ia play

I read yesterday in London Lite that £14 million from the National Lottery has been awarded to two projects with the aim of making London a happier place.

Today in London Lite the letters page is full of outrage:

“why don’t they just make a big bonfire out of the notes? Same effect”

“what a stupid idea. Why do they think that wasting more and more money on things like this is a good idea. Londoners are miserable - no amount of cash will make them smile!”

“what a way to waste money. Throwing cash at this initiative is about as worthwhile as flushing it down the toilet. People aren’t suddenly going to be happy because someone shows them how to plant vegetables, it’s much deeper than that.”

I’m guessing that the last correspondent never saw Making Slough Happy or read any of psychologist Dr Richard Stevens’ research. One of the ten steps to happiness listed in the programme was “plant something and nurture it”.

The two schemes are Well London and Active 8 London, run by the Peabody Trust, a charitable housing association.

Well London projects include:

• schemes to make it easier to buy quality, cheap, local food
• cook and eat clubs to increase rates of healthy eating
• training local people with direct experience of mental ill health to deliver mental health awareness training
• using the arts and cultural activity to improve environments and provide accessible physical activities
• increasing physical activity levels through increasing the range of sports and active recreation activities available to the community

Active 8 London plans to set up:

• food days to broaden people’s understanding of nutrition
• gardening schemes to show high-rise residents how to grow their own vegetables
• a week of events and workshops that will address common mental health problems
• the Fifty-Five Alive Club that will lead social activities for older people
• a project that will provide exercise sessions and advice in women only environments
• Pukka Tukka, which is a project to encourage single men off takeaways and processed foods and show them how to make healthy, fresh meals on a budget

So you can see why the correspondents are so disgruntled. Projects to encourage us to eat better and exercise more, what a terrible waste of money. After all £14 million does seem like a lot of money.

Amongst the information to support Well London’s bid is the fact that “ten per cent of people over the age of 65 are malnourished and account for approximately half of the £7.3 billion per year that malnutrition costs the UK.” Which isn’t the sort of information that London Lite has room for.

£7.3 billion? Now, that is a lot of money.

Yesterday’s Desert Island Discs featured Oliver Postgate, creator of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss. I listened in as my husband & I have an assortment of Postgate paraphernalia that we’ve carried with us from childhood, and some that we’ve picked up since. Postgate seems to make those programmes that become part of growing up.

He said he didn’t really think about how his creations would be received by children and instead focused on great stories to appeal to any age. He suggested that children would be patronised by programmes made just for kids.

The part of the interview that distracted me from lunch was when Kirsty Young mentioned that Postgate considered himself to be “a verb not a noun”. His sense of his own identity seemed intrinsically linked to continuously doing things, whatever those things were.

I’ve been reading Happiness - Lessons from a new science which began like an economist’s version of Authentic Happiness. So far so familiar. But then Layard moved onto the role of TV in our current state of happiness. He takes at face value the research suggesting TV makes us more violent and more miserable and didn’t really acknowledge that there was any academic debate about this at all (see Moving Experiences and Everything Bad is Good For You for alternative academic and populist perspectives).

I might have been more interested in the arguments than TV makes us unhappy if Layard hadn’t so unquestionably accepted the doctrine that TV makes us violent. Watching rubbish TV certainly stops me doing stuff. Some of that stuff is the dull routine of washing up, tidying, and mucking out the animals but it also stops me writing, reading, and making. It wastes my time. Or rather it is how I waste my time.

But watching brilliant TV is no less virtuous than watching a good film, play or musical. The problem seems to be with watching TV as a routine activity rather than a carefully chosen programme and so the arguments seem warped.

In the hierarchy of sinful media it seems that video games are the worst, then television, and then cinema. Novels and theatre aren’t on the scale. No-one tutted when I was taken to the National by my English teacher to see the gore-fest that is Macbeth. And that was real 3-d people conducting very believable acts of violence a few feet away.

At a historical re-creation in my teens, I remember chatting to a mother of two young children. She had got rid of the TV when her children were born and had been pleased that the toddlers were growing up peaceful and happy. Recently she said, her husband had taken the children to a medieval re-enactment that had featured jousting. She sighed as her youngest son galloped past us, twig masquerading as joust, endeavouring to impale any convenient passer-by. The next time I saw them, the TV had been re-instated.

I’m going to persevere with Happiness, hopefully the economic sections will include more sophisticated positions than the Daily Mail-esque ‘TV as moral crisis’.

These came in the post yesterday from British Gas. They were part of a ‘Green Survival Pack’ which contained two energy saving light bulbs, the top trumps, some ‘helpful’ stickers to remind you to switch stuff off and some other bumph.

I like the attention to detail. These aren’t just a set of cards about the topics but genuine Top Trumps so you could conceivably have a game. I can just imagine the despair when you’ve got ‘install solar panels’ and you have to pray your opponent choses CO₂ Savings because you’ll lose on practically every other comparison. Loft insulation looks like a pretty safe bet though.

I’ve already learnt that a draught excluder will save more energy than unplugging my mobile charger or not overfilling the kettle. More support for my theory that you can teach most things with Top Trumps.

You can get a pack at www.toptrumpstrust.com

Whilst we’re on the subject of assumptions, the title of this posting was another observation by another colleague about information architects. It was meant as a statement of fact and not something that would upset anyone, let alone the IAs.

Now this ‘fact’ successfully ignores my impractical desire for my notebook to be A3 sized to allow for much bigger diagrams but that’s besides the point.

We can be, I admit, narrow in our communication methods. Most people never want to be shown a spreadsheet. But I think in this instance my colleague is confusing ‘being visual’ with ‘using colour’.

Then again ‘you lot are a bit grey’ isn’t really an improvement.

A colleague expressed surprise today at the name of this blog since “I don’t think of you as playful… you’re very sensible”. It would seem that the arrival on my desk of a pink boggly eyed flamingo from Las Vegas and various FatDUX ducks can’t dispel years of building a reputation for pragmatism. And apparently keeping pet chickens in Tottenham is a rubbish way to be “a little bit crazy” as the little egg producers are probably the most practical pet you can get.

But I’m interested in the creation of this new antonym pair, playful-sensible. I mean, I understand what they are getting at. We have a tendency to associate play with time wasting, task avoidance, and just generally not getting the job done. It is what children do instead of doing jobs, isn’t it?

At this point I defer to John Thorn, sports historian and author of Total Baseball, someone a little outside my usual reading matter:

“Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.”

Which makes it a very sensible thing to do, surely?