Apple's definition of optimism

I’m looking up ‘optimism’ in dictionary.app on my mac, and in the Derivatives section it gives op-ti-mist. Each is a link, if you click, you get op, short for operation, ti, the 7th note of a scale, and mist, a cloud of tiny water droplets. Thank you, Apple, that’s truly useful, to be able to determine the meanings of words on the basis of the definitions of their component syllables. How did I ever live without it? Now please explain why there’s no definition for mism.

Well, although I never liked football, I used to play a lot of competitive games (bridge, chess, monopoly, etc). And I’d have a go at tennis, squash, table tennis, etc. Around 20 years ago, I lost interest.

I started to study and play jazz. Now there are similarities between Jazz and Football. A group of people get together to perform an apparently meaningless ritual. Much excitement and emotion is created. We all go home feeling we have done something exhilarating and worthwhile.

But there’s a crucial difference. In football, there are two sides. One wins, hence the other loses. A zero sum game. Football is a model of battle, or a surrogate for it.

In Jazz, we all work together to create the best possible music. There is no competition between the players (or if there is, there shouldn’t be). We feed each other ideas, we learn off each other, we enjoy each other’s success. And for me, that’s how it should be. It has all the teamwork of games, with much less of the misery and stress.

Shin of beef has a load of connective tissue that turns to lovely mushy gelatine when cooked for a long time. This dish has magical properties of deliciousness.

Serves 3

0.6Kg Shin of beef:
1 Onion
lump of ginger: 2”
2 large cloves garlic
2 or 3 pieces star anise
1/2 cup rice wine or sherry
soy sauce: quite a bit
1 cup water
Chillies (optional)

Put the ingredients in a casserole dish. Liquid should not completely cover the ingredients. Bring to a simmer on the hob. Cover and put in hot oven at 150℃. After 10 minutes check that the ingredients are vaguely simmering. Reduce to 110℃. Cook for 4 hours, stirring occasionally.

Serve with rice.

Earliest memories. Fragmented but vivid. The first: a trip to America aboard an ocean liner.

The Queen Elizabeth had two funnels, each painted Cunard red with a black stripe around the top. It was 1958 and The Boy was nearly four years old. He had never seen anything so vast. He was running around on the foredeck with a group of kids. The wind was blowing up from the stern of the ship and his parents were sitting on a bench in front of the bridge, sheltering from the wind. The ship rushed forward towards New York.

There was a railing around the front of the deck and he ran up there to look. The other kids had run off. He decided to go back to his parents, but he found he couldn’t move. The wind had pinned him to the railing. He called out but the wind blew his voice away.

After what seemed like a long time The Boy’s father looked up and noticed, ran along the deck. As he swept The Boy up in his arms, his father’s specs blew off his face and sailed away over the ocean. The image is sharp and bright in Maxwell’s mind, 53 years later. Clear blue sky, clear blue water, specs flying away to infinity.

Parents seemed to be big people who knew everything. His father towered over him and his hands were vast. If Maxwell got a mess on his face, his father would produces a giant handkerchief, get Maxwell to dampen it with his tongue, and dab away at his face, roughly, until it was clean.

Many years later Maxwell found a photo of his parents, sitting in the state room of the RMS Queen Elizabeth. The surroundings were grand, with wood panelling and white tablecloths and heavy cutlery. The parents were dressed in their best clothes. They were children. They were lost. Intrepid children, traveling the world with young kids.

The ship was a warren of corridors and wood paneling and portholes and stairways. It was a vast floating hotel. Then, more people traveled by ship to New York than flew. Within a few years, it was all over. When Maxwell was small, people traveled by sea, and by train and bus. The trains were powered by steam. The homes were heated by open coal fires. The buildings were black from the soot. Sometimes in the late autumn, when the kids were let out of school, there was smog.

Thick grey smog that choked you when you breathed in so you had to hold your scarf over your face and breathe through it. You could’t see more than a few feet in front of you. There were oil lamps burning with an open yellow flame, to mark the edge of the pavement. The smog was caused by the smoke from the coal that people burned in their fireplaces. It was considered normal.

Maxwell wonders how people had allowed this to happen. It reminded him of a Tel he had visited somewhere in Israel. A vast mound of earth with steep sides and the remains of an ancient village on the top. Centuries of habitation, of chucking stuff out the window, of building a new house on top of the rubble of the old house had resulted in people living on top of a man made hill maybe 200 or 250 feet high. Didn’t they ever look out of the window and notice that they were living on a pile of garbage?

When they came back from America, his parents moved into a first floor flat in a grand, converted house. At the side of the house, there was a tennis court, behind which was a summer house.

To the rear was a full sized greenhouse, more garden and a little wood at the back. There was even a gardener. For the four years that they lived there, The Boy and his friends had the run of this garden.

Each winter morning, his mother would get up and make a coal fire. In the evenings they would roast chestnuts in a shovel in the fire, or toast crumpets held in a toasting fork. The fire would crackle and pop, flames would dance, and later it would settle to a deep red glow. Maxwell’s father taught him to play chess with this as the backdrop. There was no TV, and the radio was in the kitchen. In the evening the family would be in the lounge, all together, in front of the fire. There was a deep peacefulness about it. They would read, play games, do crosswords.

Every so often a chimney sweep would come. He would place a large white sheet around the fireplace. He had a disk shaped brush on the end of a rod which he pushed up the chimney, screwing on extension rods as he fed it upwards. Vast piles of soot would fall down the chimney. Thinking about it, Maxwell’s mind boggles: “This was just the stuff that was left behind! Just think how much shit was blown up into the atmosphere!”

On the way home from school The Boy would walk over the footbridge that ran through the station. If he was lucky a steam train would whoosh under the bridge with all the racket and steam and smoke everywhere. Even now Maxwell couldn’t think of many things more exciting to watch.

If you ever rode on a train, it smelled of coal smoke. It was ingrained in the fabric of the seats. The carriages were maroon, and had slam doors. Inside there was a corridor down one side, and the carriages were divided into compartments with 3 or 4 seats facing in each direction, and, opening onto the corridor, a sliding door with a glass window. There was a lever to control the heating which never seemed to work. The people within huddled into a little community. The rails clattered and the engined puffed and smoked.

The smell of coal smoke pervaded Maxwell’s young life. Then the Clean Air Act began to take effect. They cleaned all the buildings, which turned out to be golden colored stone, and not black after all.

After, whenever he smelled coal smoke, Maxwell would become nostalgic. His brain had linked this foul pollution to many of his happiest memories.

Sometimes they would board a bus to visit relatives at the other end of the city. The bus would drive past the shells of buildings that had been bombed in the war. The war had finished 15 years before but it was everywhere. The kids in the school played war games where the bad guys were the Gerrys. The Boy, always curious, couldn’t work out what the war had been about, and why, if the Germans were so evil, did his parents play records on the turntable, records by Germans like Bach and Beethoven?

In the flat there was a telephone. To make a call, you would lift the receiver, and a voice would chime out “operator,” and you would ask the operator for the number that you wanted. She would sing “putting you through.” She would plug in a patch cable that connected your line to the line of the number you were calling. If you were calling a different exchange in the same city, she would connect a cable to that exchange’s line, and ask the operator over there to put the call through in the same way.

Maxwell boggles to think how much the world has changed in his lifetime. His nephew once said: “Maxwell, I didn’t know you were alive in the olden days!” They all used to laugh about that, but now it’s obvious that the kid was right.

three

Altered Scale

Altered chords

Open chord voicings

I don’t know if this is an original idea, but here’s an explanation. Maybe France and Germany created the euro because they knew it would end up at this crisis point. And now we see the coup de grace. They are about to impose fiscal and hence political union on the 15 other nations in the eurozone, who are so in debt that they can’t refuse.

First the carrot, then the stick. The poorer countries joined the euro because they knew that money would flow in their direction. And now that it has flowed, they are in debt to the big countries, which means that democracy has been suspended. Governments in Italy and Greece have recently been replaced on the orders of Merkozy. Because a debtor, in so deep, has no choice but to do what the creditor says, or to go down. And the price of saving the rest of the Eurozone is fiscal union, run from Brussels. Which means that all people in the Eurozone are equal, but those in France and Germany are the only ones with effective votes.

Germany and France knew that the other countries would not vote for political union at the outset (remember the referendums which rejected the last major set of treaty changes), so they now have Europe in a place where voting is irrelevant.

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In the UK, I hear people voicing concerns that the Government is making moves to create confidence in the markets, rather than thinking about what the electorate wants, and that this is undemocratic.  What did you expect?

If you want to be independent, you must not be in debt. Try telling your bank that you and your family have voted not to pay back your massive loan right now, and in fact want more money from the bank.  It’s a democratic decision, sure, but it has no force. Do what the the bank wants, or they will foreclose. And this is happening big time in the Eurozone right now.