“We’re going paperless!” says the headline on the letter from the utility company that provides me with gas and electricity.

Reader, they’re going paperless. How old-fashioned, you might say. Well, yes.

Strictly, they’re going paperless in their dealings with customers who don’t read the whole of this letter – who miss the bit where they can opt out of paperlessness – but still, that’s jolly paperless, isn’t it? Come on, don’t discourage them. Jolly paperless! Well done! Here, have one of my gold stars!

Even later in the letter than the bit where we can opt out is this. “Download our new App to get account updates and reminders straight to your device.”

Bless! They’ve got a new App!

If I download it, my device will start pinging away with account updates and reminders from the utility company that provides me with gas and electricity. Hooray! Can’t wait.

The letter tells me that my account with the utility company, etc., “is now easier to use than ever”.

Which is quite impressive. “You’re already benefiting from a convenient way to manage your energy online. … you have everything you need in one easily accessible place.”

I thought that easily accessible place was the gas bill. Tear open the envelope. Read what’s inside. Easy access.

But no. It’s something online. And now that they’re going paperless, I’ll be “joining a community of thousands of account users already receiving their communications this way, and we really hope you’re going to prefer the change too.”

Isn’t that nice?

I found an old chequebook the other day. Used it to pay a utility bill. Oddly satisfying experience. I know a young writer (digital native, if you remember that term) who’s taken to using a typewriter for first drafts and letters.

Going paperless isn’t exactly cutting-edge, is it?

But never mind. It’s very clever. Well done!

I think I will opt out, though, because I just don’t want the extra work.

Utility bills would just arrive. Drop through the letterbox. Remember?

“We’ll send you an email notification when you have something new to log-in and view online. If you’ve forgotten your password…” and so on.

Going online to find my bill. Extra work. Not much, but – work that I didn’t have to do before.

Assuming my spam filter lets the email through.

Continuing the theme, a certain credit-card company sent me another letter the other day.

A4. Brown envelope. Little window in it to show my address.

The same offer as comes roughly every month. Credit card. I can do a “balance transfer” from another card at no interest until some distant reckoning that needn’t trouble us at all now, tra-la.

Enclosed was the familiar What we do with your data leaflet.

They’ve been sending me these offers for absolutely ages. Always the same: a balance-transfer offer on a new credit card.

I don’t mind – my paper shredder gets hungry these days – but that leaflet does bother me a little.

By now, my data should include my responses. I’ve blogged and posted about these offers before – and I once asked Facebook, via a post, to make itself useful and tell B– (I usually name them, but I guess they're all the same) that I wasn’t interested. None of it worked. The offers still come.

Yes, I know. Old fool. Ridiculous old fool wasting his time.

But next time you wake up at 3am and lie there worrying about the surveillance economy – and big data, and data analytics, and CCTV cameras, and all the rest of it – think of me.

I’m not proud of the state of my finances, but one thing I can say is: I don’t have a credit card. I haven’t had a credit card since I got fed up with the things back in the nineties.

Therefore – I’ll spell this out, in case you’re as slow as I am at 3am – I don’t have a balance to transfer.

I’m not eligible to take up Barc– oops, that was close! To take up the credit-card company’s offer, and haven’t been since the idea of the balance transfer was invented.

I don’t know what these people do with my data, but I suspect that they don’t read it very closely.

Reader, I have tested the surveillance economy, and it doesn’t work. Relax: nobody’s paying attention.

My friend Patricia Finney advocates the “0th draft” as a starting point for writing fiction.

Fact too, probably, but Patricia writes mainly historical novels, so I don’t know. The 0th draft comes before the first draft, obviously, and what you do is, you write. You don’t faff around waiting for the perfect opening sentence – you start writing. With whatever you’ve got.

You start, and you don’t stop. The acronym that accompanies the 0th draft is BINMAD. The B stands for a six-letter word that I’ve just looked up on Google – because I try not to use certain words here and Google gives me alternatives.

Using the B-word’s second meaning in its verb form, BINMAD stands for Cause Serious Harm Or Trouble To Inspiration, Never Miss A Day. Never mind how bad you’re feeling, or how much more clearly you’d write if you just procrastinated for another day – you write.

You don’t stop, and you don’t look back. Don’t edit. Don’t read it over. Don’t circulate your opening sentence to a Facebook Group for comments.

Your commitment is to complete your 0th draft. From memory – Patricia and I haven’t had this conversation for a while – you then stick the whole thing in a drawer for a week or more (showing my age: I mean, close the file and take it off the desktop) and go do all the things you dreamed of doing while you were writing.

Then you read it. There’ll be a lot that goes straight in the bin, and a lot of what’s left won’t be in the right order, or won’t be right … and there’ll be bits that need to be there that aren’t there, that you need to write, and that character’s going to need more of a back-story, and if the plot went this way … and you’ll start writing your first draft with a much clearer idea of where your story needs to go.

And how it needs to get there. Hate those long sentences.

The 0th draft gets you past the blank sheet of paper (okay! I’m not young!) and it also removes the pressure of having to get it right all the time. If nothing whatsoever rides on whether or not you’ve chosen the exact-best expression of what you want to say, you’re free to create.

You don’t show your 0th draft to anybody.

Obviously.

I’ve just Googled “0th draft” and found other writers talking about it. Good ideas spread. Perhaps that’s the practical application of the annual NaNoWriMo event (National Novel Writing Month – which is November), which seems to celebrate splurging out a lot of words.

Okay, I’ve just put NaNoWriMo into my trusty search engine. It’s free, and the write-up does make the point that the whole exercise can serve as part of your creative process.

I’ve never written a 0th draft, but I did once spend seven hours waiting for treatment in an A&E department with only a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for company. I’ve written Morning Pages ever since (approximately; I’ve missed weeks at a time and it’s actually a way of keeping a journal).

Morning Pages are distantly related to the 0th draft, except that you don’t have to be writing fiction to use them.

Start the day by writing three pages of whatever comes to mind. “Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow,” says the write-up at juliacameronlive.com.

Morning Pages are “the bedrock tool of a creative recovery,” apparently, and I won’t argue with that. They’re not a lot of help with physical injuries, but they do clear the mind.

Everything on the internet has to be oriented towards selling something, so I’ll pause for a commercial break here: Patricia Finney also writes as P F Chisholm, and if you put either of those names into a search engine, you’ll find any number of books to buy – er, read.

Okay, that’s enough online marketing for one day. I was talking to a young friend last Tuesday about the near-insuperable challenge of getting started on a creative project, and I suspect that some variant on Morning Pages, or writing a 0th draft, could be the antidote to a lot of procrastination.

Whatever it is, let yourself do it badly as a route to getting it right. Take the risk, don’t feel the pressure. Getting started requires an act of will.

This is turning into a self-help post. Sorry. I was thinking about 0th drafts, so I started writing about 0th drafts, and then I started meandering around Morning Pages and NaNoWriMo, and now all of a sudden I’m remembering my old friend David Phillips again, and his advice on how to end a magazine article.

“If you’ve got to the end,” David used to say, “just stop.”

We think of electric-car charging stations as things like fuel pumps. You drive into a service station and pull up at the pump-thing and then insert a hose/cable into your car.

Shall we innovate? There’s electricity everywhere. It doesn’t explode if you light a match, so it doesn’t have to be kept in secure tanks under designated filling stations with state-of-the-art fire precautions.

Electricity runs along the sides of major roads. Traffic lights, lighting generally, those emergency telephones you see along the verges of motorways.

Pending the arrival of the self-charging battery – in the real-world sense of a battery that never runs out – how about installing sockets everywhere, akin to the hook-ups you find on caravan sites?

Pull in to a parking space and plug into the kerb?

I mean, imagine if you had to pull in to a phone shop every time you wanted to charge your smartphone.

I’m also haunted by the thought that cars don’t have to be cars.

If the internal-combustion engine hadn’t been invented when it was, but instead, a viable electric motor had been invented back then, what would cars look like now?

If we built up from the battery, rather than trying to fit the battery into a pre-existing great heavy hunk of metal and wheels, what would we build?

Would we invent something lighter and intrinsically safer, that goes not much more slowly?

Perhaps glides over the fields?

Without wrecking the world?

Whenever I do anything online, I imagine that there’s a cluster of photogenic young people gathered behind me, watching over my shoulder.

They’re the tech-savvy junior employees of my ISP – and every other company whose website I visit – and they’re living (but imaginary) proof that we live in a surveillance economy. Society. We live in a society, not an economy.

You know all that stuff about Big Data? Internet giants tracking our every move? They’re that. Big Brother – Sister – Big Sibling is watching us.

Sometimes – I guess it depends on what I’m looking at online – they’re hatchet-faced apparatchiks of the Security State, and sometimes – yes, it definitely depends on that – they’re shocked and horrified elderly relatives who are disappointed in me. William, how could you look at – that?

The usual youngsters just nudge each other and snigger.

Returning us now to the real world, the question I’d like to pose is this.

They may not be standing behind me, my online observers, but they’re definitely there. In offices, behind screens, watching. Taking a break. Making coffee. Playing online games. Tweeting. Planning the weekend.

Sniggering. Nudging each other. Look what he’s on about this week. He’s talking about us.

So what do they officially do, these tech people, apart from sending cookies my way and taking down my IP address?

[That’s the right term, isn’t it? IP address? Make yourselves useful, peeps, and correct it if not.]

What they do, I suspect, is reduce me to a statistic. From my perspective, I’ve got people watching me online. From their perspective, they’ve got millions of people to watch online.

So they don’t deal with me personally. Instead, they draw up charts showing that – I don’t know, some percentage. Charts reducing me to a statistic. 30 per cent of Spanish women behave as I do, while 70 per cent don’t.

Sorry, I should explain that. With the help of a tech-enabled friend, I once delved into the data that my Significant [Online] Other held about me.

And found that the company closest to me, the biggest employer of watchers of me, had collated all my data, run a bunch of clever calculations … and concluded that I was a Spanish woman in my forties. I fitted that profile most closely. And no, I have no idea what I’d been buying to give them that impression.

Yes, and there’s something else. Every time I use my laptop to go online, a pop-up appears on the screen to warn me that people know I’m in Aldershot. To hide my location, I could sign up for … you know the rest. Dollar amount per annum for the premium service.

That pop-up is probably the least effective ad I have ever encountered. Total fail.

The Spanish-woman thing is true (there’s talk of the UK government appointing a regulator for online activity, and I’m getting my compliance in early) but the Aldershot pop-up hasn’t appeared for a while. That said – important background information – I’ve never even been to Aldershot, so far as I can remember. I live in Falmouth.

And now back to the blog post.

They reduce us to statistics, the better to up the response rate on their advertising and direct marketing.

If a double-figure percentage of Spanish women in their forties (not) living in Aldershot sign up to have their location concealed; well, that’s the important thing. Much more important than being right about my age, gender, interest in, um.

Here’s what I think. We should celebrate the glorious, saving incompetence of the technology industry.

We’re not under threat from people who watch our every move. We’re under threat from people who – at best (worst) – devise tools to capture (“capture” – they use that word, but in this context, it always makes me giggle) our every keystroke and then strip out the individuality to fit us into some vast database of simplistic demographic categories.

They’re human. Paradoxically. They’ve designed data-analytics processes that don’t think.

We should encourage them in their humanity.

[Hey, you. Yes, you. Take a break. It’s nearly lunchtime. Go early. The rest of this blog post will be here when you get back. Have a great weekend.]

And we should trust their analytics to miss the specifics of our lives.

Nobody and no machine looks at me and thinks: that isn’t what a Spanish woman looks like. Nobody and no machine takes a walk with me across Gyllyngvase Beach and thinks: this isn’t Aldershot.

Like people in ridiculously complicated spy/thriller movies, these are people who trust their technology.

These are machines that do what’s asked of them – they generalise.

They don’t need to get the detail right, did I say that?

If enough people sign up to have their locations concealed – and we’re all pretty tolerant of low-level tech-idiocies now, so never mind that we’re not in Aldershot – that’s what matters.

The other saving grace of technology – I’m not exactly repeating myself here – is that it’s designed and operated by people. Human beings. All that data analysis follows rules set by, I don’t know, Seattle-based twenty-somethings who don’t get out much.

Yes, of course that’s a caricature. But I’ve analysed the “reciprocal data” that all these ads represent, and I don’t think they’re put together by world-weary Old Europeans with part-time jobs training new recruits at the Aldershot Barracks in the proper use of castanets.

No wonder, despite all the Big Data and the Big Talk and the analytics and the surveillance and the online courses in marketing – no wonder my dreams of buying the perfect happiness-inducing gadget never seem to come true.

No wonder, despite the CCTV and the facial-recognition software and the surveillance and the spy movies and the harnessing-the-power-of-technology, there are still criminals who get away with it.

Move along, please. Nothing new here. Nothing new at all.

This matter of rules. Briefly.

There are rules that are necessary. Do not jump in the deep end if you can’t swim. Do not steal my wallet.

And there are any number of rules that shouldn’t be rules. Shouldn’t be guidelines; should barely even be suggestions.

Take an ambition online, and you’ll find any number of guides to doing it. How to write, how to blog, vlog, reach number one, find your inner peace, write a bestseller, write a screenplay, market an online marketing course, make a fortune, get a job, how to get a better job, get a partner, get sex, love, money.

All that.

“If you can’t do it – teach it.” An old saying repurposed for the social-media age. We have the technology to reach the world with our writing, film-making, singing, music-making – and we sublimate our failure to launch by telling other people how to do what we want to do.

Most of those guides, these days, are written as listicles. Remember listicles? Used sparingly, on the covers of print magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire, they were effective. Ten ways to do this, five ways to do that. Oh, and three ways to do the other.

I’m not saying that if you can’t write a bestseller, you shouldn’t write a guide to writing a bestseller. Okay. It’s a way to dream. And you can probably see how to do it as clearly as everybody else who can’t do it. If you can come up with a listicle – yeah, okay.

But the problem with using a how-to guide as your entry point to a creative activity is that they only ever describe what’s worked in the past. Yes, everybody looks to the past to work out what works.

But where’s the spontaneity? The creativity? If we’re all following rules, where’s the spark of originality?

Put that guide down. Try again. This time, do it your way.

Is it me, or does the immediacy of media have a distancing effect?

Yes, and last night I dreamed of Manderley again. What a question for the early morning.

If you’ve just joined us – sorry about that.

It’s half five. I’ve lit the fire. I’m sitting at the table thinking about sitting on the sofa. Because I set the alarms for six, I woke up at five. In my life, this always happens.

I have a cup of coffee in front of me, and by the end of this sentence, I will have drunk some of it, so I will be awake enough to start making sense. There.

I’ve never dreamed of Manderley, but I have just looked it up and found the question “What does Manderley represent in Rebecca?” on Google. Manderley, clearly, only represents one thing in Rebecca, and Google will tell us what it is. So much easier than having to think.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; it’s a “1938 gothic novel,” says my source. And a film, several times over. Manderley turns up in the opening sentence of the book, and it’s a good opening sentence. Pick the book up in a bookshop or look at the 10% sample on Kindle, say, to find out who did dream of Manderley.

But don’t look it up online. Spoiler alert.

Daphne du Maurier also wrote Rule Britannia, and here’s what Wikipedia has to say about that. “The novel is set in a fictional near future in which the UK's recent withdrawal from the EEC has brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy.”

Wow! Rule Britannia was Daphne du Maurier’s last novel, published in 1972. The UK is near-bankrupt and the main event of Rule Britannia’s plot is that the US invades the UK.

Here in what we might as well call the real world, the die-hard Brexit fanatics of my acquaintance are posting dire warnings that the UK will become the 51st state of the Union now that we’ve left the EU.

Spooky, right? All foretold in 1972 by the daughter of the actor Gerald du Maurier.

Except that in Rule Britannia, the UK is, ah, rebranded as USUK. I doubt that Daphne du Maurier intended this, but if you read that aloud in a certain way, it’s an insult. The book ends with a US withdrawal.

Excuse me. I think this may be a two-coffee blog post.

Brexit’s gone out of the headlines, so I guess we’ve got it done. Facebook seems more interested in beach-cleaning this morning, so that’s healthy, and there wasn’t anything in the news about the Australian bush-fires, so maybe they’ve all gone out.

Immediacy, distance. They’re not on my screen any more.

Trump’s been acquitted – those die-hards are predicting a second Trump victory and muttering about the character (and presidential hopeful) Greg Stillson in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1979); wow, they so badly want to be proved right about how wrong the world is – and – oh – Kirk Douglas has died.

Back to my original question. I was going to write a lengthy, earnest and rather dull piece about the way everything arrives by screen these days. Whether it’s fact or fiction, it comes to us the same way (and has the same weight: discuss). And we can switch it off in the same way.

Everything’s on the small screen; everything’s contained within a small rectangle. What impact, if any, does that have on our capacity to react?

But I was side-tracked by Manderley. Narrow escape.

And now I’ve remembered that quote again. In 1920, H L Mencken said, “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Could happen, I guess.

And that reminds me of The Right Honourable Chimpanzee, by David Phillips and Georgi Markov (they shared the pseudonym “David St George”), which was published in 1978. The entertaining story – yes, it is a satire – of what happens to the UK after a chimpanzee becomes prime minister.

I remember David saying to me, “The problem isn’t that the prime minister is a chimpanzee; the problem is that the chimpanzee is prime minister.”

Mind you, I also – suddenly and clearly – remember David turning to me once and saying, “Will you stop banging on about coffee!”

Enough said.

How seriously should we take this coronavirus thing?

The pictures are impressive. Trucks pumping vapour onto the pavements of Chinese cities. Great halls full of hospital beds; swarms of diggers building new hospitals.

People wearing facemasks. Those hand-held things taking temperatures. That quarantined cruise ship.

I ask because I’ve just heard a radio interview with a professor of diseases – I think that was it – at a UK university. The interview could be paraphrased like this.

“It’s really serious, isn’t it? Is it a pandemic? How serious is it? Surely it’s a pandemic? Tell me it’s a pandemic!”

“It’s not serious yet, but its spread suggests that it could become serious.”

Which is the answer to my question. Not seriously – yet.

Take it seriously in anticipation of it getting serious? Perhaps.

People have died and a lot more people are sick, so yes – seriously.

But the news imperative seems always to talk it up. It’s a story. That interview would have gone the same way even if – oh, I don’t know.

I wish the news would include a “no news” option, or a “nothing much happened today” setting. We don’t need to be “sold” the news, do we?

I suppose we do.

But how seriously should we take this coronavirus thing?