2011 Streak 84/365: Daffodils

2011 Streak 84/365: Walk - 3.78 miles, Time - 1hr 10min, Weather - sunny and mild

Again I follow up a news story. The first time it was artificial flowers on graves and now it is daffodils.

Listening on the radio I heard an item about how the daffodil growers were suffering this year. The cold winter meant that their season was late in starting but the warm weather has meant that the flowers have come out at all at once. There is now a glut which they are finding difficult to harvest.

I don't know why it was a news item, as we are not short of big stories (Japan, Libya, budget, murders) and growing conditions are never perfect for any crop, but at least it gave me a spur to look more closely at the daffodils around me. They are all over the place. I never realised there were quite so many: beside the road, in the middle of roundabouts, in gardens, and on grassy banks. Yellow (and some white) everywhere.

Flowers and landscaping actually make an enormous difference to the feel of a place. As I looked around about the work of the parks department and how important they were in softening the edges of the town and making-up for the lack of architectural stimulation. My big hope is that they are not cut back too much in the spending cuts because it is always the soft services (those that enhance rather than being of direct utility) which are the most vulnerable. yet they are terribly important.

This is on my mind at the moment as a lot of the cuts will kick-in in a weeks time. The Guardian is starting to look at the impact on a lot of service. And tomorrow there will a big protest march and demonstration, in London. So my exercise tomorrow will be trudging along with masses of other chanting slogans. 

It will be a far more significant news story than the plight of daffodil growers but it might in some way be related..

Humility and Truth Pt. 2

In the past I have written before about running being a form of honesty. It doesn’t matter what you think of your capabilities, how fast you wish to be, or how well you know the theory, the time you take to complete a run tells you everything there is about your capabilities on the day. Of course you can plan to improve, work hard and make progress but there is always a clear measure of how you have done. You cannot bluff your way round a course.

Honesty and truth have been on my mind quite a bit recently as I have been reading Flat earth news by Nick Davies, which paints a bleak picture of the information available to us through the news media. Because of pressures of productivity, the need for speed, slimmed-down newsrooms, fewer local stringers, there is an over reliance on lifting copy from wire services and topping and tailing press releases. There is little time for fact checking and the truth of a story can sometimes be less important than feeding the prejudices of the audience. If something is said often enough it becomes the conventional wisdom and if no one checks everybody can continue to believe that the earth is flat.

This followed reading about Joseph Stiglitz's book on the full the cost of the Iraq war, which exposed a mountain of official lies by following the money. There was also interesting an article about the standards of curatorship in current art exhibitions which concluded:

The problem is not blockbusters. It's that in London we get too many exhibitions that sound big, but in reality are very small. As a nation, we've become professional bullshitters (as Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson's book Fantasy Island recently argued), and our art galleries are no exception.

All in all my head is reeling with the thought that all our public discourses and a host of consequential actions are governed by misinformation and an inability to check claims for truth.

I thus turn with relief to a run and know I can run for so many minutes and cover so many miles. It is the truth about my current condition and it gives me a grasp on one tiny bit of reality.