Like Curtis, his programmes are meticulously well-researched (if Curtis gives the impression of having watched every second of TV ever broadcast, Meades gives the impression of having devoured every book, meal and public building to be found in Europe).  Like Curtis, his programmes carry an air of formidable intellectualism (even though the ideas he discusses are usually pretty accessible, even simple).  Because of this, like Curtis, he is sometimes misunderstood as trying to produce an authoritative account of the things he discusses, when he’s actually just trying to provoke a reaction.  Not, usually, in the way that some newspaper columnists and bloggers try to provoke a visceral reaction, but in the way that a really great teacher tries to provoke an intellectual reaction: to cause people to think about a topic for themselves, and to disrupt the automatic acceptance of received wisdom.  Like Curtis, in other words, he’s an anti-hegemonist, and therefore a very necessary thing.

Unlike Adam Curtis, though, Jonathan Meades is frequently laugh-out-loud funny.  As a case in point, the first programme in his new series* Jonathan Meades on France (available on the iPlayer for the next week-and-a-bit; the second episode, which I haven’t seen yet, is available here) opens with the theme music from the Croft/Perry sitcom ‘Allo, ‘Allo – about as far-removed from the serious attitude of a typical BBC4 series as one could expect.  There’s also a lot of what has become Meades’ trademark visual style (though I suspect it was developed by his directors rather then him personally): the dark-glasses worn even on cloudy days; the pieces to camera delivered standing stock still in the middle distance rather than close up or walking; the flat, deadpan style of delivery.  All of this is designed, as always, to try and create an interesting visual counterpart to what is, essentially, a fairly un-televisual experience; for someone who works in TV, Meades’ style has always been determinedly verbal, even literary.

This wordiness perhaps explains why, in the process of preparing this sort-of review (not a real review; it’s too scattershot for that), I found myself transcribing whole sections of what Meade said, rather than relying, as I usually would, on paraphrases from memory.  I have the impression that his words are chosen so carefully that to paraphrase them would be to miss the point.  This is Meades, for example, on the subject of a once significant but now somewhat ignored monument in the Alsace region of France:

[6m:50s] The hillside at Nancy which Vaudemont is perched on is holy, or mystical, or spiritual…or one of those superstitious things, anyway.  Rosmerta, the Gaulish god of fertility (a big girl), was honoured here in the 4^th Century BC.  The Romans erected a temple to Mercury.  The first Christian site was of the 5^th Century. The basilica was built in the 1870s; it’s tower has a Mary on top of it.  She’s 25 feet tall (another big girl): if she’s capable of virgin birth, why should she not have an over-eager pituitary gland? […]

The reason that this hill should have supernatural attributes and imaginary properties dumped on it is clear: it is the only hill for miles around.  The topographically prodigious is routinely claimed for God, when in fact it actually belongs to the marvels of geological happenstance.

The scepticism towards claims of metaphysical significance is only appropriate for an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, but this also serves as a demonstration of why I regard Meades as an essayist working in the medium of television rather than a documentary-maker.  A traditional documentary-maker probably wouldn’t poke even gentle fun at spiritual matters, but more to the point they wouldn’t admit to uncertainty on the question of how the hill should be described.  Meades does so because he wants to emphasise what he sees as the intellectual bankruptcy of the notion that national identity has a quasi-spiritual relationship with geography – a notion that he thinks is central to the concept of French identity.  He stresses this point because he’s developing his thesis that the nationalist movement in France became anti-Semitic and xenophobic in part because of the belief that people from elsewhere – Jews and others – could never become spiritually French because they were not from France.

This is all interesting enough (if not exactly original; the idea that simplistic folk ideologies initially celebrated as an antidote to industrialism were co-opted first into national identities and thence into far right politics is so widely discussed that even I’ve heard of it).  It’s made especially compelling by the way Meades develops his argument, brandishing the names of politicians, journalists and novelists from a period of almost a century to make it appear that he’s discovered something profound and significant.  And it is profound and significant, in a way, but where it falls down is that Meades is trying to imply that this tells us about something quintessentially French, when exactly the same processes were taking place to a varying extent in countries as different as Germany, Britain and Norway; it was, in fact, a pan-European movement.

This is actually a fairly common experience to be had watching a Jonathan Meades programme – that something that appears dazzling and revelatory appears slightly less impressive on reflection – but this is, of course, the point.  Despite appearances, he’s not trying to construct an authoritative account of the thing he discusses, but rather to stimulate thought.  In this case I’d guess he’s most interested in making the viewer think about the idea that it’s pretty much impossible to say anything about France and the French that can’t also be said about any other country and nationality.

This idea – that national identity is fleeting and chimerical – seems to be one of the central themes Meades is exploring in this programme, and not always by such indirect means. Here he is developing the same idea a few minutes later:

[15:15] Identity is a perennial concern of the far right; it’s enemies are rootlessness and cosmopolitanism.  Identity, in this sense, is a form of communitarianism, which defines people by their race and inherited culture rather than by their individuality, their aspirations, and their talents.  It’s a kind of prison.

This is another fairly typical Meades moment, involving as it does the juxtaposition of ideas that don’t normally go together; not many people would associate the far right with communitarianism (though the starkness of the disjuncture varies depending on whether he means political communitarianism – which has quite a lot in common with libertarian socialism – or philosophical communitarianism – which seems at a cursory glance to be somewhat sympathetic to conservative viewpoints).  It’s also another example of the kind of thing that it’s initially quite easy to view as a compelling and authoritative statement, until, on reflection, other ideas start niggling away.

As a case in point: there seems to be something of a tension in the assertion that ‘identity’ as fetishised by the far right is simultaneously the enemy of both cosmopolitanism and individualism.  To call this a contradiction would be putting it a little too strongly, but cosmopolitanism (stressing as it does social cohesion) and individualism (stressing as it does…well, individualism) are not easy to conflate, and by asserting that the far right is the enemy of both of them, Meades is in danger of treating it as a kind of dustbin definition: “everything I disagree with is fascistic”.

In fact, this same tension raises it’s head again, in a sequence of comments inspired by a visit to the European Court of Human Rights:

[29:45] It is, of course, misnamed; it’s the European Court of Special Pleading.  We’re showered at birth with the promise of potential entitlements and, should those entitlements not be fulfilled, we can come here and complain, and so line the pockets of the pious shysters of the human rights industry. […] The constant injunction to celebrate vibrant diversity is moronic; it is shared qualities that should be appreciated.  To emphasise differences merely consigns people to their background, where they’ve come from: to their tribe, their caste, their religion.  It creates ghettos.

There are really two things to be said about this.  The first is that it might look less like special pleading to Meades if it was his ‘potential entitlements’ that were in question; I am inevitably quite a fan of an institution that has ruled so consistently in favour of gay and straight people receiving equal treatment under the law (if you follow the link, scroll down to get to the ECHR bit).  The second is that this passage brings the tension between Meades’ insistence that ‘it is shared qualities that should be appreciated’ and his assertion that people should be defined ‘by their individuality’ into very high relief.  If we are to celebrate the qualities we have in common, after all, it’s hard to see how this can be easily reconciled with defining people by their individuality – which is to say, by the things they do not have in common.  Of course, the way around this impasse is to acknowledge our differences, but to so do in a context that regards these differences as a source of shared pride, not as grounds for division: precisely the celebration of diversity that Meades labels moronic.

I’ve argued that Meades views himself as a polemicist, and there are clearly traces of polemic here; his comments on the European Court of Human Rights are clearly designed to provoke, and specifically to provoke people like me: job done, then.  But Meades also likes to see himself as an iconoclast, which makes his target selection here regrettable.  Attacking the ECHR is not a shocking or rebellious act, after all, since – in the UK at least – the institution is under near-constant attack, and in precisely the same terms that Meades uses here.  In his attack on the ECHR Meades is not so much a lone venturer bravely slaughtering the sacred cow as he is a late-arriving guest at the dinner party where the sacred cow – already slaughtered, butchered and roasted – is being served up with horseradish and a medley of seasonal vegetables.  I can cheerfully watch a Jonathan Meades programme while disagreeing with much of what he says – disagreeing with him is the point.  I find it harder to forgive laziness of this sort.

Jonathan Meades is frequently at his best when he’s talking about architecture, and design more generally.  This programme was no exception: the sections on Modernist architecture were interesting, and the section analysing the work of the typographer Roger Excoffon was genuinely fascinating.  For things that form such a prominent part of our design culture, typefaces are very rarely talked about, and I greatly enjoyed learning more about one that I instantly recognised, but had never really thought about as a designed artefact before.

Mistral typeface by Roger Excoffon

Probably the thing I appreciated most about the programme, though, was the sheer literary quality of the words Meades uses.  Here’s an excerpt from a description of an early visit to Alsace in 1962, when Meades would have been (if Wikipedia has his date of birth right…) 15 or 16 years old:

[54:25] We arrived at a farm high on the eastern side of the Vosges.  I remember the lunch, a sumptuous lunch, one of the finest lunches of my life: hare simmered in red wine with spices and bitter chocolate, the sauce thickened with its blood.  I remember the buttery noodles it was served with.  I remember drinking eau de vie de mirabelle for the first time in my life.  I remember a silver thread in the far distance – the Rhine – and beyond it, on it’s right bank, an indistinct spectre, a once-troubling spectre: the Black Forest, Germany.

I remember the nonagenarian great-grandmother (whose 70 year old daughter had cooked the hare).  I remember her telling me that this was the house where she had been born, and from which she had never moved.  Yet she had changed nationality four times: French, German, French, German, French.  She told me this without rancour; it was simply what had happened to her.  She hoped to die French.  She did.

That’s just really good writing: simple and affecting in the way the idyll is first evoked, then undercut (the blood in the sauce; the spectre of Germany) and then allowed to reassert itself in the long peace following the 2^nd world war that gave the great-grandmother a stability in death that she did not experience in life.  It’s beautifully done (and notice the way the repeated phrase ‘I remember’ gives the excerpt a structure and a rhythm).  Truthfully, I can put up with almost any amount of fatuous comments about the ECHR so long as Jonathan Meades keeps writing like that, and so long as he keeps making intelligent TV that encourages people to think for themselves.

—

* – Well, I assume it’s a new series.  I haven’t seen it trailed – which I might have expected if it was a new series – and the date that appears on screen is 2011, as though this is actually a repeat.  But, on the other hand, the iPlayer lists the first transmission as occurring this year, and the papers (Guardian, Metro) reviewed it like it was new.  So, on balance, I’m guessing that it’s new, and the BBC have been uncharacteristically lax with the onscreen date.

First of all, keep in mind that the £26k cap is to apply to income from most benefits.  As well as benefits paid to people because they are not working, this will also include benefits that are paid to some people regardless of whether they are in work.  The most notable benefits in this category include Child Benefit (which, the government plans, will be available to all families earning up to around £40k – and to some families earning almost twice that) and Child Tax Credits (available, for families with more than one child, for incomes up to £32k – and sometimes even more).  The unfairness here is obvious: households that are entirely dependent on benefit will lose their entitlement to money once their household income hits £26k, but households that derive part of their income from other sources will be able to have a household income significantly higher than this and still receive taxpayer subsidy.  What this means is that the government are choosing to redirect the limited resources of the state away from people who need the money more and towards people who need it less.

The second thing to note is that this is not a per-person cap, but a cap on the income of households.  This means that the policy will impact on some families, but will leave many other households unaffected.  This means in turn that all the many advantages claimed for the policy – ending welfare dependency; creating an incentive to work; and so on – will apply to only a tiny minority of the out-of-work population.  If the government were serious about pursuing the policy for these reasons – rather than as a crude method for guillotining welfare spending – surely they would be instituting a system of individual caps, with the total for each household being determined by the number of individuals within it?  Under such a system they could achieve the same reduction in overall expenditure while also making sure that no child would be unfairly disadvantaged simply because of the size of the family they are born into – a change which would cause much of the parliamentary opposition to the policy to melt away.

Thirdly, note that ‘the cap will be set at £500 a week [£26k per year] for couple and lone parent households’.  What this means is that this policy will create an incentive for two-parent families to split since, whenever such a family comes up against the benefits cap, they will be materially better off if one parent moves out, taking some of the children with them.  This is because, following such a move, each half of the family will become subject to a separate benefits cap, allowing the same group of people to potentially double their income from benefits.  Clearly this has the potential to be counter-productive by increasing the overall cost, but it’s also curiously at odds with Mr Duncan Smith’s loudly asserted belief that government policy should be directed towards the goal of promoting marriage.  (Personally, I think people’s living arrangements are no business of the state, and that it should refrain from incentivising any particular lifestyle – singledom, cohabitation, marriage/civil partnership – over any other.  This means I find myself in the interesting position of temporarily aligning myself with Iain Duncan Smith when he argues against Iain Duncan Smith’s policies, even though I don’t actually agree with either Iain Duncan Smith or Iain Duncan Smith.)

The final thing that I want to draw attention to is that the cap is to operate at the same level across the entire UK.  What this means is that those families that happen to live in high-rent areas will feel the effects of this policy more frequently than families that live in low-rent areas.  This is clearly unfair on its own terms, but it also leads on to secondary unfairness.  For example, wealthy areas of the country often benefit from better social infrastructure – better schools, lower crime rates, better access to employment opportunities, etc.  If out-of-work families are increasingly ghettoised into low-rent areas with poor social infrastructure, this will have the effect of making it harder for children from those families to get a good education, harder for them to find employment, and harder for them to come into contact with positive role models as they grow up.  In other words, this policy will have the effect of entrenching poverty, and the kind of attitudes towards work and ‘personal responsibility’ that the government claim they want to eradicate.  It will also lead to a society that is ever more starkly divided between the rich and the poor, with all the negative economic and social effects that flow from that.

Perhaps the saddest thing about this is that there is, genuinely, a problem with steadily rising welfare spending, but it’s not the fault of the supposedly feckless poor.  The root cause of the problem is that the cost of housing has risen to unsustainable levels.  That’s partly the result of the dwindling supply of social housing, and partly the result of a lack of effective rent controls in the private rented sector.  So if the government are actually serious about reducing the welfare bill without increasing unfairness – as they claim – then they have two possible solutions in front of them.  (They could pursue both simultaneously if they wanted.)  The first is to sharply increase the supply of social housing, which would reduce the rental bill (since social housing can be rented at cost price), and would also end the scandal of public money being used to support the profits of private landlords rather than being used to support the public good.  The second is to re-establish effective regulation of rents in the private rented sector, which, by limiting the cost of rent, would benefit working households as much as unemployed households.

The government claim that their policy of capping the benefit available to fund the rent of unemployed people will have the effect of reducing private sector rents.  The problem with this indirect approach is that it ignores two related problems: firstly, that in many areas there is a shortage of rental accommodation at any price; and secondly that, because a roof over one’s head is not a luxury, people will go to almost any lengths to prevent themselves from becoming homeless.  What this means is that tenants – whether unemployed or in work – are forced into competing with each other to see who can afford ever-increasing rents, rather than landlords being forced to compete with each other to offer the lowest rent.  (It’s worth noting that, long before the idea of capping benefits was mooted, research showed that as many as 70% of Housing Benefit awards were for less than the full cost of someone’s rent, but this has not resulted in a downward pressure on rents.)

In reality, it’s only by cutting directly to the heart of the problem – the unsustainable cost of housing – that the government can hope to reduce the cost of the benefit bill without increasing unfairness.  That this action would also have the advantage of making life fairer for people in employment is a nice additional bonus – a rare example of a win-win scenario.

Under Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act 1998, ‘the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England’ is explicitly listed as a matter reserved to the parliament in Westminster.  Since a referendum on Scottish independence relates to the Union, it’s clear any referendum would have either to be directly organised by the Westminster parliament itself, or organised with its permission by another authority, such as the Scottish parliament.

That’s all nice and clear, then – the Westminster parliament has a clear and unambiguous constitutional and legal right to dictate to the Scottish parliament the conditions under which it is prepared to transfer authority for organising a referendum.  So much for the theory, but what about in practice – can they actually do so?  Well, there it gets a lot more complicated.

For a start, referenda have no constitutional force in any part of the United Kingdom, including in Scotland.  So, while the Scotland Act explicitly forbids the Scottish parliament from passing legislation that will affect the Union, it’s by no means certain it prevents it from passing a referendum Act.  If the result of a referendum cannot be enforced in any court in England or Scotland (and it can’t), how can an Act of the Scottish parliament organising a referendum be said, in law, to affect the Union?  By law, only the parliament in Westminster can affect the Union, and by clear constitutional principle the parliament in Westminster is free to ignore the result of any referendum – including a referendum organised by itself, or with it’s permission.

Of course this last point – that the Westminster parliament cannot even be forced to reflect the results of referenda it organises itself – also means that any referendum, whether or not it is authorised by the Westminster parliament, has precisely the same constitutional significance.  Which is another way of saying it has no constitutional significance whatsoever.  And if authorisation by the Westminster parliament confers no legal or constitutional status on a referendum, then there’s no difference in law between referenda that have and have not been authorised.  And if there is no difference in law between an authorised and an unauthorised referendum, it’s not clear what ruling a court could make even if it wanted to – it cannot revoke the legitimacy of an unauthorised referendum, because the referendum has no legitimacy anyway.

Referenda do have force, of course.  But they have force because overruling the will of the people as freely expressed in an open and fair referendum is politically impossible, not because it’s constitutionally impossible.  If a referendum organised by the Scottish parliament backed independence or enhanced devolution, it might be constitutionally possible for the Westminster government to ignore the result – just as it would be constitutionally possible for it to ignore the result of a referendum it had organised itself – but it would be politically impossible.

What all this means is that, in attempting to dictate the format of the referendum, the Westminster government is bluffing on a weak hand.  All it takes is for the Scottish parliament to indicate it is willing to proceed with a referendum without seeking the permission of the parliament in Westminster, and the bluff will have been called.  Whatever the constitutional niceties, it’s simply inconceivable that the Westminster government could ignore the view of the Scottish electorate as freely expressed in a fair and open referendum.  There would be a high political price to pay if they tried, but even more than this it would undermine the defining central feature of democracy: that government reflects the will of the people.

Something that’s even harder to understand is why the Westminster government are even trying to do this.  It seems obvious that they want to make sure that the option of enhanced devolution is not included on the ballot, and to leave the Scottish electorate with a straight choice between independence – which virtually every poll shows the majority of them do not want – and the status quo.  But denying the Scottish people the opportunity of voting for enhanced devolution will not change the fact that, to paraphrase the words of Professor John Curtice on BBC News last night, it’s the option that seems to be backed by the majority of them.  All it will do is store up further resentment against the unionist parties in Scotland.

It looks as though the unionist parties (Labour as much as the Conservatives and the Lib Dems) have decided to pursue this strategy because it will annoy their political rivals, the SNP, but they seem to have overlooked the fact that they’re at serious risk of cutting off their noses to spite their face.  If they want them to value the Union, the unionist parties have to demonstrate to the Scottish people that their aspirations for greater autonomy can be met within it.  Preventing them from expressing those aspirations in a referendum is not a good way of achieving this.

You’ll note she didn’t write

All white people love playing ‘divide & rule’

Likewise, you’ll note she didn’t write

Some white people love playing ‘divide & rule’

That first option would be an unambiguously racist generalisation, and the second would unambiguously refute the racist generalisation, but she didn’t write either of those things.  What she actually wrote –

White people love playing ‘divide & rule’

 – is neither unambiguously racist nor unambiguously non-racist.  It’s possible she is using ‘white people’ to mean all white people, and it’s possible she’s using ‘white people’ to mean some white people (or ‘most white people’, or ‘a few white people’, or a very large range of other possibilities).  The statement as written is ambiguous – and typical of the kind of telegramese that the 140-character limit on Twitter promotes.

Certainly, this wording raises the distinct possibility of a racist generalisation, and for that reason Ms Abbott would have been wise to avoid it, and people reading it are entitled to conclude that the statement is potentially racist, and to ask her to clarify whether or not she intended to make a general statement about white people.  But jumping to the conclusion that the statement definitely is racist is unwarranted.  And pretending that the failure to explicitly refute the racist generalisation indicates racism was intended is disingenuous, since it ignores the abbreviated, terse style everyone knows is typical of statements made via Twitter.

Speaking as a white person (albeit one who is a good old mix of different nationalities, including that of a grandparent who arrived in this country as a refugee), I have to say I was not offended by the potential racism in Ms Abbott’s comment.  I agree it was potentially racist, and I take note of that, but I didn’t and don’t feel any offence – in part because I know as a white person I’m extremely unlikely to suffer any negative consequences as a result of anti-white racism.  It’s not that I excuse or condone any form of racism – I don’t – but I do think it’s ludicrous to pretend that, as things stand, black-on-white racism is an equivalent problem to white-on-black racism.

In so far as the comment bothers me at all, I’m irritated by the apparent misunderstanding of the colonial doctrine of ‘divide and rule’.  The aim was not, as Ms Abbott seems to think, that colonised peoples within the British empire would fight amongst themselves, and hence their struggle against colonialism would be blunted; the aim was that, encouraged to fight amongst themselves, colonised peoples would come to believe they were unable to resolve their own differences, and were thus dependent on the colonial power to act as a ‘neutral’ arbiter and guarantor of peace and stability.  (The difference is worth insisting on, because while you won’t find many people arguing for the kind of underhand political techniques that the first version of ‘divide and rule’ would represent, you’ll find rather more people arguing that the British empire was a force for good because it contained and limited conflict in colonised parts of the world – without considering the possibility that the conflicts were caused or exacerbated by colonialism in the first place.)

And I guess, rather less relevantly, I’m also vicariously annoyed on behalf of Bim Adewunmi, the person Diane Abbott was having a discussion with when she made her controversial remarks.  So far as this outsider can tell, it seems unlikely that there’s any such thing as a single, homogenous ‘black community’ (certainly as a white gay man I know there’s no such thing as a single, homogenous ‘gay community’ or a single, homogenous ‘white community’ – for just one example, some white people are intensely homophobic, while others amongst us aren’t).  Groups of individuals may have certain things in common, and may benefit from pooling their political efforts, but that doesn’t mean they have the same experiences and opinions, or that the same few ‘community leaders’ can speak on their behalf.  Even if Ms Abbott disagrees, suggesting that, by making this point, Ms Adewunmi has fallen victim to ‘#tacticsasoldascolonialism’ seems to me to be a little heavy-handed.

But I wasn’t the intended recipient of the remarks, so what do I know?  Please don’t attach any significance to my ‘vicarious annoyance’, or mistake it for the real thing.  God knows I don’t.

I have a problem with this.  Obviously, I have a problem with CBT at the best of times (I once described my own experience of CBT for depression as feeling like I was being sent out to compete in a jousting tournament armed only with a cocktail stick), but in this particular instance my problem is with the continued existence of self-help books.

I can see that, in the pre-internet era, someone who felt they were able to offer general help and guidance to worried or confused people might feel publishing a self-help book was the only practical means of getting their advice out into the public sphere.  Back in those days, after all, there was no easy way to get something widely distributed.  The only real alternative to publishing a book would have been trying to persuade a newspaper or magazine editor to run an article, or a broadcasting executive to make a programme.

But we no longer exist in the pre-internet era.  These days – when getting something distributed worldwide is as simple as typing some words in a box and clicking on a button marked ‘Publish’ – anyone who’s motivated by a sincere desire to help can, if they want to, make the kind of generalised advice that’s found in self-help books widely available for free.  So it follows that people who still write and publish self-help books are purposefully making use of a more restricted distribution channel with the explicit intention of making money out of their advice – or, rather, out of the worried and confused people who think they need advice.  Such behaviour seems to me to be – how shall I put this? – ethically dubious.  And that’s before we get on to discussing the advice itself.

There are a range of different books in the ‘Overcoming’ series – titles called Overcoming Depression, Overcoming Anxiety, and Overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are all promoted on Amazon – but the one that particularly caught my eye was Overcoming Low Self-Esteem.  I have concerns about the other volumes, to be sure, not least the self-diagnosis issue: many people who have mild, transient or situation-specific symptoms of anxiety, depression or OCD will not have a clinical problem at all, and encouraging them in the belief that they’re suffering from a mental illness may be disastrous for their psychological well-being.  But in terms of low self-esteem it seems to me that the overall effect of the book can’t help but be counter-productive.

I mean, think about it. Selling a self-help book for low self-esteem to someone involves actively encouraging them to think more negatively about themselves.  It means persuading them that they actually are deficient in some way, that left to their own devices they lack something that it is necessary for a well-rounded individual to possess.  See what I mean about counter-productive?

Then, too, I would have thought it was a fairly obvious point, but perhaps it needs to be stressed: self-esteem has to come from the self.  A sense of esteem built on external things – like what a self-help book says – is, by definition, not self-esteem.  Now, actually, a sense of esteem bolstered from the outside may well be no bad thing – the warm glow when someone compliments us or thanks us is a feeling most of us would agree is very pleasant – but it’s not self-esteem.  Self-esteem is what you think about yourself, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says.

So, do you want to know Aethelread’s patent method for boosting your self-esteem?  Well I’d suggest the biggest single thing you could do is stop focussing on how you feel (and certainly don’t buy any books that promise to change the way you feel): focus instead on what you do.  Anyone’s sense of self-worth has to be derived, ultimately, from their own sense that they achieve worthwhile things, and the way to bolster your sense that you achieve worthwhile things is …to achieve worthwhile things.  You should take the mental energy that you’re currently investing in poring over the supposed deficiencies in your feelings and invest it instead in doing something real – volunteer work, or a new hobby, or more time dedicated to an existing one.  By thinking about something other than how you feel about yourself you will, in time, start to feel better about yourself.

A self-help book that encourages someone to apply CBT principles is advocating a form of self-directed therapy, and therapy, by necessity, requires a person to focus their attention inward.  There are times when that’s necessary and productive (though self-directed therapy is always a fairly dodgy idea), but this isn’t one of them.  You’ll never boost your self-esteem by focussing on the way you think about the way you feel about yourself (which is what, ultimately, a CBT-centred approach is going to encourage).  You’ll boost your self-esteem by doing more things that make you feel better about yourself.

(I don’t claim, by the way, that this advice is particularly insightful, or will necessarily be helpful to you – how could I claim either when it’s at the level of generalised observations and basic statements of principle?  But it’s no less helpful – and no more generalised – than any you’ll find in a self-help book, and it comes free of charge.  If your problems go deeper than this, I offer you my sincere sympathy, and also a recommendation that you seek formal assistance.  Self-help books won’t do anything for you, except make you poorer.)

—

* – Other suggested titles in the ‘Over-cumming Series’: You’re not Trying to Strangle it to Death: Tips for Avoiding the Dreaded ‘Vulcan Death Grip’.  Or “Can’t You See I’m Doing My Pilates?”: The 101 Best Excuses for when Someone Comes In Unexpectedly.  Or Sometimes I Just Like to Crack One Out: Explaining your Porn Stash to your Partner.  Sorry.  I’ve got a million of these.

Anyway, I hope you had a good New Year’s celebration, whatever you did.  I spent it in front of the telly, and I can tell my critical faculties must have been switched off for the evening because I happily sat and watched 2½ hours of Alan Carr.  I’ve never really been able to get along with Alan Carr.  When I’ve seen him being interviewed by other people he’s always seemed a nice enough chap, but the heightened persona he creates for his own shows I’ve always found extremely grating.  I have no problem with camp people (some of my best friends, etc – although in my case that’s actually true), and I’m actively drawn to effeminate guys (and geeks; if you’re an effeminate geek, congratulations, you’ve achieved perfection), but that’s when those things are genuine.  Alan Carr is clearly naturally camp and effeminate – and more power to him – but he exaggerates those things for his TV persona, and that fakeness irritates me, in the same way that Nicky Campbell’s faked-up ‘man of the people’ act makes me want to punch my radio on those rare occasions he crops up on it.

But, anyway, I set that aside for the purposes of last night, and actually found I was enjoying myself.  I think it helped that there was a lot going on, and he had reasonably interesting guests, which meant he wasn’t forced to fall back on the insincere posing quite so much.  Mind you, it probably also helped – given how mind-meltingly shallow I am – that the show included a lot of shots of Olly Murs sitting around looking pretty.  (If you’re unfamiliar with him, Mr Murs is a former X-Factor runner up.  I’ve become mildly obsessed with him ever since coming across discovering this (NSFW-ish) photo.)

Still, the purpose of this wasn’t to talk about the tail end of 2011, but rather to talk about what I hope to achieve in 2012.  I’m always wary of having anything so concrete as a resolution, but I also think it’s a bad idea just to allow myself to drift.  I didn’t achieve a great deal last year, but I did manage to hold to my weight-loss programme.  Even if I do still look as globular as I always did to a random stranger, at least I know I’m a smaller globe – Neptune rather than Jupiter kind of thing – and having that as a thing to look back on is positive, I think.  With that in mind, this is a list of not-resolutions, things I hope to try and vaguely get round to maybe doing something about in 2012.

Eyesight

I am a dreadful procrastinator – why do today what you could put off until tomorrow? – and I last got a new pair of glasses in, I think, 2004.  My eyesight’s reasonably stable, but even so I think my prescription has probably changed in the intervening time; given it’s a gradual change it’s always hard to be sure, but I think the world is blurrier than it used to be.  Even without that, though, the lenses are quite badly scratched, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve had to start sticking part of the frame together with sellotape.  So I really do need new glasses.  My hope is that I may get this one sorted in the next couple of weeks.

Teeth

My dentist has been lovely, and very kind about (metaphorically) holding my hand through my pathetic snivelling (phobias are a terrible thing), and the hypnosis has been surprisingly helpful, but it’s time I did something about this.  Four months is long enough to have been walking around with an odd number of teeth in my head (odd in both senses – unusual, and indivisible by two).  Self-consciousness about opening my mouth in public is making me even more of a hermit than usual – there’s one social opportunity I particularly regret having passed up; if you’re reading this, sorry again – but I also think I’ve reached the stage where not having the work done will be worse for my state of mind than having it done.  That’s where the hypnosis has helped; I no longer dread treatment will be worse than dying, just assume it will be intensely horrible, which may not sound like much, but is worlds better, believe me.  And once it’s actually done, it will be a huge weight off my mind.  I may delay this for a few weeks yet – the dentists are moving to new premises, and the boost to my mood from noticeably lengthening days will also be important – but I’m setting myself a goal of having at least the important work done before the spring is out.  And then – and this is the key thing – making future trips to the dentist a cast-iron routine.  That way I won’t get into such a state again, both in terms of my actual oral health, but also my fear won’t have a chance to get out of hand.

Computing – Part One

I’ve always liked to flatter myself as a bit of a technology geek, but my case for arguing that has been looking decidedly thin in recent years.  I don’t have a mobile of any description, I’m not on twitter or facebook, and I don’t enjoy gaming – that’s a vast swathe of techno-geekery closed to me right there.  Then, too, I may have built my computer myself, but that was approaching 7 years ago, and I’ve only minimally upgraded since then (I added a second hard drive), which means my machine is decidedly low spec.  It’s actually still workable, but I’m having increasing problems with overheating, and memory errors seem to be proliferating, too.  And as a seven year old machine, its ability to multitask is not great – if I have more than one webpage with significant flash elements open at a time, it basically grinds to a halt.

So, I’m planning on buying a new computer.  As always, I’ll aim to get a machine that’s middle-of-the-road in terms of things like processor speed, memory and hard drive capacity – any higher spec than that and you start paying an unjustifiable premium just for being up-to-date.  The great thing is that, because it’s been so long since I upgraded, this is still going to be a massive improvement.  I’ve got my eye on a particular machine offered by one of the indie computer retailers locally, and if I do opt for that one the hard drive’s going to be larger by a factor of ten, it’ll have eight times as much memory, and in place of one processor core running at 2.4GHz it’ll have four cores running at 3.1GHz.  (I’m enough of a geek to find these numbers almost erotically exciting…)  And it’ll have an actual (if underpowered) graphics card, as opposed to a silly hardwired chip that actually shunts most of the work over to the processor.  I knew I’d end up regretting that compromise when I made it, and I haven’t been wrong.

Computing – Part Two

The next thing is that a hardware upgrade this significant is going to necessitate some software changes.  For a start, unless my wannabe techno-geekery has let me down, I think I’m right in saying that the extra RAM will necessitate the move from a 32-bit to a 64-bit environment, which will mean a new operating system, and new programs to run on it.  Well, ok, the new programs aren’t strictly speaking necessary, but it would seem …eccentric to buy a shiny new computer with shiny new RAM, then run versions of programs that can’t address the extra memory.  Plus, too, newer versions of programs should have native support for multi-core processors, which wouldn’t be the case with some of what I currently have; some versions I have in particular are notorious for maxing out one core and leaving the others completely idle.  So this means saying a final farewell to Windows XP.  (I know there are 64-bit versions of XP, but realistically if I’m getting hold of a new OS it would be absurd to stick with one that Microsoft will be withdrawing support for in a few years time.)

If I stick within the Windows ecosystem, an OS upgrade will obviously mean moving to Windows 7.  But here’s the thing – Win7 is different enough to XP that I will encounter a bit of a learning curve while I’m coming to terms with it.  So the obvious question is: why not take this as an opportunity to make the jump to Linux?  I’ve been interested in making the jump for years.  I actually had a dual-boot machine with Windows and Linux back around the turn of the century, but Linux was fairly scary in those days, and I also found dual-booting a pain; inevitably, whenever I wanted a file it was saved in a partition whichever OS I was using at the time couldn’t read.  I understand these days Linux can read inside NTFS partitions with relative ease.  I certainly hope so, or I’m going to have to dedicate a lot of time to transferring data, rather than just pulling the hard drives out of my current machine and installing them in spare drive bays in the new one, which is what I had planned.

It’ll obviously take me a while to get to grips with Linux – longer than it would take me to get to grips with Win7 – but if I’m going to be flailing around lost inside a new environment anyway, it might as well be one that won’t charge me an arm and a leg for the privilege of being confused.  And one that I’m philosophically and politically attracted to – open source shouldn’t just be the future of computing, it should be the future of everything (open education, open politics etc).  It will also, of course, rejuvenate my geek-cred (such as it is…) at a stroke – I may not tweet or facebook (are we using facebook as a verb yet?), I may look faintly horrified at the idea of carrying a mobile phone, but I will be able to claim use of a minority OS.

(Even if I am thinking of going with Ubuntu, the most mainstream flavour of Linux, which will immediately identify me as a total newbie to actual techy people.  I figure Ubuntu will, if nothing else, be a good way of getting to grips with the Linux way of doing things, and building familiarity with the kernel and the terminal; I can always migrate off to more rarefied areas once I’ve mastered the basics.)

I do have moments when I wonder if using Linux is actually beyond me.  Some of the ‘simple’ guides to fairly basic things like understanding the file system seem massively complicated – can I really not organise my data in a nested hierarchy under Linux’s file-system? – but I’m assuming that these are things that are hard to explain, but relatively easy to understand in a hands-on way.  My various efforts in the tech sphere have always involved blundering blindly into the middle of something I don’t understand and trying to figure it out as I go along, so I’m hoping that’ll work here, too.  If not, I may be making a shamefaced re-entry to the world of Windows at some point.

I also worry how I’ll get along in the world of open source software.  A lot of it should be fine – I already use an open source browser in Firefox, and I’ve used OpenOffice in the past (though it looks like LibreOffice is now the package of choice amongst the Linux cognoscenti).  I’m most concerned about graphics software.  I do quite a lot of image manipulation, and over the years I’ve built up a portfolio of different programs that I find simple and straightforward to use.  I’m particularly bothered that there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent to PicaView, an application I use almost constantly, both as a quick-launching picture viewer, but also as a way of converting images between different formats.  The picture viewing may not be an issue – PicaView is only really necessary because Microsoft’s default picture viewer is so bad, and by reports even large programs launch much faster under Linux – but I use PicaView fairly frequently to convert files, and I think I’ll find it frustrating if I end up having to launch GIMP every time I want to  do something as simple as change a PNG to a JPG before uploading it to the net.  But this is a classic case of having nothing to lose when it comes to the move to Linux; PicaView has been discontinued, and doesn’t exist in a version for Win7, so I’d have to give it up anyway.

All in all, there’s quite a lot to get my teeth into here, and this will probably be an ongoing project, but I’d like to have started on the process – hardware and software – before the spring is out.

Learning

Obviously, there’s going to be quite a bit of learning involved in the shift to Linux, but I mean formal studying.  It’s been a couple of years now since I crashed spectacularly out of my Open University MA in English literature (though I realised the other day that with the modules I completed I am entitled to use the letters PG Dip – for postgraduate diploma – after my name), and I find I’m missing it.  The ship has sailed in terms of the MA – they’ve cancelled the course and re-launched it, and the modules I’ve studied no longer count towards it – and I’m not sure in any case that I would be any more capable now of the kind of sustained concentration necessary for writing a dissertation than I was then.  I think I probably am capable, though, of a more structured form of studying, and I’ve been looking round for potential areas of study.  Oddly enough, the one I keep coming back to is Maths.

This is odd because I am notoriously bad at maths.  It took me two attempts to scrape a C at GCSE, and I think I was perhaps the only kid to ever ask their teachers why one plus one equals two.  Everyone else seems to see this as instinctive truth, but I still don’t understand the mechanism by which a one and another one become fused together in a new entity called “two”.  (In fact I remain quietly convinced that the number two isn’t anything real in its own right, just a shorthand way of saying “a one and another one”).  Anyway, thanks to my habit of asking questions like this – and coming up with answers like “-15” when doing the sum 24 + 7 – I was in the remedial class for maths for a number of years at school.  I eventually got out of it, thanks to some very patient teaching, and I’m quite interested to see how far I can take it.  The person who taught me GCSE for the second time said she thought I was capable of getting an A-level, if I was prepared to work hard, and I’d like to know if that’s true.  Plus, as well, how ever basic the level I peak at, studying maths will represent a real intellectual challenge for me, and I think it’s a good idea to put oneself in the way of those every now and again.

I’ve had a brief look at the OU’s maths pages, and it looks as though they offer courses that start at a level that’s suitable for an ignoramus like me, with the possibility of progressing on to more complex modules in time.  I’m not going to put a timescale on this particular not-a-resolution, but the next start date for the course that seems most appropriate for me (Y182: Starting with Mathematics) is March, so I might try for then.  (Although I’m rather put off by the talk of telephone tutorials; I don’t really do phones…)

—

So, yes, those are my improbably grandiose plans for 2012.  Well, some of them.  In between visiting the opticians, overcoming in a single bound my crippling dental phobia, mastering an entirely new (to me) computer operating system and embarking on OU study in a subject to which I am spectacularly unsuited, I’m also planning to eradicate poverty, hunger and disease, row single-handedly across the Atlantic…

You see, this is why I don’t do resolutions.  Set down like that (as opposed to mouldering away quietly inside my head) these kinds of things – even the serious ones – do look overly ambitious.  And, worse, once they’re out there in the wild, other people know what they are, and can look at me meaningfully when I fail to achieve any of them.  But I also think I can get very comfortable in my familiar, unchallenging little round, and that’s not healthy for me.  So I’m hoping the fact that I’ve told the internet about these will give me an added incentive to actually do them.

Some of them, anyway.

The ones about the eyes and the teeth I really can’t duck.

Well, I say can’t but really I mean shouldn’t.

I definitely shouldn’t duck those.

So I won’t.

Probably…

I had a nice lie-in (though, to be fair, I didn’t get to bed until around the time that most kids were probably waking up).  I went for a stroll in a local park (which was actually pretty busy – apparently people don’t all have their Christmas dinner at lunchtime anymore).  Later on I’ll have my dinner – having it late, at a time that suits me – and try and find something to watch on the TV.  I’ll probably find time for some random wandering round the internet, too – I quite enjoy the sense of the net being like a real world town, empty and half-deserted for the day.  Well, the English-speaking web, anyway; obviously for the majority of the world’s population, not being Christian (or, alternatively, the kind of Christian that celebrates Christmas on a different date), today is just another Sunday.

I did encounter a small fly in the ointment preparing for today, which had to do with the non-availability of courgettes (or zucchini, if you speak a variety of English that refers to the vegetable by its Italian rather than French name).  I realise courgettes are deeply out of season, but they could still be flown in or grown under glass.  (Either thing would be horrible for the carbon footprint of my dinner, obviously, but it’s Christmas and, let’s face it, the carbon footprint of an out-of-season courgette is as nothing compared to the carbon footprint of a turkey.)  But it turns out the shelves had been cleared of everything but sprouts and parsnips for the last couple of weeks in every supermarket, and even my local greengrocers.  (Yes, I have a local greengrocers; my brutalist 1960s high-rise estate is on the edge of a middle-class enclave; within a half mile there are places without number where I could, if I wanted, drink a coffee-and-steamed-milk product in the company of twentysomethings whose idea of aspirational urban living was formed watching Friends.)

So, anyway, yes, the lack of courgettes has denied me of my opportunity to make what I was planning on having for my dinner – a rich tomato-based vegetable stew loosely derived from ratatouille.  (Sliced mushrooms and courgettes, an onion divided into eighths, crushed garlic, a chunkily-chopped carrot and some butter beans (the last two both parboiled) all whacked into a pot with tinned chopped tomatoes, a couple of vegetable stock cubes, loads of herbes-de-provence, some fenugreek, turmeric, cumin and tarragon and allowed to simmer gently for an hour or so.  You’d think the fenugreek, turmeric and cumin would make it like a curry, but all the flavours combine together to make a stew that doesn’t really taste of any one ingredient – not even tomato, oddly.)  I could have had a go at making it without courgette, but I couldn’t see an obvious replacement, and anyway Christmas day is not the best time for culinary experimentation, since the chip shops are all shut if it ends up truly disgusting – always a  distinct possibility when I cook something for the first time.  I was at least able to track down some purple sprouting broccoli, so I will still be able to have some vegetable-based excitement later.  (To people as childish as me, purple sprouting broccoli is exciting because it turns its cooking water purple.)

Well, I realise this hasn’t been the most riveting of posts – is there another day when I’d think I could get away with telling you what I didn’t eat for dinner? – but I hope it’s been no more dull than any of the other traditional Christmas messages.  Whether that’s the Queen’s little homespun homily – she managed to say things that will resonate with readers of both the Daily Mail and The Guardian, proving that if nothing else she is incredibly skilled at walking a rhetorical tightrope.  Or the well-meaning intellectualism of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s attempt to put the Occupy protests in the context of the Book of Common Prayer’s response to 17^th Century mercantile capitalism (which proves once and for all that you can take the clergyman out of the university theology department, but you can’t take the university theology department out of the clergyman).  Or even the Pope’s sermon, in which he urged us to ‘see through the superficial glitter of this season’; apparently he temporarily forgot that he was himself swathed from head to toe in the most outrageous bling – all of it worn because it was Christmas.

And that's without even mentioning the specially comissioned shoes lovingly hand-crafted in soft red leather...

Anyway, I hope you are having/ had a good day, and I’ll end by wishing you a merry Christmas.

Which I’ve just done.

So I’ll…er…go away now…

…yes…

Oh dear.

You can see how it happened (discounting the possible but improbable scenario of a glitch on the website).  Sceptical Scott/ Animal left a comment, then thought something had gone wrong, and it wasn’t showing up.  So s/he thought, “I’ll try posting it under my other user profile”, did a quick copy-paste and, hey presto.  What makes it kind of awkward is that, even though I don’t spend all that much time in the New Statesman’s blogs, I recognise both Sceptical Scott and Animal as being fairly prolific commenters.  It makes me wonder how many of the other contrarian trolls who live under the line at the NS aren’t real people either.

Oh, and one other thing.  Isn’t the expression step up to the plate (as in start batting in baseball), not ‘stand up to the plate’?  That creates a whole different set of mental images…

Right! I've had it up to here with you!

As a good case in point, take this story, which reports on a study into the public health benefits of legalising same-sex marriage:

The number of visits by gay men to health clinics dropped significantly after same-sex unions were allowed in the state Massachusetts.

This was regardless of whether the men were in a stable relationship […]

Researchers from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health surveyed the demand for medical and mental health care from 1,211 gay men registered with a particular health clinic in the 12 months prior to the change, and the 12 months afterwards.

They found a 13% drop in healthcare visits after the law was enacted.

There was a reduction in blood pressure problems, depression and “adjustment disorders”, which the authors claimed could be the result of reduced stress.

Lesbian women were not included in the study as there were insufficient numbers to give a statistically meaningful result.

The abstract of the article – accepted for publication by the American Journal of Public Health – is here.  The article itself is behind a paywall, so in the process of researching this post I’ve made use of the BBC website story, the abstract, and the press release hosted on the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health website.  As always, I should make it very clear that I’m not a scientist (my highest scientific qualification is a D at A level biology), and I have no kind of professional experience or expertise in this or any related field.  What follows are merely the thoughts of a layman – an interested, tolerably well-informed layman, hopefully, but a layman nonetheless.

I guess I should start by drawing attention to what seems, in my inexpert view, to be the biggest problem with this study – the way participants were selected.  The press release describes the approach the researchers took:

In the 12 months following the 2003 legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, gay and bisexual men had a significant decrease in medical care visits, mental healthcare visits, and mental healthcare costs, compared with the 12 months before the law change. […] For the study, researchers surveyed 1,211 patients from a large, community-based health clinic in Massachusetts that focuses on serving sexual minorities. Examining the clinic’s billing records in the wake of the approval of Massachusetts’ same-sex marriage law […]

If I have understood correctly, the researchers looked at the same group of 1,211 patients both before and after the law was changed.  There are really two related problems I see with this.

Firstly, wouldn’t we expect that – irrespective of external factors like law changes – a patient who had to attend the clinic frequently in the first 12-month period would need, on average, to attend less often in the second, as their health problems were either resolved or stabilised?  This is, after all, the purpose of all medical treatment: to improve the health of the patient.  Secondly, I’m concerned by the fact that new patients approaching the clinic for treatment in the second year were excluded from the study.  If patients who have already been receiving treatment at the clinic for at least a year are included but patients coming forward to seek treatment for the first time are excluded, wouldn’t we expect to see a reduction in the consultation rates anyway?  Not because of any change in the health of the overall population, but just because this particular research methodology would include those patients whose health you’d expect, on average, to improve over the second half of the period, but would exclude a proportion of those whose health worsened (i.e., those who needed treatment for the first time).  It seems to me that, even if the overall health of the gay male population in Massachusetts was worsening, a study designed this way wouldn’t necessarily have found evidence of it.

I understand that it was necessary for the researchers to compare like with like, and that simply looking at the total number of consultations in each period might have produced a distorted result if, for example, the clinic recruited new patients from, or lost existing patients to, other healthcare providers.  What I find harder to understand is why the researchers didn’t calculate a standard measure of consultation rates (number of consultations per hundred patients, perhaps) in both periods, and then compare them.  It strikes me that this would have given a far more accurate picture of the trend in consultations.  Given that the description above suggests the researchers harvested their data from the (presumably anonymised) billing records of the clinic rather than from individual medical files, such an approach would have seemed as practicable as the approach they took.

Let me move on by drawing attention to something else in the research that immediately struck me as sounding too good to be true: the finding that the same level of benefit was experienced by married and unmarried people.  Or, as Hatzenbuehler et al put it in their abstract:

These effects were not modified by partnership status, indicating that the health effect of same-sex marriage laws was the same for partnered and nonpartnered men.

Without access to the full paper I can’t know the extent to which the authors considered and rejected alternative explanations for their findings, and what reasons, if any, they gave for doing so, but on its own that bald assertion doesn’t strike me as especially convincing.  I’d be particularly interested to know how the authors established that the effects they observed were indeed the result of the change in marriage laws, rather than some other, coincidental, factor.  On the face of it, after all, the finding that the benefit was the same for partnered and non-partnered men would seem to undermine the assumption that this specific legal change was the influencing factor.*

In this regard, it’s a shame that the researchers don’t seem – so far as I can tell from the press release and abstract – to have taken steps that might have helped to confirm that the observed effects were indeed the result of the amendment to marriage laws.  They don’t appear, for example, to have conducted the same research at a similar clinic in another state where the law wasn’t changed to see if they could detect the same variation in consultation results there or, for that matter, to have compared fluctuations in consultation rates at the same clinic over a period not affected by the law change.  This last seems particularly unfortunate since their method for gathering data – examining billing records – would seem to have made researching an equivalent period before the law change relatively straightforward.

There are one or two other things that strike me about this research.  For example, I note that the researchers report a decrease in consultations for both physical and mental health problems, but when it comes to healthcare costs they only report a result for mental health consultations.  Without access to the paper I can’t know what explanation, if any, the researchers give for this apparent omission, but I’m concerned that it might be because they were unable to demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in healthcare costs for physiological health problems.  If this is the case (and, of course, it may not be) then this would be troubling, because a negative result here would serve to undermine part of the assertion made by the researchers in their abstract conclusion:

Policies that confer protections to same-sex couples may be effective in reducing health care use and costs among sexual minority men.**

I also note that the abstract results quote a Cohen’s d statistic of 0.17 for the medical care visits result.  I’ll be honest, reading this abstract was the first time I had ever encountered a Cohen’s d statistic, but it would seem to be a standard measure of effect size.  I’m not able to put this into proper context – I have no idea whether Cohen’s d=0.17 would be considered large or small by someone who knows what they’re talking about – but even I can see that it’s quite small relative to the same statistic for the other results in this study (0.35 for mental health care visits and 0.41 for mental health care costs).  I think (though I may well be wrong – please tell me in the comments if I am) this suggests that, compared to the changes in mental health consultations and costs, the reduction in the number of consultations for physical health problems was the least substantial change observed by the researchers.  It’s perhaps unfortunate, therefore, that both the press release and BBC story draw attention to the impact on physiological ill-health, when it seems that this study mainly points to positive effects in the area of mental health.

In the University of Columbia press release, Dr Hatzenbuehler is quoted as saying,

This research makes important contributions to a growing body of evidence on the social, economic and health benefits of marriage equality

I realise he and the university will have reasons for talking up the significance of his research, and I’m glad of anyone joining the campaign for marriage equality, but I’m really not sure it does.

I think the decision not to look at standardised consultation rates before and after the change in the law has curtailed the ability of the study to accurately reflect trends in health consultations among the wider gay male population in Massachusetts.  I think the decision to focus exclusively on a group of individuals who had received treatment in the year before legalisation runs the risk of distorting the results, since patients who have been receiving treatment could be expected to see an improvement in their health, even if the factor being studied by the researchers had made no difference at all.  And I think that, so far as I can tell from the materials I’ve had access to, the researchers have not, in fact, demonstrated that the variation in consultation rates was the result of the legalisation of same-sex marriage.  It may have been, but it may also have been the result of another factor, or the simple consequence of focussing the research on patients who had been receiving treatment for some time at the expense of new patients falling sick for the first time.  So far as I can tell, without a comparison with a control group of some description – people living in a state where same-sex marriage wasn’t legalised, perhaps, or patients at the same clinic in a time period not affected by the law change – it’s simply not possible to say.

—

*  – A spokesman for the Terrence Higgins Trust, speaking to the BBC, suggested a link between laws that treat gay men as second class citizens (such as a ban on same-sex marriage) and feelings of low self esteem, and this is a plausible mechanism by which a law change directly affecting only a subset of gay men might produce a positive effect amongst all of them.  My major reservation about this as an explanation of the data found in this research is that it doesn’t seem entirely plausible that a single legal measure could accomplish such a significant change in self-esteem.  In 2003, when the change occurred, gay men in Massachusetts remained subject to legal discrimination in a whole range of other areas.  It would seem odd if non-partnered men, who did not benefit directly from this change, experienced exactly the same boost in self-esteem as partnered men, even though many other discriminatory practices, which did directly affect their lives, remained in place.

** – I dislike the use of the term ‘sexual minority men’ in this context, since it’s unnecessarily imprecise.  Men who are turned on by, let’s say, the scent of women’s shoes are in a ‘sexual minority’, but it’s unlikely Dr Hatzenbuehler and his colleagues intended to include them in their discussion.  An established term – men who have sex with men, typically abbreviated to MSM – was available to describe the patients who attended the clinic without having to make reference to subjective sexual identities.

This was an obviously intelligent woman, a professional musician (possibly, I think, a violinist – my memory is a little hazy – but an orchestral player, anyway), and she was describing one of her favourite activities on facebook, which was playing a game.  The game involved pretending to run a virtual restaurant.  There was a nice irony, I thought, to the idea that people who want a career in a creative profession like music often end up working in catering, and here was a person with a successful creative career who was fantasising in her spare time about working in catering.  So far, so cute.

But what astonished me – caused me, in fact, to speak out loud to the TV, saying “Are you insane?” – was that this particular game includes timed penalties that kick in if you don’t log in to supervise your restaurant.  In other words, people who play this game are – voluntarily – submitting to the demands of a machine.  This is not a machine standing by, ready to play with you whenever you want; this is a machine punishing you – actually punishing you – for not playing with it when it thinks you should.  And there are people who think this is fun.  Perhaps you begin to understand my sudden urge to ask a rhetorical question of an inanimate object.  I mean, seriously: are these people insane?

I realise this isn’t a completely new phenomenon.  Tamagotchis were basically the same thing, and similarly difficult for me to understand.  So far as I could see, they provided all the hassle and inconvenience of owning a pet, but with none of the rewards.  (For evidence, I offer you one sentence from the Wikipedia article on Tamagotchis: ‘A “toilet” icon allows the player to clean up after the pet’.)  But this idea of timed penalties is even worse – at least Tamagotchis could be paused if you couldn’t be bothered with them – and just so alien to the way I think about technology.

I still think of myself as a technology enthusiast, but for me the point of any piece of technology is that it is, essentially, a tool – it exists to let me do what I want to do, when I want to do it.  I’ve experienced dark misgivings about the extent to which people seem to be ready to take on a subservient role to the machines they own for a while, but the realisation that there are significant numbers of people who are so ready to cede control to machines that they even think it’s fun to be punished by them may well turn out to be my Wonko the Sane moment:

“Ah yes,” he said, “that’s to do with the day I finally realised the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better.” […] “It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head […] was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

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Yes, you’re right, this is yet another post about something I saw on TV.  Sorry.  But it’s this awful, desperate, shitty, bleak time of year again: watching the telly and stringing together a few semi-coherent sentences about what I’ve seen is pretty much all I’m capable of.  I’m drowning again, just like I was drowning in December last year, and the year before, and–  so on.

Nothing to be done about it but haul myself through, by sheer force of will, to mid-January, when the tide will begin to turn and this endless grey ocean will start to ebb.  Just four weeks, and counting…