The Internet Thinks That I Have Constipation

According to the BBC’s Technology News webpage, “several hundred thousand” Germans have chosen to opt out of Google Street View. That is, to have their houses virtually demolished for the purposes of the service. Whilst elsewhere in the world one can apply to have one’s face pixelated (insert predictable fetish club joke), Germans wants to take their anonymity one step further. I have no idea why – I’ve been to Germany, and it was already pretty bland. Personally, I don’t care if people want to look at my house on the internet. It’s just a house. I’m not in the habit of standing in the front garden holding up my diary, open at the most salacious page, for passing Google Earth cars to photograph. And yet, like many millions of other self-aggrandising narcissists, I feel it necessary to share my “insights” with anybody who wants to read them, on this very page. So let’s make up our minds. Do we want to publicize every banality that flits through our skulls, or sit in a darkened room, only occasionally peeping through the curtains, in case a spy satellite spots that it’s been a few days since we washed our hair, and that the glass recycling box is getting a bit full for someone who lives alone?

I understand that the issue is one of consent. One can choose not to use Facebook or Twitter, but the idea of somebody photographing your house as they drive slowly past, can seem a little presumptuous on their part. But then so does the council charging you for the privilege of emptying the bin you never asked for, or maintaining the street lights, which are annoyingly bright and close to your bedroom window anyway, and you didn’t ask for them either. That’s the point of society. You didn’t ask for it, but kind of have to go along with it if you want to benefit from its advantages. Such as sewage and the national grid. Likewise the internet: to get the benefits of free porn and Ebay, one must tolerate pop-up adverts inviting you to imiginary poker tournaments, and those nosey bastards at Google.

To reiterate: I could not care less if Google want to photograph my house, so long as they don’t come round trying to sell me a copy of it. In general I take a cavalier approach to internet privacy/security in all its forms. I have one password for everything, and have just attested to the fact in a document accessible by most of the world. If anybody wants to attempt to defraud me, good luck; if you obtain any credit, you’re a better person than I am. Also, when I took up Facebooking, I put my contact details on in the desperate hope that somebody would send me an unsolicited email or make an obscene phone call. They didn’t. There are a limited number of people in the world who want to snoop around the Facebook pages of strangers, and it’s a bit self-regarding to believe that you are somehow that interesting and stalk-worthy. However, the general benevolence of the internet aside, there is one thing which recently struck me as being an intrusion too far. And once again it’s perpetrated by Google.

When Google rolled out their predictive search engine, I felt violated, but could not quite put my finger on why. Then I figured it out. A search which guesses what you want to look at, before you tell it what you are looking for, seems to me just a bit too human. It’s as though Google are compiling a file on every single internet page you may have ever, even subconsciously, considered looking at, in case the government ever ask them for one. And since you were never actually searching for any illegal/subversive/slightly immoral material, Google have handily provided you with some for your consideration. They have begun to succeed in making me internet-paranoid.

But it is not Google’s annoying psychic automaton which has vexed me; I discovered that you can go to the “options” tab and turn it off. What make me cross are the personalized adverts which Google Mail provide you with at the top of your inbox. Unlike activity on search engines or public internet pages, one expects one’s password protected emails to be reasonably private. Now, I know that nobody sits reading my emails, carefully deciding what products to select for my perusal today, but it feels almost as intrusive as if they had. This feeling of violation hit home the other day, when I emailed a link to my sister, accompanied by a reminiscence of an event of sixteen years ago, when a third party acquaintance, during a drug-induced panic attack, was convinced that they were dying of constipation. Google helpfully decided to market me some anti-constipation drugs. To my sister, they attempted to flog feline laxatives (not sure why, she doesn’t have a cat... she must have once mentioned one in an email). Advertising an educational course similar to one I have referenced in an email subject line is one thing, but to boldly suggest that I have malfunctioning bowels, based solely on the evidence of one word in the body of a message, is not on. I wouldn’t dream of opening my emails in public, but if I did I would find it pretty mortifying if a stranger looked over my shoulder in a public library and made erroneous conclusions about the state of my digestive health. So to spite Google, I have just switched my email view to the advert free basic HTML as default. That’ll teach them: openly photographing my house from the street is one thing, but metaphorically hiding in the sewers trying to spy on my toilet is quite another.

Caffeine. Its effects and scientific implications.

I used to like caffeine. A lot. My coffee habit was legendary in both its scale, and its lack of discernment. Tea, I rarely touched. It was just too damn soft. Then, three months ago, after a week’s abstinence (due to being on holiday, and having better things to spend my money on than milk – i.e. ouzo), I discovered upon resumption of caffeinated-beverage consumption, that I had suddenly developed a sensitivity to my former drug of third choice. Before this, I would have put caffeine down as more necessary to my functioning than nicotine. I could have imagined myself giving up cigarettes, but not coffee.

When the caffeine thing first came on, I was in denial for a while, trying to convince myself that it was psychosomatic. But it wasn’t, so I gave up coffee and switched to tea. Lots of tea. I became one of those ‘tea’ people that I had formerly so despised. People who refer to “a nice cup of tea”, and say such dreadful things as “Ooh, I’m gasping for a cuppa” as though they’ve just stepped off the set of 1960s Coronation Street. Tea always seemed to me the drink of somebody who was too much of a lightweight to hold their coffee. I wouldn’t go into a pub and order a shandy, so why boil the kettle and make tea?

Well, as though being punished for my hubristic dismissal of these tea-quaffers, I was forced to become one. After a few weeks, I could no longer drink even tea, having to switch to decaffeinated, since there is no way in the world I was going to be one of those hot-chocolate-in-the-daytime drinking adults. They might as well just suck it out of a spouty cup. So I hang my head, my former fellow coffee addicts (and I mean addicts, not people who think it’s cute to call themselves addicts), and bid farewell to the lovely world of sluggish matinal need, followed by the slurp of sweet, milky joy in a giant mug. Sigh.

I have many fond coffee memories. Among the best, reading between classes at Keele University, with a latte from Vite n’ Eat. Or arriving at a seminar at 9 o’clock, with a flask and a mug (a mug that I actually used to keep in one of the teaching buildings, in some sort of bizarre display of territoriality), and pouring that levels-sustaining sixth cup of the day. The coffee-milk concoction I used to take to work at the MMU, just so I could get some extra caffeine in my system when there wasn’t time for a hot drink. So many memories. Which sets me thinking about my reason behind pondering the subject in the first place. It’s a straightforward one...my mother tried to poison me with regular tea. She swears that she didn’t, but I am not someone who has ever been susceptible to the placebo effect. I read once about an experiment, in which students were given fake-alcoholic drinks, and began to behave as though they were really getting drunk. This is understandable on one level. If in a pub full of drunkards when sober, one behaves differently than when in a station waiting room. Alcohol-induced joie de vivre is slightly infectious. But give me a weak gin and tonic, and I’ll damn well tell you about it. Upon visiting Tunisia, a country with strict licensing laws, I found that ordering beer brings one either real or fake beer, depending upon the establishment. They don’t tell you, but it’s very, very obvious which is which. Because one has an alcoholic effect on you, and the other doesn’t.

But back to tea. Yes, my mother tried to poison me. Inadvertently, I’m sure; it’s easy to get the tea bags mixed up between their containers and the cups. But the result was that I was reminded of exactly why I had quit one of my greatest simple pleasures. Many people overdo it with the caffeine occasionally, but I had become so hardened to it, that it took at least ten cups of coffee for me to begin feeling a little jittery, or to not quite be able to stop talking. Today, though, I was in this state after only a few gulps of tea. And it wasn’t nice. I found myself unable to stop playing the imaginary piano, and my voice seemed to be coming out of my head without my really having told it to. Even now, I am typing with a very uncharacteristic velocity. The result of the unpleasant side-effects was that I remembered exactly why I no longer imbibe grown-up hot beverages, and that I swore never to do it again.

However, every time I drink alcohol, I also suffer from unpleasant side-effects. So why don’t I, and the populous in general, think better of cracking open that third bottle of sauvignon blanc? Because of delay. Aside from alcohol having a really great upside, as well as a downside, it takes a good few hours for the horrible bit to hit. Usually, with some sleep in between. This seems to trick the brain into not directly associating the two events of drinking and being hung-over. Likewise, a heavy night of smoking may cause a little spluttering of phlegm the next day, but by then you weren’t thinking of lighting up for a good few hours, anyway. The reason it was easy for me to quit caffeine, however beloved it was to me, was the immediacy of the unpleasant effect it had.

And this leads me to positing my theorem of the day. If the government wants people to drink less, it has to work on devising a way to make alcohol have an immediately unpleasant effect, not a delayed one. It takes a few sips of Coke to prevent me from drinking any more of it, but it takes many pints of beer. Maybe pubs could serve only neat Malibu or rum, so as fast as a consumer could consume it, they would vomit it all up again; the added bonus being that, never-ending drinking, without drunkenness, would be good for the economy. Or, if some terrible scientist (I can imagine a Hugo A-go-go type in a secret mountain top lab) could formulate a booze, the consumption of which caused the hangover to develop along with the drunkness, I think people would actually have second thoughts about their desire to drink. And obviously, that’s a better way to encourage moderation than prohibitive price-hikes, or didactic lecturing. Yes. Antabuse in the beer-lines is the way of the future. I’m off down to Ladbroke’s to put money on it right now.

The idea that supposed paranormal activity can all be put down to drunkenness on the part of the observer

People who claim to have seen UFOs, ghosts, or other paranormal phenomena are frequently accused of being drunk. To “see” a ghost in a pub is the ultimate expression of this, as is the sighting of a UFO on the way home from a hostelry. I object to this sceptical presumption. As a habitual drunk-getter, I can authoritatively say that being in this state does not cause one to hallucinate.

In fact, in order for one to imagine that one has seen something odd when drunk, it really has to be very odd indeed. I could chat away in a pub for hours with a semi-translucent man without questioning his apparent non-corporeality. And I have more than once experienced displays of inexplicable lights, whilst returning from my local via a disused railway line, which, had I encountered when sober, would have scared me silly.

No, to suggest that anything out of the ordinary can be written off as the delirious delusions of a reveller is the laziest form of scepticism there is. I myself am a sceptic. About pretty much everything. But it wasn’t always so: my interest in all things paranormal started at around the age of ten. It took me twenty years of reading and thought to figure out that, well, yes, it’s probably all bollocks. To paraphrase Dara O’Briain, “if psychic abilities were genuine, we would all have evolved to have them.” Natural selection favours the gifted.

The landlord of a local pub of mine, a Tudor building, recently gave me a tour of his establishment, when I drunkenly expressed an interest in its extensive history. I was escorted to the cellar, which he informed me, used to house the horses, four centuries ago. Even before he told me this, I was overcome by the smell of horses. But I did not assign this to horse ghosts. Because it seemed reasonable to me that a damp cellar might have a slightly equine odour about it. Likewise, on a foray into aforementioned dilapidated railway line, with my sister, we both experienced an odd phenomenon. I was wearing a pair of rubber-toed canvas shoes, and Kezia a pair of white trainers. At a certain point on the path, both sets of our shoes began to glow ultra violet. I was, at the time, engaged in a degree in astrophysics. My sister is a sceptic with a small “c” – an extremely open-minded, but intelligent and educated observer. We did not immediately assume that it was the work of extra-terrestrials, but instead, worked to find a rational solution for the occurrence. We came up with marsh gas, incidentally.

Had I mentioned this happening in public, the nay-sayers would have raised their collective arms in glee, and pointed out that we were drunk when this happened. Well, obviously we were. It was midnight, and we were hanging around a deserted path which happens to lie between the pub and my house. But our drunkness accounts for us being there. It does not account for everything inexplicable that has ever happened to anyone, who, whilst out of doors at night-time, may have experienced anything odd.

I Hate Summer

Today it is the First Day of September, and Thank God for That. A sharp pair of eyes may draw your attention to the fact that the preceding sentence contains a few extraneous capitals, and that is because it deserves them. My name is Lindsay, and I hate summer. There, I said it. It is an opinion greeted with about as much incomprehension as that of, say, not liking kittens (I don’t, they are horrible little scratchy psychopaths), or having no desire to watch Glee (call me slow-witted, but I fail to get the irony). Aestiphobia, it seems, is a word entirely made-up, just then, by me. Typing it into Google directs one instead to research ‘vestiphobia,’ the apparently far less improbable fear of clothing.

To say I have a phobia of summer is certainly over-stating the matter. That would have caused me to chop off my own head many Mays ago. But physiologic and psychological maladies haunt me throughout the Dog Days. The Romans had the right idea, sacrificing a dog to Sirius every year, in the (sensible) belief that this was an evil time, when animals and humans became languid, and indeed, went a bit mental.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is generally held to refer to those influenced by the lack of sunlight in winter causing them to get a bit miserable during these months. I have the opposite form of seasonal woe. Ask anyone. But aside from this, physical weaknesses plague me during the summer. My asthma is exacerbated by heat and humidity, and I have a rather pathetically Celtic kind of photosensitivity, causing an unsightly and uncomfortable rash upon sun exposure. So to avoid this I wear jeans and long sleeves all summer, and have to put up with the consequences. That is, being a bit warm. Not wanting to come across as self-pitying, I would like to acknowledge that I am by no means alone in my suffering. Plenty of people hate the summer, for whatever reason. But to voice one’s antipathy towards the season is running the risk of being accused of trying to ruin it for everybody else. I can hate it all I like – it is not going to go away – so why the hell do I not have the right to attest to my aversion in public?

Newsreaders take astonishingly unoriginal pleasure in complaining, during the summer, about the rain, or the fact that the temperature is nineteen degrees, when linking to or from the weather forecast. North West Tonight presenter Gordon Burns particularly infuriates me on this count. He behaves as though the perfectly seasonal precipitation level is some kind of personal slight to him and his God-given right to be forever basking in the rays of his munificent protector Ra. I encountered Gordon Burns a few times recently, and his supposed solar obsession seems incongruous with his demeanour. He has the deportment of the butler of a haunted castle. Instead of walking, he appears to hover, and with a slight stoop. I just cannot imagine him genuinely wanting to do karaoke to “Club Tropicana” in Benidorm.

No. Summer, and heat, and drought, are not nice things. Ask any desert-dweller. What are nice are the misguided imaginings of the warm season which one experiences during the winter. I look forward to pleasantly balmy days as much as the next person, days I imagine will be spent drinking cool lager in a beer garden, or on medieval cobbles. But then, come summer, I do this about twice. The image of continental pavement cafés peopled with smartly dressed folk smoking Café Cremes is replaced by the reality of the pottery shire horses, and perpetually semi-drunk, unemployed and retired gents of my local. And my invariably getting sun-burnt and sleepy.

Summer is of course a manifestation of nostalgia. Firstly of the individual’s nostalgia for a childhood, in which summer days playing on rope-swings over babbling brooks are all that survives the intervening years of memory loss. The hours of tedium sitting in a hot car going to another castle, or the constant bullying from one’s siblings, go largely forgotten.

Secondly, there is the collective nostalgia of shared culture. I have never been boating with either a man in a striped blazer, or with woodland creatures. Nor have most people. Indeed, the closest I have come to it was a row on Crewe Park boating lake, with a selection of teenagers in Dr Martens and oversized pullovers. Most likely followed by cider in a hedge (quite pleasant and rustic-sounding, I suppose). I suspect to the city or large town dweller, the association of summer and the countryside are of greater significance. Summer suggests a simpler time of Thomas Hardy novels, home-made jam, and picnics of boiled eggs and enormous hams. But, I ask you: Did the Famous Five ever get stung by wasps in their pastoral idyll? Well, no they didn’t, because they too were living in a non-existent world of nostalgia, where the past’s negative connotations could be forgotten. I was dimly aware of this as a child. I knew that my enjoyment of the books was down to some kind of false longing for a life I did not have, but I also realised that even at the time of their being written, they were probably seen as rather wistful in their portrayal of England.

So, one’s individual nostalgia, and a shared, cultural nostalgia get tangled up to make a self-perpetuating myth. When I come out as admitting to hating summer, I am in fact trampling on the collective need to hark back to better days. A need I completely fail to understand, since desperately clinging to a perceived time of former glory, is surely a defeatist admission that nothing is ever going to be as sunny and glorious ever again, so let’s all just give up now. Well, that is the whole point of nostalgia, I suppose. Since it can only be seen in retrospect, can it really do any harm to dwell on it a little too much? As soon as one actually becomes aware that one is in an enjoyable situation, it loses its agreeableness. So, does that make nostalgia the only true form of pleasure? Looking back at a time when we were perfectly happy, without it having been ruined by self-awareness? No, because it is only when in a situation of discontent that nostalgia starts to take over the thoughts. Only some level of current misery can give rise to the need to idealise another time – a time generally limited to the past by the inadequacies of imagination. Anyway, this is digressing somewhat.

The corollary of the argument of the cult of summer being due to collective nostalgia is that I could just as easily be accused of looking at winter with rose-tinted, or more probably frosty-silvery-blue-tinted-glasses. The obvious principal attraction of winter is Christmas, but as an adult this is more of an anti-climax than any sunny day of boozing out-of-doors. However, there are elements of winter that can be pretty much relied on: clear-aired frosty mornings, and evenings which are dark by half-past four (the dark makes me feel like I can go about my business un-scrutinised, which has always seemed hugely comforting. Does that make me sound like a serial killer?) Coats. I love coats. And knitwear, and boots, and gloves, and scarves. (Wow, I really do sound psychotic; just how many layers of disguise do I need to hide behind?) But perhaps the most decadent article of cold-weather equipment ever created is the feather quilt. If the feather quilt is not evidence enough for the superiority of winter over summer, I don’t know what is.

I realise that this is all a little subjective, and self-indulgent. But my point is, that it should not be socially unacceptable to air an opinion expressing a sense of realism about the hideousness of overly-hot summers. When the mercury’s been above 25 degrees for a few days, everybody complains. Some of us just have a more realistic memory of what the feeling of it being a bit too hot is actually like.