Berlin

I’m in the middle of a ten day trip to Berlin. It feels like it’s turning out to be a bit more important than a holiday, all good stuff. I’m staying with Clive Product, a long lost musician friend of mine and have also been meeting up with a dear German friend Andrea and others. Clive and I used to do a lot of gigs together back in Buckinghamshire in the eighties and until now we hadn’t actually seen each other for 19 years – so there’s been rather a lot to catch up on. He’s now a Dad with two kids but still very active musically.

The general atmosphere of Berlin is great, much more open than many cities. I’ve done some of the tourist sightseeing bit (photo at Brandenburg Gate, wander round Alexanderplatz, that kind of stuff) but staying with good friends who’ve lived here for a while makes it all much more interesting. Through them I’ve spent some time with some rather nice women, jolly good show!

Have also been strumming one of Clive’s guitars a lot, part of slowly getting back into my music after more than a year away from it.

Still working with the homeless

Further to my June 2009 post, I have continued to work at several hostels for the homeless over the last few months. The regular weekend shifts at one of them are much appreciated and I’m now treated as regular staff there, even though I’m still an agency worker. The staff really are a great bunch of people and I’ve grown to appreciate the residents a lot more too. The overall spirit of the place reminds me a little bit of the old NHS stroke rehabilitation unit where I worked for a few years.

The weekend duties sometimes involve cooking a full roast dinner for twenty people. This has been a new experience, particularly as I’ve been vegetarian for 35 years! After a disaster with the custard during the first week, I think I’ve just about got the hang of it.

The Black Swan

Crazy stuff! Where on earth did David Cameron get the idea that the fascinating ideas of Nassim Nicholas Taleb were going to be compatible with Conservative party policy!? Apparently David asked Taleb along to speak to a party meeting and it all went horribly wrong when Taleb suggested, amongst other things, that climate change might not be man-made. Oh dear!

I recently read Taleb’s book The Black Swan and enjoyed it enormously – it gets your brain working and thinking in different ways, it’s very clever and quite witty in places. In fact his style reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson (R.I.P.), a hero of mine. Wilson was a comedian, science fiction author, Playboy editor and all-round brilliantly inspirational chap. “Never believe TOTALLY in anyone else’s belief system. Never believe TOTALLY in your own belief system.” I like this, it leaves the mind open to new realities. The prologue of The Black Swan begins as follows:-

“Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that ALL swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the colouring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millenia of confirmatory of millions of white swans.”

I guess full credit should go to Cameron for attempting to bring fresh thinking into contemporary politics. From my reading of The Black Swan, I would have thought that Taleb is pointing at the possibility of a far more radical change of thinking than anything the Conservative party could offer in a million years!