Middlebrau

Barcelona

I'm in Barcelona this week, attending a conference.  Not much time to get out and about, but always enjoy being in sight of the Mediterranean. Life is instantly different in sight of the Med.  I feel I have some kind of ancestral memory down my Italian line. 

I had lunch at the Boqueria market the other day.  Almejas (clams) a la plancha and also mixed mushrooms, both simply drizzled with some garlicky herbed olive oil and fresh sea salt. So simple, so tasty. The mushrooms full of texture and flavour.  How dare you not mop up the plate with a slice of crusty bread.

I look at dishes like this and try to dissect them.  Why wouldn't that travel?  Tried to get fresh clams in the UK?  Or competent crusty chewy bread?  Why is that so tough?  No market? No one insists on that kind of quality; that kind of freshness.  

I once had lunch in a little eatery in Wales with some Egyptian guys.  They wanted to look at the fish before they would order it.  One guy poked the fish, said it wasn't fresh and didn't order it.  That's telling 'em, though I don't think they won any friends that day.

Reflecting on: Observer Food Monthly, 13 November 2011, Saving Fitzbillies: Tim Hayward's Life-changing Year

This is really a remarkable story of today's economy.  An iconic but long-in-the-tooth institution - Fitzbillies, in Cambridge - goes into administration and is rescued out by a couple with vision and a sense that the world (or at least Cambridge) would be the worse without it. 

The article goes into the ways and means through which Tim and Al Hayward transformed their lives, giving up London and parleying his job as a food writer and her career as a 'strategy director of a big group of marketing companies' to re-open the coffee shop and plan a return to dinner service and employing 15 people, completing the turnaround in, really, just over six months.  Formidable!

I think the lesson to learn from this is that our economy is not going to fix itself without some hard work and vision.  I find it disappointing to read of youth unemployment reaching 1 million people.  Another feature - this one in the Times Sunday Magazine - highlights the difficulties that young, well educated graduates are having in finding jobs. 

I think that's the problem - they are looking for jobs, not work.  The expectation that someone out there has a job for you; that you don't have to make your own future.  That there is a cosy certainty in the compact: go to uni, (go into debt), get a job, sorted for life.  It's one of the really unnerving things about the "We are the 99 percent" Tumblr blog.  Story after story of people who feel they got a raw deal from the system, running up massive student loan debt and finding there's nothing to do out there.

I'm trying not to be facile here, and I am generally sympathetic - I appreciate these people are dead-ended and really stuck in many cases (and I loathe the US reluctance to offer decent medical care for all) - but the antidote to this is to make your own reality. Bootstrap yourself.  It's not all about pounding the pavements in search of someone else's work.  Creative people need to create; to spark new economic activity.  To offer alternatives to the concentration of ownership and control of the economy by high street chains and big corporations owned by pension funds.  Perhaps a measure of "occupy idle hands" rather than "Occupy Wall Street".

To be sure, it's a competitive economy out there.  Fitzbillies originally probably died a death at the hands of Starbucks and Costa and Caffe Nero and the like, plus shrinkage in disposable income.  But equally at fault must be a lack of a saving vision - going down with the ship because they thought the icon was too established to fail (the story about the grease trap is truly disgusting, though). 

The challenge for our economic recovery is to carve out another way forward.  I'm thinking about people writing apps, pop-up restaurants, new media publications.  Places like Stew Print Rooms in Norwich and  Norwich FarmShare .  People on the edge saying, "Fine, if there aren't any job-jobs out there, I will at least do something to make use of my talents; my passion." What are a million young kids going to do?  I think they need a sense of "fake it till you make it".  Do not approach the world with a sense of entitlement. Don't settle for bog-standard - there's enough of it already - there's no room in the economy for more of the same. 

I think government could give the economy some real incentives to create jobs.  The 'green economy' requires real dedication and high engagement - not just lip service - but it could and should be transformative. Ingenuity needs access to capital at a small scale on fair terms, and room to fail without failing catastrophically ("Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.").  Small-scale business requires a much lower level of bureaucratic oversight.  Hard work should be viewed as dignified.  People who create jobs should be rewarded with tax breaks. And with our custom!  That, at least, is a decision that requires no red tape.

90 Minutes

These past few weeks I've been suffering from insomnia and what I think is an allergy to dust or mildew or something else that's in the air with the advent of autumn - the closing of the windows and the firing up of the central heating.  The two combined to make it nearly impossible for me to sleep through the night.

I usually awaken sometime between 0300 and 0400, and I know that when I'm up at that hour it will be 90 minutes before I can fall asleep again.  It almost always happens thus.  I looked for some physiological reason for this, and it seems that typical sleep cycles last about 90 minutes, so, in effect, I am losing one of those cycles.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on sleep, you can maybe even see this phenomenon play out in the 'hypnogram' they show, where you move out of the deepest sleep and have that first waking moment.  That seems to me to be the time when I first awaken.  I imagine that as the time when my body is saying, "I've had just enough to get by."

Since I know I'm going to lose that time tossing and turning in the dark, these days I usually get up, get a cup of herbal tea and do some reading.  Might as well have something to show for it.  This morning I am reading the Economist, the Observer magazine and catching up with the saints.  November readings are nearly done, and I'm making progress in the Nemirovsky, too.

When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

Reflecting on: New York Magazine, 20 November, 2011, When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? by David Frum

I thought this was a concise and insightful analysis of what's wrong with conservative USA today, through the eyes of a life-long conservative insider and W-Bush era White House speechwriter.  One commenter on Metafilter called it David Frum "losing his political religion", which describes the piece beautifully, though Frum argues that he hasn't moved so much as the party has been hijacked out from under its former standard-bearers.

Frum just nails the current reality on so many points:

• the toxic worldview of Fox News and talk radio, painting the government as the enemy of a beseiged populace having their rights and money drained away from them
• the conservative "alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics."
• the 'reform' of campaign finance law that lets unlimited money buy attack ads on behalf of candidates, citing 'freedom of speech' as their justification
• the disaster that is the 'tea party'
• the intentional polarisation of the body politic, crossing lines and using political tactics that were, by convention, never crossed; never used - in effect, the erosion of respect for a system that had served to make America  the shining beacon on the hill, in the service of narrow interests and point-scoring.

To be sure, things aren't great in the US (or here, or on the continent, for that matter).  Projecting all the blame on the current administration is hardly realistic - and Frum points out the Bush administration's responsibility in letting things get where they were.  Obstructing the government's attempts to right a very broken economy can hardly be seen as patriotism.

I think the real disaster engendered by the Republicans today is the breakdown of compassion and commonweal envisioned by the nation's founders.  As Frum points out, policies embraced by the right under Republican presidents in the past are now vilified as somehow alien under Obama.  If it's not "our policy" it's no good, no matter what it is.  And therefore nothing any good can come of the current administration, and therefore no respect for the institutions is justified, and an all-out war to control the institutions is launched, with progress blocked along the way, irrespective of the will of the people.  The collapse of the Supercommittee looks like evidence of the same. 

It appears that the beauty contest for the Republican presidential nominee is playing into the hands of the more polished and politic players - Romney, I suppose, is the best of a bad lot - the most compromising; the most compromised.  And maybe for that reason alone the right - the tea party - find him the least palatable (or maybe it's the Mormon subtext).  Least palatable, but possibly the most electable.  And in that, perhaps a glimmer of hope for the primary season.  And if not, well, it's hard to imagine Americans at large electing any of the other nut cases, so we've got that to look forward to as well.  Myself, I'd far prefer another four years of Obama in the White House.  So I'll come out early and say that's where my sympathies lie.

Christmas Crack

I am having a bit of a session this evening on our Christmas Crack (7.0% abv).  I am proud of this beer.  We used to make our Christmas beer in the style of a Belgian brown ale, usually around 5.5% and with seasonal spicing (cardamom, coriander, orange peel, etc.). But last year we decided to do something different and brew an American-style brown ale, with the starting point of Mike (Tasty) McDole's Janet's Brown Ale published in the book "Brewing Classic Styles", but different in some important respects - we couldn't source some of the grains, we had to substitute hops and we wanted to make a bigger beer than Janet's Brown. 

Still, having never tasted this iconic American homebrew, what we have managed from words on paper and some considered substitutions is a thoroughly satisfying beer.  A beer you want to drink for a session, but an abbreviated session.  Or rather, a beer you'd be happy to drink for quality rather than quantity all night long.  That's how I felt about last year's version, and the same is true for this year. 

Decluttering

One of the difficulties of working a day job, running a family business and raising a family is that you never have time to declutter.  Small jobs accumulate and never clear and you wind up, despite living fairly simply, living under with the scourge of clutter.

Empty jars ("We'll use that for jam some day."), empty kegs ("I'll rinse them out before I shift them out to the shed."), scraps of paper ("That offer expired over two months ago!").  Old newspapers and magazines (sorry, I can't toss them without a look). 

I've been home alone this afternoon, and have made some time to start getting on top of things.  One of the consistent themes in my life this past year - get rid of stuff.  Move into the cloud.  Downshift.  Get rid of stuff I'll never use again. 

This is harder than it seems.  It can engender a trip to the tip. It can open a cascade of contingent activities... Everything you touch makes you think, "Oh, I need to deal with that before I deal with this."  I break the 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) diktat of touching things only once.  The real measure of success here is how streamlined your life is, and I confess that despite aspirations to the contrary we always seem to finish days deeper than we start them.  Well, most of the time.  Today has, thankfully, been a bit of an exception.  At least in the kitchen.

Reading in the Dark

A good day is bracketed on both ends with reading.  Our alarm goes off at 0700.  If I am up any time before that, and I usually am, that time is mine, and it's for reading. 

My first daily stops are in three seasonal readings.  Three books that have a seasonal sense to them:

The Voices of the Saints, by Bert Ghezzi, is a book with short "lives of saints" and an index that puts them on the appropriate calendar date.   Sometimes there are two or three saints on a given day. It's a useful start to the day to look at lives lived well. 

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin.  Deakin was a environmentalist, writer and film maker who lived in our neck of the woods (well, 26 miles away, as the crow flies).  The book is a collection of excerpts from his diaries over the last few years of his life, living on a rustic farm near Mellis. He died too young, at 63, in 2006.  His observations help to put a shape to the changing seasons.  This morning I came across this brief excerpt on waking pheasants:

19th November

I can lie in my warm bed upstairs and watch the pheasants waking up in their roost in the spinney at one end of my house.  The old cock pheasant roosts there - he patrols the lawn - and today it is not until 7:30 that he eventually flies down to the field to feed.  He has spent twenty minutes rousing himself out of a ball of feathers into the shape of a pheasant.  It has been a sharp frosty night, and the twigs are sugared with frost.

Somehow I don't feel so bad about crawling out of bed at 7:30 to make the kids their breakfast.

Sunday Miscellany (2006-2008) is a collection of shorter writings I found earlier this year during our holidays in Ireland.  The writings were originally presented on a long-running radio programme called, conveniently, Sunday Miscellany.  There's a seasonal sense to this collection as well, and a strong sense of Ireland.   I'm pleased to see that there is a new release from 2008-2011.  There's also a podcast, which I've never really managed to keep up with. 

I've been reading these in the season since May, so am about half-way home in all three.  And all that before 7 o'clock in the morning. Nice to have that under my belt before a day of work.

Going Back to Mac?

Reflecting on: New Yorker, 14 November 2011, The Tweaker, by Malcolm Gladwell

Interesting article about Steve Jobs's perfectionist tendencies, drawing on Gladwell's reading of the new biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Jobs as a "tweaker" - an improver of things that already work. Gladwell explores the concept of the tweaker, from the economic writings of Meisenzahl and Mokyr, looking at how such improvers were essential to the success of England during the Industrial Revolution.

Gladwell points to Jobs as more of a tweaker than an inventor or 'large-scale visionary'. Jobs's motto - "I'll know it when I see it." The semantics behind the "Think Different" ad campaign (and why not "differently"?).  Jobs as a bullying pain-in-the-butt perfectionist about everything from his clothes washer to his private jet to his oxygen monitor on his deathbed. Jobs vs Gates on come-lately Windows versus Apple's GUI, and Gates' reply: "I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." Then you see two parallel implementations of a good idea, one aiming for seamless perfection while the other aimed for good enough. 

We were talking last night about iMacs, and Christmas. And how maybe it was time for us to get one. And then I realised that what started as a tweak - the article talks of Jobs's dissatisfaction with existing mp3 players that drove Apple to develop the iPod - led us to iTunes, which led to platform standardisation that made us (okay, me) not want to rock the boat when it came to smartphones, and now how we have got so used to the Mac GUI that we're likely to go and buy an iMac for the new family computer (despite their pricetag). And we're back to where we once were, more than 20 years ago - student Mac users who went through the world of Windows at work and are coming full circle back to Macs again. And then you appreciate the vision of Jobs; the single-mindedness of it. Stick to the knitting, build the platform and they will eventually get it; they will know it when they see it. We'd better start saving our pennies...

Blogging Again

After a gap of nearly eight years, I have decided to start blogging again.  I gave up all those years ago under the sheer weight of family and professional commitments.  I still have those commitments - all of them - but I feel a bit more in control of them these days and reckon I can find a little time on the side to comment on the wider world.  So, let's see how this goes.