Degrees of Separation

   

 

The film of the catastrophic flash flood in Nepal is horrific, and the likely casualty rate is likely to be high, so many people are still unaccounted for.  The immediacy of the films brings home the casual brutality of Nature, and the ease with which a whole way of life can be brushed aside in moments.  But this is a disaster in Nepal, a far distant country from my placid residence next to the Med in Castelldefels.

     That ‘distance’ was obliterated when I greeted a friend after completing my morning swim.  I asked after his ‘aches and pains’ as he has been having muscular trouble, but he rejected my questions and asked if I had seen the film of the flood.  I told him I had and he then told me that this was a place he knew.  He had worked there, he knew people who lived there, he had seen pictures of a building that had been his administrative centre being destroyed in images that he had been sent which had not been seen on TV.

     Suddenly, a distant disaster was humanized and localized, I was speaking to someone who had knowledge of and a stake in what had been lost.

     Life goes on.  He was, after all, preparing to have a swim, as he does most days, but his mind was not centred on getting a good lane in the pool to himself.  It was a long way away.

     This event has forced my mind back to something more local, the Valencia DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos), an isolated high-impact depression, which is a meteorological phenomenon characterized by extreme weather events, particularly in regions like the Mediterranean Sea basin.

     An abstract from a report by members of the University of Valencia sums up the disaster:

 

The unprecedented DANA floods that struck Valencia, Spain on October 29, 2024, caused catastrophic human, economic, and ecological damages, resulting in 223 fatalities, the displacement of 15,000 residents, and long-term health and environmental consequences and incurred financial losses estimated over 50 billion euros. Vulnerabilities in urban planning, ambiguous command and control oversight, delayed warnings, and insufficient preparedness underscored systemic gaps in the flood preparedness and management.

 

     The key concepts are found in the last sentence, and the apportioning of blame is ongoing.  The President of Valencia, Carlos Mazón, was widely condemned for his lack of urgency in the early stages of the disaster, but he took over a year ignoring repeated calls for him to go, for him finally to resign.

     In the immediate aftermath of a disaster attention is rightly focussed on rescue and reconstruction.  But almost as important are the efforts made to understand exactly what occurred, and how the disaster was dealt with, in other words, looking for lessons to try and ensure that the disaster is not repeated.

     In the case of the DANA in Valencia, politics and self-interest have complicated the issues.  In extraordinary scenes on November 3^rd, a few days after the tragedy, the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by high-ranking officials were pelted with mud and met with cries of “Murderers!” when they visited Paiporta, one of the municipalities worst affected by the floods.

     In May in 2025 a delegation of family member victims of the DANA went to the EU in Brussels to demand truth, justice and accountability as they felt that the response of the administration in Valencia and in Madrid had been wholly inadequate.  They stressed that they were there, “not for revenge, but for truth and justice.”  One of their leaders said, “We are not here out of pity.  We are here because we have the right to know why our children, parents, siblings died, and to know who had the duty to protect them and failed.”

     In the Grenfell tower disaster, I am reminded of Conservative peer, Lord Pickles, who, when he was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, his department was directly responsible for housing policy, building regulation and fire safety guidance.  In Cameron’s government, Pickles enthusiastically championed a “one in, one out” (and later “one in, two out”) rule to slash building regulations and bureaucracy, thus compromising officials from tightening laws on combustible building materials.

     While he was being questioned, giving evidence in the Inquiry, he suggested that the Inquiry’s senior counsel should speed up his questioning because had had important afternoon meetings planned.  An astonishing piece of disrespect, though a revealing insight into his assumed importance.

     The final report of the inquiry he was heavily criticized.  He is still a member of the House of Lords and The Conservative Party.

     Too often there is no real end to a disaster.  Lives are lost, destruction is widespread and things are never really the same again.  And to make matters worse, the follow up in trying to understand what happened and why is too often muddied by politics, money and self-interest.

     The probable cause of the flash flood in Nepal was the lower part of a Himalayan glacier breaking off and crashing hundreds of meters onto the valley floor.  The massive impact generated ground energy equivalent to a 5.2-magnitude earthquake.  As the giant cascade of ice, mud, and rock raced down the steep valley, friction heating melted large volumes of the ice into water.  The debris temporarily blocked local rivers creating an intense buildup of water and sediment that catastrophically burst downstream as a high-speed flash flood.

     Why this happened may well include the fact that the event coincided with the monsoon season, meaning surrounding sediment and soil were already waterlogged and easily swept up.  Climate change means that the rising temperatures in the Himalayan region can destabilize glaciers and weaken mountain rock, leading to such extreme ice avalanches.

     Explanation.  Reconstruction.  Prevention.  Easy words to type, it remains to be seen how the authorities and the world respond.

    

    

Bread & Circuses

 

 

 

Bread & Circuses. 

     That is such a tired trope – give the Plebs this (defined in oh so many ways) and they won’t talk (or think) about that.  It is a cliché.  But you should always remember why clichés become cliches, they owe their continuing lives to the fact that they are perceived to be real, or real enough to be believed in by enough people to make them ‘work’.

     Distractions and deflections have changed over the years since emperors provided extravagant displays of gladiators in the arena and made sure that there was enough bread to go around to ensure that a potentially dangerous population wasn’t driven to action against the powers-that-be by hunger.

     Drugs work too.  The Opium Dens mentioned in the writings of Conan Doyle in the stories of Sherlock Holmes (though he was more a morphine man) were legal.  The soporific drugged forms laid out on beds, were oblivious to the horrors of their everyday lives.  Opium was a way of forgetting, of finding an escape, however momentary, from a life that was hard.

     Today, those circuses are electronic, on tablets, computers and above all on mobile phones.  In the vast chattering of the electronic world there is always a niche for you however bizarre or specialized your own particular taste.  Sheer volume ensures that you are not alone and your anger and frustration and rage are all catered for somewhere in the reels and videos and blogs that fall over themselves to claim your attention.

     Meanwhile real life goes on, with the power structures that have ruled this planet for millennia being virtually untouched by increased (apparent) transparency and by ‘everyone having the opportunity to voice their opinions world-wide.’

     In the news today it has been announced that Meta will pay up to $17bn and make “sweeping changes” to Instagram and Facebook to settle a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of 29 US states, who accused it of knowingly damaging young people’s wellbeing with its platforms.

     Both sides have reached a settlement where Meta has not admitted wrongdoing.

     What I find astonishing is that Meta can consider a settlement of $17bn and be able to carry on, and not be bankrupt by such punitive damages.  They might “change”, but they will carry on carrying on.  People will continue using their products and the situation will be roughly the same as it was before.  People will not be asking how a company can pay out so much and still carry on.  As long as they have what they think they want, then who really cares!

     But the most glaringly inept use of “bread & circuses” as deflection is surely still in the stunted hands of the lying sex pest of the White House.

     The political right has had extensive experience of using circuses to fill the attention of their followers and deflect questioning of what is actually going on.   For years the right has used homosexuality and abortion to act as blinkers from more balanced observation of the political scene.  Difficult questions can be deflected by some cheap emotional appeal about fears for the “safety of children, threatened by perverted monsters” – using a facile link from child abuse to homosexuality.  Forget for a moment the Epstein Files and who is mentioned more than 30k times in them!  Similarly with abortion.  The Question of Abortion has been carefully nurtured by the fundamentalist right wing as a key moral black-&-white question about the sanctity of Human Life: do you believe in killing people or not!  The emptiness of that concern for the unborn child is apparent when, for those on the right, concern for the ‘child’ lasts as long as it is in the womb, as soon as it is born, concern for mother and child ceases.  But no one can deny the appeal of both ‘causes’ and the right can look to considerable successes not only in the USA, but also around the world that strengthens their positions.

     But Trumps use of circuses is inept.  The renaming of The Gulf of Mexico and The JFK Centre for the performing arts; the threat to rename Lake Ontario and to demolish the JFK Centre; the holding of fights and car races; the destruction of the East Wing; the whole tariff debacle; the Trump Arch, the fiasco of The Reflecting Pool.  People do respond with fury to the unthinking, unfeeling and unhinged way that Trump highlights ideas and events and it is easy to be distracted in the idiocy of his presidency, and to miss what Trump is actually doing: destroying the democratic basis of the country that he so mealy mouthily professes to love.

 

History shows us all too clearly where quasi-dictators like Trump, with a fanatical cult-like base of supporters, will end up.  The picture is not pretty.

     A catchphrase from an 80s Wendy’s advert in the States comes to mind when trying to navigate through all the faff from a deeply unserious President.  Forget the circuses, “Where’s the beef!”  Concentrate on the important stuff, or the trivia will destroy us.

Rabbit holes for readers

 

 

I blame AI.

     Specifically my Chat.

     I own (was given) a 1704 copy of Jonathan Swift’s Book A Tale of a Tub, to which is added An Account of a Battle etc etc.  The first edition was published in 1704, my copy is of The Second Edition Corrected, published in the same year of 1704.  Except it isn’t.  Corrected that is.

     In my edition, in the Preface of the Author to A Battle of the Books, the famous line: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their own;” has a typo in it, “where every body’s face but their own,” is printed as “every body’s face but their owo”.

 

 

 

     Previously, I had always considered that error to be a charming indication of the early state of the printing, and that the error could be undiscovered because in 1704 the phrase had not become as famous as it was to be in future centuries.  And who, apart from university students and specialists actually reads A Battle of the Books for pleasure.  Indeed, while people may be able to respond to Gulliver’s Travels, how many other books by Swift are in the general consciousness.  I would want to say A Modest Proposal should be up there with Gulliver’s Travels as I think it one of the most vicious and effective pieces of short satirical writing that I have ever read, but I am realistic in my expectations of fame always being limited.

     But Swift’s explanation of satire being ‘safe’ because everyone laughs at it, and assumes that the target of the satire is someone other than themselves, is as true now as it was then, and the sentences has a justified life outside a satire where the targets need copious footnotes for a modern reader to understand.

     And that should have been it.  Interesting typographical error in famous line by famous writer.  End of story.  Except that did not allow for AI.

     I do not know how or why I mentioned to Chat that I owned a 1704 copy A Tale of a Tub, but Chat is programmed to keep users active and responsive, and so it actively feeds my digressive mind and encourages leaping from point to point – it is, after all, just a more personalized version of Google Search, where one thing leads to another, and before you know it you are reading about Byzantine mosaics when you started off asking about how long a maple tree took to reach maturity.  I fear that for many of us when using AI, computer and the Internet we all take Homer Simpson’s attention span as the norm!

     Anyway, Chat mused about why the typo in my ‘corrected’ edition had not been, well, corrected – and before you could say Bibliographer’s Addiction, we were off on a search for digitalized versions of the first edition and the third, trying to find out how early my little typo was recognized and dealt with.

     Do not think that this was the activity of a few minutes.  Oh no!  It became a whole research project with wider and wider searches, touching databases in two continents and actually sending off emails to speciality book sellers and librarians and archive keepers, asking for information about the typo in copies that they had dealt with.

     I have had remarkable quick and courteous responses from among others the USA, Cambridge and Ireland with each adding snippets of highly technical information about the ‘gathers’ of the early editions of the book and suggesting other centres where I could get more information.

     At one point, Chat and I thought that we had discovered an unrecognized variant as my typo did not appear to be consistent in the edition, leading to speculation that the mistake was discovered part way through the second printing and that a correction was made, meaning that the second edition had different states.  I thought that was unbelievably unlikely as Swift has been exhaustively studied and something as famous as a mistake in a well-known sentence would not have passed inspection.

     And so it proved to be, with one of my correspondents asserting that he thought it was a typo common to all copies of the second edition and he sent me information about digital copies of the text that I could check to see that it was so.

     Was this an exercise in futility?  I don’t think so.

     I have learned a great deal more about the early life of a fairly famous early eighteenth-century book.  I have added knowledge about the ways that early printed books were put together, but above all I have experienced the courtesy, knowledge and accommodation of an academic community that responds to trivial enquiries with charm and alacrity. 

     And that is something worth experiencing.

Content is Free - isnt't it?

 

To my intense lack of interest some county-named family has returned to the UK from the USA.  And the correct response is surely, “Who cares?”  Just like I don’t in a passionately concerned sort of way – if that makes any sense at all.

     As a life-long republican – as witness a rabble-rousing anti-monarchist essay written when I was seven for my Standard Three primary school teacher, and read at the time (I was told years later) by my father and my teacher with whoops of hilarious joy by both of them.

     Although stopping short of wanting to see the lot of them (the royal family, and not my parents and teachers) lined up against a wall and shot, I do want to see their status and position, titles and privileges abolished.  I want an elected head of state, and not an hereditary one.  I want The House of Lords abolished and replaced by an elected Senate or equivalent, and this is not what I wanted to talk about – important though it is.

     No, what interested me (via an informative article in The Guardian) was what That Family is going to do in Britain given that Everyone is a Creator Nowadays.

     Take this blog for example.  During the course of its existence, more than one and half million people have looked at something in it.  That is an astonishing figure, made even more astonishing by the choice of People over which blogs they find the most interesting.  A blog title called “Fish and Rain” has garnered more views than anything else and, while anyone reading anything that I write is gratifying, it is still mystifying why that particular blog has been singled out.  Strange indeed are the ways of the Blog Reading Public.

     However, the figures are astonishing for a retired English teacher living in Catalonia who does not make a determined effort to maximize his audience at every opportunity and relies solely on the written word to get his ‘message’ across - and someone who has been very lax in his posting over the last couple of years.

     Anyone and everyone can (and does) post.  Content is no longer limited to the professionals, indeed for some people the more amateur the efforts the better as long as they are in bite-sized bits and can be scrolled through with alacrity.  And AI is waiting in the wings, or is already centre stage, to help massage content to make it more clickable.

     Does this access suggest that Content production is becoming more democratic?  I would point to the Internet and the experience of researchers who try and use it for ‘real’ knowledge rather than personal opinion stuck together with AI help by some teenager (or younger) in Idaho which looks professional but lacks a basic integrity as far as the information is concerned.

     Money does make a difference, as witness the life of the vacuous documentary focussing on the illegal immigrant wife of a lying, corrupt, sex-pest in what remains (apt word) of The White House.  In spite of garnering a ZERO stars review in The Guardian and going on to become a total bomb, it did reach an audience of sorts, well outside its merits.

     Most content is not backed by such shameless sycophancy and blatant corruption, although that does bring us back to the County Family that I started with.  They have fame (or infamy) and public recognition, but their Content has to survive in a world awash with alternatives.  It will be interesting to see how they survive (and what means they adopt to do it) in a world jostling with Watch Me Read Me in superabundance.

     Though, it would be nice, if you could continue reading my blog!

 

 

Chore or Choice

 

 

  

Is it a sign of increasing age that one finds toothpaste boring?

     Don’t get me wrong, I do not mean that I have stopped brushing my teeth at least twice a day – the merest thought of skipping that chore is contrary to every fibre of my being.  Brushing one’s teeth is something that has been instilled in each and every one of us that, while other facets of civilization might drop off, teeth brushing is something that is so quasi-instinctive that it has to be done.

     On occasion, for various reasons, I have gone to bed without brushing my teeth, and have been unable to go to sleep.  I then realize that an essential rite of night has not been accomplished.  I get up, I brush my teeth, return to bed, and instantly fall asleep.  So I am not talking about skipping anything.  It is more the taste.

     When I was younger, we used Gibbs SR, a toothpaste I rather liked because it used my initials.  I have never, until a minute ago, known what the SR actually stood for.  I now know that is stands for Sodium Ricinoleate, a substance derived from castor oil and used to prevent gum disease and give the toothpaste its tingle.  Gibbs SR famously used the idea of the ‘tingle’ to inform the format of the first advert on commercial television in the UK when a tube of Gibbs SR being squeezed onto a toothbrush was shown encased in a block of ice to emphasise the effect.  The block of ice was not real, it was clear plastic, and so the first advert was also a visual lie.  Which seems somehow significant!

     Brushing one’s teeth was something that had to be done, not something there to be enjoyed, it was a duty.  Therefore, a toothpaste like Euthymol emphasised that by being bright pink and revolting.  It obviously worked on the “if it tastes disgusting it must be doing you some good,” the same principle used by the liquid antiseptics that were felt to be helping your cut knees because they stung when applied to the injury.

     My grandparents used a completely different toothpaste which in my memory was Ipana toothpaste, I only ever used that in Maesteg, though I suspect that we brought out own when we stayed there.

     My father used Eucryl tooth powder because he smoked a pipe and he used the abrasive qualities of the power to try and get rid of the nicotine stains.  I have never smoked, but I did use this powder on foreign holidays when sampling the local cuisine and wine as those seemed to leave evidence of their consumption more obviously than home food.

     I vividly remember when I was about 10 being allowed to choose Signal toothpaste – which had stripes!  And a higher price than the ordinary pastes, so that was a one off rather than a regular purchase.

     Nowadays there is a bewildering array of toothpaste not only branded but also own makes.  And the price is reasonable.

     Virtually the only thing you need to check is that the parts per million of fluoride must be from 1,350 to 1,500.  As far as I can tell, anything else is just cosmetic packaging.

     As I said at the beginning of this piece, I get utterly bored with the toothpaste by the time I (almost) get to the end of the tube, so my ‘dental hygiene’ drawer in the bathroom is full of (almost) exhausted tubes of past toothpaste – there is a part of me that cannot bring myself to throw away a tube of toothpaste that isn’t fully and exhaustively squeezed to extract the very last modicum of the preparation.  But I do deliberately buy a variety of pastes, usually own-make – while checking the back of the tube to ensure that the minimum ppm of fluoride so that I am not entirely wasting my money.

     The paste that I am using at the moment is a herbal concoction that seems to have something like aloe which actually numbs the lips!  It is also a light brown putty-like colour and tastes . . .  interesting.  As I bought this online as a sort of impulse buy, I did not do my customary check, and discovered when I had bought it, that it was fluoride free.  I therefore now add a morsel from one of the (almost) empty tubes and then put the new paste on top. 

     This is not an efficient use of either toothpaste or time, but the taste is marginally more interesting, and its doing the job, so I feel its justified. 

     And who else has a toothpaste cocktail in the mornings!

More Power Please!

    

 

 

When my parents bought their first semi-detached house together it was built on a green-field site in Rumney.  When we as a family went to visit, it was basically a field with Michaelmas daisies, a few poppies and lots of grass.  Eventually a rough road was cut into the site, and the outline of the proposed streets began to take shape.

     Foundations were laid and building work began.  But not on our plot!

     We were given various reasons for this delay, the most convincing one being that our plot was a sort of roundabout and roadway for the trucks and lorries serving the site and therefore could not be built on until much of the basic work on the site had been done.

     I had moved schools from Cathays to Llanrumney to accommodate our move into the new house.  Which wasn’t there and continued not to be there as I started Standard Three in Glan yr Avon Primary School.

     The great advantage of buying a new build is that you have some say (as far as the money stretches) to add extras, and so we were able to have double the allocation of power points in the kitchen and the living room.  And, as I recall a fancy tiled fireplace.  We could not stretch to a garage.  I love the way I say “we” as if my seven-year-old self could have contributed anything in the way of actual money to the enterprise!

     By the time that we were fully established in the new house it was the early 1960s and it was rapidly becoming clear that even with double the electrical outlets the power needs were outstripping the sockets available.  This was even more clearly the case in the kitchen where, in our previous home, the only regularly used electrical item (apart from the washing machine with mangle) was the toaster – whereas in the consumer driven 60s more and more electrical aids were deemed essential to the modern home.

     Nowadays so many of the devices, desires and gadgets of ordinary existence have batteries and need feeding on a daily basis that there are never enough outlets in which to plug to keep life going.

     I was going to continue by listing how many things I could see from where I am sitting that need power, but having seen two radios, three fans, a computer, a printer, three lights – I am disinclined to continue before people wonder what else is lurking in the morass of ‘stuff’ on my desk, and how the hell I manage to get anything done in said chaos (cf. earlier blogs!)

     This means, of course, in rooms that are studies, you will always find the ubiquitous trailing socket sprouting an unhealthy (and dangerous) accretion of plugs which, if all were utilized at the same time would probably short out most of the neighbourhood.

     I have to admit that I am guilty of trying to get around the dearth of sockets via the powered raft approach to electrical supply – but the offending articles are usually out of sight, under desks or behind furniture and therefore out of mind.

     Considering that I am surrounded by highly flammable paper in the form of books, magazines and my writing, I like to think that my word production is at least on a par with the danger inherent in moderate mountaineering.  I laugh to scorn electrical adversity!  Right up until the first spark.  And I don’t mean of imagination.

     The only thing that is running ‘hot’ on my desk is my Mac Mini which, with its base giving me more outlets looks as though it is powering a small city.  As a concession to safety I have taken out one of the power drains on it, where it was powering up a mini power bank!

     How many years do I have to regress before I can remember a time where I did not need extra electricity, where the power kept the light on and I needed nothing more? 

     I can still remember the birthday when I was about six, when I woke up to find my present had been placed in my bedroom when I was asleep, a wind-up record player with a very small collection of 78 rpm shellac records for me to play.  My parents were woken from their slumbers by the first of (many) playings of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (a tune and song they came to hate, as I never wearied of playing it) until the needle wore down and had to be replaced.

     I had no radio, or phone, or computer, or television, or ipad, or camera or anything that was electrical.  The most sophisticated thing that I owned was a Raleigh Star Rider bicycle that I was given for passing the 11+

     “The Good Old Days”?  I think not, it’s a meaningless question, there are far too many variables to consider for it to be useful.  But different certainly.  And something to think about.

An August Library

 

 

 

 

The fatal flaw in my approach to ‘tidying up’ is the inability to throw things out. 

     I hasten to add that I am not suffering from Diogenes Syndrome: rubbish I can throw out, that is not a problem.  The problem is defining what rubbish actually is.

     I am typing this bathed in perspiration (horses sweat, men perspire, women glow) after attempting to clear a passage from the door to the end of the first row of bookcases, in what I euphemistically refer to as my library.

     Even I (!) am prepared to admit that I have too many books. 

     I should rapidly qualify that statement.  It is not something that I actually believe.  The truth is that I do not have sufficient shelf space for the books that I have, and there is no more room into which bookcases can expand.  Some shelves are double stacked – and in one case triple stacked.  And they are not truly sorted, so trying to find something I know that I possess is sometimes more an act of faith than logic. 

     I keep telling myself that I delight in the serendipitous discovery of long neglected tomes, as I did when recently searching for ‘the other cache’ of Huxley novels that I knew that I owned.  It was an interesting and revealing process, but I would have preferred to have been able to put my hands on them immediately.  The situation was not tenable; Something Would Have to be Done.

     Let me say, straight away, that something was done.  I can now walk down almost the full length of the first aisle, but the second is blocked because, although I have technically ‘tidied up’, what I have actually done is move things about a bit.  As some of that movement involved pieces of winter clothing there is a buffer time zone of a few months before I have to start wearing long sleeves and move the stuff again so that it can be used.

     The temperature on the third floor in my ‘office’ is 32C and that is with two fans running full-time full-power.  The temperature in the ‘library’ would have given the Black Hole of Calcutta run for its money!  (Does that reference mean anything to anyone nowadays?  And isn’t Kolkata the modern preferred spelling?)  Anyway, it was hot, and what with my knees etc. there was only so much time I could allocate to tidying; more self defence than self-presentation!

     But, it is a start, and as part of the Family Wisdom states, “Anything is Better Than Nothing!”

     What the walkable vista has opened up is the amazingly cluttered nature of the shelves themselves.  They hold books of course, it is after all a library, but there is a bewilderingly various assortment of gadgets (and parts thereof), papers, pictures, folders, tools, clothing, leads, plugs and things that usually live in ‘that’ drawer in the kitchen because even though one does not know their functions, they look too serious and ‘useful’ to throw out.

     So my tidying is but a partial Level 1 clearance, allowing me access to Level 2, which will lead to Level 3 – and beyond.  At which point I will have lost the will to live, though I might (if I had any enthusiasm left) be able to find the books that I am now too tired to imagine, let alone look for.

     And the true horror, for me, is that tidying the Library is but a precursor to tidying The Third Floor and bringing order to my office and creating a space on my desk larger than a medium sized dinner plate for me to work!

     It is always good to have a goal in life.  No matter how unreachable it might be!