Yesterday the knuckle of my left index finger was hurting. I couldn’t type normally, or hold a cup of coffee.

Twenty years ago this would have been a painful knuckle, end of story. But I’ve reached the age where my trials are tripled:

PAIN. I didn’t like the pain. Same as twenty years ago.

WORRY. There have been hints lately. Is this an early sign of arthritis or some other chronic condition of old age?

SHAME. Absurdly, this may be the worst of the three. I don’t want to hurt, and I don’t want to be old, but most of all, I don’t want to be perceived as old by others or by myself. If I have arthritis, that lands me in a new category for all the world to see. I’ll suffer twice the pain, please, if it can be pain with no significance.

[6 January 2015]

The Dutch East India Company was the most powerful company the world has ever known. It was the first multinational corporation and the first to issue stock, and had the power to wage war, found colonies, negotiate treaties, execute convicts, and mint coins. It was much bigger than the English East India Company and for a century was the main conduit of wealth into northern Europe. It made the Netherlands fabulously rich, brought tea and coffee and chocolate into our lives, and transformed Amsterdam and Jakarta. It founded Cape Town. It founded New York.

In Amsterdam last week, we went to the VOC museum, which is large and excellent and includes a spice trading ship we crawled over from fo’c’sle to quarterdeck. There were twenty or thirty other tourists at the museum.

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutchman who lived 37 years and produced beautiful paintings, including striking self-portraits. The story is well known of his dramatic final years, featuring a quarrel with Gauguin, mutilation of his ear, commitment to a mental institution, and death from a gunshot wound. In Amsterdam we went to the Van Gogh museum too. There were two or three thousand other tourists there.

[8 January 2015]

My sister and I spent nine years of our childhood on a voyage around the world by land and sea.

This statement is true, though we didn’t notice it until our father pointed it out to us. The first leg of the journey, in 1956, was on a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic from England to the USA, when our father was returning from a sabbatical at Cambridge. (In America we paused to spend eight years as kids growing up in a suburb.) The rest of the journey unfolded in 1964-65 during his next sabbatical. First we drove across the USA and took a freighter to Australia. Seven months later we sailed to Athens by passenger ship. Trains and a rental car got us to Holland, and finally, a ferry to England completed our circumnavigation.  (Shortly thereafter we flew to Boston and commenced the remainder of our lives.)

A nine-year voyage around the world!  I am Marco Polo, I am Magellan!

[6 December 2014]

Kate and I and her parents attended midnight service last night in Iffley’s beautiful Norman church, St. Mary’s, and I learned a fine point of Anglicanism in the early 21st century. It seems that  communicants who prefer gluten-free wafers may mention this to the vicar, who will accommodate them accordingly. Note how neatly this option reflects the fact that the Eucharist is merely symbolic. If the wafer actually turned into a piece of the body of Christ, gluten wouldn’t be an issue.

[25 December 2014]

As Kate and I walked along the Thames last night, just below Folly Bridge in Oxford, we were tickled to note that it’s boathouses on the left, houseboats on the right.

[18 October 2014]

A man stood up and I thought, that’s my brother-in-law Dana!

Then he turned to another angle and I thought, no, that’s my nephew Adrian!

The funny thing is, I’ve never noticed that Adrian and his father look much alike. But this stranger looked like both of them.

[12 October 2014]

I’ve long enjoyed the fact that there’s an evolutionary explanation of why trees do such a good job of providing shade. The function of leaves is precisely to catch the sunlight, and any sunlight that gets through to the ground is a missed opportunity.

Natural selection helped me out in another similar way just now. I was cleaning up the hallway after a visiting upholsterer left some duck feathers on our floor. Nothing is easier, I dicovered, than vacuuming up duck feathers! A little thought reveals that this is because evolution, as it were, has optimized duck feathers precisely for vacuumability: they are designed to be as light, and as good at catching the breeze, as possible.

[14 October 2014]

In an email I was writing just now, I accidentally typed “sitting over the week” when I meant “sitting over the wing”. This kind of error is appearing frequently with me — typically I replace one word by another with a similar sound. Luckily, I caught this one before sending the message. I’m a pretty careful editor.

I think this is pretty much the condition of ageing. Your engine loses power, and you cover yourself with a lifetime’s experience in editing.

[10 October 2014]

An urban myth has it that the word “posh” comes from port out, starboard home. On the old steamship journeys between England and India, to avoid the worst of the heat, wealthy passengers would book cabins on the port side going out, the starboard side coming home. What makes the notion fun is the geometric fact that to avoid the sun, you need to be on different sides for the two journeys.

A similar bit of geometry pleases me today. I’m on BA 178, a daytime flight from New York to London. I like window seats, but I hate having the sun streaming in on me, so I arranged to sit on the left side of the aircraft. Here in the morning we are heading northeast, with the morning sun to the southeast. In the afternoon we’ll be heading southeast, with the afternoon sun to the southwest. The poor lubbers on the starboard will be roasting all day long while I sit here in shady comfort, the plane slowly turning to stay between me and the sun. There’s Boston on my left now, magnificent in morning sunlight.

[10 October 2014]

On a New York sidewalk today I passed a stand selling baby outfits with this message printed in big letters across the chest,

“If I don’t sleep, nobody sleeps!”

We have here a fine case study in logic. The negatives on both sides are a tipoff that there’s a simpler equivalent formulation, the contrapositive,

“If somebody sleeps, I sleep!”

So why does this one feel so wrong? It’s the distinction between implication and causation. Yes, if somebody sleeps, that logically implies that baby must sleep. But it doesn’t cause baby to sleep, and indeed it’s baby who must drift off first before anyone else will get a chance. “If I don’t sleep…” says it right because it aligns the logic and the causation. Maybe it adds to the fun that we dimly sense this twist.

[29 September 2014]