My daughter is too clever to become a feminist

My daughter is too clever to become a feminist.  That’s a good sentence.  I like that sentence; it says something, but I suspect it does not say what many will have read in to it.  Modern feminism is bankrupt; morally bankrupt and empty of purpose.  Florence is clever and will see it for what it is, so will not claim to be amongst it.  You’re still not there are you?

I have noticed in many bio’s on social networks a common meme of young women who chirpily say they like this and that, and do a silly pose in their picture, and oh also, they are a feminist.  It’s such an afterthought that I suspect that most of these people are simply women who expect to be treated equally, and not sexualised arbitrarily.  All fair, but also, all normal these days.  Sexism does exist, but that is a personal thing, a personality thing, specific to an individual due to upbringing, and peers.  It is not what it used to be; systematic, or institutional, or a legal framework.  Expect in cleaning product adverts.  Have you ever seen a man using a hoover in any of those ads?  It’s always a woman smiling in her domesticity, who cleans wearing heels.  Personally, I like hoovering, and I have a method for doing my stairs which requires six separate passes, but then I’m an engineer and I think like that.

The current generation of women have rights, and privileges, freedoms and empowerments, that no duchess could have matched a century ago.  Attitudes and expectations of both men and women have changed permanently, at least in this country.  In its formative years feminism, like trade unionism, had very valid and real reasons to exist.  The industrial revolution brought jobs, and wealth, and suffering, and exploitation of a magnitude not seen before or since in Britain.  Thanks to those early days of unionism, I and the rest of the work force, enjoy a great many rights and securities.  These days, as a post industrial economy trying to compete globally, trade unions seem to act as an anchor more often than a way of driving wide spread changes for the future.  Feminism showed us how our society was bias towards the men in it, how our language and grammar, our laws, and our everyday social etiquette, reinforced that bias.  It showed the inequalities that existed, not just because of traditional attitudes, but because the law was structured to promote inequality.  But now it’s all changed, at least here, in the democratic secular west.  The vast majority of women on this planet have nothing in comparison.  Feminism has become women in very comfortable bubbles complaining that someone else might have a slightly more comfortable bubble.  It’s been reduced to picking over amendments to paragraphs of employment law.  The big fight here is over, and it’s not women who have won, it’s everybody.  A fairer society is simply superior to an unfair one.

It’s like animal rights.  Britain has the most ethically driven regulatory framework in the world.  We are the gold standard, but those campaigning for laboratory animals keep going after work done in the UK.  If they really cared they should be saying to the world, ‘why are your standard so low compared to these?  You should match or exceed them’.  That would help a numerically larger group of animals, permanently.  Of course that would require them to think.  Since I’m sure some of them must have been ill at some stage and used some sort of medicine, they are clearly either hypocrites or idiots.

I’m not comparing the rights of women with animals, nor likening feminists to antivivisectionists; it is a simile to highlight that a cause can become so committed to the struggle that it loses all sight of the larger context, until the struggle becomes meaningless.

Yes, it is true that our democratic system, and our boardrooms are unrepresentative of a country where 51% of the population is female, and it needs to be fixed.  But it can’t be done with quotas, or positive discrimination.  That either leaves men thinking a woman is present as a ‘token’, or leaves women thinking they are not there because of their merits.

No matter whether a man or a woman, all of us in Britain can live where we wish, work where we wish, marry whom we choose, including no one.  We can be educated as we choose, express whatever sexuality we choose, and hopefully soon have any type of permanent relationship celebrated as marriage.  Gender is no longer a factor in entitlement to these choices; money is the main factor now, but only here, in the secular democratic west.  For millions of women across the world, where they live is decided by their father, who practically owns them, until it’s time to marry them off, when their new owner takes over the decisions.  They’re not educated because why would you bother educating a woman, and they’re not allowed to work because that’s not what they are for.  Feminists here do nothing about this, because it’s a long way away, and they’re foreign and you can’t expect any more from them can you?  And that is moral bankruptcy.  If you believe it is right for a British woman to have these rights, you believe it is right for all woman to have them.

I’m the father of a daughter and I don’t expect anything to be withheld from her, I think that she will far exceed me.  She will do things I am incapable of, and have opportunities I never got a glimpse of.  I’m a white, middle class, western male; I’m a member of the least oppressed group in human history.  But I don’t expect her to know her place; I expect her to forge her place.  And my society will not be what stands in her way; that will be the limitations that she places on herself, as we all do.

I recently did my first gig as a STEM ambassador, explaining to a group of sixteen year olds why they might like a career in networking.  I think I did ok; they stayed awake, and asked some decent questions.  No one hacked in to my laptop; I had it running Wireshark, on the internet, with no firewall, so I had no exciting demonstration to finish on.  Oh well, you can’t have it all.

I spoke to two groups of twenty, and there was one girl in each.  There needs to be more, but this will come from a change in attitude.  You don’t need to fight for it, you need to encourage it.  And attitudes are changing.  I’ve been in engineering for nearly twenty years, and I’ve met more woman engineers and scientists in the last five than the previous fifteen.  By the time Florence hits university and needs to make choices about her direction, it will be more common still.

We should acknowledge and celebrate the changes that the battle for equality has made to our society, and build on the hard won rights we enjoy, and guard them jealously.  Feminism won because it was right, but fighting the good fight after victory is commonly acknowledged can even be counterproductive.

Instead of hounding a society that agrees with them, to be taken seriously feminism should be going after Catholicism and Islam, the two largest organised abusers of woman on the planet.  But that means banging the atheist drum, which it won’t do as it is afraid of been called racist; despite religion not been a race.  As others have pointed out, anything you can convert to, or from, is not a race.  For a movement that overturned centuries of accepted social norms and conventions, they seem unwilling to overturn the convention that religion is special, and deserves protection, rights, and privileges from society.  People have rights, whether man or woman, but ideas do not.  The societies that reduce the status of women most are the ones that elevate religion most.  The idea that this is acceptable must be challenged, and the faith that inspires the idea must be challenged too.   Religion will of course lash out at such a challenge, as reason is its biggest enemy.  It would be a hard fight, and I would support it, but there is no sign of it.

That is why Florence will not be a feminist, unless she invents a new type of feminism, which she is perfectly entitled to do, and that, in itself, is possibly the point.

You need to grow a brain

We’ve just had a half term and it was good.  The weather conspired to keep us indoors a fair bit, but we found things to do and as always with Florence, I had a good time, and so did she.  And we didn’t just sit around watching telly.  This is in part because I don’t let her; in fact I’m very restrictive on how much she gets to watch.  I have certain brain development issues, or I would have if I could make any damn sense out of the science.

Now, if you ignore Susan Greenfield, and every living being on the planet should, then it is not at all clear cut what effect, if any, exposure to all this technology has on young minds.  Unlike Greenfield, a number of proper scientists have published the results of studies about brain development in very young children and the impact of screen time.

The summary is that in early life a number of behavioural traits are established, and that expectations about stimulus are set.  If a toddler has lots of television and computer games, then this interaction sets a pattern of dependency, reinforced by the dopamine released by the colourful, fast moving, sound tracked, stimulation on the screen.  If a child can watch as much telly as they want, they will want more and more leading to damaged behaviour and poor concentration skills; the digital babysitter gives your child ADHD.

Only that doesn’t seem right, not completely.  It’s too simplistic, and even though I am not a behavioural neurologist, I know that is not how dopamine works in detail.  This relates to what I have said before about science been a framework of ideas that all interlock and interact.  Sometimes, I find that when research focuses on one aspect of one effect in one group, the results when considered in a wider context don’t ring true.  Dopamine has a range of functions in the brain, but its main one appears to be as a motivator, not as a reward in itself.  If you eat food, and it’s nice, then you release dopamine.  If you fall down the stairs and break your leg and it hurts, you release dopamine.  In the first instance it is to encourage you to eat, and not starve, in the second it is to be more careful in future.

Animals altered not to produce dopamine will starve to death in the presence of food, as they make no effort at all to obtain it.  We think of eating as the most basic and powerful of instincts, but instinct doesn’t exist; it’s just the name we give to chemical pathways that evolved so long ago everything has them.

Interestingly, if you receive a reward you expected then you get no dopamine.  Children like to watch the same thing over and over; they are famous for it.  All parents have a DVD they can cite as having seen a hundred times.  Once you have learnt all the songs in a Disney film and jump and sing to them all, you are not getting dopamine, you getting something else, they used to say serotonin, but that’s in doubt now too.

And indeed there are published studies which say screen time does not damage social skills and emotional development.  These studies still recommend restricting screen time, but only because they highlight it’s not the screen, it’s the lack of socialising that causes problems.  The screen is a symptom as much as the short attention or bad behaviour.

Florence is very social.  She loves to talk to anyone, and will play with any children she comes across give even a small chance.  In Tesco she likes to wait for me on the benches they have behind the checkouts.  If there are any other children around, she will head straight to the bench they are on and sit down next to them with her big grin in place.  I’ve seen a few surprised kids in there, but they all seem to get it in the end, and make a game of running between benches, then waiting so they can climb on together, before running back to the first one.

At the moment Florence totally loves Snow White and has seen it dozens of times.  I have to admit that sometimes she has watched the whole thing on her own, as the reality of single parenting makes it almost unavoidable.  But normally she is only allowed to watch half of it, and I will watch parts of it with her.  When Snow White is running through the scary wood, Flo likes to tell me ‘it’s ok daddy, the animals aren’t scary’.  We both shout ‘Boo’ at the queen every time she appears as the wicked old lady, and we cry ‘go Grumpy!’ when the dwarfs rush to her rescue.

Another favourite is dancing to the start of the Octonauts.  I love the Octonauts, and I wish I could be more like Captain Barnacles; I’m not awesome enough, but I’m trying.  During the half term I took her swimming.  I try and take her swimming every weekend, but I have to say it is more an ambition than a reality.  This time, when we got to the pool we found it closed for maintenance.  Presumable somebody, a genius of some sort, decided to close it during half term as no one could possible want to use it that week?  I was going to go home, but then I realised Captain Barnacles wouldn’t go home, so we drove forty minutes to a bigger better pool.

‘Florence, let’s do this!’

Over the last week her nap has gone all over the place.  It is meant to be at one o’clock, and my child-minder manages this with almost perfect regularity, but with me, one can sometime mean two, or three, or ten past four on the train back from the Natural History museum.  To her immense credit, she doesn’t seem to mind, and as she gets older she gets more and more adaptable to events around her.

The next big adaptation is dropping the nap, which I had been thinking about until recently.  But now I have decided to keep it going as long as is logistically possible, in to school even.  She clearly still needs it as she almost always goes off with no trouble at all in the afternoon, and if we have a day with lots of people or actions, then she’s even quicker to drop off.

Learning and sleeping are intimately linked.  There is significant evidence that sleep directly affects the performance of long term memory, which is in essence where we store our learning.  Evidence of changes to short term memory seems less conclusive, although if children are taught a new skill and then asked to repeat the action later, if they’ve had a nap meantime, their reliability consistently increases.

Florence is, in a very real sense, tying to grow a brain.  One that I hope will eventually blow the doors off my feeble efforts at cogent reasoning.  This is why I would like to understand more about what is potentially happening in that most fascinating and impenetrable of organs.

Until recently I would have said, along with most others, that our best way in would be observing the brain working directly through fMRI.  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging can detect areas of the brain that are consuming more oxygen in near real time.  By devising psychological tests for volunteers to perform while inside the MRI machine, it is possible to see which areas of the brain are associated with different cognitive activates.  As ever when it comes to the brain, it’s not that simple.  fMRI only gives you useful information if you can remove the noise from the signal you are looking for.  The brain is a noisy place with lots of totally unrelated activity going on during your experiment.  Removing the noise is essentially a statistical process, and it seems to have gone wrong.

Returning to the interconnectedness of different parts of science, as the techniques and possibilities in one area grow they run in to other areas, and whole new fields of research spring up.  Quantum biology is a good example, where biologists have found problems only quantum physics can solve, and physicists have found new ways to perform their experiments biologically, rather than cryogenically.  Well fMRI has started attracting researchers from other areas who bring their own mathematical tools with them.  Unfortunately rather than expanding what fMRI can do, it has mainly served to highlight errors the subject may have been making all along.  This culminated with a rather public demonstration where established neurological statistic tools where used to show activity in the brain of a fish.  The fish having been bought from the fish counter of a supermarket a few hours earlier.  Some estimates suggest that as much as ninety percent of existing data may be corrupted.

For me there is a clear historical parallel.  I have seen fMRI used to make some very bold claims about very specific but complex mental processes.  A few years ago this was common in genetics.  We were subject to regular headlines about the gene for crime or the gene for autism.  Now we know enough about the scale of complexity of interaction of the proteins and enzymes our genes code for, to know that such black and white statements are nonsense.  The claims made by fMRI recently are like someone claiming to have found the gene for speaking French or for parallel parking.

As ever with science, if existing hypotheses are shown not to work they will be replaced with superior hypotheses.  Until then I will have to keep reading the literature and applying common sense.  Make sure that Florence’s experiences and situations are as varied and interesting as I can reliably manage.  And treat studies saying how I’m harming my child with a healthy dose of scepticism.

Climate models and deniers

After some introspective posts, it is time for Science!  I was going to write this one after the IPCC published the full version of the fifth report, so that my shotgun would be heavily loaded before I blast the sceptics.  But then I don’t need to wait as it’s clear from the preliminary release that their tactic is to be either to make things up, or pick on semantic discrepancies between paragraphs.  They are not going to be dismissing entire technical appendices with well supported and referenced research, which is what would be required to have any credibility.

Here, I am not a member of the general public, I have an excellent, broad, and continuous scientific education, and I am not thrown by their diversionary tactics.  There is a lot of talk about models too.  ‘The models didn’t show this.’  ‘The models did show that.’  All I ever hear is, ‘I don’t know anything about models’.

Gran Turismo 5, the game, on the PS3, is a model.  It models cars on racetracks, and it does it rather well.  It includes many relevant factors to a car at speed on tarmac.  Sprung mass, unsprung mass, drag coefficient, torque, grip, gradients, and many others I don’t know about because I am not an automotive engineer.  Within the model, things seem to be very realistic; if you lap an Aston Martin Vantage it will beat a Focus ST.  However, if you go to a real track featured in the game and drive both those cars, then it will not match the model.  The lap times would be different, and the gap between the cars different, and other variables would be off to.  Corner entry speeds, brake points, the gear you take a particular section in.  The game may be similar, but it would not be identical to reality.  The Aston would still win though.

One of the main features of the Gran Turismo series is the customisation of the cars.  These modifications produce realistic changes to the performance of the car, at least within the context of the game.  Changing the damper rate or rebound rate, adding boost pressure or reducing weight, will make the car faster, but possibly harder to drive.  A big spoiler on the back will break up the air flow and reduce drag, which increases top speed, but it also shifts the centre of gravity back, so the front wheels have less weight on them and will under steer more.  When braking, remembering that a car is a weight on springs, the centre of gravity will shift forward, but it now has further to go than before you modified the car, which may make it a bit awkward under braking.  Do this to the real car and the discrepancy between the game and reality grows, as the model only takes some of this in to account, while nature takes everything in to account in real time, at the atomic level.

This is one of the roles of the model in science, to allow you to play around and experiment with factors that you cannot in real life.  Even if we had access to a vast range of exotic cars and a track, I doubt any of us would pound round and round, tweaking the car till we had a huge crash, then revising our modifications, and carrying on again.

But in the model it is quick and simple to try out different scenarios.  Change the inputs and see how it affects the output; see what small changes produce dramatic differences.  It allows the principles that underlie the model to be explored.  Although all of the maths in the model is of human invention, the interaction of multiple layers of maths is beyond the ability of any human to instinctively understand; you need a computer to do it.  The maths may produce results that those who created the maths could never have expected.

The Mars lander, Curiosity, had the most accurate delivery system ever devised, with a landing area only 4 miles by 12 miles.  It eventually landed roughly one mile from the nominal bulls eye in that area.  After a flight of three hundred and fifty two million miles, that is a truly astonishing feat.  And it is all down to Newton, and very clever people.  The mission team used his equations of motion and gravity to plot the course that the craft should fly on its way to Gale crater.  An equation is a model; you put in variables measured from the real world, and it will give you a prediction that applies in the real world.  In the case of Newton these predictions are extremely accurate, if you stay well below the speed of light.  But the model is totally wrong.  Newton assumes there is a force of gravity; that satellites orbit due to an attractive force.  They don’t; they orbit because they are travelling in a straight line on a curved space time.  Einstein showed us that both mass and energy distort space time.  The mass of the Earth bends space time such that if you get above the atmosphere and travel at the right speed you never stop going round.  And you don’t have to keep turning left; you go in a straight line and the universe turns left for you.

That is the other use for models in science.  It lets you predict a system using a simpler method, while ignoring that actual mechanism found in the universe, so you can have more confidence in your predictions.  You could run a Mars mission using general relativity, and it would give a slightly more accurate prediction, but the error inherent in your flight hardware would eliminate that advantage.  Better to use the easier mathematics; less likely to make mistakes and easier to double check.  It cost two and a half billion dollars.  It’s important to get the sums right.

There is a third option, of a model which is accurate and uses the actual mechanism that the universe utilises, but we can never really tell we are in that situation.  We can only say the mechanism hasn’t been proved wrong yet.  See my post on the scientific method.

Climate models are in the Gran Turismo mould of things.  They simulate, or emulate parts of the factors involved in Earth’s climate.  Some are simpler than others, but none are detailed enough to be expected to make stunningly accurate predictions.  A scan through the TOP500, the list of fastest supercomputers, will show that systems used, and sometimes dedicated, to climate modelling, are regularly in the top twenty.  There are systems that model as many climate factors as possible, over the whole globe, but at a low resolution.  Other systems concentrate on one aspect of climate at higher resolutions.  But been able to do everything at high resolution for the whole world is a technology we do not have, and it may be more than a decade away; and we’re not a decade from the exaflop.  Sometime in the mid to late 2020’s someone will build a quarter billion dollar machine that can simultaneously handle all the different factors of climate that we have a mathematical representation for at a one kilometre or better resolution.  Probably.

Till then we model the parts separately, or globally, with fewer factors included.  Our approximation is more approximate.  But that isn’t a waste of time and effort.  Remember a model is there to explore the underlying principle in the thing been modelled; to try and find factors that are minor and factors that are powerful.  If you take ten models and run one hundred different scenarios through them, you get one thousand different answers.  None of which may be the correct answer; the truly accurate answer.  That doesn’t matter, because what it gives you is a data set, and analysing that will give you insight.

Anyone who has ever crashed in Gran Turismo will know that the model completely ignores damage.  Now the problem with that is that it introduces deep flaws in to the model and allows it to predict outcomes that will never ever happen.  If you are approaching a chicane, then instead of applying the brakes like the other cars, it is possible to plough in to the field ahead of you and use them as your brakes.  Your car slows much quicker than it would under braking, and you can go from eighth to third in half a second.  I know enough about cars to understand this is nonsense.  Climatologists understand that their models will give them nonsense outputs sometimes.  Or at least outputs that may teach them something about their model, but don’t directly apply to the Earth itself.

 

The deception employed by the sceptic is to exaggerate the capacity of the model, and then use the models inability to meet this imagined standard, to decry them.  The general public presume that if a sceptic credits a model with great predictive power, then it must have such, as they wouldn’t pay is such a compliment otherwise.  Having setup this falsehood, they then use the falsehood as evidence of the model being wrong.  But it’s false, so it’s not evidence.  The public have difficulty spotting this, and the public is where we draw our elected officials from, which adds to the problem.

All the different models and variables and runs, give us data.  Data gives us trends and indications.  The indication is warming.

It doesn’t matter if the models did or did not predict ‘the pause’.  The models can emulate ‘the pause’, so we can justifiably say we understand it.  As an engineer it’s clear to me that if you add energy to a system, but it doesn’t warm up, but it does have a heat sink, that there is no mystery where the heat has gone.  The climate has a heat sink, we call it ocean.  The atmosphere has not carried on warming, but the water has, especially the deep water.  We have directly measured this; it is not a supposition.

The biggest disappointment, in terms of those who argue against climate change, is that the physics is crushingly simple; near infrared, far infrared, harmonic frequencies, and reflectivity.  I have, in the past explained it to people with no real scientific education, people who think the greenhouse effect is something that might happen in the future.  The greenhouse effect has been present for four billion years and is the single most important contributor to Earth having life, as it keeps our water wet, as opposed to solid.  Normally I can make them understand that the Earth absorbs energy from the sun, and radiates energy too.  Some of the energy is stored here for a while, but there is a constant turnover.  The amount stored is determined by the thermal equilibrium of our climate.

The thermal equilibrium of a system is set by the amount and ratio of ingredients in the system.  Humans are changing some of these ingredients.  This will change the equilibrium.  We strongly believe it will change it in the positive direction; hotter.  We know that if we don’t change it, then things will be alright, but if we do change it we don’t know, because of the short comings of our models, that it will still be alright.  I fail to see the rational argument in knowingly changing the thermal equilibrium of our planet, whist simultaneously saying that we needn’t worry, and things will be fine, when you cannot possibly know that.

If not changing it is the best option, then changing it as little as possible seems then next best option.  Now the deniers like to say there are natural systems at play here that have very large effects, so let us leave the evidence aside for a moment and say that is true.  We cannot do anything about the natural systems, they must run their course, be we can affect the human contribution because we are the humans.  Having accepted that a small change is better than a large change, we should minimise our climate altering emissions wherever possible.

Anyway, oxidising carbon is a rubbish way to power a civilisation.  The rest of the universe runs off binding energy and so should we, whether it is the binding energy in our own reactors, or the reactor we orbit.

I should say here that I am very positive about the future.  The doom mongers are as wrong as the deniers.  Humans will adapt.  We are a very adaptable species; our technology makes us more so.  We will still be here in a few centuries, but the world will be different.  Some will not be pleased with the changes.  Parts of the Earth that are currently heavily populated may become uninhabited.  If a billion people choose to migrate then it will cause trouble, although there is nothing you can do to stop them, except moan afterwards.  Those of us who understood the physics all along will say ‘we told you so’.

Some describe this current era of Earth’s history as the Anthropocene, a recognition that human activity is dominating even geological activity in shaping habitat.  We are a powerful specie, and if we acknowledge that we are altering the climate to our detriment, we are only one step away from acknowledging we can alter it to our benefit.  Obviously, as I love science, and I love technology, for me geoengineering is an easy sell.  In fact I have a feeling that an industrial civilization of eleven billion cannot exist without it.  It would be an extension of the power, data, transport, and agriculture that such a civilisation would require.

The Earth has always had a very stable climate, compared to the rest of the solar system.  This is because it has a thermostat which runs via geological and biological processes, but it takes tens of millennium to respond to any changes.  We are getting near the point where we need to take over that role ourselves, and thanks to our models, we are getting near the point that we could.

Charlotte Lamb 1975 to 2012

I've finally mounted and hung the pictures of Charlotte that I wanted, so I can take all the others down.  The majority of the pictures I had were of my wedding, and that seems strange now, because I’m not married.  I’m a single man, able to get out there and seek love from whoever I choose.  Not that I choose to.  I’m really not hoping for a girlfriend as it wouldn't fit; I’m very funny about sharing Florence’s upbringing right now.  But I can’t deny that it is lonely sometimes.  I miss the physical presence of a partner, and hugs; I definitely miss those.  Florence is on the receiving end the hug gap right now.  Obviously she loves it; she’s two, but at fourteen, possible not so much?

I now have a small number of carefully chosen images, in one place, so the rest of the house is free for me to put whatever I want, where ever I want.  It sounds fairly obvious that I have carte blanche to layout my own home as I wish, but actually making decisions, and the type of decisions I've made form a major part of this last year.  It is one year to the day since Charlotte died and it’s time to review the last twelve months.

First off, Florence and I are doing very well.  I know this because people keep telling me what a good job I’m doing.  I wonder how many single mums get told they are doing a good job?  Few, I expect.  Not because they aren’t, but because no one tells them.  I have noticed an implicit assumption in society that a man cannot raise a child on his own.  Apparently, only women have an instinct for this; well that’s fine.  I have intelligence; intelligence trumps instinct every time.  I know I’m doing a good job.  I can see it.  I spend a lot of time trying to be an honest judge about our life together.  It’s probably why I can write so candidly.

My life is at the very least smoothly functional.  I am happy, my house is tidy, I’m not in debt, there are a number of kind and helpful people around me, and I have a little girl who is happy and lively and vivacious, and for a two year old, well behaved.  Certainly her eating, and sleeping, and playing present me with no great parenting workload.  The last year with her has been highly enjoyable, teaching her, learning from her, and watching this being form before me.  I don’t remember what I did before Florence, or why I did it.

Florence learns very quickly.  She might not manage something at first, but she sticks at it till she’s got it.  In the last year she has mastered scooters, tractors, peddling, and her balance bike.  She dresses herself, takes herself to the toilet, and puts DVDs away when she takes them out the PlayStation, even if it’s not in the right case.  Her talking is constant, and her sentences ever more sophisticated.  The other night she even washed her own hair while I was fetching her bedtime milk.  That went fine until she rubbed her eyes with soapy hands.  I didn't know she could reach the shampoo.  She is in the 87^th percentile of height for her age mind.  Wonder where she gets it from?

A lot of this smoothly functional life stems from the decisions that this last year has presented and how I've gone about making them.  It possibly all starts before the funeral.  I had a talk with a very dear friend, themselves experienced with close loss, and they were surprised, and perhaps a little relieved, that I had already accepted that I had permission to live.

I was with Charlotte for fifteen years, but I will be without her for fifty.  To try and dwell would be unworkable, and harmful, certainly to Florence.  I am, as my friends, and the friction it has induced, would testify, relentlessly practical.  A situation that is impractical and destructive would simply not be permitted.  I live my life, not because I have to, but because I want to.

I was helped in this by us being a very close couple, that Charlotte was very clever, and we knew she was dying.  Combined, this allowed us to talk, and plan, about the what-ifs and the what-nexts.  Charlotte chose to go to the Countess of Brecknock hospice as she was very clear that the place where she lived, and the place where she died must be separate.  Florence and I required our home to remain just that.  It was a noble act and typical of her.  Incidentally, in the weeks after the funeral, her friends raised £1,300 for the hospice.  Well done everyone.

I am still under official instruction from Charlotte, not to mope.  I’m not a moper anyway.  I like to get on with things.  I enjoy getting on with things.  I become frustrated if I can’t get on with things.  I have frustrated myself quite a lot recently.

When you are on your own permission has to come from yourself.  There is no one to ratify or counter your decisions.  The only perspective you have is your own, and that allows for some fantastically bad choices.  I’ve not made any, or at least can’t see any with hindsight, because my strategy to making these decisions has been to do it very slowly.  Because I lack another person’s context, the only option I have is to wait until my context has changed and then see if the decision still stands.

I can’t decide if Florence is so well suited to this single parent upbringing because that is her personality type, or because she has been shaped by losing her mum so young.  But whichever it is she is so so, good, at it.  She has been a pillar to me for the last year, and I don’t think it has been a burden to carry her father at all.  And now she is no longer a baby, she is a companion, and I am utterly grateful for it.  She has spent quite a lot of the last year on her own, as I can’t be there in the room supervising or playing with her full time; I have so many other things to do to.  But she just gets on with it.  If she wants me she will come and find me and talk to me or have a cuddle, and then go back to doing what she was doing.  Florence is a very independent little lady, and while I’m very glad of that and will encourage that self-reliance throughout her life, I do wonder if she’s had to find this skill a bit quickly because it’s just the two of us?

But we’re a team now.  Just us against the world; and we have it outnumbered.

Around our home I've done a lot of throwing out, and a bit of decorating.  My bedroom was first; very important to get my identity stamped there as quickly as possible.  Now I’m planning in other areas of the house.  The lounge will be next.  The disco lights and lasers are already in; next the massive sofa to form the core of a social hub.  It’ll just have me and Flo in it, but it’ll look like a social hub.  That may be an example of a man lacking female supervision?  Would Charlotte have allowed it, perhaps not, but my sofas are quite old and looking worn, and replacing them will do no actual harm.  There are worse ideas.

There is a very strong desire to sell my house, leave, and not tell anyone where I've gone; the full ‘clean slate’.  The feeling comes and goes, but it returns regularly, when I’m angry with people, or disappointed with people, or none of those things.  I’m not going to do it; the emotional side of me has never been in charge, I’m too rational.  It’s a bad plan; the nuclear option is always a bad plan, that’s why it’s called ‘the nuclear option’.  I have spent a good amount of time this last year trying to understand my emotional decisions, but act on my logical decisions.

Despite outward appearances, it hasn't all gone to plan.  Florence has started play school, and it is going very well, she loves it.  On the way home she will talk about when she can go again.  I take her swimming on Saturdays and she can’t wait.  As soon as she is changed and the armbands are on, she’s off and in the water.  With her legs going for it, she propels herself from one end to the other, climbs out, on her own, and jumps back in.  There’s no fear in that little girl, or big girl as she describes herself, but then she is ‘nearly out of two’.

My troubles lie in the minutia; the trivial side issues we all have to deal with; opening my post to see if there are bills in it, remembering to return calls, that manner of thing.  My evenings have become incredibly unaccomplished; I do nothing.  I don’t mean I watch telly, then I would be entertained and learn something as I’m the guy who watches BBC4.  No, I do nothing.  There has been a lot of going to bed at half nine in the last year.

For example, while I am not a sports fan, if I have a sport, then it is formula one, but as an engineer that is unlikely to be much of a shock.  I like the technology, and the innovation required to make your car better than the others, while been constrained by the same technical regulations.  But I also like the interplay of the teams, and how they are run and what effects these different methods have on the side stories in each season.  Ferrari, for instance has a lead and a second driver.  If they have an aerodynamic modification that they think will make the car better, then the second driver gets it; if they know it makes the car better, then the lead driver gets it.  The main job of the second driver is to not get above their station; to be publicly hit over the head by the lead driver every weekend.  It must be a crap job, in an awesomely great way?  McLaren don’t play favourites; both drivers are equal.  They have their own technical team and each is trying to beat the other every time they strap in.  Charlotte was a big fan too, and we would watch the races together and talk about the politics between in-between.  We both liked and focused on different areas, but over fifteen years you get very familiar with how each other’s perspective runs.

I haven’t watched a single race, or read a single article since she died.  If I hear of a controversy at the grand prix on the news, I make no effort to find out what it was.  It has just turned off.

I haven’t watched Doctor Who in a year either; although I have now decided to catch up in time for the fiftieth anniversary.  Which may be tricky as it’s not far off.

This is symptomatic of the psychology of scarcity.  Humans, at least in our modern world, require three main things; health, wealth, and social contact.  If you feel you are very poor in one of those areas then the brain can become distracted and focus on the missing element, which makes it very hard to move forward and solve the problem.  When Florence is around or friends are about, or I’m at work, then I’m fine and get things done; it’s when I’m alone that the inertia kicks in.

Fortunately I’m a clever guy, so once I know something is happening and why it is happening, I can compensate for it.  The decision to overcome has been made, and as a result I feel that I have improved my situation and manage to put that extra bit of push in to keep myself going.

I’m going to the gym again.  I’m determined to keep the blog going.  I’m outlining a novel.  I used to write ultra-violent shorts, but I've decided to go for science fiction, as it’s science and it lets me write about things that don’t quite, but could well, exist.

A particular plus is that I've managed to stop been angry with people for no actual reason.  Some of the things that have set me off in the last twelve months I refuse to admit to.  It didn't suit me, and I didn't understand it, which really didn't suit me.  And it’s not penny psychological nonsense like, your wife is alive and mine is not.  That’s very silly reason to be angry, and you’d have to be angry at an awful lot of people with that reasoning; comfortably over a billion.  Now, when something that did anger me happens then I relax, and accept that it’s happened, and that other human beings have other lives.

I am helped in this, as in so many things, by Florence.  She is not an angry person.  She is a very outgoing little girl.  Only the other day we were out in the street on our scooters, when she noticed one of our neighbours, whom she know a little, was working on his car.  So she sets off down the road, pulls up alongside him and launches in to a conversation about something or other; all smiles and curly blond locks.  I like gregarious Florence and I can’t have angry David spoil it, so he had to go before she started copying him.

On balance I feel I have coped well.  It would have been our wedding anniversary recently, and if I’m honest I had to be reminded what day it was.  That weekend I went to Mottisfont, where we were married, and sat on her bench, which I had arranged for the National Trust to provide.  I sat quietly with Florence, before our friends arrived for a picnic and gave her a big hug, and wiped a tear.  It’s a nice setting and I like visiting it, then we climbed trees and had fun.  I’m not moping you see.  There is a future to take a firm hold on.

My STEM ambassadoring is moving along, and I may have a gig, well two actually.  And I’m a Bloodhound ambassador too, so I can now officially bang on about how cool a one thousand mile per hour car is, and that Britain does make things; awesome things that other countries can’t make.

And I’m cooking.  I’m trying to make things I've not made before, while also improving some old favourites.  My bolognaise is fabulous, I know this, and I've tried to make gravy like Charlotte.  The first time I did, it was brilliant, every time since then, I've decided to go without gravy.  Having been left with a cupboard full of every type of sugar and flour that there is, I have started baking too.  Not made my own bread yet, but a step I feel will be coming soon.  It’s very gratifying, and someone has to teach Florence how to do it; it’s what mums do.

There is so much to teach her.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s in to year two we go.  Don’t worry; you’ll all get dinner invites.