Occasional-Essays

Image Source: (c)Nathan Anderson – It is to a stroke of fortune that I owe listening to the final episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast three times over the last week. The first of the series of events which led to that was upgrading to iOs11 which messed up my podcasts, led me to seeking out Overcast as a replacement, and then having to decide on which ones to subscribe to or which to bin. That episode, Basement Tapes, explores a son’s reaction to finding out he has played a part in debunking to some of extent what has been the essence of his father’s work. The son, Robert Frantz is contacted out of the blue by a researcher, Chris Ramsden (Scientific American describes as the Indiana Jones of science), who is looking to acquire raw data from an experiment conducted by Robert’s father, Ivan, in Minnesota between 1968 and 1973. What results from Chris’s analysis of the data is a fundamental questioning of the conclusions of that study and the diet-heart hypothesis which claimed a linkage between a low saturated fat diet and the low blood cholesterol levels it produces and a reduction of the associated death rate (or adverse outcomes, as the study euphemistically puts it). ...

I decided that for Lent this year I would give up caffeine, if starting almost a week after the properly faithful and switching to tea, topped up by the odd cup of decaf coffee count as giving up. No longer being part of any of the Orthodox traditions meant I failed to get the prompt I took for granted growing up, the ash crosses on foreheads that signalled Ash Wednesday, and the start of Lent. The point of Lent is spiritual - which giving up caffeine is not, at least on the surface - but I think there is a spiritual point in trying to best what has become a costly, insidious habit; proving to myself that coffee is not my master. Given how much my morning routine at work is related to taking time out to reflect at the start of the day with a cup of coffee in hand, it should be an interesting thirty-seven forty days. Hopefully it translates to better sleep - the data from my Fitbit will be the judge of that. ...

For the Wordpress Discover Challenge Prompt: Song - - 1995 was an interesting time to be young and Christian. DC Talk, The Newsboys and Audio Adrenaline were at various stages in their evolution from being the niche interest of church youth groups to becoming recognisable by mainstream music lovers. Seemingly out of the blue, Christian Contemporary Music was on its way to acquiring a sort of coolness that the work of the likes of Larry Norman and Rich Mullins had deserved but somehow never achieved. In my corner of the world, Hosanna Music’s body of work was the rave, a slew of live worship albums including a couple recorded in post apartheid South Africa (Tom Inglis’We Are One and Lionel Petersen’s Rejoice Africa) building on a collection that included several offerings from the likes of of Ron Kenoly, Don Moen, Bob Fitts and Randy Rothwell. ...

Source [ Afolabi Sotunde]. For the WordPress Discover Prompt, Outer Layers --- When asked to describe my look, I tend to go for scruffy chic, this being my attempt to rationalise away what is my laissez-faire approach to dressing up. Left to my devices I default to four objects: jeans, a t-shirt, super comfy shoes and a pair of glasses which I am increasingly dependent on. On the occasions on which I have deviated from these, they have tended to be to the relative safety of a shirt and a blazer over jeans; the full shebang - a suit and a tie - only coming out for weddings (the last of which I agonised over before buying a new suit) and black tie dinners, which I tend to avoid. I suspect I have managed to get away with this, particularly at work, because I work in the Engineering field and have largely worked for employers where a formal dress code has never really been enforced. ...

Brexit - full – It’s official, we’re the leaving kind after all. Voting last Thursday concluded with a 52% majority that Great Britain’s future path lay outside the EU framework, ending a 43-year association. The easy conclusion - particularly given how much the result has been affected by voted cast south of the Solway-Tweed line - is that insular England has held the Union hostage, but I suspect things are far more nuanced than that. ...

Image Source Two weeks ago on a whim, I decided I would book a short trip away from the ‘Deen, to London. The plan was simple — fly out on Friday night after work, catch up with a few friends, particularly S, and then head back on Sunday night, with no one the wiser at work. At such short notice, British Airways to Heathrow was a non-starter, as was Flybe to London City. This left EasyJet to Luton or Gatwick as the only viable options. In the end, I settled for Luton, the weekend of the 10th of June being the best fit with friends and family. On the day, having packed my go to travel bag and done work, I hopped on to the 727 from the bus station next to work, arriving just past 6.00pm for what was meant to be a 7.35pm flight. ...

Image Source The conversation - when it happened - happened on a whim; as unplanned as could have been. The intent - to set up a face to face meeting later in the week - quickly snowballed into a full-on conversation about the direction the whole L thing was headed. As it turned out, it was headed nowhere. It, the culmination of months of chasing, was about as anti-climactic as could be, worsened perhaps by how sure I thought I was that this was it. A lot of things sucked about it - not least the fact that the reasons offered; the uncertainty around work and the pressure from family all felt like convenient cop-outs. That my interest, made known clearly and consistently over the past few months ultimately counted for nothing felt like a slap in my face. The alternative too felt inferior. True he was probably a lot more heeled than I was, but there was baggage which I didn’t have which - given the seriousness with which L had seemed to chase this - should have counted for a lot more than it. ...

Source – A year ago if you had asked me if I thought I was a patient person, my unequivocal answer - given without so much as a batted eyelid - would have been that I thought I was; somewhere between 9 and 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10 if you had pressed me to quantify. The reality, grudgingly accepted after much soul searching a few weeks ago, is that I am not; a realisation that has left me second guessing the validity of all the other assumptions about myself I carry. The first seeds of doubt to assail my iron clad convictions were sown by an offhand comment by my friend M, the context being a decision she needed to make. As far as I was concerned, it was an open and shut case; she needed to put the poor sod she was stringing along - in my opinion - out of his misery. To her it was a lot more nuanced than that, for which I got the quip about being impatient (and unfeeling). ...

In his seminal essay Why I Blog, Andrew Sullivan reflects on the subject of blogging; it’s similarity to - and shared etymology with - a ship’s log, its rise in step with the proliferation of the web technologies which have made it possible, and the unique niche it fills in the online space. Its overarching and enduring quality, he surmises, is due in part to two things; the informal, almost instantaneous nature of blogging as a reaction to news and events, and the intense, if sometimes unforgiving, interaction between blogger and reader that blogs enable. The conclusions he reaches are from considering a specific form of a blog, the sort that lies at the intersection of personal reflection and journalism, much like his (now retired blog) Daily Dish. Overall the numbers are mind boggling. Back in 2005, Technorati estimated that a blog was born every second, with 14.2m blogs being tracked by them back then (For some context, Tumblr which didn’t exist back in 2005 was home to 261 million blogs as of the 1st of November this year). The vast majority of this blogosphere is made up of blogs that are far less serious in nature and content than the ones Sullivan’s comments concern primarily, however his conclusions apply, perhaps more-so in this personal, less formal space. ...

In the opening chapter of his autobiography, Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez explores his introduction to the English language, and the strain his commitment to mastering it places on his relationship with his parents. Being Mexican immigrants to America in the 1970’s, their primary language of intimacy and engagement is Spanish, their efforts in English being halting and deeply accented, even though his mother is an excellent speller of words. The emotion most stirred in those early days - when he as the up and coming scholarship boy gets to be out and about with them - is one of embarrassment and perhaps frustration at their limitations. For him, as with most people looking to escape the limitations of a certain kind of background, aspiration is a keen motivator, one that drives him to seek to immerse himself in knowledge and books, and take up the manners, airs and graces of the class and culture he looks up to. ...