About Me

About Me. Hmm, well there's a start. Anyone who invests effort into writing an "About Me" signals an ego and a measure of conceit. The very presumptuousness of assuming anyone wants or needs to know about me! But vanity is the devil's favourite sin.

In all of what is posted on the internet, "About Me"s and dating profiles should above all else be taken with a pinch of salt. Whenever anyone pens an "About Me" they, of course, craft only how they want to be perceived.

In the 21st-century world of internet dating, what if we were to prepare our profiles, not with the things we were most proud of, but instead, the things we were most ashamed of? Perhaps if we did that, we would have far fewer dates, but those we had, would stand a better chance of enduring.

A better measure of someone is often to be found when they post in conversations, especially when those conversations become heated and when they may forget to conceal who they really are!

I digress! This is About Me! Me, Me, Me! That's what you have come here for, right? And so, without further ado...

Dad

First and foremost I am a dad. Everything else is a role I take, being a dad is what I am. The bonds of love are non-negotiable, immutable, unconditional, and probably entirely irrational. I have two of the most fantastic children in the world. The world is truly a better place for their presence. Their mother (former wife who gave me these children) is also a remarkable and amazing person who I shall always love.

Chris

Maddy and Dad

Mum Tracey and Maddy

English But

I am an English man. Turn me upside down and you will find an "English" hallmark on my bum. Snap me in two and you will find "English" written through me like the writing in a stick of Brighton rock. My Englishness is that of red telephone boxes, cream teas, raindrops running down the windows of a tube train at North Ealing Tube station, and assuredly a connoisseur's appreciation of British SitCom. I am English by a thousand aesthetics. But here comes the "But". My Englishness was wrought and forged in a country that is far off and distant from the England of today. In 2012 I saw a country proud to throw its arms open to embrace the world in the Olympics. Since 2016 and the Brexit referendum, I have seen that brand of patriotism curdle and sour like a pint of milk left out in the Sun (pun intended). England and the UK are now led by a government that is not so much the Conservative party of yester-year, but UKIP-2 with a dash of BNP and a liberal sousing of Billy Smarts Circus. Brexit and then clown-in-charge, Boris Johnson, a narcissistic sociopath and his cabinet are the most self-serving miscreants to hold office. Their malevolence and incompetence have stirred and fuelled xenophobia under the guise of patriotism and this will tragically socially and culturally blight the UK for at least a generation. I am English, but England is not my England.

Left-Leaning

I lean to the left. Fundamentally I believe that if we all aspired to have just enough, there would be more than enough to go around. There is a word I learned recently "Lagom", Lagom is a Swedish and Norwegian word meaning "just the right amount", "in moderation", "in balance", "perfect-simple", and "suitable".

For me, there is elegance and nobility in just enough. Lagom!

The world of politics seems broadly divided between left and right, between democrats and republicans, between Labour and Tory, between flavours of "We Are" and "I am". Nothing that can be possessed is ever diminished when it is shared.

In England I see the country being pulled by an elite greedy few towards a dark and sinister future.

My Manifesto Would be (and I may fill this bit out in time)

• Proportional Representation
• Social Housing Par Excellence
• Education Reform
• NHS Reform
• Wealth Taxation
• Inheritance Tax Reform

Animal Lover

I love all animals with the exception of some human beings. In particular, my dog Ronnie is my best friend.

Guilty Meat Eater

My daughter is vegan. She is right. I am an outdated dinosaur in my meat-eating habits. In a generation or two, my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will see a picture of me eating meat and will be horrified when their mother explains I was eating a dead animal.

A dinosaur I am though and changing the eating habits of a lifetime is not easy. I try to reduce my meat intake and am also trying to only consume locally sourced free-range farmed meat. The local goat is very tasty - and traditional!

Intelligent Sceptic

My observation of so much of what I see online leads me to believe we have a failing education system. Observing Facebook dialogue on the recent events of Brexit, Covid and religion convince me of this.

We, in the UK, have an educational system that has raised an army of photocopiers. We have trained our children to cram "facts" for regurgitation at examination and we do not encourage any form of intelligent scepticism. We have a world of social media tailored for this army of photocopiers, they built an App especially for them the Share button!

If I were a teacher at a primary school I would be giving my children Atlases with countries named incorrectly. I would then ask them to explain why they knew the Earth was flat, and to give me the distance between Paris and Berlin. they would get thick ears if they agreed with what I had given them. The first lesson of education must be to question your sources - any and all sources. This IS needed more than ever in primary and most especially secondary education. Students not able to show proficiency in intelligent scepticism and questioning of authority should be banned from tertiary education! A lawyer with a degree in law who only knows how to follow the rules is a danger to one and all.

Give me Cut and Thrust over Copy and Paste - every time!

As for tertiary education

Ethical Pervert

The greatest perversion of our time is how straitjacketed sexual expression has become. Sex as well as just being jolly good fun is to me is a language for the communication of intimacy where sometimes words just run out of steam. Providing there is adult informed consent, but also an essential mutual and genuine duty of care, then I believe absolutely anything goes.

Relationships always have to have a certain amount of give and take. In my experience, great sex is about give and give. It just so happens that the giving is exactly what makes you both (or all) happy. 

Religion

Until recently, I would have described myself as agnostic. But now I've found faith and it is atheism.

If you push me hard into a corner I can only logically defend the position of agnosticism, but watching Louis Theroux's My Scientology Movie convinces me that if you can fill an auditorium based on a recently manufactured bat-shit crazy religion, people will just believe any old nonsense. I see nothing to convince me that there is anything to distinguish the credibility of any other religion from bat-shit-crazy Scientology.

This presents me with a serious conflict of interest when choosing to live on a small Greek island when so much of the wonderfully rich culture of daily life is so interwoven with the Greek Orthodox Church. There are Panigiri here, these are church festivals where a mass is followed by a communal meal. I have been lucky enough to have been invited to several. When I first attended the communal meal, I felt like I was intruding and there under false pretenses as I did not share the faith. But, what I saw, in the shared feasting was a community where everyone was welcome and everyone rich or poor, old or young, was partaking in a communal act of caring and sharing. That resonates with me so very deeply. What else are we here for?

I hope to remain welcome at such Panigiri, and wherever I am able I will be honoured if there is one day any aspect of being able to help with them. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we do not need a God to live socially interconnected lives with kindness and compassion.

This faith in the non-existence of God has been recently bolstered by none other than Chat-GPT (or AI and neural networks in particular). Let's go back to my time in my school days when a friend, a member of the Christian union put to me the following argument for the existence of God.

"If you were to walk down a country road and come across a beautiful wristwatch lying on the floor, telling the right time and softly ticking, would you not assume it had a maker?"

This tale, anecdotal as it is, has troubled me with its persuasiveness for well over forty years. But ChatGPT has thrown light on this for me. It's not what ChatGPT has to say about the subject, but rather it's how ChatGPT does what it does, that leaves me more convinced than ever that a creator is not necessary for fantastic things to exist. Simply put, ChatGPT is a neural network; a large collection of remarkably simple elements, silicon 'neurons'. This collection of simple parts, exposed to enough data in time, has been able to exhibit behaviour that most remarkably is able to surprise us with its response to prompts. It is possible to hold a 'conversation' of sorts with this technology. To me, this gives more weight to Carl Sagan's "These are some of the things hydrogen atoms do given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution."

So ChatGPT puts my mind at ease regarding the finding of a watch in a country lane. Which in turn frees me to follow through with my belief that religion in the 21st century does more harm than good.

We live in a time where we have information coming at us from many sources and all the time. It's more important than ever for kids to be taught to be intelligently skeptical about the information they receive. They need to be armed with the tools of deductive reasoning to be able to weigh and judge arguments based on evidence. Religion encourages us to do the exact opposite. It not only says it all comes down to a matter of faith, but it actively discourages the necessity for evidence. Put another way, if someone is willing to believe in an invisible friend, it surprises me little that they would be anti-vaxer, climate-change-denying Brexiteers.

Art

But Is It Art?

Art is the product of creative endeavour that distills experience into essence.

Art is the essence that can take the viewer into another world, perhaps a world he knows, or has known, or perhaps has never known. Like the maiden waking from a dream of pregnancy "knowing" "something" of what it is to be pregnant. Like the young man who wakes from a dream of war, "knowing", "something" of the horrors of the front line.

To appreciate Art there has to be a collaboration between artist and viewer. As such they must share a "language" or one must invest in learning the language of the other. Without this, there is no resonance.

Art communicates. Art informs. Great Art is succinct and efficient in that distillation.

When you experience great Art, when that collaboration works well, it hits you with the immediacy and intensity of an intravenous hit.

Other Stuff

• Socratic Irony The head agreing with a foolish heart, to teach it a lesson. "Post Socratic Irony": The heart having been taught a lesson, saying "I don't care"
• Since turning forty, I have learned that there are far worse things that can happen to you than making a fool of yourself. This is just as well, as since turning forty, I have become increasingly foolish.
• Conventional wisdom is often more about convention than wisdom.
• The crowd that crowns you today is the same mob that will lynch you tomorrow.
• The time when we feel our worst is the very time when we should seek to behave our best.
• If you are not free to comment about certain things, you are not free to comment.
• Mob rule is a democracy that doesn't stop to think.
• An author is always wealthy, he has the imagination of others to spend.
• If sex is a language, the language we use for communicating some of our deepest heartfelt feelings, BDSM extends our vocabulary.
• Once we start castigating or deriding "stupid questions", we condemn areas of inquiry to convention rather than wisdom. Stupid questions are the way forward.
• There are only so many ways to rub two bodies together, but no limit to the ways you can rub two minds together.

I Am European

Well, that much is inescapable as I was born in England to English parents. But, much more than that I am a passionate believer in the EU. Whilst the EU is far from perfect in its implementation. it is founded upon the ideal of peace through prosperity. That much is stated in the opening chapters of the Treaty of Rome. Specifically, it is Peace through Shared Prosperity. The EU is a project that brings cooperation where there was once only competition. It brings collaboration where there was once only conflict.

Brexit, in my opinion, was a tragic farce. I believe it will cost the UK economically (I  know well my own company has suffered) but ultimately the greatest cost will be social and cultural.