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I’ve played golf four times in the last month, for the first time in two years, and it’s made me realise how much has changed in the last two years. My body is pathetic – doughy, out of shape, but mostly just out of sync. I can putt the ball as well as I ever could – in fact a few times I found myself wondering where that touch came from – but every swing of the club felt like a quarter second delay in mental initiative to physical execution, and it even extended to basic things like picking up the ball from the cup or putting the bag of clubs onto my shoulder. I’ve lost rhythm, and it won’t come back quickly.

It’s not like I’ve been totally sedentary for the past two years, mind you. I’ve been taking the dog for her minimum of two hours of daily walks – she has energy and she needs it and she demands the effort – and I’ve been raising the son full time, with only rare breaks, since last March, including all cooking, cleaning, commuting, teaching, encouragement, discouragement, and all the rest. That burns calories. In the meantime, I’ve also realized that not going to the office at all means I can mix a gin and tonic at 11am and no one cares; indeed, sometimes having a gin and tonic in hand for an 11am conference call is the thing that preserves my sanity. Perspective is a challenge, and having perspective in the face of a pandemic, in the face of a multiple part-time startup enterprises, often requires a gin and tonic at 11am. I am making no apologies.

Hitting the course was strange because that weird disconnect – that tenth of a second between head and shoulders, brain and wrists – meant I was losing golf balls at a majestic rate. In fact on Tuesday this week, I had to give up after six holes because I had literally ran out of golf balls, despite the late fall bare ground allowing me to find at least one ball for every two I lost. It was a new course for me but I joined for a membership for the next year – I’m going to get out and play more, and the boy is really getting into the game, and it seems like a good idea to be able to have a place where I can just trot up and play. But not if I’m going to lose a dozen balls every six holes – I need to polish things up.

In Maine, one doesn’t polish one’s game up starting in November, however.

I walked the last three holes without playing them – not having a ball is a significant impediment to playing golf – and threw my clubs in the back of my car, changed my shoes, and let my body feel itself. Nothing nasty, mind you – I just let my body talk to itself, describe its aches and annoyances and the like – and that’s where I heard it talk about the disconnect. Yes, it felt the impact of an up and down three mile walk on a chilly November morning; yes, it said “you really need to take an Advil before you play golf these days”. It also said yes, it’s now 1pm and you’ve earned the gin and tonic. But what I felt in my flesh and bones was a disconnect, a timing being off. My body as it has aged has gotten slightly slower than my mind, and my body is awfully annoyed about it.

So I got in my car and drove back to the house. The dog was in her day care so I didn’t need to pick her up, and the boy wouldn’t come home until much later in the afternoon. I grabbed some supplies for dinner and checked the mailbox; the New York Review of Books had arrived. I read the first essay, about a book written by an author whose family had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan, and fixed that gin and tonic.

And it occurred to me that I hadn’t written anything in a long time. I mean, I know I haven’t written anything for The Essence of Water in awhile – for those who follow it, you may be excused for thinking that this has become Mark Hannam’s personal essay site. Heck, Vero and Matt haven’t written anything in even longer, so that’s not a singular failing on my part. But even more than that, I haven’t written any letters in a long time. This is noteworthy because for most of my life, letters have been the way I’ve expressed myself. Letters to lovers, to friends, to coworkers, you name it – I write letters as my primary means of expression. These essays have, in a basic way, been extended letters to an audience of friends – old and new, current and long-forgotten – but also an extended letter to my son, to let him know how his father was as a human being while he was growing up. From 2017 to now – for over four years – this has been an extended letter to the universe, and yet for the past five months or so, I haven’t written back.

It’s not like the universe has stopped talking to me, or that any of you out there have stopped talking to me. I mean, some of you have – I got an entertaining email from someone asking to be dropped from the distribution list I occasionally send out to let people know of new postings, for example – and what with the pandemic and travel restrictions and the like, plenty of us have just sort of lost touch out of entropy. We may very well like to stay in touch but since the likelihood of physical contact has vanished, part of the incentive to keep the other elements of communication alive have also atrophied.

The art of speaking out, however – not speaking per se, but speaking out into the wind, into the public, regardless of whether anyone listens – is a practice, and when put aside, that practice gets stale. I can’t hit the ball straight anymore, and it feels the same way to put hands to keyboard as it does to grip the club. Typing this is easy; finding the words is a lot harder than it was a year ago, two years ago. There is a disconnect, a hesitancy in the act of bridging the thoughts in my mind to the fingers which press the keys and make the words appear on the screen.

It occurs to me as well: you have to start sometime all over again. It’s November here, and the air is crisp but also it gets damp and cold, the wind howling off the Atlantic. The house is more or less ready for winter, and it’s not the right time of year to be learning golf again. But I’m going to head out next week, on Tuesday, when the boy is in school and the dog is in day care, and I’m going to buy a dozen golf balls from the bargain bin, and I’m going to try to play again. I will be awful; with luck I will sink a few putts, or have that lovely pitch that gets within a few feet of the hole, before I drive it into the bushes on the next tee and curse and feel the disconnect in my nerves, my hips, my feet, my shoulders, my mind.

And today, I’ll hit publish, and start over again on writing. To my son: I’m sorry I forgot to write for a few months. To the rest of you: I hope you viewed the respite as a little break in a year where little breaks mattered a lot. To the ex-reader in San Antonio: screw you. It’s time to start over again.

As the earth’s atmosphere continues to warm up, so political leaders from around the world head to Glasgow for the 26^th Conference of Parties.  There will be no shortage of hot air, but unfortunately there is unlikely to be an immediate step-change in public policy, which is what we need.

By coincidence the UK’s annual budget for the next financial year was announced last week, which included a measure to lower the rate of tax on domestic air travel and another to defer a planned rise in the rate of tax on petrol.  These measures were both aimed at pleasing the travelling public, lowering the cost of short-haul flights between, say, London and Cardiff or Edinburgh and Belfast, and avoiding additional costs for drivers at a time when oil prices have risen steeply.  Given the choice between long-term virtue and short-term popularity, it is perhaps no surprise that the politicians choose the latter.  But it is important to recognise that they do so because they understand that many of us share their preference for instant gratification.  We might not have the politicians we say we want, but we mostly get the politicians we deserve.

Continue reading “Hot air”

I start with a joke.  There are 10 sorts of people in the world.  Those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t.   

In our culture, we are encouraged to think that we can divide the world up using binary oppositions.  We are either x or we are y.  In politics we are on the left or on the right; in personality we are extrovert or introvert; for our intellectual training we choose between the sciences or the arts; we are routinely asked, by organisations gathering data on diversity, whether we are male or female, homo- or hetero-, abled or disabled, black or white; in London, you either live north of the river or you don’t really live in London at all, which illustrates a significant problem about the use of dichotomies: they set people in opposition one with another.    

I recently came across a remark by Bertrand Russell, who said of the development of his philosophical temperament that he had leapt from the Hegelian view that the world was a bowl of treacle to the atomist view that the world was a bowl of lead shot.  In other words, he had abandoned the view that we cannot understand anything until we understand everything, since as Hegel claimed the true is the whole, and instead had adopted the view that the only way to understand anything is to break it down into its component parts and try to understand each of them in turn and then figure out how they connect.  Atomists, of whom Russell is a good example, think that the main purpose of philosophy is analysis, that is, the systematic separation of each part or element of a phenomenon, so that it can be studied in isolation; by contract, treaclists, of whom John Dewey might be a good example, think that the main purpose of philosophy is synthesis, that is, the examination of the interconnectedness of phenomena, so that their reciprocal influence upon each other can be understood.  I was taught philosophy in the atomist tradition, but during my training I leapt in the opposite direction to Bertrand Russell, and I am now a confirmed treaclist.  I try to resist attempts to divide up the world, believing that we understand best when we consider the whole and the fulness of its variety.   There are many more than 10 sorts of people in my world.

Continue reading “Atomic treacle”

This week, there are lengthy queues outside petrol stations in Britain, as desperate motorists try to secure fuel for their cars.  The companies that supply petrol stations say there is a shortage of lorry drivers to transport fuel from the refineries and that the government needs to offer visas to foreign drivers to meet demand.  The government, not wanting to accept that its policy on immigration – linked inevitably to the way it managed the UK’s exit from the EU – is the source of the problem, says that there is no shortage of fuel in the country.   Unsurprisingly, as soon as government ministers deny that there is a shortage, some drivers assume they are lying and head to the petrol stations to fill up.  Many others, seeing growing lines of cars, waiting at the pumps, worry that they will lose out unless they join; so, they do.  Whether or not there was a serious problem a few days ago, there is certainly one now.

Queues of irate drivers waiting impatiently to buy petrol makes for good television and newspaper coverage, which has temporarily displaced the story of the other, more serious energy crisis from the headlines.  Natural gas is a major source of energy for the UK, with more than four out of five households reliant on gas for heating their homes and around a third of wholesale electricity produced by burning gas.  Prices have risen dramatically over the past twelve months, for example, the ICE’s NBP Natural Gas Index has risen from 33.5 to 213.  Whether this price spike will be temporary is unclear, but it has become a political problem for the UK because of the way in which energy prices are regulated.

Continue reading “The cap that does not fit”

I am writing this text at my house in Co Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland.  This is my first visit for twelve months, my first journey into the European Union since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland formally exited.  Flying from London to Belfast was my first trip by plane for a year and, for some reason I am not fully certain of, it was comforting to travel at altitude once more.  I am glad to be back.

The house was in good condition, despite the absence of occupants for a year.  My neighbour checks in regularly and my local contractor fixed a problem with the heating system over the winter.  There are no signs of damp or water damage, no broken tiles or windowpanes, and the plumbing and electrics all seem to be working well.  I have replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms and defrosted the freezer, and in addition I have given all the rooms a thorough clean since I discovered a greater than usual number of spider’s webs and a plenitude of dead flies. Most of the latter were scattered across the floors: I imagine the flies entered the house via the vents in the windows but could not find their way back out again and died of cold, hunger, or old age.  A few were tangled up in webs, but I suspect most of the flies that were trapped that way had already been eaten.  The war between the Arachnids and the Muscidæ lacks the graphic intensity of Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw” and does not stir the passions as that between the Jets and the Sharks, but it is nonetheless one small part of the cosmic evolutionary struggle.  The detritus of battle was soon sucked up by my vacuum cleaner, and the house feels more comfortable for humans as a result.

Continue reading “I re-land”