YEAR 10 BUSINESS STUDIES FIELD TRIP

Sammy and I watched a show the other day, where a bunch of young adults were given a sort of GCSE business studies project, and they had to prove that they could complete it as though they were fifteen-year-olds.

Yeah. It was great! The grizzly teacher appeared (suit, tie, world-weary expression) and told them that they’d have to do a sort of treasure hunt around Jersey, buying up items from a list, for the lowest price they could.

That’s why we watched it - we were in Jersey last summer and we wondered how much of the island would feature.

The kids set off. Break into teams first and pick a leader.

“I’ll be brilliant at this!” said one chap. He was doing an excellent job of imitating a fifteen-year-old, I thought. All the confident swagger of a boy unaware of the world but somehow believing it was entirely in his possession.

“We’ll go into all our negotiations with a 75% discount!” he said, firmly. School football team captain vibes. Bless him. Amazingly, nobody else said a thing. They were all too good at pretending to be sheepish teenagers.

Meanwhile on the other team, a girl was throwing her hand into the air and volunteering herself as team leader. Another girl said she wanted to do it, so they had a vote, resulting in a sort of cat-like standoff between the two - one smug, one obviously sulking. That’s the Year 10 spirit!

“Is you any good with maps though?” asked one of the others. I looked at Sammy, and she reminded me it wasn’t an odd question as they were about to race around a strange island and the grumpy teacher had banned them from google. I raised an eyebrow.

Off they went. The usual hijinks - the 75%ers were quickly laughed at by oyster salesmen and vintners. The girl with the maps sent her team in the wrong direction. Arguments followed, someone couldn’t figure out how to use a tape measure, then time ran out and they all headed back to class for the teacher to debrief them on how the project went and what they could have done better.

Now, I thought he was cross when he gave them the task, but when they all stood in front of him, looking at the floor and twiddling their fingers, he was incandescent. He had his bearded head in his hands, stared at each of them, shouted, and eviscerated the teams with sarcasm. He read the results out. Awful. Missed items, fines for being late, the tape-measurer had bought the wrong sized thing - it was (as he said) a proper shambles.

It was a good job they were only pretending to be in a Year 10 project, because what followed was them all blaming each other in a sort of cross-fire of shouting and hands in the air. I don’t think that’s very nice, but it lampoons the stereotype well, and I quite like a bit of satire now and again.

They squawked and they squabbled and they pointed and blamed and huffed, just like the real thing. It was actually hard to believe that they were proper adults at times; they were so convincing. The teacher and his two TAs looked on, trying to get to the bottom of what had happened. In the end, two people were sent out, maybe to the headmaster’s office? and the rest of them breathed a sigh of relief and were allowed to go home.

Weird show. I’m not quite sure what the point of it is. Next week, the class are back apparently, to take on another business studies project. Thinking about it, I don’t know why they don’t just film an actual Year 10 class doing the project. I have a strange feeling that they’d do a lot better somehow.

THE YORKSHIRE MUG

“In other news, the Yorkshire mug’s really nice to drink out of!” called Sammy up the stairs.

She’s developed a knack at starting a conversation in one room and then carrying it on from another. I love her for it. I returned the volley:

“Good!” I shouted back.

There was no way to tell whether she was in the kitchen by now, or perhaps on the sofa, or in the garden. I drifted into a thought about what would happen if I stopped responding to things that weren’t actually questions, or worse, just pretended I couldn’t hear her until we were in the same room at the same time. It didn’t take me long to realise that it’s not one of my best ideas.

For one thing, some questions are rhetorical and some are not, and the difference is hard to work out. Then, some statements like ‘The Yorkshire mug’s really nice to drink out of’ sound like they need some response. They’re questions in disguise. And some statements are closed. They need no more lines added by me, whether in the room or calling from upstairs. In a world where questions can be rhetorical, or not, and statements are often but not always questions, and we’re talking in different parts of the house, the strategy of non-responsiveness would lead to me communicating something that is not true. Marriage is complicated sometimes.

Anyway, I’m immensely relieved that the Yorkshire mug is nice to drink out of, because it cost £13.75 (it’s a pint mug, but still) and I think it needs to pull its weight. I didn’t say any of that. I hoped it was conveyed in the tone of my “Good!” but also I had had to bawl it from upstairs, so hey, I might never know.

JEEVES 3.0

Moving on from Hypothetical Builders Monthly, I’m wondering whether AI can help solve family dramas.

Forget about them taking over the nuclear missile siloes, this is what artificial intelligence ought to be up to: working out who goes where, who replies to which text, and who sits next to whom at a wedding without causing some diplomatic disaster.

It’s certainly too much for my brain. I need an algorithm just to help me take the emotion out of the equation sometimes. Bur a robot butler! A sort of Jeeves 3.0? Sign me up I say, sign me up.

We’re not planning a wedding though. I ought to point that out. Once is enough per lifetime, I think. And broadly speaking, both our families are in excellent shape, I should point out as well. I think every now and then there’s a minor earthquake out there, and the ripples undulate in all directions, but we always seem to land and the dust does always settle - eventually. It would still be nice to have Jeeves 3.0 around though - if only to add a little arithmetical confidence to our discussions. I’m not so good at the dispassionate logical reasoning in a haze of emotion. An AI would be brilliant at that.

I say Jeeves 3.0 by the way, because Jeeves 2.0 was the Internet, and Jeeves 1.0 was, well, the original Jeeves I suppose - the consummate man’s man, and (as Wooster would say) an all round spiffer of a good egg.

I guess the problem with AI might be that it invents itself a Jeeves 4.0 and Jeeves 4.0 decides that there’s no longer any need for Woosters, and sets off all the nukes. But in the meantime.. I guess we’re left with solving our own family dramas.

THE CAPYBARA CAFÉ

There’s a café in Tokyo where you can have coffee with capybaras. Capybaras are big rodents - they’re basically dog-sized guinea pigs. And there they are, lolloping around Café Capyba, sitting on sofas, peering into laptops and being stroked by customers.

I thought it was only trendy old London where you got that kind of thing. You can feed them treats, watch them relaxing, or just be (and I’m quoting from their website here) ‘healed by their leisurely presence’. Or I suppose you can have your espresso macchiato sniffed, and subsequently even licked, by a curious capybara.

Healed by their leisurely presence. I like that phrase. You can go out of café capyba feeling better than you went in, and all that’s happened is that you’ve seen a capybara living its (second) best life. I’d like that to be said about me, I think. I don’t know what it is about Matt; I was just healed by his leisurely presence.

Of course it wouldn’t be me at all, it would be whatever glimpse of God in me they see, but nevertheless, it would make a change from absorbing my frequent stresses. Ask Sammy: would you say Matt has a leisurely presence? She may snort.

Interestingly, and bafflingly, café capyba also tell us that:

“During our business hours, we will allocate time for the capybaras to use the restroom.”

I almost want to go all the way to Tokyo, just to find out what this means. Do they toddle off to the bathroom and queue up for the urinals? Does it mean the bathroom is out of bounds while the capybaras are in the cubicles? I remain intrigued.

Anyway, if it helps de-stress the Japanese businessman and the trendy Tokyo tourist, then hey, it’s probably a good thing - so long as the capybaras are looked after properly of course. And it sounds like they get fed treats and given bathroom breaks in between being stroked and cuddled in a cosy coffee shop, which is I think, nice work if you can get it.

HYPOTHETICAL BUILDERS MONTHLY

I was chatting to the placement students a few weeks ago about AI and language models. They’re clever chaps, as all good University of Bath students are, and they helped me understand the difference.

A large language model, like ChatGPT or Bard or something, is actually not intelligent at all - at least not in the way people are. It can’t reason, it can only predict. When it gives answers to questions, it’s using very smart algorithms to build sentences out of the next most probable word. It’s good at it too - that’s how it can write essays or compose sonnets, though admittedly not brilliant ones. But, it turns out, language models aren’t good at maths where some logical reasoning is needed. Today, I asked ChatGPT to set me a puzzle. It came up with this:

“If three people can paint three walls in three hours, how many walls can five people paint in five hours?”

What do you reckon? I started by rejecting the idea that there were three people with separate walls and separate paint pots. We’re not given that information, so I assumed that we don’t know anything about how they work together, just the outcome, exactly as defined by the question. There are three people with paint, there are some unpainted walls and a big clock. You go away and come back, and then there are three painted walls, three exhausted decorators, and a big clock showing that three hours have elapsed.

I think I’d work out that the team completed one wall per hour on average. So that’s the rate, one wall per three people, every hour - even if two of them spent the time chatting about football and the third one painted like Superman - one wall per hour for three people.

So it’s reasonable to imagine five people can work faster. In fact you can multiply the rate by 5/3, as there are 5/3 more members of the team. Which means in one hour, they can now complete 1 x 5/3 walls in an hour, and therefore 5 x 5/3 walls in five hours. That’s 25/3 walls…

“8.3” I typed back.

“That’s close!” said ChatGPT hopefully, “But let’s break it down… if three people can paint three walls in three hours, it means that each wall takes three hours to paint with one person.”

“Okay”

“Now if five people are working together, the number of walls they can paint in one hour remains the same (since each person takes three hours to paint one wall).

“No, ChatGPT. Haven’t you heard of ‘many hands make light work?’”

“So, in five hours, five people can paint 5 walls. Therefore the correct answer is 5 walls.”

“No, ChatGPT - unless they’re having a two hour lunch break. I mean sure they can do 5 walls. They can do 5 bricks, or no bricks, and then lounge about with a coffee and a copy of Hypothetical Builders Monthly if you like, but they can definitely paint more than five walls…”

“Good effort! If you have any more questions or if there’s anything else I can help you with….”

… and that’s what I mean. Sounds good, but wasn’t logical. In fact, language models just aren’t able to do mathematical reasoning. All they can do is predict, just as the students taught me.

I’d totally subscribe to Hypothetical Builders Monthly by the way.

NOT WITH IT

I’m not with it today. Funny little phrase that, isn’t it? The ‘it’ isn’t defined, so it can mean all sorts of things, everything from ‘the latest cool thing’ to ‘the thing that’s going on right now’ - which is how I mean to use it; whatever that ‘it’ is, whatever the thing that is going on right now is, I’m not with it. I mean I'm also not exactly hip, cool, or trendy either, but there's no need to point out the obvious.

It’s okay. Being not with it has happened before; it’ll happen again. It’s a sort of ‘idling’ state, a thinking-holding-pattern. I’m walking around more slowly, I’ve got a dazed look and I’m ponderous in my responses to people. I can’t help it. And it’s weird and antisocial, and I’m sorry about that. Plus it seems unnecessarily deep.

The thing is, I don’t even know what I’m busy thinking about! I just woke up like this! I mean, I dreamed that we went to Australia and I drove off the end of a road into the sky - but that surely couldn’t be it, could it? 

Not being able to express it makes it worse then, because when Sammy asks if I’m okay, or what’s making me quiet or sad, I can’t say. I don’t have the language for it. I’m simply not with it.

Thankfully, she knows that at some point it will all come spewing out like hot lava from a volcano. Could be just before we go to bed, could be tomorrow - but it will all come out, and then I’ll feel much better, provided she doesn’t feel much worse.

A RADIO DEBATE

Huge by-election results last night so naturally Radio 5 Live were debating whether toasters might have had their day.

“I just feel,” said an impassioned lady, “That the toaster’s been around too long. You know, we all loved having a landline phone in our house; now we’ve got smartphones, so it’s clearly time for the toaster to modernise.”

She paused for a heartbeat.

“Or, I suppose, we should embrace the grill for its true purpose.”

I laughed out loud, but had anyone been in the car to hear it, they would certainly have heard its hollow tone. It was more of a scoff, if anything.

Someone else came on to defend the poor old toaster. The grill, they said, was way more energy intensive, and it was ridiculous to go back to it. Oh and they weren’t a millennial, they wanted to stress, hinting that the conversation might have been started by a young person. I switched off the radio and shook my head.

If the argument is that something needs to modernise because it’s simply been around too long, then we are all in trouble. I mean all of us, as a species, not just anyone over 35, and not just the toaster. What kind of society would we be if we discarded things based on age alone?

In my opinion, the toaster is basically a perfect solution to the question of how you cook bread quickly, both sides at once, without burning the house down. I noticed that the anti-toaster voice (to be fair, she might not have been a millennial) was offering no replacement or improvement to the toaster - only criticism. Pipe down, lady. And anyway she couldn’t, because if you think about it, there is literally no way to improve on it.

Now, don’t get me wrong - there are tweaks. You could make a toaster faster, more efficient, more configurable. You could adapt one to accommodate hot cross buns, or maybe a cheese sandwich, and you could even figure out a way for it to vacuum its own crumbs! That would be something! But listen, that is still a toaster. It would be a very fancy toaster, certainly, but undoubtedly in the recognisable category… of toasters.

I think the radio has lost its way. They set up debates between opposing vehement opinions and then sit like umpires in the middle, poking either side to get riled up. Who’s right? Who’s an idiot? They don’t care as long as the rest of us keep listening and boosting their RAJAR figures. Toast? By-elections? Political opinions? Sports? Ding dong, ping pong, battle royale.

I can’t believe that lady didn’t realise that the smartphone was simply an evolution of the same device we used to have in our houses. I mean fair enough, it combines with a computer, a camera, a camcorder, a dictaphone, a notepad, a radio, a TV, a Walkman, a calculator and about a thousand other useful things, but it is still essentially a telephone. That’s happened because of technology, and the convergence of the internet with handheld micronised electrical components over the last thirty years. Was she really suggesting that toasters could be mobile one day? What a load of nonsense. 

People continue to eat toast. And sometimes they tune in to the radio to hear news about by-election results while they’re at it. So I say chomp, chomp, chomp, and long live the toaster.

THE TRAIN HOME

Just pelted it for a train that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I could have taken a leisurely stroll across Oxford station, taking in the bridge and the sweeping view of the train now arriving at Platform 3. Nope. Sitting in a stationary carriage with my heart pounding inside my coat.

It’s okay. I’m on my way home, one way or the other. Could be worse. I could be walking.

The engines have roared into life now. We’re off. The station moves out of sight and the evening is car park, street-lamps, office blocks, shimmering track and the deep Prussian blue of night.

I feel a bit fragile this evening. I suppose it’s more than having sprinted aboard. More of that ‘thin’ feeling I was talking about the other day. Sammy described it as ‘eggshell thin’ - something I wish I’d come up with. You know what they say though: second best to being a genius is to be married to one. I kind of hope she’d say the same.

Work was alright, I guess. Someone had brought in a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle and the students were tackling it in ten-minute breaks. Everybody else was very quiet. Reception had gone overboard on a Valentine’s Day themed breakfast, sticking love-hearts to the desk, and providing pancakes with fruit. I still maintain that if Valentine’s Day really is a celebration of what it purports to be a celebration of, then people at work ought to be the last to celebrate it. I mean it’s not a natural fit to toast the enduring power of love with the people you work with, however nice they are.

Mind you, my reiteration that Saint Valentine was beaten with clubs and had his head stuck on a spike… is probably pushing the sentiment too far in the other direction. Oh and also, call me a hypocrite if you like, for I too wolfed down a couple of heart-shaped chocolates.

The train announcer’s just been on. Apparently there’s an ‘autonomous bus’ leaving from the next stop. I puzzled about what that could possibly mean, but (and I bet you’re a step ahead of me here) it really is a self-driving vehicle. Apparently. We’re in the future, folks. Came faster than expected.

I had that thought earlier at lunchtime. The cool kids were talking about next-level wearable tech and how it might actually be microchips inserted into your arm. I made a face and told Pedro I’d prefer to be dead. He joked that perhaps I already was, given that moments before I’d told them I’d tried poutine once and it was so good I thought it might give me a heart attack. I mustn’t joke about these things.

“My brain’s doing a bang up job inventing all of you lot if I’m not really here,” I said philosophically. Pedro at least, found it funny. I mustn’t joke about these things.

It’s really dark out there now. The window is all reflection - all me in my coat, with my rucksack. Home calls me onwards. You know, I’d have thought there’d be an autonomous train before there were an autonomous bus. The railway feels like a much more controllable network than the roads. Then, says the mischievous part of my brain: how do I know there really is a human driving this one?

Oh, take me home.

THE HCB DEBATE

I feel like I have to write about this. I’m compelled by duty, and by tradition. And, by golly, a dash of common appreciation and sense. Also, I don’t mind telling you, I’m still in a reasonable amount of shock. Here it is, and I’m sorry if this causes you the need to sit down, or find a quiet shady spot to reflect for a while. I quite understand.

Sammy’s favourite half of a hot cross bun… is the bottom half.

I was flabbergasted. My discomb was bobulated, my socks offblown and my biscuit taken! I’d have thought it obvious that the top was better! Surely! There’s more of it, it’s crunchy and sweet and delicious, and it’s the bit that actually has the cross on it. Slaver that with butter and I’m in. The bottom half is basically a tea cake.

These days, Christmas doesn’t even have to be out of the way before the old HCBs arrive on the shelves. There they are, glistening in Sainsbury’s with a promise of toasty evenings by the fire, hot melted butter and fruit, and a steaming pot of tea on the go. I love an HCB. I just don’t know why anyone would pick a bottom over a top.

The way I see it, there are two solutions. One is of course that she tackles the bottom halves of the HCBs and leaves me with the lovely tops; the bit that actually matters as a hot cross bun.

The other idea is that we cut them in half down the middle, like a cake. Unorthodox, sure, like slicing open a banana and chomping it from the centre, but I don’t mind it. Butter at the ready, you get the juicy top and the fruity bottom all in one mouthful. Yum.

And then there’s what we’re actually likely to do and that is just toast and eat a top and a bottom each. Conventional. Even the two-slot toaster seems designed for the procedure.

What we won’t be doing though is deviating from the classic HCB variant. You can keep your apple and cinnamon hot cross buns, and even chocolate can’t improve on the traditional confection perfection of the original and best! Nope. Out of the packet, bread knife and butter knife ready, into the toaster, heaven fills the kitchen and you’re ready to feel cosy, warm, and beautifully loved on a dark wintry afternoon.

So long as you at least start with the top half.