Sometimes I wake up and none of this happened. I wake up and we’re in the world we could have made. In this world, the internet brings us closer together; the news is rich and varied and always immediate; we’re forgiven the angry, judgemental, ridiculously -ist tweets of our adolescence. We don’t use social media to attack each other and/or obsess over a short list of recurring global issues; we have built personal media instead, to open ourselves up and share our individuality and thereby foster harmony. To know all is to forgive all, is that the saying? We have harnessed the power of technology to bring our inner children into the world.
 
We don’t live there, but we’re not far away. We’ve been lucky in an idiosyncratically human way. There was a time, in the early days of digital technology, when the workings of these new machines were beyond our understanding. Strangely – or perhaps inevitably, given human nature’s weakness for mystery – that drew us in. A whole generation accepted the complexity of the new technology as the price of the simplicity it seemed to offer. But it was as if, in return for mystifying us, we gave computers power over us. We wanted them to run our lives.
 
We mistake inscrutability for wisdom. For a time, computers ran everything: our healthcare systems; our transport infrastructure; our communications and our finances. Algorithms told policy-makers about human behaviour; databases updated doctors on our medical conditions; at the simplest level, even the judicial system automated itself – speeding fines, for example, were levied by machines on the evidence of automated cameras. Aircraft began to land themselves; empty trains travelled to where they would be needed. Machines oiled themselves in silent factories*.
 
We began to build self-driving cars and intelligent roads. We remembered the Turing Test, whereby a machine would pass as a human, and now we spoke of the Singularity, whereby a machine would surpass a human. We spoke of these more readily as milestones to be passed, than as dangers to be avoided. And as we spoke of the future, all the complexities of the present – of the machines; of the lives we had once lived – became hidden. Generations grew up for whom every task could be undertaken by the simple expedient of tapping a screen. 3D printers took over manufacture for us; intelligent assistants flipped every switch for us; machines not only ran but lived our lives for us.
 
Near-anarchy. And everything became argument. Detached now from the physical world, with no challenge left for us to face, with every creative achievement mediated by a machine, we sat at our screens projecting our own frustrations onto the world around us. We attacked each other as though other people were figments of a hostile “Them” that existed nowhere outside our own hazy sense of injustice; we defended our rights angrily, although they were not under threat except in our own minds, and many of us came to need the fight. It became a lightly done thing, a ready impulse, to sign up for a cause. Much good was done in those times, but at the price of a discontent that brought us to near-anarchy.
 
Then madness brought sanity. Suddenly, at the end of a short debate that was charged more by emotion than reason, prompted more by the MPs’ self-interest than the public interest, a government of the time, riding a wave of public anger, made it illegal to distinguish between people on the basis of gender or ethnic origin. In any way whatsoever. Even gender-indicative pronouns were to be phased out. Reaction was swift, hostile and loud (as it was to everything, back then). But governments do not admit mistakes, opposition to the new Act split into factions, and inevitably, given the mood of the time, that opposition provoked a countervailing movement (array of factions) in support of the new Act. The government did not fall; the Act was not repealed.
 
Blurred boundaries. The Act was, perhaps, the “Act of Madness” that some suggested, but it is the clearest marker of the new beginning – it was the idiosyncratically human stroke of luck. Scholars have struggled to explain what happened next. Some suggest that there was already a strong undercurrent of public feeling against exclusion of any kind; others to the launch of the #AllOfUs movement (which was responsive not causative, surely?). [There is even an argument that the Left-Handed Rights campaign, which in its short life achieved the banning of handles and grips moulded for right-handed use, also served to draw attention to so-called “invisible minorities”.]
 
We all agree, though, that the new Act succeeded in blurring a boundary that had become an obstacle to mutual understanding. “You can’t run a fence down the middle of equality,” was a saying of the time.
 
It is scarcely believable now that the not-so-gradual repurposing of the word “populist” – to refer to people in the way that the word “feminist” had referred to a gender-identified subdivision of the people – took some observers by surprise. But the crucial point here is not the speed of the change, but its substance. The old movement, feminism, had expressed so much injury, so much injustice, so much resentment, that on a superficial analysis, a simple change in the law should not have been enough to bring about such a transformation. But it did, and the reason for that was, crudely, we were all newly able to share the pain. There is a technological explanation for this, of course, and we'll get to that. But first, let us further explore the human aspects. They were important too.
 
Humanity found. This was a long-overdue time of boundaries crossed and broken down; it was a time when we began to discover how to find peace before conflict; how to share ourselves in ways that had not been possible when we had defined ourselves by difference. It was a time, we can now say, when we began to look for similarity and found empathy. We were beginning, in that time, to reach out to each other in ways that seem commonplace now but were unheard-of then. “We were all feminists then; we are all populists now,” was a transitional slogan. It was a brave time.
 
Yes, the first populists – in the new sense – belonged to the same subdivision of people as had populated the old feminist movement. But the Act, mad as it might have been, stroke of unintended luck, had opened us up to each other. We embraced this opportunity to be together. The People’s Institute increased its membership by a third in a month; the popular podcast and radio programme People’s Hour reported a doubling of its audience in a single audit period. So much hurt – suddenly shared. A dam broken.
 
Dressed for tech. So far, so idealistic. It would be good to believe that human nature achieved harmony on its own. But this is where technology finally proved its worth. First, the Summer Heatwaves of the early 2020s saw the launch of [gender-neutral] Cool Clothing – a brand name, but it neatly summarises a durable fashion; whatever the influences from other cultures might or might not have been, whatever the PR and marketing that convinced us, we all began to wear “Summer dresses” back then, and we still do. Intelligent dresses. It is, in both senses, Cool to do so.
 
Then, using a combination of biotech and quantum-generated AI, drawing on lessons learned during those early abortive attempts to evolve sentient cars, a small start-up company based in an industrial park on the edge of Peterborough, then unknown, without venture-capital financing, launched its initial range of Mood Fabric. Initial response was cautious – mood disclosure via clothing made from the fabric was involuntary – but then, shortly afterwards, came the company’s first range of defensive clothing. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Almost overnight, gender-related interpersonal violence became a thing of the past. After all, what would-be attacker could get past a defensive release of pheromones and relaxants? All violence began to decrease, mental health to improve, as intelligent clothing hit the mainstream and our emotional states became visible.
 
When the UK’s Ministry of Defence placed a bulk order for uniforms woven out of Peace Fabric, the world did change overnight. We can signal our own and respond to each other’s moods and desires: we can reject and disarm violence; we can extend warmth and understanding in bulk to whole regiments of would-be enemies; above all, we can negotiate (an archaic word, but still useful) our interactions and relationships on the basis of mutual understanding. To wear clothing that doesn’t signal our feelings is not illegal, because it doesn’t need to be: given what technology can do for us now, it would be absurd not to wear our hearts on our sleeves.
 
As a diplomat was heard to say, in the brief interval between the Five-Minute War and the Three-Day International Love-In And Peace Conference, “The only real change is that we’re all on the same side.” But what a difference that is, and all because technology finally helped us to be the people that we needed to be.
 
*This sentence a fragment of a poem that I can’t find right now, in my clumsy translation from the original German. A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, I think.

It’s Wednesday morning in Falmouth, and there’s bright sunshine coming straight in through the windows, almost horizontal this early. The sun’s just up and I’ve closed the blinds beside me: hard to see the screen in this much light. There’s probably a paradox in that, but I’m not in the mood. Today is my free morning this week, until later, and I’ll make a start on this before the day begins.
 
I can hear seagulls. There’s a cruise ship in, smaller than they usually are, reversed in against the dock. Smoke – steam? – rising from its funnel. I think later I might do some research on the correct (not exactly technical) terms I really should know already, if I’m going to start the day’s writing with a description of a short white cruise liner tied up in Falmouth and blowing off steam. Maybe it’s about to leave. It was here yesterday and they don’t stay long. Looming up over Events Square like a sudden apartment block.
 
Steam. The seagulls are still arguing and I’m sitting here looking out at an innocuous white cruise ship with a mental image of men shovelling coal into furnaces. I think maybe I should cut down on the film-watching. It’s a bright morning. Sun glittering on water. There’s a whole world outside. On that ship, people are waking up, and maybe a few of them are rolling aside the cannons and peering out of the gun-ports – sorry, looking out of their windows – portholes, I can say portholes, I think – at the sunlit townscape going up the hill I front of them.
 
Swag. Maybe somebody’s sitting over toast and tea and writing a description of the morning view of the town into a journal. Maybe there’ll be photographs in which I’m a tiny undetectable micro-pixel in a window-shaped blur. Or maybe they’re all huddled round their devices picking up the latest developments in the Trump presidency. Smaller cruise ships tend to be marketed as exclusive, high-end, whatever, blah-blah, pay more, get more, fewer passengers, et cetera, so I think it’s a safe bet they’ll all have state-of-the-art technology. Maybe they’re all huddled round preparing to meddle in the US mid-term elections.
 
Would they be immune from prosecution, if they did their meddling while in international waters? Wow – all this going on and I haven’t even had breakfast. Imagine the Bursar – Purser, whatever (I see a uniformed man in a small cabin tapping out a Morse Code message about an iceberg) – idly reading a few of the postcards before bundling them all into a sack marked ‘Swag’ and hauling them off to the Post Office.
 
“Dear children and grandchildren. Wish you were here. Grandad and I have had a lovely morning in Falmouth sewing doubt in the minds of voters in New Hampshire. I’ve marked a cross on the picture to show you where William Essex is writing his blog post. You know what to do. Love, Granny.”
 
Stumble. Ooh, that’s scary. Even considering that I’m making it up as I go along, spontaneously, never knowing what the next sentence will bring*, et cetera, that’s scary. Brings back a sudden memory of being read Treasure Island as a child, at night (Robert Louis Stevenson, long time ago). Didn’t the whole thing start with the tapping of a stick, heard late at night? And a black mark on a paper? Excuse me if I don’t look that one up (fact-check it, as we say these days); I may have confused more than one bedtime story, but I like the memory as it is.
 
Let’s all think happy cruise ships. Nice cruise ship. Happy passengers. Innocuous blog post. Blog post about seagulls and sunshine and NOT about stumbling across a massive international conspiracy to subvert democracy. [Anybody here from Facebook: do NOT take this blog post seriously. It is supposed to be FUNNY, which is like fake news but OKAY. No, it is NOT fake news. Nice Facebook. I like Facebook.]
 
Even the seagulls have gone quiet … maybe too quiet?
 
*I don’t always write that way, if you’re wondering, hardly ever in fact, but this post seemed to know where it wanted to go. Remember Microsoft’s early tagline, “Where do you want to go today?” Still looking for an answer.

There was once a market, gaudy and bright and self-consciously strange. It was away from the main trade routes, but not hard to find again if you had developed a taste for the merchandise it offered. This was a market that specialised in fantasy fiction. Most of the stallholders were young, and most of them were American, and most of them had written and made (ordered to have printed) the books they had to sell. These were authors, well versed in the myths of their culture, perhaps also jaded with the realities, come now to the market to sell their own myths.
 
Some of the market stalls were located inside a walled garden, and some were scattered around the open country outside those walls. All were brightly painted, and all were piled high with brightly coloured paperbacks*. Even from a distance, from the covers of these paperbacks, the casual visitor could see immediately that this was a place to find tales of young heroes, tall and thin, dressed in long jackets or cloaks, sometimes hooded, always armed with a sword or a staff. There would be horses and dragons, and always a high chance of finding magic.
 
The roads travelled. But would the myth-making be done well? That was the question. The casual visitor stopped at the fork in the road where the market began. Behind him were the familiar trade routes, paved with gold and good intentions, and back even further into his past were the big, established, ordered book markets, bright with promises and media hype but greying with complacency and self-regard, all of them gated, surrounded indeed by gatekeepers, the hard-to-enter cloisters for the chosen few casting long shadows over the slush-piles and the heaps of stillborn myths. He’d had stalls in those markets, over the years, but he’d watched their magic fade until finally he’d left to save his own magic.
 
The casual visitor, who had never understood why parables should stick to the script, sat down on a gnarled old tree-stump with a scowling face and a whole bunch of runes carved into it, reached into his travel-stained robe, and pulled out his e-reader. Pausing only to reflect on the convenience of a travel-stained robe with hidden pockets, he read a bit more of his current book. He’d pre-ordered this one on the strength of some pages he’d seen online, started reading it, and then there’d been something on Facebook about last-minute editing, and the book had changed in his hand. He had been amused by that semblance of magic. The book had drawn him to this market in search of more like it; now, he needed to read it.
 
But it was time for another paragraph. The casual reader stood up. He fumbled around in his travel-stained robe for the right hidden pocket, then, exasperated that he couldn’t find it, laid his e-reader down on the gnarled old tree stump while he tried to find its hiding place. That gave him an idea. He enjoyed blog posts in which creative people unpacked their bags to reveal the kit they took with them on their creative assignments. Could he write something like that?
 
No elaborately dressed china doll? He reached into his hidden pockets, finding them easily this time, and brought out: an Easter egg (he put it down); a whistle, clogged with sand, with an inscription on the side (ditto); another whistle, this one packed with explosive (you understand that he’s putting these things down on the tree-stump, right?); a baseball (only, it clogs up the sentence if I keep having to make that clear); a shadow without a person attached to it (having said that, he put that shadow straight back where it came from, oh yes); a stick (we’ll call it a stick); a very old coin wrapped in a clean white cloth (a denarius, one of a number sought by both sides of an old conflict); an ancient book, probably a grimoire, damaged and apparently blank, bound in something that certainly looked like leather); a
 
new paragraph, because that one was getting too long; a Martini shaker (but not a stirrer); a set of hooks and a thumper; a Ring (got to be One); a corked bottle (very dark glass); another bottle, clear glass, apparently empty but very, very firmly stoppered; a phaser, set to stun; an iPhone 6; a Samsung J5; a Moleskine journal (blue, A5); several pens; a Lenovo Ideapad 320S; three sheets of folded and crumpled (lined) A4 paper (a draft article arguing that state broadcasters should foster young talent rather than paying top dollar for established names); an assortment of daggers, bracelets, amulets and other silverware; several wooden stakes; a green plastic Spork; a pot of green ink and a quill pen; a blue spotted handkerchief; a green banana in a yellow banana-shaped plastic holder.
 
No, no story in that lot. But good to get it all out. Feeling very much lighter, the casual visitor stepped away from the gnarled old tree stump and the heap of his needful objects. Maybe he should look for that article he’d once read about getting rid of possessions and going through life much lighter? He made a complicated series of movements with his hands and rose three inches off the ground. Levitating with the bearable lightness of having almost nothing left in his pockets, he took the right-hand road and entered the market.
 
Sign and sign again. Immediately, he was surrounded by stallholders. This, he had expected. But what surprised him was, none of them were trying to sell him their books. All of them wanted him to sign up for their email newsletters.
 
“Why?” he asked.
 
“So we can keep you up to date with book launches and special offers.”
 
“But I’m already here and I want to buy – oh, okay.” The casual visitor signed, and signed, and signed, and as he did so, the country around the market silted up with email newsletters, some of which he would take home and read. “I just want to find something to read after my current book,” the casual visitor told an excited young woman who was offering him a ride on her unicorn. “I’m going to review it, and then I want another book. Another well-told story.”
 
“You’ve come to the right place!” she told him, and he waited, but she said nothing more.
 
Live interactions. Soon, he was through the cordon of email-newsletter-writers and into the heart of the market. The stalls here were piled high with books. The casual visitor hesitated. Where to begin? He was surrounded by books. On every cover, the eyes of the hero glowed white (sometimes red, occasionally silver) even against the visual cacophony of the market, and on every cover, the lettering of the title curled around, italicised and magical, reaching out like vines or creepers or in some cases briar roses, to catch the casual visitor’s attention. Or maybe his ankles.
 
There were screens, and there was YouTube, and there were podcasts and live interactions and any amount of social media and marketing, but we’ll gloss over all that because I can’t think of a way to work it into the story**. The casual reader was drawn at first to the brighter stalls, to the carnival atmosphere and the celebrations, to the music and the dancing, and yes, he did watch a lot of the social-media activity, but none of it involved reading and soon he tired. “I just want something good to read,” he said.
 
“How about this?” said a voice. The casual reader had settled on another tree stump – yeah, yeah, gnarled, face, runes, all that – next to a stall towards the back of the market. This was a stall that he hadn’t noticed before, not even as he sat down next to it. There were books, and perhaps over there under a pile of paper was a sign-up form for an email newsletter. But on this stall, there was no pristine vintage Remington typewriter, no coffee cup and saucer artfully arranged, no state-of-the-art software for collating a novel once conceived. There was no glossy surface to this stall.
 
There was paper. Pens and pencils. A laptop so battered that it looked ready to be written into a proverb. And this stallholder had just handed him something and gone back to writing. The casual visitor watched for a while. The stallholder went on writing. The casual visitor looked down. He had been given an opening chapter. He began to read. In no time at all he looked up again. “Is there-?” he began. The stallholder, clearly not wanting to be interrupted, handed him the next chapter.
 
Ah, here's the tinderbox. This time, when he had finished, the casual visitor stood up. Quietly, he went to the front of the stall. Cross-checking between the books on offer and the chapters he had just read, he piled up, first, a copy of the book he had just begun, and then the rest of the series as far as it went. Reaching into his most hidden pocket, he pulled out a wallet containing every means of payment so far invented. He was about to interrupt the stallholder, who was still writing, when he felt a touch on his arm.
 
Behind him stood all the other stallholders. “Shhh!” said one. “The final volume isn’t finished yet. Please don’t interrupt the writer. We all want to know what happens in the end.”
 
The casual visitor emptied all his gold coins onto the stall, took his books, and rose into the air. Silently.
 
*Yes, I know – they’d be selling ebooks as well. Don’t be difficult.
**Look, if you absolutely insist, we could say that the whole market is virtual and all the books are ebooks – but a travelling band of faeries cast a glamour that made it seem … I hesitate to say real. Gimme a break, okay? I started with “There was once a market.” And this happened***.
***I wanted to write a piece about young authors (and others) who get so stuck on social-media marketing that it becomes the end rather than a means – and they evolve into, I don’t know, broadcasters or vloggers or whatever. Maybe starting with the past tense was a mistake. There is a market…

Given the unseasonal length of the post above the picture, I’ll keep this one short. In her Investing column on the back page of the FT Money section of the Weekend FT last Saturday (and, because I’ve had enough coffee this morning to be twitchy about such details) Sunday, the editor-in-chief of Money Week*, Merryn Somerset Webb, reviewed a set of age-related statistics on happiness, and then suggested a “summer holiday reading list”. [I’m not sure that the inverted commas are necessary there, but never mind. Too much coffee.]
 
We get happier as we get older. “If you are 50-59 now, odds are you have happy times ahead,” wrote MSW. And then the books: two recent titles on the theme that everything isn’t getting worse, but actually a lot better, and then The Blunders of Our Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, which was first published in 2013 (Oneworld). “Huge blunders are perfectly normal for governments. Our current one is not uniquely idiotic – which is something to hang onto if you find your mind wandering too much from beach to Brexit.”
 
Hang on tight. And even if there isn’t space in your suitcase for at least one hardback (one of the books reviewed is too recent to have got past that stage), the article itself is worth reading. Title: Why be fatalistic? Life’s getting so much better. Maybe it’s time to enjoy the real world, too.
 
*Sorry for all this preamble.

When the League of Nations failed to prevent the Second World War, it was replaced by the United Nations. When the European Union failed to secure an unambiguous mandate from the British electorate, it was replaced by an array of euphemisms. There were Agreements, Arrangements, Understandings, Models; only the word “Union” itself was excluded from the eventual Settlement. “Politics is the art of talking a lot and changing nothing,” said one observer, crudely paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck*.
 
At 11pm on Friday, 29th March 2019, the UK formally left the EU. That Summer, a UK political party fought a leadership election over the question of whether or not the UK had actually left. As one (defeated) candidate put it, “We’re still members, even if we’ve torn up our membership card.” The issue perpetuated a rift in British politics: departure had entailed the signing of a new set of treaties (Agreements, etc.), and this was, or wasn’t, a betrayal of the original vote to leave (see the chapter Referendum: Boring in the Apocrypha section of this imaginary history textbook). The status quo hadn’t really shifted; the nation states of Europe hadn’t moved. History continued.
 
Blame the late-stage innovations. But the real historical significance of the so-called “Brexit Era” was not the unresolved split between the broadly equal numbers of “Remainers” and “Brexiteers” in the UK electorate, nor was it exactly the rise of “populism” (however defined; the term itself was dismissed as a “political blunt instrument” by a high-profile broadcaster in early 2019). The key to understanding this period in British history is simply this: it was short. The Brexit Era lasted barely more than a decade, and Brexit itself was the culmination of a change process that began perhaps as early as 2011.
 
Historians disagree as to the trigger event for the Brexit Era, with some pointing to geopolitical change, thus fundamentalism and the rediscovery of religion, and others to cultural changes that were themselves triggered by globalisation. A few still refer back to the “first transition event” in value exchange**, but most now argue for a subliminal – barely visible but rapid – change in social/interpersonal attitudes that they track back to one of a small number of late-stage innovations in retail technology. This was also the era of communication via “smart” devices; technologists were still talking about “artificial intelligence”; they had not yet addressed the more pressing issue of “artificial stupidity”.
 
Venn diagrams, each circle felt as local. Where historians do agree is: this was the decade in which, so to speak, everything changed (or for a few, began to change). Hindsight might give us Brexit as the headline issue, but by then, truly viable communications technology had reached the masses, globalisation had reduced distances, value exchange had ceased to be physical, and such concepts as “the nation state” and “national government” had become anachronistic – as had political systems built on the “static democracy” model of a “nationwide” vote at fixed intervals (of years rather than minutes). “The money hasn’t just run out; it’s dematerialised,” tweeted a popular comedian and political theorist, making a more subtle point than perhaps she realised.
 
Much has been written about the “global localism” enabled by personal communications technology; much has also been written about the speed with which today’s culture of personal identity has been adopted. Our system, based on each individual’s personal grid (or “personal space” in common usage) of intersecting interest groups anchored in physical location, is unprecedented in recent human history. It is also, of course, only viable at today’s global population levels.
 
We’re always arguing about something, aren’t we? It is a tragic irony that global warming, coupled with human nature, has finally given us a semblance of stability. We built the “vectors” whereby the so-called “heatstroke rabies” pandemic achieved its global reach, but it was human nature that stopped our response – stopped us grounding the world’s aircraft, closing shipping lanes and highways, thus stopped us limiting the spread of the disease, and buying time to find – look for, at least – a cure.
 
Why did it matter, whether or not this new plague was a “zombie apocalypse”? Why was so much time wasted on protecting early-stage patients (showing “zombie” symptoms) from those who advocated euthanasia? Why so many reassuring lies and so much argument, when above all we needed to work together? Why spend so much on PR for the status quo, when the world around us was collapsing?
 
It’s too late now. Billions died. A generation has been born since those end-times, and we’re beginning again. The Summers are hot and the Winters warm. As some say, it’s as if we live in the world that dystopian fiction described. There are wasps the size of drones, and packs of feral dogs (and cats). But the scattered tribes of survivors are still in communication with each other, and at a basic level, the cities still function. The weather powers the generators, and the technology – some of it – still works. There is good hunting in the stone canyons, and shelter to be found in the ruins.
 
One day, not too far from now, we will set out across the plains, along the surviving roads, over the bridges and through the tunnels, to meet up with our fellow survivors and teach them to live in compliance with our ways and our beliefs. Then, at last, we will live in harmony.
 
*“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” Otto von Bismarck. I looked this up online, of course. Above the late German Chancellor’s passport photograph and quote is an ad for FlexiOffices (I’ve added the capitals). Below is a message for me. “None of your friends have liked this quote yet,” I’m told. There’s something endearingly strange about the modern world.
**The period between the implosion of the “global economy” in 2007/8 and the launch of the Bitcoin network in 2009 has been memorably described in one text as “the scraping of the iceberg along the hull” for the old order. Some historians specialise entirely in the language of technology/utility advertising of the time. We were put there frequently, but were we ever “in control”, they ask?

In writing the post above, I noticed that my spellcheck now queries “Remainers” but not “Brexiteers” (or “Brexiters”). I wonder if the Illuminati have turned in favour of Brexit, or perhaps the Trilateral Commission are now working to separate the UK from the EU. There was that book by Jon Ronson, Them (2001), that went into a range of conspiracy theories, and of course we shouldn’t forget Nudge by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein (2008), which tells us that change can be more effectively achieved by nudging people than by telling them straight-out to change and then getting all officious about it.
 
Makes sense to me. It’s human nature, I suppose, to pick up on the nudge-filled specifics of a situation, whether we’re doing the old-style hunter-gatherer thing, or buying a used car, or negotiating a billion-dollar contract – or indeed deciding whether to eat something that’s way past its sell-by date. Intuition. It’s green. It’s quiet – too quiet. Something just doesn’t smell right. That cliché from fiction about the smile not reaching the eyes. We pick up on all that, but our eyes glaze over at the explicit insincerities of advertising and/or motivational management-speak.
 
Also read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2006), and while you’re at it, watch any episode of Columbo (“they” haven’t remade it yet, I’m pretty sure; I mean Columbo with Peter Falk, and preferably an early episode – perhaps you’ll find the episode – maybe there was more than one – where they were all so obviously trying not to laugh). Everything’s spelt out these days, as if we’re being programmed, but that’s not how we work. Intelligence can’t be treated as artificial. [Even, one day, when it is?]
 
[Aside. Does the job “computer programmer” still exist? Sometimes I think that all the computer programmers of old went into management, after having learned nothing/forgotten everything about human behaviour.]
 
Sorry, politics. Not that it was exactly a nudge, but I liked the detail, a day or two back, that the announcement of the latest agreement (sic) on the UK government’s Brexit strategy (sic) was announced just as the cabinet sat down to dinner – so that they were all three courses and coffee away from being able to brief against it. Bet there were chocolates with the coffee. There have been resignations since, I know, and all manner of ructions, but for me, that timing was the detail, the little flick of the ball past the defender (yes, I watched France:Belgium), that indicated real skill.
 
Not that I’m expressing an opinion in favour of any particular individual, you understand, nor any political party, but I like those minutely but irrevocably revealing moments. Let's invent another one, and this time let’s hold the politics: you’re standing on a beach, looking out at a flat-calm sea, and trying to decide whether this is the perfect, or just a very good, opportunity to go swimming. Then, very briefly, about a hundred metres out, just for a split second, the dorsal fin of a shark breaks the surface. Leaving you still watching a flat-calm sea, but pretty clear that you’re not about to go swimming.
 
Okay, we’re off politics. There’s a piece of music I like. I came across it when I watched the first episode of a television programme called Sanctuary; it’s used as the theme tune for the first and second seasons (changed in the third, I think; no idea why). It’s called Symphonie pour un monde etrange, if you’ll pardon my French, and if you click here, you’ll see the credit sequence as well as hear it; I’m only mentioning it because the tail fin, ten seconds in, has just come back into my mind. Curious how the mind works. But this is where that opening sentence above has taken me (a robot would just have added those two B-words to the spellcheck, or subtracted the R-word, and powered down).
 
Symphony for a Strange World, Joel Goldsmith and Neal Acree. The late Joel Goldsmith. Film, television and video-game music. I love the internet at moments like this, and in particular, I’m really quite fond of YouTube. There’s so much music out there that I haven’t heard. So many clips. And all because – excuse me; I’m going to listen to music for a while – I picked up on that funny little detail about the cabinet eating together. Politics does serve a useful purpose, after all. Who knew?

Having been eaten by bears in my previous incarnation, one careless early morning in the Spring thaw, I thought long and hard about my options going forward. Reincarnation – incarnation from that perspective – is only one of the opportunities available in this world that I’ve built. [If you don’t know what I’m talking about, scroll down to the (very recent) post Was that you, walking beside me? and read up from there.]
 
I thought about roles in guardianship, companionship, and just generally hanging around on the outer edge of consciousness making accidents not happen. [How do we survive? Think about it. Life is dangerous even if – especially if, statistically – we stay at home.] I like a world in which there’s more than just a prosaically visible reality, and sometimes that means, er, showing up. Or not showing up, exactly. Being there. Wearing the sheet. Breathing the wind. Occasional thunderbolts as an expression of emotional release.
 
But that’s too easy. Solving problems from inside the problem is always the real challenge; to be a participant observer rather than some kind of ex-machina uncredited assistant. There’s a parallel universe in which I went that way, and yes, I had a lot of fun until I was challenged to try it for myself, but in the world on my screen right now, I chose a quiet, uneventful life inside the walls of a sunlit hill town in what we now call southern France.

​Weren’t you going to say something about Brexit? I was content. Nothing happened. I was never bored, because boredom hadn’t been invented back then, and I lived a life that I accepted as my due (to the extent that I thought about it: like so many of us in those times, I avoided the religious debates while taking a deity for granted). I was married to the second daughter of my patron, and the achievements of that life were two children, girl and boy, both safely married by the time I died, a widow left financially secure, and twelve carved faces high up in the soft stone of the cathedral that my daughter lived to see completed.
 
They’re gone now, those faces, worn away by time and the elements, but there were descendants from that life, and they prosper. Have to tell you, though, that I came away from that deathbed unfulfilled: a habit of caution so often builds to an avoidance of life. I spent time outside thereafter, handling the serendipities of everyday life for a group of artists, and then I began a period of decades in which I shadowed a similar life to the one I had so recently lived: he was one of the artists, but a follower not a leader. You’ll know his works, if you’ve studied the art of the period.
 
Come on, what about Trump? And when that was over, we talked. A completed life, however long and however fulfilled, is only ever part of a greater whole, we agreed. This meant, we told each other, that working together would bring us more quickly to … we both hesitated; he said “enlightenment”; we both smiled. For our own amusement, we conducted our conversations in the library of a not-yet-ancient university, where we were taken to be scholars by those who could see us. Laughter would have been out of place; smiling it had to be. Life, so-called life, is an opportunity to engage as well as to experience, we agreed; its meaning is outside itself.
 
In time, we went back into life as believers, heretics in each other’s eyes, on opposite sides of an argument about the specifics of belief. My town, my beloved walled town to which I had returned, burned around me. We were unaware of our true selves, of course, because true experience requires prior ignorance, and in the end, his was the signature, his the seal, that gave me over to the fire. I waited for him at his end, and after a moment of fear that purged that life's lingering enmity between us, he laughed at last, at the loss of constraint, and I laughed with him. We had found our way to “enlightenment”.
 
What is this post going to do to your brand image as a writer of predictable but sometimes amusing blog posts on Brexit, Trump, gender issues and all the rest? But we had started a new cycle now, twisted around each other like two helices, and we both realised that this could not be an end. We were born again, died, were born again. We hated each other, loved, loved again. In time, the balance between us defined what we were: partners, brothers, twin souls, one. We – I – wrote it all down. The manuscript, rolled tight in a jar in the old way, properly sealed, awaits discovery. It is the seed of another cycle.
 
Okay, that’ll do for today’s post. I did have something insightful to say – promise – about Brexit, or maybe it was Trump, but on the evidence of what I’ve written so far, I’m really not in the mood. Read the opening passages of John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany (1989). Pick up the tone of the narrator’s comments about Reagan and the Contras, and apply that to whatever’s in today’s headlines.

​If the world had been over-run by giant, mutant wasps, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. But it hasn’t, so I am. The art of the arresting opening sentence was taught to me, a long time ago, by a manager – not an editor – at the Financial Times. He read something I’d written – not for the paper – and then spent five minutes sharing his view that “The” was the most boring word in the English language. “Never start anything with “The””, he told me.
 
And I never have. Not for publication, anyway. I worked out for myself that giant, mutant wasps can only be deployed at the start of articles about giant, mutant wasps – there’s such a thing as too arresting – and learned also that if you just let an opening sentence take you where it wants to go, you’ll end up with something far more interesting than if you’d stuck to your first idea. You can always go back and edit, after all. But if the spontaneities aren’t written down as they occur, they’re lost.
 
Reading the wall. “Never take notes,” said a friend of mine, and I ignored that. “Always carry a notebook,” said another, and I try to do that. My notes tend to be phrases, sometimes sentences and very occasionally paragraphs, but when they take the form of things I have to do – I’ve noticed that the things I’ve written down are the things I’m least likely to do. They’re illegible, a lot of the time, and when they aren’t – well, they’re safely on the list, so I can stop worrying about them.
 
Yes, I do possess a waterproof notebook, and yes, I have made a note to put it within reach of the shower. When I find it again. Yes, the best ideas invariably turn up just after I’ve applied a generous helping of shampoo, but one of the disguised gifts of aging is a pre-occupation with mental function – and holding onto a phrase (sentence, paragraph) for the time it takes to reach a flat surface and a writing implement can feel like a real achievement. Yay! I’m still alive. Now, where are my reading glasses?
 
Yes, I know. Technology. Gets in the way, doesn’t it? What? Oh, sorry. Like so many people, you’re younger than me. Or perhaps, less stubbornly set in your ways? But you’re right, of course: technology’s wonderful. If it standardises our responses, well, okay. Idiosyncrasy is a small loss in a mechanistic society concerned only with what it can measure. Imagine Lewis Carroll trying to write his “nonsense poem” Jabberwocky (1872) with auto-correct – there is a spellchecked (and wholly, flatly nonsensical) version online, along with various analyses and explanations. We’re not going to let it just be its rhythmical, portentous self, oh no.
 
What we've lost. I’m of an age to be nostalgic about some of the old ways – although I wouldn’t want actually to use a typewriter again, I like to see all the images of typewriters and typewriter keyboards used online to suggest writing. Because it’s a grown-up activity with a history, perhaps; laptops edge into the category of modern things that advertise themselves by evoking directly what we’ve lost: airline seats in which people are sleeping soundly; new cars cruising along empty country roads; property developments named for the landscape feature that they’ve destroyed. Oh, and smartphones that bring people together.
 
Enough of this gloom. What I meant to say was, I’ve reached the third age: I was covetous of more bandwidth and a faster processor and the lifestyle advertised in connection with the latest silvery gadget; then I was grumpy in a whole range of mildly self-indulgent ways (feel free to boast about the performance of your self-driving car, if you can – ha!); now I think I’m preserving not-yet-ancient skills like handwriting, note-taking – and come to think of it, writing a blog post to express an idea rather than as a vehicle for whatever’s the latest incarnation of SEO.
 
Do we still talk about SEO? I’m finding new ways to be old-fashioned. My local tablet-mending shop has a Commodore 64 in the window – I had one of those; used to play Elite – and next to it a PDA – there was a game on mine that involved lining up coloured blobs. No wonder the birds are angry to have lost that one. Memo to self: when you get wheeled off to a nursing home, take lots of graph paper so you can teach the nurses to play the pre-tech version of Battleships. Or, if their minds are too evolved to grasp that, you can challenge your contemporaries.