Mixed bag

1.      Force of habit

A mixed bag of stuff in this November blog, running a bit late. The reason for both the mixed bag and the late arrival is that I fear I am running out of things to say. It did, however, occur to me to talk about how I, and possibly you, do things in ways that are suboptimal, just because that is always the way we have done them.

Let’s give a very simple example. As I mentioned in a previous blog, first thing in the morning, Linda and I tend to watch the repeat of yesterday afternoon’s Countdown on the telly. There we are, sitting on the settee in our dressing gowns, watching bloody Countdown. Lo are the mighty fallen. But anyway, since I got hearing aids around ten years ago, I have always tended not to put them in until after I have had breakfast. So we are watching the television, and I can’t turn it up to a level at which I can hear everything that is being said without deafening Linda. So I try to work it out as best I can from a combination of lip-reading and watching the letters and numbers on the boards. At the former, I am pretty rubbish. In particular, the monologue from the guest and Susie Dent’s origins of words might as well be a distant breaking of lemonade bottles. So there is an awful lot of asking Linda what people on the box have just said. To her credit, Linda does not get angry at this.

What’s the obvious solution? Put my blasted hearing aids in before watching. Now I could argue that this would not be ideal as I might forget to take them out before having my pre-breakfast shower, and consequently banjax them, but that’s not the real reason for not wearing them. The real reason is that I have just grown into the habit of not wearing them.

And how often have I broken a cup or plate because I always put the washed and dried crockery back in the cupboard in a certain order, despite that order not making sense? When typing on the computer, if I notice an error, say, six or seven words back, I don’t click on it and correct it. I use the back space, deleting everything I have typed since the error and type the whole lot again. This illogical habit must date to the early 1980’s before we had the pointy-clicky stuff.

I seem to recall my old pal Kevin Connelly talking about this slavery to habit, noting that it is a very common feature of Samuel Beckett’s fiction. I think Kevin actually wrote, or at least planned, a parody which combined Beckett with Henning Mankell’s fictional detective, Inspector Wallander.

Some of my drinking habits were moulded in the days when the children were little, and there were fewer opportunities to go to the pub. Before the kids, Linda and I went out together. Then came a time when we started cocooning and staying in to watch a video over a bottle of wine and some nacho chips. Then the kids came along and we hardly ever went out at all. However, if I had to go an errand on my own, I would sneak into the pub on the way back and have a surreptitious pint. From this, I learned that Linda can smell beer on me across a fifty-acre field, and in any case she said she didn’t need to as I always had a silly grin on my face if I had been for a pint. The point is that this habit continued long after the kids had got older and I could go for a beer whenever I wanted. Force of habit again.

I have stopped doing this now, as in recent months I have tried to cut down on the booze. I still drink a blooming sight more than the doctor would like. But then again, nobody asked her to like it.

2.      McGuffy’s Law

My dad used to refer to McGuffy’s Law much as everyone talks of Murphy’s Law. For the most part, he meant exactly the same thing: if something can go wrong, it will go wrong (hence the broken crockery in our house due to my sticking to the same order of replacement in the cupboard). However, he also used it to mean something else: that a process that works for everyone else doesn’t work for you.

Warning: I am about to talk shop. Although retired now, I still publish the occasional scientific paper, and I still act as cancer editor for the Journal of Medical Screening. When a scientific paper is submitted to a journal, the editor will send it out to other experts in the field who will review it and hopefully spot mistakes and suggest improvements. These will then be returned to the author, who will amend the paper and submit a revised version. If the reviews are particularly damning, suggesting that the paper is irremediable, the author will be told politely to stick it up his jazz drum.

When I, with my editor’s hat on, send a paper that has been submitted to the JMS out to potential reviewers, they always say that they don’t have time to look at the paper for me. I have sometimes asked twelve potential reviewers before one consents. However, when I as an author submit a paper to a journal, the picture is totally different. The editor seems to have no trouble in finding half a dozen myopic nutters who then supply page after bloody page of closely typed obsessive babble about my paper. It really gets on my nerves. And I am sure my old man would have considered that an instance of McGuffy’s law.

3.      Nostalgia

It only recently occurred to me that this year is the fortieth anniversary of my stint working in Singapore. I was in my twenties and this was very exciting for me. I first had to spend a couple of weeks in the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, then fly from Lyon Satolas (now called Lyon St Exupéry) to Paris Orly, and subsequently from Orly to Singapore, the latter flight taking about eighteen hours. I enjoyed the flight. In those days, economy class in Singapore Airlines was pretty luxurious. In 1985, there wasn’t that much in the way of visual entertainment, but I listened to the various audio options on the little earphones, including the jazz classics channel. The material would probably be considered pretty corny nowadays, but there were two numbers which I felt had real impact, East St Louis Toodle-Oo by Duke Ellington in his sinuous jungle period, and Bix Beiderbecke’s Dixieland masterpiece, Singin’ the Blues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZnjJZLsfd0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ue9igC7flI

If I listen to either of these now, I am this young fellow back there on the plane, looking out the window as we start our descent over Peninsular Malaysia, mile after mile after mile of rain forest, and wondering what my next few months in the far east will be like.

I may tell you about the more significant events of my time in Singapore later, but for now, here is a very minor vignette from my first couple of days there. We had had a momentous monsoon storm that day, with rainfall of a ferocity I had never seen before. I was getting a taxi back to my flat. The Chinese taxi driver said, ‘Have to go long way round. Because of flooding.’

‘OK,’ I replied.

He wasn’t convinced that I had understood.

‘You know, flooding,’ he said.

‘Yes, OK,’ I answered. I wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

He was still far from persuaded that this dim-witted ang mo had got the point.

‘You know,’ he said again, ‘Plenty water.’

                                    The Singapore River in the 1980's. A vanished world.