Ashes to Ashes

It looks like the volcanic cloud business is over for the moment. What a fascinating affair and a good demonstration of the inability of the media to talk sensibly about risk.

First we had dramatic stuff about volcanic dust turning to glass inside jet engines and wrecking them, based on several stories about near misses. Excellent. I always like learning from near misses, they do so much less damage but still give us knowledge.

By the middle of the crisis we had questions being raised about whether it was all a panic about nothing. Surprise, surprise, but did we have a sensible discussion? No. At no point did anyone discuss the crucial questions. The first is, I think:

“How many planes crashing are justifiable?”

If the answer is none, then the ban on flights was probably inevitable. I suspect that was the number that the air traffic control people were working on, no increase in risk.

That has a cost, millions apparently lost in cancelled flights etc. I bet some of those calculations will turn up in due course at shareholders meetings and the like. So that’s the other half of the calculation:

“How much money can we afford to lose to maintain a given level of safety?” Again a question not asked.

I heard countless interviews with poor stranded tourists and others affected by the flight ban and no one got around to asking them:

“How big a risk would you take to get home?”

It is apparently the case that the public are not good at assessing risk – people keep doing stupid things because they don’t realise how dangerous they are. Here was a golden opportunity to do something about it. Is flying through a cloud of volcanic dust more dangerous than drinking twenty pints a night or smoking twenty a day for ten years? Is driving back from Spain more dangerous than flying through the cloud?

I think I finally despaired of anything good coming out of it when I heard that Willy Walshe was flying around in the cloud. Given his gung ho approach to industrial relations he was the obvious guy for it but no one asked him the obvious questions.

“Did you restrict the flight to uninhabited areas or the sea?”

“Did you have a parachute?”

He was flying over us and we were living under him, who was taking the biggest risk?

4 Reasons why you might not trust drug companies

4 Reasons why you might not trust drug companies - or why a new drug is the background for my novel ‘A Rag Doll Falling.’

Temptation 1 The price. A patent protects the invention when a new drug comes out, but it doesn’t last forever. The company has to take out the patent as soon as they invent the drug and at that stage they have no idea what it does. They have to try it out on different diseases. Usually they’ll try it on cells in test tubes and then in animals and eventually in people. They test for safety in normal volunteers and then on people who are very ill, the last chance saloon and eventually if things go well it gets on the market, licensed for a particular set of conditions. All that testing takes time and the clock is running down on the patent. The more that the public demand safety, the longer it takes. As soon as it is on sale the company has to try to recover the investment and make a profit. So there is a big temptation to charge the highest possible price.

Temptation 2 Keep testing to a minimum. Do the shortest clinical trials you can get away with. If possible test your new drug against a placebo, rather than head to head with the best drugs so far. That way no one can tell for sure if the new drug is really an improvement.

As the New England Journal of Medicine says “Placebo-controlled trials require smaller sample sizes than active-comparator trials, are less expensive to conduct (and therefore reduce the costs of market entry), and present less risk of producing unanticipated unfavorable findings…Yet placebo-controlled trials that are not supplemented by active-comparator trials leave clinicians, patients, and payers in the dark, providing no guidance on a new product’s advantages or disadvantages relative to existing products.” From (10.1056/NEJMp0906490) published on August 12, 2009, at NEJM.org.

Temptation 3 Stretch the licence. Encourage doctors to prescribe the drug for all sorts of other conditions where it might do some good. It’s not legal to do that and every year we hear of companies being fined by regulatory agencies for going too far. The fines often run into many million, which gives some idea of the profits that are at stake.

Temptation 4 Fund patient groups so that they demand the drug. If you can’t persuade the doctors with advertising and salesmen, maybe their patients will do the job for you. Why don’t patients tell their doctors to stick to the older drugs that are tried and tested? Mostly because illness scares people, cancer in particular, and it’s easy to assume that a new drug must be a better drug. All that media reporting about science and breakthroughs pushes us in that direction. Some of that must be set up by the dug companies mustn’t it - who else can they ask?

OK I don’t want to overdo it, but you have to admit it’s a good backdrop for a novel. Of course in fiction you can throw in some very unethical ambition and the odd murder that I’m sure don’t happen in real life – well I hope not anyway.

Read the book as an ebook at www.smashwords.com/books/view/11358

Living with an artist

It has finally dawned on me that I am living with an artist. I always knew that Lois could paint and draw, but facility is not necessarily art. I think it was Pissarro who warned his son against facility, though it might have been someone else. The point is that if you are good at something then you don't have to work at it. If you don't work at it then you may not really get what it is about.

Compared to me, and to many others I guess, Lois has facility in painting and drawing, but she also finds it hard to work at it. In the last two years she has discovered machine embroidery, what I call fabricollage. Collage with fabrics in other words. Embroidery as we usually know it is all detailed little stitches, careful hand sewing and nimble fingers. Machine embroidery on the other hand is a much more wild adventure.

For a start changing the foot on the sewing machine, or taking it off altogether, modifies the sewing machine. That means you can stitch anything to anything, within reason anyway. If you thing a piece of plastic or a sweet wrapper would look just right for the effect you want, then stitch it on, or glue works, or Bondaweb that you iron on will do. PVA adhesive turns out to be an embroidery material.

This freedom forces experiment. If anything goes, then everything goes, anarchy rules, and it is the final look of the work that determines what is best.

Trying things means that the house is covered with experiments and there is something exciting about living in the middle of art in creation. A writer experiments of course, my computer is full of them, but my experiments are not physical. I don’t trip over them.

It is hard to say exactly what art is, hence the multiplicity of definitions if you look for them. Inspiration is part of it, and seeing things differently and something that Nicholas Serota said about lifting the spirit. The cool thing is that Lois has an idea, sees something differently, and my spirit is lifted. It is an inspiration.

E-Books

My new obsession with e-books started on a train one evening; the journey between Paddington and where I get off in Worcestershire can be boring. It’s busy and too full as far as Oxford and then we ramble through every one-horse-stop in the Cotswolds till we get home.

Some time can be frittered away watching the other passengers. At first the urbanised city business types, commuting out of London, get off in Slough, Reading and Didcot. Next mixtures of those and more otherworldly academics get off at Oxford, and don’t forget the people toting bicycles. After that, things change as we get deeper into the time warp that is the Cotswolds. I guess it is a little known fact that Morton-in-the-Marsh is actually stuck in 1957; visit and you’ll see what I mean. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for the train company to run the trains on time.

I digress, the woman opposite me is using a Sony e-reader and is clearly just as engaged in her book as I am in the paperback that I bought on the station. Our house is filling up with those books; we have actually had to take some to the charity shops. After another long delay in the middle of nowhere I ask her about the machine and she talks enthusiastically about it for ten minutes. I get a free demo of how it works and a look at the screen. OK it costs some money but it’s a lot less than building an extension on the library, or even the cost a new set of shelve to match the nice mahogany ones we got years ago.

When I got home I did some research and found I could get a free Amazon Kindle app to go on my Iphone and with that I can access the whole Kindle range of books with my Amazon account. They download straight into the phone.

Can I read them OK on the screen? Actually yes. I find it best to turn the brightness down a long way, which reduces glare and also saves battery life. So far I’ve read seven books and I can’t find much wrong with the experience. This week Kindle for MAC has come out so I can get the same books on my MAC air laptop and on the IMAC at home. What’s more Amazon manages to know that it’s me and doesn’t charge me extra for having the books on all three devices. What’s even more clever, is that when I open Kindle on the phone it knows where I got to when I was reading on the laptop and lets me update the bookmark and start in the right place.

Is there any difference between this and reading a book? I don’t have to find a bookmark, the phone fits in my pocket and I was carrying it anyway. The pages are easier to turn, given that my fingers are getting arthritic, this may be a real plus sometime in the future. It can be hard to know how much of the book is left, you know that rush you get as you get near the end of the book when you know there’s only five pages to go and you’ve still not spotted the final twist. On the laptop version there is actually a percent read score in the bottom left hand corner, which is almost as good as feeling the width of the remaining pages. On the phone version, if you tap the middle of the page a graphic appears at the bottom that shows you how far you’ve got. It looks just the same as the thing that comes up across the top of the screen in ITunes to show how much of a song is still left to play.

Another miracle of modern science is that I can put so many books in my Iphone that I would need a trailer if they were paper, but the phone still weighs the same.

Obviously Amazon has made this move in an attempt to stay one step ahead of Apple’s Ipad, which will be out shortly in the UK. It also means that if I buy one of those I can put the Kindle app on there as well and read my books on that, which means Amazon will still be selling me books and able to compete with whatever book store Apple come up with.

So the only questions I’m left with is why do e-books cost so much, and should I try to sell my book as an e-book? Maybe the answer to the first question is hidden inside the second.

Do literary agents know what they are doing?

Do literary agents know what they are doing? OK I appreciate that thinking about this is a reaction to getting rejection letters. I also do know that there are plenty of stories about authors being turned down and then eventually being successful. Keep trying they all say.

Put all that on one side and ask the question, do any of them keep score. So far, on all of the agent’s web sites I have looked at, I have never found an agent that says how good they are at spotting winners.

The sort of thing I am looking for is something that says we have looked at X number of submissions and approved Y new authors and of all the people we have turned down only Z have gone on to be published by someone else. If Z as a proportion of the rejections, is smaller than Y as a proportion of the submissions, then it would suggest that the agent knows what they are doing. If the numbers were the other way around then you would have to conclude that the average of all the other agents was better than the agent in question.

As I have never found any agent who publishes any stats, other than telling me how many submissions they get, I am leaning towards the conclusion that none of them keep score, or if they do then they don’t want to tell anyone about it.

So what does this tell me? I guess the obvious answer is that one might conclude that none of them are particularly good at spotting talent. Does that matter? Probably not. The key thing is whether the agent is any good at representing talent – getting you a good deal if they do take you on. Some data to help answer that question would be helpful, but I don’t see much sign of that either.

There is another problem, if most agents turn down most submissions then any author who gets accepted is likely to just say yes whether the agent is any good or not, so they are in a sellers market.

On balance then, I guess the right strategy is to get an agent, any agent, and get published. After that it must be a lot easier to get a good agent, because all of them are interested in making money and they would rather take on a published author than an unpublished one.

It actually feels like a rubbish system that is ripe for a new business model – I just wish I could figure out what such a model might look like.

Testing Testing Testing

For the last year I have been a test subject, well, that’s not quite right because in a way I have been the tester, or at least obliged to say what I think. Lois gave up eating gluten and wheat a year or so ago and has been experimenting with gluten free cooking ever since. Anyone with Coeliac Disease will be familiar with the products that are available through the NHS, but lets face it they taste like medicine.

Lois has set about trying to make interesting food with alternative flours. We bought a small electric flourmill from Switzerland – the Internet is wonderful isn’t it – and can now make flour out of almost anything, peas, almonds, tapioca, even the maise we grew in the garden.

I’m not going to give away trade secrets, because Lois is now writing a cookbook and about to start selling some of her cakes. The rationalle is; why shouldn’t Coeliacs have treats?

So where do I come in? Each new recipe has to be tested, so Lois invented test sheets. Imagine eating a delightful new cake or biscuit and then filling in a form full of terms like:

Mouth feel.

Crispness.

Chewiness.

Early flavour.

Late flavour.

Aftertaste.

You get the idea. In many ways it is a lot of fun. So far she has cracked cakes and pastries and biscuits and now makes versions that are at least as good as anything made with traditional wheat flour. The next step is being inspected by the environmental health folk, hence getting the uniform as seen in the picture. Further excitement will be getting the products tested to be sure we haven’t accidentally introduced any gluten, designing packages, establishing a brand name. Much more fun than getting rejection letters from agents. Watch this space.

The box in the attic

I belong to a writing group, most times I don't put that writing on here but for a change here is last week's piece. I've posted here before about the old farmhouse I live in and this is another in that series, though written about the early years when we first bought the property and embarked upon a massive renovation.

The box in the attic

I did wonder if it was cursed, or had a spell on it. The jewels inside certainly looked the part. Old dark stones set in tarnished silver, strange trinkets hung on ancient links, and all tangled up in there so we had no idea if it was a necklace or a bracelet or just broken pieces.

There weren’t any diamonds, nothing flashed in the light as we took the lid off, just dull glows and sparkles from amber and jade and who knows what among the tangled chains. It was dirty in there, dark, almost as though the light was being slowed down, reluctant to come out again and tell us its secrets. And then there was the fever. It came on me suddenly. One moment I’m sitting in the one armchair in the house, happy at a good days work all done and waiting to eat the supper I can smell. The next moment I’m shivering, overcome by rigors, teeth chattering, clutching every part of me together to try to stay warm, feeling chilled to the bone on a midsummer’s day.

How it came to be there took time to discover, the house is old so it might have been there a hundred years or more. Perhaps it never should have been disturbed, but there’s no going back now. Everything about this house sucks us in, drags us past a point of no return, one thing leading to another and another and another.

Leaning on a wall upstairs started it. It’s an innocent enough thing, leaning on a wall, until the wall moves. Don’t let me exaggerated, it didn’t set off for the next county, it just moved an inch, and if you leaner harder it moved another inch and came back when you stood up straight. No way a wall like that can stay in a bedroom, so it had to go. After than it was obvious that the ceiling had problems. It sagged. It hung like a blanket, like the roof of a desert sheik’s tent, three inches lower in the middle than it was at the sides. That moved too, not that we tried very hard. Standing under a ceiling and pushing it up and down a couple of inches is hardhat work, and not for the feint hearted. We climbed up in the loft to examine the problem from above. Dirty old fibreglass insulation covered the floor but pull that aside and under a century’s dust you could see where the ceiling had come away from the rafters. All that held it up were the ancient laths embedded in the plaster, that and the woodworms holding hands.

Of course it was worse than that, the rafters were coming away from the joists as well. It all had to go, and that’s how we found the box.

It’s not really fair to call it a treasure chest. That gives the wrong idea about size. This wasn’t some massive structure, weighed down with iron bands around venerable oak planks. Such a thing would have fallen through the decrepit canopy long ago. It was smaller than that, two hands could get around it and barely cover the metal, but it looked the part a sort of shiny pewter colour. As we tore the ceiling down and ripped away the old insulation it came down with the dead spiders and the dust. We almost missed it. I wore a facemask and a respirator and a tyvek suit. As the demolition went on the room filled with dust. It got so dark I could hardly see from one end to the other and the floor disappeared under a carpet of broken laths, torn insulation, archaic horsehair plaster and dust. So much dust – choking, black and pervasive dust.

Sitting in the heap was the box. If it hadn't been shiny we might have missed it, but the dust slid off the metal and even in the fog it gleamed enough, as though it knew the time had come to be found.

The rigors went on for almost an hour. Using every coat and blanket we could find in the house made little difference. Lois took a picture of me huddled in the armchair, shaking and shivering. I looked like an elderly Eskimo swathed in multiple coverings, hooded over as though I was in the arctic and not summer in Worcestershire. I watched her worry. I drank sweet tea and I shook from head to toe. Another ten minutes and she would have called an ambulance but it finally passed and left me weary to the bone.

It must have been some sort of allergy to the dust. Easy to say in hindsight but in the thick of it a spell or a curse was just as convincing. How did the box get there? Like everything else in this house one thing leads to another.

The previous owner had read somewhere that when you go on holiday the best way to hide your valuables is to put them in a box and stuff them under the insulation in the loft. Burglars are unlikely to look there.

It’s easy to do and you just have to remember where you put them. If you are just beginning to get Alzheimer’s disease the remembering is the hard part. It was the Alzheimer’s that made them sell the house and hence we bought it. It was the Alzheimer’s that stopped him maintaining and repairing the house, hence the sagging ceilings and worn out fabric.

We took the box back to the former owners they told us the story. The curious antique jewels were family mementos, trinkets bought to celebrate children’s births and other valued events. Such things have a life of their own and a meaning that comes from memory. The box wasn’t cursed, it was charmed, and it needed to find it’s way home.