Pleasurably perplexing perceptions

 

Bong, bong, bong, bong; bong, bong, bong, bong;

bong, bong, bong, bong; bong, bong, bong, bong:

BONG !!!

Sorry, did I wake you up?

Among the more unlikely benefits of growing up in the vicinity of Nottingham was the occurrence of features which encouraged interesting misunderstandings, although I suspect that many localities offer equivalent examples to a perceptually wayward child. There was, for instance, a cinema called the ‘Globe’, which was squeezed  between Arkwright Street and London Road as they converged onto the north end of Trent Bridge. How could such a tiny site contain a cinema, I wondered? From the outside it looked as though its seating capacity would be about four. Well, as I later discovered, many buildings deceive.

Again, not a unique occurrence (the Severn in Shrewsbury can offer a similar experience, as can many places along the Thames), the large bend in the River Trent between Wilford Bridge and Trent Bridge induced in me a pleasurable kind of controlled puzzlement, so that while walking along the Victoria Embankment I could amaze and amuse myself at how distant views shifted, how the war memorial which was over there a minute ago was now over here, and how the buildings of the city centre a mile or so to the north had suddenly moved somewhere else – as had the distinctive profile of Sharphill Woods away to the south-east.

Nottingham, conventionally starting out as twin communities dating from Saxon and Norman times, is relatively unusual as British cities go in possessing a large central space, the Old Market Square, as indisputably the nodal point of the city, a place where people “just go” for what it is. Uncouth people call it Slab Square; more familiarly it is just “the Square”. A few years ago it had a makeover that has done nothing to enhance its appeal, unless you like tripping over micro-steps, being nice to weirdoes, scarfing pop-up streetfood, or riding the occasional big wheel. The Christmas tree, placed in the centre of the Square (in other words at the centre of the centre) and throughout the ages notoriously of variable degrees of weediness, has in recent years been partially obscured by the shabby sheds of seasonal retail tat and by festive amusements both high-adrenalin and high-cholesterol. Trams come and go; buses and trolleybuses no longer do so. This vertically slightly warped quadrilateral was always awkward and asymmetric, but I was happier with the deco-ish layout from between the wars. Even the pigeons seemed more stylishly urban in those days; the lamp standards certainly were.

Although common in many continental cities (Brussels, Barcelona, and Krakow being among the most spectacular), only a handful of other UK cities have a definite focus in the form of a market place or square that unarguably celebrates the centre, while not necessarily being the main hub of commercial activity. George Square in Glasgow is the only comparable instance that springs readily to mind – Piccadilly Gardens and Albert Square in Manchester, Colston Avenue in Bristol, Donegall Square in Belfast, and the area around St George’s Hall (St. John’s Gardens) in Liverpool all approach the ideal but don’t quite succeed. The market places in Cambridge and Norwich are also feasible candidates, and there are surely others, but not many. Trafalgar Square acts as a magnet for tourists and for public gatherings in London, yet is only one of several contenders (Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square among them) for being the very heart of the metropolis or, indeed, of the nation.

Given the existence of the Old Market Square, Nottingham’s residents may have an unusually strongly developed concept of the role of centrality in urban places. I certainly grew up with that kind of awareness and expectation, and I think it aids both navigation and the development of a sense of place. This centrality is emphasised by the location on the east side of the Square of the Council House, the edifice that most other communities would call their town hall or city hall. It really is a glorious pile, a magnificence of civic pride and municipal splendour, undeniably powerful while not overpowering. In front of the building, with its eight enormous Ionic columns, sit two stone lions, Leo and Oscar. Their faces are so un-leonine, in fact so human, puzzled-looking rather than snarly, that you know they aren’t meant to be taken seriously. They’re friendly lions.  More familiarly known, respectively, as the left lion and the right lion, they serve – as befits the guardians of a central place – as popular meeting points. “See you by the left lion” is implicitly understood by every Nottinghamian - except those who can’t tell right from left anyway. The lions were designed by local sculptor and art teacher Joseph Else, who has a Wetherspoons named after him just across the road from here.

While the Council House is still used for ceremonial events, the city council some years ago relocated most of their office space elsewhere. Designed by T. Cecil Howitt and completed in the late 1920s in a cheerfully successful bastardised fusion of architectural styles in Portland stone, the Council House assists the feeling of centrality by virtue of its bulk and height – the golden ball on the top of the dome is at exactly 200 feet above the ground. Until the eruption of the typical and mostly unlovely highrise from the late 1950s onwards,  the dome was - together with the Castle half a mile away on its sandstone outcrop - absolutely dominant over the cityscape, and visible from many miles around. The chimes (similar to those of Westminster) of the Council House clock ring out every quarter of an hour, and incorporate the famous bell called Little John. This bell, cast in nearby Loughborough, weighs over 10 tons and has the deepest tone in the land, providing a regular audible reminder of the centre of the city for everyone within earshot – up to seven miles away. Earlier this year, when we went outside on Thursday evenings  to “clap for carers”, we often heard it chiming eight o’clock, providing a kind of reassurance of normality, a connection with the centre of local life.

 As a child I loved to glimpse the Council House dome, especially if I caught sight of it unexpectedly, from different places in the city – Lady Bay Bridge, for example, or Thorneywood Rise, or the Victoria Embankment.  I also loved to be taken into town and to go into the Council House, or rather, the part generally accessible to the public, namely the Exchange, a T-shaped arcade then lined with upmarket shops (most famously Burton’s, the local equivalent of Harrods) that lay immediately behind, via an invisible segue between civic and commercial. The Exchange Arcade – usually abbreviated to “the arcade”, there then being no other, or known alternatively by older residents as Burton’s Arcade - was supposedly inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, a city with perhaps the finest central public place anywhere in the world, the Piazza del Duomo, with the Cathedral occupying the spot analogous to the Council House.

Long long ago and once a bong a time, I liked to stand in the arcade at the spot  immediately beneath the dome, in order to listen to the chimes of the bells, ideally at 12 noon, getting the benefit of maximum bong-count. I would look up to the underside of the dome, high above me, at the spandrel-filling murals featuring Robin Hood, Charles I raising his standard, and other scenes from the city’s real or mythical past. In passing, I should say that, visiting the city last week for the first time since before lockdown, I felt strongly - and sadly - that someone needs to raise the standard again.

 Only gradually, as a child, did I realise that something was wrong about what I saw from this perspective. It appeared that daylight was coming in directly overhead, yet how could this be so, given that the dome is covered in grey lead and by ever-increasing quantities of pigeon produce? My dad, who I assumed would understand these matters, tried to explain, and even made me a model “under-dome” out of strips of cardboard with cellophane layered over it. This made me very irrationally cross, for it didn’t make any sense to me. The whole thing appeared impossible, mainly because I assumed, wrongly, that the underside of the dome as I saw it from the arcade was immediately beneath the dome I saw from the outside. But , if so … where were Little John and friends? They were up there somewhere, but where, exactly? The sound of the bells was coming from somewhere … impossible.

To this day I’m not quite sure what is going on up there, but there must be a drum-shaped chamber that houses the bells, with the externally-visible dome sitting on top of that. In fact, seen from the outside it’s perfectly obvious that this is the case.

Well, I enjoy perceptual oddities. I find it fascinating that you can look at something from one side and, from the other side, see something completely different, and that between the two, there can exist a whole realm of the invisible and the unexplained, the delusional and the misunderstood. Like the Globe cinema, a space that seems geometrically impossible..A magical realm where Little John and the merry men will bong, loud and happy, every fifteen minutes for the rest of eternity. Ah ha, midday is approaching:

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG

Skewered by skeuomorphs, smarting at smart

 

Like many averagely intelligent and moderately well-educated  people of my age I find the products of information technology to be among the principal causes of stress in my life, resulting in much bad language and wasted time. Touch wood, it isn’t malevolent hackers that cause me the problems. It’s not even that systems crash with alarming regularity, like Spotify did yesterday and much of Google did today, or even that Windows 10 needs to update for a couple of hours every day or two (you’d think after all this time they would have got it right). No, it isn’t that, not entirely. While these examples reveal how – even without the impacts of malicious intent – our crucial information infrastructures are absurdly, crazily vulnerable, unreliable and flaky, the issue I want to address here is subtly different. From the perspective of an everyday user of computerised systems it’s the intrinsic design – one might say the underlying ambient assumptions – that forms the subject of my concern today. Just to be clear, I refer to those systems without which it is scarcely possible to continue to lead a civilised life – to find things out, to write, to buy stuff, to communicate with people, to take photographs, to play or listen to music, and so on.  Important activities.

Design, in a word, is much to blame for this impoverishment of our collective quality of life. Simple activities never used to be complicated, and they don’t need to be. Being incomprehensible is not the same as being clever. “Smart” should never be a synonym for “stupid”, yet so often it is. Now, even attempting to switch on the telly or to answer the phone can be fraught, with no guarantee of success, without prior instruction. A lightbulb can take longer to fully illuminate than the time it takes to do whatever you needed it on for. Just lately I’ve noticed that some people on the other end of a phone line sound as though they are immersed in a polygonal steel tank full of soapy water while simultaneously inhaling helium. Since when was a flat piece of glass the ideal geometrical form connecting the mouth and the ear; has human anatomy really changed that much since the dawn of the telephone? Did a clever man with a clever algorithm work that one out? Yes, of course he did. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. QED. This is  progress, and if you don’t like it I’ll warm up the lecture about making omelettes – yes, the same one they use for promoting driverless cars.

Many of the difficulties technology inflicts upon its users result from a perverse desire to design counter-intuitively, and from a failure to align what has to be done in order to get some device or function to work, with what common sense and intuition suggest should be done. 

What ought to be user-friendliness so often appears as user hostility or user contempt. What should be the bleedin’ obvious is frequently baffling - and that is without the added strains imposed by age-related deficits concerning dexterity, hearing and eyesight. Just don’t get me started on the subject of packaging.

One needs to fight back. Recently, having had quite enough of G-mail altering the words I intended to use, and then telling me that my spelling and grammar were wrong, forcing me to go back through my message to unpick the consequences of this unwanted interference, I decided to do something about it. The crunch came on the day when it took me two attempts to get “Wombledon” to stick, in a silly piece I was writing about a trip to the alternative W villages of south Notts, including Wibberley, Wobberley, and Wallaby-with-the-Wind. That’s it, I thought, I’m not putting up with it any more. Actually, I was rather taken aback that Google knew of Wimbledon. Apparently there’s one (population 192) in North Dakota, so there’s your likely explanation. Mind you, Microsoft has never heard of Belsen, as you’ll discover, if you use their spellchecker. Enough’s enough, I fumed. I was determined to remove the unwanted idiotic “smart” intrusions, there solely – as far as I could see - to intimidate me into acknowledging the dumb omniscience of the onanistic oligarchs of Asperger Valley.

But how to go on the attack? Well, a resort to instinct and nebulous intuition is often a good idea. Over the preceding weeks I’d developed a sneaking suspicion that the symbol which I’d always taken to be a flower, or possibly the sun, or just an arbitrary piece of decoration, was in fact a cogwheel. I guessed – rightly as it turned out – that this tiny icon implied “settings”. It might, of course, have been a cue for the whirrings of considered mentation, for thought itself, but no, it was the sort of cog that could be vaguely symbolic of machinery as we used to picture it, in that dreamily long-ago era before nail parlours provided the principal contribution to our economy. Perhaps it was a nod in the direction of the clattering computations of Charles Babbage. Holding my breath, I clicked on this little symbol and then - refusing to be fobbed off with cosmetic, geek-pleasing banalities - I found a link where I could deal with the unasked for “preferences” responsible for screwing up my e-mails. Now I could disable all these irritating “smart” reflexes, and take charge of writing what I intended, not what some pre-set algorithm had decided was best for me. Best of all, I could be British again.

Oh yes, British, as in British government. We’ve heard quite a lot about algorithms this week, haven’t we. Algorithms are clearly bad news; they’re not designed for you or me, but for someone else, someone who wants to cut corners in the interests of making their own life easier and more profitable, but yours or mine more difficult and lowly. Algorithms work to the lowest common denominator; they democratise mediocrity. As we have seen, they are designed in their quasi-mathematical pseudo-objective faux-scientific thuggery to impress the likes of our esteemed heart-warming education secretary, William Gaviscon Jnr. While I tend to visualise young Gaviscon in short trousers, at this point I should emphasise strongly that he is not a major participant in my erotic fantasy life. Although I admit that when he bleated at the Russian leader to “shut up and go away”, at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, I felt a quiet thrill of submission-by-proxy, at the same time hoping that Vladimir Vladimirovich was able to enjoy a more direct and robust physiological response.

However, ugh, shudder, I digress. Following my sussing out of the cog symbol and my subsequent smug victory over Google - fooling it into writing the words of my choice, beating it down, one-nil to the human race - I realised that, as regards most of the symbols that are sprayed round the edge of the computer screen, on phones and tablets, and all over the place, I haven’t a clue what they mean. I wouldn’t dare touch them. Does anyone know what they all mean? I’ve just noticed one of them  which as far as I can tell, with the aid of a magnifying glass, features a man in a pale blue pullover with an unnaturally extended right arm. I’ve been hovering over this symbol, cautiously, with mouse in retracted pounce mode. A box has popped up, saying “Welcome Center”. Well, thanks but no thanks, for it has something of the aura of a touchy-feely religious cult, something best left in the bleak suburbs of middle America, in an endless desolate prairie of the soul, where everything from pecan pie to the clear night sky is omigod awesome. Pale blue pullovers, that’s the giveaway. I can visualise the plate glass, the A-frame in pale brick. [Can we please get back on track? We left Wimbledon, North Dakota, some time ago. - Ed].

Anyway, those few icons that I (sort of) understand, I do so because they operate metaphorically to suggest physical items from my past, like the dustbin symbol for getting rid of rubbish, and the floppy disc icon meaning ‘save’ or ‘store’. They remind me of real things and therefore they mean something to me, though not necessarily what is intended. The dustbin is quite like one that my grandmother had. I think bin day was on a Friday. Yes, I can relate to that, just the thought makes me feel happy, and I can imagine other rewarding possibilities for on-screen iconography. I so wish that computers had something like a bus conductor function. Or a chocolate application..

But then again, your average enthusiast is too young to remember floppy discs, or bus conductors, or decent non-greasy chocolate made in Birmingham in satisfyingly large chunks at half a crown a slab. His real-world bin, if he has one, is a wheelie bin, quite different in form and profile from the much beloved fluted variety with ill-fitting lid that would bang around cheerfully in a strong wind. If analogy is perception, as Douglas Hofstadter would have us believe, it will rattle and clang its way up the garden path, and leave you there, gripping a hovering mouse without a paddle. The use of skeuomorphic imagery – the fancy name for stylised bins, cogs, floppies and the like, inspired by associations now anachronistic or redundant - has to keep pace with the mental associations of users. Otherwise it merely confuses.

Thoughtfully employed, digitally or otherwise, skeumorphy can be useful, innovative and inspired. For instance, I like the reassurance of the soft scrunching sound made by some digital cameras to indicate that a picture has “taken” – referencing the shutter clicking on a photographic camera. However, for the young digerati, unused to “analogue”, I fear that all it tells them is that anyone nearby can hear them taking a photograph, and so they had better be careful, since their voyeurism or breach of performance copyright is audible. The archaic metaphor may be lost on them. Tough. Technology grinds on mercilessly.

Potassium ferricyanide never did me any harm

 

Last night I watched some catch-up, including a programme about the dangers of the postwar house, which included a man doing some work on his houseboat with an electric drill below the water line; kitchen kettles which when boiled would thoughtfully eject their electric leads straight into your washing-up water; and the perils of gas boilers in inadequately ventilated bathrooms. In order to demonstrate  the silent, tasteless, odourless dangers of carbon monoxide, a glass box was produced. Momentarily I wondered if Schrödinger’s Cat was going to put in an appearance – I’d love to see that experiment - but no, that was neither here nor there, and instead the presenter made do with an electronic monitor that beeped timidly. Disappointment all round. Nevertheless, the 1950s fondness for DIY apparently resulted in all manner of unpleasant amputations, electrocutions, falls, bangs on the head, and other unexpected and frequently lethal weekend occurrences. It may have also explained why our garden shed used to wobble if the breeze got up.

Even more amusing was the part of the programme dealing with home chemistry experiments. This was something with which I could identify.  Like most boys with a scientific bent, or certainly with some bent scientific tendencies, I had a Lotts chemistry set supplemented with items nicked from the school chemistry lab, or purchased legitimately from the local pharmacy, and in my case, obtained by my father who had access to chemicals used in photography and printing. Despite several years’ intimacy – some of it condoned by school - with wonderfully dangerous materials like elemental mercury, sodium chlorate, conc nitric acid, benzene, potassium nitrate, uranium oxide, and any amount of beautiful blue copper sulphate crystals, I’m still around to laugh at the sort of shock-horror media types who regard anything that sounds vaguely chemical as being firmly in skull and crossbones territory. “Acid”. “Poison”. “Explosive”. “Nasty smell”. Ooh, I’ll have to sit down for a minute. Nurse, nurse ! When I hear that 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate have gone up I sort of smirk knowingly, while suppressing uncharitable thoughts about missed opportunities. This isn’t callousness in the face of mass casualties, it’s a nodding acknowledgement of an old friend. I hadn’t thought about ammonium nitrate for years.

Having smugly survived, consequently I’m proud to be a member of that generation that treats “Elf and Safety” with a degree of disrespect. Especially when concern extends inappropriately, crossing over into the drear realm populated by snowflakes and the feeble minded. Some years ago we were on the glorious flat-topped summit of Golden Cap, Dorset, at 627 feet the highest point on the south coast. Close by were a mother and father and two children, whose brayings suggesting they might have been members of the Profoundly-Dymme family, resident towards the southern end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The mother was squealing that it was dangerous, that it was a long way down, there was a bit of fence missing, children could fall off, there weren’t enough notices,  she was going to write to somebody, she was going to sue, etc etc. I think she mentioned the United Nations. We gave her a suitable glaring at.

Recently we read about an evidently similar episode in Snowdonia, an area quite well known for being mountainous - itself a description which tends to imply abrupt transitions in altitude. A year or two ago we read of a group of adults drowning in the sea, not so much because they couldn’t swim, but because they had never made the hypothetical  association that connects deep water with drowning. Many similar examples could be cited. Whenever some juvenile - glued to their dim-phone, head wrapped in earphones listening to some crap apology for music - walks in front of a train, you can be sure that it will be the rail company that gets blamed for having their trains in the wrong place, going too fast, without signs on them saying “train – keep off”, and inadequately protected from the body-part-spattering embraces of total idiots who – and whose parents – know their rights. Of course I want children - and everyone else - to be safe, but many dangerous situations are only dangerous if you deliberately get into them against all reason.

Attitude to risk is complex. One is tempted to generalise that the people who have a problem with the fundamental qualities of terrain and the irresistible forces of physics and biology are the same ones who flout common sense when it comes to protecting the wider population from coronavirus, and whose actions further delay the end of the crisis and add to the toll of misery. These may also be the same ones who think that the re-opening of nail parlours is a must-have major leap towards the restoration of the UK economy (and who, sadly, may be right) and that a couple of days swilling lager by the Med justifies anything.

Generalisations aren’t always fair, but then neither is life. Every member of every generation is subjected to the innate hazards of life on our small planet, plus some novel ones specific to time and place, and it adopts a spectrum of attitudes accordingly, though unpredictably so.

Hence the title of this piece. Potassium ferricyanide never did me any harm, but that was mainly because I didn’t do anything stupid with it. I was humorously aware that the “cyanide” part of the name terrified elderly relatives, while being a mere whimsicality of chemical nomenclature. It’s not a completely innocuous substance, however, but I didn’t try to eat it or inhale it or stuff it into unreceptive orifices – either my own, or those belonging to next-door-but-one’s cat. No, what I did was this. I found an old Quink bottle (the sort that would sit on one’s school desk) and washed it out thoroughly. I took it to a local beauty spot called Tinker’s Dale, where I had noticed that the banks of the stream were a reddish colour. There I filled the empty ink bottle with stream water and took it back to base. I then dropped in a few tiny orangey-red crystals of potassium ferricyanide, K₃Fe(CN)₆, and observed the sudden deep blue flush, a colour similar to Prussian Blue. Thus I confirmed the presence of iron in the water. Scientific curiosity encouraged, no risk taken, no harm done. Healthy and safe.

The gestalt of personal design

 

The what? Exactly. Pretentious? Moi?

Possibly. But why is it that we unconsciously select some things as being legitimately of interest to us, and reject others as “not us”? Some components of this great experience called life seem to self-select for our attention and enjoyment, others shy away or skulk in plain sight, confident that we’ll never flick them a second glance. Some aspects of our ambient environment become foreground from early on in life, much remains in the background; prominent and recessive soon shuffle into their natural habitats. That way we make sense of things and survive.

Operating this necessary gestalt inevitably generates casualties. I’m never going to be even remotely interested in anything to do with horses, economics, hip-hop, video games, or baseball, but I still convince myself that there’s time to acquire some elementary Russian vocabulary, to listen to more Elgar, to be able to distinguish cars by techniques more subtle than the identification of colour, to visit the Uffizi again (pandemic permitting), and to read the entire works of Charles Dickens. The truth is, I’m probably not going to get far with any of them; they’re not “really me”, yet they might be, and I feel that they should be. They’re not core, and I can do without them if I have to. My core interests will remain as they are, bubbling away with steadily ebbing energy and diminishing motivation in the glorious cauldron that pulls them all together, that disorderly melting pot otherwise known as my mind or - more briefly - as me. I will attend to the core, because I have to, because it’s instinctive, because it’s me. But how has that happened? Why this and not that, and why any house room at all for the potential ought to in-betweenies? Well, I’ll avoid addressing most of the specifics for now.

Spoiler alert: fish coming up.

The dilemma is between having a fixed personality with defined interests and tastes, as opposed to one much less rigid, but open to anything and everything. I imagine most of us lie between the two extremes of cognitive rigidity and cognitive flabbiness, but however hard we try, we can’t design or redesign our personalities. We can fiddle with the edges, we can adjust the rigidity- to-flab ratio a mite or two, but in truth we have little real say in the matter.

The twin perils accompanying this conundrum are of wasting time, money and energy on things we will never like, and excluding much that we might enjoy but for ignorance or fear - like a relative of mine who won’t eat Stilton because about 70 years ago his father told him it reeked of smelly socks (one of several successful paternal ploys for rendering him quiveringly larkined for life). Then again, I can’t talk; I’ll never enjoy intimacy with a haddock thanks to a childhood fear of the man in the Co-op fish department. However, if we are able to progress beyond such deep seated, life-impoverishing, debilitating quirks as Stilton-specific turophobia or chronic intractable generalised  ichthyophobia then surely we can tentatively explore, we can probe gingerly into previously unknown territories.

Advertising, and the kind of “if you like this then you might like that” recommendations that the internet handles so well, are deliberate, commercially motivated attempts to nudge us towards other “likes”, entities in some way similar to those we already enjoy – or which our online activity to date has betrayed an interest in. Pushing the envelope is good for those seeking to profit from us, and may be good for us as consumers too, especially if it’s in unexpected directions that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to us. Sometimes we resist, sometimes we’re happy to be nudged. Sometimes something registers at the back of the mind, festers for a while, and gets to us later. But we like our comfort; we like what we know and we know what we like and every conceivable quasi-Rumsfeldian permutation thereof. Comfort zones are comfortable and are to be enjoyed, preserved, and generally left alone, despite the holier-than-thou goadings of emotionally-stunted HR officers, sadistic gym teachers (is there any other sort?), empathy-deficient team-building training-day fascists, and other malignant species of professional bastard lowlife who think they know better. I know what I know and I like what I like. There’s no compulsion to extend.

For most of us, I imagine, under normal circumstances, we stagger unpredictably from one thing to another, from one transient taste or interest to another, from one must have or next big thing to another, as fads and fashions and accidental circumstances suggest, seduce, or demand. An advertisement here, a TV programme there, a visit to an historic site, an enthusiastic review, something that a friend said we might enjoy. Instinctively we’ll judge, select, reject; potential inputs that make us “us” – a deeper “us”, or a wider “us”, or both. Or not. Instinctive, automatic.

That’s fine in principle. If we had unlimited lifespans and bottomless pockets there would be less - or even no - need to select, for we would have infinite time and capacity to benefit from all that the world has to offer. Potentially we would in time all be omniscient, and identically blessed, leisurely perambulating through every treasure to which our minds and senses are capable of response. But life isn’t like that – fortunately. In the absence of an infinite capacity for flabbiness the question may gradually focus on whether we should spend time revisiting what we know we like, deepening our knowledge of and pleasure in those things, or whether we should devote more time to exploring what we don’t know, on the off-chance of reward and surprise. Experience tells us that the tyranny of choice usually reduces to the dictates of circumstance, time and money.

Coronavirus, thanks to enforced limitations and increased awareness of mortality, has encouraged focus. Arguably, that’s one of its few positives; warfare might act similarly. Under normal circumstances rarely is “personal design” deliberate or planned. Like stuff in general, it just happens – we are who and what we are.

When we’re younger, however, and we know we’ll live for ever, we may more self-consciously draw up life plans, agendas, to-do-lists. As energetic adolescents we may draw roadmaps of ambitions, critical flow diagrams for intended accomplishments and ambitions; we may scribble on wallcharts the goals we want to achieve, the milestones to reach, the attainments to attain. Earlier in life the more open-minded and less rigid strategy is surely the one to be recommended, the more daring, experimental one, the jumping out of aircraft or hopping across Antarctica one, that blissful phase of life where – if you’re lucky enough to have all the support mechanisms in place - you can shock yourself pleasantly with your catholicity of outrageousness and your eclecticism of taste for the existentially challenging. Time will never end, so you can give full rein to your declared fondness for Karlheinz Stockhausen at maximum volume, your self-impressing bedtime addiction to the works of Martin Heidegger, your smug infatuation with Georg Baselitz. You must! Go for it all while you’re young and life stretches endlessly ahead, even if occasionally discordant, incomprehensible or upside down. Sorry, I’ve had a bad week with the Germans, but you get the idea.

Much later on, when you reach that age when the sands of time are rapidly running out (the same sands we considered last time), deliberation may become more, er, deliberate. The question of what to spend one’s time on becomes more urgent but, I suspect, the answer not much easier to reach.