Mellow fruitfulness is Autumn, isn’t it? This is the season for rationalising last year’s forecasts and then shamelessly making new ones. I remember saying something about a certain president – if he was a foreign agent, they’d have trained him better than this – and then going out on a limb to criticise the current fashion for fake news – it’s only a problem because we believe what we want to believe – but being wrong about yesterday doesn’t mean I can’t grab a headline today by forecasting doom tomorrow.

So here goes. It’ll all go horribly wrong – except global warming. Politics will depart from the near-universal, near-constant trend towards compromise, procrastination and business as usual for as long as it takes to normalise whatever’s just happened – and for once it will do what the news media are always hoping it will do. Brexit won’t turn out to be a damp squib that leaves us at roughly the same distance as ever from the euro-bureaucracy. Civil war – the People’s War, historians will call it – will break out in England; Scotland and Wales will secede; the Irish will close the border. Budgets will be increased across the board for broadcast-news journalists and the gender pay gap will be closed overnight at the BBC. There will be an internal coup; highly motivated radical news teams will take over management.

EU advisers will be sent in to support the Remain side in London and the home counties, but in response, a formerly imperial (but we don’t talk about that) Asian power will send troops to support the Brexiteers in the North. There’ll be a fragile peace for a while, but then shots will be fired across the M40 just outside Oxford, and an ambitious young reporter, supported by a veteran camera crew, will share footage that seems to show – it was raining that day – armoured vehicles with Chinese markings deploying around a shopping complex in Reading. On 1st April 2019, the Russians will annexe Northern Ireland. The following morning, Cornwall will declare independence and an economic partnership with – but that would be telling. Hint: oil. Theresa May will survive a confidence vote.

Meanwhile, across the water, US politics won’t follow its usual late-term path of kicking the can down the road while the various constituent parts of the US government seek compromise in private while denouncing each other in public. A leading figure in the executive branch will be found to have received payments in his youth from the East German Stasi, while another will confess – in return for immunity – to being a long-term sleeper agent for – but you can guess. Everybody will impeach everybody else. A hacker will leak documents indicating that the NSA, CIA, etc., have known all along that all governments everywhere interfere in all elections everywhere. California will announce that it is adopting its own independent foreign policy. The Senate’s long-running enquiry into something we’ve all forgotten will produce an interim report.

On 1st April 2019, news reports will suggest that the volcano beneath Yellowstone Park has finally erupted; populations will not flee because they think it’s entertainment. Early footage will indeed be dramatic, but the shockwave from the eruption will break open dozens of top-secret government laboratories experimenting with – well, among other things, lethal bio-toxins, zombie-plague viruses, man-eating plants, bio-engineered predatory animals, AI-driven super-soldiers – and even the emergency networks won’t be on the air for very long.  A volcanic cloud will cover the entire continental US from April through to – sorry, thru – September, cutting all communications and grounding all air traffic, and when it clears, it will be found that the entire country has reverted to a simple agrarian economy. There won’t be any violence, “frontier law” will make sure of that, but a relatively small Asian nation will send a force of peacekeepers all the same.

Theresa May will survive another confidence vote. In September, armoured and infantry divisions of the newly formed Army of Scotland will invade northern England, fronted by Pipers and supported by Ghurkhas and handing out flowers. Much to their own surprise, they will reach York in two days and Oxford in three. Peace talks will ensue, and all foreign forces will withdraw from the British – the term will be used for clarity – mainland within a week. A new Act of Union will be drawn up and – after brief confusion – be signed by representatives of both sides. The centre of government of the newly united nation will be moved to Scotland. A treaty will be signed with the Welsh. Unexpectedly, the Russians will withdraw from Northern Ireland and negotiations will begin with the various parties to government there. The Edinburgh and Cardiff governments will sign a separate treaty with Cornwall, which will have a monopoly on oil supply to the “British” mainland.

And while all that’s holding our attention, global sea levels will rise by another inch. We won’t notice that. Icebergs the size of countries will break loose and stray into shipping lanes. We’ll be too busy with the political news to register the significance of that. Arctic and Antarctic wildlife populations will dwindle – inside a year; some of us will notice that – and several varieties of tropical lizard will start to produce young that are significantly larger than the norm. A popular scientist will pitch an idea to a TV channel for a show about the return of the dinosaurs. He’ll be turned down and we’ll never see that. In December 2019, in just one month because acceleration really can happen, global sea levels will rise by another inch and a whaling ship will announce that it has caught an ichthyosaur.

But that story will break on Christmas Eve 2019, and we’ll miss it. Later that same evening, a group of shepherds tending sheep on a hill outside a small town in the East will see a flaming comet cross the sky, and then another, and then there’ll be a whole series of impacts that will shake the ground beneath their backs, and then, rather to their surprise, clouds of dust and ash that resemble vast horsemen will spread rapidly across the sky above them, sea levels will rise abruptly to wash at their ankles…

…and in the aftermath, as all that dust and ash forms into a not-quite-walkable crust on the water; as unfamiliar sea creatures crawl up onto the remaining beaches and start walking about on their fins; as reports trickle in that herds of dinosaurs are roaming the burnt forests – all the surviving World Leaders will sign (after all-night talks) a Solemn New Year’s Resolution For 2020 banning climate change.

And promising to do something about it.

And ash will continue to fall from the sky…

…blotting out the sun.

Yes, there will come a time when I need a new sofa, new mattress, shiny new hatchback, new breakfast cereal, complete new lifestyle with thumping music in the background and a fizzy drink in the foreground – my dear, the people! – and of course a small technological object to save me the trouble of flicking the light switch, and yes – it is helpful of the advertising industry to remind me of all this at ten-minute intervals while I’m in a post-Christmas dinner haze on the sofa, watching the other half of the film that was on in the background last night – but I think a better New Year’s Resolution than “Go Shopping” would be “Get Rid Of The Television”.

Chop wood, carry water. Do things in the evenings. People watch Netflix anyway, don’t they? All these ads on Freeview are for my eyes only. Maybe next year I’ll become fit and prosperous, develop a whole range of new interests, chop responsibly sourced wood, build a log cabin, carry only the water that I’m prepared to return to the river, carve wooden toys, smelt iron ore, pick up plastic from the beach – do stuff rather than watching imaginary people do stuff. Instead of taking my concerns and worries verbatim from concerned-looking people reading off autocues, I’ll make new friends, talk to people, read more. Actually, that last one deserves more prominence. Read more.

My attention span is shorter than it was. The rest of me is older than it was, but that’s fine because surveys reveal – no, wait. That’s fine because I have found for myself, personally, on my own, without prompting, that getting older has its fun side. Less stress, et cetera, and more – never mind. Surveys – hah! I’ll read more. No, I won’t download an app that reads to me, even if I can pick the voice. When I say I’ll read more, I mean I’ll take books – physical books – down off the shelf (resolution: build bookshelves) one by one and I’ll sit with them in my favourite armchair and I’ll decipher the rows of black squiggles until once again they make sense in the way that they did when I was younger. And I’ll be away.

Remember the (apocryphal?) story of the young girl asked whether she preferred reading to TV? Reading, because the pictures were better. [Might have been radio versus TV, but never mind. Fake news, fake apocryphal stories.]

No, I do NOT need to turn on the TV to find an ad for a store that’s including favourite armchairs in its sale. I have a sofa. It’s old, but that’s not so bad, see above, and anyway, you can’t find forgotten treasures down the backs of new sofas. So – as I used to say – there!

There’s that picture, isn’t there? Auden – Musee des Beaux Arts. That’s the poem. The picture is Pieter Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus (1560-ish; read up online about the doubtful attribution), and W H Auden wrote his poem about it. Except that Auden understood Breughel’s emphasis on the plough in the front, and the horse, and the ship catching the wind. While Icarus is falling from the sky in the background, the bloke in the foreground is busy preparing his ground for the food that will feed his family. [Caution. This paragraph contains assumptions.]

Somewhere inside my television today, writing this sentence on Tuesday morning after hearing about the cancellation of the vote, great events will be left unresolved in Westminster and Brussels. Journalists will record “packages”, to be replayed through the day until I finally watch them, about politicians not after all voting together about the interminable issue of the day. A government will soon fall, or it won’t – I tell you now, writing on Wednesday afternoon, before the confidence vote, that I’m not going to come back and edit this later in the week – and political life will go on, relentlessly discussed. I have a bag with “Carrying Stuff Around Is The New Leaving It Where It Is” printed on the side. “Left unresolved” is the new “finally settled”.

Elsewhere today, somewhere out across those fields and beyond the houses, babies will be born; lives will begin (and end); there will be celebrations, and illnesses, and triumphs, and disasters; and washing up will get done. People will get hot, cold and go to work. Replacement bus services will carry rail commuters to their desks. Vast airliners will ferry people in their thousands from, say, Seattle to London, while other vast airliners will ferry people in their thousands from London to Seattle. Corner shops, not all of them on corners, will sell tobacco and newspapers and brief conversations about football to lonely old men, and vapour stores will sell things to suck.

It’s a popular name, so there’s a reasonable chance that one of today’s babies will be called William. More than one, possibly, but that William, the one we’re thinking about, will emerge into the world baffled by the unfolding of his limbs and the air on his skin, and he’ll breathe all of a sudden, and the first sound he makes will be a plaintive cry that attracts the attention of his mother. Then, let’s assume, he’ll get some breakfast, wrap up warm and go to sleep. At intervals through the day, people close to him will be impressed, in a not entirely positive way, at the force, consistency and all-round un-ignorability of his output.

Advent calendars will be opened, chocolates will be eaten, and Christmas-present lists will be compiled. Online-banking apps will be used, and if that ad is to be believed – the ad I’m thinking about – at least one young-ish photogenic man will lie on his front on a treatment table, with a forest pf acupuncture needles in his back, grinning happily at his smartphone as he checks the balance on his current account. Other ads are available, and somewhere, there’s a photogenic woman in a gym, a towel around her neck, who’s paused on the way to the shower, and sat down on a bench, to grin at her banking app.

I don’t take my smartphone into the shower with me, and nor do I know any acupuncturists, but today is busy for me too. I have a piece to write – no, not this one – and a “let’s meet for coffee” date with a friend, and a trip out to a storage unit in Redruth, and probably a late lunch, and roof bars to fit to the roof of my car, and bills to pay (two of them), and trees to visit, and mysterious strangers to meet, and an unfolding destiny to keep from getting tangled up with all the laundry I need to sort out, and  to-do list on which I need to change the ‘Tuesday’ at the top to ‘Wednesday’, and dragons to slay, and then this evening I’m meeting a graphic designer to talk about a book cover. [Here I am on Thursday, and I am NOT updating.]

And all the while, in Westminster and Brussels, they’ll be burbling on about the trade deal. A tree fell yesterday, onto the road between Falmouth and Truro. It wasn’t in a forest, and there were no bears nearby going about their private business, but a lot of people heard it and we all saw it – picture posted on Facebook. I’ll go that way later, find out if it’s been cleared. Maybe from Bailey’s, the country store – not from the roadside – I’ll pick up some logs today. William, the baby, will continue to act on the assumption that the world owes him a good lunch and a warm place to sleep. His face and the story of his birth will spread across social media. At least one bright star will light the heavens tonight, as it did last night.

Ministers will brief against each other, off the record. At the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, at least one tourist will check in via Facebook. People will be wheeled along corridors to rooms where they will be invited to count down from one hundred – rooms where they will miss the day, waking up tomorrow with pains where they had tumours. Young journalists who don’t know whose gravestone bears the words “Grand Inquisitor” – a question from a regular quiz in one of last weekend’s magazines – will tell us how serious the various possible outcomes of the eventual vote could be, and then when the outcome finally arrives, they’ll tell us how serious its possible consequences could be. [NOT updating this. I refuse. Shan't!]

There’ll be weather forecasts, and lunches served in cafes, and dogs walked, and thunderstorms, and ships sunk, and heart-warming stories shared on social media, and pictures of cats, and every time I turn on the radio, the discussion will be about the possible consequences of what could happen in – how many weeks, did you say? Outside my window, there is one of those eight-legged, red, shallow-water drilling rigs. You know the things? The eight legs are so that they can shift position. The business of the sea, like the business of the land, will continue while the radio talks about the trade deal.

Behind me as I sit here, because unlike those bears earlier on, this room only exists when I perceive it – there’s an aching void that is shiningly dark – there’s light everywhere, but nothing to reflect it – and luminous with an absence of stars. In my kitchen sink, there are knives, forks, spoons, and last night’s plates. I think I might turn my back on those. [Voids have feelings too, you know.]

When William asks about today, if he ever does, the story told will be one of realising that the time had finally come - come late or come early or come exactly on time; the story told will be one of rushing to the hospital; of their reception at the hospital and of (let's say) the funny-in-retrospect thing William's young father said when he first held William. His parents’ eyes might meet as they tell the story, and they might be as much sharing the memory with each other as with their son, and it’ll be jazzed up slightly for his benefit, and if any other relatives and friends are there, they might chip in with their memories of his arrival…

…and if this is the kind of stable family unit that appears in TV ads, they’ll all be sitting around a table wearing party hats and grinning at each other – but I’ll bet my Peter Rabbit 50p piece that nobody will mention the brand of the butter, let alone that other B.

My post last week, Brexit wrexit, don’t it? got a reply. At least – let’s not get carried away here – I emailed Patricia Finney to let her know of her new role as Second Footnote to my post, and she replied. I replied to her, and she replied again. Carried away with my success, I emailed Simon Minchin to let him know that I’d made last week’s second blog post out of his recent attempt to call me via Facebook. He replied too.

Having so satisfactorily answered the question “What do I have to do, to get people to read my blog posts?”, I decided to celebrate by filling this space with my correspondence. So here goes. I wrote Brexit wrexit, don’t it?, and Patricia Finney replied as follows:

Funnily enough, the Roundheads were (violently) against being in the then equivalent of the EU and the Cavaliers were sort of vaguely for it, when they thought about it, which they usually didn't. The Roundheads won because they used better technology, which included new cavalry tactics and a better strategy, not because they were Righteous, although that's what they thought. Don't know what that means in terms of your blog.
 
As for Brexit Wrexit, I know you're sure there'll be the usual English fudge (CofE-style) and I hope you're right. The signs are good for the fudge which is great. 90% of the time the deal is made, the fudge happens and everything carries on as before with a few tweaks.
 
There is that annoying 10% of the time when the fudge doesn't happen and then everything goes to hell - Hitler was probably very disappointed when the nice fudge he offered the British in ?1940 didn't happen and that loony Churchill got power instead. When we look back, of course we know it was the right result. But that's not how it looked at the time.
 
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper none dare call it treason."  [John Harington]
 
So I'm reduced to mysticism - the hope that whatever happens in the Brexit short-term, in the long term it'll turn out OK thanks to something ineffable about Britain and its people or whatever.
 
I still think that a good third of the Leave voters in 2016, voted that way to give Cameron (remember him?) a good kicking, with only the vaguest notion of what the EU actually is. I also think that given the chance again, many of them will vote Remain so they can give Theresa May a good kicking - and I quite understand why few politicians like the idea.
 
I think another referendum would be great (and possibly best of three if the Brexiteers shout loud enough and anybody believes them), but I don't see it happening without a constitutional crisis.
 
slainte
 
Patricia
 
So I replied:

If Brexit was the work of populists, as currently demonised, I don't buy the idea that they would have listened to Leave politicians for long enough to be fooled by them. Immediately before that first People's Vote, Mr Cameron went to Brussels to extract concessions, and came back with nothing. To the extent that 17 million voters can be given one motive, I'd guess they voted against the EU, which has been an issue since Mrs Thatcher's time, and against the prevailing assumptions of the political centre, which isn't populist by any definition. Against the political centre, in other words.

But I don't care about Brexit any more. Whether we're a trading partner or a member of the EU isn't as big a question as we're being incited to believe by the political centre - the "media-political complex". It's a question, but the future is unknowable and can't be determined by any amount of debate. Something will happen, but it won't be determined by a vote in parliament. The UK doesn't know what it wants - Lord Halifax would be the Remain/status quo/keep-a-hold-of-nurse candidate for PM - and the EU's doing a fair impression of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy single-mindedly working to hold itself together. With internal borders being closed to migrants, etc., the EU isn't quite the European ideal either.

What fascinates me is that we haven't addressed, or indeed resolved, whatever it was that made 17 million people vote against the EU, after all those years of EU membership and all those EU benefits. Instead, we've convinced ourselves that the Leave voters were misled/mistaken. We've raised the spectre of "the Brexiteers", and come to believe that a second People's Vote would go for Remain. But we haven't fixed the reasons why the first People's Vote was for Leave. Those 17 million voters have been told that they were wrong, repeatedly, but nobody's asked them why they voted that way, nor done anything about it.

Calling the second referendum a People's Vote, as though the first was something else, is surely insulting to the People who Voted in the first referendum, and hardly guaranteed to get the desired result. Just as we all expected 'Remain' in 2016, we're all expecting 'Remain' in 2018/9. One more referendum, and we'd end up with best of three anyway, is my guess.

Nothing catastrophic will happen if we Leave/Remain. We'll be in, or we'll be out, and we can start to deal with that. But the fudge won't set properly, if you want to put it like that, if we don't ask the reason why we are where we are.

To that, Patricia replied:

Yes, of course, you're right - we need to ask the 17 million voters who voted Leave why they did it.
 
I've done that as far as I can (a totally unscientific and unbalanced poll) and the answer splits between "keep Britain independent/hate Brussels bureaucracy", "don't like migrants" and "kick Cameron."
 
I think it's absolutely disgraceful that nobody has bothered to ask, there have (as far as I'm aware) been no studies on it apart from demographic ones (younger and more educated people tended to vote Remain, older and countryside-living tended to vote Leave) which doesn't get you very far.
 
We're heading for a USA type mess where everybody is shouting at the other side and nobody is listening.
 
Salud!
 
Patricia
 
Meanwhile, out in the wild country to the North of here, Simon Minchin had just laid a fire of the finest hardwood from the forests around his home, opened a bottle of the finest claret from his cellars and left it to breathe for a moment before decanting, and settled back into his creaky-but-still-favourite ancestral armchair to wrestle with opening his new box of organic green fire-lighters, when his inbox chimed with the news that I’d … see above.

Some while later, my inbox clanked, and I read this.

I met Robin Snelson. Nice man.

Which seems like a good place to leave it. Patricia’s book is just out, and Simon’s book is out next year. Search the usual engines, watch the usual spaces.

Just to go on record with a prediction, I think Brexit has become the MacGuffin for a fairly standard UK-political endgame, while the European Union seems to have begun the process of turning itself into a merely bureaucratic version of the Soviet Union. We’ve been in these arguments for so long now that human nature seems to be reasserting itself in those directions. The People’s Vote of 2016 was hardly the Prague Spring, and belief in Remain is hardly a deeply held conviction that Communism will eventually prevail, but watching it all, I do get the weirdest sense that we’ve been here before.
 
Leave/Remain isn’t actually a terribly big question, outside the minutiae of the trade deal itself, and it’s my observation/experience that in the absence of deals, deals get made. The purpose of the GATT, and the WTO, and the Doha Round, and the - keeping reading, this blows over - meeting in Bali in 2013 was to lower tariffs and trade barriers, et cetera, and the obstacles to all that effort weren’t stubborn trade barriers, because everybody wanted them gone, but the combination of self interest and human nature most commonly expressed by politicians. [See also US:China, but we’re not going there.] We can trade together, once we get the politics out of the way.
 
The benefit of this latest catharsis, I would like to think, will be to get both our attention and the politicians'; to force a working together without obfuscation or manipulation. We had a vote that split the country down the middle. Then, instead of examining why so many people were against the Divine Right of Kings, we climbed into our entrenched positions and waited for somebody to invent the tank. Break the stalemate. Which didn’t happen. So we’re still in our trenches hurling insults at each other. Or rather - correct me if I’m wrong, politely if you don’t mind - the Remain side is making a lot of noise while the Leave side has drawn the curtains and kept its voting intentions to itself.
 
I hope I can say that without taking fire from both sides. I accept that there is no such thing as “A Remainer”, while the term “The Brexiteers” once referred to a small number of politicians and now seems to be used most commonly to impugn the motives of the majority of the (voting) electorate. I’m not making a political point here, but it does seem to me that we need Sellars & Yeatman* more than we need Barnier & whoever’s running our side this week. The Parliamentarians are Right and Repulsive (no offence, but maybe tone it down at bit), while the Royalists are Wrong but Wromantic (sic) in their belief that the Golden Hind can set sail and make trade deals all around the world.
 
But we’re still facing each other across the barricades. And now we’re going into a straightforward old-style political fight without any real acknowledgement that (a) everything’s changed, and (b) everything’s stayed the same.  What’s changed is that technology has brought us together - in the sense that we’re gathered around the castle with our pitchforks and flaming torches and smartphones, rather than dispersed across the surrounding countryside, unable to organise**. What’s stayed the same is that the people inside the castle have their own priorities and interests, et cetera, and are just ever so slightly pleased with themselves for being on the inside. They know better, right?
 
Or however you want to put that; there does seem to be a new sense to the term “haves and have-nots”. I’m going to try to finish this without mentioning the closing scene of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945 - oh, rats!), and to help me in that (already failed) endeavour, I did write a piece here a while back suggesting that, come mid-2019, we wouldn’t be able to tell whether we’d left the EU or not, but what I really wanted to say was: Brexit doesn’t matter because the existence of splits, breaks, ruptures, trade and other wars leads to people trying to mend them. We fall out; we make up.
 
Except that we can't start making up until we acknowledge the fall-out, or bring it to a head perhaps. These days, it seems possible just to go on falling out - for a while anyway; the punch-up will come, and the longer we hold it in, the worse it will be. None of us know the future, but I’d guess that the outcome of a straightforward negotiation between two parties - we’ll call them the EU and the UK for the sake of the story - would tend to be at least mutually a little bit acceptable in the short to medium term, and not actually the key determinant of the future or anything else in the long term. Things happen, the world changes, et cetera. I’m excluding from this simple equation such extraneous factors as a hysterical news media with a 24-hour rolling news cycle to fill with low-budget reporting. And both sides’ inclination to persist with their passive-aggressive slanging match while the underlying split gets wider.
 
What I’m really trying to say is, Brexit doesn’t matter because it can’t matter. We can’t know the future. We can’t be certain of our entrenched positions. We can get past Brexit and make it our next step to argue for closer ties with the EU (or for leaving the EU), but we can’t fix on that one thing and hold it responsible for the whole unknowable future. And while I’m at it, I might as well go on to say that news isn’t news. Things happen, and they’re part of the given. They’re showing The World At War (1973-1974) again on one of the Freeview channels and they’ve got to the bomber war: shots of children being children in the ruins of Berlin; for them, those ruins were part of the given. We live our lives and change goes on. [Yes, I know what happened next.]
 
Events happen, and they’re terrible. I’m not saying otherwise. When they’re reported, they evoke a reaction. Non-events happen, and they’re nothing. When they’re reported, they evoke a reaction. For news to work as news without provoking a disproportionate reaction and thus destabilising us, there needs to be a zero value. It happened in numbers.

I’ve just gone online and waited through the pop-ups and ads - yes, I accept your cookies; no, I don’t want your notifications; I’m not a woman and I don’t have a 401k so I don’t want your app - and for my reward, I can bring you (cut and paste) this quotation. "The Indian [or numerical] zero, widely seen as one of the greatest innovations in human history, is the cornerstone of modern mathematics and physics, plus the spin-off technology." That’s Peter Gobets talking, secretary of the Zero Project. Thank you, livescience.com. And while I have your attention - football may be “everyone’s game”, as another of these ads says, but I don’t watch it.
 
A zero value for news. Some way of going on air to deliver the news that nothing much happened today. Difficult, of course, and globalisation doesn’t help - there’s always something happening, somewhere. But could there be an alternative to the current arrangement? Instead of flying off somewhere and reporting on whatever’s happening there, which would be expensive, we give ever-greater prominence to ever-tinier stories. Today’s big political interview: another obscure politician says he’s going to vote against the deal. Uh huh. And now we’re going live to our reporter outside the building who’s going to summarise what we just said and then do a vox pop with somebody who says yes and somebody who says no.
 
Zero value would be a kind of news version of the weather forecast. It would be both real and honest. “It’s been a quiet day across Westminster, with no big votes scheduled. Tomorrow looks like being another quiet day…” A man can dream, right? What I think is news, or might one day be the worth-mentioning angle on what’s happening at the moment - is that while those people in Westminster are kicking the political football back and forth - or the can down the road, or whatever - the rest of us are still at odds. Brexit will end up as a compromise deal signed at the last minute after all-night talks - because that’s how everything ends up these days - and politicians will talk to cameras about how wonderful it all is. They’ve always made very clear that this is exactly what they wanted all along - news less easily scripted in advance would be good, no?
 
It’ll be a compromise. Or a fudge. Or one of those words for something that makes no difference. And unless somebody does a very good job, very quickly, of recognising and addressing the strength of feeling on both sides of this issue - then 17 million plus 14 million equals, wait a minute, 31 million voters will feel that their politicians have let them down. In opposite directions. Those politicians will have our attention. And we’re already gathered around the castle. Shouting at each other. We've had one civil war; it won’t take much.
 
*1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England by W C Sellars and R J Yeatman (1930).

**Here's a paragraph from Patricia Finney's book How to Beat Your Son at Computer Games (2012, Climbing Tree Books). "The Publisher ... starts talking loudly – as Publishers do – about a commission for the cover of another book, written by him for another Publisher. He comes up with an idea for it that's so good I can't believe it's not been used before." She's talking about the cover of my book Who's Afraid of the Media-Political Complex? (ditto), which you can find in the column on the right. Being naturally modest, I can't quite bring myself to identify the person identified as "The Publisher", and that book's out of print anyway, but the cover makes my point about smartphones, pitchforks and, er, hammers and cocktails.

Yesterday, for the second time in a fortnight, somebody tried to call me via Facebook. I knew who it was and what was happening. Up came the little face, and Facebook started buzzing and flashing and pretending to be Skype. All very obvious. So I pressed the little green picture of an old-fashioned handset, and up popped a message: my microphone wasn’t configured properly. Technology’s so helpful, isn’t it? I messaged my mobile number to my friend, and we had a telephone conversation on our mobile telephones that began with humour about my tech-incompetence.
 
I don’t feel incompetent, but it’s a role that works well enough in conversation. I use FaceTime, Skype, Facebook and Messenger, blah, blah, video and audio, perfectly competent, yada yada, and while I don’t agree that code is poetry, I’ve written some of both. I’ve met various not very convincing robots, and I’ve had conversations with jam-jar-sized prototypes that turned the lights on and off to show how clever they were. I can do that. Come to think of it, I’ve written books - back in the days when books were printed - about the technologies that would soon be with us. Back then, late nineties, references to “the intelligent fridge” meant roughly what “the internet of things” means now.
 
So I can claim a certain vague awareness of the technology all around me, although I’m a deliberate late adopter and my fridge is still stupid. Technology is a means not an end, and while it so happens that I’m using a Chromebook to write this post on Google Docs, it doesn’t matter to me that I usually start the week’s posts in a Moleskine journal. Writing with a felt-tip. TMI? It does matter to me that I’ve just gone to the Moleskine website and found the message UNWRAP YOUR PASSION superimposed on a picture of a Christmas present being unwrapped (red paper) to reveal a 2019 diary, but I refuse to be sidetracked.
 
No, I don’t. My diary for 2019 - sorry, my PASSION for 2019 - is a Filofax insert in a leather Filofax-style organiser (is that the word?) made from leather brought up from a wreck. Here we are. It’s Russian reindeer leather brought up from the Metta Catharina in 1786. How come I own this? Must have bought it (I dimly remember my Filofax phase). I’ve had it for years, keeping it safe (by forgetting about it), and just recently (found it again and) decided to buy the insert and use it as a diary. I suppose I could wrap it up and then UNWRAP MY PASSION, but I think I’ll just carry it around. Deserves to be used, is my current thinking. The Metta Catharina went down in Plymouth Sound, all hands saved, and much of the leather was worked by the craftsman Robin Snelson, of Penryn. So perhaps I have a complete provenance.
 
I went to the Moleskine site because there’s usually a paragraph about the late Bruce Chatwin and how he used to use Moleskine notebooks - at least there used to be, on the paper that falls out when you buy a new Moleskine notebook (the full story is online) - and I had an idea about crafting a sentence in which I gave up on harnessing the power of technology and instead harnessed the tradition of Bruce Chatwin - but it didn’t really work. I do find that my Moleskine notebook switches on very quickly, displaying a blank page in the time it takes me to get it out and open it, but I’ve got to the point where I regard all these things as tools, so I won’t make a big deal out of that.
 
But it does still seem to be an (optional) tribal ritual for my age group to be faux-incompetent with technology. My friends comment on apps that are just helpful enough to tell you why they won’t help you. Outside my peer group (by which I mean, when I’m fraternising with people younger than I am), I’m old enough and technology is still young enough for me to be assigned an “old guy doesn’t get it” role without even a hearing. Same response, only more so, if I do start muttering about technology needing so much help to be helpful. [No, I still haven’t configured that microphone. It’s not exactly progress to render my expensively “smart” phone obsolete.]
 
There’s no such thing as technology. Not in the sense we use the term. There are the tools we use. I qualify as a “cyborg”, by some definitions, because I wear spectacles to enhance my natural vision. I don’t feel like a “cyborg”, by the definition I’d find quite quickly if I read enough science fiction. Any kind of tool is a form of technology, although it’s not helpful to know that. I’ve just put the word “technology” into the default search box on this laptop, without thinking to click the link to Google first, and my technology tells me, “Yahoo is now part of Oath.” Which has expanded my knowledge very slightly while failing to answer my question.
 
No doubt there’s a story behind Oath’s decision to adopt (absorb) Yahoo, just as I’m sure there are reasons why Facebook wants to be a telephone. There are also the tools we don’t use. Technology is “science or knowledge put into practical use to solve problems or invent useful tools,” I discover. That’ll do. Science, in case you’re wondering, is “knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation”.
 
Uh huh. So we start by getting to know each other, and the natural world around us, and then we use whatever we find out to solve each other’s problems and develop tools that we might find useful.
 
Maybe we should try that some time.
 
What’s that? Sorry? You want to enhance my online experience by putting cookies into my computer? Look, I’ve got so many people at so many companies working to enhance my online experience already, by doing exactly that with their cookies, and so far, it’s pretty much the same online experience as it’s always been. So … oh, okay. Maybe you’ll do something new and interesting.
 
But I’m still keeping the tape over the inbuilt camera, thank you very much.