To: pdimoldenberg @ quatro-consults.co.uk
Cc: andy.hull @ islington.gov.uk; theresa.debono @ islington.gov.uk; richard.greening @ islington.gov.uk
To whom it may concern,
I recently received a leaflet informing local residents of a planning application on behalf of Arsenal stadium to increase the number of ‘rap, hip-hop and rock concerts’ taking place each year from three to nine. It would be fair to describe the leaflet as strongly negative in tone, going so far as to suggest that ‘tens of thousands of Islington residents will have their Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings ruined on three weekends in July or August’.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have no personal or financial relationship with Arsenal. I have never attended a stadium-sized rap, hip-hop or rock concert, nor do I have any plans to do so. Meanwhile, I reside about as close to Arsenal’s stadium as is possible without living in a railway station (something which I do not recommend) and my working hours are 9am-6pm, Mon-Fri. (I mention this fact solely to highlight that I presumably fall into the category of residents for whom ‘hours of loud music’ may ‘make it impossible to relax and prepare for work’ according to the leaflet – although I suppose that this only really applies in relation to Sunday concerts.)
However, in the interests of civic duty I shall now attempt to put aside these personal factors to perform a disinterested analysis of the question at hand: should planning permission for such an extension be granted?
We must begin with some philosophical assumptions. Although Bentham’s utilitarian desire of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” cannot give a full picture of our moral responsibilities as human beings, it should nonetheless provide a rough and ready guide to the costs and benefits of local planning disputes. Furthermore, I shall ally this axiom with an assumption of equal human worth: I will assume, in a democratic spirit, that each person’s happiness is of equal value. Given that the objections raised in this leaflet almost entirely concern noise levels, I also intend to ignore economic concerns and concentrate simply on weighing ‘sound causing happiness’ against ‘sound causing unhappiness’.
Firstly, the benefits. Arsenal stadium has a capacity of roughly 60,000. It is reasonable to assume that (almost) all those attending a rap, hip-hop or rock concert enjoy the sound of these events, so the application to increase by six evenings equates to 360,000 collective evenings of enhanced happiness if we assume full stadium capacity. (Is it reasonable to make this assumption? I have checked this with someone familiar with such events, and he believes that it is – any further information would be greatly appreciated.) Now we need to make some measure of ‘how much’ extra happiness is generated. This is necessarily difficult to quantify, but I will assume that an evening at a concert which one has chosen to attend would bring a 50% uplift in happiness as measured against a baseline evening. In the round, I hope this does enough to balance sentiments of ‘I thought Coldplay were disappointing this time’ against ‘watching Coldplay, I approached true ecstasy’.
Now to the costs side of the equation. The population of Islington is about 200,000, with an area of roughly 15 square kilometres. I am no expert in sound levels (again, external contributions to the analysis would be warmly received) so will assume what I believe to be a fairly generous 1km radius of affected area around Arsenal stadium, or an area of 3.14 square kilometres and about 42,000 residents. (Yes, I have assumed an equal distribution of residents across the borough. There are only so many hours in the day.) Of course, not all residents would be in their homes during the evenings specified – particularly given the days involved – but then again, others might have guests over. (In fact, the problem of guests is specifically raised by those issuing the leaflet as concerts may make it “difficult for friends / delivery vans to visit”. As a side note, delivery vans on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings strike me as a niche problem.)
Estimating the loss of happiness to these 42,000 people is challenging, as – unlike the concert attendees – they are not self-selecting with regard to the concerts. The leaflet I have received talks of “ruined” evenings, but this is a subtly unhelpful term as it implies a near 100% reduction in happiness measured against what you might have hoped for over an evening, rather than what (on average) you actually get. (Indeed, I would conjecture that an individual whose enjoyment was actually, in a strictly technical sense, ‘ruined’ by the sound of a music concert – that is, their temporal happiness was so eroded as to induce genuine misery – would also be susceptible to many other threats to their happy evenings.)
However, we may be spared the necessity of in-depth calculations as our numbers have already revealed an impressive 360,000 collective evenings of enhanced happiness against 252,000 collective evenings of reduced happiness. Sticking with an assumption of a 50% ‘happiness uplift’ for the concert attendees, we would need a more than 70% reduction of happiness in the average resident to equal this, on each and every one of the six evenings in question.
I respectfully submit that this is unlikely. For one thing, it assumes that an evening of increased background noise brings significantly more upset than a concert, which you have specifically chosen to attend, brings more joy. For another, it assumes that all evenings are independent of each other. This is a reasonable assumption for the concert-goers: it is unlikely that very many of them will be the same people from night to night. But the residents are largely the same people from night to night and, even for those upset by the noise, they are unlikely to face the same level of fresh misery each night, by something they are used to, and have already factored into their daily lives, as something that is relatively rare. By analogy: an Islington council tax bill, while unpleasant, is expected. A random demand for the same amount, made without any warning, would be much worse.
Therefore, on the basis of the available evidence, I respectfully petition for the proposed extension to be granted.
So that others may critique the calculations involved, I also intend to place a copy of this analysis on my blog.
Yours sincerely,
Dominic Self
“I… I… I thought we had something. I believed in you! I loved you, dammit, I loved you! But you kept this from me – you lied, lied about the most important thing… all those times you looked me in the eye you knew what you’d done…”
I could barely speak anymore – great waves of horror kept building, bigger and bigger, and then smashing over my head until I was struggling just to stay standing. She was still sitting on the sofa, motionless, frozen, numb from the shock. When I think back I imagine her eyes as pleading with me, apologising, begging for me to forgive her, but they weren’t – they were just lifeless. Dead. All so suddenly it was over, and we both knew it.
Please! A little background.
We met on Omegle: a beautiful union of You and Stranger, or Stranger and You, depending on which way you saw it. “Hi!” – the exclamation mark did it at once – that effortless burst of joy which came so naturally to her. I signed off with my Facebook page, just in case, and the next morning there she was, new friend request, new lives together. She posted on my wall. I liked. She tweeted, I retweeted. Tagged you in a photo. Tagged you in a note. In a relationship? (I became mayor of her bed on foursquare.) In a relationship! Lots of love, xxx.
By the next iPhone release cycle I had moved into her place for real. It was a perfect little flat, just off Swiss Cottage, cosy, homely and with an unsecured wireless network from that nice Mr. Papucci next door. We would spend whole evenings together just snuggled up on her sofa, planning our futures together – and then our future together – feeling utterly safe from the bustling world outside. We had each other, and that was the only news feed story that mattered.
“Ding!”
My phone flashed lazily with a new message. I paused from my current task – stroking her beautifully long hair – just long enough to lean over to the table and pick it up.
“Hey, do you sometimes think we’re too dependent on technology? xxx”
I laughed. “Nooo…”
She turned round smiling. “Well of course, I don’t really. But sometimes I think it might be nice to try living without it all for a day or something, y’know, like our ancestors did.”
“Yeah, that could be fun actually. If we went really primitive, just for a day, as an experiment.”
“I mean, obviously I’m not saying go crazy.”
“No.”
“Not kill ourselves doing this!”
“No!”
“But like, there’s something quite noble about the old days really. Take phones. We take this all for granted, but in the past people had to cope with much lower screen resolutions…”
“God yes. No HD screens for them – nothing even close. Sometimes they weren’t even full colour! And polyphonic ringtones…”
I felt a little shiver of excitement run down her spine. “Y’know, my grandfather had one of those phones, or something even older! It was a Nokia, a 3310, yes that’s right, and before he died he gave it to me to keep!”
“Do you still have it?”
“Of course! I think it’s over in that box on top of the wardrobe somewhere. Y’know, the one I need a stepladder to reach…”
I laughed. “Aha, but I don’t, shawty. I’ll go get it for you.”
The box was pretty heavy as I lifted it down, and covered in dust, so I put it down and began rummaging through it in the corner rather than spreading the dust all over the living room. It seemed to be a wonderfully eclectic collection of stuff from over her life: photos from her childhood, a signed Ethereal Fire gig ticket, a human skull from her gap year in Tyrgyzstan. (“It was all so exotic!” I remember her saying to me about it, “and like, so interesting! We got there just as the civil war was really breaking out, so there was so much to do – in their culture when there’s a civil war it’s traditional for the different groups to really go for each other, like really brutally, so there was always room for volunteers to pitch in, laying mines, shooting, executing prisoners of war… and they were so grateful, those guys we were with. It felt like we really made a difference to their world, y’know?”)
Aha, there it was! Laying right at the bottom: a battered old Nokia 3310 lying peacefully at the bottom of the box, frozen in time. I reached in to pull it out, but then something else caught my eye… a little piece of card, tucked neatly between some photographs. There was nothing remarkable about it, and it looked innocuous enough, so I can’t explain why I pulled it out other than idle curiosity. But I did.
And then my life fell apart.
Fade out. Background over. Back to the start.
“I… I… I thought we had something. I believed in you! I loved you, dammit, I loved you! But you kept this from me – you lied, lied about the most important thing… all those times you looked me in the eye you knew what you’d done…”
What could she do? I mean, what could she do? Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, she did at least try and make a go of it – taking the card weakly from my outstretched hand and trying, at least, to feign ignorance.
“Look, it’s nothing… yes, it is a wedding invite, and yes, it is my wedding invite, and yes, Dave and I were engaged once. But you knew that, or near enough: I told you all about us, remember? I don’t know why I kept it really, but it doesn’t mean anything, I promise…”
She trailed off. I stared at her. She stared at me. I started to well up, and tried as hard as I could to stop the tears from coming as I forced out more words.
“Please. Don’t do this. You know as well as I do that this is nothing to do with Dave, nothing to do with you being engaged… fuck it, I wouldn’t mind if you had forty two children living in a shoe somewhere. This isn’t about that. This is about you.”
She looked down.
“Look, I just need an answer to one simple question.”
She said nothing, but nodded slightly.
“This invite…”
It was so hard to speak. So hard.
“You… designed it?”
She looked up, avoiding my eyes.
“Well, um, I mean, I can’t remember exactly, I think, maybe, maybe Dave did some of the work, I don’t…”
“It was you. I can tell. It’s you all over. Look, you’ve even included your website on it. This was you.”
Silence.
“But… but…”
“STOP IT!” she yelled. “Yes, it was me. YES, OK, IT WAS ME. There, I said it, I confessed, I’m guilty. I designed that invite. I designed that invite down to the very last pixel. And I…”
I took a deep breath, and then finished her sentence for her.
“…used Comic Sans MS?”
“Yes. Yes. I used Comic Sans MS.”
“For your wedding invitation.”
“For my wedding invitation.”
I breathed in deeply, again.
“And the WordArt?”
“At the time, it just… seemed… so… zany…”
By then I was already backing out the door, re-arranging the furniture of the flat in my head to be without my stuff, mentally packing up my Blu-ray discs and USB cables.
She remained still. And then…
“So, this is goodbye, I guess…”
“Yes. The end.”
Now she was crying too.
“Look, I hope we can still be friends. Y’know, on Facebook and stuff. LinkedIn.”
“We’ll see.”
It was all I could manage. My voice was cracking. I had to get out of there.
We was over. Finished. Sans serif, sans us.
And then I was gone.
Ricky Martin – God’s lost child?
But have you ever wondered whether God would approve? To find out, I decided to e-mail the ultimate authority on His Divine Will – right-wing Christian websites based in the States. Here’s the e-mail:
Hi. My name is Richard. I’m… a bit unsure about writing this e-mail to be honest, but I need help and I need Jesus and your site just speaks to me. I’ll try and explain but it’s late and my mind is confused about what’s going in my life.
Basically, well, it’s all about this girl. She’s into… superstitions. Put it like that. Black cats and voodoo dolls, that sort of thing. And I feel a premonition – really strongly in my heart – that this girl’s going to make me ‘fall’.
Oh but it’s great. She’s into new sensations – ‘new kicks in the candle light’ as my old mother would say. So I tried to put up with her habits. But it seems like she’s got a new addiction for every day and night! (If you know what I mean)
The things she does, with me, you know I feel embarrassed talking about them even though you’re just a stranger online. She’ll make you… take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain, yeah we did that once. It’s like this utterly crazy life, she’ll make me live it, but she completely takes away all my pain. But I think Jesus is telling me it’s like a bullet, you know, to my brain. Come on! Help me God!
I’ll tell you about the craziest thing she did. You won’t believe me, honestly, it’s so crazy. I woke up, one morning, in New York City. A funky, cheap hotel (you know the kind). She took my heart, that girl. (She also took my money… oh but that’s a different story altogether!) Anyway, when I saw her in the room, I realised she must have slipped me a sleeping pill or something. Of course, because she never drinks the water! She makes me order champagne instead (French, she insists.) Haha, I just thought, she’s a bit like that herself. Once you have a taste of her you’ll never feel the same eh?
She is going to make me go insane. Oh Jesus, what shall I do?
Yours faithfully,
Richard Martino
Beth on Bergen: “It’s always fun to see you two having such a great time exploring a new place!” Apr 7, 15:05
