It really is a Small World

Back in the late 1960s, the American sociologists Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers conducted their well-known experiments of sending letters to a stockbroker in Boston---but via unknown intermediaries. They found that the letters took on average just over six hops to reach the stockbroker, a result that has achieved an almost iconic status. In 1990, John Guare wrote a play called Six Degrees of Separation, and a film followed. But is there any truth to the six degrees? After all, Milgram and Jeffrey sent out 296 letters, and only 64 reached the Boston stockbroker.

To test the proposition, Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz recently analysed 30 billion instant messages exchanged by 30 billion people using Microsoft Messenger in various countries. They found an average length of 6.6 hops, vindicating Milgram and Travers. Think what this means: every person reading this article is, on average, only half-a-dozen steps away from the Pope, or if you prefer, Madonna.
This close linkage holds some ideological challenges for those of us brought up to have an individualistic outlook, taught that effort and ability are enough for success. In fact, life isn’t like that, and network connections really do count. Some recent research by Lauren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy on the network connections of mutual fund managers provides a good example. Over the period 1990 to 2006, they matched the educational backgrounds of fund managers with board members and senior officials at publicly traded companies. They were looking at the timing of stock buying and selling, and profits. The results were surprising at many levels, but particularly when a manager was at the same school at the same time and studying the same subject as a senior official. Having such a connection allowed the fund manager to make more than double profit on the stocks with the connection, compared to the unconnected. The authors conclude that ‘connected holdings outperform non-connected holdings in a statistically and economically significant way....’. What adds some human interest is that the timing of fund managers for bad news didn’t equal their exemplary timing when the news was good. The implication is that the old classmates at the corporation enjoyed passing on exciting tips, but kept quiet when there was trouble afoot.

In the mutual fund manager case, the links were probably one-to-one. What if the links are more tenuous, as for example between someone reading this article and Madonna? Actually, the more tenuous the link the better, at least when it comes to getting information, perhaps about a possible job. In 1973, in what is perhaps the best-known research in sociology, Mark Granovetter showed that ‘weak’ ties work best. The rationale is that people with whom you have strong links will have pretty much the same knowledge base as yourself, but people to whom you are only weakly linked will have quite different, and more useful, areas of access. Professor Granovetter, now at Stanford University, is continuing his network research on the phenomenon of Silicon Valley.

Describing ties as ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ implies that they can be quantified, and some recent research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, on the spread of obesity in the United States, uses this fact. They show that an individual’s probability of becoming obese increases dramatically the closer his or her relationship with someone who is already obese. When the tie is strong, or the number of degrees of separation is few, for example between good friends, a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57 per cent if she or he had a friend who became obese in a given interval. For siblings, the probability reduces slightly, to 40%. The most interesting finding is that even three degrees of separation increased the probability. The results are statistically very robust, and based on impeccable data. It is not clear why network effects should carry over such long social distances, especially as geographical distance did not affect the results. Social norms no doubt play a role, as perhaps does physiological imitation through the ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain’s frontal lobes. As the two researchers note, ‘even infectious causes of obesity are conceivable’.

Sources
Travers, Jeffrey and Stanley Milgram, 1969 “An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem” Sociometry, Vol 32, No 4, pp 425-443.
Microsoft Report
published in the journal Physics in March 2008, and also as a Microsoft Technical Report in June 2007.
Mutual Fund Managers
Cohen, Frazzini and Malloy paper: published as a National Bureau of Economic Research paper
Weak Ties and Jobs
Mark Granovetter: “The Strength of Weak Ties” American Journal of Sociology,
Obesity
Christakis, Nicholas A, and James H Fowler, 2007 “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years”. New England Journal of Medicine 357: July 26, 2007

How big's your social network?

Recently, there have been three ideas entirely new to me that have affected me profoundly. By profoundly I mean that until I happened to read the scholarly papers containing the ideas, I had no conception that such ideas even existed. It was such a shock that I had to stop reading and allow myself a little recovery time before reading on. And each time it happened I thought of John Keats, writing about his first experience of reading Chapman’s Homer:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken


The most recent ‘planet’ was a 2003 paper by RA Hill and RIM Dunbar published in the journal Human Nature. They discuss the relative volume of the neocortex of the brain compared to the rest of the brain. Yes, I know that doesn’t sound very promising, but wait! All primates, such as humans, have a neocortex, the brain’s most recent addition. The neocortex is responsible for cognitive skills, such as identifying and recognising friends and foes. Now, what Hill and Dunbar did was to measure the share of the volume of the total brain taken up by the neocortex, primate species by primate species. They then looked at the size of the social group maintained by members of each species. The remarkable thing is that there is a direct, linear relationship between neocortex share and size of social group. Less neocortex means fewer friends, or at least people to socialise with.

The linear relationship predicts that the average human would have a social group size of about 150 people. This sounds like a lot of people to me, but then I’m a bit odd and not many people want to be friends with me. Anyway, the researchers then surveyed people in the UK, finding out the size of their social group through their Christmas-card lists. The result: the average Christmas-card list contained 154 names. Isn’t the fact that the predictions matched reality so closely fascinating? Now, one might want to run this particular survey again, and in other cultures perhaps, using something other than a Christmas-card list, perhaps e-mail recipients. That would be interesting in itself.

The irony of Grameen

There’s a delicious irony in the report in the Financial Times of 17 February that the Grameen Bank will soon start lending operations in the United States. The Grameen Bank is based in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries. How could it be that a Bangladeshi bank has made inroads into the world’s richest country?

The story is interesting on several levels. First, Grameen is a micro-finance operation, started by the unassuming Muhammed Yunus, who in 2006 won the Nobel Prize for his work. The fact that a micro-finance bank can pick up business in the United States speaks more than a volume for the disparities in wealth in the home of capitalism. Second, the concept of micro-finance has come under attack recently, but mostly from people who cannot grasp the non-traditional motivations of the bank. In fact, there is nothing really new about the way micro-finance operates. What is new is that the concept is reappearing at a time when most people thought that the ‘traditional’ sources of credit were all that existed. Third, and for me the most interesting, is the link between micro-finance and ‘social capital’, the topic du jour for economists.

Micro-credit banks operate by advancing very small sums of money to people who either cannot obtain credit from banks, or, if credit is available, at usurious levels. Grameen itself started in 1976 when Mr Yunus loaned $27 to 42 women in Bangladesh. The women used the money to start new enterprises, and earned enough to repay the loans. Everyone benefited, not least Bangladesh.

One of the two interesting elements in micro-credit is the loan guarantee system, and this is what makes micro-credit so interesting from a sociological point of view. New borrowers have (usually) to be introduced by other existing borrowers. If a borrower defaults, the others share the bank’s loss. Naturally this makes everyone ultra-careful, and there is a great deal of social pressure on the borrower to make sure repayments are on time. In a very real sense, the bank has outsourced credit control to the community, but passed on the savings to its customers. The credit control is even better since Grameen stopped lending to men. Yunus found that men often squandered their loans on luxuries or drugs, and that women were the real agents of change in rural Bangladesh.

The other element is the ‘social business’ purpose for micro-credit, exemplified by Grameen. In essence, the bank depicts the emerging paradigm of profit replaced by sustainability. Grameen, and other micro-finance operations, were designed with a specific social purpose in mind, that is lending to borrowers marginalised by mainstream credit operations. The bottom line for micro-credit is therefore more than just profit, although that is necessary just to maintain and expand operations. The bottom line is now “people, profits and planet”.

Criticism of Grameen’s way of doing business is usually the basis of a misunderstanding of the role of micro-credit. The role is not charity, and lending money to the marginalised is not ‘the kindness of strangers’. The role is similar to the idea of giving someone a plough instead of a sack of wheat, and the whole point of the bank’s credit enforcement structure is that the other borrowers are not strangers.

For me, the most interesting part of the Grameen success story is the timing. Grameen is growing at a time when globalisation seems unstoppable, even if it might just possibly be a good thing to somehow ‘stop’ it. It’s entirely possible that Grameen could only grow as a result of the social gaps left by what Schumpeter called ‘the creative chaos’ of modern capitalism. Micro-credit might therefore be a workable indicator reflecting the social capital of a society. How much ‘glue’ there is, sticking the society together, is revealed by how ready the members of the society, or community, are to lend money to each other through micro-credit. Because micro-credit depends on knowing how far you can trust your neighbour, and as an extension, your willingness to bail out your neighbour if times are hard, micro-credit can only exist when social capital is strong. Grameen’s entry into the United States is fascinating not so much for the fact that such a wealthy country needs a small Bangladeshi bank, but from the apparent existence of high social capital groups that can and need to borrow small sums. Grameen’s new American borrowers are groups of immigrant women in New York’s borough of Queen’s. I wish them the very best of luck.

Hardy's Tree of Life

My brother Henry recently sent me (and my two sisters) a link to some information about Thomas Hardy. In his early years, Hardy worked as a trainee architect in London, and part of his job involved the movement of a graveyard. The bodies had to be carefully exhumed and moved to make way for a railway station. Even in their new location, the bodies were not left in peace. The photograph shows a tree forcing its way upwards through the headstones and brushing them aside.

Hardy would have appreciated the image because of its depiction of blind impersonal forces at work, entirely unknowing and careless. One has only to read Tess to see how Hardy viewed mankind's relationship with the rest of the natural world. As humans, we dance around on the surface of a tiny, unimportant planet, entirely at the mercy of forces we don't even know about. It's enough to make you open that bottle of Chateau Palmer before it's too late.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer influenced Hardy, as well as Proust and other writers of Hardy's era, but their names remain far better known than that of Schopenhauer. It's true that the only photograph we have of the man shows a rather grim figure (he had all his teeth removed) and his philosophy can be depressing if you're not prepared to take risks. A major theme with Schopenhauer is that it would have been better not to have been born in the first place but, being here, we should make the best of it. At first reading this is not terribly uplifting, and it's a long way from religious ecstasy or incense sticks and humming. But Schopenhauer does ring true, particularly for older readers such as myself. In some ways, Schopenhauer was an early existentialist, and it is not surprising that his work was largely ignored until the horrors of the Second World War became known. The existential movement---Sartre, Camus and the rest---could (and should) trace its intellectual underpinning back to Schopenhauer.

In his book The Confessions of a Philosopher, Bryan Magee has described how he had never heard of Schopenhauer until he chanced on The World as Will and Idea in a second-hand bookshop. Magee recounts that he was so strongly taken by its originality that he spent several years studying Schopenhauer, producing his masterly The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in 1983. In his book, Magee notes the references to Schopenhauer in the work of creative writers such as Hardy (p408), and the depiction of scenes which reflect the philosopher's ideas. For example, 'the plight of being alive' is a recurrent theme with Hardy. Schopenhauer strongly believed in our 'propensity to give unconscious expression to our true feelings', and so Hardy describes Angel sleep-walking and revealing his true feelings for Tess while doing so.

This is not to say that Hardy just copied down Schopenhauer's ideas. Instead, I think that Hardy had some intuitive ideas of his own, but lacked the formal structure. When he read Schopenhauer, he found a framework that he agreed with, and so he clothed it with his imagination. The combination results in fiction that resonates with readers of no religious faith, and which must surely challenge others to think through their faith.

I don't like to end with such a downer. I remember as a teenager being totally captivated --- and for life --- watching Julie Christie in the film version of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. Now, would life be such a 'plight' if one could snuggle up with JC and the afore-mentioned Chateau Palmer?

Possibility of a picnic?

Vancouver is no means the chilliest part of Canada, but freezing nights are normal in the winter. About now, the nights are getting slightly less freezing and snowdrops are beginning their daring early-spring show. This report from the natural world is confirmed for me by my garage-door opener. As in practically every other household in the land, my garage door rolls up and down thanks to an electric motor and an arthritic system of tracks and chains. In winter, the grease on the tracks becomes a little sticky and the underpowered motor can't quite do the job. It fights valiantly of course, and then collapses into an asthmatic humming. I have to push to help the door on its upward journey. About now, the weather is warm enough for the motor to perform its task unaided. So, perhaps spring is here?

If that is the case, the opportunity to save a little money and give Marcel yet more childhood memories is at hand. I'm talking of course about the chance to have picnics. And not the messy habit of eating in the car, but a full-blown picnic, done with style. For me, there's nothing quite like it. The planning, the preparation, the wicker baskets, the anticipation…and the weather.

My childhood memories are littered with picnics, most of which didn't quite turn out as planned, despite the valiant efforts of my parents. It's hard to keep four boisterous kids under control on a horse-blanket in the corner of some damp field. The ones we had on beaches were more successful, although even for those the chief memory is of gritty tea. There's a poem, Trebetherick, by John Betjeman which exactly captures the post-war picnic:

Sand in the sandwiches
Wasps in the tea
Sun in our bathing dresses heavy with the wet
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea
Fleas around the tamarisk
An early cigarette.

There's something about the relaxed atmosphere of a picnic---the lounging about, the open air---that leads, at least in my mind, to the hope of romance.

In my late teens I took the then girl of my life out for a picnic, on a field near a river. A perfect bucolic setting. A bottle of wine cooling in the water, shade under a fine chestnut tree, carefully chosen food. All was going well until we heard heavy breathing behind us. It seemed like every cow in Bedfordshire had gathered for the show, and they seemed unhappy with the performance. I shouted and waved my hands, danced around, but they were not impressed, and edged even closer. Fortunately we had brought, in the best English tradition, a big black umbrella. Opening and closing an umbrella seemed to be the only thing that repelled them. We pushed everything into the basket and fled. But I forgot the wine, left cooling among the rushes at the water's edge. When I went back two days later it had gone.

I like to think of the person who found that bottle, and his or her theory of how it might have got there. I also think about the girl who was with me, and whether she ever casts her mind back to a picnic which came a little too close to nature. I hope that the bottle-finder enjoyed the wine, and the girl still laughs at the ridiculous sight of a young man fighting off cows with an umbrella.

Does risk of death cause happiness?

Two university professors have just completed a truly huge survey of two million people from various countries. The question: how does happiness change through your life? The result is a graph shaped a bit like a bath-tub. The youngest are very happy, but as the toddlers start to age, they become less happy. The nadir for women is about 40 years of age, and about 50 for men. The graph moves optimistically upwards after that, at least until the grim reaper unsportingly interrupts the survey process. Naturally, any individual’s own experience might well differ markedly from this, but the fact remains that on average these perceptions of happiness are what most people experience.

When I read the paper, I thought about some work I’d done in survival analysis. SA is a statistical technique often used in medical statistics to work out probability of infection or recovery, given what’s known about a particular patient. The probabilities are based on a large number of previously recorded cases so that a comparison can be made. Drawing a graph for the probability (or risk) of death shows, yes, a bath-tub effect. The neo-natals are at higher risk of death than toddlers, and so on. The graph slopes downwards, but then goes upwards again as we age. And of course there is the inevitable snipping of the thin-spun life. The end of the line.

Putting the two bath-tub graphs side by side I was interested in the similarity of their shape. Is there anything to the similarity? I don’t have the data used in the happiness survey, but maybe I’ll ask for a copy of it. It would be interesting to match an individual’s perception of his or her happiness at any point in time with the risk of death that that individual was facing.

Less formally, I’d like to advance some ideas for why the two graphs look the same. For a start, kids should be happy, being pretty much ignorant of any of the nastier things in life. Life for them is literally boundless, and every day brings exciting new knowledge. Some of the excitement might have worn off a bit by the early thirties, ground down by the sheer dailiness of life, the struggle to keep things going. At the same time, those in their thirties still think they’ll live for ever, and risk of death is, it’s true, low in relative terms. Perhaps their confidence in the continuation of life means taking life for granted, and so there isn’t the desire to experience the moment. It’s hard to be all transcendental when the mortgage payments are late.

So far, so obvious. But why does the happiness curve start going upwards along with risk of death? Being someone who is beginning to feel a chill wind on my shoulder, I am particularly interested in this point. Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self has some answers. His book is primarily about creative people and their need to be alone to do their best work, but he does some interesting remarks about happiness and aging. He points out that emotional dependence begins to decline with age, and as one ages inter-personal relationships don’t matter as much. Emotional dependence is replaced by an interest in one’s own internal concerns. Storr suggests that this is why grandparents and grandchildren often get on better than parents and children: they expect less of each other.

Getting older also seems to allow the individual to swim along with life, rather than trying to fight against the flow. There is a well-known letter from a former patient to CJ Jung which captures this very well:

‘So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought.’

The two university professors offer their suggestions for the upward slope. Their surmises are purely conjectures of course, because they lack the data to be able to test them. They suppose that by mid-life, individuals have come to hold a more realistic view of what they can and cannot do. This conjecture matches the patient who wrote to Jung. Their other conjectures are that more cheerful people live longer, so that the boring old misery-guts types have died out by their fifties’ leaving only us cheery old ‘uns to carry on. Unfortunately this is not empirically true, although one would certainly wish it was, at least for the aged whiner who bores me on the bus every day. Their third conjecture is more philosophical: they write “I have seen school-friends die and come to value my blessings during my remaining years”.

Naturally I am delighted by the thought that my life might get even happier, but I can’t help feeling that just being grateful to be alive misses something. Surely there is more than that? How about being more willing to take risks because you know you’re going to snuff it soon anyway? I’m planning on getting back to pipe-smoking and drinking absinthe. Catch me if you can!

Another madeleine?

One of my little famiy's little treats is to have lunch in Pastis Restaurant. It's good practice for a five year-old, and Marcel does well. As soon as he enters the restaurant he seems to sober up, in marked contrast to many of the clientele. Last week we noticed that on the dessert menu madeleines were available, and of course we immediately ordered the entire freshly-baked stock. Marcel got his name from his mother's partiality to the films of M. Pagnol, and his father's interest in M. Proust. So the lad was immediately bored rigid with tales from his dad about Proust's eating of madeleines, how they evoked childhood memories and the like.

The Pastis madeleines were really good, but a bit on the small side. I decided to try and bake some myself. I strode arrogantly into the local cookware shop, fully expecting them not to have any madeleine moulds, and to be able to mutter disparagingly under my breath about the lack thereof. I was somewhat abashed to find that they had a selection. I found a recipe (there are plenty) and got going. The second lot was better than the first, probably because I put in a few drops more of the orange flower water. Everyone kept tasting them, and got so full that there was no possibility of supper. Calories per serving? Don't even think about that question.

Now that the household was somnolent after gorging on madeleines, I thought some more about Proust. With his usual elegance he described a madeleine as a 'little shell of a cake, so generously sensual beneath the piety of its stern pleating'. But what about the memory part? Naively, I thought that probably not many people would have bothered their heads with this question. A quick Google showed how wrong I was. There is a veritable cottage industry of people either trying to reproduce the exact madeleine that Proust ate (had to be dry and crumbly) or spouting off about the relationship between Proust's consumption of a madeleine and his memory of his Auntie Leonie. My madeleines were so remarkably good that there was little point in bothering to reproduce Proust's. So I fixed on the second question.

The whole point of Proust is, to me at any rate, the separation between chronological time and experienced time. The only time that really matters is experienced time. In his book about Proust, Alain de Botton has it right when he chides tourists for rushing through France to Combray. It is 'idolatrous', he says, because we are not experiencing the places in between origin and destination. And, anyway, Combray is a very ordinary little town, notable only for its tenuous connection with Proust.

In later life, Proust famously ate a few bits of his madeleine (probably dunked into his tea---lime-blossom--- but the record is unclear) and was suddenly transported back to his Auntie Leonie's Sunday morning bedside in Combray, and experiences of his childhood are evoked. The scene is described by Jeannette Lowen like this:

Unusual experiences led Proust to "the truth of involuntary memory," the basis for his life's work. The famous incident of the petit madeleine revealed to him a past lying dormant within him, ready to be called back to consciousness. He was able to retrieve "a feeling of inexplicable happiness" when his mother offered him the little plump cake. He was illuminated by a childhood memory (of Combray), where his Aunt Leonie on Sunday mornings used to give him a madeleine, dipping it first in her own cup of tea. It "all sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea!"

In short, the memory of a madeleine eaten as young lad had lain dormant in his subsconscious for decades, only to be suddenly evoked by another madeleine eaten in maturity. This very morning, my Marcel's first words were, "Can we have some more madeleines like last night?" Perhaps a subconscious memory is being laid down, and when he is older he will bite into another madeleine and a memory of his father will be evoked. I hope it's a warm one of a father who cares about his culinary culture.

Memories are made of this

Examples of folly--- struggling on when any rational hope of success has gone---are, to borrow a splendid word from the Bible, legion. Barbara Tuchman wrote a book about them, called The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam. Her book was written in 1984, towards the end of a brilliant life. The March of Folly has all Tuchman's trademark clarity, attention-retaining personal details, and her characteristic sweeping overview, but it has something missing. When I first read it nearly twenty years ago, it felt flabby, especially in comparison the astringency of her other books, such as The Zimmerman Telegram. Thinking about it now, I realize that she needed less history and more psychological insight into why people, and not just world leaders, act as they do when confronted with their own personal Trojan Horse.

So, why do people persist in follies, when the mistake is as plain as a pikestaff to everyone except them? In a new book, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, two psychologists explain that it's basically down to cognitive dissonance (surely one of the most enduring theories in a discipline not noted retaining theories for very long). We form an image of ourselves and believe that image to be 'true', in the sense that there is no dissonance between our actions and the self-image who performed those actions. Confessing a mistake is difficult because it means that our self-image has cracked, perhaps why America treated its Vietnam veterans so badly: they are living reminders of a mistake.

If we grant that we subconsciously exclude the possibility of a mistake from our current thinking about ourselves, can we extend the concept back in time? Humans are notoriously selective about which memories are kept and which are thrown out, or hidden, and this is perhaps why. We retain memories which reinforce our self-image as a caring and thoughtful mother, or whatever structure on which we have built our idea of ourselves. Memories which create dissonance are suppressed. The desire to retain certain memories is manifest in the desire to retain certain objects which have the power to trigger the warming flow of a pleasant memory. I was thinking about this when my sister Mary reminded me about a family photograph I'd forgotten about. Just the thought of the photograph was enough to allow me to relive a delightful day.

In a new book, Memory: An Anthology, Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt present the study of memory from two vantages: literature and science. I found the discussion of public memory fascinating, especially Sudhir Hazareesingh's exploration of French public memory. How could a nation which tore itself apart over the Dreyfus affair have allowed the camp at Drancy and the deportation to death of so many of its citizens? These memories, dissonant with the French self-image of themselves as world-leaders in enlightenment and civilisation, have only recently allowed back into the national history.

Space in the brain is limited, and we can't remember everything, so we toss out memories which are unlikely to be needed in the future. This has an evolutionary origin, not hard to see. Why remember places where you failed to catch your dinner? Instead, remember the place and the circumstances under which you did catch your dinner, and the people you ate it with. Perhaps this is why many of our warmest memories are those in which food is shared. The pleasant memories link us back through the generations to those early hunters and their pleasure in knowing that they had succeeded in feeding their family.

The Edwardians

The longer we live in Canada, the more I appreciate the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which runs, at least on radio, some really interesting programmes. I don’t know about the TV because I can never get to watch it, what with younger members of the family claiming precedence. Last Sunday, the science show, Quarks, featured a discussion about information and how it flows. Teleportation came up, and one scientist mentioned that there had been a successful teleportation of a beryllium atom. Can a person be next? Quite possibly.

If we can be teleported across a spatial dimension, could we also be moved across time? If so, would you like to travel backwards or forwards, or remain firmly rooted in the present? I guess it depends on being sure that you could come back to the present. Perhaps before your Mum knew you’d been off somewhere without telling her. If she only knew!

I’d like to go back to the era of the Edwardians, that gilded time, in Britain at least, between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the First World War in 1914. I suppose a reaction to the severe propriety of the Victorian times, ruled over by the ‘widow of Windsor’, was only to be expected---but, boy, did they go for it! Led by the new King, Edward, who had been waiting for the throne for sixty years, there was a sort of louche vulgarity which I find appealing in its honesty. Those people just had a good time without worrying about what other people thought. It reminds me a bit of Hong Kong: sometimes flashy and tasteless (to some people at least) but with no inhibitions at all. There is something fresh and vital about the approach to life. Go for it!

There’s an excellent book by Roy Hattersley (The Edwardians) which is full of amusing details about this short era. For example, the ‘Thunderer’, or the London Times, discussed the well-known moral failings of the new king, saying that he had been ‘importuned by temptation in its most seductive forms’ and had no doubt prayed ‘Lead us not into temptation with a feeling akin to hopelessness’.

This must have been an intoxicatingly confident time to be alive, with still the Benthamite thought in the air that a better world was possible. No world wars, still the belief in the essential goodness of man. And then came the Kaiser, and the lights really did go out all over Europe, as Sir Edward Grey had so presciently predicted. And then came Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and their ‘willing executioners’. It’s hardly surprising that Existentialism started life in the Europe immediately after the Second World War, and hasn’t spread much beyond that continent. In comparison, much of North America seems stuck in time, still believing in Providence, with what appears as an almost child-like naiveté. Good books on this: Tony Judt’s Postwar; AC Grayling’s Being Good; and Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. Tuchman in particular writes with a clarity and such deft touches that history really does seem to come alive. I think she must have almost abandoned herself to living in the times she describes so well. In her introduction, she mentions her regret at having to discard so much good material. She feels the figures from the age ‘crowding around me now as I write’. Me too.

A raccoon on my front lawn

The other evening, I looked out of my bedroom window and there was a raccoon on the front lawn. Bold as brass, he was. I called the rest of the family who said he looked very cute. But if the animal on the front lawn had been a biggish rat, would the family reaction have been so taken with our visitor?

A while ago, an Italian told me that friends who come and stay in your house are like fish. Welcome at first, but after three days rather smelly and should be got rid of. Perhaps it’s the same for the animals who live with us in cities. Harry Eyres from the Financial Times makes the same point but in reverse, discussing why sparrows might have left London. He puts out seeds and tries to encourage birds into his garden. He’s only recently moved in, and he says that the birds make him feel right at home. He goes on to describe the significant loss of bird species that the planet is experiencing, and that loss is down to human activities.

On the same theme, the CBC recently carried an interesting radio programme about how we, as humans, relate to the other animals we live with. I say ‘live with’ but perhaps I should say ‘we have come to live among’ because it is we have moved into their habitat. That raccoon on my lawn might have been justified in thinking ‘who is that visitor peeping at me?’ Incidentally, the presenter mentioned that the raccoon had been most successful at taking advantage of human occupation. They come out mostly at night, so they don’t attract too much attention. And their fur is marked with bands of white, making them somehow seem cleaner—especially when compared to a rat.

The programme also dwelt at some length on the changing fortune of the pigeon. I had thought that somehow the dove and the pigeon were different species, but I was put right. The dove of the Bible is a messenger of peace, and still carries that message. We talk of ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’. Until fairly recently, it was considered quite acceptable to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and somewhere there is a photo of my brother aged about three doing just that. He had put his head down on the ground to say hello to the pigeons, eye to eye. Now the pigeons are considered vermin, are scared off with birds of prey, and feeding them is an anti-social act. Their role as carriers of messages during the First World War is an interesting story. There is a story, which I haven’t checked, that a pigeon won an award for bravery in that war.

A sad day for John-Paul

One can’t help feeling that a little (or perhaps a lot) of the image of the French has been lost today---fumeurs are now forbidden to light up at will in cafes. Some ingenious methods have been suggested to get round this tiresome new law. A cafe-owner in Lyon, Liberation reports, will himself pay the fines of his smoking clients, financed by the sale of used ashtrays over the Internet. The ashtray becomes a work of art, but one wonders just how many people will buy such ‘art’, with a reserve price of 200 euros.

I smoked my first pipe on my sixteenth birthday, having been enthralled since about the age of ten by a series of George Simenon’s detective novels Maigret on the television. My father used to watch Maigret with regularity on the hand-me-down black and white set we had, and sometimes we kids could sit in on the show. In the introductory part of each episode, you see Maigret walking down a little cobble-stoned alley in foggy darkness, pause, light a match using the sole of shoe, get his pipe going, then walk on. It was extraordinarily romantic. I don’t smoke with any regularity at all now, but I still have some pipes in a drawer. I can’t remember whether this early Maigret was dubbed or made by a British company. Certainly it wasn’t in French.

There is a newer version (in French), starring Bruno Kremer. The pipes are still smoked but the match-striking has gone. You can still watch some of the series on MySpace. Incidentally, at the end of the war, Simenon was worried about being labelled a collaborator because three of his books had been made into films by a German company. Nothing happened, of course.

From experience, I can say that drawing on a well-lit pipe does seem to promote a reflective state of mind, but that might be that there is little else you can do with a piece of briar stuck in your mouth. But the question remains: if we lose the ability to smoke in cafes, do we lose some of the insights that might go along with the smoke? Think of John-Paul Sartre, puffing away at the same table year after year, thinking and writing the most original of thoughts. What if we could carry on smoking?

There are two main objections to smoking: the habit causes respiratory diseases, and some people don’t like the smell. Now, try this thought experiment: let’s say that the combination of genes that allow lung cancer to develop can be identified and ‘turned off’, meaning that I could smoke with impunity. Would I go back to my pipes? Would anyone have any reason to stop me?