The Book of Dave: in search of psycho-voltage

I've just finished reading Will Self's "The Book of Dave". In a nutshell, it's the story of Dave Rudman, an estranged, deranged and deluded London taxi driver who writes a cathartic, misogynistic thesis to his son. He buries the book, and centuries later it is discovered in a post-deluge age where it spawns a fanatical, fundamentalist religion.

Pretty much par for the course for Will Self, then, you might say. There are a staggering number of facets and ways to interpret this book. Readng a few reviews of the book, it is primarily seen as a biting satire of religions: the ease with which passing moods and memoirs of a few people in history can be magnified and mauled in the future. Self does this satire unnervingly well. Indeed, it strikes me that the more self-contained and fully-formed someone's thesis on life, the more extremist it probably is, because it will not have been honed and subjected to reasoning discourse. Had I written a long essay ten years ago entitled "People who will be first against the wall when I am king" (which, I assure you, I didn't) I can guarantee I'd now be mortified by it and desperate for it not to see the light of day. Of course, that makes this blog all the more worrying, because by the time I am mortified by it it will have been in the public realm for some time and there'll be no clawing it back.......

For me, though, the most striking quality of "The Book of Dave" is the way in which it creates two dramatically different versions of London. Few writers can have envisioned more different Londons than Self, as it his stock in trade, really. Yet the two (or more?) Londons here are so polarised: one is the personal, intimate memory-mapped city organised by the enlarged frontal lobe of a taxi driver's Knowlege; the other is a staggering landscape of an impersonal, dysfunctional authoritarian city-state painted with a big, hairy brush. The gradual swapping over of these two perspectives, so that we discover the personalities of the future and the authoritarian dysfunction of the present, is the real trick of this book. Thus it becomes a satire in the ancient classical tradition, as well as a homage to Dickensian social commentary on London.

A really interesting question for me is whether other cities or places could ever be such fertile territory. There are so many Londons, factual and fictional, but could there be so many Sheffields, England, or Bostons, Massachusetts, or Thursos, Scotland? I suspect that the big, old cities of the world, such as Barcelona, Moscow, Istanbul, could well compete with London on this, but not many others. I'd suggest that there are two crucial ingredients a place needs in order that it can exist more in the imagination than in the here and now:

it has to be physically too large for any visitor or inhabitant to ever feel they've really grasped its true extent (so any fiction within it is geographically plausible);

it needs a long enough, messy enough history that an equally long and messy future is assured (so any fiction is temporally plausible).

The taxi driver is one person whose geographical grasp of a huge city is likely to be better than most. You, like me, might be perplexed that taxi drivers in a medium-sized city like Sheffield often have a lesser knowledge of their patch than London cabbies, or even than many of their passengers. That it is so much less of a challenge probably makes it less worthy of knowing. On the other hand, we could speculate that a spatial Knowledge bigger than what is realistically knowable is what drives Dave Rudman mad.

In other words, a city so big that you can never really know it will drive you mad if you try, and knowing that it could drive you mad is what makes that city so different from smaller, knowable places. It has a kind of psychological voltage, which is what powers the imagination.

So, dearly beloved, we come to the bit where I pose a sustainability question. Received wisdom (and I often believe it myself) is that there is a natural size to settlements that lend themselves to being environmentally and socially sustainable. Too small, too dispersed and there are no economies of scale, not enough community. Too big, too dense and a settlement becomes unknowable, impersonal, antisocial, too hungry for natural resources.

But consider this: if that 'natural' size actually means a 'comfortable' size, might living in such a place reduce that psycho-voltage? Would the imagination and creativity of mankind suffer, and with it our ability to envision a sustainable future? Should we instead be seeking out the extremes - the teeming cities and the unending, open horizons, where unknowability fuels our minds? Is the unknown our friend, and comfort our enemy?

Happy New Year.

AW

The Santa Clause - an eternal mystery solved

I was in a teleconference yesterday where the conversation turned to the frustrating phenomenon of Christmas inertia. You know the problem: Christmas actually lasts approximately two days, and most people have about a week away from work, yet it is completely impossible to achieve anything work-related for a whole month, between 5th December and 4th January. How does this happen?

Then, realisation struck. We noticed that two crucial things happen during that month of crippling inactitvity:

1) public sector bodies (usually, though not this year, thanks to George Osborne) put out a huge raft of competitive tender invitations and then go off on leave, thereby condemning every consultant in the land to burning the midnight oil over Christmas, forgetting to do any Christmas shopping, falling out with loved ones, not being able to contact the potential client to discuss the tender, and resigning themselves to probably not winning the tender in any case;

2) Father Christmas miraculously breaks into every household in the world within about 20 hours*, to deliver gifts and raid the booze cabinet.

(* This calculation is based on the fact that midnight varies around the world by 12 hours and there is an average 8 hours of darkness, so if Father Christmas sets out at sundown from the dateline and travels west he has about 20 hours until the sun comes up again. This does not allow for the fact that he has to start AND finish in the north, where the night is longer, whilst nipping down to Australasia, Southern Africa and South America during their much shorter, summer nighttime. Nor does it consider whether he discriminates against predominantly Muslim countries, where people are less likely to be interested in Father Christmas and booze cabinets will be few and far between. I am not a mathematician and will not be held responsible for inaccuracies in this calculation.)

These two observations provide incontrovertible, empirical evidence that Father Christmas and the Government are colluding in the annual implementation of a cruel and cunning manipulation of time-energy. This works by stopping everyone - except consultants and Father Christmas - in their tracks, using a bizarre formula combining gravity and cryogenics. People continue to eat, drink and shop, but are otherwise completely immobilised and are unaware that time has ceased to pass. The energy embodied in their eating, drinking and shopping is syphoned off to fuel Father Christmas's mammoth fleet of hovercraft, which set out across the globe on a month long endeavour to distribute gifts and gather up booze. When this work is done, time restarts, people find themselves swamped in wrapping paper and family discord, and civil servants return to work to find reams of verbose tender submissions stopping up draughts in their offices.

The question is, does the fact that we have stumbled across the solution to this eternal mystery mean we can, or should, prevent from happening again?

No-one visiting Sheffield over the past year or so will have failed to notice the giant Ferris/hamster wheel rotating slowly at the top of Fargate (just across from the Town Hall). Despite being a hilly enough city that the top of the wheel is several hundred feet lower than the view from my garden, Sheffield dared not be left off the list of British cities hosting a big wheel. I never went on it, because for me it wasn't worth several pounds to spend a couple of minutes up amongst the city centre rooftops accompanied by a running commentary....but I'm sure some people enjoyed it.

Last week I noticed that the wheel was being dismantled, presumably to be reassembled in some other lucky town, or possibly a victim of the public sector cuts. ("Wheel latest victim of cuts" would be an amusing local newspaper headline.) This did not stir much emotion either way for me, though on balance I decided it would be nice to have the big space at the top of Fargate back.

Today, however, an altogether more bizarre structure has appeared in its place, similarly fenced off from reality. It is a cone, about 30 feet across at the base and as tall as the surrounding buildings, covered in coniferous leaves, with a doorway at the bottom labelled "Santa's Grotto". I looks a little as if someone has indulged in a controversial, pacifist art project to temporarily camouflage a war memorial.

Santa Claus troubles me at the best of times. I vividly remember concluding at five years of age that Father Christmas didn't exist: I'm not questioning that St Niklas of wherever, on whom the Father Christmas legend is based, existed in the past, but I think I always knew the modern, red-coat Santa was a fairytale. My parents didn't try to persuade me otherwise, though for those first few years I did wake to find a sack of goodies had arrived unannounced on Christmas night. Not long after I remember my grandma taking me to a Santa's grotto in the local shopping mall. Firstly it struck me as odd that a stranger in disguise should ask me what I would like for Christmas. I probably requested lego. Even more odd was that he then proceeded to give me something totally different from my request, namely a very shoddy plastic rifle. Why ask me what I wanted if he had no intention of giving it to me? Why give me something I didn't like, and which didn't do anything (it wasn't anything fun, like a water pistol, just a bit of black plastic in the shape of a rifle)? As I look back at this now, I wonder if he was one of these depressed, estranged fathers or out-of-work actors, bitter about the hand life had dealt him, who gave all the kids toy rifles and found great entertainment in the image of dozens of small children running riot in the shopping centre with plastic artillery, like some junior battle re-enactment society. In any case, he wasn't Father Christmas, he was a very naughty boy.

I guess my suspicion of Father Christmas also stems from the fact that, to me, it makes much more sense that gifts would be exchanged between people who know and like each other, rather than being distributed by some abstract benefactor. At school, regular moral assertions from the teachers that it was "better to give than to receive" sat uncomfortably alongside the annual ritual of writing letters to Santa. The flipside to this is, of course, charitable giving, where the giving is done as an abstract concept and the giver's reward is to bask in the glow of their own benificence.

Now, of course, all these mysteries are solved in one fell swoop. All the letter-writing rituals and folklore are part of the conspiracy to keep ordinary people occupied while the incredible time-energy-warp is under way. And Sheffield's giant Grotto structure is, in fact, a gravitational refraction beacon that has been erected, and disguised as an entertaining quasi-natural feature, to facilitate the sucking of energy out of people and into Father Christmas. If we were to take direct action, dismantle the Grotto, poke Father Christmas with a stick through the ticket booth window, and cut down drastically on our eating, drinking and shopping, we just might be able to wrestle December out of his evil grasp.

On the other hand, we could work on tender submissions whilst nibbling mince pies and sipping sherry.

AW.

The heady whiff of nostalgia

In the past two days, I've suddenly been caught up in a whirl of emails from old friends from my time as an architecture student in Newcastle. Some of us haven't seen each other for 15 years, but enough of us still know one or two others that it becomes a bit like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon - we each know someone who has contact details for people we considered to be long-lost. Now there's talk of a reunion, and I'm getting quite excited by the idea.

The odd thing is, I seem to have been already indulging in nostalgic thoughts for a few weeks. It probably started with tidying the attic and finding stashes of old photographs. The slightly demoralising thing about this was that, for a long time, I considered myself to be a serious photographer, so everywhere I went I took lots of artfully composed pictures of buildings, streetscapes, landscapes, animals, sunsets, interesting roadsigns....you get the drift; and yet it's the badly-lit, alcohol-laden group snapshots of friends that beckon to be kept and treasured. Just as well Facebook didn't exist back then, otherwise my profile might as well have been called "pictures of places I've been to that you might have been to too."

Nostalgia stepped up a gear last week when I paid a final visit to live music at The Grapes, in Sheffield. My own bands have played there many times and I've lost count of the number of times I've lost count of the number of beers I've drunk there of an evening. Live music at The Grapes has not so much been a victim of progress (it has managed to laugh in the face of progress) but of the mundane - a change in the personal circumstances of the owners. Whatever the reasons, a dark room above a slightly seedy pub has long been the best place to see live bands at their most up-close, their most exposed to the audience, and their most captivating. Absolutely everyone who ever played in a band since the 1980s has played The Grapes, and its passing is a very sad moment.

Then came all this reunion stuff. I've long been suspicious of reunions, seeing them as a dangerous mix of finding out how little you actually had in common with people, and competing with them for how successful you've each been in the interim. However, thanks to the modern age of email, social networking etc, we already know what we've all been up to and, hopefully, we're all content with what we've done and happy for the others. And, much more than that, our explosion of emails is full of instant humour and banter, so the ice will be well and truly destroyed by the time we meet. It probably helps that architecture was one of those very intense courses, where for several years we spent more time with these people than with our families, and now, 15 years later, it's still easy to recall an inflexion in a voice, a shared moment of mirth, midnight oil-burning equally suffered and relished.

But perhaps the strangest piece of this nostalgic interlude has been snow-induced. My local neighbourhood is quite high on a hill, and we are in the grip of the biggest pre-Christmas cold snap for about 30 years. We have 15" (nearly 40cm) of snow here, and it keeps on coming. It's wonderfully picturesque, and when I hear someone complaining that it's "horrendous" because they can't dig their car out, I want to subject them to violence. I want to say, for God's sake, unless you're really ill and need the kind of medical attention that this weather obstructs, or you're genuinely poor and can't heat your home, then this is the exact opposite of horrendous. It's a magical, escapist world, where you can skip work, marvel at the snowflakes, throw missiles at your neighbours with impunity and, in the case of the students who live next door to me, ski to lectures.

Walking along the middle of a main road normally in thrall to the cars and buses, and seeing other people do the same, dragging their shopping home on sledges, laughing, hearing a hubbub of conversations because there's no vehicular traffic to drown it out, noticing how frenetically busy the local shops are when no-one can drive to the supermarkets.....It's amazing: all that has to happen is that water falls out of the sky frozen, instead of liquid, and our world is transformed into a magical, picturesque, and virtually car-free idyll. Suddenly, the principal role of men in society is to dig paths through this frozen water to help out old ladies, and play icy games with children and neighbours.

Before I know it, I'm being nostalgic for a time before our time - a world I never knew, where this kind of sociable, communal behaviour was commonplace; where an ASBO was administered with the back of a hand and horse-drawn vehicles used the warmth of the horseshit to de-ice the roads. I'm actually remembering fondly a past that I never experienced, and which probably didn't happen. A past where literacy and good sanitation were bourgeois fripperies, and Britain was a world power.

All because of a drop in temperature. So that's the answer: supporting local shops and services, driving less, being a good neighbour. It doesn't require swathes of policy and public spending, and partnership delivery initiatives, or whatever they'll be called next week. It just requires a massive snow machine.

See you at the sustainability practitioners' reunion dinner. In Lapland.

AW.

Solvitur Ambulando

I came across the Latin phrase "solvitur ambulando" - it is solved by walking - a couple of years ago, and as someone who has always taken pleasure and solace in walking this unsurprisingly had resonance for me. Then I forgot all about it, until this week.

I have often noticed how much better I feel when I am walking fairly long distances quite regularly. As a student in Newcastle I walked 10 miles most days: my flat was 2.5 miles from the university, so I walked there and back for lectures and then usually again to socialise in the evening. Most weekends a friend and I would go to the Coast or up to Hadrian's Wall, and walk then too. I had a succession of pairs of Dr Martens boots that clocked up several thousand miles each. I have never been fitter, nor more relaxed, before or since.

Back then I took it for granted: walking was a free mode of transport, and it was just something I did without really noticing. I only really noticed the magical powers of walking a few years later, when it played a big part in digging me out of an emotional trench. Since then I have had phases of walking every day, and phases when the habit has slipped, but I have absolutely no doubt that walking is pivotal to both my physical fitness and my mental wellbeing. I have noticed specific - and financially costable - benefits too: aside from saving on bus fares, I've noticed that a number of skeletal and nerve pains that normally put me on the physiotherapist's couch every few months almost vanish once I'm walking on average more than about 3 or 4 miles a day.

There is another huge advantage for me, which is that walking burns off the calories and toxins that characterise two of my other great loves, wine and cheese, both of which I consume to levels many people would think excessive.

Of course, not everyone can be expected to enjoy walking, but most people must have a comparable source of joy. There is quite a bit of news at the moment about Government trying to utilise an Index of Happiness. This is meeting with a mix of frustration from those who have long argued that happiness cannot be measured by economic indicators, and probably cannot - or should not - be quantified; and ridicule from those who think it all hippy nonsense. The latter group do have a point, though it pains me to say it, because of well-established correlations between relative income levels and key social indicators like access to health and education. In other words, the ability to pay for stuff is certainly a quality of life issue.

In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that "solvitur ambulando" could lead us to a pretty straightforward measure of happiness. Consider these two questions:

What is the thing in life you most enjoy doing?

What prevents you from doing this as much/often as you'd like?

Answering these questions wouldn't give a perfect measure of happiness, because having too much opportunity to do something you enjoy would tend to devalue it. Nevertheless, the more you think about them, the more useful these questions are. So long as you answer the questions honestly, they will reveal how you might wish to change your life to achieve greater happiness. For example, you might really enjoy making vault-loads of money, spending more time with your children, spending less time with your children, having casual affairs, getting drunk, writing poetry, raising money for charity, training for an Olympic gold medal, growing vegetables, foxhunting......The questions make no moral assumption about whether what gives you pleasure is wholesome or despicable, lucrative or frivolous. They can also get right to the heart of the barriers to your happiness, be they lack of time, lack of money, health problems, relationships, the postcode lottery or even, perhaps, the law.

Worth bearing in mind, before making a judgement about the legality of your preferred activity, that walking is not always legal (the Mass Trespass of 1926 being a notably unlawful stroll in the countryside), and much social progress has been made through protest, rebellion and direct action.

It is solved by walking.

AW.

Naked Ambition, or, “the future of sustainable access to airports”

I apologise in advance that this blog entry will probably give you more of an insight than you wished for into the inner workings of my brain....

We've all had those naked dreams: the ones where one minute you're minding your own business, doing normal things, and the next minute you discover you're naked, in public. You desperately attempt to avoid eye-contact with the disapproving throng, cover your embarrassment with a newspaper or, worse, a business card, and make a carefully timed dash for somewhere more secluded.

Quite how running as fast as possible would make a naked person stand out less in a crowd than if they sauntered will never be answered. Maybe the idea has infiltrated our subconscious from seeing streakers at sporting events, where speed is of the essence to maximise effect and postpone the inevitable rugby tackle from some burly, heavily-clad police.

Anyway, we've all had those dreams and I am no exception. Except that last night once such dream took an unexpected turn: rather than being ridiculed and mortified, I found, after a few minutes of the usual panic, that I became a cult figure, rather like those naked hikers that keep getting arrested. I still got some verbal abuse, but more often than not I just heard people saying, “Hey look, there's the naked guy”. Viewers of the unbearably popular TV series Friends will be relieved to hear that the word 'ugly' did not feature in these exclamations, but I won't take that personally either way.

Then came the really interesting and, I have to say, quite inspired part of the dream. I decided to use my new-found notoriety to do some good in the world - “put something back” as people often call it. I decided to set up a “pedestrian travel to airports” service, where passengers convene at convenient, city centre locations like bus stations or libraries, and are then escorted on foot to the local airport. By a naked man. Naturally, there was a small charge for this service, but think of all those car journeys to airports that could be saved, and all those tonnes of carbon emissions!

Of course, in the tradition of dreams, once the slightly unreal situation has been set up, the dreamer becomes an impartial observer, rather than a participant. So picture, if you will, the following scene. A sizeable group of sizeable American tourists has gathered at King's Cross station in London, ready to try out the new “Streakerbus” service that has started up between there and London Stansted Airport, from where they hope to fly to the next destination on their European tour. The service was recommended by Conde Naste as a 'uniquely, quintessentially English ideas that is right up-to-date in its attitude to environmental responsibility, yet steeped in a thousand years of travel history'. The tourists are mildly perplexed to find that their guide is stark naked, but after four days in London, little surprises them any more except the price of a bagel.

As the journey progresses, of course, they find that it is an epic adventure with a surprise at every turn. London Stansted turns out, inexplicably, to be nowhere near London, England, and after six days they're still walking. Since they turned off Holloway Road they haven't seen another coffee shop, nor even a fish and chip shop, so they're feeling quite disorientated. The small, plastic wheels on their large suitcases proved not to be up to the journey, and the convoy has now been joined by a small army of Big Issue vendors and out-of-work civil servants, recruited from outside Stoke Newington Job Centre, who are now acting as sherpas, carrying the suitcases on trolleys fashioned from stolen bicycles. When the main roads become too dangerous for such a modern-day caravan, the group takes to some long-distance footpaths along the valley of the River Lee, much of which is quite marshy, and some of the suitcases, plus one particularly cumbersome tourist, have to be abandoned for the greater good.

All the while, their pasty-fleshed guide marches along cheerily, pausing occasionally to extract a pebble from between his toes.

Eventually, after being thrown out of a youth hostel in Bishop's Stortford for being unfeasibly dirty and smelly, the now bedraggled, but substantially lighter, party of American tourists arrives at Stansted Airport. They are five days late for their flight, one person is missing, their sartorial elegance leaves much to be desired, they are totally disorientated (or, their own words, disoriented) and so desperate for caffeine that they might cause an international incident at any moment. In fact, they have all this in common with the rest of the passengers at check-in (apart from the Saudi-Arabians, who are immaculate, but rarely seen at Stansted) though they have brought with them a tale of an experience they'll never forget, but which no-one else will believe.

No wonder it was recommended by Conde Naste.

AW.

The Devil travels by bus

It was one of the few occasions when I wished I was a Tweeter.

I was on the bus, and we passed the front of Primark, where two police cars were positioned like beached whales on the pavement, their lights flashing, right against the shop's entrance doors. Two girls of about 19 were sitting immediately behind me and one said to the other, in a thick, Sheffield brogue, "Eh up, someone's bought summat again." The mixture of spontaneous wit and social commentary prompted me to text details of this event to my wife, and then to another friend. My wife's phone was switched off. The friend, however, replied quickly: "Bus?!!! That's the devil's mode of transport!"

"But the devil has the best tunes," I replied, reminding him of Lucifer's fabled good taste. I also hear that the devil wears Prada, which only goes to confirm that he hasn't shared a bus with me for some time.

As I mulled over this brief event, it occurred to me how splendid, and funny, it would be if the public service bus really was the devil's favoured mode of travel. A bus's average speed is about 7mph (11kph) so Satan's progress around the world would be pretty pitiful, certainly compared to that of Santa Claus - although this would at least give him plenty of time to weave his evil web around shopping-weary city folk. So one might argue that Old Nick was not hell-bent on efficiency. On the other hand, his reputation for suave moves and musical discernment might lend a much-needed air of coolness and style to a maligned means of movement. "As seen in Hell". "Devil-Endorsed". "Black Magic Bus". The advertising slogans would come thick and fast, a bit like buses about 30 minutes after the rush hour has subsided.

This same bus trip was also a revelation for me on another front. Finally, after at least two years of being vaguely aware of the facility, I registered that the bus stop I was waiting at was inviting me to send its identification number in a text message, whereby I could get real time bus times. So I did. Initially I was confused by a list of 5 buses all bearing the same destination and shown as being "1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute and 17 minutes away", respectively. However, when four buses arrived in convoy I realised the uncanny accuracy of the text service, and swore to use it regularly. Once I know how long it takes me to walk to a given bus stop, and I have stored the bus stop's ID number in my phone, I need never miss a bus again. So long as my phone has a signal, which it often doesn't.

Actually, my nearest bus stop is directly underneath a mobile phone mast, and next-door to a funeral parlour. So maybe the devil has also sussed how not to miss his bus.

I did once travel by bus through a housing estate in a New Town in Scotland, which I believe is where the term 'Godforesaken' was originally coined, and there were a number of people using that bus whose vitality was in some doubt. There is also the Greyhound bus in the excellent film Ghostworld, which may or may not be providing a shuttle service between this life and another. So maybe there is some mileage in this Devil-bus theory.

In any case, I'm a big fan of integrated transport. Wherever you're heading, missed connections are a pergatory best-avoided. As is the P&O Hull-Rotterdam ferry, but that's another story....

AW.

Circular Arguments

I bumped into an acquaintance this week who asked me to Blog more often. Buoyed up by the idea that someone out there might actually be reading this, I decided to oblige....

"This is a city built on the circular. So if you want to understand it, you have to get into that circular frame of mind. And that frame of mind is everywhere...... You refer to others in the same circle. You don't think outside the circle."

(Angus Lordie in "The World According to Bertie", by Alexander McCall Smith.

We often find ourselves saying, "We've come full circle". Indeed, it's a phrase that comes around again and again. Circles are mathematically pure, structurally strong, visually appealing. Circles are socially both inclusive and exclusive: "He mixes in certain circles".

In the worlds of design and systems, circles represent a more highly-evolved condition than lines. Closed-loop systems and feedbacks make for more efficient, more responsive operation - and this tends to be better for sustainability, too. A linear system has a productive output and a waste output, but in a closed-loop system there is, in theory at least, no waste.

Of course, there is also a negative language to contend with in terms of management and decision-making: "We're just going round in circles". "We're back where we started". "This is a circular argument". Linguistically we're making an assumption that, if we have gone around in a circle, we haven't made any progress.

Perhaps the problem is that we're getting hung up on travelling IN A CIRCULAR MOTION, whereas we should be thinking about travelling IN A CIRCULAR ENVIRONMENT. The area of land bounded by the M25 motorway is infinitely more varied and interesting than being on the road itself (although there is a whole other essay half-written in my head about roads....that's for another day). A circular walk is attractive over a point-to-point walk for three reasons: one, you know that there is your home, a railway station or a pub at both the start and end of it; two, you get to travel through places en route; three, you never have to turn back on yourself in order to reach your destination. It isn't the circular line itself that is of interest, but the sights, sounds and smells that lie either side of the line. In that example, it's worth noting that we can be just as interested in what is outside the circle as what's inside it or, put another way, what it is that the circle is travelling through.

We know that the world is round and that the universe is governed by circular forces. We are also familiar with the argument that life is not linear, but circular (we do call it a life-cycle, after all), and we can extrapolate from that that time is also circular. So, in terms of aspiring to make progress, in society, art, science, politics, whatever, the question we should really be asking is, "How do we want this to look next time it comes around?"

In the sphere of project management (note cunning use of circular language), it would be particularly interesting to move from linear planning to circular planning. Imagine a Gant Chart (sorry, I know, I loathe them too) where the end of the chart is actually back at the beginning. Yes, it would be possible to draw a circular Gant Chart, but would it be useful? We'd have to try it, to find out. More importantly, we could ask these questions:

1. Are we bound to travel all the way around the circle in order to complete the project, or can we make shortcuts within the circle?

2. If different project partners need to be at the same place in/on the circle at the same time, are there different arcs they could take that would intersect at the right points?

3. What is the operational landscape (time, resources, people, decisions) that the circle is travelling through?

4. What happens if someone goes off at a tangent?

5. How do we expect the start/end point to have changed when we get back there?

6. Do we plan to go round again?

This week'd homework is to try applying circular project planning to something you're currently working on. I'll see you back here next week, to find out how you got on.

AW

The Rebellious Ethic of Sustainability, or 'The Happy Addict'

I was reading recently an article from the Guardian by Adam Philips, a child psychologist, about the pursuit of happiness. What children need, he argues, is not to be happy but to be absorbed: happiness prevails when children are absorbed and interested in what they're doing.

Philips also recounts the story of a young patient who had been torturing animals. The child said that the power this gave him over the creatures made him feel really, momentarily alive - and he associated this ephemeral, horrifying feeling of vitality with happiness. And if we're honest, we can all recall a time of being very angry with someone or something, when the whole world takes on a peculiar intensity.

Mercifully, being angry doesn't make me happy. Nevertheless it is possible to understand how that fleeting intensity might be addictive. In fact, one could argue that all addictions are addictions to momentary experience and that, therefore, momentary experience is the element of the human condition that is addictive. Now here's a challenge: name a pursuit that generates momentary experience that is not, in some way or other, mortally (or morally) dangerous.

Is it the case that the whole point of momentary experience is that it blanks out any consideration of the past or future, and therefore of consequence? Are humans programmed to crave moments in life when they can forget about consequence, and escape the responsibilities of knowledge?

If we define 'functioning addicts' as those who are aware of their addiction, then these are people who utilise the momentary experience as escapism that helps them balance or manage the other, responsible side of their lives that faces up to its consequences. Obviously there is a danger that the pleasure of the escape becomes more attractive, on balance, than the alternative rewards of being in control, respected, responsible and alert to others' concerns. But so long as both aspects have comparable, complementary attractions, then there need be nothing wrong with being a functioning addict.

The trouble is, of course, that society appeals to people to limit their addictive habits by appealing to them to 'take responsibility' - for the effects they have on their health, relationships, and the dangers they pose to themselves and others. Yet often it is the burden of responsibility that the addict is running from. The trick, therefore, is surely not increase people's fears of what happens when they don't behave responsibly, but to make the responsible aspect of their lives a more attractive place to be, so that they instinctively re-balance in the right direction.

The odds are stacked against this being achievable. Not only is 'responsible life' a fairly troublesome place for many people, delaing with financial worries, inadequate housing, unruly children, sick relatives and so on, but the same political and media circus that criticises our irresponsibility also contrives to make the responsible world seem so fractious, tense, gloomy and ultimately doomed that there's very little temptation to get any more involved in it than we already are.

Surely this comes back to Adam Philips's happiness argument. Making the responsible world a happy place might be unrealistic, but making it an interesting place must be entirely possible. If we found living responsibly, empathically and sustainably an interesting, absorbing activity, instead of a chore, then we'd want to spend more time doing it.

Recently a commentator drew on the great environmentalist and technophile Douglas Adams, in countering claims that online social networking was destroying meaningful communication. This argument ran that for a relatively short period of humanity communication has been a one-way street, in which the printing, radio and television ages have broadcast messages to anyone who will listen, but done very little listening in return. I'm doing this now: I have no idea whether anyone will ever read this! What's more, professional journalists always tend to choose their own version of reality and find research and opinion to back it up. By contrast, for all its amateurism, social networking represents the globalisation of one-to-one and many-to-many conversations, with a whole new demand for self-regulating etiquette that people are clumsily learning from scratch without teachers or precedent. And they're finding it absorbing, and yes, addictive.

Whenever a social networking site loses its magic, it happens because the 'broadcasters' - advertisers, record companies, news corporations, have taken over the space that site occupies in people's lives. The public simply zone out and move onto another network.

Uncomfortable though this may be, especially for professionals, the solutions to so many big, intractable challenges, such as fragmented societies, terrorism, unsustainability, anti-social behaviour, may well lie in a world of uncontrolled conversations, momentary experience and addiction. The conversations in social networking cover the full range of views, from cringingly right-on to unpalatably right-wing, from politically correct to offensively hilarious. But I'm pretty sure one factor unifying them all will be a disdain for authority. Most people are quietly rebellious.

Making the world sustainable is not about promoting responsible, clean, well-mannered living. To live more sustainably, more healthily, more ethically, more frugally: these need to be the stuff of everyday acts of quiet rebellion and casual addiction. That is where fun, friendship, creativity and entrepreneurism are born. Ants can be well-organised, but only humans can enjoy being rebellious.

Psychocycle

I've recently become a cyclist. By this I mean that although I've probably owned one bike or another, on and off, for about half my adult life, I've never used one as a mode of regular transport until the last couple of months. My motivations were partly about getting more exercise, but also very practical. I have been making regular journeys recently for which bike is definitely the best option: walking takes too long, the bus is no quicker and costs a fortune, driving means finding somewhere to park.

Today the word 'psychogeography' came back to me via the radio, and it's timely, because there's definitely a psychogeography for each mode of travel. Cycling puts you in curious netherworld between pedestrians and drivers. Neither pavements nor roads are particularly well-suited to cycling, and the best way to negotiate a city by bike is to use bits of both. You can plod around with and between pedestrians, or put your foot down and keep up with the belching traffic. You have to be on high alert. There is always a risk that drivers won't make allowances for you, but a much greater tendency for pedestrians not to notice you and walk out in front of you, so you have to do all the noticing. More specifically, you learn a new knowledge of your city based on which gear to be in for which gradient, which streets to avoid because they're too steep to climb, where the dropped kerbs are, where the potentially capsizing potholes are, which traffic lights to approach slowly and which to hurtle towards at full tilt, and so on. Gradually you realise that you carry different mental maps of the same place, depending on the mode of travel you happen to be using at the time.

Today's really interesting experience has been going back to walking for a day, after several days of cycling. Suddenly it dawns on you that while walking is mode of travel, it is also a way of living - in a way that no other mode can really live up to - because only when you're walking can you really notice the world around you as space, rather than as route. You can observe, for example, how the demolition of a building has opened up a new vista of a street, and let a little extra light into that part of the city. That sets you off wondering what will happen to the demolition site. The law of averages suggests that within a few months there'll be a building of even less architectural merit than its predecessor and with at least as much skill at cutting out views and light. What if it were remodelled as a public space? What would the space be used for? How would the city make such a space an economically viable proposition? Would it make the city a better, more civilised place, or would it become a haven for shabby fellows contemplating their fate with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine? Is building more shiny buildings, hiring armies of high-visibility 'city ambassadors' and imposing no-drink zones really an effective way to treat the Buckfasters?

Back to the reassuring whirr of chains, gears and tyres. Enough contemplation.

AW.

Youth of today, eh?

I'm currently reading Consumer Kids: how big business is grooming our children for profit, by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn. The premise is that a range of companies selling things kids tend to like, for example sugary foods, clothes and computer games are being ever more inventive in worming their way into children's lives. Particularly useful to them seems to be developing loyalty to brands as soon as, or even before, children become consumers, so that these early habits continue to influence their buying choices when they get older.

It's entirely plausible and, I have no doubt, true. The bit that trouble me is, can we say for sure if this is a good, bad, or indifferent development in society?

The authors seem confident that it's a bad idea to condition children so early as consumers. But what if we were conditioning them to be sustainable consumers? Surely it's the principle that sustainability thinkers have been pushing for years. Get kids into the idea that wasteful products, excessive food miles, over-packaging and so on are bad things, and recycling, renewable energy and local produce are good things, and walking and cycling are cooler than driving. Then these values will stay with them as they grow up and gradually society will become more sustainable on a generational basis. Furthermore, they can pester their parents and grandparents to be more sustainable too. Good? Good.

So here's the rub: if the brainwashing of children was being pursued for morally splendid consumer choices, we'd probably be quite relaxed. But consumer choices that skirt the suburbs of repugnance are highly lucrative, and therefore are the ones more prone to trying out a spot of expensive subliminal messaging. In other words, we're making a value judgement as to what children should be brainwashed about, rather than whether or not brainwashing is a good idea.

I'm not sure it stacks up. I'll just get another [insert branded sugary drink here] and then see if I can work it out.

AW.