Status

Leaving

Earlier than usual, while the setting sun was still splashing orange around the 21st floor, I said my goodbyes. There weren’t many; 18 months on my own designing reporting tools – I never really got to know the accountants I worked amongst. This had been odd and awkward at times but now it just meant I got out of the building sooner. Down to the street where the large articulated buses lurched off on their stop-go journey into Sydney’s north. By then, I imagine, I was stifling the urge to sing.

Over the harbour bridge, past the buildings, glowing blues and red in the twilight, lined up on either side of the water, like opposing football teams. Through North Sydney, the old familiar route, warn by the commute, the morning haze and the exhausted journey home, now alive with lights and shops and bars. Just this once, the beginning of the road! Southwest, then west, then north, and east again in the end. Great big swathes of Australia in front of me. Travel, of course, never quite takes you to your dreams. Never quite works out as you planned. And I’m pretty sure most of my giddy thoughts on my way home that evening weren’t ever realised. While other things, which I spared no time for at all, like the slow return of disease, were shortly to intrude. But such is life. I still made it to the Outback, to the lonely Walls of China, to Uluru, to Palm Valley and Mataranka. And Darwin and the Kakadu. To Karumba and Wipa. And Noosa in the end. Limping along the way. But more than that I got to drink and drink of that feeling, as the bus took me to the northern beaches on my final evening of work, of everything being wide open, possible and unscripted, which is maybe even best of all.

North

Life has a funny way of connecting the dots. Were it not for spreadsheets I would never have made it to Greenland. It was my ability to make spreadsheets whirr that got me the job in the investment bank. And it was the money the bank paid me that bought me the tickets on boats and planes north to the arctic circle.

Were it not for my ex-girlfriend’s sister getting married. I would never have flown from London to Boston, over Greenland late one day, when the sun was pulling shadows of mountains over plains of icing-sugar snow. And if I hadn’t seen that view, from miles above, gazing out the window. I would never have dreamed of going there in the first place. And if I handn’t stumbled across the fact that it was actually possible to backpack round Greenland, by chance when browsing the shelves of a books store off high street Kensington I would have never even thought to actually try and follow that dream.

Speaking of heights (high altitude, high latitude) my vertigo (which isn’t actually fear of heights) has gone. As quick as it came. And I’m very happy about that.

AC/DC

In secondary school one of my biggest fears was that, one day, the bogans would breed. Watching the fans for tonight’s AC/DC concert thronging through Wellington this afternoon it was clear that fear had been realised.

Although, looking at the aging Metallers – black jeans, balding, beer bellied – and their pale pimply offspring, as they took in the sights of the big city, fathers and sons wearing the same T-Shirts, I figured maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Which isn’t to say mobs of AC/DC fans are pretty. They’re not. Although, I can’t claim the high ground really. I was one of them once. Camouflaged in a black jersey, in the audience when they played Athletic Park. I think it was the last ever concert allowed there. After the fans rioted through Berhampore musical events where forever banned. Somewhere as a souvenir I still have one of these.

[Update: sometime between 8 and 9pm last night one of the local bogans started cranking AC/DC on their stereo. Fair enough I thought, if you can't make the concert, make your own. About an hour later, and starting to get annoyed, I wandered outside to see just which bogan it was. Only to discover that the noise was emitting from behind the hills, from the city itself. Suspicious I drove up above the hockey grounds behind Newtown. Sure enough, that wasn't a bogan with a stereo. What I'd been hearing was the concert ! On the hill behind the hockey grounds there was a small group of fans standing listening. Even in Island Bay it was loud enough to make out what songs they were playing! Have a look on the map.]

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[Update two: It strikes me that, with their dopey play-on-words-about-sex lyrics and big guitar chops, AC/DC are a pretty bad band. However, they're also as good as a bad band could ever possibly be. Which, oddly enough, means they're still pretty good.]

[Update three: and this morning the city (or my part of it at least) is shrouded in mist, as if the hungover sky had pulled the curtains, so it could have a quiet little lie-in.]

Rays

I got my x-ray results yesterday. The bad news is that my hips are damaged. Mechanically damaged as opposed to just inflamed (although the damage is a product of the inflammation). So I guess I get to keep my limp. Though how bad it would be if I ever got the inflammation under control I don’t know. Nor do I know what it means really. The end of any chance of being able to walk long distances again? A problem for surfing? A replacement down the track? Or maybe just an inconvenience should I rid myself of the underlying problem.

The good news on the other hand, is that my spine doesn’t seem to be fusing together at any significant rate yet. This – for all the reasons which spring to mind when you hear the words: spine, fusing, together – is something to celebrate.

Quick Thought

Neo-classical economics exists as a doctrine solely because enough people (some politicians, and the public in particular) don’t pay much heed to doctrinaire neo-classical economists. If they did pay heed, the inequalities, cyclical instability, and unnecessary suffering associated with actually trying to govern inline with the doctrine’s prescriptions would rapidly confine that particular way of thinking to the intellectual dust-bin.

Instead at we get stimulus packages and state supported health care and education, and all sorts of intervention which, despite the dilemmas of collective action, work well enough for certain schools of economists to simultaneously take the credit and demand their dismantling.

Vertigo

Sometime petty early Sunday morning I rolled over in bed. And I kept rolling: welcome back vertigo.

I’ve had vertigo before. A very few times before surgery and more regularly since. There was week about this time last year when I lolled around walking like I was on the deck of a ship at sea. But yesterday’s encounter was by far the worst. If I lay on my side and didn’t move I felt ok. But if I sat up or, heaven forbid, tried to stand the room swum and made me nauseous real quick.

Jo’s away and I couldn’t even think about driving, so the medevac involved my father coming to collect me and an embarrassing retreat back to my parents’. With a stop on the way to throw up and another one at the after hours medical centre in Lower Hutt.

Today I’m feeling a fair bit better; either because the Stematol is working or the vertigo passing. More than anything else though I really want a break. A year, a few months even, with less pain, no heart worries and no new symptoms to try and work my life around. I know I shouldn’t moan as things could be much, much worse but this evening I’m just a little tired of it all.

Burdens Gate

If I remember my history right, Burdens Gate used to be the hop off point for travelers on the old coast road from Wellington to the Wairarapa. Beyond the genteel Days Bay, past the fishing village of Eastbourne and at the beginning of the inhospitable coastal track. It wasn’t easy travel – there were highway men and murderers, fords and slips, and the weather.

These days Burden’s Gate is still a hop off point – for picnickers and day-trippers on summer’s days, for walking or riding round the long-tamed Pencarrow Coast. There’s a cycle rental, an ice-cream stall, and info-boards from the regional council. There’s also a lazy little left point break when the swell is big enough.

It’s been twenty years since I surfed it last. There’s better waves nearby and on the occasional day that the mood, or disease, took me to the end of Eastbourne looking for a gentle wave to longboard I’d aim for Lions Rock, two bays back. But Lions Rock doesn’t break any more. It’s been swallowed by shingle, debris from the 1855 earthquake, washed from the Orongorongo river, and carried by swell after swell into the Harbour. And so, yesterday, eager to surf despite the storm, I drove over there, hopped into my wetsuit in the teeming rain, and paddled a long board out off the point.

Rain squalls fell off the hills, hitting the water and driving stinging spray. Walking back up the beach after a long ride was almost impossible, board kicking and bucking in the wind like a rodeo horse. And the waves were as small as ever. But despite all that it was fun, plucking little lefts out of the stormy sea, and trimming and fading along the sectiony little walls.

And there’s a beauty in ugly weather, the frantic battered water and the harried clouds.

I’m not alone in thinking this. There were 15 other surfers out there yesterday. All of them as eager as me. Grimacing n the stinging spray, unable to talk for the wind, but friendly and smiling. Whether it’s just a need to get a wave, something you do because you grew up doing it, or because you actually find it fun, storm surfing is pretty cool. At the hop off point. At the end of the road. And on the edge of the angry, windy sea.

Yes We Canberra?

Well, all going to plan, Jo and I are moving to Canberra. Me to do a PhD; Jo to work. I’ve still got a couple of administrative hoops to clear before the PhD is 100% confirmed but I’m definitely looking forwards to the chance to study and learn. While at the same time feeling perturbed by the task in front of me.

And, of course, the key uncertainty is health. Or, more specifically, my health, field research and developing countries.

We’ll see how we go…

Gray’s Anatomy – a very short review

[Disclaimer: review written from a hasty, lazy holiday read.]

John Gray, it has been pointed out, has worn quite a few intellectual hats in his day (Classical Liberal, Thatcherite, Classical Conservative, Green Conservative, anti-Globalist, Sceptic of Progress, Progressive Critic of Neo-Conservatism…) so the last thing I expected on opening Gray’s Anatomy, a collection of essays spanning from the 1970’s until today, was coherence.  I was in for a surprise – of sorts.

No doubt it’s partly achieved through the essays selected for re-publication, but there is a thread, a kind of coherence, to the positions taken. Start with Oakeshott (the Conservative English philosopher), and argue that knowledge is partial, humans un-perfectible and ethical schema un-completable. Then point out – persuasively I think – that there’s also a liberalism in Oakeshott: politics as process and conversation; society as civil society. This can be linked to Mill and Classical Liberalism (almost). The un-perfectibility of humans gives you grounds to argue against communism, while limits to knowledge and information (pace Hayek) provide a solid critique of the centrally planned social democracy of 1970s England. And so you can support Thatcher – a bulwark against communism, an anti-planner – up to a point, while still opposing free market and globalist utopias, for the same reason you oppose all utopias ( scepticism of grand ideas).

Environmentalism and conservatism go together well enough. And anyone sceptical of grand ideas and utopian thinking has plenty of reason to be sceptical of neo-conservatism.

As for progress, Mill and Oakeshott (according to Gray at least)  had their doubts and, after the 20th century, Gray’s position that progress, while real enough in science, is incredibly fragile in human ethics, is plausible.

Anatomy certainly has its weaves and bends but as far as trains of thought go Gray’s are coherent enough to at least avoid derailing.

Much less coherent are the passengers on the train – the policy positions Gray takes. State education systems might not work perfectly, but neither are they complete failures. Nor are they, as Mill feared, really tools of indoctrination. And it seems to me that a conservative, of Oakeshott’s ilk, in this day and age would recognise this and that if they did, they’d probably oppose, rather than propose, anything as radical as a voucher scheme for schools. They’d also probably have something similar to say about universal basic incomes, and having the NHS support alternative remedies. There are plenty of times in Anatomy when Gray seems neither conservative nor liberal at all, but simply hair-brained.

He’s also unpersuasive in his critique of progress. Sure it can be reversed, but do we gain anything by banging on, like Gray does, reiterating this point? Is there anything novel in useful in pointing this out.

Still despite these criticisms, Gray’s Anatomy was an interesting read. More or less recommended.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem

Informally put:

You can’t please everyone.

Holiday Snapshot

Forget the allegory; the real magic in the Narnia Chronicles is in the travel. A wood of worlds, flight above a newly forming land, escape from the War, journey into the kingdom of the giants. Border lands, subterranean countries. As a child my favourite was the journey to the end of the earth in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The magical islands, the way the sea slowly gave out: shallower, populated by mermen, then shallower still, then ending in a mat of lilies.

Something similar happens to the land out beyond Collingwood: the Kahurangis drop away and, no longer so self-assured, it becomes low and uncertain, criss-crossed by tidal rivers; estuaries alternating with expansive mud-flats.

At Puponga, just before the spine of hills died out completely, we walked over to the west coast, and watched the collapsing sea. Then we drove up to the Farewell Spit visitor centre and looked out across the sandy hook. Although the day was clear the wind was blowing a gale, carrying clouds of sand, pulled off the top of dunes, billowing like smoke, out and beyond the point where the last dune gave way to beach and beach in turn dissolved into the sea.

Happy Holidays!

Work

Denise had gone back to college in the states, the arthritis had abated and I was broke. Out of money and without a social safety net, in London, there was one solution: I sought work.

The first few days I worked for building site cleaners. Simple maths put paid to that job, though; my earnings were less than rent, let alone food. Next up I found work through an employment agency, Manpower, or something like that. Just after 5am I’d catch the first train on the District line, change at an empty Earls court and ride the Piccadilly line out to an concrete industrial estate somewhere. Being there early was the only guarantee of work, of making my rent.

They set me to work as a stand in garbage collector, and for a few days I collected the trash of Hammersmith. Trundling down thin streets while the skinhead driver of the garbage truck rolled his joints on the steering wheel. One of the guys a young good looking kid possessed some sort of built in radar – if there was anything valuable in the trash he’d know, just by lifting the bag. Old copper pots, they could be recycled, same with household appliances.

“Heavy bag this one.”

“‘at ‘ill be magazines. Open it up. Porn. Always is. Ang on.” In between the magazines was a set of photos. “Let’s ‘ave a look at these.”

The first few were holiday snaps and then…

“Owwah, look at this, kinky bastard.”

The people of Hammersmith and surrounds, I was to learn over the next few days, take a lot of photos of themselves undressed.

There was a slow patient old guy who we worked with. His accent was softer than the rest, exhausted maybe.

“So are you over ‘ere on ‘oliday are you?” he asked me one morning.

“Yeah, I guess, well I’m travelling round.”

“I started on the garbage trucks as a holiday job. Just for a summer I thought. Twenty seven years later, an’ I’m still here.”

It was time for me to move on.

Next job the people at Manpower found me paid more. A bonus – yuk-money. It involved driving round London servicing sanitary bins in Women’s toilets. Each morning I’d start with a map, a van full of clean bins and the slightly sickly smell of disinfectant. By the end of the say, the clean bins would be gone, replaced by the ones we’d extracted from toilets (“Hello? Is there anyone in there? We’re from Cannon Hygiene. Just servicing the bins”). It was late into a hot, humid summer. By the end of the day the van would stink. The smell, the traffic, the fact that if I wasn’t lost I was always only one wrong turn away from it. I really, really hated the work.

There’s a story that starts in there somewhere. How from the hygiene van I graduated to giving away food samples for a promotion company, to doing data entry work for them, to getting a job in an investment bank.

But that’s not today’s story. Today’s story is about Ben, the tall quiet Kenyan who worked for Cannon. And who would accompany me some days. We didn’t talk much. Mostly we just tried to race from job to job. He’d navigate and I’d do my best not to crash. One afternoon though, we finished early, and I offered him a ride home (one of the perks of the job is that I got to keep the van in the evenings).

“Are you sure? It’s out of your way?”

“Yeah no worries. It’s not that far and traffic’s good.”

“Thanks. Now I can go home and have a sleep before I start my second job.”

“You work two jobs?”

“At night I pack computers into boxes in a warehouse.”

At that point in my life I laboured under some sort of naive third-worldism. I figured that prosperity was a sham of sorts. And that people in developing countries had access to a real ’spiritual’ wealth.

It was, I’m quite happy to admit, half-baked. And inconsistent with other views I had at the time. But being wealthy, white and living out of a backpack, half-baked thinking was a luxury I had.

Working two jobs, one of them in toilet hygiene, Ben I figured, must have seen this too, I thought. Stuck in London, a city I never loved, a long way from the land.

“So what’s Kenya like, how does it compare to here? Do you prefer it?”

“No, I prefer London. Here, the people, I think, are much more free.”

Mist

I must have woken in the grey. In a fog that loped in from the sea. To tiny rivulets of water traced upon my tent. I would have lain there for a while, and read, and eaten breakfast from a can. I might have wandered into the village.

I would have started walking. Around the East of the island, or to the bay on the north where icebergs parked like ships inside a harbour. I probably felt lonely, at some point – examining the broken relationship from all angles, again – although as I walked, that would have ebbed away.

Later in the day, still walking, I climbed one of the two hills, up towards the peak, where unanticipated, just shy of the top, the mist gave ground. It went from thick to nothing in a few meters. And I found myself above the cloud, in a powder blue sky. Half a kilometre away the other hill also struck out of the grey. Each peak an island, floating on a fairy sea that stretched to the curve of the earth. Beneath us somewhere the occasional husky howled and calving icebergs rumbled.

And as I hovered there, unable to find words, I promised myself I’d remember that day. And the impossible beauties of the Arctic. Though now, nearly 9 years later, my determination to remember is the main thing I remember. The view itself is faded, barely there, less tangible than the mist.

In which the long departed spirit of irony wails and rattles her chains…

Garth George:

He was discoursing on how Green politics has become a religion, a sinister example of ideology becoming a theology that rejects man’s right to reason and choose.

It was, therefore, no small coincidence that elsewhere in the Herald that day was another classic example of ideology which has become theology…

The same Garth George:

I know…[that Climate Change is] codswallop, and every time I see a rainbow I have it confirmed for me. It tells me that God is keeping the promise he made to Noah after the world-drowning flood thousands of years ago recorded in Genesis.

“I establish my covenant with you,” God told Noah. “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the Earth … I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the Earth. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between me and all living creatures of every kind on the Earth.”

Towels

Robert Fisk has Paul Litterick reaching for the Losartan. The issue isn’t the Middle East though. Rather it’s the hitherto uncontroversial terrain of towels.

Fisk:

The latest tomfoolery to come my way – all travelling readers will have come across the same nonsense – is the little card that lies upon my hotel pillow, exhorting me to spare the relevant spa, hostelry or caravanserai the cost and bother of cleaning my sheets, pillowcases or towels…

…None of this, you understand, has anything to do with saving the costs of cleaning and detergents. Oh no, indeed. It is we – who pay the bills – who are helping them, the five-star hotels, to look after the environment. Of course, if they really cared about all that green stuff, they’d hang a notice above the bathroom saying “Use Less Bloody Water!” But then again, I suspect that water charges are a fixed price – and the environment can be thrown out with the bath water.

Paul thinks otherwise:

(Note to Robert Fisk: shut up. Really. Just shut up. We really do not care, at all, that the world’s luxury hôtels are now asking you to use your towels more than once.).

None of my business. But I’ve always pondered the psychology of those little signs (they have them in cheap hotels too). Like Fisk I think it very unlikely the hotels are motivated by concern for the environment. If they were, there’d be a few other items higher on the list. Much more likely it’s the bottom line. Of course, if you ever had a sign that said, “Help us maximise the profits of our share holders, please reuse your towels”, people almost certainly wouldn’t.

And so we get the plea to please consider the environment. Which, judging by the proliferation of the signs, seems to work. I know I follow the request, framed as it is. Despite my cynicism. Funny how it works.

Questions

Sometimes life with a chronic disease feels as much as anything else like being attacked by a flock of questions.

Is the problem with my liver function going to get worse?

If it does, will I have to stop the methotrexate?

If I stop the methotrexate will I be able to get TNF inhibitors?

If I go on TNF inhibitors will I be able to travel overseas?

Does the fact I feel sore this week, mean the methotrexate’s stopping working?

Or maybe it’s just a bad week and maybe I could lower the methotrexate dose and that would help with my liver?

Do the people I see in Australia know what they’re talking about? Does my rheumatologist?

Could I find a new antibiotic to try? Could I find a doctor who would prescribe it to me?

Is work making my arthritis worse?

Would it help if I eliminated all starch from my diet? If I did that, what would I eat?

Why do I still get breathless?

Is the ongoing inflammation damaging my ascending aorta? If it is, would I survive surgery to have it replaced?

Questions.

Failure

Wave buoys, weather maps, and a rising south swell. That was the start of it. A plan that built through the week. A plan that grew in increments with each furtive scan of the internet surf reports. Along the way I accumulated a couple of guys I knew from work. Out of towners. I figured I take them to my old local spot.

It was touch and go, as summer swells are, but on the day there were waves. A little weak, a little wobbly, but, we all agreed, worth a surf. So we paddled out under the low grey sky. The water was brown and silty; run off from the swollen local creek. As I paddled through it, black swirls trailed under my arms.

It wasn’t an easy day. The drift took you off the takeoff spot. And the swell lurched and burped, no where near as strong as predicted. But more than that I couldn’t surf. My hip ached, my legs resisted the jump to the feet motion at the beginning of each ride and by the end, a few half rides later, I couldn’t stand on my board.

As I pulled on damp clothes in the drizzle afterwards, I wondered about my health. Some weekends I can surf, just. Others I just can’t. I’m better than I was (courtesy of ongoing megadoses of methotrexate.) And that’s ok, or it’s great even, but as I stood there on the beach in the fading light, it was hard not to think about the half empty cup, and the waves I couldn’t ride.

Zines

I subscribe to three different magazines*. While I enjoy the magazines I subscribe to I’d be lying if I said I read every article in every issue of each. Indeed, between all three combined there’s probably an issue’s worth of articles I’m thrilled to read, an issue’s worth I’d read at a pinch, and an issue’s worth I’m not interested in at all.

And so…I keep dreaming of a subscription service which allows me to choose 15 articles a month from a suite of magazines, turns them into a PDF, and sends the PDF to me to print.  I’d happily pay for it…

 

* And the Surfer’s Journal

Wondering where that go to

About six months late and looking the worse for wear my Boston Review arrived over the weekend.

 

I think I know why it was late….

I’ve never been to France. In a stange way I’m actually kind of chuffed I own a mag that has.

Accents

The painting crew were run by a friend of a friend of mine. They were travelling to Montauk and I hitched a ride.  There was a Puerto Rican from near Long Beach somewhere, a gruff old guy with a beer-rounded belly and a beard, another older man with a long-broken nose, and some young guys, pale and slouching, from the unhappy suburbs round Islip. They all looked at me like I was from another planet when I wandered down their boss’s driveway telling them I’d be catching a lift. Shambling and shaggy with baggy jeans and long hair, I was used to looks like that in Long Island.

I travelled first with the Puerto Rican and a couple of the pale kids. They said nothing but the Puerto Rican was friendly, more talkative than me even. At the end of the day, I hitched a lift back again. This time with the older guy with a beard. For a while he didn’t say much.

“So, where’re you from?”

“Me, oh, I’m from New Zealand.”

“Hmh, I knew it was somewhere like that. Everyone was trying to guess where you were from. Those young guys, they’d never heard an accent so strange. They figured you must be from Connecticut or something.”

The Book Review Takedown

This is near perfect. I love the horses’ return at the end.

The Dangers of Dorms

The youth hostel dorm in Quetzaltenango was lots of things. It was bustling. It was friendly. It was anarchic. It was communal. A single room, a tin roof, plywood walls and 30 beds in rows, it was home to aged hippies and earnest Spanish students. It was busy, it was transient, it was a good place to meet people. It was not restful. Plastic bags cackled through the night. People stumbled in the dark. Toilets flushed. The French woman three beds down snored like a hibernating bear. After a while I got used to it. The sub-conscious sentinels that keep watch during sleep relaxed a little. Decided that I didn’t need to be woken with every noise. They relaxed but not so much so as to stop me from waking in an instant, when a drunken Dane peed on the floor nearby. The sound was unmistakeable.

“Hey!” I didn’t need to say anything. An outraged American, even closer to the urine stream, was springing to action.
“Huh”
“Not here. The toilet. The toilet.”
“Nuugghhh.”
“THE TOILET”
“Auuggghhh” The weeing stopped and he shambled off.
I pulled my pack up onto my bed and slept next to it for the rest of the night.

The next morning the Danish guy didn’t remember a thing. Drunk. Sleep walking. The urine had already soaked into the floor.

Three months later and a long way further south, in a much smaller room in Puerto Natales, I woke to the same sound. This time there were only four of us. Me, Christine the French Canadian, and Sandra and Eddie, two English travelling companions. We’d just walked round the Torres del Paine. And had celebrated that night by getting pleasantly drunk.

Once again. I didn’t have to say anything. Sandra was closer to the action.
“Eddie? Eddie! Good God Eddie what are you doing?” Sandra, was well heeled, with an accent from an expensive school somewhere. Her tone I thought was just about right for the situation. Eddie, however, was having none of it.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m having a piss.”
His voice had a grumpy certainty to it. Quite convincing, and for a moment, still only half awake I wondered whether peeing on the floor was normal after all. Or, at least, normal where Eddie came from.

He finished his toileting and got back into bed and for a moment there was silence. Sandra was clearly as confused as me. And if Christine was awake she wasn’t saying anything. Maybe it really was normal. Maybe…
“Arrrrgghhhhh!” That was Eddie. “Where are we?”
“The youth hostel in Puerto Natales.” My chance to contribute to the conversation.
“And I was just…”
“Pissing on the floor.” Sandra finished the sentence for Eddie. Sounding rather cross.
“Fuck. I thought we were still on the trail. I was outside the tent. I couldn’t figure out why you were asking.”
“Right.”
Christine began to giggle.
“Maybe,” I wondered aloud, “you might want to mop that up?”

Maps

My mental maps from my first years of travel are much like the maps drawn by ancient mariners. Coastlines carefully plotted but with great empty spaces inland (save for the odd dragon or airport or two). If it was more than 50 miles from a surf spot, I wasn’t interested. The temples of Ubud? No thanks. Not while Padang Padang was breaking. Komodo dragons? Just big lizards really and at least two days travel from Lakey Peak. Celtic Castles? If they were on the coast, perhaps.

I arrived in Mexico in this frame of mind. And all went more or less according to plan. Arriving at night, flying over city lights that stretched horizon to horizon, we slept over at the airport. The next morning we used my carefully researched notes to get us to the right bus station on onto a bus to Puerto Escondido. For six weeks we surfed up and down the coast. In the melting heat and thumping marcismo of Puerto Escondido. In the sleepy surf camps in bandito country in Michoacan. In the dilapidated concrete shell hotels of Pascuales. I didn’t go any further inland than Tecoman. That was a trip to the bank.

We did end up, after all that, stuck for couple of days in Mexico City though. It was just the way the bus and plane schedules worked out. The first evening we were wandering round the safe but still hectic Zona Rosa, half-heartedly trying to do something, when the sky began to rain ash on us.

“Yuck”

“Pretty bad smog, aye”

“Yeah, wow what a polluted city.”

Pete scrapped a big glob of the stuff off a car windscreen. “Glad I don’t live here.”

“Yeah. It’s actually pretty hard to breath. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

The next morning skies had cleared. Big billowing clouds puffed and bulged above the horizon but above us it was fine. And the pollution seemed to have gone.

“Let’s do something.” I think it was Bill’s idea. He went and asked at the reception about day trips and they told us to go to Teotihuacan.

“Las Pyramidas”

My Spanish was still pretty bad but it sounded, I told Pete and Bill, “like there might be Pyramids there, or something.”

And so, with misplaced accents and forlorn verbs searching for objects, I navigated us via the metro to the right bus station and on to the ancient city.

We bickered a bit wandering through the tourist stalls. Pete was driving irritating me. I was bugging him. And we were both driving Bill nuts. I’m not sure we really started paying attention until we made it to the top of the, ‘Pyramid of the Moon.’

“These buildings,” a guide explained to some tourists next to us. “We ancient even to the Aztecs. They didn’t know who built them. Their legends had that the pyramids were the creations of an ancient race. Or Gods, perhaps.”

“That Pyramid of the Sun, which we are looking at, is the World’s largest pyramid outside Egypt.”

It was impressive. Hewn geometry. Jabbing into the sky. It shone lazy yellow in the sun. Behind it, the dark clouds billowed, threatening.

“Looks like thunder,” I wondered allowed.

“Thunder?” a German tourist looked at me like I was an imbecile. “That’s the eruption. You know, the Volcano?”

“Volcano?”

“Yes the one that everyone’s talking about. In the news. The ash cloud that smothered the city yesterday?”

“Ash shower? Oh. That ash shower.”

The German gave up on me and I went back to staring over the ruins. The ancient city and monuments, as old as legends, sun-gold against the eruption-dark sky north of us. And I decided that seeing I’d come all this way I should probably take notice of the land as well as the sea. Every once and a while, at least.

Love Songs

90% of love songs suck. Here’s two that don’t.

 

For what it’s worth, I think Classic Girl works because it’s about actual human experience rather than some sort of idealised form of it. While Ash on the other hand aren’t quite singing about love but instead that giddy feeling of falling into it. Which works just fine amongst the tumbling guitars and space cadet lyrics.

Oh, and, “they may say those were the days; but in a way you know for us these are the days…” has to be one of the happiest lines in pop.

Of Seals, Skydives and Farewell Spit

Skydives, sandy drives and the ghost of a seal.

Here’s the story that stemmed from this, and which AA directions published.

Below is the story I would have preferred they published.

And here (at the old blog) is what really happened.

–

Falling for Nelson

One of the best things about backpacking is the lessons you learn, not only about the places you go but also about yourself. There are parts of your personality that you will never meet until you’re stranded in unfamiliar territory – making your way map-less across an unfriendly city, or trying to buy tickets in a train station where you can’t read the place names let alone speak the language. The discoveries you make will stay with you long after Rio is only a faded memory and Xinjiang a stack of photos in the cupboard.

You don’t need to lug your pack to the ends of the Earth to learn these lessons either. All you need is somewhere new. Recently, not far from home at all, travel gifted me just such a moment of self-discovery. I was poised, my feet dangling out the door of a Cessna, four kilometres above Motueka, when I learnt that I was afraid of heights.

Desperately.

Back on the ground skydiving had seemed like a great idea. ‘Why not?’ I thought. Now, as Thomas my tandem partner made the last adjustments to our gear, I had all the answers I needed to that question. We were several hundred feet higher than Mount Cook, for a start. So high that small fluffy clouds grazed like sheep way below us. And, in a few seconds, we would be travelling at over 150 kilometres per hour – straight down.

“Ready?” Thomas’s voice was as sunny as the sky above us.
“Nuuerrk,” I croaked.

With that, he accepted gravity’s invitation on our behalf and we pitched forward into nothing…

My trip to Nelson and Golden Bay hadn’t started this way. Not at all – my first mode of transport was defiantly sedate, a 1952 Bedford school bus, which took me from the airport to the World of Wearable Art and Classic Cars museum.

Why the decision to mix cars and costumes was made I don’t know, but apparently the combination is a winner. “Couples,” our museum guide advised us, “come here all the time. The women come to look at the wearable art, the men the cars. Well at least the men say they come to look at the cars but sometimes they spend more time with the dresses.”

I only had to spend a few moments with the dresses myself to realise that the men who ditched the automobiles were onto something. Woven within the wearable art is a magic of sorts and you don’t need to be interested in fashion to find it. All that is required is an eye for imagination: dreams are spliced to legends, ideas stitched to stories and fables sewn into science fiction.  After an hour at the museum it was easy to understand the tale of Russell Sutherland, the retired mechanic from Invercargill who was so inspired on visiting the museum he entered the awards himself. His design, an incredibly engineered if uncomfortable looking undergarment, won him the Bizarre Bra award for 2006 and second place in the overall event. Not bad for someone who was probably only there to see the cars.

After the museum I exchanged the bus for a car of my own and headed west, over the switchbacks of Takaka Hill and into Golden Bay. By the time I got to Collingwood the wind had gathered grey clouds, folding them over the peaks and valleys of the Kahurangi National Park. I pulled over on the edge of town to consult my directions and found myself next to the war memorial. On impulse I got out and had a look.

The story set in stone was the same in Collingwood as it is in hundreds of other small New Zealand towns: a long list of names; some surnames repeated two, three or four times. Families ended and small towns emptied. With the first footprints of rain falling on the windscreen and now feeling as glum as the thick evening sky I got back in the car and drove off to find the hostel.

The next morning the clouds were gone but the war remained. As we bumped along the track out onto Farewell Spit, Paddy our guide recounted the story of Jack Ashford, the first person to regularly traverse the spit in an automobile. Jack had been gassed at the Battle of Passchendaele, his lungs ruined. After the war, as his breathing got worse, he was told by a doctor that he had three years left to live, maybe a bit more if he got a job that kept him close to the sea. The salt air, the doctor said, might just help. So Jack found himself the one job that guaranteed salt air in abundance: Farewell Spit lighthouse keeper.

Creeping cautiously over the sand in Farewell Spit Eco Tours’s four-wheel drive bus it was hard to imagine how Jack managed the journey with rattling lungs and a rattling 1928 Chevy. But Jack did more than manage. He thrived, living to see his 99th birthday. And, by the time we reached the lighthouse at the end of the sand’s empty curve, I could see how life in one of New Zealand’s loneliest places could be curative. Sitting in the shade amongst the sighing Macrocarpa – watching as clouds, sand and sea blew by – it was impossible to escape the two things that Farewell Spit had in abundance: space and peace. Each, I thought, as good an antidote to the doom of trench warfare as one could hope for.

The last lighthouse keeper left the Spit in 1984. Since then the closest thing to permanent residents to be found on the slender strip of sand are the Gannets who set up a colony on the shell banks beyond the light in 1982. From a handful of pioneer breading pairs the colony has grown to nearly 5,000 birds. It’s New Zealand’s only sea level Gannet colony and a rare example of a native bird reclaiming territory on the mainland, so we kept a respectful distance. Gannets, though, are naturally curious and pretty soon we were treated to an up-close display of aerobatic skill as inquisitive birds, their wings bent back like bows, swept by us, checking out their awkward, earthbound guests.

Later, as we headed home along the beach, impatient sand dunes casting shadows in the early evening light, I decided that out there, on the edge of the spit, I had made it as close to the horizon as I was ever going to get. I eased back in my seat, enjoying the particular type of content that comes with having been somewhere truly special, and watched as the sun fell towards the sea.

…Meanwhile, back in the sky above Motueka, 50 seconds after it started and now some two kilometres lower, my own plunge towards the Earth came to an abrupt halt. The parachute opened.

The parachute opened! And all of a sudden everything changed. The roar of the wind was replaced by silence as clear as the sky itself. I looked around, we were still a long, long way above the Earth, but now – with my fear left billowing behind me in the strengthened-nylon chute – I began to take in the world we floated over. Down below, the tiny houses and roads were still too small even for matchbox cars. While, to the south, snow covered peaks shared the altitude with us. We spun slowly, looking out over Tasman bay, where stray clouds dragged patterns of shade and light. In the distance, Nelson twinkled in the sun. And I revised my initial assessment; I wasn’t afraid of heights at all, only of falling and, once you got beyond that, the view from up there is like nothing else.

Small Comment

Ok, so busy, busy, and post free until next weekend.

In the meantime though, I just wanted to say that I’m still kinda chuffed that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize.  :)

Certainty

As I opened my mouth I was certain I knew what I was talking about, by the time I closed it again I wasn’t nearly so sure…

The Funeral

Tidy and tended, trailing off between sandy hills, the road took hold like a story. We’d stopped halfway, camped among the acacia trees, next to the sea, waiting for waves. We had stopped halfway, but the road kept on, like a set down book, and after a few days watching the surfless sea we decided we needed to know how it ended.

It was made of cobblestones; laid by hand, by a team of men, tapping; one stone at a time. We wandered out on to it one morning, sitting on its verge waiting for a ride. After maybe half an hour we got a lift in a rundown van held together by cheery splashes of paint.

Onde?
O fin da rua?

The end of the road? Both a question of his destination and a statement of ours.

Sem.

And so we got in. After about a kilometre curving right, towards Sao Nicolau’s northern edge.

There were houses along the way, every once in a while, in clusters, but it wasn’t until the road’s end that we hit the village proper. Worn houses square and white, or pastel pink and green, caught the light carried between the puffy rainless clouds. By then we were on the Island’s weather coast, up from a rocky shore, swept by the break and swash of trade-wind swell.

Benji and I wandered into the square. We’d lost track of the days of the week, but figured, from all the people milling outside the church, that it must have been a Sunday. We stood and watched for a bit, not quite sure what to do with our destination now we’d found it.

The bar is closed but come back to my place; I’ll get you a drink

He was old, in a frayed but otherwise tidy jacket and shirt, round around the waste and with brown skin that hung like old sails. He smelt slightly of spirits.

I’m always uneasy round drunks. Or, maybe more truly, I’m always uneasy round people full stop. I was about to thank him and politely decline, when Benji piped up.

Great, we’d love too.

Benji was a few years younger than me but an effortless traveller. From the north of France he spoke French and English fluently, and was reading a book in German. He spoke ok Cape Verde Criole too. His Portuguese wasn’t as good as mine (a small win I jealously guarded) but he was relaxed, casually taking in his stride things that set me on edge.

The old guy’s house was small and carefully kept. He and Benji chatted.

Where are you from?

France and New Zealand.

When I worked on a fishing boat we went to lots of places, but never New Zealand. That’s a long way.

The fishing boat explained his English. Throughout the lusophone countries I’d run into old men who spoke English, who’d learnt it on boats. No education, yet amongst the hard work, time to pick up enough words to thread together conversations in another tongue.

What are you doing here?

We’re surfers, camped at Barril?

Ah, I see. Come on. Finish your drinks. It’s time to go.

Where?

To the funeral. That’s what they were waiting for in the square. The graveyard is back down the road. You can catch a lift.

And that’s how we joined the funeral procession, invited by a drunk old fisherman. Piling into the back of one of a fleet of coloured, rusty Utes. The whole village was going to the burial and no one, apparently, saw anything strange in two scruffy Europeans joining them.

After maybe a twenty minute drive, following the flow of people, we wandered into the graveyard. The old guy was quietly crying now. We still had no idea who’d died. As the body arrived all the women around us, wearing dresses and headscarves, starting wailing, singing their grief into the sky. The words must have been different but the sound was strangely familiar, like that at a Tangi. The same cries in song, different words but with the same meaning. Conscious now of our intrusion into someone else’s sorrow, I touched Benji on the arm and we walked back up to the road.

A bright red pick-up pulled up. Its driver’s name written on the side: Juao de Deus – John of God. We hopped onboard and he started for home, back now from the end of the road, and away from the funeral. Back to the camp amongst the Acacias. In the small bay of Barril.

Poor

From here:

The combined GDP of the 58 countries of the bottom billion is about $350 billion per year — smaller than the GDP of metropolitan Chicago.

Meanwhile on the back of a very small envelope…

Duncan Green links to an interesting attempt by the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion to answer the question, can the world’s poorest countries eliminate extreme poverty by redistribution? The short answer is that for wealthier developing countries (like Brazil), they actually could. However, for the World’s poorest countries there simply isn’t the money to redistribute.

This got me thinking about the global distribution of wealth and so I jotted a few numbers down on the back of a very small envelope (or, in other words, these are very rough scribbles, they could be wrong and I haven’t double checked them…)

In 2005 global income per capita was $8,730 (US purchasing power parity dollars.) Or, in other words, if the globe’s income was distributed equally everyone would have had earnt $8,730 in 2005. (Purchasing Power Parity takes into account the fact that US$1 goes further in developing countries so everyone would have earnt $8,730 and the cost of living would have been the same as it was in the US in 2005).

The Globe’s income isn’t distributed equally however, and, in fact, in 2005 nearly half the World’s population lived off less than $912/year (US PPP) or $2.50 a day. Approximately 80% of the World lived below the US poverty line of $13/day.

Had the World’s income been distributed equally, the percentage living off less than $2.50/day would have been 0. The percentage living off less than $13/day would have been 0 too. In fact everyone would have been living of $24/day: 1.85 times the US poverty line.

In other words, poverty – as measured by a US poverty line – would have been well and truly eliminated globally. Instead, in the real world 8 out of every 10 people live below that line.

In table form…

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should strive to equalise global income as a tool to eliminate poverty. Let’s consider that proposition using Eric Olin Wright’s 3 criteria for utopian thinking.

As far as desirability goes, using a simple utilitarian calculus the equalised globe would certainly be desirable. The welfare of the vast majority of the World’s population would be dramatically improved.

The trouble is, such an equalisation would not be (to use Wright’s terms) either viable or, realistically, achievable.

In terms of viability, such radical equalisation of wealth would eliminate the incentives that play a role in generating wealth in the first place. And equality of this degree could only be maintained by the sort of police state that used to keep George Orwell awake at night.

And, in terms of achievablity , the sad truth is that, while redistribution of the nature described above would improve the welfare of most of the world’s population it would dramatically decrease the welfare of one particular group: the already very powerful, who would no doubt resist tooth and claw. Meaning that even if such a world could feasibly exist, getting there would be next to impossible.

Still, it’s worth noting that the staggering phenomenon that is global poverty doesn’t in exist the current day and age because the planet as a whole is too poor. Rather it exists because we are too unequal.

Refs:

Global Figures.

Ravallion 2008 [PDF]

Chen and Ravallion 2008 [PDF]

[Update: the above, of course, hinges on mean global income per capital being the same as GNI - I need to check this!]

Paul Collier Debated

The Boston Review has an interesting essay debate on Paul Collier’s thinking and the potential for international intervention to help the World’s poorest countries. Definitely worth a read.

As I read through it I took some notes. When I get time I’d like to write them up into a post of their own, with my own thoughts. For now, they’re over the fold.

Limits to Growth

Wow.

Rich nations will need to reconsider making growth the goal of their societies, according to the leading economist who wrote the government’s report on climate change.

Lord Stern…

Windows

I woke from a God-awful dream. For a little while I just lay there, letting it melt away; leaving the place where anxieties shape reality and returning to the world where they only reflect it. The Southerly was blowing. Listening, I started to go over the plan, born of a mid-week weather map and argued ever since. A Tasman low, a west swell and a reef tucked in out of the wind. My doubts moved across the wind (too strong?), the swell (already gone?) the crowds (everyone knew), before settling on the real issue – my body.

I’d tried surfing three times since surgery and since the arthritis came back. Each effort a mixture of failure and success. In the water, (in the water!), but in aching joints, meaning I could only just get up, slow and awkward, often as not too late to my feet.  This time though, I figured I had an almost solution, I’d started taking Methotrexate on Wednesdays, so as that the full force of the drug would be felt over the weekend. The difference wasn’t huge but it might be the enough to allow me to surf properly.

“Get up and give it a try,” I told myself.

Written now, after the fact, it seems simple enough. Give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, oh well. But as I drove along the weaving road the sea, with nervous internal chatter I managed to pull the problem apart and look at it a hundred ways.

At the ocean’s edge, my doubts were answered one at a time. The swell: small but a perfect size for me. The crowd, mostly just guys milling around in the car-park complaining that the swell wasn’t bigger. And the wind, strong, but ok.

I paddled out on my own, in the channel that ran between the point and the reef itself. Out the back, heart hammering and breathless as ever, I waited for a wave. Behind me, at the head of the valley that tilted down into the bay, a giant white windmill spun, turning the Southerly into electricity with patient sweeps of circling arms. Beyond it, the hurrying sky carried clouds and blue off into the north.

Eventually, a wave came my way and I set my own arms circling, trying to build speed to tap into the steepening slope. Paddling, paddling and then in an instant I had it and reflex took over. To my feet and this time, in time. Slow. Sore. But fast enough and free enough to have me up and off down the line. The swell steepened and walled up and I sped along the face, around the bend of the reef and into the bay, where I coasted over the shoulder and into deeper water.

Hah!

Behind me, the windmill kept spiralling away. And out to sea another set of waves lifted the shimmering water, and I took protesting arms and constricted lungs and paddled out the back just as fast as I could. So I could catch another. So I could catch as many as possible. Making the most of the window I had.

What’s Left

More jotted notes, sorry…back to the hillsides and horizons stuff soon, I promise!

I’m trying to think my way through a technical, and neutral, definition of left-wing politics. Historically, the left was defined by a concern with equality but I don’t think this is true any more – quite a few on the left would be happy to tolerate inequality if it led to absolute increases in welfare.

So my draft definition would be:

An active concern with the welfare of the less well off, and a belief in the need for collective action to improve the welfare of society’s less well off.

The key distinguishing feature between left and right being the belief in the need for collective action (collective action, not state action so as to include anarchists). It’s not that the Right doesn’t have concern for the less well off, but rather that they’re more sceptical of active collective efforts to improve things.

Obviously, this is all about degree: most centre right parties favour some collective action in the area of improving welfare, but typically it’s less than advocated than by groups to the left of them.

One other type of definition I thought of was that the left tend to argue that actions that appeal to a deontological ethics (sharing, cooperation etc) will lead to better outcomes in a consequentialist sense too. Of course some segments of the right, particularly libertarians, do this as well, with a completely different set of deontological ethics (particularly geared around self-ownership and property rights), but much of the right (classical conservatives, if you will) argues against the deontologically appealing with the claim that it just won’t work.

In Defence of Globalisation

Once upon a time people felt the need to write weighty tomes defending globalisation. If they really wanted to defend it, all they needed to do was this.

(H/T Chris Blattman)

District 9 – a really short review

For a couple of years I was stalked by the movie Independence Day. People would suggest we go see it at the cinema, I’d stop round to visit friends and they would have just got it on video, I’d get on a plane and it would be in-flight entertainment. Arrgghh. It was insufferable. A long series of cliches and improbabilities held together something a generous observer might mistake for a plot. People called it escapism. Me, stuck watching it again, I just wanted to escape.

Possibly the most grueling element of the movie were the implausibly evil aliens and the flag wavingly fantastic American heroes. On about the third watch, as an antidote I day-dreamed what I figured a more realistic alien encounter movie would look like. For a start we’d be the baddies; the history of human conquest and colonialism makes that pretty likely. And we’d be convincing ourselves we weren’t bad all along, like we’ve always done.

In my day dream movie we, the humans, would be the ones venturing into outer space, made more dangerous than ever with superior technology and interstellar travel. I’d never thought about bringing the aliens here…

…and so I was pretty chuffed by District 9, with it’s alien refugees and realistically detestable humans. It’s an achievement when a movie takes you out of your own collective identity and has you cheering for another race or nationality. It’s an even bigger achievement, I think,  when by the end of District 9 you’re cheering as the lobster-like aliens vaporise human villan after human villan.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect, the plot bulldozed over a quite a few holes. And the portrayal of the Nigerians made me queasy. Surely, a movie set in opposition to xenophobia and simplistic depictions of the Other, could have avoided basing one of its groups of villans on a bunch of stereotypes of Nigerian refugees? Still, the Nigerians are far from the greatest villans in the tale, that title is awarded fairly and squarely to Us, which makes a pleasant change, poor old Them having been tarred with it for so long.

[Update: Here's a Nigerian who thinks District 9 isn't racist against Nigerians.]

I was wondering as I drove home…

is William Easterly a kind-of conservative or  a sort-of libertarian. By which I mean, are his objections to aid and planning driven by a cautious conservative incrementalism that recognises the need for collective action but also appreciates its limits and argues that we should work slowly to improve practice and expand the boundaries of what we can successfully do, rather than making large leaps into the unknown (so something vaguely akin to the conservatism of Michael Oakeshott).  Or does he really believe that collective action itself is mostly unnecessary and that we have the answers we need to the problems of the world in the system of free exchange (libertarian, in other words).

Either way he could be right, I’m not using these terms pejoratively here, I’m just curious – both tendencies can be found in his writing at different times.

Irrational Reassurance

Robert Shiller’s talk on behavioural finance at the LSE is worth a listen (you have to scroll down to find it). It’s rambly, but that seems ok; almost the right tone for a talk on the less rational aspects of economic behaviour.

Listening to it, it seems to me that you there’s a very plausible argument to say that the bank bailouts and stimulus package worked, not just because they freed up capital flows and pumped money into the economy but also because they reassured people that there was something that could be done. And would be done. And that reassurance changed behaviors from the types perpetuating the economic unravelling (cinema, smoke, I’m heading for the door!), to types that slowly started to counter it.

Maybe.

On this theory everything could still go belly up if people were to lose confidence in the ability of governments to act. If they were confronted with government failures to match the market ones we’ve just seen.

-~-

Meanwhile, being pessimistic, if the worst of the GFC is behind us, presumably we’ll be shortly returning to the other crisis it interrupted – commodity shortages. Not to mention the climate crisis on its way…