Look ma, no hands!

I’ve been at something of a blogging impasse recently, stymied by my own self-censorship. I was going to say something about the new AI start-up Matter and Space and in particular what I perceived as a bit of white saviour complex in their promo, but a) Audrey digged deeper than I would and b) it’s not really my place to comment on it. After turning down a prestigious invite to the UN recently (because of travelling to the US), I also wanted to say something about the difficulty of hosting, attending and bringing people to open ed conferences in the US, but again, that’s not my story now and so I didn’t feel it appropriate to comment.

All of which is preface to me writing something deliberately frivolous. As I said in an earlier post, I’m working through what this blog is post-OU, and so far it seems to be a therapy blog about blogging. This navel will not go ungazed.

A couple of years ago, I mentioned to Maren that I couldn’t whistle. I figured it was a genetic thing, like being able to curl your tongue – some people can, some just can’t, that’s all there is to it. But as I said that, I realised it was just one of those background beliefs I had (I should emphasise that I don’t think about whistling a lot). The genetic ability thing is not in fact true, although it turns out lots of non-whistlers (the great unwhistled) believe it to be so. You can learn it. So, I spent a week learning to whistle, by watching YouTube videos. When I say a spent a week, I don’t want you to have visions of an intense whistle retreat in the Welsh mountains. Rather, in my mid-morning break every day, I would spend about 15 minutes practicing whistling, and would also try it at random moments, to the bemusement of my dogs.

Well, I learnt to whistle after a fashion. I’m not one of those people who can break into a trilling solo at the drop of a hat, I require about five minutes of unsightly lip wetting to be able to emit a feeble beep. If we were engaging in a covert operation, I would not recommend that we use whistling as a means of alerting each other to the enemy’s presence. You would be carted away and locked up before I got my first warning. But I can whistle. It is no longer on a list of things I can’t do. To demonstrate insouciance I could credibly whistle past a graveyard.

This got me thinking of other things that I can’t do. That is obviously a long list, so I clarify it as: trivial skills that many people possess, but for some reason of biography, I don’t, but I could probably learn to do it in a week. It’s not big things, like speaking French, coding Python, or surfing. This brings me on to this week and my new task: Learning to ride a bike with no hands.

I used to spend a lot of time on a bike as a kid, but never quite managed to cycle around no-handed. It is an entirely useless skill (even more so than whistling) for a man in his late fifties, but let’s face it, it does look cool. As with whistling, I am not alone in not being able to do this, and so I’m following this helpful video this week:

I have an ongoing list of such trivial skills to master in my attempt to disprove the old dog, new tricks adage. If the next blog post is from a hospital bed, you’ll know the cycling no-hands didn’t go well.

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