I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it’s just clickbait, a way to get dumb people to visit Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website and part with crazy amounts of money for utter rubbish (shades of Reggie Perrin’s Grot shop). On the other hand, it’s perhaps representative of the strange times in which we live, times in which people feel they can say, do or be anything, but become incandescent with rage if someone else says, does, or is something they don’t like. Times in which there are increasingly no rules and boundaries, and simultaneously dozens of new ones every day.
Just out of interest, would the reaction be the same if Jeremy Clarkson brought out a car air freshener called, I don’t know, something like This Smells Like My ……
Two new blogs I’m fast becoming a fan of. The first is The Red Hand Files by the Australian singer/composer/actor Nick Cave. The second, Brainpickings by the American reader and writer Maria Popova. Well worth a few minutes of your time. The headline above refers to a recent post by Nick Cave.
I’m not sure this is a trend as such, but the concept is certainly interesting. On top of the Copenhill power plant in Copenhagen the architect has placed a dry ski-slope. Why? Why not? The architect uses the term “hedonistic sustainability”.
I’ve started buying old watches, notably old diver’s watches from the 1960s and 1970s.
They are generally cheap as chips, unless you pick a big brand. The one in the picture is a fairly obscure Sicura from the 1960s (probably). It’s rather worn, which is why I like it.
It cost me £110, so if it gets lost I wouldn’t lose sleep over it, although the more I wear it the more attached to it I become. If only I knew it’s history. Who wore it and where?
One of the best bits about the watch is it isn’t that great
at telling the time. This one gains about 40-minutes a day, unless I wear it to
bed, in which case the loss drops to 10-minutes depending upon how much I toss
and turn in bed (it’s self-winding). The point is I always know roughly what
time it is, and if it’s absolutely essential that I do something bang on time I
can always look at the clock on my phone.
Anyway, I think there is something loosely liberating about
not knowing the exact time.
What’s this got to do with the future? Nothing, except that if pushed I suppose one might start to ponder the nature of time and the relationship of past, present and future. And when is ‘future’ exactly? I was speaking with a friend and sci-fi writer Lavie Tidhar a while back and his working definition of ‘future’ was when things got weird. But that’s now surely? My own ‘future’ tends to be 10-15 years out, but personally I’m more focussed on the present these days. Anyway, the future was always a bit of an excuse to get people to engage more with the present.
As for clock watching, I think the purpose of clocks generally is to be prepared for future events. That’s possibly the worst load of mumbo jumbo I’ve ever muttered in a blog post.
I should perhaps point out that this isn’t photoshop, it’s an actual fire globe in Austria. Can’t help but think that Sydney fireworks missed a trick. Perhaps they should have asked everyone around the harbour to simply turn they phone flash lights on instead and given the cost of the fireworks to the rural fire service.
I don’t remember where I heard this (I may even have read it in a book I’m reading called The Geography of Genius), but someone recently said that the golden age of den (camp) building was between the wars. I disagree, I think it was post WW2 and, in particular, in the 1960s before urban development went into overdrive. My own personal experience was camp building in the late 60s and early 70s when many of the bomb sites from WW2 were still vacant land. The big houses had generally been cleared, but the land had not, which meant I had acres of wild space on my doorstep. Probably trespassing, but nobody seemed to care back then. We dig huge holes, made bows and arrows , built fires and constructed camps.
So, my question is this. If the 50s, 60s , 70s or whatever were indeed the peak of den building (and generally of kids, especially boys, running wild outside), did this have a lasting effect on the imaginations of these generations? More to the point, given that kids generally play indoors nowadays, what is happening to their imaginations today? I’ve seen a study saying that creativity among kids started to decline roughly when video gaming and cable TV started to become popular and another study saying that the distance kids roam around their home has shrink considerably over the last few decades, especially since the dawn of the internet and social media, so maybe so? Or maybe kids just build things and roam around in VR rather than RL these days?
BTW, if you Google golden age of den, or camp, building you get zip, which means there could be something to be written about this. But not by me.
Historically, the sight of rising smoke generally meant human activity or presence. To some extent it symbolised life. Nowadays it generally means the opposite. Smoking is deemed bad for us. It is bad for the environment too. Puffs from cigarettes have more or less been outlawed, replaced with clouds of electronically generated vapour. A microwave oven probably produces more pleasure than these dreadful devices, which seem to have more in common with mobile telephones and their chargers than old-fashioned cigarettes.
What of cigars? Cigars are somewhat different. They are still an outlaw activity, but they have escaped the opprobrium of the pleasure censors, possibly because they are generally consumed behind closed doors. It is also a minority pursuit, so hardly worth the attention. But why smoke a cigar? More to the point, why do I?
I cannot explain why I started to become a cigar enthusiast, but I can perhaps explain why I haven’t stopped. In a nutshell, I see things more clearly through a haze of sensuous, swirling, cigar smoke. I think it’s the breathing more than anything else. You have to really think about how and when you breathe. If you have ever tried meditation the parallels are not insignificant. You are fully present in the moment. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that smoking cigars is healthy, but they do help me to relax. I’ve never been a cigarette smoker, but it seems that cigarettes operate in the opposite direction. The expression ‘a quick cigarette’ is no accident. A quick cigar, in contrast, is practically impossible.
It’s the smell too. I actually think cigars smell best before you light them. Annoyingly, they smell ever better when someone else is smoking one. Twin a cigar with a good malt whisky, or glass of cognac, and the pairing is almost incomparable. Somehow the smoke combines with the glass to create useful distortions of reality.
Cigars are also pleasing to look at and to hold in the hand too. And a hand-rolled cigar is human-made and always slightly different, which could perhaps be viewed as a revolutionary act of defiance against the cult of efficiency and homogenised societies that too often confuse fast movement with enduring progress.
The packaging of cigars is generally from a bygone era, as are many of the shops that sell them. This too is an example of how cigars, and the paraphernalia that surrounds them, is a welcome pause, or deceleration, from a world that is not only rapidly accelerating towards I have no idea what, but obsessed with immediate gratification, newness and novelty.
Another reason for smoking, or continuing to do so, is the complexity that surrounds the cigar. Like wine, there is a lot to learn about cigars and a lot of cigars to choose from. It is a complex and ritualistic world. To begin with this can be intimidating. (All I came out with from the very first cigar shop I visited, Davidoff in London, was a box of long matches). But the cigar world is full of people keen to share not only their knowledge, but their enthusiasm too. This is perhaps another parallel with the wine world. Eventually I settled upon a handful of favourite cigars, the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No.2, the H. Upman Magnum 46, the Romeo Y Julieta Short Churchill and the Bolivar No.2, but I continue to experiment.
There is also one further aspect, which, frankly, is not popular to discuss. This is the fact that cigar smoking is an almost entirely male activity. I have nothing against woman smoking cigars, in fact I rather like it, or perhaps I mean them. No, what I mean is that many of the rituals, meeting places and activities that were once wholly male have been invaded by women. Again, I have nothing against women, and nothing against places were both sexes might mingle happily, but just as women may need their own spaces so might men.
I will end by returning to my opening remark about thinking. How can it be possible for a cigar to make someone’s thinking clearer? The answer, in my experience, is that a cigar un-divides one’s attention. You start by cutting the cigar, carefully, and proceed to light it with expectant focus. The mind is already becoming unhurried. You take a puff (two puffs if the cigar is somewhat reluctant to fire up) and you see where the cigar takes you. You savour the flavour. You watch the smoke curl slowly upwards. Daily distractions momentarily disappear in the extended space between puffs. There is some solid science behind this, behind what appears to be nothing more than clouds of silent smoke.
When we are relaxed, when we are unhurried or seemingly wasting our time with empty moments, the mind starts to wander. As the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton once said: “The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.”
Given the right time and the right space the mind starts to seek patterns and connections in what we might ordinarily see as random inputs and experiences. You don’t always finish a cigar with an “ah ha” moment, but the very act of slowing down and sitting silently can do much of the groundwork to make insights and original thoughts rise to the surface. And, if none of this happens, you have at least had a relaxing moment to simply be.
I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it’s just clickbait, a way to get dumb people to visit Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website and part with crazy amounts of money for utter rubbish (shades of Reggie Perrin’s Grot shop). On the other hand, it’s perhaps representative of the strange times in which we live, times in which people feel they can say, do or be anything, but become incandescent with rage if someone else says, does, or is something they don’t like. Times in which there are increasingly no rules and boundaries, and simultaneously dozens of new ones every day.
