For those of us who don’t meditate, washing up is the most sublime form of meditation.

I don’t practise mindfulness either, but there’s something so very in-the-moment about plates stacked so high in the sink that you can’t get the kettle under the tap.

Today, now, this minute, I think that there are two kinds of people in the world.

There are people who stack the plates so high in the sink (bringing them in and dumping them down with a sense of a task triumphantly achieved) that there’s no way to start washing up without taking some of them out again (sometimes – pointedly – all the way back to the dining table), and there are people who clear what’s there already before bringing in another lot.

There are people who don’t rinse the suds off before putting a plate to dry, and there are people so twitchy about their own kitchens that they notice these distinctions.

I find that my washing-up practice is best conducted very early on the morning after, to the sound of meditation music – rushing streams, women wailing (tunefully), occasional single notes plucked from guitars.

A very slight not-quite-hangover helps, in that it imparts an urge to get everything precisely just-so.

No, Spellcheck, we need that hyphen.

If the rain is hitting the skylight hard, and everybody else is asleep, and the embers in the fire are still showing a few sparks, and there are leftovers for a quiet pre-breakfast self-indulgence, so much the better.

No, CCleaner, I still don’t want that update. You showed me that pop-up five minutes ago.

If there’s a still-wrapped present under the tree, that everybody missed yesterday, and it turns out to have your name on it–

What am I talking about? It’s the middle of August.

That’s the trouble with unreliable narrators. You just can’t rely on them.

[Important detail I left out: today, I’m planning to write about unreliable narrators.]

We did hold something of a celebration yesterday, and the day was so drenchingly wet that we did light the fire. That was a good idea. But no. There isn’t a tree, and I’m imagining the still-wrapped present.

And yes. Everything else about this moment triggers associations with a December morning after. There’s discarded wrapping paper. The fire isn’t quite out. It was necessary, you understand, to do something with the couple of left-over roast potatoes.

No, Spellcheck. ‘Roast’ is correct.

In that sense, the intended post-festive atmosphere – perhaps you felt it? – has a kind of truth to it, while not being true. Kind of. Discuss.

Much of what makes a story is atmosphere. Which is built up of [I don’t know what] incidental detail, style, voice, crashingly intrusive statements of the obvious. There is an atmosphere of post-festive, slightly tetchy, would-eat-comfort-food-will-settle-for-cold-potatoes-ness hanging over this blog post.

Thank you, CCleaner. No.

Snow is drifting against the dry-stone walls marking out the fields, and down in the valley, I can see a gritting lorry moving slowly along the main road to Alverton. The light is grey with the promise of more snow. [Alverton? What? I'm in Falmouth.]

That is not true, but it should be. The snow only started yesterday evening, but already this morning, when I went out with the dog, I had to push against the front door to get it open. [That’s absolute nonsense. We’re in the middle of August.]

There are children tobogganing down the access road towards our house. Later, we’ll serve them cocoa, and their parents will walk down to join us for coffee. I can see their cars parked along the top road – they won’t risk driving down.

I wonder if Johanna will come.

All that – the tobogganing, the cocoa, the parents joining us – it’s all a Winter tradition [and totally made up]. I’ll leave fitting the snow plough to the tractor for tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. I moved the Land Rover up to the top road last night. Chains? Yep.

I feel a tightness in my chest. Marko will be with her, and the twins. We must avoid eye contact.

Behind me, the log fire is blazing and the house is warm. We hung those tapestries back in ’79, the Professor and I. He brought them back from – well, yes. You know about that. You read his book, of course. It was all true.

The rug in front of the fire. I should remove it, in case she does come.

The bookshelves? Oh, they’ve been there forever. Oak, I think. Help yourself, if you’re looking for something to read. No, not – not that book.

But know what? I don’t feel like writing about unreliable narrators today. Maybe we’ll leave them for another week.

I’ve got that high-definition caffeinated feeling that you get on mornings after, you know?

And anyway, unreliable narrators aren’t people who babble on about snowdrifts and children tobogganing – and they certainly don’t do that on damp grey August mornings that are just possibly warm enough for a swim later.

They’re narrators who are part of the story. At some level. You realise, as you read, that they don’t know themselves, or that they’re emotionally involved, or that they have some kind of agenda. Even when they’re telling, they’re showing themselves.

I don’t think the narrative voice – the voice of the narrator, the voice telling the story – necessarily has to be an “I”, and I don't think that "I" has to be the "I" who sits behind the laptop. Typewriter. Who holds the pen.

I do think that one of the pitfalls of storytelling is that you reveal yourself. That’s not necessarily a pitfall, but it’s a shame if it’s unintended. [You caught that tendency towards irritability, didn't you? I know you did. I'm not really like that. Really. But every time I clear my mind of thoughts, somebody adds a pile of dirty dishes.]

Which is another reason – No, CCleaner! – to be just ever so slightly aware of the narrator. Maybe it’s just you, telling your story. But maybe there’s scope for “you” to be just subtly a character as well as everybody else in the story. [I'm really a nice person.]

Did you see them ride out, that morning, on their quest? That rose-red sunrise, do you remember? I was up on the plateau, waiting to light the signal fire.

Tell me how it was, for you, watching them leave. No, don’t tell me at length; just a couple of lines in passing. You said your goodbyes, didn't you, last night?

As you tell a story, or read one, maybe pause every now and then to ask your narrator a couple of questions. This doesn’t happen every time, but in some stories, you can find – detect, even – a story behind the story.

Read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).

What? Questions? No, certainly not. There’s no Q&A today. Oh, no, that's not what I meant at all.

Ladies and gentlemen, William Essex has left the website.

Hurriedly.

Some days, I think I should just sit here waving back at the trees.

The morning is uniformly grey, there’s a lot of silence around, and the trees are waving at me. Stillness. Except for the trees. It’s about 6.15 in the morning, which is – ah! Sudden flurry of wind, sudden scuffle among the trees. They shouldn’t be fighting, this early in the morning.

It’s 6.15 in the morning, I said that already, which is … some other time in Seattle, Washington. I was speaking to somebody there, video chat, and she had a big mug of coffee while I was winding down at the end of the day.

Now I’ve got the big mug of coffee and – anyway, it’s not morning in America at the moment.

I was going to write about something. Yes. I came across a rant the other day. On the obvious social-media platform. A rant posted to a group dedicated to creative writing.

A woman – young, I think, although I’m not sure – had written a story – a fantasy novel, I think – and failed to convince an agent to take it. I could add another “I think” here, but that would be repetitive: implied in the rant was that she’d tried several agents and they’d all turned her down. She was facing a brick wall.

Except that she wasn’t.

The woman who ranted began by declaring her intention to rant. Then she ranted. She was good at ranting, and while I can’t say anything about her novel, I can say that she is a forceful writer. Ranter. But writer as well, obviously.

Most of the comments on her rant (there were lots of them) suggested that she should persevere. Archetypes were evoked: struggling artist; years of rejection slips; final vindication. But a few of them asked the question that occurred to me. Why did this matter?

Back in the day – no, that day – the publishing industry consisted of small-ish firms (that were about to be taken over by conglomerates) in which editors spoke disparagingly of slush piles and would-be novel-writers without access to social media grumbled into their sock drawers about the impossibility of ever getting published.

These days … we have social media. The phrase “getting published” is still a kind of mantra, as though it’s an end-point rather than a beginning, but the act of getting published is comparatively easy.

Dangerously so, if you’re old enough to believe that manuscripts should be left in a drawer for a while and then run through the typewriter again – not that I’m deliberately showing my age or anything.

But “getting published” isn’t a portal in the way that it used to be, and it isn’t guarded by “gatekeepers” (remember how we used that word?) in the way that it used to be.

Yes, there’s still a “trad” publishing industry – been there, done that – and yes, they’re still as dedicated as ever to not publishing would-be novelists. Now, there’s also an “indie” publishing industry, but no, they can’t lavish their attention on everybody, so yes, they’re becoming much the same (although there was a phase where they bought the rights to out-of-print authors to give an impression of scale).

It’s a human instinct to close ranks around the chosen few.

Now, there’s the free-for-all that is the internet. Where there was once pulp fiction – cheap paperbacks, pamphlets, A5-sized sci-fi/fantasy “magazines” packed with short fiction in tiny print (I have a couple) – now there are e-books and POD paperbacks. [Print On Demand.]

If you remember even further back, to the early printing presses churning out tracts that were nailed to the dooors of churches, famously or not, you might agree with me that today's over-accessible publishing "industry" has a longer tradition than the tightly clenched publishing industry of the late twentieth century. Not that it matters any more, but.

One way to give an impression of high-mindedness is to decry the quality of some of the fiction available on e-readers these days. Fine. But you don’t have to read it. And who are you to deny those people their chance to reach an audience?

This is not going to turn into a rant. This is NOT!

But I’ve been entertaining myself with Kindle Unlimited recently (alternatives are available, etc.). This is not a plug, and I’m not taking money.

I’ve just been enjoying downloading and reading ebooks for free. I’ve discovered authors I would never have tried (and sent some of them back after the first paragraph). I’ve strayed into genres, ditto (and ditto).

In the process, I’ve tolerated writing that hasn’t been as accomplished as it could be, and I’ve been entertained by stories that haven’t necessarily followed a conventional narrative logic. Or any logic at all, sometimes.

To put this as tactfully as I can, I’ve adjusted some of my tolerance levels, and been rewarded for doing so. [There are life-lessons everywhere, right?]

I’m left happy with the idea that anybody interested in “getting published” can do it. Even if what they first decide to publish is a rant about not getting published.

If you’re reading this – I have, after all, published it, so that’s possible – I just want to say: good luck, best wishes, and I’m looking forward to reading your book.

Characters in books tend to know their own back-stories.

We can extend that to characters in films, games, box sets, blog posts and just about anything else that you might care to invent. You understand that I’m talking mainly but not exclusively about fiction, right?

Characters also tend to know what they look like. I’m the character here - because somebody needs to act as the example - and I’m not going to spend any of my third paragraph glancing across at that handily placed mirror and describing what I see there.

Any more than I’m going to sit here reflecting – in detail – on the lifetime’s experience that has brought me to this moment. Not even the relevant bits.

Which is a problem if you’re trying to write a novel that starts with a bloke sitting on a sofa writing a blog post (who is feeling a bit dishonest because the only mirror he can see is actually showing him the ceiling). You’ve written your opening scene, let’s say, and now you need to fill out your character a bit more before he sets off on his quest.

Or doesn't, given that I'm quite busy today. Maybe we could pencil in the quest for tomorrow?

You could do an “info dump” – there’s even a term for it – but like I said, I know all that stuff. I’m just not – sorry – going to sit back on this slightly saggy old sofa, in this cluttered but comfortable room with its view of the harbour through the two front windows and the glass panel on the front door, and tell myself my own back story.

Even if it does add depth to my character.

The harpoon gun and the framed photograph of me with [REDACTED] are going to remain unmentioned. I’m not suddenly going to think back over that time I saved [REDACTED] from [REDACTED] with a spanner and a chisel. When I write a blog post, I think about the blog post, not about my past.

Sorry.

Info-dumping kills any narrative momentum you might have built up, and the worst thing is, it’s incongruous. Like I said, characters just don’t do that.

But you have to get the biographical information across to the reader somehow. If you’re trying to write a fantasy novel, you also have to convey the world you’ve built.

But how do you do that, if you don’t want to stun your readers with all the “necessary” verbiage?

Okay. Yes. You do have to drop bits of information into the narrative. You’re right. But look at this another way. Info-drops (not dumps) can be useful. For one thing, they can be used to change the pace of the narrative.

For example, I’ve just single-handedly fought off a dragon with a frying pan and a domestic fire extinguisher. That scene was so nail-bitingly fast that I think we could all do with a leisurely description of the editorial office I once shared in Holborn, which had a view out over a medieval plague pit. That was a green rectangle of grass among the office blocks. The plague pit where I once found a ring…

What does it say about my character – as a character – that I can remember that green space more clearly than the magazine I was editing back then? What does it say about London, that the ancient dead are left undisturbed? Those ancient dead, anyway. I wonder…

But look! There! On the horizon flying towards us! More dragons! Back to the story and let’s pick up the pace.

Ouch! Sorry. Just caught the ring I’m wearing on the arrow rest of my longbow. It’s an old ring, very old, with an inscription…

Find your own answer to the “How do I tell the reader what she needs to know?” question. There are no rules except the ones you can work out from your best friend telling you “The beginning was good, but I just haven’t had time since then…” and then changing the subject.

Characters know stuff. They don’t feel the need to explain it. But they might mention it in passing.

Be careful not to repeat yourself.

And trust your reader. They – she, if we’re talking about my imaginary reader, who is currently grinning at me from her perch just above my laptop screen – will pick up the slightest clue. Possibly fall asleep if you over-explain, but hang around for more if you under-explain subtly enough. And if all else fails, you can arrange–

“Where did you get that scar?”

–for a convenient interruption by a secondary character you’ve intro–

“Secondary? Excuse me!”

–very important character, crucial to the plot, whom you’ve introduced because the whole book would fall apart without her. Not just because you need somebody to ask a question.

Real reader, I'd like you to meet my imaginary reader. She's the one doing the interrupting (avoid superfluous stage directions). And now excuse me while I answer her question.

“That scar? I was running. The alarm was sounding. The bulkhead door was open, but without thinking, I put my foot on the bottom sill of the bulkhead. That lifted me enough to hit my head on the top sill of the bulkhead.”

“Ugh! Did you get blood in your eyes? Were you on a warship or a submarine? You were on a mission, obviously?”

Good questions, but let’s not answer them. Real readers (let’s hope) will be interested enough to wait around for more detail. If you were writing this, just suppose, I would suggest that you wait until later to reveal that I was recruited – then – and trained – there – in martial arts among other skills.

You’ve said enough already to leave the rest of it until I kick-box my way out of a tight spot.

But really, make up your own rules. What matters is keeping people reading your book. Nothing else matters, not even what your creative-writing teacher says about characterisation. You can invent characters who interrupt–

“Your imaginary reader is a girl?”

“Most people are.”

“I’m a woman, thank you!”

“Most people are female, I meant.”

–as and when you need them. If you have an Invisible Friend as a character, as well as an Imaginary Reader, and let’s give them capitals, your Invisible Friend can interrupt as well, and you can use all the interruptions from both of them to get–

“Don’t tell me you’re bringing him into this! He's invisible!”

–some quite intricate stretches of dialogue, but–

“I’m needed. We’re about to do the he said/she said thing.”

“Go away! This is the one about info dumps.”

[Said my Imaginary Reader. I’m losing the plot here.]

“But if there are three of us–“

[Said my Invisible Friend.]

“Trying to write a blog post here, people.”

[That was me.]

–you need to keep track of who’s speaking at any given moment. Putting in he said/she said can seem cumbersome, but when it’s necessary, it’s absolutely necessary.

“Told you. It’s he said/she said this week. We can do it with three people.”

“You don’t need me, then.”

“You're not listening! Read that last bit again. We’re doing he said/she said, and you’re the only she.”

“Said the Invisible Friend who’s turned up in a ballgown.”

“It’s not a ballgown! It’s a cape.”

“It’s a cloak,” said the person who’s actually writing this. Me. “Black. Heavy-duty cotton. Mostly. I dreamed you up, so I can dress you how I like. I thought about giving you a scythe, but–”

“I like your ring. Haven’t seen that before.”

“She said! Put in she said! People are going to think I said that!”

“Oh, thank you. I dreamed it up a few paragraphs back and started wearing it straight away.”

“Nobody’s going to think you said–“ she said. Began to say. Was interrupted while saying. My Imaginary Reader, I mean. She said that. To my Invisible Friend. Because she didn’t think that you would think that my Invisible Friend would say – sorry, I’m over-explaining. He seems to be Visible now, anyway.

“What does the inscription say?” said my Invisible Friend, politely ignoring the over-explanation. Visible friend.

“Oh, just some stuff about, don’t wear this, blah, blah, if you do, I’ll come and get you, et cetera. I think it’s a prop
from another story.”

“Is this my Easter Egg? I love chocolate! Oh, thank you!”

“What’s that odd scratching noise? Is there somebody at the door?”

“More like slithering. That musty smell. Who’s that moaning? There’s definitely somebody at the door.”

“Talk about an obvious stage direction!” [I’m not sure who said that. I just added it in the read-through.]

“Oh look – suddenly the inconveniently glass panel in the front door, which you specified earlier, is opaque. We can’t see through it.”

“Gosh! There’s a shadow behind it.”

“Hang on, I’ll just see who it is. No – on second thoughts–”

“You've given me a scythe! Thank you!”

“–maybe you should get the door.”

There’s something in the human mind that invites catastrophe.

We grow up with it, entertain ourselves with it, and throughout history, we’ve believed it to be close to us. I had Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as my childhood companion; I’ve enjoyed planning for the Zombie Apocalypse; these days, I’m as convinced as I need to be that Global Warming is really happening.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. But this is an odd kind of panic. Celebrities, activists and others are still trying to convince us that we have a problem. They’re not exactly facing resistance, and whole organisations are now dumping single-use plastic, but down here at “ordinary people” level there’s still a degree of inertia. How do We, capital W, shift that?

[If you’d prefer to replace Zombie Apocalypse in that list above, by the way, I could go with Plague – we were worried, weren’t we, that air travel would spread Ebola to the parts of the world where health insurance is rife?]

Life’s boring without an existential threat – discuss.

Maybe we just don’t know what to do.

There’s a quiet movement gathering up waste plastic, taking milk cartons to the recycling centre, et cetera, but there’s a noisier, less organised movement dropping litter and eating/drinking out of non-recyclable plastic containers. Smoking roll-ups and dropping the filters.

I’ve seen panic. It doesn’t look like this. Felt it, too. Doesn’t feel like this.

Maybe we do know what to do, but we don’t think our own contribution is significant enough to matter. What’s one plastic bottle in the scheme of things?

I don’t know how to answer that, except to say that as the years go by, I become increasingly convinced that we have more of a collective consciousness than we realise. We’re all against certain things that we weren’t against a generation (or two) ago, and no leader, no government, no single influencer caused that change.

We were nudged, yes, but what really happened was: we just changed our minds – our mind. And they – it – stayed changed.

One day, perhaps, dropping a plastic bottle, or a cigarette butt, will be as unacceptable as downing a final double whisky before climbing back into the muscle car and hitting the road at pedestrian-killing speed. But not yet.

We’re not quite ready to stop teetering on the brink of climate change. I suspect that might be it. There’s something in the human mind, et cetera.

There’ll come a day when – I don’t know – food prices go through the roof. The global tobacco crop fails. Whole states, whole countries (and not just small ones) disappear under rising sea levels. I don’t know what it will take.

But on that day, we’ll fix it. Try to fix it. Perhaps fail. Definitely fail.

On that day, we’ll be too late. We need to act now. But how do we shrug off the inertia? Get past that something in the human mind?

Perhaps – I’m more than half serious about this – we need to find the next existential threat before we can move on from this one. If we could buy into the next imminent catastrophe, we’d no longer need to teeter on the brink of this one.

Maybe government agencies could tell us a different scary story. Maybe then – about two-thirds serious, given that after all the official talk and target-setting, there’s still plastic blowing in the hedgerows – messing up the planet would become as boringly distasteful as drink-driving. [Yeah, dangerous too, but my whole point is, that doesn’t seem to work as a primary concern.]

Hey, NASA, we need you now! Isn’t there anything heading towards us on a collision course? Are you sure? Check again. Centres – sorry, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Doesn’t anybody contagious ever get on an aeroplane anymore?

And you in the global food industry – yes, you! Enough with the healthy alternatives! We need comfort food, now!

Oh. Wait.

Words to avoid, at the start of a short piece of writing, are “The” and “I”.

They’re not strong words. “The” was described to me, at the very beginning of my career, as “a deeply boring word” and I’ve stuck with that. I was eventually fired by the man who told me about “The”, but never mind. The company settled. I left by mutual consent. And bought myself a car to replace my company car.

No, there’s nothing actually wrong with starting your post, or your review, or your opinion piece with “The”, but if you want to give yourself an edge – don’t.

Get into the habit of thinking about strong words, action verbs, attention-getting starts, rhythm, active, yada yada, blah blah, droning on, dozing off – Boo!

Surprise is good.

Don’t introduce yourself, either, or explain what you’re writing. “Start in the middle,” somebody once said. If your readers are caught by the start, they’ll pick up the rest as you go along.

“I” is a more recent problem.

It’s typically coupled with “think” or “believe” or “really believe”, and the only difference between those three is that “I really believe” implies “I state this as fact” whereas the other two stop at “I know better, so here beginneth the lecture.”

“I” starts a piece in which the writer is thinking about – do we say “themself” nowadays? I’m not sure – thinking about himself, given that I can see him in my mind’s eye and he’s definitely a “himself” with that moustache and – ugh! – those rippling muscles; how does he do that? – rather than thinking about you, the reader, and what you might want to read.

I lost a comma somewhere in there. Maybe I should go back and count the dashes – nah. It makes enough sense as it is.

If you’re going to start a piece with “I”, remember the reader, and bear in mind that you’re writing a confessional rather than a lecture. “I love you” is good, as is “I will pay you double what you’re getting now to come and work for me.” But any variation on “I believe what we should do about Brexit is…” should be avoided.

The problem with opinions is that nobody wants to know what you think. There are people who like to debate “The Issues”, but that’s a matter for consenting adults and most of them are just waiting for their turn to talk, rather than listening.

Telling us what you think isn’t going to change what we think. Not these days.

But enough about that. “I” is self-reflection while writing is communication. There’s a mirror in “I” that can interrupt your view of the reader.

Use “The” and use “I”. You can’t avoid them. They’re useful. Necessary.

But if you start a piece with either of them, be aware of what you’re doing.

In the recent past, I’ve been told that my paragraphs should be shorter (tick), and that the background image makes – made; it’s gone now – this page look old-fashioned (reluctant tick).

Now it turns out that I’m interesting when I write about writing.

I’m not asking for all this advice – except that last bit: see Obvious enough for you? below – but I’m getting it. Oh, and I’ve also received a fair amount of unsolicited guidance recently on my profile pic, personal appearance and – never mind. What is "brand identity" anyway?

If I start writing about writing, though, I’m going to forget to write about everything else. So here’s just a quick summary of my views on all the major issues of today except writing. I may revise them, go back to them, et cetera, but just in case I don’t, here’s what I think about…

Brexit. You are absolutely right. Thank you for explaining your views at such length. Yes. No, I do understand; no need to explain again. Oh – is that the time? Sorry, I must have dozed off; I really have to go.

The President of the United States of America. Uh huh. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you, sure, exactly, it’s – look, I really must go. Yes, you said that. Look, I agree with you. He is, yes, absolutely, but I have to go.

The Weather. Weird, isn’t it? We shouldn’t complain, but.

Global Warming. Look, I’m not arguing with you. I agree. I agree! I said I’m not disagreeing with you. But surely the question isn’t whether it’s happening, but what do we do about it?

Strong Leadership. Yeah, right, absolutely; we do need strong leadership to sort out all our problems. But have you seen the news recently?

British Politics. Really? Really? I thought it was a satire. You’re not serious.

Strong Leadership. Or studied history?

Weak Leadership. Ditto?

Baked Beans. Do you remember, a few months back, people talked about stocking up on cans, in case Brexit or some other catastrophe disrupted food supplies? They’ve gone quiet, haven’t they? Thinking it through, perhaps. I'd keep quiet if - but I haven't! There's nothing in that big cupboard! I keep it padlocked because - it's empty! That's why!

Climate Change. Yeah, but could we do something about it? No, I’m agreeing that they’re to blame. Absolutely. They’re the guilty ones. Yes! They're going to feel really bad! Ha! So there! But could we do something about it now?

Liberal Democracy. No-platform the lot of them, frankly. We must defend our values. Uh, could you just run through your definition of “liberal” again, maybe? And yes, that referendum was such a bad idea that we definitely need another one to bring us to peace and harmony, ha ha. Oh, you're serious.

Beach Cleaning. Happens a lot around here. In the absence of strong leadership, and in defiance of weak leadership, maybe people taking their own steps to clean up the planet is a good idea, yes?

Greenhouse Gases. Alternatively, we could book the town hall for a meeting, and agree a declaration that we’ve agreed targets to reduce the town’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025?

Artificial Intelligence. Artificial stupidity, don’t you mean? Maybe we could harness the power of technology to solve all our problems? Or spend all that money on feeding, educating and housing actual people? Children, even? Build a human future?

When you set out to write a blog post about absolutely nothing, the important thing is to get the opening sentence right.

It should be arresting, or at least attention-getting, and it should deliver the reader quickly to the second sentence, which can include lots of commas and subordinate clauses. Third sentence can be short. The fourth, if there is one, rounds off the paragraph so that we can move on to the next.

There’s a thing about rhythm, too. Long sentences, short sentences, maybe a rhythm that flows with the logic of what you’re saying.

It’s a speech rhythm, I suppose, and I’ve heard writers talk about finding the tone of voice that goes with what they’re trying to say. That, I suspect, has to do with the idea that you’re always writing (speaking) to one person.

If you’ve got your ideal reader perched above your laptop screen, or settled in your head somewhere, you can work out – intuit, maybe – the tone of voice that goes with speaking to that individual. Same principle as if you’re bouncing a toddler on your knee, or facing an interview panel for a senior post with a high security clearance. Save the baby talk for the – shall we dispense with the predictable joke here?

I said “that individual”; I could have said “that representative of your audience”. I’ve heard it said that when you make a speech, you should pick out members of the audience, one at a time, and speak directly to them, in turn. Reduce the whole thing to a human scale by addressing your remarks to representative members of the audience, rather than the whole mass of faces all at once.

Of course, you don’t want to deliver your entire speech to the increasingly unnerved-looking woman in the third row, which is why I suggest eye contact successively with him over there, her over there, him up there … and so on. You’re talking to another human being, and with any luck, they’ll respond with an appropriate facial expression.

But this is a complete digression from the idea of writing to one person. I can see you there, smiling slightly, one eyebrow raised (now try the other one; bet you can’t), shifting slightly in an effort to make that big chair more comfortable. Is it some kind of throne? Is it resin? Never mind – I’ve got you in my mind’s eye, and I’m writing this for you.

Put down that mug. You’ve had quite enough coffee for one day.

If you’re writing something big, start anywhere and think about the step rather than the mountain. But start. Put the map down, stop discussing routes and start walking. If you’re writing something short – well, you’re nowhere until you’ve got your opening sentence.

Oh, well done. I wasn’t sure if you’d seen him creeping up behind you. All that martial-arts training finally paid off.

Sketch it out and plan it and make notes, et cetera, if you must, before and after finding the simple, declarative statement that is your opening sentence, but don’t think you’ve achieved anything by covering sheets of paper (screens, files, docs; I’m showing my age) with writing about what you’re going to write. Planning is a way of not starting.

Oh, it’s you now. Actually, it’s been you all along, hasn’t it?

What? My usual thing about not starting with the intro? I was going to abbreviate it. You know how, when people write to tell you about something, they sometimes start “I am writing to tell you about something”? My old mentor used to talk about “throat-clearing”; if he got something that didn’t strike him as quite good enough, his first move was to delete the first three paragraphs.

Surprisingly often, that worked.

Have I written a blog post about absolutely nothing? Perhaps not. But at least you and I are back together. I like the cloak, by the way.

And yes, you’re right. It’s a very individual thing. But if a piece of writing is a one-to-one communication, you have to write it as a one-to-one communication. Yeah, yeah, writing for yourself, all that. Been told it, know it. But if you’re only writing for yourself, why not stand in front of the mirror and talk it out?

What’s that? Global catastrophe? Planet becoming uninhabitable? Change of government in the UK? Brexit? Collapse of civilisation? Yes, I know about all that. It’s just – well, you see, there was a sudden spike in my numbers the other week. Numbers of people who read this blog.

I’m far too high-minded to think about such things, of course. But I consulted somebody whose opinion I respect, and she said that I am interesting when I write about writing.

No, I didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question. I reserve the right to be – whatever – by writing about subjects other than writing. But if this is my (huh!) “obvious niche”, then I suppose I should come back to it every now and then.

Yes, I’ll write about all those other subjects, although my opinions are as predictable as anybody else’s – what?

You have a go? Good idea, why don’t you?

No, there’s no tech store, but most of the antique shops along the old High Street have typewriters in the window. There’s even a letterpress printer – a shop, Juniper Bespoke – so you can start in the future, if you like – the past, I mean, the past; we’re still bathed in the white heat of the information superhighway, aren’t we, still relying on tapping screens for everything? Our analogue future is still a few degrees away.

You’ve got a pencil and paper? Oh. Okay.

Yeah, just write. Get started. That’s the trick of it. Express yourself.

What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not a teacher at all! I’m writing this, aren’t I?

Even my ideal reader doesn’t take me seriously.

So my other thought was, how many influential people of the past would still be influential today?

They wouldn’t be solemn and serious and looking at us out of black and white photographs. They wouldn’t have time to write those fat old books that none of us have read.

Einstein would comb his hair. Nietszche would trim his moustache for breakfast television. Karl Marx would be making it big on Facebook and Marcel Proust would have signed up for a Twitter account.

All of them would be wearing pancake make-up and sitting in studio discussions, arguing with people who – for balance – disagreed with them. We’d learn about the Theory of Evolution from a screened argument between Charles Darwin and, say, a comedian-politician who disagreed with him (and made it funny). The presenter would have ended that discussion with “One thing is certain. This argument will run and run.”

Or perhaps a joke with the punchline “God knows.”

Imagine Leonardo da Vinci walking towards us across landscapes, advancing on the camera crew backing away from him, waving his hands expressively and switching from one location to another in the blink of an edit.

Or Karl Marx at the New York Stock Exchange and then at the Alte Borse in Frankfurt. Jane Austen at the Hay Festival and then back in the studio for the week’s round-up of the latest crime fiction.

The books would have been printed on glossy paper, full of photographs; they would have been books of the series. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913) would have included flashbacks, for clarity. [Actually, William…] For Einstein’s TV debut, researchers would have found somebody prepared to argue that E doesn’t equal mc squared.

The big career move, in fact, would be to get on the other side of the argument from somebody big. Property is ownership. E is just E, Albert, actually. Bees can fly.

All this - yes, even that - was designed by somebody intelligent.

And then where would the rest of us find our beliefs?

Whatever the ideology, whether it's liberalism or socialism, capitalism or fascism, we have a collective instinct to impose it. Discuss. Quietly, please, and without involving social media. After five minutes, swap with your partner, and argue the opposite point of view. No shouting. Bonus points to anybody in the group who concedes the possibility, at any stage, that they might be wrong.

Happy day yesterday at the Park Live micro-festival in Kimberley Park, Falmouth. The next Park Live is on 1st September, and by then, the new stage might be open. The Official Falmouth Website, no less, says: "This seven-acre site is the home to many fine ornamental trees and along with the formal bedding areas has helped Falmouth win many Britain in Bloom competitions." Bring a picnic, and a rug or a fold-out chair, and find shade under one of the trees.

Spellcheck is my friend. She mangles walruses in messages for me, and does it so reliably that sending out the correct walruses in an immediate follow-up has become standard practice.

*words*

When I say Spellcheck, of course, I mean Autocorrect … but you never see them together, do you? I suspect they’re different sides to the same personality. Spellcheck is Dr Jekyll to Autocorrect’s Mr Hyde.

One swig of the stuff in the test-tube with the green smoke coming off it, and Spellcheck throws aside the red and blue wiggly lines, to start summarily correcting my English.

*corrupting*

Somewhere in my smartphone is a tiny script going “Hargh! Hargh! Hargh!” in an I’ve-just-drunk-the-potion villain-style laugh. Never did work out why they always found their work so funny, but that’s another bolt-hole.

*blog post*

Today’s subject is warthogs. Aspiring warthogs. And of course warthogging. As a warthog myself, I think of what I do as a form of composition. It’s not exactly music-making, but there’s a rhythm to be achieved within a structure of – okay, rules – that itself transcends the rules. The rhythm transcends the rules, I mean. I said this last week: if you know the rules, you can break them. What matters is clarity.

Sometimes, a walrus like warthog is so obviously not what was intended, that there’s no need for the follow-up.

No, Spellcheck, not “walrus-like”.

Today, I also want to write about Autocorrect in history. And, because I’ve used the analogy, in music. Autocorrect would have added notes to John Cage’s 4’33”, which in its true form – see here for a live performance; it opens in another window – presages mindfulness, today’s fashion for meditation, and much of the modern self-help industry.

If Autocorrect had had her way, we’d all be humming a tuneful – note-packed – little ditty and completely missing the shark attack that marks the start and finish of each movement.

*stopwatch*

Yes, and most prayers would have been reduced to “Sorry about that; please may I have a pony?” But in the absence of an effective messaging format, the corrective follow-up – *penance* – would never have been sent. So many young horses miraculously delivered. We’d be knee-deep in house ducks.

And the Gettysburg Address. Here's Autocorrect’s cut-down-to-the-essentials version. “Eighty-seven years ago, our grandparents founded a nation in the belief that we’re all free and equal. Now we’re fighting among ourselves about that. We owe it to our dead to achieve freedom.”

Sorry. To commit a similar sacrilege on a historic British address, how about this? “We shall fight on the beaches and inland. We shall never surrender, and even if we are invaded, we’ll win in the end.”

Kind of … almost. But no cigar, Boris – er, Winston.

Not now, Spellcheck!

I know smoking can be harmful to your – where did that come from?

No, I know I don’t smoke. It’s just a – oh, go away!

Where was I?

Yes - my problem with Autocorrect/Spellcheck isn’t just that she introduces Abyssinians into straightforward sentences; it’s that she tries to reduce everything to a bland, programmed English. And often succeeds. We value originality, but all our tools iron it out.

*absurdities*

You never hear an artistic success story that starts with “I followed the rules scrupulously, and…” You don’t start an entire new literary movement by producing something that does what it’s told. Rules are descriptive, anyway. They’re really saying “This is what worked in the past.” This is what worked to achieve clarity, I mean.

Clarity, or something else. Somewhere in the deep history of – insert religion here – there’s a bloke (usually a bloke) who did that, dressed like that, at that time on a Sunday (?) morning, and achieved transcendence. So now we have to turn up at that time, to do that, and – no we don’t!

We have to do what works for us.

Like he did.

So keep going, would you mind? You’re not wrong; you’re just doing it your own way. If your own way doesn’t work, well, yes, maybe you should get to know the rules better, but once you’ve made their acquaintance, don’t follow them. Go back to your own way.

Uh oh. I set out to write a post about Spellcheck and Autocorrect – you’ll notice that I’ve split them up and given them capitals – and now here I am telling you how to live – which is exactly what I’m against.

But I get into conversation with people younger than I am – everybody’s younger than I am; I’m talking about “young people” in the conventional sense – and I get the impression that they think the future’s something given to us. Or lately, taken away from us via the cancellation of a certain trade deal that I can’t quite bring myself to mention.

Gimme a break. Your future’s your own. So’s your ambition. If you’re looking for an answer, or an original idea, or an opening sentence, or a story to tell, or perhaps another warthog to share your life with, you won’t find it in the software.

So trust yourself! Get out there and wiggle!

*win*

Made the mistake of turning on the radio the other morning. Haven't done that for weeks. There was a discussion. Very impassioned. Caught my attention. But what were they talking about?

In the UK, 7% of people do this, and a woman was speaking very fast about banning it. Was it eating meat? Drinking out of plastic bottles? Something worse? Keeping pets? Murdering people? No fewer than twenty prime ministers... Oh, politics.

They were talking about private education. People pay money to have their children educated at Public Schools, which are of course private schools. Baby prime ministers get sent off to Eton. State-funded education is provided for free, but people pay to go private. Shouldn't be allowed, said the woman.

Seems to me that simple ideals like "freedom of choice" are quite complicated in practice. There are arguments both ways on this one, but "We don't like people doing this, so we're going to legislate to ban it" is problematic, surely? Doubly so in this case, where the private-school teachers (and the children) might go overseas rather than bring their magic to the state system.

Yeah, and then my radio started talking about - you know, the other thing. Somebody who wasn't prime minister (yet) hadn't said that he wouldn't do something, so a group of MPs had tabled an amendment to stop him doing it. Uh huh.

My radio eavesdrops on a world where the first instinct is to stop things happening. Not sure what kind of an -ist this makes me, but I'm really not sure that I live there any more.

In other news, we went to a party the other night. It was so-so, fun in some ways, not in others, and we voted by a narrow margin to leave. We went out to the entrance lobby, and then one of us said "We can't just walk out the door!" Somebody else suggested the back door, and then the idea came up that we could climb out of an upstairs window. "I'm not going to let us jump off the roof!" said somebody.

Our hosts were standing right there, watching us. By this time, they'd stopped urging us back into the party, and were clearly just waiting for us to leave.

There had been talk of us taking food and drink with us, and continuing the party outside. But that obviously wasn't going to happen.

"We could stay!" one of us said. "Let's vote on it again!" she added.

And we're still there, talking about staying or leaving, doing neither, stuck.

Sometimes, at charity events, a video is shown of a horse race from the past. Nobody knows who won the race, nor indeed where it was run or when, so everybody bets on the race and the losing money goes to the charity.

Moving on, I wonder if this idea could be worked up into an audience-participation television event. Re-run a general election from the past, with as much of the original verbiage as possible, in real time over three weeks (?) and see what result we get today.

Make it a scorcher of an election - one of the Thatcher landslides, or the one that brought President Nixon to the White House (run it over longer than three weeks), or the one that brought - you know, that guy - to power in Germany.

Obviously, some genius would have to come up with a way of disguising the real event, but even if that failed, it could create some media coverage. But if the election could be "anonymised" somehow, I wonder whether we'd get the result that a previous generation did.

Or maybe just run the whole thing again, exactly as it was, like we're re-running the moon landing now. An actor to play Margaret Thatcher, an actor to play Michael Foot, and at the end of it, the audience votes.

Talk about "rewilding" Heathrow Airport and the need for "strong, decisive leadership" in tackling climate change.

In other areas of human activity, we talk about consent.

Perhaps instead of forcing people off their aeroplanes, we could encourage the IT industry to develop viable large-scale teleconferencing facilities, crossing say Skype with wide-angle lenses and IMAX cinemas, so that diplomats could think and negotiate in their own time zones, jet lag could be abolished, and climate-change summits wouldn't require quite so many gas-guzzling motorcades.

Stop me if I'm missing something. The people voted for the representatives to take decisions for them. But the representatives decided to ask the people to decide for them. And the people voted for a decision that the representatives wouldn't have taken. So the representatives, having asked the people, got stuck with implementing a decision that went against what they would have decided.

Now the representatives have given themselves power to block implementation of the decision taken by the people at their request. But not to propose an alternative. This is a logic loop, and it's ruining the game for me.

Right. Let’s get this started. Wednesday morning, time to kick off another blog post. The seagulls were shouting and screaming earlier, but now, everything’s gone quiet. Trees waving just slightly, but no birds at all now. Flat, albeit slightly flurried, calm. I’ve never really thought about the word “overcast” before, but I think this is it. The greyness of the sky has just, I’ll have to work on this, soaked down a bit, no, been left to infuse into the air, that’ll have to do, so that the Roseland is a deeper grey band under a grey sky and over a grey sea.

Nothing you could actually point to, and say “That is the sky.” Matching sea: grey, barely awake. The trees nearest to the house are still green, and they’re moving just slightly, so I suspect this is going to turn out to be a pleasant, fresh morning for my walk – my occasional morning walk; that makes it sound more regular than it is – and just a little bit more blowy and breezy than it looks from this just-got-up room. I shall have to take a notebook with me.

[Later the same day. Same room, but the light in the kitchen next door has been switched on. Noises off to represent: extractor fan, saucepan on gas cooker, eggs boiling. As the curtain rises, William bends over his laptop.]

Overcast and probably high pressure – close, anyway. But there was a bit of movement in the air, so no need for the word “muggy”. Short version: I enjoyed my walk. There was a Scottish couple (accents) who agree with each other, as I passed them, that this weather was preferable to “that cold”. There was a young man with a dog that touched its nose to my hand as they passed me (I can’t quite bring myself to word this so that I have to clarify: dog’s nose, not boy’s), and then there was a man, my age, tanned, dressed for fitness, who went past with his smartphone held up to his face. Looking into it.

I thought about that for a bit, then I sat down on the high kerb at this end of Wellington Terrace, pulled out my notebook, and wrote the post below the picture. Most of it, anyway. Some of it. Okay, the opening sentence. I didn’t balance a laptop on my knee and write with an inane grin on my face, but in every other respect, that was a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge moment. I was “on the go”. I was “in control”. Just a pity I was writing in a small black notebook with a dragonfly printed on the front. Pity I was using a cheap felt-tip I bought from Sainsbury’s in Truro.

I had to wait for the notebook to open up, of course, and then I had to wait while it installed an upgrade and asked me to confirm my identity, so it was probably a good thing I didn’t start with an inane grin on my face – keeping it up would have given me cramp. I had to open a new page, but at least that didn’t take long. [Additional marks will be awarded to candidates whose papers include discussion of why the writer is talking such nonsense.] Getting the felt-tip to work was easy by comparison: I took the lid off and it was already fully charged.

A fine walk. But we’re no nearer writing this week’s blog post. I came back to the house and sat down and, yeah, here we are. [Why does the writer omit any reference to putting eggs on to boil? 10 marks.] I did have an idea for a piece under the title “What happens to pond weed?” but that both overdoes it in the arresting-opening-sentence department [Huh? 5 marks.] and doesn’t get me to the answer I wanted to reach, so we’ll brush that one back under the carpet. My idea was that over-populations correct themselves.

Ponds with a lot of weed in them tend to attract weed-eating insects and animals. Summer weather conducive to wasps typically ends with a hard frost – or at least, we notice the first hard frost, and imagine the wasp:frost symmetry. I was going to go from there to saying something about dominant species that damage the climate by their over-use of fossil fuels, but I couldn’t quite make the logic work. It’s just that I’ve been part of several conversations recently – enough to be, ah, “statistically significant”, at least to me - in which the problems of the world have been blamed on over-population.

Global warming, lack of car-parking spaces, crowded beaches, green ponds and waterways, NHS in crisis, slow internet and populism – all down to the over-supply of people. There are too many of us, and what I was going to say is … oh, I can’t be bothered. Falling birth rates, aggressive climate, yes, you’ve been in those conversations too, haven’t you? Thanos, in that film, deletes half the population to save the other half, right? So it’s down there in the collective subconscious. Yeah, yeah, we’re wrecking our own habitat. But isn’t that just … what we’re instinctively going to do?

Who knew that when we finally got our communications technology perfected, it would be full of distractions? What made us do that? We had so much to say to each other – or thought we did.

I remember those aspirational ads in which young urban sophisticates dashed between meetings, holding bricks to their ears and looking serious about whatever they were hearing (younger readers: pre-smart mobile phones used to be the size of bricks). The glossy-magazine ads in which a clutch of male and female supermodels in designer clothes gathered around a laptop to be beautifully impressed by whatever they saw on their shared screen.

Oh, and do you remember the one in which a vaguely arty-looking fit and healthy barefoot young person sat in a tree with his laptop to work on his screenplay? And that other one – the vaguely arty-looking fit and healthy barefoot young person sits cross-legged on a log in the middle of a stream with her laptop to work on her screenplay between bouts of meditation?

You don’t? Oh. Maybe my interior life is stranger than I realised.

You must remember the (epistolary?) novels written entirely in exchanges of text messages? And all those (printed) guides to “text-speak”? No? Really? Well, I have one of those to show you! It’s just … here. How strange…

Somebody must have moved it. I’m sure I had it right – never mind.

My point being, of course, that we’ve got everything we dreamed of having, oh, ten, twenty years ago. Back when technology didn’t really work very well, and the bandwidth wasn’t there, and the processing power was barely 100 times what it took to get us to the moon – back then, we could really see what was coming. The paperless office, remember? The intelligent fridge? A lot of talking animatedly into our phones about serious things?

I used to think that the spy novels of Len Deighton were written to make office life seem interesting – sorry, that line floated in from a parallel blog post. There’s a parallel universe in which I write about the spy novels of Len Deighton. It’s probably also full of lost guides to text-speak.

It’s just interesting, that’s all I’m saying. Those of us who are digital immigrants (remember that distinction?) can not only see how the world has changed, but also how far it has deviated from all the predictions. Every generation learns this eventually, I think: the obvious, or at least predictable, outcome isn’t the one that comes. There are too many variables.

Now that we have the technology, we’re having fun with it. More importantly, now that we’ve got it, we can forget about it and move on to the next stirring vision for the future. Which is ... ?

Why am I attracted to women? I am a rational, reasonably well educated, probably quite cultured (if we still use that term), politically aware, economically aware, socially aware, not young (but still middle-aged if you stretch the definition) user of social media in a late-stage Western liberal democracy. I post. I have Friends. I Like and am Liked in turn. I worry about plastic and global warming. I own a Fitbit so therefore I am health-conscious. If you provoke me, I’ll tell you exactly what I think about Brexit.

And yet, as I sit at one of the tables outside Picnic on Church Street, eating lunch and discussing where to go next – this was the Sea Shanty Festival last Saturday; Falmouth is full of music in the Summer – I notice that without any conscious input from me, without conscious permission, my eyes just happen to be following, um, people of a certain appearance as they pass along the street. Not all the time, but - picking them out one at a time and following them, like a very slow-motion tennis match: watch one out of sight; pick up another coming the other way.

No, it wasn’t exactly like that; I just liked the tennis metaphor. Just occasionally, you know, just occasionally noticing and, well, my eyes were doing it, that’s the point. Nothing to do with me – yes, okay, something, but unconscious, like I don’t tell my heart to beat. “As a writer,” to use a phrase popularised in the media, I’m using the example of – well, that – to kick off yet another post about the human condition: we are more than our conscious minds, which contravenes a lot of what we seem to believe about ourselves these days. We may think we’re in charge, but. There are aspects of ourselves, little behavioural thingummies, that give the lie to rationality and planning.

I was with Somebody at that table, capital S, which – who – was enough to fill my attention, and (spoiler alert) we then failed to get into The Grapes (packed), stood outside Mango’s (big open windows; we could see as well as hear the band) and then spent a very happy afternoon following the music and meeting people through the pubs and cafes and, er, Watersports Centre along Church Street, Arwenack Street and into Events Square … and then later, back again to The Moor and to the marquee outside the Seven Stars, and then to the upstairs bar where the Strumpets were singing.

And finally, not to leave the story incomplete, to Asha, the Indian restaurant. There are moments in life, moments typically brought on by sunshine, music, the news that you’ve just walked 11,792 steps, when the answer to every question seems to be: a cold pint of Cobra beer. Every question except one. Why am I attracted to women? Or rather, to refine the question down to what I’m really asking, what’s with this unauthorised person-watcher lurking on the edge of my consciousness, looking out through my eyes, directing a fragment of my attention towards opportunities to, um? I mean, at my age. It just doesn't fit. It’s so incongruous!

He’s presumably part of the team that handles the sub-routine for the fight-or-flight response. And working in the same office in the primitive part of my brain is the sub-William who presses the buttons to make me crave a Cobra when I’m, I don’t know, or an apple when I’m short on Vitamin C, or, er, something full of protein when I need protein (with my conscious mind, I don’t even know enough to construct the example). I wonder if there’s something slightly more than just “She looks nice!” in what that subterranean sub-William sees.

I wonder if combining that woman’s qualities and my qualities would … perhaps I won’t continue this train of thought. But – yeah. DNA. Genetics. Every now and then two pairs of eyes meet, and maybe there’s a level at which two people assess … I believe I said I wouldn’t continue this train of thought.

I wasn’t born yesterday. I know about the birds and the bees. That thing with the stork. Peacocks, peahens and those apes with the red bottoms. I know what happens when two beautiful young people with perfect dentistry Like Each Other Very Much But Can't Admit It Until Nearly The End. I’m a rational, et cetera, and I know the answer to the question at the top of the page. It’s just that, frankly, that answer strikes me as, yes, incongruous. My italics. I mean, I’ve actually read Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. I own an iPhone. I can clear a whole pub full of sea-shanty enthusiasts with the strength of my views on Brexit (actually, I can’t, and I’ve got the bruises to prove it). I’m here, now, writing a blog post in the slatted sunshine through the window, feeling quite good about myself, feeling quite, I suppose, civilised. And yet I’m sharing my head-space with this – ooh, look at her!

And sharing it with a vivid imagination, given that I’m on my own in here with the blinds not yet up. Alone except for the sub-routine that’s telling me it’s time for another coffee. Don’t entirely trust that one, but – hold on. Aaah, yes. Coffee. Just what– Where was I? Yes, I realise that this isn’t just me. Everybody has a version of the same thing going on. We argue about – everything, these days – and yet relationships keep on happening and the human race keeps on making babies. The Victorians wouldn’t have begat the Edwardians without the occasional intrusion of incongruous thoughts, after all. And so on back through history – and up and down Church Street, and throughout nature. At the duck pond the other day, I watched tiny fluffy baby ducks grubbling (yes, spellcheck – grubbling; look up “neologism” – no, don’t; it isn’t) around in the shallow weed for whatever they eat, and I thought: that isn’t learned behaviour. It’s there already.

Those ducklings were carrying pre-installed software to deal with hunger. I have pre-installed software to ensure (a) that I eat an apple occasionally, and (b) that the human race survives. My installation of (b) is not very useful on a day-to-day basis, not to me, quite embarrassing actually, but look around you: that program has been very successful over the centuries. All these people! And it occurs to me to wonder: if the ongoing success of the human race (and animals, and of course plants) is being handled by the unconscious primitive-brain department, what does that say about the conscious mind? Not an easy question to ask, as we negotiate our way through today’s big issues, but … did we check the foundations, before we moved into this building? Did you hear that?

Hold off on your playing of the glass-bead game while I go slowly down this narrow creaky staircase to the basement and reach out my hand – slowly – to the handle of that door standing ajar with the darkness behind it. What do you mean, let’s separate? Have you been watching television again? We’re in this together. This is our metaphorical house. No, I don’t think we were ever consulted on the design. Yes, I know about that dark patch on the blueprint for the basement, but I thought we agreed to ignore it. Hang on while I just – argh!

And then – because there’s also an inbuilt instinct to worry about disaster, from the Apocalypse of Revelations through to the Cold War’s Mutually Assured Destruction and all the way to today's Global Warming – it crosses my mind to ask – what if the whole of human civilisation was just a defensive primitive-brain move against the darkness? What if we grouped together to defend against predators, built that into tribes, built that into nations, went too far and built that into globalisation? What if all that was driven by the unconscious – by instinct? And what if, now, it’s all unravelling because we built something beyond what we intended to build? Are we all – wait for it – doomed?

Brexit, nationalism, populism, localism (no, wait, that’s a good thing) and borders closing. If nature built in a bunch of unconscious primitive-brain fail-safes – fight or flight, band together, et cetera – to handle the existing threats of day-to-day life in the wild, and unchecked they all led to civilisation, then globalisation, what new sub-routines will emerge now that we’re civilised? And globalised?

As you might ask if you thought in these terms: what rough beast is this, its hour come round at last, slouching towards us out of the darkness, refusing to take the rational, sensible, economically literate answer? Whatever will we vote for next?

Invitation to a thought experiment. First, choose between two possible scenarios. One, I was playing with my smartphone the other day, and I happened to open the Notes app. Two, I was hacking my way through impenetrable jungle the other day, when I stumbled through into a clearing and found a temple. Entering the temple, I found a scroll.

Chosen? Good. In front of me is a piece of writing. Tapped in quickly with a pair of thumbs (smartphone scenario), scratched hastily on the parchment by a scribe with a hangover (jungle), the piece of writing reads as follows:

“Let us imagine that you start with/as a lump of clay, and are gifted somehow with the ability to mould yourself into whatever human being you want to be. At some point there’s the fingertip-to-fingertip thing of introducing consciousness, and you are allowed to give yourself all the qualities that the good, bad or morally ambiguous fairy would impart at your naming, christening or equivalent ceremony. The goal is to end your clay’s life with a positive score on morality. Problem is, if you start good, you have to be really good. If you start bad, every good impulse counts for something. Who would you be?”

I do this. I trudge through the pre-dawn neighbourhood (hack my way through the pre-dawn jungle) wrestling with metaphysical speculations about the nature of reality, morality and anything else that occurs to me. And sometimes, I write the results down. On this particular morning, I think it must have crossed my mind that in all the myths and most of the realities, bad-to-good gets more traction than stayed-good-throughout. To be saved, for example, you first have to be unsafe. The prodigal son really has to mess up before he’s welcomed home.

What does that say about the human mind?   

Not that I’m superstitious or anything, you understand, but having written at length about my own funeral last week, and having enjoyed myself (even) more than usual lately, I think I should make it clear that I intend to live forever. I don’t have space in my diary for anything else, actually.

Not being superstitious, I haven’t just played through my head the conversations about irony – as in “he wrote that, and then that happened” – that would ensue if, you know, I, um, over the next few days. But I have enjoyed myself rather a lot lately, and I did write that, so … I think if you don’t mind I’ll just describe the morning walk I take most mornings and will be taking every morning until further – until nothing! What am I saying? Will be taking every morning. Perfectly rational. Not superstitious at all. Just describing it because it’s worth describing.

I leave the house, and if it’s today, I think about childhood Summer holidays. The trees are moving, and noisy, and the wind carries flecks of rain. This is the weather for walking down to the beach with spade, bucket and crab-line. This is the weather for not wanting to be the only child on the beach in a complete set of waterproofs. Picnic out of a hamper, wait an hour to swim, and then later, have the sand brushed out from between my toes before I can put my shoes back on. This is that weather. Piling up walls of sand against the tide. The weather for shivering, and then being wrapped in a towel. Soul weather, by one definition.

More recently, this is the weather for walking down Trelawney Road from the top, the big trees moving in the wind, then crossing the road at the bottom and going round (okay, spellcheck – around) past the cinema into The Moor. There’s a bus shelter outside Wetherspoon’s where, if you happen to be me and it’s a day like this, you can sit and watch the trees up the slope above Good Vibes, Espressini, et cetera. Yes, I have a thing about trees. Down from Good Vibes (et cetera) is the paper shop. Up from Espressini (et cetera) is a shop called Matt’s RC Garage, and that’s going to matter in years to come.

RC as in Radio Control, of course, not Roman Catholic nor Rigid Containers. But we’ll get to Matt and his establishment in a few paragraph’s time. Right now, we’re walking down past the bottom end of Jacob’s Ladder, past Tesco on the other side, past Bow, which sells bags, and round into Church Street, which is cobbled (except where it isn’t, but the water-main people have promised to put the cobbles back). If you time it just right, Church Street is packed with outsize delivery trucks squeezing past each other. At Wilko, until recently, the pre-opening cleaners played loud music to themselves over the PA system.

Church Street, and then the slope down to the Church Street Car Park, which is actually Fish Strand Quay, which is where Captain Lapenotiere arrived in the schooner Pickle in November 1805 with news of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson (readers unfamiliar with the history: naval battle; admiral who won it but was killed). They’re refitting the closed pub by the slope – probably not the same “Them” who work behind the scenes to rule the world through the Illuminati. If you walk to the far end of Fish Strand Quay, you come to a slightly lower area of the car park where there are occasionally early-morning exercise classes.

Then it’s up past the sailmaker and the figurehead, past the oyster restaurant and the build-your-own breakfast café – the Wheelhouse and the Rumbling Tum respectively, been to the first (yes!), not the second (I’ll get there) – and out of the stone archway onto Church Street, That was Upton Slip, named after Captain Upton (readers unfamiliar, he was mayor of Falmouth in 1708), and now we’re crossing Church Street again and heading up Well Lane, past the craft shop and Pea Souk, and now here we are on New Street facing the steps. We need to go up and then diagonally across the cleared grass.

This is where the long-term planning comes in. I’ve heard it said that the test of really good writing is that it needs only the bare minimum number of words to get a huge amount of meaning across – plot, character, emotion, scene-setting, et cetera – and if this post qualifies as really good writing, you’ll already know that in the window of Matt’s RC Garage, there’s an all-terrain radio-controlled vehicle, maybe the term would be “muscle car”, or “utility”, or some such, on which each wheel has been replaced by three wheels within a caterpillar track – so that it has a kind of triangular tank track at each corner. On its own scale, this thing would be extremely handy for climbing steps. I need one. Scaled up. Or rather, I need its wheels – tracks.

Walking is a good time for thinking, or indeed forward planning, and the current recurring daydream – they tend to last a few days each – is all about how I’m going to take this walk when I’m as old as, I don’t know, that 25th-Dynasty Egyptian mummy in the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro. Iset Tayef Nakht was a priest from the Temple of Al Karnack, I find. Busy man, no doubt. I suppose he had people to carry him around. I need – eventually, I’m going to need – a mobility scooter with a souped-up engine and some serious step-climbing wheels – triangular tank tracks, in fact. Iset went off into the next world in a carved box surrounded by representations of all the things an Egyptian man of that time would have accumulated in his shed. I need something that’ll get me to the sunlit uplands of Vernon Place and beyond.

Some time back, Jack London wrote a book with the title The Call of the Wild (1903). Self-explanatory title, I’ve always thought. I don’t exactly feel the call of the wild as I walk past Matt’s RC Garage in the mornings (strictly, I don’t, because I go round by the cinema; let’s call this artistic licence), but as I glance in the window at all the gadgets, remote-controlled cars, aeroplanes, accessories, shiny things, I do feel the call of something. I said goodbye to my last mid-life crisis a while ago, and I’m not quite ready for my second childhood, but … something. Taking a small radio-controlled vehicle for a walk every morning would be an alternative to getting a dog, I suppose, but … no. It’s not that.

The call of the Inner Child, maybe? I don’t know. Do I need to develop an interest that requires more hands-on work than just tapping on the screen of my smartphone? Not sure. Maybe. I'll go in one day. But in the meantime, if this weather continues, I’m definitely buying myself a bucket. And a spade.

Could we hold the American chickens for a moment, please? Hold the chlorine, and I suppose, hold the mayo? I went to the cinema a few days back, to see a ballet, live, piped in from somewhere else. There was an interval, and in the interval, I felt thirsty. Now, this wasn’t the West End, where the drinks we’d booked for the interval would be waiting for us at a table in the bar. This was the Phoenix Cinema, Falmouth, where there is a bar, perfectly good bar, and a food menu as well, good place to eat before or after a superhero film, and actually, they’ll bring your order to you while you’re watching – sorry, I’m getting side-tracked.

There’s a bar, but the bar’s upstairs and I was downstairs, and sometimes, when you know that everybody else has gone upstairs, and when you’re really too thirsty to go up and join the back of the drinks queue that just came out of Screen One – I went to the ticket desk. Here, the choice was between a blue Slushie and something from the fridge. Nothing against Slushies, and do look them up online (gosh!), but – reader, I bought myself a plastic bottle. With fizzy water in it. Yes, I have been thinking about the self-exemptions we give ourselves when we care about the planet. Yes, I am totally and righteously against waste plastic. But … this was me and I was thirsty.

Surely, if I’m genuinely and sincerely against plastic waste, I can buy myself a plastic bottle when I need one? Just like – no, I’ll stick with my own example. Just one teensy-weensy plastic bottle containing a mere 500ml of ice-cold fizzy water filtered through the layers of prehistoric rocks and minerals behind the Phoenix Cinema’s chiller cabinet? Surely? The salutary moment was the look of genuine shock on the face of one of my companions when I returned to my seat with my plastic bottle. The answer to the question(s) in this paragraph turns out to be … no. Just because I consider myself to be one of the good guys, doesn’t mean I can be bad occasionally.

To get the rest of the virtue-signalling out of the way quickly, I wrestled with my conscience, bought a Sodastream, couldn’t get it to work (this says more about me), bought half a dozen glass bottles of fizzy water, read the Sodastream instructions, asked for help with it, got it to work (well, I didn’t exactly), search-engined my way through a lot of online stuff about the wickedness of bottled-water companies, blah, blah, blah, drank a glass of water poured from a glass bottle, and got on with my life. By which I mean: I got on with a long weekend of dropping out of the news cycle.

No matter what I was doing; that isn’t the point. What matters is: I had a long weekend of not hearing any news at all. Nothing whatsoever. The sun shone. The rain fell. The days went by quickly because we were enjoying ourselves. I missed the whole of a controversial state visit, and a big chunk of a leadership race. The climate changed, but in my bit of it, the weather was just weather. I didn’t hear any news for about, oh, five days. The sun shone, the birds sang, the tide came in and out. The milk arrived in the mornings, the post in the early afternoons, and at intervals, the washing machine rumbled in the background.

I remember exactly where I was when that happy time ended. Where I was, but the point here is how it ended. There I was, in my state of disconnected bliss, and all of a sudden, somebody threw a bucket of cold water into my face. No, wait, that’s the metaphor. What really happened was: all of a sudden, somebody launched into a detailed description of the treatment meted out to chickens by “agribusiness” in the USA. The treatment of chicken farmers as well. Pigs came into it. And I thought: oh no! I’m back on this planet. Having been so totally tuned out, I couldn’t immediately connect with the details; it was more that we were bonding over indignation; that such things are done in the world; that being indignant about them is the other half of the human condition; that nothing is far away any more. There was automatically a side to take, but for once it was the side-taking that struck me first.

If what I was told is true, you may assume that I agree with you. Yes, I get it. But what I want to know is, why are we like this? Why can’t we just be happier in the world? Kinder to life? Answer: (1) because people behave in ways … and (2) we can’t help finding out about them and (3) we react as we do. Those ways might be expedient, and perhaps there are arguments on either side, et cetera. It’s a shame, in a way, that we’re all so committed to getting our own side across. But just altogether – why? What is it about the human race? I’ve lived in rural places where the animals have lived happy lives that ended too quickly for them to know about it. I’ve lived long enough to know that we’re worse to each other, physically, spiritually, mentally, than we are to any other living thing. How is it that we don’t learn to live? To live in nature?

I’ve kept chickens, and I remember a farmer saying to me once, after a not very successful attempt to hatch eggs in an incubator, “The fact is, William, the hens are better at this than we are.” I’m neither vegan nor vegetarian, but if there’s horribleness involved, I’m going to have to look elsewhere for my lunch.

Here we go again. Another leaflet through the door for a funeral plan. Am I supposed to identify with the male half of the couple on the front? His partner does look delighted that he’s got his death covered. “Plan for your future,” says the line at the top. That’s cheerful. By the logic of this leaflet, my future is a deathbed surrounded by relatives happy that they don’t have to pay for my funeral. I wonder if the plan allows for the hire of professional mourners.

Assuming there’s a funeral-pyre option, I want mine built on a barge, Viking-style, and towed out to sea from Prince of Wales Pier, Falmouth. I want crowds. I want trumpets and cymbals and those professional mourners wailing and – I don’t know whether I can stipulate this – gnashing their teeth. Lots of uncontrolled emotion – and let’s hope for a mix-up in the bookings so that there’s also a clown to distract the children. Oh, and wouldn’t it be great if there were several mysterious women dressed entirely in black (blacker black than everybody else), with veils over their faces, who queue up to drop a series of single red roses into the water? At five-minute intervals, perhaps?

And fireworks, of course. Yeah, and a representative from the insurance company underwriting the plan, who doesn’t quite know where to put the tasteful corporate-colours bouquet he’s brought to demonstrate his company’s commitment to customer service at all times. Finally, distracted by the clown pulling an egg from his ear just as he’s got up the nerve to ask the nearest mysterious woman whether she has any plans for later, he panics and hurls it into the water, where it skims like a flat stone until it catches up with the barge. And then sinks like a stone because he’s forgotten to remove the brick of funeral-plan leaflets that he was supposed to hand out to the mourners as they left – not to the professional mourners, said the memo.

Or could it be that the funeral-plan leaflet – that I’ve just put through the shredder – doesn’t offer any of those options? Could it be that the funeral-plan leaflet doesn’t even invite me to choose between lying on my back for a very long time and blowing in the wind? I wonder if the late funeral-plan leaflet – much missed, now that I need to check up on these details – doesn’t really care what I want, so long as my plans for the future include paying the company behind it a regular income. A regular income from money that would otherwise go to my descendants. Who wouldn’t charge an “administration charge” or a “set-up fee” before paying for anything. I think I can manage without financial planning for the hereafter, if what that really means is signing away today’s money to corporate strangers.

Financial planning, I said, not fraud, although they’re easily confused. When did we all get so single-mindedly obsessed with money? For quite a lot of my life, it occurs to me now, there’s been at least one insurance company whispering in my ear, offering me the opportunity to commit to paying a regular monthly amount towards the distant prospect of something that a conventionally minded unimaginative person would imagine that I wanted at that age. My first credit-card offer – oh, the nights out I’d have, the consumer technologies I could buy, so easily, so easily – and all those offers of loans towards the deposit on the motorbike, the car, the flat, the debt burden. All I ever had to do was sign a lengthy contract, full of small print, that committed me to providing an insurance company with a long-term income…

…and I suppose I should apologise for the dismal subject-matter (and length) of this week’s post, but hey, why don’t we all just blame the insurance company? After a lifetime of sending me glossy sheets of paper that I didn’t want, full of opportunities that came to me anyway – or didn’t – without their expensive intervention, their final pitch is this: pay us an income for the rest of your life, and when you’re dead, nobody will be out of pocket.

Well, great. All that Western Civilisation, all those ancient Greeks, Romans, writers, artists, self-help gurus, enlightenments, renaissances, German philosophers with difficult beards and unpronounceable names, the sixties, the eighties, The Economist magazine, all that Harnessing The Power Of Modern Technology, Wired, Terry Pratchett, the Mona Lisa, Kindle, NaNoWriMo, the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (seriously; all those lumped together in one ministry) – all that, and it comes down to this: we want your money.

And here, right on cue, is another credit-card offer. It’s offering me a competitive rate on balance transfers. It comes from the bank where I’ve had an account since I was fourteen, and it includes a leaflet detailing how they’re using my data. Now. If you’re me, you’re probably wondering: how can this bank, of all banks, not be aware that I haven’t had a credit card for upwards of twenty years?

If you’re me, you’re wondering whether it’s possible to have a “balance” to “transfer” if there isn’t even a credit card to transfer it from? I mean, my finances aren’t that healthy, but – no. Full stop. This doesn’t work. If you’re me, you’re wondering about that, and about the embedded inaccuracy of all the data collected about us, and you’re playing around with some neat but overstretched metaphor that involves bears, woods and toilet paper – and you’re missing the real point.

But you get there in the end. In my lifetime, I’ve gone from a credit culture in which the objective of a credit card, or a loan, was to buy a television or a sound system now rather than at the end of the month. I’ve gone from that, to a credit culture in which the objective of a credit card is to manage existing debt.

I thought the financial crisis was ten years ago – more than that. I thought we’d killed that monster. We’ve defeated it, and we’re living in the happy-ever-after, right? The fact that dust is trickling down the heap of rubble doesn’t mean that the monster is about to come bursting out again, does it? I should give up on these metaphors. We’re all in bad shape, financially, and the banks are competing with each other to take our interest payments as income. Remember the financial crisis? All those mortgages treated as securities?

I mean – if my own bank (a) doesn’t know that I don’t have a credit card and thus, you know, don’t make regular payments out of my bank account, duh, to service a credit-card debt, not rocket science to work that out, and (b) doesn’t realise that its shiny new algorithm doesn’t know me half as well as Mr Bedford (nicknamed “Uncle Bedford” in the family; my bank manager in my teens) knew me back in the day – well, I think I can stop worrying about the “surveillance economy” and all the data being collected about me. Because when they finally get around to using it, it’s not about me. It’s levelled out, rounded up, rounded down into a generic version of me that wants what some generic average person in my demographic would want. It’s not actually cost-effective to know me personally.

I don’t know what people in my demographic want. I see them often enough, in the coffee shop, the café, the cinema and the theatre – on the coast path, the beach, the high street – and I suppose I could ask them. I could join them where they gather and ask them – no, wait a second. Maybe I’ve got this wrong. Maybe they’re not gathering at the box office, or taking the dog on some Nordic Walking expedition. Maybe the Wisdom Of Insurance Companies is correct, and actually, I’ll find them queueing at the undertaker’s, waiting to enquire about opportunities to make advance payments towards their funeral.

After all, those credit-card companies and insurance companies wouldn’t have spent that much money over that many years on so many glossy mailshot leaflets if they didn’t know what they were doing, would they? If that was the case, you’d have to ask – where the heck did they get that much money to waste?

Global warming itself is separate from the scare about global warming. My respects to the science, but if the planet is changing its weather, that’s the planet’s business. There’s a balance that the planet maintains, an equilibrium, and if that becomes unsustainable (because some pesky mammal species is burning too much fossil-fuel, for example), the planet shifts everything just enough to reach a new equilibrium.

Yes. Fine. The pesky mammal species can stop what it’s doing, or – not. The planet goes on. We all survive, or some of us do, or none of us do. End of story.

Except that … I’m convinced by the science, yes, sure, and the weather does seem to be worth talking about, uh huh, and yes, I did see that piece shared on Facebook about – yes, yes, I know, very worrying. We’re too late to stop it, and people do keep leaving plastic bottles on beaches, I know, and that’s bad, and yes, I will bring a bag for plastic waste next time I head for Gylly Beach. I agree with you. Bad situation.

Could I just say – not disagreeing with you at all, not even slightly – that I’ve noticed something that doesn’t fit? It just occurred to me, and now I can’t get it out of my head.

It’s this. There’s always something. It was Mutually Assured Destruction and then it was Nuclear Winter. Some time before that, it was the Apocalypse and Armageddon and all manner of nastiness if we didn’t pick the right church of a Sunday. I can remember being worried that international travel would spread plagues around the world. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962). Communism was seen as a big threat in the USA in the nineteen-fifties, and now I think they’re worried about “socialised medicine” (as in: the UK’s NHS) while we’re bothered about chicken (something about chlorine).

Don’t quote me on the USA; I speak from ignorance. I’m just saying this. The space in our heads currently occupied by global warming has never been vacant. There’s always something. And whatever it is, somehow, we always survive it. We had The War To End All Wars, and then another one, because we were always at war. And we’re still here. My generation lived with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, blah blah blah, just as my parents’ generation lived with, you know. And we should respect the plight of Generation Whatever We’re Calling Them Now, whose futures have been utterly destroyed by – no, I’m not getting into that.

I find this reassuring, actually. I take it to mean that we’re changing. We may not realise it, but we’re adapting. The situation may look close-to-hopeless (it always looks close-to-hopeless), but all the beach-clean initiatives around the world, the green initiatives, the Un-rap store in Falmouth (and the rest of the bring-your-own-packaging movement) do actually count for something. They’re the tip of an iceberg that may not melt all the way after all. Don’t stop picking up the plastic, but don’t despair either.

If I was planning for the future, for real, I’d plan for a future in which the distances travelled are shorter, the roads are clearer, the batteries last longer – the batteries in the bicycles, I mean – and the background noise is birdsong. A future in which technology has a place, and transport, and trade, and horses, and long lunches, and Summer afternoons, and butterflies, and fresh air. Because if I set reason aside for a moment, I'm pretty sure that's what's coming next.

Footnote. I just made a phonecall. Two minutes at most, to confirm the time for a meeting over coffee. My phone is now displaying the question: "How was the quality of your call?" Under that, five white stars. Under that, the word "submit". To which my immediate response is: I'm not submitting! Who wants to know, anyway?

Nobody’s doing the theological analysis. Nobody wants it. Back in 1636, by some weird accident of alternative history, the populace were (okay, spellcheck – was) given the opportunity to vote on the Divine Right of Kings to Rule. This, you will remember, was the principle that monarchs are monarchs because a Higher Authority wants them to be monarchs. Disagreeing with a king was therefore a no-no. [Recorded instances of people being zapped by thunderbolts for disagreeing with the king’s ideas are hard to find, but that’s not to say it didn’t happen.]

Except that parliament was disagreeing with the monarch. So the referendum was intended to settle the question once and for all: do you want the king to rule, or parliament? But to everybody’s great surprise – before the vote, all of London was hailing the new era of parliamentary democracy – the country turned out to be split down the middle. There was a slight – very slight – majority in favour of keeping the Divine Right of Kings to Rule, but as the scribes and pharisees (what are they doing here?) were quick to point out, a third of the populace didn’t even bother to vote.

If you assume, so the scribes' argument ran, that non-voters are more likely to be in favour of the status quo, you can lump them in with the Parliamentarians and discover that, although the Royalists won the actual vote, the Parliamentarians won the argument. Given the scale of the projected change to the constitution, this argument had some force. But the counter-argument was also compelling: parliament had set the terms of the referendum, and committed itself to respecting the result. The two sides became entrenched; efforts to find compromise only complicated the issue. Thus began the Long Parliament (1640-2019), in which everybody had an opinion, and nobody had the authority to make a decision stick.

Early on, the question arose: the Divine Right of Kings to Rule what exactly? After all, it would be ridiculous to argue that the DRKR meant that the king should rule everything. Surely a “soft” DRKR, in which the king got to decide the menus for royal banquets, would be closer to what the populace had intended when they voted for the DRKR to stay in place? Or – another voice shouted across the debating chamber – maybe they meant that the king should be in charge of foreign policy while we actually run the country? But that idea was immediately shouted down – existing trade relationships were too important to be left to one man and his extended family of royal cousins overseas. They argued according to national interest anyway, whatever the treaties said.

And it couldn’t possibly be the case that the populace had no confidence in parliament. Before the Long Parliament – and by the way, this is one of the ironies that make alternative history such a rewarding subject to study – parliament had been a relatively efficient (for its time) decision-making body. The actual business of clogging up the country with red tape and bureaucracy was left to the various ministries (“Leadership by management; management by measurement!” was a slogan of the time), but in matters of preferment and privilege (see also the discussion of the “expenses scandal” in Chapter 19), parliament knew what it wanted and went out and got it.

Much of the credit for the efficient running of parliament belonged to the two-party system. This was a system of patronage whereby honourable members (and the rest) aligned themselves with either the Whig (they wore wigs, but couldn’t spell) or the Tory (tall stories, ditto) faction, and voted thereafter along party lines. Individual MPs accepted the trade-off between having an opinion of their own – in which case, nobody listened to them – and voting according to their faction’s party line – in which case, at least they had a chance of sitting on the front benches eventually. The front benches had legroom.

As the Long Parliament wore on, party discipline broke down. This was partly due to the advent of social media – smaller, more efficient printing presses on which pamphlets and newspapers and op-ed opinion pieces could be rapidly printed and disseminated – and partly due to the new-fangled 24-hour news cycle, a related development whereby the space available for the presentation of opinions rapidly outgrew the supply of opinions from the usual sources. There was so much white space to be filled in the news-sheets that talkative MPs – those who could generate opinions on anything at short notice – found themselves in demand.

In the terminology of the time, there was a shortage of “talking heads” that would offer “challenging opinions” and “incisive commentary”. Demand for opinions continued to grow. Now, for the first time, an individual MP could express an opinion to the media (thus bypassing parliament, note) and have the illusion of being heard. For the first time, MPs could gain influence – “raise their public profiles” – outside parliament, and crucially, outside the two-party system. The proliferation of opinion (Chapter 19 again) was a significant causative factor in the breakdown of two-party discipline and the early development of the One-Person Party system we know today.

But it took the nationwide split over the DRKR, and the resulting Civil War, to drive change. Without that, this country would still be a United Kingdom. We may look back at the years of debate over the various theological justifications for the DRKR, and the assorted scriptural refutations, and we may acknowledge the force of Dr Johnson’s observation, mid-way through the Long Parliament – “A pox on your hard and soft options, sirrah! A pox on your theologies! The populace have voted – has voted, I grant you, spellcheck – and they just don’t want it!” – and we may despair of ever achieving a settlement.

But we have to acknowledge, even so, that without the DRKR, and the Civil War, and all those Hard and Soft Options, and those inflexibly opinionated MPs, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

How were we persuaded to forget the old ways? Went to a brunch party on Sunday, to celebrate a friend’s new house, and sat out in the narrow garden in a half-circle of chairs, and talked. There was coffee, and there were croissants, and there was porridge. Excellent porridge. Jam, fruit, bowls of fruit, more coffee, toast, orange juice, prosecco, more prosecco, coffee again, and maybe I will just have one more coffee before I go. There was a red rose, copiously in bloom, and a shed, and somebody identified a raspberry bush. If only we could breakfast (brunch) like this every day.

We talked about music. Jazz. We became discursive on the subject of ceramics. Art, more music, ballet, theatre, children, dogs, local radio. Somebody mentioned [redacted] and his bid to lead the [redacted] Party, but that passed quickly, and I don’t think President [redacted] even came up. Which is the measure of a good conversation these days. It was an enjoyable party, four days after a Europe-wide election, and the part of the conversation that comes back to me now, because I’ve been thinking about it, is the part about hair-washing.

Somebody who was sat – sitting – in that half-circle of chairs doesn’t wash her hair. Somebody else washes her hair only occasionally. When I say “doesn’t wash”, I mean – doesn’t use conventional shampoo. To wash your hair with conventional shampoo means to squeeze chemicals from a plastic bottle onto your head and massage them in. And I’m thinking now: why do we do that? Whether you’re vegan, green, health-conscious, worried about the planet, a hypochondriac or (let’s be inclusive here) embarrassingly carnivorous, pouring chemicals onto your head counts as normal. And I’m thinking – huh?

I have a substance in my bathroom, in a plastic bottle, that contains chamomile. I don’t know what chamomile looks like, but if you came to a brunch party at my house and told me I have chamomile in my garden, I’d believe you. If you pointed out the chamomile, I could pick a bunch of it, take it up to the bathroom, and next time I feel an urge to dowse myself in chemicals, I could rub it on my head. The thing about not using conventional shampoo is actually about letting “natural oils” do their thing, but still. I could comb out the chamomile flowers easily enough.

Natural oils. You rinse out any impurities every now and then, in running water, but generally, your hair just self-corrects. You don’t have to use anything. At all. Nada. Which makes this whole subject even more perplexing. I can imagine an ancestor of mine being persuaded that using chemicals is easier than boiling up vats of chamomile, letting them cool, et cetera, but to go from nothing to a plastic bottle full of liquid that froths up into a lather – even if the plastic bottle has a nice picture of nature on it – to go from nothing to all that kerfuffle (not to mention the “avoid contact with eyes” aspect) is just weird.

I’m not against shampoo. I’m sure all the chemicals are properly mixed together in shiny steel vats and responsibly pumped into ranks of plastic bottles marching along on conveyor belts. I’m sure that the huge plastic (?) barrels in which the individual chemicals are delivered are rinsed out and taken to the recycling centre. I’m sure that the rivers around the factories are clear. But – the whole business strikes me as odd. I’ve just gone into the kitchen, and yes, I’m washing my dishes with a substance, in a plastic bottle, that apparently contains “real lemons”. How come I’m not scrubbing my dirty dishes with real lemons?

This is how we live, and the more I think about it, the weirder it seems. I’m not saying that I should keep a cow in my kitchen, rather than a plastic bottle of milk in my fridge, and I’m entirely happy that the “farmyard manure” I put on my garden comes in a sealed plastic sack with “farmyard manure” printed on the outside. No horses need apply. But that conversation in the garden about hair being naturally capable of looking after itself just brought it home to me that – yeah. Like I said, the weirder it seems.

Now, who do you think should lead the Conservative Party to calamitous defeat at the next General Election?

There are moments in my life for which I can never be forgiven. I’m not talking about unspeakable crimes (I’m so over those*), nor about the people I’ve hurt. I can look back and regret that I did that, or said that to her, or wasted that much money on – what was I thinking? I’ve been insensitive in the past, and callous, and aggressive, and stubborn, and clumsy, and a lot of other words that add up to: I’ve been pretty much as fallible and human as everybody else on the planet. I’ve felt envy.

There have been moments when I have found it expedient to remind myself of this truth: we are embarked on a spiritual journey that takes us through the bad stuff as well as the good. We can sit at home and meditate and look virtuous and heap blessings on all around us and post bland pictures of sunrises overlaid with trite messages of goodwill on Instagram – and we can get nowhere. We can become uncomfortably aware of our own faults, and work with them, and get a long way. Spiritually, I mean.

The path to wisdom, and perhaps even to enlightenment, runs through being a complete git sometimes. Or if not that, at least through something other than a ten-part online course in How To Be A Good Person with a free downloadable book for signing up to the email newsletter. Siddhartha Gautama was a rich prince, indulged by his father, “entertained by dancing girls” it says here, before he became The Buddha. Saint Augustine famously prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” And look how that worked out. Bet he had some memories.

It’s not that I can’t be forgiven by other people – that would be up to them, anyway. It’s not that I can’t forgive other people, mostly, nor that I can’t forgive myself for (some of) the wrongs I’ve done to other people. By which I mean (he adds hastily) I’m kind of okay with a lot of the things I did because, you know, all that was a long time ago, probably forgotten on both sides, not such a big deal anyway, we both came out of it okay, moved on, blah blah blah. See above re: fallible and human. I don’t know if “forgive” is the word to use here, but I was younger then, and I didn’t know any better, and…

Yeah, and there are one or two things that, you know, can’t be unsaid and can’t be undone, and I’d just like you to know that I, um; which is to say that I’m very, er, and I wish that I, you know, hadn’t, and if I hurt you (I know that I hurt you), I just want you to know that I’m very – what? You don’t remember? What do you mean, you don’t remember? I’ve been agonising over this for years and you don’t even remember – no, nothing! Nothing at all! I was just thinking aloud about – something else! Oh, you have remembered now? Look, I just wanted to say that I’m – hello? Hello?

We lose people by being human. We can indulge our own fallibility, but fail to recognise it in others. We hold other people to higher standards. All that. But what really strikes me is that I’m human enough not only to regret but also to forgive myself for most of the past. I suspect that we all are – and in the instances where we’re really sorry about something, we’re either human enough to say sorry, or to work with it in some other way. A weekly hour of therapy, for example. A buttress of resentment to push the guilt the other way. I don’t know how the perpetrators of unspeakable crimes deal with what they’ve done, if they’re capable of dealing with it, but most of us manage to live with ourselves.

To be alive is to practise self-deception, at least to some degree. We’ve all done bad things. We can’t always make ourselves the heroes of our own back-stories. But for most of us, there isn’t an alternative to carrying on, so we deal. What I think I’m saying is, we manage to live with ourselves by creating and sticking to a story about who we were and what we did. I remember the good deeds, and I smile to myself. That was me! I remember the bad – and I explain them to myself. That was … I’d slept badly; it was raining; the train was late; you were being unreasonable. Mitigating factors. Most of the time, that tactic works. We know we’re fallible, and fallible is another word for forgivable. We can’t help but look back, but the past can be improved in the telling…

…but then sometimes – and here we go, here’s what I’m really writing about – it can’t. Self-forgiveness doesn’t always work. That’s bad enough. But here’s the really hard part. The moments in my life for which I can never be forgiven – by myself – are not the moments where I’ve been bad, nor the moments where I’ve been wrong, selfish, callous, et cetera. They’re the moments that make me cringe. Moments where I’ve knocked a hole in my own back-story by making a complete fool of myself. By demonstrating unequivocally to myself that on top of everything else, I’m a complete dork.

I look back at myself and I think: you were THAT gullible? You said THAT in front of ALL THOSE PEOPLE? How could you have walked out onto that stage, in front of that many people WITHOUT CHECKING YOUR ZIP? I mean, REALLY? And all those other ones as well: how could you have wasted that much money, all those opportunities, so much of your life, blah? Been so stupid, blah? Look at all those roads not travelled, blah. With great age comes a lot of past, and not all of it’s bearable. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but the truly unbearable parts of an averagely lived life are the parts where we were neither the hero nor the villain, but the fool.

I’m going back to bed to hide under the duvet for a while. But before I do – hey, the sun’s coming through the fog; such timing – but before I do, let me say this. I suspect that there are no grand struggles in life. No heroic quests or great tasks – just the humdrum business of being and day-to-day living. Even if you’re a hero on an epic quest, let’s say, you’ve still got to brush your teeth in the morning – or maybe sit a bit further away from me, would you mind? Spend a little bit more time in the bathroom, of a morning? And listen, Odysseus, let’s be frank with each other: have you even heard of Lynx deodorant? For men?

I suspect that the really valuable components of the spiritual journey are the ones that we’d prefer not to acknowledge at all. We can celebrate the good bits of our past, yes, and work with the bad bits. It’s healthy to work out how to forgive ourselves, let go of our mistakes, upload to Instagram, program the camera to catch the sunrise. All that. It matters. We can work towards empathy, and compassion. We can sit cross-legged and aspire to wisdom and whatever is meant by that word ‘enlightenment’. There's a lot to be said for learning the art of self-forgiveness. And for laughing at yourself - okay, myself. Me, if it helps you.

But to achieve a true spiritual breakthrough, I believe it is important that somebody close to this laptop should also acknowledge the day on which – ugh! – he travelled all the way to London – aaaah, no! – on a packed commuter train – owww – in his smartest possible suit, for a job interview, feeling totally cool and at the top of his game, with a Cornflake lodged in his beard.   

*Social media, this is intended to be funny. Surveillance economy, please instruct your algorithm that this is not a confession.

PS: I got the job.

Looking back over the past however many years, I’d say that the biggest surprise has been the sky. Not the speed of the change, nor the scale of their tragedy. Nor even the return to our ancestral home. No, the quiet aftermath has surprised me most. I lived for a while of the edge of a city, where the night above us was a yellow, light-polluted, dirt-polluted darkness. Now there’s no dark matter in the night sky at all; just a multiplicity of stars, some of them too far away to reach us with all of their light.

I’m old enough to remember first contact. They came with their conviction and their arrogance and their belief in their need, and their machines and their noise, and they tore away the trees of our forefathers. In time, the whole of our forest was gone. We were given “civilisation” in its place, and taken away to learn their ways. There was grief, of course, but I remember the place where we were given to live, the “shanty town” as some of them called it when it was no longer necessary to deceive us, where the grasses and the weeds were already pushing up through the broken roads and the dusty paths. We could already see what they would never see.

There came a time when they believed that they had learned from their mistakes. By then, some of us had begun to use their machines, because the old ways would not work in their “civilisation”, and I remember that suddenly, once again, they turned against us. This time, we were the enemy for being what they had tried to make us. We weren’t “standing in the way of progress” by trying to protect our forest. Now, in their eyes, in their shanty town, strangers on the edge of their city, forced immigrants, we were one more focus for resentment. Yes, I know most of the pollution came from them, but in their failure to understand, they needed outsiders to blame.

We were told that we must reduce our usage of their machines, and that by doing so we would “contribute to a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions” as they put it. For a while, they feasted on words and slogans about living with nature, and we were exhorted to change our ways – but this time (although they failed to understand even this) they were exhorting us to change back to what we had always been. They congratulated themselves on their new-found virtues as though they had always been wise. They lectured us on what we already knew. Still, they did not understand, nor see. New trees were growing on the edges of the city, the tarmac was breaking, but still, they could only talk at us, not hear us.

Do you remember those corporations they had? Yes, including the one that took the forest; that’s a good example. Do you remember how they commissioned films and advertisements to show how they were taking action on climate change? Yes – exactly. All those grand declarations set to music. Those advertisements showing scientists in white coats – white coats! – growing trees under glass in laboratories. All that music. Yes – yes, exactly; I remember the day we worked out – yes, exactly, the incredulity; we couldn’t believe it – the day we worked out that they weren’t doing anything other than making their films, their grand declarations.

Even now, they don’t look outside themselves. They’re scavenging in the ruins, while we’ve returned to the forest’s abundance. Some day soon, yes, we will have to go into their broken cities, to rescue them. We’ll break down their remaining roads and buildings, break the rest of their concrete and let the returning forest complete its work. We’ll bring them back here, to be with us, and teach them how to live.

Oh, look at those stars.

We forget the importance of not knowing what happens next, in life as well as art. Went to see Arthur Miller’s All My Sons a while ago, via the Phoenix Cinema in Falmouth, and wow! That was a satisfying, I don’t know, beginning, middle and ending. Still thinking about it now. Many years back, I went to see (do I have to say William Shakespeare’s?) The Merchant of Venice without knowing how it ended, and I remember being surprised at how hooked I was.

Surprised because – well, my introduction to Shakespeare was three years of “doing” King Lear for my Eng. Lit. A level (older readers: Eng. Lit. is the modern contraction of the subject formerly known as English Literature). Should have been three different plays, but there was a mix-up. So we ground through the same text three years in a row (still haven’t seen the play), and by the end I was still no clearer as to why the royal couple called their eldest daughter Goneril.

But I was pretty sure I knew all too well why the name never caught on. Ugh! Because I’m old and grizzled, my ticket to see All My Sons cost me all of four quid (US readers: four British pounds, which isn’t much for a cinema ticket), and one legacy of my education is that I’ve avoided Shakespeare ever since. I can go to see (almost) all the plays without knowing the ending. The Shakespeare plays, I mean, but having started this with Arthur Miller – no, I haven’t seen Death of a Salesman; yes, I am looking out for a performance of Death of a Salesman.

Eng. Lit. Dept., all is forgiven. I have Theatre ahead of me. What was best about last night was watching “real” characters wrestling with a “real” moral issue. None of them was overtly signalled as the good guy or the bad guy; all of them were flawed, fallible, human, whatever word you want to use; the whole play ran like – sorry, but the word just inserts itself – clockwork. Yes, there were two young adults talking about getting married; no, they didn’t do the rom-com thing of having a row ten minutes before the end and then reconciling after a rethink and a frantic chase to stop one of them getting on the train.

The unpredictability of it all. No doubt there were dramas in 1947 and 1605 that ran along predictable lines, but did any of that predictability intrude into real life? Today, we’re all pretty sure that – no, I’m not going to mention it – is a clear-cut good/bad thing, and that the President of – no, I’m not going to mention him either – is an antidote to the old politics/should never have been elected. We’re settled in our assumptions. We seem to accept the certainties handed to us rather than debate the complexities, and I suspect that by doing so, we fail to deepen our understanding. People are human; they’re not social-media constructs.

The importance of not knowing what happens next. Actually, that’s not quite it. The value of several hours of not knowing, wanting to know, assuming, getting it wrong, being taken by surprise – the value of several hours of paying attention. Of getting some mental exercise. Of not having a ready-made answer from the start. If we’d known, back in 2020, that global warming was going to be so subtle, so insidious – if we’d really engaged with it and debated it – we wouldn’t be where we are now. But we took it for the simple, straightforward catastrophe we had conditioned ourselves to expect, and completely missed its real impact until it was too late.

Global warming – the simple catastrophe, the “zombie apocalypse” without zombies. Lots of storms, regularly unpredictable weather, reports from remote places of fertile land turning to desert. If only we remember to plant a tree every time we fly, we can go on as we did before. All that seems so absurd now, so tragic. Global warming was too clever for us. It came on more as a deception, a massive con trick, than as a straightforward, manageable, containable catastrophe. Global warming didn’t come at us via predictable extinctions of species we knew, like markers on a scoreboard; it worked – gradually, invisibly, inexorably – through parts of the natural ecosystem that we didn’t even know existed – that we depended on absolutely.

And then it hit us. As the New Druids are saying now, it was as if global warming was “intelligently designed” to get around us. We are part of Nature, of course, and as the Wiser Heresy teaches, we work with Nature more than we realise. Consciously, back then, we worked to retain the status quo; unconsciously, we subverted our own efforts. We failed to see what was happening, and by that failure, we brought our own population back down to a sustainable level.

It’s a neat theory, and I think I believe it. I remember the Hunger Days, yes, and nobody could have wanted them, even unconsciously. But I also remember governments and summits and declarations against climate change. All those admonitions and platitudes shared on social media. It’s almost funny, how ardently we declared climate change unacceptable, and called on governments to fix it for us. As though it was a problem up in The Cloud – remember that? – that we could have sorted out on our behalf while we went on driving and heating our houses. As if we really believed words and higher powers would save us. No, really. Right to the end, we were simultaneously blaming and putting our faith in governments.

Enough of this. I remember that performance of All My Sons and I remember The Merchant of Venice. But tonight’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the forest clearing where my people now hold their gatherings, will be much more in keeping with the spirit of the times.

Maybe with the European elections looming, we’ll forget all about climate change and go back to panicking about Brexit. Extraordinary, how effective the media is at disseminating short-term headline-related panic.

I was walking back from the Greenbank Hotel yesterday evening, after a drink with a friend, when I passed a Citroen CV6, looking its age, parked where the pavement was so high that I could look down into it, and then a brand-new Toyota Aygo. Both cars in versions of roughly the same colour.

Struck me that car number one in that sequence was a piece of machinery constructed for the purpose of getting from A to B by people whose primary interest was in providing a means whereby customers could get from A to B. Wheels, seats, engine, protection against the weather. The Toyota Aygo, in this company, looked like a shiny red cocoon on wheels.  Also practical, but plump, shiny, closed.

And I wondered about the two generations that had made these two things. Did the first really give birth to the second? What lessons were passed down, and what happened to the straightforward, utilitarian-looking, getting-there-from-here design of the CV6? Why did the Aygo have to be so beautiful, so enclosed, so cosy? So very designed?

I should drink at the Greenbank more often (mine’s a Honda Jazz, thanks). I thought about the evolution of cars, from things you could step into and get out of, to things that wrap you up warm in a safe space with soothing music while the road goes by outside. There are cars that are sold on safety, and cars that “perform”. None sold on the basis that they are quite useful if you just need to get from A to somewhere else.

The travel is assumed, these days; we all need to be getting from wherever we are to somewhere else. We’re all “on the go”, even when we’re buying lunch. But why these cuddly little comfortable cars? Why not modular cars, or cars that could be adapted for different purposes? Instead of the metallic-paint options, you get the clip-on bulldozer attachment or the seats that can be removed (easily) to make more luggage space.

Why not one-person cars that could be lawnmowers with the right attachment, or diggers, or cars that could hook themselves into long road-trains as easily as you drive onto a ferry? Maybe even cars that dock with the side of the house as neatly as spaceships dock with space stations (you’ll want the pebbledash paint options, sir). Buy one of those and convert the garage.

Cars today are aspirational. They’re descended from vehicles where the whole point was that somebody else would do the work. Except that the chauffeur’s space has withered away and the steering wheel has regrown itself in the rich-customer compartment in the back.

I had a pleasant rest-of-the-evening, thank you. I walked on, under the archway, past the Star & Garter pub (“Harbour Views Since 1892”) and past that tantalising little print shop, Juniper Bespoke; I paused briefly at the window of Toro, which opens occasionally for the sale of air plants and other magical greenery; then went on past Stone’s Bakery and the antique shops; past the sports shop and the vintage clothes store; turned left onto Prince of Wales Pier and out towards the Pier Café and beyond.

And not for a moment did I think about cars.