Michel de Montainge

Michel de Montaigne 

Michel de Montaigne is an old friend of mine. 

We were introduced back in 1960. My aunt Kay and her husband Henry had invited my brother and me to spend a fortnight with them on Scotland's 'Outer Isles'. We walked a lot during the day, enjoying the peaty hinterland of Lewis and the sandy 'machair' sward and the 'crottle'-covered, rocky, hills of Harris. After evening dinner, Henry amused himself with 'Les Essais de Montaigne'  in their archaic French of 1588. ***  I was thrilled to note how easy and succinct I found the old French.

Henry told us of this distinguished gentleman, active in the politics of Bordeaux, removing to his ancestral village and castle de Montaigne when the plague came to the city; troubled in later life from kidney stones, touring Europe from Spa to Spa searching for a cure. (Here Henry digressed to give his own opinion that drinking pure water was the best cure, and he described the terrible operation by which Samuel Pepys was successfully 'cut of the stone' in 1658.) He was called back from Italy when elected, in his absence, to be Mayor of Bordeaux, at the age of 48.

Montaigne, as a young boy, was brought up speaking Latin as first language. By strict order of his father, the servants and also his mother had to speak only Latin when around the boy. 

As a young man he enjoyed a deep comradeship with a brilliant poet and politician some four years his senior, with whom he delighted to converse. However, Boétie died (perhaps of the plague) at the age of 32 leaving Montaigne bereft. It is suggested that the honest, intimate, discursive, introspective as well as curious, wandering and learned writing of these essays evolved as a replacement for his conversations with Boétie. 

Inclined to solitude...

"In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments,........." [he retired to his tower with his books and his pen.]

The mature man showed fairness, inquisitiveness, great learning of the Latin and Greek writers who had come his way, and that rare ability called 'common sense'.  He was liked and trusted by both of the warring religious factions. He talked to seamen about Brazil, and to farmers about crops, 

But when I step back and consider Montaigne as a man and an intellect, I realise that there are also: Voltaire, Rousseau, Euler, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, JS Mill, John Keats, Walter Scott, not to mention Shakespeare. I suppose I would like to think I resemble Montaigne. Other heros (friends, companions) will appeal to other readers.

(*** Footnote. C.f. I'ay veu plusieurs de mon temps conuaincus par leur conscience retenir  . .X . . .(1588); with J'ai vu, de mon temps, nombre de gens, auxquels leur conscience reprochant de s'être approprié  . .X . . . (1907). I was thrilled to note how easy and succinct I found the old French, as long as you realise that v and u are inter-changeable, as also i and j.)

Starmer's Mission

 Starmer's Mission

The idea here came to me while witnessing the bizarre process of the media trying (over the weekend 7 - 8th Feb) to squeeze a political crisis out of the Epstein-Mandelson affair, and from listening two days later to "The Rest is Politics" podcast from the gifted Campbell-Stewart duo titled "Is it 'Game Over' for Starmer?" (9th Feb 2026). And (to be fair to myself) from my own posting of 14th Jan on the previously manufactured 'crisis' over ID cards [1].  It is not primarily my own idea, but I am endorsing it.

My impression is that Sir Keir Starmer's mission is to bring straight-forward honesty into politics. His earlier successful career as a lawyer shows a consistent attraction to justice and decency. His calling (i.e. the force that drives him) was not concerned with I.D, cards, nor with fiscal deficits.  His stance is moral.  It is barely political. If forced to take sides, he would perhaps say that slightly too large a fraction of the wealth generated in the country goes to the bosses, the gamblers and the cheats, and that advantage is constantly being taken of the disadvantaged and ill-educated working class. Political finesse is not his forte; nor is finance. His forte is justice. 

However, like all of us, he may be touched to some extent by ambition. I mean bankers and gamblers want to get rich, scientists want to the the first to discover truths, authors want to be read. And politicians (doubtless) would like to see themselves in command of a well-ordered outfit bringing justice, wealth and happiness to the nation.  

It is embarrassing to see philosophers like Newton and Leibnitz scrabbling over priorities. Similarly, I wince when a chancellor says " 'I' have decided to increase the duty on petrol by a penny." How pompous!  Why not say "We have decided......"?  For it should be the Cabinet that decides, and takes responsibility. 

It should not be part of Starmer's duty to decide on Corporation Tax rates, or allowances for 3-children families. If he wants to dictate to the cabinet on such issues he is indeed touched with madness. He does not need to reply, just because the press ask him for his ideas, or get cajoled into taking the blame for other people's mistakes. Other things being equal, stability is of course good, and dithering bad.  

As Rory Stewart says in the podcast (c. minute 25), what the country surely wants is for Wes Streeting to use all his drive and initiative to sort the NHS, Peter Kyle to take charge of business 'Growth', and Rachel Reeves to balance public spending against taxation. Perhaps there is also a role for younger members of the team like Allin-Kahn. 

There is an important two-way communications job for the whips. To avoid a back-bench revolutions, it is not sufficient for whips merely to explain Government policy to the benches. The back-benchers should know, discuss, and own those policies, and explain their views to the cabinet. 

Starmer's rôle is to be 'honest' and 'decent'. And (copying Neson) to remind his team that "England expects that everyone will do their duty". It would be a bold move to abolish 'Prime Ministers Question Time', but that may be what is needed. The Prime Minister deflecting each question to his appropriate lieutenant.

References:
[1]  https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2026/01/digital-id-cards-and-bbc.html 

My Fracas

 My Fracas

I am constantly being reminded of my recent 'fracas'. When I heave myself out of my chair I  realise I have a bruised left hip, and a sprained left wrist. When I look in the shaving mirror I find I have a small bump above my left eye.

I assure you that I had done absolutely nothing wrong. But I was being pursued by two rather boisterous youngsters. And the mood was deteriorating. I thought I had thrown them off,  but no; there they were again close on my heels. So I decided to tackle the front one and go for his legs. I threw myself with maximum force at that target, missed his legs but, flailing my arms rather futilely in his general direction, I fell to the ground and bumped my head.

Frustrated and rather sore, I found myself half awake and on my bedroom floor, in the narrow gap between my bed and the wall. I had dragged the duvet off the bed and had banged my head on the radiator.  Oh dear! I crawled back onto the bed, pulled the duvet back on top and went straight back to sleep. 

Normally, when awake, I am well controlled and rather passive, looking before leaping and thinking twice before making any irreversible decision. It is while asleep that I get into trouble. Not every night by any means, but five or six times a year. Twice I broke the great brass bedside lamp in Josie's guest room. Several times I kicked my companion. Once I hit her in the face with my fist. Nothing to do with her; my assailants are un-named younger males. She is unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time, looming over when I believe I am being attacked. My father has not figured in my dreams for decades. He died 40 years ago.

You might be inclined to suggest I try psychoanalysis. To see who these anonymous demons really are. I am disinclined. Ever since reading Jones' Life and Work of Sigmund Freud back in 1970, I have preferred not to tinker with my mind, in case the 'motivator' sprung out like a watch-spring and I could not coax back in. 

One day I may go too far. One day I might submit to analysis.

Student Loans

 Student Loans

I was lucky. In my day (1961-1964), a 3-year undergraduate degree was provided free to those school children who were believed to be able to benefit from it. The state (in my case the UK) provided the universities with enough money to put on sufficient courses. And the state (or the county) provided means-tested grants that provided just enough money for needy student to feed and house themselves for each academic year of 30 - 40 weeks. Mine was a pretty average family, with one parent writing a book and the other working as a G.P.; but I and five siblings each received the full student maintenance grant for our 3-year courses.

The state wanted so many doctors each year and got them, so many scientists, so many teachers, so many librarians, artists, etc.;  and they got them. Each year a new cohort of school-leavers found places at university, and a new cohort of graduates found jobs. Firms toured around the better-known universities like wasps round an open jam-jar, desperate to snare the best talent. 

Then some wretched government, wanting to bribe the electorate by lowering taxes, found that there was no longer enough central government money to pay for the university places; and a short-sighted boffin suggested charging Student Fees. 

It is argued that a university degree confers a benefit on the graduate. That is not contested. But it also confers an enormous benefit on the state. With a healthy university system we can staff our hospitals, laboratories, workshops, class-rooms (etc) without needing to bribe people from other countries. I have not heard much about the benefit to the state from a healthy university sector. (On the other hand, I have heard that the university sector in the UK is in an unhappy condition.)

There is some talk about fairness. That it is unfair for the state to give, free to able school-leavers, a means of earning more than less able ones. It is certainly not equal, but it may be fair, if selection is handled fairly and without prejudice. 

The thought of going into considerable debt (e.g. £30,000) at the beginning of a working life may put many able school-leavers off studying for a university degree. 

Suppose the median annual pre-tax salary in the UK in 2025 was £40,000 (actually £39,039), and that of non-graduates was £30,000 (actually £29,500). Suppose, therefore, that the median annual pre-tax salary of graduates is £50,000. (This is a guess.)

It must be obvious to many people that graduates will therefore probably pay more tax than non-graduates, and that this might be sufficient to pay for the university course; and to pay by that means for a free education (for suitable candidates). So I did some calculating, using data on the salaryaftertax.com website.

                        Pre-tax(£)   After tax(£)     % tax   Tax p.a.  Tax (30 years)
Non-graduate:        30,000           25,120   16,3        4,880      146,400
Graduate:                50,000          39,520    19.2      10,480     314,400

It is clear that, in a working life, the graduate is indeed paying for her/his tuition, many times over, simply in the familiar and accepted progressive tax system. Over a 30-year working life, the graduate (on average) pays £168,000 more tax than the lower earning non-graduate; more than twice as much. 

If the government wants the cost of the education paid up-front rather than when its fruits mature, perhaps we could allow them to offer a loan scheme. But to charge interest on that loan at greater than RPI seems simply greedy; in fact usurious. 

But I would prefer, as fairer, the system of my youth.

Comments are welcome, direct to cawstein@gmail.com

Exploring Circles

 Exploring Circles

One of the treats for my 84th birthday just passed was to spend an hour with my brother trying to prove a conjecture, which I do not remember ever having been taught at school. 

(It recalled a similarly enjoyable hour spent 62 years earlier. David, Peter and I, were final-years students each reading for different degrees; David (Greats), Peter (PPP), and I (Botany). We found ourselves meeting regularly on Friday evenings at the "Welsh Pony", a now-vanished pub down by Gloucester Green, Oxford. Conversation roamed; on that occasion we were trying to remember the proof of Pythagoras' famous theorem involving the square on the hypotenuse.)

I had recently noticed that the diameter of a circle subtends an angle (at any point on the circumference) that looks very like 90°. Is it exactly 90°? Why were we never told about this at school? 

Figure 1
In Fig. 1, XZ is a diameter, Y is any point on the circumference, YW is a second diameter. Angle XYW is called a, WYZ is called b. The hypothesis is that angle XYZ (= a+b) = 90°

I showed this to my brother who became equally intrigued. We scribbled away for an hour, occasionally sharing the progress we had made. Success came the next morning. It seemed to us convincing that, by symmetry, we can label four radii as equal, four angles as equal to a, and four equalling b.  Furthermore, in the triangle YCZ, the angle sum (= 180°) is 2a + 2b; so a+b = 90°. Q.E.D. This would be true wherever we placed point Y.
After bathing in the glory of this success for an hour, I wondered if I could prolong this happiness by floating some more hypotheses. What, for example, if the chord was not a diameter but was shorter, as (for example) XW in Fig. 1. That chord clearly subtends angles at Y and Z that are less than 90°, but they are nevertheless patently equal. What is more, the chord XW subtends and angle at the centre that is twice that at the circumference. Of course they are special cases, as the lines XZ and WY are diameters. So I drew Fig. 2. (Below).

Figure 2
In Fig. 2, AB is a diameter, as is CD, passing throught the centre O. AO is therefore the radius, length r. AC is a chord of length r, thus subtending an angle of 60° at the centre and 30° at the circumference. CF and BF are also Chords of length r. 

Once again, AOB and COD are diameters (going through centre O). But the chord AC (likewise CF, FB, and BD) was chosen to be exactly r  because I know (from previous work) that exactly six such chords fit round a circle, forming exactly six equilateral triangles with their tips at the centre. It can be seen from Fig. 2 that chord AC subtends and angle of 60° at the centre and 30° at the circumference. 

In fact, all chords subtends two angles at the circumference. In general one is less 90°, and the other is greater than 90°, unless the chord is a diameter, when both are 90°.  

The chord CB subtends an acute angle (60°) at D, and an obtuse angle (120°?) at F. This example illustrates further property of chords.  The obtuse angle is supplementary to the acute angle (60° + 120° = 180°). For another example, the chord CF subtends an acute angle of (30°) at D, an angle (COF) of 60° at the centre (i.e. twice that at the circumference); and an obtuse angle of 150° at E  (supposing angle-sum quadrilateral is 360°, and you remember that FC and FO are both radii.)

References:

Wikipedia: Chords, Hipparchus,. 

There are many YouTube and other videos on Chords, Tangents and Secants

Apparently chords have been much studied since Babylonian times. The Greek geometer and astronomer, Hipparchus,  wrote a 12-volumed book on Chords around 150 BC, though that book itself is now lost. Tables of chords were used as we have used tables of sines.]

Comments are welcome, direct to cawstein@gmail.com

Happy though Human

How to be happy though Human∗

My father practised as a Freudian psychoanalist. Well, he said he was technically an 'Eclectic'. But the truth is that his training analyst was Freudian; it is just that my dad's training was incomplete. I think the war intervened. I sensed in him a deep respect for Freud's intuitions, but with some minor reservations. He had much less time for Jung, and I do not think I ever hear him mention Adler. My mother, who was usually busy with other aspects of general practice, and house-keeping, respected the more mystical Carl Jung, and summarised Alfred Adler for me as "replacing Freud's monomaniacal emphasis on sex, with the more general concept of 'power'". Thus was the house in which I grew up. 

Last week I  paused at the the bookcase on my upstairs landing to enjoy the mere presence of my beloved books. A cluster of early Pelicans caught my eye:  two by A. N. Whitehead, Paul Einzig on monetary policy and Béran Wolfe's familiar title "How to be Happy though Human". Familiar, arresting, haunting; I doubted if I had ever opened  the book in the 60 years in which we had shared a house. I wondered who had bought it; I, or my mother, or my father. First published 1932, republished by Penguin Books in 1957. From the back cover I learned that Wolfe had been an 'assistant' to Adler in Vienna between the wars. At last! My chance to glimpse the Adler view of human motivation. 

But ouch! This is going to hurt. Opening the book at random, I found a section titled "The Fine Art of making Presents".  I read: 

"... the giving of gifts for reasons of duty, custom, or the like. ....is the worst... way to make a present.......you give a small boy....... a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations because of some vague hope ....". 

And I wince, for I have made exactly that silly mistake with my oldest grand-daughter, and was about to err again with her younger sister. 

On the other hand, despite Wolfe's rather clunky use of English, Béran offers many pieces of sound advice. For example:

"Peaceful social intercourse can exist only in a society of mentally mature individuals. You can achieve a great deal of happiness and gain an enormous host of friends if you will (sic) incorporate the wisdom of social relativity (?)...... If you wish to convince him of a point, or teach him a new technique, minimise the distance between your superior position of knowledge and his inferior position of ignorance..... Conscious modesty in attitude, quietness in gesture, combined with firmness of purpose and decision, mark the well-adjusted adult. .... The words 'absolutely', 'certainly', 'always', 'never'.. have little place in the vocabulary of the happy man." 

Or his comment on Deferred Living: "One important source of unhappiness is the habit of putting off living to some fictional date in the future.........."

Or: "[The immature man] lives a plan-less life. His strategy consists either in muddling through, or dreaming through, life."  

(Touché!  Though I call it 'going with the flow', and explain my strategy as a result of my fear of making a wrong decision. I am beginning to see developing the theme of this essay; its raison d'être écrit.  Wolfe is forever stripping away the multilayered protective carapace in which I have carefully wrapped myself. I keep pulling it back and re-wrapping.  His therapy is rather brutal; it is like pulling a hermit-crab out of its borrowed shell and telling it to stiffen up.)

Béran Wolfe devotes a significant portion of the book to 'Happiness in Love and Marriage', or more correctly to the unhappiness generated in these area of life. He suggests that there are but few people who could number amongst their acquaintances 10 happy couples. However, he goes on to suggest that the great majority of this widespread unhappiness stems from avoidable causes. There are (he says) certain fundamental prerequisites to a happy marriage:

"Mental maturity, physical health, and psychological independence in outlook, a knowledge of the art of love and the practice of contraception are important premisses of a normal sexual life. A mature sense of social responsibility, the willingness to make concessions to reality, freedom from neurotic traits (including any tendency towards romantic idealism), a wide and catholic range of human interests, and the willingness to grow, to cooperate, to suffer sometimes, and to share always the disappointments and the joys of life – these are the foundations of success in the solution of the love problems of every day life. The willingness to encourage, the ability to identify oneself with the situation of the sexual partner, help one over the usual obstacles, ........"

 Well! That explains that then. In my 15-year marriage I do not think I met a single one of those 12 fundamental prerequisites; unless you would allow me  'psychological independence in outlook', and a 'catholic range of human interests'; which latter I admit would be quite generous, considering my total ignorance of sport and pop music. Contraception clearly defeated us in the second year of our marriage. And the 'Art of Love' defeated me till I was 70 years old. I bristle with a host of neuroses; and I am sure those must include romantic idealism if that means 'foolishly trusting nature as a guide', 'hoping for the best', and 'extreme shyness'.

Surely it is obvious that a neurotic person needs his neuroses. They are his defences against  the pain of facing up to his inadequacies. 

As I put the book back on the shelf, I felt inclined to admit that 'Life' was rather wasted on me. And yet, you know, I just about managed. Bailing, perhaps, but still afloat.

∗ Wolfe, W. B. (1957) "How to be Happy though Human", Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex

On the Purchase of Greenland

 On the Purchase of Greenland

I do not see the Trump position and the Danish/Greenland/European positions as necessarily incompatible; though our media, and maybe also the principal participants, see the situation as a confrontation.

The sale/purchase of Greenland does not prevent the Greenlanders (with or without the Danes) from having complete control of the question of sovereignty of their island. The way these things normally work is that the would-be purchaser mentions a price. The potential seller then nods or shakes his head. The purchaser then mentions a higher price, and so it goes on until both parties agree that they have found a price at which a transfer of ownership can be mutually agreed. Or the bidder gives up. 

Does anyone know how the purchase of Alaska off the Russians was negotiated? The purchase of California/Texas/Arizona/New Mexico from the Mexicans was negotiated, but not without the threat of continuing a disasterous war. The Hawaiian Islands were merely taken; without (I understand) even so much as a 'by-your-leave'. 

(I believe, that the Hawaiian Islanders had gone so far as to design a flag (in 1848) that incorporates the British Union Jack in a corner as did the Aurtralian and New Zealand flags. Alas, in 1898, we let them down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Hawaii)