The best thing I read this week...

...had some stiff competition. I finished Consider the Lobster and read The Sense of an Ending, both of which have ended up pretty high on my "best things I have read so far this year" list. But the best thing I read this week was not fiction or literary non-fiction. It was a very short ebook by Andrew Lightheart which has the potential to be game-changing for me in a very important way.

Andrew's current focus can be found at apeacefulresolution.com, on the topic of difficult conversations and how to deal with them. I was intrigued by a blog post on the site which someone linked to from Twitter, and even more intrigued by the existence of the e-book - so much so that I did what I never do, and signed up to a newsletter. With my work email address and everything. I have a couple of dirty email addresses (mostly spam and newsletters, nothing important likely to come through them), one (my gmail) which is a balance of clean and dirty, and my work email, which I like to keep cleaner than clean (except in terms of language and content, of course). Any kind of syndicated email publication is anathemic to my own conception of clean email, so I tend to sign up for newsletters using one of my dirty email addresses and then never read them. But the blog posts I read over at A Peaceful Resolution looked interesting (and visually clean) enough that I didn't think the newsletter was going to annoy me, so I took the potentially-besmirching plunge and signed up with my work account.

My reward for doing so was the ebook which I have already mentioned, the BTIRTW of this post's title. Now, I imagine that a large part of A Peaceful Resolution's target audience is people who have just come to the realisation that they need to have a difficult conversation (defined as "any interaction that isn't totally straightforward", usually because there are a lot of emotions in play) and, worse, that they are desperately ill-equipped to do so. People with an acute case of difficult conversation syndrome who are looking for topical relief. When I came to the site, it was not as one of them. That's not to say that I never have difficult conversations. They crop up more often than I'd like, and usually when I'm least expecting them. And some important and necessary conversations are always going to be difficult. Therapy, for example, is one long difficult conversation. But (as is the case in terms of conflict resolution with other people as well as within the self) there are times when it's got to be had. No, I did not go to APR because I wanted the eponymous peaceful resolution for some specific conflict. I went there by accident, but when I did, it became clear that there was a lot of stuff worth sticking around for.

The first weekly email I got after signing up contained not merely discursion, but also a task. A simple task, but one which I hadn't done before. It outlined the concept of the emotional heatmap, with a four-stage scale encompassing green (emotional wellbeing & general good feeling), low amber (niggling anxiety & emotional discomfort), high amber (clenched, high-intensity negative feeling) and red (outright rage or grief), and theorised that most of us spend most of our time shuttling between the ambers - true green and true red are rare. The task was to spend the rest of the day mindful of the heatmap, and to take into account the shifts in feeling which occur during the day.

Think about how you felt on a particular day and you'll probably pick one static feeling which characterises the whole of that day for you. "On Monday I was really happy because I had a really nice date with x", or "Thursday was a total write-off; I couldn't concentrate at work and went home with a terrible headache." The most overwhelming of the emotions experienced on any one day seems to paint itself into the cracks of time and colour entire days, but, from hour to hour and minute to minute, the reality of human experience is not that clear-cut. I had some idea that this was the case, but didn't realise the full extent of it until I tried thinking about how I was feeling in terms of the emotional heatmap. It turned out, on the day I tried it, that I was all over the place - from solidly in the green to right up at the top of high amber, not-sure-I-can-keep-this-in-check style emotional intensity. Admittedly, it was an outlier of a day because of all kinds of non-typical stuff I had going on. But if I hadn't been bearing the heatmap in mind, and you'd asked me today how Monday had gone, I would probably have said that it was mostly terrible but got slightly better towards the end. Which, based on what being mindful of how I was feeling brought to light, would not even begin to cover all of the places my feelings were going over the course of one afternoon.*

Already, I was impressed with APR - I'd received an email newsletter which didn't annoy me at all in terms of formatting or tone, and which had contained a task that I found both fascinating and useful. Double win. And then I read the ebook I'd received upon signing up for the newsletter. It was incredibly simple and incredibly effective.

The ebook, Stop the Dread!, is an 11-step pointer in the direction of difficult conversations. It lays the groundwork which needs to be done before having the conversation itself. All 11 tips are interesting, and some are truly inspired. The best and simplest deal with the kinds of cognitive biases which affect the way we think every day - things like trying to predict how the other person in the conversation is going to react, or being sure of what they think, when really we can't know anything beyond what we can perceive and what they tell us. And the reminder that what you do and what you say is in your control, but, beyond that, not a lot else is - you can't control what the other person does or says or thinks, or how they react. It's really simple stuff, but it's stuff that I have an enormous tendency to forget, especially when emotion triumphs reason (as it so often does in highly-charged situations).

I'm not a big believer in self-help or personal change, especially not through a weekly email digest or thought for the week format. I'm too much of a cynic to believe that the majority of these self-help- and business help-style newsletters are doing anything more than making money and paying lip service to common sense. The stuff being covered on APR should be common sense, but so often, in the heat of the moment, it isn't. We all lose sight of things, lose sight of ourselves and our control and our reason when we're wound up about or wounded by something. Stop the Dread! is simple, effective mindfulness at its very best; the stuff it contains can be applied to any difficult conversation, conflict or interaction, from medicine to workplace to romance. I recommend you sign up to the newsletter and read the ebook right now. Go on. It's awesome.




*Side note: this is the problem I have with every kind of mood-tracking software/app that I've tried - none of them go into enough detail, either in terms of timeframe or in terms of emotional intensity. A graph which is minute-by-minute on the x-axis and able to be distinct and precise into the thousands on the y-axis would be perfect (scale of 1-10 doesn't quite cut it), but the stuff that's around at the moment is too blunt to capture that kind of data.

A Brief Note on the Tesco Scandal

By the looks of things, the Tesco scandal has come to a conclusion. Sort of. In that Tesco have come out and suggested that the DWP perhaps shouldn't mandate unpaid "work experience" with the threat of cutting off benefits to the non-compliant. They have not (as Sainsbury's, Waterstone's and TK Maxx have) stated that they will no longer support the scheme, so it's not exactly a win. In fact, none of this is a win. Whoever was responsible for the decision on behalf of any of those major retailers (and countless more) to participate in the scheme in the first place clearly did not foresee "major PR nightmare" as one of the potential consequences, or else they wouldn't have agreed to do it. And, of course, it shouldn't be the PR nightmare that worries them - it should, perhaps, be the fact that they willingly participated in state-sanctioned (nay, encouraged) slave-labour*. But that is not, of course, their biggest concern.

Would Tesco have urged the DWP to reconsider the manner in which this "work experience" is mandated were it not for the fact that they ended up on the wrong side of a vitriolic public backlash when the details of their involvement in the scheme became widely-known? Call me cynical, but it seems very unlikely that they would.

Gestures, like TK Maxx ending their participation, or Tesco calling for changes to the way the scheme is carried out, may be conciliatory. But they shouldn't be enough to make us forgive and forget. The jobseekers who were and are forced to work in this way don't have the luxury of voting with their wallets, but I do, and so do you.

Forced labour is forced labour, whether it's in a North Korean detention camp or in your local supermarket. And it shouldn't take public outcry to make big business finally able to tell right from wrong.

The only good to come out of this is further proof that social media, historic home of cat videos and being able to slag off people you don't like facelessly and without recrimination, is an excellent medium for slagging off big faceless corporations without recrimination when they do things you don't like. It's a fine expression of democracy, and I'm glad it works.


*I realise that the "workers" on these "work experience" schemes were receiving Jobseeker's Allowance in exchange for their work. I do not consider this to be payment, nor do I believe that JSA should be given by the state in exchange for anything other than a willingness on the part of the individual to do as much as they can to find work (short of enforced, unpaid work experience).

Try this one cool tip for eternal youth dreamt up by someone's mother somewhere

You've all seen the kind of adverts I mean. The poorly-executed, poorly-designed scam ads which are plastered over certain websites, bearing horribly-written slogans ("one trick of a tiny belly") that anyone with a basic command of grammar can barely parse. Or the ones which show screenshots ripping off the BBC/NBC/Fox logos, to give the gravitas of television news to whatever confidence trick it is they're advertising. The ones which claim that a British mother has invented a formula for everlasting youth. They're close kin to the most recent round of Twitter spam, the direct messages with a link, saying something like, "hey, I can't believe the nasty things that someone is saying about you on this blog." They're stupid and badly-done, so badly-done that you almost can't believe anyone falls for them, and they're probably best ignored. However, I believe that this family of adverts aims itself primarily at women, and for that reason I find them particularly odious and offensive.


The crudely-drawn shrinking figure in the "tiny belly" ads, for example, is always a woman. It's always someone's mother who has discovered a snake oil to rid you of wrinkles. And the 'products' they're pushing - acai berries, and goodness knows what other awful crap - are usually related to weight loss and beauty, two areas of both traditional and non-traditional advertising where women = goldmine.

The problem with these ads is not simply that they prey on vanity. Almost all advertising is intended to exploit a combination of vanity, envy and self-loathing; I've just about made my peace with that fact (although I still think it's a toxic cocktail to feed for multiple hours on a daily basis to everyone who has senses). The fact that many people can tune all advertising out reasonably well isn't a mitigating factor or excuse. What bothers me about these adverts in particular is the specific type of (mostly female) vanity they are intended to prey on. They work on the basis that all women with money to spend want to look younger or be thinner (or in the case of the "someone said a terrible thing about you" spam tweets, the idea that people are being mean about you behind your back, which is not so much vanity as insecurity, or, as previously mentioned, self-loathing), or some other similarly ubiquitous and reductive generalisation of femininity. There's also the implicit competitive element - "person x has discovered secret x and won't share it with anyone but us, and we'll sell it to you but only if you get a move on" - which is equally unsavoury, in that it encourages individuals in the target audience (women) to regard the rest of the target audience (other women) with suspicion and fear, in case the other women get to the magical slenderising/anti-aging treatment first.

And, of course, it perpetuates the notion that beauty and the ideal body and being worthy of love and respect are all concepts which are in finite and severely limited supply, which is just as much bullshit as the rest of this pernicious trash.

Look past the poor execution and hideous copy for a second. The fundamental message of all of these adverts is - like so much of Western advertising, but vastly less subtle - "you're not good enough, and you hate yourself because you're not good enough, and you hate yourself enough to pay money to make yourself more acceptable to our pre-determined standards, which were decided upon without your consultation." The ads are spectacularly brainless, which makes them easy to disdain or ignore out of hand. But they've bothered me for years, and it wasn't until I began to articulate this irritation that I realised how deep it went, or why I felt it.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but hear me out anyway: ladies, you are good enough. And dudes, you're good enough too. Everyone is fine, and no one should have to pay £6 to look twenty years younger, or whatever drivel it is they're peddling. No one should feel as though they have to look twenty years younger at all, but that's not a very popular opinion in advertising/media/fashion/cosmetics/plastic surgery circles, and I can't see it gaining any more traction any time soon.

The problems I have with this specific subsection of ads are inextricably bound to the problems I have with advertising, particularly when targeted at women, in general. I think it's a battle worth fighting in its entirety, and I've picked these specific examples as both an easy target and as an incidence which is particularly stupid and offensive. There's an inherent dishonesty and subterfuge in all of it, especially these: a little voice whispering in the ear which says, "you can be what you are not and should not be. You can be young when you're old and skinny when you're fat, and the only cost is money." And that's true of a lot of advertising, but nowhere is it more unashamedly open about this than in these particular ads.

I don't know when advertising changed from "buy x" to "buy x because it is better than y for these reasons" to "buy x because it is the only thing that will make you an acceptable human being." I'm not sure it was as linear as that - there are hints of lifestyle-aspiration even in pre-Bernays Victorian advertising - but the progression has been made, and carefully-engineered self-loathing is the lot this century's ordinary (and even extraordinary, for none of us can escape it) men and women are dealt.

In twenty years, I'd like adverts which rely on women (, people) feeling bad about themselves to be as utterly and universally reviled as those from decades past which sold cigarettes by making smoking look cool. Failing that, I'd like some adverts intended to make women competitive and jealous about wanting to be the best lawyers and doctors and entrepreneurs and developers and writers and artists and scientists and WOMEN as they can be, and not just about being pretty and youthful and thin. That would be awesome.

Veganuary: A Retrospective

From 00.00 on the 1st of January to 00.00 on the 1st of February, I attempted to be vegan.

There are three instances in which I believe I may have eaten something that came from an animal, which I will list here:

 - I ate a spoonful of some tomato soup which looked clear (and thus milk/cream-free) but, upon tasting, might have contained dairy. I did not eat the rest of the soup.

 - I ate three black olives which may have been contaminated with tzatziki. I did this because a) it was not clear whether or not they had been and b) I have no self-control when it comes to olives.

 - I ate a crisp which turned out to have "cheddar" in the name. My excuses for this are that it was 8pm, I'd been drinking heavily and I hadn't eaten anything that day.

These transgressions aren't groundbreakingly interesting, but they do illustrate my general attitude to the whole thing: I was as cautious as it was possible to be within reason, and thought a hell of a lot more about what I ate than I usually do, but I wasn't prepared to beat myself up over a mouthful of soup or three olives or whatever.

As an experiment, it was interesting. I did not experience the utter, blissful absence of disease, malaise and ill-feeling which the more vocal of the veganazis promise (I guess that's because I haven't given it long enough for all of those pernicious dairy-based toxins to leave my system, right?), but then, neither did I expect to. I wasn't at all ill in the last month, although that's not a great indicator of dietary benefit; I have a pretty tough immune system, and it would be normal in any given month for me to have been healthy throughout. Without going into detail, my digestion was different but no worse or better than usual. I was a little hungrier than usual in spite of eating a decent quantity of food. 

In terms of negative health effects, it's hard to say - so many variables act on the human body on a daily basis that it's impossible to point to anything that I experienced this month and think, "yep, that was definitely a result of veganism." I had some minor sleep and mood disturbances in the first half of the month - very minor - and it doesn't seem likely that these correlate to cheese (it was also January, which suggests itself as a stronger correlative). My skin was a little drier than usual, but that could be atmospheric, or based on spending Christmas in a soft water area and then coming back to a hard water area.

It would have been interesting to have had some kind of blood work done immediately before and immediately after the month, but it seemed impractical to do so. I gave blood during the month and didn't show any signs of anaemia; the donation went well.

I felt pretty good, but I felt pretty good in November and December, too.

I cooked some interesting stuff that I probably wouldn't have made before, as well as some modified versions of old favourites, and in general used more fresh ingredients and spent longer cooking. Houmous became a catch-all savoury dairy replacement. Burritos with cheese and sour cream became burritos with houmous. The cheese-blanket which had of late covered most of my self-cooked meals was generally replaced with a dollop of houmous. It satisfies something creamy and salty and primordial. The lazy dinner option became straight carbs rather than carbs-with-cheese; I don't think this is much healthier objectively, but it might be. I feel much happier cooking with fresh tofu than I did before, which is awesome. I'd always wanted the knack. Lunch at work was nowhere near as boring as I'd feared - with some vegetable-and-salad wizardry and a lot of sweet chilli dressing, I made interesting and delicious lunches every day. My fruit and vegetable consumption - previously already reasonable - skyrocketed.

On the ethics front, it was a reflective period. I'd been vaguely troubled by certain aspects of commercial dairy farming, and was wondering if this month would push me into the "I definitely want to be vegan full-time" category.

The short answer is, "it didn't."

Veganism, to me, is much more of a grey area than vegetarianism. Vegetarianism is easier to make black and white, even if people have a tendency to take the term and do as they will with it (I'm looking at the pescetarians who don't call themselves that here). As a vegetarian, I did not and do not eat anything which was ever alive in an animal sense. Even fish, whose plight and murder does not inspire any immediate visceral feelings in me. Even tasty, tasty bivalves. Now, there were still some ethical quandries inherent in this lifestyle - I believe, for example, that nothing living should have to die so that I can eat it. But I kill insects with something akin to insecticidal glee, simply because I hate bugs and find them weird and gross, and don't want them all up in my personal space. And then there are the lesser-or-greater degrees, like gelatine (I tend to avoid it but am not as troubled if I find I've eaten it by accident than I would be if I'd accidentally eaten meat) or isinglass used in the production of booze.

Veganism is even less clear-cut. On the surface, the simple, "no dairy or eggs" doesn't sound like an ethical problem area. But most of the vegans I know do it to different degrees, or have different exceptions. Some will eat honey, because bee-keeping might actually be helping the bees. Some have no problem buying woollen products (just like some vegetarians will buy leather), others will drink regular wine and beer, or will drink or eat something that they don't know isn't vegan until they find out that it is, or will make exceptions for things which are advertised as containing trace amounts of something non-vegan. 

In terms of strictness, it goes much deeper than this. I delved into the world of vegan bloggers, and found those who are strictly raw, and people who won't eat tofu or soy products because they disagree with the way soy is farmed, or who will only eat certain types of sugar - all kinds of other distinctions beyond the simple "I don't eat eggs or dairy" which marks where the popular conception of veganism begins and ends.

The thing that really troubled me about this blog scene (and there were a lot of things which troubled me) was that each more stringent definition seemed to be pursued in an attempt either a) to detoxify the human body entirely from what seem to be mostly imagined 'toxins' and/or b) to be the most virtuous person who ever lived. 

I don't know what it is about food that makes people attach emotion to it. It's something which I try to avoid doing, and it gently angers me every time I overhear someone at lunch talking about "good" or "bad" or "naughty" (that one really gets me) food. Food has no inherent emotional load or value. There isn't an objective scale, with deep-fried dime bar cake at one end and iceberg lettuce at the other, which demonstrates the value of food. It's food. Take it for all in all. Even if all of the pie slices are bright red on the Sainsbury's package. Maybe you shouldn't eat exclusively that thing, but you probably shouldn't eat any one thing exclusively anyway. 

From a very brief foray, it seems that the emotional loading of food is rife within the vegan (and especially the raw/foodblogging) community. On both an ethical and a health level. There are a lot of people who are searching for the most ultimately sanctimonious way of eating - the thing that is the absolute best for their bodies (rarely backed up by decent nutritional science or historical evidence that most humans can eat meat and fish and dairy and not suffer from ill effects), and which has the least impact on the lives of other creatures and on the world around them. 

I'm all for low-impact food, but not when it becomes the sole focus of one's life. It's a fact of the modern world that mass importing/transportation/farming processes aren't always great for the environment, but also that most of us are so damn busy all the time that it's impossible to live the best of all possible lives, food-wise. We balance the two. We do as much as we can to reduce our impact whilst still getting up and going to work every morning and having a good time. And the puritanical aspect of some of the culinary extremism that can be witnessed on these very interwebs is indicative of a mentality which wants to take every drop of joy out of food and eating. Orthorexia may not be medically recognised, but it's an interesting framework through which to view this effect.

At times, the militance becomes dangerous. I saw at least three examples of people who claimed to manage their cancer/other serious or terminal illness entirely through a vegan/raw diet. It's dangerous both for them and for the people they influence. Touting any dietary changes as some kind of miracle cure for disease - as a cure for the absolute fact of mortality, almost - is irresponsible and should not be encouraged. And yet I didn't see many voices of dissent within those communities. Possibly because the dissenters are all people like me: fans of modern medicine who are angered too much by the concept of a diet curing cancer to stay around long enough to comment. One of the most powerful lessons the Internet has taught us is that you can't engage people in meaningful debate if they don't want to engage, even if you're pretty sure you're right. 

As well as delving into the world of vegan blogging, I also got up to speed with the ex-vegan community, which is pretty interesting itself. It's made up of people who were formerly notable vegan/raw bloggers who decided not to remain vegan and went public about this decision, often because their diets were having a deleterious effect on their health. The response from the hard-line vegans was often outrageous - one woman was told that she and her family deserved to be killed like the animals they had gone back to eating. The response was much stronger than the complaints these hardcore vegans levied against people who had always eaten meat and never been vegan, most likely because of the sense of betrayal invoked by a high-profile vegan publicly going back to meat-eating. Which brings us, once again, to the emotional loading of food and lifestyle.

At heart, what I do and don't feel comfortable eating boils down to the level of cognitive dissonance which I'm happy experiencing. Everyone is walking around with a head full of the stuff - it's how we're not all constantly curled up in the foetal position, unable to comprehend the cruelty of the world. And I'm reasonably sure that this is also how other people decide what they will and won't eat. The level of cognitive dissonance which someone like Sali Owen can process is very different to the level experienced by someone who eats everything - and that's fine. I'd spent the last couple of years wondering if I'd continue to be able to justify (to myself) eating animal products which don't result in the death of the animal. And it turns out that I can.

On a conscious level, I'm concerned about the ethics of dairy farming. I think there are many things wrong with the way we mass-produce food in general, particularly when it's harmful to the welfare of sentient creatures, and to that end I've tried for many years to be as conscious of this as I can when choosing what dairy I do eat (the freest of the free-range eggs, and the like). I drink mostly soy milk, partly because I prefer the taste and partly because I know that it didn't cause distress or discomfort to any cows. But I don't find that I care enough about it to avoid dairy altogether. Objectively, the suffering of animals in dairy production is as distasteful to me as the thought of eating their flesh; on a day-to-day basis, and especially when it's cooked into something pre-produced, or when it's in work, or when it's a trace of milk powder (unnecessary but ubiquitous) in something like tortilla chips, I can't bring myself to care enough to stop eating these things.

It's now the 3rd of February, and I still haven't broken veganism and probably won't until we go to Meat Liquor tomorrow, when I intend to cram large amounts of halloumi into my face. Veganuary was a fascinating experiment, but I don't have the desire or commitment to be entirely vegan all of the time. The current plan is to eat almost exclusively vegan at home and at work (with occasional exceptions), and to be vegan where possible but more likely lacto-ovo vegetarian when I'm eating out. So veg*n, with a tendency towards the vegan end of the spectrum. This is a level of cognitive dissonance I'm content with.

"Even if religion isn't true..."

Or, why I'll read Alain de Botton's new book but don't like its ad campaign.

Alain de Botton is a fascinating man. On Twitter, he's one of the most consistently thought-provoking people to follow, dispensing 140-character chunks of serene wisdom, many of which are deeply applicable to the state of the human condition in the modern world.

I read Status Anxiety when I was fifteen, and thought it was wonderful (although it's almost certainly in need of a re-read now that I'm no longer fifteen). His new book, Religion for Atheists, looks like it's going to be lots of things I'm very interested in - not least the idea that one can be an atheist and still appreciate the trappings of religion.

I love religious architecture and music, but it irks me that such glorious, transcendental, humbling things have been built and made by man to the glory of God, when so few things built to the glory of mankind and man's achievements are on a similarly mind-blowing scale. We're getting there, especially in terms of art, music and literature (less so architecturally, but still somewhat), and I have no doubt that, as society drifts further towards atheism in the most literal sense, this trend will continue. Humans make beautiful things. We can't help ourselves. And there doesn't need to be a higher power to justify this creation. The range of human experience - the vast, mutable palette of human emotion - are enough to keep us creatively occupied until there are no more of us. Having a constant to continually compare that to, in a world where nothing is constant, is impractical and unnecessary.

My only concern with the release of Religion for Atheists is the advertising campaign which accompanies it. The adverts are a series of gorgeous images of religious structures, with the tagline, "Even if religion isn't true, can't we enjoy the best bits?"

I applaud and support the sentiment; it's the usage of "true" which troubles me. It jarred my ear as soon as I read it. Of the relevant definitions of "true", it's a choice between "conforming to the actual state of reality or fact; factually correct" and "legitimate". And it's clear that the advert isn't using "true" in the sense of legitimate (e.g. referring to the Catholic Church as the "one true Church"). Which leaves us with "conforming to the actual state of reality or fact."

My issue with "even if religion isn't true" is that I don't like the application of "true" to broad, sweeping concepts. "True" suggests a reasonably straightforward true/false dichotomy. Which is not something that "religion", as a noun, presents us with. You could take "government" as a comparable conceptual noun. No one is going to argue that government isn't true. Whether or not it exists is something you could theoretically doubt ("even if government isn't real..."), and you could certainly take it to mean "legitimate" (though modern English does not tend to use "true" to mean "legitimate" except as an identifier, like in "the one true Church"), calling upon the "true government" either as a request for a government to step up to the plate on something or in contrast to a non-legitimate government, but one would not ask the question, "Even if government is not true, can't we still enjoy the best bits?" Nor, even, would one state, "government is not true." Not valid, sure. Not real, maybe. But "true" or "not true" in a strictly true/false, "factually correct" usage (as I believe it is being used in this case)? No.

It's a subtle usage - perhaps not even incorrect, but questionable enough to set off my inner alarm bells. On the surface, the statements implied by the question asked by the advert - "religion is/isn't true" - sound as though they mean functionally the same thing as "I do/don't believe in religion" (as a concept, and as opposed to believing in God). The statement "I do/don't believe in religion" are not useful or functional tools for examining the role of religion within society. And whilst "even if religion isn't true" does not quite mean exactly the same thing semantically, there's not much of a mental leap between "I don't believe in religion" and "religion is/is not true."

The question which the first clause of the advert implies, "is religion true?", is a redundant one, and not useful to the conceptual framework in which the book (I dearly hope) attempts to examine the role of the trappings of religion in the life of the modern atheist. If de Botton's examination will (as I hope it will) open the debate on creating glorious things in the glory of man, not God, then we cannot afford sloppy copy. Atheism, to me, at this time, should need no justification or legitimisation in the eyes of the world, yet still it does. For a long time, we've had some of the best thinkers. Ideas - precious ideas about the infinite potential of the secular life - need to be grounded and clothed in the best possible words we can muster. And "Even if religion isn't true..." doesn't quite cut it.

An Uncensored Life

Yesterday evening, at long last, I watched the most recent episode of Sherlock (S02E02, 'The Hounds of Baskerville') and it dredged up a long-forgotten childhood memory of the fact that my whole family was mauled by giant dogs from Hell.

Quick critique on the show itself: I've heard from quite a few Sherlock fans that they were disappointed by last week's episode, and from watching it I can see why. It was interesting that the explanations for the strange occurrences around the Baskerville site as suggested by the locals were along the lines of some kind of horrible beast created by genetic research - I thought this was quite a good 21st Century parallel for the mythological/folkoloric suggestions from the original Sherlock Holmes novel, but at the same time I kind of missed the supernatural element because I really love Dartmoor mythology and folklore (this is what you get when you take nerdy kids to National Trust bookshops and allow them to purchase volumes entitled Ghastly Ghosts of Devon and the like, but more on that later).

The way they shot Dartmoor itself was also very interesting, although again I was slightly disappointed. There were a lot of panoramic shots where they kind of messed with the colours a little bit to make it look more vast and bleak and forbidding, which is an entirely natural cinematographic response to that kind of landscape, but it didn't work for me (although it wouldn't have looked out-of-place in an adaptation of, say, Wuthering Heights). The great thing about Dartmoor, as a couple of the local characters mentioned during the episode, is precisely how vast and bleak it is, but that for me was lost in the way they shot it. Especially the vastness. There's a certain perspective you sometimes get when standing around on Dartmoor, not even anywhere particularly special like on top of a tor, just by the side of the road looking across acres of gorse scrubland, wherein everything you are feels infinitely dwarfed by the untameable, untillable, barely-inhabitable land. And the big, fancy shots of it that they put into last week's Sherlock managed to completely lose that aspect of the scenery. The more intimate bits shot in "Dewer's Hollow" (which doesn't exist, although there are plenty of places very much like it which do) gave a much better feel for the landscape close-up than any of the panoramas did (although it's entirely possible that those bits weren't filmed on Dartmoor at all).

A lot of the plot elements were stupid (as one of the people I watched it with mentioned, why would a super-secret CIA experiment have its own t-shirts?), but on balance it was at least an entertaining (if not perhaps as intellectually tantalising) episode. I did like the fact that they showed Sherlock experiencing doubt and fear; that was a really nice piece of characterisation.

But enough on that. What those ninety minutes managed to remind me of (aside from how much I love Devon) was my first foray into the library held at our primary school. This would have been in late 1994, during my first full term at school; our infant class was dutifully marshalled down to the library in small groups and told that we could pick any volume we chose to take home and have our parents read to us. I would like to emphasise the word any; perhaps this is more about my earliest experiences with the fallibility of adult authority, but I digress. I was overwhelmed by the possibilities offered to me. My reading experience thus far had consisted of the formulaic books we were using to learn to read, filled with poorly-developed (and illustrated, if I'm honest) farmyard characters and little to offer in the way of narrative intrigue. So to be presented with a room full of books which were filled with completely new pictures and stories seemed wonderful.

I chose, being a morbid five-year-old, an illustrated (and, I presume, heavily abridged) kids' edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Show me the five-year-old who would not rather be reading about a flaming-eyed murderous hell-hound than, say, Spot the Dog, and I'll lose my remaining faith in humanity. I cannot fully express how entirely awesome this kids' version of The Hound of the Baskervilles looked. I was practically foaming with literary rabies at the prospect of taking it home and forcing my parents or grandparents to read it to me. It was like a shining beacon in a sea of battered tomes. I can remember many things about that day, in that room, but what any of the other books offered looked like or consisted of are details lost to my memory. I plucked The Hound off the shelf and proudly presented it to whichever teaching assistant was there with us, to "show us around the library". Or, as it turned out, to censor what we read. For that is what she did.

I was told in no uncertain terms that The Hound of the Baskervilles, even in such an innocent and childish incarnation, was entirely unsuitable reading material for little girls. Being a ballsy thing, I protested, and was once again told that I could not have it. I believe (although perhaps this is just years of anger about a] the whole experience and b] the way gender is hammered into children from almost every source during every developmental period) that I was offered something more girl-specific as an alternative choice. But no other choice (and certainly not whatever I ended up being fobbed off with, the memory of which escapes me) was in fact anything resembling my choice, since I had chosen and subsequently been denied the right of choice.

There's an incredibly happy ending to this story, though. The people with the most power to censor my reading - my parents - chose at almost every opportunity not to. I can recall perhaps only one or two attempts made by my parents to stop me from reading something they considered unsuitable, and those were almost certainly both Jilly Coopers furtively stolen from my grandmother at the age of nine. I have no idea why, when they were fairly overprotective about many other aspects of my young life (including in particular the films and television I was exposed to), they made so few attempts to control what it was that I read. It could have been the speed at which I read - books were coming in and out of the house at such a frantic rate, and often with so little involvement from them, that what I was reading was pointless or impossible to police. Or perhaps, especially when I was a little older, it was that they had not themselves read what I was reading, and thus couldn't comment on its suitability.

It was a glorious and remarkable freedom, and one which I would urge all parents to grant to their children, no matter how much they long to shelter them from the shocks and hurts of the world. It meant that I was occasionally reading wildly inappropriate things, books whose contents I had no register of tone or emotion by which to frame and thus properly understand. Will Self, for example, is a startling writer even now - when I was thirteen, his novels were just penetrable enough to be unsettling without me realising how darkly funny they were also intended to be. The same goes for Don DeLillo - I read White Noise entirely straight when I was fifteen, and it was only when I came back to study it for a dissertation that I realised how funny a book it is. These wildly inappropriate things did not damage me in the slightest - and neither would The Hound of the Baskervilles have done, had I been allowed it. One of my favourite things to do when I was a lot younger was to read something that frightened me so much I could not sleep. That the human imagination is capable of producing such an effect is a glorious thing, to be treasured rather than prevented.

The great thing about literature is that so much of it self-censors, depending on the reading age (and, perhaps more importantly, the emotional maturity) of the young reader. So much of description, narrative and tone can be gained or lost by the reader. It was precisely because I had been allowed to read widely and rangingly that I came to love reading so very much. Censorship does not protect; it merely makes children bitter and angry towards the censors.

So please do not censor the reading of your children. Their development will censor itself, up to a point, and even after that they're unlikely to be damaged by what they read. Many of my earliest memories involve reading and books, and for kids who don't easily make friends, a book is a passage into a world where the social constraints of day-to-day life do not matter in the slightest. A book is a true friend, even if it appears to be a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, too-much-makeup-wearing older kid, trying to lead your child astray. Reading is one of the safest ways a child can thus be led.

2012 - Resolutions

There's a word I was trying to remember earlier on, whilst watching The West Wing (Season 3 Episode 6, 'War Crimes') with my housemate. Bartlet comes back from church ranting about how awful the sermon was, how it lacked panache, and how the preacher fundamentally misunderstood the passage from Ephesians that the sermon was meant to be about. The President's interpretation of the verses was not that they pertained to the relationship between a man and his wife, but that they are all about the passage, "Be subject to one another."

The word I was looking for is accountability. Accountability to one another is incredibly important. It reminds us of our better selves. It reminds us that we shouldn't do stupid, hurtful things to other people. It's a great reality check, except in the case of mass delusion: if I do something or want to do something that I'm not sure of the ethics of, and someone whose judgement I trust agrees with me that it's an okay thing to do or to have done, then that's good enough for me, and it's a stronger indication than just my judgement alone. I'm not saying that one cannot live an ethical life without someone to be accountable to, more that for those of us who are particularly human it can be really useful to have a gate. And sometimes both you and the person you consider yourself accountable to are wrong about something, but somehow that makes it better than just you being wrong. At least, it does for me.

In 2011 I made resolutions at the beginning of the year. Some of them I kept and some of them I failed at, but I didn't really publicise any of them. I told people casually that I was trying to do this, or that, or the other, but I wasn't really accountable to anyone but myself. And that was fine. I didn't need to be, and I don't think I would have succeeded at any more of them if I'd stated my aims publicly at the start of the year. But there's something nice and satisfying about writing my resolutions for 2012 down on some stone tablets at the top of a mountain somewhere in the Holy Land and then proclaiming them to those who care to listen, so to speak.

So I am being accountable here. I don't need or want a cheerleading team, or a stern, authoritarian power outside of myself to shame me into keeping or not keeping them. I just want to let it be known that this is what I hope to achieve this year.

- To read all of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu:

I received a complete translation for Christmas. Never have I been so afraid of a Christmas present in my life.

- To be vegan in January, and to generally eat less dairy in 2012:

I find myself increasingly using cheese as a condiment. I'm hoping that Veganuary will both make me think more about what I cook and eat, and will instil in me a proper and fitting reverence for cheese.

- Not to eat a single Ginsters cheese and onion slice:

This is kind of a subset of Veganuary, and is mostly motivated by the fact that the aforementioned slices do not even slightly resemble food. That they are frequently reduced in the Co Op, and that I am frequently hung over, are not reasonable grounds for putting these monstrous things into my system.

- To be more forgiving and less bearing of grudges:

I come from a long line of grudge-bearers. My mother once didn't speak to her father for six months over a fight they had about a biscuit. I don't want to be that guy, difficult as it can be to let go of stupid, petty things at times. They're always stupid and petty, and life would be better if I didn't hang on to them for a long time, or, ideally, at all.

- To be formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church:

I have been functionally an atheist since the age of five, when a priest could not satisfy me on a point of theology. There have been times in my life when I attempted to find religion, but I'm just not wired for faith. It is ludicrous that a decision could have been made for me at an age when I was not sufficiently intellectually developed to object which is incredibly difficult for me as a rational adult to extricate myself from. It used to be that one could formally defect from the Catholic Church, which was easier to achieve than excommunication, but they closed that loophole in canon law some time in 2010. In order to be excommunicated, I have several options, including assaulting the Pope or a high-up Cardinal (I'm not such a fan of beating up old men, and this might result in a prison sentence), desecrating the Host (this would probably require going to Communion, which I don't want to do) or proving my apostasy. I am very much looking forward to writing the letter by which I intend to declare myself an apostate.

See you in 2013 for an update on how all of these went.