Albaicin

I spent a large part of 1971 in a town that so utterly captured my heart that I never wanted to leave. I had just landed in India after more than three months in Thai prisons. I saw a giant picture of the Himalayas and Tibetan monks in the window of the Government Tourist Office of West Bengal. Although I had almost no money I knew I had to see that place. I fell in love with Darjeeling almost instantly and wept for hours when the Bangla Desh war brought down an edict that all foreigners had to leave sensitive border areas, among which Darjeeling was unfortunately numbered.

Throughout subsequent years that became decades I always nursed the thought that if it all turned to custard I could just go back to Darjeeling. Three years ago it did, and I did. It was a journey that came close to breaking my heart. Everyone I had known was dead and the town itself had been comprehensively and brutally trashed by random, hasty and ugly development. My home street, Tenzing Norgay Rd, had been one long, lovely vista. Too narrow for cars, all I ever heard outside my window was voices, footfalls and the bells of the various wallahs who brought milk, bread and shoe repairs, among other things.

Now the lower side of the road has been completely built out with shitty brick buildings. All you see is filthy walls, there is rubbish everywhere and noisy motorbikes and scooters zoom by, horns blaring. Almost the whole town has suffered this fate. I left, shattered.

But fate has been kind. Incredibly kind. Three years later she has given me the Albaicin, the old mountainside Arab quarter of that most wonderful city, Granada. Strangely, many of the qualities that made Darj so special are present in the Albaicin. Cobbled streets too narrow for cars. Voices and footfalls. Bells, many bells, not of pedestrian traders but churches. Here they still ring the Angelus.

The architecture, this architecture, is protected for all time. Whitewashed walls, terracotta tiles on a hill so steep that your immediate view is often your neighbour’s roof, just like Darjeeling of old.Towering over the streets and houses not the Himalayas but a man-made wonder, Al Hambra castle, against the backdrop of Spain’s highest mountains, the Sierra Nevada. They say it is listed as one of the ten most beautiful structures in the world.Perched on a hill and stretching a good kilometre of castellated towers and walls it is oddly reminiscent, to me at least, of the great Kanchenjunga massif that floats in the sky above Darjeeling.

The people, too, have similar qualities to those others back then. At the top of the hill poor but cheerful, warm people live in caves fronted by shanties. The shopkeepers are full of laughs. Shopping is done at a cheerful shout – my Spanish is getting better all the time, but I won’t be happy until I can join in the shouting. That has started. Buying bread at the panaderia the other day, the big, jolly builder said with a big smile what I thought was, “Sank you bery much.”

“Thank you very much,” I answered. No, he said, in Albaicin we say ‘Sank you vene mas!’ and roared with laughter. So did I – it was a great joke. Vene mas means come again or come more often. He reached out, still laughing, and shook my hand.

At the little Coviran grocery store on Plaza Larga the woman serving greeted me with, “Holá vecino!” “Hello neighbour.” I had been here for less than three weeks.

Yesterday morning I was up among the caves hauling sand for my guitar teacher’s cave building when a 30ish African man came out and started calling. He had an odd accent and it took me a moment to clock that he was greeting me. I went over and shook his hand, exchanged smiles. He was very clean, not so common up there, and had a big string of beads around one shoulder and under the opposite arm with two large icons, one of the Holy Family, hanging from them. His beautiful, full set of teeth were well cared for, also not the norm in the caves.

“I’ve got work,” he said, grinning broadly. “Congratulations,” I replied, “doing what?”
“Singing and playing.” He made a drumming gesture.
“Well done, man,” I said. “When did you start?” I was a bit doubtful that actually had a job, but he did – for a week now he had been playing a regular gig at a club in town that features African sounds. He was just so happy about it, I guess he was telling everybody. I congratulated him again, we did that upside-down-handshake thing that ends with the fist-to-fist touch and went back to filling my wheelbarrow, warmed by the moment.

What I Believe

Something is watching out for us. I don’t know what. Call it God if you like. Why do I believe that?

First, there’s all this perfection. Examples of perfection are never more than an arm’s reach away. I had this thought as I waded through dry leaves under a great linden tree after three weeks of midsummer drought. Stressed by too little water the tree sheds its leaves, cutting down transpiration to save water. Automatically it tunes itself to the conditions, keeping its leaf surface area just right and returning the nutrients to its feet. Absent some blight or the chainsaw that tree will go on doing that for hundreds of years without our laying a hand on it. Perfection. Virtually all the organisms we see are perfected to live in their current environment.

I don’t doubt that this is the product of natural evolution but I feel sure that there is something driving it, transcendent, infinitely powerful and ubiquitous. This force inhabits and invigorates nature’s realm, set it going in the beginning and keeps it running. Extend your senses, shut down the filters which are only there, after all, to keep us safe and alive. Perception does not equal reality, not by a long stretch — this has been proved over and over. If we reach beyond the survivalist chatter of our verbal reasoning we can feel it. Know it. And know that it is looking after us. Not gently. It permits all nature of savagery, excess and barbarism. It allows genocide and starvation in one country while other countries like Qatar throw money around like confetti.

One indicator is how every now and then this divine caretaking shows up in a single, identifiable moment when it saves us from falling all the way into global darkness, evil and destruction, coming to the rescue of the good and the wholesome, sometimes through the agency of a single human at a single moment. General von Rumstedt decides to halt his panzers 15 miles short of Dunkirk, ensuring the survival of an allied army that will eventually shorten the thousand-year Reich by nine hundred and ninety years. Vasili Archipov refuses to acquiesce in the decision of his two co-commanders to launch a nuclear torpedo at a critical moment of the Cuban missile crisis and literally saves the world from nuclear annihilation. Single decisions that changed the entire history of the species. You could say we got lucky those times but I don’t think so. At Dunkirk the weather was critically important; calm and clear for six long days, enabling sailing dinghies and little runabouts to cross the Channel. I know; there’s nothing miraculous about that but the timing was literally perfect. In the Soviet era Archipov’s independence of thought and courage of his convictions were virtually unknown, doubly so in the ranks of the military. Everyone followed instructions. I can’t prove it but I believe these were not rolls of the dice: we were saved.

I believe that it will often be a close-run thing but as long as there are enough good people in the world, (the ten good men of Sodom?), and most people are fundamentally good, that force of goodness will save us and the good world and, at times, show up in something that we can see and name. Jesus Christ was its epitome. Reminders appear in the form of the virgin, as avatar. After three separate Papal enquiries by appointed ‘Devil’s Advocates’, deliberately chosen atheists, we still have no explanation for what happened at Fatima. We were visited, spoken to, in human language. An explicit warning was given. Either three illiterate shepherd’s children in a rural Portuguese backwater had their finger on the pulse of Russian politics or a miracle took place. The warning was ignored and Russia and peoples all the way to the middle of Germany endured 70 years of misery and massacre. There have been other such miracles and not only in the Christian epoch.

The question is what do I do about it. Be as good as I can, obviously. But why do I and so many others feel the need to do more, to reach out, communicate, supplicate, humble ourselves and give praise and thanks? It is more than the essential homeostatic urge to bind with our neighbour and support the good and powerful among us in the interests of communal survival. It is a deep thing, a fundamental. Faith. We long for faith. Indeed if faith can be named as a thing among things, not sui generis, then it is an emotion. One of the basic emotions that we are kitted out with, along with love, hate, grief, joy and the others. Psychologists say, and they are right, that wellness requires the expression of a full range of our emotions, and every emotion contains within itself the powerful urge to share it with others. It’s why we have love songs and hate preachers. We are literally built to have, and share, the emotion of spiritual faith and without it we are incomplete, just a transport vector for water and cellphones.

Of course many, even most people are not aware of this potential for faith. But everyone who has ever asked themselves. “Is this really all there is? This the whole deal?” is feeling its absence. They just don’t know it. People of faith don’t ask themselves that question.

Which raises another question: why do we have the capacity for this emotion, faith in a higher being? Can we be furnished with with such an essential emotion as faith and it be based on an illusion? I think not. If we are made to be creatures of faith then there is something there that is to be the object of that faith.

God. We are designed to believe in God. It is universal. Truly atheistic societies have been rare, short-lived and chaotic. So I’m inclined to believe in God, aware of my desire for faith, but to be honest, most of the time it is not enough. I’m just too damn rational. Fortunately, realism in the 21st century, scientific rationality, has come to our aid. Thanks to advances in physics, belief in a creator is now the rational choice.

Traditional rationalists, the Richard Dawkinses of this world, would have you believe that faith in the supernatural has been superseded by our deep understanding of the natural universe, right down to the quantum level. We start out by discovering that thunder and lightning are not displays of the wrath of gods and advance to the present day to where there is no need for divine explanations of anything: we understand the world, we see how it works.

Well, as we will see, we don’t.

That proposition worked pretty well for a century or so but around the middle of the 20th century it began to unravel. I’m talking, if you haven’t already guessed, about the fine-tuned universe.

I think it got going with the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why could no two identical particles in a system not be in the same state? And more importantly, how is that when you force one particle into a state already occupied by another its counterpart immediately changes state, regardless of the distance separating them? We don’t know – it just does and has been shown to do so in experiments that are now almost commonplace. Simultaneous interaction at a distance with no connection or information being transferred. It should be impossible. Showing this experimentally was, in my opinion, the point at which traditional rationalism started to come apart.

Far greater steps have been taken since then. Thanks to computer modelling and a hell of a lot of mathematical legwork, we are able to say what the universe would look like if the force of gravity, for instance, were just a shade stronger or weaker. The short answer is a universe totally unable to evolve or support life.

What about the weak nuclear force, the thing that keeps electrons orbiting protons? A fraction of a percent stronger and electrons would bind so strongly that no compounds could form. The same degree weaker and the electrons would fly off and everything would just be some formless stew of undifferentiated matter. Obviously, again, a universe without life.

The fact is, gravity could theoretically have any value. Likewise the weak force. There are no fundamental principles behind them – they just happen to have, within a tolerance of ten to the power of a ridiculously large number, the exact values needed to create and sustain a universe with stars and galaxies and planets like Earth. And, amazingly, the same can be said of literally dozens of other universal constants. Introduce the most infinitesimal variation and it all comes apart.

The same is true of life itself. In the mid-20th century there was a lot of excitement about the ‘primordial soup’. A couple of scientists sealed methane, hydrogen and ammonia, supposedly replicating the pre-biotic earthly conditions, in a glass container and passed steam over it. This produced a handful of amino acids – the building blocks of life, no less! The crowd went wild.

Alas, later work has revealed that pre-biotic earth was nothing like that. And supposing that chucking a whole lot of amino acids together could eventually produce the exquisite, densely coded phenomenon that is life is like saying, as the great Fred Hoyle put it, like supposing that a giant tornado blowing through a vast junkyard could leave behind a fully-functional Boeing 747 (although a single living cell is probably even more complex than a jumbo jet).

I won’t cover the whole subject here – there are plenty of works already doing that, and it’s huge – but get to the end point: maintaining a ‘rationalist’ conviction that life is accidental requires the rationalist to believe in something so unlikely that believing some lucky chancer could win Lotto week after week for years would be a safer bet.

The fact is that traditional rationalism now requires a far greater leap of faith than any deist has to face.

Some unimaginably intelligent force with unlimited agency created the universe and then, with a second wave of the almighty hand, created life, and us.

It is the only reasonable conclusion.

There you are: God exists. Science proves it. The rest, however, is supposition. I happen to believe that Jesus Christ, and possibly Gautama Buddha, were dropped in at the right time to give us some direction as to the deity’s intentions for us. They came along a mere few hundred years apart, i.e. simultaneously on any evolutionary or geologic time scale. It was time. I wonder if humanity was not going through some kind of phase shift around then, but we are too far down among the weeds to see it.

Perhaps one day science will prove those things too, although I doubt it. Never mind. I see no harm, and much good, in taking it on faith.

Vape!

How loutish, greedy homo sapiens turned a public health miracle into a social and environmental disaster

It started with such promise, supported by an unimpeachable authority: Public Health England. In 2015 the NGO commissioned a series of investigations into the relatively new phenomenon of vaping. The conclusions, which it kept updated with further studies and never resiled from until its dissolution in the reforms of 2022 are unequivocal. To summarise:

  • Vaping is probably the most effective, lasting and easiest path to quitting smoking yet devised
  • Vaping is 95% safer than smoking
  • Vaping neither stains, infects or in any discernible way damages the lungs, (by inference including that of bystanders).
  • Vaping is not a gateway to smoking among young people. The decline in the uptake of smoking among young people in developed countries continues.

Are we sure about that? Let us turn to a more disapproving but equally prestigious body, the John Hopkins Centre for Heart Disease:

There are many unknowns about vaping, including what chemicals make up the vapor and how they affect physical health over the long term. “People need to understand that e-cigarettes are potentially dangerous to your health,” says Michael Blaha MD.

After more than a decade of widespread vaping, that’s what they’ve got: ‘unknowns’; ‘long term’; ‘potentially dangerous.’ From the language we can tell that they feel that it must be bad, why, it’s almost obvious. It’s just that, dammit all, they can’t find any evidence, and it’s not for want of trying.

Now to what is happening on the ground. The virtuous public regards vaping as another form of smoking, and equally bad. Most people firmly believe it to be harmful. Laws have been passed in some jurisdictions limiting and controlling vaping. This should be a civil liberties issue — banning an activity many find helpful and pleasurable, with no evidence of harm? Where is the outrage?

Silence.

Why? Because it looks like smoking. It’s … cheating!

“You can’t do that here!”

“No smoking!!!” Ah, the shrill self-righteousness. The self-satisfied revelling in judgement without fear of third-party disapproval.

Vaping has become a trope in screen entertainment. Heroes never vape. The bad guys, and especially the bad guy’s dim muscle boys, frequently do. Slaggy molls vape.

The papers are full of material treating vaping as a known evil. Of course they are; that is how the echo chamber of modern media works. If the public conceives a prejudice, any prejudice, feed it to them with all you’ve got. Truth? Who cares? We have advertising to sell.

How did this happen? Let’s roll back to the beginning. For me, it started fourteen years ago. I was living in England and sitting in a surgeon’s office being briefed for a knee replacement, the damage from an old skiing accident having by then almost crippled me.

“Do you smoke?”

Answer: yes. In fact, after decades of abstinence I had returned to smoking a few years earlier in the cauldron of a marriage gone bad. Partly for the stress and partly, I confess, because it infuriated my wife. Mea culpa.

The surgeon: “If you stop six weeks before your operation, you will have 50% less carbon monoxide in your blood. If you quit three months before the op you will have none. This is very good news for the anaesthetist, whose job it is to keep you alive while I saw your leg off.” (A doctor once told me orthopaedic surgeons were glorified mechanics; he might have had a point.)

This was not really what I wanted to hear. I still rather enjoyed a fag and was, of course, properly hooked. But there was this new vaping thing. Not available in any shop I could find, but all over the Internet. A few days later I received my kit. A thing called a ‘vape pen’ that constantly leaked a fluid that the label warned should never be allowed to touch the skin, and a range of flavoured liquids. The so-called tobacco flavours were uniformly foul, the sweet ones less so but I did not want to smoke a lolly, but that espresso flavour hit the spot. Coffee and a fag rolled into one — what’s not to like?

I ditched the smokes and started vaping. Effortless. Literally effortless. Vaping was every bit as satisfying as smoking, in fact if I got the coil resistance and wattage right I could generate vast, gratifying clouds of steam that looked like smoke but wasn’t.

I quickly learned that those around me most emphatically did not enjoy being enveloped in the visible products of my exhalations so I toned it right down. Vaping was to be a private pleasure. Fine.

Alas, the instincts of the young to loutishness soon dropped a spanner in the works. Online forums sprang up swapping tips on how to wind your own coils and supercharge your kit to produce a fog of vapour sufficient to conceal the advance of an infantry battalion. Within the year stores began to pop up on the high street, gleaming palaces of fluids and kit ranged up like expensive perfumes. Posters and instore videos advertised conventions where yoof in giant pants competed to blow the most smoke rings from one puff.

The idiots seemed to think vaping was cool. Wrong! A Gauloise hanging from the corner of Albert Camus’ mouth, perhaps, but those clunky devices the size of a small handgun, those vast nimbuses of water vapour? Never.

The rest is history. Obnoxious zoobs marched around with their portable fog machines literally getting up the noses of the citizenry and the long decline began, a decline which turned into a cliff thanks to one Zang Shengwei, of Shenzen parish, godfather of the Elf Bar and similar candy-coloured devices which are now the curse of our landscape. In 2022 it is estimated that 40 tonnes of lithium were tossed away in tiny batteries inside those bits of bright plastic trash in the UK alone. In the middle of an eco-disaster, they let it happen. Business is business.

How did the powers that be not instantly ban those things? If there is one harm that can absolutely be sheeted home to vaping, it is the effect of high doses of nicotine on developing brains. The lamentable Mr Zang knowingly, deliberately designed those things to look like toys and to deliver the kick of a horse. And he was allowed to. Became a billionaire, in fact.

And so we go down the familiar track. Australia has passed a raft of laws, some sensible. With luck, medicalising vaping will channel it successfully down the quit smoking route for which it has been a godsend. But then they have blown it by letting loose a barrage of misinformation and outright lies.

The ‘About vaping and e-cigarettes’ page at health.gov.au lists several toxic substances that e-cigarettes ‘can contain’, such as acetone and formaldehyde. Sure, they can contain them but any fluid you are likely to buy most certainly will not. Acetone is highly flammable, a substance only a lunatic would expose to a glowing e-cigarette coil. Inhaling its vapours would make you throw up. The page repeats the ‘gateway to smoking’ lie, which the authors must know to be untrue. And so on.

What any over-the-counter fluid does contain are two substances widely used in food, drinks and, significantly, in vaporisers designed to deliver drugs: propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, both rated GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) world-wide. And nicotine. Nobody objects to nicotine in gum, pills and patches and nor should they in vaporisers. Time for a little-known but true fact: exhaled vape steam contains little or no nicotine because the drug is very rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream across the alveolar membrane of the lungs. You breathe a lot in but breathe very little out. So here is the truth about forcing others to breathe in your ‘chemicals’: the vapour is almost entirely steam, and the trace chemicals it may contain are the very same that your bystanders have probably, voluntarily but unknowingly, ingested by one means or another in the preceding twenty-four hours. All they had to do was eat a supermarket muffin or anything else listing E1520 and/or E422 in the small print on the ingredients label.

None of this, of course, will make the slightest difference to my life as a vapist. No matter how discreet I may try to be, I will continue to be cursed and condemned. In the end the war on smoking is in one respect like any other war: the first casualty is truth.

In Defence of Nicotine

Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.

Tobacco, by Graeme Lee Hemminger

Vaping is rather satisfying. It recalls the pleasure of the pipe. It delivers one of those plant-based drugs that almost appear to have been devised by God to benefit us humans, the alkaloid family. Caffeine, morphine, nicotine, codeine, quinine, atropine and thousands more.

Nicotine, with a couple of caveats, is a Good Thing. It’s a pity it’s addictive, like many other alkaloids, but hey, we’re addicted to oxygen, water, food, motion. The idea of a life without addiction is a nonsense. A lot of people, and as a vapist I know, are deeply addicted to passing judgement on others. God knows I’ve given enough of them their fix.

But taken to excess, nicotine is bad for your blood pressure. I vape using a machine with a removable rechargeable battery containing liquid with a very low level of nicotine – 6 mg/ml, so much weaker than a cigarette that when I took a puff on one a while back I turned green and nearly vomited. My blood pressure was 119/68 this morning thanks to my practice of Nordic walking thousands of kilometres per year. If you don’t know how outstanding 119/68 is, ask a nurse. It plummeted when I quit drinking. I am 77 years old, in bouncing good health, and I have been vaping for more than a decade. Bad for you? Bah!

In fact, nicotine is rather good for your brain. So good, in fact, that they give it to some dementia patients. There is a reason the photographic annals of the world are awash with pictures of great writers and artists smoking while they work. This is no trivial thing – Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England in 1587, just in time for Shakespeare and the great English literary renaissance. It is my belief that tobacco was one of the driving forces that turned England from a country with few literary figures of note to one whence flooded a literary canon revered to this day. A canon, one must say, overflowing with praise for the weed. Google ‘literary praise for tobacco’ and you will be swamped. Were they all wrong, all fools? I decidedly think not. A pity they did not fully appreciate the dangers of inhaling smoke, but we are the beneficiaries.

My father was a writer and I grew up next to his study, forbidden territory, where he sat pounding his typewriter and filling the atmosphere with a grey fug from his endless cigarettes. They killed him in the end, but he died content at 84, hardly a life tragically curtailed by the fags. But I am under no illusions: he got lucky. Now I spend my days at a laptop, puffing happily on my vape, my brain firing on all cylinders on much smaller doses of the blessed drug than he ingested, but still doing its benign work.

Vaping, by removing the harm of smoke but retaining the benefice of inhaled nicotine, is to my mind an outright blessing. Long may it reign.

You may commence firing. I may flinch but will not run.

Welcome Back – to the Middle Ages

“Honoured and esteemed Sir, may the Lord protect and preserve your eminence, we humbly ….” etc.

There was a time when even academic treatises would start in such terms. Why? Because the authors knew their endeavours had no hope of acceptance unless received and sponsored by someone of power and influence. A time when a recipient would first look to the authors’ names and positions before even considering looking into the content. And if those authors were not similarly endowed, the chance that some eminence might even read, far less consider the contents, was also doubtful.

This was when medical ‘knowledge’ was believed to be perfectly embodied in the works of Galen, millennia dead.

Then came the Enlightenment and the rise of the modern world, with all its material and intellectual riches. One single, non-fungible asset underpinned everything that followed: the idea of the supremacy of merit over social position, leading rapidly (on the historical timescale) to the day when a lowly Jewish patent office clerk would upend our understanding of the universe.

The primacy of merit is the most precious asset we have. It is sublimely simple: the sense to ask ‘What?’ instead of ‘Who?’ It has delivered us such riches that we now believe ourselves so secure in our prosperity that we can pat it on the back, say ‘Well done, and goodbye.’ Now we return to the mediaeval notion that people and their ideas (or lack of them) can be advanced or held back because of who they are, not what their abilities may be. We are, quite simply, reverting to the mediaeval state. Once, what mattered was to be a landed noble, a king’s bastard, or a bishop’s. Now, the sinecures and leaderships go to those who meet the right metrics of equality, diversity and inclusion. Don’t believe me? Stroll along Molesworth St in Wellington at lunchtime and mingle with those who guide our future; hang around the lobby of a university or two, or perhaps the spacious halls of the TVNZ building on Hobson St in Auckland. Look at who, ever-increasingly, holds the power in New Zealand. Sorry – Aotearoa. We now live in a funding environment when the first criterion many applications must meet is that they will somehow benefit Maori. Nor is this some covert agenda. It is often declared in the funding guide. Conducting research into some aspect of medical biology? Better get at least one EDI-friendly face on the team if you want your research funded. I’m not making this up.

Pale, stale and male? Begone. We don’t care what you may have to offer, don’t care that you have the talent and training to stand pre-eminent in your field. We now believe our society to be so wealthy that we can afford to place lesser but more worthy, more diverse and supposedly less privileged candidates in the vanguard of society, let such deserving souls determine our future together.

How is this working out? Plagued by low productivity, NZ’s economy remains one of the developed world’s worst performers. Next door, Australia has resisted the fad for the return to mediaevalism and not only remains well ahead of us on virtually every performance metric, it is hoovering out our unwanted talent at a rate that should be, but is not, a national scandal. Of course many who flee across the Tasman will say it is for the money, the sunshine. But if you get them alone and ask for the truth, I guarantee many will tell you that it is also because they are sick of seeing the opportunities going to those who are the right gender, sexual orientation or, God help us, ancestry, just like in the Middle Ages. To the more ‘diverse’ cohort. They know they won’t be battling that over there.

And so back we go, to conditions where an ever-shrinking pie is divided up ever less fairly to favour the whos over the whats.

Time to buy an ox, perhaps.

Or to stop the rot.

Hello there ..

The stats tell me this blog gets more than a hundred views a month. Since I do nothing to promote it, I’m mystified. I keep it as a personal thought silo which people are welcome to browse. That’s all it is.

Who are you? I would love it if you would leave a comment or just say hi. I promise I won’t try to sell you anything.