What if we’re wrong? What if none of it matters? A friend suggested to me the other day that the United Kingdom’s chance of a prosperous future had been “cancelled by Brexit,” in that slightly annoying (to me) more-passively-sinned-against-than-aggressively-sinning tone that goes straight to resentment without passing reaction. I wanted to say: don’t sit there moaning; do something about it! Then there was the enormous march, and with that came news of the enormous petition, and I thought: those people have really messed up the opening paragraph of my post this week.

But I’m okay with that. I’m all for getting out and doing stuff. Whingeing on social media, not so much. [Yes, I know. But this isn’t social media; it’s my website.] Marching beats signing petitions, and signing petitions beats moaning about Brexit privately and/or on social media. And all of the above beat the sheer paranoid inertia of telling me that our children’s children’s futures have been blighted by that referendum. If a generation is twenty-five years, say, and two generations is, er, not far off fifty-ish years, that means the reverberations of the 2016 People’s Vote will still be felt in 2066. Which is a bit like saying … let me see, fifty years back from 2019 … that we’re living lives blighted by the events of 1969. And if you look back at 1969, you see how ridic–

Oh! The internet was invented in 1969 (ARPANET), the modern gay rights movement in the USA got started (after the Stonewall riots) and the first cash machine (ATM) went live. Moon landing, cold war, et cetera. It was an interesting year after all, and there goes my third paragraph. I take back the word “blighted,” but apart from that – yeah, okay. Maybe in 2069 we’ll be three years out from another People’s Vote on the EU, and parliament will be conducting a series of “indicative votes” to find out what it thinks – sorry, to “take control,” I mean. That’s what my radio said these votes were intended to achieve. Stop laughing; this is a serious subject. No, really. Parliament’s “taking control”. I said stop laughing!*

But what if we’re wrong? What if Brexit isn’t the big historic thing? What if it’s the 2019 equivalent of, oh, I don’t know, the 1969 publication of Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife white paper, which of course has transformed all of our lives and continues to drive political debate today? Or more accurately – doesn’t. What if the writing on those placards you were carrying last Saturday isn’t the writing on the wall? Sorry. That was just too neat to resist. What I mean is – what if Brexit itself doesn’t matter so much, but – in 1969, the Stonewall riots caused far longer-lasting change than any of the politicians did – the marching and the shouting and the banner-waving do matter?

My sources tell me (okay, I’ve just googled the phrase) that the original “writing on the wall” appeared while King Belshazzar of Babylon was hosting a feast. What it said was “Numbered, numbered, weighed and they are divided,” and what it was interpreted to mean was “Your formerly united kingdom is about to collapse, guv.” Which – if you’ll allow for the very loose translation – is peculiarly appropriate. W B Yeats wrote the poem in which the phrase “The centre cannot hold” appears, and Alfred Hitchcock’s screen-writing associate Angus MacPhail came up with the term “the MacGuffin” to describe “the desired object that serves to advance the plot” (thanks, Wikipedia).

What if Brexit’s the MacGuffin that we’re all chasing in a historical narrative that’s all about the chase? Yes, Leave/Remain does matter, up to a point, and yes, I suppose the terms of the withdrawal are important. But this important? Really? I don’t know whether there’s a “silent majority” of “shy Tories” or “shy Leavers” who would take us all by surprise in the event of a second referendum, but I do suspect that tomorrow’s historians will focus more on the noise of this one than the substance. If you filter out the issue itself, you’re left with: a government that doesn’t seem able to govern; an opposition that doesn’t seem able to oppose; a cast of serial forecasters prophesying a doom that never quite arrives; our Brexit-obsessed media; our failing nation state; a climate that’s warming us into extinction anyway…

…and a heck of a lot of noise that seems to be coming from the people. We’re not “populists”, because that term now refers to autocratic right-wing leaders and would-be leaders of EU member states, but the “national conversation” does seem to be running kind of hot. And what I think about that is: we’re all so very networked these days, so wholly connected to the means of self-expression, that a five-year cycle of voting in a bunch of remote representatives to make our decisions for us – or fail to do that, ha ha – just doesn’t do it for me. I like the idea that parliament’s “taking back control,” or taking control, or whatever it’s doing (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha – sorry), but I suspect that what really happening here is a kind of chaotic subsidiarity.

And if you’re not familiar with that term, it’s defined in Article Five of the Treaty on European Union (2007). Or let’s try the internet. “Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate level that is consistent with their resolution.” Go, Wikipedia! And if we run that through the same translation software as we used for the writing on the wall, we get the idea that if government can’t govern, parliament has a go, and if that doesn’t work, we try another People’s Vote, and if we’re still arguing, well, we’ve all got the smartphones we need to muster an English Spring, which is like an Arab Spring (other constituent nations of the United Kingdom are available) but without the firearms.

We end up with politicians who are within range of our dissent. If the current arrangement of remote government (sic) by total strangers in armoured saloon cars with motorcycle outriders doesn't work, and if it doesn't work because they're out of touch with the national conversation as it is now being conducted (via technology, on social media, et cetera), then I suggest that we forget about national government and devolve power down to "administrative units" no bigger than you could realistically fit into a smartphone's contact list. [By the way, look up “How Belgium Survived 20 Months Without a Government” online.] We’re due for a big rethink (post-mortem) on how national government works (or rather, doesn't), and whether we plan this or it just happens, I suggest that short-range government (the term "local government" is already in use) will prove to be both workable on a human scale and compatible with our technology.

Now, I realise I’ve written this post in a digital format in the middle of the Modern Dark Age, but just in case it does survive, here’s a footnote for future historians. You’ll know that we went over to digital storage for all our important records – we called it “the cloud” – without properly thinking through the tendency of digital storage to decay, and I’m sorry that we’ve left nothing behind except a pile of plastic bottles – but in case you’re wondering, “Brexit” was the name we gave to an early attempt by one of the states to secede from Europa (then known as “the EU”), and if you do have that much, Brexit fits into the timeline before Grexit, Frexit and the European Civil War. Yes, all those terms with "-exit" attached refer to episodes of civil unrest.

And if you’re reading this in 2069 and you think I might be your long-lost grandfather – sorry about the mess.

*They've rejected every option! Okay, you can laugh now.

Unless you write about politics, and people pay to read what you write about politics, don’t post about politics. That would be Lesson One in my non-existent Social Media for Creative and Interesting People online training course, which I’m now offering at the cut-down price of still more money than it’s worth. It’s not that half your audience will disagree with you, but that there seems to be a set tone of voice for political dialogue.

We’re all resentful. Somebody’s either in the wrong, or too stupid to see the obvious truth as we see it, or both. And yet they have the power to ignore us. Which is Not Fair! And all that comes across in the tone of voice. [Sorry, grammar-check; I am going to start that sentence with ‘And’.] If you post about politics, it’s very easy to sound mulish and dogmatic, and if you reply to comments on your post about politics, it’s very easy to sound irritable and impatient with your readers’ failure to see the obvious truth as you’ve seen it.

If you’re a writer, say, you might even end up attacking potential buyers of your book. More likely than that, and more damaging – your sarcastic side is on display, for however long, to any potential buyer of your book who googles your name. And that is absolutely not a good look. Social media for writers is a matter of being the person who writes those books. For creative and interesting people – other creative and interesting people, sorry – it’s a matter of being creative and interesting.

I don’t say this is an absolute ban, and if you want me to know what you think about [yes, that], okay, but please try to foam at the mouth in a way that doesn’t ruin my first coffee of the day. Then you can wear the noise-cancelling headphones and I’ll tell you what I think about [yes, that]. And then we’ll part, and spend the next hour feeling less friendly towards each other. We won’t change our views, because politics isn’t a rational weighing-up of The Facts; it’s a conjunction of upbringing, tribal loyalty, peer-group pressure (however light) and observation.

I agree with you that this is happening – observation, check – but we’ll never agree on who to vote for in the hope that they’ll do something about it because you’re you and I’m me. And they’re them as well, come to think about it. My own problem (headphones, anybody?), very briefly, is that politics is ephemeral. Five years from now, we’ll look back at [yes, that], and only be able to see it in the rosy glow of what happened next. By then, we’ll be panic-stricken about the next-but-several big issue. Which is my other problem. We’re too excited. Why? Millions sign petitions. Millions march. Change happens slowly, if at all. Life goes on. Five years from now…

Perhaps that’s a political view, and I shouldn’t bother you with it. I want to bring this post round to saying that if you’re a creative person, writer or otherwise, touch all of your output with your creativity. Don’t subordinate your vision to some focus-grouped manifesto. March, yes, sign the petition, yes. But hold onto what you are. Don’t just share the outrage; feel it your way and express it your way. Write the story, make the film, post the gif, vlog about what you were wearing on the march - do what you do best. I don’t want to know that you think the same way as everybody else riding the same bandwagon; I want the story told as only you can tell it.

Five years from now – must put this in my calendar – I’m going to write a post about how chaos and confusion, even repression, are conducive to great art. It’ll get past the censors, because I’ll tap it out on an old typewriter rather than a connected device, and I’ll make the first copies using carbon paper. By then, I’ll be running a publishing company that has actual printing presses concealed around the neighbourhood, and one whole cell of the resistance will be dedicated to online shopping in our names, using our digital identities, to confuse the surveillance economy as to who we are.

Well, that was fun. Opened up my laptop and decided to write this post straight onto the website. As opposed to Google Docs, Microsoft Word or the back of an envelope. Clicked the icon for Firefox, and got the “Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.” message, along with three suggestions: I could come back later; I could check my network connection; I could check that I’m not behind a firewall that doesn’t allow Firefox to access the internet.

Remembered that I’d switched everything off last night. Debated going upstairs to switch it all back on again. Nah. Plugged in my iPhone, found that the personal-hotspot slider was already green; found that the laptop couldn’t find the iPhone. And vice-versa. Restarted laptop – no luck. Restarted iPhone – no luck. Thought about … yeah, maybe that’s it. Fix it now? No. Want to write. Made coffee. Did washing up. Returned to laptop and opened a Word document. Wrote “Well, that was fun,” and remembered that I’d been thinking about honesty.

Wasn’t there a writer, recently, who faked a large part of his/her personal history? A journalist, maybe? I don’t remember the details, and I wouldn’t name the person anyway, but there was a serious illness, or an experience of discrimination, or something else, that turned out to be invented. Maybe it was ethnic origin or past employment or a professional qualification; I don’t know. A writer for a high-minded US monthly magazine, I think, or possibly a weekly, although the internet kind of stomps on the idea of a periodical, doesn’t it? Maybe it doesn’t. I like buying physical magazines, actually, because – sorry. Where was I?

Of course, it’s deeply shocking that a writer, a culturally sanctioned purveyor of truth and wisdom, should fabricate any part of a personal history. And not just writers – all artists. I remember the furore that erupted, shortly after I joined the Bolshoi Ballet as a principal dancer, when one of the younger choreographers dropped into the conversation that he’d worked with Diaghilev. Oh, the laughter. But also the genuine indignation: how dare this youngster claim to be more than he was! I knew Diaghilev myself, and he’d have laughed at such clumsy name-dropping.

I wouldn’t name the person because we live in a world of illusion anyway, and the best defence is not to vilify the fantasists. A writer invents. Even a writer of facts invents the sentences in which they’re delivered. The craft of “making things up”, if you’ll pardon the inverted commas, applies to fact as well as fiction, and such legitimate building blocks as metaphors, similes, imagery, et cetera, draw on more than just the facts. Whatever those might be. I remember my brief stint as a speechwriter for a past US president who shall remain nameless – realising that the job entailed working up a vision of whatever the situation was, a sense of its historical significance, rather than just a straight retelling of the facts.

We’re all fantasists. It’s in our nature. And our fantasies reveal our vulnerabilities. A choreographer, even a wholly imaginary choreographer, reveals something vulnerable in himself if he claims to have worked with one of the big names of his industry (Sergei Diaghilev, 1872-1929, founded the Ballets Russes in Paris). Something similar applies to writers. It’s in their nature, and it’s in the nature of the job (no, the egg came first), to emphasise the significance of whatever they’re writing. Part of that is to project themselves as writers, of course. I’m okay with the idea that being the exactly-right writer for the story is part of the storytelling. For example - this blog post finally uncovers the startling truth behind whatever it is that I’m on about, and only a writer with my long experience of, I don’t know, blogging about stuff could do the subject justice. That’s the template for a pretty standard claim.

What is the truth, anyway? What are the facts? You may remember the scene in that play I co-wrote with William Shakespeare, in which the characters discuss the difficulty of knowing what the facts are, let alone sticking to them. That writer who falsified a past – yeah, I get that. Just bulking up the story – or even just being human. Some people want to be taller, shorter, thinner, fatter, more attractive, et cetera; some people already believe that they are taller, thinner, good-looking in that outfit, et cetera. Doesn’t matter that you can’t reason with them – it would be a cruelty to be honest with a person who turns up at a big event, for example, in an outfit that makes, um, that bit look big. We all know it and we can all see it, but there are times when the duty to truth comes second to compassion. Honesty is a dish best served tactfully, at home, in advance. With writers – yeah, right, we’ll believe you for now. And maybe get a bit more out of the story by doing so.

And who’s to say that the writer at the top of this blog post wasn’t covering up some personal vulnerability? We rail against fake news, which is one thing, but taking down fantasists can slip over into a kind of mass trolling of the vulnerable. I’ve found it now; I’m being offered the story about the writer as a “sponsored post” on Facebook; a newspaper has paid money to spread it further. Let’s really knock this guy down! Okay, our writer friend (still not naming him) shouldn’t have made that claim, but who are we to cast the first stone? He’s a novelist – an official fantasist – anyway. Phrases such as “no better than she* ought to be” and “ideas above his station” may have dropped out of common usage, but those resentments are still there in our minds. We’re not letting anybody climb out of this hole.

Whatever this hole is. If the absolute cold-light-of-day factual truth is what makes us behave like this, I think I understand why we need fiction, fantasy, self-deception, affirmations, compliments, in whatever order the situation demands. I am uniquely qualified to write this post, and if you’re wondering why, well, I’m an adventurer, an explorer, and once, on a holiday to the Amazon rainforest, I stumbled on a lost tribe of Warrior Women who – it was so disappointing – used me for domestic chores. I gained such insights into the nature of fantasy, and the need for fantasy in situations that could be more exotic and, um, on that trip. I have all the experience and insight I need for this post, and if you want to start researching the evidence for lost tribes of Warrior Women, or Googling lists of principal dancers at the Bolshoi – well, that’s another story, isn’t it?

But be kind when you tell it, why don’t you?

*If you look up “no better than he ought to be” online, it defaults back to “she”. I really wish that surprised me more than it does.

Struck me the other day that all my instincts are designed/evolved (delete according to belief system) to help me get along in situations where even my head might go offline. Not only that; they’re a survival mechanism. Babies have the “startle reflex” whereby they grab for the nearest parent when they’re startled; adults have “fight or flight”, whereby they’re charged up with adrenalin when they’re rear-ended by a fugitive bad guy driving a stolen car through the downtown streets of the City of Angels. An oncoming deadline triggers the “drink coffee” reflex.

Instincts are great, if you can stick to situations where they apply. A startled baby needs a mother who is practised in the art of swinging from tree to tree to get away; a driver hit from behind by a passing high-speed chase needs an encyclopaedic knowledge of the back streets and the ability to drive on two wheels down narrow alleys and through street markets to overtake the bad guy and get his insurance details. Name, anyway. Other instincts are specific to, for example, keeping population levels up, but we needn’t go into those.

The thing about instincts is that most of the time, we don’t know they’re there. And the other thing about instincts is that they’re completely inappropriate. Babies might grab for a tree-climbing mother; they actually get picked up by a parent of the grounded variety. That driver has to tone down the urge to fight (or run away) for long enough to sustain an intelligent conversation with the driver from the breakdown service. “Don’t get mad, get even” works better as “Don’t get instinctive, get civilised.”

Boringly enough. Instinctive behaviour would be fun, don’t you think, if we could find a way of doing all that without upsetting the neighbours? Or each other? More than fun – all of that cavorting about is how we’re designed to behave. We are those animals. The basic design/evolution principle behind human beings is: we fight, or we climb the trees with our babies. We do a variety of other things that we associate with fun. Adventure playgrounds, for example. And yet we’ve built a civilisation in which very few of our instincts work in our favour, and some of them are downright inconvenient.

We needn’t go into those either, and I’m not saying we’re wrong to be civilised first – but instinctive never? Not even second or third? To what extent do we deny essential traits of ourselves and each other, and what does that do to us? I don’t know the answer to that, but I wonder sometimes.

 Has there been any research done on the apology rate? By that, I mean the rate at which tech giants, other large corporates, governments and other public-service institutions, et cetera, decline to be interviewed but instead put out a statement saying that (1) Lessons Have Been Learned, and/or (2) We Have Already Invested Billions In Achieving Excellence In This Area Where We've Just Messed Up. Again. Because I think the apology rate is going up.

In my imaginary novelisation of the collapse of Western Civilisation (sic), the fall starts with a series of minor glitches in routine systems that have disproportionately big impacts. Mostly, these are human-nature errors that are taken up and spread all too widely by technology, but there are a few instances of sloppy programming, and one or two where the accident investigators work out that some critical person didn't take ownership of whatever he or she was supposed to be getting just right. Instead did what the car industry used to call a Friday-afternoon job (strictly, the phrase I'm remembering is "Friday-afternoon car").

So a bank's systems start to reject long-standing routine payments, for example. Not all of them, but enough to cause bankruptcies and other awkwardnesses down the line. Welfare payments also stop randomly, and there are deaths from starvation and imprisonments for hunger-motivated thefts - but these don't get as much publicity as the hedge-fund manager embarrassed at the country club because her membership wasn't auto-renewed. Hospital admissions are snarled up, patient records go missing (and if you haven't got records, you can't be treated), and whole fleets of cars are recalled because their wheels fall off when they go above 40mph. That hedge-fund manager kicks up a stink. Then the country club goes bust and important people realise that this is serious.

I'm deliberately not using any real-life examples, although I can't stop thinking of them, because Lessons Have Been Learned and we can rely on those companies (governments) not to do anything like that again. Can't we? And by the way, I'm not making the old-guy point that technology makes us careless and prone not to bother too much about details. We've always been careless, et cetera. It is worth asking: what does technology assume? Because the answer tells us something about ourselves. The boom in audio books tells us that we don't read as much as we did, for example; the success of grammar-checking software suggests that we can't write accurately any more.

I'm not a "grammar nazi" (telling phrase) because I'm okay with the idea that language evolves, and I'm wrong to think that I'm in a dying business - writing this in words rather than speaking it straight to video - because the USA and beyond is full of young people writing fantasy novels and putting them out via Kindle, Kobo, et cetera. Look up Angel Medina ("Aspiring Author") on Facebook, for example. Read him. The "But" that corresponds to the "It is worth asking" line in the paragraph before this one goes like this: "But that's all it does." Technology makes assumptions that tell us about ourselves - but that's all. And even that's just an example of how technology just extends human nature. Towards inertia, or perhaps even laziness, but the point stands. On the plus side, technology extends us towards publishing our fantasy novels.

I'm writing about big human organisations. Those vast corporate entities where, for example, the front-line duty of care to customers is outsourced either to computer systems or to minimum-wage workers (and no offence to them, but they're not exactly incentivised to "take ownership" of their employer's reputation). Western capitalism is a hotel where nobody cares about the state of the rooms nor the timely delivery of room service; where tips are grabbed by the management; where management lives in the penthouse suite and buys in services from outside. What do you mean, you can never leave? You can ride through the rooms on a horse with no name, for all I care, and those people over there are convinced they can burn it all down. No, that's early-morning mist on the water. Put down that guitar - now!

Capitalism, civilisation, back on track. In Chapter Two of my imaginary novelisation, the CEO of a tech giant seethes at the head of a boardroom table. The meeting is about the tiny little errors that have been creeping into the code - that have been exposed in the source code, et cetera - that have been causing minor frustrations for customers - including customers with big social-media followings. Something has to be done. Finally, after listening to the tech people for too long, the CEO bangs the table. The word has to go out that the problem has been fixed. Lessons have been learned. The CEO is doubling the company's social-media and advertising budgets, and he wants to get even bigger celebrities promoting the brand.

The word goes out. Vloggers, bloggers, celebrities are all brought in to bolster the brand and tell the world that everything's fine ... and all the errors and the viruses go on trickling through the system, spreading through the networks, cue sinister music. But Lessons Have Been Learned and the future is bright. By now, the astute reader is beginning to suspect that I have a thing about the way big organisations never quite seem to get it right. And the astute reader is onto something. Big organisations - especially the ones that send me text messages addessed to "Hey William" - never quite seem to get their act together. Chapters Three and Four depict a world in which Everything's Fine, with Business As Usual, and if rising sea levels are beginning to flood low-lying suburbs - yeah, that's really serious, and our PR people are right on it.

I mean, global corporates like ours are teaming up with governments to harness the power of technology in declaring a worldwide campaign against global warming; you can download the declaration to your smart device. We've agreed unanimously - at 11.59 last night, actually, isn't that cool? - that global warming is a bad thing and Action Must Be Taken. Of course our CEO's available for interview, but why don't you save yourself some time by using these pre-approved remarks in your article? What's that? Oh, we'll go along with everything that we all decide to do. Pro-actively, of course. Governments must act, and we'll go right along with what they do. And hey, we're the good guys, right? The CEO demanded an assurance from the tech people that everything was fine with the software. You'll read about it in the media release. Really demanded. They caved in right away.

In Chapter Five, the maverick programmer gets fired from her job (for arguing yet again that they should fix the source code rather than adding more patches), and while wandering in Company Park afterwards, meets the feisty young anthropologist who will be her sidekick through the rest of the book. He's been trying to introduce insects into the park (with its imported trees and underground heating for the exotic plants), and talks excitedly about how it's not too late. By Chapter Six going on Seven, Lessons Have Been Learned to the extent that the electricity grid has failed, the suburbs are under water, and the tech giant has Invested In Excellence to the extent of distributing massive generators around the downtown area (except where it's under water, of course), so that customers can charge their smart devices and keep up with the tech giant's progress in Demanding That Global Warming Must Be Stopped.

By now, the feisty anthopologist and the maverick programmer are living in a beach hut somewhere, and he's convinced her that using nanotechnology to make smart replica insects is not the answer. They've built their beach hut out of washed-up plastic, and now they're working on a boat. One day, using a rod and line, casting from the beach, the anthropologist hauls in something that the programmer has never seen before. Why, it's not made of plastic at all! It's almost ... alive. As the sun comes up over the distant horizon, and that weird music starts up again in the background - they've never been able to track it to its source - he teaches her that there were once fish in the sea, in the time before plastic, and that they could be eaten.

But she flatly refuses to believe that, so - reluctantly - he throws the fish back into the sea and teaches her about vegetables. "I thought apples grew in baskets, in farmers' markets," she says at one point. But no. They light a fire and huddle together under the blanket, watching - the continuity's completely off here - the sun go back down again. Chapter Eight happens, and then Chapter Nine, and by the time sea levels stop rising, they're living in a beach hut on the edge of Las Vegas, which blew all its fuses years ago and is now a deserted tropical paradise, overgrown with trees and creepers and thick green undergrowth. There are lakes, and mangrove swamps, and populations of animals that were either near-extinct or thought to be actually extinct. She's relaxed the vegetarianism to the point where she will eat coelacanth. They're becoming a nuisance.

The novelisation's quite slow in this middle section, but so's the film - critics were divided on the director's decision to tell most of the story in flashback. "There's no tension," said one. "We find out far too early - and it's too obvious anyway - that the world is going to be saved by people working together, in small groups, rather than by governments and big corporates, with their self-interested agendas." And many of them found the ending contrived. I mean - really! The programmer and the anthropologist are sitting on the shore of their reduced America, and they see a boat come towards them over the horizon. It anchors in the bay, and a group come ashore in a launch. They're from somewhere else, and their technology is also something else. Their leader approaches, and says something.

You'll remember the scene. The programmer looks at the leader for a moment, and then offers him a strip of freshly cooked coelacanth. The leader says something, and the programmer shrugs. "De nada," she says. Come on, you do remember the scene. The leader goes back to his people, waiting by the launch, and tells them, in his own language but also in subtitles, "This land is called Denada, and I claim it in the name of the Emperor."

There are two surveillance economies. There's the one in which the various algorithms know me better than I do, because my various online activities and disclosures (and all that location-tracking my phone does) are somehow a window into my soul, and there's the one in which utility companies can send me "Hey, William!" letters offering me (recent example) a video doorbell in exchange for a series of monthly payments added to my utility bill. Regardless of whether or not I have a video doorbell already, or even need one.

I don't have a video doorbell actually, but any description of my front door would have to include the words "glass" and "can see it easily from". My video doorbell would transmit a picture to my phone, so if I didn't want to look out and see who had arrived, or if I was in my kitchen (with my phone) and didn't want to turn round and see who had arrived, it would be very useful. I like the way you think, algorithm. No, really, I'm not laughing at you at all.

And here's another one. "William, live your best life with Fitbit Versa." I had a Fitbit once. Unlike the Fitbit Versa, though, it didn't offer "phone-free music". It just went several ways about measuring my health. Useful, it was, until I stopped wearing it.

I like the person they think I am - this shadow William Essex, this doppelganger, so busy dropping clues online that he wants ... this eclectic range of consumer products and services. Who is he, this guy? In some ways, he's so real to me that I want to call him up and tell him that I'm getting all his mail. In others, he seems to be the kind of everyman that you'd create if your customer profiling only went ... so deep.

Do the people tracking the shadow William Essex really want to gain an intimate knowledge of his wants, needs and desires, or can they sell enough video doorbells without really bothering to get to know him at all? I mean, I'm as impressed as anybody by the overall sinisterness of algorithms and all that - big data and analysis and ooh-scary electronic surveillance - but a video doorbell? Really?

PS. Wifi-enabled (solar-powered?) smart cat's eyes embedded in the roads to communicate with smart self-driving cars. That's the indea I'd have if I was an innovator. The smart self-driving car rolls along, and the cat's eye tells it about the speed limit, the stop sign coming up, the congestion ahead and the school. If we got really sophisticated, we could coat our roads with recycled plastic - people are doing this already - and put a pressure-sensitive grid into the plastic - I don't think anybody's thought of this yet - so that the smart car would have another way of knowing about the stationary big heavy truck dead ahead.

Bumblebee knocking against the window. Clear blue sky. Flat sea. Occasional knocking of a hammer on wood: the roofbeams of that house down below, behind the trees. It's cold in this room, at about knee level as I sit here, and I should probably act on at least one of my array of next things to do. Light the fire? Close the windows upstairs? Unload the washing machine?

I woke up this morning and decided I would have a day of being efficient. So I put on the washing machine, which is what I do when I'm being efficient, then I cleared some junk mail from my inbox and paid a bill. I wrote some emails, and then I wrote a list. I made coffee. I looked up where I'm supposed to be on Thursday. A man with eight children and two grandchildren, all of them boys, came and bought my old television (this doesn't happen every time I have an efficient day, ha ha). I read something that I wrote yesterday, and started writing. Then the washing machine stopped.

And so did I. I've heard of seasonal affective disorder, which is where you - I - get grumpier in winter, but I never realised that I'm on the same cycle as my own washing machine. That does make a kind of sense, though. I put it on, which makes me feel that I'm being efficient, and then it rumbles along in the background while I work (we'll call it "work", if you don't mind). Then the machine stops and by then I'm so used to having it there in the background that I also switch off. The house is still. But for the faint sound of this laptop, and the occasional thump of that hammer, it's silent.

I remember, many years ago, there came into our lives a heavy blue plastic box, roughly hand-sized. If one of us pressed the button, it produced a deep, resonant, thumping heartbeat. Edgar Allan Poe would have loved it. I remember, from around that time, many conversations about the challenge of getting babies to sleep - they like noise, movement, deep, resonant, thumping heartbeats. Maybe it isn't just babies. Maybe I should try writing with the Hoover roaring in the background (that worked, all those years ago), or maybe I should just get all my laundry done?