This is going to be so difficult. But in the absence of a training course on how to write this blog, or a downloadable book on how to attract “traffic” to this website, or at least a flow chart showing how to pick the exact-right words for a standard-issue blog, I guess I’m going to have to wing it with whatever I can muster by way of creativity and imagination. So here goes.
 
I know. Storytelling. Last week. That thing about reincarnation. I picked a starting point for my Journey – no, I’m okay with that word, even with the capital J – that fell at some time in the early years of The Beaker People, for whom I have a soft spot. An entire civilisation, lasted a thousand years-ish, and all we know about them is that they left some beakers behind. Imagine if all we had of The Victorians was a small collection of chamber pots. Imagine if all we had of The Dinosaurs – lasted millions of years, went everywhere – was a small collection of fossils.
 
No, wait. We’ve gathered at the stone, the children and I, and I’m telling them the story about the sun. It’s early in the day, because storytelling is important, and I’ve started the story by challenging them to look at the horizon and tell me where the sun will rise. They’re just at that age where they leave the hearth to play-hunt in a pack, and there’s laughter because their childish bonding makes me an outsider. But I wait, and presently, one of them tells me correctly that the sun will rise over the long mountain.
 
Does it always rise there? No. [Storytelling starts early: they’ve heard this, and been prompted to make the observation, already.] We stand to welcome the sun, and in return he gives us the warmth back, and we watch his light spread across the land. There is birdsong; we are not alone in welcoming the sun. I ask them what signs there are in what we have seen and heard, what those signs tell us about the day to come, and again, but this time without laughter, they give me their answers. Together, they have felt the sun’s touch and sensed the land’s response.
 
That was different. I’m not finished yet. I want them to come away with the idea – sorry, I’m going to have to follow this story through – that the sun follows the seasons just as they do, so that one way of working out where they are in the cycle of seasons – one of many, for everything is a sign – is to watch where the sun rises on the horizon. When he comes back to the long mountain, as he has now, the cold season is ending. But between now and the greening of the trees, children, we must be cautious hunters: the hibernating predators will wake up soon, and they will be angry with their own hunger.
 
When I say that, in that tone of voice, the children will look at each other, having heard that warning before but not yet believing it, and it is in the nature of small children that those shared looks will spark laughter, and I will release them for another day. They will run off to play-hunt, and watching them, I will think of a flock of birds turning and turning in the sky. Then, because a story is a useful thing, a tool for survival, worth honing, I will sit with the sun for a while, telling him the story as I will tell it next time.
 
A story must be busy to hold the attention, I know, and I will talk to the sun about his home under the edge of the land. About – it occurs to me – his partner. Do sun and sky argue; does sky cry; does sun take the warmth until he feels ashamed and brings it back again? Sun is an old man, I feel; sun and sky have been a long time together. What have the sun and the sky made of us over so many seasons? Do they react to our behaviour? I begin to craft a new story…
 
Finished? Nearly. The woman comes to me. It is not yet child-season, but she is big, and our child responds to my touch on the curve of her belly. The woman bears my mark on her forehead and I bear her mark on mine; the marks will remain until the hot season wanes and it is time for me to choose and be chosen again. I am strong; I have stories; I will remain among the chosen for many seasons yet. But this woman; I want to tell her that I would choose her again. She touches my lips before I can speak: the baby will have come by then, and that is a happiness of its own. We have had our time.
 
Enough! Any more of this, and there’ll be blog-writing gurus hammering on my door and shouting about keywords and search-engine optimisation. Why, they’ll demand, haven’t I turned this into a ten-part training course to get people’s email addresses and sell them things? That’s what absolutely everybody else does, they’ll point out – not seeing the flaw in their argument. And then the brightest among them will offer to sit down with me and thrash out whether mine should be a training course on sunrise-watching or storytelling*, and then we’ll all wander down to the Jacob’s Ladder for a pint and a discussion on the England v. Belgium match.
 
Not a bad ending, actually.
​
*My book Ten Steps to a Bedtime Story is out of print, sorry. That would make a ten-part training course. Maybe I should think about reading it onto YouTube, or something. No, wait. The whole point of bringing it back would be to get your email address and sell you things, so not YouTube. And anyway, the stuff I’ve got to sell goes quite easily at the weekly car-boot sale up at the rugby club. Although maybe I’m missing something here…

​Go back a few thousand years, and you would have found me sitting in the entrance of a communal dwelling, holding a beaker, watching the sun set, telling stories of gods and monsters to the children of the tribe. After an early death – do the guardian-angel thing and walk beside me here – I would have been reincarnated as a peasant, listening to a seriously fired-up preacher telling stories, et cetera, to the entire tribe and thinking: I could do that.
 
But that would have ended badly, in circumstances involving a stake, some bundles of dry wood, and somebody with the woodcraft skills not to have to wait for lighters to be invented. Because I’m a slow learner (in today-speak, a late adopter) I might then have gone into a life of mysticism and wizardry, wearing a long cloak, growing my beard past the itchy stage and dying it greyer with ash from all my ritual-fire ceremonies … wearing a big hat and carrying a big stick and defying the Romans. Some bard would have written a description that survived into a museum collection, and Tolkein would have found it and dreamed up Gandalf.
 
Dry twigs, anybody? But that would have ended, um, yeah. Then maybe I would have applied to join the Medieval Church as a scribe, shaving my bald patch into place in advance of its arrival, going big on piety and the acceptance of whatever alms happened to be on offer on Wild Boar Night at the local hostelry, and doing the words for illuminated manuscripts. Assuming I could have remained fat (regular Wild Boar Nights) and un-psychic and not prone to visions, that might have ended reasonably well. Today, there’s a run-down ancient church somewhere, protected by the National Trust, where tourists gasp as they look through glass at my bones in an ancient stone casket.
 
Having not quite learned my lesson (at what we might as well call soul level) about the link between speaking out and dying badly, I might then have gone into the metal business, melting down base metals to make letters for the new-fangled technology of printing. I might have launched courses in Print Media Marketing For Playwrights, or I might have handled the print side for some flamboyant entrepreneur with a taste for nailing his demands to church doors – or I might have decided that the play’s the thing, and written a few. Today, collectors bid by telephone at hushed auctions of the few remaining original printings of my work. There’s a flaw in a lower-case ‘d’ that is taken to prove authenticity.
 
Watch Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) for an entertaining play (sorry) on the theme of misattribution. After all that, I would have died young after drinking water from the wrong standpipe in Victorian London, and then I would have sat in a trench looking at barbed wire and writing a letter home to express a truth hard-found– a letter never sent. They didn’t all survive (or not survive) to be remembered. Kipling, among so many others, lost a son. A generation represented in tragedy by poetry. Wilfred Owen.
 
Animals in captivity. Born once more into the second half of another century of war, I would have absorbed lessons about stasis, inertia, peace in the form of war never quite declared and only fought by proxy. A form of peace represented in a triangulation of prose, at this end of Europe, between, say, Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, Alistair MacLean and maybe Margaret Drabble (discuss). There’s a poem I read once, in a magazine, and have never found again. It might have been called Television War and it might have begun “We died for you at Hue, flamed to death in Sinai sand...” Maybe it's well known. Wish I could find it again.
 
I would have watched the beginnings of what we now call new technology and the dissolution of the great-power balance. I might have shaken my head to see once again the rising of fundamentalism…
 
And now here we are. Now this. All those years and all those emotions and all those passionate beliefs, all that pain and love and hunger and fulfilment, and the sun is about to break through the clouds on a bright grey morning in the south-west corner of the island where I – I and my predecessors, if we’re all so madly rational now that we’re uncomfortable with that riff on reincarnation – lived it all. What now?
 
Spain beat Iran. Last night I sat down in front of the television and took some notes. Here is the wisdom of our time, as gathered in a quick surf through Freeview.
 
TripAdvisor is as easy as dates, deals, done … Nivea Men gives me protection from dry skin … Lending Stream streams loans … Giffgaff is the mobile network run by me … Pampers is grateful to midwives … I could get ready to unleash Summer by making a Malibu-based cocktail … I could find ten grams of protein in one delicious Nature Valley bar … the Evans family now shops at Aldi.
 
Not forgetting the football, of course. Any nation whose fans can sustain that much noise through a match can’t be all bad. We should drop the stage-managed handshakes and play more ballgames. Elsewhere on television, two men were arguing with each other over something one of them had said to somebody else’s girlfriend; young men in swimming gear were picking partners from a group of young women in bikinis; Ed Harris was in deep water (The Abyss, 1989); the NCIS team was losing a case to the FBI; there was a trailer for Grimm, which seems to be a show about young people who look briefly like monsters when they’re taken by surprise.
 
Nail that lot to the door of a church and hope for a reaction.
 
Oh, take me back.

​Here we go again. I must make sure I write this blog post. I must make sure it’s the right blog post. A phrase came out of the radio this morning. “We must make sure we get the right result.” Oh really? Any ideas on how we might get the right result? No?
 
No. Turns out somebody’s done some research: children who take smartphones into the classroom are more likely to be distracted from learning than children who don’t. Leaving aside the odd fact that we need research to tell us this – as if just knowing something isn’t good enough any more – the question arises: what do we do about it?
 
Hello, Mr Chips. We talk about it. The phrase “We must make sure” sends actually doing anything right to the back of the class. “We” includes everybody who thinks children are at school to learn, plus everybody who thinks children have a right to hold onto their smartphones, plus everybody else except convicted paedophiles and authority figures, whose motives are always regarded as suspect. As for “must”, the active verb somehow attaches to the “We” but not to the person speaking.
 
And “make sure” mandates a long studio discussion or series of meetings. “Make sure” articulates a belief in collective decision-making that somehow inhibits individual initiatives. We all have to agree first, ha ha. Do not confiscate children’s smartphones until we’ve had a discussion; do not stop discussing until we’re all in agreement. Ha ha. I went back to the radio after an hour and they were still talking about it. Very realistic. They were also talking about a UK-government scheme for subsidised nursery care: the government is trumpeting its success; the nurseries are appealing for “donations” from parents because they can’t get enough official money to stay in business.
 
Hi, Coach Carter. Also very realistic. But it's the willingness to learn, how that is sparked, that really matters, right? Not the technology. About the only contemporary depiction of a classroom in which the children – young adults; not sure how old they are – seem to be consenting to learn is the one in Twilight (2008), in which Edward does seem to have retained some knowledge after all those years of looking at slides under microscopes. And maybe the one in The Blind Side (2009), and…
 
…so that’s my argument undermined. I don’t know, maybe there’s some wisdom in this tendency to discuss before/rather than acting. Maybe we should all just remain totally still, resisting any change to the status quo while talking up the action we're not taking. Something happened about Brexit last night, a vote I think, and then Trump went and signed something, and that kept the news media busy while the rest of us got on with watching the football. Iran was playing Spain, I know I mentioned this above, but the sight of a lot of people jumping up and down and shouting, waving Iranian flags, blowing plastic trumpets, their faces painted in Iran’s colours …
 
Oh, yeah, Freedom Writers. I don’t watch football, except to the extent that I do seem to be watching it now, but the sight of that crowd last night (I guess it’s obvious that I’m writing this on Thursday) went a long way towards normalising relations between Iran and my living room – using “my living room” in the sense that political commentators use “Downing Street” to refer to the British government. Today, “my living room” means me. I felt for those Iranians. If I’m ever afflicted by megalomania in my later years, I hope I remember to send a football team rather than call for sanctions.

Watching that third-generation hereditary leader shake hands with that democratically elected president the other day, I thought: gimme a break. Am I really going to write about this pantomime? Across the USA, there are young people writing narrative fiction, and most of it’s fantasy. They tweet, demonstrate, organise and vote, yes, and they’re against guns, yes, but* their enduring contribution to the culture is a body of work that features dragons, monsters and threatened worlds.
 
Go to Facebook, and you can find groups discussing: whether anti-heroes are a good thing; whether characters can express/embody real-world ideas; whether the “rules” of magic can be bent. Oh, and whether this cover is more eye-catching than that cover. Technology enables the production of printed books as readily as it enables blogging, vlogging, tweeting and fake news – and these young people are choosing to write novels – not screenplays – that (a) take us back into myth, and (b) can be bought in old-fashioned print form. Technology has given individuals the ability to bring back the past by going directly to print, but without collecting however many hundred rejection slips first.
 
Gatekeepers. These youngsters are putting out their own stories – putting them out all the way from writing to publishing without anybody blocking their way. If you think that means there has been a wholesale democratisation of storytelling – yes, but it’s a re-democratisation. Yes, I remember the term “slush pile”, and yes, I remember the vast intermediation of book publishing in, say, the eighties – agents, commissioning editors, publishing conglomerates, SAEs, et cetera – but this takes us back over the hump of all that to a time when published stories were either good or they weren’t – authors** managed to entertain, and thus to develop a following, or they didn’t. An idealised, imaginary golden age, perhaps, but I do like that colour for the scales on my dragon.
 
There’s a whole blog post to be written about the collective loss of authority of authority figures everywhere, but the figure I most like to ignore is the one whose response to any new idea – or set of sample chapters – is in the range from “You don’t fit my preconceived notion of a marketable author” to “It won’t work because it doesn’t resemble something that worked last week.” By way of “I’m too complacent in my gatekeeper role to feel my lack of a creative imagination or even empathy.”
 
If the gate’s open, I’ll open it for you. Not that I’m bitter’n’twisted or anything, but even after all these years, I remember the name of the agent who returned something to me (that was subsequently published without her help) with the covering note: “This has been on my desk for several weeks and I haven’t picked it up so I’m returning it to you.”
 
Well, gee, thanks. It sold quite well in the end, actually. And perhaps more significantly for the ongoing collapse of western civilisation, I remember the agent who came back to me with this response to another project (paraphrasing): “It was very good but it didn’t fit with the rest of my list.” Never mind the quality; it has to fit in with everything else. I’ll represent any book you like, so long as it’s this book again***.
 
I wonder sometimes about the conformity of opinion – but that’s another blog post. I realise that some of this young American fantasy fiction won’t conform to, say, F R Leavis’s idea of literature (as expounded in, say, The Great Tradition of 1948 – I got that from Wikipedia), but that isn’t the point.
 
Your turn. They’re getting their shot. That’s the point. Many of these young Americans (other nationalities and age groups are also available) won’t make it as authors in the long term, but that’s just natural selection. They deserve their shot and they’re getting it. They deserve a measure of respect, too. I can complain about technology – quite enjoy complaining about technology, actually – but I will say this for it: if you want a shot at being creative – I’m talking here about novel-writing, but this also applies to just about anything else – today’s technology gives you both the tools and access to the audience. If you have the stamina and the nerve to take the chance.
 
Nice cat. Yes, thank you. Very amusing. Now excuse me – I have to go and photograph my lunch for Instagram.
 
*I wonder whether that’s a “but” or an “and”.
**Charles Dickens, for example.
***The appearance of agents marks the point at which an industry goes beyond human scale. Discuss.

What if these aren’t the end times? What if these are the few transitional decades between, say, the end of the Cold War and the New World Order triggered by final mastery/rejection of all this new technology we’ve over-accepted lately? We’re made stupid by machines; are we still capable of recognising that?
 
Enough of the old-guy talk. The chicken came first, stands to reason, just as our inability to stretch our minds around grammar came before Grammarly. Which is a good thing; it’s a “cloud-based English-language writing-enhancement platform,” and we all need one of those in our lives. I still refer occasionally to my bookshelf-based copy of Hart’s Rules, which have been going – Horace Hart’s rules have – since 1893; look for the New Hart’s Rules among Oxford University Press’s various guides. Or log into Grammarly and follow the prompts.
 
Yes – end, what end? As the Art Editor of a magazine said to me once, as I rushed into the Studio, in the grip of some emergency and laden with galley proofs, b/w pics and layout sheets (never a Pritt Stick around when you need one): “Relax. After a few years, even crises aren’t crises.” Good point. We have the technology to express our opinion, even to panic, but not to show us the long view. Everything’s big and now and newsworthy (sic).
 
I don’t know, I don’t think I can sustain the level of hysteria required for communication these days. A friend signed a petition to “demand” more investment in public transport in the UK. She lives in Hungary, and has posted pictures of bus stations there, so I suppose her interest in the buses of another country, somewhere she hardly ever travels by public transport, is at least discernible – but “demand”? One of the tiny cracks in tech-enabled civilisation is the lack of opportunities just to “ask”.
 
We’re all adversarial now. No, answers aren’t readily available either, but that’s a “something’s wrong” to set against the lingering idealism of tech-enabled communication. To demand isn’t to offer (force, even) an opening for dialogue. If we’re demanding because asking doesn’t work, we’re moving away from the thing that’s wrong, and away from addressing the failure of communication. Maybe the apocalypse will hit, and we’ll all be too busy shouting at each other to notice. Shouting about social media’s ability to bring us together, perhaps.
 
We are on apocalypse-watch, aren’t we? To drag in the obligatory cultural references – here come the spoilers – on the one hand, we have Dr Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, telling the US Congress (I think it was Congress?) in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) that we’ve unleashed forces that we can’t control – meddled with nature, and so on. By the end of the film, the question isn’t what the T Rex makes of the lion from the zoo; it’s what the dinosaurs are going to make of Caesar and his army from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). They’re all loose in the same imagined neighbourhood, I think?
 
And let’s not forget the zombies from World War Z (2013), who will no doubt be keen to join the party. “We’re all doomed” is the stronger hand, I think. On the other hand, well, I was thinking about my tendency to overplay whatever it is that the storytelling requirements of the collective imagination tell us about our instinctive fears – about what we’re tantalisingly afraid might actually (although not quite literally) happen – when onto the car’s music system came Brian Eno’s Just Another Day, from the album, if that’s still the word, Another Day on Earth (2005). “We’ll say, that was just another day on earth…”
 
We’ll put it all behind us. That sums up an attitude that isn’t prevalent these days. Our inconvenient truth (ha! Easter egg!) is not that things might be going wrong, but that they might not matter very much. The forecasts are all doom-laden and dire, the social-media activity hysterical, but the passengers get to their destinations, the presidents shake hands, the forecasts for wholesale post-referendum economic collapse – yeah, right. And does it strike you that there’s always someone else to blame?
 
Mind you, enjoyed the preoccupation with dysfunctional family relationships, and even smiled at the solution proposed by the Father Figure/baddie, in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). Half of us have to die, for us all to be saved? Uh huh. I would drone on about global warming at this point, even “demand” that somebody sorts it out. But I suspect that somehow, the real disasters slide by us while we’re arguing about them. Easier to tweet about what we (sic) must (sic) do, than to do it. I’m not suggesting this, but global warming does begin to look worryingly like a tool we’ve devised at some instinctive level for handling over-population.
 
If so, there might be a short cut. Wasn’t there a thing recently about flatulent cows contributing to global warming? Junk food, anyone?

If animals could think, and perhaps they can, they would pity us. We can’t fly like birds, so we have no knowledge of the 100% of the world that is covered by air. We can’t swim like dolphins can swim*, so we have no knowledge of the 70% of the earth that is covered by water. We don’t have whatever it is that dogs have, so we can’t enjoy, say, walking along a country lane with the intensity that a small, furry, not notably intelligent four-legged animal can bring to the task. We can’t see what cats see.
 
We’ve used our large brains to set ourselves apart from nature. We’ve codified our basic drives into mythologies and moralities; we’ve suppressed, denied or camouflaged our animal instincts; we’ve set ourselves apart not just from nature but also from our own natures. Asked what they regret, the dying don’t proverbially regret not getting more large-brain activity. It’s not more time in the office that they wish they’d spent. It’s more time with their partner, family and friends; more time at home; more time having sex.
 
Home range. In the Star Wars galaxy and others like it, there are bars, typically with live music, where you can find fast spaceships, ace pilots, drinks with smoke coming off the top, and let’s not forget the spectacularly varied clientele. Sometimes, in those bars, you see a customer wearing breathing equipment, maybe even a space-suit. They’re breaking their journey, let’s assume, in a hostile environment. We’re a bit like that on our own planet. We have no idea what’s going on around us. I noticed the female blackbird the other day, beak full of worms, waiting for me to go back inside before delivering lunch to her family.
 
This isn’t a journey. This is home. In my “home range”, there’s a multiplicity of intersecting worlds, some of them human. Out back, the robin is defending his territory against all comers – other robins, anyway. I wonder if he has any reciprocal sense that I regard my garden as my territory. Out front, a bench is being painted and garden furniture arranged in a clearly demarcated territory. I remember looking up at a hawk once, a big one, and thinking: he sees me, but he dismisses me as prey because I’m too big to lift. And then I thought: he doesn’t dismiss me because I’m human and somehow exempt.
 
Wouldn’t happen to a human being. We’re part of this. But we’re not. I remember in the film The Fly (1986, the David Cronenberg remake), Jeff Goldblum refers to “insect politics”. That’s a real thing, in a sense. Every now and then, I get caught by a television programme called The Secret Life of the Zoo, in which young zookeepers discuss the personalities, interactions and sexual activities of captive animals. The big question, every time I tune in, seems to be whether or not the resident male is going to mate with any of the females now being added to his tank, cage or enclosure. “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen,” as a lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria said after seeing a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra. How very different from my – never mind.
 
In our dystopias, we do harm to the world. If they’re made in America, the human spirit triumphs. World disintegrates, popular virtues prevail, man kisses woman, credits roll. But our core mythologies – right back to, for example, the Garden of Eden – are about living on equal terms with animals – sorry, other animals – and indeed plants. Knowledge is the fruit of a tree. From Genesis to Snow White and beyond, apples are dangerous. I can go down to the beach and look out over a sea that is teeming with carrier bags and tiny pieces of plastic, and not see any of them. Sorry, I meant to say “teeming with fish”, but I suppose we have at least made the ocean in our own image.
 
Atlantis. We’re not really here, are we? We haven’t established ourselves. And we know, deep down, what’s going to happen. The dinosaurs lasted for 170 million years. We’ve been around for about five minutes. Our founding mythologies are about living with nature, but so many of the stories we tell ourselves these days – from The Day After Tomorrow (2004), say, to World War Z (2013) via, oh, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and maybe The Road (2009) – are about near-extinction. So’s most of the broadcast news, really; the same weighing-up of the prospects for catastrophe.
 
Curious to think that one day, the European Union might attain the mythical status of Atlantis. Was there really such a civilisation? But if you consider that wood, paper, digital storage, metal all decay over time, the real puzzle will be: who were these weirdos? There was once “a widely scattered archaeological culture of prehistoric western and Central Europe, starting in the late Neolithic or Chalcolithic and running into the early Bronze Age” (Wikipedia) that left behind absolutely nothing except a collection of beakers – they’re known to us as The Beaker People.
 
Given the durability (not) of all our achievements, we’re going to enter the archaeological record as The Plastic Bag People, aren’t we?
 
*Always had a soft spot for David Bowie’s “Heroes”.​

Walked into my local bank branch the other today. A cheque* had arrived, and I needed to pay it into my account. State-of-the-art bank branch. Open space. The counter is now an island down on the right-hand side, past the young woman (usually a woman) standing in front of the ATMs where she can do your banking for you**. On the left, there’s a children’s play area, empty, then a set of relatively easy chairs round a low table, empty, and down at the end the little glass offices where people are taken to be sold things. Usually empty.
 
The brief to the designer of this space probably talked about being “accessible” and “inclusive” and perhaps even “friendly”. The word “community” probably appeared more than once, and possibly the phrase “heart of the community”. On screens on the walls, the bank’s TV ad runs constantly, so you’re being smiled at while you wait (it’s not the one with the horses). There are mirrors in lifts because apparently you panic less if you’re stuck in a box where you can see yourself. Similar principle with the smiling TV screens, I guess.
 
Just saying. But there’s never anybody in the branch except the queue at lunchtimes and other peak-convenient times. You stand in the queue and think about what this space could be, if it was used as it’s designed to look as though it’s being used. Make it available to mother-and-toddler groups? Let a lunchtime book group meet here, maybe? Waterstone’s in Truro used to have (probably still has) story-time in the children’s department – a member of staff sitting cross-legged on the floor and reading, say, Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo (1999, Macmillan) to toddlers and their parents (usually mothers).
 
And no, there was no actual need to buy the book afterwards, although perhaps toddler-pressure might have been applied. Once, many years ago, I was given lunch by the manager of Harrods Bank***. Lunch in the store. We talked about the yield on floor space given over to banking, and the yield on floor space given over to selling teddy bears. I suppose if my local bank branch wanted to diversify into the heart of the community, letting the toddlers bring their teddy bears, and bringing in some sample toys from the store across the road, might be a start.
 
Put out a coffee machine. Not so long ago, in one of my own photographs here, I spotted my copy of Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy (1999, Orion Business). About making people feel comfortable enough to buy in stores and retail spaces. Must read it again – where was I? Oh yes. Got to the counter. Had the usual Q&A about electronic payments being more efficient than cheques. Then the usual Q&A about the savings account they could offer me. Paid in my cheque. Walked away from the island thinking about all the conversations – like the one with the doctor about healthy eating and exercise – that are delivered with no sense that, y’know, might have heard it all before.
 
No, ma’am, it has never occurred to me that electronic banking might be more efficient than carrying this cheque around. I could sit in my armchair and never get any exercise at all. Emerged into the sunshine, thought briefly about the levels of authorisation that branch would need to open up its space to the community, and got on with my life. Some large organisations just congeal into irrelevance, don’t they? Went home, pruned my roses in the manner suggested by the man in St Agnes, made tea. If you go to St Agnes, don’t miss the roses in Chegwyn Gardens. Really don't.
 
If you want to know, just ask me. Then, first thing this morning, an email arrived. From the bank. Subject line: We welcome your feedback. Heading on the content: We value your opinion. Okay. “Dear William Essex,” it begins. Almost like it’s programmed to use Fname, Lname, like a Mailchimp send-out. You should understand that I’ve had this account since I was fourteen. I don’t use it much, but the branch is handy for the occasional cheques that still arrive. [If you’re here from Facebook: irony; humour. Yes, I am aware of online/electronic banking.]
 
“We’re dedicated to making our customer experience the best it can be,” said this automated missive from the bank that I’ve known since I first said “Hello Uncle Bedford” to the branch manager who had come to our house to discuss some business thing with my father. A long time ago. Mr Bedford. I was a lot younger than fourteen when he and I were first introduced. A bit hazy on family and other relationships. Uncle Bedford.
 
The thing from Mailchimp – sorry, the bank – refers to “our” customer experience, but I’m pretty sure they mean “your” – in the sense, mine (no slip there, Professor Freud). “We will combine your feedback with our customer records to better understand how to improve the service we provide.”
 
It’s got these darling little ATMs. Jolly good. They’ve got people coming into their branches, joining the peak-time queues, standing idle for perhaps ten minutes on their turf, and what they want to do is combine my post-visit tick-boxes with my past transactional history to work out how to improve – what? Will there be an “other” box where I can put “hire more staff to reduce queues” or even “open up your spaces to mother-and-toddler groups”? These questionnaires are so often a distancing mechanism, aren’t they? Sitting behind the scenes adding up responses to the questions you’ve chosen to ask is safe by comparison with talking to unpredictable customers.
 
It’s not even that, actually. “Based on your recent experience in branch, how likely are you to recommend [bank name redacted] to a friend or family member?” What? Leave out “in branch”, which is reminiscent of “in country”, which is a term I associate with the Vietnam War. [In Country. Film 1989.] Just what kinds of conversation do you think I have with friends and family? “Oh, by the way, I really recommend this out-of-the-way little bank branch I’ve found.” Those sentences have to have a second half. If it’s a café, it’s the coffee, or the tapas, or … and if it’s a bank branch, it’s the, er, emptiness, maybe?
 
“Please give your answer on a scale where ‘0’ means ‘not at all likely’ and ‘10’ means ‘extremely likely’.” Janice Nicholls, where are you now? Anybody here remember the TV show Juke Box Jury? Janice Nicholls’ catchphrase was, “I’ll give it five.” So’s mine, when I bother to complete these things.
 
*Younger readers. Like an online payment, but printed on paper. You have to take it into a bank to activate it.
**And you can both pretend that this is somehow different from walking up to the little island and asking the other woman (usually a woman) to do your banking for you. I think I’m supposed to take the hint and do this for myself in future, but they’re pleasant young people.
***I ate a lot of lunch in that job.