Entropy and stress

You buy something new. It's shiny and perfect and owning it gives you a satisfying glow of pleasure. Be it a new car, some kitchenware or some clothing, the acquisition of new material possessions gives you a sense of pride, a sugar-rush of happiness. A trip to the mall, coming home with shopping bags of new stuff, the thrill of new things. Doesn't that feel good?

But after a while, your new toy will begin to tarnish. Stuff ages. Stuff breaks. You lose that sense of its preciousness; it's getting rusty, it's wearing through, it no longer works as well as it once did when it was new. 

This, dear reader, is entropy – the second law of thermodynamics – and the only way in which we know in which direction of time's arrow runs. Things move from order to disorder, to randomness, to chaos. Nothing old and broken will spontaneously return to its new state. 

No matter how careful you are with your new car, some oaf is always out there to scratch it in the supermarket car park. Yes, you can take care not to avoid undue wear and tear on your possessions, and then you become the custodian of things. As a custodian of things, you get stressed as entropy gets the better of them. Keeping an old car running needs extraordinary dedication. For some folk, it's what they want from life, it defines them. I'd argue that as a society, having a direct connection with the past in the form of old furniture, vintage clothes, mediaeval architecture and so on is extremely important, and I salute people engaged in keeping the ravages of entropy away from things that should be preserved for future generations.

But for the vast majority of the stuff that surrounds us, its ultimate fate will be landfill – or in an optimal world – recycling. Stuff should be looked after, yes; it should last as long as we can make it last. Ultimately though, we need to find a balance between obsessively caring for our stuff and mindlessly abusing it so that it ceases to be fit for purpose far too soon.

The answer – own less, buy less.

The fewer material possessions we have, the less stress we get from worrying about them when they scratch or tarnish or tear or break. We kid ourselves that we need something when actually we don't; we are sold stuff we don't really need, and when that stuff we didn't really need starts playing up or breaking down, we feel stress – consciously or subconsciously. Stressors are bad for our health; we need them out of our lives. Think before you buy. That's one more thing you don't need to worry about breaking down.

[Talking of things breaking, yesterday my 2016 Huawei phone finally packed up. For the past 15 months, I've been using it (minus SIM card) only to measure my activity with its health-tracker app, so that I could compare like for like with my medium-to-high intensity walking in previous years. Now without it, I've been finally forced to deploy the health tracker app in my 2023 Samsung phone. Wow! It's so much better. More functions, voice notification each kilometre, telling me time and number of paces – I wish I'd been using it sooner.]

This time eight years ago:
I am environmentally illiberal

This time ten years ago:
Thoughts on brewing and investing

This time 11 years ago:
Cruisers and low-riders - cycle fashion

This time 14 years ago:
Gone is the threat of Państwo Smoleńskie

This time 16 years ago:
Bike ride to Święty Krzyż

Britain changes course

Up for much of the night to watch the results of the 2024 UK general election. I went to sleep at quarter past two, woke up at half past four, then a nap between quarter past eight to wake at quarter to ten. Just over four hours of sleep then. But what a night.

This election can be characterised as the electorate punishing the Conservative government after 14 years in power; an anti-Tory rather than a pro-Labour vote. Sir Kier Starmer's Labour party won broadly rather than deeply. Its vote-share went up by a mere 1.6% from its pathetic 2019 performance under Corbyn, whilst the Tory vote-share plunged by 19.9% compared to 2019.

This was the biggest Conservative loss of all time ever – the worst result in the party's 190-year history, losing 250 seats, including many ministers. The Tories were mangled from every direction, losing seats to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, a process made easier by Reform splitting the right-wing vote.

The Liberal Democrats made their biggest gains ever, up from just eight seats to 71, the best Liberal result since 1926 on a vote-share of 13%. As a demonstration of how the UK's first-past-the-post voting system works, consider this: Reform won a 15% vote-share which yielded it only five seats, whilst the Green Party won four seats – but on a 7% vote share. The LibDems and Greens showed the importance on focusing on key battlegrounds, whilst Reform, by standing candidates in all constituencies, were clearly intending to damage the Tories as badly as possible rather than seriously attempting to win all those seats.

Turnout was low at 60% (down from 68% in 2019); opinion polls had for so long been predicting a massive Labour win (and massive Tory defeat) that many people might have felt little inclination to vote. Having said that, Labour's low vote-share can also be attributed to tactical voting. In many constituencies where Labour had little chance against the Tories, Labour voters cast their votes for the Lib Dems, and in constituencies where the Lib Dems had little chance against the Tories, Lib Dem voters cast their votes for Labour. This worked well for both Labour and the Lib Dems.

Scotland* decidedly turned its back on the Scottish National Party. Labour now have a massive chunk of Scottish MPs. The SNP was left with a mere nine of the 47 Westminster seats it had in the previous parliament. Wales is now without any Tory MPs, while in Northern Ireland Sinn Féin has become the largest party, not because it won more seats (it still has seven), but because the Democratic Unionist Party lost three and now only has five. This suggests that nationalist pressure in Scotland or Northern Ireland won't be a big worry for Sir Kier Starmer's government.

* Counting is still in progress in a remote Scottish constituency so the final result may change.

Wither the Tories?

If the Conservatives want to return to power, the party needs to move back towards the centre rather than towards the right. Extreme left-wingers Michael Foot (in 1984) and Jeremy Corbyn (in 2019) only served to turned moderate voters off Labour, extending its period in opposition. So analogously, if the Tories decide to turn further right in an attempt to scrape votes from Reform, they will only stay away from power longer. The stage is now set for a battle to decide whether the Tories want to return to centre-right moderation or veer in the direction of the extreme right. The shake-out of Tory MPs mean that the economic libertarian wing (Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Jacob Rees-Mogg) are gone, helping the out-and-out migrant-bashing populists.

Below: the moment that Labour secured its 326th seat, thereby securing its parliamentary majority with  three seats swinging to Labour. Sir Kier Starmer is only the third Labour prime minister to have been elected to office in my lifetime – Harold Wilson in 1964 and Tony Blair in 1997 being the other two (neither James Callaghan nor Gordon Brown became PM by winning a general election).

The opinion polls overestimated the size of Labour's majority. Here are the last five surveys published before election day (final score: Lab 412, Con 121, LibDem 71). Just look at how wildly out the Survation poll of 2 July was! The IPSOS exit poll was far closer (Lab 410, Con 131, LibDem 63)

Don't mention the 'B' word

Asked by the Guardian whether he could see any circumstances where the UK rejoined the single market or customs union within his lifetime, Starmer said: “No. I don’t think that that is going to happen. I’ve been really clear about not rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union – or [allowing a] return to freedom of movement.”

Those words were like a kick in the teeth to me. Had I read them a week earlier, I would not have cast my postal vote for Labour – for me, the UK's rejoining  the EU is my number one political priority when it comes to UK-Polish relations. I want a strong UK and a strong Poland in a strong EU. Preferably not one dominated by the Franco-German axis.

So – the new government has a massive task ahead. Without a return to frictionless trade with the world's richest trading bloc on its very doorstep, it's hard to see how the UK economy can grow enough to deliver the public services that Labour have promised the electorate. Also, worth bearing in mind that the Tories still have a working majority in the House of Lords.

This time last year:
Lawn to meadow, meadow to forest

This time four years ago:
Town and country in summer

This time five years ago:
Across the Pilica to Strzyżyna

This time six years ago:

West Ealing to Castlebar Park – waiting for Crossrail

This time seven years ago:
Trump flies into Warsaw

This time eight years ago:
Making Poland's railways safer

This time 17 years ago:
Lublin and the Road

Assessing the passage of time while asleep

In a normal night, I'll wake up once, maybe twice, for a wee. My bedroom is almost light-tight as I have roller blinds over the window, but I can sense the daylight though the opaque glass on my bedroom and kitchen door. Now, in high summer, it starts getting light soon after 4am, and so between 11pm and 4am, I have no clue as to what the time is should I wake between these hours. 

In the days when I'd keep a daily dream diary, I would notice that the quality and vividness of my dreams would become sharper throughout the night, with the best dreams in the morning. The ones I noted down upon waking up in the night would be less memorable than the ones captured around 7am, my normal time for rising.

But the question of guessing the time as I wake in the middle of the night got me thinking about my ability to assess the passage of time while asleep. So what I've started doing is this: I wake up in the night, and before getting out of bed, I guess what the time is. I base this on what had been going on in the dream prior to waking; what the narrative had involved, how many twists to the plot as it were. Having made my guess, I check on my phone. Sometimes I'm way out – last night, for example, as I woke up and estimated that the time is 01:30;  when I looked, I was surprised to see that it was already 02:55. Sometimes, I'm closer. Once or twice I've been right to within five minutes. 

If I were to come up with a rule of thumb here, I'd say the more memorable the dream, the better I can gauge the passage of time. While space distorts wildly in dreams (Poland morphing into the England, for example), time seems to pass at the same pace as in waking life. Having said that, I've had dreams where an anomalous logic loop occurs – the dream's narrative 'knows' information that logically could not have been known to me earlier (this dream is particularly fascinating).

So – question – can I improve the accuracy of my assessment of time's passing while I'm in the sleep state? I shall start logging this nightly in an n = 1 experiment, would be interested to see how readers get on with this!

When we are asleep, do our circadian clocks switch off? I am reminded of a story from the 1980s, when at the CBI National Conference in Glasgow. A colleague, well-known for his lunchtime drinking, returned to his hotel room for a nap. He woke with a start and looked at his watch – it was almost nine! Still dark outside (Scotland in November), so too late for a hotel breakfast – he dashed to the conference centre so as not to miss the opening speech of the second day, and arrived to find the venue closed, no one there. It was indeed nine o'clock – but the previous evening. Alcohol switches off certain brain functions when a drinker's fast asleep, including having a measure of the passage of time.

At this time of the year, waking up in daylight is no problem. An early start (for example, to catch the train to Gdynia last Friday) holds no terrors for me. No alarm clock – just leaving the roller blinds open so as to be woken naturally as the sun rises. But winter – no. I refuse to do early starts once sunrise is later than 6am.

Final point, mentioned to me by my brother a few weeks ago: "Hypnagogia – the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. If you have trouble dropping off to sleep, don't do this, but I have become adept at noticing myself sliding into hypnagogia – having awareness of the moment. I welcome it, though insomniacs might find the very act of noticing its onset snaps them back to wakefulness, again and again.

This time last year:
Summertime dreamland

This time three years ago:
Getting our heads around UFOs

This time six years ago:
Bristol-fashioned

This time seven years ago:
The imminent closure of Marks & Spencer in Warsaw

This time 12 years ago:
Along mirror'd canyons

This time 13 years ago:
Mad about Marmite 

This time 14 years ago:
Komorowski wins second round of Presidential elections?

This time 15 years ago:
A beautiful summer dusk in Jeziorki

This time 15 years ago:
Classic cars, London and Warsaw