Blinking into the light

An insect crawled out of my salad.

It was a garden centre restaurant in leafy Surrey where ladies of a certain age meet to talk about nasturtiums and put the world to rights over a skinny latte and Victoria sponge.

They didn’t say anything about the additional protein frolicking in the lightly dressed side salad.

To be fair and honest, he wasn’t a particularly large bug. We’re not talking hairy-legged tarantula or antipodean funnel-web monstrosity. A little wingless weevil chappie I suppose.

He scuttled a couple of inches to the edge of the plate and … stopped. He looked at me and I looked at him, like two gunslingers facing each other down across a dusty street.

When I say “he” I have to confess that I am speculating. If I am unclear about his or her species then I am equally clueless about his or her gender.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

My wife looked up. “Oh?” she asked.

I pointed at the critter.

“Oh!” she said. It was nice to have matrimonial confirmation.

At this point in our story, our unexpected guest took to its several legs and scrambled off my plate and clear across the table. Exit watched by a suddenly appetite-less diner.

Gingerly I picked at the now-toxic remnants of the salad. I am not sure what I was looking for. An accomplice or two? Evidence of his activities under the lettuce and rocket? An insect party still in full swing where the other guests were wondering where Fred had gone?

Well, what could I do? I politely summoned the waitress and told her that our table for two had briefly become a table for three. Of course I had no proof as the offending beastie had taken to its heels. If insects have heels. I am a bit hazy about details like that.

She offered me a gratis pudding but that only gave me visions of spiders in the profiteroles. And nobody spiders in the profiteroles.

That’s where it ends. We never did see our friend again. I like to think that he had a good and fulfilled life, as bug lives go. I picture him happily doing bug things that have nothing to do with being lightly tossed in vinaigrette.

As for me, these days I like to inspect my salad with a little fork prodding and judicious lettuce lifting.

As you do.

The universe laughs

It was more than forty years ago, an age of innocence and wonder, peppered with moments of high anxiety and embarrassment aka my school days.

Some days earlier, the teacher had set us some maths homework. We were to find something round and measure both its circumference and diameter. Then repeat with something else that was equally round. What did we notice about the relationship between circumference and diameter?

This homework delighted me beyond all reasonable reason. I already knew that the magic ratio was pi. Or as we nerdy types like to call it 3.141592654.

So with a flourish I scribbled a mini essay about pi. Never mind all that fuss and nonsense about measuring jam jars. Here it was to 9 decimal places. Nine! Count em.

With a few minutes before the class was about to start, one of the other kids sidled up to me. “Have you done your homework?” he asked.

“To nine decimal places,” said I, with a deal of pride.

“Lemme copy,” he said, reaching for my exercise book.

Well, what could I do? He was (a) bigger than me, (b) tougher than me and (c) I always liked to be helpful and (d) I was delighted to share in the nine (nine!) decimal places.

“Bloody ‘ell,” he said. “The teacher would never believe me if I said all that. I’ll just say 3. That’d be near enough.”

(Yes, but it’s not to nine decimal places, is it?)

So there we have it. I hand in my homework with its nine (nine!) glorious decimal places. He hands in a scrappy exercise book with a piddling zero decimal places. Surely no contest? An answer of “um, three” cannot possibly live with a scholarly essay on the nature of pi.

Have you worked out the punchline yet?

The teacher hands out the homework. My friend, the cheat, scores a frankly implausible 10 out of 10. “A superb piece of homework,” says the teacher. “Just what I was looking for.”

If he scored a 10/10 what heights await me? I open my exercise book to find a dismal 5/10 sitting there, with the comment “You cannot measure accurately to nine decimal places.”

The unfairness of it still rankles, some 40+ years later. My answer was objectively correct, but it wasn’t what the teacher had asked for. Measure a jam jar. That was what he said and that was what he wanted. Not someone showing off to nine decimal places.

Yeah, good one, Universe. You got me.

The button

Forgive me, friends, for I have sinned.

As sins go, it’s not a huge one. I’m not about to be clapped in irons and hauled in front of a magistrate. It’s probably only a footnote on my ledger when St Peter and I have that performance appraisal review meeting in front of the pearly gates.

It was a breakfast meeting of the local Rotary society. Around a dozen of us were putting the world to rights over a full English breakfast and croissants.

Then something dreadful caught my eye. Horrified and curious, I could not look away although I knew I should. It was a car-crash moment.

One of our number was eating his croissant in quite possibly the worst way possible. He was dissecting the poor innocent croissant with knife and fork like a surgeon carrying out an appendectomy.

There was more. Having made multiple incisions, he then proceeded to lather the croissant with butter. Did he know how much butter goes into making a croissant? My arteries hardened at the thought of it.

He was not done. With minute application and care he ladled marmalade onto the butchered croissant. Marmalade! This was medieval torture to rival being hanged, drawn and quartered. His poor breakfast was hacked, drowned and marmaladed.

I was transfixed. My wife was saying something incredibly witty and profound to my right, but I caught not a word. For that moment the whole world was just me and him and a warm French breakfast product.

It turns out that the Universe has a sense of justice. As he was lifting a fork’s worth of calories into his mouth one almighty dollop detached itself and landed splat on his shirt front. Naturally, it would be a formal while cotton shirt.

The judges would be reaching for perfect 10s for this dive. Not only had the marmalade double-flipped off his fork, it has also landed perfectly on one of his shirt buttons. It had not deviated to left or right. It hit the bullseye as accurately as a modern day Robin Hood.

That blob of marmalade was as stark and beautiful as a button on a clown’s shirt. Bright and orange and glistening.

I looked around the room. No-one else had spotted it. Everyone was deep in conversation about the heat wave or Boris or the war in Ukraine. The Universe and I were the only ones who knew that one of our number was now wearing his breakfast.

It was at this point that my courage failed me. I should have told him about the preserve on his shirt-front. But to do that I would have to admit that I was staring at him during his unusual (some would say unethical) use of domestic cutlery. So I said nothing and let him depart this place of breakfast for the wide world.

Pray pardon me. I am weak. My penance was to spend the rest of the day, and much of the days that have followed, pondering about when he would realise his predicament. Would he go on to smear marmalade over much of Godalming during his day’s travels? Maybe he would be cheered during his day to find that his breakfast was not yet done with, and that he had saved a tasty snack for later in the day.

Better still, his discovery would probably occur when he was in a location without access to knife and fork, so that he might complete the breaking of his fast with his fingers as the Universe intended.

Maybe at the point of discovery he took comfort from the fact that no-one at the breakfast had seen his bright orange clown’s button.

Universe, I admire your breadth and beauty and timelessness and all that. But sometimes you have a wicked sense of humour.

My pet typo

I have a confession to make. It is a little bit embarrassing. I suppose most confessions are. But we are friends and I hope you will be gentle with me.

It all starts with my square hands. Grave digger hands. Peasant’s hands. Palms as wide as they are long with stubby fat fingers. Hands made for moving pianos rather than playing them.

If we trace my lineage back far enough, my forefathers were undoubtedly more Neanderthal than Elven. We don’t do elegant.

When I was knee-high to a hobbit, this gave me the worst hand-writing that the world has ever seen – a squiggly mess that looked like the missing link between cursive script and Anglo-Saxon runes.

These days, poor handwriting is less of a problem than it used to be. We hardly need to write anything other than making a mark on a van driver’s phone to acknowledge delivery of … well, just about anything really. Over-consumption in the 21st century comes in a white van.

You might think that all my problems would be solved by technology. Surely the keyboard doesn’t care if I have short stubby digits or the long delicate pincers of a concert pianist. Equality starts with QWERTY.

But no. The technologically digital world does not compensate for my lack of elegance in the biologically digital department.

You see these fat fingers are highly skilled in hitting two keys at once. Or transposing letters. Or going the whole covfefe and writing utter gibberish.

Incidentally while typing that I noticed that the spellchecker doesn’t object to covfefe. That’s another one to put on the list of things that you wouldn’t believe were true.

Ho hum. Back to my stubby fingers … which I had initially typed as finfers. This must be at least partly how a dyslexic person reads. Nearly every word is a torture of backspacing, deleting and trying again.

That 70,000 word novel probably took over 100,000 words of trial and flipping error.

Auto-correct helps a little. Or as it is known in our household – auto-corrupt. Sometimes the inner pixies who work in the Word department will cover up my blushes. Or, as I originally wrote, my bluishes.

But Word can’t detect when I spell a word incorrectly but accidentally come up with something which is a legitimate word. The pixies can’t see that “bluish” should have been “blush”.

Which brings me to my confession. There is at least one mischievous word which lurks in the design of the QWERTY keyboard. There may be others, but this is my personal demon.

My friends, I would like to introduce you to “busy”.

The initial “b” is not a problem. It sits there all on its own in the middle of the bottom row. It’s a perfect target for a right-handed pointy finger. I can do “b” with, ooh, let’s say a 90% success ratio.

I’m pretty cool with “u” too. It’s a short hop from “b” and a little to the right. Still pointy finger, up and across a bit.

All is well with the “s”. That is such a common letter that we can plonk on it pretty much by instinct.

It is what happens next that causes me difficulties. The transition from “s” to “y” goes via the trickster that is the letter “t”. As I aim for a safe landing on “y”, many is the time that I undershoot and hit “t” on the way.

And as if by magic “busy” becomes “busty”.

Many is the time when I have written an email to someone which starts something like this “Sorry to bother you. I know you are very busty at the moment.”

It’s such an old-fashioned and non PC word that I can’t imagine writing it except as a mistake or in this blog. Or maybe as something for a character to say.

But it keeps on appearing at the keyboard in those perilous moments before hitting “send”. I don’t think I have ever sent an email with “busty” in it, but it’s always lurking as a possibility.

Incidentally, my wife reminds me of an incident where she wrote an email about our son and a friend needing to bring his Wellington boots on an outing. She referred to as those items of footwear as “wellies”. The spell checker of today might know covfefe but the spell checker of yesterday didn’t recognise wellies.

The email she sent said: “The park might be muddy so the boys will need to bring their willies.”

A tale of two demons

Well, my daddy left home
When I was three

And he didn’t leave very much to my ma and me
Except this ole guitar and
An empty bottle of booze

Johnny Cash “A boy named Sue”

My version of the Johnny Cash classic “A boy named Sue” would not be so dramatic. My parents divorced when I was seven. I lived with my ma and saw my pa on Sundays. Never mind the ole guitar or empty bottle of booze, he didn’t leave me much except these two demons, one on each shoulder.

Two demons? It has taken my nigh on half a century to realise it. People have been telling me but I just have not been listening. “Do you know there’s a demon on your shoulder?” they would say.

And I would say – what’s so odd about that? I have another one sitting right over here.

Demon number one, step forward my friend and introduce yourself.

My first demon is self confidence. Bucket loads of it. You might say supreme over-confidence and indeed some have said just that. Usually after a job interview. The self confidence to think that I can do anything if I set my mind to it.

My Dad had a kind of strut and swagger about him. In the 1960s he was a teddy boy – all slicked black hair and sharp clothes. There is a family legend that he got expelled from one school on his very first day. That surely can’t be true, but it’s a good story.

This self confidence did not propel him to academic success. He was variously a bus driver, a refrigeration engineer, a scaffolder, a builder. But he always carried himself as if he could do more. As if he could do anything. He ended up as a manager in a construction company, wearing a suit and driving a reasonably flash company car.

Naturally, he was right in every argument. He could see no problem, domestic or foreign, that could not be solved by sending the army in. I am glad he is not around any more to see these days.

My over confidence demon has had me apply for jobs that I couldn’t really do. And get those jobs , some of the time. It has helped me bluster my way through life as a generalist in a world full of specialists. Written books. And yes, indulge in arguments where I am absolutely sure I am right. Not so sure about sending the army in, Dad.

Now you might say that this a good thing. We need highly confident people to dare to do things. Just about every advancement that homo sapiens has made has started with someone saying “it can’t be done” and someone else puffing out their chest and saying “I can do it.”

Maybe, maybe. Come over here, demon. Let me tickle you under your pointy red chin. Just where you like it. You’re not so bad after all, are you?

I suppose it’s time to introduce you to demon number two. The ying to over confidence’s yang. Salt to its pepper.

Say hello to imposter syndrome.

He’s a quiet little demon, this chap. Doesn’t shout or boast. He leans into your ear and whispers: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

You’re making this up as you go along.

You’re bluffing.

You’re going to get found out one of these days.

You can’t do this.

This demon picks his moments. At 4 am in the morning when you can’t sleep, turning over and over that work problem. When the inbox throws up a nasty deadline. When your boss says “Isn’t that project ready yet?” When you look at your to-do list and that job is still there. Always there. Impossible to shift.

Of course, my imposter syndrome demon is close bosom buddies with the procrastination demon. They work to the same agenda.

The imposter syndrome demon plays on feelings of inadequacy. No matter how good you are, you could do more.

Looking back, I reckon there have been half a dozen times in my life when my over-confidence has got me in too deep, and my imposter syndrome demon has dragged me out. A couple of jobs. A marriage. A sports car. A conversation with a literary agent that wasn’t really working.

And no doubt there have been some things I could have done, but didn’t. Opportunities not taken.

I suppose the bottom line is that we all have demons like these. What matters most is how loud they shout and how much we listen to them.

You see, right now the over-confidence demon is yelling: “Great blog. They’re going to love it. Press ‘publish’.”

And the other demon says “No, don’t do it. It’s too personal. No-one will read it. And, besides, you don’t know how to end it.”

What was that you said, demon? I don’t know how to end it?

Here is wisdom

Listen. Here is wisdom.

Friday bottles have less wine in them. Or beer or whisky or whatever sails your galleon. I don’t know how they do it or why. But it’s a thing. It most definitely is a thing.

Each generation knows that its pop music was the best and all that modern stuff is rubbish. Apart from the sixties generation which smiles a smug little smile whenever this question gets asked.

Broken biscuits have no calories. This is known. The same goes for food eaten out of doors and chips stolen from someone else’s plate.

Drinking diet coke magically halves the calorific value of whatever food you are eating at the same time. Don’t ask me to explain the science of this. Please. It’s osmosis or Brownian motion or quantum physics.

The same goes for blobbing low fat mayo onto a burger the size of a small calf. It strips those calories right off and stuffs them through a gap in the space-time continuum.

My wife speaks too quietly these days. I think it’s a trick she has learned from the television. And radio. And the doorbell. And …

There is something very wrong with the training offered to hairdressers and gents’ barbers. They have stopped asking me which side of my head I want my parting on. For that matter, they seem to spend far less time on the hair on my head, and much more time fussing with my ears, nose and eyebrows. Someone ought to sort out their training.

I used to love the joke about the East German pole vault champion who is now the West German pole vault champion. This joke used to be funny. Heck it used to be a joke. Now the youngsters look at you as if you’ve mentioned a CD, fax machine or a floppy disk.

Trouser waistbands shrink in the wash while the knees go baggy. No-one knows why this is.

There was a time when I would see 3 am whilst inputting fluids and making lots of noise. These days I see 3 am whilst outputting fluids and trying to be quiet. The universe clearly has a sense of humour.

Whenever someone says “I am not one to do X, but …” they will invariably do X before the sentence has finished. I am not a racist, but … I am not sexist, but …

We download updates. How does that work exactly? Up or down? Does anyone ever upload a downdate?

The internet is a device for telling other people that they are wrong.

“Does my butt look big in this?” is a question which is not a question. It is a coded instruction to answer in the negative. Do not under any circumstances answer with “it depends what you mean by big.”

“I love you” is a statement which is actually a question. It is a coded instruction to answer in the affirmative. Do not under any circumstance answer with “it depends what you mean by love.”

The future King of England tried that once. It didn’t work out too well for him.

Of all the jokes I remember, some are funny but I am not allowed to tell them any more. Others I am allowed to tell, but they are not funny.

The older I get the more I realise that most of what I think I know is certainly wrong. Including that last statement.

Is that wisdom?

I don’t know you

I don’t know you.

You are the product of all your life’s experiences. Of your parents. Your education. Where you live. What church you go to, if any. The politics you live by. The things you love, the things you hate.

All of these things have made you what you are, just as all of my life experiences have made me what I am.

I am white. Mostly Anglo-Saxon, Northern European with a dash of Norman French and probably a bit of Viking. I do not know what it is like to be black. Or any other colour, race or creed.

I am a man. I do not know what it is like to be a woman.

I am heterosexual. I do not know what it is like to be gay.

I am English. I do not know what it is like to be from any other country.

I was brought up with protestant christian values. I do not know what it is like to be from another religion.

I am an atheist. I do not know what it is like to have a religious faith.

I have been reasonably fortunate in life and have never known true poverty or illness.

I have worked in white collar office jobs. I don’t know what it is like to be unemployed or hold down a blue collar job.

I am me and you are you. You could come up with your own list of the things you know and the things you don’t. I hope you will find, as I did, that what we know is a lot smaller than what we don’t know.

It is a little like a food you have never tried. We can guess what it might taste like, but we can’t truly know until we have a bite. Until that time comes, that food is an unknown to us. I have never tried caviar. I imagine it’s fishy and salty, but I really don’t know.

So how do we all get along? If there is all this stuff we don’t know, how can we cope from day to day? How do we talk to each other? How do we make sense of it all?

Part of the answer is to listen to each other. I don’t know how offensive the N word is to a black person. I can try to get a sense of what it might feel like, but I can’t truly know.

By the same argument, I can’t know how offensive it can be to show a depiction of Muhammad. Or how someone from a culture with a strong belief in human rights might not want to wear a face mask. Or why some Americans have a belief in their right to carry guns.

If someone tells us that they have strong feelings about something, then we have no authority to argue with their feelings. We can argue about facts, but we can’t crawl inside someone’s head and see the world through their eyes. Walking a mile in your enemy’s moccasins is a great idea in theory, but we can only imagine what it is like to live in those moccasins every day.

Humanity has invented another way of dealing with differences of opinion. We turn our opinions into universal “truths” often by writing them down. We have constitutions, codes of laws, religious texts, social norms.

We can then use these universal “truths” to win arguments. We can close down other points of view. Batter our opponents into submission. It’s the linguistic version of serving an ace in tennis.

The problem with this is that the other side of the argument often has universal “truths” of their own.

For example, abortion can be summarised as an unborn baby’s right to life versus a woman’s right to decide what happens to her body. Which right takes precedence? I don’t know. I truly don’t know.

Arguments around wearing face masks often revolve around the rights of the individual versus the obligations of the individual not to cause harm to others.

Part of Donald Trump’s appeal to his base was his implied assertion that steelworkers and coal miners had a right to continue in their jobs, versus the argument that these industries contribute to global warming and climate change.

My universal truth is better than your universal truth. So there!

I have a love/hate relationship with the concept of “woke”. On the one hand, yes, I can see the need for change. We do need to become more tolerant of other points of view. We do need to tackle bias and discrimination.

But the implication of “woke” is that there is only one correct viewpoint – that of the “woke” – and that anyone who doesn’t agree is still sleeping. They will wake up eventually.

And this, for me, is another example of “my universal truth is better than yours”.

So while I agree with much of “woke” I can see that it is alienating some people.

It’s probably around now that you’re thinking that I’m a liberal snowflake. But hear me out, because the argument cuts both ways. Left wing views and right wing views are just that – they are points of view. All sides of an argument have an equal right to their opinion.

What is the answer? I think it starts with admitting that there is much that we don’t know. We can usually only inhabit our own point of view.

Then we need to move on to listening to each other. Really properly listening. And be very wary of arguing on the basis of universal “truths”, which usually are not as universal as we would like to think.

There is a little game I like to play. When I come across a difficult argument, I imagine that I’ve been hired as a defence lawyer for the other side – arguing for the point of view that I don’t agree with. Of course, I can’t get fully inside their point of view, but I find it helps. As a good (pretend) defence lawyer, I have to start by listening to the other point of view.

But, hey, what do I know?

Passing away

My mum died a few days ago.

Of course, we don’t say “died”, do we? We say that she passed away. Or that she is no longer with us. Or that we have lost her. Or some other such fluffiness.

But my mum was a plain talking lady. She never liked to mince words. So let me say it how she would have.

My mum died a few days ago.

I must have said it a hundred times over the past few days. I have been informing friends and family. Telling all the organisations who need to know – the bank, the electricity, the Government. Sorting out the funeral. Talking to the solicitors about her will.

I am sorry to tell you that my mum died a few days ago.

I have said it over the phone, in letters, by email, in forms filled out in the internet.

There’s more than one way to look at this. On one level, we can talk about what we have lost. She was a fiercely independent and strong-willed woman who affected everyone she met. A much loved mother, grandmother and great grandmother. A teacher for many decades. A parish councillor. A friend.

The world is a slightly greyer and less interesting place without her.

Having said that, I am sure that the local supermarket will be quietly relieved that she isn’t around any more to take a pen out of her handbag and correct the spelling and punctuation of anything written in the store. Teachers don’t retire, their pens just get a little redder and a little sharper.

Yes, there is loss. In an ideal world I would have loved to have discovered the secret of immortality and given it to her as a birthday present, tied up with a green silk bow. Green was always her favourite colour.

While there is loss, there is also relief. The last few years had not been kind to her health. Medical science is great at prolonging life but it isn’t always so good at prolonging quality of life. When science couldn’t cure her, it offered a choice between painful lucidity or a pain-free vagueness. Eventually even this choice was taken away. She hated the side effects of the painkillers but she couldn’t manage without them.

I am relieved for her sake that her suffering has ended. It is a guilty thought, but an honest one. She had largely given up on a life that didn’t seem to be giving her much in return.

My mum died a few days ago, and I feel it as loss and relief in equal measure.

I don’t want to remember my mum as an old woman living in constant pain. That wasn’t who she was. It was what she had become.

Instead I want to remember the young woman born in 1938 who lived through the second World War as a child. I want to remember the brave young woman who was the first in her family to go to grammar school and then teacher training college.

The lively teenager who loved the performing arts and danced in a college production of the Rites of Spring.

The caring teacher who taught thousands of children.

The sensual woman, modern before her time, who married three times and lived with a fourth partner.

The loving mother who brought into this world four children, two grand children and two great grand children.

The independent woman who celebrated her fortieth birthday by learning to drive, getting her ears pierced and answering the lonely hearts ad in the newspaper which turned into husband number three.

Loss, relief and thanks. Thanks for a life well lived.

So yes, my mum died a few days ago. I can’t deny it. But I don’t want to think of it that way. I prefer to think that my mum lived from 1938 to 2021.

I don’t want to remember her for dying. I want to remember her for having lived.

The hobby trap

There comes a time in a man’s life when he fancies … a little something that he doesn’t need. A little obsession that is going to cost him money for little outward gain. Something that his family might not understand. Something that is simultaneously frivolous and deadly serious.

When I say “man”, I am not being sexist. This does appear to be mainly a man thing. Not 100% man, but- ooh, let’s guess – maybe a 75% or more.

I am talking hobbies.

Photography. Hifi. Huntin’, fishin’ and shootin’. Cycling. Collecting stuff. Computers. Phones. Woodworking. Metal working. Cars – real or model. Bikes. Tattoos. Exotic piercings. Hiking. Sailing.

I had a friend who collected just about every science fiction movie and television series. He had to have an extension built to his house to keep his ever-expanding collection of Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Doctor Who …

You name it, he had it. And all on VHS cassette. Oops.

I lost contact with him around about the time that he was thinking of buying it all over again on DVD. And I dread to think what he would have done when blu-ray came in.

I shouldn’t be too smug. I have way too many books that I haven’t read. Photography gear that I rarely use. A hifi that doesn’t get played as often as it should. Too many watches, Playstations 1 to 4 … yup, I’ve been there too.

Then it hit me. With a few exceptions, all hobbies cost the same.

Okay, okay, so we need to exclude mega-hobbies like buying yachts and motor-racing . The price of entry is too high for mosty folk. Let’s ignore those blue-chip hobbies.

After years of extensive study. I believe that there are four price points for every hobby. There used to be only three, but a fourth option has snuck in quite recently. Let’s leave that one as a surprise for the end.

The traditional three price points are:

1. A two digit dabbler – up to £99 or $99 or 99 Euros.
2. A three digit hobbist – £300 to £999
3. A four digit enthusiast – over £1,000

Something that costs up to £99 feels like an impulse buy. You probably don’t have to ask permission from your significant other or suffer a raised eyebrow or two. It’s less than 100! A bargain. Heck, they are almost paying me to take it off them.

Dabbler kit will do the job, but with few frills. You can buy a serviceable camera that will take photos and videos. A music player that will play music. A watch from Timex or Casio that will tell the time.

Move on up to three digits and you’ve got a bit more work to justify to yourself or your family that it’s an impulse purchase. At this level, you can put together a hifi with separate amplifier, speakers and some sort of source – streaming, record deck, CD.

Three digits will buy you an entry-level DSLR camera. A decent mechanical watch by Hamilton or Seiko. The latest playstation or XBox.

Move on up to four figures and we are well and truly on an endless upgrade path. Luxury swiss watches costing tens of thousands. Gaming PCs costing several grand. Hifi that costs more than the studio equipment used to record the music in the first place. Professional grade cameras.

At this level, you either need deep pockets or to be pretty well obsessed with your hobby or both.

Hence my conclusion. With a few exceptions, the cost of any hobby is the same – it is whatever you are prepared to pay. The manufacturers do everything they can to give everyone an entry point depending on their budget and level of commitment. Then once you are hooked they offer you an upgrade path. The latest bit of kit. The next model up. A little less amateur – a little more professional.

Each step up the upgrade ladder brings an improvement, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in. A watch costing £1,000 is not going to be twice as good as one costing £500.

Sure, a £10,000 hifi will sound better than a £1,000 hifi. But few of us will ever get the chance to listen to both side by side. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if a more expensive system sounds better than yours. If you never hear the more expensive system, does it really matter?

That’s the capital cost of the equipment. But then we have the costs of staying in the hobby. Buying magazines. New games for your XBox. Records. The eye-watering maintenance costs of servicing a Rolex. The costs don’t end when you have bought the kit.

I mentioned at the start that there was a sneaky fourth price tier. My tech-savvy 20 year old son pointed out that there was another option. Why buy a hifi or watch or camera when your phone can do it all for you and for free?

He has a point. Your phone’s camera won’t be as good as a DSLR but it will probably be good enough. Stick a pair of buds in your ear and you’ve got a music player. Download some games and you’ve got a mini Playstation. Watch movies on your phone and you’ve replaced your 50 inch television.

So do we need to talk about a new hobby price tier? Do we need to add a “free” option?

Ah, no. Sorry.

Your phone isn’t exactly free. The absolute cheapest smartphone you can buy is less than £100 – our dabbler range. Most people will go for a phone costing three digits. Premium phones are above £1,000.

The rules about the cost of hobbies still apply to phones. A phone can do more things at once, but it is still going to cost you exactly the same as any other hobby – whatever you are prepared to pay.

Now, you might think that these price points should fall over time. As new technology comes along, we should get more bang for our buck. Today’s £400 entry level DSLR ought to be £200 in a couple of years, right?

It ought to work that way, but it doesn’t. Sure, the manufacturers will sell off their outdated models for a discount, but they will still maintain their price points. The entry level DSLR has been £300 to £400 for years and is likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.

I suppose it’s the same as the wine list in a restaurant … back in the days when we had restaurants. At one end of the scale, there would be a house white and a house red for reasonable prices. At the other end would be the extremely expensive wines that you’d need a second mortgage for. And somewhere in the middle would be the happy medium that everyone gravitates towards. Not too cheap, not too expensive. The goldilocks zone.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. I don’t even know what the question is.

Maybe all we are doing is an echo of what our ancestors did hundreds of thousands of years ago. We are driven to make our lives a little more comfortable, whether that is upgrading to a better hifi or staring at the walls of our cave and wondering if we needed more animal skins to keep the draught out.

Invisible punctuation

Do you have an electric hedge?

You see, it’s a family joke chez nous. Whenever we see “electric hedge trimmer”, the automatic question is …. “that would be very useful if we had an electric hedge.”

This is not restricted to garden topiary. We could also buy an electric beard trimmer … for electric beards.

Bruan sells a precision beard trimmer, which could be for precision beards or it could be a precision trimmer. Of beards.

Now, you might think that this is all very obvious. The adjective “electric” goes with the second noun “trimmer”. It is the trimmer which is electric, not the beard or hedge.

Okay, okay, I see that. But might I direct your attention to a zoo in San Diego?

A wild animal park … is it the animals who are wild or the park? Are we talking about a park which is full of wild animals? Or a wild park which has animals in it?

Or, to put it another way, is this a WILD-ANIMAL park or a wild ANIMAL-PARK?

I’d reckon that most people would agree that an electric hedge trimmer was “an electric trimmer for hedges”. The adjectives cozies up to the second noun.

Conversely, a wild animal park is “a park for wild animals”. The adjective cozies up to the first noun.

In other words, there is no hard and fast rule. In a menage a trois with an adjective and two nouns, the adjective can sometimes go with the first noun and sometimes with the second.

Incidentally, the whole concept of a wild animal park seems a little suspect to me. If the animals are in a park can they be truly wild? Or should we refer to them as “animals previously known as wild”, a la Prince?

Frankly, it’s chaos out there. There seems to be no consistency or clarity.

Now, that’s all very well, but can we talk about shampoo?

You can go to your local pharmacy and buy a shampoo for greasy hair. That seems fair enough. My hair is greasy. If I use this shampoo, it won’t be. The “for” in the description tells me what maladies it improves. It’s a “before” statement.

Taken at face value, “shampoo for greasy hair” sounds like a weird thing. Why on earth would I want to make my hair greasy?

But we can also buy shampoos for clean hair. Here, the description tells me what my hair will look like after I’ve used the shampoo. It’s an “after” statement.

Different again, we can buy shampoos for different types of hair. Shampoo for curly hair. Coloured hair. Fine hair. Thick hair.

Here the “for” isn’t the bad thing that we’re trying to treat “like greasy hair” or the good thing we’re trying to achieve (like deep shine). It’s more a neutral explanation of which shampoo to buy. Shampoo for curly hair doesn’t make your hair curly. It doesn’t stop your hair from being curly. It’s just the right shampoo to use for curly hair.

Weirdly, there seem to be different rules for different cleaning products. Shampoo is mostly sold on the bad things things it improves, like greasy or oily hair. But soap seems to be sold on its positive qualities. You don’t see many soaps for dirty hands.

Ditto with toothpaste, which is mostly sold according to its good effects.

Why? I haven’t a clue. Reasons. History. Accident. Advertising. Pick whichever suits your world view.

But here’s the funny thing … most of the time none of this matters. We accept that we live in a world where we buy shampoo for greasy hair and toothpaste for brilliant white teeth. We don’t worry about electric beards or hedges.

When we are presented with something that might be ambiguous maybe we put on our charitable hat and parse it as whatever the speaker intended it to mean.

Part of this is down to custom and usage. But there may also be something else – what I like to call invisible punctuation. I believe that when we say something like “electric hedge trimmer” we automatically add a little pause between the words that don’t belong together. And we scooch up the words which are co-habiting.

It’s hard to write this down. The closest I can get to it is:

“electric …. hedge-trimmer”.

or

“wild-animal … park”

Invisible punctuation. Is it a thing? Or maybe I’m just day-dreaming.