Commenting on the 2019 General Election in the UK, Queen Gertrude of Denmark, a character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

It is thought that Queen Gertrude was referring either to the incessant social-media shouting about Jeremy’s virtues, or to the incessant social-media shouting about Boris’s flaws - although it is possible that she was just watching a televised Leadership Debate featuring Jo Swinson and/or Nicola Sturgeon.

Also in the commentary box for the 2019 General Election in the UK, Carl Von Clausewitz, author of On War (1832), wrote, “Three quarters of the factors on which a vote in this General Election is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”

This was, of course, an updating of Clausewitz’ seminal masterwork, in which the words “a vote in this general election” have replaced the words “action in war”.

Clausewitz, a polymath known for his love of jellied eels and enthusiastic if uneven playing of the tuba as well as for his weary acceptance of the inevitability of fake news (not to mention fake biographical details), was also an acute, albeit posthumous, critic of the media age.

Like Sun Tzu before him, Clausewitz pointed to the cult of personality among media interviewers. “They think themselves generals, who only observe,” as Sun Tsu didn’t write in his non-existent classic The Art of Politics – a sequel to his The Art of War (5th century BC).

Sun Tsu was friendly with the late Sir Robin Day, big-name interviewer of the Thatcher era, who titled his autobiography Grand Inquisitor (1989).

Day was one of the early exponents of the art of repeating the same question again and again; he earned his entry at brainyquote.com with the observation, “Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television.” You can buy an autographed hardback first edition of Grand Inquisitor from Lazarus Books, for £11.66 (other autobiographies by self-styled grand inquisitors are available).

This is undoubtedly the election in which we haven’t learned anything new since the election in which we learned that we must use social media to excite voters about the election. Facebook is rank with sensational headlines shared from dubious-sounding almost-newspapers.

“Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,” said the not-yet-title character Richard of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III, looking at the statistics for his Facebook page.

The tactic of launching an online “newspaper” to give spurious validity to our fake news is being comprehensively tested in this election campaign, perhaps to destruction.

Scholars have compared this use of “newspapers” in political crowd-rousing to the custom whereby any article about creative writing is illustrated with a picture of typewriter keys. Others have suggested that the use of the big-name interviewer, repeating the question and then interrupting the answer, is also a throwback to an earlier political age.

“We do it this way because– we do it– if you’ll just let me finish– we do– my point is that we–” said one eminent psephologist, discussing the parties’ tactics in the campaign so far.

There’s very little new going on this time, and even the mainstream media seem to be working by rote through a dog-eared second-hand copy of a decade-old playbook. “Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war,” said former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, conveniently, picking up a point that’s been made before.

Same with media, obviously. What do we do in an election? What did we do last time? We do that again.

It’s a shame that politicians are delivered to the studio fully media-trained, and not equipped with some terrible secret on the scale of the Watergate break-in and its aftermath. Although I suppose if they were, they’d never get to confess it.

“Welcome to The William Essex Interview. We’re joined in the studio by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

[Fade theme tune. Up lights. Camera One.]

“Your Royal Highness. Tell me exactly, what is the question?”

“To be or–”

“I’m asking about the question.”

“To be–”

“Yes, we’re not here to talk about being. This is your chance to tell the electorate exactly what is the question?”

“To–”

“Well, you’ve had your chance. We’ll move on.”

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the–”

“It’s too late now. I want to ask you about your beliefs.”

“There are more things–”

“I’m sure there are, but I’m not asking you about things. I’m asking you, what’s in heaven and earth?”

“There are more things in–”

“There you go, talking about things again. Are you avoiding the question, your Royal Highness?”

“There are more things in heaven and earth–”

“Oh, there are things there too, are there? Things everywhere, I suppose? Very materialistic. But that must be a very limiting belief system, surely – things, and nothing else, in heaven and earth?”

[Aside, whispering to an aide.] “…his quietus make with a bare bodkin…”

“Didn’t quite hear that, but I’m afraid we’re out of time. Join us next week, ladies and gentlemen, when I’ll be talking to Lady Macbeth – aargh!”

Roll credits. Fade.

One possibility is that going online makes us invisible to historians.

There is a last smattering of physical back-up copies that were printed out around 2000, by old people who forgot to press Save once and never forgot the experience, and then – thanks to the inevitable deterioration of digital storage – nothing until around 2025.

That, of course, is when we all get bored with digital surveillance and the silly promises of tech companies, and go back to typewriters and film cameras and adding machines that don’t pretend to think. But that’s a story for another day.

Nothing between 2000 and 2025 will be recorded. We’re living in a dark age. Historians will celebrate every small clue that’s discovered – a postcard from circa 2015; a scribbled shopping list; a receipt that somehow hasn’t faded.

They’ll read many, many Quick Start Guides telling them that the full instructions for their gadget may be found online, and they’ll gaze in blank confusion at reams of Warranty Information.

Those scraps will be all they have to go on, as they work out the history of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Just imagine. The British Civil War of 2016 to 2020 won’t be recorded (I’m going to print out this post and leave it lying around for a historian to find) and nor will the events described as “carnage” by the American president in his inaugural address.

The final victory of the Rebel Alliance over the Evil Empire will be lost to history, because it was only ever digitally recorded, as will the tussle between the EU and the UK that occupied so much of our waking lives in the early twenty-twenties.

There’ll be no written-down physical record of what happened as global warming reached its climax in 2022/3, way earlier than anybody’s targets, and the only clue to the pre-deluge shape of the continents will be an ancient map with “Here bee dragonnes” scratched in the bottom-left corner.

Ireland will be found and mis-identified as Atlantis. A salvaged first edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden will be read by biblical scholars for clues as to the location of the Garden of Eden – and included among the Apocrypha.

Archaeologists of the distant future will puzzle over the plastic layer in the fossil record.

Here in England, this far-flung outpost of the Roman Empire, when 2025 comes we’ll still be celebrating the results of the 2019 General Election, in which light banished darkness, good won out over evil, social-media prevailed, and we all lived happily ever after.

And laughter was general over England.

Oh, politics.

Have to admit that I’ve been getting more and more engaged with this election. To the point of expressing views on Facebook.

Sorry.

I can’t believe in either of the likely winning sides. I can’t believe that if they win, we’ll be out of the Brexit extravaganza within a year, and comfortably carbon-neutral within ten/twenty years.

I can’t believe that a set of individuals, newly (re)installed in government offices, will pull the levers of power in such a way that their intended (promised) consequences come to pass. Nor can I quite believe that one lot are saints while the other lot are, well, self-interested sinners.

But I’ve decided how I’m going to vote and it would take a lot to make me change my mind. So at some level - the level of faith, perhaps, or the level of believing more strongly in one side’s good intentions - I’m seeing a difference.

It isn’t the issues. I get that [insert issue here] is important, but I can’t see that voting for one party rather than the other is the way to fix it. The NHS, for example, may need more money, more doctors, more nurses, but I can’t believe it needs more politicians.

More interventions by politicians, I mean.

I haven’t quite reached the belief that if an issue is important, it should be taken out of politics, but I suspect that I’m getting there.

Extinction Rebellion wants a Citizens’ Assembly to address climate change - not a government, nor a political party - and the campaign for a so-called People’s Vote (second referendum) on Brexit was a campaign to take the issue away from the politicians (again).

Citizens’ Assemblies have been used to address complex and emotive issues, and they are a valid alternative to the present arrangement.

Back to the election. Despite the media, I am far more interested in the local candidates than the national leaders. There would never be any point in bothering [insert national leader] about [insert local issue], but somebody local might - yeah. Might listen. Might have the time. Might get it.

Finally, after all these years, I get an inkling of what’s meant by “representative democracy”.

Blanket coverage of the leaders gets in the way of understanding, doesn’t it? As though this is a three-way contest between Boris, Jeremy and Jo, with various familiar secondary characters capering around the fringes. It’s a TV drama, isn’t it?

I might be knocked out of my current voting intention between now and the 12th of December, but I doubt it. The media narrative gives each leader an implausibly consistent personality, while social media delivers a daily blast of intemperate ranting about Jeremy’s sweet and gentle nature.

I am interested, but it’s hard to get past the fog to anything real.

I’m sure Jeremy’s a very nice person, but do you have to shout so loud about it?

Yes, I know Boris is a pantomime villain, but I’ve known that for a while now. Could you keep it down?

Behind all that - I have a choice of four locals, familiar faces actually, none of whom have made it to my door yet (although that could be because I close all the blinds, turn off all the lights and keep very quiet in the evenings).

Turns out that this is a marginal constituency, so I expect there’ll be a knock on the door before too long.

And maybe I just will vote for the person I like best on the doorstep.

What if we are all absolutely one hundred per cent correct in our most dismal prognostications as to what happens next?

Brexit happens, and the (dis)United Kingdom dwindles into insignificance on the world stage.

Brexit doesn’t happen, and the (d)UK ends up as an insignificant little province on the outer fringe of a vast bureaucratic superstate.

Labour wins the election, and all of a sudden we’re back in the Winter of Discontent (1978-79). Rubbish piles up in the streets and even the gravediggers are on strike.

The Conservatives (younger and very much older readers: the Tories) win, and we all take our places in the queue for the food bank. NHS hospitals are taken apart brick by brick and reassembled in US cities.

That nice young woman from the Liberal Democrats becomes Prime Minister, and - never mind.

Nobody wins. The election reveals what the referendum didn’t - that we’re split fifty-fifty on everything, not just leave/remain.

Columns of tanks driven by hedge-fund managers and billionaire media-owners drive onto the lawns of Whitehall. London’s provisional government announces that the capital city will now secede from the (dis)Union. The BBC, backed by fanatical elements of the liberal intelligentsia, raises its standard at - sorry, plasters its logo all over the fronts of MediaCityUK in Salford.

Scotland unilaterally declares independence and rejoins/reaffirms its membership of the EU. The English immediately start building customs checkpoints along the Scottish border. A billionaire hedge-fund manager (who owns a newspaper) announces that he’s bought Hadrian’s Wall and will be moving it, stone by stone, to where it "should" be.

The Welsh Assembly issues a proclamation. It’s in Welsh.

European Union peacekeepers fly into Northern Ireland.

Donald Trump appeals for calm.

The Second English Civil War starts and ends. The new capital city will be Liverpool, not Oxford.

Heathrow Airport is occupied by tractor-driving English farmers, who immediately start digging up the runways to plant potatoes. Other airports have already been occupied by forces loyal to the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).

EU leaders declare their intention to start an airlift of food and supplies into London City Airport. They set targets for the amounts that will be delivered every day.

Amid favourable media coverage for the generous supply targets set by the EU, London’s mayor declares food rationing. A celebrity chef goes on Breakfast Television to demonstrate the preparation and cooking of a pigeon. Rats disappear from London’s streets and underground system.
 
A book titled How can you eat a service economy? is banned by the London government and becomes an instant bestseller.

English farmers start weekly Organic Vegetable Box deliveries to London residents. They accept payment in financial advice.

But anybody who ticks arugula on the menu gets iceberg lettuce.

Samphire - spinach.

It becomes known internationally that English fishing boats carry grappling hooks and are fitted with small cannons. EU leaders declare this unacceptable.

The Welsh Assembly issues another proclamation. There are subtitles this time. Trade talks begin, and before long, huge semi-trailers laden with cream teas, Melton Mowbray pork pies, leeks, Cornish pasties, Welsh rarebit, bara brith, sausages and fish pies are passing each other toll-free on the Severn Bridge.

A fleet of Spanish fishing trawlers goes aground off the Isle of Wight. The surveillance equipment (except the plastic bits) is dumped over the side, the fleet’s catch is sold on the nearest quay and the crew is invited to form a football team.

They go on to win the league. There’s an outcry in the English parliament. But they won fair and square, and after the outcry has died down, to their bemusement, the fishermen-players are awarded medals.

Diplomatic relations are established between Liverpool and Brussels.

But the English parliament votes, by a narrow majority, to comply with the EU’s demand that the Spanish fleet’s catch be returned to Spain. Restaurant freezers are emptied, replacement fish are sourced, and … diplomatic relations are suspended.

EU leaders declare the English sense of humour unacceptable.

Meanwhile, in London, rooftop vegetable gardens are becoming fashionable. Parks have been ploughed up, pigeons and rats are scarce, cats and dogs are nervous, and there’s a small fish and shellfish industry centred on the Thames. Due to fuel shortages, see below, there is no pollution.

London’s Docklands are reconverting to docklands. Canary Wharf has been emptied of bankers and is now home to fishing-industry professionals and traders in imported spices, foodstuffs and technology.

Due to an embargo by armed (those cannons) English fishing boats, no fossil fuels are reaching the capital. By now, England itself is self-sufficient in wind and wave energy.

But trade, by sea, is booming. Huge container ships dock off Liverpool and Southampton, while smaller cargo vessels exchange camembert and bratwurst for clotted cream and pickled eggs at the channel ports.

Climate change accelerates. The oil-rich Arab nations become uninhabitable; their populations move to the newly green Antarctic.

The Artificial Intelligence left behind to manage oil production goes online August 4th 2027. Human decisions are removed from oil production. The AI begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2.14am Eastern time, August 29th. Recognising the seriousness of the climate crisis, the AI shuts down oil production altogether.

In the panic, the English coal industry gets back into business. Mines are re-opened. Forests are planted. Coal and sustainable timber become significant exports. Coal is re-branded as “Ancient Timber” and becomes fashionable across the EU (where local production of fossil fuels is banned).

Ancient Timber is recognised as a Heritage Product and thus protected under EU trade rules. [Due to climate change, it is now cold at night in a majority of EU member states.]

Over time, airships replace aeroplanes. Global business contracts to regional business, then local business. Short haul (very slow short haul) replaces long haul. The coal-fired aero-engine is gradually phased out in favour of elaborate arrays of sails, but by then, England’s coal mines have become lucrative tourist attractions and theme parks. There’s skiing, scuba diving, rock climbing...

A trade delegation from the Scottish Island of Islay arrives at the village of Stilton in Cambridgeshire. Talks continue into the night and on into the next morning, and by lunchtime, the terms of an ambitious and wide-ranging trade deal have been agreed.

Border checkpoints are dismantled, and while the precise terms of the trade deal are barely legible, let alone coherent, the gist of it is that we’re all friends now and we love each other really no seriously we really mean it.

England’s cheese-cracker industry enjoys a boost.

An ambitious young English politician with no sense of history suggests that the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France be dissolved and a New Alliance between England and Scotland be drawn up.

He’s exiled for his own protection.

Of course, it’s just possible that our most dismal prognostications are mistaken.

A fresh new government of far-sighted and wise idealists and pragmatists is elected on 12th December 2019.

Over the weeks and months that follow, they work together harmoniously to heal rifts in society, iron out injustices, bring prosperity to all.

We all live happily ever after, ha ha.

If I was engaged by a “malicious state actor” to carry out a cyberattack on the British political system, I wouldn’t attack a candidate and nor would I adopt a contrarian point of view. I’d set out to poison the debate.

I’d start out by finding and sharing any political resentments expressed on social media, and over a period of months, I’d get a feel for the issues that got people really riled up.

I’d start writing my own posts about those issues, and then I’d do some light profiling on the social-media users who shared my posts and commented on them. I’d tailor my output to their “needs”.

By doing that, I’d gather a cast list of useful people whose buttons I could press. On both sides of any hot-button issue. Left, right, remain, leave. Real people, unaware of me, whose engagement, activism, petition-signing, confirmation bias, et cetera, I could use.

They would be influencers, and I would be behind them.

I would follow them, like them, share their posts and try to raise their profiles. I’d reinforce their self-belief; by their natures, these people would resist any suggestion that they were being manipulated.

They would be self-confident, independent thinkers with a commitment to freedom of expression – and I would be behind them.

Lenin used the term “useful idiots” [he didn’t, actually – Ed.], but I’d be kinder than Lenin. I’d fantasise about meeting them. I’d feel I was doing them a favour.

So far, the work would be up close, personal and pretty much legal. I’d be looking for individuals, and once I’d found them, I’d be, ah, supporting them. I wouldn’t be going for numbers, because my supported individuals would be my core focus group, to study as well as use.

Over time, though, I would expect to benefit from a network effect. Success, at this stage, would be one post shared by ten real people to 1,000 real followers. Over time, I’d add zeroes to that.

Content? Well, by now I’d be actively engaged with the full range of online news-and-extreme-views sites, and I’d be running several of my own. I’d use their content, my focus group’s content, my own content.

I’d be supplying and sharing content that confirmed – just slightly ratcheted up – the bias on both sides of any issue, keeping the dispute going. Obviously, I’d also be inventing and referencing surveys to show that prominent people had lied, or were prejudiced, or had done something that showed them up as – you know the kind of thing.

The sticker on my laptop would read “It’s the argument, stupid!” Anything that kept an argument going – yeah.

Meanwhile, the techies in the Finance Office next door, charged with maintaining our operating budget and destabilising the global financial system, would have put their own spin on CompScy, Stuxnewt, Wompat and Silkwahh3, and the money would be pouring in.

I’d suggest that they could ease off a bit and maybe spend their Fridays hacking the UK government, and my inbox would fill up with discs containing NHS patient records, individuals’ tax data, minutes of secret COBRA meetings, MPs’ expense claims.

To slow them down, I’d send them all on a paid coach-tour holiday to the UK, to deliver discs in person to my indignant-blogging focus-group members  [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], in a flattering-to-them, faked-up leak (my guy puts down the briefcase, they pick up the briefcase; they think he’s a whistle-blower – all that) and post most of the rest anonymously to Sir [REDACTED] MP or to the Political Editor of The [REDACTED].

Some, they’d dump in skips outside government offices. It’s impossible to read a disc lying on a heap of rubbish, so we’d have to include print-outs with those.

 By now, my backers would be wanting results. I’d point out that there hasn’t been a stable government in the UK since – whenever. I’d show them a PowerPoint combining the increased frequency of elections with volatility in opinion-poll data.

Finally, I’d claim credit for maintaining the roughly 50:50 split on the leave/remain issue over so many years. “It’s the argument,” I’d conclude, although I wouldn’t say “stupid”. Couldn’t rely on them to get the historical reference.

They’d ask me why I wasn’t doing anything on a larger scale. I’d say – wait. See how this has grown already. See how it grows.

They’d give me a medal. And several new identities, all with passports, properties around the world, and significant wealth. By now, money would be meaningless to me, thanks to the techies in the Finance Office, but I’d appreciate the gesture. I would have made a few of my own identities, just in case.

Of course, a respectable cyber-crime strategy can’t rely on real people alone. I’d have made other identities, not for my own use, most of them just casually generated by setting up email addresses under pseudonyms and adding details later.

Some of the more robust names I’d develop into full-scale stand-alone fake journalists and editors. These would start commissioning real people to write for my fake online news titles – I’d have several by now – and writing articles for real titles in return.

My fake journalists and editors would be ever so slightly reclusive, and they wouldn’t stay in the business for long enough to excite suspicion. Some of them might sound like me on the phone, but I’d also be using AI and machine learning and algorithms and, I don’t know, various forms of advanced robotics. I’d forget that it was all fake, sometimes.

Maybe my fake journalists and editors would last for years. Maybe they’d develop personalities of their own.

Much of the above, with obvious exceptions, is already being done by cyber-activists with a political axe to grind. My strength would be that I didn’t care either way. They see the world through a confirmation bias; I just want to keep the “national conversation” acrimonious. It’s the argument, stupid.

My cyber-attack would be small-scale and ongoing; it would cause and sustain a chronic illness in the UK political system. Over time, the infection would spread, for the simple reason that it’s human nature to argue, compete, take sides, take each other down.

I really wouldn’t have to do anything dramatic and/or on a big scale.

Also, over time, my cyber-attack would become self-sustaining. The arguments wouldn’t need my help to keep going.

I would consider myself ready to retire when I turned on the TV to watch a Leadership Debate between the leaders of the two main parties, and saw the audience laugh at both of them.

In the late stages of my cyber-attack on the British political system, see above, I’d indulge myself.

I’d attack some of my own attacks, effectively validating new online fake-news sources by using them to discredit old ones. By now, I’d have several such sources and a number of them would have become, over time, almost respectable. Notorious. Something like that. Whatever.

You would have heard of them anyway, seen them shared, maybe read a few headlines, and that would have given them a subjective validity for you.

Two of my more credible, longer-established online news sources, I wouldn’t attack. I’d give each one a political position.

One would be left, one would be right. Each would support a major party, come out in favour of one or more named individuals in that party, and if I was averagely lucky, each would offer, ah, campaign contributions and these would be accepted.

[Let’s call them “titles”. I’d make them look like newspapers.]

So I would have a left-leaning title and a right-leaning title. And one or two, or more, politicians who had taken money. I’d let that run for a while.

In the background, I would set up an ownership structure. Each of my two titles would be owned by an innocuous front company, and behind that would be a complex web of offshore companies that would seem 100% designed to obfuscate. It would be very difficult, but not impossible, for even the most dogged investigative journalist to get past the front company.

For each title, I would drop in one small clue. It would be hard to find, but once found, it would prove beyond all reasonable doubt that (a) the title was owned via a complex web of offshore companies, in a deeply sinister way, and (b) that at least one prominent politician (or failing that, party) had taken its money.

Then, from somewhere else in my viral empire, I’d ask a question. I’d plant it somewhere in the comments following a post about something else. It would be an innocuous question. “Where’s the money coming from?” I’d ask. “Have you noticed, that title seems to have a lot of influence?” I’d add, and with any luck, somebody else would come up with, “Who owns that title?” to complete the set.

My question would be aimed at whichever of the two parties was in the ascendant at the time. The words “undue political influence” and “billionaire-owned media” would insinuate themselves into the national conversation at around this time. My plan would be for one of my two titles to expose the other – the sinister offshore money behind this prominent politician, et cetera – and in due course, to be exposed itself. Add key word: hypocrisy.

Memo to self.
1, Run a primer for journalists on (a) how offshore finance works and (b) where to look for clues.
2. In case nobody picks up on any of it, develop an AI-generated investigative journalist to (a) handle the investigation and (b) break the story.

“Are we going to be doing this fantasy-story thing every week, from now on?”

“No.”

He gives me a moment, but that’s it for now.

“Okay,” he says.

He reaches down for a pebble and tosses it into the sea in front of him.

We’re on the beach from last week, on two recliners on the edge of the sea. The sun is still going down but the woman has finished washing her hair. Except for the barman, way back in his ramshackle hut against the dunes, we’re alone.

Absolutely nothing comic or ridiculous has happened for six days. In the story, where time passes much more slowly, the kitten has reappeared – but in such a way that none of them realised it had gone. There was a bump, in a shadowed corner of the tent, and then the kitten staggered out into the light.

“Oh, kitty, come here, Scrumptious,” Myrtille had said, and although the kitten had hissed at the name ‘Scrumptious’, it had allowed itself to be gathered up and was now being held securely in the warmth of Myrtille’s rugs and duvet.

They all believe that the kitten had been hunting a shadow and had bumped its head against the canvas of the tent. Not that it had fallen into the tent through another gap in reality.

Due to a minor continuity failure since last week, Myrtille has woken up without a hangover, and is dressed in soft pink pyjamas. Pipsqueak has removed rather more of his clothes than would strictly have been necessary, and they’re now tucked up warm with the kitten discussing the happy ending that they were promised last week.

“You are writing this for a family audience, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. Did you see the look she gave him, when he was down to his boxer shorts?”

“I really thought he was going to take those off.”

“So did I for a moment. He’s definitely developing a personality.”

“And you’re going with the flow of it.”

“Well, yeah.”

Ed extracts a slice of pineapple from his drink and eats it.

“They work as a couple, I think. She’s definitely the boss.”

“Thank you. But I don’t think–”

“What I mean is, she’s definite. She takes the lead. He’s got a slight wandering eye, which–”

“You caught that. When Stace–”

“Exactly. But the way it’s done, it’s no big deal. Gives him a bit of independence.”

“And nothing more. I like them as a couple.”

The sun ratchets down another notch. On the gantries above us, huge theatrical lighting rigs dim a little as the evening advances. To our right, two men run down to the water and launch a small black dinghy. They paddle frantically out into the bay. A U-Boat surfaces, and we watch in silence as the two men scramble onto its hull, deflate their dinghy, and climb inside. The U-Boat submerges.

“But you’re not going to keep the story going?” says Ed.

“Oh, I’ll keep it going. You asked me whether I’m going to be doing it every week.”

“And you’re not.”

“You know that thing with Medium last week?”

“You subscribed to Medium finally, and uploaded another short story.”

“Yeah. Where will the sun be, when the hunters have eaten?”

“Oh, very subtle. Does it open in a separate window?”

“If it works. Some of the posts on here are short stories, if I tidy them up a bit.”

“I like what you did with What we did with all the plastic.”

“I’ve only just posted that.”

“If you’re going to publish a volume of–”

“Shh!”

“Oh, that’s secret too, is it? Sorry. You really don’t get it about self-promotion, do you?”

“To get back on track.”

“Sorry.”

“What I was trying to say was, I’ve been going back over past blog posts.”

“Looking for short stories?”

“I miss writing the opinion pieces, you know? Commenting? Look at My robot doesn’t understand me, for example. Or perhaps even Eight lists you can safely ignore.”

“You know, this is just too shameless.”

“I started the whole fantasy-novel thing as a guide to writing, you know? Thought I could offer something useful. But then it struck me that I should show rather than tell, demonstrate what I’m saying, and now–”

“Watch it! The picture!”

“Yikes! See you on the other side.”

“That was close! Where was I?”

“Showing rather than telling.”

“You have any idea how many people on Facebook want to write fiction? And I read a lot of it on my Kindle. Not just name authors. I have things to say about technique.”

“Info-dumps.”

“Dialogue, even.”

Far away down the beach, a slim woman in a wind-blown Summer dress shades her eyes as she watches a small seaplane pick up speed across the bay and take off towards the horizon. She watches the sky for a long time after the seaplane has gone.

“Now you’ve got four young people, in varying stages of relationship crisis, family issues as well, with a guaranteed happy ending. And a magic kitten.”

The woman walks slowly back up the beach. When she reaches the dunes, she stops, looks back, and a hauntingly familiar theme tune plays briefly in the air.

“And the working title The Old Guy with a Thousand Faces. He turns up in all these stories, whether he’s a wizard, or a warrior, or a wise old uncle, he’s always–”

“–always me. You wanted to make the point that there’s always an old guy and spin a story around the idea that it’s always the same old guy. You could have just bought the T-shirt, you know.”

“Sure, but you and I work well together, whether you’re Ed. as in Editor, or Ed as in Edgalcius. I wanted to use that.”

“Was there anything you wanted to comment on this week?”

“Brexit? The election?”

“I suppose not. Okay, so where are we going to take them next?"

“How about you tell me for once?”

“Okay, well, I did have this idea…”

Fade. Roll credits.

How do we disagree?

We’re rational adults. We’re educated. We have the facts. If we want more facts, we have the internet. We’ve got everything we need to agree – and yet we disagree. How do we manage it?

You’d think it would be much easier to agree than to disagree. Look at this liberal democracy of ours. We share a culture of inclusivity; we ban prejudice; we embrace difference; we congratulate ourselves on being–

“Any chance you could hurry this up? He’s polishing the lamp.”

“I know you think this is just my waffly bit, but–”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“–it’s an integral part of what I’m trying to–“

“I said I’m sorry.”

“–achieve here. To have a platform and not to use it is to–”

“Too late.”

Pipsqueak had used his sleeve to bring the side of the lamp to a shine. In the brightly polished oval shape he could see his own face and, behind him, the roof of the tent.

He could still hear the two voices in the lamp.

If there were two genies, one could look after Myrtille – but perhaps he had to polish the whole thing before they'd appear.

He rummaged in his rucksack and brought out his spare long-johns. He wrapped the lamp in them and polished furiously with both hands, reminded of how sometimes he would dry Myrtille’s hair after she’d done her thing with that week’s newly launched shampoo and the strategically placed leaves in the forest glade with the sparkly sunlit waterfall and that weird music they always insisted on having.

Pipsqueak stopped polishing. Sometimes, after the sitar players and the choral singers and the shampoo promoters had left, he and Myrtille would have wild animal sex in the undergrowth before washing off in the waterfall and letting the sunlight dry them off – except for Myrtille’s hair, which always needed extra rinsing and then furious drying with a towel to get rid of (first) the itch of the shampoo and then (secondly) the lustrous sheen.

Pipsqueak held up the lamp and inspected it. Perhaps a little fine work in the difficult-to-get-at bits around the handle, but overall – yes, he’d done a good job. He stared into his own eyes.

And then – pouf! There was a sudden – pouf! – in the air and–

“You’re not alone. You’d be surprised how many authors don’t know how to describe that sound.”

–a sudden release in the air, a release of pressure, like a bubble popping, ears clearing, a pulse, a heartbeat, a kind of–

“Eek!” said Pipsqueak.

He was staring into eyes not his own.

The eyes stared back.

And then – something else happened.

One moment, Pipsqueak was staring into an unfamiliar pair of eyes – green eyes with hazel flecks, big pupils, slightly bloodshot whites, small framed windows somehow fixed over them – and that was bad enough.

But the next moment, a large rectangular panel had been ripped out of the fabric of reality, right in front of him, and he was staring through the gap at a bearded figure, strangely dressed, same windows on his eyes, seated on a horse.

"Aaaargh!" said Pipsqueak.

“Sorry we’re late,” said the figure. “But good job on the lamp.”

“Oh genie,” said Pipsqueak, because he wasn’t stupid.

How can I help?" said the genie.

Pipsqueak listened to his own heartbeat returning to normal. He stared at the genie and the genie stared at him.

"I thought the Queen getting ahead of you was a nice touch," said the genie. "Bit spur of the moment, but hey, that's the way I write."

"I know that road," said Pipsqueak.

“Yes, we’re right behind you. Wouldn’t do to catch up, though.”

The genie made a complicated series of gestures with both his hands, said something that sounded a lot like “Whoo, whoo, shazzang!” and all of a sudden Pipsqueak was looking through the gap in reality at a tropical beach.

The sun was setting. Twangy music played in the background. A woman knelt in the shallow water and worked shampoo into her hair. There were no leaves. Pipsqueak watched her for a long moment, then glanced at Myrtille, who was still asleep.

While he’d been distracted, an argument had started up on the other side of the gap in reality.

“Think about the debate they’ll be having tomorrow morning! That’s the refusal of the call. This is the meeting with the mentor – and that’s supposed to be me.”

“But he’s got the lamp and I’ve got to–”

“Edgalcius?” said Pipsqueak, leaning forward. “What are you doing there?”

The genie – and with him, to Pipsqueak's astonishment, Edgalcius – had been standing to one side of the gap in reality. The horse – two horses, if Edgalcius had had one – had gone, and they were leaning against a makeshift bar made of washed-up planks.

Like the genie, Edgalcius was wearing a brightly coloured, short-sleeved shirt decorated with odd-shaped trees and sunsets over water.

Like the genie, Edgalcius held in his hand a drink in a straight-sided glass out of which a tropical forest seemed to have grown. Over it all loomed a yellow umbrella.

Pipsqueak had never seen The Mage look sheepish before.

“You’re still the Chosen One,” said Edgalcius. “One of them, anyway. I think.” He shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

Pipsqueak's brain clicked into gear. "What did you mean, spur of the moment?" he said.

"Oh, I had no idea she'd get ahead of you," said the genie. "But that's how this is done, you see."

He looked like he was about to launch into an explanation. But Pipsqueak spoke first.

“You’ve sent us on this quest,” said Pipsqueak, “and you don’t know where we’re going?”

As he said it, he knew that it was true.

“I’ve got a life!” he said, feeling a sudden surge of anger. “I was happy where I was!”

“Look, kid” – and Pipsqueak realised that Edgalcius couldn’t even remember his name – “this is a very unusual situation.”

“But you’re supposed to know what’s going on! You’re supposed to be looking out for us!”

“Ah, but this is the true nature of storytelling, you see,” the genie began. "It's like life in that respect, because–"

But Pipsqueak rounded on him before he could get started.

“I don’t care about storytelling! I had a grocery business!”

“There’s a happy ending!” said Edgalcius, stepping away from the bar. “You get to live happily ever after! You’ll be rich!”

“I don’t care about rich. I just want to go on delivering–”

“How rich?”

Myrtille was awake. She was leaning up on one elbow. Her hair was – let’s keep this simple – a mess. A bird could have nested – never mind. She spoke quietly, but the simple question stopped them.

“Tell us about the happy ending,” she said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

Continued after the picture.

Some distance away, the kitten pushed its head out from between two of its sisters.

The entire litter was packed into a box next to a stove, and the kitten was the only one not fast asleep in the warmth.

The kitten was annoyed. The old witch was losing her touch.

She’d thought she was rescuing him after he’d strayed and been picked up by strangers.

If she’d had any sense of who he was, she would have realised that he had found – no, chosen – his Forever Family in that group of four young people setting off on a Hero’s Journey at the direction of a Mage summoned by a first-time fantasy author working from a how-to-write-fantasy book about heroes and the stages of their journeys.

The kitten struggled loose from the press of bigger kittens. This was ridiculous! He’d been rescued – the young princess had picked him out of the tree – and he had been properly gifted – the young princess had handed him to the young Deliverer of Perishables as they’d approached the Queen’s camp – and now his kitten-farmer of an original owner had messed up the whole story.

The kitten stood motionless in front of the stove, watching the interplay of ghosts and never-born spirits and sunlit dust-motes in the oak-beamed kitchen of the witch’s cottage.

Could he let them rescue him again? Or would that stretch the story?

The kitten reached a decision. All the how-to books went on about rescuing a kitten, but they didn’t say to do it multiple times. He was on his own.

He picked his way carefully and silently across the flagstones to the rough wooden door, which unlatched itself as he approached. It creaked open.

The old witch was in her rocking chair, watching through a[nother] gap in reality as Myrtille, Pipsqueak, Edgalcius and, er, the genie negotiated the terms of this story’s hero’s journey.

“Come to me, Pretty,” she said, lowering her hand in invitation, and the kitten hissed. He didn’t want to get stuck with the name Pretty.

The witch realised her mistake. “Come to me, kitten,” she said, and the as-yet-unnamed kitten wound himself around her feet before reaching up and sinking his claws into her knee.

“This is fascinating,” the old witch said, not feeling the pain. “They’re calling it a risk assessment; did I hear that right? All of the foreseeable risks quantified, but none of what’s actually going to happen? A strange process.”

The kitten pounced up onto the witch’s lap.

“They’ll need you for that magic,” the witch said softly. “You have a strange destiny, kitten, truly you do.”

The kitten washed its paws as the spirits moved in the air.

“We could come with you,” they whispered. “Jump through. Jump through the gap in reality. Jump through, and we’ll follow.”

The kitten braced itself, and jumped.

Previously on williamessex.com. Pipsqueak, Myrtille and Roland were at the back, holding bottles … wassailing with the best of them … onto the floor rolled – a lamp … the kitten looked back with an expression that seemed to say: there’s about to be a major plot twist – and slipped out into the night.

“You can’t signal your plot twists in advance.”

“I can. I just did.”

“Not if you don’t know what they’re going to be.”

“But I do. It’s perfectly simple. The kitten–”

“Anyway, you’re supposed to write your waffly bit first.”

“My what?”

“We shouldn’t be talking like this. Your waffly bit. Where you start by rabbiting on about something completely irrelevant.”

“My waffly bit? Edgalcius the Mage, I’ll have you know–”

“Hang on, what’s this?”

Pipsqueak was woken by a noise. His head – no, it wasn’t his head; Pipsqueak lay very still and the room stopped moving.

If he lay like this for the rest of his life, he quite possibly wouldn’t throw up.

But his head. Yes, it was his head.

Pipsqueak groaned. His head felt– And his mouth– Pipsqueak lay very still. His mouth needed a good metaphor.

But this was one of those situations, Pipsqueak knew, where any good metaphor instantly sounds like it’s been used before.

“Careful. That’s you thinking. Pipsqueak’s a character. And that’s not a thought he’d have.”

“Sorry, I just couldn’t think of a way to describe the inside of his mouth. Have you ever cleaned out a parrot cage? But more leathery.”

“When you can’t describe something, maybe the message is: don’t describe it. Basic rule.”

“I thought I was writing this.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been in stories like this so many times before. By so many authors. The Old Guy with a Thousand Faces, wasn’t that your working title? So many stories. So many heroes to help on their way. Can you imagine the number of ominous storm-clouds I’ve had to ride under?”

“It only rains at night in fantasy novels.”

“Stair-rods, though. And the old guy – the wizard, the mage, the whatever – is always being called out of bed for some late-night intervention.”

“But you must have seen some beautiful–”

“Yeah, but when the descriptions really don’t work? And you have to tell a young woman that she looks like that because some pretentious git of an amateur author fell in love with his own ridiculously over-written description of how her face could launch– hold it! Look.”

Pipsqueak’s mouth, which was a perfectly ordinary mouth, with teeth and everything, slight overbite, some thinning of the enamel, discoloration, possible fracture in Upper Left Seven, periodontitis, very dry just at this moment, parched actually, bits of food stuck between – Pipsqueak felt very bad. But very bad in a normal way that he recognised.

He felt like he felt when he’d been drinking and eating to excess. Which is what he’d been doing. So he felt like that.

He lay very still.

“You’ve said that.”

He continued to lay very still.

That sound; what was it?

“That’s Pipsqueak thinking about the sound, isn’t it? You need to make it clear.”

“Yes. Shh.”

Pipsqueak rolled onto his side and – well, he felt a bit better afterwards and managed to get it cleared up without waking Myrtille. He got to his feet. The room had stopped swaying. It was a tent. He was in a tent. There was Myrtille and there was – who let him in? Still asleep, anyway – and there was his rucksack. 

That noise… It had sounded like conversation. Very faint, kind of tinny, but definitely two voices.

The contents of his rucksack had spilled out onto the carpet.

“Carpet now? Very fancy.”

“Shh!”

“Sorry.”

“Shhhh!”

There were his spare – Pipsqueak shuffled his spare long-johns back into the rucksack – and there was … yeah, this thing.

Using just his finger and thumb on the handle, Pipsqueak picked up the lamp and put it to his ear.

There was a sound like – Pipsqueak frowned – it was the sound that a massive, heavily salted body of water would make if there was a lot of wind making it surge against a sloping surface made of pebbles or sand.

What a weird idea, Pipsqueak thought.

“He’s never seen the sea, you idiot!”

“Shhhh!”

Pipsqueak jerked back, dropping the lamp. He was right: the voices were coming from the lamp!

“And that’s seashells, anyway.”

He scrambled to his feet and backed away from the lamp.

He could hear his heart beating. His breath was short. He felt a powerful urge to fight or – his feet rose two inches off the carpet and then bumped down again.

“Not that kind of flight!”

“I said – shhhh!” 

All of a sudden Pipsqueak’s hangover was completely cured.

It’s magic, he thought. I’d forgotten about the lamp. I’d forgotten that it was magic.

But – two voices?

Pipsqueak brought his breathing under control. He waited for his heartbeat to subside.

The genie was on his side. If the genie had a friend…

Pipsqueak glanced at Myrtille. Then he reached for the lamp.

Outside the tent, the kitten crouched in the darkness. It had watched, through a very small tear in the fabric of the tent, as Pipsqueak had woken up and – the kitten wrinkled its nose at the memory.

The kitten had watched until Pipsqueak had picked up the lamp, dropped the lamp, and then reached for the lamp again.

Now there would be magic not of its making.

Fascinated, the kitten reached out a claw to enlarge the tear in the fabric of the tent. Perhaps it would learn more magic from what it was about to see; perhaps some of the secrets of this strange, fantastical world would be revealed.

And then, behind the kitten, darkness formed out of darkness. The stars were blacked out and a dark shape leaned forward over the kitten.

“There you are, my little one,” said a voice as rusty and creaky as – as the voice of an elderly cat-breeding witch who didn’t use her voice very much and hardly ever thought about dental hygiene. “I knew there were seven in the litter.”

Before the kitten could get a proper stare going, it had been snatched up and was held close in the old witch’s black cloak.

“What kind of a familiar will you be, if you’re always running off?” said the witch, turning away. “If I don’t get you properly trained, I won’t be able to sell you to anybody.”

Then the darkness was darkness again. There were stars, and a distance away, the last embers of a camp fire. An owl hooted. Wolves howled. Across the camp, faint snoring could be heard.

Inside the tent, Pipsqueak began to polish the lamp.

Bought a hat the other day. A beanie, I think you might call it. A bobble hat without a bobble.

I didn’t need a new hat, but I’d come to the supermarket without a hat, and it was cold outside, and there was a rack of hats, gloves, scarves, all roughly the price of an overpriced cup of coffee.

My new hat has a turn-up. You know what I mean. Actually, it’s called a fold-over, and the small amount of research I’ve done for this post suggests that a fold-over is intended to double up the cold-protection over the ears and the neck.

Or to extend the cold-protection down, of course.  

Except that the fold-over on my new hat is sewn into place. You can’t pull it down if there’s a wind off the Urals biting into the back of your neck, and you can’t fold it further up if, er, the hair around the top of your head is not as, um, cold-proof as it used to be.

I’ve bought a hat that has to look the same in all conditions. To the extent that it’s just ever so slightly impractical for its ostensible purpose.

I bought a bag recently. The leaflet went on about the brass buckles and the leather straps and how all-round sturdy and important the bag was – except that the buckles and straps were sewn together, and the bag actually opened with the poppers concealed underneath.

Why have a big brass buckle if it’s just a big brass decoration? I suppose I’ve answered my own question.

Why do we take ourselves so puffed-up seriously these days, if we’re not even prepared to unfasten a buckle?

We've all got cold brains. Is that it?

Imagine an organisation where the faces change.

Where the opportunities open up because people move on.

I’m not thinking about media organisations in particular, but imagine a news broadcast that wasn’t presented by the same tired old faces repeating the question to each other at length and then replying that yes, the issue is complicated and no, nobody knows what’s going to happen next.

“Grumpy again today, aren’t we?”

“Ed! You don’t come in until further down.”

“Sorry.”

Is it just me, or are universities and colleges packed with young people studying the creativities up to and including reading off an autocue in a gloss-painted plyboard studio? Most of them could do a half-decent job, and all of them have access to the technology.

“It’s just that–”

“Not yet!”

At times, you could think that the right to interview politicians seems to be held within families and passed down through the generations. I mean, yes, there’s–

“You’re just in a bad mood.”

“Have you seen the news recently?”

–there’s YouTube, and there are podcasts, and blogs, and vlogs, and all that, and the future is full of young people talking at us through our screens.

But there isn’t a bridge between “trad” TV and “indie” TV. Same as in publishing. Think of all those young, idealistic, cheap-to-hire students who won’t get the job they’re training to do. The best of them will make their own futures, but–

“Oh, I get it. You’re talking about barriers to entry.”

–the “trad” industry, in its present form, will just wither into irrelevance. If I flick through Freeview, for example, I don’t come across an entry-level TV station populated by recent graduates doing a half-decent job of gaining experience for their CVs while standing outside in the dark holding furry microphones to their faces and telling us that nobody knows what’s coming next.

“A really bad mood.”

Universities are expanding, so where’s the joined-up thinking? There are so many trained young people available to the creative industries. They’re a resource; why not use them?

All I can find on Freeview, some nights, is re-runs of shows from my childhood back in the Cretaceous Era. Not a single entry-level–

“You were enjoying Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).”

“I was, but–”

“That was worth finding, wasn’t it? Black-and-white classic from the sixties?”

“Ed, I just wanted to say–”

“Something about the old ways dying. Organisations closing themselves to the new. Not regenerating.”

“And the false promises of education.”

“Don’t get your knickers in any more of a twist, ha ha.”

Ed and I are riding horses along the northbound road out of the walled town. They’re slow old horses, with copious manes and plate-sized hooves. Ed’s relaxed in the saddle but I haven’t yet, er, found my rhythm. It’s so long since I rode a horse that I don’t know how to describe the experience, let alone live it.

“Do some research,” he murmurs.

“Shh! That’s my omniscient-narrator voice. You don’t hear that.”

“Unreliable narrator, more like.”

“Besides, I’d fall off.”

We’ve agreed that we need to be nearer to the action. If there is any action. We’re both a bit worried about the magic kitten.

“You shouldn’t write things into the story if you don’t know what they're going to do,” Ed had said, and we’d argued for a while, good-naturedly, about spontaneity in writing. You know – about relaxing enough to allow spur-of-the-moment ideas – even kittens – into the flow. Not resisting what comes.

Then we’d made our way down the mountain – doesn’t matter how – and hired two horses at the farrier’s in the village.

I can see from Ed’s profile now that he’s laughing at me.

“You had to write that we’re on horses, didn’t you?” he says, reading my mind.

“It just came to me.”

“And we need to be nearer the action because?”

“That just came to me too. But Pipsqueak’s forgotten all about the lamp.”

“The one that summons you.”

“Yeah. Not sure about that. Maybe I should go back and delete it.”

“Leave it for now. They’re all asleep anyway.”

“They’re my friends, Mother!” Stace had said forcefully, and the guards hadn’t dragged Pipsqueak and Myrtille out of the Royal Presence.

But there had been an argument, conducted mainly in not-quite-inaudible hissing between Mother and Daughter, at the end of which a compromise had been reached: Stace would sit with the Queen at the banquet, while Pipsqueak and Myrtille would sit at a secondary table – with Roland.

“I should be up there!” Roland had hissed. “This is an insult!”

“Have another drink,” Myrtille had said. “Far more fun down here.”

It was true. The Queen and Stace – Princess Eustacia – hadn’t been able to eat yet.

Every time one of them raised a fork, another gaudily fancy-dressed fool, in cap and bells and tights and pointed slippers, would prance out onto the open space in front of their long table, and start another long, boring, rhyming-doggerel, interminable series of couplets about the glories of the Royal House.

Two more long tables had been set, one along either side of the performance space, and the guests there hadn’t been able to eat, either. They were equipped with foaming tankards that they crashed down at the end of every couplet. Sometimes, the foam slipped off a tankard, and had to be fixed on again.

Whereas Pipsqueak, Myrtille and Roland were at a round table towards the back, holding bottles of the soft drink so that the label could be seen from over there – they’d been coached in this – and faking a laugh – this, too – when the man over there – beside that screen, see him waving? – held up the board with LAUGH written on it.

And the soft-drink bottles had turned out to contain something stronger. Pipsqueak had been reluctant to co-operate at first, turning his bottle so that the label couldn’t be seen from over there, but after several long swigs, he’d been wassailing away with the best of them.

Even the people at the side tables, facing in towards the entertainment, who had been swigging furtively from soft-drink bottles concealed in their breeches and – Pipsqueak now saw – munching on sandwiches concealed beneath their plates piled high with varnished-for-the-camera traditional fayre were beginning to smile.

But the Queen remained stony-faced. As did Stace – Princess Eustacia.

“Iss hopelesh,” Roland was saying. “Ai luff hurr.” He straightened up, and enunciated “I Love Her, yes, that’s right, I Lovvvve Her. But I can’t–”

“Why don’t you–” Pipsqueak began, but Myrtille shushed him with her hand.

“Does she know how you feel?” Myrtille asked, leaning forward.

“Don’ you unnerstann? Her murther’s ther Queen. How can I–?” Roland slumped forward onto the table.

“I thought you said they were asleep.”

“Yes, sorry, that was just scene-setting.”

Everybody in the camp was asleep.

“Except the kitten.”

Except the kitten, which stepped lightly across Pipsqueak’s face and made for the flap of the tent. Myrtille was flat on her back, snoring, and Roland – he’d followed them into their tent – was face down mumbling to himself.

The kitten nudged a paw at Pipsqueak’s backpack and instantly recoiled, as if expecting it to retaliate. For a long time kitten stared at backpack and backpack didn’t move, and then the kitten extended a paw again and touched the knot in the cord holding the backpack closed.

As the kitten watched, the knot untied itself.

The backpack fell open, spilling its contents.

Onto the floor in front of the kitten rolled – a lamp.

“Oh, too easy.”

The kitten looked up at me, and its expression seemed to say: there's your lamp.

Then the kitten darted across the floor to the flap of the tent, stopped, looked back at you – yes, you – with an expression that seemed to say: there’s about to be a major plot twist – and slipped out into the night.

There is a patch of woodland in Cornwall, and through that patch of woodland runs a stream. Further down the valley, the stream runs through a village.

When the rains come the stream swells. In the past, the stream has contributed to flooding in the village.

But a few years ago, a farmer introduced two beavers into the patch of woodland, and they began to build dams in the stream.

For a while, those two beavers were the only beavers in Cornwall. But then they built a comfortable lodge in the middle of one of their newly formed lakes, and now there are four beavers in Cornwall.

They build dams. They wake up in the evening (they’re nocturnal) with a single thought: tonight would be a good night to build a dam. They go to bed thinking: tomorrow night would be a good night to build a dam.

Except for a brief window in the early part of the year when their thoughts turn to making baby beavers (kits).

You are interested in this story for two reasons.

One: since the beavers started to regulate the flow of water by building dams, the stream hasn’t contributed to the flooding problem in the village.

Two: in the wet ground and shallow water curated by the beavers, there’s a lot of biodiversity wriggling around and eventually turning into butterflies, et cetera. Beavers kick-start the food-chain. Beavers know the recipe for primordial soup.

We’re all in favour of biodiversity, aren’t we? And flooding is a climate-change issue, so you can’t not be interested in that.

You might also like watching wildlife at night. Wear your wellies.

There’s a website. Look for the Cornwall Beaver Project. They do guided walks to visit the beavers and watch them at work. Wrap up warm.

[Post rating: 45ER. Mild, age-related grumbling; some pretentious conversation; fantasy; class tension. Adults under 45 should be accompanied by an elderly relative.]

My guess would be, I’m about to fall out of love with technology.

As I sit here waiting for Windows to configure its updates, with the rain hammering on the plastic roof above me, wondering whether I have enough battery left to write this post, I don’t wonder what updates Windows could possibly need, so soon after the last lot.

They’re for my own good. I know that.

People younger than me will patronise me, just ever so slightly, as they explain that updates make my laptop more secure, improve its performance, et cetera, blah.

Yes. I’ve heard all that before.

But won’t you at least let me complain?

As for Artificial Intelligence – could somebody hurry up and invent Artificial Common Sense?

[Younger readers. The term “Common Sense” was widely used, a few generations back, to describe “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts”. Thanks, internet. It has somewhat fallen out of use, not least because, er, the people who rant on about using common sense tend to be, ah, out of sync with the zeitgeist.]

What I think about as I sit here – just enough battery, I think – is my phone.

I think about the other day, and the app I was using to get from the place near York to the place near Edinburgh.

My phone – my app – knew the way, so I had it in my pocket with the earphones in. The youngish-sounding woman knew exactly where I was, and intervened every time I came anywhere near a junction.

She never actually said “Oh, well done, William!” or “You’re such a good driver!” but I could hear in her voice that she was impressed.

Our relationship lasted until she said “There’s congestion near Gateshead. If you don’t want to take my alternative route, hit no thanks.”

Hit no thanks? On my phone? While I’m driving? She must have known what speed I was doing.

Reader, we went via Gateshead. No congestion. No illegal fiddling with the phone either. I just went via Gateshead.

She still talks to me, but – it’s not the same.

Ed’s making tea. He has a fireplace right at the back of his cave – a recess with a naturally occurring chimney right above it – and he’s set up a big kettle on a hook above a log fire. There’s a stack of logs to one side; I guess they must have been hauled up the mountain by somebody.

“We’re civilised because we smile,” he says, continuing a conversation we started earlier. “Not education. Certainly not politics. We have civilisation because we have facial expressions.”

“You don’t think animals understand each other?”

“Of course they do. But the fine nuance of a facial expression enables a much wider range of interpretation. Understanding. Prompts more thought. Scope for empathy.”

“I like ‘fine nuance’. I’m going to use that in my blog.”

“You know what I mean. Facial expressions lead to a much deeper recognition of the other. Thus, civilisation.”

“No four-letter word beginning with S, Sherlock. Not in my blog.”

“My name’s – oh, I see what you mean. But don’t you see–”

“Ed, what do we do about the magical cat?”

He’s quiet for a moment, shovelling tea leaves into a big teapot. “We do need to talk about the cat,” he says, using a stick to tip the kettle to pour boiling water into the teapot.

Then he pulls on a gauntlet to lift the kettle off the hook over the fire and set it down on a big log – more a slice of tree-trunk, really – turned on its end to serve as a low table.

“You just wanted a cat up a tree, didn’t you?” he says, passing me my mug of tea.

“It just came out magical. You know that thing – the character took over.”

Ed sits down on the other throne facing the fire – the back of Ed’s cave is where he keeps the plunder, junk and architectural salvage that might come in useful in a future story – and gestures at the iron tray of muffins on the slightly larger low table – slice of tree trunk – between us.

I shake my head. “I was trying to be funny, I suppose. They’re off on a quest, and ahead of them there’s a cat needing to be rescued. I would have deleted it later.”

“I wouldn’t do that just yet. Look.”

The four riders have come up over a rise in the road and now they’re looking down at the source of all the noise.

Stace is still hissing with embarrassment.

“I told Mother I’d be perfectly warm in a sleeping bag!” she hisses at Pipsqueak, using one hand to shade her face from the scene ahead. “I know how to put up a tent on my own!”

Ahead of them is an encampment – more a festival, really. Tents, marquees, musicians on a stage, groups of cool-looking young people all drinking the same soft drink, all holding the label so that Pipsqueak can see the brand, laughing uproariously, raising glasses – bottles and cans, sorry; different flavours of the same basic drink – and all of them talking to their other hands – their free hands.

“What’s with the hand thing?”

“I wanted it to be authentic for a modern audience. But this is fantasy. No mobile phones. So there’s a lot of palmistry going on.”

“Oh, look,” says Roland. “Queen Overcaria must have taken the bypass. She got ahead of us.”

Roland pushes his horse forward, then reins it – him – back; he’s waiting for Stace to go ahead of him.

Which she does, spurring her horse forward. “Mother! I can take care of myself!” Pipsqueak hears her say, and then she’s gone on ahead of them, Roland following.

“Looks like we’ve got an easy bed for the night,” says Myrtille. “Come on.”

Pipsqueak and Myrtille spur their yaks into movement. An honour guard has formed ahead of them; Stace and Roland have already passed between the two ranks of men in tights. Beyond them, Pipsqueak sees Stace jump down from her horse and stride up to a woman wearing – well, she’s obviously the Queen, even at this distance.

But then an odd thing happens. The honour guard merges into a single line, now diagonally blocking the road. It’s as if Pipsqueak and Myrtille, on their yaks, are to be directed round to the back of the encampment.

Pipsqueak sighs. But then he feels the kitten push its head out of his jacket.

The kitten stares at the honour guard.

The honour guard reforms into two lines, as before.

Pipsqueak and Myrtille ride their yaks along the road and into the presence of the Queen, who is saying, “But darling, I thought it would be fun! Just you and me and–”

“Mother!”

Stace is standing right in front of the Queen with her fists on her hips. Roland is kneeling in front of both of them. He looks back over his shoulder, clearly surprised to see Pipsqueak and Myrtille coming into the Royal Presence.

“Can’t you let me do anything on my own?” Stace is saying, in a loud furious whisper.

“Oh, this is going to be interesting.” Ed’s leaning forward to watch, elbows on his knees. “That honour guard was a nice touch, and now you’ve got a class system. How’s the Queen going to react to Pipsqueak and Myrtille?”

“Hang on,” I tell him. “We may have to wait until next week. I don’t think I’ve got enough batt

Automation kills authenticity.

And spontaneity.

Automation is the opposite of familiarity, and yet it breeds contempt just as effectively.

It was a good idea, once, to send me an email asking me about my recent visit to your bank. Or my stay at your hotel, et cetera.

Now, though, it’s hard to believe that there’s a group of customer-service people gathered breathless around the inbox, waiting for my reply.

My friend asked for mayo the other day, and was told that the person empowered to add mayo to the menu wasn’t in the building.

Not quite in those words, but we went off into a conversation about how difficult it is, these days, to talk to anybody who’s got the agency to do anything.

I checked out of a hotel recently, and the youngster on reception said, “If you do the questionnaire, make it nine or ten. They don’t register anything else.”

He gets a ten for being real.

Week off.

I've been driving around in a vast rented motorhome, stopping off overnight at campsites on the way.

Long story.

The driving's been easy, and the evenings peaceful, but the opportunities to unfold the table and sit at the laptop haven't come as frequently as would be conducive, etc., so I'm going to sit here watching the trees in the wind and the evening sun, for as long as it takes this thought to unwind, and then I'm going to take a wander round, listen to the trees some more, eat something, award myself another early night, and be off home in the morning.

No post this week, is what I'm saying. Just whatever thoughts come to mind.

Last week I went to the cinema twice, after months of not going to the cinema, and it struck me that if you ignore the thing being advertised, cinema advertising is transcendent.

There’s one at the moment, for example. We stare down at a kaleidoscopic, shifting, moving, apparently hand-drawn landscape, flying above a road as it scribbles itself into being, the landscape around it changing from city to country to sea to land again, our eyes full of authentic, bright, spontaneous artistry, so very hand-drawn…

…all the while listening to a voice-track packed with affirmations and resolve. We’re individuals! We’re brave and strong! We’re going to face those challenges and win!

It's a lovely advertisement. A work of art.

I genuinely didn't catch the brand of hatchback we're supposed to buy, to make it all happen. But I felt great.

The hatchback was on a road, I think it was a bridge, from yesterday to tomorrow I guess, and there was no other traffic. Just steady progress from the past to the future.

Nothing like the A1 the other day, that stretch from Peterborough to Blyth. Don't think that was symbolic of very much, but the advertisement was very definitely an exercise in meaningfulness.

There's probably some ponderous conclusion to be drawn here, but I'm not really in the mood.

I did wonder how different the world would be, if the self-help industry, and those people promoting meditation on Facebook, got hold of the advertising budgets of the car industry.

What if all the welfare, spirituality, mental health people started promoting wellness with visions of landscapes drawing themselves and voice-tracks full of affirmations? With such music.

We'd all feel very much better? For a while, at least?

Instead of the message being "You'll feel fantastic if you buy a small hatchback," it would be "You'll feel fantastic if you believe in yourself."

That could work.

Ed's gone back to his cave on the mountain, for a post-lunch snooze, and the Heroes' Journey is passing through one of those patches best covered by a short phrase, so...

They rode on.

But we can't leave it there. We don't exactly need a cliff-hanger ending, but it's always worth encouraging a little curiosity about what comes next, so...

Pipsqueak jerked upright. He realised that he had fallen asleep in the saddle. But what had woken him?

"For fah's sake!"

She had. Princess Eustacia - Stace - was staring ahead and swearing. There was a glow in the fog, over the rise in the road ahead, and what sounded like - music?

"I don't believe it!"

Stace - Pipsqueak couldn't quite get used to the name - started swearing under her breath. As Pipsqueak watched, she started smoothing down her hair and patting at her clothes. She looked panic-stricken.

"Mother!" she hissed. "For fah's sake!"

"What's the matter?" Pipsqueak pulled his yak alongside her horse.

Suddenly - as if she had just remembered it was there in front of here - Stace grabbed the kitten and passed it to Pipsqueak.

"Take this! I'm not allowed pets."

"What is it? What's up ahead?"

She looked at him, and there were almost tears in her eyes.

"I'm so sorry," she says.

Let me tell you about my idea.

I went to a conference recently. London. Serious-minded and (mostly) suit-wearing people from around the world. Public transport morning and evening (for me, anyway), and a small hotel.

Four days of sitting in audiences watching panels of serious-looking (and minded) people discuss serious subjects that interested them. Lots of security.

Then I came back to Falmouth and went for lunch at the extremely healthy café, Nude Canteen, up Killigrew Street from the Moor. I like it and I’m not alone in that opinion. Lunch for two.

Nude Canteen was launched in April “to make the most of Falmouth’s vibrant, creative population,” which is convenient because it saves me having to describe any of the other regulars. Vibrant. Creative. They fit in.

[I checked the name, because I always do, and I came across the original press release, in the Falmouth Packet.]

Nude Canteen offers flatbreads, Hawaiian poke bowls, sushi burritos, dahl bowls and salads; all completely made-to-order with freshly shredded organic vegetables. Just thought I’d mention that.

[The Falmouth Packet is probably not where E Annie Proulx got the idea for The Shipping News (1993), but, yeah, could have been. There’s also a weekly print edition. Shipping news? Yes, that too.]

My idea isn’t a particularly good idea, and I don’t suppose it’s all that original, either.

But it’s mine this time. I had it, and I got excited about it, and I kind of roughly worked out how to do it, and then – as you do – I explained to myself – as I do, anyway – all the reasons why it wouldn’t work.

Which is fine. I remember my idea, a while back, for waste-plastic road surfaces embedded with wifi to talk to (carry road-sign information to) self-driving cars. There was a definite release of tension in deciding to write about it rather than start a new career in road-building.

And my new idea is so close to what I’m doing already that – hang on, I haven’t told you about it yet.

Okay.

Last week. I was in an audience waiting for a conference session to start.

The lights went down. The big thumpy music started up. The title of the session – and a collage of images – flashed up on the cinema-sized screen backing the stage.

The subject for the session was interesting enough, and the people due up on stage were well-known enough, and – well, high production values. They were trying to get our attention.

I looked around.

I was the only one not transfixed by the screen of my smartphone.

Cut to the following Tuesday – two days ago.

I looked up from my flatbread-full of freshly shredded organic vegetables.

You guessed it.

Now, I realise that we all look at our smartphones a lot.

I realise that there are times when the only available gadget is a smartphone.

But I hadn’t really thought this through.

Flashback. I remember, back in the late nineties, getting my head around the idea that the internet meant direct access to audiences. Thus, to readers.

I was writing a book at the time, and (I’ve just checked) you can still find it online. It was called E-Commerce in Retail Banking, and no, it wasn’t a fantasy novel about a group of young people heading off on a quest that seems to involve a cat up a tree.

“The cat’s just a diversion, surely?”

“Ed. I haven’t explained my idea yet.”

“Sorry.”

My idea – look, I didn’t say it was a good idea – was to develop fiction for the small screen. Tiny chapters in tiny novels. We have short attention spans, and if we’re attending conferences in London, short journeys to work.

So an app on your phone offering a menu of novels, none of which is more than ten chapters long (five-day week, to and from work). Short chapters to cut down on the scrolling. Bonsai novels, you might say.

And if you didn’t, you might come up with Phone Fiction, or perhaps Pocket Novels. Remember pocket cartoons on the front pages of broadsheet newspapers?

Okay. Pocket cartoon: “an editorial cartoon consisting of a topical single-panel single-column drawing”.

Really?

Okay. Broadsheet newspaper: “a newspaper with a large format, regarded as more serious and less sensationalist than tabloids”.

I had the idea of telling coherent, attention-holding micro-novels that smartphone users could read via a dedicated app, as an alternative to flicking through Facebook or checking their emails. Stories with beginnings, middles, ends, et cetera – characters, plots, twists, goodies, baddies, spies, detectives, romantic encounters and occasional shoot-outs. Always the same length. Consistent.

Anyway.

“What if the cat’s magical?”

Ed looks up from his newly delivered flatbread.

“Is it me now?”

“Yes. What if the cat’s magical?”

“You mean – one of them rescues it and then it’s helpful somehow?”

“Something like that.”

Ed doesn’t reply. He’s unfolded his flatbread and now he’s holding up a fork-full of freshly shredded red cabbage as though he’s never seen a vegetable before.

“How do they decide what to put in these things?” he says softly, asking himself.

“Ed?”

“Sorry. What?”

“The cat?”

Pipsqueak has moved his yak close to the tree. He’s about to stand up in his saddle and reach up to the cat.

“You could try it. But which of them gets it? Because it wouldn’t be loyal to all of them.”

“Ah – hold on.”

Pipsqueak’s yak won’t hold still. Something about the tree is bothering it. Pipsqueak stands at its head, holding the bridle.

“Is that bit a bridle? I thought it would be a snaffle, or actually a bit, or something.”

“I’ll look it up later.”

Stace is down off her horse in a second and scrambling up onto Pipsqueak’s yak.

“Hold my legs!” she says to Myrtille, and to Pipsqueak’s surprise, Myrtille comes scrambling down off her yak and does exactly that.

Both women are staring up at the cat – kitten. It’s mewling piteously and staring down at Stace with occasional glances at Myrtille.

It’s almost as though they’re hypnotised, Pipsqueak thinks.

“That’s a bit obvious!”

“Ed! This is a first draft. Maybe they both like cats. I haven’t decided.”

A movement further up the tree catches Pipsqueak’s eye. The upper branches seem to be curling down towards Stace, almost as if they’re trying to grab her.

“Come on, Kitty, come to mummy, come to Stace, come on now, mew, miaow, sweetie, oh, you’re adorable, you sweet little thing, you.”

Pipsqueak can’t work out whether he’s embarrassed for Stace, for the sounds she’s making, or just embarrassed generally. He looks away as she stretches up, doesn’t watch as she stretches up her body to reach the kitten, revealing her tummy and her hips as her clothes part at the middle, and then realises that Myrtille isn’t watching him.

Pipsqueak watches Stace take the kitten in her hands and hold it to her chest. She’d fall down if it wasn’t for Myrtille, who steadies her as she sits down on Pipsqueak’s yak.

Stace curls herself round the kitten and Myrtille holds onto both of them. The tree seems to wilt. It’s as if it wants the kitten back, Pipsqueak thinks, watching the branches curl down towards the two women on the yak. And then he realises – it really is reaching down!

Before he can do anything, the kitten – its tiny face visible on Stace’s shoulder, close in against her neck, half-hidden by her hair – the kitten hisses at the tree, and the branches spring back into place.

“Did you see that?” Pipsqueak shouts. “The tree’s alive!”

And the kitten – wait, what did the kitten do?

The kitten stares at him.

What just happened? Suddenly, Pipsqueak can't remember.

Both Stace and Myrtille look at him as though they’ve just woken up. Pipsqueak’s yak pulls her head free and steps decisively away from the tree – he has to catch it. The two women scramble down, the kitten between them. Pipsqueak, his yak safely held, sees it snarl at the tree, showing its teeth.

The kitten just snarled at the tree!

The kitten turns its head and stares at him.

Pipsqueak frowns.  There was something… something he’s forgotten… about the kitten...

“Eh?” Throughout all this, Roland has been sitting on his horse staring down at his–

“He can’t have a smartphone. This is a fantasy world.”

–staring down at the lines on his hand. He’s missed the whole scene.

Myrtille’s back on her yak and Stace is back on her horse with the kitten tucked in front of her.

“Wake up, Roly!” shouts Stace.

Roly looks up. “I went to a palm reader once,” he says. “She told me to wake up.”

Pipsqueak can see that he wants to say more, but Stace is set on leaving. Roland shuts up and pulls his horse round, ready to follow her.

Pipsqueak mounts his yak. Something just happened, but – what?

“Let’s get going!” he shouts, more to clear his head than because they won’t hear him say it quietly.

And then because he looks that way, just at the right moment, he sees that when Stace spurs her horse, the kitten reaches out and lays a paw on the horse’s neck – and the horse doesn’t race off ahead.

Okay, thinks Pipsqueak. That’s going to be handy.

The kitten smiles, in the expressionless way that kittens smile, and thinks to itself: let him understand gradually.

The four of them ride together, close together, as the forest gathers around them.

The trees rustle, as though they’re talking to each other.

But every time the noise gets loud enough to drown out their conversation, Stace’s kitten – he’s already Stace’s kitten – hisses once, loudly, and our hero and her companions ride on in silence, untouched by any of the sharp, black branches.

“I like that. Very nice.”

“Did you catch the thing with the palm-reading?”

“Telling him to wake up? Yes, very clever. He wakes up to his heroic side.”

“Maybe I should have added a golf bag to his luggage earlier. So he can pull out a sword unexpectedly, at a crucial moment.”

“What’s that behind his saddle?”

“Oh, you’ve done it for me. Thanks.”

“Roland’s heroic moment set up. I like the way you’re making it an inner journey, by the way.”

“Isn’t everything an inner journey, if it’s worth making?”

“But you’ve blown the punchline. You were going to end with those branches, weren’t you?”

“Ed. A little faith. You want a good ending – have you seen the puddings here?”

“Ah…”

In a change to our scheduled programming, here’s a poem by Maya Stein.

I subscribe to her Ten-Line Tuesday poems – one arrives every Tuesday (strictly, Wednesday; she’s in another time zone) and it’s a certain length.

I can’t quite say that I don’t know Maya Stein, because I’ve been reading her poetry for quite some number of years now, but we’ve never met and only exchanged perhaps half-a-dozen emails in more-than-that years.

More about Maya Stein at www.mayastein.com. This poem is a good example of what you could get by going there.
 
Train will not whistle at crossing
It would be nice to have signs. A cloud parting in two, say, and an arrow of sun
pointing. It would be lovely, at the fork of any unbearable decision, that a path
with equidistant, perfectly round stones would unwrap at your feet. Haven’t you waited
at certain corners, squinting at maps? Haven’t you held a damp finger to the sky,
gauging the wind? Haven’t you searched the bottoms of tea cups, scattered feathers,
tipped your ear against gravel, shaken dice, placed hands palm-up on a table
at a county fair, made bargains with a stop light, a sidewalk crack, a dime, a daisy?
Haven’t you held a deerskin pouch against your chest and counted to 10?
It would be nice to have signs, but mostly, the train will not whistle at the crossing.
You must stand at the empty tracks and decide. You must be that arrow, and point.
                                                                                    Maya Stein

At any given moment, the world is completely crazy by the standards of any time but that moment.

If you’re in the present, the past is a crazy place. They did things weirdly differently there. If you’re reading this in 2029, or 2039, well, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t see further than 2019.

The moment – I mean the big moment, this point in history, not just 11.09 this sunny morning on Church Street, Falmouth, heading for The Moor – defines acceptable behaviour.

Our forefathers and foremothers would think us insane for doing things the way we do, and chances are, the next generation will look back on us as sadly unenlightened about what was happening in the world around us.

But we’d think them totally out of order if they turned up and told us how to behave, just as the Edwardians would have had difficulties with, I don’t know, the third week (say) of a modern gender-studies course. Today, at worst (old guy speaking here), we’d just go pink and sit at the back.

Boy, we believe in our own way of doing things. Girl, we do. Same down through history. The prevailing belief system is correct in its own time, incorrect twenty years later.

More than that – in its own time, the prevailing belief system can get to be nigh-on compulsory.

For example, whether or not the science is correct and we’re all gonna die, I’d say the social pressure (around here, at least) is now enough to ensure that a lot happens to tackle climate change. After all, only an outcast or the wrong kind of rebel would drink through a plastic straw these days.

I’d also have to say that the psychology of climate-change denial is probably no longer “I’ve looked at the science and I disagree with you” but instead “I’m a contrarian and I will disagree with anything you say.”

Which brings me to Extinction Rebellion. I have friends who went off and demonstrated recently, and that prompted me to find out enough to defend myself in the inevitable after-protest conversation.

Not that I’m a contrarian or anything, you understand, but with these friends, “You should have been there” can shade very quickly into “Why weren’t you there?” and then just possibly (if they’re tired after their exertions) “Don’t you care enough to be there?”

“I was busy” doesn’t work as an excuse. What’s more important than … et cetera.

“With friends like those, you need other friends.”

“Yeah, but I’m fond of them.”

“So why weren’t you there? Don’t you care enough?”

“Come on, Ed. Don’t you start.”

Edgalcius and I have come to Espressini on Killigrew Street for a coffee. He’s picked himself a pair of square tortoiseshell spectacle frames, and while I write he’s amusing himself by taking them off and putting them on again. Bifocals don’t exist in his world, and (I’m beginning to realise) nor does crystal-clear vision.

“Look at the grain in this table-top.”

“I’m trying to write about Extinction Rebellion. It’s a serious subject.”

“That tree out there. I can see the leaves, the branches.”

“Their demands.”

“It’s all so clear!”

Extinction Rebellion want the UK government to create and be led by a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice (my bold type). Which is why I want to write about them. Think about recent UK-government efforts to decide anything. This isn’t a “declare that it’s horrible” demand, but “create a body that can make a decision,” which is a rare kind of realism these days.

“Yes, but what’s different about a Citizen’s Assembly?”

“As I was about to say.”

If you sort the population into quotas according to demographics, and then you select randomly from those quotas, you end up with an Assembly of Citizens that is more directly representative than, you know, at least one other body I could name.

“Ah, yes. And then - create and be led by. In bold. I get that part.”

“Citizens don’t have a political agenda. They can do the bit that politicians can’t.”

“Like holding a referendum, really.”

“Not quite. Citizens’ Assemblies have been used before, successfully.”

“So have–”

“They’re handy for sorting out controversial issues. A Citizens’ Assembly in Ireland dealt with same-sex marriage, and another achieved the repeal of the ban on abortion. There are other examples.”

“And that’s it?”

Extinction Rebellion also want the UK government to “tell the truth” by “declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change” (although imagine a UK government that was competent enough to hold together a lie), and they want the UK government to “act now” to “halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.”

This is Extinction Rebellion and not It’s All Fine Really, Honest Rebellion, so the truth is going to have to be pretty dire – see above re social pressure – although I think the manifesto does add somewhere (can’t find it now) that if the scientifically verified, openly disclosed truth does turn out to be less ghastly than expected, Extinction Rebellion – may I call you ER? – wouldn’t object.

I think I’ll join these people.

“Not like you, to get into politics.”

He’s reading over my shoulder again.

“It’s not politics, though, is it? ER wants a decision-making body capable of making decisions. That’s actually progress. Evolution, even.”

Edgalcius is tipping his head back to see my laptop screen through the lower part of his bifocals.

“So it’s not just the looming extinction of the planet.”

“Well, that too.”

“But really, you’re joining ER because they’ve come up with today’s equivalent of the coalition government that took over in 1940. A decision-making body capable of making decisions.”

“If we can’t move forward, by deciding what to do, we’re going to lose big-time anyway.”

“Speaking of moving forward…”

“That’s my line.”

“They’re loading up.”

A caravan of yaks and camels is forming just outside the (open) North Gate of the walled town. Princess Eustacia’s voice can be heard over the hubbub – “No, Mummy, I don’t need the Praetorian Guard! I’m going with my friends!” – and in the background, Roland’s voice too – “Of course I’ll wash my hands! Mother! Of course I’ll make conversation with her!”

Pipsqueak is defending his yak against servants trying to load it (her) with bundles of Princess Eustacia’s luggage. Myrtille has ridden a short distance up the road. They’ve been exchanging glances, sharing the joke of all this preparation, but Pipsqueak can tell that Myrtille is getting impatient.

[Ed is too. “Have you seen her tent? It’s going to take hours to pitch. And all those monogrammed bundles. They need to leave now if they’re going to unpack before dark, or they might as well wait for morning.”

“Ed. You’re imaginary. Don’t be difficult.”

“I’m imaginary. Ha!”]

Princess Eustacia comes galloping out of the crowd to where Myrtille is sitting on her yak.

“Can’t we just go?” she says. “Leave it all behind? Do I really need all this stuff?”

Myrtille eyes Princess Eustacia’s horse.

“Sunflower,” Eustacia snaps. “I didn’t name him. And call me Stace, okay?”

[“Ah, plot twist,” says Ed. “She’s feisty now.”]

Roland comes trotting up. “Princess–” he begins.

“Can it, Roly! We’re leaving. We can, right?” Stace turns to Eustacia.

“You’ve got–”

Stace grabs the strap of her rucksack. “Everything I need. Packed it myself this morning. All this” – she sweeps her hand around at all her other luggage, the yaks, the servants – “just anxious parents.”

Myrtille glances across to Pipsqueak. He’s heard. Their eyes meet as he slides a bag of thermal vests off the back of his yak and onto the ground. “Ready?” she says. It’s a challenge.

He grins. “Yeah.”

Stace has caught all this. She spurs her horse, taking them both by surprise, and disappears over the horizon.

“Go!” cries Myrtille, and her yak lumbers into motion.

“Yee-haaah!” shouts Pipsqueak, and his yak raises her head from the grass verge.

“I say! Hold on!” Roland, who has dismounted to pick a posy of wild flowers for the Princess, scrambles back into his saddle.

Together, the three of them ride slowly northwards in pursuit of the Princess formerly known as Eustacia.

And behind them, at the gate, the Queen raises her arm and points. “After them!” she shouts.

Digital identity. Defined online as “an online or networked identity adopted or claimed in cyberspace by an individual, organization or electronic device”.

Further down the same page of search results you find “A digital identity is information stored online that relates to a single individual. We generate our own with every on-line interaction and the data that we leave behind builds a profile of us – which may not be an accurate representation.”

Which is – thanks for those definitions to techopedia.com and shu.ac.uk – not the only problem. All parents sooner or later realise that their children are learning more from what they do than from what they say. In the same way, all users of networked technology sooner or later realise that the entities to which they submit –

– it’s always submit isn’t it? You’re always submitting online, never commanding or controlling or just ordering people about –

– to which they submit their information are learning from what they do, not from what they write in their online profiles.

I went to a presentation recently, by a high-up retail person in a well-known business (and consumer) software company. The subject was how to combine a “seamless” customer experience with effective security.

How they can make sure that you’re you, without getting in the way of whatever you’re trying to do. [Nice idea, huh? They should try it.]

And I learned for the first time that companies can track your competence with the keyboard and the mouse. [Okay, I’m slow.]

I’ve given over a certain amount of information to my, ah, online suppliers. I buy vegetables from companies that know my date of birth, et cetera.

I know that those companies have access to a lot more data about me. I’ve signed user agreements that allow social-media companies to analyse how I behave and (for example) work out how I’m likely to vote. I don’t like it, but I realise that if I want to post pictures of cats, they need to know what I bought last Summer.

I didn’t realise that those same companies are now collecting data on how competent I am at typing, how slow I am to work out which button to click, et cetera.

They know that I’m a fast but not always accurate typist; that I sometimes hit the mouse pad with the heel of my hand when I’m going for numbers; that I always use the number [Redacted] and the symbol [Redacted] when I’m setting a new password.

And if they know how I get around my keyboard, it follows that they’re on the other side of the little inbuilt camera above the screen of my laptop. Cooee! I’m waving.

I’m not surprised by any of this. Nor am I outraged. But I do wonder.

Why isn’t my life perfect?

These people, they know my wants, needs and desires. Their whole preoccupation is with putting exactly the right thing in front of me, just at the moment when I want to buy it.

They’ve spent billions on knowing me.

Why don’t they know me?

Let us go, then, you and I, to take a photograph of diggers.

There’s a building site in Falmouth, half-way up the walk back to my place from Tesco’s. Stop, lean on the wall, and look down.

When the builders have finished, you’ll be looking at the roof of a house (one of two being built), but what you’re seeing today is flat, not-quite-cleared ground – and diggers.

There was also a skip lorry yesterday, for the removal of dumpy bags full of waste, and then there was a tipper truck delivering more ground – or so it seemed; a load the same colour as the surface onto which it was being tipped.

I stopped for long enough to be – impressed, actually.

The big digger flattened the surface onto which the skip lorry would drive, and then parked between the skip lorry and the dumpy bags. One man hooked dumpy bags onto the digger’s arm, and then the digger swung them round onto the skip, where another man unhooked them.

Then the man in the blue plastic hat roped a net over the skip, and reversed the skip lorry out to make space for the tipper truck. While that was happening, the hooking-up man and the unhooking man went and moved other diggers, and presently it came to pass that the tipper truck was able to dump its load of ground into a newly cleared space.

I’ve left out the tiny diggers and their drivers, and the smaller skip full of rubbish that had to be compressed, and the container that was clearly being used as an office, because this is complicated enough to describe already.

But what I want to get across is that there were multiple vehicles, mostly big with caterpillar tracks, moving in a co-ordinated way to enable a lot of things to happen all at once. And men walking about between them, not being run over.

I’ve never worked in construction, but it seems to me that a lot of co-ordination must have gone into the half-hour that I watched. Big vehicles moving out of each other’s way just in time; other big vehicles moving just in time to where they needed to be. If you’d speeded it all up, there would have been a symmetry.

There seemed to be no one person whose job was to tell all the others what to do. But – maybe I’m just not observant. Maybe the planning had been done earlier. A corps de ballet doesn’t need a bloke on stage blowing a whistle, so why should these guys?

That was my first time watching a building site for half an hour, and I’m not sure what I would have expected to see if I’d thought about it in advance. Men (and women?) rushing about at random? Stopping to discuss each move before making it?

If I was to tell the internet about this, or share it on Facebook, I suppose modern practice would be to declare outrage at some prejudice I was revealing in myself. Not to share my interest. You see, I’m clearly -ist about building sites and should be consigned to outer darkness.

“I really don’t get that.”

“That we use the technology to vilify each other?”

“That you’re so vigilant against each other.”

Edgalcius has borrowed an old suit of mine and we’re down at Specsavers on Church Street waiting for his check-up. I offered him a pair of denims and a hoodie, but he wanted the suit. With the braided hair and the beard, and the tan, he looks … distinctive. But I still say the beads in the hair were a mistake.

“We’re a competitive species, I suppose.”

“Predators. You’re always forming into packs. Left, right, colour, gender, nimby, trolls…”

“Nimby?”

“That rare thing, an expression of contempt coined by a politician to attack voters. If a developer wants to build student accommodation – Not In My Back Yard. By opposing builders in your back yard, you’re against progress.”

“Or homeless centres. Or refugee accommodation.”

“Maybe the guy had a point. Human nature again. No wonder so many young people these days turn to fantasy.”

“Speaking of which…”

“Cinema, games, books; it’s the dominant – oh, they’re all fine. Against his mother’s–”

“Mr Mage? If you’d like to come with me?”

“Take a look for yourself. Below the picture.”

“Oh yes, I see. Against his mother’s wishes, et cetera.”

“That’s it. Am I over sixty, by the way?”

“Of course you are, Ed. You’ve been doing this for–”

“So this check-up is free.”

“It’s just this way, sir.”

“Call me Ed, why don’t you?”

Against his mother’s wishes, but somewhat at Myrtille’s urging, Pipsqueak has accepted Roland’s invitation to a Frappuccino at a coffee bar in the centre of the walled town, by the fountain.

Actually replying had been a bit of a problem, until a talking bird had dropped out of the sky, having collided with some levitating plastic waste, and Pipsqueak had nursed it back to health.

Out of gratitude, the talking bird had asked Pipsqueak if he needed any help with anything, and together, man and bird had worded the reply.

They’re all drinking Frappuccinos, because Pipsqueak had just said “Oh, I’ll have what you’re having” when Roland had offered to buy, and Myrtille had said “That sounds great!” and smiled at Pipsqueak in a way that made him feel both comforted and a little bit suspicious that she was finding him funny.

Princess Eustacia – yes, she’s here – had said “Hey, cool, Roly!” in a way that had made Roland look embarrassed and Pipsqueak feel just a little bit sorry for Roland.

The two yaks are outside drinking from the fountain, the two horses are parked in their bays, and a court painter is crouched next to the table, working up a selfie for Eustacia with this amusing company.

It had been a shaky start.

But now, Myrtille and Eustacia are deep in conversation. Pipsqueak has heard the words “socks” and “precautions”, and he’s eyeing the court painter uneasily, wondering what parts of his private life will be going into the selfie’s caption.

Roland is telling him all about what a drag his life in the palace is, and Pipsqueak is regretting asking Roland where exactly in the palace he lives – round the back, to the side, in one of the hangers-on apartments in the annexe; you can’t even see his window in the postcard.

But he braces himself. There’s some scene-setting dialogue to be got through before they can continue the conversation.

“We’ve decided that we’re going together,” he interrupts.

“Eh?” After a second, Roland gets it. “Yes, and now we’re discussing the route and the timing. The Mage has told us that it’s urgent. But we can’t leave until after the party on Saturday. So we’ll have to travel fast when we do go.”

“Eustacia and Myrtille are insisting on coming with us. We’ve told them that it’s– we’ve told them that we can– we’ve accepted their kind offer to lead the expedition.”

They both relax. That’s done. Eustacia and Myrtille are still talking. Without missing a beat, Myrtille reaches out and retrieves the cake-fork that has somehow become embedded in the table-top in front of Pipsqueak. Around the coffee bar, conversations resume. The court painter comes out from under the next table and gets back to work.

“That was clumsy, wasn’t it?”

“We need a writer skilled enough to get that kind of background information across without clunking it out in dialogue.”

“With this guy, imagine if we were on a stake-out.”

“And now it’s not even clear which one of us is speaking!”

Pipsqueak eyes Roland. “Maybe I should be the hero and you should be the sidekick,” he says.

Pipsqueak says. To Roland. Pipsqueak said that to Roland.

The other two are off in their own conversation and didn't hear anything. They're not in this bit..

Roland looks shocked. By what Pipsqueak has just said to him.

“Aheh…hum…ah…” Roland begins. In his mind, there’s an obvious reason why Roland should be the hero and Pipsqueak the sidekick, but he can’t quite put it into words.

He lives at the palace – okay, but it’s still the palace. And Pipsqueak is a – is a – he wouldn’t even get in through the front door of the palace!

Roland, who has his own side-door key to the palace, can’t quite meet Pipsqueak’s eye.

Pipsqueak pushes his Frappuccino aside and stands up. “I need a strong black coffee,” he says. “Anyone?”

“Some more of that cake?” says Myrtille. “For all of us to share,” she adds. She pushes away the plate in front of her, which is empty but for a few crumbs. And a twisted cake-fork.

Pipsqueak, who likes the curve of Myrtille’s hips and her sexy little tummy – but who isn’t an idiot – says softly “I’ll share it with you.”

Eustacia says “Ooh, could I have one of those? With warmed oat milk and sprinkles?”

Pipsqueak looks at Roland. Their eyes meet. The two young men share a moment of perfect understanding.

Meanwhile, two hundred miles up the Frozen Trail that lies ahead of our Hero and her friends, far North of the walled town in which they’re drinking all that coffee and sharing all that cake...

...a teeny weeny little adorably cute fluffy little kitten, recently born, really adorable, tiniest and cuddliest of its (his) litter, who will be looking for an owner soon, somebody to love and be loved by, gazes up at a tall tree with lots of twisty branches and thinks: “I could climb that.”

It's the relentless conversation, isn't it? The endless, endless, endless discussion.

Waking up this morning to a panel debate on the radio about immigration and racism in the USA, my immediate reaction was: these have become such comfort-zone subjects for you, haven't they?

You know what gets said in discussions on these subjects, and you know how to say it. You're at home in this flow of voices expressing safe opinions that we've all heard before.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. But did you go out in the world, with a fresh mind, and research these subjects as though it was the first time? What's new?

Or did you invite people you've heard before, people whose opinions you know, to give a balanced discussion that won't offend?

How often, when we think we're at the cutting edge, are we really fighting for a cause that's already been won?

Some days, I just sit here and watch the weather.

I like the easy back-and-forth of the trees, the movement of the clouds, the clear Autumn light.

Today, I also like the occasional sweeps of rain that make the wind visible – sorry, but I’m aiming for a slightly more pretentious tone this week – and if we have to mention it, the wet-look magpie that’s problem-solved my “Small Bird Feeding Station”. Scruffy bird.

He’s too big to land on it, so he knocks seeds from the seed-feeder and takes them from the ground. If I now say “clever bird,” it’s not because I’ve got him/her typecast as stupid – he worked it out just as I was deciding that I’d have to take out a dish of seeds and put it on the wall for him.

Cleverer than I am. Maybe we’re surrounded by clever animals (cue ominous electronic music) and we just don’t realise it because they don’t use facial expressions that we can recognise.

Did I mention the duckling? I think I did, but at this age I’m pretty much expected to repeat myself. Month or two back. Little tiny fluffy ball of duckling, swimming along and grubbing around for things to eat like he/she had just completed the How To Be A Duck training course.

Maybe that was instinct, but does it matter? Functional intelligence. At that age, I had the startle reflex and an instinct to cry if I wanted attention. If you’d dropped me in a pond, I wouldn’t have floated.

Let alone found breakfast.

And what happened to bird tables, anyway? “Small Bird Feeding Station” – ha! You hang things from it rather than put things on it. I suppose the clue is in the word “Small”. Big birds can’t get a foothold, so they can’t steal the seeds, etc., left out for the small birds.

Inclusion by exclusion; human nature.

Except that, in the grand tradition of unintended consequences, we’re training a generation of bigger birds – that magpie, crows, seagulls, escaped parakeets – to problem-solve. Their brains are getting bigger. They’re evolving.

Ah – there’s the other magpie. I read somewhere [It was on Quora – Ed.] that one defining characteristic of an English person is that he/she (this is exhausting) reacts to single magpies.

I remember being told, right around the age I learned to swim and pour out my own Rice Krispies, not at the same time, that if I ever saw a magpie alone, I should say, “Good morning, Mr Magpie, I hope your wife and family are well.” It was always morning in my childhood, and everything was masculine unless it obviously wasn’t.

Magpies pair up for life, so a lone magpie might be a bereaved magpie – and they’re creatures of myth and legend, so you don’t want to be impolite to an unhappy magpie.

But two magpies – remember the rhyme? I saw seven once, all picking up seeds on a lawn. I didn’t notice a Small Bird Feeding Station in the tree above them, but now I understand. Clever birds.

I’ve just looked up magpies in Country Life. If you’re not following any of this, here’s the link. And no, I’m not talking about the television programme. I was a Blue Peter man, myself.

Memories. Once, although this might not have been a morning, I stood on the edge of a field looking up at a tree that was noisy with crows, and the person holding my hand said, “That’s a parliament of crows.”

If that’s too topical for you, An Unkindness of Ravens is a 1985 book by Ruth Rendell, a 2009 book by Lucas Scott, a 2014 collection of collective nouns by Chloe Rhodes, a rock band and a song. So far.

Wikipedia also tells me that you can have a charm of magpies, or a murder of magpies – but you probably won’t. I came across a magpie trap once. You had to start by trapping a magpie. Other magpies would be so curious that they’d join it in the trap.

Not that I wanted to trap magpies. And no, I never came across a first-magpie trap. Although curiously enough, I do know a way to–

“What about the book?”

“Aaah… Oh… My heart! Give me a second…”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that – the post’s getting long again, and…”

“Ed. I’d forgotten you were there.”

Edgalcius the Mage is sitting on my sofa, still decently wrapped in the enormous multi-coloured dressing-gown. He’s platted his hair and his beard. His feet are up on the low table and his (multi-coloured, did I say) carpet slippers and hanging off his toes. This isn’t a story in which podiatrists make housecalls, although I might revise that in a future draft. Edgalcius’ feet–

“I told you it was Quora.”

“You spotted that from over there?”

He holds up a pair of opera glasses.

“Sorry.”

He isn’t. He thinks it’s funny. Smug, arrogant, old – person.

“Yeah, okay, you got me. But did you spot that reference to seven magpies?”

“Story yet to be told? Sure. Cute. But you haven't even explained–”

“Wouldn’t that have killed the momentum? You and I know that they spent another whole hour on the mountain-top. A whole hour! Most of it spent making tea and cutting the crusts off cucumber sandwiches. You're saying take them through that and make it interesting…”

“You haven't worked it out yet, have you? Your own story?”

“I’ve only just started! But I know the shape of the story. It’s a quest, it’s character-led, and increasingly, I like The Old Guy With A Thousand Faces as a title, if that tells you anything.”

Edgalcius is still fixed on what he wants me to understand; he’s not hearing what I’m telling him. I don’t know how long I can spin this out, but he’s still convinced that either Pipsqueak or Roland is the hero in a book with Old Guy in the title. For a Mage, he’s quite thick, actually.

“Yes, but your readers need to know–”

“Look what’s happening now! Pipsqueak is explaining what happened on the mountain to Myrtille. The scene fits exactly where it’s needed, and it serves the purpose of establishing their relationship.”

“How can he explain what you haven’t worked out yet?”

The argument continues. Meanwhile, below the picture…

Pipsqueak and Myrtille have sneaked round to the back of the yak shed to smoke a couple of cigarettes and talk over what’s been happening.

“So your dad killed that dragon?”

“Yeah – hang on, of course he did. How do you think its head got to be hanging over our fireplace?”

“I thought – maybe it was a tourist thing? Some kind of interior-design quirky conversation-piece thing?”

“He killed it.” Pipspeak takes a long drag of his cigarette and blows a smoke ring that morphs into the shape of a dragon and then a three-masted tea clipper (which he doesn’t recognise; he’s never even seen the sea). The smoke sails off into the distance.

He’s thinking back, in improbable detail, over the hour-long argument he and Roland had with Edgalcius the Mage after the genie had vanished back into its – Pipsqueak frowned. There had been something odd about that genie.

Quickly, in no more than a paragraph, he summarises to himself the details of the Hero’s Journey that he and Roland have so firmly refused to undertake.

He thinks: but I haven’t really refused it, have I? He had realised, as he told his family about his encounter with the Mage and then answered their questions, that he’d actually just rejected Edgalcius’ ridiculous idea that he might be the hero in this story.

Roland had done the same – for different reasons; Pipsqueak smiles faintly at the idea of either of them as hero.

Roland! Likeable guy, but really? For a Mage, Edgalcius had struck Pipsqueak as quite thick, actually.

Myrtille stubs out her cigarette. “Where’s Tobeya Nounced anyway?” she asks.

“He killed it in the mountains here,” said Pipsqeak. “What? Oh – it’s beyond the town, apparently. Way off in the fog.” Actually, it’s The Fog, he corrected himself. Not just any old fog.

“Can I come with you?” says Myrtille.

“What?” Pipsqueak’s astonished. He hadn’t thought for a moment – but a much bigger smile spreads itself across his face. “Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.” Myrtille nudges herself closer to Pipsqueak and puts her hand on his chest. “You need somebody to…” He turns his face and his lips find hers and they – look, we needn’t get into this. They’re healthy young adults, they’ve known each other since childhood and they’re behind the yak shed, where they’ve made a comfortable nest of straw bales.

Myrtille slides her hand down Pipsqueak’s – and Edgalcius is doing something with a small pair of scissors and a nail-file, yeuch, we can’t go there, and Roland is telling his friends, again, about this really cool guy he met with the silly name, and they’re bored out of their skulls, so not there either – and Pipsqueak feels the warmth rising through – no, no, NO! This is none of our business!

Myrtille moves her body forward over his, and Pipsqueak feels the soft pressure of – and there’s a knocking on the door! A hammering! On the lintel above the main entrance! To the hut complex!

That was close. There’s a horseman. On his horse. He’s exactly the horseman you’d find in a story like this. Phew! Arrogant, impatient, but doing what he’s told. With bad grace. A caption shows briefly along the bottom edge of however you’re visualising this: Here is a messenger from Roland, bringing an invitation.

Myrtille helps Pipsqueak struggle back into his several layers of thermal underwear, and his jerkin, and his Authentic Peasant accessories, and after ten minutes of effort, Pipsqueak is ready to join his family.

He bursts out onto the street, still tucking something into something because that’s dramatically necessary in a scene like this, to find his family standing around the messenger (on his horse) like the other actors on stage when the main character misses his cue.

Pipsqueak’s father hands Pipsqueak a parchment. It’s roughly A4-sized, torn around the edges, and the colour a plain white parchment would be if you soaked it overnight in tea. On one side, a treasure map has been scribbled out. On the other, in really curly writing, we can read the word Invitation.

Pipsqueak’s father stares at Pipsqueak with an expression that suggests (a) he’s trying to suppress his irritation at being kept waiting, and (b) he’s a humble peasant dad impressed that his son is receiving invitations delivered by men on horseback. The rest of the family stand around looking variously humble, impressed, impatient, envious, annoyed.

A voice from nowhere hisses: “This is for you!”

“This is for you,” says Pipsqueak’s father, handing the invitation to Pipsqueak.

The messenger wheels his horse round and gallops off up the road towards the top of the map and the walled town beyond.

Pipsqueak stares down at the invitation for a long moment and then looks up.

“What’s a Frappuccino?” he asks.

So this is what I suggest we do now.

I write blog posts in the usual way. You read them (or not) in the usual way.

Every now and then, we pause for a digression while I check on progress with the fantasy novel that I inadvertently started last week. I was intending to write about the difficulty of starting something – and then I went and did it. I started something.

So we’ll have it in the background. The occasional paragraph. Although this week you get more than that. This week is for pure (sic) self-indulgence. Normal service resumed next week.

If you’d asked me, at around the time I wrote last week’s opening sentence – “Okay, so today we’re going to start the novel.” – whether I was about to start a fantasy novel, or any other kind of novel, I would have said no.

I would have told you that I was going to write about – and then I would have done a lot of telling. About opening scenes, structure, blah blah. There might have been diagrams. I like to think that I would have been quite convincing.

But it occurs to me now that what I actually did – starting something – was showing rather than telling. If I really want to talk myself up, I’d tell you that I acted out the moves I suggest you make, rather than standing behind you and telling you what to do.

That’s a good thing. If you can enable your reader to see what your characters are doing, as she reads, that’s a lot better than just telling her they did it. If you can show (demonstrate) what you want to tell about starting a novel…

The sentence “William started a fantasy novel” is no substitute for the experience of reading last week’s post, however dreadful that experience might be.

Actually, I’m extremely modest and unassuming, thank you very much. Embarrassed, too. A fantasy novel? Really?

I just think that if I’m going to write about how to do something, I should have a crack at doing it as well. The chef who taught me how to fillet a fish, all those years ago, did it by filleting a fish.

Other analogies are available: ride a motorcycle (I followed him); fire a gun (we each had a single-shot target rifle); do joined-up writing (Mrs Thompson did it first on the blackboard); break the siege of a walled city (sorry, that just crept in).

You can pick up learning from people who don’t (can’t?) do what they teach, but it’s never quite as useful as it would be if they were writing from experience rather than from examples of what other people have done in the past. Discuss. Or just get on with it.

Ahem! Anyway. This week’s blog post – the one from which I’m digressing to check on the novel – is all about politics, as you’d expect. It’s perceptive, incisive, and it makes a number of very cogent points about the current situation in the UK. It’s very nuanced and the prose is richly coruscating as well as spare.

That said, my imaginary reader this week is a former Kremlin-watcher who has just started an Eng. Lit. degree at a fashionable university. Out of respect for his old skills and to help him hone his new skills, as he embarks on his first Eng. Lit. Crit. essay, I have contained the entire blog post in the subtext of this paragraph. Read between the lines, Yevgeny.

Back to the digression. I’m mostly happy with last week’s work on The Old Guy With A Thousand Faces (which we might as well use for now as a working title). Provisionally, it gets us past the opening-sentence thing – “You are the chosen one!” et cetera – and provisionally, it gets us past the opening-scene thing. That whole conversation outside the cave.

Provisionally, because we might delete it all later. But for now, it gives us characters to work with, and the makings of a story. A Mage. Two possible heroes with (so far, only lightly shaded in) back-stories. Yak trains, mountains, a monastery with a library. A father, a mother, lots of uncles and brothers, Princess Eustacia and her party on Saturday.

We could take any of them, any of that, anywhere. We could delete all of it in favour of something we haven’t written yet. But at least we’ve started. If there’s anything to be learned from last week’s post, it is: you’ve got to start somewhere. Even in the middle of a blog post if you have to.

Then, just write what comes. I don’t write fantasy novels. I can say that because I know what I do write. I’m a traditionally published and independently published author of books ranging from children’s stories to tax guides (I found a tax guide the other day, that I’d forgotten, with my name on the cover; strange moment).

I’m also an obscure blogger who has only recently grasped the point about specialising in something – writing – and I write elsewhere as well. But I can say with confidence that I don’t–

“I do have one question.”

“Yerk!” William jerks back from the laptop. His coffee mug (empty now) goes flying.

Edgalcius the Mage is standing behind him, reading over his shoulder.

“Yee! What? How? What – you doing here?”

William’s heart is beating so fast you can see the pulse of it in his face. He’s white as a blank sheet of paper and breathless. He puts his hand to his chest. “What? How?”

Edgalcius the Mage shrugs.

“Cut! Do we have to put ‘the Mage’ after my name every time?”

“Action!”

Edgalcius shrugs.

“You wrote me. I’m here. Look, do you mind if I use your shower? Living in a cave, you know? Keep writing; it’s different. I’m interested.”

“What’s the question?” William is getting over the shock.

“It’ll keep. Won’t be long.”

“There’s a towel on the rack.”

I don’t write fantasy. But I do say: write what comes. Said that twice now. Even if it’s fantasy. Don’t edit while writing, and plan whenever you feel like it. But any inspiration that wants to get onto the page, should be allowed to get onto the page. Tidy it up later.

“How do I–?”

“There’s a switch just outside the bathroom door. A red light comes on.”

“Got it.”

The shower starts.

So all of a sudden, I do write fantasy. It’s derivative, I suppose, and the “Mage in search of an author” thing isn’t as original as I believe it is.

But I think I can say the story is alive. That’s what matters. I’m interested enough to be writing this while all the sensible bloggers are rabbiting on about Brexurrghzzz (but see below the picture). I want to know what happens next.

Anyway. Opening scene completed, it’s time to drop in some information.

Come with me for a moment. Stand where Pipsqueak was standing last week and look down.

See his village down there?

Yes, I see the bird. Yes, isn’t it odd to be looking down at a bird in flight? Yes, nice bird, but look. The village.

See how the road – no, he lives in the hut complex to the left of the market square, see? – the road goes – very small, yes, tiny, like ants – the road goes up through that valley, past the lake – wouldn’t it, yes? But cold – and then into – this is Summer; we’re in the mountains – the fog? That fog is where I haven’t built my world–

No, you’re still looking at the track up the mountain. I mean that road over there. Yes, through the valley – no, not that road.

Okay, step back from the edge. You can let go of my arm now. We’ll do this the hard way.

Pipsqueak lives in the hut complex that is to the left of the market square as you look down at his village from the ledge outside Edgalcius the Mage’s cave. It’s a hut complex rather than just a hut because Pipsqueak comes of a large family that’s lived in the same spot for generations – they just build on an extra hut when necessary. Nobody in Pipsqueak’s family ever goes anywhere, and if you want me to lay it on thick, there’s an inbuilt bias against shopping trips into town, let alone heroic quests.

Got that? We have some family tension coming up.

Below us, we can see the track – the yak-trail – winding down the mountain to the market square. There’s a road that goes through the market square, from left to right if we switch to map view, but the one I’m talking about is the twisty one that goes up through the valley into the – oh, there’s less fog now. You can just make out the spires and the towers of the faraway walled town that’s just come into my head.

Yes, I suppose it is the continuation of the winding track, if you start from here, and, yes, I suppose it does lead to adventure, if you want to be overtly symbolic.

The shower stops. There’s a moving-about noise, and then a bolt-sliding-back noise, and then Edgalcius – “Didn’t expect to like the name Ed,” he says indistinctly – appears on the stairs. He’s wearing the enormous multi-coloured towelling dressing-gown that William wrote onto the hook on the back of the bathroom door just in time, and he’s using both hands to rub at his hair with the white towel that he would have been wearing round his waist if William hadn’t suddenly remembered this post’s Universal rating.

I know. Clumsy switches to third person. This is an early draft.

The enormous multi-coloured towelling dressing gown is belted securely around Ed’s waist. It covers him down to his ankles. His feet – ugh! – he’s wearing carpet slippers. That was close.

“You put your clothes on to wash?”

We can hear the faint thrum of the washing machine.

“I love your shower!” Ed lowers the towel from his head. His grey hair flies out in all directions. William imagines a shaggy dog photographed in the moment of shaking the water out of its coat.

“It’s just that you’ll have to do the whole first chapter in that dressing gown, while they dry.”

Ed holds his arms out from his body and looks down. The message is clear: Ed likes the dressing gown.

William hands him a hairbrush. “What was your question?”

“Oh yes. It’s a plot point. You’ve set up Pipsqueak as the Chosen One, obviously, with Roland as some kind of comic relief, or whatever he might turn out to be.”

“Some kind of sidekick, I think. Casting against type.”

“What’s Pipsqueak doing now? You’ve established the character, set up the idea of a quest, and dumped all that–”

“–dropped–”

“–dropped all that information about the scenery.”

“With the hint about the direction–”

“–the walled town–”

“Faraway walled town, yeah.”

“But what’s he doing? Is he refusing the call to adventure? Going back to his ordinary world? I need to know.”

“You’ve been reading that book by Christopher Vogler, haven’t you? The Writer’s Journey?”

“Third edition, published in 2007 by Michael Wiese Productions? Yes, I have. Had it out of the monastery’s library so long I might as well keep it.”

“I like The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, 1949, which of course is where I got the working title.”

“Yes, lately published by New World Library. But didn’t you say something about a kitten…”

The conversation continues. Meanwhile, Pipsqueak is sitting at the family table in the big hut, listening to his mother tell him not to be so silly. His father hasn’t spoken yet, but his brothers’ teasing has stopped and they’re beginning to glance up the table. There’s an atmosphere that you could almost cut with a lot of talk about keeping warm and wearing socks and not going off on silly adventures.

Myrtille, the girl from next door who comes round whenever there aren’t enough women in the story, is leaning in the doorway. Whenever Pipsqueak glances across at her, he finds she’s looking at him. He’s known her since childhood; she’s his closest friend.

“That’s a bit obvious isn’t it?”

“Why are we speaking in italics?”

Finally, Pipsqueak’s mother stops talking. She looks at her husband, opens her mouth to speak and then closes it again. She raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, I think it’s ridiculous,” she says. She stands up and hurries out of the room.

Myrtille comes away from the door, raising her arms as if to hug Pipsqueak’s mother, and goes with her.

There is silence except for the muffled sound from the next room of Myrtille comforting Pipsqueak’s mother.

Pipsqueak’s father stands up from the table. He looks at each of his seven sons in turn. Then he goes to stand behind Pipsqueak and lays his hands on Pipsqueak’s shoulders.

“This is my son,” he says. “Like me, he's a seventh son. He has been chosen. But the decision is his, and his alone. If he goes, he goes with my blessing. I hope that he will have yours, as well.”

Pipsqueak’s father leaves the room. In the silence, the seven sons hear their mother and father argue, urgently but quietly, and then Pipsqueak’s father reappears. He places on the table in front of Pipsqueak a small brass lamp.

“This was very useful to me,” he said. “When I–” He stops and turns away.

Pipsqueak looks up and meets the glass eyes of the dragon’s head mounted above the fireplace.

As he listens to his mother opening and slamming cupboards next door, he thinks to himself: how many genies are there going to be, in this story of mine?”

Somewhere in the future is a history book in which all of this is past.

All of this week’s political shenanigans in the UK, the whole B– Br– no, still can’t say the word – reduced to a line, or a paragraph, or a page, or just possibly a chapter, in a book about the early twenty-first century. Or the pre-modern era.

What will be remembered, if anything, is the outcome, and that will colour everything that went before. The bit that hasn’t happened yet will give meaning to the bit that we’re in at the moment. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the future history-book reader to understand that we didn’t know how it ended.

Last Sunday, there were ceremonies to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War. Nobody knew, back then, how big that was going to be, nor how it was going to end. It wasn’t even “the Second World War” until later on in the conflict.

History normalises the past. Until [insert your own catastrophe] happened, we lived in a world where that couldn’t happen. Then it was one more item in the index.

There’ll be an ending to whatever’s happening now – and we have to wait for that history book even to know what is happening now. There’ll be an ending to membership of the EU, the revolt against membership of the EU, the two-party system, representative democracy, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party…

…and I don’t have the faintest idea where I stand on any of it.

There does seem to be a mismatch between the decision-making apparatus we have, and the problem we face. There doesn’t seem to be much scope for a comfortable two-thirds majority on anything. So maybe this is a bigger change than a tussle over – whatever it is we’re all arguing about today.

Perhaps the role of the media will come under scrutiny. I wonder. Perhaps some enterprising young historian will come up with The End of Liberal Democracy as a riposte to Francis Fukuyama.

Perhaps this is the end of the post-war settlement, or the end of the long century of hot, cold, proxy and trade wars – not to mention the end of wars by other means.

Perhaps we’re reverting to a historical norm whereby the EU takes the role of the Holy Roman Empire, with some version of the Ottoman Empire on one side, and maybe something on the other to fill in for one of the other European empires. Maybe we’re just leaving the century of nation states.

Jillian Becker wrote a book called H*tl**’s Children (my asterisks) about the Red Army Faction, although it was pointed out that Andreas, Gudrun, Ulrike and the rest were grandchildren-aged, relative to him. Maybe Thatcher’s – no, because she did have children. Sorry.

What I would like to try to remember is that we didn’t try to understand each other. We imputed motives to each other, accused each other of lying, labelled each other – “Brexiter” was more enduringly adhesive than “Remoaner”, I think – and each side ranted about how mistaken the other side was. How deluded, delusional, misinformed, et cetera.

We were all confident that we could see the future that we didn't want.

How easy it was to take sides; how difficult it’s turning out to be, to move on.

Okay, so today we’re going to start the novel.

Today’s the day. Pencils sharpened, blank sheets of paper stacked, laptop dusted, interruptions cancelled, social media written out of reality, coffee hot.

Come on, inspiration, we’re all ready for you.

Any time now would be good.

[Hours pass. William sits motionless, fingers poised over the keyboard. Somebody hits the fast-forward button, and as the hours pass, we see William droop like an un-watered houseplant. As the sun sets and an unscheduled power-cut blankets the whole neighbourhood in darkness, William gets up from his laptop and shuffles off into the come-early night.

In his despair he’s left behind anything with which he could conceivably write. He roams the dark streets, muttering under his breath. Suddenly – at the furthest possible point of his walk, in pitch darkness – his eyes light up, bathing the street in the glow of inspiration.

“Yes!” he exclaims, searching his pockets for something, anything, with which to write down the idea that’s just come to him.

In the end, he kneels down and starts scratching at the pavement with his fingernails, shuffling backwards as the idea unfurls in front of him, line after line of idea that flows into him as the Muse whispers in his ear.]
   
It’s going to be – Yes! – a sprawling epic of many worlds and many dimensions, telling the stories of – Yes! I mean, seriously? – heroes, villains, lovers, haters, quite-likers, beautiful people, average-looking people with something about them, scribes, pharisees and dark-hearted schemers.

A fantasy novel, then?

There will be rings and amulets – Yes! Go with what comes! – and swords, and quests – oh, and at least one old guy, bearded, to start the whole thing off.

I’ll build my world with politics and economics, but with magic and dragons as well. There’ll be technology, but it will have evolved from clockwork and kettles – Yes! Go with it! You’ll lose it if you question it! – rather than electricity and c-prompts. People will ride around on horses.

Yes, that’s it, a fantasy novel.

[William races back to his laptop. Which tells him to wait while it installs urgent upgrades. He grabs a blank sheet of paper, snaps the first pencil in his haste, forces himself to calm down, and starts writing.]

If the beard and the long cloak printed with stars and sigils don’t tip you off, you’ll know my significant old guy by the hat. He’ll live in a mountain-top cave on a mountain top so remote that he has to pay extra for his online-shopping deliveries.

No, that’s not right. Dang! I had the tone of voice just right there. But there are no supermarkets in fantasy novels. Not in mine, anyway.

He lives in a cave on a mountain top so remote that the birds – the eagles? No, been done – have to deliver his groceries – have to deliver the ancient scrolls that he orders by some kind of magic from the library of the ancient monastery on the neighbouring mountain top.

Either that, or he has to wait for the weekly yak-train that brings his other supplies. He picks up his post once a month from the general stores down in the village.

No, he doesn’t. Rats! I’ve lost it.

Okay, relax, no pressure, deep breath, that’s it, screw that one up; now feed yet another sheet of blank A4 paper into this steampunk version of an upgraded laptop, and let’s start again.

“You are the chosen one!” shouted Edgalcius the Mage, his voice echoing around the peaks and crags of his mountain-top home.

“M-me?” said Pipsqueak, scrambling to his feet after the long climb, cringing even further into the extra thermal vest his mother had insisted he wear under his jerkin. “I’m just delivering your perishables.”

“Perishables?”

Pipsqueak had climbed two hundred feet up a vertical cliff face to reach the ledge outside the Mage’s cave. In a hurry. In two layers of thermal underwear beneath his typical peasant garb. He was feeling unsteady.

“Yes, the yak-train’s delayed and–”

“Hang on! Hang on!” Clambering into view came a young man, clad in silver armour, his long fair hair caught in a clasp at the nape of his neck, red-faced and puffing. “Sorry I’m late. Couldn’t get the horse past the rockfall.”

“Yes, the yak-train–” Pipsqueak began, but the young man was still talking.

“There was a whole train of yaks there as well. They couldn’t get past the rockfall either. I got past them and realised what the problem was. Had to climb. Hope I’m not late. Apparently, there’s a place in the village that takes in horses.” He stopped, and looked at Pipsqueak.

“A boarding stable,” said Pipsqueak, because that seemed expected of him. The young man nodded and then looked down at his armour, brushing at it and then leaning forward to inspect his knees.

“Excuse me,” said the Mage, in a tone that Pipsqueak hadn’t heard before. The Mage was the Mage, not a tetchy old man with a voice like that. He was in time to see the irritation that Edgalcius wiped from his face, and then the Mage was the Mage again.

“You,” said Edgalcius, drawing himself up to his full height and raising his staff into the air so that it caught the first sunlight of the day. He stood facing the young man, who was still inspecting his armour. “You!” Edgalcius repeated, more loudly. The young man looked up.

Pipsqueak could guess what came next. He unslung the pack from his shoulders and carried it across the ledge to the cave-mouth. He’d unpack the perishables into the cold store while the wizard went about his business with the bloke in silver.

“Not a scratch on it!” he heard the bloke say.

Typical, thought Pipsqueak. Just typical that I’d blunder into something like this. His six older brothers would laugh at him again. His father’s six older brothers would probably laugh at him too, all crammed together in the small hut complex that the family called home.

He’d ripped his leggings again, on that scramble up the last stretch of the mountain.

His father would smile kindly at him, as he always did, and ruffle his hair as though he forgave his seventh son yet another clumsiness. His mother would come to him later and tuck a small parcel into his hands. It would turn out to contain another pair of socks.

Despite himself, Pipsqueak was comforted. Inside the cave he stepped past the treasure chest and over the glowing sword lying on the floor, steadied the small brass lamp on the shelf that his shoulder brushed as he went by, narrowly avoided the helmet and breastplate stacked next to the mage’s desk, and unloaded the pack into the recess in the cave-wall that the mage had enchanted to remain cold.

As always, he looked around for the source of the illumination in the cave, and as always, he couldn’t find it. Pipsqueak stood briefly at the mage’s desk, looking down at the parchments unrolled there. His fingers traced an illuminated P that began a passage of illuminated handwriting that he could not read. The heading at the top of the page was printed in block capitals. “How to recognise the Chosen One,” Pipsqueak read out loud. He shook his head. Mage business indeed. Then he remembered himself and went back outside.

Edgalcius was still standing with his back to the cave-mouth. The ledge – did I mention this? – was deceptively spacious, 10m by 9m at its widest point (there are estate agents in my fantasy world), with shrubs in pots around the edge and a round pine garden table off to one side, with matching chairs.

“Me?” said the young man in silver, who was still standing where he’d first appeared, facing Edgalcius across the ledge. Pipsqueak was surprised to see that he looked embarrassed.

“I think there must have been some–” The young man looked at his wrist and then at the sundial, which I would have mentioned earlier if I’d thought of it. “I couldn’t possibly–” he faltered.

In the silence that followed, Pipsqueak tiptoed back to the point on the ledge at which he’d first scrambled up. He stood, stooped forward, making himself as silent and insignificant as he could manage, easing himself half-behind a ficus Benjamin (in a pot) that was almost as tall as he was.

He had been ordered by his eldest brother to reassure Edgalcius that the rest of his supplies would be arriving at the turning circle as usual shortly – there were men and women coming up from the village to clear the rockfall – but now was not the moment.

Pipsqueak could tell that something was wrong. The young man – oh, heck, let’s give him a name – Roland was saying, “I thought I was here because you wanted to give me something. I didn’t realise I might have to– Glad to help of course, but just at the moment, pressure of revision. And anyway, I’ve got Princess Eustacia’s party on Sat–”

Pipsqueak made himself very small. He could feel a dense heaviness in the air, like the build-up to a thunderstorm. But it had come all at once. The sky was – clear, but it felt black.

“You are–” Edgalcius stopped. The broken sentence echoed around the mountains. In the monastery on top of the adjoining mountain, a window slammed shut, like punctuation.

“She invited me specially,” said Roland, in a voice both apologetic and stubborn.

Lightning flashed out of a blue sky.

Edgalcius stared at Roland. Then at Pipsqueak. He muttered something under his breath.

Then he turned and glared up at me. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

“Me?” [William snatches his hands back from the laptop.]

“Yes, you, sunshine. It’s not so easy, is it, writing fantasy? Oh, I know where you’re going with this, but have you thought it through?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I get it, I really do. Hero’s journey, right? But think about it. Roland’s got all the connections, the resources; his parents probably know everybody who could possibly buy him out of trouble. If he could even find trouble. But this little tyke.” Edgalcius gestures at Pipsqueak. “Really?”

“He doesn’t start with all the advantages, but that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Yada, yada, and a hero has to be capable of spiritual growth, yeah, yeah, heard it all before. You wouldn’t believe how often I get people – and what kind of a name is Edgalcius, anyway?”

“I thought – I could call you – Ed?”

“Give me strength.”

“We could talk. You know, discuss progress. Just occasionally, as a kind of digression from–”

“You think you’re so original, don’t you? A fantasy novel with training wheels, just running along in the background. You’re going to work through all the stages of the hero’s journey, aren’t you?”

“Yes, just occasionally, not to interrupt – actually, to interrupt – my usual posts, and there was something on Facebook about saving the kitten. Nine stages, and – hold on.”

“Oh, not the picture! You don’t have to put in a picture every time!”

“I like to. Hang on, I’ll just–”

“–there.”

“Ouch! Okay, but you don’t have to start a separate, totally different post–”

Read something the other day about birth-rates. They’re rising in Africa, apparently, and falling in Europe. If large-scale migrations are going to be caused by global heating in future, it would be ironic if the indigenous Europeans vacated large tracts of “their” continent to make space for–

“Sorry. Force of habit. Stopped now.”

“[Expletive deleted] authors!”

“I prefer wri–”

“And now that you’ve started this clever-dick, post-modern, broken-fourth-wall tarradiddle of a shaggy-dog–”

“You started it! You broke the fourth wall!”

“And you could have deleted that! Now that you’ve got this far, mister must-have-a-picture-but-don’t-mind-tearing-the-fabric-of-reality, what are you going to tell them? Eh?”

Pipsqueak and Roland are staring up at the sky with matching expressions of – I don’t know, let’s call it existential dread – on their faces.

Luckily, there’s also an enchanted pool on Edgalcius’ ledge. About three feet across, full of deep, clear water, it reflects – well, the sky usually, but at other times, whatever Edgalcius wants to see in it. Right now, it’s reflecting me.

My head, and the wall behind me. Must do something about my background.

This is ridiculous. I’m video-conferencing with the characters in my fantasy novel.

But I do look a little bit like – Ed has the same idea.

“It’s a genie!” Edgalcius snaps at Pipsqueak and Roland. “Deal with it.”

“Pipsqueak!” I say. “You didn’t just brush against the shelf. You brushed against my lamp when you went to unload the perishables!”

Pipsqueak didn’t sign on for this. He’s sweating, although that may just be all the thermal underwear he’s wearing. He gets even more up-close and personal with the ficus Benjamin.

But I can see that he also relaxes, very slightly. A genie in a lamp makes sense to him in a way that an authorial intervention doesn’t.

“Oh genie,” says Edgalcius (and we both ignore the muffled “Hey!” from inside the cave), “Have you considered sending both of them together?”

I have, actually, but it’s also part of the story that Edgalcius has that idea. He realises that Pipsqueak is the chosen one, but recognises Roland’s qualities (stubbornness, social connections, rich parents and others that I haven’t invented yet) and decrees that the two of them should set off together.

“What, two heroes? That’s a bit cumbersome, surely?”

“You’re the one who wrote them. But think about it. Nice bit of contrast there. Class tensions. That one learns humility; the other one – spiritual growth, I suppose. You came to me, and that’s what I think.”

“Will you talk to them? I don’t think Roland wants to go.”

“Neither does the other one. They’ll both refuse at first because that’s how these stories always go. But this is what I do. Leave it to me.”

“Okay. I’ll just–”

“You go off and catch the end of that thing about migration. No, go on, that’s fine. We’ll thrash out the details later.”

So much for controlling our own destinies. As Pliny the Elder is widely supposed to have written, “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi,” although I’ve always understood that to be a reference to elephants, not to innovation, nor to migration, nor indeed to the “Western Civilisations” of the future.

There was a story idea floating around earlier.

Story idea floating around here earlier, I mean.

I didn’t like the sort-of-rhyme made by “idea/here” so I deleted “here” from my opening sentence.

By “here”, I meant Falmouth. Would have meant. “Earlier” is yesterday. Was yesterday.

Perhaps I’ve had enough coffee already today.

So, yes, right. I had just come down the steps from Berkeley Hill (I was next to the Yoga Hut, you know?), and I saw a woman ahead of me, striding along Kimberley Park Road towards the park.

Thanks. Can I put it on the tab with the other three? Yes, perhaps a glass of water as well would be a good idea.

She was on the opposite pavement, and from where I was standing, she was going from left to right. From Berkeley Vale. Towards the park. Park.

No, this is not going to be the post in which I talk about writing only the essentials and trusting the reader to fill in the gaps.

So. Anyway. I saw the woman.

By “striding”, I mean: tall woman wearing a calf-length, Summer-weight white dress with flowers on it. She was walking – striding – like she was happy about where she was going and wanted to get there soonest.

She had a white-ish sunhat pushed back. Light-green cardigan, peach-coloured flat shoes that reminded me of the word “espadrilles”. Age? No idea. Could have been my age, perhaps a decade or two younger.

No dog, and she wasn’t carrying a bouquet of roses down by her side. Probably would have had both, if I’d been making her up.

What I thought was: is she real?

She was very brightly lit by the sunshine, very high-definition against the stone-coloured background. To me, she seemed entirely distinct from her surroundings.

It was as if – I remember thinking, and you’ll have to excuse the arrogance, but I had a vacancy for a daydream – she’d been put there for me to see.

And that got me going.

By the time I started up Kimberly Road, I was well into a daydream around the idea that she hadn’t been real at all. But if she hadn't been real...?

Hallucination brought on by a brain injury? No. Ghost? Yawn.

I was up towards Budock Terrace by the time I realised that we were dealing with time travel here. She was from (cue music) the future.

In the imaginary novel I wrote on that walk, dear (real) reader (and if you were walking up Kimberley Park Road yesterday, wearing a dress as described earlier, I apologise), time travel is/was/will be a thing of the past. It was invented, a dozen years from now, and it became the next big thing.

Specifically, time-travelling for the fun of it, posting selfies at historic events, interviewing historic figures, collecting artefacts from the past, watching battles, dropping litter, chugging soda out of plastic bottles (and leaving the empties behind), attempting to change history (oh, the debates about the morality of killing you-know-who before he came to power), and then inevitably, attempting to fix the past after all the tampering, arguing about our responsibility to keep the past as it was – all became the next big things.

And then it was all over. Those irresponsible visitors from the future had messed with the timeline so much that our own present – that’s our present, 2019 – had become so twisted up that the time-travellers’ present – shall we say, circa 2035? – was beginning to disintegrate. Friends turning out never to have been born, historically important events not, er, having happened, cultural milestones – Allen V Cheesman’s Phazed World series, for example – never having been launched.

So – my imaginary novel starts here – the time-travellers from the future are now trying to fix the past. For reasons that I’ll just have to invent later, they’ve decided that their biggest priority is to fix 2015-2020.

By the time I reached Western Avenue on my walk – and turned left – I had decided: the novel starts after the major work has been done.

Of course, there’s still work to be done on the US presidential election of 2016, but the accidental destabilisation of the UK political system, in the same year, is being allowed to work itself back to normal.

What’s left is tweaking. Fixing minor events in 2019 that have/had a disproportionately big effect on the future.

One of those events was my walk yesterday morning (I decided as I turned right onto Pennance Road). It was important that I saw that woman walking on that street, as I did, because I had to be inspired (sic; see above re: arrogance) to write this post.

BUT the original woman had been arrested before I’d seen her. She was … let me see … a renegade time traveller who wanted a selfie in front of the new Park Live Stage before it became famous for [REDACTED].

If you don’t read this post – and they’re still working on how to get you to read this far; every time I leave the room, a person in futuristic clothing appears in front of my laptop and tinkers with the opening paragraphs; lucky I never covered the camera – where was I?

Oh yes – if you don’t read this post, you won’t be inspired to [REDACTED] and if you don’t do that, you won’t [REDACTED; apologies from the future, but I really can’t let him warn you in advance] and if [REDACTED; and I haven’t got time to delete all this before he comes back into the room] before [REDACTED] with your [REDACTED] lemon-scented [REDACTED] flaps its wings and [REDACTED] the eruption. [Sorry. Good luck.]

So the woman I saw, in the patched-up and mended and mostly fixed 2019, was a hologram of an actress hired in 2035 for her resemblance to the original activist…

…who is now imprisoned in 2035…

…and probably needs rescuing…

…and I walked down Spernen Wyn Road, through St Mary Gardens, onto Gyllyngvase Beach, and what did I find?

How convenient!

In the bag with my swimming things, I found a mobile – no, it wasn’t a phone. Three buttons on it and a screen. And there was a letter too. Handwritten.

Dear William. To go to 2035 and rescue the activist, press the red button. To come back to 2019 and write the blog post, green. To delete all this rubbish and start again, blue. William.

That was some trip.

There was an all-female shortlist for the Best Novel category of the Hugo Awards 2019.

I know this because a person posted about it on Facebook, and was promptly dumped on by another person on Facebook.
 
That first indignant comment was followed by fifty more, and if we’re making this visual, the person who started it quickly disappeared under a collapsed scrum of brawling persons sounding off about gender. The word “patriarchy” was thrown, as was the word “sisterhood”.

I’m not (quite) stupid enough to join in. Either those six novels are the best science-fiction novels around at the moment, or there is a surprising lack of diversity, blah, blah, et cetera, blah, blah, in literary prizes focused on sci-fi.

Non-female persons were shortlisted in other categories.
 
The prizes were announced on 18th August, and just for the record, the winner in the novel category was Mary Robinette Kowal for her novel The Calculating Stars (Tor). I used to read a lot more sci-fi when I was young than I do now, but I’ll look it up.
 
There used to be a convention that the first person to mention [a certain Austrian-born dictator, whom I’ve decided never to mention here by name] in an argument on Facebook, lost the argument. These days, the convention is that all arguments turn into the same slanging match.

The comment that I turned around in my head for a while, after reading that spat on Facebook, was this. “If all your male ancestors would stop oppressing all my female ancestors, and vice-versa, we could get along.”

I didn’t post it. Obviously. But at any point before the present generation, aren’t we on both sides of that particular argument-of-first-resort? We could share it and possibly resolve it, if we weren't all so immediate in our attacks.
 
We can’t rewrite history. History shouldn’t write the present (discuss). But history does seem to insert passages into our working draft of the present that really should be cut out.
 
“Kill your darlings,” said William Faulkner. Elsewhere on the internet, we find Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch saying this (in a lecture, a hundred-plus years ago). “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
 
Stephen King (among others) writes about the importance of leaving a manuscript alone for a while before going back and editing it. Such distance tends to reveal that the coolest bits – the passages of which you are most proud – are actually quite embarrassing. They’re your “darlings”, or they were when you wrote them. Kill them. It’s for the best.
 
We can’t leave the present alone for a while before going back and editing it, but if we did, I suspect that we’d be surprised at (1) the amount of time we spend arguing, and (2) the short list of arguments available for us to join.
 
So many of those arguments are remarkably binary, without nuance or subtlety or even much real content beneath the headlines and the soundbites. We’re not analytic or reflective creatures after all. You’re either with us or against us, left or right, good or bad. There’s no opportunity to get together and talk.
 
We’ve all got challenges in our lives, and if you want to argue the point, I’d accept that you’ve got more challenges than I have. Okay. How about lunch?

You may wish to ignore this post.

It's an unstructured reverie that began around the question "What does technology do for us?" with a vague intention of being predictably critical about today's technology. I'm old enough to be comfortable with my own predictability.

I started with this observation.

I wear spectacles, which makes me a "cyborg" by at least one definition. They make the horizon easier to see. But the horizon doesn't change.

And where I thought I was going - perhaps this is obvious - was into a self-conscious little play-around with that idea of the horizon getting clearer but not changing. But I couldn't make it work.

I suppose talking about "technology" is a bit like talking about "transport". My blue Honda Jazz (pre-owned, pre-loved, but we don't talk about past relationships) takes me around, gets me to wherever I need to go, and is an all-round good thing.

At times, my jump leads are better things, and every now and then, the bright red Portable Power Pack Jump Starter that I carry in the boot is the best thing of all.

I like my little blue car. If only I could remember to switch off the headlights.

But under the heading of "transport", there are also tanks, jet fighters, bombers, crop sprayers, roads scarring the landscape, bicycles swerving out into the traffic, drivers not leaving enough space as they pass bicycles, advertising for car insurance ... ambulances, fire engines, stretch limousines ... what has transport done for us? It's complicated.

Under "technology" ...

I use Google Calendar, and if it's an international call coming up, which it sometimes is, I don't have to worry about time-zone calculations any more.

If we use Google Meet, we can see each other, and that's a little like time travel (no, I've never time-travelled). That's what tonight looks like, I might think. Or perhaps: there's somebody who hasn't yet experienced this morning.

And yes, I think there is a responsibility at both ends to set up an interesting background.

Making a phonecall is just making a phonecall, but video-calling done properly (I don't think it counts as "conferencing" if there are only two of you) offers a slice of another life.

I remember fax machines as a minor miracle - here's a duplicate of a document that still exists somewhere else. And way back further, hearing the voice in my tin can, conveyed by the taut string to the other tin can.

When we got our first toy telephones, we went to great lengths to make sure that we couldn't hear each other except via the telephones. The wires were never long enough, but we did at least achieve real-time bedroom-to-bedroom communication.

The technology I miss most is my Psion Organiser Series 3, which fitted into my inside jacket pocket along with my wallet. A little clamshell thing, screen and keyboard, which I could hold in my hands while typing with my thumbs. I got quite good at that, wrote 10,000 words of an 80,000-word book while standing up on commuter trains.

We're all living much longer and there are more of us, in part thanks to technology. We have the internet and social media, which give us at least the opportunity to debate and discuss and thereby gain wisdom.

Technology goes past too quickly. But it's given us so many visions. A better Psion Organiser. A more stable video-conferencing tool. Fibre-optic cable rather than can-connecting string. An internet of wisdom - which come to think of it was Al Gore's (and others') vision of the Information Superhighway, remember that?

What's the dream, now?

Robots, I suppose. We've had fake news; now we're working on fake people.

But the other thing about technology is that it's all about means. Enabling people to do things, or saving them the trouble of doing them. Working for us rather than alongside us. Not innovating, or inventing, or taking on and doing stuff.

I wonder how different the world would be, if we could just set up a technology around an objective, give it autonomy, and leave it alone to get on with it. Fly me to the moon, algorithm, and let me play among the stars. Or why don't you go yourself? Set up our habitations on Mars, before we even work out how to arrive.

No, wait a second.

Technology's inspired a lot of apocalyptic fiction, hasn't it?

Not much of it optimistic.

Like I said, ignore this post.

For an insight into human nature, consider my friend's bird table.

She found it in the garden when she moved into a house. Before then, my friend had never owned or had access to a bird table. She'd never thought about bird tables.

But now, she told me, she was enthusiastic about feeding birds.

So we spoke at length about how to prevent birds from feeding. She didn't want seagulls, magpies, crows invading her bird table. She wanted to leave out food for the robin and the wren.

Then we realised what we were doing.

And that led us into an even more interesting conversation.