January 2018 – Page 3

Subtitles

Last night I watched a Swedish film (no, no, no, not THAT sort of Swedish film) – ‘A Man Called Ove’. Unsurprisingly, because the film was Swedish, the dialogue was in Swedish and so I watched it with subtitles switched on. Now, I am not a huge one for foreign language film or TV although I have recently watched three series of ‘The Killing’ (Danish), two series of ‘The Bridge’ (Swedish) and a few episodes of ‘Inspector Montalbano’ (Italian) and so watching programmes with subtitles isn’t something I do often or something I have thought about much before.

Anyway, once the film had finished it immediately struck me that I had been almost completely oblivious to the fact that I was listening to dialogue in Swedish but reading subtitles in English. I FELT as if I had just been watching a film as I normally would, assimilating the dialogue without any different effort or attention than I would have done if everything had been in English. I had certainly been reading the English words and I had certainly been hearing the Swedish words but my brain had tricked me into thinking that I had just been effortlessly absorbing everything, like I had been rearing/heading AND INSTANTLY UNDERSTANDING Swenglish (for want of a better name). It was quite a weird realisation. It then occured to me that I might quite possibly PREFER watching a foreign language film with English subtitles because I suspect that to do so I had to focus more intently than usual and so had probably entered something more akin to a ‘flow’ state (at the very least a minimally distracted state of mind).

It was interesting.

Incidentally, I enjoyed the film a lot. It was tinged (understatement) with a lot of sadness but also softly and playfully humorous throughout. And it made me want to own a classic Saab car (but obviously not a Volvo…) [watch the film].

Introducing… Dudley Disrupter

This morning I went for a five and a half mile run before work. This meant I got into work a little later than usual but this was all part of my original plan for the week. In truth, by the time I got into work (after a two mile walk) I was 14 minutes behind schedule, but I had already sneaked a look at my email Inbox and knew that there was nothing much in there that was going to take my time. So, I was confident that I would be able to get back on track pretty much straightaway. My plan for the day followed the same structure that I had (successfully) deployed in the last couple of days, namely a short spell devoted to email first thing, a short buffer of spare time, a longer timeslot of concentrated work on a substantive project (lecture planning in this case), a break for lunch, a planned timeslot for some research reading/activity, a second session on email and miscellaneous tasks and then a two hour meeting to end the day. After two days in which I have stuck unbelievably well (for me) to this kind of plan and made real progress on the substantive tasks I had set aside time for, I felt cautiously optimistic about the day ahead.

Anyway, back to the run. As I ran, I found myself remembering some cartoons I used to watch as a little kid. What I vaguely recalled was a cartoon in which the main character (possibly Mickey Mouse) had two little imaginary characters sitting on his shoulders, on one side a little angel who tried to get Mickey (let’s assume it WAS Mickey) to make good choices and behave well and on the other side a little devil who had the singular ambition to get Mickey into trouble. I have no idea why this particular cartoon idea popped into my head when it did but as I ran along I found myself thinking that my frequent struggles to stick to plans that I have made bore a lot of resemblance to the cartoon. Instead of Mickey generally going about his business there is me, trying to keep focussed and remain productive at work, and perched on my shoulders are the two imaginary characters, the ‘good’ one telling me to stick to my plans and the ‘bad’ one doing absolutely everything in his power to disrupt them, whispering things like: ‘It won’t matter if you just take a break here, you’re tired and you will work better later on if you do’ or ‘There’s no harm in not replying to that email immediately, it won’t do any damage if you just leave it there and then notice it and think about dealing with it another twenty or thirty times…’. I could see that this bad character was just hell-bent on disrupting my best-laid plans, and for that reason I decided that he would need a name with Disrupt or Disrupter in it. First off, the name Disrupter Dave came to mind, but I have a friend called Dave at my running club and he is friendly, helpful and just a generally really nice guy so I couldn’t bring myself to adopt that name. After a bit more thought I settled on Dudley Disrupter – the character Dudley Dursley in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novel series isn’t the nicest (although he is far from the worst of course) and I liked the idea that Dudley could be shortened to Dud which is exactly what I become when Dudley Disrupter gets his way.

I suppose there must also be a ‘good’ character on my other shoulder who also ought to have a name but I don’t really find that he gets in my way very much and so I hardly notice him. Consequently, at present, I am content simply to assume his presence but leave him un-named.

I decided on my run that one of main challenges in life is to watch out for Dudley whispering in my ear and trying to pull me away from my planned path, and I wondered to what extent Dudley might show his face today…

Now, at the end of the working day (I arrived home not long ago) I am glad to report that Dudley didn’t come out to play today. For the third day in a row I stuck to my plan and for the third day in a row I got some really USEFUL work done, as opposed to just getting some work done. I don’t doubt that Dudley Disrupter will appear on my shoulder again soon, tap me on the head and try his best to steer me off course, but it feels as if, by flushing out his existence and giving him a name, I might just have stumbled on a strategy for keeping him out of harm’s way.

Going Japanese

Saturday will see a rare event occur – I have just booked to go out to a restaurant for a meal with my wife and daughter (it will be a birthday meal for my wife). I almost never go out to eat in restaurants and when I do eat out the venue is generally a pub or a chain restaurant (cheap and easy). The chosen venue (my wife’s choice) is a local Japanese restaurant which should be interesting as I have only eaten Japanese food a few times and my only real recollection of eating it is from around 45 years ago when we had a Japanese visitor (a member of a group of teachers visiting local schools) staying with our family. If my memory serves me well his name was Mr Natsume and the occasion of us eating Japanese food with him was quite a memorable one…

Mr Natsume (I will assume I have remembered correctly) stayed with us for perhaps two weeks and at some point towards the end of this period he announced that he would like to cook real Japanese food for us. After a little thought he decided what he would make (Tempura was the main thing I remember), relevant ingredients were bought and the evening came for him to cook. I remember him setting to work in the kitchen and it getting later and later and later with no food appearing. Eventually (and I really do mean eventually), the dishes were ready and much later than planned and so absolutely starving hungry we tucked in (the food was absolutely delicious). Conversing as we ate, it turned out that he had NEVER cooked before as his wife always cooked for him, and his efforts were based entirely on his observations of her preparing and cooking food at home. This went some way to explaining quite why it had taken so long for fairly basic ingredients (vegetables, batter) to transmogrify into delicious morsels.

So, as I look forward to Saturday evening I have two key things going on in my mind. First, I am excited because I can still recall just how delicious Mr Natsume’s Japanese food was and I am looking forward to more of the same. Secondly, I am wondering how many snacks I should eat on Saturday afternoon, just in case it turns out that slow preparation is not only something for a first-timer trying to mimic the efforts of their wife but, rather, is a general characteristic of Japanese food.

Putting Up Barriers… Sticking To The Plan

It is Monday today. On Friday last week I determined to try to make two changes to the way I work this week with the overall aim of making better progress on substantial tasks and getting less stuck hacking my way through email-related work and other stuff that comes up. Change number 1 was to schedule specific times to handle work email each day – usually one at the start of the day and one at the end of the day or as close to that as I could get given other commitments – and to switch to offline mode at other times so that I could still work on tasks that required access to emails and attached documents but would not see anything new incoming. Change 2 was to schedule largish blocks of time (minimum two hours) that were pre-allocated to specific substantive tasks. Linked to this I made a new sign for my door that indicated that I was not to be disturbed (to be displayed during these work sessions) and which also showed when I COULD be disturbed at other times.

The result was that for today, I planned to do an email catch-up from 09:00-09:30 followed by a 30 minute buffer of unallocated time, followed by a two hour block to work on a new version of a Workload Data Collection Form, an hour ‘spare’ over lunchtime and then a three hour block for marking some reflective reviews by Final Stage students with a final one hour block for further email catch-up at the end of the day.

It is now almost 5pm and I am somewhat surprised to find that I have more or less stuck to my plan. I found that I needed about 40-45 minutes on my email this morning but I was still able to fit in 10 minutes of meditation and a trip to the kitchen to make a cup of tea into the shortened buffer period. I then did more like two and a half hours concentrated work on the Workload Form before having lunch despite forgetting to switch the sign on my door and being interrupted by a colleague for about 20 minutes (albeit that it was an important interruption). Lunch over-ran a bit due to some interesting conversation with colleagues (who, incidentally, were amused by the sign on my door that said I was ‘Open for Business!’) but I was still hitting the marking by 1.30pm and managed to mark 18 pieces of work (one third of the total amount) before 4pm which represented a rate of progress that I was happy with. I then switched my email back on to find about 12 new incoming messages including one important one that I was expecting which required a fair amount of thought/effort to respond to. Clearly, given that I am writing this now, I managed to do everything email-related that I needed to and still had time to write this entry. I also had time to read a Scientific American article about the search for Dark Matter (axions) in between completing the marking and starting email again this afternoon, which provided a kind of break.

So far so good then. I have set things up with an almost identical structure tomorrow so I ought to be fairly optimistic of another day of success, but Wednesday gets a bit more messy as I (currently) plan to go for a run for an hour or so before work (so will get in a bit late), have a big two hour meeting at the end of the afternoon and have populated the hours in between with some different types of task that I need to get to (bracketed by email sessions again) – an hour for some initial planning for four new lectures I have to prepare and an hour to do some reading relating to a little piece of research I am trying to do at the moment (on atmospheric tides). Then, on Thursday, I have two teaching sessions to complete that will dominate the day and so I have only scheduled one email session that day. Friday is currently left more or less open as I wanted to see how the first part of the week panned out and leave myself plenty of time clear in case something unexpected and important cropped up.

Frankly (Mr Shankly*), I will be pretty amazed if things continue to go as well as they have today but I have had quite a bit of success recently getting unstuck and getting things done so there’s reason to be hopeful.

[* Anyone who is a fan of the music of The Smiths will appreciate that it is virtually impossible to write or say the word ‘Frankly’ without continuing (perhaps internally/silently) with the words ‘Mr Shankly’.]

Night Fox

A couple of nights ago I was driving back from watching a film (Battles of the Sexes) at the Arts Centre and was almost home when one of these beautiful creatures ran across the road in front of me, jumped a wall and headed down towards Blindman’s Wood (a very small piece of private woodland sandwiched between the estate out house is on and one of the largest road junctions in Plymouth):

I think foxes are quite possibly my favourite wild animal. I haven’t seen them that many times – I recall one occasion when I was probably about 10 in fields on the Somerset Levels, another time a few years ago in a field near Minehead and the previous most recent sighting, very early one morning in the very same road that I saw my recent sighting. That one stood in the road and looked straight at me as I slowed the car so I got a really good view of it, unlike Friday’s one which was clearly in a hurry to get to wherever it was going.

Today I have driven just over 300 miles from Plymouth to Southampton and back and saw ANOTHER four foxes. Four in one day! But sadly all of today’s foxes were dead ones, littering the roads; collateral damage from the human desire to rush around at top speed all the time. Heartbreaking.

Thankful For A Fit And Strong Body

This morning I went for my longest run for ages (since 6th October to be precise) – an 11.4 mile loop down to and then along Plymouth’s waterfront before returning home via Devonport and Blockhouse Parks. It was a cold, crisp morning, only one or two degrees above freezing but I wrapped up well and the sun was out so I ended up feeling plenty warm enough. It was a good run. I was a bit worried that my left glute, which has been giving me a bit of jip for quite a while now would play up, what with the increased distance from most of my recent runs, but it was basically fine – a little sore but not to the extent that it held me up.

As I started on my way back from the waterfront, running up through Devonport towards the park I was passed by a man coming the other way on a mobility scooter. He was probably not too dissimilar in age to me, huge and clearly not at all fit, healthy or mobile. The thought that ran through my head as I ran along was how thankful I was that I have been able to run for the last (almost) five years and have a body that is now fit and strong and capable of propelling me along under my own steam for quite large distances and at a reasonably respectable pace (I guess that I could probably run further than a mobility scooter on a single charge and also faster, at least over a short distance). So this post is just to acknowledge this gratitude and to count my blessings in this respect.

What Am I Trying To Prove? (and who am I trying to prove it to?)

Last night I went out for a run with my running club. I nearly didn’t go – about 15 minutes before I was due to leave the heavens opened (again) and it became clear that the evening was going to be a wet one. But I told myself that I couldn’t keep not going to the running club every time a bit of water fell out of the sky. It was still raining by the time we got out for the run about 45 minutes later but the amount of water on the ground seemed out of all proportion to the time the rain had been falling. Much of the run was spent splashing through almost ankle deep puddles and/or trying to avoid them. The end result was that I found myself retreating into my own little space and musing about the difficulties I have been having trying to decide on my running plans for the year ahead.

Usually at this time of the year I have a pretty good idea of the focus for my running in the first part of the year. For example, last year I had set myself the target of a 50 mile ultramarathon in May and the year before I had set up a succession of races of steadily increasing distance ahead of the 32 mile Dartmoor Discovery event in June. This year I have been vacillating badly. I haven’t yet entered a major event and I haven’t been able to decide whether I am going to go proper long again. I had almost decided to start running the entire South West coast path over a period of about 5 years and, with this in mind, I had almost fixed on a set of race events in March, June and August that would cover almost 95 miles of it. But the snag has been that these events are all ones that are popular (so many races seem so much popular than they were even a couple of years ago) and so likely to book up quickly which has meant that I have been trying to make fast decisions on whether to enter them and having to think about associated transport, accommodation etc. And then there was the nasty issue that entering just these three key events was going to cost approximately £150 just for the race entries, a big hit in one go.

Anyway, back to last night’s run. As I ran I found myself wondering whether I really wanted to do any of these events, or rather whether I really wanted the hassle of deciding and committing to any of these events right now. Why couldn’t I just run a bit, enter an event when I felt like it (accepting that certain races would be full), and not feel the pressure of having to decide and plan the year’s running out in advance? And then my mind started to ask the killer questions… by entering and completing race events what was I trying to prove and who was I trying to prove it to? I don’t have an answer to these questions yet. In fact, I am not sure that I want to find answers to them. As I ran it struck me that maybe I should just not be bothered about setting myself a major running target in advance this year. Maybe I should just run, follow a general training plan designed to get me up to marathon plus distance by, say, May, and then, or along the way, see what takes my fancy. Perhaps an event that I thought would book up would have spare spaces after all. Perhaps I’d feel like doing a different event on the spur of the moment. Perhaps a real desire to do a particular race would take hold at some point. I decided none of it really mattered because, I realized, in the final analysis I have no need to prove anything to anyone.

Blockchain, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency… I haven’t got a clue

I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent individual capable of understanding complex scientific ideas but I have just read 18 pages of articles in the January edition of Scientific American about Blockchain, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency and I will freely admit that I am left wondering what on Earth it was all about. It was one of those rather odd experiences where you read and understand most of the words but don’t get a grasp of the overall meaning. For example, I now know that a blockchain is a ‘distributed ledger’ and that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that uses blockchain technology. I know that there are multiple cryptocurrencies and that Bitcoin involves people ‘mining’ to securely add new blocks of transactions to a blockchain. But I still don’t really have the foggiest idea what Bitcoin actually is and how one would go about using it (or even why really). I had hoped that the articles would give me just enough knowledge that I would understand the basics so that all of the media references to this emerging field might actually mean something to me but, alas, it seems that I still have a lot more work to do if I want to achieve this goal. Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter much. It is not as if understanding with Bitcoin is will increase the amount of wealth I have judging by the amount of cash I currently have in my pocket…

(and I’ll spending £1 of this at my Running Club tonight to pay my weekly fee!)

Back in Work

Today is my first day back in work after the Christmas/New Year break. I am allowing myself the luxury of a ‘slow’ day to ease back into things – dealing with emails that have come in over the last week and a half (thankfully not too many and nothing particularly complicated), processing a few bits and pieces that I carried over from December and getting my head around the more significant tasks that I have to do over the next two or three weeks. These include marking some reflective reviews by Final Year students (approximately 55 to do which will take the best part of two days), finalizing the set-up of my first year examination which, this year, is being delivered online, producing and circulating the final version of the School’s Workload Data Collection Form and writing six lectures to be given in the last week of January/first week of February. Put together, this is quite a substantial amount of work but, fortunately, I have a relatively clear schedule so I ought to be able to carve out some good chunks of time to tackle this work efficiently.

I was thinking this morning about how my default ‘position’ at work is to sit at my desk in front of my computer monitor and how this tends to automatically push me towards working on and thinking about email. But I have come back after the break determined to try to only look at email and also only to think about task planning at specific times. I have realized that I need to shift my default position and break the physical link between where I am at work and the tools that I have in front of me. I should try to set things up so that the space in front of me has a notebook for thinking/planning/creating, papers to read etc. and then I should move to my computer only when I need to use it. As long as it is there directly in front of me then I will look at email, shuffle tasks around and do certain types of ‘small stuff’ work as my default activity, which is not what I want. I have taken the first step and collected a new A4 hardback notebook (because above anything else I just love a new notebook) and when I have finished typing this I am going to shove a few things around on my desk space, reducing the space taken up by my computer/tech and increasing the open/free space for other types of work. Then, I suppose, I had better knuckle down to some work…

Turning Things Into THINGS

Yesterday I realised that I have what I suspect is a bad habit. When I think about doing a thing I want to do, like building a model boat, running the south-west coast path or meditating more, I immediately turn the thing into something much more complicated and involved. The thing becomes a THING. For example, I have a model of the RMS Titanic waiting to be built – it is a big model with lots of stages involving cutting and glueing and painting and to do a good job of it will take a long time. Now, instead of simply thinking that I can spend some time making the model, bit by bit, I catch myself wrestling with the idea of completing one step of the model instructions every day and taking a photograph to record my progress. The simple thing of building the model becomes the more complicated THING of building the model every day with the added visual record. Or, I have had the idea of running the entire South West coast path, which is around 630 miles, but instead of just seeing how it goes over a long period of time, I catch myself thinking of setting myself a target of completing it in 5 years, getting sponsored for charity as I go and writing a blog/website about my experience, all of which require quite a lot more planning and turn the simple (on paper) thing of running quite a lot into some kind of crazy complex public challenge complete with time pressure, accompanying subsidiary activities etc. – in other words, a big THING. And obviously, when I think about meditating more or exercising more or writing more I’m not happy just to try to do these things more, I try to convince myself that I have to do them EVERY day and track my progress.

The more I consider this, the more I think that turning things into THINGS is a really bad habit. It adds layers of complexity that means that activities then require planning and oodles of motivation which, of course, renders them less likely to happen. In fact I wonder whether this is why I think this way, as a kind of internal avoidance system which naturally puts the brakes on my initial enthusiasm and holds me back from taking action. I’ve decided this is something I will try to resist. I don’t want to be making lots of big grand plans. I don’t want to be thinking about doing THINGS. I just want to be getting on with doing things.