Real age is measured in phrases. Once upon a time, I was "Life begins at forty!", which took a decade to reach "You can't be fifty!" and then mutated quickly into "You're not old!", which is where I am now. But I'm beginning to get "Ah, free travel on buses!", and that, I would like to think, will bring me on to the camaraderie of a phrase I have yet to discover. Shared as we sit together at the back of the bus, I hope. I notice that people of a certain age - an age I've yet to reach - always seem to share something when they first make eye contact (with me watching them). Live for long enough, and age becomes an achievement - once again, although without the fractions this time: "I'm four and a half" is a worthwhile measurement in a way that, say, "I'm sixty-eight and three-quarters" wouldn't be.
     I came to real adulthood at the entrance to Holland Park tube station, a century ago, on the way to work (my first job). Back then, I used to buy a newspaper every morning, from a man behind stacks of newspapers in a small shed. Every morning, he'd take my money, and as he folded and passed across my newspaper, he'd say: "There you go, guv!" Occasionally, we'd share a brief insight into the weather, or the state of the traffic on Holland Park Avenue, but most days, it was just: "There you go, guv!" And I'd go underground to the Central Line and head for Chancery Lane.
     I liked being "guv". Not that I actually thought about it until - but I'm jumping ahead. Being "guv" - being called "guv", I mean - made me feel that I belonged in the adult world (looking back from today, I was so young). It was an acknowledgement; in a small way, a status. Not to make too much of it, and I didn't think about it at all until - nearly there. For the purpose of this telling, my role as "guv" signified adulthood and I liked it for that.
     Except that it didn't. I went away for a month, or at least a period longer than my routine holiday absences. Don't remember why, don't remember how long, but I do remember that when I got back, the man in the shed, my regular newspaper provider, had forgotten me. He didn't recognise me. Or if he did (I don't think he did; I'm just overthinking this), his perception was that I had changed. On that first morning back, the morning that made all this memorable to me, I handed over my money, and as he folded and passed across my newspaper, he said: "There you go, young man!"
     Young man. It was a significant transition. I've been "young man" ever since. "Young man" to the man behind the counter in the butcher here, Myatts; "young man" to every other "You're not old!" man, and occasionally woman, with whom I trade a small amount of money for - you know the transactions I mean*.  I was "young man" before and after the transition into fatherhood. I don't know what comes after "young man", perhaps just a tone of voice and a nurse's hand on my arm (or a bus driver's), and of course there's no correlation between the introduction of youth into the conversation as we get older, and the belief among spiritual types that when we die, we come at last into life. But ... we go from phrase to phrase, and each one means more than the year-number of its arrival.
     Wait - it's not just phrases; it's whole descriptions. I've just looked up The Stages Of Life System In Hindu Society, because I've had conversations about that and I've just remembered it, and (ignoring the pop-up ad for "breathable ice silk boxers" - cor!) I find that I'm at a much more interesting age than any number could possibly convey. More convincingly described, as well, in that stages shade into each other and aren't clock-dependent. I was born in August, not in "8" as the date-of-birth forms would insist, and in years, I'm at a stage of my life's journey that really can't be captured by a number.
     How old am I?
     How long have you got?
*To women who are "Not old!", I'm usually "dear" or "darling", once "gorgeous" (I can take it), but only occasionally "young man" and never "guv". It's a different system. Like football.

There was a picture of Groucho Marx in a magazine last week, captioned "Karl Marx". What to do? My first impulse was to post something on Facebook. Make fun. Win myself a few brief likes.
     Then I thought: what? That morning, the radio was telling me, repeatedly, on the hour, that "new footage has emerged" of an incident in which a sportsman (deliberately not naming names) had been involved in a "fracas" (the radio's word). The "fracas" happened on Monday night, so - I grumbled to the inert lump of plastic and metal that was doing the coherent talking in my kitchen at that time of the morning - the footage wasn't "new"; it dated back to Monday night. Some intrepid newshound had tracked it down in time to be included in this repeating loop of "news".
     I should drink coffee before turning on the radio. Woke up this morning to an interview about a "new survey" that has "revealed" that a percentage of the population - might have been 25% - don't get any less racist over time. Wanted to ask the question that the interviewer didn't ask: was this a survey of one ethnic group's attitudes or - given that we live in a multi-racial society - of everybody's attitudes? The interview talked about attitudes to Muslims but not (that I heard) to Christians. Went afterwards to check it out, and found that "You now need to sign in. It's quick and easy. And we'll keep you signed in."
     If it's quick and easy, why do you need to keep me - maybe two cups of coffee before I start. Clicked on the explanation bit - given that not so long ago, it was quick and easy because there was no need to sign in at all - and read that "This is so we can make the BBC more relevant and personal to you." Didn't really expect to find an "It's personal enough, thank you" button, or an "I'll be the judge of that" button, but scrolled down anyway past the "You're in charge" heading, and the "privacy promise" and the bit where they explain that privacy means they'll share my data with TV Licensing (three cups?) ... and went on to discover that the commercial channels' news websites don't impose a sign-in.
     But this is just me griping. In the process, I failed to find any other mention of the racist-attitudes survey, so either it was a filler or I dreamed it. I realise that any body set up to stop something depends for its continued existence on the survival of the thing it's supposed to stop, but I also remember being told more than once, "Fake it till you make it", which I suppose is a cut-down version of Gandhi's injunction to "Be the change." On that basis, I guess the truly racist-attitude-changing approach would be to stop bothering people with questionnaires about their attitudes to eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, ethnic origin - stop reminding them to think about racism, so I won't start doing that.
     Some of my best friends are - but that, too, would be singling them out for my purpose. Also, on a "Be the change" basis, I think today would be a good day to stop being the kind of person who finds a mistake and immediately thinks of social media. Let's assume that Karl was having a bad-hair day, or just setting off to a party in weirdly prescient* fancy dress and I didn't recognise him in the picture. Let's leave open the possibility that we all make mistakes, even in magazines, possibly even in blog posts, and leave it at that.
*Karl Marx died in 1883 and Groucho Marx was born in 1890 and feel free to point out that "Groucho" wasn't Groucho's given name**.
**You get one point for that immediate impulse to point out that "Groucho" wasn't Karl Marx's given name either. Go outside. Breathe the air. 

This from an interview in the New Review section of last Sunday's Observer. "I like to posit a ridiculous theory, which is: perhaps sleep did not evolve. Perhaps it was the thing from which wakefulness emerged." The speaker is "sleep scientist" Matthew Walker, who has a book coming out on 3rd October. "I would still like to know where we go, psychologically and physiologically, when we dream," says Walker.
     I have a suspicion that more progress is made by scientists prepared to posit "ridiculous" theories, than by scientists loyal to the straight and narrow. Aren't all the best science stories about rebels against an orthodoxy? It's what scientists are supposed to do.
     And sleep is such an interesting place, twinned with imagination. The book is Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Allen Lane), and yes, that is me ahead of you in the queue outside the booksh- no, let's make it the Falmouth Bookseller, with a red carpet outside.
     Carry on dreaming; it's just like being awake, isn't it? Except for those elephants.

So I pressed <post> a moment ago, and couldn't see it, and thought: uh oh. Went to Facebook, where I keep an "author page" for these posts and the short stories I post on Medium, and there it was. My post for today. Came back here, and thought: ah ha! [I use a lot of vowels in my thought process.]
     I post on Saturdays, but I write on and off during the week. Each post keeps the date on which it was started. Today's - titled "Oh, Darwin!" - is dated the 19th because that's when I pressed the 'new post' button and moved a text box and yada yada whatever. But I wrote a short piece on the 20th and posted it straight away. So that remains the most recent because today's is dated the 19th and counts as earlier and therefore appears beneath it - stop me if I'm boring you.
     Turns out it was Groucho Marx who said: "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five." It's so simple, this. Almost too simple. Maybe send someone to fetch an AI.

Opened up my inbox today, and found the '10-line Tuesday' poem for this week, from Maya Stein. It's called "at home at the edge of the world", and I really like it. I've been getting a 10-line poem a week for a long time, since I stumbled across a poem by Maya Stein called "Tulips" and wanted to know more. There's also one called "the velocity of tulips" (and I'm beginning to wonder about my use of a capital T a moment ago).
     I haven't found "Tulips" ("tulips"?) online, and maybe I'll ask permission to transcribe my copy of it here*. The link this post does need is this one, where you'll find past 10-line Tuesday poems going back a while. If you get them weekly (there's a sign-up) they come headed by a photograph. At time of writing, "at home at the edge of the world" hasn't been uploaded to the site, but they say deferred gratification is good for the soul. Or if they don't, maybe they could?
*Update. Retrospective permission. Just thought to check, and look what I found.

There's a point where organised anything collapses in on itself. Organised religion ceases to be the heartfelt expression of whatchamacallit and becomes the observance of forms. Constitutional monarchy waves goodbye to the divine right of kings and gets to a point where the "minor royals", so described, are delivered by minibus to a royal wedding. Nation states become sets of rules and the means of enforcing them, while losing in the process the emotional, historical and downright irrational ties that hold them together.
     Institutions need irrationality. It is possible to object, on rational grounds, to just about anything. But to point out that, say, the Church of England [or the House of Lords, or the monarchy, or any other example you care to throw in here] is pretty much indefensible as an institution, is to miss out on the curious truth that [insert your example or mine] does serve a purpose. Invariably - here's the curious part - it's not the purpose that we associate with the institution. But it is a purpose that needs to be served.
     I remember the survey put out a year or two back by Professor Richard Dawkins on religious belief. Very roughly, Dawkins' contention was that a lot of people claiming to be Christian didn't seem to know very much about Christianity - not knowing, for example, which was the first book of the New Testament. This, suggested Dawkins, invalidated their claim to be Christian (I'm telling this from a combination of memory and YouTube). Challenged by Giles Fraser in a radio interview to give the full title of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Dawkins muttered, "Oh, God!", and couldn't. Put <Dawkins Fraser> into a search engine and find what I just found on YouTube.
     Dawkins subsequently wrote at length in the New Statesman about why this didn't matter, and I sympathise. But what I took away from that episode was Dawkins' survey's finding that a large proportion of people self-identifying as Christian said that their faith made them want to be better people. Not bad: the Church of England/Christianity has a positive effect on society. It's useful in that it makes people want to be better people. Although a certain well-known Deity rarely gets a mention in its deliberations.
     If we can forget their stated purpose, institutions can be useful. The reality of monarchy is minibuses, but pageantry boosts tourism. The higher reaches of the Church of England may echo with debate about whether women can dress up as bishops, but see above - and the local clergy are pretty good at community events. In fact, you know, it strikes me that some of the most dangerous people on earth are the true believers - I'm talking mostly, but not only, about religion. Maybe it's a good thing that nobody in the C of E mentions - you know who.
     So maybe we should just nod, and smile, and agree that if they want to look for the Word of God in the small print of who can wear what, well, that is indeed where they'll be looking for it. Pointless activity, but without it, would there be anybody to splash water on the heads of our babies? Or listen to the elderly in their last days? It's all indivisible, and irrational, and so what?

We live under the tyranny of today. It's not a particularly explicit, nor indeed tyrannical, tyranny, but we live under a set of values as clear and unarguable as any we might find in history. There's an unchallenged because unchallengeable orthodoxy - not universally shared, but more than slightly inclined to claim a kind of, for want of a better word, virtue. There are "shy Tories", but no equivalent on the left, because conviction plus immunity to self-doubt adds up to a tendency to unfriend first and limit debate to who's left after that, pun acknowledged. I'm not expressing a political view, so much as still wondering: if the democratic-liberal consensus fails to win at the ballot box, how can it go on being right if it's unexamined (and that not-quite-pun I'll leave on the table)?

When we talk about catastrophe, we talk about the end of the world. The phrase we use isn't "the end of us", or even "the end of the species", but the end of "the world". I suppose the term means more than just the planet, but Mother Earth is in there somewhere.
     Strikes me now that Gaia might be pleased to see us gone. We've trashed our room, we think "the world" revolves around us, and we're certainly not listening any more to what the thunder says. There's a weekly Q&A interview in a(n inter)national newspaper in which the regular question used to be asked: "Do you think about your carbon footprint?" The question seems to have gone now (although the Q&A survives), perhaps because the answer was too often a yes qualified by the admission that the interviewee really had to fly around the world burning up fossil fuels in pursuit of some career objective. Think about my carbon footprint all the time, me. Any chance of an upgrade to first? I have the air-miles.
     Seems to me that globalisation doesn't work (discuss), but that's a subject for another day. Global warming may or may not be the cause of the tragedy now happening in the Caribbean, and it may or may not explain why Florida residents are being warned to look out for displaced alligators as they move back into their properties, but what troubles me is that if Gaia really has turned against us, it won't be "the world" that ends. And it won't matter then whether we've finally agreed that global warming is or isn't real. Water is now being offloaded from aircraft in the Caribbean, and there are even British troops on the scene - pursued, as is traditional, by British journalists complaining that they're not moving fast enough.
     But in the background, there's an official response going on that feels, to me at least, much more familiar. News reports suggest that OECD rules prevent British aid being given to British overseas territories (Anguilla, Turks & Caicos Islands, British Virgin Islands) because (only on paper now, but that's what counts) their GDP is too high. Overseas development secretary Priti Patel tells us that she's "written to" the OECD's "development assistance committee" asking them to change the rules. Boris Johnson has toured the islands (remember him in Liverpool?) and is reportedly about to chair a meeting of the COBRA emergency committee. That's two committees in one paragraph. Now I understand why all the governments, etc., of my early childhood so regularly called in International Rescue.
     At least Cabinet Office Briefing Room A looks like every White House Situation Room known to fiction, which is reassuring, and we can assume that Hurricane Irma hasn't disrupted the postal service between the OECD and Ms Patel's office. Talk about grown up. It's just that ... I remember the contrast between the official response and the community response after the Grenfell Tower fire. If "the world" does end, will we be stuck with the official response? Will the final broadcast show Boris Johnson touring the battlefield at Armaggedon, or should  we maybe think a bit harder about the simple truth that "the world" doesn't need us. For all we know, Gaia might look quite kindly on - what? Termites? Water Bears? Our successors, anyway.

Thinking about gerunds at the moment. And present participles. If you prefer, '-ing' words. That would be how I think of them, but I happened to be watching a YouTube video in which Michael Hyatt (high-profile "virtual mentor"; he's not hard to find) talked about building a "personal brand". Interesting, and in case you're wondering, suggested to me in the course of a recent collaboration/intervention in a friend's self-employed career development. Personal branding is part of marketing, if you're a solo entrepreneur with something to promote (sell), and I suppose it's just a step away from the injunction to be appropriately interesting.
     Appropriately, in the sense that if you're a romantic novelist, don't tweet about your love for slasher movies. If you're a Michelin-starred chef at a health-food restaurant, don't tweet about your new-found passion for junk food. If you're the president of a global superpower, don't get into a tweeting contest with - sorry.
     Anyway, in the video I watched, Mr Hyatt was discussing ""The Five Elements of A Personal Brand"; you can find it here. I won't spoil it, except (very slightly, sorry) to say that at one point Mr Hyatt suggested that, in building your powerful personal brand: "You need a gerund."
     Eh? I may write this stuff, but that doesn't mean I know the technical terms. So I looked up "gerund". And dear old Wikipedia gave me this: "Gerund is a term for a verb form that functions as a noun. Although similar in usage to verbal noun, the two terms are not synonymous as gerund retains properties of a verb while verbal noun does not; in English this is most evident in the fact that a gerund can be modified by an adverb and can take a direct object. The term "-ing form" is often used in English to refer to gerund specifically. Traditional grammar made a distinction within -ing forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in..."
     ...I can feel it slipping away. But I get Mr Hyatt's point: to have a gerund is to have a short, succinct phrase that sums up what you do. "Solving the world's problems." "Teaching your children to pass crucial exams." "Setting off fireworks safely." "Driving this bus." Please stop me, I could go on all afternoon.
     Gerunds are wonderful, but like everything else, they can be over-used. After a while, also, they get static. If the gerund of the van says, "Keeping the traffic moving," but the miles of traffic cones say exactly the opposite, what's the use of the gerund? In that example, either it requires constant activity - a team of (wo)men constantly waving their arms and urging the traffic on - or it becomes almost a cross section of an activity - a steady-state, aspirational statement of being rather than doing.
     It's a scale thing. Either the individual and his gerund work together - or the gerund disconnects and floats away into meaninglessness. Take responsibility for your gerund. Look after it. Act it out every day.
     Gerund. Functions as a noun, right? In big companies, a verb that's turned to stone.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Brexit the first mass negotiation in history? We've had mass protests before, over the centuries and in our modern, tech-enabled times - Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street - but the whole interpersonal networking thing really comes of age with Brexit. Everybody has an opinion, deeply felt, and it's not only possible to break friendships - as it was in the nineteen thirties over appeasement, and subsequently over Suez, and no doubt in the US over Vietnam - but also to engage directly with the Powers (sic) That Be, if that phrase has any meaning at all any more.
     We're told this morning that a senior member of the Labour shadow cabinet is working to bring about nationwide insurrection via mass industrial action over pay. To the extent that this constitutes direct action to destabilise the government, we are told by the (doubtless, legally qualified) journalists reporting - sorry, spreading the story, this might be illegal. I think I've got that right - although I have to admit that even my assumption might be flawed these days; I mean my assumption that getting it right still matters.
     Anyway, somewhere in among the truth, truthiness, fake news and sheer fabrication that we might be facing here, there's the odd little fact that it's happening (in fact or fiction) in the public eye. I wonder if Lenin would ever have made it onto that sealed train to Petrograd if his advisers had been tweeting his intentions throughout. How would 1917 have played out, if they'd had access to today's range of screens, news sources and participant bystanders?

Can we take it for granted that I have something unsurprising but deeply felt to say about today's politics? My qualifications for saying it are no greater than most people's - I watch, listen to, read the news - and yet I'm so convinced by my own conviction that I really must sound off here or on Facebook (other social media are available, but I can only deal with so much neediness disguised as ersatz friendliness - my privacy is their product, I think we're realising). I really have to take a stand.
     My long list of options includes: to write something of my own (actually, that seems to be the least popular option for most people); to comment at length on somebody else's post (but then I would be dismissed as a "troll" almost regardless of what I said); to share a post by somebody in (or commenting on) politics; to share a headline written to be shared by a populist news outlet (ah, that's the one); to put some kind of filter over my profile picture, perhaps a rainbow flag or a statement of voting intention; to click on "Like" and choose the emoji that most matches my mood; to raise an army and march on London - no, wait. Scrub that last one. The miracle of social media, and the curse, is that we're simultaneously all riled up by it, and pacified.
     Those big global companies are the overmighty subjects of our day, I suppose. They're too powerful, too rich, and their attention to our details has a Big Brother-ish quality. But do they actually make anything worse? They only matter because we use them, and we use them because (duh) they're useful. We resent them because they're there. It's a while since I read the book*, but if I remember rightly, Big Brother was the figurehead of a government, wasn't he? He'd be Little Brother now, given globalisation, capitalism, the internet and how we use it?
     I wonder if politics is today's opium of the people, in that we still head up our resentments with political figures, despite knowing - we do know, don't we? - that they're so beset by just about everything - relentless media scrutiny, shifting public opinion, fractious parties, political rivals, events - that their power is fragile at best. Real power is to be found behind the throne (holding the knife) or somewhere further away than that. A political leader may have the power to persuade, but it's measured in terms of who will back him (I thought about putting "her", but the point's made already).
     To share a headline about politics, or to signal a voting intention, perhaps these days even to attend a political rally, is to reach back into a comfortable pre-globalisation past where politics mattered; where the protests we remember have that comforting simplicity of success. We want that seriousness, ideally served simultaneously with that sense of vindication. We don't remember the complexities of the political past; we only remember the successful causes all telescoped together with their outcomes. But I do wonder whether those are the real lessons of history.
*George Orwell, of course. Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949 by Secker & Warburg.

Been following a thing online about the importance of voting. Individual votes matter because the average of a large number of votes is closer to the "right answer" than the average of a small number of votes or (I think I've got this right) any individual vote. This is borne out by the results of votes where there actually is a quantifiable "right answer" - James Surowiecki's book on the wisdom of crowds, mentioned here on 24th August, talks about guessing the weight of an ox (among other examples; that one goes back to Sir Francis Galton, who left a complicated legacy of ideas).
     Key detail being that you can judge the rightness of the answer by putting the ox on the weighing scales after the vote. That's not possible in politics, because the post-vote road not travelled isn't there to be compared with reality. It's vanished, and that set of policies will never be proved right or wrong (or somewhere in between). But the point stands that collective wisdom gets wiser as the collective gets bigger. So to speak.
     If turnout in an election is high, we can take the result as the "right answer". This is nearly self-evident, in that more of the people voting to express the will of the people will get closer to the will of - but let's not go down that spiral. High turnout equals right answer. Deliberate abstentions - no. Not going there.
     Check the statistics, and you'll find that there was a high turnout for the EU referendum and then another high turnout for the 2017 general election. We could take it, then, that both gave us "right answers". On the EU - a balanced result but with a slight preference for leaving (a vote for a soft Brexit, in today's terms, which suggests that Labour are reading the tea-leaves more accurately than the Conservatives). In the general election, a government without a majority and a credible opposition not quite able to take power.
     "Right answers" in politics don't necessarily take the form of a binary either/or. In the US, the presidential election rejected the former political establishment, but gave us a president who has turned out not to be able to do very much. In France - established parties rejected; Macron elected. It will be interesting to watch what happens to Mutti on 24th September.