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So many books

Wednesday 5 August 2026 at 20:43
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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Friday 7 August 2026 at 09:10

So many books

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

 

So many books

[4 minute read ] 

Opinion

I have so many books to read; fourteen! It is not a lot over the six month academic 'year'. Yet, they are not books I would read for pleasure. I absolutely have to forget that they cost me more than £125 otherwise my resentment will interfere with my focus on why I am reading them. I am beginning to think, though, that I don't like the omniscient point of view; a narrative that allows the thoughts of characters to be written in stories. I know that it helps to develop characters in the readers' minds but I am an action kind of reader.

Having detached emotions by default I tend not to put much effort into connecting my emotions to moments of relaxation; not that reading these fourteen books is relaxing for me because in the absence of OU guidance for my module I have to make copious notes on anything I consider to be remotely relevant. I am just wildly guessing, but I suppose I am focused.

Having been steeped in marketing and logistics for many years, studying with The OU is like a crash-course in a different subject, even over four or five years. Even during summer, which is not my academic term, I cannot realign my studies back towards marketing, economic and logistics. These subjects which are really a bunch, are so familiar to me that I feel so much more comfortable wallowing in those text books than the ones I now find myself compelled to read in a preliminary fashion. 

I probably have a different style of learning to most people. It is one that I established when I think I was about eight or nine. back then we had BSA (I think) assignments to complete that tested for comprehension. There was a little story of perhaps one hundred and fifty words and and then some questions that related to the text. I would read the questions first and then read the text, mentally marking where the answers were. Then I read the questions again and write my answers one by one. It was efficient to do that and it had no negative effect on my secondary school achievements. Given an outline of what I am supposed to learn in October onwards I would be able to make notes much more efficiently. In fact, by October, I think I might have finished the modules before I even start them. Achieving a good degree is secondary to understanding the wider scope of the subjects, to me. 'Getting it right' is key in contrast to proving academic ability to others; at least it is for me. 

       'Yeah, I got a third, but I know the subject inside out and back to front. I spent a lot of time reading outside of the scope of the degree modules. I find that not being constrained by bindings and circumscription allows me to approach my work and social life with a fresh attitude that brings with it some novel questions. Can I have the job? or do you want me to just keep my head below the parapet and nod when you speak?'

It would never be a good thing to say that, I propose. I approach my future in a bipartite way though. Everything I study can be applied to both PAYE employment or self-employment. So, I am fairly flexible in my speech. Some might say, careless. Hmmm, I suppose so; too much free-reign and hedonism in the past perhaps. But, I was left to my own devices when I was sixteen and two months old so what can we expect of me? Should I have run away from my bullying enabler older brother guardian and put myself in care? I think, in retrospect, that is precisely what I should have done. I did run away from him once at 5am, to live in Sherwood Forest. I was a bit of a romantic fool then. I got tired and hitch-hiked back again; more fool me! However, it was around this time that I bought my first thesaurus and set me on the path to autodiadatic education and then further education at night school, and then daytime college. Who knows what I would have become if I had been in care? A misogynist? A plagiarist and cheat? An invisible banality? A kind and thoughtful community leader? I am none of those, but I do get my emotions in gear sometimes now my fraternal tormentor is dead and I help my community.

I am inclined to rewrite history in my head and imagine different futures lately. I like my imagination, no, I love it! But it is intangible and ephemeral and having no substance and there being nowhere to direct it, it is an invisible gim-crack, a bagetelle, a folly. Oh, I frame it so negatively with blunt but tasty words. It is almost believable that I am distracted by my disdain. That is not so; but most people might chuck a reality-checking statement at me such as, 'You have your head in the clouds', or 'You are off with the fairies again.' or 'Daydreaming won't pay the bills!' Because I know all this I have to check myself and manifest something tangible from something intangible if I am to deny opportunities in other spheres of my life. Most people, I think, would immediately think of writing for a living. I shan't be doing that though; there is a reason why not, but I can't quite see enough of the future to know precisely what it is just yet.

I can't help thinking that I have wasted enough time and i really have to leap to the capstan and haul my anchor up. Yet, I also feel like I am still on a lee-shore (wind blowing onto the shore making sailing away extremely problematic for square-rigged ships - like HMS Victory).

I suppose my imagination is a sailing ship with no engine and since I espouse modern assistance, a metaphorical engine, I shall find myself becalmed and adrift. I really don't like the trail and impact that modern technology has though. Analogue books are on the verge of obsolescence and only those who plan for the world to be knocked back to the same kind of existence the people of the 1960s and 70s had, can be inclined to honestly believe that publishing only analogue books will provide sufficient money for the opportunity to write to be viable in the near future. 

Tags: daydream, books, writing, imagination, opportunity
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Forced Opinion

Friday 27 March 2026 at 08:59
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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Friday 27 March 2026 at 13:58

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

silhouette of a female face in profile mental health

[ 8 minute read ]

WARNING - evokes thoughts and ideas on bestial violence, division and hierarchy (dogs fighting)

This is about how the pen is mightier than the sword

Get a licence

'He should be on a lead!'

Throughout the whole of yesterday, inspired by a headline on one of the online news websites, I had a mind to show how evoking emotion can lead people towards a conclusion that can be cemented by confirmation bias; with conclusions that confirm an idea that has lain transparent, gossamer-thin, and nascent, but, through skillful nurturing, becomes more opaque; and as it does so, less open to good counter-argument. I 'hemmed and hawed' at how I would do it; whether I can do it, even whether I should do it. Can I pull it off? I had a theme in my head that I am certain would draw support even though I intended to present it in a surreal way; an oblique approach allows others to make their own minds up; I believe this is the strongest and most abiding force, that of being guided (tricked) into transmogrifying a narrative into something that fits one's own perception and interpretation of the world.

Such is my expectation that the drive of the subject, by dint of it being contentious, would evoke, what may indeed be biased agreement in a large segment of the world population, I, perhaps foolishly, made no attempt to even try to consider a different way to demonstrate the power of words and how they influence opinion. I was going to write a short story but I realised that I cannot control any after-effects. I decided that it is better to present the scaffolding and not the facade. Hopefully, this will cause some people to read a bit more objectively. So, make no mistake, I have an intention and an agenda, but it is an open one.

     'Did you hear? You have to get a licence now if you want a live-in boyfriend?'

A long time ago, people in the UK needed dog-licences if they kept a dog. The details of it are not really the point here. If dog-breeders needed the same licence is beyond my guess. I think the idea was born from a melding of bifurcated opinions that had emerged from both the dogs' perspective and from dog-bite victims. How can we protect the public?

I suppose many dogs were a bit wild and perhaps mistreated and were more than a little scared of strangers and defensive. I think a dog, as a pack animal, needs to assert its authority by it's fighting prowess. Annoy a dog and you can expect a warning snarl and then a nip, perhaps from lying down position, and then an aggressive standing stance with head lowered, and then a violent advance that will be something that you cannot extract yourself from. You must now fight it.

     'Did you hear? We no longer need to buy dog-licences because dog owners are better at understanding their pets' needs.'

That, if you got the connection and ran with it with your own thoughts, is how, by tapping into a long-standing, not yet fully fully considered, belief that men are brutes, gives us the idea that a comparison can be made between a woman's higher intelligence and reasoning ability and that of a less intelligent animal which presents itself (the animal) as though it acts solely on some kind of primordial instinct. People need a licence to keep a dog and women need a licence to keep a man. The point is a higher and reasoning intelligence is considered apt to be in a controlling position over a lesser more instinctive intelligence. Dodgy, huh?

Clearly the two speeches above are uttered from, first, a female perspective and then, from a universal perspective. Now a speech sentence from a male perspective.

       'Did you hear? We can now check to see if our girlfriends are sane by whether she has been granted a licence or not.'

What may first have appeared to be a device (a licence to keep a man) to protect women in my dystopian world as recognising and portraying men as 'cavemen' brutes; and as such need to be kept on a leash, is now a psychometric test as to the suitability of women as girlfriends, from a male perspective.

Now I have opened a can of worms. For many people, I have pulled the rug from under their feet. I expect the overriding thought, for them, is that I am a misogynistic brute. However, to some extent I have deliberately tried to make this happen. The task for me now is to be successful in assuaging (negating) that feeling. Instead of dampening the heat of a blaze though, I must take away the smoke of poorly consumed wood that I intentionally added to the fire, along with the dry tinder that acted as an accelerant.

I am a man. Like a dog, I sometimes act instinctively. And, like a dog, I am a pack animal. Just the same as a dog, I will have picked up bad habits right from birth, through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. But, even as an adult, because the world is changing, much of what once seemed proper behaviour, that arose from attitudes of a past time, is now 'deemed' to be inappropriate. Even the use of the word 'deemed' leaves opens the subject; just like a flare-up in a fire when a piece of paper is thrown onto embers. It offers an idea that I do not agree with an idea formed by others, of which I am contemptuous. But it slips quietly in because it follows the word 'seemed' in the same sentence.

There is now a burgeoning world view that social media has some kind of effect on children, social development and behaviour. There are moves and pilot studies to understand the effects and how to eradicate negative influence and effect from social media activity.

Psychologists debate which has more effect on an individual's behaviour; nature or nuture. Was the successful person pre-determined to be successful because they had good genes, or was the parenting and social education of the successful person influential in allowing a good academic education to be absorbed and implemented.

When dogs fight, the owners have their expectation that dogs will fight suddenly realised. The attitude, in the main, is to drag them apart and one owner will probably berate the owner who did not keep their dog on a leash. When men fight on a Friday and Saturday night in the UK, as long as no-one is not hurt too badly they are dragged apart by friends and bystanders and everyone gets to go home. The wounds remind the fighters over the next few days that they should be wary of a probability of future wounds if they act in a similar way. The police, if they deal with men fighting, are loathe to lock them up, but invariably do if they consider that a flaring up is inevitable, and then later release the fighters, after they have calmed down and sobered up.

You can see that, in the UK, men are indeed considered to be similar to dogs. Hence, there is a need for responsible people to register their men with the local authorities. Since dogs cannot be the owner of other dogs, it falls upon women to step up and claim men as their possessions. 

Here then I have introduced some ridicule into the subject. It is crazy to think that men need to be licenced right? What you may have missed in considering this comedic conclusion, is that I have inferred that women are a different species. Anyone who said to themselves, 'Yeah, he has a good point, men should be licenced, and who better than women to apply for those licences', no matter how briefly they held that weird thought, they unwittingly absorbed a potentially damaging concept by way of a back-door.

This post is not intended to create any long-standing ideas of any differences between males and female, or humans and animals. However, by highlighting animal behaviour, there is an expectation that many of the peripheral thoughts around supposed differences were illuminated in our minds, were momentarily considered, reshaped, and stored again. That is how opinion can be deliberately, and inadvertently, changed by both canny and poor writing, and of course, careless reading.

By the way, I would be grateful in knowing if a woman wants to claim me as being potentially useful to her. I am house-trained and have learned to use my hands to eat.

UK

Samaritans - phone 116 123  'Call us any time, day or night' - 'Samaritans works to make sure there's always someone there for anyone who needs someone.' 

https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Childline -  Open 24hrs & days a week. Contacting Childline Call us free on 0800 1111 or find out how to get in touch online. Whatever your worry, day or night, we're here for you. 

https://www.childline.org.uk/get-support/contacting-childline/

Tags: licence, thought, opinion, persuasion, coercion, writing, forced opinion, mental health, creative writing
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Am I human enough now?

Thursday 13 November 2025 at 05:21
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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Friday 28 November 2025 at 21:27

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

silhouette of a female face in profile    

[ 2 minute read ]

Am I human enough now?

I have just been party to a conversation on why Grammarly indicates that an original piece written solely by a single real person (These days we have to prefix 'human' with 'real' to mean a human) has a substantial probability that it has been written by A.I.

My crikeyness! Pull yourselves together! Why would anyone use technology to check if they are human? Quite frankly, I ask myself why anyone would even consider using A.I assistance without recognising an inadequacy in themselves. If a researcher is paid to find stuff and they use A.I. assistance, then they are not doing their job. The whole world that has contributed to the vast information that is available to the A.I. search algorithm has done the job in collaboration with the A.I. tool. Wow! And there are actually people out there who are worried that they will lose their jobs to A.I. It is because they have been using A.I. generative text assistance to fool their bosses into thinking they were valuable employees. Strangely, their bosses have let them do this.

If I ever wrote a book and used Grammarly for some weird and unfathomable reason at ANY stage in the process whatsoever, I would need to include Grammarly as a collaboratoring author on the book cover otherwise I would feel like a fraud. The whole world would be entitled to a substantial share of the royalties.

In the conversation I overheard by dint of being able to read it online (I over-read it then) someone was bemoaning that in rewriting paragraphs, Grammarly A.I. checker came back with a higher and higher probability of it being written by A.I. Clearly, the more focus and skill that was put into the rewrites meant that the rewrites were better and better according to Grammarly A.I. checker. 

       'Oh woe!'

       'Oh no! Your own writing is improving! What are you going to do?'

I think I might be able to see the wood in the forest because I don't rely on technology to help me think.

If Grammarly tells you that you are an A.I. assistive technology algorithm it is giving you a compliment; I am just wondering whether it flirts with really good writers. Let's all aim for Grammarly telling us that there is a 100% probability that the piece we have submitted is A.I. generated and then we know we don't need A.I. assistive technology for writing tasks, and we have returned to being a real human again, without technological mutant augmentation. Otherwise we are just one step away from being a Borg in the Star Trek series.

Tags: A.I., generative technology, writing, AI versus human
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