If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?
I have posted before about the ill founded exceptionalism of the human race. Let’s start with one thing I want people to understand. We are simply members of the animal kingdom ourselves, not some kind of master species. Our pets are generally far more intuitive than we are and we ignore their instincts to our detriment. So, what can we learn from our pets?
First of all, unconditional affection. We are extremely bad at loving other living things with no agenda. We want to know what we can get from them. Well, pets stay with us for food, you might argue. Evidence shows that you are wrong. Pets will stay in houses where they are underfed or mistreated because of that unconditional love they have. When they are abandoned they shut down because they lose so much whereas many of those who abandon their pets do so without feeling the least bit guilty. However much pets go through, they want to love and trust again.
Second, your pet will be able to sense a ‘wrongun’ very quickly. If someone visits the house, they size up the unconscious cues that we all give off and decide whether to approach, to observe or to avoid. If they avoid the person, that is an excellent indication that they are not particularly pleasant.
Third, we have a lot of difficulties in ascertaining the emotional state of our pets. They have to be exhibiting extremely unusual behaviour for us to notice. We on the other hand only need to be showing small signs, imperceptible to other people and perhaps even to ourselves, and our pets will pay closer attention to us, be more affectionate and will do that until we feel better at least temporarily.
Finally, our pets learn what we are like and what our routines are far more quickly than we realise. They are often ready to greet us as soon as we come home. I remember reading that they can identify the sound of your footsteps long before you come into view because of their excellent hearing. If we go away on holiday, particularly a long holiday, they will get agitated even if someone they know is taking care of them during your absence. Our cat Albus had my daughter looking after him for nearly three weeks during Christmas 2024 and her schedule was very different to ours. He was absolutely fine, being fed, played with and cared for, but when we got back and he had forgiven us, he spent a good few days reintroducing us to his correct schedule!
Our pets are intuitive, loving and loyal. In return they deserve the best care and attention we can give them. We are the true dumb animals in this relationship and the sooner we realise that the better. That said, there is one thing I do want Albus to understand. If it’s raining outside one door, it will be raining outside all of them so there’s no need to try all three! ☔☔🤣🤣
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
I was given the name David when I was born. In 1965 it was the third most popular boy’s name in the UK, behind Michael and John. In the decade as a whole it was the top baby name in the UK. As a result there were a good sprinkling of Davids everywhere I went. It is a ‘classless’ name in that you can’t tell where a David might come from in the social hierarchy. There would have been as many Davids in the comprehensives as there were in the Public schools. Interestingly, if I had been a girl I would have been given the name Jane, the 7th most popular name for girls during the decade.
David is a Hebrew name meaning Beloved although I never really lived up to that! I am interested to find out that it also means ‘to boil’ more appropriately as I often found myself boiling over! I think it’s interesting how having a common name makes you one of the masses. Now, obviously there have been famous people called David throughout history, but its ubiquity means that you are much more likely to fade into the background of life. In the Scout movement and in Polytechnic I was almost always called Dave but I am not a fan of the shortened version. To me, Dave sounds quite common – in the class context rather than its ubiquity – and indicates a person who is in some way trying too hard to fit in. I never went as far as telling people not to call me that, but I never really took to it.
Funnily enough, it was my middle name that attracted the most attention, generally negative, because I was given my Dad’s name for my middle one, as was common at the time, so I was David Gerald. Unlike me, he disliked the full version of his name and called himself Gerry from very early on. That suited him far more than Gerald would have done because he was always at the centre of everything in social terms.
As a name, David is OK and I have just accepted it over the years without question, but I wonder what would have happened if I had been given a more unusual name. Would I have been a different person? It’s an interesting thought experiment but how would you go about pursuing it?
What’s your dream job?
I think a dream job is an obsolete concept in two ways. First, the idea of a dream job belongs in your childhood. In those days you don’t think about the reality of employment and nor should you. Your childhood is a time for trying to find your strength and your passion in your life. When I was younger I wanted to be a sports journalist or a music writer, and I would have been good at it, but the reality was that you had to be hard nosed to get into papers and I wasn’t. In those days you had to work in local papers reporting on everything and anything and I wouldn’t have had the instincts to do that. The fact that I have had the opportunity to write about music and sports in various ways is a bonus and because it hasn’t become a job, it’s been better for me as a person.
The second reason why you should forget about the idea of a dream job lies in the way that today’s employment practices are so impersonal and so profit driven. I have said it before and I will say it again, employees have never had it so bad in my working lifetime. Since Human Resources took over from Personnel, the difference in treatment has been stark. It wasn’t just a change of vocabulary, it was a change of approach. Personnel departments used to be full of people who had done the same jobs in the same situation and therefore understood you and your issues. They had compassion for you as people as well as employees. Nowadays, HR departments are full of university graduates with no experience of the sectors and no interest in the people who work for the firm. They are there to protect the firm not you, because you are Resources, not Humans. The shareholders are the people who count and the employees merely replaceable cogs in a machine. As a result of this change dream jobs can no longer exist in my opinion. I would love to hear from an HR professional with their take on this, but I am merely a small blog so I don’t suppose it will happen!
What makes a good leader?
When I was younger I saw leaders in all areas of life who had compassion, fairness, an ability to acknowledge their mistakes, respect for those they were leading and an understanding of the responsibility they had for those in their sphere of influence. I thought that this is what leaders would always be like. It was the type of leader I have attempted to be throughout my life and I feel like I have to some extent succeeded.
At some point, the world moved away from me and the type of leader I valued became obsolete and unpopular with the majority of the human race. Now that we are in the 2020s the majority of people want leaders who despise others who disagree with them and look to make them suffer. We have leaders who revel in being prejudiced and dismissive and whose followers love them for that. The worse they are to those who are of a different mindset, the more popular they become. When they make mistakes they double down, they lie, and they attack everything about those who have seen their mistakes. Their devoted followers are despised as human beings and seem to be completely disposable. The idea of responsibility for those they lead is now completely out of the question. They only see responsibility for their own enrichment, their own power and their own selfish desires.
This change goes from the President downwards. Leaders in politics have never been worse, leaders in business at all levels have never been worse, and human nature has never been worse in my lifetime. At some point life left me behind in this respect, but there was no way I was ever going to follow the wrong direction.
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
My son came round the other day and he was telling us about this programme or podcast that he had seen. It was a thought experiment regarding vehicles. Basically, the speaker was imagining a world where the electric vehicle was the only option and someone was proposing a petrol or diesel driven vehicle. It would become very clear very quickly what an appalling invention was being proposed.
The Internal Combustion Engine would be associated with pollution, destruction of the environment in countless areas through the requirement to drill into the ground and sea and, as a side issue, be the cause of wars and territorial disputes in countries like Venezuela, Iran and Greenland, to take three random examples, where spurious reasons for taking over a territory might be given by a greedy super power intent on profiting from a huge amount of oil lying in the ground.
The first attempts to produce commercial electric vehicles were patented in the late 19th century and Andreas Flocken is credited with building the first proper road going electric vehicle in 1888. Many other areas of life happily relied on electricity to run things. Electricity was used in trains both underground and overground from the same time and are still in use today. Why didn’t it work? Well, the original batteries were fine for the shorter trips favoured at the start of the 20th century and were in fact more reliable than the fuel in petrol driven cars. Unfortunately, people started to want to drive longer distances and neither electric nor petrol vehicles had the infrastructure needed to support them. So a choice had to be made, and to the extreme detriment of the environment petrol stations rather than charging points were chosen.
Money talks as they say, and the oil based motor industry paid off more politicians than the electric equivalent. If the reverse had been the case we would be living in a much better, cleaner and more peaceful world. The Infernal Combustion Engine (the typo is deliberate by the way!) has been nothing but a disaster for our world and it should never have been invented.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 