“GE’s problems could not have been foreseen, he insists. “We had McKinsey do a study in July 2007 and we asked them to say how long the global liquidity bubble will last and they came back and said forever, so it wasn’t like we didn’t ask the tough questions.”"

In a Guardian puff-piece on General Electric here: http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/14/general-electric-jeff-immelt-multinational

Her thesis is pretty much what you would imagine from the title of the book, that overly positive thinking does nothing but distract and fool you – be a realist instead. See your real situation. Sounds a bit like rationality to me, as preached by all those over at Less Wrong. So I am all for it – I don’t think that George W. Bush or Sarah Palin can really be doing any good with a completely blinkered approach to life. Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true. And just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was for the best, or meant to be. Nonsense and piffle.

The point from the audience that struck me was a comment from someone who heads up the UK office of a US organisation. She said that the only reason that she can get away with her approach to work is because of the three-thousand miles of ocean between here and there. She claimed that she would not be employable at the US head office, would be seen as, “not a team player”, and believed that this had major implications for US / UK relations. And for the rest of the world.

I hope she is wrong, but those statements really struck a chord. And this is where it really starts to matter, and where we see leaders appealing to personal conviction to justify actions that have real world impacts. Conviction means almost nothing in the end – not when it runs straight into reality and causes death and destruction. But personal conviction seems to feature more and more in our political discourse, our international relations. That is scary.

As an aside, one thing that confused me is what the definition of positive psychology is. The wikipedia article looks a bit wishy washy from the first sentence, but I interpreted a lecture from Sonja Lyubomirsky I saw online (and posted about here) differently. I thought they were documenting correlations between behaviours and self-reported happiness, which is interesting and harmless, and can help think about what contentment, or happiness is. There must be something else built on top of this to attract the hostility I think Barbara Ehrenreich has for the field. More research needed… perhaps tomorrow.

The revolution came, of course, with central heating. In the days when smoke still drifted from every household chimney and coal came to the door in sacks, my Latin teacher instructed us in the word “hypocaust”. Roman villas, he said, had a form of central heating concealed beneath their floors – the Romans being so advanced, and in this instance more advanced than we were… And then within 30 years nearly every house was fitted with its miniature variant… … sending children to nest in warm bedrooms, permitting more frequent baths, redistributing the living room furniture. Entire houses, rather than just one or two rooms inside them, now glowed wastefully with heat.

From this balmy atmosphere, fuelled largely by imported gas, we can view the external cold with far greater equanimity… Unless things go wrong, we don’t feel it, not as we used to do. And if things do go wrong, I recommend you pick up a copy of The Worst Journey in the World, which will make you thank God for even the coldest British bedroom – in that sense it is a very warming book.

I grew up in a house without central heating, but with plenty of condensation and damp. Some of my strongest memories are of the Sunday night bath, followed by a rather desperate and comical gallop down the stairs to the front room. Wrapped in a worn out towel, I would huddle with my brother around the two-bar gas fire. Eventually some level of warmth would return, enough to dress in vests, pyjamas, sock and jumpers before retiring to our beds layered with as many blankets as we could negotiate. I seem to remember him playing the, “I’m the youngest” card to get the marginal blanket.

And that was summer. Good times!