Back to (Ab)Normal

So we’ve had International Women’s Day and other celebrations of the normally uncelebrated major part of humankind, the brouhaha is over, it’s non-alcoholic hangover time, and I find myself haunted by the unlovely word “misogyny”, meaning hatred of women. That sounds too harsh; to me it can mean a wide range of milder negative feelings and possible put-downs, for instance appreciating a new achievement but minimizing the role of the woman behind it.

A perfect example of this comes from the obituary of a Russian-American woman, Evelyn Berezin, who died recently at the age of 93. The obituary credits her with having changed office life forever by inventing and launching the first word processor in 1971, freeing millions of secretaries and copy typists from retyping whole documents because of a few small errors. Eventually it also swept away most of their jobs, as an unexpected side effect that Berezin deeply regretted.

Her photograph shows a plain, slightly overweight smiling woman at her keyboard, friendly but forgettable. Her achievements are all the more memorable: in the 1950s she became the only woman in the team of engineers working for the US Defence Department, and later produced a series of new sophisticated computerised systems. In 1960 she began work on the word processor and created a machine that she called the Data Secretary. From there on her career moved from one dazzling result to the next, and her company grew from having nine employees to 500. No need to spell out her other achievements –

Or is there? Not that it would do much for her. The obituary ends with these words:

“While her role in the digital revolution has not been much recognised, her machine, the Data Secretary is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.,”

It’s idle to wonder whether her role in the digital revolution would have been more recognised if she had been a man;  at least, unlike her memory, her machine has a safe future in a museum.

“It’s difficult not to write a satire”, wrote Horace  in Rome in the first century BCE.

Quite so.

Tut-tut, CRUK!

CRUK stands for Cancer Research UK, and it’s a widely known charity with shops in many High Streets all over the land. I have mixed feelings about its negative attitude towards alternative therapies, but then, as a semi-official body, it obviously has to toe the conventional line of cancer medicine. And that’s a pity, because medicine is supposed to be a science, and the motive force of any kind of worthwhile science should be curiosity, the quality Einstein warned us never to lose, the kind of unbiased sharp curiosity that asks “What if…?” and doesn’t tire of looking for an answer. In view of the dismal global cancer statistics, any promising alternative approach should be researched and tested, instead of dismissed sight unseen. (Having myself recovered from Stage 4 metastasized malignant melanoma 35 years ago on a nutrition-based alternative therapy, I know what I am talking about. But that’s another story.)

However, right now what I object to is CRUK’s choice of slogans. To put it mildly, they are inept. “Against breast cancer” is one of them, combined with a pink ribbon to wear on your lapel. Against, sure —- is anybody for it? You might just as well be “Against climate change” or “Against knife crime” for all the good it’ll do. The other daft slogan invites us to “Beat cancer sooner”. Sooner than what? Is there a deadline for the ultimate victory? Based on what? Why don’t they tell us?  And that’s not all: the imagery used on some posters is also worrying. I remember with distaste a photo of a scientist in a white coat  intently gazing into a microscope in his laboratory, while next to him stands a woman in an overcoat, holding an armful of second-hand clothes presumably donated to the charity. Not exactly hygienic, to say the least, but at last  something real to be against.

However, what preoccupies me at the moment is what I heard recently in a radio news bulletin, namely that according to some researchers the growing incidence of male breast cancer might be linked to more men using deodorants and antiperspirants. Of course  women have been using the same products for a long time and yes, there is plenty of breast cancer among the female population, so that’s worth pondering.  After all, deodorants are applied to the underarm area which is full of lymph nodes, so that anything toxic is promptly absorbed, so near to the sensitive breast tissue. This was truly alarming.  I immediately moved to CRUK’s web page and found, among many things, the following: “2006-03-10-little-scientific-link-between-deodorant-and-cancer-says-cancer-research-uk”. The inveterate researcher in me wanted more details – how “little” is that scientific link, for instance? who funded the research? did the researchers have any connection to the cosmetics industry? – but when I found another link, promising information on “causes-of-cancer/cosmetics-and-toiletries#” and clicked on it, up came the reply:  “Sorry – the page you are looking for can’t be found.”  That seemed odd. I would have expected CRUK, recipient of huge donations and great public support, to be better organised. Or maybe somebody wasn’t looking very hard for the answer?

Undeterred, I went over to “http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/”, only to be fobbed off with “This page can’t be displayed.” Really? Well then, where on earth can a bona fide interested party get some reliable information about a topic that concerns us all?

Clearly, not from the obvious source. I have long felt that acquiring knowledge must be a grassroots effort, largely individual, but hopefully becoming a spontaneous group effort, so that the more of us ask the right questions, the greater the chance of getting the right answers.

Sorry, CRUK, the way things are at present,  I am not impressed. In return, don’t be surprised if I stonily ignore your innumerable demands for donations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DIY – or rather not?

I have a soft spot for Google. The very name is endearing – to me at least it smacks of the nursery, belonging to a slightly battered  favourite toy. More importantly, the programme itself is the greatest ever time-saver and tracker of references, providing information for which in pre-Google days (feels like the last Ice Age) one had to traipse to the reference section of the nearest Public Library and painstakingly dig out the needed data. So I follow all news concerning Google with interest, which is how I came across the following information (quoting from memory):

Google’s voice-activated Assistant Duplex can carry out entire phone conversations by itself. This technology has been worked on for many years and is still being developed, to help consumers do daily tasks, such as booking hair appointments or making restaurant reservations.

Eh? But surely consumers have been coping with those tasks ever since hairdressers and restaurants have existed, or more precisely since we’ve had telephones. What difference will it make whether I or Duplex books my much-needed hairdo? Actually Duplex could make a total mess of this simple task, as – unlike I – it can’t check other entries in my diary. The whole idea is a no-brainer, and to hear that many years of hard work have been invested in its development sounds depressing. “Mountains are in labour, a ridiculous small mouse will be born,” Horace wrote over 2000 years ago, and a better metaphor could hardly be found. Are there no other tasks for our awesome technological skills to carry out?

But perhaps I should scrutinize the true motivation behind the invention of Duplex. And the first thing that springs to mind is that according to C.G.Jung, the human being’s greatest passion is idleness. Now it’s safe to assume that Jung knew what he was talking about, but even so his view is confirmed by a somewhat downbeat text I once saw in a collection of international folk wisdom:

“It’s better to sit than to stand, better to lie down than to sit, better to sleep than just lie down, better to be dead than just asleep.” Well, that seems a trifle drastic and we can safely ignore it. What remains is the lasting love of idleness – workaholics, please stop reading – and its immediate result: the need to find someone or something that’ll do the necessary work instead of us. To achieve that should be enough for the average idler, but there’s the added pleasure of superiority, of having Duplex – or Alexa or the increasing army of electronic slaves – to do our bidding.

The more I ponder this, the less attractive we people sound, even if having electronic slaves instead of human ones sounds a great improvement. Also, the principle of “use it or lose it” chimes in a warning. Just imagine, if we gradually transferred all useful activities to Duplex-style electronic assistants , becoming unskilled in the process, and one day the global supply of electricity would run out (as we are told it will ), we would quickly perish from sheer helplessness. Which might be a chance for the Duplex lot, boosted by Artificial Intelligence, to take charge of the world.

But hang on! All that passivity and idleness is only half the story.  Put against it the lasting popularity of DIY in home and garden, the innumerable brave and often calamitous attempts to make one’s personal world a better place, and the gloom begins to rise. Personally I’m immune to any such ambition but still  remember my amazement when a highly erudite friend boasted to me of his greatest ever achievement – replacing some cracked tiles in his bathroom. The way he sounded, he might have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it’s time for me to revise my set of values.

So here we are, passionately idle and passive on the one hand and hyperactive and creative on the other. No advanced version of Duplex will ever combine those two opposites. We are a crazy mixed-up lot, and I just love it.

 

Beware of the Glass Floor

“Upskirting” is the latest addition to the English language, proving its ability to  condense a complicated process into one snappy word. It means nothing less than “taking a photo of underneath a person’s skirt without their consent, often in public places”. The official definition gains extra gravitas from the added warning, “This can cause emotional distress for a long time after it has happened”. Well, there is an alternative to distress. Surely if an ill-advised male came sufficiently close to me to commit this idiotic act, he would also be close enough for me to kick him into flight. No, I’m not a brutal amazon, just an ordinary female getting tired of  women complaining when they could take positive action.

I know what I am talking about. Many years ago one fine summer evening around 8 p.m. I was walking home in a respectable part of  West London when a man leapt out from behind a tall garden wall and dragged me into the garden. He was Scottish, he was very drunk, and he kept muttering about the so-and-so who’d done him wrong, all of which made my prospects dim. So I talked to him and maintained eye contact, as instructed by self-help manuals, until he began to cry and asked me to take him to the police station. This, I felt, was not my job and ran home fast.

The next day I enrolled at a self-defence class for women. There were ten of us of all ages and sizes and the instructor was a very capable girl. I was paired with a six-foot-tall Frenchwoman who lifted and swung me over her shoulder as if I had been a shawl. We went on for a few weeks, but then the group shrank until it was no longer viable and the few remaining members were offered to train with a men’s group. Three of us volunteered. The men treated us with the utmost tenderness; for the only time in my life I felt like a piece of priceless china; this also meant that we didn’t learn any self-defence skills, and that was the end of that. Nowadays I carry a little alarm gadget that utters a sound as shrill as a police siren. I fear its effects on my hearing, never mind that of my attacker.

Upskirting is an illegal offence in Scotland, not in England or Wales, but likely to become so under the heading of voyeurism or indecency. And so it should be. There are enough camera phones around to justify a little censorship. Anyway, this seems to be a camera-mad time, with selfies spreading like an epidemic and highly resistible family photos trailing every other e-mail. However, I’ve just come across a story from the 10th century BCE which cheered me up enormously, because it shows that a version of  upskirting was practised already then, moreover by the wisest and most powerful of men, namely King Solomon himself.

When a visit from the Queen of Sheba was due, Solomon had a glass floor laid from the entrance to his throne. The Queen mistook the glass for water and lifted the hem of her dress, uncovering her legs which, to Solomon’s consternation, were as hairy as that of a goat; worse still, the Queen had one normal foot and one goat’s hoof. Solomon actually reprimanded his visitor for this anomaly; this, to my mind, was not only unwise but very rude and unfeeling as well. All right, Solomon had up to 20 main wives and 80 to 100 secondary wives, numbers which obviously lowered the value of women, but surely a visiting Queen should have received special treatment.

However, I shouldn’t have worried, because despite all the above in due course the Queen of Sheba gave birth to Solomon’s son, called Menelik, which means “son of the Wise”. So this 3000-year-old ancient scandal of the upskirting glass floor ultimately led to a happy outcome.

Of course these days women have to worry about the glass ceiling, not the glass floor.  But that’s another story.

 

 

 

 

A Quick Tour of the Place Below

Did he or did he not deny the existence of Hell? The controversy about the official opinion of Pope Francis may still be going on – I’ve lost track of its progress – but it reminded me of the time, some years ago, when I was vividly interested in the subject, although not for religious reasons. History of Art was one of my subjects at university, and when it came to selecting a subject for my dissertation, I chose the various depictions, both verbal and pictorial, of the underworld and particularly its infernal region. This was partly a reaction to too many sugary Madonnas and Babies, preferred by my professor, but mainly a rebellious wish to explore a fairly unpopular subject.

The first thing I discovered was that climate determined the prevalent temperature of Hell. In hot countries it was unbearably scorching, but up in the far North Pohjola was a dark, terrible and forever frozen place of icy despair. Ancient Greece chose a moderate climate for an underworld that wasn’t particularly hellish; indeed, its worst feature was the three-headed dog Cerberus guarding the entrance to Hades, its best (in my view) Lethe, the river of oblivion, washing away all memories and, by doing that, healing all wounds.

Continuing my search in Southern Europe, Dante’s Inferno with its nine concentric circles of torment almost made me abandon my project: it was so perfect, so superbly organised and all-embracing that it seemed futile to move beyond it. It offered a rich menu of sins – lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery, which, except for heresy, are still practised today, and each variety was illustrated with poignant real-life stories of the sinners who were stuck there for all eternity. But then I realized that it was enough to read the morning paper with a special focus to find gorgeous current examples of those sins. Clearly, lust was behind the inappropriate behaviour of more or less eminent men reported almost daily (sorry, chaps, women can’t catch up with you here, and this gender gap has to be treasured), gluttony cum greed was behind the wave of obesity hitting us, wrath and violence were the parents of conflict, fraud fed the financial pages of the press, and treachery wasn’t hard to find, for instance in politics. But since we live in a secular society, the “sin” bits don’t come into the story; neither does the fear of ending up in Hell.  There are other fears – ending up in prison, going bankrupt, becoming a social pariah, losing foolishly one’s  celebrity status and so forth, but somehow these lack the dark glamour of one’s individual version of the infernal region.

My project suddenly grew wings with the discovery of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the 16th century Dutch painter of superhuman imagination. His depictions of Hell can be studied endlessly without solving the multiple puzzles of his symbols. Little wonder: it seems clear that Bosch was playing a double game, painting images that were outwardly acceptable to the Church authorities and his wealthy patrons, but hiding  behind them was the message of the medieval Cathar heresy. Once I entered the world of Bosch, there was no need for much else…years later I still haven’t solved his intricate, beautiful puzzles and go back to them every time the current world becomes dreadfully colourless.

Yes, Hell is a subject of endless fascination. Still plenty to explore in its depths. And it comes as a let-down to remember the much-quoted dictum of Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the peak intellects of the 20th century. He simply said, “Hell is other people.”

 

 

Welcome to the Madhouse

“Oh, cheer up,” said my irrepressible friend on the phone, “Spring is coming, the first daffodils are out, why are you so gloomy?” I gave a non-answer and changed the subject. But afterwards I made a quick mental list of the strictly non-personal reasons, the ones concerning every single one of us, for my mood that was as cloudy and chill as the February afternoon outside, with no  precocious daffodils able to brighten it.

O.K., this is what happened that day. I switched on the radio and gathered that global sea levels had risen in the 20th century at nearly double their previous rate. Coastal habitats have been devastated, soils eroded and contaminated, flooding doubled, and with the glaciers melting we can no longer stop the process, only slow down its pace. (I live near the Thames and yes, recently the tides looked pretty swollen – surely West London isn’t yet on the list of doomed habitats?)

Switch off radio. Pick up morning paper. Long piece full of statistics about human overpopulation. Every 12-15 years we add another billion to our bulging masses, I read, and the impact on the environment is devastating. An expert called it “A barrel of explosives”. Oops – as these days explosives figure often in the daily news, this makes me shiver. Overconsumption, loss of tree cover, inadequate fresh water, starvation, increased pollution, new epidemics, you name it, we’ll have it.

As if this weren’t sufficient, the scientific journal that arrives in the mail confirms that at present  we are using up the renewable resources of 1.7 Earths, and by 2050 we’ll need three Earths to keep us going. Where on…no, where outside Earth are we going to find them? Just to pick out one grim detail, in the last 40 years our planet lost one third of its arable land, due to erosion and over-cultivation. Beyond a certain limit artificial fertilisers can’t make up for the loss of healthy fertile soil; first the quality and eventually the quantity of the crops plummets and all that remains is dead soil and the fertiliser run-off poisoning rivers and brooks. More people, less soil to grow food for them – surely something is very wrong here?

Enough is enough. Can’t take any more gloom and doom. Instead, I browse the sunnier uplands of the internet and read the messages of  the various civilian groups that, scattered all over the world, swim against the mainstream, trying to mitigate the damage caused by the unwisdom of the Establishment. Crowd funding, signatures by the milli0n, powerful  grass root initiatives  which succeed against heavy odds: things begin to look and feel  hopeful. No, perhaps it’s not too late, it’s still seven whole minutes to midnight. If those in power, the global decision-makers applied themselves to the task, they could stop the rot and start the healing process. End spending unimaginable fortunes on arms and plant forests instead. Feed the starving. Make contraception available everywhere to curb population growth. Educate and empower women and girls to add their special gifts to community life. Teach men to express their anger by non-violent means.

Wow, what a beautiful programme. It covers several topical needs. The next step is to involve those in power, the ones not caught up in corruption, fraud, nepotism or sex scandals to get going, inspire and lead us towards success. Surely they are aware of the huge risks of the moment and are busy seeking solutions?

So what does President Trump, head of the world’s No.1. superpower  think about all this? Well, actually he doesn’t. He’s preoccupied with the utterances of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and sends him this message: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

If it weren’t about the possibility of nuclear annihilation, this would remind me of nothing more important than small boys arguing behind the bicycle shed, on the level of “my Daddy is bigger/stronger/richer than yours”, or, more ominously, “my knife is bigger/ sharper/more expensive than yours”. Unfortunately this time the parallel doesn’t work, except in the lunatic logic of the madhouse.

And then my friend on the telephone wonders why I sound so gloomy.

 

 

 

Let Them Eat Plastic

“Let them eat cake” is what Queen Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said on being told that the poor peasants of France had no bread to eat. From what is known about her kindly nature she probably did n0t say it, but even if she did, she would have been motivated by ignorance and royal remoteness from the realities of poverty and famine.

No such excuse applies to one of the greatest powers of today, namely the Food Industry. According to a recent report in The Guardian, “Half of all the food bought by families in Britain is now ‘ultra-processed’, made in a factory with industrial ingredients and additives invented by food technologists and bearing little resemblance to the fruit, vegetables, meat or fish used to cook a fresh meal at home.”

Wow. So now it’s official. “The Food Industry makes us sick,” says a weary doctor friend of mine, “then passes us on to Big Pharma which extends our lifespan, allowing us to eat more junk food.” He is exceptional in realizing the food-health link: medical training spends scandalously little time on teaching the subject. Hence the vagueness of otherwise excellent doctors when asked about dietary matters. “Try eating a good balanced diet”, they say ; the rest is silence.

Having spent half my adult life studying the connection between food and health, viz. ill-health, I can’t fault my doctor friend’s diagnosis. Ultra-processed foods look good, taste reasonable and smell authentic, thanks to some 3000 “food cosmetics” used Europe-wide to produce the taste, looks and smell of emasculated foods that have been stripped of  their own natural characteristics. Or even of their substance, like fake noodles that consist of oils, starch and additives…

So if half of all the food  bought by families in Britain belongs to this ultra-processed variety, it’s time to look at the cause-and-effect side of the story. Psychologists tell us that children understand the link between cause and effect from the age of seven; can it be that some adults, including decision-makers, don’t? Yes, we all want the NHS to be properly funded and able to function at its best, but no amount of funding will be sufficient while people methodically eat themselves sick and obese.

What’s the answer? Not official guidance from above; as a rule that sparks off immediate resistance in suspicious citizens, with shouts of “No nanny state!” as a soundtrack. My answer is a new brand of food populism, a recognition and use of consumer power which is often obscured by brilliant advertising and avalanches of special offers. Yet we consumers have the power of choice, of saying yes to some products and a resounding no to others.

This food populism has already started at grassroots level,  led by an – as yet – small minority of rebellious consumers. They buy fresh organic produce wherever they can find it, cut down on red meat and cut out sugary snacks and  soft drinks. Some club together and arrange with an organic farmer to grow the foods they require, against guaranteed payment. Others subscribe to a weekly box scheme.And no, this needn’t be the “niche” indulgence of the well-off:  the money you save by boycotting non-foods and spending it on the real stuff leaves you well within your budget.

One of my informal rules is to avoid any food that has a long list of ingredients, many of them positively alarming. Again thanks to the Guardian, I now know that a Mr Kipling Angel Slice, a  top national favourite. has 22 ingredients, including red colour derived from insects. Compare this to a tin where under ingredients I find “Organic Red Kidney Beans and Water. And that’s it!” Rather endearing.

Lots more to say, but the long and the short of it is that we have choice in matters of what we eat and we have only ourselves to blame if we don’t use it.

We don’t have to eat plastic. Honestly.

 

 

 

Porch Door Blues

My house, in a quiet nook of West London, is officially described as a Victorian workman’s cottage, and as it is one of a terrace of similar buildings protected by a conservation order, a Victorian workman would easily recognize it. True, before the order came into force, a few residents attempted to turn their houses into Regency “villas” by demolishing the bay windows and investing in fancy door furniture, but the total impression is that of solid, no-nonsense redbrick houses, with porches.

Until you’ve had a porch with a custom-made door (be warned, it costs a lot) you don’t realize how useful a thing it is. It puts an extra layer of defence between you and the road and saves some heat in winter;  it’s a fairly safe place to leave smallish parcels, dripping umbrellas and muddy boots and, fitted with an automatic sensor light that comes on after dark, it makes would-be burglars and other no-good boyos depart pretty fast.

The only snag with my porch door is that some callers don’t shut it when they leave, so that the prevailing easterly wind knocks it against the neighbour’s fence, damaging the paintwork and making an annoying noise.. So I started creating appealing notices, using the best colours and fonts my computer could produce, saying “Please shut this door – thank you”. I thought this would do the trick, but I was wrong: every day several callers, including those undeterred by my stern “NO JUNK MAIL” notice, come and go —and leave the door open.

Now there is more to this than damaged paint and noisy knocks. What it’s really about is the culprits’ total disregard of other people’s wishes, in this case mine, as the owner of the door. It’s the same disregard that makes people in crowded cafés pull out their chairs when they leave and not push them back, turning the place into a kind of obstacle race, or that lets women in public places concentrate on their smartphones while their infants scream, roar or sob (the smaller the child, the stronger its voice), making no attempt to calm them, while the rest of us suffer mutely and/or send forgiving thoughts to King Herod.

This social trend, to give it a polite name, reminds me of the teaching of the great  Austrian philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) who first formulated two modes of existence as the “I – Thou” and the “I – It” varieties. These refer to human relationships: in the case of “I – It” the “I”  regards the other person as a separate object which can be used or experienced; in the “I – Thou” variety there is a relationship between equals where the other is linked to, not separated from the “I”. Granted, Buber had in mind one-to-one relationships, but his idea can be stretched to cover the” Individual – Collective” juxtaposition as well. In everyday life, out in the world,  most of us manage in the “I – It” modality, but switch to the “I – Thou” version when disaster strikes and helping others, relating to their distress, becomes as natural as breathing.

Bang – there goes my porch door, being left open once more,  as usual, by our grim, humourless postman who may be suffering from “job fatigue” or permanent indigestion: no good trying to talk him into better ways. I’ll just let him go and then nip out to shut the door. Meanwhile, to let off steam, I draft the text of the notice I’d really like to display on the central glass panel of the door. Something like “Unless you can’t read, don’t understand English or are hopelessly stupid, please shut this door!”

But then of course the individuals I have in mind wouldn’t read my notice anyway.

There are times when the only correct attitude is to admit defeat. This is one of them.

 

 

 

 

 

Use It Or….

Two recent news items have lowered my spirits and raised my blood pressure in equal measure. Both concern students and therefore our future, and the picture they paint is not reassuring. Firstly, I learn, students’ handwriting has become so illegible that Cambridge University is considering letting undergraduates use laptops in exams, since – according to examiners – a reliance on computers has left young people unable to use a pen. Well yes, for some time now I’ve been noticing some truly alarming  signatures on impeccably typed official letters, nasty scrawls bearing no resemblance to the name of the alleged signatory; indeed, looking as if the writer had held the pen in his clenched fist, not knowing what else to do with it.  Is this becoming the New Normal?

Secondly, freshers at universities across the country are being issued with colourful wristbands printed with the name of their hall of residence, to help them get home after a night out. Apparently this will be useful for those who get so drunk that they can’t tell the cab driver where to take them.

Ouch, twice over. Not being able to use a pen slams the door on a peak achievement of human beings, the ability to make marks on a surface – mammoth tusk, clay tablet, parchment, marble, paper – that translate into words and meaning. These marks have to be made, not delivered by a clicked key. But once this unique ability is lost, and if for some reason one day laptops no longer work, what remains? Do we have to start all over again, trying to remember which line goes where, meaning what? As for those colourful wristbands, they could cost a lot of money to a sloshed reveller who happens to collapse in the cab of a less than scrupulous driver and is taken home via a long, meandering route.

What I find so depressing is that in neither case is an attempt made by the powers that be, in this case the university authorities, to correct what is  obviously wrong. By allowing the use of laptops in exams they sanction the loss of handwriting skills among our future intellectual elite. (The rot has already set in: an apparently well educated young woman I know prints all her messages in wobbly, childish block letters, joined-up writing being beyond her.) Besides putting the few remaining graphologists out of work, the end of individual, highly personal handwriting is an impoverishment, another loss of our modest uniqueness. (By the way, I have nothing against laptops: they are good servants but  make dangerous masters.)

As for the wristbands – well, their official message seems to be that it’s perfectly all right for a student to get hopelessly, idiotically drunk, as long as he or she lands in the correct hall of residence. Wouldn’t it be better to launch a culture of intelligent drinking in which alcohol heightens enjoyment, creativity and camaraderie, instead of turning the drinker into an irritating, helpless oaf? Sorry if I sound virtuous, that’s about the last thing I am, but I lived long enough in France and Italy, neither country being remotely teetotal, to know what I am talking about. In my view  binge drinking and enjoyment exist on different planets.

What links these cases is their drift towards the line of least resistance. “Let’s make it easy for the users” seems to be the official line. And ease is, of course, the highest value of the consumer society. Things have to be co-operative and  friendly in order to be desired and bought. I often feel baffled when something I buy claims to be easy to use – well, of course, I don’t expect my new dress to resist when I try to put it on, or my ballpoint pen (yes, I do write by hand) to spit ink at me when I pick it up; nor do I like to be assured that the book I’ve just bought is easy to read. I’d rather decide that for myself, thank you.

O.K., I’ll come clean. I’ve come to hate the supremacy of “ease”. It removes the need for effort, for using our abilities to achieve small victories and keep the flab off body and mind. (I’ve just noticed that the most topical rhyme for “ease” is “obese”, the plague of the so-called developed countries which is also spreading to others where people adopt the Western diet. It was an American friend who pointed out to me that the acronym for the Standard American Diet is SAD…) C.G.Jung once claimed that the human being’s greatest passion is idleness, and he was probably right. Of course the ideal consumer is passive, idle, easy (here we go again) to brainwash into consuming ever more stuff that’s neither wanted nor needed. “Death is the consumer’s last resistance,” wrote Ivan Illich. I like to think that there are less drastic escape routes, too, even though far from being easy they require some effort and plenty of common sense.

I’m already working on mine. What about you?