Christmas Rituals

If you still believe in Father Christmas and you don't want to know the score; look away now.

I returned from midnight mass on Christmas morning at 01:00, and was faced with what has now become an anual ritual - the impersonation of Father Christmas. We follow the tradition of leaving out a drink and a snack for the big man and his reindeer, and it is my duty on returning from church to consume the said items before proceeding to the filling of the stockings. The particular delicacies that Father Christmas enjoys at our house are a glass of port and a mince pie. In the morning the believers in the household (there are 2 true believers and one who knows the truth but perfers the fantasy) will have a little more evidence to support their belief in the magical man who brings them presents each year.

This year it occured to me that I take part in two rituals in the small hours of Christmas day - each involving the consumption of a round piece of food and a drink made from grape juice. First of all I take communion - a circular wafer of what passes for "bread" in the Church of England and a sip of what passes for "wine". I then come home and consume a mince pie and a glass of port. Each of these actions is a ritual which has no real purpose apart from it's meaning. And though the rituals may look very similar, the meanings are quite different.

Communion is the taking of the body and blood of Jesus Christ himself into my own body, so that the one God who created the universe, the world and all that exists is not just a spiritual idea or thought, but is actually, physically experienced.

The second ritual is a game we play for the children. It entertains them and we are delighted by their delight. Some cynics often call it a lie or a deception, but I think that it is no more than a game. They will know the truth about Father Christmas one day, and I doubt they will be sorry that we played this game with them.

Bah! Humbug!

"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!'' cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
"Bah!'' said Scrooge, "Humbug!''
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
"Christmas a humbug, uncle!'' said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure.''
"I do,'' said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.''
"Come, then,'' returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be dismal? what reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.''
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, "Bah!'' again; and followed it up with Humbug.''
"Don't be cross, uncle,'' said the nephew.
"What else can I be,'' returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,'' said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas'' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!''
"Uncle!'' pleaded the nephew.
"Nephew!'' returned the uncle, sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.''
"Keep it!'' repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you don't keep it.''
"Let me leave it alone, then,'' said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!''
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,'' returned the nephew: "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!''

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Efergy Smart Meter

In a bid to do everything to reduce expenditure, I have focussed on Electricity consumption. When I last checked the cheapest supplier for my energy, I found that our household uses the “average” amount of gas for a UK household, but 1.5 times the “average” amount of electricity. I recently heard of a device called Electrisave, which is designed to get your electricity meter out of the cupboard and put it in front of your face. The objective is to allow you to monitor continually the total consumption of power by the house, and take action when it seems too high. In researching the Electrisave, I came across a superior product called the Efergy Smart Meter. This device does the same as the Electrisave, but also has a memory so that you can review historical consumption without needing to note down meter readings. The Efergy Smart Meter is also about GBP 25.00 cheaper than Electrisave. The only down-side is that the designers have not taken so much care over looks, and I would say that the Electrisave is a more elegant gadget compared with the Efergy’s functional feel – something that may be important if you want to keep it on a coffee table in a pristine living room; but something which matters not one jot to me.
The Smart Meter works by monitoring the current flowing through the wires leaving your electricity meter (which it does by induction, so there’s no wiring to do, just a clip that fits round the meter wire), and transmitting a radio signal from the meter cupboard to the hand-held metering unit. This means that the device is completely wireless and can be taken from room to room to keep an eye on what happens when electrical equipment is turned on. It runs on AAA batteries, 2 in the transmitter, and 2 in the receiver. The transmitter batteries last only about a month, so rechargables might be a good option.
So what have I learned about my energy consumption? If you’re going to make savings you need to learn what’s going on and put some changes into practice. The unit costs GBP 45.00, and as electricity costs GBP 0.07/kWh, you have to save about 650 kWh before the unit has paid for itself. That might not seem much – savings of 10% are quoted by salesmen – but it does require very disciplined application. It’s no good turning off stuff today and then ignoring it for the rest of the year. Smart Meter is a way of life. You have to watch it all the time. However, it does teach you some basics about electricity consumption. For example, I found that the house consumes a base load of about 200 W. That is, when I turn off everything, I still see (by torchlight) a reading of 200 W, which must be accounted for by standby, digital clocks, wireless access point etc. That might not seem a lot – a mere GBP0.336 per day – but this is a constant load which adds up to over GBP120 on my annual bill. (Or course the central heating pump and the fridge are intermittent loads, and it’s hard to know if they are included in this figure or not.) Another lesson is that lighting actually uses up a lot more energy than you’d expect. The humble 40 W light bulb seems fairly cheap to run (less than 1 kWh per day). But we have these in triple light fittings, so that’s 120 W for each fitting. Then consider that we have four of these on the ground floor and five on the first floor – that adds up to more than 1 kW just in lighting if you put on all of these on together.
To sum up: the Smart Meter is an educational tool which will open your eyes to the way you use energy. However, you need to be obsessive if you really want to make it into an investment and expect to save any money by purchasing it.

Vectrix Electric Scooter

This summer I took a Vectrix electric scooter for a test ride; and I have to say that I was very impressed. With a top speed of 100 km/h and a range of 110 km, this could easily be the first truly usable electric vehicle since the milk float. The acceleration was extremely good; the feel and handling were excellent. With all the weight low down, but with much less weight than the older generation of electric vehicles, it makes for a really useful little machine. I was very impressed with the sales team too. They were both bikers, so they new what they were talking about and understood their customer. They were quite happy to bring a machine with a fully charged battery to my home, follow me on a test ride to work and recover me if the range of the vehicle wasn’t up to it. That may seem rather odd, since my journey to work is only 55 km – half the maximum range of the Vectrix - but apparently the maximum range is not available at the maximum speed. My journey to work looks like this: 5 km town driving (max speed 50); 35 km motorway (max speed 120); 15 km dual carriageway (max speed 80). That middle section of 35 km at what would mostly be flat out for the bike could prove a big drain on the battery and would need to be assessed. In the end I decided not to buy one. Below is my assessment of the pros and cons of this particular vehicle, but my main concern was that the top speed just isn’t high enough. It’s not the time – it would add about 3.6 minutes (or 9%) to my minimum journey time – but the actual usability on a motorway. I watched how I ride on motorways, and came to the conclusion that I do use that top 20 km/h most of the time. Given that more than 60% of my journey is motorway, I just wasn’t happy with having no acceleration above 100 km/h.

Advantages of the Vectrix (over my Honda ST1100):

• Cheap to run – would cost about £1 a week.
• Cheap to service – apparently has only 7 moving parts (brakes and bearings)
• Zero cost to tax

Disadvantages

• Unknown battery life. Ten years is claimed, but warranty only covers two or three
• Unknown resale value – Have to assume that it depreciates fully over the warranty period.
• Lack of top speed for motorway work
• Unknown insurance costs – Vectrix recommended a broker who quoted a crazy price
• Unknown range when the battery gets old. I’d be a bit stuck if the range drops off after a year of use and I can’t get to work.

It’s very difficult to get an accurate picture of the true cost of ownership of the Vectrix. With fuel costs at £50 per year instead of £1500 you’d think it would make sense. One model I built, the whole thing hinged on the tyre life, believe it or not. But any realistic model of cost for any vehicle is based on the depreciation. Buying a brand new scooter for £7000 with an unpredictable resale value, compared with a middle-aged big bike with a strong second-hand market just leaves too many unknowns. So it was with some reluctance that I gave up my hope of going electric for my commuting. But give up I have until there’s a bit more top end, and a bit more history on which to base depreciation estimates.

Fitbug

My employers recently decided to try for a fitter, healthier workforce and gave us all a gadget called a Fitbug. This is a digital pedometer that counts your steps. But it’s not just a dumb step counter that counts your daily steps, oh no, this is a smart step counter. It keeps a record of when the steps were taken, and stores that all in a memory. It can store up to 2 weeks worth of data, but the idea is that you upload the results to a website where it leaves a permanent record of your activity. Through the website you have access to a graphical interface where you can compare across days, or look at the detail of which hours you were active on any given day. Furthermore, if you walk for 10 minutes or more without a break, the Fitbug deems that to be aerobic exercise, and counts the steps as Aerobic steps. They then give you a target for how many steps you should be doing each day, and how many should be aerobic. Then they set you a target for how many of each kind of steps you need to do. Based on your performance against target, they colour-code each day’s activity: grey – not enough steps; green – enough steps, but not enough aerobic; blue – enough aerobic steps, but not enough total steps; pink – target achieved. So you get a graph that looks like this:

Now of course the most obvious question is: what do you do with this information? Well, it beats me! The best use I can think of is that if you’re in the habit of exercising regularly and you notice that you’ve had a very active day, you can skip today’s exercise session and save time. That seems kind of contrary to the spirit of the thing. To be honest, I have actually walked instead of driving a few short journeys recently so that I get the steps. But not enough to make a real difference.

My conclusion – if you’re motivated to get fit, it might help you. If you’ve got a lazy, unfit and out of shape workforce, you need more than a gadget to get them motivated.

Bike or Train

When I first moved to Bishop’s Stortford in 1996 I was working in the City (of London). The only sane means of transport for getting to work was to use the train. So I bought a house a short walk from the station and bought a season ticket each month. Nothing much changed for about seven years. Then my employer announced an office move to Canary Wharf in the London Docklands. For those who don’t know the anatomy of London, Canary Wharf is an office village about 5 km east of the City, and is attempting to take over the City’s position as the financial centre of the UK – an aspiration which it has so far been quite successful in realising.

The problem for those of us living out to the North of London is that public transport links to the London Docklands are poor, to put it mildly. The only obvious route is to go into the City as normal, and use public transport from there. This adds a further 30 minutes to a journey of about 1 hour, giving a total daily commuting time of 3 hours, not to mention an additional GBP50 per month.

The only real alternative is to use the road system. This is another situation altogether. Bishop’s Stortford is right next to the M11 motorway which takes you down to the north east corner of London and connects with the A12 Eastern Avenue and A406 North Circular roads. These are fast dual carriageways taking you further into London, and, crucially, into Canary Wharf without touching any urban roads. Of course using a car is an option, but has two draw-backs: namely that the roads get very busy during the morning and evening peaks, and the size of a car makes it expensive to park during the day.

So the only viable solution is a motorcycle. On a bike I can jump all the queues and park for free in the office car-park. The journey time is as little as 40 minutes on clear roads and seldom more than 50minutes even in the heaviest traffic. A bike is a completely different experience from a train, but I settled into the different routine well enough for the first year. Then, in the spring of this year, I was told that due to overcrowding of the office, we were being moved back to the City for an unspecified period. I still visit the Canary Wharf office a few times each week, but when I have to go to the City, I use the train. This has got me thinking about the relative merits of the two means of transport which are so different in nature. There are definitely some positive points about using the train – I’m writing this on a train, something I can’t do on a bike – for example. But if I had used the bike today, I would have been home by now and I could type this in the comfort thereof. I’v compiled a list of plus and minus points for each of the two forms of transport.

Train:
Plus points:

• Gives me 1.5 hours of time when I can read or use a laptop
• Requires about 30 minutes of brisk walking per day to keep me fit
• Allows me to relax and even sleep when I’m sleep deprived
• Low risk on the cost front – Cost is fixed (unless I forget to buy a ticket)
• Low risk on the safety front.
• Relatively comfortable, most of the time.
  

Minus Points:

• Takes twice as long as the bike
• Costs about twice as much as the bike
• Timetable is quite inflexible, so if I’m 1 minute late for the train I can be 30 minutes late for work.
• When things go wrong they go badly wrong, and you’re helpless.
  

Bike:
Plus points:

• Much quicker than the train
• About half the price of the train (though costs are harder to quantify)
• I’m not tied to a timetable
• Even when roads are blocked there’s a way through the traffic.
  

Minus Points :

• Takes all concentration, so I can’t read or work in transit
• Can be quite uncomfortable in the rain or in cold weather
• Relatively high risk of death or serious injury
• Relatively high risk of financial loss due to accidents or speeding fines

On balance, an impartial reader might think that train has the upper hand. If you gave all the points equal weight you’d probably come to that conclusion. But the one point that clinches the deal for the bike is that it gives me an excuse to ride the bike every day. For those not familiar with riding, you probably won’t understand that; if you compare it to driving a car you won’t see the connection. There is a saying that if I have to explain it, you won’t understand, and that applies very well to riding a bike. Those who don’t ride, don’t know. It might be chucking down with rain; it might be freezing cold, but I’d rather be on my bike than in a comfy train. Riding into the City I don’t enjoy it so much – the urban traffic is an acquired taste – but whenever I can find an excuse to go into our Canary Wharf office, I’ll be there on my bike.

Smallcreep's Day

Following yesterday's posting regarding Smallcreep’s Day, I did a bit of searching with Google, and came across this little gem:

It’s someone reading an extract from one of my favourite parts of the book. It’s not exactly as it was written; the words are in fact a montage of two conversations into a single (almost) monologue, performed in a menacing, distorted voice.

At this point in the plot, Smallcreep has found the factory offices, where he clumsily stumbles in on first a salesman and then the Managing Director. Both characters give him their view on life which is, I believe, the central message of the book. You may be tempted to view this critique of life as highly cynical, but I would suggest that it is quite the opposite. The acknowledgement that, if you have a dustbin, you condemn a man to empty it for you, is irrefutable. Here he faces up to the reality of capitalism, not in a sentimental hand-wringing way, but with a totally genuine and bluntly honest way. Well enough of my views – listen to it for yourself

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And if you now want to read the book, pre-order it now on Amazon – it’ll probably be cheaper than a second-hand copy on ebay.

Smallcreep and the internet

When I was very young – just a baby – my father wrote a novel and was successful in getting it published. The book is not really the subject of this post, but here’s a brief summary of it: The book is called Smallcreep’s Day, and follows the exploits of a factory worker, Pinquean Smallcreep during a very unusual day in his life. Mr Smallcreep, having become obsessed by an idea, leaves his machine and goes exploring through the strange world of his factory. On a quest to find meaning in his monotonous existence, Smallcreep experiences many surreal and disturbing situations. Each scene explores some of the author’s ideas about human relationships, freedom and the value of human life. Some of the scenes are hilarious, some depressing and some macabre. The final two pages are taken up with a powerful vision of the futility of factory work and a passionate cry for the lost dignity of the craftsman. (It is not hard to guess, reading this conclusion that the author very soon left his life as a factory worker and became a craftsman potter.)

The book was originally published by Gollancz, and later issued in paperback by Picador and Panther. Many years ago it was discontinued and can now only be found occasionally on ebay, paperback copies often fetching a tenner or more. Needless to say, this book has become the stuff of family legend. I cannot remember a time when there was no Smallcreep, and my three siblings and I have always been enormously proud of our father’s work. You sometimes meet people who have read it, and they always turn out to be interesting people who were very impressed by the book. Mike Rutherford, the guitarist, used the story as the inspiration for a concept album in the 1980s (though he sold out the true meaning of the book and gave it a happy ending). Having been out of print for so many years, it’s becoming less and less frequent that I meet anyone who’s heard of Smallcreep.

One morning this year I received a phone call at work from a number I didn’t recognise. The caller ran a small publishing house in London, specialising in out-of-print works by authors with interesting views on life, and wanted to know if I was related of the author of Smallcreep’s day. He was interested in contacting him with a view to re-issuing the work. I was delighted to put him in touch with my father. I was also delighted to learn today that the book will be re-published by Pinter and Martin in May 2008. Order your copy now

You might expect that this would be the end of the story, but it gets stranger yet. A couple of months later I got a message through Friends Reunited, from someone interested in … contacting my father with a view to writing a screen play for Smallcreep’s Day. Luckily Friends Reunited had not managed to remove her email address from the message, so I was able to make contact without having to shell out to join their service (which I wouldn’t have done).

So the interesting thing is that there is enough information on the internet to track down the children of the author of a work which was published over 40 years ago. (My father does have his own web-site, but it would have been impossible to find him, as he now goes by a stage-name.) I asked the 2nd caller how she had reached me, and how she knew it was me, from the thousands of David Browns on the Friends Reunited site. She had apparently heard of the connection through an old school friend of mine who writes a blog – Random Burblings. He mentions me and the town where we grew up, so it was then easy to find the right Brown family from that information.

I’m very pleased that I can be traced via stuff that people put on the internet. Arguably the first caller did a better job, as he found the switchboard of my company and asked for me by name. Despite there being about 20 David Browns in our Global Address List, he still managed to get through to the right one. However, if you have any reason not to want to be contacted by strangers - skeletons in the cupboard perhaps, or worse – be very wary about posting information on Friends Reunited or other sites. It might pay to Google your own name and town of birth from time to time, just to see what’s out there. Don’t think of it as vanity; it’s identity protection.

Honey from Africa

I recently came across a charity called Hives Save Lives Africa (HSLA)which seeks to help people in developing countries to develop independence by providing them with beekeeping equipment and training. Traditional African honey production techniques are several hundred years behind western methods, which results in a honey with a smoky flavour (caused, they argue, but the excessive use of smoke in the harvesting process) that is difficult to sell on the world market and fetches a low price. HSLA argue that if they can provide African apiculturalists with the hardware and knowledge to produce top quality honey, they can increase income from bees and provide more independence.

I bought those arguments and donated some cash to HSLA. I then wondered what African honey would taste like, so I set out to find some in Waitrose. There I found a jar of Tropical Forest Honey, a fair-trade label with a different take on the African honey situation. Tropical Forest buy the honey from the traditional honey harvesters, smoky flavour and all. I tried it, and sure enough it does taste of smoke! The Tropical Forest view is that the smoky flavour is natural; not caused by harvesting – they put it down to the presence of pollens which the western pallet is not used to. They use this flavour as a unique selling point, claiming that it is enjoyed by true honey connoisseur. They argue that the traditional methods are better suited to the African situation, with lack of infrastructure and lack of capital making western-style honey production impractical and inappropriate.

So here are two opposing views of African development through honey production: the HSLA approach of giving hardware and knowledge to allow honey farmers to produce western style honey to compete on the open world market; and the Tropical Forest approach of buying the low quality product produced by traditional apiculture and trying to find a market for it in the west. The HSLA approach could be accused of forcing western style development on situations where it is not appropriate. The Tropical Forest approach could be accused of creating a dependency on a small market which will limit future development. Ultimately the judgement has to be which is the most effective at providing poor communities with an independent and reliable source of income.

Meanwhile the Tropical Forest honey jar languishes in my cupboard, half-finished, while I’ve gone through several kg of English and French honey and a several jars of - my favourite addition to yoghurt – acacia blossom honey from various countries. I can‘t see myself buying any more of the Tropical Forest honey in a hurry; but I’d love to know what the honey from the HSLA projects tastes like.

No such word as “blog”.

I did a Google search for “no such word as blog”. I was expecting to find many people writing treatises on the decline of the English language and where on earth have all these new words come from. I was disappointed! One poet complained it was such an ugly word, and couldn’t we use a word with more syllables (though he didn’t propose one), but mainly it was people speaking in the past tense about how “when I started this blog there was no such word as blog” etc. So how exactly did the word get into the language – and in the language it jolly well is, whether or not it’s in any particular dictionary or spell checker.

When new things are invented, we need to give them names so that we can talk about them without having to describe them each time. In the “good-old-days” inventions were made by inventors, or at least by companies, who then had the privilege of inventing a new name for their new article. This could be new word – like “television”, a combination of existing words (e.g. “Compact Disk”), or a new use for an existing word (“record”, to stick with the recording media example). But since the web era, things (like blogs) have been happening without being invented as such. And people start using words to name these things, and those words are then part of the language. But for a word to mean something, the speaker and the listener both have to know what it means. So how does a new word get into common usage? Well the answer has to be the media. Unless we’re really on the cutting edge of technology, we hear these new terms used in the news. Then we go and look them up and find out what they’re all about. And when we tell people about them, we use the term we heard in the media.

So why are so many of the new internet age words so dreadful; for example “phishing” to describe trying to get someone to reveal their password. Who thought of that and why on earth would anyone journalist give it the dignity of actually passing it on. Well I suppose the answer is that journalists are not very creative people. They just read a press-release, or someone else’s news story, and they repeat it parrot fashion to their readers/listeners/viewers, and so the words get passed on and used, whether they deserve it or not. But it doesn’t always happen that way. The decade between 2001 and 2010 still needs a name, and we’re already more than half way through. Several different names have been proposed for this decade, including the unbelievably crass “noughties”. Why on earth would anyone think of that, let alone use it? We don’t say “two thousand nought seven” do we? For two digit dates it’s more likely “oh seven”. And there’s nothing particularly naughty (which I assume is the allusion they were looking for) about this decade compared with any other. So I’m pleased to say that while I’ve heard a few people in the media attempt to create this term, I’ve yet to hear anyone use it seriously.

So where does that leave my blog. Actually I hate the word. It’s a rubbish word with a rubbish etymology and only one letter away from “bog”, the English slang for a lavatory. But it’s undeniably the word that we use to describe this kind of internet journal. (I checked the meaning of “journal” in the Oxford Dictionary, and apparently you have to update it every day to qualify as a journal.) So “blog” it is – it could have been worse!