On exercise. And on exercising our rights

Sarah Boseley, a fine Guardian journalist, recently shared an invaluable insight on the subject of the best way to protect health through exercise:

Incorporating physical activity into our everyday lives, from taking the stairs to holding “walkaround” meetings in the office, is more likely to protect us from heart disease and an early death than buying a gym membership, according to the author of a major new global study.

A sentiment that needed voicing.

I’ve often been struck by the number of people who apparently feel that buying a gym membership was sufficient to guarantee them good health. Actually using the membership? Three or four times in the first month, maybe. A couple in the next. But in the long term? Life’s too short, even when prolonged by exercise. It’s like War and Peace, isn’t it? How many people have bought the book and how many fewer have read it? How many holders of gym memberships go so far as to use them?

A long Russian novel and a passport to strenuous exercise
More honoured in the purchase than the use?

Still, it was good to read that walking around and using stairs is helpful. It was a relief, to tell the truth. Following my purchase of a fitbit last month, I’m still living under its tyranny. When it tells me to get up and walk a bit, or to do a few more steps to reach my daily goal, I find it hard to tell it to get lost and remember it’s only a bracelet and not my master. Of course, it would only provoke a wry smile, in me and perhaps in it too, if I did say anything like that – somewhere deep in whatever passes for a soul in a purely electronic device, it knows it’s my master.

So it’s a comfort to have it confirmed that what it’s making me do might help improve my health.

On the other hand, it’s always intriguing to see the message it sends me, from time to time, announcing that it has decided to “sync” with my phone. That gives me something of a syncing feeling, but not for what it's doing to my phone so much as for what it's doing to my language. 

That’s a fine verb, sync. An alternative, I assume, to swym, which wouldn't be appropriate for so notoriously a non-waterproof device as a fitbit. But what, I wonder, does the verb use as a past form? I feel it ought to be “sunc”. But that might lead to confusion: “I’ve sunc my fitbit” sounds like a cruel way to treat a device that dislikes water. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what I should do. Sinking the odious thing might be a blow for freedom, an insurgent act against unbearable tyranny. Perhaps under the slogan “Couch potatoes of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your fitbits". 

Chuck it in a swimming pool and escape its thrall? It might not be a bad move.

I could always buy a gym membership instead.

The transient's diary, weeks 4 and 5

It seems like we hit the trough at the end of week 4.

It was already getting a bit tedious, this transient existence. Danielle and I were both feeling how pleasant it would be to be able to move home. Not Toffee and Luci, the dogs, of course. We brought our sofa with us, so with their favourite resting place, plenty to eat, and plenty of walks, they had nothing to complain about.

We, on the other hand, were running out of patience. There’s nothing wrong about our rented appointment. Well, nothing except that the pipes start moaning from time to time, for no good reason, when we’ve had the temerity to run some hot water. Nothing I can do seems to stop it – eventually it dies down like the moaning of a banished spirit – so I’ve been reduced to muttering, “oh, do shut up, you ghastly bit of plumbing”. 

Ineffective, you think? No more than anything else we’ve tried.

Still, even without that, we’d want to get home. Home’s home, after all, the place where we feel we belong. Small and modest it may be but, hey, I’m small and modest myself. Well, small anyway.

However much we miss being away, Misty, our cat, is even more fed up. Each time we show up at the old place, where we’ve left him – it seemed more humane than imposing a cat flap-less existence on him – he rebukes us loudly. I mean, he’s happy to devour the food we give him, but he makes it clear he resents our failure to remain in our home. Which is also his home.

Scarcely inhabitable

Still, at the end of week 4, the place really wouldn’t have been possible to live there. Or, if possible, certainly not desirable. Hey, the kitchen gave straight onto the garden, without so much as a door between it and the elements. And, until blocked by a sheet of plywood at night, in a gesture to security, the sitting room-as-was gave straight on the kitchen, so had the sofa been in its accustomed place, it would have been for all practical purposes, in the garden. Or at least, in an annex to it.

That was the trough though.

By the end of week 5, the change was spectacular. Why, the wall-less hole at the end of the kitchen had turned into a real wall, with a real door, and a real cat flap (well, the hole for the cat flap was there. The flat itself will come later).

A new door to lock out the garden
A broom as a sign of optimism
A massive cat flap in preparation

And upstairs, in what will in time be our bedroom, we had – a window! With a view, what is more. Or at least, there was a view until they covered the whole thing (leaks, you know: a temporary measure until they’re fixed).

The beginnings of a view

Still, it’s a huge step in the right direction.

Even so, that was the end of week 5. We’re approaching the end of week 6 now. And we were already getting fed up in week 4.

There’s no joy in vagrancy.

The funny thing about Trump and Brexit

As a student, I had the pleasure of attending the legendary London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s at a time when Ronnie Scott himself was still around to do his act during an interval in the music. One of the lines that has stuck in my mind was his dead pan reassurance to us all that, while we might not be the best audience in the world, we were certainly the worst.

There’s something about the Trump presidency that brings that back to mind. Whatever else he’s done, and to be honest he’s done precious little, he’s assured himself a place in the history books. Or at least, he will if there are still history books being written, and Trump doesn’t contrive to end civilisation (such as it is) in a conflagration followed by a nuclear winter triggered by his inability to find a peaceful way out of his confrontation with North Korea.

What is particularly outstanding about his presidency so far is that he’s clearly uncertain which party he belongs to. The leadership of the Republican Party was never happy with his candidacy, and aren’t particularly enamoured of his performance since entering the White House either. But just recently he seems, in his confusion, to have started to think he was a Democrat. Certainly, twice in two weeks he’s come to something like a deal with the Democratic leadership in Congress – Chuck Schumer, minority leader of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, his opposite number in the House of Representatives.

Err... that's the Democratic leadership
You're supposed to be a Republican, Donald

Except that perhaps he hasn’t. That’s how exciting the Trump presidency’s proving. His tweets seemed to suggest at first that he hadn’t made a deal on steps concerning unauthorised immigrants who were brought to the US as children, later that he add. So who knows? Did he or didn’t he? We may discover in time.

The one thing certain is that he had Pelosi and Shumer around and not Paul Ryan from the House or Mitch McConnell from the Senate, the actual majority leaders, from the Republican party he ostensible represents. But does he really? See what I mean about exciting?

He may be suffering from a little confusion too. Making a deal with the minority party in Congress may sound like smart work, but that word “minority” isn’t without significance. To get things through Congress and into law requires a majority. For something to happen, it isn’t enough for Trump to decide that it should, even if he gets agreement from congenial company around honey sesame crispy beef.

The people you really have to sympathise with in all this chaos are the left-behind voters, mostly poor, who backed Trump as a way out of their desperate misfortune as well as a means of kicking the establishment that was letting them down. Whatever they were hoping for, Trump hasn’t provided it. If he’s now reaching out to the Democrats, then he’s working with the people who most excited their wrath.

Something similar is happening in Britain, where the government is in chaos over Brexit. As realisation grows of the damage likely to be inflicted on the economy by leaving the European Union, ministers are beginning to look for ways to soften the blow. Why, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (our Finance Minister) is even talking about a transitional period which would be indistinguishable from the status quo.

Now that’s not an approach likely to attract the many leave voters who chose Brexit, like Trump supporters, to give the establishment a kicking. They’ve found a spokesman in the form of Boris Johnson, a man whose main claim to celebrity has been principally based on an assiduously cultivated image as a buffoon. He is, however, currently moonlighting as Foreign Secretary. That’s an office to which he has brought the special gift of his buffoonery, to the amusement and sometimes anxiety of his opposite numbers in other countries.

To the surprise of his cabinet colleagues, he has chosen to sing the praises of Britain outside the EU, and the glorious future that awaits it. Why, he even repeated the claim, made during the referendum campaign, that Brexit would free up £350m a week that could be spent on the NHS. That particular piece of propaganda has been entirely discredited since, but that didn’t stop Johnson repeating it. Using it not just as part of his pro-Brexit campaign, but in support of the much important one that he hopes will take him to the Conservative leadership and number 10 in replacement of Theresa May. 

Sir David Norgrove, the head of the UK statistics authority, denounced the claim as "a clear misuse of official statistics".

We, like the Americans, seem to be living in a looking-glass world in which principle, consistency and certainly the truth, count for little. Britain and American seem to have reached a similar state, in response to the same frustration of the left-behind. But if Trump and Brexit have much in common, there is one big difference.

Americans need only wait until 2020 to get rid of Trump.

Britain will need a generation to realise what a mess it has made by leaving the EU and applying to join again.

Though, of course, if Trump manages to handle matters with North Korea as badly as he has so far, none of that may matter very much.

Austerity in the GP surgery

Curious.

We – my wife and I together – joined our current GP practice because the service was simply so much better than any other we’d known.

The practice is associated with a walk-in centre, which itself provided great support for patients: anyone needing care immediately but not urgently – in other words, patients who were sick or in pain but not obviously suffering from anything potentially life-threatening – could attend the centre and be seen, seven days a week, from early morning into the evening.

A generous service. But not one it pays to cut

That’s a relatively expensive service to provide. There is at large today, throughout the Western world, a view that such expense should be cut back wherever possible. I wrote the other day that it’s often in the little things that we see austerity economics at work, and our GP practice is no exception.

Today, Saturday, I tried to renew a prescription on-line. That didn’t work. I could log in to the system but the buttons thoughtfully provided to select a medication to renew simply didn’t react if I clicked on them (and, before I’m challenged as a computer illiterate, let me assure you that I tried on two machines, using tree different browsers between them).

I then phoned the surgery but was told that, while the walk-in centre was open, the surgery itself was not. Could I ring in again on Monday?

“Yes,” my wife told me, “we’ve had a couple of letters. Funding’s been reduced so that they can’t stay open at weekends any longer.”

Once more, I felt the glacial fingers of austerity gripping my innards.

If the GP practice is facing cutbacks, the walk-in centre won’t be far behind.

While the service it provides seems generous, it’s only those with the narrowest of account-book outlooks, entirely focused on the short term – in other words, Conservatives – who can persuade themselves that such a cutback makes sense. It’s true that shutting down a walk-in centre would save a lot more money than shutting any other kind of practice but, unfortunately, the patients who use it won’t go away. They still feel ill or in pain, so if they can’t find care from a GP, they’ll go to the emergency department of the local hospital instead.

An emergency department is far more expensively equipped than any GP surgery. I’m not just talking about physical equipment, much of which is indeed costly: for instance, devices to provide a view of what’s happening inside a human body, whether by ultrasound, radiology, or some of the more powerful and sophisticated techniques now available such as CT or MRI scanning. However, even that fades into insignificance compared to cost of staff: medical and nursing staff on a wide hierarchical range, professional support such as pharmacists and various types of therapists, and even administrative staff.

The result is that while it may cost £50 to see a GP, it can cost £124 on average to attend an emergency department.

Cutting back on GP care is, therefore, a false economy.

There’s nothing unusual in that consequence of Conservative healthcare policy. All over England, hospitals are spending a fortune on agency or bank staff (“bank” is in effect overtime: existing staff doing additional hours on a far more expensive, hourly-paid basis). Why are they spending so much? Because they’re being denied the funds to take on more permanent staff, though that would be cheaper.

Of course, the false economy of shutting the walk-in centre would turn into a real one, if the patients denied treatment were unable to attend an emergency department instead. But for that to happen, our local hospital would have to close, or be replaced by a private one which only treated patients who could pay the full, economic cost of the care it provided.

I suspect a lot of people at the top of the Conservative Party would be perfectly easy about that happening.

However, I wonder if all their voters, further down the income range, would agree with them…

Reminders of the shame of austerity Britain

Often, it’s the little things that mark you…

There is, near where we live in Luton, a rather attractive open space known as Stopsley Common. In the middle are wide open spaces, including three cricket fields and a dozen or more football pitches, as well as areas simply left open for walking. Around the edge are hills and wooded areas crossed by well-maintained paths.

Luci and Toffee enjoying Stopsley Common

It’s a place frequented by cricketers, footballers, dog walkers, joggers or just people out for a quiet stroll. It is an invaluable resource to be enjoyed by all, a reminder that community matters too, and not just the capacity of small numbers of individuals to makes themselves rich.

Sadly, however, it’s also an area much favoured by joy-riding bikers, the kind that like to race their motorbikes or quads, without registration plates, across the grass, churning it up and endangering lives including their own – the obligation to wear helmets is one of many they ignore.

Many of these people seem to be what one might call sedentary travellers. In other words, they belong to that community of people we think of as travellers, in the sense that they wander around the country in caravans (often, it has to be said, drawn by large BMWs or Mercedes) and only stop for short periods in any one place.

However, a group seems to have set up permanent home in Stopsley. Occasionally, they alert their more peripatetic brethren of the fact that a gate has been left open, or blocks of cement designed to prevent access to certain places, are more mobile than their designers imagined, and we discover a few days later that a favourite place has been invaded once more.

I use the word “invaded” advisedly. When these travellers move into a place, they don’t simply inhabit it for a few days before moving on, which I would strongly favour tolerating. Although they use highly sophisticated caravans, they seem not to like the toilets most of them contain, or perhaps they don’t like dealing with the waste. So they tend to use the area around where they park as an open toilet, making it generally less attractive as a place to wander in.

At least that involves substances which are biodegradable. Far more unpleasant still is one of the ways they have chosen to earn a living. They contract with unscrupulous builders to collect waste from construction sites, which they then dump, at no doubt highly competitive prices, anywhere they choose – including those same places, that others value for their beauty and their amenities. Our Council is starved of cash, so it can take many weeks before these materials are cleared away.

No way through
Dumped construction site waste blocking a path on Stopsley Common

”But,” you will no doubt exclaim, “such behaviour is surely illegal!” And it is. But the law can only be enforced if there are people to enforce it. I’ve already said that the Council is strapped for cash; so is our police force. It has the resources to chase major crime, to track down murder or terrorism. But what merely lessens quality of life or inconveniences the public, is beyond their resources. So no action is taken over the dangerous quad bikes or the dumping of rubble in a public park.

In 2010, David Cameron assured the British electorate that “… we have a moral obligation to stop running up bills that will have to be paid by future generations.”

He won the election that year and he and his successor, Theresa May, have had the opportunity to honour that moral obligation. The result? National debt has grown from a trillion pounds to approaching two trillion.

What has been the result of their austerity programme? Nurses are 14% worse off than they would otherwise have been. It seems that the poorest people in society are to lose on average a further £50 a week of income by 2020 or around £2500 a year. To put that in context, median income in Britain is around £25,000 a year. By definition, half the population is below that level; the forthcoming cuts will disproportionately hit such people.

Belatedly, the government has realised that its approach is failing. It has decided to start moving away from its pay cap for public servants. As usual, however, it is doing so in too mean a way – police are to have an increase of 2% instead of 1%, in other words a rise that is  paltry as opposed to derisory – and as divisively as possible: most public sector workers, including nurses, will have to suffer at least another year of the 1% limit.

Austerity has caused pain, but there has been no gain on the debt front. On the contrary, things have got worse. And life has been impoverished in myriad ways.

For me, it’s the spoiling of Stopsley Common. That is a fitting tribute to seven and a half years of Conservative austerity rule. But I don’t deny it’s only the monument: the real thing is the terrible suffering being inflicted on people already poor enough.Still, at least the state of many part of Stopsley Common reminds me of the sheer ghastliness of Tory rule each time I take the dogs out there.

Reminders are what the British electorate apparently most needs.

fitbit fatigue in Brexit Britain

It’s been a tiring week.

The principal reason is that I was training two new colleagues. In the long run, that’ll be great, because one of them will be taking over my old job, so I can focus on my new one. In the short term, it means that I’m still doing two jobs with training thrown in on top.

What made things worse was that a third colleague couldn’t join us because of problems with work permits and visas. They’ve been solved now, or nearly, but that’s too late. Trying to organise remote training as well as delivering training locally just added another dimension to the workload.

Still, I suppose that this kind of thing is good practice for me, at least for as long as I stay in Britain. Once the xenophobes have successfully raised the Brexit walls to cower behind, getting anyone into the country will become a new bureaucratic nightmare. The problems I had this week are just the template for things to come.

I began to realise just how tired I was getting when it dawned on me that for two days in succession, I’d shaved with hand cream instead of shaving cream. The razor blade glides quite well through it, but I have to say, it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to foaming.

The fatigue all came to a head on Friday evening, when I got home after walking up the hill from the station. Why did I walk? I’ve succumbed to fitbit tyranny. How many steps have I taken? How many now? How many in the week? It’s appalling. I can’t get away from it. The thing buzzes at me if I haven’t done 250 steps in an hour and I leap up, as though stung or scalded, and scamper up and down a corridor, if I can’t find the time to walk around the block.

Oddly, once I was home, I felt like taking the dogs out, despite my tiredness. That was when the fitbit madness took over once more. It had once sent me a message congratulating me on doing 20,000 steps. 

You may ask, why would anyone care? It’s an electronic device, for God’s sake. A bracelet. Can it possibly matter to me that to have its approbation?

Night falls as we wander through the park in the grip of the fitbit fit

It seems it does matter to me. I set out to achieve the same high goal. That meant that I ploughed on through gathering darkness (depressing how short the days are becoming) to say nothing of the ever heavier rainfall, until even the dogs were looking at me as though I were mad. Something in their eyes, when I could see them in the bleary light of the occasional street lamp, told me that they would feel nothing but pity for me if the cold and wet hadn’t made them use up all their compassion feeling sorry for themselves.

In my defence, there was a restorative aspect to my labours. When I’d climbed into my car to drive the dogs to the park, I’d noticed that some kind fellow – perhaps resenting my presence in his street (we’re in temporary accommodation as builders wreak havoc in our house) – had bent one of my wing mirrors back as far as it would go, apparently breaking it in the process.

This seemed rude. My car is one of those polite ones that tucks its wing mirrors in when you lock it, so there was no call for forcing the mirror back like that. Try as I might, I couldn’t adjust it to make it useful, prompting a sense of depression in me made all the deeper by the tiredness.

The first place I went to was our (real, permanent) house. Our cat, Misty, is the only member of the household still living there (we felt a flat without a cat flap was too much to inflict on him). But Danielle hadn’t seen him when she went around earlier.

Sadly, he didn’t come to my call either (usually the call of “Misty, Misty, Misty, pss, pss, pss” is immediately followed by the loud impact of paws on ground – he’s no small cat – a lot of mewing and a rush of fur to our side to be stroked).

That meant starting the walk with a wing mirror damaged and, far more worryingly, a member of the family missing.

Then, when the sun finally set, we ran into a large dog coming down the path. Luci, the nervous one – our black toy poodle – vanished at once. And, blow me down, as I was looking for her, Toffee – the orange toy poodle – who isn’t nervous at all, vanished in another direction, surely attracted by some interesting smell.

Imagine my state of despair.

My car had been vandalised.

My cat had vanished.

And now both dogs had gone.

Fortunately, this was the low point. Soon, both dogs reappeared, from different directions. Back at the car, I fiddled again with the wing mirror, until it suddenly gave a satisfying click and started to work again. And, back at the house, calling Misty in the sodden night, I was delighted to hear an answering patter of paws (that’s “patter” at something close to the stamp level) followed by plaintive mewing.

Relief: the wanderer returns

What’s more, I got my 20,000 steps done.

The only fly in the ointment: I haven’t yet had a message from fitbit congratulating me on the feat.

Or, since we’re talking about steps, should that be feet?

The transients' diary: week 3

Every day, I assure myself that the destruction has gone as far as it needs in our house, and now the process of construction can go steadily forward with no more backtracking or regression.

Then I find that something else has gone down. Or been torn up. Or ripped off.

What? What? Where's my roof? Or even my floor?

That’s not to say that there’s been no progress. There has. Things have been built in amongst the continuing demolition. It’s just that the demolition still, for the moment, seems to be outpacing the building.

Ah well, that’ll change. I know that can’t be wrong. 

Can it?

Three weeks gone now. It can’t be more than five to go – as we’ve said before, these projects complete to schedule. 

Don’t they?

In making progress, it’s curious how simple some decisions, how complex others. Not, generally, the way you might expect them to be. I’m reminded of one of the more colourful characters in Shaw’s play, You Never Can Tell, the barrister Bohun:

”… there will be no difficulty about the important questions,” he assures the other characters. “There never is. It is the trifles that will wreck you at the harbour mouth.”

So it proved this very day. A decision about putting in a new water main, ripping up more of the floor to do it? No problem. Investing more money in making sure the water gets to the different places we need it, at sufficient pressure? A few minutes discussion led to a decision to go ahead. Changing our intentions over accessories and units to make the most of that water? Easy.

No, what took the time – an hour and a half of it – was selecting a new cat flap to go in the kitchen. I pick my words with care because he gets terribly upset at any hint that he might be a little larger than he should be, so let me just say that no one would suspect him of anorexia ever. At one point, he managed to rip a cat flap right out of a door.

Well, that door’s going in the new arrangements. So, we need a new cat flap – actually, a small dog flap, as Luci and Toffee have to use it too. This one will not be in a door at all (why cut a hole in a brand new, double-glazed door?) but in the wall next to the far better door with which we’re replacing the old one. Though the construction work is going to increase the room available to us in the house a bit, space will still be at a premium. It isn’t easy to pick a cat flap that will take up a sufficiently small proportion of the wall space we can play with, but still be – again I pick my words judiciously – large enough to accommodate a cat of respectable girth.

It took me an hour and a half to solve that conundrum. To be honest, I’m still not sure the solution will work. We won’t know until the new cat flap turns up and the contractor can compare it with the space available.

As for Misty himself, he seems to be doing reasonably well. We still pop round to see him at least once a day. He’s always pleased to see us, trotting over to be stroked and mewing in loud appreciation as we go over to his shed with a packet of food to refill his bowl.

What most pleased me, though, was to find him inside the house the other day, among the building workers. We thought he was keeping well away from these strangers. But one of them explained to me that he’s taken to stroking Misty when he shows up and making sure he has access to his dry food.

So Misty has a friend and the purgatory that the project implies may have been lightened a little for him.

Good for Misty. I’m looking forward to moving back in and seeing him settle once more into his home. And, of course, use his new cat flap, making all my effort and heart ache entirely worthwhile – as I’m sure he will.

Won’t he?