The drying of the will

The hot, dry winds from the Sahara still blow across Accra. The dust gets thicker and the attempts to stave it off become more desultory. Any notion you might have that equatorial Ghana is plush with forest, dripping water, snakes and crocodiles must be relinquished immediately! It is an effort to keep vivacity going through the long, hot days and it got me to thinking about the will and personal discipline.

What is our relationship with inner drives? We talk about how by strength of mind we can rein them in and channel them to our advantage but the fact of the matter is that for too much of the time they control us rather than the other way round. Let me take some examples. I’ll try to think of four. The first is keeping in shape. We now know that physical exercise elongates life’s path. Let yourself go and the brain suffers and you become prone to faster ageing and the various diseases associated with it. I have a pool, a gym and, separately, a treader with elastic skiing straps which I can mount and watch the tele as I go. This affords me the opportunity of watching documentaries and toning up. That’s the idea, anyway. But do I do it enough? No. There are days when something inside creeps out of the darkness of the unconscious mind and prevents me. I might go two days without pool or gym or treader. I feel really irritated afterwards but at the time I am blithely evasive about facing myself.

Now, what would be the second? Writing. I need to finish the third and last book in my fictional trilogy about the beginnings of humankind’s dallying with religion and the apparition of death. If I wrote two pages a day, I’d be finished by May. But there are days when I don’t write at all or prefer to do a blog like this or a number of emails to friends. My mind tells me that I need to think about the next piece of writing and allow it to gestate. But is that a fallacy? I know when I attack writing with discipline, no matter what corner my characters find themselves in, I can get them out by some alchemical process.

My third? I play the guitar and learn songs. I do this because it is good for me, I know. Highly meditative. I am not even averagely good at music. It is all a struggle to keep things improving. It goes back to when I was eleven and sang tenor to another boy’s contralto in concert parties to raise funds for a village hall. My voice broke and a deep musical depression fell upon me. So when I am playing and singing today I am facing the demons of early ageing!

There has to be a fourth. Probably hundreds more. Some things I manage without fail Diet, except when on holiday where I implode - or explode, actually! Daily raw fruit and vegetable juices for instance. Let me say, reading. There are books I should read. They would help in backing up my skimpy knowledge about the history of human thought but I just don’t. In fact, as I have said, I can’t bear fiction which is well researched because it seems to preclude the real power of the imagination. I read the odd page of non-fiction and a few bytes of the internet.

So, as you read this, what do you not do that you know you should? Why do you desist when you know the consequences could mean the lopping off of years of your life? What are the hot Sahara winds that lay you low and desultorily pondering?

Labels: Accra. The will. Discipline.

The dust settles on Accra

I was reminded of Dickens’ Bleak House this last week because Ghana is experiencing the Hamatan. It is dry and the sir is full of Sahara dust. Read the quote from the beginning of Dickens’ novel and substitute dust for fog and you’ll get the picture!

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green lanes and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

The light is milky and it affects breathing and how clean you feel. Coming back from work reveals your clothes filmed in it. Our house here in Accra has no glass in the windows, just mosquito netting so the dust penetrates everywhere. It would take a whole below-stairs of Dickensian staff to keep it from being a repository of dunes. You just paddle about and ignore it.

The contrast couldn’t be greater when watching the horrors of water-logged Australia or the strangely surreal European snow reports on Sky News. At the same time our swimming pool, which ought to be called Wikileaks, is allowing the water to seep away so we are encouraging the process by bucketing it to the garden. It’s ankle deep at the shallow end and the new Alsatian pup, Andromeda, appears to be unlike her cowardly big friends, the Sirius the Doberman and Heracles the Alsatian cross. While they are bumptious on dry land, they run a mile when you suggest having a dip. She, however, a mere three months old, scampers in and thrashes her paws in the water making a fine spray. The other two watch her curiously as though she is an alien.

Meanwhile, back in the UK which seems less and less where I would want to live these days, the Tories have cut an education programme which gives free books to children from poor homes. Maybe three million or so? The Tories are the Hamatan of culture. Any notion that the reason why people might want to live and work in the UK is because it is a natural habitat for creative artists is quite beyond them.

Labels: Accra. Hamatan. Tories. Culture.

Lies, damn lies and poor interpretations of statistics

Funnily enough, when I was flying back from Japan, I saw a programme called Freakonomics based on the book of the same name. I hadn’t read the book but understood it was a lateral look at the myths that can abound when people make wrong inferences from data. Well, two outcomes that stuck in my somewhat jetlagged nut. One related to Japan. The other to New York.

First the Japanese angle. What the documentary showed was that when a society has, it imagines, in-built ethics or traditional cultural behaviours, it will not face the consequences of these being brought into disrepute. We saw sumo wrestlers. Here is an ancient art, a rule-ridden battle between men whose weight is more significant than their body shapes. Giants who are fed like the carp in Japanese ponds until their mountainous flesh vies with Fuji itself. They fight their way to the top where the pickings can be massive and include enamoured, beautiful, slight-bodied women. And NO-ONE could envisage even the sniff of corruption in this stylised, mannered world. No single event had come to light until an ex-sumo coach said that fights were fixed. Uproar. The media tried to shut him up. But our intrepid statisticians looked at the data and, over thousands of fights they found an anomaly. There was a huge bias where victories by opponents did not hurt the losers because they had already enough victories under their great leather belts to progress to the next championships. The Japanese federation accepted that in certain cases, injuries among sumo wrestlers (some died in training) were the result of abuse but would not accept the statistical pattern showing that a big proportion of fights was rigged. This notion that culture has its purities that we need to believe in, regardless of the true state of affairs, rings a bell, does it not? Politicians peddle it when they defend the police, secret services, religious schools, the royals, foreign conquest and so on. We are not expected to challenge these verities. Wikileaks exposed not only the malady in ambassadorial life but also the hypocrisies that abound when people like Hilary Clinton defend their nasty email injunctions to spy on America’s friends.

The other angle was the New York one. I have to admit that I was a sucker for the story about how New York was reformed by its Mayor and its policy of zero tolerance. By jumping on the small details of antisocial behaviour (breaking windows, throwing litter, petty stealing) the big ones do not occur in the same numbers. What a great breakthrough in public order. Well, our number crunchers looked at the data. What did they find? Following Ceaucescu’s fall from power in Romania it was discovered that he had forced women to have babies to swell the labour market. Twenty years later these unwanted babies had inflated the criminal ranks of the country. At around this time, the American Senate passed what seemed to be an unpopular law which allowed women to have abortion. Twenty years later, the crime figures for New York and elsewhere had dropped sharply. Unwanted pregnancies had been so diminished. Of course, religious fundamentalists don’t like it that abortion is a possible tool for ensuring babies are born to their mothers when they are ready to support them. Others on the liberal front attack the connection on the grounds that it appears to be biased against the poor, suggesting they are poor parents and irresponsible. But the causality is striking, make of it what you may.

Two examples from Freakonomics. You have to be brave to challenge social orthodoxies that underpin your culture and you have to control your own destiny, regardless of the State. But you may die for such causes. Take Punjab Governor Salman Taseer who was assassinated this week for wanting to repeal blasphemy laws. Laws that do not stem from the Koran but from bigots who want to limit freedom of speech and frank debate about religious and other pillars of Pakistan society.

Labels: Freedom of speech. Bad statistics-based policies. Being brave.