William Essex
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The Yoghurt Theory of Consciousness

26/9/2018

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

Spend long enough walking past sheep in the mornings, and you realise that they’ve developed a language. It says what they need it to say - “Where are you?” says the mother, and “I’m over here,” says the lamb, and that’s kind of it from the perspective of a man walking past with a dog on a lead. Spend long enough sitting on a bench on Prince of Wales Pier, Falmouth, eating a West Country Ham With Cheese & Pickle Tiger Bap from Warren’s, and you begin to understand the language of seagulls.

“I don’t want to fly. I want you to bring me something to eat,” says the young seagull. “That tourist is going to tread on you,” says the parent. After that, it’s a language of demonstration: this is how you swoop down and snatch an ice cream from the hands of a toddler. Or a West, etc., from an adult. Seagulls aren’t popular around here. But there is a whole language of: that guy’s dropped a piece of cheese; it’s mine because I’m brave enough to dart forward and grab it; okay, I’m just about to dart forward; hey, pigeon, that’s cheating. We have bugs in our guts, apparently, with strangely elaborate names; and we have birds all around us competing to eat our lunch before we feed it to the bugs.

I wonder what life is like for one of those bugs. More sociable than a few years back, I guess. Same coffee washing down in the morning and same Shredded Wheat, but now regular drenches of acido-bifulo-fafulofulously energetic organic-yoghurt, no-added-sugar, brighten-up-your-day bugs to, ah, lick the walls clean. And then finally - we’ll dispense with full disclosure here - the long journey South. Let go. Relax. Go into the Dark. Sorry. Birds map the world differently; organic live cultures in a plastic (huh?) bottle of Kefir from the health-food shop would probably not come up with Catholicism if you challenged them to invent a religion.

Consciousness is what we - they - need it to be, isn’t it? I woke up this morning with an idea in my head for a post about the invention of language. It might have been a dream, actually. But anyway - my first protege, a woman, senior in the eyes of her following group of close relatives and, um, unattached males, snatches up a stick and bangs it against a tree. It doesn’t break. She stands with it in her hand. She’s not dominant in the group, but the others stop and turn to look at her. Stop, she says, although without words because they haven’t got words yet. Here.

Stop. She hits the tree again and then scrapes a mark on the dry ground beneath her feet with the end of her stick. Because this is my dream, the dry ground is about the consistency of a raked sandpit on a wet day - we’ll be playing indoors today, children. She stands, this nameless woman, and her group - her tribe, let’s say, because it will be a tribe - stands and looks at her. Then they all look at the mark on the ground, and with an emphasis that is part body language, part vocalisation and all force of personality, my protege invents the idea that a mark on the ground can signify a place. Here. Stop here. These trees. This earth. All in this mark. Ours.

Considerably later, she will use a mixture of charcoal, earth and oil to immortalise a hunting party on the wall of a cave in what will be southern France. She will invent art. But for now, she has told her people, by the use of a mark on the ground, that this is their place. She has opened their minds to “I”, “We”, and”here”, and in a few generations they’ll rampage across what will be Europe in a holy war that will erase nascent civilisations across the land mass - but for now, they just gather in a huddle and start looking for bugs (not those bugs) to eat. We’ll leave them there, but their minds have been sparked: they have identity beyond instinct; a means of communication that extends beyond themselves; above all, consciousness of themselves stopped in a landscape.

Consciousness - by which in this instance I mean the ability to harness the power of communications technology (in the sense, pick up a stick, scratch a mark, thereby communicate an idea) - is what that woman needed to get her tribe to stop their aimless, just-been-imagined, no-back-story-yet wandering. There was probably a volcano. At least one well-nobody-said-anything-to-me-about-extinction giant pterodactyl. Probably a party of explorers led by an H. Rider Haggard character with a beard. I could talk about intelligence, but that's limited by being measurable; as I use the term, consciousness is all of it. Focused consciousness, perhaps.

But let's not define terms. No, let's not. Consciousness - in the sense, being able to think of a more interesting use for the amount of processing power that you’d find in a modern-day washing machine, was what got us to the moon. Consciousness is there when we find it and it's a directional thing - it’s not what we need; it forms around whatever idea we’ve got in mind - and it’s highly responsive. Acidobulufulo-cultures don’t need thought, but I bet they’re good hunters in their own way. I should probably mention opposable thumbs at some point.

I’m not sure whether it was consciousness or human nature that filled the outer, outer, outer atmosphere with so-called space junk, but I do wonder how much practical consciousness we’re going to need going forward, and what form it’ll take, now that we’ve invented a technology that takes work away from us; now that creativity and innovation amount to finding apps to do for us what we used to do. There was a small sign offering a “petrol app” where I filled up yesterday. Google just offered me "Smart Compose" for my email account. I wonder if I can use auto-complete to tick the "I am not a robot" box when I'm filling in a form.

By the way, did you see that drama the other night? The one everybody’s talking about?

If only real life was that realistic.


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Dreaming Spires 2.0. Two shallow-water drilling rigs and a Navy ship. Elsewhere in the harbour, to the right of this picture, a cruise liner called The World has come for a two-day stay.

Instead of a Universal Basic Income, because we all get in such a tizz about money, why don’t companies gift to their employees the robots that are going to take their jobs? If I get a universal hundred quid a week, say, I could splurge it all on wine (other beverages are available), persons (please specify gender) and song (high volume can cause permanent hearing loss; do you wish to continue, Y/N?) and still need benefits by the end of the weekend. There’d be tax forms to complete, allowances and deductions to take seriously, and if the current benefits system is anything to go by, rigorous annual interviews aimed at finding an excuse to give me a pay cut.

Because I’m not above cheap one-liners, I’d say that receiving a UBI could become a full-time job. Because I’m usually wrong about most things, I have just gone online and found various accounts of UBIs being trialled around the world - and giving vulnerable people stability - so I take it all back. Most of it. My argument isn’t with the notion of a UBI - in prehistorically agrarian days, when we were all aspiring to be subsistence farmers, there was a UBI in the form of whatever crops grew that year - but with the administration. See above re forms, etc., and excuse me while I mutter under my breath about the bureaucratic mindset that would want to look busy by getting between me and my UBI.

He’s really benched the bold-type side-heads, hasn’t he? I know it’s just me, and no doubt there’s some remote childhood trauma that explains it, but I don’t like having to thank an intermediary for something that is mine by right. Heck, I even get twitchy when I complete an online form and the last button to click says “Submit”. I want it to say “Issue a direct order” or “I want it now”, but no. I have to “Submit”, even if it’s my money that I’m handing over. It’s no wonder that whenever I get angry, I turn into a huge scaly fire-breathing monster and rampage through the nearby forest until I calm down again. And then have to find something to wear for the walk home.

Yeah. Because...

...and we might as well resign ourselves to this digression...

...that’s always a problem. There’s an old adage that if Our Hero is going to save himself by pulling out a gun, he has to have been seen to have put a gun in his pocket in an earlier chapter. Boy, that was wordy: if he’s holding a gun now, he has to have picked up a gun then. Basic physics. One of the reasons why I’ve never written a fantasy novel about shapeshifters, in the sense of werewolves or whatever, is because my early chapters would get so boring: Our Hero wanders around the forest concealing biodegradable-but-waterproof bags of lightweight clothing for afterwards. Women are better at this, in my experience*.


Yes, I think he thought we were getting a bit distracting. I mean, a word or two to break up the flow of text is okay, but we were starting to develop our own - oh! Sorry! Fantasy novels always have a map at the front; mine has a map with a lot of crosses on it, plus tiny notations that if it’s cold, he should go to that cross for the warm top. His favourite boxer shorts are behind that tree, and for shoes, he’ll have to climb that tree and evict those two squirrels. The plot would all be about finding biodegradable storage bags, then suitable lightweight clothing, good hiding places - and the real plot would start in about chapter seven, on the day that he came down from an angry [Can I say “an angry”? Like “a high”? My hero, call him Greg, would, so that’s okay.] to find that all his concealed clothes were missing.

Either they’ve all been stolen by somebody who wants to delay his return home - no, wait, I know: they haven’t been stolen, not disappeared at all, but now there’s some kind of tracking device concealed in the lining of - yes, and the bad guys have got footage of the fire-breathing monster and - yes, that’s it, and now they’re hunting him because, let’s see - no, wait, let’s not see yet, because there’s a fire in the forest - and…

...I’m sorry about all the environmental devastation this blog post is causing, by the way…

...and maybe that girlfriend back home, who doesn’t know his secret (scribbling madly here) but does wonder why she never sees the clothes in his laundry basket go back into his cupboards - he does his own laundry, but y’know, she looks around - yes, that's it, and then in about chapter ten (can't keep up with these ideas) I’d take him out shopping again for replacement gear. Without her. Chapter nine would be all about her thinking he's seeing somebody else, and him wanting to buy a trolley-load of undergarments...

...Online shopping hasn't arrived in fantasy fiction yet, has it?...


...fire-proof this time, two sets, one for the cupboards. She loves him really, but she doesn’t admit it to herself because he’s kinda dangerous and she has a secret of her own. If (yes!) he ever finds out that she’s, um, thingummy, he’ll never love her, she believes, although right at the end she saves him, necessarily revealing what she is, and he loves her anyway, and…

...and the incidental characters all work in clothing stores, like the one in Boston where I bought that T-shirt with ‘Innocent Bystander’ written on the front. They actually know something about clothes, which gets that audience...

Hmm. Maybe we should sit this one out. Sorry. Big digression there.

The risk with a UBI would be that it became an administrative nightmare. Governments never do anything simply; bureaucracies sustain themselves through complication. But if I was employed doing something that could easily be done by a machine, the “robots taking our jobs” problem would go away if I could send my own robot to do my old job. Instead of the proverbial gold watch at retirement, or whatever is the modern equivalent, let’s imagine that the team had a whip-round in the usual way, for the cake, and then at the end of the evening, in a hugely ironic and post-modern gesture, what came bursting out of the cake was - my robot.


Everybody on the team would meet - let’s call it Greg too - and its … his appearance would be roughly modelled on me, complete with flat cap and pipe. Every Monday morning from then on, Greg would set off for work, and every Friday evening, without fail, without stopping at the pub on the way, Greg would bring home his/my pay packet. We’d spend the weekend playing golf - I don't play golf, no hand-eye co-ordination, but I’d never lose - and on Sunday evening, he’d cook me and mine a huge roast (late) lunch. Then, let’s imagine, he’d plug himself into the screen in the corner, and show us all a drama of his own devising.

Flat cap and pipe? Sorry - I’ll shut up. Or something like that. There would have to be a UBI, of course, because companies don’t gift anything and I’d need the money to lease Greg. So I’d be paying for him to go do my job and bring me money, and Greg would have to be a taxpayer, and I’m thinking small here, because I could have two Gregs, one at work and one at home, with a single consciousness (sic) between them that goes there during the week, at the flick of a switch, and back here at the weekend, and then of course there’s the issue that if my partner and I decided to move in together, she’d come with, er, Leonie, and let’s just imagine that there was a software incompatibility between Greg and Leonie, or they started to compete because they were made by different manufacturers…

...and then one Sunday there was fighting in the kitchen over whether it was Greg’s turn to cook…

...and then serious difficulty over whether or not we complimented Leonie’s Softbank Robotics roast potatoes with as much sincerity as we gave to Greg’s IBM parsnips…

...or vice-versa, of course, and then another row because my partner and I got so hungry waiting that we secretly ordered take-out, but the delivery robot had once known Greg, who can scent him/her/it over the wifi...

...and I think maybe there’s a lot to be said for a UBI. But let’s also go to work, eh, instead of designing machines to operate our machines?

*My experience of reading fantasy novels about shapeshifters, I mean. Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock, for example, always carries something to wear. She has unembarrassable neighbours and the men in her life wouldn't mind, I imagine, but let's add the believable detail, right? A principle of fiction, I think, is to confront the difficulty rather than write a way round it.
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Is there an app for towing cruise ships?

20/9/2018

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Started the day sitting on a bench at the top of a steep green slope with trees, watching tugboats manoeuvre into position to escort the latest cruise ship back out of harbour. A dog came, with a tennis ball that he dropped at my feet. Threw the ball. Dog caught it and took it to the man who was by them climbing the slope, and that was me done with ball-throwing for the day. A woman came with another dog, but she didn’t stay.

The tug boats moved in close to the cruise ship, one at the back and one towards the front. Struck me to wonder whether there would be a person at the back of the cruise ship (and the front, but we couldn’t see the front so easily) who would throw a rope to the tug boat, or was the presence of the tug boats just a health-and-safety thing - cruise ships can get themselves back out of harbour these days, thank you - or was the whole thing done by some clever technological method that didn’t require an actual person to throw an actual rope (cable?).

Harnessing the power of technology to harness the power of tugboats. But my smartphone didn’t know the answer, and while I was consulting it, an actual rope (cable?) had appeared in the air between the stern tugboat and the cruise ship. So that was me done with that question until the next cruise ship. Why do I take my smartphone with me in the early mornings? I’d find out so much more if I just watched the world around me. Or, you know, ask somebody. Although I wouldn’t be able to watch the little blue dot on the Maps app, taking its own walk. I grow fond of that dot.

The cruise ship and its attendant tugs didn’t go at the top of the hour but shortly afterwards - inhabitants of that world think of tides more readily than clocks, I guess - and the next three things that happened in my life were (1) an ancient VW camper van with that rattly engine sound struggling to get out of a parking space, then (2) a youngish-woman having a remarkably animated conversation with - nobody? nothing? - driving past me at speed, and then (3) my smartphone pinging to announce the arrival of my daily Tarot reading. Ah, that’s the real reason I take my smartphone in the mornings. To find out as early as possible what the Tarot has to say about the day ahead.

“Save those creative, foot-loose and fancy-free activities for another day and focus on the nuts and bolts,” was my message from the folk at astrology.com. Although it took a moment to find that out, because the message itself jumps around the screen while the ads and pictures drop into place. “Enjoy 12 weeks of The Economist for £12. Plus free limited edition Moleskine notebook,” might have been the reading for the day, although the card itself - wait, just downloading, here it comes - was The Pope, which probably tallies better with Don’t Be Creative than with Spend Twelve Weeks Reading The Economist.

Although twelve is a number with a certain power, come to think of it, and if you sat an actual pope down in an armchair and started a word-association game with “twelve”, you wouldn’t be short of answers. So maybe the Tarot does want me to subscribe to The Economist. I had the Death card a few weeks back, I remember, and that also came with a recommendation to read The Economist. Subscribe, I mean. For twelve weeks. Or do those good people (making an assumption of virtue here, but why not?) at astrology.com want me to start posting about economic issues? This is all some kind of nudge from the astrologists?

Or are we looking at an odd demographic quirk here? The ad that really works with the daily Tarot reading is the ad for The Economist? I get a certain amount of economic forecasting into my inbox, and while I don’t like it as much as I like my daily Tarot reading, I do read it in much the same spirit.

I know two things about economic forecasting: while it’s intended to be a best guess, nobody expects it to be correct (ignore a forecaster who seems to believe she knows what the future will bring); any forecasting is better than no forecasting because we need a direction of travel. Forecasters talk about what “could” happen, and because they’ve read the entrails - sorry, crunched the numbers - it’s not an objection that they’ve never been right before.

Take those two into account, and you begin to understand why we have sober-suited gentlemen who were demonstrably wrong last time being taken seriously this time. Sooner or later, anybody who comes out with any kind of a firm statement about what the future holds is going to be proved wrong - it’s always a news story (in the old sense of the word “news”) if an old forecast turns out to have been accurate. The human-nature part of this is that we go on believing the modern-day shamans as long as they look the part.

If you are an elderly gentleman with a penchant for wearing white, who travels with an entourage of elderly gentlemen with a penchant for wearing red, we will listen to your views on … trying to think of an example here … how to treat pregnant young women - no, I can’t bear it - how to treat young children in the care of celibate elderly men and women - no. Let’s go with a less painful example. If you’re a banker in a position of influence, we will listen to you talk about the doom that awaits us if we [insert glaringly obvious example here] even if the doom that awaited us last time you hit the headlines never happened.

We need convincing leaders more than we need convincing leadership, is that it? We need that nudge to think about the consequences of what we’re doing, even if, in real life, with the help of social media, we skip the thinking and cut straight to panic mode? I’m beginning to suspect that the biggest split in British politics, can’t speak about anywhere else, is the split between people who have seen through all that, and those who still take it seriously. Not left/right, which is so twentieth century, nor leave/remain, which is so 2016. But “Oh no! A politician seeking attention has said that if we wake up tomorrow morning the country will collapse!” against “Has he? I wish those people would shut up and leave us in peace.”

The phrase “silent majority” comes to us from US political history. It’s self-explanatory, and I think there’s one here. If I could think of a current political issue on which, let’s say, the “vocal minority”, turbo-charged by a media hungry for an easy story, just won’t stop boring on and in the process convincing itself that it knows best - I’d be looking for the size of the “You’re not listening to me and you’re not even trying to understand me so I’m going to vote against you” vote. Expecting it to be big.

Anyway, never mind all that. I have nuts-and-bolts stuff to get done, and never mind how I know that. Scientists? Astrologers? Tarot-card readers? Looking at the state of my desk, any economist or politician would tell me the same thing.

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You won't forget to leave our tugboat behind, will you?

We miss the strangeness of the world because it’s routine. Between getting up this morning and writing this, I’ve gone for a short walk, eaten a small(ish) breakfast, and discovered the thoughts of two Greek politicians on the Chequers Plan. Spot the odd one out. The trees outside my front door are blowing in the wind - my favourite sound - and on my desk is a letter from Honda (about a safety recall) that has the words The Power of Dreams under the word Honda. My car is a second-hand (sorry, pre-loved) Honda Jazz. I don’t dream while driving it; I prefer to stay awake. I like it because it’s reliable - touch wood (sic).

Some gadget not a million miles from here, I forget which, has the words In Search of Excellence prominently displayed in all the places where my generation would have put, say, Instructions, or perhaps Warranty Information. My old laptop would play back recorded interviews on something called Windows Media Player. I do the exact-same thing in the exact-same way on my new laptop, except that the utility that turns itself on to handle the task is called Groove Music.


That’s fine. Funny, even. I like the distance between who they think I am and who I am. All that Big Data I must have generated since buying this laptop. All that technology, all that commercially driven analysis, all that “don’t switch off or even touch me; I’ve decided without consulting you to spend ten minutes showing you a blue screen while I update myself”. All that, and they still think I’m a Groove Music person and not a “can’t wait any longer; writing down my idea in my old Moleskine notebook” person.


Technology’s taking over like cars took over, but in that analogy, we’re still driving Model T Fords. The world we’ve made doesn’t really “get” any of us, does it?


I like “touch wood” as an expression, by the way, but “for my sins” is better. Not quite as common, but I was once told by a cameraman wearing headphones that he was filming (about to film; there was time for a chat) an address given by a Seattle-based technology guru (who had written the book on the innovation of the day) “for my sins”.

He was there with his camera and his black t-shirt and his headband and all his gear - for his sins? I could tell you what the guru said - I could go into my standard rant about cutting-edge technologists who derive their, ah, conference bookability from the existence of an old-fashioned printed book - except that I can’t take either of those roads because I spent the whole talk wondering what the cameraman’s sins might have been.


And let’s postulate some kind of outside-life committee of elders calculating the exact next-life consequence of every one of a lifetime’s sins. If we can work with the word “sins”. Wasn’t there some debate over cardinal versus venial and who gets to decide what counts as a sin? Of course, there would have been, but let’s stick with the question of what I did in old-time Constantinople to be writing this now.


Consequences of every thought, word and deed, perhaps. What did that cameraman do, to be pointing his camera at an individual coming out with yet another life-changing, fortune-making (not necessarily in that order) app? Who came up with [I can’t think of another example; my sins must be catching up with me] and who’s she going to be next as a result? I’m uneasy now, about eating that third Shredded Wheat.


This is a long way from turning on the radio while the kettle boils and ripping open Shredded Wheat packaging while listening to an earnest discussion offfffffffffffff - sorry, I blacked out for a moment. You know what they were talking about. You could recite it word for word, although don’t try that while driving. Somewhat more soporific than singing along to a favourite song. And anyway, I’m writing this not about Brrrrrr - but to argue for mindfulness as a response to strangeness.


The world is routinely strange. It’s strangely wonderful. Leaving a friend’s apartment yesterday, after tea and Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, I looked at the view of the Moor from her door (I must have done something careless back in 1582, to make that rhyme so jarringly) - I looked at the view of the Moor in Falmouth from just outside her front entrance; at the trees, the buildings, the green slopes, the concrete - and all of a sudden I thought: we are the invasive species.


That stopped me.

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Let them debate Brexit?

13/9/2018

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Whenever there’s nothing happening, we magnify whatever tiny amount of whatever isn’t happening to fill the gap. And because we’re stuck with human nature, we get exercised about it. Arguments break out. We take sides. Brexit, for example, hasn’t been happening for years. Not in any real sense of evolving, changing, generating news. But every twitch of not very much happening is magnified up to fill the space in our heads. It's also a cheap story to report.
 
I’m not in favour, nor am I against. I’ve forgotten why I voted the way I did. Pretty sure I'd vote the same way again, because nothing substantive has changed, although this time my main motivation would be wanting the whole subject just to go away. Whenever I turn on the radio, a voice expresses an opinion about Brexit that I’ve heard before. BBC Radio 4's Today lost 800,000 listeners between April and June 2018, compared to the same period last year. This, said a BBC spokesperson (I’m paraphrasing, obviously), was because the news was more interesting last year. And they’re still talking about Brexit.
 
Come 2020, we’ll still be however many miles from the mainland. We’ll still be richer or poorer, happier or sadder, wiser or, um, because of what we do and what happens to us, because of the many events, accidents, serendipities, pay rises, broken ankles, redundancy notices, hospital closures, health scares, bad decisions, friends who need to talk, rainy days, alarm clocks failing to go off, doctor’s appointments, celebrations, attacks of indigestion, long walks and visits to the cinema – that make a difference to our lives.
 
Today’s speech by a politician we’d almost forgotten, today’s secret but copiously leaked meeting in Conspiracy Room A at the House of Commons, will make a slight difference. We’ll get a slight charge from baying for somebody to be sent to the guillotine, or whatever is the modern equivalent, but can you remember the speech that same person made last week about Brexit? Neither can I, but I wouldn’t mind another slice of that cake. None of it really merits the amount of head-space we give it.

I keep having to remind myself that we're living through "austerity" and not "the collapse of civilisation as we knew it." Looking at the state today, I wonder about how easy a certain personality type finds it to apply austerity to other people. And how easily some people can argue that a short-term drop actually indicates a long-term gain. What it is to be human, eh?

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Sometimes, on an early walk, I lean on a wall and stare out to sea and think: I should take a photograph of this. And sometimes, the photograph comes out even more gold than the reality. And dark blue where there was only shadow.

Out there in the darkness, the rain is still falling. The wind is swirling it around in refracted clouds that dance around the street light and the gutters are running loud with water. Wetness makes everything bright, like the artist used a blacker pencil on silver paper. You scribble out that whole opening.
 
It’s a rainy night.
 
You’re sitting alone at a small table by a tiny front window with uneven leaded panes, in a part of town that you really think you might visit more often, and when you’re not staring out through the glass - weather like this is difficult not to watch - you’re filling the time with your notebook and your coffee, which has a pattern drawn into the foam. You want to be drinking something else, but you know that would be a mistake.
 
You came in here because you were getting wet and you saw the word “Bar” in red neon. Just that. You came in. You opened your notebook. Trusted the impulse. The bars are different where you live. Not quite so … you can’t put your finger on it, but it’s there. And yes: the stillness after the weather, and the way the door closed behind you with a sound like air being punched - you scribble out that line too - and the way nobody looked up as you came down the steps feeling just a little conspicuous in the big coat and Boston Red Sox baseball cap you’ve chosen for this outing - you like this place already.
 
Should we say something, do you think? The door - it’s got one of those metal-arm things at the top to close it slowly. It’s a heavy door - that piston could run an engine. Your table is recessed into the space next to the steps down from the door - so you’re in a small space, private almost, with the little window. There’s something odd about the window. You’re looking out at the street, but - you came in off the street, and there are, yes, seven full-size carpeted stone steps down into the bar. Stair rods. This window should be a basement window. But you’re looking out at the street.
 
You tear open the packet and eat the little pastry thing that came with the coffee, in the saucer with the teaspoon. It’s soft, for once, fresh. They never are. The door: some weird perspective thing, obviously. You’ll check it out when you leave. You pick up the teaspoon and fit it through the pattern in the foam, just neatly, under the top swirly bit. Then you stir it all in, and by a magic that you don’t notice, the coffee becomes strong and dark and hot again. No foam now. You take a sip. Oh, this is coffee. This is absolutely coffee. You’re going to come here again.
 
Seems to be some kind of writing exercise. Maybe in the morning. Perhaps tomorrow. You’ve been thinking about writing a piece set in a bar. An atmospheric bar. The click of a pool table. Waitresses delivering trays. Food orders ready; line of sight through to the kitchen. Music. People. That kind of bar. You lean back, set down your pen on the keyboard of the Lenovo Ideapad 320S you’ve been carrying for the past few weeks, and look around. You can’t see much, because you’re also tucked in behind the end-curve of the bar itself, which runs the length of the room away from you, down the left-hand wall, but you can see the long mirror, and the panelling, and some of the people at the tables. The place is okay, but – shouldn’t a bar have live music?
 
There’s a faint tobacco smell to the room, you notice, but unlit tobacco, not stale smoke. You think it’s tobacco; that’s the association that comes to you, anyway. A cigar-box smell, maybe. It’s pleasant. And the sound is just about how you like it. You can hear conversations, but not conversation - you write that down. There’s music, but not so loud that you can make out what it is. And that composite sound of waitresses bringing trays, hey, there is food, forks hitting plates, glasses - it’s all a composite sound, but that’s the part that holds it together - the composite percussion of the composite sound. You pick up your pen again, open your notebook again, and then think: no.
 
Like an artist’s sketchbook? Only in words not pictures? There’s a man watching you. He’s over there, across the room, sitting side-on to you at that square table. He’s watching you through the mirror. He looks familiar, but you’re pretty sure you don’t know him. He’s somebody you see around on the street, maybe? Or in a shop? Somewhere regular. Your eyes meet and he grins: busted. He turns his head to look at you directly, and mimes: mind if I join you? You shrug in a way that says: sure, come on over. Because you can’t do anything else. And while he gathers up his stuff, you move your coat from that chair to that chair, and make space at the table.
 
He sits down, a big presence in your small space.
 
You close your notebook and your laptop.
 
“You’ve got that book coming out soon, haven’t you?”
 
You’re surprised by the question. But then he looks at you, direct, eye to eye, and all of a sudden, you know who he is.
 
“The compilation? Yes, I-”
 
There’s the tiny fleck of black in the iris of his eye, on the left, just below the pupil. Not big enough to be a flaw.
 
“No, I meant the other one.”
 
You sigh. “Yes. At last.”
 
But he doesn’t want to hear whatever you’ve got to say about “at last” and how long it took.
 
“What about the ​other other one?”
 
This is the question to which you don’t know the answer. You don’t reply immediately, and when eventually you do, he just nods a couple of times. He’s been watching your body language, you realise, and now he’s watching your hands form mudras over the table. You’re sitting face to face still, although you’ve pushed back your chair.
 
Then he says, quietly, “It’s the whole thing, though, isn’t it? The yin or the yang or the other thing. It completes the mystery.”
 
Nothing for us here. He's just talking to himself. You run your hand back over your hair and then take off your glasses and inspect them. It’s a composite move you’ve made so many times that you’re not aware you’re doing it, and what it tells him is: you don’t know; you suppose so; you don’t understand it but you’re going along with it. Somewhere in there is also: you’re tired. It’s almost done. But you don’t know if you-
 
He leans forward. “Do what comes next. That’s all there can be. No explanations.”
 
“I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts recently.”
 
“I’ve been reading them.”
 
“They’re fun to do. They come naturally. But – what are they?”
 
He takes a sip of his drink. It’s whisky-brown, with ice in it that clinks in the way that ice should, and although he’s been sipping at it all evening, it’s still the same double-on-the-rocks that he ordered.
 
He puts the drink down. “No explanations,” he says. Then, “Is there a moral to this one, by the way? There usually is.”
 
You relax. You’re off the hook. “Just the punchline. Which is obvious by now.”
 
He laughs softly. “Getting in touch with your imagination. Right.”
 
“But I don’t know…”
 
“You’ve got twice as many unique visitors as when you used to bang on about that EU vote and the US President. And in your case – you can have this for free – finish things. You’ve got a lifetime’s work that you never-” He shakes his head. “You’re hopeless at that.”
 
“But…” There isn’t a but.
 
He’s shrugs on his coat,
 
“I like the way you did this. Out in the open.”
 
“I’ve been thinking about it. I wasn’t well, you know? Thinking time.”
 
“Plus, you even talked about the books.”
 
“All three of them.”
 
“Although we both know... You do have to talk about them, you know.”
 
“Yeah, right.”
 
He laughs. And then you’re alone.
 
You sit there for a while, thinking about new beginnings and the unfinished past, and while all that’s going through your head, the life of the bar goes on around you. Live musicians appear, and there’s laughter, and then there’s a wild-looking gypsy woman – you just know she’s a gypsy woman, and boy, she looks wild – playing some crazy fast lament on her violin that runs up high and drowns out the four guys in sombreros playing their banjos, A full-grown tiger ambles past your table, glancing at you incuriously as it goes, and then a stiletto knife whizzes past your ear, hitting 180 and splitting the dartboard in two.
 
This bar is so very you. But it’s time to go.
 
When you emerge onto the street, you find that the rain has stopped, although there’s still a wet clarity to everything. You pull your coat around you, and it’s not until you’re almost home that you remember you were going to check that thing with the window.
 
But does it matter? You shake your head, wondering if you’ll ever find that bar again.
 
You leave your bag by your desk, pull off your coat and your jacket, and go through to the kitchen. The floor boards creak. They didn’t used to do that, but we’re close to the end now so obviously they would. You notice that the door across the hall – you’ve got a hall? – has been left ajar, although you’re sure you closed it before you went out. Inside, in the gloom, you can see a rocking chair, rocking. What do you mean, you don’t own a rocking chair?
 
It is, of course, pitch dark at the top of the stairs and the door to the cellar is wide open. Luckily, your bedroom and the bathroom are on the ground floor. The end is nigh, and you’d take so long getting up those stairs, testing every creak – there just isn’t time. Sorry, I know you wanted the room at the front with the en-suite – never mind.
 
You were going into the kitchen, remember? You go into the kitchen. You’re not going to be in here long enough to light the candles, so you switch on the ceiling lights and never mind the hum.
 
You stand in the kitchen doorway with a mug of – I don’t know, what do you like in the evenings? – camomile tea, and look at your work-table, the bay window and the night beyond. Streetlight has a forgiving quality, you decide. But if that’s worth writing down, you’ll remember it in the morning.
 
You turn off the kitchen light. What’s left is the yellow light from outside.
 
Forgiving? Really?
 
It’s a good light for this late - you check the time. You leave the rest of the tea and kick off your shoes. Usually you take off your clothes as well, before going through to the bathroom, but there are people reading this blog post who don’t know you, so we’ll jump-cut straight through the costume change - now you’re wearing a truly voluminous dressing gown made out of curtain material lined with velvet and a fez with a tassel (don’t ask me; I just write the stuff) - and you’re ready for the punchline - in fact, you’re wishing it would hurry up and come so you can get some sleep.
 
You go through to the bathroom - what do you look like in that ridiculous dressing gown? - and barely controlling your patience, you brush your teeth.
 
Then, finally, it’s time. You take off your glasses and lean forward to the mirror. There, just there, below the pupil, the flaw in your left eye, on the left in your reflection.
 
He winks at you. “Good talk,” he says, although no sound comes through the mirror.
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See you next week?

6/9/2018

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Some days, the urge to write the week’s blog post evaporates in a welter of cough linctus, paper handkerchiefs and those pleasant little soft throat lozenges that are so embarrassing to like in any other circumstance. We all know the term “man flu”, but this is so much worse than that. I’ve got [some text missing here] out of my ears, and [some text missing here] right down deep in my [some text missing here] with a whole [some text missing here] bright red.

So we’re going to have to manage without the usual snap, crackle and buzz of whatever you were expecting to read when you got here. The usual attractions are shuttered up, and the empty streets are blowing with detritus torn out of rubbish bags by hungry seagulls. That bloke in the trench-coat, hyphen courtesy of Weebly's spellcheck (spell-check, surely?), his back to the wind, hand on his hat, has just appeared in my mind’s eye but I’ve no idea where to send him. Yes, the Ferris wheel is about to blow over, but the emergency services are on their way.

Is this one going to make any sense, do you suppose? How did they know to come? Oh, I don’t know, they’ve got a psychic on the payroll and they’ve learned from bitter experience that whenever the lighting goes weird and the spooky music starts up, they should listen to her. So they’re tooled up for the Ferris wheel landing on the electricity substation and, um, the nuclear reactor built in direct contravention of planning controls right on the corner behind the launderette, There’ll be a fire and the reactor will melt down, but they’ve got all that covered, and almost certainly some ancient evil will be woken from its centuries-long slumber by all the noise - but there’s a department for that kind of thing now.

The giant gorilla snatching the news helicopter out of the sky comes as a surprise, but it’s important to maintain an element of unpredictability in these situations. Try some more of this cough medicine, it’s really - powerful. Thanks, don’t mind if I do. No, to the brim is fine.

He's drinking the stuff in this antique brown bottle with "patent medicine" embossed on the side? Seriously? Sometimes, I kind of almost like being unwell - oh, gravely ill; you wouldn’t believe my symptoms - because if it’s the right kind of illness, just the right intensity, it’s an opportunity to switch off for a couple of days and catch up on some reading and box-set watching. Is that a tree branch tapping on the window? For a moment I thought - no, couldn’t be.

That’s your raven, right? I think it likes me. There are no rules for how to behave in this situation - there are rules, multitudes of them, but they’re all backward-looking, describe what’s worked in the past as though it’s established practice and kind of get in the way of introducing anything new - no rules, so we’ll just play this one by ear. How do you deal with the “rule” that a weekly blog has to be a weekly blog even if the person who writes it is in a state of - oh, you wouldn’t believe; oh, no, sorry, I’ve said that already? If the person who writes it is -

What is this stuff? Have you read the ingredients? Yes, thank you, I think I could possibly manage a cup of tea. And a couple of biscuits, perhaps? And I wonder - is there any of that cake left? Oh, no, not a large slice, well, perhaps wide enough to include two of the cherries on top? What’s that? Well enough to get out of bed? Oh, my head, I would, you know I really would, but… no, the chocolate biscuits would be gentler on my stomach, I think. Only one cherry? The cake’s in the side in the kitchen, isn’t it? Did you say you were going out later?

Where was I?

Oh, don’t worry, it’s an old house; there’s bound to be some creaking. I was talking about rules, wasn’t I? Commitment to write weekly; but not at all well today (and yesterday; time’s running out). It is a truth universally acknowledged by people who put together courses on how to do social media properly that a blog, or a vlog (don't worry; no prospect whatsoever), or a podcast (thinking about it), or a multi-media online spectacular featuring wild animals, snake charmers, fortune tellers and rabbits being evicted from hats (can I leave you to fill this bracket?) must be updated regularly, at whatever interval the "unique visitor" (that's you) has come to expect. What does the rulebook say about being ill? Apart from: don't? Sorry, the playbook. Everything’s a playbook nowadays. What does the social media/blogging playbook say?

No wonder he's looking flushed. But at least he's forming sentences. I think the answer is, sit huddled on the side of the bed, duvet around your shoulders, hot water bottle on your head and old-fashioned thermometer in your mouth, feet in a mustard bath (no idea why, but the sentence was rolling along and suddenly there was this mustard bath), and then ask the nurse in the starched 19th-century outfit to fire up the laptop, help you to open up Google Docs, and then bravely, heroically, write a short apologetic piece to say that normal service will be resumed next week.

Reader, this is that piece. Normal service will be resumed next week. I’m - oh, you can work out how I’m feeling. The heart monitor’s blipping away happily, and the visibly eccentric boffin with the wild hair and the defibrillator paddles is looking disappointed. There’s a storm coming, but nobody’s thought to connect the lightning conductor to the slab on which I’m lying. Rumours that I’ve come downstairs and settled myself at my desk with a larger slice of cake, two cherries wide, are, um, true, well, three, but I’m really not feeling up to much. Sorry.

Hang on. I see four cherries. That's half a cake! If I go on like this, I’ll get a client. There are whole genres of fiction - and I’ve read most of them since heading up to bed two days ago - in which the first chapter of the first book of the series invariably starts with the hero, male or female, sitting in his/her office (which is sometimes a regular table in a bar where he/she knows everybody) grumbling about (take your pick) headache, hangover, bills to pay, lack of cash, lack of clients, failure to look presentable and/or find uncrumpled clothes, run out of soft throat lozenges, nobody’s taking me seriously, I really am ill, et cetera. They grumble, grumble, grumble, and just when you’ve got it clear that they’re not at their best - the book starts with the arrival of a client.

I blame Raymond Chandler. Except that he was good at it. Anyway, our hero sits at his (enough of the his/her; we’re talking about me) desk in his pyjamas, with his hair out of control, not seen a razor recently, writing his apology for a blog post, and there’s a tap on the door and in walks this ice-cold tall blonde woman with green eyes (this is my story) in a sharp suit with a supercilious expression (I’m sure the suit has a supercilious expression too, but you know what I mean) and they trade one-liners until it’s clear that he’s independently maverick-ish and unaffected by her condescension and she’s prepared to pay him an enormously large sum of money to find the McGuffin within twenty-four hours or the kidnapped heiress Runs Out Of Time.

Everybody down at the Precinct has vouched for him, although she clearly can’t believe it, and it’s only that extra thing Detective Petersen said that keeps her from walking straight out again. She’s not looking for a relationship, she’s heard all those lines before, this is strictly business, but - there, that was almost a smile.

He's not going to tell us what Detective Petersen said, is he? So I don't know if the social-media playbook has a rule for this, but going by everything I’ve read over the last few days - wow, this 19th-century cough medicine is strong stuff - the real-life rule for what to do if you have a blog post to write and a really impressive attack of man flu - did I tell you about [some text missing here]? is - grumble. Big-time. Wow, this medicine. Not only do you get cake with cherries on top, but if you go on long enough - oh!

Excuse me, I think I might just nip upstairs and brush my hair.


Picture
Where's Gertrude Stein when you need her? It's a verge, a verge, a verge.

There’s a sign on the wall of my local surgery about the cost of missed appointments. No figure given, but the same money could have bought “a new fancy car” or a “once in a lifetime holiday” or an “extension of the surgery for better care” or a “donation towards 84 defibrillator machines in Falmouth and around Cornwall”. They could have bought a new ear syringe machine or extended the car park.

One of those missed appointments was mine. I don’t feel good about it. Early-morning phone appointment. But I’d set my phone to silent the day before, for a reason I don’t remember, and forgotten to set it back to intrusive. And I’m hazy anyway first thing in the morning. So the price of a day trip to Bristol, or perhaps of a half-share in five defibrillator machines in Penryn, was spent on keeping that doctor sitting at his desk holding his phone to his ear and listening to the dialling tone.

We fill small moments. Except that I don’t think that’s what happened. I don’t remember whether I got one missed call or two from the surgery’s Unknown Number, but I’d guess the doctor recorded me as a no-answer and got on with using the unexpected free time to do something useful - read his notes for the next patient, get some much-needed sleep/coffee, et cetera. If there had been a way to unhook him from his salary for that ten/twenty minutes, and cut off the utilities to his consulting room for that brief interval, there would have been spare cash to put towards a new parking space.

But that isn’t how life happens. For the record, I did go in to the surgery and apologise, and when I picked up the phone at the appointed time for my remade appointment, the doctor and I were all friends again. But that’s just a self-interested little digression: what I’m saying is, the front-office staff are not on a Caribbean cruise because of how many people failed to pick up the phone for their remote appointments. We fill small moments with work. My missed-appointment money was spent on - let’s be extravagant here - giving the doctor a few moments of freedom that might have done wonders for his mental health.

Or on getting him properly ready for his next appointment. There aren’t people sitting in that waiting room thinking: if I miss another three appointments, I could get them as far as Phuket. Any more than there are doctors who think: the patient wasn’t there, so I shall spend the next twenty minutes consciously wasting the time. But my real question is, why does it always have to be money? Do we have no other language, even in health care?

Large-scale infrastructure projects. I like the people at my local surgery, but (a) I don’t feel inclined to take the guilt trip because human error - like mine in forgetting that appointment (at my age, etc.) - is part of the human condition that is their business anyway, and (b) if they’re as hard-pressed as they claim to be, they’ll probably welcome an occasional unscheduled opportunity to regroup. If this is dementia-friendly Falmouth (I see stickers saying it is), people who forget appointments aren’t the bad guys.

I get it that people who can’t be bothered to turn up, say, are causing resources - doctors, nurses, ear syringe machines - to be moved expensively into place for no reason, and okay, there probably are good arguments for replacing patients with robots. AI doesn’t forget appointments. Assuming you remember to recharge it overnight. Oops.

But - “we could have bought a car with the money we spent on getting ready for you”? I don’t, er, buy it. That’s accountancy. Next time we’re given a figure for missed appointments, or indeed large-scale infrastructure projects or anything else, perhaps somebody could ask for a breakdown of how that figure was reached? And if we’re not given a figure, I don’t know, maybe we should ask how much a “donation towards 84 defibrillator machines in Falmouth and around Cornwall” is in real money.

Feathers. And come to think of it, “we could have gone on holiday if we hadn’t been waiting for you” doesn’t really work as an incentive. We’re about to be celebrating the centenary of the guns falling silent. Earlier in that war, in 1914, the Order of the White Feather was founded “to shame men into enlisting in the British army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform” (Wikipedia; not a happy story). That was counterproductive (read it, quite interesting), but the reason I know that is that I went looking for that old Kitchener poster.

You remember the one? Typically misremembered (by me too) as the “Your Country Needs You” poster; that phrase redirects to the original, which actually says “Lord Kitchener wants you”. I thought of it because I wondered whether a better “nudge” for my surgery to use would be a poster showing a tearful nurse or doctor or receptionist (okay, I’m over it; I’m not going to list everybody) over the slogan “Your Surgery Misses You”. That would do it, surely? I don’t feel too sad about keeping them from binge-buying defibrillators, or buying a car, but if they’re sitting up there on the hill worrying about me - well, I’d hate to let them down.  

Money isn’t the root of all punctuality, and a white feather, or an “I forgot my appointment” badge, wouldn’t be the right approach either. But caring about the staff, getting a sense of their disappointment at not seeing me, thinking of them sitting there saying “Do you think he’s all right?” and checking their watches, while the ceiling lights hum and the wall clock ticks away the seconds - okay! I’m coming!

This isn’t a footnote, but I thought I’d put it here anyway. Way back when, you got to be an “investigative journalist” because you were a journalist and you investigated things. Typically, things that somebody else didn’t want investigated, rather than things that turned up in your inbox in the form of a media release or a leak.

These days, you can do a course in “investigative journalism”. Teaching people how to investigate requires a set of assumptions about what they’ll investigate, and you have to spell out a list of investigative methods, to fit into a syllabus, rather than teaching them flexibility and responsiveness - but it’s okay, because how would you do that anyway? If you can’t do it, teach it, goes the old saying. If you’re taught it, that doesn’t mean you can do it, goes today’s version.

A certain well-known president is making a lot of noise at the moment about “treason”. Maybe today’s Deep Throat couldn’t find anybody prepared to go into the parking garage with him, so he had to write his own article.
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