A day out in London

There is a long article in today's paper suggesting that use of the internet is causing people to lose their ability to concentrate on reading long articles or complex books. It suggests that knowledge might become wider and shallower, with less depth.

Over the last year or so, I have noticed that my own ability to just sit and read to long periods has definitely diminished but I had not attributed it to use of the internet. I don't feel a constant need to check my emails, I don't spend much time just flitting between web pages and I don't suffer anxiety if I don't have internet access. None the less, until recently, it had been a long time since I had been able to just read something for several hours.

By contrast, my daughter, 19 years old and very much in the thick of current trends in internet usage, is able to read for hours at a time. Indeed, after years of this, she is now tremendously well read. Most days she manages 50 to 100 pages of pretty serious stuff. Her current reading is Richard Dawkin's "The Ancestor's Tale", the 600 page hardback edition from a few year's ago.

A few weeks ago, we were in France and didn't have internet on demand. It was swelteringly hot and so there was little excuse not to read a lot. And for the first time in years, I found I could do several hours a day. What a treat. And perhaps a sign that the newspaper article is on to something.

Since France I have definitely done better. I read eight books while in France and have managed four more in the two weeks since we got back. Current reading is a collection of essays on Isaac Newton called "Let Newton be!" and the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Mathematics. I currently manage about an hour a day. As always, I'd like to read more, but this is definite progress.

My London trip covers a couple of meetings related to possible work going forward and the purchase of fresh pasta and sauce from our favourite Italian deli in Soho.