Poor little critter. Anya's hand is now looking much better - the suppurating quality is gone, for instance - but it still looks like she's rubbed it in sandpaper.
Of course, you'd never know this from the way she behaves. She's as happy as ever, pretty much - a bit whingey at times, as I would be if I had an infected hand, but mostly all smiles and bounces and kicks.
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Boundaries, boundaries
I remember reading in some parenting book that 10 months is the time to introduce kids to the concept of "no". I have to say I've not felt much need for it yet - she's done very little over her short life that I've not found delightful or, in the case of filled nappies, at least blameless.
Clearly though, with the discovery of independence through crawling etc she's acquiring the potential to get to places we don't want her to go. And though that can mostly be corrected by picking her up for a cuddle, she's simultaneously starting to discover that she can influence the world in less pleasing ways.
One way that this has started to manifest is in tantrums in miniature at the dinner table. Thinking back to these events, I think they're often as much inspired by our tardiness in letting her get down and get back to playing as anything else. Adults, being too analytical for their own good, tend to make up a bowl of food and think that their baby hasn't finished eating until the bowl is empty. So when she looks like she wants to be let down after half a bowl, we tend to sit it out a bit and hope she'll get her appetite back once the cat walks out of her line of sight. This can lead to howls of frustration from Anya, and I can see her point: adults vary our meal times and sizes, so why shouldn't babies do the same?
All the same, a tantrumette is a tantrumette no matter how justified, and we have had a few. It's been suggested to us that the ideal way to deal with this is ignoring (on the rather flattering principle that nothing is more precious to a baby than their parents' attention) and I like the fact that this provides a way of dealing with negative behaviour that isn't negative itself. But boy, is it hard to get right.
For one thing, it's hard to know when to stop. Anya starts screaming; I pretend to scrutinise the fridge door. Anya stops screaming; I look at her with a big rewarding smile. Result? Anya gives me a look that says: "Now that I have your attention..." and starts screaming again. She's 10 months old and she's outsmarting me already!
For another thing, it sorta raises the bar for normal attention. To give your ignoring weight, it must be sharply, unmistakably different from your normal behaviour. But when I'm fixing Anya's breakfast and my breakfast and feeding the cat and getting ready for work, I'm probably not the greatest conversational partner. This is one of those skills everyone eventually masters: talking to your kid with your brain stem only, while your higher cognitive skills are focused on keeping all those parent plates spinning. I'm sure it will come, but I haven't quite got it yet.
Clearly though, with the discovery of independence through crawling etc she's acquiring the potential to get to places we don't want her to go. And though that can mostly be corrected by picking her up for a cuddle, she's simultaneously starting to discover that she can influence the world in less pleasing ways.
One way that this has started to manifest is in tantrums in miniature at the dinner table. Thinking back to these events, I think they're often as much inspired by our tardiness in letting her get down and get back to playing as anything else. Adults, being too analytical for their own good, tend to make up a bowl of food and think that their baby hasn't finished eating until the bowl is empty. So when she looks like she wants to be let down after half a bowl, we tend to sit it out a bit and hope she'll get her appetite back once the cat walks out of her line of sight. This can lead to howls of frustration from Anya, and I can see her point: adults vary our meal times and sizes, so why shouldn't babies do the same?
All the same, a tantrumette is a tantrumette no matter how justified, and we have had a few. It's been suggested to us that the ideal way to deal with this is ignoring (on the rather flattering principle that nothing is more precious to a baby than their parents' attention) and I like the fact that this provides a way of dealing with negative behaviour that isn't negative itself. But boy, is it hard to get right.
For one thing, it's hard to know when to stop. Anya starts screaming; I pretend to scrutinise the fridge door. Anya stops screaming; I look at her with a big rewarding smile. Result? Anya gives me a look that says: "Now that I have your attention..." and starts screaming again. She's 10 months old and she's outsmarting me already!
For another thing, it sorta raises the bar for normal attention. To give your ignoring weight, it must be sharply, unmistakably different from your normal behaviour. But when I'm fixing Anya's breakfast and my breakfast and feeding the cat and getting ready for work, I'm probably not the greatest conversational partner. This is one of those skills everyone eventually masters: talking to your kid with your brain stem only, while your higher cognitive skills are focused on keeping all those parent plates spinning. I'm sure it will come, but I haven't quite got it yet.
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Poor sore paw
Anya is of an age where she's getting everywhere and is in everything. One result of this is that her hitherto blemish-free epidermis is getting into its first few scrapes.
The one that's bothering her at the moment cropped up out of nowhere on Sunday morning. It looks absolutely horrific: two patches of what looks like broken blister on her right hand, together at least as big as a 5p or 5c piece. The top layer of skin is worn away, and that below looks damp and painful, with the whole thing surrounded by an angry red halo of inflammation. But so far it bothers Anya far less than it does us, and she's been absolutely heroic in calmly letting us clean the thing.
The worst bit is that we don't know what caused it, or even what it is. It looks like a very nasty burn, but Anya's not shy about telling us she's unhappy so it's weird that we didn't notice that happening.
There was a moment on Sunday morning when she fell over close to the radiator and got very upset from the tumble flat on her back. I might have mistaken burn-crying for fall-crying; but if her hand brushed against the radiator it would only have been for a split second as she fell, and I can't see that you could get a burn that nasty, that quickly. Furthermore, it doesn't seem sore now, and I'd have thought a burn that bad would still be painful.
We saw the doctor yesterday, who noticed she had a temperature and thought she might have picked up impetigo - quite a common if yucky skin condition among toddlers. So we got some ointment and antibiotics and we're dosing and cleaning and dressing the poor girl multiple times a day, and we took a swab which should bring back results later this week.
The bright note in all this is just what a ray of sunshine Anya has been. She has been more whingey than usual and we were both a little strung out when we got back from the doctor yesterday, but her good nature and humour shines through all the time. At the doctor's we braced ourselves for a fit when she took the swab, which is meant to be quite painful; but Anya was a complete stoic, and even burst into peals of laughter a few seconds after when she noticed that the doctor's box of tissues had a picture of puppies on it. The doctor was so charmed that she said we should take the near-empty box away for her. Wheeling her round the pharmacy afterwards, I caught her absently pulling out the remaining tissues and dropping them contentedly on the floor like a bored flower girl; and cracked up laughing myself.
The one that's bothering her at the moment cropped up out of nowhere on Sunday morning. It looks absolutely horrific: two patches of what looks like broken blister on her right hand, together at least as big as a 5p or 5c piece. The top layer of skin is worn away, and that below looks damp and painful, with the whole thing surrounded by an angry red halo of inflammation. But so far it bothers Anya far less than it does us, and she's been absolutely heroic in calmly letting us clean the thing.
The worst bit is that we don't know what caused it, or even what it is. It looks like a very nasty burn, but Anya's not shy about telling us she's unhappy so it's weird that we didn't notice that happening.
There was a moment on Sunday morning when she fell over close to the radiator and got very upset from the tumble flat on her back. I might have mistaken burn-crying for fall-crying; but if her hand brushed against the radiator it would only have been for a split second as she fell, and I can't see that you could get a burn that nasty, that quickly. Furthermore, it doesn't seem sore now, and I'd have thought a burn that bad would still be painful.
We saw the doctor yesterday, who noticed she had a temperature and thought she might have picked up impetigo - quite a common if yucky skin condition among toddlers. So we got some ointment and antibiotics and we're dosing and cleaning and dressing the poor girl multiple times a day, and we took a swab which should bring back results later this week.
The bright note in all this is just what a ray of sunshine Anya has been. She has been more whingey than usual and we were both a little strung out when we got back from the doctor yesterday, but her good nature and humour shines through all the time. At the doctor's we braced ourselves for a fit when she took the swab, which is meant to be quite painful; but Anya was a complete stoic, and even burst into peals of laughter a few seconds after when she noticed that the doctor's box of tissues had a picture of puppies on it. The doctor was so charmed that she said we should take the near-empty box away for her. Wheeling her round the pharmacy afterwards, I caught her absently pulling out the remaining tissues and dropping them contentedly on the floor like a bored flower girl; and cracked up laughing myself.
Nimbys have a point
Matt Yglesias is always interesting to read on urban issues, but I think in this post he draws too long a bow.
He's responding to some people complaining about a Mexican restaurant planning to open in their Washington, DC neighbourhood, with an outdoor area serving drinks till 3am. His argument - that the interests of people likely to be employed by the business, and the council amenities likely to be funded from its tax revenues, should come before those of Nimby neighbours - does a good job of staking out a sort of left-libertarian stance on these issues. But I think it misses why these sorts of decisions are so controversial.
Pretty much every planning decision involves a transfer of property. Land and property are valued according to their context: bulldoze that park and build an incinerator, and you can be pretty sure that both homes and businesses in the area will lose value. We talk a lot about the problem of negative equity in the wake of a credit bubble, but in many cases these sorts of decision can wipe out someone's equity even in a stable market, and certainly leave them paying over the odds for their property thanks to the stroke of a planner's pen. Of course, not everyone loses out: the incinerator-owner gets to upgrade previously unsuitable land, and can hope for higher margins as a result of her reduced property costs.
The same goes for someone who wants to build a house extension that will overshadow their neighbour's garden, someone who wants to build a coalmine in the middle of a farming district, or someone who wants to double the size of their shopping centre in a residential area (all cases I know of around Sydney at the moment). Property, mostly in the form of land value, is being transferred from one group to another via the planning system.
I'm not saying this should never happen. Clearly Nimbyism has unfair targets as well as fair ones. But listening to the fuss made by large, wealthy institutions like the mining industry when a government suggests raising their taxes, it strikes me that Nimbys are mostly a small-scale version of the same thing: people complain when governments reduce their wealth.
The main difference between Nimbys and major business lobbies is mostly one of influence. Peak lobby groups have managed to shift the tax burden down the income scale in recent decades, cutting top marginal tax rates despite the fact that more progressive taxation is wildly popular. The same groups are frequently on the non-Nimby side of planning disputes. And the trend across numerous countries is to take more of these decisions out of local hands and give them to central and regional governments, who are more likely to back the big end of town.
I don't see Nimbyism as the main problem here. For the most part I think Nimbys are the little sling-throwers in these David and Goliath battles. Mostly I think they have a sound case for their objections. Not always a winning case - I agree with the point that many developments should go ahead for the broader public benefits, whatever the neighbours think. But they're cases that deserve to be heard on their merits, rather than dismissed out of hand as obstructionism and resistance to progress.
(For the record: I don't own a house, so I haven't got a dog in this particular fight)
He's responding to some people complaining about a Mexican restaurant planning to open in their Washington, DC neighbourhood, with an outdoor area serving drinks till 3am. His argument - that the interests of people likely to be employed by the business, and the council amenities likely to be funded from its tax revenues, should come before those of Nimby neighbours - does a good job of staking out a sort of left-libertarian stance on these issues. But I think it misses why these sorts of decisions are so controversial.
Pretty much every planning decision involves a transfer of property. Land and property are valued according to their context: bulldoze that park and build an incinerator, and you can be pretty sure that both homes and businesses in the area will lose value. We talk a lot about the problem of negative equity in the wake of a credit bubble, but in many cases these sorts of decision can wipe out someone's equity even in a stable market, and certainly leave them paying over the odds for their property thanks to the stroke of a planner's pen. Of course, not everyone loses out: the incinerator-owner gets to upgrade previously unsuitable land, and can hope for higher margins as a result of her reduced property costs.
The same goes for someone who wants to build a house extension that will overshadow their neighbour's garden, someone who wants to build a coalmine in the middle of a farming district, or someone who wants to double the size of their shopping centre in a residential area (all cases I know of around Sydney at the moment). Property, mostly in the form of land value, is being transferred from one group to another via the planning system.
I'm not saying this should never happen. Clearly Nimbyism has unfair targets as well as fair ones. But listening to the fuss made by large, wealthy institutions like the mining industry when a government suggests raising their taxes, it strikes me that Nimbys are mostly a small-scale version of the same thing: people complain when governments reduce their wealth.
The main difference between Nimbys and major business lobbies is mostly one of influence. Peak lobby groups have managed to shift the tax burden down the income scale in recent decades, cutting top marginal tax rates despite the fact that more progressive taxation is wildly popular. The same groups are frequently on the non-Nimby side of planning disputes. And the trend across numerous countries is to take more of these decisions out of local hands and give them to central and regional governments, who are more likely to back the big end of town.
I don't see Nimbyism as the main problem here. For the most part I think Nimbys are the little sling-throwers in these David and Goliath battles. Mostly I think they have a sound case for their objections. Not always a winning case - I agree with the point that many developments should go ahead for the broader public benefits, whatever the neighbours think. But they're cases that deserve to be heard on their merits, rather than dismissed out of hand as obstructionism and resistance to progress.
(For the record: I don't own a house, so I haven't got a dog in this particular fight)
Monday, 27 June 2011
Lobby madness
That last post got me thinking: probably the best argument in favour of agricultural protectionism is that it keeps farming as a small business.
After all, farmers are basically commodities producers, and with a few significant expections (George Soros, Marc Faber) small businesses and the commodity trade don't go hand in hand. It's simply too risky to bet the family home on the next season's crop yield. Under normal conditions, farmers would be like professional gamblers, only with fertiliser and tractor costs thrown in. Not a good model for a stable life.
The world seems to have come up with two solutions to this: financial derivatives, which were developed to help the US midwest's grain and livestock farmers to get a steady price for their products and pass the volatility risk on to speculators; and subsidies, which protect farmers from dips in the market.
Small farmers do use derivatives surprisingly regularly, but I think it's tricky enough as a market that they wouldn't survive against the Wall Street rocket scientists in a state of nature. Which suggests that taking away the subsidies would see farmers gradually give up and turn their land over to people with the capital and appetite for risk to take on the inherent volatility of the industry: big business.
The outcome of that would, I think, be something like the US farm system. Agribusiness concerns like Cargill and Bunge would become very dominant, but this would do little to diminish the lobbying power of farmers. If anything, wedding big business funds with the persistent popular perception that farmers are a bunch of salt-of-the-earth hayseeds would produce a lobbying machine of even more awesome might than we have at the moment.
Look at the US; not only does it still subsidize farming: it does it to a lavish extent in the teeth of a brutal deficit-cutting frenzy. At the same time that Congress is cutting nutritional requirements from school meals for poor children, it has renewed a program paying $150m a year to Brazilian cotton farmers. This was introduced after Brazil successfully sued the US at the WTO over its cotton subsidy program; in settlement of the suit, rather than give up its own farm subsidies the US agreed to start funding Brazil's as well.
I don't know that eliminating subsidies would automatically hyperpower the farm lobby, but my impression from looking as other industry lobbies is that ones representing industries with a small number of very big businesses - oil, finance, mining - tend to be a lot stronger than those with large numbers of smaller business members - farming, construction, retail. Given that I think business lobbies generally have too much political influence, I'd much rather have the latter than the former.
After all, farmers are basically commodities producers, and with a few significant expections (George Soros, Marc Faber) small businesses and the commodity trade don't go hand in hand. It's simply too risky to bet the family home on the next season's crop yield. Under normal conditions, farmers would be like professional gamblers, only with fertiliser and tractor costs thrown in. Not a good model for a stable life.
The world seems to have come up with two solutions to this: financial derivatives, which were developed to help the US midwest's grain and livestock farmers to get a steady price for their products and pass the volatility risk on to speculators; and subsidies, which protect farmers from dips in the market.
Small farmers do use derivatives surprisingly regularly, but I think it's tricky enough as a market that they wouldn't survive against the Wall Street rocket scientists in a state of nature. Which suggests that taking away the subsidies would see farmers gradually give up and turn their land over to people with the capital and appetite for risk to take on the inherent volatility of the industry: big business.
The outcome of that would, I think, be something like the US farm system. Agribusiness concerns like Cargill and Bunge would become very dominant, but this would do little to diminish the lobbying power of farmers. If anything, wedding big business funds with the persistent popular perception that farmers are a bunch of salt-of-the-earth hayseeds would produce a lobbying machine of even more awesome might than we have at the moment.
Look at the US; not only does it still subsidize farming: it does it to a lavish extent in the teeth of a brutal deficit-cutting frenzy. At the same time that Congress is cutting nutritional requirements from school meals for poor children, it has renewed a program paying $150m a year to Brazilian cotton farmers. This was introduced after Brazil successfully sued the US at the WTO over its cotton subsidy program; in settlement of the suit, rather than give up its own farm subsidies the US agreed to start funding Brazil's as well.
I don't know that eliminating subsidies would automatically hyperpower the farm lobby, but my impression from looking as other industry lobbies is that ones representing industries with a small number of very big businesses - oil, finance, mining - tend to be a lot stronger than those with large numbers of smaller business members - farming, construction, retail. Given that I think business lobbies generally have too much political influence, I'd much rather have the latter than the former.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Totally bananas
We did the weekly shop today and so I got a bunch of bananas - currently an essential part of Anya's breakfast. There were five of them and it cost A$15 - or about £2 per banana.
There's a good, bad reason for this. Cyclone Yasi, the massive storm that slammed into north Queensland earlier this year, wiped out 99% of Australia's banana crop. If it had flattened that extra 1%, we wouldn't be able to buy them at any price, because Australia doesn't import fresh bananas. None Nada.
The official reasoning for this is that Australia's environment is so unique and disease-free that the importation of a foreign banana could beget an environmental disaster of cane toad-style proportions. As a result, Australia's quarantine policy - all the airport theatre of contrabanding the apple from your airline meal and pest-spraying your trainers - is wildly popular across the political spectrum.
Clearly there's some law of nature that demands that every rich country come up with some excuse to funnel money to its farm sector. The EU and US do it through subsidies and tax breaks; Australia does it through thinly-disguised protectionism.
The quarantine argument is just bogus: a couple of years back the WTO declared there were no biological grounds for Australia's century-long ban on New Zealand apples; but these cases take years so that ruling didn't exactly open the floodgates. Furthermore, if we really want to preserve Australia's unique ecosystem, about the best thing we could do would be to introduce a series of superbugs that would wipe out all these introduced species that we use to feed ourselves.
The more honest justification is that some hypothetical disease might make agriculture less productive, which will ultimately harm the livelihoods of farmers. I think that risk is exaggerated but it's at least honest about what is going on: this is industrial policy for the farm sector. Keeping out foreign bananas means Australian farmers are better-off, just as keeping out foreign widget-makers would make Australian widget-makers better off.
The question then comes whether this is a price worth paying. Changing the policy would likely impose hefty costs on a small vocal group - banana farmers - while keeping it in place imposes a slight cost on a large, voiceless group: grocery shoppers. Across a whole basket of groceries, this means Australians generally pay too much for fresh fruit and veg, and probably poorer Australians find it particularly difficult; but we're geographically isolated so I'm not sure that the surplus cost is that great.
In principle, this situation is unfair: firstly because farmers are getting a special subsidy, and secondly because it's paid for regressively through people's shopping baskets. But I'm not sure anyone except me and a few like-minded weirdos cares very much, so I can see that if I was a politician I would leave the whole situation well alone. And that, in microcosm, explains a lot about why principled political change is usually so difficult.
There's a good, bad reason for this. Cyclone Yasi, the massive storm that slammed into north Queensland earlier this year, wiped out 99% of Australia's banana crop. If it had flattened that extra 1%, we wouldn't be able to buy them at any price, because Australia doesn't import fresh bananas. None Nada.
The official reasoning for this is that Australia's environment is so unique and disease-free that the importation of a foreign banana could beget an environmental disaster of cane toad-style proportions. As a result, Australia's quarantine policy - all the airport theatre of contrabanding the apple from your airline meal and pest-spraying your trainers - is wildly popular across the political spectrum.
Clearly there's some law of nature that demands that every rich country come up with some excuse to funnel money to its farm sector. The EU and US do it through subsidies and tax breaks; Australia does it through thinly-disguised protectionism.
The quarantine argument is just bogus: a couple of years back the WTO declared there were no biological grounds for Australia's century-long ban on New Zealand apples; but these cases take years so that ruling didn't exactly open the floodgates. Furthermore, if we really want to preserve Australia's unique ecosystem, about the best thing we could do would be to introduce a series of superbugs that would wipe out all these introduced species that we use to feed ourselves.
The more honest justification is that some hypothetical disease might make agriculture less productive, which will ultimately harm the livelihoods of farmers. I think that risk is exaggerated but it's at least honest about what is going on: this is industrial policy for the farm sector. Keeping out foreign bananas means Australian farmers are better-off, just as keeping out foreign widget-makers would make Australian widget-makers better off.
The question then comes whether this is a price worth paying. Changing the policy would likely impose hefty costs on a small vocal group - banana farmers - while keeping it in place imposes a slight cost on a large, voiceless group: grocery shoppers. Across a whole basket of groceries, this means Australians generally pay too much for fresh fruit and veg, and probably poorer Australians find it particularly difficult; but we're geographically isolated so I'm not sure that the surplus cost is that great.
In principle, this situation is unfair: firstly because farmers are getting a special subsidy, and secondly because it's paid for regressively through people's shopping baskets. But I'm not sure anyone except me and a few like-minded weirdos cares very much, so I can see that if I was a politician I would leave the whole situation well alone. And that, in microcosm, explains a lot about why principled political change is usually so difficult.
In the deep midwinter
But right now, it's 4pm, 20C, and we're hanging out in the park under the glorious sun.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Security bunny
Like Peanuts' Linus, Anya has become inseperable over the past few weeks from a security object.
This is supposedly part of the whole separation anxiety thing. As such, it's quite a good problem to have as it's seemingly the only aspect of separation anxiety she's taken on. Some kids scream when they're away from their parents, hide and cry when they meet new people, and end up having to be carried constantly. Whereas Anya is pretty content as long as she's got a hand on her favourite bunny.
The original has a pink handkerchief body and a fairly realistic head, and was given to us by the mother of an old friend of Kate's. We started giving it to her at night a few months ago as we weaned her from the swaddle, and now she won't sleep without it. Sometimes, putting her to bed, she will cry for longer than usual and on checking her we discover that she's managed to fling bunny out of the cot - in which circumstances sleep is clearly out of the question.
Over the past few weeks, this attachment has migrated to awake time as well. When we pick her out of the cot after a sleep, bunny will be clamped firmly in one hand. Sit her in her high chair for breakfast, and you'd better make sure that bunny is scrunched on the table opposite to provide her with a witty and intelligent dining companion. This morning I was crawling around on the sofa with her, trying to stop her falling off, when she climbed down quite determinedly, grabbed bunny off the floor where she'd been last dropped, and climbed back on the sofa to return to whatever it was she was doing.
While we were over in the UK, Kate very presciently decided to order some identical back-up bunnies online. When I found that she'd bought two, my initial reaction was to think it was overkill--how long does it take to clean a machine-washable bunny? But in practice, a 10-month old with a fanatical devotion to a toy rabbit can get it remarkably mucky remarkably quickly, while still wanting to chew on its mashed-broccolli-stained nose. Two back-up bunnies now seems only just enough.
My only concern about this is that some day, toddling through the house with bunny in one hand, she might come upon the other two bunnies drying on the rack. That doesn't bear thinking about: like some Twilight Zone episode for babies.
This is supposedly part of the whole separation anxiety thing. As such, it's quite a good problem to have as it's seemingly the only aspect of separation anxiety she's taken on. Some kids scream when they're away from their parents, hide and cry when they meet new people, and end up having to be carried constantly. Whereas Anya is pretty content as long as she's got a hand on her favourite bunny.
The original has a pink handkerchief body and a fairly realistic head, and was given to us by the mother of an old friend of Kate's. We started giving it to her at night a few months ago as we weaned her from the swaddle, and now she won't sleep without it. Sometimes, putting her to bed, she will cry for longer than usual and on checking her we discover that she's managed to fling bunny out of the cot - in which circumstances sleep is clearly out of the question.
Over the past few weeks, this attachment has migrated to awake time as well. When we pick her out of the cot after a sleep, bunny will be clamped firmly in one hand. Sit her in her high chair for breakfast, and you'd better make sure that bunny is scrunched on the table opposite to provide her with a witty and intelligent dining companion. This morning I was crawling around on the sofa with her, trying to stop her falling off, when she climbed down quite determinedly, grabbed bunny off the floor where she'd been last dropped, and climbed back on the sofa to return to whatever it was she was doing.
While we were over in the UK, Kate very presciently decided to order some identical back-up bunnies online. When I found that she'd bought two, my initial reaction was to think it was overkill--how long does it take to clean a machine-washable bunny? But in practice, a 10-month old with a fanatical devotion to a toy rabbit can get it remarkably mucky remarkably quickly, while still wanting to chew on its mashed-broccolli-stained nose. Two back-up bunnies now seems only just enough.
My only concern about this is that some day, toddling through the house with bunny in one hand, she might come upon the other two bunnies drying on the rack. That doesn't bear thinking about: like some Twilight Zone episode for babies.
Friday, 24 June 2011
Stand, there's a midget standing tall*
I've been missing my usual dose of Anya with Kate and her in Wauchope yesterday, so I'm pretty stoked that it's the weekend and I'm going to get a whole two days with my darlings.
I'm told the standing is advancing pretty rapidly. There's more pulling up, more standing-from-sitting, more generally standing around gazing around the room like someone waiting for a toddler-sized cartoon bus. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly she picks these things up: I have to pinch myself to remember that at the start of May she was barely crawling.
Of course, I'm sure there's a long road ahead before she's walking properly. You can't stand till you know how to keep your centre of gravity between your feet; but you can't walk till you can move it out in front of you, and catch yourself before you topple over. That seems a fair bit harder. But still, she's heading there. Ask me how she's progressing and I won't be able to resist the pun: "Baby steps, baby steps."
*The title is a reference to a cringeworthy line in Sly & the Family Stone's civil rights anthem "Stand!" Kate and I have been humming it all week every time Anya pulled up. I imagine some angry politicised midget answering the line by saying they "don't want to be judged by society's height-ist biases".
My other favourite line demonstrating that 60s soul singers didn't get the whole smorgasbord of minority rights issues at the first instance is from Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions' "They don't know": "They don't know that every brother is a leader / And they don't know, every sister is a breeder." Er ... right.
I'm told the standing is advancing pretty rapidly. There's more pulling up, more standing-from-sitting, more generally standing around gazing around the room like someone waiting for a toddler-sized cartoon bus. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly she picks these things up: I have to pinch myself to remember that at the start of May she was barely crawling.
Of course, I'm sure there's a long road ahead before she's walking properly. You can't stand till you know how to keep your centre of gravity between your feet; but you can't walk till you can move it out in front of you, and catch yourself before you topple over. That seems a fair bit harder. But still, she's heading there. Ask me how she's progressing and I won't be able to resist the pun: "Baby steps, baby steps."
*The title is a reference to a cringeworthy line in Sly & the Family Stone's civil rights anthem "Stand!" Kate and I have been humming it all week every time Anya pulled up. I imagine some angry politicised midget answering the line by saying they "don't want to be judged by society's height-ist biases".
My other favourite line demonstrating that 60s soul singers didn't get the whole smorgasbord of minority rights issues at the first instance is from Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions' "They don't know": "They don't know that every brother is a leader / And they don't know, every sister is a breeder." Er ... right.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
In defence of Racist Raquel
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZbCsrzrSY&w=560&h=349]
There's a genuinely interesting reality TV show being broadcast in Australia this week called "Go Back To Where You Came From". The concept is pretty simple: get six anti-refugee xenophobes to take the same journey that refugees endure to get to Australia, and see if their views budge at all.
Every reality show has to have its Simon Cowell, and so the producers must have been thrilled when Raquel Moore walked into the casting session. A self-professed racist who comes over as a white trash Victoria Beckham wannabe (wearing false fingernails and Rachel Zoe sunglasses to a Kenyan refugee camp, etc), she is an obvious hate figure whose every sneer was being pulled apart on Twitter tonight while the show was being broadcast. The closest she gets to an argument in her defence is to say: "This isn't my problem. However awful these people's lives are, they're stuck with it and there's nothing for me to do about it."
I personally found her behaviour repellent--as Kate pointed while we were watching it, the lack of empathy at times appeared to be bordering on the psychopathic. But it also strikes me that it was very close to one of the main theories of international relations--so-called foreign policy realism. This is the view that however awful the humanitarian situation in another country, a government should not get involved unless its own national interests are directly at stake. Essentially, "This isn't my problem. However awful these people's lives are, they're stuck with it and there's nothing for me to do about it." But writ large.
It's very easy to comfort ourselves with a feeling of moral superiority to the likes of Raquel, but the further you get into the sum of human suffering worldwide, the harder it gets to decide where to draw the line. Clearly it makes both moral and economic sense for Australia to abandon its inhuman refugee policies and open its borders to more people in need of protection. We should do it tomorrow, and it would immediately make the world a better place.
But what makes crossing a border so special, when you're thinking about human welfare? There are 50% more internally displaced people than refugees in the world; what are we doing to give them a better life? Sure, they're not in your face like a refugee who turns up in your country--but what does someone's physical proximity have to do with their need?
Go further down this path and you start thinking about welfare in even broader terms. Why do we mostly think the living standards of the average Burmese man, or Somali woman, or gay Saudi, are beyond the scope of our politics? Why do we care so much more about human rights violations than other threats to human happiness, such as economic inequality? Certainly it's difficult to do anything about these problems, but it's also pretty difficult eroding a century of xenophobia and racism in Australian public life. And why do many of the same people who so easily condemn Raquel's lack of empathy for Congolese refugees find it equally easy to put their own empathy on hold when it comes to the plight of Libyans being bombed by their own government?
I'm not saying there's easy solutions to any of these problems and I'm not suggesting any--I'm completely conflicted what to think about Libya, especially as it drifts into a more and more entrenched stalemate.
Clearly, improving the problems in our own backyard is a good place to start. But I think we need to think a little harder about the fact that the main difference between Raquel and the rest of us is largely a matter of how widely we draw the radius of our empathy.
There's a genuinely interesting reality TV show being broadcast in Australia this week called "Go Back To Where You Came From". The concept is pretty simple: get six anti-refugee xenophobes to take the same journey that refugees endure to get to Australia, and see if their views budge at all.
Every reality show has to have its Simon Cowell, and so the producers must have been thrilled when Raquel Moore walked into the casting session. A self-professed racist who comes over as a white trash Victoria Beckham wannabe (wearing false fingernails and Rachel Zoe sunglasses to a Kenyan refugee camp, etc), she is an obvious hate figure whose every sneer was being pulled apart on Twitter tonight while the show was being broadcast. The closest she gets to an argument in her defence is to say: "This isn't my problem. However awful these people's lives are, they're stuck with it and there's nothing for me to do about it."
I personally found her behaviour repellent--as Kate pointed while we were watching it, the lack of empathy at times appeared to be bordering on the psychopathic. But it also strikes me that it was very close to one of the main theories of international relations--so-called foreign policy realism. This is the view that however awful the humanitarian situation in another country, a government should not get involved unless its own national interests are directly at stake. Essentially, "This isn't my problem. However awful these people's lives are, they're stuck with it and there's nothing for me to do about it." But writ large.
It's very easy to comfort ourselves with a feeling of moral superiority to the likes of Raquel, but the further you get into the sum of human suffering worldwide, the harder it gets to decide where to draw the line. Clearly it makes both moral and economic sense for Australia to abandon its inhuman refugee policies and open its borders to more people in need of protection. We should do it tomorrow, and it would immediately make the world a better place.
But what makes crossing a border so special, when you're thinking about human welfare? There are 50% more internally displaced people than refugees in the world; what are we doing to give them a better life? Sure, they're not in your face like a refugee who turns up in your country--but what does someone's physical proximity have to do with their need?
Go further down this path and you start thinking about welfare in even broader terms. Why do we mostly think the living standards of the average Burmese man, or Somali woman, or gay Saudi, are beyond the scope of our politics? Why do we care so much more about human rights violations than other threats to human happiness, such as economic inequality? Certainly it's difficult to do anything about these problems, but it's also pretty difficult eroding a century of xenophobia and racism in Australian public life. And why do many of the same people who so easily condemn Raquel's lack of empathy for Congolese refugees find it equally easy to put their own empathy on hold when it comes to the plight of Libyans being bombed by their own government?
I'm not saying there's easy solutions to any of these problems and I'm not suggesting any--I'm completely conflicted what to think about Libya, especially as it drifts into a more and more entrenched stalemate.
Clearly, improving the problems in our own backyard is a good place to start. But I think we need to think a little harder about the fact that the main difference between Raquel and the rest of us is largely a matter of how widely we draw the radius of our empathy.
Enough with the ash clouds already!
Kate and Anya were meant to be visiting relatives today in Wauchope, near the central NSW coast. But plate tectonics has put paid to that after a volcano blew its top in Chile, so they've switched to a flight early tomorrow.
This has got me thinking about pattern recognition and randomness. There certainly seem to have been a weirdly large number of scary ash clouds of late: I'd never heard of the things disrupting flights before Eyfynditturmouthful or whatever it's called went up a couple of years back. But when we were in the UK last month we missed the Grimsvotn disruption by about a week; and now this.
I'm pretty sure this is all random coincidence. Certainly there's more flights up there, meaning more chance of ash-related disruption; but on a quick Wikipedia check I can find only two incidents of planes actually running into ash clouds from 1982 and 1989 (scary!), and then a whole lot of nothing till this current cluster of cancellations. That feels so un-random that I can't help feeling there's some other factor at play.
I remember ages ago reading an article (now offline, but a summary is here) about how Apple had to re-engineer their iPod 'shuffle' function because people didn't believe it was truly random. They found their favourite tunes coming up again and again, and concluded that the iPod was secretly selecting tracks to please them, like an over-solicitous friend with a jukebox and a pocketful of change. Whereas in fact, it's entirely predictable that a device you have painstakingly loaded up with all your favourite tunes will frequently wind up randomly playing your favourite tunes.
I'm no expert on the mathematics of this, but it's an interesting reflection on the fact that our brains are hard-wired to see a smooth, even distribution of information as random--when in fact that sort of pattern is highly organised. The sort of random clumps that turn up all the time in nature--in the distribution of galaxies, or rock types, or coin flips or prime numbers or ash clouds--intuitively feel so structured that we find it incredibly difficult to recognise them as anything else.
This has got me thinking about pattern recognition and randomness. There certainly seem to have been a weirdly large number of scary ash clouds of late: I'd never heard of the things disrupting flights before Eyfynditturmouthful or whatever it's called went up a couple of years back. But when we were in the UK last month we missed the Grimsvotn disruption by about a week; and now this.
I'm pretty sure this is all random coincidence. Certainly there's more flights up there, meaning more chance of ash-related disruption; but on a quick Wikipedia check I can find only two incidents of planes actually running into ash clouds from 1982 and 1989 (scary!), and then a whole lot of nothing till this current cluster of cancellations. That feels so un-random that I can't help feeling there's some other factor at play.
I remember ages ago reading an article (now offline, but a summary is here) about how Apple had to re-engineer their iPod 'shuffle' function because people didn't believe it was truly random. They found their favourite tunes coming up again and again, and concluded that the iPod was secretly selecting tracks to please them, like an over-solicitous friend with a jukebox and a pocketful of change. Whereas in fact, it's entirely predictable that a device you have painstakingly loaded up with all your favourite tunes will frequently wind up randomly playing your favourite tunes.
I'm no expert on the mathematics of this, but it's an interesting reflection on the fact that our brains are hard-wired to see a smooth, even distribution of information as random--when in fact that sort of pattern is highly organised. The sort of random clumps that turn up all the time in nature--in the distribution of galaxies, or rock types, or coin flips or prime numbers or ash clouds--intuitively feel so structured that we find it incredibly difficult to recognise them as anything else.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Standing room only
Milestones time: Anya did her first-ever stand-from-sitting today.
She's been standing more and more surely for the past few days, able to support herself without handholds for 10 seconds or so at a time. She's even done the odd little standing dance, shaking her centre of gravity around while staying upright. She's also been falling over, a lot, which has meant a greater-than-usual share of tears. But I suppose the falling is as important, in working out how to stand, as the staying upright.
I didn't see it as I was at work, but Kate says that today she pivoted to kneeling, straightened up, and stood, without holding anything, on her own two feet. I can imagine the half-surprised, half-oblivious smile on her face: she was probably being delighted with the cat, or a toy, or the play of light on the wall, rather than her own achievement. To me, the speed of this change is pretty amazing: a month ago she was barely crawling.
One of the reasons I started writing this blog again was that I was looking back on the first nine months of Anya's life and realised I didn't have much of a record of how she had developed. While in the UK I was shown my own baby book: between covers of light blue sateen-effect vinyl, there was a photo album and space to record the appearance of the first tooth, the first word, the first crawl.
I can see the argument that these things are in some ways meaningless. Surely what matters in life is internal, and largely invisible to outsiders: when was her first feeling of affection, or fear, or amusement? When did she first realise she was a person, distinct from the world around her?
But Kate and I naturally want to remember as much of we can of her life. The milestones will do fine for us.
She's been standing more and more surely for the past few days, able to support herself without handholds for 10 seconds or so at a time. She's even done the odd little standing dance, shaking her centre of gravity around while staying upright. She's also been falling over, a lot, which has meant a greater-than-usual share of tears. But I suppose the falling is as important, in working out how to stand, as the staying upright.
I didn't see it as I was at work, but Kate says that today she pivoted to kneeling, straightened up, and stood, without holding anything, on her own two feet. I can imagine the half-surprised, half-oblivious smile on her face: she was probably being delighted with the cat, or a toy, or the play of light on the wall, rather than her own achievement. To me, the speed of this change is pretty amazing: a month ago she was barely crawling.
One of the reasons I started writing this blog again was that I was looking back on the first nine months of Anya's life and realised I didn't have much of a record of how she had developed. While in the UK I was shown my own baby book: between covers of light blue sateen-effect vinyl, there was a photo album and space to record the appearance of the first tooth, the first word, the first crawl.
I can see the argument that these things are in some ways meaningless. Surely what matters in life is internal, and largely invisible to outsiders: when was her first feeling of affection, or fear, or amusement? When did she first realise she was a person, distinct from the world around her?
But Kate and I naturally want to remember as much of we can of her life. The milestones will do fine for us.
Monday, 20 June 2011
No girls allowed!
Either I'm crazy, or someone in magazine-land has been watching too many episodes of Mad Men. On the back of the latest issue of the London Review of Books is a full-page advert for a new magazine called Port.
From the look of it, it plans to publish the sort of intelligent, long-form journalism that Kate and I love, and for the most part can only be found these days in American magazines like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and indeed the LRB. So far so good. But, of course, there's a twist. There has to be a twist with a new magazine. Port is marketing itself specifically as a men's magazine--its motto is: "The Magazine For Men."
Am I alone in thinking this is a bit weird? I can understand why you would have men-only publications in fashion (think GQ), exercise (Men's Health) and even, inevitably, soft porn (examples are legion). But if you're just publishing good thoughtful journalism, in what sense is that a gender-specific market?
I suspect part of the answer is that the ad sales department wants a gender-specific market because the thing is going to be funded by glossy adverts for Ralph Lauren, Ben Sherman et al. Looking at their website, I can see that, sure enough, one of their six sections is "fashion". But the other articles on the page--covering comic books, British culture, and Afrobeat music--all seem to be subjects of equal interest to women.
Kate and I are both huge fans of Mad Men. But I find it quite baffling that the pat fashion/culture/media response to this series--about lives blighted by the strictures of American gender mores before the 1960s feminist revolution--has been: "Oh my god! Unreconstructed men in sharp suits are so now." And this magazine seems to me a product of that thinking.
After all, if your mission is just to publish great journalism and make a profit while doing so, shouldn't your audience and choice of subjects be as broad and catholic as possible? What do "men-only" subjects, in this context, even look like? In-depth profiles of bespoke tailors, gritty accounts of life inside Colombian prisons, nerve-jangling extreme sports reportage? And again: if the writing is good, why wouldn't women, too, be interested in those subjects?
I'm sure I'd probably enjoy the articles if I picked up a copy, but the high concept annoys me. Perhaps it is really all about high-end fashion ads. But is it really so inconceivable--nearly 50 years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique--that intelligent men and women might be content to share their ad space, and even their fashion pages, with the opposite sex?
UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coates has some great ideas about this at his blog--on The Atlantic's site, of course
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Film: Black Narcissus
We decided to watch a film last night after Anya had gone to bed and dug out Black Narcissus. I was wondering if it was going to be as impressive this time around as when I first saw it--a lot of the drama of it comes from the unexpected turns of the plot--but it holds up brilliantly.
It is of course utterly over the top melodrama, and the novel it's based on is no doubt justly forgotten. But that points up the differences between the two genres: the film works well precisely because it is so melodramatic--as one of the characters says at one point: "There's something in the atmosphere here that makes everything seem exaggerated." You can get away with melodrama on film because it's visual and visceral; the audience doesn't get a chance to sit back and grow sceptical.
The visual element is what really makes this film stand out. This was still a relatively early colour film: you sense that the directors were still enamoured of the new medium, and determined to use it to do new things. I think that creative excitement is part of what has kept it looking so fresh: it's only relatively recently, with the dawn of computer-based manipulation, that directors have started putting as much effort into the visual design of their films as Powell and Pressburger did here, back in the late 1940s. The palette is all blues, yellows and whites; red is so rarely seen that each instance of it is shocking.
The story is basically a haunted house tale, except the ghosts are of the living. Half-a-dozen nuns are sent to the edge of the Himalayas to establish a mission hospital; set up in a crumbling cliff-edge palace where a local monarch once kept his harem, the desires and feelings they have kept repressed for the cloister start to flourish and bloom in the mountain air. There is a touch of The Turn of the Screw in the whole thing: the nuns are following in the footsteps of a bunch of Franciscan friars who were only able to stick it out for five months, and Deborah Kerr has a slightly governessish quality about her.
Naturally enough, nature takes its course and the sisters are unable to hold it together. In many ways this reflects a long-standing British idea of the sublime, in which dramatic landscapes are in some way deranging to the well-ordered mind. Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey, joked that gothic was impossible in England because the hills were too low and the valleys too shallow. In the same way, it seems inevitable that putting a bunch of Catholic nuns on a cliff at the edge of the Himalayas will engender gothic. Repression can't survive long in close proximity to the sublime.
It's a truly wonderful film, despite a few touches which date it (the role of the palace's housekeeper is taken by an old music hall actress, who plays it for laughs in the manner of a Shakespearean rude mechanical). The performances are solid but not spectacular: Deborah Kerr as the Sister Superior Clodagh and David Farrar as a raffish agent on the fringes of the Raj are decent; Kathleen Byron as the unhinged Sister Ruth hams it up a bit too much.
But of course you're not looking at the performances, you're looking at the imagery: the ranks of white wimples against blue washed walls; modest eyes cast away from lubricious frescoes; the shock of a scarlet dress, cherry lipstick, or sweat beading on a forehead; the gorgeous, ominous amber light of dawn in the final sequence; Byron appearing through a doorway, deranged and dishevelled, like an avenging angel. Her death is filmed with oblique genius: a stand of green bamboo swaying against a blue sky; the clatter of tribal drums; a flutter of birds rising in alarm.
Friday, 17 June 2011
World's most expensive swat
Way back a month or so ago, I'd woken up at something like 5.30am with Anya and was trying to deal with the usual morning wrangle of change wriggly baby, watch excitable baby, feed grumpy cat, feed hungry baby, keep grumpy cat away from excitable baby, wash, rinse, repeat.
Popping into the bathroom to dispose of a heavy nappy, I saw a huge huntsman spider crouching in the sink. These critters are famous for having a bark that's worse than their bite: this one wasn't a big specimen, but it was not that much less than handspan-sized, with spindly hairy legs and a habit of jumping up about 20cm in the air when startled. Their bite, I'm told, isn't much worse than a bee sting; but they can be aggressive and I didn't really want the thing running around my early morning madhouse.
So I grab a rolled-up newspaper, screw up my nerve and advance on the bugger. Huntsmen move very fast and have a habit of coming into houses to scare the bejasus out of folk; anyone who's spent more than a year or so in Australia will have dealt with one and knows that, even with the best thought-out strategy, it's 50-50 whether you'll manage to trap or kill the thing. As I said, the bite isn't bad; but they're so creepy generally that you don't want to contemplate the consequences of missing.
So: spider pinpointed; arm goes back; all my force slams down on it, desperate not to miss or strike a partial blow. There's a little tinkling sound, and I look down to see the huntsman crumpled up amidst several shards of porcelain. It was squatting on what our odd-job man Raymond later tells me is the structurally weakest point of the sink. I've smashed the basin along with the spider.
Getting this fixed was a bit drawn out but Raymond finally did it yesterday, and the point of this story is that the whole thing, parts and labour included and cash in hand, cost just A$10 shy of A$500. Reminding me again that odd-job man isn't too shabby as a career option.
Popping into the bathroom to dispose of a heavy nappy, I saw a huge huntsman spider crouching in the sink. These critters are famous for having a bark that's worse than their bite: this one wasn't a big specimen, but it was not that much less than handspan-sized, with spindly hairy legs and a habit of jumping up about 20cm in the air when startled. Their bite, I'm told, isn't much worse than a bee sting; but they can be aggressive and I didn't really want the thing running around my early morning madhouse.
So I grab a rolled-up newspaper, screw up my nerve and advance on the bugger. Huntsmen move very fast and have a habit of coming into houses to scare the bejasus out of folk; anyone who's spent more than a year or so in Australia will have dealt with one and knows that, even with the best thought-out strategy, it's 50-50 whether you'll manage to trap or kill the thing. As I said, the bite isn't bad; but they're so creepy generally that you don't want to contemplate the consequences of missing.
So: spider pinpointed; arm goes back; all my force slams down on it, desperate not to miss or strike a partial blow. There's a little tinkling sound, and I look down to see the huntsman crumpled up amidst several shards of porcelain. It was squatting on what our odd-job man Raymond later tells me is the structurally weakest point of the sink. I've smashed the basin along with the spider.
Getting this fixed was a bit drawn out but Raymond finally did it yesterday, and the point of this story is that the whole thing, parts and labour included and cash in hand, cost just A$10 shy of A$500. Reminding me again that odd-job man isn't too shabby as a career option.
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Sleeping through!
Oh my. We finally know what all those other parents have been enjoying since week dot: Anya slept through the night last night.
The joy of having a baby like Anya is that she is always on, full of beans and into everything that's happening around her. The flipside is that this doesn't stop when she goes to bed: if Anya wakes up at 10pm, she's likely got an empty stomach from all the crawling and standing and smiling and looking she's been doing, and she's likely immediately wondering where mum and dad are, and she's likely priming her little lungs to make sure they know about it.
Hence the pretty settled pattern we've had for the last few months, where she would wake up once around 10pm and again around 3am. Like her parents, she's got a fast metabolism. As a result, Kate's barely had an unbroken night's sleep in nearly a year, and I haven't done much better.
Today's a red letter day. She went to bed around 6.30pm, grumbled in her sleep a bit till 11, and then lay like a stone till she woke up hungry about 5.30am.
Once upon a time, I'd have looked at a 5.30am start to the day with horror. But this felt like bliss.
The joy of having a baby like Anya is that she is always on, full of beans and into everything that's happening around her. The flipside is that this doesn't stop when she goes to bed: if Anya wakes up at 10pm, she's likely got an empty stomach from all the crawling and standing and smiling and looking she's been doing, and she's likely immediately wondering where mum and dad are, and she's likely priming her little lungs to make sure they know about it.
Hence the pretty settled pattern we've had for the last few months, where she would wake up once around 10pm and again around 3am. Like her parents, she's got a fast metabolism. As a result, Kate's barely had an unbroken night's sleep in nearly a year, and I haven't done much better.
Today's a red letter day. She went to bed around 6.30pm, grumbled in her sleep a bit till 11, and then lay like a stone till she woke up hungry about 5.30am.
Once upon a time, I'd have looked at a 5.30am start to the day with horror. But this felt like bliss.
Thursday, 9 June 2011
Education and immigration
Kate's sister Althea came over for dinner last night and we got talking about the master's degree in public health she's working on. She's got an exam next week so naturally enough I asked if she was nervous.
"Oh, no, not really," she says. "You get a pretty good idea of what's going to come up. They've taken us through the past eight years of exam papers and shown us the answers. They want as many people to pass as possible."
She then started telling me about an ex who left the University of New South Wales because he was basically ordered to pass a higher percentage of his students.
This is no doubt related to the fact that
Australia's second largest export industry after mining is education. Thousands of students from emerging Asian economies pass through Australia's universities each year, bringing in handsome revenues and, after a few years, usually ending up with permanent residency status and ultimately citizenship.
I don't particularly have a problem with any of this but it's a strikingly perverse way to go about things. Tertiary education is being used as a backdoor immigration route to make up for the fact that the paths to legitimate migration are severely obstructed by xenophobic laws.
That means that universities can jack up their course fees for overseas students, dragging domestic fees up in their wake. Because universities have to keep the money rolling in, grading gets more generous because no one wants the cash cows to flunk out.
The result is that domestic students are paying more and more for crappier education, while overseas students are mostly putting in the bare minimum to stay on their courses, while flogging themselves in their free time driving taxis and washing dishes to pay some of their course fees.
On paper, the education sector is thriving because there's lots of export revenues coming in, but in practice Australian universities continue to punch well below their weight in global terms and the push for fees before prestige isn't helping.
The first thing a sane Australia would do on migration would be to stop wasting money on inhumane detention centres, lift the cap on refugee intake, and get over its weird paranoia about boat people. (I have a pet theory that boat arrivals are feared so much, compared to the majority of refugees who arrive with a plane ticket, because the sight of boats bringing in immigrants makes modern white Australians feel unnervingly like Aboriginal people circa 1788..."look how that turned out for the locals" being the unconscious subtext.)
But the second thing Australia should do is remove these perverse incentives that are damaging the country's universities, themselves a crucial long-term national asset. At present, wannabe migrants essentially pay a A$20,000ish 'fee' in course costs, plus several years of living costs and work in Australia, in return for this backdoor migration.
Why not just set that fee officially? Open the doors and say that anyone, subject to the usual personal background checks, can migrate if they pay the money? Make the fee higher if you want, and spend it on resettlement services for at-risk refugees. Better still, advertise it widely in countries where people routinely fall into the hands of paid people smugglers, and cut the snakeheads out of the business.
The right of residency in Australia is clearly highly prized around the world, and the sort of people who go to these lengths to get to this country would likely make great contributions to society and the economy down the track. We should be selling them what they want, not this shabby under-the-counter migration policy.
"Oh, no, not really," she says. "You get a pretty good idea of what's going to come up. They've taken us through the past eight years of exam papers and shown us the answers. They want as many people to pass as possible."
She then started telling me about an ex who left the University of New South Wales because he was basically ordered to pass a higher percentage of his students.
This is no doubt related to the fact that
Australia's second largest export industry after mining is education. Thousands of students from emerging Asian economies pass through Australia's universities each year, bringing in handsome revenues and, after a few years, usually ending up with permanent residency status and ultimately citizenship.
I don't particularly have a problem with any of this but it's a strikingly perverse way to go about things. Tertiary education is being used as a backdoor immigration route to make up for the fact that the paths to legitimate migration are severely obstructed by xenophobic laws.
That means that universities can jack up their course fees for overseas students, dragging domestic fees up in their wake. Because universities have to keep the money rolling in, grading gets more generous because no one wants the cash cows to flunk out.
The result is that domestic students are paying more and more for crappier education, while overseas students are mostly putting in the bare minimum to stay on their courses, while flogging themselves in their free time driving taxis and washing dishes to pay some of their course fees.
On paper, the education sector is thriving because there's lots of export revenues coming in, but in practice Australian universities continue to punch well below their weight in global terms and the push for fees before prestige isn't helping.
The first thing a sane Australia would do on migration would be to stop wasting money on inhumane detention centres, lift the cap on refugee intake, and get over its weird paranoia about boat people. (I have a pet theory that boat arrivals are feared so much, compared to the majority of refugees who arrive with a plane ticket, because the sight of boats bringing in immigrants makes modern white Australians feel unnervingly like Aboriginal people circa 1788..."look how that turned out for the locals" being the unconscious subtext.)
But the second thing Australia should do is remove these perverse incentives that are damaging the country's universities, themselves a crucial long-term national asset. At present, wannabe migrants essentially pay a A$20,000ish 'fee' in course costs, plus several years of living costs and work in Australia, in return for this backdoor migration.
Why not just set that fee officially? Open the doors and say that anyone, subject to the usual personal background checks, can migrate if they pay the money? Make the fee higher if you want, and spend it on resettlement services for at-risk refugees. Better still, advertise it widely in countries where people routinely fall into the hands of paid people smugglers, and cut the snakeheads out of the business.
The right of residency in Australia is clearly highly prized around the world, and the sort of people who go to these lengths to get to this country would likely make great contributions to society and the economy down the track. We should be selling them what they want, not this shabby under-the-counter migration policy.
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
The flight back
We got back last night. I'm still suffering the after-effects. The journey on the whole was perhaps a bit better than the flight out, but it was a mixed bag.
The Good:
Anya is quite a different baby to who she was three weeks ago, and nowhere was it as obvious as on this flight. She's simply much better at entertaining herself and the episodes of crying were pretty brief. It turns out that crawling endlessly up aeroplane aisles, pulling yourself up next to sleeping passengers and then giggling in their unsuspecting ears etc is a pretty good way to wear yourself out. Between the exhaustion, I actually had quite a lot of fun, as I always do round Anya.
The Bad:
Another way in which she's changed utterly is that she has given up the swaddle and sleeps on her front now. Whereas you could normally get her down to sleep previously by drugging her with breastmilk and quietly slipping her into a cot/bassinet, now that just doesn't work. Her method of falling asleep now is to crawl around for a while, moaning disconsolately, pulling herself up on the bars of her cot, before collapsing in a heap with her favourite bunny clasped to her. That's fine but it just don't work in a 80cmx40cm bassinet. So every wink of sleep she got--and I don't think it amounted to more than about five hours out of 24 hours of travel--was on Kate's lap, an inch away from the milk supply. Which wasn't great for Kate's sleep.
The Ugly:
She had terrible jetlag last night. Screaming for hours on end, only stopping briefly when we gave her a feed, restarting as soon as the nipple left her mouth. Obviously, it was horrible to listen to.
The Cute
Where to start? At the worst moments she'd come through with a smile, a little chatter, one of her tender gentle little gestures or just some of the funny, odd behaviour that cracks up Kate and me and puffs us up with delight. After her morning nap today, she battened down ravenously on a feed; but, Kate told me, once she was done she determinedly fell back to sleep, sure it was the middle of the night though it was nearly midday.
I think she'll get better over the years, but she's already a pretty awesome travelling companion.
The Good:
Anya is quite a different baby to who she was three weeks ago, and nowhere was it as obvious as on this flight. She's simply much better at entertaining herself and the episodes of crying were pretty brief. It turns out that crawling endlessly up aeroplane aisles, pulling yourself up next to sleeping passengers and then giggling in their unsuspecting ears etc is a pretty good way to wear yourself out. Between the exhaustion, I actually had quite a lot of fun, as I always do round Anya.
The Bad:
Another way in which she's changed utterly is that she has given up the swaddle and sleeps on her front now. Whereas you could normally get her down to sleep previously by drugging her with breastmilk and quietly slipping her into a cot/bassinet, now that just doesn't work. Her method of falling asleep now is to crawl around for a while, moaning disconsolately, pulling herself up on the bars of her cot, before collapsing in a heap with her favourite bunny clasped to her. That's fine but it just don't work in a 80cmx40cm bassinet. So every wink of sleep she got--and I don't think it amounted to more than about five hours out of 24 hours of travel--was on Kate's lap, an inch away from the milk supply. Which wasn't great for Kate's sleep.
The Ugly:
She had terrible jetlag last night. Screaming for hours on end, only stopping briefly when we gave her a feed, restarting as soon as the nipple left her mouth. Obviously, it was horrible to listen to.
The Cute
Where to start? At the worst moments she'd come through with a smile, a little chatter, one of her tender gentle little gestures or just some of the funny, odd behaviour that cracks up Kate and me and puffs us up with delight. After her morning nap today, she battened down ravenously on a feed; but, Kate told me, once she was done she determinedly fell back to sleep, sure it was the middle of the night though it was nearly midday.
I think she'll get better over the years, but she's already a pretty awesome travelling companion.
Anyamoticon
I mentioned in some earlier post how closely Anya's big grin resembles a sideways capital D.
This made me think that I need the following emoticon to indicate Anya in texts and emails:
: D
But then I thought that emoticon is pretty 'done' on teh internets as generally indicating amusement.
So I boosted the eyes a bit, as that's one of the first things people notice about her:
8 D
And I'm also thinking about adding her increasingly Bieberish hair. I tried this:
/ 8 D
to reflect the symmetry of her cut, but I'm concerned that the forward-slash symbol is a sort of emoticon shorthand for Hitler, leading to potentially embarrassing confusions, or just lots of unwanted emails from very happy Nazis.
So I'm settling on this:
( 8 D
Now you know.
This made me think that I need the following emoticon to indicate Anya in texts and emails:
: D
But then I thought that emoticon is pretty 'done' on teh internets as generally indicating amusement.
So I boosted the eyes a bit, as that's one of the first things people notice about her:
8 D
And I'm also thinking about adding her increasingly Bieberish hair. I tried this:
/ 8 D
to reflect the symmetry of her cut, but I'm concerned that the forward-slash symbol is a sort of emoticon shorthand for Hitler, leading to potentially embarrassing confusions, or just lots of unwanted emails from very happy Nazis.
So I'm settling on this:
( 8 D
Now you know.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Misery Fur
When we go on holiday, something weird happens to Jasper's already overactive shedding tendency. We call this "misery fur": it's as if he's trying to shed enough to bud another friendly cat from.
Three weeks away and he's really excelled himself this time. This bundle of lint came from handbrushing less than a square metre of the couch. I'm thinking of making a jumper.
Three weeks away and he's really excelled himself this time. This bundle of lint came from handbrushing less than a square metre of the couch. I'm thinking of making a jumper.
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Fashion can be weird
Kate and I had lunch today at one of our must-visit destinations in London: the mozzarella bar on the second floor of Selfridges.
This gave us a great view of some of the concessions. Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen had some beautiful pieces, but I got the biggest eyeful from the Gucci store, which was just bizarre in a more-money-than-sense way.
I can see what they were trying to do with these two dresses but whatever they looked like on paper they don't really work in practice. The one on the left is like what a Samurai Kylie robot would wear to the Cotton Club; the one on the right, MC Hammer at a Lion King-themed fancy dress party. And they looked worse in the flesh than this photo indicates.
There seems to be a fashion thing at the moment for these hanging-crotch Hammertime women's pants. Sitting outside the waiting rooms while Kate tried things on at Cos on Regent Street, a woman drifted by wearing a sort of baggy babygro in pleated white muslin. It wasn't Issey Miyake, but it looked vay vay expensive. And I couldn't help thinking she should have accessorised with the head from a polar bear costume.
Saturday, 4 June 2011
In three easy steps...
The speed with which Anya has been learning locomotion the past few weeks is extraordinary. It's hard to believe that she was basically unable to crawl until a week or two before we got to the UK. Now she can wear out my old-man knees by scampering all round the house, shrieking with delight and fixing her smile in a permanent sideways D. At Petra's yesterday, she pedalled up the stairs in pursuit of Albert the cat as if it was no more than a gentle incline. And she's standing all the time.
One interesting change I've noticed is that, now she can stand and cruise on her own, she doesn't want help any more. She used to love it when we held her upright by her hands, but now when we do that she goes jelly-legs and gets grumpy. If she's standing, she wants to do it herself.
This comes back to that emerging-personality thing. Anya is extremely sociable and loving, but self-sufficiency also seems quite an important part of her character. She is often quite unwilling to be spoon-fed, preferring finger foods she can shove in her own mouth. And she isn't one of those babies who will only go where her parents lead her: put her down on the lawn and she's off up the garden like clockwork in search of soil she can thrust in her mouth.
On the other hand, isn't that sort of sweeping statement a bit ridiculous? Just because she's been getting slightly grumpy at being stood up, and likes feeding herself a bit more than other babies of her age do, why should I feel confident enough to diagnose grand aspects of her personality?
Naturally, parents can't help doing this, so I'm not losing sleep about it. Furthermore, in some ways it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: however much we may try to make our responses neutral, we've got the idea in our heads now that she's self-sufficient, and will probably unconsciously reward further displays of this characteristic by finding them charming. But it's interesting to me how easily we arrive at our assumptions.
Anyway, this is a long sidetrack from the main point of the post, which is that Anya took her musical walker for a proper walk in the garden a couple of days ago, and this morning performed the same feat on the more challenging surface of the dining room carpet. Obviously, still grasping the zimmer handle, but with perfect balance even as it wheeled away from under her centre of gravity. That's some sort of a breakthrough. Yay!
One interesting change I've noticed is that, now she can stand and cruise on her own, she doesn't want help any more. She used to love it when we held her upright by her hands, but now when we do that she goes jelly-legs and gets grumpy. If she's standing, she wants to do it herself.
This comes back to that emerging-personality thing. Anya is extremely sociable and loving, but self-sufficiency also seems quite an important part of her character. She is often quite unwilling to be spoon-fed, preferring finger foods she can shove in her own mouth. And she isn't one of those babies who will only go where her parents lead her: put her down on the lawn and she's off up the garden like clockwork in search of soil she can thrust in her mouth.
On the other hand, isn't that sort of sweeping statement a bit ridiculous? Just because she's been getting slightly grumpy at being stood up, and likes feeding herself a bit more than other babies of her age do, why should I feel confident enough to diagnose grand aspects of her personality?
Naturally, parents can't help doing this, so I'm not losing sleep about it. Furthermore, in some ways it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: however much we may try to make our responses neutral, we've got the idea in our heads now that she's self-sufficient, and will probably unconsciously reward further displays of this characteristic by finding them charming. But it's interesting to me how easily we arrive at our assumptions.
Anyway, this is a long sidetrack from the main point of the post, which is that Anya took her musical walker for a proper walk in the garden a couple of days ago, and this morning performed the same feat on the more challenging surface of the dining room carpet. Obviously, still grasping the zimmer handle, but with perfect balance even as it wheeled away from under her centre of gravity. That's some sort of a breakthrough. Yay!
The workers owning the means of production
Via Mark Thoma, there's a great column by Nancy Folbre in the New York Times arguing that shared capitalism--finding ways to share more of the benefits of a company's profitability with employees--produces more successful businesses and happier workers.
This seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised anyone could think otherwise. People don't like to feel exploited, and companies that don't invest in good staff don't tend to do well. Shared capitalism is an obvious way to solve both problems.
I've long had a pet idea about this which goes a bit further than Folbre's idea. Basically, say 40% of equity in all companies--or holding companies when they're part of a group--should be owned by an employees' trust. I don't know if 40% is the exact level, but I'm thinking somewhere in that ballpark.
The trust manages a staff pension fund and acts as fiduciary for current employees. It appoints directors to the board, in proportion to its own shareholding. If the company is making profits and paying dividends, it receives those dividends as income and can decide whether to add them to the pension fund, or return them direct to employees as bonuses.
The reason for this is to align the incentives of shareholders, employees and management. One of the reasons we've had decades of median wage stagnation in the West is that managers are ultimately answerable to shareholders alone, and an easy way to make shareholders happy is to give them all the economic rewards from improved productivity, when at least part of that belongs to employees. Equally, this era of labour-bashing seems to be a backlash against the age when managers were most fearful of industrial action, and made employees happy by giving them all the economic reward when at least part of it belonged to capital providers.
Making employees shareholders seems a good way to square that circle. Managers can't enrich one side at the expense of the other--they're all in it together.
Employees would come to view the dividend bonus as a part of their income, and would have to weigh up losing it if they made unreasonable pay demands. Likewise, if shareholders made demands detrimental to employee welfare, they'd have to have a very strong case if they wanted the managers to get it past board members, 40% of whom would be appointed by the employee trust.
I don't see how this would get in the way of other corporate functions. The trust would have access to the pension funds and likely some of its own capital, so it shouldn't have a problem taking part in equity raisings if they were genuinely in the long-term interests of the company. Acquisitions and demergers wouldn't be hampered, as acquirers would just be looking for 60% control; the trust's assets and rights could be split and reassigned according to which businesses are spun off.
Obviously you'd need to bring such a system in over a span of years to avoid chaos from the sudden change; and obviously the whole thing is my pie-in-the-sky musings anyway since managers, shareholders and the political and financial classes have far too much invested in the status quo to want any such change. But I can think of lots of problems that a system of this sort would solve, and I'm struggling to think of any concrete insurmountable problems it would introduce. Can anyone suggest one?
This seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised anyone could think otherwise. People don't like to feel exploited, and companies that don't invest in good staff don't tend to do well. Shared capitalism is an obvious way to solve both problems.
I've long had a pet idea about this which goes a bit further than Folbre's idea. Basically, say 40% of equity in all companies--or holding companies when they're part of a group--should be owned by an employees' trust. I don't know if 40% is the exact level, but I'm thinking somewhere in that ballpark.
The trust manages a staff pension fund and acts as fiduciary for current employees. It appoints directors to the board, in proportion to its own shareholding. If the company is making profits and paying dividends, it receives those dividends as income and can decide whether to add them to the pension fund, or return them direct to employees as bonuses.
The reason for this is to align the incentives of shareholders, employees and management. One of the reasons we've had decades of median wage stagnation in the West is that managers are ultimately answerable to shareholders alone, and an easy way to make shareholders happy is to give them all the economic rewards from improved productivity, when at least part of that belongs to employees. Equally, this era of labour-bashing seems to be a backlash against the age when managers were most fearful of industrial action, and made employees happy by giving them all the economic reward when at least part of it belonged to capital providers.
Making employees shareholders seems a good way to square that circle. Managers can't enrich one side at the expense of the other--they're all in it together.
Employees would come to view the dividend bonus as a part of their income, and would have to weigh up losing it if they made unreasonable pay demands. Likewise, if shareholders made demands detrimental to employee welfare, they'd have to have a very strong case if they wanted the managers to get it past board members, 40% of whom would be appointed by the employee trust.
I don't see how this would get in the way of other corporate functions. The trust would have access to the pension funds and likely some of its own capital, so it shouldn't have a problem taking part in equity raisings if they were genuinely in the long-term interests of the company. Acquisitions and demergers wouldn't be hampered, as acquirers would just be looking for 60% control; the trust's assets and rights could be split and reassigned according to which businesses are spun off.
Obviously you'd need to bring such a system in over a span of years to avoid chaos from the sudden change; and obviously the whole thing is my pie-in-the-sky musings anyway since managers, shareholders and the political and financial classes have far too much invested in the status quo to want any such change. But I can think of lots of problems that a system of this sort would solve, and I'm struggling to think of any concrete insurmountable problems it would introduce. Can anyone suggest one?
Friday, 3 June 2011
Why we should be saving *less* for retirement
We, as in Kate and myself.
Pivoting off this post by Andrew Sullivan: like him, we've always been the prudent types who've done what the government and economists have recommended. We've always put aside a decent chunk of our incomes for savings towards retirement, over and above what we pay into state retirement schemes.
When I started doing this I thought we were being forward-thinking. We were preparing ourselves for the future; we were diversifying our financial risk, by keeping some money back from housing costs, unlike the bulk of our generation who are making no significant savings at all because they're putting all their money into mortgage payments.
I changed my mind about this the other day. Like I said, the vast majority of our generation are not saving a penny, and are still piling their money into leveraged bets on the property market. And while I can see this is a horrible mistake in theory, in practice whatever the vast majority of your generation are doing with their money, you should probably do.
After all, what happens when we both reach retirement? The savers will be asset-poor, with cash and securities subject to capital gains tax and, if they've done well, a tax-free home that is small in proportion to what they've saved. The borrowers will be asset-rich, with minimal savings but likely, over the course of decades, extensive levered-up capital gains on a more valuable home. However, the savers' assets will produce an income and the borrowers' won't, which makes all the difference.
If you own liquid, income-producing assets it's politically very easy to tax your wealth. The opposite is the case if you own illiquid, non-income-producing assets, such as an owner-occupied home, or, in Australia, a loss-making buy-to-let property (none of them make profits, but that's a story for another day).
Without an income there's nothing easy for the government to tax. You can take the Georgist attitude that the land value should be taxed and impose a property tax, but for this to operate in any significant way would require aged owners to at some point sell their property to pay their tax bill--something that would be political suicide, especially when the market is unpredictable and likely to produce wildly divergent outcomes. Some sort of reverse mortgage set-up, where investors pay your tax bill in return for a claim on all or part of your property after a fixed period of time, could work in principle; but reverse mortgages already exist and don't have a great track record.
So the savers would be looking at a situation where, despite being less wealthy than the borrowers, they would have larger cash flows and would therefore be the politically easiest target for bailing society (read: the borrowers) out of its failure to save money.
This is a weird situation to be in. I personally think property is still in a huge bubble and will lose value over a 10-15 year timeframe, but if we wait that long to buy somewhere we will have very few income-earning years left to pay off a mortgage. And given I don't see much real-terms upside to prices, it feels like madness to tip in our quite substantial savings and double our housing costs for the privilege of owning the same sort of place we currently rent--which is the sort of calculation you would make to buy a house in Sydney at the moment.
I think there's maybe a 10-15% chance that buying a house in Australia right now would end up making us money; a 25-30% that it would be catastrophically loss-making, in the manner of people who bought in Dublin in 2007; and a 55-65% chance that we'd just end up paying about a half to two-thirds over the odds, relative to people born five years before us before the credit bubble started to inflate and those born 15 years after us who'll reach property-buying age when it's more deflated.
That doesn't sound like a strong argument to buy rather than rent, but when you throw in the long-term fiscal argument, and the short-term massive inconvenience of having no security of tenure at a time when childcare, schools etc are vastly oversubscribed and wedded to location, then I can see that we will end up doing it at some point. And of course, the moment that sceptics like us capitulate is always the moment that bubbles burst.
Pivoting off this post by Andrew Sullivan: like him, we've always been the prudent types who've done what the government and economists have recommended. We've always put aside a decent chunk of our incomes for savings towards retirement, over and above what we pay into state retirement schemes.
When I started doing this I thought we were being forward-thinking. We were preparing ourselves for the future; we were diversifying our financial risk, by keeping some money back from housing costs, unlike the bulk of our generation who are making no significant savings at all because they're putting all their money into mortgage payments.
I changed my mind about this the other day. Like I said, the vast majority of our generation are not saving a penny, and are still piling their money into leveraged bets on the property market. And while I can see this is a horrible mistake in theory, in practice whatever the vast majority of your generation are doing with their money, you should probably do.
After all, what happens when we both reach retirement? The savers will be asset-poor, with cash and securities subject to capital gains tax and, if they've done well, a tax-free home that is small in proportion to what they've saved. The borrowers will be asset-rich, with minimal savings but likely, over the course of decades, extensive levered-up capital gains on a more valuable home. However, the savers' assets will produce an income and the borrowers' won't, which makes all the difference.
If you own liquid, income-producing assets it's politically very easy to tax your wealth. The opposite is the case if you own illiquid, non-income-producing assets, such as an owner-occupied home, or, in Australia, a loss-making buy-to-let property (none of them make profits, but that's a story for another day).
Without an income there's nothing easy for the government to tax. You can take the Georgist attitude that the land value should be taxed and impose a property tax, but for this to operate in any significant way would require aged owners to at some point sell their property to pay their tax bill--something that would be political suicide, especially when the market is unpredictable and likely to produce wildly divergent outcomes. Some sort of reverse mortgage set-up, where investors pay your tax bill in return for a claim on all or part of your property after a fixed period of time, could work in principle; but reverse mortgages already exist and don't have a great track record.
So the savers would be looking at a situation where, despite being less wealthy than the borrowers, they would have larger cash flows and would therefore be the politically easiest target for bailing society (read: the borrowers) out of its failure to save money.
This is a weird situation to be in. I personally think property is still in a huge bubble and will lose value over a 10-15 year timeframe, but if we wait that long to buy somewhere we will have very few income-earning years left to pay off a mortgage. And given I don't see much real-terms upside to prices, it feels like madness to tip in our quite substantial savings and double our housing costs for the privilege of owning the same sort of place we currently rent--which is the sort of calculation you would make to buy a house in Sydney at the moment.
I think there's maybe a 10-15% chance that buying a house in Australia right now would end up making us money; a 25-30% that it would be catastrophically loss-making, in the manner of people who bought in Dublin in 2007; and a 55-65% chance that we'd just end up paying about a half to two-thirds over the odds, relative to people born five years before us before the credit bubble started to inflate and those born 15 years after us who'll reach property-buying age when it's more deflated.
That doesn't sound like a strong argument to buy rather than rent, but when you throw in the long-term fiscal argument, and the short-term massive inconvenience of having no security of tenure at a time when childcare, schools etc are vastly oversubscribed and wedded to location, then I can see that we will end up doing it at some point. And of course, the moment that sceptics like us capitulate is always the moment that bubbles burst.
Thursday, 2 June 2011
There's no business like choux business
Yesterday we went for a four-hour, 14-course lunch at The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's garlanded shrine to sea salt foams, dill fluid gels and other molecular-gastronomic delights.
I'm not going to describe the whole meal until I can upload our photos, but one thing that stands out about this style of cooking was its attitude to performance. This is obvious from one perspective in Blumenthal's almost nauseating ubiquity on reality TV shows, serving prairie oysters to Cheryl Cole or teaching school dinner ladies to syringe blood orange reduction into fennel-poached chicken breasts. He's a showman, who clearly quite enjoys taking on the roles of carnival barker, conjuror and snake oil salesman.
His embrace of his own celebrity could be a bit off-putting in this age of superstar chefs, but it does seem of a piece with his approach to cooking. The appreciation of industrial cooking processes--all the gels and gums, dehydrators and aerators used to impart unexpected textures--may come direct from Ferran Adria, but there was a slightly cheesy playfulness in the meal that was all his own.
Blumenthal's reality TV appearances seem to be half in love with their own ridiculousness, and so is a style of cooking that serves sashimi washed up on an edible beach, complete with the sound of lapping waves on headphones emerging from a conch shell; or a Lewis Carroll-inspired soup made from a dissolving pocket watch; or a course of woodland flavours that starts with a smoke-flavoured film placed on the tongue and features a mat of scented oak moss belching grass-green vapour. The whole thing is of course totally over the top, but the flavours are perfect and the childish enthusiasm dares you to be so poker-arsed as to do anything other than laugh in delight.
It's great that he's taking some of the odour of sanctity out of fine dining, and those inclined to denigrate the sense of performance in this cooking should look to themselves. After all, what is the white-tablecloths school of haute cuisine if not a grand performance? Traditional restaurant culture, hatched in Napoleonic Paris, always seemed to me to be part of that era preserved into the modern day: poised between the feudal and democratic, allowing paying diners to play at being aristocrats. That controlled Bourbon gentility, where the connoisseur should acknowledge the pleasurable, but not so much as to appear carried away with emotion--where it may be permissible to laugh, but to show your teeth while doing so would appear barbaric. Over that, give me Blumenthal's evocation of childhood (petits fours served up in a sweet-shop bag, accompanied by a Parma Violets-scented menu card) any day.
I'm not going to describe the whole meal until I can upload our photos, but one thing that stands out about this style of cooking was its attitude to performance. This is obvious from one perspective in Blumenthal's almost nauseating ubiquity on reality TV shows, serving prairie oysters to Cheryl Cole or teaching school dinner ladies to syringe blood orange reduction into fennel-poached chicken breasts. He's a showman, who clearly quite enjoys taking on the roles of carnival barker, conjuror and snake oil salesman.
His embrace of his own celebrity could be a bit off-putting in this age of superstar chefs, but it does seem of a piece with his approach to cooking. The appreciation of industrial cooking processes--all the gels and gums, dehydrators and aerators used to impart unexpected textures--may come direct from Ferran Adria, but there was a slightly cheesy playfulness in the meal that was all his own.
Blumenthal's reality TV appearances seem to be half in love with their own ridiculousness, and so is a style of cooking that serves sashimi washed up on an edible beach, complete with the sound of lapping waves on headphones emerging from a conch shell; or a Lewis Carroll-inspired soup made from a dissolving pocket watch; or a course of woodland flavours that starts with a smoke-flavoured film placed on the tongue and features a mat of scented oak moss belching grass-green vapour. The whole thing is of course totally over the top, but the flavours are perfect and the childish enthusiasm dares you to be so poker-arsed as to do anything other than laugh in delight.
It's great that he's taking some of the odour of sanctity out of fine dining, and those inclined to denigrate the sense of performance in this cooking should look to themselves. After all, what is the white-tablecloths school of haute cuisine if not a grand performance? Traditional restaurant culture, hatched in Napoleonic Paris, always seemed to me to be part of that era preserved into the modern day: poised between the feudal and democratic, allowing paying diners to play at being aristocrats. That controlled Bourbon gentility, where the connoisseur should acknowledge the pleasurable, but not so much as to appear carried away with emotion--where it may be permissible to laugh, but to show your teeth while doing so would appear barbaric. Over that, give me Blumenthal's evocation of childhood (petits fours served up in a sweet-shop bag, accompanied by a Parma Violets-scented menu card) any day.
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
Mountain climbers are just big babies
It was only when Anya started climbing almost as soon as she could crawl that I realised it: climbing is just vertical crawling. Anya has been re-enacting that Monty Python sketch about climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Road.
This is all a roundabout way of pointing that she made it up nine steps of the staircase this morning--with a protective dad right behind her of course. But she's clearly not quite got her mountaineer spirit yet--she gave up within sight of the top for the much more interesting activity of chewing a leaf.
This is all a roundabout way of pointing that she made it up nine steps of the staircase this morning--with a protective dad right behind her of course. But she's clearly not quite got her mountaineer spirit yet--she gave up within sight of the top for the much more interesting activity of chewing a leaf.
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