Coffee

So today I made the Lebanese coffee the right way, and managed to find a small cup to drink it out of. Delicious.

It makes a nice change to have a cup, rather than a bucket of coffee. Which reminds me how much it annoys me when you can’t just get a human-sized coffee from places like Starbucks and service stations.

M&S café at St George’s hospital in Tooting is the one that annoys me the most. There is no option to get a cup that is either in size or weight suitable  for an old or infirm person to drink out of. Every time I’ve taken my mum there, I’ve had to ask them to pour some out because she can’t lift it or hold it safely. They don’t get it, and still fill them 7/8 full. I have to go outside and pour half of it down the drain, but that still doesn’t change the fact that if you have to carry hot liquid half a mile round a hospital, you don’t want a wobbly cardboard bucket that you can hardly get your hands round.

When did this happen, and why? In what other country in the world is a standard cup of coffee bigger than any mug you have at home?

I just love hating multi-tasking.  Self-styled multi-taskers are the most irritating, self-deluding, smug and dangerous people I know. Fortunately, they are doomed to distinction in evolutionary terms – their brains will never spend long on enough attending to one thing to develop into anything beyond neural spacedust, and they will walk into moving traffic as they change songs on their iPods. Unfortunately, a number of the rest of us will be killed by drivers who are reaching for a sandwich, putting on lipstick, arguing on their mobile or distracted by their overpumped in-car entertainment system.  And I predict that most of those killers will be women, since it is women who are falsely credited with being able to multi-task. Let’s hope they stop believing it.

Up til now, my anti multi-tasking rants have focused on a bit of research here, and a hunch there. But I was delighted to see the main points immortalized in print in John Medina’s book Brain Rules. I’d heartily recommend the book, it’s one of the best reads I’ve had in a long time, but for the low-down on the multi-tasking see the section on Attention at www.brainrules.net.

Pass on the good news
If you want to make the world a better place, share the news with others.  Here’s an example. On my way to Malta a few weeks ago, I was waiting in the queue for the checkouts at Boots at Gatwick Airport. There were two people on the tills, one a rather dour looking girl, the other a friendly looking guy. Please God, I thought, let me get the nice bloke. The dour girl was treating the customer in front of her like she was trying to bring back library books that were ten years overdue, issuing thin-lipped information about what the customer could and couldn’t do as she stared into the till and fiddled with change.

I was just on the point of wanting to slap her, when she looked up at the customer and suddenly the impression changed – she wasn’t a fembot after all.  Meanwhile, I was lucky enough to get the nice bloke, who was even nicer than  the impression I’d had. His colleague was bantering with him as I went towards the till, so he smiled at me and said ‘We’re always having these arguments about multi-tasking, because she says men can’t multitask’.

‘Nobody can’, I replied,’Not even women’. Its’ a myth. There are people who think a better word for it would be ‘continuous partial attention’.

‘Continuous partial attention’, he repeated, clearly engaged ‘I must remember that. You learn something new everyday.’

And as I left, I realised why his colleague had come over so dour and ghastly – she was trying to multi-task: talk to a customer while she was counting change. And because she was counting change, she talked to the customer without eye contact, as if the customer was a coin that needed putting in the til, not a human being. As soon as she stopped multi-tasking and focused on the customer, she was normal again.

My nice bloke, by contrast, focused on the customer (me), maintained eye contact, and had a real conversation. He could do this, because he didn’t try to do something else at the same time. For service like that, I’d come back to Boots, so customer-service trainers, take note.

See also (via wikipedia) Christine Rosen (2008) The Myth of Multitasking from The New Atlantis.

Middle class thuggery in print, an advert for Clarkson's latest drivel

I guess it’s only cyclists that understand just how idiotic and dangerous most drivers are. The reason I’m not dead yet after years of cycling in London is only because I assume that everyone in a car is applying make-up, looking the other way when they turn into a main road, texting, phoning, getting something off the back seat, drunk or drugged, racing to get their kids to school, or racing to get to work after the school run. That’s just the normal ones.

But then there’s a class of driver who actually hate cyclists. They don’t think they deserve to have space on the road. Rather like the person who  said travelling by bus was a sign of failure, cyclist-haters are usually those who are inexplicably proud of owning an expensive car, as if that changed anything about them as a person. They beep at you, overtake you with no room to spare, and act like bullies. They endanger you for no other reason than they don’t think you should be there in the first place.

Cyclist haters are largely made, cultivated by the media. You can almost tell when some drive-time radio talkshow host is having a go at cyclists, because you seem to meet more unforgiving, reckless and aggressive drivers on your way to work. I wish I had complained about the presenter I heard inciting hatred of cyclists. If cyclists were an ethnic group, he would have been jailed.

On that occasion, I didn’t do anything about it. But this advert for Clarkson’s latest book infuriates me. There is absolutely nothing funny about developing a dislike of any group of people, particularly when this dislike might lead them to be treated even more recklessly than they are now. I am going to complain to Penguin about this advert, and if you’re a cyclist, I urge you to do the same.  It’s only because Clarkson is middle class that he gets away with it – listen to what he says as if he had an Estuary accent, and he’s just another thug.

Update: I’ve just complained to Penguin, Boris Johnson & the Advertising Standards Authority about it. I mentioned to Boris that it’s a bit odd that TfL should be advertising a dislike of cyclists below the ground, while the mayor is trying to develop cycle routes above it.

• Clarkson’s views on cyclists and how drivers should treat them
• The People vs. Jeremy Clarkson, from the Independent in 2005.

Have you ever been to Slovenia? I have, four or five times. It’s a beautiful country. Ljubjlana is one of the quaintest, cleanest cities I know. My impression of Slovenians is of a self-assured, intelligent, well-educated, design-conscious nation, benefiting from a strong economy, an almost perfect location in Central Europe (beautiful, temperate, convenient), and a rich, honourable history.  Even when it was part of  Yugoslavia, it was the richest and most lightly-attached of all the republics, so much like Austria that you couldn’t really tell the difference, apart from the language.  It gained independence in 1991, and is one of the strongest economies of the new EU member states (of all of those, it has the highest GDP per capita, and 91% of the EU average, according to the wikipedia entry on Slovenia’s economy).

So what on earth did the Mail mean by its headline news today “England, the sick woman of Europe: Our poor cancer detection and bad diet mean Slovenian women live longer“? I’m not even going to go into the bad or rather meaningless science,  what really troubles me is that papers like the Mail still rely on its readers’ ignorance and arrogance to stoke up pointless disgust and disregard for nations just because they are not within commuting distance of Sevenoaks, or don’t have nuclear weapons. I really wonder if the Mail have any idea what or where Slovenia is? Mark Wallace certainly doesn’t:

Mark Wallace, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said last night: ‘It is shocking that England is falling behind other European countries – and even more that we are falling behind a country like Slovenia. We spend a vast amount on healthcare but we don’t get the results that we should.

What does he mean, ‘a country like Slovenia’, given that there is every reason why Slovenians should enjoy a long and healthy life.  On what grounds should we always be ahead of Slovenia? The picture of Slovenians, all (unusually, by the way) in national costume  is compared to a fat (presumably English) woman eating KFC-like chicken from a box on a roadside bench. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to make of this: that the fat woman and her love of chicken is letting the side down, giving those Commie folk-dancers a head start? If it weren’t for her chicken-problem, she’d be running the country and writing books about  Slavoj Žižek?

And if we were to suddenly beat Slovenia into 13th place, by ensuring their women died 2 months earlier than ours, would that be a cause for celebration? Do they deserve to die because they used to have a socialist government, or because they have funny accents over their letters? I’d like to suggest that the Mail reporters and Mr Wallace pay a trip to Slovenia to see how much further we have yet to go before we look even half as civilized. But it’s the absence of such pricks in that lovely country that makes it so pleasant to be in. So on second thoughts, just stay here, please.

I was in Prêt à manger the other day, and the counter assistant (as she had been bidden by management, no doubt) started asking me with fake enthusiasm what I was doing in the area etc.

‘Oh research,’ she beamed, ‘how interesting! What subject? Ah! Education, how interesting. Just education generally, or some special subject in education?

‘Music education’, I replied. She might have replied ‘Oh cool’, and carried on. But instead, her face fell, and suddenly, her training and happy smile deserted her.

‘Eurgh’, she said, ‘I always hated music at school. I always think of music teachers as being, like, forty, and living alone with a cat.’

‘Really?’ I said, ‘that doesn’t fit any of my fellow students. Most of them look pretty cool, actually’

‘Yes, but if you think back to what your teachers were like when you were young.’

When I was young. She made it sound as if it must be so far back I could hardly remember. I was on the point of saying ‘Oh, yes, actually now you mention it’, but then remembered that wasn’t true. There were a few teachers who were mad or depressed or best left alone, but mostly my teachers were a pretty impressive lot. If we’d used the word then, I would even have said some of them were cool.

When I thought of that, this spinster-phobic waitress suddenly seemed very uncool. It was definitely not a good look, to be uncooled by your own coolness.

Ah well, that’s customer service for you.