What if handedness was an issue? What if, instead of wasting time on boringly obvious signs of otherness, like ethnicity and gender, we discriminated against people who are really different? People who look like you and me, who move among us undetected, but who secretly belong on the other side of the mirror, in the reversed world where everything’s the other way round?
 
I am, of course, talking about left-handed people. Some 10 per cent of the world’s population are left-handed. Is left handed. Are. Is. Around. Pfleugh. That’s 0.73 billion. Fewer than a billion. That’s a big enough minority to be portrayed as a threat without quite being a significant constituency. We could move against left-handed people and there wouldn’t be enough of them to mount a campaign for justice. [If you’ve come here from Facebook, where irony is famously not recognised, you may need me to tell you that I’m not serious. The, ah, subtext here reads: the author is caricaturing a cynical form of political calculation.]
 
Big side-head, little paragraph. But wait.
 
Shouldn’t we find out more about these people? Why can’t they be like us? Surely, if we reasoned with them, they could be made to see sense and use their right – right, correct, geddit? – hands? [Yes, I know. Those were the days, eh?] No, sadly not. If you search the question “Why are people left-handed?” the little box at the top of the results concludes, “Left-handers are born that way.” You see? There’s no reasoning with these people.
 
If you then search the question “Why are people right-handed?” the little box at the top amends that to “most people” and tells you, “Left-handed people are more skilled with their left hands when performing tasks.” So we might infer a clear bias towards talking about left-handed people even if the question’s about right-handed people. They’re even taking over the questions. Although that does makes up for all those years of struggling with the moulded grips of other people’s kitchen scissors. Not that I make a habit, you understand, but. Oops. Have I given myself away?
 
Take the trip. If you then – sorry, just one more question –  if you then take up the suggestion for a “related search”, and put in, “Are more people left or right handed?” the little box tells you, “Right-handed people are more skilled with their right hands when performing tasks.” Which is the kind of in-depth factual analysis that makes the internet so useful. The little box then goes on to impart some statistics before concluding with a statement about left-handed people that I won’t repeat. It includes the words “skilled” and “tasks”. Thank you for joining me for this trip along what Al Gore (at least) once referred to as the “information superhighway”.
 
Left-handed people aren’t obviously different – you have to watch their hands, duh – but they are deserving of whatever special attention we give to minorities. They’re not discriminated against, but they do operate in what we could call a post-discrimination environment. We have the word “sinister” from the Latin for left*. Despite globalisation, there are still cultures – guidebooks, at least – in which it’s apparently bad to eat with your left hand. We could go into the explanations for that, but let’s not. You’re an honoured guest if you sit on your host’s right. Among other “related searches” on my screen are “Why do left-handed people die earlier?” and “Why are left-handed people classed as witches?” Why ARE**? Not that I was distracted by that, you understand, but…
 
…today’s randomly discovered internet-fact is that around 5 per cent of people have at least one extra nipple. There are celebrities with extra nipples (and copious pics online). Although extra nipples are (were?) traditionally associated with witches – for feeding familiars, and yes, left-handedness was (is) also traditionally, et cetera – most people with an extra nipple are male. 98 per cent of them, apparently. End of digression. Left-handed people die earlier because of all those scissors, I think.
 
Cleverer. There’s the discrimination that bothers us – racism, sexism – and the discrimination that happens every day but goes unacknowledged. Spend long enough online*** and you’ll tire of the relentless drivel written by people debunking (sic) myths (sic) about left-handed people. There’s an industry devoted to asserting, with what passes for evidence these days, that for example left-handed people aren’t more creative, and it’s just a coincidence that a lot of creative people are left-handed. That for example left-handed people aren’t cleverer, and it’s just a coincidence that five of the last seven US presidents are left-handed. Obama’s left-handed, Trump’s right-handed, and I’ve just found a website suggesting that Michelle Obama is ambidextrous.
 
Maybe “good enough at working the US political system to get to the top” isn’t the same as “cleverer”, but never mind. If the point has to be rammed home that left-handed people aren’t special, although they are in a minority, maybe we should go for some affirmative action. We could go for all-left-handed shortlists, or quotas, or (if we accept the line that left-handed people think differently) we could campaign for more left-handed people on company boards. “A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research [a US entity] floated the idea that left-handers favour ‘divergent’ thinking, a form of creativity in which the brain moves ‘from conventional knowledge into unexplored association’,” says the website lefthandersday.com.
 
Don’t apologise. Oh. Wait. Bill Gates is left-handed. Oprah Winfrey too. James Cameron’s left-handed. I like Avatar (2009); is that ex-marine left-handed? Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is, and get this. Must watch it again. Ridley Scott as well. Alien (1979); the creature? The film I actually watched this week was Divergent (2014), appropriately enough, which was more enjoyable than I expected, and then up came five minutes of The Fault In Our Stars (2014), with the same actress, Shailene Woodley, who is not listed as left-handed, nor are the directors of those two films, Neil Burger and Josh Boone – not anywhere that I found, at least. But I’m getting off the point. Angelina Jolie is left-handed. Whoopi Goldberg and Sarah Jessica Parker. Scarlett Johansson.
 
Winston Churchill. Prince William. Okay, hold the affirmative action. No need to apologise for the scissors. Nor indeed for that witchcraft question. To misquote the last-but-one line of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – we’re here already.
 
*The word “dexterity” comes from the Greek word for right-handed, although note: online sources disagree as to whether sinister/dexterity come from Latin or Greek; Old French and Middle English also get a mention. Maybe I could leave that question with you?
**Find that question on Yahoo Answers. Best answer in my opinion: “I’m a witch and I’m right-handed.”
***It takes about thirty seconds.

This is one I hadn’t come across before. Between the second and third seasons of a soon-to-be box set that I might eventually impulse-buy, there was an actor change. I found this out when I went to YouTube to check a clip from the first season. Same scene, dialogue, action, everything. Except that one of the actors was different. Again: absolutely everything was the same except for that actor. His face, at least, was changed. I remember when Kremlin-watchers used to work out who was in and who was out of the Soviet Politburo by who lined up to wave (and in what order) for the military parades. I’ve seen and compared photographs in which Stalin does and then doesn’t have a particular person standing behind him.
 
But this really took me by surprise. Yes, I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the novel by George Orwell first published by Secker and Warburg, and yes, I could probably say something about Big Brother here. But … I suppose it makes sense. I’m guessing that the scene was originally shot with the actors standing in front of cameras and delivering their lines, with make-up and lights and trailers and people holding big boom microphones – and that the scene was “reshot” on a computer using digital widgetry. It makes sense to have a main character’s face consistent throughout, if you’re putting the whole thing in a box. But how strange to be the original actor and find that not only have you left; you were never there. So to speak.
 
Father? You there? I’m talking about the TV series Lucifer (2017-), which has now gone at least a season beyond the point where I stopped watching. Enjoyable, but I’ll wait until it’s complete and probably go back. I was checking that clip in hot pursuit of a thought process around heroes and anti-heroes, villains and good-bad guys, and there’s a brief scene in the first season where the policewoman seems to be starting to research this odd new partner that the plot has given her. It’s just a moment, and not unlike the similarly brief scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) where Gandalf peruses ancient documents in search of more about the One Ring. Research gets a scene in these dramas, but just as an acknowledgement – not like forensic examination, for example, which often lapses into musical montage.
 
Anyway. Police officer. Research. That would have been an interesting route for the plot to take – I mean, what would you do? – but instead, spoilers, we head towards psychotherapy sessions for Lucifer’s father issues, dysfunctional family, et cetera, while meeting along the way a series of bad guys who deserve to be punished* – and who better to do that?
 
Psychotherapy trumps religion here, as does outside-the-box policework. Lucifer the TV character derives from Lucifer the graphic-novel character, and he embodies something for us here in the way that “the rebellion” calls out for our allegiance in Star Wars (1977 and beyond). Colin Wilson caught the wave of the fifties with a book called The Outsider (1956, Victor Gollancz), not The Insider – sorry, this sentence leaked in from a version of this blog post written in a parallel universe.
 
Holding onto scary old nanny. Once upon a time, the popular bad guy was Hannibal Lecter. Now, we have a contender for the role who joins us from a darker corner of our collective mythology – but trailing clouds of rationality and psychotherapy rather than any whiff of burning. For me, that’s the significant detail: the absolute denial that – how do I put this? – there could be anything under the bed. Myths aren’t allowed to speak to us these days.
 
Science has excluded the unknown (I smile at that statement even as I write it) so that even reason can sleep easily. Oh, and I think I’m right in remembering that Lucifer describes himself more than once in the series as a “celestial being” – rather than “infernal”, for example. Dad’s upstairs, I suppose, and this is a domestic drama focused on the paternal home. He’s a mixed-up kid, and “father issues” is a safe, tame, above all containable explanation. No wonder so many “indie” novels by young Americans bring back magic.
 
What scares us? Not terrifies us in that sense of a flat-out denial that there’s anything represented back to us by the mythology that we can’t psycho-analyse back under control, but what fears do we like to have around? The psychotherapist eating his patients? The celestial/infernal being who’s a good boy at heart? The Empire repeatedly building hidden weaknesses into its Death Stars? I wonder. They say something about us, yes, and we could get into that, but maybe also they stand between us and – no, look away. Don’t go there. They’re a tool for denial. Everything is under control and we can explain everything and let’s be afraid of this because, gosh, isn’t it scary, children? Those are our fallibilities, over there, lined up neatly, and – no, don’t look that way…
 
But if we can’t even rely on the faces in the stories staying the same…
 
Surely that tells us something too. As does the insistence that left-handedness (see up top) is just a matter of hand-skill. My library card took me to the graphic-novel section this week, where I failed to find Lucifer, decided against anybody else from DC or Marvel, but then thought: I can’t come away with nothing. So I reached out and took something at random from the non-Marvel/DC shelf. And that’s why I have on my desk Volume Two of Stitched (2013, Avatar Press), which is oddly difficult to find online (cue spooky music; remember the box in Hellraiser, 1987?). Story by Mike Wolfer, pictures by Fernando Heinz Furukawa.
 
I won’t be searching out Volume One any time soon, to be honest, but if you can tolerate – enjoy, I should say – a well-told story in which pretty much every character dies a horrible death (“true horror doesn’t stay buried in the sands of time – it transcends them,” says the back cover), then you might find it reassuring to know that there are still some bad guys, in this case lurking on a library shelf, who are unambiguously, without equivocation or rationalisation, splattered with red ink.
​
*Strictly speaking, they punish themselves, as is regularly emphasised at the ends of episodes.

It’s probably not worth launching an entire new career as a time-management guru on the strength of this, but I’ve found that the most effective aid to getting stuff done under pressure is a very short list headed “What am I doing now?”
 
It’s not that I don’t have lots to do. I have lots to do. It’s just that getting myself organised – drawing up to-do lists, deciding what to do first – is an activity in its own right. One more moderately time-consuming thing to do. And the challenge isn’t getting organised; it’s not getting distracted. My desk is a heap of paper. My laptop is – I don’t know how you would explode out a laptop into an analogue representation of all the work it contains, but – my laptop is a heap of paper.
 
Meta-narrative. Rene Magritte, where are you now? I’ve found that if I follow the dictum “If you’re not doing anything, do something,” I can generally navigate my way through a busy day. I may err on the side of checking Facebook again, but if I have my “What am I doing now?” list to hand, I can almost always find my way back again. If you want to put a label on it, I suppose I’m talking about mindfulness, or being in the moment, or perhaps even some form of modern real-world meditation that doesn’t involve washing up. I’m writing this – here we go; Facebook again – with a reporter’s pad next to me. What am I doing now? Oh – I’m writing a blog post.
 
I suppose I could do it all on my phone, and I suppose I could ask my digital assistant what I’m doing, but no. It’s there in black and white. I’m writing a blog post. Now, if I wanted to play around with a soupҫon* of post-modern referential thingummy, I could tell you what the pad says this blog post is about, but then I’d have to get into the whole “what the artist is trying to do” thing (artist – huh!) and it’s a sunny day and let’s just keep going. The artist (huh!) is trying to get outside. Sunny day. Beach. The meta-narrative**, in which the unreliable narrator inadvertently reveals his true motivation, is all present and correct.
 
Captains. I was sitting on a bench the other say, on Prince of Wales Pier, in the sunshine, eating a chicken’n’mayo tiger bap and thinking about the collapse of Western Civilisation (it’s okay, I know; I embarrass myself sometimes), and it struck me that organisation isn’t just my problem. It’s everybody’s. So I pulled out my journal (see above re: there in black and white) and wrote these words. “There are several reasons why Western Civilisation never quite rights itself. One is the interplay between human nature and regulation.”
 
You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and scribble down something profound that you really must remember in the morning? And then next day you wake up and what you’ve scribbled down is something like “remember the captains” (which is a true example from my past)? It also happens to me with chicken’n’mayo tiger baps, except that I solve the world’s problems instead of scribbling down gnomic reminders to myself. Turning the page of my journal, I find: “Regulation of money, penalties for wrong advice, therefore follow the herd.”
 
It’s pleasant, sitting in the sun on Prince of Wales Pier. There are families with small children, fishermen, ferry passengers embarking and disembarking. And one solitary man scribbling notes for a possible blog post about the tendency of financial advisers and others to follow the prevailing wisdom. If they’re wrong, I think my point was, they can at least point to everybody else being wrong too. Oh dear – there’s even something here about herds of wild animals and predators. Embarrassing.
 
Bureaucrats. Then I go on to scribble notes about “the interplay between human nature and interesting things to do”. My idea was, I think, that creative expression is invariably swamped: say something new, or invent something new, and a competition ensues not to build on whatever it was, but to say it again, or build it again. Copycat books, films, even news stories. The winners of those competitions are invariably people who are good at winning competitions, but rarely people good at saying/inventing something new; the two sets of qualities are mutually exclusive. Wow, I was in a mood that day.
 
As for organisation, I think the danger is that it becomes descriptive of a preconception of how a thing should be done, thus an exercise in building a box to think inside, rather than a first step to making a thing happen. [Do I really write this way?] If I add the words “Write a blog post” to a list, I end up with a sense of myself as an organised writer of blog posts. With a list. But no blog post.
 
I see that I wrote a note to myself to track down that remark about the BBC starting out as bohemians pretending to be bureaucrats, and then turning into bureaucrats pretending to be bohemians – which I have since failed to do (anybody?). I have also written, “Technology takes the form of bureaucracy.” Oh dear. Perhaps if I asked them to hold the mayo next time?
 
Anyway – it says here that I’m in the back garden planting out seedlings, so I’ve obviously finished the blog post. Let’s hope my list says “Beach” later.
 
*That’s not a cedilla and I don’t think that’s even a c. I was down in the Cyrillic section of the character map – for my piece on being distracted.
**Actually, the term means something completely different, but I like it. Look it up, but, hey, sunny day.​

This isn’t going to be another post about online marketing, but I do have one last thing to say on that subject. Nobody knows what works. There are the moves that everybody makes – the sudden and unavoidably self-conscious launch into blogging; the solemnly planned Investment Of Time In Building Up A Following, et cetera – and then there are the odd, quirky ideas that are almost embarrassing to have.
 
We’re not talking about money, but if we were, I’d say: there’s putting your savings into a boringly safe bank account, and there’s buying a lottery ticket. And no, that analogy doesn’t work, except to say that boringly safe bank accounts never get you rich quick, and lottery tickets don’t cost much. And I’d rather listen to the story-telling of a lottery-ticket buyer, frankly. Yes, I know that the odds, blah, and the security of a bank account, blah blah, but think of those happy little moments in the run-up to the draw. You don’t get those from your online-banking app.
 
All blog posts lead to an argument for originality these days, if they’re written by me. Leave space for not following the prescribed method. If the software wants to divide your work into chapters, but you’re doing it as one long stream of consciousness – either adapt the software, or junk it. Some people can remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news that [insert momentous historical event here]. I can remember hearing the term “work-around” for the first time, as in: the technology’s stubbornly wrong, but the work-around to get it to do what you want is … et cetera.
 
Fool the technology with some combination of moves that it’s not expecting. Don’t even think about trying to make it see sense. Yes, I did enjoy the film Passengers (2016) last week, and in particular, I came over all happy at [spoiler!] the technology’s first assertion that it was “failsafe!” so that Chris Pratt couldn’t have woken up early. There should be an award for the flicker in Michael Sheen’s – the robot barman’s - expression when Pratt points out that, nevertheless, he is awake. [Nicely done, those bar conversations. “Written by John Spaihts” is the credit on the box; Spaihts is the “go-to guy for space thrillers,” says Wikipedia*.]
 
To the limited extent that this blog is turning into a cumulative self-portrait in words, I suppose I’m obliged to disclose that I had to turn the film off at the point where Pratt starts talking about reviving Jennifer Lawrence. Didn’t want him to do that, and perhaps I’ll spend some time wondering why it bothered me. I turned to IMdb to check that there would be a happy ending, and yes, I could return to the film. That was a Garden of Eden they built, wasn’t it?
 
Surrounded by technology, and what do they do? Spoiler again. They plant greenery and – I think I’ve got this right – build themselves a little house. So much for the luxury automated hotel rooms. [For readers who have just joined us, I have rediscovered my old library card, and there’s a rack of fairly recent DVDs. Seem to turn to the films first these days, not so much the books, which probably tells me something – but I did also borrow William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984 again, Victor Gollancz) last week as well. Paperback edition, with The Matrix (1999) represented on the cover.]
 
Where was I? Oh yes – rabbiting on about marketing again. Originality. Breaking out of the box as well as thinking outside it. Not to bring politics into this, but I think I was “inspired” (ha ha) this time by a news report on The President Formerly Known As The Donald’s decision to pull out of the Iraq nuclear deal. Not by the decision itself, nor the speech, but by the absolute certainty with which one of the follow-up talking heads described what was going to happen next. As I say – not to bring politics into this, but we all know that the Titanic is unsinkable. We can all state with absolute certainly that the ship won’t sink – or in this metaphorical present case, that it will sink.
 
I’ve no idea. But the world’s moved on – in a good way – from certainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, just as we don’t know what’s going to work. We are surrounded by definitive statements of how repudiations of nuclear deals, et cetera, are going to turn out. We are surrounded by instructions on how to do stuff – literal “how to” guides and lists of steps to whatever. None of which change the fact that we don’t know. Let’s get out of the TV studios and talk to the Iranians, if that’s our line of business; let’s follow our own best ideas, if we’re in an ideas-based line of work.
 
*Not surprised to find that Jon Spaihts also co-wrote Prometheus (2012). I think I’d prefer to have Michael Sheen’s robot cleaning the glasses in my kitchen.
​

Marketing’s one-dimensional. Just a tick-box list of things to do. Or is it? If we’re going to stretch this to a third (and final) instalment of my guide to the online marketing of fiction for authors who dislike the word ‘marketing’, we’re going to have to get one thing straight first. There’s no “should” in this. Marketing for authors can be – and you’ll have to trust me on this for at least a couple more paragraphs – an interesting, absorbing, entirely optional but possibly even enjoyable add-on to writing fiction. Although you won’t hear that from the professionals.
 
Spend even a short time looking for guidance on marketing, and you’ll start to hear people using the word “should”. Occasionally, “must”. A friend was told recently that she really should set up a landing page for her forthcoming novel (more on that in a moment). Another, that she should look for opportunities for guest-blogging, and another, that she should think about launching a podcast. In a city, as I said last week, you’re never more than three metres away from somebody who thinks that collecting email addresses by offering an email newsletter is an absolute must.
 
Let’s have some bold side-heads. Behind every Should is a Could. These are activities you could take on, if they came naturally. But a person telling you that newsletters work is actually telling you that newsletters have worked in the past. History doesn’t subscribe to the podcasts that fizzle out after a few weeks. Yes, having a landing page is a good idea, but if you don’t know the term and you look it up (and you’re an author who dislikes, et cetera), I think you’ll come away confused. Even Wikipedia rabbits on about “lead capture” and “directed sales copy”. All of which is fine if you like that kind of thing, but not much use for the rest of us.
 
So let’s take the term “landing page” as our digression for today. Suppose that you’ve researched marketing exhaustively (as, let’s say, you research the technical background of your novels). As a result of all this research, you’ve turned yourself from somebody who writes words, into a one-person multimedia empire, pumping out blogs, podcasts, video series and commentaries – and The Cloud above your head is full of other people’s willingly given email addresses. [You’re now too busy to write novels – we’ll come to that.]
 
They liven up the text, apparently. At some point in all this frantic activity, a social-media-consuming potential reader is going to think: “I have developed such a set of positive associations with this person that I would like to know more and possibly even buy the book.” Your name gets clicked*. And that click takes your potential reader to – ta-daaa! – your landing page. Or to a great long list of your social-media connections if you don’t have one. Now, it’s common sense to have a landing page, and it’s not difficult to work out what the term means. But my intelligent and creative friend was flummoxed. Her problem was, approximately: if there’s a term for it, surely there must me more to it than that? Am I missing something?
 
No, it’s just a page. On a website. People click on your name, they see it. You’ve got one already, actually. The term did need to be invented, because telling people to set themselves up with a landing page is quicker than running through that rigmarole of an explanation every time. But it’s descriptive. It doesn’t hint at depths of insight and expertise and secret wisdom known only to marketing folk**. They can tell you what’s worked for authors in the past, and they can tell you what’s working for authors now. They can’t tell you what will work specifically for you in the future. I’m not saying: ignore them. But I am saying: don’t be flummoxed.
 
Break it up in a good way. And do run the occasional reality check. Not so long ago, you could go to seminars for small-businesses and self-employed eccentrics (me and a couple of others who regularly turned up) and count on being told that Content was key. That’s right. There were graphs and charts to prove that the Content – they meant the words and pictures – mattered. But that never quite meant that we (the writers present) could go home and write our own stuff. SEO, you know. Hire us to write words that search engines will find. Most marketing people aren’t trying to impress you with faux-science. Most.
 
Like I said. Run the occasional reality check. Yes, I have been told, more than once, by marketing people, to leave the writing to them. In the specific context of marketing, to be fair, in circumstances where I knew what they meant – with one exception (an idiot), the point at issue was Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve also been to one recent seminar given by a marketing professional that featured a PowerPoint presentation of SEO done badly by professionals. And I’ve also been told (I don’t know if this is true) that if you don’t do your own SEO, Google will do it for you.
 
They can be quite useful. But I don’t care about any of that. Let the professionals do their job. This is a blog post about what authors can do. As I said: do your job. So here goes. We’ll continue to use the word “marketing” to refer to “the online marketing of fiction for authors who dislike the word ‘marketing’”, but this is our word now. It means what we need it to mean.
 
Marketing is making people feel good about you. Feel good in a particular way. They’re interested by you, and they like what you write. They want to get to the point of sale, and when they get there, they’ll be interested enough, positive enough, to buy your book. A potential reader (buyer) who finds you online will be given everything she needs to work up an enthusiasm for you and your work – given all that by whatever marketing you do. Even before she gets to your landing page, she will have a strong impression that you’re the author for her. [If you’re followed by a lot of people with those feelings, marketing people will want to back you, but that’s another subject.]
 
To foreshadow what comes next, for example. What this means for you is: be yourself, but more so. Be yourself across social media. I pretty much said that last week, but here’s this week’s angle on it. Being yourself is not a distinct activity from your writing. You write in, say, Word and/or Scrivener, and now you also write in Facebook and Twitter. You’re an author – show it. Use social media in whatever creative way you feel might work for you. [Now you do have time to write your novels because the marketing is a kind of extension of that – at least to the extent that you don’t switch off the writing part of your brain and switch on the marketing half; it all comes from the same place now.] Let the writing overflow.
 
Note the “connect” here. If you write fantasy, post about fantasy. Don’t post views on the Venezuelan economy, or Jeremy Corbyn, or the Trump presidency, and expect the people who click on your name to buy your children’s books. Get rid of any lingering fear that what you’re doing is “marketing” as defined by somebody else, and make it up as you go along. Finally, be nice. Be generous. Pay it forward, backward, sideways; be known for your generosity and deserving nature. Thank people. Compliment people. Market them, even. If you’re a truly unpleasant person and you know it, work on your “brand image”, which is to say, pretend to be nice. Common sense, right? And don’t forget to be original***. Below the picture, I’ll give you an example of originality.
 
Mongolian Death Worm. Turned on Freeview the other night to find that I’d just missed a film called Mongolian Death Worm (2010). A truly magnificent title, deserving of further research. It’s a TV film, scoring 3.3/10 on IMdb. I’ve now watched the trailer on YouTube – the blonde woman’s truck has broken down in the middle of nowhere, and back at the drilling site people are starting to disappear – and something that came after it called Mongolian Death Worm: Kill Count, which lives up to its title. The Death Worms reminded me of Predator (1987) somehow, and perhaps there’s a little Dune (1984 again; yes, there’s fresh talk of a remake) influence in there too. Remember the bad guy’s jaws at the end of Blade: Trinity (2004)? Neither do I; I’m far too highbrow to admit to watching anything like that.
 
No, I haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War yet. Yes, I suppose I will. Remember what I said about originality?
 
*Or your book’s name. People talk about having a landing page for a book. Not un-adjacent to your author website. And/or Facebook page. All closely connected together, in fact.
**I was talking about this once, saying something about Facebook posts I think, and a friend in the marketing business interrupted me. “That’s not social media!” he said. “That’s social-media marketing!” Apparently, there’s a difference. Do feel free to go ahead and work out what it is. I’ll wait here.
***I’m glad you’re doing all the conventional stuff, but here’s the thing: so’s everybody else. Doing all that gets you into the game. What gives you a winning hand is your originality.

Above the picture, we talked a bit about originality. There is a first-time novelist in the US by the name of Noelle Nichols. I don't know her; I only became aware of her because she was added to a Facebook group that I launched recently, with my friend the photographer and writer Claire Wilson (and that I’m just casually dropping into the conversation here), called Falmouth Storytellers. The idea is, briefly: every post begins a story; every comment continues the story. No, you don’t have to live in Falmouth. Just give your storytelling skills a work-out. Am I being subtle enough for you?
 
Anyway, Noelle Nichols contributed to a couple of stories at Falmouth Storytellers, and I read her contributions, and I thought: I could do with something to read. So I clicked on her name. Her first novel, coming out in June this year, is Shadow’s Hand, and it’s the first in the projected Shadow’s Creed Saga. Fantasy. Okay. If it’s well-written. Pre-ordering already live on Kindle, paperback edition coming shortly … and I like the front cover. I made a mental note to find Shadow’s Hand on Kindle when it comes out and download the free sample. Buy it if I like it.
 
Then Noelle Nichols really got my attention. She posted on Facebook a short video clip of her computer screen, on which she was doing some not-quite-final edits to the first couple of pages of Shadow’s Hand. Editing, live on camera. I think that counts as original. She read the story out loud as she edited it, and there was a (to me, anyway) nail-biting section in which she dealt with a repetitive passage on the second page. Two dogs and a cat intervened towards the end, and there was a cut-away to the room. You know that thing with author photographs? You try to read the titles of the books of the shelf behind? A bit like that.
 
My first point in writing about Noelle Nichols’ Facebook post, obviously, is that it fits so well into an argument for originality in the marketing of fiction by authors who don’t like the word ‘marketing’. I have no idea what this particular author thinks about the word ‘marketing’, but she seems to know how to do it with a pleasing degree of originality. And my second point is even simpler. In the opening pages of Shadow’s Hand, a woman with a stick (a staff) attacks a man with a sword. Now that I’ve seen that Facebook post, and thus read the opening pages, I want to know what happens next.
 
I’ll let you know. I realise that I don't represent the precise target demographic for a book written by a young woman that starts with a young woman attacking an older man with a stick, but I’ve pre-ordered the book, and it arrives on 30th June. Watch this space.

Okay, more to say. This is the second, and certainly the only second, instalment of my personal guide to the online marketing of fiction by authors. It arises out of a conversation I had about the first instalment last week. And the first thing I want to say is: don’t approach this as marketing. It is marketing, and we both know it’s marketing, but the online marketing for authors is only marketing in the sense that keeping track of how much money you have in the bank is accountancy.

There are whole agencies to take this seriously, just as there are whole accountancy firms to scribble numbers on the backs of perfectly good envelopes. You may have a publisher, or you may be your own publisher. Fine. This is about being an author. Here we go. First...
 
People hate self-promotion. Potential readers hate it – as you will find out very quickly if it's all that you do – and for example the people who run Facebook groups about writers and writing hate it. You don’t promote yourself by promoting yourself. Potential readers who first discover you talking about how wonderful you are, or pressing them to buy your fiction, won’t want to know.

They’ll only tolerate such behaviour if they already like your fiction and you’re giving them useful (or inside) information – how the next book’s going, for example. I’ve no idea whether this is a cultural thing – a British thing – but I’m pretty sure that if your first encounter with William Essex was me telling you to spend your money on my book*, your reaction wouldn’t be to reach for your credit card.
 
People like to join in. That’s where we go from here. People don’t like to be pushed – by your self-promotion, for example – but if you respect their autonomy, let them decide what to do, they might just join in an interesting conversation, follow an interesting author … buy a book, or series, that sounds as if it might be interesting.

You are, by definition, interested in the subject matter of your books. Your readers are by definition interested in the subject matter of your books. If you were an accountant, you would at this point add 2 and 2. But you’re not, so the answer is to promote yourself by starting a conversation around you, your books and their subject matter. Online. With comments enabled. Led and run by you, unless there’s a really good reason why not.
 
Start as you mean to go on**. I’m not here to burble on about the technicalities, but I will say this. As you fire up all your social-media accounts, position cameras, download teleprompt and podcast software – as you do all that, pause for long enough to set yourself an approximate but realistic schedule. You’re going to be doing this for a very long time – for as long as you’re an author – and you don’t want to saddle yourself with a chore.

My definition of marketing, dreamed up last week, is: do what you like doing, only more so, and more publicly, over time. Have the conversations online that you’d have at home if only the people at home were as obsessed as you are about your fiction. It’s not a requirement, but you’ll know you’re doing this right if you’re enjoying it.
 
Online marketing for authors is visibly being the writer of your books. Over time. The key to success is to keep going. Agree a schedule with yourself that you can manage - regular, but not necessarily frequent. Let your creative process overflow onto the social-media page (again in English: talk about your characters and plot and perhaps word-count). Let your online marketing become – how do I put this? – another outlet for the ongoing daydream (again: it's you communicating with readers - the problem was what, exactly?).

Agree a schedule and decide what social-media outlets work for you, and then put in the time to make those easy. I would say: do have a website, with your name on it, because you can put all the background, practical information up there - reading orders, publication dates, sample chapters - and interested-but-not-buying-yet potential readers can check you out even further. Social media can be no more than a casual interaction - going to the website is a definite step closer to the point of sale. At the website, they are definitely in the You section of the bookstore (actually, it's the You bookstore, but let's not go too far with this).

Everybody does email newsletters these days, and it’s never difficult to find a consultant who’ll tell you that the key to marketing is getting people’s email addresses. So if you can figure out a use for a clutch of email addresses, do one of those. If you like writing letters to people, do a newsletter. I would say, don't get bogged down with the personalisation, et cetera. The downside of getting it wrong - Dear First Name rather than Dear William - is greater than the upside of getting it right. One I like invariably starts, "Hi, it's Cathy here, and..." so on.

Above all, don’t let go of originality. Don't take my word for it. Or anybody else's word. You don’t write your books to be like other people’s books; you don’t just do what everybody else does when you’re writing. You have a voice, and it's your own. Apply that to the ongoing conversation that is online marketing. Originality isn’t compulsory either, but there are no rules beyond what works.

Oh! That works as a punchline. I seem to have reached the end. I was going to say something about the marketing of individual books, but maybe next week. Or not. In the relatively recent past, I’ve watched Atomic Blonde (2017), and moving on, there were those hours that I spent in front of Assassin’s Creed (2017). Odd, the dress code in movies. If you’re a blonde secret agent, you wear a short skirt with stockings and boots, big coat, big dark glasses, and boy, do you blend in. If you’re an assassin, you wear a distinctive tailored-looking outfit with the hood up, and nobody notices as you weave through the crowd towards your target.

I used to wonder where assassins bought those sleek suitcases with slots for every component of their sniper’s rifle – but I seem to have regressed to Grosse Point Blank (1997), which was fun.

*That was just an asterisk. There had to be one. Think about your reaction to it, maybe?

**Although, if you write a text-heavy weekly blog, be prepared for your friends in marketing to take you aside and talk to you gently about the importance of breaking up the text, putting in headings and spaces, and so on.

To write this into my own record, John Bird made an interesting point in his column in The Big Issue of 9th to 15th April this year. “I’ve grown through nationalism and internationalism, through left and right, through reactionary-ism and liberalism and I’ve come out the other end believing passionately that people are only as good as the anecdotes they choose to believe,” Bird wrote. “We continue to screw ourselves through our inabilities to find a way out of the labyrinth of outraged opinions.”
     “Anecdotes”, I think, is Bird’s word for all the noise generated by news media and social media, and “noise” is my word for all the packages, posts, tweets, et cetera – all the space-filling din that even on the quietest day is never replaced by “Nothing happened today, so here’s some music to ignore us by.” Out of all that cacophony, we choose to believe one collection or another of “outraged opinions”.
     Well, yes. My only objection would be to Bird’s use of the word “passionately”, which has that adverbial meaninglessness – sandwich shops are passionate about sandwiches, et cetera. Believe confidently if you must, but you could just believe. Full stop. Or is that just a tangential way of making a related point – let’s be less impassioned? The problem with believing anecdotes, Bird suggested, is that you end up in “a competition over the ‘best’ way of handling what’s wrong with the world.” It can be a “bitter, at times prejudicial and thoughtless, competition”.
     We squabble over Brexit, or gun control in the USA was Bird’s other example, on the basis of what we read, or hear, and choose to believe. That choice – this is me speaking – arises out of prejudice, bias, nature, nurture, probably class, et cetera, and not out of a sober evaluation of whatever “facts” we can infer from an unknowable future (hint: there are no “facts”, because we can’t know the future, so it’s all what we choose to believe). We’re just arguing.
     Maybe the unknowable rights and wrongs of the big questions, however passionately we attack and defend them, aren’t the point after all. Maybe your vote to leave/remain wasn’t a criminally irresponsible failure to appreciate the unarguable facts of the unknowable future. Maybe it was just your best guess. Maybe the sun will rise tomorrow. Bird suggests: “We might more pressingly need a fourth industrial revolution of the heart.”
     Hidden Figures (2016) was worth seeing.

This is the first, and possibly the only, instalment of my personal guide to the online marketing of fiction. It arises out of a conversation I had with a friend who’s preoccupied with doing just that. It may come to nothing, or it may evolve into a downloadable book with attendant YouTube videos and the opportunity to subscribe to an email newsletter. Or, like I said, not. I have no qualifications whatsoever for writing about this*. Online marketing of fiction by authors, I mean. Leaving the publisher out of it, if there is one. Here goes. Film in a moment.
​     Marketing, as various eminences have reasonably pointed out, is relationship-building with people who might buy your book. It starts long before they reach the <buy> button and it continues long after they’ve bought the book. It does if you’re planning to make a career out of book-writing, anyway. The word <Marketing> is not scary. See below the picture.
​     You have three objectives.
​     One. To alert potential book-buyers to your existence.
     Two. To give them the idea that you write books they want to read.
     Three. To give them a positive attitude to you and your writing.
​     [You can do all of these without reference to your publisher, if you have one. It's your career. You're an item on their list. The more you do, the more they have that they can support.]
     So far, marketing is two-thirds giving and one-third alerting. That’ll do for now. To work through those three objectives in reverse order:
     Three. To give potential book-buyers a positive attitude to you and your writing, you need to project yourself online as a writer. That means more than just project yourself online. People can like you, chat with you, feel good about you, agree with you, want to know you, without for a moment connecting any of that to the idea of spending money on books written by you.
     So use social media to write about what you write about – characters, subject matter, perhaps writing in general – and to project yourself as a person who writes books and is entertaining, writes books and is interesting, and so on. A writer of fantasy novels will be a writer of fantasy-related social-media posts, for example.** Social media is a first-person narrative in which you are your main character. Who do you want to be?
     Two. To give potential book buyers the idea that you write books they want to read, write original stand-alone posts, tweets, stories. No particular length, but by you. Yes, you can publish samples of your work, sell books at reduced prices (and/or free), discuss characters and plot developments, and all that is worth doing, but as a writer, you have the enormous opportunity that everything you write shows off your skill.
     I would say: the various social-media platforms are full of second-hand (pre-loved, ha!) material that people are sending round because they like it. Pictures of cats, memes, political opinions. Don’t do that; write words of your own that might be liked and shared and eventually read by book-buyers. If [insert Deity here] wanted writers to find Marketing difficult, [insert gender here] wouldn’t have given them words. Yes, sure, buy a camera. Learn how to use it.
     Yes, I am aware that Three and Two are very similar to each other. You’re a writer. You want people to know that. What do you do? No, you don’t share a newspaper article with a clickbait headline that was written by somebody else and came to you from somebody else. At least half – I’d prefer more – of what you post online should start with you. Be written by you, I mean. Originate with you. Okay, add a photograph. And it shouldn’t be too difficult for anybody who reads it to work out that you’re a writer worth reading, who has written books that might also be worth reading. Make your subject matter your own. Post about it. See above.
     One. How do you alert book-buyers to your existence? First, you decide who they are. Seriously. Yes, I know you want everybody to buy your books. But that doesn’t tell you anything. Narrow it down to one or more identifiable groups. The narrower the better. The more you narrow down your definition of a target reader, the more likely it is that they’ll cluster together. There are discussion groups online – forums – for people who like their fantasy novels to have dragons in them. If your book has – they’re all there in one place. Talking about books and looking for writers to read.
     The narrower your idea of who your ideal readers – book-buyers – would be, the higher the probability that they all belong to one or more special-interest groups on their chosen social-media platforms (as you may have noticed, I’m deliberately not mentioning any by name). Chances are, they want to find you almost as much as you want to find them. Bearing in mind that marketing is all about building up long-term relationships with readers and potential readers, I’d suggest not blundering in with a “buy my books” message, but rather, joining in the conversation(s) over time. If you’re interesting, and let’s assume you are, potential book-buyers who like your comments will look you up and – you guessed it – buy your books.
    So far, the definition of marketing for writers might as well be: do what you like doing, only more so, and more publicly, over time. There’s more to be said – you need to give potential buyers ready access to the buying opportunity; you need to have a coherent online presence that delivers all the information you want to deliver and in the process, projects your “brand” (sorry; I was doing so well) – and there’s probably also scope for a sequel on marketing a specific book, but right now, it’s tea time, so I’m off. Be generous. People like to be liked, shared and thanked in the comments. They return such favours.
     One film, before I go. For reasons best left unexplored***, I sat in on a watching of The Last Witch Hunter (2015) in which Vin Diesel plays an immortal witch-hunter (the last one, although I’m not clear why there couldn’t be others) and Michael Caine plays his sidekick. [If there can be successive Dolans, why can’t there be…?] Not bad, actually. I came away liking the greenery in one witch’s apartment, liking the imagined world, but struck by one detail in particular. In the story, Vin Diesel (now aged 50 in real life) was an 800-year-old immortal, and Michael Caine (now 85 ditto) had been working for him all his mortal life. I liked the detail that throughout the film, Diesel addressed Caine as “Kid”. Nice touch.
     Oh, and I liked what they did with the Witch Queen’s hair. And costume. Julie Engelbrecht. If you don't know, watch the extras to see what she looks like with the make-up off. Watch them anyway. Interesting comments. For a really effective villain, you have to be able to see their point of view. Discuss.
*This is almost true. I did once have the experience of stepping out of a lift, to be met by my editor with the words, “Your book’s a bestseller.” But that was another time, another place, another life.
**It goes without saying (not) that any potential book-buyer should be never be more than one or two clicks away from a buying opportunity. Make it very easy for potential buyers to find out more about you – and buy your books.
***Funnily enough, I wrote my short story Life Elsewhere, which you can find on Medium, before I knew about The Last Witch Hunter, possibly before it was made. Haven't checked the timing - just amused by the slight echo.

Thanks to Tim Grahl for his series of free tutorials under the title How to Build Your Author Platform. Marketing’s an interesting subject (to me; hope I’m not boring you) as well as a necessary activity for authors (among others), and it’s always pleasantly surprising to find somebody who knows what he’s talking about, who writes well. Grahl says: “Marketing is simply creating long-lasting connections with people and then focusing on being relentlessly helpful.” That’s Tim Grahl.
     In a fit of wild excitement I posted this comment of my own into a discussion on a writing-related Facebook page. All in one long paragraph. Sorry to butt in like that, people; here it is again on my own turf. Film after.
     “We talk about marketing like some people talk about writing. It's more like learning to dance than learning a new language. What matters is the doing, not the learning the big words. It's become this big capital-M thing, but even the term "marketing" was just invented as a catch-all word to describe all the things you can do to get the attention of people who might buy your books. Write blog and FB posts as samples of your writing that people can like and share, and in marketing-speak, you're "creating shareable assets". Enlist the help of friends who might help to promote your book, and you are "recruiting a launch team". Marketing is writing and being seen to write, while making a positive impression on potential book-buyers and ensuring that all the "buy" buttons are in plain sight. And when I said "all the things you can do" earlier, I did mean to imply that clever and original ideas and initiatives are better than following the same textbook as everybody else. That should give us an advantage, surely?”
     Enough of that. In this week’s second dose of film news, multiple-spoiler alert, stop reading now, I’m pleased to report the discovery that Kong: Skull Island (2017) delivers on its title. It does exactly what it says on the plastic DVD box. H. Rider Haggard’s Horace Holly would be right at home, and I suppose Ayesha might have found a constituency. And the Witch Queen probably - there's an extensive cave system, apparently. [And isn’t the great thing about the internet that you don’t always have to provide explanations and links? If you don’t know Holly and She Who Must Be Obeyed, enjoy the search.] Endearingly efficient film. And yes, of course there’s an extra scene right at the end of the credits – and know what? The revelation is: There’s More Out There! Somehow, I knew there would be.
     But I noticed something else. At one point, the female “anti-war photographer”, played by Brie Larson, falls into a lake. And it’s deep. She sinks. Very deep. All water in action movies is deeper than it could possibly be. Think of the river into which Franka Potente’s character, Marie, sinks after being shot in The Bourne Supremacy (2004). She goes down. And down. And I thought: these films do grab their opportunities to show us the subconscious, don’t they? I'm currently reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (1949, Pantheon Books), so I suppose I would be thinking along those lines, but ... there's a blog post in those depths somewhere. A very deep one.

We had a conversation about sex scenes. Men can't write women, somebody had said. Men - that vast category - can't write Women - that vast category. And as such conversations will in mixed company of a certain age, this one moved quickly to the depiction in fiction of the other's lived experience during a sexual encounter. And that turned into: you've no idea how that is for me. Could a man have any idea of what it might feel like to...? And vice-versa. Could a woman...? The whole thing ended as a score draw - with each side satisfied that (a) being on their side was better, and (b) that the other side couldn't understand them, let alone convincingly write their experience, so - ha!
     Nobody mentioned Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man (Viking Adult 2006), in which the author describes her eighteen-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and spent time in a range of all-male hang-outs (concluding that she preferred being a woman*). Nor did Tiresias come into it. He was the prophet of Apollo who spent seven years as a woman before being turned back into a man. He preferred being a woman, I think I remember. Checking the story with Wikipedia, I find that the first sex change - man to woman - was a punishment (sic) for killing two snakes that he had found, er, making out, while the second sex-change was a reward (sic) for not killing another two snakes found similarly, ah, compromised.
     Yes, here we are. One version of Tiresias' story suggests that he was drawn into an argument between Hera and Zeus as to whether women or men got more fun out of sex. This was after all the snakes, so Tiresias could speak with authority. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only," Tiresias replied (says Wikipedia; I don't stray far for my sources). For that, Hera - yes, Hera - struck him blind. If I've got that right, that means she didn't want to be the one getting more - never mind. No, dear, I'm not complaining. Zeus, by way of compensation, gave him a longer life and the gift of foresight. Thanks, I guess. Although Tiresias should have retired from public life at that point, I think. Look him up.
     Where was I ? Oh yes - sex scenes. Depictions aimed at getting them right from the other point of view. We could get into Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (Hogarth Press, of course; 1928) here, although that's more about having imaginary fun with Vita Sackville-West, over a long, history-rich opulently imagined life, than about the physicality of the, um, act. Or wasn't there a recent-ish Japanese animation...? Hold on a second. Yes, there was. Your Name (2016). But we're dangerously close to watching clips from It's a Boy Girl Thing (2016) on YouTube and losing the plot entirely. Nobody even think of mentioning Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, okay? We're talking about switching from one gender to the other, which Tiresias does and Orlando does, and you'll need only five minutes of the several hours you might end up spending on Google to realise that this is a big subject. Gender, generation - Freaky Friday (I argue for the 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis) - we're all interested in the experience of the other.
​     I suspect the necessary art here is not to get the detail right, actually. It's not to write convincingly about how, er, this goes there, and the going feels good when you're on the receiving, uh, hah! Lovely day. Must go for a walk later. Because if you do get it to sound right, in all its richly detailed intensity, your readers are only going to assume that you asked a few people and took down their answers. [Am I squeamish or childish? I so wanted to type 'trousers' there.] Once upon a time, maybe in the nineteen-seventies, there was a sub-genre of thrillers written by male writers and with female protagonists ... who would invariably, around Chapter Two, strip off in front of a full-length mirror and describe themselves to themselves.
​     But we're not going there either. Strictly in the matter of writing one side from the other side, so to speak, or any side from not itself, the necessary art is to say as little as possible. Because, if you're genuinely writing about unlived (by you) experience and you want to get it right, the best you can do is conjure up a sequence of hints that enable the reader "on the other side" to conjure up in turn a person in not quite their own image. Whether or not you're writing about sex. Supply nothing that jars, nothing that gets in the way of the imagination, because frankly, nobody can write anybody. Men can't write Women and vice-versa, but if you get the writing transparent enough, conducive enough to the reader's imagination, mainly limited to the externals perhaps, then it doesn't matter who you are.
​     Men can't - doesn't matter. Women can't - doesn't matter. What matters is that in the writing, Men can read A Man when you want them to, and Women can read A Woman when you give them - just enough. Get the writing transparent, conducive, clear - and they'll supply the detail from their own experience.
​     Several days after the conversation happened, I have finally made the point that I would have made if I'd thought of it at the time. Subject closed; normal service resumed.
*This from the book's Wikipedia entry: "Vincent writes about how the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man: her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions, and features which in her as a woman had been seen as "butch" became oddly effeminate when seen in a man." 

This may be widely known, but it’s new to me. High up on a wall of Paisley Abbey, which dates back to 1245 and claims to be “Cradle of the Royal House of Stewart” on its website, is a gargoyle modelled on the alien from Alien (1979). Not the “face-hugger”, but the full-grown snarling, drooling affront to dentistry. Those snapping teeth – and those snapping teeth. If unfamiliarity is a part of scariness – it’s said* that you can scare off a hungry lion by doing something unnatural, like playing loud music to it – then the Alien alien is probably the most effective of Paisley Abbey’s gargoyles at their popular task of scaring off supernatural horrors that might otherwise interrupt Evensong.
​     Then I went into this further. There’s a Darth Vader “grotesque” on the Washington National Cathedral, in the USA, and the character Gizmo, from Gremlins (1984), is depicted in stone on the 15th century Chapelle de Bethléem in Nantes, France (I found this out here). I think the distinction is that while a “grotesque” is a carved figure, only a “gargoyle” takes rainwater from the roof and projects it away from the walls. There’s a brief film here that convinces me that Paisley Abbey’s alien is engaged in water removal.
     I’m delighted. I could probably work up some kind of an argument that we’ve relocated scariness – or anti-scariness – from church teachings to the manifestations of cinema, and I’m sure I could find some kind of significance in that, but why bother? It’s a shame we can’t buy gargoyles alongside the pipes and joints at DIY stores, because they’ve clearly passed the test of time, but hey – there’s one of H R Giger’s aliens on the side of Paisley Abbey, and this time it’s on our side. Things ancient and modern.
     Concluding his 1927 essay Possible Worlds (which is the title essay in a collection; search online), the scientist J B S Haldane writes: “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I remember once discovering that an argument for “intelligent design” (in the sense, somebody had to have made this, it can’t just be chance, so that proves the existence of God) is that the universe is complex – the complexity of a Bee, say, is such that it can’t have occurred by chance (or, you know, evolution).
     An argument for queerness, in its 1927 sense of strangeness, is easier to make. Today, for example, we have a Swiss artist’s design for an extra-terrestrial monster featured in a 20th Century Fox production of an English director’s film starring an American actress now protecting a 12th Century Scottish abbey. Quod Erat Demonstrandum is probably the Latin phrase I need at this point. You could make it up, but you probably wouldn’t.
*By me, among others. Many years ago, I wrote an article under the title How Not To Be Eaten By A Lion. The Jersey zoo’s lion man was working at home on the day I phoned, I remember. I sometimes wonder what work he took home with him.

My problem these days is a pervasive sense of déjà vu. I haven’t been here before, but I’ve been somewhere very much like it. All the big political and social arguments have been settled … but we’re still unsettled. We agree so totally on what constitutes virtue – equality, respect, et cetera – that opinion might as well have been collectivised … and yet we’re still at odds. It’s all so very familiar, and yet not the same.
​     I came here in a time machine from the nineteen-eighties, when everything was clear. The Threat was the cold war, which was unambiguously a bad thing, and The Enemy Within was either Thatcher or Scargill, right or left, according to political affiliation. [Thatcher was winning the landslide elections, but.] Television was fighting at Orgreave Colliery, and in the cinema, we were somewhere between Blade Runner (1982), E.T. (1982), WarGames (1983) and Ghostbusters (1984). Oh, and we all knew what not to do with Gremlins (1984) after midnight. Talking Heads released Stop Making Sense; Bruce Springsteen released Born In The USA (first CD manufactured in the USA); the Eurovision Song Context was won by the Herreys singing Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley.
    And then history ended* and time did a series of U-turns. Today, with the digital read-out saying April 2018, we’re past (almost**) all those time loops – Back to the Future’s future was 2015, Skynet did its thing in 1997, while 2001: A Space Odyssey was just a little optimistic (and am I right to remember trimphones in Space 1999?). Oh, and let’s remember Timecop (1994), in which the future is located in 2004. It’s as if we’ve travelled on past the future. And if you’ll allow me to channel Christopher Lloyd’s “slightly mad scientist” (IMdb) from Back to the Future for a moment – of course! This must be the remake of the past!
    Remake, reboot, not sure of the difference. But look at the evidence. We’ve had the Blade Runner and Ghostbusters remakes (reboots) already this year; Tomb Raider has just been released – again – and there’s a listing on IMdb for Gremlins 3 (updated July 2017). And – I don’t believe this (yes, I do) – there’s a WarGames TV series due later this year. Read this. In politics, Trump seems to be remaking Nixon in China***, but with North Korea, and in place of Orgreave, we’ve got Brexit. A lot of indignation, lots of passionate denunciation, but this time round, no actual blood spilled.
    Talking Heads’ David Byrne released American Utopia this year; Bruce Springsteen’s putting out The Album Collection Vol. 2 in May (and currently performing on Broadway); the Eurovision Song Contest 2017 was won by Salvador Sobral singing Amar Pelos Dois. All very familiar, and sometimes I ask myself: did I actually travel? Or is this still 1984 but in a parallel universe? I know that I’ve gone somewhere – or somewhen, cue spooky music – because The Threat has mutated. There’s no longer a big, external Us vs. Them situation; we’ve internalised it somehow, made it our own: women objecting to men; populists objecting to elites and vice-versa; everybody objecting to Trump. All real, but now, simultaneously an abstraction. Or perhaps, our opposition to The Threat has somehow become insubstantial: Trump got elected; Brexit is happening; heterosexual marriage is still legal. How come? We’re collectively against things that somehow find mass support.
​     It was easy, back in ’84. There was good and bad and brave – you were brave if you were unconventional because it cost you something. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, which began publication in novel form in 1978 (Harper & Row), not only addressed AIDS, but also the then-difficult subject of coming out as gay. Search for Michael Tolliver’s letter. No, be strong and do it yourself. I just added a colour, not a link. These days, there’s a ghost of that bravery in the defiant tone of people coming out as – some version of pretty much mainstream-different, actually, conventionally idiosyncratic, but with a filter on the Facebook profile pic to signal their allegiance to whatever cause we’re all supporting these days. Why take a stand if we’re with you already? Was it the long-ago TV critic of the FT, Chris Dunkley, who came up with the phrase “standing up to be counted long after everybody else has sat down” in a review? I think it was. We’d call it a meme these days; the phrase stuck in my head at the time and I still remember it (yes, I think I did first read it in the nineteen-eighties).
    I no longer have my ancient paperback copy of Ken Grimwood’s fantasy novel Replay (1986, Arbour House), but if I remember the plot rightly, the narrator relives a big chunk of his life every time he dies – like the later film Groundhog Day (1993) but with multiple decades instead of one day. After living his life several times over, he suddenly notices an anomaly – a well-known event hasn’t happened this time, or something else isn’t how he remembers it, and the plot kicks up a gear – could we get some more of that spooky music here, please? As I say, I no longer have the book, but on a side-impulse from the writing of this post, I did the analogue thing and went down to Bookmark in Arwenack Street to order a second-hand copy. [Younger readers: “second-hand” is the same as “pre-loved” but without the silly emotional nudge.]
    No screens were consulted in the ordering of this book. By me, at least. Bookmark’s attic was searched – actual attic, not database; no copy in stock. The book will be here on Monday, and when I pick it up, hold it in my hands, turn pages, I’ll feel that I’ve, I don’t know, reconnected with the world that was. I remember enjoying that book. The action happens in our reality, but the narrator suddenly realises, for example, that this time round, Peachtree haven’t launched the T-Connect, and the film Sky Song (1977) has been replaced by something called Star Wars. Timeline: totally messed up. Plot: interesting. The narrator's not the only time traveller hiding in plain sight. I used to go into bookshops and buy/order books in the past, so at least that detail hasn’t changed. Although the internet’s a bit of a surprise this time round.
    Wait a minute. This isn’t the future at all, is it? And I'm not exactly back where I started. Has The Matrix (1999) blown a fuse? Now, that would be a blog post.
*Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992, Free Press). The long-term trend is for democracy to prevail as a system of government. Discuss.
**Inconveniently for my main argument, the original Blade Runner looked ahead to 2019. Which would you prefer – the urban sprawl and the off-world colonies, or Brexit? The remake, Blade Runner 2049, is unusual in that it pushes the future out even further – although I suppose in that respect it’s just redoing what the original did.
*Nixon in China by John Adams, 1987. Back in the eighties, we had operas based on foreign-policy initiatives. Beat that with a tweet.​

In his 1996 book Why Things Bite Back: New Technology and the Revenge Effect (Fourth Estate), Edward Tenner writes: “We seem to worry more than our ancestors, surrounded though they were by exploding steamboat boilers, raging epidemics, crashing trains, panicked crowds, and flaming theaters. Perhaps this is because the safer life imposes an ever-increasing burden of attention. …there are, not necessarily more severe, but more subtle and intractable, problems to deal with.”
​     So begins Teller’s final chapter, in which he aims to “investigate why disasters should lead to improvement, and improvement should paradoxically foster discontent”. Tenner’s point through the book, briefly and in my words, is that we’re good at progress, good at reacting to disasters, good at innovating solutions, et cetera, but incapable of avoiding the “revenge effects” whereby each solution goes on to impose its own challenges. Teller writes: “Technology demands more, not less, human work to function. And it introduces more subtle and insidious problems to replace acute ones.” Cars don’t break down so much, but we can’t fix them at the roadside when they do.
​     I think “revenge effects” is a more precise term than “unintended consequences”. We are indeed living “the safer life” in many respects, and perhaps the problems we face are indeed “more subtle” than those faced by our ancestors – although we’ve faced some pretty unsubtle disasters as well, since the turn of the century. One of Tenner’s examples is “the rediscovery of chronic illness”. We may have worked out how to prevent a “multitude of deaths from infectious disease in middle age”, but those deaths “undoubtedly concealed many chronic conditions” that are now faced by the survivors.
​     That’s a precise “revenge effect”. But Tenner remains cheerful. In one of his several chapters on “the computerised office”, Tenner writes, from the perspective of 1996: “There is a brilliant, well-supported argument that we are actually in the early stages of a more fundamental revolution.” Yes. But from the perspective of 2018, I enjoyed adding the italics to this sentence: “Software can devour highly complex tasks with ease if they fit well into its existing categories.” Notice the word “well” there. We’ve all encountered AS*, brother of the more famous AI. By then, Tenner’s arguing that replacing the “old ways” with technology doesn’t simplify a task; it “recomplicates” it in different ways.
    Read the book. Tenner’s conclusion is an argument for vigilance – “constant monitoring of the globe, for everything from changes in mean temperatures and particulates to traffic in bacteria and viruses” alongside personal vigilance. We’ll be okay, right? We’re vigilant, and when we spot something like global warming, polar ice melting, social media undermining democracy, viruses taking down banks, health services, global networks, we can Harness The Power Of Technology to sort it out, right? Right?
​     The final sentence of Tenner’s book ends with the words: “…reality is indeed gaining on us.”
*Artificial Stupidity. No, come on, you know what I mean. Watch Amber Case on YouTube, arguing for “calm technology”. Some of her examples of the other kind.

In the original 1972 novel by Ira Levin (Random House), The Stepford Wives have been murdered. Such was the heightened state of Artificial Intelligence in Ira Levin’s imagination at the end of The Sixties, that they have been replaced by robots identical in every respect except that they’re compliant. They can’t be described as “sex robots”, to use a modern term, because they’re also “washing-up robots” and “doing-the-housework robots” as well. We could compare Levin’s vision with the current state of robotics – those life-size dolls that will answer simple questions; the various table-top gadgets we can tell what to do – and that would be amusing.
​     But I’m thinking about something else. The same is true – the women are dead; the men seem to be okay with robot wives – in the 1975 film. But then came successive made-for-TV versions (I’m relying heavily on Wikipedia here, but it’s an interesting trail to follow) in which (1980) the wives were hypnotised, broke free, took revenge; (1987) wives and children were victims but husbands (“conspirators”, says Wikipedia) ended up being killed; (1996) the title was changed to The Stepford Husbands, which says what needs to be said. In that last one, the making-into-robots/hypnotising was led by a woman, and the wives*, I imagine, didn’t do much clearing up around the house. No, I haven’t seen it.
​     I didn’t know any of that (thanks, Wikipedia). I did read the book and then see the original film, years back, and then I saw the 2004 film (do I have to insert “made-for-cinema” here?) directed by Frank Oz and starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler and Glenn Close, among others. With that cast, perhaps it’s not surprising that the wives weren’t murdered and replaced with mindless automata**. They’re capable of being rescued. Yes, one of them is shown to be a robot (spoiler) or a machine or a something by a husband who uses her as a cashpoint (her mouth dispenses banknotes), but even she is capable of being restored to, er, full working order.
​     After The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin wrote The Boys From Brazil (1976, Random House), which gives us an interesting take on cloning technology. In 2011, in a Guardian review, Sophie Martelli wrote, “What scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering: in the 1970s, although scientifically possible, [the villain’s] plan belonged firmly in the realm of fiction; now it's not nearly so far-fetched.” I’ve always liked the idea that cultural change can be tracked through popular entertainment***; maybe Ira Levin’s unusual prescience also extended to the impacts of science. If you're thinking of indulging in a little light cloning over the weekend, read The Boys From Brazil first.
​     Yes, I know I haven’t mentioned Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin’s second novel (first published on 12th March 1967 by Random House). In a discussion of Ira Levin’s curious prescience, perhaps that baby is just a little problematic. She (he?) would lately have celebrated her fifty-first birthday. Or thereabouts. Not that I’m in any way mentioning politics in this post, and I’m not in any way thinking of the plots of The Omen (1976) and its sequels (yes, there was a remake), but, you know, isn’t fifty-ish a good age to be thinking about running for office?
*I’m assuming they did agree to marriage, as the title suggests.
**Is that too finicky? I mean “automatons”.
***For example, the idea that all those black-and-white movies of the fifties about alien invasion expressed fear of communism.
​To complete the record, Ira Levin's first novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1953, Simon & Schuster), told the story of a wife-killing serial murderer. Spoiler - he ends up boiled, which a cinema buff might consider a blow for bunnies everywhere.

There’s a saying. “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” And a definition. “Engaged in futile or ineffectual actions.” Apparently, it’s humorous. Thank you, Collins Dictionary. Dot com. I was thinking about that saying earlier, and it struck me that if you were the deck-chair attendant on the Titanic, in the ship’s last hours, you’d probably want some comfortingly familiar activity to take your mind off things. And then it struck me that badly placed deck chairs might be an obstacle to an orderly evacuation. You’d be needed.
​     But if we come at the saying from a slightly different angle, we might get: continuing to engage in activities that are long past their sell-by date. Those deckchairs would need to be out of the way, and you wouldn’t want to throw them over the side for fear of hitting a lifeboat, so you would perhaps secure them as per regulations for adverse conditions. But then going around collecting drinks orders, or advising that the late-night deck-quoits competition is scheduled to begin in five minutes, would be inappropriate.
​     Enough with the Titanic. People died. There was a deckchair attendant, at least one, and at some point he realised that there wasn’t a place on a lifeboat for him. What I’m saying here is – we’re often mistaken about usefulness. To go somewhere else and pick a different example, it’s not exactly “futile or ineffectual” to have the soldiers (visibly) guarding Buckingham Palace dressed in conspicuous red jackets, nor indeed for the travelling on important state occasions to involve gold-coloured, horse-drawn vehicles*. All of that may be past its sell-by date (the real guarding is done by [redacted]; a black cab would get you there quicker), but it does bring in tourist dollars (yen, etc.) and it draws the eye.
​     Soldiers in red jackets are useful. But not for their original purpose. It’s disconcerting (but not surprising) to research the subject online, and find that red jackets remained part of the British Army’s standard going-into-battle uniform until shortly before the First World War. See for example Stanley Baker, Michael Caine et al in the film Zulu (1964)**. The idea of the red jacket was for the enemy to see the British Army coming and be frightened off the battlefield (or not). Let’s have some emphasis here, please: once that red jacket was written into the regulations, not even (for example), the increasing accuracy of snipers’ rifles through the nineteenth century could dislodge it.
​     Happily for those young officers leading the charges up out of the trenches and into the barbed wire, and for the men following them (who were shot if they didn’t go), by then the red dye for the jackets had become too expensive for widespread use***. We can conclude that a century ago, cost-cutting worked better than leadership in saving us from a rule-bound adherence to sending men into battle dressed as targets. And it occurs to me to say: maybe just about anything works better than leadership – or is that going too far? I think of the community response to the Grenfell Tower fire, against the official government response, and the way that every clever government reorganisation of services ends up with fewer services.
​     You can’t even cost-cut effectively if your biggest state secret is that you’ve mismanaged everything to the point of having no money. But this is me going off on a tangent again. Somewhere back there, I was on target to make the point that usefulness is all about what works, in financing public services, evacuating ships, bringing in tourist dollars (yen, etc.), and not about official roles, official uniforms, what the rulebook says. I should clarify that this is not a post about those organisations of today that employ battalions of lawyers and PR executives to tell us how useful they are; that tell us “lessons have been learned” every time they hurt people; that respond to requests for an apology by telling us how sorry they are that we’re upset.
​     It’s not about them. But – “engage in futile or ineffectual actions”? And – “engage in activities that are long past their sell-by date”? Hm. Let’s hear it for the deckchair attendants. And the locals. Like I said, often we’re mistaken about usefulness. And effectiveness. And sometimes we’re not.
*Although I remember the so-called “minor royals” turning up in grey minibuses for the most recent royal wedding. Why do reporters call them that?
** “By 2007, critics were divided over whether the film should be seen as deeply anti-imperialist or as racist,” says Wikipedia. Also, same source, the battle at Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers (2002)  was filmed with Zulu in mind.
***“Nonsense! That red jacket will frighten the snipers away, man. Off you go.” I think I remember reading somewhere that a sniper could always spot an officer because he’d be the one holding a handgun and not a rifle. Officers were to be killed first, of course, to cut off the flow of orders.

With social media and marketing, I think it’s important to maintain the illusion. I get regular emails from total strangers addressing me as “Dear William” (and occasionally as “Dear FNAME), and I feel I should write back in the same affectionate way. My mobile-phone provider always expresses such excitement in its texts about competitions – there are “hundreds of prizes to be won” in the current one, apparently – that I feel guilty for never texting back and offering them the chance to win one of my old mobile handsets.
​     Omitting company names to protect the innocent (sic), I had this through the post the other day – the old-fashioned post, I know, but still. It’s a slip of paper bearing the message: “We are pleased to share with you the exciting news that the takeover of [one company name] by [another company name] has succeeded and our new brand name is [a third company name].” I’ve kept it. Occasionally I take it out and imagine the pleasure, the excitement, the wild celebrations – the parties, the dancing on desks, the instantly regretted spontaneous hugs and kisses – and I think about writing them an impassioned letter – through the post, of course; green ink, scented paper, the works – to tell them how much the news that [one company name] has changed into [a third company name] has changed my life for the better.
​     I get over it quickly enough (although I'm tempted to go ahead and write anyway). The second single-sentence paragraph on the slip tells me what the company does. There’s something marvellously zeitgeist about sharing all that excitement and then feeling the need to explain who they are and what they do. And something even more zeitgeist about an explanation that leaves me none the wiser. This company is “a market-leader in the delivery of technology-enabled solutions”. Unlike all its rivals, who are backward-looking providers of spare parts for stagecoaches, of course.
​     I remember the opposites test - may even have invented it. I used to apply it, still do, and once I even wrote about it in a book (Can I Quote You On That? Harriman House, 2006). The test is: could this person (or company) say the opposite and still make sense? If not, they can safely be ignored. A doctor telling you that she cares for her patients can be ignored, because she couldn’t say the opposite. But a doctor saying that she treats everything with a short course of tablets is telling you something worth knowing – if you believe in talking cures, for example, or the restorative power of fresh air and cold baths, or homeopathy, you might want to go elsewhere.
​     The opposites test can be applied to politics, although the results are almost always disappointing, and might be a useful tool for generating follow-up interview questions, for interviewers prepared to go off-script and chance it. A variant is to replace "men" with "women" and vice-versa in any text about who's equal to whom, et cetera. We only achieve true equality when the two versions make equal sense. 
​     But the new thing is the right-relation (not) between statement and emotion. We don’t really believe, do we, that the staff at [one company name] were quite so gripped with enthusiasm when management got them together and told them they were now working for [a third company name]? We know, don’t we, and they know, that the next exciting conversation will be about achieving efficiencies? And we know what that word means. Same applies to every announcement these days: are you really that thrilled? If not, why are you bothering to pretend?
​     All that excitement is the house style of the connected economy, and at best it’s meaningless. At worst - if the emotion doesn’t fit the statement, and both fail the opposites test, well, that’s an exciting opportunity to engage proactively with the challenges that the future presents to us as individuals, isn’t it? We appreciate your contribution over the years, and wish you every success in whatever you choose to do next. Here's a box for your personal items. Goodbye.​

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but there’s a scene in the film Terminator 2 – Judgement Day (1991) in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing the Good Terminator, has to explain the workings of the Bad Terminator (played by Robert Patrick) to the young John Connor (played by Edward Furlong). If you missed the film, Arnold has been sent back through time by the older John Connor to protect the young John Connor from the Bad Terminator, which has been sent back…
​     You see, the older John Connor is successfully leading The War Against The Machines*, which began when Skynet became self-aware (in, er, August 1997) and realised that people were trying to turn it off. Skynet’s losing the war (so much for AI – ha!) but it does have a time machine so it can kill the hero while he’s still young. This isn’t Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot short-story collection (Gnome Press, 1950) because Skynet is concerned for its own wellbeing. Self-interest rather than protecting people from themselves – how times change.
​     Bad T, as we might as well call him, is an advanced prototype, made of liquid metal**, a T-1000 to Our Arnold’s T-101. Bad T can take the shape of anything he (it) touches. Young John’s question is, why can’t it become a bomb and get him by exploding? Reasonable question, and there is a case (although this isn’t one of them) for films that end with the hero(ine) being wiped out at an early stage*** to give us all a bit of a rest while we watch the bad guy take over the world and then have to start fielding complaints from neighbours about, I don’t know, the latest economic data and Brexit.
​     Sorry. All this explanation has slowed down the blog post. Where was I? Oh yes. That question. You’re making an action sci-fi movie, and sooner or later, your audience is going to wonder why Bad T doesn’t just get close to John Connor and explode. So you write the question into the script before the audience gets to it. But then you have to answer it in a way that doesn’t slow down the action…
​     …and all of a sudden it’s time to halt the narrative again with another laborious explanation from me. I read a lot of fiction on Kindle, independent small-press and self-published fiction. I like writing that’s published that way, because it’s subject to natural selection: you’re either good enough to find an audience, or you’re not. And why shouldn’t you go direct to an audience for that judgement? And yes, it is standard practice to offer the first 10% of a book as a free sample before buying. But, oh, the explanations. Oh, the number of sub-Chandler detectives who are visited out of hours by an alluring would-be client with sex appeal and a secret … detectives who then take us through a laboriously explained, clumsily scene-setting reminiscence of who they are and why their world is as it is.
​     Oh, the action heroes who have only to pick up a gun to remember the chapter-long entirety of their military careers and weapons training; oh, the fantasy heroines who have only to get up in the morning and find they're out of coffee to remember the entire history of, say, witchcraft as it works in their world. If I was running a creative-writing course, I’d say: trust the audience! With the exclamation mark. Let the characters know what they know, let them show it through their actions rather than bore us with a back-story dump at the outset, and let’s just trust the audience – I would say “readers”, but the ebook trade seems to prefer “fans” – to pick up or supply the rest.
​     So my point is – have I explained this enough? – give the audience something, even just an acknowledgement of the issue (not an evasion), and they’ll do the rest. They don’t want the narrative to stop any more than you do. And now back to the blog post.
     John Connor asks his question. And what could happen is: the entire film could grind to a halt while Arnold Schwarzenegger explains the imaginary but necessary science behind shape-shifting terminators made of “mimetic poly-alloy” (brilliant). Without that explanation, we might wonder. But this is a big-budget Terminator movie. These people don’t stop for anything, and nor do their terminators. Arnold’s reply is a masterclass in how to handle any kind of explanation or background that might slow things down.
     Why doesn’t the T-1000 get up close and explode? The reply starts with a couple of sentences about complex machines with moving parts, et cetera. Maybe a second or two of screen time. Then…
     Then Mr Schwarzenegger gives us the all-important explanation. Everything we could possibly need to know about the T-1000’s limitations in one sentence.
     “It doesn’t work that way,” he says.
     And that, people who write the books I read before going to sleep, is how you do it. Please.
*Another war against the machines. See also the Butlerian Jihad, covered here.
**Another blob! Scroll down for last week's blob coverage. Just occurred to me that the thing in The Thing was a blob too. They're all over the place.
***If you haven’t seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), see it now.

Maybe I should start by saying that I caught the last ten minutes of The Blob last night, the 1958 film starring Steve McQueen. Interesting how old the young people looked, and how frequently the not-quite-so-young authority figures kept dismissing them as young. A plot device, I suppose, and it was a film of course, but I don't associate "young" with men and women that old. The leading actress, Aneta Corsaut, playing Steve's girlfriend, had to be carried out of several of her scenes, literally, helped out of the rest, and I couldn't quite get my head round the relationship between the two of them. The term "submissive" has fifty shades of meaning that I don't intend here, but Steve was definitely in charge.
​     That was his first starring role! Didn't realise. The film is a "cult classic" and was released as half of a double bill with I Married a Monster from Outer Space. In The Blob, Steve McQueen ​"plays a typical oversexed, car-lovin' highschooler who can't get anyone to believe his story", says the internet. Oh, wow. Compare and contrast Steve and Aneta with, say John Travolta and Nancy Allen in the original Carrie (1976; the one with Sissy Spacek). Depictions of oversexed, car-lovin' highschoolers changed a lot in that eighteen-year period, and I'd say that Nancy Allen's character was certainly dominant in that relationship.
​     I did want to say something about the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, released on Friday 9th March, showing that manufacturing is up while construction is down, but given last week's observation that my "unique visitors" prefer film talk to boring stuff about Brexit, et cetera, maybe I should say first that there was a remake of The Blob in 1988, and the title is listed as "in development" on IMdb. Expect more blobs. Such a divergence in  relatively long-term economic data - no, don't go! I saw Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri last night. Dixon's character arc was interesting, and no wonder Sam Rockwell won an Oscar for it - just quickly, if you don't mind, such a divergence is yet more evidence that the world is changing....
​     ...well, I find it interesting. In one window of my local cinema is a b/w (grey, geddit?) poster bearing the injunction "Don't Miss The Climax" and in the next window is a colourful poster depicting a group of garden gnomes. Front and centre is, I do believe, Sherlock Gnomes. And yes, I have just looked that up, and it is a film. Clever old me. As for the other one - you know, it's just occurred to me, out of nowhere, that back around the time of the original The Blob, the term "women's picture" meant something completely different from what it might mean today...
​     ...so I've looked up "women's picture", scrolled down the search results, and on second thoughts, given current sensitivities** and realising that I'm completely out of my depth here, maybe I will finish by insisting on saying that a dramatic divergence of economic data might as well be welcomed as a sign that the world is changing. We don't need to - probably shouldn't, although so often it's the automatic response - defend the status quo in manufacturing or indeed in construction. Or membership of international trade bodies like the European - but you're right. Enough already.
     The Blob - spoiler - ended with the blob itself being flown off to the arctic, where the cold would render it inert. Pity they didn't take it to Antarctica, where it would have really helped Kurt Russell in The Thing (1982), which was another remake of a (1951) cult classic - but I could go on all day, and there'll be more economic data next week. Don't want to use up too many film references all at once.
​*The  1951 film The Thing from Another World became John Carpenter's The Thing of 1982, and then Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s The Thing of 2011. All of them were based on John W Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There? which was first published in the August 1938 edition of Astounding Stories - at around the time Campbell was appointed editor, oddly enough. Campbell was successful in the role, Wikipedia tells me, and remained editor until his death in 1971. Note: the magazine went through several titles; I've abbreviated one.
​**Posters up outside our little cinema this morning include Tomb Raider, with Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, and Mary Magdalene ("Her Story Will Be Told"), which I found described online just now as the "Rooney Mara Jesus Movie". We are so very much of our time, aren't we? If we're speaking in movie titles - Analyse That!***
​***Since you ask, 2002 sequel to 1999's Analyse This.

Let's invent modular cars. Little one-seater roadworthy vehicles, I do mean cars and not bikes, that clip together when two - or more - friends want to share a journey. Electric, I imagine, with onboard AI to handle the docking with another modular car. For riding on intelligent roads, I imagine; roads made out of sensors and waste plastic trawled from the ocean.
​     You sit in your car, which is a cross between a mobility scooter, a Smart car or equivalent, and one of those ancient Heinkel three-wheeler one-person cars (click here to see one - the front opens, in case you're wondering), and if somebody else wants to come with you, the decision is: which side to put his car? Then, let's say, his front wheel on that side and your back wheel on that side retract as the cars dock with each other. Then you roll back your window, he does the same, then you're both front-seat drivers while the AI and the GPS do the actual work. Maybe the convention is that only one of two docked cars is powered to drive - the one on the right, say, shuts down for the journey.
​     Any more friends (family) - bolt them on behind. Give it time, and augmented reality - AR? Is that right? - can do the road signs. The sensors in the road talk to the AI whenever there's a junction coming up, and our little cars route us round any potential traffic jams. If we take some kind of Nudge* approach to speed limits and distance, all slowing down together and gradually adjusting our ideas of how far is too far, maybe we'll all end up so local that we talk to our neighbours as easily we do the staff at the reception desk today.
​*Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Yale, 2008. "Nudge Theory" advocates changing behaviour via interventions that are "easy and cheap to avoid". Example: put the junk food on a high shelf and the fruit at eye level. For speed and road safety - I think of those tiny shrines of flowers, cards and photographs that flash past occasionally on the verge, and also of those roadside signs showing the black silhouette of a motorcyclist, with a number beneath.
​     We would have to "harness the power of technology" to do this, of course, reducing our intelligence to the level of the computers we were applying to the project, but that would be okay because we could also go back to using "Space Age technology", in the sense that these cars would dock in the way that Command Modules docked with Lunar Modules - Columbia docked with Eagle on the Apollo 11 mission, for example.

More harm has been done to the world by people who think that they know what's best for the future, than by people who worry that they aren't up to the job. Discuss. I think I'm becoming an enemy of certainty. The world's unpredictable. No, you can't be sure that's how it's going to turn out. Stop pontificating. Learn humility. "Nobody knows anything," said William Goldman (Adventures in the Screen Trade, Warner Books, 1983), who did at least know that much.
​     And more, actually. It's a good book. Token television reference: I came across a Freeview channel the other night, on which they were making a great deal of fuss over the news that Lost in Space was going from black and white into colour. Pretty sure I was there when that happened first time round. I struggle to describe my feelings at this evidence of how far we've come in all those years.

Some weeks, I'm just fresh out of opinions. I like the idea of sitting down here and writing this, but nothing much has happened (that I've noticed) and my interior monologue has failed to turn up any worthwhile (no, I'll be the judge of that, thank you) insights into anything. No reflections on superhero movies, no more thoughts on last week's brief snow - nothing to distract from this still-life morning with its ice-flat shiny sea reflecting dark clouds one way and blue sky the other, with the sun kind of cramped in under the clouds and - hey, look! - Stena Line ferry easing itself slowly towards the dry dock.
​     Went to Sainsbury's last night, in Truro, and there was no milk. Gaps on the shelves. Went to Tesco at the weekend, in Falmouth, and there was very little of anything. Deliveries not back to normal after two whole days of snow, I suppose*. The usual news sources tell me that we're facing water shortages due to burst pipes and floods due to melting snow. Engineers are "working through the night" to restore power to homes cut off by, er, whatever it is about snow that kills electricity. Engineers work through the night in the way that political leaders reach agreement after all-night talks, treaties are only ever signed at the last moment** and winning athletes couldn't have done it without the support of the crowd. All part of the myth we live by.
​     Back to those engineers. The snow lasted two days. Two whole gruelling days. Imagine the state of the country if it had lasted through the weekend. [There is absolutely no way I can work in a reference to the film 30 Days of Night (2007) here, is there? No? Good film, anyway. Watch the extras.]
​     Not to get too apocalyptic on a peaceful morning with the sun now decisively shining, but is this really how the unexpected hits us? I think it's fair to say that country-wide snow really is unexpected in the UK. Every time. The weather here is famously unpredictable, and yes, it was sunny just before the snow, and again on the afternoon after Day Two Of The National Crisis. That was when I sat out in the sunshine on Prince of Wales Pier and thought: nobody in those countries that get snow predictably and handle it sensibly would believe this - that it's all vanished overnight. They can laugh at us, but how would they handle not knowing what the next day will bring?
​     Yes - genuinely unexpected. And because it's unpredictable and never hangs around, there's no point in spending money on being prepared for it. Which suggests to me that country-wide snow in the UK gives us a good indication of how something truly unpredictable would hit any equivalent*** nation. Not snow, necessarily, but anything unexpected (like, say, a strike of fuel-tanker drivers - another British first). Supermarket shelves empty after two days, engineers losing sleep, talks continuing through the night to find a solution. Given the fragility of our socio-economic whatchamacallit, structures, civilisation, arrangements for keeping everything going, you really don't need zombies to stage an apocalypse these days. Just a glitch in the supply chain.
​     The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the title of a 1797-1798 etching by Francisco Goya. It's satirical, according to something I read, and apparently a self-portrait; Goya had interesting dreams. The Slow News Day of Reason is the title of a 2018 blog post by William Essex, and it seems to have taken us from a nothing-happening sunny morning to a zombie-free apocalypse in five, now six, paragraphs. Maybe on my next trip to a supermarket I'll get a really big trolley and work myself up to some panic buying.
​     We're all doomed. Again.
​     I feel much better now, thank you.
​* "Just-in-time (JIT) is an inventory strategy companies employ to increase efficiency and decrease waste by receiving goods only as they are needed in the production process, thereby reducing inventory costs. This method requires producers to forecast demand accurately." So says Investopedia. I remember JIT coming in. Books were written. There were gurus. Nobody mentioned snow.
​** Although the fashion these days is to sign them after the last moment - the US government actually does shut down before a budget deal is reached, for example.
​*** I nearly put "civilised". Then I thought about "western", but got hung up on W or w. Then I thought: what I'm trying to say is "equivalent". So I put "equivalent".
​And finally ... not that I got distracted or anything, but I find that the antique question "Do you want to come up and see my etchings?" has been superseded by the invitation to "watch Netflix, and chill". Okay. I have noticed recently that people talk about what they've seen on Netflix in the way that they used to talk about what they'd seen on TV. But I don't think "Do you want to come up and watch my television?" ever took off. "Come up" implies apartment-dwelling, above the ground floor. Above the art-supplies shop, perhaps. [This is probably my moment to mention Bloodhound Gang's 1999 single Bad Touch. Everybody was watching X Files back then, chilled or not.] 

I've noticed something about this weekly blog. Finally. After all this time. Whenever I decide that what the world needs now is a further dose of what I think about Brexit, Trump, the NHS or politics generally - whenever I decide that and write accordingly, the number of "unique visitors" to the site goes down dramatically. Ordinary visitors stay away as well, I guess, although there isn't a count for them*. But when I say something about a film, or box set, or other screen-based entertainment, my unique visitors all come back again. Dramatically, yes, because they're like that - or that's how I visualise them.
​     How do they know? Is it the title? No - wait. Before I say anything else: I am in the middle of bingeing on the two-season box set of Afterlife (2005/2006; I mean the one starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln), which was axed apparently because Britain's Got Talent was getting more viewers (thanks, Digital Spy). I'm one disc (two episodes) away from the end, and when I finish, I'm thinking of tracking down the first season of Medium (2005/2011, starring Patricia Arquette and Jake Weber), which ran all the way to its natural conclusion without being cancelled.
​     Thinking of watching Medium for the comparison: the two series started in the same year and tackled roughly the same subject. One's a US drama; the other's British. I like Andrew Lincoln's character's houseboat, but I think I'd want to live in the Medium house - but not the neighbourhood (predictable weather). Perhaps the house could be transferred, flat by flat, prop by prop, to the UK? Like that bridge was taken from London to a US desert, is that right? Anyway - maybe I could get a few paragraphs out of the comparison. Fictional ghosts in the US behave a lot better than their UK counterparts.
​     Oh, and yeah. I was saying something about unique visitors. Websites and how people somehow instinctively know to stay away from a post about Brexit. Something about that. But more importantly, I have been watching television. Promise. Came home last night, flicked it on to see Michael Douglas say, "I'm the bad guy?" (Falling Down, 1993, Robert Duvall's in it too), flicked over to Newsnight - no, wait. Don't go. Gladiator (2000) was on, and a thing in which a group of remarkably attractive young Americans were tracking down a murderer**. That lasted me through till bedtime. No news at all. Promise. No, really.
     Okay - I'll go to the cinema again.
​*Of course I know what unique visitors are. Sort of. I'm trying to be funny.
​**Medium was on, too. They all looked a little older, so no doubt it was a later series than I remember, but doesn't it strike you as odd, sometimes, this peculiar immortality of TV characters? With their clunky old mobiles and black-and-white complexions? Long time since I first saw Jonathan Harris arguing with Billy Mumy on that distant planet, and even Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) (1969) are still bickering.

To go on this interminably about Brexit is to express a faith in the government's ability to achieve a right result, one way or the other. To believe that Remain/Leave will deliver a definitively better future than the alternative, is to forget, first, that we're living unpredictable lives, at the mercy of events, and secondly, that the government is implemented by career civil servants, with an unavoidable bias towards the status quo, at the direction of pragmatic idealists whose first instinct is to resort to soundbites rather than evidence.
​     Nothing is definitively right or wrong. It's all a step towards whatever happens next. Negotiations on big international treaties and issues are invariably reported as processes towards a form of words that everybody can sign, rather than processes towards a solution. Everything is a can to be kicked down the road. Europe isn't going away, and nor are we.

Friday, 2nd May, a footnote to make up for yet another Brexit rant. Yesterday and the day before, Falmouth (the UK original) ground to a halt after a few inches of snow. No traffic, most shops closed, students using surfboards as toboggans. The TV news filled up with reports from young journalists in remote places talking about sheep and stranded motorists needing to be rescued. A&E staff were reported to be bedding down in their hospitals; farmers were interviewed about using their 4x4s to bring food to pensioners. People smiled at each other as they crunched past on the street.
​     Globalisation has given us embarrassment about the national tendency to get excited about the weather. There are countries that get more snow, for longer, that manage perfectly well. We must look ridiculous, goes the conversation, as we try to scrape together enough snow for a snowman from around the abandoned cars. But it's not the snow that's exciting; it's the unpredictability. Went to bed last night to a snow scene; peaceful, quiet. Woke up this morning (having been woken up several times in the night) to find the snow more or less gone, temperature above freezing, and the forecast storm, Storm Emma, living up to its designation for once.
​     It's very windy. So windy, in fact, that you could almost put money on tomorrow being a flat-calm day, possibly thick fog but more likely a warm sun in a clear blue sky. Or maybe snow again. That's what's exhilarating. Must get some wood for my lovely little Anevay stove - tea party on the beach tomorrow.

Non-apologies are back in fashion. There was one this morning, repeated perhaps six times in the space of a short interview. Several the other day. And several more, a little before that, in the furore over the gender pay gap. We're very sorry, apparently, that woman feel that way - "we" being company bosses who are paying women less than they're paying men.
​     Non-apologies are obvious, but I wish they could be challenged more. Where the apology would be, for example, "I'm sorry I punched you on the nose," the non-apology is, "I'm sorry you have bruising on your face." Notice the distastefully careful avoidance of any admission of liability. Of course, we're all madly sorry that women are so upset about being paid less, blah blah, but we neither admit nor feel liability, and while we're on the subject, perhaps we could mansplain yet again, in our patronising voice, the various ways in which the systems we've set up don't allow us to ... out of our hands, you see ... so we're sorry you feel that way. Ma'am.
​     It's not just the calculated evasiveness, which in my opinion amounts to premeditated dishonesty (although tax evasion isn't illegal, so I suppose equating any form of evasion with "dishonesty" is a bit harsh), but the, not sure how to put this, moral flabbiness, lack of respect for the other, self-centredness, legalistic persnicketiness; yes, that's it, the legalistic persnicketiness that gets to me. Take that, spellcheck!
​     And as I say, the failure to challenge. Costs have been cut, and these days, even the most investigative reporting amounts to, "Now I'm going to interview my fellow journalist about this story," but when there is somebody in the studio, and you're determined to interrogate them about the past rather than let them get onto whatever agenda they're pushing today, surely you could break from your prepared list of versions of the same question to ask, "Does that mean you're apologising for what you did?"
​     Or maybe just say, on behalf of the entire audience, "We know what you're doing." In that sneery voice that goes so well with the phrase. Because we all do, don't we?

​While I'm on the subject, there was a piece in yesterday's (Monday's) Financial Times suggesting that companies might be holding back their pay data until immediately before the deadline for disclosure (4th April) in the hope that they might be overlooked in the last-minute indignation-frenzy. Towards the end of the piece, the possibility was raised that some companies don't understand the reasons for their gender pay gap.
​     And by extension, the reasons why they pay anybody whatever they get? It hadn't occurred to me until now, not clearly at least, but there's an assumption in this gender-pay thing that companies at least know what they're doing. That rightly or wrongly, they have arrived at a set of criteria whereby they decide an individual's (or a job's) rate of pay. Oh, silly me. They haven't a clue, have they?

We condemn each other online, and call it “virtue signalling”.
     Virtue?
    We’re like self-appointed prosecutors, loudly getting ahead of the judgement in a show trial. The more emphatically we condemn, the more we believe we’re telegraphing our best qualities.
     We compete to throw the first stone. Somehow, we manage to believe that our stone-throwing gets us in with the compassionate crowd.
     How did democratic, live-and-let-live, laissez-faire liberalism turn into such a rigid orthodoxy?
     When did being a nice, fluffy, kind person become so hard-line compulsory?
     I almost hesitate to write this, but somebody should call up a certain disgraced film producer just to check that he’s okay.
     Virtue is elusive. It requires courage. I suspect that it can’t be found in crowds. I suspect that it can’t be found in following. It’s a thing of the soul and presents a question every time we act or react. If we answer that question wrongly, that wrongness is at least as much our own as anybody else’s. We may transgress in the public domain, and there may be a penalty, but the real work is in our understanding.
     And perhaps we come by stages to knowing that. Perhaps we learn something valuable by making the journey from one answer to another. There’s a moving passage in Lauren St John’s Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm (Hamish Hamilton, 2007) in which she describes the process of realising that the propaganda of her childhood was a wrong answer. I remember thinking as I read it that there’s something of that journey in all our lives – although perhaps not quite so much of it as Lauren St John faced.
     Perhaps we’re all wrong, to some degree, and working towards right. Perhaps, when we arrive at (or start from) an apparent certainty, we should at least hesitate to use it as a weapon.
​     Even if that's as far as our humility goes.​

Yes, and there’s “The Profumo Scandal” of the early sixties, in which the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s government, John Profumo, lied to parliament about his affair with Christine Keeler (who was also involved with a Russian military attache) and was forced to resign. That almost has a contemporary ring, and having just read about the circumstances of their meeting, and their early relationship, I wonder what Facebook would have made of it.
​     Profumo went on to be awarded the CBE for his charitable work, in 1975, and Wikipedia tells me that Margaret Thatcher once described him (in the charitable phase of his life) as a “national hero”. He was present at her birthday party in 2005, apparently. “There are no second acts in American lives,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald, and these days, it seems that there are no second acts in any lives, particularly those that have been trashed online.
​     Profumo’s disgrace led to a second (British) life, and a fulfilling, useful one at that. All the condemnation, all the rabid monstering, need not be the end. What you survive, and then rise above, finding your own uniquely chastened wisdom on the way, makes you stronger.
​     The curtain can come up again, and won’t we be missing something if we’ve already turned away.

Unequal pay for equivalent work is an outrage. It's not even a gender issue. It's simply wrong. Not fair. If the excuse is some variant on "the system made me do it," the system is wrong and needs changing. If it's a version of "I was only following orders," well, we've heard that before. Cost-cutting, or cost control, or indeed austerity; not one of them justifies breaking the law.
​     Employees are people. Some of them assert themselves more than others - or whatever set of clichés you care to muster. But it's not the job of the employer to get into that kind of sophistry. Once an employee is employed, it's the employer's job to hand out the work, and pay for it fairly once it's done. Explanations for pay inequality, however reasonable they might sound, never amount to more than arguments for disregarding or setting aside or removing whatever obstacle is apparently standing in the way of compliance with the law.
​     I don't consider myself a feminist*. I think life is unfair on all of us, if we choose to look at it that way, but I also think life distributes advantages to each one of us. Not necessarily equally, but that doesn't mean we can't treat each other as equals. I don't consider myself a feminist, but I've surprised myself by getting really, really angry over the latest developments in the equal-pay row at a certain well-known broadcaster - and now, elsewhere as well. This issue is gaining momentum. Unequal pay is just not fair.

​*Not sure that I remember this correctly (corrections welcome). When Malcolm X was asked why white people couldn't join the Black Power movement in the sixties, he replied that coffee was stronger without milk. His larger point was that some allegiances have to be lived to be truly shared. They have to be felt, and sympathising isn't the same as belonging. Fairness, or the lack of it, can be felt. That said, I'm not the masculine equivalent of "feminist" either, there isn't a word for it, because I also have feelings about felt allegiances that divide us. We're people. We should work together. As equals, for equal pay. And if you're still reading after the picture, we come to the further complication that gender is fluid anyway.

Interested to find that the Representation of the People Act 1918 only gave the vote to women over 30 who were occupiers of property or married to occupiers of property ("married", back then, meant married to a man). Surprised to find that the Representation of the People Act 1918 also gave the vote to men over 21 who were not property owners - before 1918, men had to own property to be eligible to vote. The Act gave the vote to 8.4 million women and an additional 5.6 million men (figures from Wikipedia).
​     Before 1918, the situation wasn't that men could vote and women couldn't. Wealthy men could vote, but nobody else could. We might use the term "ruling class" here. I came across this, too. In 1864, Lord Palmerston wrote: "​I deny that every sane and not qualified man has a moral right to vote. What every man and woman too have a right to, is to be well governed and under just laws." Gee, thanks. Palmerston was Prime Minister when he wrote that.
​     Also stumbled across a reference to the Military Service Act 1916, whereby every man from 16 to 41 was "deemed to have enlisted" in the armed forces and so could be carted off to the trenches. Huh! Lots of men not eligible to vote got caught by that one, I guess. With that in mind, I was relieved to discover that there's a consultation due (already under way in Scotland) on reform to the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The idea behind the consultation seems to be that a new Act would "de-medicalise" gender transitions; not sure where I found the term but the point is that you wouldn't have to prove that you've changed.
​     Stonewall proposes an Act that "requires no medical diagnosis or presentation of evidence for trans people to get their identity legally recognised". That's a distinct and bigger issue than me going on about gender-specific legislation, but it does remind me of that enclosure at the Glastonbury Festival a while back, that was restricted to people who "self-identified as women". There's a serious point here as well as a frivolous one, in that we'd get rid of a lot of issues if we could all just self-identify as whichever gender worked in the circumstances.
     Military Service Act? Not me!
     Women and children first? That's me!
​     You're paying how much to men? I'll take it.
​     Men-only dinner? I'll get my party frock.
​     Or maybe not that last one. But wouldn't the world be different, if we could just limit gender to the very few situations in which it really is, ah, worth exploring? And in the rest - stop hurting and bullying each other.
​     If you're still reading after this picture, spoiler alert, we change the subject.

It says a lot about today's England that we're even arguing about driving a double-carriageway road through a tunnel under Stonehenge, and building a flyover above the nearest roundabout (a broad summary of the proposal based on a search online). Yes, there's a lot of traffic. But also - yes, there's a lot of archaeology around that site that we've yet to dig up. Think of the generations of ancient people who, I don't know, came by to watch the sun rise. What artefacts (translation: litter, stone picnic cutlery, etc.) did they leave behind?
​     There is a parallel universe in which it wouldn't even occur to us to turn up with plant-hire bulldozers and earthmovers and Portakabin site offices and men in hi-vis jackets and plastic helmets, to start wrecking the place in the name of efficient traffic flow. There wouldn't be a PR agency hired (I'm guessing one has been) to put our releases assuring the media that not damaging Stonehenge is the highest priority of, I don't know, the mysterious entity being paid vast sums by the government to [judging by recent events] go bust half-way through the project leaving a big pension deficit. Nor would campaigners actually have to make the case for not churning up the World Heritage site.
​     In today's England, it doesn't occur to us that we just shouldn't be there. Leave it alone. Is it a calculator or an algorithm that you use to work out the exact minimum tolerance for how close a bulldozer can be driven to the stones without shaking them down?
​     The cinematic reference here might as well be Tobe Hooper's 1982 original Poltergeist, in which (here comes the spoiler) Craig T Nelson grabs the developer warmly by the lapels and says, "You left the bodies, didn't you? You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones. Why? Why?" Maybe the local cinemas should all be playing that when work starts.
​     Although I'm sure it says something about something that when I went online to check the quote, most of the YouTube clips I was offered were titled "Everything wrong with..." Poltergeist and a string of other movies "...in fifteen minutes." Tempted to ask: what's wrong with this picture?  

Thinking about the past, the present and the fog outside. The barometer tells me it's a clear day - at this time of the early morning, the sun symbol denotes a clear sky with stars - but nobody has told nature. It's chilly out, real close-the-door-again-quickly weather, but no stars. Woke up, and in a circuitous way, came round to thinking about my old friend, colleague and mentor David Phillips, who wrote a novel back a long time ago called The Right Honourable Chimpanzee (Secker & Warburg, 1978). David wrote the book in collaboration with his friend the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, and it was published under the pseudonym David St George.
​     That seems like a lifetime ago, actually. The Right Honourable Chimpanzee came before, for example, Michael Dobbs' House of Cards (Collins, 1989) and, let's see now, Chris Mullin's A Very British Coup (Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), and let's also remember - or perhaps let's not. Lots of politicians, former spies, media types and allied trades have written novels, some more successfully than others. Lots of them have fictionalised politics, espionage, their own working lives, and some of them have succeeded in making that kind of work sound worthwhile and full of purpose. The Right Honourable Chimpanzee takes a different tack.
​     As a breed, and as no doubt you'll agree, politicians are fine, upstanding, intelligent people, full of good intentions, driven by a desire to better the world, stuffed to the gills with whatever President George H W Bush (the first Bush) was talking about when he referred to "the vision thing" (in the run-up to his successful 1988 campaign for the presidency). But what if they weren't and that was just me checking that you're still awake? What if politics was a rough game in which just about anybody could achieve high office if they had the right backing and/or drive? Just imagine.
​     The Right Honourable Chimpanzee tells the story of a successful conspiracy to get a chimpanzee elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It's fiction. No, really. Assume a liberal (small l) application of appearance-altering cosmetics and a lot of time spent on voice coaching, training, et cetera, and not too many chapters into the book, you have a new Prime Minister (and one deserving of capital letters, it seems to me). From that point on, the issue is not that the Prime Minister is a chimpanzee, but that this chimpanzee happens to be Prime Minister. What the chimp says, goes. What the chimp's handlers say...
​     Can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something almost contemporary about that premise. The Right Honourable Chimpanzee is a very funny book, but in the satire, there's a serious point. David Phillips went on to write one other novel, The Removal Men (Duckworth, 1990), which is also oddly topical (a comedy about offshore tax avoidance), and there's also Conversations in the Garden of Shizen (O Books, 2002), which is subtitled Jesus of the Gospels, Women, Sex and the Family. But I come back to that sad, baffled leader, and his backers. More prescient than most, was our David.

On the side of the bus this morning, I saw the legend, “Connecting communities in Cornwall since 1929”. I think “legend” is the right word. Not “slogan,” for example. The bus was still a bus, but I did feel just a slight positive something-or-other of an emotion at the vision of this fine band of bus drivers working through the generations to keep us together.
     Here’s another bus. “A monumental cinematic achievement.” Oh, wait. Not the bus but an ad for that film in which Gary Oldman gives us his Hamlet – no, sorry, his Churchill. He’s due an Oscar, anyway, and maybe this time, this role, et cetera. Lots of make-up. Seen clips; very convincing (although, never saw Churchill). If you read the critics I read, you’ll know it as the film with the made-up scene in it in which Churchill goes on the tube and everybody supports him. Really? There’s an F-word that’s generally applied to news, ending in -ake. What kind of history is this?
     I’ll skip that one, I think, although I might see STREEP HANKS, as the poster seems to call it, although the film’s title is The Post. Katharine Graham wrote an autobiography (Personal History, Knopf, 1997), and if I could find my fat paperback copy, I’d quote from it. The film tells the story (I don’t know; should I say “a” story?) of The Pentagon Papers, which came before Watergate. “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes,” as Mark Twain perhaps didn’t say, and following on from the Nixon-era leaks, now we have the Wikileaks thing and The Panama Papers.
     Not to mention the bus drivers holding us together. This is some wild kind of free verse, although it does “rhyme” in the sense that not only … Pentagon … Panama … but also a lot happened for the USA after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus in December 1955. Get a haiku out of that lot. I wonder if they’ll be making a film about The Panama Papers in however many years’ time.
     If so, I wonder if my descendant(s) will go see the film just for the laptops and all the rest of the fondly remembered ancient “new technology” (and shots of the buses). I’m off to see STREEP HANKS to ogle the typewriters and the presses. Oh, and in the clip I saw, those leaked papers from the Pentagon were parcelled up in an actual, physical box. With string tied around it. Actual papers. Such nostalgia. I do so miss the days when writing, publishing, printing, doing anything actually, meant more than just “click here”.

 ​Last word on the inappropriate-advances thing. Not the deliberate misbehaviour, abuse of position and grotesque criminality that got the media started on the story, but the legal-albeit-clumsy (and yes, okay, annoying and inconvenient) advances that Catherine Deneuve meant to defend in her now-controversial signing of that open letter in Le Monde*.
     Of course it became controversial. That’s how the media operates (so much for plurality). Deneuve apologises to victims upset by the letter; stands by her signature. But none of that furore gets us to the point I want to make. The open letter defends non-abusive and non-criminal interactions between willing or at least tolerant parties (I apologise for my abbreviated summary), and in doing so, and here’s my point, incidentally paints a picture of how such interactions are commonly initiated and managed between adults. A picture that makes me wonder how we survive as a species from one generation to the next.
     We’re clearly good at this, or Malthus** wouldn’t be so easy to find via the in-built search engine on my new laptop. However prudish we are, or exasperated with each other, or clumsy, or unwilling to countenance nudity on screen before the 9pm watershed (a UK-specific reference, now archaic); however much we might prefer to believe that twenty/thirtysomething adults in rom-coms – Americans - can get all the way to the lying-beside-each-other, out-of-breath stage of even the most <wow!> sex scene (not shown, dammit) without removing their underwear – however, all of that, I’m losing my grip on the structure of this sentence – however, despite, notwithstanding all of that, we can still make babies.
     And that seems the unlikeliest outcome of all. We’re rational-ish beings with a grievance against each other. And yet we can still reproduce. The abuse, and the anger, seem real to me. Okay, are real. And yet, we still...
     This was my opinion back in November 2017: to be happy about what we're doing, we need to get rid of ambiguity and communicate clearly what we would and wouldn’t welcome by way of an advance. But after I had posted that, I thought: AI.
     If we were to start again...
     If we were to remove everything from the human reproductive process (got to call it something) that was unsatisfactory, irrational, or in any other way, not needed on this particular voyage...
     If we took it all away, and left ourselves only with the machine-like knowledge that survival of the species required us to (excuse me) bring this wriggly thing with a tail into contact with that relatively big round thing…
     If we built the whole process again, on rational principles, in such a way that the resulting instruction manual could not conceivably (sic) offend anybody, even today – if we did all that, we would absolutely not end up reinventing what we have now.
     We’d end up with something like my mobile phone. I put my fingertip on “Power off”, and it asks me to confirm that I really mean it. I don’t have a digital assistant, but I imagine the conversations that we don’t see in the TV ads: turn the lights off/confirm you want the lights off/yes I want the lights off/I am turning the lights off. Imagine two of the so-called “sex robots” that one comes across in stories along the wilder shores of innovation; imagine that two such robots went so far past the singularity that they became interested in each other. Imagine the exchanges: confirm that you want me to…/yes I want you to.../I am about to/Yes! Don't stop!/confirm that you don't want me to stop.../Yes! I mean - No!
     And off go the lights. Even they wouldn't get it quite right.
     Sometimes, I wonder whether the entire AI industry isn't just one big displacement activity. Yes, AI's useful, handily diagnostic for all the measuring we do, but.
     Those are the times that I wonder what it means to be a self-aware animal. There's a kind of singularity needed for humans, too - we're not rational, but we can negotiate with our impulses and our drives. We're self-aware but also instinctive. We may have "better angels" in our natures, in Stephen Pinker's phrase, but there's nothing "worse" about what else is there. It's just there.
     Who are we really? How can we be what we are, happily? After the anger, maybe that's the conversation that we need to have.

*To insert one link here would be to deny you the chance to sample the wide range of media comment available on this story. In English. No, I don't. They’re all saying more or less the same thing, but even so.
** This time, a link. Of the available summaries of The Malthusian Theory Of Population, as expounded in Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, J. Johnson), I like this one.

Some days, it's just a matter of turning on the machine and starting to write. And, perhaps, opening the shutters. The sky's a deep blue, this early in the morning, and those are the lights along the "scenic route" that goes around the point. No noise, except - now that I'm listening - one, possibly two distant birds. Some silences have substance. My new laptop has interrupted me twice since I started this paragraph: once, to tell me how to alter the background on my desktop, which I've done already; once to tell me that my virus thing has saved me from 250 threats since I turned on the machine.
​     It is indeed a dangerous world. This was the week of the mudslide in high-net-worth California. There are people trapped in European ski resorts by too much snow. Record low temperatures in this country, and I think I saw a report of snow in the Sahara Desert. The NHS went into crisis, cancelling planned operations, and it occurred to me to wonder why the solution demanded is always money. Not that re-organisation, or "reform", seems a particularly good idea either. We have "Save the NHS" campaigns, rather than "Save health care", so I suppose we want the large unwieldy corporation rather than doctors we can call in like we might call in plumbers, but aren't there just too many of us?
​     And is there any money, anyway? Isn't the big secret that nothing works any more? Asking for money is assuming that there's somebody sat up there with a fat wallet. Some kind of deus ex machina teacher/parent figure; a secular deity. Even the weather's gone hinky again - and now my laptop wants me to know that "hinky" isn't a word. You're not getting into the spirit of this, laptop. The BBC was revealed last Summer to pay its women less than its men for equivalent jobs, and when the subject came up again recently, the BBC defended itself: it had commissioned independent reports that conclude: the BBC's pay gap isn't "systemic". Women are getting less money than men, still, but it's not "systemic gender discrimination". That's okay, then.
​     Still silent outside - no, there's a car passing in the distance. Somebody's awake. I remember Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962, Houghton Mifflin), and I wonder how differently she'd write it today, given that the threat to nature is just us, rather than specifically the agri-chemical industries. The sky has taken on a pleasant pink-ish tint, more healthy than embarrassed, and maybe the time has come for me to go look up that old story about the seven plagues of Egypt. I wonder if they ever had snow.

Haven't found the reference, yet, but I'm sure it's in the book Those Who Trespass Against Us by (the?) Countess Karolina Lanckoronska (published in a translation by Noel Clark by Pimlico in 2005), which I read years ago and have found again. The book is subtitled  One woman's war against the Nazis, which is a sufficient description for today's purpose.
     Lankoronska, Austrian, was active in the Polish resistance, ending the war in Ravensbruck concentration camp, and was observant. I'm looking for a passage in which she describes one or more meetings with a senior figure in the church (if I could find it, I'd be more specific), to discuss the clergy's response to what was happening around them. Some were weak, some weren't. Some left, some didn't.
​     In particular, I'm looking for a reference to a group of young priests, who went down to the main railway station and forced their way onto the trucks taking frightened Jews to what was then an unknown destination. To be with them in the trucks, to be with them and to give comfort, no matter what.