Warwick Cairns is a neighbour of mine and the author of two very funny books on very different subjects. Despite the fact that he lives just a couple of minutes from my house I interviewed him by email. Here is the result.
SP: As you know, your book sparked quite a bit of debate on this blog. What has been the general reaction so far?
WC: It’s almost invariably along the lines of ‘Do you know, I’ve got a bit of a thing about all this Health & Safety nonsense myself – I mean, honestly, it’s ridiculous. When I was young, I…” and then you get a story about the stuff they got up to, which, if you let your children do anything remotely like it, would see you end up in court or on the front pages of the newspapers, or both.
Best one so far was a man at my work who told his mum, at the age of eight, that he wanted to go to Holland for the day with his friend. So she said ‘Alright, dear’ and when the day came, saw them off to the station with their ferry tickets. And then made tea for them whan they got back that evening.
Compare and contrast with what happened to Lenore Skenazy, a journalist in New York who wrote this year about letting her son make his own way home from Bloomingdales on the Subway, and ended up reviled as ‘The Worst Mom in America.’
SP: You mention a remarkable chap by the name of Squire John Mytton in your book. Care to tell us a bit about him?
WC: There are risk-takers in this world, and there are foolhardy risk-takers. And then there was Squire Mytton, who was far, far beyond foolhardy, and who in addition was blessed, or cursed, with endless free time and – until he squandered it all – an enormous fortune with which to indulge every hare-brained idea that came into his head. These ideas tended to revolve around endangering his own life and the lives of his companions in ever more outlandish ways.
On the hunting field, he would ride his horse at impossible jumps to see what happened. What happened, generally, was that he would come off, often breaking a rib or two in the process, and then get up and carry on as if nothing had happened. But that never seemed to put him off of doing it the next time.
He loved to frighten his friends, too – inviting them over for dinner once and turning up in full hunting-kit, mounted on the back of a particularly large and bad-tempered bear. As they dived under the tables and out of the windows in panic, he shouted ‘Tally Ho!’ and dug his spurs into the bear, which promptly turned round and bit a lump out of his leg. He also invited the local parson and doctor to dinner on another occasion but ambushed them on the way, dressed as a highwayman and shouting ‘Stand and deliver’ as he fired his pistols over the terrified man’s head.
This way of living tends to take its toll and he ended his days in 1834 at the age of 42 in a debtor’s prison in Southwark, a shuffling, round-shouldered shadow of his former self.
SP: Was there one statistic or fact that particularly struck you when researching the book?
WC: Yes – in an age where we’re all so paranoid about letting our children go out to play, it would take the average child 200,000 years to be abducted by a stranger. And even then the chances are you’d get them back alive and well within 24 hours. It’s not that bad things never happen: it’s just that the fear of them has got all out of proportion.
SP: What is your attitude towards danger/safety in your own life? How much risk do you take?
WC: I’d say I’m a cautious risk-taker.
By that, I mean I take quite a lot of physical risks in life, but I do it in a really cautious way.
Because of the sports I do, and how often I do them, I’d say that more or less every day I take risks that frighten me.
Until I started writing this down I’ve never thought about it in quite that way, or how odd it sounds, but that’s how it is.
I’m a skateboarder (at forty-six years old) and I do what’s known as ‘vert skating’ which is the sort of thing Tony Hawk does, only not as good. I don’t mean travelling around Ireland with a fridge – rather I mean riding those 12-foot high halfpipes with vertical walls and doing tricks at the top. I do that about 4 or 5 days a week, in my lunch hour, and at the weekends I either skate some more or go mountain-biking – I’m into jumps and drops and BMX-style tricks.
The point is, I want to be still doing them both at a reasonably high level by the time I qualify for my pension, when I’m 65. So I need to stay in one piece. Because of this I always wear safety-kit at the skatepark, even when no-one else does, and I always learn tricks gradually, step by step, and work out all the things that could potentially go wrong at every stage, and how to get out of them unharmed.
When I do come up against an all-or-nothing challenge that I can’t approach in a gradual way I tend to run through all the possibilities in my head over and over again and I agonise about it for ages. The first time I rode off of a big drop on my bike it took me the best part of a year to get myself into the right state of mind and feel confident enough to go for it. I used to wake up in the night worrying about it. But then, when you make it, the feeling is amazing.
But I don’t believe in trusting to luck or chance where risk is concerned – I believe in going into things prepared for all eventualities, with your eyes wide open, and knowing that you’ve done everything you can to stack the odds heavily in your favour. It doesn’t always work – I have had a few broken bones and I’ve been knocked out a couple of times, but I’ve learnt how to fall, over the years, and I generally come out of things OK.
But I really don’t do ‘shut your eyes and hope for the best’ risks - I’d never consider taking up smoking, for example.
SP: And does that attitude change when it comes to your kids?
WC: Not massively so, actually.
My wife and I have different approaches to this. I want them to have more freedom and take more risks; she’s not so sure. And probably with good reason. On the two occasions that my eldest daughter has been taken to hospital with injuries, it’s been on my watch. Once they had to stitch the top of her finger back on.
So having the two of us with different approaches is probably for the best: I think that’s what mums and dads are for.
SP: I also reviewed your first book, About The Size Of It, on the blog. What got yo interested in measurement?
WC: You’d probably never guess from reading the book, but it was an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss – which sounds like a really odd reason to write a humorous book about measurement, of all things.
But it was around the time that it had been decided that we were going to have to stop buying our apples in pounds and ounces and start buying them in kilogrammes. What got me was the fact that the measures we have in this country are one of the few remaining living links with our most distant past. Not just the world of Shakespeare and Chaucer, not just with the time of the Romans, who gave us the Mille Passus, or mile, and the Libra Pondo, or pound (still symbolized by the letters lb), but with the farmers and pastoralists of the late stone age, who measured the height of their cattle with their hands, and the length of things with their feet or their herding-sticks (the word ‘yard,’ by the way, means ‘stick’ and comes from the same root as ‘goad’). And I could not understand, still cannot understand, how we can throw this all away so lightly. And I’ll never bring myself to ask for ‘a hundred grammes’ of anything in a shop, not unless I’m in France or somewhere.
So there’s a subtext there, beneath what is to all intents and purposes a light, quirky book about a geeky subject: it is also, in my mind at least, an elegy for a lost world.
I don’t know whether it’s something about writing that makes you feel like this, but when you look at the membership list of the British Weights and Measures Association, which is the save-Britain’s-measures organizations, you do see rather a lot of writers there. A few that jump out at me: JK Rowling, Jilly Cooper, Dick Francis, the late George McDonald Fraser, Alexander McCall Smith, the Iggulden brothers, Richard Mabey, Richard Ingrams, Candida Lycett-Green, Keith Waterhouse…
SP: Care to furnish us with a stunning nugget of measurement information?
WC: A weird one for you. The Harvard Bridge, in Cambridge Massachusetts, is paved with concrete slabs which are all one Smoot in width. The Smoot is five feet seven inches precisely, and is the height of a man – which is to say, not a man in general but a particular man by the name of Oliver R Smoot. Back in the 1950s, Smoot was used, as part of a student fraternity initiation, as a human ruler to measure the bridge. Smoot was chosen for the job because he was the shortest – which would make the task longer and more arduous – and because he had the silliest name, which was already considered sound a bit like an obscure unit of some sort, anyway. So they took him out at the dead of night, laid him down on the ground and began the task of painting the whole bridge from beginning to end with ‘Smoot-marks’. It trook them all night and 364.4 Smoots “plus epsilon”. But the incident caught people’s attention and became part of local folklore, to the extent that when plans were submitted in the 1980s to resurface the bridge, local people and institutions – including the Boston Police department – petitioned for the Smoot-marks to be preserved. The council ended up casting them in concrete and building them into the fabric of the bridge. As a postscript, if you go to your computer and look at Google Earth, you’ll see that you are able to measure the distance between any two places in the world in miles, kilometres – and Smoots.
SP: We both live in Windsor and will be appearing at the Windsor Festiva in September. What is your favourite Windsor haunt?
WC: It would have to be the little skatepark in Vansittart Road Park.
SP: What are you working on next?
WC: I’m working on a proposal for a book on a theory I have about human nature, and why some people are driven by pleasure and others are driven by duty, why some people like to stay in bed of a morning and others think you ought to be up and about, and how the two sorts really don’t understand each other. I’ve been talking to evolutionary psychologists, archaeologists, anthropologists – all sorts of ologists.
SP: And finally, all guests here are asked to recommend a favourite book. WHat's yours?
WC: I’ll go for Arabian Sands
Warwick's amusing take on the history of weights and measures, About the Size of It
Quote:
why some people are driven by pleasure and others are driven by duty, why some people like to stay in bed of a morning and others think you ought to be up and about, and how the two sorts really don’t understand each other.
End Quote
Do make sure and ask all those intelligent people--I'm quite sure that the Neandrathals are still around. Just one more category for you to explore, but honestly if you think about it, you know you've met some.
Posted by: Maria | July 15, 2008 at 04:03 PM
The thoughts that this post brought to my mind: I am precisely one Smoot tall; and my grandfather, god bless him, broke his ankle skateboarding when he was 74. He wasn't even attempting a jump or anything, just came to grief over an uneven paving stone and landed badly. What grieved him most about this was that he wouldn't look his best at his Lodge's ladies' night: he was the Grand Master, and my grandmother was long-suffering as he danced every ladies' night away with all the pretty young things.
And now I shall go out and buy the book!
Jane
Posted by: Jane Smith | July 16, 2008 at 06:52 PM
I had heard of the bridge in Boston being measured in Smoots, but I am immensely heartened to discover that Google Earth has not only heard of Smoots, but embraced the concept to such an extent. There is hope for the preservation of eccentricity, after all.
I very much enjoyed your contribution to the Firestation Book Swap chit-chat and your books are on my wish-list, with which I prod my children as my birthday approaches...
Posted by: Pauline | April 13, 2010 at 12:24 AM