Gourmet selection of pain

We all know that there are different types of pain. There are dull aches, stabbing pains, prickly pains, burning pains and all the myriad of combinations in between. Recently, I started going to a masseuse in an attempt to work out some of the worst knots in my muscles. It's only since then that I've discovered quite how many different flavours pain comes in (and by that, I just mean physical pain; emotion/psychological pain is a whole other kettle of fish). There are ticklish pains that make you want to laugh in a you-either-laugh-or-you-cry sort of way. There are uncomfortable pains that you're not sure whether it's just discomfort or actually pain. There are tearing pains that feel like you're muscles are being ripped apart. And then there's the most delightfully excruciating sort of pain, that I can only describe as an exquisite pain. I hasten to add that it's in no way pleasant - actually, quite the opposite; it's the sort of pain that I dread the most. But it's so... pure and, well, almost delicate, that you can't help but admire it. It's a bit like a safecracker breaking into a bank vault - you don't approve and you don't like it at all, but you can't help appreciate the craft. If you've not experienced it, then you probably have no idea what I mean by an exquisite pain, but I've mulled this over for a while now, and I can think of no other description of it. But if you're curious, go find your nearest sports masseur/masseuse and experience it for yourself. I'm not going to say that you won't regret it (because several times now, halfway through the massage I've started having second thoughts...), but it's certainly an experience!

Hunger

We tend to think of hunger as a bad thing. It usually is, I suppose; especially if you consider how much malnutrition and starvation is happening in the world. But it struck me today that hunger isn't always a bad thing. I was on my way back home after a run that followed a cycle, and I was hungry. I mean really hungry. But there was something sort of... pleasurable about it, and not in a masochistic way. It was a niggling hunger that I knew wouldn't go away unless I ate something - not even a distraction would shake it. Just enough discomfort to make me know that I'd had a decent workout, but not enough to be painful (I daresay almost anyone who has hit the wall before will probably agree that hunger can be painful). And then I started fantasising about the food and drink I would have when I eventually made it back. I think this is the best bit of being that hungry - the anticipation of the first bite of food or the first gulp of drink. Sometimes I get pretty weird cravings for things when I have an exercise-induced pang of hunger; this time around it was pretty normal - I wanted some cola-flavoured sweets.

So yeah... that's about it really. Hunger can be pleasurable sometimes...

Beeps of pointlessness

Why do mobile phones have a setting that makes them beep every time you press a key? These key tones are incredibly annoying for everyone around, but seemingly serve no purpose whatsoever. I'm inclined to suggest that if you need the phone to beep every time you press a key when you, in fact, are the one pressing that key and (presumably) watching the screen to see the result of said key press, then you're probably not quite up to working a mobile phone yet.

In vino veritas

The loosening of the tongue that comes with inebriation applies also to the internal voice; Occasionally, alcohol will break through the veneer of the lies that you tell yourself without realising it.

On the benefits of curvature

Curly fries are better than normal fries. This is a universal truth and I think the few people who disagree with this statement are just plain wrong. But I'm fairly sure that it's not the curvature that makes curly fries so tasty, but rather the seasoning. So why don't they put that same seasoning on straight fries?

It's the little things

I just had a realisation (in the shower, naturally). It's a realisation that sounds very similar to thoughts I've had previously, and it will suprise none of you (or at least not those of you who know me), but I think it's actually quite significant. It was one of those realisations that completely stops you in your tracks when it strikes you and makes you wonder how you never thought of it before. This time around, it is this: A decent shower and a cup of tea makes the world a better place in almost any situation.

I realise that that sounds a little trite, but I genuinely mean it literally. Think of any situation - pick the absolute worst thing that you can imagine happening; Your best friend is involved in a car crash and there's nothing you can do to help, your home country is invaded by a foreign power and is now at war, there's a plague science has never come across and is powerless to deal with sweeping the globe, you wake up with a horrifying realisation that you're going blind and deaf - literally anything. Now picture the exact same situation, but now you have a shower and a cup of tea and imagine how you feel - still pretty darned awful, but slightly calmer, slightly more in control. Perhaps not perceptibly better (and if you're in such a situation, I doubt you'd consciously notice the improvement), but definitely incrementally better.

Now take the other extreme - think of the best thing you can imagine. You fall utterly, hopelessly, uncontrollably in love and the object of your desires reciprocates, you land that dream job that you never believed might even be a possibility, you win big on the lottery just at the moment when you thought you were going to have to declare bankruptcy - again, absolutely anything. Picture it with a shower and a cup of tea afterwards - you're ecstatic still, but now you're even more energised.

It works for everything in between too. You're feeling too hot? Shower and a cup of tea. Had a long, tiring day? Shower and a cup of tea. Someone was horrid to you at work? Shower and a cup of tea. An old friend calls you up out of the blue and you have a lovely conversation over the phone? Shower and a cup of tea. In fact, the only things I can think of that aren't improved by a shower and a cup of tea are water and energy shortages. But with anything else, a shower and a cup of tea might not be the solution (it rarely is), but it'll certainly improve matters. It's the little things.

I've just got out of the shower - I think I'll go and make a cup of tea...

The juvenile sweet tooth

When you're young, you'll eat anything that has enough sugar in it and you'll like it too. Don't believe me? Right, remember how much you liked eating glacé cherries when you were a kid? You used to love baking with them, just because it meant you were allowed to eat some of the leftover cherries (or sometimes, the cherries that were supposed to end up in whatever you were baking), right? Well, try them now. They are nauseating...

Old friends revisited

There are few things in life better than visiting old friends for dinner. One of those few things is having old friends over for dinner.

Life in the fa(s)t lane

I think it's funny how some of the greatest pleasures come from such silly little things. I've commented here before about the immense satisfaction available from puncturing the seals on Nutella jars. Today, I found myself absurdly happy after reading a new post on a friend's blog that essentially just said that things were going really well for her. But on the way home, it suddenly struck me that there's something that happens to me virtually every day that brings me immense pleasure and is ridiculously simple: zipping past traffic on my bike. When the sun's shining and all you see are people (well, mostly blurs of people) sat in the sweltering heat of their cars, going nowhere, with nothing but the brake lights of the car in front for scenery and you are proceeding merrily along the same road, you can't help but smile. But then it gets even better, when you realise every minute they sit in traffic, it's costing them money for petrol, whereas you're not only going fast for free, but getting healthier and fitter with every metre.

It's a bit more difficult to be quite so happy about it when there's lashing rain and it's cold and wet, but actually, I think I'm generally still happier that I'm out on my bike than in a car. At least I know I'm not going to get fat while I'm still cycling!

The power of music

Music is powerful. Done right, it can be incredibly emotive - though I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anyone can be moved by Bach, but that's probably an argument that I shouldn't start right here. But certainly, music has the power to conjure up really powerful emotions. I was thinking about the songs and pieces that I felt had the biggest effect on me, and something struck me - they are almost all sad. It's not the only feeling that music can instill in me, but it's certainly the easiest.

If you don't believe me, go and have a listen to A Boy and His Frog by Tom Smith. The fact that it's a Jim Henson memorial song probably gives it an unfair advantage, but even still, it's a damned good one. It was also referenced on Something Positive a while back, which was how I originally came across it.

But I'm struggling to think of (m)any songs or pieces that make me feel joyful, happy or energized. Maybe Beethoven's 9th, though that seems a bit too obvious (if you're confused, that's the "Ode to Joy"). Perhaps sorrow is just the easiest emotion to tap, but I do think this somewhat unfortunate.

Taking the hint

I was in Oxford town centre yesterday and noticed that a shop that has been mostly empty since Tchibo stopped having retail stores in the UK has now been filled. Unfortunately, it's been filled with one of those discount bookstores - you know the type; full of crap books and terrible stationery that no one wants. The Works is a nearly perfect example of this, save one small detail: The Works has found a way to be profitable. Not two doors down is another example of this type of shop that has gone out of business. At the same location prior to that shop being established was a near-identical one, which really didn't last very long at all. In fact, Oxford (and it seems, pretty much every town I know of) seems to have been littered with instances of failed cheap bookshops. Now, I'm not very good at taking hints (I'm sure Ann will tell you that), but even I realise that there's probably a very good reason for this: it's a crap business idea. No one wants to buy the stuff these shops sell and even if someone loses their mind and does buy something, all the merchandise is so crap it has to be sold at such low prices that there's very little profit available. It's not like pound shops where you might feasibly find something interesting, or something that is good enough. The only saving grace about these shops is that they're so unprofitable, it usually doesn't take long for them to disappear.

Local branding

I'm in New York at the minute, and I've been in America for the last two weeks. It's been an interesting experience, but there's something that's been bugging me. There's a clothing chain called T. J. Maxx here. In the UK, the same chain is called T. K. Maxx. Why, dammit? Who decided that that initial was so important? And what was his/her reasoning? I can see that things need to be marketed differently for the two countries (anyone who's watched a single commercial break on TV in each country will be aware of that), but is that one letter really going to make that much difference?

Requesting insults

Okay, picture the situation: you're browsing in your favourite bookshop and a book catches your eye. You've been looking for an introductory text to a particular topic and this book fits the bill. Happy that you've found it, you tuck it under your arm and saunter over to the counter to join the queue. Then, while you're patiently waiting, some complete stranger yells at you "Hey you! You're a complete idiot!". Now how does that make you feel? Angry? Confused? Outraged? Indignant? I certainly don't think I'd be happy. So why would you go and buy a book titled "The complete idiot's guide to..."? Or for that matter, "...for dummies"? I find it curious that people don't like it if you insult them for free, but are quite happy to pay good money to be insulted - and again every time they look at their own bookshelf. But they do, and whats more, they do it in their thousands. Craziness.

Cynicism

Okay, I don't want to come across overly preaching and joyous, but this is something I really need to get off my chest. It's rather similar to the first post I made this year, though with a subtly different focus. I must stress that I'm not one of these naïvely optimistic types who think that everything in the world is good. I consider myself somewhat cynical insofar as I won't take "facts" given to me at face value but rather look for corroborative evidence, or at very least think for myself about how likely it is to be true. But it seems to me that it's become cool to be cynical about everything, to an excessive extent. To doubt has become the norm; while I am a firm believer that questioning things is extremely important, I also believe that giving people the benefit of the doubt (where there's no evidence to support or deny the case in point) is simply a healthy thing to do - and above that, the sort of thing that a nice person should do. And above all else, I believe that being nice is important and something more people should try.

So I think there is a danger that all too many people are at risk of falling into - that is, to disbelieve anything because it goes against your intuition or worse, your preconceptions. To question is healthy, but you must leave yourself open minded enough to accept good, logical arguments that support ideas that might not occur to you. Not to do so is just to be bloody-minded.

Growing old

I'm getting old. Now, I know a lot of people will be foaming at the mouth at reading this yelling "You're not old! Now stop whinging and go find me my cane!" or something like that. But it's true, I am definitely getting old. I've come to this conclusion after two observations made in the last month or so:

1. When it snowed, my reaction upon waking and seeing the blanket of white wasn't "Yay! Snow!", but rather "Ohhhh, I'm going to have to walk to the lab."
2. The urge to lick the spoon when baking no longer grips me, even when baking with chocolate.
   

Ah well, it had to happen sometime...

Book dimensions revisited

Okay, maybe I was a bit hasty with my previous post on the subject. The appropriate dimension of a book is not always the length of time it takes to read. I posted a paperback to a friend in France this week and discovered that occasionally, the weight of the book (and before someone tries to be smart, yes it is the weight and not the mass - the post office measures it with a top-pan balance) is the appropriate characteristic. But on that note, I discovered that air mail is really rather cheap. Sending a ~780g package to Paris cost just £5.11. Bargain.

Bach

I was listening to Radio 3 just now, and Bach's Prelude and Fugue no. 1 from the Well-Tempered Klavier came on. Now, I know I'm not exactly the biggest Bach fan in the world, but one thing did occur to me - it's not even as interesting as Musak. There has to be something wrong when you think lift music sounds more interesting...

Buying local

For those of you who don't already know, I'm a bit of a tree-hugging hippy. I recycle obsessively, constantly bemoan my lack of a compost heap - I am currently toying with the idea of an indoor wormery, but have rather a small room - and try to save energy like there's no tomorrow (which, metaphorically, there won't be the way the world is going, but that's a rant for another time). And I care about such things as food miles (though probably not nearly as much as I should do - and I really hate the term). So between minimising energy wastage with food transportation, supporting local producers and a belief that local, small producers will often output better quality produce, I like to buy things sourced locally where possible.

It's an uphill struggle though. Earlier this week, I tried to buy a particular high powered LED (a Seoul P4 U-bin cool-white emitter) in an attempt to upgrade my bike light. So I found a UK supplier - Farnell, based in Leeds - who would sell me the LED I wanted. Now, it's a single LED, but it's not cheap - I was trying to buy £7.89 worth of goods, not 20p. But they have a minimum order charge of £20 if you want to put it on a credit card - ostensibly for their free delivery. I would have been perfectly happy to pay an extra pound or two for delivery, but they wouldn't have it. Their FAQs state that they accept BACS or cheques as payment too, but when I rang them up, they said I would have to make the £20 minimum order charge. So after a little bit of searching, I found DealExtreme, who are based in Hong Kong. It turns out, they will send me the exact same LED, with no minimum order charge from across the other side of the world. Their price? $5.12, with free shipping. That's about £3.54 at current rates. So even leaving the minimum order charge aside, that's under half the price. I hate ordering from across the globe when there's a UK alternative, but the price difference is excessive - and in this case at least, that LED is more likely than not manufactured in Taiwan or nearby anyway, so the overall distance covered by it is probably rather similar from either supplier. But the point still stands.

Another thing that irks me on this note, is how difficult it is to find locally produced honey. If you go to a local farm store, it's dead easy, but I will admit that usually convenience corrupts me and I end up at a supermarket. Take a look at the honey - you'll find honey from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Venezuala and a whole myriad of places over a thousand kilometres away without any trouble at all. But try looking for English honey (not even honey from your county, just honey from anywhere in England) or even honey from anywhere in the UK, and see how much harder it is. In my local supermarket, I couldn't find a single jar of honey from the British Isles. But I had a choice of three from Australia. We are a nation of beekeepers - it should not be this difficult to get honey that has come from less than 500km away!

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.