There’s a saying, attributed to Peter Drucker, that if you can’t measure something you can’t manage it. The unspoken corollary in an age of KPIs and data tracking is that if you can’t measure it then it isn’t important. For a long time I’ve held the opposite view, that the things you can measure are often the least important.
That’s a broad rule of thumb: some numbers are important and worth tracking such as, in my case, HbA1c, blood pressure and PSA, but others are a problem, which brings us to Orthosomnia. Orthosomnia is a relatively recent (2017) term for becoming obsessively focused on sleep tracking information from a smart watch and incurring damage because of it. There’s more information here:
I have a couple of smart watches (one ancient and near end of life and one more recent) that I find useful when I’m exercising and have tended to keep on my wrist all the time. They gave me useful information about heart rate and the like, but both of them are now turned off and in a drawer because I caught myself looking at the data all the time and sometimes feeling anxious about it. Some of that was to do with sleep but some was to do with the other notifications and tracking that the watch does, or purports to do, and I was getting irritated with the scolding quality of the notifications. And there were some odd ones: you’ve had a stressful day it would nag as I sat in a recliner with a book, or conversely you’ve had a relaxing day when I’d been to the gym and been more active than usual. Also the messages seem to be calibrated towards a notional person in their thirties rather than a man in his sixties recently treated for cancer. That isn’t a huge surprise with a mass-consumer product, and some personalisation is possible, but not much and not enough.
In any event it isn’t entirely clear what the watches are measuring, and a lot of what is being ‘measured’ as a health statistic is not something that can reasonably be called manageable in a cause and effect kind of way. In principle I could just look at trends, but that is to make the best of an unhelpful situation when it is easier just to cut it adrift.
There is also significant disruption in my current ‘health statistics’ because of the impact of the hormone implants on my metabolism and sleep patterns. The bigger picture is summarised well in the following extract from recent correspondence with a doctor:
Androgen deprivation is a very powerful intervention, and what you’re describing is a direct consequence of how it works rather than a sign you’re doing something wrong. Cancer treatment involves specific and very influential medications, and when those are in play, diet and lifestyle often don’t shift weight and appetite the way they otherwise would. What worked for you in 2021 [to put type-2 diabetes into remission] may simply not behave the same way now.
What I can say is that the foundations haven’t changed. Sleep still matters enormously, and it’s worth protecting properly. So do stress levels and social connection, which get far less credit than they deserve. Eat whole foods, broadly Mediterranean in shape. Keep moving, and lift weights, which I’d emphasise more than usual given what hormone therapy does to muscle and bone over time. Those things are the right thing to do whatever else is going on, and at your stage they’re probably the highest value things available to you.
The medication that caused this is almost certainly the same medication that bought you your outcome. Some of what you’re living with now is the price of something that worked. That doesn’t make it less annoying, but on the whole it’s a good problem to have.
Eating whole foods to a Mediterranean-style diet (so-called), exercising with weights and aiming to get decent regular sleep are things that I do, and I don’t need to be hectored by a watch in pursuit of an illusory ‘perfection’ based on questionable metrics; what is more important to me is the very real sense that I’m feeling fine and doing the right things.
I’ve been in a strange mood of late, and two things are on my mind; one is global heating, the other is the state of the economy in the age of Mango Mussolini.
In the case of the former, the overwhelming public discourse is around how this has been an ‘exceptional summer’ in the northern hemisphere and tropics. The missing context is that this year’s summer will, short of a major volcanic eruption (which will bring its own problems), come to be seen as cool by comparison with what’s to come. We are firmly on course for an uncontrolled global temperature rise of at least 2° above the historic average (however that is baselined) and that will be catastrophic.
This isn’t a new thought: it has been a constant in this blog and its predecessor; it underpins my second book of what are ostensibly vampire stories, The Butcher Bird. The background of those stories is that emissions have been halted but changes already in the system continue unabated. When writing that book I kept up to date with the science and every time I thought I’d gone a bit too far for dramatic effect I would later have to turn the dial up a bit more. Perhaps there’s another book there; hooray.
In the case of the economy, so much of the world’s finances and institutional investment are now tied up in the multiple Ponzi or Ponzi-adjacent schemes and corruptions in the US markets that, to use a well-worn metaphor, one domino brings the rest down in a way that makes the great liquidity crisis of 2008 look like a dress rehearsal. I’ve long thought that we never properly addressed the structural and behavioural issues that underpinned 2008, especially network interconnectivity and interdependency, and the consequences of those issues will manifest with the inevitability of earthquakes releasing tectonic stress. Whatever triggers the collapse of the AI bubble, the rippling impact will be immediate.
The impacts of both the above are likely to strike and strike hard within the ten years, probably well within that period, and the impacts will compound. We are, of course, wholly unequipped to deal with either let alone both. The warnings have been there for years if not decades; I have no expectation at all that our political classes will do anything substantive to find and implement mitigations. I stick to my view that the notion of ‘net zero by 2050’ is a useless form of words used to disguise doing nothing at all; a manufactured fantasy to ignore the science. Indeed the current mood in the USA is to decry the science as fake and consciously sabotage mitigation efforts; this is dreadful but only an extreme example of the general trend of elevating political and financial expediency over physics. And there’s no excuse.
None of this means that we should do nothing, but it does set the context for whatever it is we do even if that is too little too late. The first step is to change our relationship with the petro-chemical industry utterly and decisively. Given the widespread devastation caused by fire and floods this year one might hope that the penny might drop where it counts, but it won’t.
I published a couple of parallel pieces on Substack, one to do with physical consequences of cancer treatment, and one on creative consequences. If you’re interested, you’ll find them here:
I decided to call my ADT-induced moobs Liam and Noel because they are a pair of useless tits who won’t go away.
More seriously, talking with other men in a similar situation, it is/was naive of me to think that as the hormones wear off the side effects will just roll away. I think the only way to counteract the impact of the hormone treatment is to go back to the diet and exercise disciplines I adopted to get rid of type-2 diabetes four years ago. Here we go again.
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For various reasons I have bought a ticket for each night of the Rush shows in Glasgow next March and have been making my way chronologically through their back catalogue. I am forming opinions and in due course will express those opinions here. I suspect a lot of long-time Rush aficionados will disagree with those opinions. I’m looking forward to it.
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I haven’t yet seen Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey but I have watched two of this year’s other releases, albeit on the small screen, The Mandalorian and Grogu and Supergirl. Both were very efficient, well-made pieces of corporate entertainment; both were formulaic and empty.
I’ve spent most of the month since I last posted sitting out under a sun umbrella either reading or trying to write. A lot of the reading has been research for the writing, and has included spells in the National Library, Edinburgh Central Library and the National Records. In terms of fiction I’ve been deep diving once more into Dorothy Dunnett; I really enjoyed her second series of historical novels, the House of Niccolo series set in C15 but have always found her earlier series, the Lymond novels (C16) harder to get into and that’s my current task. So far so good.
I thought writing would flow more naturally once the worry about cancer receded but I’m finding it tough to get back into it. My process is to turn up for work every day with notebook or MacBook and trust that sooner or later the Muse will come and join me. I’m getting there but it’s slow going.
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I have occasional conversations with other men who have been through, or are still in the middle of, the prostate cancer experience. Those of us who have had the hormone treatment tend to gripe about the inexorable weight gain that is common amongst us. One chap said that he had named his moobs Thelma and Louise and I got to thinking about mine – Agnetha and Anna-Frid? Althea and Donna? Suggestions on a postcard, etc.
Added: since writing and publishing this my perspective has shifted somewhat. Stay tuned for further thoughts 🙂
Rush is a band that has never done much for me. I recognise the quality of the musicianship but the music itself has never grabbed me. I have several of their CDs, the ones the hardcore fans talk about, that I bought cheap some years ago and every so often I put one on to see if I like Rush yet and the answer is always no.
I mention this because Rush are making waves with a reunion tour with Anika Nilles taking the drum seat left by the death of Neil Peart in 2020. Despite my general feelings towards Rush, I enjoyed the first appearance of the ‘new’ Rush (which includes Loren Gold on additional keyboards) at the Canadian Juno Awards (embedded below) and have been dipping into fan footage of the first shows of the tour.
Anyway, two things have come out of this. The first is that I checked out the prices of their Glasgow dates next March thinking it might be nice to tick them off the list of bands I’ve seen. I looked at the numbers then put my credit card away again. The second is that I had another listen to one of their popular albums: I was part way through track two when I turned it off. Still no.
Added: since writing and publishing this my perspective has shifted somewhat. Stay tuned for further thoughts 🙂
The BBC’s statement this week on the future of Dr Who has provoked a lot of comment, not least because it whiffs of a chaotic rush job to mask behind the scenes issues. For this viewer since 1963, there is a sort of sadness but not a lot of surprise.
Cards on the table, the idea of contracting production to a company other than Bad Wolf under a lead writer other than Russell T Davies is necessary, not because I have any particular animus towards them but because I think their time has run its course. Spectacle and melodrama have increasingly nudged thoughtful writing aside and the show got caught up in a doom loop of diminishing returns soundtracked by Murray Gold’s over-wrought incidental music that never shuts the fuck up. Yes there were latterly some very good episodes, but they shone against a dimming background.
Dr Who has a long history of experimentation, exploration and invention, balanced by an equally long history of bathos and ridiculousness; each of those things lie behind both its persistence and charm as well as those moments that invited things to be thrown at the TV screen. This is not just a New-Who thing: critics of modern incarnations often forget that both Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy had to put up with some seriously weak material, Baker especially, before the show was put out of its misery and placed on its long hiatus.
Dr Who is, in many respects, a victim of its own longevity and also labours under the expectations of vocal, online fandom [as I’ve said before, fans are great but fandoms cleave to toxicity.] The well is poisoned by notions of canon and rigid canonicity is policed by obsessives with nothing better to do but whinge on YouTube. Even so, despite having all of time and space to play with, somewhere along the way the producers ran out of ideas about what the programme could be, or perhaps they knew it but no one had the courage or vision to carry it through except in occasional flashes and glimpses, most consistently recently in the Peter Capaldi incarnation.
What if?
Writing has moved on since 1963 as has televisual language, not just in terms of major points of reference like Twin Peaks, Sense8 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but in the conceptual possibilities of all genre and cross-genre programming. Dr Who was conceived in the era of Robin Hood just like Star Trek was Wagon Train in space. As I write, I’m rewatching the magnificent Arrival which, like the story it came from, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, exemplifies a way of treating time and language and adventures in time in a thoughtful, emotional and intelligent way that Dr Who has rarely approached. Can you even begin to imagine Arrival or Project Hail Mary scripted by RTD?
There have been some very, very good stories told, notably in the Steven Moffat era, but we’ve also had a succession of good actors doing good work over increasingly short tenures and having to do their best with shallow or inadequate material, or good material produced on the cheap, or stories that fail to rise above a premise, with poor dialogue and a lack of substance. Jodie Whittaker, whose Doctor I liked, also had to contend with Covid and lockdown.
Would a general audience respond well to a Dr Who that cloned the off-kilter modernism of Twin Peaks, the Return and mixed in Arrival or Annihilation? Probably not (though I would), but it would respond to a writing and production team with an expanded conceptual language. I do not suggest a complete reimagining but I would like a conceptual regeneration featuring coherent stories by talented writers that engage at least two of the following three: my emotions, my imagination and my intelligence. I’m not expecting Andre Tarkovsky or Denis Villeneuve or Alex Garland, and at heart Dr Who is a family show, but a tangible sense of meaning and depth wouldn’t go amiss.
The danger is that the BBC will award the production contract to a company that promises more of the same, that the corporation will run scared of the creative imagination. That is, after all, what it normally does. How much better would it be to honour the original vision of Verity Lambert and give us something that finally matches the unworldly possibilities of Delia Derbyshire’s original and unmatched realisation of the theme
[Added after first posting, it occurs to me that Dr Who would benefit from a spin off that stands in much the same relation to it as Andor does to the main Star Wars corpus. This does not mean a war between the land and the sea.]
2026 is one of those years in which various things come together that should be celebrated. The first is our fortieth wedding anniversary in August, the second is a significant birthday for Kirstin and the third is the end of my cancer treatment. We took the opportunity to do something we haven’t done for a while: we had a holiday. After a lot of thought we booked up for a week in Bardolino on the shore of Lake Garda in Italy. We thought May would be cooler than in August.
Italy is an easy country to like and we’ve been there several times over the years, starting with our honeymoon above Sorrento in 1986. It is a country, like Portugal, where I have occasional fantasies of living out retirement. It is a fun fantasy to indulge until reality kicks in, the main problems being Brexit, climate and climate change. Al fresco living with good food is only part of the story when a heat dome settles above you and the temperatures soar (or seismology takes a hand.)
There are some lovely little towns around the lake albeit that they are significantly over-touristed. It was an odd feeling sometimes given that I live in a city that is also over-touristed. We visited Garda, Lazise and Sirmione and I liked them all even though they’ve all fallen into a similar pattern – restaurants around the waterfront with tourist shops behind. The tourist shops all sell the same stuff which seems pointless (the same is true in Edinburgh.) There were gems to be found, especially in old churches which usually also had the benefit of being cooler inside than out; in general, though, the ‘authentic’ is increasingly buried beneath a packaged history.
Sirmione was particularly overcrowded, which was a shame as I think it would have a lot to offer in slower time. I had a fine lunch in Lazise at the Caffè del Corso, a simple bruschetta caprese with tomatoes and burrata, but with good bread and good local wine. Garda, though much smaller, had a great vibe and also has hidden depths, I suspect.
We also took a bus to Verona which was where the wheels came off a bit. Verona is lovely, like walking through a Dorthy Dunnett novel, and full of places I’d like to spend more time exploring. The Duomo is impressive for more than the Titian that graces its walls. The problem was that the weather was already hot and, that Monday, the temperatures started to rise, the sun bouncing off the marble streets and the buildings. We wilted. The next day, our last, was the one on which May heat records were broken all over northern Italy. We got caught out in it waiting in the full midday sun for a delayed ferry and I found myself drifting towards heat stroke until I found shade, ice cream and plenty of water.
My homework before we went was to binge watch both of Stanley Tucci’s series in which he eats his way around the Italian regions; I binge watched them twice (one is on Disney+ the other on Amazon Prime and probably elsewhere too.) My homework paid off. There is plenty of decent food in Bardolino but I/we set out to find proper regional cooking rather than tourist cooking; I wasn’t looking for decent food, I was looking for exceptional food. My top three places to eat, should you ever go there, were (in alphabetical order):
Caprice 1971 (by the time we left there was a line waiting to get a table)
Taverna da Memo
Trattoria Bardo (better for supper than lunch but went out of their way to help with Kirstin’s allergy.)
With an honourable mention for Corte San Giovanni which gained bonus points for the presence of a Nonna.
My best mains were at Caprice 1971 (Bigoli all’amatriciana was superb) and Trattoria Bardo (Bigoli di pasta fresca alle sarde di lago was excellent); Trattoria Bardo also had the best house red of the week (Enantio Massenà which I can’t trace in the UK though there is information about the grape.) I also had a series of excellent variations on Carpaccio di Manzo as starters throughout the week.
Over the week I developed a rough checklist of what makes a good Italian restaurant; it is not a foolproof list and may be revised next time we visit, but I hoped for the majority of these,
Italian extra-virgin olive oil on the tables rather than generic ‘EU sourced.’
A good house wine (every respectable restaurant should have a good wine list from top to bottom)
A varied menu with, in tourist hotspots, more imaginative dishes than pizza or Italian ‘classics”
Good bread, preferably made in-house
The degree to which they worked with Kirstin’s dairy allergy
The overall ambience.
I did not want the holiday to end, and we’ve been talking about going back, but if we do it will be in either April or October to avoid the worst of the heat.
I was at the hospital today where it was confirmed that my PSA is <0.1 ng/mL which is effectively undetectable. No doctor will say that I am ‘cured’ because that is not how cancer works, but the news is that the treatment worked. Hooray for the NHS and Edinburgh Cancer Centre.
I will now have blood tests every six months for the next couple of years and then annually thereafter. The main side effects of the treatment for me have been weight gain, hot flushes (especially at night) and general fatigue and joint pain. I’m told that I can expect all of these to improve by the time of the next test in December.
I’ll probably write a more considered piece about the whole experience, but not yet.
Despite the metabolic havoc wreaked by hormone implants, I was delighted and relived to find out this week that my HbA1c remains in the ‘normal’ range (34mmol/mol, 5.3%). I was concerned that the weight gain caused by the hormones had messed with my type-2 Diabetes ‘in remission’ status; happily, it has not. I’m also happy to report a weight loss of 1kg (2.2lbs) over the past few days, so perhaps that is on the turn.
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I found a passing mention of a book called Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy published in 1973, based on his PhD thesis. The book reprints articles and news items from Jackson County, Wisconsin, primarily from 1885 to 1900. The book also includes photographs by local photographer Charles Van Shaike and the articles are primarily from the Badger State Banner as well as records from the local mental hospital.
Unfortunately, the book is now quite expensive, however a film adaptation was made for the BBC’s Arena, broadcast in 2000, narrated by Ian Holm. The film is very much available to view in excellent quality on BBC iPlayer and in lower quality on YouTube (links below). I watched the film twice, enthralled. It is very dark (and some may find it upsetting), the more so because the stories are narrated straight without commentary. And the music choices are excellent.
I found the objectivity of it very affecting, especially the many, many human tragedies. I had a powerful sense of the fragility of life and a dissociation from the usual internal narrative of what it is to be human. I sometimes get this in Family Tree Research which, at its most basic, revolves around a narration of birth, procreation and death. Some of that was on my mind when I had my initial cancer diagnosis although it also helped reconcile me to the diagnosis and informed my determination to live life to the full while I’m here.
Wisconsin Death Trip added something else, a feeling of the shallowness of so much of life, of the wasted potential of our species that has such a high opinion of itself.
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