You know that feeling you get when you wake up at 3am, scribble down a brilliant idea and then in the morning it turns out to be rubbish? There’s even a mythology for it – fairy gold, which turns to dust at daybreak. Well, I woke up at 2.30am this morning, scribbled frantically for the best part of an hour, then went back to sleep. This morning, I found this, written all over my pillows in indelible laundry marker. I tend to be stubborn about not losing my ideas.

Because I think I might like my 3am self if I ever met him, I’m going to keep what he did, and the simplest way to do that is to copy it all down here. In a clumsy attempt to make this look like a deliberate, wide-awake, premeditated blog post, I’ve added some questions at the end – so could we all pretend that this is the mid-term exam for anybody who reads this regularly? The questions are optional, obviously, and I have absolutely no idea what I would do if you sent me some answers.

But hey, why not? My 3am self wrote this – as follows:
 
Isn’t there a creation myth whereby The Great Editor In The Sky took a rib from the first man and used it as the basis for creating the first woman? Quite a popular creation myth, I believe, leading in time to publications such as Spare Rib and movements such as #MeToo. Odd one, though: you would have to have a sophisticated understanding of human anatomy - or the familiarity that would come from running the cannibal equivalent of a steak house with ribs on the menu - even to start wondering: why’s she got one more than I have?
 
Small children may tickle each other, but they don’t persist until they’re counting ribs. And both adults and small children alike tend to notice other differences than bone structure when looking at each other’s, um, bits. I imagine The Great E. in the S. planned from the outset that there would be two, a matching pair; otherwise, why make that bit on the man like that, and so on? The question of how many it takes to tango would have been uppermost in said Creator’s mind even before the personal pronouns were handed out. If I put this bit here on this one, and this bit here on that one…
 
In fact, we all have twelve pairs of ribs. Sorry. Our skeletons are different, and whole genres of television drama sustain themselves on being able to tell, for example that the body on the examination table was the pizza-loving daughter of the university vice-chancellor who found out about the creepy janitor’s drug-smuggling operation, but ribs only ever come into it if one of them has been microscopically nicked by a blow-pipe dart made from the venom of a snake indigenous to that remote area where the friendly and helpful grad student from earlier on in the show happened to mention visiting last Summer.
 
Snakes are big in creation myths, but ribs just aren’t important, surely? Snakes turn up - roughly at the same point in a good creation myth as the totally innocent-seeming grad student says a brief hello and talks about his holidays in a detect-by-numbers TV drama. That makes sense. But why ribs? I’m guessing: close to the heart. If a creation myth is an early response to a need just to have some kind of an explanation rather than nothing, well, yeah, okay, the first one gets made from available materials and for the second one, there’s a not-yet-automated process akin to cell division.
 
All of the above works perfectly well however you distribute he and she, She and He. First woman, first man; doesn’t matter. Gaia or some patriarchal figure - never mind. We’re here now. But think of the power of those early storytellers. They’re trying to snooze off a wild-boar lunch, but the tribe’s children (of a certain age) won’t stop asking awkward questions, so they make up something about ribs – while ambush-tickling them, perhaps – and that’s what gets remembered down the millennia. Not the tribe’s important contribution to plant science, say, or the interminable song cycle by the officially revered poet – but that chance remark about ribs. Why?
 
And why ribs? Close to the heart, maybe, yes, but really, I’m asking – this is where the questions start. Why not half of this one’s heart, or the breath out of this one, or open up the ribs and take out – what? If you had to make up a creation myth on the fly, after a good lunch, how would you explain the coming-into-being of mummy and daddy to an audience of children armed with blowpipes and slingshots?
 
And why snakes? No, don’t answer than one. What about the absolutely first man/woman? You’ve got an assembly kit made up of, okay, a rib for the second of the two, but where do you start with the first? A lump of clay? Or remodel one of those furry little bunnies? Perhaps one of those less cuddly furry creatures swinging from branch to branch? Candidates are invited to supply their own creation myth, max. 1,000 words, accounting for: mummy and daddy, the rabbit, that butterfly and those primates. Extra marks will be given for beginning with the creation of the universe and the invention of gravity.
 
But seriously - why ribs? Is history full of failed creation myths where the raw material was collarbones, or internal organs (please specify), or toenail clippings? Or do we just have a cultural thing about ribs? Why?
 
And if there’s anybody out there who knows anything about washing out indelible laundry marker, I have a bonus question for you.

There is the notion of "big data". People who take themselves off to vast international conferences on finance and technology, financial technology, fintech, tend to develop views on big data. Sometimes, they write blog posts on the subject...

Thinking aloud just for a moment, the idea behind "big data" - big data as a Thing, with a capital T - is that everything we do online generates data. It's big because it's detailed and comprehensive; every move I make generates more data. Whenever I use a search engine, I'm generating a micro-byte of data on my interests. If I google, let's say, a leather wallet, I'm telling Google that I'm interested in leather wallets. Other examples are available. I know, because the pop-up ads keep reminding me, that I search-engined bistro tables the other day. And I'm haunted by ads for office furniture.

Was I really looking for office furniture? Must have been. I remember that bistro-table impulse; I wanted something for just outside the back door. Item of big data, therefore: William's interested in bistro tables. Add that to the great complexity of data that is held about me. Add that to the location data from my phone; the embarrassing data from my browser; the CCTV; the medical, financial and other records if you can access them; the social-media indiscretions from way back. Because big data isn't just made up of signals I send deliberately. Facebook knows me as well as I can be known from everything I've ever done there; my mobile phone travels with me, so my telco knows where I am; every purchase online, or post, or - whatever other example of a capturable event you care to suggest - tells the big-data industry something about me.

And in theory, therefore, every approach to me, commercial or otherwise, can be fine-tuned on the basis of everything that is known about me. Which implies that all my enthusiasms and interests can be matched to an appropriate provider. I search for a table - you offer me a table. I buy an ebook; you pitch ebooks on similar themes. You don't at any point, ask me what I want, because you're confident that you know me well enough to be sure of your welcome. [Or because you deal in categories of customer, rather than people? Let's not go there.] And you use me for your statistical modelling: people behave this way; men behave that way; men of this age and that income bracket claim to do this but actually do something else entirely. All the way down to: this individual wants to read an ebook about bistro tables.

I don't have a problem with any of this. If you're fixated on offering exactly what I want to buy, at the moment I want to buy it, I'm on your side. Please continue. Or rather, please start. Stop all the pop-up ads about office furniture, because I don't have an office that needs furnishing - as you would know if you looked closely enough at my big data. Stop bugging me with ads for bistro tables - surely you've noticed that recent transaction on my credit card? The garden centre? The hardwood bistro table? Yes, okay, I'll take your word for it that I'm interested in office furniture, but that might have been the time I was looking for a kneeling chair - I was looking for solutions to back pain. Nice try, but I'm okay now. Thanks.

Big data is useful in theory. In practice, I wonder whether analysing my behaviour, and the patterns of my behaviour, is as reliable as it "should" be. You can put together a profile of me and my interests, using big data, as easily as you might draw a line around my shadow. But I move. My shadow moves. The light changes. A cloud crosses the sun. I bought that ebook, and enjoyed it, but today I feel like bingeing on a box set. Sorry, but I'm too human, too unpredictable, to live up to my big data. And no, I know, you can't ask me what I'm going to want tomorrow because even I don't know that. I may fit a demographic, but I'm an individual. Too idiosyncratic even to align my wants, needs and desires precisely with my interests.

Big data is a tool, and a useful one I'm sure. But I reserve the right to be myself. If you want to sell stuff to me, that's great. But keep this in mind: even if I have just written a blog post mentioning bistro tables, and office furniture, and ebooks, right now I'm really only interested in spending significant money on [some text missing here]. You could work that out from my accumulated big data, of course, although it's just today's unpredictable impulse, but you've never even thought of sending me an ad for one of those, have you?

Can't rid myself of the thought that there's an innovation missing. We have artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, the blockchain, early-stage quantum computing ... and I don't think it quite works to fit all of our present challenges to this convenient set of new solutions. There's one more piece of the jigsaw. No idea what it is, but let's think towards the next innovation rather than assume that we've been innovative enough already.

Before it's too late, maybe we could find a university to conduct research into how much today's relatively new technologies have changed us. Not sure how to structure it, but some kind of comparative study of the millennial generation, their parents' generation (who would be the "digital immigrants", yes?), their parents' generation. Not to judge, but to some to some kind of understanding of the one thing we can't understand as we sit here - how our understanding isn't what it was before we upgraded to whatever tech add-ons we're depending on to get us through the day.

Whenever there’s nothing happening, we magnify whatever tiny amount of whatever isn’t happening to fill the gap. And because we’re stuck with human nature, we get exercised about it. Arguments break out. We take sides. Brexit, for example, hasn’t been happening for years. Not in any real sense of evolving, changing, generating news. But every twitch of not very much happening is magnified up to fill the space in our heads. It's also a cheap story to report.
 
I’m not in favour, nor am I against. I’ve forgotten why I voted the way I did. Pretty sure I'd vote the same way again, because nothing substantive has changed, although this time my main motivation would be wanting the whole subject just to go away. Whenever I turn on the radio, a voice expresses an opinion about Brexit that I’ve heard before. BBC Radio 4's Today lost 800,000 listeners between April and June 2018, compared to the same period last year. This, said a BBC spokesperson (I’m paraphrasing, obviously), was because the news was more interesting last year. And they’re still talking about Brexit.
 
Come 2020, we’ll still be however many miles from the mainland. We’ll still be richer or poorer, happier or sadder, wiser or, um, because of what we do and what happens to us, because of the many events, accidents, serendipities, pay rises, broken ankles, redundancy notices, hospital closures, health scares, bad decisions, friends who need to talk, rainy days, alarm clocks failing to go off, doctor’s appointments, celebrations, attacks of indigestion, long walks and visits to the cinema – that make a difference to our lives.
 
Today’s speech by a politician we’d almost forgotten, today’s secret but copiously leaked meeting in Conspiracy Room A at the House of Commons, will make a slight difference. We’ll get a slight charge from baying for somebody to be sent to the guillotine, or whatever is the modern equivalent, but can you remember the speech that same person made last week about Brexit? Neither can I, but I wouldn’t mind another slice of that cake. None of it really merits the amount of head-space we give it.

I keep having to remind myself that we're living through "austerity" and not "the collapse of civilisation as we knew it." Looking at the state today, I wonder about how easy a certain personality type finds it to apply austerity to other people. And how easily some people can argue that a short-term drop actually indicates a long-term gain. What it is to be human, eh?

Out there in the darkness, the rain is still falling. The wind is swirling it around in refracted clouds that dance around the street light and the gutters are running loud with water. Wetness makes everything bright, like the artist used a blacker pencil on silver paper. You scribble out that whole opening.
 
It’s a rainy night.
 
You’re sitting alone at a small table by a tiny front window with uneven leaded panes, in a part of town that you really think you might visit more often, and when you’re not staring out through the glass - weather like this is difficult not to watch - you’re filling the time with your notebook and your coffee, which has a pattern drawn into the foam. You want to be drinking something else, but you know that would be a mistake.
 
You came in here because you were getting wet and you saw the word “Bar” in red neon. Just that. You came in. You opened your notebook. Trusted the impulse. The bars are different where you live. Not quite so … you can’t put your finger on it, but it’s there. And yes: the stillness after the weather, and the way the door closed behind you with a sound like air being punched - you scribble out that line too - and the way nobody looked up as you came down the steps feeling just a little conspicuous in the big coat and Boston Red Sox baseball cap you’ve chosen for this outing - you like this place already.
 
Should we say something, do you think? The door - it’s got one of those metal-arm things at the top to close it slowly. It’s a heavy door - that piston could run an engine. Your table is recessed into the space next to the steps down from the door - so you’re in a small space, private almost, with the little window. There’s something odd about the window. You’re looking out at the street, but - you came in off the street, and there are, yes, seven full-size carpeted stone steps down into the bar. Stair rods. This window should be a basement window. But you’re looking out at the street.
 
You tear open the packet and eat the little pastry thing that came with the coffee, in the saucer with the teaspoon. It’s soft, for once, fresh. They never are. The door: some weird perspective thing, obviously. You’ll check it out when you leave. You pick up the teaspoon and fit it through the pattern in the foam, just neatly, under the top swirly bit. Then you stir it all in, and by a magic that you don’t notice, the coffee becomes strong and dark and hot again. No foam now. You take a sip. Oh, this is coffee. This is absolutely coffee. You’re going to come here again.
 
Seems to be some kind of writing exercise. Maybe in the morning. Perhaps tomorrow. You’ve been thinking about writing a piece set in a bar. An atmospheric bar. The click of a pool table. Waitresses delivering trays. Food orders ready; line of sight through to the kitchen. Music. People. That kind of bar. You lean back, set down your pen on the keyboard of the Lenovo Ideapad 320S you’ve been carrying for the past few weeks, and look around. You can’t see much, because you’re also tucked in behind the end-curve of the bar itself, which runs the length of the room away from you, down the left-hand wall, but you can see the long mirror, and the panelling, and some of the people at the tables. The place is okay, but – shouldn’t a bar have live music?
 
There’s a faint tobacco smell to the room, you notice, but unlit tobacco, not stale smoke. You think it’s tobacco; that’s the association that comes to you, anyway. A cigar-box smell, maybe. It’s pleasant. And the sound is just about how you like it. You can hear conversations, but not conversation - you write that down. There’s music, but not so loud that you can make out what it is. And that composite sound of waitresses bringing trays, hey, there is food, forks hitting plates, glasses - it’s all a composite sound, but that’s the part that holds it together - the composite percussion of the composite sound. You pick up your pen again, open your notebook again, and then think: no.
 
Like an artist’s sketchbook? Only in words not pictures? There’s a man watching you. He’s over there, across the room, sitting side-on to you at that square table. He’s watching you through the mirror. He looks familiar, but you’re pretty sure you don’t know him. He’s somebody you see around on the street, maybe? Or in a shop? Somewhere regular. Your eyes meet and he grins: busted. He turns his head to look at you directly, and mimes: mind if I join you? You shrug in a way that says: sure, come on over. Because you can’t do anything else. And while he gathers up his stuff, you move your coat from that chair to that chair, and make space at the table.
 
He sits down, a big presence in your small space.
 
You close your notebook and your laptop.
 
“You’ve got that book coming out soon, haven’t you?”
 
You’re surprised by the question. But then he looks at you, direct, eye to eye, and all of a sudden, you know who he is.
 
“The compilation? Yes, I-”
 
There’s the tiny fleck of black in the iris of his eye, on the left, just below the pupil. Not big enough to be a flaw.
 
“No, I meant the other one.”
 
You sigh. “Yes. At last.”
 
But he doesn’t want to hear whatever you’ve got to say about “at last” and how long it took.
 
“What about the ​other other one?”
 
This is the question to which you don’t know the answer. You don’t reply immediately, and when eventually you do, he just nods a couple of times. He’s been watching your body language, you realise, and now he’s watching your hands form mudras over the table. You’re sitting face to face still, although you’ve pushed back your chair.
 
Then he says, quietly, “It’s the whole thing, though, isn’t it? The yin or the yang or the other thing. It completes the mystery.”
 
Nothing for us here. He's just talking to himself. You run your hand back over your hair and then take off your glasses and inspect them. It’s a composite move you’ve made so many times that you’re not aware you’re doing it, and what it tells him is: you don’t know; you suppose so; you don’t understand it but you’re going along with it. Somewhere in there is also: you’re tired. It’s almost done. But you don’t know if you-
 
He leans forward. “Do what comes next. That’s all there can be. No explanations.”
 
“I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts recently.”
 
“I’ve been reading them.”
 
“They’re fun to do. They come naturally. But – what are they?”
 
He takes a sip of his drink. It’s whisky-brown, with ice in it that clinks in the way that ice should, and although he’s been sipping at it all evening, it’s still the same double-on-the-rocks that he ordered.
 
He puts the drink down. “No explanations,” he says. Then, “Is there a moral to this one, by the way? There usually is.”
 
You relax. You’re off the hook. “Just the punchline. Which is obvious by now.”
 
He laughs softly. “Getting in touch with your imagination. Right.”
 
“But I don’t know…”
 
“You’ve got twice as many unique visitors as when you used to bang on about that EU vote and the US President. And in your case – you can have this for free – finish things. You’ve got a lifetime’s work that you never-” He shakes his head. “You’re hopeless at that.”
 
“But…” There isn’t a but.
 
He’s shrugs on his coat,
 
“I like the way you did this. Out in the open.”
 
“I’ve been thinking about it. I wasn’t well, you know? Thinking time.”
 
“Plus, you even talked about the books.”
 
“All three of them.”
 
“Although we both know... You do have to talk about them, you know.”
 
“Yeah, right.”
 
He laughs. And then you’re alone.
 
You sit there for a while, thinking about new beginnings and the unfinished past, and while all that’s going through your head, the life of the bar goes on around you. Live musicians appear, and there’s laughter, and then there’s a wild-looking gypsy woman – you just know she’s a gypsy woman, and boy, she looks wild – playing some crazy fast lament on her violin that runs up high and drowns out the four guys in sombreros playing their banjos, A full-grown tiger ambles past your table, glancing at you incuriously as it goes, and then a stiletto knife whizzes past your ear, hitting 180 and splitting the dartboard in two.
 
This bar is so very you. But it’s time to go.
 
When you emerge onto the street, you find that the rain has stopped, although there’s still a wet clarity to everything. You pull your coat around you, and it’s not until you’re almost home that you remember you were going to check that thing with the window.
 
But does it matter? You shake your head, wondering if you’ll ever find that bar again.
 
You leave your bag by your desk, pull off your coat and your jacket, and go through to the kitchen. The floor boards creak. They didn’t used to do that, but we’re close to the end now so obviously they would. You notice that the door across the hall – you’ve got a hall? – has been left ajar, although you’re sure you closed it before you went out. Inside, in the gloom, you can see a rocking chair, rocking. What do you mean, you don’t own a rocking chair?
 
It is, of course, pitch dark at the top of the stairs and the door to the cellar is wide open. Luckily, your bedroom and the bathroom are on the ground floor. The end is nigh, and you’d take so long getting up those stairs, testing every creak – there just isn’t time. Sorry, I know you wanted the room at the front with the en-suite – never mind.
 
You were going into the kitchen, remember? You go into the kitchen. You’re not going to be in here long enough to light the candles, so you switch on the ceiling lights and never mind the hum.
 
You stand in the kitchen doorway with a mug of – I don’t know, what do you like in the evenings? – camomile tea, and look at your work-table, the bay window and the night beyond. Streetlight has a forgiving quality, you decide. But if that’s worth writing down, you’ll remember it in the morning.
 
You turn off the kitchen light. What’s left is the yellow light from outside.
 
Forgiving? Really?
 
It’s a good light for this late - you check the time. You leave the rest of the tea and kick off your shoes. Usually you take off your clothes as well, before going through to the bathroom, but there are people reading this blog post who don’t know you, so we’ll jump-cut straight through the costume change - now you’re wearing a truly voluminous dressing gown made out of curtain material lined with velvet and a fez with a tassel (don’t ask me; I just write the stuff) - and you’re ready for the punchline - in fact, you’re wishing it would hurry up and come so you can get some sleep.
 
You go through to the bathroom - what do you look like in that ridiculous dressing gown? - and barely controlling your patience, you brush your teeth.
 
Then, finally, it’s time. You take off your glasses and lean forward to the mirror. There, just there, below the pupil, the flaw in your left eye, on the left in your reflection.
 
He winks at you. “Good talk,” he says, although no sound comes through the mirror.

Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. The sea’s pretty much flat but there are occasional flurries across the surface - which clearly means that the wind’s getting up and we could be facing a hurricane later. Oh, and the sun’s taken on that extra-bright brightness that it gets when it’s sharing the sky with dark clouds - or could this be the first hint of a massive solar flare that’s about to frazzle all our electronics?

If you’re reading this, you’ve survived - well done. Go tell your story to that photogenic team of government scientists - yes, those people over there, the thoughtful-looking young woman, the young man with glasses, the older man with an authoritative grey beard, the ethnic mix, the stereotypes - who are stepping through everything in their hazmat suits, breathing audibly and carrying old-fashioned geiger counters. No, that’s not a car alarm going off. Collect a thin grey blanket before you go - as a survivor you need to have a thin grey blanket round your shoulders - and make sure that tall young guy at the back - yes, the one shouting that it’s not over yet; the one they’re all stubbornly ignoring - hears what happened to you (sorry, hears exactly what happened to you).

Bit early for a swerve off into fantasy, surely? Because this could be Only The Beginning. [Oh, the wind outside my window. I look up and the sun’s gone and the trees are really moving - I can hear them. This could be evidence that The Creation, or The Universe, or Reality, call it whatever you like, pretty much gives you what you expect to get from it*. I didn’t really mean it about the hurricane and the solar flare. Life meets expectation. It’s been done before, keeps on being done, but it’s still an attractive story idea. If I ever get round to creating a universe, I’ll include that as one of the sub-quantum rules of nature. But - okay, yes. Doesn't fit with the "expectation" theme, but let’s keep the scene in which the scientists send a vast electron microscope whizzing round and round a circular tunnel under a Swiss mountain – and find me grinning back at them. “Surprise!”]

We’re celebrating the word “could” today. Five letters, not bad for Hangman because it’s short and even if you do get those two vowels early on, you’re still not really there. More useful as a tool for getting yourself a high profile in the media. If you can cook up some half-way plausible we’re-all-doomed scenario, base it on at least some kind of evidence and give yourself a job title that sounds impressive, you can really, ah, wow the punters, I believe that’s the phrase, with your concerned expression. But do practise it in the mirror first. No point going on the news to discuss your survey finding that cloudy days could lead to global warming - and failing to control your own urge to giggle.

He's got himself back on track. That's a surprise. And remember - “could” be, not “will” be. It’s the secret of all forecasting. You can dress it up and say just about anything if you remember “could”. As Head of Irresponsible Forecasting here at the Falmouth Institute of Unreliability, I’ve studied the signs, and I believe that they could point to the kind of outcome that will keep your viewers coming back for more. If I step up to the podium and show you - click; sorry - show you this - click, click; could use a little help here, this remote - what? Oh, press the green button with the arrow on it, sorry, ha ha  – show you this footage of the drama unfolding outside my window this morning. You see the clouds? The sun shining? And if you listen to the wind - I’m sorry, the audio seems - ah, here we are; click - listen to the wind, you see - hear, of course - see and hear clear signs that we could be in for a storm later. And that could develop into an apocalypse.

Yes, I know it’s a sunny day with a light breeze, but it could develop, is what I’m saying. Honourable mentions, by the way, for two recent articles, both effortlessly qualifying for gold in this blog post’s I Take It All Back category. Read How AI could kill off democracy by Jamie Bartlett at newstatesman.com, which is a serious analysis of a credible threat, and Sarah Gordon’s Why Brexit could save Britain’s countryside, Weekend FT magazine, 25th/26th August 2018, which describes a possible future for British farming. Both articles are clear evidence that the word “could” can be used constructively. I’m just allergic to the “Somebody says something could go wrong” style of headline-writing, which seems fashionable these days.

He’s holding it together quite well now. All of the above is just “Could” at work, though. In her personal life, Could is a free agent. Much happier than Should, who lives in the flat next door and never comes out for the spontaneous street parties that are such a feature of life in this imaginary universe. Should is weighed down with obligations, and worse, she’s never sure where those obligations came from - upbringing, education, social and work pressures generally – but they’re deep in her psyche and she’s only now learning to recognise them, let alone challenge them. Could tries to help, and they’re close friends, really, but it takes a lot of coaxing to bring Should out of her shell.

Oh, here we go. Spoke too soon. Could’s apartment is bright and airy, with light-wood floors and tall windows and billowy light curtains that move in the fresh air. There are mirrors and pictures and plants and a drafting table on which there’s always some new design being brought into being. Could works for herself, she’s freelance, but it’s more accurate to say that she plays for a living: she paints, draws, calls herself a graphic designer and makes very little money, but she’s happy following her own spontaneity. Small local galleries display (and sell) her pictures; she illustrates children's books and designs book covers; those are her funny little cartoon figures dancing through the pages of that magazine you like. If she could see her thoughts, which she can’t, she would paint them as butterflies. She’s late for everything, but people are invariably pleased when she does finally arrive.

He’s off. Should works in a bank. It’s a safe job. She has a pension scheme, and although she isn’t paid as much as you might expect, she’s already quite wealthy. If you ask her what she does, which you won’t because she doesn’t inspire curiosity, she’ll tell you that she’s in compliance. Then she’ll start to explain compliance - until Could, who knows her friend well, comes over to rescue you. Everybody wants to know what Could does, and sooner or later, you’ll see her being mobbed by expensive-looking people trying to impress her with whatever they value about their own lives. But she doesn’t like fast cars, she’s never heard of wherever you said, and she doesn’t go skiing anywhere, let alone there.

This time, Should rescues Could, because Should is beginning to recognise that (against all reason) Could is where the action is. If even her bosses are drawn to Could: if they’re challenged by her; if they need her to know that they matter - then what is it that she has, that they don’t? Should is a thinker, and finally, she’s turning her thought process to her own situation. Having lived next-door to Could for so long, having watched her from the day she moved in, having consciously dismissed her at first and then become gradually fascinated, having at first nurtured a sneaky feeling of superiority over her neighbour that, if she's honest, had to be worked at even from the outset, Should is finally beginning to realise that Could is not just irresponsible, careless, foolish after all. She's all of those things, yes, but there's something else as well, and Should wants to know what it is.

There’s going to be a moral. I just know there’s going to be a moral. Lying awake one night listening to the faint sound of music through the wall, Should thinks: I know what I’ve got, and how much, and where it is, but what am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my life right now, not in some planned-for future that won’t happen that way anyway? And exactly then, at four in the morning, midweek, Should gets out of bed, disables the alarm in the main room, turns on all the lights in the apartment, and sits on her sofa to make herself a list. She’ll research sound systems in the morning. Buy a bottle of wine. Perhaps a stylish little wine rack, she thinks, looking through at her kitchen. On impulse, feeling very brave, knowing what time it is, Should goes and makes herself a cup of tea. I’ll call in sick tomorrow, she thinks; I’ll take a day off. She doesn’t, but the thought that she nearly did sustains her through the day.

Could nearly misses the invitation. It’s in a matching envelope, small one, tiny weeny don’t-see-me one, with her name printed in tiny capitals on the front, slipped under the door near the hinge - the door catches it and slides it out of the way. But Could does see it, and life changes. The invitation says: would she like to join Should for a quick glass of wine tomorrow evening at six? Not a party, nothing special, just a quick glass and a chat. Like neighbours do. Sometimes. Not important if she can’t, so don’t worry, they can arrange another time, silly of me to assume… Could checks the time. 11pm. She’s just got in. Glass of wine - hey, yeah. She grabs the flowers from the vase - dripping, so takes the whole vase - and goes.

Uh oh. Should opens the door sleepy-eyed in dinky pink pyjamas and a matching dressing gown, big fleece slippers, a sleep-mask pushed up onto her forehead. She’s seen through the spyhole that it’s Could, but they still have to wait for a moment while she unlatches the chain and opens the door properly. Then there’s a misunderstanding that they both laugh about later: Should thinks there must be an emergency; Could tries to explain that she’s just come round for a drink now rather than waiting for the time stipulated on the invitation. "Why plan to have a drink tomorrow when we can have a drink today?" says Could.

In the end it’s Could who gets them inside, points out that it’s the weekend tomorrow anyway, gets the wine opened, gets them both sitting on the sofa, glass in hand, close together, Could doing the talking but Should at least nodding along, that little frown between her eyebrows showing that she's listening...

I don't believe it! Then it’s Could who acts upon a sudden impulse to-

But it's Should who follows up "Oh!" with "Okay..."

And there we leave them. I Could go on, but I don’t think I Should. They’re together now, still in separate apartments but thinking about it, and this works quite well as a happy beginning.

Yep. Told you. Here comes the moral. Did you notice “happy beginning” not “happy ending,” by the way? Very cute. Amazing how far you can go, if you bring together Could and Should.

*The Cosmic Ordering Service, Barbel Mohr, 1998

There is, at the moment, a campaign in the UK to hold a People’s Vote on the terms of whatever shambolic compromise of an eleventh-hour, last-minute bodge-job of a deal the UK government accepts from the EU’s rather more media-savvy and assertive collection of B - can’t type the word any more - negotiators. A People’s Vote is, of course, a far cuddlier thing than, say, a Second Referendum, and it has the further advantage that you can no more argue with the result of a People’s Vote, than you can reject the verdict of a People’s Court.

Hold a Second Referendum, and you end up with a “best of three” campaign - assuming the people get it right this time - in the sense, they don’t show themselves up once again to be incapable of understanding the issues as clearly as We do. The whole B - my spellcheck suggests People’s Previous Vote - argument only goes away if the People’s Vote confirms that The People Meant It. Add the no-shows to the Leave votes, and you get a majority of people who didn’t vote to remain in the EU. Or vice-versa, yada yada.

If we can accept a People’s Vote but be against Referendums on some kind of principle, and if we can accept that The People voting in a People’s Vote somehow outvote the people voting in a referendum, then we arrive at an argument for correcting votes with Votes. Maybe the simplest thing would be to correct the result of the last general election with a People’s Election, and we can set off down that route to freedom and democracy.

Today, I shall write a short piece about the word “triangulation”. Interesting word. Seriously. Thirteen letters and no e, but still not good for Hangman because as soon as you see the -ation, you’ve got too much of the rest of it. Anyway, you need short words for Hangman. Triangulation stays interesting, though, because it's also a word with a range of meanings. Politicians use it to refer to one instance of their tedious cunning (“triangulating” their message); spies use it to describe [redacted]; psychologists talk about the Karpman Drama Triangle, or they do if they’ve recently put triangulation into Wikipedia in their search for meaning(s). Triangulation isn’t curvy, but it sounds as though it bounces.
 
Triangulation is a tactic in chess and a strategy in currency speculation - “strategy” might be overdoing it, but I like the tactic/strategy progression. Triangulation can be manipulative; it can be a method of helping one person through another. Finally, triangulation is the art of drawing lines and triangles and thereby deciding where you are. It’s that last meaning that interests us now. Interests me, anyway (the post discussing the linguistic trick whereby the word “is” the thing will have to wait for another day). Triangulation is what navigators do when they want to know where they are - in the narrow geographical sense of finding out where their boat is on the map.
 
We’re being serious today. They go up on deck with a gadget - in my day, it was a protractor and a piece of string, but Form One was only ever interested in the height of the tree on the far side of the playground. Form One never sailed the high seas and they don’t fit here, but I remember their faces and it’s nice of them to drop by. Navigators go up on deck, extinguish any fires that might be burning, then use their gadget to work out where “magnetic north” is on the horizon. There’s also true north, if I remember rightly, but that, er, plays you false if you’re finding your place off a shallow rock-infested coastline. True north lacks the magnetism, the sheer charisma, of magnetic - sorry. This is a serious blog post about a thirteen-letter word. We’ll put a lid on that one right now. To continue.
 
[But just quickly - digression - isn’t it a shame that we can’t repurpose the term “angle grinder” for navigation? It would fit so well.]
 
To continue. Yes. The boy stands on the recently extinguished deck, aligning his gadget with magnetic north, and then, because this is also an equal-opportunity blog post, he consults with the girl standing on the slightly less blackened part of the deck, and the man and woman, and the representatives of the several ethnic minorities on board, and they all agree as to which of the symbols from the Ordnance Survey map they’re going to seek out on the rocky coast to the left.
 
Port. Left. Not starboard, not dead ahead. Port out, starboard home, as the saying goes, or at least went, and we’ll assume that they’re heading up the right-hand side of the map with the rocky coastline to their port. They’re all standing there, feet pleasantly warm, clutching the day’s first mugs of tea/coffee, and as the horizon lightens with the coming sunrise, they can see that during the night, the horizon has changed from the endless straight-line flatness of the open ocean, to the rocky immediacy of the coastline.
 
Port is where the land is supposed to be, and it’s there. That’s a relief, actually. There is at least one person still in the wheelhouse (one or two of them had wondered, seeing the crowd on deck; the wheelhouse isn’t lit now, and it’s difficult to see inside). The sails are flapping a bit, but the engine is running and the crowded little boat with the still-warm deck is moving forward nicely. They just need to know how far up the blue bit of the map they’ve come since last time they got out the gadgets. It was a dark and stormy night, obviously, last night, with lots of storytelling, and keeping track of progress hasn’t been easy. “Triangulation,” they mutter to each other, uneasily. “We need to do some triangulation.”
 
You're losing it again. So, having found magnetic north, they work out the angle from the boat to the Triangulation Pillar they can just make out through the mist, and then, as the sun rises, the man with the eye patch and the tricorn hat and the wooden leg and the parrot on his shoulder (I thought he was with you) raises his hand and points. “I see a sign!” he cries, and sure enough, it’s the Windmill With Or Without Sails they had been expecting. Leaving a small group arguing over whether they’re actually going to see a Graticule Intersection At 5’ Intervals and what it will look like if they do, they go inside and draw lines on the map. Somebody uses the words “reciprocal”, but everybody else pretends not to hear.
 
And there they are. On the map. A point at the intersection of straight lines, beating on, moving under power, going with the current, borne forward ceaselessly into the future. I’m better at navigation than I thought I was. I took a course once, with a Dutch guy, but flunked it. [Note. It is characteristic of this author that he embeds half-references to other works in his writing. Here, for example, we hear an echo of F Scott Fitzgerald, and this is followed by a rather clumsy attempt to pack in a reference to the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In some tellings of that story, the captain of the doomed ship is heard to ask a young crew member (unidentified), as they both walk up the gangplank to embark for the last time, “What’s the protractor for?” But this is a recent addition.] They never did find the ship. I told him he needed a piece of string.
 
A happy ending would be nice, at least? And there we leave the little boat, sailing up the rocky coast, low in the water, crowded with its multitude of peoples on board, course set, somebody holding the wheel, headed for the beach where it will beach, ha ha, tipping sideways at the last moment because nobody thought to retract the keel, leaving everybody to wade ashore, the last of humanity, come to this deserted island (with only its weird profusion of Ordnance Survey landmark buildings and structures to suggest that it had ever been inhabited) in this post-apocalyptic fable spun out of the word “triangulation”, to move into the (okay, there’s also a village) deserted cottages, farmsteads, corner shops and Selected Places of Tourist Interest, to begin again, but this time without conflict or plastic bags.
 
Triangulation is also the thing you do when you emerge from an embarrassing little panic about a laptop glitch (keep calm and clear the cache) to find that (a) you have a Second Website, and (b) the template for your Second Website shows a clutch of little blog posts with pictures at the top - all of which (c) put you in mind of book covers with blurbs underneath. If we imagine those thoughts as the metaphorical lines on an imaginary map, then we can probably get away with suggesting that the “You are here!” point at the intersection looks remarkably like the kind of cartoon idea-lightbulb that would carry with it the inspiration for an entire - but I’ll tell you later. Watch this space, that space, and come to think of it, tonight’s the night for the fireworks at the end of Falmouth Week. Watch them too, if you’re here.

There's a quotation going the rounds on Facebook at the moment. It's a remark - possibly a lament - by a scientist, from a few years ago, and while I'm leading up to it I'll just also mention that I did come across a "Did he really say that?" exchange in the comments section of - I don't know, something. So bear that in mind, and here we go.

The scientist is Gus Speth, and the remark attributed to him is: "I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with thirty years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that."

For a ghost of a moment, I thought that we, the people were at fault for not being rational agents, and for an even smaller unit of time I thought of that Brecht poem about the government dissolving the people, but then I thought: this is realism. This is factoring in a variable that wasn't quite so accurately factored in before. I find that Gus Speth is the author of a memoir, Angels by the River (James Gustave Speth, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), and a number of other books.

I think the time has come for me to start reading Gus Speth.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe it's just me. My default assumption is that any glitch with a computer is going to be something beyond comprehension. In the early days, this was true. My first "serious" computer - in the sense, thing I used for work - was an Amstrad. Never had a problem with it. I wrote a large chunk of my first published book on a Psion Organiser Series 3. That little gadget was magical: I could carry it in the top inside pocket of my jacket and write even while standing up on crowded commuter trains.

Yes, of course I carried notebooks and scrap paper. Pens. But that Amstrad and that cute little Psion Organiser did what I wanted technology to do back then. They jumped the "transcribing my notes" stage. They were a shortcut to the "printing out a final typescript" stage. Back then, I would have understood the term "digital storage" to mean a cardboard filing box with a futuristic pattern printed on the outside. I had a Commodore 64 at one point, and the long wait while Elite loaded was all I needed to know about new technology.

​Then everybody started babbling on about bandwidth and processor speed. There was a thing called a Pentium Chip. Behind the typewrite on my desk, a huge Apple screen appeared. Somebody from the studio took a picture of me - on a film camera - using scissors and a Pritt Stick to lay out pages in the shadow of my Apple. There would have been a little bottle of Tippex as well, and I would have been working to get my page layouts into the envelope in time for the afternoon bike messenger to the typesetter. There was a training course associated with the Apple. I wasn't allowed to switch it on until I'd done the training course.

I remember all those old typewriters being stored in case the digital revolution didn't take. I remember working on a screen with the objective of producing a print-out. The early days of email: sending between glass-walled offices; meeting the eyes of the person who had just received... There were people who scrawled their emails - no grammar, punctuation, caps lock on or off. I became familiar with a little black bomb symbol. Even Apple computers reach the limits of their tolerance sometimes, or did back then.

​Working through all that was an odd and complex challenge. The technology presented its problems in a language that assumed you knew the basics, and/or spoke American, and very little of what they did could be fitted to a pre-tech mindset. I remember the day I worked out that a website's pages weren't pages you turned, like pages in a (printed) book. I wasn't interested enough to devote time to un-baffling myself, though, and I suppose I just got acclimatised to the assumption that when something came up, I wasn't going to have even the basic mindset even to start fixing it. I just wanted to write words (as in: think about planning to get round to writing words, right after I finish reading this book).

A big part of my attitude to early computers was formed when I made the discovery that everything in a document could be lost, if the machine or the programme shut down unexpectedly. Advice to save regularly was always given in the past tense - you should have hit save - because everything about computers was somehow so obvious to everybody else that they didn't think to tell you in advance. That, and the mulish expression that came onto people's faces when they were telling you about all the wonderful things computers could do - and wanting it to be true. Early car enthusiasts probably wore the same expression.
 
Digression. The man who came whenever I had IT problems, after I'd gone freelance. I remember the odd little pang of jealousy when my computer showed him screens it had never showed me. I remember his story about being on a trawler late at night, spotting a periscope, using Morse Code and a torch to signal I C U to the submarine practising its trawler-stalking. I remember the time I called him up and told him there was smoke coming out of my big old monitor. "You've probably got a software conflict. Shut things down, restart, and let's see what happens." No, I told him. It's actually on fire. Yes, of course I'd shut it down by then, but I wasn't going to miss telling him.

All of which might explain why my reaction to the sudden refusal of my new laptop to let me into the 'edit site' page of this website was: download several other browsers, delete several browsers when they didn't work; buy the domain williamessex.online, start building a website there, write a blog post using my old laptop, dream up Second Website Theory citing Asimov's Foundation trilogy as a precedent, see below, go down and bother the guy behind the counter at the computer store near the cinema (again), write to the Weebly helpdesk.

Melissa E replied. Had I considered clearing my cache?

​Er...  

​Thank you, Melissa.

There is now a Second Website, and yeah, the guy behind the counter might have said something about clearing the cache now I come to think about it (from now on, I shall take my problems to the computer store in a calm, rational, receptive, listening, panic-free state of mind), but the main thing is - normal service resumed. Interesting how the mind works. We are (I am) the product(s) of our (my) experience. Not time travellers from a previous world, panicking at the machines.

If this site every goes dark - Friday comes and there's no new post; years pass and it's still this sentence at the top - you might want to - well, you might want to breathe a sigh of relief, but if you came here on purpose (thanks), you might want to try william essex dot online.

There's nothing there at the moment (except that I pressed "publish" on the template so you get to look at that, plus ads temporarily), so I'm not linking the address (and I'd hate you to watch how slowly I get my act together over there), but I had a glitch on my other (new) laptop the other day, and that got me daydreaming about paper back-ups, hard drives, thumb drives, redundant systems, cloud-based computing, server farms, solar flares knocking out electronics generally, sea levels rising, zombie apocalypses, black holes ... and then I had a thought.

If I actually sign up for a second website, maybe I'll be able to watch YouTube clips without those earnest young entrepreneurs telling me how easily they set up their websites. I've found that if I keep doing online banking, the bank stops sending me those pictures of the young woman in exercise gear, at the gym, who's chosen just that moment to check her balance on her smartphone. So I transact like crazy. Perhaps the same principle applies here. Perhaps if I just set up a website and tinker with it occasionally, the young bloke in the specs who's just set up his website and now leans forward, one elbow on the desk, and starts being very frank with me about how easy it all is - will go away.

I signed up for the minimum package over there, hence the ads, but I'll upgrade as and when I get my act together. The thing with the new laptop was, it decided as of Thursday evening last, to block my access to this page. Not the dashboard, but the "edit site" page. My chromebook (Chromebook?) did the same. The man behind the counter at the computer store just down from the cinema did what he always does when I come through the door - carefully, slowly, he explained a few possible solutions that I could try at home, and then he sent me away without charge. Usually, that works.

But this time, when I got home, his possible fixes didn't work, so I think I might have an excuse actually to get in there and pay him something. It's about time. He'll probably fix the thing, but if it turns out that my new laptop's awkward little moment is the first sign of an impending global meltdown in all my current IT dispositions - yeah, I can work with the template I've chosen. And anyway, there are precedents. I dimly remember, from years ago reading under the sheets with a torch, that the conclusion of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (spoiler) somehow involves the discovery that there's a second Foundation hidden behind the first.

I've been told not to mention any movies for a while, so let's put it this way. If you're breeding dinosaurs from blood preserved in mosquitoes preserved in prehistoric amber, you will know the importance of maintaining a second island. If your first Death Star was shot up by pesky rebels, you will know how much it matters to build a second Death Star - secretly - with absolutely the minimum possible number of fatal vulnerabilities.

There is now a Second Website. This one's built on Weebly. I like Weebly. I have no plans to leave Weebly. If there was a "Like" button I would press it. Weebly! Weebly! Don't misunderstand me. But - yeah. Just in case. Dot online kind of covers all the bases, I think.

This curious habit of writing a second blog post under the picture. It’s going to have to stop. The phrase “fair-weather sailor,” used literally, describes a person who only goes out sailing in a flat calm, being unable to handle anything like good (as in: challenging) sailing weather. The phrase “cold-weather blogger,” used this morning, describes me sitting here today. Too much sun. Too much pleasant breeze coming in through the open windows.

Come December, and I’ll tell you what I think. Twice. Once above the picture and once below. Today, I’m going out back to do some watering. The roses are having a good year, although two of the recently bought miniatures dried out and had to be coaxed back to life, and the new magnolia hasn’t been doing half as well as it would have been, had I not left it without water for a crucial week of hot sunshine. Senior moments are fine until they affect the garden (and last a week).

So, yes, I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave this for now.

[The finely drawn uncial script with pictures of winged babies in the margins ends at this point. The writer, clearly agitated, continues in a near-illegible scrawl using a faulty Biro that leaks inkblots and scratches the vellum.]

No, we’re not. I suppose it’s inevitable that I refer to the weather as fine, after weeks of set-fair heatwave, and the monsoon starts.

The light greying out through the skylight, and then the hammering of the rain. The air fresh to the touch. Pleasant, actually. But inconvenient. The rain came hammering down yesterday afternoon (time passes differently while I’m writing these posts) and I sat in the doorway thinking about stair-rods – I remember stair-roads – and climates where heat alternates with heavy rain. Global warming is important and it’s happening, I know, but it doesn’t half trigger some entertaining daydreams.​

Saw the weather forecast last night. There’s a lot of red weather coming up from the Mediterranean, pushing out the yellow weather and turning London orange. We’re in for a resurgence of the heatwave. This I find encouraging, albeit in a rather sinister “things are getting interesting” kind of way. And yes, I do remember the heatwave of Summer 1976, thank you.
 
In particular, I remember sitting outside that pub on the North side of that famously wide high street, at a big round table with a group of friends, and inside, on the machine, Bryan Hyland starts to sing “So we gotta say goodbye, for the Summer,” and we all hear it, and we all realise: it’s over. I remember the news pictures of parched ground. I remember Paolo. Simon. K. The round table, although that was later, and that basement. Did we wonder whether future Summers would be like this? I suppose we did. Oh, and I remember the Rolling Stones at Knebworth. “What are we going to do now, Keith? Rip This Joint? Okay.”
 
Howell’s rain dance only worked once. Yes, and waking up on the lawn outside that house with the waterwheel, after that party. That false clarity [Oh dear. I seem to have spilt coffee over several of my memories of Summer’76.] as though all of consciousness has crystallised at the edges. Cracked fields with canyons in them. Jerry Cornelius. David Bowie. Max Demian. Lighters held up in the darkness at the Deutschelandhalle. Those hand-drawn maps of [Oops. Again. How clumsy of me.] and the walk up from the lake afterwards. Was that the year – never mind.
 
And I remember a politician by the name of Denis Howell, who was appointed Minister for Drought shortly before the rains came that Autumn. He was Minister of Floods for a short while, and then, in the ‘78/’79 Winter, Minister for Snow. I remember that Winter, too. The house painted in pink and green stripes. Those jeans you wore, if this means I'm thinking of you, and the name of the cat. Refuelling the helicopter, and the ride back under the Golden Gate Bridge.
 
Did the referendum on joining – actually, staying in – the then-EC happen in Summer 1976? No, 1975. I remember that we had bundles of rectangular paper fliers, about the size of something you’d see stuck in the back window of a car, bearing black-print-on-white slogans about the benefits of continued EC membership. They were great for cutting up and then invisibly mending (Sellotape) with the letters rearranged to say something rude. That referendum was funnier, more decisive, and I suppose I could say that it was over more quickly.
 
False memory. Except that it wasn’t. It didn’t ask a fresh question and it didn’t end the argument. It was a referendum on changing an existing relationship with the European Community, and it set us up for several more decades of arguing about Europe. You could say that today’s arguments are just business as usual. We’ve been bothering about the neighbours for centuries, sometimes by warlike means and sometimes by disagreeing with ourselves over the results of referendums. Referenda. Whatever. Not expressing a view here, but leaving is the one thing we’ve never tried, to shut down the argument.
 
But I’m not going to talk about that. We’ve spent two years failing to recover a sense of perspective on Europe; let’s talk about the weather. The direction of the colour scheme last night reminded me of all those doom-sayers burbling on about the Gulf Stream and how it flows up the graphic representation of global ocean currents to the left of the UK, mainly blue-green, bringing with it lines with triangles on them that signify rain today, sun tomorrow, fog on Friday and a blustery weekend with a sunny morning for Monday. British weather. Isobars, you know. The curved ones as well.
 
We had doom-sayers back in ’76, but not like we’ve had over the past few years. I suppose that the Millennium Bug and the Mayan Calendar and the Dot-Com Boom and the mindset of complete unreality brought on by social media have put us in the mood. Instead of SNAFU, how about SINWAD? Situation Normal: We’re All Doomed. Mind you, our grandparents had MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – as a serious, straight-faced, generally accepted principle of international superpower diplomacy, so we can’t talk. Remember the SALT? The media doubled up on the T, didn't they? Talks.
 
Barbarossa. Here, now, this year, the real danger of global warming is not that giant icebergs will float right up to the waterfronts of picturesque Icelandic fishing villages and cause evacuations and photo-opportunities, but that the Gulf Stream has already “switched off” (as those happy pessimists used to put it), so that the weather is starting consistently to come from somewhere else. These days, if you want that comfortable tucked-up-in-bed feeling of impending doom, all you have to do is look for a weather forecast in which the colours move from right to left across the country … like last night’s.
 
Isn’t it great? Another reason to think that now is a significant moment in human history. I remember those flickery ocean currents bringing warm weather up from roughly Jamaica, bottom left, to somewhere up around the Shetland Islands, top right. Easy on the eyes, dependent on the world not changing. And what does the world do? Regardless of the fact that our mobile-phone company has put us “in control” and bought TV advertising to tell us so? Yes, it changes. No, we’re not in control. Go look out of the window. No, the window is the screen with the world outside it. Not touch-sensitive, sorry.
 
If that movement of warmth has stopped happening, I guess the best guide to the weather of the future will be one of those interminable black-and-white documentaries about “H*tl*r’s War Machine” getting bogged down at the gates of Moscow. [Sorry, I hate to type the name.] Come September, we’ll get heavy rains that, er, turn the roads to mud, and then, on some soon-to-be-ominous same-every-year date in early December, say, we’ll see the first wisps of snow. Within a week, we’ll be running through a black-and-white landscape in our snowsuits, cutting off the supply route to the 6th Army in Stalingrad.
 
Tick tock not. Or whatever would be today’s equivalent. The war-documentary analogy doesn’t quite stretch that far, but you get my drift (hey, pun!). The winds of Winter will come straight from the Urals (it’s always the Urals, have you noticed?) and the Summer heat will spill up the weather chart from the Sahara (other mountain ranges and deserts are available). Extreme weather conditions will shorten human lifespans, so that if you stare long enough at the statistics and ignore everything happening around you, there’ll be the opportunity to start an argument, or if you’re a government, put out a press release, about how we’re all younger-looking and healthier. Statistically.
 
Assuming I do discover the secret of eternal life, or at least implausible longevity, at some point between now and the date on which my body clock “should” cease to tell the time, I’m going to find the architecture interesting. Travel to a hot place, and you find a distinctive architecture of coolness. Travel to places where they ski, and you find an architecture of steeply sloping roofs (rooves?), shutters over the windows, clocks with wooden birds in them and saunas where you can get yourself really sweaty and then rush out into the snow and dive into an ice-cold bath. [No, I don’t visit ski resorts much. Why do you ask?]
 
How do you blend those two together? Interlined curtains? My guess is that (a) you don’t, and (b) the status quo is breaking anyway. The term “architecture” will soon be meaningless. We’ve been comfortably arguing over who recycles and who doesn’t, who litters and who doesn’t, comfortably complaining about the neighbours, and now we’re going to have to face the final countdown: fires across former wetlands, water shortages, more potholes in the roads, the elevation of the Minister for Catastrophe to cabinet rank, the total collapse of civilisation as we know it, and TV advertising from mobile-phone companies to tell us how they’re empowering communities to take responsibility for their own environments by recycling their old phones for negligible sums of barter chips.
 
Good talk, Nostradamus, thanks. Traditionally built homes, alternately perma-frozen in Winter and roasted at maximum temperature in Summer, will disintegrate. Architects will become scavengers, eking out their scant livings on the edges of crumbling cities, scratching designs for temporary dwellings into the dried roadsides in return for scraps of food. In the few years we have left before global air travel spreads the plague that kills us all, we’ll become nomadic – but over short distances, in the British way, moving seasonally (discreetly, without fuss) from the ground on which we pitch our Summer yurts to the adjacent ground on which we build our Winter igloos. We’ll maintain our hedges to keep out the neighbours, of course, mustn’t let standards slip, although we’ll have to switch from native species to imported tall-grass varieties.
 
State media will continue to reassure us that nothing has changed, while running property shows about seasonal housing – Kevin and Brenda run a glamping business through the Summer months, then they close for a week in December and re-open as an ice hotel just in time for the festive shopping spree. Derek’s construction company alternates between building straw-bale houses, with plenty of ventilation, and building ice houses. Freezing coloured water as a decorative speciality. Decorative fabrics embedded in blocks of ice*. By then, with or without a follow-up vote, thanks to ice caps melting and sea levels rising, we’ll have moved a long way further from France. As for the Netherlands, yeah. About that whole below-sea-level thing.
 
Get a load of those dots! Okay, I’m feeling very much better now. Really cheerful. Optimistic, even. But – hey. I nearly forgot. On top of all that, I heard a rumour. Somebody told somebody who told a friend of mine who told me the other day that the army is stockpiling food. Just that – “stockpiling food”. Nothing more than that. They’re not modifying their tank tracks to run on mud, or insulating their engines so that they’ll start even in Ural weather. Nor are they specifically buying Heinz Baked Beans in bulk, or Kendal Mint Cake, or Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, say. Or getting ready for a big party. No details. Just “stockpiling food”.
 
It’s the perfect rumour. Simple, believable, quite possibly meaningless (perhaps somebody in uniform did a bulk-buy at a cash-and-carry and was seen) – but if you get the tone of voice right when you’re spreading it around, definitely ominous. Could signify anything… Especially with those three dots (which are the emoji version of a Meaningful Look – a rare instance of the emoji coming before the chicken – er, egg – er, I mean, the expression that it signifies. The emoji, I mean. Oh, never mind).
 
Then last night, with the imaginary wind blowing around the house, the imaginary wolves howling in the imaginary forest outside, the sinister imaginary theme tune failing to drown out anything at all and the floor upstairs creaking in that way it does when there’s nobody up there (Or Isn’t There?), I had a thought. After watching the sinister red-tinged weather forecast and ferrying another sack of canned food down to the fall-out shelter, I thought: if I’m going to write about this, maybe I should write about the shortage at the supermarket. And the more I thought about that…
 
There was snow in Falmouth for two days at the beginning of this year. Just for two days. But I remember that on the first day there was talk of “panic buying in the supermarket”, and then, on the second day when I went shopping, I found empty shelves because the supply lorries couldn’t get through. [That was the Official Explanation, cue ominous music.] This country is not good at extreme weather – far too much fun getting in a panic – but that was a failure of “Just In Time” stock control on a grand scale.
 
Clearly, we can guess that The Army Knows Something. If it starts raining in September, and doesn’t stop, get your panic-buying in early. Equip yourself with snow shoes and heavily insulated clothing. Hire an architect to re-jig your house so that it has cool, airy interiors and heavy-duty insulation on the outside. Take igloo-building lessons and learn to carve ice sculptures. Don’t be surprised when the snow comes and you see tanks trundling through town with your online grocery order dangling from the gun barrel.
 
*No! Not deceased relatives. Although taxidermy would have to change.

Are we stuck in the present, or just wary of anything that might take us out of the status quo? On the side of that bus just now, the words “Working in partnership with” and then the logos of the two local universities. And now here comes that other bus, the small one, the one that I’ve mentioned before, bearing the words “Connecting local communities since 1929.” There’s a schematic on one of them, a bouquet of green lines with place names instead of flowers, but those are the words that these two buses use to introduce themselves to the world.

You might think that a mission statement along the lines of “Going from A to B” would be more appropriate, or perhaps “Giving you a ride home in return for a small-ish amount of money,” but no. Even that schematic doesn’t exactly add up to “If you want to go to Penryn, get on this one.” These buses are engaged in a vast, static purpose – partnering with universities, connecting communities – and I guess that’s what they want us to think of them. The fact that the wheels on the bus go round and round is incidental. Whether the mummies on the bus go chat-a-chat-chat or just dream of Ancient Egypt – I can’t believe I thought that would be funny. Sorry.

Survey tunes. Mummies and daddies on the bus, I'm sorry to have interrupted your conversation. On the table in front of me is a white paper bag. It contains small items recently collected from a nearby store. On the back of the paper bag is a request. “Please complete our survey to help us make sure we’re giving you the best service.”
 
Not “Complete our survey to help us work out whether we’re doing well or badly” or even “to work out how we’re doing, or how we could improve,” but “help us make sure…” we’re the best. Complete our survey to help us confirm to ourselves that we’re doing really well. Okay. I have more to say about that, but before I go any further, I want you to know that I really care about you, as a reader of this blog. Please help me by grading this post from one to ten, where ten is “William, I think you’re wonderful”, and one is “I’m sorry, William, I’m just not capable of following what you’re on about.”
 
Thank you. I value your opinion. If you would like to add any further comment, please use the box provided (max. 28 characters). And no, it’s not necessary to tell me in person. You’d be welcome, and I suppose we’d both laugh, but we’d be laughing because that’s not what such invitations invite. We all know, don’t we, that if I turned up at that store’s counter and started helping them to make sure, etc., in my own special way, our relationship would be soured. “Here, let me wrap that for you,” would not go down well, and nor would “Can you really not see that there’s a queue?”
 
We, Robot. It's as if we’re trained (influenced, nudged, pressured) to think in States of Being these days. Not doing, Being. A bus driver might ferry people around town, just as an individual retailer might sell me stuff. But collectively, at the level of the organisations that aspire to direct our lives, we're being put into a still picture and not a moving, doing, changing narrative. A town’s bus company is Working In Partnership; its directors have meetings with academics (administrators, sorry) and come away thinking they’ve done something useful. But has their discussion moved a single commuter from A to B?

Your bus is delayed, I'm afraid, but comfort yourself with the thought that your communities are connected. Oh, you've given us a 0 in the survey. Is our best service not reaching you? Perhaps you should get to the bus stop earlier. Of course we put The Customer first. What do you mean, you're the customer? How arrogant. There are hundreds of customers. We can't spend our valuable time just focusing on you.

What seems to have happened, somewhere deep down at soul level, is that we’ve abandoned attempts to achieve The Singularity by building computers that can think like we do, and started instead to train ourselves to think like computers do. But wait a minute. Think about that paper bag from the store. There’s a great hierarchy of people and managers behind it, who have to Sign Off The Paper Bag before it goes into production, but only two who matter. Only two whose disappearance would matter to the production of the paper bag.

Exactly. The (I guess) freelance graphic designer who made it what it is, and the writer who wrote the first draft of those words on the back – the draft that said “tell us how we’re doing.” Those two, designer and writer, along with all the rest of their kind, are (more or less contentedly) accepting money to provide first drafts of all the world's paper bags, slogans and schematics on the sides of buses, and if you think about it, instructions on how to interact with reality.

Not harness - unleash. Their drafts are wrenched back from creativity to stasis by middle management, and they accept that because they're getting paid to do this stuff and they can be creative out of hours. But just imagine what would happen if they realised their power.

If there were no first drafts, their would be no second drafts. No second drafts, nothing to sign off, no meetings, no brain-achingly dull statements of the obvious to include in our marketing literature. So my suggestion, for getting us out of this State of Being and back into moving forward, is not to Harness The Power Of Technology, which is almost as inert as a bureaucracy until it's given something to do, but to Unleash The Designers And Writers, whose creativity is unpredictable, who don't go bang and fizzle out if you drop them in water (no, wait) and who generate ideas without first having to be programmed with self-limiting parameters.

I also think money isn't the solution to everything and managers should be subordinate to the people we manage, but we're not talking about the NHS. Just think. Yes, the words on the bus would be “Paying designers generously” and the schematic would show a writer accepting a card payment, but there’s a fighting chance they’d be self-confident enough, secure enough in their own skills and general all-round value, to ask a straight question: how are we doing?*
 
*See above re: SINWAD.

Sometimes I wake up and none of this happened. I wake up and we’re in the world we could have made. In this world, the internet brings us closer together; the news is rich and varied and always immediate; we’re forgiven the angry, judgemental, ridiculously -ist tweets of our adolescence. We don’t use social media to attack each other and/or obsess over a short list of recurring global issues; we have built personal media instead, to open ourselves up and share our individuality and thereby foster harmony. To know all is to forgive all, is that the saying? We have harnessed the power of technology to bring our inner children into the world.
 
We don’t live there, but we’re not far away. We’ve been lucky in an idiosyncratically human way. There was a time, in the early days of digital technology, when the workings of these new machines were beyond our understanding. Strangely – or perhaps inevitably, given human nature’s weakness for mystery – that drew us in. A whole generation accepted the complexity of the new technology as the price of the simplicity it seemed to offer. But it was as if, in return for mystifying us, we gave computers power over us. We wanted them to run our lives.
 
We mistake inscrutability for wisdom. For a time, computers ran everything: our healthcare systems; our transport infrastructure; our communications and our finances. Algorithms told policy-makers about human behaviour; databases updated doctors on our medical conditions; at the simplest level, even the judicial system automated itself – speeding fines, for example, were levied by machines on the evidence of automated cameras. Aircraft began to land themselves; empty trains travelled to where they would be needed. Machines oiled themselves in silent factories*.
 
We began to build self-driving cars and intelligent roads. We remembered the Turing Test, whereby a machine would pass as a human, and now we spoke of the Singularity, whereby a machine would surpass a human. We spoke of these more readily as milestones to be passed, than as dangers to be avoided. And as we spoke of the future, all the complexities of the present – of the machines; of the lives we had once lived – became hidden. Generations grew up for whom every task could be undertaken by the simple expedient of tapping a screen. 3D printers took over manufacture for us; intelligent assistants flipped every switch for us; machines not only ran but lived our lives for us.
 
Near-anarchy. And everything became argument. Detached now from the physical world, with no challenge left for us to face, with every creative achievement mediated by a machine, we sat at our screens projecting our own frustrations onto the world around us. We attacked each other as though other people were figments of a hostile “Them” that existed nowhere outside our own hazy sense of injustice; we defended our rights angrily, although they were not under threat except in our own minds, and many of us came to need the fight. It became a lightly done thing, a ready impulse, to sign up for a cause. Much good was done in those times, but at the price of a discontent that brought us to near-anarchy.
 
Then madness brought sanity. Suddenly, at the end of a short debate that was charged more by emotion than reason, prompted more by the MPs’ self-interest than the public interest, a government of the time, riding a wave of public anger, made it illegal to distinguish between people on the basis of gender or ethnic origin. In any way whatsoever. Even gender-indicative pronouns were to be phased out. Reaction was swift, hostile and loud (as it was to everything, back then). But governments do not admit mistakes, opposition to the new Act split into factions, and inevitably, given the mood of the time, that opposition provoked a countervailing movement (array of factions) in support of the new Act. The government did not fall; the Act was not repealed.
 
Blurred boundaries. The Act was, perhaps, the “Act of Madness” that some suggested, but it is the clearest marker of the new beginning – it was the idiosyncratically human stroke of luck. Scholars have struggled to explain what happened next. Some suggest that there was already a strong undercurrent of public feeling against exclusion of any kind; others to the launch of the #AllOfUs movement (which was responsive not causative, surely?). [There is even an argument that the Left-Handed Rights campaign, which in its short life achieved the banning of handles and grips moulded for right-handed use, also served to draw attention to so-called “invisible minorities”.]
 
We all agree, though, that the new Act succeeded in blurring a boundary that had become an obstacle to mutual understanding. “You can’t run a fence down the middle of equality,” was a saying of the time.
 
It is scarcely believable now that the not-so-gradual repurposing of the word “populist” – to refer to people in the way that the word “feminist” had referred to a gender-identified subdivision of the people – took some observers by surprise. But the crucial point here is not the speed of the change, but its substance. The old movement, feminism, had expressed so much injury, so much injustice, so much resentment, that on a superficial analysis, a simple change in the law should not have been enough to bring about such a transformation. But it did, and the reason for that was, crudely, we were all newly able to share the pain. There is a technological explanation for this, of course, and we'll get to that. But first, let us further explore the human aspects. They were important too.
 
Humanity found. This was a long-overdue time of boundaries crossed and broken down; it was a time when we began to discover how to find peace before conflict; how to share ourselves in ways that had not been possible when we had defined ourselves by difference. It was a time, we can now say, when we began to look for similarity and found empathy. We were beginning, in that time, to reach out to each other in ways that seem commonplace now but were unheard-of then. “We were all feminists then; we are all populists now,” was a transitional slogan. It was a brave time.
 
Yes, the first populists – in the new sense – belonged to the same subdivision of people as had populated the old feminist movement. But the Act, mad as it might have been, stroke of unintended luck, had opened us up to each other. We embraced this opportunity to be together. The People’s Institute increased its membership by a third in a month; the popular podcast and radio programme People’s Hour reported a doubling of its audience in a single audit period. So much hurt – suddenly shared. A dam broken.
 
Dressed for tech. So far, so idealistic. It would be good to believe that human nature achieved harmony on its own. But this is where technology finally proved its worth. First, the Summer Heatwaves of the early 2020s saw the launch of [gender-neutral] Cool Clothing – a brand name, but it neatly summarises a durable fashion; whatever the influences from other cultures might or might not have been, whatever the PR and marketing that convinced us, we all began to wear “Summer dresses” back then, and we still do. Intelligent dresses. It is, in both senses, Cool to do so.
 
Then, using a combination of biotech and quantum-generated AI, drawing on lessons learned during those early abortive attempts to evolve sentient cars, a small start-up company based in an industrial park on the edge of Peterborough, then unknown, without venture-capital financing, launched its initial range of Mood Fabric. Initial response was cautious – mood disclosure via clothing made from the fabric was involuntary – but then, shortly afterwards, came the company’s first range of defensive clothing. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Almost overnight, gender-related interpersonal violence became a thing of the past. After all, what would-be attacker could get past a defensive release of pheromones and relaxants? All violence began to decrease, mental health to improve, as intelligent clothing hit the mainstream and our emotional states became visible.
 
When the UK’s Ministry of Defence placed a bulk order for uniforms woven out of Peace Fabric, the world did change overnight. We can signal our own and respond to each other’s moods and desires: we can reject and disarm violence; we can extend warmth and understanding in bulk to whole regiments of would-be enemies; above all, we can negotiate (an archaic word, but still useful) our interactions and relationships on the basis of mutual understanding. To wear clothing that doesn’t signal our feelings is not illegal, because it doesn’t need to be: given what technology can do for us now, it would be absurd not to wear our hearts on our sleeves.
 
As a diplomat was heard to say, in the brief interval between the Five-Minute War and the Three-Day International Love-In And Peace Conference, “The only real change is that we’re all on the same side.” But what a difference that is, and all because technology finally helped us to be the people that we needed to be.
 
*This sentence a fragment of a poem that I can’t find right now, in my clumsy translation from the original German. A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, I think.

It’s Wednesday morning in Falmouth, and there’s bright sunshine coming straight in through the windows, almost horizontal this early. The sun’s just up and I’ve closed the blinds beside me: hard to see the screen in this much light. There’s probably a paradox in that, but I’m not in the mood. Today is my free morning this week, until later, and I’ll make a start on this before the day begins.
 
I can hear seagulls. There’s a cruise ship in, smaller than they usually are, reversed in against the dock. Smoke – steam? – rising from its funnel. I think later I might do some research on the correct (not exactly technical) terms I really should know already, if I’m going to start the day’s writing with a description of a short white cruise liner tied up in Falmouth and blowing off steam. Maybe it’s about to leave. It was here yesterday and they don’t stay long. Looming up over Events Square like a sudden apartment block.
 
Steam. The seagulls are still arguing and I’m sitting here looking out at an innocuous white cruise ship with a mental image of men shovelling coal into furnaces. I think maybe I should cut down on the film-watching. It’s a bright morning. Sun glittering on water. There’s a whole world outside. On that ship, people are waking up, and maybe a few of them are rolling aside the cannons and peering out of the gun-ports – sorry, looking out of their windows – portholes, I can say portholes, I think – at the sunlit townscape going up the hill I front of them.
 
Swag. Maybe somebody’s sitting over toast and tea and writing a description of the morning view of the town into a journal. Maybe there’ll be photographs in which I’m a tiny undetectable micro-pixel in a window-shaped blur. Or maybe they’re all huddled round their devices picking up the latest developments in the Trump presidency. Smaller cruise ships tend to be marketed as exclusive, high-end, whatever, blah-blah, pay more, get more, fewer passengers, et cetera, so I think it’s a safe bet they’ll all have state-of-the-art technology. Maybe they’re all huddled round preparing to meddle in the US mid-term elections.
 
Would they be immune from prosecution, if they did their meddling while in international waters? Wow – all this going on and I haven’t even had breakfast. Imagine the Bursar – Purser, whatever (I see a uniformed man in a small cabin tapping out a Morse Code message about an iceberg) – idly reading a few of the postcards before bundling them all into a sack marked ‘Swag’ and hauling them off to the Post Office.
 
“Dear children and grandchildren. Wish you were here. Grandad and I have had a lovely morning in Falmouth sewing doubt in the minds of voters in New Hampshire. I’ve marked a cross on the picture to show you where William Essex is writing his blog post. You know what to do. Love, Granny.”
 
Stumble. Ooh, that’s scary. Even considering that I’m making it up as I go along, spontaneously, never knowing what the next sentence will bring*, et cetera, that’s scary. Brings back a sudden memory of being read Treasure Island as a child, at night (Robert Louis Stevenson, long time ago). Didn’t the whole thing start with the tapping of a stick, heard late at night? And a black mark on a paper? Excuse me if I don’t look that one up (fact-check it, as we say these days); I may have confused more than one bedtime story, but I like the memory as it is.
 
Let’s all think happy cruise ships. Nice cruise ship. Happy passengers. Innocuous blog post. Blog post about seagulls and sunshine and NOT about stumbling across a massive international conspiracy to subvert democracy. [Anybody here from Facebook: do NOT take this blog post seriously. It is supposed to be FUNNY, which is like fake news but OKAY. No, it is NOT fake news. Nice Facebook. I like Facebook.]
 
Even the seagulls have gone quiet … maybe too quiet?
 
*I don’t always write that way, if you’re wondering, hardly ever in fact, but this post seemed to know where it wanted to go. Remember Microsoft’s early tagline, “Where do you want to go today?” Still looking for an answer.

There was once a market, gaudy and bright and self-consciously strange. It was away from the main trade routes, but not hard to find again if you had developed a taste for the merchandise it offered. This was a market that specialised in fantasy fiction. Most of the stallholders were young, and most of them were American, and most of them had written and made (ordered to have printed) the books they had to sell. These were authors, well versed in the myths of their culture, perhaps also jaded with the realities, come now to the market to sell their own myths.
 
Some of the market stalls were located inside a walled garden, and some were scattered around the open country outside those walls. All were brightly painted, and all were piled high with brightly coloured paperbacks*. Even from a distance, from the covers of these paperbacks, the casual visitor could see immediately that this was a place to find tales of young heroes, tall and thin, dressed in long jackets or cloaks, sometimes hooded, always armed with a sword or a staff. There would be horses and dragons, and always a high chance of finding magic.
 
The roads travelled. But would the myth-making be done well? That was the question. The casual visitor stopped at the fork in the road where the market began. Behind him were the familiar trade routes, paved with gold and good intentions, and back even further into his past were the big, established, ordered book markets, bright with promises and media hype but greying with complacency and self-regard, all of them gated, surrounded indeed by gatekeepers, the hard-to-enter cloisters for the chosen few casting long shadows over the slush-piles and the heaps of stillborn myths. He’d had stalls in those markets, over the years, but he’d watched their magic fade until finally he’d left to save his own magic.
 
The casual visitor, who had never understood why parables should stick to the script, sat down on a gnarled old tree-stump with a scowling face and a whole bunch of runes carved into it, reached into his travel-stained robe, and pulled out his e-reader. Pausing only to reflect on the convenience of a travel-stained robe with hidden pockets, he read a bit more of his current book. He’d pre-ordered this one on the strength of some pages he’d seen online, started reading it, and then there’d been something on Facebook about last-minute editing, and the book had changed in his hand. He had been amused by that semblance of magic. The book had drawn him to this market in search of more like it; now, he needed to read it.
 
But it was time for another paragraph. The casual reader stood up. He fumbled around in his travel-stained robe for the right hidden pocket, then, exasperated that he couldn’t find it, laid his e-reader down on the gnarled old tree stump while he tried to find its hiding place. That gave him an idea. He enjoyed blog posts in which creative people unpacked their bags to reveal the kit they took with them on their creative assignments. Could he write something like that?
 
No elaborately dressed china doll? He reached into his hidden pockets, finding them easily this time, and brought out: an Easter egg (he put it down); a whistle, clogged with sand, with an inscription on the side (ditto); another whistle, this one packed with explosive (you understand that he’s putting these things down on the tree-stump, right?); a baseball (only, it clogs up the sentence if I keep having to make that clear); a shadow without a person attached to it (having said that, he put that shadow straight back where it came from, oh yes); a stick (we’ll call it a stick); a very old coin wrapped in a clean white cloth (a denarius, one of a number sought by both sides of an old conflict); an ancient book, probably a grimoire, damaged and apparently blank, bound in something that certainly looked like leather); a
 
new paragraph, because that one was getting too long; a Martini shaker (but not a stirrer); a set of hooks and a thumper; a Ring (got to be One); a corked bottle (very dark glass); another bottle, clear glass, apparently empty but very, very firmly stoppered; a phaser, set to stun; an iPhone 6; a Samsung J5; a Moleskine journal (blue, A5); several pens; a Lenovo Ideapad 320S; three sheets of folded and crumpled (lined) A4 paper (a draft article arguing that state broadcasters should foster young talent rather than paying top dollar for established names); an assortment of daggers, bracelets, amulets and other silverware; several wooden stakes; a green plastic Spork; a pot of green ink and a quill pen; a blue spotted handkerchief; a green banana in a yellow banana-shaped plastic holder.
 
No, no story in that lot. But good to get it all out. Feeling very much lighter, the casual visitor stepped away from the gnarled old tree stump and the heap of his needful objects. Maybe he should look for that article he’d once read about getting rid of possessions and going through life much lighter? He made a complicated series of movements with his hands and rose three inches off the ground. Levitating with the bearable lightness of having almost nothing left in his pockets, he took the right-hand road and entered the market.
 
Sign and sign again. Immediately, he was surrounded by stallholders. This, he had expected. But what surprised him was, none of them were trying to sell him their books. All of them wanted him to sign up for their email newsletters.
 
“Why?” he asked.
 
“So we can keep you up to date with book launches and special offers.”
 
“But I’m already here and I want to buy – oh, okay.” The casual visitor signed, and signed, and signed, and as he did so, the country around the market silted up with email newsletters, some of which he would take home and read. “I just want to find something to read after my current book,” the casual visitor told an excited young woman who was offering him a ride on her unicorn. “I’m going to review it, and then I want another book. Another well-told story.”
 
“You’ve come to the right place!” she told him, and he waited, but she said nothing more.
 
Live interactions. Soon, he was through the cordon of email-newsletter-writers and into the heart of the market. The stalls here were piled high with books. The casual visitor hesitated. Where to begin? He was surrounded by books. On every cover, the eyes of the hero glowed white (sometimes red, occasionally silver) even against the visual cacophony of the market, and on every cover, the lettering of the title curled around, italicised and magical, reaching out like vines or creepers or in some cases briar roses, to catch the casual visitor’s attention. Or maybe his ankles.
 
There were screens, and there was YouTube, and there were podcasts and live interactions and any amount of social media and marketing, but we’ll gloss over all that because I can’t think of a way to work it into the story**. The casual reader was drawn at first to the brighter stalls, to the carnival atmosphere and the celebrations, to the music and the dancing, and yes, he did watch a lot of the social-media activity, but none of it involved reading and soon he tired. “I just want something good to read,” he said.
 
“How about this?” said a voice. The casual reader had settled on another tree stump – yeah, yeah, gnarled, face, runes, all that – next to a stall towards the back of the market. This was a stall that he hadn’t noticed before, not even as he sat down next to it. There were books, and perhaps over there under a pile of paper was a sign-up form for an email newsletter. But on this stall, there was no pristine vintage Remington typewriter, no coffee cup and saucer artfully arranged, no state-of-the-art software for collating a novel once conceived. There was no glossy surface to this stall.
 
There was paper. Pens and pencils. A laptop so battered that it looked ready to be written into a proverb. And this stallholder had just handed him something and gone back to writing. The casual visitor watched for a while. The stallholder went on writing. The casual visitor looked down. He had been given an opening chapter. He began to read. In no time at all he looked up again. “Is there-?” he began. The stallholder, clearly not wanting to be interrupted, handed him the next chapter.
 
Ah, here's the tinderbox. This time, when he had finished, the casual visitor stood up. Quietly, he went to the front of the stall. Cross-checking between the books on offer and the chapters he had just read, he piled up, first, a copy of the book he had just begun, and then the rest of the series as far as it went. Reaching into his most hidden pocket, he pulled out a wallet containing every means of payment so far invented. He was about to interrupt the stallholder, who was still writing, when he felt a touch on his arm.
 
Behind him stood all the other stallholders. “Shhh!” said one. “The final volume isn’t finished yet. Please don’t interrupt the writer. We all want to know what happens in the end.”
 
The casual visitor emptied all his gold coins onto the stall, took his books, and rose into the air. Silently.
 
*Yes, I know – they’d be selling ebooks as well. Don’t be difficult.
**Look, if you absolutely insist, we could say that the whole market is virtual and all the books are ebooks – but a travelling band of faeries cast a glamour that made it seem … I hesitate to say real. Gimme a break, okay? I started with “There was once a market.” And this happened***.
***I wanted to write a piece about young authors (and others) who get so stuck on social-media marketing that it becomes the end rather than a means – and they evolve into, I don’t know, broadcasters or vloggers or whatever. Maybe starting with the past tense was a mistake. There is a market…

Given the unseasonal length of the post above the picture, I’ll keep this one short. In her Investing column on the back page of the FT Money section of the Weekend FT last Saturday (and, because I’ve had enough coffee this morning to be twitchy about such details) Sunday, the editor-in-chief of Money Week*, Merryn Somerset Webb, reviewed a set of age-related statistics on happiness, and then suggested a “summer holiday reading list”. [I’m not sure that the inverted commas are necessary there, but never mind. Too much coffee.]
 
We get happier as we get older. “If you are 50-59 now, odds are you have happy times ahead,” wrote MSW. And then the books: two recent titles on the theme that everything isn’t getting worse, but actually a lot better, and then The Blunders of Our Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, which was first published in 2013 (Oneworld). “Huge blunders are perfectly normal for governments. Our current one is not uniquely idiotic – which is something to hang onto if you find your mind wandering too much from beach to Brexit.”
 
Hang on tight. And even if there isn’t space in your suitcase for at least one hardback (one of the books reviewed is too recent to have got past that stage), the article itself is worth reading. Title: Why be fatalistic? Life’s getting so much better. Maybe it’s time to enjoy the real world, too.
 
*Sorry for all this preamble.

When the League of Nations failed to prevent the Second World War, it was replaced by the United Nations. When the European Union failed to secure an unambiguous mandate from the British electorate, it was replaced by an array of euphemisms. There were Agreements, Arrangements, Understandings, Models; only the word “Union” itself was excluded from the eventual Settlement. “Politics is the art of talking a lot and changing nothing,” said one observer, crudely paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck*.
 
At 11pm on Friday, 29th March 2019, the UK formally left the EU. That Summer, a UK political party fought a leadership election over the question of whether or not the UK had actually left. As one (defeated) candidate put it, “We’re still members, even if we’ve torn up our membership card.” The issue perpetuated a rift in British politics: departure had entailed the signing of a new set of treaties (Agreements, etc.), and this was, or wasn’t, a betrayal of the original vote to leave (see the chapter Referendum: Boring in the Apocrypha section of this imaginary history textbook). The status quo hadn’t really shifted; the nation states of Europe hadn’t moved. History continued.
 
Blame the late-stage innovations. But the real historical significance of the so-called “Brexit Era” was not the unresolved split between the broadly equal numbers of “Remainers” and “Brexiteers” in the UK electorate, nor was it exactly the rise of “populism” (however defined; the term itself was dismissed as a “political blunt instrument” by a high-profile broadcaster in early 2019). The key to understanding this period in British history is simply this: it was short. The Brexit Era lasted barely more than a decade, and Brexit itself was the culmination of a change process that began perhaps as early as 2011.
 
Historians disagree as to the trigger event for the Brexit Era, with some pointing to geopolitical change, thus fundamentalism and the rediscovery of religion, and others to cultural changes that were themselves triggered by globalisation. A few still refer back to the “first transition event” in value exchange**, but most now argue for a subliminal – barely visible but rapid – change in social/interpersonal attitudes that they track back to one of a small number of late-stage innovations in retail technology. This was also the era of communication via “smart” devices; technologists were still talking about “artificial intelligence”; they had not yet addressed the more pressing issue of “artificial stupidity”.
 
Venn diagrams, each circle felt as local. Where historians do agree is: this was the decade in which, so to speak, everything changed (or for a few, began to change). Hindsight might give us Brexit as the headline issue, but by then, truly viable communications technology had reached the masses, globalisation had reduced distances, value exchange had ceased to be physical, and such concepts as “the nation state” and “national government” had become anachronistic – as had political systems built on the “static democracy” model of a “nationwide” vote at fixed intervals (of years rather than minutes). “The money hasn’t just run out; it’s dematerialised,” tweeted a popular comedian and political theorist, making a more subtle point than perhaps she realised.
 
Much has been written about the “global localism” enabled by personal communications technology; much has also been written about the speed with which today’s culture of personal identity has been adopted. Our system, based on each individual’s personal grid (or “personal space” in common usage) of intersecting interest groups anchored in physical location, is unprecedented in recent human history. It is also, of course, only viable at today’s global population levels.
 
We’re always arguing about something, aren’t we? It is a tragic irony that global warming, coupled with human nature, has finally given us a semblance of stability. We built the “vectors” whereby the so-called “heatstroke rabies” pandemic achieved its global reach, but it was human nature that stopped our response – stopped us grounding the world’s aircraft, closing shipping lanes and highways, thus stopped us limiting the spread of the disease, and buying time to find – look for, at least – a cure.
 
Why did it matter, whether or not this new plague was a “zombie apocalypse”? Why was so much time wasted on protecting early-stage patients (showing “zombie” symptoms) from those who advocated euthanasia? Why so many reassuring lies and so much argument, when above all we needed to work together? Why spend so much on PR for the status quo, when the world around us was collapsing?
 
It’s too late now. Billions died. A generation has been born since those end-times, and we’re beginning again. The Summers are hot and the Winters warm. As some say, it’s as if we live in the world that dystopian fiction described. There are wasps the size of drones, and packs of feral dogs (and cats). But the scattered tribes of survivors are still in communication with each other, and at a basic level, the cities still function. The weather powers the generators, and the technology – some of it – still works. There is good hunting in the stone canyons, and shelter to be found in the ruins.
 
One day, not too far from now, we will set out across the plains, along the surviving roads, over the bridges and through the tunnels, to meet up with our fellow survivors and teach them to live in compliance with our ways and our beliefs. Then, at last, we will live in harmony.
 
*“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” Otto von Bismarck. I looked this up online, of course. Above the late German Chancellor’s passport photograph and quote is an ad for FlexiOffices (I’ve added the capitals). Below is a message for me. “None of your friends have liked this quote yet,” I’m told. There’s something endearingly strange about the modern world.
**The period between the implosion of the “global economy” in 2007/8 and the launch of the Bitcoin network in 2009 has been memorably described in one text as “the scraping of the iceberg along the hull” for the old order. Some historians specialise entirely in the language of technology/utility advertising of the time. We were put there frequently, but were we ever “in control”, they ask?

In writing the post above, I noticed that my spellcheck now queries “Remainers” but not “Brexiteers” (or “Brexiters”). I wonder if the Illuminati have turned in favour of Brexit, or perhaps the Trilateral Commission are now working to separate the UK from the EU. There was that book by Jon Ronson, Them (2001), that went into a range of conspiracy theories, and of course we shouldn’t forget Nudge by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein (2008), which tells us that change can be more effectively achieved by nudging people than by telling them straight-out to change and then getting all officious about it.
 
Makes sense to me. It’s human nature, I suppose, to pick up on the nudge-filled specifics of a situation, whether we’re doing the old-style hunter-gatherer thing, or buying a used car, or negotiating a billion-dollar contract – or indeed deciding whether to eat something that’s way past its sell-by date. Intuition. It’s green. It’s quiet – too quiet. Something just doesn’t smell right. That cliché from fiction about the smile not reaching the eyes. We pick up on all that, but our eyes glaze over at the explicit insincerities of advertising and/or motivational management-speak.
 
Also read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2006), and while you’re at it, watch any episode of Columbo (“they” haven’t remade it yet, I’m pretty sure; I mean Columbo with Peter Falk, and preferably an early episode – perhaps you’ll find the episode – maybe there was more than one – where they were all so obviously trying not to laugh). Everything’s spelt out these days, as if we’re being programmed, but that’s not how we work. Intelligence can’t be treated as artificial. [Even, one day, when it is?]
 
[Aside. Does the job “computer programmer” still exist? Sometimes I think that all the computer programmers of old went into management, after having learned nothing/forgotten everything about human behaviour.]
 
Sorry, politics. Not that it was exactly a nudge, but I liked the detail, a day or two back, that the announcement of the latest agreement (sic) on the UK government’s Brexit strategy (sic) was announced just as the cabinet sat down to dinner – so that they were all three courses and coffee away from being able to brief against it. Bet there were chocolates with the coffee. There have been resignations since, I know, and all manner of ructions, but for me, that timing was the detail, the little flick of the ball past the defender (yes, I watched France:Belgium), that indicated real skill.
 
Not that I’m expressing an opinion in favour of any particular individual, you understand, nor any political party, but I like those minutely but irrevocably revealing moments. Let's invent another one, and this time let’s hold the politics: you’re standing on a beach, looking out at a flat-calm sea, and trying to decide whether this is the perfect, or just a very good, opportunity to go swimming. Then, very briefly, about a hundred metres out, just for a split second, the dorsal fin of a shark breaks the surface. Leaving you still watching a flat-calm sea, but pretty clear that you’re not about to go swimming.
 
Okay, we’re off politics. There’s a piece of music I like. I came across it when I watched the first episode of a television programme called Sanctuary; it’s used as the theme tune for the first and second seasons (changed in the third, I think; no idea why). It’s called Symphonie pour un monde etrange, if you’ll pardon my French, and if you click here, you’ll see the credit sequence as well as hear it; I’m only mentioning it because the tail fin, ten seconds in, has just come back into my mind. Curious how the mind works. But this is where that opening sentence above has taken me (a robot would just have added those two B-words to the spellcheck, or subtracted the R-word, and powered down).
 
Symphony for a Strange World, Joel Goldsmith and Neal Acree. The late Joel Goldsmith. Film, television and video-game music. I love the internet at moments like this, and in particular, I’m really quite fond of YouTube. There’s so much music out there that I haven’t heard. So many clips. And all because – excuse me; I’m going to listen to music for a while – I picked up on that funny little detail about the cabinet eating together. Politics does serve a useful purpose, after all. Who knew?