William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
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Obvious enough for you?

31/7/2019

 
When you set out to write a blog post about absolutely nothing, the important thing is to get the opening sentence right.

It should be arresting, or at least attention-getting, and it should deliver the reader quickly to the second sentence, which can include lots of commas and subordinate clauses. Third sentence can be short. The fourth, if there is one, rounds off the paragraph so that we can move on to the next.

There’s a thing about rhythm, too. Long sentences, short sentences, maybe a rhythm that flows with the logic of what you’re saying.

It’s a speech rhythm, I suppose, and I’ve heard writers talk about finding the tone of voice that goes with what they’re trying to say. That, I suspect, has to do with the idea that you’re always writing (speaking) to one person.

If you’ve got your ideal reader perched above your laptop screen, or settled in your head somewhere, you can work out – intuit, maybe – the tone of voice that goes with speaking to that individual. Same principle as if you’re bouncing a toddler on your knee, or facing an interview panel for a senior post with a high security clearance. Save the baby talk for the – shall we dispense with the predictable joke here?

I said “that individual”; I could have said “that representative of your audience”. I’ve heard it said that when you make a speech, you should pick out members of the audience, one at a time, and speak directly to them, in turn. Reduce the whole thing to a human scale by addressing your remarks to representative members of the audience, rather than the whole mass of faces all at once.

Of course, you don’t want to deliver your entire speech to the increasingly unnerved-looking woman in the third row, which is why I suggest eye contact successively with him over there, her over there, him up there … and so on. You’re talking to another human being, and with any luck, they’ll respond with an appropriate facial expression.

But this is a complete digression from the idea of writing to one person. I can see you there, smiling slightly, one eyebrow raised (now try the other one; bet you can’t), shifting slightly in an effort to make that big chair more comfortable. Is it some kind of throne? Is it resin? Never mind – I’ve got you in my mind’s eye, and I’m writing this for you.

Put down that mug. You’ve had quite enough coffee for one day.

If you’re writing something big, start anywhere and think about the step rather than the mountain. But start. Put the map down, stop discussing routes and start walking. If you’re writing something short – well, you’re nowhere until you’ve got your opening sentence.

Oh, well done. I wasn’t sure if you’d seen him creeping up behind you. All that martial-arts training finally paid off.

Sketch it out and plan it and make notes, et cetera, if you must, before and after finding the simple, declarative statement that is your opening sentence, but don’t think you’ve achieved anything by covering sheets of paper (screens, files, docs; I’m showing my age) with writing about what you’re going to write. Planning is a way of not starting.

Oh, it’s you now. Actually, it’s been you all along, hasn’t it?

What? My usual thing about not starting with the intro? I was going to abbreviate it. You know how, when people write to tell you about something, they sometimes start “I am writing to tell you about something”? My old mentor used to talk about “throat-clearing”; if he got something that didn’t strike him as quite good enough, his first move was to delete the first three paragraphs.

Surprisingly often, that worked.

Have I written a blog post about absolutely nothing? Perhaps not. But at least you and I are back together. I like the cloak, by the way.

And yes, you’re right. It’s a very individual thing. But if a piece of writing is a one-to-one communication, you have to write it as a one-to-one communication. Yeah, yeah, writing for yourself, all that. Been told it, know it. But if you’re only writing for yourself, why not stand in front of the mirror and talk it out?

What’s that? Global catastrophe? Planet becoming uninhabitable? Change of government in the UK? Brexit? Collapse of civilisation? Yes, I know about all that. It’s just – well, you see, there was a sudden spike in my numbers the other week. Numbers of people who read this blog.

I’m far too high-minded to think about such things, of course. But I consulted somebody whose opinion I respect, and she said that I am interesting when I write about writing.

No, I didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question. I reserve the right to be – whatever – by writing about subjects other than writing. But if this is my (huh!) “obvious niche”, then I suppose I should come back to it every now and then.

Yes, I’ll write about all those other subjects, although my opinions are as predictable as anybody else’s – what?

You have a go? Good idea, why don’t you?

No, there’s no tech store, but most of the antique shops along the old High Street have typewriters in the window. There’s even a letterpress printer – a shop, Juniper Bespoke – so you can start in the future, if you like – the past, I mean, the past; we’re still bathed in the white heat of the information superhighway, aren’t we, still relying on tapping screens for everything? Our analogue future is still a few degrees away.

You’ve got a pencil and paper? Oh. Okay.

Yeah, just write. Get started. That’s the trick of it. Express yourself.

What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not a teacher at all! I’m writing this, aren’t I?

Even my ideal reader doesn’t take me seriously.

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Can you see all that wood? Yes, I can see it too. And the trees.

So my other thought was, how many influential people of the past would still be influential today?

They wouldn’t be solemn and serious and looking at us out of black and white photographs. They wouldn’t have time to write those fat old books that none of us have read.

Einstein would comb his hair. Nietszche would trim his moustache for breakfast television. Karl Marx would be making it big on Facebook and Marcel Proust would have signed up for a Twitter account.

All of them would be wearing pancake make-up and sitting in studio discussions, arguing with people who – for balance – disagreed with them. We’d learn about the Theory of Evolution from a screened argument between Charles Darwin and, say, a comedian-politician who disagreed with him (and made it funny). The presenter would have ended that discussion with “One thing is certain. This argument will run and run.”

Or perhaps a joke with the punchline “God knows.”

Imagine Leonardo da Vinci walking towards us across landscapes, advancing on the camera crew backing away from him, waving his hands expressively and switching from one location to another in the blink of an edit.

Or Karl Marx at the New York Stock Exchange and then at the Alte Borse in Frankfurt. Jane Austen at the Hay Festival and then back in the studio for the week’s round-up of the latest crime fiction.

The books would have been printed on glossy paper, full of photographs; they would have been books of the series. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913) would have included flashbacks, for clarity. [Actually, William…] For Einstein’s TV debut, researchers would have found somebody prepared to argue that E doesn’t equal mc squared.

The big career move, in fact, would be to get on the other side of the argument from somebody big. Property is ownership. E is just E, Albert, actually. Bees can fly.

All this - yes, even that - was designed by somebody intelligent.

And then where would the rest of us find our beliefs?

Sunday in the Park

29/7/2019

 
Whatever the ideology, whether it's liberalism or socialism, capitalism or fascism, we have a collective instinct to impose it. Discuss. Quietly, please, and without involving social media. After five minutes, swap with your partner, and argue the opposite point of view. No shouting. Bonus points to anybody in the group who concedes the possibility, at any stage, that they might be wrong.

Happy day yesterday at the Park Live micro-festival in Kimberley Park, Falmouth. The next Park Live is on 1st September, and by then, the new stage might be open. The Official Falmouth Website, no less, says: "This seven-acre site is the home to many fine ornamental trees and along with the formal bedding areas has helped Falmouth win many Britain in Bloom competitions." Bring a picnic, and a rug or a fold-out chair, and find shade under one of the trees.

With fiends like these

23/7/2019

 
Spellcheck is my friend. She mangles walruses in messages for me, and does it so reliably that sending out the correct walruses in an immediate follow-up has become standard practice.

*words*

When I say Spellcheck, of course, I mean Autocorrect … but you never see them together, do you? I suspect they’re different sides to the same personality. Spellcheck is Dr Jekyll to Autocorrect’s Mr Hyde.

One swig of the stuff in the test-tube with the green smoke coming off it, and Spellcheck throws aside the red and blue wiggly lines, to start summarily correcting my English.

*corrupting*

Somewhere in my smartphone is a tiny script going “Hargh! Hargh! Hargh!” in an I’ve-just-drunk-the-potion villain-style laugh. Never did work out why they always found their work so funny, but that’s another bolt-hole.

*blog post*

Today’s subject is warthogs. Aspiring warthogs. And of course warthogging. As a warthog myself, I think of what I do as a form of composition. It’s not exactly music-making, but there’s a rhythm to be achieved within a structure of – okay, rules – that itself transcends the rules. The rhythm transcends the rules, I mean. I said this last week: if you know the rules, you can break them. What matters is clarity.

Sometimes, a walrus like warthog is so obviously not what was intended, that there’s no need for the follow-up.

No, Spellcheck, not “walrus-like”.

Today, I also want to write about Autocorrect in history. And, because I’ve used the analogy, in music. Autocorrect would have added notes to John Cage’s 4’33”, which in its true form – see here for a live performance; it opens in another window – presages mindfulness, today’s fashion for meditation, and much of the modern self-help industry.

If Autocorrect had had her way, we’d all be humming a tuneful – note-packed – little ditty and completely missing the shark attack that marks the start and finish of each movement.

*stopwatch*

Yes, and most prayers would have been reduced to “Sorry about that; please may I have a pony?” But in the absence of an effective messaging format, the corrective follow-up – *penance* – would never have been sent. So many young horses miraculously delivered. We’d be knee-deep in house ducks.

And the Gettysburg Address. Here's Autocorrect’s cut-down-to-the-essentials version. “Eighty-seven years ago, our grandparents founded a nation in the belief that we’re all free and equal. Now we’re fighting among ourselves about that. We owe it to our dead to achieve freedom.”

Sorry. To commit a similar sacrilege on a historic British address, how about this? “We shall fight on the beaches and inland. We shall never surrender, and even if we are invaded, we’ll win in the end.”

Kind of … almost. But no cigar, Boris – er, Winston.

Not now, Spellcheck!

I know smoking can be harmful to your – where did that come from?

No, I know I don’t smoke. It’s just a – oh, go away!

Where was I?

Yes - my problem with Autocorrect/Spellcheck isn’t just that she introduces Abyssinians into straightforward sentences; it’s that she tries to reduce everything to a bland, programmed English. And often succeeds. We value originality, but all our tools iron it out.

*absurdities*

You never hear an artistic success story that starts with “I followed the rules scrupulously, and…” You don’t start an entire new literary movement by producing something that does what it’s told. Rules are descriptive, anyway. They’re really saying “This is what worked in the past.” This is what worked to achieve clarity, I mean.

Clarity, or something else. Somewhere in the deep history of – insert religion here – there’s a bloke (usually a bloke) who did that, dressed like that, at that time on a Sunday (?) morning, and achieved transcendence. So now we have to turn up at that time, to do that, and – no we don’t!

We have to do what works for us.

Like he did.

So keep going, would you mind? You’re not wrong; you’re just doing it your own way. If your own way doesn’t work, well, yes, maybe you should get to know the rules better, but once you’ve made their acquaintance, don’t follow them. Go back to your own way.

Uh oh. I set out to write a post about Spellcheck and Autocorrect – you’ll notice that I’ve split them up and given them capitals – and now here I am telling you how to live – which is exactly what I’m against.

But I get into conversation with people younger than I am – everybody’s younger than I am; I’m talking about “young people” in the conventional sense – and I get the impression that they think the future’s something given to us. Or lately, taken away from us via the cancellation of a certain trade deal that I can’t quite bring myself to mention.

Gimme a break. Your future’s your own. So’s your ambition. If you’re looking for an answer, or an original idea, or an opening sentence, or a story to tell, or perhaps another warthog to share your life with, you won’t find it in the software.

So trust yourself! Get out there and wiggle!

*win*

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Not every cloud has a silver lining. Some of them have a rose-coloured edging that doesn't quite colour-match in photographs. But this morning - this early morning - did almost make up for the heat and humidity recently.

Made the mistake of turning on the radio the other morning. Haven't done that for weeks. There was a discussion. Very impassioned. Caught my attention. But what were they talking about?

In the UK, 7% of people do this, and a woman was speaking very fast about banning it. Was it eating meat? Drinking out of plastic bottles? Something worse? Keeping pets? Murdering people? No fewer than twenty prime ministers... Oh, politics.

They were talking about private education. People pay money to have their children educated at Public Schools, which are of course private schools. Baby prime ministers get sent off to Eton. State-funded education is provided for free, but people pay to go private. Shouldn't be allowed, said the woman.

Seems to me that simple ideals like "freedom of choice" are quite complicated in practice. There are arguments both ways on this one, but "We don't like people doing this, so we're going to legislate to ban it" is problematic, surely? Doubly so in this case, where the private-school teachers (and the children) might go overseas rather than bring their magic to the state system.

Yeah, and then my radio started talking about - you know, the other thing. Somebody who wasn't prime minister (yet) hadn't said that he wouldn't do something, so a group of MPs had tabled an amendment to stop him doing it. Uh huh.

My radio eavesdrops on a world where the first instinct is to stop things happening. Not sure what kind of an -ist this makes me, but I'm really not sure that I live there any more.

In other news, we went to a party the other night. It was so-so, fun in some ways, not in others, and we voted by a narrow margin to leave. We went out to the entrance lobby, and then one of us said "We can't just walk out the door!" Somebody else suggested the back door, and then the idea came up that we could climb out of an upstairs window. "I'm not going to let us jump off the roof!" said somebody.

Our hosts were standing right there, watching us. By this time, they'd stopped urging us back into the party, and were clearly just waiting for us to leave.

There had been talk of us taking food and drink with us, and continuing the party outside. But that obviously wasn't going to happen.

"We could stay!" one of us said. "Let's vote on it again!" she added.

And we're still there, talking about staying or leaving, doing neither, stuck.

History plays

22/7/2019

 
Sometimes, at charity events, a video is shown of a horse race from the past. Nobody knows who won the race, nor indeed where it was run or when, so everybody bets on the race and the losing money goes to the charity.

Moving on, I wonder if this idea could be worked up into an audience-participation television event. Re-run a general election from the past, with as much of the original verbiage as possible, in real time over three weeks (?) and see what result we get today.

Make it a scorcher of an election - one of the Thatcher landslides, or the one that brought President Nixon to the White House (run it over longer than three weeks), or the one that brought - you know, that guy - to power in Germany.

Obviously, some genius would have to come up with a way of disguising the real event, but even if that failed, it could create some media coverage. But if the election could be "anonymised" somehow, I wonder whether we'd get the result that a previous generation did.

Or maybe just run the whole thing again, exactly as it was, like we're re-running the moon landing now. An actor to play Margaret Thatcher, an actor to play Michael Foot, and at the end of it, the audience votes.

Cooler heads

20/7/2019

 
Talk about "rewilding" Heathrow Airport and the need for "strong, decisive leadership" in tackling climate change.

In other areas of human activity, we talk about consent.

Perhaps instead of forcing people off their aeroplanes, we could encourage the IT industry to develop viable large-scale teleconferencing facilities, crossing say Skype with wide-angle lenses and IMAX cinemas, so that diplomats could think and negotiate in their own time zones, jet lag could be abolished, and climate-change summits wouldn't require quite so many gas-guzzling motorcades.

Not doing but teaching

18/7/2019

 
So I came across this letter the other day. It was printed in a magazine, and it was a letter to the editor. The writer of the letter was apologetic, but firm: he was against use of the word “So” to begin a sentence.

So I thought about that for a while, because it’s the kind of thing that interests me, and I decided: Nuh. With a capital N. After a colon. And I’m sorry, spellcheck; I’m going with “against use”. I think you want “against the use”. Tough.

When I use “So” to begin a sentence … hang on, let me think of something ... I mean to give a sense of something before the sentence, whether that something is a quarter-hour spent reading the letters page of a magazine, or the breath taken after an absorbing thought process.

Or, y’know, I don’t know why I use “So” to start a sentence. Sometimes, it just feels right. So there. Writing is self-expression, and my self has a “So” in its vocabulary. With a capital S, all ready to pull out first. So … there, or did I say that already?

People my age get really angsty about moments of forgetfulness.

Writing only works if it’s transparent, I once decided. Like the individual brushstrokes in an Old Master painting, the words need to be so well applied that they become incidental to whatever is being expressed. You see the picture not the words.

I went through a phase (I’m still going through a phase) in which I went back and re-read any passage, in anything, that got to me. Went back and really studied the brushstrokes.

And what I found was, it wasn’t just the words. It was everything else as well - the said, the not-said, the style of the writing. The writer’s skill in putting it on the page but also in leaving it to my imagination.

Not the writer’s skill in forming a conventional English sentence. Transparent was what mattered, I decided, not formal precision. Writer speaks to reader.

[At this point, William stops and gazes out of the window. Skip the paragraphs in italic if you don't want the absorbing thought process that comes before the next "So". William pressed "italic" rather than "delete" at the last moment, because he likes these memories. But they really don't fit here.]


Once upon a time, I had a job in which I interviewed people, and I remember realising that silence worked as well as a question. If the interview is going well, don’t ask the next question. Nod, murmur, look expectant - anything but ask a question. Nine times out of ten, the person being interviewed knows what question should come next, and answers it.

You can go back to your prepared questions later.

And I remember an accountant I interviewed once, for something I had to write that was financial and technical and way beyond my competence. I asked him to read through the difficult bit, because I was relying on his explanation and also quoting him, and when he came back to me, he told me that I used too many commas. Oh, yeah, the technical stuff was fine, but … commas.

Really? I could have spoken to him at length about commas, and Oxford commas, and
Hart’s Rules, but I would have been making all that up. Commas are useful, like pauses in speech. Full stop.

[Sorry about that. Now back to the blog post.]

So. Yes. And. But. I have my own problems. I kind of notice apostrophes. I like the distinction between “few” and “less”. But I use commas like some people use garlic in their cooking, and I’ve pretty much made up my own rules for semi-colons. Okay, spellcheck, semicolons.

I like hyphens. But my point is: that’s me. I don’t over-fuss (any more). Every now and then, spellcheck gets out the red wiggly line, and I go along with it. Niggly line. Yes, of course I genuinely believe red means serious. What, spelling and grammar? Careful, spellcheck, that’s multi-tasking.

It’s customary at times like this to say something about language evolving, and if we’re really getting defensive-aggressive, to denounce the custodians of proper (sic) usage as “grammar nazis”, or some such expression. I don’t know about that. Language is a tool, and knowing how to use it can be useful. Same goes for chainsaws. But sticking to some rigid set of rules? Like I said: Nuh. Where would we be without all those toadstools carved out of tree-trunks that you see on roadside verges?

Oh, and language belongs to everybody, even people who don’t take very much care with it. [Safety notice: we’re done with the chainsaw analogy.] Not far from here, there’s a “Minor Inijury Unit”. A while ago, I saw a sign directing “Vechicles” around a traffic hazard. People weren’t standing outside wondering if they could bring their injury to the inijury unit, nor was there a huddle of bewildered drivers asking: if the vechicles go that way, where do the vehicles go?


We get by. I think what matters - what really matters - is that the meaning gets across, not that we’re using the correct form. In paint, Mark Rothko found a way to get his meaning across, as did Edward Hopper. You can feel the draining heat in Joan Didion’s Democracy (1984) although it's never exactly described - and while we’re mentioning works of the century before this one, try Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard (1987). Both authors to be read by anybody who wants to write.

I’m currently reading Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party (2010), which suggests that politicians sometimes use speech-writing to work out their ideas. Work them out, not just express them. But I’ve gone off the point.

“So” doesn’t matter. What matters is getting across what you want to get across. Know the rules, but don’t feel constrained by them. And if you’re the kind of nerd who likes to find a subtext in everything, even blog posts - what? “Nerd” isn’t offensive? Surely not? - maybe I could just point out that we’re surrounded by people telling us how to do stuff. That seems to be pretty much the sole purpose of social media these days. In my case, it’s how to do marketing, how to write a novel, a screenplay, a successful sales pitch, and would I like to download a FREE book as a reward for signing up to the mailing list…?


No.

Because so many of these people are teaching, not doing. And what I would say to them is: the way to do - whatever it is, and we’re not just talking about writing now - isn’t to repeat what worked last time. Study the brushstrokes, yes, but you crowd out originality by insisting that you’ve found out the only true way to apply brushstrokes.

You can build a course out of that, and defend your course on the grounds that it’s based on proven techniques, but what the world needs right now is something that can’t be taught.

So if you could stand - yes, right over there. No, further … yes, that’s it. No, you’re not too far away. Hear you? No, but I can lip-read if necessary. Yes, use the screen if it hooks up to your laptop. There’s a flipchart if you want it. No, that’s fine. Sure. Arrange those deckchairs however you want them.

I just want you far enough away that the truly original thinkers, the creative people, can’t hear you telling them that they’re doing it wrong. Let them find their own voices.

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Wish those cows would put their sleeping bags away. I said that once, and for a fraction of a second, I was believed. Felt it.

Due to adverse weather conditions, there will be no post beneath the picture this week. I like this time of year, when sand gets everywhere and my swimming trunks see daylight, but it’s really not conducive to staying in and writing.

So I’m going to leave this space blank and head for the beach. There will be: students gathered around barbecues; young parents with tiny babies seeing the sea for the first time; boys racing each other into the water; paddle-boarders heading for the horizon; bands of older women shrugging themselves into one-piece garments made by sewing towels together to roam the beach picking up plastic; thin, nut-brown old men with long silver hair swimming alone.

And there will be me. Staying afloat. Possibly even waving.

The playing fields of Neverland

15/7/2019

 
Stop me if I'm missing something. The people voted for the representatives to take decisions for them. But the representatives decided to ask the people to decide for them. And the people voted for a decision that the representatives wouldn't have taken. So the representatives, having asked the people, got stuck with implementing a decision that went against what they would have decided.

Now the representatives have given themselves power to block implementation of the decision taken by the people at their request. But not to propose an alternative. This is a logic loop, and it's ruining the game for me.

The Repair Planet page

11/7/2019

 
Before we start, could I just say that I agree with you about the latest literary masterpiece from So-and-so?

A little over-long, perhaps, and some of the characterisation is a little heavy-handed, but the wit is definitely coruscating and the prose sparkling. Oh, yes, spare, too, the prose is very spare. Economical too, yes, pared back, and - excuse me, I think I’m about to use the word “liminal” to describe the, ah, mise en scene. Missing an accent there - where are you when I need you, spellcheck?

But there’s definitely an oeuvre going on here, squire; this is a work for our time, weaving themes of alienation and angst into a bildungsroman spanning the lives of characters we can recognise all too easily. What does it mean to be a woman? There’s a moral ambiguity to…


Phew! I was beginning to feel I’d never be off camera again. Would you like some more of this fizzy stuff, or shall I see if I can find us a couple of cans of Korev? This time, when the woman goes by, I suggest you just grab the tray. Save me a couple of those round bready things with the cream cheese and that salty black stuff…

...here you go. Cheers. They’ll never film us with these in our hands. Given that the prize is being sponsored by - hey, isn’t that...? It is, isn’t it? Funny how they’re always smaller in real life.

Have I what? Read her book? Don’t be ridiculous.

They’re going to want us to sit down in a moment. Don’t be silly. Come and sit with me. Nobody will mind. Yes, I know it’s assigned seating, but if I just pick up this name card… There. You’re sitting next to me. Let’s sit down. That’ll make it official.

There, you see. She’s thought better of it. Too many cameras around to make a fuss.

Red, please.

I use an e-reader, actually. I still read books, but - actually, the thing that interests me is, I find that different formats suit different things. I like facts in hardback - or paperback, yes, and there’s something special about a library book, whatever it’s about.

But if I’m reading fiction these days, a lot of the time I pick up my e-reader and browse through the online store. I don’t know if we still use the term “killer app”, but what makes it for me is the free sample. You can read the beginning free, and then decide whether you want more.


Yes, a lot of it’s- Yes, a good sample doesn’t always mean a good book- Yes, I know, but-

What do I read?

What do you mean, what do I really read? Did you put in those italics?

Okay, what do I really read?

I read a lot of beginnings, obviously. I’m genre-agnostic - yeah, good term; no, I just made it up - and a lot of the time I trust the algorithm to make suggestions. Although it’s an AI - you know, Artificial Stupidity? - so it’s always just wanting me to read more of the same, rather than making intuitive leaps.

But the best writing these days; no, I mean the writing that makes me want to hit “buy” when I get to the end of the beginning. A lot of that’s genre fiction these days. I don’t know why, but every author you’ve never heard of - they’re either writing fantasy, vampires, you know, or there’s a murder in Chapter One and the quirky small community is thrown into uproar.

Maybe it's just easier writing fantasy? Less need for subtle nuances of character if they're all riding around on dragons and hacking at each other with swords? I don't know, but I don't mind a bit of witchcraft if the writing holds my attention. If it's sincere, I suppose, is part of it.


I came across a catastrophe novel the other day, in which the apocalypse is triggered by a freak weather event. Man walks into a bar on page one, and the TV above the counter - counter? - is talking about the snow. Except that it’s snowing everywhere. Another one: suddenly, nobody could sleep.

No, it isn’t weather all the time. The obliging thing about genre novelists these days, especially the
ones who only do ebooks, is that if you find one you do like, they’ve generally written a whole series. Dozens of books sometimes, featuring the same characters. It’s not like, this is the Big Book; it’s more, this is the world I’ve created.

Artificial Stupidity? Yes, I know, Intelligence. Don’t get me started.

But why do we need to build machines to think for us, when we can think for ourselves?

I had my laptop fixed the other day - after a conference call, the word-processing … is it app or program now? … wouldn’t start. None of the files would open. So I took it to a friend who used to do that kind of thing, and after a certain amount of muttering and writing-down of error codes, we got to the “Repair Page”, where we downloaded a fresh copy of the word-processing - thing. Whatever.

Yes, exactly, papered over the old one. Didn’t fix it at all.


And I thought my usual thought. I could have done that. Tapped that many keys. Got to that page eventually, like all those monkeys with typewriters that were eventually going to write Shakespeare, remember? I used to be in awe of people who could fix computers, but that was a century ago. Everything now’s just tapping keys. I couldn’t tune a piano, or even learn to play one with any feeling, but I can tap keys. That’s the kind of problem I can solve.

If only we could solve global warming by tapping keys; we’d be great at it. If only the solutions to real life could be found down a predetermined labyrinth of solutions to problems that somebody, somewhere, Seattle perhaps, Cupertino, has pre-defined as the unexpected.


Is that machines thinking for us, or people who think like machines thinking for us?

Or people who want to believe machine-thinking is how it’s done?

Anyway, the moment was: I could do this! It would take me longer, but there’s no inspiration or creativity required. Just finding the path through the labyrinth.

Like I said, don’t get me started.

But perhaps there’s a game. Global warming: the game. We could solve that.

Now, there’s an idea. Keep us busy, make us feel better about-

What? No, that’s not possible! I’m only here for the-

Did you know about this?

Oh, tell me there’s an acceptance-speech app on this phone.

Picture
On a day like this, what better than a picture of the ground underneath the bench on which I was sitting to eat my sandwich? The sunrise has been done, the cloudless sky, the birds; the horizon is the preserve of painters in Cornwall - so | looked down. And thought about fingerprints.

There’s a family story about a great-uncle who turned down the opportunity to buy the grand house in which he was living, at a nominal price, because the rent was so cheap. He didn’t want the burdens of ownership, and way back then, renting was seen as the sensible thing to do.

Then - well, my grandparents remembered the depression of the thirties, and my father (born in 1921) travelled extensively in Europe and then Asia in his late teens and his early twenties. My mother told her war stories too - code-breaking and truck-driving, among other activities.


The generations that came of age during the mid- to late-twentieth century lived through challenging times. By the time I came along, they’d been through rationing, national service and the Korean War. Far away from anywhere, the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests were just ending, and in the USA, “agribusiness” was poisoning everybody (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962).

The “leading-edge” baby boomers were about to start being drafted into the Vietnam War, the Berlin Wall was about to go up, and we were well into the early stages of the Cold War.


Back then, the reason to stockpile baked beans was that we were all half-expecting to be annihilated in an exchange of nuclear missiles (the idea was, you sat it out in the bunker you’d dug in the garden, then ate baked beans until the radiation dispersed, ha ha).

The Fulda Gap was the area of West Germany that would take the brunt of the Soviet land invasion, and the big question was, would the Americans launch nuclear missiles once Warsaw Pact tanks had rolled up NATO and taken hostage all those US troops stationed on our side of the Iron Curtain?


Oh, and the other question was: would “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD; the perfect acronym) be enough of a deterrent to stop one side or the other launching a first strike? Clearly, it was. We’re here. The survivors, anyway. Asbestos in our cribs. DDT on our vegetables.

I remember watching news reports showing the spread of fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, but that was later. I remember Beatles songs in the playground. Went into the HMV store in Truro the other day, and they’ve gone back to racks of vinyl - although it was all very much cleaner and brighter than such places were back in the day. I wonder if there’s still scope for listening before buying.


Although, come to think of it, I recognised most of the album covers, so that would be pointless. Sometimes, I think I’m living through a remake of my own youth.

Yes, and there was a piece in - I forget where - the other day, about generational unfairness. Old people own all the wealth and young people can’t even buy houses. A binary, simple thing. So simple. Underpinning it was the assumption that aspiration adds up to one thing - home ownership - and maybe it does.


But nothing’s stopped. Change goes on happening. I think of my great-uncle sometimes. The certainties of his life were as certain to him as the certainties of our lives are certain to us. Sorry, clumsy sentence. But he knew that renting was preferable to buying. He was, in our terms, wrong. But he knew.

What do we know?

And when am I going to be compensated for all those years I had to spend without the internet?

Plus ca change, tiddley pom

4/7/2019

 
So the climate starts to stabilise, because we’ve all changed our behaviour, and the change-deniers declare that there was never a problem. Nobody comments, not even on Facebook. A truck laden with croissants and camembert* takes the ferry from Calais to Dover without difficulty, except that the English coast is now half an hour further away from Europe. Nobody comments. Four horsemen ride across the sky, but we’re all looking down at our smartphones.

Politics continue as normal, with regular updates from senior politicians on the progress of the negotiations. The BBC airs a prime-time investigative report under the title What are we negotiating about now? and gets its first-ever zero rating. A well-known news anchor is rushed to hospital after complaining of head pains. “I just can’t get the urgency into my voice any more,” he says. “I just can’t do it.” Reports are denied that he had been reading the same headline story off the autocue every fifteen minutes for sixteen hours. “We take care of our staff,” reads a spokesperson from a prepared statement.

Nothing continues to happen. In one twenty-four-hour rolling newsroom, a desperate producer resorts to sending journalists out to find real things that have actually happened and report on them. Two days later, that channel’s 2100 bulletin leads on a bus crash in Wallasey. By 2115 that’s been knocked off the top slot by a freak wave at Cley-next-the-Sea. Footage of the Cromer lifeboat dominates the 2130 update, floodlights and sirens, but by 2145, even that’s been knocked out of the schedule by the live report from the scene of the small fire in the chip shop in Whitby.

The producer’s fired, of course, but his story’s picked up. Next morning, “the day the news agenda went walkabout” runs as the “and finally” item every fifteen minutes across the networks. On Facebook, to everybody’s surprise, the story goes viral. The Campaign For Real News is founded, with the fired producer as head of its news channel, and journalists everywhere start plumbing their smartphones for heartwarmingly realistic-looking stories that could pass as real things happening. News goes local. Fires are started in chip shops.

Four journalists die when the coffee shop in which they’re looking for news is raided by a trigger-happy SWAT team. They have been so busy with their smartphones that they failed to notice the hostage situation building up around them. Another journalist is fired for enticing cats up trees and calling the fire brigade. There are calls for a new Code of Conduct for news, but these are ignored by the news channels. Principal photography begins for the documentary about the making of the film about “the day the news agenda went walkabout” - on a sound stage in Berkeley, California.

Meanwhile, in a parallel world similar to the one in which you’re reading this, the first wifi-enabled cat’s eyes are installed on the M25. London’s orbital motorway is already coated in recycled plastic, in which is embedded a “smart comms lattice” carrying road-sign information, traffic-density reports and any emergency warnings via wifi and bluetooth to autonomous cars. Reaction is immediate. An MP calls for a ban on “lewd and immoral” behaviour in the tipped-back front seats of “driverless cars”, as he calls them. 

Two late-night TV shows are launched, Naked at the Wheel and Driving Attraction, and there are calls for drones to be banned from the airspace above motorways. The driving-seat passenger of an autonomous car is successfully prosecuted for painting over the windows of his car, but several new models on show at the Paris Motor Show dispense with seats altogether - passengers in these cars will share one “couch”. The driving test is abolished; car owners must pass a basic IT-proficiency test before taking to the road.

A baby is born in a traffic jam on the M11 just south of Cambridge. Road-haulage operators diversify, offering creche facilities and kitchens on their car transporters. “Just sync your car with our vehicle and drive up the ramp,” says the advertisement that runs on car dashboards. It shows a young couple getting up from the couch to hit the red button and do just that. Docking’s automatic, so they don’t even have to dress before picking up their lattes from the machine in the car transporter's kitchen. On the road around them, drones pursue cars, carrying takeaway orders as well as high-definition cameras.

The English government unveils a massive infrastructure project: over five years, every road in England will be coated with wifi-enabled recycled plastic. The Scottish government announces a similar project, but with a four-year time-frame. Wales announces that roads will be replaced entirely with plastic, but only as they wear out. Prices of recycled plastic soar on the Baltic Exchange; trawlers returning from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch report a thinning in the plastic cap - “plasticbergs” are breaking off. There are warnings of a shortage of waste plastic.

Armageddon arrives, heralded by pictures of young women in Summer dresses cooling themselves in Paris fountains. Large parts of the planet’s surface become uninhabitable to warm-blooded mammals. Insects start to mutate. A video clip goes viral, in which a termite kills and eats a crocodile. Students on campuses across Asia riot against climate change while world leaders debate the terms of a declaration that they will commit to reversing climate change. A tall thin figure in a black hooded cloak carrying a scythe is decisively no-platformed when he arrives uninvited to address a graduation ceremony at a small college in the southern United States.

Sea levels have risen now, and there is no ice at the poles. As the water continues to warm, dense fog forms over land and sea. This baffles meteorologists, who know more about the formation of fog than I do. Aircraft are grounded; only the autonomous cars keep buzzing around, although the fog soon gets into their electrics. The world falls silent, and then, in the deep silence, we hear the sound of horses galloping towards us.

​*From the Guardian and Observer style guide, an entry on cheese. “Normally lower case, even if named after a place: brie, camembert, cheddar, cheshire, double gloucester, lancashire, parmesan, stilton, wensleydale, et cetera.” Eat that, spellcheck.

Picture
Seaweed, in case you're wondering. Close to low tide. Walked down to Fish Strand Quay to eat a sandwich for my lunch yesterday, and with the sun in my eyes, pointed the camera at the water and pressed the button. Several times: the pictures are unexpectedly okay. This one for today.

Where does the time go? Morning, Thursday, just after sunrise. The blinds still down, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see this screen, but the slats are brightly lit from behind, as though the aliens have arrived in one of those movies of the eighties. “They’re here” - or was that something else? I remember: the poltergeist(s) in the housing development.

What rules our lives? Not the people on the screen, nor the colleagues of my friend who works on the local council. Works - represents. We’ve somehow accidentally built an amorphous, invisible, distributed dictatorship of the mind that treats us as - fools? I went to Facebook yesterday, for example, and there was a post telling me to bring home plastic waste from the beach, but not sea life. Well, yeah. If I wasn’t going to do that anyway, would I do it because I’d been told?

I go to work, or the doctor, or just about anywhere, and there’s a poster about “safequarding”, which is like caring for people except that it’s a series of processes to be gone through. Thinking not feeling; there’s no injunction to “feel”. The significant verb on the safeguarding poster is “assess”. Yes, I agree that we need to care for children and vulnerable adults. No, there’s no argument against safeguarding. But do I care enough to do it, just because I’ve seen the poster?

Where are our hearts in all this? Where are our minds? There - first sound of the day. Not a seagull, nor the dawn chorus; it’s a distant car alarm. As so often happens when a car alarm goes off, we’re all rushing out of our houses to prevent the car being stolen. Not.

I have a DBS form - Disclosure and Barring Service - which certifies that I’m not a criminal. Officially. Nobody asked me, but there are databases somewhere. I remember the time I looked up the information that some online shopping entity held about me, and found that its algorithm had me pegged as a Spanish woman in her - my - mid-thirties.

Crimes aren’t committed by people who declare themselves in advance. I can see the point of DBS forms, can't argue against them, but would you trust me, because I’ve got one?

You would? Really? In that case... 

Ah, here we go. The day’s first trip to Facebook. A post reading, in white type on a purple square: “I have known for years there are no gurus on this earth - just YOU.”

Serendipity, right?

I have spoken. We’re here.
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    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

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    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

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

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

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


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

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


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    Read My Shorts?

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

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


    Roads without end

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

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    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

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

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

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

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

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


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    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

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

    Man down?

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


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

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

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    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

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