Choice Words

Posted on 04/08/2024 by Yvonne Rogers

The 2024 Olympic Games have taken Paris by storm. They are mesmerizing. Such a diversity of human athletics performing all manner of extraordinary feats, whether it be swimming like sharks, diving like dolphins, running like cheetahs, or jumping like kangaroos. I watched the triathlon which is an endurance multisport race consisting of swimming in the murky Seine, and then cycling through and running up and down the muggy streets of Paris. The stamina and grit of those who take part is superhuman. There isn’t an animal that matches their prowess.

Which is why when something mind-boggling happens it is truly remarkable. For a long time, during this year’s race, the favoured Brit in the men’s competition, Alex Yee, was way behind his rival, the New Zealander, Hayden Wilde. But then out of nowhere, he stepped up a gear and proceeded to race passed Hayden, with just 400 metres to go. He kept going reminding me of Forrest Gump, his momentum keeping him ahead. He then won the gold medal by a considerable distance. His rival could do nothing at that point but look on; having expended all his energy before, thinking he had it in the bag. How was this possible? How is someone able to turbo charge, like a sports car, after 2 hours of gruelling racing?

It appears on the last lap that he heard his coach poignantly say: “Anything can happen, mate.” These choice words jolted Yee into action. Usually the crowd will rally together in the hope of motivating runners with cries of “Not far now,” “You can do it”, “come on, keep going” and the like. Coaches might use arm gestures or hand signals. But this philosophical turn of phrase, which appeared seemingly out of the blue, resonated in Yee’s brain and body in a way that stock phrases might not have. It did not nudge him but empowered him to believe he could go the extra mile.

What is it about the power of language that it can motivate us to change our behaviour and even do something out of the ordinary? Peter Johnston in his book on education, called Choice Words, provides examples of words and phrases that are key to the effective orchestration of the classroom. He points out how what teachers say can have a big impact on how children learn, think and behave later on in life. Importantly, a teacher that can get a child to figure things out for themselves is the best strategy. This involves encouraging discussion by asking open-ended questions rather than simply telling children what they can and cannot do. As Jean Piaget famously once wrote, “When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.”

Yee’s coach was masterful when he spoke those four words – they were not intended to encourage him to keep going – as he was clearly way behind his rival – but to make him stop for a second, think the unimaginable, and in so doing, turn things around. They were chosen not in anger but in brilliance.

Peter Johnston (2024) Choice Words. 2nd edition. Routledge.

Numbing numbers

Posted on 25/11/2022 by Yvonne Rogers

A part of my work involves advising various companies and government bodies about their future technology research strategies. This week, I had the pleasure of visiting the EPSRC headquarters in Swindon for a two-day meeting. Besides being super excited about meeting up with other members of the scientific advisory team for the first time in 3D (many of whom I had only met as digital postage stamps during the past 3 years), we were also invited to tour various facilities at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in nearby Didcot. I was assigned to a small group that went to see the Diamond Light Source. Sounds like a big laser show but it is in fact a massive science centre. On entering the building we were shown a model of the building to see what is inside. From an aerial view, it reminded me of Apple’s latest donut campus – in terms of its shape, scale and size.

This huge set up enables a laser beam to whiz around a circuit at some unbelievable speed that has the effect of giving off light 10 billion times brighter than the sun. The mind boggles at what that actually means in practice. Of course you never get to actually see the beam racing around the donut but I was mightily impressive to know it was hurtling around while we mere mortals were walking tentatively around the place. What you do see are various numbers, graphs and images in the nerve centre that lets you know what it is up to.

The shining beam is siphoned off into lots of little labs where teams of scientists use it to study all manner of topics, including fossils, jet engines and vaccines. In a nutshell, it is a ginormous microscope that allows lots of measurements to be taken during millions of experimental trials. The scientists and engineers we were introduced to, who work on site, told us how having such a powerful magnifying beam enables them to do incredible science. Making the invisible visible in all sorts of unknown ways. However, they all also mentioned that the data that is collected from the various beam runs is so massive, that outside researchers who come to run their experiments at the facility, nowadays can’t cart their data home with them because there is simply too much of it. Instead, the data has to be stored and analysed on site before a digested form is sent back to them. A few years ago they could save it all onto a portable hard drive…

So what do scientists do with this ever growing mountain of data? How do they count it, describe it and then importantly, work out how to turn it into new knowledge? While data scientists may revel in this sea of data, other kinds of scientists often find it somewhat overwhelming, to put it mildly. To help them in their quest, every now and again, the ‘numbers’ community come up with new names to make it more manageable to describe it. Just this month, the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures introduced some new names (or prefixes, cf. milli- to be precise). These included talking about data in terms of being a ronna which has 27 zeroes after the first digit or a quetta which has 30 zeroes after the first digit.

So how would you use these funny number names to talk about science? Consider the mass of the sun. Previously it was talked about in terms of 2,000,000,000 yottagrams. Now its mass can be said to be 2,000 quettagrams. To me it all sounds a bit double-dutch but to data scientists it provides a new and hopefully more meaningful way of expressing huge quantities of digital information.

Coming up with new data words must be one of the fun parts of the job. I wondered how did they choose them this time? What were they thinking of? Ronna is also a girl’s name meaning “rough island and true image”, while a Quetta is a fort and is the tenth most populous city in Pakistan! And what will replace the ronnas and quettas to express the ever growing volumes of data that will have accumulated in the next 5-10 years? What new words will be dreamt up? Perhaps Tom Lehrer should get in on the act. I am reminded of his classic song, The Elements, from 1956. Makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Thanks to John Collomosse for taking the photos inside the Diamond.

Groundhog Day

Posted on 10/12/2021 by Yvonne Rogers

Yesterday evening many of us living in England sat down for the nth time to watch a live Press Conference from Number 10 about the latest COVID restrictions, with a sense of déjà vu rather than dread. We had heard it all before last and earlier this year; only this time, instead of the Delta variant being the cause, we were introduced to the weirdly sounding Omicron. A bit like coming up with names for hurricanes. We were then told about Plan B (no fancy name) and what it meant for us. I wondered what had happened to Plan A and what might Plan C be? Was there a Plan D if all went belly-up? Different letters of the alphabet for Plans and Greek letters (omicron is 15^th) for variants. All very confusing.

Many of us had already been contacted by our places of work telling us ‘Omi’ was on its way and to cancel our planned Xmas parties. Rather than do this we decided on our own Plan B which was postpone it until the New Year. This way of managing meant it felt less like disappointment and more like a waiting game. New government Plan B rules are like the ones we had in place earlier this year: Work from home if you can. Take PCR tests if you travel abroad. Wear masks in public places.

But there is a new twist to Plan B. You can still party in the pub. Round and round we go.

I looked back at my last blog entry from two months ago, where I was extolling the joys of being on a business trip again for the first time in 18 months. Such a stark contrast in emotions. I was mighty glad I had managed to get away while Delta was stabilizing and before Omicron had raised its ugly head. I even squeezed in one more trip to Finland in November to give a keynote at a workshop aimed at Gen Z. Turns out I was one of the few attendees to make it in person. Many decided not to show up to the event for fear of catching COVID, having watched on the news how the level was rising in that part of Finland.

It was a foreboding of what was to come. But during my brief visit to this neck of the woods in Finland I managed to make the most of being in a completely different place, that was remote, sparse and felt like a million miles away. I enjoyed witnessing for the first time in ages crazy minus something temperatures that made my cheeks glow and lips sting; I loved the feel of crunchy, icy snow underfoot, and the sharp contrast of warmth blasting through my lungs when entering indoors after being outside. I learnt a lot about what it was like to be part of the rise and fall of Nokia – the Finnish mobile company. I also heard about how the Finns keep themselves sane during the many dark months of winter – skiing, shooting and sitting in saunas. And I discovered a sense of humour I did not know existed. The seminar room where one of our meetings was held was called Mr Frost! One wall was completely covered in plastic ice shards! And to top it off, on my last morning, I spotted Santa on his sleigh coming from the North Pole. All very strange and delightful.

Sadly, those delights seem like a distant dream now. My planned conference talk this week – in the lovely city of Leuven, Belgium, booked months and months ago, was cancelled at the last minute. Instead, I was asked to give my talk online – again. So I set up my imaginary row of teddy bears on a shelf just behind my laptop and gave them names as if they were my audience. Another Groundhog Day moment. At 8.30 a.m. I started talking to my laptop and zoomed into Zoom. The remote audience ‘listened’ and ‘chatted’ in Discord (the online social platform often used these days). At 9.30 I stopped talking, pressed the leave button, walked into my kitchen and filled the kettle. Job done but no joy. Such a disconnect. If only there had been a roomful of attentive faces smiling and laughing.

Meanwhile, many migrating wild birds returning to the UK from Russia and Europe have got Avian flu. Worryingly, it has begun to spread to other wild birds like falcons, curlews, swans, geese and gulls. You can’t tell those birds to switch to Plan B and work from home or wear masks. Instead, there is much fear about how and when the avian flu will spread from wild to ‘kept’ birds. Already, there are isolated cases being reported of farmed chickens, turkeys and ducks starting to catch it. Instead of increasing the number of vet hospitals or oxygen ventilators to help cure the poor birds they are instead brutally ‘culled’. It must be soul-destroying for the poultry farmers who discover their birds have caught it. Then it is Plan K for them: Kill all their birds. Luckily, the risk of avian flu to human health is low – but who wants to eat sneezing turkey meat? Nut roast for Christmas dinner, anyone?

Post-Pandemic Bliss

Posted on 14/10/2021 by Yvonne Rogers

I am on my first work trip abroad for 20 months and it is so exciting. The return to ‘in-person’ meetings after what seems like a lifetime of being on Zoom and Teams is sheer bliss for many reasons. Not least experiencing again all that we took for granted but for so long has felt like a distant memory, like using body language, sitting round an actual table, sharing cakes, buying a colleague a coffee, having a side conversation with the person sat next to you, smiling at someone across the table, to name but a few. While I agree with many colleagues that we managed very well during the pandemic and there are some advantages to meeting online – not least you can work more efficiently and have more meetings in a day, and you don’t have to travel – I have sorely missed talking while being co-located and in-person; the conversations can meander and allow for sensitive and unexpected topics to be touched upon and explored in more nuanced ways. Also, I find it discombobulating to hop from one online meeting to the next in a matter of seconds barely any time to catch your breathe. Being 5 minutes late for a physical meeting is acceptable; being two minutes late for an online meeting and item 2 on the agenda is already under way! I like to walk between rooms where different meetings are being held to gather my thoughts and reflect on what was said, what was not said and what we might do next.

But it is more than meeting others in person. It is the travel I have also terribly missed – by whatever means of transport. Flying is a real treat. It has been very easy to feel smug about not using planes for nearly 2 years and how much reduced our carbon footprints have become. But for me travel has always been core to my job as an academic. I cannot do my job without it. So I am very happy to be able to travel again to foreign lands, sharing wisdom, ideas, and advice while listening to others. I am more than happy to travel by slower means (i.e. by train) when it seems sensible, but sometimes it is necessary by plane when it is too far to do so. I live in hope that our engineers will build viable zero emission planes in the not too-distant future. Airbus is already on the case.

So, to Berlin it was for me this week to give a keynote followed by attending an in-person research meeting with many European partners I had not seen for eons. I arrived at the North Terminal in Gatwick on an autumnal Sunday evening. After a slick check in and a super fast security check, I walked through the labyrinth of brightly back-lit duty-free shops when my senses began to go into overdrive. Colours, sounds, logos, smells…bang, wallop, bang. Then, out into the even brighter lit terminal building, where I found myself drawn to more back-lit rainbow-colours – this time a new bar just opened with socially distanced bar stools around it. Before I knew it, I found myself perched on one of the empty stools, gazing intently at all the lovely different kinds of spirits evenly and artfully spaced in beautifully coloured bottles. I had forgotten how magical it is just to look at aesthetically pleasing and perfectly placed artefacts. I sat there for an hour nursing a drink just staring and enjoying people watching.

And then I surprised myself by asking a guy, seated at the next-but-one barstool to me, where he was flying to. He was so surprised that a stranger had spoken to him that he appeared rather startled. But then when he saw I was just being friendly he relaxed and regained his composure. We then started chatting merrily, just like in the pre-pandemic times, about this that and the other for a good period of time, before realising we needed to to head off to our respective gates. I thanked him for talking to me and he reciprocated, saying this was the first time he had spoken in person to a stranger for so long and what a joy it was. We both learnt something about each other’s life we could take away with us. I now know much more about US banks in Europe and he more about human-centred design.

The flight was over in a jiffy. After the plane had landed, my journey out of the brand-new airport (I barely noticed it as it was dark) was smooth, effortless and fast. Straight through security, no queue at the taxi rank, roads empty, and another super slick check-in at my hotel. Hassle-free travel. My room was weirdly modern with a sofa that looked like a green vegetable on steroids. The next morning, I enjoyed the delights of an over-flowing buffet with a sculpted watermelon on show. I felt like a child in a sweet shop.

I gave my keynote in a small loft room to a group of seated students and faculty. To begin, I focused on 2 or 3 smiling student faces (always helps to calm the nerves) and enjoyed the occasion flexing my full body while flailing my arms. The talk was also relayed via Zoom to other students who were sat in another building (German universities have strict guidelines on the number of people allowed in the same room). It seemed to work although I could not see any of the remote audiences. One remote student asked a question at the end which I had to repeat so those in the loft so they could hear. Later in the evening at the reception, the student who had asked the question revealed herself and told me all about her PhD journey originating in Mexico, via the USA, Germany and ending up in the UK. She was full of joie de vivre.

Drone Delivery

Posted on 25/06/2021 by Yvonne Rogers

Amazon have been trialling drone delivery of parcels to people living in remote and suburban towns for a while now. Since then, flying deliveries have literally taken off. Only last month, a rival start-up company in Ireland, Manna, took it one step further. They have developed a fleet of drones that are pretty nippy, flying at 80km/h and delivering goods in less than 3 minutes within a 3km radius of take off. That is really impressive.

At first, the dropping of goods in this way was limited to medicines where there is a need for urgency. Now, it seems all manner of groceries are being dropped, from coffee to melons. People can order something on their phone and within minutes a parcel is released and lowered on a dangling piece of string in front of the person’s house. How novel is that – having a cool glass of wine or a cup of coffee suddenly appear in this way – as if it was out of a sci-fi movie. Look up to the sky and see hundreds of buzzing drones circling, descending and releasing parcels in the air.

Speaking of which, a new report released by the Pentagon provides further evidence that UFOs are for real. The US military has documented meticulously an increase in unidentified flying objects sighted moving around in the sky. At first, one might think there is a coincidence – an increase in drones dropping objects might be what is being mistaken for as UFOs. But the video clips and photos they have released pre-date drones. They look like supersonic bats or lit up jellyfish in grainy skies. For many, it is the ultimate fantasy to imagine actual aliens landing on earth coming from these mysterious flying objects. However, no one has caught on camera any sighting of them lurking around Wandsworth or such like. Sadly, it seems there is still no real evidence. Just glimpses of what might be. Part of the problem is us earthlings don’t have the means to capture them or catch up with them, as they zip passed our planet at lightning speed. As noted by the former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, “Movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for or are travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom. “

Meanwhile I am looking forward to my first G&T dropping slowly from the sky…

Step Challenge

Posted on 28/02/2021 by Yvonne Rogers

There are a myriad of apps available now that are designed to get you to take part and sustain interest in some form of physical exercise – be it walking, running, cycling, yoga, swimming or other. Many have been around for a few years now and have had considerable success in motivating the masses. At the start of the New Year I succumbed to one, called Hadrian’s Wall Virtual Challenge, that caught my eye as it flashed through my Instagram feed, and before I knew it, I had signed up. I have been quite debilitated for the last few months, having been diagnosed with sciatica and some damaged discs in my back – in part due to sitting badly, for months of hours on end in front of Zoom meetings. I am slowly on the mend and in need of an incentive and encouragement to get doing some exercise again. The Conquest challenges you to walk the 90 mile length of Hadrian’s Wall not literally but where you happen to be. I have always wanted to do that walk in the real, but with lockdown and bad back, it remains for the time being a pipe dream. So why not do it virtually? You walk the steps wherever you are and they get added to your total count. Simple idea but clever.

The app has been around for a few years now and has so many endorsements from people who have taken up the various challenges, it had to have been designed well. Indeed, it has the right wow factor, and good use of behavioural change mechanisms in place; rewards when you reach certain stages; compelling and simple visual feedback on a map that charts your progress against others; employs a social good factor; has some personalisation, and promotes peer support. The interface is also intuitive to use although the navigation is a bit fiddly at times. It also automatically downloads your steps (once you work it out, so even walking round the house adds to your total). You find yourself of an evening looking to see where you are on the virtual map and how far you have gone that day and how far to the next stage. It is quite compelling.

I asked a couple of my friends to join me on the Conquest and we paid our dues and got set up and set off. We created our own community so only our icons appeared on the route on the virtual map. There are thousands of people from all over the world doing any one of the challenges each day so you don’t want to be crowded out by lots of stranger icons. I uploaded an orange cagoule-hooded image of myself and it magically appeared on the map.

I set myself 12 weeks to complete the walk – having only just begun to walk again. My friends popped up soon on the route just behind me (you can see one of them on the screen shot). Then they got neck and neck. Two days later they were both racing ahead, fighting it out to the end, with me lagging behind. It was a bit of healthy competitiveness, pushing all of us to exercise that bit more each day. I came third but well within the time I set. By the end I was averaging 6-7,000 steps a day – which for me was a major achievement.

During the Challenge we received various messages charting our achievements. We also each planted 4 trees along the way as part of the Eden Project – that gives you a feel good factor. The strangest part of these ‘add-ons’ was every now and again being sent a virtual postcard, handwritten by yourself to yourself, about what you had seen and learnt. It reminded me of when I was a young child I wrote to myself a postcard from the Victory ship my family were visiting on a day trip to Southhampton. I did not know what to say to myself other than something inane ending up with ‘wish you were here’. There is something weird about writing to your other self. And my handwriting was dreadful then – at least it has improved since then.

After completing the Hadrian’s Wall, we hastily joined another virtual challenge to keep us going. This time we decided to climb Mount Everest. However, it did not feel right as it only counted your steps and not the height of your steps. Pity, as we would have had to have all been running furiously upstairs for the next few months to reach the lofty height of 8,849 m rather than the 39.9 miles we clocked.

I was surprised by how much I have enjoyed the Conquests. Not least, keeping in touch with some friends in a lighthearted and lightweight, but competitive way – while personally upping my game and helping me to get fit again. When you complete each one you have the option of being sent, in the post, a chunky physical medal with a fat ribbon to wear round your neck. The girl below is showing hers off on Facebook, having just completed the Land’s End Challenge, which is a whopping 1,743 km. No wonder she has such a big smile. I wonder what our next Conquest will be?

Dancing Queen

Posted on 12/11/2020 by Yvonne Rogers

Since the pandemic turned our world inside out most of us have been sat for hours on end each day in front of a display (phone, tablet, laptop or PC) interacting with all manner of virtual talking heads. We have gotten used to this way of connecting with our colleagues as the new normal – even joking about still wearing our pyjamas as no-one can see our lower half while on screen. We have also developed a new norm – turning our cameras and mikes on and off when coming in and out of focus during meetings. We don’t do this in the real world but we all do it now in the digital world. It is easier and less stressful to not be visibly present when not talking. Then there is the abrupt ending to our meetings, clicking on the ‘leave meeting’ button transports us back to our home life in an instant.
Today, I gave a keynote at a virtual conference called ISMAR20 that is about mixed and augmented reality. I have given a few invited talks now during lockdown. They are quite different in the extent to which I feel connected with the audience. Some totally detached and others more engaged. Today’s talk was more the latter. The organizers had asked me to record my talk beforehand so that I could be more relaxed during the session and also to reduce the risk of too many technical hiccups overshadowing the talk. The conference setting was a 3D virtual world; that was designed to be like a futuristic virtual campus, comprising lifelike campus buildings and luscious outdoor spaces (the actual conference was meant to have been held in Recife, Brazil).

It has been a long time since I have properly set foot in a 3D world. It required me becoming an avatar and controlling it with my keyboard as if just behind. I had a few attempts to get used to using my keyboard to move around. It is easy to move too fast and walk into or through a wall. A nice touch they had added was ‘clippy-cloppy’ noises as I walked. It almost made it feel I was walking in stilettos. For my appearance, I selected some clothing from a virtual wardrobe, dressing myself up for the occasion. I donned a blouse, skirt and jacket in contrasting colours. Instead of wearing a badge, my name appeared automatically above my head in a halo cloud that followed me around, making it easy for others to see who I was at a distance. Then I was ready to enter centre stage.

There was a lot of tech involved to switch between and to turn on and off at the right time – that needed practice. It seems virtual A/V is just as tricky to get right life as is physical A/V – if not more so. But we got there. Then when it was time for my talk I stood by the virtual podium facing the audience and my pre-recorded talk appeared on a large display behind me. It meant I could not see my slides as I ‘talked’. So, I popped up my slides on my laptop back home and listened to myself rabbiting on in the virtual space. All very strange. Sometimes I had an out of body experience.

After my video ended, I ‘walked’ my avatar to stand besides another screen, clicked on it and there I was again, only this time, as a larger than life video feed fielding the audience questions, which the chair asked me via his avatar. At that point, there were too many of ‘me’. It made almost for an existential crisis, especially when the audio started reverberating. But I managed to cope – as you do – and answered the questions without too much waffling.

Then as I walked off the stage, I was not sure what to do with myself (there was no-one to go for coffee with) so I tried out some of the other avatar actions (like dancing, waving, clapping). Doing the samba was fun and reminded me of Theresa May’s entrance when she danced to Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ at the Tory party conference in 2018. But mine was as an exit to an empty space rather than as an entrance to a rousing crowd. Given the world is so topsy turvey right now it seems apt to dance off stage than on to it. And then in a flash it was all over; I clicked the ‘quit menu option and walked to Tescos down the road to get a sandwich.

Remote Sport

Posted on 01/06/2020 by Yvonne Rogers

Football has started again in Germany played in front of empty stadiums. It must be so weird for the teams to play without the roar of the crowd cheering them on. Normally, the chanting, banter and singing can lift and energise players to new levels. Now with the social distancing rules in place, when they score a goal there are no physical celebrations or embracing of other players. Instead, a punch in mid-air or a tap on the elbow. Not quite the same sense of euphoria or release. The lack of atmosphere means there is no home advantage. Many players approach the game more like a practice one. Show-boating and waving at the crowds also gone. It is no longer the beautiful game.

Same is true for other spectator sports and the Arts, from horse racing to concert-players. No audience physically present and no atmosphere to speak of. How can the performers find other ways to reach out to their fans and the fans connect back with them? Some venues have been thinking about how to bring real people back in their own car bubbles. A number of drive-in outdoor events are being experimented with. The Danish football side FC Midtylland, for example, plan to set up two massive screens in their large car park – that has 1000s of spaces – so that fans can rock up into a socially distanced space and tune into the commentary through their car radio. Instead of drive-in cinema it is drive-in footie. Maybe it will raise the noise level, as they hoot their horns when a goal is scored, but will it create the desired atmosphere for fans and players, alike? The football club have thought about this, too, and will show live footage of the fans parked up cheering in their cars from the car park inside the venue so at least the players can ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the crowd – albeit in their cars.

It might work – certainly better than the cardboard cut-out solution that some stadiums are using with canned cheering and crowd noises being emitted from loud speakers. I wonder how the graphic designer chose which people to use and how to place them at this match – to be representative of the fan base but also a chance for loyal season ticket holders to send in their choice of image to adorn their designated seat. Other plans are afoot for socially distanced drive-in raves and concerts. The mind boggles at the thought of 1000s of cars bouncing up and down as the owners ‘body’ dance while sat in their car seats.

All of these attempts to create some kind of connection, however, are a far cry from the real thing. Maybe, they will become the new normal for a while and morph into something that is still socially distanced but more socially connected. For example, they could evolve into a form of tailgating parties that are so central to US football culture – where fans rock up hours before the game to drink beer and cook on barbecues in car parks and open spaces near the stadiums. However, switching to drive-ins requires turning our cars into entertainment hubs – which obviously SUVs, 4x4s and pick-up trucks are best suited for. Trouble is society is trying to wean people off these gas guzzlers and get them to switch to compact electric cars. Seems counter-productive to saving the planet. There is also the problem that most cities don’t have the parking lots or spaces to support large-scale drive-ins. And then there is the added problem of managing toilet facilities but maybe someone will invent a portable toilet that disinfects itself after each use.

The strangest of drive-ins that have appeared are ‘drive-thru’ churches that pop up and where an outdoor mass is literally held in the carpark. It looks a sorry sight – no communal sharing of the bread and wine. Just the lone preacher necking the wine down himself while talking to a bunch of dark-windowed SUVs. That might be taking the biscuit somewhat.

Another way of connecting fans with players is to keep it digital. Streaming video games have been around for a while, where millions of spectators around the world watch top ‘streamers’ perform. They are provided with all sorts of extras that enables the fans to discover more about the player – not least their emotions and fluctuating heart rate and skin conductance at different stages of the game. This additional layer of data has been found to enhance the spectator experience and improve the connection between the streamer and spectators. But then we would return to being couch potatoes. Personally, I can’t wait to be part of a physical audience again, be it at a football ground, an outdoor venue or a theatre.

Thanks to Daria Lisotsova on unsplash.com

Remote Places

Posted on 26/04/2020 by Yvonne Rogers

Last week, everyone was experimenting with backdrops for their Teams, Zoom or GoTo meetings – I have seen the Northern Lights, New York, beach resorts, outer space, and various exotic places. Quite a contrast from the mundane, domestic kitchens and make-shift home workplaces we have become accustomed to peering into. One of my PhD students, chose Hawaii for his backdrop (see above), and at one point during the meeting it looked like he was surfing as he moved his head back and forth against the palm-tree foregrounded sunset beach. The illusion is created because the backdrop does funny things with your own image when you move your head – your hair starts to look like it is moving with the wind.

It made a light-hearted change to the start and end of our meetings, talking about the funny effects. The reason my student chose the Waikiki beach backdrop was that a group of us were meant to be flying to our annual CHI conference – which was to be held in Hawaii. Normally, 3000-4000 rock up, from all corners of the globe, for a week each year at this time (last year it was held in rainy Glasgow) to network, learn and talk about our current research for a diversity of areas concerned with the design and use of tech. But like many other large events involving travel it was cancelled due to Coronavirus. For many of my students this was a huge disappointment as it was to be their first time going – but they put on brave faces. Next week, instead of using backdrops, we plan to get dressed up in Hawaii Hula clothing and leis. Well maybe. Anything to lighten the mood.

Many of us are getting the lockdown blues now, feeling restless and bored. As the weeks of lockdown drag on the need to look forward becomes ever more pressing. Some people are rebooking their cancelled holidays for next year, giving them at least something to plan for. The papers are full of ads now for big ticket holidays and cruises – costing £1000s for a holiday of a lifetime. The images of ancient sites, rain forests, glistening beaches and city skylines are very alluring but seem all the more remote. One can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to enter a busy airport, let alone cram onto a plane with hundreds of other passengers for countless hours. How are we going to keep our distance if we are sat in a window seat and need to go to the toilet?

Many of my us are craving the embodied contact that comes with physically being with others. While we persevere with our remote meetings each day, trying to make the most of the impoverished bandwidth and the strangeness of seeing someone but not being with them, we are all getting tired of it. We are at that stage now wondering what our country will provide by way of a lockdown exit strategy. Some countries are further ahead and have already started taking baby steps. Singapore, China, Korea, Germany, Finland, Australia and the Czech Republic have begun to reopen schools, shops, gyms and other businesses. In the UK, however, we continue to wait. Boris returning to number 10 soon will buy him more time – as our daily morbidity level continues to remain relatively high.

But whether and what it might mean to return to the ‘old’ normal is anyone’s guess – it could take months, possibly years. I looked at some photos today of Spanish children being allowed outside for the first time in two months – whizzing around on their bikes, roller skating with their arms flailing or simply just running around. The sense of joy and freedom on their faces was palpable. It gave me hope that it might not take that long.

Meanwhile, our governments continue to thrash it out with their scientific advisors. All sorts of factors have to be weighed up against each other, including wellbeing, unemployment, numbers of daily cases, relative change in daily deaths, availability of hospital places, medical staff available, who to safeguard, the likelihood of unrest, rebellion or uprising, and so on. The fear of relaxing too quickly and too soon is that it could result in a second spike, just as bad or if not worse than the first, meaning we would all have to go back to lockdown again. Keeping people cooped up for too much longer, however, is likely to have devastating and long-lasting effects; not least, a huge increase in mental health issues, economic disaster for many businesses, and many unknowns.

For those of us who see the glass half full, we continue to dream of returning to familiar but now remote places soon: re-imagining what it is like to experience the real thing rather than the digital substitute. To drink a proper cocktail rather than meet at cocktail ‘o’ clock, to go to a live concert rather than a livestreamed one, to go to a real football match and throng with the crowds rather than watch classic games on the TV, or simply to be able to walk into a coffee shop, enjoy waiting in line (not at a distance), having a banter with the other customers, and then take from the hands of the barista, a perfectly made frothy coffee with an emoji heart on the top.

Plastic Robots

Posted on 07/02/2018 by Yvonne Rogers

Six months ago, I was all in favour of the arrival of interactive androgynous robots in public places, like shopping malls and airports, that had the potential to be equally appealing and entertaining to kids of all ages and gender. Now I am not so sure. When departing from San Jose airport the other day, I came across a new breed of plastic robots that provide public services for travellers and their young children. The first one I encountered was a weird looking robot-guide, about adult-sized, who looked less robot-like and more digital display-like with a ‘blockhead’ stuck on top. I approached it out of curiosity, then started pressing icons on the display to get directions to a coffee shop. While interacting with it, its encased head appeared to move while its eyes blinked at me. Not creepy but over the top silliness: a strange way to mix technology. Three of these so called greeters, named Norma, Piper and Amelia, have been at San Jose for over six months! They were developed by a Korean company and cost $120,000 each. That might explain their design but this is Silicon Valley.

Then a hundred meters away, I noticed a play area where two more plastic robots stood motionless amongst a bunch of other more colorful, conventional toys, such as a truck, balls, soft dolls, a desk and chair, crayons and the like. When a mother stopped to look, the human assistant in the play area invited her to place her toddler into the play pen. She then switched on the robots to make them come alive with the goal of attracting the child towards them. Their tummy displays lit up and they made some sounds. One started moving its clunky arms towards the toddler, as if beckoning it to come closer. The child glanced momentarily at it but then turned to play with the truck on the ground that it was near to. They seemed far too big and ungamely for toddler interest. Compared with the toys that come alive in the Toy Story movie, the robots did not become animated when switched on but stood strangely, inanimate and cold-looking. And their white plastic bodies looked most unappealing. Neither robot had mouths but just big inset eyes. One of the robots had been dressed in a little frilly, red tutu-thingy. It looked most bizarre. The mix of cloth, plastic and digital display materials did not work at all together in this context. And why leave the other one ‘naked’? Most people walked straight passed the play area without so much as a glance. But one couple that did stop (they seemed to know the human assistant already) placed their toddler in the smaller pen next to the robot area. The toddler started to play with some Disney-character, oversized, but more ‘normal’ looking dolls. During this interaction, none of the assembled humans took a blind bit of notice of the robots.

I walked closer to the play area to read the marketing banner that was promoting the new child-friendly robot. “I am cute, I am cool, I am capable” it proudly acclaimed. We have a long way to go before robots start to get anywhere near being any of these – let alone useful, attractive or desirable – at least in these settings.

Driverless Cars

Posted on 21/06/2017 by Yvonne Rogers

We hear all the time now about how driverless cars will revolutionize the automobile industry. Billions of dollars, yen and euros are being poured into research labs throughout the world to make this happen. The race is on – who will lay the golden egg? Google has spun out its own company, Waymo, calling itself, “a self-driving tech company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around”; Apple’s CTO has described their venture as “the mother of all AI projects”, while relative newcomers to the field, Uber, fancy their chances, too.

The rhetoric behind why such a game changer in car control is inevitable is hard to argue against. It usually starts with how many people are killed in car accidents. From the road crash statistics website, we see that “Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44.” That makes it the biggest killer amongst young people. The bottom line is that self-driving cars will make our roads safer by reducing human error. The computer controlled cars will be able to be programmed to be reliable, safe and efficient. Unlike, human drivers, they won’t be susceptible to poor judgement caused by road rage, fatigue, failing eyesight, texting, distraction caused by talking on the phone, etc. Furthermore, driverless cars will enable people who can’t drive, for whatever reasons, to be mobile. Instead of hailing a taxi or waiting for a bus they will be able to call up a driverless car from their garage or a special pod and instruct it to go where they want to. Who would not want such a future?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA. One of the first Google self-driving cars being displayed at the Google headquarters in 2012 in California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

However, there is a long way to go before anyone gets anywhere near the finishing line. It is a ginormous undertaking to work out how to transform society so that the billions of cars we currently use today are replaced by driverless ones. It is not like developing a single piece of tech, such as a smartphone, or even a big piece of tech, such as a process control plant. The amount of computation required to run a driverless car city is likely to involve trillions of lines of code in conjunction with the necessary radar, LIDAR sensors, and other hardware/software (current cars use millions of lines of code to work). The driverless car city will also need to sort out how to deal with all the legal, social, logistical, ethical and environmental aspects: who is responsible for updating the software, how the cars are taxed, who is responsible for paying out compensation, who pays for the upkeep of the new whole system, whether children can be driven alone in a car and so on.

I have been trying to imagine what it would be like to be in Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, London or even Brighton with a new road system that supports self-driving cars. I find it hard to compute. For starters, people are not stupid and they like a bit of mischief. Once they clock that jumping in front of a driverless automated car will result in it stopping in its tracks – all manner of ‘knock down ginger’ car games will come into being. The autonomous car system will quickly come to a standstill especially when a group of teenagers start the craze of flash mob car standstills. Sure, the authorities will eventually make this kind of behaviour illegal but people will still find ways of getting in the way of the driverless cars.

And what about bikes weaving in and out and whizzing past the driverless cars? That will give their laser beams a right wobble. Next, the authorities will have to force bike riders and pedestrians to wear sensor and laser tech themselves, too – so a system of systems will have to decide who has priority, whether to stop a car or hoot at a person to stop.

Governments will then have the smart idea of keeping cars, bikes and people segregated – just like they did when building the relatively new city of Milton Keynes. In this modern metropolis, the cars drive above ground on a grid and roundabout system while the cyclists and pedestrians cycle on red paths (called ‘redways’) along a network of canals and through a cobweb of underpasses. The result is a city of isolated burbs that don’t connect (and apparently has one of the lowest cycling levels in the UK). As Ben Evans tweeted the other day, just like “horseless carriages – remove the horse and everything else changes”. There is none of the rub of what a city should really be – amongst which the smells, blasts, sirens, laughter, screams and revving of waiting cars are central.

Vehicle autonomy may save more lives than our current cars but at the expense of requiring segregation of the people from their urban centres and separate driverless car networks. Is that what we really want? Perhaps the less lofty goal of augmenting existing vehicles with all manner of driving aids that can help drivers be more alert and help reduce their errors by taking control at opportune times is the best way forward?

Roving Eyes

Posted on 30/09/2016 by Yvonne Rogers

It is now increasingly common to see bobbies on the beat wearing body cams. Millions of drivers have in recent years bought dash cams for their cars. More cyclists are attaching Go-Pros cams to their helmets. The placement of these ‘cams’ on the body, the head or in the car while on the move is in anticipation – recording in the background just in case an incident happens, that can then be replayed back as evidence. These roving eyes are able to ‘truthfully’ show who said what, how recklessly a car was driven, who threatened whom and so on. Which can be quite different from and often more reliable than what people recall from human memory.

But it seems the cams are doing much more than acting as our personal CCTV cameras. This week, a paper published in the journal, Criminal Justice and Behaviour, claimed there were far fewer complaints made against police officers than in the previous year. The reason was laid squarely at the power of the cam. A completed trial compared the impact of when police wore cams and when they did not. The results showed a whopping reduction in complaints. In fact, nearly 100% – there were only 113 complaints compared with 1,539 reported in the 12 months before.

Seeing someone recording you changes your behaviour:

“Once [the public] are aware they are being recorded, once they know that everything they do is caught on tape, they will undoubtedly change their behaviour because they don’t want to get into trouble.”

People aren’t as rude or aggressive towards the police. Moreover, they are much less likely to make up porkies about being subject to police violence or assault – knowing they are being recorded. But even more interesting is that it works both ways. Police officers were also found to change their behavior, knowing what they say and do will be recorded for later use. They appear to be kinder and more courteous. And even more remarkable, was the study reported a huge reduction in complaints for the control group – the police who did not wear the bodycams during the trial period. This cascading effect was explained as a form of ‘contagious accountability’ sweeping through the whole police culture. Being nice to each other makes others nicer.

The cam, however, seems to have, so far, not had the same impact on car drivers. Road rage is still very much the order of the day. And the peculiarly British disease of ‘crash for cash’ is on the rise. In particular, the number of people claiming for whiplash is spiraling out of control. A report that came out last week in the UK showed that there were more than ¾ of a million insurance claims last year just for whiplash. That is one in every 38 cars insured on the road – an awful lot of people driving with stiff necks. Of course, whiplash claims are well known for being one of the biggest scams around. Hard to detect, easy to engineer and even more difficult to contest. No wonder, motorists are easy prey for claims management companies, who spam them relentlessly with emails, texts and ads, asking if they had an accident recently. These ‘ambulance chasers’ lure their victims by charging nothing for their service but then taking a hefty chunk of the spoils – easy money, and bread and butter work for them. What’s more it is a win-win for both parties.

Might it be possible soon for insurance companies to require the use of the output from dash cams as evidence against this kind of blatant fraud? With a bit of extra gubbins thrown in to the cam, we could soon have quality car intelligence. Indeed, it seems this might be starting. Recent dash cams, like the RoadHawk, can detect speed and force from an impact as well as showing the setting in how it took place – all in high-def. If these smart cams became a compulsory part of the car that might reduce whiplash claims to only the genuine ones – in the same dramatic way as bogus police complaints have been reduced. And it might even encourage more courteous driving behaviour.

Imagine, too, if cyclists all had to wear head cams that recorded how they cycled. We might see more cycling courtesy and less bike rage. Only today, I had to stop in my tracks on a zebra crossing as a bike refused to stop for me but darted passed me. Not only did he increase my heart rate, but shortly afterwards, another cyclist had to swerve to miss him as he continued at speed through a red light.

I am all for technology acting as our external memory if it can change human behaviour to make people more courteous and considerate of each other – given, how many of us, it seems, have a tendency to try to beat the system whenever we can.

The i360

Posted on 08/09/2016 by Yvonne Rogers

The latest attraction in Brighton, the i360, opened a few weeks ago to much fanfare and a bit of grumpiness. On the website, British Airways who are behind the project proudly proclaim, “Take a flight to the skies and see Sussex as you have never seen it before. Glide up slowly to 450 feet high to enjoy breath-taking 360 degree views of up to 26 miles from the world’s first vertical cable car.” Janet Street-Porter, in the Independent, described it as “naff” and “an expensive and hideous eyesore”. At ground level, the locals refer to it as the ‘donut on a stick’. On a sunny day, it stands out like a shimmering silver time machine capsule majestically rising above the rooftops.

In the first three weeks of it’s opening, over 100,000 visitors have coughed up £15 each to have a ride in it. That is a lot of people and even more dosh. R and I went a month into its infancy, on a shiny sunny Tuesday afternoon. As we entered, we were screened and patted down as if going on a flight. Once inside the capsule, we found our spot to view Brighton as never before seen. We waited with much anticipation, chatting and eyeing up the other people on board, who were snapping merrily on their smartphones. At one end, was a bar selling the local NyeTimber champagne. We resisted, wanting to go up and down before celebrating. Other visitors, however, were less restrained, already in holiday mode, happy to neck back the bubbles at any occasion.

There were no announcements, no British Airways muzac or welcome. Instead, the capsule simply started moving upwards, almost imperceptibly and silently, at first. It was smooth and gentle; watching the people on the ground becoming more matchstick-like and the cars move slower, and more blocks of Lego-like flats appear on the expanding horizon. The coastline west and east swept into toy town fringes, of groynes, lawns and shingle. Then just as it had started moving the bubble stopped and our ears popped. It was all a bit of an anti-climax for what was the final view before we started our slow descent. There was no sighting of France, nothing of the Isle of White and even less of the suburbs of London. Just a bit of a blur at the edges. The South Downs were there in the distance, but unlike experiencing them from favourite viewing spots, when walking in Firle, Devil’s Dyke or Chanctonbury Ring, there were no little villages or cricket pitches unfolding before your eyes or fresh new sights around each corner. No distant sounds of cars, cows, planes or trains. No wind in the hair or country smells. No unexpected sights or quotidian human traffic. Just chirpy people taking lots of selfies.

Ironically, by far the most spectacular view was from outside the capsule – looking directly up from below, as the shimmering donut descended down onto bystanders waiting their go, from a brilliant blue sky. Like the transmogrifying Anish Kapoor Bean in Chicago, you could see distorted reflections of yourself and others, growing larger and more funfair-like, as the capsule finally came to rest.

On exiting, you are bundled into a basement room, a cornucopia of tat. You are suddenly reminded, that just after being screened at the entrance you were photographed for a personalized souvenir. For the princely sum of £21.50 you could now buy a paper album, curated with your mugshot set against backdrops from different eras and places in Brighton. Victorian, modern, and space age. Unsurprisingly, no-one was buying them. R snapped some of the pictures as we flicked through the pages with his iPhone. Then we went across the road and had a delicious cream tea in the Victoria Terrace at the Grand Hotel – that cost less than the tacky booklet. It was a real treat, with all the trappings, and on top of that, fine views of the sea and pier.

All-electric Car

Posted on 21/06/2016 by Yvonne Rogers

Driving a fully electric car for the first time felt like being in an ultra turbo charged golf buggy. Well, the acceleration and deceleration part of driving. Instead of going vroom vroom when you put your foot on the pedal the car shot off with a G-force lurch in almost silence. And when you take your foot off the pedal the opposite happens. In equal measures, the deceleration is quite dramatic. There is no need to use the brake as the stopping happens automatically.

The car in question was the new BMW i3. I had been offered the chance to give it a test drive while at a conference in Brisbane, Australia. At first blush, it looks like any other mid-range car – shiny and stylish on the outside, roomy and detailed on the inside. However, it begins to look different when you peer in. For a start there are no door handles on the back seat doors (I begun my trip as a passenger). The driver has to let you in by pushing out a swing-like saloon door. Then, when you take a closer look at the dashboard it seems not quite right. Things seem to be missing while others are in strange places. Switches and buttons have replaced mechanical parts. For example, to start, you press a button to switch the ‘engine’ on and flick another switch to turn the hand brake off. No force is required to yank the gear lever or make sure the hand brake is fully disengaged.

A light touch is only ever needed throughout the experience. There is never any sense of ‘giving it a bit of welly’. The only welly seems to be hidden in the car when it seemingly takes a lot of the control out of the driving.

So how best to describe the all-electric car? Coffee comes to mind. The drive starts off like an espresso and then switches into a latte. You get a jolt, reaching 100 km from standing in only 7.2 seconds. After that, it feels very smooth and quiet as the outdoors passes you by. There is no smell of petrol, oil or diesel or in the marketing blurb “no odours at the point of use”. And of course, there is no purring or idling of the engine. Just new car smell silence.

The blurb on the website goes onto claim, “first and foremost it delivers exceptional driving pleasure. To move off from a standstill, just dip the accelerator gently and the BMW i3 will accelerate powerfully and almost silently.”

Somehow dipping and driving don’t mix just like oil and water.

“How did you like the dip?”
“Quite a big one, eh!”
“Wasn’t that quiet acceleration out of this world?”

“Zero Co2 emissions, zero noise, zero coke.” It seems, we are increasingly living in a world of denial.

You can’t imagine a boy racer talking like that. The language of driving is going to have change to match the new slipper-soled, all-electric experience.

When I parked the car, I eyed a gleaming orange BMW i8 parked nearby. I could not take my eyes off it – nor could many other passers-by. Now, that is the super duper souped up top of the range going for a song, to the order of £250K. Obviously, targeted at the wealthy to swan about in. The doors open outwards, again, but this time more majestically like insect wings. It flies like an angel, just maybe.

Super Smellers

Posted on 28/04/2016 by Yvonne Rogers

Last night the weather suddenly turned into a full on symphony as I made a dash from the train to the taxi rank; all at once rain started lashing, wind howling, lightning sheeting, thunder cracking, reaching a crescendo of hailstones crashing on the ground. It really was a case of elephants and lions rather than cats and dogs. I sank into the backseat of a taxi thankful I did not have to wait. The inclement weather was mercifully silenced and shut out by the slam of my door. Within seconds my nostrils were filled with a distinctive smell of almonds that turned to marzipan. Before I knew it, I was being transported back to childhood memories of eating Christmas cake.

Because it was such an unusual and strong smell, I mentioned it to the cab driver who guffawed:

“All the girls say that. Smelling of almonds and then marzipan. It is actually Coronado Cherry.”

I sniffed again and tried hard to think of cherries and sure enough I began to detect some different notes.

“Yes, it is cherries like you taste in Dr Pepper!” I chirped.

He laughed heartily again.

He replied “It is funny because men usually say it smells of chocolate.”

We then got into a very animated conversation about the difference between men and women’s ability to smell. He reckoned that 9.5 out of 10 women say it smells like almonds while 9 out of 10 men say it is like chocolate. His sample is based on the 10-20 customers he picks up a day over the last 3 years he has been buying his tubs of California Coronado Cherry. What is more, he doesn’t ask them directly, but just waits for them to say something about what they can smell. Just like with me that sets him off. What a wonderful icebreaker I mused.

But not only that, it is a lot of data collected ‘in the wild’ that shows a massive gender difference. I had no idea we were so different in our ability to identify smells. Whether women are better is another matter since we all seem to think his car smells more almond than cherry.

I’ve always thought car air fresheners are a bit naff. My memory of cardboard pine trees in a variety of colours dangling from rearview mirrors is that they were always overpowering and unpleasant – artificial sickly sweet. Reminded me of when I was 16 – and the first time I went on a date with Aaron the carpet-layer from Luton – who had a couple hanging in his Ford Cortina. Whatever was I doing…

When I bought my Scirocco a couple of years ago, it had that horrible new car smell of plastic and rubber. It never seemed to fade, so I caved in and went to Halfords in search of a car freshener to mask it. I was amazed to discover just how many different kinds of exotic trees, sticks, sprays, and tubs of super smelly gunk there are now to fill our cars with fragrance. Seems the marketing departments have gone overboard with Tropicana scents that conjure up drinking cocktails on a beach. All of them had exotic sounding names with the likes of “Jelly bean Margarita”, “Bahama Aruba Blue Breeze” and “Bahama Waikiki Wild Hibiscus Vent Sticks.” I bought a stick that promised the taste of Pina Colada – coconuts and pineapple. After taking the wrapper off, however, it smelt more like the Costa del Sol than fresh fruits. It was awful. I had to throw it out and keep the car windows open for a couple of weeks to get rid of the new smell.

As we neared home, my taxi driver regaled how he has met women who could even name the make and brand of perfume others are wearing. What must it be like to be a super smeller?

Hot Shots

Posted on 14/12/2015 by Yvonne Rogers

Everywhere you look now there are people – the majority young girls – taking photos of themselves, whether it is on the beach, up a mountain, at a party, or in front of a famous landmark. It is increasingly common for selfie sticks to be used to enhance the poser’s look, by providing better angles of their face and other bits. These are then instantly uploaded to Instagram and the wait begins. Who will give the first like or comment? How many likes will they get in the first hour?

An instant hit follows if someone gets some likes and/or comments within five minutes of uploading. The hits only last for a moment and then it is onto taking the next set of photo shots hoping one of these is even more likeable, stunning and stands out from the others that their followers are taking in their parallel worlds.

Last summer while on vacation on a Greek island we saw the Instagram craze in full throttle while on a quiet boat trip to a few of the less populated beaches. A group of twenty-something year old Greek girls, covered in shiny skin salt spray (that was frequently applied to make their skin look like it does for models on the cover of glossy magazines) posed on the boat, sometimes just a few inches away from us – for the whole 8 hours – completely oblivious to anyone else, but themselves. At times they took up to 100 shots per hour. The trouble was that their poses were as fake as their tans. The fluttering of the eyelids, the pushing of their cleavages out of their bikinis and the pouting of lips just did not cut the mustard. Well not for the rest of us on the boat. They were also on the chunky side and, in our minds, not at all attractive.

The same happened yesterday when I was on a wine tour in the Yarra Valley in Australia. A group of young girls, wearing floppy hats, large insect shades and high waisted shorts joined us on the bus. Instead of listening to any of the commentary they spent the whole time shooting snap after snap, uploading the best of their batch at half hour intervals and then waiting anxiously for the notifications to start pinging likes and comments on their phone. I don’t think they took in anything about the production of the wine, the beautiful scenery or what the different wines were. The time they seemed most animated was when taking photos of themselves posing by glasses of champagne at Chandon Australia (the image is not of them but another one from @Chandon Australia).

There is a viral video at the moment doing the rounds called ‘Instagram Husband’. It captures how many young girls now use their partners as extended selfie sticks to get more extreme shots of themselves to post in their virtual worlds. It is all about the ultimate posing and most gratifying posting now.The boyfriends and husbands are left feeling like second fiddles, largely being overlooked.

According to Mashable, more people died in 2015 from accidents taking selfies than were killed by sharks. 12 people died falling off cliffs, stairs and other precipices whereas only 8 people were killed by sharks. That stark statistic puts the latest narcissistic craze into perspective. The number will surely rise as tourists become ever more daring in order to get ever more likes. It is hardly surprising that increasing number of parks and tourist attractions are now banning the selfie stick because they dont want dead tourists in their midst.

Meanwhile, superstar singer and songwriter Ed Sheeran announced recently that he is “taking a break” from social media to begin seeing the world through his own eyes and not always via a screen. He has a phenomenal 16 million Twitter followers and 5.5 million Instagram fans lapping up his snaps. This random photo got 393,000 likes and over 5000 comments/strings of emojis (“you look cute”, “wow”, “so amazing!”, “love this photo”). Good on you, Ed. Just make sure you don’t take a smartphone or camera with you on your travels.

Sense-able Cars?

Posted on 25/07/2015 by Yvonne Rogers

Last week, when on a road trip in Ireland, a worrying ping followed by a warning light appeared on the dashboard – as we were merrily cruising along a remote country road. The car was asking us to check the pressure of the tyres – in the middle of nowhere. It picked its moment! Why suddenly then? Did we have a slow puncture? Had we been driving for too long? Had the nasty pothole we had driven over an hour ago caused one tyre to loose pressure? We discussed a number of possibilities but could not settle on the cause. When we eventually reached our hotel (there being no garage on route) we looked at all the tyres and kicked them. They all looked and felt fine. Next day, after turning the engine on, the car pinged at us again and the dasterly warning light came back on. Eventually, we found a garage and checked the tyres – getting our hands filthy from twisting the caps off. All was fine. We turned the engine back on but the hazard light was still glowing menacingly on the dashboard.

When we got home I phoned the local VW dealer to ask them how to turn it off. They told me to switch on the car entertainment system and navigate through a series of sub menus until I reached one that said ‘car’ settings. When I tried I found everything but the menu of ‘car’ options. So I gave up and instead drove to the dealer. A friendly mechanic sat in the car, poked around and eventually located a small button inside the glovebox hidden obscurely right at the top. He pressed it for a few seconds and the warning light went off.

There was nothing wrong with the tyre pressure. Just every now and again the car thinks it should let you know you should check them. How annoying is that piece of software design? Especially when it is not smart enough to tell you how to turn the warning light off or, what to do after you have checked them and they are fine. Which design engineer came up with the smart idea of placing the reset button in a place that is impossible to find? And which sensor engineer came up with the idea of asking you to check your tyre pressure at some random time through using a warning sign on the dashboard – causing unnecessary anxiety?

Meanwhile, in the States last week, a Jeep Cherokee got hacked into by some clever security guys – through its connected entertainment system. They wanted to demonstrate how it was possible for anyone with some smarts to control the car remotely. The car company recalled all of its 1.4 million Jeeps to patch the software fault. No-one got hurt but those guys caused an enormous amount of anxiety and worry amongst owners of a Cherokee. Just imagine if some real hackers had actually taken control of some random guy’s Jeep and driven it into a ditch or towards oncoming traffic. The security guys certainly made their point. Let’s hope the sensor technology and the intelligence behind them gets a little smarter and secure in the future.

Yesterday, I went with R to Knightsbridge to check out the super bling cars that appear at this time of year for a few weeks, when the mega-rich come over from the Middle East to do a bit of shopping in this exclusive bit of London. They have their special shiny cars flown over for the occasion. Against a backdrop of torrential rain we spotted several of them parked illegally outside Harrods. Our favourites were a gold-plated Ferrari and a Swarovski crystal-encrusted Merc. Both had their own personalized number plates: F1 1RAK and BA11 BYY. The dazzling goldie is owned by a former Iraqi (sic) world kickboxing champion called Riyadh Al-Azzawi. The twinkly sparkler is owned by a 22-year old Russian student called Dario Radionova who had the bright idea of covering her car in tiny crystals to make it look like the ultimate jewel. Beats Damian Hirst’s diamond skull by a mile – for sheer audacity, head turning awe and ultimate glamour. Everyone who walks past these cars cannot but stop, stare and snap; not quite believing what they are seeing. The ultimate car is one that glitters not one that tries to be too clever by half.

Super Technology

Posted on 12/07/2015 by Yvonne Rogers

My smartphone beeps. This time, a message from my fridge alerting me to buy milk on the way home. This rather tired example of smart technology is still being rolled out whenever anyone talks about the benefits that future technology holds for us. Why can’t it order the milk and get it delivered without needing to involve me? Surely, that would be the smart thing to do. A bottle of milk would be sitting there on the doorstep for when I arrived home. But, equally, I could have nipped out to the corner shop when finding the milk had run out. Just like many of us happily do now. Once there, we might have a chat with the shopkeeper and find out about the local gossip or their opinion about the heatwave or their joy at England beating the Aussies in the latest Test match. And even try the new apple and ginger fruit juice he has just got in.

Much of everyday life is made up of these unexpected encounters. We bump into people we know all the time: at work, down the street, at the cinema, in the supermarket and even miles away on holiday. Inconsequential in themselves but which is the social glue that holds society together.

Opportunities for unexpected human contact are slowly being eroded for every transaction that becomes automated – unless you use apps like Tinder specifically to meet a random person you fancy the look of. Taking humans out of the loop is of course nirvana for business, helping them to cut down on operating costs while making services more efficient – and at the same time encouraging people to buy more.

It can also take the headache out of having to queue – and how we hate having to wait for others in front of us especially if they are slow. Last week, when driving to Cambridge, I whizzed across the Dartford Crossing without having to stop at a toll booth and chuck a few quid into an over-sized bucket and then wait magically for the barrier to rise. The new Dart Charge system that has been installed swiftly reads your car registration number and checks to see that you have paid online within 24 hours of crossing. That is super technology.

Trouble is it takes five minutes to fill in the form and register online to use the Dart service. They want to know all sorts of things about you, your car and not forgetting the all important bank details. The same has happened now when parking at Brighton station. There are no barriers or uniformed officials sitting in glass windowed booths. There is still one small wooden hut but it was locked with not a person in sight. All rather eerie. You can pay in advance or up to 24 hours afterwards. After that they slap on a penalty. I paid as soon as I got home fearful I would completely forget once ensconced in domestic life.

It took me another five minutes to key in my details online. The same pattern happens when buying tickets for train journeys. I nearly missed my train last week when trying to buy a ticket to Lincoln on the Virgin site. There was some mix up with being a new user versus a registered one. And it did not tell me until I had filled in all the details including the prized seat facing forward at a table with electric socket. They just vanished from the screen after the error was detected. I had to get a new password as I could not remember what it was. It would have been easier if I had bought it at the station and much less frustrating!

The underside of the relentless push towards ever more automation is that we humans have to do the ‘paper’ work to make it work – tapping all those personal details into our computers or smartphones for every new transaction, making up new passwords and forgetting them. For each new cloud-based system that comes along and replaces the old fashioned way of doing things – like paying with cash and having a human be in charge of the transaction – requires us to sign up before or after and give bank details.

And then there all of those services that we have signed up for using direct debit because it was easier and because sometimes they give a miniscule reduction – be it the TV licence, car tax, gas, water, leccie, Virgin/Sky Media, Netflix, O2 and so on. While taking away the pain of having to fill out yet another form online (once it has been set up) it means we forget how much money each month they are taking from us. When they increase their monthly subscription or charge we simply shrug. I don’t know how many direct debits and standing orders I have now. Some just disappear from my radar. When email notifications pop up from these companies I often don’t bother opening them. I don’t want to really know I have spent an extra £50 this month on data while roaming abroad.

Shockingly, I don’t know how much I earn anymore. Instead of enjoying the monthly ritual of opening a pay slip that would come in a brown envelope – especially when there was a rise due, many of us now have to go online to find out. That means remembering the URL or typing into the search engine when in the work’s intranet and tapping in our user ID and password (finding the one the computer used to have stored is no longer valid) to get to the same information. I simply forget – since there is no monthly email reminder I’ve been paid. And it is not as pleasurable looking at the data in a spreadsheet format – which invariably it is formatted in.

The weather is miserable out there today. So I booked online to get tickets to go to the cinema tonight. It only took a couple of minutes, even after having to scroll down a long menu of countries to enter that I live in the UK. Why do they need to know that? Then up popped a ‘Verified by Visa’ form for me to fill in. I hate those things and can never remember what the 2nd, 4th or 8th or other 3 random sequence of letter/digits they ask for from my password for that credit card. So another couple of minutes filling this bit in and stressing that it was correct.

Hey presto – up popped the message:
“ORDER COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY”
but then as I read on:

“Collect your tickets from the cinema counter or kiosk – Don’t forget your Reference Number!”

Usually it provides a RFID code that you print off as your ticket so you don’t have to queue. What was the point of doing all that key tapping in again and paying an extra online booking fee (nice one!) if I still needed to line up?

An email arrived a few minutes later with the codes on them. Just as well.

I just read in the news that the number of fines issued by the new automated payment system at the Dartford Crossing in its first 6 months exceeded the number of speeding tickets issued in England and Wales for an entire year! 867,897 motorists were fined £70 each compared to the 713,000 speeding tickets issued throughout the whole of England and Wales. That is a whopping £60,752,790! But it gets worse. Some drivers have reported that they are being charged on days when they have not used the crossing. Apparently, the automated letter recognition software sometimes mixes Cs and Gs and other similar looking letters. That is not smart technology. I dread to think how much has been made by Transport for London (TfL) since the Congestion charge was introduced in London over ten years ago. In 2009, alone, nearly 1.5 million congestion charge penalty charge notices at £120 each were made. TfL managed to collect £77m of what was owed to them. That is daylight robbery.

Japanese Blooper

Posted on 02/12/2014 by Yvonne Rogers

One of the delights of going to a foreign country is discovering the different ways of doing things in all manners, from greeting someone to sharing a meal. Japan, for example, where I am currently visiting is full of them; often mindboggling for those of us from western cultures not familair with such habits. It makes us have to rethink what are normally taken for granted habits, ranging from taking our shoes off when entering someone’s house, to never taking a dripping umbrella inside a shop, to not blowing your nose in front of someone else. It all makes perfect sense when you think about the reasons behind these etiquettes and, of course, is far more civilized than not doing them. But, inevitably one slips up and does the wrong thing, like I did today, big time.

The hotel I am staying at in Japan, in the city of Nara, has a bath house – which I was curious to try. Called a Sento, in japanese, it translates into cleanliness plus nakedness plus togetherness. The japanese bathing culture started centuries ago, coming orginally from India, as a communal place for both sexes to get scrubbed cleaned while gossiping – just like what happens in Turkish Baths. Nowadays, many have closed, while most others survive on tourists paying good money to experience something that they simply dont have in western culture.

Being a good citizen, I looked at the folder in my room containing the directory of services but for the entry against bath house, it just mentioned the opening hours. So I thought I better read up on the etiquette of public bathing, especially given that I was going by myself. So, I checked it up on the web and was quite surprised to see so many rules associated with the tradition of communual bathing. What drew my attention were two key rules which could easily cause problems for prude and brash brits: (i) no-one is allowed in wearing a swimming costume and, (ii) no-one is allowed in bearing a tattoo – the reason being is that tattoos are associated with symbols from the Japanese mafia. I stopped reading up about it after this – assuming there would be a receptionist at the desk to show foreign guests the ropes (as I had recently experienced when visiting, for the first time, a Turkish Bath in Istanbul a few weeks ao).

I went down to the bath house on the 6th floor in my hotel flip-flops holding my hotel towel, eager to find out more. However, no-one was around to tell me what to do at the front desk so I walked into the ladies changing room, where I saw a japanese lady drying her hair. I stripped off and wrapped myself in my bath towel, thinking that was what I should do. I then asked the japanese lady (who rightly spoke no english) in a kind of improvised janglese, flappy arm sort of way, where the entrance was. She pointed to a sliding door and then started waving her small wet towel at me, gesticulating and rabbiting on in animated japanese. Google Translate would have come in handy then – but maybe not when standing naked. So, instead, I waved my large towel and she laughed mirthfully at me. This cross-purpose banter went on for some time with neither of us getting anywhere. Then she pointed to my wrist – I showed her my orange wristband locker key and that got a nod of approval from her. At least I got that right! Then I grinned inanely, as you do when you reach a lost in translation impasse, and slid the door into the bath house. I was confronted with female nudity which took me aback. A few women were merrily showering and lathering themselves, each holding a handheld shower and sat squately on a feeble plastic stool in front of their own mirror. I felt far too self conscious to try doing the same. Instead, I put my large bath towel to one side and plunged straight into the large communal hot bath. I sat there by myself feeling like a lemon, wondering if I should have showered first. There was no one for me to follow in their footsteps or to give me a helping hand. Eventually, some of the japanese women who had been cleaning themselves followed me into the bath but sat at the other end.

At that point, I realized I had messed up big time. Got it the wrong way round. So I stood up and walked straight out, without looking back, to the changing rooms – wondering what the women sitting in the bath were thinking about me. Luckily, the hair-drying woman had disappeared. I then saw a sign saying restroom and thought I could hide in there to rest, overcome my embarrassment and decide what to do next, but on sliding the door open discovered it was just a toilet (it seems they use the American term here for toilets). At which point I wanted to sink into the ground. I hurriedly put my clothes back on and rushed out, back to my room.

On re-reading the dos and donts of going to a Japanese bath house, back in the safety of my own room, it turns out that having a little towel is really important, and you should never use a big bath towel when there. I was reminded of the divers at the Olympics who all have their little flannel towels they wring and use all the time to dry bits of them while focusing the mind. So, that was what the hair-drying woman was trying to explain to me. Then I discovered the other faux pas I had made:
Not washing all over beforehand but instead brazenly walking straight into the bath: “Wash thoroughly before entering the relaxation baths. It is important that every square inch of skin gets a pre-soak lashing of the suds. Typically, one squats centimeters above the ground under small showers with the backside resting on a miniature stool. Don’t worry, it is more comfortable than it sounds – even if the knees have seen better days. Instead of allowing water to run over yourself as you clean considered wasteful in Japan – pour water over your body with a shallow plastic bucket provided by the sento.”

This time I read on. I could have done worse! Apparently, they do use a chemical in the water that turns it purple if you pee in it. But not only the water it also turns your skin purple. Could you imagine if I had turned up at my talk scheduled for tomorrow all purple and the Japanese members of the audience chuckling to themselves, knowing the reason. I cringed imagining how that might have played out! Professor Purple found in the bathroom with lead piping…

For more on Bath House rules.

Bushy Tailed

Posted on 30/09/2014 by Yvonne Rogers

Today I found myself jumping and jigging around with a large furry tail strapped around my waist. I had been invited to a preview of a new theatre production called Dusk devised and directed by David Harradine and Samantha Butler, artistic directors of Fevered Sleep. It will go on public release in mid- November at the Young Vic. While the production is meant for very young children, aged between 4-7 years, adults and helpers are invited, but they have to join in, too, even being daubed with special green paint on their face.

A colleague, Sarah, and myself, were visiting with a view to developing interactive technologies that the children could subsequently express their feelings and reflections about the piece. Getting children as young as four to reflect on their phenomenological experience is quite a challenge – but one we were inspired to think more deeply about in light of having taken part.

Dusk is set in a theatre where groups of children come into a darkened space and are met by a friendly host, who is wearing a tail. He makes fun of them not having a tail – thereby making them all want a tail. Piles of big bushy tails magically then fall from the sky and the children scramble to put them on. Tailed-up, they then follow him through an Alice-in-Wonderland like red door into a magical forest, where there are bright lights, stars, moons and trees. Not knowing what to expect or when to sit down or jump around with their tails they are like butter in his hands. The suspense is palpable and what is in store proves to be a real treat. The children are completely immersed in the experience – for well over an hour. Even the fidgety ones stop in their tracks and join in with all the others.

Central to the piece is a 40 minute film that traverses the physical and the digital, time and place. A lost hybrid creature with horns and a tail wakes up to find he is all alone in the forest. He tries to find the other creatures he was playing with, before he fell asleep, and comes across the same door the children, at the theatre, have just entered. He walks though it and is confronted by an unknown world, where he experiences all sorts of emotions, from fear to joy. At various points he cries out in a haunting way, with the hope that someone will answer. Each time the children echo his cry sometimes spontaneously and other times egged on by the host. It was both mournful and joyful to listen to them bearing their soul, with heads high and mouths wide open – sounding like a pack of wolves.

The narrative is about growing up, where the hybrid creature crosses mountains, seas, forests and terrains on a long and often lonely journey. He eats flowers to survive and takes comfort from seeing an owl, a deer, a snail and a beetle. Through his journey he comes across men destroying a forest using menacing logging equipment and then when he finally enters a city he sees a tree caged in by wrought iron – intended to protect it. Paradoxes like these of being unprotected but needing to be protected and being protected but needing not to be protected are one of many that are traversed through the piece. There is a lot going on – a rich layered tapestry of meanings. What would a four year old make of it all? Judging from their faces – a lot.

At various points of the journey it looks like the creature is about to make it home but in classic Shakespearian style some other obstacle or challenge gets in the way. During these moments, the children instinctively turn their heads to the physical door at the back of the theatre forest that they entered through – waiting in suspense for him to appear in person and then when he doesn’t, swivel their heads back to watching him virtually on the screen in front of them. Each time it occurred, it was for me a wonderful moment and so clever – the kids traversing the physical and digital and back again in seamless and seamful ways.

They seem to know when he will finally come home. Rather than jump out of the screen – like in the movies – he eventually and somewhat hesitantly comes through the physical door. He then wanders through the undergrowth where the children are sprawled and seated, kicking their tails and touching their faces, to make sure they are real. He then whoops them up into a crying frenzy and then spontaneously they are up on their feet, following him in his special tail-jigging dance. And all the adult audience members and helpers who had donned tails (called ‘big its’ by the host) find themselves joining in, spellbound and smiling – and that is how I ended up jigging on the spot with a whooshing large furry tail behind me.

The piece is both a film and theatre and sometimes neither. From the programme blurb, it says it is “an invitation to see the world with our eyes and ears wide open, smiling awestruck. To slow down and to look.” Judging from the absorbed reactions of the little ones it seems the directors succeeded in doing more than that. It was a far cry from any Disney film, TV show or cartoon that they feed off during their daily screen time. Instead of a sea of faces fixated ‘heads down’ mindlessly staring at a screen, we witnessed a group of ‘heads up children, enraptured, alive and embodied – being both an audience and being a part, being there and not being there. That is mindful interaction and a joy for all to see.

Data Slices

Posted on 18/08/2014 by Yvonne Rogers

British Airways sent me an email a few months ago with the teasing subject line, “Want to know how many miles you’ve flown with us, Dr Rogers?” I was intrigued and clicked on the link. It sent me to my very own dashboard letting me know how many miles I had flown since joining the BA frequent flier club. The email also proudly announced, “it’s a celebration of your life in the air with British Airways.” However, it just made me think, wow, I travel too much. I immediately wondered and worried what that makes my carbon footprint like – bigger than Bigfoot’s even? Not only does it show me the total number of miles I have flown but also how many weeks I have been in the air (three!) and how many cities and countries I have been to. I looked at it in horror and then quickly squirreled it away, shocked at how much travelling I had done rather than celebrating it. But then, a few weeks ago, I found myself looking at the link again – more intrigued than guilty this time, to see how much more I had flown in the last few months.

Dashboards have become an increasingly popular form of information visualisation, serving up slices of data for all manner of things, from health to business trends to the pulse of a city. For example, the London City dashboard shows portals of data side-by-side from multiple feeds. Health and well being devices, like FitBit, Nike Fuel and Jawbone Up have tailored their dashboards towards the individual, using an assortment of gauges, bar charts and pie charts to make it easy to see how well the wearer has done that hour/day/week, and whether they have met their targets.

By themselves, the graphical components of most dashboards are relatively easy to read. However, collectively, many of them have been designed with poor visual design by software vendors who “focus their marketing efforts on dazzle that subverts the goals of clear communication” (Few, 2013, p2). The result can often be a hotch-potch of graphs and tables making it difficult to know where to find something or how to compare data over time or multi-dimensions. The holistic design of a dashboard needs to provide a digestible and legible slice of information that is thoughtfully laid out in a spatial manner and intuitive to the user when first looking at it, drawing their attention to anomalies or unexpected deviations from the norm. This involves thinking about how best to combine and contrast the different elements.

So, which is the easiest to read – BA or London City? Which is the most aesthetic and informative? What piece of information stands out the most?

The BA dashboard has much thought gone into its visual design and the pictograms that have been selected instantly drew my attention. Noticing I have flown an enormous number of miles and that I have been in the air for nearly a month is truly shocking. What the BA dashboard does not tell me, however, is how long I have been a member of the BA frequent flier club. That requires more digging of the data. If I had only joined last year the dashboard of factoids would be really scary but it has been many years since I joined them – so maybe, all things considered, it is not so bad. The piece of information in the lower right hand corner also adds a bit of humour.

In contrast, the city London dashboard, developed by some colleagues of mine from UCL, provides much more information about transport, the current level of service on the various London Underground lines, the weather, news headlines, cycle hire capacity, weather forcast and more. At first glance, it seems incredibly busy. But after studying its form, the spacing between the blocks of information makes it easy to break it down into its components. After a few times looking at it, I can begin to make more sense of it, and see which parts I might be interested in so I can quickly glance, for example, at how bad the traffic is or what the air pollution is in Bloomsbury.

But all very different from the car dashboard that makes you turn into a cold sweat when the warning lights suddenly come on indicating a full-on failure, or simply some faulty electronics. Who knows which?

Few, S. (2013) Information Dashboard Design: Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring. Analytics Press.

Voicing Opinions

Posted on 24/07/2014 by Yvonne Rogers

This morning I received an evaluation summary, via email, about a conference I gave a keynote at a few weeks ago. It presented lots of pie charts and collated all the comments attendees had cared to write up. I always dread reading this kind of feedback. A comment from a student on the very first course I taught at Sussex University has stuck with me ever since, etched permanently in my brain, “Yvonne needs to speak more loudly. Or get a microphone.” Not the worst or most critical of those that I have received over the years since, but it hit a raw nerve at the time as I thought I was trying my hardest to project my voice.

I scanned through the comments from the conference summary to see what was written about me and staring me in the face was the comment, “Yvonne’s talk was interesting, but her presenting was not as engaging as, for example, the second keynote speaker”. That did not feel good. I got that sinking feeling, being such a sensitive soul. I read on fearing the worst. Someone else had written, “the second keynote speaker was too self-centric and showed too many pictures of himself.” I was the first keynote. Phew!

Further down the evaluation was a section on the catering. People are very picky when it comes to what they eat and drink, it seems, “Almost all tea at coffee breaks was flavored — not tea!” This was counteracted by a comment written by one seemingly happy camper, “As a vegetarian, I am used to going hungry at conferences, either because meals are lost or have no protein. The veg meals here were FANTASTIC.”

Right at the end there was a section for attendees to “describe the best aspects of the conference.” And there in the middle of some praise about the conference organization, venue, and warm atmosphere, someone had written, “The first keynote was really, really excellent in it’s inspirational creativity.” I am not sure it undid the damage made by the first comment as negativity always seems to make more of a mark than positivity, staying longer with you. But that person’s praise certainly helped restore my self-esteem.

I have always been in two minds about the value of this kind of customer/student/attendee feedback because of the way it can sting. Reading the negative reviews on Trip Advisor may be entertaining and informative to the traveller but it can damage someone’s business if it is over the top or simply not fair. Someone may bear a grudge, be picky or have an axe to grind and being invited to write an online review about their recent experience gives them the license to do so – especially if they can remain anonymous.

But it is not just conferences, courses or travel sites that ask for feedback, it seems to have become the default request for an increasing number of our experiences – be it a trip to the dentist, doctor or candlestick maker. Governments, policy makers and councils are all eager to find out more about what we are thinking and feeling. There are numerous online sites asking people to voice their opinions about any number of topics, from internet security to what to do about fly tipping in the countryside. Trouble is it is usually only a minority who sign up to take part in these online forums. Most people are too busy, can’t see the point of taking part or are simply not interested. Others are suspicious of where our personal data ends up. When we see someone with a clipboard or tablet computer in the street coming towards us we look down and steer away from them. We’ve all been asked at some point or other to help out with market research or public opinion. Standing there in the street giving your age, gender, and views about a topic with a stranger is not pleasant and can be socially awkward. Is it any wonder most people shy away from voicing their opinons?
Welcome to VoxBox – our latest creation that is “a playful machine that wants your opinions.” Instead of ticking boxes or typing comments online or on paper an assortment of colourful sliders, buttons, and switches are presented for people to turn, dial and slide their answers to. At the end of completing the questions an old fashioned phone rings and asks you an open-ended question. After completing a set of questions the box lights up and a ball drops down a chute to show completion rate. How different is that? On the back are real time visualisations updating the data collected, for example, showing the percentage of people who are enjoying and feel part of the event. We designed it to be deliberately brightly coloured and attractive.

We trialed it for the first time the other week at the Tour de France fan park in Green Park while the cyclists were peddling from Cambridge to London. Many people dropped by to take a look at VoxBox. Over 120 people took part and gave their opinions about the event, including groups of friends, families, couples and individuals. Some even queued for the experience. It was a joy to see them taking it seriously, reading the questions our aloud, talking to one another about the questions and lifting their young kids to voice their opinions. Yesterday I got an email from a colleague who works at the BBC who remarked how it reminded him of, “a mix of Willy Wonka, the controls of the Tardis and those ornate fairground automata. You certainly pulled off the irresistible affordance of ‘come and have a go’. Maybe we should start puting VoxBoxes in conferences…

Special Assistance

Posted on 21/06/2014 by Yvonne Rogers

I have never really given much thought to special assistance provided at airports until now other than wondering if I could feign a broken foot to get upgraded to business (which never works anyway). However, this week I had to fly to Rome with a genuine injury. I’d sprained my ankle a few days before and it was still very painful to walk on. I went to check in my suitcase, so as at least to make it easier to walk through the airport, but was told at the check-in desk that I couldn’t as I had one of those cheapo tickets that allow hand luggage only. It would cost me an extra £40 each way to do so now. I explained my predicament. The BA assistant took pity on me, saying she could provide me with special assistance through Gatwick and also on the other side when we reached Rome airport. Within a few minutes, another smiling assistant arrived with a wheelchair and I hopped into it with my bags on top of me. Then off we went through the back doors, secret lifts and side passages that only staff and special people normally pass through.

It did feel strange, more like being a VIP rather than an invalid. At security I didn’t even have to get out of the wheelchair but got body checked whilst still sat in the chair. This involved delicate touching including being patted on my underside legs and bottom through the underneath of the seat! I looked over to my smiley helper whilst this was all happening and noticed her struggling to put her winter boots back on. I thought it most odd that she was wearing knee length suede boots in the height of summer and so asked her. She replied that they were the most comfortable shoes she had and that she had even cut the metal decorative bits out of them so that she could get through the x-ray machines without triggering the alarm. I looked at them more closely and noticed the hand made holes on the front and back. But it did not always work and this time her holey but comfy boots had failed her. I understood her point given how many hundreds of times she has to go through the machines each week.

Then off we went again, this time planeside, wending our way through the throngs of unsure passengers, headed for the special assistance hub. I felt really vulnerable all sat down and small, made worse by not being in control of which way to turn or when to slow down. When in a wheelchair you are not at the same level as your helper. They are always pushing behind you and so you have to crane your neck if you want to try to make any eye contact. Even then they are looking ahead in order to avoid all the people and obstacles coming their way.

The special assistance area was full of people sitting and waiting. I often wondered why they needed a special pen since they are essentially sitting and waiting, just like everyone else. Why do they need to be segregated? Then it dawned on me – it is where all the scheduling takes place for who needs to be taken to which gate and at what time. A team of jolly ladies were huddled together behind a desk when we arrived, writing the passengers’ information down by hand onto paper sheets that looked a bit like the paper strips they used to use in air traffic control. I marvelled at an old fashioned technology that seems to work wonderfully to manage the constant flow of passengers needing special assistance. When it was my turn to be dispatched my helper came to collect me and off we whizzed on another seemingly perilous journey.

Most passengers are oblivious to everyone else – just concerned, and often nervous, about getting to their destination in unfamiliar territory. They simply don’t see people sat in wheelchairs. Several times our wheelchair got bumped unwittingly by trailing suitcases. I was terrified someone might accidentally barge into my ankle and kept bracing myself.

When we landed at Rome airport, a row of helpers were all waiting standing next to a line of wheelchairs. My name was on their list and I was pushed up the ramp to the top of the gate by a sweet italian girl. But instead of being whizzed through I was promptly left as she returned to pick up more specials from the plane. I sat there, all by myself waiting, not knowing what was to happen next. I was reminded of the scene from Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” where wheelchair bound Brenda is left by herself in the emergency stairwell after David and Gareth abandon her during a fire drill. But thankfully, in my case, within five minutes my helper came back with a big smile and got me through to a taxi in no time at all.

Everyone should have to sit in a wheelchair for a day to experience what it is like to be at the mercy of not-seeing others. It certainly opened my eyes to what they have to go through and I hope when I am mobile again that I will step aside, smile and be über patient with those who are in wheelchairs.

But it is not just at airports. Wheelchair-bound people are also overlooked by others all over the place. For 20 years, up until the late 1990s, the UK’s Radio 4 ran a weekly series called “Does He Take Sugar?” that presented an in-depth treatment of disability. The title of the program refers to when the carer is asked about sugar instead of directly asking the person who is being offered a hot drink. It captures the sentiment of talking about someone who is disabled in the third person, while in their presence, regardless of whether that person can speak for him or herself. The programme brought attention to this kind of “overlooking” and gave disabled people a voice (it also had a disabled presenter). It did wonders for helping “abled” people realize how to listen, talk to, and engage with disabled people just like anyone else.

The people whose job it is to provide special assistance or care for those with reduced mobility – as it is called now – are unquestionably guardian angels. It is the rest of us who cant see them for what they are who need to spend a day in a wheelchair to appreciate a little bit more what they have to go through every day.

“Does he take sugar in his tea?”
Hello, why not ask me?
I might have a disability,
But to answer for myself I still have the ability.
Just ’cos I’m not stood up like you:
Does not mean there is very little for myself that I can do…

—Michael W. Williams, “Connah’s Quay”

Tube Encounters

Posted on 10/06/2014 by Yvonne Rogers

In a round table monthly meeting this morning, one of our researchers started talking about a new new app he was building that would enable passengers on the London Underground to meet each other digitally and then perhaps physically, by playing games with each other on their smartphones. The idea was to make more of the idle time sat on a tube train by enhancing the wi-fi connections through using data given out from passenger’s smartphones. This could be combined with personal information about a passenger they had signed up for to signal availability to play. The app would ask some questions first that when answered allow it to match with someone else in the same carriage.

Before the researcher could explain the technical details of how this system would work (that he was most interested in), arms were raised throughout the room – troubled by the very idea of using phones to connect with strangers on the tube. While the idea of hooking up with strangers using phones is not new, e.g. “toothing” (a great hoax when Bluetooth first came out that claimed people were connecting with the opposite sex using it on the tube) it hit a raw nerve amongst fellow researchers. One student shot her hand up and said while the researcher’s motive was well intentioned his assumptions were wrong. Most people want to be mindless, i.e. not talking or playing with strangers, when sardined together on a tube – choosing to spend the time playing games by themselves on their phone; reading a book or the free daily Metro newspaper; daydreaming or simply just in thought. The last thing they want to discover is some creepy guy sitting opposite them, digitally signaling to them that they want to connect and play a game.

Tubes are horrible spaces that most of us are only too glad to escape from as quickly as possible. And as it can turn out, can become a melting pot that can quickly turn very unpleasant.

Later that afternoon, on my way home, I got on the Victoria Line at Warren Street heading to Victoria. At Oxford Street there appeared to be a bit of a disturbance as the doors closed and I switched my gaze to its source. A woman in her 30s had stood up to offer a seat to a man in his 50s, who was wearing dark glasses and walking with a stick. A waft of alcohol breathe permeated the carriage. He was clearly worse for wear. He raised his arm and told her to “sit down, women should not have to stand up.” A young man opposite her quickly stood up and offered his seat instead to the man. She sat down again. The man lurched forward and nearly toppled over. Several other passengers came to his aid and helped him into the vacated seat.

Two seats from him on the opposite side of the carriage sat a priest in his 70s minding his own business. He was easily recognizable by his purple shirt and dog collar. The man looked at him and started shouting abuse and ridiculing him, “hey you going to Westminster to do your penance? You need to do your penance. Ha ha.” The priest leant forward and replied gently “what for?” The man was affronted by his gentleness and started swearing even more profusely, f-ing this, f-ing that. On he went. “You don’t believe in that Jesus shit?”. The priest withdrew and looked the other way. Then another man sitting opposite me entered the fray and shouted at him, “hey stop swearing, there are other people on this train.” We all looked at him in amazement, only too aware of the regularly reported horror stories of passers-by being knifed, shot, hit or abused when daring to intervene. The drunken man glared at him and retorted, “mind your own fucking business! Who the fuck do you think are you?” The other man replied, “I am a police officer! Look, here is my badge.” He took out his police badge from his pocket and showed it to him. The other geyser went ballistic, “so fucking what?” He wasn’t a f-ing fighter like himself and he couldn’t care whether he had a f-ing badge or not. At which point the atmosphere in the carriage became electrified. In between abusing the off duty cop he kept repeating that a woman should not have to stand up for a man.

Victoria station arrived and most of us got off except the geyser who sat muttering, head shaking and continuing his tirade. I was struck by his old fashioned respect for women but lack of respect for others in cloth, amplified by booze. Here was a veteran, probably from the Gulf War, two days after D-day ceremonies, oblivious to accepted social protocol.

There is no way a mobile app is ever going to bring strangers together on the tube to chat or pass the time away being more mindful of each other. Only yesterday, I was in a carriage where some guy asked a smartly dressed guy in suit and tie to turn his beeper off on his smart phone. It was annoyingly loud and every key he pressed on the screen resulted in a loud beep. The man did not even look up and shamelessly said “I don’t know how to.” There was no answer to that.

Slow-Mo Time

Posted on 28/09/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

Last week my bag was stolen on the train as I was travelling home. As the enormity of what had happened dawned on me I jumped up and ran out of the carriage to the train door. But it was too late. The train had just started to pull out of the platform. I stood there helpless and my fellow passengers tried to help with offering to phone the transport police. All was in vain. I got off at the next station, Wivelsfield, and ran to the other side to catch a train back to the previous station, Hayward’s Heath, but just missed it. I was stranded at a tiny provincial station and had to wait another 30 minutes for the next one. There was no one in sight – no one I could explain what had happened to me. During that time as I replayed over and over again in my mind what had just happened. It was all in slow motion – paradoxically, as I paced up and down the platform. I was desolute.

It is common for traumatic experiences to be remembered by people in slow motion. How and whether there is scientific evidence for it is open to debate. But the perception is real to those who have witnessed a crash, been in an accident or had something unpleasant happen to them. Time really feels like it is slowing down. My memory of the moment of realization was it feeling like ages from jumping up from my seat to getting to the door of the train.

The way in which the theft happened was very clever. Two dodgy looking guys distracted all of us sitting in the carriage with a seemingly innocent question – and during that moment they stood up, took my bag (which was next to my feet) from under our noses and disappeared. It was less than a minute later but it was too late. They had gone.

The next 24 hours were desperate times. I had nothing on me except my train ticket. My purse, house and work keys, laptop, phone, ID card, address book, glasses, etc., etc., were gone. When I eventually got home (my neighbours had a spare set of keys so I was able to get in) I started the process of stopping my cards and changing my passwords. Then the next day, I went to the Apple Store and begged them to sort things out for me (they are incredibly busy all the time). I was there for 4 hours and they were very helpful. I ended up with a brand new phone but being credit/debit cardless, had to go home to get other forms of ID that would allow the phone company I had a contract with to agree to give me an upgrade on my account. Backwards and forwards I went.

For the last few days, I have been changing all my passwords and updating all my digital records. There are so many things that we have connected to our cards. For example, the automated top-up feature on my Oyster card failed because my debit card, it uses, had been stopped. My new credit/debit cards, which arrived today, wont work until the new PINs arrive. Deliberately sent a few days later to prevent fraud. I’ve been living on cash (my bank was able to let me get some out using an old cheque book and my passport for ID) for the last few days and it makes you realize how much we depend on plastic for our everyday transactions. The list goes on, from having to set up again other direct debits and credit card details for utility bills, Amazon, British Airways, etc. Exhausting and very time-consuming sorting everything out.

But every cloud has a silver lining. I was able to upgrade on my O2 contract to enable me to get a brand new iPhone 5s without too much extra cost. A slate silver one. It is a very beautiful object. I’ve been exploring all the new functions and enjoying trying them out – in between the relentless pursuit of re-establishing my digital identity. One function that is cute is the slow-mo video that is included as part of the package, that slows down the video to a fourth of its speed. This is my first attempt – one of my new PhD students (Jessi Baker) jumping up and down in my office.

There are many more of them appearing on the Internet. Here is another one I really liked. I look forward to more hours of fun ahead instead of more grief.

iPhone 5s Slow-Mo from Eric Grindland on Vimeo.

Finally, I am reminded of Mark Wallinger’s ethereal ‘Threshold to the Kingdom’ (2000) – a masterpiece of slow-motion, which I have spent much time absorbed in. Best experienced through life-sized projection with loud stereo, but here is a clip of it as a taster:

MARK WALLINGER from John Mallinson Duff on Vimeo.

Urban Divide

Posted on 31/08/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

“You don’t want to go to East Palo Alto! It is on the wrong side of the tracks”, was the advice I was given when looking for somewhere to rent in Silicon Valley back in the late 90s. East Palo Alto has been very poor since the early 80s and has much higher rates of crime than the other bits of Palo Alto that just got more wealthy and posher during the technology dotcom bubble. A similar demarcation exists in Bloomington, Indiana, where I also once lived. Those on the wrong side of the tracks live in poverty and are often regarded as trailer trash whilst those on the right side are university dons and students, respectable and educated. A clear town and gown divide.

More generally, every country has its north and south or east and west. If you live in the south of England you consider those ‘up north’ to be working class, poor and hard-nosed. Conversely, if you live in the north of England you consider those ‘down south’ to be stuck up, wealthy and snooty. The dividing line is located at the infamous Watford Gap service station on the M1. Apparently, nearly 75% of the English are prejudiced against their northern or southern neighbours.

The same can be said about cities. People south of the Thames rarely venture north of the river outside of work and vice versa. Each side of London has its own culture, accent, street fashion and views about people living on the other side.

Such urban splits are perpetuated right down to the street level. There is a street in Cambridge, UK, called Mill Road that is divided by railway tracks. On one side is Romsey and on the other, Petersfield. Romsey people believe Petersfield is less safe and has less community feel than their neighbourhood. But what do those in Petersfield think? Do they regard themselves as being poorer – whether financially culturally or economically? Do they think it is more or less unsafe than Romsey? Another case of being on the wrong side of the tracks?

Are the perceived differences about the other side real or imagined? This is the question being asked on one of our current research projects run by Lisa Koeman and Vaiva Kalnikaitė as part of the ICRI Cities. Instead of simply asking people on the street what they think, we have employed electronic voting devices to mediate. 18 of these portable devices have been designed, custom built and placed in shops along the street – some on the Romsey side and the others at the Petersfield end.
Shoppers get to vote on a variety of questions to do with the neighbourhood, by simply pressing one of three coloured buttons, depending on whether they agree, are neutral or disagree. Statements include “the street has a real buzz today”, “I feel socially connected” and, “I feel at home on Mill Road.” They are of course free and encouraged to talk at large about the issues with others in the shop or street.

The logged votes are then aggregated for each shop and displayed as a public visualisation outside them. Local graffiti artists spray the breakdown of the votes as a percentage for each choice – using temporary chalk and stencils – onto the pavement next to each shop taking part. This then becomes the talking point for for all to see, be puzzled about and compare.

At the end of the week an evocative visualisation of all the votes for all the questions, from the two parts of the street – divided by the tracks – will be designed and sprayed on the bridge pavement to show whether and what are the differences, as judged by the shoppers and shopkeepers. Will it be the case that the perceived economic and social differences are as marked as we are led to assume?

The jury is out.

If you want to have your say pop into one of the participating shops and cast your vote. The project also hopes to enable residents and visitors to the area to find out more about the street – which is known for its vibe, diverse community and international shops.

Hair-raising Hiking

Posted on 01/08/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

The idea of trekking across a tropical island from coast to coast is tantalizing. Especially when it involves traversing a rugged rainforest and hiking up and down a steep mountain in the middle with a magnificent rock on the top with spectacular views of the different sides of the island. This is what the Pacific island of Rarotonga’s cross island trail has to offer. Who could resist the challenge?

We should have had a premonition that it was going to be more than a sightseeing jaunt when we saw, the day before, a bedraggled family flag down the bus we were travelling on at the southern end of the coast path. The mother, covered in mud, was helping her bandaged young son hobble onto the bus, muttering, “that was rather an unsuccessful walk.” But, afflicted with hubris, one thinks that it won’t happen to you. Ha ha.

The walk starts gently for the first couple of kilometers with gob-smacking, larger-than-life ferns, banana trees, palms and other tropical vegetation. You feel dwarfed and can’t help but be in awe. All of a sudden the path gets very steep, with a strenuous ascent through a multitude of knotted arthritic tree roots. It feels like climbing endless, uneven steeple steps. You have to select your next step very carefully to ensure a good footing. Very concentrated, looking-downward, walking.

So we puffed our way up to the rock, known as the Needle, head down most of the time. Finally, we looked up again as we came out of the bush to take in the breath-taking 360 degrees views of the island, its coral reef and surrounding pacific sea. Many people attempt to climb the Needle but my vertigo and creaky knees put a stop to that. I already had a sufficient sense of achievement and did not have the urge to climb any further.

A short stop and then time to continue. The descent is usually easier and faster, accompanied by a mountain goat leaping down approach. How wrong I was. Like the ascent, the path was covered in an unpredictable combination of slippery mud, roots and rocks. However, whereas one can haul oneself up by clutching part of the crochet of roots, it is much trickier jumping down using the same technique. In many places there was no path – just a vertical mudslide drop. They call it a severe scramble in the guidebooks. We had to clamber down by grabbing hold of whatever was at hand above and below to anchor ourselves; shrubbery, old bits of rope, stumps, roots and hanging tree branches, some less firmly attached than others. But the force is propelled downwards and so it is more a matter of monkey-hanging rather than leveraging up. At other times, we had to cross a gushing stream, wading up to our knees, traipsing across mossy immersed boulders.

It was quite terrifying, especially when looking over the edge of the path that dropped very steeply into a thicket of the unknown. One slip too many and it could have been tropical curtains…I also had only Adidas plimsolls on which gave very little purchase. Unsurprisingly, I slipped a few times, once rolling head over foot near the edge and landing in an ungainly heap. Towards the end, I was covered in mud and my feet drenched and shriveled from all the wading through the stream.

All of this amounts to a big adventure that boot camp and other outdoor activities organizers would salivate over. Others have blogged about their amazing experiences but for me it was an ordeal. Confronting potential danger certainly gets the adrenalin going but when it gets treacherous it turns into fear.

At the end of the path is a big waterfall and accompanying deep pool. The locals simply drive to it up a tarmac road, get out and waddle over to look at it, play music and maybe dive off the rocks. The contrast between my relief at getting to the end of our momentous trek and the ease with which the locals entertained themselves was palpable.

Fishy Tales

Posted on 25/07/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

Part of the joy of going on vacation is regaling tales of the unexpected, especially big adventures. The art is in the telling and the secret in the embellishment. Disrupted journeys due to thunderstorms, hurricanes or other ‘Acts of God’ are popular, along with seeing exotic creatures very close up when not expecting them; a stingray zipping past you in the ocean, a python slithering inside your tent whilst you are in your sleeping bag or a scorpion hiding in your bathers.

We are all prone to exaggerate – the size, the length, the duration, the inconvenience, the fear, etc. – the extent to which we do so depending on the reception from the listening party. The bigger their pupils grow, the more fishy the tail end of our tale.

Whilst on vacation, we have been snorkeling a lot along the reefs of the South Seas. It is stunning, breathtaking and addictive. The snorkel mask does the telling; magnifying the many amazing fish and corals to appear larger and closer than they really are. You keep wanting to see more shoals, bigger fish, brighter fish, and ever more different kinds of corals, than you did the last time.

At the resort shop selling souvenirs, I bought a laminated card depicting a selection of common fishes spotted around Castaway Island in Fiji (where we are) to try to identify the ones I could remember seeing. Part of the pleasure of snorkeling is being able to name what you have seen afterwards. When paying for the card, the shop assistant threaded a piece of rubberized plastic through one corner of it and said to me to wear it on my wrist when snorkeling next. I could not stop laughing at the absurdity of the idea. Besides looking daft dangling from your wrist, the fish tend to swim past you at speed, so there would not be any time to scan a two-sided card of about 100 images to see if they matched up to any of the real ones. Moreover, the printed names of the fish are in tiny eight-point font and in blue so I doubt if they could even be read when bobbing around in the ocean’s currents!

It got me thinking about whether being able to identify a fish in the moment was important and how augmented reality could help. Imagine, wearing a version of Google ‘snorkel’ Glass that could tell you, in that GPS ‘lady’ voice, what was in front of you or the names could be projected onto your mask so you could read them next to the fish swimming past. But, just like in the rain forest, the pleasure is in the here and now seeing and then combining it with one’s imagination and memory afterwards, whilst browsing the Internet and one’s photos to recreate the experience and regale it as a tale.

I have had a lot of fun simply looking at the card whilst on land trying to match some of the illustrated coral fish to those I think I have seen, such as bird-nose wrasses, boomerang trigger fishes, angel fishes, trevallies, green pullers, orange-blotched surgeon-fish and some shabby parrotfish. The names are for real, not ones I have made up! Who needs technology or the urge to bluff with names like that?

Naked Eye

Posted on 28/06/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

Ever wanted to see the eyes, teeth and texture of a crocodile close up – enough to make you jump out of your skin and run for your life? The Solar Whisper Company in Queensland, Australia can help out. It offers ‘Croc Cam’ binoculars that can magnify wildlife by focusing “the camera on animals allowing you to identify using the onboard screen.” No more fiddling with the focus rings – just look at a zoomed digital image of the crocodile on the screen rather than using old-fashioned binoculars or even the naked eye…

I’ve spent the last week with friends in remote Northern Queensland, enjoying the unknown, the unexpected and the uncertain. We’ve been to an Aborigine dance festival, explored the rain forest, camped under a star-studded sky with the Southern Cross shining bright, and snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef. What struck me about all of these out-of-the-ordinary places, besides being utterly magical, was how they didn’t need to be enhanced through digital technology. Their beauty in the raw took our breath away. To be swallowed up by a dense forest of over-sized tropical plants; to hear piercing mysterious sounds at every turn; to be surrounded by schools of dancing day-glow fish; to be floating above an amazing bed of multi-textured coral; to drive into a full moon rising slowly above you on a straight empty road – all leave you in awe and remind you of just how small you are. They don’t need to be enlarged or brought into focus. If you want to find out a bit more there are ample pamphlets, signs and maps, provided at the sites and information centers. And they don’t need to be spoken about by a jolly recorded voice. Every national park or discovery centre (e.g. Daintree Centre), it seems, now offer various audio tours in multiple tourist languages to transport you back to another time and place.
All of which causes me considerable dissonance since much of the research in my field is driven by a motivation to come up with novel technologies that will enhance our experiences of the places we visit. The aim is to enable people to learn more about what they are seeing and to decide where next to go whilst interacting with digital resources in situ. However, besides the joy of snapping photos, I am coming to the conclusion that many of these other technologies are superfluous. They seem like overkill, masking the magic of what it means to hear and see nature in the wild.

I have had many discussions with Margot, a fellow interaction design professor who invited me on the trip, about the value of technology interventions in places ‘out there’ (as opposed to ‘in there’, e.g., offices, homes, libraries, shopping malls). When walking through the rain forest we both agreed that whilst it seems obvious and useful to have ‘a mobile app’ that could answer the kid’s and our own questions whenever they popped up, such as what is that, why are those fruit so blue, who eats them and so on – the real joy is to simply wonder. Maybe we don’t need instant information at our fingertips that gratifies our here and now curiosity. Maybe, it is better to try to conjure up a response to one’s own questions and let this lead to further questions, however, lateral. Letting our minds wander and letting questions remain hanging, rather than simply looking up information on an app is what inspires us to think more deeply and to imagine. Whilst it can be rewarding to discover the name of a tree one has just seen or, see the eyes of a croc appear bigger than in real life using a croc cam, there is something special about unaided contemplation.

Maid in Hong Kong

Posted on 17/06/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

Hong Kong is now one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Every square inch of the island is made use of and valued like gold. High-rise blocks are squeezed in everywhere, dotting the landscape, that makes me of think of rows of x-rayed teeth – long, close together, uniquely stained but uniform.

It is easy to think you are still in the airport when surfacing via the Express train at Hong Kong station. A vast, multi-leveled shopping mall welcomes you – that looks just like the one you left at the airport. There are rows of expensive boutiques interspersed with ubiquitous phone and electronic goods shops. All enticing and packed with wealthy shoppers.

I had arranged to meet a couple of friends, who are currently living here, outside a Prét-a-Manger (that ready-to-eat sandwich shop with the same fillings everywhere). Rather than drink their frothy coffee from a brown polystyrene cup we chose to go upmarket to a Tea Boutique (sic), called TWG further down the mall (there is also one in the UK based in Harrods). They claim on their website that they “will carry you away on a journey of sensations, spiced with elegant samovars, brass weighing scales, Italian marble floors and hard wood tea counters.” We discovered from the menu that they also serve over 800 different types of tea from all over the world. How surreal is that? I thought there was only posh tea, builder’s tea and herbal tea. It made choosing just one from an endless list of exotic sounding teas nigh on impossible. I was tempted by ‘sexy tea’, ‘desert mirage tea’ and ‘dancing tea’ but in the end selected a Jasmine tea (being in China) that had a few other nice sounding adjectives added to it. Someone in the marketing department must have had a field day.

After drinking our fine Grand Crus tea we walked out onto one of the many ‘walkways in-the-sky’ – that provide covered spokes to other neighboring high-rise buildings. It was mobbed with Philippine girls, huddled together in small groups, sitting on the concrete, demarcated by makeshift walls made from cardboard boxes. These are the maids of the wealthy and the middle classes. At first glance, it looked like they had set up market stalls but, on closer look, it turns out they have colonized the concrete paths, turning them into temporary living/dining rooms. In each one, you can see them chatting, laughing, sleeping, reading, texting, playing, eating, drinking and grooming – as if in their own homes. This is how they spend their one day off from serving the natives and the ex-pats, bringing with them their umbrellas, blankets, food, drinks, magazines, Scrabble sets, iPads and mobile phones. Because they live in terribly cramped apartment spaces – barely enough room for a bed let alone a kitchen – they decamp to the shopping Mecca’s many arteries to socialize and relax with their fellow maids, against a backdrop of Gucci shoppers and gourmet tea drinkers traversing from one tower block to another. What struck me, was how they had appropriated the cardboard boxes to make their living spaces; the flimsy barriers providing them with just enough height for a level of dignity, privacy and territoriality whilst low enough to be seen and to see. A creative way, indeed, of horizontally inhabiting a vertical city, whose earthly goods are mostly out of their reach.

Hell’s Dinner

Posted on 10/05/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

For many years, I used to look forward to reading the Winner’s Dinner column on the back pages of the Sunday Times; you always got an excellent meal of the late Michael Winner’s witty anecdotes, abundance of charm and pencil-sharp observations of his latest dining experience. It was a pleasure to consume and chuckle over coffee and toast on a Sunday morning. Sometimes, his best articles were about some of the worst places he visited – because it provided him with so much more rich material from which to mercilessly mock, slam and share.

I can only imagine what he would have written if he had been to Ollamessa – an Italian restaurant in Southbank where we went on my last night in Melbourne. From the outside, it looked tempting with plenty of greenery, potted plants and a front piece of glass at the entrance, with slick water gently pouring down it, giving the place a green, tropical feel. But once inside it felt like a different world. I am sure on moving from outside to inside Michael would have called his chauffeur and made a quick exit.

We were too tired to pick up on the signs and then it was too late. Inside, was very dark. The place we were taken to had black plastic seating from floor to ceiling, in a cavern like space. No windows and closed in by a long imposing wall. As we neared our table, my eyes were immediately drawn to a large, brightly lit-up glass meat fridge, where large slabs of red pig, sheep and cow cadaver hung – just like a Damien Hirst piece, all within a few feet of our table.

The owner came lurching over to us. His ubiquitous white shirt stood out against the black backdrop; the buttons stretched at his belly where a mobile phone was inserted. He tried to tempt us with plates of cheese, garlic bread, cheesy bread, antipasta and other starters he deigned to list. Each time we shook our heads, he reciprocated by leering more at us more. Then he smiled and said he had been drinking since 7.30a.m – it being Anzac day – starting with 12 pots that morning. He eventually walked away but left his beery smell permeating in our nostrils. The plastic menus he left for us were greasy and plastered with too many options, covered with italic text on both sides. Too much choice. I eventually found the section on pizzas, and the first one listed comprised a strange assortment of potato, cheeses and meats. Not one I had ever heard of before – or wanted to try. The others also sounded equally unappealing.

A hapless waiter arrived and I asked him if they had a pizza oven. He gave a Basil Fawlty blank look. I understood immediately and ordered instead the simplest thing I could find – spaghetti with olive oil and garlic and a mixed salad. My companions ordered a Porterhouse steak and a Saltimbocca with salad and chips.

What was served and what we ordered, however, did not match up. No chips but soggy looking mash. No porterhouse just a rib-eye. My ‘mixed’ side salad was all fiery, wilted rocket leaves doused in an explosive dressing that ripped off the roof of your mouth. The rib eye turned out to be a rump of pink flesh and the saltimbocca a thick slab of fried grease. My spaghetti had been cooked for about an hour, was cold, and had the texture of baby food tinned pasta smothered in some overpowering garlic oil.

As we struggled to eat some of it, the waiter then brought a plate of cheesy pizza bread – compliments of the house. Talk about adding injury to insult. We just asked for the bill. I could not get out quickly enough. As J and I stood taking gasps of the night air the other J. suddenly came running out shrieking in distress. She had found a cockroach crawling up her sleeve when putting her jacket on.

When regaling our story to the Melbournites, they were aghast. The city is renowned for its amazing restaurants. Surely, not possible. But ironically, it is one we will dine out on for years and remember, unlike some of the other wonderful restaurants we went to. Sometimes, it pays to endure unpleasant and shocking experiences to pit against the good ones. At least for round the campfire.

Tiger Thrill

Posted on 14/04/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

I’ve always been terrified of motorbikes, ever since one of my college friend’s got knocked off her Honda 50cc, when she was just 16 years old, and tumbled over the bonnet of the car that hit her. She survived suffering only mild concussion and bruises but another colleague’s wife died in her 20s, when she was knocked off – as a pillion – from his bike. So, it was with much fear that I agreed to go on the back of a bike – a bright orange powerful Triumph Tiger – to visit a winery in the Mornington Peninsula. The build up and banter amongst the Melbourne crowd who had set me up for this made me even more terrified.

Kitted up in all the gear and having listened to the basics of being a pillion, I stepped onto the bike behind my friend and confident driver, Steve. I trusted him 100% to drive safely and for good reason. You are at their mercy. There needs to be good body talk and understanding as you can’t chat or see eye to eye once on the move. Tapping on the shoulders means stop – like pulling the safety cord. I was determined not to have to do that.

After saying farewell to the others, who were driving there in the car, we whisked off up the driveway and immediately came to a roundabout. My arms and body were shot and taut with adrenalin. First test within seconds: was I leaning enough, should I look to the left or right or bury my head in Steve’s back. So many mini-fears raced through my mind. And it seemed like my inner thoughts were shouting at me – being amplified under my helmet. The next 10 minutes were sheer terror – when I dared not look at anything except Steve’s silver helmet in front of me – which I kept hitting with mine as we braked.

And then slowly, I started noticing the scenery, the amazing modern houses along the coastline, the beaches, the other drivers, the curves and inclines in the road. It was fun to be peeping at the world as it whizzed by. I started enjoying leaning round the bends and the umph from accelerating and zipping in and out of the traffic. I felt so vulnerable and yet so free at the same time. And so enclosed (with all the protective gear on) and yet every now and again could smell fresh grass in the fields or raw petrol coming from the car exhausts – that I had not experienced before, with such intensity. It was all so precarious and yet so enthralling. Knowing one had protective gear on that could help save us from brain damage or ripped skin was reassuring. But also knowing a margin of error by another driver could be curtains for both of us was unnerving. The tension, contemplated at speed, added to the thrill. I got it – for what it means to be a biker.

Another dream fellow has been researching thrilling interactions as part of his work on new forms of entertainment. He has conjured up, in collaboration with a number of artists, ever more amazing experiences, including a new form of interactive thrill ride that is controlled by a person’s breathing. His take is to deliberately use discomfort as a way of enhancing the excitement. It seems the more frightening, scary, dangerous and uncomfortable, the better.

A thrill begins with the much feared anticipation, followed by an extreme physical sensation, and then the euphoria of relief at having survived the experience. That sums up my experience to a tee. But why do we keep seeking novel thrills? It doesn’t seem natural to put our lives at ever more risk by deliberately scaring ourselves shitless. One theory is that such feelings of thrill fill the void that has come about through civilisation. We crave powerful emotions that somehow have got lost through becoming a modern society. No longer able to hunt or face a roaring tiger we seek out new thrills, like bungee jumping, white water rafting, or riding a motorbike Tiger.

The terror we go through, before, during and after combine together to heighten the actual experience and subsequent memory of it. I may forget what we had for the delightful lunch at the winery afterwards but I will never forget my Tiger Triumph bike ride.

*****************************************************************************************************
Tragically, Steve died last night (18/4/13) suddenly and unexpectedly in his sleep.
Just one week after this. Life can be so cruel.
My thoughts are with his wife, Anna, and their son Alec.
The remembrance page.
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Facing Fear

Posted on 03/03/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

We are creatures of habit. We slip readily into routines, from the paths we take to how we make tea. For many, it is because it is comforting and reassuring giving us our sense of self and identity. For some, it is because of their aversion of risk and reluctance to try out new things in case of undesired outcomes. We tend to stick to what we know, preferring to remain in our comfort zones.

At the same time, many of us would like to be happier, more creative and live more fulfilling lives. But wisdom and words suggest that entails us taking risks and doing something different. We’re told part of the trick is to set grand challenges and life goals that we can then aim for. Self-help books and websites push the language of the journeys we need to take to attain them and the steps along the way. There are lots of lifestyle apps, too, that promise to help you live your dreams and be happy. One I just stumbled across is aptly called, Everest, claiming it can help you “break goals into small steps, build step streaks, learn from others, and beautifully capture your journey from dreaming to doing.”

Seeing one’s dreams and aspirations in ‘step streaks’ is like ticking checkboxes or crossing off lists. There is a degree of satisfaction in doing this. But, as I have discovered on my travels, there is another side to living our dreams – not the small steps up the mountain but the big ones down it. That includes facing our fears.

When I was in Cape Town, I finally overcame a lifetime fear of putting my head under water. Ever since I was a young child, I’ve associated it with terrifying feelings of suffocating and drowning. It comes as no surprise that my idea of hell is scuba diving. I remember the mushroom swimming floats we were taught to do at school. I could never quite grasp my legs and let go in the way my schoolmates did so effortlessly. The same with sitting on the side of the pool when learning to dive. I was hopeless, not even managing a belly flop. After school compulsory lessons, I simply avoided putting my head under, opting instead for the tortoise head swim.

So how did I get over it? The family I was staying with had a swimming pool and each day, 8 year old J, would jump in the pool and swim like a porpoise, encouraging and cajouling me, “Hey Yvonne, come on, put your head under water.” He showed me how to do it. And each day I did it for a little while, even when it gave me ‘stinky’ eyes due to too much background chlorine. Somehow putting my trust in someone much younger seemed to do the trick. Then during my last week, a group of us (adults and children) went to a stunning beach for a final swim and snorkel. I bravely put on my goggles and made a few efforts to hold my breath and look underneath at the seaweed. It was quite choppy because of the wind so I kept popping my head out when no-one was looking. I followed them up onto the rocks, and suddenly I found myself on a precipice that felt like it was 4 meters high. The rest had all jumped in, with the exception of J., who was behind me. I looked down at the swirling seaweed beneath me and the taste of metal tin fear entered my mouth. J. could sense my terror and softly said “Come on Yvonne. Jump.” – I hovered, quivered and mumbled for what seemed like an eternity.

Then I jumped (that is not me but it is the rock!).

I felt a tremendous rush all around me, my body accelerating downwards, sucked into a vortex, and a swishing loud noise in my ears. An enormous fear of drowning enveloped me. I did not know when or how I could stop my body being propelled at top neck speed downwards. I had to wait for my body to stop and reverse back up. In that moment of eternal speed I understood my fear. As I plunged deeper and deeper I wondered if I could hold my breath for much longer. And then I missed the moment of turn. When, finally, my head whooshed out of the sea there was a mighty roar – not from within but from my friends cheering me on.

For days afterwards I marveled at what I had done. Overcoming and understanding the reason for a lifetime fear – however, trivial to others – is like climbing Everest. What next?

My next is to overcome a fear of heights. Many of us suffer from some form of vertigo. It goes against our natural instincts to go near an edge we could fall off and yet others love it – base flyers, bungee jumpers and sky divers crave that adrenalin rush. You wont get me doing any of those extreme sports – not just yet. However, on arriving in Melbourne yesterday, as the next stage of the dream fellowship, I discovered my apartment is on the 61st floor of a modern high-rise block, called Eureka Tower. It has a balcony with stunning views. The concierge who showed me how everything worked in the apartment opened the door to the balcony but would not step out himself. I gingerly did but came straight back in. Since, I’ve made about 20 attempts now to go back out there and hold on. Today I even held onto the glass at the edge of the wall and looked down a crack that goes all the way down. Somehow, it does not seem that bad.

What next?

There is a skydeck much higher up the tower on the 88th floor, with a glass box hanging over the edge. You walk out on your socks and look down beneath your feet at the world below. For many, it is yet another thrill but for the concierge and myself it will take a lot of nerve to ‘step streak’ that one. I have two months to do it in.

Inspiring Otherness

Posted on 08/01/2013 by Yvonne Rogers

I flew back to Cape Town at the beginning of 2013 for the second stint of my dream fellowship. South Africa left such an enormous impression on me last year that I craved for more of its beauty, intrigue and mystery.

First port of call was a magical place called Stanford – a mountainous coastal village near Hermanus. Good friends from Cape Town had invited me to stay with them in their house in the bush; a tranquil remote spot on the water’s edge. During the days we were treated to fish eagles and mole snakes. During the evenings we sat round a roaring campfire staring at the night sky and admiring the inky darkness encrusted with milky ways, shooting stars, a very bright Venus and satellites mysteriously circling the earth above. And periodically we experienced the doppelganger mating call of the African Platanna frogs in the lagoon like the sudden onset of a steel band in full flow.

Technology simply slipped from our thoughts as nature filled our imagination.

Over dinner one night, the topic of conversation moved onto uniform rules in South African schools and how strict in detail they were a generation ago. The legacy of obedience and punishment for deviating – even ever so slightly – remains today although the rules are a little more lenient so as not to be too out of step with modern fashion. A boy’s hair has to be cut above his ears and shirt collar. A girl’s hair has to be tied back and her skirt has to be 7 inches above the knee. Boys not allowed earings. Girls only allowed one stud in each lobe. And so on. All exactly specified. Every week each child’s hair is checked and their attire measured.

I wondered how this regime impacted on their impressionable minds. What purpose does it serve that socks have to be of a certain colour, have the right stripe and be worn with cuffs at the ankles? And for those who dared to have an extra piercing in the upper part of their ear or a streak of colour added to their hair – would such peccadillo-inspired defiance, with potentially grave consequences, lead them to be different in later life?

The conversation then moved onto which teachers the kids liked at their school, which they disliked, who was good, bad and who was just plain weird. The 14-year old daughter, F, piped in about her maths teacher, whom she claimed not to like but admitted to being good because she made them work hard, fear and respect her. And whats more F’s grade went up by 15% last year. It turned out that F’s maths teacher stood out from the rest: riding a Harley Davidson, having short hair, wearing men’s clothing and taking part in cage-fighting (cage-fighting is predominantly a male sport where competitors try to force each other to submit by attacking each other in a cage with punches, kicks, knees and elbows and choking). Moreover, she even has a large baseball bat at the side of her desk that she threatens the kids with – if needs be. The antitype for school children brought up on a strict diet of female and male roles and rules. Maybe she was one of the few who broke away when she was a school child in an even harsher regime and now imposes her own self-styled code of conduct. Paradoxically, it appears as another form of severity but with an alternative twist.

The 11-year old son, F, then chirped in about his art teacher who was, “like, 600 (sic) years old, a hippy, with long grey hair and wore strange clothes.” He also was held in high regard, being thought of as a good teacher who made them see the world differently.

There was magic and mischievousness in the kid’s eyes as they talked fondly about their teachers who dared to be different. Thank goodness the school does not lay down the law for what the teachers can wear, say or do. Children so need to value divergence in a uniform world of orderliness and, importantly, be inspired to otherness, themselves.

Compulsory Camera

Posted on 03/11/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

Sitting in a cab on my way home the other week on a wet dark evening I noticed a very small TV screen, adjacent to the driver’s rearview mirror, streaming live video of me sitting there. It was rather disconcerting looking at myself in a miniature digital mirror – with no recourse to turn it off or move out of its lens. The same thing happened a few nights later when I hopped into another taxi – only the camera was wide angled in a way to get both me and the taxi driver on the screen, as if we appeared to be sitting next to each other. Even more disturbing.

An ad for an all inclusive CCTV system on eBay.

I asked both drivers why they were using them. They replied that it was the law now, whenever you applied to renew your license from Brighton and Hove council. Each unit cost upwards of £500 and the data is recorded onto a hard drive located in the car boot. If an incident happens the driver can send the hard drive to a company who for £12 a pot, will retrieve the requested incident. This footage can be used in a court as evidence. The reason why many taxi drivers have not complained about the extra cost or new law, is to protect themselves from what appears to be increasing numbers of non-paying customers and violent drunks:

“Taxi driver head butted and bitten in attack shows why CCTV Cameras are crucial for our safety and security!”

I wonder if they would feel the same, if the tables were turned, and the value levelled at the taxi CCTVs was considered for the customer’s safety, where it could be used as potential evidence against them – from assault to racist comments. Maybe next someone will suggest they become compulsory for all company cars, cabinet minister’s cars, police cars even and on and on.

We have all gotten used to CCTV cameras being everywhere – in our shopping malls, buses, trains, roadsides, car parks, railway concourses, homes, traffic lights, bridges, schools, universities. Somehow the public location of these make them appear distant and hence more acceptable. The ones I saw in the taxis were far closer making them less acceptable. Tiny cameras poking their noses at you in the dark – trapped in the headlights so to speak – not able to walk away from their prying eyes, which is why it is such an uncomfortable experience. What makes it worse, is that often the drivers have a big infra-red illuminator next to the camera so as to make the image clearer in the dark. Lots of red glowing beads pointing at you encased in a big lamp. And no doubt there is a discreetly placed mic in the back seat or roof of the car tuned into record the conversations taking place – which I am sure MI5 would be very happy to get their hands on and mine for interesting topics.

I always thought paying for a taxi to drive you to a destination of your choice was a private transaction. This latest ‘safety measure’ clearly contravenes that expectation. Whatever next?

Kids no doubt love the in-car CCTV, entertaining themselves by making faces and mooning, and turning it into their very own Big Brother show. But I could not help thinking how uncomfortable it would be for amours on noticing themselves being recorded on camera for evermore. Canoodling viewed on technicolour CCTV digital is very different from an occasional glance in rear mirror shadow. Many a relationship has begun in the back of a taxi; the intimacy affords brushing of legs and sitting closely leading to that first kiss. For others, it might make them wonder if 1984 had finally arrived.

The mark has been overstepped. How does Brighton and Hove Council, along with several other councils who have followed suit, think it perfectly legitimate to legislate such an invasion of privacy? Laura Macphee has also written about this invasion of privacy in the Guardian for Oxford (The photo at the top is from her article).

Mobile Panic

Posted on 23/09/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

“I love technology!” exclaimed a sprightly 74 year-old lady who was sitting next to me on a flight to Seattle. She had many a twinkle in her eye; sitting with a drink in one hand and reading from her Kindle in the other. From then on in we chatted merrily about her trip to the US and how ageing is in the body and not in the mind. She was fascinated with technological innovation and has been a Twitter, iPhone, Skype and Facebook user for years. As soon as there is a new app or device out she wants it. It would not have surprised me to see her in one of the long snakes at an Apple store last Friday when the new iPhone 5 was released. It made me think again how we really need to adjust our assumptions and prejudices about the ageing population and what ‘older people’ want.

But not all novel technological developments hit the spot – whatever age you are – especially if they are driven by system efficiency and tree-saving rhetoric rather than creature comfort or cognitive amplification. The latest app that is guilty of this is the mobile boarding pass.

Mobile boarding passes have been around for a couple of years now but I – like many others – have chosen to stick with the tried and tested ways of printing them out at home or at a check-in machine at the airport. The reason being is that I can think of too many things that can go wrong – not least the phone battery running out of juice. I get very anxious flying and so try to avoid unnecessary risks that might increase my fear.

Last week when I was flying back with United from Portland to Seattle I was sent an email with a URL to my mobile boarding pass. Not having access to a printer on the return trip I decided to try it out. The email message was inviting:

“Select a link below to display your mobile boarding document on the screen of your mobile device. Scroll down to the barcode, and then scan the barcode at security checkpoints and at the gate to board your flight(s). Printed versions of mobile boarding documents will not be accepted.

Mobile boarding document links:
Mobile boarding document for flight UA5423 from Portland, OR – Portland, OR (PDX) to Seattle, WA – Seattle/Tacoma (SEA)

For YVONNEDR ROGERS
https://mobile.united.com/CheckIn/MobileCheckInShortCut?txtInput=FKJFC9&eBP=1&origin=GHFYfXVuK3Ml6vF6iLV1abpOD4padh0J”

I clicked on the link in the hotel before we left and it took me straight to the boarding pass. It was really easy and I did not think about it again until we got to security. Then suddenly, I remembered I did not have a print out pass and started fumbling with my iPhone to bring up the mobile pass. The wi-fi took ages coming up and I started fretting. When it did show up I then needed to scroll through the long regulations page to confirm I was happy with the terms and conditions. The page is not designed for mobile phones and requires stretching it to make the tiny accept button big enough for a fat finger to press. More fiddling and fretting. Eventually, I was able to get to my mobile boarding pass and placed my iPhone on the security reader. Trouble was as I moved my iPhone from its portrait view when held in my hand to the scanner the phone’s accelerometer decided I wanted to look at the page in landscape mode and in doing so obscured half the QR code. Not very clever, I thought. The machine barked at me and stayed red. More fiddling to switch it back to portrait view.

When I finally got through (the passengers behind me had started sighing) I was mightily relieved and so went to have some lunch. I put my phone away not thinking. But then at the security check at the gate the same thing happened again. Only this time I could not get the wi-fi to work. I really started to panic. What if they would not let me on the plane as I had no proof. If only I had that paper print out… I waited and waited for the pie-chart icon to appear at the top of my phone, cursing. Finally, it appeared; but then I had to go through the same rigmarole of accepting the terms and conditions of the airport free wi-fi. Then the portrait went to landscape mode and the QR code was not readable. More sighing behind me. More fuming inside me.

Once through, I kept my phone awake by shaking it so that when I finally stepped onto the plane the web page with my boarding pass on it would still be showing. How stupid is that! But one resorts to desperate measures under duress. Once sat in my seat it then came to me in a flash. Why not simply use screen capture? And store it as a photo. At that point I really felt stupid.

At Heathrow T5 on the way out I noticed for the first time a Car Finder kiosk next to the car park payment machine. What a great idea I thought remembering the times I’ve forgotten where exactly I had parked my car. Turns out Siemens made the system and is very proud of its efforts. I asked my driver to put his parking ticket in to see where his car was parked. He obliged. We were both marveling at how the system knows which parking spot you are in when the machine asked for him to type in his car number plate. He balked at giving away this information. I probably would not remember mine especially with jetlag.

The system can work out which floor and roughly which section you are in – but not the actual parking place – based on the cameras it has throughout the car park by scanning your number plates. Not that clever yet if it can’t read the number plate that is printed on your parking ticket when entering the car park. Far smarter is the workaround my Intel colleague uses when he can’t find his car at the very large car park at his place of work – pressing his car alarm button on his car keys.

It got me thinking – what happens when you lose your parking ticket? Technology not designed to help there. Instead, they slap a hefty fine on you.

Top image copied from Alistair Donnell’s blog

Silly Siri

Posted on 10/09/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

I love going on vacation out of season when the weather is still perfect and the town and hotels are only half-full of more discerning tourists; the bumper families who descend in July and August having returned to their routines of work and school. We’re staying in a beautiful quiet spot on the island of Hvar that has dreamy views and a very still warm Adriatic sea gently kissing the shores. Sun-loungers covered in bright orange mattresses deck the rocky tiers beside our private beach, dotted with spruces, pines and other exotic trees, providing shade and privacy. Nirvana.

The joy of floating and snorkeling in clear blue sea and then drying in milky warm sun takes over as we let our bodies relax. So, too, do our minds empty. Stress-inducing, incessant work email is left on the plane. But our love and attachment to technology persists. Free Wi-Fi is pervasive, in our hotel, in the town, the bars, the restaurants and even at the beach on the sun loungers. We scan our friendly email, look at our twitter feeds and read the news – but only for the news and trends we want to catch up on.

On the first afternoon of our arrival I snapped with my iPhone one of our fellow guests slumbering, having quickly given up on her Kindle and succumbing to a change in her body rhythm. It lay inert in its place. At breakfast it popped up again. Everyone nowadays (even the retirees) has a Kindle, iPhone or iPad perched besides them at their table. They seem part of the furniture.

In the evening whilst having a sun-downer, A and I tried our voices at Siri, on our respective iPhones. We have previously both only ever had a fun time with him, showing him off to others who have not experienced asking him questions. Treat him like a fun app and you don’t get disappointed. He becomes the topic of conversation – since he always ends up misunderstanding you or only ever being able to tell you the weather. And you nearly always end up swearing at your phone because you want to see if he understands that – we’re all childish at heart. We asked him last night – admittedly after a glass or two of wine – what ‘good morning’ was in Croatian. On cue, he replied that the weather in Zagreb was 18 degrees. We tried a few more times, speaking ever more slowly and loudly into our phones, as one does to a foreigner or a child who does not understand you. Each time, we ended up in fits of laughter, listening to ourselves asking a piece of technology to tell us what good morning was in another language. Imagine if we were trying this on the train to London in the morning, our fellow commuters would have throttled us before even nearing Hayward’s Heath.

When the waiter came by to ask if we wanted another drink we asked him what good morning was and he told us sweetly what to say. Sorry Siri – the human won effortlessly – but not nearly as much fun. Next morning at breakfast, we noticed paper sheets on our dining table overlaying the tablet cloth – listing all the key phrases a tourist needs to know in 5 languages. The irony made us chuckle heartily over our continental breakfasts.

While we were playing with Siri at the bar the night before, we kept switching over to the BBC Sports page, in order to keep updated on Andy Murray’s semi final against Tomas Berdych in the US Open Tennis championship. Every few minutes a new line of text would pop up, nudging the old score down. There is something very exciting about waiting in anticipation for it to appear and imagining the game play out in the way you want, instead of watching or listening to it unfold under its own volition. When you imagine right there is a tremendous sense of satisfaction. A whole different way of experiencing sport.

We’d caught a glimpse of the start of the match on the receptionist’s TV as we left for dinner, then again as we passed a bar in town. We saw that Andy had lost the first set and, so later, when we got back and read on our iPhones that the match was into its 4th set, we assumed that it was Tomas who was 2-1 up in a commanding position. The set ended with a tie-break and we saw ‘match point’ flash up followed a couple of minutes later by ‘match point saved’. It got very tense for us, not knowing when the next update would come or whether Andy had already been knocked out. Being Andy, we assumed the worst and were about to switch back to Silly Siri when a new line of text appeared ‘Murray through to final!’ Our excitement was palpable. And the joy at regaling how we had got our wires crossed about Murray was even more fun.

It is OK taking technology on holiday. Some frown and tut, thinking a complete break is what is needed. There is even a new craze called digital detox. On ‘one site, it proselytizes “disconnect from technology and reconnect with yourself. Recharge your mind, body and soul. The Digital Detox is a tech-free personal wellness retreat where attendees give up their smart-phones and gadgets in exchange for four days of serenity and bliss. Yoga, meditation, hiking, hot-springs, art/writing workshops, and healthy eating in a natural and tranquil environment help one gain balance, perspective and a piece of mind.”

To ‘disconnect to reconnect’ is an oxymoron to our ears. It is an integral, extended part of us now not an addiction. The trick is to switch your technology into holiday mode and use it to enhance and join in the fun. That is where Siri and Kindles can give so much pleasure. It is simple once one understands how to switch.

I am sitting on a terrace by myself, listening to the sea on one side and plates being cleared away in the distant dining room, using my laptop to write this – I have never enjoyed writing a blog entry so much. It is natural, tranquil, and bliss. And technology is ever present in its place. It would not be nearly as much fun without it.

Sound City

Posted on 28/07/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

Sometimes you find yourself being a tourist in your own city. Yesterday after work, I got caught up on the crowded Circle Line on my way to the Tate Modern, along with the hoards of Olympic Ceremony goers making their way to the Stadium. After I surfaced from London’s underground, I walked across the now affectionately called Wobbly Bridge, that was thronging with people from far flung places. We all found ourselves suddenly immersed in unexpected stereo sounds: single words and sentences booming from big speakers hanging over the bridge cables, resonating like a wall of deep sound.

Having gotten a little tired of our mayor, Boris, chirping all week his heartfelt recorded message ‘Get Ahead of the Games’ – on the buses, trains and in the station concourses – I found this unexpected 3D soundfield, suffused with our pattering feet, delightful. I discovered later that it was called Tales from the Bridge and created by Martyn Ware (founder of The Human League) in collaboration with the poet Mario Petrucci. Lines of poems and strings of local anecdotes about the life and times of London ran and rang alongside us as we strode forth across the Thames. They did not stream together as a coherent narrative but faded and overlapped, acting as emotive heart-string pullers. I was transported back to being much younger, vividly being reminded of special times when I had gone to see a Shakespeare play outdoors at Regent’s Park and a trip to the Museum of London. This jolting of childhood memories was a refreshing change, making me focus on the potency of words rather than having to navigate my way through the visual overload of garish Olympic mascots, banners and flags. From the accompanying website, it suggests it will “immerse the listener in an oasis of peace and contemplation, half-remembered dreams and thoughts, of meditation and learning.” Indeed, instead of worrying about something at work I drifted back in time.

I eventually met up with Rafael at the Tate where we stumbled into one of its latest installations located in the bowels of their massive oil tanks. The first darkened enclosed room we went into had just a hanging microphone that emanated with powerful 360 degree voices. Again, my ears were seduced by a singular form of audio art. I sat and just listened. Appreciating art through sound is ephemeral. But such momentariness triggers visceral emotions and memories in such a sharp shard way. I wanted to linger in the moment in quite different ways to being immersed when looking at visual art.

Back in the underground we heard several buskers, strumming and singing in the echoing tunnels. Again, it took me back in time to when I first heard those songs.

Such is the magic of a tune when walked into an unfamiliar context but very memorable time.

Hearing the city, augmented with mellifluous voices and sweet sounds, is such an arresting contrast to the “cha, chee, chee, cha, boo, booom” we hear so often and resent so much leaking out of our fellow commuter’s ear buds. While city dwellers enjoy their personal playlists reverberating through their inner worlds, serrendipitous street-shared sonics pervading our cities are, in my mind, infinitely more pleasurable for all.

“I’m not in love. So don’t forget it. It is just a silly phase I’m going through.
I’m not in love, no no, it’s because…”

10cc’s mid 1970s ethereal song reminds me of long gone summers. To top the day, I caught a snippet of it when walking past a store. And even now, it continues to hit a sweet spot: melancholic, romantic, and full of teenage-angst.

Changing Lives

Posted on 03/06/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

Some people love coming home after a vacation, enjoying the creature comforts of being in their own home and seeing the faces of their pets and loved ones. Others pretend they are still out there; wearing the briefest of beachwear and exposing burnt tans on semi-naked bodies, strutting along the miles of corridors at Heathrow airport, having flown from sunny far-flung places in January, not wanting to face the greyness of Huddersfield, Watford or the like.

I’ve just come back from 3 months of dreaming in Cape Town and it feels like I imagine it is for an astronaut, hurtling through outer space back to earth after orbiting earth for a weightless period of time. I had such a brilliant time out there on many counts, that returning home was indeed very difficult. Unlike a 2-week holiday, a 3-month sabbatical gets you used to a new way of life that almost becomes a settled routine, where new friends become part of your social life, and you feel part of the place, enjoying the delights of being a local, while each day discovering something else new. It is an aching wrench to say goodbye to the spectrum of a new life that one has invested in and enjoyed in the making. The transition back to one’s old way of living is hard; one even, somewhat perversely, tries to make changes to match the new changed self. For me, that includes an absence of engaging with the media; I did not miss watching TV, listening to the radio or reading the newspapers. They were such an integral part of the old me – can I persist with reading books, playing guitar, and other stuff I began doing instead? But, somehow, I found myself buying the Sunday Observer today without realizing…slowly, surely and inevitably…

One desperately clings onto the vivid memories that have filled one’s 24/7 senses; constantly reminding oneself that it is only 2,3,4 days, then a week, since I was sitting drinking coffee overlooking Table mountain. After a week, the time units begin to be replaced by the demands of the old-new life. A couple of weeks then go by, the tan fades, and it feels like one has never been away at all. Even the indulgence of recycling through all the digital photos and the fingering of all the physical stuff brought back in the extra suitcase pales in significance. Nothing can bring the life back but one can’t help being nostalgic. It is the same when one leaves university, after having ‘the time of your life’, or retires from a place of work, where the room sounds hollow after everyone has gone back to their desk and you are left with a big over-sized ‘miss you’ card, covered in witty anodyne anecdotes about you.

As kids we used to dread going round to my parent’s friends houses who had just come back from a trip – because after tea, the great old-fashioned, physical projector slide show would commence. We would be subjected to hours of pretty pre-Instagram places we had never been to while our host warbled on forever, embellishing each new image with great gusto. For them, such a trip down memory lane brought it all back. And occasionally we got caught up in it, but the joy was very much in the telling. Now, we speed through ready-made, digital slideshows with accompanying music and Kenny Burns effects. But people get bored even more quickly than then so I don’t show my collection of photos anymore; instead I tend to just whip out my iPhone and scroll through 4 or 5 selected images, checking to see how glazed their look is, before putting it away.

A lot of research has been done in the last few years to enhance, extend and facilitate the sharing of photos and memories amongst friends, families and those with memory impairments; there are now a range of ingenious devices, created by my fellow colleagues, that make the joy of remembering closer to the original joy.

But technology augmentation cannot dampen the painful transition one has to go through to realize how much one has changed from having had a complete change of scene. The cliché ‘there is no gain without pain” seems apt. One sees and enjoys the world so very differently. One has big thoughts and dreams. Trying to cling onto them, however, is like running after the string on a helium balloon disappearing into the sky. Recharged and with a different gaze, the memories eventually become less visceral and one is then ready to move forwards with the new wisdom, rather than looking back.

Flight Encounters

Posted on 18/05/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

I’ve just returned from an epic journey, travelling from Austin, Texas to Cape Town. We left about 3.00p.m Thursday and arrived back home at 9.00a.m Saturday. It involved long periods in airport lounges, and two whole nights stuck on planes, where many hours were spent sleeping next to and talking with complete strangers. During such times, one is forced to endure considerable discomfort but one can also entertain other possibilities. I often wonder which way I will turn: will I stay locked in a digital media bubble, watching endless videos on the headrest of the person in front, or will I start talking to my fellow passenger. The decision can be fickle.

My first night in the skies was on an American Airlines 767 flight from Dallas to London, in economy class. It was literally a case of sardines in a vacuum tin. Shortly after squeezing into our seats I got talking with my Texan neighbour, who was tattooed from head to foot. I’ve always been intrigued by those who go the whole hog and so somewhat brashly asked him about his tattoos. He told me he had been painting his body from the age of 17 and had finished his complete bodywork, a couple of years ago, in his early 40s. Not an inch of his exposed skin was left un-inked – except his face – but he’d made up for sparing that part by covering all his extremities, including feet, toes, soles, fingers and palms. I asked him how it felt now he no longer had the joy of thinking about what and where next to have a new tattoo. He just stared sideways at me with droopy eyes and a big moustache twitching slightly. Then in a measured Texas drool simply said that he was very content now that he had completed his whole body and that instead what he enjoyed was tattooing other people’s bodies with their latest designs and whims.

His tattoos, I am afraid to say, were not very striking or beautiful, except for a big colourful mallard duck on his neck – which was kind of cute. He told me he had a thing about ducks and that he had more of them on other parts of his body. At that point I had this terrible urge to go “quack quack” and could feel the words coming up through my larynx, but thankfully was able to swallow them (where do such childish impulses come from?). The rest of his designs were the usual medley of symbols, scantily dressed women, names of significant family members and other stuff meaningful to him, all mingled together in a way that only real ‘tat’ aficionados can fathom out.

I carried on asking him silly questions, such as what was the most difficult, painful, coloured… He answered me patiently and I began to feel a bit like a phoney Louis Theroux. But there was absolutely no sign of chemistry or connectedness between us – or attempt at reciprocation. The only time he lit up was when he started telling me how he dreads getting on planes that have a 6 in the middle of them. The 767 we were on in his classification, was truly ancient, offering only a bank of 3 pink-tinted shared screens miles ahead of us on the wall for our entertainment system. It made him almost chuckle that we were stuck on a clapped out piece of junk.

Eventually, he tired of regaling his tat stories and fell silent. I, too, tired of tat details. We both then fell asleep within inches of one another. I always find that very strange to be so close to someone locked in an activity that is normally so private and where one is so vulnerable to the other.

When we were both abruptly woken by the bright lights being switched on from above, we remained in our own bubble and did not acknowledge each other’s presence again. I find that also strange, as waking up next to someone in the morning is normally such an intimate thing. Instead we both stared blankly at the plane icon flying over the shuddering map of Britain in the distance, until it hit the outskirts of Heathrow.

We did not even say goodbye or look at each other as we stood up and disembarked. So very different from my encounter with Fabio Capello, a couple of years ago, when I could not stop jabbering for the whole duration of the flight.

The next guy I sat next to en route to Cape Town from London could not have been more different – a very friendly Afrikan guy who was in his mid 50s, very outdoorsy and extremely proud of his sons. This time, he initiated the conversation, by asking me questions about where I had been, what I was doing in South Africa and the usual polite chit-chat stuff. I reciprocated in my questions, and he told me how wonderful his country was, etc. It was a very agreeable conversation. He seemed such a content and positive chap, telling me all about his passion for fishing, hunting and hiking in the deserts of deepest Africa.

But then out of the blue, he started telling me about how he and his family had been robbed by a gang of six black men, who had entered their house one evening, armed with knifes. His story of what happened next was scary and gruesome. His voice changed and he stared ahead. His son had left a door open within their compound to let his new puppy go walk about. The gang had been watching for a while and pounced on the momentary slip-up. The gang went straight for the jugular, taking all his guns and then his wife’s worldly goods.

He then said very softly that his family all had counseling afterwards. And how his son still suffers. And now how his home is like Fort Knox. Scarred and scared for life. Then it was time for lights out and the eye patch on.

Next morning he asked me how well I had slept. The ensuing conversation was very polite and pleasant. Then as the plane began to disembark we shook hands, said our farewells and exchanged business cards.

One of my lasting memories of South Africa is how kind, interested and gentle the people are who live here.

The cartoon image at the top is from Cindy’s blog which provides a list of annoying things you can do on a boring plane ride. The photo on the left I took from a shopping mall car park north of Cape Town. You see Table Mountain popping up everywhere but sometims it pops up in the most unlikely places. I particularly liked this juxtaposition as the backdrop to an urban landscape.

Safari Lite

Posted on 12/04/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

Part of the must-do experience in Africa is to go on safari and see wild animals, especially the Big Five; that is the lion, buffalo, leopard, elephant and rhino. The term was originally used by hunters to refer to the most difficult and dangerous animals to hunt by foot, but is now commonly employed by marketing people as a slogan to entice tourists to game reserves and national parks. Many a word has been written about the Big Five, “whether the biggest, the fiercest, or most formidable, these animals are the ones that have the power to remind us of our insignificance in the face of the true kings of the savannas.” William Taylor et al (1999).

The adrenalin-rush of the old days of hunting has been replaced by the thrill of spotting and snapping. If you see a lion with blood on its mouth, leopard cubs playing and a baby elephant being caressed by its mother, all on one trip, you’ve hit the jackpot. Trouble is the Big Five don’t all live naturally in the same part of Africa and so to see them all together, one needs to go to an enclosed park or reserve, where they have been introduced into man-managed and electric-fenced environments.

We went to one of these places and experienced the whole package, with hours sat on an open-topped truck as the sun rose and set and then more hours afterwards by the roaring fire, listening to war stories and unique anecdotes being regaled by fellow travelers and guides. It was only then that I began to really understand the immense pleasure and specialness of being in the presence of such great animals. The ultimate safari is going to the vast savannas of East Africa, such as the Serengeti, and camping out for weeks on end, looking out for the herds in their naturalness, and if lucky, spot a lion mauling the soft parts of a freshly caught springbok. We, however, opted for Safari Lite and spent a couple of days and nights at a luxury lodge that had been built as an integral part of the reserve half way along the Garden Route. In one of its ads, it claims you can see all five in a malaria-free environment. That whetted my appetite and reassured me – being a bit of a wus these days. But they had substituted the leopards with cheetahs while also adding a few giraffes (which don’t normally live there) to the mix, giving us a bonus: five plus one.

On our first foray into the wild we donned big green capes – not for camouflage but because it was raining and windy (it being the start of winter) and we being out in the open for a few hours for each safari stint. We plonked ourselves in the three-tiered seats at the back of the truck that looked a bit like one of Juan Muñoz’s bleacher sculptures.

Six of these strange looking trucks then set off in all directions, each with their own guide/driver at the realm, barking out safety instructions to us and what to look for. Our guide, who looked like a young version of Clint Eastwood, drove us across the terrain in search of rhinos. And it did not take long before he spotted three in a creek. He stopped the truck and turned the engine off so we could see them in all their glory. Instantly and in unison, we raised our telephoto lenses and began shooting image after image of them lolling around, eating and playing with each other, while he bellowed factoid after anecdote about this one of the five. Once satiated, we went off in search of the giraffes. We were not disappointed. One proud mother stood high, shielding her 4 day-old baby. By this point we were incandescent. Our cameras went into overdrive – click, click, click. Being so close to animal greatness – however semi-tame – was special.

And then more feasting followed; with many sightings of other wildlife, including zebras, impalas, springboks, elands, bonteboks and others. We learned the difference between many kinds of deer and antelope.

Seeing a giraffe eating shrubs with its neck bent over was strange. But when it stretched it back up, stood tall, and started chewing and regurgitating against the sunlit backdrop, it was breathtaking. Our guide reassured us that these giraffes had adapted well to their new habitat. The evidence, he said, was in them having babies – the female we spotted had just given birth to one that looked tiny in comparison and awfully cute. But the difference between eating acacia trees and local Fynbos shrubs is that the leaves on a tree start to taste very bitter after about 10 minutes, causing the giraffe to move onto the next one, whereas the shrubs don’t. The bitter leaf taste is caused by the tree releasing tannins to defend itself from being all gobbled up. When it gets too bitter the giraffe moves on to the next tree and so on. This way the trees can survive. The indigenous shrubs, on the other hand, have not had giraffes in their midst and so have not adapted to releasing tannin to defend themselves.

Our minds wondered about how such man-managed ecosystems were able to keep balanced, given these non-adaptations between animal and plant. The trick is in the fencing, the feeding and the numbers. Keeping the animals apart stops them killing each other, which is what they do in the wild but is expensive and messes up the balance in a small reserve. Rhinos and elephants need enormous quantities of food and so are fed with plant fodder brought in from elsewhere.

Our guide was full of juicy pieces of knowledge that helped up build up a complex picture of how a game reserve works as we zig-zagged our way around the many tracks. He even answered, with a Clint-like seriousness, the barrage of one-liners one of our fellow visitors kept asking him about each new animal we saw: what they tasted like and had he ever tasted them. We found out that zebra tastes like cow and rhino and giraffe meat are simply inedible, especially if they are full of testosterone.

Our final encounter was with the lion. As our fellow visitor began asking what lion tasted like, it stood up, looked over at our parked truck and took a mighty pounce towards us. Our guide momentarily lost his Clint-eyed look and revved his vehicle at full pelt. The diesel fumes started pouring out the back of the truck and the wheels started spinning in the mud, as he tried to race up the hill with the lion charging towards us. We really felt the adrenalin then – not least because we were nearest the lion and were totally defenseless. But the smell and sheer quantity of the fumes were bitter enough to stop the lion in its tracks. It then just roared at us as we drove towards the automatic gates.

The lion story will stay with us all, no doubt embellished a little more each time of its telling. But that is the essence of the safari lite experience, just like the memories of a hunt – being able to regale and recapture the beauty and fear of such magical moments.

“Africa’s Big Five” by William Taylor, Gerald Hinde and Richard du Toit (1999)

Seeing More

Posted on 03/04/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

The Cape of Hope is a ‘beauty spot’ at the southwestern tip of Africa, famous for its dramatic scenery and steeped history. Its magic has captivated travellers for centuries; rugged rocks, sheer cliffs, white beaches, indigenous flora and fauna, stark lighthouses, galloping buck, cheeky baboons and fleeting zebras. When I visited last Sunday, coachloads and buses of excited tourists from all over the world were spewing forth out of their capsules, snaking their way along one of the ‘southern’ most points of Africa. Many were scantily clad and some even covered in garish bling that made us stare and snigger. The contrast been man and nature was stark.

I went with a local artist, H and her 11 year-old granddaughter, Tye who lives nearby. T had an amazing sense of the place, walking the whole time with bare feet, despite the harsh gravel, sharp dust and prickly plants along the paths. As we joined the crowds pounding the well trodden steps slowly rising upwards towards the pinnacle of a lighthouse, a few of our fellow sightseers looked at her feet and started pointing and talking in loud foreign voices. She smiled and leaped passed them like a mountain goat.

Not only did she have gecko-like soles, but radar-scanning eyes, spotting camouflaged creatures before me and her ommi had chance to saccade from the last amazing sighting; fat black lizards sunbathing on the rocks, a bald-headed eagle drifting by, a slinky family of mongese scuttling passed, some dassies hiding in the rocks (that look like a cross between a rabbit and a rat), and towards the end of the afternoon a big black male ostrich popping its long neck up from its skirt of black feathers from beneath the bushes and even a kelp-like shark in the distant sea. It was an unexpected feast for our eyes, as we followed her flitting movements and chirpy commentary. But her proudest moment was pointing out a very big puff adder lying right next to us, basking slothfully in the sun. We gasped in shock and then fumbled with cameras.

There were a few false alarms, too. A rock that looked like a tortoise and a stick that looked like another snake. We then had a very late lunch at the Two Oceans restaurant, near the point where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans join. We were joined by scavenging birds who showed no fear, as they tackled very crisp chips, by slapping them down on the table to break them into beak-sized chunks. One cheeky one even had the audacity to peck at the dried on ketchup on the side of the bottle to mix with his mini chips.

We then walked to a beautiful bay where very few tourists were and saw a rock formation that looked like an Egyptian dog head. T meanwhile had been darting dangerously near the edge of the cliffs, jumping over ropes and cascading off the boardwalk as if she was surfing on her gecko pads while at the same time talking in a hyper-manic way, regaling intricate and intimate stories of her antics back home, school and somewhere between. Later we realized it was the Coca Cola talking the walk. I was reminded of my hiking trip last weekend, when some of my fellow walker’s enchanted us with their epic tales which widened my pupils as I imagined what it must have felt like to be there; cobras hissing next to their sleeping bags, hyenas licking the outside of their tents; lions lying at the end of their marital bed, and baboons nonchalantly peeling bananas taken from the fruit bowl having gotten in through the kitchen window. These guys sure know how to tell a yarn – the kind we never get back in the UK.

Compared to the safaris where groups are caged in 4x4s, binocularing and then checklisting the big five African mammals, in anticipation, we just kept stumbling across the unexpected by noticing something strange. My big African moment was looking at some big brown rocks that suddenly started moving – turned out they were muscles and horns…it was a big herd of eland munching their way through the Fynbos. A rare, out of the blue, sighting. I, at last, understood what it meant to see more and to be like T.

Being Inventive

Posted on 28/03/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

Slackbacking is South Africa’s answer to hiking-lite; everything is organized by an enterprising company for you from the moment you fill in your personal details online and enter your credit card number. From then on in, there is a guide at hand to assist, firing emails, brochures and other information and doing all the planning and logistics. An itinerary is thoughtfully and meticulously worked out for you, with full board accommodation arranged and other little treats. All you need to do is bring your own day pack and fill it with a packed lunch each day that you hand pick, after tanking up on a sumptuous breakfast.

I just returned from a long weekend of slackbacking, traversing 28 kilometers of the Western Cape coastline, taking in a large number of pristine bays, each quite different from the last; whiter, wider, windier, sandier, sloppier, stickier. Some covered in discarded shells, others big boulders and others strewn with giant tentacles of desiccated kelp. We trekked from Paternoster to Jacobsbaai in picture perfect weather, lapping up eternal sun, sea and surf. Blue skies, white sands and blue and white waves, all stretching far into the horizon. Each new vista being more gob-smacking and mind-blowing than the last.

For most of our hike, we barely saw anyone else walking; the few other people we did see were dotted along edges of the camping beaches, surrounded by tents, and lots of camping gear. It was out of season, being the start of winter, and yet, paradoxically, a perfect weekend for being outdoors. Ideal weather – not too hot, windy, or humid. Those who had ventured out were a mix of retired folks, families and friends, hanging out, fishing, cooking and simply being. What struck me was the time, effort and ingenuity they had mustered in creating their makeshift homes.

My hiking companions told me how ‘being inventive’ was part of being South African, and their way of thinking out of the box. I could see their point as they described the details of the nomadic homes, with makeshift loos, power showers, brimming fridges and coolers charged by chugging generators. One we poked our noses in (the owners were only too pleased to show us around and demo their array of tight fitting gadgets) was a 4×4 tent, that had a double kitchen sink with running hot water, a fold away shower snucked on the side of the 4×4 (also with hot water), 150 litres of water stashed away underneath in an enormous tank, all the electrics you needed to light up the sky and even a well hidden drinks cabinet, with bottles of spirits all neatly lined up. We were all mightily impressed with its cleverness, compactness and neatness.

Contrasting with mankind’s ingenuity, was Mother Nature’s sculptures, huge boulders and rocks carved individually by wind, sea and storm, protruding and jutting from the sand. Many of these extraordinary rock formations were coated and stained in vivid reds and tangerine oranges. After a while, we began to see them, not just as abstract-shaped beauties, but as transmogrified camels, toes, snails, elephants, human faces and other body parts. Perhaps we had been primed since our lunch destination on day 2 was ‘tietiesbaai’ – a name given to a rock that stands out like a breast on the hill behind the sheltered beach. After that, it was impossible not to have evocative Dali-esque moments.

On our way home from a restaurant in the small town we were staying at, we looked into the local hotel that was a melting pot of locals and tourists. At the back we discovered a pokey darkened bar, adorned with rash moments of frivolity. Hanging from the ceiling and the walls was a dense canopy of underwear, of every color, shape and size, many stenciled by their former owners. This room full of cheeky curios is officially called the Panty Bar. It has been in existence for nearly 40 years ever since the former owner, Johan Carosini, started a collection of ‘honeymoon panties’. Our minds boggled.

There is something very weird about these kinds of small Twin Peak towns and their surroundings. Not only do the blistering boulders make you see the world strangely, but so, too, do the local’s antics – letting their hair down or setting up camp – make you imagine being inventive differently.

Bunny Chow

Posted on 28/02/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

It is funny how certain dishes grab your attention immediately on a menu. The one that got my eyeballs today, when we were having lunch at a local surfer’s café, was “Bunny Chow Chicken Curry Pizza.” Now that is a mouthful to read! And parsing it took me into an unknown space. I tried conjuring up the components and an image of rabbit’s ears together with ‘number 55 chinese take away’ on a piece of fine Italian dough came to mind. Not a pretty sight.

Gary laughed at my naïve translation; pointing out that the bunny derives from a South African word for a local indian people (Bania) and not from the pet rabbit. Usually it is just called bunny chow chicken curry but this dish had been extended, presumably for the macho surfer – in the way the ‘gutbuster breakfast’ at a certain all nighter cafe in Brighton, UK has become legendary for serious nightclubbers in the early hours.

The café we were visiting was located in Muizenberg – a popular very blue and laid back beach place, open to surfers of all levels. It was on the front with fantastic views overlooking the bronzed bodies and shark tattooed boards. Gary had the bunny (see above) and I had a less evocatively named, but still tasty, toastie sarnie.

The original South African dish originates from the 1940s as indeed a kind of take-away. The local Indians, who were not allowed in certain cafes and shops during Apartheid, were served a lovely curry, out the back of the restaurant window in Durban, in a scooped out loaf of bread. The bit that was scooped out was then put back on the top like a plug – the bread acting like a container. The modern day version is more refined but the sentiment behind the dish remains. And apparently the butter chicken is every bit as scrumptious.

I remember frequenting an American-style bakery chain, called Panera, at lunchtimes when I lived in Bloomington, Indiana. It also used to serve piping hot food in very large scooped out sour dough bread – if requested by the customer. They literally called it a ‘bread bowl’. Bunny chow, however, looks and sounds much better.

Just like I find the name odd, I find it strange that you can eat the container your food arrives in. Now, that really is sustainable cooking.

Cape Town

Posted on 26/02/2012 by Yvonne Rogers

I nearly had to postpone the start of my dream fellowship trip to Cape Town, as flu continued to wreak havoc with my body, brain and mind. I’m normally a heavy cold person – getting caught out once a year – and soldier on, with tissues abound. But this time, I was knocked for six. Splitting headaches, shivering bones, crawling skin, and no appetite for life.

Somehow, I managed to get through the worst of it by the weekend and decided to take the risk of flying.

As I was gingerly whisked off to Heathrow, my driver commented on how the way to tell whether someone has flu or a cold is to tell them there is a £20 note in the garden. If they have a cold they go outside and pick it up; if they have flu, they won’t even register what you are saying.

I don’t even remember looking outside or opening the blinds. I did not even Google my symptoms to check what I had. For the last 4 days I had been struggling to think along a straight line, let alone bothering to check my email, etc. Instead, all I did was fall into feverish, delirious sleep at every opprortunity. When eventually I woke up, I’d struggle to the bathroom, and then return to bed in an altered state for another day.

The flight to Cape Town just passed me by. Then I watched the passengers as they plopped out of the plane, like drops from a pipette, onto hot soil. The warm unfamiliar air hit my face as I joined them. I was taken aback. I’d managed to arrive without going through any bout of nerves, anxiety or stress. At least there was a silver lining to the great illness.

G, my host, welcomed me to his adopted country. He looked totally at one in it. As we drove through the burbs back to his abode, I listened to him talk about “braai”, and living in different parts of SA. Then we drove to the bay, bought excellent coffee from a wonderful local bakery, sat down for a bit and watched some baby seals flip their tails. There was an intoxicating smell of fresh fish being grilled, cleaned, and caught. Everywhere I looked, I sensed a Hockney-sparkle in the water.

Peacefulness and perfect sunshine enveloped me. I felt my body beginning to stir; ready for some blue-sky thinking.

Bordering Beautiful

Posted on 11/11/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

A major refurbishment is going on at Gatwick South terminal and ‘bordering on beautiful’ is one of the slogans proudly plastered over makeshift walls. I didn’t recognize it when the bus dropped us off. Instead of the usual unwelcoming, grungy dungeon we are normally dumped at, we were let out onto an elevated ramp, reaching up to the skies. Our eyes were in for a feast. The spanking new concourse was lit up with ambient banners of digital fruit colours that changed imperceptibly – alleviating the stress of starting a long journey from a London airport. A modern, vibrant and upbeat sign for Gatwick South was prominently displayed, with Aqua blue font.

I was flying with Norwegian.com to Sweden – a low-fare airline that bizarrely flies from London to Stockholm. It is one of the more discerning ones, even boasting free Wi-Fi on board. On passing through the concourse, I noticed a bank of sideway facing Norwegian.com kiosks and – just like in the TV commercials – friendly, uniformed smiling faces standing besides them ready to assist and welcome every passenger on their way.

Printing my boarding card was a breeze.

More elegant, ergonomic signage swept me up the stairs into security. The space – unlike the previous cattle market of fighting travellers winding their way through chaotic lines – was airy, quiet and soothing against a backdrop of more ambient lights, fluxing pink, blue, green, yellow and orange. I was in heaven.

Invisible, perambulatory paths continued to sweep us along until we reached a row of 19 glass-gated lanes with barcode readers, inviting us to slow down and step on yellow footprints. This is the face of the new border control, fully automated, and calming. Apparently, the new security system, if operating smoothly, will enable each passenger through in less than 5 minutes. So would it work for more me, to be whisked through to the other side?

Sadly, no. There had to be a hitch somewhere in this smooth, soporific journey. The card reader did not recognize the barcode on my boarding pass. I turned it around and tried different ways of getting the black lines to line up with the red lines, peaking through the scanner. No luck, so it was off to find a human to help out. At Lane 1 of the starting line, I spotted an official looking man. He looked over at me and said, rather too gleefully, “I can see what’s wrong straight away”.

I couldn’t, so brazenly asked him what it was. He peeled off another barcode strip from his large book of stickers and placed it over the faulty one on my boarding card. Then he pointed to the problem, “see here, your boarding pass has two lines of perforations, and one of them goes straight through the barcode. So it can’t read it. The company’s fault.”

I presume Norwegian.com did not know when buying the paper rolls for its boarding card machines that the lines of perforations (inserted for their boarding agents to tear easily into two bits at the gate, one they keep and the other given back to you to take on the plane) would line up where the barcode was to be stamped. I thought about chortling at this wonderfully simple, system error but thought better of it, as the man looked quizzically at me and then at my passport mugshot. One always feels vulnerable at such moments of comparative scrutiny, especially when bordering no-mans land.

Meanwhile, a small queue had started to line up behind me, presumably with similar problems – the man was kept very busy.

I was reminded of the person who is assigned to the cacophony of barking, self-checkout machines that have now taken over the cashier-staffed ones in our supermarkets, stores and newsagents. We all know the benefits to the retailer: it costs much less since only one attendant is needed to run a pen of 4-6 checkout tills at a time. But these new-fangled transactions are far from being beautiful for the customer. There is always something that a human needs to do when the machine comes unstuck or cannot be trusted – be it checking someone’s age, needing to remove the security top on a wine bottle, or rectifying cases of mistaken identity or non identify, such as deciding what a strange looking fruit is with no barcode label on it.

Once through security I went off to potter, preparing myself for the two and a half hour flight. At WHSmith, instead of using one of the self-service machines to buy a magazine, I obdurately queued with lots of others to use the old fashioned way of making a purchase. A jolly man marched up and down besides us, a bit like a ticket tout, sarcastically repeating his smarmy tagline “pay over here – and you don’t need to queue.” Noone budged over to his row of empty self-service tills. We were all determined to pay a human, no matter how long it took.

Finally, when I handed over my magazine to the cashier, she scanned it on her machine and then handed it back to me, after it had beeped. The days of them bagging our purchases are long gone, but so it seems, is the humble paper receipt’s day, numbered. I asked the lady for one and she retorted, “ohhh, I can’t do that, it needs special…(inaudible mumble).”

I gave her a puzzled look, indicating my concern at how were the security guards to know if I had paid for my magazine. She looked back at my look, and triumphed “ahhhh, there are loads of cameras everywhere”, raising her eyes to the ceiling. I followed them. Sure enough, there was an army of tiny roaming, drove cameras hanging from high; poking their swivelling lenses down at us. I wondered whether the now largely absent, human cashiers were being retrained as CCTV shoplifting spotting, experts. And I wondered, too, what I would need to do, now receipt-less and bag-less, to prove that I had paid for the magazine. But I did not need to worry – there weren’t any uniformed security guys at the front of the store to have to do any explaining to.

The world of commerce and security has gone topsy-turvy. Anything but bordering on the beautiful.

Flirting Butterflies

Posted on 06/11/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

There are countless online dating services now; most well-known are Match.com, eHarmony, and Guardian Soulmates. Yesterday evening I heard about another one, Flirt.com. As its name suggests, it is a lot more raunchy and explicit in its claims than the more romantically named ones:

“Join the world of free online dating with Flirt.com, make new friends and start hot all-night affairs. We’ll show you a short cut to all forbidden pleasures and to 1000s of personals of frivolous men and women looking for passionate lovers or hot mistresses in the UK.”

However, judging by the reviews it seems that these kinds of lurid sites are full of computer-talking bots rather than real people. Despite this automated fakery, many people still try their luck. And some get lucky. One young lad I met on the train last night was going all the way to Worthing to meet in the flesh the girl of his dreams, whom he’d been flirting with on the website for the last two weeks. Moreover, he was prepared to travel far and pay a lot to see her. He’d come all the way from Nottingham to meet her in a hotel. He’d never been south in his life, let alone London. This was the biggest adventure of his lifetime.

As we chugged out of Victoria Station he jumped around the carriage snapping photos with his phone of the twinkly lights on the bridge across the Thames. Then he tried to snap the fireworks as they kept popping up in the dark against the backdrop of the London skyline.

His excitement was palpable.

He asked me if he and his mate (who only looked 14 but seemed far more streetwise) were in the right bit of the train going to Worthing (the train splits into two at Hayward’s Heath and the first 4 carriages go to Littlehampton and the remaining 8 to Lewes). I nodded and then we got chatting. He was a bright ginger-haired boy, about 16-17 (although claimed to be 18) with several teeth missing and wearing crumpled, chav grey trackie bottoms with matching grey hoodie.

He called his Worthing date his North Star. Very touching.

He then started telling me how he was from a broken home, been in trouble, and now wanted to start a new life in Worthing with his flirt.com lady. His dream has always been to meet someone, get married and raise kids, and be a proper mum and dad that would live together. This was going to be his first proper girlfriend – at least that was what he hoped. I could see there was a lot of damage hiding behind the missing teeth, but it was lovely to see such romantic idealism shining through.

He was very twitchy and soon went off to the toilets to get changed. His mate (with no matching date), on the other hand, just played a video game throughout the journey. When he came back, he had an air of self-consciousness, this time donning an even more crumpled stripy t-shirt, but obviously one of his favourites. He sat down and carefully folded his carapace hoodie, putting it neatly in his backpack. Care that you take when in a care home.

He suited the nickname Ginger.

Ginger and his mate had been travelling already for 6 hours. I asked them how long they planned to stay in Worthing. Ginger piped up wistfully “maybe forever”. He kept looking at his mate and saying he had butterflies. His mate looked back blankly and just smiled. But I could see them very clearly fluttering all around Ginger.

Ginger’s mobile then trilled loudly. Nervously, he answered it. It was the flirt.com lady. She asked where they were. He looked at me and I shouted East Croydon. Ginger then added: “the lady on the train says we are in the right carriage and would be there in an hour.” I liked the ‘lady’ touch. Bode well.

We went through a tunnel and he lost her signal. She’d already had a few drinks and he seemed a bit put out.

The boys then suddenly realized they were sitting in First Class and that gave them a thrill. The ticket lady eventually came by and they scarpered into the next carriage. She gave me a knowing wink as she followed them. Then she left the train and they came scampering back into my carriage – only to be shooed out again by the next ticket inspector. It became a playful cat and mouse game – their childhood innocence getting the better of them, along with the butterflies.

As the train came into Hove, I stood up, walked over to Ginger and handed him a fiver, suggesting he buy his lady friend a nice cocktail (I am a big softie when it comes to kids with a shard of hope stacked up against such a mountain of damaged background). He swiftly put it in his pocket and thanked me quietly. Then he told me his name was Stevan – emphasizing it was spelt with an ‘a’ and not an ‘e’. I do hope flirt.com works out for him and is not the scam many unhappy campers have written about online. It is a long way for a boy so young and sweet to be duped and have his looking glass life shattered.

Image: redbutton.com

Smart Cards

Posted on 10/10/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

This morning I received an email from [email protected] that was every bit automated. If only question marks could become pounds we could solve the economic crisis in Greece overnight:

“Due to an operational issue, you are due a payment of ?2.50. This is now ready for collection at Victoria [London Underground].”

I should have taken this database spew as a premonition rather than marvelling at how the revolutionary Oyster Card system can detect an issue, solve it and let you know it will be fixed next time you slap your card on one of their readers at the ticket barrier.

But it was not to be.

My card did not collect any question marks at Victoria [London Underground]. Instead, it resolutely did nothing. I slapped it a few times on the yellow circle, normally such a seamless operation, turned it over and slapped it again – but to no avail. A London Underground employee then appeared and did the same, and resignedly said “the mechanism is broken. You need to go over there and change it.”

I looked over to ‘there’ and saw a long line. My smugness of being a well-oiled commuter instantly changed into Frustrated from Hove. I was already 20 minutes late due to some unknown ‘issue’ on the train from Hove – and which the driver had admitted being clueless about. I walked over to there and stood at the end of the line, cussing and cursing for 10 minutes, until eventually Window 3 barked at me.

Another London Underground employee listened to me behind the glass and then went off to a tray at the back of the office and pulled out a tatty looking form. Her voice sounded tinny, raspy and echoey as she relayed what I need to do through the intercom system. I wondered what I sounded like to her as I puffed and snorted my ‘issue’ with Oyster pointedly at the microphone that was sticking awkwardly out of the glass (I often think the same in taxis which have a similar system in place – it seems so weird to talk to the driver through an artificial amplification system when you are in such close proximity to them).

I snatched the form from under the glass. It looked like one of those over-photocopied ones (cranked out from an overworked machine) that was slightly wonky and has lots of spaced boxes to fill in so that a computer can read it automatically. Trouble is it requires us humans to think and write quite unnaturally, forcing us to etch letters from box to box rather than flowing from one to the next.

So, I started filling in my name, address, date, email, password, etc., and then realized I’d filled the wrong boxes in – I crossed some of them out and filled in some other ones. If this had been a US customs form I’d have been sent to the back of the line and severely chastised. But luckily for me this is Britain.

The woman behind the glass looked nonchalantly at me as I slipped it back to her. She turned it over and slipped it back. There was another whole side to fill in! There was no point in huffing and puffing anymore. Instead, I staccato-ed my way through the same details as I had on the other side. It is at this point of being so far out of my comfort zone that a streak of mischievousness can kick in. I thought about adding my favourite country, my mother’s maiden name, the name of my junior school and my favourite band, what I had for breakfast, even, but knew my petulant attempt at humour would be wasted.

Instead, a third of the way through the form I gave up, slipped it back to her and she nodded, chewed, and started tapping at her computer. I asked her why this part of the process could not be automated and she replied wryly “just is that way.” After a few more minutes of tapping and then pulling out a receipt from another machine, she handed me a brand new activated Oyster Card. My relief was palpable – but short lived. She then told me that I now had to go to the London Underground website and change the details for my card since the auto top-up would not work anymore. Luckily, there was enough credit on the new card (it had miraculously been transferred) to get me to work with some small tiny residue of composure.

So much for smart cards.

Facing Fame

Posted on 02/10/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

The other night on the train home I sat down and heard a voice that sounded familiar. I looked across and immediately recognized the guy sitting by the window – Steve Coogan.

Trains are great places to spot and talk to people but Steve was completely preoccupied with his agent. He was also eating and drinking. So not approachable. But that did not deter me. After he had finished his roll and scrunched up the bag it was in, I got up from my seat, faced him and said a little impertinently:

“Excuse me, now that you have finished eating, do you mind if I take your photo? I do like your work, especially the Trip.”

He gave me one of those pained “I am busy, leave me alone” looks but replied courteously and curtly “only if it doesn’t take long”, thereby clearly signaling he did not want any further conversation. I snapped him quickly on the iPhone, nodded and returned to my seat, appropriately put back in my place.

Now Fabio Capello was a different ball game. About a year ago, while waiting in line at the EasyJet check-in at Palermo airport for a flight back to Gatwick, we spotted him standing by himself. Various people asked him for his autograph but we continued to wait in line, looking discreetly, pretending not to be excited. After we had checked in we turned round – and lo and behold he’d gone. We were disappointed by our earlier nonchalance – ruing the moment for not having snapped him to show off to the folks back home.

But as we passed through customs to our gate we sighted him again, this time sitting by himself on one of the benches reading a book. No hesitancy this time – we boldly sat next to him and asked if it was OK to have our photos taken next to him. He nodded and gave that craggy Capello smile. Then we got chatting and before we knew it were escorting him through the throng of people to board the plane, shouting “speedy boarding, speedy boarding’” at the jaw-dropped crowd, as if we were his minders. Once planeside, I turned back to ask if he would like to sit next to us. He hesitated and then said “sure” with another craggy grin.

C sat by the window, I sat in the middle and Fabio in the aisle.

The flight took an hour longer than scheduled because of a French air strike (we had to circumvent France) so we had several hours to strike up a conversation and compare notes. He was well read, and despite struggling occasionally with his command of English, we had several in-depth conversations and jokey chats about wine, olive oil, Sicily, modern art, books, family, having to fly with EasyJet (only flight on a Saturday to London) and, yes, lots about football. At one point, I took out my map of Sicily to show him where we had been and he used it to point and tell us all about the places he’d been to and where to go next if we ever came back to visit. He then took out his modest mobile phone and started showing us photos of his olive grove and some of his modern art collection in his garden. He’d just got hold of a Calder and wanted to see if I liked it. It was bright yellow and stood proud amongst the trees. Luckily, I was up on my outdoor Calders (there is a stunning one on the Bloomington IU campus I used to walk passed every day) and so was able to make an intelligent comment rather than simply a ‘that’s nice’ one. He was impressed.

It was his unguarded self that has stayed with me most from facing fame. Fabio seemed at ease sharing memories and moments with complete strangers in the way one does with family and friends. And throughout our encounter he touched my arm several times with a familiarity that was endearing.

Even though I could never get away from always knowing that I was in the presence of the Fabio Capello – whom we’d seen hundreds of times on TV, read so much about in the papers and online, while talking endlessly about him in the pub, especially during the world cup – I was able to relax in his company rather than be a nervous groupie.

So why do we mere mortals behave like infatuated children when we come face to face with a famous face? I’d been talking earlier in the summer with Rafi about his fascination with famous people and seeing them in the flesh. There is something magical about being in the presence of someone (having seen them so many times on TV or online) who has become famous for having achieved something special – like being a brilliant comedian who can spot-on satirize life or a world-class football manager who knows how to play the beautiful game at the highest level – that makes us so deferential and star-struck. A raw wow moment.

Slow Time

Posted on 13/09/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

It has only been just over a week since I started my new job but it feels like an eternity. So many new experiences encountered one after the other – people, sounds, sights, tastes, paths, notwithstanding the myriad of obstacles and challenges that come with trying to become part of a new institution. And all that travel on Southern trains.

I am so not used to it – no wonder I am exhausted this weekend. I dipped into Eugene Ionesco’s “Fragments of a Journal” this morning – remembering when I first read it, being struck by how he poignantly captures the stretching and shrinking of time in people’s lives. When he was 8 years old he remembered:
“everything was joy, everything was presentness. The seasons seemed to spread out in space.”

But paradise does not last long:
“since then I have tried, every day, to cling on to something stable, I have tried desperately to recover a present, to establish it, to widen it. I have travelled in search of an intact worked over which time would have no power. Indeed, two day’s travel, the discovery of an unfamiliar city slow down the rush of events. Two days in a new country are worth thirty spent in the place we are used to, days shortened by triteness, debased by familiarity. Familiarity smooths down time, so that you slip on it as on an over-polished floor.” (p. 11)

It got me thinking about part of the problem of aging is the paradox of routine. Having a structure in life gives it meaning but our string of daily habits makes life all too familiar, and so we slip on time. And as we slip out of the routine of work into the routine of retirement our habits become even more familiar and yet we linger on them, trying to stretch them further but in doing so shortening the present. Taking an hour to drink a coffee, and reading the paper from cover to cover. And then it is lunchtime.

Given this inevitability how might we change time, even trick our perceptions of it, as we get older? How might we evoke memories that make the present more present rather than simply triggering faded, fond memories? Is it possible to build on the Proustian experience of involuntary memory – “…than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me…” to doing something more with them – that is if we are lucky enough to encounter them in the first place?

Pleasure Essence

Posted on 13/09/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

I had just sat down on the train back to Brighton after a very agreeable afternoon with DK and was mulling over the day’s events – watching Random Dance troupe rehearse at the Lilian Baylis theatre, discussing our project for studying creativity and cooking over a light luncheon at Metcalf and a peripatetic brainstorming stroll down Pentonville Road – when in walked two good looking black boys who sat down at the table beside me on the other side of the carriage. They both looked at me and one said “Don’t worry lady, we aint gonna hurt you. We’re nice boys.”

I thought, oh no, here we go. No one else was in the carriage. I looked at them, smiled, picked up my book and pretended to read it. They went back to joshing with each other. Moment over. I glanced at them a bit later and saw paraphernalia on the table; the one nearest me had started rolling a big fat spliff. I returned to looking at my book and then I don’t know what got into me but said in a really pompous joking voice:
“Boyz! Are you going to smoke that on the train?”

They both looked up at me in amazement. A split second of unknowing on both sides. A slow motion Muybridge moment. Then I smiled again and winked at them. Their fear dissipated, they began joking with me.

“This here, is for medicinal purposes.”
“Yes, you do look well”
“That’s why I am so well.”

The banter continued and the one nearest me grinned, showing off a mouthful of gold teeth. I asked him why he had so many for such a young man. He said it was his identity when he was young. And then he started on about his cram and graffiti and being recognized on the trains for his cram. And how he did not smoke on the trains anymore. He was now 31. Over that. Smoked at home. I asked him what cram was – thinking it was some kind of crack – and he said it again, slowly, ‘crime’.

The penny dropped. Then he started talking in a nice English accent – almost public school – and said how people prided him on his English speaking.

After a while he asked me what I was reading. I showed him the cover “How Pleasure Works” by Paul Bloom (a well known Yale psychology professor).

He smiled wryly and said “that’s good coz it is about how pleasure works, man, not what pleasure is. It is all in the mind. Body shows the mind.”

Then he started telling me about the book he was writing on being inside your body. About “the essence”. About what’s inside.

I then read out aloud a bit of the blurb on the back of the book:
“We are attracted, whether we know it or not, to the hidden aspects of things and people… some teenagers enjoy cutting themselves with razors. Some men pay good money to be spanked by prostitutes.”
He was clearly puzzled by this and replied “them men – it is in the mind why they like that kind of thing. Not that they get more pleasure from it.”

He then gave an example of his take on pleasure: “how when you do nice things for a girl, like you buy her chocolates, take her out for a nice meal, it opens her up, makes her feel good and that makes you happy, and you do it to get to her mind, and you get more pleasure and she gets more pleasure.”
I then commented on how Bloom’s book was all about essentialism, the hidden essence of things and read part of a quote from John Locke that was on page 9:
“And thus the real internal, but generally… unknown constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence”.

He started nodding, and agreeing. Then he carried on a bit more about the topic of inner self and his essence.

He was well pleased with his pop philosophy on pleasure.

The train stopped at East Croydon and they got up, cleared their debris and the gold toothed one asked me my name, told me his, and said it was a pleasure talking to me. Then on the platform he looked back at me through the window, winked, smiled and did a gesture with his fingers and thumb – as if to say “we connect”.

I do hope he does write his book “Being Inside Your Body”. It would be a match for Prof Bloom’s “How Pleasure Works.”

Transformer Sweets

Posted on 01/09/2011 by Yvonne Rogers

As I got off the train at Victoria on my first day at the new job I tried to embrace the role of being a London commuter rather than casual visitor. After brazenly holding up my season ticket for the first time, level with the eyes of the ticket barrier man, I then waltzed through with a brashness I thought befitting of someone in the know.

Victoria concourse is always a bit of an assault course to get through but I weaved my way through in nonchalant fashion. In the middle a gaggle of brightly clad people were thrusting yellow packets at passers-by. Usually, I take a swift glance at such freebie advertising and pass by empty handed. But this time I put my hand out and accepted the gift – seeing it as part of my new act. I put it in my bag and then forgot about it.

A couple of days later I was rummaging in my bag for a pen and noticed the yellow packet. I took it out and read the label “guzzle puzzle: what’s your fruity formula?” I ripped the packaging open. Inside was an assortment of strangely shaped and assorted coloured jelly things – some rings and others in the shape of plugs. The secret is to mix and match the two – placing a ring on top of a plug – to create your own fusion of flavours.

The red (raspberry) and the green (lime) when mixed are meant to create ‘pink lemonade’ flavour. The orange and yellow (banana) turn into bubblegum and the green (lime) and the dark maroon (cinnamon) into cola. I got my researchers to come and experiment with them, combining green and maroon plugs and rings to see if they were able to taste the ‘real thing’. There were not enough of the sweets to do a more thorough blind-fold study but they did think they were chewing on cola.

Who ever invented the idea of transforming coloured fruit flavoured candies into fizzy drinks had a streak of creativity in them. Not sure, though, about the process of putting a ring on top of a plug or vice versa.