To be filed under “things I didn’t know about that I prob­ably should’ve and that answer so many ques­tions: win­dow tax.

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.

At Christ­mas, Al’s Grandma brought two boxes of Ibupro­fen with her — 200mg and 400mg. The ques­tion was, which was which? Al’s Grandma is eld­erly, often con­fused and has prob­lems with her vis­ion. Given that she was nurs­ing a broken thumb at the time, adequate pain relief was neces­sary, so we explained which was which and how many of each to take, set­tling the mat­ter. But it niggled at me that the mat­ter wasn’t even slightly settled — as soon as she got home, she’d be straight back to square one: one of these dosages is higher than the other, and I don’t know which.

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.]

In lieu of going to bed, I give you the Spo­tify playl­ist I’ve been obsess­ively play­ing over and over for the past few weeks, to the det­ri­ment of Al’s men­tal health. It’s only eight tracks long (track­list­ing below) and it’s in no par­tic­u­lar order that would make musical or lyr­ical sense, but I sug­gest you play each track on repeat about ten times before listen­ing to the whole thing. Trust me, it’s the best way to listen to music and the people you live with will just love you for it.

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