Moving House

Life is trade offs, at least it is when you are on a tight budget.

We have moved from a spacious flat in a fairly fashionable area to a smaller flat in an unfashionable area. Why? Because at the same time we have gone from a damp, draughty, cold home where we couldn’t face another winter to a lovely warm, dry one that is a pleasure to just lounge around in. It’s also cheaper, but unfurnished, so the difference will mostly have been spent on furniture. Trade offs everywhere.

It’s also why I haven’t posted for a while.

Rules of life learnt in the lab

In the past I have brought you lists of life tips from such luminaries as Kim Stanley Robinson and me.

Today’s tips come courtesy of Kary Mullis, scientist and Nobel Prize winner (he invented PCR):

Always use a funnel when pouring acetone from a large bottle to a small one.

Drink tea not coffee.

Be sensible, you’re a scientist [only applies to some people]

I should hope the first was not contestable, as all right-thinking people would agree.  I drink both tea and coffee but if I had to give one up I would give up coffee.  As for the last one, well if you read his book Dancing Naked in the Mindfield, you will realise that he didn’t really follow that one.

Reality check – UK spending “cuts”

Time for some evidence-based blogging, particularly in light of recent trade union idiocy, and the on-going fantasy-based world of Labour.

Nothing complicated, nothing new (data courtesy of Adam Smith, and no doubt elsewhere), but curiously missing from “the narrative”.  The graph below shows the extent of the spending “cuts”.

Oh look, spending is going up.  Not down, but up; the opposite of down.  Spending, you might say, is increasing; that is, more is being spent.  The distance of spending from zero is increasing over time, in a positive direction.  If we had a pile of pound coins representing the spending for each year, the later piles would be taller than the earlier piles.  Truly, Thatcher walks among us once more (because she never cut spending either).

Getting rid of mornings

I am Not A Morning Person.

This really put’s a downer on every work day – it’s not good for me and it’s certainly not good for The Girlfriend, who has to put up with my moroseness and general inability to speak or even make eye contact.

The solution?  I can’t just snap out of it, I don’t think that ever really works, so I have decided to get rid of my mornings, or at least minimise them.  Now that I am cycling to work I have found that once riding I am alive and ready to face the world, so I’m going to leave the house straight away in the mornings, and have breakfast at work.  I should also pack my bag and make my lunch the night before.  This will reduce my mornings from 45 minutes of sullenness to the 5 minutes it takes to get out of bed, but some clothes on, pick up my bag, and leave the house.

Don’t try and will your life to be better – change your patterns and routines to make better inevitable.

Freecycle, the GDP subversives

As I’m sure you know, Freecycle is an email listing service whereby you offer or request goods for free.  No payment or swapping allowed; the etiquette is that your first post should be an offer rather than a request.

We are about to move to a smaller place and are taking the opportunity to reduce our clutter.  We took two Tesco delivery crates worth of books to Oxfam.  Some things have gone on Amazon and sold very quickly, some things have gone on Freecycle and have also gone quickly – everything had been claimed within 1 hour, and only one of the items was even in full working order.

I’m feeling a bit subversive about the financial system at the moment – fiat money, wasted taxes, the works – perhaps I’m reading the tinfoil-hatters too much; so Freecycle appeals to me.  I like the fact that people’s needs are met, but it doesn’t show up in the statistics – no GDP growth, no jobs growth, no whatever.  But surely it is our patriotic duty to go out and spend, to “create jobs”?  It is not.  Your duty, to you and your dependants if you have them, is to make sure your needs are met (without breaking the law, obviously), and that is it.  If you can do that for free, so much the better.  Jobs are a cost of production, not a benefit.  Beware a government “creating jobs”, they can only do this by taking money from the bits of the economy that were already creating jobs, thank you very much.

But if we get more things for free, and use fewer people to make the things we DO buy, won’t that “cost jobs”?  No, it won’t. Consider the Industrial Revolution.  In one sense you could look on this as one long succession of inventions of labour-saving (that is, job destroying) devices.  Surely after all that there must be no jobs left by now?  In round numbers, the industrial revolution started in the UK in 1750.  At this time, the population of England was around 6 million. It is now around 50 million.  Lots of jobs then, lots of jobs now.

Print is here to stay

Alright Bogue, I’ll bite.

I’m sure my inner Luddite will continue to get slowly eroded and in five years time I’ll have a Kindle or read all my books on my computer.  However, for me they are NOT a replacement for print books, and never will be.

With a book, unless you actually put it down and walk away, you have to follow through the narrative the author has set you, whether it is describing a story or an idea.  It is a deep connection between reader and writer, which is reinforced by the length and linear nature of a book.  I do not have the same discipline on a computer.  I google, click links, get distracted – I find it difficult to follow the narrative the writer has laid out for me with all those distractions.  Of course, it can be useful to check Wikipedia half way through an article or chapter, or follow up a train of thought; but this is different to how you read a book.  That is why digital books won’t replace print books.  Digital may become dominant, but it will not be a like-for-like swap, but the gaining of one thing and the losing of another.

I want to stop

I want to stop.

I want to stop repeating the same thing every day no longer knowing why and barely caring; I want to stop having to concentrate so hard on not falling off that I don’t know where I am, where I’m heading or how fast I am going.  I want to stop being jammed in the centre of a pack, a flock, all headed somewhere, all headed to the same place, but where that is I don’t know and neither does anyone else.  I want to stop.

If only I could stop.

If only I could stop, I could take a look around at where I am and where I am heading, but I can’t.  If only I could stop I could look back at where I have come from, and I would see the turnings I might have taken.  They’re all grown over now, impenetrable and clogged with weeds, and I can’t take those turnings any more but there might be some more up ahead.  If only I could stop, I could find those turnings and make sure I don’t miss them like the last ones.

I can’t stop.

I can’t stop though, so I’ll probably miss those turnings, because I am too busy pedalling and concentrating on the ground immediately in front of me, trying to avoid the mundane pits and rocks that can knock you off, but not having time to check my course.  I can’t stop, and I never will, until I run out of road which has followed a route that I didn’t choose.

Then I’ll stop, and look at all the turnings I missed.