by Last night I had an argument with my Skype student. I really hate having arguments with anybody, especially people who are my customers, but sometimes these things just happen. I’d suggested an article to read; it was about climate change and the lifestyle changes that five climate change scientists had personally made. “Could we do something else? I’m not into climate change.” What does that mean? I was more bothered about the philosophical problem with his statement than the fact that he (an intelligent man roughly ten years younger than me) appeared not to give a shit. Being into climate change (or not), in the same way that you might say you’re into football or not into Game of Thrones, simply makes no sense. Globally, the last five calendar years were the five hottest years on record. Climate change is a basic fact, like rain or death or needing to poo.
I suppose I have been more interested in environmental issues since I moved to Romania, which is a fairly immature consumer society. Watching Romanians consume reminds me of the eighties boom, with added smartphones. People here are caught up in an ever-escalating arms race: no matter what they do and have, they’re trying to catch up to someone else who does and has more. Just yesterday I spoke to a woman who had just spent £600 on her son’s fifth birthday party, and admitted that they spent all that money just so that her son wouldn’t feel deprived compared to others in his kindergarten group. None of my birthday parties (I don’t think we even called them parties) would have cost more than a tenner. Seriously. If routine £600 birthday parties for five-year-olds is where we’re at, in Romania of all places, no wonder we’re fucked.
My interest has also been piqued because, partly by accident, I no longer live a consumerist lifestyle. On the rare occasions I visit the mall (which, since its latest revamp, looks like an airport terminal on the inside), I happily walk past all the clothes shops, and pick up the few ink cartridges and pieces of stationery and basic food items I need. I’m out of there as fast as possible. I don’t drive. This is also by accident (where I live, there’s nowhere I can easily keep a car). This year I won’t be taking any planes, unless I decide to spend Christmas in the UK. Once again, this is by accident – if Dad hadn’t had his cancer operation, I’d have flown there in June. But it’s not all by accident. Even though I’m not shopping and consuming like most other people, I never for one moment think I’m missing out.
One thing I still do is eat meat. I now realise (for the first time) I could do without that too, at least over the summer months, because the locally-grown fruit and vegetables here are so tasty.
I’m trying to sort out a trip to Montenegro by train (no plane!) in mid-to-late August. I’ll write more about that in my next post.
So many people have described the Djokovic–Federer Wimbledon final in such glowing terms that I wonder if they saw the same match I did. Or Mum did – she sat up all night to watch it, and said it was bloody awful. I wouldn’t go anything like that far, but I’d say that to qualify as a proper classic, both players need to play at a sustained high level. That didn’t happen on Sunday. Where the match did massively succeed, however, was in the drama stakes. I read a piece that talked about the “excitement index” (EI), an objective measure of how exciting a match is, based on the average importance of each point in the match (not all points are created equal). The EI for the final was 7.5%, the highest ever for a men’s grand slam final, which meant that the difference between winning and losing each point had an average impact of 7.5% on each player’s chances of winning the match. Intuitively, given that over 400 points were played in the match, that’s a huge number. It was boosted by the tie-breaks (which are always high-volatility) and also the craziness that went on as the final set stretched beyond 6-6, particularly the two successive breaks from 7-7 to 8-8, and that knife-edge game at 11-11 when Federer held break points.
