New Leopard crampons

This summer one possible plan is to walk around a bit, and climb a bit, requiring crampons and axe, but only sometimes. We already have lightweight axes, but my existing crampons are not light. I have two sorts: the traditional steel ones (yellow), and a lighter aluminium pair (blue) echoing D's. These weight 1053 and 728 grams for a pair, respectively. The new ones weight 384 (orange; these are flexlock not leverlock), a saving of 340 grams, well worth having. They also pack up a little smaller. I notice that the steel ones are Grivel, the aluminium ones Salewa, and these (also aluminium) are Petzl; here's their website (arch). They advertise them as "Ultra-lightweight crampon for ski touring and snow approaches".

The downsides are threefold: they are a bit more of a pain to get on; they don't have anti-balling plates; and they may be less securely attached. Exactly how well attached remains to be seen; but I walked round the garden in them and front-pointed a tree, so they seem fine so far.

Online, you'll see people dissing aluminium crampons, and initially - years ago - I was nervous, but I've scrambled over rock in them quite happily and they were what I wore to Scotland last winter and they survived The Runnel quite happily.

Caveat: the pair I have are at the limit of their lengthening (notice the little recesses to pull the string back into). If you have boots above size 11, Petzl say "Boot sizes: 36-46".

Here it is fitted to my boots:

Old hat, new hat

I "retired" my old sun hat a year or two back, but it was still hanging around. Today I finally resolved to throw it away and stop clogging up space, but in the end failed; it is now in the shed.

The old hat was bought many years ago, on holiday in Mallorca most likely, possibly 2012 but maybe 2008 (although probably not that far back).

The old was a 58, and always a bit small. The new is 59-62, and I could have done with one a bit bigger but that was the best that M+S could do me.

Book review: Ice and Iron

 By Wilson Tucker. I think I must have read this years ago; the matriarchal culture rings a bell. But only vaguely: I've forgotten all else. And it is pretty forgettable.

The story premise is advancing glaciers; this is pop-sci from the 1970's after all; see The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus. Coupled to that we have Charles Fort style rains of frogs, fish and in this case bricks and then people; these are folded into the story as the results of some mysterious weapon that transports its target back in time.

I think the curious obsession with bricks that made up game hides, and indeed with eskers, must stem from some real experience; and as sometimes elsewhere, I think that a better book might have been made of those elements without the cifi admixture; but I wouldn't have read it of course.

No reason is given why the future society is matriarchal; no reason is given for them inventing weird back-into-the-past-guns, or preferring them to the arguably rather more useful normal guns we all know and love. And when one of these guns turns up in our time, we seem curiously uninterested in examining it.

Book review: Seed of Stars

I remember reading this, or rather I have memories related to reading this, way back when I were a lad. Mostly I remember the naughty bits; there is rather more unrestrained - though non-graphic - sex than most scifi manages.

The plot is somewhat more carefully thought through than immeadiately appears. For example, early on, Our Starship rescues some freighter from Kepler VI - their destination planet - which has been hit by a meteor, and there's some surgery and stuff, all very conventional-space-rescue stuff. But in the end it turns out that Our Hero has thereby contracted the Space Disease that does Terrible Things to embryos.

Having been written in the 1970's, the "space ship" is fully isomorphic to a battleship in its mode of motion, command structure, relations between officers and enlisted, and men and women. And actually most of the plot ditto; the aliens only come in right at the end, and they are kept at a safe distance. The aliens, having (as I gather) in the previous book tried to surgically alter humans into aliens are now trying to genetically engineer them; this seems like a hopelessly roundabout way of behaving (can you imagine us taking octopus-type aliens and trying to get them to give birth to humans?) and indeed it doesn't end up working, because when the humans give birth to monsters they, errrm, aren't very happy about it. Note incidentally that medical tech in the far-distant starfaring era hasn't advanced as far as ultrasound scans, obvs.

I can't really recommend the book. I only got it because of my vague memories and my curiousity as to how the book would match up.

Book review: This Being That Becomes

This book annoyed me. But the publisher Windhorse says With the aid of lucid reflections and exercises Dhivan Thomas Jones prompts us to explore how conditionality works in our own lives. This Being, That Becomes is a sure guide to the most essential teaching of Buddhism. Who is right? You can be the judge. Everything in italics is a direct quote, I'm sorry I didn't preserve page numbers. I only got as far as the end of part one.

Eventually, I realised that one of my main objections is that this stuff is all non-analytic; it is more feel, emotion, idea. It doesn't care much about self-contradiction; whether a given statement is literal or a metaphor; and it has never been through critical scrutiny.

The other is the yawning gulf between self-help psychology and eternal bliss. The book is full of thoughts about de-stressing your life and learning to see things clearly (or, on p 71, about maybe avoiding chocolate cake) and all of this is fine, and quite possibly helpful, but is incommensurate with enlightenment and won't get you to nirvana. And as far as I can tell all the advice relates to the former; the latter amounts to trust-us, step out on the way and you'll get, or perhaps come to see, that stuff later¹. We get stuff like The Dharma is fundamentally a practical teaching about how to find release from suffering and unhappiness, or, to put it positively, to attain enlightenment or awakening but I don't think that's correct: you can be released from suffering with finding enlightenment; the quote is trying to blur the gulf.

That's the high level stuff; now some details.

Self aware: for a movement that prides itself on seeing clearly, there are too many lapses of awareness. Consider: In one of these stories, the Buddha fell into conversation with a religious wanderer named Sakuludāyin, who had previously been talking to a spiritual teacher who claimed to be omniscient; that is, he claimed to know everything through his extraordinary spiritual attainments. However, when Sakuludāyin asked this teacher some difficult questions about the past, he prevaricated and changed the subject, and Sakuludāyin was understandably disappointed. Knowing that the Buddha too had some spiritual attainment, Sakuludāyin asked him to comment on this topic of knowing the past. The Buddha's reply, however, was not what the wanderer had expected. Putting talk of omniscience aside, he said: But let the past be, Udayi, let the future be. I will teach you the Dharma: this being, that becomes; from the arising of this, that arises. This not being, that does not become; from the ceasing of this, that ceases.¹ That is, the Buddha simply drew Sakuludāyin's attention to how present experience arises according to the principle of condition-ality. The moral of the story is that understanding conditionality is more important than comparing spiritual teachers.

Sounds good to you? Stop then and consider: is anything wrong with this passage? Yes: poor S asks <sage> for info, and <sage> blows him off. S asks Big B instead, and Big B blows him off. And somehow this demonstrates how great B is. WTF? This is the kind of stuff I mean when I say this has never had any critical feedback; it is only sung to the choir.

Former Buddhas? I find In the same way, monks, I saw an old path, an unwinding old road travelled by Buddhas of former times. This seems odd; I would have said that Big B was the first; certainly one only hears from him, not from before him. Why the veneration for him in particular, if he was but one of a long series?

Wearisome? While the Blessed One was secluded and alone, the following thought occurred to him: 'The Dharma that I have discovered is profound, difficult, abstruse, serene, rarefied, non-conceptual, subtle, only to be known by the wise. But this world is ensconced in pleasure, enjoyment, and delight; and, the world being so ensconced, it is difficult for people to fathom the perspective of conditionality and dependent arising, and hard too for them to make sense of nirvana, that final dispassionate perspective in which all formations are calm, all that is borne is given up, and craving is extinguished. If I were to teach the Dharma, and others did not understand me, it would be a wearisome bother for me'. Big B is not happy that the world has pleasure and enjoyment; and yet P+E seem good to me. Moreover, we notice that despite his enlightenment, he can still be troubled by weariness, which seems contrary to what is said elsewhere.

Escape from Death? Big B: no one knows how to escape from dukkha, from ageing and death... I came to realize through insight that: 'When there is birth then ageing and death exist; with birth as condition, there is ageing and death. So, errm, that doesn't seem like a particularly brilliant insight; and the problem is that his solution to the problem of aging and death is to avoid birth, which doesn't seem like a good idea. I don't think I'm mis-interpreting this; there's also from the cessation of birth, old age and death, grief, sorrow, pain, misery, and despair cease.

Rebirth? Do you believe in rebirth? This is unclear. For example What do these twelve links mean? Unfortunately the ancient records of the Buddha's teaching do not preserve a clear and unambiguous explanation of how to interpret the twelvefold series. In this chapter I will present two ways of looking at them. The first one is the traditional Buddhist interpretation of the twelve nidanas, which understands them as explaining the rebirth process as it occurs over three lifetimes. However, while this interpretation has been worked out over many centuries in the Buddhist tradition, it is not to be found in the early Buddhist teachings, which mainly present the twelve links just as explaining the arising and the ceasing of dukkha (note BTW that the "three lives" stuff, which confused me, doesn't mean that you only get three lives: it means your previous, current, and next of the infinite series). The problem is that the Buddhist tradition is suffused with rebirth; no book is allowed to say explicitly that it is all woo. Instead we retreat to "interpretations" and so on. Note though the explicit admission that we don't really know how to interpret this stuff; and so (sez oi), lacking revelation, there is no real source of truth.

I think our author knows this, because somewhat later we get This is the 'unconditioned' state, which is 'unborn' and therefore not prone to 'ageing and death'. But note the scare quotes around unborn and death; this means he doesn't mean those words literally, he means them... metaphorically? What would that even mean?

But we also have: This was the kind of assumption made by the Buddha's contemporaries who believed in the atman, or permanent Self, which transmigrated between lives. This assumption leads us to seek salvation in spiritual experiences or by looking forward to a pure heaven realm after death. The Buddha also taught rebirth, but no ātman that is reborn; there is just a continuity of conditioned processes. I don't know how to interpret this. It seems that there is no soul that is reborn, but there is... something else that is reborn? What does "continuity of conditioned processes" mean? My suspicion is that this is just a desperate dancing to try to keep everything in the air.

Around p 122 our author has another go: Thus consciousness is not an atman or imperishable Self that continues or transmigrates (eternalism). But this does not mean that our lives and actions have no lasting significance or consequence (annihilationism). While the conditions that support existence endure, there will be the ripening of actions and re-becoming in samsara. Hence the Buddha taught rebirth as a process governed by karma, in the sense of the ethical quality of intentional actions. But this is no more satisfactory than before. And notice the switcheroo: previously, annihilationism was no-soul-death-is-death; now it has become lives-hve-no-consequence, which no-one believes. And whatever is supposed to be between these still makes literally no sense.

God? Ritualistic religious beliefs, the idea that certain practices like bathing or fasting can be ethically purifying, for instance, are ignorant views, from the Buddhist point of view. The belief in a God on whom we depend and who will look after us is an ignorant belief too... this seems to say - as well as somewhat unkindly dissing religions - that there is no God; or perhaps it allows for a God who we cannot depend; characteristically, clarity is lacking. And yet there are gods; there is the god of death, Yama; and other gods, devas. Or is that just an explanatory story for the proles, an "ignorant view"?

Knowledge: There are some questions that the Buddha refuses to answer: whether the universe is eternal, whether the universe is finite, and so on. The phrasing implies that Big B knows, but does not answer because you don't need to know. But he is but an enlightened man, not a god; he doesn't know (unlike the Christian God, who knows all things). Why doesn't he simply answer "I don't know"? I think because this would be embarrassing.

Science: Both Buddhism and western science believe that the universe has come about through natural laws and processes. However, whereas western science has been primarily interested in investigating the laws that govern the working of the external world, Buddhism has mostly been interested in the mind - the inner world of consciousness and not just theoretically but in practical ways... I think this mistakes science. Science has obvious and undeniable success in understanding the physical world, and gradually but now completely religions have abandoned any effort to compete. But science has put a lot of effort into understanding mind too; it's just that the successes in this area are less obvious.

Can't get no satisfaction: Our bodies affect our moods; our feelings affect our thoughts; we all affect one another, for better or worse; our individual worlds are so interconnected that we may discover our truest selves only in solitude. In the midst of all this interdependence we find ourselves faced with the disorienting perception that there is nothing to hold onto that will not some day change and pass away. The question now arises of where we can find lasting satisfaction and happiness in this obviously unreliable situation. We pass too quickly from the facile observation that nothing is permanent to the assertion that the situation is unreliable, whatever that might mean. Many things are, on the timescale of an individual human, either effectively permanent or slowly-changing. Clinging to permanence might be bad, but so is throwing it all away.

Relatedly: Most of us, most of the time, believe that the solution to life's problems consists in having more of what gives us pleasure and less of what gives us pain.  This reactive strategy of rejecting pain and seeking pleasure happens so naturally it is mostly unconscious, but it also keeps us relentlessly seeking pleasure in a world often characterized by pain and change. This is not correct - apart from for the proles, of course: most of us indeed want more pleasure and less pain because we aren't mad, but that doesn't imply the relentless lost-in-pleasure-seeking sybarism that the text suggests. It is as though he is desperately unsubtle, unable to think of reasonable placid people enjoying pleasure but not bound by it.

Pain: Someone without craving still feels physical pain as pain, but by not reacting to it, they experience freedom from the 'second arrow' of reaction. The end of dukkha, therefore, does not mean the end of all physical pain. It refers rather to such pain ceasing to be a problem because one does not react to it with aversion. This is nonsense. Pain is a problem because it hurts, whether you react to it or not.

Burnin' down the House: The sequence of links, with birth, ageing and death depending on a whole series of cognitive and psychological conditions, suggests that our usual experience of life, and our familiar sense of being a self or an ego, is a conditioned structure, like a house. Although such a structure apparently provides safety, security, and definition, it is also fixed, limited, and resistant to change. The Buddha's discovery was that the taking down of this 'house' of the ordinary ego is the way to the end of dukkha. This is a really dumb analogy, at least for people in the Cold West. Destroying your house might make sense for people with no possessions in a benign climate like India, but makes no sense at all in mid-latitudes in winter. You would die. See-also "self aware".

This year's model: I read on into the start of part two. Wherein we are told, but it has been said before many times: Things arise on certain conditions, and cease when those conditions are no longer present. But this is a very poor "model" for people, or for pebbles. People "arise" at birth. But we don't cease when the conditions of birth are no longer present. The conditions for aging and death are very different. Or consider a pebble: it "arose" from a bigger bit of rock, and was smoothed by a sea or a stream. It didn't cease when those conditions ended - when someone took it out of the stream - indeed, had the condtions continued, it would have ceased: it would have been ground smaller. It will one day, likely in the far futuer, cease when something resembling the conditions of its arising re-continue: when it is once again further ground down.

Moral theory: ...whatever action is done because of non-greed, born of non-greed, with non-greed as its source, and arising from non-greed, or done because of non-hate, born of non-hate, with non-hate as its source, and arising from non-hate, or done because of non-delusion, born of non-delusion, with non-delusion as its source, and arising from non-delusion - that action is skilful (kusala), that action is blameless, that action results in pleasure, that action conduces to the ceasing of action, and that action does not conduce to the arising of action. So this is a moral theory we would call "intentionalist": what matters is what you intended; the converse theory is "consequentialist": what matters is the consequence of your actions. Std.western.philo finds both theories inadequate, for fairly obvious reasons: terrible things can happen because of "well intentioned" acts, and it is hard to call such morally good; and if bad people for bad reasons do things that accidentally turn out well, it is hard to call them good. But Buddhism doesn't refer to anyone else's theories; it has its own scriptures; and presumably it does not progress. How could it? It knew the answer millenia ago.

Common people: Hedonistic indulgence is 'common, vulgar, ordinary, and ignoble' for just this reason: it is a strategy for avoiding dukkha that does not help us come to any real understanding. The middle way involves recognizing and acknowledging dukkha, leaning into it with as much awareness as possible, in order to find the path that leads beyond dukkha. From the Buddhist point of view, hedonism is a poor strategy for finding true meaning in life. I sense here an distasteful revulsion from the pleasures of the common people, who wallow in filth like swine. But this follows a description of Big B's former life of hedonism, which was distinctly uncommon and not at all ordinary and it would be odd to call it vulgar; so all this is unthinking. Moreover, notice that Big B was successfully avoiding dukkha, but this - despite all the emphasis on doing so - is not good enough, because it did not lead to real understanding. This is revealing: the true goal (at least at this point of the text) is not avoiding dukkha, that's just fluff: the real aim is real understanding. From my point of view, that's great; but from the viewpoint of a coherent text, it isn't. I can't accept their "true meaning" of course; there is no "true" meaning; that is teleology.

Update: after a discussion with M, who says something like "I use the useful bits in my practice" and (my paraphrase) she silently discards anything not useful, or that she doesn't agree with. This re-inforces my annoyance with the book; why am I bothering to read a pile of stuff that she has silently discarded, and not knowing which bits are regarded as sensible? Note that she does regard certain people as "enlightened", so doesn't think there is a 100% failure rate.

Refs

* Living With Awareness 

* Why Materialism is Baloney.

Notes

1. The idealised route seems to be: The path from dukkha to faith manifests in different ways. It may be a sense of unsatisfactoriness with the material things in life and a desire to find greater meaning, or we may be prompted by an accident or serious illness with a desire to live more fully while there is still the chance; or the death of someone we love may lead us to search for something to fill the gap in our lives. In all cases there is a restlessness that comes from realizing that life is not entirely satisfactory and wishing to search for something better. If we succeed in hearing the Dharma at this point, then the conditions are present for faith in the three jewels to arise.

Book review: Macroscope

SciFi trash by Piers Anthony. I read his OX etc, which I now discover to be 0X etc, many years ago, though I remember little of it except the game-of-life, which helped me fill in several dull hours during my history O-level when I'd run out of history to regurgitate, my memory being poor. Aanyway, I knew the kind of stuff I was getting into and lo and behold, the characters are cardboard as is the geopolitical situation. For unclear reasons he appears to try to rescue astrology, but it a long book and he has lots of things to throw in, some of which I skipped over.

The main "sci" element is the macrons, not to be mistaken for a Gallic leader, no, these are some kind of particles rather like light, in that they travel at the speed of light and allow one to form visual representations; indeed in most repsects they are exactly like light, except they can be "focussed" to arbitrary distance and through solid bodies. Anmd they can also be rx'd (well, obvs) and hence tx'd by aliens as it turns out, thus allowing the cognoscenti access to alien tech, because this is, helpfully, being broadcast.

It turns out - stop me if I've got this wrong, it was all so utterly implausible that I skipped lots of the exposition, plus the expo was done via his characters, who were irritating - that the helpful tech signals are being masked by a "destroyer" signal (which fries your brain), which is itself there to stop people rx'ing the "traveller" signal (which latter somehow allows interstellar flight). After a while they start thinking that the "destroyer" might not be so bad, because the "traveller", by allowing interstellar flight, permits war, and there's some mind-bogglingly crude caricatures of how-to-fight-wars that shows you that war is bad, in case you didn't know. But! Then it turns out that suppressing initiative tends to dullness, so perhaps overall the wars are worth it. So, there's some attempt at "philosophy" in there, and the answer, per Garden of Eden, is that refusing to look at the truth is bad, so at least he gets the right answer, well done.

Book review: Living With Awareness

Living with Awareness is Sangharakshita’s commentary on the Satipatthana Sutta. He outlines the transformative power of mindfulness, linking it to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Sangharakshita offers practical advice for integrating mindfulness into daily life, fostering wisdom, compassion, and peace. The book encourages us to live with presence, deepening understanding of impermanence, and improving relationships, according to Windhorse. At least for contemporary eyes, the commentary is necessary, the original would be incomprehensible; but nonetheless that the commentary is 10-20 times the length of the original leads me to doubt that it is not introducing material of its own.

Before we go on, some preliminary quibbles.

What is the source of truth in Buddhism? For example, in contemporary physics, whilst in practice anyone wishing to study it would read papers, ultimately the source of truth is reality: comparison of theory to experimental results. In mediaeval physics, the source was Authority: generally, whatever fragments of Greek nonsense had come down to them; but we've thrown all that away now. In Christianity, the source is the Word of God, the Bible, as interpreted by the Holy Church, especially if you're Catholic; with God guaranteeing inerrancy. Buddhism has overwhelming respect for Big B, but he isn't a god, and I don't think he is inerrant as a source. Separately, whatever he said (assuming he existed as a historical person) was passed down orally for hundreds of years before being written down; and as the book itself says about 2/3 of the way through, it is likely that what was transmitted was heavily adapted towards being said, and being memorised. So I think that the claim is that, whilst at-origin the product of an enlightened being, it must ultimately stand or fall by rational scrutiny.

An appalling success rate? Nominally, the aim of Buddhism is enlightenment. Nominally, you have been given clear instructions for achieving this (p 229: this is no mere pious exhortation; the Buddha left nothing unclear. The Sutta provides everything we need; we are told exactly what to do, and exactly how to go about doing it). And yet the success rate is waay under 1%. Why? I don't see any sign of soul-searching in the book as to why the instructions are so bad. After all, big B was just some chap, and he had no instructions to follow, yet he made it. I do wonder if there's an analogy with language: I can speak; I could not tell you how to speak. Or easier: I know the rules of English grammar, I could not tell you the rules of English grammar, or how to write down a grammatical sentence. Just because Big B was enlightened, why do we think he was any good at writing down instructions of how-to-be-enlightened?

Buddhism: an individual creed? Again, it can be helpful to compare to Christianity: under which the "aim", so to speak, is to get to heaven; but you do this by... well, opinions vary, let us take a middle ground and say "by being good, by pleasing god", and you do this by (a) believing in him, and (b) loving your neighbour as yourself (hey, whaddayaknow, I got that right: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these). I don't think Buddhism cares about part (a), but I don't think it really has part (b) either; the emphasis is on perfecting yourself. The book in uneasily aware of this; for example from p 220: But the further back you go in the history of the Buddhist tradition, the more significant this attitude seems to be. Buddhism, in other words, was never as individualistic as people sometimes think. It may well have been that the other-regarding aspect of the practice was second nature to the early Buddhists and hence did not receive so full an emphasis in the oral tradition. The Sutta contains only the most perfunctory references to anything beyond one's experience of oneself, the fourfold establishment of mindfulness apparently having come to be regarded as an all-sufficient method. I'm not really buying the "oh yeah everyone knew that so no-one wrote it down" stuff. But also I'm not claiming this is a problem, from certain viewpoints.

Buddhism is suffering-oriented? I have complained before that Buddhist books are prone to start with something like "life is suffering". Our author has heard that too, and does his best to counter it: It is worth giving careful thought to this. Hearing these truths, people often conclude that Buddhism is suffering-oriented, inward-looking, and self-centred, as though the idea was to become immersed in one's own suffering and how to alleviate it. But this is not what the Buddha is saying. Oh good; what is he saying? What is usually translated as 'suffering' is the Pali term dukkha, which points to the fact that conditioned existence, taken as a whole, is unsatisfactory and frustrating. But this does not mean that Buddhists view life as unremittingly painful and unpleasant, which it obviously is not. On the other hand, we can be sure that the Buddha did not choose this example of the workings of conditionality at random. It is salutary to reflect on the inherent unsatisfactoriness of things; like reflecting on the loathsomeness of the body, it is an example of 'bending the bamboo the other way'. We are not being asked to stop finding life agreeable, if that is our experience, but to acknowledge that however agreeable it may be, it is never wholly so. Dukkha is pain and sickness, but it is also lack of complete fulfilment; it is anxiety and loss, bitterness and cynicism... So I think he only gets a half credit: life is not unrelieved suffering, but he cannot help emphasising the loss and bitterness. I think this is an attitude for mediaeval peasants, which on the whole Tibetans were. It doesn't fit the modern world; certainly not my experience of it.

Conditioned existence. I think this term is flung around without being defined; as far as I can tell it means "existence", i.e. life in the real world, as opposed to, errm, the unreal world. The idea is that life must inevitably be unsatisfactory, because we cling to permanence in an ever-changing world. Again as far as I can tell, this is adopted as axiomatic, and never questioned, but I think it should be. I don't think I am clinging to permanence. Nor am I convinced that "ever changing" is really that good a description: the world changes, of course, but quite slowly. Life is wonderful; why would you think otherwise?¹ From the perspective of heightened consciousness, the apparent beauty of the mundane world appears grotesque, says p 69, so why would I want your height?

Modern life is rubbish? From p 220: The Buddha's early followers would not have experienced the alienation from nature that characterizes the lives of so many people today. For them the natural world was ever-present, and the forest glades and parks in which the monks and nuns meditated were highly conducive to the cultivation of enthusiasm and mettä. These days we have to shut ourselves off from the clutter and disharmony of modern urban life, in which the cultivation of positive emotion is continually undermined, and in these circumstances we are likely to find it difficult to contact our feelings in meditation. I'm always doubtful of the happy-peasants-dancing-in-the-fields idealisation of the past.

Aanyway, careful readers will notice that much of that comes from the last 2/3 of the book, and I found that easier to grasp. The earlier stuff I found rather mushy; it washed past my eyes leaving little behind.

What of mindfullness? It appears twice in the summary and is a Key Concept in modern Buddhism. Well, I dunno. It is a concept; one can indeed forget it, and it is good to be reminded (see-also Meetings With Remarkable Men) but I'm doubtful it can support the burden it is given.

Notes

1. That's rather hostage-to-fortune perhaps. But (a) Buddha was the favoured son of a rich family; and (b) you're not telling me this stuff is for the down-hearted only, are you? No: so why is solace-from-pain relevant; there doesn't seem to be an obvious connection between it and enlightenment.

Tidying the shed

Fixing boxes, tidying the shed: retired life is one adventure after another.

My picture shows "before", should you be in any doubt.

When we moved in the shed was there, invitingly empty, and so we threw various things into it, until it became a mess and full, as you'd expect. After which any change became a matter of shuffling round the mess, and various "traditional" gumpf faded into the background at the back and was never seen again.

It is made fairly well, of metal, but doesn't offer much in the way of opportunities for hooks or shelves or the like. Perhaps I should put up some wooden beams to allow this. But for now, since I was in B+Q after wood glue, I bought some el cheapo (£20) plastic shelving, threw things out into the garden, swept up some cobwebs, and re-assembled the mess onto the shelves, in the process throwing out a small amount of junk.

The after picture shows things looking somewhat better; I still need to finish off over on the left side, and decide whether to get another unit, or to put up the fourth metal shelves that didn't go into the basement, or whatever.

Update: I did indeed put in a beam-type thing. Here's the first, on the RHS; I also did one on the left later.

And then, looking at the back left the next day, turning over a pile of curtains and stuff, a cloud of wasps flew out and they weren't happy. But after a bit of fly spray they died down.

Fixing the Primavera box

Years ago - before children, I think, so decades ago - M bought me this lovely box, and we used it for years, and then it got accidentally knocked out of the window and broke; and for some obscure reason I thought I needed to fix it "properly", and so put it away and didn't. And today I ran across it again and thought I might as well fix it as well as I could, and worry about perfection later. 

So having bought some new wood glue, the old having congealed, I rather roughly glued it together, and then though oh I really ought to be clamping it while it dries, by which time it was a bit late but never mind.

And now I have:

It was, per my title, originally from Primavera. The assistant said something about it being made by "England's premiere boxmaker" but that could just have been sales talk.

Book review: Sad Cypress

Another Christie. This time we rise from the lower-class depths of Mrs McGinty with a sigh of relief to a more refined upper-class plane: the inheritance of the estate of Mrs Welman provides the driver for the plot, with to-be-weds Elinor and Roddy going down to see her having received an anonymous letter. We get to see that while the two are nice enough they are useless and aware of it; indeed so is Ma W; as so often, those with wealth have in these books done nothing for it.

If you want the plot, Wiki will tell you, so I won't.

I was all in favour of it-were-Roddy-wot-dun-it; he fits the young-man stereotype, though not obviously the pushy cocky type. His enthusiasm for Mary could easily be faked; with Elinor out of the way the dosh would be his. Instead, and nicely I think because it is good to have minor characters pulled up, it was the nurse wot dun it.

Nit-picks, and so on. I think we could have done with less of Elinor woozing around in a daze half wondering if she really had done it. We know she hasn't, because it would be terribly tedious if she had. Peter Lord's car appears unexplained, unless I skimmed to much at the end; presumably he visited, and presumably he dropped the German matchbox; it was kind of him to provide red herrings for Aunt Agatha. But unless Hercule immeadiately recognised these as red herrings, and I saw no sign of that, he would inevitably have asked the good doctor to account for his time that afternoon, and this he did not do; Ag doesn't make him do this, of course, because she knows it is a red herring; and I suppose I should have taken the hint. Poirot knows that Roddy has been back to England earlier than he said because he burgled his house; but it would be natural to consult the immigration records or whatever to confirm that. The torn-off fragment of (m)orphine label is anomalous. Hercule never considers whether it was accidentally left, or deliberately done as a plant to make the poisonning clear. But it has to be an accident, since it is "the wrong label" (my previous motto of "whenever something is torn off there's always a clue there" is true in this case), in which case it is an unexplained accident. As to the poisoning: we're back at the usual trope of "oh she was killed with poison" ignoring niceties of dose and so on. Had Elinor done it, it would have been natural to ask how she knew what a fatal dose was, but no-one does. As it happens "Hopkins" is medical, so does know. "Hopkins" survives because of the emetic, and this brings in the thornless roses, and so it is all terribly cute, but also rather convoluted; more naturally she would just have put the powder in Mary's cup and poured tea for her, which would have worked just as well.

The biggie, though, is the idea of Mary inheriting, then dying, and passing her property onto her aunt. As someone else pointed out elsewhere, as an illegitimate child this would have been difficult; presumably even harder as aunt-of-child; and anyway the evidence that she was Mrs W's child is slender. Not only that, but "Nurse Hopkins", it emerges at the end, has hopped it from the New World with plod hot on her tail, so how is she proposing to turn up to make the claim? This just doesn't seem well thought through. Incidentally, the letter-to-Mary, which we are told to read as though to the child, is clearly written as though to a third party; I saw that but didn't think it through clearly, I merely though: "oh, our Ag has carelessly written it as though to a third party", but I should have known she isn't careless in that way. Oh, and also, as I read the situation at the end of the book: that plot has come to pass. Mary should have inherited. But no-one mentions this, not even Poirot saying quietly "well we'll just forget that shall we?".

New Laptop

I have a new laptop. Now that I am a gentleman of leisure and unable to sponge off work, I felt the need. The old Lenovo I paid £200 for four years ago when transitioning from Qualcomm to Roku is too small slow and weak. Here we see how gloriously sleek and slender the new one is.

It is a Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16" 3K Touch Screen, 1.66 kg, H12.80 x W355.40 x D252.20mm, Super AMOLED, 2880 x 1800. There are a confusing variety of options; I'm not at all sure I needed the "360" bit, which means it folds back like a tablet, but after looking around I concluded this was about the best I could get without spending ages possibly saving a few hundred pounds. This is from John Lewis: I wandered around there - it was where M got whatevre she has - and it was their only product that at all caught my eye. The screen is lovely and survives well against a bright background. And is also touchscreen, though I don't find myself using that much.

Here's the proof that it has no missing pixels yet. It has a combined power-and-fingerprint-sensor that appears to work. Here's it updating the BIOS to P14RHB.

Book review: Reflections on a Marine Venus

Or, what I did on my holidays, by Laurence Durrell. Sort of. I'm being unkind for effect, which I probably should not be. But quoting Goodreads, In his hugely popular Prospero's Cell, Lawrence Durrell brought Corfu to life, attracting tens of thousands of visitors to the island. With Reflections on a Marine Venus, he turns to Rhodes: ranging over its past and present, touching with wit and insights on the history and myth which the landscape embodies...  which I interpret as the previous book did well, there's clearly a market for this stuff, can you do another island book please?

And so he has dutifully written up his time on Rhodes, post WWII. There's the stuff he actually did, though it seems rather thin for several years worth (perhaps he was busy with his assigned job, and it wasn't quite the holiday I'm claiming), a few stories of excursions, bits of potted history or myth to pad it out, and a culminating peasant festival.

This is from 1953; it may be his second book, and pre-dates the Alexandria Quartet; which, for all my quibbling, I may well now read.

What saves it, of course, is that he is a well-bred cultured chap who writes well. You can take this book anywhere. But, somehow, to me at least, he fails to really convey the joy of the island and instead it is a bit laboured; the effort shows. Perhaps it is indeed a bit dutiful.

Book review: a Trace of Memory

A pot-boiler, from the Amnesty bookshop. I confused KL with KR, who wrote the rather lovely Pavane; and having sorted that out I confused KL as author of A Plague of Pythons - which is Poul Anderson - with A Plague of Demons - which my very vague recollection finds similarities to in this work.

The story further has echoes of Glory Road, in that a shiftless man is picked up  by an alien; but I confess the connections are slight.

The plot need not trouble us here I think; we start on Earth, we transition about half way through to the distant planet of Vallon; various things happen; it is all reasonably entertaining and light weight.

A key plot point, which another book would have explored philosophically, is: the aliens have very long physical lives, but every so often, perhaps about every length-of-human-life (bizarre coincidence) they "change": forget everything, and rejuvenate. But! They have tech that allows them to store previous memories, and so re-image themselves and continue where they left off (why, evolutionarily, this would happen is totally ignored). But it turns out that you can be re-imaged into any other person's body; our hero is, in the end. But all of this is used as nothing more than a background plot device as convenient.