Driving in Italy

We drove from Rome round the heel and instep of Italy to spend a week with friends in Palermo.  I was expecting driving in Sicily to be challenging - I had heard that motorists here were wild and dangerous.  But on the whole, it was wide open roads with some spectacular scenery and pleasurable driving.

Coming into Palermo, I must admit that the Monday morning rush hour was very busy, with all sorts of vehicles and pedestrians weaving in and out of each other vying for position.  But in all this chaos there was an amazing amount of give and take.

In the UK, I would have seen much more aggression and attempted intimidation.  Here, a car will pull in front of you and take its own space, and you let it.  People will walk in front of your car, expecting you to give way.  In essence, I am seeing assertiveness in action, rather than aggression.

The Italian driver seems to have a much broader perception of the systemic nature of traffic rather than seeing themselves as an occupant of an inviolable steel box.  I cannot say, however, that I have a huge desire to get in the car and drive around Palermo - it is quite a small city, and walking is the preferred way to get around.  The same would apply in any city.

And the roads in southern Italy... miles of empty new autostrade - and all carved through mountainous terrain with hundreds of brand new tunnels.

 

They must have cost the EU about as much as the average HS2. And all leading from one sleepy seaside town to another. Quite staggering infrastructure after the frenetically crowded UK system.  Once out of a city, driving is pleasurable.

Me and Voting

For the vast majority of my adult life, although I have had a chance to vote, doing so has been at best a symbolic gesture. The only time my vote (or indeed any kind of political activity) had any meaning was October 1974, when I was living in Beeston. The sitting Tory was re-elected with a majority of 121.  Afterwards, I played with the fantasy that if I had spent a few weeks energetically canvassing, and persuaded others to do so, I might just have made a difference, one person at a time. It was the only time that I had any sense of agency or meaning in the process.

Since then, I have had the pleasure of being represented by (in turn) M.Heseltine, B.Johnson and D.Cameron. All with safe, nay unassailable, majorities. And the sense of futility which goes with any prospect of doing anything other than protest.

If I lived in a constituency which had a chance of doing anything other than reflect the Mail/Telegraph/Murdoch reactionary worldview, I think that I would be more galvanised. As it is, we have joined and donated to the Greens, and are showing Green posters and a placard.  Holding my nose and voting for pro-Trident, pro-austerity Labour would have no more effect than voting Green.  In effect, a minority rebel like me in a solid Tory seat can't make a difference.

Katy's considered account is more detailed, and on the principle that if you have a skilful resident pundit it's no good attempting to match the passion and commitment, it's here:

 .....................

Why I am not voting Labour, I'm voting Green

Several people I respect, and whose views I mostly share, argue that anyone who doesn't want to see another Conservative government must vote Labour, even if we have to peg our noses to do so, since a vote for anyone else, such as the Green Party, would be wasted or, worse, could let the Conservatives in again.

If the Labour party had continued to stand for the values, principles and policies which I believe in and support, I would be only too happy to vote Labour. Today, though, the Labour party has moved a long way to the right, and the Green Party, instead, almost exactly matches my position.

If, purely in order to keep out the Tories, I were to vote Labour, I would appear to be endorsing many policies which I find simply wrong. And if, as a result of my and other nose-peggers' votes, the Labour party formed the next government, that government would be able to claim that it had a mandate from the country for policies which I deplore, even if many of the people who had voted for the Labour Party actually disapproved of some or most of their policies. Correspondingly, they would be able to look at the smaller number of people who had stuck to their principles and voted Green, and ignore or dismiss any perceived Green concerns because it would appear, on the basis of the vote, that fewer people shared those concerns than is in fact the case.

So the only possible reason for voting Labour is simply that it's not Conservative. That's a pretty poor reason; but more than that, if people are prepared to vote Labour for no other reason than that it's not Tory, the Labour Party has no incentive to reverse its slide to the right, increasingly towards a neo-liberalism driven solely by the interests of international capital, and differing from the Conservatives only in minor details.

Before the 2005 election, I wrote the following; it still applies, but I am shocked on re-reading it how rapidly the policies and principles which I had previously expected of the Labour Party have now completely disappeared from anyone's expectations:

The last time, I voted Labour

I voted Labour because it promised an ethical foreign policy

I voted Labour because it promised open government

I voted Labour because it promised the abolition of the House of Lords

I voted Labour because I believed it would reform the electoral system

I voted Labour because I wanted Britain to join the euro

I voted Labour because I wanted an end to privatisation and to ‘contracting out’

I voted Labour because I wanted the railways returned to public ownership

I voted Labour because I wanted a diminishing gap between the richest and the poorest

I voted Labour because I wanted uniformly high quality schools and hospitals everywhere, not ‘choice’

I voted Labour because I believed it valued teachers

I voted Labour because I believed it would safeguard grants for university education

I voted Labour because I believed it would stop the trivialising of corruption and deception as ‘sleaze’ and ‘spin’

I voted Labour because I was sick of ‘yah-boo’ adversarial politics

I voted Labour because I wanted politicians who admit they sometimes make mistakes

I voted Labour because it promised a ban on fox-hunting (Bingo!)

I voted Labour because I wanted the UK to have a minimum wage (Bingo again! Oh wait …. two out of fifteen is … not very good)

I didn’t vote for a Labour prime minister to become the side-kick of an extreme right-wing Republican US President

I didn’t vote for a Labour government to take us into a war unsanctioned by the UN

I didn’t vote for a Labour government to introduce indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial

I didn’t vote for a Labour government to have its policy on refugees dictated by The Sun

I didn’t vote for a Labour government to sell control of state-funded schools to Creationists

I voted Labour because I thought I could trust them.

That was the last time I voted Labour.

"I didn't see you"...

...common first words of motorists who plough into innocent cyclists, and the lady who ploughed into me predictably came up with them.

50-odd years of defensive cycling have left me possibly smugly aware of drivers who don't have the slightest clue of what is around them, and this is my first experience of being knocked off my pedestal of rather knowing hubris.

So - here I am, after 24 hours of travelling to, waiting in, and being subject to the ministrations of, our (for the time being) glorious NHS.  I have a rapidly-healing dislocated shoulder and various bruises, and my overwhelming feeling is one of great relief that I am in one piece with no lasting damage.

For my new (24 hours old and very expensive) glasses and my (30 years old but hand-built and high quality) bike it's a different story.  But they are things, and replaceable.

So - what happened?  I was going round a small roundabout and made the mistake of expecting a car coming from my left to see me.  My usual practice is to make eye contact with drivers who are in a potentially threatening position, but this time I slipped up.  My attention stayed too long on seeing a gap in the traffic surging onto the roundabout from my right.  So there you go.

Two witnesses pressed their names and addresses on me, and Sam, who was walking past, kindly tended to me.  Two small female teenagers wearing police uniforms soon took control of the formalities and looked after the offending driver, who was devastated.  I sat on a windowsill and clutched my strangely misshaped shoulder watching the world go by through a shimmering mist of delayed shock.

I phoned Katy, who brought the car and she and Sam loaded a pile of twisted wheels and double-butted Reynolds 531 tubing into it, and we went off to Witney hospital.  After a few X-rays and some head-scratching, the team there said that I had better go to the JR . 

After some entertaining people-watching in casualty, my turn came up in the triage and they proposed a series of possibilities.  Some of them involved attractively-described experiments with gas and air, but they said that they would try the low-impact treatment first.  This simple method was to rest my torso on a sloping surface dangling my arm over the end holding a couple of kilos.  The idea is that the gentle prolonged extension of the joint persuades the head of the humerus back to its rightful place.

The result:  one happy DC - it worked!  I was fitted with a sling and given an appointment for the trauma clinic.  I schlepped over there the next day and the consultant said that it would heal well.  I'm waiting for the physio appointment, and realising now that the major focus of my attention has been the shoulder which took most of the impact of the tumble while the rest of my body has been ignored.  Minor scrapes and bruises which have been overlooked now become more noticeable, and I have been exhausted by the process of initial healing.  I am writing this nearly two days after it happened - I just haven't felt like doing much before now.

So - I'm thankful that it wasn't worse, and feeling a lot better.

Coincidentally, the roundabout is one I wrote about in a previous post about a cycle accident.  It's on the approach to what has been since the middle ages the single traffic bridge across the Windrush, currently embroiled in local controversy.

Rant

Once upon a time commercial concerns wanted, and rewarded, loyalty.  The world has changed.  We had an insurance renewal notice for £488.  In years gone by, we would have renewed.  I phoned Churchill (for it is they) - first having looked up their 0800 number on the excellent 'saynoto0870' website - and said that we were looking at competitors.  I was then offered a "loyalty discount" of £166.  Just like that.  For one phone call.

Using comparison websites, I've just bought better insurance for £230 less, and Churchill has lost another disgruntled customer. 

The problem with this evolving state of affairs is that I am taken for a sucker or I have to spend time and effort monitoring all relationships with service providers to make sure that they are not benefiting from the inertia effect.  I suppose that I'm just being old-fashioned, but I seem to spend inordinate chunks of time avoiding being ripped off.  I suppose that it's the way things work nowadays, and it's saddening.

Fallen trees

I've been taking photographs of fallen trees in the Chilterns since 2003. For one fallen tree in particular, I have been snapping multiple shots from the same viewpoint all this time at various times of the year.  It's visible here:

(tip - click on any pic to see full size)

It's difficult to give an idea of the scale, but it was a large specimen.  Indeed, it was visible from space for some time, as this Google Earth image from 2004 shows:

  

The exact location is: 51.749130°  -0.770632°

One problem with taking pictures in a forest is that you can't see the tree for the wood (!) - it's impossible to stand back.  So instead I set up a tripod fairly close to it and take about a dozen shots.

The resulting sweep of individual pics are cunningly stitched together to make panoramas which, although they bear little relation to how it's perceived, can be eyecatching.  Here's one from its first winter:

 

 

 From the second spring:

...and this is what it looked like around 7 years later:

And there are other fallen beasts - another sample:

Inertia

Scene: the queue at Lidl. Opposite me is a guy who is buying two items - one is a 2 litre bottle of some drink or other. He has laid it across the belt. Every time the belt lurches forwards, the bottle predictably attempts to stay where it is and rolls 'backwards'. This comes into conflict with his place marker and once or twice dislodges items from the stack of the person following. Several times, he rearranges the bottle further forward.

I wonder whether he has any notion of inertia, and how he could simply lie the bottle down with its long axis along the belt to avoid this repeated learning opportunity.

At least, he didn't stand the bottle up, and have it fall over each time. There might yet be hope for humanity.

Spooky...

Back from Towersey Festival - we camped for the first time in about 20 years, which was quite a change. Enjoyable to be part of a circle of tented chums, and the weather was kind (apart from a very chilly Saturday night).

Stars of the show for me, again, were The Spooky Men's Chorale (check them out on YouTube if you are not familiar!) I went to the two vocal workshops run by Stephen Taberner (the Spookmeister of this outfit) and was bowled over by his facilitation of the (literally) hundreds of participants. A true master at work.

I am getting increasingly annoyed by over-amplification. The technology of PA systems has moved on, and generally the sound was really high quality. But the guys on the desk seem to want to prove how earthmoving their rigs can be, and they certainly pulled the stops out for some bands. A friend had recommended the Demon Barbers, and I went along expecting, and getting, some great high-energy music.

Problem was, the bass drum was amplified through a huge "subwoofer" which put out levels of sound way beyond comfort. Immediately they started, people began to leave, and after the first number a guy actually shouted out from the audience about the painful thumping. The vocalist said that he couldn't do anything about it from the stage.

I left (along with many others), and on my way out had a word with the guy on the sound desk, who said that I was out of touch with what people wanted(!) Apparently, people enjoy having their brains shaken to a jelly inside their skulls, and their chest cavities resonating in time...

As we retired to our tents nearby, the whole world seemed to vibrate - earplugs made very little difference - it was as if the rattling was happening inside my skull. I'm happy for the loud stuff to be in its proper place - I saw Edward II on one of the other stages (which I think I could rightfully say was more oriented towards younger tastes) and they were quite loud! But I suppose that I want to make a plea for moderation in a venue which is basically for folk music. Ho hum...

Faith restored...

My faith in the risky business of shelling out shedloads of money to see top performers has been restored (see my earlier review of Dylan). We went to see Leonard Cohen last night - and I was totally bowled over. His rapport with his backing group, and with all of us sitting out there in the wind and drizzle, was warm, light and respectful - and his performance beguiling and emotionally powerful.

The whole thing is a very professional, well-rehearsed operation (you can find video from this tour all over YouTube) but he makes it seem immediate yet unhurried: a star with humility. I really don't resent contributing to his pension fund!

Last Straw...

Nipping into Waitrose on Friday evening to see what bargains might be had, I see one of my favourite wholemeal spelt loaves (*) reduced for quick sale. As I prepare to pounce, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice slides quickly in and grabs the bargain before I can reach for it. Jack Straw (for it is he) is probably on his way to his weekend cottage, which is in a village up the road from us, and is obviously in training for a relatively impoverished impending retirement. You read it here first! This reminds me of the first time I met him - it was 1969 or thereabouts, and, as President of the National Union of Students, he was in a meeting I was attending for some reason which now escapes me. After the meeting we wandered down to the House of Commons public gallery (as you could do in those free and easy days) to witness some bit of legislation which had a bearing on students. The proceedings turned out to be quite dull, but suddenly a guy in front of us leaps to his feet, shouts "you bastards!" and jumps off the gallery. He broke his leg. I still don't know what he was protesting about... (*) That's S.P.E.L.T. spelt "LOAVES"

Is this a question?

I've just come across evidence that the much-despised antipodean rising inflection habit has gone full circle and has now been superimposed on written (well, at least on *some* written) discourse (citation: a Freecycle group - sorry, it's a closed group and therefore cannot substantiate with a web ref, he said primly and conscientiously...):

(start quote) ..........................
Hi i am hoping that someone has got some exercise equiptment lurking somewhere that perhaps needs a new home??

I have lost quite a bit of weight and wanted to keep it going with adding some exercise?

Any offers would be fab.

Thanks for reading
...................................(sic)

What is absolutely amazing is that no-one would have dreamed of writing this even 10 years ago - my thesis is that people have just got so used to the sound and feel of saying stuff like this that when they come to the (relatively marginal) job of writing, the inflection is replicated in text. I'm quite fascinated by this...

Experience over hope...

To a Dylan gig in Birmingham last night. I last saw him (from about 300 metres away!) in Earl's Court over 30 years ago, so I was pleased that I had a seat nearer the front this time. But hope drained quickly as the evening started. Dylan seems to have adopted a routine of completely ignoring the audience and, hunched at the side of the stage, routinely pounding on the Hammond as his passably talented backing musicians struggle to inject some musicality into the evening. I suspect that their skills are kept under tight rein so as not to upstage him...

Vocally, it was a game of "guess the track". Often I would recognise a lick or a chord sequence but, despite this, not associate it with the words until the first chorus. It's almost as if he is just lost down a long, oft-rehearsed tunnel of self-parody in a sneering, whining, gutturally unmelodic attempt to put listeners off the scent of recognition. It's all very well developing and evolving as a performer, but this is just taking things too far!

His well-documented separateness (one longtime drummer said that he never left any musical "breadcrumbs" for accompanists to follow) from his fellow-musicians and his complete separation from the audience was sad. People I was with were comparing him with Cohen, who, in exactly the same venue, managed to make an immediate, astonishing, intimate contact.

A disappointment. And not, perhaps, in the way that the guy who famously shouted "JUDAS!!" all those years ago. It's not that I'm against his moving on, or his new techniques, or his bringing new life to old material. I'm not saying that he has betrayed himself, or his fans, or a cause. I suppose I'm pinning my colours to the mast and saying that this emperor has very few clothes left as a live performer. He is running on his reputation (palpable around me last night) - which is massive.

He has been and continues to be one of the great 'pop' singer/songwriter/performers of my lifetime. He is up there with Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Lennon/McCartney, Loudon Wainwright, Bonnie Raitt, Frank Zappa, James Taylor, Neil Young, Gerry Rafferty, Paul Simon, Van Morrison and the other predictable idols. But...

He is showing signs of running on empty. I liked "Modern Times" - but as I think about it, it probably owes more to the musicians around him and making a special effort for the studio than he doles out to his paying gig customers. I asked myself "why does he do this..?"

He can't (like Cohen) need to build up his retirement pot. He slogs around the world doing his thing, but for what purpose? SURELY he can't be enjoying it? That, I think, is the major reason for my discomfort. There didn't really seem to be a point. He really needs to rest his larynx. It sounds shot to pieces - and he doesn't even attempt to sing, as such - and I reckon that it must be quite painful for him to do so, which is why he resorts to snarling.

I'm beginning to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells...

Amassing Ammo

I've just handed in three chunky live bullets to the fuzz - they were found (I am a member of a group caring for local paths and public spaces) whilst clearing rubbish alongside the river.











On the same day we also found a driving licence and a handbag (probably discarded after a robbery) complete with credit cards but no cash.

The bullets were in a rusty old tin:













...quite possibly a wartime relic that had become an embarrassment.
















A close-up:









...we also found two shopping trolleys, a car battery, engine oil and enough discarded tins, wrappers and assorted rubbish to fill about twelve large bags.

ps: I hope you liked the title of this post :-)

Brain Scan

Nice work on the Today programme. Steven Rose, the retired OU biologist (one of those old-fashioned maverick profs who also has the advantage of a particular Jewish authority and chutzpah!) was talking about the brain, and whilst talking about MRI scanning, slipped in a speculation about whether the brains of the members of the Israeli cabinet would show up any activity in those areas responsible for moral judgements. Lovely.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7814000/7814946.stm

It's the last (0854) item.

Brown and Bush

During the summer, when our new PM was settling into the job, I saw a snippet of TV news which angered me. At the time, no-one seemed to see it in the same light as I did, and indeed subsequent government disasters seem to have eclipsed this marginal observation. But I thought I would record it anyway...

Brown's first visit to Bush was obviously going to be a difficult event. Blair had been his mate, spoken his language and fawningly colluded with one of the most ruthless projects of belligerence in recent history. I observed that Brown had a very different personal style. Indeed, my sense of him is that he is further along the autistic spectrum than most of us: managing himself in interpersonal situations seems to be a baffling project that he doesn't quite have a handle on. He reportedly had to be trained to smile and give the appearance of connecting at an emotional level before he was considered electable.

I expected that Bush - the archetypal frat boy - would have problems in dealing with him. What I did not expect was that he would do what frat boys do with the new kid on the block - to subject him to a finely-tuned bit of humiliation.

When Brown arrived in the USA, Bush arranged to transport him from the plane to the waiting press pack (as in "wolf pack" - and guess who is "top dog"...) in a golf buggy. As he set off, he threw the buggy into a tight circle so that Brown was subjected to centrifugal force on the outside of the curve and, without a steering wheel to hold on to, had to tense his body and grab for support in an undignified way.

I remarked on this to a German friend, and he pointed out that Bush had put Angela Merkel through a blatant and abusive piece of intimidation in his "playful" alpha-male way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dfrHT8o-0A

But back to the golf buggy - I have looked around for media comments:

"If Brown was deferential, Bush was playful -- from the very beginning of the visit. When Brown arrived at Camp David on Sunday, Bush invited him into a golf cart labeled 'Golf Cart One' on the front. The president started to head off but then threw the cart into a 360-degree turn, smiling mischievously for the cameras, before speeding off. Brown, in this AFP photo, looks a bit aghast. But he went along for the ride."

source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/07/30/BL2007073000950_2.html?hpid=topnews

"The hacks here are divided about whether to call this the 'roast beef summit' (after the food served to the president and prime minister) or the 'golf buggy' summit (after the vehicle Mr Bush took Mr Brown out for a spin in, producing a look on the PM's face that said 'this wasn't in the script'!)"

source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/gordon_brown_usa_07/


I didn't detect much negative comment at the time, but it evoked in me a surprising and totally unfamiliar sense of patriotic outrage that my prime minister should be subjected to such treatment.

Well, I suppose that's what happens when a country allows its military-industrial subculture to engineer the results of an election...

Altrustic Driving

I've been fascinated for some time by traffic dynamics - especially standing waves on busy motorways. A good introduction to this interesting phenomenon is this BBC report.

The report makes use of Bill Beaty's observations (note - not theories!) which can be read here - and anyone interested in science will enjoy wandering round the rest of his site.

My Right Foot

I've been experimenting for some time with fuel economy since buying a car (Skoda Octavia 1.9 diesel) which offers a display of the instantaneous fuel consumption. This is a useful feature which offers feedback on driving style - and I confirmed the established truism that a heavy right foot on the accelerator lowers consumption.

To step back from this observation - there are of course many other factors which reduce economy:

• short journeys (especially in a diesel, which takes longer to reach efficient operating temperature)
• getting from A to B as quickly as possible
  
• maintaining speed up hills

...and I assume that anyone who is keen to reduce consumption of our fossil fuels will be aware of the basics. My intention is to take this interest forward.

The right foot in a car is placed on the pedal in a way which makes it able to apply large force (using the calf muscle). This is very useful in braking - although this is nowadays not necessary due to power assistance. The fact is, however, that this arrangement does not make fine control very easy. The large muscles of the leg are designed for locomotion - fine muscular control is available only at the end of the limb. An analogy would be to imagine having to do what you normally do with your hands if they were encased in a shoe.

"Dynamic Tension" (with apologies to Charles Atlas!)

Another observation: when driving the right leg is typically held in a position of tension - the antagonistic muscles of the calf and shin maintain and vary the angle of the ankle. This is fine when standing or walking, but I wondered how it might be if the major leg muscles could be allowed to be at rest. Of course, the right foot must always be available for instant action to operate the brake - but I haven't found this to be a problem.

So - I made a rounded “platform” or ledge close to the right hand side of the pedal. On this I rest the right side of my foot, and the left side of the foot touches the pedal. In this way, rotating (or to use the technical term, everting/inverting)the foot rather than using the gross movement of the ankle produces much more controllable pressure on the accelerator.

I experimented with various materials, and finally built up laminations of carpet tile with a glue gun. This is shaped to fit the contours of the car interior and attached with Velcro to the carpet lining.

(A digression – when people have shown an interest and asked how they might do it, I have found that some cars do not have a lot of room to the right of the accelerator pedal. I’m just thankful that the Octavia does!)

Taking care to get the right arrangement, the result is a foot-rest which enables me to have fine control of the accelerator. Since I have installed it the overall MPG of the car has risen to around 57. Using care I can get 70+ and indeed even short quick trips are rarely under 50.

Raw competitiveness
It's quite easy to develop new habits and get used to the lower average speeds which result. And I've also found that my competitiveness (which used to manifest in seeing how fast I can get from A to B) has now shifted. The pursuit of economy can substitute for more destructive urges - I'm sure it's all part of the macho spectrum, but less damaging to the planet.

And it's catching - my wife will come back from a trip in the car glowing with pride and punching the air announcing "I got 60!!" It might be something to do with the ageing process, or perhaps an evolving awareness of our global responsibility - but playing games like this is fun!

I'm grateful to Charlie, a physiotherapist friend who discussed this project with me.