A blog free summer

One might think that the summer would be a good time for blogging. Long days, time to reflect in the sunshine and all that.

Bear in mind 2007 and it becomes clearer that the summer may not be all it promises. This year the disasters have been less all encompassing than being flooded but still disruptive in their own way.

The garage doors started it off – random openings being the main symptom - obvious attention seeking behaviour from some piece of electronic chippery. There is a lesson in there somewhere. Random and intermittent faults get much more attention than just failing altogether. A garage door that is stuck open or stuck shut can be got around but an intermittent fault requires a man in a van to come and gaze at it and look puzzled. The same is true of human behaviour I think. If you are obnoxious all the time folk think it is character and work around it. If, on the other hand you are erratic then they call men in white coats. Actually I think that’s a bit unfair to psychiatrists as I think they operate in plain clothes these days.

Of course all the other remote controlled, silicon based stuff that we have must have some way of spotting that the garage door is getting a lot of loving attention from strangers, at least that seems to me to be a reasonable explanation for the rash of copycat behaviour that has spread like a virus around here.

The sewer is the most disruptive. I should explain that we live out in the country. Rural. Not isolated – we can still get pizza delivered so we are not cut off from civilisation altogether. We are a long way from a main sewer and when I asked the local planning department if the sewer would ever get this far they just laughed. We have our own treatment plant, a massive plastic tank thing buried in the ground at the bottom of the garden. It does clever things; blowing bubbles through the sewage and passing it between different inner compartments in some cunningly programmed way. It is called activated sludge – a great name. The end result is clean water that can be discharged into the nearby stream with the approval of the local environmental health inspectors.

All this is controlled by a box full of electronics that sits on a concrete thing to keep it out of any future flood. Actually ever since the flood this box has been producing random faults – a little orange light comes on which means we have to call out another man in a van. Maybe the garage door caught the affliction from there.

It’s easy to see how the infection could spread to the gate. The thing is controlled off the same zapper thingy as the doors. Is there some sort of newsletter that goes around motorised gates I wonder? All it took was one tragic story in the media about some poor child being crushed by a gate and our gate start to malfunction. First it took to jamming open. And that needed a new set of wheels to fix it. Then we found that the safety devices had stopped working so if you happened to be in the way it would keep on closing until it had squashed you flat. With impeccable timing it adopted this new behaviour just before the weekend when we were expecting about 100 visitors.

More vans. In fact at one time we had the sewer van and the gate van here at the some time and I had to spend part of the day operating as car park attendant.

Eventually it was decided that there was a leak inside the depths of the sewer machine. I should remind you that this is a massive plastic thing about 15 feet deep buried in a lot of concrete sunk deep in the garden. Take the top off and what you see is dirty smelly water being stirred around. Hard to spot that some of the water is coming through a hole that should not be there. It had to be completely emptied out – this requires a big tanker as well as the man in the van to supervise. In the end a tanker a van and a range rover in order to get enough combined expertise on site and finally see that about six feet down there is a split in the plastic.

So we then enter a period when we have one of those plastic outdoor loos that you see at open air pop concerts. This adds a lot of entertainment to the week we have the grandchildren visiting.

The malfunctioning disease spreads. Next my IMAC starts to slow down to walking-in-treacle pace. That little spinning wheel you see when MACs are busy takes up residence almost permanently on my desktop. I phone Apple Care, actually I just phone Apple and they ask me for the serial number of my IMAC and it turns out that I bought Apple Care when I got it and there are three weeks left on the contract. Astonishing, my luck is changing, normally they would be telling me that it ran out three weeks ago – even my bad luck is malfunctioning.

Each thing they suggest to do takes an hour or so before it fails to work and I phone them back. Over the course of the day I talk to four different friendly helpful advisors and by the end I have completely wiped the hard disc and we have come to the conclusion that it needs replacing. I end the day driving forty miles to the nearest dealer and leaving the machine there for four days.

When I get it back everything seems to be working, apart from having to reinstall all my software and files which are supposedly sitting on a thing called a time machine. A neat, sleek, Apple white plastic box with a terabyte of so capacity which is supposed to have everything backed up on it. I did actually take a sneak look at it using my laptop before I wiped the old hard disc and everything did seem to be there.

I set it going and hold my breath for the next 46 hours while it transfers files. Yes it really did take that long. There were nine hours at the beginning before it even guessed how long it might take.

It all worked and now the machine is running. The sewer isn’t fixed yet but the little plastic cabin outside is doing OK and the man who comes to empty it once a week is very friendly and helpful. We have survived the grandchildren visiting without any catastrophe. One had a stomach upset, with rather more use of the plastic cabin as part of the impact, but at least she caught it before she got to us.

The insurance company have passed the matter to a specialist company who decided that it was too complicated for them and passed it to someone else. They in turn passed it to someone else but the third company have sent a man to look at it and he turned up on Saturday.

Enough, enough I hear you say, but at least anyone who cares to read this far knows why I haven’t been blogging.

I dreamed I wrote a blog last night. I remember laughing. I’m certain it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever written. I actually woke up still giggling, but by then I’d forgotten it. I remember the warm feeling that comes from good humour, but what was the joke?

Do all bloggers get these dreams? I’ve often woken up thinking of scenes and conversations for my novels. I usually get up and write it all down, right then, in the middle of the night because I know for sure it will be gone by morning. Those scenes have drama or poignancy, stuff that sticks in the mind and keeps me awake. Unfortunately hilarity seems to be short lived. I remember the laughter; I remember the mood, but not the joke. Are all good jokes like that? Are all good dreams like that?

It all starts with shoes

Nordstrums in San Francisco is a fabulous store. I particularly like the café on the top floor where they top up your coffee forever. The sales people are incredibly helpful, there seems to be no end to how hard they will try to find what you want.

That level of service tempts you to go for the impossible, which in Lois’s case is all about shoes. We tried to get a new pair of shoes. I think we ended up with three assistants and about fifty pair of shoes spread out on the floor. Maybe we were lucky to get there on a slow day, but I think that was when it dawned on me that it was all beyond us. If Nordstrums can’t find a shoe to fit Lois then there probably isn’t one anywhere.

There’s little point in trying to explain why her feet are weird, it might make sense to an orthopaedic surgeon - maybe. I should know, I once wrote a chapter in a book about the foot. Feet are quite complex and very three dimensional, almost four dimensional when you consider that they change shape when you stand on them. There are bones and muscles and ligaments all struggling to do their bit. Shoes, on the other hand don’t follow the same rules. Ideally you need a shoe that helps your foot; that holds your foot where it happens to be weak. Lois now has orthotics to go inside her shoes that support her feet and keep them in shape so long as the orthotic stays in the right place. That means the shoe has to work with the orthotic and of course shoes are not designed to do that. No matter how hard all those assistants tried, there just wasn’t a shoe that hat did the job.

We did eventually discover that riding boots work OK, they are reinforced underneath to cope with the stirrups. Back when Lois was younger she just had constant problems with her feet and couldn’t wear fashionable shoes. That meant she didn’t wear fashionable clothes, or make-up or jewellery, and that in turn leaves you out of a lot of conversations as a teenage girl.

Lois ended up being the outsider looking in, observing others but not part of the scene. She became a psychologist. Now she’s an artist, both roles seem to involve a lot of observation and wry comment. That’s what bad feet can do for you.

Well that’s the short version; I think the whole story could be a book.

Turn the bloody music off

Here’s a weird thing. Why to they put music behind words all the time? It seems like every thing I watch on TV has music, even when it’s the words that count. They even do it on the radio. Not on the news yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Is this some devious plot by the musicians union?

It seems now as if no one can talk without background music to set the mood. Are the words really so inadequate? Have the collective writing skills of the current crop of journalists and documentary writers got so bad that they can’t convey mood or emotion or drama without a background track?

It is catching, not only is it all over the TV but amateurs are doing it too. At the Writing Festival at York University a few weeks ago one of the guys who was chosen to read his work to the after dinner audience did it with a sound track behind him. I guess it is only a matter of time before I meet someone in the street who has to play a background track when they so hello to me, just in case I don’t get their mood from what they say, or their face, or their body language or all the other clues we have spent thousands of years evolving.

It is nice that I now often get the choice of watching TV in High definition, which makes sense if it is really about the pictures, but what I would pay extra for is some way to cut out the silly music track behind the speech. I realise that this is probably some feature of my increasing deafness – well it might be, I suppose. Maybe my particular kind of deafness makes it harder to separate the words from the music. Maybe I’m weird in wanting to hear the words at all.

OK that is just me being reasonable, trying to see both sides, etc. etc. What I really mean is TURN THE BLOODY MUSIC OFF!

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.