Concrete thinking

I finally finished the concrete and it looks awful. I knew it would. Stopping half way through because of teaching and Lois having the flu, means that the joins between the first bit and the last bit are very obvious. Add on the inescapable fact that nothing in this house was level to begin with, and it’s obvious that this bit of floor would have to be sort of bent, wiggly, and sloping, just in order to connect up with the library and the cellar and the corridor that leads into it. Even that sentence is bent and wiggly.

Fortunately I know what to do, so this is a sort of tip for any would be DIY floor repairer. You can buy some magic stuff called self-levelling flooring compound, various people make it but I always found the Evo-Stik version was best. It comes as dry powder that you mix with water so it feels a bit like custard. You pour it on and spread it around, and it levels itself, I suspect custard would do the same but this stuff wears better once it has set. I have to admit that last statement is a bit of a guess - I haven’t tried custard; it might go quite leathery I guess, but I suspect that the mice would eat it.

Having said that I’m not sure about our mice, they are very fastidious. A few Christmases ago we went away for a few days, leaving some presents under the tree; when we came home the mice had eaten some of the biscuits, but here’s the neat bit – they only ate the expensive ones.

So that just leaves, re-fit the skirting boards, remaking the first step into the cellar, hanging the door, putting the bookshelves back up, putting the books back. At the moment all those books are stacked in very tall piles on the window ledge in the library, which completely fills the window so the library is dark all the time. Putting them back will be difficult because it will raise yet again the thorny question of which books go where, and what these books have done to deserve being banished from the library. In some cases this can only be answered by reading them again. Is it any wonder that DIY takes forever to get done?

The one good thing about doing the concrete – apart from removing the damp patch at the bottom of the stairs - is that I feel pretty exhausted afterwards and so sit in a chair with the laptop, too tired to do anything except edit. So far this concrete has helped revise 19 chapters of Rag Doll Falling, 50,449 words. This is a major edit to work in a different beginning, which has knock on effects right through the book. After that, of course it will all have to be done again, and again…

More on Unseen Academicals

Thinking more about Unseen Academicals, having now read it twice in two days, such is the liberating effect of not being well enough to do anything else. One of the new characters is Mr Nutt. At first he appears to be a Goblin but later it emerges that he is an ORC, a sort of breed that has been manufactured as a kind of slave mercenary warrior. OK so anyone who can’t stand fantasy books now wants to stop reading, but if you can bear it, keep on to the end.

Gradually through the book we find that Mr Nutt is very clever and immensely strong, virtually a superhero in disguise. Normally this would be quite boring, lets face it this type of fiction is awash with supermen, but Pratchett is a much better writer than that.

Scenes emerge, usually driven by the actions of other characters, that reveal the talents of Mr Nutt, but running though the book is another story. Mr Nutt lacks self-confidence, and is desperate to discover himself and prove his worth. Instead of a fairly trivial story about the emergence of a new hero, we get a much more moving tale where we are drawn into being concerned about, even sorry for this poor individual, who believes he may be the last of his kind in the world. Other characters are drawn into caring for him, despite the fact that they know that his species, if that’s the right word for made up creatures, has a reputation for tearing people’s heads off.

The story of Mr. Nutt and Glenda, the brilliant cook who runs the night kitchen, is really a simple romance of self-discovery, but set against the improbable background of the reinvention of football it becomes a comedy. Scratch a little deeper and there’s almost no limit to what you find.

Football started out as a street game, but by now it has become a proxy for gang warfare, cue lots of minor characters, sketched in just enough detail to bring to life every unsavoury miscreant you’ve ever heard of.

The magicians, most of them familiar from previous books, could be any university group, they provide an opportunity for plenty of jokes about elitism, but a proxy too for any section of society that tries to run on its own rules, above or outside the law.

The law in this case is the Patrician, the appointed tyrant who is nevertheless a benevolent dictator. Lord Vetinari is subtle and so clever that he knows that despite his apparently absolute power he has only as much power as the population gives him. Power is in the mind of those who accept it in others. The same message comes from Glenda the cook; those who keep us in our place only keep us there because we know our place.

Like so many of Terry Pratchett’s books, it is a comedy on the surface, and often very funny, but underneath it could be ‘East of Eden’ or ‘For whom the Bell Tolls’. It seems obvious to me that he could have written classic novels anytime he felt like it, but somehow he went beyond that and created an imaginary world where all the deep complexities of the human spirit can blossom, safely wrapped up in exaggerated comedy so that the reader never realises that they’ve been exposed to literature.

Flu and laughter

This week we have flu. More to the point Lois has flu and I’m sitting here hoping I don’t. I had my flu vaccine shot on Saturday, but of course that is for last year’ flu, not the new one.

Lois and I spent the last week teaching, fifty students all week in a room that wasn’t ventilated very well. The university has some sort of system where all the ventilation is controlled from some central point, which of course takes a couple of days to track down. Even when we talked to the guy, nothing seemed to change much. Has anyone in the control centre ever sat though a whole morning of teaching in a stuffy room I wonder? Not very likely, I guess. I suppose it might be possible to have some sort of device that measures how often the air changes but one way or another I think Lois must have got the flu from someone in that room.

Lois tried out the online system run by the department of health so you can diagnose swine flu yourself. If the computer thinks you have swine flu then it gives you an ID number, and then you send someone else to collect the Tamiflu. So even if she doesn’t have swine flu, she at least has computer flu. Which ever it is, it comes with a cough and fever and feeling rotten.

This computer system is sensible of course; if all the people with the flu turned up to collect the supplies then it would certainly put the staff at greater risk. On top of that anyone with a wrong diagnosis who came to collect the supplies would probably get the flu anyway from the other people who were collecting. Making the diagnosis by wire and sending a friend must reduce spread to some extent. As it was when I collected the stuff for Lois I was the only one there.

Fortunately the new Terry Pratchett novel came out this week so a week sitting at home is less of a pain. For many years now I’ve been buying Pratchett’s as soon as them come out, plus going to book signings as well.

This one, Unseen Academicals, is as good as all the rest. Several new characters appear as well as a few familiar ones. This book is about football, sort of. A particular disc world kind of football, but I’m sure it draws on a lot of the history of the game in real life too.

Like all Terry Pratchett novels it draws on a deep understanding of humanity, but what he does is to make the messages a little lighter by giving some of the characteristics to dwarfs and trolls, or other sundry life forms. How we relate to strangers and how we cope with our deepest fears, is there in all his books, but it’s not heavy. Pratchett is very funny too; this new one is a tough book to read on a bus, because you are almost bound to laugh out loud at some point - actually at a lot of points.

I’m probably a little weird at the moment, not exactly feverish but something is operating a bit differently, either fighting off Lois’s virus (old people, like me, are supposed to have some immunity to it) or maybe just dealing with having the vaccine. Stuff like that makes me more emotional, when I’m sufficiently ill that all I can do is read in bed I find books make me cry a lot. Even the ones I laugh at a lot make me cry as well. I know I’m not really ill this time because Unseen Academicals just made me laugh and laugh.

Joan Baez

On Thursday evening, I did something I’ve been doing for about 45 years, I heard Joan Baez in concert, and it was as good as ever.

Birmingham Symphony Hall is a very special place. I used to have a season ticket at the old Town Hall in Birmingham, back in the days when Simon Rattle first came to conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Over the decade here was here they got better and better and it exposed the awful acoustics of the Town Hall. It’s a nice historic looking building but if you have a seat under the balcony then you get a pretty muffled version of events.

I first heard Joan Baez in the town hall in about 1963 or 64; I really can’t remember which. I do know I had to queue all night to get the tickets and I sat in the front row. I can’t remember all the songs she sang but she did lose her place part way through and had to ask the audience which ones she’d done, she had a list of songs such on the topside of her guitar. Maybe it was a trick to get rapport with the audience, but it worked, she had everyone in the palm of her hand and that almost instant bond with the audience has been there ever since.

After the concert, because I was sitting in the front row I was able to dash through the door into the artist area and interviewed Joan for the university student newspaper. I have actually washed the hand that shook her hand since then, but I know which one it is.

Years later Simon Rattle persuaded Birmingham to build Symphony Hall. It is a masterpiece of sound engineering. When they built it the architect said it was the biggest perfect hall he was prepared to make, any bigger, any more seats and the sound would have been worse.

It is so much better than anywhere else I have been that it is hard to explain. I remember once listening to Cecilia Bartoli, she doesn’t use microphones or anything like that. At the end of the concert she did a piece where she sang to the people sitting in the choir sets behind her. As she sang the song she turned though 360 degrees three times. The second third time I closed my eyes as she sang, and it was impossible to tell which way she was facing, the sound quality did not change at all, whether it was coming straight from her mouth or bouncing off the back walls.

As soon as the place was built I started hoping that Joan Baez would sing there one day, I just wanted to hear that voice floating through the upper air in that place. For a couple of years, every time Joan toured she played in places like Warwick university and didn’t come to Birmingham, but when she did it was magic. Her voice really just flew through the hall, like a banner flying in the sunshine; it just makes you feel good. Joan obviously liked it too; she kept talking about the hall as the concert went on and at the end she turned off the mikes and sang, just by herself, with no band and no guitar. I just loved it, her voice and the hall was everything I’d expected. She let it go a bit, singing a song that rally let the high notes rip, floating right up there, I’m so glad I heard it back then before I started to go deaf.

Last night, I thought, maybe she is getting older; she looks a little stiff when she walks on, but the rest is the same. The rapport with the audience is total and that makes the concert a great experience, being in the middle of a thousand people who are having a spirit lifting experience, is something you don’t get too often.

She sang a few of the old songs, like ‘The night they drove old Dixie down’ and Diamonds and Rust. That’s been fun over the years; I think when it first came out there was a line ‘Twenty years ago I bought you some cuff links’. Now it’s ‘Forty years ago’.

This time she had an assistant who kept taking off her guitar after each song and bringing on a new one. Usually Joan takes about a minute after each song re-tuning. She makes jokes about it but this time it only happened once. She must have a fantastic ear because most guitarist that I’ve heard don’t re-tune between songs.

We did have one minute of twiddling the knobs and plucking. ‘I’ve been tuning this guitar for fifty years’ she said. ‘I know some of you have been here through it.’ Yup that’s me – ever since her first concert in the UK.

Times change, though she didn’t sing that. In that first concert she sang ‘Don’t think twice – it’s all right.’ She did it again this time but it was jazzed up, bouncing along almost like a celebration not a lament. I remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan sing one of his songs to a completely different tune; it was a huge shock, but a revelation too. I guess it’s not a surprise that Joan can do it too.

She made jokes, about how much she likes mournful ballads where people get heartbroken and die all the time; in fact at one point she sang one verse of a spoof version of ‘Silver Dagger’ in which damn near everyone died.

There was a nice moment when she talked about her mum and dad getting remarried after a couple of decades of divorce. Her dad was ninety at the time and she sang ‘Forever young’. Given the ages of her parents, the same might apply to Joan; if she goes on like this we could have a few more years yet.

I phone therefore I am??

I’ve spent the last week buying an Iphone. Why on earth would that take a week? First I went to Carphone Warehouse, mostly because the local one has its own carpark. They have none in stock – buy it on the web they said.

I would have gone to the Apple store in Birmingham but they only sell the pay as you go version. So I get on the web and try to buy it from O2. I wade through all the menus and get to the final button and it refuses to sell it to me, saying that there is a problem with my credit.

Panic. Has someone hacked my account? What can possibly have happened? I have this bank thing that sends you a text message if someone makes a credit check on the account – no message comes. The mystery deepens. I phone the bank, ordinary phoning, not Iphoning. The bank say there is nothing wrong with my credit.

I get back on the O2 web site and try to phone them. The number on the site gets me a number unobtainable message, so I Phone, I won’t repeat the joke, you’ve got it by now, and BT tell me it’s not one of their numbers and anyway seeing as I moved my phone account to Tesco I should phone Tesco. They don’t actually say Piss off, but it’s as near as a tape recorder can get.

Tesco at least give me another number for O2 and they tell me that the problem lies with Equifax, who they use to get credit reports. So I phone Equifax, who tell me I don’t exist, Nice of them to say so. Has it crossed their mind that someone must be talking to them? Perhaps they do special personality tests in order to make sure that the operator is not spooked when they find themselves talking to a person who does not exist.

I try explaining that I do exist, I have a CBE; the Queen doesn’t usually give those out to people who don’t exist, it’s so hard for her to hang the thing around your neck when you don’t exist, hand to shake hands too. Actually in the same batch of emails that include the one from Equifax saying that I don’t exist, I have one from Who’s Who congratulating me on being in the latest edition, in fact I think I’ve been in it for the last decade. Obviously Equifax don’t consult Who’s Who when they decide who isn’t who.

It takes two more days to narrow the problem down to the postcode address files; our house is in twice, once as Stonebow Farm and the other as Stonebow Farmhouse. That appears to be the problem, when their clever software puts profiles together from many different sources some of them have one version and some have the other, so the computer can’t decide what to do and goes for the simple solution of deciding that I don’t exist.

I did eventually persuade O2 to phone the bank that issued the card I was using and now I have the Iphone.

Back to Equifax, I figured I had better sort out the mess with them in case any other misguided retailer uses them. Their web site allows you to verify who you are by sending them copies of things like utility bills and passports. Their web site is the slowest I’ve had to contend with for a long time. It timed out or crashed on me six times before I did eventually get the documents loaded. It probably only does that to people who don’t exist, they’re hardly likely to complain are they.

They have another cunning trick, part way through the routine they give you a code number and tell you to phone them. Just as well I have an ordinary phone, it must be tough on any non-persons trying to get their first phone.

The first thing that happens when you phone is you get a friendly message telling you that the easiest way to contact them is to go to their web site, you know, the one that just told me to phone the number that’s telling me to use the web site.

I remained calm and decided that this was just a standard promotional message, not some twisted irony. The phone gives you a bunch of menus, you know the sort of stuff, ‘If you are fed up with the idiocy of this company press one.’ ‘If you really object to being charged by the minute to listen to this rubbish, press two.’

None of the menus appear to relate to the instruction from the web site. You would have thought there would be something saying, ‘If our web site has told you to phone, press three.’ No such luck. It took several goes around their menus and a few dead ends and one spell when it waited so long that I gave up. The blasted message about using the web site is repeated between most of the menus. It is obviously a nice little earner, to charge by the minute and include plenty of messages that will render the client apoplectic, so they collapse in a heap leaving the phone connected and running up bills.

Fortunately we non-persons are made of sterner stuff. I did eventually get it all done and now I exist. Next problem is to correct the rubbish on their site. The local council manages to send me an email telling me that I am on the electoral register, but Equifax thinks I’m not. My bank collects a mortgage payment each month and sends me annual accounts, but Equifax says I don’t have a mortgage.

I wonder if I could get Equifax to tell the bank to stop sending me bills?

This old house

Why no blog for such a long time? It all does back to the floods in 2007, when the water flooded almost all of the garden, my pottery and the garage and nearly came into the house. It flooded the cellar and ever since then we have had a damp patch at the foot of the staircase, the cellar is just underneath there. It’s had two years to dry out and still looks damp so I decided that the floor had better be dug up to see what was going on.

This house was built sometime between 1820 and about 1850 and probably built in pieces because you can see a joint halfway along the house where the second phase started. More was added in 1970, but that’s another story.

I think farm workers who knew very little about building must have knocked it up, every time I take plaster off or dig anything up I find more horrors. After removing about a ton of old quarry tiles and earth I found the root of the problem. See the picture.

The staircase comes down towards the wall of the cellar underneath it but it never actually gets there. There’s a gap of about 4 inches that was filled by a chunk of wood (now pretty rotten). When the water came up in the cellar it would have flowed into that gap and soaked the wood, hence the damp patch. The wood in question is that piece under the pick axe

So instead of blogging I have been digging, taking out all the old muck and filling it back in with a new damp course, some foam insulation and a ton of concrete. It’s a new kind of keep fit. I’ve lost three pounds and hopefully there won’t be a damp patch any more, well, once the concrete has dried out completely.

Non random thoughts about the BBC

Yet again the BBC does something awful to the English language. What? I hear you say – surely that’s not possible, they are the bastion of good English and pronunciation. Possibly true, unless numbers and numerical concepts are involved.

The word that’s being wrecked this week is random. I heard a trailer for a programme called ‘Random Edition’. Apparently each week they are going to take a random edition of a newspaper and go back over the stories to explore the historical significance. The first random edition is September 4, 1939. So on the 70^th anniversary of war breaking out they are expecting me to believe that they have managed to pick out the day after war was declared at random from all the other days they might have picked in the last seventy years. The odds of getting any particular day in that time period are more than 20,000 to 1

What random means is that all the possible choices are equally likely. I’m prepared to bet that all of the editions that are picked in this series will turn out to be momentous days in some way or another. I haven’t seen any publicity material about the programme, other than hearing a flyer for the first episode, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we happened – at ‘random’ - to get the day Kennedy was shot, the day the Berlin wall fell and other days like that.

Of course I’m cheating a bit because this is not the first series. The last series featured Lindberg’s first flight across the Atlantic, the first performance of Handel’s royal firework music, Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Hardly random events!

In my somewhat biased way – I’ve spent my life involved with epidemiology after all – I think this is part of a pattern of lack of numeracy at the BBC. Twice in the last five years I’ve heard items on the Today programme say something along the lines that in properly conducted randomised trials of prayer to alleviate sickness, that half of the attempts seem to work. The protagonist for prayer then cheerfully says that if it works half the time there must be something in it. This like saying that if I toss a coin and get it right half of the time then I must be a clairvoyant or fortune teller. The stupidity of the statement ought to be obvious to everyone yet on neither occasion did John Humphreys challenge the speaker, presumably because he has no understanding of what a randomised trial is, or how it works

When we try out new drugs the concept of randomisation is important, we usually divide the patients in the trial into two or more groups that are selected at random before treatment. That means that every patient has an equal likelihood of getting the new drug or of getting some other drug or treatment that we want to compare the new one with. That way, when we add up the results of the different groups, if there is a difference between the treatments, we have good grounds for thinking that the difference is caused by the treatments and not by some characteristic of the patients or their circumstance. If they are really chosen at random then the samples are much less likely to be biased and the results are more likely to be true.

If we misuse the word random so that the public think that a random date just means an interesting date, picked so that more people will listen to the programme, then how on earth will we convince them that treatments that have been shown to be worthless in randomised trials are not worth taking, or hazards shown to be dangerous are best avoided?

Our whole society is becoming hopeless at making sense of risk, and part of that comes from lack of understanding of the mathematical concepts. I think it’s time that the media faced up to their responsibility in this.

It’s also true that advertisers have a lot to answer for. How do we let the lottery, which is supposed to be random, get away with saying ‘It could be you’? OK I guess it is true that it could be you, but it would be more honest to say ‘It’s really very very unlikely to be you.’

If I invented a new drug that had a one in a million chance of making you better then I’m sure I wouldn’t be allowed to say ’This could cure you’, but such a statement would be just as honest as the advertising for the lottery, it gives a lot of money to good causes. What I object to is a steady process whereby the population is deskilled in assessing risk.

The consequence is that people smoke, drink and feed themselves to an early death. I don’t mind if they really do make an informed choice to do that, but if the BBC and other media keep wrecking any chance that the population will understand statistical concepts then informed choice is very unlikely.

No doubt someone will point out that the BBC does produce one programme (‘More or Less’ on Radio 4) which is about making sense of these concepts, but by putting it in a separate box and labelling it as the programme that is about numbers they pretty much signal that this is the one to switch off. What is needed is a change in culture at the BBC so that they are as scrupulous about statistical and mathematical truths as they are about other issues in the integrity of newsgathering and reporting. That is obviously harder to bring off than dragging in a few geeks to make one programme a week about numbers.

Why am I banging on about this? I think it’s a public health issue. If no one understands risk, then too many people will die and be disabled by diseases they could have avoided, and public health professionals like me will be forever labelled as killjoys for trying to legislate our way to a healthier society. If no one understands risks then risky things have to be banned in order to make people safe. In the long run that is a bad idea, it makes us all even less able to deal with the next risk to come along.

A long and happy life does not happen by accident – it’s not random.