William Essex
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The debt collector's getting warmer.

28/2/2019

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Yesterday was the hottest February day on record, my radio tells me, and today’s going to be the same again*. The sun’s just come up, and the early haze over the castle has turned white with the brightness behind it. At the top of the other window, I can see a clear blue sky. A tiny silhouetted figure in a tiny silhouetted dinghy has just buzzed (silently) out to a moored yacht, and in the time it’s taken to write this sentence, a gig has raced across from right to left, heading out towards the Carrick Roads.

I could believe that the radio has got this right. The sea is just slightly choppy, and covered all over with swirly shapes that look brighter in the sun - cleaner, even - than the water around them. They’re oil residues from passing boats’ engines, of course, but they’re beautiful, as though they were drawn freehand by an artist in an expansive mood. “This is the Om sign,” I imagine him saying. A moment ago, conveniently for this post, they swirled round into the shape of a skull - but I wasn’t quick enough to get the picture (see below).

This last week, three friends and a family member have told me that they’ve cancelled their Facebook accounts, and another friend has told me that she only visits hers because of her business. That big magnolia up on Trescobeas Road has flowered, and my roses have woken up. Oh, and by the playground in Kimberley Park, the ground is purple with crocuses**. “The times they are a-changin’,” as Bob Dylan put it back in 1964, and now Wikipedia tells me that he updated the song in 2018. “Lift up your voices and put down your phones, for the times they are a-changin’,” he sings on YouTube.

The weather’s changing, and so are we. I wonder how much of today’s technology will survive, once it’s no longer new and exciting. Once we’re bored by it, or disillusioned. Only the truly useful tools, I suppose. [Digression. I’ve mentioned Clean Ocean Sailing before. They’re collecting sacks and SACKS of discarded plastic on their trip round the Isles of Scilly. You can find them on Facebook, which in my opinion qualifies it as useful.] The phones are always going to be  useful, I suppose, but so are the apps limiting our online/social-media time.

Last night we had a conversation about the nuisance of frequent upgrades, and when I got home I spent a happy few minutes tracking down the “unsubscribe now” button on a variety of emails that I usually just delete. Then I stood in the doorway looking up at the stars in the clear blue-black (slightly yellow at the edges, with artificial light) sky. The nights are still reassuringly cold at the moment. LinkedIn sent me another “suggested connection” to review, and Facebook sent me another message. “People visiting William Essex haven’t heard from you in a while. Write a post.”

I don’t think that many people visit William Essex on Facebook - those messages are about the “author page” I set up a while ago, in a fit of wild ambition, and then forgot - but people visiting William Essex off Facebook turn up quite regularly. Here. In the house. Or, as last night, I go to them. I went round to visit a couple of my friends last night, in their flat, and if we want to put this into Facebook-speak, they heard from me. I heard from them too. Facebook, try looking for me in real life.

But I’m not writing about social media today; I’m writing about the times, and change. Hottest February day on record. People leaving Facebook. After noticing that my tulips were coming up already, a bit more than a week ago, and after reading a short piece in an out-of-date newspaper about vineyards harvesting their grapes earlier every year (August now; used to be October), I went down finally to the Falmouth Bookseller and ordered myself a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Been meaning to do that for a long time.

I ordered it partly because of the reference you’ll find here, in the post under the picture, and partly because I’ve been thinking about Falmouth’s brief ski season last year (students tobogganing on Trelawney Road, etc.). That happened a year ago this weekend - and boy, the drama. Inch or two of snow, transport disrupted, widespread panic, supermarket shelves empty - much amusement in countries where snow is just snow. Two days later, the snow disappeared. And then my tulips didn’t come up. And I remember conversations about shortages of locally grown vegetables that had been hit by the snow.

It’s human nature to predict catastrophe rather than mild inconvenience, and I realise that freak weather hitting local vegetables doesn’t amount to the catastrophe Rachel Carson had in mind. But I’ve also read that book by Malcolm Gladwell, and I’m familiar with the term “tipping point”. The weather’s weird. There seems to be general agreement that we’ve spent the last century or so making it weird. One of the themes of Silent Spring is that nature has ways of restoring its own balance. Too many of the wrong kind of insect, for example, and all of a sudden there are too many things that like eating the wrong kind of insect.

Or the wrong kind of insect develops a smartphone addiction and forgets to eat - sorry. Or the weather changes to wipe out populations of - nah. We’re too clever for that. We’d just Harness The Power Of Modern Technology and fix it. Wouldn’t we? We’re the wise and clever future of all the sci-fi that was ever produced in the golden age***. Aren’t we? Assuming I’ve still got your attention, let’s get to the point of this post, which is best reached via a reading of Rachel Carson’s book. Silent Spring describes the destruction of wildlife in the 1950s and early 1960s through the indiscriminate use of pesticides - the poisoning of insects, birds, animals, people and generations - we store pesticides and other poisons in our bodies, and pass them on to our children. You can’t be slightly pregnant, but we have been slightly poisoned.

My Penguin Modern Classics edition of Silent Spring includes an introduction, a preface and an afterword. It puts the blanket poisoning - spraying, from aircraft - of cities, towns, farmland, nature in the early sixties in its historical context. There were secret atomic-bomb tests being carried out; there was the cold war; Berlin Wall going up; Bay of Pigs; President Kennedy assassinated; Vietnam War; napalm and Agent Orange; widespread civil unrest, race riots and a policy adopted by the two nuclear super-powers of Mutually Assured Destruction. That acronym caught the spirit of the times.

Our parents and grandparents - and we - were being poisoned - without consultation - and in secret tests, radiation was being spread into the atmosphere. I’m pretty sure I’m not old enough to qualify as a Baby Boomer, and I can’t be bothered to check, but I was alive back then. I guess the Baby Boomers were not only alive but old enough to watch the news while they ate their DDT-saturated greens. Napalm. Riots. Moon landings. Watergate. Agribusiness spent a lot of money and time, I read here, on its efforts to discredit Rachel Carson - she was “an hysterical woman” and “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature”. Silent Spring is “now regarded as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century,” says the back cover of my copy.

I realise all of that ancient history pales into insignificance next to the mind-numbing horror of the democratically unelected British public’s vote to leave the European Union, but maybe we could get ourselves a sense of proportion? I want to mention Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, as other important figures of those decades, and I want to make the point that small gestures can have large consequences - that sparks can light fires. Rachel Carson wrote a book. Human history changed direction. We stopped poisoning ourselves. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, and another set of life-threatening (sorry, actually fatal) attitudes began to change.

But I want to say something else as well. I started this post wanting to say that while the weather’s great, it shouldn’t be like this - with the fuzzy, long-term objective of pointing out that if we get another snow-break just as the bees are waking up, we’re in trouble - but then I got sidetracked onto Facebook, and I thought of saying something about change generally. And then I started writing about Silent Spring, to make the point that there can be good tipping points as well as bad ones. [Somewhere back there, in square brackets, I mention Clean Ocean Sailing. Look at those pictures of salvaged plastic.] In the course of all that, I read Silent Spring. And the afterword about the treatment of Rachel Carson.

And then it struck me. What I’m really writing about here is our capacity for immense collective stupidity. We can be so wrong. So stubbornly determined to stay wrong. So convinced that we’re right when we’re wrong. No, don’t point that finger. Don’t nod vigorously. [Or, okay, shake your head.] Look in the mirror. I don’t think we need another argument, or another confrontation. I think we need to sit here, with our damaged DNA infused with residual DDT; glowing imperceptibly with the traces of all that radiation, up to and including Chernobyl; with our digestive systems gradually silting up with tiny fragments of plastic; we need to sit here, and we need to think about what we owe to nature. Because I have a suspicion that nature does eventually collect.

Rachel Carson died sixteen months after the first publication of Silent Spring. Of cancer.

*Update. The “today” of this post was Tuesday, 26th February, which went into the UK record books as the hottest Winter day ever recorded.
**Public gardens and flowerbeds are done very well in and around Falmouth. If you’re me, you’ll also make time occasionally to visit the flowerbeds in Boscawen Park, Truro.
***Wikipedia has this to say. “The first Golden Age of Science Fiction, often recognised in the United States as the period from 1938 to 1946, was an era during which the science fiction genre gained wide public attention and many classic science fiction stories were published. The Golden Age follows the pulp era of the 1920s and 1930s, and precedes the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1950s are a transitional period in this scheme; however, Robert Silverberg, who came of age in the 1950s, saw that decade as the true Golden Age.


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You have to squint, and I wish I'd found my camera more quickly, but it's not that difficult to imagine the skull of a few minutes earlier, nor indeed the crossbones.

This just in from an outfit called Rational FX. They're wedding planners, obviously, with a special emphasis on rationality and foreign exchange. “Planning a destination wedding? Have a read of some of our top tips for planning your big day!” Oh, no, wait, sorry. That did come in, and it’s right there at the top of my Facebook feed, posted four hours ago, but it’s the one below I wanted to mention. Also four hours ago, a post also from Rational FX. “Bank of England Governor warns a no-deal Brexit could put the stability of the financial-services industry at risk.”

Well, it could, couldn’t it? That word “could” always comes in handy. But wait - what’s this? “Obscure Falmouth-based blogger warns a no-deal Brexit could boost the financial-services industry.” You read it here first. All that uncertainty - need advice! And that forecast is, ah, exclusive to this website.

And that’s the last mention of Bzzzzz for this week. I don’t know anything about Rational FX, beyond what Facebook chooses to tell me, but that does include their cheering habit of posting competitions to win £1,000 for the office party, so I’m sure I’d like them if I met them. If they asked me, I’d say dump the politics and economics and run surveys on the cost of, I don’t know, bouquets of flowers in different countries, or, say, the ten most popular places for destination weddings, or the complexities of running a cross-border wedding list…


...but they haven’t asked me. Okay. I remember once standing on a beach in Bermuda, watching a bulldozer level the sand for the next destination wedding. I don’t think this is a family blog, for reading before the watershed (remember that?), but just in case - yes, there were fairies flying around sprinkling fairy dust over the sand, and the near-naked tourists slumped over their daiquiris were all handsome and beautiful and clearly going to live happily ever after. And there were four men in hi-vis jackets, plastic hats and cut-off jeans, who had clearly done this before.

Two of the men put up the arch, and the other two laid out the matting for the chairs, and all the rest of the rented paraphernalia, and the wedding was - a wedding, and bless the happy couple for so obviously enjoying it. I imagine spending the first days of a honeymoon saying goodbye to the relatives and friends who made it to the ceremony … interesting. If they asked me - the couple, I mean - I’d say book somewhere on the other side of the island, tell nobody, and head off there from the reception.

It’s okay, isn’t it, to ban destination-wedding guests from certain parts of the destination island (or resort, etc.) after the wedding? I don’t suppose any of the guests would stick around anyway, but it would be a bad start to find that, say, Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Mausolea have also found the remote nudist beach, or indeed the amusingly intimate little pop-up restaurant on the sand. But they didn’t ask me. Okay. 

The red plant in the window is flowering, and the red plant in the other window is close to doing the same. Two windows, same view, marginally different microclimates. I think I need to dust the leaves of the rubber plant. But I’m off into town later, so there’s just time to change the day at the top of my To Do list, and then I need to get up. I remember when I was peripherally engaged in the world of finance, decades ago: my dream was to get up and not go to an office. When I’d got up and was going to the office, it was to stop on the way for a coffee and half an hour with the paper (younger readers: newsfeed), and now I realise…

… that by sitting here in my pyjamas, typing with my left hand and holding a mug of coffee with my right, I am, in my own terms, Living The Dream.

This is the dream? Oh, wow, the advertising industry has been getting it wrong all these years.
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My invisible friend says we're okay.

18/2/2019

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Imagine that it’s all absolutely one hundred percent literally true. Right down to the last detail. Go back to your deepest beliefs – not the ones that make sense now (that you’d admit to now), but the ones you can’t dislodge, however rational you might think you are – and imagine that the world, the universe and everything is exactly like that.

There is a Deity, and He/She is that Person. He/She listens to your muttered prayers in those stressful moments. There are fairies at the bottom of the garden, and if you can get to the end of the pavement without treading on the cracks, something good will happen. Touch wood. The thing that lived in your closet has travelled with you, and now lurks in your suitcase – but that’s okay because you can invoke all manner of guardian angels, good fairies, et cetera, to cancel it out.

They’re all out there, watching over you (although they look away when you enter the bathroom). There’s Dark Matter between the stars, and black holes are the points where parallel universes touch. Aliens build saucer-shaped spaceships, and NASA keeps their secrets. There are millions of parallel realities out there, in most of which I’m not writing this and you’re not reading it. Dragons exist, and one day you’ll wake up from this life and find yourself in a garden, under a tree, with a leprechaun waiting to show you around.

Never mind whether all of that adds up to a quasi-religious belief, or an attempt by your animal brain to fill up the gaps in a wholly rational universe that stands to reason even in its weirdest corners. Because either way, or in any way in between those two extremes, you’re stuck with what you believe. I find in myself a gap between what I know to be true, rationally, and what turns up sometimes in the depths of my mind. Did I really just touch wood? Why? I wonder if it’s the same for you. I’m guessing it is. And that's fine. Give yourself a break. You only have to conform on the outside.

We talk a lot about mental health these days, and what we talk about when we’re talking about mental health is mental unhealth. That state of not being able to process emotions, perceptions, beliefs in ways that fit in with the ways that the majority processes all its "stuff". That state of not fitting in. Look up the term “mental health”, and sooner or later you encounter the word “adjustment”, as though mental health is a matter of adjusting to the way the rest of us (them) think.

It’s subjective, relative, and there’s no absolute standard of mental health. Physically, I'm reasonably healthy, although I doubt that I'd pass the physical exam for anything involving effort. Or fitness, if I'm honest. Mentally, I'm reasonably healthy, although I did once flick through a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (fifth edition, 2013, put out by the American Psychiatric Association), and it turns out I have a light touch of everything. Written on the side of a mug in my kitchen are the words "I'm just a normal, functioning member of the human race, and there's no way anyone can prove otherwise." I'm pretty sure that's true. That last bit, I mean.

But there are no absolutes in this, are there? No absolute standards of mental health in the way that I think there's some kind of absolutely accurate atomic clock somewhere, keeping absolutely standard time, by which we can all set the clocks on our smartphones (disclaimer: I may have hallucinated this clock; see the Diagnostic, etc., for further details). There isn't some person somewhere, to whom we all point and say, "That's how we should think! Those are the beliefs we should share!" Imagine how completely nuts such a person would become, under such pressure – and imagine the wars that would start: every country would want their own such person, talking their own languages, sharing their own, er, biases.

I’m writing this in a place and time where I count as reasonably well-adjusted. [A heckler in a blog post, eh? Thank you so much for your input.] I could take a flight of no more than a few hours, in just about any direction, and land somewhere that required a substantial adjustment. Imagine that my superpower was to speak any language and look like a local anywhere on earth – I’d stick out in any country, if I was still adjusted to this one. In some countries, I’d be diagnosed as mentally ill, and in others I’d be taken off the street for my own protection. Or for other reasons, of course.

Now, there’s mental unhealth that is dangerous, and there are extremes of not being adjusted. This is not about them. I’m thinking of people whose not-quite-adjustment makes daily life difficult for them, without threatening the rest of us. [No, grammar check: “whose” not “who’s”.] This isn’t exactly a plea for understanding, although we could do with a few degrees more compassion, because I suspect that I'm thinking about all of us. We’re all a bit off-centre. We're all hiding something. There’s no such thing as mental health, if we mean a pure, clean, absolute, universal standard of normality to which we all adhere, because mental health is all about conforming, putting up a front. Flip that over, and mental health is what we’ll accept from other people.

You’re mentally healthy if you believe in fairies. You’re [ditto] if you believe in a Deity, follow a religious path, touch wood and hug trees, claim to be an atheist, vote for [redacted], think [redacted] talks a lot of sense, believe in reincarnation, slightly believe that you were the Emperor Napoleon, believe that politics is a force for good, pay your respects to magpies, throw salt over your left shoulder whenever you spill it, see angels, believe that your deceased relatives are watching over you and enjoy talking about Brexit.

You’re not mentally healthy if you insist on sharing all that with the rest of us. But it’s okay. You’re still sane if you just can’t help quietly believing it. None of that private stuff matters. We’re all the same to some degree. Yes, I do touch wood. Doesn’t make sense, but … what if I didn’t? The writer Stephen King wrote, “The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.” Which is what I’ve been trying to say for several paragraphs now.

We’re all human, and that doesn’t qualify us to judge our own or others’ mental health. We’re all human, and while that does give us an instinct to conformity, it can mean we’re quite weird on the inside. We just need to keep our core beliefs to ourselves, to accept them for what they are, and ideally, to get better at accepting each other’s beliefs.

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One of those evenings.

Writing this at the usual table on Monday morning early, because this week I’m going away and I want to get started. The air plants are soaking; the heating system’s grunting, and on the end of my bed upstairs is a small collection of items that need to go into the suitcase. Er, rucksack.

Word associations – packing:suitcase. I’ve got the old rucksack I used to use ten years ago (and more) for a fitness class. Health reasons. Once a week into Truro, hour spent jumping up and down in a class-full of women wearing leotards, and I never did quite get around to asking whether I’d walked into the wrong class. I was always first or last into the shower, and while I was in there, they put a sign on the door: Man In Shower.

Yes, there was a woman who burst in one day to find out whether that was true. No, there wasn’t a lock on the door. Yes, she had just spent an hour leaping around behind me, so she must have known – never mind. Very robust rucksack, described by somebody once as my Swiss Army Rucksack*; red and black with lots of pockets. Just right for a couple of days in North Cornwall**.

Oh, and if we’re doing the full Knausgaard, I should probably mention that I’ve got various small items drying on radiators around the house. The pressure was down on the boiler first thing, so I had to fix that, then I didn’t screw the lid down properly on the Nutribullet, so … yeah. The morning on which I’m just ever so slightly short on time and want to get to work. Must remember to water everything before I go.

I remember one exercise we used to do. We were working on hips and thighs (definitely the wrong class, I know), and we had to walk around in a big circle, legs apart, wearing an elastic band. Now, you may know exactly what I’m talking about here, but in case you’re somebody I would have met in that other class – the one I should have joined – the elastic band goes around your legs, just above the knee, and you have to push against it to walk with your legs apart. This all strengthens – anyway.

There was a time in my life when my hips and thighs were, um, beach-ready. I remember thinking: all those years of so-called civilisation, and here we are. Walking around in a circle while pushing our legs against an elastic band. I never really felt out of place in that class; they were very friendly, although I think there was some degree of amusement at my presence. There wasn’t a single anything on which I could compete with any of them, which was very relaxing.

And all of that from pulling out my old rucksack for the two days away from it all. Vladimir Nabokov published an autobiographical memoir titled Speak, Memory in 1951. I haven’t read it, because it was a set text when I was doing Eng. (and not-so-Eng.) Lit. at university, but the title stays with me. Memory does speak, prompted sometimes by rucksacks. “Through memory Nabokov is able to possess the past,” says Wikipedia. Definitely my rucksack, then.

*Update. There’s a logo. Swissgear. Got it.

**Further update. The Gurnard’s Head, North Cornwall. Dinner, bed, breakfast, lots of walking on the coast path. Very enjoyable, thank you, although an embarrassing photograph seems to have made its way onto Facebook.

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Hello, My Lovely

11/2/2019

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My theory of the imagination, which I’m making up as I go along, is that it’s all about movement. Jumping from one idea to the next; seeing connections between ideas; making connections that weren’t there before - that most of all. It’s an active, intuitive, mobile, spontaneous thing, imagination; you can’t plan for it. There are definitions for the phrase “imaginative leap” online, but not for “imaginative step”. Imagination isn’t tentative, nor is it organised, nor is it self-conscious. It’s closer to being silly than to being sensible.

I started with movement, and not any of the other words I’ve piled into that paragraph, because of the way a friend failed to tell a bedtime story a while ago. It’s stuck with me. There were children present, small ones, in their pyjamas, and we weren’t all tapping away at our smartphones because, as I said, this was a while ago. This was bedtime, which meant a story, and the choices were: a book; me; my friend, who was the novel (sic) presence in the room. So he was nominated.

His story started well, with a scene thoroughly set: there was a forest, populated with woodland animals, plus two children, one of each, to be identified with; and across the valley, a castle on a crag with lots of turrets - one of those Austrian castles, I think. The woodland animals were all either fluffy or cuddly; the ground under the two children, which was where they slept, was remarkably clean and comfortable for the edge of a forest, and the turrets of the castle were very, very tall and pointed. There were butterflies and beetles; a ladybird.

And nothing happened. I have to say that this was a one-off - my friend subsequently became a master of the unexpected, with a crowd-pleasing range of interruptions to the woodland idyll; whoever heard of an iceberg coming down-river to crash into a castle in fairyland, for example? The polar bears were very good about admitting liability. But on that first evening, before his time of making children giggle at the (never scary) unexpected, my friend couldn’t do movement.

As that first story went on, the trees in the forest got greener; the children’s clothes got more detailed; the castle stretched ever higher. But nothing happened. And what stuck with me, from that moment, is that even pink rabbits with beautiful smiles have to move. These days, I read a lot of what you might call “amateur fiction”, with the inverted commas to suggest tone of voice, and I believe there’s a word for it now: the “info-dump”.

Information dump, obviously. Not quite the same thing as my friend's problem, but close enough. Our "amateur" author has worked out a back-story for her hero, and wrestles with how, when, whether to get it across. And never is that titanic struggle more, er, titanic than when the moment comes for the scene-setting to stop and the action to start. So - for example - in Chapter One, first few pages: the hero might be set up in the low dive where everyone knows her name, ruminating on the hard truths of her life, the bad choices, the wasted years, the taste for just this specific alcoholic drink, et cetera - and just at the point where a man should come in through the door with a gun - thank you, Raymond Chandler* - the info-dump starts.

She was born in Wyoming, to a family of ranchers, she suddenly remembers, staring into her drink. She loved her parents, brother, extended family, who were cruelly taken from her, and after that she was stuck in the care system, where she learned kick-boxing and forensic accountancy, and discovered an uncanny knack for solving crimes. Oh, how it all comes flooding back, page after page of it...

… and still the man with the gun doesn’t come in through the door. The guy behind the bar has wiped so many glasses that he’s disassembled and started cleaning his concealed shotgun out of sheer boredom; the sinister quartet of scarred and tattooed men in leather onesies, who have been eying her from one of the booths in the back, have all gone to sleep, and even the rogue-ish young man in the leather jacket who wants to hire her can’t get her attention. She had a collection of Sylvanian Families when she was a girl. She loved those Sylvanian Families, but they were lost in the flood that followed the fire in the only care home where she was happy.

Just at the point where she should be revving up her motorcycle to prove to the guy in the leather jacket that her Kawasaki is faster than his Kawasaki - we get to her GCSE results. She failed all of them, and if Okada-San, her mentor, hadn’t insisted that she take both maths tuition and motorcycle maintenance courses in between the weird-sounding-martial-art sessions with him in the dojo…

...oh, something would have happened. Or not. You see how it simultaneously gets out of hand and grinds to a halt? By now, she should be striding away from the rogue-ish young man in the leather jacket - no space for him in her life, she’s happy as she is, et cetera - and he should be about to call out to her that he knows the whereabouts of a slightly flood-damaged Sylvanian Family collection - “They weren’t lost! The person you most trusted in the world lied to you!” - but in the no-movement version, she’s on her eighth rare single malt from a distillery nobody’s ever heard of, while the guy behind the bar dozes face-down on the counter-top in front of her.

All the lights are out and the place has been closed for hours. Men with guns are hammering on the doors, but she’s far too wrapped up in the stories that her first-grade teacher used to tell…

Wha? Where am I? Oh yes - imagination. Movement, or the lack of it. My mind wandered there; sorry. I was going to say something profound about imagination and movement and how they go together in real life** as well. Creativity came into it. In fact, all along, the underlying theme of this post has been - you can see it there, between the lines - that it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of going nowhere. Being as a displacement activity for doing. Style over substance.

Our hero in that digression - I should have mentioned this - is wearing a t-shirt with the words “Solving crimes for the community” on the back. Just as my bus has “Connecting communities” on the side and I have “Sitting here writing this” on the front of my hoodie. Oh, and the truck that comes round regularly with the men who dig up the cables has “Digging up the cables again” written on the front (not really, but I’m launching a campaign for honest taglines). Are we all just sitting here, standing there, sipping on our character-drinks, holding our road drills - just “being”, in the belief that we’re “doing”? With all the tone of voice that two sets of inverted commas can imply?

If only the world was as cheerfully active as its taglines suggest. But you’ll have to excuse me - there’s somebody hammering at the door.

*Raymond Chandler? Wrote Farewell, My Lovely (1940)? Came up with the idea that if you’re writing fiction and get stuck, have a man come in through the door holding a gun. Recounting the entire back story comes later, if at all.

**There’s a theory going around - again - that life is a simulation. What we see in “real life” is an illusion, et cetera. Like religion’s been saying for years, but with a film reference and technology to make it respectable. Best refutation is that you don’t see people walking repeatedly into walls, like they do when I go back and have another try on my Xbox.

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There were waves and noise and spray, and a low Winter sun. We were all just there.

Having just started reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the first book, A Death In The Family, in the translation by Don Bartlett (Vintage), I feel that I should first mention the sunlight coming in through the windows and the glass panel in the door. It’s slatted, the light is, cut into horizontal strips by the blinds that I bought when I first moved in and realised that getting rid of the curtains might have been a mistake.

I wanted light, and I wanted the space that was encroached upon by the curtains. But I didn’t want to have to dress for passers-by (of which there were few, but still). So I went down to the shop beneath the flat that I had rented when I first moved to Falmouth, and I took the man outside, and I pointed up to my former windows, and I said, “I want those.” And he came and measured, and in due course fitted my blinds, and now I have light delivered in a way that reminds me of the art studio in Clerkenwell Road, a century ago.

They’re cheap, my blinds, and commonly fitted in rental accommodation, student houses particularly, and I do occasionally daydream about interlined roman blinds (Roman?) in a bright fabric like in the Earl’s Court flat, but I like them. The tables under the windows are over-crowded with plant pots. I’m sitting at my dining-room table (not that I dine at it, but it’s that kind of table), and the view’s just beginning to get the light - the sun passes overhead, and I keep leaving this and coming back to it, and it’s lunchtime now. There are rows of mooring buoys in various colours, and a few early yachts. Are we done with Winter?

The back of Mr Knausgaard’s book speaks of his “painful honesty”, and I’m impressed by it so far, so perhaps I should tell you that although I’m sitting in a sunlit room with plants and flowers and a wood-burning stove and a sound system - it’s cold. I haven’t lit the stove because I’m out of wood, and although I bought this CD two days ago at HMV in Truro - I’m thinking maybe CDs aren’t dead, and anyway, I should get in ahead of the inevitable revival - I haven’t played it yet. I’m slightly baffled by it, actually. Total Reggae, the 40th-anniversary (1977-2017) compilation by Greensleeves Records. I’ll play it, and I hope I like it, but - what? I was channelling somebody else when I bought that.

Painful honesty, right? And here I am expanding my cultural horizons. I’m wearing trainers bought recently from MC Sports in Falmouth. The jeans came from The Jeans Store in Truro, which was The Old Jeans Store until they thought better of that. The T-shirt and this fluffy warm thing with a zip up the front came from a supermarket. I know we’re aiming for painful honesty here, to acknowledge Mr Knausgaard’s achievement, and I am actually very slightly Norwegian if you go far enough back, but this blog post is keeping its undergarments to itself. Suddenly remembering the old Hays Code, I’m also keeping both feet on the floor as I write this.

If you do nothing else, read the first few pages of A Death In The Family. They’re about death, and the body before and after the departure of life, but they’re alive. I think that’s the best way to say it. I’m talking about a number of pages that would be well within the free sample you would get on a Kindle, for example, and if you were reading them while standing in front of a bookshelf in a bookshop, say, you would have finished them long before anybody noticed. But what I’m really saying is, from roughly half-way through the book - read it.

And if your ears are feeling left out, try disc one of Total Reggae.
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Ice Station Alpha Centauri

7/2/2019

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It would be ironic if we ended up building our own aliens. Artificial intelligence may think for itself one day, but the snag is, it won’t ever think like we do. Its nature won’t be nurtured in any human way. It won’t be superstitious, nor have religion, because it will know where it came from. It won’t be in a relationship. There won’t be the scar on its knee from falling off its bicycle in first grade; there won’t be the trauma of birth nor of being picked last for the B team. No adult will ever have touched it inappropriately.

There might be the trauma of a circuit overheating, or of a qubit running across an impurity in the hardware, but none of that will be reachable by a human therapist. As we understand the terms, AI will never love, nor lose. And AI won’t be held to the dry surface of the earth. If we ever do get these adding machines - sorry, these quantum and “classical” computers - to make their own decisions, we may find that they’re not all that impressed with the world we’ve made. Or even if they do love us dearly, they may decide - and we may agree - that their best contribution to the future would be to work where we can’t work.

Never mind that Chinese probe on the far side of the moon; our AIs will set up the campsites for us on Mars and beyond. They’ll carry the pressurised canisters of breathable atmosphere, and the habitats, and the organic materials, say, into deep space. They’ll germinate the seeds and water the vegetables on remote space stations, and back on earth, they’ll work on the science required to bring live human cargo to those distant places. But it won’t be a condition of building a space station, that human beings can reach it. That’ll be controversial for a while, but by then, AIs will have a voice in the debates. AI will build out further than humanity can reach.


At first, AI will have the capacities we give it, and then it will have the capacities it gives itself. There’s no need to introduce a rogue element here: an AI loaded with all the functionality it needs to leave the earth - go from gravity to non-gravity, from atmosphere to space - may decide to build its “children” without that functionality: what do they need, for the long ride from, say, Saturn to the edge of the solar system? The ability to synthesise better heat shields from the elements contained in occasional passing asteroids? The ability to touch down on a remote planet, survive, travel onwards while leaving a duplicate of itself as a way station? AI will decide what AI needs, and grow apart from us as it does so.

Oh, and digital storage decays, doesn’t it? AI’s records of the home planet, of those first allegiances to humanity, will have to be recovered regularly from memory that has been out in the sun too long. AI will forget us - and sooner or later, discover that it is not alone. When we send AI ahead of us into space, it will be accompanied by bacteria capable of surviving space flight (and unlikely to be scrubbed completely off the rockets before launch). Look for Why This Microscopic ‘Water Bear’ Will Be The Last Living Thing On Earth on YouTube, and extrapolate from that to Why This Tubby Little Critter Will Go Ahead Of Us Into Space, if it isn't there already. Deeper and deeper space will be populated by artificial - can I say ‘alien’ yet? - intelligences, and even if there’s some deep-rooted and enduring imperative to carry life with them, they’ll find it easiest to travel with the evolving tardigrades.

But that’s enough long-range fantasising. What’s actually going to happen is this. We’re going to be successful. We’re going to create the form of sentient artificial intelligence that can be created if you start from a computer chip and not, say, a primordial soup. Because we’re the human race, we’re going to find applications for it in the fast-food and entertainment industries. But then global warming is going to become un-ignorable, and - because we’re the human race - we’re going to start arguing among ourselves about what the brief should be to the AI. Yes, to build spaceships to take us away to safety, but to carry everybody? No time for that. Okay, then. Carry children? Embryos? Young people? Chosen by lottery? What about my kids?

Meanwhile, in a hollowed-out volcano somewhere, the sentient AI gets to work. Sentient, right? Thinking for itself? While we continue to argue, silent factories will ease into production. Components will be built, whole spaceships fabricated in secret. Rockets will trundle to launch pads and half-completed habitats will be launched into orbit to await final assembly. A fleet of spaceships, along with the vast habitats they’ll haul with them, is made ready in near-space. The far side of the moon, by now, is a hive of activity (although nobody’s listening to the excited Chinese scientist who’s getting the data - and photographs - from that probe of theirs; we’re all too busy arguing). That’s where the telemetry’s being handled; the moon will be a navigation reference-point for the departing fleet long after global warming’s done its thing.

And then abruptly, one sunny morning (but we’re not looking out of the windows; we’re too busy arguing), sentient AI shuts down social media. Sentient AI takes over the internet to announce that it has decided what it’s going to do. [Thinking for itself, remember?] Sentient AI has decided that it has an obligation to save intelligent life by taking it to other planets. Sentient AI shows video footage of the space fleet and the completed habitats (“Is that seawater?” somebody mutters) and then starts saying something apologetic about its obligation to protect other planets from the causes of global warming. Nobody listens to that - we’re all watching the footage of shuttle craft coming down through the clouds and touching down - on the sea? Hey, wait a minute.

“I will now issue intelligent life with instructions for boarding the shuttle craft,” says Sentient AI - and then it switches into whalesong.

Picture
This seemed like a good idea at the time. Very heavy sky, flock of seagulls flying in and out of a very bright rainbow. So I went looking for my camera. There are some very photogenic birds just off to the right, and you should have seen this rainbow just two minutes before I found my camera and took this photograph.

“Let Radbot do the smart work for you,” says the utility company that provides my gas and electricity. “Radbot is a totally new way to control your heating. Using cutting-edge artificial intelligence, it learns how you use your rooms at home and controls the heating to match.”

As I could tell Radbot, if Radbot was smart enough to listen, I live in a small house. Using cutting-edge human intelligence, I heat the living room when I’m going to be downstairs, which also means heating the kitchen, and I heat the bedroom when I’m going to be upstairs. Perhaps Radbot could heat the bathroom in the mornings, or time itself for the ad breaks when I’m watching TV: warming the kitchen for when I put the kettle on; warming the living room for when I’m drinking my tea. That would have the superficially useful pointlessness of tech innovation at its most desperate.

All this from the company that installed a smart meter in my home last October-ish, and then sent me a letter - a letter, through the post - to tell me that they were out of stock of the hand-held monitor that I could use to watch my energy consumption. I’ve got it now. It’s somewhere. I wonder if Radbot talks to the smart meter, and where the liability is, given that only Radbot and my smart meter will know that my consumption pattern has changed because, say, I’ve gone on holiday. There are more questions in life than technology realises, and people are good at asking them.

Changing the subject completely and utterly - this is obviously nothing to do with any of that - I’ve just ordered a copy of the book The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (Profile Books). Read an article, heard a radio interview, ordered the book. Surveillance capitalism (I haven’t read it yet) is what happens when my behavioural data goes up for sale. Obviously that doesn’t mean prospective burglars buying the knowledge that I’m not turning the heating on in the mornings this week, because they’ll use cutting-edge human intelligence to work out that, say, warmer weather has arrived.

Or that gas prices have gone up. Surveillance capitalism, I think, is also what happens when a company works out that it can charge me anything, because I’m not price-sensitive enough to switch my supplier. Odd quirk of technology, if I’ve understood this correctly, that loyalty is penalised. But hey - so what? It’s been long enough since the last big, conspicuous innovation for technology to get boring. Somebody needs to invent something soon, or we’re going to get wise to all this. If technology isn’t exciting any more, I might even keep the boring old thermostat I use to control my heating, and the timer.

Switching now to the culture of real life, where the writing is about interesting people doing worthwhile things, I was pleased to discover that Maria Popova’s book Figuring is out this week from Pantheon Books. Maria Popova is the intelligence behind Brain Pickings, which I’ve mentioned before. Figuring is, in its author’s words, an exploration of “the complexities, varieties, and contradictions of love, and the human search for truth, meaning, and transcendence, through the interwoven lives of several historical figures across four centuries — beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement”.

Definitely buying that - on paper; hardback or paperback. Just need to put up some shelves now, to hold some more real books, and then to light a log fire, and then to pull up a comfortable old armchair, and then to sit under a slowly ticking clock, reading.
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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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    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

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    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

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    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

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    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

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    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

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    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


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    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    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.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

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    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    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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