Tom Dymond | Updates

The False Path: Thoughts on recent controversies surrounding The Salt Path

Tom Dymond — Fri, 8 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

By the time I launched Hooked on the Horizon in 2021, Raynor Winn’s bestselling book The Salt Path was into its fourth year of print, had sold millions of copies, and been translated into some 20 languages. It was enjoying an almost unfathomable level of success by any book’s standards, let alone one that operates in the nature memoir genre, the genre which I had just joined.

As such, when a reader left a five-star review for Hooked on the Horizon pronouncing it was “probably the next Salt Path”, I couldn’t have asked for a better one-liner to help me access an audience that Winn had tapped into. Grateful and touched, I immediately pasted the quote into the book description on my product pages, and I am sure the small connection to that multimillion-selling success helped to nudge a few more sales over the line.

Anyone who has braved the news over the past month won’t be surprised to hear that I have now removed this once-glowing quote from my product pages (although, I should say, I remain very grateful to the sentiments of that kindly reviewer). Since The Observer published its investigative article and cast doubt over the integrity of Winn’s books, the idea of being “probably the next Salt Path” now suggests something entirely different.

Full disclosure, I have not read The Salt Path, nor the two books that followed in its wake, nor have I watched the recently released film. But I understand that, for the benefit of those in the same boat, the book begins with Winn and her partner, Moth, losing their home as a result of what she has called “a bad investment”. Having put money into a friend’s business, its failure led to the calling in of this large sum, ultimately resulting in a legal dispute of which Winn writes: “We lost. Lost the case. Lost the house.” And so The Salt Path finds its feet with a tragic case of poetic irony, whereby the protagonist’s act of good will is leveraged cruelly against them.

Winn and Moth’s circumstances worsen further when Moth is diagnosed with Corticobasal Syndrome (CBS), a rare neurological disorder for which there is no cure or treatment. The pair then embark on a journey along the South West Coast Path and – as a nature memoir is prone to do – The Salt Path tracks the way in which the world offers them salvation from homelessness and sickness alike. Crucially, The Salt Path is published and billed as “an honest and life-affirming true story”.

But that appears not to be the case.

The Observer’s investigation is ongoing, but at this stage there are two allegations made against Raynor Winn (whose real name is, in fact, Sally Walker), one for each of The Salt Path’s cornerstones. Firstly, that their financial misfortunes were caused not by being wronged, but by doing wrong. It has emerged that the real reason they lost their house was not at all because of “a bad investment”, but because Winn embezzled £64,000 from an employer over the course of several years. On being caught, Winn managed to get a loan from a wealthy family member and strike a deal with her (now previous) employer, in which she repaid them the full amount in return for the employer not pressing charges and signing a non-disclosure agreement. But when her family member’s business failed a few months later, the loan that rescued them was called in by a third party. It is in these circumstances, entirely different to those depicted in The Salt Path, that their house was repossessed.

The second allegation relates to Moth’s neurological disorder. CBS belongs in the same family as Parkinson’s disease, and is a devastating condition in which sufferers can endure tremors, loss of control of body and speech, and eventually develop dementia. A typical diagnosis gives six to eight years to live. Winn’s three books to date suggest Moth has now lived with CBS for 18 years and remains capable of walking hundreds of miles with a backpack and a tent, enduring not only the vicissitudes of the British climate and landscape but also that of his condition. More presciently, all three of Winn’s books heavily imply that at the end of their long walks Moth’s symptoms have improved and he is much better for their journeys. The template, it would seem, is: Moth ill, Moth walk, Moth better.

It is true that Winn notes early in The Salt Path that Moth’s experience of CBS seems atypical: it progresses slowly and appears to cause him less discomfort than it might in others. In light of the investigation by The Observer, Winn has made Moth’s medical records public on her website – no doubt an anguishing decision to have to make about a deeply personal and sensitive matter – and they do show that Moth has indeed been diagnosed with CBS. Confusingly, however, these medical records date from after their first walk took place, and as such the records raise as many questions as they answer. Did Moth have CBS during their walk, or were his symptoms backfilled into the narrative? Is it physically possible for a CBS sufferer to walk 630-miles, wild-camping and carrying their lives on their backs? And, most crucially for her many readers who either have CBS themselves, or friends and family with the condition, did the long walks truly help Moth’s symptoms?

Winn states that she is not offering medical advice. But in writing, as in all forms of creative expression, the explicit is seldom as important as the implicit. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining,” wrote Russian novelist Anton Chekhov, “show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Winn has held a piece of broken glass up to sufferers of untreatable neurodegenerative conditions and given them a glint of hope that nature and walking can heal. But this does not seem to be the light of the moon, so much as that of a carefully positioned artificial light which has served to sell millions of copies of books, secured lucrative publishing deals, and seen Gillian Anderson wheeled out to play Winn on the big screen.

Of course, nobody expects memoirs to be the exact and exhaustive accounts of the stories they are retelling. One doesn’t have to ponder it for too long to realise that nobody would actually want that at all. In Art of Travel, Alain de Botton makes this point in typically amusing fashion by describing in painful detail what a travel writer might mean by the summarising sentence “we journeyed through the afternoon.” The reality of said afternoon, de Botton posits, would involve a thousand details the narrator could have shared with us, from the digesting of lunch, to unexplained pangs of anxiety, to the flight pattern of a circling fly. When we read accounts of personal experience, we trust the author to draw out the moments that are poignant to the narrative arc that they are building for us. We not only permit the omission of certain elements of their experience, we wholeheartedly demand it. By the same tenet, we demand that the commission of untrue or fictitious experience is absent. The Observer puts this another way:

“Our reporting has found sins of omission and commission in The Salt Path. Leaving stuff out is run-of-the-mill for a memoir, but the sin of commission – inventing important passages of the book – is not.”

I once wrote a blog called ‘In Defence of Truth: The Elephant in the Room’, in which I sought to demonstrate how the postmodern movement has ushered in a post-truth world. We are now so far into this epistemological wasteland that we don’t even question whether we are being lied to: we expect it. From politicians to service providers to influencers, the rot, we are sure, is real. Not even scientists or doctors are safe. Perhaps I’m biased, perhaps overly romantic, but the memoirist seemed one of the last defenders of a world where truth was fundamental. What does it say of the state of truth if the most successful nature memoirist of the last decade, the author of “an honest and life-affirming true story” as the publisher would have it, has distorted the foundations of their story to the point of almost being unrecognisable?

Not all readers will feel aggrieved or cheated by recent revelations, and for many the content of the book is not as important as the hope that it instils. After all, if the implicit trumps the explicit, that can cut both ways. Regardless of the reasons, Winn and Moth did endure and overcome hardship as they walked the winding and windswept footpaths of the coastline, and their story will remain one of inspiration for many of the millions who followed their journey. Indeed, none of us read a book in the same way, and the readers who take no issue with memoirists taking artistic license to its very limits are welcome to that opinion.

I suspect there are at least two groups for whom Winn has crossed a line. Firstly, and most importantly, sufferers of CBS and similar conditions, along with their families and friends. Many readers with the condition have taken from her books that they should have walked more, and those who have lost loved ones feel guilty that they didn’t encourage them to do so too. This guilt resides even when it would have been physically impossible for the person to have taken these walks given the limitations of the very condition they are battling. Of course, I am no spokesperson for this group and I know that not all sufferers of CBS and similar disorders feel this way – for some The Salt Path remains a beacon of hope – but it would appear they are in the minority.

As for the second aggrieved group, I count myself among their ranks: memoirists. For those of us who have gone to painstaking lengths to stay true to our stories, it feels a profound injustice to discover that a fellow writer has built great success on foundations of mistruths. The nature of books like Winn’s The Salt Path, or my Hooked on the Horizon, is that they detail experiences that take place in remote parts of the world where it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for anybody to verify specific events. (Having said that, The Observer is now attempting to investigate the extent to which Winn and Moth actually took the journeys the books depict, and there seems to be questions surrounding this too.) Indeed, the temptation to not only embellish scenes in a memoir, but also to invent details to enhance them such that they become more dramatic, emotive, funny or spectacular is strong. After all, who will know? Or, perhaps more poignantly, who will care?

Judging by the overwhelming reaction to the news of Winn’s fabrications, it would appear that many people still do care. It would appear that, at least when it comes to the memoir, the truth still counts for something.

This is welcome news for those of us who believe that to write a memoir is to enter into a moral contract with a reader. I hope to write many more nature memoirs in the years ahead, and I would like to pledge to you now my commitment to the truth in all of my accounts, both past and future. It is a sad sign of the times that such a pledge need be made at all, but in a post-truth world we’re going to need to start saying the quiet part out loud.

Thanks for reading, and have a beautiful day.

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From the Thames to the Sea: A Journey by Kayak

Tom Dymond — Sat, 7 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Of the many fascinating tidbits found on the information boards along the Wey & Arun Canal, the one that caught my attention above all others was that the last recorded boat to travel from the Thames to the English Channel did so in 1872. These information boards tell the dramatic story of the rise, fall, and future hope for this waterway, bringing a wonderful element of history to the West Sussex and Surrey countrysides. It was in reading this particular tidbit in May 2025 that I realised my foolhardy endeavour to tackle London’s lost route to the sea would be a first for 153 years*.

Such recklessness, I should say, is part of a larger picture of recklessness. On Saturday 10th May I departed a sunshine-soaked Bristol Harbour on my 17 foot sea kayak, setting off to reach the Black Sea via the inland waterways of Britain and Europe. In the planning stages of this journey, I was transfixed by the curiously incomplete line that drew from north to south from the River Wey to the River Arun. If I could traverse those broken lines on the map then I could reach England’s south coast, and from there I could easily take the ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. The idea was thrilling to me. But could it be done?

I reached out to Gordon Powell, one of the many wonderful volunteers of the Wey & Arun Canal Trust, for help. Such a feat had been attempted a few years before by a small group, he told me, but it seemed that a combination of time constraints and failing kayak trolleys had thwarted their efforts. But they’d shown me that it could be done, and that was all I needed to settle that this would be my route. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.

Fast forward to late May and I was jubilant to have spent ten inconceivably beautiful and sunny days kayaking from Bristol to Weybridge. From the River Avon, to the Avon & Kennet Canal, to the River Kennet, and finally to the River Thames, I had spotted otters, caught flashes of kingfishers, and gone from complete disinterest in bird life to an avid enthusiast. Coots, grebes, herons, cormorants, moorhens – I now knew them all, and that was just by day. By night, the sounds of owls, cuckoos and woodpeckers penetrated the thin walls of my tent, and if I stayed out long enough I was bound to see the silhouette of one of them arcing across the night sky. Terns held a special place in my heart for saving me from at least some of the mayflies that seemed magnetised to my green kayak along the waters, swooping ahead of me in flocks to pluck them out of the river and air alike. But it was the skimming-stone flight paths of the wagtails that has ultimately won me over – I have been overjoyed to see them flit across my bow to bob elegantly on low branches of overhanging trees. Indeed, I had been totally immersed in the waterways, although – up to that point – not literally immersed in them. That was still to come.

Indeed, it was a bad omen that my last act on the River Wey, just as I arrived to the beginnings of what was once the canal at Shalford, was to fall in it. I had been obeying the ‘Private Waters’ sign strung across the narrowing river, and thereby attempting to climb up a rather steep and muddy bank. I ended up scrambling up it from waist-high water, soaked from hip to toe, and muddied considerably. As such, when I got onto the towpath and had hauled my heavy, gear-loaded kayak onto its trolley and marched off on my long portage, I did so to the sound of squelching.

The towpath, while it lasted, made for a very agreeable portage. It was when the Wey-South Path would diverge from it and head off down narrow, scarcely-used footpaths, that I would begin to understand the scale of the challenge I’d set myself. It was not made easier by the fact that the path is, at times, poorly marked, and by my lack of foresight to bring a map. Following footpaths, I was reminded, is somewhat different to following rivers and canals.

Nevertheless I forged on, staying as true to the original Wey & Arun Canal route as the path would allow. I caught glimpses of water, but rarely enough to make launching the kayak worthwhile, for I would only have to clamber out again shortly thereafter. The dry spell we had enjoyed since I left Bristol was seeming a little less fortunate now, for the canal was surely even drier than usual.

I also caught glimpses of the work that is going on along the canal, and was starting to appreciate the monumental effort that is required of the Trust. From the engineering work, to the ever present maintenance requirements, not to mention the fundraising, communications, and no doubt mountain of paperwork, I found myself in awe of everything that is being attempted here. It reminded me of how I once tried to set up a film club at a local library, which one would hope to be a fairly straightforward endeavour. But after months of delays from the council and various other bodies that had to be brought into the process, I simply gave up. I shudder at the thought of how difficult it must be to restore miles and miles of canal, and yet there were very obvious signs of progress being made.

On my second day I reached Loxwood and met some volunteers at the centre. I learned of other various challenges, such as the fact that the canal route goes through what is now many different people’s private land. Standing there in my still wet shoes, having done my level best to avoid ‘Private Waters’ the day before, this struck me as a particularly unfortunate challenge to have to deal with. But what struck me more than anything was volunteer Phil’s admission that the canal most likely wouldn’t be restored in his lifetime. It was the not the first time I had heard somebody say as much, and I find it terrifically admirable that so many volunteers must be plugging away at this project despite such a prospect.

I left the centre feeling inspired, and was also extremely pleased that a reliable stretch of water spanned out ahead of me which I could kayak along. I was further gladdened by the fact that I had purchased a guidebook for the Wey-South Path at the centre, and very thankful that they had gifted me an old OS Map that would guide me along the footpaths down to the River Arun. Both were invaluable during my remaining journey (and I don’t deny would have been rather useful at the start of it too.)

Paddling along the section of canal away from the centre, I couldn’t help but notice that that this waterway was – although extremely pretty – not as full of the wildlife that had dominated the rivers and canals I had come along before. But – and this is the thing – one day it will be just like them. One day this will again be a corridor along which wildlife can flourish, and boaters can come to enjoy it for all that it will be. And they will have the innumerable volunteers who have selflessly dedicated many, many years to thank for it, despite the fact that many will never be able to enjoy it themselves. In that moment, more so than any other on this ridiculous few days of dragging my kayak along the canal, I saw fully what the Trust has envisioned, and it is a beautiful picture.

The most ridiculous was still to come, however. After a welcome stopover and rest at the Bat & Ball pub in Newpound, I began my last stretch of portage. A couple of hours in, with an aching back and blistering hands, I came upon a field with cows in. It didn’t occur to me that this might be a problem, although probably it should have done. When I entered the field they were a couple of hundred yards away. By the time I was halfway through it, they were upon me.

Whether they thought my kayak, rumbling and clattering along behind me, was food or foe I do not know. What I do know is that when a herd of cows starts running at me, I will not hang around. I dropped my precious cargo and sprinted for the cover of a tree astride the canal side. From this relative safety, I watched aghast as the cows approached my kayak at first tentatively – which by now must have looked very much like a trough full of lunch – and then go quite mad over it.

Thankfully all of the hatches were sealed shut, but the cockpit was open and inside lingered an array of interesting items. With dismay I watched a cow lift my bag of valuables up in its mouth and begin to chomp away. Visions of arriving to France the following week and having to explain in broken French that a cow had eaten my passport flashed through my mind. Another had picked up my kindly donated OS Map, and was happily chewing on that. The rest of the herd were getting rowdy and randy at the scene: one cow mounted another in excitement, while another used its head to tip my kayak upside down. I was sure it would have snapped my paddle protruding from the cockpit, and I shouted my displeasure at them. They roundly ignored me.

In the end, all I could do was wait with my hands on my head in disbelief. The cows had, mercifully for all concerned, spat the items out and gradually they were growing disinterested. The trough that had promised so much was proving to be quite the disappointment. Once they had wandered back across the field, I took my chance. Walking briskly to the kayak I surveyed the damage – there was none! – and swiftly launched into the canal quicker than one could say “ moo”. The cows by this point were back, but I was already paddling away. At the end of the field the water hit a blocked tunnel, but fortunately I was able to exit on the other side of the fence, and reprimand the onlooking livestock from the safety of the other side.

Challenges still remained, although I’m glad to say they were not of a bovine nature. Bridleways became footpaths, and with them stiles and kissing gates became my new nemeses. The kayak, with all my camping gear, clothes, supplies and personal belongings inside, was getting on for 50kg. And at 5 metres long, I couldn’t exactly pop it on my back to hop the fence. Instead I had to empty the contents at each obstacle, and lift everything over individually. As such, when a section of the River Arun came into view, one can understand why I was tempted into trying to paddle along it.

This was, it transpired, a terrible alternative. Just as I rounded the first bend of the narrow River Arun, a fallen tree blocked my way. Undeterred, I squeezed my way through its branches, and gave myself a pat on the back. This was the way to do it, I told myself. But another fallen tree awaited me around the next bend, and another after that. Suffice it to say that when I yanked my kayak back up the riverbank half an hour later, my only rewards were having travelled the length of a single field and acquiring the appearance of a walking bird’s nest. I brushed the twigs, leaves and insects from me, and trudged on along the Wey-South path.

The following morning, on the fourth day of traversing the Wey & Arun Canal, I came upon Pallingham Double Locks, marking the navigable beginning of the River Arun. Well, I say I came upon them, but in fact I could not find them. As best I could tell, they were on private land, as was much of the River Arun after that. It seemed I had two choices. I could either approach one of the houses and plead with them to grant me access to the river, or to carry on portaging until the footpath met the river again further downstream. The latter, you will understand, was not at all an enticing option. As it was then, and no doubt as many a Trust volunteer has had to do over the years, I knocked on the door to somebody’s home and explained my mission to them. It was not a mission, I emphasised, that could be completed without a bit of help – or, at the very least, consent – from them. I got lucky, and the elderly couple and their nurse whose house I had walked up to were very obliging. They not only let me access the River Arun from their beautiful garden, but filled up my water packs for me too.

When I was coming along the waterways from Bristol I saw many a beautiful garden, and I have no doubt that the garden was all the more beautiful for having a full flowing river or canal at the bottom of it. I firmly believe the properties and the people who own the land along the Wey & Arun Canal’s route have so much to benefit from by endorsing the restoration of the Wey & Arun Canal, as does the local economy, culture, and – most importantly of all in my book- the wildlife.

I finished my journey to the sea in Littlehampton the following morning. It was a relief to be back on the water, paddling amongst the birds and river banks once again. It was not, however, without incident itself: that the River Arun has a tidal range of 5 metres was news to me, as was the fact that it is rather problematic to escape its steep, reed-ridden banks at low tide. Nonetheless, as I hope will be the case as I head across to Europe for the summer, I managed to find a way.

It has been nothing if not interesting, being the first boat to navigate the Wey & Arun Canal for 153 years. It is my earnest hope that it will not be another century and a half before a boat can do it again, but rather a whole lot sooner, and in the way that it should be done. That is, on water from start to finish. Water that is filled with fish, a surface that is buzzing with insects, and surrounded by an air that is absolutely alive with the sounds of birds. Hundreds and hundreds of birds.

* 20/08/2026: I have just received an email from a Mr John Vening relieving me of this imagined record. John kindly wrote to me about the passage he and the late Dr. John Hancock made in the late 1950s in a PBK 18 canoe that they built themselves. Bravo to both Johns.

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Down Under: A Book Review

Tom Dymond — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When the world’s getting you down, you can’t go far wrong in picking up a Bill Bryson book. I did as much recently, and whilst Down Under swept my mind firmly away from war in Europe to the relative peace of Australia, I was dismayed to find it brought about quite a different problem. That is: knowing what we know now about the climate in 2022, is it still possible to read and enjoy travel books bursting with the ignorance that helped get the climate into this mess? Are we reaching a tipping moment in our morality, in which we view the environmentally harmful actions of the generations before with reprehension?

Down Under was only published in 2000, and yet a mere 22 years on – even between all the wit and charm of the world’s most loved travel writer – it is hard not to jar on all the flippant references to absurdly long cross-country drives and international flights. Bryson’s travels in Australia were intermittent: he would jet in in between other commitments before, say, flying to the United States to pick up his walking gear – as if it were just around the corner – and then board a plane to Damascus for a charity walk. A few more flights later and he would find himself back in a hire car, bumbling across a continent he describes in his typically hilarious and lucid style. A case in point:

“Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it’s okay now because he’s off the life support machine and they’ve discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.”

Bryson is obsessed with the lethality and omnipresence of Australia’s exotic wildlife. But what a travel writer in the year 2000 is unable to fully grasp is quite how lethal his own species is. Reading of all Bryson’s air miles in 2000 might have inspired wanderlust, envy and admiration in a reader. Reading him in 2022 it is – at best – a little uncomfortable, knowing what we know now about the impending climate catastrophe. If somebody were to read him in the year 2100, well, all those air miles may well fly off the page and slap them in the face. Sadly, as wonderful and funny as this book is, it smacks of a naïve time.

Because 2000 was naïve, wasn’t it? The combination of the numbers 9 and 11 had no meaning, the global economy was still years away from the crash of the century, pandemics were a thing of science fiction, environmental concerns remained fringe issues at most, and war in Europe was as likely as an alien invasion. 2000 was a time when even Bryson himself could waltz off to Damascus (the capital of war torn Syria) for that charity walk, blissfully unaware of the fires and horrors that lay ahead for that city. Indeed, it was a time so naïve that Francis Fukuyama had declared the ‘end of history’, assuming western liberal democracy was somehow immune to all the problems that had befallen empires of the past.

One cannot blame Bill for any of this, of course. His literary gift is a gift to his readers, and I have passed many a happy hour reading his books. Down Under is up there with the best, and follows his typical approach to travel. Guided by whim and instinct, and forever failing to grasp the distance between Australian towns, Bryson whisks us across the nation with him. Armed with a determination to visit an array of destinations, from the inane and the bizarre to the fun and the fashionable, he drops in to whatever town or city seems vaguely auspicious according to the map. He then throws a bag into a hotel room before turning on his heel to head out into the heat of the afternoon. After a few dry observations about an invariably dry town he seeks sanctuary in a cool bar with a cool beer, where he’ll entertain reader and writer alike with tidbits from a history book, or musings of a map spread across the table before him.

It is this casual and enviable rhythm permeating the page that makes Bryson so wonderfully readable. Along with a happy dearth of knowledge, humour and vocabulary he carries the reader across the Australian vastness with an ease matched by few other writers.

“Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn’t have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.”

To my mind, to not read any Bill Bryson would also be a loss entirely belonging to the person so foolish as to not pick his books up. But as we accelerate through the 21st century, it is worth bearing in mind that Down Under will not read in 2022 as it was intended to be read in 2000. It simply cannot be – too much has changed – but that fact hasn’t stopped me picking up more of his books, and nor is it ever likely to.

Nonetheless, as the climate crisis becomes an ever larger problem in our lives, it will always be hard to look back on these travel books without wondering to what extent they were a symptom of naivety, and to what extent they were to blame.

I leave you with this last quote from Down Under, that echoes eerily to us now through the tunnels of time.

“Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.”

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The Snow Leopard: A Book Review

Tom Dymond — Tue, 8 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The point being, what is is wonderful enough. He makes the point again later when reminiscing on his late wife. Her favourite Zen quote (and perhaps also now mine) was: “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.” Which is to say, everything is as it is, and that is it.

So whilst his zoologist friend collects data on mating blue sheep that are neither blue nor sheep, Matthiessen withdraws further into himself to investigate:

“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not” (my emphasis).

Indeed, neither Matthiessen nor Schaller are particularly interested in the snow leopard. And so why call it The Snow Leopard? Why make it all about this? Well, that we should ask such questions in the first place is the very reason itself. Because we – by which I mean we all – are always looking at what the endgame is. Surely, we say, the adventure only makes sense with a goal, and surely the book only makes sense with a resolution? The reader spends half of the book wondering if the adventurers will ever see a snow leopard until – almost imperceptibly – one discovers in oneself that it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. In fact, confusingly, the point is that there is no point – there just is what there is.

This may make little sense until you take the journey with Matthiessen, but therein lies the genius of his book: it is performative. To read it is not only to join him on a frankly brutal journey into the mountains, but is to take a spiritual journey too. And the latter is no less brutal, as Matthiessen realises with sickening despondence upon nearing the end of his journey.

“I had meant to go lightly into the light and silence of the Himalaya without ambition of attainment,” he writes as the book comes to a close. But because even a spiritual ambition is an ambition no less, he realises he has failed:

“I am still beset by the same old lusts and ego and emotions, the endless nagging details and irritations – that aching gap between what I know and what I am.”

He has failed in his spiritual quest because he is human, and no human can be “without ambition of attainment”. But in embodying this, Matthiessen has also surely succeeded.

The beauty and genius of The Snow Leopard finds no better way of expressing its own achievement than through that perfect phrase above – “that aching gap between what I know and what I am” – and it is worth us all, spiritual or not, holding such wisdom close to us.

Indeed, as Matthiessen leaves the mountains the void between what he understands of his own mind and what his own mind is capable of is as large as the canyons he has crossed during his three-month expedition.

And do they ever see a snow leopard? It really doesn’t matter.

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In Defence Of Truth: The Elephant In The Room

Tom Dymond — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There is a well-known analogy about an elephant that gets trotted out quite often. In its original form, The Blind Men And An Elephant was a parable where four blind men approach and touch this great mammal, and the point of it was to demonstrate that each man would come away with a very different perspective of what an elephant was. In this manner, the parable defied the idea that there could be such a thing as truth: each man’s truth was dependent on the bit of the animal that they were coming into contact with. I have some things to say about this and they are a bit complicated, but I think my variation of this elephant parable can help explain them in fairly simple terms, and after that I’m going to tell you how this all relates to why everything appears to be collapsing in on itself at the moment (spoiler: because everything is collapsing in on itself at the moment).

This is a radical and alien idea at the moment, and we have no idea what a world led by Turquoise Cloak will look like because it has never happened in our history. But Wilber argues that as each of us as individuals develop to this integral stage, we will get society there too. History shows that once about 10% of a population get to the next stage a tipping point is reached, and at that point the stage becomes the leading edge of society. This happened in the 17th Century with the Enlightenment, and in the 1960s with postmodernism. To get ourselves out of this mess we all need to don a turquoise cloak. That is to say, we need to fight for the very veracity of truth, and be empathetic with (though not necessarily tolerant of) those who do not see the world through more learned eyes.

I will leave you with one more Wilber line, and implore you to read his book for a far more detailed account of the ideas that I have tried to introduce to you. Here is an excerpt from Trump and a Post-Truth World. I hope this has made sense, and that it will be of use to how you see the world from now on. We are profoundly stuck at the moment, and conversation is the only tool we have to get ourselves moving. Those conversations are not going to be easy, but they are going to be worth it. For everybody. Here is Wilber:

“In embracing all of yesterday, it opens us to all of tomorrow.”

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Keep Calm and Stay At Home. And Read.

Tom Dymond — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have experienced a quarantine of sorts before. During our circumnavigation, James and I underwent several self-inflicted phases of social distancing as we traversed oceans. The Atlantic Ocean: 19 days. The Pacific Ocean: 24 days. The Indian Ocean: 28 days. We must now all prepare for at least this amount of time in the company of ourselves, and with those who we live.

One of the best things about those days of confinement at sea was the opportunity to read books. It was made easier by the removal of distractions: I couldn’t waste away precious minutes scrolling through Facebook, or perusing an infinite amount of television series, or hooked on the news cycle. Those precious minutes, I hope you will have realised by now, accumulate into hours over the course of a day. These hours become weeks over the course of a year, and the weeks become years over the course of a lifetime. Whenever I catch myself aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of Annie Dillard’s simple but poignant observation: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I don’t want to spend my life scrolling.

With that in mind, I would implore you to be mindful of how you use this coming period of weirdness. Keep up to date with the news, by all means, but recognise that we are at the point where we know what we need to do: stay at home and wash our hands. Keep up to date with social media: it is a wonderful tool to keep in touch with friends and family in times like this, but use it in moderation. And keep up to date with Netflix and iPlayer, there are some great shows on there deserving of our attention (the BBC’s Noughts and Crosses is great.)

But, also, consider the book that’s been gathering dust on your bedside table. You bought it for good reason; it too is almost certainly worthy of your attention. One cannot be lonely in the company of a good book. But if you just can’t get into it, or if you’re looking for something new and nourishing, then here is a handpicked selection for you from three years worth of reading at sea. I have divided them into categories in case you were after something in particular: fiction, non-fiction, a memoir, a poem, and, as a bonus, the book that I would pack in the grab bag when James and I set to sea, in case we ever found ourselves castaway on a desert island and were in need of a wholesome read. It’s not an entirely different scenario to the one we are now entering. So, here we go.

Fiction

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

When an author has the ability to draw characters so delicately and absolutely that they climb out of the very pages and hold your hand as you move through your day, whispering into your thoughts and visiting you in your dreams, you know you have stumbled onto something special. This was my experience with Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and upon finishing my fictional friends story, I was left aching for them. Of course, they are still there: they live on in the book, going round and round, in a fate that has been written for them, but a fate that you would still gladly read again and again just to be in their company. Ian McEwan – as far as I’m concerned – can do no wrong, and I would wholeheartedly recommend anything he has written, particularly Saturday if you have already read Atonement. But in Atonement he has produced something so real and heart wrenching and wonderful that it fully justified being created into the Keira Knightley-wielding motion picture. As usual, the film did not do the book justice, which is by no means a slight on the film, but a nod to McEwan’s masterpiece, which made it into the Time Magazine’s list of 100 Best Novels.

It is told from the point of view of Briony Tallis, who in 1935 at the age of thirteen initiates a series of events that play out disastrously against the backdrop of the Second World War. This novel is a lesson in the dangers of storytelling, but at the same time McEwan’s very storytelling entices and charms, and ultimately demonstrates its redeeming powers.

Here is one of my favourite excerpts, of Briony grappling with what it is to be human:

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”

Non-Fiction

Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

I have no hesitation in saying that Robert Sapolsky’s Behave is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. Unfortunately, once I have introduced it you are probably going to think it’s not for you. It sounds complicated, unnecessary, perhaps even dull. But in fact it is a comprehensive, fascinating and incredibly accessible piece of work that delves bravely into explaining what the bloody hell is going on in those noggins of ours. If science and a deeper understanding is your cup of tea, I implore you to give it a go.

Sapolsky’s multi-disciplinary approach must be one of the most ambitious attempts yet to explain human behaviour, taking everything into account from neurons to childhood to culture. The structure of the book is key: Sapolsky arranges it as if we are looking through a lens that is slowly zooming out. We begin by learning about how our behaviour is influenced by things at the lowest level: that of neurobiology. Don’t worry, I’m terrible at science too, but Sapolsky guides us through this intricate molecular world with impressive ease. He then pulls out to the level of sensory cues – the sounds, smells, sights and so on that draw certain reactions from us – before zooming out further to the role of hormones. With this biological background in place, the reader is then given a grand tour of how foetal life, childhood and adolescence serve to form us.

We then reach a field of research beyond that of the individual, as we are escorted through the ways in which culture, ecology and evolution have shaped us, before being shown how we might think about the big questions of morality, war, and free will in terms of all this information. Humane, hilarious and eminent, this book is a heroic effort to bring the perplexing to the people.

Sapolsky clearly did not write it with a pandemic in mind, but it is interesting for me to think back on it now and recognise how poorly prepared our psychology is to deal with something like Covid-19. As stress hormones saturate our brain throughout these terrifying days, a fight or flight instinct arises in us, naturally. But there is nothing to fight, at least not in the sense that evolution has designed us for. And as for flight, that tends to mean running to the safety of our loved ones, which is the last thing any of us should be considering right now.

Personally, and perhaps paradoxically, I take strange comfort in the knowledge that our minds are not designed to deal with this: as the saying goes, it’s okay not to be okay. There is nothing about the state of the world now that evolution could have prepared us for: this is a very unique mess. But we will overcome it.

For all my love and respect for this book I am, however, acutely conscious that it is somewhat monstrous, coming in at 700 pages. In fairness, considering the vast ground it covers and the level of detail given, it is wondrous it fits into a mere 700 pages, but I appreciate this lockdown may be over before you get a chance to wade through all of that. In any case I still recommend it: the knowledge and enjoyment I gained from it is unparalleled by any other non-fiction book I know of.

A Memoir

My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell

If it’s something lighter you are after in this time of gloom and doom, some sort of escapism that trumps watching spring emerge through a glass pane, then look no further than Gerard Durrell’s enchanting account of his childhood in Corfu.

I read my mum’s copy of My Family and Other Animals when I was young, and so perhaps a certain nostalgia accompanies it for me, rather like re-reading childhood classics like Roald Dahl. Durrell’s books, however, though written through the lens of childhood innocence, are very much for adults; with devilish wit, bewitching descriptions of scenery and wildlife, and a warm, cosy insight into the antics of his preposterous family. Whilst My Family was the first memoir Durrell wrote, its success allowed him to write a further two – Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of The Gods – about the same period of his life, and they are both just as wonderful. Let the world spin outside, put the kettle on, and allow Durrell to transport you to the sunny climes of Corfu, and regale you with uproarious – albeit somewhat embellished – tales of a childhood, that most of us can only dream of.

A Poem

Shoulders, by Shane Kozycan

Stories, lyrics, and the odd poem, tend to be my comfort blanket. There is little work I know of, however, that can offer any comfort in these times, because there have never been times like this.

But in Shoulders the Canadian spoken word poet Shane Kozycan offers us something that might do the trick. The poem is actually about the climate crisis, but it brims with a wisdom that can offer a lot in this situation too I believe. He discusses how the responsibility to act lies with us all. For the time being, of course, that means the responsibility of staying at home. Here is a nice excerpt:

“The most alarming part of the statement ‘we are facing crisis’

Isn’t the word ‘crisis’,

It’s the word ‘we’.

Because those two letters take the responsibility away from one

and rest it squarely on the shoulders of everybody.

We are Atlas now.

But our strength will come from finding a way to share in shouldering the responsibility,

Of turning the impossible into somehow.

Somehow, we will do this.

We can do this.”

It is to be listened to, not read, so check it out on Spotify or on YouTube. If you like his style then I definitely recommend listening to This Is My Voice and The Crickets Have Arthritis as well.

Desert Island Book

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières

I will be forever bemused by the decision of the castaways on Desert Island Discs who choose to take things like dictionaries and encyclopaedias as their sole source of reading to their island. You are alone, scared, and with little hope of ever seeing another soul again, and you choose this moment in your life to read about all the things that you never bothered to learn before. To what end?

I would want a book that preserves as much of the human experience as is possible for pages to hold. A book I can lose myself in, that can carry me along on the rollercoaster of a life that I am missing out on. I know of no book better placed than Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which will move you from warmth to anger, from hope to despair, from laughter to tears.

Hailed as a modern day version of The Odyssey, Bernières magnum opus is set in a little Greek island during the Second World War. This is a tragicomic novel of love and loss, of a tiny community and a big, wide world, of war and of peace. Indeed, one might draw comparisons with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with both authors rebelling against the idea of a top-down reading of history, each insisting that history be read through the accounts of ordinary folk. In his 900-page epic Tolstoy writes:

“To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved… it is evident that only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of history lie.”

Bernières mirrors this himself, summarising his novel as being about “what happens to the little people when megalomaniacs get busy.” Indeed, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a scathing appraisal of how the decisions of the mighty torment the lives and loves of the ordinary people.

But above all, this book serves as a reminder for the beautiful things that can flourish out of times of devastation. Like many, I was dismissive of this coronavirus at first, but now we know we also dwell in devastating times, and this gem of a book might bring you some hope. Unglue yourself from the news cycle for a little bit, and allow some beauty to flourish in your life during this moment in history.

Here is an amusing but painfully relevant excerpt:

“Italians always act without thinking, it’s the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish…well, God knows.”

If you choose to pick any of these up, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Be safe, and enjoy them.

Stay home. Read a book. Save lives.

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100 Seconds To Doom. Apparently.

Tom Dymond — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Please note: This blog was written some weeks before the world turned upside down. Nonetheless, I still stand by most of what follows.

‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’‘
No. What do you say Harrison Starr?’‘
I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book?’’
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.
I believe that, too.

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

One can forgive Kurt Vonnegut for these misguided prophecies, writing in the midst of the Cold War about his World War Two experiences as he was. In an era when it must have seemed inevitable that the world would return to the familiar state of conflict – this time an unthinkable nuclear version that would surpass even the horrors Vonnegut had witnessed in Dresden – an anti-glacier book might have been considered less of a waste of money. Slaughterhouse Five, an anti-war book itself, turned out to be an extraordinary work that is well worth the read, but as with almost all postmodern texts, it is not one that can actually tell us anything about the world we live in today, let alone how to live in it.

Because, as it turns out, in the years that Vonnegut was writing about the inexorableness of wars and glaciers, the world was in fact muddling its way towards ending both. Glaciers, I suspect you will have heard, are being stopped in their tracks, and are even withdrawing. War, it might surprise you to learn, has undergone the same retreat.

Whilst it is true that civil wars continue to devastate the likes of Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, you will doubtless notice that these are poor and unstable states, and that is no coincidence. War between democratic nations, on the other hand, has ceased; and given the world is slowly undergoing democratisation, we can be hopeful that it will one day also become peaceful. The point here, by the way, is certainly not to climb up on some high Western horse and to devalue or criticise those who had the misfortune to be born in the Syria’s of the world, but simply to point out that if anything in the last few hundred years can be analogous to the advance of a glacier, it is not war, but rather the cold, solid, gleaming fact of progress. Postmodernism at its core foolishly denies this, which is why it’s so delightful to read something like Slaughterhouse Five and recognise that, one, yes it is a wonderful piece of prose, but two, its lack of predictive powers will keep it firmly on the shelf of fiction. Indeed, so long as the world continues to advance, and developing nations can prosper in the same way that we have, one can be hopeful that the chances of war melt away altogether.

There is, however, a problem with this, in that it appears the glaciers have to melt away too: the price of human flourishing seems to be that of global warming. And it is this warming that might keep the fires of war alive after all.

It might seem peculiar to talk about wars and glaciers in the same breath, but – like Vonnegut – that is precisely what The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have been doing of late. Since 1947 The Bulletin have kept beady eyes on the level of existential threat to humankind, and by way of measuring the danger we are in they created the concept of the Doomsday Clock. At its inception it was set at seven minutes to midnight, and has been adjusted accordingly in years ever since. In the early 1950s, as tensions between the United States and the USSR built, it ticked ominously to two minutes to midnight, but then over the following decades it edged away again, and come the end of the Cold War in 1991 the hand rested a luxurious seventeen minutes from the apocalypse. The world could breathe easy, it appeared. Last month, however, immersed in the context of the climate crisis and deteriorating relations with Iran, the Clock edged closer to catastrophe than it ever has before: we now have only 100 seconds to midnight.

How can it be, then, that in increasingly peaceful times we find ourselves teetering on the precipice of extinction, ostensibly peering down over the edge and into the abyss? It seems paradoxical that in a world of plenty, where more people die from obesity than from starvation, and from suicide than from war, that we have never been more vulnerable as a whole.

But these are times in which the impulsive paws of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un hover over red buttons, where uncertainty surrounding the nuclear capabilities of Iran and Israel exasperate an already tense Middle East, and where the embittered states of India and Pakistan hold in their hands the power to cast us all into a devastating nuclear winter. Put in these candid terms, the forecast looks bleak, as if great clouds loom on the horizon, curiously mushroom-shaped.

If the world is only just holding back this tide of nuclear war, it is already losing to the flow of the glaciers. As they retreat, the fresh water supply to some two billion people diminishes, casting uncertainty on future supplies of food and drinking water, which will likely result in levels of mass migration that have never been seen before. The pressure that this will put on international ties is why The Bulletin has incorporated the strains of climate change into its Clock considerations.

Taking all of this into account, and throwing the US’s withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal in for good measure, one might wonder if there is even 100 seconds left until midnight. Either way, we are apparently living in the time of mankind’s greatest peril.

It is at this point I hope to convince you otherwise. Not that the threat of nuclear war isn’t a very real one: it is consistently ranked alongside climate change and the unconstrained march of artificial intelligence as the greatest of existential threats. But even in the midst of a warming world it seems there is not only good reason for calm, but a duty towards it.

In fairness, it is likely you haven’t given all of this much thought: we tend to assume the responsibility lies with those who have the required knowledge and expertise, and that we are in safe hands. At the same time, however, we know that Trump can literally press the button whenever it strikes his fancy. Indeed, if anything demonstrates the human brains ability for cognitive dissonance – the capacity to hold two opposing ideas in ones head at the same time – then it is surely the topic of nuclear weapons.

It is funny, though, that we find so little of this in the media. Most outlets completely ignored the movement of the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds, which is bizarre given it plays so well into their alarmist culture. Indeed if your idea of the world is based on the news then you would assume the most likely cause of your demise is either terrorism, immigration, or – as is currently in vogue – the coronavirus*. It seems that The Bulletin were directly selling into this fear-mongering custom, but for once not all of the media was buying it.

I am not, as such, a fan of the Clock. When The Bulletin created it, one would assume – and indeed hope – that they used some scientific method for arriving at the initial figure of seven minutes to midnight, rather than the mere notion that “it looked good”. Alas, that is precisely the reason the Doomsday Clock began at 11.53, and to this day it has been set by nothing other than the subjective whims of the panel selected to decide it.

The panel, of course, is comprised of extremely clever minds with good intentions, but whilst their endeavours to increase public awareness of the existential threats we face are admirable, its effect, unfortunately, may be more pernicious than prudent. In ratcheting up fear, for example, it might induce a panic amongst a public that would all too readily support nuclear action against an enemy, which in a world of mutually assured destruction only serves to invite nuclear action upon themselves. In this sense, the Clock is a self-fulfilling concept: it is merely a measure of fear, which only begets itself.

The Clock instils in us an inevitability of disaster, because as far as we know it is only ever a matter of time before a clock strikes midnight. I would be interested to know what the scientific consensus is on changing behaviour with these tactics. For example, is the best way to get people to change how they act on climate change issues to scare the shit out of them? Or is it to encourage that change by reporting what progress is being made on it? I genuinely don’t know which is the more effective – and suspect the answer will play a big role in the future of the planet – but I do know which one sells more newspapers and gets more article clicks.

But whilst a warming world is a tragedy of the commons conundrum, the nuclear threat differs to it significantly in that it comes from an enemy (or perceived enemy). To suggest the inevitability of doom – as the Clock does – serves only to weaken the motivation to bring the nuclear threat under control, because it suggests that our only way to survive is to maintain nuclear weapons. In this manner, the fear of death might be the death of us all.

What would be a constructive way to approach the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons then? Well, how about demonstrating the progress that has been made in the area? One might make the point that since the end of the Cold War the amount of nuclear weapons in the world has been reduced from over 70,000 to less than 15,000. So there are 55,000 fewer nuclear weapons today than there once was, and not one of them ever got used. That is truly remarkable. It borders the ridiculous, in fact. Now, admittedly, 15,000 nuclear weapons is still quite enough to destroy life as we know it, but it is movement – quite incredible movement – in the right direction, no? Increasing public awareness of such improvement would almost certainly put more pressure on the United States and Russia to renew the New START Treaty, which commits the world’s leading nuclear stockpilers to reducing their stores and keep the momentum going. As it stands, however, this is set to expire in 2021.

Another positive worth remembering – a vastly understated one – is that we are now in the seventy fifth year since the last – not to mention the only – atomic bombs were used aggressively. For a weapon to only be used once in seventy-five years is unprecedented in human history. If we further note that it has not been used at all since multiple states gained a nuclear weapon, then we might find reason for optimism. Indeed the fact that several states have nuclear weapons brings into play mutually assured destruction, and that is an enormously powerful deterrent that does not diminish with time. It is as powerful now as it was in the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it will be just as powerful in the future. It is so powerful, in fact, that at one point it contained 70,000 nuclear weapons. Nothing else can do that, and we would do well to remember that mutually assured destruction is not going away.

Around about now opponents tend to point to a long and terrifying list of close-calls, where nuclear war might have broken out by mistake if it were not for the heroic decisions of a few individuals. Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov are among them. They are fascinating stories in themselves that make for harrowing reading, but perhaps something best left for another time. What I would say though, as a Parthian shot of sorts, is that whilst we could deem these escapes from extinction to be a matter of luck, it might also be worth considering that the sheer amount of these examples could indicate that something about the systems in place is, in fact, working. So far, no individual or state has overcome the undeniable reality that pressing that button has consequences beyond all imagination. As Stanislav Petrov put it after he declined to react to an apparent inbound attack on the USSR in 1983: “I knew perfectly well that nobody would be able to correct my mistake if I had made one”. Perhaps you need some luck for that to be the case – for him to be the man in the chair at the time – or perhaps we are a smarter and kinder species than we give ourselves credit for.

I will leave you with another excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five. It is a rather lengthy one and, as you have been so kind in sparing me this much time already, I shall offer a brief overview of it if you don’t want to read it all.

In the excerpt, Vonnegut has his protagonist dream of a war movie in reverse, where all the terrors of the World War are undone: shells are magically pulled out of a flaming German city (presumably Dresden), shrapnel is sucked from the bodies of dying men so that they might live, and – most wonderfully of all – the bombs are taken back to the factories, where they are disassembled and hidden back amongst the earth. (That this latter part is carried out by women, who used to be employed in the bomb factories but are now seen to be undoing the destruction of their male-counterparts, feels particularly poignant.)

My point is this: whilst this dream sequence feels mythical and impossible to Vonnegut and his readers, this is quite literally what has been happening in the world since Slaughterhouse Five. The cities of Germany that were ablaze at the end of the Second World War are amongst the globes wealthiest, and they have benevolently opened their doors to people whose own cities now burn. Of course, the millions of men who lost their lives fighting in those wars were never brought back, but so far the developed nations have done a pretty good job of not repeating their mistakes, at least when it comes to fighting other developed nations. Developing nations are also getting better at this as they get richer. And, finally, on the bombs that Vonnegut saw returned to the earth, one can all too easily draw parallels with the 55,000 nuclear weapons that have been taken to the factories and disassembled since 1991, “so they would never hurt anybody ever again”.

In playing this movie in reverse for us, Vonnegut inadvertently exhibits the very progress that he thought impossible. The Doomsday Clock, however, victim to a questionable modern philosophy that to panic is the way to progress, seems only to be ticking forward.

Here is the passage in full.

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.” ]]>

The Sound Of Sirens

Tom Dymond — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

‘On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’

– Thomas Macaulay

On what principle is it, when we hear the sound of sirens, we long for the sound of silence? Heads will drop and mouths will mutter an “Oh no”, as flashing lights career by, and we wish we had not witnessed the desperation of the scene. So much noise and so much rush just to perpetuate all this fragility. A solemn, microcosmic reminder that for all our struggles, life holds a cruel and harsh reality. At first they are long, drawn out wails from afar. The graveness of the situation begins to dawn upon us, and gets irresistibly stronger as the siren quickens with the beating of our hearts. A crescendo of panicked bleats is reached as the emergency vehicle blurs by, and we balance on thoughts of curiosity and hope for a moment, as we watch it. The wails become steadily longer and drawn out again, until they are out of earshot and we can forget them: out of siren, out of mind. Had those sirens not screamed into one ear and out of the other, our day would have been more peaceful, and the world a better place for it we feel. Indeed, we would have preferred the sound of silence.

But there would not be silence. There would be the groans of agony of the man the ambulance did not come for. There would be the howls of rage of the robbed shopkeeper who the police did not chase the perpetrator of. There would, most devastatingly of all, be the meows of the cat up the tree that the firemen did not rescue. I would prefer the sound of sirens.

There are indicators in this world that masquerade as proof of the ills of society, when they are in fact evidence to the contrary. People always got sick, people always robbed each other, and cats presumably always got stuck up trees. But whereas before there was a cacophony of groaning and raging and meowing, now there is the sound of sirens.

The news works in a very similar way to the sound of sirens. The headlines that blare through our lives each day are designed to grab attention and instil alarm. They pull our thoughts to something awful that is going on in that very instant and in giving it all of our concentration – as we feel obligated to do as good citizens – we are blinded to the context surrounding it. When that ambulance roars by, we worry for the dying person inside of it, and fail to recognise the magnificence of the roads it drives on, the altruism of the cars that dart out of its way, and the wonders of the hospital that it is going to. The problem with this, as the inspirational intellect Stephen Pinker puts it, is:

“When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs.”

In the chaotic state of pre-industrial times, a time of increased entropy according to Pinker, the idea that a motorised vehicle would whisk you loudly through a labyrinth of roads to a special building in which a team of people would spend all their energy trying to keep you alive, would have sounded more heavenly than anything written in the Bible (not that you would have likely been able to read at all back then). Life now is more ordered than ever before, and one of the greatest signals of that is to be found in the freedom of speech and freedom of press that are the hallmarks of every democracy. Ironically – not to mention tragically – increasingly the way the gift of media is wrapped is to suggest that everything is going terribly wrong.

Allow me to demonstrate this with a story from this day, Sunday 12th January 2020. There is nothing particularly special about today, it is just another day in which headlines must be written and columns must be filled. Take the appalling news of the eight children migrants who drowned this morning trying to reach Turkey. It is tragic – do not mistake my candour for callousness, it is heartrendingly tragic – and it is part of a wider narrative that shows how far from heaven we still are. Indeed it is worsened further by the nagging feeling that the immigration policies of the countries in which we reside are partly responsible for such tragedies, and as such we might be culpable ourselves. But – there was always going to be a but – a story such as this is also completely unrepresentative of the world we live in. This is an immensely important thing to remember, and also an immensely difficult one, in a life where headlines beam bad news day and night. If ever I am overcome by all the sadness I find in the news, I turn either to the aforementioned Stephen Pinker, or to a man who Pinker himself was inspired by: Hans Rosling.

After reading of the children, I picked up my Kindle, opened up Rosling’s book Factfulness, searched it for excerpts including the word ‘drown’, and I found this:

“Would I ever hear about children who don’t drown? Can I see a decrease in child drowning’s out my window, in the news, or in a charity’s publicity material? Keep in mind that the positive changes may be more common, but they don’t find you. You need to find them. (And if you look in the statistics, they are everywhere.)”

And they are. In a country like Sweden, only three in 100,000 children under the age of five die of drowning. Clearly the children who lost their lives this morning were from a country far poorer than Sweden, and that is no coincidence, but Rosling finds reason for optimism still:

“Child death from drowning is one of the many horrors that has nearly disappeared as the country has become richer. That is what I call progress. The same improvements are taking place across the world today. Most countries are improving faster than Sweden ever did. Much faster.”

I undertook this exercise almost at random: I picked a devastating piece of news and followed up on it to see the context that surrounded it. And I found hope.

Talking of hope, I also noted a strangely hopeful story in the news today about the flowering of plants in parts of the 15.6 million acres of land affected by the Australian bushfires. The message is clearly supposed to be that the emerging pinks and greens from the ashes are a sign of unconquerable beauty and life amongst this ravaged earth. And in this postmodern society, where we are hell-bent on seeing the terribleness in everything, it is only a small step for our Nietzsche-warped minds to extend this metaphor to a global one, and to suggest to ourselves that this is the make-up of our world as a whole: a ravaged earth with the occasional flower.

News outlets will allow themselves these occasional optimistic stories, but rather than challenging the hysterical foundations of their industry, such stories actually compound the feel of panic they are already seeking to induce. This is done by way of contrast: a story offers a glimmer of hope amongst the apparently ubiquitous despair – some flowers amongst the ashes – and it suggests to us this is what could be, but it is not what is. What this is, they tell us, is a world of sin and flames.

The media is a paradox. It is one of the greatest successes of the human race, but it is determined to argue that there is nothing but deterioration before us, despite there being nothing but progress in the rear view mirror. It is an ambulance that screeches through our lives, blazing bad news in the streets so prominently that we forget how incredible the very idea of the ambulance itself is.

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A Teedious Introduction

Tom Dymond — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

I write to you to introduce my new website. The painful and elongated process of creating this website is chiefly in aid of selling a book, which will concern the circumnavigation of the world that I recently undertook with my friend James. You might know about that already though – and in any case, as it stands, there isn’t much more to say on that topic – so I shall focus instead on introducing you to my blog, which fills the otherwise empty space of my author’s website. I have titled it Teediously, but there’ll be more on that in a moment.

Whilst writing the book should be my main focus, it transpires it is in fact a rather challenging prospect, and so I have opted for the method of procrastination by way of preserving what is left of my sanity. The result of this will be the irregular and probably infrequent delivering of blogs to you, which may or may not be of interest. As to what they will concern, how often they will arise, and whether they will be worth their weightlessness in data… your guess is as good as mine.

In a way, this missive is a blog itself, whose sole purpose is to justify the naming of this section of the website. To make such a case we must go back to the beginning of all time. Well, all my time, which is all the time that matters as far as I’m concerned.

In late 1991 I was bequeathed to parents suffering from a common case of chronic unoriginality, as evidenced in their decision to call me Tom. I don’t know what was so unexceptional in the bundle of screams and slime that they found before them that encouraged them to give it one of the most widespread names in the Western world, but Tom it was. Dick or Harry, I believe, would have been far more preferable.

In all fairness, Thomas is my father’s middle name, so I suppose the responsibility really lies at the door of his parents, my grandparents. But grandparents, of course, carry a charming air of innocence, whilst parents are to blame for more or less everything, and so for this careless christening they stand accused – albeit belatedly – of dooming their firstborn to a life of perpetual confusion.

Because there is no end to the ‘Tomming’ liberally tossed across playgrounds, over supermarket aisles and out of television screens; each time summoning a scramble of the twenty-odd Toms inevitably within hailing distance, like dogs to the rustle of a food packet, hoping it’s finally their turn. I find it a miracle to have thus far escaped serious neck injury from one too many snaps of the head toward the sound of my name, and I often wonder if chiropractor waiting rooms are chiefly comprised of Toms, and if for every new “Tom” called by the receptionist there is a succeeding chorus of gasps as the room spins a head to see if it was aimed at them.

The levels of farcicalness peaked when I arrived to my dormitory on the first day of secondary school – a state boarding school that went by the enviably unique name of Sexey’s. There I discovered that of the four in my room, three of us had had the misfortune to be branded Tom, and that there was another one yet just next door. As worldly eleven year olds we lamented the foolishness of our parents, and then set about sorting the matter with a sudden-found haughty maturity. There and then it was destined that my peers and teachers alike would know me by my initials: TDA.

For many, however, it was too arduous an affair for an appellation to have as many syllables as it did letters, and so for brevity’s sake I was soon stripped of an alpha and delegated two echoes, in order to be lengthened in such that a way that I was shortened to the monosyllabic ‘Teed’. One seldom has a say in one’s nickname, but this was one I was not displeased to be assigned. By and large it has served me well, with the only notable exception being when in the company of French people, who tend to call me Didier (amongst other things, I have often suspected.)

Some years later ‘Teed’ would provide eponymous inspiration for the name of a blog in which I would post writings on whatever happened to arrive at my mind and alight at my fingertips. That my writing often zooms in on the most inane matters – perhaps you have noticed already? – in a way that could be appropriately described by the original form of the word tedious, makes this a devilishly clever play on words by my reckoning; and this suspicion is only heightened by the suitably tedious introduction I now find pouring from my extremities.

Nevertheless, it is my earnest hope and motivation that you enjoy reading such tedium as much as I enjoy writing it. This work, if it can be so grandly termed, is produced in the self-flattering spirit of the words of a book I never intend to quote again:

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

- Hebrews xiii, 2

Yours Affectionately,

Tom Dymond-Andrews, TDA, Teed.

(Not to mention Tee, Tommy Boy, Teeds, Tuh-Duh-Ah, and, reserved only for my grandmothers whom are mostly responsible for all of this, Thomas.)

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