Carpe Diem

At no time has man so loved life as he did at the end of the Middle Ages.

― Philippe Ariès

Meandering the UK and gaping at the ubiquitous twelfth-century churches and town halls has nudged me to take carpe diem off the backburner.

Death was in your face in medieval times, when dysentery, ergotism, gonorrhea, influenza, leprosy, malaria, measles, bubonic plague, smallpox, childbed fever, and typhoid fever killed people every day in their own beds.

Today, in contrast, the dying simply vanish, retreating at old age into retirement homes, hospitals or hospices, while ads, films, songs, magazines, and social media posts paint a picture of perpetual youth and wellness that divert us from ever thinking about death.

"Much of social life can be interpreted as an elaborate means of shielding us from our inherent anxiety about death," says Roman Krznaric in his new book Carpe Diem Regained.

"The way so many of us desperately seek career success or lasting fame, our tendency to accumulate possessions that give us a sense of permanence, our wish to pass on a trace of ourselves to the future by having children, or the way we simply fill our time with so many diversions, from collecting stamps to foreign travel―these are all, at least in part, strategies for dealing with the stark reality that one day, sooner or later, we will cease to be and the worms will claim us."

Krznaric thinks the medieval spirit of carpe diem has been "hijacked by consumer culture," which teaches us to live happy lives through shopping, web surfing, fingering our mobiles, and―the latest craze―practicing mindfulness.

The better way to live, he believes, can be discovered in the past, when people seized opportunities to exist spontaneously, not by denying death, but by remembering it.

United Breaks Guitars. But Priceline Breaks Contracts.

You've probably heard Dave Carroll's story.

He's the musician whose $1,200 guitar was broken by United Airlines baggage handlers.

Dave tried for nine months to move the company to honor his claim. But United said "No," because he'd failed to submit the claim within 24 hours of the incident.

So he wrote and recorded a song, "United Breaks Guitars," and uploaded it to YouTube.

After only 150,000 views, United contacted Dave and offered to pay the claim if he'd delete the video.

Dave instead produced and uploaded two more, related songs, at which point the media picked up his story. He did over 200 interviews.

Then, the song parodies and knockoffs started, and millions of people learned to sing "United Breaks Guitars." On one flight from Newark, New Jersey, the passengers sang it in chorus as the plane taxied to the terminal.

Within three weeks, the company's stock plummeted by 10%, a decrease in value of $180 million.

A week ago, my wife and I tried to board a flight from Washington, DC, to London, using tickets we'd purchased for $1,200 six months earlier through Priceline, only to learn the company had cancelled the tickets.

When I called Priceline from the airport, I was told it had indeed cancelled the tickets in September and would not issue a refund. Ever. "We do not issue refunds," I was told.

My wife and I made other travel arrangements, at six times the cost of the cancelled Priceline tickets.

Next week, I'll send a brief protest letter to Priceline's executive chair, Jeff Boyd.

I'll remind Mr. Boyd of Dave Carroll's story and close the letter with the words, "Song to follow."

A Finger in Every Pie

While roaming about the yard of St. Kentigern’s, a 12th century church in Britain's Lake District, my wife and I ran into the docent, who was locking the church doors for the night.

He was a wizened Hobbit of a man, dressed incongruously in a leather biker's jacket and a matching Los Angeles Rams cap.

He took it upon himself to give us a guided tour of the churchyard.

He pointed out a large Celtic cross over one grave and said that the man below "had his fingers in both pies," meaning the man was hedging his bet on Christianity by having an ancient pagan symbol erected above him.

The docent's statement was a corruption of an old expression, "to have a finger in every pie," which means to be a busy body.

It probably first referred to nosey visitors to the kitchen, who couldn't resist tasting the cook's dishes by sticking their fingers into them and taking a lick.

Shakespeare alluded to the expression in Henry VIII, when the Duke of Buckingham says of the meddlesome Cardinal Wolsey:

"No man's pie is freed
From his ambitious finger."

The docent of St. Kentigern’s meant less that the dead man was intrusive, but that he hoped, in the afterlife, to have his cake and eat it too.

The Shepherd's Lives

The geographic constraints of the farm are permanent, but within them
we are always looking for an angle.

― James Rebanks 

I had the honor yesterday to visit the farm of James Rebanks, to interview him for a couple trade magazine articles.

Rebanks is a British sheep farmer, an Internet rock star, and author of The Shepherd's Life, an international phenomenon whose sales have already reached over 320,000 copies.

He sat down for the interview over lunch, his clothes still muddy from the fields, where he'd been working since before dawn to care for his animals (lambing season hasn't quite yet ended, so the farm is busy).

Rebanks mentioned that, after lunch and our interview, he'd be meeting with students in the classroom he and his wife have built onto the rear of their home. Student groups visit the farm regularly to learn about raising sheep. Sheep farming at a small scale isn't very profitable, so teaching is a second income stream for the couple.

Although farming is his occupation, Rebanks, in addition to teaching, supplements his family's income with writing, professional speaking, consulting, and even the occasional construction job.

With the soft demand for wool and meat, crushing competition from industrial farms, and small-famers' meager subsidies from the government, every small sheep farmer is the UK today has to diversify, to get by. The income from a small farm is just too little to sustain anyone.

The next time I complain about having too many clients, too many projects, and too many emails to read, poke me.

Priceline Loves Loopholes

Loophole at Windsor Castle

A "loophole" is a mistake in an agreement or law that lets you escape an obligation.

We say, for example, "Priceline exploited a loophole to avoid paying any income taxes seven years in a row."

The word stems from the Middle English loupe, literally "a narrow window in a castle wall."

A loophole was designed to protect an archer as he shot at approaching enemies.

The word took on its figurative sense, "a means of escape," around 1660.

Castles could be full of bad odors, and a loophole served as a "vent" to let them out.