The sun sets behind Sonesta Beach.

Floating in the dead sea at 5.30am after a night in a coach, as we travelled towards Jersualem.

Tourists at the Wailing Wall.

Tiny door at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Affable Palestinians in peaceful Bethlehem.

Government offices, overlooking the National Museum in Cairo, burnt by protesters during the Arab Spring.

The Nile, the only peaceful part of bustling Cairo.

Our Felucca Captain and First Mate take us to the other side of the Nile.

Sherief, our excellent tour guide, obliges us with photos posing in front of the Pyramids of Giza.

The view of the three large Pyramids.

Up close they are huge.

So many tourists being haggled and hassled.

Cairo itself is a mess of half-finished buildings.

Constant gridlock, complete disregard for traffic laws. Crazy.

A view over Petra, a bizarre necropolis carved out of sandstone.

A brief visit to Aqaba, in prosperous Jordan.

Then back to the immaculate gardens of our resort . . .

… in stark contrast to the entropy of the Sinai desert.

One final trip to snorkel in the sea and rest in the beach.

Thank you, Egypt!

Why responsive?

The business case for going responsive is clear: 20% of our visitors are using a mobile device. We could have created a stripped down mobile site or built an app, but both options are much more expensive. The former means maintaining a separate codebase and the latter involves difficult choices about what devices to support and how much time to devote to maintenance.

Where to start?

Luke Wrobleski has argued that responsive designs should be built mobile first. By starting from the smallest canvas, you are forced to focus on the what message you want each page to get across. You design for users rather than the space. Mobile users are treated more respectfully: their time and bandwidth is precious. By starting with mobile, you put user experience at the core of your design.

Unlike most people who undertake responsive redesigns, I didn’t start with a blank canvas. Before I was hired, SPT had commissioned wireframes, mockups, and HTML from D8, a really great design consultancy in Glasgow. My role was odd one, consisting of guiding D8, writing the content for the site, and building the CMS. I was, however, happy to get the desktop site finished before beginning the responsive version, if only as a point of reference.

Comment it out and start again

Despite having pre-existing CSS to work with, my first action in making the site responsive was to comment out all the old CSS and create a LESS file. (If you want to get started with LESS, I recommend using Andy Clarke’s 320andup framework, which includes some really useful mixins). Don’t worry about breaking anything. Indeed, it is good to break things to understand that they do. For instance, D8 used the Meyer reset, I replaced this with Nicholas Gallagher’s normalize.css and some things broke but overall it reduced the amount of CSS I had to write.

My process from here was to get get the main page elements working – container, header, navigation, main section, sidebar, footer – using a semantic grid system to take care of the percentages for the columns. Everywhere D8 had used ‘width’, I replaced it with ‘max-width’, meaning that the site looked virtually identical to the desktop version in no time, especially once I started reintroducing styles that I had commented out, rewriting them for efficiency and sustainability.

Display:none

Using display:none is bad in theory, as it means you are reducing the experience of the mobile user. As a pragmatist, I am happy to use it on secondary content until I have got the main functionality of the site working. It is a question of resources and using display:none can really help in the early stages.

When it comes to main content you can’t use display:none. The things that broke most egregiously at 320 pixels were tables and tabs. For wide tables (e.g. Bus timetables), I used Chris Coyier’s excellent CSS for converting table cells to block elements. For tabs, I shrunk the text size and padding, ensuring that they were still clickable with even the fattest of fingers.

Polyfills

Jamie Boyd, the front end developer who wrote the HTML/CSS for Macdonald Hotel site, recommends presenting a static site to those using IE8 and below, but I ran into no problems using polyfills.

Debugging

I debugged the site completely at 320 pixels, then at 480, then at 600, then at 768, then finally at 1024. This mobile first process of debugging, checking at all the breakpoints and fixing as issues as appropriate was much quicker than I expected it to be.

Conclusion

Responsive web design is not the only solution to the problem of multiple devices in a world where technology is constantly changing, but it’s the best we have at the moment.

Over the past few years, Facebook has gone from being just another social network to being so ubiquitous that it has become a verb, like ‘to text’ or ‘to email’. Some are betting that ‘to Facebook’ will replace both. The reasons for its success are manifold: it is simple, usable, fast, and, crucially, made permission-based photo sharing easy to set up. Unlike MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, and Bebo, this allowed Facebook broke the age barrier. It is photos that tease the social anxieties of teenagers, tickle our voyeuristic, vicarious tendencies, and ensnare parents and grandparents with the promise of seeing their children and grandchildren at play.

We are living in an age of accelerating addictiveness and Facebook the crack cocaine of websites. It is compulsive: rewarding short, frequent visits with ‘likes’, pokes, comments, event invites, phototagging, and chat. Some have reported pangs of withdrawal as the fear of missing out on something takes hold. You become conscious of an addiction when it starts having negative consequences; people drink a lot of tea, but view see themselves as being addicted. What are the negative effects of Facebook? For me, it was the consciousness that the content was so banal that I felt myself become cretinized. There is only so many times you can see a ‘funny’ video or a witty bon mot about some ephemeral news story before you want to poke your own eyes out. I like my friends, but found their Facebook output depressingly low on substance.

For people like me, regular internet users since the mid-Nineties, Facebook represents a refutation of the idea that you can be something more than your meatspace identity. All those avatars and nom de plume were replaced, in Facebook-world, with the stolidity of your first and last name. Arguably this is the great advance of Facebook over other social networks. The dream of Zuckerberg and his cohorts is that by having everything you do attributable to one identity, people will be more responsible in what they say rather than hiding behind the mask of anonymity. This is very useful for advertisers and potentially useful for human beings. Anyone who has ever been abused by a pseudonymous forum member or commenter will know that this is a good thing. But what happens when that so-called identity becomes a vivid part of yourself. What happens when its tendrils wrap themselves around your conception of who you are with all your likes and dislikes. What happens when this self-conception starts to limit possibilities? If a person falls in a forest and there is no one to say “Lol” do they really fall at all? The more you write about yourself, the more imprisoned within your ego you become. A personality is nothing more than a collection of reactions by other people. Is the person who is reacted against more real than the person who is ignored?

On day two of my experiment, I was hit by a feeling of dread. It was as if I had no identity, I was a free-floating collection of atoms with nothing to confirm who and why and what I was. And yet, by limiting the amount of information I consumed, my thoughts were clearer and I am generally more relaxed. It makes you wonder how much mental energy goes on keeping up with the social whirl.The longer I remain deactivated, the more incredulous I was that I visited Facebook at all. When you give something up there is a point after which it is so insignificant that you you wonder why you gave it up in the first place. The anxiety of missing out on events and the validation from having something click “Like” on your post, didn’t matter a jot.

If the noise of Facebook is the bottomless banality of Farmville, music videos, and checking in, what is the signal? What is the good stuff? It seems to me that the good stuff is the sense of human connection, it is a one-to-many communication device that doesn’t feel completely impersonal. Alas, on Facebook few appeals to the many are felt as personal: it is spam, boasting, teasing, provoking, or just banal. And, it seems to me, that because Facebook is used when we want to procrastinate, it is banality that is rewarded with comments and ‘likes’, further discouraging thought or beauty.

Facebook updates (photos, notes, links, videos) are like crisps, you can keep eating them as long as they are there. If, in the middle of a packet of crisps, you found a steak you would throw it away, it is inappropriate.
*

My first full day after having given up Facebook proved one thing – and that is that the human mind is capable of finding distraction everywhere. Distraction is the thing that takes you away from the moment. When you are in the moment, there is nothing like it. Distraction is the thing that takes you out of the moment, preventing you from embracing it, telling you to look elsewhere for enlightenment.

*

Facebook is like capitalism in the sense that it can consume everything you throw at it (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal updates), but cannot be consumed (due to the walled garden). It is the end of the internet. Douglas Ruskoff, an early internet pioneer and prophet, is misguided when he says that Facebook will fade as the cool kids leave, just as other social networks faded in the past. Unlike the other social networks, this one has gone way beyond cool kids into the office and the retirement home.

*
Without Facebook, life is quiet; you can concentrate on things without the tyrannical need to check for reactions, events, happenings. I no longer felt alienated from the modern world and its celebration of tittle tattle. I found that I was more willing to engage in one-to-one conversations, which are far more rewarding than one-to-many. One-to-many feels like spam to me, however cutesy the wording is.

*
Trouble is, if you’re going to stop Facebooking there are a lot of other silly online things that you need to stop doing at the same time. Reading newspapers (and especially newspaper comments), watching YouTube videos, going on Twitter, or checking email.

*

Completely removing yourself from Facebook is an extremist, scorched earth policy, which implies that you are incapable of moderation. The people I admire most on Facebook are those who are on Facebook but don’t use Facebook. They understand that it is a fact of modern life — like television and the mobile phone — but don’t need to check it compulsively or at all. And so, for the last few days of the experiment, I reactivated my account in order to see if I was capable of this kind of self-discipline.

At its best, Facebook is just a set of tools: an events manager, email without spam, a nice way of keeping in touch with friends and family, a means to connect to websites without being forced to fill in yet another registration form. Ignore the relentless banality of the status update, resist the urge to observe the drama of everyday life, and it might even be useful.

This post assumes that you have a self-installed WordPress blog and know how to install and navigate to plugins. If you don’t, check out the Codex.

It uses a WordPress plugin called Redirection, which allows you to create quick 301 redirects like so:

For The Spirit of the Staircase I created a fake download mp3 link which redirected to my real mp3 link. You can use this fake link and the podcast will download as normal, but with the advantage of getting statistics.

It seems obvious in retrospect, but hopefully this might help out one or two people who have the same problem. Whether it is healthy to be overly concerned with stats is another matter.

Gamification is the use of game mechanics in non-game situations and has swiftly become the big tech story over the last 12 months. Whether it is the badges and leaderboards of Foursquare and Gowalla or the statistical feedback of Nike+, game elements are everywhere.

As anyone who has ever lost an entire day playing Super Mario knows, games are astonishingly good at creating flow experience. Addictive and absorbing, it is no great shock to learn that companies would try to use their magic to ensnare customers. Thus far their efforts have been embarrassingly rudimentary, focused on extrinsic rewards rather than intrinsic motivation (a strategy that, as Daniel Pink has highlighted, is counter-productive in the long run).

This post is an attempt to imagine a truly compelling gamification of everyday life, explaining how it might be implemented and what hurdles would need to be overcome.

Life as a Role-Playing Game

First we need to select the genre of game most appropriate to everyday life. Sports simulations are too narrow, puzzle games too banal, platform games too simplistic, only role-playing games (RPGs) provide the necessary combination of challenge, narrative, and character development to be comparable to everyday life.

Characters in RPGs typically have attributes such as strength, intelligence, and ability to cast spells. These skills ground you in the game much in the same way as your abilities and qualifications ground you in life. By undertaking tasks defined by your current context you can increase these attributes and level up, helping you to progress in the game and defeat more challenging adversaries.

It’s not hard to imagine setting yourself life goals in the same way, using data to assess your progress. For instance, I really want to write and release an iOS app. Undertaking this goal requires various sub-goals to be completed: finish reading books on iOS development, learn the basics of Objective-C, sketch user journeys, write content, designing icons, and test. Completing each sub-goal, you could note down an increase in your skill levels, giving you the feedback to confidently progress towards achieving the overall mission.

The main obstacle for gamification is the inherent subjectivivty. In a video game you have an objective goal (rescue the Princess, defeat the big boss) and objective feedback on your progress, performance and abilities. It may be okay if your goals are compelling and achievable, but the issue of feedback is more problematic, particularly when you are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect (i.e. the beginner tendency to over-estimate competency).

One area where feedback is improving is in the field of health and fitness. Aza Raskin, whose Behaviour Change Checklist talk is essential listening, believes that health feedback will be the next iPod. According to Raskin, devices such as Nike+ and FitBit are just the beginning: soon we will be able to track the number of chews per spoonful, the amount of calories we consume, and our adrenalin levels. Alas, getting this right is still a few years off, so in the meantime we will need to abstract and assess our attributes subjectively.

Character Attributes

To help assess how I am doing, I’ve outlined five universal attributes that make a character:

• Health (speed, strength, alertness, power, stress levels, endurance, recovery speed, constitution). You have nothing if you don’t have your health. This is the foundation of any attempt to achieve anything. You may not need to be strong or quick, but if you are stressed or tired you will find everything much harder than it should be.
• Skill (mastery of a subject, dexterity, learning, magic abilities). Games are compelling because they demonstrate — with clear feedback — how practice makes you better. If you think talent is genetic you won’t practice and won’t improve.
• Intelligence (inspiration, wit, wisdom, focus, motivation). You can have all the skill in the world, but if you can’t focus it and stay motivated, it will come to nothing. Intelligence is what helps you to assess whether what you are doing is paying off.
• Presence (relationships, rapport, charisma, luck, appearance). The social element part of life is not an optional add-on. Recent gamification efforts have concentrated on social networking, realising how much people are motivated by impressing their peers.
• Wealth (money, social capital). Ability to buy resources is as important in games as it is in life and cannot be ignored.

To know how well I am progressing towards my goal of building an iPhone app, I could give myself ratings (out of 100?) for each of the above on a weekly basis. This would allow me to make informed decisions about what to do next.

Compelling Gamification Principles

But is this enough? To make life more game-like, here are some more potentially useful principles:

• Be Playful. Games encourage an iterative process of trying, failing, trying, improving. Failure is feedback, so don’t give up.
• Avoid extrinsic rewards. Rewards, as Daniel Pink’s book Drive shows, can diminish performance. Do things because they are valuable and inherently worthwhile for maximum motivation.
• Responsiveness. Learn when to persist and when to try another tack by assessing your state.
• Increase challenge gradually. Gain confidence and increase challenge incrementally.
• Apply rules. Give yourself behavioural limits (e.g. drink water rather than cola), but don’t be too hard on yourself if you go over it.
• Add time pressure. Injury time in a tight game of football provides added enjoyment and urgency. Use something like the pomodoro technique to create the illusion of urgency.
• Create a story. Make sub-goals part of a journey. Focus on small steps, not giant leaps.
• Get social feedback. Present your work to your peers and get them to tell you exactly what they think, thank the people who help you.

Potential Problems with Gamification

Gamification is not without its critics. Here is a list of potential pitfalls:

• Addiction/compulsion. The power of gamification lies in its appeal to the unconscious, tapping into evolutionary centres of fear and reward in order to keep people engaged. It is not a rational endeavour and a gamified experience could easily become compulsive.
• Lack of narrative. In real life, the narrative is rarely so clear and you only get one life with which to complete your entire mission. Failure has a high cost.
• Predictable rewards. Variable rewards are far more compelling than predictable rewards. You need to think more along the lines of Habit Judo than Progress Wars.
• Reliance on extrinsic rewards. If something is intrinsically rewarding surely it doesn’t need gamifcation. Daniel Pink shows that extrinsic rewards actually diminish motivation for creative work.
• Games are unforced. Video games are always voluntary and separate from life. Games in life, especially at work – however enjoyable – often feel compelled.
• Statistics encourage cheating. As Adam Curtis showed in The Trap, target driven statistics encourage people to cheat.
• The Hawthorne Effect. Named after a study of an American factory where it was discovered that no matter what change was made by consultants (more light, less light, various reward schemes), productivity levels always went up before returning to normal levels after a few weeks. It wasn’t that the changes were especially effective or ineffective, rather it was simply being statistically monitored in a novel that appeared to improve output.
• Tracking data is drag. In a game, the computer tracks progress automatically. By contrast, self-tracking means a huge amount of admin.
• Fiction. In games, fiction creates space for the imagination. In real life, embracing fiction is considered a psychopathy.
• Dependency. What if gamification becomes a crutch. As someone who uses the Pomodoro technique I sometimes worry that I actually need it to do work.
• Reality is harsh. In life there are no tutorials, no pause, no save, no solution for every puzzle, no fair fight, no extra lives, no control.

Despite these issues, there is no way to know whether it will work without trying it out. This is precisely what I am going to do over the next month.
I will let you know how I get on.

Further Reading

• Johan Huizinga is the pioneering author of Homo Ludens. All of culture is an expression of the will to play. We are homo ludens. What he identifies is that play always has rules. I like his line that we prefer the cheat to the spoilsport. The former respects the illusion of order.
• Roger Caillois, author of Man, Games, and Play.
• Sebastian Deterding is a German academic whose presentations on Gamification give philosophical depth to the current discussion.
• Stephen P. Anderson writes on user experience.
• Jane McGonigal is the author of Reality is Broken, used her idea of SuperBetter to recover from serious head injury.
• Gabe Zichermann is at the forefront of Gamification for marketing purposes. His blog highlights the latest developments. He has recently been criticised by Deterding and Kathy Sierra.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creator of the key concept of Flow.
• Nadya Direkova‘s Game On presentation from SXSW provides a foundation for thinking about using game mechanics in websites.
• Buster Benson, self-tracker and creator of Health Month.
• Aza Raskin, author of an excellent presentation called The Behaviour Change Checklist: Down with Gameification Feedback needs to be immediate if gamification is to occur. You can’t do public health gamification because for the most part people don’t think of the consequences of what they eat and smoke and drink as being immediate. There tends to be a gap between the two.

Gamified Sites and Apps

• Habit Judo, a valiant-but-flawed attempt to introduce variable rewards into forming habits.
• Epic Win. Imagine if you could attack your to do list with as much verve as you attack space invaders? This is the thinking behind Epic Win, a role-playing game where you get rewarded for completing real world tasks.
• Scavngr, challenges across the city.
• StikK, combines habit changing with fear of losing money.
• Gowalla, location based journeymaker.
• Foursquare, visit cafes to become the mayor.
• Progress Wars shows Skinnerian gamification with no intermittent variable reward.
• Nike+, track your running and get feedback.
• Health Month, gamified web app to get people to stick to habits.
• Mind Bloom attempts to get users to see their life as a tree that they maintain online.

1. Turn off all intrusive notifications
Your most precious asset is time and attention. Every notification erode attention and takes up a moment of your time, preventing your from getting into a state of flow. Instead, assign time one a day to batch process email. No email requires immediate acknowledgment.

2. Treat all random inputs as email.
Facebook is an inbox, Twitter is an inbox, text messaging is an inbox. Just because one of them is full of nice messages from your friends and other has requests from your boss, doesn’t mean they don’t both take up time and attention. Reduce the number of inputs to a minimum in order to reduce friction. Forward everything to one account and respond there.

3. Don’t look in your inboxes unless you have time to process them
It is the easiest thing in the world to check stuff, somewhat more difficult to something useful with it. The variable reward addiction of email and Facebook, makes you think there will be something fun or sexy or exciting in your inbox. So you keep checking, hoping for something fun, when — disaster! — there’s something horrible. Worse still, you haven’t got time to deal with it now. Stop checking for the sake of it. Don’t increase your expectational debt.

4. Process inboxes properly
When you do have time to look at your inboxes, process it properly. You can do one of four things: 1) delete 2) archive 3) reply immediately, or 4) reply later (archive it and add a reminder to your tickler file). Insist on the preciousness of your time when dealing with timewasters. If you can’t do something, just say ‘no’.

5. Process items one at a time.
I go through my emails systematically from the top (freshest first) and blitz them one by one. It is easy to cherry pick the nice ones and be left with the nasty ones, but this increases guilt and resistance.

6. Overcome resistance
Do you ever have an email that you can’t bear to look at because it sets off feelings of guilt and shame? Perhaps you have let someone down. Perhaps you haven’t met your own expectations in some way. Either way, you are repressing negative emotions by avoiding the dreaded email. You will do anything rather than address the issue. The solution? Just do it. It will never be as bad as you think.

7. Unsubscribe to all product emails
The noise of product emails is not worth the trouble it takes to delete them. The idea that you have to know about a feature immediately is spurious.

8. Use a text replacer
Use a text replacement tool for frequently used replies. Even simple examplea like “cch = Cheers, Neil” will save hours of your precious time. I use Texter on PC and TextExpander on Mac.

9. Write clearly and simply
Think of email as if it were text message. Be direct, clear. Do you need to say ‘Dear’ and ‘Yours sincerely’ every time? No! Email should be free of fluff. Say what you need to say, no more.

* Not 100% sure how things got complicated but this post offers some explanation: the publishers wanted a book on email, he wanted to write a book on the nature of being.

Bonjour Laziness by Corinne Maier – 100101
I seem to always read books on idling when I am not in work and not very stressed. It is completely the wrong mind-set and I inevitably found this stupid and banal.

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp – 100103
Excellent creative biography by a New York choreographer, inspired me to create my own web app (though not enough to ship).

What about China? by Alastair Sawdays et al – 100111
Joined the Green Party and read this to defend myself against spurious arguments. Can’t remember any of them now.

No Logo by Naomi Klein – 100207
More relevant than ever, but the message is lost on me who tries to avoid consuming wherever possible (unless it is made by Apple).

The Smashing Book by Smashing Magazine – 100219
Bought this at work to support Smashing Magazine website, nothing here that isn’t either obvious or more concisely written at the site.

The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge – 100225
Fascinating account of how our mental habits create who we are. Especially good bit on the neurologically slippery slope of pornography addiction.

100 Years of Menswear by Cally Blackman – 100307
Picture book with David Bowie wearing a yellow suit on the cover. Lost my dandyist inclinations this year, despite growing a moustache.

Nothing to be frightened of by Julian Barnes – 100316
Bleak, but relatively fearless book on death. As slick as Barnes’s other books.

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson – 100319
Short, salutary book on work and companies. Forceful writing that tells you to drop anything you don’t care about.

The Invisible Hand by Adam Smith – 100329
Got this Penguin Short from the Spectator in the airport on holiday. Love the descriptions of early factory work.

Tenerife by Brian and Eileen Anderson – 100403
Tourist guide read whilst sitting next to the swimming pool in Tenerife. Didn’t inspire me to explore the island much, alas.

Die Trying by Lee Child – 100411
My annual Lee Child was a bit soppy for my liking but had its moments of Die Hard style heroism.

Quirkology by Richard Wiseman – 100419
Diverting account of various quiky experiments, such as trying to find the world’s funniest joke. Not as good as 59 Seconds.

The Situationist International by Simon Ford – 100426
Comprehensive account of the delusions suffered by Guy Debord and others.

Kick Ass by Mark Millar – 100516
Read one bathtime. Better than the film, mainly because it hasn’t got the dull Mr. Sam Taylor-Wood in it.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis – 100518
Lyrical Amis novel set in Italy in the Seventies. More like Experience, his memoir, than the Rachel Papers.

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett – 100524
Became obsessed with the Seventies after watching the 1974 election on BBC Parliament. This was a marvellous companion piece.

Tribes by Seth Godin – 100526
For all his admirable insights, almost everything Godin writes is immediately forgettable. I don’t know why.

101 Things I learned at Architecture School by Matthew Frederick – 100702
Beautifully illustrated little hardback full of gnomic advice for architects.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – 100613
Read on the train to Oban for my summer holiday. Protagonist is a mess. Reminded me of a friend’s livejournal.

In a strange land by Eric Gill – 100616
Weird collection of essays, mixing the radical and the Catholic.

Tour of the Western Islands by Samuel Johnson – 100618
Enjoyable romp around Scotland.

Whoops by John Lanchester – 100626
Saw him speak at the Glasgow Book Festival and enjoyed this history of the Credit Crunch.

Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil – 100706
Terribly bland picture book that would work a million times better as a website.

On Writing by Stephen King – 100722
Never read King, but might do after this thoughtful account of the creative practice.

The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd – 100731
Time, according to David Bowie, flexes like a whore and falls wanking to the floor. Zimbardo and Boyd disagree, explaining that it is the only thing that really exists and to balance your perspective of past and future in order to succeed and enjoy life.

The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe – 100805
I read Coe’s biography of BS Johnson in 2009 and thought I should read some of his fiction. I found this story of being a teenager in the Seventies both addictive and affecting, so much so that I immediately read . . .

The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe – 100808
This is the sequel to the Rotters’ Club, set when the protagonists had grown up. Not as good, but still interesting.

Linchpin by Seth Godin – 100819
Don’t be controlled by your lizard brain if you want to be teacher’s pet at work.

HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith – 100924
Short but entertainingly odd book on HTML5.

Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich – 101001
Intriguing book about the circle jerk of the self-help industry written by a woman who survived cancer without turning into a positive-thinking moron.

Cock & Bull by Will Self – 101023
I love rereading and should do it more often. As a teenager, I loved Cock, but now I much prefer Bull for its tender descriptions and narrative vim.

The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe – 101031
Predictable, mechanical plotting couldn’t quite spoil this outlandish and refreshingly bizarre story.

Timescape by Gregory Benford – 101110
I love the Gollancz SF Masterworks series and this novel is a worthy addition. Kind of loses its way in the second half, but the dystopia of the first half is remarkable.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud – 101110
A mindblowing book, an astonishing philosophical work on comics and graphic novels, that should be read by everyone.

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe – 101121
The least endearing of Coe’s novels, a heavy-handed social satire of the Thatcher era.

A Study in Scarlet by Ian Edginton – 101127
Lazy adaptation of Conan Doyle’s creation, especially so after the sprightly BBC specials and the less sprightly Guy Ritchie film.

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff – 101127
I read the Tao Te Ching on an almost weekly basis but was awed by this telling.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman – 101128
Plays upon the idea that Jesus the man is different to Christ the inspiration behind the evil institution of the Christian church. I always liked Bible stories, so I was entertained without ever really engaging with it on a theological level.

Maus Part 1 by Art Spiegelman – 101204
A brilliant, self-conscious graphic novel about the holocaust.

Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson – 101208
The first half is an inspirational portrait of Bohemia, showing why it is so appealing and so necessary to flout bourgeois conventions (they are idiotic). The second half is rather feminist and less inspirational, but not bad. Not sure how many times I can read about how bad Augustus John is at doing the washing up.

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge – 101209
Took me half a year to read at work and I was thoroughly jaded by the end of it. Great interviews with the Xerox Parc team at the start of the book.

Not Buying It by Judith Levine – 101212
Robert Wringham interviewed Levine about this book for the first issue of the New Escapologist, so when I saw it in the charity shop I thought I should check it out. I wish I hadn’t. It’s really bad. The author seems stuck inside a caricature of a neurotic New York Jew and thus was incapable of learning anything from her year of not buying anything but so-called essentials.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle – 101214
Heard of him via Oliver Burkeman’s column in the Guardian. Apparently he is the leader of a massive, Oprah Winfrey-inspired cult. You wouldn’t know it from his simple instruction to just live in the now (it is the only thing that exists). Interesting to read after having read The Time Paradox.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee – 101218
I read this too quickly, incapable of stopping even as I stayed up well past my bed time. He is the consummate comedian, a genius of the form, and blessed with integrity as well.

Top Five Books I’ve Read This Year In No Particular Order
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett
The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee

Next year I am going to try and read more classics, such as:
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
The Ego and its Own by Max Stirner
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

I’ll let you know how I get on.

The question is a way for the stand up to draw the audience into their world, creating some tension through random banter, but it has wider implications. The IT geeks and checkout girls aren’t just IT geeks and checkout girls; they are killing time and making money. Everyone is a million other things — the check out girl could be an artist or a seductress — but society only thinks about people in terms of money and time.

I asked my five year old nephew, what do you want to do? Not only did he not know, but he didn’t really understand the question. He was alive, he was being, he was existing, he was playing. Being alive was enough doing. You don’t need to do anything else. Just be. Move on. Be again. Don’t define yourself.

Of course, this doesn’t help when you’re chatting to someone at a party. The answer is crucial. Here you have to walk the line between impressing them and disappointing them. Do you go with what you do 9 to 5 or something you aspire to do? Maybe 1 hour a week you polish your novel. Characters are flat, it isn’t really working, but it forms a part of your identity. There’s something there, there’s some spark that makes you want to continue. Could you call yourself a novelist? No.

Nevertheless, it is nice to have that gap in the universe for spontaneity. People who overplan their lives are rarely happy. Time is only thing in the world that you can’t get back. What you’re doing now is what you should want to be doing.

For each of these, the answer is obviously ‘No’, but there are a few ambiguous propositions. Take alcohol, for instance. Drinking with friends is fun and a good way to bond, but is it worth the wasted hungover days, the destroyed neurons, and the liver damage? Perhaps teetotalism is the way forward.

Teetotalers fall into three distinct categories.

There are those who drank too much and have had to give it up, like Frank Skinner, Will Self, and Russell Brand, former addicts who fear that the smallest drop of alcohol will make them lose control and leave them in the gutter pawing over their shattered dreams.

The second type are those who haven’t got time for the impurity of alcohol for spiritual reasons: Tony Benn, Ian Paisley, and Tom Cruise fall into this camp.

The final type are those who want to be super productive and don’t want alcohol and the resultant hangovers getting in the way of doing stuff. Isaac Asimov, David Beckham, Steve Jobs, and Friedrich Nietzsche have given a pretty good account for themselves on this score. They realised that life is short and that they want to be sharp. Not for them the glass of red at dinner that blunts your conscious mind just enough to get you through an evening of trash television.

Alcohol numbs reality and I know from past experiments with teetotalism that after a month or so you reach new levels of clarity . . . and yet. And yet I can’t quite become teetotal. People in the pub are generally more full of bonhomie than those in cafes. The pub is a nice place to go. It is a brilliant way of sharing consciousness with other people. When we meet we are individuals, when we leave we are united.

The idea of the best stuff rising to the top is good in theory but in practice it is horribly skewed towards the mediocrity of the masses. Sure, if you are reaching out to — and have a relationship with — early adopting mavens you may do okay, but there is an awful lot of stuff out there and only a limited amount of time. When was the last time you clicked past the fourth or fifth page of Google search results? We scrape the surface, find something the approximates what we are looking for and then move on.

There used to be a time where websurfing was a voyage of discovery, where you could find new ways of thinking and carefully constructed essays on life. This is being replaced by skimming minutiae on Facebook and Twitter. Nobody is interested in the minutiae of your life, but given the choice between reading fluff and actually having to engage in something meaningful, they’ll take the fluff.