The Isolationist

I have just returned from a wonderful poetry evening at the Troubadour Café on Old Brompton Road.  Take a right out of Earl’s Court Station, down Earl’s Court Road and take a right at the bottom of the road where you will find a fabulous red patterned medieval door.  Various lutes, guitars, violins and stringed instruments hang from the ceiling, generously laden plates fly past; a happy buzz of conversation fills the different caverns.  A sip of wine, a sigh of relief.  How wonderful to be in London in this place! 

Downstairs is the poetry café, a raised platform with a man playing the accordion sets the scene.  The crowd is an interesting one: older, eccentric, from all parts of the country, all classes, all types.  This is my second Monday night at the Troubadour in the last couple of months; eight poets take ten minutes each to read poems of their choice from their various collections (they are newly published poets and experienced ones), there is a break after the first four.  It is needed.  I find I can only absorb a bit at a time but I love the experience of hearing new work, words flowing, ideas, emotions.  I tend to remember one poem from each poet and it is usually one about something emotional which touches me: tonight my favourites were about a man going to visit a friend in a psychiatric ward and not having the normal social parameters of conversation to go by; a woman imagining her friend meeting her lost loved ones in heaven and how they would greet her and a woman grieving for her husband and their sleep together. 

Looking round the audience tonight though I wondered why poetry was rather an extinct art form in our generation. Yes, there are poetry circles and evenings like this around the country but it is so far from the main stream.  I was the youngest person there by at least a decade.  Poetry is what was once learnt at school, often rather painfully (apologies, apologies) and maybe what can be found in song lyrics.  It is a small shelf at Waterstones, probably behind a pillar in an unobtrusive place, it is a present from a loved one that has rarely been looked at or a great book for the toilet, for those precious few spare moments you have in your day.  The poet may wince to think of their carefully crafted words being mulled over during a …. but no more need be said on that, at least the poems are being read! 

There is something about the freshness of experience of poetry that hits me (perhaps a longer paragraph break needed here after the last paragraph!)  A novel you have to plan, agonize over, draft and re-draft and try and finish for an eternity.  A poem can be spontaneous or struggled over but it can exist without the need for publication, it can meet that creative need to use words to express yourself instantly.  For the slightly fickle-minded character like myself, poems allow that space, that variety, that satisfaction.  You just have to like playing with words.  A poem can be a friend for life, a line remembered can accompany you in times of distress or happiness, it can help you to realise something you hadn’t quite been able to express or it can just make you laugh.  When memories start to go in old age, it is often those poems learnt by rote at school which stay in people’s minds and still they are recited. 

I wonder if anyone out there would like to share poems they enjoy with me?  We could have a poetry appreciation section. 

I had an experience this Saturday which reminded me or Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’.  I had Saturday afternoon wonderfully, wonderfully free: no school work, no house work, no visits, no phone calls to be made, no nothing, yes there were hundreds of things I could be doing but I just decided to stop all those list-ticking exercises which are duly renewed every weekend and maybe … write something.  As it turned out, I stared at my blank piece of page in wonder and thought, I have nothing to say.  It was a strange feeling.  It made me wonder if I fill up my time to stop this feeling, this anxiety, this emptiness.

 
Days by Philip Larkin

 
What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

 

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

 
Although not the happiest of Saturday afternoons, perhaps it was fruitful to realise this and to take the time ‘to stand and stare.’ 

 
I await your poems…

Following recent 'chicken out' entry I felt compelled to post this comment which Chris recommended I move into an actual Entry itself. So here it is with a bit more digression and rambling :-)

Do you actually know that all the rest of the chicken is thrown away by companies/supermarkets selling cheaper broiler farm chickens? These guys are serious profit makers and I would be fairly certain they use at least some of what you don't get (even if not for moral reasons) for other purposes.

Supermarkets are also some of the countries most efficient transporters of food and I know the farmer's markets do sell fantastically better quality but there's no reason to assume you're doing the planet a favor by having 20 half full old trucks bumbling around the countryside and another 500 people getting themselves there and then to the supermarket anyway.

What is actually needed is supermarkets be forced to act more responsibly by law, meaning they aren't allowed to source food from so far etc etc. Supermarket chickens are super cheap because supermarkets are incredibly efficient because its in their interests to be (and of course because that chicken will suffer more). Efficiency concerns drive good strategically driven transport and networks of depots. The morality of what goes on with the animals etc aside, people should be prepared to admit that supermarkets do have some good points and learn from those if suggesting new methods of feeding 60 million people.

Don't get me wrong I dislike supermarkets and most of what they stand for but there is a model underneath at least worth examining. Encouraging them to change is important since they feed the majority and that's not going to change for some time. Admittedly taking one's business elsewhere will do this but it's questionable weather this is more effective than buying selectively in the supermarket since they then have more idea what you do want rather than just knowing that they have one less customer.

BTW I prefer organic and local farmers market stuff any day of the week. I just want to point out that in some ways its currently a far from perfect solution other than for one's taste-buds and health.

Ideally we'd all just stop eating meat, it'd be 10 times better for the planet and that's not much of an exaggeration honestly, it's a real biggy considering how much resource goes into animal transportation and watering and feeding. 1KG of meat requires about 100 times more water to produce. And the livestock grown on this planet for food consume about half of the worlds grain and wheat supplies.C'mon; I mean let's confess, we all know it right?

I mean if the point is animal welfare then stop eating them, if it's saving the planet then there's a many less efficient ways of bringing meat to your table then supermarkets manage. Or is it really because we want that nice tastey lamb chop on our table instead of the fat, injected crap that supermarkets dish up? Many other options exist in supermarkets these days. My biggest bug bear with supermarkets is packaging. Why must I buy my organic apples in a carton wrapped in plastic just so they can write 'organic' on it. Super pisses me off. Giveth in one and taketh with the other. This is where the government should step in and legislate. It would be really simple. It's their f*****g job after all.

It's fun to point fingers at the 'indolent fuckwits' but while we profess to know better and still don't act accordingly then there's more than an pinch of hypocrisy about it all. I see a lot of people liking meat too much and making themselves feel better about not giving it up by buying differently. I include myself here. We could all get a little more honest about this, that's all I'm trying to say. But then I guess we'd have to go and live under a rock somewhere and eat mud if we really want to be able to point the finger. We do stuff cos we like it and people just draw different lines in the sand.

Shit was that a rant? Was that even anything to do with Chris's original posting? I dunno, I just struggle with myself about the whole meat thing and farmer's markets and all that stuff is no answer to the planet's predicament and singling out other groups that aren't FOR SURE doing any worse is a difficult one for me. Just because they draw a different wrong line in the sand.

Oh dear this goes no where doesn't it? Means, 'because I do wrong I can't criticize others'. Ah, I go round and round like a fucktard's verbal merry go round. Help I can't get off!!! arrrgh. Not the most constructive argument I've ever made but this is the 'Isolationist' and I'm new here so bare with me. I wasn't sure if we're suppose to be bleak in a 'there's no hope sort of a way' or slightly more constructive. I guess I'm just becoming more and more jaded buy this stuff. Every time a new 'way forward' is suggested people find it fine to follow unquestioningly. I'm the same. Then you read something a few years later telling you that what you did before was better because of x,y and z knock on effects. But we find a dozen ways to justify it if it suits. We managed to justify theft to ourselves as soon as it saved us €15 on a CD purchase. Lots of things cost too much in this world and lots of companies make lots of money charging for them but the 1st time it was very hard to get caught stealing people convinced themselves it was OK to do so. Coincidence? Organic food from farmers markets just tastes better right?

Don't you sometimes ever feel like we're a bunch of ants running round on an egg that's fallen from a very high nest. I mean it seems to be the case. From an outsiders perspective at least. We know we're not and are trying to act accordingly and steer it somehow but the human mind's ability to head bury is vast and probably as yet mostly unexplored territory :-) we'll see soon enough I guess.

I've just re-read that last post and apart from not quite making it on to secondly I realise that there's a massive sentence in there that could probably have been broken up into more bite-sized chunks. Sorry about that but there was Buffy to watch, so it was either that or clean up that article. Which explains my poor grades at school. Oh well.

Speaking of school, do you want to see my French written assignment? Tough.

It's about my profession.

125 words of pure gold!

Here we go.

Are you ready?

Voila:

"Mon profession est créateur des jeux électronique, que j’ai fait depuis 15 ans, et je l'aime beaucoup. Mais créant les jeux est long – quelques-uns demandent plus de trois ans - et stressant. Alors, je voulais une vie plus simple donc presque il y a une année j'ai quitte mon emploi et je suis revenu à bristol. Depuis que j’ai travaillé à mon compte et j'ai fait beaucoup des choses, même réparer les fenêtres ! En ce moment cependant j'ai un contrat court durée pour lequel j'ai crée un site Web prototype. Je travaille chez moi surtout, que j'aime beaucoup. Le trajet de mon travail est très court! Côté  inconvénients pendent la journée, en dehors de mon co-locateur qui travaille chez nous aussi, il y a personne à parler à."

The good old London Review of Books landed on my doormat on Friday. It's a great magazine if you can find the time to read its incredibly well written but equally incredibly long articles. As a matter of fact, I've got a free subscription offer that technically I've given Clem first dibs on but it's free to a worthy home.

The lead article this week is a review of a book called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. You can read it here and I strongly recommend that you do. As it goes its not one of the longer articles that the LRB publishes.

Ok, read it? Good. See what I mean?

I'm not going to reiterate everything that John Lancaster has written in his article but I just wanted to ruminate a little on a couple of things.

Firstly it's very interesting to read about a book that purports to give substance to what I'd hitherto suspected but not been able to quite put my finger on, namely that the contents of our newspapers have, to quote a PR monkey being interviewed about the newly diminutive Mars Bar on the Today show a couple of years ago, an increased sensation of lightness. I've felt disinclined to read newspapers for a number of years now for this very reason. For the record I read The Economist predominantly and The London Review of Books when I have time, which is not as often as I would like to even though without fail every time I do take the time I'm struck by the same thought that I wish I had more time to read this more often.

John Lancaster quotes some interesting statistics that Nick Davies' research team uncovered when they analysed the contents on the "posh" papers as he calls them and the Daily Mail. Posh I take to mean what would formerly have been described as the broadsheets. Specifically, oh what the hell, I'll stick the same quote here that's in the article, you probably didn't read it anyway:

"They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked."

So essentially journalists are regurgitating press-releases and wire copy (which he goes on to say is largely Press Association).

Reading all of this reminded me of a talk that I went to at the frontline club (a private club for foreign correspondents) which was an interview with John Fisher Burns, the Bureau Chief in Iraq for the New York Times. You can see that interview here. Incidentally there's also a recording of an interview with Nick Davies that you can see here. Anyway, go back to the John Fisher Burns interview and watch from about 40 minutes in until 50 minutes where Burns is responding to a question about who may have predicted the outcome of the invasion of Iraq at the time to which he responds that Robert Fisk was probably the only person who did before going on to explain that in the year leading up to the war that he was writing articles based on the premise that the human rights abuses going on in Iraq were so atrocious that getting rid of Saddam almost no matter what the cost was the correct course of action. He then expands on that thought I think with a remarkable degree of honestly to say that he felt that he measured the problem "by the standard of human rights [rather than] by the standard of history" and he concludes by saying that if he had his time again he would have studied the history of Iraq and the region in much greater detail.

I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear this from this man who was, and I say this with no trace of over-statement, one of the world's most important opinion formers leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here was the bureau chief for Iraq admitting that he had a "failure of imagination" and didn't grasp that removing the capstone that Saddam Hussein was would cause the kinds of problems we've been seeing for the last five years.

And we wonder why our Newspapers are light. There's your answer right there.

Makes I mad.

Well. Life is a mess of contradictions isn't it? Just when you thought you'd got used to something, wham! Life hits you smack in the face.

So it is with life and so it is with the isolationist.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that a blog entitled "the isolationist" would contain the self-indulgent ramblings of a single self-obsessed individual who eschews human contact, striving only to express the perfect solipsistic thought. And I'm not here today to contradict you. I'm just saying that rather than one isolationist there are now five. Each individual free to follow their own whims and fancies. And lets face it, if they write more I can get away with writing less, which is better for everyone.

So without further delay the new writers are:

Caroline Child
Thomas Paullier
Clemency Evans
John Shave

I asked them to be guest contributors because they've all got really interesting viewpoints on life and come from very different backgrounds as well as a penchant for wordiness which goes a long way with me. Thomas and Caroline have already written excellent articles about dancing and scuba diving and John and Clemency will be posting their first articles in the next couple of weeks.

Here I am, standing in my trunks on the side of this swimming pool which is no larger than a dozen of feet in diameter. The warm water bubbling at the surface could lead to believe that this is a Jacuzzi of some sort. But it is not. I am approaching the edge and stare hypnotically at the water which I cannot see the bottom. What looks like a tiny pool is actually an impressive tube of water, which disappears in the deepness, like an infinite column of blue fizzy liquid. This is a proper scuba diving training pool, with 15 meters of depth, the equivalent of a 5-storey building. A few minutes before my first dive, a strange feeling of vertigo takes me…

I have been thinking about this moment for the past few days with a mix of excitement and apprehension… And the closer I got to the crucial moment, the more my anxiety grew and I tried to think of an excuse that would postpone the experience. Actually, I do have a little cold these days and diving with a cold is against safety rules. But my instructor accurately assessed that this pretended cold was only as important as a couple of sneezes a day and replied wisely that I’ll be alright… Nice try… However, I’m sorry to insist but I forgot my diving license today, and it is mandatory to have it on you for any dive… you know, in case of accident for the insurance and so forth… I was hoping for a little bollocking followed by something along the lines of ‘sorry sir, the rules are the rules. I’ll let you dive next time when you have all your documentation with you, but we gonna have to cancel your dive today’. Instead, my instructor gave me a sympathetic glance. He went to his office, looked up on the internet and checked on the official website that I indeed had a licence. Then he came back to me and ‘exceptionally’ accepted that I dive without my licence. Damn it! I ran out of ideas, and accepted the fact that today was going to be the day.

I am now all equipped in my diving outfit, which makes me look like some futuristic frog - typical for a Frenchman! Before getting into the water, Christian, my instructor, reminds me the basics: ‘Remember to breath normally, to balance the pressure in your ears while going down, not to do so while going up, to exhale when you go up, to deflate your jacket as you go up'... It seems to me that there are a million things to remember and I am far too busy being nervous to be able to do so…

He jumps… And then I jump…

Wow! I love this weightlessness sensation in the water. After a few seconds at the surface, I deflate my jacket, which makes me go down in the deepness instantaneously. I feel like an astronaut. Christian and I meet at 5 meters of depth where we settle for a while, checking that everything is okay. He asks me to perform a couple of stupid exercises like taking my nozzle off or undoing my goggles and put them back on again… I perform them. No problem. I am actually much more relaxed now. The fact that we need to communicate with our hands is good fun too. From those signs, I imagine us talking like little Indians. You looking. Me going down. You following. If you problem, you telling me. Roger? Roger.

We hover around in the water and decide to carry on our descent along the vertical rope. I am really surprised by how everything is slow and blue and peaceful down here. And the deeper we get, the easier it becomes to go down. Within a few minutes, we are at the very bottom of the pool where we settle and ask each other again if everything is all right. I am happy to be here. Christian makes an applauding mime, which is no proper scuba language sign, but I understand he congratulates me for having made it. I am very proud.

We remain at 15 meters of depth for about quarter of an hour, performing various exercises, before we start moving back up again. I am very concentrated on all the safety measures during that critical phase of the dive. Not that any of it is difficult, but the fact that most incidents turn into major traumas is a good motivator to do them all properly.

As I come out of the water, I am very much aware of my weight and of the surrounding noise. It takes me a while to actually want to talk. Undoing my equipment requires a lot of effort after thirty odd minutes of lightness. Christian debriefs me on the time spent under water. Apart from a couple a minor points, he is fairly positive about this first experience.

I have a big smile on my face. I am pleased that I managed to overcome my anxiety and made this happen without any trouble. Already, I cannot wait for my next dive to occur! The real thing this time, into the wild blue sea. Le Grand Bleu…

Just found this site, looks quite cool. Not a lot of entries for Bristol and thereabouts, though.

Since coming back to Bristol in June last year one of the things that has been most important to me is to start climbing again. It's taken a while - I really only managed to go a handful of times last year - but I think I'm finally starting to get back into the swing of it.

The last time I climbed properly was in 2002-2003 when I first got into it and I did a couple of courses teaching how to climb outdoors safely and was regularly leading 6c's indoors at Undercover Rock at St Werburgh's. 6c is nothing to a real climber but I was quite pleased to be able to do those at the time. Outdoors I only did it "properly" once on a Very Severe, 4c multi-pitch climb in the Avon Gorge. I've published a post from the original incarnation of The Isolationist, dated 29th August 2003, describing that climb; I was quite excited.

When I first picked up climbing again, probably in September or October last year, I went all the way back to top-roping 5a's and struggled a bit with that. That was quite hard but when I went last Friday night I was quite pleased that I felt relatively comfortable leading a tricky 6a climb. At least I'm back in the 6's! I was also doing ok in the bouldering room.

So now my attentions are turning to climbing outdoors again. Time to dust off my trad gear, and hope that the ropes haven't perished and the wallnuts haven't rusted. Only one way to find out!

This was posted on the original Isolationist website way back in 2003 (August 29th) when I was first bitten by the climbing bug.

Another crazy climbing adventure today. We climbed Central Rib on the main walls at the Avon Gorge (VS, 4c).

"Central Rib * 220ft VS. First climbed by B. Page and Miss A. Clark in 1954. Pleasant and popular. "

Very pleasant I imagine, with only a pair of hob-nailed boots for protection. This was first time that I've properly led outdoors, placing gear and relying on it. I'll tell you, it certainly makes you feel alive. The moves weren't technically difficult but I was so scared, particularly when protection got to be a little way beneath me. So scared in fact that I started playing with it a little bit. At one point, I was probably about 150 feet up, and my leg started shaking, really quite badly: I put my hand on a nice secure hold, leg stops shaking, take it off again, leg goes again, off: shaky, on: steady, off: shaky, on: steady. Puny Earthling! So that was fun. It was a multi-pitch climb so I had to figure out how to setup a belay station roughly half-way up the wall, basically on a narrow ledge, to get Ginger up safely, which took forever. But when I finally saw Ginger making the last few moves before joining me I felt this really warm satisfied glow. The kind you get when you've done something important (to you at least). I think we mis-read the guide book a bit for the second pitch because I got up about ten feet and thought there is no way I'm climbing up that and traversed left about ten feet. When I started going up after the traverse I found a section that the guide book had described, back on track, hurray. I'm glad I didn'thave to do that other bit, flashback to images of mountain rescue. I'd never been so glad to see a little crack in rock in all my life as I was today, climbing up towards the two hundred feet mark and suddenly there was nowhere to place protection, the climbing was pretty easy but the last bit of gear was about twenty five feet below me. And that does strange things to your mind: "I know this is safe, it's really unlikely that I'll fall. But if I do, I'm falling at least fifty feet onto a bit of gear that I placed and that may or may not hold."
Add to that the fact that I can't remember what that last bit of gear was rated to withstand. Was it 2KN or 12? That makes a big difference when a sixty-five kilo man drops fifty feet, I can tell you. And remember I was getting on for two hundred feet up at this point. And I'm really quite scared of heights. Fortunately I found a little crack to jam something into. Which was nice. So that was that, 220 feet of pure adrenalin, but man, it was so satisfying reaching the top and then seeing Ginger get up safely too.