Russell Davies

That's a long time

Great stuff from Malcolm Gladwell about structure and rhythm for presentations. Especially long ones.

How do heat pumps work?

We're thinking of getting a heat pump so I've been watching lots of videos about them. (SATURDAY NIGHT FUN!)

It struck me that, having watched quite a few, I still didn't understand how they work. Lots of the videos say things like 'it's like a refrigerator in reverse' which is only helpful if you know how a fridge works and possibly not even then. I'm not convinced I need to know, I buy tons of things I don't understand, but, well, I probably should. 

Having watched a lot of them I'd say this is the best one, though I'm not sure the marbles really help.

So, having learned that the best way to understand something is to see if you can explain it I have tried to write down 'how heat pumps work'.

It's probably not as simple as it should be while simultaneously being too simple for many of you. But here it is. I'd be grateful if any actual experts out there could let me know what you think. (Alby?)

I must have gotten something wrong. What is it?

1. Even on a very cold day there is still heat energy in the outside air. (It’s above absolute zero)
2. The heat pump sucks that air in with its fan and passes it over some tubes which contain a fluid called a ‘refrigerant’. A refrigerant is a liquid that turns into a gas at a low temperature.
3. The refrigerant is very cold - even colder than the outside air - so the heat energy in the air is drawn into that refrigerant and heats it up, boiling it into a gas. This is how heat energy from the outside is brought into the system, even the low amounts of heat energy on a cold day.
4. That gas is then put into a ‘compressor’ and electricity is used to squeeze it. When you squeeze (or compress) a gas it gets very hot - as you might have experienced with something like a football pump. 
5. That very hot gas is then passed over the water pipes of the central heating system and that water heats the house, through radiators etc.
6. The refrigerant gas having passed its heat to the water is then allowed to expand, which means it becomes very cold again, and we go back to step 2.

The electricity in the system is used to run the fan and to compress the refrigerant - moving energy from air into home. This is normally much more efficient than using electricity (or another fuel) to directly heat up the water or air in the home. That’s how heat pumps can transform 1 unit of electricity into 3 or 4 units of heat.

Mornin pages

OK. This is about 'morning pages'. It's really drafty, different versions of the same thought bolted together. Pre-editing. A demo. You can tell from the repetition. But, what the heck. Put it in the world, fix it in post.

I started doing Morning Pages during lockdown. That phase when we were allowed out of our houses but weren't allowed inside anywhere else. Though, if you were lucky, you could sit outside a cafe. And there was an Italian cafe, about 20 minutes walk from our flat where I could sit and sip a cappuccino.

So I would wrap up in too many layers and head out every morning. I was really after the exercise. I wanted to walk but I find walking for its own sake really difficult, I need a destination. Coffee provided that. And then once I got there I didn't want to just stare at my phone, work was all-screen, all-day at that point and I wanted an escape. So I made up a 'practise' based on half-remembering what Oliver Burkeman had written about Julia Cameron’s idea of Morning Pages. 

Sitting with my cappuccino, every morning, before I looked at my phone, I would write, longhand, in a notebook, three sides of A4. 

It usually took me about 20 minutes and ended up being about 400 words. I write quite big. It wasn’t designed to appear anywhere. It wasn’t even for looking back on. And the main task was just to keep writing, to keep the pen moving. If I couldn't think what to write I would describe the coffee or note down the conversations around me. 

It sounds very banal but I found it incredibly useful. It seems to loosen something in your brain. Just keeping the pen moving makes it easier for words to come out, things at the back of your mind, that you're only dully aware of, trickle down your arm and drip onto the page.

The painter Victoria Cantons, describes her painting practise as ‘a way to clear the drainpipes’. Morning Pages felt the same. It combined really well with the 20 minute walk and the coffee. I would slink out of the flat preoccupied with last night’s issues and the loomings of the day. I would walk, caffeinate and scribble and stride back home with a straightened spine and some solutions. 

(To be clear, none of these solutions were about splitting the atom on painting another Guernica. They were how to phrase an email or the order to do a presentation. The small creativity of everyday life.) 

One of the things you learn is that there’s no such thing as ‘having nothing to write’. Some mornings, many mornings, you’re just forcing yourself through the slog of writing. You’re just sitting there describing the sound of a mostly empty house or noting how your elbow has a small ache. And the sheer act of thinking and writing tips you into a felicitous phrase or an observation. It’s like your unconscious is an old storage unit you’ve been forced to explore and you come across something interesting. Or at least something you’ve forgotten about. 

I've since read Julia Cameron's book The Artist’s Way and I think I'm roughly doing it ‘right’. She says it’s “Three pages of whatever crosses your mind—that’s all there is to it. If you can’t think of anything to write, then write, “I can’t think of anything to write …” Do this until you have filled three pages. Do anything until you have filled three pages.

She’s very keen that you never skip a day, never show them to anyone and try to do them in the morning. That all makes sense. But it's most important that you just do it. Remember: dailyish. Don’t let the broken streak become the enemy of the doing.

Try this: 

White daily is a in a notebook. As early in your day as you can. Life permitting. Do three pages of A4 or some amount which is a bit more than comes easy. You’re trying to flush out the front of your mind and to pay attention to the stuff at the back. 

Or take your notebook out into the world. If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes take yourself out somewhere. A bus stop. A cafe. A library. Sit with your notebook and just write stuff down. Make notes about what’s around you. Describe the decor or the atmosphere. Explain the queuing system. Listen to what people say. Write it down verbatim and notice how it’s completely unlike the dialogue in movies. Wonder why that is. Try and think of the right word to describe the smell of the drains mingling with the chip shop next door. 

If you’re really stuck, if you feel like there’s ABSOLUTELY NOTHING out there to note just start writing down the random stuff in your head. The quotes, bits of song lyrics, catchphrases or odd bits of corporate language all of us just seem to carry around. You are my sunshine. Into the valley of the shadow of death. Out of the black and into the red, nothing in this game for two in a bed. If nothing else the pen is moving, the ink is flowing. And, eventually something will pop up. Some tiny thing will spark something else and you’ll feel like you’re not just copy and pasting from your filing cabinet.

This is this

This is why you blog this. Because people tell you how to make it better.

Why be more interesting?

This is a section I'm working on for the book. It's not a simple answer...

Tooth and claw - the productivity answer

There were once two hikers setting up camp in the woods after a long day’s walking. They’d just finished their evening meal and were settling down in their tent, getting into their sleeping bags, when they heard the unmistakable sounds of a bear snuffling around the campsite. They froze with fear. Then they heard it getting closer, then they saw the bulge in the nylon as the bear rubbed against the outside of the tent. One of the hikers slowly reached over to their rucksack, dug out a pair of running shoes and silently started putting them on. 

“What are you doing?” whispered the other hiker “You can’t outrun a bear”

“I don’t have to outrun a bear” the first hiker replied “I just have to outrun you”

This is a reason to be interesting. It’s a competitive world out there. In a world of work, a world of raising money to start a business, or to persuade someone to buy your new idea, or to support your cause, or whatever it is, it helps if you’ve got a little edge. And being more interesting can be that edge. It won’t make you the fastest runner in the world but it’ll help.

Just because - the life is for living answer

Someone once did a study which claimed that a greater proportion of scientists who won Nobel Prizes had hobbies than those that didn't. I posted this on the Do Interesting instagram and my friend James poked at it, questioning what I was suggesting: ‘be interesting so you can be successful, so you can win?’ And, yes, that's a bit of it, we talked about that above. 

But there's more to it than that. I think it's a useful counter to all the productivity pom in the world to remember that not only is being maniacally focused on work unhealthy, but that it also doesn’t work. I like the Nobel/hobbies study because it demonstrates that hobbies don't get in the way of professional success. Many of us want to succeed professionally and feel like our hobbies should sit on pause while we do it. This is study is one indication that that's pointless.

What else is there? - the happiness answer

The Australian author Helen Garner just wrote a magnificent essay for The Guardian about happiness. She said she’d finally realised that it wasn’t a thing you got after a lifetime of striving but something that you ‘glimpse in the corner of your eye’ Something elusive, that slips away before you name it. 

And then she writes:

“So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.”

And then she tells you about the things she’s noticed. It’s magical and mundane. Go read it.

Being interesting means being interested. What else is there?

Updates from the House of Procrastination

I done a newsletter: Happy Septuagesima

And the latest 41233 features fairy tale weddings.

Learning to fly

Looking back I've always been pretty bad at going to gigs and going out dancing. Or, rather, I was OK at it until some point in my twenties.

Fondly remembered gigs as a teenager: Genesis and Tangerine Dream (twice?) at the Assembly Rooms, Prefab Sprout and The Daintees at The Blue Note.

Fondly remembered gigs while at college: Trouble Funk at the Town and Country, The Membranes, The Mekons and Bogshed at Stow Hill Labour Club, Newport. (This one?)

After that. Not much. Similarly I've been bad at going out dancing. 

Fondly remembered dancing as a teenager: 6th form disco. Co-op Function Rooms & the Blue Note, Derby.

Fondly remembered dancing while at college: the Tufty Club, various parties.

Since then it seems to have dried up. Some combination of work, hating smoke, always being the only person not drinking, being in a band, not liking crowds, really loving being at home has gotten me out of the 'going out to music' habit.

I have determined of late to change that. Because I really like live music. I really like dancing. And yet, as discussed, I never do either of them.

Partly because I don't drink. And sitting on my own sipping a Diet Coke seems more something than nursing a beer or a whisky. The latter would make me feel like a stranger on the edge of town, the former makes me feel like a Dad dropping someone off.

Partly because I have no one to go with. Anne's not really interested in much of the music I might like. She is occasionally kind enough to humour me with pleasant jazz if it involves sitting down but that's about it. My current solution to this is to buy two tickets to things I fancy and then flail randomly amongst my friends trying to entice them to come. So far it's not really working. People have lives.

But 2023 is the year I'm determined to get better at this. If you fancy a gig let me know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also duck

Executive summary*

I've just written this as a first page in the Do Interesting book. (Don't worry, we've also written other pages. This isn't all there is.)

If you’re in a bookshop trying to decide whether to buy this book this is the page you want.

Interesting isn’t something you are, it’s something you do. You get more interesting by being more interested, by paying a little more attention to the world. And there are a bunch of relatively easy, ways to do that. Which we’ve divided into three sections

Noticing - you should spend a little bit of time, dailyish, paying extra attention to the world and noticing something new about it.

We’ve got 23 ways you could do that.

Collecting - you should make an extra effort, weeklyish, to collect and compile what you’ve noticed so you can find it and use it again.

We’ve got 15 ways you could do that.

Making - you should do something with what you’ve collected, monthishly. You should make something that you put back into the world. Something interesting.

We’ve got 21 ways you could do that.

We’ve also interviewed a bunch of interesting people who aren’t Steve Jobs or Picasso but just regular people like you and me who tell us how they do all this.

*if not you’re not an executive please don’t read this page