Piano Man

Last night, something happened in bed which hasn't happened to me since I was a small boy.

I'm almost certain it's exactly not what you're thinking....

Here’s a short story about it with links to a forthcoming 4K virtual reality video thrown in for good measure.
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I grew up with a piano in my house and as soon as I was able, I started playing and composing. It was one of the happiest parts of growing up at home - sitting down at a piano and just playing when the mood took me.

I left home at 18 and I'm now 31 and have never lived in a house with a piano since. In London I VERY nearly lived with an old lady who was Oxbridge and ex-MI6 because she had a Steinway grand and lived in Sloane Square - but she told me she wanted 'more than a tenant - I want a companion'. I'm still not quite sure what she meant, but I walked away from the deal. I love the piano, but I guess I have my limits.

A couple of years ago my parents decided to give away their piano as no one at home played it anymore and someone else might as well have it. Despite living at the other end of the world, I still got sad knowing it had gone and kept going to play it when I was back visiting - forgetting there was just an empty space there.

After a little bit of moping and looking to the past, it struck me that I'm 31, and if I want a piano, and am dreaming of a piano, I should get one! We recently got kicked out our house in Fitzroy as the landlord wanted to move back in - so found ourselves in a slightly cheaper area, with a slightly bigger detached house. Time to get a piano I thought!

For those who think this might be quite a lot of trouble to go to (why not just use an electric keyboard etc) I recently realised that a significant proportion of my friends don't know the following things about me:

1. I play the piano and cello
2. I compose music and record it (hence needing a real piano)
3. I have my first album coming out in a few weeks (all being well!) on the Atlantic Jaxx label

Having a way to record piano in my own home means I don't have to beg or borrow time on other pianos and can spend more time 'composing' rather than improvising and hoping that one take I managed to do is usable.

So I get online and find a ton of free pianos and manage to get hold of a beautiful Australian made piano and arrange the delivery online.

The night before the piano is due to arrive, I can't get to sleep. This happens to me occasionally, like most people - and almost always after doing something just before bed that involves my pre-frontal cortex and a bright screen.

Usually by 3 or 4am I get off. Last night I didn't get off until 6am, about an hour before the alarm! I couldn't figure it out - I hadn't have caffeine - what was it? Then I realised - I was TOO EXCITED to sleep! I was actually so excited about getting a piano that I couldn't sleep - like that feeling when you're a kid and it's your birthday or Christmas or a big exciting holiday the next day! It had been so long since I'd felt like that I'd forgotten it could happen to adults!

The Comedy Delivery

So at 8am, sleep deprived and not in the best state, I'm greeted by the delivery people with my piano in the back of a truck

The first thing they say is 'we didn't know it was stairs'. I said I didn't know I needed to tell them there were stairs - this being Melbourne, a city with houses that have stairs. I had offered all the information the company requested - and had perhaps naively assumed that piano movers would be equipped to deal with a flight of 5 steps up a porch.

'It'll be an extra $100 as there are stairs'. What can I do but agree? They've got my piano hostage in a truck.

So we take the fence down - and then they deliver the news that I have to help them move it.

I get talking to them, they are international students trying to make a living - both from Amritsar - a fine city, and I told them of my visit a while back to try and build rapport. So we start trying to move the piano.

It becomes apparent very quickly they're not professional movers. One of the guys simply isn't strong enough to lift it - and I'm not a strong man, hence paying removal people! What I have here are the Punjabi Laurel and Hardy. Sadly, I'm the punchline! They're counting in punjabi and I figure out when they say 'jar' I need to lift. But apparently at one point my Punjabi wasn't up to scratch and I mistime a lift, get it half up the step, land it on my foot and cut my hands and hurt my back.

I manage to convince them to count in English so we can synchronise our lifting. This plan would have worked perfectly - if any of us were actually strong enough to lift it. Now, I'm all for diversity and equal opportunities in the workplace - but there are certain expectations when paying for hired muscle, that, well, you've hired some muscle.

We get stuck. We simply can't get it up the final step. We try for ten min, damaging the bottom of the piano in the process, sweating in the heat of the summer day.

Then, like a mirage of tanned muscle, a couple of Australian delivery people spot us. They ask if we need some help (the most rhetorical question I've heard all year) and the two of them proceed to lift it up onto the final step for us as we were all exhausted. I was very grateful, and they wouldn't take a dollar and wished us a good day. I decided this was quite an Australian thing to happen.

Once we'd wheeled the piano into the house the removal people asked for payment, including the extra $100. As you might imagine, I was slightly less enthusiastic about paying the extra money, having done a fair share of the heavy lifting myself.

What followed was rather awkward, as essentially, we'd all been put in this shitty situation by the bad management of the company - them quite fairly being told not to leave without being paid and me, quite fairly, not happy about being essentially mugged in my own house and made to do a job I'd paid other people to do - that they had then outsourced, for free.


The guys were getting quite aggressive, and let's just say I wasn't in the best of moods being sleep deprived - but we parted on good terms and bonded over being students while they helped me reassemble my fence.

Coda and album 'spruiking'

So the coda to this tale is that I now have a piano in my house for the first time in over a decade. Most importantly, I can now start serious work on finishing my second album.

For anyone who is interested, my first album 'Blue Sun' will be released in the next few weeks - here are a couple of places you can subscribe to or following for updates:

• soundcloud.com/jacksnunn
• https://www.facebook.com/jacknunnmusic/
• Subscribe to the Youtube channel and watch that space for a 4K virtual reality 360 degree balloon ride
• https://twitter.com/jacknunn
• https://www.instagram.com/jacksnunn

More soon - thanks for reading!

I’ve watched two significant referendums in the UK play out over the last year or so. Living in Australia means most of my UK news is filtered through social media. I believe in self-fulfilling prophesies – so I’m writing this to help reflect on how we can shape those. We can dream the future, if we wish.  

A shared illusion

Borders, money, laws and human rights only exist if people believe in them. The shared illusion of countries, governments or businesses may also be viewed simply as groups of people acting in either their own interest, or that of their ‘organisation’. This organisation of people may or may not be acting in the 'public interest' or the perceived benefit of the whole world.

Why now for a referendum?

Why are we really having a referendum? If those in power cared what the British public wanted, why didn't they ask before we joined? Why now?

I don't trust most politicians, who I sense are often influenced more by groups of people acting in a self-interest, under a brand or business name than those people they claim to represent. By using politicians as tools, groups of people can manipulate politicians around the world, using all the 'legal' forces they can muster (from trade agreements to guided missiles, guided occasionally by the Geneva convention).

I find this a helpful way to try to comprehend the current referendum – asking who is acting in who’s interests and why?

Where’s the money coming from?

Let’s start with some facts to frame this discussion. The UK is the biggest financial centre on earth. Thus the biggest economic force of power in the UK is the ‘financial services industry’. To imagine it has no influence on politics and the media isn't even naive, it's dangerous. Over the years many people have formed the financial sector into a kind of city state, with huge powers (the City of London Corporation’s key role is ‘supporting the financial services industry’).

The EU represents financial regulation

While publicly, those representing the City have been ambivalent to the EU, there is clear vitriol against proposed regulation and other models such as ‘The Robin Hood Tax’, with some commentators seeing the City ‘under siege’ from the EU which seeks to ‘control and manipulate’ this financial centre. One commentator suggests that EU to many in that sector represents a threat to their self interest in the form of regulation. The Robin Hood Tax, or ‘financial transaction taxes’ (FTT) was attacked by the City of London Corporation. Those working for it stated the likely ‘impact of the FTT on household savings is expected to be large’, suggesting it would destabilise things like pension funds and risk people being able to save for ‘planned large expenses such as, for example, education, building a cushion to be able to deal with large unexpected outlays such as for special health care’,  failing to mention that all of these things could be directly provided by a fairer spread of wealth and could be subsidised by the taxes raised by such a system. Naturally, the biggest threat of this kind of regulation is to those who stand to transfer their wealth to governments.

The UK is the money laundering capitol of the world

Let’s quickly deconstruct the word ‘regulation’. For a country that rightly prides itself on exporting the rule of law, dating back to the Magna Carta, we have a strange doublethink attitude to ‘regulation’ in a free market that has permitted a rotten heart of ‘systematic fraud’ and corruption. The UK’s National Crime Agency states that ‘hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks’. These financial services appear so powerful that they are arguably accountable only to people expressing their desires and power through a free-market, rather than to any democratic system. The financial industry in the UK perpetuates according to a kind of moral fallacy used to justify corruption, in that it might as well be ‘us’ skimming off the top, rather than ‘them’ (for example, New York, Paris or Hong Kong). Rather than lead by example, the policy is to let the UK wait for the imaginary date the financial services will agree to global regulation. Precisely because the UK financial services are not regulated as tightly as the conscience of a significant number of the public would desire (say for example, to stop facilitating money laundering by people involved in activities labelled as organised crime and terrorism), the UK's financial services are able to outcompete more regulated markets.

So what does this have to do with a referendum? Naturally - these financial powers interface directly with ruling politicians.

Money buys political power on both sides of the debate

The current group of ruling politicians form themselves into a 'party' which can't seem to decide whether there would be more or less financial incentives (including bribes) staying in the EU. There are groups of people lobbying on behalf of considerable amounts of 'wealth' on both sides of the debate and it's not clear to them which the most self-interested path is.  

Rather than risk spoiling their party, which seems to work well for most members, they seem to have decided to use the referendum as a tool to both keep their party united and hopefully silence a growing and noisy party centred on UK 'independence' (wouldn't it be interesting to hear from people from a 'UK interdependence party’) which is weakening their control. This vote, they perhaps hope, will silence that party. 

The opposition party is in disarray, with the leader openly anti-EU yet formally campaigning for it to bind the party around a common cause no one quite seems to comprehend in a world where the actual ‘labour’ and toil is mostly done off-shore.

The probable conclusion of the more prominent members of the current ruling party is that if they use the referendum as a bargaining chip, they might win more in negotiations with others who represent countries in the EU, such as perhaps not regulating people working in finance too tightly.

The gamble backfires? 

However, it seems the plan may be backfiring as people motivated by self interest are expertly using   demagoguery, crafting words to stir up ancient and innate fears of 'the other', helping perpetuate the illusion that because the UK is an island nation, it can chose to exist independently. 

What does independent even mean in this context? Air pollution, fish stocks and desperate human beings are but a few things that do not share in the illusion of borders. In every sense, all life on this earth is interdependent. This is fact has been competently recognised for centuries by trade organisations of merchants (such as the Dutch and British East India Companies), redefining sovereignty as something beyond mere nation-states – arguably creating a financial incentive for peace, not war. Recent trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership arguably ‘endanger the sovereignty of the signatory states’ far more than a bloc of nations such as the EU ever could (Dan Carlin explains this wonderfully in this podcast).

When you vote – is it in fear, or hope?

Whatever you chose to vote, just ask yourself in whose interests are you acting? Which illusions are you choosing to share in? What are your outcome measures of success?

Is it a pure financial outcome, a stream of numbers forgotten to history but remembered in your personal bank account? Is it the number of desperate children seeking shelter and 'asylum' rescued or the number turned away and washed-up on beaches? Is it maintaining the faded-flag of an idea of nationhood, straining to stay relevant in a digitally dominated world where people increasingly identify more as ‘global citizens’ – national rivalries seeming as ridiculous as Yorkshire Vs Lancashire. If nations are doomed to evolve or dissolve this also begs the important question about what exactly will emerge instead, and who will be the next big customer of our arms dealers, and to who will they be accountable?

This is how to vote

Are you being honest with yourself about why you are voting? Are you hiding behind other people's lies or fears. Do you question everything you are told with your heart as well as your head – with full knowledge – conscience? Are your own fears or hopes a tool for being used by someone else or are you happy in your personal illusion, your shared illusion, accountable to it?

What ever way this vote goes, I want to share in the illusion that people were capable of voting beyond a self-interest, voting with their conscience and dreaming a better world into reality, born not of fear, but hope.

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This piece was written by Jack Nunn on 16^th July 2016 and is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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Contact - Twitter: @JackNunn  - Jacknunn.com

To gather up the crumbs: Whose table is it anyway?

Using only camembert, smoked salmon and controlled laboratory conditions, I had a revelation about the relationship between researchers and publishers. This is the story.

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I was in one of the world’s leading laboratories being given a tour of a potentially hazardous area, when suddenly the PA barked ‘ATTENTION ALL STAFF, ATTENTION ALL STAFF’. I was ready for the worst, to evacuate or suit up. But why was I there at all?

I’d spoken earlier that day about public involvement in research and publishing at an event at the inspiring Walter and Eliza Hall Research Institute.

It was organised and paid for by the open access publisher Biomed Central, in order to raise awareness about their work.

The publisher recently asked if I would volunteer my time to be a member of the editorial board of the new journal ‘Research Involvement and Engagement’ and also speak at their events in Australia. It is a new journal being run on a not-for-profit model and BioMed Central are world-leaders in open access publishing, so it was exciting to accept.

I found myself plunged into the mysterious, intriguing and often self-perpetuating world of publishing.

The speech I made essentially asked the question ‘What value do publishers add to research, and therefore the public good’. This is a different question from how valuable is publishing - to which the answer is ‘very’. Publishers make lots of money from publishing research, including open access research. In other words, I sought an answer to the question – ‘what are publishers giving back to the research process, in return for the money they take’.

I also asked how the public could be supported to be more involved in every stage of the research cycle, including publishing and dissemination. I ended with my usual plug for Tim Berners Lee’s eye-opening TED talk about open and linked data, which describes how everyone can access and interpret data - the very embodiment of public involvement in research.

If you’re interested, the full speech I made is here. Briefly, I said I think publishers have an important and crucial role in science, and posed a series of questions to reflect on why do publishers exist as they do - much as one may ponder ‘Why do we have a Royal Family?’ in a neutral and balanced way.

After I spoke, I met interesting people around a delicious buffet of cheeses and smoked salmon and then was fortunate enough to be given a tour of the research institute by a friend and colleague who worked at Walter and Eliza Hall Research Institute.

Within half an hour I’d met world-leading cancer researchers, people developing potential malaria vaccines and seen other labs full of people working late, missing out on time with friends and family in order to do countless wonderful things in the name of research.

As it was a working lab, naturally there were exciting things like negative pressure rooms and gene-sequencers - but also the reminders you were somewhere potentially dangerous, with ‘biohazard’ signs and emergency eyewash and showers at every corner.

Suddenly the PA system barked out ‘ATTENTION ALL STAFF, ATTENTION ALL STAFF.

They had my attention too.  I was ready to evacuate, or go on a three-day lock-down to hunt for an escaped malaria-carrying mosquito.

The announcement continued:

‘THERE IS LEFT-OVER FOOD UPSTAIRS. Repeat, THERE IS LEFT-OVER FOOD UPSTAIRS ’.

I laughed, half in relief - but on reflection, there was nothing that funny about it. The food was from the BioMed Central event I had spoken at.

Naturally, no one wants food to go to waste - but the funny side wore off when I saw researchers head upstairs to eat leftovers from an event, which like many awareness raising events, is partly funded by open access fees. These are often paid by research institutions to publishers to cover the costs of making it available without a ‘paywall’. However, many publishers also spend significant amounts of money to attract researchers to publish with them. Naturally it’s more complicated than this, but a simple thought struck me and I daydreamed…

I day-dreamed of a world where researchers doing life-saving work had publishers eating their leftovers, at events hosted by researchers. Events where researchers allowed potential publishers apply for the privilege of publishing them - and researchers decide who they will allow to publish their important research.

I imagined what would happen if all researchers collectively and suddenly decided they didn’t want to submit to ‘for-profit’ publishers because they felt reputations and ‘impact factors’ were suddenly irrelevant in a digital age, thus disrupting any business model based on prestige. Would less money go to publishers and more stay within research institutions for research? Would a sea of poor quality research drown good research with no one paid to check it, or would publishing just happen faster, like me publishing this blog -  the reviewing stage happening afterwards, in the open, in public?

It was a wild day-dream and I blame the blue cheese.

So dear reader, if you ever feel you are not worthy to eat the crumbs of others, always ask ‘whose table is it’?

In research, the table is for everyone, and we should all be invited to sit at it as equals.

We just need to figure out who is bringing the cheese and smoked salmon.

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Full disclosure: I receive no money for the time I volunteer with BioMed Central. I did, however, eat more than my fair share of cheese at one of their events.

Follow me on Twitter @jacknunn

Am I normal?

This article is about the dangers of the word ‘normal’, combined with the ever-increasing uptake of health and fitness devices. This has made me dream of a wondrous future for health technology, built on the ideal of open source.

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Today my phone told me I wasn't normal. My phone has a built in heart monitor. In fact, many smartphones are capable of giving a rough estimate of your heart rate these days. However my phone now pairs this hardware with some 'fitness' software. Today the software told me that my resting heart rate was outside the 'normal' range. In case there are any insurers reading I won't say if it's too slow or too fast and by what number but needless to say it gave me cause for concern. Suddenly I'm not normal, and more than that I might not be normal in a potentially lethal way. My first issue was with the word 'normal'. Normal can be a very helpful word, especially in a medical context. However, that context is one of statistics and averages, not of individuals. Therefore one person cannot be described as normal, normal is simply a result of statistics; a result being described as normal in comparison to a wider data set. However, normal takes on a different meaning for many people, especially people less familiar with medical terminology and statistics (for example people with a lower level of health literacy, some younger people, or those for whom English is not first language). ‘Normal’ in everyday life is linked to ideas about identity, social belonging and a host of other associations including appearance and behaviour. As I consider myself fairly able to navigate the Internet and seek out trustworthy sources, I was able to quickly learn I didn't have too much to worry about. However it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to see somebody reading 'not normal' and worrying, perhaps even worrying themselves to death. At this point I would just like to say I think the use of technology in modern health and self-management is a wondrous and fantastic thing. Seeing friends with diabetes managing their blood glucose levels with gadgets, you can begin to see how some of this technology will soon go mainstream. However, developers of technology to help people manage their own health and fitness must learn quickly the dangers of getting it wrong. My example is a very small one, but points to the tip of an iceberg. A free market economy combined with a semi-regulated technology may create an environment which may not afford developers and manufactures the time or conditions to adequately test and refine their creations. This creates a new frontier for the public, patients, users and consumers of devices to have a more active role in the development and monitoring of the quality of information, devices and services. To anticipate this, I dream of some kind of voluntary international mark or accreditation which developers and manufacturers can sign up to (it would have to be international, or it would be pointless). To get the accreditation, developers must show that information is evidence-based, reliably cited and that the words used have been developed and improved by users and consumers and other members of the public. Additionally, there should be a clear way for people to comment and give feedback on content.
Finally, I would encourage all ‘for profit’ developers and manufacturers to make as much of their work and code as possible ‘open source’. If you’re ‘not for profit’ (charity or Government) then there’s absolutely no reason to hold anything back. There is little value to be gained from intellectual property surrounding bad services and products. Make them open source, make them transparent and let the world and the community improve and develop them. Ideas and code, along with hardware, will increasingly form part of a delivery model for a service, rather than the valuable commodity itself. In health technology, the value and revenue will likely come from delivering a service which is useful to people who need it (think of Google ‘giving away’ the Android operating system, letting other people build the hardware and code that then brings the revenue back to Google). Trust will form a huge part of a business model, with users increasingly handing over the most personal of data to servers, perhaps even our whole genomes. And a quick note on law. No one is above it and we all need it to be in place and upheld to protect everyone. As a result, yes, we need lawyers. But revenue won't come from paying lawyers to help monopolize discrete pieces of information that make a wider system work. That will just get us more lawyers.

The example that comes to mind is Apple, patenting the action of moving a finger across a screen to ‘unlock’ the device– or ‘performing a gesture’ as they put it. Well I’m imagining performing a gesture at the people who employ this kind of thinking, especially when applied to health technology.

To quote Dickens, the ‘lawyers always win’. To quote a more up-to-date source ‘the answer to the innovator's dilemma is not here in the courtroom suing people’ (John Quinn, Samsung's lawyer). The balance must be between employing lawyers to protect people and protecting the incentive for creativity.

Openness is a strength, not a weakness. A strange Orwellian paradox is that the more open and transparent a project is, the less likely we are to have products and services with vulnerabilities. In the panopticon, we have ultimate transparency and we need to strike a balance between having everything be open, shareable and hackable/improvable – and having security vulnerabilities in things like pacemakers. The United States Food and Drug Administration has already communicated on this issue and where this balance is struck should be a conversation everyone is invited to be a part of.

When I'm dying, and a robotic combination of code and hardware is keeping me alive, I want to know that anyone has been able to improve the code, that everyone owns it, and I, along with anyone else, have had the chance to make it better.

Is that normal?

Remembrance

I arrived eleven minutes late to the shrine.

The guns already fired, with poppy wearing figures making a slow return across the Yarra.

When the first shot fired I was  half across a bridge. I'd stopped over a railway line and took off my cycle helmet in awkward reverence, ignoring the endless rattle of the city.

A man near by stopped and looked at his watch, to check his silent pause was on the dot.

I've had less than half an hour of minutes in my life to remember.

As a child it's explained, but now it's understood. Almost.

I arrive and sit on grass near by as a brass band plays 'Waltzing Matilda', somehow somberly.

A smile creeps across my face.

Fast jets shoot by, flaring smoky promises to founding future shrines.

As the jet trails fade, I queue to enter the inner sanctum.

At midday, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month the sun shines on the word 'love', to help us remember.

I hope I can remember this for more than an hour.

To the lighthouse, with a twist.

Today I visited somewhere I've wanted to visit my whole life. You might have already guessed it's a lighthouse. For Virginia Woolf fans [spoiler alert], the twist is that I finally made it.
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I have fond memories of growing up in Loughborough. As more distant memories do, they blur into one. When I think of being 6 or 7, my memory is of walking home from primary school. In my head it's usually autumn, and my pockets are full of conkers and other clichés . There was a certain part of the path walking home that always seemed to have a big puddle, and busses would always splash you.

So I'd get home, the central heating would be timed to be on already. A loving parent would be preparing dinner, and, if my sister permitted or was absent, I would get the spot by the radiator and hold my legs against it to dry them out.

My sister and I would sit there, hour after hour, year after year, watching children's television.

Growing up in England as a child your television was either home-grown or American. That was basically it.

However, in the early nineties a new show appeared where everyone had Australian ascents and it always seemed to be sunny. It was called 'Round the Twist'. The music was catchy, the story lines were hilarious, occasionally supernatural, and usually with a firm (but not patronising) moral message. And it was always good. And they lived in a lighthouse.

Ask anyone who grew up in the eighties/nineties if they watched this show and they will sing you the theme tune. It was repeated solidly for over ten years and I think it's probably the best children's' show that's ever been made.

My sister bought me the box set a few years ago and I've watched a few of them recently. They're genuinely still really good and often, much much stranger than I remembered.

This show was my first glimpse at life in Australia. Before it, I knew very few things about the place. For example, the only fact I knew about Australia from the age of four until 11 was that they had bum-biting spiders. From 11 onwards I genuinely thought 'Waltzing Matilda' was the national anthem until I was in my twenties.

I remember that 'Neighbours' was always on after kids TV, but the few times I did stray into it, it was just adults sitting around talking and schools girls in gingham uniforms gossiping. I never lasted more than five minutes.

But 'Round the Twist' was great, and it got me into Paul Jennings (it was based on his books). I devoured his books and also read 'Misery Guts' (by Morris Gleitzman) about an English family that run a chippy that burns down and they decide to move to Australia. It was also made into a great TV series and I guess it was at that age that the seed of the idea of moving to Australia as an escape was sowed.

It's a well trodden narrative and films as recent as the 'Inbetweeners 2' still peddle the idea of it being a sun-soaked heaven on earth for British people.

So today, Alicia and I were driving our car along the Great Ocean Road to the lighthouse from 'Round the Twist'.

As for Virginia Woolf [no one has used square brackets more effectively than her], her book 'To the lighthouse' popped up in my head today for a couple of reasons. It's set during the Great War and paints a painful picture of the good life, just out of reach, and interjects short and powerful reminders throughout [usually in square brackets] that men are being mown down just across the channel. Without meaning to spoil the book, they always talk of going to visit the local lighthouse, but never get round to it. For me, the lighthouse represented the promise of the good life.

On the way to the lighthouse today, we drove through the memorial arch of the Great Ocean Road and were reminded that the road we were driving on was built by returned veterans from the first world war [to give them work] and it is the world's largest war memorial.

Alicia and I took it in turns to drive, so we could both gawp freely at the amazing views and spectacular waves.

And then, in the distance, the lighthouse appeared. A familiar sight from my childhood that has come to represent Australia in my mind.

As I drove there, I decided that not only is the Great Ocean Road the biggest memorial, it's also the most effective. I can't think of a better way to honour those murdered by war than to build a road that doesn't need to exist, just so it can remind you how beautiful life is, and how bloody lucky we are [have you ever, ever felt like this?].

So in wet trousers [by a radiator in England] I set out on a journey and arrived at the lighthouse.

What's app doc?

This is the story of how I used my phone to protect my balls from harmful radiation in Vietnam.

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It's no exaggeration to say that ever-improving technology has improved almost every aspect of travelling during my life.

I’m old enough to remember post-cards being sent unironically, long distance phone calls that cost more than a good meal and waiting four weeks to realise you had your thumb over the lens.

In Vietnam, for the first time ever when travelling, I brought a local sim and enjoyed unlimited access to the internet on my phone.

Of all technological progress, being able to access the internet anywhere really has changed everything.  No need to worry about storing maps offline, hunting out wifi hotspots to share your latest digital brag or losing irreplaceable photos if your phone should be suddenly snatched from your hand by a thief on a motorbike.

However, of all the online tools, the most unexpected thing which has really come into its own has been translation.  I downloaded Google's translation app (a babel-fish clone) for a bit of fun while bored in a station. I was astounded how far this technology has come.  It quickly became indispensable.

For those unaware, not only can you use text translation, you can also speak into it in a range of languages and have it read out the translation back to you. In some languages, you can just point your camera at signs and the phone quickly tells you what it says. Hopefully.

It is on the whole quite accurate, with a few hilarious exceptions. We tried to strike up a conversation with a friendly waitress with limited English skills. We hit a conversational hurdle so I whipped out my phone and she told me that she loved the smell of my milky cobra thighs. We still don't know what she meant.

The translation tool came into its own one day when I wasn't feeling well. Too much sleeping with the air conditioning on had given me a chest infection and I'd been in bed for a day or two. I generally try to avoid doctors when travelling but after coughing up a bit of blood one morning, I thought it was time to get checked out.

A local doctor was sent for. His English was limited, my Vietnamese stretched to two or three words.

Out came the phone, I quickly explained and he quickly diagnosed and said I needed a chest X-ray. He charged me less than two US dollars. Almost nothing to me, though a huge amount to some I’m sure.

Our hotel receptionist offered to drive us to the hospital and come along with us. I'm so grateful she did, as she did more than a translation app could do. She took us to the better, less crowded university hospital and also negotiated the 'local' price for me, which tourists don't usually get.

On entering, we walked past a trolley with a man who seemed to have been in a car accident and was bleeding heavily. I tentatively sat on a nearby bed and told Alicia to touch NOTHING. My trusty alcohol gel was poised. Within a few minutes, (after some more successful translation) I was given blood tests and the results within one hour and waited almost no time for an X-ray (unlike some of the poor local people).  

I walked into the room and was greeted by an X-ray machine that looked older than me and still used a film plate. I was asked to take my shirt off, stand facing the wall and prepare to be probed. By photons.

I suddenly remembered something was missing from all this and got slightly nervous I was about to be accidentally sterilised. Being able to say 'do you have a lead plate so I can cover my genitals’ is a phrase I’m convinced I wouldn't know had I been taught Vietnamese for years.

So happily, my phone was able to translate and I stepped into a lead plate harness-thingy which happened to be hanging next to me, as the radiographer had forgotten about it.

So don’t let anyone ever tell you that keeping your phone in your pocket is bad for your balls!