Square-rimmed glasses, skinny jeans and 1940s clothing are all subject to aesthetic considerations. Are these driven by the whims of fashion or are they part of a deeper and more obscure notion of ‘good’ taste?

In this week’s podcast, we discuss taste. Are there objective elements to taste or is it purely subjective? We discuss the case of John Lewis, Hipsters, Donald Trump, and the Russian aristocracy. We explore the barber pole model for fashion and ask if there is a difference between social status and taste-making ability. Finally, we rank our own taste.

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing Boris Johnson's drinks trolley. Nick, I assume this episode was actually a ruse and an intervention. We had lured Peter Coghill here, okay, and we were doing an intervention because this is really about taste, right? But I just feel I've just totally ruined your taking the punchline out of your intro, but go for it. Boris Johnson's drinks trolley.

No, we do need to talk. Peter's got a very unusual approach to decor and things, so we'll tackle that. Yes, he does, he does. Because whether or not Peter thinks he has good taste is an interesting question.

I like to think that my perception of the aesthetic transcends this concept of taste.

Exactly. So yeah, we'll get on, and there's plenty to unpack there, but just on the issue of Boris Johnson's drinks trolley. So there was recently a leak of a list of stuff that they bought to renovate their house or their flat in number 10. And it includes, well, I suppose you might think reasonably expensive items. He is the prime minister.

He should have nice stuff, right?

Like there's a rug for 7,000 quid. That's not crazy. It's not bonkers. It's not 70,000 quid. It's 7,000 quid. There's things like, you know, fabric for sofa, an antique, it's called an antique double wing back chair, whether it's an antique or just antique style, I don't know. If it's antique style, questionable taste there. But the really exciting thing was the Nureyev drinks trolley for £3,675. And it's horrible. Yeah. I don't know if you've seen it, it's really ghastly.

Yeah, it's got hands like brass, gold leaf, I don't know what you are, a sort of faux hands that are holding... Like human hands or animal hands? No, human. But it's also holding a thing at the top, I can't quite explain it.

Almost like battlements going around each layer of the drinks trolley.

Is it artistically significant? Is it like a one offy thing?

Oh, no, it's a thing you can buy. Anyone can go and get themselves a Nureyev drinks trolley. You rushed out and got two after you saw, yeah. Yeah. So you could smash them together. Yeah. It's just obviously not very nice. I mean, what would a nice drinks trolley be like? I don't know. There might be something intrinsic in the concept of a drinks trolley, which is sort of naff. So there's something to discuss there. But anyway, the point is that I looked at it and I thought, obviously, would me with my great taste can see that this is awful. But, you know, maybe not. Boris Johnson is, you know, got aristocratic heritage and stuff. Maybe he's right and I'm wrong, as horrific as it might be to contemplate. So the question is whether or not taste, you know, there are objective elements to it, whether we can say, yes, this actually is good or bad taste, because I very strongly want to say, this is bad taste. And it's not just me. It really is objectively bad taste. So, yeah. And surprisingly, we've never done a podcast about taste, sort of what taste means before. So I think this would be a good excuse to do one.

Yeah. There's lots of things already pinging off my mind at the moment. But the first thing to say is, of course, as we're recording this, it's only about a week or so ago that Boris Johnson resigned. Right. And famously, when he moved into Downing Street, they trashed or Carrie, his wife, trashed the predecessor's taste, which was Theresa May and her John Lewis taste, wasn't it? And sort of very much looked down upon that. John Lewis. Right. Yeah. Which John Lewis sort of used to their advantage in a rather savvy manner. That is interesting, actually. Yeah. And I mean, the whole thing is, you know, the response from John Lewis was, yeah, we're John Lewis. We're great. And yeah, you want to be boring? Fine. Come with us.

Yeah, it's interesting, because when I think of John Lewis, I think they sort of are actually a good barometer of what? Yeah. Like, it's kind of arch middle class. Yeah. Exactly. And so at the moment, everything is sort of gentle curves, slate grey. Yeah. You know, pigeon shit grey. Yeah. Everything in John Lewis is like that. But in the 80s, it was all sort of slightly Laura Ashley kind of puffy floral things, you know. So. So, yeah, John Lewis is an interesting

thing to bring up. And the other thing before you get into the, you know, the meat of this is the, I think, taste. It's like it's like sex and driving and humor. Right. Everyone thinks they're great at sex. Everyone thinks they're really funny. Everyone thinks they drive really well. OK. But sadly, this is not. I mean, obviously, we all do, you know, but it's taste. Everyone thinks they've got they've got good taste, don't they? Or do they? Well, that's an interesting question.

Everyone says that everyone thinks they've got good taste. But I don't. I looked for it. I was looking for a survey. Have you got good taste? Which says 90 percent of people say yes. I haven't found such a thing. And I'm not sure that received wisdom is necessarily true. Yeah. I just remember

once seeing a TV documentary. It was only when the whole new going into people's normal people's houses had just started. And it was really quite like the reality. Yeah. Not the through the key style. Well, no, it was more the through the keyhole style, but just with regular people. OK. Before people started doing up their homes. And what's the name with the big cuffs would come in Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen, whatever. It was before all that. And actually, it was quite made me feel quite sad. There was this one person just sitting in this, frankly, horribly decorated house, just saying, oh, my house is just horrible. But I don't know what to do. Yeah, I've got no taste, really. And you have really felt for this woman anyway. And then I think the other thing about, to what extent is this stuff relative? Is there an absolute? I don't know. I think that's really interesting. Right. I mean, that's all just pinging off my mind. Peter, what do you reckon?

I'm also intrigued about the relative versus absolute sort of the subjective versus objective nature of taste. I don't think it is. It's a very human construct. So it's just based on. So it is relative, you think? I think it's totally relative. I mean, you don't need to look far for cultural differences in sort of the aesthetic that seem fine and totally normal and quite appreciated in certain places. And in other places, they are considered bad taste or just abhorrent in some way. I mean, a stark example, which we kind of joked about before the podcast is Putin's table. So there's a very sort of like high Russian showing off-ism that you get in Russian state buildings. A lot of white and gold. A lot of white gold, lots of white and grey marble, big rooms, lots of gold, kind of a bit like an 18th century kind of aristocratic home. It's definitely a Russian imperial thing, isn't it? Yeah, a very Russian imperial thing. But also sprinkle in a bit of dictatorship showing off kind of thing. Yeah. So there's definitely a thing there, but that would be... Do you think, do Russians think that that looks nice? Do they go, that's a good start? I think some Russians probably would. But I think other people of that type. So if when he invites Assad round for dinner, Assad goes, oh, lovely table. I need to get one of those. Oh, what lovely gold leaf on everything. I need to get more gold leaf in my life. So it's, I think that there's a certain type, there's a certain community, a certain group that set a standard for the rest of the group. So the elites within any given kind of set of people, and elites in kind of normal world, in our normal world would be the sort of social elites, the sort of professionals and the celebrities will set a sort of standard for their people who aspire to be like them. Well, I don't know about that. Because if you

think, well, what do you think of a footballer, just bought a big mansion, gets a nice pair of, I don't know, stone lions outside his mansion. Surely, that's, well, at the very least, that's iffy, taste-wise. Well, to us it is. New build 80s mansion, stick some stone lions on it.

I bet there are plenty of people on the street, if you ask them, what do you think of this house?

They'll be like, oh, wow, yeah, amazing. But that's what I'm actually, I've struggled to find evidence about, about whether sort of, you know, people share those senses. But I think the point is that those stone lions on a 17th century building owned by an aristocrat. Yeah, fine. Yeah, no problem with that at all. But stone lions on an 80s mansion, on an 80s mansion. Yeah, but now, so what I'm saying is, they'll be concrete. Yeah. And they'll probably be painted something. Well, but the point is that they're like elites, let's say of some sort, footballers, you know, but I don't think people look at them as arbiters of good taste. I think, if anything, the opposite. You know, so I want, there is that question of what's, is there a difference between social status and taste-making ability? You know, are there people, so for example, hipsters, you wouldn't necessarily say are high status socially, but they seem to play quite a big role in determining the

aesthetic of things like what a restaurant should look like. Hipsterism is kind of defined partly by an anti-fashion strand to it. So hipsterism, you're sort of dressing like a hipster is trying, is bucking any given sort of, like, incumbent trend. So like wearing, you know, wearing like three quarter length trousers because they're fucking ridiculous. And having a beard because it's stupid. You know, it's like, it's deliberately doing things which are anti-establishment or anti... Anti-whatever the general trend is. I mean, that sort of thing has existed

forever, right? I mean, that's like the teddy boys and like the mods and the rockers and the punks, and they've always done things that are deliberately, you know, violently countered to, you know...

But they're all trying to be individual, but they end up all looking the same.

Yeah, so we're talking about class as well here comes into this, right? Because it's not just social elites, as you say, you know, a footballer can be in the social elite, but it's not necessarily in a traditional sense of what class means. They're all posh, right? And I wonder if, thinking about the elites around the world, I wonder if you get sort of quite posh Russians, but they're not nouveau riche, who just look at all their stuff, you know, a posh Russian comes around to your house. And he loves the fact... Old money Russians. Yeah, old money. Yeah, exactly. There aren't that many old money. A lot of them were. So yeah, I reckon there's some sort of intelligentsia around the world with some old money.

Well, see, now, someone like Donald Trump, who, you know, if you look at his Mar-a-Lago mansion, a lot of ostentatious gold. I can't imagine, actually, that even Donald Trump could afford as much actual real gold as there is gold things on display. So I can only assume it's some kind of gold effect. But, you know, a lot of gold on display. He was, I don't know if you remember, he was the president of the United States, which is pretty high status. And yet I don't think a lot of people, there would be that much disagreement that it's bad taste, right? Well, how much more elite do you want to get than the president of the US?

That's my point. He's, you know, he's not really, he's elite in one sense, but he's definitely not old money, although his father was very rich. There's still a lot of the nouveau about him. And he's certainly not some sort of kind of part of the intelligentsia. So maybe I'm sort of thinking this slightly left wing leaning, but loads of cash and has for generations.

Yeah. So look, I mean, there's a lot of things we haven't yet determined. Yeah, I don't think we've framed this properly yet. Because we're sort of assuming that those people are setting tastes or that there are some people out there setting tastes and we think they're high status. But I want to unpick various things here first. What is it? What do we mean by taste at all? Like, and then, so the theories that we've advanced are like, well, taste is essentially what high status people like. And having good taste is working out what high status people like and doing that. I don't think that goes far enough because I feel like what high status, they don't just roll a dice and go, oh, that's it. I like that one today. I like red today. Yeah, because it's hard for people to make their decision. Yeah. And I feel like if you were to ask these mysterious high status tastemaker people, why do you like this? They would give you some reasons. You might think they're spurious, but they would give you reasons. But the point is that they, even if let's say they're at the top of the taste hierarchy, they're not just randomly choosing stuff, right?

Yeah, but I feel we're slightly regressed in our conversation because we're going back to talking about what people think of as taste and why they might have that. And we do still need to delve further into why they might have it and the decisions. But still imagine if we lived in a world, which is not that far away in time or distance, where let's say it wasn't possible to have taste. Okay. It wasn't to make taste decisions, right? About where you live and what you wear. Okay. Would you still have, and yet would you still, even though I said that you couldn't have taste or make taste decisions, could you still have it? What kind of world are you talking about? I'm talking about- North Korea type thing. Well, I mean, but the thing is, that's been imposed upon that society. But what about if we're just hunter gatherers, for example, okay? Of which there are still some in the world. But if we go back a few thousand years or whatever, 10,000 years, because as soon as you start to get civilisation, I'm sure you start to get taste. And I wonder if it goes back to our old friend signalling, which we've already talked about a little bit. But if you're hunter gatherers, all you've got to worry about today is make sure you get the mammoth and all that sort of business. Would you still have taste? I think you would.

I think you do. There's quite a lot of archaeological evidence that in the good times when hunting and gathering was going well, and you had plenty of spare time, they spent quite a lot of time on their dwellings, making them nice and neat and tidy and collecting particularly interesting shells and rocks and things to keep. It's assumed they had certain social importance that you would then show off to your neighbours and to your peers as an indication of how much free time you've got. Because if you're doing well, you've got more free time, you can...

And the high fashion is always a bone flute and a picture of a bison. Well, yeah, yeah. At least it has been for the last 20,000 years. Because I think there's this element of cohesion which goes into taste, right? As the David Hume thing that we're apt to call barbarous, whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension, that being cohesive or being accepted by a crowd, by a group, is obviously vital in the evolutionary environment, right? So we've got this incentive to kind of work out what it is that people find acceptable and to do that. So just as a kind of to show that you're in the in-group. And in that sort of, under that theory of, well, taste is really just trying to conform with the people who you want to conform with, so that they're, you know, let's say high status people, I suppose, in the context of a tribe, it might be if the chieftain seems to like, you know, he's got a thing about antlers, well, I should get myself some antlers because then the chieftain will like me more. So there's that sort of sense in which, OK, this is about simply working out what high status people are doing and trying to do that. I think there's a bit on the

flip side of that, though, is also you can use taste to set yourself apart from people. Going back to the anti-fashion thing. So if there were two warring tribes, you would choose to display the things that the other tribe didn't because it would reinforce, like, through, you know, in a negative sense, your association with them and therefore strengthen your association.

Or even if you want to set yourself apart slightly within your group, like a hipster kind of thing.

But Nick, keep going. Well, that's the, so, but the problem with that is it doesn't really explain why it's that. I mean, that could be, it could be any arbitrary thing, right? It could be that, you know, our particular tribe really likes smearing elephant dung on ourselves, right? And. Or we're the blue hat guys. Well, the blue hat guys, see, that's what I'm getting is that you can imagine it being a blue hat thing. Okay. We've got blue hats and that's how we know we're us. And we all want to wear blue hats because non-blue hat wearing people are just degenerate scumbags. But what I'm saying is I find it unlikely that the whole, you know, smearing elephant dung on yourself would be as popular. It's easier to get a kind of blue hat to be good taste. And so what I'm saying is there's, I think, I don't think it's purely, it's not purely arbitrary. It's not, and it's not sort of purely subjective, but there are some elements to it where we can say, actually, this is good taste. So I don't know, take the difference between, say, like a chair designed by a famous designer compared with just a chair from Ikea. Now the designery one is more expensive, but I think a lot of people go, that's a better, it's still a better chair. And you know, we don't think it's good taste because it's expensive and by a designer. And if the designer had produced the Ikea one, we'd say exactly the same thing about the Ikea chair. I think we want to say it's just genuinely better. It's a nicer chair. It's more fitting for its purpose. You know, we'd be able to explain why we thought that chair looks nice in that

position. I can sense a segue into you attacking my sense of the aesthetics. Well, I think you're right. There are, yes, I hadn't thought of this before, but there are, I think there are certain completely objective things that you could probably spot in any fashion. And I think I'll posit one, which is that it's got to be sustainable in that it's not too inconvenient. So the whole elephant dung thing probably didn't catch on because everyone, you might run out of elephant dung or it's just smelly. So it's just not a nice thing to do. Whereas in the modern world where you don't have to work with your hands, you can get away with having ridiculously long nails because you don't work with your hands. So you can get away with it. So that's a sustainable thing. Even though it's got no practical value, it's sort of an adornment that doesn't get in the way too much. I'm finding this actually surprisingly,

surprisingly difficult to nail down, actually. I didn't think it would be quite as elusive as this, but there's a couple of things that strikes me that we're not talking about because, one of which I've already forgotten. But one of them is you could have two people of very similar backgrounds, very similar aspirations, similar, similar, similar all the way. Right. But I think you could definitely still say that one of them, they could have very differing tastes. Okay. And I think you can imagine walking into two different rooms and let's just say that they've not been designed on purpose. Right. But someone's just thrown together that room for whatever reasons and someone's thrown together that room. I'm sure all of us would have a preference of one over the other and say, hey, this one's more tasteful somehow. And I think there's something slightly there and I think to do with creativity or something. I don't know, maybe that. But also I just wonder, and actually this is the other point and going back to universalisms, which is, I don't know about the philosophy of aesthetics. Is there such thing as a universal aesthetic? So, for example, I think one of the reasons why, thank God they're dying out, skinny jeans are crap. Not them again. Yeah. It's because they just, they're not flattering. And the reason why is because the form of the jeans themselves, things that, so if something sort of slightly flares out towards the bottom, that in itself is more flattering of the shape of a human figure. And I can't, I don't, and I think that's just, that's it, that's the norm.

And that might relate to something sort of natural or fundamental, like, you know, it's kind of the shape of a tree.

Yeah. All I'll say is that when you ask people to explain why they think one thing is nice and another thing isn't, very often you'll get confabulations that are like what you're saying now.

What's a confabulation?

then we're talking about the difference between fashion and taste. Yeah. Well, what is the difference? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. I think specs did converge.

The good old fashioned NHS glasses that you used to get with the, uh, with the sticking

cluster on. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it feels like there should be a difference because you could be, can you have taste and be out of fashion or do you have to be in fashion if you got taste and it's taste the same as style? Yeah. I think there's, I think there's an

driven. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. But I still feel sort of at the heart of it that I, and I suspect we all intuitively feel that we, some people have better taste than others. Um, and you know, I think there is something in there about individuals and the way they express themselves that's that you can, although we fail to, that you can kind of separate from fashion and needs and other things. Um, some people just are, have got good taste. Yeah. Well,

there's a question about whether we, whether we all sort of want to have good taste because I, everyone is going to, I bet everyone says, oh, I don't worry too much about taste. I bet everyone, most people probably think they don't really care that much about taste. And yet we probably all do. We probably have an intuitive sense of what, of, well, you know, my living room is nicer than the guy's because they've got some horrible fake pot of flowers

and a gold clock and I don't have those things. Yeah. I think trying to look at the decision making process, I think there's a, it's perhaps having a good taste living room. So you're trying to keep up with the Jones's next door. Well, then you already assumed that that's what is driving tastes. Let's take that off the table. Take that as an assumption. I'm going to posit. All right. So,

so how are you doing? So what I'm trying to do is look like next doors. Yeah. So what you're

trying to do is look like next doors, but better, right? Cause you're trying to, you're trying to put your place in, you know, relative to them, uh, in the, in the sort of pecking order. Um, but the skill, how you do it, the skill involved is having more or better things than the other person, but having them all kind of within any given, uh, aesthetic paradigm fit with each other. Correct. Right. So you wouldn't have like, uh, an art deco vase next to an eight on an 18th century temp table because it just wouldn't quite work.

But I think you could, I think someone with good taste would work out to pull that off. Yeah. And, and, and I, uh, and I like to take that far enough, you end up with the whole thing of, oh, I want to have the curtains matching the upholstery. And actually a lot of people would start to think that go, that starts to look super naff. Yeah. It's the kind of matching things is one of those things that is considered to be quite low middle class and looked down on. Admit it,

I'm not saying it's bad, but there've been different types of matching. There's the sort of the crude matching in terms of the upholstery and the, perhaps the era, just making sure that it was the kind of vase that would be on that table when that table was made. But why does that, why is that necessary? There is the aesthetic of, well, it's a bit of a hodgepodge of different things. And as long as the hodgepodge is the right combination of the right kinds of things, it works. But if you add something wrong, it doesn't work. Yeah. I think Peter's really struggling with the

same thing we're all struggling with, which is we keep wanting to fall back on this is just right or good or proper, or it's kind of just elegant enough. And it's really hard to pin down what those things are. Yeah. It doesn't lend itself to analysis very easily. No. And so that brings us onto, you did allude to signalling, but I think the barber pole model of fashion, which I think is quite a useful, it kind of pulls everything together a bit here and it explains how tastes change and so on. Were you about to go into something there? Yeah. Okay. Make it quick because. Well, it's just the, so the barber pole model, I think it's named that, Scott Alexander called it that. And I think it's a really useful analogy, but it's just the idea that something happens at the top end and then the people below the top end, everyone is trying to emulate the sort of fashions of the people above them so that they can kind of be accepted into that class. But everyone's trying to differentiate themselves from the people below them. So there's this intrinsic instability to it all, but that generally the fashions will sort of flow downwards. And I think that sort of does the job. I think a lot of the job of explaining how things do change over time and things that were once considered exclusive or elite gradually become more and more mainstream until eventually they're just considered naff and people avoid them at the top. So that, and I think that sort of does some of the job of explaining that dynamic. What it doesn't do is get us to, I suppose it's a bit like, okay, but the fact, so the fact that things change over time, it doesn't tell you it's arbitrary in the same way that in the 19th century, we thought that horses were fast and now we think planes are fast, but it doesn't mean the concept of fastness is changed. It's just that the expression of fastness has changed. The concept is the same. So I, and I guess the question, so to get, but this partly explains why it's mysterious, right? Because if it was reducible to a formula, do A, B and C and hey, presto, you've got good taste. It would intrigue, it would instantly become poor taste because everyone would do it. So, so I think there is that, that whole idea of, you know, of a shibboleth as being something intrinsically hard for people to emulate. That's why it works. It's almost like we're forging with the people at the top of the taste, the taste makers are just, why is that? It's hard to emulate what they're doing when they're deciding that something is, is good taste is the same reason it's good taste, right?

If it was easy to copy it, it would no longer serve that function. True. But I still think you're coming about it too much in as an economist and engineer type person and not as a, as a creative like myself. We need to wrap it up really quickly because I've got a question. I've got, I've got, I've got a couple of points I want to make and a question,

but go for it Peter. I think there are certainly sort of characteristics of what is good taste you can, we can pick out. So for me, like the, the, the, the effort, effortlessness, like if somebody's obviously gone to a lot of effort to compose a room, that to me is bad taste. Whereas if it's naturally kind of beautiful without them curating it, that to me is good taste. And that's sort of the kind of the aristocratic British timelessness where it's just, oh, this is a collection of old

things. There's a sliding scale though, isn't there? Because at some point you've got to make some decisions. And I'm sure even if you go, look, I just don't care about what stuff looks like. I just want a sofa and I'm only going to spend 50 quid on it. That's that. You're still going to make a choice. Is it just that you walk into a shop and the first sofa you see for 50 quid,

you buy it? Or you're still making a decision of one thing over another? I think Peter's criteria in there is necessary, but nowhere near sufficient. Because I don't care about, let's say, I think I don't care about taste. I know that I do. I do. I look at sofas and I bought a new sofa recently. And we looked at them. We said, well, that one looks nice. That one's horrible. So I'm making some judgment there. But if I didn't, if I just said, look, I really don't care. I'm just going to go out and buy the first five sofas I see and put them all in my living room back to back. I don't think I'd somehow mysteriously pull off good taste just

because I wasn't trying. No, it's necessarily not sufficient. I think in not nailing this down, we've kind of nailed it down a bit, actually, and said, actually, this is a bit weird and uncomplicated, maybe. Two things. Surprisingly, we haven't talked about music, actually, because we've talked a little bit, taste in music, taste in clothes, taste in decor. We've not

talked about taste in music. But it might be interesting to ask why and actually why taste in music is not considered to be as important as decor and clothing and those kinds of things. But I think it's because it's not on display. It's not sort of something which actually you're making a social statement with by and large. I think you can still, in the same way that we

might say that someone has good or bad taste in clothes, for example, I think, and even more interestingly, not necessarily the same person could be a different person. You could talk about whether they've got good or bad taste in music as well. I think the equivalent there

would be if people were all making their own music, like in the same way that you sort of

choose what clothes to wear. Well, but we don't make our own actual sofa or make our own actual clothes. I don't know. No, that's true. Sorry, we don't have time for that. And one other thing, we've actually not talked about the word taste itself, because what taste really literally means. And maybe there's a connection there, which makes it quite hard to pin down. I've got a question I want to ask. I want us to quickly rank each other's taste one to ten and rank your own taste one to ten. So one, not got a clue, ten, beautifully tasteful.

Am I supposed to aim off for the fact that actually, I'm using myself as an arbiter? I don't know. It's too hard to answer, I think. Okay, it's just too hard to answer. I can't, I can't say. I know that I don't care much about, I don't care much about things like, you know, taste or, you know, but I kind of, I would know things that I really wouldn't want in my house. There are things that I, you know. I think you're fairly tasteful. But you can also

see, and this isn't, you can also see that you kind of don't care about taste. Oh, so that's good. I've successfully communicated that. You're massively on trend. Yeah, I mean, there's an integrity and honesty about that, right? And a self-awareness maybe about it. And then with Peter, he's quite a sort of functional kind of guy, I reckon. He's an engineer, he's all about

the pragmatism and utility of stuff. As Augustus Welby Pugin put it perfectly. He did, yes. He did. When he said, there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for

convenience, construction or propriety. What a load of, this is the guy who designed the Houses of Commons. Goodness sake. He's talking out of his arse. Have you seen it? It's a gothic, you know, monstrosity. It's full of twiddly bits. And I, so I don't think he's practicing

what he preached there. But there was another phrase, isn't it? It was very similar to that, which is to have nothing in your home, which is not without function or that has a beautiful

can I try to explain why my sense of the aesthetic transcends any time? Right. Definitely. You can try. Yeah. Okay. So I, I absolutely do not care about taste in certainly my own home and my, my decor, although I don't practice it at the moment because I'm in a rented house, my perfect decor will be entirely functional. So I'd like a stainless steel kitchen, like a working kitchen. I would like my bathroom to be like a sort of the bathroom you'd find in a hotel. My, you know, the, the, the, the sort of the WC would be like the WC in a railway station. Entirely sort of functional. There's no sense of flow about this house, but keep going. And my office would be an empty white room with one massive screen in it. Right. And no other,

no other distractions, no books, no shelves, no nothing, no trinkets, nothing. We've said, we've seen, we've experienced Peter untrammeled. I mean, he's at the moment he's, he's living with his partner. So we, so we can't really separate the, you know, the real people, but we, but we saw him in his old place, which he owned and he lived on his own and it was miserable. Yes. It was like, it was just bare. But also I remember there was, it was idyllic. No, it was totally bare. It was depressing. It felt like a house which somebody had just moved out of. Only he'd lived there for like five years. And they'd left a few bikes. Well, some people

would describe as liminal. I find in certain places quite comfortable, quite sort of homely.

Yeah. Yeah. But then I remember there was a hole in the floor. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. He didn't, as long as there was a board over the hole in the floor, that was fine. That wasn't,

that wasn't fully decorated, but the living room would be the good example. No pictures or

anything. No, no, no, no. But I, I, yeah. I feel like you could do minimalist in a much nicer way than Peter does it. Peter does minimalism in a very minimalist way. So he just, he just sort of says, right, I'm not going to have any stuff. And then he just puts stuff in the room, puts stuff in the room. Like the sofa is in a weird place. The, the table is in a weird place.

There's a chair just there. By the way, I like the way Pete, the defensive tone there is in Peter's voice. Now, is it because he's, he's, uh, we've insulted his sense of taste or his

sense of practicality? I don't know. Yeah, it's because, because you're insulting my sense of practicality. I'm insulting his engineering skills. The chair's in the middle of the room because that's where the chair needs to be. If you want to sit on a chair in the middle of the room, which nobody does. I just remember it looked like some sort of graveyard for bicycles, your house. So if there is a unifying, uh, sort of aesthetic that I have, let me try and give you a couple of examples of which sort of get close to it. Right. Yeah. So they're entirely things based on function. So imagine a factory or a warehouse, everything has its place. It's not necessarily tidy looking, but nothing is out of place because it gets in the way. You wouldn't

be a great factory at producing widgets, but it's not particularly tasteful. I'm not saying it's tasteful.

Your, whatever your subjective view of taste is, but to me that looks great. The, the, the, uh, uh, server room is a brilliant example where minimum, you've got, you, space is a massive constraint and there's lots and lots of wires and annoying, complicated things. Yeah. A good server room, you can spot a good server room for a bad server room because it's really, really tidy and spotless because dust is the enemy. Yeah. But we're talking about being organized, not being but it's like, to me, organization comes first and then if you can make it look nice by changing the color of the cables or whatever. Great. But that's not, that's irrelevant. They're

totally irrelevant. I think we have merely shown how complex this is and how, yeah.

And yeah. How, and how, how this intervention is, is not, you know, it's been too long in

frankly. Um, so I would like my house to look like a service tunnel under a big, I don't, I don't think it's gone well. I feel like we've made it worse. Yeah. He feels he's

unusually resistant. He's become emboldened in his, in his terrible attempt to remove all, all shred of humanity out of his living arrangements. We need to force him to live

in a sort of a Laura Ashley designed house or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, just to finish, I'm massively tasteful, obviously. Yeah. Well, I haven't had that much experience with your house and nowhere near as much as you have of mine. I thought, I thought you were gonna say nowhere as near as much as I have of my house. I'm quite an

expert on my house and what's in there. That's also true. But I, the bits I've seen in the background of your new house look nice. They look, they look fitting to, for, for a sort of 18th century, you know, Lincolnshire townhouse, which is what you live in. Exactly. But also

I've added my own, as you can imagine, sort of just somehow je ne sais quoi. We were talking

about your colours. We were, we were, we were. And they're good. They're good colours. But I think because they have a, they have a 18th century feel to them. Yeah. But are you topping out the

feng shui though? No. Um, no, but the thing is actually just finally, actually probably is important to me. I'm probably at the other end of the spectrum, uh, to Peter on this. It's actually super important to me that I feel that things look nice, you know, that horrible word. And, and it gives me great pleasure, you know, to sort of be in that room, you know, surrounded by my concrete lions and so on. And, um, yeah, there we go. Um, so on that kind of unsatisfying note, we have to draw things to a conclusion. Um, so like I say, I don't think we quite got there with that one, but we kind of did as well. Um, but we'll stop there. Thanks as always for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.