If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run

I don't quite recall everything I did when I was in university. That's 30 years ago now! I do remember playing the rhythm guitar for the hall's rock band, playing rugby, even some hockey for the university, composing and performing a song for Talentime, writing and staging a musicalas well as chairing the music and dance committee. Yes, I was very much into the social aspects of university life then. I even found myself a wife, courtesy of some hacking into her VAX bulletin board and leaving her original poetry to read.

If the genes pass on as they should, one can assume the next generation would find university life a fulfilling one. And that has indeed been so.

J has been just as active. In his case, he joined the outdoors club, served on the committee for Singapore students and is really involved in the Catholic church and all its activities, including helping up after a hurricane pelted the shores of North Carolina. He also found time to make bi-monthly trips to New York City, and is a proud owner of a Dodge Charger and now living on his own in his student apartment. Oh yes, and being on the Dean's List with Distinction for consecutive years now.

It's M's turn now to figure out how she wants to fill her days. And just only in her second term of her first year, she has already managed to keep herself rather busy and holistically so!

She kept up her sporting life and is now representing her university in Ultimate Frisbee, a game she had picked up recreationally in Singapore when she stood down from softball. She is now playing that competitively in the UK and have just had two matches in the BUCS games.

There is a large population of Singaporeans and Malaysians here in the UK and the student association here actually has quite a bit to do and M had enjoyed the activities they organise (even before term started). So, quite naturally, she wanted to do her bit and has just been elected to the leadership committee as the welfare officer. In this role, she will be helping new students to the university settle in and feel at home with engaging events, and in keeping with her passion, to ensure everyone is well and to look out for their welfare.

Unlike her dad, she has not at all neglected furthering her intellectual development. She has been accepted into a university-based consultancy which specialises in sustainability. Her first project is to research and formulate solutions for carbon capture and sequestration. Right up her alley!

And spiritually, she has been serving on the Order of Malta, specifically serving food to the poor and in fact has just been made a team leader on the Catholic charity.

She does all of this while adjusting to life in her own (and even sorting our the house she and her friends would stay at next year), going to the gym, practising yoga (she is now at an advanced level, from my novice perspective) and keeping up her grades wonderfully with multiple essays written each week which are increasingly now beyond me.

She even cooks for herself sometimes and keep up pretty tidy larder and shelf!

Her days are usually chock full of stuff and still she finds time to connect with friends and fellow Catholics (including those in London and beyond) and with her family.

Rudyard Kipling, in his poem If, wrote "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run". Many interpret this to mean living your life in full, not wasting a single second and doing so with worthwhile activities, then M is certainly living up to this aspirational advice.

Kipling went on to say that if you can do that, "Yours is the Earth, and everything in it! And - which is more - you'd be a woman, my daughter". I paraphrased it a little but the intent remains exactly the same, that a life lived with purpose is the life of one who has grown up and grown up she has.

It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier, by Amy Fleming

This is a compelling write up on The Guardian, which a friend posted up on Facebook. It was the perfect article to get me in the mood to do my 777th workout on Runkeeper (almost exactly 5.5 years since I started logging) and D and I walked nearly 10km today at 5.67kmh with M accompanied us virtually on the phone for a km as she got ready too for her Frisbee training session in University Parks.

Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara believes that plenty of regular walking unlocks the cognitive powers of the brain like nothing else. He explains why you should exchange your gym kit for a pair of comfy shoes and get strolling.

Most of my 777 workouts are runs. Some fast (10kmh) and some slower (9 kmh). Mostly outside but sometimes on the threadmill. In the gym, I mostly do the elliptical machine. I also put in some swims, and even a cycle or two. Walking however has been either a cooling down or part of an interval training session. D was the one who first got into walking and as in many things in life (consulting, public sector, design sensitivities, etc), I followed her. And boy, am I glad I did... esp for all the virtues extolled here!


Taking a stroll with Shane O’Mara is a risky endeavour. The neuroscientist is so passionate about walking, and our collective right to go for walks, that he is determined not to let the slightest unfortunate aspect of urban design break his stride. So much so, that he has a habit of darting across busy roads as the lights change. “One of life’s great horrors as you’re walking is waiting for permission to cross the street,” he tells me, when we are forced to stop for traffic – a rude interruption when, as he says, “the experience of synchrony when walking together is one of life’s great pleasures”.

He knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data – walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier.

We are wandering the streets of Dublin discussing O’Mara’s new book, In Praise of Walking, a backstage tour of what happens in our brains while we perambulate. Our jaunt begins at the grand old gates of his workplace, Trinity College, and takes in the Irish famine memorial at St Stephen’s Green, the Georgian mile, the birthplace of Francis Bacon, the site of Facebook’s new European mega-HQ and the salubrious seaside dwellings of Sandymount.

O’Mara, 53, is in his element striding through urban landscapes – from epic hikes across London’s sprawl to more sedate ambles in Oxford, where he received his DPhil – and waxing lyrical about science, nature, architecture and literature. He favours what he calls a “motor-centric” view of the brain – that it evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won’t work as well.

This is neatly illustrated by the life cycle of the humble sea squirt which, in its adult form, is a marine invertebrate found clinging to rocks or boat hulls. It has no brain because it has eaten it. During its larval stage, it had a backbone, a single eye and a basic brain to enable it to swim about hunting like “a small, water-dwelling, vertebrate cyclops”, as O’Mara puts it. The larval sea squirt knew when it was hungry and how to move about, and it could tell up from down. But, when it fused on to a rock to start its new vegetative existence, it consumed its redundant eye, brain and spinal cord. Certain species of jellyfish, conversely, start out as brainless polyps on rocks, only developing complicated nerves that might be considered semi-brains as they become swimmers.

Sitting at a desk all day, it’s easy to start feeling like a brainless polyp, whereas walking and talking, as we are this morning, while admiring the Great Sugar Loaf mountain rising beyond the city and a Huguenot cemetery formed in 1693, our minds are fizzing. “Our sensory systems work at their best when they’re moving about the world,” says O’Mara. He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants’ activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O’Mara, “from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion – and we need to test this – is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.”

O’Mara’s enthusiasm for walking ties in with both of his main interests as a professor of experimental brain research: stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition. “It turns out that the brain systems that support learning, memory and cognition are the same ones that are very badly affected by stress and depression,” he says. “And by a quirk of evolution, these brain systems also support functions such as cognitive mapping,” by which he means our internal GPS system. But these aren’t the only overlaps between movement and mental and cognitive health that neuroscience has identified.

I witnessed the brain-healing effects of walking when my partner was recovering from an acute brain injury. His mind was often unsettled, but during our evening strolls through east London, things started to make more sense and conversation flowed easily. O’Mara nods knowingly. “You’re walking rhythmically together,” he says, “and there are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they’re absent when you’re sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.”

From the scant data available on walking and brain injury, says O’Mara, “it is reasonable to surmise that supervised walking may help with acquired brain injury, depending on the nature, type and extent of injury – perhaps by promoting blood flow, and perhaps also through the effect of entraining various electrical rhythms in the brain. And perhaps by engaging in systematic dual tasking, such as talking and walking.”

One such rhythm, he says, is that of theta brainwaves. Theta is a pulse or frequency (seven to eight hertz, to be precise) which, says O’Mara, “you can detect all over the brain during the course of movement, and it has all sorts of wonderful effects in terms of assisting learning and memory, and those kinds of things”. Theta cranks up when we move around because it is needed for spatial learning, and O’Mara suspects that walking is the best movement for such learning. “The timescales that walking affords us are the ones we evolved with,” he writes, “and in which information pickup from the environment most easily occurs.”

Essential brain-nourishing molecules are produced by aerobically demanding activity, too. You’ll get raised levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which, writes O’Mara, “could be thought of as a kind of a molecular fertiliser produced within the brain because it supports structural remodelling and growth of synapses after learning … BDNF increases resilience to ageing, and damage caused by trauma or infection.” Then there’s vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which helps to grow the network of blood vessels carrying oxygen and nutrients to brain cells.

Some people, I point out, don’t think walking counts as proper exercise. “This is a terrible mistake,” he says. “What we need to be is much more generally active over the course of the day than we are.” And often, an hour at the gym doesn’t cut it. “What you see if you get people to wear activity monitors is that because they engage in an hour of really intense activity, they engage in much less activity afterwards.”

But you don’t get the endorphin high from walking, I say. “The same hit you get from running is what you’d get from taking morphine? We simply don’t know that’s true,” he says. “People who study this area don’t go on about endorphins and there may be a reason for that.” Not that he is opposed to vigorous exercise, but walking is much more accessible and easily woven into everyday life: “You don’t need to bring anything other than comfy shoes and a rain jacket. You don’t have to engage in lots of preparation; stretching, warm-up, warm-down …” O’Mara gets off his commuter train a stop early so that he can clock up more steps on his pedometer. To get the maximum health benefits, he recommends that “speed should be consistently high over a reasonable distance – say consistently over 5km/h, sustained for at least 30 minutes, at least four or five times a week.”

Twice during our circuitous route, he asks me to point to where I think our starting point of Trinity College is, and my estimates are pretty close. “That just shows you how good your GPS is,” he says. “You have never been here before, but you have a very good sense of where you need to go.” This is reassuring, I say, because, of course, Google Maps is enfeebling our innate abilities to find our way. “That’s absolute garbage,” says O’Mara. “We really have to get a grip. If you hire a car and drive around a country you’ve never been in, taking a route into a city you’ve never driven into before, the first time, you rely very heavily on the GPS. The second time, not quite so much and, by the third or fourth time, you don’t need the GPS at all, because you’ve learned the route. I actually think GPS is great for helping us disambiguate where we are.”

So it’s mere speculation that relying on satnavs is killing our sense of direction? “Yeah it is. There is no data of any quality showing that, over the long term, reliance on GPS is a bad thing. Honestly, the brain is much more robust.”

O’Mara describes our inbuilt GPS, or cognitive mapping system, as a silent sense. “It is constructed largely without our awareness, and we only notice it if it fails us.” While the sensitive vestibular system of the inner ear governs balance, for mental mapping (which can work even when our eyes don’t), we have what are known as place cells in our hippocampi. If you stay in one place, the cell for that position keeps firing, but if you move, that cell will stop firing and a cell marking your new position will start firing and so on. In rat experiments, the system worked less well when the rodents were wheeled around as opposed to walking.

It’s clever, but not infallible. “We get fooled when we walk a long way in a single direction,” says O’Mara. We need to keep looking around us and recalibrating with visual cues. “If you’re feeding your place cells by coming from a single direction, what they know about the environment is that single direction and you want them to have input from all directions, so look around occasionally and your place cells will reset from the whole sensorium around you.”

While all this is going on in the background, our social brains are working to predict which direction others will take, to avoid collision. In order to walk and navigate, the brain flickers between regions, just as our waking minds are often, says O’Mara, “flickering between big-picture states – thinking about what we have to do tomorrow, plans for next year, engaging in what is called ‘mental time travel’ – and task-focused work. And you need to flicker between these states in order to do creative work.” That’s how important associations get made, and this flickering seems to be bolstered by walking.

It’s part of the reason, O’Mara suspects, that the prolific writer and thinker Bertrand Russell said that walking was integral to his work. Likewise, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who pondered a single problem on his daily walks for seven years, eventually inventing a number system called quaternions, without which we couldn’t make electric toothbrushes or mobile phones.

O’Mara’s ultimate ode to urban walking is TS Eliot’s 1915 poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which he describes as “a journey on foot, and a journey through states of mind”. Wordsworth composed poetry as he wandered, while Aristotle delivered lectures on foot in the grounds of his school in Athens. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche memorably said that “only thoughts reached by walking have value”, a notion that Charles Dickens – who was as prolific a walker as he was a writer – would no doubt have seconded.

And, while my mind has been flickering through the streets of Dublin, says O’Mara, “you haven’t died or fallen over, and you’re continuing to breathe. Your heart is booming away. You’re putting one foot in front of the other, and we’re engaging in this conversation, information exchange.” Plus, I’m checking out the area, admiring fanlights and looking for clues of neighbourhood life. “All of this is going on all the time. Robots can’t do this. Getting a robot to cross the road is really hard.” Whereas for our brains, “evolution has been solving this problem, billions of times an hour, for the past 400m years”.

Isn't our hobby the greatest? by Robert Schryer

I am a deep hobbyist. By that I mean when I like something, I get really quite passionate about it. I would read up vociferously about the topic, subscribe to enthusiast magazines, join online communities, make favourite lists and personal indexes and of course buy up lots of stuff and have this thing about getting a complete collection (all the U2 or Liu Wen Zheng albums for instance, first on cassette, then CDs and now vinyls). D would say I am a hoarder.

I first got into audiophilia back in university. I always liked music but sound quality as a high school student didn't bother me much. Any mini-compo would do; though even at the age of 14 or 15, I could tell the difference in sound quality when listening to my Uncle J's equipment in his consumer electronics shop. Of the brands he carried, I had liked Sansui and JVC best!

I started buying better stuff when in university: KEF speakers, Philips CD player and Pioneer amp. Value for money best buys! When I started working, my budget got correspondingly larger: Magneplanar speakers for instance, which I shipped to Bangkok, HCMC and back. I upgraded into complete new systems about 15 years ago when we moved into a new place and again now as I moved again. I also found a kindred spirit in an old friend J whom D calls a godfather to me AV equipment (my third child :-).

And when this article got published this month on Stereophile (one of the more respected audiophile magazines out there), it naturally spoke to me.

And here is the clipping:

As per our ritual, Karim and Dan arrived at my door in late afternoon, bearing our ritual's customary offerings: dark beer, wine, cold pork sandwiches, fruit and chocolate tarts, good music on well-recorded CDs, and audio hardware to try out on the host's hi-fi—on this particular Friday, my hi-fi. It's what we did: break bread while gabbing like regular folk about regular things, then bolt for the listening room for an evening of hi-fi fun.

It was that evening, during our fun, that I was struck by the specialness of the moment, and of us. We had gotten together no more than a handful of times over a span of six weeks, knew little of each other's personal lives, yet already our event felt traditional, like we'd been doing it for years. Because of audio, we'd become instant best friends, to the point that I knew in my gut that I could count on either of them to bail me out of a sticky situation.

But . . . why? Our hobby isn't exactly a social activity—it's not bowling or line dancing. Most of the action happens in our minds. It's a selfish business, conducted mainly in isolation, to better immerse ourselves in our music. That's how we like it, obviously, or else we wouldn't be audiophiles.

And yet, as antisocial as our hobby fundamentally is, something about it had super-glued Karim, Dan, and me together.

But what? Curious, I replayed our story from the beginning, to that winter day when I received an email from a Karim. I'd never heard of him. Attached was a photo of a man with an enormous smile, possibly explained by the even more enormous Dunlavy SC-V speakers in the background. The thrust of his text: Would I bring my $5000 Audible Illusions L3A preamp so that he could audition it in his home?

"As if!" I thought. "It's a trick! I'm going to get bonked on the head and be out a decent preamp." That's when the audiophile angel who sits on the pinna of my right ear whispered: "He just wants to evaluate the L3A's sound where it counts most: in his own system." It was a convincing argument. I related, totally. I wrote back, saying I would grant Karim his wish and might even lend him my preamp for the night if it would help.

As it turned out, Karim was his real name, and I didn't get bonked on the head for my preamp. But if I did, I would've chalked it up to karmic reckoning. That's because my decision to help out Karim wasn't entirely selfless. As much as I appreciate the private nature of our hobby, the audiophile in me was lonely and craved contact with other hobbyists.

So, with preamp in hand, I GPSed my way to Karim's house. There, I was greeted by Karim and his new friend Dan, who I didn't expect, along with a kitchen table crammed with food and drink, also unexpected. Five minutes into our chat, I saw in them the audiophile that exists in me. It felt almost like a homecoming.

In the days after, I was introduced to music and audio gear I had never come across on my own, and I learned, at age 53, that female vocals appeal to me more than I'd led myself to believe. I was also reminded of basic truths I seem to forget and remember in cycles: that despite personal preferences, every audiophile seeks a variation on the musical truth; that A/B testing is untrustworthy when it comes to deciding what I can live with; that system synergy is what we spend our lives trying to perfect; and that as much as I enjoy the intimate, vibrant presentation served up by my stand-mount speakers, big monitors like the Dunlavy SC-V's are kings of scale, sweep, and bass tones that seem to shake the very fabric of the space-time continuum. There is a pot of gold at both ends of the rainbow.

At last year's Montreal Audiofest, Karim called me just as I was preparing to rush home, 20 miles away, to complete my show report—and I discovered that I'd lost my car key. I was panicking. "Don't worry," Karim said calmly. "I'll drive you home to get your second key and bring you back to your car." That we hardly knew each other made Karim's offer seem incredible to me.

So . . . how come? I suggest the answer to that question starts with the music: its timelessness, universality, humanity, power to unite—its link to our collective and personal pasts and our refusal to live without it. Then comes our reverence for audio gear that holds the promise of making our favorite music sound new again.

Most important, I think—what makes the superglue super—is what happens when the three of us get together. It is celebratory. Liberating. Suppressed thoughts leap out of our mouths, and we scamper in the half-light placing gear and recordings in their proper place. When the music begins to fill the room, I can feel my gratitude swell to triple its normal level, commensurate with the number of us collectively reveling in life's most essential pairing: of music and high-fidelity audio.

Or, as Dan put it to me after a particularly memorable listening experience: "Isn't our hobby the greatest?"

Requiem for a dream, by Roger Cohen

I have enjoyed reading Roger Cohen's opinion pieces on the editorial of New York Times. From Mandela to the US-China hegemony, he puts into words emotions we feel but cannot express. This one is written at the very moment the UK exits the European Union is one good example.


Britain exits Europe. It will be poorer, above all in its shrivelled heart

Image credit: Thomas Paterson

I have covered many stories that marked me over the past 40 years, in war zones and outside them, but none that has affected me as personally as Britain’s exit from the European Union. Brexit Day, now upon us, feels like the end of hope, a moral collapse, a self-amputation that will make the country where I grew up poorer in every sense.

Poorer materially, of course, but above all poorer in its shriveled soul, divorced from its neighborhood, internally fractured, smaller, meaner, more insular, more alone, no longer a protagonist in the great miracle of the postwar years — Europe’s journey toward borderless peace and union. Britain, in a fit of deluded jingoism, has opted for littleness.

The fiasco was captured this week when that pompous and pitiful British nationalist, Nigel Farage, waved a miniature Union Jack in the European Parliament as he bid farewell and was cut off by the vice-president of the Parliament, Mairead McGuinness. “Put your flags away, you’re leaving, and take them with you,” she said.

Farage looked like a sheepish schoolboy caught breaking rules. He blushed. An Irish woman from a country uplifted by European Union membership reprimanding the new breed of little-England male as he exits history in pursuit of an illusion: the symbolism was perfect. “Hip, hip hooray!” Farage’s flag-waving Brexit Party cohorts chanted. Save me, please, for I shall weep.

Speaking of symbolism, the fact that President Trump has been a fulsome supporter of this folly is apt. An ahistorical, amoral American leader cheering on a British abdication sums up the end of an era. The world was rebuilt after 1945 on something of more substance than British-American lies and bloviation; it took resolve. The torch has passed. To whom exactly is unclear, perhaps to a country slow to contain a plague. That is a problem.

Brexit belongs to this era in one quintessential way. It is an act of the imagination, inspired by an imaginary past, carried along by misdirected grievances, borne aloft by an imaginary future. The age of impunity is also the age of illusion turbocharged by social media.

Inequality, poor infrastructure, low investment, inadequate schools are real British problems but the take-back-your-country transference of blame for them onto “Brussels bureaucrats” proved that the imagination now overwhelms reality. Truth withers. The mob roars. This, too, is a problem.

Yes, Britain was undefeated in World War II and helped liberate Europe. But it could do so only with its allies; and it was precisely to secure what it is now turning its back on: a free Europe offering its people the “simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.” Those are Churchill’s words in 1946 in a speech that also contained this phrase: “We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” Unbowed Britain was once consequential Britain; no longer.

I used the word “abdication” advisedly. Europe needs the great tradition of British liberalism at a moment when Hungary and Poland have veered toward nationalism and, across the Continent, xenophobic hatred is resurgent. It is perverse for Britain to try to look away. Europe is part of Britain. Visit the great Norman monasteries in England and tell me this is not so. The British dead who lie in the Continent’s soil having given their lives for its liberty tell the same story of interlaced fate from a different perspective.

To be so orphaned is painful. The 47 years of British membership cover the entire arc of my adult life. Europa was our dream. I covered Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, speaking to the European Parliament about hope and peace in 1981, eight months before his assassination. So much for dreams.

Yet they persist, for otherwise life is unlivable. I wandered from Brussels to Rome to Paris to Berlin to London and everywhere I lived I experienced some iteration of Europe’s beauty, as a physical thing, as a cultural bond and as a transformative idea.

The sensation was most acute in Germany, where the idea of the union was the most effective escape from postwar shame and the rubble of 1945, a form of atonement. But it was ubiquitous, the guarantor of our deliverance and the symbol of our capacity to reinvent the world and even make it better.

Every European country, through the goal of ever closer union, changed itself. They grew richer, no small thing. But they also reframed their self-image.

Italy and Spain left Mussolini and Franco behind to become stable, prosperous democracies. France found its tortuous way to truth after the humiliations and predations of Vichy and discovered a European avenue to express once more its universal message of human rights founded on human dignity.

Central European countries stabilized their escape from the deadening Soviet imperium to which Yalta had confined them. Britain ceased equating Europe with scourges like intellectuals, rabies and garlic, as it had in my childhood. Hyde Park became a babble of European tongues. The British economy surged. Britain had given up its colonies and found a new identity in association with Europe, or so it seemed, flickeringly.

Then I lived in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war and I saw, in inert bodies torn by shrapnel, and in history revived as galvanizing myth of might and conquest, the horror from which the European Union had saved my generation. It had laid bad history to rest. That was enough to be forever a European patriot.

But not enough for the British a quarter-century later. In the words of my friend Ed Vulliamy, who also covered that war, Britain has become a country “that boards cheap flights for stag outings to piss all over Krakow.”

Hip, hip hooray!

When I lived in Berlin, I would cross the nearby Polish border and never failed to marvel that where millions had perished decades earlier a nonexistent frontier traced its invisible line across fields of wheat. I would pass from the German world to the lands of the Slavs and nobody asked me who I was, what papers I bore or what was my intent.

If German-Polish reconciliation has been possible, anything is possible, my only solace at this moment. A bunch of flag-waving fantasists, at the wrong end of actuarial tables, have robbed British youth of the Europe they embrace. They will be looking on as 450 million Europeans across the way forge their fate. Their automatic right to live and work anywhere from Lisbon to Stockholm will be lost.

I’ve lost a limb; more than a limb, my heart. Europe helped Britain grow bigger and more open and more prosperous. Now it will shrink. Another suffering friend, Patrick Wintour, the diplomatic editor of The Guardian, sent me these lines of Auden:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

A better epitaph for the aborted story of Britain in Europe and the tragedy of a disoriented nation’s willful infliction of enduring self-harm is impossible to imagine.

PS (my own): we are witness (and in M's case, a ringside seat) to history as it happens. Britain has exited Europe. The essay above which I have now kept it for posterity on my blog describes my own feelings well. Having said that, maybe because I am less sentimental about this as I did not personally experience its glory days, I am also less pessimistic. I do think Britain will land on its feet, albeit in a lower place. However, if its leaders are true, moments of great disruption are also moments for true transformation. 

Pandemic

We all learned about the black plague in the history books. It was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. 

It is thought to have originated in the dry plains of Central or East Asia where it travelled along the Silk Road reaching Crimea by 1343. From there, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that traveled on all merchant ships spreading throughout the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population.

The last time there was a virus outbreak in Asia was nearly 2 decades ago, the SARS virus. Then, nearly 800 died died and eight thousands were infected mostly in Asia over a period of 9 months from November 2002 to July 2003. The economic toll was just as fatal especially to open economies relying on trading and travel, like Singapore.  It was estimated that some USD6b of GDP was lost!

This time though it seemed more threatening. Thought not quite of Black Plague proportions, it however is threatening from three aspects. First, the outbreak originated in Wuhan at the start of Chinese New Year when millions are travelling in and out of this major transport node of a city in China. Second, it travels as esaily and as fast and as wide as modern conveyances take it and thirdly, its victims can be infectious without showing any symptoms of illness. So, the guy sitting next to me on a crowded Scoot flight now from Singapore to Kuching .... (argh, too frightening to contemplate.....). 

Which is why, at D’s insistence, I am all masked up. Those who know me know i can be cavalier in matters like this, which is why the blog below (from an anonymous blogger hobbitsma) is a good reminder that we should take nothing for granted, especially someone like me who is often in crowded places in close proximity with strangers!

Make no mistake, the 2019-nCOV virus is not a remake of SARS. It is a blockbuster sequel. Like Empire Strikes Back. And like all well-made sequels. There should be many surprising twists and turns to the plot. I call this a sequel because both SARS and 2019-nCOV belong to the coronavirus family of viruses.

For other old coots like me, we have fought and survived SARS. I wouldn’t call it a victory, but we survived. That’s enough for me because I know people who literally and physically did not survive SARS. The 2019-nCOV is the big test for the current young generation of healthcare workers.

Like most major and surprising developments, there is good news and then there is bad news.

First the good news. From a case-fatality (CF) rate perspective, the 2019-nCOV is less lethal than SARS. The CF rate for SARS was about 10% (10% of those infected died) while the CF rate for 2019-nCOV is hovering around 3%. The other good news is that the international healthcare community has developed very quickly diagnostic tests that can give you a result in about 24 hours, versus SARS when diagnostic tests took about 2 to 3 days to give a result and these tests were only developed late into the outbreak. But even so, we should remain guarded on this point because we are not sure when the tests can pick up the disease because we do not know for sure when the disease turns detectable. The third piece of good news is that this new disease is spread by droplets (and not airborne) like SARS and a good mask and universal precautions should be enough to break the transmission.

So much for the good news. Now for the bad news, of which there are much.

The 2019-nCOV outbreak (I wish someone in WHO or China will give this bug a more catchy name, like R2D2 or BB8 for example) is designed to perfection in several ways. First, it is perfect in timing. It blew up about a week before Chinese New Year in China, the busiest week of the year when hundreds of millions of Chinese are travelling back to their villages or for holidays, both within China or beyond China’s borders. The size of the travelling population in the week preceding Chinese New Year has been likened to the entire populations of France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain going on the road at the same time. Or the whole of USA moving. In other words, timing-wise, it is timed to perfection for maximum dissemination/propagation of the virus. And it is not done yet. These people now in their hometowns have to return back to their workplace – so a few hundred million people have to go on the road again soon in the next one or two weeks.

In comparison, SARS occurred post-Chinese New Year in 2003, in mid-spring, when Chinese New Year travelling had already been done and dusted.

Outbreak-wise, the 2019-nCOV is location-perfect. It has chosen Wuhan, the city right in the middle of the world’s most populous country with the most comprehensive network of high-speed trains, otherwise known as the High-Speed Rail (HSR). Wuhan is a bit like the Toa Payoh of Singapore in terms of location- smack in the middle. From Toa Payoh, you can easily travel to Jurong, Yishun, the CBD or Changi by a network of expressways. Similarly, from Wuhan, you can travel to the populous Sichuan province and Chongqing in the west, Beijing in the north, Shanghai in the east or Guangzhou and the Greater Bay area in the south within 4 to 6 hours by HSR.

Wuhan and its surrounding areas are so central that since ancient times, it has been a battlefield for different armies contesting for supremacy of China. This is especially evident in the Three Kingdoms period (at the end of the Han Dynasty in the third century) where the Three Kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu fought around Wuhan and the nearby cities, such as Jingzhou. Wuhan is at the junction or confluent point of these three kingdoms, which underlies the centricity of it’s location. The biggest battle of the Three Kingdom period took place in Chibi or Red Cliff on a tributary of the Yangtze. It’s so famous that director John Woo made a two-part movie about it (Battle of Red Cliff) with a star-studded cast in 2008. Chibi is a stone’s throw from Wuhan and one of the first cities to be locked down together with Wuhan.

You cannot choose a better location than Wuhan in Hubei province to plant a disease outbreak in China. As they say, location, location, location. And Dr Evil couldn’t have chosen a better location even if he wanted to.

Next is the speed of transmission. In the past, a migrant worker may take up to four or five days to return to his kampong from centrally-placed Wuhan – You take a few slow trains, take a bus, hitch a ride and walk etc. Now with the HSR, you are home probably on the same day, within 24 hours, for 90% of China’s migrant working population. China’s HSR and road network is as good as any developed country in the world. That means the spread of 2019-nCOV is several times faster than the 2003 SARS, thanks to great travel infrastructure in 2019. In other words, in terms of coverage, 2019-nCOV beats SARS hands down.

Outside of China, the spread is also of many orders of magnitude faster and bigger than SARS, thanks to the huge number of Chinese travellers going overseas for holidays over the festive period. In 2003, SARS only came to Singapore because the virus travelled to Hong Kong and several Singaporeans caught the infection when they travelled to Hong Kong and stayed at the Metropole Hotel and brought the virus back to Singapore. That took time and quite a few people. Now in 2019, you can see that most countries have the infection introduced to them by people travelling from Wuhan directly to these countries. The number of travellers coming from Wuhan number in the tens of thousands in any given month to major cities in Asia. The number of Chinese travelling abroad in 2003 was a fraction of what we have in 2019. In 2003, we had to “import” SARS from HK, which in turn was imported from Guangdong, China. Now Wuhan has directly “exported” 2019-nCOV to Singapore and several other countries.

SARS lasted quite a few months in 2003. In the end there were about 8000 cases and 800 deaths. Contrast this to 2019-nCOV. Official investigations into this new disease started after the Chinese National Health Commission was alerted to the outbreak on 30 Dec 2019. It took only 4 weeks since then for this new disease to infect about 4000 people, half the total number of SARS patients. It is no surprise that the official (let alone the unofficial) statistics reflect the speed of the spread. This hobbit predicts that many more people will be infected with 2019-nCOV than SARS. Hopefully with a lower CF rate, and better facilities, therapeutic options now than in 2003, not too many people will perish. But I am not betting the farm on this hope…..

These are the hard truths. But there is more. The prospects may be grimmer than the above because of our imperfect understanding of the disease on two fronts:

• We do not know if the infected person is infectious during the incubation period or not
• Simple signs like fever may not be a reliable sign for the disease

These two points dramatically change the game for us battling this new disease. SARS patients were not infectious during the incubation period and when they were infectious, they had fever. That gave us time and ease of detection. Outbreak fighters were given up to one incubation period (a minimum of ~7 days) to locate close contacts of SARS patients so that they could be quarantined and in doing so, break the chain of transmission. Now, if claims that a patient is infectious even during the incubation period are true, that one-week window of safety may no longer be there. There may be no time to find and round up close contacts. The Chinese believe this is so while local (Singapore) experts think this point is still debatable. We don’t have conclusive evidence on this one way or the other.

The next point is that fever may not be a reliable sign, although according to a study published in The Lancet on 24 Jan 2020 for a cohort of 41 patients, 40 out of 41 or 98% of patients developed a fever, thought it was not stated if they developed the fever early or late into the course of the disease. Other reports cite that up to 30% of patients do not develop fever. The jury is still out for fever as a reliable sign. From a study design point of view, the power of a study based on a cohort size of 41 is debatable. We need bigger studies.

In Singapore, there is no evidence of community spread. Strictly speaking, there is no cause for panic. Or even N95 masks. So surgical masks should suffice for front line staff unless you are dealing with a suspect case, pending serological confirmation, in which case you need to get a N95. But if you are dealing with a suspect case, you are probably working in a restructured hospital, armed to the teeth with PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment) and as a SARS veteran yourself or a younger doctor supervised by a SARS veteran, you should be OK.

The problematic issues for now remain on two fronts

• Where do we get surgical masks (and other PPEs) in the private sector?
• How to risk-stratify and what responses should we make to different risk levels

For folks in the private sector, surgical masks are getting increasingly if not impossible to get. Strangely, you can still get your box of N95s from SMA. But no one can promise you your supply of surgical masks beyond the odd box of 50 masks here or there. That is hardly reassuring to the GPs in the frontlines. This hobbit would like to think or hope that someone is sitting on a war-chest of surgical masks (and gowns) like Joseph hoarding grain in biblical times, now ready to unlock the supply that will be enough to feed Egypt in a famine lasting seven years. Or at least enough masks for seven weeks lah……

As for risk stratification, policy makers have made it clear that travel to China is a major risk factor.

Returning (from China) students and healthcare/eldercare workers are required to be quarantined. The selection of these groups reflects the thinking that these are people with the potential for spreading the disease to many people quickly, should they be infected.

A much more worrisome point is that it has now been reported that 2000 persons who are now in Singapore have been to Hubei recently. How many of these are already carrying the infection? What are the chances that community or local transmission will arise from these 2000 persons?

The next question we must ask is that how do we enforce a proper quarantine for these groups? Should they be monitored closely like in the past during SARS? Does home quarantine suffice, since fever may not be a reliable sign and they may be infectious during incubation and hence may spread the disease to family members? Should we think about hotel quarantine instead? (Since there are going to be quite a few empty hotel rooms soon, I guess)

There are many questions. But as with any novel disease outbreak, the answers are few. We need to buckle down, keep our morale up, and observe strict discipline in our infection control practices. These are obvious.

What is less obvious, and quite worrisome, is that we must avoid the mistake that many generals make – generals often fail or get defeated when they fight the last war.

This is a new enemy. A new war. We have to think new too.

CNY 2020

This blog is now 6 years old and one of the very first entry was around the chinese new year and it featured an ‘everyday’ conversation between my parents. It’s a really ordinary chat on the surface but the discerning listener (esp one who is their offspring) you can hear how totally co-dependent they have become on each other when even the simplest of decisions is a joint one. Around Chinese New Year, there are indeed many things to do: from spring cleaning to banquet meals.

Every culture has its rituals and these rituals are most manifestly expressed in the major festivals. For those of Chinese ancestry, there is no festival bigger than the Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival. The new year for the Chinese is marked not by a static calendar but rather the celestial calendar. It falls on the day that the Spring Season is deemed to have arrived. Spring itself is a season laden with many good meaning. It is when the first green shoots of growth, the first flowers bloom and the weather turns far more pleasant from a cold dark winter. It is indeed a season worth celebrating.

For the Chinese, the celebration is done loud. Loud noises (from lion dance drums and fire crackers) and loud colours (bright red clothes). It is also done big. Big family gatherings (reunion dinners and visitations) and big business (from all the spring cleaning and new stuff procured). It is also done abundantly. Abundantly long (it last half a month!) and abundantly generous (with food and ang pows galore). 

This year it is celebrated on the 25th of January. So, we are celebrating two new years in a month. Its the year 2020 and the year of the mouse which starts a 12 year cycle. The Chinese New Year is also anchored by a zodiac animal. There are 12 altogether. Legend has it that the celestial supreme being had summoned the world’s creatures for an audience and the first 12 were honoured with years named after them. The first of these animals is a mouse. The legend continues that the mouse, though small is really crafty. It had sought out the hardest working animal, the ox, whom it knew would set out first to the heavens and hitched a ride on its back. Upon reaching the gates, the mouse leapt off the ox’s back and dashed to be in first place.

So this new year is a particularly apt moment to start afresh. I am reminded of this quote from Walt Disney.

Never doubt a small creature. Especially one with imagination and courage. Just like Walt’s Mickey.

May the year of the mouse bring all of us abundant peace and happiness.

Like Lewis and Tolkien

These are two giants of English literature, esp that of magical creatures in mystical lands. M and I spent a day wandering through the streets and parks of Oxford just like these two friends. We talked like friends, too, on subjects ranging from mythology and religion to sociology and knowledge. We even managed to squeeze in a low-brow activity, watching a live televised match between Manchester United and Liverpool in an Irish pub (well, I watched while M attended to some club activity and expectedly my team lost :-().

M guided us expertly to all the places.  And without any digital navigation aid. In fact, she also got us in time to the church, to the match and to our dinner reservation. I remember it was J who often did the map reading so I am so glad to see her progress in this department. Clearly, D’s spatial intelligence gene has been passed down to our second child too. It surely couldn’t have come from me for I was born with none whatsoever! Speaking of intelligence, everyone here oozes it, from a learned chaplain at SBH to the diner next to us who has written books on the Middle East. I must say I got a real buzz from just being here in the midst of all these.

So, even as I was flying off to Davos, an advertising poster in Heathrow Airport caught my eye, “not all intelligence is artificial”. I was drawn to this because just earlier this morning, Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO, published an Op Ed on FT arguing for the regulation of AI. I do agree. Market forces will not be able to control what it should or should not do. But until governments, get their act together, us humans must recognise one thing: the intelligence that will matter now is that of imagination. Of God’s creatures on Earth, and of the human creations too, only humans have the imagination and ability to create and innovate. M and I were chatting over dinner and I had argued that the act of originating a new creation is often prized over that of innovating on something already created. M pointed out that innovating, however, is often the more practical and ultimately more accepted and hence rewarded form. She is right.

At the root of it, maintain our spirit of curiosity: to always wonder and search for new and better ways to do things. That is the fuel which Messrs Lewis and Tolkien thrived on to create their respective monumental works. Truth is they drew inspiration from the city they lived in: the river that flow through it, the college grounds and especially the sinewy trees that grow there and of course, while they are close friends, they are also rivals and hence they are constantly and simultaneously inspiring and challenging each other to do better. Indeed, better they became. The lands of Narnia and Middle Earth are now part of our mental landscape as much as the world’s geography is.

As creatures of God, we are all made to have a day’s of rest. Just like the one M and I had. In fact, we yearn for it and that’s why we have holidays and vacations and governments have regulations against over-working and some are even legislating ever shorter work weeks. Therefore, it is completely logical that to get us to our greater heights, we need the challenge of a rival. Whether it was Lewis vs Tolkien, or Edison vs Tesla vs Westinghouse or Mozart vs Saltieri or Senna vs Proust and of course Manchester United vs Liverpool, rivals can and do make us better. So those endowed with that gift of curiosity should also embrace the threat of a challenge. These two combine to hone our creative powers.

There is however one more element we need. If our creations are to become world changing, like electricity, joyful music and thrilling drives, we need courage. There is no denying that any worthy endeavour is a hard endeavour. And I don’t mean intellectual difficulties which we overcome by working harder. I mean societal resistance. To break through, courage is about being prepared to be unpopular, and in some cases even being prepared to lose it all. M pointed out to me that education advocate, Malala Yousafzai is in LMH, which is a stone’s throw away from her hall of residence. There were countless detractors who were not just resistant to change but are opposed to change and therefore opposed to her and indeed one of them shot her. She soldiered on and her courage got her here to the university to help change the world for educating women in less developed countries.

So, there you have it, curiosity, challenge and courage. Add it altogether, you can change the world. And my weekend here with M really brought to life how she is indeed living this life. A curriculum and tutors that endow her with new curiosity. Fellow students and friends who challenge her to perform even better. The courage though she needs to find that herself. We spoke about all of these as we wandered the streets and parks like Lewis and Tolkien. From all that I can see and hear, she certainly is.