Too many letters...

"Truth is ever to to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

Isaac Newton

After having wondered a couple of miles upstream towards the Bridge over the River Kwai (as made famouse in the David Lean film of the same name), today I find myself enjoying the cool and pleasant environs of Miss Coffee, an establishment that according to the owner has been open only for a grand total of four days. Oft times, I take a pic of the coffee shops I frequent and use them as a heading. This time the roles have been reversed. Being one of her early customers, the charming lass who runs the place took a pic of yours truly for inclusion on her website. There is something of a fondness in many Eastern cultures of making an art form of the practice of enjoying liquid libations. Such pleasant distractions seem enough to stir the loins of many a bon viveur of the oriental variety. Much time and energy is devoted to lifting the experience out of the mundane and into the extraordinary. This attitude goes back a long way. Such ancient cultures as Japan and China spent much time perfecting the art of enjoying a beverage with many writers devoting whole volumes to the preparation, presentation and consumption of such refreshments.
The past few days here have seen both an increase in, and a change in the type of heat. The local weather is now soggily sticky and stifling, which tends to suck the energy from the body unless one is extremely careful to expend one’s physical resources economically. What this does mean though, is a great excuse to spend even more time in air-conditioned cafes indulging in online flaneurial activities. Observing the World and the changes its societies and cultures are going through is the very essence of the role of a flaneur. Hopefully at least, one can apply a relatively detached and objective attitude, indeed, this is the very essence of flaneurism (hmm...I think I just invented another ‘ism’, just what the World needs right now...).
One of the changes that has, for the most part at least, been a relatively positive development in recent years has been the general acceptance, at least in most of the first World, of people’s various tastes in sexual expression. The LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) movement was much needed to address a long standing intolerance, usually based on scripture from outdated religious movements, regarding people’s sexual preferences. The reasoning seemed to be that if some wandering semitic tribe or other didn’t approve of such things a few millenia back then we should endeavour to reinforce such antedeluvian prejudices for the rest of time. Many lives were seriously affected by such attitudes, especially when they were transcribed into law. Perhaps the most influential man of the 20th century, Alan Turing (the mathematician and codebroker whose seminal work lead to the development of computers, smart phones and all the other digital paraphenalia that affects each of our lives so fundamentally today), preferred men as sexual partners . For having this relatively common trait he was offered, by the British justice system of the time, the choice of prison time or chemical castration. He chose the latter, but it seems that the changes his body went through and the concurrent depression lead to his taking his own life.

The LGB community made a valid point and their contribution to the debate led to great changes to the legal standing of such folk throughout America, Europe and the Antipodes. Unfortunately, those demanding inclusivity then started to add ever more letters to original, perfectly clear, three. It has been interesting to watch this process which seems to have gone from the short and pithy original to the frankly absurd current state of affairs. To give a couple of examples, one version now reads LGBTQIAGNC, which apparently stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and gender-non-conforming. Another, even catchier version gives us LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA. In case you haven’t guessed already, this stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, curious, asexual, pansexual, gender-non-conforming, gender-fluid, non-binary, and androgynous... obviously.
(At times, it seems to me that to make sense of such acronyms one would need the memory of an elephant and the code breaking skills of Alan Turing himself!)
Where did it all go wrong? I would suggest that occurred from the moment the letter T was appended to the the LGB. Many of those within the community understand that this was a decidedly odd step to take. Up to that point the issue being addressed was that of sexual preferences. With the addition of the T though, a medical condition (body dysmorphia - or the belief that your body is other than it is) was included as if it is somehow part of the continuum.

In all but a tiny number of cases, all human beings have either XY or XX chromosomes. These are to be found in every cell of one’s body and define, at the most basic biological level, whether one is male or female. It is not a choice. It is not something that you can change on a daily basis. It is not a matter of societal roles, or some other such nonsense. It simply is. In the case of the male for example, no amount of estrogen or genital mutilation will change the basic fact that he is still a male. No matter what chemicals he takes, no matter what he chooses to wear, or what his stated preference - to use the pithy vernacular of my youth - a bloke in a dress is still a bloke in a dress.
For some reason, pointing out this all too obvious truth outrages some people, particularly those who have been exposed to the completely bogus academic field of ‘gender studies’. Groups representing these poor souls (Transgender people have a suicide rate at around 40% - an horrifically high number that has changed not a whit despite our more ‘enlightened’ times) have successfully pushed through legislation in several states in America and nationwide in Canada that forces people to use ‘preferred pronouns’. What this basically means is that a person can now be prosecuted for calling a man a man. These folk often accuse people who point out the absurdity of this situation of being ‘transphobic’. I would counter that those who insist on such spurious notions are, in point of fact, realityphobic.
By nature, and by practice, I am a libertarian. My belief is that as long as the activity doesn’t impinge on the choices of others, then people should be free to behave however they like. If a man wants to wear a dress, stockings and high heels it is of no concern to me. He can even pretend that he is a female in his own mind, that is again essentially his own affair. Where I would draw a line however, is in the insistence that I recognise his pretense as if it were reality. I may choose to use his preferred pronoun out of good manners, or even respect, but that is my choice, not his. To pass laws that tell me that I must say something that is quite contrary to the reality I perceive seems a very strange route for the legal system to go down.
A couple of hours have passed in these musings, and with it the worst of the days humidity. It is now time once more to sally forth in the direction of the slowly setting sun. It seems I am likely to leave this part of the World in the next few days, Northward bound for Guangzhou in China. That part of the World has its own charms (along with its own annoyances!), but I will miss the town of Kanchanaburi and several of the people I have got to know better whilst I have been here. Tis an oddly enigmatic little place, the whole town only having a population of around 30,000. The part I frequent is probably only a mere couple of thousand but...it has a an enigmatic quality of its own that somehow draws me back again and again. With some reservations, I really quite enjoy Thailand, but Kanchanaburi I actually love. Not completely sure why, but probably something to do with the unpretentious but charming nature of the place and the variety of characters that it draws to its generous bosom. Many, like me, come back year after year.
Long may it continue.

Lazy days...

Today, as sticky and as hot a day as one would wish to experience, I find myself in the slightly frayed-at-the-edges, albeit relaxed, environs of the Betty Boop Bar in Kanchanaburi. The place’s air conditioning seems to have been installed by someone who failed to understand the concept as the bar opens out directly onto the street, the opening being the entire width and height of the premises. It does ‘benefit’ from a plethora of fans though, doing what fans do in these conditions. Essentially, that consists of moving hot air from one part of the bar to another, in a very similar way to fan heated oven, with roughly the same effect. Pride of place is taken by an eight foot by four foot snooker table that the locals, as well as the expats, like to play pool on. As the table is essentially built for snooker, with the much smaller pockets that come with that game, the version of pool played here is very tactical in nature, multi ball breaks being fairly exceptional. Such amenities are at least free here though, as opposed to the slot style tables that are to be found in the UK.
In these conditions it is necessary to be somewhat economic in the way that one spends one’s energy; any drastic increase in output tends to mean that one is drenched in sweat in under a minute. As someone who both enjoys exercise and feels a need to indulge in such activity, it has become necessary for me to literally get up at the crack of dawn, just after 6 a.m., in order to do an hour’s juggling, yoga and planking. A couple of times in the last two weeks, due to slightly overindulging the previous night, I failed to start exercise until 7.30 a.m. This was a drastic mistake on my part and led to some unpleasant heat exhaustion like symptoms similar to those I suffered in Chiang Mai four years back. A certain amount of common sense is required and the pragmatism to understand the beneftits of laziness in an environment such as Thailand’s.
Oddly though, the enforced laziness that the environmennt here necessitates is, for this flaneur at least, often somewhat paradoxical in nature. Despite strolling around the place at the pace of a happily stoned two-toed sloth having an easy day, and spending much time imbibing an endless variety of fruit smoothies and other such hydrating concoctions, I seem somehow to get more done than I manage back in the UK. On my last trip to SE Asia I consumed innumerable books on finance and investing, wrote several articles, read half a dozen novels and spent much time investigating the possibility of a new book, even completing in draft form the first four chapters. All this whilst zig zagging back and forth between Guangzhou, Dongguan, Hainan Island and Thailand.
Even on the present trip I find myself studying the ever elusive Mandarin (it is actually getting better now - at last!), continuing my attempts to improve the schoolboy French I have had for years, reviving this blog, consuming George Orwell novels and researching a new idea for a novel, whilst on the physical side I manage an hour’s yoga and juggling at dawn most mornings. All this on top of some very pleasant social activities, enjoying in-depth conversations with several of the interestingly philosophical souls one finds in Kanchanaburi, and socialising for several hours each evening, which seems to mostly consist of playing pool with locals and ex-pats and watching the odd football match in the bars. This is, all in all, a fair amount of activity yet feels as if it is all done at such a leisurely pace that almost everything from the juggling to the conversations, from the French to the novel, feels like an easy-going indulgence.
I remember noticing this phenomena in another blog (Busy Doing Nothing) a couple of years or so back. Oft times, those who seem to be buzzing around like the proverbial blue-assed fly, flitting at ever increasing pace from one unfinished task to another at breakneck speed whilst driving themselves into a froth-mouthed frenzy, somehow seem to manage to be both forever short of time and remarkably unproductive. As ever fooled by the superficial, we often seem to confuse activity with productivity, the appearance of busy-ness with actually getting things done. P.G Wodehouse was famous for spending each morning in his Southern French villa leisurely writing on the verandah and the rest of the day indulging in the pleasant lifestyle that that particular part of the World offers. He did this for years, but left behind a remarkably large body of work that has easily endured the test of time in the decades since.

As I finish this blog sitting beside the River Kwai and gazing out across the slow flowing waters on yet another pleasant evening, I find myself once more appreciating the benefits of slowness, of taking one’s time, of savouring the flavour of one’s very existence. Often in modern culture it feels as if we are forever chasing, faster and faster, towards some potential future. Indeed, life itself is often framed in this way, a continuous quest to prepare ourselves for a part of life that is yet to come. It is all just imagination, of course. These futures scarcely ever come to pass, and even when they do they are often not at all as we had imagined them. The reality of marrying that dream girl, of getting that yearned for promotion, of buying that house is often really rather disappointing. Rather than forever projecting ourselves into such fantasies, perhaps it would be wiser to realise that there is but one time when we are truly alive, and that time is right now, in this moment
Live it well.

Finding the Words...

"The limits of my language are the limits of my world.❞
‒Ludwig Wittgenstein

This morning I find myself working happily in the small bar at the rear of the Tara Guesthouse. It is slightly more expensive than the cafe on the main road, but is has a much quieter ambiance, more conducive to activities such as this. There is a small pool, barely wide enough to execute a single stroke, but quite pleasant on a hot day. Today though, it is overcast and remarkably cool for Thailand, the mercury barely managing to reach 28 celsius. Such days though are to be appreciated here in normally sunny Siam, much like Goldilocks’ ideal: not too hot, not too cold.
I have spent most of the morning since a juggling session at 6.30 a.m. struggling to improve my nascient Mandarin. I have made efforts, infrequent and intermittent it’s true, but efforts, to acquire this most challenging of languages for about four years now. Some urgency has been added to the task as it now seems likely that I will be back in the Centre Land (Zhong guo, so called apparently because the Chinese perceived their country as being the centre of the World) by the end of November.
Why is it that language acquisition is so difficult beyond one’s teenage years? I am not the brightest in the World, but I am not the thickest either (though, at times, I have my doubts...), but acquiring another language at this stage of life does seem to be an immensely difficult undertaking.
I have posed this question to several of my fellow travellers whilst here in Kanchanaburi, but without receiving a satisfactory response up to now. Some of them speak a second language, several are even polyglots, but none seem to have acquired much fluency in another language later in life. I did meet an American in One More Bar who seemed to speak adequate Thai after living in the country for seven years. His understanding though was limited to the spoken word, as became obvious when he tried to translate the writing on a cigarette packet. Even with the obvious context, a gory picture of impending damage if one should actually enjoy the product therein, he still found it difficult. I was impressed both by his obvious intelligence and his willingness to risk embarassment whilst seeking to improve his skills, but a little discouraged by his inability to understand the fairly simple text.
I recently spent some time in France (see blog) and was pleasantly surprised with just how much French I knew. I had told my travelling companion before we left that essentially I had no French, but when faced with the reality of seeking out some pain killers in a pharmacy it became clear that I knew far more unconsciously than I had given myself credit for. Thus emboldened (this happened on the first day of the trip) I had a lot of fun inflicting my enthusiast, if somewhat dubious, language skills on the local population. Apart from the odd ‘zut alors’, they seemed mostly encouraging!
The thing is though, somewhat depressingly, my French comes from my long lost childhood, from a time when language learning actually seemed to somehow stick. The famous psychologist and all round renaissance man, Noam Chomsky, once opined that all children are born with a Langauge Acquisition Device (LAD) embedded into their neurology. I have personally witnessed many examples when children of mixed nationalities or those who find themselves growing up in a different country to their parents homeland quickly and easily pick up the local language. Unfortunately, Chomsky also was of the opinion that this device atrophies somewhere in the latter teen years, thus making it progressively more difficult to learn another tongue as we get older.

Noam Chomsky

On the positive side, there has been a veritable explosion on the internet in recent years, particularly perhaps on Youtube, of people advocating ‘hacking’ a language. They use techniques such as focussing their attention on frequency tables (lists of the most commonly used words), flashcards, basic grammar hacks that quickly reveal how each language’s grammatical assumptions work and several other such ‘quick fix’ ideas. Sometimes though, I wonder if it is not the simple willingness to make mistakes, the sheer thick-skinnedness, of these individuals that allows them to make progress. Indeed, perhaps this is what we lose as we get older and mature from teens into young adults. As children, we are often unafraid of making a mistake, occasionally even making a fool of ourselves, but the older we get the more we tend to dread such embarassing situations. As our personalities ossify with the passing years perhaps it is that very process that makes further learning more and more difficult?
These language ‘hackers’, from Benny Lewis (the Irish Polyglot) to Tim Ferriss, tend to have one thing in common; a willingness to take a risk and to be unafraid of making mistakes, even advocating such situations as a way of learning. They are a brave and somewhat extrovert bunch, but perhaps their methods are not applicable to everyone.

After starting this week’s blog I found myself in a situation when I was forced to employ German with some fellow travellers who share the same verandah in the Smiley Frog. Again, much to my surprise, the German I had learnt as a 30 year old in pursuit of a certain young lady in the fair city of Stuttgart came readily to mind. It was by no means fluent, but I found I could understand 95% of the conversation and could contribute myself to the extent where I was readily understood. Interestingly, to learn the language I had used a very esoteric method known, at least at that time, as accelerated learning. Large parts of the sessions consisted in lying back, eyes closed, listening to baroque music from the 18th century and gradually, very gradually being fed German whislt you were in this relaxed state. Amazingly, despite the rather disconcerting conscious feeling that you were not learning at all, the stuff seemed to stick.

Perhaps this is the answer to my own conundrum. It is clear that many of our most fluid and fluent skills are completely unconscious. Indeed, when the conscious mind tries to interfere with them it is often to the detriment of performance. If you try to consciously think, for example, of how you actually perform the act of walking and then try to control it with that part of the mind, you will invariably find that it becomes much, much more difficult. The skillful execution of a golf swing, the playing of an instrument, the construction of a long and complex sentence in conversation, all these are generally done completely unconsciously and very much best left so.
With these heady thoughts in mind, I think it is time to finish imbibing this beer and consign this week’s effort to the World Wide Web. The venue has moved on to the Triple B Bar on the main drag, musicians crank out “I still haven’t find what I am looking for” which, in the circumstances, maybe quite appropriate. But maybe, just maybe, I have my first clue!

Working ourselves to death...

After a gap of about seven months, I find myself once more back in the pleasant environs of The Jolly Frog in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. Actually, to be a tad more accurate, it has now been renamed to The Smiley Frog and, to a small extent at least, revamped. It still attracts some of the same sorts of characters that made it such an interesting place to stay as before, but clearly not as many as previously. As I write these words at 10:30 on a Thursday morning in the airy restaurant of The Frog, I find myself alone but for one other guest who, in similar fashion, is tapping away at a laptop to her heart’s content.
Staff outnumber customers by a ratio of about 4:1 in the restaurant and, subjectively at least, it feels as if they do throughout the establishment. They seem, for the most part, to wander around relatively aimlessly trying to look busy but with very little useful to actually do. Thailand is, at least at times, a very hot and humid place and this seems to have lead to a kind of widely accepted, and very pragmatic, lethargy. Few people rush anywhere, apart from perhaps on the roads where one wonders if it is the widespread belief in reincarnation or a native carelessness that leads to the routinely reprehensible recklessness one sees there.
Other countries seem to have very different attitudes. I was reading recently about a phenomena that originated in Japan but seems to be spreading throughout more or less the whole of the so-called ‘developed’ World. It is known as ‘Karoshi’, basically a term used for the process of literally working oneself to death. Many workers in Japan, particularly those of the white collar variety, will quite routinely work until 10 or even 11 p.m., staying hours after their allotted time performing invariably unpaid overtime. Often they follow this with bouts of heavy drinking, a few hours sleep, and then returning to the office early the next morning.

Obviously such a lifestyle is deeply unhealthy. Many succumb to the stress and end up having breakdowns, becoming alcoholics or, all too frequently, simply dying, usually of heart attacks or strokes brought on by the extreme hours, sometimes they choose suicide. The Japanese government, after many high profile cases in the recent past, have been embarassed into legislating that the maximum amount of overtime that can be legally worked in a given month is an eye watering 100 hours. Such a high figure perhaps reflects the cultural attitude to service and work in that country. Given the societal expectations that are prevalent in Japan, one is aware that this is only a perfunctory exercise, people will continue to work in excess of even these astonomical limits.
Other countries, notably China and South Korea, are reporting more and more incidents of the same problem. The motivation is subtly different in these countries perhaps, a mixture of the notion of ‘going for it’ in order to be a ‘success’, familial piety a la Confusciu (or the idea that you should devote yourself completely to the furtherance of your family or group), and ‘face’, the notion that you should be concerned with how you are perceived by your fellows. Appearance is everything in China, you not only need to be successful but you need to be seen to be successful - hence the perceived necessity for so many wearable consumables: badges of rank denoting how successful you are and hence how high your status is. Apple as a company loves China. Their sales there are phenomenal, with Chinese customers often literally climbing over each other in order to be the first to own the latest iphone or laptop.

To some extent, Karoshi is now beginning to appear in the West as well. It is often driven by many of the same motivators, though perhaps pure consumerism plays a much greater role. Much like China, a person's worth, often even their self-worth, is dictated by the ability to afford the right products. Part of the process, in the UK at least, is the willingness is go into ever greater debt in order to ‘afford’ particularly nice cars, TVs or sofas. Whatever the motivation, the effect is much the same, with people feeling obliged to work longer and longer hours of almost invariably unpaid overtime to keep their ever increasingly demanding jobs.
One cannot help but wonder, given the damage to our planet, our personal lives, even our health that such unhealthy consumerism has brought, if is a wise way to go. Our very existence and pertinence to society seems to now be measured in how good we are at being consumers. Perhaps, finally, it is time for a paradigm shift. a shift away from being consumers to being producers, to stepping outside the economic system and becoming responsible for the basics of our own lives. A shift away from the top down model of consuming ready made goods and foods to a bottom up model wherein we take responsibility for our own lives and become producers rather than consumers.
This phenomenon can already be seen occurring in the US and, to a certain extent at least, in the UK. The realisation that the current way of being is not working and is deeply unhealthy on many levels struck many after the economic crash of 2008. Lots of people lost much of their wealth, their status, sometimes even their homes in the US in the aftermath of that crash. This lead to a questioning by many of the assumptions that consumer society is based on. Do we really need to live in such large houses? Do we need the gas guzzler? Do we need to go to supermarkets to buy plastic wrapped food soaked in salt, sugar and various chemical concoctions when we can produce good, wholesome and healthy food ourselves?

Such thinking is beginning to question some of the most fundamental assumptions that Western society has lived by for the best part of a century or more. More is always better is being challenged by those of us who appreciate minimalism; big governance and its centralised model which tends to favour industry and corporations (and itself, of course!) is now being seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution; the notion that one needs to be a ‘success’ in material terms is now perceived by many to be a form of neurosis rather than anything positive or life affirming. The times clearly are a-changing, as Bob Dylan once famously wrote.
Back here in the Smiley Frog restaurant a pleasant hour has passed and the place has become a virtual hive of very slow motion activity. A lass clad in turquoise smiles over to me as she continues to soporifically mop the tiles. The waitresses listen to a Thai talk show and studiously avoid eye contact hoping that the few customers they do have will go away. The gardener (he does a great job, even if he does it very, very slowly) wanders back and forth trying to find something that might need his attention.
As I finish the blog for another week, I find myself pondering the possibility of a trip up to Laos at the end of the month. Some Thai people apparently are of the opinion that the Loatian people are lazy. Given the soporific pace of life here, Lao laziness must be something to behold...

Au Revoir Paris...

Today, after a break during which I spent some time in the UK and some in Spain, I find myself enjoying a coffee at the almost ubiquitous Starbucks. Normally, I am not a great fan of this particular multi-national, but being in central Paris, and finding the cafes in the Avenue Champs Elysee itself wanting to charge seven euros fifty for a tiny cup of coffee, I chose to put my normal objections on hold and enjoy a long Americano in their outlet in the Arcade Champs Elysee. Truth be told, this place has a rather impressively grandiose interior, with ionic columns in marble supporting a mock vaulted roof. For me, it evokes images of the original flaneurs who would have haunted these very halls well over a century ago now.
This is my first visit to Paris for around 20 years or so. The demographic changes in that time are stark indeed. It is almost as if the centre of this once great metropolis has been all but abandoned to another culture, one that has little sympathy for, or understanding of, the history of this fantastic city.

Before arriving in Paris, the previous few days had been spent deep in the Normandy countryside in a tiny, one bedroom gite just to the west of Falaise. The contrast between rural, small town France which barely seems to have changed at all, and the capital, is huge. The borgoisie seem more discretely charming than ever in the villages, towns and smaller cities such as Caen, Falaise, Flers and Bayeaux. Life seems relatively slow, relaxed and polite in such places. Paris, however, is completely different; fast paced, frenetic, distinctly rude and often more than a little dangerous.
Much the same difference can be seen in Britain where London seems to be in the process of becoming a distant satellite of the UK in general, as are some of the other larger cities. The distance in politics, philosophy and outlook is vast and ever widening. Witness such occurrences as last year’s EU referendum – the people away from the larger urban conurbations voted emphatically for leave, those within them just as emphatically for remain.
Twenty years ago one espied the odd armed gendarme as one wandered along the boulevards of Paris. Now armed police, and even soldiers, are to be seen everywhere. Just recently, two policemen were attacked by a machete wielding fanatic on the Champs Elysee itself, not far from this very spot. Reading the BBC news today, a similar incident occurred in Brussels last night where fortunately the terrorist was promptly dispatched, though not before injuring two policemen, and a further incident was reported to have occurred just outside Buckingham Palace.
And so it goes on. Small incidents, followed by larger incidents, random sacrifices made to a random god. It speaks ill of man’s credulity that so many can still believe in the vacuous nonsense that inspired these attacks in the 21st century. For this rather liberal flaneur though, what is really unforgivable is the wish supporters of this particular superstition have to forcibly impose such a palpably illogical, unscientific and, in all honesty, ignorant view of the world on others.

The philosopher Karl Popper once pointed out the paradox of tolerance. If you extend that tolerance too far you end up tolerating the intolerant, thereby killing tolerance itself. We seem, through a mixture of pesonal, moral and political cowardice, to have gone a long way down that particular road now, each concession to the intolerant leading to the demand for yet more concessions.

Fortunately, there are still parts of Paris that retain much the same charm as ever. Strolling around Montmartre one still comes across the artists, the writers, the bon viveurs and the simply joyous, although admittedly the hordes of tourists are beginning to erode the authenticity of the place, but such is modern life. For now, at least, Montmartre’s charm still attracts enough of the creatives, the eccentrics and the downright weird to make life interesting.
It is now nearly ten p.m., and a pleasant young man has informed me that Starbucks will be closing in ten minutes. I quickly finish off my coffee and swallow the last of the customary glass of water that I like to accompany it with. I wonder if this will be my last evening in Paris. I have spent quite a few here in the past but...that was a Paris that has slithered slowly into history now. The city of the Enlightenment, of the birth of liberal democracy, of the Revolution, of Bonaparte, of Jean Paul Sartre, of Simone de Beauvoir, of Jean Jacques Rousseau, of the dadaists, of the surrealists, of Ernest Hemingway, Gertude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Josephine Baker, Anias Nin and HenryMiller, home of the flaneur, of the intellectually daring and the avant garde, the city that encapsulated the notion of joie de vivre, is all but abandoned to another culture now, a culture that cares little for joy and even less for life.

Au revoir Paris, it was good to know you...

Losing my religion...

This week I find myself enjoying the cooling pleasures of an air-conditioned café a few metres south of Victory Square in the centre of Bangkok. The temperatures rising (it isn’t surprising…) but, having learnt over the last few years the benefits of pacing oneself, I find myself feeling cool in both the physical and affective senses of the word. I have been on the road a month now, but it feels like I have barely begun. Another six months of this peculiarly peripatetic lifestyle would surely not go amiss. Sadly, after a brief sojourn to Southern China, I am due back in Blighty in a mere ten days. 
 
This particular café is much to my tastes, if not so much for its décor at least musically. I have been here ten minutes and enjoyed a nostalgic trip down memory lane to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel, Don McLean and Don Williams. Not the coolest choice of backing tracks perhaps, but much preferable to the short loop boredom of overly loud and intrusive music one usually has to suffer in Thailand and China. 
 
The first fortnight of this particular sojourn was spent in Kanchanaburi being, on one level at least, incredibly lazy. The furthest I traveled in that time was down to the local football stadium and back to watch a lethargic match between the langurous and laissez-faire practitioners representing Kanchanaburi and their downright soporific and slumbersome opponents. On another level though, it was also a time of fairly intense activity. More or less every day a considerable amount of time was spent reading, writing and generally studying economics and value investment techniques. As it seems that an increasing amount of my (reasonably) passive income comes from that source these days, it both makes sense to understand the subject in some depth and, idiosyncratically perhaps, I actually derive a degree of pleasure from researching such arcane and apparently complex subjects. 
 
Part of the process involved the investigation of certain ideas and concepts on the web. Much as the internet itself is an ever useful cornucopia of information and yet, for me at least, it also holds two dangers. The first, and one that I have been prey too far too much in the past, is the dreaded and dreadful ‘click-bait’ that one finds embedded in so many news sites. A scary thought for me would be the comprehension, if one were able to quantify such things, of just how much of one’s life has been wasted chasing one’s tail because of the temptations of these ubiquitous snippets of ‘news’. Tis designed that way of course, and annoyingly effective it is too. Being aware of the problem does help though, and I feel I have managed to remain far more focused during this trip than has been the case heretofore. 
 
The second danger is that of the obfuscation of reality due to the tendency of people to forcefully express their opinions through the internet no matter how unsupported by fact, how nebulous or how credulous they are. This is as much the case in finance as it is in politics or religion. It seems that whatever one searches for one will inevitably find support for one’s own biases or, alternatively, someone who has a diametrically opposed view and wishes to express it forcibly. Tis a wonder to me how some people are able to extract completely opposite lessons from the self-same events. Oh well, nowt so queer as folk as the old adage has it.

I recently became aware of the Israeli ‘historian’ Yuval Noah Harari and even attempted to read some of his contributions online. Scarcely, if ever, have I come across such a hugely opinionated and tendentious commentator who seemed happily capable of making utterly presumptuous and preposterous statements and then, fearlessly adding insult to injury, extrapolating exponentially on those ideas (perhaps ‘biases’ would be a more appropriate word here…) to the point where the conclusions reached were but a distant and far-removed cousin of any reality I am aware of. To his credit though he did advance one very interesting and thought provoking notion; the idea that much of human advancement has been due to the actions of people inspired by a given concept, be that concept religious, political or philosophical – to some extent no matter how ill-founded the actual concepts were/are.

Great things have throughout history been achieved by those smitten by such beliefs, even when the most cursory examination of said beliefs demonstrates them to be at best nebulous or, at worse, downright nonsense. In the case of religion one can think of Judaism, essentially a collection of tribal myths of a wondering semitic desert tribe with unpleasantly racist overtones, or Christianity, effectively a serendipitous historic accident that grew, often for political reasons, out of all relationship to its original significance, or onto Islam, surely few religions have done more damage to the very people who espouse to follow it than this particularly illogical set of unpleasant prejudices? With politics one need look no further than the extremes of either the right or the left, the republicans, the royalists, the socialists, the communists or the fascists. All these ideas, deeply flawed as each and every one of them are, have inspired great men and women in their time and led to significant changes and, sometimes, even to progress. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: many inspired by these self-same beliefs have committed and continue to commit the most heinous and inhuman acts and have felt quite justified by their ‘beliefs’ whilst doing so.

Such considerations are huge and certainly beyond the far more modest aspirations of this little blog. Suffice it to say that the internet, much like human society itself, is peopled by those who passionately express more or less every possible viewpoint … often to the point of absurdity. For this flanneur the realisation that much of this verbiage is far better disdained save for the occasional indulgence for amusements sake, tends to save an awful lot of time. Although once of more idealistic mien myself, in my callow and long-lost youth, a healthy and pointed pragmatism is all I tend to aspire to these days.

Time has moved on and time for me to move on too. It has been a very pleasant couple of hours spent meditating on these mentations in this cool and pleasant café. The Americano was good, the music pleasant, the musings interesting (to me, at least!). What more could a wandering and wondering flanneur wish for?

The Dream of Socialism....?

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Winston S. Churchill

Having spent the last two weeks in Dongguan, the need to escape the constant and very wearying airborne pollution has led me into taking a trip 70 miles South to the former British colony of Hong Kong. As I sit here in the Hebe Haven Yacht Club comfortably pondering the direction of this particular post, I find gazing thoughtfully across a quiet and pleasant harbour in one of the quieter recesses of the New Territories. This place does indeed have a very British feel to it, as one looks around it becomes immediately apparent that the majority of the guests are ex-pats though, given their ages, one would guess the majority have only come to Hong Kong in the last few years. The place feels quite swanky and the clientèle well-heeled, even if many of them seem to be wearing yachting plimsolls at the moment.
Although times are challenging generally, my impression of Hong Kong is one of long term success. Indeed, it seems that the economy here has been happily growing for at least the last fifty years or so. Way back in the early sixties, the former Crown colony was fortunate enough to have been the used as something of a petri dish for an economic experiment. It was largely overseen by one John James Cowperthwaite, a British civil servant who was given the role of Financial Director for Hong Kong in 1961. He remained in this position for the next decade during which time the colony went from being something of economic basket case to a thriving, successful and wealthy enclave within which opportunity and entrepreneurship thrived.
One may wonder exactly what it was that Cowperthwaite did in order to instigate such a miracle? Strangely, the answer to that question is better given by highlighting what he chose not to do than by illustrating any changes that he instigated. Cowperthwaite believed that for economy to succeed the most beneficial thing that a given governing authority could do was simply get out of the way. He was convinced that a positive attitude of non-intervention was the best thing a government could do to further economic growth. Famously, he even went so far as to instruct his civil servants not to collect statistics for fear that such an operation would lead to them being tempted to interfere. Essentially, this was laissez-faire capitalism at its most blatant. The subsequent success is hard to argue with.

In this view, the essential job of governance is to defend a country if necessary, ensure that basic law and order is upheld (the prevention of force being used by one citizen or group of citizens on another) and, apart from such fundamentals, interfere with the economic life of the society as little as possible.
It is interesting to compare the results with another location that was going through similarly drastic changes at the time, which also had a huge and unfriendly neighbour on its doorstep, but chose the polar opposite system to laissez-faire capitalism. Cuba, after the revolution of 1959, adopted socialism, centralism and government controlled economic policies. Today, it is clear that the experiment has not gone well. The country went from being being successful, if somewhat corrupt, economy to the current complete disaster whereby the very fabric of the infrastructure is in constant danger of complete collapse.

Personally, to admit that state interference in economics doesn’t work comes hard to me. From the time I became interested in politics as a very callow youth (my callowness was legendary) I had, up until recent times, always favoured left-wing views, sometimes despite the evidence of my own experiences. It has taken a long, long time for me to realise that my idealism is not supported by the facts.
Many, many moons ago, on one of my earliest adventures, I had visited the former Soviet Union. This was a couple of years before its eventual collapse but it was all too obvious even then that the basic standard of living was far, far below that which we were enjoying in the West. The people of the USSR also suffered constant strictures and controls as ‘the Party’ succumbed, as is so often does in socialist or communist states, to the paranoid temptation to meddle and interfere with every aspect of people’s existence.
Despite this experience, over the years my idealistic sympathies continued to be socialist but, as I looked around one’s own society and others that I experienced on various sojourns, it was becoming clearer and clearer that socialism was often the cause of economic woes rather than the cure.
Perhaps in recent times the most obvious example of this is that of Venuzuela, an oil and mineral rich country blessed with superbly arable farmlands to boot. It seemed to be an almost ideal country for a long term socialist experiment. Amidst much flag waving and sloganising, the government of Hugo Chavez was held up by the left of an exemplar of what such policies could achieve. Unfortunately, as has invariably happened time and time again, the inevitable control-freakery, the corruption, the de-motivation of the work force, and all the other evils of socialism set in. Currently Venezuela is on the edge of anarchy with daily food shortages and disintegration of even the basic structure of the society.

One fears that the lesson will be short-lived and much the same thing will happen again. As ever, it will be launched in a flurry of flag waving, drum banging and worthy idealism, but end in societal and economic collapse, despotism and violence. At some stage the realisation has to set in: socialism simply does not work.
Such lessons as Hong Kong were not lost on a certain Deng Xiao Ping, effectively the Chinese leader following the demise of Mao Tse-Tung in 1976. Deng had witnessed first hand the previous three decades of stagnation, starvation and idealistic but useless posturing and the damage it had done to China under Mao. He gazed across the border to the miracle of Hong Kong, drew the obvious conclusions, and decided to create the very first special economic zone in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in 1979. The experiment was so successful that it was rolled out across the rest of China over the next two decades and led to the freeing of countless millions of people from the grinding poverty that they had experienced previously under communism. Of course, being nominally the “Communist” Party of China, the leaders couldn’t admit the reality, so to this day we hear the endless verbiage about this experiment being a step on the road to a socialist utopia but… beyond the tiresome rhetoric, the current crop of leaders understand the underlying reality.

Back in the Hebe Haven Yacht Club, the waitress brings a fresh cup of Americano to finish off what has been a very pleasant lunch. The view is wonderful, tiny boats bobbing about the harbour with islands dotting the bay beyond, the surrounding comfortable and the spot ideal to reflect on such matters. Perhaps, as we started this week’s effort with a quote from a very influential 20^th century British politician, it would be fitting to let him have the last word too (although this particular pearl of wisdom may be apocryphal, there are many versions on the internet):
“If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a capitalist by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”

The First Green Shoots…

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu

This week, the first week of the New Year, I find myself enjoying the pleasantly clean atmosphere of the Milo Cafe. In the last week, I have popped into the Hey!!! Cyber once or twice, but such was the stink from the ever-present smokers that I have, apart from those occasions, kept to the notion of paying a little extra for some half-decent air. As far as I can tell, the smoking ban has had hardly any effect whatsoever and I have seen not a single iteration of the stricture being enforced in Dongguan. Such is China and attitudes to law here, very much a pick and choose situation, both from the point of view of the citizens and from the enforcement agencies themselves.
Having said that, the voluntary move to such swanky places as the Milo has proven pleasant. It is an oddly dark place with multiple small rooms and cubicles giving it an almost baroque ambience. The seats are deep and sumptuous, each supplied with at least one extra cushion, books line the walls and the choice of background is piano sonatas by the likes of Chopin, Bach and Mozart. All in all, a far more conducive atmosphere to settle down, ruminate and attempt to stew happily in some creative juices.
The Milo itself is one of the multiple cafés to be found on the edge of the local square. Already a pleasantly green space, it was previously just mostly an open meadow. In the last year or so though, the local government have been busily planting more and more trees. At this rate, by the time I next return it will be a veritable jungle. This is an aspect of modern China that should be both recognised and applauded. During Mao’s time the government basically completely wrecked the environment. In particular, during the ill-fated ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958-63) the government’s policy not only led to the needless deaths of millions, mostly by starvation, but to a complete decimation of forests across the land as trees were ripped up to sacrifice as fuel for the furnaces in a doomed, and rather ludicrously laughable, attempt to produce steel for construction sites. The steel thus produced was of such low quality as to be as good as useless. By the time they realised their error ,the damage to the environment and people’s assets (pots, pans, tools and utensils, basically anything metal was being smelted) was enormous.

Similarly disastrous attitudes to the environment prevailed during much of the subsequent 50 years. Much of the economic advantage that China gained in the latter part of that period was very much at the expense of massive environmental damage. From Mao, through Deng Xiao Ping and all the way up to and including Jiang Zemin, the reckless damage to China’s Eco-system was very, very low on the list of priorities. China as a country still suffers much from the catastrophes inflicted on it during those years. The rivers are still very suspect, the air filthy, industrial practices still very dubious but, after so much wanton vandalism and reckless wrecking of the environment, it has to be admitted that since Xi Jinping came to power there has been a fundamental change in attitudes.

Part of that sea change has been an attempt to plant huge numbers of trees and to reforest large areas of China. The aim is to attempt to undo at least some of the damage of the past and to end up with more than 20% of the country covered by forest. This is a noble ambition indeed, and one that looks to be on the point of success. Each year here there is a national tree planting day when thousands upon thousands of trees are planted by politicians, dignitaries, celebrities and even school children.

Another very positive development has been the encouraging of the development of electric vehicles and a government willing not only to subsidise the industry but also help the consumers make the transition. This is in complete contrast to the UK where the zeitgeist seems to have taken a completely opposite turn with the government there reducing their role both in industry and as far as subsidising the consumer is concerned. This seems, given the now parlous state of the air, particularly in London, to be about as short sighted a policy as one could imagine. A good day in a Chinese city is still far worse than a bad day in London but… the Chinese are addressing the problem with their usual energy and, bit by bit, the pollution levels are coming down. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the total opposite pertains in the UK.
One company that has made great strides in this area is BYD (Build Your Dreams). Originally a maker of batteries for mobile phones, they have branched out into auto manufacture and become World leaders, alongside the American company Tesla, in the production of electric vehicles. Tesla’s vehicles, it must be admitted, have far more cache but are also incredibly expensive. The range, perhaps the most critical problem remaining for electric vehicles, on the BYDs is now almost as good as Tesla’s but their models cost a fraction of the price. Given their access to the Chinese market, perhaps the biggest in the World for electric vehicles, it certainly is a company to look out for in the future. The famous financial wizard, the almost legendary sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, seems to think so. He has literally invested billions into this company over the last few years. Given Mr. Buffett’s incredible track record in investment over the last five decades, far be it from me to argue that this is not a very wise move indeed.

There has also been quite astounding work done in the North of the country. Nicknamed “the Great Green Wall”, the Chinese have planted a huge ecological barrier that first halted, and then reversed, the encroachment of the Gobi desert. The man-made arboreal barrier now covers more than 500,000 square kilometres. The government looks forward to a time when the forest will stretch nearly 5,000 kilometres from Xinjiang province in the West to Heilongjiang province in the East. The sheer scale of such a project is impressive indeed. In these pages I have oft criticised those in charge in Beijing, but on this particularly occasion I happily doff my cap to them and utter a sincere ‘well done!’.

Back in the Milo I ponder the implications of these matters to what now sounds like Bach. China’s cities at this moment in time are not the most pleasant places to be. This week in Dongguan there has been hardly a breath of air and with temperatures in the mid to high twenties the steady build up of air pollution has been noticeable but...over the years I have come to this part of the world the improvement is quite clear. If the reforestation goes on at its current pace and the Chinese government are successful in converting the drivers here over to the joys of electric transportation, the future could be bright indeed.