I have highlighted a remarkable number of passages in this book and it still feels like it glanced off the surface, like some wayward missile with too low a trajectory and too much speed. With Hitchens at his best they rush at you with tremendous velocity and force.

At other times, in other essays, I simply can’t parse Hitchens. I don’t have the classics background or the deep knowledge of the literature to cope. Letters to a Young Contrarian° is accessible and because of the nature of the book it is a generous seam to mine for Hitchens quotations. It’s a book, and they are increasingly rare, in my ‘read again’ pile.

Here are my selected quotes:

“There were many who retained the unfashionable hope of changing the world for the better and (which is not quite the same thing) of living a life that would be, as far as possible, self-determined.”

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

“The term “intellectual” was originally coined by those in France who believed in the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. They thought that they were defending an organic, harmonious and ordered society against nihilism, and they deployed this contemptuous word against those they regarded as the diseased, the introspective, the disloyal and the unsound.”

“It may be that you, my dear X, recognise something of yourself in these instances; a disposition to resistance, however slight, against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion, or a thrill of recognition when you encounter some well-wrought phrase from a free intelligence.”

“To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.”

“You must feel not that you want to but that you have to. It’s worth emphasising, too, because there is a relationship, inexact to be sure but a relationship, between this desire or need and the ambition to rely upon internal exile, or dissent; the decision to live at a slight acute angle to society.”

“This would be idiocy in its pejorative sense; the Athenians originally employed the term more lightly, defining as idiotis any man who was blandly indifferent to public affairs.” “

“On Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words: “The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.”

“George Orwell said that the prime responsibility lay in being able to tell people what they did not wish to hear.”

“Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.”

“Oriental religions, with their emphasis on Nirvana and fatalism, are repackaged for Westerners as therapy, and platitudes or tautologies masquerade as wisdom.”

“Pyotr Kropotkin might have been rather a rarefied anarchist but he had a point when he said that if only one man has the truth, that’s enough.”

“Our standard for these things is subject to its own Gresham’s Law:° not only does it recognise the bogus but it overlooks and excludes the genuine.”

“The fish rots from the head in such matters”

“This depressing discovery need not blind us to the true moral, which is that everybody can do something, and that the role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints.”

“the human race may be inherently individualistic and even narcissistic but in the mass it is quite easy to control.”

“The socialist movement enabled universal suffrage, the imposition of limits upon exploitation, and the independence of colonial and subject populations. Where it succeeded, one can be proud of it.”

“Fatalism and piety were the least of it; this was cynicism allied to utilitarianism. Don’t let yourself forget it, but try and profit also from the hard experience of those who contested the old conditions and, in a word or phrase, don’t allow your thinking to be done for you by any party or faction, however high-minded.”

“The crucial distinction between systems, he said, was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, think that the citizen could—or should—be “the property of the state.””

“Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics (“our sensibilities are engaged . . .”) Always ask who this “we” is; as often as not it’s an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.”

“Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.”

“In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.”

“Irony, says Czeslaw Milosz in his poem Not This Way, is “the glory of slaves”: the sharp aside and the witty nuance are the consolation of the losers and are the one thing that pomp and power can do nothing about.”

“There are times when one wants to hold society’s feet to the fire, and to force a confrontation, and to avoid the blandishments of those who always call upon everyone to “lighten up” and change the subject.”

“Dante was a sectarian and a mystic but he was right to reserve one of the fieriest corners of his inferno for those who, in a time of moral crisis, try to stay neutral.”

“However, you should get and read Joe Sacco’s cartoon-history Safe Area Goražde°, to which I was honored to contribute an introduction.”

“The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism.”

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.”

“Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

“Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

The advert on the back of Private Eye this week features a watch from the company, Christopher Ward. The watch is the C65 Anthropocene and it comes in at £995 in its cheapest version.° Apparently: “Inspired by the Scottish Opera’s ‘Anthropocene’, this 300-piece limited edition integrates the production’s icy wilderness setting into its very design.” Well, let me speak plainly: what a load of absolute bollocks. For a start, and this is mostly an aside, this is the kind of pretentious imagery that makes me want to gouge out my own eyes.

But it’s worse than fluffy PR hype. Let’s be clear, high-end luxury watches are about blatant consumption and excess. Ironically, Christopher Ward’s thrust is that they are, in fact, affordable when compared with the ultra-oligarchal end of the market. It’s a marker of how far we’ve distorted consumption when spending £1000 on a watch is positioned as reasonable. The main headline for the advert is Product of the environment. Yes, like everything is of course, and that’s rather the point isn’t it? We wouldn’t be in the Anthropocene if we hadn’t pursued our boundless ambition to produce from the natural resources we have at our disposal.

Apparently 5% of the price will go to conservation charities and this virtue-signalling is currently commonplace in the premium watch market.° We should call it out for what it is: cynical marketing that flags the rank hypocrisy of manufacturers. I don’t qualify as an environmentalist, I understand that there are many changes I still need to make to my life to help with sustainability, and doubtless there are many luxury goods I have that I could forego. However, I’m still sufficiently grounded in reality to recognise that conflating expensive watches with environmentalism is vomit-inducing fakery and naked deceit.

One of my basic beliefs about email is that the key to success is to be online for the minimum possible time. You treat it the same as a physical mailbox. You wouldn’t stand beside your letterbox doing the work that was received in the letters. You have to treat it as a collection point. Get in, get out. Do the work. Go back later. Preferably just once or twice a day. You are still communicating fast compared to the old snail mail but you can achieve some balance with competing demands on your time.

The most heinous email crime one can commit is to work out of one’s inbox when it’s still hitched to the open streams of the internet. This approach drives my views on the apps I use to manage my email. The ability to work offline is essential and makes browser-based email a bit of a loser. It was just three weeks ago when I was bemoaning° this missing feature and I’ve just discovered a rather wonderful email app for Mac, MailMate.° It also has a lightning fast structure and even allowing for some initial set up it is going to save me a lot of time.

Just to reiterate: you can’t take care of the work that comes into your inbox if you are forever pausing to look at the next email as it pings. As well as the evidence around the cognitive impact, it’s a psychological torture device. A bit like working in certain branches of medicine, say emergency medicine, where the work never stops flowing in. You never get to the end of the work, the doors never close, but at least you do get to the end of your shift. With email people don’t even have a virtual clocking off time. They just plough on, wondering why they are so stressed.

Back to MailMate. It has a spartan appearance and you have to write your replies in plain text and Markdown - though the app handles HTML incredibly well and styles the outgoing emails as needed. I realise this will scare some people off but it is straightforward. The developer also makes a compelling case.° And, really, how many emails do you send with anything more than very occasional smear of italics or bold? MailMate does only work for IMAP so if you are locked into the Microsoft Exchange structure then it won’t help. My university email sits within that dreary walled garden but I do have other accounts where I have some more freedom.

MailMate allows you to toggle individual accounts and I have also discovered, and this is wonderfully helpful, that when the email account is offline, you can still send email. MailMate doesn’t block access to the SMTP server and you can still send out. This is completely fantastic. It’s always been a problem that when you collect the email you have to turn it back on again to send - more emails trickle in and, inevitably, you are back on the email dreadmill. I’ve tried to hack all kinds of solutions for this and MailMate just bakes it in.

I made a couple of tweaks to how it works for me. There are good instructions at the site but there’s a potted summary in the next two sub-headings.

Turn on your app in an offline state

If you turn Outlook to offline and close it then it will, when re-opened, still be offline. No problem there. It does mean you have to remember to do it each time - and I have conditioned myself to make it a habit. MailMate also allows you to tweak the preferences to ensure it always starts offline. I highly recommend this. If you have to grab a file or check the wording of an email for another piece of work you don’t get subjected to your inbox again if you left the app with it still online. It does involve a little bit of work in MailMate and you’ll have to go into the Terminal but it’s simply a matter of cutting and pasting a single line of code to change the default. Restart MailMate once you’ve done it. Easy. Here’s the code to type into the Terminal:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmInitialOfflineStateEnabled -bool YES

How to add a global shortcut key that toggles all accounts online and offline

This is the keybindings functionality that MailMate makes it easy to access. Go to the MailMate app in the Finder and right click. Open Package Contents. Then go to Contents/Resources/KeyBindings. I duplicated the Gmail plist file and called it Gmailextra. I then added this line of code under the ‘Only in MailMate’ section of the file:

"~@o" = "toggleOnlineStateOfAllAccounts:";

That now means that Option-Command-o will toggle the online state of all the accounts. Then, you simply type Gmailextra into the Preferences panel in the app:

And, that’s it. The app is now automatically offline when you open it. You can use Option-Command-o to turn everything off and as soon as you have them downloaded then flip to offline again with the same keyboard shortcut. Rinse and repeat.

Happy days.

06 Dec 2019 EDIT: I just updated my MailMate to the new version. The plist file with my Gmailextra settings disappeared in the update so my keyboard shortcut to toggle all accounts on/off was broken. I added it again, as per my own instructions, and all is well.

There is not much doubt that click bait book titles are in vogue. They tend to be provocative, Buzzfeed inspired, and just like standard click bait they don’t necessarily reflect the content of the actual book. My most recommended book this month is James O’Brien’s How to Be Right… in a world gone wrong.° O’Brien is a radio chat show host on LBC° and he’s very left wing. Unusual in the world of ‘shock jocks’. His book is brilliant at walking through the arguments people use to ram home their points around race, migration, Islamophobia, feminism and, of course, Brexit. He carefully and comprehensively demolishes them and shows us how to do it too. His techniques will, naturally, work for any political position and he is incredibly ineffective at pushing people further to justify their position. In all the examples in the book they quickly fall apart. It is compelling.

He uses transcripts (or recollections of them) in the book and it works brilliantly in audiobook form. I have a slight fear of authors reading their own work. Audiobook narration is not easy and butchering it can destroy the experience. This is one where I’m happy to report the opposite. I can’t imagine this book working without O’Brien’s voice as he narrates his work and recreates the debates with the angry callers. I’m still not that keen on the title. It isn’t really about being right in the sense of besting someone. It could be argued it is about being ‘right’ in the sense of ensuring one’s arguments are robust, coherent and consistent with one’s experience and the evidence available. O’Brien excels in deconstructing opinions that can’t meet these criteria. (It is possible my enjoyment of this book is a form of bias as well - O’Brien’s views are a very close fit with my own.) I’ll be listening again in the near future.

If you want to move a little further away from Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg then you may wish to consider giving up WhatsApp. It was acquired by the Big F in 2014 and they paid a cool US$19 billion.

The best alternative I have found is Signal app.° It is an open source project that is supported by grants and by donations. There is no profit motive and it’s there to support the users. It works beautifully on my old iPhone, has an Android app, and the desktop app works well too. It was one of WhatsApp founders, Brian Acton, who set up the Signal Foundation and developed Signal after he left WhatsApp in 2017. In fact, it’s the end-to-end encryption technology of Signal that provides the privacy backbone in WhatsApp.

I don’t feel that concerns about my privacy are that great. I don’t have any concerns that the government is going to hack me. And, as Signal makes clear, WhatsApp is very secure - though it does attract more hackers’ attention than other platforms. I just think Facebook’s completely dominance of this market is damaging. Facebook is, in this article from Wired°, “a monopsonist of media attention”. I’m hoping Elizabeth Warren gets her wish and breaks up Facebook. Meantime, I’m just doing my bit to break out of the Facebook stranglehold and Signal makes it an easy decision.

There is just one story that is getting bandied around in GP circles this week. It’s the Kent Local Medical Committee (LMC) motion,° debated at the national meeting, that home visits should be removed from core contract work.

Now, I’ve little sympathy for the heart-tugging nostalgic view of general practice that is peddled by dewy-eyed traditionalists. But, really, what on earth were they thinking? It takes about 30 seconds to spot the flaws in this suggestion. It fragments care, disrupts continuity, and it wages its effect on the most vulnerable people in society. It throws the housebound, disabled, and terminally ill under the bus. Did we learn nothing from the 2004 contract when we gave up out of hours care? The splintering of primary care into separate pockets damages services and will always have a disproportionate impact on the most needy.

I’m all for radical thinking and I appreciate that GPs are hard-pressed but this is so desperate I wonder if it is incredibly Machiavellian. Bear with me, I’m trying to be charitable. Maybe it’s actually a clever way of highlighting how parlous the situation is, that GPs would even countenance such a policy. It might yet have that effect, and things are undeniably hard, but this doesn’t seem conspiratorial. It has cock-up written all over it.

Audiobooks are big business. I’ve been listening to a lot of them this year and the combination of my regular driving commute and running means I get through them quickly. I’ve developed my own system for taking notes when reading and it’s an important part of my reading process. I’ll detail that another time but here’s my immediate problem: how do you capture notes and thoughts when listening to an audiobook?

It’s straightforward if you are sitting down and listening as you can keep a notebook handy. However, one of the attractions of audiobooks is that they are consumed while you are doing other things. Usually I’m driving but I have started listening when out for a walk or sometimes a run.

So, I’ve been mulling over the possibilities.

Just use your usual system

Stop what you are doing and make a note using your preferred medium. Not very handy when engaged in some activity but I do fall back on this when I can.

Dictating notes

It’s an audio medium so using audio to record notes has some logic. There are some options here. You can use the phone that is playing the audiobook to record a voice memo. It may involve hitting some buttons if you don’t have a plan. I’ve never been happy to try this when driving as any fiddling with buttons is almost certainly not legal and definitely unsafe. It can be done without a massive fuss when out walking although it is disruptive when running.

So a no-hands system is needed. I have tried keeping a dictaphone in the car and I have found it quite straightforward to use for the occasional quick note. It does involve fiddling with a device (so isn’t really no-hands), though with mine I can do this without even looking at it. Being safe is clearly the priority. For complete hands-free safety then Siri (or equivalent) could be the way forward. It is possible to set up Siri to open an app like Bear and one can just dictate directly into that. (Although I have discovered that when CarPlay is enabled then Siri won’t allow it.) Alternatively, it is even easier to get Siri to open a voice memo and speak your thoughts. I use the voice memo option as I think it reduces any temptation to look at the screen. The voice memo is also super-easy if you are out walking or running with headphones that have a microphone.

Make a bookmark

It is possible in some audiobook apps, and the Audible one does this, to press a button and make a bookmark. I use the Bound app for iOS° for DRM-free audiobooks as it has a bookmark function. This is just the digital audio equivalent of turning over the corner of a page and you have to come back later and re-listen to the section and take any notes. This is quick and easy but I have found that I’ve been rubbish at going back and re-listening.

None of these are hugely easy and they often risk additional distractions. As well as the obvious safety concerns I also find it jolts me out of my reverie - both from the book and the activity. More and more I’m not worrying about notes and treating audiobooks as a different experience to reading. I’m not trying to replicate the note taking. If that truly bugs you then you could stick to books that might not need any notes or just let them wash over you. Fiction is the obvious example where you’re less likely to want to take notes. I realise this is unsatisfactory but if I genuinely have an insight while listening to an audiobook then I’m finding it sticks with me long enough to get captured later.

What is it about the verb “to die” and the word “death”? In recent weeks and months I find myself more and more distracted by the inability of our journalists, politicians, or anyone on the media, to state plainly that someone has died. They have, more often than not, ‘passed away’. I heard a DJ on Radio 2 do it earlier in the week and, this evening, I even heard the newsreader on BBC 5 Live refer to a ‘passing’ to avoid using the word, death.

We are tiptoeing around death. There seems to be a self-imposed ban, a moratorium, if you will, on the D-words. I don’t want to over-play it but is it related to our increasing need to cure every ill, our inability to tolerate any ailment? We can’t face our own mortality in an age of individualism. Death is a dirty word. I spent part of the afternoon re-reading a Belgian paper, which will be published this coming week in BJGP Open, that extends the debate around euthanasia and dementia. Belgium and the Netherlands are two countries who have already enacted legislation. Yet, how can we possibly have a sensible conversation in the UK about death and one’s right to choose, to exercise control, if we’re unable to even speak its name?

Wilf Taylor’s Passage, Lancaster Hole

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who is attributed with the quote: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” She was a political figure in her own right and most prominently was First Lady of the United States for over 12 years until April 1945.

It wasn’t difficult to come up with my one thing today.

I got invited along on a caving trip to the Ease Gill Caverns. The strange thing about this is that, despite living locally for well over a decade, I had no idea about this cave system. It’s the longest system in the UK° coming in at around 41 miles. It’s just a few miles from my home. The entrance involved a 34m abseil down a shaft known as Lancaster Hole. It’s a little difficult to describe the route after that. Mainly because, as a caving novice generally, and very much new to the Ease Gill Caverns I had only a vague notion of where we were. Apparently though, according to one website,° the “Lancaster Hole through trip is a classic.” This seems to involve finishing at a place called Wretched Rabbit while we exited via the ‘Manchester Bypass’.

It was impressive. And, I’m certainly not ‘cave-fit’ with the whole experience offering a full body workout. The last hour was a lot more physical and there was a lot of scrambling around and over greasy boulders, some tight crawling at times, and much thrutching, bridging, and cursing as we gradually covered ourselves in mud from head to toe. There was one, er, interesting traverse on a slippery shelf above a large drop, but we had the reassurance of fixed ropes and ‘cow’s tails’ to clip into them. By caving standards I don’t think any of the crawls would be regarded as tight but they didn’t feel too loose either. I had to consciously work to suppress any bubbling panic.

It could certainly be parked in the ‘scary’ slot today but it never got out of shape. The “scary” part of Roosevelt’s sentiment feels like it just about nudging ourselves out of our comfort zones. It doesn’t need to be a new sport, especially one, if you’ll pardon the pun, is rather niche. Perhaps the best aspect was the chance to spend a few hours with some like-minded people who I got to know a bit better. I will ache for a week though.

Image by Langcliffe under CC-BY-4.0

Black Friday, much like Christmas, has gradually extended in scope. The word “Friday” is doing some heavy lifting to justify the sales blitzkreig that will sweep over us for a fortnight. This is, patently, for no other reason than to extend the opportunity for us to be parted with our money and accumulate more stuff. Scarcity may have some economic value but it is not, so it seems, as effective as a relentless dogged exposure to the ‘deals’ on offer.

If you do find yourself eyeing up the latest Black Friday bargains then I’d point you towards the Diderot effect.° The adverse consequences of the Diderot effect happen when you buy something that isn’t complementary to one’s life. The risk is that your spending then escalates as you seek more products to match this item and you lose control. Frenchman Diderot wrote, around 250 years ago, an essay with the wonderfully humdrum title: Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown.° He tells the sorry tale of how a smart new scarlet dressing gown left him feeling rather dissatisfied with the other rather tawdry and threadbare possessions in his life. He went on a spree and accumulated debts. Actually, the essay is not a terribly easy read and the popularisation of the term is thanks to an anthropologist, Grant McCracken.

The point, however, is well made. The culture of consumerism is exemplified by Black Friday. We are being manipulated. It is intrusive. And, as well as the unsustainable environmental costs, it doesn’t even make us happy.

Recently, I found myself coveting a smartwatch. A GPS device that could tell me how far I had run, my heart rate, and a million and one other metrics. The new Garmin Fenix 6 caught my eye and I perused the reviews, making my decision on which one I should get. Then, I caught myself. I don’t need one of these. I don’t think it will make me life better. I have a perfectly serviceable watch and I’m not going to get more joy from my running by measuring it in any more detail than I already do. One of the best things one can do to avoid getting sucked in is to avoid advertising. Or, if you are like me, develop strongly contrarian responses when exposed to advertising. The moment I realised I didn’t need a Garmin Fenix 6 was when I saw a TV advert with Ant Middleton° trying to sell it to me. He’s a picture of rugged masculinity, battling the elements with his Garmin. Absolute fucking bullshit, I thought. I’ll stick with my Casio watch.

My Casio is the W-735H version. I would have the wonderfully light and very retro Casio F-91W° but I found the alarm was sometimes lost on me and the light is rubbish. The W-735H can usually be found for under £20, and it has a vibrating alarm that has never failed to wake me. It also has a clear light that is easy to read in bed at night. (Actually, I have to cup it with my hand to avoid dazzling my wife.) What more do I need?

As Seneca said: “It was nature’s intention that there should be no great need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy”.