Furniture making

The Whistle-stop Tour Enters an Ironic Part 3

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Every so often, fate relents. Pretty much the moment we arrived in Triscombe and stepped into the warm glow of our little log cabin, we knew we were going to have a good time there. Over the weeks that followed, I fell completely in love with the place, the area, the lifestyle. If we hadn’t been renovating our house, I’d have lobbied hard to stay.

People had been saying to us, was it really a good idea to go and live in one room? But if that one room is extremely comfortable and cozily warm, with the best shower ever in the ensuite, and wonderful people as your hosts up the road, then yes. The cabin was long and low, panelled in rough hewn wood and solid as the Quantock Hills, which rose like a natural rampart behind us. At night, in our comfortable bed, we lay and listened to the winds of the winter storms howling far overhead with an intense sense of wellbeing, protected, warm and safe. I fell hard for the countryside, which has a kind of storybook beauty, the epitome of that rolling, lightly wooded land of far, far away. Most people we told forgot where we were really going and assumed it must be Devon or Cornwall. But Somerset is better because it is hidden in plain view. We were about twenty minutes from the coast, about the same from the great purple bulk of Exmoor, and it was very rural, very quiet, very peaceful. Every phone call my mother would ask, but you have a shop near you, don’t you? And every time I would reply, no, it’s a fifteen minute drive for a pint of milk. She had a deep distrust of any place so under-resourced, but I was beginning to see the benefits of not living crammed up against other people. I could sum it up this way: most of the roads were single carriageway with passing places, and on the relatively rare occasions I met another car (or tractor), there was no aggro or intimidation, no battle of wills. Instead, we reversed, we squeezed past, we smiled, we all waved thank you at one another, and went on our way. Courtesy on the roads. Quite incredible.

I’m a bad traveller: the disruption makes more of an impression than the destination. But living somewhere different for a while – and this was very different to East Anglia – was a joy. The unfamiliar surroundings, the new routines, the different faces, all gave us an unusual gift: the chance to reinvent ourselves. Within a couple of weeks, Mr Litlove had been transformed by his experience of the workshop. Williams & Cleal is a terrific place, a little haven for nurturing creativity, lots of support in design, lots of attention paid to precision in making. Mr Litlove loved being surrounded by other makers, and I wondered whether the ransacking of his own workshop was perhaps a nudge towards finding something more collective when we were back home (though there seems nothing like this anywhere near us). He needs people. He benefits from routine. I was invited to all their social events and sometimes called on Mr L in the workshop, and I – with no great need of people – loved talking art and creativity with them. They were a special bunch.

The prototype of our kitchen cupboard doors in the making – spruce veneer and a design inspired by designer-maker Franz Karg.

My (re)treat was to sign up for an online course, working through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron under the guidance of Louise Tucker. I’d just thought it would be fun to do – and it was, mostly because of Louise and the other women on it, who were a delight – but it turned out to be more apt and well-timed than I had expected. The book is a series of essays and exercises designed to help you work on your artistic self, in particular, dealing with any creative blocks and limiting beliefs you may be holding. I never think of myself as especially blocked because generally, I just like writing and I don’t have to force myself. But at that time, I was starting out on the fourth structural rewrite of a novel I’d begun in 2020’s lockdown, and frankly, I was jaded. I wasn’t sure that my usual determination to reach the end of a project would overcome the entropy and malaise involved in rewriting 90k words, each one of which required extraction by forceps without anesthetic. Doing the course obliged me to stop pushing the Sisyphean rock uphill and have a good look at it instead.

The writing fatigue was understandable, if not easily solvable. No, the real problem for me was emotional. As soon as I get near to selling something, all the pleasure goes out of it. I have a problem with the book industry as it is at the moment. I think it’s become about power and ego, with agents and editors often careless or ruthless towards writers who are supposed to be submissive. I don’t like the pile-ons that happen in social media (also about power). And most books just die quietly unread for lack of publicity. I’m not saying that great books don’t come out of this – sometimes they do. But I think it’s a deeply unhealthy environment for writers to work in. I haven’t come to any conclusions about what I should do, but there’s a way to go yet before I’ve written a novel I’m proud of. So the course gave me a lot to think about.

And so winter melted into spring, the clocks went forward, our birthdays and Easter passed by, and there was only one problem with Somerset: we were going to have to leave it. I ended up returning a week early because the builders had reached the stage where they really needed one of us on site to make decisions. As it happened, we went back to the cottage we’d been renting before, because the landlord’s renovation plans had been delayed, and our house wasn’t ready to camp in. Mr Litlove drove me back and as soon as we reached the village, we eagerly rushed across the green to see what the new build was like – and the moment we stepped inside we started rapidly shedding layers of outdoor clothing. The atmosphere inside was tropical, as hot as a sauna with condensation running down the windows. The heating had recently been put in and the builders needed to dry out the screed, so they’d switched it on without leaving any windows open. There were plastered walls up now, the start of tiling in the bathrooms, new spaces we experienced in a sweaty daze, but everywhere was filthy, furred by plaster dust and grit and grime, littered with boxes of supplies, discarded packaging materials and tools. The months of wet weather had caused mould to form in patches on all the downstairs walls, and our belongings, piled in the upstairs spare room like an afterlife treasury in the Valley of the Kings, reproached us with their uselessness. We hadn’t needed these things for months now. What was all this crap, and why were we keeping it? The amount of work to be done before we could move back in was overwhelming.

And then, three days later, my mother suffered a major stroke.

The first time I walked into the acute stroke ward at the hospital, I didn’t recognise her. And then when I did, I felt sick. My mother had gone, leaving a bundle of bones that barely made a hump in the institutional blue blanket. Her face had the glazed look that strokes bring, and she was almost completely immobile. We wouldn’t get her diagnosis for a couple of months, but she had suffered a major incident, deep in the brain, and this was on top of a number of small prior incidents that we hadn’t been told about (although she’d been in A & E a handful of times over the previous few years). She stayed in the acute ward for about ten days before being transferred to a rehab unit on the coast. There was some rehab, but not an awful lot. The Stroke Association produced a report recently that says only 13.3% of stroke patients receive the recommended amount of rehabilitation, such is the impoverished state of the NHS, which means that the average amount of time spent on support is less than 4 minutes a day. And my poor mother, who hates hospitals, was stuck there lonely and bored and probably stressed for six weeks until the doctors decided there was nothing more they could do for her. Throughout this time, my Dad and my brother visited her daily. My brother lives five minutes from our parents and is the person you want beside you in a crisis – stalwart, utterly reliable, a sensible problem solver. He’s been a complete hero and we are lucky to have him. We visited when we could, the rest of the time cleaning and sorting and painting our house. I didn’t have the energy to unpack our suitcases yet again, so we camped in the cottage, where shortly the boiler conked out, never to be replaced. And then, in the midst of all this, Mr Litlove caught Covid. It was a crazy, exhausting time.

Let’s fast forward to the present day and where we all are right now. We moved back into our house three weeks ago, which was not a moment too soon. After all our travels I developed a craving for my own space, for our new space. It is strange and wonderful to be here, with the front of the house much as it always was, and then the back entirely transformed. There’s a Narnia feel to moving between the rooms, and I sense the possibility of being different here, of living differently. There is still a ton to do, but time now in which to do it.

My mother is also back at home, with my Dad – from the generation of men who never even needed to look after himself – as her full-time carer. Mum has the use of her right hand and arm. She can talk (the injury was to her right brain) and feed herself and smile again, but that’s about all she can do. They are both being very brave and stoic and it breaks my heart. I batch cook for them, and we visit regularly, but I feel horribly inadequate. I take this as a useful reality check. I want to fix and to rescue, to give them back their old life, their old selves, and none of this is possible. I haven’t got the hang of things yet, and approach them the way I would a 9 am lecture on a Monday morning with the second years. I try to pick them up and hoist them across my shoulders and carry them over the rocky terrain they find themselves on, and when I catch myself doing it, I think, really Litlove, this again? Years ago I fought my family quite hard to get a special dispensation for CFS, an agreement that I wouldn’t overstretch myself energetically and of course now that I have it, I don’t like it. I feel it reflects badly on me, like I’m not equal to doing whatever is necessary under the circumstances. Please understand, no one is making me feel like this apart from myself. My parents are simply grateful for any love and support, even if it comes in unnecessarily amped up form. No, what I see again and again, is how complicated our emotions are. How convoluted their roots and their triggers. We do ourselves and others such a disservice by assuming too often that what we feel is a direct response to what is right in front of us.

This is my favourite photo of us. I am 24, Mum is 51, so this was 31 years ago, which is to say back when I knew nothing. My mother had made my dress, incidentally. She had skills, my mother, and was beautiful, could be very funny and insightful, and when she was happy and loving there was no one like her. But she was was an easy prey for fear and put a lot of energy into her insecurities. I am aware I have the capacity to do the same. I own that DNA. This little series of posts has begun and ended with confronting mortality, and in each case I find myself with the same question: what makes a good life? After my treatment, I rushed into the world, accepting all the challenges, seeking change and action and adventure. I felt I’d cooped myself up for too long with all the insecurities that were the legacy of CFS. And it was fun in its way, but I lost track of myself, too, for I am easily erased in my own mind by the demands of other people and other places. ‘Think of yourself as dead,’ Marcus Aurelius wrote. ‘You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.’ If I am to keep writing here, then these are good mantras to think about. What is it to live properly? What makes a good life? It’s implicitly at the heart of every book I read. It’s a place to start.

Of Workshops and Kittens

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So ages ago, I promised you the saga of Mr Litlove’s new workshop and now that he is finally in and preparing for Open Studios once again, I think it’s safe to employ hindsight. In the last episode of Tales From Litlovia, we had decided not to move house but to extend the single garage where Mr Litlove works. We found an architect in the village who drew us up a plan and said he knew a builder who was semi-retired but liked this kind of groundwork job. Let us call him Dave. We were now in, ooh let me see, early November? And Dave apparently had no trouble working over Christmas, in fact he loved to work over Christmas! So, terrific. I had fantasies of calling Dave in from the garden to have a spot of Christmas dinner and Mr Litlove, with great reluctance, started emptying the contents of his garage in readiness.

Never before had I understood the extent to which my husband is a pack rat. I mean no disrespect, after all, I myself have a handful of books about the place. But the amount of stuff that came out of that single garage was mind-blowing. Mr Litlove filled the entire conservatory to eye level and still it kept coming. Every stray piece of wood or metal that had ever passed below Mr Litlove’s pretty little nose had been squirreled away ‘just in case’ and we were looking at the fruits (or nuts) of twenty-one years of dedicated squirreling. The wood piled up on the lawn and was propped in great stacks against the garage wall. Mr Litlove was even surprising himself. But eventually the flow steadied and ceased and December came and the garage was empty and ready, and of course there were no builders.

Dave turned out to like working over Christmas so much that he went on a long and lovely Mediterranean holiday until a few days into the New Year. And then January came and went while they were working on a tricky job elsewhere. To look back now and think we were fussing about whether or not he’d ordered the steel in January. Ha! Finally towards the end of February the builders arrived, just as we were looking into the possibility of finding someone else to do the work. The first day they came there were three of them, likely lads one and all, but by the end of the first day they were reduced to two. Apparently, one had been sent home for having ‘too many opinions’ which was quite fascinating. Was it really the quantity of opinions that was the problem, or their content? I would have loved Mr Litlove to find out, but Dave was a talker and Mr Litlove was already drowning under a tide of anecdote. They went through Dave’s complicated romantic and medical histories and moved seamlessly into a chapter on Great Exploits. This featured, for instance, a story about Dave seeing off a burglar with stealth and one of his collection of sword sticks. I was admittedly cynical. But at least when I lay in my bath in the morning and heard the dulcet tones of Dave’s voice floating over the garden towards me, I knew it was a good day because the builders had turned up.

Because of course, they hardly ever did. See you Wednesday! Dave would say cheerily, by which he really meant, see you next Monday. Maybe. And when they were here, I had never before seen a wall rise so slowly. Dave placed a brick at a time as if arranging jewellery in a shop window. The plants in the garden were growing quicker. Where are Polish builders when you need them? I would wail, and then amuse myself by sending emails to friends in America, telling them I’d found the perfect crew to build that Mexican wall of theirs. March came and went.

Now March was an interesting month on many levels. I think it was the first ever month of my life in which I had to enforce a news blackout because watching it was beyond painful. i did some stockpiling, mostly the heavy duty eye gels that get me through the day, all of which come from Europe. of course. But also tinned tomatoes and sardines and loo roll because Annabel said it was a good idea. Little did I know then that it was all a rehearsal for next October. Brexit seems to me to be a problem caused by insufficient reality checks, and the inevitable outcome of trying to push through a bad idea whilst pretending it is a good one. You know when you were a kid and you told a lie to get out of a tight spot? Only the lie just made the situation worse and worse until you knew the truth was going to come out and then you really didn’t want it to? Well, that’s pretty much where our politicians are now. The overinflated fantasy of Brexit is going to run around on the uncompromising rocks of reality at some point, and there’s a scale from bad to apocalyptic along which it might land. Well, my friends, reason and compassion are the only things that can save us in this life. However much people might love their outrage and anger and hatred, they get us precisely nowhere.

But on a brighter note, we did find one solution to a vexing problem.  You may remember that we had new kittens last spring? Dexter and Deedee. Well, last summer Deedee developed an alarming health issue.  She began to scratch great wounds in her fur and to develop odd swellings – in her eyelid, on her cheekbone or a paw. The two seemed to be related but we weren’t sure how and at first there were all sorts of frightening diseases that might have been its cause. When she was old enough we sent her for blood tests, and these fortunately came back clear. There is always amusement to be had even in worrying situations. I will never forget the moment when the vet rang up and, on Mr Litlove answering the call, asked cheerily, ‘Am I talking to Deedee’s daddy?’ This threw Mr Litlove somewhat, but once over the first shock of paternity, he took to the role quite willingly.

Deedee the fearless adventurer

So after all this, we understood that the problem was an allergy of some kind, but what it was we couldn’t discover, and regularly Deedee would puff up with what the vet called her ‘comedy leg’. Well, finally at the end of winter we made her a ruinously expensive appointment with the consultants at the vet school in Cambridge. They initially prescribed a special diet – kibble made of pea and venison, if you please which had Mr Litlove shaking his head in disbelief. In Mr Litlove’s cat philosophy, Whiskers is the food of the devil but any other cheapo options really ought to be fine. Now of course the cats adore this kibble and refuse anything else. But that didn’t do the trick. Finally, Deedee had a course of steroids, and these cleared the problem up immediately and – I am touching wood fervently here – so far she hasn’t had it back. Will we ever understand what happened during those ten months? I doubt it, but I can’t tell you the relief to see her fully-furred and normal shaped again. She is such a darling little cat.

And so, thus distracted, the workshop crawled towards completion. Finally over Easter towards the end of April, Mr Litlove could get the electrician in and, the great moment he’d been waiting for, his new machines arrived. This turned into a lovely party, as the lorry driver’s tail gate bust and he had to hang out with Mr Litlove and the electrician all morning until his brother turned up to fix it. The lorry driver had voted Brexit but was going to live in Thailand later that year with his Thai wife. I just mention this in passing. Finally by the end of April Mr Litlove had his new workshop and was very pleased with his expanded space. In fact, I fully expect curtains to appear at the windows and a little plaque with the number ’10A’ upon it. Oh, but of course there was one more thing – the new bi-fold doors that are to go on the front. Mr Litlove swore blind to me that there was no way he could order them until he had the exact measurements to send. He finally got around to doing that in May.

We’re still waiting for the doors.

 

My Last Essay And Other Stories

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Well, the middle of August is not the best time to pop up in the blogworld after a lengthy absence, but the lovely Numero Cinq online magazine is coming to a close and I have a final essay in it on Doris Lessing. I’ve had a wonderful time writing for my gorgeous editor, Douglas Glover, who is also an excellent writer himself (do check out his story collection, Savage Love, it’s incredible).

And I also promised a catch-up, if there’s anyone out there who would still like to catch up with me. Basically, I haven’t been blogging because I still have recurrent marginal keratitis. I seem to have a genius for developing conditions that can’t be cured but only unreliably managed, and despite my best efforts with every eye gel, drop and lotion on the market, it still flares up, especially when I read. So I hope you’ll understand that I haven’t been around visiting blogs because a) the reading is a bit much for me and b) it’s sort of depressing to hear about the lovely books everyone is reading or looking forward to reading, etc, when I’m so restricted these days.

I got excited a little while back over Manuka honey, after finding an account of a man who’d had my condition for four years, lost his job because of it, and tried everything to fix it. Nothing worked until he bravely attempted an experiment with the honey, putting it directly onto his eyeball. How he managed this, I do not know, as I bought an eye drop with a small percentage of honey and to say the red fire ants are consuming my eyeballs when I use it is an understatement. You should have seen the comments – so many people desperate for a cure who had had marginal keratitis for up to 25  years, all hopeful for the first time. I’ve been using it for six weeks now and maybe it’s helped a bit; it’s hard to tell and there’s certainly no great change or return to stability. But I will persevere.

In more positive news, Mr Litlove launched his furniture-making business at the start of July over the course of two Cambridge Open Studios weekends. He had a terrific response: on the first weekend we had just under a 100 visitors to his workshop and the little gallery we’d set up. The second we roped in our son for reinforcements and had somewhere between 60-70 visitors which was definitely more manageable. Since then he’s done well with orders and enquiries. He’s currently making a desk and chair, with a shelving unit, coffee table, eight chairs and a table and another table lined up, a possible further six chairs in the pipeline. So he’s really happy.

As for my novel, well, it’s been a very odd experience. I did well to begin with in my last submission round at the end of March. Four agents requested the full ms. One backed out almost immediately but that was fine as she was a non-fic person standing in for a colleague on maternity leave, and I wasn’t sure how that would work anyway. But then the next three just went quiet and four months later, I hadn’t heard a thing. One finally turned up about two weeks ago with a no, which I was expecting after all that amount of time. The other two, still not a peep. I mentioned my experience to the online writing group I belong to, and one woman replied to say that her last submission round came up with 10 requests for fulls. Of those, there were seven rejections (that took 6-10 months to arrive), two r & rs (not sure what this is but think it must be rewrite and resubmit), and one whom she had not heard from despite numerous prompts. She had finally saved up enough money to get a professional report on her book and now felt she had a good direction to take it in. Two years after submission.

I admire her grit enormously, because people, the timescale here! I don’t think I have it in me to stick with a novel for the two, three, four years it must take anyone to find a home for it. In the four (almost five) months of agently silence, I have fallen out of love with the old novel, started another that’s now much more interesting to me, resurrected a non-fiction project and have joined in with two friends on an interdisciplinary artwork that should be sheer pleasure. Maybe something will come out of these things and maybe not, really who knows? The system, such as it is, for turning professional with art, seems to me hopelessly overwhelmed to the point of brokenness.

But I don’t want to self-publish novels either. That’s just another way of dropping your work into an ocean of verbiage from which little is ever distinguished. Unless you are some sort of marketing guru, that is, and I am not. So I don’t know. I suppose I keep enjoying a writing life, and try not to worry too much about a writing career. That works better some days than others, of course.

 

 

Snooping, Blinking and a Controversial Chair

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As you may remember, while my eyes have been troublesome, Mr Litlove has been reading to me most days after lunch – a sort of bookish siesta. This has meant picking out books that we’re both interested in, which in reality has meant non-fiction, and mostly psychology studies. Earlier this year we read two related books that couldn’t have been more different.

Snoop by Sam Gosling had an intriguing premise. What Your Stuff Says About You, the subtitle reads, and essentially, it’s about decoding the objects people possess in order to gain psychological insight into them. It’s what most of us do when entering the room of a new acquaintance for the first time, casing the joint to see what kind of books, pictures, music the new friend owns; the fact that Gosling’s research students prove you can make a pretty swift and accurate personality assessment on this basis seems to show there’s more to it than meets the eye (see what I did there?). Gosling proposes that daily clutter can be categorized three ways, as an ‘identity claim’ (things we’re proud to have reflect on us), a ‘feeling regulator’ (things that arouse emotion or contain special memories) or a ‘behavioural residue’ (the overflowing laundry basket that says you’re a slob). Then he introduces the reader to the five big personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – and shows how objects can be character markers of these traits.

And that’s about as far as we got before we abandoned the book. There were a number of problems that stymied us (okay, mostly me) and that forced us to give it up in the end. The first is that, in the history of crossover non-fiction literature there are few academic authors who are quite as evidently pleased with themselves as Dr Gosling is. This is a bit off-putting. The book begins with him showing off his amazing skills to a television producer who has sent him a box of items from the room of a mystery person. From a small tube of skin cream, a hairbrush, a scratched CD of dance music and a photo of a sink area, Dr Gosling deduces an Asian male in mid-to-late twenties who is probably gay. What seems important here is that all this is for the pilot episode of a new program about snooping that would have a role for an expert in such matters (guess who?).

But as we get more examples of Gosling’s prowess, I did begin to question it somewhat. Gosling gives us the example of a large seagull mobile hanging in the office of a research collaborator that catches his eye. What does this tell him about his colleague? What may he deduce from it? After much pontification via the strategies of Hercule Poirot, he decides that the seagull was probably linked to a fond memory or a meaningful event and that it helped his colleague stay calm and focused. When asked, the colleague said she’d bought it at a conference at Stockholm and used it ‘to stop tall people standing too close to her.’ Conclusive, no? No. Dr Gosling helpfully points out that you can’t ever expect one object to tell you everything about a person, and the chances are you’re going to be wrong more than you’re right. And this was the problem with all his argumentation that I heard; it was dilatory, digressive and far from clear. He just couldn’t nail his points.

It was about now that my life began to seem very short and precious to me.

So I had a snoop of my own in Dr Gosling’s acknowledgements and found a very long, fulsome expression of gratitude to his editor and the hours they spent side-by-side writing and rewriting, to the extent that he felt she was a ‘co-author’. Which told me that Dr Gosling had probably got his contract on the TV interest and the high concept and then struggled manfully to write the thing. Of course, in all fairness the problem with a DNF is that it might have become brilliant in its later stages and entirely fulfilled all its initial promise. I don’t know; I never got that far. But maybe that editor whipped him into shape by the end.

Anyhoo, we decided to swap to the book that had first drawn attention to the ‘science of snooping’ and given Gosling his break: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Blink is a book about snap judgements and the way they can be more accurate and helpful than second, third and fourth thoughts. Gladwell opens with a marble statue bought by the Getty Museum, supposedly dating from the sixth century BC. The purchase took place after a cautious 14-month investigation by art experts, and then the statue went on display to full fanfare. At that point the trouble started, as other experts and dealers and people from the art world came and looked and felt in their gut that something just wasn’t right. The Getty took the murmurs of uncertainty seriously and further investigations were made. And oh dear, it turned out that the kouros ‘didn’t come from ancient Greece. It came from a forger’s workshop in Rome in the early 1980s.’

So, Blink is a book about the way that our cautious, thoughtful brain can be confused and our quick, grasping one can be clear-sighted. It’s sort of an easy version of Daniel Kaufman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, with extra jolly anecdotes. Because say what you like about Malcolm Gladwell (and I believe some people do), that man has a genius for exploiting the exemplary anecdote. His arguments throughout this book were beautifully made, utterly lucid and persuasive, and consistently interesting.

He moves from the frivolous to the serious and stops at various stations of the cross in between. Pausing at researchers working with five minute videos of couples from which they deduce the likelihood that the couple will stay together, through Warren Harding’s truly disastrous presidency (yes, there are precedents!) which he won almost entirely because he looked the part (exactly like the butler from Downton Abbey, in case you’re wondering), through the madness of market research. Take the rivalry between Pepsi and Coca-Cola and the television adverts Pepsi ran in the 1980s that showed people off the street taking a sip of each drink and declaring Pepsi the nicer of the two. Coca-Cola, rattled, ran its own blind tests and found that 57% of participants did indeed prefer Pepsi. Horrified, they altered the secret formula to make the drinks more similar – and released the product to consumer outrage. Their loyal customers hated the new drink and it was rapidly taken from the shelves never to be seen again. The thing is, what might be nicer on the basis of one sip (because it’s sweeter) is not necessarily nicer to drink at length. The sip test turns out to be misleading.

There are also more serious sides to the book, considering the use of snap judgements in combat situations and in the case of four white officers shooting a lone black man in the Bronx in February 1999. The man was entirely innocent of any crime, and the object he had withdrawn from his back pocket as the officers approached him turned out to be a wallet, not a gun as they had assumed. Gladwell looks at this incident from the perspective of a ‘mind-reading failure’. We have them all the time, instincts that arise and tell us someone is hostile or angry or something else altogether, drawn from another person’s facial expressions and body language. But police officers have to act regularly on those instincts in life or death situations, and sometimes they have terrible results. When you have so much adrenaline pumping through your system that you literally cannot tell the difference between a gun and a wallet, I think that’s a pretty good argument for not arming your average patrol cop, but what do I know?

So, all in all, this turns out to be a book that is just as cautious about snap judgements as it is congratulatory of them. Essentially, Gladwell is carving out a position in which thinking fast is a good idea, and shading in all the areas in which it gives misleading (sometimes disastrously so) results. Essentially, the issue boils down to experience and expertise. The more time you have spent studying something, and the more experience you’ve had in judging and then weighing the results of that judgement, the better your instincts will be.

This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding.’

Which, in an age that has become ‘fed up’ of experts, is something we should probably all hear.

Finally, then, a little blink test of my own. Below is a chair that Mr Litlove has recently finished after the style of Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Do you like it or not? I do, but Mr Litlove doesn’t. What does that say about us, I wonder?