Evolution

Sight, I can understand. The retina responds to a narrow band of EM radiation, which corresponds (give or take) to the highest intensity band generally seen on Earth. Hearing reacts to pressure waves over a large range of frequencies in the air that surrounds us. Touch responds to pressure on your skin from the local deformation. While taste has to monitor a whole host of different chemical patterns, at least it is limited to the small subset of things we stick in our mouths.

But smell - what on Earth is going on there? Your sense of smell is incredible (unless you're anosmic, in which case, my apologies) - it responds to millions (if not more) of entirely unrelated chemicals. If you pay attention, you might notice that people have (to some extent at least) their own individual smell - not their sweat, not their shower gel, but an underlying scent that will be different to another person's. Buildings have their own characteristic smell. Even the slightest hint of an ingredient is often detectable in food or drink - while some French cheeses can be smelled through the box, a plastic bag and halfway across the house. And then you remember that compared with dogs or pigs, we have an incredibly crude sense of smell. I really wonder how the sense of smell developed. Evolution is a madman I tell you.

Book dimensions

Reaching the end of a good book is always a slightly bittersweet experience. You have the joy and the contentment that you've reached the end, that the story is wrapped up and all the loose ends that are going to be tidied up have been tidied. But then you have the knowledge that there's no more to enjoy. The end of a good book always sneaks up on me. All of a sudden, you turn the last page and it's there. It's always a shock.
But the end of a mediocre book is exactly where you expect it. And the end of a bad book is, in my experience, rarely ever reached. In an ideal world, I think that places like Amazon shouldn't list the number of pages contained in books; rather they should have the length of time it takes to read it. Time is definitely the appropriate dimension to be measuring books in, not the physical size.

If you're wondering what book prompted this thought, it was The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. You can get it for £5 on Amazon, and trust me, you won't be disappointed.

Jars of satisfaction

Jars of Nutella and instant coffee tend to come with a seal of foil-backed paper. I'm not sure I've come across anything quite as satisfying as puncturing the surface of these with a teaspoon handle or knife. I may need to start buying smaller jars of Nutella so that it happens more often.

Cool to hate

It's cool to hate. And it's easy to hate too. Turn on the TV and watch the news, and pretty much all that you'll hear is bad news. We're in the midst of a recession, unemployment is on the way up and the economy's going to get worse before it gets better. There's another war in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan are still pretty damned dangerous and the long-fought war in Sri Lanka still rages. Kenya, the one real example of African democracy actually working, just passed a bill curtailing the freedom of the press. Russia's cutting off it's gas supplies to the Ukraine and it's hitting Europe (again) and Zimbabwe's still trying - and failing - to free itself from Mugabe's evil grip - but now it's being ravaged by cholera too. Ask the average person on the street and they'll talk about how everything's more expensive, life is harder, taxes are too high and the government's terrible. They'll most likely yearn for the "good ol' days" and wax lyrical about how things were in days gone by.

But before you go and spend all day in the quagmire of a deep depression, this is not the point I want to make. My point is that life is pretty darned good actually. We're finally getting rid of that simian President of the USA and with the new administration, that disgrace to the supposedly free world (by which I mean the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp prison) might finally be dismantled. Technological advancements have never made life so easy as it is now. Labour saving devices abound and allow previously impossible tasks to be done with the click of a button. You can be fired in a metal tube weighing several hundred tonnes at nine-tenths of the speed of sound, 10km above the ground and expect to land safely - halfway across the world in less than a day. Even if you don't fly, you can still talk to family and friends in far-flung lands for absolutely nothing. Healthcare improves with every day and you will survive illnesses and accidents that would've killed you under half a century ago. Things we take for granted now were just dreams not very long ago at all.

Sure, there are things that aren't perfect and some things are getting worse. But there's a hell of a lot which is good and improving too. So next time you hear someone whinge that the world's crap and wish it was still the 1970s, don't just nod and give your half-hearted agreement. Have the courage to stand up and say "Actually no, you've never had it so good. Stop complaining and appreciate it, dammit!". Or at very least, think it.