William Essex
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Chariots of the Forecasters

28/8/2018

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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. The sea’s pretty much flat but there are occasional flurries across the surface - which clearly means that the wind’s getting up and we could be facing a hurricane later. Oh, and the sun’s taken on that extra-bright brightness that it gets when it’s sharing the sky with dark clouds - or could this be the first hint of a massive solar flare that’s about to frazzle all our electronics?

If you’re reading this, you’ve survived - well done. Go tell your story to that photogenic team of government scientists - yes, those people over there, the thoughtful-looking young woman, the young man with glasses, the older man with an authoritative grey beard, the ethnic mix, the stereotypes - who are stepping through everything in their hazmat suits, breathing audibly and carrying old-fashioned geiger counters. No, that’s not a car alarm going off. Collect a thin grey blanket before you go - as a survivor you need to have a thin grey blanket round your shoulders - and make sure that tall young guy at the back - yes, the one shouting that it’s not over yet; the one they’re all stubbornly ignoring - hears what happened to you (sorry, hears exactly what happened to you).

Bit early for a swerve off into fantasy, surely? Because this could be Only The Beginning. [Oh, the wind outside my window. I look up and the sun’s gone and the trees are really moving - I can hear them. This could be evidence that The Creation, or The Universe, or Reality, call it whatever you like, pretty much gives you what you expect to get from it*. I didn’t really mean it about the hurricane and the solar flare. Life meets expectation. It’s been done before, keeps on being done, but it’s still an attractive story idea. If I ever get round to creating a universe, I’ll include that as one of the sub-quantum rules of nature. But - okay, yes. Doesn't fit with the "expectation" theme, but let’s keep the scene in which the scientists send a vast electron microscope whizzing round and round a circular tunnel under a Swiss mountain – and find me grinning back at them. “Surprise!”]

We’re celebrating the word “could” today. Five letters, not bad for Hangman because it’s short and even if you do get those two vowels early on, you’re still not really there. More useful as a tool for getting yourself a high profile in the media. If you can cook up some half-way plausible we’re-all-doomed scenario, base it on at least some kind of evidence and give yourself a job title that sounds impressive, you can really, ah, wow the punters, I believe that’s the phrase, with your concerned expression. But do practise it in the mirror first. No point going on the news to discuss your survey finding that cloudy days could lead to global warming - and failing to control your own urge to giggle.

He's got himself back on track. That's a surprise. And remember - “could” be, not “will” be. It’s the secret of all forecasting. You can dress it up and say just about anything if you remember “could”. As Head of Irresponsible Forecasting here at the Falmouth Institute of Unreliability, I’ve studied the signs, and I believe that they could point to the kind of outcome that will keep your viewers coming back for more. If I step up to the podium and show you - click; sorry - show you this - click, click; could use a little help here, this remote - what? Oh, press the green button with the arrow on it, sorry, ha ha  – show you this footage of the drama unfolding outside my window this morning. You see the clouds? The sun shining? And if you listen to the wind - I’m sorry, the audio seems - ah, here we are; click - listen to the wind, you see - hear, of course - see and hear clear signs that we could be in for a storm later. And that could develop into an apocalypse.

Yes, I know it’s a sunny day with a light breeze, but it could develop, is what I’m saying. Honourable mentions, by the way, for two recent articles, both effortlessly qualifying for gold in this blog post’s I Take It All Back category. Read How AI could kill off democracy by Jamie Bartlett at newstatesman.com, which is a serious analysis of a credible threat, and Sarah Gordon’s Why Brexit could save Britain’s countryside, Weekend FT magazine, 25th/26th August 2018, which describes a possible future for British farming. Both articles are clear evidence that the word “could” can be used constructively. I’m just allergic to the “Somebody says something could go wrong” style of headline-writing, which seems fashionable these days.

He’s holding it together quite well now. All of the above is just “Could” at work, though. In her personal life, Could is a free agent. Much happier than Should, who lives in the flat next door and never comes out for the spontaneous street parties that are such a feature of life in this imaginary universe. Should is weighed down with obligations, and worse, she’s never sure where those obligations came from - upbringing, education, social and work pressures generally – but they’re deep in her psyche and she’s only now learning to recognise them, let alone challenge them. Could tries to help, and they’re close friends, really, but it takes a lot of coaxing to bring Should out of her shell.

Oh, here we go. Spoke too soon. Could’s apartment is bright and airy, with light-wood floors and tall windows and billowy light curtains that move in the fresh air. There are mirrors and pictures and plants and a drafting table on which there’s always some new design being brought into being. Could works for herself, she’s freelance, but it’s more accurate to say that she plays for a living: she paints, draws, calls herself a graphic designer and makes very little money, but she’s happy following her own spontaneity. Small local galleries display (and sell) her pictures; she illustrates children's books and designs book covers; those are her funny little cartoon figures dancing through the pages of that magazine you like. If she could see her thoughts, which she can’t, she would paint them as butterflies. She’s late for everything, but people are invariably pleased when she does finally arrive.

He’s off. Should works in a bank. It’s a safe job. She has a pension scheme, and although she isn’t paid as much as you might expect, she’s already quite wealthy. If you ask her what she does, which you won’t because she doesn’t inspire curiosity, she’ll tell you that she’s in compliance. Then she’ll start to explain compliance - until Could, who knows her friend well, comes over to rescue you. Everybody wants to know what Could does, and sooner or later, you’ll see her being mobbed by expensive-looking people trying to impress her with whatever they value about their own lives. But she doesn’t like fast cars, she’s never heard of wherever you said, and she doesn’t go skiing anywhere, let alone there.

This time, Should rescues Could, because Should is beginning to recognise that (against all reason) Could is where the action is. If even her bosses are drawn to Could: if they’re challenged by her; if they need her to know that they matter - then what is it that she has, that they don’t? Should is a thinker, and finally, she’s turning her thought process to her own situation. Having lived next-door to Could for so long, having watched her from the day she moved in, having consciously dismissed her at first and then become gradually fascinated, having at first nurtured a sneaky feeling of superiority over her neighbour that, if she's honest, had to be worked at even from the outset, Should is finally beginning to realise that Could is not just irresponsible, careless, foolish after all. She's all of those things, yes, but there's something else as well, and Should wants to know what it is.

There’s going to be a moral. I just know there’s going to be a moral. Lying awake one night listening to the faint sound of music through the wall, Should thinks: I know what I’ve got, and how much, and where it is, but what am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my life right now, not in some planned-for future that won’t happen that way anyway? And exactly then, at four in the morning, midweek, Should gets out of bed, disables the alarm in the main room, turns on all the lights in the apartment, and sits on her sofa to make herself a list. She’ll research sound systems in the morning. Buy a bottle of wine. Perhaps a stylish little wine rack, she thinks, looking through at her kitchen. On impulse, feeling very brave, knowing what time it is, Should goes and makes herself a cup of tea. I’ll call in sick tomorrow, she thinks; I’ll take a day off. She doesn’t, but the thought that she nearly did sustains her through the day.

Could nearly misses the invitation. It’s in a matching envelope, small one, tiny weeny don’t-see-me one, with her name printed in tiny capitals on the front, slipped under the door near the hinge - the door catches it and slides it out of the way. But Could does see it, and life changes. The invitation says: would she like to join Should for a quick glass of wine tomorrow evening at six? Not a party, nothing special, just a quick glass and a chat. Like neighbours do. Sometimes. Not important if she can’t, so don’t worry, they can arrange another time, silly of me to assume… Could checks the time. 11pm. She’s just got in. Glass of wine - hey, yeah. She grabs the flowers from the vase - dripping, so takes the whole vase - and goes.

Uh oh. Should opens the door sleepy-eyed in dinky pink pyjamas and a matching dressing gown, big fleece slippers, a sleep-mask pushed up onto her forehead. She’s seen through the spyhole that it’s Could, but they still have to wait for a moment while she unlatches the chain and opens the door properly. Then there’s a misunderstanding that they both laugh about later: Should thinks there must be an emergency; Could tries to explain that she’s just come round for a drink now rather than waiting for the time stipulated on the invitation. "Why plan to have a drink tomorrow when we can have a drink today?" says Could.

In the end it’s Could who gets them inside, points out that it’s the weekend tomorrow anyway, gets the wine opened, gets them both sitting on the sofa, glass in hand, close together, Could doing the talking but Should at least nodding along, that little frown between her eyebrows showing that she's listening...

I don't believe it! Then it’s Could who acts upon a sudden impulse to-

But it's Should who follows up "Oh!" with "Okay..."

And there we leave them. I Could go on, but I don’t think I Should. They’re together now, still in separate apartments but thinking about it, and this works quite well as a happy beginning.

Yep. Told you. Here comes the moral. Did you notice “happy beginning” not “happy ending,” by the way? Very cute. Amazing how far you can go, if you bring together Could and Should.

*The Cosmic Ordering Service, Barbel Mohr, 1998

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There's advice on the internet about what to do if life gives you lemons. To fill the obvious gap: if a stone wall gives you daisies, go buy some lemons anyway. Celebrate.

There is, at the moment, a campaign in the UK to hold a People’s Vote on the terms of whatever shambolic compromise of an eleventh-hour, last-minute bodge-job of a deal the UK government accepts from the EU’s rather more media-savvy and assertive collection of B - can’t type the word any more - negotiators. A People’s Vote is, of course, a far cuddlier thing than, say, a Second Referendum, and it has the further advantage that you can no more argue with the result of a People’s Vote, than you can reject the verdict of a People’s Court.

Hold a Second Referendum, and you end up with a “best of three” campaign - assuming the people get it right this time - in the sense, they don’t show themselves up once again to be incapable of understanding the issues as clearly as We do. The whole B - my spellcheck suggests People’s Previous Vote - argument only goes away if the People’s Vote confirms that The People Meant It. Add the no-shows to the Leave votes, and you get a majority of people who didn’t vote to remain in the EU. Or vice-versa, yada yada.

If we can accept a People’s Vote but be against Referendums on some kind of principle, and if we can accept that The People voting in a People’s Vote somehow outvote the people voting in a referendum, then we arrive at an argument for correcting votes with Votes. Maybe the simplest thing would be to correct the result of the last general election with a People’s Election, and we can set off down that route to freedom and democracy.
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How much of what would a wood-burner burn if...?

23/8/2018

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Here we are, in these most interesting of times, and nothing is happening. There are stock figures behaving predictably - Uncle Donald has tweeted something again, somebody who’s been famous for a long time has died - and even the natural world is co-operating: we have fires, etc., to demonstrate the truth of global warming. But when was the last time you were surprised? It’s not news that everything’s happening in accordance with what we expect.

Never mind that; it’s not reality either. I wonder, sometimes, whether there’s a real world that we’re just not seeing. Not in any religious/supernatural sense: I just wonder whether we're capable of reading reality. What was that line? Burnt Norton, T S Eliot. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." And for that reason perhaps, human kind fails even to see it. Our minds are constructed within a defensive perimeter of preconceptions, assumptions, confirmation bias. We see reality through a glass with our imagination's film version of life projected onto it. [Sorry. I seem to be channelling some weirdly pretentious psychobabble at the moment. Keep reading. It might wear off.]

Not him again, please. ​We follow the US president’s Twitter feed, because it’s a source that’s worked for us in the past, and we miss the obvious fact that he’s just a fallible human being like the rest of us (spoiler: there's more on Donald Trump below the picture - sorry). Fallible in his own way, sure, but you try walking a mile in his shoes. We’re saddened at the departure of [insert name here], and the reports take on a standard format: she was so influential; she was kind to me; here’s an example of her wit. An album of previously unheard out-takes will be released in time for Christmas.


But we miss the truth of things. We overlay everything with its - his, her - role in the human drama. Films adhere to a structure; so do books, myths, leaks, rumours; so does life as we know it. For example, smoke billowed out over the centre of Falmouth on Sunday morning. I saw it as I turned onto Clare Terrace, looking for a parking space. A small crowd had gathered to watch those great clouds of black and grey smoke rising over the densely packed houses.

I joined them and we stood and watched as the fire didn’t rage out of control, the area wasn’t evacuated and firefighters weren’t drafted in from other towns. Perplexing, almost, and we all knew what should have been happening - but this fire wasn’t sticking to the script and it didn’t demonstrate anything about global warming - somebody had just lit a bonfire. [The clouds weren't that great; the houses aren't that densely packed. Whenever actors in a drama ask a question, they insert the word "exactly" for added emphasis. How exactly do you want this, inspector?]


We could, of course, and did, rush to judge the perpetrator of Falmouth’s Downtown Bonfire Shock for contributing a small collection of particulates to atmospheric pollution, but - hey. Pile of garden waste. Box of matches. Well-thumbed copy of What we did without even thinking about it before everybody got so cross about everything (William Essex, Imaginary Books, 2018). The thought comes into my head that intent matters. Intent is the difference between manslaughter - didn’t mean to cause death - and murder - set out to kill. In the context of midtown bonfires, getting rid of garden waste by burning it is a different offence from setting out deliberately to pollute the world.

Seriously? Back to Trump again? But we kind of take the opportunity, don’t we, to condemn? Donald Trump is now filtered down to us by journalists he’s antagonised in the past. And that’s fine because they give us what we want. Speaking of which - sorry, this is an absolutely screeching handbrake-turn of a subject-change but I have to write about something other than The Man - there was a thing in the paper the other day - no doubt picked up by broadcast media, but I missed it - about UK government proposals to regulate “wood-burner fuels”. Yes, wood. Burners of wood. The fuel they burn. You spotted the oxymoron. But also coal. We’re burning inefficiently wet wood, apparently, which means global warming is our fault, and anybody who burns house coal is even more to be condemned.

I love this one. I spent a whole day grinning at the thought of all those legislation-writers compiling lists of exemptions. Under the heading of “unintended consequences”, let’s imagine the Winter of Discontent that would ensue if, say, crematoria were suddenly (unintentionally) banned from burning anything at all except government-sanctioned lengths of wood dried in accordance with the regulations set out in appendix blah blah blah. Would they be banned from cremating, you know, actual bodies? Or would bodies have to be seasoned and dried in accordance, et cetera? What about hospital incinerators?

And now we’ve veered off into history. Imagine those racks of bodies, hanging up to dry. A feature of the original Winter of Discontent, back in ‘78/’79, was the strike by eighty gravediggers (union members, part of the wider industrial action; I’m abbreviating a complex situation, and possibly a full account should be included in one of the lessons of history we’re supposed to learn). Eighty gravediggers went on strike, and Liverpool City Council hired a factory in Speke to store bodies. The factory began to fill up at a rate of 25 bodies per day (Wikipedia). Solutions proposed by official spokespeople - aloud, in the presence of journalists - included: grieving relatives being allowed to dig their own graves (you know what I mean); the Army doing it; private companies getting involved. Oh, and it was suggested that the dead could be buried at sea. [The gravediggers eventually settled for a 14% pay rise.]

Buried at sea. Yes. The suggestion was made, hypothetically but by the government-appointed authority figure handling the crisis, that if the number of unburied dead exceeded the available storage capacity, or, y’know, hung around too long (they were in plastic bags with a bury-by date six weeks out), they could be taken out to sea and tipped over the side. Or, given that the government was speaking about letting relatives do the digging, perhaps a pop-up industry would have appeared - trips around the bay, bury your auntie on the way.

You've lost the plot completely here. What would that have done for fish stocks and the fishing industry? A lot of good, obviously. In fact - think of the environmental and economic benefits all round. Maybe we should applaud initiatives to restrict the burning of anything other than government-approved small blocks of wood. Crematoriums - enough with this "crematoria" nonsense - could go into the smoked-fish business. And meat. Biltong. Cheeses. Think of those former fishing villages, suddenly busy again. Think of the blog post to be written about the row over the banning of black life jackets. "We have to be able to see mourners, if they fall into the sea," said a spokesperson. And never mind the Marie Celeste - Uncle Albert's Funeral chugged off into the morning mist, never to be seen again.

Sometimes, on a moonless night, when the wind's in the east and the tide's running hard against the shore, it's as if you can hear the cries of lost mourners coming to you from somewhere far out, towards the rocks where legend tells - sorry. We're not going there either. Uncle Albert sleeps with the fishes, and the rest of it's just the kind of silly story that crusty old seadogs tell credulous tourists in this kind of sleepy, out-of-the-way blog post. After lunch, the tour bus is going to take us to the gravebuoy-making factory on the edge of town.

Burying people on land is just a cultural norm, after all, as is cremating them. As a seafaring nation set fair to leave its mooring next to France and the Netherlands, ta-rah boom crash, maybe burial at sea would be a fitting tradition to adopt - but let's not get into The People and their Votes. We could do burial at sea. It would very quickly become an ancient tradition. Leave it at that. Just as we all know what is meant by the term “funeral pyre”, so we all have a mental picture to go with “burial at sea” - although the ranks of sailors in white uniforms and the bugler are extras - please see the published list of charges. Yes, the body is wrapped in white, like a plaster cast, but no, you can’t draw on the wrapping.


I’m in favour of thinking outside the box, even if the box is a coffin. And - oh! I don’t believe this!

I don’t believe this!

I'm okay. I just need a moment.


That's it. He's gone. Totally gone. I started writing this post with an idea that I was going to say something about the confirmation bias we apply not just to the news but to the world around us. Confirmation bias is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.” Thank you, Wikipedia.

I wanted to write about that and started the post with that in mind. I even looked up cognitive bias as well. That would have come into it too. But the post kind of got away from me, somewhere around the bonfire I think, as posts do, and I started on a speculation (oh, this is embarrassing) as to the kind of wood that a wood-burner would burn if a wood-burner could burn - actually, couldn’t burn any old fuel. Then the Winter of Discontent, then the bit where crematoriums became niche smoked-food restaurants, emporia probably, then Uncle Albert chugged into view, then ... everything went a bit hazy, but there were these voices, crying out, and I wanted to go to them, and then…

...and then I sat back, raised my mug of coffee in my right hand, and with my left hand, idly typed “burial at sea” into Google. And I discovered...

Yes! It’s an option. Already, albeit in a small way, a tradition. You can be buried at sea. But would you believe it? There’s a dress code. And a whole collection of rules. This absolutely is a British tradition waiting to be adopted by the rest of us.

So here's my style guide for the big day. If you want to be buried at sea, you must wear “light, biodegradable clothing”, bright colours acceptable, and you must carry identification. No, really: if you drift, and you’re caught in a fishing net, the fisher folk will want to know who you are. I imagine you’ll be included in the part of the catch that’s returned to the sea, but that’s not specified (I’m getting this from the BBC). Your coffin should have holes in it, and it should be weighted down.

Oh, and one final faux pas to be avoided - if anybody offers to embalm you before your burial at sea - refuse.

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Rare to see trees dancing like this. I had to use a very fast shutter speed to freeze the movement. I believe it is true that, before the invention of photography, nobody knew how horses' legs moved at speed, either.

There was a thing across the news networks last night about a US lawyer who had apparently paid money to two women in return for their silence about what they’d done with (to?) the US president. At no point did the man himself say, “I did not have sex with those women,” but he was quoted talking about when he knew about the payments. Yes, we were back with, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” The coverage came across as a homage to the Watergate generation, and frankly, I’m beginning to think about putting money on Donald Trump getting in for a second term. [No, I’m not coming out in support. Just saying.]

We are invited to believe that the president knew the two women. It is implied in the reportage that he behaved with them in ways that - well, if I’m still able to do what I’m imagining right now at his age, I’ll be happy about it. I’m not sure whether I’m assuming complete indifference on the part of the US electorate, or just realism - he’s a powerful man, and the #himtoo aspect is established. But I don’t see the indignation. Not the genuine indignation*. We are invited to be shocked, and therefore to vote against him. But while [whatever they’re implying] is the kind of thing we should be indignant about - should - the fact is, you know, we’re out here living in the real world. And what’s it got to do with his job?

You'll snap the handbrake cable if you go on like this.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, the Chair of the Magistrates’ Association was reported as suggesting that criminals could be recruited as magistrates. The objective, apparently, is to increase diversity. People with minor convictions should not be excluded from sitting up on the high chair in court, banging the gavel and shouting, “Order!” Or something like that. I don’t think they get to wear wigs. But yes, criminals should be recruited as magistrates, was the gist of the story. [As you can imagine, John Bache didn’t go quite as far as some of the coverage suggests - but he did say that a “relatively minor criminal record” would be no barrier to recruitment. Er, according to the quoted remarks I read.]

The criminals-as-magistrates thing was about diversity, yes - magistrates are all [you can fill this in for yourself] of a certain age - but it was also about falling numbers. People - the usual people; okay, the usual suspects - just aren’t volunteering to be magistrates. The usual crowd’s not filling the gaps, so suddenly we’re open to recruits from the real world. So to speak. It did cross my mind that one solution to NHS staff shortages would be to have relatively undead patients wheeling the trolleys around, and no doubt we’ll soon be hearing from a government minister about a ground-breaking new initiative - which (would you believe it?) will just happen to cost less money - whereby older children in school will be recruited as classroom assistants to teach the juniors.

Is delegation of responsibility the same as abdication? No, of course they’ll be supervised. A single teacher will be able to supervise up to five classes simultaneously from a central point. Very efficient. Mental-health patients are already told to call the Samaritans when they can’t get through to their carers. Hospitals (and supermarkets) outsource their parking (and, hospitals, their catering). Prisons are run by private companies - did you see that recent story? The armed forces are sponsored by - no, wait. That’s a forward-looking statement. I don’t think the armed forces are sponsored yet. I’m quite looking forward to writing about that - but even more, to covering the arguments when it’s discovered that soldiers in war zones routinely unpick the more eye-catching logos from their uniforms.

The common thread here - somewhere in the US political system, two women are negotiating book deals; in a hollowed-out volcano somewhere in the Welsh mountains, Ernst Stavro Blofeld is filling out his application to be a magistrate - the common thread is not the clear evidence that the centre cannot hold, nor really the indifference - US voters don’t react to the president’s private (sic) life; honest people don’t volunteer to support the UK legal system. None of that. It’s the disconnect.

The cat does still have to be white, though. There are standards. 
All those journalists, putting together their “packages” about what the US president did or didn’t do with one or more women. Of course people should be shocked. Of course people should turn against him. But the world doesn’t respond to those stimuli any more. Those buttons are still there to be pressed, but they’re no longer connected to the public nervous system. This is populism. It’s not anger. It’s just that people aren’t listening any more. All that just isn’t relevant to their lives. Being a magistrate is - huh! If they want me to volunteer, they should make it easier.


One day, not far from now, the clerk of a magistrate’s court will look up from his paperwork, at the start of a new day, and say, “Oh, hello. Back so soon?” Yes, I am back again, but I’m not the accused this week. I’m the magistrate. “Really? In that case, turn left through the door. Yes, of course you can take your cat.” And I’ll go left through the door, find the court, take my seat. First offender - ah, yes, I was expecting him. Repeat speeding offence. In that ridiculous car of his. Now, let me see, the maximum penalty…


​*Among the journalists, I mean.
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Sailing Dutch

16/8/2018

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Today, I shall write a short piece about the word “triangulation”. Interesting word. Seriously. Thirteen letters and no e, but still not good for Hangman because as soon as you see the -ation, you’ve got too much of the rest of it. Anyway, you need short words for Hangman. Triangulation stays interesting, though, because it's also a word with a range of meanings. Politicians use it to refer to one instance of their tedious cunning (“triangulating” their message); spies use it to describe [redacted]; psychologists talk about the Karpman Drama Triangle, or they do if they’ve recently put triangulation into Wikipedia in their search for meaning(s). Triangulation isn’t curvy, but it sounds as though it bounces.
 
Triangulation is a tactic in chess and a strategy in currency speculation - “strategy” might be overdoing it, but I like the tactic/strategy progression. Triangulation can be manipulative; it can be a method of helping one person through another. Finally, triangulation is the art of drawing lines and triangles and thereby deciding where you are. It’s that last meaning that interests us now. Interests me, anyway (the post discussing the linguistic trick whereby the word “is” the thing will have to wait for another day). Triangulation is what navigators do when they want to know where they are - in the narrow geographical sense of finding out where their boat is on the map.
 
We’re being serious today. They go up on deck with a gadget - in my day, it was a protractor and a piece of string, but Form One was only ever interested in the height of the tree on the far side of the playground. Form One never sailed the high seas and they don’t fit here, but I remember their faces and it’s nice of them to drop by. Navigators go up on deck, extinguish any fires that might be burning, then use their gadget to work out where “magnetic north” is on the horizon. There’s also true north, if I remember rightly, but that, er, plays you false if you’re finding your place off a shallow rock-infested coastline. True north lacks the magnetism, the sheer charisma, of magnetic - sorry. This is a serious blog post about a thirteen-letter word. We’ll put a lid on that one right now. To continue.
 
[But just quickly - digression - isn’t it a shame that we can’t repurpose the term “angle grinder” for navigation? It would fit so well.]
 
To continue.
Yes. The boy stands on the recently extinguished deck, aligning his gadget with magnetic north, and then, because this is also an equal-opportunity blog post, he consults with the girl standing on the slightly less blackened part of the deck, and the man and woman, and the representatives of the several ethnic minorities on board, and they all agree as to which of the symbols from the Ordnance Survey map they’re going to seek out on the rocky coast to the left.
 
Port. Left. Not starboard, not dead ahead. Port out, starboard home, as the saying goes, or at least went, and we’ll assume that they’re heading up the right-hand side of the map with the rocky coastline to their port. They’re all standing there, feet pleasantly warm, clutching the day’s first mugs of tea/coffee, and as the horizon lightens with the coming sunrise, they can see that during the night, the horizon has changed from the endless straight-line flatness of the open ocean, to the rocky immediacy of the coastline.
 
Port is where the land is supposed to be, and it’s there. That’s a relief, actually. There is at least one person still in the wheelhouse (one or two of them had wondered, seeing the crowd on deck; the wheelhouse isn’t lit now, and it’s difficult to see inside). The sails are flapping a bit, but the engine is running and the crowded little boat with the still-warm deck is moving forward nicely. They just need to know how far up the blue bit of the map they’ve come since last time they got out the gadgets. It was a dark and stormy night, obviously, last night, with lots of storytelling, and keeping track of progress hasn’t been easy. “Triangulation,” they mutter to each other, uneasily. “We need to do some triangulation.”
 
You're losing it again.
So, having found magnetic north, they work out the angle from the boat to the Triangulation Pillar they can just make out through the mist, and then, as the sun rises, the man with the eye patch and the tricorn hat and the wooden leg and the parrot on his shoulder (I thought he was with you) raises his hand and points. “I see a sign!” he cries, and sure enough, it’s the Windmill With Or Without Sails they had been expecting. Leaving a small group arguing over whether they’re actually going to see a Graticule Intersection At 5’ Intervals and what it will look like if they do, they go inside and draw lines on the map. Somebody uses the words “reciprocal”, but everybody else pretends not to hear.
 
And there they are. On the map. A point at the intersection of straight lines, beating on, moving under power, going with the current, borne forward ceaselessly into the future. I’m better at navigation than I thought I was. I took a course once, with a Dutch guy, but flunked it. [Note. It is characteristic of this author that he embeds half-references to other works in his writing. Here, for example, we hear an echo of F Scott Fitzgerald, and this is followed by a rather clumsy attempt to pack in a reference to the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In some tellings of that story, the captain of the doomed ship is heard to ask a young crew member (unidentified), as they both walk up the gangplank to embark for the last time, “What’s the protractor for?” But this is a recent addition.] They never did find the ship. I told him he needed a piece of string.
 
A happy ending would be nice, at least? And there we leave the little boat, sailing up the rocky coast, low in the water, crowded with its multitude of peoples on board, course set, somebody holding the wheel, headed for the beach where it will beach, ha ha, tipping sideways at the last moment because nobody thought to retract the keel, leaving everybody to wade ashore, the last of humanity, come to this deserted island (with only its weird profusion of Ordnance Survey landmark buildings and structures to suggest that it had ever been inhabited) in this post-apocalyptic fable spun out of the word “triangulation”, to move into the (okay, there’s also a village) deserted cottages, farmsteads, corner shops and Selected Places of Tourist Interest, to begin again, but this time without conflict or plastic bags.
 
Triangulation is also the thing you do when you emerge from an embarrassing little panic about a laptop glitch (keep calm and clear the cache) to find that (a) you have a Second Website, and (b) the template for your Second Website shows a clutch of little blog posts with pictures at the top - all of which (c) put you in mind of book covers with blurbs underneath. If we imagine those thoughts as the metaphorical lines on an imaginary map, then we can probably get away with suggesting that the “You are here!” point at the intersection looks remarkably like the kind of cartoon idea-lightbulb that would carry with it the inspiration for an entire - but I’ll tell you later. Watch this space, that space, and come to think of it, tonight’s the night for the fireworks at the end of Falmouth Week. Watch them too, if you’re here.

Picture
I take a lot of pictures that end up looking like this. I think it's the light on the water that triggers the primitive take-photograph instinct. Almost appropriate this time, with the early-morning sun and the crunkled-up horizon.

There's a quotation going the rounds on Facebook at the moment. It's a remark - possibly a lament - by a scientist, from a few years ago, and while I'm leading up to it I'll just also mention that I did come across a "Did he really say that?" exchange in the comments section of - I don't know, something. So bear that in mind, and here we go.

The scientist is Gus Speth, and the remark attributed to him is: "I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with thirty years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that."

For a ghost of a moment, I thought that we, the people were at fault for not being rational agents, and for an even smaller unit of time I thought of that Brecht poem about the government dissolving the people, but then I thought: this is realism. This is factoring in a variable that wasn't quite so accurately factored in before. I find that Gus Speth is the author of a memoir, Angels by the River (James Gustave Speth, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), and a number of other books.

I think the time has come for me to start reading Gus Speth.
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Don't think old guys do, actually.

14/8/2018

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Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe it's just me. My default assumption is that any glitch with a computer is going to be something beyond comprehension. In the early days, this was true. My first "serious" computer - in the sense, thing I used for work - was an Amstrad. Never had a problem with it. I wrote a large chunk of my first published book on a Psion Organiser Series 3. That little gadget was magical: I could carry it in the top inside pocket of my jacket and write even while standing up on crowded commuter trains.

Yes, of course I carried notebooks and scrap paper. Pens. But that Amstrad and that cute little Psion Organiser did what I wanted technology to do back then. They jumped the "transcribing my notes" stage. They were a shortcut to the "printing out a final typescript" stage. Back then, I would have understood the term "digital storage" to mean a cardboard filing box with a futuristic pattern printed on the outside. I had a Commodore 64 at one point, and the long wait while Elite loaded was all I needed to know about new technology.

​Then everybody started babbling on about bandwidth and processor speed. There was a thing called a Pentium Chip. Behind the typewrite on my desk, a huge Apple screen appeared. Somebody from the studio took a picture of me - on a film camera - using scissors and a Pritt Stick to lay out pages in the shadow of my Apple. There would have been a little bottle of Tippex as well, and I would have been working to get my page layouts into the envelope in time for the afternoon bike messenger to the typesetter. There was a training course associated with the Apple. I wasn't allowed to switch it on until I'd done the training course.

I remember all those old typewriters being stored in case the digital revolution didn't take. I remember working on a screen with the objective of producing a print-out. The early days of email: sending between glass-walled offices; meeting the eyes of the person who had just received... There were people who scrawled their emails - no grammar, punctuation, caps lock on or off. I became familiar with a little black bomb symbol. Even Apple computers reach the limits of their tolerance sometimes, or did back then.

​Working through all that was an odd and complex challenge. The technology presented its problems in a language that assumed you knew the basics, and/or spoke American, and very little of what they did could be fitted to a pre-tech mindset. I remember the day I worked out that a website's pages weren't pages you turned, like pages in a (printed) book. I wasn't interested enough to devote time to un-baffling myself, though, and I suppose I just got acclimatised to the assumption that when something came up, I wasn't going to have even the basic mindset even to start fixing it. I just wanted to write words (as in: think about planning to get round to writing words, right after I finish reading this book).

A big part of my attitude to early computers was formed when I made the discovery that everything in a document could be lost, if the machine or the programme shut down unexpectedly. Advice to save regularly was always given in the past tense - you should have hit save - because everything about computers was somehow so obvious to everybody else that they didn't think to tell you in advance. That, and the mulish expression that came onto people's faces when they were telling you about all the wonderful things computers could do - and wanting it to be true. Early car enthusiasts probably wore the same expression.
 
Digression. The man who came whenever I had IT problems, after I'd gone freelance. I remember the odd little pang of jealousy when my computer showed him screens it had never showed me. I remember his story about being on a trawler late at night, spotting a periscope, using Morse Code and a torch to signal I C U to the submarine practising its trawler-stalking. I remember the time I called him up and told him there was smoke coming out of my big old monitor. "You've probably got a software conflict. Shut things down, restart, and let's see what happens." No, I told him. It's actually on fire. Yes, of course I'd shut it down by then, but I wasn't going to miss telling him.

All of which might explain why my reaction to the sudden refusal of my new laptop to let me into the 'edit site' page of this website was: download several other browsers, delete several browsers when they didn't work; buy the domain williamessex.online, start building a website there, write a blog post using my old laptop, dream up Second Website Theory citing Asimov's Foundation trilogy as a precedent, see below, go down and bother the guy behind the counter at the computer store near the cinema (again), write to the Weebly helpdesk.

Melissa E replied. Had I considered clearing my cache?

​Er...  

​Thank you, Melissa.

There is now a Second Website, and yeah, the guy behind the counter might have said something about clearing the cache now I come to think about it (from now on, I shall take my problems to the computer store in a calm, rational, receptive, listening, panic-free state of mind), but the main thing is - normal service resumed. Interesting how the mind works. We are (I am) the product(s) of our (my) experience. Not time travellers from a previous world, panicking at the machines.
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Laying the Foundation

11/8/2018

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If this site every goes dark - Friday comes and there's no new post; years pass and it's still this sentence at the top - you might want to - well, you might want to breathe a sigh of relief, but if you came here on purpose (thanks), you might want to try william essex dot online.

There's nothing there at the moment (except that I pressed "publish" on the template so you get to look at that, plus ads temporarily), so I'm not linking the address (and I'd hate you to watch how slowly I get my act together over there), but I had a glitch on my other (new) laptop the other day, and that got me daydreaming about paper back-ups, hard drives, thumb drives, redundant systems, cloud-based computing, server farms, solar flares knocking out electronics generally, sea levels rising, zombie apocalypses, black holes ... and then I had a thought.

If I actually sign up for a second website, maybe I'll be able to watch YouTube clips without those earnest young entrepreneurs telling me how easily they set up their websites. I've found that if I keep doing online banking, the bank stops sending me those pictures of the young woman in exercise gear, at the gym, who's chosen just that moment to check her balance on her smartphone. So I transact like crazy. Perhaps the same principle applies here. Perhaps if I just set up a website and tinker with it occasionally, the young bloke in the specs who's just set up his website and now leans forward, one elbow on the desk, and starts being very frank with me about how easy it all is - will go away.

I signed up for the minimum package over there, hence the ads, but I'll upgrade as and when I get my act together. The thing with the new laptop was, it decided as of Thursday evening last, to block my access to this page. Not the dashboard, but the "edit site" page. My chromebook (Chromebook?) did the same. The man behind the counter at the computer store just down from the cinema did what he always does when I come through the door - carefully, slowly, he explained a few possible solutions that I could try at home, and then he sent me away without charge. Usually, that works.

But this time, when I got home, his possible fixes didn't work, so I think I might have an excuse actually to get in there and pay him something. It's about time. He'll probably fix the thing, but if it turns out that my new laptop's awkward little moment is the first sign of an impending global meltdown in all my current IT dispositions - yeah, I can work with the template I've chosen. And anyway, there are precedents. I dimly remember, from years ago reading under the sheets with a torch, that the conclusion of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (spoiler) somehow involves the discovery that there's a second Foundation hidden behind the first.

I've been told not to mention any movies for a while, so let's put it this way. If you're breeding dinosaurs from blood preserved in mosquitoes preserved in prehistoric amber, you will know the importance of maintaining a second island. If your first Death Star was shot up by pesky rebels, you will know how much it matters to build a second Death Star - secretly - with absolutely the minimum possible number of fatal vulnerabilities.

There is now a Second Website. This one's built on Weebly. I like Weebly. I have no plans to leave Weebly. If there was a "Like" button I would press it. Weebly! Weebly! Don't misunderstand me. But - yeah. Just in case. Dot online kind of covers all the bases, I think.
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I write this, and then the weather changes.

9/8/2018

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Easy to forget, but there was a time when rain would fall from the sky. Days were cold, and going outside meant wrapping up warm and finding the other glove. Today, there’s sun streaming in through the windows, the gulls are singing, sort of, and the grey ships are still in the harbour.

About the only thing that could spoil this peaceful scene would be me mentioning – brace yourself – Brexit. Sorry. I know the subject doesn’t come up in polite conversation. I know it’s gone from boring-subject-to-be-avoided to irritating-noise-on-all-broadcast-media. But there was something I wanted to say, and I think I can get from Brexit to something more interesting.

Besides, we’ve had a bit too much excitement in this blog over recent weeks. The Inner William, the one who lets his hair grow long, wears open sandals and wanders the beaches looking for the one footprint that will tell him it’s time to build the stockade – where did that come from? Anyway, that guy – he’s had too much sun recently.

And what better way to dampen the spirits? Brexit is the ready-made, the pick-your-side binary conflict of this transient moment. It’s the pre-existing news story that enables reporters to look busy without having to go out and find some actually new news. It’s the ready-to-wear, off-the-peg, drive-through, confected argument that holds our attention while the real politics goes on behind the scenes. It’s pre-packaged thinking for social media. It’s–

There was a piece on the news last night in which a young reporter went around the Edinburgh Fringe (ha!) asking performers about Brexit; mind you, they all seemed to have dreamed up performances about Brexit (huh!). You go for entertainment and you get Brexit. And now it’s even here. I’m ashamed of myself. So maybe – what’s that you’re saying? – maybe I should just hurry up and say my piece about Brexit and get on to something else?

There are other blogs, you know.


Okay, well, thanks for coming. Am I alone now? No – you’re still here. Thanks for staying. What’s that? Oh, you’re still looking for your other glove. You do realise that was just imaginary rain and cold in the opening paragraph? Yes, I know what Sartre said other people were. And yes, okay, it is very quiet and peaceful here now that I’ve mentioned Brexit – look, if you don’t mind, I’ll just keep going.

[Feel free to skip this paragraph.] Both the 1975 and the 2016 referendums (look up “referendum plural” on Google; oddly appropriate little boxed definition from Wikipedia) asked simple questions. In 1975, abbreviating it for the conspiracy theorists among us (hi, didn’t see you behind the curtain), it was “Should we stay in?” and in 2016, it was “Should we remain or leave?” Same question with a slightly different slant. [In 1975, one losing-side slogan was “Out! And into the world.” Just saying.]

[If you did skip that paragraph, the point being made was simply that the Brexit referendum asked a very simple question. There was some historical stuff, but never mind.] So we’ve taken a very simple question, and from it, we’ve created a hugely detailed argument between two hugely detailed opposing points of view. That was my point really. We can’t argue a simple question. We have to build up the wrongness is the other side until we can see it as delusional or just plain crazy, and that gets us out of just straightforwardly debating our point of view. How afraid are we, of not having our received wisdom confirmed? [I'll leave you to insert the word "exactly" wherever you want the emphasis.]

To digress slightly, in one of the papers a while back, a columnist wrote: “The vote for Brexit was in part an attempt to relive the emotional heights of Britain’s second world war.” Really? In fact, yes, I remember getting up that day feeling that I wanted to relive the Dunkirk evacuation. Or perhaps D-Day, I mused, over my breakfast muesli. Perhaps this is my chance to relive the Burma campaign. Not that I lived it first time round, you understand, and hardly any of us did. But still – Brexit. We should have voted on the beaches. Then people would have realised we weren’t just answering a simple question. They don’t make referendums like they did when I was a lad, you know.

John Wanamaker (no idea; I just looked up the quote) said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Roughly half of the votes cast in the 2016 referendum were cast by gullible, misinformed, deranged criminal lunatics bent on driving the country into disaster – and we get to choose which half. The same columnist wrote, in the same column: “…we now know one thing about Brexit: it will be a failure…” and yes, I am quoting that out of context, hence the dots. We get to make our own definitive forward-looking statements about what Brexit will be, too.

Funny, isn’t it? Whenever anybody offers me a cup of tea, I relive the lives of the tea planters of an earlier historical period, just as my flat white from Good Vibes or Espressini (or Beacon Coffee – new one) puts me right there in the hold of the prison ship, being transported to Australia after sentencing. I don’t drink cappuccino because I don’t fancy making nice with Lucrezia Borgia. To un-digress now, I remember the days of the religious wars, when a simple message of tolerance became a series of global (by the standards of the time) conflicts over the precise letter of various doctrines.

I remember a history lesson – this is going way back – on the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation. Was that the intention? To trigger a passionate, antagonistic debate over what just happened to the piece of bread when it was broken? Was it still bread? Did it represent–? Did it actually become–?  A debate where the penalty for coming up with the wrong answer was – I mean, really? But that’s human nature, isn’t it? That’s us. My guess is, the important part of that one was: think of me when you get together to eat – sorry, think of Me. And the not-even-second-most-important part was: don’t get hung up on details you can’t get right anyway. But – yeah. That’s us.

Human nature. Mind you, I was touched last night when a young Fringe performer shared his insight that people who hold opposing views aren’t necessarily raving fascist-beast monsters. I think I remember he said something about his mother voting against him – “against him” being my way of not disclosing which way either of them voted; “against him” being the point, really, come to think of it. Brexit’s really boring. But maybe we’re learning from it.

How would history have been different if Galileo hadn’t been forced to recant his view that the sun revolved around the earth? The Inquisition threatened him with torture if he didn’t proclaim publicly that the United Kingdom would be better off staying in – sorry, that the sun revolved around the earth in compliance with a particular reading of scripture.

For me, the answer to that question is more interesting than simple. Galileo wouldn’t have been held under house arrest for the remainder of his life, so he wouldn’t have had all that time to write. But all the other would-be scientists and discoverers of his time might have felt able to speak up, publish, sound off, rant about the truth of things. The mistake, in Galileo’s case as always, is for the holders of authority to retreat into the detail of the letter of what has been said rather than the spirit of what flows, and orthodoxy is all about the detail of the letter.

That’s my Brexit monologue. Thank you for listening. You can clap now. Hello? I said you can clap now. Could we turn the lights back up? Thanks – oh.

Maybe I should transfer this to the Edinburgh Fringe next year.


Picture
"Still Life with Seaweed and Footprints" (2018). Essex's work is at once plangent, liminal and coruscating - words more commonly associated with a certain kind of book review. This picture, his masterpiece, was achieved one morning in a car park in Penryn. Ten minutes early for an appointment, Essex discovered his small red camera at the bottom of his rucksack and, in his own words, "went off in search of a picture that I could use to express some ideas about the captions you get on modern photography".

This curious habit of writing a second blog post under the picture. It’s going to have to stop. The phrase “fair-weather sailor,” used literally, describes a person who only goes out sailing in a flat calm, being unable to handle anything like good (as in: challenging) sailing weather. The phrase “cold-weather blogger,” used this morning, describes me sitting here today. Too much sun. Too much pleasant breeze coming in through the open windows.

Come December, and I’ll tell you what I think. Twice. Once above the picture and once below. Today, I’m going out back to do some watering. The roses are having a good year, although two of the recently bought miniatures dried out and had to be coaxed back to life, and the new magnolia hasn’t been doing half as well as it would have been, had I not left it without water for a crucial week of hot sunshine. Senior moments are fine until they affect the garden (and last a week).

So, yes, I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave this for now.

[The finely drawn uncial script with pictures of winged babies in the margins ends at this point. The writer, clearly agitated, continues in a near-illegible scrawl using a faulty Biro that leaks inkblots and scratches the vellum.]

No, we’re not. I suppose it’s inevitable that I refer to the weather as fine, after weeks of set-fair heatwave, and the monsoon starts.


The light greying out through the skylight, and then the hammering of the rain. The air fresh to the touch. Pleasant, actually. But inconvenient. The rain came hammering down yesterday afternoon (time passes differently while I’m writing these posts) and I sat in the doorway thinking about stair-rods – I remember stair-roads – and climates where heat alternates with heavy rain. Global warming is important and it’s happening, I know, but it doesn’t half trigger some entertaining daydreams.
​
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Ordered organic, would settle for fresh, get survival rations.

2/8/2018

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Saw the weather forecast last night. There’s a lot of red weather coming up from the Mediterranean, pushing out the yellow weather and turning London orange. We’re in for a resurgence of the heatwave. This I find encouraging, albeit in a rather sinister “things are getting interesting” kind of way. And yes, I do remember the heatwave of Summer 1976, thank you.
 
In particular, I remember sitting outside that pub on the North side of that famously wide high street, at a big round table with a group of friends, and inside, on the machine, Bryan Hyland starts to sing “So we gotta say goodbye, for the Summer,” and we all hear it, and we all realise: it’s over. I remember the news pictures of parched ground. I remember Paolo. Simon. K. The round table, although that was later, and that basement. Did we wonder whether future Summers would be like this? I suppose we did. Oh, and I remember the Rolling Stones at Knebworth. “What are we going to do now, Keith? Rip This Joint? Okay.”
 
Howell’s rain dance only worked once. Yes, and waking up on the lawn outside that house with the waterwheel, after that party. That false clarity [Oh dear. I seem to have spilt coffee over several of my memories of Summer’76.] as though all of consciousness has crystallised at the edges. Cracked fields with canyons in them. Jerry Cornelius. David Bowie. Max Demian. Lighters held up in the darkness at the Deutschelandhalle. Those hand-drawn maps of [Oops. Again. How clumsy of me.] and the walk up from the lake afterwards. Was that the year – never mind.
 
And I remember a politician by the name of Denis Howell, who was appointed Minister for Drought shortly before the rains came that Autumn. He was Minister of Floods for a short while, and then, in the ‘78/’79 Winter, Minister for Snow. I remember that Winter, too. The house painted in pink and green stripes. Those jeans you wore, if this means I'm thinking of you, and the name of the cat. Refuelling the helicopter, and the ride back under the Golden Gate Bridge.
 
Did the referendum on joining – actually, staying in – the then-EC happen in Summer 1976? No, 1975. I remember that we had bundles of rectangular paper fliers, about the size of something you’d see stuck in the back window of a car, bearing black-print-on-white slogans about the benefits of continued EC membership. They were great for cutting up and then invisibly mending (Sellotape) with the letters rearranged to say something rude. That referendum was funnier, more decisive, and I suppose I could say that it was over more quickly.
 
False memory. Except that it wasn’t. It didn’t ask a fresh question and it didn’t end the argument. It was a referendum on changing an existing relationship with the European Community, and it set us up for several more decades of arguing about Europe. You could say that today’s arguments are just business as usual. We’ve been bothering about the neighbours for centuries, sometimes by warlike means and sometimes by disagreeing with ourselves over the results of referendums. Referenda. Whatever. Not expressing a view here, but leaving is the one thing we’ve never tried, to shut down the argument.
 
But I’m not going to talk about that. We’ve spent two years failing to recover a sense of perspective on Europe; let’s talk about the weather. The direction of the colour scheme last night reminded me of all those doom-sayers burbling on about the Gulf Stream and how it flows up the graphic representation of global ocean currents to the left of the UK, mainly blue-green, bringing with it lines with triangles on them that signify rain today, sun tomorrow, fog on Friday and a blustery weekend with a sunny morning for Monday. British weather. Isobars, you know. The curved ones as well.
 
We had doom-sayers back in ’76, but not like we’ve had over the past few years. I suppose that the Millennium Bug and the Mayan Calendar and the Dot-Com Boom and the mindset of complete unreality brought on by social media have put us in the mood. Instead of SNAFU, how about SINWAD? Situation Normal: We’re All Doomed. Mind you, our grandparents had MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – as a serious, straight-faced, generally accepted principle of international superpower diplomacy, so we can’t talk. Remember the SALT? The media doubled up on the T, didn't they? Talks.
 
Barbarossa. Here, now, this year, the real danger of global warming is not that giant icebergs will float right up to the waterfronts of picturesque Icelandic fishing villages and cause evacuations and photo-opportunities, but that the Gulf Stream has already “switched off” (as those happy pessimists used to put it), so that the weather is starting consistently to come from somewhere else. These days, if you want that comfortable tucked-up-in-bed feeling of impending doom, all you have to do is look for a weather forecast in which the colours move from right to left across the country … like last night’s.
 
Isn’t it great? Another reason to think that now is a significant moment in human history. I remember those flickery ocean currents bringing warm weather up from roughly Jamaica, bottom left, to somewhere up around the Shetland Islands, top right. Easy on the eyes, dependent on the world not changing. And what does the world do? Regardless of the fact that our mobile-phone company has put us “in control” and bought TV advertising to tell us so? Yes, it changes. No, we’re not in control. Go look out of the window. No, the window is the screen with the world outside it. Not touch-sensitive, sorry.
 
If that movement of warmth has stopped happening, I guess the best guide to the weather of the future will be one of those interminable black-and-white documentaries about “H*tl*r’s War Machine” getting bogged down at the gates of Moscow. [Sorry, I hate to type the name.] Come September, we’ll get heavy rains that, er, turn the roads to mud, and then, on some soon-to-be-ominous same-every-year date in early December, say, we’ll see the first wisps of snow. Within a week, we’ll be running through a black-and-white landscape in our snowsuits, cutting off the supply route to the 6th Army in Stalingrad.
 
Tick tock not. Or whatever would be today’s equivalent. The war-documentary analogy doesn’t quite stretch that far, but you get my drift (hey, pun!). The winds of Winter will come straight from the Urals (it’s always the Urals, have you noticed?) and the Summer heat will spill up the weather chart from the Sahara (other mountain ranges and deserts are available). Extreme weather conditions will shorten human lifespans, so that if you stare long enough at the statistics and ignore everything happening around you, there’ll be the opportunity to start an argument, or if you’re a government, put out a press release, about how we’re all younger-looking and healthier. Statistically.
 
Assuming I do discover the secret of eternal life, or at least implausible longevity, at some point between now and the date on which my body clock “should” cease to tell the time, I’m going to find the architecture interesting. Travel to a hot place, and you find a distinctive architecture of coolness. Travel to places where they ski, and you find an architecture of steeply sloping roofs (rooves?), shutters over the windows, clocks with wooden birds in them and saunas where you can get yourself really sweaty and then rush out into the snow and dive into an ice-cold bath. [No, I don’t visit ski resorts much. Why do you ask?]
 
How do you blend those two together? Interlined curtains? My guess is that (a) you don’t, and (b) the status quo is breaking anyway. The term “architecture” will soon be meaningless. We’ve been comfortably arguing over who recycles and who doesn’t, who litters and who doesn’t, comfortably complaining about the neighbours, and now we’re going to have to face the final countdown: fires across former wetlands, water shortages, more potholes in the roads, the elevation of the Minister for Catastrophe to cabinet rank, the total collapse of civilisation as we know it, and TV advertising from mobile-phone companies to tell us how they’re empowering communities to take responsibility for their own environments by recycling their old phones for negligible sums of barter chips.
 
Good talk, Nostradamus, thanks. Traditionally built homes, alternately perma-frozen in Winter and roasted at maximum temperature in Summer, will disintegrate. Architects will become scavengers, eking out their scant livings on the edges of crumbling cities, scratching designs for temporary dwellings into the dried roadsides in return for scraps of food. In the few years we have left before global air travel spreads the plague that kills us all, we’ll become nomadic – but over short distances, in the British way, moving seasonally (discreetly, without fuss) from the ground on which we pitch our Summer yurts to the adjacent ground on which we build our Winter igloos. We’ll maintain our hedges to keep out the neighbours, of course, mustn’t let standards slip, although we’ll have to switch from native species to imported tall-grass varieties.
 
State media will continue to reassure us that nothing has changed, while running property shows about seasonal housing – Kevin and Brenda run a glamping business through the Summer months, then they close for a week in December and re-open as an ice hotel just in time for the festive shopping spree. Derek’s construction company alternates between building straw-bale houses, with plenty of ventilation, and building ice houses. Freezing coloured water as a decorative speciality. Decorative fabrics embedded in blocks of ice*. By then, with or without a follow-up vote, thanks to ice caps melting and sea levels rising, we’ll have moved a long way further from France. As for the Netherlands, yeah. About that whole below-sea-level thing.
 
Get a load of those dots! Okay, I’m feeling very much better now. Really cheerful. Optimistic, even. But – hey. I nearly forgot. On top of all that, I heard a rumour. Somebody told somebody who told a friend of mine who told me the other day that the army is stockpiling food. Just that – “stockpiling food”. Nothing more than that. They’re not modifying their tank tracks to run on mud, or insulating their engines so that they’ll start even in Ural weather. Nor are they specifically buying Heinz Baked Beans in bulk, or Kendal Mint Cake, or Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, say. Or getting ready for a big party. No details. Just “stockpiling food”.
 
It’s the perfect rumour. Simple, believable, quite possibly meaningless (perhaps somebody in uniform did a bulk-buy at a cash-and-carry and was seen) – but if you get the tone of voice right when you’re spreading it around, definitely ominous. Could signify anything… Especially with those three dots (which are the emoji version of a Meaningful Look – a rare instance of the emoji coming before the chicken – er, egg – er, I mean, the expression that it signifies. The emoji, I mean. Oh, never mind).
 
Then last night, with the imaginary wind blowing around the house, the imaginary wolves howling in the imaginary forest outside, the sinister imaginary theme tune failing to drown out anything at all and the floor upstairs creaking in that way it does when there’s nobody up there (Or Isn’t There?), I had a thought. After watching the sinister red-tinged weather forecast and ferrying another sack of canned food down to the fall-out shelter, I thought: if I’m going to write about this, maybe I should write about the shortage at the supermarket. And the more I thought about that…
 
There was snow in Falmouth for two days at the beginning of this year. Just for two days. But I remember that on the first day there was talk of “panic buying in the supermarket”, and then, on the second day when I went shopping, I found empty shelves because the supply lorries couldn’t get through. [That was the Official Explanation, cue ominous music.] This country is not good at extreme weather – far too much fun getting in a panic – but that was a failure of “Just In Time” stock control on a grand scale.
 
Clearly, we can guess that The Army Knows Something. If it starts raining in September, and doesn’t stop, get your panic-buying in early. Equip yourself with snow shoes and heavily insulated clothing. Hire an architect to re-jig your house so that it has cool, airy interiors and heavy-duty insulation on the outside. Take igloo-building lessons and learn to carve ice sculptures. Don’t be surprised when the snow comes and you see tanks trundling through town with your online grocery order dangling from the gun barrel.
 
*No! Not deceased relatives. Although taxidermy would have to change.

Picture
Here's a small slice of nineteen eighty-something. Not as far back as 1976, but close enough, given what my memory's bringing up. As you can see, the sky was the same back then, albeit with that pre-washed, ripped-denim overlay, but the colours were richer and the balconies were all slightly out of focus.

Are we stuck in the present, or just wary of anything that might take us out of the status quo? On the side of that bus just now, the words “Working in partnership with” and then the logos of the two local universities. And now here comes that other bus, the small one, the one that I’ve mentioned before, bearing the words “Connecting local communities since 1929.” There’s a schematic on one of them, a bouquet of green lines with place names instead of flowers, but those are the words that these two buses use to introduce themselves to the world.

You might think that a mission statement along the lines of “Going from A to B” would be more appropriate, or perhaps “Giving you a ride home in return for a small-ish amount of money,” but no. Even that schematic doesn’t exactly add up to “If you want to go to Penryn, get on this one.” These buses are engaged in a vast, static purpose – partnering with universities, connecting communities – and I guess that’s what they want us to think of them. The fact that the wheels on the bus go round and round is incidental. Whether the mummies on the bus go chat-a-chat-chat or just dream of Ancient Egypt – I can’t believe I thought that would be funny. Sorry.

Survey tunes. Mummies and daddies on the bus, I'm sorry to have interrupted your conversation. On the table in front of me is a white paper bag. It contains small items recently collected from a nearby store. On the back of the paper bag is a request. “Please complete our survey to help us make sure we’re giving you the best service.”
 
Not “Complete our survey to help us work out whether we’re doing well or badly” or even “to work out how we’re doing, or how we could improve,” but “help us make sure…” we’re the best. Complete our survey to help us confirm to ourselves that we’re doing really well. Okay. I have more to say about that, but before I go any further, I want you to know that I really care about you, as a reader of this blog. Please help me by grading this post from one to ten, where ten is “William, I think you’re wonderful”, and one is “I’m sorry, William, I’m just not capable of following what you’re on about.”
 
Thank you. I value your opinion. If you would like to add any further comment, please use the box provided (max. 28 characters). And no, it’s not necessary to tell me in person. You’d be welcome, and I suppose we’d both laugh, but we’d be laughing because that’s not what such invitations invite. We all know, don’t we, that if I turned up at that store’s counter and started helping them to make sure, etc., in my own special way, our relationship would be soured. “Here, let me wrap that for you,” would not go down well, and nor would “Can you really not see that there’s a queue?”
 
We, Robot.
It's as if we’re trained (influenced, nudged, pressured) to think in States of Being these days. Not doing, Being. A bus driver might ferry people around town, just as an individual retailer might sell me stuff. But collectively, at the level of the organisations that aspire to direct our lives, we're being put into a still picture and not a moving, doing, changing narrative. A town’s bus company is Working In Partnership; its directors have meetings with academics (administrators, sorry) and come away thinking they’ve done something useful. But has their discussion moved a single commuter from A to B?

Your bus is delayed, I'm afraid, but comfort yourself with the thought that your communities are connected. Oh, you've given us a 0 in the survey. Is our best service not reaching you? Perhaps you should get to the bus stop earlier. Of course we put The Customer first. What do you mean, you're the customer? How arrogant. There are hundreds of customers. We can't spend our valuable time just focusing on you.

What seems to have happened, somewhere deep down at soul level, is that we’ve abandoned attempts to achieve The Singularity by building computers that can think like we do, and started instead to train ourselves to think like computers do. But wait a minute. Think about that paper bag from the store. There’s a great hierarchy of people and managers behind it, who have to Sign Off The Paper Bag before it goes into production, but only two who matter. Only two whose disappearance would matter to the production of the paper bag.

Exactly. The (I guess) freelance graphic designer who made it what it is, and the writer who wrote the first draft of those words on the back – the draft that said “tell us how we’re doing.” Those two, designer and writer, along with all the rest of their kind, are (more or less contentedly) accepting money to provide first drafts of all the world's paper bags, slogans and schematics on the sides of buses, and if you think about it, instructions on how to interact with reality.

Not harness - unleash. Their drafts are wrenched back from creativity to stasis by middle management, and they accept that because they're getting paid to do this stuff and they can be creative out of hours. But just imagine what would happen if they realised their power.

If there were no first drafts, their would be no second drafts. No second drafts, nothing to sign off, no meetings, no brain-achingly dull statements of the obvious to include in our marketing literature. So my suggestion, for getting us out of this State of Being and back into moving forward, is not to Harness The Power Of Technology, which is almost as inert as a bureaucracy until it's given something to do, but to Unleash The Designers And Writers, whose creativity is unpredictable, who don't go bang and fizzle out if you drop them in water (no, wait) and who generate ideas without first having to be programmed with self-limiting parameters.

I also think money isn't the solution to everything and managers should be subordinate to the people we manage, but we're not talking about the NHS. Just think. Yes, the words on the bus would be “Paying designers generously” and the schematic would show a writer accepting a card payment, but there’s a fighting chance they’d be self-confident enough, secure enough in their own skills and general all-round value, to ask a straight question: how are we doing?*
 
*See above re: SINWAD.
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    State of the Union

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    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.

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    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.

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