All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
food+drink

Sizzling Beef

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Over bank holiday weekend Noreen and I were in Manchester – just because we had the opportunity of a cheap-ish weekend break. We spent the time doing next to nothing – a bit of sightseeing; some shopping; lots of sleeping and reading. We managed some good food and avoided an excess of alcohol. The highlight was probably Sunday lunch at the Pacific Chinese Restaurant in George Street (in Manchester’s Chinatown).

Knowing we were staying close to Chinatown, I contacted a former colleague in Manchester (who is Chinese) and asked where was especially recommended to eat. He said to try the Pacific and then admitted it was owned by his father! He also said “I recommend you try the Sizzling Beef Fillet Steak – Cantonese style. It’s to die for”. Noreen phoned and booked us in for Sunday lunch.

Manchester’s Chinatown is fairly scruffy and unprepossessing and arriving at the restaurant the omens did not look good: a scruffy doorway into a stairwell that looked as if it led into a semi-derelict block of high-rise social housing, complete with buggered lift. We followed our noses up the stairs to the first floor and found ourselves in the restaurant: Chinese on this floor and Thai on the floor above. Yes, a single establishment with two different cuisines in separate restaurants. This was quickly followed by “no we do not have your reservation and we don’t have a table for you; please to wait a few minutes”. Doubts set in but a quick check revealed that we were in the right place; so we waited.

The restaurant was indeed full. Full of Chinese. Large family parties of them; three or four generations sprawled at large round tables covered with what looked like mountains of food. Hardly a European face to be seen, a the few who were in evidence were going upstairs for the Thai lunchtime buffet. We waited; maybe 10 or 15 minutes, then were shown to a table in the middle of the restaurant and presented with the usual bewildering menu. But yes, there was the Sizzling Fillet Beef, with a choice of sauces.

We ordered a mixed Dim Sum starter for two. And for the main course we both ordered the Sizzling Fillet Beef, one with Cantonese sauce the other with spring onion and ginger sauce. Plus some mixed stir-fried vegetables and noodles.

Mountains of scrummy-looking food kept walking past the table: big dishes of duck and rice; towers of five or six bamboo steamers; endless pots of tea. The Chinese just appeared to eat and eat. Some left; more people from the long queue by the door appeared at the empty tables. The noise of chatter was deafening. Black-clothed waiters scurried hither and yon; and paired up to carry huge round trays piled with dirty crockery off to the dishwashers.

The Dim Sum arrived. They were clearly excellent, but for me were a disappointment. This was something to do with the combination of flavours and textures not working for me. Noreen was more impressed.

My colleague’s father, very recognisable and dapper in his grey suit, wandered round generally keeping a watchful eye and lending a hand here and there.

The sizzling beef arrived – sizzling! The hair-like noodles; mixed stir-fried vegetables (nicely crunchy after the Chinese style) and bamboo shoots with mushrooms were all delightful. The Sizzling Beef with Ginger and Spring Onion sauce was excellent with whole slices of ginger just waiting to assault the taste-buds. The beef with Cantonese sauce – a very subtle and nicely balanced sweet and sour; lots of onion but not a sign of the normally ubiquitous pineapple or lychees – really was to die for. It was one of those dishes one could just go on eating it was so, so good. So good in fact that we decided to forego a dessert and enjoy the flavours lingering in our whiskers.

At just over £60 (including soft drinks and service) for the two of us it was the same price as we paid the previous day for an equivalent lunch in Café Rouge (one of the better national chains of bistros). Both were good. But the Pacific was much more fun and stole the award for the overall best dish: Sizzling Beef Fillet Cantonese Style.

nudism, personal, thoughts

Are children traumatised by nudity?

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This question is posed by Vanessa Woods in her blog Your Inner Bonobo.  As an anthropologist Woods, an Australian living in America, clearly doesn’t understand the default American assumption that the answer to the question is “Yes”.

This is something about America that puzzles me. What do children stare at for the first year of their life? I think it’s a female breast. Did [male student] think at the sight of naked breasts, every child under 5 would be lining up for a feed, like at an ice cream truck?  What is it, exactly, about breasts, that would be so terrifying to children?

[…] at no time have I seen a woman in public pull down her top and breast feed her child – which is totally common place in oz. And my friends here have told me it’s not socially acceptable.

Can someone explain it to me? Why is a wardrobe malfunction [as per Janet Jackson] a threat
to moral authority?

I fear that the explanation for America and the UK lies in the puritanism of the religious right. And of course as I’ve blogged before (for instance here) this seems to me and many others to be the root cause of the high rate of teenage pregnancy etc. in these two countries.

But what is the real answer to the question?  Are children really traumatised by nudity?

No, of course they’re not! Isn’t it daft just to suggest that they are?

In a recent-ish article in British Naturism’s magazine (BN, issue 182, Winter 2009; I’ve naughtily put a copy of the article online as it isn’t otherwise freely accessible to non-members) Roni Fine

explores the issues that surround the presumption from the outside world that simply being nude means a lot of saucy goings-on.

Yes a large part of the article is about the erroneous perception that the naturist movement is, by its very nature, merely a cover for “adult” activity.  It isn’t, and there’s the problem. Roni Fine goes on …

Too many people […] just cannot differentiate nudity from sex. If only they would visit a typical naturist club […]

The times I have heard people say it is “disgusting” to be undressed in front of children. They use [children] to warrant their own outrage […]

Outrage, I might add, which the same people cannot articulate when asked. Fine continues …

Children are not associating what they see with anything remotely sexual; they just see bodies. They grow up with a realistic attitude to the human form. I envy their upbringing.

And further on here’s the crux of the whole problem at an individual level: basically people don’t think things through:

[…] something is only “rude” if you perceive it to be so. How can the natural body be deemed as rude? We all have one, it is how we are made and it isn’t “rude” until someone tells us it is … so who are they to decide? And why let them dictate their own hang ups onto other people?

As BN’s researched briefing paper Children and Nudity says:

Young children are completely oblivious to their own nudity. Consider the archetypal nude toddler in the supermarket with a trail of discarded clothing behind them.

As they get older they are taught that clothing must be worn but until about age 10 or 11 it doesn’t really take hold. They will quite happily go naked when the circumstances are appropriate.

As children enter their teens they become more body conscious and unless they have prior experience of naturism they are usually nervous about participating.

Many naturist children become more reticent as they enter their teens but then teenagers are notorious for not wanting to do the things that their parents do. They do usually continue to participate, at least for activities such as swimming, and many return to naturism when they become more mature […]

There is no evidence that children are any more at risk at naturists events than at equivalent textile events. Indeed in some ways they are safer.

Let me end on a personal note …

I admit I had a somewhat bohemian upbringing, back in the 1950s and 60s. So it should be no surprise that when I was about 9 or 10 my parents were foresighted enough to organise a couple of summer holidays at a nudist club in Essex. I was totally not bothered by this; indeed I enjoyed the nudity and running round in the sun all day. Yes I realised that little girls were constructed differently to me; just as there was a difference between my parents’ anatomies. Beyond that I couldn’t care less; if anything I was more amused by the size and shape of peoples’ bums (typical small boy!). And that was the point; it was all part of my education to make me aware that people were all different and to be comfortable with nudity. It succeeded. I have retained that comfort ever since, even (as I recall) through the embarrassed teenage years.

So there we seem to have an answer.  Are children traumatised by nudity? Absolutely not – unless the adults they’re with tell them they are.

Adults … get a life!

memes, personal, photography

4-18-10 Meme


4-18-10 Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Here are the 12 questions, and my answers, to this week’s Flickr meme:

1. Night Owl or Morning Person? Neither, but slightly more lark than owl
2. What is the one thing that will make you happy? Beer
3. If you could be someone else for a day, who would it be? God, except he doesn’t exist so I can’t
4. If you somehow became the opposite sex, what is the first thing you would do? Have sex; like probably most men I want to know what sex is like for a woman. Oh I’ll do all the other thigs as well, but let’s start at the beginning!
5. What time is it right now? Later than I’d like
6. Random word. Go Vespiary
7. What is the plural form of “Starbucks”? Poisoning
8. If you won 40 Billion in the lottery, what is the first thing you’d do? Faint
9. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course but you will never know
10. X-men or Spiderman? Xanthene; makes as much sense as the choices offered!
11. Sword or gun?Penis. Remember “Make love not war”? Or to put it another way: “The penis mightier than the sword”.
12. What do you do for fun on your day off? Be depressed

1. NO ONE LOVES ME & NEITHER DO I, 2. Adnams, 3. nothing, 4. Stephanie1, 5. Beware the Moon, 6. vespiary – under construction, 7. Poison Midnight, 8. faint pink lips, 9. You’ll never know if he’ll have body hair!, 10. The Secret to Cloning — Revealed!, 11. Penis_girl, 12. Soul

As always the photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys

amusements, books, science

Crocheting Robot Mice

I must share the following; it’s from the “Feedback” column of last week’s (17 April) issue of New Scientist.

We are pleased to see that science is well represented among the contenders for the Diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year. The top titles for 2009 were announced last month by UK magazine The Bookseller, which organises the prize.

Overall winner, with 42 per cent of the 4500 public votes cast, was Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Diana Taimina. This beat off competition from Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton, Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots by Ronald Arkin and The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Maria Dubinski.

The less obviously scientific What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? by Tara Jensen-Meyer and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James Yannes came second and third, respectively.

Horace Bent, custodian of the prize at The Bookseller, admitted that his personal favourite had been the spoons book, but went on to acknowledge that: “The public proclivity towards non-Euclidian needlework proved too great for the Third Reich to overcome.”

Philip Stone, the prize administrator, said he thought that “what won it for Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes is that, very simply, the title is completely bonkers.”

The Diagram prize has been running since 1978. Its inaugural winner also had a scientific theme: it was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.

The mind boggles at the mere thought of reading almost any of those titles!

natural history, photography

Cherry Blossom


Single Cherry Blossom , originally uploaded by kcm76.

Yay! Spring is definitely here, at last. All the cherry blossom is out; the birch catkins swing low among the new bright green leaves. And the apple blossom is not far behind — if the weather stays fine and warm (which it is forecast to) the apple tree will be in full bloom before the end of the weekend – I can just see pink buds breaking this afternoon. Wouldn’t it be lovely if it stayed like this all summer – warm sun and clear blue skies?!

books

Anthony Powell's Dance on the Weblog

In the last few days I’ve discovered a couple of recent, and very gratifying, weblog postings about Anthony Powell’s Dance – which readers will know is “one of my hobbies”.  Rather than post everything again here, I’ll refer those who are interested to my alert on the Anthony Powell News weblog. 

current affairs, environment, science, thoughts

A Question of Sandblasting

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There’s a lot of fuss around at the moment about the inconvenience being caused by a bit of Icelandic ash causing disruption to air travel.  There are, naturally two major schools of thought.

First.  Volcanic ash cases major problems with jet engines (see at least two near-miss major disasters in the 1980s).  Given that the ash is being blown across northern Europe, one of the most densely used pieces of air space in the world, we have to exercise real caution and ground flights.  We must not take the risk of anythinggoing wrong; after all we don’t want another Locherbie-style disaster (different cause, of course, but similar effect) and inconveniencing a few (hundred thousand) people.is better than the repercussions of killing a couple of plane loads.

Second.  The naysayers are of the belief that this is health and safety gone barmy.  They contend (seemingly on little evidence) that a disaster is unlikely and that the world economy cannot be held to ransom in this way by disruption that could last weeks (at best) by a load of risk-averse numpties.  In their favour there are reoprts that KLM have flown a plane through the ash cloud in Dutch air space without any damage (Lufthansa have also reportedly flown test flights); KLM are now pressing for the restrictions to be lifted.

As always there is a degree of logic on both sides.  How does one weigh the cost (monetary or otherwise) of the potential for a major disaster against the inconvenience of not flying?  This is hard and depends entirely on one’s underlying philosophical approach to life (see the last section of this).  I feel sure when the original “no fly” order was given the expectation was that the ash cloud would clear in a day or so.  Now it seems the disruption may last weeks, even months or years, depending on the course of the eruption.

Is the disruption of air travel over much of northern Europe viable (even justified) for a protracted period?  The powers that be seem to be working on the assumption that they have no option and that they have to be risk-averse.  The naysayers contend that such disruption is not justified.  Let’s look at some aspects of the disruption:

  1. There are large numbers of people, who are through no fault of their own, are in the wrong place.  They’re either on holiday or away from home on business and unable to return.  Or they are at home when they should be away on holiday, business or attending to family emergencies.  Some are managing to travel, and anyone on mainland Europe has a chance of travelling over land or sea – capacity permitting.  But anyone across the sea, eg. in the Canary Islands (as is at least one friend), in the Far East, the Americas or Africa is basically stuffed until air travel is resumed.  Clearly anyone who is away and cannot get home may have issues with employment, studies, animal welfare, supply of essential medicines etc.
  2. This naturally has a knock-on effect on business.  Business people can’t travel to/from where they (think they) need to be.  Is this a really justified concern?  I suggest that in these days of efficient audio- and video-confereceing this should not be a concern for a large number of businesses.  For the last several years before I retired I did almost no business travel despite running geographically spread teams – and I don’t just mean people spread across the UK; I regulalry worked with, managed or worked for people right across Europe, in South Africa, the USA, India and Australia without once leaving the UK!  What it does demand though is (a) more thought about organising teams and tasks, (b) reasonable telecomms and IT facilities, (c) most importantly a “can do” attitude on the part of those involved.  By reducing travel in this way organisations can save millions of (select currency of your choice); that’s millions a month for large companies (in 2005-ish just one sector of the company I used to work saved over $1m a month in travel).  Clearly there are jobs which cannot be done remotely: anything which requires specifically my bodily presence, for instance anything medical or where I (and not anyone else) have to handle a specific object; but the range is increasingly small.
  3. The third aspect is the disruption of trade – or at least that part of it which has to be done by air-freighting stuff around the globe. This of course includes food supplies and the postal service.  People are beginning to worry that we are going to run out of food.  While my feeling is that this is unlikely, I concede that our choice of food may be restricted somewhat with anything being air-freighted around the globe dropping off the market – prices will get too inflated to be viable or it won’t be possible to get the commodity from source to shop quickly enough. Indeed all prices may rise as a consequence of supply and demand.  Is this a bad thing?  Well clearly price rises are a bad thing, but beyond that it depends how one views food miles.  For my part I suggest the reduction of food miles is a good thing.

It’s a tough call, and one I’m very glad I don’t have to make.  Who would want to be the person responsible for either closing air space and risking such massive disruption or (perhaps worse) saying it’s OK to fly and then watching 100, 10, even just one, 747 fall out of the sky?  Undoubtedly there is no right answer, but I can’t help feeling I too would err on the side of caution.

So what of the long-term effects of all this?  Well the following seems at least plausible:

  1. There will be a permenant downturn in business travel, as businesses discover they can save lots of cash for a small investment in remote working.  Bad for the airlines; good for business generally and probably good for the work-life balance of many professionals.
  2. There will also be a further downturn in foreign holidays – at least where air travel is required.  Again bad for the airlines and the holiday companies; good for trail/ferry companies, the indigenous holiday sector and maybe even, longer-term, for heavy engineering like shipbuilding.
  3. Also there might, with luck, be a downturn in the amount of food we ship (specifically air-freight) around the world; either because we get used to doing without it, because it can’t be shipped fast enough or because Joe Public won’t pay the inflated prices.  Undoubtedly this will be bad for the producers and the airlines.  But it should be good for local farmers who might be encouraged to put land to better use and it could lead towards the much needed restructuring of world-wide agriculture (which I’ve written about before, see for example here and here).
  4. All of this leads to a long-term downturn in aviation with (if ones believes in it) a positive effect on climate change and probably several airlines going out of business.  

As one of my friends on Facebook has observed: “perhaps we need to get used to the fact that the modern ease of transporting ourselves [and our stuff – K] across continents is not something that should be taken for granted”.

And as a final thought: who can now justify the expansion of Heathrow, or indeed any other airport?

current affairs, environment

Join Airplot

An unusual piece of campaigning from me as in general I don’t actively promote specific campaigns.

Airplot is a small piece of land acquired by Greenpeace, in the village of Sipson, on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport. If Heathrow’s third runway goes ahead, both Airplot and Sipson would be destroyed. You can find more details of what Airplot is about here.

So far, an incredible 77,500 people have signed up as beneficial owners to Airplot, along with Greenpeace, Greenpeace, Emma Thompson, Alistair McGowan and Zac Goldsmith. The target is to reach 100,000 beneficial owners by 1st May. Being a beneficial owner costs nothing but makes life far more difficult if the land has to be aquired by the government (or its agents) to build Heathrow’s Third Runway.

If Heathrow expands, Sipson and the surrounding area (homes, farmland and jobs) would be completely destroyed and the airport would become the single biggest source of climate pollution in the country. Although the current government’s plans for Heathrow received a major setback in the courts last month (see here and here) the battle is not over; the project has to be completely scrapped.

If the incoming government on 6th May tries to restart the project, Greenpeace will continue challenging the proposals through the planning system and if necessary by peaceful direct action.

I signed up as a beneficial owner a long time ago because the Third Runway is something I feel very strongly against, both from an environmental standpoint and because I am far from convinced the suggested expansion of air transport capacity is required.

Will you also help the environment and support Londoners by becoming a beneficial owner: an Airplotter? There’s just three weeks left to do this; when the deeds are finalised on 1st May the names of all Airplotters will be included and everyone will be issued with a certificate of beneficial ownership.

Sign up here.