It's Okay To Be Cool
Because an hourglass has more moving parts than the International Space Station
Happy Sunday!
And a warm welcome from the Palace Park.
For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor, cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel and Expeditions Manager at British Exploring Society.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I wannabe cool.
It’s Okay To Want To Be Cool…
…If you know what cool is
This little story began as a bike thought. These are like shower thoughts, but instead of being thought in the shower, they’re thought while cycling.
(And shower thoughts, of course, were originally called bathtub thoughts, named after the urban legend concerning Archimedes and the density of a phony ‘gold’ crown.)
Whatever the mundane backdrop to these thoughts — bath, bed or bicycle — they are always profound:
If your shirt isn’t tucked into your trousers, then are your trousers tucked into your shirt?
An hourglass has more moving parts than the International Space Station.1
A vampire walrus would look a lot like a normal walrus.
(I didn’t say they were significant.)
Anyway. Back to my bike thought, which actually started as:
I want to be cool.
Immediately a second voice (still in my head) piped up:
It’s not okay to want to be cool. That implies extrinsic motivation — desperately striving to seem ‘cool’ in the eyes of others.
Instead of shutting up and concentrating on the road ahead, the first voice (unusually for me) fought back:
What’s wrong with wanting to be cool in the eyes of others — if it’s what I also think is cool? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying social approval, so long as it’s in good faith.
The second voice was so surprised that it fell silent. So the first voice carried on:
It’s okay to want to be cool, if you know what cool is — for you.
And that highly profound cycle thought led directly to this morning: wandering around Crystal Palace Park with a custom map I’d made, showing the location and species of every single one of the park’s 2,798 mature trees.
Because my definition of ‘cool’ includes both:
Using spreadsheet data to make useful maps;
AND
Going out on a wet Sunday to forage for wild edibles and fatwood.
On my wanderings, I found no fewer than four dog roses, dotted around the margins of the park, and each weighed down with rosehips.
I collected no more than a handful from each tree, stuffed my pockets, and brought them home to process into raw rosehip syrup.
After pricking them with a fork, I stuffed the rosehips into an air-tight jar filled with sugar.
Over the course of the next few weeks (or months), sunlight and sugar will draw the liquid from the rosehips and (hopefully) give me a gloopy syrup.
BUT WHY, DAVE? WHY?
Because raw rosehips are ridiculously high in vitamin C: more than five times the puny orange, but also multiples more than lemons, limes, grapefruit, guava, potatoes, papaya, kiwi and kale.
In fact, rosehips contain more vitamin C than any other fruit or vegetable except acerola cherries and kakadu plums — and (let’s be honest) what the fuck are those?
Rosehips are nature’s own remedy for winter colds. They grow all around us: in our parks, in our gardens, in our hedgerows, ripe for the picking, completely free of charge.
So, yeah, I think that’s pretty cool.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. ‘Tax the rich’ doesn’t mean what you think
By 2023, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population.
A 2021 study … found each one-point increase in the Gini income inequality measure increased support for far-right parties by one percentage point, with people more likely to support the far right if they have “economic insecurities, distrust elites, are socially disintegrated, and hold national identities.”
Wealth inequality 👉 Rise of far right 👉 More inequality
Source: Equality Trust
2. Please Look After Your Campfires
3. Re-Awaken Human Potential
An interview with Robin Sheehan, co-tutor on the Certificate in Advanced Wilderness Therapeutic Approaches that I’m currently studying for.
Thank You
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As always, thank you for your eyeballs and thanks for your support.
Big love,
dc:
There are approximately 3.7 million grains of sand in a bog standard hourglass. Beat that, ISS! (I originally used the Large Hadron Collider as my comparison, until ChatGPT gently pointed out that the LHC involves the movement of trillions of protons.)
This post is cool. And so is the writer.
It's cool to be cool for yourself. I've been thinking a lot lately about ego, and the sin of pride. I think they are at the root of a lot of the world's problems. But, yeah, this is very cool!
I made some very unsatisfactory non-raw rosehip syrup last week. Am going to give this one a try now - we still have a fair few rosehips in the garden, and there are loads of bejewelled bushes along the road down into the village.