Posting today to keep up my record of posting (at least) once a week for quite a long time. Nothing to say. The year ended; the year began. Fireworks. Headache.
 
Now, if I was John Wyndham, a morning like this would spark the idea for something like The Day of the Triffids (1951). Lights in the sky, and then something more than the average hangover.
 
Wyndham also wrote Chocky (1968), which developed the idea that a child’s imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary at all. Not in a scary way, if I remember rightly (long time ago), but to raise the question: what if aliens aren’t physical creatures like we are, driving physical spaceships like we would drive if we had the know-how?
 
I remember Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968), and somewhere off a different chart, the Outsider author Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) - we’d have emotions, and not recognise them as aliens. No wonder I, ah, didn’t pass all of my exams that year.
 
But I educated myself. Facebook’s full of cute little memes about reading a lot, and if that’s what matters, then my teenage self was the most educated person on the planet at the time.
 
I still have an aversion to King Lear (due to an administrative error, we “did” King Lear twice, rather than switching to the alternative text in the second year; none of us questioned the repetition), but I can still remember a lot about Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius. And his various alternative egos - ugh! The scenes in that cave.

Herman Hesse.
 
The sky’s taken on a very, very slightly pink-ish tint; it was pretty much duck-egg blue a moment ago - but we don’t need a new-year reminiscence about my painting of Airfix models.
 
If the colour charts for those models were accurate, then a lot of effort must have been expended by the air forces of World War II, in sourcing duck-egg blue paint for the undersides of their aircraft.
 
Duck-egg blue was as rare in model shops as getting Peter Shilton in the football coins. And weren’t there coins about flight, as well? Finishing up with the moon landing? I wonder how many of the mechanics working on those historic aircraft thought to bother with duck-egg blue.
 
Who had the idea of painting aircraft-undersides blue anyway?
 
Who first had the idea for anything we do?
 
Who first said: “Before you eat your meat, let’s cook it on the fire and see if that improves the taste?”
 
Who said: “Let’s collect together all this wheat, crush it up, add water and yeast, knead it for a while, then bake it in the - quick, somebody invent ovens - oven, because it might be worth eating while we’re waiting for somebody to pull the meat off the fire?”
  
“And look what’s happened to this old milk. Perhaps you’d like to spread it on your baked wheat?”
 
So silent, earlier. No triffids, but no people, either. The students have all migrated to sunnier climes, so the parking spaces are easier to find. This is the interval between years: the clocks tick more slowly; there’s no politics.
 
Must find a fresh battery for that clock. Before Monday, when the world begins again.

Not to overdo the gloom, but isn’t global warming pretty much self-correcting?

We’re part of nature, so the proof that climate change is happening – if we still need proof – is that we’re adapting at an instinctive level. Birth rates are falling, et cetera. It’s in our nature to, for want of a better expression, get out of the way.

I got caught in a traffic jam on the way to the recycling centre.

In the back of the car, glass and plastic bottles, cans, cardboard, paper.

Around me, cars.

Underneath all of us, tarmac. A wide, flat road laid down on fertile earth, connecting us to the great network of tarmac surfaces laid down on so much of the fertile earth.

On either side of us, shops. Glass windows showing us – on that stretch of road – skiing and outdoor gear, furniture, bedroom suites, a showroom full of electric bicycles.

And underneath it all, more of the fertile earth.

There is, in Falmouth, a building called The View. It’s a block of student flats. It stands between an older row of terraced cottages and any sight of the sea. Its own view has been similarly obscured.

I thought of The View, and then I thought of the millions of acres of tarmac and buildings, car parks, offices, blocks of flats and housing developments, that we’ve laid down on the flood plains and the fertile earth.

Then I thought about the traffic jam around me. My idea of “too much traffic” is enough cars to slow me down on stretches of road where I should be able to burn up fuel and go fast. It’s not the existence of traffic, full stop.

The road network’s a recent thing. The first motorway in the world opened in 1929, in Italy, and then came a German autobahn at some unspecified (by Wikipedia) date in the 1930s. The M1 in England opened in 1959.

The Wikipedia page Evolution of motorway construction in European nations shows far more dramatic rises than anything about global temperature.

If you seek our monument, look around you. We’ve tanked the landscape with non-porous tarmac.

[For those of us without experience of damp cellars, “tanking refers to the application of a waterproof coating, effectively making the walls permanently watertight.” Cut down from the definition on permagard.co.uk’s advice page. Thanks.]

When I got home, I looked up “global birth rate” on Google. Pew Research Centre’s FactTank tells me: “For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates.”

But are we preventing ourselves quickly enough? Will climate change get there first? Maybe our instincts will give us more arguments, relationship break-ups, disagreements?

Ironic, I’d say, if the argumentative angels of our nature goaded us to salvation.

Most of the mud thrown at me during the election campaign was intended to hit Boris Johnson. He was variously, flamboyantly wrong on so many levels, I was told, mainly via Facebook.

Never mind Freddie Starr eating anybody’s hamster; Boris Johnson was apparently munching his way through the entire pet shop.

Most of this drivel came in the form of headlines shared from real and unreal news sources, often based on unsubstantiated “research” or revealed by “a major survey” of which no details were given. None of it was convincing; you had to want to believe.

Once, the online “newspaper” was so clearly faked up for the occasion that it carried only one story, alongside a sidebar that read “In this sidebar, you can add text…” et cetera.

I suppose there was some appeal to confirmation bias, or maybe it was just plain stupidity that accounted for the relentless oversharing. I live in a Labour council ward, on a street in which every window instructed me to vote Labour, so I suppose the idea must have been to preach to the converted. Not to convince anybody else.

They were, now I come to think of it with hindsight, throwing their trash at the core vote.

Perhaps in Conservative areas, the clumsy fakery was directed at Jeremy Corbyn. I don’t know. Maybe. But.

I did quietly laugh at a friend’s blog post in which she claimed that “According to First Draft who analysed the ads used by all parties in the first four days of December, Tory Facebook ads were 88% misleading, against Labour’s 0%.”

No disrespect to First Draft and never mind the advertising*; I know what was being thrown at me via Facebook.

No, I’m not making a political point; yes, I’m sure the other side are just as bad; now, can we get on?

About half-way through the campaign, I spoke to an official Labour person (who happens to be a friend) about all the mendacious, vindictive, not-even-half-true [expletive deleted] that was coming my way. Private conversation. “It’s hurting us,” was the response.

And I think that’s the take-away for me. Fake news reveals the character of the faker. It traduces its own side of the argument. To do anything else – indeed, to be effective at all – it has to be more than thrown-together nonsense.

And it never is. Even in a big-time serious even-the-Russians-must-be-watching global-headline event like a British general election, the fake news is done so badly that it doesn’t work.

I find that reassuring.

*Except – maybe Facebook advertising does work? Worrying thought.

Just briefly. In the post-election Weekend FT, there was some worthwhile analysis and commentary in the main paper.

In the separate Life & Arts section, there was a front-page story about the trend towards creating “virtual celebrities” – people who don’t exist, who express views, endorse products, attract followers.

A company named A-fun Interactive has a “soul-extractor” room in which the likenesses of real people are taken for the construction of their avatars.

Very amusing.

There are avatars of real people operating independently - avatars of real people who have passed through that room - and also there are “virtual celebrities” who don’t exist anywhere at all. These truly virtual celebrities are likenesses of nothing - likenesses of the void.

They express views. They endorse products. They don't exist.

Having written several pieces recently about fake news, for example above the picture, I don’t know how to take this.

Perhaps our lives, like the print editions of newspapers, are separated into sections.

In the politics section, we’re bothered by fake news. In the culture section, we’re excited by the building of totally fake people.

Perhaps next time, in five years or however long, politicians’ avatars will tour the constituencies denouncing the other side’s use of fake news.

While their souls stay at home.

Pleasant to be writing this with the result still two days away. With the future – which will seem so inevitable once hindsight kicks in – still unknown.

A letter came from the Prime Minister this morning. A man named Johnson. For all I know, he’ll still be Prime Minister when you read this.

An actual letter. Clever man. He must have guessed that I would eventually “snooze” the entire population of Facebook in my ongoing effort to mute the politics. I couldn’t tell you what he said, because I shredded his letter as soon as I realised what it was, but I did pick up the gist. He and I want the same things, he told me. Hah!

The envelope was a muted yellow, with a window in it. Sender’s address on the flap was “CCHQ”, which I didn’t recognise – surely they were always at Central Office and that was always in Smith Square? I tore it open.

CCHQ? GCHQ? Time to grab the go-bag and run? Oh, no, wait a second. Politics. “Dear William Essex,” wrote the Prime Minister. That, in itself, was a refreshing change from “Dear WILLIAMESSEX” or “Dear MISTERWILLIAM” or “Dear (f)name,” but I suppose the politicians hire only the best tech people.

The man wanted something. There were pictures. At lunchtime I wandered down to the sandwich shop, where the staff were wearing red Christmas hats and the music was asking “Do they know it’s Christmas?” Thought of suggesting that “Won’t get fooled again” would be even more seasonal, but I’m already an old guy in a crumpled overcoat sitting at their corner table – don’t want to worry them any further.

It’s cold despite the sunshine and I’ve just put on the heating to take the edge off. [The rest of this paragraph was added later, causing a continuity error regarding the weather. Never mind.] It's grey outside. Drizzly rain. Sea merged into sky.

To take the other edge off, I’ve just made myself a large mug of tea and some toast and black-cherry jam. Comfort eating, I suppose. Yes, thank you, I have a book to read, and a sofa.

Work to do as well, but procrastination is a fine art for a Winter’s afternoon. The light is fading. Still a week at least until the shortest day.

Outside, the wind howls [see above re continuity] and the political battle rages for a few more days [hours]. In here, I just have to remember to keep the TV and radio off.

It’ll be over by Christmas, I suppose.

By Friday lunchtime, the winner will be making good on his (her?) promises to solve all our problems within hours, days, weeks of victory, and the rest of us can get on with the important work of being here – working, resting, playing, volunteering, socialising, opening the curtains in the mornings, turning on the lights in the evenings (so far, not a single - edit: so far, only one - canvasser has caught me in), turning on the radio and then off again quickly, and waiting for the world to end.

Politics needs problems more than it needs solutions, doesn’t it? Politics needs us all worried enough to vote.

And yet this time, sea levels really are rising and vast areas of the world really are on fire. How does it feel to be accountable for solving those problems, Prime Minister?

Let’s hold a summit and set some targets, eh? That'll work.

Would somebody kindly remind me why we have to sit at the top table in all these metaphors about international relations?

We’d be no less a country for taking a back seat while China, USA, Russia face off against each other. We wouldn’t end up head-to-head with Iran if we retreated into the Celtic fringe.

The notion of a “special relationship” with the USA is borderline ridiculous, for a start. If we were anywhere near equals, we’d have a relationship. It’s “special” because we claim a relationship beyond our means and they humour us – sorry, humor us.

Also because we speak a similar language and share a history. But today? Come on.

There was an empire and then there was a commonwealth, and – this just in – I’m told by Google that The Commonwealth of Nations still exists.

Unexpected foreign leaders do still turn out to have been educated at a well-known private boarding school down the road from here – that’s “here” in the sense of where my smart (sic, ha ha, smart) phone thinks I am, not where I am – and apparently we do still “punch above our weight” in diplomacy, which must annoy people heavier than us.

Sooner or later, the lightweight who insists on getting between the heavyweights – what’s the phrase? – gets stomped into the ground. Pulverised with a light flick of a ballistic missile.

Tourism is the unique selling point, isn’t it? We’re a great venue. Maybe our diplomats should go back to wearing Elizabethan costume. Maybe we should stop deluding ourselves and accept our destiny as a leading player in the global, geopolitical hospitality industry.

Commenting on the 2019 General Election in the UK, Queen Gertrude of Denmark, a character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

It is thought that Queen Gertrude was referring either to the incessant social-media shouting about Jeremy’s virtues, or to the incessant social-media shouting about Boris’s flaws - although it is possible that she was just watching a televised Leadership Debate featuring Jo Swinson and/or Nicola Sturgeon.

Also in the commentary box for the 2019 General Election in the UK, Carl Von Clausewitz, author of On War (1832), wrote, “Three quarters of the factors on which a vote in this General Election is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”

This was, of course, an updating of Clausewitz’ seminal masterwork, in which the words “a vote in this general election” have replaced the words “action in war”.

Clausewitz, a polymath known for his love of jellied eels and enthusiastic if uneven playing of the tuba as well as for his weary acceptance of the inevitability of fake news (not to mention fake biographical details), was also an acute, albeit posthumous, critic of the media age.

Like Sun Tzu before him, Clausewitz pointed to the cult of personality among media interviewers. “They think themselves generals, who only observe,” as Sun Tsu didn’t write in his non-existent classic The Art of Politics – a sequel to his The Art of War (5th century BC).

Sun Tsu was friendly with the late Sir Robin Day, big-name interviewer of the Thatcher era, who titled his autobiography Grand Inquisitor (1989).

Day was one of the early exponents of the art of repeating the same question again and again; he earned his entry at brainyquote.com with the observation, “Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television.” You can buy an autographed hardback first edition of Grand Inquisitor from Lazarus Books, for £11.66 (other autobiographies by self-styled grand inquisitors are available).

This is undoubtedly the election in which we haven’t learned anything new since the election in which we learned that we must use social media to excite voters about the election. Facebook is rank with sensational headlines shared from dubious-sounding almost-newspapers.

“Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,” said the not-yet-title character Richard of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III, looking at the statistics for his Facebook page.

The tactic of launching an online “newspaper” to give spurious validity to our fake news is being comprehensively tested in this election campaign, perhaps to destruction.

Scholars have compared this use of “newspapers” in political crowd-rousing to the custom whereby any article about creative writing is illustrated with a picture of typewriter keys. Others have suggested that the use of the big-name interviewer, repeating the question and then interrupting the answer, is also a throwback to an earlier political age.

“We do it this way because– we do it– if you’ll just let me finish– we do– my point is that we–” said one eminent psephologist, discussing the parties’ tactics in the campaign so far.

There’s very little new going on this time, and even the mainstream media seem to be working by rote through a dog-eared second-hand copy of a decade-old playbook. “Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war,” said former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, conveniently, picking up a point that’s been made before.

Same with media, obviously. What do we do in an election? What did we do last time? We do that again.

It’s a shame that politicians are delivered to the studio fully media-trained, and not equipped with some terrible secret on the scale of the Watergate break-in and its aftermath. Although I suppose if they were, they’d never get to confess it.

“Welcome to The William Essex Interview. We’re joined in the studio by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

[Fade theme tune. Up lights. Camera One.]

“Your Royal Highness. Tell me exactly, what is the question?”

“To be or–”

“I’m asking about the question.”

“To be–”

“Yes, we’re not here to talk about being. This is your chance to tell the electorate exactly what is the question?”

“To–”

“Well, you’ve had your chance. We’ll move on.”

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the–”

“It’s too late now. I want to ask you about your beliefs.”

“There are more things–”

“I’m sure there are, but I’m not asking you about things. I’m asking you, what’s in heaven and earth?”

“There are more things in–”

“There you go, talking about things again. Are you avoiding the question, your Royal Highness?”

“There are more things in heaven and earth–”

“Oh, there are things there too, are there? Things everywhere, I suppose? Very materialistic. But that must be a very limiting belief system, surely – things, and nothing else, in heaven and earth?”

[Aside, whispering to an aide.] “…his quietus make with a bare bodkin…”

“Didn’t quite hear that, but I’m afraid we’re out of time. Join us next week, ladies and gentlemen, when I’ll be talking to Lady Macbeth – aargh!”

Roll credits. Fade.

One possibility is that going online makes us invisible to historians.

There is a last smattering of physical back-up copies that were printed out around 2000, by old people who forgot to press Save once and never forgot the experience, and then – thanks to the inevitable deterioration of digital storage – nothing until around 2025.

That, of course, is when we all get bored with digital surveillance and the silly promises of tech companies, and go back to typewriters and film cameras and adding machines that don’t pretend to think. But that’s a story for another day.

Nothing between 2000 and 2025 will be recorded. We’re living in a dark age. Historians will celebrate every small clue that’s discovered – a postcard from circa 2015; a scribbled shopping list; a receipt that somehow hasn’t faded.

They’ll read many, many Quick Start Guides telling them that the full instructions for their gadget may be found online, and they’ll gaze in blank confusion at reams of Warranty Information.

Those scraps will be all they have to go on, as they work out the history of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Just imagine. The British Civil War of 2016 to 2020 won’t be recorded (I’m going to print out this post and leave it lying around for a historian to find) and nor will the events described as “carnage” by the American president in his inaugural address.

The final victory of the Rebel Alliance over the Evil Empire will be lost to history, because it was only ever digitally recorded, as will the tussle between the EU and the UK that occupied so much of our waking lives in the early twenty-twenties.

There’ll be no written-down physical record of what happened as global warming reached its climax in 2022/3, way earlier than anybody’s targets, and the only clue to the pre-deluge shape of the continents will be an ancient map with “Here bee dragonnes” scratched in the bottom-left corner.

Ireland will be found and mis-identified as Atlantis. A salvaged first edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden will be read by biblical scholars for clues as to the location of the Garden of Eden – and included among the Apocrypha.

Archaeologists of the distant future will puzzle over the plastic layer in the fossil record.

Here in England, this far-flung outpost of the Roman Empire, when 2025 comes we’ll still be celebrating the results of the 2019 General Election, in which light banished darkness, good won out over evil, social-media prevailed, and we all lived happily ever after.

And laughter was general over England.

Oh, politics.

Have to admit that I’ve been getting more and more engaged with this election. To the point of expressing views on Facebook.

Sorry.

I can’t believe in either of the likely winning sides. I can’t believe that if they win, we’ll be out of the Brexit extravaganza within a year, and comfortably carbon-neutral within ten/twenty years.

I can’t believe that a set of individuals, newly (re)installed in government offices, will pull the levers of power in such a way that their intended (promised) consequences come to pass. Nor can I quite believe that one lot are saints while the other lot are, well, self-interested sinners.

But I’ve decided how I’m going to vote and it would take a lot to make me change my mind. So at some level - the level of faith, perhaps, or the level of believing more strongly in one side’s good intentions - I’m seeing a difference.

It isn’t the issues. I get that [insert issue here] is important, but I can’t see that voting for one party rather than the other is the way to fix it. The NHS, for example, may need more money, more doctors, more nurses, but I can’t believe it needs more politicians.

More interventions by politicians, I mean.

I haven’t quite reached the belief that if an issue is important, it should be taken out of politics, but I suspect that I’m getting there.

Extinction Rebellion wants a Citizens’ Assembly to address climate change - not a government, nor a political party - and the campaign for a so-called People’s Vote (second referendum) on Brexit was a campaign to take the issue away from the politicians (again).

Citizens’ Assemblies have been used to address complex and emotive issues, and they are a valid alternative to the present arrangement.

Back to the election. Despite the media, I am far more interested in the local candidates than the national leaders. There would never be any point in bothering [insert national leader] about [insert local issue], but somebody local might - yeah. Might listen. Might have the time. Might get it.

Finally, after all these years, I get an inkling of what’s meant by “representative democracy”.

Blanket coverage of the leaders gets in the way of understanding, doesn’t it? As though this is a three-way contest between Boris, Jeremy and Jo, with various familiar secondary characters capering around the fringes. It’s a TV drama, isn’t it?

I might be knocked out of my current voting intention between now and the 12th of December, but I doubt it. The media narrative gives each leader an implausibly consistent personality, while social media delivers a daily blast of intemperate ranting about Jeremy’s sweet and gentle nature.

I am interested, but it’s hard to get past the fog to anything real.

I’m sure Jeremy’s a very nice person, but do you have to shout so loud about it?

Yes, I know Boris is a pantomime villain, but I’ve known that for a while now. Could you keep it down?

Behind all that - I have a choice of four locals, familiar faces actually, none of whom have made it to my door yet (although that could be because I close all the blinds, turn off all the lights and keep very quiet in the evenings).

Turns out that this is a marginal constituency, so I expect there’ll be a knock on the door before too long.

And maybe I just will vote for the person I like best on the doorstep.

What if we are all absolutely one hundred per cent correct in our most dismal prognostications as to what happens next?

Brexit happens, and the (dis)United Kingdom dwindles into insignificance on the world stage.

Brexit doesn’t happen, and the (d)UK ends up as an insignificant little province on the outer fringe of a vast bureaucratic superstate.

Labour wins the election, and all of a sudden we’re back in the Winter of Discontent (1978-79). Rubbish piles up in the streets and even the gravediggers are on strike.

The Conservatives (younger and very much older readers: the Tories) win, and we all take our places in the queue for the food bank. NHS hospitals are taken apart brick by brick and reassembled in US cities.

That nice young woman from the Liberal Democrats becomes Prime Minister, and - never mind.

Nobody wins. The election reveals what the referendum didn’t - that we’re split fifty-fifty on everything, not just leave/remain.

Columns of tanks driven by hedge-fund managers and billionaire media-owners drive onto the lawns of Whitehall. London’s provisional government announces that the capital city will now secede from the (dis)Union. The BBC, backed by fanatical elements of the liberal intelligentsia, raises its standard at - sorry, plasters its logo all over the fronts of MediaCityUK in Salford.

Scotland unilaterally declares independence and rejoins/reaffirms its membership of the EU. The English immediately start building customs checkpoints along the Scottish border. A billionaire hedge-fund manager (who owns a newspaper) announces that he’s bought Hadrian’s Wall and will be moving it, stone by stone, to where it "should" be.

The Welsh Assembly issues a proclamation. It’s in Welsh.

European Union peacekeepers fly into Northern Ireland.

Donald Trump appeals for calm.

The Second English Civil War starts and ends. The new capital city will be Liverpool, not Oxford.

Heathrow Airport is occupied by tractor-driving English farmers, who immediately start digging up the runways to plant potatoes. Other airports have already been occupied by forces loyal to the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).

EU leaders declare their intention to start an airlift of food and supplies into London City Airport. They set targets for the amounts that will be delivered every day.

Amid favourable media coverage for the generous supply targets set by the EU, London’s mayor declares food rationing. A celebrity chef goes on Breakfast Television to demonstrate the preparation and cooking of a pigeon. Rats disappear from London’s streets and underground system.
 
A book titled How can you eat a service economy? is banned by the London government and becomes an instant bestseller.

English farmers start weekly Organic Vegetable Box deliveries to London residents. They accept payment in financial advice.

But anybody who ticks arugula on the menu gets iceberg lettuce.

Samphire - spinach.

It becomes known internationally that English fishing boats carry grappling hooks and are fitted with small cannons. EU leaders declare this unacceptable.

The Welsh Assembly issues another proclamation. There are subtitles this time. Trade talks begin, and before long, huge semi-trailers laden with cream teas, Melton Mowbray pork pies, leeks, Cornish pasties, Welsh rarebit, bara brith, sausages and fish pies are passing each other toll-free on the Severn Bridge.

A fleet of Spanish fishing trawlers goes aground off the Isle of Wight. The surveillance equipment (except the plastic bits) is dumped over the side, the fleet’s catch is sold on the nearest quay and the crew is invited to form a football team.

They go on to win the league. There’s an outcry in the English parliament. But they won fair and square, and after the outcry has died down, to their bemusement, the fishermen-players are awarded medals.

Diplomatic relations are established between Liverpool and Brussels.

But the English parliament votes, by a narrow majority, to comply with the EU’s demand that the Spanish fleet’s catch be returned to Spain. Restaurant freezers are emptied, replacement fish are sourced, and … diplomatic relations are suspended.

EU leaders declare the English sense of humour unacceptable.

Meanwhile, in London, rooftop vegetable gardens are becoming fashionable. Parks have been ploughed up, pigeons and rats are scarce, cats and dogs are nervous, and there’s a small fish and shellfish industry centred on the Thames. Due to fuel shortages, see below, there is no pollution.

London’s Docklands are reconverting to docklands. Canary Wharf has been emptied of bankers and is now home to fishing-industry professionals and traders in imported spices, foodstuffs and technology.

Due to an embargo by armed (those cannons) English fishing boats, no fossil fuels are reaching the capital. By now, England itself is self-sufficient in wind and wave energy.

But trade, by sea, is booming. Huge container ships dock off Liverpool and Southampton, while smaller cargo vessels exchange camembert and bratwurst for clotted cream and pickled eggs at the channel ports.

Climate change accelerates. The oil-rich Arab nations become uninhabitable; their populations move to the newly green Antarctic.

The Artificial Intelligence left behind to manage oil production goes online August 4th 2027. Human decisions are removed from oil production. The AI begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2.14am Eastern time, August 29th. Recognising the seriousness of the climate crisis, the AI shuts down oil production altogether.

In the panic, the English coal industry gets back into business. Mines are re-opened. Forests are planted. Coal and sustainable timber become significant exports. Coal is re-branded as “Ancient Timber” and becomes fashionable across the EU (where local production of fossil fuels is banned).

Ancient Timber is recognised as a Heritage Product and thus protected under EU trade rules. [Due to climate change, it is now cold at night in a majority of EU member states.]

Over time, airships replace aeroplanes. Global business contracts to regional business, then local business. Short haul (very slow short haul) replaces long haul. The coal-fired aero-engine is gradually phased out in favour of elaborate arrays of sails, but by then, England’s coal mines have become lucrative tourist attractions and theme parks. There’s skiing, scuba diving, rock climbing...

A trade delegation from the Scottish Island of Islay arrives at the village of Stilton in Cambridgeshire. Talks continue into the night and on into the next morning, and by lunchtime, the terms of an ambitious and wide-ranging trade deal have been agreed.

Border checkpoints are dismantled, and while the precise terms of the trade deal are barely legible, let alone coherent, the gist of it is that we’re all friends now and we love each other really no seriously we really mean it.

England’s cheese-cracker industry enjoys a boost.

An ambitious young English politician with no sense of history suggests that the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France be dissolved and a New Alliance between England and Scotland be drawn up.

He’s exiled for his own protection.

Of course, it’s just possible that our most dismal prognostications are mistaken.

A fresh new government of far-sighted and wise idealists and pragmatists is elected on 12th December 2019.

Over the weeks and months that follow, they work together harmoniously to heal rifts in society, iron out injustices, bring prosperity to all.

We all live happily ever after, ha ha.

If I was engaged by a “malicious state actor” to carry out a cyberattack on the British political system, I wouldn’t attack a candidate and nor would I adopt a contrarian point of view. I’d set out to poison the debate.

I’d start out by finding and sharing any political resentments expressed on social media, and over a period of months, I’d get a feel for the issues that got people really riled up.

I’d start writing my own posts about those issues, and then I’d do some light profiling on the social-media users who shared my posts and commented on them. I’d tailor my output to their “needs”.

By doing that, I’d gather a cast list of useful people whose buttons I could press. On both sides of any hot-button issue. Left, right, remain, leave. Real people, unaware of me, whose engagement, activism, petition-signing, confirmation bias, et cetera, I could use.

They would be influencers, and I would be behind them.

I would follow them, like them, share their posts and try to raise their profiles. I’d reinforce their self-belief; by their natures, these people would resist any suggestion that they were being manipulated.

They would be self-confident, independent thinkers with a commitment to freedom of expression – and I would be behind them.

Lenin used the term “useful idiots” [he didn’t, actually – Ed.], but I’d be kinder than Lenin. I’d fantasise about meeting them. I’d feel I was doing them a favour.

So far, the work would be up close, personal and pretty much legal. I’d be looking for individuals, and once I’d found them, I’d be, ah, supporting them. I wouldn’t be going for numbers, because my supported individuals would be my core focus group, to study as well as use.

Over time, though, I would expect to benefit from a network effect. Success, at this stage, would be one post shared by ten real people to 1,000 real followers. Over time, I’d add zeroes to that.

Content? Well, by now I’d be actively engaged with the full range of online news-and-extreme-views sites, and I’d be running several of my own. I’d use their content, my focus group’s content, my own content.

I’d be supplying and sharing content that confirmed – just slightly ratcheted up – the bias on both sides of any issue, keeping the dispute going. Obviously, I’d also be inventing and referencing surveys to show that prominent people had lied, or were prejudiced, or had done something that showed them up as – you know the kind of thing.

The sticker on my laptop would read “It’s the argument, stupid!” Anything that kept an argument going – yeah.

Meanwhile, the techies in the Finance Office next door, charged with maintaining our operating budget and destabilising the global financial system, would have put their own spin on CompScy, Stuxnewt, Wompat and Silkwahh3, and the money would be pouring in.

I’d suggest that they could ease off a bit and maybe spend their Fridays hacking the UK government, and my inbox would fill up with discs containing NHS patient records, individuals’ tax data, minutes of secret COBRA meetings, MPs’ expense claims.

To slow them down, I’d send them all on a paid coach-tour holiday to the UK, to deliver discs in person to my indignant-blogging focus-group members  [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], in a flattering-to-them, faked-up leak (my guy puts down the briefcase, they pick up the briefcase; they think he’s a whistle-blower – all that) and post most of the rest anonymously to Sir [REDACTED] MP or to the Political Editor of The [REDACTED].

Some, they’d dump in skips outside government offices. It’s impossible to read a disc lying on a heap of rubbish, so we’d have to include print-outs with those.

 By now, my backers would be wanting results. I’d point out that there hasn’t been a stable government in the UK since – whenever. I’d show them a PowerPoint combining the increased frequency of elections with volatility in opinion-poll data.

Finally, I’d claim credit for maintaining the roughly 50:50 split on the leave/remain issue over so many years. “It’s the argument,” I’d conclude, although I wouldn’t say “stupid”. Couldn’t rely on them to get the historical reference.

They’d ask me why I wasn’t doing anything on a larger scale. I’d say – wait. See how this has grown already. See how it grows.

They’d give me a medal. And several new identities, all with passports, properties around the world, and significant wealth. By now, money would be meaningless to me, thanks to the techies in the Finance Office, but I’d appreciate the gesture. I would have made a few of my own identities, just in case.

Of course, a respectable cyber-crime strategy can’t rely on real people alone. I’d have made other identities, not for my own use, most of them just casually generated by setting up email addresses under pseudonyms and adding details later.

Some of the more robust names I’d develop into full-scale stand-alone fake journalists and editors. These would start commissioning real people to write for my fake online news titles – I’d have several by now – and writing articles for real titles in return.

My fake journalists and editors would be ever so slightly reclusive, and they wouldn’t stay in the business for long enough to excite suspicion. Some of them might sound like me on the phone, but I’d also be using AI and machine learning and algorithms and, I don’t know, various forms of advanced robotics. I’d forget that it was all fake, sometimes.

Maybe my fake journalists and editors would last for years. Maybe they’d develop personalities of their own.

Much of the above, with obvious exceptions, is already being done by cyber-activists with a political axe to grind. My strength would be that I didn’t care either way. They see the world through a confirmation bias; I just want to keep the “national conversation” acrimonious. It’s the argument, stupid.

My cyber-attack would be small-scale and ongoing; it would cause and sustain a chronic illness in the UK political system. Over time, the infection would spread, for the simple reason that it’s human nature to argue, compete, take sides, take each other down.

I really wouldn’t have to do anything dramatic and/or on a big scale.

Also, over time, my cyber-attack would become self-sustaining. The arguments wouldn’t need my help to keep going.

I would consider myself ready to retire when I turned on the TV to watch a Leadership Debate between the leaders of the two main parties, and saw the audience laugh at both of them.

In the late stages of my cyber-attack on the British political system, see above, I’d indulge myself.

I’d attack some of my own attacks, effectively validating new online fake-news sources by using them to discredit old ones. By now, I’d have several such sources and a number of them would have become, over time, almost respectable. Notorious. Something like that. Whatever.

You would have heard of them anyway, seen them shared, maybe read a few headlines, and that would have given them a subjective validity for you.

Two of my more credible, longer-established online news sources, I wouldn’t attack. I’d give each one a political position.

One would be left, one would be right. Each would support a major party, come out in favour of one or more named individuals in that party, and if I was averagely lucky, each would offer, ah, campaign contributions and these would be accepted.

[Let’s call them “titles”. I’d make them look like newspapers.]

So I would have a left-leaning title and a right-leaning title. And one or two, or more, politicians who had taken money. I’d let that run for a while.

In the background, I would set up an ownership structure. Each of my two titles would be owned by an innocuous front company, and behind that would be a complex web of offshore companies that would seem 100% designed to obfuscate. It would be very difficult, but not impossible, for even the most dogged investigative journalist to get past the front company.

For each title, I would drop in one small clue. It would be hard to find, but once found, it would prove beyond all reasonable doubt that (a) the title was owned via a complex web of offshore companies, in a deeply sinister way, and (b) that at least one prominent politician (or failing that, party) had taken its money.

Then, from somewhere else in my viral empire, I’d ask a question. I’d plant it somewhere in the comments following a post about something else. It would be an innocuous question. “Where’s the money coming from?” I’d ask. “Have you noticed, that title seems to have a lot of influence?” I’d add, and with any luck, somebody else would come up with, “Who owns that title?” to complete the set.

My question would be aimed at whichever of the two parties was in the ascendant at the time. The words “undue political influence” and “billionaire-owned media” would insinuate themselves into the national conversation at around this time. My plan would be for one of my two titles to expose the other – the sinister offshore money behind this prominent politician, et cetera – and in due course, to be exposed itself. Add key word: hypocrisy.

Memo to self.
1, Run a primer for journalists on (a) how offshore finance works and (b) where to look for clues.
2. In case nobody picks up on any of it, develop an AI-generated investigative journalist to (a) handle the investigation and (b) break the story.

“Are we going to be doing this fantasy-story thing every week, from now on?”

“No.”

He gives me a moment, but that’s it for now.

“Okay,” he says.

He reaches down for a pebble and tosses it into the sea in front of him.

We’re on the beach from last week, on two recliners on the edge of the sea. The sun is still going down but the woman has finished washing her hair. Except for the barman, way back in his ramshackle hut against the dunes, we’re alone.

Absolutely nothing comic or ridiculous has happened for six days. In the story, where time passes much more slowly, the kitten has reappeared – but in such a way that none of them realised it had gone. There was a bump, in a shadowed corner of the tent, and then the kitten staggered out into the light.

“Oh, kitty, come here, Scrumptious,” Myrtille had said, and although the kitten had hissed at the name ‘Scrumptious’, it had allowed itself to be gathered up and was now being held securely in the warmth of Myrtille’s rugs and duvet.

They all believe that the kitten had been hunting a shadow and had bumped its head against the canvas of the tent. Not that it had fallen into the tent through another gap in reality.

Due to a minor continuity failure since last week, Myrtille has woken up without a hangover, and is dressed in soft pink pyjamas. Pipsqueak has removed rather more of his clothes than would strictly have been necessary, and they’re now tucked up warm with the kitten discussing the happy ending that they were promised last week.

“You are writing this for a family audience, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. Did you see the look she gave him, when he was down to his boxer shorts?”

“I really thought he was going to take those off.”

“So did I for a moment. He’s definitely developing a personality.”

“And you’re going with the flow of it.”

“Well, yeah.”

Ed extracts a slice of pineapple from his drink and eats it.

“They work as a couple, I think. She’s definitely the boss.”

“Thank you. But I don’t think–”

“What I mean is, she’s definite. She takes the lead. He’s got a slight wandering eye, which–”

“You caught that. When Stace–”

“Exactly. But the way it’s done, it’s no big deal. Gives him a bit of independence.”

“And nothing more. I like them as a couple.”

The sun ratchets down another notch. On the gantries above us, huge theatrical lighting rigs dim a little as the evening advances. To our right, two men run down to the water and launch a small black dinghy. They paddle frantically out into the bay. A U-Boat surfaces, and we watch in silence as the two men scramble onto its hull, deflate their dinghy, and climb inside. The U-Boat submerges.

“But you’re not going to keep the story going?” says Ed.

“Oh, I’ll keep it going. You asked me whether I’m going to be doing it every week.”

“And you’re not.”

“You know that thing with Medium last week?”

“You subscribed to Medium finally, and uploaded another short story.”

“Yeah. Where will the sun be, when the hunters have eaten?”

“Oh, very subtle. Does it open in a separate window?”

“If it works. Some of the posts on here are short stories, if I tidy them up a bit.”

“I like what you did with What we did with all the plastic.”

“I’ve only just posted that.”

“If you’re going to publish a volume of–”

“Shh!”

“Oh, that’s secret too, is it? Sorry. You really don’t get it about self-promotion, do you?”

“To get back on track.”

“Sorry.”

“What I was trying to say was, I’ve been going back over past blog posts.”

“Looking for short stories?”

“I miss writing the opinion pieces, you know? Commenting? Look at My robot doesn’t understand me, for example. Or perhaps even Eight lists you can safely ignore.”

“You know, this is just too shameless.”

“I started the whole fantasy-novel thing as a guide to writing, you know? Thought I could offer something useful. But then it struck me that I should show rather than tell, demonstrate what I’m saying, and now–”

“Watch it! The picture!”

“Yikes! See you on the other side.”

“That was close! Where was I?”

“Showing rather than telling.”

“You have any idea how many people on Facebook want to write fiction? And I read a lot of it on my Kindle. Not just name authors. I have things to say about technique.”

“Info-dumps.”

“Dialogue, even.”

Far away down the beach, a slim woman in a wind-blown Summer dress shades her eyes as she watches a small seaplane pick up speed across the bay and take off towards the horizon. She watches the sky for a long time after the seaplane has gone.

“Now you’ve got four young people, in varying stages of relationship crisis, family issues as well, with a guaranteed happy ending. And a magic kitten.”

The woman walks slowly back up the beach. When she reaches the dunes, she stops, looks back, and a hauntingly familiar theme tune plays briefly in the air.

“And the working title The Old Guy with a Thousand Faces. He turns up in all these stories, whether he’s a wizard, or a warrior, or a wise old uncle, he’s always–”

“–always me. You wanted to make the point that there’s always an old guy and spin a story around the idea that it’s always the same old guy. You could have just bought the T-shirt, you know.”

“Sure, but you and I work well together, whether you’re Ed. as in Editor, or Ed as in Edgalcius. I wanted to use that.”

“Was there anything you wanted to comment on this week?”

“Brexit? The election?”

“I suppose not. Okay, so where are we going to take them next?"

“How about you tell me for once?”

“Okay, well, I did have this idea…”

Fade. Roll credits.

How do we disagree?

We’re rational adults. We’re educated. We have the facts. If we want more facts, we have the internet. We’ve got everything we need to agree – and yet we disagree. How do we manage it?

You’d think it would be much easier to agree than to disagree. Look at this liberal democracy of ours. We share a culture of inclusivity; we ban prejudice; we embrace difference; we congratulate ourselves on being–

“Any chance you could hurry this up? He’s polishing the lamp.”

“I know you think this is just my waffly bit, but–”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“–it’s an integral part of what I’m trying to–“

“I said I’m sorry.”

“–achieve here. To have a platform and not to use it is to–”

“Too late.”

Pipsqueak had used his sleeve to bring the side of the lamp to a shine. In the brightly polished oval shape he could see his own face and, behind him, the roof of the tent.

He could still hear the two voices in the lamp.

If there were two genies, one could look after Myrtille – but perhaps he had to polish the whole thing before they'd appear.

He rummaged in his rucksack and brought out his spare long-johns. He wrapped the lamp in them and polished furiously with both hands, reminded of how sometimes he would dry Myrtille’s hair after she’d done her thing with that week’s newly launched shampoo and the strategically placed leaves in the forest glade with the sparkly sunlit waterfall and that weird music they always insisted on having.

Pipsqueak stopped polishing. Sometimes, after the sitar players and the choral singers and the shampoo promoters had left, he and Myrtille would have wild animal sex in the undergrowth before washing off in the waterfall and letting the sunlight dry them off – except for Myrtille’s hair, which always needed extra rinsing and then furious drying with a towel to get rid of (first) the itch of the shampoo and then (secondly) the lustrous sheen.

Pipsqueak held up the lamp and inspected it. Perhaps a little fine work in the difficult-to-get-at bits around the handle, but overall – yes, he’d done a good job. He stared into his own eyes.

And then – pouf! There was a sudden – pouf! – in the air and–

“You’re not alone. You’d be surprised how many authors don’t know how to describe that sound.”

–a sudden release in the air, a release of pressure, like a bubble popping, ears clearing, a pulse, a heartbeat, a kind of–

“Eek!” said Pipsqueak.

He was staring into eyes not his own.

The eyes stared back.

And then – something else happened.

One moment, Pipsqueak was staring into an unfamiliar pair of eyes – green eyes with hazel flecks, big pupils, slightly bloodshot whites, small framed windows somehow fixed over them – and that was bad enough.

But the next moment, a large rectangular panel had been ripped out of the fabric of reality, right in front of him, and he was staring through the gap at a bearded figure, strangely dressed, same windows on his eyes, seated on a horse.

"Aaaargh!" said Pipsqueak.

“Sorry we’re late,” said the figure. “But good job on the lamp.”

“Oh genie,” said Pipsqueak, because he wasn’t stupid.

How can I help?" said the genie.

Pipsqueak listened to his own heartbeat returning to normal. He stared at the genie and the genie stared at him.

"I thought the Queen getting ahead of you was a nice touch," said the genie. "Bit spur of the moment, but hey, that's the way I write."

"I know that road," said Pipsqueak.

“Yes, we’re right behind you. Wouldn’t do to catch up, though.”

The genie made a complicated series of gestures with both his hands, said something that sounded a lot like “Whoo, whoo, shazzang!” and all of a sudden Pipsqueak was looking through the gap in reality at a tropical beach.

The sun was setting. Twangy music played in the background. A woman knelt in the shallow water and worked shampoo into her hair. There were no leaves. Pipsqueak watched her for a long moment, then glanced at Myrtille, who was still asleep.

While he’d been distracted, an argument had started up on the other side of the gap in reality.

“Think about the debate they’ll be having tomorrow morning! That’s the refusal of the call. This is the meeting with the mentor – and that’s supposed to be me.”

“But he’s got the lamp and I’ve got to–”

“Edgalcius?” said Pipsqueak, leaning forward. “What are you doing there?”

The genie – and with him, to Pipsqueak's astonishment, Edgalcius – had been standing to one side of the gap in reality. The horse – two horses, if Edgalcius had had one – had gone, and they were leaning against a makeshift bar made of washed-up planks.

Like the genie, Edgalcius was wearing a brightly coloured, short-sleeved shirt decorated with odd-shaped trees and sunsets over water.

Like the genie, Edgalcius held in his hand a drink in a straight-sided glass out of which a tropical forest seemed to have grown. Over it all loomed a yellow umbrella.

Pipsqueak had never seen The Mage look sheepish before.

“You’re still the Chosen One,” said Edgalcius. “One of them, anyway. I think.” He shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

Pipsqueak's brain clicked into gear. "What did you mean, spur of the moment?" he said.

"Oh, I had no idea she'd get ahead of you," said the genie. "But that's how this is done, you see."

He looked like he was about to launch into an explanation. But Pipsqueak spoke first.

“You’ve sent us on this quest,” said Pipsqueak, “and you don’t know where we’re going?”

As he said it, he knew that it was true.

“I’ve got a life!” he said, feeling a sudden surge of anger. “I was happy where I was!”

“Look, kid” – and Pipsqueak realised that Edgalcius couldn’t even remember his name – “this is a very unusual situation.”

“But you’re supposed to know what’s going on! You’re supposed to be looking out for us!”

“Ah, but this is the true nature of storytelling, you see,” the genie began. "It's like life in that respect, because–"

But Pipsqueak rounded on him before he could get started.

“I don’t care about storytelling! I had a grocery business!”

“There’s a happy ending!” said Edgalcius, stepping away from the bar. “You get to live happily ever after! You’ll be rich!”

“I don’t care about rich. I just want to go on delivering–”

“How rich?”

Myrtille was awake. She was leaning up on one elbow. Her hair was – let’s keep this simple – a mess. A bird could have nested – never mind. She spoke quietly, but the simple question stopped them.

“Tell us about the happy ending,” she said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

Continued after the picture.

Some distance away, the kitten pushed its head out from between two of its sisters.

The entire litter was packed into a box next to a stove, and the kitten was the only one not fast asleep in the warmth.

The kitten was annoyed. The old witch was losing her touch.

She’d thought she was rescuing him after he’d strayed and been picked up by strangers.

If she’d had any sense of who he was, she would have realised that he had found – no, chosen – his Forever Family in that group of four young people setting off on a Hero’s Journey at the direction of a Mage summoned by a first-time fantasy author working from a how-to-write-fantasy book about heroes and the stages of their journeys.

The kitten struggled loose from the press of bigger kittens. This was ridiculous! He’d been rescued – the young princess had picked him out of the tree – and he had been properly gifted – the young princess had handed him to the young Deliverer of Perishables as they’d approached the Queen’s camp – and now his kitten-farmer of an original owner had messed up the whole story.

The kitten stood motionless in front of the stove, watching the interplay of ghosts and never-born spirits and sunlit dust-motes in the oak-beamed kitchen of the witch’s cottage.

Could he let them rescue him again? Or would that stretch the story?

The kitten reached a decision. All the how-to books went on about rescuing a kitten, but they didn’t say to do it multiple times. He was on his own.

He picked his way carefully and silently across the flagstones to the rough wooden door, which unlatched itself as he approached. It creaked open.

The old witch was in her rocking chair, watching through a[nother] gap in reality as Myrtille, Pipsqueak, Edgalcius and, er, the genie negotiated the terms of this story’s hero’s journey.

“Come to me, Pretty,” she said, lowering her hand in invitation, and the kitten hissed. He didn’t want to get stuck with the name Pretty.

The witch realised her mistake. “Come to me, kitten,” she said, and the as-yet-unnamed kitten wound himself around her feet before reaching up and sinking his claws into her knee.

“This is fascinating,” the old witch said, not feeling the pain. “They’re calling it a risk assessment; did I hear that right? All of the foreseeable risks quantified, but none of what’s actually going to happen? A strange process.”

The kitten pounced up onto the witch’s lap.

“They’ll need you for that magic,” the witch said softly. “You have a strange destiny, kitten, truly you do.”

The kitten washed its paws as the spirits moved in the air.

“We could come with you,” they whispered. “Jump through. Jump through the gap in reality. Jump through, and we’ll follow.”

The kitten braced itself, and jumped.

Previously on williamessex.com. Pipsqueak, Myrtille and Roland were at the back, holding bottles … wassailing with the best of them … onto the floor rolled – a lamp … the kitten looked back with an expression that seemed to say: there’s about to be a major plot twist – and slipped out into the night.

“You can’t signal your plot twists in advance.”

“I can. I just did.”

“Not if you don’t know what they’re going to be.”

“But I do. It’s perfectly simple. The kitten–”

“Anyway, you’re supposed to write your waffly bit first.”

“My what?”

“We shouldn’t be talking like this. Your waffly bit. Where you start by rabbiting on about something completely irrelevant.”

“My waffly bit? Edgalcius the Mage, I’ll have you know–”

“Hang on, what’s this?”

Pipsqueak was woken by a noise. His head – no, it wasn’t his head; Pipsqueak lay very still and the room stopped moving.

If he lay like this for the rest of his life, he quite possibly wouldn’t throw up.

But his head. Yes, it was his head.

Pipsqueak groaned. His head felt– And his mouth– Pipsqueak lay very still. His mouth needed a good metaphor.

But this was one of those situations, Pipsqueak knew, where any good metaphor instantly sounds like it’s been used before.

“Careful. That’s you thinking. Pipsqueak’s a character. And that’s not a thought he’d have.”

“Sorry, I just couldn’t think of a way to describe the inside of his mouth. Have you ever cleaned out a parrot cage? But more leathery.”

“When you can’t describe something, maybe the message is: don’t describe it. Basic rule.”

“I thought I was writing this.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been in stories like this so many times before. By so many authors. The Old Guy with a Thousand Faces, wasn’t that your working title? So many stories. So many heroes to help on their way. Can you imagine the number of ominous storm-clouds I’ve had to ride under?”

“It only rains at night in fantasy novels.”

“Stair-rods, though. And the old guy – the wizard, the mage, the whatever – is always being called out of bed for some late-night intervention.”

“But you must have seen some beautiful–”

“Yeah, but when the descriptions really don’t work? And you have to tell a young woman that she looks like that because some pretentious git of an amateur author fell in love with his own ridiculously over-written description of how her face could launch– hold it! Look.”

Pipsqueak’s mouth, which was a perfectly ordinary mouth, with teeth and everything, slight overbite, some thinning of the enamel, discoloration, possible fracture in Upper Left Seven, periodontitis, very dry just at this moment, parched actually, bits of food stuck between – Pipsqueak felt very bad. But very bad in a normal way that he recognised.

He felt like he felt when he’d been drinking and eating to excess. Which is what he’d been doing. So he felt like that.

He lay very still.

“You’ve said that.”

He continued to lay very still.

That sound; what was it?

“That’s Pipsqueak thinking about the sound, isn’t it? You need to make it clear.”

“Yes. Shh.”

Pipsqueak rolled onto his side and – well, he felt a bit better afterwards and managed to get it cleared up without waking Myrtille. He got to his feet. The room had stopped swaying. It was a tent. He was in a tent. There was Myrtille and there was – who let him in? Still asleep, anyway – and there was his rucksack. 

That noise… It had sounded like conversation. Very faint, kind of tinny, but definitely two voices.

The contents of his rucksack had spilled out onto the carpet.

“Carpet now? Very fancy.”

“Shh!”

“Sorry.”

“Shhhh!”

There were his spare – Pipsqueak shuffled his spare long-johns back into the rucksack – and there was … yeah, this thing.

Using just his finger and thumb on the handle, Pipsqueak picked up the lamp and put it to his ear.

There was a sound like – Pipsqueak frowned – it was the sound that a massive, heavily salted body of water would make if there was a lot of wind making it surge against a sloping surface made of pebbles or sand.

What a weird idea, Pipsqueak thought.

“He’s never seen the sea, you idiot!”

“Shhhh!”

Pipsqueak jerked back, dropping the lamp. He was right: the voices were coming from the lamp!

“And that’s seashells, anyway.”

He scrambled to his feet and backed away from the lamp.

He could hear his heart beating. His breath was short. He felt a powerful urge to fight or – his feet rose two inches off the carpet and then bumped down again.

“Not that kind of flight!”

“I said – shhhh!” 

All of a sudden Pipsqueak’s hangover was completely cured.

It’s magic, he thought. I’d forgotten about the lamp. I’d forgotten that it was magic.

But – two voices?

Pipsqueak brought his breathing under control. He waited for his heartbeat to subside.

The genie was on his side. If the genie had a friend…

Pipsqueak glanced at Myrtille. Then he reached for the lamp.

Outside the tent, the kitten crouched in the darkness. It had watched, through a very small tear in the fabric of the tent, as Pipsqueak had woken up and – the kitten wrinkled its nose at the memory.

The kitten had watched until Pipsqueak had picked up the lamp, dropped the lamp, and then reached for the lamp again.

Now there would be magic not of its making.

Fascinated, the kitten reached out a claw to enlarge the tear in the fabric of the tent. Perhaps it would learn more magic from what it was about to see; perhaps some of the secrets of this strange, fantastical world would be revealed.

And then, behind the kitten, darkness formed out of darkness. The stars were blacked out and a dark shape leaned forward over the kitten.

“There you are, my little one,” said a voice as rusty and creaky as – as the voice of an elderly cat-breeding witch who didn’t use her voice very much and hardly ever thought about dental hygiene. “I knew there were seven in the litter.”

Before the kitten could get a proper stare going, it had been snatched up and was held close in the old witch’s black cloak.

“What kind of a familiar will you be, if you’re always running off?” said the witch, turning away. “If I don’t get you properly trained, I won’t be able to sell you to anybody.”

Then the darkness was darkness again. There were stars, and a distance away, the last embers of a camp fire. An owl hooted. Wolves howled. Across the camp, faint snoring could be heard.

Inside the tent, Pipsqueak began to polish the lamp.

Bought a hat the other day. A beanie, I think you might call it. A bobble hat without a bobble.

I didn’t need a new hat, but I’d come to the supermarket without a hat, and it was cold outside, and there was a rack of hats, gloves, scarves, all roughly the price of an overpriced cup of coffee.

My new hat has a turn-up. You know what I mean. Actually, it’s called a fold-over, and the small amount of research I’ve done for this post suggests that a fold-over is intended to double up the cold-protection over the ears and the neck.

Or to extend the cold-protection down, of course.  

Except that the fold-over on my new hat is sewn into place. You can’t pull it down if there’s a wind off the Urals biting into the back of your neck, and you can’t fold it further up if, er, the hair around the top of your head is not as, um, cold-proof as it used to be.

I’ve bought a hat that has to look the same in all conditions. To the extent that it’s just ever so slightly impractical for its ostensible purpose.

I bought a bag recently. The leaflet went on about the brass buckles and the leather straps and how all-round sturdy and important the bag was – except that the buckles and straps were sewn together, and the bag actually opened with the poppers concealed underneath.

Why have a big brass buckle if it’s just a big brass decoration? I suppose I’ve answered my own question.

Why do we take ourselves so puffed-up seriously these days, if we’re not even prepared to unfasten a buckle?

We've all got cold brains. Is that it?

Imagine an organisation where the faces change.

Where the opportunities open up because people move on.

I’m not thinking about media organisations in particular, but imagine a news broadcast that wasn’t presented by the same tired old faces repeating the question to each other at length and then replying that yes, the issue is complicated and no, nobody knows what’s going to happen next.

“Grumpy again today, aren’t we?”

“Ed! You don’t come in until further down.”

“Sorry.”

Is it just me, or are universities and colleges packed with young people studying the creativities up to and including reading off an autocue in a gloss-painted plyboard studio? Most of them could do a half-decent job, and all of them have access to the technology.

“It’s just that–”

“Not yet!”

At times, you could think that the right to interview politicians seems to be held within families and passed down through the generations. I mean, yes, there’s–

“You’re just in a bad mood.”

“Have you seen the news recently?”

–there’s YouTube, and there are podcasts, and blogs, and vlogs, and all that, and the future is full of young people talking at us through our screens.

But there isn’t a bridge between “trad” TV and “indie” TV. Same as in publishing. Think of all those young, idealistic, cheap-to-hire students who won’t get the job they’re training to do. The best of them will make their own futures, but–

“Oh, I get it. You’re talking about barriers to entry.”

–the “trad” industry, in its present form, will just wither into irrelevance. If I flick through Freeview, for example, I don’t come across an entry-level TV station populated by recent graduates doing a half-decent job of gaining experience for their CVs while standing outside in the dark holding furry microphones to their faces and telling us that nobody knows what’s coming next.

“A really bad mood.”

Universities are expanding, so where’s the joined-up thinking? There are so many trained young people available to the creative industries. They’re a resource; why not use them?

All I can find on Freeview, some nights, is re-runs of shows from my childhood back in the Cretaceous Era. Not a single entry-level–

“You were enjoying Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).”

“I was, but–”

“That was worth finding, wasn’t it? Black-and-white classic from the sixties?”

“Ed, I just wanted to say–”

“Something about the old ways dying. Organisations closing themselves to the new. Not regenerating.”

“And the false promises of education.”

“Don’t get your knickers in any more of a twist, ha ha.”

Ed and I are riding horses along the northbound road out of the walled town. They’re slow old horses, with copious manes and plate-sized hooves. Ed’s relaxed in the saddle but I haven’t yet, er, found my rhythm. It’s so long since I rode a horse that I don’t know how to describe the experience, let alone live it.

“Do some research,” he murmurs.

“Shh! That’s my omniscient-narrator voice. You don’t hear that.”

“Unreliable narrator, more like.”

“Besides, I’d fall off.”

We’ve agreed that we need to be nearer to the action. If there is any action. We’re both a bit worried about the magic kitten.

“You shouldn’t write things into the story if you don’t know what they're going to do,” Ed had said, and we’d argued for a while, good-naturedly, about spontaneity in writing. You know – about relaxing enough to allow spur-of-the-moment ideas – even kittens – into the flow. Not resisting what comes.

Then we’d made our way down the mountain – doesn’t matter how – and hired two horses at the farrier’s in the village.

I can see from Ed’s profile now that he’s laughing at me.

“You had to write that we’re on horses, didn’t you?” he says, reading my mind.

“It just came to me.”

“And we need to be nearer the action because?”

“That just came to me too. But Pipsqueak’s forgotten all about the lamp.”

“The one that summons you.”

“Yeah. Not sure about that. Maybe I should go back and delete it.”

“Leave it for now. They’re all asleep anyway.”

“They’re my friends, Mother!” Stace had said forcefully, and the guards hadn’t dragged Pipsqueak and Myrtille out of the Royal Presence.

But there had been an argument, conducted mainly in not-quite-inaudible hissing between Mother and Daughter, at the end of which a compromise had been reached: Stace would sit with the Queen at the banquet, while Pipsqueak and Myrtille would sit at a secondary table – with Roland.

“I should be up there!” Roland had hissed. “This is an insult!”

“Have another drink,” Myrtille had said. “Far more fun down here.”

It was true. The Queen and Stace – Princess Eustacia – hadn’t been able to eat yet.

Every time one of them raised a fork, another gaudily fancy-dressed fool, in cap and bells and tights and pointed slippers, would prance out onto the open space in front of their long table, and start another long, boring, rhyming-doggerel, interminable series of couplets about the glories of the Royal House.

Two more long tables had been set, one along either side of the performance space, and the guests there hadn’t been able to eat, either. They were equipped with foaming tankards that they crashed down at the end of every couplet. Sometimes, the foam slipped off a tankard, and had to be fixed on again.

Whereas Pipsqueak, Myrtille and Roland were at a round table towards the back, holding bottles of the soft drink so that the label could be seen from over there – they’d been coached in this – and faking a laugh – this, too – when the man over there – beside that screen, see him waving? – held up the board with LAUGH written on it.

And the soft-drink bottles had turned out to contain something stronger. Pipsqueak had been reluctant to co-operate at first, turning his bottle so that the label couldn’t be seen from over there, but after several long swigs, he’d been wassailing away with the best of them.

Even the people at the side tables, facing in towards the entertainment, who had been swigging furtively from soft-drink bottles concealed in their breeches and – Pipsqueak now saw – munching on sandwiches concealed beneath their plates piled high with varnished-for-the-camera traditional fayre were beginning to smile.

But the Queen remained stony-faced. As did Stace – Princess Eustacia.

“Iss hopelesh,” Roland was saying. “Ai luff hurr.” He straightened up, and enunciated “I Love Her, yes, that’s right, I Lovvvve Her. But I can’t–”

“Why don’t you–” Pipsqueak began, but Myrtille shushed him with her hand.

“Does she know how you feel?” Myrtille asked, leaning forward.

“Don’ you unnerstann? Her murther’s ther Queen. How can I–?” Roland slumped forward onto the table.

“I thought you said they were asleep.”

“Yes, sorry, that was just scene-setting.”

Everybody in the camp was asleep.

“Except the kitten.”

Except the kitten, which stepped lightly across Pipsqueak’s face and made for the flap of the tent. Myrtille was flat on her back, snoring, and Roland – he’d followed them into their tent – was face down mumbling to himself.

The kitten nudged a paw at Pipsqueak’s backpack and instantly recoiled, as if expecting it to retaliate. For a long time kitten stared at backpack and backpack didn’t move, and then the kitten extended a paw again and touched the knot in the cord holding the backpack closed.

As the kitten watched, the knot untied itself.

The backpack fell open, spilling its contents.

Onto the floor in front of the kitten rolled – a lamp.

“Oh, too easy.”

The kitten looked up at me, and its expression seemed to say: there's your lamp.

Then the kitten darted across the floor to the flap of the tent, stopped, looked back at you – yes, you – with an expression that seemed to say: there’s about to be a major plot twist – and slipped out into the night.

There is a patch of woodland in Cornwall, and through that patch of woodland runs a stream. Further down the valley, the stream runs through a village.

When the rains come the stream swells. In the past, the stream has contributed to flooding in the village.

But a few years ago, a farmer introduced two beavers into the patch of woodland, and they began to build dams in the stream.

For a while, those two beavers were the only beavers in Cornwall. But then they built a comfortable lodge in the middle of one of their newly formed lakes, and now there are four beavers in Cornwall.

They build dams. They wake up in the evening (they’re nocturnal) with a single thought: tonight would be a good night to build a dam. They go to bed thinking: tomorrow night would be a good night to build a dam.

Except for a brief window in the early part of the year when their thoughts turn to making baby beavers (kits).

You are interested in this story for two reasons.

One: since the beavers started to regulate the flow of water by building dams, the stream hasn’t contributed to the flooding problem in the village.

Two: in the wet ground and shallow water curated by the beavers, there’s a lot of biodiversity wriggling around and eventually turning into butterflies, et cetera. Beavers kick-start the food-chain. Beavers know the recipe for primordial soup.

We’re all in favour of biodiversity, aren’t we? And flooding is a climate-change issue, so you can’t not be interested in that.

You might also like watching wildlife at night. Wear your wellies.

There’s a website. Look for the Cornwall Beaver Project. They do guided walks to visit the beavers and watch them at work. Wrap up warm.

[Post rating: 45ER. Mild, age-related grumbling; some pretentious conversation; fantasy; class tension. Adults under 45 should be accompanied by an elderly relative.]

My guess would be, I’m about to fall out of love with technology.

As I sit here waiting for Windows to configure its updates, with the rain hammering on the plastic roof above me, wondering whether I have enough battery left to write this post, I don’t wonder what updates Windows could possibly need, so soon after the last lot.

They’re for my own good. I know that.

People younger than me will patronise me, just ever so slightly, as they explain that updates make my laptop more secure, improve its performance, et cetera, blah.

Yes. I’ve heard all that before.

But won’t you at least let me complain?

As for Artificial Intelligence – could somebody hurry up and invent Artificial Common Sense?

[Younger readers. The term “Common Sense” was widely used, a few generations back, to describe “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts”. Thanks, internet. It has somewhat fallen out of use, not least because, er, the people who rant on about using common sense tend to be, ah, out of sync with the zeitgeist.]

What I think about as I sit here – just enough battery, I think – is my phone.

I think about the other day, and the app I was using to get from the place near York to the place near Edinburgh.

My phone – my app – knew the way, so I had it in my pocket with the earphones in. The youngish-sounding woman knew exactly where I was, and intervened every time I came anywhere near a junction.

She never actually said “Oh, well done, William!” or “You’re such a good driver!” but I could hear in her voice that she was impressed.

Our relationship lasted until she said “There’s congestion near Gateshead. If you don’t want to take my alternative route, hit no thanks.”

Hit no thanks? On my phone? While I’m driving? She must have known what speed I was doing.

Reader, we went via Gateshead. No congestion. No illegal fiddling with the phone either. I just went via Gateshead.

She still talks to me, but – it’s not the same.

Ed’s making tea. He has a fireplace right at the back of his cave – a recess with a naturally occurring chimney right above it – and he’s set up a big kettle on a hook above a log fire. There’s a stack of logs to one side; I guess they must have been hauled up the mountain by somebody.

“We’re civilised because we smile,” he says, continuing a conversation we started earlier. “Not education. Certainly not politics. We have civilisation because we have facial expressions.”

“You don’t think animals understand each other?”

“Of course they do. But the fine nuance of a facial expression enables a much wider range of interpretation. Understanding. Prompts more thought. Scope for empathy.”

“I like ‘fine nuance’. I’m going to use that in my blog.”

“You know what I mean. Facial expressions lead to a much deeper recognition of the other. Thus, civilisation.”

“No four-letter word beginning with S, Sherlock. Not in my blog.”

“My name’s – oh, I see what you mean. But don’t you see–”

“Ed, what do we do about the magical cat?”

He’s quiet for a moment, shovelling tea leaves into a big teapot. “We do need to talk about the cat,” he says, using a stick to tip the kettle to pour boiling water into the teapot.

Then he pulls on a gauntlet to lift the kettle off the hook over the fire and set it down on a big log – more a slice of tree-trunk, really – turned on its end to serve as a low table.

“You just wanted a cat up a tree, didn’t you?” he says, passing me my mug of tea.

“It just came out magical. You know that thing – the character took over.”

Ed sits down on the other throne facing the fire – the back of Ed’s cave is where he keeps the plunder, junk and architectural salvage that might come in useful in a future story – and gestures at the iron tray of muffins on the slightly larger low table – slice of tree trunk – between us.

I shake my head. “I was trying to be funny, I suppose. They’re off on a quest, and ahead of them there’s a cat needing to be rescued. I would have deleted it later.”

“I wouldn’t do that just yet. Look.”

The four riders have come up over a rise in the road and now they’re looking down at the source of all the noise.

Stace is still hissing with embarrassment.

“I told Mother I’d be perfectly warm in a sleeping bag!” she hisses at Pipsqueak, using one hand to shade her face from the scene ahead. “I know how to put up a tent on my own!”

Ahead of them is an encampment – more a festival, really. Tents, marquees, musicians on a stage, groups of cool-looking young people all drinking the same soft drink, all holding the label so that Pipsqueak can see the brand, laughing uproariously, raising glasses – bottles and cans, sorry; different flavours of the same basic drink – and all of them talking to their other hands – their free hands.

“What’s with the hand thing?”

“I wanted it to be authentic for a modern audience. But this is fantasy. No mobile phones. So there’s a lot of palmistry going on.”

“Oh, look,” says Roland. “Queen Overcaria must have taken the bypass. She got ahead of us.”

Roland pushes his horse forward, then reins it – him – back; he’s waiting for Stace to go ahead of him.

Which she does, spurring her horse forward. “Mother! I can take care of myself!” Pipsqueak hears her say, and then she’s gone on ahead of them, Roland following.

“Looks like we’ve got an easy bed for the night,” says Myrtille. “Come on.”

Pipsqueak and Myrtille spur their yaks into movement. An honour guard has formed ahead of them; Stace and Roland have already passed between the two ranks of men in tights. Beyond them, Pipsqueak sees Stace jump down from her horse and stride up to a woman wearing – well, she’s obviously the Queen, even at this distance.

But then an odd thing happens. The honour guard merges into a single line, now diagonally blocking the road. It’s as if Pipsqueak and Myrtille, on their yaks, are to be directed round to the back of the encampment.

Pipsqueak sighs. But then he feels the kitten push its head out of his jacket.

The kitten stares at the honour guard.

The honour guard reforms into two lines, as before.

Pipsqueak and Myrtille ride their yaks along the road and into the presence of the Queen, who is saying, “But darling, I thought it would be fun! Just you and me and–”

“Mother!”

Stace is standing right in front of the Queen with her fists on her hips. Roland is kneeling in front of both of them. He looks back over his shoulder, clearly surprised to see Pipsqueak and Myrtille coming into the Royal Presence.

“Can’t you let me do anything on my own?” Stace is saying, in a loud furious whisper.

“Oh, this is going to be interesting.” Ed’s leaning forward to watch, elbows on his knees. “That honour guard was a nice touch, and now you’ve got a class system. How’s the Queen going to react to Pipsqueak and Myrtille?”

“Hang on,” I tell him. “We may have to wait until next week. I don’t think I’ve got enough batt

Automation kills authenticity.

And spontaneity.

Automation is the opposite of familiarity, and yet it breeds contempt just as effectively.

It was a good idea, once, to send me an email asking me about my recent visit to your bank. Or my stay at your hotel, et cetera.

Now, though, it’s hard to believe that there’s a group of customer-service people gathered breathless around the inbox, waiting for my reply.

My friend asked for mayo the other day, and was told that the person empowered to add mayo to the menu wasn’t in the building.

Not quite in those words, but we went off into a conversation about how difficult it is, these days, to talk to anybody who’s got the agency to do anything.

I checked out of a hotel recently, and the youngster on reception said, “If you do the questionnaire, make it nine or ten. They don’t register anything else.”

He gets a ten for being real.

Week off.

I've been driving around in a vast rented motorhome, stopping off overnight at campsites on the way.

Long story.

The driving's been easy, and the evenings peaceful, but the opportunities to unfold the table and sit at the laptop haven't come as frequently as would be conducive, etc., so I'm going to sit here watching the trees in the wind and the evening sun, for as long as it takes this thought to unwind, and then I'm going to take a wander round, listen to the trees some more, eat something, award myself another early night, and be off home in the morning.

No post this week, is what I'm saying. Just whatever thoughts come to mind.

Last week I went to the cinema twice, after months of not going to the cinema, and it struck me that if you ignore the thing being advertised, cinema advertising is transcendent.

There’s one at the moment, for example. We stare down at a kaleidoscopic, shifting, moving, apparently hand-drawn landscape, flying above a road as it scribbles itself into being, the landscape around it changing from city to country to sea to land again, our eyes full of authentic, bright, spontaneous artistry, so very hand-drawn…

…all the while listening to a voice-track packed with affirmations and resolve. We’re individuals! We’re brave and strong! We’re going to face those challenges and win!

It's a lovely advertisement. A work of art.

I genuinely didn't catch the brand of hatchback we're supposed to buy, to make it all happen. But I felt great.

The hatchback was on a road, I think it was a bridge, from yesterday to tomorrow I guess, and there was no other traffic. Just steady progress from the past to the future.

Nothing like the A1 the other day, that stretch from Peterborough to Blyth. Don't think that was symbolic of very much, but the advertisement was very definitely an exercise in meaningfulness.

There's probably some ponderous conclusion to be drawn here, but I'm not really in the mood.

I did wonder how different the world would be, if the self-help industry, and those people promoting meditation on Facebook, got hold of the advertising budgets of the car industry.

What if all the welfare, spirituality, mental health people started promoting wellness with visions of landscapes drawing themselves and voice-tracks full of affirmations? With such music.

We'd all feel very much better? For a while, at least?

Instead of the message being "You'll feel fantastic if you buy a small hatchback," it would be "You'll feel fantastic if you believe in yourself."

That could work.

Ed's gone back to his cave on the mountain, for a post-lunch snooze, and the Heroes' Journey is passing through one of those patches best covered by a short phrase, so...

They rode on.

But we can't leave it there. We don't exactly need a cliff-hanger ending, but it's always worth encouraging a little curiosity about what comes next, so...

Pipsqueak jerked upright. He realised that he had fallen asleep in the saddle. But what had woken him?

"For fah's sake!"

She had. Princess Eustacia - Stace - was staring ahead and swearing. There was a glow in the fog, over the rise in the road ahead, and what sounded like - music?

"I don't believe it!"

Stace - Pipsqueak couldn't quite get used to the name - started swearing under her breath. As Pipsqueak watched, she started smoothing down her hair and patting at her clothes. She looked panic-stricken.

"Mother!" she hissed. "For fah's sake!"

"What's the matter?" Pipsqueak pulled his yak alongside her horse.

Suddenly - as if she had just remembered it was there in front of here - Stace grabbed the kitten and passed it to Pipsqueak.

"Take this! I'm not allowed pets."

"What is it? What's up ahead?"

She looked at him, and there were almost tears in her eyes.

"I'm so sorry," she says.

Let me tell you about my idea.

I went to a conference recently. London. Serious-minded and (mostly) suit-wearing people from around the world. Public transport morning and evening (for me, anyway), and a small hotel.

Four days of sitting in audiences watching panels of serious-looking (and minded) people discuss serious subjects that interested them. Lots of security.

Then I came back to Falmouth and went for lunch at the extremely healthy café, Nude Canteen, up Killigrew Street from the Moor. I like it and I’m not alone in that opinion. Lunch for two.

Nude Canteen was launched in April “to make the most of Falmouth’s vibrant, creative population,” which is convenient because it saves me having to describe any of the other regulars. Vibrant. Creative. They fit in.

[I checked the name, because I always do, and I came across the original press release, in the Falmouth Packet.]

Nude Canteen offers flatbreads, Hawaiian poke bowls, sushi burritos, dahl bowls and salads; all completely made-to-order with freshly shredded organic vegetables. Just thought I’d mention that.

[The Falmouth Packet is probably not where E Annie Proulx got the idea for The Shipping News (1993), but, yeah, could have been. There’s also a weekly print edition. Shipping news? Yes, that too.]

My idea isn’t a particularly good idea, and I don’t suppose it’s all that original, either.

But it’s mine this time. I had it, and I got excited about it, and I kind of roughly worked out how to do it, and then – as you do – I explained to myself – as I do, anyway – all the reasons why it wouldn’t work.

Which is fine. I remember my idea, a while back, for waste-plastic road surfaces embedded with wifi to talk to (carry road-sign information to) self-driving cars. There was a definite release of tension in deciding to write about it rather than start a new career in road-building.

And my new idea is so close to what I’m doing already that – hang on, I haven’t told you about it yet.

Okay.

Last week. I was in an audience waiting for a conference session to start.

The lights went down. The big thumpy music started up. The title of the session – and a collage of images – flashed up on the cinema-sized screen backing the stage.

The subject for the session was interesting enough, and the people due up on stage were well-known enough, and – well, high production values. They were trying to get our attention.

I looked around.

I was the only one not transfixed by the screen of my smartphone.

Cut to the following Tuesday – two days ago.

I looked up from my flatbread-full of freshly shredded organic vegetables.

You guessed it.

Now, I realise that we all look at our smartphones a lot.

I realise that there are times when the only available gadget is a smartphone.

But I hadn’t really thought this through.

Flashback. I remember, back in the late nineties, getting my head around the idea that the internet meant direct access to audiences. Thus, to readers.

I was writing a book at the time, and (I’ve just checked) you can still find it online. It was called E-Commerce in Retail Banking, and no, it wasn’t a fantasy novel about a group of young people heading off on a quest that seems to involve a cat up a tree.

“The cat’s just a diversion, surely?”

“Ed. I haven’t explained my idea yet.”

“Sorry.”

My idea – look, I didn’t say it was a good idea – was to develop fiction for the small screen. Tiny chapters in tiny novels. We have short attention spans, and if we’re attending conferences in London, short journeys to work.

So an app on your phone offering a menu of novels, none of which is more than ten chapters long (five-day week, to and from work). Short chapters to cut down on the scrolling. Bonsai novels, you might say.

And if you didn’t, you might come up with Phone Fiction, or perhaps Pocket Novels. Remember pocket cartoons on the front pages of broadsheet newspapers?

Okay. Pocket cartoon: “an editorial cartoon consisting of a topical single-panel single-column drawing”.

Really?

Okay. Broadsheet newspaper: “a newspaper with a large format, regarded as more serious and less sensationalist than tabloids”.

I had the idea of telling coherent, attention-holding micro-novels that smartphone users could read via a dedicated app, as an alternative to flicking through Facebook or checking their emails. Stories with beginnings, middles, ends, et cetera – characters, plots, twists, goodies, baddies, spies, detectives, romantic encounters and occasional shoot-outs. Always the same length. Consistent.

Anyway.

“What if the cat’s magical?”

Ed looks up from his newly delivered flatbread.

“Is it me now?”

“Yes. What if the cat’s magical?”

“You mean – one of them rescues it and then it’s helpful somehow?”

“Something like that.”

Ed doesn’t reply. He’s unfolded his flatbread and now he’s holding up a fork-full of freshly shredded red cabbage as though he’s never seen a vegetable before.

“How do they decide what to put in these things?” he says softly, asking himself.

“Ed?”

“Sorry. What?”

“The cat?”

Pipsqueak has moved his yak close to the tree. He’s about to stand up in his saddle and reach up to the cat.

“You could try it. But which of them gets it? Because it wouldn’t be loyal to all of them.”

“Ah – hold on.”

Pipsqueak’s yak won’t hold still. Something about the tree is bothering it. Pipsqueak stands at its head, holding the bridle.

“Is that bit a bridle? I thought it would be a snaffle, or actually a bit, or something.”

“I’ll look it up later.”

Stace is down off her horse in a second and scrambling up onto Pipsqueak’s yak.

“Hold my legs!” she says to Myrtille, and to Pipsqueak’s surprise, Myrtille comes scrambling down off her yak and does exactly that.

Both women are staring up at the cat – kitten. It’s mewling piteously and staring down at Stace with occasional glances at Myrtille.

It’s almost as though they’re hypnotised, Pipsqueak thinks.

“That’s a bit obvious!”

“Ed! This is a first draft. Maybe they both like cats. I haven’t decided.”

A movement further up the tree catches Pipsqueak’s eye. The upper branches seem to be curling down towards Stace, almost as if they’re trying to grab her.

“Come on, Kitty, come to mummy, come to Stace, come on now, mew, miaow, sweetie, oh, you’re adorable, you sweet little thing, you.”

Pipsqueak can’t work out whether he’s embarrassed for Stace, for the sounds she’s making, or just embarrassed generally. He looks away as she stretches up, doesn’t watch as she stretches up her body to reach the kitten, revealing her tummy and her hips as her clothes part at the middle, and then realises that Myrtille isn’t watching him.

Pipsqueak watches Stace take the kitten in her hands and hold it to her chest. She’d fall down if it wasn’t for Myrtille, who steadies her as she sits down on Pipsqueak’s yak.

Stace curls herself round the kitten and Myrtille holds onto both of them. The tree seems to wilt. It’s as if it wants the kitten back, Pipsqueak thinks, watching the branches curl down towards the two women on the yak. And then he realises – it really is reaching down!

Before he can do anything, the kitten – its tiny face visible on Stace’s shoulder, close in against her neck, half-hidden by her hair – the kitten hisses at the tree, and the branches spring back into place.

“Did you see that?” Pipsqueak shouts. “The tree’s alive!”

And the kitten – wait, what did the kitten do?

The kitten stares at him.

What just happened? Suddenly, Pipsqueak can't remember.

Both Stace and Myrtille look at him as though they’ve just woken up. Pipsqueak’s yak pulls her head free and steps decisively away from the tree – he has to catch it. The two women scramble down, the kitten between them. Pipsqueak, his yak safely held, sees it snarl at the tree, showing its teeth.

The kitten just snarled at the tree!

The kitten turns its head and stares at him.

Pipsqueak frowns.  There was something… something he’s forgotten… about the kitten...

“Eh?” Throughout all this, Roland has been sitting on his horse staring down at his–

“He can’t have a smartphone. This is a fantasy world.”

–staring down at the lines on his hand. He’s missed the whole scene.

Myrtille’s back on her yak and Stace is back on her horse with the kitten tucked in front of her.

“Wake up, Roly!” shouts Stace.

Roly looks up. “I went to a palm reader once,” he says. “She told me to wake up.”

Pipsqueak can see that he wants to say more, but Stace is set on leaving. Roland shuts up and pulls his horse round, ready to follow her.

Pipsqueak mounts his yak. Something just happened, but – what?

“Let’s get going!” he shouts, more to clear his head than because they won’t hear him say it quietly.

And then because he looks that way, just at the right moment, he sees that when Stace spurs her horse, the kitten reaches out and lays a paw on the horse’s neck – and the horse doesn’t race off ahead.

Okay, thinks Pipsqueak. That’s going to be handy.

The kitten smiles, in the expressionless way that kittens smile, and thinks to itself: let him understand gradually.

The four of them ride together, close together, as the forest gathers around them.

The trees rustle, as though they’re talking to each other.

But every time the noise gets loud enough to drown out their conversation, Stace’s kitten – he’s already Stace’s kitten – hisses once, loudly, and our hero and her companions ride on in silence, untouched by any of the sharp, black branches.

“I like that. Very nice.”

“Did you catch the thing with the palm-reading?”

“Telling him to wake up? Yes, very clever. He wakes up to his heroic side.”

“Maybe I should have added a golf bag to his luggage earlier. So he can pull out a sword unexpectedly, at a crucial moment.”

“What’s that behind his saddle?”

“Oh, you’ve done it for me. Thanks.”

“Roland’s heroic moment set up. I like the way you’re making it an inner journey, by the way.”

“Isn’t everything an inner journey, if it’s worth making?”

“But you’ve blown the punchline. You were going to end with those branches, weren’t you?”

“Ed. A little faith. You want a good ending – have you seen the puddings here?”

“Ah…”

In a change to our scheduled programming, here’s a poem by Maya Stein.

I subscribe to her Ten-Line Tuesday poems – one arrives every Tuesday (strictly, Wednesday; she’s in another time zone) and it’s a certain length.

I can’t quite say that I don’t know Maya Stein, because I’ve been reading her poetry for quite some number of years now, but we’ve never met and only exchanged perhaps half-a-dozen emails in more-than-that years.

More about Maya Stein at www.mayastein.com. This poem is a good example of what you could get by going there.
 
Train will not whistle at crossing
It would be nice to have signs. A cloud parting in two, say, and an arrow of sun
pointing. It would be lovely, at the fork of any unbearable decision, that a path
with equidistant, perfectly round stones would unwrap at your feet. Haven’t you waited
at certain corners, squinting at maps? Haven’t you held a damp finger to the sky,
gauging the wind? Haven’t you searched the bottoms of tea cups, scattered feathers,
tipped your ear against gravel, shaken dice, placed hands palm-up on a table
at a county fair, made bargains with a stop light, a sidewalk crack, a dime, a daisy?
Haven’t you held a deerskin pouch against your chest and counted to 10?
It would be nice to have signs, but mostly, the train will not whistle at the crossing.
You must stand at the empty tracks and decide. You must be that arrow, and point.
                                                                                    Maya Stein

At any given moment, the world is completely crazy by the standards of any time but that moment.

If you’re in the present, the past is a crazy place. They did things weirdly differently there. If you’re reading this in 2029, or 2039, well, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t see further than 2019.

The moment – I mean the big moment, this point in history, not just 11.09 this sunny morning on Church Street, Falmouth, heading for The Moor – defines acceptable behaviour.

Our forefathers and foremothers would think us insane for doing things the way we do, and chances are, the next generation will look back on us as sadly unenlightened about what was happening in the world around us.

But we’d think them totally out of order if they turned up and told us how to behave, just as the Edwardians would have had difficulties with, I don’t know, the third week (say) of a modern gender-studies course. Today, at worst (old guy speaking here), we’d just go pink and sit at the back.

Boy, we believe in our own way of doing things. Girl, we do. Same down through history. The prevailing belief system is correct in its own time, incorrect twenty years later.

More than that – in its own time, the prevailing belief system can get to be nigh-on compulsory.

For example, whether or not the science is correct and we’re all gonna die, I’d say the social pressure (around here, at least) is now enough to ensure that a lot happens to tackle climate change. After all, only an outcast or the wrong kind of rebel would drink through a plastic straw these days.

I’d also have to say that the psychology of climate-change denial is probably no longer “I’ve looked at the science and I disagree with you” but instead “I’m a contrarian and I will disagree with anything you say.”

Which brings me to Extinction Rebellion. I have friends who went off and demonstrated recently, and that prompted me to find out enough to defend myself in the inevitable after-protest conversation.

Not that I’m a contrarian or anything, you understand, but with these friends, “You should have been there” can shade very quickly into “Why weren’t you there?” and then just possibly (if they’re tired after their exertions) “Don’t you care enough to be there?”

“I was busy” doesn’t work as an excuse. What’s more important than … et cetera.

“With friends like those, you need other friends.”

“Yeah, but I’m fond of them.”

“So why weren’t you there? Don’t you care enough?”

“Come on, Ed. Don’t you start.”

Edgalcius and I have come to Espressini on Killigrew Street for a coffee. He’s picked himself a pair of square tortoiseshell spectacle frames, and while I write he’s amusing himself by taking them off and putting them on again. Bifocals don’t exist in his world, and (I’m beginning to realise) nor does crystal-clear vision.

“Look at the grain in this table-top.”

“I’m trying to write about Extinction Rebellion. It’s a serious subject.”

“That tree out there. I can see the leaves, the branches.”

“Their demands.”

“It’s all so clear!”

Extinction Rebellion want the UK government to create and be led by a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice (my bold type). Which is why I want to write about them. Think about recent UK-government efforts to decide anything. This isn’t a “declare that it’s horrible” demand, but “create a body that can make a decision,” which is a rare kind of realism these days.

“Yes, but what’s different about a Citizen’s Assembly?”

“As I was about to say.”

If you sort the population into quotas according to demographics, and then you select randomly from those quotas, you end up with an Assembly of Citizens that is more directly representative than, you know, at least one other body I could name.

“Ah, yes. And then - create and be led by. In bold. I get that part.”

“Citizens don’t have a political agenda. They can do the bit that politicians can’t.”

“Like holding a referendum, really.”

“Not quite. Citizens’ Assemblies have been used before, successfully.”

“So have–”

“They’re handy for sorting out controversial issues. A Citizens’ Assembly in Ireland dealt with same-sex marriage, and another achieved the repeal of the ban on abortion. There are other examples.”

“And that’s it?”

Extinction Rebellion also want the UK government to “tell the truth” by “declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change” (although imagine a UK government that was competent enough to hold together a lie), and they want the UK government to “act now” to “halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.”

This is Extinction Rebellion and not It’s All Fine Really, Honest Rebellion, so the truth is going to have to be pretty dire – see above re social pressure – although I think the manifesto does add somewhere (can’t find it now) that if the scientifically verified, openly disclosed truth does turn out to be less ghastly than expected, Extinction Rebellion – may I call you ER? – wouldn’t object.

I think I’ll join these people.

“Not like you, to get into politics.”

He’s reading over my shoulder again.

“It’s not politics, though, is it? ER wants a decision-making body capable of making decisions. That’s actually progress. Evolution, even.”

Edgalcius is tipping his head back to see my laptop screen through the lower part of his bifocals.

“So it’s not just the looming extinction of the planet.”

“Well, that too.”

“But really, you’re joining ER because they’ve come up with today’s equivalent of the coalition government that took over in 1940. A decision-making body capable of making decisions.”

“If we can’t move forward, by deciding what to do, we’re going to lose big-time anyway.”

“Speaking of moving forward…”

“That’s my line.”

“They’re loading up.”

A caravan of yaks and camels is forming just outside the (open) North Gate of the walled town. Princess Eustacia’s voice can be heard over the hubbub – “No, Mummy, I don’t need the Praetorian Guard! I’m going with my friends!” – and in the background, Roland’s voice too – “Of course I’ll wash my hands! Mother! Of course I’ll make conversation with her!”

Pipsqueak is defending his yak against servants trying to load it (her) with bundles of Princess Eustacia’s luggage. Myrtille has ridden a short distance up the road. They’ve been exchanging glances, sharing the joke of all this preparation, but Pipsqueak can tell that Myrtille is getting impatient.

[Ed is too. “Have you seen her tent? It’s going to take hours to pitch. And all those monogrammed bundles. They need to leave now if they’re going to unpack before dark, or they might as well wait for morning.”

“Ed. You’re imaginary. Don’t be difficult.”

“I’m imaginary. Ha!”]

Princess Eustacia comes galloping out of the crowd to where Myrtille is sitting on her yak.

“Can’t we just go?” she says. “Leave it all behind? Do I really need all this stuff?”

Myrtille eyes Princess Eustacia’s horse.

“Sunflower,” Eustacia snaps. “I didn’t name him. And call me Stace, okay?”

[“Ah, plot twist,” says Ed. “She’s feisty now.”]

Roland comes trotting up. “Princess–” he begins.

“Can it, Roly! We’re leaving. We can, right?” Stace turns to Eustacia.

“You’ve got–”

Stace grabs the strap of her rucksack. “Everything I need. Packed it myself this morning. All this” – she sweeps her hand around at all her other luggage, the yaks, the servants – “just anxious parents.”

Myrtille glances across to Pipsqueak. He’s heard. Their eyes meet as he slides a bag of thermal vests off the back of his yak and onto the ground. “Ready?” she says. It’s a challenge.

He grins. “Yeah.”

Stace has caught all this. She spurs her horse, taking them both by surprise, and disappears over the horizon.

“Go!” cries Myrtille, and her yak lumbers into motion.

“Yee-haaah!” shouts Pipsqueak, and his yak raises her head from the grass verge.

“I say! Hold on!” Roland, who has dismounted to pick a posy of wild flowers for the Princess, scrambles back into his saddle.

Together, the three of them ride slowly northwards in pursuit of the Princess formerly known as Eustacia.

And behind them, at the gate, the Queen raises her arm and points. “After them!” she shouts.

Digital identity. Defined online as “an online or networked identity adopted or claimed in cyberspace by an individual, organization or electronic device”.

Further down the same page of search results you find “A digital identity is information stored online that relates to a single individual. We generate our own with every on-line interaction and the data that we leave behind builds a profile of us – which may not be an accurate representation.”

Which is – thanks for those definitions to techopedia.com and shu.ac.uk – not the only problem. All parents sooner or later realise that their children are learning more from what they do than from what they say. In the same way, all users of networked technology sooner or later realise that the entities to which they submit –

– it’s always submit isn’t it? You’re always submitting online, never commanding or controlling or just ordering people about –

– to which they submit their information are learning from what they do, not from what they write in their online profiles.

I went to a presentation recently, by a high-up retail person in a well-known business (and consumer) software company. The subject was how to combine a “seamless” customer experience with effective security.

How they can make sure that you’re you, without getting in the way of whatever you’re trying to do. [Nice idea, huh? They should try it.]

And I learned for the first time that companies can track your competence with the keyboard and the mouse. [Okay, I’m slow.]

I’ve given over a certain amount of information to my, ah, online suppliers. I buy vegetables from companies that know my date of birth, et cetera.

I know that those companies have access to a lot more data about me. I’ve signed user agreements that allow social-media companies to analyse how I behave and (for example) work out how I’m likely to vote. I don’t like it, but I realise that if I want to post pictures of cats, they need to know what I bought last Summer.

I didn’t realise that those same companies are now collecting data on how competent I am at typing, how slow I am to work out which button to click, et cetera.

They know that I’m a fast but not always accurate typist; that I sometimes hit the mouse pad with the heel of my hand when I’m going for numbers; that I always use the number [Redacted] and the symbol [Redacted] when I’m setting a new password.

And if they know how I get around my keyboard, it follows that they’re on the other side of the little inbuilt camera above the screen of my laptop. Cooee! I’m waving.

I’m not surprised by any of this. Nor am I outraged. But I do wonder.

Why isn’t my life perfect?

These people, they know my wants, needs and desires. Their whole preoccupation is with putting exactly the right thing in front of me, just at the moment when I want to buy it.

They’ve spent billions on knowing me.

Why don’t they know me?

Let us go, then, you and I, to take a photograph of diggers.

There’s a building site in Falmouth, half-way up the walk back to my place from Tesco’s. Stop, lean on the wall, and look down.

When the builders have finished, you’ll be looking at the roof of a house (one of two being built), but what you’re seeing today is flat, not-quite-cleared ground – and diggers.

There was also a skip lorry yesterday, for the removal of dumpy bags full of waste, and then there was a tipper truck delivering more ground – or so it seemed; a load the same colour as the surface onto which it was being tipped.

I stopped for long enough to be – impressed, actually.

The big digger flattened the surface onto which the skip lorry would drive, and then parked between the skip lorry and the dumpy bags. One man hooked dumpy bags onto the digger’s arm, and then the digger swung them round onto the skip, where another man unhooked them.

Then the man in the blue plastic hat roped a net over the skip, and reversed the skip lorry out to make space for the tipper truck. While that was happening, the hooking-up man and the unhooking man went and moved other diggers, and presently it came to pass that the tipper truck was able to dump its load of ground into a newly cleared space.

I’ve left out the tiny diggers and their drivers, and the smaller skip full of rubbish that had to be compressed, and the container that was clearly being used as an office, because this is complicated enough to describe already.

But what I want to get across is that there were multiple vehicles, mostly big with caterpillar tracks, moving in a co-ordinated way to enable a lot of things to happen all at once. And men walking about between them, not being run over.

I’ve never worked in construction, but it seems to me that a lot of co-ordination must have gone into the half-hour that I watched. Big vehicles moving out of each other’s way just in time; other big vehicles moving just in time to where they needed to be. If you’d speeded it all up, there would have been a symmetry.

There seemed to be no one person whose job was to tell all the others what to do. But – maybe I’m just not observant. Maybe the planning had been done earlier. A corps de ballet doesn’t need a bloke on stage blowing a whistle, so why should these guys?

That was my first time watching a building site for half an hour, and I’m not sure what I would have expected to see if I’d thought about it in advance. Men (and women?) rushing about at random? Stopping to discuss each move before making it?

If I was to tell the internet about this, or share it on Facebook, I suppose modern practice would be to declare outrage at some prejudice I was revealing in myself. Not to share my interest. You see, I’m clearly -ist about building sites and should be consigned to outer darkness.

“I really don’t get that.”

“That we use the technology to vilify each other?”

“That you’re so vigilant against each other.”

Edgalcius has borrowed an old suit of mine and we’re down at Specsavers on Church Street waiting for his check-up. I offered him a pair of denims and a hoodie, but he wanted the suit. With the braided hair and the beard, and the tan, he looks … distinctive. But I still say the beads in the hair were a mistake.

“We’re a competitive species, I suppose.”

“Predators. You’re always forming into packs. Left, right, colour, gender, nimby, trolls…”

“Nimby?”

“That rare thing, an expression of contempt coined by a politician to attack voters. If a developer wants to build student accommodation – Not In My Back Yard. By opposing builders in your back yard, you’re against progress.”

“Or homeless centres. Or refugee accommodation.”

“Maybe the guy had a point. Human nature again. No wonder so many young people these days turn to fantasy.”

“Speaking of which…”

“Cinema, games, books; it’s the dominant – oh, they’re all fine. Against his mother’s–”

“Mr Mage? If you’d like to come with me?”

“Take a look for yourself. Below the picture.”

“Oh yes, I see. Against his mother’s wishes, et cetera.”

“That’s it. Am I over sixty, by the way?”

“Of course you are, Ed. You’ve been doing this for–”

“So this check-up is free.”

“It’s just this way, sir.”

“Call me Ed, why don’t you?”

Against his mother’s wishes, but somewhat at Myrtille’s urging, Pipsqueak has accepted Roland’s invitation to a Frappuccino at a coffee bar in the centre of the walled town, by the fountain.

Actually replying had been a bit of a problem, until a talking bird had dropped out of the sky, having collided with some levitating plastic waste, and Pipsqueak had nursed it back to health.

Out of gratitude, the talking bird had asked Pipsqueak if he needed any help with anything, and together, man and bird had worded the reply.

They’re all drinking Frappuccinos, because Pipsqueak had just said “Oh, I’ll have what you’re having” when Roland had offered to buy, and Myrtille had said “That sounds great!” and smiled at Pipsqueak in a way that made him feel both comforted and a little bit suspicious that she was finding him funny.

Princess Eustacia – yes, she’s here – had said “Hey, cool, Roly!” in a way that had made Roland look embarrassed and Pipsqueak feel just a little bit sorry for Roland.

The two yaks are outside drinking from the fountain, the two horses are parked in their bays, and a court painter is crouched next to the table, working up a selfie for Eustacia with this amusing company.

It had been a shaky start.

But now, Myrtille and Eustacia are deep in conversation. Pipsqueak has heard the words “socks” and “precautions”, and he’s eyeing the court painter uneasily, wondering what parts of his private life will be going into the selfie’s caption.

Roland is telling him all about what a drag his life in the palace is, and Pipsqueak is regretting asking Roland where exactly in the palace he lives – round the back, to the side, in one of the hangers-on apartments in the annexe; you can’t even see his window in the postcard.

But he braces himself. There’s some scene-setting dialogue to be got through before they can continue the conversation.

“We’ve decided that we’re going together,” he interrupts.

“Eh?” After a second, Roland gets it. “Yes, and now we’re discussing the route and the timing. The Mage has told us that it’s urgent. But we can’t leave until after the party on Saturday. So we’ll have to travel fast when we do go.”

“Eustacia and Myrtille are insisting on coming with us. We’ve told them that it’s– we’ve told them that we can– we’ve accepted their kind offer to lead the expedition.”

They both relax. That’s done. Eustacia and Myrtille are still talking. Without missing a beat, Myrtille reaches out and retrieves the cake-fork that has somehow become embedded in the table-top in front of Pipsqueak. Around the coffee bar, conversations resume. The court painter comes out from under the next table and gets back to work.

“That was clumsy, wasn’t it?”

“We need a writer skilled enough to get that kind of background information across without clunking it out in dialogue.”

“With this guy, imagine if we were on a stake-out.”

“And now it’s not even clear which one of us is speaking!”

Pipsqueak eyes Roland. “Maybe I should be the hero and you should be the sidekick,” he says.

Pipsqueak says. To Roland. Pipsqueak said that to Roland.

The other two are off in their own conversation and didn't hear anything. They're not in this bit..

Roland looks shocked. By what Pipsqueak has just said to him.

“Aheh…hum…ah…” Roland begins. In his mind, there’s an obvious reason why Roland should be the hero and Pipsqueak the sidekick, but he can’t quite put it into words.

He lives at the palace – okay, but it’s still the palace. And Pipsqueak is a – is a – he wouldn’t even get in through the front door of the palace!

Roland, who has his own side-door key to the palace, can’t quite meet Pipsqueak’s eye.

Pipsqueak pushes his Frappuccino aside and stands up. “I need a strong black coffee,” he says. “Anyone?”

“Some more of that cake?” says Myrtille. “For all of us to share,” she adds. She pushes away the plate in front of her, which is empty but for a few crumbs. And a twisted cake-fork.

Pipsqueak, who likes the curve of Myrtille’s hips and her sexy little tummy – but who isn’t an idiot – says softly “I’ll share it with you.”

Eustacia says “Ooh, could I have one of those? With warmed oat milk and sprinkles?”

Pipsqueak looks at Roland. Their eyes meet. The two young men share a moment of perfect understanding.

Meanwhile, two hundred miles up the Frozen Trail that lies ahead of our Hero and her friends, far North of the walled town in which they’re drinking all that coffee and sharing all that cake...

...a teeny weeny little adorably cute fluffy little kitten, recently born, really adorable, tiniest and cuddliest of its (his) litter, who will be looking for an owner soon, somebody to love and be loved by, gazes up at a tall tree with lots of twisty branches and thinks: “I could climb that.”

It's the relentless conversation, isn't it? The endless, endless, endless discussion.

Waking up this morning to a panel debate on the radio about immigration and racism in the USA, my immediate reaction was: these have become such comfort-zone subjects for you, haven't they?

You know what gets said in discussions on these subjects, and you know how to say it. You're at home in this flow of voices expressing safe opinions that we've all heard before.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. But did you go out in the world, with a fresh mind, and research these subjects as though it was the first time? What's new?

Or did you invite people you've heard before, people whose opinions you know, to give a balanced discussion that won't offend?

How often, when we think we're at the cutting edge, are we really fighting for a cause that's already been won?