Category: Random stuff

For posts about anything really

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.

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!)

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.

Stealing From/Gifting To Future Me

This week I have been catching up with recent episodes of Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative Podcast. One particular episode (this one: Accidental Creative Podcast) resonated with me more than most, highlighting the idea that many of the things that we do now are either stealing from our future self or gifting something to our future self. For example, if we procrastinate now while we are supposed to be doing something else (or at least trying to do something else) then we are stealing time from our future self because the task will have to be done sometime if it is not done now. Or, if we exercise now we are gifting a stronger/fitter body to our future self. The thing that might be stolen could be time, money, energy, health etc. and the thing that might be gifted could be confidence, resilience, courage, money, time, strength etc. This is an obvious idea, but like many obvious ideas, it is really handy to have a simple and memorable way to be reminded of it.

When this idea is combined with the knowledge that the way our brains relate to our future self is much the same as the way that they relate to a complete stranger, it becomes particularly powerful and important to remember it. This means that our default tendency tends to be to take the easiest, most comfortable, most straightforward approach to the present moment. But if we do this then we run a huge risk that we will become a thief or miss out on an opportunity to give a gift. I don’t think anyone would choose to be a thief (in an ideal world at least) and I am certain that all of us like to receive gifts. So, I am now trying to catch myself as often as I can and ask myself am I stealing or am I giving? Simple.

Battling the Cracks in Time

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working my way through a huge (virtual) pile of marking – 161 pieces of first year coursework about the circulation of water into and out of the Mediterranean Sea, each one taking me approximately 15 minutes to mark (which equates to a little over 40 hours over a two week period during which all of the rest of my work also had to happen). It was a mammoth task and not one I want to repeat again next year so I will have to make sure that I re-design the work into a more manageable form. To make matters worse, I absolutely hate marking (I suspect everyone does) – it is repetitive, physically and mentally tiring, boring and often quite disheartening. It is a job where it is absolutely essential to be efficient and to stick on task.

As I was working through the pieces of work and struggling to keep on track and avoid being pulled off to do something else more interesting and enjoyable (i.e. anything else) I got a really strong sense that the secret to being successful against this challenge was to not allow tiny cracks in time to open up. The critical time was always just at the moment when I had completed marking one piece of work but just before I had started on the next one. I came to think of these moments as cracks in time.

At the end of each piece of work I had a strong physical sensation of a tiny crack in time appearing and even the slightest hesitation at that point would result in it opening ever so slightly wider, then wider, then wider still until I had tumbled in (to have got up to make a drink or check something on the internet or anything really). I had to be ready for these cracks; ready to outwit them by stepping over into the next piece of work before the crack could take hold and rip open. As soon as I had completed the final action of processing the piece I had just marked I had to be into the next one, opening up the file ready to start work on it. I found that it mattered much less if I paused a few seconds if I had already opened, and therefore ‘started’, the next piece of work than if I paused before doing so. To do the latter allowed the tiny crack to begin its expansion and immediately that had happened a huge amount of additional willpower was needed to get back on track. Although battling these cracks was obviously really a mental challenge, I cannot really put into words how physical the sensation felt, and I think for that reason the idea of cracks in time and my having to battle against their development has taken hold in my head in a wider context than just marking. I have come to realise that much of my battle to maintain the high level of productivity that I desire is the battle against allowing the cracks in time to open. Knowing this I am starting to train myself to be ready for them, to recognise their appearance at the earliest possible stage and to have in place strategies for leaping over them to leave them behind me before they become too wide.

Just get the job done

Spoiler Alert – If you haven’t watched Series 4 of Game of Thrones yet and think that your might want to, don’t read the rest of this post… [I’m not sure who I am addressing with that comment – almost no-one will ever read this anyway!]

Towards the end of the Series 4 of Game of Thrones (TV series), episode 8 to be exact, there is a classic piece of single-handed combat that nicely captures a really important lesson in life. The fight is a ‘Trial by Combat’ in which the flashy Prince Oberyn of Dorn elects to fight the ruling family’s representative, the huge, heavily armed and aptly named knight ‘The Mountain’. Oberyn has chosen to fight on behalf of the person on trial because he seeks revenge/justice against The Mountain who, previously, had raped and killed Oberyn’s sister. So, essentially, the battle is one of speed, agility and showmanship (Oberyn) versus cumbersome bulk and extreme brute force (The Mountain). Everyone watching expects The Mountain to win easily because that is what he always does, such is his size and power, but Oberyn fancies his chances because he is quick and skillful.

The battle starts and the lightly-armoured Oberyn spins and dances his way around The Mountain wielding only a long spear. It’s very flashy and showy stuff. The spear whirls and twirls through the air as Oberyn leaps under, over and around The Mountain but no particular damage is done. I can’t remember the exact sequence, but The Mountain does take the ascendancy at some point, smashing Oberyn’s spear after, I think, the latter slips or is tripped, but a replacement is immediately thrust into Oberyn’s hand. Oberyn then lands a telling blow, and another and another until The Mountain is put onto the floor, apparently in a near-death state with mortal wounds… This is where Oberyn gets things wrong. He is so bent on seeking vengeance on behalf of his sister that it isn’t enough for him to win the battle and kill her abuser, he feels the need to insist on a confession from his nearly dead adversary. He stands over him yelling at him to confess – to confess for the rape, to confess for the murder, to name the person who gave him orders to do this crimes etc. Over and over he dances over The Mountain’s prone body, screaming for him to own up to his crimes. And then [of course], suddenly, The Mountain grips Oberyn’s leg, twists him round (brute strength comes in handy even when you are practically dead) and lays him on his back. The Mountain rights himself, crouches over Oberyn and thrusts his hands into his head/eyes pushing down with the enormous force that his massive frame gives him. [At this point I began to stop paying much attention to what was happening on the screen – I am a pretty squeamish person and I could tell it wasn’t going to be pretty. Unfortunately, not only was the resulting scene visually one of the most gross things I have witnessed but, also, the popping sound as Oberyn’s skull bursts open was also pretty horrendous (shudder)]. So, despite being taken to the brink of death by Oberyn, The Mountain wins the fight.

But the thing is, Oberyn COULD have won. In fact, Oberyn SHOULD have won. All he needed to do was to take his spear and finish The Mountain off. He had the time and he had the opportunity. But oh no, these flashy types simply cannot resist the temptation to make a point, to play to the crowd or to try to finish things in style. You would think they would learn.

So the lesson here is that when you are given the opportunity to get the job done, don’t lark about, don’t show off, don’t try to make a point or get extra value/credit or anything similar, learn a lesson from Oberyn’s mistake and just get the job done.