From wikipedia:

Properties with between ten and twenty windows paid a total of four shillings, and those above twenty windows paid eight shillings.  The number of windows that incurred tax was changed to seven in 1766 and eight in 1825. The flat-rate tax was changed to a variable rate, dependent on the property value, in 1778. People who were ineligible for church or poor rates, for reasons of poverty, were exempt from the window tax.  Window tax was relatively unintrusive and easy to assess. The bigger the house, the more windows it was likely to have, and the more tax the occupants would pay. Nevertheless, the tax was unpopular, because it was seen by some as a tax on “light and air”.

The tax was imposed in Scotland in the 1780s, instantly explaining (almost) all of the buildings in Edinburgh with bricked-up windows.

Additionally, the tax is considered to be a possible origin of the phrase “daylight robbery“, though this remains unproven.

So this article from Futurity, “Caution, may cause confusion and misuse” has me thinking about why medication directions, both prescription and over-the-counter, are so difficult to follow.

“Half of adults misunderstand common standard drug warnings on prescription labels, putting them at risk for using the medicine incorrectly or even having a life-threatening event.”

The information on medication is overly complex and often difficult to follow. Instructions are misleading, abstract and wording used just because it always has been, even when there is no evidence of its effectiveness:

“A lot of the current warnings were phrased very abstractly and were confusing. For example, we changed ‘For external use only’ to ‘Use only on your skin.’ We moved from the intangible to the concise.”

A similar project was undertaken by a graphic designer for Target in the US in 2005, complete with identifying colour labeling for family members. As far as I’m aware, nothing similar has made it over to UK pharmacies yet.

The photo to the right is the label from some nose drops when I had a sinus infection (let’s skip over who prescribes medication that needs you to hang upside down four times a day to someone with a bad sinus infection). One drop to be “instilled” four times a day for “esven” days, later contradicted with mildly terrifying warning “not to be taken”. The instruction is in small, blurry, badly printed text, with the name of the pharmacy as, or more, prominent than any of the directions.

I take a lot of medications, and there is nothing consistent about them. While they all come in boxes (apart from the odd ear/nose drop) almost all are generics, so there’s often very little packaging difference between one and the other – it’s branding for the generics company, not the medication, so get two from the same company and confusion ensues. If I happen to go to a different pharmacy to pick up my prescription, then I’ll more than likely get a different brand of generics from them than my usual pharmacy, with a different box and different branding. As for the actual pills, they can vary so much between brands that there is no real point in trying to identify them by shape, size or colour.

I’m lucky. I can read without problems, and I have no problem remembering what the GP has told me about my medication (or asking them to repeat it until I have no problem remembering). I can pull out a load of pill boxes, mentally sort them, and remember which ones to take when – when I remember to take them at all, that is. I’m bolshy enough that if a medicine isn’t working as it should I’ll go back to the doctor and whine until they change it. But what if I couldn’t read well? What if I couldn’t remember? What if I’d had a stroke and couldn’t comprehend written language well but lived alone? What if I forgot why I was taking any medication in the first place, let alone what it was or how many to take? What if I was too embarrassed to ask for help? What if I didn’t know where to go for help? At least one, if not all, of these things will happen to me in the course of my life. You too.

So why is labeling so bad here in the UK? Why is there so much variation, odd English and so little help? What would help? If I could, I’d go back to Christmas and make some large colour-coded stickers to label the ibuprofen with. Even if she struggled to read the digit some days, Al’s Grandma would soon learn to associate the pink with the pills she takes two of. Why can’t she walk into a pharmacy and say, “I’m not sure how many of these to take as a standard dose” and have them sticker the packs for her?  Why can’t she get large-print, colour-coded labels on her pills, and why can’t the doctor print out a timetable for her detailing which of her prescriptions to take when?* I can Photoshop up a giant pink 2 icon in less than a minute (and potentially print it out and stick it on a box. I’m a grafter, me.), but imagine what could be done for labeling with a bit of research, some user testing and, most importantly, some consistency?

*When thinking about this, I planned a website which luckily already exists: MyMedSchedule. It is US-based, so most UK drugs will have to be laboriously typed in, but I can’t find a UK equivalent.

The poverty of stimulus theory argues (something along the lines) that language must be innate, not learned, because a child could not develop knowledge of complex grammar and language based on the limited input they receive from adults. It’s also something that keeps popping into my head as I get frustrated by myself and my inability to write.

I read A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and came out thinking that if I could write like that I could really write. And I think of incidents I could write about, how I would write about it. And then I get to the computer and instantly turn to Google Reader to catch up with the latest Lolcats before switching my attention to Twitter to see what knowledge I can glean in 140 characters.

And then I beat myself up because I order a copy of Didion’s non-fiction from Amazon since the library doesn’t have it and it seems to be hard to get. Because technically, I can’t really afford it.

And I beat myself up because I sign up for two courses I really want to do. Because technically, I can’t really afford it.

Lolcats? Lolcats are free.

But in this case, is free necessarily good? Is free healthy? It’s the cheap but bad for you food versus the expensive but good for you food argument, but in knowledge form.

Is information worth paying for? Can the stimulus be made richer simply by investing in it? How to tell the difference between what’s worth paying for, and what you wouldn’t (shouldn’t) use, even if it were free?

You can be an expert on anything on the internet. Pick a topic, make some lists, wait to be interviewed on other blogs – cha-ching, pop-up Expert. This is not necessarily expertise worth listening to. This is unlikely to be expertise worth listening to. That may be an unjustifiable comment, to assume that someone who blogs their knowledge knows less that someone who write journal articles.

What really matters is the provenance of the information. I trust Didion on grief because she has been there. Do I trust her more because she can write well about it? Because she has been published on the subject? If I wrote about grief, would I trust myself as a source? I have a degree in linguistics, but there are so many more places I would send you for information on linguistics than my brain, which can barely recount the poverty of the stimulus argument. I would send you to books. I would refer you to other people’s brains. Does that mean they’re experts? Or just that I trust in the provenance of the information? I trust them to tell you what they don’t know as well as what they do know.

I don’t know.

At some point in late October,deep in the midst of post-viralness when the most active thing I could do was think, I realised the strangeness of months and years: how could a group of days be so easily categorised as September or This Week or 2009, and how could I spend so much time blaming that month or that year for everything going wrong, when the days, the years, really have no more in common than the sunrise and sunset? It was no more October’s fault that I had been constantly ill than it was the people next door’s, and I wasn’t crying at their front door each night, ruing the day they moved in. So I’m finding myself trying really hard not to blame 2009 for the catalogue of general lousiness that has been 2009, trying hard not to pin my hopes on waking up on January 1st 2010 we a sense of focus and clarity and boundless energy. But if I were to look at 2009 as a whole, to lump the days together into one neat bundle: wow, 2009. You sucked.

The biggest measurable challenge? Easily my dissertation, complete with overambitious, overcritical, underqualified, underhelpful supervisor. No, really, did I ever tell you that story about how she only sent me the first draft feedback at 7pm the night before the dissertation was due in? And how that feedback included a huge list of things she wanted in it that she’d never mentioned before? I cannot let go of the whole thing. Spending six months having to answer to the every whim of a slightly crazy person will do that to you.

The biggest challenge to my faith in the world? Either my purse being stolen (I know. It sounds so… petty.) or the random stranger Waitrose incident. Taken alone – even taken together – these seem like such relatively minor incidents, and you know, I am fine with replacing bank cards and watching bruises subside: I’m both alive and I’m grateful not to be in the headspace that makes attacking people in supermarkets seem like a good idea. But I’m increasingly realising that both incidents eroded something in me: I’m leaving 2009 with much less trust, and most less conviction of the goodness, of the world around me. I’m aware of how overdramatic that sounds, but that person who reaches around me to pick up a loaf of bread? I don’t think I can trust them anymore.

The biggest me-challenge? Trying to find out who to be when uni ended. I left university knowing two things: 1) I didn’t want to be a linguist 2) I didn’t want to jump onto the graduate career treadmill. It turns out that rules out very little and there is still so much hanging in space, undecided. I’m lucky enough to have a marketable enough skill to pay the rent while I work as a (sometimes very) part time freelance web designer, and for someone with no design background whatsoever there have been victories – I somehow managed to brand an awards ceremony, got two very conservative organisations to adopt social media policies, have yet to be arrested for the shoddy filling in of a tax return, and I’m currently disproportionately excited about being on some Creative Review Twitter lists as an actual designer. [That's just crazy. There are real designers on those lists!] But I don’t know if this is really the direction I want to take, don’t know if this is really what I Want To Do and whether I shouldn’t just go and do what my family suggest and get a “proper job”.

But the biggest challenge of 2009, the one I will look back on and go I can’t believe I did that? Just keeping one foot in front of the other and keeping going. It has been so ridiculously hard at times, but I’m starting to regroup and starting to look forward. You have been a lousy arbitrary collection of unconnected days, 2009, but I’m looking forward to the next lot.

[Note: I wrote this, which is less of an entry and more of a collection of random thoughts, as part of the Best of 2009 Challenge. I'm struggling to find any "bests" this year. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that the next decade can't get worse than the last one.]

Obviously, because it’s a Spotify playlist, you’ll need Spotify to play it, and because it’s a Spotify playlist there’s a good chance it randomly won’t work because the sky is the wrong shade of grey or there are leaves on the internet or something.

Click here for playlist

Low – Just Like Christmas
David Gray – Please Forgive Me – Radio Edit
The Holloways – Generator
Slow Moving Millie – Beasts
Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Big Pink – Dominos
Andrew Bird – Eugene
Kate Nash – Mariella

Some days it’s best to just give up and spend the afternoon sitting in the kitchen listening to the radio and covering balloons in tissue paper.

If you’re wondering, the image is from a copy of the Sunday Times Magazine wherein Mariah Carey describes her music as “hardcore, but not too hardcore.” I love this. It proves you can say anything, and as long as you believe it – even if you are the sort of person so deluded that you want a million white kittens to serenade you as you enter a room – people will print it without questioning. Okay, so it probably helps to be both extremely rich and superbly famous, but if Mariah Carey can claim to be hardcore without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow, I should be able to get away with more.