Personal Blogs

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

[ 2 minute read ]

Sold

I want to be fooled

I recently read that it is almost impossible to make someone want something they don't already desire. I studied marketing for two reasons: because I needed it in my business, and I wanted to be able to undo the work of the nasty, puppet-masters in the shadows. 

I read that people cannot be forced to buy anything they don't desire. I don't believe this for one minute. I think it is a short-sighted fool who believes this. I never desired a mobile phone (cell phone) or a home computer until they were marketed. When farmers were polled at the turn of the nineteenth century as to what they desired, they said, 'a faster horse'. Henry Ford sold them the internal combustion engine. Now, farmers want better tractors and trucks. Offer a fast horse to a farmer and he thinks about whether he has a daughter or a sporting neighbor, or not.

I still don't relish having a mobile phone (cell phone) and I never crave a faster computer; just smaller operating systems. I desire what we had in the past. That is called nostalgia. We all get it; it is incurable. 

It is true that I would not be forced to buy a time-machine to go back in time and do nefarious things to make sure the mobile phone never evolved beyond a phone without a wire plugged into a wall. I MUST own a mobile phone because they were so successfully sold to the world in the first place, by marketers. I am not forced by today's marketers to buy a new amazing mobile phone (cell phone); I am forced to buy a second-hand phone both because we now have to all have one, and because I absolutely do not want any phone that has A.I. in its operating code from the outset. There is no reset that eliminates and removes all the crazy updates that new phones allow, to reset it to A.I. free, because its code positively seeks more A.I. updates.

Modern marketing seems to be ever-seeking the next thing to sell. It doesn't seem to try to sell us what we once had. Go into any UK village in 2026 and you will see a bunch of outsiders updating the village. They don't preserve it. They visited and loved the village. Oh wow! they said, This is heaven. Lets change it!

The dispensing pharmacist at my local doctor's surgery wanted to talk to me about my blood-pressure and cholesterol levels and how I could have stats (an update or a patch to fix a bug in my human software?) I have high blood pressure because I am stressed and don't get appropriate treatment. Even if I do have high cholesterol levels, it is probably because I eat too many free eggs. Of course, the 'chat' was necessary to the pharmacist because I was weighed by my doctor more than three years ago, and I was very slightly overweight according to the Body Mass Index (BMI) chart. Most people are so used to aimlessly being updated that they think they desire it. I don't think they do. I think it is like asking an alcoholic if they want a drink; they will invariably shake their heads as they say yes, we just can't process two things at the same time. 

     'Are you in a relationship?'

     'It's complicated.'

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

[ 4 minute read ]

Maybe and might

I was in Tesco a while ago. I needed to buy some dried beans. I used to be a professional juggler and the first thing we learn with are bean bags; but I was going to eat these beans not start sewing cloth around them.

There are different ways of looking at things and they are highly contexualised within certain groups. When I had a job that required me to have good musculature and enter homes, 'Pop in for a cup of tea if you are in the area' sometimes meant one thing if their husbands and boyfriends were going to be at work, or 'get a free drink and rest for a while if you need to.' The funny thing is, I may have imagined the former being real. But if you hear it enough, is easy to get an idea of veiled intent. Except, the veil was more on how the offering of a cup of tea was made. It was always said in front of the husband or boyfriend as though it was truly innocent. No-one ever trapped me in the hall and seductively slurred, 'Come up and see me sometime!' with hooded eyes, peering meaningfully into mine, above a suggestive smile. I never did go back to visit any of those houses; I really would not do that, and also because just like if any single women had cornered me, if I had gone back during work hours I would have been in the vulnerable position of being about to be rejected. Nobody likes that. So we often speak in code and double-talk and innuendos and double-entendres.

One of my neighbours delivers eggs to my doorstep. I like her because she intrigues me. I could really like her. She does have highly attractive facial expressions that suddenly appear onto a blank canvas; and that intrigues me. She measures her behaviour. The moue of slight embarrassment I once saw is something I want to see again but not if I am the one to embarrass her; you know, not with a gentle jest or tease. Maybe, when she gets home each day she just enters a regeneration period and does precisely nothing interesting. Maybe.

In Tesco, because we are coming up to Easter, there were some little toy, chicks for sale in sets of three, and all made with felt (3 centimetres tall or so). There were also three pigs and three rabbits; all of them anthropomorphised in some way. I remember as a small boy my mum would include little toy fluffy chicks with our Easter Eggs, and they really were nice to have. I originally bought these nine figures to put outside my house for parents to take, but I now think that my neighbour, with her obvious measured consideration would be an ideal recipient.

There she is on the stage, all bashful and surprised. 

     'For measured and considerate behaviour towards your neighbours, you, Sally, have been awarded the coveted prize of nine cheap felt animals'

     'Oooo! Thank you very much! I would like to thank Martin's mum for bringing him up to like felt animals, even though he was surrounded by real ones; and of course, the architects who designed our houses and make the trip next door so easy. My thanks go to the wonderful chickens who laid the eggs I give him, and of course, his nearest neighbour who has so far resisted stealing them.'

I left the nine felt animals in a freezer bag on her doorstep; so, she will not get a standing ovation, and she will no doubt want to share them, because she is like that. The problem with that, is with that last; will she be able to break an unwritten code of not giving away received gifts? She is sensible and mighty clever and really considerate so she just may share them. Good!

Sometimes, living in the maybe moments are more favourable than the real ones. I suggest, it is something every one of us enjoy but I think we don't provide it for others as much as we might. A lot of the time, if I am honest, I am a bit afraid of how appointments and meetings may turn out and I push for order and reason.

I have been looking into how language is used in creative writing and went to Beth Roars, a voice coach, on YouTube to see what she says about singers. After hours of fascinating stuff she told me about 'The Fate of Ophelia' by Taylor Swift. Now, let me be clear, I have always considered Taylor Swift to be a bit whimsical and childish in her singing and writing. Let's face it her target market was teenage girls. One cannot deny that she is a huge hit and writes at least some of her songs (I think she is in fact a contributor to all her song lyrics). Without the guidance of Beth Roar and the accompanying Fate of Ophelia video, and Beth Roar obliquely pointing out that the song references Taylor Swift's current boyfriend, herself, and Shakespeare's 'Ophelia' in Hamlet, the whole message of the song would be entirely lost on me. 

Taylor Swift, it seemed, did not allow herself to live in a 'real maybe', if there is such a thing. 'Maybe' is almost entirely based on hope and probability, and its make-up is measured (if you can measure 'maybe') in differing amounts for everyone. 

You may note that I described Sally, next door, as 'measured in her behaviour' which if I did not make clear, comes from her careful consideration for possible outcomes. What a wonderful trait! But what a terrible place to live in if it is a place where everything has a known quality and any combination of events has a known outcome. 

It seems that 'maybe' might only exist when things are new, like surprises. 

Oooops! Deja vu!

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

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/

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

[ 6 minute read ]

Parasite or milking Farmer?

It doesn't seem very long ago that I had a strong standpoint on promoting oneself. (I was about to continue the sentence with 'in public' because the sentence, to me feels incomplete, but it isn't). Social protocol and introductory salutations were always a problem for me; do we say what we do, or are good at or not?

     'Hello. Pleased to meet you. I am a doctor in Physics'

     'Oh, yes. Hello. I am a plumber.'

     'Ah. Interesting. Do you work locally?' (No doubt I shall have use of a local plumber one day)

     'Yes, I live around here.  (I doubt you can help me with anything).

There is an imbalance. The physicist is useful, but not directly to their community. The plumber, on the other hand, is eminently useful. I am in complete agreement with myself in thinking that all tradespeople should promote themselves and be proud of what they do. They are builders, while many other people are merely hangers-on; but not to the coat-tails of the tradespeople or fabricators of society.

I think in West Germany strangers when they met would introduce themselves by name and profession. I may be wrong. It may have been a twee idea I read in a picture book on learning German. You know how some of the phrases are stilted. In truth, when I worked in Germany, I never met anyone who told me what they did. There is a part of me that wouldn't mind if people in the UK did state their job as part of their introduction. Fat lot of chance of that happening; I have had conversations with strangers for over an hour and not even learnt their name. Asking someone's name is like asking for someone else's telephone number if you are attracted to them. It means I hope we meet again. It no longer means, if we meet again I should be pleased to be polite and use your name.

Consider this:

     'You, yes, you, take my bag, would you?'

     'Yes, Guv.'

And this:

     'Hello again, I believe we met some time ago.' (You were so insignificant to me I didn't bother offering my name to you, or accord you any civility in asking you yours.)

The latter greeting is no more polite than the former. But why? In both cases the initiator is in need of something, physical labour in the first, and mental stimulation in the second. An attitude of greater-than-thou, or mightier in some way, is clearly evident because names are not considered to be important and so there is no personal approach. In both cases the meeting has an element of parasitism. We are all parasites in many respects. I can heat my home because someone else has done some work and thinking in the past. But that is a result of people specialising in a job role, and is indicative of a former meritocracy. Someone, long ago, in the dark Winter nights, when no more fieldwork could be done due to the darkness, made an extra pair of boots by candlelight, and their neighbour liked them, and because they were better made then anyone else made in their community, bartered for those boots. Blacksmith, thatcher, cobbler, they all arose through meritocracy.

Do we expect that the tanner in the same village would give away the best pieces of leather to the cobbler, so the whole community could wear good boots? Did the blacksmith shoe horses and forge iron for nothing so the village could thrive; so farmers could get to markets, and tools could always be on hand? 

No, that is communism or, more kindly, altruism, and thriving would only mean self-sufficiency, because if it means thriving in a competitive market there is going to be a metric of some kind, and I strongly suspect it would be in the form of banking; either a harvest, storing fat on the body, or a universal currency; money.

     'It takes a village to raise a child!' Yes, the hunter teaches basic rabbit-skinning skills; the farmer teaches basic food production skills and how to predict weather; and the potter teaches basic clay manipulation skills (removing air pockets before firing).

Modern life in 2026 has the internet and YouTube videos to teach us those basic skills albeit in a classroom and not 'in the field'. When someone introduces themselves as a teacher of young people what should we do? Give them all the knowledge we have despite the possession of that knowledge being the only thing that makes us worthy of a wage? Despite having spent years honing our skills and distilling information down to useful and pithy tips, we should give it away to teachers? Schoolteachers today are paid the same universal currency that we all are. If we could see into the future and see the financial damage we might do to ourselves if we give away material that should have been copyrighted, would we, when we meet a schoolteacher suddenly clam up about what we do? Are schoolteachers parasites that will take knowledge from people they meet and sell it to someone else, albeit with the payment coming indirectly? Those questions, I feel, are a clapper on a cracked bell for many people. They are discordant and terrifying.

     'Hello. My name is Martin. I am writing a book on inventions that have not yet been constructed or implemented. The book has a section on good ideas too.'

     'Hello. I am an inventor. I have some ideas and inventions that no-one has heard about. Would you like me to tell you about them?'

     'Oooo, yes please!'

     'Will you get some kind of reward, money, fame, or something when you publish your book?'

    'Well, yes, I will be considered by my professional community to be eminently useful and I shall make some money.'

     'What will I get?'

     'You will have helped society, of course. It takes a village to raise a child, you know?'

     'Do you consider yourself to be a milker or a parasite?'

     'Good day to you. I feel an important appointment is looming elsewhere.'

     'Well, that is what happens if you moo a lot. You should expect to be milked.'

Like I said, many philosophers state that altruism only exists when it comes to raising our own children. Sacrifice, that is.

If a schoolteacher DOES NOT reveal that they are a schoolteacher, are they being deliberately false, because they intend to parasitically milk information from unsuspecting others and use it for their own advancement?

It is only a thought-experiment that has no resolution in my mind today. It is however, a child of considering cyber-security and fraud.

You can read edgier posts on some similar subjects (though not necessarily this one) on my own website  martincadwellblog.hegemo.co.uk  (opens a new page). Or my site, hegemo.co.uk for my viewpoint on mental ill-health (opens a new page). Look for the tabs at the top of the site, which you may have to drop down. I don't write on there very often though, about once a week or so.

Learn how I introduce and describe a character by getting another character to do it: https://www.hegemo.co.uk/creative-writing/

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

You can read edgier posts on some similar subjects on my own website martincadwellblog.hegemo.co.uk  (opens a new page). Or my site, hegemo.co.uk for my viewpoint on mental ill-health (opens a new page). Look for the tabs at the top of the site, which you may have to drop down.

Learn how I introduce and describe a character by getting another character to do it: https://www.hegemo.co.uk/creative-writing/

[ 3 minute read ]

The room faded

That Mulberry Molasses you have at the back of the fridge since forever, tastes good in black coffee with a drop of vanilla essence. You can really taste the dark, and strangely seductive fruity promise of a full relationship before a wash of vanilla reason joins the briefly intriguing conversation. The taste is complex and is much like walking on a quiet beach at dawn with the attractive person from the party, not looking for, but open to a hiding place, only to be hailed by the person's partner. You search each other's faces for the same desire you both feel and see it reciprocated and then look towards the cheery but woolly interruption. Again, a glance at each other and then you exhale. 

Oooo! The first sip was sharp and bitter, but there was something in it. Ah, perhaps the pairing was not quite right. But just as you find some features in other people queer and then they become quaint with anticipation, the second sip carries with it a knowledge of what to expect; it allows a deeper sense of flavour to be appreciated. It is much more like the long snog after a first kiss on New Years Eve; hungry and explorative; and mutually giving. There is a mustiness like a light perspiration of flavoured alcohol has permeated the freshness of perfume and scent that was applied hours ago. The kiss and the smell is organic. It is almost primeval and immediate in its intent; now it is tasted. With the kiss broken the taste lingers. But it will be a memory of that moment when full desire of an illicit encounter was unfulfilled. A look into each other eyes and then another deep promising kiss, and then the sounds of the noisy room comes back and you are separated by the crowd; the moment and chance has gone.

I drank only one cup of coffee like that yesterday afternoon and didn't finish it; but there was still some left in my large mug, so I made a fresh coffee over the top of it. The mulberry was still there and the vanilla accompanied it and if I had been looking out a window out of a party I would have seen them leaving together as they should do. I would have looked longingly at one of them and known that without the other, the promise would have been filled but the guilt would surpass the pleasure. Despite the overwhelming sweetness it has in itself, Mulberry Molasses without vanilla makes coffee dark and bitter. It fails to sweeten it. Adding a fruitiness it competes for dominance and fails. Instead it highlights the dark and bitter nature of black coffee that even added sugar cannot erase. I can tolerate eating sugar from a spoon but an equal amount of Mulberry Molasses is too sweet. In coffee, it is a quick and hungry grope in a dark alley; good-looking but ultimately cheap and treacherous. In marriage, it is better behaved and mature and must always be only a soft moment of 'maybe' and never something that needs to be secret.

I wonder, if I add milk to the coffee, mulberry molasses and vanilla,  I might legitimise my relationship with Mulberry Molasses in coffee. With milk acting as a soft blanket, the vanilla, if I add it, might be the smell of a home that comforts us as we embrace. The sharpness will still be there in the background, but it will be a memory of our first kiss when our teeth and foreheads bumped, and the touch was truly and honestly ours, without guilt, secrecy or regret. 

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

[ 8 minute read ]

Elements throughout this post tie in with the Tuesday 17th March 2026 'Why did they suddenly brake?' post on pressing SNOOZE, braking distances, foreign holidays and English Summers. (Tags: English Summer, snooze, holiday, micro-sleep, alert)

What are you up to?

     'What you got there then? Been newting?' I asked.

It just came out as I cycled up behind a man carrying a black plastic bucket. I didn’t know him and had never seen him before. He visibly jumped in surprise. Most people can hear my bicycle tyres on the lane, but he didn't. I suppose the surprise of a man on a bike suddenly by his side and the, what turned out to be, very direct and relevant line of questioning caused him to answer with words that surprised me in return.

     'I have been collecting frog-spawn. It is illegal to collect it now, but I shall maintain that I am relocating it to my pond.' I assumed he meant his pond in the back of his garden. But I was a little confounded that he was confessing to a crime to someone who may just work for the Environment Agency. Who else would ask about 'newt-napping’ with no preamble or introduction? Amazing!

We fell to chatting and named ourselves. He was alarmed that I used to drive at 65mph on motorways in one of my vans while thinking about how I could improve my business. That, to him, was indicative of someone in dire straits and driving too fast to fulfill a contract they were late for. Why would anyone think that? It turned out he used to be an upholsterer and sometimes he had to deliver his finished chairs or things in a van. He considered, it seemed to me, that the slow and easy pace of upholstering also requires gently allowing a van to roll merrily along back roads and giving way to proud Shire horses pulling large open farm wagons (wains).

There is the difference between us; it was my job to be efficient, and everything I could control in my job was firmly in transport and logistics. His job, on the other hand was about fine finishing. 

     '65mph is quite fast enough for me', he said. 'Me too', I thought, because it costs exponentially more money the faster we drive while the extra time saved for each extra unit of speed diminishes.

Let me tell you that it is only at the lowest speeds of travel that the greatest savings in time is made. Assuming one can drive at a constant speed for 150 miles we can see the amount of time saved diminishes as the speed rises:

30 mph – 5 hours

40 mph – 3 hours and 45 minutes (75 minutes quicker than 30 mph)

47 mph - 3 hours and eleven minutes

50 mph – 3 hours (45 minutes quicker than 40 mph)

60 mph – 2 hours 30 minutes (30 minutes quicker than 50 mph)

70 mph – 2 hours and 9 minutes (21 minutes quicker than 60 mph)

80 mph – 1 hour 53 minutes (16 minutes quicker than 70 mph)

90 mph - 1 hour 40 minutes (13 minutes quicker than 80 mph)

100 mph -  1 hour 30 minutes (10 minutes quicker than 90 mph)

110 mph - 1 hour and 22 minutes (8 minutes quicker than 100 mph)

Remember this is at a constant speed over 150 miles.

All well and good, if you can actually drive at those speeds from your doorstep to your destination. In France, on the motorways you can. In the real world in the UK, you need to drive exclusively on motorways and dual carriageways at night and with no other traffic delays for those timings to be considered useful. Our road network and traffic flow just isn't like France though. In the UK, I used to drive from a town right next to the A1 (The 'Old North Road' - Ermine Street - goes through that town) with excellent North, South, East and West roads local to the town, to all parts of the UK, and drive to all parts of Europe, doing 65 mph whenever I could, and the average speed over 10,000 miles, according to my dedicated SatNav, was just 47mph. 

See the AA Route Planner image below for a route from Stoke-on-Trent to central London, that is mostly on motorways. (3 hrs and 9 mins for 158 miles) which is very close to an average 47 mph. Stoke is connected to the M6 by the dual carriageway A500 at Jct 15.

In Town, outside ALDI, I met a man with a £10,120 electric bicycle that does 30 mph. In the UK, it should only be able to reach 15.5 mph, he told me; but by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on his digital internet device, he managed to get it sent from China. I think that means it avoids some kind of check on it, even import duty if the value is so high. Isn't that smuggling? It, like many mountain bikes had a small front sprocket so a very low gear could be engaged to get up those really, steep hills. But it has a seemingly unrestricted electric motor to make this happen! Another cyclist came along with a small front sprocket on his bike and the two of them rattled on about stuff that just went straight over my head. I did manage to hear that the electric motor on the £10,120 electric bicycle was a top of the range one. The whole bicycle is more expensive than a secondhand, 2009 Kawasaki ZZR1400 that has done 11,863 miles, for sale in 'Exchange and Mart' for £5,590; a 2024 Honda CBR650R with 2,196 miles on it, for £6,990; or a brand new moped for less than £3,000.

It seems there is no accounting for taste. From illegally collecting frog-spawn (he only guessed the gloop he gathered is frog-spawn) to illegally importing an electric mountain bike, I come to tax and insurance dodgers.

The UK Government, I heard, intends to crack down on online-sellers to seek lost revenue from tax evaders. As a process to glean more revenue, it might just work. As a device to make the UK population pay more for even more stuff it will indubitably succeed. Yet, on the DuckDuckGo index pages, which reads the Google indexing and others, the 'postoffice.co.uk' entry has 'Start your online selling side hustle with our guide.' to attract 'beginner' online-entrepreneurs to its site. I am pretty sure a 'side hustle' is a slang term used to denote a personal income that is beyond or outside of normal and regulated work activities. If you own a sawmill and openly sell planks with invoices and pay appropriate taxes, the side hustle is selling the normally wasted sawdust to pet owners and stables for cash, 'under the table' so to speak, or as a 'back-hander' in other words, not declaring the sales to the tax collector in the relevant country. A side hustle is not a legitimate business, is it?

I have a very eager chap who keeps phoning me to try to get me to take on a delivery contract. He expected me to give a 'yes' or‘no’ over the phone a couple of days ago. Of course, I told him that I would need to start a new spreadsheet and link it to a number of other spreadsheets to ascertain the feasibility of his offer. It really comes down to opportunity cost, with money thrown into the lengthy equations. One of the key factors for self-employment in transport and logistics is insurance, specifically commercial insurance for a motor vehicle; Goods in Transit insurance; and Public Liability insurance. It took me about five minutes to see that the job wasn't really for me as it stands. However, 48 hours later, I am still adjusting and rewriting whole sections of spreadsheets to fit in any new opportunity, as a value adding programme for new avenues of revenue (in this case, offsetting costs). Even though, I declined the contract, he has phoned me three more times. I don't answer his calls because I still haven't satisfied myself that I have examined all the facets of a myriad of new opportunities and their future viability that such a contract throws up. Just like students flipping burgers to pay for a new future, I have to consider doing undesirable jobs or contracts if they might provide a route to a more favourable position. Money, in my head, is not really measured as having value, as much as it is for its utility (what it can be used for).

Let me explain: Taking on a new contract such as the one I am currently assessing will mean hiring a van. Hiring a van is a fixed cost that heavily impacts on any income stream a new contract provides. Normally, this would be enough to determine whether a contract as a single enterprise is feasible. But feasible doesn't end with 'money in' and 'money out' calculations. The cost of a hire vehicle can be offset by the poor but adequate revenue from a new contract, which means that any other low revenue contract that uses the same van considered as solely providing income, with only the variable cost of fuel to be considered, and of course, time. In the current financial climate there is no choice but to hire only an EV (electric vehicle).

However, time is also a fundamental issue. How much time, as a resource, is used? Time spent 'here', is time that cannot be spent elsewhere. Much as I like to quickly and easily generate income, I also, am not about to skip doing diligent research into paying tax and insurances; nor will I be driving too fast to save useless time; start smuggling; or take protected wildlife in my spare time.

***

According to the BBC web page for Thursday 19th March 2026: 'Stretching 2,689 miles, the world's longest coastal path opens in England' - (About 80% of the route is now open and most of the rest of the path is due to be completed by the end of the year.)'

'The new English coast path links with the Wales Coast Path - an 870-mile route encircling the Welsh coastline. It was completed in 2012 and was the first path in the world to follow an entire national coastline.

There is no single official coastal trail in Scotland, though much of the shoreline is accessible thanks to Scotland's "right to roam" law passed more than 20 years ago. Estimates of its mainland coastline vary depending on how it is measured, but it is often put at around 5,500 miles.

Taken together, a continuous coastal walk around Britain would therefore total some 9,000 miles. At an average of 15 miles a day, it would take almost two years to complete, assuming no rest days.'

For context: The flight route to Perth in Western Australia is about 9000 miles from London, UK.

Now, a trip around Britain including the new 'King Charles III England Coast Path' is an experience I just might be attracted to, tent and sleeping bag and all. 10 mph on a bicycle, where allowed, would take 900 hours, or over a month if you never sleep. A 14 hour cycle ride at 10 mph every day would be 64 days.

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

Snooze through an English Summer

[ 8 minute read ]

Pressing 'Snooze' on your alarm clock means you miss out on English Summers.

Going on holiday to hot countries, I suggest, unless the heat there is oppressive and hated, makes British people indifferent to their homeland. I think it is a bit like pressing 'SNOOZE' on our alarm clocks, every morning. There is a moment at waking when many of us think to ourselves, 'Not yet, just a few minutes more.’ There follows this thought, a wonderful feeling of warmth and comfort, an unfelt feeling when we first lay down to sleep. Many of us consider this to be a prime moment in our lives. I suggest that we are no more rested after those wonderful five minutes than we were before we pressed SNOOZE. Except it isn't five minutes of wonder or perceived comfort, it is more likely to be between three and seven seconds before we are asleep again.

I read somewhere that if we press SNOOZE each morning we are not allowing our body-clocks to set a routine or schedule for sleeping and rising. Simply, the idea is that the brain would eventually settle into a routine process of restoring itself and the body with a 'recognition' that it must accomplish this within a set time. I suppose it is constantly measuring enzymes, hormones, and blood sugar levels, among other things, to know when it should wake up. But what if there is never enough time for the brain to do what it needs to?

My understanding is that the brain can 'micro-sleep' for between 0.3 seconds and a whole three seconds. It does this even when we are driving at any time of the day (or night).

Some numbers

According to the RAC, the thinking time, if we need to do an emergency stop, at 50mph is 49ft (15m) and the braking distance is 125ft (38m); so the overall stopping distance is 174ft (53m). At 70mph the overall stopping distance is 96m or 315ft.

The internet gives us: 1 mile is 5280 feet or 1609.3 metres, so 3 seconds of inattention or micro-sleep is 220ft (67m) travelled at 50mph before the braking time for an emergency stop even starts.

With a micro-sleep of 3 seconds the overall stopping distance at 50mph is 125m. The overall stopping time for an alert and wide-awake person driving at 90 mph is 122m. Poor sleep that results in three seconds of micro-sleeping could be the same as driving unchecked at 90 miles per hour in a 50mph zone.

https://cfm-calculator.com/calculator.php?utm_source=/physics/Stopping-Distance-Calculator.php

In case you need to think about that a bit more (extraneous numbers)

With 0.7 seconds delay (the average reaction time) the thinking distance at 50mph is 15.6m, with an extra 0.3 seconds (micro-sleep) the thinking distance is 22.3m at 50mph. 

The whole stopping distance with a reaction time of 0.7 seconds, thinking and braking distances, at 27mph is 22.7m. This means in a 30mph zone an alert driver will have stopped before someone micro-sleeping for only 0.3 seconds will have even started braking.

But this isn't about about safety, it is about quality of life. By driving around in much of Europe I have seen a whole bunch of beautiful places, countryside, rivers, valleys, mountains, cathedrals and castles, cobbled streets and animals. If I had never seen any of it, I might be more interested in the Muntjac deer that eat the shrubs in my garden. No, to me they are pests, not at all like the magical creatures in Europe that live alongside snakes, wolves and bears.

     'What's your point, Martin?’

Tanned and with skin still fizzing from the UV light of cloudless skies over pristine dry beaches, we look back at the days of fun and easy relaxation; there was no work to think about; there were no school uniforms to sort out, or gym kits to wash. There was no cast-iron budget to adhere to – that was covered by our judicious savings over the year. Now, at the airport, there is a little sand in our shoes and some fragile souvenirs in our luggage. The kids need to be verbally corralled, quietened and shepherded, and we are starting to put ourselves back into our own boxes; the places we need to be in to marry ourselves to our home environment. Along with this airport experience the knowledge of how an English Summer is not reliably hot or dry is beginning to bubble up from our memory. On the plane we are already nostalgic for the warm Spanish, Jamaican or Thai evenings and the exciting scents that come from our fellow diners that mix, sometimes incongruently, with the spicy foods. Again, we look forward in time to when the plane alights (lands) and we may need to put that sweater on over our holiday tops and T-shirts; that sweater that we have in our hand luggage or on our laps. Before we have even gotten into British air-space we have written off any hope of joy and frivolity in our English Summer; at least with any realistic consideration for its possibilities and futures and predictability.

     'The one predictable thing about English weather is it's unpredictability.' A twangy voice from a few rows away reminds us.

It is done; we are no longer on holiday. We are constrained to making only sketches of plans with no contingency plans written in. Perhaps we can visit a ruined castle, but if it rains on the day we will just stare at each other in our homes until we separate; the kids upstairs and the adults periodically commenting on the weather from the window.

     'It's still raining.' Even the sound of the ice-cream van is still discordant and cannot lift us from our disappointment, but we expected all this all along.

According to The Met Office, Summer runs from the 1^st of June to the 31^st of August, which is thirteen calendar weeks. There are thirteen obvious weekends that may be warm and sunny. I would not wager that a Saturday and the following Sunday would both be warm, clear and sunny. It doesn't matter to me if they do not match. After a long period of no rain, as a teenager, I danced in the street, semi-naked, when it finally rained. I have seen, decades later, teenagers do the same. Both times, the rain was warm and there was no hurry to dry ourselves, and both times, the dancers, including me, were laughing; once when I danced and once when I watched.

It is the unpredictability of English Summers that make them so good. But there is more. There is a lushness to our gardens and the countryside when the weather behaves itself. There is an aroma of newly warmed grass and flowers that, drenched in water freely give off scent-laden moisture. There is the sudden appearance of insects that today, warm and humid, and a bit muggy from the shower yesterday, splat on our windscreens, that yesterday were clear; and then there is the smell of windscreen washer rushing into our open car windows accompanying the little flecks of wetness.

But for those who were in Spain or Jamaica or Thailand earlier, or for those who are planning on going abroad at the very end of the school Summer holidays, none of this will be seen or heard, or felt, in the same way as someone who has never been abroad.

     'Huh, it's raining.’

     'Not long now, love.’

     'Have we got everything we need.’

     'Darling, we have been planning this since December.’

     'New Sandals!’

     'Sandals!’

In a job interview, the employer started to tell me about the mandatory holiday days that we can all expect in England. I foolishly told him that I think the reason we need to take time off work is because we are not happy at work. My statement carries too much baggage with it. There is a train of carriages that are pulled by the engine of those words. There is never enough time to unpack them all. I didn't get the job.

My point? That delicious snooze when we really should be getting up makes us resentful of the beginning of the morning. We nominally drive at up to 90 mph in a 50 mph zone, we missed a few important sentences in the morning meeting and because we failed to make in-roads into setting up a sleep routine that our brains crave. We are going to miss out on the joy of being fully awake again, because just like we compare the whole English Summer with two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, we will press 'snooze' again tomorrow morning because warm and comfortable snoozing, just like tanning on a sunny beach, is preferable, in a sensual way, than good sleep, or a trip to an English field on a wet day.

'Snooze' writes off our perception of good sleep. Two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, I suggest, writes off our appreciation of our home Summers.

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

Caught by Cats

[ 5 minute read ]

People of 'yore' (olden days) were far more able to know what was happening in their villages than anyone in the modern world can with their digital devices today.

If the villagers in the past saw a wet cat they could easily infer that there is disease in the area. It might even have been possible to borrow a cat a while ago.

QUOTE 'A magical method of transferring any disease was to throw the water in which the patient had washed, over a cat, and then drive the creature from the house.’ (Encyclopedia of Superstitions). However, black cats should never be driven from the home otherwise the household can expect bad luck and misfortune. Someone, maybe a young family member, may, beyond the little story (below), be scolded.

In this little story we have Blackberry, a cat so named because he was born at Michaelmas, the end of the blackberry season; Spew, a Tortoiseshell cat; and Fluffy, a skinny cat whose fur has mostly fallen out.

     'Hey Blackberry!'  mewed Spew, a Tortoiseshell cat.

     'Hello, Spew.’

     'Ugh! You're all wet.’

     'Yeah, homeless again, as well! It's alright for you.'

     'What do you mean. I get wet too.’

     'It's coming up to May and your tail is needed to rub on warts to make them fall off.’

     'But only in May. In June, I get wet.’

     'I just leave the home before anyone washes. I mean more than once a week, anyway,' chimed in Fluffy, who had sauntered up to join them. 'I used to get fooled by people offering bowls of milk and I would go in, but not anymore.’

     'No,' maiowed Blackberry. 'It is the cow barn for me from now on.’

QUOTE 'In some parts of Europe, cattle were believed to acquire the gift of speech on Christmas Eve. It was however, dangerous for any human being to listen to their talk. Whoever did so would meet with misfortune..’ (Encyclopedia of Superstition). Apparently, the listening person might hear of their own death. It was believed that during the Holy Season of Christmas animals had foreknowledge and knew what might occur on the farm.

     'Wait for us. We're coming with you,' mewed Spew.

A damp warm smell met the cats’ delicate noses. This was not the farmyard of our playful childhoods that we read about in twee books. This was a farm with astringent and corrosive uric acid that threatened to burn the back of the throat, and rampant bacteria that slowly dissolved the wooden walls with its fecal acidity. Yet there were islands of comparative comfort and safety in the guise of heaped straw in one of the corners and in the loft above.

Ignoring the three cows chewing their cud, with nothing else to eat, the cats made their way up to the loft by careful and studied leaping. Spew climbed the ladder. She remarked on the health of the three beasts below.

     'What's up with the black and white one lying down?’

Even though the cats had recognised that there was a man seemingly dozing in the stored hay, they did not expect him to answer Spew's question.

     'I offered to buy it, but it was not for sale. It is probably going to die, so now the farmer has to sell it.’

‘I have heard of you. You are the glue-man's son or assistant, aren't you? Your father buys ill cattle and makes glue from their horns and hooves.’

     'That is why I am hiding, cats.’

     'You make them ill by offering to buy cattle that are not for sale!' hissed Blackberry. He arched his back and fixed the rising man with his piercing green eyes.

QUOTE 'To meet a black cat is usually thought to be fortunate, especially if it runs across the path of the observer. […] In East Yorkshire, while it is lucky to own a black cat, it is unlucky to meet one.' (Encyclopedia of Superstitions)

In America, it is white cats that were lucky and everything about black cats is to Americans, attributed to white cats and vice-versa; so Americans were appalled to see Europeans petting white cats and not minding if they crossed our paths from left to right or turning back on themselves.

     'Oh no you don't.' Blackberry mewled,  'You are not going to stroke me  three times for good luck to save your skin from the farmer.’

     'You will get no luck from Blackberry.' offered Fluffy haughty with her wisdom.

     'Too right!'  mewed Spew.  'He won't even enter anyone houses uninvited anymore. He just won't give anyone free luck.’

     'They keep getting ill. I am still wet from the last time!' moaned Blackberry.

Fluffy pondered for a while and then announced, 'You know what? If the villagers catch you and kill you, I might jump over your coffin so your soul is haunted by what you do.’

Spew laughed because he had noticed two hefty looking lads in the byre (barn) doorway looking up to the loft. His attention had been drawn by a warning low from one of the cows.

     'I reckon that's him.' said the tallest one with tousled hair.

     'I reckon it is, and crazy too. He's talking to the cows.' Neither of the lads had seen the cats half buried in the straw, only the looming, rising man.

     'Karma', lowed the black and white ailing cow before letting its head fall for the last time.

     - End -

Cattle diseases were, like those of human beings, often attributed to witchcraft. So, in medieval days, once the glue-man's son or assistant is caught he would be looking at being dunked in the village pond to see if he drowned or not. If he did drown he would be free of guilt for witchcraft and Fluffy would probably be chased out of the church where his coffin might lie for a while. In 1964, when the Radfords compiled their book, I wouldn't be surprised if offended people made him, or people using magic, look at a full moon through glass or something, or perhaps they might have handed 'magic' people a slippery mirror, hoping they might drop it and have seven years bad luck.

References

Encyclopedia of Superstitions, E. & M. A. Radford, edited by Christina Hole, 1974, London, Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers) Ltd. [1964]

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

You made your bed so you lie in it!

[ 4 minute read ]

In my book, 'Encyclopedia of Superstitions' by E. & M.A. Radford, written in 1974, and edited by Christina Hole, there is an entry on 'Beds'; 'If three people take part in making one bed, someone will die in it within the year.'

Roald Dahl wote some short stories of mystery and intrigue. I think he might have had fun with this superstition. Either three siblings are eager for their parent's treasure and one of them lays on the bed later in the same year; or there might be a coroner's report stating 'Death by natural causes' and then it comes to light that the deceased's three offspring innocently, or nefariously, shared the housekeeping duties for one day in the last year, including making the bed.

It can get more intriguing if the bed-making occurred in Oxfordshire:

'If one day you should wed,

Turn your bed from foot to head.'

The three plotting siblings may inadvertently kill their ailing parent's new spouse.

By now, in any good story, the three siblings may even have advertised their assassin services with cards in telephone boxes across the UK (in the 1970s and 80s of course).

It was just an unfortunate series of events

In court:The house-help nervously chewed on her bottom lip.

     'I was told to take the day off because his children thought I was very kind but needed to take a bit of a break. Gor Blimey! I needed one!'

Later, the barrister in friendly, almost conversational tones asked the oldest sibling,

     'Your father was quite unwell by this time. Did you or your siblings help around the house?'

     'Yes, I believe we did on occasion.'

     'Clean the floors? Make the bed?'

     'Yes, Matilda, Mary and I shared the tasks when the help took a day off. We told her she needed one.'

     'Do you have much experience with housework?'

     'Good Gracious, no! We even had to share making the bed together.'

     'All three of you! Is it a big bed?'

     'No, not really, but it took all three of us to turn the mattress and then remake the bed with sheets and blankets. You know, sort of tuck everything in.'

     'Quite.'

***

It is unlucky to enter the bed on one side and leave it next morning by the other.

Joke:

Sister Mary was walking towards the chapel for early morning prayers when she suddenly stumbled.

     'Goodness! Did you get out of the bed the wrong side?' asked Sister Jude.

     'No, I just tripped' replied Sister Mary.

After prayers, Sister Mary, in the refectory, stumbled again and dropped her bowl as she moved towards a table to eat.

     'Goodness! Did you get out of bed the wrong side today?' asked Sister Grace.

     'No. The floor is uneven,' replied Sister Mary.

Throughout the day, Mary was asked the same question, 'Did you get out of bed the wrong side today?'

Eventually, Sister Mary was asked by Mother Rose. By now, Sister Mary was puzzled.

     'Why does everyone keep asking me if I got out of bed on the wrong side today, Mother Rose?' asked Sister Mary.

     'You're wearing the Bishop's shoes.' said Mother Rose.

***

In keeping with the secret tryst idea. 'In Northumberland, it was deemed unlucky for one person to be the sole owner of bees. There should be a partnership between a man and a woman of different households. Joint ownership by a man and his wife was not enough, presumably because they were considered to have been made one by marriage.' (Encyclopedia of Superstitions).

     'I am just going to see to the bees, dear.'

Sally, a superstitious woman, looked at her husband and then looked out the window at the flock of birds flying from left to right and thoughtfully nodded. 

     'That's fine dear. I have to pop out to make a phone call.' She knew there was a card with a telephone number on it in the phone box at the end of the lane that advertised 'Housekeeping Help by Three Siblings', and thought she might stay with her sister for a year or so.

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

How does that make you feel?

[ 7 minute read ]

Quick! Grab his avatar

Well, that's new! I am convinced that I did so well at school because I went to school with no emotion. I really couldn't care less if I was there or not; I really had no interest in any of the subjects; and I never took my emotions to school that were only relevant to being outside of school. That is not the new stuff.

I am interested in literary devices. To anyone who does not know what literary devices are I shall tell you this: Neither did I until this past couple of months. It seems that fiction writers use devices in their writing in an attempt to evoke some kind of emotion in the reader. The device that drives me wild with irritation is 'show and don't tell'. In other words, don't write  'It is hot outside' (weather); write instead about empty roads in sun-bleached villages where only a mad dog, too crazy to care, is barking in direct sunlight, while everyone else is snoozing in the shade to get some succour from the hazy, soporific and stupefying air.

The new bit is; I am just beginning to understand that The Open University does not want to educate me by just supplying information; it wants to permanently change me by causing me to let my emotions determine my actions (change the way I write). Apparently, I also have to be able to accept and offer subjective opinion both from, and to, other students, and on other selected writers, in future modules, AND interact with tutors, if I am to continue on my degree path. I fail to see what benefit any of this will have in my life. I have absolutely no intention of writing anything, like a novel, for anyone to read. 

Of course, I shall comply because I am interested in how emotion gets in the way of progress, and how modern schooling is so invested in personalising students. Many people will find my cold interest to be difficult to fathom; that I feel, is because modern schools do not teach students how to control their emotions, and if these people scratching their heads in confusion were recently 'educated' through modern attitudes to schooling, then I propose I have already made my case for why they do not follow my reasoning; they have not been taught to control their emotions and how to reason. At least, I have induced that to be true.

I have never made a secret of being troubled by having an IQ that is far higher than the average IQ. It is difficult to know what to do with it. One of the goals I have is to make sure I can elucidate what I want to say without also sewing in confusion. Apparently, this is far harder to do than I ever anticipated because I cannot circumvent other people's emotions. If I avoid sewing in my emotions, people seek to know what they are so they can understand my reasoning. Just like I need to 'show and not tell'. It is like learning a new language to speak to a different species on the planet. I see no progress being made if we all just run around telling everyone how we feel, or how others make us feel. Someone, somewhere, needs to invent the wheel or a steam engine. In short, we need people who can put aside their feelings and come up with a solution to problems; a solution that ameliorate negative feelings that arise from the problem; Don't we?

I am considering doing something that I have in the past been intensely rattled by when other people have done it; I am considering fabricating an avatar of myself. I am thinking that the chit-chat that degree level study with The Open University demands is interfering with my learning. Yesterday, I spent two hours writing an email just to explain why I was writing an email and why I wrote a previous email. Ridiculous! By writing the email I missed a tutorial. Ridiculous! But the person who needed my email would otherwise implement, who knows what, on my behalf. Anything anyone does on my behalf is never going to help me, which is why I am so adamant that people should talk to me and not about me. We have all heard of Chinese Whispers, haven't we?

Essentially, if a bunch of people talk about someone else, the bunch of people need to agree on a coherent shared view of the 'talked about' person. To do this they have to create an avatar of the 'talked about' person. Unfortunately, the 'talked about' person becomes a lesser being than the avatar, and, because they are not party to the fabrication of the avatar, they will always find that they are misunderstood when they attempt to make themselves clear; quite simply because they do not comply with the expectations others have, who were party to the fabrication of their avatar.

I think that I must create a public persona that is quite separate from my private persona, and consider that managing the public persona is just 'what I need to do'. Wait, What? That is what everyone does? They are deceptive, disloyal and untrustworthy? Good Crikeyness! I finally get it. If I want to feel safe in the modern world, I should pretend to be something I am not. But I already knew that. It is why, so many years ago, I decided to be honest. I think Jack Nicholson in the 1992 film, 'A few Good Men' had it right when his character, Colonel Jessup, shouted, 'You can't handle the truth!' to Lieutenant Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, in a courtroom. People just don't want to know, they just want to 'feel'.

Even though students are encouraged to make their subjective, highly personal, opinion clear in reviewing other students' efforts at writing; they are not actually allowed to tell the truth. If they don't like the written work they are reviewing, they must instead use reason to determine what words of encouragement they should use to say, 'Your work stinks!' I fail to understand the efficacy of waffling and prevaricating in telling the truth.

In the past, I have assured my tutors that positive reinforcement in feedback has no beneficial effect on me. However, I have been made aware that tutors feel a need to offer positive reinforcement to students. I am pretty sure that their modern schooling makes them feel like that, because it was, to my understanding, an environment wherein everyone held hands and sang 'Kum ba ya' or something to encourage togetherness or teamwork.

What The Open University is actually doing is encouraging teamwork among the students doing the same modules as I. The very idea that I need a team to do a degree, is to consider myself to be inadequate to the task if I work independently. I fail to see why any educational body would try to attack anyone's confidence. Yet, The Open University seems convinced that no single person can achieve anything of any consequence.

     'Hey everyone. Let's form an attitude of togetherness. It is not necessary to grow a thick skin to protect you from the truth, because none of us are ever going to tell you the truth. Instead, we shall all learn devices to encourage you to make the same mistakes.'

If there is any reality in my wild exclamation, and I am not going to strongly advocate for that, then why does The Open University find it difficult to accept that some of us want to learn literary devices in order to be able to NOT manipulate other people's emotions; evoke emotions that were not evident before? I have no wish to manipulate other people. Indeed, as far as I can tell, it is through people's emotions that they can be controlled.

     'Martin, you need to open up the gateway to your emotions.'

This is why I should create an avatar of myself. Let the world have access to the avatar and see if they can control something that is ultimately under my own control. Good luck with that! The difficult part is to be emotionally distinct from the avatar. I wouldn't want to have a conversation with it any time soon.

None of this is new to me. I knew, when I was eighteen, and decided that I would  no longer allow anyone to take photographs of me, that the 'future me' would feel this way. What is new to me is the realisation that everyone already has an avatar for work, and one for friends, and another for family, and never should their avatars meet. To tell the truth I did  know that. When I was about twenty, I recognised that one group of friends I had should never be aware of, and definitely not meet, another group of friends I had. I did act differently in different circumstances and environments. I pretended I was interested when I was not, but back then I was still shaping my 'private me' and I didn't want just any old crap to influence me. I did have a gatekeeper. 

Now, in the modern world, I recognise just how vital it is to have a gatekeeper and an avatar to attend to the gate. I suppose I have The Open University to thank for that.

The most important thing for me to remember is to never give any clues to what I really think or feel that may be added to a profile of me. 

Michael Ayers in his book on the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), includes a quote by Locke, 'The mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflection on its operations, takes notice also, that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehension, and made use of for quick dispatch, are called so united in one subject, by one name; which by inadvertency we are apt afterward to talk of and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together; because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves, to suppose some substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result , which therefore we call substance.' (Ayers 1998).

Locke is talking of substance, ideas and things. Yet, it does not take too much for us to apply much of what he said to the amalgamation of some simple ideas about a person, which could stand as independent from one another, yet are combined to become a simple idea about the person. This could be the fabricated avatar that is created and shared among members of a group to which the original person has no access.

References

Ayers, M., 1998, 'Locke', 'Substance, Accident and Doubts about Essence', 1998, Pheonix (Orion Publishing), p29

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

Shred, blend and rewrite books

[ 8 minute read ]

From a selection of 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman; 'Locke' by Michael Ayers; 'The Pattern on the Stone' by W. Daniel Hillis; 'Trainwreck' by Sady Doyle; and 'The Devil and all his works' by Dennis Wheatley.

I rearranged my bookcases yesterday and ended up giving myself a whole bunch of books to read 'urgently'. Once again, I feel like I would just like to plug myself into a digital stream and assimilate the words; but that is all I would do, absorb the words. I might just as well as read a dictionary, which would be a great deal more fun. And there it is. Actually experiencing the words and the definitions in a dictionary is preferable to just ramming words into my brain. Without real-time processing, I would understand nothing because I do not have a computer's operating system in my head. My brain does not compartmentalise everything it experiences, ready for close attention of only designated information at its own leisure.

Still in my head from yesterday is the crazy marshall at a fun-run who waved two cars through a red traffic light when I was crossing the road on my bicycle. I had to leap out of the way with my bike because she distracted the drivers by so wildly gesticulating that they didn't see me crossing. Still in my head from yesterday, is her marshall friend who, once I had leapt back from the cars, came over to me and said, 'Excuse me, there is a queue.' On the pavement / cycle path were a bunch of cyclists. I, however, was on the road; a road-user. I had arrived at my position on the road by using the road. Once the cars had passed there was no queue on the road. Some people are merely hazards to the rest of us. I forget, though, that not everyone can see the world as I do. Oh yes, it seems I am arrogant and merciless. However, we all believe that what we perceive is the same as everyone else perceives; and we are all certain that what we believe is the same that everyone believes, and when we find out that this is not so, we are puzzled, and I suggest, a little scared.

Absorbing the information in the books I want to read now, I think, would be absorbing it through a lens of resentment for me. I am so self-absorbed that I want blinkered people to just leave me alone. Of course, I must admit to also having tunnel-vision. My microcosm of existence is in a macrocosm we call the world. It really is incumbent on me to make sure that everyone else's happy microcosm is not negatively affected by my jaded attitude. Hence, I shall be reading the book, 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman. Most of the time straplines and sub-headings do nothing for me, but 'Why it can matter more than IQ' really sings the right tune to me when I consider how the marshalls were weirdly important to themselves. They will never understand what really happened because they pat themselves on the back for doing an entirely different task. 

Michael Ayers, a British philosopher and professor at Oxford University, on writing about the philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) in his first chapter, 'Ideas and Things' writes, 'Locke's epistemological thesis is that the ways in which we conceive of the world, including ourselves, are determined by the ways we experience the world.' Although I started reading the book some years ago, I really must read it again with new insights. (That is why I never deface books with dog-ears, highlighting and annotations). Apparently, there is a YouTube video of Professor Ayers talking in 1985 about Locke and Berkeley. I think it is Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1783) of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer, and clergyman and is regarded as the founder of immaterialism.

Dennis Wheatley in his 1972 book, 'The Devil and all his works', begins with a statement, within which he posits a loose, though considered, opinion that 'To many Christians...the doctrine of the Trinity is no longer fully acceptable. God the Father has faded into the background, and most people find the role of the Holy Ghost somewhat difficult to understand' He then goes on to offer an idea that, using words that were ?acceptable? at the time, [Africans] 'prefer Allah, as the one, indivisible God', for this same reason. I might have to ignore any inference to levels of mental acuity that Dennis Wheatley has inadvertently created with his statement. Reading on, I cannot find that Wheatley was racist, but that may be because it is not important to me. He seems to be able to separate his point from his attitude, and that is enough for me.

 I am not really concerned about inappropriate language, my interest lies firmly in why modern Christians favour 'Jesus' over the 'Father'. I have no care for the Christian God being male or female, because I don't think that God is limited to only one gender. If I believe in a Christian 'God', I also believe in omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. If I also believe that males and females are equal, yet do not believe they are the same, this does not conflict with the language that was used to talk about any Christian God, or the language that will be used to talk about any Christian God. If I believe that males and females are the same, then 'Father' is the same as 'Mother', and it is only semantics that troubles people. Perhaps a nod to modern attitudes on gender equality by modern Christian churches has exacerbated the state of confusion that Dennis Wheatley talked of.

Likewise, W. Daniel Hillis, in his 1998 book, 'The Pattern on the Stone', which has the sub-heading, 'The Simple Ideas that make computers work', makes an assertion about how computers may, or may not solve, the 'Travelling Saleman' problem. I believe it is a Maths problem, which is given to students as, 'Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?' Hillis makes note that the time grows exponentially with the size of the problem, 'No-one knows any algorithm that is order n² or even n³, or n to any power, that will accomplish this. Yeah, I am confused by 'n' too, but I think 'n' is the number of cities in this problem. Welcome back to those happy days of algebra! Hillis wrote, 'If we add ten more cities to the salesman's itinerary, the problem gets a thousand times harder'. I don't know about that because I only think in ways to solve problems using my analogue brain. A bit further on, Hillis, writes, 'No predictable technical breakthroughs in computers will help solve the travelling salesman problem, since even a computer a billion times faster will still be stumped by the addition of a few more cities. 

What I find interesting about Hillis's statements is his complete lack of realising that just 28 years later, his belief is tested by A.I. I don't pretend to understand whether he is now proved wrong; it is not really my aim to do that. I am interested in how something we believe to be true today is false tomorrow. I suggest that, no amount of studying in 1998 that Hillis may have undertaken might have led him towards building A.I. assistive technology. Just as John Gall, the Systems Theorist, said, 'A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked'. Likewise, It is the evolution of understanding that fascinates me.

'Trainwreck' by Sady Doyle, in her 2017 book, with the sub-heading, 'The women we love to hate, mock and fear....and why', writes about the shaming of Mary Wollstonecraft (and a lot more else). Doyle finishes a paragraph with: 'Even if you believed in the brotherhood and equality of all mankind, you didn't want to march into battle calling yourselves the Crazy Slut Fan Club'. Doyle continues her point with, 'The only way for a woman to engage in feminism at all it turned out, was to actively participate in the shaming: Harriet Martineau, one of the few to carry the torch, declared that. "Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied". Doyle finishes with her own alarm that there was an idea that real feminists were entirely unlike Mary Wollstonecraft and allowing her into the movement set it back. She quotes Harriet Martineau again, '[Their] advocacy of Woman's cause becomes more detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness, unless they have fortitude enough [...] to get their own troubles under their feet, and leave them out of the account in stating the state of their sex". Doyle goes on to say that Wollstonecraft was considered to be a whore, a madwoman, an idiot and a joke, and most of all, responsible for setting women's rights back and so was 'wrecked'. I think today, we might say 'cancelled'; except that by modern standards, women today might consider Wollstonecraft as being nothing less than a free woman.

I have never read about Mary Wollstonecraft in the same light that Harriet Martineau casts on her. My interest is not in feminism and whether it is right or necessary or who advocates for it best. My interest is how opinion changes according to the information we are given, and importantly, the environment in which we receive it.

I selected the book 'Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ' (1996) by Daniel Goleman, because it fell open, after a few previous openings, at the chapter, 'Pandora's box and the power of positive thinking'. After Pandora had let almost everything out of the box, she was just in time to stop 'hope' flying away. Daniel Goleman mentions a study by a University of Kansas psychologist, C. R. Snyder, in which the psychologist found that hope is elemental in recovering from disappointment, and thus achieving higher grades after a setback. People with low hope levels just gave up and plodded along believing they could do no better and like a self-fulfilling prophesy continued to get low grades, while people with high hope levels accepted the setback and studied harder, which invariably meant they achieved higher grades than the disappointed 'plodders'. Goleman's book contains a whole lot more on EQ.

My task is to mesh all my chosen books together; to find parallels and connections and attempt to portray how I understand the world, myself and others. But not portray it to all and sundry. No, I need to portray it to myself.  I need to be able to 'see' the invisible whiteboard with pithy statements on it that fit my mind. And this needs to be in a format that, if I ever want to, I would be able to explain to others. If it cannot be explained to others, I feel that it is of no use to me, since it would suggest to me that I have lost my way, and fabricated an illusion of the world and all that is in it.

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

[ 8 minute read ]

My mind is an incubator

'All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity' Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

I randomly opened one of the books on my floor; the place reserved for 'Books to randomly open at any page' or for ones that are likely to be referenced often, like my Roget's Thesaurus and 'Simply Psychology'.

The quotation above, by Samuel Johnson is under the chapter heading, 'Is Mysticism a Kind of Schizophrenia in Disguise?' in 'Zen and the Brain' (James H Austin M.D., 1999, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT)  I have long been fascinated in our febrile states when we dream, and the reasons given for why we dream by 'sleepologists', or at least people who have studied sleep and dreaming, as being so we can process the day's, and prior events, in our lives. I see it as a fountain of data thrown into the air and the brain catching bits as they fall in an attempt to make a coherent pattern or shape while using templates it has made in a similar way before; a bit like the old video game Tetris.

Anyone with a mental disorder, temporary or otherwise, I suggest, claims it as their own, and as it being a part of them. To make any statements on a specific mental state is likely to offend anyone who suffers from any of a myriad of mental illnesses. The chapter title I found in the book is as much an irritant to many people, as it is smack bang in the middle of my intrigue. I haven't read it yet, but I definitely shall. 

I suggest that just as a mental illness or disorder is claimed as being an integral part of someone, so are the templates or heuristics we make as a result of our febrile dreaming. If I am exposed to radical ideas in my days, my dreaming will shake up this information and other information stored in my head, and my brain will process it it like the old game 'Tetris' with falling (or suspended) pieces that need to be aligned and placed securely with no gaps between them. if there are any gaps they have to be thrown into the air again. Wake up before this has happened and we are not rested.

When I was about sixteen I had a fever. It lasted for at least three days. I had nightmares and lay in bed for those days and nights. One night I had a dream in which there were hundreds of wires that needed to be joined. There were an equal amount of red, blue and yellow wires (primary colours you might note) that needed to be joined to corresponding red, blue and yellow wires. The problem I faced in my lucid dream was that I could not test to see if the wires were joined to the right wires until I had joined them all up; then, and only then, could I test it, or 'turn the circuit on'. It seemed that I was 'doing' this for hours. If it was a real physical task it would have taken years. However, there is nothing so quick as the human brain, and dreams, lucid or not, are scripted to take a specified length of time so we can understand how we got to a result and formed a corresponding template, or new premise or heuristic, so it could have been only a minute; but I think my bedside clock told me it was actually three or four hours. 

As soon as the 'circuit' worked, meaning all the hundreds of unlabelled red, blue and yellow wires were correctly connected (in my dream) I fell asleep and woke much more rested than the previous nights of the fever. During the day, I improved as I moved around my home. The next day I was fine, just as if I had never been ill. Of course, as a teenager not eating for a day or two didn't really have any noticeable affect my energy levels, so things were good.

Anyone would have a hard time convincing me that I was unaware that my body was attacking a virus or whatever it was. I am convinced that different antigens were stuck to T cells that were marched out to battle and messages were sent back with intelligence on the enemy invader. My brain, I am certain, made changes to the antigens and stuck them to new T cells and mass produced a weapon that eliminated the virus threat. Because I was interested in electronics at the time my dream was of the complex and seemingly ever-changing conundrum of how to connect electronic circuits. (My understanding of biology and chemistry is sadly much limited and so no-one should believe that I know what I am talking about when it comes to immunology).

Because I fully believe I was prescient during the final battle in my body I cannot turn from considering that the chapter title, 'Is Mysticism a Kind of Schizophrenia in Disguise?' as being wholly relevant.

Many people believe different things. I believe that people are limited in what they believe, because they either lack mental acuity or the ability to focus it; because their mental development is still undergoing significant changes which require more shake-ups and vivid dreaming; or because they have formed a set of templates that negate either disparate or opposite suggestions. In a group this is an hegemony (Link opens a new window on my post about hegemony and doctrine) in that even the articulation of alternative ideas is inhibited.

I am disruptive; I can set aside my emotions in most scenarios. I am ruthless because in setting aside my emotions only reason and the truth is measured. People don't like this in me, and they don't like it in anyone else.

Imagine if an adult enters into a game that three, four and five year olds are playing. The adult may introduce ideas on mortgages and loans, and work, and fitting kitchens or fixing cars or booking flights and holidays and might try to get the little kids to play their own game but with the adult's rules and experiences. I strongly suspect that the kids will be confused and the enjoyment of their game will wane until it becomes only a boring bane to them, if the adult won't let them leave.

I forget every day that everyone is the centre of their own universe. I forget about 'Sonder'. (Link opens a new window with my post on sonder). I forget every day that everyone needs to feel secure in their thinking; that they are confident that they made the right choices, and confident that they listened to the right people. There are, however, persons who set themselves up as superior in knowledge and understanding who seek to create 'thought progeny' in others.

I might claim to be the first person to put 'Cool', 'Calm' and 'Collected' in a sentence decades ago. I might claim to be one of the leading persons who first put 'kind' before 'regards' at the end of letters. I might also claim to be one of the leading persons, if not 'the' leading person who thanked recipients of my letters 'for their patience and understanding in dealing with this matter'. Certainly, I had never heard or come across any of these devices prior to me inventing them in my personal world. Certainly, modern customer service follows this line of obsequious thinking but is not really clearly evinced. The 'Cool, Calm and Collected' I came up with when I was sixteen, and walking to the top of my road tossing the idea about that I should test my environment so I could understand it better by being 'prickly' that day, and then I thought, No! Cool, calm and collected might be a better approach to protecting myself my mental anguish.

It doesn't matter if I am correct in believing this. However, let's say I am correct on all three counts of being an initiator of consequent common action in the modern world. These actions that come from how people think in the modern world would stem from my 'thought-progeny' and a certain amount of pride could be felt and shown, if only that I happened to mention it in a paragraph, above.

Yet, everyone affects the world in some fashion. We just don't get to see it unfold because it takes decades, at least it did.

We should be mindful that a lot of people want to be influencers. What does this mean? 'Think like me!', and by inference, buy what I buy so you can be like me. This is, as I have mentioned a few times before, seeking validation. Someone's thoughts or understanding, no matter how many people share the same thought, either because it was born by immaculate conception as a leap of innovation, or a particular assembling of pieces of the day falling down in dreams; or through insemination by someone else's strong idea or belief, are not necessarily correct.

Once upon a time, the Romans thought it was a good idea to crucify people. They weren't the first to do this though. Today, Romans and their fellow country-people might not be so keen to nail people to wooden crosses. Yet, some people might consider it to be not good practice only because, to them, realistically, it is unhygienic, and some rotting fingers or toes might fall on the kids playing below. This is a prime example of weighting our thoughts.

When someone is in a position to influence my understanding of the world, I, like everyone else, hold hard to my own carefully considered beliefs. They are part of me. Tell me I am wrong and you insult me at the very core of my existence. To this end, I eschew strong opinion. I will listen to anything and adjust my thinking accordingly and appropriately, but zealots are brutes who seek to plants seeds in other people in a deliberate attempt to hatch thought-progeny. The action of seizing someone else's mind, throwing it to the ground and spearing an idea or thought or belief into it, is something that they are proud of. When they see the change in a person who has been thoroughly abused in this way they are pleased, and if there are enough of these changed people, zealots are able to confirm their own bias. 

'All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity' Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).

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

[ 11 minute read ]

No Thanks

Just quietly do your job

While the world seems to want to be more closely linked in personal ways, I vehemently eschew such interaction. There is a strap-line for a Google SmartPhone that goes something like this: 'If someone asks you a question and the answer is on your phone, why not let your phone answer for you?' When the world got widespread availability of mobile phones we all wanted to talk, to share our experiences in real-time. It was fun and fine to do this. I liked it. Then we got social media in which we were able to make artifices of ourselves; we could pretend we live in a big house or near a white sandy beach when we really live on a council estate in Manchester. 

It is okay to lie because we all seemingly do it even if we don't recognise we are doing it. 'I don't have time to do that' You probably do. 'I did the best I could' No, you didn't.

Now though there is a drive towards the personal approach in business and business entities. This came about decades ago when after-sales care became interesting for businesses, largely in the USA. It transmuted itself into the UK and now the personal approach is making itself known in the government bodies in the UK.

I received a text message on my phone. It used to be until quite recently that my phone was not a SmartPhone with internet capabilities. However, the government practically overnight took away our hopes of privacy by mandating that the 3G network be discontinued. DumbPhones worked on the 3G network and as we know, they are dumb because they have no internet capability. That is precisely why I had one. I have a whole gamut of procedures to prevent my personal information escaping from my devices. The most important one is that I never let my SmartPhone go on the internet, not even to update itself. It is a phone, not a media device, to me. I have laptops with internet capability that have manual switches or manually inserted dongles to access the internet, if I want to play.

It is no secret that I am an Open University student; A.I. established that long ago; before I even realised it did. Here is an example of why I never let my SmartPhone go online:

My local council sent me a text that said that they are updating their records and that I should use the link (in the text) to access an online form. Of course, I could allow internet access because I have 20Gb data allowance with my SIM plan, but I didn't. Instead, I very carefully typed the link address into the website bar in one of my laptops. I received a default message, ostensibly saying that there was a problem and access is not enabled. I am used to coding and recognise that the tiniest error will result in absolutely nothing happening. The address though is very simple and I rewrote it and treble checked it; same result. I phoned the council and told them that I could not access the online form. 

     'Let's fill out the form over the phone then, Mr Cadwell'

     'Okay'

     'What is your date of birth and national insurance number?'

     'Why do you want to know that?'

     'I don't know.'

I did not announce who I was when I phoned, but because they have my telephone number on record they knew who was calling. I explained that I would never click on a link on my SmartPhone, which is what prompted the offer to fill out the form over the phone. I knew that by allowing my phone to go online all sorts of interrogatory software would be downloaded and everything on my phone would be uploaded somewhere. That is a matter of course. Samsung, the phone manufacturer, wants to know how we use our phones. Does it have expanded memory? for example. Google want to know who we are and what we do and like, and who our contacts are. Remember, if it is on your phone and someone asks you a question, why not let your phone answer for you?

We all know that a government body can use our national insurance numbers to ascertain our tax position. My council, if I tell them what my national insurance number is, would be able to place me in a socio-economic band. Why do they need to do that? Even credit reference agencies can do this with our national insurance numbers. As an ID it is not as good as a passport or driving licence so asking for this information is not for the purposes of identifying someone, in itself.

The reason the link in the text from the council didn't work when I typed it into my laptop website bar is because the link goes to a site that expects a SIM to be in a SmartPhone with the appropriate operating system. My laptops do not use any SmartPhone operating systems. That is why I use them for internet use; because practically everyone else uses their phone to access the web, it makes my web fun safer since there is a reduced chance of phishing software accessing my data; simply put, it is inefficient to write software to also deal with computer operating software when data can easily be garnered from people's phones anyway.

Just as the person answering the phone at the council office can see on their screen who is calling if they have recorded a number associated with a  person; the web form where the link would go would interrogate a SmartPhone and find the telephone number associated with the SIM, and then be able to present a personalised form to the user. That is fine, except that it demonstrates that interrogatory software is being used. What is your date of birth and national insurance number and what is your email address? It takes me no time at all to recognise that I would willingly and with full permission be creating a profile of myself using an online form, or over the phone, without knowing what the information would be used for. Why would anyone want to have an identifying profile of me? Why would anyone be foolish enough to say, 'Here is my profile, do what you like with it.' ? I presume that if I ask the council they will tell me that they want to personalise their contact with me. And that, is precisely why I never want personalised contacts. That whole idea is merely a way to garner personal information for a profile to be built. I happen to know that our bank accounts can be accessed by Government bodies. In the past, I have signed into my Experian account and been able to see my bank balance in real time. I expect the council for would ask for my bank details. Where do I spend my money? Is there a repetitive amount that denotes a gambling or alcohol addiction or do I have a lot of insurance or a loan, perhaps. In my case, I pay for a website. Might be worth a look to see if I post subversive content, eh?

Imagine this. In its beneficial clothes, personalised contact can make age appropriate information available. If you are young, you might want to be made aware of an upcoming music event; if you are older, you might want to hear about a new lawn bowls green, or vote on one being built. However, the young person will not hear about the new bowls green and the old person will not hear about the music event. Even if neither party cares not for the preferences of the other, the opportunity to search for what interests us is diminished, even if we do not become marginalised by our supposed physical and mental ability or supposed preferences.  Let me elaborate: If I want an ice-cream and an ice-cream van comes along, I am unlikely to walk past the ice-cream van to the shop nearby. My opportunity for satisfying my want is increased by the arrival of an ice-cream van; but it really isn't. Having an ice-cream van immediately before me will stop me going into town to a shop and buying a bowl of ice-cream in a cafe; it will stop me going into Lidl or Marks and Spencers to buy ice-cream and a few lollies as well. So, personalising messages reduces social interaction, just as if your phone answers a question for you. It really is a case of, 'I can't be bothered. In any case, I have done enough, and I have done my duty to interact with you by allowing my phone to answer questions and make decisions for me.' (the settings on the phone being a conduit for suggestions from business entities).

I suspect though, that the council has a hidden agenda. If an empty form came up on my laptop when I typed the link in, I would have been able to enter my name; which is a far safer way of accessing and filling out forms. What the council thought appropriate is that my personalised telephone number should be accessed and sent whizzing through the air as data, that data is in a form that can be harvested (hence the resultant personalised web form). Not a good idea yesterday, today or tomorrow! I can only guess whether the pictures of my garden would have also been harvested from my phone. Of course, there are no pictures of my car or my family or of any persons, or even a pet on my phone. All of these are absolutely part of a highly personalised profile if they ever exist somewhere else.

       'We only wanted to establish a personal way to approach you. How do you want to be approached?' This seems evident because the person who took my call at the council actually offered to only send letters to contact me. That is weird in itself because no business wants to use paper, that has a cost attached to it, to contact anyone. So, it seems highly likely to me that the council has completely got things wrong in that people actually want to have a personal relationship with them as though they are friendly and listening. This is merely a limping alternative to just doing their job. 'I am sorry you are not satisfied, we understand your frustration...' Just do your job!

On education with he OU: I absolutely do not expect to need to ask any tutor for advice while I am an undergraduate. If I cannot understand the text books it is because the OU has failed to supply adequate and appropriate material. Just supply the information in the first instance. End of story. 'Actually, Mr Cadwell, we don't know how to any more. We recognise that people have different needs and so we propose to treat everyone on a personal basis by getting to know them.' That is no doubt due to the current weird way of educating people in UK secondary schools wherein the strongest are compelled to hep the weakest and so the weakest feel empowered and think they can later do a degree - hence the need for tutors being friendly and approachable. Instead of people recognising their limits they have been sold a lie. I have already written on why not everyone can be what they want.

I understand how to build a rapport with someone because I have studied it. One can 'pace' and 'mirror' someone when you are in their presence, for example. If this is not do-able, then sharing common values is a good way of building rapport - 'agreeing', in other words. However, in agreeing with me the tutor gets to tell me about themself. Here is the rub, for me. A tutor is not part of the subject material. I never need to know what a tutor likes or does not like. I never need to know what their preferences are or how they interact with the world. I only need to know the subject material. I absolutely do NOT want to store information with a hook that is associated with any person who is not part of the subject material. Just mark the assignment and say where I went wrong. You know what? Even though I despise A.I., give the task to an bunch of algorithms and let the feedback be emotionally arid.

But this attitude I have is not normal in the UK today. It seems that because people are so connected with their digital devices they have become augmented by their digital devices to such an extent that removing the digital implants from them would likely bring on a mental breakdown that doctors would foolishly diagnose as PTSD, when all it would really be is acute anxiety. 

I worry that world conflict may inhibit me completing the current module I am studying, so I shall jump to the End of Module Assignment, due in May this year, because even with an amazing score for all the Tutor Marked Assignments throughout the academic year, without a pass for the EMA by the deadline I shall fail the whole module. This means that I shall skip at least one TMA, but I have achieved a high enough score at Level One to not need more marks for TMAs.

I cannot imagine beyond being incredulous what people would be like if the phone network breaks down even a little bit. I rather think that most people would die if they were washed up marooned on an island, not from lack of food or water, but from severe anxiety because they have completely lost their personal contacts and reliance on 'how to' advice from the internet. 

In today's climate my reluctance to share my personal information makes me seem hostile. No, that isn't me. I simply loathe personal service. As far as I am concerned, personal service is an excuse for not doing the job right in the first place; that is excepting establishments such as expensive restaurants and hotels that were originally built on the novelty of offering personal service.

Of course, if I had been sold a lie when I was younger and actually believed that I can do anything if I am in a team I would never have noticed that the Council are trying to harvest information.

My tutor means well. He simply doesn't realise that I never believed anything about myself that I didn't discover by myself. 

My degree is my degree. It is not going to be a team degree. Unfortunately, the Open University seems to award degrees on the basis that undergraduates can't do a degree by themselves. Part of my degree, it seems, will be based on social interaction, or teamwork, or a deep reliance on tutor assistance. I vehemently discard such notions as being a valid position or qualification to aspire to.

Thanks, but no thanks.