William Essex
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Accusative, tense

30/1/2019

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Several years into our friendship - which is to say, this happened last week - one of my favourite people turned to me and said “You’re not a Tory, are you?” She said it in such a shocked tone that my immediate reaction was outraged denial. “Of course I’m not!” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

I reacted to the tone almost before - okay, before - I heard the words. My friend had known me for - well, at least five years, and we’d never got into politics. But then she had her sudden thought, and the tone of her question would have suited, say, “You’re not an axe murderer, are you?” As if being a Tory is up there - down there - with axe-murdering. And my denial was, I don’t know, an immediate, instinctive response to an accusation. Not a reply to the words. Can’t think of anything I need to be guilty about right now (honest!), but if there is something, clearly I have my denial lined up and ready. Right there next to fight or flight.

I’m not a Tory, as it happens, but I’m not anything else either. Can’t see the sense of it. I’m not Labour nor a Corbynite (different things?) and if we’re sticking with the most-reported parties, I don’t see the point of the other lot. I find it impossible to be an atheist, convenient as that would be, but I can’t find a religion that fits me, either. It so happens that I’m not Jewish. I’m an individual. Lightly brainwashed by media and social media (and education, and societal norms, and peer-group expectations, et cetera; the list could go on), but stuck with whatever that combination of non-compliances makes me.

I’m sorry, but I can’t see political parties as problem-solving, intended-consequence-achieving mechanisms, any more than I can forget that religions were designed and put in place by fallible but (I assume, mostly) well-meaning people (ha ha), not directly by - well. If we’re going to get into my spiritual health, and the state of my soul, I’d rather step past the intermediary (nice outfit, though; must have been expensive) and speak directly to The Deity. No, I don’t mind holding. Does any of that make me unusual? Or am I just the same as everybody else, and we’re we all just getting on with our lives, while the political nonsense buzzes along in the background?

We do need a collection of reasonably intelligent adults prepared to oversee the running of society as we want it run. Okay. I get that. We do need some idea of where we’re going. Yes. But political parties? Really? Today? As if pulling the steering wheel round to the left, and trying to hold it there, after your Significant Other has been holding it firmly to the right - as if that’s a sure way to make the car stay on the road and go forwards in the straight line you want? I can’t see that approach working better than any alternative - or more exactly, I can’t see it holding out against any pressure to evolve into something else. This squabbling mass of party (dis)loyalists - they’re the centre. Can they hold? Given how very badly they’re doing at the moment?

Oh, and populism. We talk about it as though it’s new. French Revolution. Arab Spring. The fall, and actually the dismantling by the crowds who were there, of the Berlin Wall. That recurring theme of an elite that’s lost touch completely. Boris Yeltsin easing Mikhail Gorbachev away from the podium. Populism isn’t a new normal; it’s an old normal reasserting itself. And if that’s true, politics isn’t about which of the tiny little people in our television sets will lead us to the promised land. Because however bright that promise and however fertile that land, enough of the historical precedents suggest that we won’t follow them for long enough to get there. President Macron displaced the two main parties in France in a popular uprising; his popularity has now collapsed. Robespierre would have understood that. Evolution happens. Rapidly sometimes, and painfully.

Thinking about the evolution that might be coming now - given how very badly, etc. - and writing this in the days after Holocaust Memorial Day, I think we should be careful about letting our politics simplify to the point where “Tory!” is an accusation rather than just one of the available positions in a debate. Where “The Brexiteers” are wreckers rather than participants in a democratic process. [Oh, stop! They were issued with ballot papers, and they voted.] Where the democratic rights of probably under-informed (and possibly credulous enough to be deceived by politicians) people come into question. [Ditto!] Do they know enough to be allowed to vote in our election? What are their educational qualifications? Let’s not reach that point - or rather, let’s pull back from it now that we’ve got here.

And on a personal note, I wonder what that split-second denial says about me. “Not me! No!” Would I have denied knowing The Man, for example, three times before the cock crowed? If I’d been standing in a Paris street in 1793, would I have tried to stop the crowd jeering at the aristocrat (Tory?) heading for the guillotine? Or thrown the rock I was given? Would I have agreed with Galileo, say, standing before the Roman Inquisition, that the sun moved around the earth and not the other way round?

And how easy it is, I discover now, to find people online who refute the idea that Galileo said “And yet it moves!” as he left the courtroom. He wasn’t heroic, even under his breath, today’s self-appointed historians take it upon themselves to tell me. How do they know, for one thing, and why do they have to spoil the story for me? Are none of us allowed to be heroes, is that the message? What a cultural evolution this is going to be.

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This turned up the other day. UECC's m/v Autosun. Built in 2000 by Tsuneishi. Measured in RT43 units, which are based on a 1966 Toyota Corona, the Autosun can take 2,080 cars. I never understood trainspotting, but ships have websites, and I'm beginning to get the idea. Should I be embarrassed, or embrace my new interest?

Brexit is beginning to remind me of the Millennium Bug. As the clocks tick over to 23.01 UK time on Friday, 29th March 2019, borders will slam shut, ferry crossings will cease, and for a reason that I haven’t figured out yet, roads in southern England will become clogged with lorries. Supermarket shelves will empty of basic foodstuffs, pharmacists will run out of essential medicines, and everything you can still buy will be soft and mouldy, because suddenly it will have ceased to comply with the European Freshness Directive.

I think that’s right. The future’s unknowable, so I can only find forecasts of what might happen, and they all seem to assume that everything else remains constant. Nobody prepares before, or reacts after. Civil servants sit motionless in their offices (or, looking at the time, sleep peacefully in their beds). In real life, lots of people are preparing, but I’m talking about the forecasts. It’s in the nature of forecasting that you take one thing and assume that it’s the only thing. We wake up on Saturday, 30th March 2019 to a static reality instead of the usual ongoing narrative. Brexit was the cause and this is the effect. Nothing else moves. Change has been cancelled. Events have stopped as well.


To make it absolutely certain that Brexit will bring the static end-state of the so-called United Kingdom, just about every report in the British media now includes the question “Will the EU back down?” or occasionally “Will the EU blink?” If I was an EU negotiator, I’d be stubbornly keeping my eyes open at the moment, stubbornly facing forwards and upwards. I believe that “forward-looking statements” are contentious in financial advertising - because it’s wrong to promise a reward when future performance is unknowable - and I wonder whether we might think about “forward-looking questions” in news reporting.


News, by just about any definition except the one being acted out in the news media at the moment, doesn’t come with a question mark attached to it. No - really - it doesn’t.


Forget Brexit for a moment. Open your eyes. If it’s news you seek, look around you.


See?

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I consider myself, therefore I am.

24/1/2019

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This was strange. My phone rang the other day, unfamiliar number, and I answered it, and a voice asked me if I’d mind completing a questionnaire about something I did in 2017. “Yeah, sure,” I said, because the voice sounded pleasant enough (and because opportunities to find out what I was doing in 2017 don’t come along often, ha ha). So off we went.

Ten minutes later, we got to the “control questions”, I think that was the phrase. First of these was something like “When you were born, did the people around you consider that you were male, female, other, prefer not to say?” Now, I don’t think ultrasound was available when (before) I was born, so there was a moment, immediately after birth, when the focus of interest for everybody in the room was between my legs. I’m not sure how much consideration was required, but I’d guess they came to a determination reasonably quickly.

And I’m reasonably confident that the words “We’d prefer not to say” weren’t it. Second control question was “Today, do you consider yourself male, female, other, prefer not to say?” I’m pretty sure the voice on the other end had reached a tentative conclusion on that one already, because he (pretty sure it was a he) laughed as he read it out. But I gave him my considered opinion that I was - this is online, isn’t it? No disclosing of personal details. We went on to ethnicity and whether or not I considered that I was living where I was living (spoiler: I did).

“Do I consider myself to be?” as a gentler substitute for “Am I?” Amusing - to both of us on that call, at least - and touching: there are people for whom identity questions aren’t as clear-cut as it’s easy to assume they are. Because we all get cross about everything these days, I would love to take this opportunity to come over all grumpy and old - to mutter something under my breath about how it wasn’t like this in my day - but no. I’m far too young, for a start - I consider myself to be twenty-five - and besides, I’m not the kind of woman who takes cultural correctness personally.

After the call, I thought about those “control questions”. I love the freedom of a world in which we’re released to “consider ourselves” across the range of possibilities rather than just “to be” on its own. I consider myself to be spectacularly attractive, for example, which helps me get through the day. Rich, too, although that assumption is rather too easily tested. But let’s make the most of this. I consider myself to be the winner of this coming weekend’s National Lottery draw, and - brace yourself for a shock - it’s just occurred to me that I consider myself to be Napoleon reincarnated. France, I’m on my way! Gather the armies!

No, wait a minute. Delete Napoleon. Exile to Corsica, or Elba, would be okay, so long as I was allowed to take with me a laptop and a coffee grinder and my Kindle (I’m assuming all islands have free wifi nowadays), but the inconvenient fact of the matter is, I like living in Falmouth. And while we’re dealing with inconvenient facts, well, it wouldn’t take me too long undressed in front of a mirror to establish, um. Although I suppose even that isn’t conclusive these days. My Lottery winnings will be paid directly into my bank account, won’t they? The big cheque’s just for show, isn’t it? Important to know these things.

I would like to believe - I will try very hard to believe - that government departments commission market-research companies to employ young-sounding male-sounding persons - I should have explained all this earlier; it was a government questionnaire - that governments ask these questions because they’re going to take the answers seriously. If I tell them I consider that I’m a woman, will they treat me as a woman? Pension age, et cetera? No - the survey was anonymous. If all respondents declared themselves to be women, would that be a blow for feminism? Falmouth fills up with women’s services; government inspectors are sent in to find out what happened to the missing men?

Possibly not. And I suppose a “control” question is just asked to confirm what they already know, is that it? That youngster had my number, after all, and no doubt access to my details. The answer “I consider myself to be a warthog” wouldn’t have triggered a visit from the RSPCA. The little scamp (so easy just to let rip with the assumptions) was far more interested in the score out of five that I gave to whatever I did in 2017 (still not sure what it was, but I scored it highly) than he was with my “control” answers. So, yeah, again, what is the point of control questions? Oh, I see. Just consulted online. They cross-reference the answers. That must be why he asked me whether I considered I had two legs or four, and how likely it was that I would be invading Russia this year.

All very explicable and just ever so slightly absurd. I put the phone down with a happy sense that I’d helped the guy fill his quota of survey responses. But then later, while searching for anything about conquering Europe on Google, I thought “Actually…” and that developed into “...who am I?” Which isn’t an easy question at all. I could show you my passport, or refer you to the foreign embassy where their resident manipulators can tell you how I’m going to vote in the next General Election, and no doubt there’s a bank or a health authority dumping print-outs of my confidential data in a skip even as we speak - but who am I? Would you trust my answer to that question?

Is the government humouring us? Probing at attitudes? Or is this far cleverer than that? A set of questions about who I consider myself to be, cross-referenced with control questions to check that I really do consider myself to be Napoleon reborn and not, say, Lobengula - they’re far more likely to get an accurate answer about me - as in: who I am - than a straight “Who are you?” Somewhere in conspiracy-theory heaven, there’s a laboratory packed with white-coated scientists, all of whom are studying my answers … and gradually, they’re narrowing down the possibilities … until, finally, they reach the conclusion. I’m me.

So who am I? That’s what I want to know. But there’s a bigger question. I spoke once to a “Big Data” enthusiast who was rabbiting on about how my online behaviour can be analysed to work out exactly what I need and what I want - and what I’ll buy - at any given moment. To him, analysing away at the ebook on military strategy and the suntan lotion I bought recently, and to the government, cross-referencing my answer on religion with my answer on happiness (two, five; those were scored), I say this. If you’re all so very clever, and subtle, and competent, and all-knowing, and confident that your methods are foolproof - why haven’t I got everything that I want, and why isn’t my life perfect already? If you’re so clever?

Mind you, I was in a pub the other day, enjoying a lunch of scampi and chips (and peas; the peas are never mentioned*) with an old friend, and on the far wall, a TV screen was showing Prime Minister’s Questions. I looked across at one point, and thought - those are the people we delegate to run the country for us. When there’s a problem, like with the NHS or our trading relationship with Europe, we set those people to sort it out.

And come to think of it, those are the people who think it’s important to know whether I agree with that long-ago midwife about the evidence between my legs.

And I experienced a moment of perfect understanding.

*Neither is the sticky-toffee pudding with custard. But I was just being polite because she was having it, and she was just being polite because I was having it, and there are no calories in politeness. So that’s okay.

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This was build by a local land-owner as a quiet place to meditate. The road wasn't there back then, so perhaps he had enough silence to work out who he was. I say 'he', but...

May I ask you a question? No need to answer it immediately, and perhaps I should give you the background first. Somebody said to me the other day, “Of course, I’d read your blog more often if it came to me by email.” I remember the “Of course” quite clearly. We talked for a while about the difference (if any) between “often” and “frequently”, and then I came home and pulled the duvet over my head. I’m doing what I’m doing, for my own reasons, but “of course” I should be doing it differently.

Distributing blog posts by email is tantamount to sending out an email newsletter. And that, I think, is one of the great sins of our age. No, not sins - errors. Errors in the sense of falling for a heresy. One of the biggest unchallenged assumptions of today’s internet is that email-based newsletters are a mechanism for collecting people’s email addresses. You persuade people to subscribe to your newsletter, which of course means giving you their email addresses, and once you’ve done that, you pester them directly to buy what you’re selling.

Sorry - not “pester them”. You send them a newsletter packed with exclusive offers carefully selected just for them, is what I should have said. You do that. You clog up their - you brighten their day, because of course there’s nothing else in their inbox. There’s a whole pseudo-science of this. You promise them a newsletter, tempt them with a freebie, get their email address, sell them stuff. I’ve seen online “how to do a newsletter” presentations that are so much about selling stuff that “remember actually to send them a newsletter” turns up in the “don’t forget” section.

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this. Yes, you’re right, but we’ll deal with the caveats first. No offence, but I don’t want your email address. I don’t want to manipulate your data. Nor do I want to know who you are, or anything about you. That’s a deliberate policy. I have a perfectly adequate imaginary reader hovering over my laptop as I write this, and if I had you there instead - well, no, of course, that would be delightful, always a joy to see you, but - it’s just that if the words flow more easily if they’re private. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either.

I can’t avoid seeing the numbers for “unique visitors” and page impressions every time I log on here, but that’s different somehow. I like to know that my visitors are unique, but that’s enough information for me. Any more, and - see above. If you don’t mind, I’ll stay with my imaginary friend. He’s amused right now, because he’s wondering how I’m going to close out this paragraph and get to the question I mentioned at the outset.

Like this, amigo. Would you like this blog to come to you by email? If so, I still don’t want any of your data, although I have to ask for your email address, and I still don’t want to sell you anything. But if it would be more convenient for you, I could paste a couple of weeks’ posts into a basic newsletter template and press Send every now and then? Fortnightly, or perhaps less frequently?

I reserve the right to mention books, et cetera, that I’ve published, obviously, but I’ve worked out that I can create and send a newsletter without ever opening up the subscriber list and actually looking at anybody’s email address. So my imaginary reader’s job is secure. He’s okay with this.

If you want a more positive mission statement (ha ha; am I showing my age or do they still have those?), it would run something like this. Newsletters should be newsletters. We can, er, make newsletters newsletters again. [If you haven’t found Brain Pickings by Maria Popova yet - find it.] Newsletters used to have an editorial purpose - to be interesting to readers - and that seems to me to be worth reviving. If you answer my question by subscribing - the link to the form is up there in the menu, or it will be if I do this right - I could engage with the whole idea of putting together a newsletter worthy of the name. Probably fortnightly, as I said, and probably just that fortnight’s posts, but let’s see what happens.

There is also, of course, the option of answering my question by NOT subscribing. In that case, the “Subscribe By Email?” menu item will disappear, and we’ll say no more about it. But the question has been raised, and I’d be grateful for your help in answering it.
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The overcrowded raincoat

17/1/2019

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Damien Hirst once preserved a shark and titled the resulting artwork The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The goat’s milk I put on my cereal every morning arrives in 500ml cartons. On those cartons is printed a coupon. I can’t remember when I started cutting out those coupons, but when I’ve saved up enough, I’ll be able to send off and get myself a free stuffed-toy goat. I’m thinking of calling my stuffed-toy goat The Physical Impossibility of Writing a Blog Post without Mentioning Brexit.
 
Even my technology’s in on it. “Here’s what you need to know about Brexit this morning,” said my phone to me when I picked it up for the first time today. I’m writing this on Wednesday, 8am, after breakfast - after not turning on the radio, after making coffee in peace, after eating cereal (full disclosure: muesli) and then thoughtlessly picking up the phone. I’ve switched the thing to silent now and put it on the far side of the room. But it’s too late. It told me last night, just before I went to bed, that the vote had gone as expected. I think I saw the phrase “fighting to save her government” and there was something about a vote of confidence. Been there, done that. I’m busy today. I’ll check the news at lunchtime.
 
Mind you, I like that phrase “need to know”. Makes me think of those old-time spy novels, and films, and intrigues as practised in the fiction of my youth. Among the middle-aged men in bowler hats and night-blue overcoats who used to meet in St James’s Park in the late nineteen-fifties to feed the ducks and talk about the looming (but still just avoidable if the hero goes on a dangerous mission behind the Iron Curtain) spy scandal, information was always shared on a “need to know” basis, which generally meant that hardly anybody got to hear about it. Just the baddies and the half-dozen civil servants around the minister, one of whom was clearly the traitor. Furled umbrellas, anybody? It never quite rained in St James’s Park in the fifties, but it was never warm and sunny either.
 
Today, we have a technology-enabled wonderland - sorry, liberal democracy, and if we assume that the politics we’re seeing is the politics we’re getting - which seems safe enough given that all conspiracy theories require the conspirators to be omni-competent (ha ha, come off it) - then we can work out that my security clearance is roughly on a level with a senior minister’s in, say, the Macmillan government circa 1957. Never mind that I have all the technology I need to fake a moon landing right there in my washing machine; the significant change is that I have the news media, the social media, Wikileaks, even my phone delivering “Witchcraft” material (thank you, John le Carre) to my kitchen worktop, bedside table, er, living-room television, et cetera, all day, every day. My “need to know” is taken for granted, and, um, the delivery is reliable.

My desire to know? Not really. My nostalgia for heavy old bakelite phones with a rotary dial instead of a scrolling display of “news” headlines? Absolutely. I remember thinking years ago, as I sat in an office reading one of the Len Deighton spy novels, that those novels - crumpled macs and weary cynicism for the heroes; immaculate overcoats for the high-ups who didn’t really get it - were written for people who worked in dreary offices where they weren’t saving the world for democracy. Not exactly to give their lives meaning, but to provide some kind of comfort. I may look like the wearily cynical owner of a crumpled mac, as I sit at my desk reading a book in my lunch-break, but wearily cynical owners of crumpled macs can be interesting too, you know.
 
That’s three paragraphs out of five without the B-word. And here I am, all those years later, sitting at my desk. It is - because I don’t write this all at once; I leave it and come back to it - time for my lunch-break. I could go and find myself a Len Deighton novel, or a le Carre, or I suppose I could act out a scene from one of them, in the sense: get myself a real-time briefing on what’s happening in Westminster and beyond. Turn on the radio, I mean, not pull on my overcoat and head for St James’s Park. But - no. Life’s too short to spend time on “affairs of state”, as they used to be called. They’re arguing. They’re going to go on arguing. The EU is going to go on - spookily - speaking with one voice. Our lot are going to go on yelling at each other, and in the wider “national conversation” on social media, insulting each other’s intelligence.
 
For what it’s worth - I know, it's not worth much, but I’ll only take a couple of sentences - I still say that Brexit doesn’t matter. However this plays out, we’ll still be in a relationship with Europe. What’s significant about today - and tomorrow, and with any luck the next day - is that after two years (plus) of confident assertions that the future will be a disaster if we don’t come to our senses and leave/remain - after two years of that confident drivel, we’re beginning to recognise once again that the future is utterly unknowable.
 
Not knowing what’ll happen next is a characteristic of a real future. Endless talk about what “could” happen is just a holding pattern. That “deal” failed. And now the disembodied voices in my radio are asserting - as confidently as ever, mind you - that we don’t know what’s going to happen next. Thanks, people. Welcome to the refresher course on reality.
 
Anybody here remember Oskar Homolka, by the way? I know Michael Caine wore the mac, but still.

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Low tide, boats. Damien Hirst's original shark dissolved eventually, and was replaced. I wonder how the second one's doing.

Last week, I sat back and thought - no. I’d mixed up two subjects that seemed (at the time) to belong together, and then somehow fumbled the join. Result: a post that didn’t make the point I wanted it to make. Didn’t flow. Didn’t feel right. Didn’t hang together at all, actually, when I looked at it again in the morning. The post was readable in its way, and I fiddled with it for a while trying to make it right, but - no.
 
So I put it on one side and launched into a piece about typewriters and forecasting (as you do). Spontaneous, last-minute and written straight into Weebly (usually, I start out in Google Docs - in a long and lengthening document called Blogs through October). Turns out I’m in favour of typewriters and against forecasting. That piece is down below if you want to read it. [If you’re a grammar nerd, by the way, do let me know whether you agree with that hyphen a moment ago, in ‘last-minute’.]
 
First of my two subjects in last week’s failed post was left-handedness (and we’ll find out in a moment whether it belongs with the second). I’ve written about left-handedness before, I know, but it’s my go-to example of a potentially hazardous condition that affects a minority without attracting any special treatment. I’m not saying that we should all stand up and offer our seats on buses to left-handed people - but we don’t, and there is some evidence that being left-handed is a risky condition. Put “Hidden dangers of being left-handed” into Google.
 
Doncha love the bit about psychotic disorders? Scroll down far enough, and you’ll come to the ancient piece from The New York Times that tells us: “Left-handed people tend to live significantly shorter lives than right-handers, perhaps because they face more perils in a world dominated by the right-handed.” Now, just to be even-handed (sorry), search the phrase “Hidden dangers of being right-handed”. There aren’t any. That phrase also takes you to results about the dangers of being left-handed.
 
It’s almost worth taking this seriously. Roughly 10 per cent of the population are left-handed. I am left-handed. In certain moods, I drop in to kitchen/hardware stores and ask for left-handed scissors. I’m often told (or perhaps rarely, but it stays with me when it happens) that there is no demand. Ditto, garden centres and left-handed secateurs.
 
Population of the UK in 2017 was 66.02 million. [66.02 million at the end of 2017, I think, in case you’re tempted to ask the obvious question.] That’s 6,602,000 left-handed people cutting things with scissors moulded for their “wrong” hands. Six million customers, I should say, who have - I’m just guessing here - given up asking. No demand - yeah, right. That’s a six, followed by (if you ask 2,000 of them to wait outside) six noughts. Every one of them - further assumption - with money to spend.
 
I now own more than one pair of left-handed scissors, because as well as being creative, quick-thinking, et cetera, I am persistent. Look up “Do left-handed people’s brains work differently?” online. If you’re right-handed, I’m quicker-witted than you are, apparently. But don’t worry - read this at your own pace. I keep my left-handed scissors in a drawer, because I don’t want to lose them. But I do get a pair out specially when a right-handed person asks to borrow my scissors.
 
More often than you’d think, actually. Maybe I shouldn’t waste this problem-solving brain of mine on manoeuvring people into borrowing scissors from me. Maybe I should do it more often. I’m part of a minority for whom the entire world is configured the wrong way round, and that’s how it feels for me when I’m using the wrong kind of scissors. So there. No wonder my tribe has more accidents than yours does. Maybe it should be illegal to sell right-handed scissors to left-handed people.
 
Spend just a little more time with your search engine, and you’ll find that left-handed people are more creative, imaginative, quick-thinking, attractive, amusing and all-round wonderful than right-handed people. I know; I wrote some of that stuff myself. If you’re right-handed, you might also notice the various articles putting forward the ridiculous notion that there’s no real difference between left-handed and right-handed people. You can believe that, if you want to; it’s well within your intellectual capacity.
 
Have I offended you yet? The other subject I wanted to bring into that post last week was women’s football. I had just read a thing on Facebook about girls playing football. It was posted by a mother whose daughter plays football, loves football, wonders why she doesn’t see more women playing football on television. Lot of comments. Point made that “the England team” is the one with men in it, even though “the England women’s team” ranks fourth in the world while the men are down at fifth (FIFA rankings; the men went up to fifth in October 2018; the women went down to fourth in December 2018).
 
It’s almost a cliche now, to push women forward all the time, and the truly vital battles for rights and  equality are happening in parts of the world where - may I put it this way? - having to go means having to go outside (and be vulnerable). Those battles are not happening in the boardrooms where the TV rights to football are up for negotiation. Nor in the places where I buy scissors, obviously. But that Facebook post did start me thinking about the vagaries of discrimination. Nobody notices left-handed people, and somehow, nobody notices that so much of the football on television is played by men.
 
I could put together a credible Health & Safety case for compulsory displays of left-handed tools alongside right-handed tools, but actually, why bother? We’ve all got something that puts us at a disadvantage, and I’m not convinced that the challenge of living in a right-handed world hasn’t been good for me over the years. But girls and football - that nagged at me last week, and still does (although I find that there are more women’s games televised than I had assumed). It would be impossible even to write a sentence comparing boys and girls and containing the words “are better at football than”, but if you follow the money, you get to the men’s game.
 
That doesn’t make sense even at the most basic level. People - men and women - like looking at women. That’s true in retail, true in marketing and advertising, just plain true. People like looking at men too, yes, but you can’t tell me that twenty-two women running about with a football aren’t going to be just as worth watching as twenty-two men, can you, really? I don’t imagine that the assorted backers of the men’s game are, in so many words, discriminating against the women’s game, but I do suspect that some of our attitudes run quite deep and don’t change as quickly as we think they do. Even now, whatever we think we believe, what we actually sit down to watch is...

Common sense - perhaps I mean conscious sense - doesn't come into it. I suppose real, deep change takes time, and anything involving money changes slowest of all - the mass audience follows the money just as the money follows the mass audience, and okay, you tell me the one about the chicken and the egg. But I still want to write about this.
 
There are parts of the world where gender issues are potentially life-threatening, and the football question seems likely to sort itself out over time. Okay. I get that. But I realise now what was nagging at me last week: this is about children, not men and women. That’s why I still want to write about it. How would it be - this is the thought that came to me - if all the campaigns for social justice in the world - feminism being the obvious example but not the only one - were run on the principle that every child has a right to a role model? Run for the benefit of the next generation as well as whatever we’re demanding for ourselves.
 
And think about this. I like those occasional moments when somebody says to me “Are you left-handed? I never realised!” as though it’s something special. I hope left-handed children get that. There are left-handed pens for learning to write, and possibly, I don’t know, left-handed keyboards and gadgets and all the rest of it. Whatever there is, I’m also in favour of children, all children, having the right to feel special, even if only (ha!) for being left-handed. The tenuous link - from left-handedness to girls’ football - is the link between feeling special and having a role model. Tenuous, yes, I know, but you tell me that a small child dressed entirely in a certain team’s kit, with a certain number (and name) on the back isn’t feeling special.
 
Where the post went completely wrong last week was in the idea that followed all that. I thought about campaigns for change, and I thought about how we all “fight” for our own rights - it’s always a battle, somehow, never a negotiation, and it’s always about our own rights - and I thought: parents. I thought: imagine a movement that gave fathers with daughters, mothers with sons, parents generally, not to exclude non-parents, a common goal. They’d work together, effectively, for a better future. More than they would for themselves.

Then I thought: how the heck am I going to fit all this into a coherent argument?

Then I thought: typewriters!
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Delivering the silver ball

10/1/2019

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Mind you, the snag with mythologising the past is that we get to pick the lessons we learn from it. If Santayana, Churchill et al were right that “those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them,” then we are so doomed if we think that drawing up our own lesson plans “based on” history is the same as learning anything. [That bit in quote marks is “based on” the original quote, which I’ve improved because it didn’t quite fit what I wanted it to say.]

“Have you never seen a prime minister ride the underground before?” says Gary Oldman dressed as Churchill, in that film based on British politics in the early 1940s. Mr Oldman is fortunate to have joined a carriage-full of young but otherwise diverse Londoners who are unanimously on his side in the burning European question of the day. Somewhere in the grim darkness of the far future, to borrow a phrase from the Warhammer catalogue, a young actress (as yet unborn) is joining that time’s idea of a representative group from “the early twenty-twenties” (tidier, if we relocate The Brexit Saga to the beginning of a decade), to ask a similar question.

You know the shoes she’ll be wearing. The whole outfit, probably. If it’s Mr Corbyn not Mrs May who gets the based-on-history treatment, you know the cap he’ll be wearing. You can make a stab at guessing the ethnic, gender, et cetera, mix of the people she/he will meet. At some other point in the drama, there’ll be an encounter with an American actor - but we’ll stop there. I’m not thinking about that. Or about any of it, actually. I’m thinking about a glaring absence. Like Gary Oldman in 1940, that young (old?) actress (actor?) of the future will commune with her (his?) constituents absolutely free of any interference from the people who absolutely would be there - the official bodyguards.

Back in Gary Oldman’s 1940, the answer to his question would have been “No. Because it doesn’t happen.” Today, and in at least the foreseeable (ha ha) future, the answer has to be, “Frequently, on screen, but in real life, they only ever travel behind the smoked-glass windows of armoured limousines, in convoys along closed roads, with motorcycle outriders, so we never see them at all.”

And they never see us. That distance, between them and us, is filled in that way by the security services, for understandable reasons. It doesn’t contribute to the smooth working of what a layman might understand by the term “democracy”, or indeed “liberal democracy”, or come to think of it, “open government”, but never mind. We understand. If our leaders were allowed to walk freely among us, we might kill them. That’s the assumption. And it’s valid. Which makes it even worse. Security protects leaders from the people who elected them, and sometimes, it fails. Insert your own examples here. The division between leaders and led, in today’s open democracies, is as wide as it’s ever been.

That iceberg you’re not seeing is today’s metaphor. It represents the state. The visible 10 per cent is made up of bulky individuals who don’t seem interested in what the leader is saying (plus motorcycles, etc.), but just imagine the other 90 per cent. The term “deep state” means something sinister, so let’s call this the hidden state. No, the behind-the-scenes state. Imagine the scale of the logistical exercise required to move this week’s prime minister from A to B. Even routine short trips - it’s in the manual that they can’t be allowed to become routine, so the route has to be varied and that variation has to be communicated to all concerned. That alone is a big exercise; imagine the whole thing. So many people. So much work. All necessary. And moving on from this focus on security and movement, imagine the size of the overall behind-the-scenes state.

It’s not sinister. It’s not malign. It’s just enormous. Which means that it has space within it for the whole variety of human nature, motivation, altruism, self-interest, activism, laziness, drive, common sense, wrong-headedness, doubt, conviction, religious belief, atheism. In the UK, government doesn’t shut down because budget talks are deadlocked, or because … can’t think of another ‘because’. In the UK, government doesn’t stop for anything. It rolls on. That vast edifice of state control, management, administration, protection just keeps on happening, through changes of government - even through revolutions, if the victors don’t want chaos. And it’s driven by human nature, all those diverse crowds of people with their own reasons for turning up to work. [I'm avoiding the term "bureaucrat" because I'm imagining everybody from front-line (sic) NHS staff to permanent (sic) secretaries. The people who don't get "honours" automatically, and those who do.]

As I say, nothing wrong with it. Never mind democracy; you need that many people to keep any modern state going. You need cadres of experienced administrators more than you need newly appointed government ministers, actually. But one of the enduring myths of our time, and of history, is that an individual will come, who will save us from what went before (I’m trying to avoid the religious echo here). Don’t think so. Given the size and complexity of the state and the thickness of the bulletproof glass between a new Prime Minister and the rest of us, I suspect that government works on a kind of reverse-butterfly effect. The new PM stands up and says, “Let There Be Light!” and the blown bulb in my living room gives out a faint “pfzt!”.

Or perhaps - full steam ahead on the metaphors - the manifesto promises to revolutionise transport in this country, and after the election, the A30’s coned off while a yellow-jacketed workforce fill in some potholes. Yellow-jacketed, yeah, right, got that reference. I don’t know. The “levers of power” in this country are less like light switches and more like those intricate structures of dominoes and carefully balanced spoons, glasses, fulcrums and levers that you see sometimes on Facebook delivering a small silver ball to an egg-cup. Except that Facebook never shows you the failures and the trial runs. Government tries hard, no doubt, and the machinery works, but I’m afraid we seem to have misplaced your silver ball, minister.

That crowd waiting for the young actress (or her replacement) on the tube train will be unanimously in favour of however this current crisis ends. They’ll believe that the solution was (will be) achieved by the selfless efforts of whoever steps in through the carriage door. That’s the myth we need, to get us through this chaos. Shall we just sit back and wait for it to arrive?

Picture
Here's a picture of the castle. The science of caption-writing has advanced beyond the point where I can just say that, hasn't it? Pendennis Castle is "twinned with" St Mawes Castle. They cover the entrance to the Carrick Roads, where, incidentally, a significant part of the D-Day invasion fleet mustered, The two castles were tasked with firing cannonballs at any Spanish, or other, armadas that might have happened by. The coast around here is also dotted with those WWII "pillboxes" that were the scaled-down equivalent designed to face any twentieth-century incursion. No doubt the two castles would have had a role then, too.

Running out of time today. I do have a second post to put beneath the picture, as is customary around these parts, but I looked at it earlier and thought: this needs another run through the typewriter. That's the phrase my old mentor would use, when he was being tactful about a piece of mine. Needs another run through the typewriter. Another run through the laptop doesn't have the same ring, somehow, and we still use pictures of typewriter keys to symbolise writing - as our social-media profile pics, et cetera - so I wouldn't put it past the future to bring back typewriters and mechanical gadgets generally.

There's a genre, isn't there, steampunk? Combining steam engines with early technology. No, wait, looking it up. "A genre of science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology". Okay, and - cor! - On the same (first) results page, "Steampunk Plastic Bone Black Corselet". That young lady isn't wearing any - never mind. Staying on the subject - I wonder if the future isn't playing a trick on us. If the next-but-one genre - the next-but-one reality, actually - won't turn out to be some form of "punk" that combines "advanced" (cue uncontrollable laughter) technology with mechanical devices that allow us to use our hands for something more than just tapping a screen.

Instead of steam-driven whatever, we find ourselves, for example, changing the [typewriter] ribbon on our laptop, turning the key in the back of our app to wind it up, buying the big rotary-dial accessory that comes with the next-but-several model of our mobile phone. I love the fact - to digress - that opera, ballet, National Theatre productions, et cetera, are now broadcast to cinemas, and also the fact that you can buy seats - effectively, car seats - to sit in as you play your driving-based (or other) video game. I get quite exercised by the notion that innovation is just a matter of finding the next screen-based thing. It isn't.


We forecast the future in straight lines, and then live it in a tangle of scribbled zigzags. I suppose it might be clockwork-punk, or just mechanical punk. Motor cars go back to being mechanical, instead of computer-run, so you can just reach in under the bonnet and fix them. Writing goes back to being writing, with paper, pens, Tippex and ribbons. Notes can be scribbled. Young ladies get to pull on cosy thermal undergarments over their plastic bone black corselets. We get to use our opposable thumbs and pick up tools again.

As I say, I do have a second piece to put below the picture, in the usual way, but I'm going to hold it back because I'm not happy with it. Maybe next week. Assuming I can find a typewriter.
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The day I discovered fire

3/1/2019

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This is one of those quiet grey mornings on which the entire world seems to be waiting for something. It isn’t, I suppose, the world, waiting for something, and I can’t see much of it anyway, but the wind’s making flurries on an otherwise flat-calm sea, and the branches of the trees are moving just so, keeping time. They program tiny movements like that into robots to make them seem alive. The sky’s low today, grey and white, thick, like the surface on a ferment.

Assuming “a ferment” means what I think it means. I went through a phase, years ago, of home-brewing various concoctions, beer, wine, I think mead once, and as I remember, there was always a stage where I had a pleasant-smelling liquid with a crust on top - that crust is the surface I remember; that liquid is what I mean by “a ferment”. Up to that point, I enjoyed my alcohol-making activities - all the more if everything rose up in the yeast-driven equivalent of milk boiling over - but my experiments tended to fail at the point where the instructions said: leave it for three months.

Or some such interval. You have to taste things, don’t you? And if they don’t taste as good as a cold glass of (I think I’m remembering this correctly) White’s American Cream Soda, well, three months is longer than a lifetime at a certain age. And agreeing to the pouring of a vast quantity of ghastliness down the drain in return for a packet of Mintolas is an obvious no-brainer, right? No, we didn’t have the term “no-brainer” back then, but we would have understood the concept. Rolos were for everyday eating; Mintolas meant that a negotiation was serious. Yes, a whole packet. And there was always Airfix to fill the rest of the day.

Anyway - that’s what the sky looked like this morning. The grey/white contemporary reimagining of the surface on a small-ish boy’s attempts to make alcohol. No, there can’t have been any expectation that I might succeed, and no, it never occurred to me to open up the drinks cabinet and find out whether there was anything inside that might justify calling it the drinks cabinet. I suspect that my interest in wine-making had more to do with witches and wizards mixing up potions in books and comics and on television, than with any ambition actually to drink.

That came later. I had a chemistry set, back in those dangerous days, and used to rig up test tubes, variously shaped flasks, etcetera, into confabulations of glass and tubing that would have achieved just about anything colourful and bubbling - but I gave all that up after discovering that mixing chemicals randomly and then applying a lit match to see what might happen - enough said. I was lucky. Health & Safety didn’t exist back then, so it couldn’t regulate the chemicals that were supplied with chemistry sets, in little glass bottles, to small boys (and no doubt girls) playing in their bedrooms, with matches.

Sudden flock of birds - seagulls, I think - and behind them the same sky. Maybe I went to wine-making because there was a lot of water involved, and water can be trusted not to ignite. Maybe that’s to impose a narrative structure on fragments of memory. All this peace and quiet outside the window - and we’re settled on a tectonic plate that is floating (?) on the molten core of a rock that is hurtling through a void, in an orbit around a burning star. There’s a narrative structure for you. Somebody should tell these birds - although I suppose much of their ability to navigate, work out where they are, et cetera, depends on gravity, moon, orbits, tides, and maybe we’re all what we are because of where we are.

On this soft-centred hot rock under a grey sky - greyer than earlier; the wind’s getting up - held in place by gravity, which wouldn’t work without the whole hurtling-through-space thing. I wouldn’t be me without the easy availability of Flowers of Sulphur back in the long ago, and that seagull wouldn’t glide so easily if the world wasn’t spinning on its axis. Maybe without realising it I’m writing a blog post with a moral - small changes, however well meant, risk destabilising complex structures. If the world would just hold still, as it does in that H G Wells short story, the one about the man who could work miracles, we’d be able to sort out what’s good for us.

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Trees and dancing. I had a friend once who preferred the ambient sounds of nature to music. He made an exception for Mozart, speaking in particular of "Mozart endings," which he said were abrupt. A good thing, apparently.

Brexit - yes, that again, sorry - is a massive lump of uncertainty that will be resolved one way or another in the near future. Let’s hope. Whatever its long-term effect on the “British economy” (see Glossary), the short-term impact of our departure from this unusually adhesive trade deal (or our unequivocal decision to stick with it) will be the removal of fear. The sane move, right now, would be to get it out of the way quickly - hard, soft, whatever - so we can plan a future.

The first People’s Vote (see Glossary) asked the question - I paraphrase - “Do you want to leave?” and got the answer “Yes.” We can engage in the sophistry of counting the people who didn’t vote on one side or the other, but by the rules of the game back then, the vote was to leave. The proposed Second Referendum (see Glossary) seems likely to ask the question - again, I paraphrase - “Do you want to step from wealth into poverty, light into dark, flat-calm inshore waters into raging sea - or do you now realise that you were mistaken and you’d like to stay after all?”

None of which is remotely patronising and all of which is carefully phrased to ensure that those voters who were so easily deceived first time are able to get the right answer this time. But before we get into an argument over the phrasing of that sentence, I’d say - it misses the point anyway. Okay, you’re right. Yes. Yes, I see that. Sure, fine, whatever. Yeah, yeah, got it. Uh huh. Right. Yeah. Gosh, what a rigid conviction you have. Oh, how I regret raising the subject. I’ll just crawl off and vote quietly, alone, my way.

But how about this? Let’s just get past the whole thing. It doesn’t matter how this ends now, just so long as it does end. No, sigh, I’m not saying that I would welcome a total disaster, just that the ending - whatever it is, either way - is just about the only place left where we can look for a new beginning.

PS: I did have one thought. They didn’t want us to join, back in the past - de Gaulle’s “Non!” predates Thatcher’s “No! No! No!” by a long way - but the most striking aspect of the negotiations to date has been The Twenty-Seven’s reluctance to let us leave. You’d think they’d be eager to show us the door. But no. They clearly like our approach to the European project. Minds have changed on the other side of the water.

If they like us, and the arguments are so compelling, perhaps we should get Brexit out of the way first and then apply to join the EU.

Glossary
British Economy, The. Abstract term used to make scary forecasts sound as though they’ll affect all of us. Example: “The British Economy could collapse after a Leave vote.”
Could. Word used to enable scarier forecasts. Example: “The British Economy could go into complete meltdown after a Leave vote.”
People’s Vote. Referendum
Referendum. People’s Vote
Sanity. Belief that Brexit won’t make that much difference either way, in the long run.

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    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

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    State of the Union

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    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

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    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

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