Greenwich, meantime

(Right: the place where time begins)
Today I left my hotel in Earl's Court with an invitation to visit an old mate from Master Practitioner training, Rabiyah Patel. Rabi and her husband Nigel, her brother Farid, and her adorable baby son Nour, live in a lovely apartment in Greeenwich, overlooking the Thames, just west of the Cutty Sark, a 141-year-old clipper ship - the last-built merchant sailing vessel, the only remaining tea-clipper - that some arsehole tried and failed to burn three years ago.

My feet being the kind of ruined they've been since I had to give up my orthotics, I nearly contacted Rabi on any number of occasions in the past week to turn down the honor of her invitation, especially once I scoped out the distance between the nearest Docklands Light Rail station and her apartment. Doubling that distance for a round trip, and adding the trek through Bank station to the DLR tracks seemed like asking for trouble.

But one doesn't have adventures by avoiding trouble, even supposing it could be done. So after braving The Horror That Is The Breakfast Room, I walked the very few yards between my hotel and the Earl's Court tube, and headed east.

The world standard of maps and driving / transport / walking directions is the Google map, but when Google goes head-to-head with London, put your money on London. I had not yet arrived at this useful conclusion when, armed with my walking directions from you-know-who, I set out from Cutty Sark DLR station, already a bit late for the lunch Rabi's mum was making for me: homemade Dal and Basmati Rice.

Londinium is about 2000 years old, having been built by Caesar's lads, who laid out streets much as they are in Rome, along cartpaths, footpaths, and cowpaths. The way in which streets begin and end, rename themselves seemingly at random, and fade into nonexistence in the middle of council housing estates is either quaint and charming, or diabolically perverse, depending on how much your feet hurt. Outfoxed by London's streets, I wandered around Deptford for 45 minutes, aided by three sets of conflicting directions from locals, before asking a west African man near Deptford Green. He was new to the neighborhood, so he reached into the back seat of his car and pulled out his A-Z.

The "A-to-Zed" is the London standard of maps and directions. Every one of those deliberately perverse little bovine trails is represented somewhere in its pages. We found the street, and he offered to drive me there, as it was a miserably hot and humid day in Caesar's little riverside town. When we had no luck finding a way in to Rabiyah's street, we asked a passerby, who sent us 180 degrees from our destination. As I began noticing streets I'd walked down forty minutes before, I alerted my benefactor, who turned the car around, then noticed that the end of the street was right in front of us, nowhere near the location indicated by either the A-Z or Google. He dropped me off, and I walked around for another 20 minutes looking for the right building.

So in the end I got my Dal, and some water, and then Rabiyah and I walked to Greenwich Park, and up the hill to the Royal Observatory, where time on this planet begins and ends, then down through the park to the Old Royal Naval College--one of the architectural marvels of 17th-century Britain. Then we turned past the Cutty Sark (still undergoing restoration), and back to the DLR station.

My feet still haven't forgiven me, but the rest of me is glad I opted for a bit of adventure on my last day in town.

Alarums and Excursions

Right: Leicester Cathedral

Ask anyone who knows me—I hate alarm clocks. I’ll do almost anything to avoid having to wake up to any sort of buzzing or beeping. Sometimes “anything” includes getting to work late, but don’t tell my boss.

In England, though, one is much more likely to wake up to church bells. Every city has a cathedral, and every village, town and market town has at least one church. Sizeable towns and cities have sizeable numbers of them, and that means that you’d have to be pretty far off the beaten path not to hear church bells announcing every hour of the day, and specialized bells for canonical hours, to call the faithful to prayer. As I’m not faithful, I don’t know one of these tunes from another, except to say, “Oh, it’s that one. Nice.”

The executive flat where I’m staying on this trip to Leicester has about four times more space than my hotel room at the Travelodge, where I stayed week before last, about six times more than my London hotel room between trips, a kitchen, a leather couch, a huge television, and Leicester Cathedral. Well, the latter’s not actually in the flat, but just a little way outside where I can see and hear it, and by hearing, know the time.

Bells have a certain authority that mere clocks lack. Let’s face it: your kitchen clock can say one thing, your oven clock another, and your bedroom clock something unlike either. One can quibble with a clock, but bells are another matter; they leave no doubt what o’ the clock it is. They give the clock a voice. And they give a tired traveller a buzzless, beepless way to wake up in time to get to her seminar.

So today was the first day of Chris Hall’s three-day seminar on “The Paradoxical Nature of Change” at the lovely old Ramada Jarvis Hotel here in good old Leicester, wherein our heroine learned that problems are paradoxes, and “stuckness” is a result of not knowing how to resolve them via a sort of unified field. Golly. Wonder what I’ll learn on day two?

Life for the Win

As I’ve been restricting my running about to save what’s left of my feet, I’ve no exciting tourist photos to build a story around. But the other night on the BBC I encountered this story, which I hope you’ll enjoy.

In October of last year, Richard Rudd was riding his motorcycle past a filling station near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, when a car exiting the station struck him and threw him 20 feet. Rudd, 42 and the divorced father of two teenage daughters, could initially move his limbs, but a post-operative infection caused his organs to begin shutting down, and he went into a coma. When he emerged, he was completely paralyzed.

He was moved to a special neuro-intensive care unit at Addenbroke Hospital in Cambridge, where doctors determined that the damage to Richard’s lower brainstem was such that he would never recover movement in his body, or the ability to speak, or even to breathe on his own. His father and his children agreed that Richard himself would not want to live in that condition.

They related stories of Richard saying things like “If anything like that happens to me, I don’t want to go on.” Richard’s father said he felt that keeping his son alive would be “like playing God.” There was “no way in a million years” Richard would want to live in these circumstances. It seemed pretty clear that if Richard had thought to draw up a living will, it would have included a provision to withdraw care at this point.

The family’s consent to take Richard off the ventilator having been given, it was now up to the doctors in the unit to come to a decision. There seemed to be a general agreement that there was no point to keeping a man alive who wouldn’t want to be under these conditions. But Professor David Menon, a leading expert in treating brain injuries, and the creator of the neuro-intensive care unit, felt there was still some input missing. Richard’s.

He went to visit Richard, shortly before the time scheduled for shutting down the respirator and removing the tubes that fed oxygen to his brain. He asked Richard if he would move his eyes to the left. Richard did, then to the right on Menon’s second request. A BBC film crew was present, and caught the expression on Menon’s fact that seemed to say “This changes everything.” Richard performed those eye movements over and over at Menon’s request, but was unable to respond to a more complex suggestion that involved holding on to an instruction over time.

Menon determined that Richard was not capable of giving a meaningful answer to the question of whether he wanted to live…yet. His responsiveness hinted at higher brain function still intact. He decided to wait for the final life-or-death decision until Richard himself might have a chance to weigh in.

Menon put a speech therapist on the case, who interviewed the family for Richard’s likes and dislikes, and facts about his life. She came to his bedside every day with a list of 23 questions to which he could answer yes or no by moving his eyes to the left or right—questions that included tests of long- and short-term memory. Every day for three weeks, she asked the same questions and got the same answers. Sometimes after the questions, she'd have a conversation with him. Richard passed all tests easily. At no time did anyone ask him about withdrawing care. It wasn’t yet time for that question. Menon wanted to give Richard time to consider his life as it was now.

What Richard had been experiencing since waking from his coma is what doctors are now calling “Locked-in Syndrome.” The patient’s total paralysis and inability to speak are much the same as in vegetative states, but as demonstrated by the recent case in Belgium of a man who reported having been conscious during a 23-year vegetative state, locked-in patients are awake and aware, although unable to communicate. David Menon had demonstrated that the nerves controlling the muscles that moved his eyes—located higher up on the brainstem than the worst of the injury—were still intact and responsive to Richard’s will. He had given Richard Rudd a way to communicate with the outside world.

Once Professor Menon was convinced that Richard was capable of understanding his condition and prognosis, and of considering the question of his own future, he began to have that talk, and ask those questions. Three times on separate occasions, he asked Richard if, under the circumstances which he now understood, he wanted to live. Three times Richard answered yes.

The photo below was taken in March of this year, five months after Richard Rudd’s motorcycle accident. He had, by this time, learned to move his head an inch in either direction. He had also recovered the use of some of the muscles in his face, allowing him to smile.

Richard’s case has inflamed renewed debate over living wills, which are legally binding documents. A spokesman for a group opposing the use of living wills says: “This case shows the weakness of giving legal force to documents which, by their very nature, can never cover every possibility.” And no matter where you come down on the subject, you might agree that there’s a difference between an imagined future and a tangible present.

David Menon puts it this way.“There may sometimes be differences between what a patient declares when he is fit and healthy, and what he feels when he is the one in the hospital bed.” Richard Rudd is living proof of that.

Manhunt

As events of the trip so far would be of little interest to non-Jedis, I thought I'd tell you a true story, as I watched it unfold on TV. This was going on for most of my first week in England, and I thought you might find it interesting:

Last Friday, as I was preparing for this year’s trip to London and Leicester, Durham prison was releasing Raoul Thomas Moat from a prison term for assault. Though it would not come out for some days, Moat had already been arrested once for conspiracy to murder, and the prison authorities alerted the Northumbria police upon his release that he might pose a threat to his former girlfriend, Samantha Tobbard. The warning was filed and ignored.

Sam Tobbard had written Moat a couple of weeks earlier from Northumbria, just north of Durham, telling him that she was breaking up with him for another man, who was "better looking." In an effort to frighten him away from confronting her, she said later, she told him her new partner was a Northumbria police officer. He was actually a martial arts instructor. She had just sentenced Chris Brown to death.

A couple of hours into Saturday, UK time, Raoul Moat went to Sam’s house on Tyneside, near Newcastle, and started shooting. Brown tried to protect Sam, but Moat shot him three times in the head, and shot her in the stomach. Brown died of his wounds; Sam Tobbard lived to regret taunting a psychopath.

So far, although it was a sad case, it was not yet newsworthy in the long term. But 24 hours later, as I was boarding my plane for Heathrow, Raoul Moat rang 999 and announced he was going to kill another police officer. A few minutes after that, he walked up to a parked patrol car, and shot unarmed Northumbria Police Constable David Rathband in the face and upper body, possibly with a sawed-off shotgun. The BBC declined to air the photos of Rathband’s injuries.

If terms like “firearms officers” and “armed response teams” create a certain sensation of disconnect, you might be a Yank. Police in the U.K. “serve by consent” and do not, as a rule, go armed. So while Moat was in no danger from P.C. Rathband, the response to his shooting was as might be expected: Coppers with guns descended on the formerly sleepy village of Rothbury, north of Newcastle, where Moat had liked to camp, and where some intelligence they’d received led them to believe he’d be.

Meanwhile, Moat had gone to visit an old friend, and had given him a 49-page handwritten letter to deliver to the police, in which he promised to “keep killing police until I’m dead.” The police had already interviewed the friend, but were not keeping him under surveillance, so missed their chance to arrest Moat, much as they had missed their chance to protect Sam Tobbard and Chris Brown, and possibly arrest Raoul Moat for a lesser crime before he shot two people, then picked David Rathband as his next victim. Another letter from him was found later in the week in an abandoned tent near the River Coquet.

Suicide by Cop?

The situation seemed custom-made for “suicide by cop,” but for a few things: Moat took no hostages, provoked no armed police, and did not go to ground to make a last stand. He disappeared into the wooded rural area surrounding Rothbury, helped by friends in the area and occasional forays into empty houses. One family reported someone had broken into their house while they were away, took some food, and slept in a bed. Despite the ubiquitous police presence in Rothbury, it took police three hours to respond.

The search for Moat, and the bizarre sight of hundreds of armed men and women patrolling the village streets (at the height of the hunt, 10% of all Britain’s firearms officers were involved, along with aircraft, helicopters, and lots of fancy technology) was on the front page of every newspaper, and at the beginning of every news broadcast on every channel all that week. BBC1 even ran live coverage of a town hall meeting in the village hall, where police attempted to reassure townspeople they’d be safe, while also reminding them there was a dangerous criminal nearby, and they should remain indoors. Even the spy exchange between Russia and the U.S. was small potatoes next to the biggest police manhunt in Britain for 30 years. It was an inescapable dramatic narrative.

“You’re better off dead.”

Photographs of a three-year-old Raoul Moat reveal a lovely, round-faced, ginger-haired boy with sparkling blue eyes. These were frequently shown on TV and in newspapers alongside his mother’s advice on hearing of her son’s alleged crimes: “…you’re better off dead, son.” Just something to reflect on if you’ve ever wondered if psychopaths are born or made.

Newscasters and armchair investigators wondered why the massive search effort continued to narrow until it contained little more than the village of Rothbury, but when Moat was spotted on Friday evening, it was very near the center of town, lying on a riverbank near a bowling green, a few yards from the entrance to a storm drain—a favorite dog-walking area for villagers. The drain was connected to a tunnel that ran under Rothbury to a drain on the other side of the village. Raoul Moat had probably been under the police's feet on and off for days.

On spotting their target, police officers surrounded Moat, but not too closely—he was holding his sawed-off shotgun to his own neck, and they'd publicly promised a peaceful conclusion to this business. Negotiators were brought in, and the quiet standoff continued for seven hours, while officers stood by with guns and tasers, and rain came down in buckets. At the end of that time, Raoul Moat apparently heard some officers who had been creeping up behind him in the darkness, and shot himself. The manhunt was over, and so was a life that must have been a painful one to leave so much pain behind.

P.C. David Rathband will live, but has already undergone the first of many facial reconstructive surgeries, and may never regain the sight in one of his eyes. He says he holds no malice towards Raoul Moat, and that he wants to continue to be a police officer. Chief Constable Sue Sim has assured him he'll always have a future with the Northumbria Police.

You may find it somewhat disturbing—as I do—that some people in and around Moat’s native Newcastle consider him some sort of Robin Hood figure. They’ve been leaving candles, floral tributes, and notes outside his former home, expressing sympathy with him, his actions, his bravery. Perhaps they’re short of heroes up there.

The Churchfitters

When one is invited to a musical event at the Garboldisham Village Hall (and if one is me, which might be even less of a shared experience), one might be forgiven for wondering if one is in for a long, long, evening. I left Seattle last month with just such an invitation in hand, fresh from experiencing The. Worst. Live. Band. In. Seattle – possibly in all creation, so I may have been more concerned than I would have been otherwise.

Carolyn White, John Thurgood and I arrived in Garboldisham at a quarter to seven on a Saturday night in late January, and had no problem finding good seats towards the front of the hall. In fact there were so few people in evidence that we feared the acts would be playing to a sparse audience. We soon learned we had arrived an hour early due to misinformation in the local paper, and by a quarter to eight, every seat had been claimed, and the bar was doing a good business in Old Chimneys Ale, a local brew.

The opening band was a husband-and-wife duo at least the equal of T.W.L.B.I.S. They sang original but indifferently-composed-and-written songs, and while she could sing and he could play, she was so enamored of her own style and so in her own head during her performance that she did sing-along numbers flourished up with her own vocal meanderings that had the audience totally unsure where to go next. Good singers have rapport with the people they’re singing to; this woman, despite having a lovely voice, was not a good singer, in my opinion, at least as humble as the one in paragraph one. By the time they’d left the stage I had grown even more concerned with what I was going to hear for the next 90 minutes.

But history is not prophecy, and neither is the quality of the first act. The Churchfitters had me in the palms of their hands from the opening chords of the opening number. The spine of their music sounds like very solid and proficient Irish trad, but onto that they build every possible rock-blues-folk sound and more, including a bit of Breton flavor, and playing a staggering number of instruments, including hand-built bass viols and bass guitars created by Boris, the bass player, who might have come straight from an audition for an Addams Family revival.

The degree of sheer musicianship would have been impressive by itself, but the band is also practiced and tight and innovative and original and FUN. Though becoming better known all the time in the UK and France, they are not a worldwide phenomenon…yet.

The astounding live experience of The Churchfitters is not to be replicated in an audio-only medium, so have a butcher's at this. You can also listen to a wide variety of album tracks on their website, and if that prompts you to buy a CD and tell a friend, so much the better. On the way out the door I told Boris, “I’d go around the world to see you guys again.” I hope their fame grows and grows, so I won’t have to travel quite that far.

Return to Elysium

Above: Size really, really doesn't matter.

Some of you may remember my fond tales of the Elysee Hotel in Bayswater and its two-person lift (luggage not included). Believe me, you haven’t heard them all, but that’s as it should be. Suffice it to say those anchors are still in place, and I remain quite fond of it, even though they enlarged the lift.

Ye olde Elysee been somewhat modernized since my last visit, with wireless access in the public areas, and the addition of some tiny garret rooms on the fourth (fifth) floor. I booked one of these “compact singles,” expecting it to be a hole in the wall into which I could insert myself and my bags, and to my delight it turned out to be a charming and nicely-appointed little space with a nice view of the street, where a light snow is falling. There’s a TV on the wall at the foot of the bed, and they’ve even managed to find space for a desk. The bathroom is predictably tiny, but quite nice. After living 12 months in a 6x12x10, this roughly 8x7x7 space seems quite livable, at least for three days.

Last night I walked out and bought a supper to eat in my room. I passed places I’d eaten and shopped and done my laundry in, and in the process reminded myself how much I sometimes miss dear old London. That said, I’ll be happy to get back to my life and my people and my projects, none of which are here.

I’ll be off with Dev Agarwal and Terri Trimble tonight, to the streets around Waterloo Station, to find a good curry.

This is Your Brain in Leicester

Leicester used to be the place from which I caught a train to Hinckley. I spent so much time in Hinckley during 2008 that I developed a fondness not only for that place and its wide variety of cheap curries, but for the unprepossessing railway platforms of Leicester. One incident in particular stands out: I had just come on a Sunday night from enjoying a leisurely coach journey from Hinckley, necessitated by engineering works on the railway. The journey was so leisurely, in fact, that when I arrived on the platform I’d missed the last train to London.

I remember well the compassion of the Midland Mainline employee as she regarded me with head cocked in disbelief: “The LAST train to LONDON left TEN MINUTES AGO!” as if I alone in all the land had not memorized the timetable. I had to find a hotel room.

Now in those days I was living in London on £400 a month, something many people, including my friends at Her Majesty’s Customs and Immigration, thought was impossible. And I was living well, eating three meals and a TV time snack in a comfy room in a nice neighborhood. But even with what help my loved ones could give, the travel demands of my training were hard on the budget. Rent included utilities, so everything I had left after the landlady came around on Monday for 80% of my weekly budget was divided into a) food and b) everything else. Everything else often included a monthly rail journey to Hinckley for my Master Practitioner training.

So when I found myself facing taking the cost of a Leicester hotel room out of the bank, you might imagine my dismay. A lovely taxi driver drove me to a hotel quite near the rail station, where I negotiated a rate that made me feel a little better, and all was well, as usually happens, does it not?

So now Salad’s trainings are being held in Leicester, where I was for the past week. I had no internet connection worthy of the name, hence the lateness of this post. So I’ll say that Leicester was a great place to spend a week, that Carluccio’s and Mem’Saab offer a great menu for the price, and that the U.S. needs more pie shops. I ate most of my lunches and a couple of dinners from Urban Pie, and a fellow delegate, seeing me tuck in to my pie and mash, said “Oh, that’s so ENGLISH!” And so it was. And so was she; I was the only Yank in the room aside from our trainer.

Christina Hall has got to be one of the most amazing trainers in the world, and that sentiment was echoed by several delegates who had taken NLP trainer training with others at the top of the field, including from Bandler and Grinder themselves. The training was spectacular. When she’s through with me in July I ought to be able to teach any subject with a lot more skill and a lot more understanding of the learning process; when this is done I may actually have earned my “Jedi Master” title. I made new friends and continued old friendships, and made new understandings from previously-acquired knowledge, and ate lots of pies and mash. What else could one ask?

Sneaking in (and out)

Left: Look closely - I'm in row 27

It's Wedsneday afternoon, and I'm waiting for my flight to Heathrow to start boarding. I'll only be in Old Blighty for two weeks this time, and another two in the summer, so I hope no-one's expecting any mind-expanding travel commentary, but I'll do what I can.

The occasion for these next two trips is NLP Trainer training, which I'll be doing in Leicester with Christina Hall. Chris is a big name in NLP for a few reasons: one is that a lot of people think she's a fantastically good trainer (I had the privilege to spend three days learning from her a couple of years ago, and I agree); one is that she's been in this field since Richard Bandler was a slender young man with a full head of hair. Last but not least, she's famous for being the person RB sued back in 1990-ish over who owned "NLP." The court ruled nobody did, and that's about all I know about the whole matter. I respect and admire both parties in the dispute, and my interest pretty much ends there.

When I came back from my training with Chris in 2007, I rhapsodized to my friend Michael Perez, who said "Now you know how Richard used to teach, many years ago." Dr Bandler is famous these days for teaching in ways that impact the unconscious mind more than the waking one. The result is that you learn a lot, but aren't necessarily sure what you learned until you find yourself doing it. He has training partners who handle the more cognitive bits, but what he does is more indirect and...dare I say it...sneakier. He's a sneaky genius.

Some people, it must be said, find Dr Bandler scary. A friend once asked me if I did. I replied that I find being held at gunpoint by a psychotic for several hours scary (and after that, not a lot else is, when you think about it), and I think RB's a very eccentric genius with a tremendous amount of compassion. I'm glad I was able to learn from him, and I'm glad I'm going to be spending two weeks this year soaking in as much as I can from Chris Hall. She rocks.

Before and after training I'll be visiting with friends and re-igniting my love affair with London. When I land I'll go directly to Cambridge to visit Carolyn White and John Thurgood, who've been the inspiration for several of my earlier posts, and after a few days enjoying winter in East Anglia, I'll head for Leicester, then on to London after training. Meanwhile, as it occurs to me to write here, I will. I miss the old blog, and it's good to be back, even if only for a while.

Au revoir, Seattle! Look out, England!