101 Things #72 - Becoming Crusoe

As I write these little pieces, debunking the suggestions of others as to what constitutes valid and exciting bucket-list objectives, I have found a couple of the most outré on the website of Tomas Laurinavicius. The casual idea of about building a multimillion dollar business empire was one we had to put down. In rather similar vein, I think I am happy to add to my pile of rejects, 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die the notion that one should

Buy an island.

I am not clear if one has to have pocketed the proceeds from one's multimillion dollar business before buying the island or whether the island comes first. Perhaps it is while roaming its lonely beaches and gazing mournfully out to sea from the top of the low hill in the middle, wondering where the hell the rowing boat with the food has got to, that one has the fantastic idea that will guarantee the success of the business.

Obviously if you are a multimillionaire, then buying an island is as natural as the luxury yacht, private chef and Van Gogh in the drawing room. For a few million pounds you can be lord of a sun-drenched Greek isle or an atoll in Tahiti, or perhaps a wee slab of heather and mountain in the Hebrides.

There are even specialist agencies that sell islands and will arrange for clients to visit. But if you are in the happy position that private flights are laid on for your trip to the other side of the world just so that you can purse your lips, tilt your head sideways and say thoughtfully "That sand will have to go" then you have really passed beyond the bucket-list stage. Your aspirations can all be attained at the drop of a cheque tap of an banking app.

Without some sense of challenge the bucket-list becomes a mere shopping list and ceases to be of much interest. Why should the ordinary commuter on the platform want to own an island? For a start and almost by definition they are hard to reach. Maybe in Finland where islands outnumber people by two to one, or up in the Canadian north, it is easy to live close to one. Here, for example, is a charming little place we spotted near Helsinki on a Baltic cruise

Pic: One of mine

 
 For the rest of us, the prospect not only of flying somewhere but then renting a car for a long drive, then engaging a local fisherman and hanging on grimly to the sides as the gales whip the waves over the gunwales - and then arriving and having to unpack and defrost the freezer and get a fire going and all the rest of it because of course nobody has been near the place for months - and then reversing the procedure a few days later when you want to go home ....

I would also worry about the practical aspects. The weather closes in and you are marooned. Your power supply fails. You hear strange footsteps outside at night and the nearest help (police, vets, whatever) are many hours away, assuming you can contact them anyway.

A natural counter to all this pessimism is to opt for nice little island on a lake where there a lots of other nice little islands and a town on a highway just a few hundred metres away. A bit like the one in my picture, perhaps (although it is still a hell of a sweat going for a pint of milk in the morning). But where is the fun in that? You might as well buy a country home on the mainland. Surely the whole point of an island is the remoteness, the isolation, the limitless views in all directions and the liberating feeling that you really all master of all you survey.

 I propose to be practical. There is no point in aspiring to own an island (at least an island worth owning, as opposed to a lump of mud in the Thames Estuary that is only visible at low tide) unless you have a considerable amount of ready cash to spend both acquiring it and on the wherewithal to furnish it and to travel there in comfort. And if I was in that position then I would not bother to have a bucket-list at all. As I am not, this idea can be filed away under 'U' for utterly pointless.

Misleading Tweet of the Day - Gatwick Express

This may or may not be the start of a new series.

I present to you, plain and unadorned, a tweet as it appeared on my tweetline or whatever it's called today.  Before you read my comments, study the whole of it and consider what it is trying to convey.

If you take the time to read it then it informs of delays to the railway service between Brighton and Gatwick (and poor old Eastbourne as well). If you simply scan it lazily, letting your normal perceptive skills take charge, then you will focus on the 60% of the whole that is composed of a picture. A picture of delays, of anxious passengers looking hopefully up at departure boards, perhaps of a harassed traveller running to an airline boarding gate that is about to close, all driving home the key message that there are problems?

Not a bit. We see, cunningly pictured in a nostalgic black and white, a couple strolling insouciantly (I think that's the mot juste) along the platform. No doubt their train has arrived on time and they have in mind a leisurely check-in, a drink in the bar, a pleasant flight and who knows what in a seedy backstreets hotel in Rotterdam afterwards? She thinks he's leaving his wife at last. He is juggling her and another girl friend in Rotherham as well as his long-suffering wife who thinks he's off to yet another boring sales conference. Little do either of them know that a sinister duelling-scarred man in a black cape is also on that platform ...

Ah, as usual, my imagination has run away with me but you see the point? A picture may be worth a thousand words but in this case those words are utterly misleading. I have forgotten all about the delays. My musings about Simon and Kath (not forgetting Deirdrie in Rotherham and Glenda in Sidcup and the mystery man¹) have diverted me from the key issue, that there are delays on the Brighton line. Never mind, I don't use that line so I couldn't really care less. But if it was you, you were in danger of missing a flight and were panicking about how to reach Gatwick in time, would this artfully staged photo (comprising most of the message, let me remind you) make you feel that the Gatwick Express people:
a) cared about your journey?
b) cared only about projecting a misleading image of themselves?

Footnote:
1. Could this be the long awaited return of Count Indesit Ariston de Dietrich?

101 Things #71 - Waiter, There's a Fire in my Mouth

Do you enjoy burning the roof of your mouth off? Is it fun to gasp for breath, with a scorching sensation running down your throat? Do you find that having stinging pains throughout your digestive system and out the other end enhances your day? If so, the proposal found on the Life Listed website that you should

Take a bite into the hottest chili in the world

is definitely one to add to your bucket-list of items you wish to achieve. For my part, I am happy to add this to my still-expanding anti-bucket-list that is laughingly described as 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die. 

Chilis (or chillies, for us Brits) enhance the flavours of many dishes. Eating them raw is different. The active ingredient - capsaicin - reacts with the taste buds and skin and even tiny quantities of it are enough to have a violent effect. There is really no reason at all to want to eat them raw, apart from the dubious pleasure of taking part in a contest. These have become popular in recent years, fuelled, of course, by the internet and it is easy to find footage of people making fools of themselves in public as they try to be the last person still eating.

I was a on a flight to Tibet many years ago with Pakistan International Airways. They took a long time to give us any refreshment, and of course that was after the usual endless hanging around at the airport and then waiting to take-off, so when a plate of food finally arrived I tucked in ravenously . I thought the large green thing by the side of the rice was a vegetable. I ate it whole. It was a chili. I then had quite a long time to regret my impulse.

That chili was a pretty mild one, of course. The hottest chili in the world is a different order of magnitude. The authorities seem to concur that the Carolina Reaper is the hottest; it is about 1,000 times as hot as whatever it was that I ate all those years ago (measured in terms of the amount of those vicious chemicals in each bite).

The chemical formula for capsaicin is C₁₈H₂₇NO_3.Nothing exotic in it, just the amazingly common elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, the building blocks of all life. But it is not just potentially lethal in this form, it really is - read this unnerving article on Mens Health.com if you still fancy a quick nibble.

A bucket-list item ought to be enjoyable, at least in retrospect. There is nothing pleasurable in the idea of biting into a Carolina Reaper. If others wish to try then good luck to them (and to those who have to be close to them afterwards). This one goes into my reject pile.

101 Things #70 - In Praise of Friendly Bombs

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now ...

Sir John Betjeman 

If you have been following these columns in recent months you will know that I am writing little pieces on the theme of "I'm not doing that". They are building into a set known as 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die. Quite a lot of the inspiration comes from other people's bucket-lists, the achievements they actually wish to be able to tick off and say "I did that".

This piece, however, returns to a theme explored in one of my first outings, the less pleasant parts of the surrounding towns to beautiful Ruislip. We blasted Hayes; now it is the turn of the vast slug-like excrescence guarding the approaches to London from the west. I shall use the good offices of my friends at Google maps to present a kind of pictorial essay to explain why I shall not be numbered amongst those who may

Enjoy Slough. 

Sir John was ahead of his time, as always, in his 1937 short poem, of which the first lines are quoted above. Before I give you a glimpse of what it is like to drive around this place, consider the following supporting evidence

• My car was stolen last year. It was later recovered by the police. Where was it found, the thieves having abandoned it? Slough.
   
• Facebook believes that Ruislip is part of Slough, even though it is nearly 10 miles away and in a different county. This geographic vandalism has gone unchecked despite the protests of many residents including myself. We can only conclude sinister forces are at work. 

Now have a look at one of the most desolate town centres you can imagine. Not poor, not run down, in fact, it is a prosperous town, well placed in the thriving Thames Valley corridor. But utterly soulless, devoid of any attractive architecture, any sense of harmony or belonging to a particular time.

The huge double carriageway that bisects the town effectively relegates pedestrians to being second class citizens. And look at the last picture where each building is a different style and a different height, and we see it from yet another wide road that isolates anyone on foot behind a wall of traffic.

What a welcome to the shopping centre

Concrete brutalism

Sod you, pedestrians

Lovely view, eh?

Town centre? Near enough.

Just urgh! At least this is on the road out toward Ruislip

 I am not going to express the hope that you enjoyed looking at these pictures, but if I have persuaded just one person not to visit expecting to see a quaint old Berkshire town oozing history and charm, my work will not have been in vain.

101 Things #69 - Seeing the Unseeable

Most of my little pieces on the theme of 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die are about fairly straightforward aspirations - exotic places to go, unusual activities to try out - and my take on them is to explain why they do not represent anything that interests me. Quite different is the topic for this episode for we are venturing into the realm of science and the suggestion made, presumably in good faith, by the website Pick Your Goals, is to

Witness a supermassive black hole.

I am certainly not pouring any contumely on the thinking behind this notion. The very idea of black holes was a mere philosophical curiosity until just a few years ago when the implications of Einstein's theory of gravity became better understood, and then observations of the behaviour of certain stars and entire galaxies confirmed the reality.

A black hole represents the triumph of gravity over all other natural forces. Created by the collapse of sufficiently large stars at the end of their lives, the matter implodes until the gravity is so strong that nothing can move away from it and anything that gets sufficiently close will be caught and added to the singularity - the impossibly dense and impossibly small object at the heart. By impossible I mean that the current understanding of physics can not say what is going on there - real stuff goes in and nobody knows what becomes of it. Included in that stuff is light.

Light moving toward a black hole will curve around it and may curve directly into it. It will not emerge. The black hole itself generates no light because there are no electrical processes possible that would generate photons. Therefore we cannot "witness" one, whether it be supermassive or rather tiny. There is effectively nothing to witness.

Ah, you may be thinking, did they not show a fantastic photo of a black hole quite recently. Yes, they observed the light curving and bending right round a black hole and produced one of the greatest scientific pictures of all time, as I noted at the time and here is that remarkable image again.

But this is the light bending round it - you see just blackness - the utter absence of light or any other radiation - in the place where the singularity lurks.

I would dearly love to say that I have witnessed a black hole but it would be nonsense, a little bit like saying you have seen someone's face from just observing their shadow. I am going to, reluctantly, have to move this idea from "to do" status to "don't bother".