Insufficient Wuthering

I’ve been a fan of Kate Bush since the beginning of her career in 1978. I think I identify with her general weirdness and artiness, and her birthday is the same as mine although she’s older than I am. She’s also from Kent, like me, but of course she’s far more successful and famous than me or most of the people I know. At the age of thirteen I wrote an essay for school about how I regarded her as a rôle model, so that’s one of those things you can keep behind your ear.

Nor am I alone, even now. In recent years there has been an annual re-enactment of her interpretive dance routine from the ‘Wuthering Heights’ video, where hundreds of people gather in open spaces all over the world to recreate that moment at the beginning of her fame:

I don’t know if this is widely known, but Emily Brontë shares Ms Bush’s and my birthday, and I presume there’s a link there although I haven’t come across her explicitly mentioning that so far as I can remember.

During the early days of the lockdown, I decided to use the ‘Wuthering Heights’ routine as a kind of exercise programme. It proved to be fairly successful but not particularly energetic, and strong though my attachment to the woman and her music is, I’d probably do better copying someone like Dua Lipa. That said, I do believe dance is a potential key to keeping fit in the circumstances I’ve been in over the past few years, though not the only one.

I took up long distance running as a teenager at secondary school. I used to enjoy it, partly because it had no explicit element of competition or aggression. From about the age of twelve, I used to run the thirteen kilometre annual sponsored walk and it kind of developed from there. It may be partly down to my ADHD, but I just couldn’t be doing with plodding along the whole route at walking speed. From the age of fourteen I used to swim a kilometre each Sunday at the local swimming pool, Kingsmead. I walked from school every day, a distance of around five kilometres, and I used to run on Wednesday afternoons. From January ’85, when I was seventeen, I used to get up at 5 am each morning. However, I have never made a huge effort to increase my distance, duration or stamina, although I do walk almost everywhere under about ten kilometres, including to and from all my clients as home visits. It isn’t massively energetic, but it’s something, and I actually consider it to be fairly normal, though perhaps less so in recent years in heavily industrialised countries such as this one.

Or I did. Once I started caring for my father, it became more difficult to get out of the house for protracted periods of time due to his demands on me, which could possibly come at any time of the day or night. At the start of 2019 I did Couch to 5K, which I eventually built up to running seventeen kilometres in a single day, though not in one go. However, the point did not come by which I no longer regarded it as a chore. It was good to have done it, but never really good to do it. Just a relief to get it over with really. I also injured myself a few times, and I think there’s a trade-off there between fitness and injury because it seems that any kind of strenuous activity is likely to lead to injury, and once that’s happened it stops you from exercising while you recover.

At the opposite end of all this is Yoga, or rather Hatha Yoga. This I started when I was about four, which is apparently too young. I was able to follow it off a TV programme and had no idea what I was doing. Later on, when I was maybe eleven, I followed various books on the subject, and adopted some of the other practices such as kriyas and meditation. Eventually of course, I married someone who was deeply involved in Yoga and became a Yoga teacher. A number of issues arise with it. Firstly, at the time and since, fundamentalist Christians decided it was evil and Satanic, as they did lots of other things such as heavy metal music and Dungeons And Dragons. Secondly, it became heavily commercialised and commodified and tended to drift in the direction of sports and away from a spiritual practice, to the extent that people tend to ask you what kind of Yoga you practice, expecting an answer like “Bikram” or something when that isn’t what Yoga is about. It’s like asking someone who takes herbal remedies whether they get their stuff from Holland And Barrett. Finally, there’s the weird issue of cultural appropriation and Yoga, which I suspect is focussed mainly on what I can only think of as “degenerate” Yoga, perhaps not even deserving of a capital Y, i.e. the likes of the aforementioned Bikram Yoga, where they try to sell rich White Westerners as much as possible on the side of accoutrements, which is just despicable really. But I honestly don’t see how Yoga can be cultural appropriation, because to me Yoga is part of the fabric of reality. It isn’t just about asanas, and in fact some traditional Yoga practitioners disapprove even of doing asanas because they see them as glorifying the body, which should only be a temporary vessel encumbering the soul on its way to Nirvana. I’m not of that ilk. However, I’m aware that we got our concept of zero and place value from India via the Arab world, and I don’t consider mathematics using Western Arabic numerals to be cultural appropriation, so why would Yoga be? Quantum physics and relativity doesn’t belong to the West and attempts to address fundamental truths about reality, and so does Yoga. What’s the difference? Unfortunately I tend to honour Yoga more on a theoretical level and don’t pursue it much, although I do incorporate some asanas into my life in a kind of “first aid” therapeutic way, such as vrksasana to improve my balance, twists to deal with digestive issues and so forth.

The third form of exercise I’ve already mentioned, and is dancing. From about the age of fifteen to twenty-five, I used to dance a lot, go clubbing over some of that time and so forth. I don’t think I’m a good dancer by any means but I did very much adopt the idea of “dance like nobody’s watching”. I’ve even gone so far as to dance on stage, spontaneously. Although I’m aware that there’s a lot of theory and practice around dance, I know very little about any of that. There’s something out there called Labanotation, for example, and of course interpretive dance, and I did square dancing and maypole dancing at school and Scottish country dancing at a wedding once. The rest is just disco dancing. I will say one thing. Dance music and other pop or rock music swaps over in its greatness when you dance to it as opposed to listening to it. There are dance tracks which sound truly dreadful if you’re just sitting there listening to them which are absolutely awesome when you get up and dance to them, and also brilliant pieces of music for listening to which become totally dire when you try to dance. There’s another aspect, particularly to disco, which only dawned on me in recent years. As a White person I was kind of trained subtly to hate disco, but the thing is that disco is, albeit commercialised, Black, Latinx and Gay music, and this should be taken into consideration before one judges as a White straight person.

A common factor in all of these, probably due to lack of knowledge and being driven by enthusiasm rather than skill, is that I regularly seem to injure my knees to a limited extent. When I was younger, running on hard surfaces was supposed to be a big no-no, because it was thought to damage the joints generally. I don’t know what I think about this now. It’s apparently no longer thought to be the case, but I get the distinct impression that when I do this, it does seem to cause some kind of mild injury. However, one aspect of running and other similar forms of exercise is that they do induce mild inflammation and other types of injury temporarily which, I presume, makes the body stronger and healthier in the long term, so maybe that’s the influence here. Likewise with asanas in Yoga, when I was younger and didn’t know what I was doing. I used to twist my knees sideways rather un-physiologically and I wonder if this has had a long-term effect. It also happened with disco dancing and even cycling. After a night of solid dancing, I would often find that my knees in particular ached.

There was a time when I was both practicing asanas and running a lot, and I found that the increase in muscle tone and strength interfered with my suppleness. I think there may be a further trade-off here, and the question then arises of whether the joints need that support, as with the shoulder girdle in particular. I found that I preferred to be supple than strong. Presumably there are many people out there with hypermobility issues for whom this constitutes a real problem.

Overarching this entire thing of exercise, which is of course generally good for mental wellbeing if it doesn’t become an addiction, is a long-term reluctance to do any of it, which I found in particular set in during lockdown, and I’m now back in the position of being a couch potato. Some of this is situational, because it’s difficult to get out of the house for long, but as I’ve mentioned significant parts of my regimen, if it’s worthy of that name, could be undertaken indoors without any real issues, so what is it that’s stopping me? Is it low-level depression of some kind, or not feeling like I have enough space and time to myself? Is it a need to comfort eat? I wonder how many other people this affects. I also think it would be easier to move my father around if I had better muscle tone, as right now I don’t think it does either of us much good.

On this occasion then, I have a question for you in the interests of research: have you found yourself more reluctant to exercise as the pandemic situation goes on? I see lots of people run past the house, but how representative are they? What, again, is going on inside people’s homes which I don’t see? Let me know.

The Youth Of Today

There’s an Ancient Greek play, maybe by Aristophanes, where a market trader complains about the young people of his day, that they no longer show the respect he used to in his youth and so forth. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t really go into much detail, but it’s telling how the exact same sentiments could be expressed more than two thousand years later. This strongly suggests that the youth of today are in no way more “snowflaky”, feckless, disrespectful or lazy than any other youth of any other day.

Were I to be asked, I would probably say that youth is the period from about eighteen to twenty-five, although the duodecimal system also provides quite a nice division from twelve to twenty-four which conveniently ends at the age when the brain stops growing. Anyway, for me, the first version of that would’ve been from 1985 to 1993, which spans the period between just before I left home to just after I got married. At that point, the norm for English middle-class youth would be that after they did their A-levels at an FE college or a sixth form from sixteen to eighteen, they would leave home and either get a job straight out of school or go to university, polytechnic or an HE college in a distant town or city, study a degree for three years living in a Hall of Residence or private rented accommodation from a small-scale landlord while receiving a grant, then hopefully get a well-paid professional job before settling down and getting married in their mid-twenties and probably paying a mortgage and becoming a homeowner. This situation was the norm from probably soon after the War until 1989, after which various processes changed things, notably the Tory introduction of student loans, followed by various other happenings, which in fact didn’t do a lot of natural Conservative voters much good, such as the replacement of small private landlords by massive private firms building new student accommodation, which incidentally is how this blog started. Yet for some reason, it doesn’t seem to put them off voting for them, and because the older generation is more likely to vote Conservative, this also leads to them complaining about the Youth of Today when in fact it’s the policies of the party they voted for that led to them being put in their current position. I presume that their response would be that it results from their own laziness and might attribute the cause to the policies of New Labour and their effect on schooling and parenting, although this is now beginning to recede into the past and put the Government in a similar position to that of the Tories in the late ’90s after what proved to be eighteen years of the same party in power.

What we have now, in any case, is the “Boomerang” phenomenon of young people either leaving home for university and returning to live with their parents, not uncommonly into their thirties, which of course means they no longer count as youth. Since more students go to university locally now, this means in turn that they may not leave home at all. Those of us of a certain vintage may be tempted to see this as a backwards step, but in fact it bears some resemblance to life before the Great Transformation, when life stages consisted not so much of childhood, youth and adulthood as the stages before and after marriage, and before it they would probably have lived with their parents. The causes of this are multiple, but include low wages and internships, high rent, fragile romantic relationships and a precarious job market. Three and a half million single young people in the UK are now thought to live with their parents, up one third over the last decade. Research at Loughborough University has led to the claim that this situation is now permanent. The statistics break down as follows:

• 71% of single adults in their early twenties live at home.
• 54% are still with their parents in their late twenties.
• 33% are still there in their early thirties.

I should probably point out at this point that Covid-19 has exacerbated this trend due to such factors as job losses, the restriction on higher education and banning people from moving home, and the takeaway from this is that although the pandemic probably means the data and research are obsolete, it would have accelerated the trend. Stagnating wages and insecure employment would do the same. In 1996, 55% of twenty-five to thirty-four year olds were “home owners” (actually meaning they were paying mortgages and therefore effectively renting their houses off banks or building societies). By 2016, this had fallen to 34% and there’s no reason to suppose it won’t fall further. To spell out the causes, they amount to rising property prices and low incomes for young people as well as their perception that they’re in debt (see the other blog post for an explanation of that description of the situation).

At the same time as all of this, and probably in connection with some aspects of the boomerang situation or its causes, mental illness has famously reached epidemic proportions among young adults. Between 2007 and 2018, universities reported a fivefold increase in disclosure of mental health conditions from 9 675 to 57 305 despite a fairly small rise in student numbers. This may be partly caused by an increased willingness of young people to talk about their feelings, but there are ways of disentangling the underlying reality from that possibility. For a rather younger age group of thirteen to sixteen year olds, A&E admissions for self-harm rose 68%. One in ten children and young people are estimated to have mental health problems and 70% do not receive sufficiently early intervention. Typical problems in that cohort are depression, generalised anxiety disorder and conduct disorder.

As a break for the unrelenting gloom I suspect this post is emanating, possible ways of helping this situation include good physical health, being part of a well-functioning family, taking part in local activities having the chance to enjoy themselves, hope, optimism, the opportunity to learn, feeling loved, trusted, valued and safe, accepting who they are, a sense of agency and belonging, knowing what they’re good at and resilience.

Risk factors for mental health issues in young people would include the opposite of all of those, and also such things as bullying, being a carer for an infirm adult such as a parent who is also physically or mentally ill, long term educational problems, poverty, homelessness, being in a group subject to prejudice, bereavement, a family history of mental illness (note that this is multiplicative because of the aspect of being a carer along with environmental factors of other kinds and genetics) and parental separation. I would contend that many of these risks are greater due to government policy, and before you go thinking I’m blaming the Tories I would also include Blair’s and Brown’s terms and the policies made under them in that, for example in education. But clearly the crisis in the NHS, rise in homelessness and the creation of a world fit for no-one in the past decade don’t help.

The results include PTSD, generalised anxiety disorders, eating disorders, self-harm and depression, and an environment in which ADHD is seen as a problem, or maybe I should say a disabling environment which fails to make the most of or accommodate people with ADHD. This brings me to the first organisation I want to link to: PAPYRUS. This is a charity aiming to prevent young people ending their lives, and it gives the following advice regarding helping people avoid doing this: listen non-judgementally, don’t be afraid to mention the S-word, be direct, try to stay calm. One young person in four has had suicidal ideation, so it’s common and this may help break down the taboo, and mentioning it won’t provoke them into doing it by giving them the idea because they’ve already had it. It can happen to anyone and you aren’t expected to solve the problem. You might want to pass them on to a professional who can help.

CALM is another group aiming to help men with depression. 75% of people who kill themselves are male. I don’t have much to say about it than that.

Then there’s the issue of Pathological Social Withdrawal or ひきこもり- hikikomori, and at this point I need to make a bit of a digression because before I go into this I need to point out the issue of 日本人論 – Nihonjiron, or Japanese exceptionalism. Nihonjiron translates as “Japanese Theory” and is something which both certain Japanese and Westerners are keen on to an extent which could be seen as nationalist from within and racist from without. There is a cluster of hypotheses intended to support the idea that Japan is unique, to the extent that in extreme cases it’s even been claimed that the Japanese people are descended from different primates than the rest of the human race. It is true that East Asians have more Neanderthal DNA than other people but this probably isn’t what they mean and doesn’t amount to them specifically having a radically different genetic makeup. The Japanese are seen as an isolated island race, ethnically homogenous (they aren’t, because of the Ainu for example), having a unique language (it’s a linguistic isolate but has a lot in common with other SOV languages and drops pronouns in a similar way to the Chinese dialects, and also has some features in common with Korean, to which it was thought to be related) which leads to a fusion of the ego with others, and social structures which are filial rather than “horizontal” (e.g. tiger parenting and not wanting to disappoint one’s parents and grandparents). Of course Japan has various features which are unusual, although I tend to think many of them are shared with Britain, but there’s an element of caricature and looking at the Japanese people as if they’re laboratory specimens to me in some of this, and it can be very unhelpful not to recognise the commonalities which also exist, one of which is hikikomori, also known, perhaps more helpfully, as Pathological Social Withdrawal. This is not to ignore the particular pressures Japanese youth find themselves under, but please remember that the following description tends to apply more broadly than just in Japan.

Hikikomori literally means “pulling inward”. The textbook case is of someone who has for a long time stayed in their room all day and doesn’t socialise. The situation began in the 1990s with the Japanese recession, and affects 1.2% of the Japanese population. It’s often precipitated by perceived academic failure or inability to get a particular job. However, it isn’t confined to young people and is also found throughout the adult life span and has another peak late in life. There may be connections with depression, autism, agoraphobia and social anxiety. Parents often need to devote a fair bit of time and energy to ensure the long term security of their children. Help is often unavailable because by its very nature the problem is hidden, and there’s also the usual problem of it not being dramatic or visible, like many situations of poor mental health. I imagine that attempts to model the English education, or rather schooling, system on those of the Far East really don’t help with the situation here. But we need to recognise that this is not a uniquely Japanese problem and that it exists here in Northwestern Europe.

To finish, I want to address one more issue which is sometimes mentioned in connection with depression: the question of exercise. A few years ago, an academic investigation into the relationship between exercise and addressing depression was undertaken which appeared to demonstrate that it didn’t help. Two groups were surveyed over a one year period, one of which had pharmaceutical and counselling and the other of which had both plus information on exercise opportunities. The problem with this study is that it ignores the issue of psychomotor retardation. The problem is motivation and the sheer physical ability to exercise at all. One feature of depression and several other illnesses, including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, generalised anxiety disorder and disordered eating (and I feel the need to add here that thinking of illnesses as entities in themselves may not be particularly respectful of people diagnosed as mentally ill but I have a lot of plates spinning here), is reduced physical movement and slowed thinking. This can lead to empathy breaking down because someone who is not suffering this, and perhaps never has, apparently easy, everyday tasks are not done, and it may also appear to them that this is an easily overcome problem. This is of course part of the famous “snap out of it” idea of depression, that it’s an easily solved problem and almost sinful in nature. You can’t expect someone who literally cannot even get out of bed to spend any time on a gym treadmill or going for a run.

To use a cliché, the current situation is a perfect storm for young adults. The political situation has led to difficulty in holding down or even getting paid work, affording accommodation or, at the moment, even getting out of the house. There’s also an epidemic in mental illness within that age group for a number of reasons, and it should also be borne in mind that they are, as far as they’re concerned, facing a potentially grim prospect regarding the state of the planet which their predecessors don’t seem interested in doing anything about at all. Many of them would therefore also withdraw. So I suppose what I’m saying is, don’t blame them. Much of this is the doing of the previous generations and we are not used to living in their world.