Category: Miscellaneous

Snail mail in action

An amusing item on the BBC news today. Postal workers in Britain have complained of being forced to walk too fast -four miles an hour or 6.44 km/h – and that some have been fired for being too slow. The Royal Mail denies imposing a minimum walking speed but staff insist that the company’s new computer system forces them to rush through their rounds. One postman claimed his schedule did not take into account long driveways, bad weather or hostile dogs.I’ve blogged before about howwalking speedis a cultural barometer but this case underlines the folly of assuming that faster is always better.

What happens when postal workers are in a rush? Well, like everyone else, they make mistakes. Several times a week, we get mail delivered to our house in London that is addressed to the neighbours, or even to people several streets away. And lots of stuff sent to us never arrives. According to one estimate, the Royal Mail loses over a million letters and packages every month.

Something else gets lost when postal workers work race the clock – the banter on the doorstep, the friendly hello in the street, the watching out for the elderly neighbour, thehuman touch. The postman used to be part of the social glue of the community; now he’s just another service-provider hurrying to meet his targets. The idea of that the postman always rings twice now seems like a quaint memory from yesteryear. When our postman delivers a package, he rings only once, and even then you have to sprint to answer. Dilly dally for a few seconds and he’s already gone. Probably to deliver some of our mail to the neighbours…

Is golf too slow?

Golf is famously slow. Shooting a round on an 18-hole course can take three, four or more hours. Which is part of its charm. Fresh air, a bit of nature, some friendly banter and exercise a very relaxing way to while away an afternoon. And yet some people like nothing more than a bracing round of Speed Golf. I suppose the acceleration of golf is inevitable in a world with Speed yoga, Speed meditation and Speed Dating. Speed Golf is pretty simple: players carry only six clubs and sprint between shots, with the fastest rounds lasting about 45 minutes. I have to admit that this holds a certain appeal to me: I’ve given up golf because now that I have kids I don’t have time to be blowing off a whole afternoon on the course. Is squeezing a round into an hour the solution?

What I find most fascinating about Speed Golf is a comment from Christopher Smith, the sport’s world-record holder: “In Speed Golf you don’t have the option to think,” he says. “All you have time to do is size up the situation, look at the target and hit the shot. So golf becomes a reactive sport rather than a deliberative one. It’s more like tennis where you’re responding to the something coming at you.

This jibes with my own experience of golf – that dreadful, sinking moment when you think a shot to death. Once the second thoughts and self-doubt start to flow, you know you’re going to mess it up even before you swing. That is why I prefer faster sports. I love squash precisely because you have no time to mull over a shot.

Does that mean that golf is too slow? Or that we play it too slowly? While almost everything else in the world has accelerated over the last century, golf has been slowing down. The star players of yesteryear, like Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, played quickly. What changed was that golf became a TV spectator sport at exactly the same time that Jack Nicklaus was at his peak – and he was remarkably slow. The upshot: around the world, both amateurs and professionals began spending long, tortured minutes circling their ball, sizing up the path to the green, testing the wind, visualizing the perfect shot, regulating their breathing.

Whether this helps us to golf better is unclear. Smith finds that he often racks up a better score speed-golfing a course than when playing it more slowly. He recommends that we all experiment with acceleration try a few rounds with no practice swings, for instance, or take no more than 10 or 15 seconds to play a shot after pulling the club from your bag. Since I won’t be venturing onto the course any time soon, I’d be interested to hear if this acceleration works for any of you out there.

A final caveat, though: even the fastest golf player needs to make room for slowness. When Smith reaches the green, he always walks. The idea is to slow down his heart-rate so that he can putt smoothly, calmlyand accurately.

A slow prayer…

The other day I gave a talk in the chambers beneath St. Peter’s churchin Vienna, Austria. It was the first time the crypt had been used for a secular event in nearly a thousand years. With the dim lighting, ancient altarpieces and faint whiff of incense, and with the stone walls blocking out all mobile phone reception, it was the perfect setting for an evening devoted to Slow. My hosts were the Austrian chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization– high-flying businesspeople, in other words – but the monsignor in charge of the church was there, too. I felt a bit uneasy seeing him in the front row, but in the end he laughed along at the more risqué jokes. Afterwards, he came up to me with a confession. You know, as I was listening to you, I suddenly realized how easy it is to do things in the wrong way, he said. Lately I have been praying too fast.

A nice surprise…

Just heard that Under Pressure has been shortlisted for theWriters’ Trust Award for Non-Fiction,one of the biggest literary prizes in Canada. To me, the best part is that the shortlist is not in the Parenting or Education or any other niche category – it’s for all non-fiction published in 2008.

By the way, I will be back blogging again soon….

Snail Mail…

All around the world artists are grappling with our addiction to speed – hardly surprising given the intimate link between slowness and the act of creation. I know of at least oneSlow Art Manifesto. And every week seems to bring the launch of another exhibition exploring the tension between fast and slow. A few days ago it was the turn ofNo Time To Losein Aberdeen, Scotland. But today I want to draw your attention to a charmingly eccentric slow art project at Bournemouth University in the UK. It’s called Real Snail Mail and its aim is to make us rethink our impatient relationship with time and technology. It works like this: Three genuine snails have been placed in a tank and fitted with devices that send emails on behalf of visitors to awebsite. When a snail slithers past one of the transmitting nodes in the tank, it collects a message that has been downloaded from the site. It then slithers away at a very unhurried 0.03mph (0.05km/h) . When the snail passes within range of another node, the email is dispatched to the recipient. The whole process can take hours, days, weeks, or even longer. One snail, Austin, has emerged as the fastest delivery boy of the three: he has sent 10 messages with an average delivery time of 1.96 days. But his pal, Muriel, has so far failed to dispatch a single email. Anyway, I’m wondering if I can file my tax return this way.

Blast from the past

The first leg of my North American book tour for Under Pressure is over. My last interview here in San Francisco had a nice symmetry to it.Back in 1990, when I was in the final year of my undergraduate degree at Edinburgh University in Scotland, ABC’s Good Morning America came to town to do a few shows. I got taken on as a runner and ended up working with one of the presenters, Spencer Christian. We got along well and I’ve always remembered him fondly. So what a happy surprise to find Spencer waiting to interview me onView From the Bay.We even had a laugh about it on air. Sometimes TV can be a lot of fun…

Slow Film

All over the world, artists are making works inspired by the Slow revolution. Here is a wonderful 90-second film sent to me by someone in Montreal. It’s his entry for Biblioclip, a contest where participants submit short videos exploring the rebirth of the public library. The film is beautifully shot and crafted, dreamy yet sharp-eyed, hypnotic almost; and it features a haunting soundtrack from Radiohead. It’s narrated in French but I’m told it works for non-francophones too. Click HERE to watch it.

Slow homes

It was only a matter of time before someone applied the Slow label to housing. Calgary, the biggest city in my home province of Alberta, is booming at the moment. A forest of cranes looms over the sky-line and the construction industry can’t build homes fast enough to meet demand. But in all the hurry, and with everyone focussed on turning a quick profit, corners are being cut. Much of the new housing is of the one-size-fits-all variety found across North America, complete with large carbon footprint and low-grade materials. Many new neighbourhoods have very little character. But now the fightback has begun. A local architect named John Brown has launched a Slow Homes movement. He wants Calgarians to invest more time and thought in the way their homes are built and their neighbourhoods assembled. He wants to replace the high-turnover, homogenized model of house-building with something that is not only more sustainable and aesthetically pleasing but that also promotes stronger communities. Something slower, in other words. Sounds very sensible and timely to me. To find out more, clickHERE.

Early slow…

Our culture is obsessed with time – how to use it, how to gain it, how not to waste it. But the roots of that neurosis stretch back long before the invention of management consultants and the BlackBerry. Mankind has been fretting about time for centuries, even if the anxiety deepened with the invention of clocks. A reader has just sent me a glorious excerpt from Rabelais’ Gargantua, which was written in the 16th century. It contains wisdom and advice that ring true today:
“… And because in all other monasteries and nunneries all is composed, limited, and regulated by hours, it was decreed that in this new structure there should be neither clock nor dial, but that according to the opportunities and incident occasions, all their hours should be disposed of; for, said Gargantua, the greatest loss of time that I know, is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion.”

Everyone (almost) gets it

If you can gauge the strength of a cultural shift from the range of people taking part, then things are looking up for the Slow revolution. I get invited to speak to groups right across the spectrum, from schoolteachers, doctors and yoga coaches to business executives, IT specialists and architects. In fact, I’ve just agreed to speak at two events on February 7th in London. In the afternoon, I will give the second talk in a series of lectures and debates on slowness organized by the Royal College of Art. Then, after a very slow break, I’ll join an evening debate held by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council at the Hayward Gallery. The questions on the table are: “Are we moving fast enough? Does more speed always mean a society is making progress? Or is it time to put the brakes on our breakneck world?” Artists and engineers are seldom natural bedfellows but even they are finding common ground when it comes to challenging our fast forward culture.

By the way, the Hayward Gallery event is open to the public so maybe I’ll see some of you there…