Ephemera

I was listening to a band recently, Oi Va Voi. With a name like that, apparently some Jewish link. They produced a mere couple of albums and vanished without trace. Some may consider that a good thing, depends on your musical taste. More conceptually to the point is their transience. Stuff that exists, hangs around a while and then disappears back into the void. Music is one example, fashion another. But Nature is full of them; the bloom of a flower, the fragile windblown butterfly. Or, the life of an adult mayfly, the archetypical example of ephemeron. Imagine, just 24 hours - maturing from larva, mating and death. How intense a life is that? Talk about pressure - only a few short hours to find a mate, find a site, perpetuate a species. We humans have it so easy by comparison. Though I can think of a few people who might find the idea of a one night stand very appealing, knowing will be the only one ever may not be so great.

Does anthropomorphising the life of a mayfly make any sense? Measuring their lives by our timescales? What about mayflies as a species, how old are they. They pre-date humans by a good margin with a fossil record back into the Cretaceous period. With a lifecycle so short they evolve perfectly to their environment.  And so, whatever it is they do, however it is they live and die, it certainly works for them. Ephemera - it is not the thing and its passing, but what it signifies; change & adaptability. 'The one thing constant in life is change’ ; Francois de le Rochfoucauld; ephemera are the embodiment of that change. Maybe then briefly mourn their passing beauty, but embrace the circumstances that enabled it.

(Un)Helpfulness

Over the past few years and months and weeks and days there have been many opportunities for people to be helpful. And I am sure there will continue to be. I have nothing against being helpful. Even I have been known to helpful - though very probably not as frequently as I should. However, I really question the motives of some of these ‘helpful’ actions. There are the obvious ones that needed questioning - invading Iraq. Was that helpful? Yes - if you were an arms dealer, but evidently not so much for anyone else involved.

I heard recently about Investors suing Tesco for damaging the profitability of their shares. In amongst the various fines, investigations and acute competition from other high street retailers - namely Lidl and Aldi - in what sense is this activity helpful? Will the shareholders recover their losses? Will Tesco perform better? Will it even survive? Could this action prevent similar activities in any other company trying to protect it’s image? The answer to all of these questions is no. So who does it help? Actually, the only people likely to come out ahead on this one are the lawyers. Lawyers can fulfil a need, but this cynical action is mostly self serving and probably no benefit to anyone else.

On a more personal level it is surely necessary to examine our own motives when we intend being helpful, as much as we should carefully examine the possible consequences of our ‘helpfulness’. A recent Grauniad comment made the excellent point that flying out to help in Nepal was not necessarily any help at all. Unless they had certain specific and immediately useful skills, cluttering up the place with purposeless do-gooders exacerbated the problem. Unprepared, unqualified and finally useless they are a drain on much needed resources and divert attention from the most needy. So, this is merely an exercise in self gratification and self importance. 

In a similar vein, the amount of unsolicited ‘helpful’ advice flying around is astounding. Take a well tested example; divorce. Plenty of advice to be thrown around here. But really, if advice is not sought it should most probably not be offered. Friendship is not about growing our own egos at the cost of someone else's discomfort and pain. Who benefits here? The advisor or the person advised? There is an aphorism - “the empty vessel makes the most noise” - and when it comes to offering advice, my experience to date is that this is most frequently the case. Furthermore, walking away leaving a trail of chaos and destruction for someone else to manage whilst proclaiming “I was only trying to be helpful’ very keenly demonstrates how unhelpful those actions actually were.

So finally, on helpfulness, the key question is, and always should be, who benefits? After some thought, if the answer is not absolutely the person being offered help, then what is actually taking place is unhelpfulness. The world could certainly do with a whole lot less of that.

Oh no. Knot again!

Ever wondered why it’s impossible to coil earbuds up without getting the cable into a tangle. It would be easier to unravel the Gordian Knot than it is to try picking apart the bird’s nest that spontaneously appears out of a mere 1 metre of audio cable. One moment it is neatly coiled around three fingers and carefully placed into a pouch. Nothing much happens in the pouch …. probably. And yet, when extracted, my neat coil has metamorphosed into an amorphous, randomised mass of wire and plastic. The earbuds and jack, though obviously the endpoints, seemingly fused into the tangled mass that is the interconnecting segments of wire. No matter how I start, as I loosen one section, another tightens and makes the whole unpicking process that much more tedious.

Which end should I start from? The jack - only one of those. Or the earbuds — two of those and an awkward shape guaranteed to catch annoyingly with each loop they’re threaded through. No matter how I start, the process is lengthy and for short tube journeys, almost not worth the effort. Maybe I should follow another philosophy, just pull the ends out and tighten the knots. Then, if the music sounds a bit strangled off and choked, at least I’ll know why.

Election Blues

Conservatives on for an outright majority. Miliband loses his Balls and the confidence of the rest of the UK - so two Eds definitely not better than one. The SNP steal Scotland. Clegg’s LibDems, prophetic with their leader’s recent pose by Land’s End signpost, are one small step away from pitching entirely off the political map in the UK. What a joke this election has been. Polls suggesting a close run match, except in Scotland, right up to the start of voting, when suddenly the exit polls indicated a Conservative landslide. Wonder where Paddy Ashdown’s hat is now? I certainly don’t want to be anywhere nearby when it reappears.

What we have now is a more of a DisUK than a UK - grandiose optimistic intentions for one nation Toryism aside - Scotland have isolated themselves ideologically from the rest of the country, and the Democratic Unionists have almost achieved the same in Northern Ireland.

One ironic thought, when Cameron puts the EU referendum before the people his staunchest allies in campaigning to maintain the status quo will be his otherwise fiercest foes. UKIP and the Tory EU sceptics will have had their day, but it is unlikely that should they lose, and they probably will, they will accept that verdict. Expect years of carping and back biting to follow.

So now I await with 'bated breath the Queen’s speech with new business for this parliament. With such a narrow margin for governing, every bill will be a close fought battle with the opposition parties and the dissident rank in his party. Three line whips will be the order of the day, a single abstaining MP could be the downfall of any legislation. And, with all this whipping going on, will BDSM now become even more mainstream than since 50 Shades?

Citychosis

London really is a place to be wary of. I'm now minus my motorbike. It was parked in a public motorcycle bay, on a busy road, locked. It's 250Kg of bike, so not small. It wasn't sporty, it wasn't new and shiny, in fact well overdue for a proper wash and polish and heading for a set of new tyres to boot. And yet it vapourised. I'd not suspected a bike could evaporate so completely in full public view and yet it did. Needless to say I reported the evaporation of my vehicle to the police, it seems that this kind of event is pretty frequent, bikes evaporate all the time. Occasionally they even precipitate out in different parts of the country, I suspect this will not be the case with mine, more likely there will be a diffuse spread of motorbike parts over the next few months appearing sporadically in an eBay auction or Gumtree advert. RIP BMW.