New trends – the heart thrills

WEAVERS FROM GHANA

Milan, 21 April 2024

It’s the Salone del Mobile this week in Milan, the annual furniture and furnishings fair that the city hosts. As proud citizens of Milan (well, adopted citizen in my case) my wife and I take part in the fair – but only marginally, because there’s a huge amount of events all over town, and outside of town as we shall see, and hordes of people visiting each event. In fact, this year we have only visited one exhibition, which is taking place in Varedo, a small town on the outskirts of Milan. Varedo is best known for a huge factory it once hosted which made artificial textile fibres until it folded in 1999. It was part of the SNIA Viscosa group, which itself went belly-up in 2010 after a long agony. All that is left of the Varedo factory are mouldering industrial buildings: a sad reminder of the deindustrialisation of Europe.

The exhibition was taking place at the other end of the town, in the villa Bagatti Valsecchi, which 100 years ago had been the country house of one of the elite families of Milan, the Bagatti Valsecchi.

It didn’t look too bad from the outside, but that statue gives a premonition of what the inside looked like: it too was a mouldering mess, although at least the floors were still in place.

I haven’t managed to find out what happened exactly to the villa, but I assume it’s the same as what happened to many country houses in the UK: it simply became too expensive for the Bagatti Valsecchi family to maintain it. They “generously” donated the house and property to the municipal government, but I suspect this was a poisoned gift. The municipality certainly has done very little if anything to maintain it.

Of course, it’s edgily chic, is it not, to showcase new, shiny, cutting-edge design in mouldering rooms. Here’s the thing, though. The furniture and furnishings my wife and I were confronted with as we wandered from room to room might have been newly minted, straight from the designers’ workshops, but to my mind the design ideas behind them were as mouldering as the rooms they sat in. Nothing new, just the same old ideas we’ve been seeing for 30 years or more recycled, endlessly recycled.

The one fresh design we came across was down in the basement, in a dark, dank room. Which was OK, since the product in question was lighting. Here is what we found ourselves in front of.

Some words of explanation are required here. The design group behind this is Spanish, going by the name Fernando Diaz de Mendoza 9, or FDdM9 for short. This particular design idea came about through the merging of the need to find ways to cleverly recycle PET bottles, on the one hand, and the desire to support traditional weaving skills still in existence in various parts of the world, on the other. The result was a project which the group calls PET Lamps.

The project started by making lampshades for single ceiling lights. The clever thing was that they were using PET bottles as the lampshades’ basic infrastructure: a component that is now free pretty much everywhere in the world since we are drowning in waste PET bottles. The mouth and shoulders of the PET bottles play the role of the fitting at the top of a traditional lampshade. Through it runs the wire and light bulb socket. What’s more interesting is what happens to the rest of the bottle. It is sliced into thin strips, and then the strips are used as the initial warp for weaving the weft across. What type of weft gets used depends on the weavers with whom the group is working.

The group started by working with weavers from the Eperara-Siapidara indigenous community in Colombia, who use the stripped down leaves of the Paja Tetara palm tree dyed with natural pigments and adopted traditional motifs.

They also worked with a community which weaved with wicker, a plant imported by the Spaniards.

They worked, too, with other communities in Colombia and Chile, but I’ll jump to Ethiopia, where FDdM9 collaborated with weavers of traditional coiled baskets from the city of Harar, to make lampshades like this.

Here’s an example of a cluster of these lamps being used in a restaurant.

I’ll skip the lampshade designs which the group collaborated on with weavers in Japan and Thailand; readers who are interested can go to the Pet Lamp website. I’ll go on to the designs they created with the Gurunsi people who live in the far north of Ghana. Together with them, they came up with a modern take on their basket weaving designs to create “wavy” lampshades. Here are the weavers at work (the weft in this case is elephant grass, by the way).

And here is an example of the final product.

While here we have a cluster of these lamps being used over a table.

Before going on with Ghana, I want to jump to Australia, where to my mind things started to get really interesting. There, FDdM9 started collaborating with weavers in Arnhem Land, in the far north of the country (I mentioned other Australian weavers in a previous post). The weavers started by making individual lampshades with designs based on their traditional mats.

But then one of the weavers began linking two lampshades together, which led the weavers to link all their lampshades together, in a way that reflected their kinship relations.

It gave this as a final product.

This is what it looks like when it is put up.

Which brings me back to Ghana. Several years after their initial collaboration with the Gurunsi people, FDdM9 went back to create large-scale “lamp tapestries” (I can’t think what else to call them) similar to those they had helped to create in Australia. Whereas the design of the tapestries in Australia were based on kinship relationships between the weavers, the designs in Ghana were based on aerial views of the houses where the weavers lived (which is actually also a representation of kinship relations if you think about it, since children built their houses next to their parents’).

Here we have the weavers at work.

And here we have a final product.

I suppose FDdM9 would expect these lamp-tapestries to be used like this.

But that’s not the way my wife and I would like to use them. We would prefer to eliminate the lamps and use the tapestry as a wall hanging, as we saw in that damp, dank cellar in Villa Bagatti Valsecchi. And we have just the wall where we could put it! Of course, the price might be an issue: one of these lamp tapestries would set us back a cool €17,800. But you have to suffer for great art! (still, though, €17,800 …)

BEAT-UP OLD PICKUP TRUCKS

Milan, 13 April 2024

The area of LA where my daughter and her partner live can be characterised as one of neat lawns in front of the houses and well tended cars parked on the streets. This photo from Google street view sums up the general feel of the area.

So one of the odder things which my wife and I spot as we take walks around the neighbourhood are the occasional rusty old bangers parked among the gleaming new cars. These photos, taken on a neighbourhood walkabout with our grandson a few days before we left LA, show what I mean.

Some internet surfing has told me that the first car is a Buick Wildcat. The second I know well. It is a Jaguar E-Type which I remember admiring on the streets of London in my youth.

As I say, this habit of having cars which would look perfectly at home in a junkyard sitting on neat, clean, well tended streets appears odd to me. That being said, oddity is in the eye of the beholder, to slightly distort an old saw.

One of the oddest examples of this sub-genre of urban decor is old pickup trucks. So that my readers can understand what I’m talking about, here is a photo I took of one such pickup truck parked some ten houses down the street from my daughter’s place. I have taken it from both directions so that readers can admire its well-worn features.

As sharp-eyed readers can see, this pickup is a Ford. Our daughter’s next-door-neighbour has instead a General Motor’s Chevrolet pickup truck.

Normally, he also parks it on the street, but he must have been away when I took this photo, because it’s parked in his driveway.

It doesn’t finish there. On a neighbourhood walk my wife and I took the last time we were in LA on the nearby hill of Mar Vista (View of the Sea, and indeed you can see the ocean from the top of the hill), I spied another such pickup truck parked on the street. I didn’t take a photo of it, so readers will just have to take my word for it. That’s three old pickup trucks in a radius of a couple of kilometres or so.

I’m no expert on pickup trucks, but Google searches suggest to me that these are all from the 1940s or ’50s. Here are photos of particularly fine examples, the first from 1940, the second from 1950.

What on earth is going on here? Allow me to try out some hypotheses on you, dear readers.

Given the obviously poor shape these pickup trucks (and the other old bangers) are in, my first thought was that their owners were indulging in a subtle piece of Keeping Up with the Joneses retro-snobbery: “The neighbours all have the latest in swanky Teslas and what not parked in front of the house? Peuh, we have a beaten-up old pickup truck. Beat that!” Just for the hell of it, I throw in a cartoon or two on the phenomenon of Keeping Up with the Joneses.

But I’ve decided that I am probably being unfair to the good folk who live in the neighbourhood.

I then thought that the owners of the pickup trucks in particular were making a political statement about the days when certain segments of American society were “eating bitterness”, as the Chinese say. Certainly, when I see these trucks, all beaten up, worn and weary, they make me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

The family in the story, the Joads, had to abandon their farm in the Midwest which had become part of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. They rode out West to California in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan, to try to find work and a new life.

“The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places – this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”

This is what that pickup truck looked like in the film made in 1940 of the book, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.

And then I immediately think of that famous photo taken by Dorothea Lange of a mother and her children in a camp for migrant agricultural workers in California, where the Joads ended up.

But I suspect this is too high-falutin’ an explanation.

My internet readings in the little world of old car collectors suggests a simpler explanation. It seems that one important strand of car collection is made up of people who, once they reach a certain age and high enough income bracket, buy old cars and trucks to relive comforting memories of their youth (adding a little bit of political spice, when America was Great or something like that). In the case of pickup trucks, it could be youthful memories of Grandpa, and maybe even of Grandma, working on the farm with the family pickup, that spurs urban boomers of LA to buy these rusty old pickup trucks and have them quietly sit in front of their house on the street. The memories could be like this photo of a farmer in Texas unloading feed for his cattle, using what looks like a pickup truck from the 1940s or ’50s.

Or maybe the memory is something like this.

So that’s where my thinking currently stands on this intriguing LA phenomenon. If my readers have any better explanations, I would love to hear them. Of course, the next time we are in LA, I could just go up to the neighbour and ask him – but that’s so un-English …

OH NO, IT’S HALLOWEEN AGAIN!

Kyoto, 31 October 2018

Halloween is upon us once again! Time to don the costumes of ghosts, goblins, zombies, skeletons, witches, and other assorted weirdos which we’ve been storing in our wardrobes since last year, and roam the streets drinking booze and checking out each other’s costumes!

Time to light the candles in those pumpkins which we’ve been patiently carving into hideous faces (or we just bought ready-made in plastic at the local store) and plonk them down in front of our door!

A dim and distorted reflection indeed of the beliefs of our ancestors that this was the night when for a short while the thin membrane separating the world of the living from the world of the dead became permeable, allowing the spirits of the dead to roam the land.

A time not to be out and about, risking to be set upon by evil spirits. A time to stay safe at home with your family.

Our ancestors also thought that, born as they were at that moment when real world and spirit world temporarily connected, Halloween babies had the ability in later life to commune with the spirits. When, 32 years ago, I wrote to our friends telling them that our son had been born in the early hours of 31st October, I jovially added that I looked forward to him having a successful career as a medium. Somewhat like Whoopi Goldberg in the film Ghost, although she initially was frightened stiff by her gift.

As of this writing, our son has shown no such gift although he has done well enough in other ways.

I am no believer in spirits – I am, as I have said in other posts, a child of the Scientific Revolution and the rationalism that came with it – but I do find it sad that what was for our ancestors an important and holy feast day has degenerated into a twee happening fueled by companies egging us on to consume.

Even the Japanese are getting into the act! Here in Kyoto we are constantly coming across the same Halloween-related consumeristic crap that we see now from Seattle to Budapest and beyond.

Halloween, it seems, is following in the steps of Christmas and going global: any excuse is good to get us out of the house and do some shopping.

Better by far that we just stay at home and enjoy each other’s company over a glass of wine. That’s certainly what my wife and I intend to do.

___________________________

Halloween party: https://sf.funcheap.com/marin-singles-halloween-costume-party-san-rafael/
Jack-o-lanterns: http://www.maniacpumpkincarvers.com/jackolanterns/
Medieval living and dead: http://www.medievalists.net/2013/10/the-medieval-walking-dead/
Whoopi Goldberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsI5bREF20Y
Halloween shopping: http://www.halloween-online.com/articles/halloween-articles-budgeting.html
Holiday shopping: https://me.me/i/fox-10-holiday-countdown-days-until-halloween-400-days-until-2900508

NETTLES

Vienna, 25 September 2018

On the walks which my wife I have been enjoying this summer in the Wiener Wald, Vienna’s woods, we have from time to time come across nettles along the side of the path. Here’s a picture of one large patch which we came across recently.

Whenever I see nettles, I instinctively move to one side and slow to a deliberate pace to make sure that I don’t get stung by the little bastards. I suppose that those of us who live in parts of the world where stinging nettles flourish – and that’s pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa – have learned the necessary defensive tactics to adopt in order to avoid being stung, probably learned the hard way after ill-fated encounters with the plant when we were young and innocent of the evil ways of the world. To be fair to the nettle, I should note in passing that not all nettles sting; there is one species, the fen nettle, which is stingless. I read that it is a European species. I suppose I have never been to those parts of Europe where it grows, which is a great pity.

The stinging sensation comes from the plant lathering biochemical irritants on your skin, such as histamine, serotonin, and choline, and from its tiny sharp hairs piercing your skin – look at those nasty little buggers, glitteringly evil and just waiting to slice into you!

The result is, of course, those horribly itchy, hot, blotches on your skin.

Poor kid, I feel so much for him! I say this because I have a particularly painful memory from when I was a Boy Scout; I must have been 11 or 12. We had gone off on our annual week’s camp, and two groups of us found ourselves one afternoon at the bottom of a hill thickly covered with bushes, long grass, brambles – and large swathes of nettles. We made a bet as to who could arrive at the top first. For some reason, I found myself at the head of our group and so had the task of hacking a path through the wilderness. At some point, taken by a sort of frenzy, I charged ahead with minimal covering of my exposed limbs. We arrived first at the top, but by then my arms were covered with nettle welts. At first, the congratulations of my group members made up for the pain, but after a while the pain dominated my thinking. I stiffened my trembling upper lip, though, and carried on. I was a Boy Scout, after all. But the memory of the pain has lingered on all these years.

Well, I was a boy then and my behaviour can be put down to juvenility. But in preparing this post I have learned that there are actually adults who run through nettles! There is a race in the UK, called the Tough Guy Nettle Warrior contest, where the contestants not only run through nettle patches but also through fire, and through wires delivering electric shocks. They also do more mundane things like race up and down steep hillsides, run in and out of muddy ditches, clamber up 15ft rope nets, and worm their way under barbed wire perilously close to their face. Here we have them running through the nettles.

Well, all I can say is, there is one born every day.

The nettle doesn’t even have a nice flower or yummy fruit to offset its nasty stinging habits. The bramble, for instance, which is also a mean son-of-a-bitch to fall into or to traverse, has both. Does the nettle have any redeeming features? Well, it seems it does have one or two, none of which, I have to say, I have experienced personally. So I can only pass on what I’ve read.

You can eat nettles. If you’re a masochist, you can eat them by entering the World Nettle Eating Championships, another competition held annually in the UK. Competitors are served 2-foot long stalks of stinging nettles from which they pluck and eat the leaves. After an hour the bare stalks are measured and the winner is the competitor with the greatest accumulated length of stripped nettle stalks. Here we see the competitors at work.

The men’s champion in 2017 munched his way through 70 feet of nettles …

It takes all sorts to make the world, they say.

If, like me, you are not into self-harm, you can cook the nettles first; that takes their sting away. I’ve often heard of nettle soup, although not only have I never tried it but I’ve never met anyone who has. Here is a Swedish recipe for this soup (nässelsoppa in Swedish, in case readers visiting the country want to ask for it). For some reason, I sense that the Swedes make a “purer” version of it than others; I mean, isn’t Noma, the Michelin-starred restaurant where you are served pickings from field and forest, just across the waters, in Copenhagen? (and they serve nettles in various forms, according to one blogger who ate there)

Pick the nettle leaves – WITH GLOVES! Pick the top four or six leaves on each spear, they are the most tender.
Clean the leaves well of any grass and beasties which you might have unintentionally picked up as well.
Blanch the nettle leaves, and then strain them from the liquid. Don’t throw away the liquid!
Make a roux with butter and flour. Pour the water in which the nettles were blanched onto the roux.
Chop the blanched nettle leaves very finely, along with the other ingredients, which typically include chives (or ramson or garlic), and chervil or fennel. Or you purée them, although this must be a modern alternative, born with the advent of mechanical blenders.
Put the chopped (or puréed) nettles and herbs into the nettle water-roux mixture. Bring to a boil and then leave to simmer for a few minutes.
Serve, with a sliced boiled egg and/or a dollop of fresh cream.

The result should look something like this.

Njut av! (which, if Google Translate got it right, is the Swedish for “Enjoy!” – although if Bergman’s films are anything to go by, the Swedes don’t enjoy much of anything)

I read that nettle leaves can also be consumed as a spinach-like vegetable, puréed, or added to things like frittate or vegetable and herb tarts (the latter being a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe; not a word about nettles in Jamie Oliver’s recipes). It is also an ingredient in herbal teas. And of course – but here we are drifting into Medieval beliefs (literally) – nettles have been used as traditional medicine to treat a wide spectrum of disorders: disorders of the kidneys and urinary tract, gastrointestinal tract, locomotor system, skin, cardiovascular system, hemorrhage, influenza, and gout. Take your pick. Or if you have rheumatism you can have someone flog you with nettles. In preparing this post, I came across a report by someone in the UK who had himself flogged with nettles for his bad back.

Whatever takes your fancy … (my country is full of some really strange people – no wonder it voted for Brexit).

You can also make a linen-like textile with nettles; the plant’s fibres have very similar properties to flax and hemp (and I need hardly mention that the processing of nettles into textiles eliminates their stinging properties). In fact, in Europe, our ancestors were making nettle textiles at least 2,800 years ago. A piece of textile from a Bronze Age burial in Denmark, a photo of which I insert here, has been identified as made of nettles.

The clever scientists involved in the research have gone one step further and figured out that these particular nettles came from Steiermark, which in today’s political geography is in southern Austria, just down the road from where I am sitting writing this. They argue, with some justification it seems to me, that if this textile made its way from southern Austria to Denmark it must mean that nettle textiles were considered a luxury item in the Bronze Age. Quite why this is so is not clear to me, however. Nettles grow in Denmark too, so what was so extraordinary about nettle textiles made in southern Austria? I guess we will never know.

After the advent of cotton, nettles fell out of favour, along with flax and hemp. There were moments, when wars made access to cotton difficult, when the use of nettle textiles was revived. It seems that one such moment was in France during the Napoleonic wars, when the UK’s maritime blockade meant that France’s access to cotton was restricted. So perhaps La Vieille Garde, Napoleon’s elite troops, about which we heard so much during our visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, wore uniforms made from nettles?

The Germans too, it seems, made use of nettle textiles in their soldiers’ uniforms during World War I, again because the UK’s blockade cut off the country’s supplies of cotton.

Nowadays, it’s niche designers who are making clothes from nettles, promoting their greenness and sustainability. Here are a couple photos of such clothes which I found during a random surf of the web.

There seems to be a whiff of the alternative lifestyle here. We appear to still be a long way from mainstream clothes being made of nettles. But the EU, I read, is deadly serious about trying to promote a greater use of nettles, as well as of flax and hemp, as an alternative to cotton, both as a stab at greater sustainability and as a way of getting farmers to grow more non-agricultural crops, thus reducing Europe’s over-production of food while still maintaining farmers’ incomes. Perhaps fields of nettles like this will soon become common.

As an environmentalist, I of course would welcome this move towards more local production – but I would agitate for a law making signs like this a legal requirement, upon pain of the farmer being flogged with his produce if he fails to put them up.

28/9/2108: POSTSCRIPTUM

After I had posted this, an old friend of mine quickly reminded me that nettles also play a very important role in supporting butterflies, or rather the caterpillars which will become butterflies; these critters will happily feed on the leaves. Suitably chastened, I did a quick search and found a page on the Woodland Trust site which explained this important nettle-butterfly nexus. To make amends, I add here pictures of those butterflies most commonly associated with nettles.

The small tortoiseshell:

The peacock:

The red admiral:

The comma:

The painted lady:

The Woodland Trust exhorts gardeners to keep that patch of nettles which they have in their gardens, to help the butterflies. Hmm, I wonder if the fen nettle would support these butterflies? If yes, I’m all in favour of it. We would have a win-win situation here: supporting our beleaguered butterfly populations but not risking getting stung in our own gardens.
_______________________

Nettles on our walks: my pic
Nettle hairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtica_dioica
Nettle rash: http://blog.shopprice.co.nz/10-health-benefits-of-stinging-nettle/
Running though nettles: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2021411/Tough-Guy-Nettle-Warrior-4-000-endure-cross-country-hell-Britains-bizarre-races.html
Nettle eating championship: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/world-nettle-eating-championships-held-8246974
Nettle soup: http://www.swedishfood.com/swedish-food-recipes-starters/92-nettle-soup
Flogging with nettles: https://wildfoxwildfire.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/how-i-fixed-my-bad-back-using-stinging-nettles/
Bronze Age textile from Denmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3460533/
Member of the Vieille Garde: http://www.wikiwand.com/hr/Grenadir
German soldier WWI: https://www.quora.com/Why-were-Germans-called-Jerry-in-WWI
Nettle wrap: https://www.etsy.com/listing/590489032/grounding-nettle-wrap?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=nettle%20clothing&ref=sr_gallery-1-7
Nettle man’s vest: https://www.etsy.com/listing/280624084/mens-vest-handwoven-nettle-fabric?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=nettle%20clothing&ref=sr_gallery-1-13
Field of nettles: https://herbaloo.org/experimence/the-nettles-experiment/
Stinging nettle sign: https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/nettle-dandelion-greens-mint-soup-recipe-nettle-tea/
Butterflies: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2016/05/butterflies-need-nettles/

SCOOTING

Vienna, 4 June 2017

Many – many – years ago, when I was but a lad of six or seven, I was the proud owner of a scooter, one of those good old-fashioned scooters which you kick along with your foot. It looked very much like this, although my memory tells me it was blue rather than red.

Honesty impels me to clarify that it was not bought for me. Like many things in our large family where I was towards the tail end, it was a hand-me-down from one of my elder siblings. But I cared not! On this machine I was king of the pavements, sailing along at what seemed to be vertiginous speeds after a series of brisk kicks.

In my memory, the scooter’s use is entangled with a “girl next door”, a girl a few years older than me with whom I would whirl around the local pavements. Her name is gone, her face is a blur, but I think it’s true to say that I had a crush on her. I also had a crash with her, on my scooter. The details are now fuzzy, but I think we were playing a game of follow-me, wherein I was following her every twist and turn. All was going swimmingly well until she suddenly put on the brakes. I ran into her, somehow flipped over the handlebars and landed on my nose. Argh, the pain! the blood! The upshot, as I learned a few days later, when my mother finally took me to see a doctor, was that I had broken my nose.

As readers can imagine, this incident left me with somewhat conflicted feelings about scooters. I suppose I must have continued to use mine for a while, although it disappears from my memory at this point, along with the girl-next-door. Bicycles take over.

In fact, over the years that followed it seems to me that scooters generally lost their popularity with children. I don’t remember seeing many around when I was in my teen and early adult years, my children never emitted the desire to have a scooter, and none of their friends had one. And it certainly was never an adult thing.

So it was with some surprise that I registered, when we came back last September from our seven years in the East, an efflorescence of scooters on the pavements of Vienna. And being kicked along not only by children but also by adults: young adults like this one, who one could argue may not yet have completely grown up

but also by older adults like myself, who in an earlier period I would have said should stop making a fool of themselves in this way.

Now that we have come back up to Vienna for the summer and the weather is getting good, I am struck by the same phenomenon: scooters whizzing by carrying adults.

Clearly, something is up! Surfing the web, I get the impression that the trend towards adults getting on scooters has to do with beating traffic jams to get to work and doing some healthy exercise while you’re at it (although the growing use of electric scooters rather undermines this last part).

Before I’m accused of sexism, I quickly throw in a picture of a businesswoman with a scooter, although this picture is obviously posed.

It helps a lot that scooters are easily foldable

so that there are no parking problems and one can walk into one’s office (or cubicle, if that’s the company’s culture) casually carrying the scooter under one’s arm.

As usual, once something catches on the designers move in and start offering cool designs. From this, which seems to be the fairly standard design although in quite cool colours

we have this, an electric version

or this big-wheel design

(which rather reminds me of penny-farthing bicycles of yore).

Big wheels makes me think of fat wheels

while here we have a Y-shaped design, which is moved by a scissor-motion of the legs.

This is an interesting one, a luggage scooter.

In airports, you can drop down the platform and back wheel attached to the suitcase and whizz along to your gate. This last one is unutterably cool although I’m not quite sure how you are meant to ride it.

There are many more designs out there but I’ll leave it at that.

I think my wife and I need to get into this new trend, so that we too can zip by normal pedestrians, our hair fluttering in the wind. I casually asked her a few days ago if she had had a scooter as a child, to which she said no. This is going to make it tricky to persuade her to try since I feel that a residual nostalgia (and acquired expertise) from childhood would make it easier to accept looking a trifle silly on scooters at our venerable age. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.

________________

Old scooter: http://www.20th.ch/les_jouets_de_notre_enfance.htm
Young man on electric scooter: http://www.funshop.at/produkte/inmotion-3/inmotion-l6/
Older man on electric scooter: http://www.stadt-wien.at/lifestyle/elektro-scooter-test.html
Businessmen on scooters: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keggleton/zh-cn
Businesswoman with scooter: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/439312138625936673/
Folded scooter: https://www.nycewheels.com/micro-scooter-review.html
Normal scooter with cool colours: https://mobile.willhaben.at/object/186524698/
Cool electric scooter: https://www.pinterest.com/baylissw/kick-scooter/
Cool scooter with big wheels: http://www.tretrollershop.at/fs_sport_classic.html
Penny-farthing: http://www.bikemonkey.ca/blog
Cool electric scooter with fat wheels: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/439312138625936673/
Y-shaped scooter: https://www.nycewheels.com/micro-scooter-review.html
Luggage scooter: http://www.toxel.com/tech/2012/02/25/scooter-luggage/
Unutterably cool scooter: http://design720.com/category/g5/page/2

NUMBERS, NUMBERS, NUMBERS

Milan, 9 May 2017

In Los Angeles, with some prodding from our daughter, my wife and I started our exercise regimen again, quietly put aside when we left Bangkok. Once a week, we went to a shop on Wilshire Boulevard to check progress. We would get on a machine which would do some sort of body scan and give us our body weight, our percentage of fat, our water retention ratio, and other fascinating pieces of data about ourselves. Bottom line: we were losing weight and our body fat percentages were dropping, but only very gradually. There was nothing for it, we were also going to have to go on a diet.

Once back in Italy, I took over the kitchen. This was going to be done scientifically! Every morsel of food we wanted to eat or drink would have its caloric make-up clocked into my computer and would be rigorously measured before it passed our lips. So I burrowed into vast online data banks of nutritional values, dusted off the kitchen scales, and got to work. And now my life has been taken over by numbers: 200, 250, 300 calories, 60, 80, 100 grams, 5, 10, 15 ml …

Meanwhile, we have ramped up our exercise regimen, where numbers also invade our minds: 10, 9, 8 seconds to go, 15, 16, 17 lifts, …

At the same time, we have been anxiously watching the results of the French elections: 21.5%, 32.8%, 46.6%. On Sunday night, we got the final numbers: 66%, 34%. But soon we will be anxiously scouting the news for the numbers in the French legislative elections. And then the U.K. elections …

And then there are all the timetables we seem to be scanning all the time: 10:47, 12:52, 14:35, 16:50, …

And we mustn’t forget the bank account and the investment portfolio and the euro-dollar exchange rate: 1.110, 1.060, 1.035, 1.091, …

Numbers, numbers, numbers …

As Charlie Brown might have said:

But wait, I mustn’t shoot the messenger. Numbers aren’t the problem. Numbers are beauty. The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos once said, “I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is”, while several thousand years earlier Pythagoras had put it more poetically: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres” and “The stars in the heavens sing a music if only we had ears to hear”.

No, it’s just that life is now horribly complex – I turn once more to Charlie Brown.

Long gone are the days when human beings could get by counting “one, two, many”, although it seems there are still a few remote tribes who can get through life with just this as their counting systems.

I suppose we have to thank the damned Mesopotamians for pushing us beyond the one-two-many phase of our history.

They wanted cities, temples, palaces, armies.

For this they needed to count: how many bushels of wheat did you give this month, how many skins of beer, how many goats, how many days of work, how many, how many … They invented tokens like these to keep count.

And gradually, gradually, those tokens led us to this: roomfuls of accountants, keeping count of everything.

And now we have computers keeping count.

Well, I may mutter curses at the Mesopotamians, but do I want to live like this?

I don’t think so. So I’d better just get back to the kitchen and start counting the numbers for supper.

________________
Numbers: http://www.gettyimages.it/detail/illustrazione/lots-of-numbers-on-huge-diminishing-perspective-digital-grafica-stock/667585619
Aaugh!: https://www.pinterest.ph/pin/242631498644327447/
Pythagoras: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/lifenlesson.com/pythagoras/amp/
Sigh!: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201304/why-do-we-sigh%3Famp
Mesopotamians: http://www.ancienthistorylists.com/ancient-civilization/ancient-mesopotamia/
Mesopotamian city: https://app.emaze.com/mobile/@AWCFWOLL
Mesopotamian tokens: http://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-mesopotamian-accounting-tokens
Roomful of accountants: http://www.scoutingny.com/love-sex-on-the-upper-west-side-the-filming-locations-of-the-apartment/
Roomful of servers: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3rfici
Kalahari bushmen: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/03/17/how-britain-connived-in-the-end-of-the-kalahari-bushmen/

CHRISTMAS CHEER

New York, 2 January 2016

There was a habit in China that I always found strange – dissonant perhaps is the better word – and that was the locals’ enthusiastic adoption of typical Christmas decorations. One would enter any self-respecting mall at the end of the year and there, standing proudly in the foyer, would be a resplendent Christmas tree.
A tree was sort of OK. Pine trees grow in China, right? and one could imagine the Chinese covering them with colorful baubles. I could even live with the muzaked Christmas carols that invariably were being played in the malls. Seeing Father Christmases in China, though, that was really strange to me.

I mean, Santa Claus has his roots deep in Northern Europe, in some place like this

and not in the arid plains of northern China.

Luckily, I never saw any Santa elves while in China. That would really have been too much, I would have had to take to my bed.

My Chinese office staff always got enthusiastically into the swing of things in the first weeks of December, sprinkling the walls and other surfaces with Christmas decorations.

I tolerated all this Yuletide good cheer à la chinoise, although the first year I found it somewhat disconcerting that one of the secretaries kept her decorations up around her workspace way after Christmas: a cheerful Santa ho-hoing away and a couple of reindeer-drawn sleighs as I recall.

In July, I finally got around to asking her why she kept them up. They were cheerful, she replied. OK, why not? My role in running the office did not extend to policing the interior decorations, so long as they didn’t offend public morals.

Luckily, now that we no longer live in China I don’t get this weird feeling of something not quite right around Christmas time. In fact, this year, in Brooklyn, I get the feeling that everything is absolutely right. In this part of Brooklyn (Carroll Gardens), many of the brownstones have small gardens in front of them. Their owners have enthusiastically filled them with various Christmas-themed stuff, many of them lit up at night. The result is a very pleasant walk for me and my wife from the subway stop down to our daughter’s apartment. I throw in here a gallery of the community’s efforts in Christmas son et lumière (actually lumière only; there was no son except for the wind rattling the branches of the trees above our heads).

Here we have a bare-bones offering, although the lights do give off a cheerful glow.

In these next few photos, the owners have created somewhat more complex tableaux

whereas in the next cases the owners have made some serious efforts

All these efforts culminate in a wonderful series of tableaux where compressed air (I guess) has been used to create large and exceedingly cheerful balloon-like sculptures, which wave gently with every passing breeze.

But a whip around the web shows that all these efforts are nothing compared to what some people have done. Here, for instance, is an unutterably cool house somewhere in Queens.

The owners should get a medal for their efforts.

All things considered, my feelings of discomfort about seeing such cheery Christmas scenes in China are silly. In this highly globalized world of ours, where we all dress the same, eat the same, buy the same furniture and furnishings, see the same movies, and play the same videogames, where’s the harm in the Chinese decorating their apartments, houses, offices, and malls with Christmas paraphernalia? Especially since it’s all made in China.

_____________________
Christmas tree, China: http://www.ocweekly.com/news/south-coast-plaza-looks-a-lot-more-chinese-these-days-and-its-not-by-accident-6781849
Father Christmas, China: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/what-china-loves-about-christmas-and-doesnt/250488/
Winter, Sweden: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/snowandski/8355017/Skiing-in-re-Sweden-the-place-to-go-for-Europes-best-snow.html
Winter, Inner Mongolia: http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-winter-grassland-inner-mongolia-china-image50804885
Christmas decorations in office, China: http://godfatherstyle.com/creative-inspirational-work-place-christmas-decorations/
Santa Claus wall decoration: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/2Pcs-28x21cm-Merry-Christmas-Santa-Claus-Wall-Stickers-Christmas-Decoration-Random-Pattern-Christmas-Stickers/532381_32242806520.html
Garden Xmas decorations: my photos
Highly decorated house: http://indesignss.co/best/best-christmas-decorated-house-in-queens

OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

New York, 5 January 2014

Kale is king of culinary cool this year in New York. Or so it would appear from a cursory glance at the offerings in the city’s food emporia: every restaurant seems to have a dish with kale in it, every supermarket a ready-made salad containing kale. Several articles tracking the growing popularity of kale have appeared in the New York Times, while a very recent article in the New York Daily News, reporting on a survey of 500 dieticians, has these worthy people predicting that kale (along with ancient grains and gluten-free diets) will be the top nutrition trends of 2014. Why, even a celebrity chef like Gordon Ramsey has weighed in, making lots of approving noises about kale. He went so far as to propose that a National Kale Day be instituted!

Which is all rather surprising to me, since I have always associated kale with something that you feed to cows. I don’t think I had ever intentionally eaten kale until a week or so ago when I picked up a take-away tomato and kale soup from a Hale & Hearty Soup outlet somewhere near Park Avenue and 45th Street.

Quite what is so remarkable about kale is not clear to me. It is purported to help you fight various cancers, lower your cholesterol, detoxify yourself, and I know not what else. Having been around a while, I am, like this reporter in the Huffington Post, somewhat skeptical of all these claims. How many foodstuffs have I seen over the years for which extravagant health claims have been made! It is true that kale is stuffed with vitamins K, A and C. So if you need those, kale might be your thing. But as for the rest …

To my mind, all the froth and frenzy about kale is nothing compared to the wonderful story behind its very existence. Around the northern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, in what are now Italy, Greece, Turkey, and maybe further south along the Lebanese and Israeli coast, there lives a humble member of the large family of mustards. This species is known to science as Brassica oleracea, but we can call it cole (a name rooted in the Celtic-Germanic-Greek word for “stem”). With time and I presume human interference it spread from its original homeland and now can be found further north in Europe. Since it tolerates salt well and likes a limey soil, it tends to be found on limestone sea cliffs, as attested by this picture, taken on the chalk cliffs in the UK (I didn’t find a picture of the plant in its original homeland):

Anyone familiar with mustard plants will immediately see the family resemblance. And those long stems are what gives the plant its generic name of cole.

At some point, humans found that the plant was edible and presumably added it to their list of plants to gather. Some 3-4,000 years ago, maybe more, as part of the slow move to agriculture, humans began to domesticate the cole, and as they have done with just about every species which they have domesticated they began a forced process of natural selection to encourage desirable traits in their domesticates and eliminate undesirable ones. So far, so good. But the cole must have a very flexible DNA because over the millennia farmers were able to coax out of this one plant an astonishingly different array of vegetables. From the plant we see above waving on the cliff top, they managed to obtain our friend kale:

Its close cousin, collard greens:

The cabbage, which itself comes in several varieties, the common white cabbage:

the red cabbage, seen here with the green cabbage:

the Savoy cabbage:

Then we have broccoli:

Cauliflower:

and its close cousin the strange-looking romanesco broccoli:

Brussels sprouts:

Kohlrabi:

And last but not least, the Chinese kai-lan, also known as Chinese broccoli:

Pretty amazing …

The following picture shows which bits in the original cole plant all those generations of farmers fiddled with to get these massively different vegetables:

When seeing all these vegetables sitting next to each other on a supermarket shelf, it might be difficult to believe that they are actually the same plant, but when you see them still in the field the family resemblance is more easily recognized.

Kale:

Collards:

Cabbage:

Cauliflower:

Broccoli:

Brussels sprouts:

Kohlrabi:

And when these vegetables flower, which they should not, then you see the mustard-like flower coming through, as in this case of a red cabbage gone to seed:

and of broccoli gone to seed:

The early history of all these cole vegetables is shrouded in uncertainty. The Greeks and Romans wrote about one or more vegetables which sound like a cousin of kale and collards. The cabbage seems to have been developed in the colder parts of Europe some time in the early Middle Ages. Southern Italians seem to have developed broccoli quite early on, perhaps already during the Roman period, but it was many centuries before it migrated to other parts of Europe. It is generally thought that the cauliflower came to Europe from the Middle East, possibly via Cyprus and then Italy. As the name suggests, Brussels sprouts seem to have been developed somewhere in the Low Countries around the 15^th Century, possibly earlier, but didn’t migrate to other parts of Europe until several centuries later. Kohlrabi seems to have been developed at about the same time, although quite where in Europe is unclear. And then there is kai-lan. Quite how this vegetable, the descendant of a Mediterranean plant, ended up being developed in China is a bit of a mystery. It is theorized that when the Portuguese came to China, they brought with them the cabbage. Chinese farmers then did a second cycle of selection to bring about something which looks and tastes more like broccoli.

Little is known of the history of these vegetables because early European chroniclers didn’t deign to follow the experiments in genetic engineering that the humble farmers were undertaking. In his poem “the Walrus and the Carpenter”, Lewis Carroll has the walrus say at some point:

“The time has come,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings”

But those who recorded history were interested in kings and not cabbages and their ilk, so we will never know who were those legions of farmers who patiently developed this cornucopia of cole vegetables which we have available to us today. I take this occasion to salute these nameless heroes and to thank them for putting such wonderful vegetables on my table.

_____________________

THE E-CIGARETTE

New York, 22 December 2013

My wife and I have been trying for a while now to get our son to stop smoking. He’s the same age, give or take a year, that we were when we stopped but he’s still on 10 a day – more if the stress levels are high. With us cheering him on, he has tried various things: patches, gum, and I know not what. He even went cold turkey for a while. All for naught. So when back in May he decided to try e-cigarettes, we redoubled our cheering.

I know, they’re not the miracle cure they are sometimes claimed to be, but on balance we think they are better than real cigarettes.

Almost immediately, though, our son’s experiment with e-cigarettes went awry. During a night out with the boys just after he started using it the body broke (for the uninitiated, I should explain that an e-cigarette is composed of a body and a head; the two are separable and can be purchased separately, an important detail in the unfolding drama). After much badgering – our son was very busy with his new business (which of course augmented the stress levels and thus the cigarette consumption) – he finally got around to purchasing a new body via internet and received said body through the post. My wife and I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that he would imminently be throwing away his cigarette packs. But no. Our son discovered that he couldn’t remove the head from the old body despite the use of much brute strength and wrenches. So still no e-cigarette use.

Things stood thus for several months before we came to New York to spend Christmas with the children. We were determined to move things along. After more badgering, we got some guidance from our son as to where we might go to separate head from body. Our initial thought had been to find a repair shop of some sort. But who runs repair shops these days, especially for so arcane a product as e-cigarettes?

So our search shifted to so-called vapor stores. These are locales which are vigorously promoting e-cigarettes and the vapor lifestyle. Again, to make sure that the uninitiated are following, recall that the principle of e-cigarettes is that you inhale water vapor impregnated with nicotine, taste molecules (our son favors mint and watermelon), and a few other odds and ends. Thus, vapor is central to the e-cigarette experience, thus stores offering this new lifestyle are called vapor stores, and thus the devotees of this new lifestyle call themselves vapers (in contrast to smokers; cute, no?).

We located two vapor stores in Lower Manhattan. The precise location of the stores is already an indication of the life choices of the fans of the vapor lifestyle. Because when I say lower Manhattan, I don’t mean Wall Street or thereabouts, the hang-out of the Gods of Finance and their acolytes from New Jersey, I mean NoLiTa. This is an area north of Little Italy (whence the name NoLiTa; the serious New Yorker must keep up with the continuous creation of new locational acronyms). I am informed that NoLiTa is now a very cool area to live in for those into the more alternative lifestyles.

After some blundering around the small streets of NoLiTa, we finally found the first vapor store on our list. As we entered, we suddenly felt like dinosaurs, relics from a past era.

Everyone in the place could have been our son or daughter, and every single one of them was puffing on an e-cigarette. They looked at us rather surprised. Clearly, troglodytes like us did not enter the shop often, if at all.

We diffidently made our way to the counter where a young man served us, e-cigarette in hand. And as we explained the problem, he sucked on his e-cigarette and breathed out vapor from his nostrils in a fashion that was very reminiscent of angry bulls in cartoons – my wife and I checked notes afterwards and both agreed on this point

After this impressively taurine display, our young man managed to separate head from damaged body and sold us a bottle of mint-tasting e-cigarette liquid. At which point our son rolled in and took over, giving my wife and I the leisure to look the place over.

Calling this a store is clearly a misnomer. What we have here is an experience, an event. Other than the counter and the vitrines in one corner showing off e-cigarettes and related paraphernalia

our store had a bar in another corner where various high-end teas were being served – no tea bags here – and where clients could sit at the bar sipping their tea, chatting convivially, and of course puffing on their e-cigarettes together.

In yet another corner it had a nook where vapers could sit on smart but environmentally-friendly furniture made with discarded objects, and flip through high-end magazines like Monocle, all the while puffing meditatively on their e-cigarettes.

(these photos are not of the store we saw, but the fact that I found them, and many others like it, makes me think that this is the basic blueprint of all vapor stores)

It all rather reminded me of the more traditional smoking rooms of the 19th Century

or more darkly of those high-end turn of the 19th Century Parisian brothels which Toulouse-Lautrec liked to paint

Like the French say, “plus ça change et plus c’est la même chose”, the more it changes and the more it’s the same thing. In every age, there’s always a part of society which wants to be exotic.

But all my wife and I want is for our son to quit smoking.

_________________

e-cigarette: http://www.vapeitnow.com/pics/joyetech-starter-kit/joyetech-evic-5.jpg [in http://www.vapeitnow.com/products/joyetech-starter-kit/joyetech-evic.html%5D
smoking e-cigarette: http://thegazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ecigarettes680.jpg [in http://thegazette.com/2013/10/10/university-of-iowa-considers-e-cigarettes-and-campus-wide-smoking-ban/%5D
NoLiTa: http://dguides.com/images/newyorkcity/areas/nolita.jpg [in http://dguides.com/newyorkcity/areas/nolita/%5D
Dinosaur skeletons: http://www.dinostoreus.com/rex-vs-ceratops.jpg [in http://www.dinostoreus.com/%5D
Bull snorting: http://www.ecigarettedirect.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/r/a/raging-bull.jpg [in http://www.eliquid.co.uk/%5D
Vapor shop-1: http://ecigarettereviewed.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/vapor-loft-vape-shop.jpg [in http://ecigarettereviewed.com/so-cal-vapers-creating-their-own-june-gloom/%5D
Vapor shop-2: http://getvapordelight.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/IMG_93591.jpg [in http://vapordelight.com/vapor-bar-lounge/%5D
Vapor shop-3: http://www.yext-static.com/cms/af5ee3ea-019d-4b15-991d-76d4fc371fe1.jpg [in http://yellowpages.ny1.com/biz/buffalo-vapor-lounge/buffalo/ny/14216/53824266%5D
Smoking parlour Victorian England: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/clubs/11.jpg [in http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/clubs/11.html%5D
Brothel Toulouse Lautrec: http://www.studiomatters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/719px-Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec_012.jpg [in http://www.studiomatters.com/art/olympias-heirs%5D