over it, but I was interested to read a blog post about what may be happening to the brain on mornings like that:

Suppose that, for whatever reason, you woke up during REM sleep, but your serotonin cells didn't wake up quick enough, leaving you awake, but with no serotonin (a situation which never normally occurs, remember). How would that feel?

I didn't know that the brain produces less and less serotonin as you go into REM sleep, so I'm grateful  to Neuroskeptic for the information and the theory that a disturbed sleep pattern could mean in waking a serotonin-deprived condition.

The post is speculative, but it makes it seem worth trying to beat the early morning blues by staying a up just a little bit later than normal in the evening, (like most morning people, I tend to go early to bed). Unsurprisingly, people tend to sleep better after being sightly sleep deprived and they also tend to go into REM sleep earlier in the sleep cycle. If a person was doing most of their REM sleep earlier and tired, they might get through that serotonin-deprived phase of the sleep cycle in blissful unconsciousness rather than snapping awake in the wee small hours without the benefit of an important mood-regulating neurotransmitter.

Going to bed tired and triggering a different sleep pattern might also be one of the fringe benefits of taking a bit more exercise, during the day (besides the immediate natural high and the social context of exercising). Finally, just knowing that an early morning feeling of hopeless doom may, at least in part, be a passing illusion caused by a quirk of brain chemistry is a cheering reality check.

I was also quite interested to see the lack of consensus on whether or not REM sleep is important.- the Neuroskeptic thinks it might be dispensable, whilst somebody in the comments section clearly thinks that's a completely barmy notion - nice to see a healthy battle of ideas going on there.

Der gute Mensch von Bonn

The general uselessness of banks had, of course, been noted long before the current financial crisis:

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Mark Twain

One German bank employee recently decided it would be a good idea for her bank to actually meet people's needs, rather than leaving them to get wet. Of course, she was punished, to encourage the others:

Just when you'd heard about enough about the halfhearted non-apology from Goldman Sachs Chair Lloyd Blankfein and the attempts by Wall Street and big banks to quash new reforms that might save us from the recklessness that could lead to yet another meltdown, here comes the story of a banker to be thankful for.

Of course, instead of a big bonus, she got a 22-month suspended sentence for her deeds.

The 62-year-old branch head of a German bank admitted to using the bank accounts of wealthy customers to float struggling ones so that they didn't have to pay exorbitant overdraft fees. The unnamed woman was likened by her lawyer to the title character in the 1939 Bertolt Brecht play Mother Courage and Her Children...

Thanks to the Buzzflash blog for that one. Justice has now been seen to done. According to Spiegel Online:

The woman has now joined the ranks of the poor she once tried to protect. She is living in a small apartment with her ailing mother. The bulk of her meager early retirement pension is being withheld to cover her €1.1 million debt to the bank.

and to the victors, the spoils:

According to the Office for National Statistics, the sum paid in bonuses to UK bankers in the first five months of this year – during a belt-tightening era – was £7.6 billion.

That last quote was from those well-known lefty class warriors at the Telegraph. Further comment is, I think, superfluous.

Brown study

According to researchers at the University of New South Wales:

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

According to the BBC, the researchers found that dour individuals make fewer mistakes and can communicate more successfully than cheerful chappies. Personally, I'm skeptical - it doesn't seem to have worked for Gordon Brown...

Sraps and fragments

I've just been taking some old fibreglass insulation out of our loft, which we're going to have re-insulated. We could just have had the new insulation laid on top of the old stuff, but the insulation that was already there looked pretty disgusting, being covered in a decades-old layer of black dust, so I decided to take it out. It was mucky job and I ended up covered in dust, cobwebs and grime, but it was worth it to clean the place up.

Whilst stripping out the old stuff I kept coming across little scraps of discarded paper, a fragmentary record of the lives of those who have lived here before. I liked the unintentionally hilarious cover of the 1960 DIY magazine I found, (shown above), with a firm-jawed chap sawing away, his wife in the background putting up partition walls whilst tottering about in stiletto heels and a pencil skirt.

There was a child's vaccination record from around 1960, recording vaccinations for whooping cough, polio and the like. There were pages from of a correspondence course in "Scientific Salesmanship" from the early 1960's (associated correspondence suggests that this course may have resulted in somebody landing a £1,000-a-year sales job with company car, although this may have just been a puff piece by the people running the correspondence course, rather than an actual letter). There were unsent Christmas cards, a recipe magazine, a bloodthirsty child's comic-strip magazine called Warlord, with a Tiger tank advancing menacingly from the cover, more DIY magazines and some pages furtively torn from a copy of The Perfumed Garden.

Philip Larkin thought that "what will survive of us is love." Maybe. Or maybe, only rustling scraps of ephemera will survive, feeble scraps of what we once were:

Come let us now consider the generations of man,
Compound of dust and clay, strengthless,
Tentative, passing away as leaves in autumn
Pass, shadows, wingless, forlorn,
Phantoms, deathbound, a dream.

Aristophanes

Comfort eating

Contemplating those zillions of pound of debt could make a person very depressed. Time to raid the fridge, I think...

Little blue pills

At last, what the world's been waiting for - the concentrated essence of Robert Peston in a bottle, as stumbled across in the Black Triangle blog....

Pink man sings the blues

I've not had much time to blog recently, so a short post is overdue. I'm in a rather sad and melancholy mood at the moment, but I suppose a bit of harmless blather won't do any harm.

My son has recently learned most of the words for common colours, It took a little time for him to distinguish between pink and red and it occurred to me that pink's quite an odd colour. Add bit of white to blue or green paint and you get light blue or green. What's so special about red that we need a separate word for light red? The English language is quirky and unpredictable but on this point at least, it's not alone. I'm no linguist, but Spanish, French and German also have words equivalent to pink, rather than naming the colour a lighter shade of red. So, in my small and unscientific sample of reasonably major languages, the same distinction is made.

I wonder, vaguely, if this means anything more significant than that, if you go back far enough, the languages have common roots, and/or may have borrowed words and concepts?

Interestingly, The Book of General Ignorance (a spin-off from the TV series QI), informs me that in Russian there are two entirely separate words for blue; "goluboi" and "sinii", approximately meaning "light blue" and "dark blue". Goluboi and sinii are seen as as distinct colours in Russian just as pink and red are are in English. I did check and, yes, Russian also classifies red and pink as separate colours rather than just different shades, just like English, French, Spanish and German.

I would be quite interested to know if there are languages which do just regard red and pink as shades of the same colour, but at the moment I'm feeling too tired and gloomy to use any energy finding out. Likewise it would be interesting to know why the colour blue is associated with a sad state of mind when we use the American expression "feeling blue", but again, I haven't got the energy at the moment. Not to mention the fact that, although interesting, it's probably not that important. Things that are important include being kind and giving your friends and loved ones the time, care and attention they deserve. If we forget to do that, we end up feeling blue and probably deserve to do so. Anyway, whilst the blues are around, it's sort of consoling to know that, put to music, melancholy can sometimes make a majestic sound.

Postcard

Tuning into the news is still a grim experience, but some things can help to put the current state of the world in perspective. I'm just looking at an old postcard featuring a black and white picture of a ship. The message isn't anything special, viz:

Dear Ronnie,

Hope you will soon be well again. Brian send his love and will write to you again.

Love from auntie

It was sent to my dad, then a boy of eleven, some time in 1941 (the exact date on the postmark is obscured). At the time he was in Lincoln County Hospital, recovering from a burst appendix - a serious condition which could have caused potentially fatal peritonitis. Times are hard, but I imagine it was harder in those days - born into a world in the grip of the great depression, topped off by a world war, then ending up in hospital with a life-threatening condition in the days before the National Health Service. Now that is an insecure world. So maybe I should be a bit more upbeat over a few depressing headlines.

My dad survived, (although I think he missed a lot of schooling due to an extended stay in hospital), and I found myself wondering about the fate of the ship on the postcard, the destroyer, HMS Icarus. The name wasn't a good omen, recalling the boy who flew too close to the sun and fell to earth. A quick Internet search revealed that HMS Icarus didn't suffer a similar fate, but survived service off Norway, in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean to be paid off and broken up for scrap in 1946. During her service career, she served in Atlantic and Russian convoys and the Dunkirk evacuation. She was also responsible for sinking two U-boats and participated in the destruction of two more. So the Icarus story wasn't the tragedy I'd feared, although she was almost on the scene of one of Britain's greatest naval tragedies. In May 1941, the battlecruiser HMS Hood was struck by a shell from the Bismark. One of her magazines exploded and she sank in about three minutes. There were only three survivors from Hood's crew of 1,418 men, picked up by the destroyer HMS Electra. HMS Icarus was on the scene shortly thereafter, but could find no more survivors, just debris.

Moving on

Today dawned drizzly, dank and depressing. It didn't help that Radio 4's Today programme's opening headline was a story about rapidly worsening unemployment figures, with worse to come, just to darken the mood (that was their lead story before the latest figures had even been published for heaven's sake). Not that I'm directly affected at the moment, although (like millions of others) I have plans which aren't exactly helped by the massive economic storm clouds presently obscuring most of the globe.

So I've decided not to dwell on what's going on with the economy. Nor will I harbour a grudge against the over-paid twits who have so spectacularly trashed so many ordinary people's dreams - even if an enraged mob were to arrange for them to be horse-whipped in the street, I wouldn't join in, firstly because hatred is an ugly and self-destructive state of mind, and secondly because quite a few of those alpha-male freaks would probably enjoy it in a Max Mosley-ish sort of way.

Instead, I'll just ponder some of the more interesting comments and lessons from the almighty mess - see here, here and here. And then move on, with a song in my heart and a tune on my lips....

There. Now I've got closure, a couple of other things I noticed today. Firstly, in a branch of W H Smiths, I noticed they had a entire shelf of books labelled "Tragic Life Stories" - not a category I'd previously felt the lack of, but I suppose it takes all sorts. Second, a company that my workplace does business with described themselves on their letterhead as installers of heating and solar systems. I must admit to being impressed - even the Magratheans from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy could only manage to produce custom-made planets. These guys, though, install of whole solar systems. Wow! If there's a market for those babies then the economy's as far from being screwed as Cliff Richard...

Allegro, adagio

Whilst I was ranting on about this and that, I see that the Austin Allegro's been voted Britain's worst ever car in some on-line poll. I've not driven enough cars to have a strong opinion on the matter, but I do remember that my dad had an Allegro at one point in the '70's. A blue estate it was, with nasty plastic seats which stuck to your legs despite the little indentations presumably designed to stop that happening. It may well have been Britain's worst ever motor - I don't know, I never drove it. I think it may have been the last car he ever drove - I have a feeling he had it up to '79, when he died. If so, it was a bit of a low note to go out on.

At least he was driving British built, made and designed cars to the last, though - before the "all aggro" he drove a Mini, a Hillman Minx and Hunter, and probably something else made in Britain in the years which are beyond my recall. It's a lost world - the roads full of cars made in this country, my dad in his tweed sports jacket, pipe clamped between his jaws (who smokes a pipe these days?), me in shorts and a little green jumper with reindeer on it, the twenty first century seemingly a million years in the future.

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again

Sentimental nonsense, I know - a lot of the days weren't that happy and we didn't always get on. Yet I miss those times, and him, still,

.

They wanted the World to hear their voice

This is something I stumbled across quite a while ago. I'm certainly not the first to discover and mention it in a blog post - when trying to find the recording again, I found an archived mention at Harry's Place over a year ago, but it came into my mind today and it bears repetition.

It's from a BBC radio report made by Patrick Gordon Walker after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, which concludes with surviving inmates singing the Zionist anthem, Hatikva (The Hope). Their collective experience of of grief and horror can hardly be imagined, so to hear the singing with any knowledge of the context is almost unbearably poignant. Listen to this and weep.

You know how little while we have to stay...

My mention of Linda Smith in yesterday's post prompted a few melancholy thoughts about loss. Mostly, I only grieve for the personal - the loss of people I know personally, the death of a dream, the inevitable sadnesses which go with life and death.

I'm not generally one of those people who's particularly touched by the passing of a high profile celebrity who I've never met and and can't claim to know. I don't think I'm heartless - I'm sure that the friends and family of the famous person are devastated and I feel a moment's sadness for them, but in a world of six billion people, you can't cry for everyone and the loss felt by those those close to the famous person is no more or less than that of millions of others bereft of someone they love just as dearly but who never made the headlines.

The loss which you only notice peripherally when glancing at a short paragraph on the inside page of a your free paper ("local mother dies after long illness") is just as real and raw as the death of somebody whose obituaries fill the TV news broadcasts and national newspapers - cause for a brief twinge of regret and sympathy, but no more, assuming you actually want to find time to pass your own life doing something other than mourning the passing of every stranger on Earth.

Occasionally, though, I do hear of the death of someone I've never met and feel a genuine sense of loss, when that person's work has inspired, amused, enlightened, or in some other way enriched my life. Inevitably, as I get older, I find that some of those who I've never met, but who made my world a brighter place are slipping away. Here are five from this century who left a gap:

Stephen Jay Gould - died May 20th 2002

An evolutionary scientist and writer of popular science books, he also had extraordinarily broad mental horizons, informing his books with his eclectic knowledge of and interest in history, the history of science, music, baseball, popular culture, literature and religion.

But it he wasn't just a polymath - he was also a an independently minded and very compassionate man, whose greatest service to his field of evolutionary biology was perhaps to point out forcefully that evolution is just a mechanism we see producing results in the natural world and not, as some more over-enthusiastic evolutionary psychologists have tried to argue, applicable to human morality, something which we should have the empathy and intelligence to work out for ourselves from first principles.

Erudite, endlessly curious and humane he was a bit of a renaissance man. I didn't always agree with him (for example I don't buy his idea that science and religion occupy wholly "non-overlapping magisteria" and should coexist quite happily without coming into conflict), but have always respected his courage (physical as well as moral, when facing cancer) and the sheer kindliness of the man.

John Peel (John Robert Parker Ravenscroft) - died October 25th 2004

To a rather gloomy late 1970's teenager who didn't quite fit in, discovering the John Peel show on Radio 1 was a revelation. A disc jockey who wasn't an over-excited dimwit filling the space between records with mental candy floss was a rare find in those days. Urbane, witty, avuncular, with a mind which went off on lots of interesting tangents, he also played music which you might not have always liked or understood, but which had flashes of strange brilliance. I remember lying in bed the first time I heard him play Laurie Anderson's O Superman and thinking "what the hell is that?" but enjoying the fact that it was eerily unlike anything I'd ever heard.

I'm still not very musically knowledgeable and my tastes have probably become dull and middle-aged in a way that Peel's never did, but his enthusiasm and persona were always a benign presence in the background of my formative years, like a wonderful virtual uncle, as I'm sure he has been to many other teenagers who discovered him at various points in his long and varied broadcasting career.

Linda Smith - died February 27th 2006

Voted the wittiest person on Radio 4, she was just an effortlessly funny performer. She combined having strong views (humanist, left-of-centre) with having a down to earth personality and warmth, which saved her comedy riffs from being rants. A sparkling antidote to the dreary pomposity of our PR-ridden age, she was sadly missed following her early death from ovarian cancer.

Arthur C Clarke - died March 19th 2008

It was the early 1970's. I'd already been incomprehendingly excited as a child by Thunderbirds, Star Trek and watching the moon landings, I'd been bought a copy of a magazine called Speed and Power, chiefly aimed, in those gender-stereotyped days at boys, which dealt with such fascinating topics as aeroplanes, fast cars, boats and rockets. At the back of the magazine was a science fiction short story by Arthur C Clarke, called Summertime on Icarus.

It was a relatively simple story. What gripped me at the time was the combination of imagination, strangeness and reality. Tiny Icarus, with it's airless skies, impossibly close horizon, dreamlike microgravity and infernal temperatures is an utterly alien place. Yet it's also a real place, described in precise detail. Not only real because Arthur C Clarke's imagination could make the non-existent come to life (although he could do that, too). But real in the sense that it actually exists out there, indeed Icarus is a place which humans could visit with existing technology (if anyone wanted to spend the money on such a project).

It's this combination of the imaginative with the reality of how awesomely strange the universe actually is, which gripped me. I devoured subsequent short stories in Speed and Power and went on to read Clarke's short story collections, novels and non-fiction. That experience gave me something infinitely valuable - a sense of perspective, of how miniscule my life, my experiences, my home planet, everything I know is, in comparison with a universe which is incomprehensibly huge and ancient and full of mystery. Excitement, awe, a little fear, a little pride that humans have been able to use reason to throw some light on a little part of that enormous mystery. Although Clarke was a secular humanist and so am I, I guess the feeling does have almost spiritual overtones - I may not do religion, but that doesn't mean I'm not occasionally overcome by feelings of wonder which transcend the construct I call "myself".



Humphrey Lyttleton - died 25th April 2008

I don't know a lot about jazz - I like a handful of pieces, but am shamefully ignorant about the form as a whole, so I can't say a lot about him as a jazz man. But as the long-standing host of I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue, he was just about the world's finest exponent of deadpan humour and wicked comic timing. In a world which sometimes seems to have precious little to laugh about, providing so many years of hilarity was a gift beyond price.

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.