Tom's Notes—Ed Miliband: wait, what?

You know...

Let's be honest...

I get it...

Let's be honest...

I've always been very clear...

Let's be honest...

The rhetoric of Ed Miliband; we've got 4 years of this ahead. I think the over-arching thought, that no-one dares speak yet, is "wait, what?"

Ed Miliband leading the Labour party was a pleasant fiction during nomination. But now the fiction has become reality, no-one seems sure that they're sure this was for the best. The amount of media coverage older brother David still attracts suggests the media thinks it was a gaffe. The mechanical reception to his inaugural speech yesterday sets out regular party members' view of Ed. And the general public having little to absolutely no idea who Ed Miliband is says it all.

Here's my take: read again the rhetorical tics of Ed Miliband above—for what he's really like, think of the opposite.

Just wait and see.

Tom's Notes—Football Philosophy

During the World Cup, rivers of ink - Guardian ink particularly - were spilled gushing over the Spanish "ticki-tacka" or "ticky-tacky" or whatever you like to call their style of relentlessly tapping the ball about between each other. The couscous-salad-and-Helvetica crowd love ticki-tacka. They say it's the future of football. "Football 2.0."

Continentals tend to have "a system" like this. And know-it-alls are always saying we should adopt one of them.

[The systems, not the smarty-pantses or Continentals—I presume.]

The Italians have their Catenaccio. The Brazilians Samba; the Germans icy aggression—I'll call it Terminator style. The Dutch have Total Football, and the Argentinians, well, the Argentinians have Lio Messi...

Save the Dutch, all these nations have won a World Cup (and the Dutch have come bloody close, twice). So, there's something to be said about their systems.

I say: they're all dead ends.

I liken it to philosophy. The European nations had great philosophers, and those great philosophers (mostly) were in the tradition of "system builders." They'd think up one fundamental thought from which everything else flowed. Leibniz and Monads; Kant and Noumena; Descartes and his Cogito; and so on. Like a pyramid turned on its head, the body of knowledge, according to them, stood on one principle or rule or axiom. The problem there is obvious—take that one brick away and the whole thing falls down.

It's the same with football philosophy. Predicate everything you do on one principle or rule or axiom - in other words, have "a system" - and you're destined to fail, monumentally. When it goes, the whole shabang goes.

Back to philosophy, what did-in the European thinkers? British Empiricism did. It was the opposite of Continental philosophy: the artifice of human knowledge (who knows if it's a pyramid or not!) was to be built brick by brick, by something akin to "fill in the blanks." Rather than tearing down the whole lot and trying to work bottom up from one thing, the empiricists left everything in place and just went from "well, what works and what doesn't." Find something that seems like it works, keep it; find something that seems like it doesn't work, ditch it; and sod the implications of both. Simple as that. Empiricism, as a result, turned out to be a very mixed bag, but that mixed bag - and the way we got it - laid the foundations for the scientific method and the only continuing form of philosophy—Analytic.

When you think about it, mixed bags tend to work out for the best: Hitler was forced to admit, at his end, that the mixed-race Slavs were the master race (we're all mixed race to some degree though Adolf!); an average car with an average radio is more useful in daily life than a supercar with no radio or a top-of-the-range home audio system and no car; minestrone soup is better than tomato soup.

So being Empirical about our football is better than being dogmatic about it. It's the tradition of no tradition. And it's ours.

We should stick to it.

Tom's Notes—Wordsmiths

I don't know about you, but when I need to check a word my first port of call is always The Free Dictionary online. So I was surprised it didn't get a mention in the Guardian's Online dictionaries: which is best?

Strange.

Reading through the talkback on the above article, I was chastened by how many snooty wordsmiths there are. There's even a word for them: prescriptivists. I prefer "snooty."

Though the free dictionary serves my casual purposes, there are times when I have to be 100% sure (and a little bit snooty) about a word—that's when the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and Oxford Concise come out. 9 times out of 10, I find the free dictionary still had it right.

Sometimes though, I disagree with all three.

Rather than being a prescriptivist or a descriptivist—I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. And I mean this in the best traditions of Wittgensteinian thinking. Ultimately, what we've decided words mean trumps dictionary definitions. Because what we say is more important than what we write.

I'll tell you why: written words are artificial. You don't think in letters; you think in vowels and consonants, in sounds. With a voice not a keypad. Writing is an invention that humans are still trying to build-in to the species: reading and writing have to be taught at school, but there's no class for learning how to vocalize—that's instinctive. Watch a young child learning to read, what are they taught to do? Read out the words. Older children may not engage the voice, but you still see their mouth silently annunciating. It holds true all the way to adulthood: the most important thing to a writer is his voice not his pen—he knows you are listening to him and not just scanning glyphs on a page.

The spoken word is like the flesh around the muscle and bone of cognition's hand. Written words are like a glove over the hand. Think of getting your keys out and opening the front door with gloves on—not easy is it. Same thing with written communication.

So what we say has more credence than what we write. The phrase "there's a few problems" doesn't cause any problems in conversation; but write it down and suddenly problems appear. I'm sympathetic to arguments that orthodoxy for phrases like "there's a few problems" debases the language—but this puts the cart before the horse.

Nevertheless, there's no denying the importance of dictionaries to human communication.

So which one is your favourite?

Tom's Notes—Home or Away

Not knowing where home is makes feeling homesick a confusing business.

I'm English, so you'd think England would always be "home" for me. But I never knew what I loved about England until I went to live in Japan.

Life, in practice, was better in Tokyo: customer service was excellent; there were more cafes, record stores, clothes shops and commodities from around the world, than any other place I've been; it was safe; it was affluent. But it was ugly. I'll be frank. The Japanese idea of a park is often just a tree with an uncomfortable bench next to it—some ghastly granite statue or concrete fountain put in for good measure. No pomp no majesty; nothing even close to the architectural and natural splendour citizens of London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona, Prague, Moscow, Washington, or New York enjoy. The new the old, the natural—it was all equally hideous. I realized that a large part of life was missing for me in Japan: the aesthetic.

You can grin and bear it. I did for almost 10 years. But life becomes an empty chore.

At least, mine did. I don't think this holds for all people; take a look around you—it's obvious that aesthetics aren't everyone's top priority. Living in Japan made me realize though, they are for me.

I knew I'd get a bit more soul-food living in England. So when the chance came to go back, I grasped it. Now we're back, guess what. I miss the service, the cafes, the record shops, the clothes shops, the wealth of commodities. I miss the safety. I miss the affluence. I miss it all.

And I know what'd happen if I went back to live in Tokyo—it'd hate it all again.

It's classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Perhaps the only solution is think of "Home and Away" rather than "Home or Away." But then, I don't know which place is "home" and which is "away."

Go figure...

Tom's Notes—Intellectual Billionaires

Doesn't it make you just wonder how a billionaire gets a billion?

Think of it: a thousand million pounds, dollars, euros, whatever—when you've got a thousand thousand thousand of them, the currency doesn't really matter (unless it's Zimbabwean). This is 1 with nine zeroes; enough capital write off a small nation's debt for a year. It's mind-boggling: 1 man, or 1 woman, with enough money to run a small country for a year, none of it credit. Take Bill Gates, his fortune is about 53 billion. The world population is about 6.7 billion. That's almost 8 dollars from every single man woman and child on the face of the planet into Bill's bank account (for example). If you had a billion pound coins and laid them on the ground side by side, you'd make a line 22,500km long: over half the circumference of the Earth. That's like a loop of quids around the entire continent of South America, and more—you'd start the loop in New York and stop in San Francisco. If you had 2 billion pound coins you'd be able to go in a straight line from wherever you are and arrive back at the same spot with 222 thousand pounds left to spare—enough to build a house out of pound coins. It's a huge number of pounds or dollars or euros or whatevers to have. Huge.

How does one person get all that?

I tell you what makes me wonder—how a person like Frank Kermode or C.G. Jung or Marie Curie gets all that knowledge. I think of them as intellectual billionaires. I just can't fathom how one person could know so much.

[By the by: I don't count geniuses like Einstein or Beethoven in with them—geniuses create knowledge rather than accumulate it (though they accumulate an Olympian amount, no doubt). No, geniuses are a little different.]

Read the writings of an intellectual billionaire and feel tiny and resentful—in just the same way you feel tiny and resentful about the staggering amount of money some people have. Bill Gates could give me a million dollars, and it'd only be one fifty-thousandth of his fortune. That's only 0.002% of his total—so painless it wouldn't even register for Bill; and it'd make me a millionaire.

But I'd rather I had 0.002% of an intellectual billionaire's fortune. At least, I think would...

Tom's Notes—Trepidation

We're close to having our house.

We've found the one for us. We've made an offer. The offer's been accepted. We're close.

And yet so far. The good news was last week; this week the survey was completed, and the news was bad—the roof is gone, there's a woodworm infestation in the timbers; rising damp climbs the masonry. £20,000 to fix it all.

So we stand in front of a bridge; 20,000 pound coins in length. Our house and its owners are on the other side. We can't walk to them, we can't meet in the middle. We can only go 5,000 pounds forward—but can they come 15,000 pounds this-a-way?

All we can do is watch and wait, in trepidation.

Tom's Notes—Morning Metabolics

I'm a night person.

And the corollary is true: I'm not a morning person. It takes my unconscious at least an hour to negotiate the hand over to my conscious. And then another hour or so for my conscious to calculate the upside in getting out of bed.

The opposite process happens at night. My unconscious has to peel my consciousness's fingers off the controls one groaning digit at a time. My conscious will scrabble for any excuse to keep going: I find myself, at midnight, arrow-buttoning through the telly guide—give me something, anything! At gone 1 with a book, Another page, then promise I'll sleep; repeat. Staring at online newspapers and waiting for an update at 2. When all else fails going to Wikipedia—2:20 prayers for something interesting in "on this day."

I'm better than I was. Thanks to Nana.

But even Nana can't wash away my difficulty with mornings. Is it just that some people aren't wired for waking up with an eye-popping "shing!" and the thrust of "it's a new day!" get-up-and-go? It must be.

So, I remain a night person.

(Though I was up at 7 today)

Tom's Notes—House Hunting

Hands up who's bought a house?

Nana's, and my, hands aren't up. But we half made the gesture for a moment there. We're not home-owners, we're house-hunters. I mentioned this in passing a few Notes' ago; in the one about music. About a month later and we're still hunting. Our hunt, though, has zeroed in on its target.

Rye is the prize.

Yes, you may recognize the name. There've been a couple of posts featuring Rye on Together:

- The Life of Rye

and

- Old Town Kent

Beautiful place. Rye isn't actually in Kent; it's in East Sussex. Camber Sands is round the way, and Rye is surrounded by the good green (no pylons and telephone lines buggering up the views). It's the place for us.

(Funny how you can travel far and wide looking for what you want, and find it 20 minutes down the road...)

So, we're a-hunting in Rye. And we're getting very very close to the quarry...

That's why our hands half went up.

Tom's Notes—Truant English

Skiveing off Monday Music and regular posts thesedays... I have two words for you: World Cup.

Our national team has been following my lead. The eleven players on the pitch in England's opening two games have looked like husks of their club selves. "Phoning it in" barely suffices to describe their performances. The media, the people, the fans all ask why, why, why?

I'm one of those people who isn't really bothered why. It makes no difference this way or that. Sport is about winning—that's the only relevant point (and there's not much talking to be done about it). So there's really only one thing to be said about the game that will start in about 2 hrs: We have to win.

I've no idea how to do it, which players to pick to do it, the tactics involved, etc. That's all secondary. It could be eleven men from division 4 for all I care—they must win. Enough talk, enough analysis. Time for pure, concentrated, silent conviction. We must win.

If we don't, "Together" will return to its usual punctual self. Promise!

Tom's Notes—Good Taste

Apologies for no Monday Music this week—maybe we'll have a double bill next monday; or perhaps a surprise music break for the weekend? Who knows. It's very exciting this blogging stuff isn't it.

Music for most is a have your cake and eat it too objective-subjective thing. Have you ever had someone seize your i-Pod and wheel through the library? As though looking through your record collection is some shorthand way of knowing what kind of person you are. Perhaps it is. I'm not really sure. I threw my i-Pod away 3 years ago.

The "i-Tunes=You" theory seems a bit phrenologic to me; too convenient to be useful in real life. And utterly discriminatory. But discriminatory is exactly the word when it comes to taste. We can never lose sight of that; as soon as we do, culture desaturates into the bland grey of relativism. So we can't no-no the nosey i-Pod people on discriminatory grounds—but I'd argue with whose taste and personality is really being judged.

Take the interior of your house for instance. Nana and me (saying "so-and-so and I" when we're the grammatical subject of the sentence is not to my taste—it's a bit pretentious. Taste the irony!), as I was saying though, Nana and me have been looking for a house lately—and as a consequence, we've been peering into the living rooms and kitchens of other people's for-sale homes. We often find ourselves doing the equivalent of an i-Pod check on the sellers: God, look at those sofas; oh, here's someone who gets it, etc. It gives me pause to reflect on my own front room: what do the contents of that and the contents of my character have in common? I begin to think about that, and then I jerk to a halt: this question skips an important step. In asking it an assumption has been made—that we are fit to say something about our own taste and character. But, are we?

A surgeon researching a new surgical technique wouldn't practice on himself. Neither would or could a shoe-maker design a shoe to fit his own foot and expect it to fit everyone else.

Taste is a quotidian cousin of philosophy, and like (pre-analytic) philosophy it often takes the subject as its object. Almost all other professions, like medicine or shoe-making, take the object as necessarily different to the subject. Doctors need patients, shoe-makers need customers, car mechanics need cars, and so on. However, the art of philosophizing has always been different. Descartes wrapped up next to his crackling log fire came up with: I think, therefore I am. The cogito. Very good Rene, and we thank you for it; but your start point was yourself, so perhaps it isn't so profound that that's where you ended up. In a similar way, when it comes to taste, most people think all they need is themselves. We act philosophically, like R.D. I like, therefore it's good.

We beg the question .

I think we only understand something objective about taste when we turn the tables on our i-Tunes checking and living room rulings. Wheel through someone else's music library, or browse property thumbnails, and note your opinions: these say nothing about the person you're looking at, and everything about you. They give away something you perhaps couldn't arrive at by looking at your own records or furniture.

What does that mean for good interiors, good music—good taste? Buggered if I know.

Tom's Notes—Ann Widdecombe's In Confidence

I like a program called "In Confidence." It's an interview program on SkyArts—a gem of a channel (2 channels) by the way, probably sneaked in on the coat-tails of all that football revenue. I say it's an interview program, though it's really more like a confessional. The presenter Laurie Taylor annoys me a bit - a bit smug for me - but he does a good priestly job; the pitch black no frills backdrop is the point though—what encourages confession. In Confidence is what Charlie Rose would be like if Charlie weren't interrupting or ass-kissing his guests all the time.

Last night it was Ann Widdecombe's turn against the black background.

And for once Laurie Taylor didn't look smug. He was utterly outdone.

People like Laurie get it, at some level: they know they are twatty, if only through a glass darkly. It's when you get a desperately stupid person like Ann that thinks they are one ahead of you, when really they are one behind. It's then, and with people like that, that stolid misanthropy is the only option.

I attempt not to be such a booer. I watch In Confidence to be a voyeur: I'm interested in the people and their fame—I want to know yet more about them. I want to be impressed. But it wasn't like that with Ann Widdecombe. I began the program with adult reservation; I already knew I didn't like her, but wasn't about to let it spoil my enjoyment of the interview. I tried for about 10 minutes; but the more she spoke, the more her nutty philosophy leaked out on to the studio floor, the more my loathing welled up. No enjoyment, just contempt.

It's because she's so petty.

Small minds like Ann's find the perfect vehicle in Christianity for their version of pettiness, and the smugness that's corollary. A handcrafted system for moving the goalposts when you're wrong; a barricade wall to hide behind more infuriating than a miserly Italian defence—score a goal, close the ranks, hang on for full time. Unlike Italian defences (that are still cast-iron), Christian teaching is no longer a Trojan wall. And thank God for that. Yes, now there's no respect anymore people have to justify themselves—and it clearly angers Ann. She wants a free philosophical pass.

Well, Ann, you're not getting one. I watched you squirm under Laurie's simple cross-examination; I listened to you stutter and try to explain why saying gay men are morally wrong is not a condemnation of them; I laughed when you pleaded that other people were the problem when your words were misunderstood—understood, in other words. No, Ann, we're smarter than you'll never realize.

This seemed to be the crux of it—Ann Widdecombe is the worst case scenario of holier than thou.

For someone who likes the high-road, it's funny that Ann should have been a Conservative MP. I understand that might not make sense: religious, pro-norm, patriotic, thinks the first half of the 20th century in Britain was its cultural and moral zenith—of course she's a conservative. Sure, lets grant that. But at the core of it she's anything but. Ann is holier than thou, and being holier than thou, wants to tell you what to do. You can see the acrid smoke snaking off her words—some terrible despotism burning away behind them. She seems happiest looking at the World and saying "ugh!," judging, dispensing, having her say above all others. Not fascist, a-la Hitler; no, she likes bureaucracy, structures of power and institution: we're talking leftism, a-la Stalin. She's a left winger. She perhaps dislikes Harriet Harman so much because she likes her so much.

It wasn't the questions about her political career that revealed anything, we all know she was shit, predictably so. What revealed the most was this: Ann was a university administrator before becoming an MP. Just one detail in her life, but the telling detail. The detail that pulls all the rest into sharp focus. It needs no explanation—when you've heard all her sophomoric versions of moral philosophy and what's right and wrong, what's OK (by Ann) and what's not; when you know she was an MP, not a very good one; when you just listen to her bat on for more than 5 minutes, and then you learn she was a university administrator... it all fits perfectly.

We've all had to deal with this kind of woman once or twice. The miserable clerk at the post-office, the un-collaborative parent at the PTA, the scowling parish councillor. Provincial madams with a modicum of power. Spinsters with a desperate aspiration in them; not sad—sinister.

Ann wouldn't know, but near the end of Madonna's movie - Filth and Wisdom - the russian chap, leading his band at some dingy gig, sings "don't trust anyone who's never fucked a woman..." or words to that effect, talking about the prescriptivists of life—people like Ann Widdecombe. Yes, don't trust them, these people who have never lived the things they denigrate—things they'll label morally wrong but cowardly run away from justifying those words with action.

There's no wall for you to hind behind anymore Ann. Better start reading some books other than the Bible. And don't be so confident—it's a sin you know.

Tom's Notes—Say one thing...

I'm a conservative. At least, I think I'm a conservative. I had a conversation with an old friend recently that made me reconsider. Then, I read a line in a trusted book that made me doubt. And then I heard a reputable psychologist's quote that left me doubtless about my doubt.

My friend's mail illustrated to me how much we make up their own versions of what words like "conservative" or "socialist" mean; in a nice line F.F. Centore asked whether declaring yourself Christian may not be as arbitrary as suddenly declaring yourself Canadian; a Psychologist giving an account of some experiences said "...and I'm going to tell you about my views on the subject—and for my real views, just think of the opposite."

So we make up our own rules, we declare things for ourselves that are really things that only others could say about us—and often what we like to think we think, is the opposite of what we really think deep down. How many times have you heard someone proudly say "I'd never do that," only to find your reaction is to knowingly say to yourself: Mmm, OK.

I don't think people are liars; I think we're contradictory. We're hypocrites—and there's nothing truer to being human. Embrace it.

So, I'm a conservative.

Tom's Notes—U.K. Election

"Hmm." This is what most British voters are thinking now.

Nick Clegg got the bare knuckles of the press these last few days; but something has hurt him more than the extra scrutiny—second thoughts. Are the public really comfortable with the reality of PM Clegg rather than the daydream. I don't think so, and to explain why I need to talk about Cola. Yes, Cola.

Virgin Cola.

Remember the taste?

Me neither. And if you wanted to remind yourself, the only place you can get a can is 35,000 ft. in the air aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight. There's a good reason why we don't remember the taste of Virgin Cola, and why just about the only place you'll find yourself drinking it is on a Virgin plane: it's a 3rd brand in a binary market. This is the danger Nick Clegg faces.

Forget taste, and sales, for a minute, and let's only think only about prima facie popularity: what I can remember is that Virgin Cola was wildly popular for a while—when it was first released. "Yeah, why not" we thought; there was a charismatic front-man, and his product wasn't embarrassing.

When the novelty wore off, we all took an extra thought about Virgin Cola. It took a conscious effort to buy it, and to convince yourself it tasted better than the number one brand; whereas Coke required none of that. Pepsi required some of that, but was long enough established to be the acceptable smug option. Virgin Cola wasn't different enough - palatably different enough - to get anything other than faddish attention. And we love hating on the fad (even if we partook!).

Nick Clegg, and the lib-Dems, find themselves on the first line of the above paragraph; and I can see them following it word for word through to the last line. Doesn't mean it has to happen, but chances are it will.

Cameron is Pepsi, Brown Coke—and we're in a late 80s/early 90s type moment, where voters new and old, so sick of Coke's dominance, may choose Pepsi instead (for a while). My advice to Nick Clegg would be "you have to be number two before you can be number one in this market."

Better to get going on that, because right now everyone is going "Hmm."