Empty nest 1.0

Right, so he's gone.  Liz and Holly are also out.  Liz and i have both felt rather aimless today because it's bloody weird not having either of them around or needing to think of anything to do with them, although to be honest that happened quite a while ago - self-sufficient and overcome by ennui for quite some time have our children been.  So it's empty nest time, almost.  Presumably there will be a proper empty nest moment when they both really and truly do leave home, although people say that never quite happens.  Holly announced a couple of years ago that she had in fact "left home", but since she did it while loading the washing machine it wasn't entirely convincing unless we lived in a laundrette.

The thing now is to "start" as i mean to go on.  Unfortunately the whole weirdness of the situation is making it difficult to start anything.  My progress on the ebook has ground to a halt right now - i did displacement, fake work activities like making sure the text was all loaded into Evernote so i could edit it on the tablet if i needed to, but since as i said i am alone in the house, that was all a bit immaculate (=pointless).  So maybe Tuesday is the real day when i "start as I mean to go on" rather than today, but once you've had several days where you haven't started, it gets hard to convince yourself that that's what you're honestly doing.  For that reason in itself, it'd clearly be a good idea.

I have had one thought about all this which might be fruitful, and it's based on the idea of what some childless gays and lesbians seem to do.  There is more than one nurturing role available to us and as a result, such a person might choose to nurture the whole world, the youth of today or what have you.  Hence they might become a probation officer or teacher as a way of satisfying that role.  Now that is software in a sense.  Fertilisation provides the hardware - human bodies capable of learning.  Culture and nurture provide the software.  Liz and i are now in a sense a gay couple, apart from the minor detail that we're heterosexual.  Our role towards the children continues in a subdued way, but our role towards the world now comes to the fore.  Now we are supposed to provide the software more than the hardware.  There are a couple of organisms out there which are now considerably independent - the living bodies of Holly and Daniel.  However, they both existed as a piece of software from way before that in our minds because we were aware of various aspects of possible future children of ours before we even met.  For instance, some time in about 1977, i decided i liked the name Daniel and hence there was a possible future child of mine called Daniel Ure, date of birth unknown, possibly even non-existent.  That child would probably speak English as a first language, be male and so forth.  As time went by, that software was edited together with Liz's prototypes for children and eventually got compiled into the object codes we call Holly and Daniel.  The software is their souls, the hardware their bodies.  I hope that makes sense.

There is of course one other child in this family who has only ever existed as software:  Sophie Gray, date of birth 13th November 1999.  She has a soul but no body and she is still with us.  Here are some pictures of her:

This is a ghostly image of our phantom daughter on holiday in Sussex i think.  Her age here is something like nine.  Here's another one of her at home:

Unfortunately, due to the annoying fact that it's difficult to point a camera into a parallel universe, the shape of her face is a bit distorted, but she's there.  Incidentally, her eyes are the wrong colour in both of these.  Thus we still have a child at home, but she's disabled in an interesting way:  she is less existent than the other two children.

On a sort of combined software and hardware note, there are another set of phantom alter egos too:  the counterpart children who were never born but are everything, genetically, which one is not.  Everyone has one of these.  When the cells which eventually become the eggs and sperm which unite to create the hardware on which our souls run as programmes (or maybe operating systems if we are particularly dissociated or have lots of roles), each of them divides to produce two cells.  The other pair of cells, one an ovum, the other a sperm, has the other alleles, so for example any female will have a phantom male counterpart and vice versa, any homozygously blue-eyed child of heterozygous brown-eyed parents will have a brown-eyed phantom counterpart and so forth.  Hence, somewhere out there in the phase space of your genome, there is another person who is anyone but you:  Ivan and Daria, our non-children, our doubly non-existent phantom non-son Brutus, and the husband of the non-existent Ruth (who is anyone but me) who seems to be called George or Albert.  We all have these phantom counterparts who never existed, and of course many billions of other counterparts who never existed either, but in other ways.  Also, those counterparts Ruth and George have other children which we couldn't have because their very genomes are dormant or have been destroyed, depending on the sex.  These ghostly children can't even manage not to exist as well as the ones which don't.

However, we are not these bodies, whether or not they exist.  We are the software running on those bodies, perhaps with some differences.  We will never know what most of those differences were, and there would even be similarities where a homozygous recessive trait is inherited from both parents. Perhaps all of a nervous couple's phantom children are also nervous, for example.  Think of it this way.  You have a child.  They turn out to have an inherited genetic trait, such as, allegedly, being able to roll their tongue, but you don't find out until they're thirteen.  Now, suppose you had had the other, phantom child instead.  That child would not have been able to roll their tongue.  Similarly, you might find out your son is red-green colourblind.  Their alter ego would have been a daughter who was not colourblind, almost certainly (99.9% in fact).  However, simply because you discover your child can or cannot roll their tongue or is or is not colourblind does not alter the fact that they are the same person.  It means something to say they might not have been able to roll their tongue, or that they might not have been colourblind. It might even mean something to say they might have been of a different gender.  The point is that all that depends on the child's social identity.  They exist as a person in the world almost regardless of minor details in their genomes, although some differences have big consequences.  Therefore, I would say that our children are, metaphorically speaking, software, and that is the sense in which they have souls.  As such, they are also eternal because at the latest, taking my son as an example, he had a name by 1977 and he will exist in people's memories for as long as there are people to remember him after he has died.

To end frivolously, this makes Sophie as real as the other children in the sense that she exists as an imaginary character, but she is still our daughter.

Does that make sense?

It's All Over

That's it.  We're finished.  Next week, our younger child goes to college, a year early.  I'm writing this without a plan or anything, so it'll be a bit stream of consciousness.  So what's new?  Also, probably too wordy.

Right.  Way back in the 1970s, there was a boy who went to an overcrowded primary school in a village in Kent and a young woman studying for a degree in French and English.  Since it's the boy who's writing this, a lot of this will mainly be his story until they get to meet sometime in the distant future from this starting point.  The boy was disappointed to note that his teachers weren't covering the kind of things he was interested in, like biochemistry, plate tectonics and nuclear physics and tended to spell things wrong, make mistakes about life in Antarctica, but he liked them anyway.  Unfortunately, for some reason he was never able to fathom, one of his teachers started to do things to him he wasn't very keen on.  Two of the most notable things were to lock him in a cupboard every day for months on end and make him stand outside in his underwear in the snow.  Clearly he must have done something wrong because these seemed to be punishments, but he was never able to work out what that was.  However, his parents were conscientious and happy to encourage his learning and interests at home, and also concerned at what was happening at the school when they found out, so they moved him to a small school in the next village which was much smaller and friendlier.  He passed his 11+ there and went to secondary school.

In the meantime, the young woman graduated and went to teacher training college, where the now well-known autonomous education advocate John Holt actually had some of his books on the syllabus.  She gained her PGCE and started teaching at a comprehensive in Birmingham.  She found that the nature of the classes was such that it was not really feasible to practice as she would have hoped in that kind of environment, and moreover that whereas the children tended to bully the teachers, the level of pettiness and sophistication of the bullying mind games pursued by the head and the other teachers was far lower.  Clearly they had learnt much from their experience of school.  So eventually she decided to quit.  Sadly, at this point she leaves our story for a while.

In the meantime, the boy was at secondary school.  Although he was very happy to see his friends, some of whom were also his teachers, he had given up any kind of engagement at school work in most areas because he no longer expected it to be anywhere near the level he expected, although it had also to be said that much of it was still worthwhile because the school was an ex-technical school and stressed the practical quite strongly, such as annealing aluminium, worming sheep and making stopped dovetail joints.  There were also plenty of other interesting subjects, but on the whole, the teachers had little choice but to teach to the syllabus, which was extremely dumbed down.  A new problem emerged:  the harder he tried, the worse  his school reports became.  Even so, school became a useful escape to him and it was good to have to learn things which were useful despite his lack of interest in them.  The worst aspect of all was that of homework, because it was a time-consuming and boring distraction from his reading and other studying which he did when not at school, in the library, the college library and to a lesser extent in the school library itself.  He also felt that many of the teachers were on his side but their hands were tied by the nature of school itself.

Finally, he got to do A-levels, which he found a challenge, but the atmosphere of the sixth form was better than that of the lower school.  He got them, rather poorly because he had chosen subjects over a wide range, and went to university, where he found that his education was broader and the opportunity for political activism, among other things, considerable.  During this time, he joined the Green Party but was disappointed to note that they supported home education, which he believed at the time should be illegal because it gave families too much power and he felt that families were an anti-social influence on children which made them selfish, materialistic and intolerant.

However, as time went by, the government did various things to education and schools which took them ever further from the child-centred ideals pursued a decade earlier, although he paid relatively little attention to this because he had no plans to have children or start a family.

The young woman became an English teacher for speakers of other languages, an activity in which he also participated, though they never met.  They met in 1990 but she then moved to Madrid, where she continued to teach English.  Then, in 1993 she returned to England and they married.  At the time, he assumed that he was sterile and therefore that children were not a prospect.  He was wrong.  A child was soon on the way and they realised that in keeping with their beliefs, they wanted to have a natural pregnancy, natural childbirth, practice co-sleeping, use the principles of the continuum concept and then - what?  This question was answered at the Lib-Ed conference shortly after the birth of their first child.  They decided that the fairest thing to do would be to make their children aware that they could opt to go to school or not, and that they could change that decision at any time with no pressure.  For a while, their elder child wanted to go but in the end, never made that decision to go, and their younger child seemed just to assume that he would not be attending school.  Therefore, the early years of their parenting, which they shared in common with many other parents who went to parent and toddler groups and the like, and generally interacted with their children as any parents would as they learned to walk, talk, dress themselves, eat, sing, play and make friends, continued.  As the children's friends and cousins reached school age, they simply continued in the same vein, making progress, gradually becoming more independent, attending the same birthday parties and clubs as the other children along with social and educational groups their parents and other adults and older children organised.  They learned and played at all sorts of things, since the business of a child is to learn and to play.

Then, almost sooner than anyone realised, the first child was too old for school and went to college.  Then the younger child took his decision to enter formal education, in the same college a year earlier than his peers at school.  It was all over.  They had somehow never got round to going to school, and everything had worked out better than it might have done if they had, though of course that was the route not taken.

It goes without saying that the young woman was called Liz Gray, the boy and man was called Mark Ure, and the children were called Holly Gray and Daniel Ure.

Some people call this form of parenting home education, others home schooling.  It's neither.  It's simply parenting, and everyone does it wrong and tries really hard to do it right.  Some people also send children to school for a small fraction of their childhood, often because they both have to go places which don't welcome children to work to get enough money for their children, so they need childcare which their isolation means they cannot easily find in any other way.  These circumstances are new and unusual, having arisen in something like the last 0.5% or less of human history.  Nor does it just occur in the home.  It occurs in the Universe.  We live on a particular tiny blue dot, so most of what we experience is to do with that tiny blue dot and in a way it's Earth Education when we're not looking at the sky or flying to other galaxies in our minds, but there are no premises for learning, whether children are at school, at home or somewhere else, other than the human central nervous system and specific immune response.  Nor does learning begin at 9 am and end at 4 pm, or at the age of five and end at eighteen.  Learning is just what we do because we are human.

Schools have their place.  If there is no-one to care for a child because all members of that child's extended family and all appropriate neighbours and friends really have to do something else in a place where the child is not welcome, the child needs to go somewhere to be cared for, and that place is school.  However, no-one should mistake a school for a place of education which is somehow better at facilitating any particular child's learning.  It is for childcare.  For a small minority of children, it's possible that they will also learn other positive things better at school than they would elsewhere because all children are unique and they cannot be generalised about.

So that's the situation.  The children God lent us are going back into the world and we will be taking a smaller role in their parenting from now on.  We did what we felt was the responsible thing - we parented and raised our children without expecting anyone else who wasn't well-known to them to take them on when they had never asked for the job and might not know them well enough to care for them appropriately.  Now they have become adults and are making their own way in the world.

It's over.

No it's not.  It's just beginning.

Notes on plans for Working Tax Credit and Universal Credit

These are a few ad hoc notes on the question of WTC and UC:

For a couple of years now, the Government has had plans to change the benefits system considerably by introducing Universal Credit.  My concern here is with the aspect of that policy which is most likely to affect me personally - the changes in Working Families Tax Credit.  This is a benefit paid to people who are in work but on a low income.  The Government is concerned that this benefit is being used as a way of avoiding paid work.  More specifically, it is suggested that people tend not to do enough paid work because they know they can fall back on WTC.  This is also seen as applying to some self-employed people on a low income.  I am of course a person who is self-employed with a low income.

First, a preliminary comment:  I am aware that i'm underemployed.  I have less paid work than i would like to have and i think this is probably partly linked to psychological factors.  It is in fact possible that this change in policy is exactly what i need and that it will motivate me to find a means of increasing my income through paid work.  All of this may be predicated on an unrealistic doubt that i can achieve this.  However, even if this is so, there will be other people who lack that luxury, so whether or not i can extricate myself from this predicament, my comments are still relevant.

The people who will be assessing how self-employed people are performing may not have experience of small businesses themselves and this should be a requirement of anyone whose job involves doing this. Otherwise they risk making poor decisions.

Our first priority must be to our customers. If we are expected to attend interviews at short notice when these clash with appointments or other work which needs to be done on time, it will reduce the quality of our service to them and impair our ability to grow the business.

Formerly self-employed people do not make good employees and employers know this. This implies that, whether or not they are visible in the unemployment figures, the fact is that they are more likely to become long-term unemployed. This can of course be hidden by taking them on as trainees, but again they will be poorly motivated and this will impair the productivity of larger employers.

It usually takes well over a year for a start-up to make a consistent profit. Expecting a newly self-employed person to do so in such a short period of time will scupper their chances of making it work in many cases. I would expect this to be clearly understood by a party which aims to support the private sector.

Causing businesses to fold will lead to costs to the taxpayer in the long term and an increase in unemployment because they will be unable to grow and the self-employed person who would have taken on new employees after their business has been given a few years to grow will not now do so.

The senior party in the government has a long history of opposing the minimum wage for various reasons, one of which is that it makes it more expensive to employ people. By insisting that self-employed people pay themselves the minimum wage, it is introducing an excessive expense to many people who may prefer instead to invest the profits from their work in their business, and there is no clear argument consistent with a Conservative outlook to insist on this being so.

Self-employed people are more likely to vote Conservative than employees. By reducing the number of self-employed people, the government is reducing the number of Conservative voters. If formerly self-employed people are given jobs or reduced to complete dependence on benefits, they won't be as aware of how much of their income goes to the government and are therefore less likely to support a party which aims to lower taxation on principle. They will be low-paid employees or unemployed instead and therefore natural Labour voters.

'You Could've Thought of That'

In the meantime, i have published my first book - 'You Could've Thought of That'.  It's a collection of fictitious ideas and inventions arrived at through lateral thinking which may or may not work.  I'm already working on a second edition aimed at children.

Here's the cover and blurb:

 Buy it here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-a-ure/you-couldve-thought-of-that-a-compendium-of-ideas-which-havent-been-thought-of-yet/paperback/product-20266026.html

Work on 'Here Be Dragons' continues.  It now covers around thirty mythical animals, including some modern myths such as the squonk and Bigfoot.  Illustrators still avidly sought.  There's a slight hitch on file size due to images, which will be dealt with through tweaking.

Progress report on 'Here Be Dragons'

As you're probably aware, i'm in the middle of writing three books.  One is close to being ready to be published as an Ebook and probably also a small paperback for using, in one way or another, on the toilet.  I will temporarily draw a veil over the second except for a dark muttering about E4, the TV channel.  One or two people might know what i mean by that.

The third is of course 'Here Be Dragons'.  This started life when i noticed that my best science sessions seemed to be based around groups attempting to design things, particularly when they were trying to make up an animal.  Moreover, the most engaging animals are mythical ones.  Therefore i decided to write a modern bestiary, entitled 'Here Be Dragons'.

Enough of the preamble.  The current state of the book is as follows.  After opening with a factual introduction, it is framed in the device of being a report by an organisation  called the ITA - the Interdimensional Transport Authority.  This is a secret organisation set up to investigate the discovery of a booth which enables people to travel to alternate universes, of which four have so far been discovered.  These are:

* World Zero:  This world.
* Realistic World:  A world which is superficially identical to this one but where popular misconceptions, urban myths and conspiracy theories are usually true.
* Midgard:  A version of Earth which is slowly recovering from Ragnarok and is populated by creatures similar to those of Norse myth.
* Ancient World:  Where many mythical entities and lands really exist, such as dragons, centaurs and Atlantis, and where real things in World Zero such as America and kangaroos are merely mythical.
* Aphrodite's Children:  A flat world on the back of four elephants on a turtle in the imagination of a planetary intelligence on Ancient world's version of Venus.

This book is based on the mediaeval bestiaries, but has since mutated into a combination of a bestiary and an atlas.  It's currently 66 000 words long, includes a number of maps and diagrams but so far, no pictures of animals because of my questionable drawing skills.  I don't know when it'll be finished but it feeels like it's growing and growing endlessly with no end in sight.  I think what i'll have to do is settle on a more detailed plan and stick to it.

So anyway, in the meantime you may want to read my other book, 'You Could've Thought Of That', which will be coming out very soon.

797A

Why not practice as a herbalist?

Various people will have noticed that on the whole, i no longer practice as a herbalist.  This is a probably short note on why this has come to pass.

The professional bodies and many professional medical herbalists are very keen to promote the idea that the general public should consult professional herbalists in order to receive personal attention and a treatment plan tailored to their individual needs.  This is an admirable aim, but it cannot often be achieved in practice.

On the whole, inquiries made to herbalists are about whether we stock specific herbal remedies.  Only rarely will people make contact with herbalists with the aim of making appointments for consultations.  People generally hold that their knowledge about their health is sufficient for them to use the remedies we supply to heal themselves.  Many herbalists may disagree with this, as it seems to imply that they have degree-level education in medicine, botany and pharmacology, and are able to achieve enough detachment from their situations to assess their health with some objectivity.

One key word here is education.  A professional's main competitor is their client, who has chosen to avail themselves of the services they provide.  These services are expected to involve higher quality and a greater level of experience than is generally available to the client themselves.  However, this is often illusory and involves the professional talking down the client's confidence in their own self-sufficiency.  It can also involve the presence of artificial barriers preventing access by the client to the goods or services with which the professional provides them.

Clearly there are some areas where this is an adequate assessment.  For instance, i am probably never going to be able to wire a house in the conventional way, let alone build one.  Nevertheless, trade prices presumably allow a builder to do so more cheaply than their clients, which is an artificial barrier.  This is to some extent fair enough, provided we can all erect such artificial barriers due to our different competences.  However, there are many people whose work has very few perks through no fault of their own, and this disadvantages them.

It would be a more ethically acceptable approach to attempt to work with a client to maximise their degree of competence in improving and maintaining their own health.  Rather than undermining their self-belief, it would be healthier to give them the ability to supercede their dependence on you.  This implies education rather than a client-consultant style of relationship.  There are a couple of possible approaches to this, including one-to-one education with a client, classes in the subject of herbalism and the likes of herb walks.  One-to-one education works quite well but is hard to imagine without consultations, which cannot be effectively promoted to the public.  Classes also show little interest and herb walks none.

The conclusion that has to be drawn from this is that the general public do not feel a need for such services.  This is either a misjudgement on their part or our offering such services is a misjudgement on ours.  Adopting the former opinion seems patronising, because their own assessment of the situation is that they do not require our services.  It is also true that a high degree of intuition based on subjective experience can be important to address health problems.

When people get ill, they often become very motivated to find out for themselves what's happening and how to deal with the problem.  As a result, many people have already educated themselves about their condition before they contact a herbalist.  This is a positive thing as they have done what professional ethics requires a herbalist to do - reduce dependence on their profession and give the client control.

Consequently, there is no practical role for a professional herbalist in the form of consultations.  To say that there is involves a low estimation of the competence of the general public.  Therefore, whereas i will continue to offer consultations to the tiny minority of people who want or need them, this cannot be part of the main task of a herbalist.

However, this does also mean that people's general understanding of medical issues is very advanced, and calls into question other healthcare professions.

The rhetoric of thyroid dysfunction

I'm putting this here because someone expressed interest.  It's a summary of something i wrote a few years ago.

When diabetes mellitus is discussed in medical consultations, healthcare workers and patients both tend to refer to numerical measurements of glucose levels in blood as the disease itself rather than the signs, symptoms or pathology of the condition.  Discussions of thyroid dysfunction can be similar.

Rhetoric sometimes sees three major elements in discourse, namely logos, pathos and ethos, which are respectively the quantifiable and rational part, the generation of sympathy in the audience and the reputation of the speaker.  In the case of a medical consultation between a patient and an endocrinologist, ethos is a major factor.  Logos includes such things as blood glucose measurements and in the case of thyroid dysfunction also often the measurement of various thyroid hormones in the blood.  The use of numbers is frequently reassuring to both parties and brings a feeling of knowledge and control.  However, in some cases this can be higher the more abstracted these figures are from everyday experience and the use of logos in more direct physical examination such as the timing of peristalsis can be deprecated in spite of its closer link with the subjective feeling of ill-health by a patient.  The reputation of CAM practitioners is often very poor and they are less able to use this to persuade clients and the general public.

There is a tendency for clients to prefer more abstract forms of logos from sources with superior reputations to more concrete forms of logos or pathetic ways of describing health and disease, and a paradoxical preference for that which has a looser connection with everyday experience over that which is more experiential.

There you go, that's roughly it.  Irrelevant really, isn't it?  I should point out that due to the serials crisis and poor protocols practiced by CAM people, this is generally the kind of research that can be done in this context.  Anyway, i'm abandoning the whole thing:  people can educate themselves - much healthier.