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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is meaning in life, and life does make sense. But don’t take my word for it. Some of the best questions in the world have answers that we can only find out for ourselves.
     I’ve spent a good part of this season's shopping break re-reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 1946), which tells us that what matters is not so much our situation but our response to our situation – finding beauty in a sunrise, even in a concentration camp; seeing the beauty in frozen trees even on a forced march (“say yes to life” was part of the book's original title*) – and I have lately read Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense (Faber and Faber, 2012), which I mentioned here a week ago. Spufford’s notion of “emotional sense” rises above the small print of any doctrine.
     So what if life doesn’t make sense? Maybe it does, and maybe we could just accept that we’re not adequate to the task of making sense of it. So what if life doesn’t have any meaning? Well, on that one I’d argue with myself: perhaps life does intrinsically have meaning, but perhaps nevertheless the safer path is to accept the task of looking for our own personal meaning wherever our “looking” takes us – in my case at this moment, inconveniently, to a printer sitting on an armchair waiting to be plugged in because I want to print out some documents later.
     I remember that 1923 poem by William Carlos Williams, originally titled XXII:
 
So much depends
upon
 
a red wheel
barrow
 
glazed with rain
water
 
beside the white
chickens.
 
You can read up on meanings, interpretations, et cetera, for that one, and you can find out that the poet was a doctor who glanced out of a window to see a wheelbarrow and some chickens while attending to a sick girl, and you can find out that the wheelbarrow was actually the girl's toy, and you can find out that the poet saw the wheelbarrow and the chickens in a friend’s back yard ... and you can be told by a critic that the poem is a meditative poem. Oh, right.
     You can be given explanations that sort of work as meanings, sort of work, although they’ve been inserted between you and the poem and you don't feel them.
     Or you can just go with the wheelbarrow, the glazing of (recent?) rain and the chickens. Just go with the life in it, the picture in your mind. A man wrote about those chickens ninety-four years ago and here we are talking about them now. Not very much depends upon my printer and my armchair beside a window glazed very slightly with condensation, but I’m content to go with the word “meaning” to describe whatever it is about that wet wheelbarrow that stays in my memory.
     And those white chickens.

* ...trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager:

Seems to me that the next stage of human evolution is rubbish clearance. We have "space junk" above us, so abundant that it's a plot device for the movies (Gravity, 2013, for example), a whole sea area of plastic bottles swirling around the distant ocean, and closer to home, any "beach clean" exercise, regardless of season, returns at least a pick-up truck's worth of filled black sacks. Our natural environment is not the green and pleasant land, nor those pristine cities of architects' drawings, but a street-scene of - down here by the sea - seagulls tearing at rubbish bags. Waste Management is already a formally classified industrial sector.
     Maybe I mean rubbish reclassification. I mentioned that idea of using ground-up plastic bottles to make smart road surfaces - overlays full of AI/IT/sensors/tech stuff to communicate with driver-less smart cars passing overhead ("Stop here! That colour is red! When are you going to learn?") - over coffee with a friend yesterday, and the immediate response was first "They're too degraded" and only then "I've heard that before," which I think says something about human nature (sic; think about that phrase), but I think the point stands that if we told big whale-catching trawlers that plastic bottles were a valuable raw material, and we'd pay for them in bulk, we'd clear that sea area to the point of worrying about a shortage.
     Can't we think of anything to do with our natural environment? Our ancestors eventually worked out that they could use the wood around them to make fire. And the past was full of forests. Make houses out of plastic? Protein shakes out of supermarket waste?
     Or are we too degraded?

This just in from Hussein Sayed, Chief Market Strategist at FXTM. It's a news release put out to anybody likely to be spending their holiday writing about Bitcoin - the idea being, of course (do I need to explain this?), that they can quote from it freely. It's an interesting take on where we are now, and for me, worth saving. No, I don't usually pick up media releases in this space, but hey, let's not make a rule out of that. So here goes.
      Hussein Sayed writes (in black):
     With most financial markets in vacation mode, Bitcoin is the only currency making big moves in a holiday-thinned trading week. 
     After crashing by more than $8,000 from an all-time high, Bitcoin is up 3.5% at the time of writing [release received here early on the 27th]. Although the recent plunge frightened many Bitcoin fans, when looking at the relatively short history of Bitcoin trading, the price action seems just normal. During 2017 the cryptocurrency crashed by 30% or more six times. Every fall was followed by huge price appreciation until it peaked on 17 December.
      I say (in grey):
     A pleasingly sane comment, after the switch from "We profile the new Bitcoin millionaires" to "Bitcoin was always a disaster waiting to happen" in the main media. Hussein Sayed continues:
      Whether the Bitcoin bull market is close to an end or just pausing for a short break, remains to be a wild question for 2018. I still believe that Bitcoin is in a bubble formation. However, there’s no effective test to measure at which stage we are currently standing. For example, equity prices may be said in a bubble territory if investors are willing to pay much more for a stock than the intrinsic value which is justified by the discounted divided stream. Similarly, econometric tests may be run on bonds, commodities, currencies or any other asset to come up with a justified value. For Bitcoin, there isn’t any fundamental basis to justify the price.
      Buying Bitcoin falls somewhere between investing in a stamp collection and buying gold, with the two complications that, one, it's digital, etc., and therefore compatible with the global economy, and two, it has a history of misuse almost as bad as that of, say, the US dollar. Oh, and the technology doesn't seem to be quite there yet for keeping your investment safe. Moving on:
     Traders should look at multiple factors to anticipate the next move, such as government regulations, hedge funds' interest, the stability of the network, and broader mainstream adoption.
      And the long-term argument in favour may be very different from the short-term case. For all we know, Bitcoin may turn out to be the Betamax of some future cryptocurrency war, with Ethereum or maybe some kind of Fedcoin as the VHS. Sayed concludes:
      However, latest signs are not encouraging. Here are a few: Israel became the most recent country to propose banning companies based on digital currencies to trade on its stock exchange; a South Korean bitcoin exchange has been hacked, leading it into bankruptcy; cryptocurrency exchanges are disabling transactions temporarily due to high traffic; professional traders on CBOE seems to be going short on Bitcoin.
      I remember the phrase "take profits".  Not that I'm spending the holiday writing about Bitcoin, but it's a strange and interesting subject at the moment. We are the beneficiaries (sic) of a globally interconnected economy; it's digital, it harnesses the power of technology, puff, blah; and as a result, we're all happily shopping and investing online, telling our digital assistants to pick up the remote and channel-surf for us, living wonderfully tech-enabled lives as we watch fit people being active on our screens.
      And yet we balk at a currency that fits in so neatly with everything else.
      Whatever next?

Birdsong in the early morning. Bulbs coming up. Silence from town and easy parking in the streets around. The students have all gone home for the break. Birdsong. Not just gulls, but childhood, we're-in-the-country birdsong. Not even the background noise from the docks. No ships coming in. Big rain last night, but now a uniform grey-blue as the light comes up. Last night was the Solstice, Yule, so the days will lengthen now, and the sunrise move back around the horizon, fetching up close to the three trees where we used to live. There'll be people on Gyllingvase Beach as I write this, getting ready to welcome the sun.
     If this isn't the longed-for Zombie Apocalypse, it must be the Friday before Christmas, before the shops open. And yes, there among the headlines, the annual warning that the roads might be congested out of London tonight. Oh, the importance of ritual! The "Christmas survival guides" and the round-ups of the year. It seems odd to me that faith in a divinity, or a divine presence, or a whatever, is so widely required to meet the exact specifications laid down by a religious dogma. Even the Nicene Creed, whichever version you take, has the subtext: We believe what we've been told to believe.
     Maybe the shopping, wrapping, gathering together around food and presents, the TV-ad representations of weather rarely seen in these islands, maybe all of that is closer to the original spirit of the winter festival - sorry, Spirit of the Winter Festival - than the reason we're supposed to give for turning up in Church in the middle of the night and sheepishly greeting our neighbours before bellowing out the last verse of Oh Come All Ye Faithful.
     There's an interesting book, and I'm just finishing it now, on the whole Modern-Day Christianity thing - how it is possible to retain a belief in all of that in the face of reason, et cetera. The title says it all: Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense by Francis Spufford (Faber and Faber, 2012). The idea seems to be that not everything needs to make sense to be a means of connecting to something profound. Parables don't need a basis in fact, but in truth.
     Which is where we remember that while science insists on laying down its own terms for any debate, dictating rationality and its limits, the rest of us remain free to read anything we like into the dawn chorus.

It's a saving grace that we all have such short attention spans. Old-style revolutions depended on whipping up a crowd past boiling point and keeping it there. Death, disaster, beheadings ensued. New-style revolutions start strongly, but fizzle out as our attention turns to the next prompt for our indignation. Old-style "and keeping it there" doesn't seem to work any more.
     Except in the sense that new-style revolutions continue beneath the surface. The indignation seems to be today's dominant emotion - we're all ready and waiting to be shocked by the next headline - but change seems to be a more considered, more gradual thing. Indignation can become a reflex - and news a supplier of cues for those reflexes - but somewhere down there, quietly, while we're all ranting, the world quietly changes.
     As if we've evolved superficial emotions as a safety valve. As if the world is a lot more stable, or at least slow-moving, or more importantly capable of accommodating change without revolution-style convulsions, than all the screens would have us believe.

Let's keep this brief. It's a Friday, the Christmas break is looming up at the end of next week, and the early Spring Clean is well under way in this household. Global warming, no doubt. This time of year, this year, feels more than usually like an opportunity to step back - this enforced break of a couple of weeks in the year, I mean, before we all go out to watch the fireworks -  and to walk along the beach, think, review, furtively dam a stream and build a sandcastle, contemplate, meditate, drink and eat, let go for a while. And apply the Hoover to the stair carpet, which is next on my agenda.
     Maybe sometimes it just is an opportunity to step back, et cetera. There were several enthusiastic explanations of the term "constructive ambiguity" on the airwaves last week. There was a breakthrough in the glitch-up negotiations over the Northern Ireland/Eire border, apparently, so we can all go on to talk about UK/EU trade now. The inspired use of "constructive ambiguity", we were told without any guile or irony, has enabled the opposing sides to read into the agreed NI/Eire terms whatever they want them to contain. So if you think about it, there's no breakthrough, just both sides pretending to believe that they've got what they want.
     One certainty, for whenever, is that any eventual UK/EU trade deal will be greeted by both sides claiming to have got what they want. "Constructive ambiguity" was Henry Kissinger's term, wasn't it, and what's great about nowadays is that we can move forward with absolutely everybody knowing, agreeing and even broadcasting that this is only a pretended breakthrough - isn't it great? No? Be quiet. Twenty-eight nations negotiated that breakthrough, the EU twenty-seven and the UK, and in the modern style, they went beyond the eleventh hour, the last moment, negotiating through the night, up to the wire, crashing the pips, running on fumes, more and more coffee, et cetera, blah, blah, into the following week - which has about as much dramatic impact as a monster movie where they show you the monster from the outset, but never mind.
     Twenty-eight nations. Imagine a world in which it was possible to leave cross-border trade talks to the traders, councillors, shoppers on either side of the border in question. People who knew each other, who traded every day. Disaster! Imagine the unemployment in the Chancelleries of Europe*, if we left people to do their own negotiating.

*The Chancelleries of Europe by Alan Palmer was first published by Allen & Unwin in 1983, and was - is - a study of the high-level negotiating bodies that ruled Europe until all their constructive diplomacy finally ran into the mud of the First World War.

My digital radio was struck by lightning the other day. About six in the evening, loud bang, bright flash, the radio died. Nothing else, just the radio. My first thought was: what a pity that didn't happen during the pre-news ad about "giving the gift of digital", or some such phrase. Narrative truth almost requires a re-ordering of the facts, but no - it was a few minutes after the ad. And no, the radio didn't die. Services weren't available for a while, but they were there when I tried it later. I wonder if The Great Editor In The Sky is trying to tell me something - and if so, what?
     Cue speculative daydream: in any story about the supernatural, or the "I believe there's more", or the conventionally religious, whether it's fictional or factual (sic), the "other side" always has a great deal of difficulty getting through. Why? What are these boundaries and why are they/would they be there? It's consistent, this difficulty, across all storytelling, so I imagine there's a reason more substantive than, say, "thick fog in the Channel".

Did you see the thing in Nature about the semi-synthetic organism? Scientists have managed to add artificial letters to the genetic code. No, I don't understand it either, but we're all made up of A, C, G, T, which are the basic proteins of all life going back to Trilobites and beyond (disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about), and now, scientists have created a blob of E. Coli bacteria that contains not only its natural A, C, G, T, but also brand-new artificial X and Y as well. Exciting, right?
     [Why they chose to upgrade E. Coli, no idea. But that does strike me as the kind of weird detail you tend to find in authentic science. When they're not observing the effects of too much coffee on laboratory mice - good coffee, probably*, wasted - most scientists do tend towards developing weapons-grade tummy bugs and rogue bacteria. In the films I watch, anyway. And they always eventually leave the window open - or find a way to rip their pressurised suits just at the wrong moment.]
     If you're a scientist, the good news about A, C, G, T, X, Y is that we can now (or rather, eventually) make new proteins. And these can (again, eventually) be used to treat diseases in ways that they're not being treated already. But if you're at the blue-sky end of human thought-processing, this works out as a really good excuse to panic. We've spent so much time and money, fact and fiction, obsessing over whether we might build a machine that comes alive and starts killing us (insert my usual set of references here) - and now these spoilsports have just gone and re-routed life into (semi) artificial things. No need to create it after all; they've just diverted it.
     In a potentially terrifying way, at least. The scary thing about artificial intelligence is not that a hyped-up calculator might generate so much heat that it develops consciousness and decides that we're a threat, but that it's networked. Even this laptop is spying on me through its camera, after all. I wrote once here about sex robots (second paragraph, and don't miss the footnote). Imagine the attention you'd give to getting the privacy settings right on one of those. All too easily, AI shares your secrets with its peer group.
     Little robots like Pepper, or any one of those table-top gadgets that talk back at you, or that sex robot of yours, they're all networked back to something (not necessarily somebody) outside your control. I remember a presentation about Pepper: you'd tell your device at home that you needed something, and when you got to the bank, the robot there would recognise you and tell you why you can't have it - sorry, would give it to you. The bank's robot would continue the conversation where your Pepper left off, anyway, because the two of them have been talking about you.
     Scientists have added artificiality to life, so in effect we can say that they've added life to artificiality. The whole singularity thing, all the work of everybody who's ever taught a machine to play a board game, is deleted in an instant. If life now flows into machines, like a river into a new course, we might as well dump the word "networked" and replace it with "telepathic". Imagine living things, like us, who are networked to each other and to the internet of everything around them. How primitive we will seem to them.
     We're all doomed. Again.

*Was it the whole internet, or just social media, that some scientist developed just to check on the coffee machine on the floor below? I forget the story. We could digress into the space program and non-stick saucepans at this point. Packing to go into space must be a bit like ticking off an old-fashioned wedding list. 

Here's one for the record. Rachel E Dubrofsky, associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, was quoted in The Observer recently*, defining "hipster racism" as "the domain of white, often progressive people who think they are hip to racism, which they mistakenly believe gives them permission to say and do racist things without actually being racist". Interesting idea. Dubrofsky has written papers - and two books - on various issues around digital culture, including a 2016 piece entitled Authentic Trump: Yearning for Civility, and here's some further reading.
     I don't think "hipster" is anything I need to worry about, and confronting one's own -isms requires rather more self-knowledge than any of us can be confident of possessing, but this did get me thinking. In culture, politics, just about anything else, it seems to me that an assumption of virtue settles around one side of any divide, while an assumption of courage settles around the other. Too often, the virtuous end, or the courageous end, justifies the means. I don't want to give examples, but people convinced that they're working for a good cause can be as harmful to the rest of us as people convinced that they're facing up to reality.
     If you're the good guy, you get to kill the bad guy and go home afterwards. I remember thinking as a child: but surely, the bad guys think they're the good guys? If we want a metaphor, maybe we should think more about breaking eggs gently when we're making omelettes.

*26th November 2017. Article by Arwa Madhawi, "There's nothing funny about 'hipster racism', no matter how you dress it up'.

Afterthought. Across the whole spectrum of human activity, we readily accept that there's more. In politics, there are conspiracy theories, for example. In media, "secrets" are always being "revealed". We take it for granted that the world around us has a private life that's more interesting than what we see. And yet in the huge area of the human soul, the spirit, we come over all dogmatic that there's nothing beyond what we can perceive with our senses. Science works best when it's most open - the art of applied curiosity - but it contradicts something fundamental in the human mind when it insists on its own limits.