Week 11 - Greg + Anthony

I met Anthony at The Lead Station in Chorlton which is a short drive from where I live in Didsbury. I got there slightly ahead of him and realised that I’d eaten there several years before with my sister and some of her friends. It used to be a police station and is a nice space but was surprisingly quiet for 11am on a Saturday. 

I ordered a flat white and had a conversation with Anthony about coffee. I’m no connoisseur when it comes to coffee, but like to think I can tell the difference between good and bad. My friend Scott says he doesn’t trust anyone’s opinion on coffee unless they’ve lived in London. Do with that information what you will. Anthony mentioned that his new favourite coffee place does an Americino which involves steaming the coffee itself (as opposed to the milk). He’s also a fan of iced coffee which I tend to avoid, so I’m not sure I’ll be running there for my next caffeine shot. Apparently the flat white was invented by the Antipodeans as an attempt to resuscitate the cappuccino which had been destroyed by the Americans who took the Italian original and added a gallon of milk froth, creating the cappuccino we think of today. Order a cappuccino in Italy and you’ll see what I mean. 

Anthony very much treats his body as a temple and part of his regimen involves CrossFit, a sort of cult for gym bunnies, or more kindly, a form of interval training. My experience of CrossFit extends to a deluge of worryingly long voice notes I received from a local cult leader when I innocently enquired about a class whilst living in London. There’s no doubt it works, but the high-energy-let’s-do-this-guys vibe is all a bit much for me. I’ve noticed that something similar called Hyrox seems to be gaining ground, but I’m always wary of a past time that involves a branded backpack. 

Anthony currently lives in a shared house in Didsbury which is being sold due to the death of his landlady. He has decided to move back in with his parents in Kent over the summer to save a bit of cash, an unarguably practical decision, but probably not one I would choose to replicate. I love my parents dearly, but haven’t lived with them since I was eighteen and I think they’d agree that several weeks under the same roof as each other would be sub-optimal. Anthony has his own reservations about spending four months with his mother.

Anthony works as a therapist for the NHS and currently specialises in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), but is training to become as Psychodynamic Psychotherapist. I find this interesting as CBT very much focuses on identifying unhelpful feelings and behaviours and coming up with practical strategies to help improve your quality of life, whereas Psychodynamic therapy is routed in Freudian beliefs about the unconscious and how your experiences in early life affect your relationships in your adult life. In other words, although both specialisms deal with mental health, the approaches they take to managing it are very different. I’ve always been under the impression that psychoanalysis of the Freudian variety was almost like a cult that relies on blind faith by those who practice it. Anthony said that although psychotherapists of the Freudian persuasion can be cult-like with their concepts and terminology, the practice relies on the interactions between the patient and clinician in the therapy room. 

I asked Anthony whether he thought everyone needed or could benefit from therapy. You might expect someone who works as a psychotherapist to answer with an emphatic “yes”, but he in fact believes that therapy is not necessary, nor beneficial for everyone. I suggested that perhaps we might have pathologised the human condition - i.e. become guilty of treating every negative emotion or experience as a medical problem that requires treatment. This is a view I’ve freely expressed to several friends who work in mental health and it has always been met with universal agreement. This is not to say that mental health is trivial, or that we should all just blithely carry on with a smile on our face even in the most dire circumstances. It is in fact the opposite, acknowledging that being a human involves experiencing all emotions, good and bad, and that good mental health (and ultimately your own happiness) requires you to accept that fact and develop ways of understanding and dealing with those emotions. It strikes me that all too often people don’t want to put in the work when it comes to their own happiness, but would rather delegate the task to someone else. Of course this is impossible as you are the only one who can govern your own emotions. I have The School of Life app installed on my phone and occasionally watch one of their videos or read an article written by one of its founders, Alain de Botton, who believes that you can only be truly happy once you had acknowledged your own insignificance. This might sound counterintuitive, but actually makes complete sense. It’s only when you realise that you haven’t been placed on Earth for some higher purpose that you can focus on doing the things that make you happy. There is, after all, no sense in worrying about the things you can’t change. 

I had a fry up and Anthony had the waffles with mixed fruit, mascarpone, streaky bacon and maple syrup. 

We spoke about computer games and how they have become more addictive. Anthony made the point that when we played computer games as children that they were pretty much in their infancy so there wasn’t really any understanding of how to ensure people kept playing them. Whereas subsequent discoveries in neuroscience mean they can now be designed so that you get hooked. When I was a kid we had a BBC Micro with a cassette drive as our first family computer. Our favourite game was called Labyrinth and was distributed across several tapes that would need to be loaded in a very specific sequence. It took about 20 minutes to load the game and we’d then spend about 10 minutes playing it before we got bored. Our first proper game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and I only really ever played Mario Bros (the original version) on it. I haven’t really seriously played a computer game since. My sister bought a console pre-loaded with retro games for her kids for Christmas and I’m happy to say that I managed to give my nephew a run for his money (at that specific game, he was significantly better than me at all the others). 

We left The Lead Station together and both headed home. Thanks Anthony for another lovely Greg Plus One.