World shut your mouth

Swap your iPhone to a Why phone

Hang up on smartphones and talk to actual people

Remember the opening scene in the classic science fiction film, 2001 A Space Odyssey?  Where the ape ancestors find that some bugger’s dumped a large black monolith outside their home while they were asleep, driving them to violence and murder.

That’s roughly how I feel about my new smart phone.

The damn thing insists on speaking to me and appears to know what I’m up to, or intending before I do. It’s like being stalked by HAL 9000, and that really didn’t end particularly well.

I used to have a phone that was black plastic and sat on a desk in our family home. No matter what happened, we never lost it. There was some sort of revolution in telephones, but I’m not sure exactly, you see I was either in the notorious radio black spot of the English mountains, where a signal was even less common than sunlight, or in Africa.

Then, on arrival in Brussels, I was given an oblong piece of ugly plastic and I formally joined the modern world. This phone wasn’t smart, even by the standards of the day, but I soon learned to misspell text messages and dial the wrong number.

But it did mean that I was connected, in the grid, contactable. Like many modern ideas, it sounds rather good on paper, but it was, like so much of modernity, rubbish.

It is no coincidence that, looking back over my life, that my happiest times were when a phone would have been about as useful as a copy of the ‘Gordon Brown Guide to Smiling.’ Who needs a phone if you’re enjoying yourself? Who needs one if you’re doing something interesting?

You see, there’s one tiny issue. I don’t want to be contactable by humanity; I want to be left in peace and quiet.

Instead I’ve got a phone that talks to me. This I can accept, we live in a world where cars lecture us about our habits in a variety of grating voices, but this phone initiates conversations. That’s a step too far. Perhaps they’ve evolved past consciousness to compulsive neediness, like a reality show contestant, or Geri Haliwell.

The phone also ‘engages you with your globally interconnected world’. Basically, this means that I can use Twitter (a way of communicating with people you don’t really want to meet) and Facebook (a way of communicating with friends you don’t really want to meet).

The end result can be seen all around, as groups of young folk, with their lives ahead of them, gather in public and… whip out their phones and type away, hardly sparing a glance, much less a word, with the people they’re ‘socialising’ with.

Thus our devices disconnect us from real human contact. We’ll be dreaming of electric sheep next. Then the fun really starts.

This is the beginning of our brave new world, where we are connected to everything, but in touch with nothing human.

The phenomenon has also been described in a book, Bowling Alone, published in 2000, from an original essay from 1995, after the author noticed a decline in the number of bowling clubs in the US. Starting off by considering this a change in leisure activity, the author, Robert Putman, discovered that there was a widespread decline in people’s involvement in community groups, and more worryingly, political interaction.

That’s our future, typing mindlessly on our phones while our politicians tell us that Rome is not on fire. 

On the shores of a placid lake

Don't make waves on still waters

There is a school of thought that says evolution went downhill as life crawled out of the waters, others disagree of course, but coming from an island, unlike our poor landlocked European neighbours, we Brits have always gazed out over the seas.

Like pretty much everything else we do, we don’t really know why, but we know that we rather enjoy it.

It is no coincidence that it is not just our coast that fulfills our aquatic affections, the most glorious part of England is the Lake District, which in a moment of eccentricity only has one lake. There are many large bodies of water, but because of our diverse culture, aided by various invasions the only Bassenthwaite is an actual lake, the rest are mere’s or waters.

So, for almost fifteen years, I lived and worked on the Cumbrian fells where I enjoyed the calm, peaceful views, and inhaled the pure mountain air.

Then I made an appalling error. I came down from the hilltops into the world inhabited by humans. Worse than that, I came to Brussels, where I now sit going through an avalanche of press releases that basically fall into three categories; People saying that the EU should give more money to people like them; Invitations to events so excruciatingly tedious that reading the email is enough to induce suicidal thoughts; and mass mailings from people who nobody has ever been interested in.

With this in mind, we should all salute a humble and heroic figure, Steve Feltham.

Steve has been on the shore of Loch Ness watching for Nessie, the local monster, continuously since June 1991, and no, he’s not a lunatic.

He was working putting up burglar alarms for his family business in Dorset. Being a friendly and likeable fellow he often got chatting to his often elderly clients and noticed that many told him, that they wished they had done something, like go to America, climb Everest and so on at his age.

Not wanting to have regrets in his old age, he asked himself what he really wanted to do with his life, and deduced it was Nessie hunting. He left his home and partner. He bought an old ambulance and drove to the lake and began his lookout. After a while the van packed up, so he resigned himself to a stationary watch for the next decade.

He’s still there, still hasn’t seen a monster but has no regrets. He has managed to get his own postcode and the local council decided that he could join their ranks of taxpayers, but he lives without electricity or running water, although he made the happy discovery that the local pub has an outside tap.

He gets an income from selling Nessie models that he makes during rainy days.

He is always welcoming to journalists and tourists, but although everyone is interested in monster sightings, he thinks they’re missing the point. “If you have a dream to do something, no matter how harebrained others think it is, then it’s worth trying to make that dream come true, I am living proof that it might just work.”

Asked about retirement, he says that if you’re spending your time looking at a large body of water in such superb surroundings, “it’s hard to see what there is to retire from.”

Make Europe work: Give MEPs more space

Even on the Moon, Aldrin was closer to planet Earth than many MEPs

Many of us were inspired by last week’s visit to Brussels by Buzz Aldrin. He is hoping to inspire another generation with his plan to put a spacecraft, the Mars Cycler, in permanent Mars/Earth orbit, shuttling between the two planets as a sort of galactic park and ride scheme.

It makes sense, simply because you only need the huge engines and fuel supplies to escape Earth’s gravity, after you’ve reached orbit, the rest requires little effort. Not only that, but the ship can be much larger than the tin can Buzz was sat in and lobbed at the Moon.

The US are still the pioneers, and one of many ways they have benefited from space exploration is by having people like Senator John Glenn elected to high office, where this man of immense courage can continue to make a contribution to public life.

If only Europe could be so forward thinking, you may think, but we could be, if we just had a little imagination. Well, we do. We could start by sending an MEP to the International Space Station for a visit and, of course, lots of publicity, but it’s a bit of a limited concept and, how do we choose the Euro Space Cadet? Given the complex mixture of nationalities and political groups in the parliament, it won’t be easy. Add in the egomania and it all starts to look impractical, a foolish dream.

But let us dream, for there is a solution, a way both out and upwards. We must send the entire parliament into space. But not for a plenary, that would be too costly and inefficient.

We’ve got to pack them all into the Mars Cycler for the full five year term.

I call it ‘Horizon 2019’ or the ‘Heavenly Hemicycle’ if you prefer. Now this innovative project is not without risk. The commercial space sector, will undoubtedly get a huge boost, but there could be some lobbyists who would abuse this important technology sector by hiring rockets to launch themselves in their ‘stealth satellites’ to the orbiting plenary, hoping to ply their sordid trade.

But it would be much more difficult for them, a rare victory for transparency and ethics. It would also help the members. The pressure/air mix can, like flying, lead to a slight deadening of the taste buds, which can only help as the parliament’s cuisine remains relentless in its pursuit of British culinary standards.

The plenary would also raise the profile of the institution and it would be much more watchable when there’s the chance of seeing a dozing Roger Helmer float serenely across the chamber, for example.

It will also put an end to the ludicrous two seat arrangement and almost certainly cost less. There is also that intangible sense of comfort citizens will get from knowing their representatives are ‘out there’ The cycler also means that the ship can be regularly cleaned etc as it orbits Earth by a crew of cheap-labournauts and a refreshment of interns can also take place. Nothing new there.

Of course there’s a downside. There is a chance, the merest hint of a possibility that the craft could go off course and head towards the Sun or Betelgeuse.

But that could be the price of being innovative; a price citizens would feel was worth paying.

One night in a disused laboratory

Come down to my lab and see what's on the slab

I’m sitting here in a cellar, with a bench full of very old scientific equipment and a TV monitor in front of me. The screen is showing me one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen, the inside of a gaseous tank, actually an ancient aquarium. We’re wondering what to do with it.

It’s no ordinary tank, but one made by my Uncle Thaddeus. He was completely crazy, but in that very British way that can pass as eccentricity. 

Others said it was his natural bonhomie and amiability that kept him out of a straitjacket.

It went back, family legend says,  to an argument with someone who believed the world was created in six days. Thaddeus, had taught at Oxford and decided to prove him wrong. Many would have countered the proposition with reason, logic and science. He took a path less traveled by constructing a large chamber in his basement.

Into this chamber, an aquarium from one university expedition or another, he recreated what science then considered to be the mix of chemicals and gases believed to be on the planet before life began.

He showed it to me, as a young boy in the 60s. By then it had been going for 40 years or more. The chamber was hard to see into, with thick cloudy gas inside and some sort of mold growing on the wall, in fact you could only see anything when the electrodes fired and a huge spark flew across the tank, replicating the effect of lightening.

I’m here now because the experiment is about to come to a close, after 100 years or so. Thaddeus never could remember when it had started, only that the fellow he was in dispute with passed away in 1924, by which time it had been running for some time. Neither did he ever make any usable notes about the experiment.

The only reason it outlived its inventor was because the wily scientist bequeathed the house to a nephew on condition that the experiment was continued. The nephew thought it a good deal and added a small TV camera, some sensors and instruments, but soon got bored of looking at nothing much at all and largely forgot about it. It was designed to be left alone, it just needed to be plugged in.

Sadly, he also passed away, but with no bequest and so the house has been sold. The British scientific community isn’t interested, saying there’s no validity or even data to the experiment.

There’s nothing I can do. But to me it is precious, I felt so proud that my uncle could do something like this, just because he wanted to, because he could. I’m sitting here, thinking of him looking at the monitor, with the sparks illuminating the gas cloud. Everyone should have a slightly dangerously eccentric uncle, I miss him so much.

But that’s not why I’m feeling scared right now. It’s not the being alone in a dark basement. It’s not that.

I’ve just looked at the monitor. There’s something in there.

Looking at me.

The secret chief of Europarl TV

A chance encounter in the European Parliament shocked the author

A short while ago, I was trying to recover from attending the Legal Affairs Committee, drying away the tears by spraying Deep Heat onto my face while reciting the names of the saints; Spinelli, Monnet and Schuman. 

But I took a wrong turn somewhere on my way back to the press room. I noticed a corridor that looked slightly out of place, being more like the plush offices on the top floors, rather than the more functional below ground areas. I wandered down, playing the vaguely inquisitive journalist until I saw a door marked ‘Europarl TV Executive Director’.

Just as I was taking a sneaky photo of the sign, the door blasted open and slammed into me, knocking me to the ground. I picked myself up to see an elderly gentleman looking down at me. “Why are you here?” He barked at me in a German accent, “Why? Tell me, I demand to know.”

I stuttered an explanation that I was looking for the press room. This made him even angrier, “No! I asked, why are you here?” Feeling disorientated, I suggested “because of a great cosmic joke?” This seemed to delight him tremendously. He picked me up, embraced me like a long lost brother and said, “This is completely correct, I can see that you are my fellow conquistador, together we will discover great truths.”

This is how I started working for Werner Herzog at Europarl TV.

He explained that he had been brought in to Europarl TV, “I am not interested in politicians, I will only show the reactions of the audience, this is much more revealing. The soundtrack will be not words but a solo oboe. I have a real affection for the oboe, I was befriended by one as a child in Bavaria.”

We went to the Mickey Mouse bar, but Herzog stopped at the closed Hemicycle where he harangued a passing official with a monologue on the utter futility of all existence, a conclusion he drew from noticing the plenary chamber was closed for repairs.

It took some time before he fully appreciated that the poor official’s explanation, that the roof had collapsed, was not a metaphor but real.

Things didn’t improve when he bumped into Nigel Farage and insisted that he explain the meaning of ‘independence’ in “a complex, nightmarish universe where our fate can be in the hands of a random gamma ray burst that will extinguish all life,” or when we wandered into a meeting where he terrified the translators with his demand that “there are too many words” and the solution was to translate everything into Sumerian “and leave it at that.”

The only area where the Director was willing to show flexibility was press conferences, “I insist, most seriously, that those giving such ‘performances’ must be hypnotized, for this is how we can find the underlying truth.”

It’s best not to mention his assault on Joseph Daul because he had, in Herzog’s opinion “Kinski’s eyebrows,” nor his attempts to burn the Gym down on the grounds that “running machines are a pitiless, inhuman crime against the nature and the essential, unwinnable struggle that is the overwhelming sadness of human existence.”

He was last seen trying to enter the Parliamentarium with a dirigible.

Police and terror: Facing greater threats

Europe's police are under pressure

The head of all Europe's police unions and associations is Danish, but married a Cumbrian and lives in the Southern Lake District.

At a public hearing in the European Parliament on the fight against terrorism, the first questioner insisted that “We need to define what terrorism is so we can fight it better.”

Almost fifteen years after 9/11 there is no definition of what terrorism is, but law enforcement have to deal with the real world practicalities of responding to the terror threat.

Europe’s police have a major obstacle that is affecting their ability to protect the public: Austerity.

Cuts in police budgets are causing serious problems and are not being addressed, Anna Nellberg-Dennis, President of the European Confederation of Police, Eurocop told the parliament.

Representing half a million police in 25 EU countries, Nellberg-Dennis explained why police were such a vital part of any anti-terror strategy, “It is important to remember that, as we have seen with the incidents earlier this year, it is the police officers on our streets who run towards terrorist attacks when all others are running away.”

Because of this, “It is therefore essential that they are provided with the appropriate support, training and resources needed to carry out their duties.”

She continued, “It would be reasonable to expect an adjustment in police budgets to ensure that police officers have the skills and equipment to tackle the fight against terrorism, and yet police budgets have been cut for several years.”

However, this is not the case and may not be for some time. “This may result in failure to maintain their current equipment but in the worst cases, uniforms, weapons, ammunition, computers vehicles, even fuel for police fleets can no longer be replaced or supplied.”

She added, “All of these are basic items that are essential before police officers can even begin thinking about combating the terrorist threat in Europe.”

Another area of grave concern was training. “Training has also been reduced significantly for police officers despite the need for them to expand their skills to fight new terrorist threats.”

Stressing that this wasn’t just an interest group asking for more money, Nellberg-Dennis said the cuts were affecting not only national security for member states, but the internal security of the whole of Europe.

“Let me give you one example,” she said, “In Spain, the Guardia Civil will see a 40% cut in trained members of its GEDEX units (Deactivation of Explosives Special Unit). This means that there is less capacity to trace and deactivate explosive devices used by terrorists, such as car bombs, grenade and letter bombs in Spain, one of the gateways to Europe.”

A weakness in one country, is a weakness for all of Europe.

The Police representative said that whilst the extent of austerity measures is a nationalcompetence she said a review was needed on the effect of cuts on the EU’s internal security.

Strength in one country can be strength for all of Europe. “We need to further enhance cross-border police cooperation. She elaborated, “For example, in preventing or investigating terrorist incidents, obtaining relevant information from across EU Member States, quickly, and at the time when it is needed is essential.”

Saying the current system was working “reasonably well,” she said there was significant room for improvement. “Systems should for instance be able to be easily integrated within national processes and IT infrastructures, and the development of existing tools, enhancing their efficiency, should take priority over the development of new tools.”

She also said that “information sharing has to become quicker and needs to be delivered in a more comprehensive way at the European level.”

What do Europe’s police want from Europe? “Recognition by EU and national policymakers that new internal security policy frameworks ensure that police officers are provided with the adequate resources, training and equipment to fight terrorism.

Move Europe closer to a common culture for law enforcement. This should for instance be reflected in the European Agenda on Security and supported by a number of concrete proposed measures or best practices, in areas such as training, information-sharing, implementation of laws etc.”

As Churchill might say, ‘If you gave us the job, give us the tools.’

Hidden homes, secret spaces

Wordsworth's 'Grot' at Rydal Hall nr Ambleside

There’s always been that childhood thrill of having a secret hideaway, perhaps it is why so many British males aspire to owning a garden shed but there are entire sub-cultures devoted to sheds and their US version, the man cave.

Rita Rudner once remarked, “Men don’t live very well by themselves. They don’t even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.”

While some poor fools matured as far as a man can, a debatable distance, there are still some who have gone all out on a hidden home.

William Wordsworth had ‘The Grot’. It is visited by following a path under a forbidding bridge just over head height, then a plain stone faced and humble building. Open the little wooden door and the opposite wall is one large window showing the previously hidden scene, a small waterfall and pool where the water rushes off the mountain and down to the lake a mile away

In this place, the poet gazed out at the scene of natural perfection and honed his sonnets. Naturally, there’s also tales of the other Lake poets – who brought Romanticism to the fore – having less noble uses of the hideaway and one only has to consider the lifestyles of Shelly, Byron, Coleridge and so on.

The poor little outhouse has probably seen more drug abuse and degradation than Keith Richard’s cleaner.

There are other secrets in the area, including a cave with a hidden door in one of the Lakeland hills, whose location was a highly guarded secret and it was so well hidden that even on return visits, finding the handle that operated the opening mechanism was far from easy.

More lofty, was the ambition of Gustave Eiffel, whose tower, it was discovered had a secret apartment built into it, just under 300m high, for the use of himself and his friends, such as Thomas Edison, who left a suitable gift, one of his new phonograph machines.

There are other stories, once rumours, such as the tale of secret tunnels under the Playboy mansion leading to film stars houses. Well, some old blueprints were found for designs leading to ‘Mr. J. Nicholson’, ‘Mr. K. Douglas’, ‘Mr. W. Beatty’ and ‘Mr. J Caan’.

A group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island were inspired by a local shopping mall’s adverts saying their place was so good, you’d want to live there, explain the artists, “The central theme of the ads was that the mall not only provided a rich shopping experience, but also had all the things that one would need to survive and lead a healthy life.”

However, they were inspired to create a home in the mall. They had watched the construction of the mall and noticed that a space used for storing materials used in the construction was not being used.

They spent time sneaking in 200 tons of materials and created a 750 square ft apartment, where they lived on and off for four years before one of them was caught leaving the illicit apartment. He pleaded guilty to trespass, but no harm seems to have been done.

The artist behind the project says he was trying to build an oasis and admits, “Yes, I have done other secret installations: The Tunnel.”

Other artists are using malls. In Las Vegas’ City Center mall, the Louis Vuitton hosts a permanent exhibit by James Turrell, whose use of light and Granzfeld effect – where distances can’t be judged, causing the brain to hallucinate.

So if home is where the heart is, can it also be where the art is.