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Hello and welcome to the Eyecatching Words podcast, your weekly aural (with an A) magazine with news, features and music from deep in the heart of the UK, as seen by a white privileged 65 year old Brit who tries not to be typical of his demographic.
As usual I will be taking a look at my personal week, dipping an anxious toe into the ice cold water that is the news of the world, and selectively looking through the batshit that modern life produces in abundance.
The three feature articles this week are: Is it okay to be happy in sad times?; a review of the novel Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov;
And finally the “dancing in the kitchen” playout this week is Waterfall by The Stone Roses.
So let’s kick off with a look back at my week.
Week two of a shitty head cold severely limited my movements. I spent a lot of time sitting on a settee with a box of tissues, which is not nearly as risqué or enjoyable as it sounds. But it did incentivise me to research the history of the common cold, which is actually fascinating and led me to re-assess my assumptions and expectations of my own health over the course of the year. The first is that it is apparently normal to get three colds a year, double that or more for children. Given that the average duration of a cold is around ten days that means you can wipe out a whole month of your life every year to coughing and spluttering. Severity is an issue of course, with colds ranging from mild to severe. But don’t believe those annoying people who claim never to get colds, my theory is that they simply just get mild versions and motor through them. These are the people who end up in senior roles in organisations and moan about their staff going off sick all the time. It’s really a lottery and proves yet again that it is the most resilient not the smartest who often get on in life.
What really got me was that the symptoms – the coughing, the runny nose, the feeling tired – are nearly all due to your body’s immune system strutting its stuff and not the actual virus itself. Your cold virus doesn’t make you snotty, you do. Hey I’m under attack. Quick guys, make lots of snot! Cough the bastard out! I don’t really understand all this stuff personally. Feels sub optimal to make yourself feel shit as a means of self defence, but then the human body is a complicated thing. Terry Pratchett nailed it for me:
The Four Horsemen whose Ride presages the end of the world are known to be Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But even less significant events have their own Horsemen. For example, the Four Horsemen of the Common Cold are Sniffles, Feeling Chesty, Runny Nostrils and Lack of Tissues.
As a result of the cold I spent a lot of time in front of the TV and reading books. I can heartily recommend Time Shelter, a novel translated from the Bulgarian, which is reviewed in the Features section. TV watching was lightweight. Like many other people I watched out of curiosity to see David Tennant’s return to Doctor Who, even though I have not been a regular viewer of the programme since the days of Matt Smith who jumped Tardis ten years ago. The second of the three episodes was trippy and very good, a genuine mind bender. The last had a genuinely disturbing role for Neil Patrick Harris, and some scary scenes of dolls coming to life. As usual it was implausible, impossible, and good fun, but the final episode did make a less than subtle but very accurate point. In a social media world where everyone is utterly convinced that their opinion is right, conflict is inevitable and humility is at a premium.
Turning to the world at large, the news from Israel and Gaza continues to be unabatedly horrifying. I can’t think of anything new to say on the topic so have tried to read between the lines and imagine what is going on in the minds of the two protagonists. This is difficult because Netanyahu is a well known autocrat with his own bomb shelter mentality whereas the Hamas leadership is dissipated and shadowy. Trying to get inside their heads feels almost impossible, but this makes me realise that it is also difficult for other world leaders to come up with a coherent response. Biden puts pressure on Israel but also defends it to the point of vetoing a ceasefire resolution at the UN. What kind of subtle mind games are being played on a daily basis between Washington and Jerusalem is anybody’s guess but we can assume that winning the war of opinion at home is as big a consideration as doing the right thing abroad for both,
I would never have predicted that two years on the Ukraine war would still be going on and similarly I really don’t think anyone has much of an idea where we will be with Israel and Gaza by the end of 2025.
The other big news story is Rwanda. Or rather Rwandan immigration policy as an excuse for the tory party to very publicly rip itself to shreds in front of the British people again. Marina Hyde in the Guardian hinted that the tories have become addicted to playing out their divisions in public and are nostalgic for the three years after Brexit when the adrenalin was surging and they could enjoy scrapping like people in Newcastle after pub closing time on a Saturday:
At time of writing, I have no idea how Tuesday night’s vote will turn out – other than the absolute cast-iron, copper-bottomed conviction that whichever way it goes, it won’t be the end of the matter for the messiest messes out there. In the run-up to the big day, Sunak was at pains to stress that the Rwanda bill wouldn’t amount to a confidence vote in him. Ironically, even that doesn’t feel like a statement we can have confidence in. There are people – including a cabinet minister, according to a BBC report on Tuesday morning – who are now predicting (off the record) that, whatever happens with the bill, there’s absolutely no way that Sunak can butch it out to whenever in late 2024 he had set his heart on as the perfect general election date.
There are unbelievably no fewer than five factions of right wing splinter groups in nTory Westminster amounting to around a hundred or so MPs. They have, laughably, become known as the five families – just like the five mafia families in the novel The Godfather. That tells you everything you need to know about the tories continued fitness to govern.
If the tory battle over Rwanda wasn’t batshit enough, in the batshit world of science one thing stood out a mile for me which is that scientists have invented transparent wood. Yes you heard me right. See through wood. Apparently thirty years ago a man called Siegried Frink had a desire to look at wood cells without disturbing them so worked out how to bleach out their pigments. This little gem of knowledge was reported in a very specialist teutonic journal and sank without trace. God knows why. You’d think someone in Germany might have got excited at this, particularly with their long history of building log cabins in places like Saxony. The possibilities are endless. I mean, just think of people who are interested in dogging. They wouldn’t even have to go out doors to do it.
Anyway fast forward to the present day and someone uncovered this discovery and it is now being worked on feverishly by scientists as far apart as Sweden and Shanghai. This was reported in the journal knowable last July as follows:
Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested, and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin’s color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains. This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does — a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets,with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls, renders the wood transparent.
Actually it only works with thin sections of wood, but there is a serious possibility of us ending up with transparent wooden windows instead of glass, and they could be used for smartphone screens without them smashing. Because transparent wood does’t lose heat like glass it could make our buildings much more energy efficient. So if you are ever feeling glum just think about transparent wood. It is such a batshit mad idea that it makes you hope that anything is possible in this crazy world.
FEATURES
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
I don’t claim to be clever or well read enough to be able to comment on this book critically, but then the whole point of these podcasts is that I am not an expert. If books were only written for the advanced reader then it would be a small sad world. But Time Shelter, which won the Booker International prize in 2023, is neither pretentious nor obscure. Gospodinov does demand your full attention, in the same way that the great Italian writer Italo Calvino does. There are a lot of historical and philosophical references, many of which I understood, some of which I didn’t. But the book’s central thesis, beautifully illustrated, is that there is no such thing as objective time: it is a holographic phenomenon that we all see differently depending on our viewpoint, and in the end it consumes us both as individuals and as societies. It is mythic and unreliable, ultimately unfathomable, and we survive it only as long as we do by refusing to accept it. We all create our own timescapes and inhabit them as comfortably as we can, through denial and the rewriting of history.
The book centres on the relationship between two men – who may actually be only one man operating in different time zones – who create clinics or “time shelters” where people can go as they become old and confused and want to create a version of their past that they can inhabit. Over time these become popular with people who are not suffering from dementia and simply want to occupy a nostalgic space from their own past. The book then enters into realms of the intentionally absurd as whole countries decide they want to live in the past and referendums are held to decide which past that is. Different European countries opt for different decades dependent on their shared view of history, a kind of temporal Brexit. Of course, like Brexit it all goes horribly wrong. There are no idealised pasts, and factions emerge and conflicts begin between and within countries. Popular re-enactments of historical events become actual events in their own right, and lead to the present becoming a new and genuine nightmare. The whole of Europe turns into a form of Westworld, a dystopian collection of nation states with people scuttling to move between them before the nightmares become fixed and they are forced to live in a nationalistic past dictated by a slender majority of its citizens.
But at the heart of it is the narrator who brings us back to his own memories and his own subjective view. History is personal, governed by sensations. You are reminded that some of your strongest experiences are bought to life not by history books but by smells, sounds or colours, or even everyday objects that transport you to another time, another place.
Gospodinov is a Bulgarian and the post war history of that country and its time as a communist era nation strongly influence his writing. There are no assumptions or value judgements. People are as likely to be nostalgic for the communist era as they are by the events surrounding its demise, or the time since the fall of the Berlin Wall which has moved through phases of optimism and disenchantment. Other people in other countries feel nostalgia for fascism, whether they experienced it directly or not. The book lays down a challenge to the reader: just how rational are you when it comes to the past? Are you not scared of all the uncertainty of modern life? Don’t you yearn for an imperfect past over a painful present and a terrifying future? And just how reliable are your memories and how can you expect them to return to you as you get older and nearer to death?
Being happy in sad times
First off an apology. What follows is a ramble, for two reasons. Firstly this is a big subject and I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in exploring it at all. And secondly, I’m just as confused as everyone else, so if you have any thoughts send them in to me. Fact is all times are sad times in a connected world, and the more connected we are the sadder it seems, as we share the trauma of wars, disasters, and political instability through our daily television consumption and through social media. And in this world sadness and guilt go hand in hand.
I have had a lot of conversations recently with people about how the world feels heavier than ever, and in the last episode of this podcast I reflected on the fact that Generation Z, those born since 1996 and who do not know a world without social media, have notoriously poor mental health. Fact is, happiness is part of our mental health system. If we don’t have a degree of it in our lives we will not only suffer but we will be less resilient.
I don’t often quote the bible but Ecclesiastes got it right for me.
The difference between when those were written however and our lives today is the sheer speed with which we live and how we can feel so many of those things not in a month but in a single day. And the world of social media has an implicit “you should” behind every line. You should feel happy. You should feel sad. You should be creative. You should sit still. Our lives, our daily lives, are full of implied You Should statements that result in us feeling that we have lost control of our ability to feel for ourselves.
It is impossible and undesirable to avoid feeling happy during sad times. It is impossible to avoid guilt about the fact that some people that have less than we do or are suffering more than we are. It is particularly important that children grow up understanding the possibility of happiness, because the impact on mental health, as Generation Z knows only too well, can be deep and painful.
I’m not a philosopher, an ethicist or a religious person. But it does seem to me that we need some simple rules for living in a world full of crap. The first is not to live in denial or to be dismissive of what is going on in the world but to try and emotionally connect with it. I remember my elderly mother crying down the phone to me at the time of the first Gulf war when she saw all the bodies of Iraqi soldiers by the side of the road. “I don’t care who they are, they’re all some mother’s son” she said through her tears. The second rule must be to articulate and discuss what is going on with others. Managing right from wrong is not a job for the individual. Understandings need to be shared and assumptions challenged. The third rule must be one of humility particularly in the use of social media. We need to frame our views in a way that leaves them open to discourse and does not shut down the discussion. The fourth rule must be to have a way of acknowledging that a day in any of our lives is made up of many elements, some of them dull, some of them sad, some of them thoughtful, some of them happy. And you can program the happy bits in, particularly if you keep them simple. The chance to sit down with a hot drink in winter with a favourite magazine. The chance to talk to a friend. Playing with your cat. Every day should have some happiness in it. And the fifth rule is to do something if you can. Educate yourself. Make a donation. Join a cause. Take part in something positive. Go on a demo. Write to your MP. The right to happiness is part of a bigger life well lived. And going back to my earlier book review keep your feelings here in the day you are living not in some idealised past. It is very easy to convince yourself, falsely, that you were happy at some past time. Whether you were or not is not really relevant to your ability to be happy today or in the future.
The bottom line is to ask yourself whether you would want your family and friends to be disproportionately unhappy when you are going through bad times. If there is one thing that makes me unhappy it is knowing that other people are worried about me. I love them to ask how I am and I value it when they are able to help me, within reason. But I would never want other people to be unhappy on my account.
The Ghost of Christmas Past 1970s style
The 1970s were the decade when my life changed completely. On the 1st January 1970 I was twelve years old, often unhappy and confused, and on the cusp of my torturous teenage years. By contrast New Year’s eve 1979 saw me in my last year at Uni, deeply immersed in the vices of my age such as soft drugs and alcohol, and ready to take on a new decade with gusto.
The Christmases of that decade were undoubtedly tacky. Mushroom vol-au-vents really were a thing. We actually believed that cheesy balls were a taste sensation. TV was finally in rather too vivid colour not black and white. And of course some of the most iconic Christmas music was devised in the 70s.
I started the 70s wanting airfix kits and feeling genuinely pleased that I was allowed a small glass of Stone’s ginger wine, and I ended it coming downstairs at my sister’s house on Christmas Day with a hangover and no interest in presents at all. In the intervening years I started asking for clothes and books although my mother’s choices sometimes baffled me. I was presented with a volume called Lectures in High Energy Physics on the grounds that that was the kind of book that would be useful to an undergraduate. The fact that I was studying social sciences didn’t seem important to her.
Christmas TV was a big part of the festive season. Remember, in the UK at that time we only had three channels and they were definitely not 24/7 experiences. So being selective and planning your viewing – and to some extent your listening – was critical particularly if arguments were to be avoided as the TV stations seemed to delight in scheduling clashes that could not be resolved by Video Recorders in most households.
When I went shopping recently I was astonished to find that the Christmas edition of the Radio Times was now £5.50. This was in many ways the most important purchase of the entire festive season. But I will not go down that rabbit hole of reminiscence except to note that watching TV was a very strange business. It was sociable in the sense that you tended to all sit together and watch the same thing. It was antisocial in that people didn’t really talk but just ate and drank all the way through. Scheduling a loo break or a kettle break was a deadly serious affair and a moment when everyone went scrambling in different directions according to their needs.
Take this quick review of Christmas Eve TV 1977. The day kicked off at nine am with the contemporary animation Bagpuss but this was then followed by a 1950s serialisation of Flash Gordon. At 9.30 there was a seasonal edition of Top of the Pops presented by Noel Edmonds featuring The Wurzels (god help us) and Abba. This then led into GI Blues with Elvis Presley and White Christmas, interspersed with a Soviet gymnasts display. WTF as they say.
Dick Emery, Starsky and Hutch and Andre Previn took us through to midnight mass from Buckfast Abbey in Devon but if you were younger or more radical you would opt for The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC 2 followed by the movie MASH which had a degree of post watershed nudity in it.
During the 1970s pub opening hours were still restricted so this too was a factor. Pubs either closed at 10.30pm or 11pm depending on where you lived. It was a fact that they often filled up and / or emptied around the television schedules.
By the end of the 70s punk was a thing, the 1980s with lots of new TV stations was within reach, and we would end that decade with personal computers and games consoles and VHS recorders in every home. But let’s be honest, it’s difficult to feel nostalgia about those years. I certainly wouldn’t grab a lift in the Tardis to the decade that taste forgot if David Tennant gave me the choice. But there is one thing I cherish from those years and that is cheese and pineapple on a stick. A genius party food if ever there was one.
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