Le Flâneur

Philosophy Bites latest edition features features Jeff McMahan on vegetarianism. He forcefully makes the point that if you really confront the moral arguments against eating meat, there really is no contest. One point I had never considered before for instance, is that as well as having to weigh up the difference between the pleasure you get from consuming meat, against the pleasure a slaughtered animal would have experienced if given the chance to live out the rest of it’s life. Crucially you also have to in this calculation take account of the difference in pleasure you experience between eating a meal that includes meat, and a meal that is just derived from plants etc. So if you really think that this small difference is worth the suffering and premature death of another mammal then go ahead and eat meat. Otherwise you really have to ask yourself some questions.

Jeff McMahan’s closing argument is to liken meat eaters in the developed Western world to Southern slave owners in the America of the 19th century. Seemingly good people look around themselves and a see other seemingly good people doing the same thing and fail to realise the collective error in their ways. In this sense vegetarianism is a sort of consciousness raising enterprise.

Personally I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to be a hypocrite, in this area of my life anyway. Over the last six months I have grown accustomed to eating it very rarely. But I still find myself attacking vegetarians for fun. I’ll routinely point to the rich tradition and culture of eating meat, and to the gastronomic superiority and flavour of dishes that include it.  I’ll happily point out that none of the world’s top restaurants are vegetarian and top food critics and chefs have nothing but contempt for those that forgo meat in their diets. But really this is a fairly pathetic argument from hedonism and a form of nihilism.

I am now beginning to think seriously that I can live without it completely, or at least, maintain my, (admittedly somewhat enforced) current policy. I still eat fish after all. They are different; they’re less ‘neurologically advanced’ than mammals, or so runs the argument. And I’ll still eat dairy; who could live without cheese?

Previously when this discussion has arisen I have resolved to just eat meat that is ‘ethically sourced’, to at least take some steps in the right direction. You want some sort of guarantee that the animal you’re eating has at least had a good quality of life, while it lasted.  But in reality this policy is very difficult to maintain. My main weakness is for pork based products and sausages especially. Sadly I think the ethically sourced kind are expensive and difficult to come by. What we need is a whole new approach to food labeling on the back of a real cultural shift in attitudes to meat. I’m not sure that the food revolution that has occurred in the UK in the last fifteen years or so has really contributed much of use to this debate.

But now it’s barbecue season and everybody hates a killjoy vegetarian at a barbecue. Even so, I think from now on it’s scampi fries for me and no more pork scratchings.

Speaking of rules by which to live ones life by, I really enjoyed this extract from Christopher Hitchens’ new memoirs on Slate. It includes his rules to drinking and information about his daily intake. Also on Hitchens, did any one see read this funny interview from the Guardian the other week?

Just got a calling card through the front door. We get these sort of things quite a lot. I’m going to start a collection.  It reads:

Sheikh Malick: International Clairvoyant Spiritual Leader. The 11th generation of the family member of the African medium order.

Initiated healer of well known plants in the wild sacred forest; 15 years experience in Europe. Specialises in desperate cases which seem to be unwordable. He is a specialist in bringing back your loved ones, relationship problems and court cases. He can help with sexual impotency, exams, infertility, lose weight, depression, fidelity between husband and wife and many more, like immigration problems. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Wow! Is there anything Sheikh Malick Can’t do? I particularly like the enigmatic Specialises in desperate cases which seem to be unwordable. I wonder what his rates are like.

You may have noticed a new page has appeared in the top right corner called ‘the list’. This is a new mammoth project we’ve undertaken to objectively and qualitatively place absolutely everything in the world in relation to everything else in an infinite borometer of goodness. You may see that so far things like ‘Jeremy Vine’ and ‘vitamin supplements’ are somewhere in the middle of the continuum, while Semisonic are bringing up the rear. At the top are things like ‘Cate Blanchett’, ‘dogs’ and ‘The Stooges’.

Our projects does bear some resemblance to British Sea Powers’ one to deem things ‘rock’ or ‘not rock’. Except ours will encompass everything even the seemingly banal. For example, are The Charlatans better than fashionably dressed teens? The answer is probably yes, for although the Charlatans are perhaps the most perpetually mediocre of bands, they’re still better than that feeling of wasted youth one experiences at the sight of happy fashionable teens buying Japanese lager in a Shoreditch off-license. But even the most cynically minded would have to admit that fashionably dressed teenagers are preferable to Christianity. At the moment the design is a bit crude but this will be refined. We welcome suggestions for new entries, and debate with regard to placement.

This blog will now have contributions from Joe Miller and Matt Venables. This way it’ll probably be updated more regularly and you’ll have three voices to, ahem, enjoy instead of just the one. It’ll be fun. You’ll be able to read about all our exploits living in a rodent invested hell hole in Hackney. This has come about after a sustained effort on my to get them to joint the party. Thematically it’ll probably remain the same. The truth is that there is no theme to this blog, it’s just easier that way. To see who is the author of a post, you’ll have to click on the comments section and scroll down to the bottom.

This picture is from the FIB festival this summer. Matt had hurt his arm and is sporting a rather fetching and coordinated bandage. Joe is just resting his eyes having consumed only a moderate amount of alcohol.

I recently edited together my footage from that week. It had taken many months before I could bring myself to properly review it all. I think this picture is quite emblematic of the holiday. Notice how just out of frame Tom is somehow still holding it together. After this we had to walk the three or four miles along the beech back to our apartment to watch some more wrestling on the TV.

For the record, this is more or less what happened on Tuesday the 31st of July 2007. On the preceding Sunday, I had taken some snaps of what may or may not have been a Great White Shark swimming in the sea near Westcombe beach on the south coast of Devon. Let me tell you, we all had quite a scare. A day or two later I posted them on my Facebook profile. I had been joking around with friends about sending them to The Sun but had assumed that the whole shark theme the red-tops were running had now been succeeded by something else. Something less ridiculous, and something, frankly more newsworthy. Not being a huge follower of the tabloids I had little idea that the silly-season was now officially in full swing, the traditionally quiet summer months where it seems literally anything goes. (perhaps I had also underestimated how poor the ratings for Big Brother have been this summer)

Quite soon after posting the picture I began to get comments about the terrifying shark fin lurking in the background. This made me think again about sending it to a newspaper. I decided to have look at The Sun’s website and low and behold there it was: ‘Britain gripped by shark mania!’. I needed no further persuasion. I quickly cobbled together an email with a story that basically reflected events as they unfolded on the beach that fateful afternoon. Here is that email:

Hi,

Some of my pals were swimming in the sea off the coast of South Devon near Westcombe beach and the village of Kingston. It was Sunday afternoon. I was enjoying the British summer and getting some rays when all of a sudden I spotted what looked like a fin somewhere beyond my friends.

At this point I started shouting at Hannah (23) and Freya Miller (20), both on holiday from Oxford, to warn them to swim in immediately. Fortunately the girl’s cousin, Joe Miller (26) was on hand to dash into the water and help (pictured).

I think I managed to capture the moment when all three of them actually saw the fin behind them (see the second picture). The girls were a bit shaken but otherwise unharmed. They may think twice about swimming in Westcountry waters again.

Regards,
Chris Lowe.

If you’d like to purchase the pictures for publication call me on (01752 880748) anytime

The rest is history. I’m sure I will write further about this incident (in particular my dealings with the UK’s biggest selling tabloid newspaper), but right now I’m a little tired of sharks and anything shark related. Plus tomorrow I’ve got to move my whole life up to London and I’ve barely started packing.

Perhaps a bit of a boring subject to post about, but the weather this summer has been completely beyond the pale. It’s just never really started. Here in Britain we expect our summers to be somewhat aloof at times, but this year it seems more akin to how I imagine nuclear winter would be.  It’s really beginning to get me down.  The depression that this entails may stem from a sense of time itself having slowed down. Things around here move slowly enough as it is without having the constant deferment of summer as well. I went for a walk yesterday evening through the fields and through the dense mist that has descended over the South-Hams (I exaggerate only a little), and imagined all the things that might be happening if this were anything like a normal summer ie. trips to the beach, BBQs etc. This year I’ve eaten only a small number of meals outdoors. If I believed in God I would surmise that he/ she was pretty pissed off with us all right now, but I’m sure the real reason for the gloom is something much more prosaic. And worrying.

At least next week I’m heading to Spain where sun is always guaranteed. I keep looking at the BBC weather display for Valencia and the lovely orange sun symbols and I try to remember what a sunny day actually feels like. Roll on next week…

It seems that God is really messing with our heads at the moment with the announcement in Nature today of the discovery of Gigantoraptor fossils. A sort of flesh eating dino-bird twice as tall as a man. Yeah right like that ever even existed.

I was listening to Women’s hour a couple of months ago when there was a feature about a new craze sweeping the homes of super-rich Manhattenites. Apparently the new fashion accessory for the working mum is the the male nanny, or ‘manny’. The refined New York journalist being interviewed on the show explained that the male nanny offers a different kind of service to the more conventional female one. The manny takes the boys to the park and tires them out playing baseball. He provides a role model for youngsters with fathers that work long hours. You can read all about the new craze here, and here. The type of young man who typically fulfils this role is a graduate or on some kind of gap year. He is well spoken and well dressed and has a clear vision about what the future holds for him. She expressed a faith in the effectiveness of interviews for determining the appropriateness of a candidate for a position. Despite Jenni Murray’s attempts to undermine the concept, the interviewee was convinced of the wisdom of the idea and so am I. Her NewYorker’s assuredness was simply impossible to deny.

I’d forgotten about all this until a couple of days ago having lunch with a friend. We were talking about my moving to London and what I was going to do with myself when I got there when it suddenly came to me ‘London Mannies‘! © How could it fail? What ever is big in NY is bound to eventually take hold of London’s ultra-rich also. So Tom has registered the domain name for me and now we’re ready to roll. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you want in on this exciting new business venture. We can talk strategy.

I feel tempted to write the confessions of a failed art teacher here for that unfortunately is more or less what I’ve become.  There are a myriad of complex reasons for my quitting this course and I’ve become sick of reiterating them over the course of multiple friend and family reunions over the Christmas period.  The more I here my own explanations the more absurd sounding they become to my ears – they are over rehearsed and remind me of how painfully deluded I’ve been about things at times.  All I will say is that it’s a very demanding course and one I entered into somewhat naively.  I feel that without total commitment I was always doomed to fail so I dropped out instead of wasting any more time on the enterprise.  What can I say?  I always felt like the odd one out on that course for a number of reasons not least of which was the fact that everyone else seemed much more settled than me.  I feel I still have wild oats to sow and other clichés of that nature.  The trouble with the PGCE is that it completely takes over your life for a year.  Then you have your NQT year that by all accounts is hellish, and then it’s a couple more years until you feel you’re any good at it.  Basically you’ve really got to want to do it to succeed.  I knew I needed to adopt an attitude of “well this is what I do now”, but unfortunately this always eluded me.  The thought of a teacher centred social life was not a prospect I relished (sorry to any teachers reading – that’s not meant to be a dis).    Anyway I could go on and on this but the debacle is over now.  I’ll never get those four months back but what the hell, I got a pretty sweet new laptop with all the money the government gave me.

So what to do now?  I need to be gainfully employed in some capacity.  I know I’ll do TEFL course and live somewhere hot!  That’s what people do when they want to defer getting a proper career isn’t it?  So I’m applying to do a course in Barcelona in March.  Eh up, things are looking up:  the days are getting longer, I’m going be out of here soon, and Celebrity Big Brother has started.  It’s not looking like being as unmissable as last year but, well, I have quite a lot of free time on my hands now so I’ll be watching.  The Johnny Tourette vs. ‘H’ showdown is a potential mouth waterer, and Ken Russell is clearly unhinged, perhaps about to have heart attack at any moment.

Right, where’s the gin?

So I’ve been back a while now living in total solitude.  It’s amazing how little this village has changed in the twenty five years I’ve been living here.  Take the post office.  Everything is arranged in exactly the same way as I remember it as a child.  It looks like they’ve been buying exactly the same stock for decades.  The last time I was down I had my haircut in the hairdressers.  Again this hasn’t changed its interior since as long as I can remember: people like shabby it seems.  Everything is so static: change is actively resisted.  I feel alien here now.  Maybe I’m paranoid or maybe it’s just the fact that there is nobody my age in the village.  Where are all the young professionals?  Where are the twenty-something wasters even?  They must be around somewhere.  I can’t even go into the pub anymore, though that has changed but alas only for the worse.  My main daily contact with other human beings is going to the shop to buy the paper.  Unfortunately the old woman who works in there seems barely sentient, just a human shell that mechanically acts out its tasks.  Not much of an update but not much to tell I’m afraid.  Got to get some inspiration…