Loaded Objects 1: The Tennents Lager Lovelies Cans

I’m not sure how old I was when these first floated into my consciousness, but it would have been at some point in the late eighties when I was at primary school and gradually beginning to focus my attention outside of my childish circle of friends and activity into the mysterious world of adults.

The tins (tinnies): marvellous in their ranked uniformity:  the front of the can emblazoned with that bold red T with the turned down ends on the top and the sky blue background perfectly setting off the foamy-topped glass of amber liquid, and then, like a conjuring trick, you’d circle round the display in Prestos Supermarket (radio jingle: “You’ll be impressed in Presto!”) to see the many and varied lovelies on the back. How many of them were there? I never had a sense of it. Linda and Kelly and Janis and all those other reassuringly bland names. Who were they? Where did they come from? What did their mammies and daddies think about them being on the back of a beer can?

Even at that young age the cans provoked a deep curiosity accompanied by a simultaneous deep unease in me. On the one hand I liked looking at the lovelies (of course, that was the whole point of them) – their helmets of moussed hair, so fashionable in those days; the Bowieseque streaks of harsh pink blusher (considered so tacky now, but the absolute height of fashion then); and their exotic outfits, sometimes reassuring, like a fluffy pink sweater, other times risqué verging on the pornographic – baby blue satin nightgowns or glimpses of lingerie, utterly exotic when all you’ve seen is you and your mam’s faded sensible knickers hanging on the line. But along with the titillation and the aesthetic pleasure of looking at pretty young women there was something else – something that I wasn’t then able to put into words or form into a coherent question. I was taken up by the who and the what – who was Linda and what was she wearing? But the questions I was unable to form were all why – why were these women on the back of beer cans? Why were some of them wearing fancy (I didn’t yet know the word ‘sexy’) clothes? Why were there no men on the back of the cans?

There was something highly collectible about the tins, which as a child I understood very keenly. These cylindrical tubes, each with their shiny pretty lady on the back were the next step up from the Paninni stickers we traded in the playground. I imagined the men who bought the cans arranging them in similar pyramidal displays on their mantelpieces, sitting swigging their Tennents and looking at their collection of lovelies. I thought about what they might be thinking as they looked at their tinnies and I felt strange and uncomfortable inside. I knew it was best not to ask anyone about what this meant.

But there were things I dimly understood. Tennents and tinnies in general were for men, which meant that the pictures of the lovelies were for men, not for ladies. It was a bit embarrassing to look at them, to think about what Mam and Dad would say if they caught me sneaking peeks them. But then, why were they there in big displays in Prestos? You couldn’t not look at them! I’d seen the dirty magazines hidden away on the top shelves of newsagents and somehow I knew these tinnies, although they were on display right in front of the main doors of the town supermarket just like Fairy Liquid and Daz, were from the same family of items as those magazines, and that there was something not quite right going on, something that made my dull little local supermarket, in my grubby little seaside hometown, suddenly feel like a hostile environment.

To this day I’ve never had even a sip of Tennents – partly out of a class-based snobbishness (somehow I’m sure it won’t taste as good as the cold crisp expensive Italian lagers I love) but also because of the invisible gender-based taboo that was imprinted within me during the run of that advertising campaign. I wasn’t then aware of the grim drinking culture that existed in Scotland, or how masculine it was. My dad didn’t drink Tennents and my grandpa preferred to drink his beer draught, in the company of other people at the local pub. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I became aware of the tradition of the ‘carry out’ – and the fondness for Scots to sit drinking tin after tin in their own houses, or to build my imagined pyramids of empty cans on every available surface in the living room and kitchen.

The campaign ended in 1991, apparently, when I was 13. I suspect it had started to look a little gauche in the wake of lads’ magazines and Eurotrash. I feel no nostalgia for the Tennents lovelies, but perhaps some misplaced admiration for the campaign strategists that took the objectification of women to its logical apex, and persuaded an entire nation for several decades to unthinkingly sling Linda, Kelly and Janis into their baskets alongside their toilet rolls and discount dogfood. Cheers.

How we radicalise our children

Radio 4 on while I eat my lunch. I’m half listening, half focused on my tuna salad. It’s sunny outside, but looks like it might turn any moment.

A woman’s voice: frustrated, indignant, proud. I catch snatches of her conversation with a posh male interviewer. She’s foreign, but it’s not clear from where. She’s lived in the UK for many years; experienced a lot of racism. Her son is in the Middle East. He’s fighting for something or other. She doesn’t understand. It’s not how she raised him. It’s not what she wants for him.

I shudder to myself: impossible to conceive how a young British girl or boy would choose to go and fight a foreign war. Could slip off their cushy life in the UK like a snake shedding its skin and bed down with bearded infidels in some sandstorm shithole. Stop wanting iPhones and Happy Meals and yearn for Jihad and the cold steel of a Kalashnikov on their shoulder. Then I shudder again, check myself. ‘You know exactly how it happens. Exactly.’

The first doll I chose for myself was black. The first boy I kissed was Chinese. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was drawn to difference - not out of curiosity; out of recognition. Growing up in rural Scotland with an English accent, English parents and Scandinavian looks marked me out as ‘not one of us’, and no matter how hard I tried I never managed to fit in. Had to learn to be that square peg, forever squashing myself into a round hole.

My family had very few real Scottish friends – that was the first thing. We lived at the end of a dead end road a mile from any neighbours, and we kept mostly to ourselves. Five years of happy isolation had already made me an outcast, although I didn’t realise it until I started school, whereupon it was rapidly made clear to me: ‘You’re not Scottish. You’re English.’ I soon learned that any reference to an English person was inevitably preceded by the adjective ‘fucking’ and followed by the nouns ‘prick’ or ‘bastard’. The kids in the year above, who hated me on sight, called me FEB, a handy little marker, which could be applied to sassenachs of either gender and meant ‘fucking English bitch’ or ‘fucking English bastard’. I put my head down and got on with things. Learned to be funny. Learned to appease.

In secondary school things improved slightly, as we gradually learned to assume the sheen of civilised behaviour that is required of young adults. The other kids mostly hid their direct hatred of me. But the anti-English rhetoric was constant, and occasionally even my best friends would forget themselves, as in the occasion when my closest friend ended a long bitter rant with the words, ‘I fucking hate the English.’ When he suddenly realised I was present… ‘but not you Kirsten, you’re ok’. By this stage, it didn’t even occur to me to point out that I was born in Inverness, had lived in Scotland all my life. Knew fuck all about England and what it means to be English. I’d pretty much forgotten, because everyone else was so convinced about who I really was. Imagine all your friends and enemies, for years and years and years, saying to you: you aren’t white, you’re black; you aren’t human, you’re from Mars.’ Eventually you start to accept it.

I survived the thirteen years of school by absorbing the descriptions applied to me and just getting on with things. At university in Edinburgh, where for the first time I was surrounded by many English people and people from other parts of the world, the anger suddenly rose in me, fresh and vivid as the blood spurt from a knife wound. I began to think about why. Began to resent what had happened to me. Began to realise how pummelled and bruised my sense of identity was. Began to question the future of this, ‘my’ country.

The result of this intense period of self-examination and reevaluation of the past was a nascent radicalisation. ‘Fuck you all’ was my conclusion. ‘Racist parents filling the heads of children with ignorant hatefulness, and nodding as they do the same to their children and their children’s children. Fuck 1707. Fuck you all. Your beautiful country, which you don’t deserve, needs to be severed from the rest of the world before you infect it. The Romans had the right idea with their wall. Independence is what you need. Then you can’t blame your pathetic inconsequential lives on innocent “foreign” children. You’ll have to stand on your own without me and my kind as a prop.’ 

This wasn’t Northern Ireland. There was no war for me to join. I joined the SNP instead, sent in my cheque and got my little plastic black and yellow card in the mail the next week. I didn’t join up because I loved my country: I joined because I hated it. I wanted the same thing the nationalists wanted but for a very different reason. I wanted them to leave me, and all the future mes the fuck alone. It wasn’t a mature response. It wasn’t even rational, but it was something. It was the beginning of kicking back, reclaiming my identity.

So what? You might think. Some kids were mean to you at school and you got angry about it. Big fucking deal. Well here’s the thing. Here’s why I listened to that woman on Radio 4 and understood completely why her son is where he is, doing what he’s chosen to do. What happened to me was nothing… nothing at all compared to what black kids, brown kids, Muslim kids, 'foreign' kids have to go through. Especially those who are vulnerable – separated from their pack, without backup, without the social skills or the desire to rise above it all. My school days were a cake walk compared to what so many kids have to endure and yet the rejection - both the outright hostility and the subtle kind - have stayed with me and formed me. Formed my politics, formed my actions, formed my identity. Nothing about me is especially radical, yet I was radicalised, and I know that all I have to do to radicalise another is to make him understand that he won’t ever be joining my gang. I don’t need to beat him, torture him or humiliate him. I don’t even need to say it to his face, but there are a million tiny ways to communicate to him with absolute clarity ‘You will never belong.’

The smug Radio 4 interviewer ended by asking the woman if she loved Britain. The presumption in that question made me want to punch my fist into the radio. Instead of losing her temper with him, as I would have done, she gave a careful, evasive answer. She thought there were many good things about living here. Britain was a very civilised place. She is glad to be here. She’s decided to live with it, in other words. I didn’t. I got out. Left my home. Chose exile. Her son got out too. As will many others, on and on, marching off into an uncertain future, until we learn, collectively, to open our hearts a great deal more: to welcome the strange ones in.

The Magic Beans of Educational Technology

One of the trends I’ve noticed recently in my consultancy work is to get part of the way through an engagement before we reach what I’ve taken to calling ‘the magic beans moment’.

Sometimes this happens close to the beginning and sometimes almost at the end of a project, but it always involves a meeting with someone in the client organisation realising that the technology solution they’ve opted for is not the automatic route to profit/sexiness/increased student retention/a BAFTA (delete as appropriate) that they were hoping for. In other words, the magic beans they thought had been planted have resulted in a fairly standard-looking plant, not the mighty forest of their dreams.

To be fair, most of the people I work with don’t believe in magic beans. They’ve been around educational software and hardware long enough to understand that there are always limitations; that technology is not a substitute for good teaching or good instructional design, but there will always be some people - often those who control budgets and decisions - who believe that technology alone is enough.

One of the hardest things about being a consultant is having to deliver the news that I can’t perform miracles. At one meeting, a senior person in a technology team actually asked me to tell him why the software he was working a 70-hour week to build wasn’t ‘just a gimmick’. I went away and thought long and hard about it, but in the end I wasn’t able to reassure him. I decided that his product was potentially very useful (in conjunction with great pedagogy and teachers), but that wasn’t the headline-grabbing answer he was looking for. In short, I couldn’t give him the magic beans.

10 Good Things About School

School comes in for a lot of criticism, including from me. I'm really not convinced school is the best place for most of us, and if I had a child of my own (I have two step kids) I'd be very keen to home school them, rather than send them into the current UK education system.

But…

I've read John Holt; I've read Ivan Illich; and as convincing as they are, and as right as they may be, society has to be organised somehow. School isn't perfect, but as an exercise in optimism and honesty, I thought I'd try to come up with ten good things about school, partly as an experiment, and partly just to see if I could.

1. It gets kids away from their parents
This works both ways. Parents can earn a living and gain some respite from the ceaseless tedious demands of their youngsters, regaining a sense of themselves as autonomous individuals as a result. Meanwhile kids meet other adults with (if they're lucky) entirely different opinions, approaches, skin colours and habits to their parents. By being presented with variety kids gain a sense of difference, and can choose their role models. (Obviously I'm biased, but I also thing kids with two sets of parents have an advantage over those from nuclear families…)

2. It introduces risk in a secure environment
If kids were taught about the world in uncontrolled, unstructured environments (as many around the world still are), a lot more of them would suffer, and a lot more would die in horrible accidents. Schools and teachers are really, really good at introducing kids to physical and intellectual tasks in a graded, secure manner, which builds up their confidence and abilities gradually. This is considerably better than the days when kids were chucked into swimming pools and (literally) told to sink or swim.

3. It encourages creativity
I read a quote recently that the only part of the UK school system which wasn't broken was primary school, because of its emphasis on encouraging constant creative exploration. Even if it's true that this stops at secondary (and I don't think it is true), that's still 7 years of being encouraged to explore, make messes and experiment. If kids were all schooled at home, or in creches in the workplace, I think it's unlikely that they'd be given as much time or space over so many years to explore so many different subjects, write so many stories, paint so many pictures or just muck about in the grass and the sandpit.

4. It encourages competition AND collaboration
Try as they might, schools can't eliminate competition. Kids will always measure their achievements against those of their peers, just as they will continue to do as adults. Good schools will channel this spirit of competition to drive students on to do their best. A child educated at home or in an adult environment will only have their own achievements or those of unsuitable 'opponents' to measure themselves against. Similarly I can't conceive of a school environment where daily collaboration between peers wouldn't be the norm. Collaboration is essential in all human environments, but there are few where it can be as common or as well planned as in schools.

5. It provides increasing responsibility at points when *most* students are ready for it
I didn't think my step-daughter was ready for sitting an important series of tests like SATs (I'm still not happy that anyone has to sit them at such a young age), but she really surprised me by rising to the challenge of revising for and getting top marks in all of them (with a fair amount of encouragement at home, it has to be said). Most of her peers did well or well enough in them. If it had been left up to me I would never have challenged her with such high-stakes tests at her age. I'm too emotionally close with her to want to put her through something like that. And that's probably why it shouldn't be me making the judgement about when she's 'ready' to be given that responsibility.

6. It challenges them
School is hard. It's hard physically, emotionally and intellectually. My kids are often exhausted at the end of a school day, and no wonder. If they were studying at home with me I doubt I'd be able to keep them as busy, as well-organised or as engaged as they are at school. I still think that the year I sat my Highers was probably the most demanding one of my life. Many argue that school doesn't prepare kids adequately for the workplace, and in some respects this is almost certainly true, but in other respects, what experience better prepares them for negotiating complex, hierarchical organisations; getting along with their peers; coping with enormous workloads and juggling a wide variety of projects at once?

7. It gives kids opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have
If my parents had been responsible for educating me I doubt I'd have spent as much time as I did playing musical instruments, using industrial lathes, interviewing astronauts, visiting Moscow or being encouraged to study computer science. Even the poorest kids are given significantly better opportunities and experiences through school than they would otherwise have.

8. It teaches kids things their parents can't
Despite getting good marks in maths all the way through school I found myself really struggling at times to coach my step-daughter in preparation for her Maths SATs. There is no way I could help my step-son with his GCSEs without sitting them first myself. There are many other school subjects I feel ill-equipped to help my step-children with, and I know from experience that my advice can sometimes confuse matters, especially with maths, where different schools have different approaches to things. I'm glad my kids are being taught by specialists with professional training and (mostly) several years of experience in their subject.

9. It teaches them good behaviour
It's a rare child who isn't better behaved in school than at home. Because of the intense emotional closeness between children and their parents, kids generally feel freer to criticise or play up around their parents. I remember being quite shocked to see my step-daughter bring home a school report which praised her 'exemplary' manners and behaviour at school. If only I were able to report the same! That's not to say that parents can't teach good manners, but the organisational structures of school, and the emotional distance between teachers and pupils, is probably better designed for the transmission of social norms and codes of behaviour.

10. It's fun
Not all the time. Not even most of the time if I'm really honest about my own time there. But my abiding memory of my last few years of school at least is the amount of time I spent having a laugh, both with friends and teachers. Sure I was bored a lot of the time, I was bullied, I disliked a lot of my teachers and classmates - I wouldn't go back if you paid me, but I frequently used to laugh so hard my sides ached - that happens maybe once a year now, if I'm lucky. Maybe that's just a function of youth, but there again, who better to share your youth with than with other young people, and where better to do that than in school?

How not to learn a language

I've been teaching a language (English) for nearly thirteen years, and learning other languages (French, Mandarin, Norwegian) since I was five. Although I've never mastered a second language to fluency, I've got pretty far - enough to have regular, decent conversations in Mandarin when I lived in China and more recently in Norwegian. I've been teaching and writing materials for EFL (English as Foreign Language) all my working life. I was even commissioned to write several textbooks on the subject by Harper Collins. I thought of myself as something as an expert on the subject of learning and teaching other languages for some years.

Until I met Kevin.

Kevin wears pink shoelaces and likes jumping out of aeroplanes, but these are some of the less interesting facts about him. For me, the most interesting thing about Kevin is the way he's gone about learning Japanese. His goal is to move to Japan and teach English there, and so he's been diligently preparing for around 18 months by learning about the language and culture of Japan. This is in stark contrast to the approach I took when I moved to China to study English. A Pakistani newspaper vendor in Charing Cross station taught me how to say 'ni hao' (hello) and that was the only Chinese phrase I was equipped with when I moved there in April 2001. I could not have been less prepared. By contrast, Kevin is able to hold a decent conversation with any Japanese person he meets, and he hasn't even set foot in the country yet. What's really intriguing is how he's gone about this.

Kevin, speaker of Japanese, rider of tractors.

The general approach of anyone trying to learn another language is to buy a course - a set of face to face lessons with a class of fellow students; a book and audio CD; a multimedia course like Rosetta Stone; or perhaps just a textbook on its own. Kevin didn't really do any of that. Instead he jumped right in at the deep end and started having conversations with Japanese tutors and Japanese people as often as he was able.

He did this initially through a service called italki.com, a website which acts like an eBay for language tutors. You sign up, search for someone who speaks the language you want to learn and either pay them a small amount for a Skype lesson (if they are a professional tutor) or just arrange to talk for free over Skype (if they are just a conversation partner). Tutors are located all over the world, so you could learn Japanese from a Brazilian living in Poland, for example. Kevin has 3-4 regular tutors and conversation partners and schedules hour-long classes or chats with them at different times during the week. Since he started doing this, his conversational ability has increased incredibly quickly. In effect, he's mimicking the ideal situation for language learning - being thrown in at the deep end in the country where the language is spoken.

He has also joined a number of face to face conversational Japanese meetups, which he goes to in the evenings. There, the conversations cover all kinds of topics, making talking much more challenging. One of the problems of using a pre-designed course or textbook is that the conversations you practise there are highly structured and graded so that you aren't challenged too much. In real life, conversation flows from topic to topic, forcing you to search for new vocabulary and grammar structures all the time. Practising in this way means Kevin is far more challenged than the average language student, and can converse more fluently as a result (even if his grammar isn't perfect).

Kevin did go to a traditional Japanese teacher at first, but she was frustrated by his non-linear approach to learning the language, and the fact that he used slang and non-beginner grammar. Her strict methodological approach to teaching the language couldn't cope with his enthusiasm for absorbing Japanese any which way, and they quickly parted company.

As well as speaking Japanese regularly, Kevin uses digital support materials, such as Memrise, an app for helping you to memorise sets of vocabulary very quickly. I wouldn't normally recommend Memrise on its own, as it teaches words out of context, making them easy to forget. But if you are encountering new words every day in conversation or pieces of writing, an app like Memrise can reinforce this learning and help you to build a large vocabulary more quickly. This is especially useful once you have the most important grammar structures sorted, as it dramatically increased your conversational ability.

For the last nine months I've watched Kevin become more confident and more fluent in Japanese, to the point where it's become annoying. He often speaks Japanese to me, even though I can't understand a word he's saying!

His transformation into a Japanese speaker has been quite a profound education for me as well. It made me realise how much I still had to learn as both a learner and a teacher of language. For years I'd been following basically the same pattern, focusing on the course first and the conversation second. Kevin has helped to turn that structure on its head, and now the first thing I advise any language learner to do is to put the textbook away and get on italki. My own language capabilities have benefited as a result of Kevin's example. Yesterday I had satisfying conversations in three languages, and today I had my first Spanish class over Skype.

Today I also helped my step-daughter with her French homework - conjugating verbs. She was bored almost to tears by it, and says she 'hates' French. It makes me terribly sad that so many kids in the UK are being put off the magnificent experience of learning to communicate in another language. I honestly think there is nothing equivalent to the rush of having a successful conversation in another tongue. At least, as adults, we don't have to repeat the awful experiences of language learning at school. Get on italki, book a half-hour trial lesson (Spanish costs as little as £3 for 30 minutes) and then tell me I'm wrong.

My first week as a highly effective person

Title somewhat tongue in cheek, but in reference to Stephen Covey's classic self-improvement work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I am part of the way through.

I began this book about four months ago, found it engaging but somewhat depressing (I concluded I probably wasn't as effective as I'd thought) and promptly shelved it.

A couple of weeks ago I picked it up again and moved on to the 2nd and 3rd habits, and decided to give some of the ideas in the book a proper go.

I'm not going to attempt to describe the content of the 7 Habits. Happily, for once it's not a book that can be reduced to a single idea, or to a summary paragraph. Let's just say that it's well worth reading. It isn't simply a business book - there is a lot in there that's useful for personal relationships and parenting as well. It's profound and affecting. Just trust me and buy it...

The second and third habits are about prioritisation and time management. Two things I thought I was pretty good at, until I realised how much time I was spending dealing with my constantly re-filling inbox, rather than doing the work I wanted and needed to do. It turns out that 'inbox zero' is a pretty dumb way of prioritising your daily tasks.

One of Covey's ideas is that, in order to best prioritise (in both business and personal matters) you need to first really think about what matters to you, articulate that in a kind of manifesto, then use that to set long and short term goals, which then form the basis for your weekly task setting. He also uses the popular Eisenhower Matrix to help with prioritisation. I'd heard of this but never used it before.

It turns out that I was spending most of my time in Quadrant 1 (urgent and important) fighting everyday fires, and in Quadrant 4 (not urgent and not important) trying to get some respite from Quadrant 1 activities. According to Covey we should all be spending most of our time in Quadrant 2 (not urgent but important), doing the kinds of tasks that we all put off, but which would help us, for example, build up our businesses of strengthen our relationships with our children.

So last week I spent a good chunk of time, spread out over several days, thinking about what really mattered to me in life, hammering this out into a personal manifesto and a set of long-term goals. This was a strange and discomfiting experience. It felt very 'American' and 'UnBritish', but I persevered and found it quite rewarding in the end. I can't say I managed to do what Covey suggested and visualise the eulogies at my own funeral, but I did think about what I'd like people to say about me if I wasn't around, and that did help me to think about what mattered to me in life.

I then created a set of goals for the coming week, which were based on the principles in my manifesto. This was the real revelation. In an average week I'd set goals based on what was at the forefront of my mind at the time, or what I felt compelled to do because of my clients' priorities. Any personal or professional development goals were relegated to the weekend or some imaginary 'quiet time' in the future. Now suddenly I was setting goals based on what I wanted to achieve for myself and my family. So, for example, goals for this past week included 'talk to [stepson] about his choice of sixth form colleges', 'write a blog post about X', 'set up meetings with X and Y to discuss future priorities'. Now these would normally be tasks I'd never consider scheduling at the start of the week. They'd be things I might do as they occurred to me, or if I had time: not things I'd prioritise because none of them were in Quadrant 1.

And the result: I've spent the week engaged almost entirely in Quadrant 2 activities. I've still dealt with the Quadrant 1 activities, but they have seemed to almost deal with themselves. I've devoted an hour at the end of each day to clear the inbox, rather than dealing with things as they arrive. I've also spent some time in Quadrant 4, but much less than usual, and only when I was killing time at lunch or on the train. Instead of feeling exhausted at the end of each day I've felt invigorated, and strange things have happened. A long term goal that I'd set for spring next year is close to being met already. I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or a direct result of my experiment, but I don't think it's entirely unconnected. I've made significant progress in all of the major projects I'm engaged in, and have had some difficult conversations which I've been putting off. I've also achieved significant insights into my professional life, as a direct result of focusing on the future rather than the present.

Primarily, I feel more powerful and in control of my agenda. I feel a great deal more confident that I can affect positive change for my clients and with my personal projects. All this in just one week!

It's Sunday now, and although I've spent most of the weekend relaxing and doing unscheduled tasks, I've also hung out in Quadrant 2 and made significant progress with various important things. I've also set my goals for Week 2, and am looking forward to my 6.30am start tomorrow instead of begrudging it.

Bring on Week 2!

The quantified self: why small can be significant

I've been experimenting with this whole quantified self malarkey since July. I got a Ftibit for my birthday, and have been wearing it pretty constantly ever since (well apart from when I killed my first one with the washing machine - thanks for replacing it, Fitbit!) Every day Fitbit monitors my activity, telling me how active I am, how many floors I've climbed, steps I've taken and calories I've burned. I now have around 4 months worth of data on my daily activity to crunch.

Why do I do this? Well, like most women approaching middle age with a thickening waist, I'm interested in not turning into a porker. With each year it gets harder to eat cake in vast quantities and stay skinny. In previous years I've tried different diets, fasting, yoga, running, cycling, etc, with varying results. What I have singularly failed to do, along with almost everyone else I know, is to stick to any one of these regimes or to affect any significant change to my health and fitness by making a sudden, drastic change. But there's something about using a Fitbit that has made me look at the concept of affecting significant change in a different way.

For a start, I've realised that I don't want to change my body that much. I'm pretty happy with my weight and level of fitness. I wouldn't mind being 2kgs lighter, or being able to lift somewhat heavier weights, but it doesn't matter if I don't achieve this. What really matters to me is that I stay at around this weight and continue to stay fit and healthy for as long as possible. The best way to do this, I now think, isn't to go to the gym more often, or to go on the paleo diet, but to keep being *quite* active each day and to keep eating *not too many* calories each day.

I don't pay too much attention to my daily Fitbit stats, but towards the evening I do glance at how many calories I've burned. If it's loads (on a day when I've cycled into town and back, for example) I'm happy. If it's not many, I'll think about factoring in some exercise - a dance in the kitchen, maybe, or walking to the pub rather than taking the bus. Small, manageable things. If I don't manage it today, no worries, but I'll check again tomorrow and try to manage it then.

When I first got my Fitbit I did calorie counting as well, recording the calorie intake of everything I ate on a daily basis for several weeks. I stopped doing that pretty quickly - it got time-consuming and dull - but I've internalised an understanding of how calorific certain foods and drinks tend to be, and can now make broad guesses at how much I'm consuming each day. This has resulted in me consuming fewer calories each week - not by a huge amount, but enough to keep my weight stable. It's also encouraged me to snack less, and to snack on less calorific items. Small changes. Manageable changes.

What's struck me is that these changes aren't particularly significant when taken one by one, but overall, the effect is quite striking. I weigh around the same as I did in July, but I'm noticeably fitter. I now cycle whenever I can, rather than every now and then. This isn't because I've decided to cycle more, it's because I try to be more active each day. I now drink quite a lot less booze each week. Again, not because I decided to drink less booze, but because I'm trying to drink fewer calories each day.

Having a Fitbit has made me more aware of what I'm doing each day, and this has encouraged me to change my behaviour accordingly, in small, manageable steps. I'd be very surprised if, this time next year, I am less fit or weigh any more than I do now. I've changed. Not much. But significantly.