Twenty Five Things

[rhythmaning]

I don't normally do this kind of meme, but I was specifically asked to do it; I was going to decline, but I have found others' responses interesting and amusing, so I thought I might give it a go. But single sentence answers never work for me (which is why I don't normally do this kind of meme): they is always more of a story to tell, and this is all about telling stories, so it might get a bit long – twenty five paragraphs...

1. I don't like doing what I am told. People telling me I have to do things results in me doing what I want to do. This doesn't always benefit me, but at least I do what I want to do.
   
2. I play the drums. I haven't actually sat at a drumkit for many years, but it is integral to me: I play the drums. It is why this journal has the name it does. I got my first drumkit when I was thirteen; I still have it. I bought my second drumkit when I was sixteen, and it featured a large 26” bass drum; it was formerly owned by the drummer with Sparks. (The case actually says Sparks on it.) I sometimes dream about playing drums – it is deep within me, and flows through a lot of what I do.
   
3. I learnt to play the alto saxophone. When I first started earning money, I decided what I wanted was a saxophone. I found playing the saxophone very meditative: it is all about breathing. (Give me a straw a drinking straw and I can demonstrate circular breathing; although I could not use circular breathing when playing the saxophone.) I got to be moderately good at the saxophone – I had good rhythm, good tone, good breathing – but I couldn't improvise. I stopped learning – and palying – when my teacher, Dick Heckstall-Smith, said I needed to make a decision: to get better, I would need to practice more. Realising I was never going to be Bird or 'Trane, I have barely picked up my saxophone since. I do, however, still keep it.
   
4. I like music. I like lots of music. I grew up listening to jazz and rock – my father was a jazz fan, and rock was what everyone listened to when I was growing up: my older brother would play lots of heavy rock bands. I spent a lot of my teenage and later years going to gigs – I saw a lot of bands. I only got into jazz when I went to university, and I found I missed the music that my father had been playing all those years (and which I thought I didn't like).
   
5. My musical heroes are John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. I don't think I have any other heroes. It amuses me that they are all black. Duke Ellington is somewhat complicated by the deep, unfathomable connection to Billy Strayhorn – it is hard to tell where one starts and the other ends; but then as Ellington said, he was the one on the bandstand.
   
6. I have three degrees: BA (actually, strictly speaking it is an MA, I think), PhD and an MBA. My BA and PhD are in botany, and took me around the world.
   
7. I like learning. I like doing new things; I like exporing. I like making mistakes. I think these are all the same thing.
   
8. I have a fascination with ferns: the subject of my PhD was bracken. I was one of the few people who actually tried to grow bracken – for most people, it is a weed. I currently have three ferns – Adiantum hispidulum, Platycerium sp., and several clones of a specimen of Polypodium aureus; it is cloned because I chopped it up and got it to take in more pots. (Actually, I think I have two clones and one pot of sexually-reproduced P. aureus.) The Adiantum and Polypodium were growing in pots of bracken – Pteridium – which I was growing to study; which means I have had them for at least twenty three years.
   
9. I like walking. It is the main form of winter exercise for me. I walk a lot. (It ties in with playing the drums: all that rhythm.) It is one of the things which defines me. A few years ago, I walked a marathon, and I did a pretty good time – 5'40”, faster tan some of the runners. That same year, I did three extended walks to climb distant mountains, each more than 22 miles plus all the ascent: so I effectively did four marathons in one year. I have never been as fit as I was that summer.
   
10. I am left handed; almost radically so. My left hand dominates. (Surprisingly, I play the drums right handed; one can only play the saxophone right handed – it is the way they are built.)
    
11. I take photographs; I have done since I was fourteen: I got my first camera – a heavy Zenit E – in October 1974. I think I must have taken more than 40,000 photographs – and that is a conservative estimate. Photography is my main creative pasttime. It is the way I see the world. Usually in abstract, in shadows.
    
12. I like cooking. I ike cooking because I like wine. I like wine and whisky. These things are all connected. I think I am quite a good cook. I make it up as I go along; and I rarely cook anything very complex.
    
13. Did I say I liked wine? I drink a fair bit; not too much, though the Government thinks I am an alcoholic. I get through a couple of bottles of wine a week, maybe three; and I often have a dram or two of whisky – always Scotch – late in the evening. I always keep two days out of seven when I don't drink; I stick to this rigourously, on a rolling seven day average. (Except when I am on holiday...) Deciding what to eat on those days is always a quandary, since I think good food just tastes better with wine. Similarly, but differently, I try to make sure I eat vegetarian meals a couple of days a week, too.
    
14. I like books. I really like books. Not as much as many on my f-list, though. I grew up with books: my father worked in publishing; my grandfather was an author, editor and publisher. There were always books around – our house had a lot of bookshelves. Although, it has to be said, many of them contained jazz records.) As a teenager, I used to read proof copies for my father – whatever was hanging around – and spot typos and things: I read a lot on holiday. I still do.
    
15. I like rain forest. This stems from the botany. I have spent a lot of time in rain forest (although not for the last few years). There is something about big trees: the first time I went into rain forest, as a student on an expedition to montane forest in Tanzania (I wanted to go to Greenland; I got slightly distracted – the only expedition I could find was going to Africa. I made it to Greenland several years later) – the first time I went into rain forest, it was awe-inspiring; a very humbling and spiritual experience – our existence is nothing to the trees, standing over 150 feet and hundreds of years old. But it is also very fragile: cutting a path in the forest, it become a stream, and the soil washes away. After only a couple of days. But, hey, tree ferns – amazing things!
    
16. I am an accountant. Botany didn't pay; well, also it got boring, and back in the mid-eighties wasn't a good time to be an academic. I am not, though, a typical accountant: I don't actually do any accounting (aside from on my own account), and haven't for years. But having spent many years as an accountant, that too is deeply engrained in my thinking. Just a bit warped is all.
    
17. Connected but different is working woth numbers. I am good at working with numbers – making sense of them: seeing what story they have to tell. If I see a column of numbers, I feel a need to add them up. When I am swimming – another meditative form of exercise - I do percentages in my head, just for the hell of it. I am not very good at stats though – I know how to answer questions, but I don't necessarily understand the answers.
    
18. In case it wasn't clear from the last answer, swimming is my other form of exercise; but it has a pretty strict season: March to November. The end of November through to March, it is just too horrible usually to go swimming.
    
19. I live in Edinburgh, which is my favourite city (New York, Amsterdam and Paris are all up there, though). I am planning on moving back to London, after an absence of fifteen years, which will be interesting and, I hope, very rewarding.
    
20. If I had my time over again, and I knew back then what I know now, I think I would choose to study economics, psychology or the history of art. I may well do one of these courses in the future, but I can't decide which, so perhaps I shall just remain a dilettante. I like being a generalist. I like dabbling.
    
21. I like writing about art; surprisingly, I find it easier to describe works of art than music: perhaps music effects me more emotionally, so that analysing it doesn't really make sense.
    
22. I don't believe in God – I am a rational-atheist – but, if I did, the deep blue of the sky would be proof of God's existence.
    
23. I can click all eight of my fingers against my thumbs. This is connected with the drumming thing. I have a partuclarly strong left-middle finger snap. For me, the perfect dance is distilled into a raised eyebrow and a snap of the fingers.
    
24. Talking of dance, I really love watching modern dance and ballet. It is, for me, the perfect match of music and theatre. I have to like the music to like the dance though – and I cannot dance myself if I don't like the music.
    
25. I have a variable notion of truth. My truth is only one perspective; someone else's perspective might be differnet, but equally true. If I were ever called as a witness as part of the legal process, I would have a real problem with “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” These things can never be known, and it is arrogant to believe they can.
    
26. Twenty five? Fuck that. Why should I stick to twenty five? I refer you to my first point...