Write on!

 

 

How easy it is to let a few days slip by without putting finger to keyboard!

     As a person who actually enjoys writing, there must be something deeply sinister in an attitude that will wilfully lapse into indolence rather than do something that he enjoys.  Obviously, there are excuses, the first and foremost being courtesy.

     This weekend we had an old friend to stay, and we dutifully and willingly ate (and drank very little, sigh!) with her until she left on the train for the bus for home.  And we talked.

     There is something about talking with a friend that is intoxicating.  Everything, even the stupidest of small talk becomes imbued with significance when there is history to make even the most casual of comments chime with conversations past.

     It is as this point that I recollect a colleague who had had a fascinating life: world travel, a variety of jobs including working in an Adult Book Store, an easy and friendly approach – and yet his conversation, even (or especially) when talking about overtly interesting things, was boring in the extreme.  He was one of those people who, for reasons not entirely clear, drained interest from the content of his talk.

     I often tried to analyse just what it was that made him so oddly boring but, alas, I rarely found myself concentrating enough on what he was saying to give myself enough evidence to draw conclusions!

     And yet, I have had conversations, even whole evenings, of inconsequential chatter that was forgotten almost as soon as the evening was over, but whose warm memory of friendship and communality lingers longer.

     Is all of the preceding an extended excuse of inaction?  Probably.  And in justification, I am writing now.

 

 

 

 

Duolingo, the languages teaching app, is still exerting its siren-like grip over Toni and myself.  We have, wholeheartedly, bought into the idea, nay the concept, of progression “to the next league” as something which is self-evidently availing to good, even though our present position commanding the heights of our respective The Sapphire Leagues has brought us nothing apart from a number next to our names: the first three places on the list having a more elaborate number decoration than those lower down.

     As with any system, part of the learning process is working out how to play that system.

     The whole motivating process of the learning on this app is fuelled by the acquisition of points that give you your place on the list. 

     The points can be earned by successfully completing lessons and, as you progress within a lesson group you can gain crowns to show your position within that topic.  As you move from one level to another, you are given the opportunity (for 15 minutes) to gain double points for any lessons that you complete.  You can also buy your way into high paying (in points terms) exercises by using up some of your gems that you also earn as you progress.

     Some people manage to accrue thousands of points, and as the usual pay-out for a lesson completed is about 20ish, you either have to devote yourself all day to using the app or, you pay to buy the professional version of the app which gives you unlimited lives and free opportunities to the higher scoring exercises.

     If you have read up to this point, then you are either a devotee of Duolingo or you are an ‘outsider’ waiting to see what the pay-off of all this writing is.

 

 

 

If there is a conclusion that I can draw from all this, it is that the app is using tried and tested approaches to involve the user in the program in the hope that they either watch and respond to the adverts that litter the before and after of the lessons, but also feel frustration about the ‘free’ version because it is too limiting.  I can feel myself becoming more and more drawn to paying money for this ostensible ‘free’ app because I want to get rid of the adverts and I want to be able to make simple errors without losing a precious life.

     The app has encouraged me to do more work on my Spanish for a longer sustained period of time than mere physical lessons with a teacher have ever managed to get out of me!  In that sense, the ever-present phone and the easily reached app are providing a positive boost to my learning.

     And learning a foreign language, any foreign language, must be a good thing.

     But, exactly the same techniques with lives, points, hearts, animations, questions and responses, musical accompaniment, leagues, positions, congratulations etc etc etc can be used for much more pernicious reasons.

     Toni and I are working at our respective language courses for a chunk of time and are putting ourselves out for a position in a randomly constructed hierarchy of attainment, and we feel gratified by our placement within that arbitrary ranking.  We take the automatically generated congratulations and animated celebrations at our successes as something real and something to stimulate us to continue and to progress.

     We are gaining knowledge, and anything that gives me the impetus to make an effort has to be a good thing.  But it does make me look at the way that advertising is presented, and the same techniques are used in game playing and I’m sure in gambling.

     Just because you can sense that you are being manipulated, that does not protect you from manipulation.  In the Duolingo app I welcome the encouragement to participate and to progress and I am willing to accept the digital ‘payment’ the app supplies as something real to keep me at it.

     Even if I succumb and pay the monthly rate to upgrade my experience, I can still tell myself that it is a small price to pay to speak the language by which I am surrounded.

     And I am far to digital savvy to be seduced by tempting pixels.  Aren’t I?

     When I started typing this, I was First in my League.  I am fighting the temptation to check on my position now to find out if I need to a bit of emergency lessoning to restore my pre-eminence.

     In fact, I can’t check immediately, because my phone is downstairs recharging after all the use that I have made of it today.  But I do want to check!

     The app is working!

Too much, is too much

 

It comes to something that I regard as a positive achievement the fact that I can squeeze myself sideways through a narrow path of piled high possessions to get to my desk on the third floor in an almost direct passageway from the top of the stairs!  The room still looks as though it has been ransacked by indiscriminate looters, but believe me, that is an improvement on what it looked like before the attempt to turn the electricity grid in the house into a way of getting better reception for my internet radio.

     If you are still reading after ploughing your way through the last two unnecessarily complex sentences, I salute your fortitude and your innate optimism in assuming there must be a linguistic or literary reward for perusing such verbiage!

     I have never, it must be said, been able to keep a clear desk.  Whether at home or at school or work (which was also school) my desk (no matter how big it was) would, in a matter of days be reduced to a workspace more suited to a submarine than a spacious house.

     Take this moment for example.  I sit in front of a computer, in front of which is an Apple ‘magic’ keyboard and a presumably equally enchanted touch pad.  The amount of free space on my expansive desk is (I have just measured it) is a thin strip of desk on the left-hand side of the keyboard of some 12 cms!

     Just to give you some idea of what I do with ease and a certain aplomb I will describe what I can see from where I sit – and I am going to give you only the briefest outline of what ‘things’ there are occupying the space that should be free for papers and books.

     On my right is a book of post-its (with another collection of post-its further in the debris) with a rogue CD, notebooks, a copy of The Economist from April 2013; a cable for linking to the Internet; a book stand; a DVD of ‘Weekend’ – a film by Andrew Haigh with Tom Cullen who I used to teach; a disc drive; ‘The Arts of Spain’ by José Gudiol, published by Thames and Hudson; a reMarkable electronic tablet; a metal book end and a packet of blutac.  All of that lot (and more) blends into the printer and a bookcase arching over it.

     The sheer amount of stuff on the left-hand side is overwhelming and to list it in any detail will call into question not only my sanity but also my sanity.  Suffice to say a (highly edited) list of what is there includes a low cardboard box decorated with multiple images of Warhol’s Marilyn that I have designated as an ‘Archive’; a box of Christmas cards; an Internet radio; three pairs of scissors (me neither); pens, pencils, rulers; an electric pencil sharpener; a large bottle of black printer ink and a collection of plastic straws 70cms long.  There is a reason that I bought those straws, and it has nothing to do with Blue Peter constructions or drinking!

     So, I am confined to a tiny space in front of the computer.  If I do any writing that needs recourse to reference books, I have no space whatsoever to lay them out around me. 

     And because the third floor is so cluttered, there is no space to move things while you decide where to put them.  If you see what I mean.

 

     

 

     Toni accuses me of suffering from Diogenes’ Syndrome, where the unfortunate cannot throw things away.  I am not convinced by this as I seem to recall that Diogenes was the philosopher who was keen to divest himself of all physical possessions and who lived in utter simplicity (and nakedness) in a barrel.  Is the name of the syndrome based on irony?  Anyway, although, it is true that I do have a disinclination to throw things away (You never know when they might come in useful!) all the things I keep have a basic utility.  I find it hard to throw away containers, even though containers allow me to squirrel things away that otherwise might have been dispensed with.

     I remember, from years ago, a medical drama series, in which one episode concerned a medical technician who created very specific pieces of equipment for very specific patients – and then he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of those pieces of equipment, in spite of the fact that the individuality was so pronounced that their general utility was zero.  I think the more astute among you will have worked out where the narrative thrust is going.  Sure enough, a patient appears whose treatment demands just such a piece of equipment that he has in his stores and which people have been urging him to junk because it is taking up valuable, expensive room.  Diogenes justified.  But that is not why I remember the episode.

     After his triumph of being able to magic up something extraordinary for a particular patient ‘from stock,’ another scene showed him in his stockroom kicking something that he tried to move and dislodged a whole welter of other bits and pieces and saying, almost in tears of frustration, something like, “I hate all this bloody junk!”

     I am sure that the episode was not quite like that, but I remember it because it gave both sides: one piece did save a life, but most of what he had was junk and took up space.  I liked the complexity of his being proved right, but still probably being wrong in his indiscriminate belief that everything and anything might be useful.

     The Health Service can take whatever money is given to it, there will always be something that needs funding.  But funding is finite.  At some point decisions have to be made; judgements that have life changing consequences.  Just like the space for the technician’s ‘junk’.

     These decisions and judgements are not theoretical, they are being made all the time.  In the Days of Covid those decisions are here and now, we can see (and bury) the results of political decisions about what to do with limited resources.

 

 

 

 

 

     As we are Waiting for Vaccine, we have to hope that those vials are not the Godot of our times, and that the right decisions and judgements are being made on our behalf!