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.